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Desperately Seeking Marilyn: Madonna, Myth, and MTV
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13934 |
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THE ARTS
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2 / 1988 |
2,376 Words |
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Paul Coates
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The protagonists of myths are gods and goddesses; their divine status stems from the multiplicity of forms they are able to adopt. The ancient deity Diana is triform: goddess of the moon, the hunt, and fertility. The secular goddess of the moment, Madonna, is biform--both whore and virgin in the MTV video "Like a Virgin"; showbiz star and girl grateful for flowers in "Material Girl"; peep-show performer and runaway big sister in "Open Your Heart."
The dual identity of the goddess as MTV performer gives her the best of both worlds, which also means allowing her to preserve primary narcissism into adult life: In the "Who's That Girl?" video, Madonna watches a self so well known that the cursory notation of a cartoon is sufficient to identify her.
The rock video as art form, of course, feeds on a multiplicity of inconsistent images, and Madonna is perhaps the first (or best) artist of a new kind--that of rock video. A compact, transistorized version of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, the rock video so overwhelms one with a surfeit of information as to prevent one's perceiving the emptiness of rock's self-celebration. Information becomes indistinguishable from the noise.
Music becomes a form of ideology ("rock is the only true religion," the graffito tells us): anyone can subscribe to it, for it is fundamentally a matter of rhythms and patterns, not of concepts. It may be relevant to note that the rhythms of rock are of an extreme simplicity. Music may function at present as a social cement that appears to bypass ideology (and so to escape the general disillusion with failed ideologies), yet it too can be considered an ideology: that of regression. The explosion in the realm of the senses is purely biological, deliberately mindless.
Rock's Message
Nevertheless, rock does have a message: denial of origin. It can be either utopian or ideological in tenor. In its utopian mode it posits a world in which no one is limited by his or her origins: Whites can meet with blacks on the grounds of rhythm and blues, the working class can rise to riches and fame, and white trash can become a goddess (Madonna). In its ideological frame the sigh of the lip-synching singer represses the moment of the song's conception and creates an alarming personality cult that mystifies events by personalizing them (there is something rather chilling in the mass of one-arm salutes that is all one sees of the audience in a Bon Jovi or Van Halen video). A Madonna meanwhile can rip off "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and her fans will either not realize how much she has stolen from Monroe, or will see the echo as establishing a line of succession ("Madonna as the Marilyn of the eighties!").
If rock denies origin, rock videos go even farther by virtually effacing all memory of the prevideo era. The clean sweep is both exhilarating and barbaric--the genuinely revolutionary impulses that underlie it being simultaneously sanitized by ghettoization within youth culture.
In Faust, Goethe rewrites the opening sentence of the Gospel of Saint John, which ascribes primacy to the Word, as "In the Beginning was the Deed." In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, the originary position is shifted to Desire. The world founded by Desire, however, is not that of
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