Truth or Dare
From the Hamilton Club to Palladium Ballroom, New York’s twentieth century nightlife scene thrived for nearly a century. CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, The Mudd Club, Danceteria, became mainstays of New York culture and the farm team for audacious creativity. Celebrities, players, and ingenues mingled into the early hours of the morning, clawing at the rungs of New York’s social ladder, until the AIDS crisis and mounting financial troubles took its toll on Studio 54 and the broader club scene. By 2006, the last vestiges made way for a sanitized, tourist-friendly Manhattan.
But, for one brief window in time, art, fashion and music, converged in an era like none before or since, in any city, in one place, in the United States. Filmmaker Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, PARIS IS BURNING, captured one particular subculture born out of this social experiment—the competitive vogue ball scene.
If you lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side between 1979 and 1981, you might have glimpsed the 5’4″ transplant from Michigan, performing with the Gilroy brothers’ Breakfast Club or Steve Bray and Emmy at the Mudd Club or Danceteria, hanging out with graffiti artists, or shopping her demo tape around to producers and A&R executives—when they still scouted talent before the industry started manufacturing them with Antares Auto Tune—the equivalent of autocorrect for the voice.
In October of ’82, A&R Executive Mark Rosenblatt of Sire Records signed Madonna to record three singles. Her first club single, Everybody, rocketed up the Billboard Dance Club chart, yet the rest of the world would have to wait. The real breakthrough came when the videos for Borderline and Burning Up got into heavy rotation on the fledgling MTV music video network. Now, though obstacles remained, she had a full album deal. Holiday, with lyrics by Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens, created the impression among Southern disc jockeys that Madonna was a black R&B artist but even their racist hedging couldn’t stop her. The word was out. Debbie Harry’s brazen, independent, spiritual successor had arrived.
In 1988, following the career whiplash of an immensely successful third album (True Blue), Madonna attempted to transition into acting. The back-to-back box-office catastrophes of SHANGHAI SURPRISE and WHO’S THAT GIRL, and the critical drubbing received for her role in David Mamet’s Broadway play, Speed The Plow, coupled with an abusive marriage and the exhaustion of her otherwise successful 1987 world tour, had Madonna on the ropes, ready to throw in the towel. Enter songwriter and fellow Michiganite, Patrick Leonard, who coaxed her back into the studio for what would be, as James Hardgrave of Dallas-based Cinéwilde (organizers of the TRUTH OR DARE screening) put it, “The reason we’re all here.”
Though we hear Madonna emphatically shout, “All right America!” the opener, based on David Fincher’s video for “Express Yourself” (its mechanical sets and toiling workers a nod to Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS), is filmed at Yokohama Stadium. The stage numbers in New York, Toronto, Detroit, Los Angels and Turin act as chapter markers, intercut with backstage drama ranging from technical screwups to a running commentary on the state of LGBT acceptance.
As a documentary, the narrative thread, or thesis, of Alek Keshishian’s TRUTH OR DARE isn’t immediately evident. The film recaps 1990, the year of Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour. Recognized by Pollstar as the Most Creative Stage Production and Rolling Stone as the Greatest Concert of the 1990’s, it stands as the pinnacle of a storied recording career surpassed only by Michael Jackson’s. At first, it seems a disconnected series of touring vignettes intercut with the best takes of concert footage from multiple performances. Seeing it uninterrupted for the first time in twenty-eight years at the Texas Theatre in Dallas, it plays like a performance review or self-assessment from Madonna.
Flanked by longtime backup singers Donna DeLory and Niki Harris, dancers Luis Camacho, Oliver Crumes, Salim “Slam” Gauwloos, Gabriel Trupin, Kevin Stea, Carlton Wilborn, with elaborate, moving sets designed by brother Christopher Ciccone and costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and a cadre of Los Angeles’ best session musicians, production costs likely soared into the stratosphere. In an era before online ticketing, nearly half a million seats worldwide sold out in two hours.
Including the much publicized altercation with Toronto Police over her simulated masturbation—a complete farce to anyone visiting or residing in Toronto in the years hence—Keshishian contrasts the tumult and stress of the North American leg of the tour with a more relaxed European follow-up. Among other highlights is a trip down memory lane, or canal, when in Venice the backup singers take a gondola and parody Madonna’s antics in her “Like A Virgin” music video—which led to ten year old me referring to the Material One as Miss Butt Problems for a good year or two.
The director also introduces us to the onstage/offstage creative teams as well as their parents, to draw a parallel to Madonna and, ultimately, her mother who died of breast cancer in 1963. Keshishian covertly sets up a confrontation between Madonna and her childhood friend Moira McFarland. Juxtaposed against Madonna’s comical asides—e.g. McFarland, “Taught her how to insert a tampon”—is the pivotal confessional of the film. McFarland, two years older than Madonna, laments her inability to understand, empathize and comfort her over the tragic loss.
Madonna, struggling to remain stoic, offers only one takeaway: every mother must seem godlike to her children. I suspect the dismissal is less about Madonna’s reluctance to show vulnerability than her belief that the masses won’t involve themselves as deeply in what happens when she’s not being “Madonna”. A friend of mine who lost her father too early to heart disease took up an intense fitness regimen. Constant innovation and evolution is both Madonna’s workaholic race against time and her relentless pursuit of the perfection she imbues upon her mother.
Confiding in a bedroom chat with Harris and DeLory, and by extension us, Madonna remains her own toughest critic—skeptical she’ll succeed. Journalists of the time were more forgiving. Following its opener at the 44th Festival de Cannes, Vincent Canby of the The New York Times wrote, “Unlike most successful actresses, Madonna makes no attempt to convince the public that beneath the artifice of the star she’s just an ordinary woman. There is no room in her image for the commonplace. Though, by her own admission, she is neither a great singer or dancer.”
Why show us any version of herself in whom we aren’t interested? Her onetime beau, Warren Beatty, opines while her otolaryngologist assesses damage to her vocal cords in her Manhattan apartment, “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk.”
They’re both right.
There are moments of pure theater, including the infamous mineral water blowjob that seems as hilariously banal today as it was then. After all, this is a superstar who displays her amusement with the 90’s expression, “Not!” and composes poems about farts. She understands that her fans won’t relate to her beginnings as a dance student, landing a spot in Alvin Ailey and Pearl Lang’s prestigious American Dance Center, her voracious reading of Yeats or her patronage of artists ranging from MissMe (Canada’s Banksy) to Tamara de Lempicka—a woman who refined and re-defined early 20th century cubism with a feminine edge.
And yet, the industry’s cognoscenti feel as entitled to know Madonna as do Midwestern audiences. With one finger gesturing a gagging reaction, Madonna excoriates this peculiar obsession. Read between the lines: These people aren’t any more interested in her intellect than the average person, and perhaps even less. It’s all part of the hustle.
The changing dynamics of the music industry, the decline of album sales and rise of digital downloads, limited the prospect of ever again doing an album on the creative scale of Like A Prayer or a tour on the production scale of Blond Ambition. Likewise, Madonna moved on from her collaboration with Patrick Leonard to return to her dance roots with Shep Pettibone, William Orbit, Timbaland, Nicki Minaj, and other producers and artists. She knows that for all her ambition, dedication and intellectual curiosity, marketability constrains her fortunes. While others question her taste or talent, no one questions her business acumen.
Forty years later, FX’s Pose catches up with Vogue, and Mark Ronson’s surreptitiously hipping kids to the likes of Mary Jane Girls. Entertainers today still claw at the ladder while Madonna, listed by Guinness World Records as the best selling and most successful female solo recording artist of all time, remains perched at the top.
“An image and a good hook can get you in the door, but something has to keep you in the room.” – Madonna