Born This Way: Vertigaga

By Meghan Blalock

The following piece is the third in our series on Lady Gaga's video for "Born This Way." Click here for the first piece, and here for the second.

From the title credits of Hitchcock's Vertigo.

In the opening segment of the video for “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga signifies that she intends to confuse and disorient her viewers by scoring the “Manifesto of Mother Monster” with Bernard Herrmann’s famous musical score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film that depicts the complex relationship between Madeleine, a woman who poses as another woman to cover up a murder plot, and John Ferguson, the acrophobic private investigator hired to follow her; their relationship is complicated by their mutual shifting identities. Here, I will argue that “Born This Way” mirrors Vertigo’s themes of multiple identities, disorientation and, ultimately, death.

The spiraled, red hellish realm in Gaga's "Born This Way"

Before launching into my analysis of the video for “Born This Way,” a short summary of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is in order. A woman named Judy is hired by Gavin Elster to act as a stand-in for his wife Madeleine, so that he can weave a dense scenario to cover up his wife’s murder. Elster intends to throw his wife from a tall clock tower, and his scenario relies upon John Ferguson, whom he hires because John suffers from vertigo and is unable to climb high without paralyzing dizzy spells: Elster wants to set up Ferguson as a witness to his wife’s “suicide” from the tower. The theme of multiple identities is furthered by the fact that Ferguson also goes by “Johnny O” and “Scotty,” depending upon who is talking to him. After following and falling in love with “Madeleine,” Ferguson witnesses her plunge to her death from a clock tower. Later, depressed and distraught, he meets Judy, who reminds him of Madeleine because, unbeknownst to Ferguson, she actually is the Madeleine he knew, just with different hair, makeup, and clothing. While Judy posed as Madeleine, she had also fallen in love with Ferguson. She attempts to confess this to him in a letter:

I made a mistake. I fell in love. That wasn’t part of the plan. I’m still in love with you. And I want you so to love me. If I had the nerve, I’d stay and lie, hoping that I could make you love me again as I am, for myself, and so forget the other and forget the past. But I don't know whether I have the nerve to try.

She then tears apart the letter and throws it away: she has made her choice. She chooses to stay and lie in an attempt to make Ferguson fall in love with her again, not as Madeleine but as Judy. He then implores her to change her clothing, hair, and makeup to re-create the Madeleine he once knew, and whom he still believes is dead; she does so, though unwillingly. She says, “All right then, I’ll do it. I don’t care anymore about me.” It is this series of choices – to walk into danger (let’s not forget that Judy is complicit in a murder here), and to allow another person to change her appearance and thereby play into his fantasy that she is another woman (even though she actually is the person he wants her to be, he just can’t see past the different clothing, hair, and makeup, which is in itself another statement Hitchcock is making about identity) – that directly leads to her death.

Kim Novak as Madeleine, as Ferguson meets her.

Novak as Judy, as Ferguson meets her after (he thinks) Madeleine has committed suicide.

Novak as Madeleine-turned-Judy-turned-Madeleine after Ferguson has rehabilitated her look.

Lady Gaga, like Hitchcock’s Madeleine, plays a number of disparate roles in the short film for “Born This Way”: she is a celestial being, she is narrator, she is Mother Monster, she is evil incarnate, she is Stefani Germanotta, she is the bodiless spawn of herself, and she is a Little Monster. She comes at the viewer from multiple angles, and given her choice of Vertigo as a narrative template, such multiple identities disorient and cause one to wonder which Gaga is the real Gaga, as Hitchcock’s audience must ask which Madeleine is the real Madeleine: which one should be trusted, whose word should be heeded? Which way, in fact, was she born? The question regarding which Lady Gaga is the “real” Lady Gaga is a theme she recently discussed in her interview with 60 Minutes.

Photographers say this to me: “I want to photograph the real you.” And I’m like, what the hell are you looking for? I’m right here. You’ve seen me with no makeup, you’ve asked me about my drug history, my parents, my bank account: I mean, how much more real could I be? This is what I’m really like.

When prodded further about the nature of her identity, she continues.

What is it that you would like to know that you haven’t already asked? You’ve asked me everything you could factually ask me and yet you still feel like you don’t know who I am. That’s because you’re fascinated with my artistry and not with me as anything other than my artistry. That’s all I am. What is it that you’re looking for? What you’re looking for is magic.

In Vertigo, Hitchcock shows that there is indeed a distinction between Madeleine as we first meet her, Judy who was acting like Madeleine, and the Madeleine she later becomes at the request of the person she loves. He leads us to believe that Judy is the “real” person that was hired to play Madeleine, but even that is probably an identity she constructed to hide from law enforcement should the murder ever be discovered. So it would seem that at least two and possibly all of the identities presented in Vertigo are false ones. Conversely, Lady Gaga and “Born This Way” declare that the way you were born is not only your true identity but, in what seems like a contradiction, part of your free choice as a human being. You were physically born, yes, but throughout your life, you can and will choose to be a number of different people – you will be reborn numerous times. Unlike Hitchcock, Gaga says that all of these identities, these “in-finite births,” are equal and true. Like her 2011 Grammy performance, which blatantly references Alvin Ailey’s groundbreaking work Revelations but revamps it to serve the message of “Born This Way,” Gaga utilizes Vertigo and its theme of multiple identities as templates upon which to tell her own version of the story of multiple identities.

The opening “Manifesto of Mother Monster” mimics the title credits of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, not only in Gaga’s adoption of the thematic score from the film, but also in the cinematography. When we first see Gaga in “Born This Way,” the camera descends upon her from above as she spirals inside a glass box.

It appears that her eyes are closed, but the camera soon reveals that what initially seemed to be Gaga’s face is actually a painted mask on the back of her head. When we see her real face, it appears just as painted-on as the mask, with the supernatural addition of a third eye. We are led to question which face is more real, and how important a face is to a person’s essential self.

The opening credits of Vertigo – which, by the way, run the exact same length as the “Manifesto of Mother Monster” and, when played simultaneously, create a dissonance that is incredibly disorienting – touch on this same theme. We see close-ups of sections of a woman’s face (lips, nose, and eyes), but never the face in its entirety. We know – or, rather, think we know – it is a woman only because of the lipstick and eye makeup. Hitchcock, like Gaga, establishes from the beginning a lack of concrete identity based on disorienting and distorting images of a face that will descend into a more disorienting spiral as the film continues.

We then see Lady Gaga giving birth to “in-finite” bodiless heads, one of which is Gaga herself.

And while the births taking place here enact the most literal representation of the goal of “Born This Way” – the birth of “the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom” – the fact that Gaga herself is one of those born presents another theme: the multiple nature of identity, namely that Gaga presents herself as the Mother Monster, and, simultaneously, as the Little Monster. This idea is furthered by the fact that Gaga is also a third party to the birth, serving as the narrator of the Manifesto.

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. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

When Narrator Gaga describes a woman split into two during a battle of good versus evil, she is presumably describing herself – though which “self” is another topic entirely; additionally, she could just as easily be describing the main female character of Vertigo.

Not only do the aforementioned elements of “Born This Way” echo the identity disorientation depicted in Vertigo, but Gaga herself, outside of the video’s narrative confines, figures as Madeleine/Judy. She was born Stefani Germanotta, but became Lady Gaga during her artistic rebirth. She sometimes goes by simply Gaga, and when people first meet her they tend to ask, “What should I call you?” She recently told Anderson Cooper that she prefers to be called Stefani in bed because if someone called out “Lady Gaga” during sex it would “freak her out.” So we have a woman named Stefani presenting herself as Lady Gaga who at times goes by Gaga. In the “Born This Way” film, this trinity of identity is all the more confounded by the presence of so many Gagas. And just as Madeline/Judy both die in Vertigo, Gaga portrays a death at the end of the “Born This Way” film.

At the conclusion of Vertigo, Judy falls from the clock tower when a figure (later revealed to be a nun, which is also interesting considering Gaga’s Catholic upbringing) appears in the shadows, and she falls from the window in fright. At the end of the “Born This Way” video, we see a similar shadowy figure: Gaga, silhouetted, walking in the darkness of a New York City street and wearing jeans, the most pedestrian we’ve possibly ever seen her look.

A shadowy figure approaches Judy in Vertigo.

A shadowy figure approaches the camera in "Born This Way"

Then we see Skeleton Gaga – a copy of Rico Zombie, who is himself the symbol of evil that Gaga gave birth to at the beginning of the video – blowing a gum bubble, and frozen with a look of fear and surprise in her eyes.

Judy's eye's widen in fright as she notices the shadowy figure.

The video's final shot captures skeleton Gaga's widened eyes.

It seems that evil/skeleton Gaga is frozen in a death stare; the significance here is that bubblegum pop has been killed. All of Gaga’s choices have led her to this moment, when she is re-born again, in the shadows of a New York City street, as the person she became when she first stripped her clothing mid-performance and announced herself as Lady Gaga – the original Little Monster – allowing her to now kill, once and for all, the notion that pop music is as valueless as chewing gum. But unlike Judy/Madeleine’s fatal fall from the clock tower in Vertigo, Gaga intends to show that this particular brand of death is a positive one resulting from multiple equal and true identities, and, eventually, one she hopes will set free all the Little Monsters, and, possibly, the whole world. 

Author Bio:

Meghan Blalock is a writer living in New York City. Her comparative piece for Gaga Stigmata on Lady Gaga's Grammy performance and Alvin Ailey's Revelations was recently cited in The Atlantic. She writes for Gotham magazine, and has also written pieces for the local music blog Sound System NYC, The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman's Day, and other publications. Her poetry has also been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here.

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Born Superstars

By Victor P. Corona

The following piece is the second in our series on "Born This Way." For the first piece, click here.

The title of Lady Gaga’s third album and its first single, “Born This Way,” raises the question: born what way? The single’s first sung verse provides an answer: “My mama told me when I was young, we are all born superstars.” This declaration is consistent with Gaga’s message about the conscious cultivation of one’s fame, the nurturing of the self-made image, and the celebration of Otherness. The figure of the celestial Gaga that introduces the “Born This Way” video enacts the titles she has earned. She is literally a star and a heavenly “Mother Monster” giving birth to beings without prejudices. Gaga has repeatedly reinforced visual ties between herself and the most famous mother figure in history, the Virgin Mary. In a Vogue cover story titled “Our Lady of Pop,” she refers to the writing of the new album as an “immaculate conception.” The product of her gestation is the music video that, to date, most thoroughly visualizes the core goals of her work: fully liberated creativity and the creation of truly unbowed versions of our own selves.

During the pronouncement of the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” Gaga as goddess floats above the earth while perched on a crystalline throne. She is also adorned with the kind of diaphanous veils that were so prominently featured in Nicola Formichetti’s Mugler designs. The star-like throne recalls the elaborate organ she played at the Grammys. In a discussion of that performance, Betancourt describes her organ as “haloed by glassy test-tube-like lancets, [reminiscent] of the instruments used to replace a cell nucleus in the cloning process – an image that for a period of time was prolific in the news following the cloning fears of the late 1990s.” Although this is an excellent interpretation, a complementary reading might also draw attention to comparable crystalline assemblages in the Superman films. The iconic hero is, of course, an alien who becomes a paragon of virtue amid Metropolitan corruption and is largely immune to those prejudices that Gaga’s new race seeks to eradicate. In the films, ranging from the 1978 classic to the 2006 reboot, crystals constitute Superman’s extinct home-world of Krypton, the spaceship that transports him to Earth, and a secret base called the Fortress of Solitude. The elegant and shimmering quality of crystals associates purity and perhaps even divinity with the act of creation, whether the progeny is a Superman or superstars. Gaga’s guise as extraterrestrial – the most “outsider” being possible – meshes with Formichetti’s repeated descriptions of his Mugler designs for Gaga as “alien.”

The image of the celestial Gaga, legs spread, giving birth to her new race occurs even as her hellish counterpart gives birth to evil, which is embodied as a machine-gun that sprays star-like bursts of bullets. The site of the heavenly birth takes place on “G.O.A.T.,” a “Government Owned Alien Territory,” an area of space where the “eternal mother” is in labor (the name of the birthing site can perhaps be tied to the irreverent lyrics of another album track, “Government Hooker”). The acronym brings to mind Capricorn the sea-goat, although the video’s rendering of the constellation also approximates the female reproductive organs and the Satanic figure of Baphomet, who is himself imprinted with a pentagram. 

Constellation of G.O.A.T, shaped like the female reproductive system.

Image of Baphomet

Indeed, the bound silver bouffant Gaga wears has been compared to the images of elongated alien heads created by the surrealist artist H. R. Giger. She wore her hair in a similar manner during her interview on the Gayle King Show and other recent public appearances. Curiously, Giger has produced a stunning work where a pearl-skinned woman said to represent the mythical spirit Lilith straddles the head of Baphomet. Note that both Gaga and Giger’s Lilith wear gilded collars.

Mother Monster upon her throne.

Lilith and Baphomet, H.R. Giger

To be clear, I am not suggesting that “Born This Way” is somehow a vehicle for diabolical beliefs. Rather, this is another instance of Gaga’s subversion of images and symbols that are already so pregnant with meaning. In claiming that everyone is born a superstar, Gaga directs our attention to the heavens, which is the realm of actual stars as well as human hopes for an afterlife. She confronts creation myths and belief systems that also marshal the imagery of stars. Her own vision of creation, however, is underway at the present moment. The “mitosis of the future” involves an actual star giving birth to superstars that can shed the biases of the past.

Gaga’s interest in the image of the “superstar” is not new. A song titled “Superstar” was written in 2008. The lyrics describe a stardom that is accessible to all. “Tonight you are a superstar,” she sings, “Can’t you see? You’re my celebrity.” Gaga’s take on the “superstar” idiom can also be seen as a link between her aesthetic and the work of Andy Warhol. Like “Born This Way,” Warhol understood stardom as an innate quality. Certain people were particularly interesting to Warhol, which led to their inclusion in his minimalist films, often playing only slightly exaggerated versions of themselves. The artists and performers who most closely associated themselves with Warhol’s Factory were baptized as “Superstars.” New Factory identities were adopted via stage names like Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Viva, and Billy Name. By labeling themselves as what they sought to become, they undertook a conscious project of building their own fame. This intent is clearly expressed in Gaga’s “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” where she states, “We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or rather to become, in the future” (see also Durbin and Vicks 2011). If you call yourself a superstar, if your mother (Monster or natal) tells you that you were born a superstar, then that is what you are.

After Warhol’s death in 1987, the Factory Superstars had a second coming in the Club Kids and their “King,” Michael Alig. In response to the declaration of the “Death of Downtown,” Alig initiated a wave of Club Kid theatricality that dominated New York nightlife via a love of outré fashion that is not dissimilar to what the Haus of Gaga celebrates. In Warhol’s own Interview magazine, Alig states, “We were all going to become Warhol Superstars and move into The Factory and recreate the whole thing.” But the Warhol scene was twisted into a Leigh Bowery-esque piece of performance art. Alig claims, “I guess we were making fun of the Warhol Superstars. We changed our names like they did, and we dressed up in outrageously crazy outfits in order to be a satire of them – only we ended up becoming what we were satirizing.” Their performance of superstardom had a sinister end, however. While Gaga’s approach to fame as performance art now imagines the birth of a new people, the Club Kid King’s reign culminated in the killing of a fellow reveler (Alig will be up for parole in the coming years). It is curious, however, that from his jail cell, Alig has contributed writing to a stage production called “Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical.” The work, directed by Alistair Newton, chronicles the ambition and ascendancy of Gaga, perhaps Warhol’s greatest heir to date.

Andy Warhol and the Superstars Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet

The Club Kids

Whether birthed by Warhol, the Club Kids, or Gaga, what is the essence of being a Superstar? That each person is beautiful in his or her own way? Perhaps. But individual agency is also vital. When telling her followers to “Rejoice and love yourself today,” Gaga is asking that they look toward the promise of G.O.A.T. and then look inward with satisfaction rather than anxiety. This celebration of the uniqueness of individual identity has led some critics to see Gaga as merely a gentle reformer rather than a gender-bending revolutionary. As Powers of the Los Angeles Times writes, “‘Born This Way’ never hints that outsiders should remake the world in their image, instead invoking God and mommy to suggest that society’s frameworks need not change, only open their doors a little wider.” The song is certainly a call to amplify social spaces so that marginalized persons may be included and upheld. But it is significant when a song that subsumes “transgendered life” and other identities under superstardom becomes a mainstream pop hit. As Gaga told Vogue, “...every show there’s a little more eyeliner, a little more freedom, and a little more ‘I don’t give a fuck about the bullies at my school.’” The long road to a glistening, judgment-free G.O.A.T. has to start somewhere.

Bibliography

Betancourt, Roland, Eddie McCaffray, and Meghan Vicks. “I Wanna Take A Ride On Your Disco Egg! – ‘Born This Way’ Preliminary Thoughts & Discussion.” Gaga Stigmata 14 February 2011.

Bollen, Christopher. “Michael Alig.” Interview 16 April 2010.

Durbin, Kate and Meghan Vicks. “From The Fame to Born This Way: Lady Gaga and the Monstrous Evolution of Identity.” Gaga Stigmata 1 March 2011.

Powers, Ann. “Snap Judgment: Lady Gaga, ‘Born This Way.’” Los Angeles Times 11 February 2011.

Van Meter, Jonathan. “Lady Gaga: Our Lady of Pop.” Vogue March 2011.

Author Bio:
Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His writing is available at http://victorpcorona.com.

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From The Fame to Born This Way: Lady Gaga and the Monstrous Evolution of Identity

By Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks

This is the first in a series of pieces that analyzes the video for "Born This Way." Each day for the next week, we'll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.

When Lady Gaga hit the pop culture-scape with “Just Dance” in 2008, her performance was accompanied by the slogan “Pop Music Will Never Be Low Brow,” which was appropriately projected in her video-screen glasses, the first of many props that would celebrate the power of the image in culture. Since then, Lady Gaga has remained steadfast in her declaration that her performance – her lies – are her truths to be taken seriously, even while blatantly marketing, branding, and “selling” herself out. The power of performance was explored in depth throughout the era of her debut album The Fame, during which Gaga literalized and embodied the spectacle, perpetually drew attention to the power of the image in our everyday and humdrum lives, and exhibited how fictions, lies, performances, costumes, and poses make up our existence, personalities, and identities. In short, during The Fame era, Lady Gaga became synonymous with performative and creative identity – an identity that rejects essentialism, determinism, and foundationalism.

These notions are echoed in “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” a video shown during an interlude of the Monster Ball; in this video, Lady Gaga discusses “the lie” as the “real truth.” “It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill,” she says. “We are nothing without our image, without our projection, without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or rather to become, in the future.” During these two years of The Fame and its dark twin The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga repeatedly illustrated – in her daily outrageous outfits, in her music videos, in her stage performances – how life is art. There was no difference between the street and the stage: Gaga never took off her costumes, in fact, they were not costumes in the classical sense just as “Lady Gaga,” she repeatedly told us, is not a persona or a stage name – there is no fixed identity behind the mask. If art is synonymous with life, then life itself is but a performance – and we are all a part of the (freak) show. This was the idea of The Fame/Monster.

However, with her sophomore album Born This Way, Lady Gaga problematizes the notion of performative identity by moving toward the flesh, the meat(dress), the immanent muck and essential ether of being. Her most recent fashion (especially the prosthetic shoulder and cheek bones), her 2011 Grammy performance, and the video for “Born This Way” further complicate her earlier explorations with performative identity: in the Born This Way era, Lady Gaga explores a new type of identity – both natural (essential) and constructed (performative) simultaneously.

In a recent Billboard interview, Lady Gaga discusses these notions of birth in relation to a constructed identity: “[Birth] is a process of living and it’s also not ultimately a goal. It’s something ever-changing. My bones have changed in my face and in my shoulders because I am now able to reveal to the universe that when I was wearing shoulder pads or when I was wearing jackets that looked like I was wearing shoulder pads, it was really just my bones underneath. My fashion is part of who I am, and though I was not born with these clothes on, I was born this way.” Lady Gaga views fashion and the human body as cut from the same cloth: as we witnessed in “Anatomy of Change,” “fashion is essential – become part of the essence of the human body.” And fashion, like life, is something that takes intentionality and, most importantly, choice. Gaga’s goal is to empower her fans to choose to consciously become, or to choose to become conscious of the seemingly limitless potentials of who they can be. Fashion is one important way to harness this evolving identity. As Gaga also said in that same Billboard interview: “[Fashion] is part of who I am. My creativity is in my blood and in my bones as I said, and it takes time to become myself every morning.” In a very real sense, Gaga has become her clothes, just as her clothes become her. It is in this play that one’s fluctuating identity is birthed and re-born, over and over. But it takes will and consciousness: one cannot be blind and born, at least not into Gaga’s new race.

Lady Gaga’s new looks have influences that are both alien/unnatural (her new bone structure, her sharply whittled fingernails, the latex) and organic (the amniotic hair-coloring at the Grammys). Though Gaga is dealing heavily with the theme of evolution with this new album, there is no survival of the fittest here, but rather the survival of the freak. The freaks, Gaga says, will become “a new race of beings within the race of humanity…one with no prejudice.” The song “Born This Way” proclaims: “I was born to survive.” Gaga (and it may be relevant to note that gaga is often one of the first things that a baby says upon speaking) sees birth – something usually viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime experience – as something that is an “ever-changing process.”

Lady Gaga is the lie that was “born this way.”

She puts performative identity in the space of essential identity; her creation of her identity becomes how she was born.

All these notions come to a beautiful crescendo in the recently released video for “Born This Way.” The video opens with a new manifesto – “Manifesto of Mother Monster” – which Lady Gaga reads while the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo plays in the backtrack:

On G.O.A.T, a Government-Owned Alien Territory in space, 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, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom. 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. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

In this manifesto, Lady Gaga re-envisions and problematizes the notion of birth – as an infinite process of becoming, not as a singular moment of having become. As with the “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” which redefines the lie as truth and the image as reality, “Manifesto of Mother Monster” redefines birth as eternal, infinite, monstrous, and free – that is, one can choose to be born into whatever being one wishes. One is put in control of his or her own birth. 

The video features split-screen images of Lady Gaga giving birth to multiple versions of herself: both good and evil, alive and dead, nearly naked and fully dressed, Michael Jackson and Madonna. This hybridity is monstrous – it defies borders. In typical Gaga fashion, the video pays homage to much from the aesthetic arsenals of high and pop cultures: the expressionist paintings of Francis Bacon, the work of Salvador Dali and other surrealists, James Cameron’s Aliens, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the choreography of Alvin Ailey, and Madonna’s video for “Express Yourself,” to name a few. Given the theme of the video – Born This Way – Gaga’s use of these visual cultural quotations implies that she is unequivocally the offspring of these cultural giants, born in their images, created from their influences. This reflects what she said in a recent interview for Vogue:

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to – from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono – but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

Gaga as an artist perpetually messes with our notion of decades, eras, even time itself. For all her talk of “the mitosis of the future,” she is heavily informed by the past. She was born this way – organically fashioned from the cloth of the performer. These are the new identity politics of Born This Way: not just performative identity, but never-ending performative, infinite, and, above all, free births.

The video’s most interesting symbol of this performative birth is Gaga’s vagina, which houses the space where mirrors meet. Considering Gaga’s play with reflective performance and mimesis throughout The Fame era, the placement of the mirror at the vagina quite physically brings performative identity into the space of biological and essential identity. Mother Monster gives birth to little monsters; or, following the two manifestos, Mother Monster infinitely births “the spiritual holograms of who we perceive ourselves to be.”

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2011: Gagalations

By Meghan Blalock

When Alvin Ailey’s Revelations debuted in 1960, it swiftly became one of the most widely known pieces of modern dance. The original piece, inspired by what Ailey called “blood memories” from his childhood in Texas, was more than an hour long, choreographed to both traditional and modern spirituals so as to depict the spiritual journey from slavery to freedom through faith. The styles of dance in Revelations are eclectic, ranging from more classical ballet postures (deep plies, arabesques, Chaînés, and pirouettes), to the innovative use of back-lit silhouettes, boxed elbows, and bladed hands that would become Ailey’s signatures. Eventually whittled down to just around thirty minutes, the piece has inspired dancers and creators for more than fifty years – including Lady Gaga’s most recent foray into pop culture, “Born This Way.”

From her claims that the song came to her through “immaculate conception” to her innumerable references to the song as “bad kids going to church in a big way,” Gaga hasn’t exactly tried to conceal the fact that she thinks “Born This Way” (and her subsequent album, to be released in May) is spiritual in nature; even the song’s lyrics refer to “capital H-i-m” and backing vocals murmur “church” over and over again. Gaga has presented “Born This Way” as the modern-day spiritual meant to free the tormented from their binds; namely, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, women, and those among us who are “beige,” just to name a few. Here, I will argue that with her Grammy performance, Gaga has reaffirmed this intention by directly paying homage to Revelations.

The final version of Revelations, and the one still performed today, is comprised of three movements. The first, “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” is an homage to traditional slave spirituals. It depicts the incredible sorrow of slave life: dancers stick together in close formations and look to the sky, reaching with open hands and using their entire bodies to stretch upward, signifying that they are asking God and their faith for strength and guidance. The entire movement is minimally lit, in yellow or earth tones. The second movement, “Take Me To The Water,” is a more joyous piece that depicts the dancers’ pilgrimage to a river where they will baptize and purify themselves. This movement symbolizes their first taste of freedom from the sorrow and pain of their enslaved existences. The last movement, “Move, Members, Move!”, is a celebration of life after the dancers have achieved freedom, set to modern-day spirituals like “Rock-a My Soul.” It is also the movement from which Lady Gaga and her co-creators took the most (though not the exclusive) inspiration for her Grammy performance.

“Move, Members, Move!” opens with a trio of male dancers before a single female dancer takes the stage. Wearing a yellow dress and hat, and carrying a fan, she begins dancing in front of a red backdrop with – dare I say it – an egg-shaped halo of light to her right. Soon she is joined by other women in the same dresses, donning the same hats, and they dance in unison. The choreography here is nothing short of triumphant, with stomping feet, swinging arms, and levels that mirror the rises and falls of the music. The fact that Gaga was inspired by these visuals is fairly obvious.

Gaga’s latex top and skirt mimics the long dresses worn by the women in Revelations. Her dancers emerge in similar outfits, suggesting that she sees them as her equals, as her fellow freed slaves. The jacket she wears during part of her performance is similar to the button-front dresses worn in some stagings of Ailey’s ballet. The yellow hat is nearly identical to the one worn by the freed slave women in Revelations. The modernization of the costumes – the use of latex, minimalist at that – reflects Gaga’s own aesthetic and emphasizes that this performance is not Revelations – it’s Revelations for the 21st  century.

The visuals – the costuming, staging, and lighting – are not the only aspects of Gaga’s “Born This Way” performance that directly reference Ailey’s ballet. The choreography is strongly reminiscent of Revelations’ trademark movements, especially those found in “Pilgrim of Sorrow.”

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The formation of Ailey’s dancers here – huddled closely together, with one central figure in the front – clearly influence the ending formation of Gaga’s “Born This Way” performance. The motions of her and her dancers’ bodies – all moving together in unison – are taken directly from Ailey’s  choreography. The dancers replicate Ailey’s classic open-palmed, spread-finger reach to the sky (shown below), done in such low lighting that the performers’ faces aren’t even visible. While Ailey’s dancers go into deep plies and lean their torsos and open hands toward the ground, Gaga and her dancers go into deep plies and lean their torsos while grasping on to each other.

They then come back up and reach for the sky again, finishing the performance in the classic Ailey pose, but with a twist – instead of spead-finger palms reaching toward the sky, they reach with monster paws, at which point the lights are finally brought up and their faces made visible.

While the choreography during the group formation is a clear homage to “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” it seems that much of the choreography leading up to the performance’s conclusion is taken from the third section of Revelations, “Move, Members, Move!”

As Gaga emerges from the vessel and later during the synchronized choreography that begins the chorus of the song (beginning with “I’m beautiful in my way”), much of BTW’s choregoraphy reflects the ballet technique, wide second-position plies, and reverent stomping that characterizes the third section of Revelations. Right before Gaga breaks into her “rap” portion of the song, during which she encourages us to be “queens,” whether we are “broke or evergreen,” all the dancers form a single file behind her, which the dancers in Revelations do as well, to do eight counts of tendues, traditional ballet warmups. After her break at the organ (which, by the way, was a tangent into Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as well as an homage to a fortune teller head who lives inside a crystal ball at the Disney Haunted Mansion), Gaga heads back down to the stage to join her dancers, who promptly start removing their clothing – their slave garb, if you will – as she puts her jacket back on. While Ailey’s dancers remain clothed, and in fact get progressively more so from the beginning of the ballet to the end, it’s no mystery by this point that Gaga is not only paying homage to Revelations – she’s turning it on its head.

Ailey’s dancers progress from barely clothed in skin-hugging leotards to wearing full church regalia with hats, flowing dresses, and fans; Gaga’s dancers progress from full latex dresses to nothing but nude-colored underwear. Ailey’s sections progress from slavery to freedom achieved through spirituality; Gaga’s choreography suggests a regression from the third section back to the first. In order to understand why Gaga and her creative director, Laurieann Gibson, chose to do this, we should look at the meanings of the performances in the contexts of their debuts.

Revelations debuted in January 1960, at the height of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Eight years before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. was still actively speaking, and sit-ins were happening regularly. It was still four years before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, which would ban discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in employment practices and public accommodations, but the sense of imminent change was in the air. It was inescapable, one and the same with the zeitgeist. Ailey was no doubt inspired by this feeling, and elements of the ballet – including its build from sorrow to triumph – illustrate that he was likely in the throes of profound hopefulness for racial equality. Also, it’s important to note that Revelations debuted at the 92Y in New York City, undoubtedly in front of a liberal audience who shared this hopefulness.

“Born This Way” premiered in February 2011, just a couple months after Congress’ official repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law banning homosexuals from being open in the military, and one of the most blatant examples of government-supported discrimination still on the books. Gaga’s performance came after a seemingly never-ending deluge of headlines reporting teen suicides over bullying on account of their homosexuality. And while Gaga likely sees that we are definitely in the midst of a huge movement to abolish discrimination against people based on gender issues – women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, queers – perhaps she also sees that we have a long way to go. And unlike Ailey, she and the Haus were not performing in front of a small group who (likely) share their beliefs; they were performing on national television, most certainly in front of people who do not share the beliefs espoused in “Born This Way.” So while her performance progresses in reverse order from Ailey’s, it is not so much a statement of regression from freedom to slavery as it is a way to flip Ailey’s purpose on its head: Ailey was expressing his hopefulness about achieving racial equality to a room of sympathetic viewers, while Gaga actually aims to create a new race that is entirely free of discrimination. She does so by visually creating a new species of people with protruding facial and shoulder bones. Ailey aimed at racial equality and the triumph it would bring; Gaga aims at a race of equality and the togetherness it will create. This is her revelation.

“Born This Way,” both the song and the debut performance at the Grammys, is certainly a joyful hymn: the song concludes as a Church-like spiritual, with Gaga’s voice layered on top of itself, and clapping to mimic a choir. But Gaga’s homage to Revelations (established by BTW’s choreography, costuming, and lighting) also reverses certain elements of Ailey’s ballet, and therefore functions as a challenge to monsters to band together, establish a nondiscriminant race, and show the rest of the world that being yourself is the true path to spiritual freedom – so the entire world can join the choir.

Author Bio:
Meghan Blalock is a writer living in New York City. She writes for Gotham magazine, and has also written pieces for the local music blog Sound System NYC, The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman's Day, and other publications. Her poetry has also been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here.


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