The show is over, say goodbye

This is a republication of an essay from one year ago about my final ‘goodbye’ to a teen idol.

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Last night I said goodbye to Madonna for the last time. As she walked off the stage wearing a cape made up of queer and trans colors, I thought to myself, “This woman is what’s wrong with our culture. Her values are in contradiction to everything that I think is healthful, wholesome, and needful for a good society.”

The conservative nay-sayers of the 80s and 90s were right. I scoffed at them for being “old and out of touch,” because I was a shallow, insecure gay teen. But they were right. Madonna was a terrible influence on culture, and particularly on young girls. The brazen and aggressive sexual provocation that thrilled me in 1990 left me forlorn last night as the lights went down in the arena after her show last night.

If you need some context for why Madonna became an idol to 20th century gay men, my earlier essay is a good bet. In brief, I believe gay men like me cleave to narcissistic celebrity women like Madonna because they remind us subconsciously of our troubled relationships with our mothers and ourselves.

Madonna’s mother died at age five, and her relationship to her father (and to her siblings in a huge working class Catholic family) was dysfunctional. It left her with an obvious Cluster B personality disorder. The narcissism, the histrionics, and the unstable sense of self from borderline personality pathology is easy to see.

And it was the sickness in her mind that formed the major part of her appeal for fans. Madonna raised narcissism to an art form. Damaged people can create compelling displays; watching Madonna watch her own beautiful spectacle was what we were all there for.

None of this is hard to see, I know, and most people had it figured out decades before I did. But last night crystallized it for me with finality. This woman’s whole life has been an exercise in terrified sprinting from a childhood she cannot change. At 65 years old, Madonna still believes she can erase what her past did to her by being the sexiest girl in the world forever.

This is not unique; almost all celebrities are trying to become something bigger, better, and more beautiful than the child they once were. Hollywood stardom is really only attractive to broken people. Once they achieve it, the fame breaks them even harder. Madonna is not unique, but she is probably the most extreme example.

The show I attended with my friends last night was part of her Celebration Tour, a greatest-hits roundup. This is red meat to fans of legacy acts, and I hoped it would be a fond farewell and a rollicking good time. I hoped that Madonna would take a more mature approach where she gave arch winks to her youthful bad girl self.

That was not to be. She tried to be her 28-year-old self, and she appeared to believe she is the same vixen she was in 1989. What seemed daring and fresh in the late 20th century comes across as pathetic and awkward today. We were treated to recreations of her most salacious performances. Half the female dancers had their tits out, and Madonna mimed masturbation and oral sex with dancers forty years her junior. Some of the dancing men in jockstraps had no compunctions about splaying their legs to display portions of the anatomy ordinarily hidden between the buttocks.

There was nothing sly or mischievous about it; it was grotesque. After all these years, the woman has managed to shock me for the first time.

And the crowd roared, the aging crowd of straight women and gay men in their 50s who were dressed up like teeny-boppers at their first superstar concert. Fully half the middle-aged women had their hair tied up in lace rags as if they were attending The Virgin Tour. Nearly as many of the gay men of a certain age had dolled themselves up in hairstyles and outfits (and makeup) while they danced ostentatiously as if they were the evening’s fresh twink meat at the dance club.

I stood there in jeans and a sweater wishing the show would end because my back and feet were killing me.

A technical and performance let-down

The biggest surprise was how poorly the show was produced. I have seen her in concert eight times, and this show was nowhere near her usual level of excellence. She did very little dancing, which is understandable given her age. You cannot do at 65 what you could do at 30, or even at 50. But there was no compensation in her vocal performance. For the past 20 years or so, she has arranged her shows to give herself breaks to sing rather than perform acrobatics. This may surprise some, but Madonna is capable of good live singing when she wants to do it; formal vocal training in the 90s paid off. When she uses her voice the right way (lowering the key a step to compensate for age, breathing properly and not dancing) it’s actually quite pretty, especially on ballads. This is what I want in a concert, to hear the real performer herself.

I could barely hear her singing. The sound design was the worst I’ve ever heard in a concert. For starters, there was no band. It was all prerecorded musical tracks and it showed. The sound lacked any crisp treble response; it was pure mud. Her mic levels should have been twice what they were; everything got lost in a slush of interfering harmonics and echoes. The sound was so distorted that I could not detect the key, the pitch, the actual fundamental note of a song for 20 seconds or so after the start (I don’t know if I’m explaining this clearly, but maybe you get it).

Worse, she lip-synced half the songs. I could forgive this in 1990 when she was leaping across the stage, but there’s no excuse for miming a prerecorded vocal track in a comparatively sedate physical performance. We were in the second row, so we got to see her just a few feet away for most of the show. This is part of the thrill of seeing a superstar. But it also means you can see the small expressions they’re not trying to telegraph. La Isla Bonita started playing, and there was Madonna’s voice but Madonna’s lips weren’t moving. She realized it and made a screwed-up sarcastic face that said, “ah, fuck it.”

No, Madonna, fuck you. This behavior is insulting to fans who pay inflated prices to continue giving you a living after 40 years. You don’t get to phone it in.

The only benefit of the terrible acoustics was that it made her onstage speaking between sets as inaudible as the songs. She walked up to a microphone stand and started her usual spiel about how “we have to protect and cherish ALL children. . .” which was clearly about “trans kids” and “queer” politics. Blessedly I couldn’t make out a single word of that diatribe after the first sentence. In her self-congratulatory way, she strode off the stage in a cape featuring the queer and trans colors as if she were making some bold humanitarian statement.

The woman truly is a modern-day Joan Crawford. She brought three of her adopted African children onstage to perform with her, basking in the attention of being such a selfless World Mother. One of these kids is going to write Madonna Dearest.

How she looked

I don’t want to indulge in the cheap shots people take at her appearance, and I’m sensitive to the way aging women are viciously criticized. But we all know the truth: Madonna has made her face and her body the product for 40 years. If she is trapped in a plastic simulacrum of the beautiful youthful woman she once was, it’s entirely her own doing. We can all see the cosmetic and surgical lengths she goes to in her effort to fool herself and us.

Her face is iconic in the true sense of the word. It is a face of the 20th century that’s instantly recognizable, the way Joan Crawford’s face was (remember, Crawford was a beauty in her youth before the parodic decline began). And it is a remarkable and bewitching face. No one has eyes like hers.

She looked a lot better than the nasty candids you’ve seen in the past year since her recent plastic surgeries. The bloating is gone. She doesn’t look like an alien. She looks like herself, but just a little too worked on.

The trouble is the contrast between her smooth face and the fact that her body is 65. Like all women her age, her skin has turned crepe-y and flaccid. The skin on her jaw, neck, back, and arms hangs down, yet she’s squeezing herself into corsets and teddies that only highlight the problems. My friend turned to me after a costume change and said, “The more she wears, the better she looks.”

Madonna could have decided to age more naturally, cover up, and remain an attractive but older woman. What she has become is undignified and sad.

Curtains down

A friend remarked that it was probably appropriate that my last time seeing her included some disappointment and let-down. It helps put a cap on a time of life that’s over.

I wish it were different just the same. Madonna has always been mentally disturbed, but (whether you like her or not) she has also been driven, creative, and productive. Her warped frame of mind has taken over in her twilight, pushing aside what was left of her as a performance artist.

People with Cluster B personality disorders often get much worse with time and age, and it’s sadly evident in her. She is decompensating. Narcissism comes from fear of not being good enough, not being loved enough, not being worth sticking around for through thick and thin. If we can gauge Madonna Ciccone’s level of fear and self-loathing by her increasingly deranged refusal to be a 65-year-old-human, then she’s very bad off indeed.

It wasn’t until 41 that I started to change my mind about politics and culture. Having spent most of my adult life as a progressive liberal gay, you couldn’t have convinced me that I’d be writing this way about my teenaged idol. But I’m a small-c conservative now, and I think the values I carried for the past few decades were immature, wrong-headed, and unhealthy.

She never grew up, and now it’s time to say goodbye.

Godspeed, Madonna.

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