by Lucy O'Brien
But Bush would never choose to make a film about herself or her artistic process. Madonna exposed that side of herself again, with I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, the backstage documentary of her ReInvention tour, with a large section on Kabbalah thrown in. Premiered in November 2005, just after the release of her album, I’m Going to Tell You a Secret was directed by Jonas Akerlund with his customary verve. Unlike Truth or Dare, which has an air of spoiled Hollywood about it, I’m Going to Tell You a Secret signals early on that its goal is spirituality and maturity. It opens with Chris Cunningham’s slightly disturbing film of Madonna and coyote in X-STaTIC PRO=Cess. Powerful and dark, this snippet suggests right away that Madonna wants to experiment with her own myth. “I refer to an entity I call the beast…the material world we live in right now…the world of illusion,” she intones in a voiceover narrative. “We’re enslaved by it.” This from the woman who wanted a Paris collection for free. She was obviously still fighting her demons.
The film then focuses on her dance auditions, as dozens of young hopefuls queue up to make an impression. They’re a brave bunch. “I’m glad I’m not a dancer anymore,” says Madonna. “It’s a dog’s life.” Then, with her chosen few, she goes into battle, saying: “The stage becomes a beast that we have to tame.” As in Truth or Dare, the performance scenes are in vivid, high color, while the backstage interaction is shot in black-and-white. Here we have revealing moments with her husband, Guy. Clearly embarrassed and awkward to be on film, he, by turns, mocks her and ignores her. At their local pub in London’s Mayfair, he sings after-hours folk songs, while she lies asleep on a bench. After one performance, she sits mad, defensive, and sweaty in her limo, disappointed that he went to the pub instead of coming to the show. Like Warren Beatty in Truth or Dare, he is an elusive presence, uneasy with the camera, not fond of being seen as playing second fiddle to his wife.
Observer critic Kathryn Flett asked, quite understandably, why in the edit Madonna “picked so much footage of her ‘old man’ looking like an utter jerk? But perhaps all that real ale-drinking and maudlin Irish balladeering dahn Mr. and Mrs. Ritchie’s local…is what passes for cute if you’re born in Bay City, Michigan.” Maybe this was Madonna’s attempt to show the reality of marriage. “I got married for all the wrong reasons,” she says wistfully. “There’s no such thing as the perfect soul mate. The perfect soul mate is the person who pushes all your buttons and pisses you off. It’s not easy having a good marriage…[but] easy doesn’t make you grow.”
What’s more touching is her interaction with the children, as a four-year-old Rocco and seven-year-old Lola wander in and out of the frame—sparky, tenacious, and engaging. “I’d like to see her more. I’ll be happy when the tour is ended,” says a solemn and impossibly pretty Lola. Madonna sums up her dilemma as a mother when she tells her dancers: “Sorry I didn’t get to hang out with you guys more. I have another family. And one day you’ll know the pull of work and family and the struggle to keep it all balanced.”
As in Truth or Dare, the film is fascinating for what it inadvertently reveals, that strange isolation at the heart of stardom. After a show, with the crowd still roaring in the background, Madonna goes backstage to an empty dressing room. “Where is everybody?” she asks uncertainly. “As you can see, I’ve got no friends!” In that odd celebrity world, there is a pecking order, one that iconoclastic rocker Iggy Pop was forced to acknowledge when he played the support slot at her Dublin gig. “I hope he doesn’t take a shit on my stage,” she remarked, before going to his dressing room to say hello. The two native Detroiters air-kiss warily. Afterward, he mimics the bland way she says: “Have a great show!” It is a telling moment of punk rock meets mainstream pop.
Madonna shows her friendship with the high-profile filmmaker Michael Moore, whom she salutes from the stage one night on tour. “Jesus, she stuck her neck out there for me tonight, which is a crazy thing to do,” said the seasoned activist. On the one hand, Madonna shares time with radical left-wing campaigner Moore, and on the other, her Republican dad. The shots of Tony Ciccone in his north Michigan vineyard are as homey as apple pie. He gives a bland assessment of her live show: “Very good,” he says, while his wife, Joan, echoes, “Very nice.” God only knows what frustration seethes at this under Madonna’s cool exterior. But Tony makes some astute comments about his daughter’s character: “The entertainment business was the avenue she needed to express her needs…. To me it was a growing process. She’s growing up. And instead of growing up with us, she grew up with the world.”
There are parts of the film that seem affected. The backstage party, where everyone strenuously has “a good time,” for instance. Or Madonna being told by her manager that they have to reschedule a flight because the queen of England will be in the air. “Her Madgesty” quips: “There’s not room for two queens in that country.” The high-handed manner with the dancers, when she introduces them to classical pianist Katia Labèque, saying off-camera that this will be good for them “because they might not even know what classical music is.” And that odd sixth-grade poetry that Madonna and crew keep delivering to each other. There are not many people who could get excited about a poem eulogizing their ability to pick up someone else’s sweaty underpants.
Madonna is better when she’s unself-conscious. “This is stinky,” she exclaims, sniffing the corset she’s worn for dozens of shows. “These big fat Italian thighs…I stink.” And there is that compelling sequence, arguably the most important one in the film, where Madonna describes what it feels like doing a show. She’s onstage at Slane Castle, Dublin, in front of eighty thousand people. Just as she starts her show, a full moon sails over the stage and the rain pours down. She and her dancers are in constant danger of being electrocuted. “I felt such love. People stood there for six hours in the rain and didn’t move…the rain was pelting me,” she says, “I felt I was in a war zone, constantly worried for the dancers…traumatized…and when the show ended, I can’t remember what happened.”
Here Madonna describes with forceful simplicity the suspended, out-of-body nature of performance. There is no spin, no irony, just pure emotion and experience. Key parts of the film are those capturing the trancelike pull of being on stage: “BAM, right back to the crowd,” announces her skateboarder, who in the “Hollywood” medley shoots from one side of the stage to the other. “This light we’re supposed to shine back…the more we’re fed by the crowd the more we give back,” he riffs, like the surfer looking for the perfect wave, the perfect high. No wonder the dancers find it difficult making their way after the tour has ended. “They need to remember it’s about the experience. You live it and you move on,” the show’s director Jamie King says coolly.
“Dancing is best in the moment,” says ReInvention dancer Raistalla. “I don’t remember what happens. Things go by really fast. Everything is really light and bright. It’s a complete rush.” At the back of her mind, though, she always knew that it was going to come to an end, and that she needed to establish herself in her own right. “It gets lonely being on tour. No matter how much you connect with your coworkers, there’s no place like home,” she recalls. “I was in a different mind-frame from them. I was waiting to transition to being an artist.” Since the ReInvention tour, she has been working on her own music, cowriting some snaky electro-funk with Miami producers Kas Gamble and Jack Oates. While working on her self-titled debut album in 2005, Raistalla sent a few tracks to Madonna for feedback. “She loved the originals, and told me to make sure I know what I’m getting into, ’cause it can be a hard business. She was being very motherly again.” And circumspect. Raistalla’s album has been drawing people in from unexpected places—“not just those into electronica, but a lot of rock and hip-hop fans. If it grabs all types of people, that’s my goal.” Raistalla found her way quite quickly after the tour. Many dancers, though, still hit that proverbial dip. The light from the Madonna show is so bright it overwhelms anything beside it.
The only element in this f
ilm larger than her is Kabbalah and its almost evangelical undertow. In the final scenes, Madonna goes to Israel to address the Spirituality for Kids foundation, wearing a demure dress and acting like a global ambassador. “I’m here not to represent a religion but as a student of Kabbalah,” she announces, before imparting a message of unity. I’m Going to Tell You a Secret was an important film for her. She spent several months in the cutting room with Jonas Akerlund, keeping him a virtual prisoner in her home while they pored over shots. Before Madonna released the film, she invited a select audience of friends and coworkers to see a three-hour rough cut in a Notting Hill cinema, and write their comments afterward on a questionnaire. The remark that came up time and again was “too much Kabbalah,” resulting in substantial pruning before the final edit. The DVD released the following year was a longer “director’s cut,” complete with Madonna’s trip to Rachel’s tomb outside Jerusalem, where she was hounded by paparazzi. Even though she had been advised by Israeli security not to make the trip, she insisted on going. She becomes irate with the attention, but needs it at the same time. This paradox of scorning the press yet living her life in public is one that would reappear later to dramatic effect with her bid to adopt a Malawian boy, David.
“She has a messianic attitude, she wants to break rules,” said her producer Mirwais. With I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, the final fusing of Madonna the Icon with Madonna the Saint began.
EARLY IN 2006, Madonna did a photo shoot for W magazine with Steven Klein that, like X-STaTIC PRO=Cess, was packed with psychodrama. Shot in a gigantic Hollywood soundstage with six black and white stallions, these pictures featured her as a heroic horsewoman. As well as exploring the trauma of falling off her horse and surviving, with these pictures Madonna was stirring up the age-old fantasy of pubescent girls, horses, and early sexual experience. Only here she turns it on its head as a middle-aged mother. These pictures emanate all the eroticism that her Sex book lacked. There’s Madonna standing with her bare back to the camera, wearing nothing but black rubber panties, fishnet tights, and long PVC gloves. She holds a riding crop à la her Dita Parlo character from Erotica, but, nearly fifteen years later, she exudes more natural authority. There is strong muscle definition on her bare back. The skin isn’t smooth, and it isn’t a young body, but there is more sexual suggestiveness in this one cool pose than an entire collection of Sex photos.
Madonna lies face up on a supine black stallion, smoking a postcoital cigarette; she wears a hat with a horse’s tail, and there’s a saddle, so she’s half-woman, half-horse. With obvious tones of S&M, she is decked out in a jeweled bridle and black gloves. In the most surreal, dreamlike pictures, she confronts a white stallion, raising her arm as if to tame him. With the Equestrian, Madonna invented a new character—a kind of haughty, erotic, Edwardian horsewoman.
She developed the equestrian idea for her next tour, testing it out well before it hit the stage. One day during rehearsals in L.A., she marched into the sound studio next door, where the photographer Steven Meisel was on a fashion shoot. She and Meisel hadn’t been getting on for a while, but Madonna was anxious to get an audience reaction. She strode in with a riding crop and high boots, saying, “My dancers are trying out some new steps, tell me what you think.” The assembled fashionistas were then subject to an impromptu five-song set. Feedback was positive, so Madonna continued with the provocative theme, making it the opening section of her new Confessions tour.
From the day it opened on May 21, 2006, Madonna was determined to make this her biggest spectacle yet. With musical director Stuart Price, she turned it into a two-hour disco extravaganza. On the night I went to the show in early August in Wembley Arena, she had the air-conditioning turned off in a deliberate attempt to create a sweaty nightclub atmosphere. A huge Swarowski-and diamond-encrusted mirror ball descended from the ceiling and, like a beautiful alien exiting her space pod, out stepped Madonna, wearing Gaultier jodhpurs, cravat, and horse-tail hat. She and her dancers pawed the stage, combining equestrian moves with pole-dancing and 3-D gymnastics. At times, there was almost a Monty Python–esque effect to their cantering.
This show was all about visuals, about emotions and feelings writ large, and inclusive, powerful statements. As ever, she wove her life into her art, displaying X-rays and MRIs of her eight broken bones on massive video screens while she sang “Like a Virgin.” Another witty reinterpretation of her best-known song, it incorporated footage of violent riding accidents and jockeys being flung perilously from horses. As Madonna rode a merry-go-round pole dance on a diamond-encrusted saddle, you could sense the trauma, and see the breaks.
Like the London artists Gilbert & George, who turned their daily life into an art installation, Madonna sees herself as a living sculpture, feeding her own experience into her work. “Je suis l’arte,” she said to Sebastien Foucan, a parkour hero and the main advisor behind the next number, “Jump.” It is an homage to parkour (PK), a physical discipline that combines extreme sports and martial arts. Adapted from French military obstacle-course training, it is a dynamic form of movement that revolves around the notions of “escape” and “reach,” where the traceur, or participant, uses physical agility and quick thinking to overcome obstacles. The traceur moves around his or her surroundings—from walls to buildings, bridges, and railings—with complete mental dedication. Like for champion surfers or skateboarders, parkour for them is a philosophy and a way of life.
In the same way that Madonna recruited Vogue dancers from the New York underground for her Blond Ambition tour, for Confessions she used original traceurs from the Parisian suburbs. She was inspired to do this after seeing her friend Luc Besson’s parkour movies,
Yamakasi—the Modern-day Samurai (2001), and Banlieue 13, which came out at the same time as the Confessions tour. The “Jump” sequence was a thrilling moment in the show, with the dancers performing acrobatic stunts against a backdrop of 3-D buildings.
This was their most physically difficult number. “It took quite a bit of work getting used to, I’m not going to lie,” one of her star dancers, Mihran Kirakosyan, told me. Despite coming from an athletic family—his father was a choreographer, his mother an athlete—and being a dancer all his life, Kirakosyan found this song a challenge. “We had many injuries during the rehearsals and practice. That is what I love about dancing for Madonna. She’s not afraid of pushing us or trying new and creative ideas.” It seemed that after having been laid low and severely restricted after a riding accident, Madonna was fully exploring the notion of physical freedom. With the riding, roller-skating, and parkour sequences, she was forging a link with sport, movement, and dance.
After the intense activity of “Jump,” the first act concluded with a quiet, darkened stage, and voiceover confessions from her dancers. “I live with my past tucked away deep inside of me,” said one. “I cut my arms,” said another. Their words hung in the air as Madonna rose up with one of her most provocative images—standing in a Christlike pose on a gigantic mirrored disco cross. Many felt it to be in poor taste, including some Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who all complained about the way she played fast and loose with the image of Jesus. “Jesus would have loved it,” she declared in an open statement to the press, and she invited Pope Benedict XVI to one of her shows in Rome. In her eyes, it was a remarkable piece of Catholic kitsch, as vivid as the brightly colored Sacred Heart statues in her mother’s living room. Members of the city’s Orthodox Standard Bearers Union in Moscow failed to see the humor, and burned a huge poster of the star outside her concert. For some, the cross was proof that Madonna finally believed her own hype, that she truly saw herself as a Messianic figure sent to save the world, a kind of a self-appointed twenty-first-century Christ. “We thought it was a bit flashy, a bit L.A.,” says her former dancer Salim Gauwloos.
But there were also some in the Catholic Church who saw her show as an endorsement of the faith. Jesuit priest Father Carlos Novoa, for instance, wrote in the Colombian daily El Tiempo, that Mad
onna’s parody of the crucifixion “is not a mockery of the cross, but rather the complete opposite: an exhaltation of the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus.” He went on to say that the song “Live to Tell,” in which Madonna is crucified, “is one of the best sermons I have witnessed in my life.”
Whatever the shock value, it was an arresting visual image. As she sang “Live to Tell,” above her cross was a screen with figures that started at zero and ticked up to 12 million, signifying the number of children who had been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic in Africa alone. This disturbing statistic led into the second, “Bedouin” section, where Israeli singer Yitzhak Sinwani sang his glorious vocal on “Isaac.” Here Madonna interspersed footage of the Iraq War with famine in Africa, making the link with global suffering. A woman danced, wearing a hijab, the Muslim veil, and when the dance finished, Madonna “liberated” her by taking off the garment. “She’s a caged bird and she eventually takes her veil off and emerges from the cage,” Madonna later explained. Although the hijab is a garment designed to keep women submissive and hidden from the male gaze, it was rather arrogant of Madonna to imply that she was this woman’s liberator. Many Muslim women use the hijab in more complex ways, both as a source of protection against unwanted male attention and as a defiant sign of cultural difference.