Grisly Girl Power, or How I Became a Fan of Lady Gaga

So Lady Gaga's newest video, "Paparazzi," has been leaked.

The eight minute mini-movie opens with an easily too-long make out scene between the Lady and Alexander Skarskard, which quickly turns into a dangerous shoving match on the balcony as he tries to force her into a prime photographing position for the hidden pap. She falls to the cement below and the song begins as she is wheeled onto the red carpet with jeweled neckbrace and crutches in tow. The rest of the video is awash with a grotesquely fascinating mix of hyper sexual glitz and stylized, macabre flashes of young women splayed out in what one must assume are fame-related deaths, ending in Lady Gaga's casual murder of Alexander

Skarskard. As she is carried away in handcuffs, newspapers with headlines like "She's Back!!!" and "We Love Her Again!" fall around her, and the mini-movie ends with her mugging for the police camera.

For someone who is widely regarded as a pop-princess, I'd say that's pretty heavy. And it works.

What fascinates me about Lady Gaga is her armor. As a casual observer, I have never once seen her eyes unmasked by thick bangs, layers of eyeshadow, and false eyelashes. And though, as one YouTube observer so eloquently put it, "does lady gaga beleive in pants cuaes in every music vid shes wairing a bathing suit," she only ever shows her hips, butt, and thighs, which are provocative but at this point in music video history not at all intimate. Every emotional, telling part of her body (ie shoulders, collarbone, neck, face) is almost always covered by several layers or exaggerated fashion features, most famously those face-covering sunglasses or wing-like shoulder padding.

Her most sexual features are often prominently displayed, especially in this video, but in a "look, don't touch" kind of way. At least half of her dancers are male, and yet she never dances with them in a way that makes her the subservient or weaker partner. She is always dominant;

she is always in control. This is what makes the beginning of the mini-movie so frightening, as she lets down her guard to be with this guy and her cue to begin panicking is when he pushes her onto the balcony ledge and asks her, "Do you trust me?"

The flashes of the bodies of the dead girls are set against the main chorus, "I'm your biggest fan/I'll follow you until you love me/papa, paparazzi," giving the whole video a creepy, unsettling vibe. Necessary, though, to get her point across.

Lady Gaga clearly owns herself, her body, and her art. She is over the top and caricatured, but in this she gives herself the freedom to express herself and be seen in the way she chooses to, not the way the pap, or anyone else, might paint her.