By Ian Grey
Press Play contributor
It’s messing me up to write this. Then again it might be worse not to write it. But then again it’s in the nature of these 9-11 pieces to injure, so what the hell. It’s not like I can escape. Right off, I need to acknowledge that no matter how damaging the attack and the slow poison of its aftermath were for me, others had it far, far worse and in ways people who are not New Yorkers never hear about.
At the same time, I’ll be damned if I’m going to under-sell how much I hate the fact of this monster’s teeth still digging into my own hidden injuries, even after a decade. But like all people in the ‘at-risk’ category—before 9-11 I was already being treated for bipolar disorder and PTSD—I have to be vigilant. To block out TV. Especially news. Avoid most websites. Make certain not to even glance at the front pages of the Daily News, Post and Times.
Even then, triggers are everywhere. They’re in the hole in the skyline downtown. They’re in the sky, with every plane a potential invader, seen through my eyes seen as in a movie, in shaky cam and zoom-ins of ratcheting panic. As the day gets closer so does the black dog of depression. I isolate with movies: Spaceballs, Margaret Cho: Beautiful, Louis CK: Chewed Up, The Iron Giant, the Anna Faris comedy Smiley Face—three times. My love of fashion is a bone-deep need for beauty — beauty for its own holy sake. It fights a bottomless, ghastly, ugliness. And so I glut myself on couture cinema, on Valentino: The Last Emperor, Seamless and Lady Gaga videos.
Days pass without leaving the house.
But at the same time it’s true that you can’t completely cut out the world without a bone fide panic room, you must respect PTSD as a very patient life-taker. Every New Yorker, with severity increasing with proximity to Ground Zero itself, has experienced varying degrees of: Flashbacks, insomnia, panic attacks, numbness, muscular and skeletal pain, rage, paranoia, guilt, shame and self-blame, migraine, vision disturbances, depression, suicidal ideation and suicide.
Still, I think there's power in reporting things that bear witness. After all, I’m finally past the point of forced hospitalizations and being doped out on massive anti-psychotics.
Then again, as I write these words, today isn’t anniversary day. But, it's coming.
September 11, 2001
Anyway, this is me, and for me, 9-11 started like a movie.
At 9:15 AM on September 11, 2001, I exited the N train at Union Square in downtown Manhattan and saw hundreds of people standing stock-still and pointing towards the Wall Street area.
Some part of my brain instantly revolted against such intrinsic wrongness—getting hundreds New Yorkers to do anything at once truly is like herding kittens.
At moments like this, you don’t have language. It’s all light-speed fragments: Hundreds of people. A film? SF movie? A Body Snatchers thing with alien doubles ratting out the last real people, pointing, pointing and screaming?
No. Everything was dead silent. There were no cameras. I started moving uptown.
Somebody yelled, “Attack!” and I ran.
There was nobody in the office where I worked as a copywriter. Unattended monitors glowed on screensavers. Window blinds shivered in the wind. Everything was already so On the Beach.
I saw the first images on my computer. I looked in my wallet. I still had my World Trade Center security ID.
I saw the Towers go down. Half of my clients died in an instant.
Once it was clear my life-partner Keri was safe — she worked in the Con Edison building, a high value terrorist target, I felt the first jack of absolute terror: was something just starting?
At about noon, the first survivors appeared, covered from foot to face in a fine grey dust of compressed cement and god knew what else.
They trudged up Fifth Avenue South, silent in deep shock, still holding bags and brief cases, like they were in The Day After or Threads.
I found Keri and we found an Irish bar. A stout red-eyed woman greeted us silently with free beers just as the third building pancaked and then 9-11 started for Keri as she began to shudder and weep.
Film
As anxiously terrified as I was those first months, I was always tired. Because fear never sleeps.
Like other city compatriots, I’d stare at the 24/7 WTC collapse and Ground Zero imagery, a compulsion that in itself became a sickness of its own. I ate Ativan like candy, drank too much and still suffered panic attacks — ones that had me falling to my knees in strange bathrooms.
At home, Nick Cave’s “No More Shall We Part” was on the CD player for weeks on infinite replay because there are few things more focused than the part of you that catalogues all the minutia that seem connected to your continued survival, no matter how ridiculous.
Everything was all too much all the time. The armed troops on every subway. False attack warnings. Constant overhead whir of helicopters. The afternoon Keri and I ate lunch as we numbly watched the military swiftly evacuate the park so as to make way for a clunky black bomb squad vehicle straight out of an ‘80s action film. The sound of bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" mixed with the overhead whir of helicopters. Too much.
So I watched The Big Lebowski. Repeatedly.
What made The Big Lebowski powerful medicine was that it asserted that the most inept, powerless fuck ups would abide and even manage an acid piss on a horrible world. Well, except for Donnie.
But for a while the movies just made things hugely worse.
Because I was also working full time as a film writer, I couldn’t escape those parts of Manhattan where such screenings took place — like Times Square and Midtown — all of them high value terrorist targets .
The first film I wrote about was the Michael Douglas thriller Don’t Say a Word. Everything except for the film itself was unforgettable.
I remember I took a different subway car — one that I usually don’t take for that screening room. I knew that seriously mentally ill people do very poorly with any change from habit. I know now I had joined their ranks. I couldn’t breath, my heart was beating like it had a brain and that brain was on dirty crystal meth. Every slight rumble of cars was rewritten in my mind as the roar of sequenced smart bombs.
Then, during the film, a sad, weird thing. We see Michael Douglas piloting a skiff over the East River. And then, the Trade Center, standing, intact and…
There’s this remarkable moment in “The Body” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Buffy has discovered her mother Joyce, dead on couch in the living room. The EMT techs have given up on trying to revive Joyce when suddenly she wakes up and the EMT guy says “It’s a miracle!” and Buffy is suffused with joy and relief.
Until a shock cut reveals this is Buffy’s escape fantasy and Joyce, of course, is still a lifeless body.
That is, I believe, the process behind that happened when the World Trade Center appeared behind Douglas.
The audience applauded wildly, like delighted children, as if this entire week had been a terrible mistake of some kind.
It’s a miracle!
And then reality slammed down like an iron door and everyone became quiet as one.
At the screening of John Dahl’s Joy Ride there was a scene in the film where a car hit a wall and there’s gunfire. It was the first violence anyone had experienced since the attack.
With thousands of us dead a quarter mile away, it was horrible and nauseating, it made me angry at the film, at film, knowing that This what we are to do now. To re-learn how to play ball, cynically, without reaction, in the relentless virtual blood sport that defines American cinema.
I hated my job at this point. I sought out extremes of humanism and beauty wherever I could find them.
I didn’t care that The Man Who Wasn’t There didn’t make much sense, I loved its dedication to being silvery. (And again, sustenance from the supposedly cold Coen brothers. Go figure.)
I fell in love with Tom Twyker’s The Princess and the Warrior, which felt like a cleansing spirit-bath in life-crazy romanticism with a vibrant color palette to match. I was grateful to Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, to the way it didn’t shy from the cruel quickness of things that was our new verite.
Coney Island Baby
A month or so after 9-11 it became time to get the hell out of Dodge.
For Keri and I, that meant Coney Island. It loomed large in our legend. One of our first dates was seeing Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream — that tale of addiction, self-obliteration and delusion on the boardwalks of Coney and Brighton Beach. Hey — what’s not to love?
But Coney Island has another pull. To the low of income and the strange at heart it was a gloriously wrecked magnet to the City’s honestly odd. Even in 2001, Coney still felt like it looked in the film Imitation of Life, a place that age became, the home of America’s final for-real freak show, of the rusted glory of rides like Wonder Wheel, Parachute Drop and the Cyclone.
What we wanted was Coney’s off-season, under-the-radar stillness. We wanted Ruby’s Bar and its deep dark recesses. No terrorist would know Ruby’s, I assured myself, ridiculously.
So, Keri and I and two other friends took the long train to Coney. It was a ghost town that night, with Ruby’s nearly empty. I dropped quarters in the juke and in a gale of cleansing feedback, there came the Jimi Hendrix of Michael Wadleigh’s hippie hagiography, Woodstock, deconstructing the hell out of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, finding something intrinsically, even heroically wrecked in that famously ridiculous melody. Suddenly no music could sound more now than this.
I banged my head softly against the wall as Hendrix ripped truth in barely controlled distortion and nervous breakdown vibrato during the “in the land of the free” part, near the end, where it sounds like Hendrix’s Strat itself in on the verge of madness.
I was so fucking angry! At being so afraid all the time of a smart bomb, another plane crashing, of a subway sarin gas attacks like they suffered in Japan. Of the other shoe falling.
The only solace was watching people play with their dogs at whatever park I could find (I’d spend hours doing this) and in music.
I see me leaning against a cool aluminum listening post at the Virgin Megastore, now a Chase Bank, eyes squeezed closed, listening to The Doves’ “The Last Broadcast”, Low’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” to Johnny Cash’s new one, NIN’s “Hurt”.
But it’s David Bowie, for some time, a downtown New Yorker, and his song, “Sunday”, from his 2001 CD Heathen, that will always summon for me exactly what New York felt like during that first year. The only thing that comes close is Spike Lee’s film, The 25th Hour.
All on-edge loops, halting vocals, and never-resolving chords, “Sunday encapsulates the gluey sense of slow motion panic, of looking into the reflective glass carapace of a skyscraper and wondering if you caught the mirror image of a jetliner flying too low, of the damned sun that was always too bright.
For in truth, it's the beginning of nothing /and nothing has changed/everything has changed
I’m freaking myself out, thinking about this. The black dog’s hungry. Scar tissue forms randomly and imperfectly as parts of you just get a little numb, the slow Novocain of passing time.
But from all this awfulness, I see this glimmer as to why I can finally write this, how I’ve gotten through nine to make it to this tenth celebration of the worst day.
It’s Keri and I, after our night at Ruby's, after sleeping at a skeezy hotel, finding a lawn sale in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach.
She fixates on these two really old tweed suitcases filled with half-century old linens.
She drags them to the immaculate, ocean-wind-cleansed boardwalk. The surf is high.
Even as we’re halfway back to Coney Island she’s still dragging them and I yell, “Why are we doing this?”
And she yells back, “I don’t know!” And “Won’t you help me?”
Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play.
In an incredibly discomfiting confessional moment, he said that when he fucks Gaga and she comes, she can’t stand to look him in the face because she can’t stand to share an honest moment. Then he and a dance troupe in Calderone chic high-kicked into a jazzed up version of “Yoü And I,” complete with West Side Story-style choreography and a shredding Brian May cameo. When the Queen guitarist ended the song by leaning affectionately against his front man, I couldn’t help but flash back to May’s time with Mr. Freddie Mercury, and sense that a baton was being handed down, as May once sang, “from father to son.”
Understanding the flaws in Gaga’s confessional auto-erotica becomes easier when you A-B it with P!nk’s flawless journey into queered doppelgänger territory in her video for "Sober". Directed by 
And so I wonder if the reason for the video’s flaws, such as its uncharacteristically twitchy editing and the sense that Gaga is constantly trying to cut away from things, might be less of a creative crisis and more the manifesting humanity of the artist. It might be that this slip into confessional caused a very sudden, frightening sense of nakedness that almost required the birth of Mr. Calderone. This isn’t Gaga creating abstractions about poker faces, paparazzi or teeth. For the first time, this is about her showing her soft places to millions in something approximating traditional singer-songwriter mode. But this being Gaga, standard definitions always blur and mutate. The video, as dysfunctional to the rest of us as much as it is an art piece, can’t help but work to protect her from real pain, doing so with a wild storm of imagery and other beautiful things. It’s what anyone with a bohemian broken heart does except, when you’re Gaga, you get to do it with a full film, couture, makeup, lighting and CG crew. You get to invent Jo Calderone, who may bust your balls about your intimacy problems, but clearly has your back.
It’s an argument that’s very friendly with quantum logic leaps that allow the Transformers toy line to be grouped with 
What really isn't considered or countenanced is the idea that the classical cinema style can actually ruin good films. Despite not being much of a Spielberg fan, I do like Minority Report very much. But I thought watching it was a fucking chore. The film — with its primary theme of humans vs. technology — was so classically fussed over, every scene perfectly flowing into the next one like auteur mercury, that it began to feel as if one of the film's servo-mechs had directed it. Too often Spielberg seemed so in love with this seamlessness that my eyes glazed over: Please god, let there be a jump cut, a weird angle, a burst of unexpected light — anything! Ah, but Minority Report was perfect, like they used to make 'em! What else could matter? Damn these new directors playing on the classical cinema lawn, and making such a mess! Pretty soon they’ll be making Lady Gaga videos!
It’s depressing that the ultra-conservative pro-classicists will not even consider that there might be something valuable occurring through these "chaos" films, planting the seeds of a new movement and establishing a new, valid way of seeing things for a new generation. Can it be possible that those young people born after the advent of 8-bit video games experience everything faster, harder, more intensely and more vaguely than the generations that came before it, on multiple levels, in both ecstatic and numbed-down ways? Whatever the explanation, classical cinema is not and never again will be their answer. It doesn't match the experience of a generation of Facebookers, Tweeters and Call of Duty players. It just doesn’t. No amount of hectoring will change that.
It’s already a tired remark but it’s no less true: in the pulsing sensorium of multimedia, the sit-down, stand-alone feature film becomes kind of quaint, unless somebody does something to jack it into the world as it is now. And that's what "chaos cinema" aims to accomplish. The style that many of you hate is probably the only thing (aside from that other thing you probably hate, 3D) persuading people to endure an increasingly god-awful cinematic experience. Here in New York City, I sat through nine full-blown commercials and just as many trailers, along with ads for the fucking theater I was sitting in — an entire 35 minutes of advertisements — so I could watch what turned out to be a decent "classical" film that would look no worse in my home theater, and cost me a hell of a lot less money.
Along with the musty taste of a museum, there is, without question, the sour tang of elitism in the reflexively pro-classical argument, as critics pretty much demand that filmmakers to do things this way, not that way. Meanwhile, outside critical circles, cinema is doing great, new, amazing things, bringing me joy by gleefully blowing away those sagging cobwebs of "classical cinema." 
And without this "chaos cinema," I wouldn’t have 
Some basic Alphas stuff: They’re a group of genetically super-powered people who work in a shleppy Queens, New York office under the guidance of Dr. Rosen (
What I enjoy most, though, are the overlapping dialogue/mumblecore groove and the way these diverse personality types come together to create a coherent, interdependent family. There is a scene where Rachel, the most vulnerable member of the team, is attacked by the Oedipal Wrecker I mentioned at the top of this piece. The villain chooses her because Rachel feels the most rejected by her biological family and is in dire need of some kind of parental love. We also learn how the Wrecker kills, and it’s a doozy: her love causes the secretion of chemicals in your brain that are like super love-heroin, and when she tells you to scram, your body goes into a withdrawal so severe it nearly causes your head to explode. What a bitch.
Deal is, genre-loving viewers have special needs. They attach themselves to, and find themselves in, fantasies like Alphas, to the point where they love them. Marvel's X-Men wouldn’t mean much if Wolverine, Cyclops and Beast clocked out at 5 p.m. and went home to dinner with a spouse. Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is their home. Until Alphas' characters cut the cord, until Dr. Rosen’s office becomes their primary residence, there will be a ceiling to Alphas' level of alt.family awesome.
As you, your family, friends, cat and aquarium fish may already know, Falling Skies wasn't awesome. It was godawful. At first, anyway. The series from Steven Spielberg and Robert Rodat (screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan) managed to take a fool-proof concept — a scrappy Boston crew fights the extaterrestrials who have already leveled most of the Earth—and turned it into some of the worst TV that God’s once-green Earth ever suffered through.
Someone — presumably either Rodat or Spielberg — was convinced that people who watch TV are incredibly stupid — even more stupid, I would argue, than those who pay to see Michael Bay's Transformers movies, which Spielberg executive produced. So along with Tom's not-so-helpful history lessons, Falling Skies 1.0 fronted some of the most annoying, trite dialogue ever uttered in a genre TV series. For example, Tom liked to clarify who was related to whom — a lot. This resulted in Tom shouting things along the lines of “I’m his father!” or “He’s my son!” or even better, “He’s my son and I’m his father!” Others characters came out swinging with variations on “We lost his mother in the war with the aliens!” and “As a father, I must take the fight to the aliens, who recently decimated this land, which is in Boston!” “Yes, this battle," Tom shouts. "It reminds me of the American Revolutionary War, where a small band of highly motivated resistance fighters beat a vastly larger force!” It was genre TV for slow people.
But the undeniable low point of Skies 1.0’s had to be the aesthetic demotion of Moon Bloodgood, who played 
First Bloodgood started looking more like her usual, gorgeous self. Then the plot strand she occupied—something about her use of a blowtorch to sever the alien bio-mechanical mind-control harnesses attached to POW adolescents’ spines—began offering premium David Cronenberg-ian mind-body disturbances. Skies 1.0 lousiness officially bit the dust when Dr. Glass decided she’d just had it up to here with a jailed skitter and rammed her arm through the bars and down the creature's throat while it whimpered, ripped its brain out, and flung the ickorous mess on the table.
Skies 2.0 replaces Skies 1.0’s retrograde patriarchal set-up with a sense of tables being turned, of things falling apart, of familial anarchy in the USA. Dr. Anne now blowtorches harnesses off of kids’ spines, rips skitter brains out of their heads, shoot guns effectively, and basically Ripleys things the fuck up.Meanwhile, Pope (Colin Cunningham), Falling Skies 2.0's resident scumbag, is being rehabilitated into a semi-father figure who can make armor piercing bullets and IEDs while charming Tom’s youngest son. And Tom's middle kid, 
Along with Falling Skies 2.0's boldfaced cathartic craziness and familial reversals, these episodes have also tumbled to something quiet that’s intrinsic to the appeal of all post-apocalypse entertainment, something given extra urgency during the current dismal economy spin: It's the idea that whether it’s 
While Alphas works its small patch of mutant family ground hoping to build enough viewership to get another season, Teen Wolf provides the most complex, mature and existentially unsettling look at the American family around.
The show’s sensibility can be summed up in one scene. Sixteen-year-old 
The series takes place in a fictional Northern California suburb called Beacon Hills (actually Atlanta) and seriously, you can’t throw a rock in that place without hitting a sign that says “Familial horror—Next stop." Standing between Scott and his new love Allison are Allison’s family and — you guessed it! — they happen to be a clan of werewolf hunters led by the disturbingly mercury-eyed Chris Argent (J.R. Bourne). Even more family horror comes via season one's ultimate big bad, a creature called The Alpha — a mysterious, fanged, 20-foot tall, laser eyed CG monstrosity who morphs into human form. That human side of the character bears a grudge against a certain werewolf because a certain someone obliterated his entire family.
As this show hit its operatic finale, Teen Wolf uniqueness has became self-evident. The show's creative team takes its viewers deep into the souls and thoughts of its characters, presenting multiple hearts of darkness. It was a courtesy extended even to the show's ultimate Big Bad, The Alpha. Our heroes Scott, Stiles and Allison do eventually confront the creature with lab-class IEDs, but just as we’re supposed to feel all triumphant watching the teens engulf the thing's body in flames, director Russell Mulcahy and creator/showrunner Jeff Davis switch to the Alpha's point of view. What we see is unsettling. Weeping, the torched beast flashes back to the image of his family trapped in a basement, burning to death while he helplessly watched. In that moment, viewers come to understand this boy chose to become a werewolf only to gain vengeance on his family’s killers, and that fateful decision corrupted him and cost him everything. He dies, screaming with the pain of loss and and horrified by the realization of what he had become. Just when you think you're about to get a boo-yah hit of vengeance, the ultimate villain becomes a tragic figure and viewers can't help but empathize with him and mourn his fate.
In an era where 
Successful genre television shows like Alphas, Falling Skies and Teen Wolf reflect their viewers’ fears, secret desires and perceived realities. Alphas is a hit because, like X-Men, it not only assuages the viewer's fear of their otherness — their feelings of not belonging — but it also creates a fantasy family of Odd, and depicts relationships that viewers can rely on, maybe ones they enjoy because they never experienced anything like them in life. (Series co-creator Zak Penn also co-wrote X-Men: The Last Stand) There’s a bumper crop of cultural energy serving this need, in 
Following the filming of that legendary documentary, Lance moved from Santa Barbara, California to New York City. He had his own dreams — mostly all things Warhol-ian and Velvet Underground-ish — and he moved into the Hotel Chelsea, the one immortalized in Warhol’s three-hour experimental film, 
I see Lance closing his eyes and imagining the ghosts of those that came before: 
Anyway, Cowboys and Aliens. It seems to be about Jake (
Unlike the Iron Man movies, which were pretty much entirely bifurcated enterprises — part live action, part manga, with little effort to blur the transitions — Cowboys and Aliens endeavors to create a single world to house both its pioneer town/Wild West reality and its buried-under-the-desert, super-mothership CG showdowns.
And Ford? He glowers. So that leaves Olivia Wilde. I worry for her career. She owns a beauty so dazzling, so absolute in its porcelain perfection that it seems she’ll be doomed to always be cast as supernaturals, which is obviously the deal here. Thing is, she’s a very good actress. Her Ella, distastefully designed as fanboy bait only, revolts in depths and color. There’s something just the tiniest bit weary and aching when she sees Jake remembering really bad things (or what would be really bad things if Favreau didn’t use his filmmaking skill to mute them). And other times there’s something fascinatingly hermetic in her affect: she’s so into her own quiet strangeness that you watch more closely, waiting for the human tell. Favreau smartly favors very close close-ups when filming Wilde, and she never lets him down.
Which leaves us with aliens. Imagine if someone took grey leather and stretched it over a Terminator’s skeleton, made heads that are too small with huge black-blue crystalline eyes and arms that are too long and end in oversized bio-swords, then threw in chests that split open to reveal incredibly gross combination mouths/arms. The creatures are strong, super-fast, sadistic, and bloodthirsty, and they look cool getting blown up. Favreau may approach the the Western part of the movie with a whiskey bottle of don’t-care, but for the aliens part — the part that will attract our cineaste nation of boys — he went above and beyond. For the rest of us, there’s Wilde. While Woodrow and his Indian friends impotently shoot six-shooters and arrows at these fast bastards, Ella guides Jake through the electric blue intricacies of the creepy mothership’s innards. While everyone is falling off horses and/or rocks, Ellen performs one act of heroic selflessness after another.
But there was something about the series that was intrinsically at odds with a huge swath of the people living in the part of the country where the show was set. Yes, NBC screwed the pooch from the git-go, marketing to teen boys a show that often centered on Tami giving birth control tips to girls. Then it tried selling at steep discounts online, adding desperation to the mix. Then NBC announced that reruns would appear on ESPN and the female-friendly Bravo network after which it debuted a killer new tagline: “It’s about life.” Finally, NBC struck a co-financing deal with DirecTV. Which meant that at various times, the show might be available on DirecTV only, or DirecTV and then NBC.
Yet FNL was still, for five years running, a continual pop culture presence via new or repeated episodes. For five years it was just kind of, like, around. If you followed TV at all, you knew about it, you knew it was worth watching and having an opinion on and it wasn’t hard to find out where and how to see it. And still, beyond a wonderfully passionate fanbase, the prospect of roping in an even moderate following remained a chimera. Hats off to Peter Berg and his collaborators for having the skill, the vision, the steel-plated balls to create five seasons of simple, messy truths. And there may be more: as I type this, there’s tentative news on the FNL front. Following in the footsteps of 
Now, it’s admittedly a sketchy business performing cultural obituaries and looking for meaning in failure. But this is all kinds of different. This series failed to become even a modest hit, despite being ludicrously, specifically good, and having multi-corporate media muscle pushing it (however ineptly) directly but warmly with things that are now driving a country collectively off the rails. Maybe we should look at what’s rusting those rails.
By the finale, Tim Riggins has rejected a college scholarship in order to work in his garage business and build his dream house. We see Luke, son of an unstable, Bachmann-esque mother, getting on a bus for service in the Army—but there’s a sinking feeling regarding the wars started by the regime that was in power when FNL premiered. Better to focus on Tyra, whose hard road to education has paid off. She’s in college. Her lovable dork of an ex, the indie-guitar-playin’ Landry, is in college, too. Ditto that picture of soft-spoken Texan gentility, Matt Saracen (
Derek’s visits with Peter are pretty much defined by his fear of what—not even who, perhaps—lives in that horribly still, staring body. Even Stiles’ goofball fears of being gay if he does this or does that are not, I’m certain, about an actual fear of queerness, but a fear of forcibly turning into something else against his will. I already trust show creator Jess Davis to feel certain we’ll find out why Stiles is so frightened.
As I write this it’s been a month, a small eternity in social media time, since “Born This Way” (or ‘BTW’ for short) dropped. I find myself trying to solve this mystery of whys. As in: Why does Born This Way affect me so personally? Why are its effects are so damned prolix? Why it’s so freakin’ hard to put words to this experience? Why does every answer raise five more questions? Sure, you can shrug off Born This Way as gold-standard song craft, encompassing New Order-y electro, queered Springsteen, post-Sparks chamber pop and more, as an ADHD generation’s Sgt. Pepper's. But the problem with Lady Gaga as a critical subject is that there’s no journalistic preset for responsibly covering a recording artist and performance artist, video director, chatty talk show guest, fashionista, radical queer activist and hug-giving populist. Since there’s no ‘right way,’ intuition tells me to err on the side of excited overkill, and be as subjective as fact-telling allows.
Anyway—midway through BTW I felt trapped between crying and laughing with a lump in my throat, and feeling as though if I heard much more I’d simply lose my shit, and that if I didn’t hear more I’d be really pissed. I took to Facebook, to Twitter, to my blog. I had to talk about this…this…event. Were other people spazzing out like this? What did “like this” even mean? There was spazzing to spare. This was, after all, the week Gaga eclipsed 10 million Twitter followers. OMGs flew into the cybersphere at record rates.
Even the album-track lark that is “The Queen” combines pealing synth church bells, Brill Building idiom, Darlene Love-ing vocals, and hip-switching Shindig! beat with 
See, there is no cult of Gaga. Oh, fans do get obsessed (cough, cough). But there is no creepy text, no Fountainhead for the Poker-Faced. There’s nothing for fans to follow beyond Gaga’s repeated insistence that BTW is about fans seizing their right to be metaphorically reborn and reborn again until they get it right, or as the great Brit wit Stephen Fry, himself a passionately out and proud adult Monster, put it, to “find out who you are and be it.” But actually doing that is hard work, day in, day out. And that’s where Lady Gaga — in her Tweets, lyrics, Facebook reminders, multi-lingual talk show appearances, by her sheer, relentless, media-piercing, atmospheric Gaganess — most vividly earns her keep. It’s by being a best-case-scenario reflective surface for her fans’ dreams. 
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