by Lucy O'Brien
The movie was directed by Uli Edel, who had made such provocative and atmospheric art-house films as Christiane F, a drama about a Berlin heroin addict, and Last Exit to Brooklyn, adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel about 1950s Brooklyn low-lifes. Conceived as a cross between intelligent film noir and Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence was a glossy, beautifully lit, but ultimately unconvincing film. Though Madonna’s performance is accomplished, the movie was seen as part of the Sex debacle, and when it was released, it was critically panned (critic Leslie Halliwell denounced it as “too silly for words”). Audiences cheered when Rebecca was shot and fell back through French windows to a spectacular death.
“We wanted to work together. We had been looking for a project and when it came along we jumped on it,” Edel told me. “But we did it too quickly, and when it was finished it didn’t succeed.” He feels that many critics overlooked Madonna’s acting in their rush to condemn the movie. “In the film, her acting was better than usual. People go overboard in their criticism. She’s a very brave woman, she takes a lot of risks. Maybe over time people will look back and realize she was a good actress.”
By the time Madonna did Body of Evidence, she had become the world’s Sin Eater—depicted as using her sexuality in a destructive way. The received story of early Madonna was that she was a glorious groupie, sleeping her way to the top, and therefore that made her art and her music suspect. As anthropologist Wendy Fonarow writes in her book Empire of Dirt: “The female groupie is a disruptive figure. Basically, she is considered a specialized slut, not a slut who will sleep with anyone, but a slut who will sleep with anyone who has the right job.” Early tabloid coverage of Madonna reeled off the litany of her useful DJ/producer boyfriends, implying that her creative output was not her own.
Madonna often found herself portraying in other people’s plays and films a sexual woman who had to be punished. She was the trickster figure, a woman whose wayward power had to be diminished. The trickster is an archetypal character, usually male, who is both creative and destructive, who represents basic instincts and has an amoral, insatiable appetite. In ancient folklore, the trickster is a transient, running from one town to another, transgressing borders. He embodies the creative tensions in opposites: the sacred and profane. With his dedication to excess, the rock musician became the ultimate twentieth-century trickster. Madonna may not have trashed a hotel room or thrown a TV into the swimming pool, but she did her own version of that—belching loudly in public places, simulating masturbation, and exhibiting her private parts to the world. According to Fonarow: “Trickster needs to be punished for his violations.” Madonna, too, found herself being punished and disapproved of both by right-wing Christian groups like the Moral Majority, and alternative-rock artists such as Courtney Love.
Love was a rock antiheroine, with split ends in her baby-doll blond hair and an asymmetrical grin. She had a caustic wit and wrote impassioned punk songs with her band Hole. “I’m not upper-middle class and I was never popular at high school. I have tattoos and I’m subculture, a teenage bag lady,” she once said to me. Married to Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, she had been dubbed the Queen of Grunge. Madonna immediately saw the commercial potential in Hole and offered to sign her to Maverick. Love declined, saying later: “Madonna’s interest in me was kind of like Dracula’s interest in his latest victim.” Such were the misgivings that Love seemingly had about Madonna at this time, she convinced herself that a spurned Madonna had encouraged her friend Lynn Hirschberg to do a “hatchet job” on her. However, while a damming article about the Cobains written by Hirschberg did appear in Vanity Fair, there was no evidence whatsoever that Madonna had anything to do with it.
Three years later, Madonna and Love came face-to-face after the MTV Video Music Awards. Journalist Kurt Loder was interviewing Madonna for MTV when Love disrupted the proceedings by throwing her powder compact at the star and yelling “Madonna!” Sensing a scoop, Loder invited Love to join them. There followed an uneasy exchange, where Love did her utmost to annoy Madonna. The latter’s response was to say “Who’s got better shoes? Mine are Gucci,” and walk off. “Was I bumming you guys out? Were you, like, talking astrophysics and stuff?” Love yelled. “Bye, Madonna…. Did I bum you out? Are you pissed at me?”
Madonna later described Love as “such a miserable person. She’s incredibly competitive with people and anybody who’s successful she’s going to slag off.” By the end of the decade, though, they reached a truce. Love even introduced her stylist, Arianne Phillips, to Madonna. When they both became Hollywood mothers, they found common ground, but back in 1992, Love symbolized the hardcore resistance to Madonna’s charms. More and more female artists, from Love to Chicago songwriter Liz Phair, felt compelled to criticize her. “They slag me off any time anybody asks what they think of me or compare them to me. It’s kind of like what a child does to their parent, they denounce you. They want to kill you off because they want their independence from you,” Madonna complained. These competitive new rock heroines were anxious to establish themselves as the alternative to Madonna’s grand pop spectacle. She was cast as manipulator and fake, a dark female force to be reckoned with.
But then, for vast swathes of her audience, she has the opposite effect, a kind of luminosity. John Izod identifies this as the female shaman. “This figure, an unconscious healer, also sometimes plays tricks on people, inflicting discomfort on them (which may well rebound upon him-or herself ) in the process of breaking through to and healing the psyche,” he said.
This effect was clearly seen in a little book that came out at the same time as Sex. Entitled I Dream of Madonna, it was a collection of women’s dreams about Madonna, compiled by Texan folklorist Kay Turner. Madonna said she was flattered at the extent of theoretical writing about her: “I’ve so infiltrated their psyches that they have to intellectualize my very being. I’d rather be on their minds than off,” she said. Here the dreams of women from a variety of ages and backgrounds show the pervasiveness of her influence, that she figures in women’s lives as a healer, an enabler, a coconspirator, and a source of liberation. One woman, who had been the victim of sexual abuse, said that Madonna came to her in a dream, played with her children, and expressed concern about the problem of abuse. “She was interested in helping any way she could…She wanted to hear what it was like and how a message about this problem could penetrate society in a controversial way so people would pay attention.”
There are other dreams where Madonna is leading the dance, where a hologram of Madonna lights up the night sky, where she’s called Botswana—“because that means the Boss”—where she’s a bitch, an erotic seductress, or a vulnerable child. She has an everywoman quality, and what was remarkable at this time was the pervasiveness of her influence. Despite the prevailing image of her as a conscious manipulator and conniving businesswoman, many women responded to her humanity. It was as if Madonna was taking on the role of the Virgin, granting prayers and intercessions. Turner described her book as “an unofficial response to Sex, in which Madonna used a new format to continue the dialogue she initiated early in her career about the importance of dreams and fantasies…this collection is a gift back to her: these dreams represent the other half of the dialogue.”
Madonna was shown the book before publication and was moved by it. “It was a highly sexual little publication with a sense of what we called ‘Vaginal Pride,’” says the book’s British editor Peggy Vance. “Madonna liked the way it showed her human side as opposed to the posed, pornographic side. There was a gentler, homoerotic twist.” With its quirky montage of images, I Dream of Madonna became a mass-market seller. “She’s in the fabric of people’s lives,” says Vance. “She has a religious facet for people, a sense of charm and blessing. Not in the traditional way, but an empowering way. I saw people reading it on the tube, reading it everywhere.”
But, to just as many people, Madonna was a nightmare of overexposure, with values that they didn’t trust. With Sex, she had dared t
he world in an elaborate way, and some powerful men publicly picked up the gauntlet. In 1993, Madonna coproduced Abel Ferrara’s film Dangerous Game with her production company, Maverick. In taking on the cult director of such darkly provocative movies as Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, she was asking for trouble. It became an intriguing game for Ferrara, who’s been described by some as a mischievous misogynist, to see if he could break her spirit. In a reprise of previous movie themes, Madonna played yet another woman caught between two aggressive men. In this film within a film, she plays a Hollywood actress called Sarah Jennings, who plays an abused wife, Claire. Having undergone a religious conversion, Claire no longer wants to partake in the drugs and sex games she once played with her suburban husband (James Russo, a close friend of Sean Penn). Dismayed, her husband tries to humiliate her in ever-escalating ways, and eventually shoots her to death. Russo’s actor character has trouble separating art and life, and his onscreen violence becomes a little too real. The film’s director (Harvey Keitel), too, finds his marriage falling apart as the film progresses.
Madonna initially thought she was playing the role of a catalyst, an agent of transformation. But, like her experience with Speed-the-Plow, the director had other ideas. Ferrara elicited strong performances by throwing away the script and encouraging his cast to improvise. To an ordered and organized Madonna, this was unthinkable. However, over the three-month filming period, he gradually broke down her resistance until her unscripted self began to emerge. “Look in the mirror. What do you see? I see a two-bit cunt having a nervous breakdown,” Russo sneers, while a bruised Madonna looks tearfully at her reflection. As he smashes the mirror, it’s as if she’s acquiescing in her own destruction. It is clear that at one level the film is about Madonna, or the public perception of her. “We both know she’s a fucking whore and she can’t act,” Russo shouts at one point, as his character hacks off her hair the way Sean Penn once threatened to do.
In another scene, Keitel’s director character provokes Sarah by saying: “Who the fuck are you, you commercial piece of shit?” But perhaps most telling of all is a small scene where Sarah confesses to the director her experience of rape some years before. True to the spirit of improvisation, Madonna digs deep into the memory of the sexual assault that happened to her as a young woman in New York. This is what film auteur David Lynch would describe as “the eye of the duck,” a pivotal scene that lies at the heart of the movie.
Quietly, nervously licking her lips, Madonna’s character recalls how her attacker made her strip naked and lie down. He tries to rape her, but her body is so rigid, he has to resort to fellatio. “I remember this horrible choking feeling,” she says, recounting how the man then dragged her to the side of the roof by her hair and held a knife against her throat. “He said, ‘I dunno if I should slit your throat or push you off the building.’” She looks up at Keitel. “And I would’ve done anything, anything for him.”
There in that scene is the reason why Madonna did Sex. Why she stripped her body bare as a mode of confrontation as much as eroticism. Why she feigned masturbation onstage and constantly upped the ante in terms of shock and control. Underlying her seamless pop tunes, driving her music and her declarative images is a sense of white-hot anger. Writer John Izod was onto something when he described her as not “celebrating love and sexuality in their own right so much as playing with the idea of them.”
It’s not so much grief at her mother’s death that drives her as the sense of abandonment that left her unprotected. She encountered her own worst possible scenario, becoming a victim of male violence, and thereafter turned that full-tilt into her work, reversing the equation at every opportunity. This is why women respond to her on such a gut level, why so many heterosexual men feel ambivalent. The story she is presenting is not just one of charm and seduction, but anger and revenge. It’s the dark undertow, the id, the sense of righteous indignation that made much of her mainstream audience feel uncomfortable and turn away. The aptly titled Dangerous Game was a critical and commercial failure, and many found it too bleak to watch. They didn’t want to see Madonna in this light. In the same way that people saw Oscar Wilde as a wit and a raconteur and missed the poignancy, or read Noël Coward as lighthearted comedy of manners, without seeing his savage sense of social injustice, so many critics did not go beyond the shimmering surface of Madonna’s pop persona to understand the troubled rage within.
It was at this time that songwriter Tori Amos released “Me and a Gun,” a devastating song about her experience of rape that led to her founding RAINN, a national U.S. support service for victims of sexual abuse. There are parallels with Madonna in the way Amos turned the tables on violence and used it to fuel her art. “It’s about accepting the violence that had occurred, that had seeped in through every part of my being. Rape can crawl inside and live with you as another voice,” she says. “You can’t deploy a SWAT team to get this shaming voice out of you. The only way to deal with destruction is creation. That’s the key to a victim consciousness—to change that pattern so you don’t become a tragedy. You go after the rapist that has set up a stall inside your mind.”
Madonna expressed the turmoil within, and then, frightened by the result, tucked it back inside. It took five long years before she had the courage to return to it again.
12
I ONLY SHOOT WHAT I NEED
“I DIVIDE MY CAREER INTO BEFORE AND AFTER THE SEX book,” said Madonna. “Up until then I was just being a creative person working and doing things that inspired me and I thought would inspire other people. After that I suddenly had a different point of view about life in general. Sex was my fantasy and I made money off of it. That is a no-no…It’s all part of a strong woman in control terrifying people.” Sex gave Madonna sleepless nights. Unnerved by her confusing and confrontational stance, the public stayed away in droves, and her popularity dipped to an all-time low. Compelled to find a way back into people’s hearts, she chose a medium that for her had always been successful—the live show. Running from September to December 1993, The Girlie Show wasn’t as audacious as Blond Ambition, but it showcased Madonna as a comedienne, an arch proponent of modern vaudeville and burlesque.
The choreographer Alex Magno was impressed with her ideas. “It was a very organic show, based on pure performance. It didn’t rely on special effects and gimmicks,” he told me. Many of the moves were choreographed by Magno, a Brazilian street dancer who came from a poor background in Rio de Janeiro. After making his way to the United States, he formed L.A.-based dance company Personna Dance Theater and, combining ballet with jazz, built up a considerable reputation within the dance community. It was shrewd of Madonna to call him for her Girlie Show. “She picked me out of fifty different choreographers. And she tends not to go for the most famous in their field, she wants something different. She wanted to personally meet me first—she might like your work but if you don’t connect with her on an energy-vibe level, you don’t work with her.”
Among the dancers, Carlton Wilborn was the only one from Blond Ambition to join her for the new tour. “The Girlie Show was my favorite, it was much more elegant, with a more sophisticated visual effect,” he says. There was a stringent rehearsal process beforehand. For “La Isla Bonita,” for instance, where the entire cast were dressed as sailors, there was some complicated choreography. “We knew Madonna had been rehearsing on her own. Alex then brought her in to do her spots. We didn’t realize that she’d be moving as much as we were. There was a lot of motion upstage and downstage, and she knew every single thing. She was unbelievable. I went, Oh shit, that’s why the woman is who she is. She’s got her shit down. Real organic emotion came through that number, with a Latin flair. Madonna doesn’t have to put herself through that, but the side of her that’s pure artist needs to stretch herself physically.” As with Blond Ambition, Carlton took on some leading roles, particularly for the dramatic segment “The Beast Within,” a theme that would reappear in Madonna’s later work. “That was about t
he ways we hold things within us that can kill us. If we don’t come face-to-face with it, it’ll destroy us,” he says.
For the opening number, though, Madonna concentrated on the circus theme, with barrel-organ music, a big top, and a girl (Carrie Ann Inaba) descending from the ceiling on a rope. Inaba had taken lessons from a professional circus acrobat to get the right effect—only there was one difference from the normal family spectacle: she was wearing nothing but a G-string. This was a dynamic introduction to the first song, “Erotica,” where Madonna posed in the full Dita Parlo regalia of short hair, tall boots, and a riding crop. It was a gamey image, performed with slow, controlled movements that set the tone for the whole show. A sophisticated production, it reflected Madonna’s state of mind at the time, with moments of sheer brilliance and other points that were less focused, where it seemed she was treading water.
The Pantomime Dame routine, for instance, was one she had performed several times before, and a rehash of old comic ideas. Here it was done in Bette Midler’s style, with flouncy blouse, blond Afro wig, and 70s hot pants. “Express Yourself” and “Deeper and Deeper” were turned into discopops, complete with mirror ball and dancers shimmying from one side of the stage to the other. After her upset with the Sex book, Madonna was going firmly for the gay vote, appealing to her most loyal audience. “She isn’t really a fag hag, she’s got a gay sensibility herself—not as a gay woman, but a gay man. That’s what comes across,” cultural commentator Peter York told me. “She knows what the gay boys are thinking, and she’s exploited them mercilessly.”