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Directed by Alek Keshishian
A documentary with Madonna
USA, 1991
Rated R (nudity, sexual content, language)
Prince is a phenomenal, original musician and, I think, a genius, who can play several instruments and write some great pop tunes. He was popular with listeners of that era probably because his hits were so daringly, sexually perverted; he’s explored everything from masturbation to incest in his music, all in jaw-dropping detail. He provokes us with his music, while Madonna, on the other hand, incites her arguments more with visuals. Her music is always catchy and bouncy, not very sophisticated or dangerous content-wise, and that’s probably why she has remained (though she is less popular in the year 2000 than she was in 1985) a gigantic pop star and why Prince (or The Artist, or whatever his name is…) is seen more as the daunting art-pop figure.
When the music video became the next Big Thing in the industry, Madonna was one of the first stars to really use the format as more than a four-minute commercial. Her earlier clips weren’t very creative, but she pushed the envelope even back then with the midriff-flaunting “Lucky Star.” She is one of those artists (and yes, she is an artist even in the stricter sense of the word) whose videos are just as important as her music, and her music is often uncommonly great pop. “Like a Prayer” is a good pop record that segues into uplifting gospel, but it took the controversial video (that now looks a bit tacky), with its mixing of religious and sexual ecstasy and themes of non-race-oriented practices of the two, to make it a button-pushing scorcher. “Papa Don’t Preach” is darkly danceable; the video is not her most memorable, but it explores pre-marital pregnancy. “Open Your Heart” is your basic I-will-make-you-love-me pop song; the video crosses into pedophilia. “Express Yourself” is, for me, her most overpowering dance/soul recording, but even more flavor was added when it was paired with the (David Fincher-directed) video that featured a factory setting and muscular male workers controlled by a femme fatale.
Her use of visuals to get the points across that are just undertones in her music is evident in one scene from her documentary of her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour, Truth or Dare. “Like a Virgin”’s title suggests filth but the track, written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, is quite harmless. For her erotically-charged rendition on the tour, she adds an Eastern element to the song, and lies on a bed, two dancers with the signature cone-shaped bras by her side, and gets rather affectionate with herself and the mattress. The sexuality of this innocent song is brought out with directness, and the result is pretty unsettling. Her crotch-grabbing during the number threatens to put her in prison in Toronto, where they call attention to the “public masturbation” during the number (she is delighted by the charge, of course).
The film, directed by Alek Keshishian, is an attempt to show the real Madonna, and Keshishian, whose only experience prior to this documentary was, appropriately, music videos, was given complete access to everything Madonna did on the tour. Truth or Dare has the style of a music video. It has the brazenness of a Madonna clip; done mostly in black-and-white, the titles are in a rebellious red. The editing is MTV-ish and the film too often lingers away during a number in the show to backstage goings-on.
The numbers are photographed in color and most of them are exhilarating, some of them more so than their music video counterparts. Besides sex, Madonna’s other Big Issue that she frequently takes on in her videos is religion and the performances of “Oh Father,” “Live to Tell,” and “Like a Prayer,” all three songs that aren’t really about religion, are big, lavish extravaganzas of the agony and the ecstasy of Christianity, with religious imagery that is very potent. Madonna delivers to her audience; hers are not simple stool-and-microphone performances that work for big vocal talents, but aim to be as explosive as theatrical productions. Her choreography isn’t great, but the sets and the lighting and the dancing and the power of her transcendent pop all come together to make a great show.
Truth or Dare shows Madonna as a determined star obsessed with her own stardom. Her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty smartly comments, “She doesn’t wanna live off-camera.” Is there any real difference between Madonna the Star and Madonna the Person? Her whole life seems to be devoted to the development of her career. Or the development of her life through her career. This woman really works her butt off, suffering sickness and fatigue to get what she wants. She even mothers her dancers and crew, takes them under her wing and scolds them when they get in the way of her vision, and they eerily become like her children (the film suggests that perhaps this need to mother can be traced back to the death of her own mother.)
The documentary is filled with the incongruities of the Madonna Mystique. She plays mother hen backstage, but uses her dancers as sexual playthings; her show is very sexual, yet she has a prayer session each night before going on. Even Madonna’s name is a bit ironic: here is this in-your-face entertainer who’s named after a Biblical figure. And the film itself is a contradiction; it makes the private Madonna public.
Madonna is a pop artist who knows she’s a pop artist, but wants to put the Art into the formula. She explains to her obviously conservative father that the frequently lewd show is a little work of art that she’s doing, a stop on the way to her final destination. There’s a megalomania and nymphomania to her art; she’s determined never to be boring and she regularly uses sex (excessively) to be interesting. She enjoys toying with her audience and she likes being controversial; she shares this delight with Prince and other modern-day hellraisers like Spike Lee and, most recently, the deliberately offensive rapper Eminem.
But how far can you go? Madonna willingly gives away her privacy, but how can she truly be herself when she’s always aware that the camera is staring at her. Truth or Dare gets to be a bit too much when she bares her breasts right in front of the camera and plays childish sex games with her dancers. Most shocking are when we are invited to watch her visiting her mother’s grave, and when she allows herself to reveal that the love of her life is her ex-husband Sean Penn. One can’t help but feel a bit uneasy that she would drag business into such personal events and confessions. The creed of “brutal honesty” for this film does bring in some funny but startling moments. Poor Kevin Costner’s cameo is the most memorable; he meets Madonna backstage and calls her show “neat.” After he’s gone, she sticks her finger down her throat. My, how she dares! But all of these colorful incidents represent her career-driven lifestyle, and that’s what Truth or Dare attempts to bring to its audience. Whether its reality or play acting, we will never know.
During the year of the Blonde Ambition tour, Madonna was a busy woman. Her greatest hits album called The Immaculate Collection was compiled, and it’s probably her greatest album ever because she isn’t really an album-oriented artist. A collection of her most popular singles from 1983 to 1990 is more likely to be successful in capturing her pop music savvy than a regular album. The collection makes it clear that she’s a force to be reckoned with: she’s a great pop writer-producer-star, and the seventeen tracks are more great songs than a lot of the best pop artists put out in an entire career. There’s a lot of wonderful material that she recorded from “Lucky Star” to “Vogue,” and a lot that’s left out, including songs like “Causing a Commotion,” “Dress You Up,” “Keep It Together,” and the underappreciated “Oh Father.” She writes some of the best hooks in the business, and she continues to make some of the best pop music ten years after the release of this album. Also in 1990, Madonna filmed a video for “Justify My Love,” a song penned by Lenny Kravitz for The Immaculate Collection which is more atmosphere than substance. The video was the highlight of the Madonna-Kravitz collaboration and was banned from MTV, a precursor to her pinnacle of erotic exploration in 1993, with Erotica the album and Sex the book. Again showing her shrewd business skills, she put the video on store shelves and raked in thousands for the first video single ever.
Madonna is larger than life, and some of her appeal is sexual because she insists on dominating. She rarely loses sight of her main goal, though, which is to please. She’s not very good at introspection; her last album, Ray of Light, was usually lyrically so-so. The release of her latest video, “Music,” was hyped-up by MTV and VH1 and was premiered to screaming fans, proving that she still whets the public’s appetite, or at least has been able to keep loyal followers. Her latest three singles (the others are “Beautiful Stranger” and a cover of Don McLean’s “American Pie”) see her coming out of her hazy philosophizing and returning to form; all three have a let’s-have-fun modern-retro vibe.
The great thing about Madonna is she knows she’s not the greatest singer or the greatest dancer, but today’s teeny bopper divas are her plus the talent, minus the passion and attitude. Truth or Dare is wildly entertaining and gives us all the visual excitement of a Madonna concert. She’s not just making music, but an image, and even the documentary puts together an image of what she is personally, which is something like the auras of Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, the Sex Pistols, Gloria Steinem, David Bowie, and Shirley Temple all melted together; she has the same commandingly catty attitude as some of the golden Hollywood movie stars she pays tribute to in “Vogue.” The film teases us, makes us love her and hate her, because a lot of the reason why she’s controversial is because she’s an exhibitionist, not only with her body but, like the confessional singer-songwriters of the ‘70s, with her private life. She’s a compassionate anarchist, using pop music as her powerful weapon.
By Andrew Chan [AUG. 9, 2000]
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