Betwixt and Between: The Polarity of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift

“I think there are different kinds of fame. There’s a fame which is plastic and about money and then there’s a fame when no one knows who you are but everyone wants to know who you are.” – Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga)

“Nothing is permanent. So I’m very grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level. My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making art.” – Taylor Swift

Unlike the deeply distressing confessional songwriting mode and music of such classic heart-on-their-sleeve singers as Marianne Faithfull and Joni Mitchell, or even the ultra-suffering effigy of the late, lamentable Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are self-curated performance artists whose homeopathic medicine doses are dolloped out to us in artfully crafted personas always on the verge of revealing their wounds but never quite arriving at divulging it all the way. They are practically tantric in this regard. Their massively popular primal therapy sessions, conducted in ritualized public spaces and thus akin to ancient Roman colosseum spectacles, and delivered in real-time diary entries of the most flamboyant sort since Madonna, have become a kind of cultish conceptual living theatre designed to permanently suspend gratification for worshipping audiences whose fervor almost approaches the stunned crowds gathered to writhe before the early Beatles.

Donald Sutherland, 1935-2024

Elliott Gould, David Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970).

Even in a roster as quirky as the list of actors who dominated American movies in the late sixties and early seventies, Donald Sutherland – who died at the end of June, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday – was an outlier. Of course, he was different from his cohort in an obvious way: he was Canadian, born in the Maritimes and educated as an engineer at the University of Toronto, though he went on to train as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And he carried his Canadian identity with him always, through nearly six decades of a career in the U.S. – he never lost his accent or his elocution-class diction, and his acting virtues included distinctly Canadian qualities like modesty, gentleness, understatement and an ironic wit that you might miss if you weren’t listening closely enough. His skill at conveying the interior conflicts of decent men amounted to a sort of genius, and his best roles permitted him to move that skill, which has generally been relegated to supporting performances in Hollywood pictures, into the foreground. His slender six-foot-four frame made him appear paradoxically slight and imposing at the same time, as if he’d slipped off a hanger in a closet, and he had rather a goonish face (which his frequent beard tended to offset). He looked like a small-town Canadian square, but he was as much a hipster as Elliott Gould, who partnered him memorably in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the film that made them both famous. And, defying movie conventions, he was sexy at the same time, opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.