Lady Gaga’s video for her single “Judas” premiered recently. The video essentially tells the story of Judas’ kiss of Jesus, and follows Gaga and a biker gang comprised of Jesus and the apostles as they dance and drink and wander around seedy bars, parties, and outdoor gatherings (representing, of course, the temple): places that most of America’s youth can been seen hanging around today. Gaga has stated that she is Mary Magdalene, and it is easy to see that within seconds of the video’s beginning sequence: she sits on the back of the Jesus figure’s bike (a beautiful young man, with fantastic cornrows, he is adorned with a golden crown of thorns and a bling-tastic necklace of crosses throughout the video), and throughout the rest of the video she is constantly at this figure’s side, kneeling before him, clutching him, washing his feet, etc.
The video is absolutely gorgeous; it is colorful, lush, textured, and decadent. Gaga frequently brings visual decadence to her videos, and this one did not disappoint. But that is not what is so interesting about the video. What is so interesting is that it tells part of Jesus’ story in detail, and in a way that is completely accessible to today’s youth. It speaks about a biblical story in a culturally relevant way.
One of artists’ most important functions in society is creating the mythology of the time; not only making myths and our collective human spirit understandable and accessible to the masses, but also creating the myths that directly relate to and speak of the time they are living in. Artists create the images of their time, there by helping to create the mythology of the day, and the images that will last into the future. These images will help to illuminate the artists’ time for future generations.
This ‘Judas’ video does just that. It is taking an ancient story: the story of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus through a kiss, and placing it squarely into our time. Gaga has created her own set of images in this video, but also uses images that are quite normal and understandable to the masses. The idea of Jesus and his followers being a gang of bikers is a perfect example of this. Each biker has his worn in, black, leather jacket with his name (John, Paul, Judas) elaborately embroidered on the back of it. Bikers are not an unusual thing in this day; thanks to the rising prices of gas, more and more people are taking to using motorcycles as a primary form of transportation. Even without the economic factors, groups of bikers are a normal sight on an American highway, and there are specific symbols and stigmas associated with them. There is a feeling of edginess associated with bikers: that these groups of people live on the outside of general society. They have their own private society, and live in a way that is not considered normal by the masses. They live their lives by their own rules.
All that could easily have been said of Jesus and his followers. They lived on the outside, living life not according to societal standards, but by God’s standards. Gaga has presented Jesus and the Apostles in a way that we can understand. These people and their story is firmly rooted in the present, and thus we can feel closer to them and their story. Especially considering more and more people are turning to motorcycles to save money in this economy, this imagery is imagery of our time.
The imagery of our time is all throughout the video, from the places they visit to the cheap beer they are drinking. The parties, the bars, these are all places that the youth frequent. The sets have elements of the past, of theatricality: the old church, the electric bar, they all seem to come from the past, but these sets are still rooted in the present. They are generic enough sets that the viewer feels that he has been to a place like that before. It makes the story of Jesus all the more relatable and understandable. Jesus and his followers were young men and women, living on the outside of society, upset with how things were being run, upset with the expectations and practices of society, just like the youth of today. As a youth of today, I feel I can say pretty safely I feel pretty disenfranchised. That’s why going to bars, to parties, to outdoor hang outs, makes sense: that’s all that’s left.
Even the medium, the presentation of this story in music video form, helps to better acquaint it with the people of today than reading a story in the Bible ever could. The youth of today takes in so many small snippets of information on a day-to-day basis, from texts to twitter to facebook statuses to YouTube videos. We don’t like things to be long, we generally need things broken up into small segments so we can take it all in. The music video, as a general medium, is formatted in exactly that way. There are small segments of dancing, close ups, bits of a story, different emotions, etc., all compiled into a neat, 5-minute video that can easily be consumed by today’s viewers.
With all of these different scenes, Gaga can talk to us about a number of things. She can talk about being a girl in love with a boy (scene of her riding on a motorcycle with Jesus, smiling wide). She can talk about despair over losing someone, over betrayal (cue her falling to Jesus’s feet after the kiss). She can talk about youth culture (cue drunk guys at bars, cheap beer). She can talk about so much in this small-snippets format of the music video. She tells a well known story, but because the video focus’ on her, not Jesus, she is able to add her own meaning to it. Here is facebook status of hers recently:
JUDAS is an archetype in our fantasy film: Darkness casted when standing in The Light. Destiny is a siamese force.
She uses all different types of media, all of the millions of things that her fans use on a day to day basis (YouTube, facebook, twitter), to talk about the video, to help explain it’s over-all message. Judas, as much as he is a figure from the bible in the video, is also a metaphor. He is a metaphor for so many things: for a bad boy that she can’t get out of her system (and how many girls can relate to that!); for the dark side of her that she can’t quite seem to get out of her system (all of us angst-y kids know about this!); for the bad that always comes with the good in life (by loving Judas, she is acknowledging him as simply part of God’s plan, as part of the natural flow of life).
She is taking Jesus and Judas and presenting them in a 21st century way, in a way that her fans can understand and relate to. By doing that, she is bringing the mythology of Christianity into the 21st century, making the myths of today, while still connecting it to the past and to a story and faith that binds us.
