Critics analyzed the military look and scenes. The soldiers wore German underwear from the Interwar period and black shirts and leather jackets; for the authors Sally Gray and Anusha Rutnam, they represented "Italian fascist-inflected male sartorial aesthetics". In the Journal of LGBT Youth, Gilad Padva wrote that the military look is "queered by the explicit homoerotic photography, stylized choreography, the revealing outfits, their exposed muscles, and their sensual interactions". Padva wrote that the intimate interactions between the male dancers "(choreo)graphically challenge the hegemonic heteromasculinity and machismo", and Gaga's dominance reverses "the notorious heteronormative power relations" where she becomes "the penetrator rather than the penetrated". Literary critic Craig N. Owens wrote that some scenes of Gaga and the soldiers feature misplacement of the heart and the penis. For example, the beginning shows a muscular young man in a helmet and black briefs; he covers his crotch with a pistol. Owens thought the gun symbolizes the covered penis and indicates its displacement onto the upward-facing finial on the top of the helmet on his head. Owens believed the ending portrays organ replacement in that the top of Gaga's suit is changed into a machine gun-carrying bra. He found that this alluded to the ending scene of Gaga's "Bad Romance" video, in which she wears a pyrotechnic bra.
