Choose a favorite celebrity. What about them do you find authentic? What revelant fantasy or symbolic resources do they provide you?

CHAPTER Sa

Madonna

Madonna, who has been a major phenomenon of popular culture throughout the late 1980s, is a rich terrain to expiore. Her success has been due at least as much to her videos and her per�onality as to her music-about which most critics are disparaging. It is also significant that her fans and her publicity materials, along with journalistic reports and critiques, pay far more attention to what she looks like, who she is, and what she stands for than to what she sounds like.

In this chapter, then, r concentrate on Madonna's appear­ ance, her personality, and the words and images of her songs, for these are the main carriers of her most accessible meanings. Thisisnotto saythat hermusicis unimportant, for it is the music that underpins everything else and. that provides the emotional intensity or affect without which none of the·resfwould matter to her fans. But it does point to the fact that the,:pleasmes of music are remarkably resistant to analysis, and are ·equally difficult to express in the words and images that are so imporlant in the circulation of culture.

Before her image became known, Madonna was not a success: at the start, at least, her music was not enough on its own to turn her into a major resource of popular culture. In the autumn of 1984 she was signed to Sire Records, which is "where Warner' Brothers put people they don't think will sell" (Countdown Magazine Special Annual 1985: 2). She got some dance club play for "Borderline" and "Holiday," but the Madonna LP was selling only slowly. Like a Virgin, her second LP, had been made but not released. Warner Brothers then gave Arthur Pierson a tiny budget to make a rock video of "Lucky tar." He shot it in an afternoon against a white studio

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backdro}?, and the resultingvideo pushed the song into thetop ·: ten. The Madonna album's sales followed suit, and Like a; Virgin was released for the Christmas market. Both LPs held the number one position for a �umber of weeks. The film ' Desperately Seeking Susan was released in March 1985, which added an adult audience to the teenage (largely female) one for the songs and videos. The film worked to support the videosin establishing the "Madonna look," a phrase that the media repeated ertdlessly in 1985 and one that Madonna capitalized 011 by establishing her Boy Toy label to sell crucifix earrings, fingerles� lace gloves, short, navel-expqsing blouses, black lac�y garments, and all the visual symbols she had made her own.

A concert tour started in April (in the foyers, of course, items of the Madonna look were for sale) and an old film, A Certain Sacrifice, that never made cinema release was dug up for the home video market. Also dug up and published in Playboyand

· Penthouse were old art school nude photos, and at the end of 1985, her wedding to Sean Penn became a world wide multimedia event, despite its "secret" location. In other words, she was a fine example of the capitalist pop industry at work, creating a (possibly short-lived) fashion, exploiting it to the full; and making a lot of money from one of the most powerless and exploitable sections of the cqmmunity, young girls.

But such an account is inadequate (though not necessarily inacc.urate asfaras,it goes)because it assumes that theMadonna fans are merely "cultural d opes," able to be manipulated at will and against their own interests by the moguJs of the culture industry. Such a manipulatio� would be not orly economic, but also ideological, because the economic system requires the ideology of patriarchal capitalism to underpin and naturalize it. Economics and ideology can never be separated.

And there is no shortage of evidence to support this view. Madonna's videos exploit the sexuality of her face and body and frequently show her in postures of submission (e.g., "Burning Up") or subordination to men. Her physical similarity to Marilyn Monroe is stressed (particularly in the video of "Material Girl"), an intertextual reference to another star commonly thought to owe her success to her ability to embody masculine fantasy. In the Countdown 1985 poll of the top 20 "Sex/Lust Objects"

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Madonna took third place and was the only female among 19 males ( Countdown, December 1985:35). All this would suggest that she is teaching her young female fans to see themselves as mert would see them; that is, she is· hailing·them as feminine subjects within patriarchy, and as such is an agent of patriarchal hegemony.

But, if her fans are not "cultural dopes," but actively choose to watch, listen to, and imitate her rather than lmyone else, there must be some gaps or spaces in her image tliat escape ideological control and allow her audiences to make meanings

1 that connect with their social experience. For many of h�r audiences, this social experience is one of powerlessness and subordination, and if Madonna as a site of meaning is not to naturalize this, sh�_must offer opportunities for resisting it. Her

1 image-becomes, then, not a model meaning for young girls in patriarchy, but a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control and feminine resistance, of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult and the young.

The fiel&of cultural studies, in its current state of develop-· ment, t>ffer� two overlapping methodological strategies that need to be combined and. the differences between them submerged if we are to understand this cultural struggle. One derives from ethnography, and requires us to study the

. meanings that the fans of Madonna actually do (or appear to) make of her. This involves listening to them, reading the letters

·. they write to fanzines, or observing their behavior at- home or in public. The fans' words. or behavior are not,· of course, empiricai'facts that speak for themselves; rather, they are texts that need "reading" theoretically in just the same way as the "texts of Madonna" do.

This brings us to the other strategy, which derives from semiotic and structui:alist textual analy�is. This involves a close reading of the signifiers of the text-that is, its physical presence-but recognizes that the signifieds exist not in the text itself, but extratextually, in the myths, countermyths, and ideology of their culture. It recognizes that the distribution of power in society is paralleled by the distribution of meanings in texts, and that struggles for social power are paralleled by semiotic struggles for meanings. Every text and every reading

. has a s ocial and therefore political dimension, which is to be

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found partly in the structure of the text itself and pai:tly in the social relations of the reader, and the way they are brought to bear upon the text.

It follows that the theory that informs any analysis also has a social dimension thati&�a necessary part of the "meanings" the analysis reveals. Meanings, therefore, are relative and varied: what is cbnstcl1lt is the ways in which texts relate to the .social �system: }rcult_µral analysis, then, will reveal both th� wccy the dQmi.1w1�fldeology is structured into the text and h;1to the .:refmlitlgsubj�ct,-and those textual features that enable negotiated,

" T��isting,:. or oppositional readings to be made. Culturale analysis reaches a satisfactory conclusion when the ethno­ graphic studies of the historically and socially located meanings that are made are related to the se111iotic analysis of -tl\e text. Semiotics relates the structure of the text to the social system to explore how such meanings are made and the part they. play within the cultural process that relates meanings both to social experience and to the sociai system in general.

So Lucy, a 14-year-old fan, says .of a Madonna-poster:

Shers tarty and seductive .. -. but it looks-a.liigh-Pwhen she does it, - you know, what I-mean, if ·anyon�.else "did it it would Jookright

tarty, a right tart yoakn_o�lwtwithner its OK, it's acceptable .... with any01w �l��J�Qlll�{>e�lr.,Qhltely outrageous, it sounds �illy, .but u:,ttOKwitJfh�11:y6u know what I mean. (November 1985A_

·: -W�_ ..dlJ. "�dte :a number of points here. Lucy can .only finde patriarchal words to describe Madonna's sexuality-"tarty" and "seductive"-but she struggJes against the patriarchy inscribed in them. At-the same time, sb.�struggles against the patriarchy inscribed in her own subjeetivity. The opposition between "acceptable" and "absolutely outrageous" not only refers to representations of female sexuality, but is a,n.externali­ zation of the tension felt by adolescent girls w henJrying to come ..to terms with the .contradictions between a positive feminine w.i�of tneir sexuality and the alien patriarchal one that appears t�/ue�the."-only one offerec;l ,by the available linguistic ande symbolk systems: Madonna's "tartyn sexuality is "acceptable" -but to wh�m? Certainly to Lucy, and to .girls like- her whoe are experiencing the_ -problems of establishing- a satisfaetorye

......._

Madonna -IJ9" sexual identity within an oppressing ideology, but we need further evidence to StJ.pportthis te!l�ative conclusion. Matthe"Y,

\ aged 15, not a particular fan of Maclorma, commented on her marriage in the same discussion. He tho}lght it would last only one or two years, and he wouldn't like:.fQ_;Qe married to her "because she'd give any guy a hard time.'t,Lucy·agreed that Madonna's marriage would not last long, buH9und it difficult to say why, except that "marriage didn't seem to snifh�r," eyen

1 though Lucy quoted approvingly Madonna�s desire'"to:_mak� it an "open marriage." Lucy's problems probably stem from

,._, h�r

recognition that marriage is a patriarchial institution and �s such is threatened by Madonna's sexuality; the threat of course is not the traditional and easily contained one of woman ·as whore, but the more. radical one of woman as independent of masculinity. As we shall see later, Madonna denies or mocks a masculine· reading of patriarchy's conventions for representing women. This may well be why, according to Time (May 27, 1985), many boys find her sexiness difficult to handle and "suspect that theyare being kidded" (p. 47). Lucy and Matthew both recognize, in different ways and from different sociaJ

1 positions, that Mad9nna's sexuality can offer a challenge bi a threat to dominant detfnifions of femininity and masculinity.

"Madonna's Best Friend/' writing to Countdown Magazine, also recognizes Madonna's resist�i)� tq patrjarchy:

I'm writing to I

complain about all the people wh,o �{e)p �I).�say what a tart and a slut Madonna is because she tall<s openJ.y.ii],out .. sex and she shows her belly button and she's not ashamed to say she thinks she's pretty. Well I admire her and I think she has a lot of courage just to be herself. All you girls out there! Do you think you have nice eyes or pretty· hair or a nice figure? Do you ever talk about boys or sex with friends? Do you wear a bikini? Well according to you, you're a slut and a tart!! So have you judged Madonna fairly?

Madonna's Best Friend, Wahroonga, NSW. (Countdown December:. 1985: 70)

Praising Madonna's "courage just to be herself';' i; .... furt;er evidence of the felt difficulty of girls in finding a sexual identity that appears to be formed in their interests rather than in the

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interests of the dominant male. Madonna's sexualization of her navel is a case in point.

The most erogenous part of my body is my belly button. I have the most perfect belly button':.-an inny, and there's no fluff in it. ·When I stick a finger in my belly button I feel a nerve in the centre of my body shooJ.up my spine .. If 100 belly buttons were lined up against a wall I wouJq definitely pick out which one was mine. (Madonna: 0Qs.e_ up and Personal, London: Rock Photo Publications, 1985)

, What is noticeable here is both her pleasure in her own physicality and the fun she finds in admitting and expressing this pleasure: it is a sexual-physical pleasure that has nothing to do with men, and in choosing the navel upon which to center it, she is choosing a part of the female body that patriarchy has not conventionally sexualized for the benefit of the male. She also usurps the masculine pleasure and power of the voyeur in her claim to be able to recognize her navel, in all-its proudly proclaimed perfection, among a hundred ,others. Madonna offers some young girls the opportunity to find meanings of their own feminine sexuality that suit them, meanings that are "ind�pendent." Here are some other Madonna fans talking:

She's sexy but she doesn't need men . . . she's kind of there all by herself. (Time May 27, 1_985: 47)

�he gtv�s us•ideas. It's really women's lib, not being afraid of what guy� think. (Time May 27, 1985: 47)

The sense of empowerment that underlies these comments is characteristic of her teenage fans. A ·groue of "wanna-bes," fans dressed in their own variants of Madonna's look, were interviewed on MTV in November 1987 during Madonna's "Make My Video" competition. When asked why they dressed like that, they replied, "It makes people look at-us" or "When I walk down the street, people notice." Teenage girls, in public, are, in our, culture, one of the most insignificant and self­ effadng-categorie� of people; the self-assertiveness evidenced here is more·than mere posturing, it is, potentially at least, a source of real self-esteem. The common belief that Madonna's "wanna-bes" lack the imagination to devise their own styles of

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dress and merely follow her like sheep ignores the point that in adopting her style they are aligning themselves with a source of power.

The "Make My Video" competition showed how frequently the pleasures offered by Madonna to her fans were associated with moments of empowerment. In the competition fans were invited to make a video for the song "True Blue," and MTV devoted ·24 hours to playing a selection of the entries. Many of the videos played with the theme of pow�r,, oft¢n at an unachievable, but not unimaginable, leveLofla11tasy,:such as one in which schoolgirls, overpowered and tied up-a tea�her who denigrated Madonna; only by admitting her brilliance was he able to earn his freedom. Another took power fantasy to its extreme: it began with home-movie-type shots of two toddlers playing on a beach; the girl is suddenly wrapped up in a towel in the form of the U.S. flag, while the boy is wrapped in one in the form of the hammer and sickle. The video shows the American girl and Russian boy growing up in their respective ·countries, all the while telephoning and writing constantly to each other. Eventually she becomes presi�ent of the United States and he .of the USSR, and they prevent an imminent nuclear war by. their lo.ve for each other.

Another, less extreme, video made much closer connections between the empowered fan and her everyday life. The heroine sees her boyfri¢nd off at a train station, then turns and joyfully hugs her female friend waiting outside. Th�ydance-"Yalk down the street and shop for clothes in a street rtiarket. At home, the friend dresses up in various Madonna-influenced outfits while the heroine looks on and applauds. Each o�tfit calls up a different type of boy to the door-all of whom are rejected, to the delight of the two girls. The heroine's boyfriend returns, and the final shot is of the three of them, arms interlinked, dancing down the street-then the camera pulls back to reveal one of the rejected boys on the friend's other arm, then continues pulling back to reveal in sequence each of the rejec.ted boys hanging on her arm in a long line. The video shows _girls using their "look" to control their relationships; aJ!d vaµdating girl-girl relationships as powerfully, if not more so, as girl-boy ones.

In this video, as with the live "wanna-bes" interviewed in the

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same program, control over the look is not just a superficial playing with appearances, it is a means of constructing and controlling social relatio11s and thus social identity. The sense of empowerment that Madonna offers is inextricably connected with the pleasure-qf €x�rting some control over the meanings of self, of sexaaiity, and of one's social relations.

But, likeallpop stars, she has her "haters" as well as her fans:

�e,n i'sit down on a Saturday and Sunday night I always hear the .,_word Madonna and it makes me sick, all she's worried about is her bloody looks. She must spend hours putting on that stuff and why does she always show her belly button? We all know she's got one. My whole family thinks she's pathetic-and that she loves herself. Paul Young's sexy sneakers. ( Countdown Annual 1985: 109)

Here again, the ''hate" centers on Madonna's· sexuality, expressed as her presenting herself in whorelike terms, painting and displaying herself to arouse the.l'>aser side of man. But the sting comes in the last sentence, when the writer recognizes Madonna's apparent enjoyment of her own sexuality, which he (the letter is cl�arly from a masculine subject, if not a biological male) ascribes to egocentricity, and thus condemns.

Madonna's 16v�"'Ofherself, however, is not seen as selfish and _egocentric J::,y ·girls;_ �ather, it is the root of her appeal, the Jiigll.ifi�l\tice-0f wnich becomes clear when set in the context of ·mucn ,!ohhe rest of the media addressed to them. McRobbie (1982) has shown how the "teenage press" typically constructs the girl's body and therefore her sexuality as a series of problem�breasts the wrong size or shape, spotty skin, lifeless hair, fatty thighs, problem periods-the lisfis endless. The advertisers, of course, who are the ones who benefit economic- ally from these magazines, always have a product that can, at

- -a price, solve the problem. · -_ This polarization of Madonna's audience can be seen in the

"19��t�--.-ountdowri polls. She was top female vocalist by a mile (pollinif fo.ur times as many votes as the second-place singer) and was the only-female in the top 20 "Sex/Lust Objects," in which she came third. But she was also voted into second place for the Turkey of the Year award. She's much loved or much

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hated, a not untypical positiotu for a woman to occupy in patriarchy, whose inability to unde;�tand women in !eminine

, terms is evidenced by the way it polariz�s-femininity into the opposing concepts of virgin-angel andfahore-:devil.

Madonna consciously and parodically, exploits these contra- dictions: �,; �

"When I was tiny," she recalls, "my grandmotherus�d to beg me not to go with men, to love Jesus and be a good girl. t-�� 1q:r�th two images of women: the virgin and the whore. It was-.c!, lit�l_e scary." (National Times August 23/29, 1985: 9)

She consistently refers to these contradictory meanings of woman in patriarchy: her video of ''Like a Virgin'' alternates the white dress of Madonna the bride with the black, sli�ky garb of Madonna the singer; the name Madonna (the virgin mother) is borne by a sexually active female; the crucifixes adopted from nuns' habits are worn on a barely concealed bosom or in a sexually gyrating navel. "Growing uplthought nunswere very beautiful. . . . They never wore any make-up and they just had these really sei:ene faces. Nuns are sexy" (Madonna, quoted in the National Times August 23{2�, 1985: 9).

But the effect of working thesf.J?/J',8Site meaninss into her texts is not just to call attention to tb�i:t:..rql�j:(l �al�?�gemony­ a woman may either be worshippea and a-s{Qreci_by a man or used and despised by nim, but she has mean�g _p!}ly from a masculine-subject position. Rather, Madonna,. �Us_ }ntp question the validity of these binary oppositions as-� way of conceptualizing woman. Her use of religious iconography is neither religious nor sacrilegious. She intends to free it from this ideological opposition and to enjoy it, use it, for the meanings and pleasure that it has for her, not for those of the dominant ideology and its simplistic binary thinking:

I have always carried around a few rosaries with me. One day J decided to wear (one) as a necklace. Everything I do is sort of tpngµ$ in cheek. It's a strange blend-a beautiful sort of syml?oltsm� the" idea of someone suffering, which is what Jesus-Christ.offii 'Ctucifix stands for, and then not taking it seriously. Seeing ifas an icon with no religiousness attached. ·1t isn't sacrilegious for me. (National Times August 23/29, 1985: 10)

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The crucifix is neither religious, nor sacrilegious, but beautiful: "When I went to Catholic �chools I thought the huge crucifixes nuns wore were really beautiful."

In the same way, her adolescent girl fans find in Madonna meanings of femininity that have broken free from the ideological binary oppos"ition of virgin: whore. They find in her image positive feminine-centered representations of sexuality that are expressed in their constant references to her indepen­ dence, her, being herself. This apparently independent, self­ defining sexuality is as significant as it is only because it is working within and against a patriarchal ideology. And the patriarchal meanings must be there for the resisting meanings to work against. Playboy (September 1985), on behalf of its readers, picks up only her patriarchal and not her resistant sexuality:

Best of all her onstage contortions and Boy Toy voice have put sopping sex where it belongs-front �nd center in the limelight (p. 122)

But even as it recognizes Madonna's patriarchal sexuality, Playboy has to recognize her parodic undermining of it, the control she exerts over the way she uses the dominant ideology but is not subjected to it:

_ The voice-anct'the body are her bona £ides, but Madonna's secret may ne her satirical bite. She knows a lot of this image stuff is bullshit: she knows that you know. So long as we' re all in on the act together, let's enjoy it. (p. 127)

Some of the parody is subtle and hard to tie down for textual analysis, but some, such as the references to Marilyn Monroe and the musicals she often starred in, is more obvious. The subtler parody lies in the knowing way in which Madonna uses the camera, mocking the conventional representations of femal� s_exuality while at the same time conforming to them. Even one of.her ex-lovers supports this: "Her image is that of a tart, but I believe it's all contrived. She only pretends to be a gold digger. Remember, I have seen the other.side of Madonna" (Prof. Chris Flynn, quoted in New Idea, January 11, 1986: 4).

Madonna 105-

Madonna knows she is putting on a performance, and the fact that this knowingness is part of the performance enables the viewer to answer a differer\t interpellation from that proposed by the dominant ideology� and thus occupy a resisting subject position. The sensitive. tnan watching her "Material Girl" performance knows, as she dc5es, as we might, that this is only a performance. Those who take·the perform­ ance at face value, who miss its self-parody, either are hailed as ideological subject.s in patriarchy or else they rejecHhe·hailihg, deny the pleasure, and refuse the communication:

The National E�quirer, a weekly magazine devoted to prurient gossip, quotes two academic psychiatrists denouncing her for advocating teenage promiscuity, promoting a-h.ist for money and materialism, and contributing to the deterioration of the family. Feminists accuse her of revisionism, of resurrecting the manipula­ tive female who survives by coquetry and artifice. "Tell Gloria (Steinem) and the gang," she retorts, "to lighten up, get a sense of humour. And look at my video that goes with Material Girl. The guy who gets me in the end is the sensitive one with no money." (National Times August 23/29, 1985: 10)

Madonna consistently parodies conventional representa- : tions of women, and parody; can be an effective device for1

interrogating the dominartt ideology. It -takes the defining. features of its object, exaggerates ahd rriocks:them, and thus mocks those who ''fall'' for its ,ideological effect. B\l't Madonna's parody goes further than this: she parodies not jqst the stereotypes, but the way in which they are made� She

1 represents herself as one who is in control of her own image and of the process of making it. This, at the reading end of the semiotic process, allows the reader similar control over her own

' meanings. Madonna's excesses of j.ewelry, of makeup, of trash in her

style offer similar scope to the reader. Excessiveness invites the I reader to question ideology: too much lipstick interrogates the tastefully made-up mouth, too much jewelry questions the role of female decorations in patriarchy. Excess overspills i��olqgical control and offers scope for resistance. Thus .Madonna's excessively sexual pouting and lipstick can be read to mean that she looks like that not because patriarchy determines that she should, but because she knowingly chooses to. She wears

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religioU;s icons ( and uses a religious name) not to support or attack Christianity's role in patriarchy (and capitalism) but because she chooses to see�them as beautiful, sexy ornaments. She makes her own meanings out of the symbolic systems available to her, andJn-,using their signifiers and rejecting or mocking their sig'1ifieqs, she is demonstrating her ability to make her own meaning�.

The vid,eo of_"In the Groove" demonstrates this clearly. The �on$is�.the,tpeme song of the film Desperately Seeking Susan, and·the�video is a montage of shots from the film. The film is prjmarily about women's struggle to create and -control their own identity in contemporary society, and in so doing to shape the sort of relationships they have with men. The viewers of the video who have seen the film will find plenty of references that can activate these meanings, but the video can also be read as promoting the Madonna look, her style. She takes it�ms of urban living, prises them free from their original social and therefore signifying context, and comb�es them in new ways and in a new context that denies their original meaning. Thus the crucifix is tom from its religious context and lacy gloves from their context of bourgeois respectability; or, conversely,. of the brothel; the ble�ched blonde hair with the dark roots deliberately displayed is no longer the sign_of the tarty slut, and the garter belt and stocking� nolonge:r signify soft porn or male kinkiness.

This wrern;hin.g, 1lt- th� .products of capitalism from their -Ori.W.-_!lal ·_12Qy-!e,s:t an(! recycling them into a new style is, as Ch��rs·J1986) has pointed out, a practice typical of urban pepulai: culture:

Caught up in the communication membrane of the metropolis, with your head in front of a cinema, TV, video or computer screen, between the headphones, by the radio, among the record releases and magazines, the realization of your "self" slips into the construction of an image, a style, a series of theatrical gestures.

Between what is available in the shops, in the market, and the imprint of our desires, it is possible to produce the distinctive and the personalized. Sometimes the result will stand out, disturb and shock the more predictable logic of the everyday ....

The individual constructs her or himself as the object of street art,

Madonna 10-7

as a public icon: the body becom.E!S" the canvas of changing urban signs. (p. 11)

In this street-produced bricolage of style, the commodities of the capitalist industries are purified 1-nt_p signifiers: their ideological signifieds are dumped and left.- behind in their original context. These freed signifiers do not�ecessarily mean something, they do not acquire new signifieds; rrather, the act of freeing them from their ideological cont-ext Signifies their users' freedom from that context. It signifies· the power (howevei hard the struggle to attain it) of the sub­ ordinate to exert some control in the cultural process of making meanings.

The women in Desperately Seeking Susan who are struggling to control their social identity and relationships are partici­ pating in the same process as subcultures are when they recycle the products of the bourgeoisie to create a style that is theirs, a style that rejects meaning and in this rejection asserts the power of the subordinate to free themselves from the ideology that the meaning bears.

Madonna's videos constantly· refer to the production of the image; they make her eontrol over its production part of the image itself. This emphasis on themaking.of the image allows, or even invites, an equivalent control bf the reader over its reception. It enables girls toi;ee that themeanings of feminine sexuality can be in their control, can be made in'thei.'fitrter.esf?

.,

and that their subjectivities are not necessarily totally •differ­ mined by the dominant partriarchy.

The constant puns in Madonna's lyrics also invite this creative, producerly relation to the text. Puns arise when one word occurs in two or more discourses, and while the immediate context may give one priority, traces of the other(s) are always present. The pun never makes a- final, completed sense of the relationship between these various discourses-it leaves them at the stage of collision and invites the reader first to recognize the pun and second- tcr prosf\i� her or his sense out of this meeting of discourse.-Within a pun, the play of. contradictions and similarities is remark­ ably free and open. "Like a Virgin" opens w_ith the following lyrics:

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I made it through the wilderness Somehow I made it through Didn't know how lost I was Until I found you I wasb��t Incomplete I'd been had, I was sad and blue But you made me feel Yeah you made me feel Shiny and new

Like a virgin Touched for the very first time Like a virgin When your heart beats next to mine Gonna give you all my love boy My fear is fading fast Been saving it all for you 'Cause only lqve can last.

In Understanding Popular Culture, Chapter 5, I note how the semiotic excess of puns makes them particularly common in popular culture. Madonna's lyrics are no exception. Woven through these lines are puns playing with at least four discourses-religion, particularly religious love, sexuality or physical love, romantic loye, and a discourse of street-wisdom, of urban survival. Thus, made it has the street-wise meaning of sur.vived or ..came out on top, but also the sexual meaning of sexual.conquest and, in its association with wilderness, echoes of Christ's survival and resistance of temptation. It is absent from the discourse of romantic love. Wilderness, too, is, in the religious discourse, the wilderness of the New Testament, but it is also the wilderness of contemporary urban ufe without true romantic love, the secular equivalent of religious love. So we could continue. Lost is sexually "lost," a loose woman whose experience is only of sex, not of romance; it is also lost in the stJeets, and has echoes of Christ or the Israelites lost in the w.ildemess. I've been had similarly has a street-wise and a sexual meaning. So by the time we get to virgin, the word has become a semiotic supermarket-the religious vir�n, the sexual virgin (which the singer clearly is not), the ery.otional romantic virgin, (which, like the religious virgin, she is), and

I

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the naive virgin who has 'l^een'had" and 'lost" in the streets. Touched also has religious meanings of "laying on of hands" or "blessing," physical ones of sexuality, emotional ones of true love, and street-wise ones of near madness or loss of control.

The relationship between these discourses is open, unresolved and requires active, productive readers. The similarities and differences among religious love, romantic love, sexual experience, and street-wisdom are le,ff reverber­ ating and active, not closed off. There is no final meaning that says, for instance, that religious love contradicts sexuality but supports romantic love and invalidates street-wisdom. One cannot simply conclude that street wisdom and physical sexuality are rejected, and romantic and religious love affirmed. Romantic love may be placed in a negative relationship to sexuality and urban survival, or it may be a development out of them, a growth for which they provide the soil. Puns do not preach: they raise issues, questions, and contradictions, and invite the imaginative participation (and therefore pleasure) of the reader in their resolution.

, The form of the pun always resists final ideological closure: the potential meanings provoked by the collision of different discourses is always greater than that proposed by the dominant ideology. Thus, "Boy Toy/' the name Madonna has given to her range of products and the medfa^apply to her, can be read as Playboy (September 1985) does wlfeilit calls her the "world's number one Boy Toy" (p. 122) or "The compleat Boy Toy" (p. 127). In this reading Madonna is a toy for boys,‘butthe pun can also mean the opposite, that the boy is the toy for her,

as she toys with the men in "Material Girl." This is the reading that Madonna herself prefers when she says:

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I like young boys—15 or 16 year olds are the best. I like them smooth and thin. I want to caress a nice smooth body not a hulk. Madonna: Close up and Personal, London: Rock Photo Publications, 1985) “

The video of "Burning Up" is built around puns, parodic excess, and contradictions. The narrative shows Madonna in a white dress lying writhing on a road, as she sings of her helpless passion for her uncaring lover who is driving toward her in a car, presumably to run over her. Her love for the boy makes her

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as (apparently) helpless a victim as the stereotyped female tied to the railroad track in many a ·silent µ1ovie. But the last shot of the video shows.her in the driver's seat of the car, a�knowing, defiant half smile on her,lips, with the boy nowhere to be seen. This narrative denial oMetnale helplessness runs through01.�t the performance:as a m11ntertext to the watds a£ tbe lyri�

So when-sJi.esings, "Do you want to see me down on my knees? -rm· bending over backward, now would you be pl�a�d,"'"'She·kneels on the road in front of the advancing car, thetffums to throw her head back, exposing her throat in the -ultimate posture of submission. But her tone of voice and her look at the camera as she sings have a hardness and a defiance about them that contradict the submissiveness of her body posture and tum the question into a challenge, if not a threat, to the male.

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The puns in "Burning Up" are more subdued and less balanced than those in "Like a.Virgin," though they also play with the two discourses of the sexual and the religious. The sexual may be given a greater emphasis in the text, but the discourse of religion is not far below the surface as Madonna sings of kneeling and burning, of her lack of, shame and the something in her heart that just won't die. This yoking of sexuality and religion appears to be performing the traditional ideological work of usingthe;s1:1bordination and powerlessness of women ih €nristia:nity-tb naturalize their equally submissive pbsifion ih patrfa"rehy,' but, as in "Material Girl," the text �rovldes:the reader with ample opportunities to undermine the dominant ideology while wryly recognizing its presence in the representation, for again the representation of women's sexuality includes the means of that representation and therefore questions its ideological effectivity. The introductory sequence exhibits this clearly. In the

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33 seconds before Madonna is shown singing, there are 21 shots:

(1)_- female eye, opening ,(2} white flowers, one lights up (3) female mouth, made up (probably Madonna's) (4) blue car, lights go on (5) Madorina in white, lying on road (6) male Grecian statue with blank eyes

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(7) goldjfish in bowl (8) close-up of male statue, eyes light up (9) midshot of statue, eyes still lit up

(10) extreme close-up of eye of statue, still lit up (11) chain around female neck, tightened so that it pinches the

flesh (12) blurred close-up of Madonna, with the. chain swinging

loose (13) laser beam, which strikes heavy bangles, manaclelike on

female wrist ^ *■ (14) laser beam,on^oldfis]5;in b,owl (15) Madonna removing dark glasses, looking straight at

camera (16) Madonna sitting on road (17) Madonna removing dark glasses (18) Madonna lying on her back on the road (19) the dark glasses on the road, an eye appears in one lens,

greenish electronic effects merge to realistic image of eye (20) Madonna sitting on road, facing camera

I (21) . close-up of Madonna on road, tilting her head back

This sequence has two main types of image, ones of looking and ones of subordination or bondage. Traditionally, as the eyes of the Greek statue tell us, Ipoking.has J^een a major way by which men exercise power over \yomeh, and the-resulting female subordination is shown by Madonna's-stibbiissive postures on the road. The goldfish caught in the bowl is an

I ironic metaphor for the woman held in the male gaze. But the laser beam is a modern "look," impersonal, not the traditional male eye beam, and this can cut the female free from her bonding manacles, free the goldfish from the bowl. Similarly, Madonna's singing frees the chain that has previously been

, tightened aroimd her neck. Later in the video, as Madonna sings • of wanting her lover, and wanting to know what she has to do

to win him, she tightens and then loosens the same chain about her neck; the next shot is a collage of male eyes,, into which Madonna's lips are inserted as she sings. The pattern .is repeated; her performance shows how women can be free from the look and the power of the male. Removing the dark glasses as she looks at us is a sign of her control of the look: we see what

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she allows us to. The glasses replace her lying on the road, but instead of her apparent submissiveness, they gain an active, electronic, all-seeing eye; Similarly, the video of "Lucky Star" opens and closes with Madbnna lowering and raising dark glasses as she looks aHhe camera, again controlling what we see. In "Borderline," the male photographer is a recurring image, as Madonna parodies the photographic model she once was while singing of her desire for freedom. The resulting photograph is shown on the cover of a glossy magazine (called GJQss!)·being admired by men. �

Madonna knows well the importance of the look. This is a complex concept, for it includes how she looks (what she looks like), how she looks (how she gazes at others, the camera in particular), and how others look at her. Traditionally, looking has been in the control of men; Freud even suggests it is an essentially masculine way of exerting control through an extension of voyeurism, but Madonna wrests this control from the male and shows that women's colttrol of the look (in all three senses) is crucial to their gaining control over their meanings within patriarchy.

The ideological effectivity of this is evidenced in a student essay:

There is also a sense of pleasure, at least for me and perhaps a large number of ot):ter women,_ in Madonna's defiant look or gaze. In Lucky�tarau;me point in the dance sequence Madonna dances side ot\to ttie c;amera, looking provocative. For an instant we glimpse her tongue: the expectation is that she is about to lick her lips in a sexual invitation. The expectation is denied and Madonna appears to tuck her tongue back into her cheek. This, it seems, is how most of her dancing and grovelling in front of the camera is meant to be taken. She is setting up the sexual idolization of women. For a woman who has experienced this victimization, this setup is most enjoyable and pleasurable, while the male position of voyeur is displaced into uncertainty. (Robyn Blair, 19-year-old fan)

The look (in all senses of the word), meanings of self and of social relations, and power or powerlessness are inter­ determined concepts--each one requires the other two to complete it. Madonna offers her fans access to semiotic and social power; at the basic level this works through fantasy,

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which, in turn, may empower the fan's sense of self and thus affect her behavior in social situations. This sort of empowering fantasy is pleasurable to the extent that it reverses social norms,

1 and, when the fantasy can be conneeted to the conditions of everyday life-when, that is, it is a relevant fantasy-it can make the ideal into the achievable. The fitst _two fan videos described above may be wish;-fulfillment fantasies, but the third brings the fantasized ideal withiri reach of the everyday. The first two evidence the desire for empowerment; the third explores ways of achieving it. Fantasy is not adequa.tely described by writing it off as mere escapism; it can, under certain conditions, constitute the imagined possibilities of small-scale social change, it may provide the motive and energy for localized tactical resistances. Chapter Sb explores further the positive potential pf fantasy; for the moment, we need only to ·note that Madonna's popularity is a complexity of power and resistances, of meanings and countermeanings, of pleasures and the struggle for control.