timed essay question 6

Discuss how the representation of gender, class or age would appeal to a target audience in one of the media products you have analysed this year.

Chosen media products: Million Reasons + Perfect Illusion and John Wayne Music Videos (MVs)

Lady Gaga released Joanne, her fifth studio album, in October 2016. The first single was Perfect Illusion, followed by Million Reasons, and then closing off the singles releases with the title track. The music video for Perfect Illusion blends seamlessly into the beginning of Million Reasons, and then Million Reasons into John Wayne. These MVs do not necessarily follow one story, but thematically, they provide the audience with a greater understanding of Gaga’s life and give an insight into her struggles as a female musician. The target audience of her music specific, but widely diverse. Although her core demographic is primarily women between 12-24, her image and music appeals to many audiences outside this age bracket. She mainly targets the younger side of her audience, aiming her music at teenage girls around 14-16, and she uses these songs and videos as a way to warn them against restricting their femininity or allowing others to control their expression to get places in life.

The MV for Perfect Illusion focuses on her life as a female performer. Throughout the video, she performs in large crowds surrounded by her supporters. By the end, she is clearly overwhelmed by the expectations of her career and breaks down in the desert. This works as a perfect opener to the trilogy of videos, as it showcases the clear and evident fanbase that calls for her to perform, but also the pressures she faces being a prominent figure in her industry. It is alluded to that she is a perfectionist and will do everything in her power to provide her supporters with a powerful performance – and that she stops at nothing to maintain this persona of a wild performer. It is an expectation of female musicians to perform for their fans, and she cannot break free of the restraints that her job places on her. As a female musician she is expected to rely on aspects of her sexuality, supported by the opening shot zooming in on her crotch. She adheres to the expectations of sexuality, but attempts to display it in a way that acts as self-sexualisation rather than objectification. Early in her career, she was known for high concept, camp and gaudy outfits, which demonstrate her avant-garde persona, but over time, her creativity was limited and controlled by managers and producers, leading to her wearing more simplistic outfits around the 2016 Joanne era. She wears a typically masculine outfit of T-shirt and jeans, but the shirt is tight to her body and the jeans are cut off shorts, accentuating her figure and linking to her femininity. There are shots throughout the video of her driving alone, looking in the mirror with anger in her eyes. These shots represent her reflecting on her place as a musician and whether she is only successful due to her being a woman. Gaga has a history relating to cars and car accidents, using them as a metaphor for her mental health. In her music video for 911 (from the album Chromatica), she depicts herself hallucinating after miraculously surviving a life-threatening car crash. She states that ‘the video is very personal to me, my experience with mental health, and the way reality and dreams can interconnect to form heroes within us and all around us’. As an activist for mental health, she tries her best to be open and honest to her audience and fans about the things that affects her, and she this MV acts as a candid way to display the negative effects of working in such a hostile and damaging industry that is pop music. At the end, she breaks and falls down isolated in the desert, while the camera pans upwards leaving her alone with her emotions. The message of this video relates to girls being forced to utilise their female attributes to gain success and fame, and how damaging that can be. She works to tell her audience that they need to love themselves first and not to let anyone hinder them or dull their shine.

The video for Million Reasons – at its core – is the dissolution of her sexualisation. After her breakdown over her femininity, she is discovered by her supportive team, providing affirmations regarding her troubles. In the dressing room, she is covered up in her dressing gown, lamenting in the mirror. This links to the mirror scenes in Perfect Illusion – though instead of anger, she feels depressed and empty. Her lifestyle as a performer has drained her and she wants to do things her way. In the studio, she covers herself up with a pink yet masculine cowboy outfit and performs for the camera. This is her way of reclaiming her gender. She is still all the woman she wants to be, but she is doing it on her terms and not defining herself by the expectation to look sexy and dance for her fans. The events of Perfect Illusion are her breaking point, displaying her at her limit, and the events of Million Reasons are where she makes a change. The change is clear when her outfits are compared, with crotch shots of her shorts turning into full body shots of her pink suit, covered up but still playing with gender. Gaga is known for her rule-breaking, so it is no surprise that she would want to play with the gender binary in her music videos and showcase her thoughts and feelings of feminine expectations., The lyrics of the first two MVs help to further the narrative, as she realises that the industry she joined was only a ‘perfect illusion’ and instead of giving her the career she dreamed of, she is met with ‘a million reasons’ to walk away from her life. This MV aims to depict her pain and struggle, showing her audience the impacts of having your personality controlled and managed. Through denouncing her sexualisation in this video, she wants to show her audience that they do not need to be ‘slutty’ performers to top their industry. She is ultimately fine with sexualisation, as long as she is the one who gets to do it, as seen in John Wayne’s MV.

John Wayne is the final MV in the trilogy, transitioning from her in her pink suit performing to her on a motorbike in a leather skin-tight outfit, paired with a cowboy hat that references Million Reasons. This video represents her getting over her emotions and reclaiming her feminine sexuality. There are many features of both the song and the video that allow the audience to understand that she is taking back what once negatively affected her career. The opening of the video contains a spoken section where she is yelling to ‘go a bit FASTER!’, which may allude to her becoming bored with her past career decisions and that she wants a change. The motorcycle is a commonly masculine object, representing the cool bad boy. Gaga also wears high heels that double as guns, combining feminine clothing with another common masculine signifier. The gun has similar connotations to a motorcycle; she is becoming dangerous due to the control over her masculinity and femininity. The hyper-masculine features are balanced out by her self-sexualisation, effectively demonstrating that she has found her balance of gender roles and that she is the one who gets to decide how she expresses herself. The end of the video sees her end up dead in a car wreck due to the men around her. This alludes to the presence of masculinity being a negative force on her life, and that she feels that it could be the end for her. As the music video comes to a close, she is seen back in her ‘Million Reasons’ outfit, with the word ‘The End’ plastered over the screen. This may be a demonstration that she is finished with the cycle that haunts her relationship with gender - but being back in her Million Reasons outfit could allude to the cycle continuing again. Her audience are told through this video that gender is allowed to be a performance, and it should be enjoyed.

In these music videos, Gaga uses her clothing to signify her relationship with gender. She goes from being placed in a sexualised box to a worn-down balance of masculinity and femininity, and then reclaims her female power with a tragic ending. Her gender is linked with her career; she is marked as a ‘female popstar’ instead of just a popstar. To her, this feels internally damaging, and she is caught in a cycle of trying to break free – which affects her music and performing. It is undeniable that her aesthetic and theming have changed over the years, with Joanne acting as an attempt to lean into her womanhood. The MVs for this album create a powerful cyclical narrative of Gaga battling with her gender expression. As well as clothing, a thematic linking of cars and vehicles are used throughout, with her driving alone in Perfect Illusion, being driven surrounded and supported in Million Reasons, and driving wild and recklessly in John Wayne. The progression of car scenes in these videos also mirror the emotional journey that she goes through, ranging from alone and angry, to depressed yet supported, to wild, reckless, and self-damaging. The honesty she shows through these videos is her way of portraying the true and painful reality of being a woman in her industry, demonstrating to her audience that it is risky letting people control you like that. Gaga's career has been influenced by her experiences with sexual assault and rape from one of her producers when she was 19, and so she uses her platform as a method to expel some of the pain from that experience, and to allude to the extreme emotional and physical agony it put her in through her music and music videos. Her bravery and openness is a tactic to allow her female fans to understand the predatory danger that lies in many hidden facets of the world.