- Naomi WolfMonday 6 February 2012 18.30 GMT
- Article history
- Madonna, a picture of military-industrial western masculinity. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images
If you really want to watch vitriol flow on a monumental scale, be Madonna and dare to make a film.
It's been instructive to watch the trajectory of Madonna's recent fantasy-biopic of Wallis Simpson, WE, emerge into the critical light of day. A flawed but daring, visually mesmerizing piece, it takes a look at the journeys of two women – Wallis Simpson, re-envisioned by Andrea Riseborough, and a modern Upper East Side abused Stepford wife, Wally – as they emerge from victimization to personal autonomy and self-realization.
Yes, the film is not perfect – it has its historical solecisms, for instance – but it is far from representing the outright crime you would think Madonna had committed, were you a just-landed Martian reading the reviews. The recent Entertainment Weekly notice started: "The movie is a folly, a desultory vanity project for its director and co-writer."
Others were even more personally brutal. Many of the notices reviewed Madonna herself – with distaste – rather than the film, refusing to engage with it on its merits at all.
Having had the chance to interview her, I get from the start why one's fallback position can so easily be "hating Madonna". By 10am, the day of our meeting, my daughter had suggested that I change out of my boring trousers into something trendier; my partner, once I was in a dress, suggested film people were more casual; and my mom, who hadn't worried about this stuff since I was 14, called to remind me to brush the back of my hair.
Before I had even left the house, I looked hopelessly uncool.
Since Madonna is positioned as always "cooler than thou", we all are primed for schadenfreude if something in her fabulous life goes amiss. But I found when I met her that I respected her – and I respect her film.
Is Madonna a self-absorbed megalomaniac with a touch of the arriviste? Probably; but so are dozens of equally brilliant male artists in other mediums, whose imperfect but worthwhile new efforts are treated with hushed awe (see the reverence accorded the solemn and often tedious Tom Ford film, A Single Man). The reliable media theme of "Hating Madonna", whenever she steps out of her pretty-girl-pop-music bandwidth, is so consistent that it deserves scrutiny in its own right.
Why can the press just not wait to hate Madonna at these moments?
Because she must be punished, for the same reason that every woman who steps out of line must be punished. Madonna is infuriating to the mainstream commentariat when she dares to extend her range because she is acting in the same way a serious, important male artist acts. (And seizing the director's chair, that icon of phallic assertiveness, is provocative as hell.) She is taking for granted that she is allowed to stretch. This is intolerable, because Madonna has not done the sorts of things that allow women of immense talent to get "permission" or "to be liked".
What is so maddening? She does what every serious male artists does. That is: she doesn't apologize for her talent or for her influence. What comes across quite profoundly when one interviews her is that she is preoccupied with her work and her gifts – just as serious male artists are, who often seem self-absorbed. She has the egoless honesty of the serious artist that reads like ego, especially in women.
Madonna is that forbidden thing, the Nietzschean creative woman.
Her preoccupation with a high level of work doesn't allow her to follow the usual script that powerful women are expected to follow – "don't hate me for my success, don't hate me for my power". She doesn't pretend to the press that she thinks she is not talented, or suggest that she happened to make high-level art for decades unconsciously, or by accident, or in her sleep.
She doesn't parade her vulnerabilities; she does not play the victim. She is not continually letting us in to the details of some battle with bulimia or weight problems or health problems or drug abuse, or the way her heart always seems to get broken (fill in likeable talented/wealthy/successful actress, musician, etc here). Nor does she complain about how hard it is to juggle work and family, or let us into photo shoots where we see the banal and recognizable rituals of grocery shopping or ferrying kids, so that we can know reassuringly that she is JUST LIKE US (fill in likeable female politician/news anchor here).
If she did engage in those ritual forms of self-abnegation that influential women are encouraged to spin to soft pedal their power in our media culture, we would "like her more". But she would be far less important – both as an artist, and to the collective female psyche.
Many of us love the fact that Madonna does not apologize for her Nietzschean self or her appetites – that she wraps herself in glamor, not mom jeans, and that she glams up intentionally as she gets older. (I loved the fact that when I entered her astonishingly opulent home – or set of homes, all connected behind a high iron wall – the place was populated with discreet, stunningly handsome young male staffers, from all backgrounds – from the gorgeous chauffeur to the gorgeous security guard to the gorgeous fellow who brought in the sparkling water).
Even her movie, WE, does not apologize for female centrality the way most works of art by women still feel they must do: she places Wallis and Wally's journeys right at the center of the narrative. The men are peripheral, sometimes two-dimensional images (The Abuser, The Great Lover) but this works in the story just the way that female Muse figures, or Whores with Hearts of Gold, often work in films about male self-realization. Even the really erotic love scenes are shot from the female heterosexual perspective. The Lover is lit and his body panned in the same delectable aesthetic that male heterosexual directors always use on the female body. I mean, how dare she?
Last night, at half-time during the Super Bowl – that military-industrial complex factory of western masculinity, in which beefed-up men were pounding the stuffing out of each other, in between shots of the troops in Afghanistan – Madonna was marched on stage by a glistening gladiator muscle-troupe and flipped the flowing cape of LMFAO's RedFoo. Madonna was invited to perform at the Super Bowl — and ended up satirizing the Super Bowl. The girl can't help herself, and thank God for that.
So Madonna's refusal to be less powerful, less entitled, less desiring and less not-ordinary, is always going to bring out the haters, whether she is playing with sacred iconography or just pissing people off. But I would say that this ongoing hostility is just the proof she should need that she is doing her proper job in the collective female psyche.• Naomi Wolf will be online on Friday to discuss this article and answer readers' questions. Details will be posted nearer the time.
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