An Attempt to Understand Alejandro

While watching the video for Lady Gaga's latest single, Alejandro, I became intrigued as I always do by her bizarre and hardly straightforward approach to her videos. The 8-minute video is full of images of love and war, sex and violence, and as usual to me, the dichotomy begged to be understood. I find that I think best when as write, so I wrote out my reaction to the music video, expanded it, and eventually decided to post it. I took screen shots of the video to make it easier to visualize to those of you who haven't seen the video or don't want to.

If you are unfamiliar with her, Lady Gaga is a pop artist with some strange songs and an even stranger wardrobe. Being a fan, I wanted to figure out what her message was, and, being an English major, I tackled it in the manner I knew best.

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I’m trying to figure out what Lady Gaga’s latest music video is about.

While watching the video, the words that have occurred to me over and over are these: love, war, regret, and control.

To me, the song itself is about leaving behind mistakes, be they her own or other people’s. The chorus suggests that they are the mistakes she made with men - Alejandro, Fernando, Roberto… and while I think it could be that, I think the song could also be about be her fight for control over the things they have done to her. Her fight, it seems, is for control over her life and for her solitude.

There are some pretty strong religious symbols in the video, but she doesn’t seem to be using religion as the sole answer as I have heard suggested. I think she is using it as the front to her solution; it is her crusade to escape or get rid of the men, and perhaps other figures of dominance in her past who won’t let her go and live her own life.

I believe that to her, the solution to her problem, to the regret and the mistakes in her life lies in war and aggressive, proactive action. The soldiers that surround her seem to corporeally represent the violence, aggression, and control that she employs in order to escape these men and her past with them.


Clearly the men are unwilling to let her go and she has to resort to a swift break in order to return to her normal life. The sexual imagery (the sexual dominance, holding the ropes tied to the bed frames, etc.) implies throughout much of the video that she is regaining that control and could potentially win her war for her independence and solitude.


But is she successful and does she return to a normal life? The last minute or so of the video perturb and intrigue me and it suggests to me that she is unsuccessful in her attempt to regain control of the situation.


First, the images of the fire and war suggest the beginning of the end of her fight - the fire destroying anything that could have been a victory for her. She loses control as the images get more and more violent against her, and as the fire continues to burn, she loses her sexual dominance and begins to struggle against the men who she had previously dominated. Then, she is thrown between the men and stripped of her white ‘crusade’ robe - the men win control over her body.


The last scene of the video is her still lying on the bed, immobilized and suspended as she was earlier on, the man at the foot of the bed holding onto the ropes and a golden gun, controlling her with the violence that she had previously employed against the men earlier.


The final evidence of her defeat is when her face seems to be eaten up by disease-like holes and I believe that it represents the finality her defeat. She cannot try again. It has clearly all gone wrong for her, she has lost her battle, and she has succumbed to the loss.