My Bad Romance

Still from Lady Gaga's music video "Bad Romance"

My Bad Romance

by Westley Aubergine

Midway through New Year's Eve, the night of the hendecapus—that eleven-tentacled beast of lore—Lady Gaga's “Bad Romance” came on the stereo. I fell into step and began to reënact the claw dance. Those around me looked on with surprise, and perhaps consternation: what business did Westley Aubergine have knowing the claw dance?

What the other partygoers meant was that I was not the kind of person who ought to know about Lady Gaga and her claws. I live abroad and study languages, and my belt buckle shows Johnny Cash.

Yet must I, as an intellectual, be doomed to pop-cultural ignorance? In many cases I am content to be ignorant about pop culture, but I don't see why I can't know the claw dance. Not when the official “Bad Romance” video on YouTube has reached 330 million views. Not when the University of Oregon's male a cappella group, On the Rocks, offers its own inspired rendition on YouTube. This spinoff has itself garnered millions of views.

I know little about Lady Gaga and am not familiar with all of her songs, but the notion that a cultured, intellectual person ought to be above watching, enjoying, and dancing to “Bad Romance” is erroneous. As a song it is captivating, and as a music video, it is epochal.

Finally, then, out with the thesis: “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga has garnered so many views and has spawned On the Rocks' passionate cover because it is represents a new genre of music video. It offers a barely comprehensible blend of sensuality, supernaturalism, mystery, and emotion that enthralls the viewer by gripping his heart, his brain, and, inescapably, his penis. And then it torches him. (Of course, a portion of Lady Gaga's viewers must also be women. But unless these women stop watching midway through, they too stay with Lady Gaga due in part to a carnal draw. And they must necessarily suffer as the men do, or else join Lady Gaga in inflicting her suffering.)

What actually happens in this video? Upon first watching it, I would have said, “Not much.” Nothing coherent, anyway: Lady Gaga strikes the viewer with rapid-fire costume changes, convulsive dancing, and seemingly nonsense scenes. Then we end with Lady Gaga lying on a bed next to a skeleton, smoking a cigarette and issuing sparks from her bra. We are not supposed to be able to make sense of all of this; “Bad Romance” is, by design, intended to be comprehensible largely in an abstract, aesthetic sense, much like David Lynch's movies (e.g., Mulholland Drive).

Ideas and urges are there to be grasped and decoded, however, and they are juicy. One iteration of Lady Gaga in the video wears a white skirt and white sleeveless top, both semi-transparent, with vast, doll-like blue eyes, and an orange wig like a sunspot. She lies in a bathtub in a large, empty white room, and she might be crazy. Her fate is harsh: two women appear, both dressed in white, and drag her from the tub. While they tear away her top and force her to drink a clear liquid, the video cuts to dancers dressed in white, again, in wolfish costumes like that of Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Then we get a close-up of what might be said to be the real Lady Gaga, anguished and crying. We lack the full context, so many things could be happening; but realize that what you are certainly seeing is a woman's drugging or intoxication, and another woman—her analog, her alter-ego—weeping for her. Is this vapid pop culture?

The music video's main story line is Lady Gaga's pursuit and seduction of a man dressed in black who wears a kind of gold chinstrap. We see him and his all-male entourage drinking Ukrainian vodka as they behold Lady Gaga and her all-female dancers. Lady Gaga sings to him, then calls and pleads, “I want your love, and I want your revenge,” while revealing that she “[doesn't] want to be friends.” He remains stoic as she goes on to tell how they “could write a bad romance.” What Lady Gaga intends by wanting the man's revenge is unclear, but what is unmistakeable is her equation of love with violence: as she later clarifies, “All your love is revenge” (italics mine). The whole of her message, taken alongside the unsettling images that underlie the whole video, suggests a grim ending.

Yet as Lady Gaga approaches him—crawls to him—he is seduced. He goes to sit on the bed to await his seductress. And wouldn't we all? We all would go sit on that bed, even while we, as the viewer, have the awful privilege of witnessing the impending doom of the gold-chinstrapped man, the doom of our own loving, at the hands of Lady Gaga. We watch that self-proclaimed “freak bitch” change into red, we see that gaping mouth of the polar bear that is not a rug this time, but the train of Lady Gaga's fur coat. We see this and recognize the devouring to come. So must that man see it, as she sheds her coat and approaches. But we stay, and he stays, and we all burn. The only one left is Lady Gaga, vanquisher, her sparks flying.

This foreboding and fulfillment, this evident but unstoppable destruction, is the gripping claw of Lady Gaga's master music video. There are no bystanders here. “Bad Romance” did not, like many other viral videos, gain so many views on YouTube thanks only to our contemporary online culture which surfs as a collective. Nor is its success so simple as the adoration of the petite females worldwide who have, like primary school soccer players, swarmed Justin Bieber's “Baby” to amass  430 million views. “Bad Romance” has attained its lofty status because, despite the singer's words, it makes us want to be friends with Lady Gaga. Even if it kills us.◊