Vanity Fair's website has a slideshow of all her cover articles in the magazine, with all the eye-popping layouts inside. (Steven Meisel, in my opinion, photographs her best.)
I bought about half of those issues at the time, so I clicked through the slideshow with great interest to see how they would look to me now.
Madonna defined the 80s in a way that I don't think anyone outside that decade--un-imprintable by it--could understand. (I certainly remember that my mother was politely baffled. Madonna lost her completely by trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" number within the "Material Girl" video. You just don't try to take on Monroe in the eyes of someone who was there for the original, ya know?)
I was imprintable and indeed imprinted by the 80s--and hey, ya know, it wasn't just empty arena rock; it was Cyndi Lauper, Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Husker Du, Bjork, and, though his actual flowering as an artist and sexual freedom fighter would not occur until the next decade, George Michael--so I have to deal with its legacy.
Hence clicking through the Vanity Fair thing at 2am.
And realizing:
I do not understand Madonna. What the hell is that? What are those exposed, turned-out, high-low, cool-seedy images of a woman who in retrospect seems more waxlike than real?
(It occurs to me that that "waxlike" remark could be taken as something cruel. I don't mean it that way. I mean it in a distressed-wail kind of way. In the rearview mirror, Madonna's image looks pasty and dead, and it frightens me. She was my secret mommy.)
You know, I actually just shocked myself by writing that. I didn't know it until my fingers banged it out. It is, in fact, true; I did look to Madonna for all the things a girl needs mentoring or mothering in but for very good reasons can't get from her own actual mother, aka sex. What people outside the 80s will never understand is that Madonna was that, and actually had and has the power to tear weird confessions like that from her (children) audience.
I think it's because her own heart was torn from her as a child. Wrenched. Grief is a confession.*
#
There's no coherence to the pull quotes in the layouts. Here she's going on about her lust for power. There she's confessing it's all to cover up her fears of inadequacy. Now she orders us to "be creative" in sex; later she props Sean Penn for bossing her around. She says she always wanted to be "alluring," then laments her failure to be "sweet" and "submissive." She informs us that, while she fantasizes about women, she's "mostly fulfilled" by men. She warns us not to depend on what "society" thinks of us, then leaves us--the very last quote--with the thought that "This film [she's making] was seriously influenced by Godard."
The parade of images is notable for its vast stillness, its fundamentally sculptural treatment of Madonna's body. Interesting, in that Madonna is a dancer first and foremost and the center of dance is stillness. (You have to learn to hold. Only willed movement has meaning.)
Most of the images are meant to be provocative, yet are curiously antiseptic as well. They recede, even when dazzling red sequined dresses are involved. They recede from the eye and the grasp. That's what I don't understand. Madonna Ciccone has never been accused of fading back.
Maybe her karma's coming for her. Stealing her breath from her images. Stealing her heart from the page.
Why it would do that, though, when she's already paid the price, I do not know.
---
*For those unfamiliar with Madonna's biography, her mother tragically died when she was young. I remember an article about her--it might even have been one of these Vanity Fairs--where she said "Well, I've outlived my mother" (meaning she had now attained an age her mother never saw). She was in her thirties. I put the magazine down in tears.
ED.: So, dead mothers and waxy images. Yes, you could say something about that horrific event in Madonna's past and the fact that her photographic images look embalmed. AND the fact that when I saw her deadness and her deadness frightened me I called her 'mommy.' Bringing it all right back around.
You could say something about all that. I didn't. I've decided that's for the best. You take it and run with it if you want. I'm going to let it lie.
ED. ED.: Here's what I will say: this is why pop culture matters. Because this is what pop culture does.
