Sunset. Electric lights flicker on, revealing a stark landscape of white coffins. The music starts, the coffins crack open, and Lady Gaga emerges. Her shiny white bodysuit and face covering bring to mind the kind of spindly monster that lurks beneath our childhood mattresses. It's creepy, it's disturbing, but what does it mean? Gaga's phrase "I'm a freak b!+ch baby" comes to mind. The freakish costumes, hair, makeup, and plot line testify to Lady Gaga's shameless obsession with being bizarre. The truth is, there is no one like Gaga. No one.
And we crave what she has to offer, for Lady Gaga never fails to entertain in her video "Bad Romance". She mesmerizes us with glittering costumes, surgically white scenery, and honestly -- attractive Russian men and half-naked dancing girls. This is what America wants, and we are willing to pay for it.
However, one cannot disregard the obvious message behind Lady Gaga's video. She depicts a Russian bath house, or whore house, in which women are purchased and sold. Everything is desolately white, representing an absence of passion. Underneath this barren exterior lies the supressed emotions of the women. Lady Gaga sits in a bathtub with wide, inoccent eyes while she is stripped, forcefed vodka, and dragged off to the dancefloor. Next, the video flickers between the emotionless dancers and images of Gaga crying. All of these segments are interjected with clips of an emaciated Gaga hunching over in a dark stairwell, displaying a vivid image of the macabre whorehouse.
The background dancers also make a statement. When I observed them closely I saw that they are made up of different ethnicities. There is an African-American dancer, a Spanish dancer, an Asian dancer, and a Caucasian dancer. By incorporating all of these different ethnicities into her video, Lady Gaga shows us that human trafficking is a universal issue.
The only time that the dancers are alone they are dressed in red. This is a dramatic change from their previous monochromatic dress. At this point in the video, Lady Gaga is setting fire to the bed of her purchaser. Therefore, the red dancers signify the repressed emotions of the women that are breaking loose. These emotions wreak havoc in the form of a blazing inferno that burns Gaga's purchaser alive. Consequently, we see how powerful women are when they are finally fed up with repression.
Stefani Germanotta's video "Bad Romance" is a whirlwind of bizarre images, all of them fascinating. She delivers to us exactly what we want -- entertainment. True, Gaga addresses the issue of human trafficking, but honestly, does the majority of her audience pay attention to that? In reality, all we want to see is just another weird video with cool costumes and sexy dancers. Lady Gaga's true motives could be debated indefinitely, but what's the point of arguing about
shadows on a wall?
Awesome Caeleigh. Your analysis of the color scheme in the video piques my interest. Abigail also addressed the colors, and I think you have complemented her analysis very well. I had not thought of the white as representative of a passionless void. In addition, I certainly did not notice the ethnicities of the background dancers. I wonder what to make of this. I will have to watch again. In your last paragraph, you address the irony of this particular video. Despite its outlandish efforts to entertain, it does have a more implicit message about human trafficking. Of course, you are right to explain that no one really cares about this. We just want the sexy images, the colorful costumes, great beat, and (not-so) good dancing. What do you think of the ideas presented by your classmates about the human trafficking being an allegory for the popular music industry? Performers must sell themselves to the industry and its fans, but they can, like Lady Gaga, come-out on top. Regardless, like all of your writing, this is fantastic.
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