Lady Gaga: Paparazzi

Twisted, really, really twisted. Very sick kitten. Imminently watchable, though. Love her kitty snarl at the end. Social comment on celebrity arrests.

During my young days, I read an article on Bridget Bardot in which she complained about her privacy being torn from her. The exact details escape me years later, but the gist of it, How she contemplated jumping to her death from a balcony onto the rocks below, but then, she thought, the crowds would come forward to photograph her dead body.

I thought about that when I saw this video. And the other reviewer is quite clueless stating that it doesn't make sense. The scumbag boyfriend in the video obviously had a payoff lined up when he was positioning Lady Gaga for the money shot. What do the baying dogs care about it having to be a happy shot? It is dark social comment that the vultures would literally become near- ghouls after she plummets down.

It's a creepy music video with a very toxic look. Total Helmut Newton territory with the wheelchairs and staggering broken bodies, I imagine CRASH must be something like this. Even corpses by the swimming pool, dead bodies lying in the open sun, yargh, there is lots in the theme that is terribly off-putting, but it is very well filmed. And should carry a huge warning re creating necrophilia. Exactly because it is so well filmed.

Lady Gaga is one weird chick, having very odd fun, but just wait till the day she is old and decrepit, some of these invalide images might come back to haunt her. I would prefer not to see such things, don't wallow in such yuck, but in all fairness, I will repeat, well filmed, its saving grace lies in that. As such it is exactly what we have come to expect from Lady Gaga, whose trademark is finding beauty in ugliness.

The year was 2009, and Lady Gaga had just burst on the scene. At the time, radio was awash with R&B, and stars like Britney Spears and Rihanna were dominating the radio. Katy Perry was making waves with her debut album, but nothing could compare to the cultural juggernaut that was Lady Gaga. Just Dance was a sleeper hit, and at the time many thought it would be a fluke, but Gaga followed it up with Poker Face, a genre-defining hit with a clever bisexuality metaphor.

While Poker Face showed that Gaga was going to be more than a one hit wonder, Paparazzi, and the music video and performances that went along with it proved that Gaga would be an enduring force in pop culture. No one at the time, at least in the mainstream was executing high concept music videos to this degree. Paparazzi set the stage for a new age of pop culture, where visuals mattered, fashion mattered and an avant garde sensibility was a must for any new pop star.

The film, and that's what this is, Gaga routinely defies the label of music video, and turns her video treatments into films, worlds with their own aesthetic and world building totally unique. Paparazzi turned out to be oddly prophetic as Gaga would wind up in a wheelchair in 2012, when a hip injury ended up being a major obstacle. Prophetic, poetic and a killer visual that is able to be endlessly analyzed.