Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ video is a complete mess

Like millions of others, I saw Lady Gaga’s new video for ‘Telephone’ (feat. Beyonce) last week shortly after it premiered. Over the weekend, the reviews started coming out, and most of them were fairly positive. Gaga’s creation was mostly given rave reviews, and her fans deemed it to be “amazing.” That puzzled me, because it’s actually a complete waste of time.

First, for those who haven’t seen it, here’s the video. There’s a lot to talk about in it, so I’ll focus only on a few of the more annoying things after the jump.

So, there you have it: Nine and a half minutes of David LaChapelle meets the electric boogaloo, featuring Lady Gaga on bread. Fellow True/Slant-er Japhy Grant posited that the video, taken with its predecessor ‘Paparazzi’, is a two-sided commentary on life in L.A. It’s an interesting position, and worth reading, but I think he gives Gaga a little more credit than she deserves.

On his radio show, Ryan Seacrest spoke to Lady Gaga about the video, and he commented on her seemingly boundless creativity. Within her reply, Gaga said,

“I really believe in the power of visuals… visions come to me and I just know I have to do them. It kind of doesn’t really matter what – if it makes sense or it doesn’t make sense. Like the making sandwich dance in the video, it kind of comes in out of nowhere, but now that I watch it in retrospect the way that it works into the video and the commentary on kind of being over-fed, communication, and advertisements and food in this country, I think it all kind of really makes sense in the end.”

Okaaaay…

Gaga continued:

“It kind of all came together… by the end of the video it became so much more as we explored each scene… it became about transsexual women at the beginning of the video, it became about making fun of American hallmarks like with soda cans and cigarettes and mayonnaise…”.

This is why the whole thing, as a cultural commentary, is kind of a mess. Gaga leaps from one visual to another, but there’s little cohesion between them. She confesses to wanting to create visuals whether they make sense or not – that’s fine, but then she ought to just accept this video as that: a completely random series of rather interesting set pieces. When the conversation about the video swerves into cultural commentary territory, it goes to pieces almost immediately. Due to its disjointed nature, there actually can’t be a clear message.

Take the sandwich scene that Gaga talks about. She mentions that they were ‘making fun’ of American hallmarks like mayonnaise, and presumably also saying something about “food in this country.” But what? That there’s too much of it? That some of it’s not good for you? And…? And nothing, actually.

The song’s subject matter (an annoying caller on the telephone) is just as ill suited for deep social commentary. Gaga told Seacrest that the video contained a point about communication. (One that was bigger than just “Stop telephoning me.”) Again, where was it? I think I missed it while I was figuring out what model of text-phone Gaga was holding in her palm.

Which is where ‘Telephone’ really loses me: Gaga’s supposed commentary on the excess of “advertising” happens to feature a hell of a lot of it. And not ironically. The extended shot of the Virgin Mobile phone is not a commentary: it’s a promo. She’s no longer talking about the saturation of communication in Western society; she’s just hawking wares. The same goes for the sandwich dance scene. If Gaga’s suggestion that the scene was a commentary on advertising were to be true, then the poison wouldn’t be a brand-less skull and crossbones, it would be the very products (Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip) that hog so much of the frame. The message loses its teeth by only having them passively attending in the sidelines, and it fails to be anything but a simple product placement.

It undermines even the one aspect of the video that, given Gaga’s pronouncement on excess, is almost worth commenting on: its length. But again, thanks to its high profile primetime debut during a concert tour, even that loses much of its sincerity. In making it so long, did Gaga want to make a point, or was the point just that it was long?

On the surface, it looks like the ‘Telephone’ video gives us a lot to chew on, but it seems to have suffered a bit from Gaga taking herself too seriously. It’s a lot of fun for the eyes, but that’s about it.