Lady Gaga and Beyonce Unleash Orgy of Sex, Violence, Product Placement in “Telephone” Video
Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s anxiously awaited video for their The Fame Monster collaboration “Telephone” has arrived as a nine-minute-and-thirty-second mash-up of lesbian prison porn, campy sexploitation flicks and insidery winks at the two divas’ public personas. If Quentin Tarantino and Russ Meyer remade Thelma & Louise as an orgy of product placement with fiercely choreographed interludes, this would be the result. The video was scheduled to premiere on E! at 11:30 p.m. tonight, but hit the Internet early via a leak. Jonas Åkerlund, who previously helmed Gaga’s “Paparazzi” video, directed the clip.
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The mini-movie opens in a women’s prison, where guards strip Gaga bare and mutter, “I told you she didn’t have a dick,” fanning the flames of one of the most persistent rumors about Stefani Germanotta’s gender identity. Almost immediately the self-referential nudges and brand names appear: the boom box in the exercise yard blasts Lady Gaga’s “Paper Gangsta,” a fellow inmate wears Monster Heartbeats earbuds, Gaga has a Virgin Mobile phone tucked in her pants and sports Chanel shades and Diet Coke cans in her hair as makeshift curlers (nice touch!).
The song kicks in just before the three-minute mark as Gaga (in a spiked bikini and what appears to be Karen O’s jacket from the “Zero” video) takes a call in jail and launches into the most appealing afternoon imaginable behind bars — a tightly choreographed routine that has Gaga and four tattooed backup dancers stamping through the cell block.
When Beyoncé’s scheduled interlude arrives, the song breaks for another dramatic sequence. A guard perusing dating Website Plenty of Fish on a Beats by Dre laptop informs Gaga she’s been bailed out. Beyoncé (nicknamed Honey Bee, a nod to Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction) rolls up in the Pussy Wagon from Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume One, informs Gaga, “You’ve been a very bad girl” and feeds her a 50 Cent Honey Bun. Simply being in Tarantino’s car inspires some Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield banter (“You know Gaga, trust is like a mirror. You can fix it if it’s broke…” “But you can still see the crack in that motherfucker’s reflection”).
Beyoncé launches into the song’s bridge as Lady Gaga snaps photos of her with a Polaroid camera, then the pair pull up to a vintage diner where Beyoncé entertains a gentleman pal (played by Tyrese Gibson) and Gaga mans the kitchen, slipping poison into the food along with Miracle Whip and Wonder Bread (cue another awesome dance sequence, this time with cooks prancing around the stove in a moment that could have been borrowed from Madonna’s “Hung Up” clip). Beyoncé takes a moment to toy with her squeaky-clean image — busting out the line, “I knew you’d take all my honey, you selfish motherfucker” as Gibson keels over at the table — and another dance sequence begins, this time with Gaga and B in patriotic garb.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy‘s Jai Rodriguez arrives as a news reporter broadcasting word of the mass homicide (dubbed “The Telephone Effect”) as Gaga and Beyoncé speed away in the Pussy Wagon dressed in white and black veils. “We did it, Honey Bee, now let’s go far, far away from here,” Gaga says as the two clasp hands and hit the accelerator.
The clip is certainly cinematic and oddly feminist, and gasps at a larger statement about consumer culture. As Gaga told E!, she was preoccupied with “the idea that America is full of young people that are inundated with information and technology and turn it into something that was more of a commentary on the kind of country that we are.”
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