Madonna’s Living Death
No limited object, however beautiful, is able to appease the inner hunger that consumes you, because as soon as you possess it you have exhausted it.
—Fr. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire
I’ve found Madonna an irritating presence on the public scene ever since she appeared there. At the time, the early or mid-‘80s, I didn’t hear much pop music except what my friend Robert taped for me, and I never saw MTV, so I was aware of Madonna’s existence as a video-pop star and sex symbol only because the news media talked about her so much. And I was aware of that media presence before I heard a note of her music. When I eventually did hear “Material Girl” on the radio, I thought That’s it?! That’s what all the fuss is about? It struck me as very ordinary and uninteresting commercial pop. Since then I suppose I’ve heard at most a few minutes of her music. Maybe some of it’s good; I know some critics take it seriously. I never tried to find out because, as I said, she irritates me.
Why? Mainly the fact that she’s used a title that properly belong to Our Lady and made it synonymous with sleaze, part of the long campaign by a segment of our society—or should I say the ongoing human effort?—to cheapen sex and separate it from love and marriage. Who knows how much damage she did to young women who took seriously her advocacy of casual sex? There was also the fact that her popularity seemed way out of proportion to her talent; even then her antics seemed to have a slightly desperate quality. The one thing that sticks in my mind from her early career, besides “Material Girl,” is a phrase from a newspaper story about her marriage—I guess it was the one to Sean Penn: “The bride, whose nude photos appeared last month in the pages of Playboy and Penthouse…” It was something Waugh might have dreamed up, another example of the self-satirizing bent of our culture.
But of course it’s hard to ignore her completely, because she had then, and still does have, the ability to keep the news media talking about her. Whenever I see a story about her latest tour I think When is she going to go away? For a few weeks or months now I’ve been seeing bizarre-looking photographs of her, and headlines about the state of her current marriage, but not bothering to read the stories—until this morning, when I saw this headline on the Drudge Report, one of a list of several Madonna-related items: Rice milk, no TV and sleeping in plastic suit covered in $1,000 cream…
Well, I couldn’t resist that bit about the plastic suit, so I clicked over and read the story. It seems that Madonna’s life is becoming one of those spectacles so prized by the press and much of the public: the celebrity train wreck. The picture of her that accompanies this story is just plain scary. That is not a healthy human body, and unless its condition is the result of some disease it’s not the home of a healthy human mind. It made me think of the passage in The Great Divorce where a spectre who had once been an attractive woman is visiting heaven from a suburb of hell, and tries to exercise her old powers:
More than one of the Solid People tried to talk to her, and at first I was quite at a loss to understand her behaviour to them. She appeared to be contorting her all but invisible face and writhing her smokelike body in a quite meaningless fashion. At last I came to the conclusion—incredible as it seemed—that she supposed herself still capable of attracting them and was trying to do so…. In the end she muttered “Stupid creatures,” and turned back to the bus.
I’m not proud to admit that my first reaction to the account of Madonna’s desperate effort to stay young was a certain pleasure. This was partly the schadenfreude that makes us ordinary folk tend to enjoy the sufferings of the rich, famous, and powerful, and partly something more personal having to do with my old resentment of this person in particular. Ah, reality is finally catching up with her, I thought.
But that was quickly replaced by something else that had both pity and horror in it. This woman has everything that the world can offer, and even though she must know by now that it can’t satisfy her or make her happy, her life is dominated by the need to hold on to it. Worse, she’s beginning to understand that she can’t hold on to it forever. I began to sense the terror of time, of death, and ultimately of insignificance that must drive such extreme behavior. I am certainly no stranger to that fear, and I wonder what it might drive me to if I had Madonna’s money and had spent most of my adult life being adored by crowds.
What we see in Madonna is an exaggerated version of the drive that all human beings experience to hold on to a life that must inevitably pass away. The portrait in that story, and I don’t mean only the photo, is of living death. Even from a purely earthly point of view there is a sort of psychological law expressed in “He that finds his life shall lose it.” The more desperately you try to thwart the passing of your life, the less you really possess it. One wonders if Madonna is capable of experiencing a single moment of honest untroubled pleasure.
Surely great wealth and power must only make more desperate the struggle to stop time; you would have more to cling to, and be more accustomed to having things your way, than most people. There’s probably a lesson here for all of us who live in the industrialized world, who have wealth and comfort undreamed of by most of our ancestors. One begins to think that the story about the camel and the needle’s eye is not only a matter of morality but also of something like—pardon the expression—spiritual physics. It’s impossible for you to get there carrying all that. I suppose one reason for old age is to make it ever more difficult for us to hang on—or, to put it positively, easier for us to let go. Although I personally am not finding it in the least easy.
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