This is the first in a series of pieces that analyzes the video for “Judas.” Each day for the next week, we'll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.
Lady Gaga’s project has long dealt with doubles. During the Fame era, her performance was often reflective; much like Warhol, she positioned herself as a mirror upon which to imitate her interviewer (e.g. Barbara Walters, Larry King), her audience (e.g. The Queen, little monsters), cultural narratives about the female body (the Meat Dress) and about the pop star (VMA “Paparazzi” performance). She was accompanied, in a way, by doubles (and triples, and quadruples…) wherever she went, reflecting her fans and thereby embodying their “spiritual hologram,” becoming their double. Her first album, The Fame, was really a double album, soon attended by its dark underbelly, The Fame Monster. Whatever pop lightness and fierceness The Fame presented, it did so while casting shadows whose shape revealed a grotesque monster. Similarly, the video for “Born This Way” witnessed two miraculous births – one good, the other evil. Mother monster split into two, embodied both a prejudice-free heavenly being, and a violently hellish one. If Gaga was herself a mirror during The Fame/Monster, then she now looks into her own mirror during the era of Born This Way. Warhol said to himself, “People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” His answer was “nothing”; Gaga’s answer appears to be another mirror. Think of Gaga’s birthing vagina in “Born This Way,” composed of two mirrors that reflect one another infinitely, thereby generating the infinite birth of Lady Gaga. Another mirroring: Gaga costumed and made up to reflect Rico’s skeleton tattoos and Mugler suit, but in a feminine form. Gaga mimicking Michael Jackson and then Madonna at the end of “Born This Way,” enacting their zombied doubles. Finally, I’m reminded of the recent photo shoot for Bazaar, not one but eleven Gagas, copied or cloned – the mitosis of now.
The video for “Judas” is also highly invested in the notion of the double, a double whose synthesis is Lady Gaga herself. Quite straightforwardly, both the video and the song present Jesus as Gaga’s light and Judas as her darkness – both are intimately a part of Gaga, part and parcel to her own being. As Gaga has said of the video, “If you have no shadows then you’re not standing in the light,” indicating that good and evil are symbiotically connected. The video for “Judas” thus synthesizes the double into a unified figure, demonstrates how this seemingly opposing pair comprises a whole, collapses oppositions into a single expression or being – Mary Magdalene/Lady Gaga is the synthesis of Judas/Dark and Jesus/Light.
Many elements of the video enact a doubling that is ultimately reconciled. The choreography, for example, is graphed along a kind of Hegelian thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. More than any of her previous choreography, the dancing for “Judas” is very even-sided: movement on the right (thesis) is followed by the reflected movement on the left (anti-thesis), finally punctuated by a third movement that synthesizes the previous two. Especially during the chorus, this seems to be the schematic design behind the choreography. Significant, too, is the heart-shaped gesture Gaga and her dancers make with their hands, which is often the synthesizing sign; love, (it has been rumored), has the power to reconcile opposites, and it does so as a gesture in Gaga’s dance.
Think, also, of the dancing when Gaga sings, “Judas Juda-a-a, Judas Juda-a-a, Judas Juda-a-a, Judas GaGa” (2:09-2:16) – this thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis is reenacted four times during this short segment, finally punctuating Gaga herself as the body of reconciliation. During the first three “Judas Juda-a-a”, she punches upward to her right then to her left for “Judas”, and then combines these opposing punches into a symmetrical two-fists for “Juda-a-a”. The final “Judas GaGa” ends with a defiant singular fist on the “GaGa”, which brings together the opposing movements, significantly upon the utterance of Gaga’s name. Gaga is thus both named and gestured as the site of reconciliation between oppositions, which enacts a third reconciliation: that of the word (the spiritual) with the world (the flesh, the material).
This synthesis of the word with the world – wor(l)d – ties in with the extensive religious imagery and narrative that the video employs. Unlike mundane objects, religious objects automatically carry with them both a material and a spiritual reality. In essence, the religious object is a kind of oxymoron – spiritual material, esoteric physicality, tangible God. The religious sacraments, too, are defined according to this same paradox: “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us.” The video for “Judas” employs the epistemology of the religious object in its narrative, its imagery, its costuming, and even in its formal filmic composition of Gaga. She is repeatedly composed according to the techniques of icon painting, and becomes, in effect, a kind of living icon. Icon painting is itself a spiritual process wherein the artist perceives himself as a vessel through which to channel God’s inspiration, and often fasts and prays for days to ready himself to paint. The noted characteristics of icon painting include two-dimensionality and purposefully unrealistic dimensions (to emphasize that what is visualized is not of our three-dimensional world, but rather of the spiritual otherworld), religious figures drawn with extremely large, almost-disproportional eyes (considered windows into the soul), and colors that are gilded to emphasize a heavenly glow. Often, icons are decorated with jewels and gold, left as offerings by worshipers.
In “Judas,” the headshots of Gaga are composed according to many of these characteristics of the icon.
Like iconic representations, Gaga’s eyes are emphasized, she seemingly glows (illuminated by a background light), her makeup is done in such a way as to flatten out her features and further elongate her nose (again, like noses in icons), and her nails – encrusted with jewels – recall the rich decoration with which worshipers adorn icons. The costume she wears during the scene of the “Judas Kiss” is also, perhaps not coincidentally, highly reminiscent of the blue robe and head covering Mary is often seen wearing in many icons (see the second and third icon, above; thanks to Roland Betancourt for drawing this to my attention).
Thus, Gaga paints herself as an icon in “Judas”; even her creative process is akin to the methodology of the icon painter – inspiration is understood to come from a spiritual source (e.g. God, a muse), and flows forth (in Gaga’s case, more of a vomiting forth). One then honors and worships that which is produced during those moments of spiritual inspiration. Gaga’s visual self-composition as a living icon positions herself as both a corporeal and a spiritual figure, the painting made flesh (or the biblical narrative/word made flesh), a site both literal and metaphorical at once, incorporating into one being traditional oppositions between the sacred and the profane – which are the oxymoronic qualities of all religious objects.
The scene of the Judas kiss brings to a beautiful crescendo both the idea of the double and the notion of corporeal spirituality. Indeed, we can argue that the kiss itself is doubled, split into two. The first kiss involves Gaga, the lipstick gun, and Judas, whereas the second kiss reenacts the biblical scene where Judas kisses Jesus. This doubled kiss frames the interjectory scene where the music pauses (3:44-4:19) and Gaga is seen, her arms outstretched to mimic a cross, with waves crashing into and over her, and also bathing Jesus’ feet (with Judas present as well). In the space between these two kisses, Gaga is both baptized by and sacrificed to the waves.
Baptism and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin, reconciled in the figure of Gaga at this moment. Likewise, the scene in which Gaga washes Jesus’ feet also contains within it a doubling: it recalls both Mary Magdalene’s washing of Jesus’ feet with her hair, as well as Jesus’ washing of his apostles’ feet, (a rite that is still practiced on Holy Thursday when the priest washes the feet of his congregation). When Gaga washes Jesus’ feet, she both embodies the position of Mary Magdalene, and mirrors the position of Jesus washing the feet of his apostles. With Jesus before her, she reflects him, serves as a prophesy for what is to come. As such, during the space of the music’s pause, suspended between the two kisses, Gaga performs a synthesized doubling of baptism/sacrifice, as well as a synthesized doubling of Mary Magdalene/Jesus. The effect is to embody in a single figure what is traditionally at odds: whore with God, material with spiritual, salvation with destruction, feminine with masculine.
The first kiss – composed of the lipstick gun, Judas, and Gaga – makes literal the idea of a killer kiss in the object of a gun that shoots lipstick. It is the kiss of betrayal: Gaga does not want to give it, and collapses after having done so. The second kiss – between Judas and Jesus – is a kiss of forgiveness and acceptance: Jesus smiles slightly as Judas calmly kisses his cheek.
Taken together, these two kisses reconcile betrayal and forgiveness in the same gesture (as Gaga has claimed, “forgiveness and betrayal are hand in hand”), again uniting opposites.
With the Judas Kiss, Jesus is both betrayed and grants forgiveness; Gaga, too, is both forgiven and betrayed. If Judas is also to be considered a sacrificial figure (his betrayal prophesied and necessary for the crucifixion, and thus the resurrection, to come to pass), so Gaga, as the site of synthesis of light and dark, Jesus and Judas, depicts this sacrifice. In the final scene, dressed in a white wedding dress and accessorized with dyed-black hair and painted-black nails, she represents the marriage of light (Jesus) and darkness (Judas) into a unified sacrificial figure – assumedly stoned to death for the sake of forgiveness and resurrection. Mary Magdalene/Gaga is the marriage of Jesus and Judas, light and darkness, into a single sacrificial being.
It is also a stoning prophesied. Look at the final headshot of Gaga, which features another doubling: a crystallized tear on the right side of her face, and a living tear falling from her left eye. The crystallized tear prophesies the living tear that we witness come.
Click here to "like" Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.
11 PM, May 6, 2011 - Edited to add:
Re-watching the video after posting this analysis, I noticed something I'd completely overlooked: the first dance during the chorus ("I'm just a holy fool ...") inside the Electric Chapel (between 1:38 and 2:16) is first done by a company of female dancers, and then, with the shot's cut, the dancers switch to a company of all male dancers.
The switch between male and female back-up dancers occurs with every cut during this scene – as if enacting a Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis through the composition of opposing masculine and feminine dance companies. Significantly, after the synthesis has occurred (discussed above, upon Gaga's singing of "Judas GaGa") the dance company seen thereafter during the second refrain of the chorus is a blend of all genders. Gaga's synthesis unites opposing genders into one dance company.
11 PM, May 6, 2011 - Edited to add:
Re-watching the video after posting this analysis, I noticed something I'd completely overlooked: the first dance during the chorus ("I'm just a holy fool ...") inside the Electric Chapel (between 1:38 and 2:16) is first done by a company of female dancers, and then, with the shot's cut, the dancers switch to a company of all male dancers.
Feminine Dance Company
Masculine Dance Company
The switch between male and female back-up dancers occurs with every cut during this scene – as if enacting a Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis through the composition of opposing masculine and feminine dance companies. Significantly, after the synthesis has occurred (discussed above, upon Gaga's singing of "Judas GaGa") the dance company seen thereafter during the second refrain of the chorus is a blend of all genders. Gaga's synthesis unites opposing genders into one dance company.
Synthesized-Gendered Dance Company