'Gaga: Five Foot Two' Explores a Pop Star's Pain: Film Review
Joanne
But Gaga has spent the past three years deconstructing her previous project  which is its own kind of performance. Elaborate dance pop ceded ground to jazz standards  showtunes  and country rock. Tentacle gowns went into the closet; jeans and a pink cowboy hat came out. The director Chris Moukarbel shot Five Foot Two largely on handheld—maybe even smartphone—cameras. You see Gaga cooking  recording  planning  crying  bonding. In one scene  she’s topless as she chats with her team by the poolside. The implication: This is Gaga  au naturel. Yet she never seems to forget the camera. Five Foot Two documents last year’s release of her album Joanne  and makes clear how much Gaga’s public reboot relied on demonstrating that she  like everyone else  suffers. Gaga has increasingly mined the traumas of her own life  with songs and philanthropic efforts growing out of her rape at age 19. The dissolution of her engagement to the actor Taylor Kinney  mournfully referenced a few times in the documentary  seemed to inform the breakup-themed Joanne singles “Perfect Illusion” and “Million Reasons.” But there was a deeper source of anguish on  Joanne   too. The album is named for  her  aunt  an aspiring artist who died of lupus at age 19 in 1974. “Seeing what that did to [my father] and my family was the most powerful thing I experienced growing up ” Gaga tells the journalist Darryl Pinckney in the film. “I am Joanne. I am my father’s daughter. That is what this record is about.”
The most memorable scene of the documentary comes when she first plays the album’s delicate  acoustic title track for her grandmother   Joanne’s  mom. The moment verges on uncomfortable  and not only because Gaga’s father   Joanne’s  brother  gets up and leaves the room in apparent distress midway through. Gaga herself seems hungry to have her telling of an ordeal she did not personally experience validated by those who did. “Did I get it right?” she asks her grandmother  mid-hug. “Yes you did ” her grandmother responds. But she has a warning for Gaga  too: “Don’t become maudlin over all this.” For now  Gaga is asking not for applause but understanding. It’s never explicitly stated  but Gaga seems to connect to  Joanne ’s story in part because of  her  own medical situation. Iconography about hospitals and crutches and wheelchairs over the years hinted that the seemingly bionic pop star faced problems of the flesh off-stage. In 2010   she  told Larry King  she  tested “borderline positive” for lupus.  She ’s still feeling the effects of the injury  she  sustained in 2013  as seen in a Five Foot Two moment when  she  pauses rehearsals for  her  Super Bowl halftime show because of hip tightness.  Fibromyalgia  appears to make that problem worse  and being a pop star in chronic pain certainly doesn’t seem easy. One scene shows  her  having  her  makeup done for a performance while sitting in a doctor’s examination room.
Gaga’s particular ailment is an almost-literal rendering of Jamison’s “pain without a cause”—which is  as  she  notes  “pain which can’t be trusted.” A poorly understood but widespread disorder that seems to inordinately affect women  fibromyalgia is sometimes assumed to be psychosomatic. “Drug Approved. Is Disease Real?” read a 2008 New York Times headline about the first FDA-sanctioned drug to treat it. Gaga has said that she wants to help raise awareness and research dollars. During one excruciating flare-up shown in Five Foot Two  she sympathizes with less-privileged sufferers of the disorder: “Like  I don’t know what I’d fuckin’ do if I didn’t have everybody here to help me.” A few moments later  she’s looking straight into the camera. “Do I look pathetic?” she asks  tear-streaked  lying on a couch  a therapist massaging her. “I’m so embarrassed.” It’s a powerful moment because the stigma of pain is clearly part of the pain itself. But it’s also aesthetically striking. To answer Gaga’s question  she actually looks like she did in parts of the “Bad Romance” video—crying  stripped down  and oddly luminous. It’s a sign of fame’s power on the viewer: Whatever lengths she might go to put person over persona  the persona remains. * * * Pop music has firmly moved on from the phase of gleeful  Technicolor artifice that Gaga stood for at her peak. Contemporaries in wildness like Kesha and Miley Cyrus have done much what Gaga has done and traded Alexander McQueen creations for cowboy boots. They have also made a diaristic turn  harmonizing their music with their angsty  tabloid sagas.
Usually this means trading on the spectacle of suffering to sell pop’s ultimate commodity—inspiration. Beyoncé’s Lemonade is the signal example  taking the sting of infidelity to spin a tale of hurt and overcoming. Kesha’s alleged abuse by her mentor and producer Dr. Luke was addressed and transcended on this year’s Rainbow. Katy Perry marketed her latest album with an on-camera therapy session in which she cried about her “real” self wanting to be known. Taylor Swift seems on the verge of unveiling a more acidic survival story. “Victim to victory” songs are always in fashion  but the latest boom relies  more than pop usually does  on the feeling of authenticity. Adult listeners of drive-time radio typically know they’re in the realm of fantasy and commerce  yet fully enjoying the confessional-pop performance means buying into the non-musical narratives surrounding them. Beyoncé rolled her own child and husband into the Lemonade visual experience. “I write this shit  baby ” Kesha insisted on a recent single. You’re explicitly asked to believe that the gap between performer and person is negligible.  Joanne  already fit into this triumphant-confessional class  with Gaga singing about family members and friends by name and roaring  “I might not be flawless but you know I’ve got a diamond heart.” The meta-text  all along  was Gaga’s own career arc—a sense that  she ’d come down from the heights  she ’d reached from 2008 to 2013  stumbled with  her  third album  and might never recover. Glimmers of past traumas and family tragedy contributed to the pathos.  Her  medical troubles would seem to retroactively add in a new layer  though it’s unclear when  she  received  her  fibromyalgia diagnosis  and little on the album can be heard as an explicit reference to illness. Certainly the lyrics about healing through love on  her  post- Joanne  single  “The Cure ” now seem a lot less generic.
But Gaga has spent the past three years deconstructing her previous project  which is its own kind of performance. Elaborate dance pop ceded ground to jazz standards  showtunes  and country rock. Tentacle gowns went into the closet; jeans and a pink cowboy hat came out. The director Chris Moukarbel shot Five Foot Two largely on handheld—maybe even smartphone—cameras. You see Gaga cooking  recording  planning  crying  bonding. In one scene  she’s topless as she chats with her team by the poolside. The implication: This is Gaga  au naturel. Yet she never seems to forget the camera. Five Foot Two documents last year’s release of [TGT]and makes clear how much Gaga’s public reboot relied on demonstrating that she  like everyone else  suffers. Gaga has increasingly mined the traumas of her own life  with songs and philanthropic efforts growing out of her rape at age 19. The dissolution of her engagement to the actor Taylor Kinney  mournfully referenced a few times in the documentary  seemed to inform the breakup-themed Joanne singles “Perfect Illusion” and “Million Reasons.” But there was a deeper source of anguish on  [TGT]. [TGT] is named for  [TGT]  aunt  an aspiring artist who died of lupus at age 19 in 1974. “Seeing what that did to [my father] and my family was the most powerful thing I experienced growing up ” Gaga tells the journalist Darryl Pinckney in the film. “I am Joanne. I am my father’s daughter. That is what this record is about.”
The most memorable scene of the documentary comes when she first plays the album’s delicate  acoustic title track for her grandmother   Joanne’s  mom. The moment verges on uncomfortable  and not only because Gaga’s father   Joanne’s  brother  gets up and leaves the room in apparent distress midway through. Gaga herself seems hungry to have her telling of an ordeal she did not personally experience validated by those who did. “Did I get it right?” she asks her grandmother  mid-hug. “Yes you did ” her grandmother responds. But she has a warning for Gaga  too: “Don’t become maudlin over all this.” For now  Gaga is asking not for applause but understanding. It’s never explicitly stated  but Gaga seems to connect to  Joanne ’s story in part because of  her  own medical situation. Iconography about hospitals and crutches and wheelchairs over the years hinted that the seemingly bionic pop star faced problems of the flesh off-stage. In 2010   she  told Larry King  she  tested “borderline positive” for lupus.  She ’s still feeling the effects of the injury  she  sustained in 2013  as seen in a Five Foot Two moment when  she  pauses rehearsals for  her  Super Bowl halftime show because of hip tightness.  Fibromyalgia  appears to make that problem worse  and being a pop star in chronic pain certainly doesn’t seem easy. One scene shows  her  having  her  makeup done for a performance while sitting in a doctor’s examination room.
Gaga’s particular ailment is an almost-literal rendering of Jamison’s “pain without a cause”—which is  as  she  notes  “pain which can’t be trusted.” A poorly understood but widespread disorder that seems to inordinately affect women  fibromyalgia is sometimes assumed to be psychosomatic. “Drug Approved. Is Disease Real?” read a 2008 New York Times headline about the first FDA-sanctioned drug to treat it. Gaga has said that she wants to help raise awareness and research dollars. During one excruciating flare-up shown in Five Foot Two  she sympathizes with less-privileged sufferers of the disorder: “Like  I don’t know what I’d fuckin’ do if I didn’t have everybody here to help me.” A few moments later  she’s looking straight into the camera. “Do I look pathetic?” she asks  tear-streaked  lying on a couch  a therapist massaging her. “I’m so embarrassed.” It’s a powerful moment because the stigma of pain is clearly part of the pain itself. But it’s also aesthetically striking. To answer Gaga’s question  she actually looks like she did in parts of the “Bad Romance” video—crying  stripped down  and oddly luminous. It’s a sign of fame’s power on the viewer: Whatever lengths she might go to put person over persona  the persona remains. * * * Pop music has firmly moved on from the phase of gleeful  Technicolor artifice that Gaga stood for at her peak. Contemporaries in wildness like Kesha and Miley Cyrus have done much what Gaga has done and traded Alexander McQueen creations for cowboy boots. They have also made a diaristic turn  harmonizing their music with their angsty  tabloid sagas.
Usually this means trading on the spectacle of suffering to sell pop’s ultimate commodity—inspiration. Beyoncé’s Lemonade is the signal example  taking the sting of infidelity to spin a tale of hurt and overcoming. Kesha’s alleged abuse by her mentor and producer Dr. Luke was addressed and transcended on this year’s Rainbow. Katy Perry marketed her latest album with an on-camera therapy session in which she cried about her “real” self wanting to be known. Taylor Swift seems on the verge of unveiling a more acidic survival story. “Victim to victory” songs are always in fashion  but the latest boom relies  more than pop usually does  on the feeling of authenticity. Adult listeners of drive-time radio typically know they’re in the realm of fantasy and commerce  yet fully enjoying the confessional-pop performance means buying into the non-musical narratives surrounding them. Beyoncé rolled her own child and husband into the Lemonade visual experience. “I write this shit  baby ” Kesha insisted on a recent single. You’re explicitly asked to believe that the gap between performer and person is negligible.  [TGT]already fit into this triumphant-confessional class  with Gaga singing about family members and friends by name and roaring  “I might not be flawless but you know I’ve got a diamond heart.” The meta-text  all along  was Gaga’s own career arc—a sense that  [TGT] ’d come down from the heights  [TGT] ’d reached from 2008 to 2013  stumbled with  [TGT]  third album  and might never recover. Glimmers of past traumas and family tragedy contributed to the pathos.  [TGT]  medical troubles would seem to retroactively add in a new layer  though it’s unclear when  [TGT]  received  [TGT]  fibromyalgia diagnosis  and little on the album can be heard as an explicit reference to illness. Certainly the lyrics about healing through love on  [TGT]  post- [TGT]single  “The Cure ” now seem a lot less generic.