Lady Gaga and Jane Austen: on not quite making the cut for super-numinosity

Lady Gaga, a mainstream image, twilight faux feminine innocence

Lady Gaga, performing masculinity

Dear friends and readers,

File this under a “and now for something competely different” category but please do not think it irrelevant to Austen who herself has become an numinous icon whose presence and about whom stories are told which have hardly anything to do with her books: the origin of her cult is in the publication of her novels even if it first took off in 1870 when her nephew unwitting produced the terms which would enable the cult to get started (see my “Continent Isolated: Anglocentricity in Austen Criticism:” Re-Drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland [English translation of Italian title], edd. Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia. Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2005. Pp. 325-338, and comment). Nor is the soft-core parodic porn irrelevant, for Graham-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and the Zombies presents just such material.

I got into a conversation on Lady Gaga with anibundel whose insightful intelligent blog (I should have been a blogger) has been featured in Atlantic and who is my older daughter, Caroline. On one level (as my comment afterward, which I also include, suggests) Caroline-anibundel shows the pornification of our culture. Insightfully we see how not only the masochism of girl rock culture today, but also how women dressing as man are perform masculinity the way homosexual men dressing as woman are perform femininity. On another. we see an attempt to make oneself into one of these numinous icons (such as Marilyn Monroe and other celebrity women, including princesses have become). I don’t think Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta quite succeeding, and it would be interesting to understand why. I suggest Lady Gaga is not coming across as unguarded and enigmatic enough; there’s something pathetic going on.

Caroline-anibundel wrote as follows (suitably edited for this blog):

1. This is Lady Gaga’s biggest hit to date, “Bad Romance.” In it, she is trying to temper what was originally a wildly sexual piece into something (mostly) far more mainstream. (But note her microphone looks oddly like a dildo.) The faux old english ballroom setting was what caused me to ask if Dr.Who was going to suddenly materialize in his TARDIS. I apologize for the commercial at the front of this video. This is what network TV does now.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/lady-gaga-rocks-bad-romance-15025935
In comparison, here is the original video for “Bad Romance”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

2.This is Gaga’s latest release “Edge of Glory” reworked for the piano, and performed in what looks to be the dining room in Downton Abbey. This should give you a good sense of the odd pretentiousness of the proceedings, and why I said it was a bit near-Great-Performances parody.

3. I am a touch irritated that I can’t find her rendition of “Orange Colored Sky” which was the best number by far. Sadly instead everyone’s pimping the “White Christmas with an extra verse” that she did from that same setting. This setting with a small jazz band was the best showcase for her voice. (Again, obnoxious 1min long commercial alert)
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/lady-gaga-dreams-white-christmas-15025902

4. As to why people call her a Lesbian cross dresser, well, here. This was her summer release:

You’ll note there’s a tribute to Bette Milder and the mermaid thing (Gaga even appeared at one point with the fishtail in the wheelchair when promoting this video.) You’ll also get a sense of the “weird’n’wacky” outfits that Gaga wears normally. But the part that caught everyone’s attention was the shots in the cornfield. The “New York Italian tough” sitting on top of the piano that she’s singing to in her shift is actually herself, in male drag. Originally it was meant as a masturbation reference. Once she got wind that the most shocking part of the video wasn’t the odd outfits (and that no one under the age of 35 remembers bette milder) but that the idea of her in drag, she changed tactics and started doing all her public appearances in character as this new york italian tough who is gaga’s secret boyfriend from back home. That lasted maybe all of 6 weeks, which was when the next single came out.

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Lately “she” has begun to appear without her signature frilly cap

My reply:

The first video and the last used masochistic and punitive imagery; probably the first “Bad Romance” was better as it had less gadgetry and more a single mood, but it is a woman (women) offering herself (themselves) up to men to do with as they please. Masochistic over-the-top. That’s softened in the mainstream by having the guys dance too, but the use of a dildo as the mike offsets that. Nos 2 and 3 are boring in comparison, but yes mainstream and she makes these gestures she assumes or wants to be part of her signature act/performance. She has a hoarse individual voice. I agree the plush stuff comes from PBS kind of masterpiece theater or other pop norms. Glamor is the pretense. The last video had some startling self-harm stuff. Her feet, the heels and ankles bleeding. Vagina dentata with naked behinds, all got up military style. I did see right away the person on the piano was her as well as the one seated. The image that came to mind was her offering to fellatio him (only “him” is her).

On the whole, the first and last are what’s called the pornification of mainstream by second wave feminist.

But you’re right. This is not a lesbian act. Nonetheless, the imagery is imagery gay people often find entertaining especially some of the uses of grotesquerie, of big and little.

The young girl — Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (I wonder if these are really all her names, it’s a parody of a type of naming) — is super thin and anorexic in Video 1 is very Italian New York. There is an attempt here at compensatory iconographies of victimhood. She is trying to make herself into one of these super-numinous icons — from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna, from Mary Queen of Scots to Princess Diana to Jane Austen: these are women who became female icons which function as symbols women and men pour their own needs into. In Lady Gaga, the compensatory portion is not strong enough; Helen Mirren for example, comes across as having iron in her veins, she walks the walk as they say, a queen, a Marlene Dietrich. Lady Gaga is too much the twilight princess.

So I don’t think Lady Gaga quite succeeds, and offer this explanation, but to tell the full truth, I am not really sure why. Maybe it’s more that she’s not bigger than life. Helen Mirren who I likened her to is a second rank icon. Beyond that though Lady Gaga doesn’t have “it” the way Madonna has — I saw through her act to the Italian New York teenager, just a little coarse who would otherwise be going for “big hair”,a large diamond ring, a Mrs and a nose job, to say nothing of a big house in suburbia and husband in a suit.She looks like Barbra Streisand too.

Digression and coda: The above conversation took off from something the admiral in our house said (our captain). His argument was originally about 18th through 20th century cross-dressing, cross-dressing on the UK stage and television (there’s still very little of it on US TV or the stage — except maybe these teen videos). He argued that there is a difference between a woman playing a man’s role and a woman in breeches part. Breeches part you have one sex dressing as the other and it was done so men could look at women’s behinds, calves, and thighs: it is not performing masculinity but rather calling attention to women’s legs, especially their calves and behinds; breeches parts please heteronormative sexually oriented people. When women played men’s roles in complete disguises (the way Sarah Bernhardt did Hamlet or Peg Woffington Sir Harry Wildair in The constant Couple) they were not sending up heterosexuality so much as literally trying to be men, suggesting a strong lesbian impulse which validates heterosexual norms. When Lady Gaga in that last video doubles herself as a woman before a man and a transvestite male, she suggests a lesbianism as she performs masculinity in her male guise just the way homosexual men dressing as woman perform femininity.

Peter Capaldi as Vera Reynolds (from Prime Suspect 3).

It’s a form of gay entertainment. It’s not normalizing but sending up.

Thus the admiral. I chose Capaldi in Prime Suspect 3 because he goes well beyond sending up. He makes the typology poignant-tragic.

Ellen

P. S. I apologize for the UTubes which did not appear. I am not good at making UTUbes appear. Those that are not here may be reached by taking the URL and feeding it into your Firefox (or whatever you use) and hitting “enter.”