Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga: Marry The Night

Useful for intertextuality - Judas (2011) dresses like Axl Rose (1980s)
Marry the Night- into the groove (madonna) Papa don’t preach (Madonna)
Born this way- Billie Jean

Her videos are original but they aren't - oxymoron

It is oxymoronic that lady gaga can be a copycat yet unique

Does a recognition of intertextuality add deeper meaning

Metanarrative- ‘big story’ things like ‘god is good’ ‘marriage is sacred’ ‘men are active, women are passive’: codes that made up societal ideologies. Postmodernism fractures the metanarrative. i.e. ‘men are weak’. Jean Francois Lyotard.

new practitioner

Frederic Jameson-

Jameson argues that the distinction between the real and the simulated becomes very blurred in postmodern society.

He uses the terms parody and pastiche to explain the way people use and borrow existing cultural artefacts/ texts. Pastiche is basic mimicry, parody is more knowing and ironic.

How is marry the night postmodern?
Style over substance
Intro follows convention of a film narrative
Intertextuality- Thriller, Take your breath away (top gun), desperately seeking Susan, fame, Girl Interrupted (film)
Bricolage ‘to tinker with’- taking hospital hats and making them berets.
Hyper-femeninity: angry, throwing stuff, in bathtub doing hair
Lady Gaga rejecting male gaze, forcing it (nurse) (fracturing the metanarrative)
Gay Icon-
High art vs low art- Ballet vs vaguely trashy music video
“It's not that I’ve been dishonest, I just loath reality”
“The lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it”
“My past is an unfinished painting”- she’s the author of her own history

Lady Gaga draws attention to her work as a construct
Gaga is self aware. She borrows this from film directors such as Tarantino. ‘I know i’m in a media text’ Self awareness
Postmodern texts highlight their status as not real (the collapse of the distinction between real and simulated.

Postmodernism originated in the 60s
Consumerism and postmodernism is a signifier

Lady Gaga cont. 
Mikhail Bakhtin- ‘carnivalesque’
Grotesque behaviour- in modern society we embrace the carnivalesque in our consuming culture- often mocking or satirical challenge to authority and the traditional social hierarchy

Schadenfreude- people taking pleasure in your pain. Jeremy Kyle for example. 
People who are carnivalesque: Katie Price, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj 
Lady Gaga’s videos have the aesthetics of the carnivalesque. The spectator does not feel a sense of schadenfreude because we’ve come to accept the knowledge that it is what she represents however, in a postmodern society, whether everything and everyone is a commodity, her grotesque-ness becomes her star vehicle. 
Gaga in control of male gaze rather than an object of it. 
Lady Gaga embraces a hyped almost carnivalesque notion of femininity to draw attention to its constructed nature 
Lady Gaga draws attention to the overly made up version of femininity 
It becomes comical/ grotesque- not sexy
Society says ‘high heels are sexy’ she turns them grotesque/ postmodern 
In our patriarchal society that dictates ‘rules’ of attractiveness, Lady Gaga has taken the high heel and made it into something postmodern, something grotesque. 
Lady Gaga subverts notions of femininity and plays with gender identity. 
Gaga is postmodern in her refusal to be an object of the male gaze. She is in control of the gaze and men watching her will not feel voyeurism watching her.