Video Music Analysis

“Telephone”

                    

        Oh yes! That’s right! It’s Gaga on the “Telephone” (ft. Beyoncé!). This video as a whole is a mouth full, loaded with issues on gender, gender roles, sex, performance, sexuality, artistic borrowing, notes on status, and comments on class and subculture. There really is enough content here to fill a book, for this paper I will focus in on gender, and gender roles.

 It might also be important to formally introduce Lady Gaga, the artist and performer, who has become quite the artistic icon of the past few years. Lady Gaga, at the moment does not fit so neatly into the title of traditional female recording artist. She isn’t necessarily passive, fragile, or innocent with a hint of sex. Although she does offer the sex, what Lady Gaga is actually doing is using her celebrity to have fun and be expressive. She offers a gritty look at femininity and fluid disposition to sexuality. She also participates in some strategic artistic borrowing from previous female artist, who have set the ground work for strong women in the media. Lady Gaga didn’t break on to the scene this way though, in her two first singles and first two videos (“Just Dance” and “Poker Face”) she very much so played by the rules assigned to young female pop artist. Lady Gaga had the catchy songs, was feminine, inoffensive and sexualized enough for a male audience without ostracizing her younger female audience. Her next steps though took her past the commercial appeal and tested her fans taste level. All the while questioning how far she could push her audience with her more visually conceptual journey. By the time she had come out with the video for “Paparazzi” the public knew that Lady Gaga was developing into something completely different. Jump ahead a few videos and a quite a few costume changes into the future and we find ourselves at the “Telephone” with Beyoncé on the other line.

The video opens with very stylistic credits outside of a jail house and introduces Lady Gaga while she is being escorted into the jailhouse by some very large masculine women who, once in her cell, rough her up and strip her down. Leaving her face down on her bed with only a G-string and heels on. They walk away from her cell and one guard says to the other “I told you she didn’t have a d#%k” the other responds with “too bad.”. Only 10 word into the video and we already have to pause for a discussion. It becomes quite the list just to breakdown all the ideas loaded into this conversation concerning the artist. Firstly what does it mean to be a woman with male reproductive parts in Lady Gaga’s world? Why would it be favored to be transgendered, and to whose pleasure is this benefitting and in what way? What does this statement insinuate about sexuality and sex, and finally does the presents of a penis present power because of its relation to men and masculinity? Both gender and gender roles continue to be questioned and blurred throughout the video and it becomes and important question to dissect. This song and video came out in 2009 before her more “queer accepting” anthem “Born this way” in 2011, but you can already see where she begins to lay down the ground work for the trajectory in her career.

 There is already something being developed in the way she questions appropriate roles for men and women, our next scene takes place in the court yard outside. We find a mix of men dresses as women, playing the “fem” and women enacting the roles of men, as well as women breaking gender roles and dressing feminine while enacting typically male jailhouse acts, like lifting weights with some very developed bicep muscles on display. This behavior continues to disturb our social understandings of women and men and begins to set these characters outside of our social realm, resulting in a displacement in the audiences mind as “the other”. “As John Berger (1972) has established it is at the level of representation that the “normal” position of women is established, controlled and managed., since seeing repeated images which show the same patterns of behavior come to define our sense of how things “should be”. Thus, such images or representations are the way in which we give meaning and order to the world.” [1] We are led to believe that this is not our world and Lady Gaga continues to disorient us further in her costume with her glasses being made of lite cigarettes. Again she is being

1.Janice Miller, Fashion and Music (Oxford: Bloomsberg, 2011), 52

escorted into the courtyard, this time in chains and she makes a comment here about being dangerous, about needing to be watched more closely. She also projects feminine signifiers and this says something about the danger of women. This is also a foreshadowing of what is to be expected of her un-female like innocence. She takes a seat and is quickly greeted by a very masculine inmate who’s Marlon Brando like exterior projects an untraditional sexual attraction. “He” kisses up on Lady Gaga and Lady Gaga unassumingly accepts it while deciding at times to reciprocate. This moment, while subtle also says a lot about gender in lady Gaga’s world. We understand her to be strong and sinister, so when she plays up a feminine role to be passive, we also understand that she is not abiding to traditional roles and that this is a performance within a performance. She attracts the “Brando” character with her sexualized body, she keeps “his” interest with her passive invitation, but it’s all a performance. Within the story line, she is actually using “him” to create a persona for herself within the prison setting. She plays down her danger, by playing up her femininity in order to keep an element of surprise for when it comes later. She in turn hides her masculine tendencies here, which we have commercially understood to be associated with strength and power (which can be understood to be dangerous). It is also interesting that this all happens within a traditional storyline and that we are still dissecting this story with a male and female in mind.

Her next scene is at the payphone where she gets a call from within the recreational room where the inmates gather and are put in one place. She stays calm as a fight out (combing her hair back, even with her tin can hair rollers in). She gets a call from Beyoncé and walks over to the pay phone in a black leather studded jacket, fishnets and her bra and underwear. She makes a mix of references here, from Rizzo in “Grease” (as a bad ass female who would often get her grasp on her sexuality confused with being promiscuous.) to Punk subculture (that we now borrow so casually with the studded jacket that have claims to danger and anti-fashion) and to our modern ideals of the sexualized female body (this when she wears just underwear as a casual outfit, this playing up to the male objectification of women and their relevance in music as objects). This outfit creates the first visual contradiction within this story line. While her outfit does play up to the “feminine mystique” (disguising Lady Gaga into a secretly dangerous entity, with the ability to distract the male gaze away from her questionable intentions) the problem with this outfit though is that it does more harm in its context. This sexual display sends out two messages about the female artist, the first acknowledges their power as a female to play up their sexuality in their favor but the louder of the two messages is that they have to be highly sexualized to be acknowledged at all. It almost doesn’t matter that Lady Gaga is using her sexuality to hide her intentions as a “femme fetal character” because if she wasn’t highly sexualized as a female artist then the (male) audience wouldn’t care. She becomes obligated to use her sexuality, the fact that she is working within those boundaries in her favor almost becomes just a consolation prize.

Within the scene she goes to answers the phone, the song cuts in and she breaks out in dance with 4-5 back up dancers (/inmates) all dressed in studded bra and panties. Again this works against the visual argument that Lady Gaga presents for the strength of women and boundaries of acceptance (with sexuality) when the scantily dressed dancers move up and down the caged walls on display and offered to be visually objectified. It begins to cut back on the depth of her message when she reinforces traditional ideas that women are objects in the music industry. We fast forward and we get a glimpse at her partner in crime another famed female artist Beyoncé. The song breaks and Beyoncé tells Lady Gaga that she has been a very bad girl and proceeds to hand feed her a honey bun prepackaged snack. (The amount of product placement in this video is amazing, but that’s not the point.) The kind of wording and the tone that Beyoncé takes with Lady Gaga, is dominate and her presence is meet with submission. This begins to build on the foundation that Lady Gaga was originally organizing for the delicate power that women can hold within gender roles. What manifest from their union has a sinister undertone and how they decide to use their power is both strategic and entertaining.

Our next scene see’s Beyoncé with Tyrese at a dinner. Her male counterpart plays up his traditional role of sleazy no good womanizer, ready to hit on other women and cause trouble. Beyoncé’s role is also seemingly traditional as she sits on display highly sexualized, passive, and allowing the man to do as he pleases while she sits quietly. This like we have seen before though, is a performance, Beyoncé plays up her femininity to mask her sinister intentions. She later poisons her boyfriend leaving him dead on the table with no remorse. We also see Lady Gaga in the kitchen (with her telephone hat) in the back poisoning all the food. She prepares the food wearing a frosted Mylar dress with a white apron over it. This costume suggests some association with asylum attire and it plays into the ideas of insanity, which Lady Gaga has made reference to before. It does give an undertone message of women’s mental stability in situations that test their emotional capacity, which can have connotations of women being the weaker sex for having fallen ill to mental instability. This is also in association that, to be ill, is to be weak whether it be mental or physical.  The scene in turn looks as though there was a mass murder in the heat of passion which suggests that women are lead not by reason but by their emotions which is not a stately characteristic, and is often deemed to be a weak quality. Beyoncé and Lady Gaga flee the scene (after a few dance scenes in both very patriotic American outfits and Beyoncé in a skimpy bejeweled army dress) having killed a restaurant full of people. Lady Gaga then says “we did it honey bee, now lets go far, far away from here.” Beyoncé responds with “You promise we won’t come back” and Gaga responds with a simple “I promise”. I am not sure if they are running from more than their current criminal convection (which they probably are, although I am pretty sure a criminal convection is enough to keep you away from a town that were already jailed in) but that’s not the point. Because it’s not so much what they are physically saying as much as what they are saying when they are not speaking.

“The central role of the fashioned body to the identity of female musicians reflects the way in which fashion and dress have been seen to be heavily implicated in a system of social and cultural control of women and their bodies. This positions women within a seemingly natural set of behaviors, establishing both a purported natural difference between men and women and a seemingly natural position of women as the second sex.” [2] There is something that is greatly supporting these consistent set of rules that continues to persist both in and out of the music industry. What we continue to see visually just reinforces our understanding of what is to be true about gender roles. The strides that Lady Gaga makes with breaking gender roles, introducing acceptance and opening the range of possibilities in equality is only contradicted with her reinforcement towards traditional gender roles and ideas about women and their bodies. Lady Gaga is beyond just a commercial shell used by the industry to make money, she has come forth and expressed ideals that she stands behind in terms of acceptance, and equality but she is also playing in a bigger space in which she uses her dressed or undressed body to make these expressions and that’s when the game becomes bigger than any one artist to go up against. She is still playing by the traditional rules to send a message and if she (or any other female artist) is going to get any messages across then the playing field has to change and the platform in which ideas are communicated have to be based on something other than the artist sexualized body.