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November 5, 2005

[updated] about, uh, Madonna's new video

[Updated 12:30AM 11/3, notes at end]

1 - the video may be viewed here. All the comments below refer to the video and not the song.

3 - From its opening scene - Madonna working out moves solo in a rehearsal space - Hung Up wants to cobble together an internally consistent visual vocabulary that conjoins the aging Material Girl and the video's stand-ins for state-of-the-art cool: i.e., a plethora of young, dancing, colored bodies. It's an asymmetrical conjoinment largely concerned with process, mental real estate, appearances, plausiblity and (of course) Madonna's vanity and ego. The actual (real world) outcome of such a dance off isn't Hung Up's problem, making sure Madonna doesn't look the fool is, or, more precisely, that she doesn't look old. Confronted here by (predominantly) black people, the bar for victory is set significantly higher than when Madonna was confronted by, say, Britney Spears, and so her sights are reflexively set lower. Her goal here is basically just to keep up, and maybe get off if she's very very lucky.

3.5 - Bodies will dance, will hump, jump, mug, face off on the subway and throughout there won't be a white figure meaningfully engaged by the camera but Madonna's, a grabby Ms. Ciccone claiming representative / emblematic pole position over her entire race. In contrast to her well-honed, practiced singularity, the colored kids are figured by the video en masse - multiple, organic, hothouse and fecund in their black/asian/latino variety.

4 - (And really, who better to represent white people on the dance floor / Space Ark than Madonna? William F. Buckley? Judge Judy? Pee Wee Herman? Susan Sontag? Billary?)

5 - Hung up is ripe with anachronisms lifted from Madonna's 80s heyday. There's all those British Yout on a wacky race to the club, the cast styled just-so in the latest retro-BBoy finery, their antics reruns of Benny Hill and What's Happening. There's the rehearsal motif figuring Madonna in Larry Bird terms - hard working, practices a helluva lot, earns her spot on the roster by dint of a regimen of 10000 jump shots a day. There are the endless de-contextualized outbursts of quaint colored physical creativity - black folks just BE dancing AND SHIT - all the folks arrayed around Madonna young, moist little Magics to her Bird, gifted naturals bursting with Jack Kirby-esque energies. The one shot of an Asian chick stretching on a rooftop (sweet burdens of classical training) may run parallel to Madonna's dutiful self-ministrations, but it's a throwaway, a visual wormhole feeding into one of the video's recurring fantasy ciphers. Our stretchy Asian sistergirl is ultimately just reflexively shaking herself out before doing what Hung Up imagines colored folk naturally/jungalistically do; leap down concrete project staircases, for example, exultantly.

6 - Not for nothing, but the conflagration between, well, us and Madonna never actually materializes, strategic retreat in this case apparently being the better part of valor. By video's end, the rumors of war against the avatars of color are revealed to be largely the stuff of erotic fantasy, some motivational diddle-diddle playing out in the Material Girl's head while she works up a sweat alone in her rehearsal room. The video's fantasy cum shot happens outside the circle of dancers Esther Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie has seemingly been practicing to enter, Madonna instead hugging the wall where, no joke, she'll be passed between a Latin (BOGish?) dude, a Black dude, an Asian dude, a South Asian chick (MIA? Factually, no, but in concept, definitely), and a Black chick, in pretty much that order. In so much as Madonna dreams of clubland domination, she clearly means it in the "turned out in the bathroom" sense of the word.

7 - Mapped against Madonna's previous wholesale re-inventions Hung Up isn't particularly novel, and it's already being derided by her (online) fan base as "safe." While that's a legit read, the "safe" critique requires Madonna be frozen in time, its critical touchstone her own 20-year record of shifting persona. If you instead put Hung Up against the (nonexistent) backdrop of the 2005 output by the other chart toppers from 1985 it goes from disappointment to reasonably impressive display of stamina. Those of you waiting for Madonna's "American IV: The Man Comes Around" (or, conversely, despairing of its very possibility) need to flash forward 30 years or conspire to put her on her deathbed (ha!). Your revulsion is less engagement with the video and more terror and rage that the bitch just won't shut the fuck up.

7.5 - You also may be revolted that Madonna is still chasing colored dick/clit despite being older than pop culture dirt, i.e., 47. Give credit where credit is due. Hung Up's final, ballsy sexual proposition is that Madonna is and ever shall be the biggest, most-predatory, most powerful, most-slummy, most whorish LES white girl there ever was. There are many things Madonna is wrong about, but her ability to stamp competing white tramps (of any age) under a stilleto boot hell is not one of them. Make her 47, drop her in London, give her Kabbalistic religion, marry her to a hack director and it still won't mean a proverbial thing.

8 - The figurative gangbang to which Madonna surrenders (this while the "real" dancers dance) is in stark contrast to her search and destroy mission against the sexual/professional essence of poor little Britney at the '03 VMAs. The reason, of course, that Madonna could so easily manhandle the doily-like Spears while the unabashedly skuzzy Xtina escaped with some small measure of agency intact is that Britney plays it fairly white. (Her white trash-(in)bred, Springer-esque tendencies are the only avenues through which she could be plausibly niggerized.) Flash forward from the VMA's to Hung Up. where Madonna finds herself the one rapturously trembling before (six different kinds of) totemic pop otherness. Her self-ownership and purposefulness in the opening workout sequence isn't effaced by her subsequent surrender. In fact, her rigor is what makes the later (fantasy) release to the dusky sublime possible. The image of practice and rehearsal is a schematic, a plausible (to racist white people, that is) methodology by which an aging white woman may be imagined to pull hard-bodied, 19 year old blasianatinos. The secret recipe? Be rich, give good fashion, wear tall boots, keep your weight down, dance dance dance. Be Madonna.

9 - (Think of the practice sequence as a kind of whitegurl prayer to the gods of miscegenation, wherein the supplicant seeks to call down the physical resources necessary for the aping of colored kinesiology.)

9.5 - Charged as it is with creating a visual vocabulary to support a kind of one-woman sexual gerontocracy, Hung Up resorts to three "hacks" in hopes of short-circuiting our natural inclination to view its entire enterprise as absurd. First is Madonna's aforementioned feint and then retreat from any actual danceoff, her proper cipher becoming the orgy with the six kids against the wall. Second is the fact that in addition to the wall bit Hung Up also includes a semi-sex scene where Madonna rides (and I mean rides) her rehersal room boom box like it was a sybian sex machine. The solo, slow mo, dancefloor-lit romp atop the faux sybian upends Hung Up's presumed narrative arc - pro-active white girl works out to get limber before drifting to the dark downtown for a bit of strange - turning it into a techy auto-erotic fantasy powered by beats and bass. Indeed, the last shot of the video is Madonna lying on her rehearsal room floor, all fucked out and shit, by nothing, the old saw that the brain is the most powerful sex organ finding application in her oeuvre for perhaps the first time ever.

9.6 - Third hack: The sybian's feint towards a notion of masturbatory, enacted simulacra is echoed in the closing group scene where the club dance floor is abruptly replaced by a Dance Dance Revolution pad. The substitution is completely unmotivated, DDR floating through the video unmoored from diegesis. The pad comes back to its roots as surface here, Madonna alternately line dancing on it (centered in frame, of course) and free-lancing some moves that bear no relation to any visible game-play. Still, the suggestion that after so many different drummers have been offered up for Madonna to dance to - negrophilia, MILFy hubris, pop monomania - she might finally submit to DDRs pixellated virtual notation gives Hung Up a whiff of sober honesty, if not outright futurism. The DDR bit brings us full circle, makes the video a powerfully concise treatise on simulation and fakery and fantasy. The pun is priceless: Of course the video is a game; how else could a woman her age possibly hope to play? The current association between videogames and youth will disappear as the generations above us (us=me=37) die off, meaning that in the future the old will play MORE videogames, not less. 80 year olds will hold XBOX Tesseract rushing records. Jacked in via plug in the back of your neck, you will have the hottest sex ever with a bedridden great grandmother named Myrtle. At the age of 100 Madonna will release her final video. Thoroughly interactive and she will dance with each and every one us, maybe more depending on our settings.

10 - Me, I gotta go to sleep. Some specific praise for Hung Up's director should go here, but I'm way too tired..

[Update note: I've made a few language changes here and there. Item #2 re: Deluzian subtitling has been deleted (on grounds of dumbness). Item #3's been broken in two and #7's been split as well. I added two more items between 9 and 10.]

Posted by ebogjonson in screened, on November 5, 2005 3:36 PM

Comments

Posted by: TR_Double at November 6, 2005 3:45 PM

Posted by: your humble EBOG narrator at November 6, 2005 4:56 PM