The Lord Almighty Gaga has released her new nearly-14-minute-long music video/film for her latest single ‘Marry the Night’.
In this long-form tale, Narrator Lord Gaga - a character that creeps closer to Stefani Germanotta than even her pale, plain, Jo Calderone-loving character did in the “Yoü and I” video - begins her narration with what might be the most important and indicative quote of her entire career thus far: “And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest, because, I invented it.”
Here, she exposes the character of Lady Gaga, the other sub-characters of her created tales, the motifs and metaphors and moves that even now, pop culture and society still seems to take as Lady Gaga’s real reality. When in fact, it is all a fabrication, an extension of performance art that we’ve never really seen before, because there have never been this many outlets to “perform” before, because life itself has never been so much of a “performance” stage than it is today.
“It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality,” she continues. ”For example, those nurses are wearing next season Calvin Klein, and so am I.” Yes, yes, exactly, exactly exactly exactly.
Another line worthy of laud and a notable piece of her argument on what is fame is said by her mental patient character a few minutes in: “I’m gonna be a star, you know why?… Because - I have nothing left to lose.”
Nearly all irony aside (wait, no, c’est impossible!), this is quite an epic video with a lot of revealing insight to the Lord Almighty. It’s a little Black Swan-sy, it’s a little self-referential-y, but it perfectly plays into the point of “What’s the point?” There are clearly some key points of meaning to dissect from this video, but not too much, because it still teeters along Gaga’s tricky tightrope of post-post-modern wonderment of whether it all means everything or it all is silly meaningless nothing. It is both, it is almost always both, and that is the power of the Lord Gaga.
But like so many of her complex and convoluted music videos, the parable will surely go lost on all. The mainstream, her predominant “low-culture” audience, will find it too confusing and twisted to understand… While the intellectuals, the scholars, the “high-culture” authority will simply ignore it because it is, well, Gaga. But this happily leaves us, the Curators, as part of the few who tread atop that ever-narrowing line of observers of, commentators of and preachers of the phenomenon that is the Lord Almighty Gaga.
Praise her name.
