GAGA : MANNING

By Eddie McCaffray, Devin O’Neill, and Meghan Vicks

May 25 or 26, 2010, 02:14:21 PM

Bradley Manning: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history ...

Introduction

Lady Gaga’s music was used both as a mask and as a canvas when Bradley Manning downloaded classified national defense information: he lip-synced “Telephone” as the files were burned onto erased CD-RWs that originally contained Gaga’s album The Fame Monster. In effect, the “largest data spillage in american history” figures as a kind of digital palimpsest, comprised first of Gaga’s music erased, and then re-inscribed with the classified data. The leaked information carries with it the analog specter of Lady Gaga, and, in particular, an echo of “Telephone” – the latter features Bradley Manning as Gaga’s lip-syncing ventriloquist’s dummy who has come into its own consciousness, while the former positions Lady Gaga as the erased vessel upon which deadly and shameful state secrets are inscribed.

It’s a beautiful detail, but it is also incidental. This throw-away connection between Manning and Gaga probably deserves no more attention than that allotted in a footnote. Yet there’s something uncannily appropriate about this piece of trivia that places Lady Gaga hand in hand with Bradley Manning and his alleged crimes, appropriate not just in the context of Manning, Wikileaks, wartime acts, politics & aesthetics, and the public’s right to know (or the government’s right to keep secrets), but also in the context of Lady Gaga’s project – her anti-bullying campaign (DADT), identity aesthetics/politics, play with spectacle, manipulation through images, advocacy for equal rights, power grabs via pop, and rewriting of the past.

Image : Truth

Both Manning and Gaga demonstrate how uncomfortable we are with the image’s relationship to truth, albeit in dramatically different ways. Gaga embraces the spectacle as truth, heralds performance and construction of identity as one’s “born this way” birthright, rewrites her past as she wished it had been and declares that rewriting as her reality. In doing so, she eliminates distinctions between the essential and performative selves, between reality and fiction – completely implodes these binaries.

Most people think this is bullshit: they still operate in a system that opposes one’s birthed identity with one’s performed identity, and so they don’t get how one can simultaneously be a performance and “born that that way,” or how one can rewrite one’s past and thereby make it truer than its original lived experience.

So Gaga gets reamed for being a faker: she wasn’t born that way, they sneer; why can’t she just dress like a normal, real person? The irony is that Gaga’s performative birthed identity, and her insistence on the power of the image, are worshipped in the operations of the state. What people chastise in the pop figure (why can’t she just get real, cut the crap) are essential to the construction of the country’s identity. And what country performs freedom, human rights, and respect-for-life more aggressively than the United States? The country’s grandiose, ostentatious, chest-beating performance is the perfect analogy for that of Lady Gaga. But the point of Gaga’s project is to call attention to the performance as such, and to celebrate and uphold the performance as just as real as anything else not performed – and it is precisely here the comparison ends. If you try to make the country get real, to cut through its bullshit and show us how it really is, to show the nature of its performance, then suddenly you’re a traitor and a terrorist.

You’re Bradley Manning.

This distinction reveals something interesting about how performance and image function. Art and entertainment can thematize their use (and abuse) of representation. In fact, calling attention to itself as representation is a fundamental trait of art. But truth, especially of a political or ideological nature, and especially when called to exercise real power, must reject, deny, forget, and hide its nature as a constructed representation. Both art and politics require artifice, but where one requires that artifice to be recognized and discussed (art), the other requires that the artificial process be stricken from the record (politics). And when the distinction between politics and art is damaged or lost, the results are explosive.

The results are Bradley Manning.

The public has been given the palatable, performative version of the U.S. occupation of Iraq; they’ve been given the spectacle, and a rewritten, more-beautiful version of events as the U.S. government wished it had been. Sound familiar? But in this instance, the tables are turned: people take the side of the spectacle. Because neither the public nor the government want the real story about Iraq; they want safer images. No one wants to see that Apache Helicopter shooting Iraqi men and, later, children. But Bradley Manning wants you to see it cause he’s obsessed with the truth before it’s been rewritten: “i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed de/cisions as a public.”

But nobody wants the truth, Bradley Manning. We all think we worship the truth, and we proclaim we love honesty and authenticity; meanwhile, the Enlightenment pushes us to illuminate any and all truths, Modernity witnesses those truths turn out to be monsters, and Postmodernity (sometimes) laments the nonexistence of truth. Even so, through this all, we adore the truth, but here’s the hypocrisy – I bet not one of us has the guts to really tell the truth about ourselves. Didn’t the Underground Man say this? It’s impossible to write a truthful autobiography, he hissed. And even if you manage to do so, it will look too ugly and vile and decrepit and … well … in short, it will be too repulsive that you’ll end up smudging, you’ll prefer a more “literary and beautiful” version of events – a performance, if you will – to the truth that probably resembles more an Apache helicopter gunning down men than a redeeming story about freedom and democracy. The truth? “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” “Nice.”

They destroy Manning for revealing the truth, but they sneer at Gaga for not being real, for celebrating the performance (lies) as truth. Do you understand why this is? Why do they loathe Lady Gaga (but she’s FAKE!) for what they require of the State (tell us sweet lies)?

Again, this is about the power of the image, and its relationship to the truth. Both Manning and Gaga demonstrate how complicated and urgent this issue is. And the apparently-happenstance nature of their conjuncture reveals that their positions on image/truth are two sides of the same coin.

“Telephone”

What is “Telephone” about? The lyrics are about someone fleeing the shackles, the hook-up, of a ubiquitous piece of modern communications technology. The video is about an uncontrollable, destructive principle (murder, public health risk, feminism), first captured and contained by society, but soon enough breaking free and rampaging across unsuspecting, defenseless, virgin Americana.

This is the song Bradley Manning listened to as he leaked information from SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) – essentially the US Department of Defense’s classified military version of the Internet. Manning worked long hours in a dark room crammed with computers, files, and cables. He was very much at the beck and call of modern global communications, awash in e-mails and combat videos, sifting through reefs of documents, tripping over terminals, entangled in cables and cords. Much of the information horrified him and continuously forced him back to the moral dilemma he eventually solved with his leak. The frantic half-plea, half-declaration of “Telephone” – stop calling, stop calling – could hardly have been more appropriate.

At the same time, Manning fulfilled the other paradigm of the song (rather, of the video). He released carefully-controlled material on an unsuspecting (world) public. In the same way that Lady Gaga and Beyoncé tore across the countryside, Manning’s documents and videos raced around the world. They ignited controversy, caused embarrassment, and even – in the minds of his condemners at least – left the United States vulnerable to real attack: terrorism and sabotage of just the type depicted in the “Telephone” video.

Thus, Manning reveals the connection between these two “Telephone” paradigms. The (referential?) mania, the frantic, desperate madness inflicted on Manning by the constant bombardment of media found its natural response in his paroxysms of moral guilt and, eventually, confession. In an extreme version of what we all face in a telecommunication, audio-visual, hi-def-drenched world, Manning lashed out against the apparatus that endlessly subjected him to its profusion of chattering digital effluvia, and he did so in the only way that seemed natural: he turned its process back on itself. Manning took over the subject position – he stopped tuning in and started broadcasting. His reclamation of the seat behind the screen, instead of in front of it, was the greatest rebellion possible, which demonstrates just how powerfully image and truth are regarded in modern civilization. Manning’s punishment for this transgression will fit the weight given it by the civilization against which it was directed.

Trauma

In the worldwide economy of memory, perception, trauma, and communication, Bradley Manning is perhaps as sick, as dysfunctional, as schizophrenic as the big movers. If governments represent means that have supplanted the ends they were intended to attain (tyranny in pursuit of freedom, war in pursuit of peace, the strength of the state in pursuit of the common good), classifying first and asking questions second, keeping secrets habitually, reflexively, compulsively, what is Manning but the compulsive, obsessive insistence of trauma upon its own place in experience?

Perhaps this will be clearer if we take Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” video as a blueprint. Gaga is the country, or the world of people – the entity struggling to both know and live despite all indications that the two may be mutually exclusive. The story we get from our government, our military, and our media-entertainment complex – that’s the stable narrative of our experience, our memory. That story is the one that appeals to our desire to remember things “exactly as they happened” while forgetting the unpleasant parts; it claims to show us everything we need, leaving out the parts we can’t or don’t want to know and asserting that they aren’t really necessary to the truth anyway. We forget that we forgot. It’s the packaged deal in which the editing and plastic-wrap are both denied (it’s the true story) and a selling point (it’s deliberate, explained, legal, professional, entertaining, reassuring).

In contrast, Manning is the trauma, the shattered and disorderly train of remembering it with all those ugly parts included. He threatens, breaks, nauseates, compulsively vomits up what our covert media-apparatus of a government makes dangerous or unprofitable to remember. Manning and Wikileaks don’t offer a workable alternative; they represent a negative image of our obsessive-repressive cultural order, all the more dangerous and unstable because they are the scar-tissue of a violent and rigorous lifetime.

This is how Manning shows us that the system is broken, the massive multiple system of perception and memory and self-knowledge of a giant human community. Not because it has secrets or skeletons, not even because it punishes (and punishes him). What reveals this breakdown is the production of Manning and his actions themselves. He cannot negotiate, he cannot compromise, he cannot agree that some secrets should be kept and others brought to light. He can only demolish compulsive, manic secrecy with compulsive, manic exposure. The system produces two madnesses and no sanity.

Play

One of the central problematizing issues in the gradient of sanity between Gaga and Manning, and one of the fascinating ideological consequences of Wikileaks, is the extreme pornography of modern political entertainment. Gaga is an entertaining entity, and one of her goals is to entertain, to play. But there’s clearly also a playful element to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange is clearly, on some level, enjoying himself and his trickster role. And we enjoy it too.

This dynamic is metastasized when fed into the news cycle, where Manning becomes an entertaining figure, a figure for cultural consumption, and his extreme penetration and exposure of the governmental body becomes a pornographic act. We can talk about the parallels between that and Gaga’s penetration of quotidian norms with her highly disruptive sexuality, but it may be even more interesting to place the two along a spectrum of degree: Gaga plays with certain semiotic memeplexes, rearranging large blocks of visual and aural culture into forms broken and terrifying and stimulating; Manning, in his neurosis, did the same with entire governments. I’m reminded of the shift in extremity of perception I experienced when I sat down to read Ballard’s Crash for the first time while eating a particularly messy sandwich – suddenly car crashes were porn, and porn never looked the same again. The “Telephone” video points in extreme directions, but Gaga’s never actually killed anyone. As far as we know.

The element of play and entertainment becomes even more inextricable when one considers Anonymous’ role in the defense of WikiLeaks. As an amorphous entity bounded only by the ideology of unrestricted “lulz”, their involvement and necessary disengagement through the mediation of cyberland turns the entire thing into a media event for them, albeit an interactive one with material consequences. Indeed, what we’re talking about here is all media: WikiLeaks and Manning dealt, fundamentally, in information. Do we have the authority to say that the ideological and material consequences of the release of that information outstripped the violence and deforming cultural influence of “Telephone” or Born This Way or Gaga just because the consequences were more linear, the effects traceable by government, the causalities more literal?

What is information composed of? What is art composed of? The obvious answer might be meaning, but that response does indeed reveal just why Gaga and Manning have both upended information and art. By scrambling the way meaning is supposed to operate, both have introduced new values into its economy: new principles of distribution, new combinations, new authorities. In Gaga’s sphere, that of art or entertainment, this scrambling, this play, can introduce confusion, irritation, even anger. It can also introduce all the new ideas that art, at its best, is concerned with: new ways of conceptualizing the economics of meaning and form, new ways of understanding or imagining beauty, or individuality, or whatever their opposites are. In Manning’s sphere, his revolutionary playful economics of meaning, his short-circuiting of the way information is gathered and distributed, has many of the same effects: it caused confusion, irritation, anger in the American people, in the American government and military, and in other governments as well. But it is also provoking, perhaps weakly, a re-evaluation of the rules of the form, of the genre – not of art per se, but of government, of war-fighting, of state secrets, of diplomacy.

We are taught that one of these two forms of play is acceptable, and one is not. One gets people killed, the other is a basic part of being a producing-consuming “free” subject. One is disruptive and dishonorable, the other is expressive and harmless – maybe even beneficial! Why the hell not! Just as long as we play in the sandbox we’re allowed in, and stay out of the other. The idea that any idea is acceptable for discussion is predicated on the distinction that the same is not true of any action. In this way freedom of expression functions as a release valve for all those pesky urges to actually do something. Concerned about the way things are going? Write your congressman! Or call!

But performative identity doesn’t work that way: there, the concept only exists in the action (and vice versa). Maybe the Manning/Gaga comparison indicates that we should stop treating art as the place to play around, get messy, distract yourself, it doesn’t matter anyway. Maybe it’s time for a little art in government.

Identity Politics

In many ways, Bradley Manning begins where Lady Gaga ends: she presents the safe, consumable, legitimate (even acknowledged and celebrated) version (proponent, iteration) of an ideology that Manning takes to an extreme. Perhaps Manning pushes so far that he loops around, ends up embodying something that is antithetical to Gaga? Gaga has, so far, performed compliance with, participation in, even something like confidence in and enthusiasm for the political process of American democracy. She’s met with politicians, given political speeches, celebrated the repeal of DADT. At the same time, there’s a real theme of viral anarchism and resolutely non- or anti-political activity in her work. The diner-murder scene, of course, but in a broader sense any project that conceptualizes the individual as Gaga’s does is bound to have grave ramifications for the idea of democracy: Gaga ridicules and de-centers Anglo-American liberal democracy’s individual when she emphasises its fake, trash-pop aspect, or she radicalizes the individual into a dangerously-fertile, unstable principle above any laws or norms. Radical art and continual transformation probably don’t mix very well with rational negotiation and the institutionalized representation of interests.

Taking the former half of Gaga’s circular project of aesthetic identity, Manning disregarded his own safety, his career, his future, and his reputation in carrying out such a dangerous and grave breach of confidentiality right in the belly of the beast. A state built on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has nothing to entice with and nothing to threaten when dealing with a little monster that understands itself as the glittery refuse of a global-political media complex. Taking the latter half, Manning identified himself with his act in an enlightening, even aesthetic way: he had to release the information, the videos, and damn the consequences because he was born this way  – there ain’t no other way. His own principles, drives, beliefs, and experiences trumped what the established democratic system had decided should be done. Thus it’s hard – impossible – to correlate either “side” or aspect of Gaga/Manning identity politics with the territory staked out by modern democracy, because neither fits neatly into a straight pro- or anti-ideology. They’re both unresolvable, generative-chaotic principles that are inherently democratic, or at least modern liberal, in some ways, and anti- in other.

Thus, on the one hand, Manning’s actions are radically democratic: the people of the United States, of the world, have to know what their governments are really doing if any of those governments can really claim to be democratic. At the same time, Manning put his own perception and experience above that of the whole “system” – he took matters into his own hands in a unilateral, uncompromising, illegal, even secret way. This bi-curiosity vis-a-vis democracy and the Enlightenment project follows Gaga’s lead: the primary way that she empowers, praises, and defines that most sacrosanct modern concept – the individual – is to render it as meaningless/meaningfull as beautiful trash: worthless, limitless, monstrous, artificial, destined all at once. Is politics really possible with such people, who regard themselves as aesthetic projects, as little monsters? What are the concrete differences between understanding yourself as an aesthetic project and understanding yourself as a moral or ethical one?

Manning shows, quite literally and sacrificially, the weakness in Gaga’s project’s ability to be truly emancipatory. Accepting yourself as the detritus of fate, of gigantic inhuman systems, of birthright (or lack thereof) may lead us all along Bradley’s incarceratory trajectory. But perhaps the point isn’t to mobilize ourselves as a massive, well-trained, fanatical army in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness modeled conceptually on property. Perhaps a truly emancipatory project accepts the limited, contingent role of the “individual” in society, and spends more effort in transforming that individual in its relationship to its world than in mobilizing and manipulating quantifiable resources.

Other points to discuss:

●      DADT; “gender confusion”

●      Manning allowed one text in prison; he selects Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

●      POLITICAL DRAG

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Gaga Stigmata: Yale's The American Scholar Magazine

Gaga Stigmata was featured in the Autumn 2011 issue of Yale’s The American Scholar Magazine! Editors Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks were thrilled to speak with AS about Lady Gaga, 21st-century celebrity and scholarship, and Gaga’s relationship to academic studies. Check out the piece below:

  

Since March 2010, the online journal Gaga Stigmata has churned out the most intense ongoing critical conversation on the singer. The editors are Meghan Vicks, a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Kate Durbin, a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. “When Gaga’s videos would come out,” Durbin says, “there would be such a response online. It was frustrating to think that I would have to wait five years to read something about it in an academic journal. So, I thought, why not help criticism catch up? Let’s see if we can shape pop culture and critique it.” Indeed, the digital immediacy of Gaga Stigmata suits the pace of 21st-century celebrity, allowing readings of the singer to update as fast as her own reinventions. “When the meat dress happened,” Durbin says, referring to Gaga’s garb at the MTV Video Music Awards last September, “we posted stuff a week later.”

In academe, Vicks says, she dreams of lecture halls in which scholars dress conceptually, like Gaga: “While I’m in the classroom explaining how the procession of simulacra works, Gaga is showing it on the street. High theory dictates how you view and understand the world, and what is high theory but discursive spectacle?”

Are academics unduly gaga over Gaga? “She’s really adamant about serious meaning and high art,” Durbin maintains. “That may be her one entirely new thing. Warhol brought pop into the museum; Gaga is bringing high art into pop culture.”

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The Warrior Queen: Marry The Night, Trauma, Regression, and Recovery

By K.M. Zwick

This is the eighth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

– Sigmund Freud

When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened. It’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully, the lie is much more honest, because I invented it.

– Lady Gaga, “Marry The Night” Video

Sigmund Freud posited that sex (creation/joining) and violence (destruction/separation) are attractive to the most primal and perhaps truest internal aspects of all of us. He called us “polymorphously perverse,” which means that we are fundamentally pleasure-seeking, through libidinal as well as aggressive drives. What we really want is often considered “perverted,” linking sex, fetishes, violence, comfort, nurturance, joy, and death together in so many different ways and, ahem, positions, that our unconscious is basically a clusterfuck of perversion, desire, and fantasy. Modern-day analysts might suggest there is no such thing as perversion, per se, in terms of what is desired within the mind, because perversion is so ubiquitous. Additionally, what is consensually enacted between two (or more) individuals might not be considered perverse as much as it would be considered honest – an honest engagement with what is often a combination of sex and death. Simultaneous creation and destruction. Our libidinal instincts intertwined with our aggressive ones can create powerful wishes, fantasies, fetishes, and proclivities that are not only intensely sexual but are also intensely mortal; that is, destructive. It is, perhaps, the constant repression of our deepest fantasies that leads to neurosis; it is, perhaps, the denial of the interplay between sex and death – pleasure and aggression – that results in anxious and escapist symptoms in so many. Telling ourselves that sexual and aggressive fantasies are “bad” or “wrong” is likely to lead to puritanical subversion of what is most basic, and therefore authentic, in us. Freud might have argued that we are not sick when we are in touch with our most primal instincts (in safe, consensual fashions) but rather that we are most sick when we deny their existence, relevance, and the pleasurable effect of such instincts.

* * * * *

As I watch the video for “Marry The Night,” I don’t care, particularly, if Lady Gaga knows a lot about psychoanalysis or not. I think that she might, if not because she has read about it then because she has lived it to some extent. But even that – Ms. Germanotta’s autobiography – I don’t care about, per se. I have read the accounts that this video is about the worst day of her life: the day Def Jam dropped her. This video, however, uses explicit imagery related to trauma (destruction) and re-invention (creation) that hits a pre-verbal, regressive libidinal and aggressive chord. And this is what I find so rewarding and authentic about many of her videos, but most especially the video for “Marry The Night.” I care, as a trauma therapist and as a trauma survivor, that the art she makes and the world she inhabits in her music and especially in this video open up a universe for the viewer in which violent trauma, transformation, sex, mortality, creation, destruction, re-creation, and re-destruction are exposed, claimed, and normalized. That gutted psyche is Lady Gaga’s normal world.  

To say she glorifies sexuality and mortality, or trauma and sex, would be a mistake. The desire to combine those two aspects of life is so normal as to be quaint, in terms of an analytic reading of basic human psychodynamics. To label what Lady Gaga is doing with trauma, sex, death, and invention “bizarre” misses, I believe, how essentially basic and deeply human her themes are. 

What I find perhaps most pleasing about Gaga’s self-transformation in the “Marry The Night” video, which I will explore in more detail below, is that she is bringing to the fore an innocent reveling, often childlike, in fundamental and common intra-psychic processes. Not only is she a gorgeously unhinged libido and aggression, but she is also imaginative, she makes of herself and her world the imaginary, arguably engaging in something akin to pop music play therapy. She aligns herself with her internal complexes and makes art with them. She is pleasure-seeking, even through pain, perhaps particularly through pain. She is polymorphously perverse, but rather than being ashamed of it, she is proud of it.

* * * * * 

In small children, psychoanalysis posits that, especially prior to the phallic stage of psychosexual development, wishes to join (sexual) and wishes to destroy (aggressive) are uncomplicated by the superego. The internal life of a small child is, according to Freud, a life of unrepressed libidinal and aggressive desires, many of which are acted out: sucking a mother’s nipple, playing in the mud and water (metaphorical feces and urine, another form of “playing with oneself”), enjoying unfettered nudity, reacting intensely when feeling threatened, attacking others by biting, hitting, shunning. It is a life before shame, before guilt, before punishment, and often before words. This internal life is not erased with the pressures of social and familial norms or with the activation of the superego (or, the conscience); it is, analysts generally posit, repressed.

Such intense libidinal and aggressive desires and actions resurface during the teenage years, when the latency (repression) stage is coming to an end. Teenagers are, in many ways, like small children, activated again by sexual and aggressive tendencies, destroying close bonds with their parents while they create pleasurable bonds with love interests, friends, and activities outside the family. The destruction of the pleasurable parent-child closeness is a necessary component of the creation of a pleasurable self outside the home. Aggression and pleasure are linked. Of course, healthy development will find late-age teens able to hold the two sources of pleasure at the same time – a self that bonds with parents in a new and different way, and a self that bonds with those outside the nuclear family. Re-creation occurs, re-definition, and what was destroyed was necessary to destroy in order to transform and grow. The sexual and aggressive drives, creation and destruction, seem often to be crucially linked and intertwined at turning points for development, self-discovery, self-expression, and transformation, as well as intertwined in developments that help us form bonds with others. 

In this, I am merely speaking of normative psychological development. When we add into the mix trauma in childhood, we add new layers of destruction and creation that are difficult to tease apart in a general sense for the purposes of this piece. However, broadly speaking, severe psychic and physical trauma – such as early abandonment by a parent, sexual, physical, or verbal abuse, generalized emotional neglect, divorce – brings with it new forms of joining and destruction. Trauma can be so powerful, and can create such intense (sometimes self-)destructive pure id tendencies in the child or even the grown person, that the desires related to the trauma will be sometimes permanently repressed and find expression in seemingly unrelated feelings and behaviors. Additionally, trauma often triggers regressive states in the victim, dragging a person back to an earlier and more childlike psychosexual stage of development – often oral and/or anal – and again, defensive behavioral patterns may emerge to deal with these regressed states, to both avoid and survive them. Furthermore, pleasure centers are often stimulated even during traumatic experiences, further fusing together destructive and creative drives. Symptoms of self-mutilation, displaced anger, substance abuse, eating disorders, and obsession and compulsion that are seemingly unrelated to anything in particular – all these may arise to help repress the libido and aggression triggered during the original trauma. There are also “socially acceptable” forms the repression might take – e.g. becoming a cop or a soldier as a way to acceptably exert authority and aggression, becoming a doctor who, essentially, invades bodies for a living, or becoming a trauma counselor who bears witness to the trauma of others.

Those deeply in touch with their internal creative forces – like artists – often make something from the destruction they have experienced. I would not argue these artists always repress less, but they may expose more of what is true not just for them but also for many others – expose unspoken truths, histories, pain, and joy that hit the centers of unassuming witnesses. An artist may not even be aware of what she is exposing and communicating; she offers palates to be projected onto, imagery and ideas that may appear disjointed but that nonetheless resonate on some deep, gut level with those creation and destruction forces that are so inherent in human experience, whether one has been deeply psychically traumatized or one has merely experienced the normative trauma and recovery of living in a mortal, unpredictable, pleasurable, and terrifying world.

* * * * *

While the videos for “Yoü and I,” “Telephone,” “Bad Romance,” and “Paparazzi” also conjure the gutted and exposed libidinal and aggressive psyche, in no music video of Gaga’s is her transformation through trauma, sexuality, destruction, and creation so clear, exposed, and moving as it is in her new “Marry The Night” video. I have read a couple of initial reviews that describe her as self-indulgent and navel-gazing in this video, and one that criticized her acting chops in the opening sequence.

To these critics, I say, “For shame.” Her opening voiceover is nothing less than brilliant, as she tackles the slippery psychological process of remembering trauma. She rightly claims that trauma is the ultimate killer; it does something that could be considered worse than death – it allows one to live with a shaken psyche, sometimes without full memory of the trauma and without ability to make any sense of it.

In the opening, she presents herself as a recent victim, apparently assaulted and perhaps raped. She is told she cannot be “intimate” (read: have sex) for two weeks. She notes that she has lost everything. But she notes this in the context of great hope: she says that she will be a star because she has nothing left to lose. She points out that she has created this depicted trauma and has used things that bring her pleasure to do so – the mint gauze caps, the nurse on the right with the great ass, the next season Calvin Klein. She has been, in a sense, destroyed. And while acknowledging this, tearfully, she holds on to a reality within her that tells her she can do something with this destruction; she can create. She can hold death and life, destruction and creation, pleasure and mortality, at the same time.

What she has lost here is her innocence; it has been forcibly taken from her and that is physically manifested as opposed to just psychically manifested. Gaga is fairly genius at making her internal world external. She shows her polymorphously perverse nature, and it strikes me as quite the opposite of self-indulgent: she gives her viewers total permission to enjoy her perversion, thereby owning – not even vicariously, because her cinema is so sensorily pleasurable – their own perversions. She invites the linking of libido and aggression; she invites the dynamic interplay of sex and death. She doesn’t just show you it; she is fairly certain you’ll love it, that you will join her in that linking. 

When we then see her in her flat, defending her artistry and essentially displaying a mental breakdown of anguish, anger, and despair – clearly externalizing regressive states of sexuality and aggression – I cannot help but notice that her eye make-up positions her as potentially lending a nod to Amy Winehouse. Whether this was an intentional reference to the deceased pop star who struggled with addiction or not, this is certainly a plausible reading of her internal existential crisis in the flat. Ms. Winehouse was found deceased in her flat; she was a vocalist of epic proportions who brought joy (pleasure) by writing and singing about pain (destruction). The song “Rehab” was at once tragic and impossible not to dance around to, singing along. That Gaga might identify with Ms. Winehouse or feel a need to pay subtle homage to her does not surprise me. They are two women who bare something of the gutted soul for mass enjoyment.

Gaga, in the midst of this crisis in her flat, has two choices: give up or change. She chooses change. Because she has felt through the trauma – has allowed herself to regress as she flails about nearly nude with a box of cereal (here she is in an oral psychosexual moment, the first of the infantile stages of development: grappling with what should nurture her, grappling with trust, using her mouth for pleasure and aggression) – she is empowered to then have these options. She dyes her hair – connoting metamorphosis – in her bathtub, naked, again mixing destruction and sexuality together, primal and pre-verbal (now she is playing at anal stage themes of controlling the body and bodily functions), and we hear a voiceover of Gaga quietly singing some lines to what later becomes an enormously popular hit single “Marry The Night.”

As she later leaves the building (brothel? hotel? hospital?) of women, some prim and proper ballerinas, some indistinguishable, she says, “You may say I lost everything. But I still had my bedazzler.” And there it is. I laughed out loud when she said this, because, hey, it’s hilarious. It’s also another claim on transformation: she possesses the tools – metaphorically a machine that tacks rhinestones onto clothing – to transform harsh and traumatizing realities into something if not conventionally beautiful then at least beautiful to her. Destruction and creation. Sex and death. This burst of laughter and understanding instantly reminded me of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wherein humor fashions itself as simultaneously revelatory of inner conflicts and reveling in them. Additionally, she is arguably progressing through the phallic stage of development as she exits a re-fashioned woman, claiming her gender by dressing it up, quite different from the tomboyish brunette we first encountered in the clinic.

Is she navel-gazing? Is she self-indulgent? What human being shouldn’t be, in the midst of internal and external crisis? If one does not feel through such events – which may, in the face of great trauma, include intense regression to infantile stages of development – accepting the destructive forces and the effects those have on one’s intra-psychic and possibly physical self, one represses. One denies. One acts as if nothing happened. And in this way, trauma, violation, and destruction win. When one does this, one loses the opportunity and authority to create in the middle of what is destructive, loses the opportunity to take these new pieces of reality and transform them, to dominate them, to integrate them into a newly made world, and to even find pleasure through them.

Gaga goes on from exiting the building to offer us one of the most gratifying music videos I’ve seen from her. As we see her in her Firebird Trans Am, she is now at the final psychosexual stage of development, the genital phase: she is not merely woman, but sexual, empowered with her ability as a mature woman to create. The video is evocative of not just the music video for “Thriller,” but of the entire movie The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which takes us behind the scenes – like Gaga in the dance studio – and onto the street with a crew of dancers who back up her vision for her life, macabre and transformative, creating sex and pleasure in the midst of grit, destruction, and trauma. Just as Michael Jackson somehow made the threat of zombie attacks and death a pleasurable and erotic experience for the viewer, Gaga, in essence, takes back the night, whatever “the night” means to her. She won’t give up on her life. Her story, rather than ending in a clinic with bruises all over her back, surrounded by crazed young women and doped up on morphine, began there. Creation from destruction.  

* * * * *

As with the trope that “white” is culturally invisible, so too is it generally true that the “white male” form is invisible, especially in the United States, and is treated in the popular mainstream eye as a blank canvas onto which we can project our fantasies and desires, wild, tangled, and disturbing, joyous and free. Historically, the female form has been more difficult to digest as a blank canvas, as it has been so very objectified and imbued with what that form must mean to the ruling class. For a female pop artist to become a blank canvas – as I believe Lady Gaga is becoming in each of her videos and especially in “Marry The Night” – that is available for all kinds of projections and deeply felt visceral responses is a revolutionary and radical gift to audiences of any gender. We see Lady Gaga in “Marry The Night” as trauma victim, androgynous, naked, costumed many times over, masculine, feminine, sexual, aggressive, innocent, outcast, leader. She is believable in all of these roles.

                                                                                      

That Lady Gaga occupies intense libidinal and aggressive drives in a female body – and that her persona more and more presents a duality of masculine and feminine – in a world that traditionally responds primarily to men as having the power and authority to do this is, again, revolutionary and radical. It is not that Lady Gaga has invented this revolution or the themes and complexes she presents in the “Marry The Night” video. Those who have followed transgressive female artists who transform the female body, like Cindy Sherman, would rightfully skewer me if I said Gaga invented this. But what gets me, and why I felt the need to write this piece, is that much of the entire world is responding positively to what Gaga is offering; that level of responsiveness appears unmatched in this time and place. 

It seems to me that the world that loves her so inexhaustibly is crying out, in part, for the “radical” notion that the female form (and any minority body) is not simply a subjugated object for white straight men – or anyone else, for that matter – to control, subject and violate. She has made her form a blank canvas in many ways, which she strips down, bares, mutilates, rejoices, births, re-creates. 

I refute any claims that Lady Gaga is merely another pop sex object in this video because she struts around half-naked and depicts a primal sexuality, especially in the sequence in the hotel room/flat. As she uses her own form as a carrier of multiple meanings, in this as in many of her videos, it is not a fair assessment to claim that any woman who shows too much flesh is bowing to the patriarchal male gaze. Lady Gaga’s persona is a subject of her own making; it is fiercely in touch with her libidinal and aggressive forces, sometimes mutilating and morphing her own obviously gorgeous female form (throwing a box of Cheerios on her naked body, stuffing her face; bowing to ballerina perfection, which many understand to be painful and sometimes destructive to the ballerina’s body) to present us with an external version of internal conflicts and wishes, fantasies, and desires – perhaps our own. To ask that she de-sexualize herself would be to halve what is so universally appealing about her, just as it would be antithetical for her to tone down the gritty, destructive, masculine forces within her – with which she grapples, and which she so brilliantly enacts. 

And while there is arguably a certain level of trauma just in being born female – or “different” – in a society in which minorities continue to be more often objects than subjects, Gaga claims that very trauma as a tool for her own self-actualization. And she offers that claiming of trauma, that re-invention of trauma, to her wildly devoted fans. I believe this all resonates viscerally, not necessarily intellectually, which is, ultimately, its genius and its profundity.

I’m convinced Freud would have utterly loved her and might have claimed she is offering some solution to neurosis and posttraumatic stress through popular art that no other pop star of her generation with her level of success is currently offering. She regresses in the face of trauma, and she imbibes the raw vicissitudes of mortality and sexuality. She aligns herself with fundamental complexes, so essential to the grappling of any trauma, to transform herself, to cathect, and catapult from infantile regression to a position of subject, power, authority, and invention.

Bravo, Gaga. Navel-gaze all you want. Self-indulge. And transform our pain again, as I know you will. I’m a 32 year-old little monster, with my paws up. 

Citations:

Freud, A. (1966) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Executors of the Estate of

Anna Freud.

Freud, S. (1962) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud Copyrights

Ltd.

Freud, S. (1960) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. W.W. Norton &

Company, Inc.: New York, United States.

Freud, S. Quotation.

http://www.apsa.org/About_Psychoanalysis/Freud_Quotes.aspx

Durham, M.G. & Kellner, D.M. (eds) (2006), Media and Cultural Studies. Blackwell

Publishing Limited: Massachusetts, United States.

Mulvey, L. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.

Rothenberg, P.S. (ed) (2004). Race, Class and Gender in the United States: An

Integrated Study. Worth Publishers: United States.

McIntosh, P. White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

Figley, C.R. (ed) (1985). Trauma and Its Wake. Brunner/Mazel: Pennsylvania, United

States.

Eth, S. & Pynoos, R.S. Developmental perspective on psychic trauma in

childhood.

Author Bio:

K.M. Zwick, MA, is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery, addictions and group dynamics, a gender theorist, columnist, and essayist in Chicago, Illinois. Find her opinions run amok on http://thehumbleopine.blogspot.com

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MtN’s Tour de Negative Femininities

By Samantha Cohen

This is the seventh piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

The home-chopped bob with too-short bangs has always been my favorite haircut. It screams teenage theater girl or aspiring mental patient. It makes me think of knives. The girl with the home-chopped bob is so angry she’ll take a scissors to her hair, cut right into it at random, and probably use the scissors on other things, too. The bob chopper’s given up on being a good female – she’s given up on being pretty. She takes her emotions out on the very symbol of her good femininity: her hair. She externalizes her badness, advertises her desire to fail. And so she is institutionalized.

Only she hasn’t given up on being pretty, not really. The scissored-at-random look is different than the razored-all-over look. Her little bangs ask those who gaze upon her to still find her cute. Recognize my anger, her hair says, recognize its manifestation on my body, but adore me. The home-chopped bob externalizes the ambivalence and pathos of being female.

And so, in the mental institution with home-chopped Gaga we begin the “Marry the Night” video’s grand tour of negative femininities.

The mental institution has always been a fantasy space for me. I sort of blame the movie Girl, Interrupted for this.

Angelina's home-chopped bangs!

The mental institution is a place for unchecked feminine expression and sanctioned hysteria, a gathering space for failed females. It’s a lesbian separatist experiment-come-true. In Girl, Interrupted, Winona and Angelina sneak out for acoustic guitar sessions and eye sex. In “Marry the Night,” patients cavort madly in matching thongs, imaginary slumber party-style.

Gaga’s in the institution because she took a knife to her hair and then her body; because she couldn’t be a good female – “a saint” – like her mother.

But one must fail at femaleness in order to create. Creation is a selfish act, and the good female is unselfish. Gaga must accept herself as a failed female before she can be an artist, and so the mental institution is necessarily the first stop on her journey.

Gaga is not at the hospital to be restored to good femininity, like Winona in Girl, Interrupted, but to accept her failure. She just has to turn on some dramatic piano music and waltz into a studio apartment that, bathtub-in-the-kitchen, is the very signifier of glamorous New York artistic poverty, and that’s in some ways, an extension of the institution – a place for expressive seclusion.

And so she finds herself in the next incarnation of failed femaleness: the cloistered impoverished artist. She practices ballet, does performance art involving maxi pads and Cheerios, and writes songs in the kitchen bathtub as she bleaches her hair. Strutting around with a censoring black bar over her nipples, she even has an imaginary audience. Her speech is subtitled.

But Gaga’s already told us she’s beautified her past. Of course, real art poverty is the same as all other poverty. There’s no audience, and after awhile, it becomes difficult to imagine one.

And so, Gaga joins the world again, now as an artist. Which she can do, because she still has her bedazzler. She still has the tool to make herself into her own glittering object. And so she does.

And then she does “what any girl would do.” But what is it that any girl would do? She says it’s “start(ing) all over again” but her face tells us something different. 

Do you see it? It’s subtle. It could almost be that Gaga’s gum is stuck in her teeth. But, no. Gaga is going to suck cock. She’s going to embody yet another form of negative feminine: the whore.

Oh yes. She’s entered the capitalist/patriarchal system and she’s ready to sell herself to that ultimate patriarch: the Papa Paparazzi.

Gaga’s subtlety with her cock-sucking face is telling – she’s skilled at making her signals apparent only to those who know how to read them. This kind of coded signaling is itself a feminine form of communication. Men, Real Men (who may of course be women, too), the ones who run shit and to whom Gaga must whore herself are, as centuries worth of jokes and satire tell us, unobservant. Almost intentionally so – they wouldn’t want to be accused of the feminine activity of reading into things. And so, by convincing Real Men, at a glance, that she’s whatever they want her to be, Gaga gains the freedom to speak honestly, if clandestinely.

So Gaga’s a whore, but she can’t just be a whore. Like (Catholic schoolgirl) pop stars Britney and Christina, she must embrace both sides of the Madonna/whore binary. She must, too, be a saint. She clues us in on this in the same moment that she signals her intent-to-whore. Her studded denim, blonde 80s look alludes to Madonna, making a kind of visual pun that allows her to embody both the Madonna and the whore simultaneously, to effectively become a Madonna/whore hologram.

Unlike Britney and Christina, though, whom Real Men turn into whores and Madonnas in image only, Gaga becomes a real Madonna (more on this later), and a real whore. She “throw(s) on some leather and cruise(s)…in (her) fishnet gloves, (she’s) a sinner.” And it’s by embodying at once these opposing figures that Gaga has the freedom to create herself in her own image, to use those shiny patches.

By actually inhabiting both sides of the Madonna/whore binary, Gaga is able to become, while in the world, something that’s almost unfemale. By the time she’s ready for the world of the actual music video, she’s abandoned her uncontrolled, emotional femininity. Her movements have become precise, rigid, fierce. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling. She makes fists. She blows shit up. She’s become something that’s so far from popular representations of the Madonna and the whore that it’s not quite recognizable as female, so far from these representations that, upon her debut, U.S. audiences speculated about whether she was a man. In fact, she’s a Gaga. And it’s once she’s become a Gaga in this video that the actual music video can begin.

Throughout the music video, we see what it is to be a Madonna.

Whoring gives Gaga the freedom to return to the bathtub, to her space of creation, which is also her space of baptism.

Gaga purifies herself in order to “make love to this dark,” to create. In Gaga’s bathtub, the Madonna is not all about piety and selflessness. This Madonna communes with the divine, with the mystical, with the dark, in order to create. This is not a new idea of course – the Virgin Mary herself communed with the divine so hard, got so deeply in touch with the dark otherworldly, that she got pregnant with an actual baby who was part-human, part-divine. Gaga restores the image of the Madonna to what she is: another embodiment of the negative feminine.

Gaga’s Madonna is not a Madonna that the U.S. Christian right (who are almost synonymous with Real Men) would approve. She’s in touch with the dark, with the unconscious, with the frightening spiritual world.

Real Men are content, Gaga implies, as long as their cocks get sucked. And thus, Gaga turns the Madonna/whore binary on its head, making saintliness encompass emotion and darkness and everything scarily feminine, while the whore gives Real Men what they want, gaining freedom as currency.

And the chorus of “Marry the Night” sounds to me like an imperative as well as an invocation. I hear Gaga invoking Mama M-Mary, the night. Mary the dark, Mary the source of magical creation. But I also hear, “Mama m-marry the night,” which sounds to me like it sounds when I hear LA Latina mothers call their daughters mama, a term of endearment, a recognition of their inescapable femaleness. Mother monster is dispensing some advice. She advises us to marry the night. To embrace inner darkness and create from that darkness. To commune with the otherworldly, to reinvent ourselves. To turn tricks and be tricksters. To embrace solitude as well as the bedazzler. To do the home-chopped bob if we need to, but to eventually become so tough and glamorous in the world that we’ll be allowed space to return to our own rooms for emotional/psychotic/hysterical creation.

And with the Mary figure at the end of the video, Gaga offers us a god to worship. This Mary’s hard and shiny, content alone in the darkness, transmitting signals from her satellite head, knowing they'll be properly received.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen, creative editor of Gaga Stigmata, is a writer living behind the Scientology building in Los Angeles. Her fiction can be found in PANK, Black Clock, Storyglossia, The New Orleans Review, and Mary Magazine. She teaches a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts.

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