A Bad Romance: Lady Gaga and the Return of the Divine Monster. Lise Dilling-Hansen

Transcription

1 1 A Bad Romance: Lady Gaga and the Return of the Divine Monster Abstract In the Middles Ages a monster was considered a prodigy and a sign of the divine power of God, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the monster turned into a freak and was put on display to horrify and amuse audiences. Scholars from the field of disability studies have claimed that the understanding of the socalled freak as abnormal is a socially constructed discourse, and suggest the less degrading term extraordinarity instead (Garland-Thomson, Siebers, 2009). This paper adapts this theoretical approach and examines how the role of the monster has acquired new significations in modern societies. It claims that the monstrous body can actually be considered extraordinary rather than defect and wrong. In popular culture this shift makes the vampire a dream lover (Twilight) and Lady Gaga accepted as a monster in pop culture. Based on Lady Gaga s music video Bad Romance, this paper investigates how Gaga transgress dichotomies through her performances and establishes a new kind of bodily discourse in which monstrosity and beauty go hand in hand. By analyzing the visual aesthetics in the video, this paper shows how Gaga imitates and manages to stay recognizable in a heterosexual matrix (Butler, ) and normative body discourses, while deconstructing the discourses from the inside with her crippled spine, enormous eyes, spastic movements and the rah rah ah-ah-ah monster sound. The thesis of the investigation is that Lady Gaga offers us a glimpse of a possible future where the monster is no longer tied to the freak show, where deviations from the normative beauty discourse is a prodigious plus, and where we are all invited to the Monster Ball. Key Words: performativity, gender, discourse, post-humanity, extraordinarity. ***** 1. Case Presentation The singer Lady Gaga had a major breakthrough in 2008 when she released the single Just Dance and quickly became visible on the music charts and in the media. Further five singles (Beautiful, Dirty, Rich, Poker Face, Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say), Love Game and Paparazzi) were released from The Fame and

2 2 established Gaga as a hip and groundbreaking artist with daring visual expressions. But it was Bad Romance, the first video from the next album, The Fame Monster, that once and for all established monstrosity as part of Gaga s image. Besides the video Paparazzi in which Gaga appeared as crippled Gaga, Bad Romance was the first video in which Gaga appeared as physically deformed. Lady Gaga thereby made it clear that her visual aesthetics differed from that of most music video in modern pop culture, and that her goal was not to appear as perfect as possible, contrary to such singers as Beyonce, Shakira and Britney Spears. Instead she challenges the categories of beauty and sexiness. In the beginning of the video Bad Romance, light is cast on white coffins covered with red crosses and the word Monster. The music starts and up come Gaga and her dancers. The question is thus not whether Gaga is a monster or not but instead: 1) what kind of monster is Lady Gaga? and 2) what values are linked to the monster in Bad Romance? During her Monster Ball Tour, Gaga said the following between the songs Vanity and The Fame: The best thing about The Monster Ball is that I created it so that my fans have a place to go. A place where all the freaks are outside and I lock the fucking doors. It doesn t matter who you are [ ] because tonight and every night after you could be whoever it is that you wanna be. 1 Worth noticing here is the declaration that those who are not at this concert, who are not little monsters, are the freaks. And thus being a monster is constituted as normal. The monstrous space, Lady Gaga is creating for her fans, is a room of possibilities. It is a room in which borders can be crossed and where fitting into the category of normalcy is what is really freaky. This paper argues that the same pattern is repeated in the video Bad Romance. Here, Gaga exemplifies how it is possible to deconstruct the categories of normalcy and turn what is usually considered bad into positive and joyful deviations. 2. Theoretical framework The theoretical approach of this paper is social constructivist. It draws on the work of Judith Butler and the fundamental understanding of gender as being 1 The Monster Ball Tour Dvd

3 3 performative 2 and repeated by citational practices 3 that reiterate the heterosexual matrix: a hegemonic discursive model of gender. 4 In other words, gender and identity cannot be understood as containing a real core,, but instead are constructed through what people do and say. The works cited by Butler mostly revolve around sex and gender, but the terms are also relevant as analytical tools when working with other social constructions, as in this case: the discursively constructed normative body in modern pop culture. In order to elaborate the discourse of the normal body, this paper will focus on two aspects of the marginalized body: 1) the disabled body and 2) the monstrous body: 1) The field of disability studies is in this paper represented by two of the main scholars: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Tobin Siebers. They argue that being disabled in our society also means being worth less, more pitiful, and generally wrong. 5 These negative associations linked to disabled persons are caused by discourses verbally constructed and repeated by society and by the way society is designed. In an effort to find vocabulary to talk about disabled people without being derogating, Garland-Thomson suggests the word extraordinary instead of disabled or abnormal. 6 The bodily or mental features that derive from the average or the majority can thus be understood as positive extras or at least as features that are not necessarily negative derivations. In short, what is central here is to detach derivations of normalcy from the ab or dis and replace it with extra to think of them as possibilities. This theorization of extraordinarity will be applied to the understanding of the monstrous body in this paper. 2) The approach to the monster adopted here tends to view the monster as something that disturbs our way of thinking rather than shocks and horrifies us. Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen both claim that the monster is hard to 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 2006), Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge, 1993), Introduction, xxi-xxii. 4 Butler, Gender Trouble, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring physical disability in American culture and literature (Columbia University Press, 2008), 7 + Tobin Siebers, Disability theory (University of Michigan Press, 2009), Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 9.

4 4 grasp and describe. 7 The monster is thus not necessarily a huge creature with hair all over its body, continuously drooling. It is something for which we have not established a category and therefore do not yet have a language. Consequently, the deconstructive point here is that a monster is monstrous because it can never really fit the already existing categories and at the same time because its very existence deconstructs the established categories. The monster would thus lose it status as monster if it was compared to the norms, analyzed, and symbolically mastered. 8 The monster has to be understood in its deconstructing manner, in the way it messes with our minds in its ungraspable form and in the consequences of this. Using these theoretical approaches, this paper investigates how Lady Gaga breaks free from the normal structure of the human body by playing with the border between animal/woman, machine/human, insane/sane and disabled/able, and thus becomes monstrous and abnormal, but still is recognizable as a sexy pop star in modern culture. The thesis of the paper is that through her body performances, Gaga manages to detach the monster from the category of bad and marginalized and prove that extraordinarity can be an advantage. 3. The ambiguous Gaga This paper argues that several aspects of Bad Romance qualify Gaga as a monster. When Gaga s coffin opens, she sticks out her hands and makes spastic movements with her fingers. Then the rest of the coffins open, Gaga licks her lip, bares her teeth, mimics a wild animal with a rah rah sound and starts crawling out of the coffin. When Gaga and her dancers rise from the coffins, they are dressed in white latex body suits with implants resembling the ribs of a starved animal and a headgear covering their eyes. Gaga and her dancers move to the music in a rhythmical and somewhat coordinated way, but the movements are fast, edgy, and sudden. What we encounter here is a creature that is close to human but not quite human. It moves like an animal, it sounds like an animal, it acts like an animal (baring its teeth and licking its lips), and it looks like an animal in some ways (the ribs and the fact that we cannot see the eyes, which can be considered one of the bodily features that proves humanity because they are considered the windows to the soul and because the sclera is most visible in the human eye and thus the very look of them reveals humanity). In the next scene of the video, Gaga s eyes are visible, but are very enlarged and look like the eyes of a Disney princess or a plastic toy doll. Her eyes are looking at the camera but have an empty, blank appearance. The big-eyed Gaga 7 Derrida, Points...: Interviews, (Stanford University Press, 1995), Jeffrey Jerome Jerome, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University Of Minnesota Press, 1996), Preface, x. 8 Derrida, Points..., 386.

5 5 is listening to the song (Bad Romance) through earplugs and is either staggering around with robotic movements or lying in a bathtub singing along or moving her hand spastically to the rhythm as if the music has taken over her body. Again, Gaga is difficult to define is she a woman or in fact a mechanic doll? Also the question arises whether she is sane or insane. When the word love (love, love, love, I want your love) is sung for the last time in the first verse, the big-eyed Gaga first points her hand like a gun and then rolls her eyes as if she has gone insane. In the following chorus, two nurses pull Gaga out of the bathtub. Gaga tries to fight the nurses but ends up being forced to drink a liquid. This implies, first, that Gaga is being treated for insanity caused by a bad romance and second, that Gaga is trying to fight the prison of normality constructed by society (here, represented by the nurses). But is Gaga then under the spell of love or is she trying to break free from the hetero-normative discourse of a woman in a romantic relationship? 4. Enjoying the role as an object of lust In the second verse of the song, Gaga is forced into the role of an object by the nurses at the bath house, who display her in front of a half-circle of men waiting to bid on her in an auction. Though Gaga is being forced, she does not seem to resist. While dancing in front of the men, she sings such lines as I want your horror, I want your design, cause you re a criminal as long as you re mine and I want your psycho, your vertigo stick. Gaga apparently wants everything from the male observer, and the situation is not only erotic for the men but also for Gaga, who is touching her own crotch a very rare sight compared to the enormous number of music video scenes where a woman is being touched by a man. Also, taking a closer look at the video, Gaga is not really forced to take her clothes off, neither is she thrown to the floor, though it looks like it; she takes off her designer coat herself and later drops down on her knees and starts crawling towards one of the men repeating the I want your love part. Just before the men place their bit on Gaga, she gives one of them a lap dance while saying you know that I want you, cause I m a free bitch, baby. Gaga is sold for one million dollars and is then showed off as an object embodied as an unmovable body of diamonds (frozen in a rain of diamonds), gold (dressed in shoes and clothes in which it is impossible to wander freely though at this point the song repeats walk, walk, fashion baby ), and silver (trapped like a planet in silver planet rings). Should we now feel sorry for the object Gaga has become? Certainly not! Modern feminists have claimed that women like Lady Gaga keep the female gender in an old-fashioned structure, though she represents herself as a free

6 6 woman, because she does not avoid the object role. 9 Instead, I argue that Gaga evokes a new feminism in which it is possible to be an object and still be in control. Gaga is indeed the one in charge. She ends up killing the man who bought her, she is the one pressing play at the beginning of the video, she is the one wearing the black crown, and she is a free bitch. Here, Gaga deconstructs the category of woman as embodied desire as something degrading and wrong, and thus performs a female monster that transgresses the dichotomy of female and male sexuality in the heterosexual matrix. 5. Rethinking and redoing the abnormal body In Bad Romance Lady Gaga is the object being performed, but at the same time she is the subject doing the embodied performances. Gaga both is and does the body. Amelia Jones argues in her book Body art/performing subject that body art provides the possibility for radical engagements that can transform the way 9 Cathrine Redfern and Kristin Aune, Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement (Zed Books Ltd, 2010),

7 7 we think about meaning and subjectivity (both the artist s and our own). 10 I will claim that Bad Romance can be seen as a work of body art, where Gaga both is the artist (the subject) and the work of art (the object). Because of this doublerole, Gaga holds the power as a subject to use herself as an objectified tool to deconstruct and thereby change discourses of normalcy. The human visualized in Bad Romance deviates from the norm (a crippled spine, enormous eyes, staggering gait, possible insanity etc.) and monstrous (because of the uncategorizable appearance and deviant way of acting), but it is not represented as a victim. Instead, Gaga performs a powerful creature full of lust and virility with a body worth at least one million dollars of desire. By ascribing to the non-normative body positive values in her performances, Gaga is capable of both being recognized in and deconstructing the discourse of the normative body that lingers in most mainstream music videos. She performs a female body that 10 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (University Of Minnesota Press, 1998), 14. A Bibliography Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University Of Minnesota Press, Derrida, Jacques. Points...: Interviews, Stanford University Press, Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary bodies: Figuring physical disability in American culture and literature. Columbia University Press, Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. University Of Minnesota Press, Redfern, Cathrine and Kristin Aune. Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement. Zed Books Ltd, Siebers, Tobin. Disability theory. University of Michigan Press, I Youtube. Bad Romance. Accessed June 2, < watch?v=qro4yzeyl0i.html >. is a PhD student in the Department of the Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research explores the gender

8 8 normally would not be accepted in popular culture, and by this means exemplifies how the bodily features of abnormality and monstrosity can transgress the dichotomy of accepted and non-accepted bodies. The deviations performed by Lady Gaga are indeed extraordinary, but in a positive way. Through her embodied performance of the monstrous, Gaga states that the real fun belongs to the monsters and thereby challenges the viewer s fixed category of abnormalcy. 6. Conclusion This paper argues that we need to rethink the concepts of monster and monstrous when confronted with a phenomenon like Lady Gaga. She is indeed a monster, but only because she manages to deconstruct the existing discourses normally performed and cited in mainstream music videos: Gaga destabilizes the category of human nature by suggesting that humans might be closer to animals or machines than we like to think. She also questions the status of the woman as an object of lust by hinting that being an object can actually be positive and sexy. But most importantly, Lady Gaga shows how it is possible to be monstrous and still be a desired, viral role model. This paper argues that Gaga demonstrates a way to integrate monstrosity - in the shape of physical deformity, mental illness, and deviating performances of the female gender - into an acceptable and desired bodily discourse in mainstream culture. By performing the non-normative marked as positive, Gaga manages to turn monstrous features into extraordinary features which can make a woman a free bitch capable of breaking free from conventional structures. The monster enjoyed its prime in the freak show many years ago. Now it is time to re-recognize the monster -not as a sign of the divine power of God, but as a sign of future possibilities. Gaga has led the way and if we do not follow, we risk being the freaks standing outside the locked door. Notes