Soldiering Emptiness : Inverting Crucifix

By Meghan Vicks

This is the first piece in our series on "Marry the Night."

The origin, argues Maurice Blanchot, does not truly exist, for there’s always something that precedes it as a generative source. He further argues that even if the origin did exist, it would be impossible for us to comprehend or approach it without sullying and thereby destroying the origin itself: it would be irrevocably transformed and changed just by our presence, by our coming into contact with it. What Blanchot is interested in, however, is our fascination with origins in the first place, with our desire for our bare, unaccommodated selves at all. “Man at point zero,” he writes. Blanchot attributes this desire for the zero-point – the chimerical origin – as oriented not so much to the past as to the future: that is, we desire to be made anew, to refresh ourselves, to cleanse our worlds of any and all false myths and ideologies, and in so doing to spiritually and culturally start again, at zero.

It’s incredibly appropriate, therefore, when Lady Gaga tells us at the onset of the video for “Marry The Night” – her “origins mythos” video – that she loathes reality, and that the story of her origin that the video will reveal is just as much her artistic creation as it is a description of what “really” happened. “Marry The Night” isn’t about what really happened; it’s about what “really” happened.

See, when talking about “origins” or “reality,” we can no longer do so without the recourse to quotation marks (as Nabokov so famously claimed). Artistic creation (the quotes) marries reality; analogously, Gaga (the artist) marries the night. And reality is all that shit, trauma, emptiness, and horror that artistic creativity somehow makes beautiful and bearable. Sometimes I think it’s terrifying, what art has the power to do: make palatable and even beautiful real suffering – that kind of suffering that has no redemptive quality or spark of beauty when one’s enthralled in it.

When Gaga, cradled by suffering, dyes her hair in the bathtub, she’s trying to aestheticize that trauma, make it beautiful somehow. In doing so, she transforms the trauma into something redemptive, into something that’s no longer trauma. Again, when she puts on lipstick and blush in the car. When she bedazzles her denim. The hair dye, lipstick, blush, bedazzler become the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen, and Gaga becomes the artistic vision. And the trauma? It becomes the canvas, that blank space or emptiness upon which a pure potentiality of creations may come into existence.

As Gaga speaks about losing everything, and about being a “soldier to her own emptiness,” she articulates an awareness that sometimes nothingness itself can become the ultimate creative force, that even, perhaps, nothingness is absolutely necessary for artistic creation at all. You’re a soldier to your own emptiness, but emptiness allows for a kind of infinite freedom, a borderless space that allows for new things to exponentially be.

Infinite bedazzled emptiness.

So she’s turned that trauma into a creative power, into an artistic vision. And in doing so, she’s inverted the trauma, freed it from its own ontology and thereby allowed it to become something beautiful. You’re watching a video that is trauma mirrored; you’re face-to-face with your own trauma inverted. After all, you’re the one watching the mirrored reflection of Gaga’s trauma; Gaga’s mirrored trauma positions you as its spiritual hologram.

No, seriously: didn’t you notice that parts of the film were inverted (take a look at the writing on the wall)?

When I flipped the shot, I found that the wall reads this:

As we watch “Marry The Night,” we’re watching an inverted cross: Gaga has taken the trauma of her crucifix and transformed it into beauty. And what’s more traumatic than the crucifix? What’s more beautiful than its inversion?

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“[Mary Magdalene is] still in love with Judas, baby”: Nicola Formichetti's Gothic and Lady Gaga’s Weimar Hooker

By Roland Betancourt

“Government Hooker”: An Introduction to “Judas”

Fragment A:

I’m just a Holy Fool, oh baby he’s so cruel, but I’m still in love with Judas, Baby.

Fragment B:

[...] When he comes to me, I am ready/ I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs/ Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/ Even after three times, he betrays me/ I’ll bring him down, a king with no crown [...]

The fragments above come down to us as the only extant lyrics of Lady Gaga’s as of yet unreleased single, “Judas,” with a reputable provenance – Twittered and pronounced by Gaga herself.

At the “Google goes Gaga” interview, Gaga was seen in the same garb as that worn during the announcement of the Google collaboration. During the interview, Gaga stated that she wore the same clothing because of “branding,” later reiterating that she wanted fans to think of her in a certain way and connect the two visuals – likewise stressing that her project is a gesammtkunstwerk. From this same interview, Fragment B comes down to us with additional confirmation of Biblical and “symbolic” qualities of the song and its music video (to be directed by Gaga and Laurie Ann Gibson [possibly] next week). Following the interview, Gaga was seen at Twitter headquarters, again with a similar hairstyle and the same glasses, but now with large hoop earrings and a gaudy, gem-encrusted gold crucifix.

  

The large hoop earrings are very similar to those featured in her earlier appearances as a chola, a term cited in “Born This Way” that stereotypically refers to a Hispanic girl who wears tight pants, tank top, large gold-hoop earrings (usually with a name in them), tightly tweezed eyebrows, and long, gelled hair in a pony tail (a comparable term is chonga in the Hispanic community of South Florida, particularly Miami-Dade County).

As a style stereotypically linked with Hispanics whose families have recently migrated to the United States, the image of the gold-hoop earrings is one that signifies a type of conspicuous consumption through the materiality of gold and the added excess of customization, implicit in the inscribed name. While the term chola may be used in a derogatory sense, it also serves as a source of pride and self-identification – a very specific style that unifies self-identified members of such a demographic. Given the clear message of “Born This Way,” Gaga applies the term in the latter sense. Therefore, the upward mobility and marginalized community identity that exists in the valences of the chola is reified in Gaga’s use of the image.

One of the earliest appearances of the chola imagery in Gaga’s work, and by far its first broadcast image via Twitter, was in relation to Gaga’s effort to legalize gay marriage in New York by urging fans to email Senator Grisanti on 5 March 2011.

This image and tweet appeared three days after the debut of “Government Hooker” at the Mugler fashion show in Paris. Right before the fashion show, Gaga tweeted: “Show starting soon fashionmonsters! #parisisburning X Mother Monster.” Gaga used the hashtag #parisisburning as an oblique reference to “vogueing” in the New York drag community, a term made popular by the 1990 documentary of the same title. Paris is Burning, filmed throughout the late-1980s, features the underground drag club culture (referred to as “ball culture,” a name that has strong resonances with Gaga’s own [Fame/Monster] ball culture). The film still carries a strong relevance in contemporary drag culture through the ideas of “reading” and “vogueing” that have recently been widely distributed to the gay community through Logo’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, which often incorporates these routines into its competitions and directly cites the documentary as a source for these crucial drag-tasks. More importantly, the documentary explores the dynamics of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity (primarily black and Hispanic) in these balls and in the wider LGBT community. Thus, the documentary speaks to similar issues that are explored visually in Gaga’s chola fashion.

While these various connections are tangentially relevant to the overall issues of LGBT and multi-racial communities for which Born This Way serves as anthem, chola Gaga was utilized in her tweet (3/5/2011) in connection with a call-to-action. Keeping the debut of “Government Hooker” in mind, the chola-inspired costuming in this context presents an image for the Government Hooker. Gaga’s chola, with all its connotations of conspicuous consumption, marginality, and community identity, becomes the image of the Government Hooker. Here, Gaga depicts her master thesis on her role as a social activist. Gaga prostitutes herself, her fame, and her power for sociopolitical emancipation. In a sense, what the chola does through her fashion identity, Gaga enacts through viral social activism – and most certainly through fashion as well.

Gaga’s costume and appearance in the Mugler fashion show evoked the same nexus of marginality, prostitution, and club-culture identity. However, Nicola Formichetti and Gaga were not citing the usual 1980s club-culture to which Gaga and her inner circle of friends belong. Instead, they visually quoted Weimar Germany cabaret culture, something that Gaga has riffed with in the Cabaret-esque imagery of the “Alejandro” film. During the Mugler show, Gaga is seen on stage in a tight, bondage-like outfit, with striking eye makeup, smoking a cigarette in a grotesque manner. Her body is illuminated in a red glow as she leans against a composite column. The arcade becomes a vaguely turn-of-the-century European street, a characteristic of modern life as depicted in the work of Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, but in the red glow it becomes (quite literally) a red-light district.

The particular German quality of the scene is heightened by the inclusion of the Mugler “Scheiße” remix at the beginning of the fashion show, which is heard right before the premier of “Government Hooker.” For her second catwalk, Gaga wears a white dress and hat. Here, the white dress presents the ideal manifestation of the celebrity’s body: a white canvas. It is onto this white body that images are cast; the canvas upon which visual reproduction occurs and images make themselves physically manifest. In the Mugler catwalk, the white costume becomes blood red in the crimson spotlight, and in this moment, Gaga bears a striking resemblance to Otto Dix’s Portrait of Anita Berber (1925), a Weimar cabaret performer, writer, and prostitute.

As a nightlife superstar, Berber was notorious in Weimar Berlin for her cocaine use and bisexuality, often flaunting her female lovers, as well as what some would call her Avant-Garde, sexually charged performances – images of which draw further parallels with Gaga’s Mugler catwalk.

Gaga is possibly well acquainted with Berber’s image, or at least with the similar imagery of Weimar artist Otto Dix. Dix’s paintings and drawings are in most major museums around the world, and his work has recently received much attention in New York. In the past five years, two major exhibitions have taken place in the City: the blockbuster Glitter and Doom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (14 November 2006–19 February 2007), and most recently at the Neue Galerie, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in North America (11 March–30 August 2010). The Anita Berber image was displayed at both exhibitions, and was featured as one of the poster images for the recent Neue Galerie show, as evidenced by the museum’s use of the image on the show’s website.

Therefore, the image of Anita Berber is that of an Avant-Garde club-performer and writer, an activist in her brave and bold sexuality – the very image that Gaga is attempting to convey and develop through the unfolding central thesis of the Born This Way album, but particularly through “Government Hooker.” The image of Gaga as the “Hooker” is given full effect in the Mugler fashion show performance, a performance that translates Gaga’s ontology as that of a hooker. The deeper underpinnings of the Anita Berber character and the overall Weimar aesthetic are later refined and nuanced by the inclusion of chola imagery, which adds to the governmental hooker/activist element. We are seeing two visual vocabularies here to develop the activist/hooker idea: one belonging to interwar Germany, the other belonging to contemporary visual culture.

There is also something anachronistic about the composite columns and ogival, pointed arches of the Gothic arcade in the Mugler fashion show. A strange choice for a fashion show, in fact, some sources criticized the design for concealing the models. Nevertheless, any Medieval art or architectural historian would point out just how perfect Formichetti’s creative design for this catwalk was. In an event that was laden with social media on stage and behind the scenes, the arcade functioned much like a choir screen in a Gothic church by playing with the poetics of concealment and revelation.

Throughout the liturgical performance, the space of the Gothic church constructs a hermeneutics of concealment and revelation that emphasizes the pathos of seeing the sacred mysteries of the religious ceremony.[i] The consecration of the Eucharist, the blood and body of Christ, occur behind the screen of the Gothic church. Throughout this key event in the liturgy, the doors and curtains of the sanctuary and the inner sanctum are carefully open and closed to stress both the manifestation of Christ in the church as well as his heavenly distance. During the Mugler fashion show, as the models proceeded through the space, the primary visual contact and contemplation of their clothing was fragmented and constantly deferred. The arcade played with the phenomenology of the runway, challenging its habitual use by the spectator – they had to make an effort to contemplate, stitching the fragments together in their minds. The viewers were teased, the full ecstasy of the model having been constantly deferred.[ii]

Fashion in this space takes on a religious dimension, a divine process of self-production and communion with a fashion icon. It is the weekly ritual in society, like church, by which the body prepares itself for spiritual emancipation. Fashion and the celebrity icon become the religion of popular culture, by which humanity becomes a better race – free of prejudice. When considering the religious valences of these images, the salvation and emancipation proclaimed by the birthing of Gaga’s new race in the “Born This Way” film suggest a deeply rooted Christian model – especially in light of the upcoming single, “Judas.”

“Judas”: Analysis

Who is Judas? Judas Iscariot is one of the Twelve Disciples of Christ who betrays Christ by turning him over to the High Priest Caiaphas (who then turns him over to Pontius Pilate and his soldiers) in exchange for thirty pieces of silver [Cf. Matthew 26:14-16; Luke 22:3-6; John 13:27]. The betrayal occurs via a kiss, the infamous Kiss of Judas (depicted below in a Byzantine Gospel Lectionary at Dionysiou Monastery on Mt. Athos, Codex 587, c. 1100). While the Biblical narratives vary, it is generally agreed that after the crucifixion, Judas kills himself due to his guilt and anguish.

For Christianity, Judas plays an important theological/Christological role, as he puts into question the divine will of God and Christ. The Incarnation in the Virgin Mary occurs for the salvation of mankind, to cleanse humanity from the sins of Adam and Eve. This is a process that is referred to as the “economy” (or the divine dispensation). In order for man to be liberated of sin, Christ must be crucified; Judas therefore plays a central role, since without him and his betrayal, the Crucifixion could not occur. The Gospels of John and Matthew both understand Jesus as foreseeing and allowing for the betrayal to take place [Cf. Matthew 26:25 and John 13:27-28]. In the popular musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) by Andrew Lloyd Webber, these issues are made clear in the development of Judas’s character, and through his confrontation with Jesus in the scene of “The Last Supper.”

This brief history of Judas sketches important issues for the consideration of Gaga’s own Judas. In the “Born This Way” video, as well as in her BTW prosthetics, there is an emphasis on incarnation. Her fashion undergoes a process of incarnation, the literal making flesh of items, such as shoulder pads and high cheekbones. Her birth of a new race presents a myth in which a “birth of magnificent proportions” takes place as a way of liberating humanity from the sins of prejudice. The incarnation of the new race functions similar to that of Christ in the divine dispensation, as a way of cleansing humanity of the sin. One of the Archbishops of Constantinople, Nestorius (c. 386-451), considered Adam to exist as a fallen statue after his succumbing to the devil; and like a king whose statue has been torn down, God re-erected a statue in his image through Christ. Thus, Christ becomes man as the replacement of a degenerate image. Just as evil is the hidden, concealed, and static-infused image of Gaga via a sonogram in the video for “Born This Way,” Adam was a fallen, corrupted image. The new race of humanity in “Born This Way” can be understood as a replacement for the fallen image of humanity, thus playing a role similar to Christ. Therefore, the impending suffering and crucifixion of this wholly pure image always lies in the shadows as a threat, which perhaps is inescapable. Gaga concludes the Manifesto by precisely expressing her concern for the preservation of this new image, as if a threat lurked somewhere – perhaps another Judas?

The dress worn by Mother Monster in the “BTW” video, interestingly enough, is called the “Stained Glass” dress, designed by the London-based artist Petra Storrs. Upon close examination of the dress, one finds a series of images taken from important works of art (such as Raphael’s Galatea [1512] and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne [1523-24]).

The dress features a slit over her womb across which the images on the “stained glass” are mirrored. Right beside this slit, on either side, is a scene of the crucifixion. The video, as I have discussed previously, features an important use of mirroring as a metaphor for birth and self-creation. Thus, the mirroring here demonstrates that the self-creation and production of this race is somehow tied to the crucifixion. Just as Gaga’s image is mirrored and her identity constituted by the unifying slit of the mirror, the birth here is unified through the flower-like slit over her vagina that is tied to the crucifixion imagery. The scene of Christ features prominently in the dress over her life-giving vagina. It reifies the economy of incarnation, reiterating the thesis that the incarnation of Christ, the reinstated icon, occurs so that his crucifixion may occur – so that he may suffer wholly as man and divine, and by doing so cleanse humanity of their sins through his death and resurrection.

Gaga has used similar arguments of sacrifice, death, and resurrection in her previous works. Most prominently, the narrative of “Paparazzi” stages the boyfriend figure as a Judas figure, who with a kiss turns her into those men (the paparazzi) responsible for her demise, but ultimately her resurrection.

Essentially, “Judas” is the “Paper Gangster” of Born This Way. During her 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Gaga stated that people want to see her fail, they want to see her fall, and they want to know what she will look like when she has died. The incarnation of Lady Gaga that is evident in Born This Way also entails an element of the grotesque, of decay, and sacrifice. Not surprisingly Gaga recently said that her hair was falling out from all the bleaching – the bodily processes of the Fame deteriorating her flesh.

However, it is necessary to ask if Gaga’s “Judas” partakes in such a Christomimesis. This cannot be ascertained from our available fragments. Instead, “Judas” is about misdirected attention. The Fame and The Fame Monster took care of the Christomimetic character of the superstar; what Born This Way partakes of is the flesh itself, the bodily incarnation – lust.

Let us turn to Fragment B.1: “When he comes to me, I am ready/ I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs.” This line identifies the speaker, Gaga, as Mary of Bethany (collapsed into the identity of Mary the Magdalene in the Catholic tradition, but not in the East). Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus (who Christ resurrects), is the woman who poured perfume on Christ and wiped his feet with her hair. Then, Fragment B.2: “Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/ Even after three times, he betrays me.” This suggests a reference to Judas, but it is in fact a reference to Peter, who betrays Christ thrice before the cock crows. The Passion story seems to be collapsed in Gaga’s narrative, wherein the “he” is both Judas and Peter, and the “me” is both Mary of Bethany (or the Magdalene, more than likely) and Christ, since Christ is the betrayed figure.[iii]

The final portion of this fragment is perhaps most perplexing: “I’ll bring him down, a king with no crown.” Is this a reference to Christ, a king without a crown – except the crown of thorns that is mockingly placed upon him? This would make the speaker now Judas, suggesting the presence of various “I”s in the song. This is a technique that Gaga previously utilized in “Paparazzi” to stress the mutual self-creation of the fan and the superstar. Here, we may be seeing the same process – the mutual self-creation of the betrayed and the betrayer. However, perhaps Mary Magdalene is still speaking about Judas.

Fragment A suggests that the speaker is still Mary Magdalene: “I’m just a Holy Fool, oh baby he’s so cruel, but I’m still in love with Judas, Baby.” Gaga’s lyrics suggest that Mary Magdalene – the sexualized creature of Western legend who recently figured in the popular imagination via the DaVinci Code (2003) as the bride of Christ – is in love with Judas. This is the crux of the reading. “Judas” is about Mary Magdalene loving the wrong person: she is not in love with Jesus, the king of all kings, but has fallen in love with the wrong man – who will inherently bring her down.

In the collapsing of Biblical stories there are three Marys that are merged into a single figure: Mary of Bethany, Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the Prostitute. In Western Christianity (i.e. Catholicism), Mary is the redeemed prostitute who meets Christ, abandons her ways, and goes on to preach the Gospel to the idol-worshippers in Marseilles. Eventually, following the Golden Legend, she becomes a hermit. She resides in the desert, and every day is lifted by angels to receive nourishment from God. While she originally wears a hair shirt (or simply covers herself with her long flowing hair), in artistic representations her hair shirt is sometimes depicted as actual body hair. This is evidenced by Tilman Riemenschneider’s 1490-92 carving of Mary Magdalene being lifted by the angels. Her image also partakes of a similar incarnation of dress into the flesh. Like Gaga’s shoulder-pads that turn into fleshy protrusions, the hair shirt of the Magdalene becomes beastly body hair.

Back in October 2010, possibly right around the time Gaga was writing and recording the songs for the Born This Way, she wore a “Hair Dress” at a performance. The hair shirt of Mary Magdalene is one of the most widely reproduced images in Christian art, and in Western art history as a whole. Therefore, it is unwise to overlook a connection between the two.

Now let us recall Gaga’s crucifix-wearing outfit at her Twitter visit. The gaudy gold Crucifix on Gaga’s hairstyle is a fitting accessory for her to wear the day after she reveals an excerpt from “Judas.” Naturally, the revelation of a portion of one of her upcoming songs was expected to become major headline news. Nevertheless, she has maintained many of the same elements as the chola-inspired “Government Hooker.” After considering the fragments of the song, however, it seems that Gaga is stringing together these various identities to produce a composite image of the Government Hooker and the Judas persona – although not necessarily Judas himself.

“Government Hooker” previewed at the Mugler show amidst a Gothic arcade with what has been called an “electro-pop Gregorian chant,” which added a definite religious resonance to the scenery and the song itself. I do not mean to argue that Gaga has been pushing any religious agenda, but rather structuring an inter-textuality between “Government Hooker” and “Judas.” The citation to Marilyn Monroe in “Government Hooker” via JFK puts her in line with the litany of sacrificial women in “Dance in the Dark,” which I believe structures an added parallel between The Fame and Born This Way. We are struck by a series of strong women throughout history who have in some way or another been close to key political and religious figures, and who have used their sexuality and fame as a way of evangelizing their own gospels: Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, Marilyn Monroe and JFK, Princess Diana and Prince Charles, Gaga and the Government. What the song “Judas” questions is complex, but essentially: what happens when the hooker/activist falls for the wrong man? Perhaps for the wrong Gospel? But, perhaps, even more menacing, what if they all somehow fell for the wrong guy? Nicola Formichetti was quite clear in various interviews that the women’s wear show was meant to empower women; these issues, therefore, cannot be overlooked and deserve more attention when the song finally comes out.

The Mugler fashion show was a brilliantly orchestrated media blitz utilizing social technologies to introduce “Government Hooker” through the very mediums that Gaga employs for her social activism. Therefore, it only makes sense that Gaga would visit Twitter with an opulent crucifix that takes on the chola-inspired language of excessive constructions of self-identity. Both Google and Twitter are the nexuses of Gaga/Government Hooker’s potentiality in the social sphere, yet they also present the dangerous proleptic implements of her own passion. Gaga’s Mary Magdalene has assumed the identity of Jesus and fallen for Judas in Formichetti’s Neo-Gothic panopticon, through which a careful process of concealment and revelation is performed. Her fate is uncertain now that the whole process of the divine economy has gone astray.

One may interpolate that the video for “Judas” features similar themes: a gaudy, over-the-top opulence, and aesthetic structures that draw from a Mugler-inspired, Neo-Gothic, medievalizing imagery and fashion. One can suspect that the gold background of the Byzantine icon and of Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn (1962) figures into this image making: an aesthetic that captures both the enlivened spirituality and power of images in the medieval world, yet is combined with the iconicity and typologies of the Warhol superstar in the Late-Capitalist Twitter-sphere. Nevertheless, given the existing precedents, it is only to be expected that the results are much darker – more Zombie Boy, more Gothic arcades, perhaps (The) Cloisters.

A Preface at the Place of an Epilogue

As an art historian of past visual worlds, my documents and sources are often fragmentary, revealing only a portion of the story or the image that must then be extrapolated, interpolated, or restored. As an art historian of present visual worlds, my documents and sources are also fragmentary, particularly when working on matters of popular culture. Access to a figure, such as Lady Gaga, is essentially and by all means impossible. Therefore, standard research practices – interviewing, seeing the creative process in detail, getting a sense of their workshops, etc. – are largely inaccessible. Thus, the scholar must resort to other means of investigation, sometimes merely compiling what seems like an endless list of facts from all available interviews and news reports to reconstruct a mere semblance of research. Additionally, for both the scholar and the fan, the diachronous trickling down of information through the processes of fame and media politics leads us to constantly (pre-)construct narratives and understandings that are later (at least partially) unveiled/fulfilled. Gaga herself provides us with a methodology for understanding the long durée of the hermeneutics of pop culture: “But the birth was not finite but it was infinite.”

Thus, this is an investigation into this proleptic process, whereby the glimmers and flashes of information produce an understanding of a body of work that is teasingly displayed before our eyes. Here I preference the current possible analysis of Lady Gaga’s unreleased “Government Hooker” and her upcoming single “Judas,” not as a prediction of what it may be, but as an analysis of what it is as it exists today. Analyzing it as a completed work, yet one fractionally presented. In other words, my intention is not to predict what may happen, but rather what has proleptically happened. Therefore, this is an interpolation, using an existing data set to produce new information within those points.

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[i] This is a subject discussed in depth by art historian Jacqueline Jung in her forthcoming book, The Gothic Screen: Sacred Sculpture and Social Space in the Medieval Cathedral.

[ii] Formichetti’s design plays well with the Neo-Gothic elements of punk and “goth” culture, as exemplified by his use of model Rick Genest (“Zombie Boy”), both Genest and the Gothic arcade. The design and the utilization of Genest additionally speak to a medieval fascination with death and the apocalypse – the impending resurrection of humanity at the Last Judgment.

[iii] What this demonstrates is a development of the popular imagination of the Biblical passion story. The medieval Golden Legend, for example, already confused the various Marys in the Bible and collapsed them into one, despite the rigorous religious scholarship that pervaded medieval society. The Judas theme unifies the Biblical men into an abstracted manifestation of betrayal; after all, this is not a faithful Biblical rendition, but a utilization of this cultural heritage.

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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Gaga's Anaphase, Gaga's Sonogram: the Mirror, the Cell, the Vagina, the Image

By Roland Betancourt

The following piece is the fifth in our series on Lady Gaga's video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Dyed my bangs black. Its my new monsterlook. Let the mitosis of the future begin. Off to meet Judas.

11:01 PM Feb 26th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Lady Gaga’s “tweet” concerning her new bangs serves as a forerunner for the “Born This Way” film. Her statement follows a very simple formula: she has made a physical modification to her look, and that physical modification becomes the new look for her monsters. While it is her look, it structures a new “monsterlook” that will be surely mirrored by Little Monsters. The TwitPic itself is produced on her Blackberry in a mirror, as many of the (in)famous MySpace profile pictures of the early days of social networking. Gaga uses the cryptic phrase, “Let the mitosis of the future begin.” Upon viewing the “Born This Way” film, this statement retroactively becomes foreshadow and reference; but at that moment of ignorance before the video was released, this statement latches on to its utterance context for meaning. Therefore, one is led to understand a connection between her image and its reproduction. It is as if she is saying to her Little Monsters, this is my new look, go and replicate it yourselves.

After viewing “Born This Way,” one understands this statement anew, this time within the context of the video and its focus on birthing and reproduction. It is necessary to point out here the bane of every high school biology teacher who has had to teach students about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. While meiosis is the production of sexual reproduction cells, which contain half the chromosomes to produce an animal, mitosis is the exact duplication of a single cell. Mitosis is the type of reproduction that occurs for single-celled creatures – it is a form of non-sexual reproduction. Therefore, there seems to be an incongruity here. Did Gaga mistake perhaps this basic difference? No. Gaga has stated that “Born This Way” emerged as an Immaculate Conception. Was she referring to the birth of Christ? Staging herself as the Virgin Mary as I have argued here before, having been impregnated by God through the grace of the Holy Spirit? Of course not, for the Immaculate Conception refers not to the Incarnation of Christ, but to the conception of Mary herself as a vessel free of sin so as to be capable of bearing the Son of God.

What Gaga has done is create what the Ancient and Byzantine Greeks referred to as chōra, a container or dwelling place. This existed for the Byzantines as a conceptual trope for the Virgin Mary, primarily addressed in the Byzantine world as the Theotokos (the God-bearer). Chōra, rudimentarily, in Platonic philosophy, was the space in which anything could be said to exist. Therefore, it served as a useful ontological construct for the entity of the God-bearer, whose body was the “Container (Chōra) of the Uncontainable (i.e. the Son of God).” Gaga has often placed herself in this position of the Virgin Mary, either advocating her chastity to stress her creativity or wearing the McQueen Annunciation dress. What she has done now is given birth to a race that partakes in this being, a race of immaculate humans – free of prejudice – that may exist as open receptacles of ideas and images. Yet this mitosis, this reproduction of an open container, is both a violent experience and presents a dangerous receptacle.

The violence of mitosis is in fact the manner in which evil is described as being created in the “Manifesto of Mother Monster.” Just as in mitosis, where the microtubules latch onto the chromosomes and tear apart the cell from within during anaphase, Mother Monster is violently split into two.

But on that same day, as the Eternal Mother hovered in the multi-verse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.

And, as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance.

The text, however, can be misleading. We rely on word and image during the video to develop an understanding of the nature of these births. As she slowly speaks the Manifesto, the scenery changes and we are led through what seems like an early modern image of Hell; the music crescendos, and we are presented with the image of evil a few seconds after she has told of its birth, but not yet described the split. Costume-wise this is a different Gaga: she is not the Mother Monster that we saw earlier. It is not until after we see this evil Gaga pull a machine gun from her vagina that we are told how evil was created: “And, as she herself split into two...” For a brief period, the nature of the offspring is uncertain: are there two opposing individuals, or one with a dual nature? This ambiguity is lost when reading the Manifesto as a text independent of the video, but it is nevertheless crucial; Gaga employs this conflicted process of self-generative unfolding to suggest a fundamental confusion of natures and persons. She twists in agony because there are two ultimate forces, which we are left to believe are good and evil. Thus implying that good and evil pre-exist the birth. 

It therefore follows that Gaga’s birth of evil is not the birth of the force of evil, just as Mother Monster is never described as Good, but rather it is the incarnation of evil in flesh. Good and evil become potentialities of the flesh, forms of being that dwell within the container of Gaga’s image, and upon that incarnation are echoed in matter: the costume change between good and evil Mother Monsters. The “she herself” makes clear that Mother Monster is good and evil, that she is one and the same. Like the cell that has undergone mitosis, she is the shared interval of difference between good and evil, the distance between them, that makes possible both their sameness and difference. Same DNA, but she was born this way. Like a mirror, they are the same image but one is the “right” (figuratively and literally), and the other is left (literally) or an inversion of the “right” (figuratively) image. Their difference presupposes a more primordial similarity.

Now, I would argue that since we do not know what any of the births really were (other than seeing the embryonic heads being pulled out of her womb), we cannot be certain of the otherness of the offspring – precisely since it is a mitosis. We simply know how they were born, we know they were born this way. We may pretend that those beings pulled from her womb are the new race within humanity, but this is not what the Manifesto says precisely. The Manifesto says:

...a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity...

It is the act of perception of the atemporality of birth that forms the new race; it is not any birth in itself that mothered the new race. Birth and creation exist exclusively in the act of perception. Thus, the mirror-epistemology that structures the video demonstrates the importance of perception in these births, because there is no birth outside the praxis of perception.

When giving birth to a race free of prejudice, the Mother Monster is always depicted as a mirror image. She is mirrored in childbearing, having at times one presence but two countenances:

Her vagina, her birth canal, is the fissure of this mirroring: it is the non-interval, the non-slash through which the image is constructed. This image already has two countenances, two persons, but one nature, one body. The images of butterflies – creatures idealized for their bilateral symmetry – are prevalent. There is not a Gaga separate from a mirror: both are one and the same. Her vagina is the very origin of the images, it bears witness to the folding and its replication. Like the mirror-constructed image of the TwitPic and its viral distribution on Twitter, this image of Gaga giving birth in “Born This Way” is constructed in and by the mirror. In contemporary society, there is no better reification of Lacanian psychoanalysis than the MySpace mirror image, whereby identity is literally realized by the mirror – an almost too-crude literalization of Lacan’s Mirror Stage.

However, if it is true that birth did not occur until the moment of perception, why did the embryonic heads already bear the marks of the new epistemic humanity? Preliminarily, let me answer that by pointing out that the birth had not happened, only the wombs had numbered. We do not see the new humanity until after the Manifesto, before they are merely embryonic heads: non-animate potentialities, who merely bear a resemblance to Mother Monster. Perhaps more convincingly, however, is that as the “Eternal” Mother, Gaga never ceases to be a mother, but she also never begins to be a Mother: she is properly eternally a mother without beginning or end.

It is precisely this notion of perpetual birth that is conceived in the video. She states that birth “is not temporal, it is eternal.” Birth does not occur at a definite time, but rather is eternally occurring; not enduring or occurring in time, but wholly outside of time. Thus, time is collapsed and narrative merely structures a hermeneutics, thereby enabling common mortals to comprehend the cosmological ontology she has created and properly so; cosmology and cosmogony lose all distinction and become one and the same. In other words, the creation of the universe is the understanding of the universe.

Therefore, good and evil have always and will always coexist. Evil is not some other that has emerged to corrupt humanity; rather it is inherent within it. The new race that is without prejudice is birthed through “perception,” through the perception of this atemporality. It is the perception of this splitting/birth, this dichotomy between good and evil, that allows for a race without prejudice to exist within humanity, for humanity is the synthesis of the two. Humanity is the commingling of good and evil. But what precisely is this evil?

Unlike the image of Gaga giving birth to a race without prejudice, the image of Evil is not mirrored: even when giving birth to the machine gun, Gaga has one countenance and one person – despite the clear bilateral symmetry of the image. Only the image of Zombie Boy is mirrored, but he is not Mother Monster (although his mirrored and singular images deserve more attention, beyond the scope of this paper). Moreover, the image of evil is a sonogram:

The image of evil is not a direct image, it is an image that is seen darkly through the flesh, but is not the flesh, it is not externally manifested. It is not a direct contact, but rather an image formed through the reverberation of sound. Quite simply, a sonogram is not an optical image, but rather an info-graphic – it charts the echoes of physical bodies in order to produce an image from that data. This image’s format has a clear association with birth and expectancy. It therefore suggests that the birth of evil is an indwelling of an image that lurks within, as a potentiality in each human who is to be a container for infinite birth. Evil is the singular, oblique image of the self, the image that denies its own fluidity. It is not-viralized, it is not mirrored, it is instead kept within and not exposed. Evil is being insincere in the external representation of one’s own image of the self. It is an image that is corrupt:

Her image is not properly produced, perhaps due to interference from that concealment, seen darkly through the flesh. Like the murky sonogram, the image here represents the incongruous sound waves, it demonstrates itself as an icon of sound. Of supreme importance is that it is not virtuously pixilated as the Blackberry-taken, TwitPic-distributed image of social networking. Instead, it bears the formal traces of an alien corruption, one that we are not accustomed to seeing.

Therefore, the thesis of “Born This Way” becomes quite clear here. The perpetual birth of the self exists as the perpetual duplication and distribution of one’s sincerest image. “Born This Way” inaugurates an important shift in Gaga’s work, particularly towards the focus on the ontology and phenomenology of the contemporary image in circulation, in its physical incarnation as Vicks and Durbin have pointed out. It also represents the inexcusability of closeting – one’s true image should not have to be excavated through a sonogram: found in the stalls of airport bathrooms, or under the masquerade of a bully (i.e. the foot-tapping Larry Craig, or homophobic Dave Karofsky on Glee).

The question that remains to be asked and which I have brought up previously in my response to the “Born This Way” Grammy performance regards the important shift that this entire visual and rhetorical logic evidences in contemporary identity politics from that of the 1980s and 1990s. The militant insistence on “just being yourself” is coupled with the virality of the contemporary image and its cloning logic. Gaga is not at all advocating an inherent, insular construct of the self, but rather allowing one to continuously partake in whatever virality he or she chooses. The Monsters will reproduce her bangs and form themselves in her image. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” was produced and recited by Mother Monster, but is a Manifesto of/for her fans. She is both her image and her representation, as the “Born This Way” film clearly articulates.

Her Little Monsters have the same DNA, but they were born this way. I-dentity is relegated to the shifter, as it always has been. It is the “I” that is the most powerful construct of identity, so personal that only you yourself can utter it if you wish for it to signify you. Even I am incapable of expressing to you this sentiment unless you put yourself in the place of my I. Here the deictic, relative pronoun, this constitutes the identity that exceeds the virality of your DNA. It is the preference of nurture over nature. Since birth is an anachronic renaissance, the “I” that once provided us with the insincere myth in language of a stable, fixed, and continuous identity for our self has been displaced to the relative pronoun, that whose deictic function craves an antecedent for any possible signification – and if there is no antecedent available, it must be taken adverbially to mean “in this manner.” The I is a shifter as much as the this, but we suspend disbelief to delude ourselves that we know what we means. By forcing identity onto a more dependant shifter, Gaga has forcefully pushed us beyond any lazy shorthand for defining our I-dentity and placed all weight onto our articulation of the perpetual this that constructs our performance of everyday life.

Author 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. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in art history and anthropology. 

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