Gaga's gag

Gaga, Go Funk Yourself!



Considering the psychological effects of Gaga's vids reminds me of the effects found in showing military films to GIs.

These studies have shown that military films shown to GIs serve the purpose of desensitization whether the film is critical of war or not. Watch a shoot'em up film--no matter the message--and you'll want to shoot'em up. Watch Gaga dance around skinny, fit, young, and hot but for a weird head--while critiquing The Bastards, and, if you're female, you'll compare yourself to her, you'll feel the usual crushing body-image anxiety--the anxiety that quite effectively deforms, controls, and silences girls and women, keeping them preoccupied with their fuckability rather than their funkability.

Gaga's portrayal of herself as monstrous is only at the face-level--it's all headwear and eye-shadow. While Gaga's bod is trad Goddess, fuckable in a most conventional way. This Gaga gag is not a redefinition of the female, some powerful monstrous unassimilable, Cunt of the Wild, Innanic Other. Nah, our epic hero would fuck her--probably hard for being naughty.

In one reading of this masking, the defaced face is reminiscent of the nasty step-father in the film adaptation of Tobias Wolff's _This Boy's Life_. On the wedding night during some rear-entry sex, the mom turns her head to look at him. He tells her to turn around, "I don't like to look at the face."

What would have been rad? If in the Beyonce vid when the music kicks in no routine nudes appear to shake that thang. Instead, we get that jailyard for a danceline, those big bad ass tat-n-flex jailbird dykes, for a start--along with a whole variety of women types, strangers to the chorus-line, a Dionysian Bacchae most wondrous monstrous. That's the image viewers could not categorize, stereotype, create a Model type from which female views would aspire. Such a chorus-line would say, hey, you too are invited. But such a chorus-line would not sell the Covergirl make-up advertised with the video.

I maintain that Gaga's hypersexuality defined through skinny pubescent bodies is tedious, predictably destructive of female self-esteem and male female-esteem.

And I maintain her hip ugly head-do is a manifestation of the male-gaze gone openly necrophilic.