Madonna: too scary to be a star

Alice Bachini is now taking terrorism seriously. (The blogspotting link refuses to work. Scroll to Monday Oct 22: “Taking Terrorism Seriously”, if you aren’t already there.) So I will now pick up the torch of triviality (importance of) and ask: Madonna, crap actress or what? I’m going to argue for the or what position. At some length, I’m afraid, but what the hell? It’s been a rather slow Samizdata day so far.

BBC 1 showed a Madonna movie last Sunday evening. My Radio Times makes no mention of it, but does mention the movie Black Sunday, which they didn’t show. This is the one where Bruce Dern hijacks the Goodyear Blimp in order to zap a Superbowl crowd with knitting needles, and presumably they cancelled it so as not to give those Arab terrorists any clever ideas, or maybe because, what with the bad guys in this movie actually being Arab terrorists, they didn’t want to show a work of fiction that had now become insufficiently fictional. It’s odd that, isn’t it? – although I’m not disagreeing. Odd also that I settle down to blog about triviality (importance of) and profundity has immediately barged its way back in. That’s terrorism for you.

Anyway, Madonna. The movie BBC1 did show was Body of Evidence. The plot concerns a woman who picks on rich old guys with heart conditions and then shags them (very kinkily and dominatingly) to death, after first ensuring that the will gets changed in her favour. Follow the above link and you’ll find what I take to be the critical consensus about this movie in particular, and Madonna movies generally (his lower case lettering):

this movie ranks up (or should that be down?) near the top with Showgirls as possibly one of the greatest movies that is so bad and inept it’s unintentionally hilarious and cheesy entertainment. …

we get to see footage of Madonna and her deceased lover getting it on (while he was still alive of course) ; william dafoe going at it with his wife; madonna pouring hot candle wax all over Dafoe before a lengthy sex scene between the 2 with her on top; another scene where she does him on the hood of his car after he performs oral sex on her and he lays on broken pieces of glass; and yet another scene where dafoe literally rapes her with him on top while she’s laying on her stomach (this comes after we get to see 2 or so minutes of Madonna masturbating in from of him.)

so as a sex flick it delivers. and the cheesy acting and dialogue is some of the most unintentionally hilarious in recent memory.

while it’s nowhere close to being a good film, it’s above average as far as this genre of films goes and is one of the best cheesy bad but good movies in the last few years.

You sense some uncertainty in that last paragraph, don’t you? Quite right mate, she’s not a great movie actress, but neither is she that bad. Not at acting anyway.

I think that the problem with Madonna’s desperate and desperately public quest for movie stardom is quite different. Simply, most of us don’t like her. It’s not that she can’t convincingly portray the women she portrays in her movies. The problem is the women she portrays. These women are – because this is how lead movie acting works – based on her. And she is not what most of us think of as a nice person.

When movie audiences look at a leading performance – a “star” performance – in a movie, they project onto it all the baggage they remember about the star in question, all the stuff they remember him/her as having done in his/her previous movies – or in Madonna’s case her previous life as a pop megastar. For this reason, you cast against type – against previously established public persona – at your peril. If you are doing a movie starring Madonna, you can’t caste her as a genuinely timid virgin, as a women to whom it would never occur to swap sex for stuff, as a woman to whom pretty clothes are a matter of true indifference, as a woman who would only prance about in revealing constumes if forced to. The audience simply couldn’t buy that. They’d be literally unable to watch her without at least suspecting that at some point in the story, Clark Kent (as it were) would step into the proverbial phone box and emerge as: Madonna!!

Come to think of it, I suppose you could define an all-time great movie actor as one who forces you to forget all that baggage you thought you knew about him/her and concentrate entirely on the here and now. And like I say, Madonna is quite good at movie acting, but not that good.

When I say that Madonna’s movie characters are based on Madonna and when I say that most of us don’t like her, I don’t mean that we don’t like the “real” Madonna, the one who is now married to the Brit film director, with two kids, lots of money and money worries, and lots of other worries about getting old, dying, getting the new garage door to work properly, etc. That real Madonna may or may not be a sexy scary bitch. I dare say she’s no worse than most, having learned, as we all do, to cool it with the adolescent flaunting of what was her particular take on being an annoying adolescent. No, I’m talking about the public Madonna, the Madonna persona, carefully and determinedly constructed over the years.

“Madonna” stands for, approximately speaking, the following sorts of notions, in no particular order:

Girl power, not relying on men, who in any case are weak and easy to manipulate. By …

Swapping sex for stuff, “material girl” etc.. Wave your cleverly decorated body at men, give them great sex from the Madonna Great Sex Playbook, and they are then putty in your hands and their bank accounts are your bank accounts.

None of which is a burden, because on the contrary it’s all terrific fun. It’s not prostitution forced on you by some (male) pimp, provided you keep in shape and in control. And …

Any person or institution who says that the above is sinful, or even unattractive, is a pathetic moral-majority stuck-up prude, disguising male terror of the strong sexually active woman, and female jealousy ditto, as theological principle. Papa don’t preach.

Any man who, like me, says he is appalled and repelled by the above doesn’t know his own mind. He’s in the grip of false consciousness. You think you want a nice sweet hausfrau, but really you want me. That’s what a man is. An animal I can dominate, and who likes it when I dominate. Admit it. You want it, really, yes you do. And I can bring it out of you (… and thereby empty your bank account).

The above stuff so far, and this is important, is not just the truth, it is a truth that Madonna is willing to argue for in public, like any other religious leader. The reason why Madonna is both so religious and so anti-other-religions is that religion means a lot to her, and she is just as keen on spreading her religion as those churches with enough balls to denounce her are in spreading theirs.

Finally, if any or all of this gets you into serious trouble, play the sweet female card (like a virgin) – the wronged woman – until you are back in control of everything.

Like I say: a sexy, scary bitch.

Now I don’t mind admitting it. I’m totally terrified by all this. I can just about stand watching it on a stage or in a movie, although it scares me even there, but let it into my drawing room or into my heart? – no, no, no.

The plot of Madonna’s latest hubby-directed movie (which I’ve not seen yet and which scares me already) is, apparently, that she is an unhappy Madonna-type woman who by the end permanently turns over a new leaf and becomes a permanently happy normal woman, with absolutely no monster woman tendencies left inside her. But that’s impossible. Not even an Italian could do that to Madonna. (And don’t get me started on how much I hate Italian leading men in romantic movies.)

But what’s a man to do? Real Men don’t go around saying that they think sexy scary bitches are sexy scary bitches; it’s not polite. It’s not chivalrous. Real Men make polite excuses and move on.

Worse, Real Men really, really don’t admit to being scared, to wanting to be in control of the situation but terrified that if Madonna ever comes at them they won’t be. Mummy, mummy, tell the scary woman to go away!!

Even the “wanting to be in control” bit is not now something we’re supposed to say out loud these days, not as far as our dealings with women are concerned. So how the hell are we supposed to be able to discuss the fact that we want to be in control but won’t be, in Madonna-world?

I’m not quite a Real Man, which is to say that I am the kind of Real Man who is so Real that he can admit to not quite being a Real Man, which is to say that I am an Even Realler Man. So I can say all this. (Those sentences remind me of all those middle class marxists who claimed to be able to step outside the dramas they regarded everyone else as being bound hand and foot by, but I’ll let it pass. Be gone, profundity.)

And what of the Normal Women, who want to stay home and bake bread and raise kids and keep hubby happy and faithful, for at least some of the time, and keep the likes of Madonna completely away from the neighbourhood? What can they possibly say without tripping up hopelessly on their political incorrectness?

But are we, then, supposed to line up with all those stupid churches and embarrassing Republicans and general stuck-up idiots who think that even Abba is the work of the Devil? Hardly. Luckily, there is a far simpler procedure available to us:

(a) let all those not-Real-Men-or-Normal-Women film critics take it in turns to tell the universe that Madonna Is A Hopeless Actress. (These anti-Madonna critics are unchivalrous enough to blame Madonna’s acting, but, unlike your bloggist here, not Real enough to come clean about their own fearfulness.) And:

(b) say nothing.

And poor, poor Madonna’s film career remains mysteriously but permanently stuck in the mud. Ah, the poor wronged woman.

But sorry Ma’am. As one of Madonna’s female rivals in Body of Evidence says:

“She’s not the kind of woman men marry.”

That’s why she will never be a A-list Hollywood movie star.

Here’s my Madonna career advice: she should become a James Bond villain. She’d be great at that. She should simply be told to try to be as nice as possible and her persona will do the rest. The entire audience will quake in terror as soon as they spot her. Swivel chair, ooh! White fluffy pussy cat, ooooooh!! It’s Madonna!!! Perfect, she’s finally found her ideal place in society, happy at last, with an enormous army of glam-feminists. There’d be no more crap about how she can’t act, because she’d act everybody else, Bond definitely including, clean off the screen.

She should make sure they don’t definitely kill her at the end, because I reckon – as per the great Jaws – they’d want her back for the next one.