By Eddie McCaffray
In her own words, Lady Gaga’s most recent work has been, “a deliberate attack on the ‘idea’ of the ‘modern model’ or in my case, ‘the modern pop singer.’” This essay will explore how the short Haus of Ü music videos, her recent VMA performance as Jo Calderone, and her “Memorandum No. 4” in V Magazine have mounted this attack, how such an attack fits into Gaga’s previous work on identity, and how it adds to and pushes forward that work.
In her latest column for V Magazine, “Remodeling the Model,” Gaga suggests that being Jo Calderone in various ways (on stage, on camera, on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan) allows her increased freedom, even the freedom to be more herself than otherwise. In a certain sense, this is not so surprising: everyone understands the freedom that comes from dressing up as someone else. You’re free to say and do outlandish, even uncharacteristic things. After all, you aren’t being yourself and everyone knows it. You’re just play-acting, or pretending, or joking around. Because you’ve been silly enough to dress as someone or something else, everything you might do or say occurs in a kind of hypothetical non-space. Expectations, promises, memories, hopes, addictions all lose their ability or right to make demands upon the self. Thus Gaga as Calderone – or, more accurately, Calderone contra Gaga – could discuss Gaga’s relationships on-stage.
Or it lets a woman, for example, get onto the cover of a men’s fashion magazine.
But this basic truism – that one is free to be someone else when pretending or impersonating – hides what Gaga’s project is actually about: her point isn’t that dressing and speaking as Calderone allows her the freedom to be someone else, but that it allows her the freedom to be herself specifically. Calderone does not spring from Gaga. He isn’t a kitchen expansion or a mask, but a model, image, or role with as powerful a claim on reality and personhood as Gaga. They’re both valid effects of a more fundamental principle. She writes: “. . . [I]n the fantasy of performance I imagined (or hoped) the world would weigh both individuals against one another as real people, not as one person playing two. Lady Gaga versus Jo Calderone, not Lady Gaga ‘as.’ That would be the intention of the process, to co-exist with an alternate version of myself – in the same universe.” Lady Gaga’s self is thus revealed to be neither Jo, nor Gaga, nor even, by implication, Stefani. Each of these is just one image, one model. The self in which they are unified exists over and above, even because of, their mutually-contradictory natures. It doesn’t proceed sequentially, hierarchically through them; rather, they radiate outwards from it.
Thus, when Gaga writes about the model, about either destroying or reworking it, she is suggesting a project that is creative and destructive at the same time. The model is a useful tool, of course. But the issue isn’t nearly so simple as just getting rid of a model or of models in general. After all, Gaga’s work has emphasized from the get-go that all identity must be artificial. You can only be something on purpose, by putting yourself together. But like most human inventions, the model as a tool also has the potential to enslave those who attempt, who need, to employ it. As Gaga writes in her article, beauty is increasingly “quantif[ied] with a visual paradigm and almost mathematical standard” – because image or model is so useful, humans have aggressively perfected its production and application. Now the iron laws of productivity and profitability threaten to abrogate the very freedom such an institution as the model – as identity itself – once offered. No longer do we use the coherence of the model to call ourselves up into some definite role, ability, discipline, or expression, but the perfected model, which by virtue of that quantified flawless optimization has obviated the need for any other possibility, demands our adherence to it as a jealous god. Means are perfected to such an extent that they have become ends, no longer serving us but being served by us.
Lady Gaga is suggesting that a reinvention of the model is necessary for us to retake control of our tool. The best way to demolish the hold that the perfected, ultimate model exerts over you is to create a very different alternative for yourself and then place it up beside whatever model(s) you already possess – it’s very important that this creative destruction isn’t about replacing what’s come before, but supplementing it. If Gaga simply assumed the Calderone persona all the time, it would only be her new jailer, not something which liberates the broader self through its conversation and confrontation with Gaga (and Germanotta). The revelations Calderone provided for Gaga and for the viewers of his 2011 VMA performance were the result of talking about Gaga, not of pretending she didn’t exist:
It was by remodeling myself into something completely foreign, and in some ways crafting the anti-pop performance, that the complexities of ‘the model’ began to unfold. For someone known as much for her image as for her music – and this has become my model – the presence of Jo in no way eradicated my spirit from the stage. I was still ever-present and, in fact, more myself than ever. Jo had a clean slate. Jo had no past or future to answer to. Jo existed only in that moment, as I chose for him to.
Part of existing as a model or persona – as we all do – involves the avoidance of acting out of character. Foiling expectations in the wrong way is something most people work hard to avoid: strong or brave people don’t want to be seen crying; tasteful people don’t want to be found liking something trashy; someone being attracted to the ‘wrong’ gender. The difficult reality is that such forbearance is necessary for the functioning of the model – of the person – as it exists today. Changing the model isn’t enough, because you’re still left with just one coherent complex of selfhood to which you can aspire – something still has to be edited out, forbidden, denied. Rather, the excavation of sedimentary expectation is accomplished in the introduction of something entirely other, which after all only remains other, new, or unconstrained to the extent that it has something to which it can oppose itself – e.g. Judas & Jesus, pop star & paparazzi, hooker & client. Gaga suggests that freedom (particularly creative, expressive freedom) exists only in the tension between two (or more) poles.
The music video for “Yoü and I,” as well as the Haus of Ü short videos, suggests this in interesting ways. Perhaps the most blatant example is that of Yüyi the mermaid in “Haus of Ü ft. Yüyi.” Here, Gaga versus (not as!) Yüyi is carried out of a trailer, through a Nebraska cornfield into a log cabin and, perhaps, into the director’s chair in which she also appears. I’d like to suggest that this represents the creative power Yüyi is able to wield by forcing herself so far from her natural environment. Bundled through the continental United States in buses by roadies and assistants, she leaves the ocean behind and struggles, flopping and thrashing, into the position of artistic and creative power. If she wasn’t so helplessly out of place, would she occupy such a position? All we know for sure is that neither of her bipedal iterations (the Bride and the Nymph) get a director’s chair!
The Bride and the Nymph also suggest the power of being who you’re not (in addition to who you are). The Bride in particular deals in shifting identities. In the short, after shedding her hat/hair combo – her veil – she becomes increasingly Calderone-like. She goes shirtless on-screen (as only a man can), throws her jacket over one shoulder, crouches, puts up the horns, and sneers. It’s important to recognize that it’s the Bride who “arrives” in Nebraska in the full-length “Yoü and I” video, enacting the signature action of the Bride – to approach on foot – to such a radical and powerful extent that her feet are left torn and bloody after walking hundreds of miles (from New York?). Only someone who isn’t already present can arrive or approach, and every bride requires, assumes, and enables a counterpart (her groom).
The Nymph, either as dream or as dreamer, also enacts a role that is intimately tied to an other of some kind. Either someone is dreaming her, or she is dreaming someone (as is suggested, perhaps, in the full-length “Yoü and I” video). In either case she remains distinct from but completed by her counterpart (the dream or the dreamer).
These works fit in with Gaga’s continuing identity project. They reiterate the idea that true selfhood is achieved in ways that may appear to be something other than fulfillment of a certain ideal: change or transformation, disguise, play-acting, and artificiality (from make-up and drag to the cyborg machinery crawling across the Bride’s face and arm) are some of the factors Gaga wants to introduce to self-expression. But Gaga’s self, and the self she encourages and calls others to achieve, is fundamentally too complex for one image. Because a single image is inherently limiting: the coherence of identity requires the suppression of whatever doesn’t fit the character in play. That’s perfectly fine; it’s even required. The problem comes when only one image – one model – is employed. Then what is meant to illuminate and serve human being becomes its prison cell. Rather, identity requires the destruction of a model, a destruction that is only truly possible by setting up another alongside that model, without throwing down or revoking it. The tension built upon the contradictory demands and promises of each image allows true and creative selfhood.
Author Bio:
Eddie McCaffray isn’t gonna write any more author bios. So don’t ask, Meghan.
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