Yeah, at 5’1” and (apparently) 108 pounds, I doubt if the Gaga Girl packs much of a punch, but if you believe the latest reiteration of A Star Is Born, she can send a normal size guy reeling with just one blow.1
This is just one of the many questions raised by ASIB, including “Who is gayest? Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, or Lady Gaga?” Another is “How could Lady G keep a straight face in this supposed behind the scenes look at the music business, which is in fact the precise opposite of her actual career?”
There are (probably) many others, but I didn’t stick around to see them either asked or answered, opting instead to take a walk along the Potomac River, followed by a stroll through scenic Georgetown, followed by a fifteen-minute wait for a bus, during which I perused that Karl Marx classic, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, which I heartily recommend. All of this was better than the cheesy tale of how a sweet, innocent kid becomes the biggest star in the world overnight just by being herself. “Write your own songs! Sing from the heart! Just be yourself!” Hey, it worked for Madonna, didn’t it? Not to mention Lady Gaga!
I saw the first two versions of ASIB but passed on the 1976 Streisand-Kristofferson vehicle, but even though I didn’t see it, I could still laugh when, in 2018, Lady Gaga proudly declares that she’ll never get a nose job, which Streisand was famous for, you know, forty years ago!2 It was tedious seeing Lady G over and over again in extreme close-up, with trembling voice and trembling lips, in that sort of overwrought mike emoting that Maya Rudolph used to do on SNL in parody of whoever it was who was popular back then. And it was painful to see Alec Baldwin show up, so hungry for a paycheck that he was willing to do a one-line walk-on (“Ladies and Gentleman, Ally!”3), introducing Lady G as the musical guest on SNL.
So why did I even go to see a film even more banal than I expected, a film that People magazine would probably find bland?4 Because I wanted to recount what is to me the greatest bad line in movie history, from the 1954 Judy Garland/James Mason version. Tough guy Jack Carson plays oafish studio publicist Matt Libby, who spends his life covering up for front-page screw up Norman Maine (Mason). When Maine’s career falls to pieces, Libby gloats and ridicules the poor lush mercilessly. Then in the death scene, we see Maine wade out into the ocean, clearly intending to never come back. There’s a cut to Carson in close up, awkwardly answering a ringing telephone in a very poorly staged scene. He listens intently for a few seconds, mechanically hangs up the phone, turns to face the audience directly, and says in an earnest voice, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”
Afterwords
Today, a lot of people won’t even recognize that line, the tag from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”, which was then the last word in fifties existentialism, though I’ve always felt that Eliot was much too downbeat about life. Lighten up, Tom! Have some fun!
- Later, fellow co-star Bradley Cooper (as “Jackson Maine”) also scores a knock-down. Stars punch! ↩︎
- I read the synopsis for the 1976 pic in Wikipedia and there is no mention of nose jokes. ↩︎
- Even though she’s only released one album at this point, she’s already reached “one name” status! ↩︎
- Excuse me for not checking. If People didn’t find it bland, they should have. ↩︎
