Madonna as Last Gasp
Lesbian vampire and historical immortal: a career resurrection of Studio Hollywood
I am still thinking about the Britney-Madonna kiss, the culmination of a collective and perverse fantasy in which Madonna is svelte androgyne with multiple, admiring child brides. Author Lucy O’Brien covered the event in her biography Madonna: Like an Icon (not nearly juicy enough). The book was correct in its evaluation of Madonna as lesbian vampire, but overwrought in its description of the kiss as an animalistic act, horrific in itself like a midcentury B-movie.
The kiss actually brings to mind a refined and balanced lesbianism popularised by Marlene Dietrich in the early 1930s (note especially the nightclub scene in Sternberg’s Morocco) and later elegantly parodied in Kümel’s sparkly, sadomasochistic Daughters of Darkness. The real chewing, stabbing and swallowing is to come later, and it is to this that we can attribute the kiss’s specifically female magic and importance.
Madonna is often credited as a postmodern artist, capable of deconstructing and reconstructing cinematic and literary ideals. There is an intertextual level to this (the glitch-pop Western and the reused Abba sample), but more interesting is the metatextual level which serves as her consistent ground.
She plays lesbian vampire and we are highly aware of her teeth (for chewing, stabbing and swallowing). Unlike the Hollywood actresses she references, her teeth have become an actual part of her public image, one identifier consistent in a series of mental and physical reinventions.
In accepting the gap between her two teeth, we also become conscious of her actual instruments of eating and kissing and enunciation, and thus everything she takes on turns real and visceral.
The Britney-Madonna kiss is just as significant as the apex of a vampire film, with our celebrity consensus building up every subplot and suspense: a) Madonna does not age, b) Britney is a virginal protegee, c) Madonna has fangs.
A camp castoff from studio-era Hollywood: the female ruler biopic, best exemplified in The Scarlet Empress (Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great, a trickster German in a foreign land), Queen Christina (Greta Garbo as icy, androgynous and bisexual Swede), and Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor as dark, luxurious and bejewelled two-timer).
The first two are great inventions of the star machine at its cultic height; the last is said to have demolished the studio system entirely (I imagine it pulled down in a spectacle of crumbling limestone, like Day of the Locust meets Cleopatra itself).
The ruler biopic was never sincerely meant to be accurate to its subject. Queen Christina is not about Queen Christina of Sweden as much as it is about Garbo, whose reputation called for lasting historical justification in the European ‘old world’.
With the release of Christina, she went from a person to an archetype, a figure trapped for years in books and statues, and suddenly benefitted from centuries of existing myth and legend. Her longevity was doubled and then guaranteed.
Now when even the beginner Old Hollywood fan thinks of Garbo, they think of icy seas and bricked-up castles. A romantic image has been conjured forever - a testament to the strength of the studio era as vehicle of pagan worship-lite (see Sexual Personae).
Madonna in Evita is an extension of this. Her metatextual corruption of Old Hollywood continues simply due to her appearance in the film, which was made far into the era of the male blockbuster and a historical distance from every similarly significant she-ruler biopic.
No studio executive judged Madonna and Evita as ambitious soul sisters parted by the waves of time, or used the reputation of one to build a persona for the other: this judgement was the actress’s own, a letter-writing exercise performed, by legend, unconsciously.
Here comes a tripartite transformation: Hollywood starlet, Hollywood marketing executive, Eva Peron.
Madonna is not a feminist for any of the other cited reasons - but she furthers the feminist project in reviving the studio Hollywood paradigm to be completely in control of her own image and to further her personal ambition, a sort of worship-revenge.