What Does Lady Gaga's Bizarre "Bad Romance" Video Mean, Anyway?

Floating diamonds. Hairless cats. Gladiator chin straps. Dream analysis tells us there's plenty going on beneath the surface

By Leslie Gornstein Nov 17, 2009 8:59 PMTags
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Lady Gaga's video for "Bad Romance" is either astonishingly brilliant or horrifyingly, beyond-belief stupid. What do you think? Guide your lemmings, Answer Bitch!
—Liz, via Facebook

I think we need to understand what Gaga is trying to tell us other than walk, walk, fashion, baby. And to do that we need to analyze the images we're seeing, and boy are there a lot of 'em.

So what are we working with here? The video includes images of a hairless cat, a guy in an S&M roman gladiator chin strap, an alternate Gaga with anime eyes in a bathtub, and diamonds floating in space. And oh: She's crying, and dancing, but not at the same time.

She wears righteous sunglasses.

There is an actual story to the video, and we'll go over it through the wise, mystical prism of dream analysis! Let us begin...

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First, the general premise. If you've seen the Hostel movies, you may notice that, like the plots from said movies, Gaga appears to be in a situation where she's being auctioned off as a sex-slash-murder toy. Guys in S&M Roman gladiator chin straps are bidding on her, but not before she emerges as a creature from a pod who must be groomed into the fashion goddess she is. Simple, right?

OK, now let's take a closer look at some of the images, with some help from real-life dream analyst Carolyn Wills, whose work is featured in the book 365 Ways to Get a Good Night's Sleep.

She points out that the sequence of the images is important—as is the fact that the person has to actually have dreamed this stuff, and Gaga, while genius, probably just acted it out.

All that said:

The floating diamonds: They may represent "the gem of clarity of thinking; beauty of the soul, pure ideas," Wills suggests. "Frozen in space would mean those ideas are frozen, the beauty is frozen, the ideas are frozen, unable to produce."

Gaga with anime eyes sitting in a bathtub: "Extra good vision or seeing too much of any one thing," Wills suggests. "In the bathtub—that would indicate the need to be cleansed or to be forgiven, and the person with the large eyes fully well knows that."

The bidder in the gladiator chin-strap getup: "The gladiator is a romanticized version of a soldier," Wills notes, "as in 'Am I being a good soldier about some issue, or do I need to be more disciplined?' " Or, dare I say, whipped?

The hairless, hissing cat: Cats generally represent the feminine side of oneself, Wills says, but it "can also mean cattiness—hissing would indicate aggression, and hairless would indicate baring it all."

All that said, what's my opinion? Sheer brilliance.

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See how deep her brilliance goes in our Fashion Spotlight: Lady Gaga gallery