"RA-RA! AH-AH-AH! ROMA-ROMA-MA! GAGA-OOH-LALA! Want your Bad Romance!"
"Bad Romance" is a 2009 song by Lady Gaga. It was part of her album The Fame Monster and was released as a single in 2009.The video is around five minutes long, and you can see it here
. It's also got a (heavily spammed) view count of over one billion and is jam-packed with elements of Mind Screw. Which is hardly unexpected, considering who sang it.
The music video has won 7 Video Music Awards (Video of the Year, Best Pop Video, Best Female Video, Best Dance Music Video, Best Choreography, Best Direction and Best Editing).
" I want your tropes, I don't wanna be friends":
- Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me: She's implied to be a sex slave to a circle of robot-esque people and stripped against her will.
- Book Ends: The music video starts and ends with Fugue in B minor by Bach.
- Celebrity Endorsement:
- The video for "Bad Romance" features a man using a Wii remote to sell Lady Gaga as a prostitute.
- Also, her "Heartbeats" headphones which are part of Dr. Dre's "Beats" collection, as well as the Beats Edition HP Envy 15 laptops, both featured prominently in the same video.
- The laptops were the scoreboard for the whore auction.
- Double Entendre: "Want you in my rear window", anyone?
- Fanservice: Watch the video and count the fetishes as they come up. Latex, non-con, white slavery...and the robot-fetishist crowd were very happy with a lot of her movements.
- Force Feeding: Gaga gets force-fed a glass of some beverage.
- Gratuitous French: "J'veux ton amour et je veux ta revanche," which means "I want your love and I want your revenge" in French.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Rape is implied early on as she has her clothes torn off against her will and is forced to pose, and in the very last scene it's unclear if she set fire and killed her partner through of her heated and passionate emotions, because the sex was just that intense, or as an act of female revenge, and if it's to be understood metaphorical or literal.
- Light Is Not Good: White walls and furnishings, bright lighting, lots of white and/or sparkly costumes, and the plot involves slavery and murder.
- Making a Spectacle of Yourself: This was the video that established Gaga as an artistic figure and an auteur of music, of sorts.
- Male Gaze: The video takes a lot of common uses of Male Gaze in music videos and puts them in a nightmarish context.
- Shout-Out:
- To Alfred Hitchcock, but...in a somewhat unusual way.Want you in my Rear Window, baby you're sick.
- The opening shot of Gaga's Bathhaus is reminiscent of the scene in 'Aliens'' where the Marines awake from the pods.
- And the body-bags from Firefly.
- Or even the torpedo casings that Starfleet uses as coffins for fallen members.
- Speaking of the opening, the pods themselves have red text over a white background and a gratuitous cross slapped on them. Anyone else thinking NGE?
- The opening shot looks like a mash-up of Stanley Kubrick films. The bright glowing floors are highly reminiscent of the bedroom at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the pose looks like an inversion of the opening shot of A Clockwork Orange and the masks almost look like the ones worn during the cult orgy in Eyes Wide Shut.
- When watching the claw-handed Gaga groupies' crowned suits, is anyone else reminded of Max's costume and gestures from Where the Wild Things Are?
- The costumes were supposedly based on the pattern from the movie.
- The dancers in white, with their covered faces and jerky movements are a Shout-Out to the Silent Hill nurses.
- To Alfred Hitchcock, but...in a somewhat unusual way.
- Singer Namedrop: "Gaga, ooh la la"
- Single Tear: Cut aways during the music video show a surpisingly low-key (in terms of make-up, anyway) Gaga becoming increasingly more upset. The camera is close to her face, and a single tear slides down her cheek near the end of the video.
- Smoking Hot Sex: Well, Smoking Hot sex-turned-fiery death.
- Torpedo Tits: The notorious flamethrower bra towards the end of the video.
- Unkempt Beauty: Gaga appears in some scenes without any elaborate outfits or makeup, and is still pleasing to the eye.
- Visual Pun: At the word "bitch" in the first "I'm a free bitch, baby", the camera cuts to the Right-Hand Cat.
