I was sitting at work, in my should-be-pressed uniform shirt and an overlarge pair of my father’s Dockers, passing the time in whatever way I could—I’d just finished my third read-through of Maus. There were no cars in sight. There was always, I thought, the unfailing option. I clicked through a few folders to my cache of Lady Gaga music videos.
It’s May 3, 2011. Born this Way is due out in exactly twenty days, fourteen hours and four minutes. I suppose that’s important because it frames the near-shock these videos gave me—Dear god, I said to no one in particular, look at her. The video was Pokerface—no, not even, it was the ‘Making Of,’ sort of behind the scenes schtick. This was back before anybody really even knew her—she still had some semblance of her little girlishness. Her explanations of her artistry were vacuous, empty:
Now—there’s a guy coming to the poker party that I know is really into me, but I need to keep my poker face on, so he doesn’t know how much I like him—cause you know ladies, once they know you like ‘em, they run.
This girl smiles easily, she giggles and her words are free. She isn’t yet tethered to meticulous descriptions of artistic intent. And not once does she mention one of the earliest controversies of her career—the one that surfaced around the line,
I won’t tell you that I love you/Kiss or hug you/ ‘cause I’m bluffin’ with my muffin/ I’m not lying, I’m just stunnin’ with my love, glue gunnin’
The explanation she gave, the one that so famously sparked interest from so many (it prompted Barbra Walter’s personal quip “And have you had sex with women?”) was that “It’s about why, when in bed with my boyfriend, was I fantasizing about women?” I remember being piqued at this when she first said it—could it be? Amidst those cutesy rhymes (“Love it when you call me legs! In the morning, buy me eggs!”) some substance lay coiled? Back then, in 2008, I was still a little skeptical. Lovegame had just been released as Gaga’s third single. It was catchy, but there wasn’t a whole lot of meaning there. The video showed her dancing in Subway cars, wrangling dancing street gangs with her “Disco stick,” making out with a gender-ambiguous police officer. It had definite pangs of West Side Story—though it was a much more provocative Gee, Officer Krupke in Gaga’s version. I couldn’t decide whether Lady Gaga’s habit of reverse application of meaning discredited her. I still wonder—and, really, I can’t say. I know I look back on pieces of writing and see new undertones glaring at me through the ink. Perhaps Gaga does the same.
I suppose the point is—well, the thing is, I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach. Who was this girl? And how had I forgotten her? It was only three years ago that I was sitting in my granny-gold Nissan Altima, peeling back the faux wood paneling at a stoplight when Just Dance played for the first time. It was more of the same, and yet it was so different. It was a chameleon song, I decided later. “That was when Lady Gaga was still trying to ‘make’ it,” I tell people. “She had to bow to public demand before she could start doing what she really wanted to do.” From my computer screen, she laughs again, that carbonated giggle of hers, and explains a scene in Pokerface: “We’re all hanging out, playing cards, drinking some weird, suspective pink-orange pop beverage…”
I was confused. I didn’t remember this Lady Gaga. She was cute—oh yes, she was still very cute. But she paled before herself. From this came Born this Way. From this came Judas, Juda-ah.
What the fuck happened?
Lady Gaga once said that Paparazzi was the first song she’d really stopped “trying to be cool” as she wrote it. It was, in her advent, The Fame’s “realest”commercial record. Coincidentally, it was also the least successful of her singles (not counting Eh, Eh). But let’s not talk about that!
The music video is so clearly different than her others—yes, we do have the direction of Jonas Ackerlund to credit, but there’s something different about her as well. It’s almost like an ‘Iknowmyshitsoshutupandlookatmebitch’ vibe that she’s giving off. Just Dance had something of that, and Pokerface did too. But not in the same way.
Obviously, yes, we’ve got that thread of a story, and the critique of celebrity. I don’t know. It’s almost like I’m questioning her. But questioning what? Of her ‘pseudo-death’ in the video, she told an interviewer, “You don’t know if he pushed me, or if it was the cameras, or what…” I have watched the Paparazzi video over three hundred times—Alexander Skarsgard clearly gives Gaga the heave-ho. What, then, prompted this answer—a slip up? Memory? I don’t think so. Was she trying to enhance the scholarly merit of her video? Maybe. With or without this detail, the video has a great deal of critical appeal. The flash frames of devastated women, bagged, hanged, perfectly made-up and beautiful even dead in pools of their own vomit drew mixed reactions right away. She reminded me of me—she’s trying to be literary, I thought. And that video was when I knew Lady Gaga was different.
It wasn’t the cinematography itself that was revolutionary—there have been tons of “short film” music videos; Michael Jackson has four that I can name off the top of my head, and I’m quite the fair-weather fan. It was that she was reaching for this critical assessment of something. Lady Gaga was bringing an intellectual perspective to pop music. She, unlike any of the artists then on “the scene,” actually had something to say. It was a little vaporous then, but it was something, a defined idea that she conceptualized and needed to expel from herself. “I have an endless, dream-like vision of monsters and playgirls,” she said to a Norwegian journalist. She has also mentioned on more than one occasion, that if she fails to document one of her creative visions, she becomes blocked, unable to produce. In other words, Lady Gaga is an oracle. Who’d speak against it? Everything she’s touched so far has turned to gold. “I can tell what’s coming,” she told one skeptical interviewer, “I’ve got that intuition.”
The video for Paparazzi opens with a quiet piano interlude (composed and played by Lady Gaga herself), and views of a luxe estate: the quiet gurgle of a fountain, the gymnastic architecture of the mansion itself, etc. Eventually we’re brought into a master suite with Lady Gaga and her boy-toy (Alexander Skarsgard). They’re in bed, surrounded by piles of bills printed with Gaga’s image and what appears to be lots and lots of cocaine.
Boyfriend picks Lady Gaga up, and takes her outside to the balcony overlooking the property. “Do you trust me?” he asks. “Of course,” she says. The conversation is completely in Swedish—not sure what that adds, but it sounds exotic and fluid and beautiful.
A hidden paparazzo starts photographing this private moment—Skarsgard appears to be aware of the intrusion. Lady Gaga hears the clicking of the shutter, “Stop,” she says, pushing boy-toy away, searching for the photographer. He could be anywhere. We see camera stills of Gaga pulling away, looking for the unwelcome guest, but Skarsgard persists. He grabs her roughly and demands, “Look into the camera!” Gaga tries feebly to defend herself, “What are you doing,” she cries. She struggles, gets hold of a nearby champagne bottle and breaks it over Skarsgard’s head. He repays her by tossing her over the edge, swearing, “Damn you, cunt!”
Gaga tumbles in a vortex. She’s posing, but the glamour becomes something terribly cryptic—we hear camera shutters, and slashing sounds, like daggers tearing through empty space. We don’t see her hit the ground. The swirl evaporates and she’s prone in a puddle of her own brain and blood, pearls strung through clenched teeth. The cameras flash all around, delighted in her tragedy. We hear, “Give it to me! Beautiful, beautiful—” Newspaper covers flash by, headlined with things like “LADY GAGA HITS ROCK BOTTOM” and “LADY GAGA IS OVER.” At least ten cameramen huddle over her as she “dies,” helpless.
HELP MEEEEEEEEEEE
But—as we soon see—Lady Gaga has not died. Somehow, she survived the fall. The next frame shows her being helped from a limousine. She’s wearing a diamond encrusted neck brace and she’s being wheeled in on a Chanel wheelchair. Her help strips away her recuperative attire; there is a brief cut to a beautiful, masked woman with handprint-bruises across her neck. She lies—almost posed—murdered in her bathtub. Back to Lady Gaga—she’s climbing out of her wheel chair, plated in gleaming metal, hobbling forward on braces. She evokes the Femmebot, she’s broken in a way that’s clearly dangerous—but at this point, we’re not exactly sure how, or what that means.
Alfred. Ready the batmobile!
The bridge plays, and the same ghostly white woman is posed in different deaths, she lies among Edelweiss, blood trickling past perfect lipstick; she is sprawled upon an ornate staircase, a bullet hole the only imperfection in the buttery smooth pastel of her skin. This woman’s death recurs again and again as Lady Gaga writhes in leather on a floral patterned sofa, pantomiming cigarettes and an emphatic sexiness. The woman is lifeless next to a swimming pool. She’s forgotten in the woods, her makeup imprinted onto the plastic bag that smothered her. She’s facedown in a Warholian pool of vomit, her own lovely face stares up at us from the yellow puddle. Someone’s clubbed her to death with a shovel; she’s crumpled up on the perfectly manicured lawn like an old newspaper. The images of this woman are brief, synchronizing with the synthetic pulses of the background track—they appear, telescope closer and then vanishing entirely. Lady Gaga is still on the sofa, but now three androgynous blondes (they were later revealed to be the boys of a metal band named Snake of Eden—I can’t really see what their presence adds to the video beyond a sexual ambiguity; If the river is the dangers of fame-whoring, this is just a tributary. Or a canal.) join her. The four of them are being very—friendly (YOU KNOW!) with one another while more devastated woman crop up. Like Polaroid snapshots from Grandfathers’ wallets, they’re thrust into our faces and then ripped away.
Lady Gaga’s fancy couch and poor sad murdered ladies.
Lady Gaga enters a new shot through an elaborate set of double doors, marked on either side by dancers. She’s in pale ivory with a large black and white pouf clutched to her shoulder. Gaga moves wildly, with more passion than precision; her teeth are bared, she curls her fingers into claws. A single crucifix earring biting into Lady Gaga’s left earlobe evokes Madonna—and that’s saying something, because I am wholly ignorant of Madonna. It’s really sort of sad. I’m uncultured—don’t judge me!
Another murdered woman, arranged on a bed skirted in blue tarp. Lady Gaga appears in a darkened room. She sports a black-and-white feathered Mohawk headpiece, her dress is strips of film. Camera flashes echo through the dimness, the only exposure. These flashes are what we are allowed to see—what else is in the room? Can we know? Does it matter? Interspersed with the flashes of Gaga are stills of two familiar Dalmatians—Lava and her son Rumpus. They had cameos in the Pokerface video. This became a painfully ironic self-fulfilling prophecy of the video—Rumpus, who was supposed to be filmed in the Bad Romance music video, dropped dead shortly after filming. I would say stardom was getting to the poor fellow, but I think that might discredit my entire analysis, ha ha.
Cut to Lady Gaga, and Alexander, side-by-side on a cream-colored loveseat. Alexander reads the newspaper, a metallic patch obscuring one eye; Gaga clutches a tabloid reading “NO MORE LADY GAGA!” and “THE NEW IT GIRL.” Oh, she’s pissed. Gaga, in the renowned golden-rod Mickey Mouse outfit, throws her magazine down onto the coffee table, and walks lightly on her six inch heels over to a table in the corner of the room. She pours a bit of Neuro Sonic over ice; from a ring on the left ring finger she dusts clean white powder. A swirl of a spoon. She glosses it over her tongue and smiles. She walks back to Alexander; he’s absorbed in some worldly article, a map of the far east is visible on his newspaper. She hands him the glass, he drinks without response or acknowledgement. The pink disappears behind his teeth. A moment passes. Alexander’s eyes widen—he turns to Gaga, dumbstruck. She ignores him. His head slumps forward, and the newspaper and glass fall through his fingers; the camera cuts to their feet—his, duck-legged, hers, neat, arranged. Deliberate. It is strange, the shot of those feet. It’s such an intentional detail, so telescopic, highlighted.
The last newspaper Alexander would ever read…I sure hope it was interesting.
Lady Gaga smiles. We hear a dial tone. Gaga presses a hand to her black lips as if to say, “Oh—was that me? Well, shit.” Gaga pulls off her sunglasses, coy. Someone picks up the phone: “Nine-one-one emergency,” She doesn’t respond. “Hello?”
“I just killed my boyfriend.” Click. Gaga slides her sunglasses up Alexander’s nose—he is comic in death, while the juxtapositions of the woman were disturbing, tiny individual tragedies. The room darkens, fast-forwarded footage of forensics investigators rolls. Skarsgard is wheeled away and the room is left empty.
The police are dragging Gaga away in a scene reminiscent tape after tape of footage of the girls famous for nothing more than being young, beautiful and promiscuous, she’s laughing hysterically, stumbling, there are handlers on either side of her holding back the throng of paparazzi. Everybody wants a piece of her. The newspapers are back, but this time the headlines are more favorable. They scream, “SHE’S BACK!” “WE LOVE HER AGAIN!” “SHE’S INNOCENT!” Gaga’s mouth is wide in a grin, a wild cackle—it is because she’s drunk? Or do these people really know who they’re dealing with? She’s tossed, head over heels, into the police cruiser. Eyes glassed by designer frames, she smiles that dangerous little smile, and wiggles an index finger goodbye.
Cut to a police station—Gaga struts into a lineup like it’s a high-fashion photoshoot, she’s working the shit out of that mugshot—only to be told, “Look into the camera, walk away.” She sneers, obeys, and stalks off. Funny? Definitely. A slap in the self-important faces of the “Fame whores”? Maybe.
Look into the camera. Walk away.
I was immediately struck by the murdered women—it’s a clear metaphor to the menace of fame, Princess Diana came to mind—and Gaga later confirmed this correlation in an interview. It was the ultimate proof needed to give Paparazzi its venom: “That woman died for her fame,” Gaga said. And so she did. But Diana’s situation contrasted so harshly with what Gaga was presenting here—after Gaga’s “death,” we see those invested in her fame almost rejoicing. They don’t try to save her—they watch her bleed, try to crystallize the moment of her agony. Diana’s death was mourned hysterically—she shared her last day with Mother Theresa, and in death, totally eclipsed the passing of a woman who would later be awarded sainthood.
The idea that Gaga begins to explore here, the public’s ravenous hunger for the demise of their idols, is one that resurfaces recurrently in her work in this early stage; her 2009 VMA performance of the same song portrayed Gaga, apparently after some sort of chandelier accident (I call them like I see them, okay?!) in the final moments of her life, totally raw, totally exposed, bleeding to death. The way that she died was what was so riveting about this specific performance—it was real. Okay, maybe not real in the sense that it’s a sort of “OH MY GOSH I’M DONE PLAYING PIANO AND NOW IT’S TIME TO BLEED TO DEATH!” thing, but in the sense that she grabbed the glamour she pushed so hard in the music video by the ears and spat in its face.
I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me.
The blood from her outfit ran freely and it was everywhere, all over her face, down her stomach. The final still shows Gaga, dangling from her “noose.” The fake blood has run into her eye, but she does not blink or tear up. It’s quite disgusting really—and that is what makes it beautiful. Death isn’t glorious. It’s an exhalation. She’s giving us the image of her demise in the hope that we [the public] will stop looking for it. Just before the premiere of the Alejandro video, she returned to this theme: “So many will try to destroy me,” she said. “But in this period, I cannot be broken.” Lady Gaga saw a cultural obsession—the public death of the celebrity, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan—and she countered it. And, arguably, she dealt it a serious blow. But Lady Gaga still fears those who would seek to ruin her—even now, in 2011, from the top of the world, inadequacies haunt her. An HBO interview showed her wiping makeup from her face, tearing up: “It’s crazy, we’re playing the Garden—but, I still feel like a loser…” Lady Gaga still, after the millions of records and the billions of fans, can’t put herself in perspective. And that just might be her salvation in the world of The Fame. It’s a glass case sealing her humility in a vacuum.
The thing that truly differentiates Lady Gaga’s works is the very thing I questioned earlier—the videos retroactively enhance themselves and inform one another, yes, but Lady Gaga’s life as a performance works to build the message as well. The final scene of the Paparazzi video, for example—the mobbed arrest scene, the flood of paparazzi—that’s something that wouldn’t have really happened at that point in her career. Yes, she was big, she had three top ten hits within a few months of one another—but she wasn’t so big that she couldn’t walk down the street, or sneak away from the Haus for a day to catch the Warhol exhibit in London (which she totally did around this time). Lady Gaga has the uncanny ability to present the public with an image, and then clap her gloved hands and make that image reality. She asserted again and again that she was a superstar (although she freely admitted that she was lying) and she became one. She called her clothing fashion so it was. She called her fans Monsters and we all went crazy, tore our clothes, shaved our heads, cut her name into our skin. Let’s face it—the woman is a fucking magician. She manipulates the truth, plays it like one of her songs, bends it from techno-fusions of dance-pop to lovely rolling fifths on a baby grand. And if she can keep reality wrapped around her little finger, there’s no reason for Lady Gaga to go anywhere but up. She was going through her I’m-like-Tinkerbell-I’ll-die-without-applause bit at Madison Square Garden when suddenly, she looked up and said, “You know—some people wish I was dead.” A brilliant, white grin grew at the corner of her lip-stuck mouth. The fans screamed, booed, cried. “But,” she said, pulling a lock of her lemon-yellow wig from her eyes, “I’m not going anywhere.”
