If you are of sound mind and actually willing to commit the fourteen minutes required to watch the just-leaked video for “Marry the Night,†then Vulture is reluctant to spoil the experience for you. Thankfully, as the video is fourteen minutes long, we don’t have the room to mention everything. Suffice it to say that Gaga made up some new Monster mythology, and it is just as nuts as you would hope it to be! There’s a death scene in morphine-accented French (with sassy comments about the nurses); a psychotic breakdown involving an air mattress and a box of Cheerios; a truly excellent moment involving a bedazzler; and a Chorus Line reenactment. The music doesn’t actually start until around the nine-minute mark (not counting Beethoven’s Pathetique* Sonata, which plays during the Black Swan montage somewhere in the middle), leaving plenty of time for Gaga to dance around naked (heads up, that happens) and also explain the story of her creation. It’s mostly self-aware silliness, stuff about quantum physics and finishing the painting of your life to avoid the holes of ugliness or whatever. But then, just as she’s rolled into the operating room, Gaga declares: “It’s not that I’ve been dishonest; it’s just that I loathe reality.†That last part is kind of hard to argue with.
* This post has been updated with the correct name of the Beethoven sonata mentioned: it’s Pathetique, not Waldstein. Sorry, we should never try to be fancy.