YA KNOW A LOTTA people say I have a lotta balls. But you know what: they’re wrong. Because what I have is a Dick.
So boasts Madonna, ceaselessly palming her crotch in Truth or Dare or parading on the HBO broadcast—via satellite from Paris—of her Blonde Ambition tour. Abandoning the trademark Barbie ponytail for candied blond ringlets, Madonna, like Shirley Temple, faces her audience as an ambassador of American culture: an empire of signs, yes, but also a sign of the empire. Seizing the phallus (just a dick, actually) in yet another savvy wink to pop theorists, she engages not only economies of the imaginary but also the cool economy of selling her dick in question—Dick Tracy, that is. A whirling dervish, baby-pink corset straps flapping madly against her hooded sweatshirt (from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Home Boy collection), Madonna works it like a CEO with rhythm: that old hip-action strap-on-capitalism in motion. “Madonna is best understood as head of a corporation that produces images of her self-representation, rather than as the spontaneous, ‘authentic’ artist of rock mythology,” proposes Susan McClary; Madonna’s chuckling “yeah, so lucky me” on Nightline (in response to Forrest Sawyer’s query about massive revenues from the videocassette sale of Justify My Love) speaks the freshly minted language of boardroom-as-bedroom.
Madonna: eponymous, she remains a self-made book of lists, an ongoing retrospective and spectacular distraction, the favored local anesthetic of late, an irritating topical ointment, and a disposable razor, shedding skins. Dark-haired at Cannes, trembling at the Oscars, filled with mid-career ennui in Vanity Fair, or giving head to a water bottle in Truth or Dare, she continually masquerades through a repertory of gestures. She wavers, a mirage on the pop-cultural horizon, receding before desire the closer approached. Madonna’s endless reservoir of poses—her phraseology—conveys mobility, satiating mass desire for the ideology of planned obsolescence. She is not, as has repeatedly been suggested, referencing Marilyn Monroe; she refers instead to the always-already-reproduced Marilyn of Andy Warhol.
An absorbing and self-absorbed narcissist with Warholian insight into the popular, Madonna mines the nervous veins of sexual culture. Currently dick obsessed, she applauds the size of Sandra Bernhard’s in The Advocate, touts Liz Smith’s balls on TV, palms and scratches her own at every photo opportunity, and even gets a hard-on at the vision of her two male dancers deep kissing. Engaged in more than a clever game of hide-and-seek or a genital usurping of power, Madonna embodies a mass challenge to the sacred symbolic regime of the phallus. Lesbians, gay men, transsexuals, and transvestites, among others, explore sexual practices and identities that threaten to expose the phallus behind the curtain, bringing the contradictions of this mystified fetish to the surface and problematizing them. As cultural critic Carla Freccero notes, “If you lift off the veil from the phallus what you find there is just a penis, a penis is just a fleshly organ of some bodies.” Madonna’s verbal hermaphroditism taunts this obscured rule of power, recognizing that outside heterosexual phallicism lies a place where the penis might be just an object used for pleasure. Her radical challenge, however, stops short in a recent Rolling Stone interview in which she glibly dismisses dildos as silly, her art-directed lesbian masquerade crumbling in the face of this (detachable) object used for pleasure.
She, a long history of scandal. Each Tuesday MTV’s Standards and Practices committee meets to review dozens of new videos that arrive every week (over 2,500 a year), sniffing out “nudity, profanity, blatant product pitching, excessive violence, and drug use” and thereby determining programming for 53 million MTV homes. Justify My Love was rejected by this committee (whose membership MTV refuses to disclose) last November; nine days later the video single stocked record shelves at $9.98. Marshall Cohen, MTV’s executive vice president of corporate affairs and communications, doesn’t “think for one second that Madonna had any intention of getting this video on MTV.” Unlike more-obedient pop icon George Michael (who trimmed his I Want Your Sex video and added a mumble about monogamy under MTV pressure), Madonna didn’t reedit, bad-girling her way to Nightline’s second-highest ratings ever (Tammy Faye Bakker remains number one).
In the New York Times, Camille Paglia valorized Justify My Love, proclaiming Madonna the “true feminist,” questionably reducing contemporary feminists to a posse of “hangdog dowdies and parochial prudes”; in the Times’ suspect headline, “...Finally, a Real Feminist,” she made Madonna into “a stick to beat feminism.” The pages of the Times, The National Enquirer, and the academic journals teem with the debate over Madonna’s agency in her own representation, her alleged complicity with patriarchal codes. (In the words of a consummate control queen on the subject of agency: “And while it might have seemed like I was behaving in a stereotypical way, at the same time, I was also masterminding it. I was in control of everything I was doing.”) Open Your Heart (directed, as was Justify My Love, by Jean-Baptise Mondino) either destabilizes the voyeuristic male gaze or cynically regurgitates arty pornography, depending upon who bends your ear. Celebrating Madonna’s newly carved physique as an erotic dancer in fishnets and corset, the tape alludes to lesbian voyeurism (a woman in drag is among the booth watchers) and to multiple sexual subject positions, proposing the pop equivalent of “post-Modern” theories of the identity’s cultural construction.
Madonna impersonates alternately the tragic victim, damned to die for unruly sexuality (Monroe, Carmen, Camille), or the empowered dominatrix in chains, directing her own seduction, dominance, and submission. Recognizing the male-scripted, given cultural niche for female performers as sexualized commodities, she willingly tangles with the role, naming paradoxes in the process. Particularly in Justify My Love (breathlessly described by Paglia as “sophisticated European sexuality” owing to “great foreign films” a “decadent sexual underground” of “jaded androgynous creatures”), Madonna (and her image corporation) seems to suggest, as theorist Judith Butler proposes, that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.” Celebrated by some for her lingering deep kiss of a woman and condemned by others who see this as fetishized lesbian foreplay for conventional straight coupling, Madonna nonetheless serves up gender disarray for mass consumption. The videotape suggests, but never articulates, Butler’s assertion that “if gender is drag, and if it is an imitation that regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait. . . the illusion of inner depth.”
Madonna’s facile deployment of stereotype and mixed metaphor (in Express Yourself, “chained to her desire,” she wears a neck collar, laps milk from a bowl, and then creams her male lover’s face with the thick white liquid), coupled with a religious zealotry for image control, have a wealthy and powerful woman made. A cunning barometer of hot issues, Madonna embraces both “essentialism” (her, um, life “is splayed out for the world to see”; the message of Express Yourself, “pussy rules the world”) and “social-constructionist” notions of the complex process of identity formation. All this ironically occurs within the superficial and profound fishbowl of the mass media, making analysis a particularly futile task. She remains, after all, a relentless electronic demagogue, mapping out her personal politics within the marketplace’s relentless buy and sell. While she rails against the music industry’s homophobia or criticizes Kevin Costner’s questionable politics and telling silence on the AIDS crisis, Madonna continues to traffic in commodity.
Her ability to strike anything but a predetermined pose remains questionable, however, most especially in the smash hit Vogue. Unlike the Butch Queens, Banjy Girls, and Best-Dressed Women from the world of House Balls that Vogue chicly apes, Madonna achieves Realness (in Ball vernacular, to transcend gender, sexual identity, and, crucially, class) not merely by her clothes and pose but rather by her ability to be the whitest thing in the room. The Immaculate Collection, a CD and video compilation of her music and videotapes, testifies to this transformation from wishful ethnic identity (as a Latino teen in Borderline or flamenco diva in La Isla Bonita) to a paler-than-white blond. Her “rounded, spontaneous, care-free” tummy has become drum tight with discipline, her frame now clothed in a catsuit of muscle; her skin, her hair, the blackness of her eyebrows and beauty mark all make the fetish of her whiteness clearer, more visually compelling. Even her regular public appearances with black roots exposed (on Nightline, in particular) reflect the Whiteness Strategy, the vérité of her roots clashing nicely with Justify My Love’s perfection.
Sandra Bernhard, like Madonna, shares the neurosis of white girls striving for hipness, and her film Without You I’m Nothing (1990) coyly exorcises her ambivalent identifications. (She and Madonna made a floor show of lesbian allusions on The David Letterman Show, a stunt Madonna continues to celebrate and about which Sandra subsequently became testy.) Yet neither Bernhard nor Madonna possesses the political edge or directness of rappers Queen Latifah or Salt-N’-Pepa; both are too much entranced with their access to power within said Whiteness Strategy. Vogue, like much of Madonna’s production, filters multiple cultures down to simple vernacular; Madonna, the proper post-Modernist, steals when she can, colonizing, as many have, the queer and black origins of disco. The Hollywood-golden-era silvery tones of this obsessively visual tape help to obscure the real cultural use of voguing as community competition, as battle, as a way to “throw shade.” Madonna replaces the Ball’s diversity and multiple hierarchies—“Femme Queen Executive Realness,” etc.—with real white-girl realness.
Madonna, the weather, Madonna, the Gulf War, Madonna, the Supreme Court, Madonna, a race against time, Madonna, Madonna, Madonna. In Truth or Dare, I am fascinated by her fleshy lures, but apparently so is she. Baring the floodlight that is her soul in a gleefully alienated reunion with her childhood girlfriend, or thrashing about in a black catsuit clutching flowers at her mothers’ grave, Madonna enacts the toll of life lived before a lens. Even her recurrent knowing wink—the device that assures us of her radical intent—refuses to be clear. Is it a come-on or a gesture of empowerment, is she laughing at or with the mustaches penciled above androgynous lips in Justify My Love? She traffics not in myth but in the mythical, the compactness of her language—her phraseology—folding ever inward. (On Nightline, Madonna strategically referred to herself as an artist, neatly transforming and commodifying the national debate on censorship.) And yet the images: her music and film and videos, with their intimations of queer sexuality, of gender as fiction, a sly erotic camera that fucks and fetishizes, faces savagely offered to the camera in sacrifice. . . . Let’s face it, I’m watching. Circulating to a mass audience, Madonna is another muddled representation, almost there, testing the edge but remaining, in crucial ways, conventional; provoking, in Roland Barthes’ words, “a science of writing under whose gaze myth, like an animal long since captured and held in observation, does nevertheless become a different object.”
Tom Kalin is a film- and videomaker who lives in New York. He is working on Swoon, a feature film about boy-killers Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 murdered Bobby Frank.
