Introduction:
Here I have decoded the entire music video for you, as only a true little monster could. This will take you a while to read, but not as long as it took me write it...
After you have read this, what you once thought was a cluster-fuck of random scenes will now be beautiful piece of art. Let’s get started!!
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PART ONE: Background Knowledge
This is what we (the fans) knew before the video came out:
When Lady Gaga was 19 she was accepted as one of the 25 (or some small number) students from all over America to gain early entry into Tisch (the art/theater school). After one year, she dropped out and told her parents that she wanted to live on her own and make music. Her father eventually said okay. He paid her rent for the first 2 months, but after that she was totally on her own. He said he would give her one year, but if nothing happened after that, she was going back to college.
She got multiple jobs as a waitress, bar tender, at music publishing companies, anything. She was performing all the time at clubs, open mic nights, etc. Eventually she got signed by a record label called Def Jam. She had finally made it. One time she sent in disco balls full of gummy bears to the Def Jam office, as a present. The label told her that she needed to lose 15 pounds, fast, if she wanted to be famous.
A couple weeks later, she was dropped from the label. She was devastated. She did drugs such as cocaine and her life fell apart.
She has said that the only reason she made it out of this dark place was thanks to her Aunt Joanne. Joanne died at the age of 19, before Gaga was born. Gaga has said that she thinks part of Joanne’s soul/spirit was born into herself (or something like that).
She believes that Joanne’s spirit helped her overcome her depression and get back to doing what she loved to do. Eventually, she was signed again to Interscope Records and after about a year, she released her debut album “The Fame”.
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PART TWO: Theories and Evidence
In the “Yoü and I” music video, Lady Gaga sees an ice cream truck in the road. The old (creepy) man in the truck hands her an ice cream cone. After she eats it, she collapses on the ground. When asked about this scene, she said it was about “the destruction of her youth at a very young age”. She then went on to say “There are some things that I have told you about my past and some things which I have not”.
A few weeks ago she said on twitter: “The Marry the Night video is the beginning of the story I never told you.”
When describing the “Marry the Night” video, Gaga also said “It is about the worst day of my life. It is also the day I was dropped from my first record label.”
She said it like that multiple times. It’s almost as if she is separating the two things - getting dropped, and something else that might have happened on the day.
We can now come to the conclusion that the destruction of her youth, the story she never told us, and the missing element that contributed to the worst day of her life - is all one in the same.
Although it has not been confirmed, most of the fans believe that she was raped and/or had an abortion.
Evidence/Reasons to support this claim:
- “The destruction of my youth”
- In an interview with Vanity Fair magazines she said, “I used to date guys who were much older than me. Like I was 15 and they were 30.” She then says it was a mistake.
- In the video, the nurse/doctor calls her “Morphine Princess”. Morphine is a very strong pain killer usually administered in hospitals. Gaga would have had to been very badly injured to need Morphine. And by the way the doctor said it, it sounds like she needed a lot of it.
- In the video, she is wearing a white diaper thing around her genitals. This is usually used to stop the bleeding from the vagina - after an abortion.
- The doctor tells her “no intimacy for 2 weeks”. This is also told to a woman has just gotten an abortion.
- The doctor comments about time when she delivered Gaga (birth). This shows that the doctor is an obstetrician.
- She is in all-women clinic.
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PART THREE: The Music Video Decoded
The opening monologue of the video is essentially about Gaga wanting to remember her life in a selective way - only remembering certain parts, and remembering some parts in a different way then they might have happened. She says “It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality”. This meaning that she doesn’t want to remember certain parts of her past, because she can’t face the reality of it.
She says “trauma is the ultimate killer”. The trauma is possibly the rape/sexual assault.
She also mentions gummy bears, a possible nod to the gift she sent to Def Jam.
As previously stated, it appears Gaga is in the hospital/clinic for rape and/or an abortion. She cries and says that she is going to be a star, because she has nothing left to lose.
The other girls in the clinic are laughing and appear to be mentally unstable. This could represent the insanity of Gaga’s situation. The dream-like aspect of the scene could represent Gaga’s fragile/selective memory (the opening monologue).
The next scene feature Gaga as a ballerina. Gaga said in an interview with E! News that the ballerinas are meant to represent perfection. Their shoes are exaggeratedly long and pointed to show the impossibility of achieving perfection. This perfection might represent how she needed to lose 15 pounds to get her record deal.
Later she is back at her apartment. An unnamed dark-haired woman helps her undress and get into bed. I believe this woman could represent Joanne. As previously stated, Gaga believes that the spirit of her Aunt Joanne is what helped her survive this dark and difficult time. In the video, the woman’s face is not revealed, and when she talks to Gaga her dialogue comes from off-screen.
Gaga is lying in bed when the phone rings. The off-screen voice (presumably Joanne) says “..be someone important..”
After saying hello Gaga covers the receiver, look at Joanne (still off-screen) and says “It’s my manager!” and smiles. Joanne replies “Perfect. See, I told you.”
Other evidence to suggest this woman is the spirit of Joanne:
- While Gaga’s voice is muffled and hard to hear, Joanne’s voice is perfectly clear and audible suggesting some sort of separation between them.
- Once Gaga starts going crazy, the woman is nowhere to be seen.
She essentially goes crazy. She freaks out and smashes things all around her apartment and covers herself in various food items. She seems somehow disconnected as she slurs “I’m such a star!”. This scene is interspersed with her crying at the feet or the ballerinas. The perfect ballerinas. She cries because she can never match their perfection. She then sits in her bath-tub, still in a disconnected/unstable state and bleaches her hair.
The next scene shows her with new blonde hair all dolled-up and we hear her say “You may say, I lost everything.. but I still had my bedazzler.”
She is now, essentially, telling us how she put her life back together. The video as a whole is meant to represent the destruction of those negative memories, overcoming her obstacles, and becoming stronger.
She is hanging upside down from the sunroof of a car, with her make-up and hair all messed up. Her hand is on the steering wheel. This might be a representation of how her life was turned “upside down”. She slowly gets back in the car, sits down the correct way and begins the song.
The burning cars are meant to represent her “destroying” all the negativity of these dark times so that she can move on and start all over again.
The reason the majority of the song is spent in a dance studio is too convey that Gaga is working hard to get back on top of her life. One of the dancers in the studio is named “Dina”. She was Gaga’s lead dancer back in 2008 but resigned from dancing to have a family. She appears again in this video to show that this scene is meant to take place early in Gaga’s career.
In the finale of the video, Gaga and her dancers dance in colorful costumes in the middle of a street, a celebration of her accomplishments.
There are also many multiple scenes including:
- Gaga freaking out in apartment/the bathtub (already explained)
- Gaga with the perfect ballerinas (already explained)
- Gaga trying to carry a piano down a flight of stairs. She drops the piano, a man helps her up and then helps her carry the piano down the rest of the stairs.
- Gaga eating some sort of food. Immediately after she’s done she throws away the plate, heads into the bathroom stalls, and bends over the toilet (as if to vomit up the food she ate). She decides to not vomit up the food, and instead goes for a cigarette. Again, she stops herself and throws the whole pack into the trash.
- Gaga spreading gasoline over the cars, and more cars exploding as she watches.
3 - Gaga has said that she often had to carry her piano up and down the stairway of her apartment when she would go to perform in the city. I’m amusing the man in the video is her father.
4 - As for the bathroom scene, this is a reference to when she was so desperate to lose 15 pounds for her record deal. This is an excerpt from an interview from 2009:
“I was laying in my bed on my stomach—this is so sick— but I was eating a salad, and I got a phone call: Can you be at this restaurant in 30 minutes? So-and-so big record executive wants to meet you. And the salad was like a really unhealthy salad; it was like fried chicken or something. So I said, ‘I’ll be right there.’ I got up, went to the bathroom, threw up the salad, did a line of coke, and went to the meeting. I was completely mental and had just been through so much.”
5 - As I said before, the burning cars represent her trying to start over, so to speak. The reason those other 4 scenes above are cross-cut with this scene is because those are some of the memories/parts of herself she wants to destroy.
Another scene during this montage shows Gaga entering a car. Helping her into the car is the same dark haired woman who helped her get into bed: Joanne.
Once she sits down in the car she looks at her hand. On it is written the address of Interscope Records - the label that finally ends up signing her.
The last scene is of Gaga wearing a mask and a long red dress. She is surrounding by fire. After all the cars (things of her past) have been destroyed, Gaga rises from the flames, victorious - in the same way a phoenix would.
She married the night.
