Connecting the dots: Lady Gaga's Frozen Heart in Alejandro

After explaining to myself (and hearing a lot of people agree with me) the meaning of Beyoncé's painted nails in Lady Gaga's Telephone video, I have always been looking for hidden meanings behind Gaga's visual works.

Around four months after the release of the Telephone video, Gaga released a new one, this time for her song Alejandro. In her Times Online interview, she explained that the video is about the...

“purity of my friendships with my gay friends. And how I’ve been unable to find that with a straight man in my life. It’s a celebration and an admiration of gay love – it confesses my envy of the courage and bravery they require to be together. In the video I’m pining for the love of my gay friends – but they just don’t want me.”

Almost everything in the video covers that statement. For the "courage and bravery they require to be together", Gaga showed the challenges in history that gay people had to endure.  Among those are:

1.  the Nazis who mass murdered homosexuals, represented by the men dressed as Nazis

2.  Catholicism which continues to oppress homosexuals, represented by Gaga's nun outfit with rosary

3.  the Stonewall riots that happened during the late 60's, possibly represented by the riot scene showing at the big screen while the men were dancing

As for Gaga pining about the love of her gay friends, there is the bed scene wherein they try to have gay sex (and Gaga being the top), and be unsuccessful about it.

But amidst all this love for the gays and subsequent refusal, there is one odd piece in the puzzle that won't fit: the funeral scene at the beginning, a veiled Gaga leading the funeral, with a frozen heart on a pillow.

I have repeatedly wondered: what does this have to do with her unrequited love for her gay friends? Is she mourning for the loss on what could have been?

The answer came to me last night when I was talking to my friend, a fellow Gaga fan.

I told him that in Gaga's interview at Showstudio, she mentioned something about her high school:

As for the school... that has been a bit more of a sad experience. The teachers have been wonderful - the nuns are lovely, and the English teachers and the head of the school were wild feminists and instilled wonderful values in us. The teachers are the best, and the most wonderful, brilliant teachers. They are truly magical. I have nothing bad to say about the school, but I will say I've been really sad about some of the things that have happened with my high school, because my sister goes there and my family worked so hard. My parents were not rich, they spent every dollar they had for my sister and I to go to the most wonderful, expensive private school they could afford, to have opportunities they didn't have. I suppose in an attempt to also say something about religion, as a Catholic school I have been put off by the very un-Catholic way they have responded to my success. It's not even disappointing, it's sad. My family gave up many things, so my sister and I could have a wonderful education. There is such a diluted sense of religion and what is right - perhaps the school's just not what it used to be. It makes me very very sad.

I asked my friend if he has read anything specific about what made Gaga "very very sad"; he hasn't. He just told me the name of the school: Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private Roman Catholic school in Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Like the scientists that discovered anatomy in Michaelangelo's paintings, I remembered how the heart appeared in the Alejandro video.

In Catholic faith, the Sacred Heart is represented by a heart in flames (sometimes with a cross near the flames, sometimes with arrows sticking on it) encircled in thorns.

In Gaga's video, a heart tied by what looks like barbed wire or thorns appears.  But it looks frozen, and large pins appear to be securing it in place.

"It makes me very very sad," said Gaga about the school. Perhaps it was so sad that it deserved a funeral scene in the Alejandro video. A funeral in winter. Winter is gloomy and dark, and most importantly, it's cold--probably the school suddenly became cold to her family, her sister, when Gaga became famous.

A few weeks after the release of Alejandro's video, Gaga's sister graduates from that school.

Like a graduation, a funeral is a ceremony to an inevitable end.  And then a veiled Gaga declares, "I know that we are young, and I know that you may love me, but I can't be with you like this anymore, Alejandro."

The funeral with the frozen heart in thorns in the Alejandro video may be a metaphor for her sister's graduation from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an inevitable end to whatever ties she and her family may have with the school that they used to love.

In an interview by Rolling Stone, Steven Klein, the director of the Alejandro video, said, "The process was to express Lady Gaga's desire to reveal her heart and bear (sic) her soul." Indeed, Alejandro may be the most personal video Gaga has ever made.