Daily Times

The long awaited music video of Lady Gaga’s ‘Marry the Night’ is out. Designed as an autobiography project, Gaga’s directorial debut fails to impress after the first sequence due to a somewhat flat, superficial imagery that makes use of raw, sexually explicit content. But where it is surely captivating is the deeper angle capturing on camera the human state of flux, and sleek, aesthetic intermingling of pleasure and pain — a state of life fast becoming a defining feature of our times. This article seeks to present an analysis of the said offering from this perspective.

‘Marry the Night’ revolves around the scenario of one’s entire world getting derailed and life having to start over all again. For those of us who got the opportunity to watch ‘The Prelude Pathétique’, the short teaser of ‘Marry the Night’, a deep Foucaldian feel to the work was evident. Michael Foucault, a contemporary postmodern sociologist from France, was deeply influential in changing our perceptions related to the field of knowledge, medicine and sexuality. The opening scene of the video shows a pale, cold Gaga on a gurney, in a state somehow instantaneously reminding us of the first pages of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic. Similarly, the initial images, combined with a monologue, give a deep feeling of association with the work of contemporary French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan whose work on desire and themes like the role of speculum in defining our identities makes this an interesting object of philosophical analysis. Many parts of the video generate an uneasy pondering on powerful concepts in the genre of Lacanian psychology. For example, the view of a stark naked Gaga with breakfast cereal on her body reveals a perturbing combination of sexual and commodity fetish. In fact, the video has a Lacanian feel since the whole project delves into the gaze of Gaga.

Gaga’s previous video was ‘You and I’, which revolved around the idea of feeling tortured in love. It was this video that brought on screen her ideas about having a male alter ego, Jo Calderone. She defined the project with the statement, “Love is a result. We bare an unbearable human inability: to just ‘be’.” While manifesting the theme of ‘You and I’ on stage in the MTV VMA Awards 2011, Gaga had stated that her performance was based on her obsession “with the archetypes of our psychology and all the different people we can become or have become in the past, our potential for the future and how do we in our minds sort of compartmentalise our different personalities. It is almost as if I am reviewing my life as a play.” It was in this awards event that she performed not as the female Lady Gaga but rather as Jo Calderone. This performance, then, carried great sociological significance since it was based on the act of formally ‘becoming’ the ‘other’, thereby blurring the barriers between carrying a male and female identity.

‘Marry the Night’ has various similarities to ‘You and I’, e.g., the theme of identity and ‘becoming’. Similarly, it also includes the theme of feeling tortured, in this case, due to the feeling of possibly losing in life. In this way, perhaps, ‘Marry the Night’ is rightly ‘autobiographical’ since it depicts an entire life filled with the struggle to ‘be’. And it continues with her theme of reviewing life as a play. Lady Gaga has revealed that the video is a ‘surreal’ representation of the obstacles she had to face in her early career and pursuit of fame, especially after being dropped from her first record label, and about “reliving the worst day of her life”. In this regard the autobiographical project reveals many layers of reflexivity. It talks about fear, failure, feeling destroyed and breaking apart yet not giving up. In Heideggerian terms, we cope with the facticity of our individual existence and perhaps ‘Marry the Night’ tries to illustrate this fact of life.

In a recent interview about the video, Lady Gaga states that she finds it interesting “how we perceive what is artifice and what is reality”. The starting sequence of ‘The Prelude Pathétique’ expressed the typical Gagaic mystique eloquently with, “When I look back on my life, it is not that I do not want to see things exactly as they happened, it is just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully, the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it.” These words remind one of a review of postmodernist Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy stating that in contemporary times “truth results from imagination, expressivity”. The philosophical possibilities and implications pertaining to this statement are immense. The lesson gained is, perhaps, in our times the ‘truth’ is that which we define as the truth; tears can be defined as priceless emotions or as chemical malfunction in the eyes. As a thought-provoking corollary, and as many sequences in the video featuring an undressed Gaga reveal, provocative may be the new pure. What if shameless is the new shy?

Lady Gaga’s works and words, then, depict a phase of deeply interesting, yet problematic, ontological anxiety. Moreover, they mark our ‘formal’ entry, so to speak, into an age of epistemological indifference and insecurity. It is in this light that I find her an exciting figure, especially in the context of sociology of media, culture as well as religion, even though many of us may dismiss her offerings as just entertainment, insignificant, crazy or pure nonsense.

The narrative in ‘The Prelude Pathétique’ states, “It is not that I have been dishonest; its just that I loath reality,” a very interesting line. She had once tweeted, “I think the universe needs a rebirth.” This is a marvellously intricate statement about the human condition and situation today. Perhaps we are witnessing such a ‘rebirth’ today in more ways than one; our soul, our estrangement, the meanings we attach to our body, the narratives we live by; the intractable conditions of human existence including those involving the self, the sexual and the semiotic. The new questions that humankind faces today are complex. The answers are obscure still. Seems like the quest for understanding our existence is not yet over.

The writer teaches sociology at the University College Lahore (UCL). He can be reached at naqibhamid@gmail.com