Madonna and me

[hazelk]

I had a Madonna phase in the 80’s (didn’t everyone). It never went as far as bleaching my hair with napalm but I did spend actual money on that Sex book (you can pretend you don’t know me). It started with a review of Desperately Seeking Susan (a perfectly OK movie) where the reviewer was a little damming with faint praise about Madonna’s acting (little did they know then what was to come) but described her as having one of those faces that belongs on a screen, back lit and blown up 30 ft high to be stared at longingly from the safe dark.

Or something like that but I fell for the idea and later the videos. Therein lies the big difference between her Madjness and the latest aspirant. Madonna wants to be a star not a Gagaist deconstruction of one. It’s one of nature’s great ironies that she’s no actress. She can pose and she can dance but she can’t act her way out of a paper bag. Sue Sylvester gives good pose but she still dances like a gym teacher and that’s just one reason why Jane Lynch is a genius.


The Ben Elton oeuvre has given musicals structured around a single band/performer/writer’s songs a bad rep but it wasn’t always that way. Singing in the Rain was originally conceived as a vehicle for Arthur Freed’s back catalogue. The trick, if there is a trick, is really no more than having great numbers, performers and something to say. Singing in the Rain had a whole bunch of things to say about old Hollywood. Also Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Lina Lamont to steal the show. Glee’s resident Lina is Sue Sylvester and for all the talk about empowerment and girl equality this was mostly about Sue’s monstrous obsession. Possibly proving a greater force for good than any of Schuester’s clueless well-meaning.

Ray of Light on stilts and 4 minutes by marching band are proof, if proof were needed, that Sue Sylvester is the Busby Berkeley of cheerleading. If the New Directions kids would only see that and team up with the Cheerios they could squash Vocal Adrenaline like a bug but then there’d be no more show. Those two and the boy band version of What it feels like for a girl were the nearest the episode came to musical plausibility, for the rest it gloriously abandoned any hold on realism and let every number spring fully formed and unrehearsed complete with backing choirs, costumes and production values. “Vogue” take one. Take *one* and there you have it but with the twist that, unlike as advertised, it wasn’t Sue Sylvester’s Vogue but Kurt and Mercedes’s. Madonna’s original having been inspired/appropriated from black gay club dancers in a weird way this felt like giving it back to them.

Comments

[legionseagle]

The bit I treasured about the Sex book was Dirk Bogarde's comment when hearing she wanted him for it: "Ah, necrophilia section."

Since Bogarde was the most heart-breakingly beautiful star of his era, it reminded me of a Mary Renault line in The Persian Boy about the wise man knowing that all beauty must pass, but not necessarily wanting to be reminded of it.

[hazelk]

True, although he could have been dead but still pretty (and witty and gay).

[yourlibrarian]

The cheerleading routines were fantastic, but it irked me to no end that they so badly edited the second one. It's like Dancing With the Stars is able to film a single couple doing a routine, but put several couples on the floor and suddenly you have no sense of the overall pattern.

I loved that hallway scene where in the background you can see various iterations of Madonna walking about.

[hazelk]

They cut away just as the dancing starts to get interesting in lots of the numbers. It's hard to know how much is because it's a singing more than a dancing show - in 4 minutes the point in many ways was to showcase Kurt and Mercedes-and how much is just because that's the way things are done post MTV. I remember when the Single Ladies video came out people were having orgasms over the concept that there were only three cuts. Like wow Beyonce can dance a whole 3 minute routine without screwing up. With the weekly schedule they have for Glee at least some of is probably cover for not having the time to rehearse the routines to perfection.

I loved that hallway scene where in the background you can see various iterations of Madonna walking about.
I couldn't figure out what was happening with the first two and then I did. The bit in the library with them looking through the gaps in the books at each other reminded me of the booth dancer thing in the Open Your Heart video.

[yourlibrarian]

I'm sure you're right about the rehearsal time. Did people really say that about the Beyonce video? Good grief. They need to take in a musical sometime (or go to a concert). The thing is that if shooting a dance routine without multiple edits is necessary, chances are the routine isn't very good to start with. And if so, I'm ok with it. It's when the routine looks great that it's so frustrating.

[aquaeri]

I've increasingly come to treat the full costume production numbers of "hey, we could do this song" as just one of those Glee things.

On the other hand, you got me thinking. What if the entire show is Will's point of view and he's an unrealiable narrator? He sees what could be more than what is, when the students perform. It would certainly make scenes of the Cheerios practicing, followed by Sue telling them they were crap, make more sense.

Also the Artie fail could be because Will only notices Artie when one of the others is "helping" him, because Will can't conceive of Artie as a fully functioning human in control of his own wheelchair. And it would make more sense of the fact that both Will and Finn are presented more sympathetically than the other characters, despite not really having anything going for them.

[hazelk]

I think it's a musicals thing which I like because it means the show isn't being coy about what it is. It's not Will POV idealising the numbers (he's not present for a lot of them), it's everyone's. Do you think Will and Finn are presented more sympathetically? I mean it's not working if you also think they've nothing going for them. They're the nearest the show has to straight men (in the comedic sense) I suppose but Finn gets shown up for self-centredness just as much as Rachel, with being a bear of little brain where she's a drama queen. I suppose Will is the nearest to a protagonist they have or that's how the show was initially set up but I'm beginning to think Sue is the one Ryan Murphy identifies with.