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 ;)
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