madonna and subversion.

the other night, BoyCat and i saw roughly the last half of Madonna’s new documentary I’m Going to Tell You a Secret. having watched Truth or Dare few year ago for a final paper i was writing for a Visual Studies class, when i realized that this was her new documentary, part of me had to watch. i was intensely curious as to how it would be similar to, and different from Truth or Dare, which was such a sensation when it came out almost fifteen years ago.

other than the fact that both movies interspersed behind-the-scenes footage with concert footage, and the fact that they are both about Madonna, the two movies had little in common. i think it’s an interesting cultural study to see how much Madonna has changed (and hasn’t changed) in the roughly twenty years that she’s been a superstar. i’ve written on this blog before about how ambivalent i am concerning Madonna as a feminist icon. I think this new documentary did little to change my mind either way, but it reminded me how complicated of a figure Madonna is (in a cultural sense – who knows what she’s “really” like, and even if we did, i think it’s irrelevant). i remember being somewhat dismayed when she got married and started wearing jackets that said Mrs. Ritchie and jaunting around the English countryside with her baby in a Silver Cross pram. what is this, re-invention as a slave of the patriarchy? oooh, very subversive. so subversive that i almost can’t tell that it’s subversive at all.

and i realize that sort of judgment is unfair, because she’s her own person and can do whatever she damn well pleases (as she’s made known many times, by humping the floor at the VMAs or getting naked with Vanilla Ice or having a baby with a straggly-haired personal trainer or whatever). but on the other hand, she put herself out there as a public figure, and she fastidiously cultivated an image as a button-pusher, as an edgy artist, as a subverter of the dominant paradigm! so i have the right to at least comment on the irony of her little foray into high Western propriety.

of course it’s not that simple. i appreciated hearing about her wearing a shirt that said mother on the front and fucker on the back – i appreciated the one truly edgy moment she injected into the video of her duet with Britney (it involved a cane, Madonna’s crotch, and the line “well then come over here, i’ve got something to show you”) – i appreciated her artistic critiques of american consumerism and war mongering on “American Life.” in short, i appreciated that she didn’t erase all traces of subversion from her public life and her art. as problematic as I think some of her old subversion was (really, don’t get me started. i could totally post the whole 12 page paper about why Madonna failed feminism in a larger sense and paved the way for Britney’s rise to fame – it contains copious amounts of obnoxious theoretical jargon, though, so i won’t do that to you), in a way i feel starved for anything even remotely like it nowadays. i mean, really, do we have anything at all like “Express Yourself” on mtv now? well, we don’t even have music on mtv now, but you know what i’m talking about.

i feel like there is such a gaping deficit of any sort of incisive social commentary going on in mainstream culture that it’s scary. everything is such mass-produced, corporate-controlled, fully sanitized schlock – anything with even a hint of moral or cultural subversion is snuffed out. Green Day is the only exception that i can think of right now. and no harm meant to Green Day, but that is fucking sad.

there was a concert scene in I’m Going to Tell You a Secret of the title song from the American Life album. Madonna and her dancers were dressed up in military uniform type get-ups, and some other dancers were wearing clergy type outfits, and some pretty disturbing war footage pulsed across the screens in the background. the editing of the scene conveyed the frenetic energy of the whole number, which in turn evoked the sense of a culture spinning out of control, turning on itself, on the brink of collapse or destruction or both. it was the first time in years that i’ve watched mtv and felt anything other than total disgust. and then the documentary cut to a fan outside the arena after the show who said, “i though i was coming to a concert, not a democratic convention.”

and that’s where we’re at.