Oprah comforts fans with plan to split soul and live forever

Following the end of the Oprah Winfrey Show, the daytime television icon revealed an unprecedented new plan to live forever.

According to this plan, Oprah Winfrey will live on beyond her television show and even beyond her own death by infusing other people or objects with fragments of her own soul. Any one of these soul fragments will have the potential to re-manifest itself at any given time, Oprah claims.

The plan calls for Oprah’s soul to be split into seven pieces, a number that Oprah says makes her confident that she will never be completely destroyed. She began putting the plan into action “some time ago” and anticipates that it will be complete within the year.

Oprah claims to have created five of these soul-infused objects already. The part of her soul still in her body makes the sixth piece.

“When I began contemplating which items to use, it was only natural to me that Harpo Productions should be the first one,” Oprah said. “Of course I wanted to use the Oprah Book Club and O Magazine as well, considering their proven longevity. After I put a piece of my soul into Dr. Phil, I began to run out of ideas. That’s when I found Dr. Oz.”

As long as these items and people are in existence, she will also continue to exist, Oprah said. She also claims that a soul-infused object or being is nearly impossible to destroy, a comment she has refused to elaborate on.

Oprah has also declined requests to go into any details about the process of soul-splitting, calling it one of her “tricks of the trade.” Speculators suggest it may involve several former Harpo production assistants who have gone missing in recent years.

The identity of the final soul piece has Oprah fans puzzled. She claims to have not yet chosen the seventh item. One popular theory is that the final item will be the new Oprah Winfrey Network. Another says that supermodel-turned-TV host Tyra Banks will be the seventh piece.

Originally Oprah had intended to withhold the news of this plan until its completion. When fans reacted so emotionally to the end of the Oprah Show, she was moved to reveal it early.

“People were sobbing, and I thought to myself that this is about more than a television show. They’re afraid that this is the beginning of the end for me,” Oprah said. “I just had to comfort them and let them know, I’ll always be here. Forever.”

ABC network president Alex Wilson supports her decision. “Oprah has always been a media revolutionary. She’s setting a new standard of dedication for corporate moguls everywhere,” he said.

Those who oppose Oprah’s immortality claim Americans should band together, track down all seven pieces of Oprah’s soul and attack them with love.

Thanks for the memories, Oprah! We're glad it's not really the end. 

Some of you might feel like a Judas

In my first blog post about Lady Gaga’s Judas, I asserted that it isn’t heretical. In my second blog post about Judas, I may have suggested that it is, although that wasn’t my intention: Gaga becomes (not Christ but) a Christ figure, not a replacement for Christ but a new pathway into the story of Christ for those who have been blocked from taking the traditional route. This blog post is about to sound even more heretical than the first, but I hope you’ll bear with me!

Asking the right questions

As I said in my first Judas essay, the Judas video paints a very clear picture of the Christian struggle between good and evil. Even further, the video applauds public admission of this struggle and the honesty and humility of a person who can say, “I’m still in love with Judas.” And that’s true – I still find the performances of the three main figures very moving. But I know that this is not the only meaning of the video, and I believe that the main purpose of the video is not to reiterate the story of the Passion, but to use that story as a framework, perhaps even a foil, for another story. With the Judas video, we look at two stories side by side, and what we get is not a nice moral at the end, but just the unique questions that arise from those stories’ juxtaposition.

This is why contemporary art is hard to digest. If you ask, “What does it mean?” you are asking the wrong question. Some better questions are “What am I really looking at?” and “What does it point to?”

Let’s start with “What am I really looking at?”

I think you are looking at two different stories. One I’ve explained – the unique but traditional reiteration of the Christian struggle. The second story is something like my second essay, but bigger – the story of Gaga as spiritual leader.

The Gaga of the first story is a troubled follower, but the defiant leader Gaga breaks through repeatedly, and the more I watch the video, the less Jesus and Judas appear to have much to do with it.

The Second Story: Gaga, Warrior Apostle?

Let’s trace the second story, starting at the beginning. Gaga, on the motorcycle holding on to Jesus, smiles over his shoulder, his glimmering crown of thorns only edging into the frame. (Although Gaga appears to love Jesus, this scene should make us as uncomfortable as anything – Gaga is hanging out with Christ right on camera, smiling and laughing, her arm draped around the Divine Son. This reminds us with startling clarity that the divine is that close to us, and the unholy is that close to us, too). The camera follows Gaga’s head as it moves from either side of Jesus’ head, and Gaga’s face remains in focus while Jesus’ remains out of focus. Gaga, and not Jesus, is the star here.

As soon as they arrive in “New Jerusalem,” as Gaga has called it (one minute in), Jesus disappears. He is, apparently, wearing a helmet and face mask that completely hides him. Gaga waves a giant blue cape as they ride in, dismounts, and the camera follows her, leaving Jesus behind. Gaga commands the scene.

The first dance scene begins – Gaga, in flashy red two-piece, leads a troupe of dancers dressed in neutral rags in bold, aggressive choreography. The film cuts back and forth between the dancing and close-ups of Gaga on the motorcycle with Jesus.

The film will carry on this way throughout, alternating between story 1 – the narrative of Jesus, Judas and Gaga torn between them – and story 2, in which Gaga commands scenes, stares down the camera, and leads troupes of dancers in defiant choreography. Even at times when we appear to be watching story 1, elements of story 2 break through, such as in several shots where Gaga walks ahead of Jesus, or in the shot I referenced in the last Judas post where a woman leans her head on Gaga’s shoulder instead of Jesus’.

I’ll take a moment to draw your attention to two segments of the video where the presence of two stories is very obvious. The drama of story 1 crescendos with Gaga having to paint Judas’ face with the lipstick that will empower his betrayal of Jesus, but this scene is cut with a dance scene in which Gaga and dancers lunge with their fists held up, in a stance not dissimilar from a boxer beginning a match. Cutting back to story 1, Gaga smears the lipstick on Judas’ face and falls to the ground in extreme emotional duress. 

Skip ahead to 4:37 minutes – Gaga again falls to her knees in front of Jesus. But this downward movement is immediately contrasted with an upward movement - in the next scene Gaga stands in the tub between Jesus and Judas, sliding her hands up her own thighs, suggesting sexuality and power. These are two different Gagas, two different stories.

Now may be a good time to recall that historically, women have been considered incapable of reconciling their good/chaste selves with their evil/sexy selves. A woman could be all one or all the other, but a woman who found herself to be some of both was bound to crack up, Black Swan-style. In other words, Gaga collapses at least partly because collapsing is what women do. She plays out that traditional story but also bursts through it with defiance and inner power.

What does it point to?

Okay, so we see the second Gaga now, but what is she all about? This is where we start with “What does it point to?” First of all, the themes that we see in Judas are themes we’ve seen with Gaga before, and recently. Redemption, baptism even, self-assertion, the reality of good and evil as inextricable – all these themes cropped up in Gaga’s last video, Born This Way. Judas points back to Born This Way – so BTW should inform our “reading” of Judas. Anyway, Gaga has told us repeatedly that the new album will be heavily spiritual, so we can expect the various songs to present individual pieces of the overall picture of Gaga’s spirituality.

Baptism in the Primordial Ooze

Well, Born This Way is a creation myth that asks us to consider creation as eternal and our own spiritual (re)birth as infinite and self-empowered. In other words, Born This Way is about being born again. But not just once – over and over again (some background on this can be found in the long lost BTW essay).

Being "born this way" refers to a kind of post-baptism self - not the way you were actually born, but the way you are re-born. Every performance of Born This Way, including the video, features a symbolic representation of baptism. This video Gaga posted of her performances on the Graham Norton show includes a very recognizable representation of baptism (Born This Way begins at 5:33 minutes in). In this performance, a baptismal pool takes center stage - and it looks very much like the glass-front baptismal pools in Baptist churches. Gaga and her dancers climb into it and cover themselves with water. It's difficult to see on the video, but at one point Gaga even does a back bend that looks just like a baptism. 

Gaga herself calls the baptismal waters "goo" and "afterbirth" (at about 10:10 minutes in). Calling it "afterbirth" stresses the idea of baptism as rebirth and confirms that "born this way" really means "re-born this way."

In the BTW video, the baptism looks somewhat different. Here it is:

Think I'm crazy for calling that baptism? Well, I see why you'd say that. But if you watched the Graham Norton performance above, you can see that the movement in this segment is the same as the more straight-forward baptism in that clip. They are covering themselves with the liquid, anointing themselves with it. That's baptism. But it's not water, so what is it?

It looks like paint, in flesh tones from white to black, swirled together, and a multiracial team of dancers anoint themselves with it and rise from it. Is it just me? It reminds me of the "primordial ooze" from which all living organisms are said to have evolved. And Gaga calls it "the goo."

Here we go again, mixing the spiritual with the secular. What does it mean to be baptized in the primordial ooze? Baptism gets fused with evolution for this result: Born This Way presents spiritual redemption not as a one-time, bright light, road-to-Damascus conversion moment but as a conscious evolution of the soul. We refine ourselves repeatedly, by being [re]Born This Way again and again as we come closer to our divine goal. (For Gaga, the divine goal is to be without prejudice or hate, to love and validate all people. Again, there is some more on all this in the long lost BTW essay.)

The problem of sin

The emphasis on spiritual evolution causes us to look at redemption in a different way. Redemption, in Born This Way, is more a fulfillment of soul-potential than a divine intervention. But if redemption comes from spiritual refinement, a soul at work on itself (with divine inspiration but not intervention), what does that mean for sin and salvation?

If there is no singular moment of salvation, then there is no “saved” and no “damned.” A “Christian” is a work in progress, not a ticketholder for heaven. “Sin” is the rough patches we smooth away, not the evilness that inevitably marks us for hell. Sin and sanctity are both our mettle, the mediums we use to re-shape our souls.

This, I believe, is what Judas presents.

They all fall down

I have to take a minute here to point you to my favorite Gaga scholar, the brilliant Meghan Vicks of Gaga Stigmata fame. In her essay, she brilliantly points out the ways in which Judas collapses binary oppositions. “Binary oppositions” is a literary vocab word referring to concepts that are considered mutually exclusive – up/down, hot/cold, heart/head, male/female, good/evil, etc. Much of art and literature seeks to prove that some of these oppositions may not be oppositions at all, and that includes Judas.

I don’t know much about art, so I’m glad Meghan pointed out that Gaga’s makeup mimics the paintings of religious icons, in which the eyes were heavily emphasized. These icons were considered sacred, meaning that there was some divinity in them, though they were only earthly objects. By presenting herself as an icon, Gaga collapses the binary opposition between “human” and “divine.” That is not to say that she is calling herself a god – that is to say that “human” and “divine” are not mutually exclusive, that humanity and divinity can co-exist within people. And that’s not a radical concept – I’ve heard it said in many religious circles that there is God in all of us.

Similarly, Judas breaks down the opposition between good and evil. Gaga, loving both Jesus and Judas, is both good and evil. Gaga has said many times, “If you’re not casting a shadow, you’re not standing in the light,” meaning that good and evil are linked like light and shadow, and you’ll always have them both. Sin and sanctity are both our mettle.

In Judas, Gaga is follower and leader, loyal and rebellious, conflicted and assured, faithful and heretical… as the oppositions come crashing down. Even “male” and “female” seem to be collapsed, as one section alternates between identical scenes of male and female dancers. The characters themselves challenge many of those oppositions on their own: Mary Magdalene, the prostitute apostle, is chaste and unchaste, sinner and saint; Jesus is king and pauper, servant and master, human and divine.

Even betrayal and forgiveness get collapsed, as Jesus urges Gaga to give Judas the lipstick that empowers the kiss. The betrayal must happen for the forgiveness to exist. And Jesus smiles as Judas kisses him – the forgiveness and the betrayal are simultaneous. Like the light and shadow Gaga described, betrayal and forgiveness are the opposite sides of the same coin.

Meghan points out that even the choreography seems to point to the collapsing of opposites. She explains that the movements are largely symmetrical, with a movement toward one direction reflected with a movement toward the other direction, followed by a movement that seems to bring those two movements together.

Think again about the first verse:

When he calls to me I am ready

I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs

Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain

Even after three times he betrays me

Immediately the lyrics disorient you – because they collapse the various narratives of the Christian story. Mary Magdalene, Jesus, sinner, forgiver – they have all been merged. In Gaga’s stories, no one gets to be a saint but no one has to be a villain. By collapsing the Christian oppositions of sin and salvation, Gaga shows us the end of molds for what a Christian is, and the beginning of real soul freedom. There is no sanctity, only authenticity.

In Gaga’s theology, we don’t atone by praying our regret or by trying to impose rules that stifle our true selves. We atone by nurturing our best selves, being honest with ourselves, and reforming ourselves through positive self-love, not through negative self-criticism. When we collapse sin and sanctity, the result is authenticity, honesty, truth, and the potential to be born the way we were meant to be.

Some of you might feel like a Judas

In her recent interview on Ellen, Lady Gaga relayed this story (5:20). At one of her concerts, Lady Gaga said to her audience, “Some of you might feel like a Judas.” She saw many of her fans burst into tears.

Perhaps those who were not raised religious would not understand this. And some religious people may not understand it either. But many of us who were raised religious have taken a beating – religion has enriched us in some ways but deeply wounded us in others.

At a college Bible study I listened to my peers explain that if a woman’s husband beats her, they should try couple’s therapy, and the woman should do everything she can to “rehabilitate” her abuser. Now, that hurts. I can’t even imagine the wounds that gays and lesbians have sustained from the church. As my favorite feminist blogger explains, the oppressed experience their oppression as hatred. We feel hated and we’ve been encouraged to hate ourselves, to think of ourselves as worthless, maybe even damned. So Christianity isn’t the yellow brick road for everyone. Some of us need a new pathway.

For those “some,” the guilt and shame that has been imposed on them is too much to cope with. The exclusion and ostracism is too heavy to bear. Gaga wants to free them from that burden – she wants them to love themselves. So she needs a new story, or at least a new pathway to the old story.

Judas gives us a way to overcome our shame. After all, you can't feel like a Judas when you're singing "Juda-ah-ah."

Gaga herself has said that the Judas video is a “cultural” story, not a “religious” story. That means that questions like, “Did Jesus’ death on the cross atone for the sins of all humanity?” are not at play here. If you are wondering how you can make a story about Jesus and not include that bit, the answer is with courage. Many literal thinkers will reject it or even vilify it. But all Gaga is doing is using symbols she knows we will understand (Jesus=good/holy, Judas=bad/unholy) to tell a new story that, while different from the old story, explores or responds to the old story.

I think Judas opens up questions like these: How would we be different if we powered our spirituality with self-love and strength instead of self-rejection and criticism? Would we behave differently if we put more emphasis on self-directing our spiritual growth instead of depending on a moment of conversion? How would Christianity as a whole be different if we recognized equally the sin and sanctity in all people? Would we judge less, love more, and come closer to reaching our spiritual potential?

I don’t think Lady Gaga is blasphemous, and I’m inspired by the ideas and questions Judas introduces. If you don’t agree, well, you can “Judas-kiss me if offenced.” But you know that’s not very Christian, right?

A creation myth by Lady Gaga? Yes, please!

This is the long lost Born This Way essay, written back when the video was new but never posted...

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nichodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” John 3:4

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way video is a creation myth! (Literature 101 recap: a creation myth is a story about origins meant to symbolically portray truths about who we are.) So… why did Lady Gaga place her equality anthem Born This Way inside the context of a creation myth? I’m not Lady Gaga, but I’m betting it’s because she wants to examine the double-metaphor of immaculate conception as divine inspiration and spiritual rebirth.

If you know anything about Lady Gaga’s art, you know that her art is art that comments on art. (If you don’t know anything about Lady Gaga’s art, you might want to read that last sentence again.) She has described her creative process writing Born This Way as “immaculate conception.” So, by using the music video to show herself as a vehicle for an actual immaculate conception, she reinforces the relationship between creative inspiration and divine imparting.

Shall we slow down? Before we get too excited by the religiously-charged language, let me take a minute to assert that Lady Gaga is not heretical for a) writing a creation myth, b) claiming that Born This Way was divinely inspired, or c) positing herself as the creator-mother/Virgin Mary. Because actually, you’re going to find that you’ve heard most of this before.

Everyone is a creator – that’s one of the lovelier aspects of humanity. We’re creating all the time, when we don’t even know it. And Lady Gaga never misses an opportunity to remind us that she is creating every moment. Our capability, as humans, to create (art, influence, ideology, family, government, community) is considered by many to be a spiritual gift, a divine quality – so posing a human being as a mother-creator functions metaphorically to highlight the spiritual specialness of creativity. Posing Lady Gaga as the mother-creator in her own creation myth works doubly to comment on the creation of Born This Way through the spiritual gift of creativity. That’s a lot of creating.

So human creation is similar to divine creation because both are spiritual acts. That’s easy enough to accept. But can we make the metaphor even grander? We can if we’re bold. And Lady Gaga is. So was the Apostle John.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” John 1:14a.

We’ve heard this before: John writes in the opening of his gospel that Jesus was the Word in the flesh. He’s taking two of God’s creations, the divinely inspired Word and the divine Son, and comparing them, metaphorically. He’s saying Jesus being born on earth is like the Word becoming flesh. Just like it, actually.

Now Lady Gaga is not an apostle, and the words to Born This Way are not the Word, if you know what I mean. But Lady Gaga is using the same poetic devices, so hold on because it’s about to get spiritual in here.

If a person is setting out to create art and coming from a spiritual place, that person may feel that the inspiration or even the art itself is coming from God, is being transferred directly from God’s mind to her own, and that she, as the artist, becomes only the vessel for delivering a message that is not her own at all.

IF that is the case, then divinely conceiving a prophecy from God is kind of similar to divinely conceiving a human being from God. Especially if the human being from God IS the Word of God as well. See how John set that one up for us?

We are pretty lucky with this video because Lady Gaga has put it all out there directly, saying that the writing of Born This Way was like an immaculate conception. She believes that the message imparted in Born This Way, the message of love, acceptance and freedom, comes from God, and she believes that she (like all of us who will accept the call) is responsible for promoting this message. It’s art that is like a prophecy that is like an immaculate conception.

And we get to see it all play out in just the first seconds of the video: Lady Gaga’s voice speaks the story of Lady Gaga as the mother-creator immaculately conceiving and delivering a new truth. (Of course it isn’t really a new truth, but it is a truth that we must newly receive. But I’m jumping ahead here.) So in this spectacular, perhaps hyperbolic, way, the video tells the story of its own creation – commenting on creative art in general and emphasizing the spiritual import you’ll find in this particular song. And guess what Lady Gaga’s choreographer Laurie Ann Gibson said when MTV asked her to explain the video? She said, “I told the story of the record.”

Now wait a minute, I hear you saying. It wasn’t truth I saw emerging from Gaga’s shadowy, cosmic birth canal. I know. It’s time to take a shot of that “Inception” drug and go down another level.

The song’s title is a good place to start. The song is called Born This Way, so the birth(s) that take place at the start of the video should give us a clue as to what exactly is born, and in what way.

It seemed simple when the song first aired, without the video. We all know that LGBT rights are a top platform for Lady Gaga, and Born This Way, clearly an equality anthem, speaks directly to that issue. But assuming that Born This Way is Lady Gaga’s way of declaring that sexual orientation is a from-birth quality is taking the easy road, and Lady Gaga does not want that! That’s one reason there are now horns on her head.

However Lady Gaga was born, we’re all pretty sure it was not with horns on her head. She quickly set about undermining the title’s most obvious interpretation – that is, that the song is addressing an actual way in which people are actually born.

Now that we know what it’s not, let’s go back to the video’s creation myth. A mother-creator gives birth to good (in the shape of humans) and evil (in the shape of a machine gun). There’s two ways to look at it. One, sticking with our earlier track of looking at how the song comments on art, we can place ourselves in the position of the mother-creator and say, “Each of us creates both good and evil.” Cool, but that doesn’t take us further into the song. Option two, since it is “I” in the song who is “born this way,” we can say that we are the offspring of the mother-creator’s womb. That means that we are each both the human and the machine gun, good and evil.

Now that is REALLY nothing new. Good and evil are cut from the same cloth, and that cloth is us. You didn’t need me OR Lady Gaga to tell you that. But Born This Way asks us to imagine a new race of people who are all good. These people love and accept all people, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation or gender identity – in fact, they are invulnerable to prejudice. And they were born that way.

But how can that be what the song means for us? People are not born invulnerable to prejudice. So how can we be like Lady Gaga’s imaginary race? How can we be “born this way”? It’s the same way everything else in this video has been achieved. By being born. Again.

Sounds familiar, right? By showing us an imaginary birth of an all good, no evil race, Lady Gaga is asking us to consider undergoing a spiritual rebirth of our own. We can choose to be born this way. We can look at Gaga’s alien race as not just the elusive concept of ultimate good, but as a spiritual potential toward which we can strive, by refining ourselves, transforming ourselves, being born again, and again and again. Choreographer Laurie Ann Gibson explains, “It’s a race within our race. It’s a mindset, it’s an eternal journey.”

This spiritual journey is presented visually through the dancers and their choreography throughout the video. “We actually birth ourselves out of the womb when we start on the ground, and there’s lots of pushing and birthing … in the movement. And there’s a lot of punching through the adversity. And then we go to church. It’s very symbolic as far as how to pull yourself out of something and become new,” Gibson explained.

The amazing thing about it is that our spiritual rebirth is both divinely orchestrated and self-commanded. Lady Gaga has always said that her constructed self-images – the clothes, wigs, shoes and now those crazy horns – are her real self, she was “born that way.” Because what we’re talking about here is the “self” we constantly form and reform throughout our lives through the process of spiritual refinement. Our souls are a work in progress, and we ourselves are at work on them. So being “born that way” again points to our inherent creative power at work on its greatest project – ourselves. We are striving to be born the way we were meant to be – with love for ourselves and all people, with soul freedom.

That’s what Lady Gaga expressly asks of us in this song, to love ourselves and one another without judgment, to resist hate and discrimination. So when I sing those words, well, I was born that way.

The fame-hooker prophetess and the Judas-kiss

In my last post about Lady Gaga's Judas, I explained how the song and video can be seen to support the very Christian notion that each of us, as a lifelong sinner, fights an unending battle against our sinful nature and accordingly shares in the guilt of Christ's betrayer. But that is only one level of interpretation for Gaga's Judas, which like all her other videos, functions on multiple levels.

Gaga herself said Judas is "not a Bible story." And you don't have to wait longer than the first verse to figure that out:

When he calls to me I am ready
I'll wash his feet with my hair if he needs
Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain
Even after three times he betrays me

In the first two lines, Gaga assumes the voice of the supplicant. By the third line, she switches to the voice of the forgiver, but the "I" and the "him" haven't changed. Gaga (or the speaker, in poetic terms) is both supplicant and forgiver. "He" is both lord and sinner. So, no - we are not talking about Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ here.

But we were never talking about Mary Magdalene. Not here, not anywhere. Mary Magdalene, as we know her, is really a compilation of several different Biblical women. She exists to us not as a historical person but as a symbol of the fallen woman, the repentant sinner, the invisible female follower largely written out of the Gospel - and that is the clue. Lady Gaga is not Mary Magdalene, but the two represent the same thing: the faithful woman of a faith that erases women.

Shortly before her debut performance of Born This Way at the Grammys, Lady Gaga insisted on making some major changes to the costuming. She said that her costume was too different from the other dancers' - she wanted all the costumes to be similar because in Born This Way, all the born-that-way are kin.

In the Judas video, Lady Gaga is a solitary figure in every scene. In a video crowded with people, Lady Gaga is completely alone. Her costumes are dissimilar from the others, in bright colors chosen specifically to make her stand out. And even more, there are hardly any other women in the video.

Women do appear in some of the dance scenes, either in the mix of a male-and-female dance corps or alternating video shots with a similarly-dressed male corps of dancers. In the acting scenes, women appear briefly in the Electro Chapel being aggressively grabbed and kissed by Judas. And in one brief scene, a woman leans on Gaga, who kisses her head.

Now, as we've established that Judas is not a "Bible story," there's no real reason why there should be so few women in the video. Unless Gaga is commenting on women in Christianity, by which I mean, the experience of woman in a man's religion. (Remember the controversy surrounding Alejandro, which also incorporated religious imagery? There were no other women in that video either.)

Well, I'm not writing to convince you that Christianity is a man's religion, so if you're not willing to go there, you can feel free to check out now. But if you accept the (hardly deniable) fact that women have been written out of the faith since the Bible was first composed, and that we are only beginning to carve out our place in the Christian faith, with very few role models and very many obstacles ahead of us, then let's continue.

As layered in allusion and metaphor as Gaga's songs often are, they usually include some pretty strong cues, or even several lines that lay it all out fairly clearly. In Judas, I believe you find the heart of the song in the bridge:

In the most Biblical sense
I am beyond repentance.
Fame hooker, prostitute, wench
Vomits her mind.

But in the cultural sense
I just speak in future tense.
Judas kiss me if offensed,
Or wear ear-condom next time.

Lady Gaga is beyond repentance "in the Biblical sense" because Christianity does not permit women. Is that skipping too many steps? Gaga says "in the most Biblical sense," but we can trust that she is talking about the Christianity of organized religion. And since Gaga was raised Catholic, we can trust that we're largely referencing Catholic theology, and it's no secret that Catholicism is patriarchal. (Of course, we can also look at many examples of Biblical writing and/or editing that literally exclude women, but we won't go through all that right now. Feel free to comment.) Gaga has experienced a religion that addresses men first, women second, if at all. But a woman who is second to men is a figment of imagination - and thus a religion that permits women-as-second actually does not permit women at all.

In the next two lines Gaga describes herself and what she does: Fame-hooker, prostitute, wench/ Vomits her mind. As a woman who expresses herself, publicizes her art, declares her genius on controversial issues, she is equivalent to just about any nasty word for a woman you could think of. And of course the ones who have called her those names are religious conservatives, a.k.a. supporters of religious patriarchy (thus, they prove Gaga's point). Gaga has described her creative process as "vomiting" her art in an inspired deluge, then spending long hours refining it. It sounds funny in that sense, but in this song it sounds grotesque. A woman's creative output is vomit, she implies.

But in the next four lines she declares her own place. If she can't have the Biblical sense, she'll claim the cultural sense - if she can't bring the contemporary world into the spiritual realm, then she'll bring the spiritual realm into the contemporary world. I just speak in future tense. In other words, I tell the future. In other words, I am a prophet. To herself, to her fans, she is a prophet preaching love, acceptance, and most of all, the validity of all human experience, male or female, straight or gay, white or non-white.

Unfortunately we don't get to see the punctuation in Gaga's lyrics, since there are two ways to interpret the next line. One is Judas, kiss me, the other is Judas-kiss me. Since Gaga just declared herself a prophet, I'm going with the second one. She dares her enemies to attack her, and remember, ultimately she depicts herself being stoned. But what she's really doing is pointing to the fact that they legitimize her as a prophet with their demonstrations of closed-mindedness and hate. The negative response to Judas fulfills Gaga's prophecy. It's not art that imitates life - it's art that manipulates life, making art out of life, in order to expose the prejudices of life that are so entrenched in our culture that we often don't even see them.

Gaga starts as a follower, but moments of her true leadership shine through. For those of us who have seen Gaga as a feminist/queer prophet for a while, it was uncomfortable to watch her clinging to a guy on a motorcycle, hanging on his arm through half the video and looking painted and bejeweled like a doll. But in the second verse, she gestures to herself when she says, "Even prophets forgave his crooked way." And this image, which lasts for only a split second, is one of the most powerful:


With "Jesus" right beside her, a woman leans into Gaga's shoulder. Gaga embraces her and seems to kiss her head, as we often envision Jesus doing. Gaga is assuming the role of the compassionate prophet, and women are finding with her the acceptance and validation they have often been denied by Christianity.

Gaga's arguably most captivating analogy is a warning to organized religion:

I've learned love is like a brick, you can
Build a house or a sink a dead body.

You can include or you can betray one another. You can build a house (Gaga pats Peter on the shoulder as she sings this line; Jesus said of Peter, "on this rock I shall build my church") that welcomes people, or you can bring down your "enemies," the people like women, LGBTs and other minorities (Gaga gestures toward herself as she sings sink a dead body - she is both a woman and a heretic).

Immediately following the bridge in which Gaga declares herself prophetess, the music cuts out completely. Images alternate between two scenes: In one, Gaga (clothed) kneels in a tub where Jesus and Judas soak their feet. She rubs water over her own torso, pours a vial (perhaps representing oil for anointing) into the water, and washes Jesus' feet. In the other, Gaga, dressed in exaggerated golden Victorian ruffles, stands on a rock as a large wave splashes up behind her in slow motion. Water, of course, is a widely recognized Christian symbol, especially relating to atonement (think cleansing of sins, rebirth through baptism, etc). In fact, in literature, when a person gets wet (and doesn't drown) you can bet money it represents a baptism of sorts. It appears that Lady Gaga is going through the same metaphorical experience.

But on the other hand, the whole episode is highly sensual and seems to suggest female sexuality. Ultimately the wave completely overcomes her, and she is last seen collapsing underneath it. She doesn't come up, so it isn't baptism. It's the baptism that wasn't - Gaga was almost baptized but ended up overwhelmed and lost. Again, I think it points to the antipathy between organized religion and femaleness, especially female sexuality (or, in a broader context, any sexuality besides heterosexual male sexuality). In the next shot, Gaga, in the tub, stares into the camera as she flings water straight up into the air. It's a defiant move that seems to reject the "conform or get pulverized" dichotomy set up by organized religion. Gaga establishes her independence.

The biggest sin in Judas, I think, is bigotry. Judas is clearly a bigot - he's aggressive and combative. But the bigotry you can't see is the most dangerous - the bigotry that supports patriarchy and discriminates against women, LGBTs and other minorities. This is the lying your tongue does through your brain, as Gaga sings in the first verse - the acceptance of a bad ideology. Gaga is fighting the bigotry throughout the song - the dance choreography is combative itself - but she's not only fighting in the outside world, she's fighting within herself as well. Fighting against the ideologies that tempt her to think less of herself, that tempt the ostracized to believe they deserve it. After all, the "patriarch," the white heterosexual male, is a king with no crown, too.

In the end Gaga appears looking about the most absurd she's ever looked - in a puffy, shiny white dress like a wedding dress for a doll. With this image alone she shows us how impossible it is for her to conform to the roles religion have cut out for her: voiceless virgin, subservient bride. The crowd begins to throw stones at her, and the video closes with a shot of her dead body on the ground. Her prophecy is fulfilled, and it is finished. But don't worry. She'll be back. On the edge of glory ;)

Lady Gaga gets stoned. The other "stoned," that is.

Crucifying Lady Gaga over her new Judas video? She's way ahead of you.

By the end of the video, Lady Gaga is depicting the crowd executing her (in the Biblical sense, by stoning) for the messages she's delivered - because she knew they would! And I, for one, am proud of her for calling them out on it like that.

In the video Lady Gaga presents herself as a woman (you could call her Mary Magdalene, but I wouldn't) whose devotion is incomplete - she loves Jesus and is clearly committed to him, but she can't turn her back on Judas. She loves him, too.

Now, Judas is the man who betrayed Jesus into the hands of his enemies for that dastardly evil, money. The result was that Jesus was killed. So... loving Judas? I can hear the literal thinkers saying that you can't love Judas if you love Jesus, maybe even that you must hate Judas if you love Jesus. He (indirectly) killed Jesus, after all.

The question of who we can blame for Jesus' death pops up fairly often, in various ways. The Jews is a popular answer. Judas is a good alternative for the less racist.

Either of those answers works effectively if your goal is to anchor that story firmly in history and people it with faceless characters as a means of denying any personal connection to it. But if that's your goal, then Lady Gaga is a braver Christian than you.

Now, some verses in Luke and John say that Satan "entered into Judas." So you can think of Judas like a muggle under Voldemort's imperious curse if you really want to. Or you can think of Judas as an ordinary man with ordinary temptations. Doubt. Jealousy. Greed. Simple lack of faith. Even fear. Who knows? But it's a scary thought. It means that Judas was just like you. And that means that you could have betrayed Jesus, too.

Well, I think that's how we are supposed to read the story. We are supposed to wonder, what tempts me to betray Christ? because the potential exists inside each of us, and each of us have betrayed Christ in our own ways. We should all be bold enough to say, "I'm in love with Judas," because we are Judas, and so is everyone we love.

I said Lady Gaga was a brave Christian, and she is. With the Judas video she premiered to the whole world a movie depicting her struggle between choosing good and choosing evil in the most explicit symbols, as a lover torn between Jesus and his betrayer.

In the video, Lady Gaga smears her lipstick across Judas' face (via a golden lipstick gun, not via snogging) and her lipstick is visible on his face when when he kisses Jesus' cheek. That's a powerful image that figuratively merges Lady Gaga into Jesus' betrayal, and it bravely (and honestly) says, "I share in Judas' guilt."

Lady Gaga sums up the experience of Christian faith with sparkling clarity in these lines:

I wanna love you, but something's pulling me away from you. Jesus is my virtue, and Judas is the demon I cling to.

No human being is without "demons." The cowardly Christian says, "Yeah, well, I'm saved, so point that finger at somebody else." The brave Christian admits their demons and faces them. I am really inspired by the Judas video - it shows us the struggle we should all be seeing in ourselves. The struggle is there - the only variable is whether or not you will face it head on.

There are a lot of literal thinkers out there, and it's no duh that literal thinkers don't like Lady Gaga. They never will, and I'm tired of them acting like we don't know it already. But they should think carefully before they throw the first stone (Remember? Lady Gaga gets stoned at the end of the video). Just because you haven't seen the value in something doesn't mean it isn't there. And just because you haven't seen the Judas in your heart... well, it is there.


Don't take my word for it - other believers are defending Judas, too. Here's one, a fascinating article from the Washington Post blogs.