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Single Sex and the Girl By
Joseph Sobran, from the August 12, 1991, issue of National Review. |
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A few minutes later, we see that uncompromised artistic integrity as she lies on a bed onstage. The stage is dark, except for the bed. Standing beside her are two black male dancers wearing weird conical brassieres. As she sings "Like a Virgin," she vigorously massages her crotch, moaning and arching her back spasmodically. There's more, but you get the basic idea. The huge crowd goes wild. Madonna is a genius at getting attention. Everything she does gets attention — her records, her videos, her movies, her marriage, her divorce, her amours (including a joke that she'd had a lesbian relationship with the comedienne Sandra Bernhard). When she showed up at the Cannes Film Festival with her hair dyed a new color, her face appeared on the front page of the New York daily News. She has been on the cover of every magazine except National Geographic. How does she do it? as she admits, she's not a great singer, a great dancer, or even — as least in repose — a great looker. She can't act. Yet she has the most flamboyantly theatrical personality since … well, who was the last one? Bette Davis? Joan Crawford? Tallulah Bankhead? Some people have what I can only call contagious vanity. You may even dislike them, but you can't take your eyes off them. Madonna is like that. In a country where people want to be liked (maybe even more ardently than they want to be loved), she dares you to hate her. "Madonna is the true feminist," writes Camille Paglia, herself a sort of anti-feminist feminist. "She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism … Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny — all at the same time." Kink
and Danger An even more explicit video, "Justify My Love," did succeed in outraging people, and even easy-going MTV refused to play it. "The video is pornographic," Miss Paglia writes. "It's decadent. And it's fabulous. MTV was right to ban it." But she chides Madonna for coping out on Nightline by pleading "her love of children, her social activism, and her condom endorsements." If you want to shock people, go ahead and shock 'em. But don't blame them for being shocked. The trouble is that Madonna wants to have it both ways. (One problem in writing about her is that everything tends to sound like a double-entendre.) she clearly knows what she's doing, but wants to pretend she doesn't. Her calculation is shown in one sequence in Truth or Dare when her tour arrives in Toronto and she is told that the police are prepared to arrest her if she does the masturbation bit. She asks what the penalty is. She learns she'll probably just be booked, fined, and released. This, to her, is a cheap price to pay for the international front-page publicity she stands to get, so she goes ahead with it. The cops back down and do nothing. Never has the structure of incentives been so favorable to artistic martyrdom. A similar event occurs in Italy, where she finds on her arrival that the Vatican has denounced her in advance. She holds a press conference, and says that as an Italian-American she resents this prejudicial treatment. Hers is no "conventional" rock act, but "a total theatrical experience." The note of pique sounds sincere enough, but she also knows that in her terms the Vatican has done her a favor. Madonna has a keen sense of whom it's profitable to offend and whom it isn't. She surrounds herself with blacks and homosexuals. She is heavy into AIDS education: "Next to Hitler, AIDS is the worst thing to happen in the twentieth century," she told Vanity Fair recently — a good, conventional, and convenient view to hold in her line of work. And when the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles attacked her for including the phrase "synagogue of Satan" (from the book of Revelation) in one of her songs, she apologized. In the film, one of her dancers worries that his scene of simulated sec with her will hurt his career. "In this country it works the other way around," she answers. "The more notorious you are, the more you are going to work! Don't you guys understand that?" Indeed. Nothing is more conventional than the daring. In Truth or Dare, she talks nonstop raunch, bares her breasts, gets into bed with a naked dancer and whoops about the size of his organ (it's all right, he's gay), and much, much more. The
Good Christian Charity is of course the supreme Christian virtue, and those who fail in chastity often insist that they make up for it in charity. But there is more than one way of being uncharitable, and self-serving solicitude for today's accredited victims — "compassion," for short — doesn't necessarily cover a multitude of sins. In Truth or Dare we learn that Madonna leads her troupe in prayer before every performance. But the tone of her prayer is imperious and stagy. The viewer wonders if praying with the boss — or rather standing there submissively while she prays — is part of the job description of dancer. The question acquires a special urgency when the prayer turns into a chewing-out of some of those in the circle. She stops just short of demanding divine retribution against those who have offended her. Madonna is even less charitable toward the Church itself. "I've always know that Catholicism is a completely sexist, repressed, sin- and punishment-based religion," she told an interviewer for Us magazine. She was even blunter to Vanity Fair: "I think it's disgusting. I think it's hypocritical. And it's unloving. It's not what God and Christianity are all about." Nearly every interview she gives includes bitter remarks about the Church and its "rules." It's the only subject, apart from herself, she regularly talks about. But her father is still a faithful Catholic, and in Truth or Dare we see her fretting at the idea of his seeing her perform "Like a Virgin." In fact she does "tone it down" when he's in the audience, and she hales him onto the stage to be introduced to the crowd. He seems a mild fellow, confusedly proud of his famous daughter. Her anxiety about being seen by him in flagrante is puzzling: she seems bent on offending everyone who believes in the things he believes in, but not him. Why this exemption? If she hates the faith she was raised in, why doesn't she blame the man who raised her? "She doesn't want to live off-camera," jokes Warren Beatty, her beau at the time of the filming. "Why would you bother to say something if it's off-camera?" Because Madonna finds everything about Madonna absolutely fascinating, that's why. Imagine a film in which it's left to Warren Beatty to sound the note of common sense. "I find myself drawn to emotional cripples," Madonna says, explaining the odd assortment of characters she surrounds herself with. "I like to play mother." Oh. We see her visiting her own mother's grave (for the first time); naturally, she dresses in black for the occasion, brings a camera crew along, and lies down to kiss the tombstone. We see her backstage, complaining about a mike failure to a hapless technician. We see her dining with friends. We see her shopping in Paris. We see her meeting an old school chum, who she tells us once did something naughty to her at a pajama party. (The school chum, now a mother of five, denies it when informed of it; she looks shocked by this ambush, having named a daughter Madonna.) We see her telling someone or another that her mission is to be "provocative" and "political." We see, in fact, two hours of this carefully staged "spontaneity," and two hours trapped in a dark room with that ego fells like a week. The
Real Madonna Well, if we never know the real Madonna, we won't have Madonna to blame for it. She talks about herself volubly, incessantly; she poses for photo stills dressed up as Marilyn Monroe and other sexpots. It's as if her privacy might unfairly deprive us of something. Or rather, as if she wanted to become all the fascinating women of the past, and reveal their mysteries to us. Instead she creates the disconcerting impression that all they mystery may have been bogus; maybe those women were like her: self-absorbed little bores who talked in cliches about "art" and "truth," when they weren't talking about themselves. One would rather not know. As for "truth," Madonna isn't interested in any that may inconvenience her. It never crosses her mind that there may be more to Catholicism than her spiteful parody of it, which is of an order of glibness that would embarrass Phil Donahue. For her there is no fundamental order in life, only arbitrary "rules." Do whatcha want, as long as you practice "safe sex," that mirage of those who think selfishness and sensuality can be calculating and civic-minded even at the peak of ardor. It isn't just that she's hopelessly banal whenever she tries to share an insight. It's that she has reached that pitch of egomania at which celebrity supposes itself oracular. That's when you say things like "Power is a great aphrodisiac," and you think it sounds impressive. (We may note in passing that the Me Decade is now entering its third decade.) And as for "art," well, philosophers differ. But it's widely believed by wise people that art and ego sit uneasily together. The true artist, even if his ego is as muscular as Beethoven's, creates something outside himself. Art is not "self-expression" in the sense that its focus of interest lies in its creator; rather, it is self-contained. Its value doesn't depend on our knowledge of the artist. Hamlet is a great play no matter who wrote it. Parsifal is a great opera even if Wagner did compose it. But for Madonna, art is defined by the censors: it's whatever they don't like. So someone who gets the censors howling must be an artist. Silly, but a lot of people agree with her, and they buy tickers. Madonna offers something new under the sun: vicarious self-absorption. It takes a special kind of imagination to identify with a solipsist. Madonna just doesn't glory in herself: she glories in her self. And Truth or Dare suggest a novel ambition: to make the self, even in its private moments, an object of universal attention. Who was the love of your life? someone asks her. "Sean," she murmurs, meaning her ex-husband, Sean Penn (of whom it was once said that he had slugged every photographer except Karsh of Ottawa). Sean, she explains, was madly jealous and domineering, but "at least he paid attention." Better hostile attention than none at all. Like most pop music, Madonna's songs are about love. But love is the subject about which she shows no understanding at all. She is the perfect expression of an age that has reduced the erotic to the sensual: the gratification of the self rather than the yearning for union with another. "Lovers" become interchangeable and succeed each other quickly, each being merely instrumental to the self and its cravings. Real love is like art: it demands the subordination of the ego. Kinky, exciting, shocking: these are the attributes of love as she conceives it. it would make no sense to tell her that sodomy is at best a stunted and misdirected form of eros, since heterosexual love, as she exemplifies it, has the same character. The purpose of this love is neither permanent union nor procreation, but pleasure and ego-enhancement. For her, in fact, the erotic isn't all that different from the autoerotic, except that there happens to be another person present. But the word "autoerotic" is self-contradictory. Being in love with yourself isn't love. and having sex with yourself hardly qualifies as sex. The Victorians thought masturbation led to blindness. If they'd said moral blindness, they might have had a point. At least Madonna seems to intimate a connection. "Masturbation," Woody Allen has said, "is having sex with someone you love." When we watch Madonna doing "Like a Virgin," clutching her private parts (if they can be called private any more), simulating ecstatic convulsions, we're seeing her having sex, as it were, with someone she loves, all right — maybe the only one she can love. |
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one scene in Truth or Dare — a documentary, of sorts, of
her "Blond Ambition" concert tour — Madonna phones her
father to ask if he's coming to see her perform. He says he understands
her act is pretty "racy" and inquires as to whether she'll
"tone it down" for him and the family. No, she answers;
she won't "compromise my artistic integrity."
