Lady Gaga released a music video directed by Catherine Hardwicke for her new single “Til It Happens To You,” co-written by the lady herself and Diane Warren. The song was produced for the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which focuses on sexual assault on college campuses. The video is nothing like the usual avant-garde, hyper stylized Lady Gaga music video. Nonetheless, Gaga channels her usual shock-value through the heinous images and subject material in the video itself.
In the video, an enigmatic figure leads viewers through the halls of a standard college dormitory as we see the animalistic, manipulative crimes against humanity unravel in black and white. Several violent sexual assaults take place during the course of the video — one in a bathroom, one involving being drugged at a party and another inside a recording studio. This narrative is potentially autobiographical on the part of Lady Gaga, as she has claimed a record producer raped her at age 19. The video scenes play out while Gaga delivers powerful lyrics like “Til it happens to you, you don’t know how it feels / until it happens to you, you won’t know, it won’t be real.”
The video is successful in many ways. Most obvious is the upshot of Gaga’s popularity, which significantly increases the outreach of the video’s message. To have such a raw and graphic portrayal inspires emotional response on the part of the viewers. Another strength of the video is its empowerment of survivors, as it shows the assaulted characters eventually overcoming their feelings of isolation and depression with community support.
Gaga’s music video is also informative, as it closes with the National Sexual Assault Hotline phone number (1-800-656-HOPE) and the startling statistic that “One in five college women will be sexually assaulted this year unless something changes.”
One area in which the video fell short was its failure to acknowledge that women are not the only ones being sexually assaulted on college campuses. While the numbers for men aren’t as high, Gaga and Hardwicke missed an opportunity to raise awareness for the issue of campus sexual assault as a whole rather than as an issue affecting only women. While men do exit the dorm at the conclusion with the survivors chronicled throughout the video, it is unclear whether some of these men are meant to represent survivors or supporters.
Regardless, this will likely go down as the most important music video to be released in 2015. It is timely, bold and presented on a platform that has allowed it to reach over 7 million viewers on YouTube in just four days.
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