Iatribe

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

 
Richard Goldstein, of the Village Voice, recently wrote a piece for The Nation's website about Madonna's sexy military video (or however you'd describe it). I'd had a discussion with him about it before he wrote it, and can claim my laptop (or, rather, my employer's laptop) as the first location at which he saw the video, so I figure it'd be appropriate to comment.Here we go:

Hors de Combat
by Richard Goldstein

I don't know what that headline means, so I won't comment...except to say that it's in French.

She's the ultimate quick-change artist, with a style that can absorb any trend and an image to match. She's gone from material girl to S/M maitresse, from power diva to contented mother. I'm not talking about Hillary Clinton in the mind of the angry white male. This is Madonna.

The Hillary Clinton thing pisses me off, since (a) he's only talking about the angry white males of the right, not the left -- how come no one cares about those assholes? (b) What about the females, who are often just as angry? (c) It builds to so many stereotypes on race and gender without substantiating any of it -- I'm sure that, say, Condoleezza Rice gets really pissed off about HRC, but for some reason that doesn't matter...why?

Under all her convolutions lies a core persona, some would claim. In the pomo pantheon, Madonna is the emblem of desire in all its variations. But what's kept her on top of the pops for more than twenty years is her ability to select the variation that fits the theme of the moment. Madonna's great gift is staying ahead of the curve without getting truly out of line. That's why it's stunning to see her burned by the promotional video for her upcoming album, American Life.

I'll let the "pomo" reference stand for now -- let's see where he goes with it. As far as being burned, I haven't noticed any bad press -- certainly not anything even approaching the level of that against the Dixie Chicks. Madonna pulled the video from MTV, MTV did not pull the video. That's not getting burned by any means. But okay.

Madonna's chameleon instincts have been failing her lately. Sales of her music have slipped, and she's made some terrible acting choices (such as starring in last year's ridiculed remake, Swept Away). In these straits, a sex goddess can always fall back on provocation, but Madonna chose to walk a much trickier line by attaching her erotic energy to an antiwar statement. The result was a wet dream for Matt Drudge.

This video may be "the most shocking antiwar, anti-Bush statement yet to come from the show-business industry," drooled the dean of Internet factoids. From Drudge's description, you'd think Madonna had put a bullet through the President's unimpeachable head. The closest she came to that is lobbing a grenade at a man in a Bush mask who uses it to light his cigar. But that sort of fantasy is treason these days, and with visions of demonized Dixie Chicks dancing in her head, Madonna withdrew the offending video.

Well, Madonna did kind of show herself "putting a bullet through the President's unimpeachbable [and what on earth does that mean?] head," with the image of her throwing a grenade at him...If the same image had been produced by some outsider-nerd high school kid in a flash animation on the Web, he'd probably have been arrested. This isn't to say the kid should be arrested, but to indicate the kind of company that Madonna put herself into. And no one -- not even Jim Bunning -- is accusing Madonna of treason. Why is hyperbole so unacceptable when it's on Fox News, but simply the norm for this article?

That was embarrassing enough, but did she have to say she was acting "out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I support and pray for"? This was a little like hearing Trent Lott praise affirmative action--not exactly a credible gesture of repentance. Now Madonna seems headed for icon limbo.

So, is he saying that someone can't be substantially against the war(which we don't even yet know she is), but for the troops? That's certainly the implication -- and it would require that Goldstein fall into that same category. And, of course, Goldstein implies that the fact that she maintains that two-pronged position is what is sending her to "icon limbo" -- asserting, essentially, that celebrity status shouldn't be harmed when, like in the case of the Dixie Chicks, they make an anti-war statement (because that smacks of McCarthyism), but should be harmed when, like Madonna, they speak out in a way that is dissatisfying to a revolutionary left (because that smacks of Maoism, perhaps?)

Meanwhile, the contraband video is circulating on the web. This may be one of those telling moments when the promo outlasts the product, and maybe it should, since the video is one of the best Madonna has ever made. Some of its mock violence looks eerily like the nightly news. But unlike the "real" thing, it bristles with ambiguity, deftly locating the hidden connections between sex and war--and exploding them. If you want to understand the erotics of contemporary combat, this video makes a good primer.

This, of course, assumes that there is an "erotics of contemporary combat," and let's see where he goes with it.

But pop culture isn't down with ambiguity at the moment. Irony is the new Communism, which is why an artist like Madonna can't get her message across. Nothing in her career prepares her for a climate where every intention must be clear and earnest. She has no experience with optimism, the official affect of the Let's Roll Generation. She can rap, she can vogue, she can do bondage and ballads, but one thing Madonna can't be is clean-cut. In order to plug into the present, she will have to play the Marlene Dietrich camp-follower role in a remake of Morocco, running off into the desert after some latter-day Gary Cooper. It's come to that.

"Pop culture isn't down with ambiguity at the moment" -- but single-mindedness is okay when you're Janeane Garofalo, right? Or any of the other anti-war pop culture icons? This is, in fact, ironic, given Goldstein's rejection above of Madonna's ambivalence. Irony is not the new communism, as Goldstein himself just deftly displayed, and the reason why Madonna can't get her message (again, assuming she has one) across is because she withdrew her video. Meanwhile, her message in support of the troops apparently did get across: explain that one. "No experience with optimism"? This is someone who built a career on pop music! At the end here, he seems to surrender his previous argument to the one that the lack of acceptance of her video is because she's not "clean-cut," i.e. that she's sexy and so forth -- too ludicrous to even comment on.
There may well be a way in which sexuality interacts with Bush's politics, but Goldstein's failed to find it -- and, I'd argue, Madonna has, as well. More importantly, discussions of such a topic belies the reality that the anti-war movement lacked seriousness; it was an outbourst of bellicosity, victimhood, and self-gratification that should be regretted and that leaves remnants like this article.

Steven I. Weiss 7:07:00 PM