Lady Gaga’s massive 13-minute video epic arrived this week for “Marry The Night,” the fifth single from her hit album Born This Way. And if there’s anything to be learned from the ever-changing forced enigma that is Gaga, it’s that she takes over the top and self-indulgent to a whole new level.
From a hospital bed to the bathtub to a Black Swan style ballerina breakdown and beyond (into odd Madonna mimicry), we find our heroine glittered, bruised up and declaring, “I’m gonna be star. You know why? (Pause for dramatic crying.) Because I have nothing to lose.”
“It’s sort of like my past in an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again,” says Gaga at the start of the video. “It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality.” She gets a bad phone call and proceeds to rip the shit out of her apartment, naked but censored, covered in glitter and cereal.
Gaga claims the song, and that spazzy moment in particular, is an autobiographical interpretation of the day the singer was dropped from Island Def Jam.
“You may say I lost everything,” a reborn Gaga says in the video. “But I still had my bedazzler.”
The video begins to take a more traditional form around the eight-minute mark, when the song actually starts to play. Gaga and crew dance in a studio, on a city street and on and in a car, which is in flames by the end of this spectacle.
What a ride.
