Girl, you look good enough to eat.
Just compiling various Alejandro-related thoughts from Twitter--VERY rough.
I'm thinking of how in her videos she's always being pulled by all these hands in different directions--always threatened by absorption into the crowd or getting lost in her costumes (i.e., her own aesthetic aesthetic statement), which are often very clunky and heavy or being consumed by the pop culture machine. To put it rather crudely, she represents herself straddling the line between empowerment and disempowerment--like in Paparazzi when Skarsgaard throws her off the balcony. Gaga's character is a rich star, but celebrity can't save her--so she tries for notoriety (and thus a different kind of celebrity power) by poisoning him.
However, in Telephone, we find her in jail--and not only is she in jail, she's trapped in a straight male girl-on-girl pornographic fantasy. She and Beyonce get out and get lost in a Thelma-and-Louise revenge fantasy (another method of empowerment), but Thelma and Louise don't survive their movie, so that model won't work for Beyonce and Gaga either--and anyway, Beyonce's character is still trapped in the same kind of abusive relationship Gaga's character tried to escape in Paparazzi, and the only way they can think to end it is by killing him, which, as we learned from Gaga's story, doesn't actually work. And even more than this Gaga tries to find a way out through Tarantino and Kill Bill-inspired revenge, but Tarantino's thing is the aestheticization of violence--he cares more about making violence look pretty more than about its actual meaning/content--and we get that at the end of Telephone when they kill everybody in the damn diner and the camera lingers on the dead bodies and it's so fucking nuts and over the top. They're mass murderers rather than empowered heroines.
Telephone is less about celebrity culture than about consumer culture--product placement everywhere--I'd have to watch it again to see how I think that message turns out, but I'm remembering particularly the part where Gaga takes one bite of the processed cake in the plastic packaging and then throws it away. She can't resist the cake, but she doesn't consume it fully either. And also how some of the product placement is real and some of it isn't--what are we really being sold?
Idk quite what I think of Alejandro yet--I think it's more in the vein of Bad Romance than Paparazzi or Telephone and engaging less with empowerment within pop/consumer culture than with power itself, obviously--all the militaristic, religious, and sexual imagery point that direction. The video is very bleak and dark--it's maybe about disillusionment? Throughout the video she tries on (quite literally in the costuming--the gun bra, say) these various ~kinds of power in order to transcend the bleakness of her position (at a funeral--her own? Whose frozen heart is on the pillow? IDEK), but none of them particularly work: the hands are still there pulling her clothes off, and even though she's dominating one of the dancers there are still so many of them. I think that's partly what happens at the end of the video with the blinding white light from her eyes--she can't negotiate power within these structures so she imagines obliterating them entirely.
I think Gaga thinks the real method of transcendence (of what? idk--the power structures she believes she's hopelessly embedded within? That seems too easy) is art--like "Art" with a capital A--rather than sex or violence. I am really interested in what she does with the next video, because while she does seem to have a kind of transcendence at the end of this video by destroying everything (a more extreme version of what happened in the diner in Telephone), she also erases her artistic statement. Kind of. Whoever it was that said she was obsessed with death is right: death is both her goal (sacrificing herself for her art) and her biggest fear (no more art).
But this doesn't even account for a fraction of what she's doing in any of her videos--all of this is very gendered, of course--like, she's thinking particularly about what it means to be a woman in pop culture. Alejandro is a really interesting video in this regard (androgyny of the dancers, the fight for dominance in bed), but like I said, idk what I think of it yet. But I've gone on too long--sry guise--if you made it all the way to the end of this absolute mess, have this instead: http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3pf5zxDXz1qa2nz2o1_400.gif
Okay, I was going to c/p a convo no_detective and I had on Twitter about what I said above, but Twitter won't let me into my favorites.
re: Bad Romance, I'd say the beginning is gaga doing her crayest, most pure performance art (lots of birthing imagery, the all white)--that's what she gets dragged away from as an offering to the dude (who represents what? I think the point is that she's been taken away from art, or Art, lol--I bet Gaga thinks of it with a capital A--by whatever it is; maybe sex, as you say. The fire at the end: actually read this fire as ~cleansing more than anything else, an attempt to recover the whiteness of the beginning. (Reminds me a lot of the light coming out of Gaga's head at the end of Alejandro actually.) But rather than getting that back, we're left with the grotesque but comic image of Gaga in bed with the skeleton.
I kind of wonder if the fashion-baby-i'm-a-free-bitch-baby isn't a sort of meta commentary on her artistic vision--are you really a free bitch if you have this relentless voice telling you to "work it" in costumes that totally overwhelm you?
I'm thinking of how in her videos she's always being pulled by all these hands in different directions--always threatened by absorption into the crowd or getting lost in her costumes (i.e., her own aesthetic aesthetic statement), which are often very clunky and heavy or being consumed by the pop culture machine. To put it rather crudely, she represents herself straddling the line between empowerment and disempowerment--like in Paparazzi when Skarsgaard throws her off the balcony. Gaga's character is a rich star, but celebrity can't save her--so she tries for notoriety (and thus a different kind of celebrity power) by poisoning him.
However, in Telephone, we find her in jail--and not only is she in jail, she's trapped in a straight male girl-on-girl pornographic fantasy. She and Beyonce get out and get lost in a Thelma-and-Louise revenge fantasy (another method of empowerment), but Thelma and Louise don't survive their movie, so that model won't work for Beyonce and Gaga either--and anyway, Beyonce's character is still trapped in the same kind of abusive relationship Gaga's character tried to escape in Paparazzi, and the only way they can think to end it is by killing him, which, as we learned from Gaga's story, doesn't actually work. And even more than this Gaga tries to find a way out through Tarantino and Kill Bill-inspired revenge, but Tarantino's thing is the aestheticization of violence--he cares more about making violence look pretty more than about its actual meaning/content--and we get that at the end of Telephone when they kill everybody in the damn diner and the camera lingers on the dead bodies and it's so fucking nuts and over the top. They're mass murderers rather than empowered heroines.
Telephone is less about celebrity culture than about consumer culture--product placement everywhere--I'd have to watch it again to see how I think that message turns out, but I'm remembering particularly the part where Gaga takes one bite of the processed cake in the plastic packaging and then throws it away. She can't resist the cake, but she doesn't consume it fully either. And also how some of the product placement is real and some of it isn't--what are we really being sold?
Idk quite what I think of Alejandro yet--I think it's more in the vein of Bad Romance than Paparazzi or Telephone and engaging less with empowerment within pop/consumer culture than with power itself, obviously--all the militaristic, religious, and sexual imagery point that direction. The video is very bleak and dark--it's maybe about disillusionment? Throughout the video she tries on (quite literally in the costuming--the gun bra, say) these various ~kinds of power in order to transcend the bleakness of her position (at a funeral--her own? Whose frozen heart is on the pillow? IDEK), but none of them particularly work: the hands are still there pulling her clothes off, and even though she's dominating one of the dancers there are still so many of them. I think that's partly what happens at the end of the video with the blinding white light from her eyes--she can't negotiate power within these structures so she imagines obliterating them entirely.
I think Gaga thinks the real method of transcendence (of what? idk--the power structures she believes she's hopelessly embedded within? That seems too easy) is art--like "Art" with a capital A--rather than sex or violence. I am really interested in what she does with the next video, because while she does seem to have a kind of transcendence at the end of this video by destroying everything (a more extreme version of what happened in the diner in Telephone), she also erases her artistic statement. Kind of. Whoever it was that said she was obsessed with death is right: death is both her goal (sacrificing herself for her art) and her biggest fear (no more art).
But this doesn't even account for a fraction of what she's doing in any of her videos--all of this is very gendered, of course--like, she's thinking particularly about what it means to be a woman in pop culture. Alejandro is a really interesting video in this regard (androgyny of the dancers, the fight for dominance in bed), but like I said, idk what I think of it yet. But I've gone on too long--sry guise--if you made it all the way to the end of this absolute mess, have this instead: http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3pf5zxDXz1qa2nz2o1_400.gif
Okay, I was going to c/p a convo no_detective and I had on Twitter about what I said above, but Twitter won't let me into my favorites.
re: Bad Romance, I'd say the beginning is gaga doing her crayest, most pure performance art (lots of birthing imagery, the all white)--that's what she gets dragged away from as an offering to the dude (who represents what? I think the point is that she's been taken away from art, or Art, lol--I bet Gaga thinks of it with a capital A--by whatever it is; maybe sex, as you say. The fire at the end: actually read this fire as ~cleansing more than anything else, an attempt to recover the whiteness of the beginning. (Reminds me a lot of the light coming out of Gaga's head at the end of Alejandro actually.) But rather than getting that back, we're left with the grotesque but comic image of Gaga in bed with the skeleton.
I kind of wonder if the fashion-baby-i'm-a-free-bitch-baby isn't a sort of meta commentary on her artistic vision--are you really a free bitch if you have this relentless voice telling you to "work it" in costumes that totally overwhelm you?