LADY GAGA AND POSTMODERNISM

The name ‘Lady Gaga’ is used as a stage name by Stefani Germanotta. The music artist uses her stage name to keep her personal life and superstar status separate, giving her the her the ability to control her image and enabling her to get away with various different things. Fans primarily focus on her image and fashion rather than gossip or her everyday life. In an interview she said “I have mastered the art of fame.” This explains how she purposely created a hyper-real version of herself with outrageous fashion to keep the public and press attention away from her personal life as Stefani Germanotta.

LADY GAGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2smz_1L2_0

DECONSTRUCTION OF ‘PAPARAZZI’

The music video follows typical conventions of old Hollywood films as Lady Gaga is displayed to be the main character within the music video. Furthermore, a list of the cast is shown at the beginning of the music video which was used in Noir Hollywood films in the 1970’s. This is known as Pastiche as Lady Gaga is imitating the style of work from another artist.

The use of camera angles and movement is important in the analysis of post-modernism. For example in the scene where the camera cuts to a long shot of the couple lying on the bed speaking Swedish, the video not only plays homage to subtitled foreign films, but also lets the audience know what the couple are saying to each other. As the couple kiss and caress each other, there are cuts to objects around the room. The first is what looks like a dollar bill, but instead of the American figurehead, there is a picture of Lady Gaga. Written on the top right hand side of this bank note is “The United States of Lady Gaga”

The next cut shows a fictional newspaper called Evening Star with the headline “Lady Gaga Reaches the Top Yet Again, with a picture of her and three men. These two cut offs from the main scene on the bed show the audience that Lady Gaga is portraying herself in the video, but to a much bigger scale in the way that by putting her face on a dollar bill makes her look like the figurehead of America. It also lets the audience know that the woman on the bed is Lady Gaga, if they hadn’t already worked it out for themselves.

DECONSTRUCTION OF ‘PAPARAZZI’

Mimicking the way the music video begins with the wiped in circle, one scene shows Lady Gaga against a black and white swirled background. The way that the colours swirl against one another and the way that Lady Gaga moves slowly gives the illusion that she is falling. The hypnotic background is a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller, Vertigo. The background draws the audience’s focus towards Lady Gaga because she is in the middle, showcasing what she looks like so they know that she is the singer. This scene could also be a symbol for Lady Gaga falling from Heaven into Hell. I came to this conclusion because at the start of the video, it looks as if she has the perfect life; the fame, the fortune and the perfect man, but now she’s lost it all. As she falls, the audience can hear her ragged breathing and the sound of a heartbeat. These sounds would have been added in at post production, making them non-diegetic sounds.

DECONSTRUCTION OF ‘PAPARAZZI’