"Gaga: Five Foot Two," the documentary ostensibly about the making of Lady Gaga's latest album, opens with a home video of the global goddess pop star in workout clothes, milling about the kitchen while lunch is prepared. She wears no makeup. Her disheveled hair is up. She is utterly without glamour. Lady Gaga is a person, chatting and smiling. She is stripped of her otherworldliness.
It was a moment that made me equal parts uncomfortable and relieved. Yes, it was nice to see that the high-fashion electro-pop queen and fame monster was indeed a human being, but the shattering of her public image -- the way I perceived her until now -- was disconcerting. It made me squirm in a very literal sense.
Because I realized that I had paid to believe in a certain image of Lady Gaga, and that the willingness to pay to believe in someone or something is far from an isolate phenomenon. It infiltrates every aspect of modern life. Media and art could not exist without it.
I thought back, after finishing the altogether depressing "Five Foot Two," to other instances in which my illusions were dispelled, broken up all at once. I recalled the time I saw an old, yellowed photo of a young David Bowie ironing his pants in a modest apartment. There's the star with a million faces engaged in the daily drudgery of making one's clothes not look like shit. Ziggy Stardust waiting for the iron to heat up. The man who made performance art out of his death making sure to get that last wrinkle, right there by the back pocket. Just like you and me. Not you, Bowie. Not you.
I was sent reeling shortly after college when I accidentally found in an online search that Maynard James Keenan, the Tool frontman who had become a godlike figure for me in high school and college, ran a vineyard on the west coast. This can't be, I thought. Maynard James Keenan would never do something so normal or practical. He's surely far too busy experimenting with myriad drugs, creating transcendental art meant to enrich my life and help me understand the impersonal universe in which we exist. But no. He's a regular dude who happens to enjoy wine. Far from being beyond human, Maynard James Keenan -- like Bowie at his ironing board -- was indeed very human.
I had paid to believe. I had spent wheelbarrows of cash to believe that these artists were what I wanted them to be: explainers, examiners, knowers, synthesizers of human knowledge. I had paid to believe because I wanted to believe.
Who hasn't paid to believe in something? The short answer: no one. Sports fans pay to believe that their team's success means something. They fork over their cash and emotional investment to believe that the players and coaches and owners care about them, the fans. They don't, of course. There is no innate meaning in wins or losses. A game -- any game, anywhere, anytime -- is without meaning beyond the competition that ensues. The outcome doesn't matter. Nothing rides on a championship except for some undefinable sense of pride in a city or state. The fan's life won't change in any meaningful way. The city's prospects won't improve in any concrete manner. The players who won the title will soon be in another city, playing for other fans who pay to believe that the players care about them. The team's owner will pay proper lip service while he rakes in mountains of money from the middle and working class, all the time wearing a shit-eating grin at the realization that a fan will always pay to believe. Sports fans tether their self worth to the outcomes of the night's game. They're so willing to pay to believe that they'll make themselves miserable if things go wrong. What a steep price.
Many of us who have mistakenly believed that a single person can bring about good for our friends, family, and neighbors have paid to believe in a politician. They dispatch their slick ads with finely tailored imagery appealing to our demons and angels and they ask, with a smile and a nod, for our money. Want to believe in something bigger than you? Want to believe in me? Then chip in. Pay the toll and you're part of the movement. I paid to believe in Barack Obama in 2008. A young, naive version of myself saw the U.S. senator as a transformational figure, as The One, as Neo come to end the reign of the evil machines that suck us dry. I was happy -- thrilled -- to pay to believe in Obama. I wanted so desperately to believe in his potential to change everything -- to singlehandedly turn around the 10,000-ton tanker that is our rigged economic system -- that I willingly donned blinders and paid to believe. I was a broke local reporter trying to save enough money for an engagement ring, but I never questioned the decision: I had to believe, so I paid up.
The $10 billion self-help industry exists because people of every creed and color are holding out their fists of cash, begging to pay to believe. They're desperate for answers, for advice on how to stop thinking or feeling a certain way, for suggestions and strategies on how not be miserable. I've been there, stuck in a dark place, hoping that I could pay to believe that someone -- anyone -- had the answers for what ailed me. And for every good-hearted person selling advice for those who will pay to believe, there are a thousand hucksters and snake oil salesmen cashing in on this phenomenon. They know, like the owner of the professional sports franchise, that people want desperately to believe that someone out there holds the answers. Someone can get them out of this funk. Someone can unveil the secret to getting rich. Someone can cast out the anxiety and depression that ravages you from the inside out. Someone can infuse their lives with meaning. The answers can't possibly be within myself, we say, so let's pay to see if this smiling guy in a nice suit has what I need.
All organized religion thrives on folks paying to believe in something. If you really believe in the mission of the church, you're told, then you'll put some cash in the plate when it zips down your row on Sunday morning (though a personal check will do). If you believe, you'll pay. This is of course a barebones version of how the message is delivered, and much of the money in those offering trays goes to indisputably good causes in a nation where the rich have shredded the social safety net: food and clothes for those without, medicine for the sick, assistance for the elderly. But all this hinges on a people's willingness to pay to believe in the holiness of a house of worship. They must first believe that they're in a House of God, doing the creator's bidding, before any of these good works can come to pass. And then they have to pay up.
Why we pay to believe is hardly a mystery: from sports to self help to religion and politics, art and entertainment, we pay to believe in something beyond ourselves. We pay to believe that there is meaning in life, that we aren't cosmic accidents stranded on a lonely blue marble in the middle of a galactic nowhere, born only to die with all memory of our existence wiped from history an eye blink after we're gone. You can hear it if you listen closely: the collective cry of humanity begging to be shown the reason we're alive, right now, on this planet, with all its various horrors and beauty intertwined in our short, warm moment of consciousness. We don't have much, but we'll give it all if it means we can believe.
Maybe the meaning can be found in the pursuit of understanding any of these mysteries. Maybe we're wasting our time paying to believe when the experience of living is the meaning we seek. Lady Gaga, after all, is only human.