Lady Gaga's 'Telephone': Exploitation cinemas, homosexual attraction, and the blending of public and private.

The following is an excerpt from a full-length paper entitled "“We’re C-Coming Out”: Lady Gaga’s Postmodern Videographic and Public Bisexual Persona" that was completed in May 2010. For an analysis of the Gaga's depiction of her heterosexual tendencies in her music videos, see my post on irony, innocence, and the death of the heterosexual binary.



In order to experience a bisexual camp reading of the video for Telephone as a comment on one aspect of Lady Gaga’s sexual identity, one cannot expect the song’s lyrics to provide deeper meaning. The actual song does not begin until 2 minutes and 50 seconds into the video, with multiple starts and stops of the track throughout that make clear the point of the video is the visual and not the lyrical content. Although the video is ironically edited to the contents of the song in part – namely when Lady Gaga answers a payphone in prison to begin the song, singing “Hello, hello, baby, you called? / I can’t hear a thing / I have got no service in the club / You see, you see” – the overall context of the video rarely reflects the events taking place in the lyrics except through occasional irony. The video begins set in a prison and then moves to the road and into a diner – and never, ever finds Lady Gaga or her co-star, Beyoncé, in a traditional club setting. Through a reading of the visual elements of key instances from Lady Gaga’s video for Telephone, I will attempt to further the idea that Gaga’s public and private life are indeed blended together in a remark on postmodern authenticity while also calling attention to the presentation of her sexuality in a single video as never bisexual and always only hetero or homosexual.

Telephone opens with blue-tinted shots of the exterior of a prison including images of barbed wire, guards positioned up high on a wall, and the surrounding cityscape all beneath fluorescent graphics and text that announce the stars (Beyoncé and Gaga) and director Jonas Åkerlund). This text and visual style set the stage indisputably for the campy visual style of a cult grindhouse film alá the blaxploitation classic Super Fly (dir. Gordon Parks, Jr., 1972) or
I Spit on Your Grave, Meir Zarchi’s 1978 rape-revenge film. Seemingly being imprisoned for poisoning and killing her boyfriend in her previous video for Paparazzi, Lady Gaga appears dressed in an exaggerated take on the black and white striped jailhouse uniform complete with her (or Grace Jones’s?) signature pointed shoulder pads which both function as a type of androgynous costume play as well as a nod to queer camp aesthetics of exaggeration discussed by Dyer [1] and Bryant [2]. A title appears explaining she has arrived at the “Prison for Bitches” as she is guided along a long line of hard-yet-chic feminine women within their respective jail cells who cat-call, blow kisses, and lick the metal bars, pronouncing their sexually aggressive – and therefore prison-societal – superiority over the new inmate. Each dressed in their own unique and completely more subdued variations of Gaga’s uniform, the women behind the bars look more like femme sex workers than regular prison inmates (and in fact, none of the women in this segment of the video come close to appearing butch), perhaps Åkerlund’s and/ or Lady Gaga’s comment on the type of women who are depicted as deviant jailbirds who might inspire empathy in the women-in-prison films (yet another sub-genre of exploitation cinema showcased in this video) like Chained Heat (dir. Paul Nicholas, 1983) or the original contribution to the genre, Caged (dir. John Cromwell, 1950).

Gaga is shoved into her jail cell and disrobed of all but her fishnet stockings by the transgender guards, who throw her down onto her cot. As she scrambles in an attempt to escape she mounts the bars of the door to her cell, exposing her pixilated crotch just long enough for the world to see the truth of her gender identity. In a direct comment to this revelation, one of the guards becomes the authority to announce this now-proven genital knowledge to the skeptical general public when she proclaims “I told you she didn’t have a dick.” Including proof in the pixilated version of a Lady Gaga’s vulva is perhaps an attempt to dispel this rumor once and for all that she is not “a very well-endowed young man” and is indeed cisgendered.

Lyrics from her previous single “Poker Face,” which Lady Gaga has claimed is about “poker facing with your sexuality,” lead in some ways to the development of this rumor: “I won’t tell you that I love you / Kiss or hug you / Cause I’m bluffin’ with my muffin / I’m not lying I’m just stunnin’ with my love-glue-gunning.” About seven months after her 17 April 2009 appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross – the show on which Gaga was rudely confronted by the host with the rumor about her assigned gender – Gaga reinforced in an interview with Barbara Walters that the lyric “bluffin’ with my muffin” is not a reference to her assigned gender, but indeed to her sexuality as a woman who is attracted to both men and women, albeit to each in different ways. The few seconds of screen time that Gaga’s vulva receives in 2010's Telephone seek to do away with this persistent rumor – a case in which gender has been conflated with sexuality [3] – once and for all.

The scene in the exercise yard in which Gaga is adorned in an outfit complete with heavy metal chains and sunglasses covered in lit, smoking cigarettes (visible in Figure 4) positions her as “the phallic femme” discussed by Chris Straayer. She moves across the yard as two of her previous hits, “Paper Gangsta” and “I Like It Rough,” play through the speakers of a boom box, perhaps a comment on Gaga’s consistent radio presence and media saturation no matter where one might find themselves. As soon as she sits down at a table outside, a “she-butch” female [5] in leather with short hair sits down beside Gaga and begins to kiss her (see below). Gaga kisses her back and even grabs the other woman between her legs, heightening the sexual tension of the moment. Feministe blogger Sady Doyle pointed to this instance in the video as one that plays with transgression from the normative pop culture representations of girl-on-girl sexual expression, especially since “special makeout times Between the Ladies [sic] almost always happen, in pop culture, between two very femme-looking individuals” [6]. Look no further than Katy Perry’s video for I Kissed a Girl to see instances of feminine women implicated as potential sexual partners for other feminine women, or 1998’s feature length film Wild Things in which Neve Campbell and Denise Richards, two traditionally femme females, share an intimate moment together in a pool. For the remainder of the video we only see Gaga implicated in relationships with other women whether as a domestic or sexual partner, clearly aligning the Lady with her attraction for women, or the homosexual side of her bisexuality.

Soon after this femme-butch kiss in the exercise yard a girl-on-girl kung fu-style fight reminiscent of the gloriously camp and stylized Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! (dir. Russ Meyer, 1965) breaks out in the prison and an impromptu dance number begins that combines acrobatics, aerobics, and aggressive boxing moves. Soon after the brawl and the dancing Beyoncé comes to Lady Gaga’s rescue in the Pussy Wagon, loaned to Lady Gaga by Quentin Tarantino specifically for the video, who obviously recognized the parallels between Gaga’s character in this video and the non-normative femme female action star of Kill Bill Volume I (2003) and II (2004). Gaga is dressed in yet another new outfit, this time a slightly more exaggerated and androgynous nod to camp queen Jane Mansfield’s outfit from her famous scene in The Girl Can’t Help It (dir. Frank Tashlin, 1956).

After making a sandwich into a phallic object via a nod to oral fetishism and allowing Beyoncé to sing a little bit, the two ladies tear down a dirt road in the neon yellow truck on their way to a diner where they will eventually poison everyone, starting with Beyoncé’s abusive, hyper-masculine boyfriend. After her boyfriend keels over dead onto the table, Beyoncé makes an innocent yet knowing hand-to-mouth, wide-eyed gesture similar to Lady Gaga’s from Paparazzi after she too has poisoned her boyfriend. This positions Beyoncé as a referential figure by drawing a parallel to the previous video performance to create a space for Beyoncé that is indeed strictly performative and is not meant to make reference to her celebrity persona in the same way that Gaga’s gesture in Paparazzi is meant to be viewed. Another aspect of the video that positions Beyoncé in a different light than Gaga is that Beyoncé is allowed to be presented as bisexual in the contexts of this video even though her public and private personae are consistently positioned as heterosexual. The video does, however go to great lengths to situate Beyoncé’s true performance as non-normative and a stark contrast to her typical presentation in the media by her outlandish dress and her robotic movements that mirror the sound of the skipping audio track. Gaga’s videos consistently employ this aesthetic, as do her songs; Beyoncé’s videos and music, on the other hand, do not subscribe to the same “fake authenticity” that are present in the pantheon of Gaga representations. The video ends in a similarly consistently referential manner with a nod to the film Thelma and Louis as Gaga and Beyoncé grasp hands as they drive off together into the horizon. A heart-shaped graphic appears, situating the two as not just friends but romantic lovers, who interestingly enough do not share an on-screen kiss in the video.

[1] Richard Dyer. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004.

[2] Wayne M. Byrant. Bisexual Characters in Film: From Anais to Zee. New York: The Haworth
Press, 1997.

[3] Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge (1990, 1999), 9.

[4] Chris Straayer. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video. New York: Columbia University Press (1996), 83-84.

[5] Ibid, 94-101.

[6] Sady Doyle. “Nothing That Happened This Week Was Ever Going To Be As Important As The ‘Telephone’ Video.” Feministe. 13 March 2010.

Lady Gaga's video for "Paparazzi": Irony, innocence, and the death of the heterosexual binary

This is an excerpt from a paper entitled "'We're C-Coming Out': Lady Gaga's Postmodern Videographic and Public Bisexual Persona"



Full disclosure: Åkerlund’s video for Paparazzi does not have the rich visual subtext found in his later Telephone, although the lyrical content is far more relevant to the presented visual themes than the words in the Telephone lyrics. The disjointed presentation that occurs between the narrative and the song-and-dance numbers could have something to do with this, or it could be because this video deals with a heterosexual relationship that does not overtly challenge the representations of relationships. Through a close reading of Lady Gaga’s interactions with her male lover in the video’s narrative and by reading into the irony present in the juxtaposition between the song’s lyrics and the narrative elements, one can understand Gaga’s need to be loved by men and her ultimate distrust of the male relationships she has had in her life. The ending of the video will also provide a clean segue into the beginning of the video for Telephone in which Gaga is punished for her actions toward her heterosexual lover.

Lady Gaga is shown in bed intimately kissing her male lover, played by Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård of True Blood fame, until he asks her to come with him out to the balcony. In this moment we identify the gender of Gaga’s sexual attraction for this video as a cisman who likely functions as a stand-in for her real-life boyfriend before she became famous. He carries her outside, propping her body on the edge of the balcony ledge, and the viewer soon finds out his real motivations for carrying her outside were not to be romantic but to have their intimate moments captured by the paparazzi. Once the Lady realizes the motivations behind his intentions she hits him across the face, which enrages him enough to drop her small body over the edge of the balcony. Just after both parties have admitted to loving each other – and indeed, Gaga has admitted in interviews that she has “only been in love with men” although she has had sexual attractions to women [1] – the male half of this couple makes the decision to push the woman he “loves” to her death, questioning the ability for love to exist in a life so comingled with artistic performance.

Interestingly enough, the play with gender that occurs between the lyrics of the song and the actions on screen allow for an ironic, nuanced reading of the video that further positions it within Dyer’s definition of the queer camp aesthetic[2]. The lyrics of the song describe a female fan totally “gaga” over an unidentified male celebrity. The fan swears to him that “I’m your biggest fan / I’ll follow you until you love me” and promises “I won’t stop / Until that boy is mine.” Taking on the role of the female fan instead of the celebrity who is typically the object of fandom, she presents a critical look at both herself as a celebrity persona and the obsessive, bloodthirsty fans who subscribe to the cult/ure of celebrity. If we take her male heterosexual lover in this video as an embodiment of a potential adoring (read: obsessive) fan who is actually thinking “I won’t stop / Until that girl is mine.” It is foreboding that these lyrics play over the image of Gaga pushed in a wheelchair and then attempting to walk with crutches; as her voice is heard in the song singing the lyrics above, she advances awkwardly on her crutches as the video is intercut with shots of Lady Gaga sitting on a couch simulating auto-asphyxiation, indicating that obsessive infatuation with both a celebrity and a lover can lead to suffocation. Using fandom as a metaphor for romantic and/or sexual love, Lady Gaga comments on the sacrifices she will go through as a lover, and the subsequent sacrifices that her lover will go through as a die-hard fan, in order to obtain the object of their desire.

At the end of the Fosse-driven dance sequences that occur for the middle portion of the video we return to a now-recovered Lady Gaga and her lover who share afternoon tea together. Lady Gaga pours a flask of poison – the same poison we will later see utilized in Telephone – into his beverage, which kills him almost instantly. Gaga wears a bright yellow outfit decorated with a graphic print of Mouseketeers and black sunglasses quite similar to Mickey Mouse ears. Looking both like a cartoonish and a childish version of herself, Gaga places her hand to her lips in an innocent yet knowing fashion after her lover is officially dead. By poisoning her boyfriend who literally and figuratively robbed her of her mobility both physically and socially, Lady Gaga the character and the actual celebrity will now self-reflexively steal back her rightful place at the top of the fame food chain by the tabloid coverage that this homicide will afford her. By killing off her heterosexual partner Lady Gaga is effectively doing away with this strict sexual binary that society has attempted to assign to her, leaving open the possibility for new forms of sexual exploration. As she is lead into a police car through a sea of screaming fans, Lady Gaga’s regained fame spins out of newspaper headlines as she drives off into the next phase in her life and in her “career”: a short stint in prison.

[1] In an interview with Barbara Walters, Gaga states “I’ve only been in love with men, I’ve never been in love with a woman but that’s really what the song was all about: why, when I was with my boyfriend, was I fantasizing about women?” Walters reacts with far more dignity than Jonathan Ross, who, when she makes a similar proclamation on his show, reacts with “Oh, good lord…blimey.”

[2] Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Routledge, 2004.

The Future of Media is, apparently, all about Twitter

In a panel at 20 Cooper Square's 7th floor television studio in New York City yesterday afternoon, panelists Nick Denton of Gawker Media, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bonnie Fuller of Bonnie Fuller Media, Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray, and Craigslist founder Craig Newark gathered and spoke with moderator Patrick Phillips, founder of IWantMedia and adjunct NYU professor, about the trajectory, impact, and trends in new media for the remainder of 2009 as they saw it. Mostly, the themes of the panel centered on the concept of community and user-dictated need and services; opinions on whether or not users will be satisfied with a "pay wall" for their valued news and information, even if each site only mandates a wall for small portions of their content; the importance of blogging and the difference between old school and new media journalists; a grasping attempt by Murray to talk about advertising, which was quickly lost in the more timely topics of discussion; and, of course, the media wonder that is Twitter.

Everyone on the panel uses Twitter, and more recently, they all noted, everyone was using it to find their news even before consulting other trusted news aggregators like Google. While most of them recognized that there needs to be more credibility and fact-checking in these tweets, the fact remains that all five of these people who ultimately have control over the media we consume daily feed off of tweets for myriad reasons, whether for access to news, building a community with friends, or self-promotion. Dorsey admitted that Twitter was a constantly evolving animal, and that this evolution was driven by the users, not the programmers; the appearance of Trends, of @replies, of the search engine (which Dorsey states is not a search but a discovery engine...um, okay...) were all because the people at Twitter saw these things happening or saw a user need for these modes of functionality. The folks at Twitter just made it easier for their users to execute these actions and fulfill these needs.

Something I found interesting was Denton's insistence that old media producers (ie: print journalists) did not work fast enough to be successful in the blogosphere. Claiming that while these "old media" journalists did fantastic investigative work, they were not prepared to have the tightened deadlines or produce the amount of stories required for the new media format of blogging. I wonder, and sometimes fear, that the need for instant information will eventually mean an ultimate breakdown of credibility and reliability. Actually, this has already begun. But I digress.

The half-hearted attempt to discuss advertising quickly fizzled out when Denton trumped Murray's claim that advertising online was not the way to monetize a service. Gawker takes a significant portion of their revenue from ad dollars, and is still utilizing this advertising model successfully, much to the chagrin of other media outlets who are no longer succeeding with this model (for example, Murray's WSJ). Murray and Denton, who were sitting next to each other, got into a slightly heated debate during which the former raised his voice and the latter simply sat their grinning and looking overly-confident through his rebuttal. Murray admitted that advertising was indeed a part of the puzzle, but not the whole puzzle. Coming from someone whose company has effectively monetized a pay wall, Murray must have been slightly irked at Denton's claim that Gawker is thriving off of ad dollars. Newmark joined the conversation to ad that the biggest threat to the advertising model that some adhere to so stringently is actually user review services, which are huge in the gadget community (enter another excuse for Newmark to mention how nerdy he is).

There were some stark contrasts among the panelists, and this is not a comment meant to be in reference to their opinions and thoughts: their appearances and mannerisms alone defined their unique characters, almost dictating what would come out of their mouths. Dorsey, the youngest in the group and by far the best dressed in a casual blazer with sunglasses dangling from the front pocket, looked like he was going to throw up any second. He was by far the most soft-spoken, and I'm not sure whether I should chalk that up to his actual modesty or his industry greenness in comparison to the other panel members. All of his statements seemed very calculated and cautious, and I don't blame him: everyone's watching Twitter's actions right now. Denton portrayed the ultimate "I'm totally confident and I don't give a f---" new-generation kind of UK business man, draping his right elbow over the back of his chair and idly swinging back and forth on his revolving stool while eagerly grinning throughout the hour-long discussion. His mannerisms made it very clear that he, and his company, were sitting quite comfortably at the moment. Murray sat facing forward, almost on the edge of his seat, with his hands folded, stuttering a bit when he spoke up to contribute to the discussion and repeatedly talking loudly over Phillips or the other panelists. Probably the only individual still grasping to survive the "old media" model (despite the WSJ's pay wall system that seems to be functioning quite nicely, depending on who you ask), it was obvious that due to the uncertain future of the newspaper business, this man constantly lives on edge. Newmark made it known that he was a "nerd" who lacked common social skills, and made this painfully clear by emphasizing several of his points with old-timey radio effects cued up on his sleek white iPhone (a rimshot, a wah wah wahhhh noise, etc). Fuller's demeanor was pretty uninteresting by comparison to the others, although her random interjections seemed like futile attempts to establish her credibility as a celebrity journalist.

Fuller, I must add, should not be totally discredited just because she is a celebrity journalist. She did have some very interesting things to say, especially on the topic of the vanity searches that are so popular on Twitter and how this relates to new media's catering to our need for fame in our personal lives. She made a comment relating to our individual need for being known, and that the Internet can now fulfill this need better than a short-lived reality television stint can.

As the panel was coming to a close, moderator Phillips mentioned that IWantMedia does a poll each year to determine the most influential media person of the year, and asked the panelists who or what this person was likely to be, even though the year is only half way over. Fuller, Denton, and Newmark all said that, without a doubt, "It's got to be the Twitter guys." Dorsey simply sat there, hiding his smile and red face behind his hand that was casually covering his mouth. Murray piped up, saying "I was going to put Murdoch," but eventually agreed that the guys at Twitter would be "a good choice." Dorsey, in all of his modesty, whether real or feigned, calmly stated "I was going to say our users."

A little peek into my psyche...

I'm reading a book called Celebrity and Power by P. David Marshall for my Culture Industries, Mass Media and Celebrity class, and while I was reading I realized something about why I love film history so much. The book is chock full of insightful inner workings of the star-making machinery (cue Joni Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris", someone) involved in the jobs of studios, publicists and agents. It also rips the veil off of how celebrities are manufactured, and how this manufacturing is in concert with their roles in films and just as equally their personal lives. To me, a look at the details of the history of the star system in 1920s-50s Hollywood is equivalent to going behind the scenes at Disneyland (I performed in a show at Disney's California Adventure during the 2002-2003 holiday season, and when one is hired by the Disney Company one is privy to education at The Disney Academy. This is complete with a behind-the-scenes look at everything, right down to the sonic landscape that fades in and out as one moves between each "land" or section of the park). Removing this screen of artifice has so much appeal to me, and I think completely legitimizes the field I've chosen to study. You might disagree, but it certainly gives it worth to me.

In undergrad when I would mention that I was studying film, everyone would say, "Wow, that sounds so fun!" Well, yeah, it's pretty fun in that I sometimes watched ten movies a week in class, but this wasn't just for the entertainment value of the films; we weren't just sitting in class mindlessly consuming the images in front of us. Watching these films was like participating in a discourse with history, trying to attempt to understand audience perspectives of sometimes seventy or so years ago, and fitting everything together within an understood cultural and historical context.

Case in point: I tried to engage an acquaintance of mine in a discussion of celebrity, a friend who is in the drama program at The New School. She completely didn't believe anything I was saying, especially when it came to the construction of celebrity by the studio system and their agents. "Yeah, but that was really only in Classic Hollywood, right? That's not the way things are now," she said. I wanted to explain, tried to convince her that these celebrities she sees in People and other such magazines are not really who she thinks they are, that this is the same artifice that was in place fifty, sixty years ago. But she just kept saying, "I don't know...". Maybe I like that I (am at least trying to) understand these concepts while most others just look at stars as heroes, as icons, as people to aspire to be, as people worth celebrating just because they are well-known. My friend is also always saying, "Don't you think I look like (fill in the blank of any beautiful celebrity)?", constantly attempting to ensure herself that she has the same characteristics as other well-known faces and therefore deserves a spot among them, like looking similar to a celebrity means that she is also worthy of stardom.

Tut, tut, looks like naivety...

Anyway, back to more unveiling of history.

Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars

Susan Murray's Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars provides an interesting blend of straightforward history and insightful analysis of the later popular radio model and the early television model for not just programming but also advertisement. Mainly seen through the lens of the comedians who made up the majority of this early television programming, the text is a fascinating integration of presentation of gender and ethnic-based characterizations and commentary on these representations and how they evolved between the pre- and postwar eras in entertainment fields. Focusing on mainly Jewish performers in the pre-war era and integrating some of Judith Butler's comments on gender representation from her book Gender Trouble (which I have been meaning to finish one of these days), the idea of the masculine feminization is presented as being recurrent and rampant on early television vaudeo programs. While charting the evolving nature of the type of entertainment that was successful in the early years of television, the text does a great job of drawing parallels between this analysis and the analysis of the evolving nature of advertising in a visual medium, as well as the way advertisers' control over content eventually waned once broadcast companies (NBC, CBS) began to accept more than one sponsor per program while simultaneously asserting more saying power behind their performers. In its entirety, Murray's text was informative and an interesting analytic historical look at early television stardom.

I especially enjoyed the portions of the book that focused in detail on personal stories of performers, mainly Berle and Godfrey. Godfrey is incredibly unique in that Murray's analysis focused less on aspects of his straight performance and much more on qualities indicative of his style of product pitching, something that is not often seen on television today due to the decline of vaudeo and variety show performance styles, and due to the breaks in current television programming designated specifically for advertisements (commercial breaks). Another factor that I found incredibly interesting is a short block quote found on page 109, where a trade press states "Television in the short span of 18 months has practically gone through what it took radio 25 years to exhaust". I thought that this quotation certainly smacked of the increasing momentum found in the entertainment as well as the technology industries, especially in modern times. Television exhausted the radio model quicker, probably because their formats were both so similar. And now the model of the sitcom, which has experienced far more longevity, is being replaced with reality television models, which will also soon be exhausted by a more popular, of-the-moment form of entertainment. It seems to me that the evolutionary nature of effective advertising and entertaining television programming are quite parallel to each other...

Ah, the concept of celebrity

I must apologize for my extended absence. I'm taking some pretty intense courses this semester, and have found myself inside most nights of this past week reading.

Is it odd that I feel a nagging sense of guilt when I haven't updated in several days? That I have more loyalty to my blog than to my class readings? Quite possibly, but these nagging feelings are real, I tell you!

Anyway, I've been reading essays and chapters in books and more essays on the evolution to the current form of celebrity that we "celebrate" daily. I'll have to post more about this because it is fascinating stuff.

One tidbit I found amusing: my friend and I were discussing the possibility of life outside of the planet Earth, and he said it was highly unlikely. "Possible, but highly unlikely. Although, aliens did build the pyramids."

"Well aliens might have built the pyramids," I said, "but actually pyramids were probably only built as the Pharaohs' publicity stunts." Ruminate on THAT.

Yeah, I've been reading too much celebrity cultural theory.