The Chromatomachy: Demeter’s Salvation of Persephone, and other Chromatic Myths

By Roland Betancourt

The other day, I defined chromatomachy – from the Greek chromata (colors) and machia (battle) – as a battle of color on the proportions of the mythic Ancient Greek war of the giants, the gigantomachy, or the war of the Amazons, the Amazonomachy. Lady Gaga’s music video for “Applause” did not fail to manifest precisely this notion of a chromatomachy articulated specifically through the language of Greek myth. The video unfolds like a grotesque burlesque show at the bottom of a minimalist hellscape. The carnivalesque scene is replete with human-animal hybrids, dancers, our familiar Pierrot, a giant magician’s hat, and a colored-smoke emitting cauldron. While the video does not narratively stage a battle between color and black-and-white (as Gaga’s earlier statements might suggest), it certainly constructs a cyclical push-and-pull between the two – like the passing and return of seasons.

The video blatantly stages a modern day riff on the Disney classic Fantasia (1940), a fantasy of music, color, magic, and myth with a playful, at times absurd, humor. Gaga appears in a variety of guises that allude to mythic figures: for example, she emerges out of a giant hat like a magician’s rabbit, yet the figure she embodies is reminiscent more of a Satyr, with her disco-ball pants and perky fiber-optic tail, than a rabbit.

On Plastic: The Endless Garment

By Laurence Ross

The following is the seventh piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

Imagine (if possible) a woman dressed in an endless garment, one that is woven of everything the magazine of Fashion says, for this garment without end is proffered through a text which is itself unending … This endless garment has a double dimension: on the one hand, it grows deeper through the different systems which make up its utterance; on the other hand, it extends itself, like all discourse, along the chain of words.

– Roland Barthes, The Fashion System

It’s not meant to be an answer … it’s meant to be a perfuse number of questions.
– Lady Gaga

Despite the fact that Jonas Åkerlund did not direct “Yoü and I,” the video seems like the third chapter in a continuing narrative that the Åkerlund-produced videos “Paparazzi” and “Telephone” began. There is Lady Gaga’s glamour-infused romance (the result of which is death), Lady Gaga’s release from jail (the result of which is death), and then Lady Gaga’s escape to/return to Nebraska (the result of which is death). Yes, there is a repeated (rebirthed) theme, but there is also a (funereal) procession, a narrative extension on the discourse. Gaga leaves one man for another, moves from one prison to another, transitions from one state to the next. Gaga is continually killing one version of herself so that the next may be born, which implies two paradoxical sides of Gaga: one that wishes to live and one that wishes to die. “Yoü and I” simultaneously exhibits the separation (Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone) and the synthesis (Yüyi) of these two (seemingly) opposing sides of Gaga’s self. There is the Gaga who wants to be with the lover, submissive and secluded in the Nebraska barn, and the Gaga who wants to be the spectacle, the pop star, the one with agency.

I’ll Follow You Until You Love Me:

Lady Gaga stalks in her stilettos and her Chanel pants past the cornstalks. She stalks toward the one she loves, the one she had left. (“It’s been two years since I let you go.”) She is adorned in funeral garb that echoes her final outfit in “Telephone.” (A video at the end of which she says, “Now let’s go far, far away from here.”) She drops a dark flower to the dirt, because a flower, in the strictest sense, is not what she is offering. (Though, as I have suggested before, there is a Steinian aspect to Gaga’s project/narrative: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”)

When Gaga arrives in Nebraska, she still seems dressed for the part of the spectacle. Her Chanel and her stilettos stand in stark contrast to her rural surroundings. She is not, however, dressed in the makeshift, more avant-garde attire of the previous two videos. In comparison to fashion adorned with grotesque ruffles and Mickey Mouse print or fashion constructed from caution tape and flags, Chanel is quite tame. As Barthes points out in The Language of Fashion, “There is however a price to pay for the Chanel style: a certain forgetting of the body which we would say takes refuge, is absorbed in the social ‘distinction’ of clothing” (108). In wearing Chanel, the figure (the spectacle) of Gaga becomes less prominent. Gaga’s choice of fashion – away from the makeshift and toward the readymade – brings Gaga one stilettoed-step closer to the generic available to us all.

In the opening scene, Lady Gaga is also once again portrayed as part cyborg, with her exposed mechanic arm and a metal chin above a (heavy) metal voice box. Gaga has played the cyborg before, in her gold-plated attire of “Paparazzi” and with her robotic stutterings – both vocal and physical – in “Telephone,” though in those lavish and urban settings, she is clearly meant to be the centerpiece of those theaters. When Gaga arrives in Nebraska, however, she arrives alone.

Just as there is a price to pay for Chanel, there is a price to pay for Nebraska. A price that Gaga now seems willing to pay. (“But this photo of us, it don’t have a price.”) No backup dancers, no entourage, no spectators. Gaga, as spectacle, as pop star, is already fading away. (“I’ll be a girl backstage at your show.”) Even in the video’s opening shot, she is a blur, a wisp, a haze. In entering Nebraska, in pursuing her lover in Nebraska, Gaga ceases to pursue the stage. The flashing cameras and screaming crowds are replaced by the naked sun and the whistling wind.

We’re Plastic But We Still Have Fun:

In “Yoü and I,” Gaga is ready to give up the spectacle of herself. As Gaga uses her one arm to forcibly raise the other (opening her arms to be embraced?), she sings, “I’d give anything again to be your baby doll.” A doll to be played with, manipulated, and dressed up like any number of plastic toys, a doll to be experimented with. And as Barthes writes in his essay on plastic, “Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic … is in essence the stuff of alchemy” (Plastic 97). Gaga, in the video, seems initially torn by the idea of the doll, even as she sings of her desire to become one. Gaga struggles with the notion of the doll just as Gaga both embraces and rejects the actual doll she is offered by the menacing ice-cream truck driver.

But it is once inside the barn that the real transformations begin. Gaga transfers her agency as a performer to the lover: Gaga becomes the one performed upon. The lover sprays and injects (“Silicone, saline, poison, inject me.”) The first redesign turns Gaga into a being that resembles a yellow canary, a songbird/showbird/jailbird bound and retrained by her captor/curator/lover. “Fashion (as we conceive it today) rests on a violent sensation of time. Every year fashion destroys that which it has just been admiring, it adores that which it is about to destroy” (Language of Fashion 106). Gaga-as-canary is caged, pinned down, in the process of being domesticated. (The harness, the hairpin glasses.) The domesticated canary is the canary that needs to be bred, that needs to be engineered by an engineer.

The triangular shape of the shoulder pads the lover engineers recalls the memory of yet another jail suit – the black-and-white striped ensemble Gaga wears at the beginning of “Telephone” as she is placed behind bars. And the long collar constricting her neck recalls yet another constriction – the neck brace Gaga wears in “Paparazzi” after falling from the balcony. Here, in the laboratory of the lover, Gaga is not the creator, but the created; she is not the visionary, but the vision; she is not the artist, but the art.

In the process of change, of becoming domesticated, Gaga becomes less and less human. In a way, less and less alive. (“Dress me, I’m your mannequin.”) The dark-haired intermediary figure Gaga becomes between her canary form and Yüyi is the most lifeless of the three, and, in a way, the most artificial. “At the sight of each terminal form … the mind does not cease from considering the original matter as an enigma. This is because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels” (Plastic 97). Her movements in this intermediary form, despite the absence of any visible cybernetics, are quite mechanical, her eyes often vapid. She seems, in her floral-coated attire, as severed from life as the flower Lady Gaga drops to the dirt in the beginning of the video. There is nothing left here of the pop star, the spectacle as agent. (“So put your dreams up for Nebraska.”) Nearly all of her human skin is masked, her legs now sheathed in boots and stockings that foreshadow the mermaid’s tail.

Gaga’s final transformation into Yüyi, however, presents us with an unexpected shift. Yes, on the one hand she is literally legless, immobilized, contained within a large bucket, and reliant on the lover to breathe, which is perhaps the epitome of a lack of agency. But on the other hand, Lady Gaga has transformed into a mermaid, a fairytale figure of myth. Once one is in the world of Faerie, the rules of our world, the “real” world, cease to exist.

Gaga may no longer be human and her breasts may now resemble plastic more than flesh, but there is a freedom granted by this transformation. “And as the movement here is almost infinite, transforming the original crystals into a multitude of more and more startling objects, plastic is, all told, a spectacle to be deciphered: the very spectacle of its end-products” (Plastic 97). By muting the initial spectacle of herself and allowing herself to be molded, Gaga gains a mutability that allows her to become the spectacle once again. Once one enters the world of Faerie, one can become anything.

We Are the Crowd:

In comparison to Yüyi who stands out (without legs) as spectacle, the Gaga who dances in the barn is merely one of a larger crowd. The Gaga performing choreography, while perhaps striving for spectacle, ultimately fails. Barthes, in his essay on the striptease, writes, “The dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures” (Striptease 85-86). The aura of the striptease in these scenes is first generated by the costumes in which Gaga and the rest of the dancers perform (clad in bondage straps and Gaga with cuffs dangling from her hips) and is solidified by the ritual gesture of pole dancing.

Gaga is multiplied in these dance scenes by the rest of the dancers who replicate all of her movements and serve to distract the spectator from Gaga herself. (This distraction stands in direct opposition to “The Edge of Glory” video, in which the stage was Gaga’s and Gaga’s alone.) The camera angles in these dance sequences do not follow and focus on Gaga in the ways we would expect. At one point the camera abruptly tilts and Gaga is out of the frame, the focus instead on the dancers above her head. Gaga may be wearing her aquamarine wig in these dance scenes, but these are the scenes in “Yoü and I” in which Gaga as spectacle is the most obscured, the most diffuse, and the most generic.

Gaga does eventually lose all of her clothing, though it is not on the dance floor. By the time Gaga becomes Yüyi, she is not wearing any garment at all. Or, perhaps, she has (for the moment) become the garment, the accessory to the lover. There is a scene where the lover and Yüyi appear to be having sex, though whether or not they are actually having sex is questionable. (At least sex in the heteronormative, penetrative sense of the act.) The very fact that Gaga is decidedly not human in this form raises the question, is such sex even physically possible? “Feathers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their magical virtue even once removed, and give her something like the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell … the nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from human use” (Striptease 85). It is also feasible that at the end of “Yoü and I,” the lover no longer desires sex in the traditional sense. He is no longer naked, but wears rain boots (adapting to her circumstance) and shorts. He is no longer standing above or hovering over her, but curled almost in the fetal position at her side. The scene shifts from one that is overtly pornographic in its intention to one that is much more tame. In this scene, one in which both parties appear to be content, it seems compromises have been made on the behalf of each. Gaga as Yüyi not only regains herself as spectacle, she regains her agency in the relationship. The lover still holds Yüyi at the end of the video, though this hold is no longer a restraining one. The hold is now one of mutual embrace, as Yüyi is also holding him.

This scene of the mutual embrace represents the ultimate synthesis of the two disparate yet co-existing sides of Gaga – the Gaga the lover and Gaga the spectacle. In her song “Fashion,” Gaga sings: “You are who you wear, it’s true.” And if this statement is indeed a truth, then Gaga is her truest self in this scene as Yüyi. As Yüyi, Gaga is wearing nothing (and no one) but herself.

Yellow Dance and We Turn:

There is one more Gaga presented in the video who is arguably the most lifeless – the Gaga in the wedding dress. This Gaga wears the pallid face of a dead woman, her cheeks not rouged but drown in blue. In the context of the spectacle, death is, perhaps, our final show. There is our viewing, and, if we are lucky, the ray of sun(spot)light that pierces the forest canopy to shine on our glass coffin. There is our final application of make-up, our final moment on the stage before we are born forever out of sight by our pallbearers. The Gaga in the wedding dress, the most traditionally domesticated vision of Gaga we are given, is presented as a symbol of death: the corpse. But this Gaga-as-corpse is animate, not lifeless. One life (New York) is given up for another (Nebraska). Though she is filmed in the final scene with a ghostly transparency, the expression she wears on her face seems not so grave. These scenes seem more like a dream than a reality, and in the final scene, the dream (the wedding dress) overlaps the reality (the Nebraska barn). One dream (the pop star) is given up for another (the lover). And if we are merely (and perhaps endlessly) swapping dream for dream, dress for dress, does it matter which we choose?

Barthes concludes his essay on plastic with this thought: “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas” (Plastic 99). Lady Gaga, in placing herself in the generic, domesticated role of the bride, shows that whether she chooses to be the pop star or the lover (or anything else for that matter), she can remain our spectacle. As Yüyi, embodying the conflicting sides of herself, Gaga shows that it is possible for us to have our frosted cake and eat it too. That it is possible for domesticity and agency to co-exist. That Lady Gaga can be (and is) both the artist and the art. And that, in a plastic world, if Lady Gaga can become our spectacle, we have the capacity of spectacle as well.

Bibliography:

Åkerlund Jonas, Dir., Telephone. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2010. Film.

Åkerlund Jonas, Dir., Paparazzi. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2009. Film.

Barthes, Roland. “The Fashion System.” Trans. Matthew Ward. London: The Trinity Press, 1985. Print.

Barthes, Roland. “The Language of Fashion.” Trans. Andy Stafford. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Print.

Barthes, Roland. “Mythologies.” Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Print.

Formichetti, Nicola. “Yoü And I / LADY GAGA / FASHION CREDITS!!!!!.” NICOLA FORMICHETTI’S BLOG!!. 16 Aug. 2011. Web.

Lady Gaga. “Dance in the Dark.” The Fame Monster. Interscope Records, 2009. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Fashion.” Confessions of a Shopaholic. Hollywood Records, 2009. CD.

Lady Gaga. Interview by Sway. MTV. 18 Aug. 2011. Television.

Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Boston: Four Seas, 1922. Print.

Yoü and I. Dir. Haus of Gaga and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Writer Bio:

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism, among other things.

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Part of Yüyi’s World

By Alexander Cavaluzzo

The following is the fourth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

Yüyi the Mermaid was introduced to the public imagination when choreographer Laurieann Gibson leaked a faint notion of the concept for Lady Gaga’s music video “The Edge of Glory”: “I just know that we’ll be feeling very fishy.” The ichthyologic teaser was enough to spark speculation that Gaga would be appearing as a mermaid in her next video. Of course, even after a performance on the French talk show Le Grand Journal where she first unveiled her aquatic alter ego, Gaga remained bipedal throughout “The Edge of Glory” video. The hype surrounding Gaga’s mermaid guise laid out on an operating table and hacked by couture doctors was never brought to fruition. Nevertheless, the specter of Yüyi still lurked and continued to develop via tweets, live performances, and, finally, an appearance in the “Yoü and I” music video.

She perfectly summates Lady Gaga’s project thus far, combining the spectacle of The Fame, the demonic metaphor of The Fame Monster, and the dichotomy of living halfway between reality and fantasy of Born This Way. She’s not a sultry siren floating through the crystal clear waters of a blue lagoon; she’s a grotesque aberration, a welding of woman and fish, inelegantly lying on a slab, carting herself around stage in a wheelchair, or writhing in a filthy bathtub. Her tail is a squamous stub, a black latex taper with an overgrown, misshapen flipper, or a braid of scales concluding in a filiform fin. A squamous bra fuses her breasts together and erases her nipples. In exploring the creation, both literally and figuratively, of Yüyi, she bears more relation to P.T. Barnum’s strange Feejee mermaid than Disney’s beautiful Ariel (The Little Mermaid [1989]) or Daryl Hannah’s sexy Madison (Splash [1987]).

Barnum’s sideshow creation, touted as an authentic mermaid, was nothing more than a hoax (as sideshows often are), the creature in question being the taxidermied upper-body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish, dipped in papier-mâché for good measure. Meant to lure ignorant consumers and spectators into the show for their patronage, Barnum exploited mythology and disfigurement in the name of commerce. Scholar Stephen T. Asma, in his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, relates Barnum’s hoax to our contemporary cultural condition of ostracizing those who do not fit in with archetypical social structures, be they gender, sexuality, aesthetic representation, or biological functions. He says,

In Barnum-style hucksterism, we have completely fabricated monsters, such as the Feejee Mermaid, but also real disabled or abnormal individuals who were cloaked in fabricated exotic narratives. Often those fabricated narratives had implicit (and explicit) moral and political significance (Asma, 140).

In applying this theory to Yüyi and extending it to Lady Gaga overall, her transgressive nature and embracement of “the freak” typify the moral and political significance of abnormal individuals, and, in a way, reject the strictures and labels placed upon them (Corona, 2). The utilization of the wheelchair, while initially purely functional, bonds the creature specifically with handicapped individuals and even sufferers of Sirenomelia. Naturally this is nothing new, as many performers have exploited transgressive performance tactics to comment on mainstream society. However, none of these performers have over 12 Million followers on Twitter, music videos with over 1 Billion views, and constant attention in a 24/7 news cycle. Why has someone who so vigorously performs the monstrous, who impersonates men and mermaids, become so popular?

As Asma suggests, “Monsters were intrinsically exciting but also extrinsically useful in giving audiences a sense of relief and possibly even gratitude about their own station in life” (Asma, 140). This may account for Gaga’s initial rise to fame, when she did not yet tout life-affirming messages of acceptance, but rather bled on stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards while singing about celebrity voyeurs. She made the celebrity an exciting spectacle, a freak at which all normal people could gawk. She still does that, although the shiny sequined shell of The Fame has cracked and given way to a new pop organism that headlines a new race instead of a new trend.

In this exploration of Yüyi as a biological extension of Gaga’s persona, it’s clear that it comes to a pinnacle through bestial intercourse. While the iconography of the mermaid is explicitly sexualized, even in Gaga’s incarnation, there is a logical dissonance with the creature as an object of desire. They may be alluring, seductive, and provocative, but mermaids in effect neutralize sexual activity, as it is impossible for coitus to occur between man and fish. This doesn’t stop Yüyi’s human lover from having sex with her, of course, adding to the confusion and blatant disregard for boundaries Lady Gaga engenders.

Gaga’s lover, portrayed by Taylor Kinney, dominates her to the point where he becomes her master. He administers oxygen to her via a mask and pours water over her in life-sustaining acts. He keeps her immobile, trapped in an aluminum tub in the middle of a barn in the landlocked state of Nebraska. Is this her savior? As Gaga tweeted, Yüyi is “a reincarnation of my birth+artistic spirit. In incubation, awaiting a human lover to save her…” Where was Yüyi incubating? Within Gaga’s creative unconscious? Within a barn in Nebraska? And how does her lover save her? There is no doubt Gaga is feeding into the cultural mythology of the mermaid figure, mirroring Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the little maiden of the sea who barters her voice in order to attain companionship and humanity. For Anderson’s character, of course, the story ends in heartbreak: she does not marry her prince and consequently dissolves into sea foam. Yüyi is a bit more Disneyfied, ultimately forming a union with her lover, her creator, her Dr. Frankenstein, both in their final embrace in the bathtub and the wedding scene, where Gaga sports teal blush, tying her to Yüyi.  

Just like Jo Calderone and the Lady herself, Yüyi draws upon precedents established in mythology, literature, music, and film. Originating in Assyrian legend circa 1000 BC, the mermaid has existed as a staple of crypto-zoological lore. The image has been continually re-appropriated by popular culture, and in her own way Yüyi pays homage to many of the depictions of mermaids that preceded her.

Her second performance of Yüyi in Sydney sparked mild controversy when Bette Midler reacted by tweeting, “Dear @ladygaga Ive [sic] been doing singing mermaid in a wheelchair since 1980-You can keep the meat dress and the firecracker tits-mermaid’s mine.” Midler was referring to her own alter ego Delores Delago (which, interestingly, means “Pain of the Lake”), a mermaid in a wheelchair act that she has performed since 1979 in several of her shows. The “fight” fizzled out as quickly as any trivial news story, and it would come as no surprise that Gaga would stage a re-performance of a cult figure. Surprisingly, though, Lady Gaga responded to the controversy a few days after the Divine Miss M’s tirade, pleading ignorance to Access Hollywood:

I didn’t know that she’d done [it], but I do now and I think it’s great…Obviously I feel connected to women in theater and women from the past … Maybe we’re just cut from the same cloth. I couldn’t hop around in that tail so I just stuck myself in a wheelchair.

That seems like a reasonable enough explanation, although considering the uniqueness of the staging, it might provoke further inquiry into whether she was truly ignorant of the character. Ultimately the research would be fruitless since authorial intent does not have supremacy over readings, and since Yüyi in practice confounds logic to begin with. She has little thematic development, she has inexplicable sex with humans, she has no clear demeanor attached to her monstrous flesh.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of Yüyi: she exists primarily as a visual representation of the female monster. Lady Gaga’s creation of the mermaid figure inextricably binds woman and monster, a relationship that has permeated the arts and philosophy for centuries. One of the most infamous demons featured in the Christian Canon is Lilith, a monstrous female associated with storms, illness, and death (Isaiah 34:14). While only mentioned tangentially in the Scriptures, Lilith is a figure prominently displayed among many cultural mythologies, dating back to ancient Sumerian tradition. While historically Eve is credited as the first woman created by God, there is evidence that suggests there was another before her (Genesis 1:27). The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text, states that God created Lilith from the earth, as He did with Adam, before the creation of Eve. When Lilith refused to become subservient to Adam, as she believed them to be equals cut from the same cloth, God sent three angels to retrieve her and then created Eve from Adam’s rib. While both stories have receded into mere folklore, the exploration of the two females in Christianity prompts an interesting dialogue regarding the association between demons and the female sex.

Marie-Hélene Huet draws from Aristotelian theory to suggest, “The monster and the woman…find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity” (Huet, 85). Just as, she writes, demons are engendered due to the power of a mother’s imagination during pregnancy, usurping the place of the father as progenitor, Eve is deformed when she is birthed from Adam’s body (Huet, 85). She is dissimilar from man. Eve is not, however, dubbed a “demon” as Lilith was, in spite of the fact that Lilith was not the distorted offspring of a human. This concept of the monstrous birth repeatedly factors into Lady Gaga’s self-creation, alter egos, and her femininity and feminism. Especially in “The Edge of Glory” video, while sans Yüyi, Gaga displays her embracement of perhaps mythology’s most famous female monster, Medusa, in her bearing of Versace’s emblem.

Huet continues in her discussion of the monstrous imagination by examining the etymology of the word “monster,” deciding that it stems from the Latin monstrare, meaning “to show, to display.” She claims, “This tradition confirmed the idea that monsters were signs sent by God, messages showing his will or his wrath…” (Huet, 87). Demonic imagery acts as a reminder to faithful Christians of the dangers of sin and defying God’s word. This idea stems from the story of Original Sin, in which Eve plights humanity for her disobedience to God’s strictures, cementing the connection of the woman and the demon. The theory that the word “monster,” now inextricably bound with Gaga’s narrative, comes from a verb expressing the action of presentation and exposure illustrates how she uses spectacle as a tool in uncovering the monstrous aspects of the human psyche, exposing them to literally millions of people in hopes to reveal the lie and make it true.

Yüyi exists as a metaphor, manifesting all facets of her personality, in an attempt to make “this complex + incomprehensible force to be true” through acceptance of all personas, elements and processes of being, the incomprehensible force being the cultural phenomenon of Lady Gaga, a continuing effort designed to marry reality and fantasy and exist simultaneously in both.

Works Cited

Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Corona, Victor P. Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga. Journal of Popular Culture 44(2): 1-19.

Huet, Marie-Hélene. Monstrous Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993).

The New Jerusalem Bible. Ed. Susan Jones. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

“The Story of Lilith,” JewishChristianLit.com, http://jewishchristianlit.com//Topics/Lilith/alphabet.html

Author Bio:

Alexander Cavaluzzo (@AleksandrJohn) is a Fashion-Sexual and unpaid laborer at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and the art blogazine Hyperallergic.com. He graduated with a BS in Art History from the Fashion Institute of Technology and is an MA candidate in the Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. On the occasional nights when he is drunk on Jameson, he blogs at alexandercavaluzzo.tumblr.com. His lifelong dream is to become the intelligent version of Camille Paglia.

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HER AND ME

By Devin O’Neill & Mrs. O’Neill

The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here; for the second, here.

We’ll begin colloquially, since the video takes place in the country.

Having little bits of metal implanted in your face and arm fucking hurts. In fact, the entire video hurts. Even the shot of her high heels looks painful, though nothing’s involved but dirt, grass and shoes. Maybe that’s saying something about high heels. Maybe that’s saying something about a lot of things.

Women are cyborgs. People in relationships are cyborgs.

Donna Haraway basically seemed to think that anything that could be parsed as two interlocking systems could be deemed cybernetic, because the distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial” didn’t mean much to her. But we see the violation of the body’s boundaries in this video and in general, in terms of cybernetics, as painful. Robocop did not look comfortable, and neither does Gaga. What does that mean about falling in love?

These implants aren’t the only painful situations in the video. There are allusions to restraint and suffocation – a mermaid outside of the water might have trouble breathing. Those prominent gills have nothing to draw in. She’s being taken care of, but a huge proportion of the scenes in the video look very uncomfortable.

There are two notable exceptions: her wedding scene and her scene with Jo Calderone.

These are worth looking at, firstly to discover if they actually are exceptions.

I can’t think about Jo without thinking about Carl Jung. The Anima and Animus, psychic shadow-personalities created from the repressed femininity in males and the repressed masculinity in females, that act at gateways, guides to the deep areas of the subconscious. The essentialist ideas implicit here cause problems, and I wouldn’t be so on board with them except for the problematic nature of Jo himself.

He’s male, and this makes him somehow different from all of Gaga’s other creations. He received an enormous amount of attention for this. Why?

Let me put this another way: Jo throws into stark relief the fact that all of Gaga’s other images and personas, while infinitely mutable, have all been decidedly female. She isn’t as amorphous as we thought. There’s something about men.

But here, at last, she gives us a man. And she has a very special relationship with this man.

Both Jung and Aliester Crowley would argue that an individual’s marriage to herself is one of the most self-actualized accomplishments in human psychic life. And that’s what Gaga’s giving us here. The force inside you that makes you fall in love, that makes the whole world seem aglow and full of butterflies? That comes from you, and gets projected onto the love-object. You can have access to that feeling whenever you want.

Is Gaga in love with Jo Calderone?

One would sculpt a male identity based on a male ideal. A possible answer is “yes”.

So we have her and Jo loving and doving in the cornfield. But we also have a very literal wedding taking place, with a gorgeous model, this acknowledgement of the other.

This other, though, is performing surgeries and violations of pornographic proportions on the pain-nerved body of our ingénue. The aggressive imagery stands in stark contrast to the upbeat rock and roll of the track. Why all the violence?

We have, here, the narrative of human love as process. Because Gaga understands something important about love, something blindingly obvious but something that often gets left out of the media’s portrayals and our own perceptions.

Love is pain.

Her example-narrative points us not to a single moment of love, the happy moment, the moment of butterflies, but to the entirety of romantic engagement as a process viewed in four-dimensional space. Five dimensional, even, because of all the layering of metaphor. Consummation is thrust in our face at the same moment as agony, and it’s all soundtracked by a rousing stomper of an uplifting track that closes Gaga’s religious statement of an album. She says, watch me get surgery performed, watch me experience pain and suffocation, and watch me do it triumphantly. Watch me get married, too. Watch me do it all at the same time.

Love and mating are engagements in which both systems involved must open to the interaction. Parts mesh, gears grind, and things get snapped off. Love is violence and collision; I’m sure Ballard would agree. Love is the creation of the cyborg, the amalgamation; it’s the ultimate surgery on our subjectivity. This is the surgery that’s being performed in the video, and whether the interaction is between Gaga and the other or Gaga and herself is ultimately immaterial – when say that we must come to love ourselves, the violence of a bifurcation has already taken place.

The oxygen mask offered to the mermaid. The splitting of the self. The longing, and the eternal gap, and the tiny, glorious moments of consummation we get. These processes are the reward for living and loving. The processes themselves. The entire picture, and the slow disassembly, throughout our lives, of the chrysalis of ourselves, the imprisoning neurosis of our own individuality. Learn to love, and learn to die. Be ready.

Grant Morrison has declared, in lectures and in writing, the end of the individual in favor of a kind of willful schizophrenia, the development of multiple personalities to avoid the ego’s calcification and lack of options toward being. What a charming idea: two of those multiple personalities could get married.

You can marry yourself.

But you can also marry somebody else. The meshing is never easy, and you do it at peril of the disruption of your current system of self. But this pain, this surgery, is celebrated by Gaga. This song is triumphant and liberating and the video should be viewed the same way; we should marvel at this gorgeous violation of becoming, we should glory in the dirty obscenities of love as thoroughly as we celebrate its beauty. The video forces us to confront both sides of the coin at once. It’s a tesseract diagram of how to love, and we should not just examine it. We should go beyond that, and examine our own lives, loves, and pains in the same way. In five-dimensional hyperspace, the way they actually exist. They’re beautiful that way.

Photographs and video from Devin and Mrs. O'Neill's honeymoon album.

Author Bios:

Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, PR practitioner, and compulsive liar. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com/ and at http://devinoneill.blogspot.com/.

Mrs. O'Neill is a psycho.

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Bifurcation of the Simple

By Eddie McCaffray

The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here.

Lady Gaga’s newest video, “Yoü and I”, released two days ahead of schedule on August 16th, includes the usual heavy dollop of striking images and dichotomies. There’s the bloody-heeled, black-clad, cyborg Gaga lurching gracefully down a sun-baked Nebraska highway; there is the mad-scientist lover and the Frankenstein Gaga-mermaid he creates; there is the virginal dream-state Gaga performing “Yoü and I” in a cornfield for the Jo Calderone Gaga.

Clearly, present here are sets of oppositions: Cyborg Gaga is both glamorous and very literally artificial, fake, robotic, made in the big city of show business and high technology – what is she doing in rural farm country, in the heartland? There’s also Jo Calderone, the hard-bitten greaser, and Nightie Gaga, the picture of an innocent farm-girl. Not only do these two oppose one another as simple man and woman, or rebellious hellion and doe-eyed virgin, but they also, as a couple, stand in sharp contrast to the freakish and raunchy pairing of Mermaid Gaga and her mad-scientist creator (who is, in his turn, marked as the opposite to his fishy pop creation by the wings tattooed on his back).

What does it all mean? Of course, oppositional pairings are nothing new to Gaga’s work. In my essay about the “Judas” song and video, I discussed several such pairings: Judas and Jesus themselves, as well as Gaga’s equation of betrayal and forgiveness in an interview. That piece suggested that these opposites might in fact be one and the same: Gaga’s vices are her strengths, her fears are her aspirations. In my essay “Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical ‘I’”, I considered the way in which Gaga’s character songs blur the distinctions between various individuals, with major ramifications for power, agency, and identity.

In the “Yoü and I” video, as in these previous works, Gaga is interested in a very special kind of opposition, or duality: namely, she is interested in binaries which only appear to oppose one another; but when we peer at them more closely, or understand them in a new, more profound light, we come to see that they are in fact indistinguishable from one another – they are unities. Cyborg Gaga is, after all, returning to her home – “it’s been a long time since I came around/been a long time but I’m back in town.” She may have changed in drastic, even horrifying ways, but can it be denied that she is still a creature of the place in which she was born? Of course, Jo Calderone is easy to explain in this light: he is Lady Gaga in the most literal sense. And as an artistic creation, acted out by her, he fits in perfectly well as the dream of Nightie Gaga – who, after all, must be dreaming of some hunk, or why is she scampering around in her underwear at night in the middle of a giant field of fertility metaphor?

Giant field of fertility metaphor

In a similar sense, the winged-scientist lover and Mermaid Gaga also belong together, require one another. The monstrous passion of the scientist requires its project, as his monstrous lover’s passion requires the object of its lust. He clearly craves his opposite, a fish woman to his birdman, and their coupling is obviously both joyful and desperate on the part of both parties. Though perhaps Mermaid Gaga didn’t know that she needed the transformation her tormentor-turned-creator-turned lover has inflicted upon her, she seems to realize it by the end of the video. And the pain and violence of her creation is not incidental – it parallels the bloody, raw heels of Cyborg Gaga as she marches home down the highway. Journeys of self-discovery, as well as of homecoming, are difficult and even painful. (Odysseus, the original home-comer, is given his name by his grandfather who takes it from the word odium; he is later only recognized by the scars on his body – physical manifestations of the odium heaped upon his being. His pain, therefore, is synonymous with his identity.)

Thus the “Yoü and I” video is perhaps Gaga’s most overt statement on identity thus far. The crux of this video is that, despite the oppositions between Nightie Gaga and Calderone Gaga, between Mermaid Gaga and Nightie Gaga, between Cyborg Gaga and Nebraska Homestead, and between the two different romantic pairs, all these different Gagas belong together: even more, they are one.

This is how the identity which Gaga posits, and which she explores not only in individual songs and performances, but also in her day-to-day performance art project, is able to be at once performative and essential. The title of her second album, Born this Way, certainly caused a hubbub among many observers who considered themselves informed. How could Gaga champion empowered self-creation, to say nothing of LGBT rights, and yet choose a name that positively screamed the essentialist understanding of identity: from birth and by birth we are determined? Such observers could take a lesson from Gaga in the (re)unification of supposed-binaries: does having a destiny truly preclude self-creation, or transformation? Isn’t it conceivable that one’s destiny might be to make a certain choice, and if so, hasn’t the opposition between fate and freedom become obsolete or arbitrary?  

Hegel, in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, writes,

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not an original or immediate unity as such – is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presuppose its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out it its end, is it actual. (10)

I argue that what Hegel means in this passage and what Gaga is attempting to say about identity have much in common. Hegel’s argument is that the really real, the “actual”, the human subject, must include both itself and the perception of itself. There is always a distance inherent in identity, a sense in which a person knows who and where they are, and also that they could be something else someplace else. Thus, in a way, identity is an empty space, a gulf across which the self is perceived by something at once itself and alien. Compare this idea to one of Gaga’s tweets in the days before the video was released: “We bare an Unbearable Human Inability: to just ‘be.’” She grasps what Hegel means when he writes that “this substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” – humans are nothing more than the perception of something missing, of a void wherein that perception will always struggle and transform in an attempt to be fulfilled. Hence the arduous distance Cyborg Gaga must traverse, which leaves her ankles caked with blood, before she can return to a home as alien as it must be familiar. Hence the painful, rapine, monstrous transformation Mermaid Gaga undergoes before the throes of pleasure, before the coming-home of orgasmic ecstasy; hence the desire of Nightie Gaga for her dream object, which is after all only an inversion of herself. That tweet also includes “love is a result” – the result of this striving, a homecoming across the gulf of the self, which is perhaps not so different from the gulf between two selves.

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.

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The Perceptual Marriage: Notes on “Yoü and I” and Future Work

By Roland Betancourt

In June of last year, the Internet was abuzz with the news of a mysterious new model posing for Vogue Hommes Japan. His name: Jo Calderone. Soon after, following much careful formal analysis and an interesting back-and-forth of Tweets by Perez Hilton, it was clear that this hot new model was Lady Gaga. It was in this exchange that Gaga first used the phrase “Born This Way,” and Jo Calderone inaugurated the Born This Way project as its indirect poster child. Since that moment, I have been waiting for Jo Calderone to reemerge, I have written a chapter on him for the upcoming Stigmata book, and I believe him to be crucial in Gaga’s articulation of technology and her body as a shared medium for visual (re)production.

While in London recently, I tried to view the film of the shoot at SHOWstudio right before the show ended. Mysteriously, I was turned away because the basement had allegedly flooded a few weeks previously. Jo Calderone’s Twitter account, which had been dormant for almost a year, tweeted again on 2 June. It seemed that the Jo Calderone project was back in full swing, possible for “The Edge of Glory” video. However, as we now know, the original video for that – which was to contain an Enrique Iglesias-type, mermaids, and plastic surgery – never happened. Now, the parallels between the Edge video that never was and the newly released “Yoü and I” are quite evident from what little we know. Was that basement really flooded? Did anyone see the Jo video in London? (I encourage responses from readers regarding this.) What is clear is that the Jo Calderone project suddenly withdrew from the private exhibition space (the video would only be shown in house), and reemerged onto the world stage. This signals an important shift in Gaga’s trajectory, particularly after various videos that, while visually interesting, were mainly driven by Laurieann Gibson’s choreography.

I would argue that the project is complete. Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I” completes the Born This Way cycle. It all ends here. However, the fate of Jo Calderone is still left in question. Nicola Formichetti cited him as “Jo Calderone” in the wardrobe credits, along with Gaga and Taylor Kinney. Thus, the identity is still in place. When he reemerged on 2 June, Jo Calderone tweeted, “Society’s projection, should not be your reflection. If you’ve ever felt rejection, feel safe by my protection.” The rhyme scheme here suggests that this is most certainly a fragment from a new song. After all, Gaga did a similar thing with Judas lyrics months before the song came out. Thus, Jo Calderone who began the Born This Way album campaign, reemerged to complete it – and, perhaps, inaugurate the next phase in Gaga’s project.

The video also suggests an important shift in Gaga’s work, one that has always been there in statement, but lacking in visuals: the union of body and technology. The opening figure of Gaga is her new trajectory. Her feet are torn from her fashion, her body is inserted with implants, and her large hat echoes a geodesic solar panel. The image has some immediate parallels with the cyborg-like jewelry that Beyoncé donned as her alter-ego Sasha Fierce. Additionally, this potent image of the Gaga cyborg was foreshadowed the video for “Paparazzi,” when Gaga emerges from her wheelchair in Mugler body armor. Hence, we see in this proud heroic image that dominates the landscape an empowered technological Gaga, who has always tried to unify technology and fashion, and has noted the importance of social technologies in her craft.

The very idea of the cyborg, post-human body, is the unification of the organic sensorium with the distributed agency afforded by technological networks. Therefore, I would argue that Gaga is heading toward a deeper articulation of technology and social media – developing, of course, upon her BTW work that is centered on the body as a medium for infinite births. This is also a line of thought that has been of crucial interest to Nicola Formichetti, and that defined the structure of his Gothic-inspired, social media saturated Mugler show. Perhaps this will develop in fruitful ways that question the usual networks of circulation – like Björk’s exemplary new iPad-app album Biophilia.

The lyrics offered by the Jo Calderone tweet and his deployment in the video demonstrate an interesting train of thought: Jo Calderone as a personal projection. The projection has been an important, yet under-analyzed concept in Gaga’s work. Not only does the medium feature prominently in her concerts (particularly in the interludes and the “Dance in the Dark” opening of the Monster Ball), but it also appears in the Manifesto of Little Monsters. The Manifesto reads:

It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our projection. We are nothing without our image. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become, in the future.

Gaga has paralleled one’s image to one’s own projection, a present and proleptic projection. The image, the projection, the reflection are triangulated in the ideological space of perception, that is “the theory of perception.”

This “theory” seems to be a coherent – or, rather, consistent – contemplation on filmic viewing that resonates strongly with Christian Metz’s theory of film perception. Metz writes,

There are two cones in the auditorium: one ending on the screen and starting both in the projection box and in the spectator’s vision insofar as it is projective, and one starting from the screen and “deposited” in the spectator’s perception insofar as it is introjective (on the retina, a second screen). When I say that “I see” the film, I mean thereby a unique mixture of two contrary currents: the film is what I receive, and it is also what I release, since it does not preexist my entering the auditorium and I only need close my eyes to suppress it. Releasing it, I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the camera, which points and yet which records.

This process of projection is crucial to the medium of film, which is distributed across the space of the auditorium, residing neither in the projector or the screen, but in the locus of experience: the viewer as receiver. Gaga develops this thesis as a structure for the articulation of identity. (Neil Leach has applied Metz for similar purposes in his article “Belonging: Toward a Theory of Identification with Place,” in the Mining Autonomy [2002] volume of the architecture journal Perspecta.)

Gaga’s work here takes on an interesting project by slowly inscribing identity onto the act of viewership, thus empowering her users as viewers. Through the act of viewing, the viewer “poaches” the text (to use Michel de Certeau’s term), making the narrative their own in their interpretation. However, there is also a bodily confusion between the screen, the camera, the projector, and the body. Thus, the cyborg image of Gaga is theoretically paralleled to the image of Jo Calderone, who is a reflection/projection of Gaga.

The video has a simple reading, one that helps this argument: “You will never find what you are looking for in love, if you don’t love yourself,” as Gaga tweeted with a preview still of the video. Quite simply, the video is “about” having to love oneself before one can love another. Hence, Jo Calderone standing in for her lover, Nebraska, is Gaga’s depiction of loving herself. After all, Jo Calderone has important resonances with Gaga’s (infamous?) boyfriend Lüc Carl in his stripped-down drinking, rocker look. However, what are we to say about that pale, white Gaga who smiles at the camera in a daze most of the times, noticeably not even singing the lyrics? Her body seems to echo a white canvas, the space of the representation of the image – this is a thesis that I have found crucial to the rule of Jo Calderone. Here Gaga and Jo Calderone are caught in a complex relationship of projection and screen (the perpetually absent body, of course, is that of Stefani Germanotta), but the act of performing and viewing Gaga is defined by their unified relationship. Her cyborg-self presents us with the same image, but in this viewing she is a compound of the technologies and social networks of (re)production through which we, as an audience in a global public sphere, view her.

This hybridity is again doubled by the image of the mermaid YÜYI, whose name I would argue is a unification of “Yoü and I” – the “and” replaced by a “y,” as in Spanish or merely phonetically, Yoü-y-I. As a hybrid creature, she serves precisely as a union of these tied opposites: fantasy and reality, projector and screen, body and technology, Gaga and Jo Calderone. She is a creation of the lover, but the lover creates various images or permutations of Gaga. As Gaga tweeted, the more you try to alter her the more powerful she becomes.

YÜYI is the marker of a resilient viral image who embodies the full virality of the spectator and the performer, whose image is subject to the manipulation of user-masses. In a telling moment, the lover strokes the glass of her framed fish-tank-like container. She is “still” human – although like “Bad Romance,” the video works against any clear narrative development and thus it would be unwise to carelessly assume a linear chronology to these images. The scene seems to echo myths of Narcissus and Echo, or even the Portrait of Dorian Grey. She stands as a framed image with a spectator that is also a lover and image-maker.

There is a sexualized image-poesis implied, as if the creation of images is a sexual act – the impending virality a desirable venereal disease. The barn house is the artist/lover’s workshop, replete with a model of his creation in the left background. The production is violent, torturous. The figure that emerges in YÜYI is haunting; her fused breasts almost look as if they’ve been seared together. Image production is a sexualized violence. However, one must remember that this is not image production in the traditional sense of a medium (e.g. sculpture or painting), but rather image production is the node of perception, of viewer-filmic interaction in the body of the viewer. We are all YÜYI.

* * *

Lady Gaga is meant to make an important announcement on Thursday with the official release of the video. There are many things that she may well announce. Perhaps, a new song that involves Jo Calderone, probably the Born This Way Ball. However, given the strong themes of union and hybridity, I am left to wonder if there is not a big autobiographical secret encoded into this video: the video concludes with the wedding scene. A virginal Gaga is betrothed to her torturer, her image-maker, her lover. Most of the costumes featured in the video were, as usual, from major fashion houses, usual collaborators, and a few in-Haus designs by Perry Meek. One notable custom item is the veil, made to match the wedding dress. This wedding dress is credited by Formichetti on his blog as “WEDDING DRESS BY VINTAGE NORMA KAMALI (SPECIAL THANKS MRS GERMANOTTA).” The use of her mother’s wedding dress is a charged statement. Given the various articulations and structuring of union in the video, the blatant declaration of love for Nebraska, I cannot help but ask: Is Lady Gaga getting married? Or, perhaps, which “Mrs.” Germanotta is he referring to?

Writer’s Bio

Roland Betancourt is a PhD student at Yale University in the History of Art department focusing on Byzantine art and image theory, with an outside concentration in contemporary art and popular culture. Roland.Betancourt@Yale.edu 

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