Nelson: Gaga's wild rural mashup

Last month Lady Gaga filmed part of her recently released video "You and I" in the countryside near Springfield, Neb.

Having not associated Lady Gaga's previous work with rural Midwestern life, I was excited to see how she would incorporate those gravel roads, cornfields and rustic barns from just over yonder with her typically avant-garde tableaux vivants.

I just watched the video. It is visually fascinating, a sort of reimagining of "Alice in Wonderland" filmed separately by John "post-Cougar" Mellencamp and Friedrich Nietzsche (or any other insane 19th-century Teutonic intellectual) and then spliced together during a rolling dust-up between the two for control of the editing computer.

Sorry. I'm just not smart enough to interpret what just happened to me.

When failing color commentary, I revert back to play-by-play.

The video opens with Miss Gaga sashaying down a gravel road toward the camera. Focus shifts from right foreground ditch weeds to Miss Gaga approaching in the distance in the left side of the frame. She is wearing a long black dress with a black hat you might expect to see on a woman at a funeral in New Orleans for Phyllis Diller.

(Oops. Too much detail for column space. Oh jeez. The video is 6 minutes, 22 seconds long! No such extravagance allowed in newspaper columns. Must go all Hemingway on this thing.)

Cut to muscular fellow in white dress shirt lifting Gaga's white dress with his caressing hands.

Close-up of Gaga reaching to her black high heels with semirobotic hand. Appears to be standing on Nebraska gravel road.

Close-up of Gaga in white wedding dress looking vulnerable and innocent as that muscular caressing guy is caressing her neck.

Four or so fragmentary images just raced by at near-subliminal speeds, and there were needles and darkness and sharp things like those Council Bluffs Interstate sculptures and then dripping ice cream and then Gaga in black mourning dress but then in Little Orphan Annie attire taking ice cream from creepy guy who, for some reason, has parked his ice cream truck on the gravel road I assume to be in Nebraska.

Can't help self. Video drags one into nonsensical, Faulkneresque (in length, not quality) flourishes.

Things progressing too quickly to document now. Heels. Ice cream. Caressing muscular fellow. Definitely getting an innocence-devolving-into-destructive-worldliness vibe here. Upside-down scary face.

Well, now she's just flat-out naked sprawled on a gurney or maybe a sacrificial altar as the muscular fellow does erotic stuff as she writhes erotically. Is she wearing a flesh-colored top there? Does it matter, nuditywise?

Some leather daddy/industrialized masochistic porn stuff going on here.

Image of Lady Gaga in different wild, obviously haute couture black dress with some sort of tuner-racing-chiplike thing on her chin and sunglasses that look like tungsten goggles.

Shot of barn in the distance with what I'm guessing is some of that now nose-high-by-the-Fourth-of-July genetically altered supercorn in the foreground. Yet, I imagine, the corn is not perceived by Gaga as a modern marvel, but something traditional, simple, organic, pure, maybe boring? I have no idea.

We're slowing down here, spending some quality time on that gravel road.

Bam! Miss Gaga is now a greaser smoking on a piano with herself playing that piano, which sits in the middle of a crop circle. Freaky. Nice change-up there.

She seems to have had some interesting relationships.

Bunch of Lady Gaga impersonators (or Gaga herself digitally multiplied?) group dancing in an old hay barn. Nice use of dust motes.

Oh. Here's the mermaid stuff I had heard about.

Lots of splashing and writhing, and now we learn the barn has a mill attached, or maybe it's a different place.

Things start repeating themselves after 3 minutes. Realize even Gaga has a budget.

Greaser depicted as childish, sexually clumsy, possessive, volatile-to-be-cool. Probably an early boyfriend. Is this her longtime Springfield honey as a kid? Embarrassed that I can see my senior year of high school in this character.

She's running, probably away.

Muscular fellow seems to mature from Dionysian sleazebag into that gentler, kinder, more self-aware lover guy you find at the end of all romantic comedies.

Slowing down. Waters calming. Soft embrace. Clothing is back on now.

Bored at 6 minutes. Longest I've ever remained not bored by music video.

A little more tenderness stuff. We're firmly in an idyllic Nebraska now. Seen this stuff before.

Now fade to black. Thank you.