Depth for Madonna has often been along the lines of saying "Racism is
bad" and then sticking her hand down her pants. But bless her heart if
that isn't exactly what we've needed, a stylishly philosophical titty
dancer. Madonna has long stood as the willing whipping girl of America's
unreconstructed Bible brigade, a mote in our stagnant reservoir of
cultural Puritanism. Make no mistake, for all of her vacuous glory, the
Material Girl has institutionalized more perversity into the heart of
culture than a whole battalion of nymphomaniac shock troops ever could.
Madonna has made sexual deviance a matter of mere style, milking its
supposed prurience for disposable allure and then chucking the hackneyed
remains. As a gay person hoping that the rest of the world would just
get over it, I can't thank her enough for bringing banality where
enlightenment isn't always possible.
It's hard to imagine what was on Madonna's mind when she decided to pull
the video for "American Life". It's probably the salivating right wing
hordes, waiting for Clear Channel to fire the flare gun and send them on
the hunt to defend freedom by stomping it out like unattended campfires.
But that makes little sense, since she has previously lived to light a
pyre in the rectum of America's self-appointed crusaders. And let's be
honest, the people who are going to froth rabidly at "American Life"
were never going to buy her new album anyway. It's certainly not a case
of Dixie Chick syndrome; Natalie Maines was chapping the asses of her
demographic, who clearly love the President like they love baby Jesus,
bullets and Vin Diesel movies.
Madonna has always been an impresario of churning out images
simultaneously blunt and suggestive of ulterior depth, so I fully
understand that my interpretation of her intentions could be a simple
case of projecting a lake bottom on a mud puddle. Even so, "American
Life" takes a few mildly suggestive jabs at the shallowness of our
culture and the perversity at the center of the impulse to make war. The
song itself isn't exactly enigmatic. Basically "American Life"
chronicles Madonna's excess and emptiness, telling all of the
unglittered masses that wealth, fame, and power aren't what they're
cracked up to be. This is a tradition that dates back to Elvis crying in
the laps of poor teenage girls who just wanted to score. Madonna tells
us that everything she has means nothing, but curiously doesn't simply
give it all up for, say, a secretarial gig. The entire visual narrative
of the video for "American Life" implies that Madonna's bottomless wants
are indicative of our own less successful versions. More tellingly, the
spiritual void at the heart of our culture is exactly why we go to war
as if it's just something exciting to break up the regularly scheduled
programming. I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but after
watching the panting, war-horny Fox News during Operation Freedom
Liberation Jesus Gun (or whatever it was called), I'm embarrassed by
Madonna's observational accuracy.
"American Life" maligns our generally antiseptic representations of the
people we kill. You'd have had to log on to a Middle Eastern news
network if you wanted to acquaint yourself with the unseemly fact that
people die when bombs go off or that "surgical" is an accurate
description of bombing only if the surgery in question was performed in
the Middle Ages. Our images of war are primarily of stud pilots standing
at the tip of their planes, bathed in gorgeous desert sunsets, like
those cheaply framed paintings sold off of trucks in parking lots.
Madonna mines this desire for beautiful images of destruction to its
decadent extreme, parading models draped in bullets and gas masks, goose
stepping choreography, and keeping the visual tone of the militarized
montage on the verge of orgy. Like much of Madonna's other social
commentary, the overt sexualization of the statement has a tendency to
marginalize any of the political content. In "American Life", much of
the video is a fashion show of haute couture military gear. Perhaps
Madonna is taking her correspondence course Freud full circle, placing
the desire for death squarely within the desire to fuck. It's difficult
to tell whether or not she's indicting the sexiness of war or reveling
in it. But one does sense that the underlying theme is some fortune
cookie politics like: "War is Bad", "Men Make Wars as Extensions of
their Hard Ons", "American Life is Meaningless".
The crowning "offense" of the video comes when Madonna busts into the
fashion show riding on top of a weaponized Mini-Cooper and tosses a
grenade to a George Bush look alike while also spraying bullets onto the
crowd (a great ending to any fashion show, if you ask me). Instead of
killing the George Bush impersonator, he picks up the grenade and lights
his cigarette with it. (it was just a lighter, silly) Madonna's official
explanation for pulling the video was "Due to the volatile state of the
world and out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I
support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might
misinterpret the meaning of this video." Misinterpret how? Let's be
honest, the gesture of tossing the grenade is a barely veiled desire to
kill the president metaphorically. If it were a serious death threat,
it would be reprehensible, but as an artistic fantasy of reversing power
and meting out rough justice, it's no different than Morrissey waxing
breathless about beheading Margaret Thatcher. Its edgy, but also
satirical and the only people not likely to see the humor in it are
those people so jacked up by the war that they believe when an actor
flaps their opinion in California, soldiers thousands of miles away die
in a hurricane of lost nerve. Too many of those people think that
having a war is like watching Peter Pan and all of us have to clap in
unison so that Tinkerbell doesn't die.
Right-wing groups have successfully marshaled patriotism into their
corrosively partisan corner, draping authoritarianism and tax cuts in
dead troops and arias to blind obedience. It's a shame when artists have
to feel that even minor deviations from the patriotic mind meld will be
met with misspelled blacklisting. Partly, it's the sheer laziness of a
celebrity's refusal to give up their fatted pens for the spare comfort
of a clean conscience. But part of it is also the seething intellectual
violence enshrined in the heart of Republican fundamentalism that
equates difference with sin and dissent with deadly treachery. The star
of conservatism is ascendant, let's pray for its collapse and hope that
all our precious cultural values and some of our most cherished cultural
trinkets don't get sucked down its blackhole wake.
Of course, I'm no fool. This entire catch and release video program
could have been part of the Material Girl's grand designs to prime
consumers for the April 22 release date of American Life. Just as
the song "Like a Prayer" had little to do with black horny Christ
figures, burning crosses, and Madonna falling down in a skimpy camisole,
the song "American Life" is only tangentially related to the video. I
fully admit that my outrage could make me willing meat for Madonna's
venus publicity flytrap. Even so, I miss the last few incarnations of
Madonna and have little use for the newer, less brazen, more craven one.
— 29 May 2003
