IT IS SOMETIMES difficult to tell whether Lady Gaga rose from her humble beginnings on the Lower East Side intending to be a pop star or an elaborately plotted piece of performance art. If she was afraid of becoming too much of the former, her recently-released video for “Bad Romance” has ostensibly solved the problem: she now has the full attention of upper middlebrow culture critics who see the full measure of the Gaga phenomenon played out in a five-minute smorgasbord of freakish costumes, stomach-turning exploitation, and eventual sexual domination. All set to a sugar-sweet dance track that people the world over—people who probably loved Michael Jackson but have never heard of Michel Foucalt—are swallowing at a frantic pace.

Gaga is anything but a typical tabloid starlet. Decent but not even approaching transcendent, her recorded music has scaled charts everywhere in the world where charts exist. She is constantly seen in public in mystifying, sexualized but very un-sexy attire. The gossip about her never concerns private goings-on like boyfriends and heartbreaks; as far as she wants us to know, she doesn’t have a heart. She is not interested in love; the only aspect of men she cares about is their endowment. She seems to do everything in her power to make herself alienating and unlikable, as if the more she stomps on her admirers with her iron heels, the larger the crowds will grow. The more videos she makes, the clearer it becomes that the pop star is the servant of the cultural dominatrix.

The “Bad Romance” video is hardly a groundbreaking chapter in Gaga’s series of stylized self-exegesis. It essentially retells the plotline of the high-concept, eight-minute “Paparazzi” with more intriguing villain-victims and more stunning couture. We first meet her in some sort of morgue where the sarcophagi look like space pods, dancing in white latex before she is captured and force-fed a mind-altering potion. In stage two, sleazy men and hideous cats bid on her services while she stands, crawls, and dances in front of them. (According to the numbers we glimpse in the background, she's really expensive.) In the final act, Gaga engulfs herself in flames while the highest bidder attempts to claim his prize, leaving her lying victorious beside his charred skeleton.

Throughout these unsettling proceedings, the twin images of Gaga emerge: victimized waif with eyes pleading for rescue, and terrifying force of nature that is equal parts ravenous sexual appetite and reckless disregard for human life. By the end, “Bad Romance” has presented the same arc of a Gaga affair as “Paparazzi”: her victimization is actually part of a sadomasochistic plot to assert her complete and utter domination of any man that dares to involve himself in her existence. (Men in her videos often symbolize the ravaging forces of fame.) Her pleading, unadorned eyes in “Bad Romance,” glimmer with a wicked sparkle once her polar-bear-skin-wearing, fire-breathing self has delivered a punishment characteristically in excess of the crime.

But what seems to make this particular video the best encapsulation of Lady Gaga to date is the entrancing effect it seems to have on everyone who watches it, leading to, in some cases, dozens of repeat viewings. The most typical reaction I heard from friends and Twitter acquaintances was, “I can’t stop watching it.” Yet, it has none of the anthemic bop of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” or the more normative sexiness of Shakira’s “She Wolf.” As evidenced by Gaga calling her next tour “The Monster Ball,” this video—and her career itself—is intended as a kind of horror show.

Gaga seems to have noticed that being a celebrity in the United States is, more often than not, a story of meteoric rise followed by a calamitous fall, as capitalist culture sweeps away the fading to make room for the more profitable, and adoring audience turns TMZ-briefed, gavel-banging judge. Still in her early twenties, she rejected that prospect and took Machiavelli’s advice about the superiority of fear over love. For the moment, that ferocity has made her queen in an entertainment industry that more closely resembles a state of nature every day. The seductive tracks and eye-opening videos are merely channels for the promulgation of Gaga’s explicit philosophy of fame: she will make you love her, and then she will eat you alive.