[Bianculli here: Eric Gould, architect by day and new TV WORTH WATCHING contributor by night, has decided to weigh in on the imagery and messages contained within the latest Lady Gaga video. And what a hoot: Who else, I ask you, would look at one of Lady Gaga's costumes and think of -- a building?...]

Included and examined, in today's column, are all of four-and-a-half minutes of TV Worth Watching -- if not for the cultural temperature they take, but also for the mishmosh of mixed metaphors, missed metaphors, and random inanities they deliver. In the brief time it takes to watch this one, you'll most likely drop your jaw, scratch your head, and then mostly likely just shake it, disappointed and amused, as if your kid has just shown up in an O.J. Simpson mask for Halloween.

I give you the Iconoclast of the Moment: Lady Gaga and her latest music video, "Alejandro," a mash-up of shock-art retreads, including that old favorite triad: a corpse-nun eating her rosary, some simulated sex, and leather-clad storm troopers, shimmying furiously like there was no tomorrow.

Hopefully, in video art, and video music, there will be one. A tomorrow, that is.

But for now, we are stuck with Lady G -- Madonna 2.0 -- at the forefront for the moment. I freely hand it to her: She's got the dance chops, and she certainly has the fashion swagger to feed the media machine that has not tired of her yet. You simply have to admire designs that seem to suggest an apparent collision between her and one of Frank Gehry's buildings.

And style is the better part of "Alejandro," before it (intentionally) goes off the rails. It begins with Lady Gaga as a corpse-white pixie masked by some sort of binocular apparatus, looking like two soup cans with lace over the lenses. This is after the intro -- a grimy black sky, a back-lit group of men stomping in militaristic time, followed by a funeral led by Lady G with a bloody Sacred Heart on silk pillow, and then a slow zoom to a solemn-looking guy in a Speedo and a spiky Kaiser helmet.

Fair enough. You have to at least agree that Ms. Gaga and her photographer/videographer Steven Klein (veteran of Calvin Klein, Nike and Madonna shoots) have given us a consistent, dark vision. However, all this is is a visual accompaniment to some sprightly electro-pop (channeling, some say, my beloved ABBA), with lyrics about a woman who seems to not want to be the lover of Alejandro, and then not Fernando, and then not Roberto either, seemingly swearing off all men with names ending in the letter "O."

Turns out this is a piece about lost love's agony. I think. God knows how awful that is, and I could think of a few dark images for that metaphor...

Then it's on to her wicked-ripped entourage, again backlit on the cold concrete, each dancer with a black, bowl-cut haircut -- seemingly the unfortunate offspring of Michael Phelps' mother and Moe from the Three Stooges. These Gaga disciples seem to like to throw each other down on the aforementioned hard, wet concrete.

Then we're off to a sort of abstract barracks -- steel cots, with the Moe-platoon writhing around, and then all over Lady G, in bra and panties, a la Sally Bowles in Cabaret. I think there was a whip in there, too, somewhere.

Quick cuts to the red vinyl-clad corpse-nun, ruby lips, swallowing the rosary, and then even quicker to back outside (one assumes outside the dampened, concrete bunker), where we again find the furiously shimmying, leather-clad S.S., in formation with Gaga herself, adorned in a machine-gun-tipped brassiere.

That's the main part of it, but there's also a Joan of Arc cloak with a sword-cross on the sleeve; a bare crucifix-like wood piece (or maybe it was a coat rack); a kind of nighttime Kristallnacht riot with the city burning; lots of Moes running in panic; another grim looking S.S. guy, this time with full leather tie, coat and hat' and finally, Lady Gaga, stripping herself naked out of her holy robe with the bare troops again, throwing her around faux-violently, like a Busby Berkeley show gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I'm not entirely clear on what was left out. But I'm guessing Jesus should have been in there, and maybe Lot's wife, just for a pinch of salt.

I am sure the Catholics and Jews have their hands full on this one, with perhaps the Catholics edging out the Hebrews by a lash, so to speak. The Catholic League already has come out against Gaga and her director for her use of blasphemy, despite Klein's claim that the scene in question (the swallowing of the rosary beads) was Gaga's "desire to take in the Holy."

Not that I had a lot of questions about the video. It shocked me -- not for the imagery, but for the lazy appropriation of the images.

I did read a little more on it. Gaga maintains it was inspired by her love for her gay friends and admiration of gay love -- "her envy of the courage and bravery they require to be together." And Klein is on record as explaining that "the religious symbolism is not meant to denote anything negative, but represents the character's battle between the dark forces of this world and the spiritual salvation of the soul."

Artists' points taken -- although someone has to convince us this isn't just a case of pop culture eating itself in a Madonna rehash of her Catholic Blasphemer's Playground in "Like A Prayer." (Come to think of it, Klein and Gaga forgot the burning cross.) Perhaps we're seeing something amounting to fighting anti-gay extremism with similar fire. Fair enough. But why dance about it, then?

The piece is just dripping with irony anyway, intended or not, and it's better to think it was unintentional. James Montgomery from MTV commented, "Gaga has created a world that, while oppressive, also looks great." And Anthony Benigno from the New York Daily News wrote that it is "the softcore answer to The Matrix."

On its website, MTV hosts the video (which you can watch by clicking HERE) with the banner headline, "Has Lady Gaga Gone Too Far With Her 'Alejandro' Video?" Too far off course, maybe. But not too far into the realm of the truly relevant or truly shocking. (For my money, Trent Reznor's 1994 "Closer" video -- now in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection -- is the real standard for clear use of nightmare imagery.)

I don't know. There's no question the gay community should be fighting fiercely for its rights. Always. But wasn't it truly more shocking when Mel Brooks' character of director Roger De Bris, rapt with the prospect of the new play Springtime For Hitler, envisions "gorgeous showgirls in gooey gowns," and stages grinning, S.S. tap dancers, with the showgirls in headdresses of bratwurst and beer elegantly cascading down the white-stepped stage risers?

Here was Brooks, in 1968 -- a Jew, only 25 years out from the Holocaust -- meta-staging a musical comedy within The Producers, with Goebbels, Himmler and Hitler as the leads. It was an outrageous, comic, and heroic risk, an effort to deal with the unspeakable through the Jews' long-wielded secret weapon: humor.

After "Alejandro," I'm not laughing, and I haven't learned anything. But I AM writing about it, aren't I? And, after all is said and done, isn't THAT the point?