DISGRACELAND - Madonna: Music as Sex and Sex as Power in the Reign of the Queen of Pop

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

Madonna always knew her life would be art. She rose through the late 70s New York scene reinventing pop iconography and feminism alike. But whether it was Toronto police threatening her for indecency, her short-fuse husband, Hollywood bros exploiting her charisma, or far worse, Madonna learned quick: the world doesn’t know what to do with a truly free woman. To view the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠.   This episode was originally published on October 22, 2019. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. A quick warning for those affected by depictions of physical and sexual abuse. This episode details both. The stories about Madonna are insane. She's one of the most daring, explosive artists of all time. She was raped at an early age.

She was targeted by the Vatican for her performances. And nearly arrested in front of 50,000 people for simulating mouth. masturbation. She repeatedly pushed herself through her art, using it as a weapon to fight off abusive directors, to overcome overbearing producers, to outrun breathless paparazzi, and to outlast A-list significant others. Madonna obliterated mainstream attitudes about sex, refused to be slut-shamed and pushed herself creatively right up to the limits of the law. She was a megawatt star who would not be dimmed, not by critics, not by knife-wielding maniacs, and certainly not by hot-headed machismo narcissists.

Along the way, she made great music, some of the greatest pop music ever made. That music I played you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Mellow Push Push MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Mickey by Tony Basil. And why would I play you that specific slice of choreographed, cheerleader cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on December 16, 1982. And that was the day Madonna took the stage for the first time at New York City's

Dance Terea and began to slowly but powerfully push herself into American consciousness. A small step that would lead to scandal, controversy, intense expression, and icon status. On this episode, sex, controversy. Rape, cheerleader cheese, and Madonna. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. So poor that it immediately smacks of surveillance footage. Madonna, 19 years old, is lying on the floor of a downtown diner. She's just been raped.

She's sobbing, mumbling, frantic, scared, and nonsensical. She can taste fear in her mouth. Adrenaline. Her right breast is exposed. She's wearing all white, stretch pants, and an oversized. men's button-down shirt that she borrowed from her boyfriend, who is comforting her. He just made the scene. Around him, the number of restaurant onlookers grows to a small gaggle. They're no doubt hardened by their city, but not so jaded that a freshly raped teenage girl lying on the floor doesn't warrant

a curious second look. Madonna cries, Madonna moans, Madonna rise on the sticky tile floor. Her boyfriend swears revenge. It's a scene, one of the many urban storms that swell up daily and Manhattan, stirred by violence, stifled by cynicism. Madonna is in a familiar position, the center of the storm, a position she seeks, a position she craves, a position she pushes herself into. Even in this moment, not as a raped woman, but as an actress playing a raped woman. The part was her first, from the independent film A Certain Sacrifice, shot guerrilla style around the city across 1979 and 1980.

Three years before Madonna would become a star, and decades. decades before Madonna would confirm to Harper's Bazaar that in her first year in New York, she was raped for real, held with a knife to her throat on a steaming hot Manhattan roof and forced into performing fallacious. Most rape victims would understandably not want to relive their trauma on film, a mere year later. But for a hungry artist like Madonna, this was an opportunity, an opportunity for real expression, real art, transcendence, an opportunity to express herself. push past her own limits and achieve true artistry. To stand out as the undeniable force of nature,

she knew she was, which she knew the world would see too someday. New York City, Madonna's New York City in the late 70s and early 80s, was a beautiful mess. Reggie Jackson, Jimmy Breslin, Garbage Strikes, the Son of Sam, the Bronx on fire, punk rock, street art, invading highbrow galleries, the advent of hip-hop and cheap rents. It all felt like an explosion of creativity. A place and a time where culture-shifting music and art was conceived,

and Madonna was there and affected by all of it. Blondie, Baskiat, Keith Herring, Fab Five Freddy, Andy Warhol, and more, not to mention countless punk rock and dance club kids moving to the rhythm of New York's pulsing crime, grime, and electricity. It shaped Madonna, fueled Madonna. In a way, it made Madonna. New York City doesn't quit, ever. It pushes itself into every pore of your being until you become.

are expelled by it or killed by it. The city treated Madonna Louise Chiconi no different. The roots of Madonna's creativity and virgin horror ethos were well established before she made it to Manhattan from suburban Detroit in 1978, growing up working class Catholic in Rochester, Michigan. But New York City, in its merry-go-round of creative characters, helped Madonna turn her essence into the iconic image

that turned the world on. And New York City at the time was one big come-on. How far could you push it? It was a place where one day you were just another face in the crowd at Max's Kansas City or CBGB's and with the right timing be discovered made famous a lucky star seemingly overnight. At least that's how it seemed for those who knew Madonna at the time. But stardom doesn't happen overnight for anyone. It's a combination of hustle, timing, and expression.

Three things Madonna was a no short supply of, not to mention talent. The Clash were on stage at Bond's International Casino. In between songs, Joe Strummer was chastising the Times Square crowd for the less than warm welcome they'd given the opening act, Grandmaster Flash, and the Furious Five. It was a rock and roll crowd and flashed to them anyways, scratching records with a suede cangle on under his headphones, absent any live instruments on stage,

might as well have been an alien. Joe Strummer, the Clash frontman, wasn't having it. Madonna in the crowd that night, thought Joe was decidedly more attractive when he was angry than when he was strumming. But still, nowhere near as attractive as Clash bass as Paul Simmonin, who'd let Madonna and her two friends sneak in through the stage door, just as he'd done for countless other seemingly anonymous fans who'd shown up without a ticket. The Clash were in the middle of the now-famous 17-night run at Bonds,

a stretch that started out as eight shows. But after greedy promoters oversold the venue, the band had righteously agreed to keep the band. playing shows until every ticket was honored for their fans. It resulted in a month-long residency with a mind-boggling run of openers, including the Dead Kennedys, Crout, the Fall, Bad Brains, and Lee Scratch Perry. The clash's generous attitude toward their fans extended beyond ticket holders to the point of just letting in whoever showed up.

Madonna didn't have a ticket, but she pushed her way in. When she made the scene, she took note of the frumpy yet devastatingly cool Jean-Michel Baskette. visionary iconoclastic street artist who is in the midst of becoming one of the most sought-after gallery artists in the world. A year later with his star in even more intense ascent, he and Madonna would move in together. Eventually, he gets strung out on heroin. Most people in her position, a 25-year-old struggling to make her own ascent through the downtown art and music scene, while dating one of the youngest, coolest, most talented rising visual artists at the time, would have held on,

tried to make the relationship work out, junk or no junk. But not Madonna. Drugs weren't her scene. So Jean-Michel Baskat was out. Madonna dumped, pushed on. Madonna was disciplined, hungry. Some would say desperate, but that rap was ridiculous at best, sexist at worst. One man's discipline is another man's desperation.

If Madonna were a man, would her career origins be seen as desperate? Probably not. She saw what she wanted and there was no. nothing, there was no one who was going to hold her back from her goal of becoming a singing sensation and then an actress, a modern Marilyn Monroe by way of downtown chic, but, you know, who could actually act. Her ambition, off-putting as it was to powerful men in the music business at the time, was part of her charm to the legions of young women who would constitute her early fan base. By the time Madonna recorded her first singles, everybody, and burning up,

She was equally entrenched in downtown punk and dance club culture, two scenes that took themselves a little too seriously, but Madonna seemed to treat it all with the mischievous wink and nod of a free-spirited Catholic girl next door. To those just outside her orbit, fans in particular, it seemed like Madonna was always in on a joke that you'd never quite get, but that compelled you to want to know more about her. With an armful of rubber bracelets, cross-necklaces, and mesh half-shirts, She exuded mischief, sensuality, and sex.

She wasn't the most beautiful girl in the club, but she was by far the most interesting. She wasn't the stunning Debbie Harry, the suicide blonde, crushing studded hearts from the stage at Cebys, and she wasn't the beautiful beyond Compaire Chade, slinging drinks from the bar at Danciteria and frightening young, love-struck post-punk adolescence into awkward silence.

She was Madonna, and she was on to something else. Her style was her own. Leather and lace fashion manifest as the version or dichotomy she playfully tinkered with. Part vintage punk, part Catholic schoolgirl in trouble. And perhaps more important, she flaunted her vulnerability. She willfully exposed her round belly, treated it as an asset, as opposed to a physical liability, at a time when male record executives expected female singing stars,

at least the ones who they wanted to top the charts, to be the perfect image of femininity. rail thin, perfect in body and in manners. If Madonna's imperfect looks didn't betray her outsider status, then her accent certainly did. It was bridge and tunnel Betty Boop by way of Midwestern adolescence. It was decidedly uncool, not of New York, non-regional, its own thing. As a result, it was a thing that, along with her humor and confidence in her looks, turned most men on. And this outsider status made her supremely related.

to teenage girls and marginalized gay kids. Madonna immersed herself in the growing dance club scene of the early 80s in Manhattan. In club culture, a culture that celebrated and flaunted sex was as big an influence on Madonna as downtown punk. Her sexuality was hers to play with and she was unafraid to share it with the world. All of this is on display

in her first single to hit the Billboard U.S. top 10. It's hard for me to explain the greatness and appeal of Madonna's borderline. The opening notes on the electric piano got me every time I hear them. It's a simple, childlike sound and melancholic melody that looks back to the 70s,

and then the beat comes in and all of a sudden, you're in a new decade, on to something fresh, fully committed to the promise of the unknown. The feeling is similar to the beginnings of any great relationship. You feel comfortable and safe,

while at the same time excited about where it's all going. The single was Madonna's first big come on, her flirtatious glance across the bar, her nonchalant bump on the dance floor. It was electric, the casual touch from her hand, pushing it, the whisper in your ear, keep pushing it, the mischievous laugh, heart melting, the smile, the pout, the abandon, the control, a total turn on. Madonna had made a pass in America, and America was smitten. Penn wasn't fucking around. He was going to shoot him down. Paparazzi. Parasites. Vultures circling

their Malibu home on his and Madonna's wedding day. The shotgun was missing in the house. Sean was manic. Madonna was laughing. As usual, it was all a joke. Annoying, yes, a possible harbinger of what her life would become an endless test of her so far bottomless appetite for attention. But in the moment, pretty damn funny. And if she were being honest with herself, totally Shahn didn't see it that way, because Sean saw everything through the gaze of a serious-minded artist. He was just her type, currently taking his at bat as one of those next Brando, next Pacino types that come along every decade or so. To him, the helicopters were a big fucking problem. They were the kind of problem only a power couple as rich and famous as he and Madonna could even have.

The helicopters would drown out the sound of the ceremony, making it impossible to hear, which was the reason everyone was there in the first place. to hear Sean and Madonna proclaim their deep love for one another. It was the reason she found it funny, and the reason he couldn't stand it. And at least in that way, they balanced each other's intensity. Plus, Sean got word that the choppers were freaking out the guests, especially Martin Sheen, who was rumored to be flashing back into intense paranoia,

back to his days in the Philippines when he was filming Apocalypse now, experiencing a very real alcoholic meltdown and using it as fuel for his performance on a set drowning in cold. cocaine, LSD, and Machismo, sharing prop helicopters with Filipino military while dodging revolutionary guerrillas, turned on and tuned way the fuck out. Sheen had replaced Harvey Keitel, who according to Manic director Francis Ford Coppola, didn't have the acting chops. So Martin Sheen poured himself into the role and ended up having a heart attack on set for his efforts. And at the moment, in Sean Penn's backyard, it looked like he might be having another one. Either that or

like he might snap, like an actual shell-shocked Vietnam vet, instead of the actor who famously played one in the epic war film. Additionally, Martin Sheen's sons, Charlie Sheen, and Emilio Estevez looked bored. So did Tom Cruise, and so did Andy Warhol. But Andy always looked bored, and to him, Charlie, Emilio, and Tom looked good enough to keep his mind occupied while Sean and Madonna sorted out the helicopter thing. Where the fuck was the shotgun? Sean gave up and settled on dispatching a friend etch into the sand on the beach below his home

in giant 25-foot letters, Fuck you! As a silent scream at the vulture photographers circling above. Madonna laughed. She looked great in all white with her black top hat. What the hell was all that about Andy Warhol wondered. Orhall was insightful about celebrity in this case as he was in all cases. What the hell was all that about is exactly what America would be saying

about the marriage that began that day, until the day it dissolved, inevitably, like the grains of sand that made up the giant fuck you on the beach. But for the four years in between, Sean and Madonna's marriage was a straight-up tidal wave. Madonna, for her part, entered into it with clear eyes about their chances. She understood that when two like-minded, volatile artists got together, that they could either spur each other to greatness or flame out in epic fashion. A year after the big fuck-you in the sand, they were on the island of Macau filming a movie together, Shanghai's surprise. As Madonna suspected, their union had become a non-stop test of endurance against a swarm of paparazzi. When Sean was arrested on the island, for dangling a photographer over a balcony,

she wasn't surprised. She might have even liked it a little. She was surprised, however, to learn Sean had escaped from an unlocked jail cell and high-tailed it to Hong Kong on the first ferry he could find. The entire troubled production fled Macau, and they were able to keep the incident out of the papers. But Sean Penn would not get less volatile when they were back home. If the Penn-Chicconi marriage was meant to push two artists to New Heights, the fiasco and bombing of Shanghai's surprise was a loss on Sean Penn's turf, the movie biz. Madonna the musician, she was in the middle of an unprecedented creative high. With borderline, she had crossed the threshold into stardom. But when her second album, like a virgin, dropped in 1984, she became a true pop icon.

The in-on-the-joke Virgin Horac she had developed in the ripe dance and punk scenes of New York resonated across the globe. And it didn't come easy. Madonna had a stare-down veteran hitmaker Nile Rogers, who was producing the album. He didn't believe in the song, thought it was a novelty bit. Madonna held firm. She was undaunted by the more experienced, more successful man sitting in the producer's chair and she insisted on recording the track. It goes without saying whose instincts were right. The artist had a vision, a vision or producer at the time couldn't see. She was rewarded for her commitment, as was Rogers, who eventually bought in and produced a tight-sounding monster. Like a virgin, became a massive smash. Madonna's first number one hit, followed immediately by

Material Girl, Angel, Into the Groove, Dress You Up, all cracking the Billboard Top Five. Every, Three single, over half of the nine-track album, was a stone-cold hit. Madonna had pushed herself in the mainstream American consciousness. She was a megawatt star and nothing was going to dimmer shine. Not even leaked nude photos from her days as a model back in New York struggling to make it. When the pictures were leaked to Playboy without her approval in 1985, she refused to be shamed. Unlike Champaign, Madonna could handle the exposure. No shame.

No pain. Virgin, whore, what's the difference? In the end, we all sink beneath the sun. Madonna pushed on. She owned Live Aid, performing alongside Titans of the music industry at the time, from Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger to Patty LaBelle and Tina Turner, in front of a live audience of 100,000, and a global simulcast audience of 1.9 billion, nearly 40% of the Earth's population, and she crushed it. Her movie career took off with the success of desperately, seeking Susan, and her third album, True Blue, dedicated to Sean Penn, cemented her status as the Queen of Pop, selling 25 million records around the world. But all this glory brought even more

attention. She and Sean had driven each other to new extremes, and among the two stars at the time, it was Madonna who truly transcended from the top of her craft to global icon. They inevitably, but amicably divorced in 1989. And with the 90s on the horizon, Madonna was freer than ever to push cultural and sexual boundaries right up to the limits of the law. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. The after party was lame. It was always lame. Besides, by Madonna's estimation, who had time to party? Which megastar performer, which singers are actually partying after putting on a show on the scale of Madonna's blonde ambition tour?

Madonna playing multiple characters throughout the course of her set list, diva, showgirl, and of course, both the Virgin and the horror. Numerous complicated set changes, an iron-ran fountain-head-looking metropolis set, a cabaret set, a religious set, an art deco set, and a Dick Tracy set dedicated to promoting her new film with her new boyfriend, the incorrigible Warren Beatty. There were stage costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gautier, a ten-piece band, eight dancers, a film crew,

a production staff of 100, 18 tractor trailers, a giant 747 plane to haul all of the equipment around and a private jet to get her the fuck out of there after the show. But no, the damn after-party. Prince, Michael Jackson, Elton John, even Mick Jagger in the Rolling Stones. Madonna didn't understand. First of all, how does singers do it?

Sit there in a cramped, barely furnished room in the bowels of a cold stadium, covered in sweat, your adrenaline pulsing through your body, your brain on overdrive, your vocal cords, strained and carry on conversations about nothing with famous people you don't know but who act as if your lifelong friends when really all you want to do is compare show notes with your dancers and your band and celebrate the Herculean task you all just pulled off, staging a highly complex, physically demanding, emotionally draining show in front of 30,000 people. But no, the afterparty.

L.A. was the worst for obvious reasons. The biggest starfuckers on the planet are stars themselves. Madonna thought it was silly, the Hollywood ass-grabbing. But Warren Beatty took it seriously. This was, after all, his town. He'd been on the A-list for 25 years, a career player in Hollywood land. The social conventions of celebrity, the clubbiness of it, the premium on privacy and appearances, the coated dues and don'ts, they were all just sacred cows for the slaughter to Madonna. But from Beatty's perspective, they were to be taken seriously, as rights passage into his inner sanctum. Al Pacino, Lionel Richie, Shuck Kong,

Mandy Patinkin, Olivia Newton, John, Martin Scorsese. They were all there with her, backstage. And so was Kevin Costner, who despite his A-list blockbuster status at the time in 1990, was awkward as fuck when he met Madonna. He told her in all earnestness that her show was quote-unquote neat, like he'd just seen Annie Hall for the first time before coming to the show that night but didn't get the joke.

Neat went out, I would say, at the turn of the century. Madonna was repulsed by Costner's lameness, and as soon as he split, she turned to her friends in pantomime vomiting to express her displeasure with the star. Neat. Beatty was not pleased. But the jam backstage was no surprise. Neither were the jam stadiums. Madonna was one of the biggest attractions in the world,

the production, the creativity, and the performances. The whole show was novel for the time. It was a hot ticket selling nearly half a million seats in the first two hours after they went on sale, and eventually grossing $60 million. And it wasn't without controversy. The show was a full-on theatrical production exploring Catholic sexuality. On stage, the grueling craftwork took its toll and mid-tour shows had to be canceled so Madonna's throat could recover. Offstage, Catholic watchdog groups across the U.S. and Europe protested the subject matter, and when the blonde ambition tour hit Italy,

the Vatican threatened to outright ban Madonna from performing. But in 1990, for Madonna, nothing was more controversial than her show in Toronto. Madonna was sleepwalking through Where's the Party on stage at the Skydome. 53,000 people, more if you counted the mouth-breathing Canadian Mounties on hand, to bust Madonna if she went ahead with her performance of like a virgin, where she had been infamously simulating masturbation as part of her dance routine. The song was coming up next.

It was all Madonna could think about. When she got the news backstage before the set, that she was being arrested if she went ahead with the performance, she was immediately defiant. I'm not changing my fucking show, were her exact words. Her defiance quickly turned to exuberance. The thrill of the arrest was downright exhilarating, as was the prospect of the ensuing publicity shitstorm

where she'd get hauled in for public masturbation or indecency or whatever charged the Mounties threw at her, she refused to be humiliated and shamed. Despite the smooth talk from Madonna's management, authorities weren't budging. Madonna's camp threatened to cancel the show. The Mounties held firm. She touches herself, she goes to jail.

Backstage, the tension and excitement was palpable. Nikki Harris, a dancer in the show, told Madonna the cops meant business and that they arrested Bobby Brown for fucking onstage. Madonna lit up. Did they? And then slightly answered, I hope he's in jail when I get there.

And with that, Madonna defiantly walks on stage. Sitting on the plush red velvet covered bed, center stage in a gold bustier, black fishnets, and high heels, gone as the belly from her borderline days. Her body is taut, fit, muscular, a dancer's body, a result of the grueling physical demands

of the four-month three-continent ten-country tour. The drums percussed their way into the beginning of her most identifiable song like a version, but they're slower, more sensual. The feel of the live version of the song is significantly different than the single version. The tempo is down, less playful, more seductive. The dance on the bed is all upper body,

a Middle Eastern-influenced siren call in the flesh, arms extended, slithering to the beat like cobras, and then Madonna turns to face the crowd and begins to slowly sing the words. The crowd immediately freaks out. Her serpentine arms continue to wade through the stagelights above her. The drums kick in. Madonna rolls onto her back, spreads her long legs,

revealing her gold panty-clad crotch and comes to her knees on the bed. She grinds her hips into an imaginary lover beneath her, pushing it. The song continues through the chorus, back to the verse. And when she hits the second chorus, she does another spread eagle and more grinding, more intense this time. pushing it harder, hotter. Madonna leans into the ride, straddling her imaginary lover, teasing.

Her hand begins to rub her belly, slowly inching down her navel, closer to the crotch. She moans the vocal refrain, slides her hand back down her belly again. This time, even closer, closer to her crotch, pushing it, dominating her audience of thousands.

A baseball stadium jammed with horny-inspired fans and a small handful of conservative soul-crushing canaan, Canadian Mounties. The song hits the bridge and Madonna falls onto her back on the bed. Two dancers at her side caress her arms and back. She rises up onto her feet on stage and begins massaging her Jean-Paul-Cautier-cone breasts and falls into the arms of her two dancers who take her. She rise beneath them, still singing, not missing a beat. They mouth her nipples, palm or vagina. The song's tempo picks up. Madonna's hand grabs her crotch. She's on her back thrusting her hips up. It's more than sex. It's violence. It's inspired. It's nasty. Madonna rolls over onto her stomach on the bed and begins frantically dry-humping, banging her head and her blonde hair up and down and up and down and up and down. Her healed feet outstretched like a V. The crowd is freaking out in full throat, screaming, cheering,

panting right there alongside her with every thrust until the music finally comes down. Post-climax, post-coitus. The show could have ended right there. Madonna's performance of like a virgin, under threat of censorship from Canadian Mounties, was so inspired that there was no need to finish the set, but of course she did. And in the end, there was no arrest. The authorities, perhaps sensing a potential riot, backed down. And Madonna had once again used her art to win out in the end.

Vanilla Ice took Madonna from behind. It was staged, but so what? It was hot. As was Madonna wrapped in two other women, curves, buzzcuts, and tattoos with a knife to her crotch, or Madonna alone in a leather blindfold, studded lingerie with exposed nipple cutouts, a riding crop between her teeth, and hand between her legs, mesmerizing and kinky black and white. This was Madonna's idea of a coffee table book, Sex, All Caps. It was to be a literary and visual companion to her fifth

album, Erotica. Sex would sell out its first edition within a few days, but even as America shelled out money to peep Madonna's erotic fantasies with one hand, it slapped her wrist with the other. Madonna's pushing of the envelope, her virgin horror image, had always attracted intense criticism, but after sex, the criticism reached a new level. Critics who had once praised her pushing boundaries now trashed her work casting her as a try-hard slut. Time magazine predicted, it'll be the first aluminum-covered soft-porn book ever to grace the remainder been. But they were wrong, of course. Today, sex is one of the most in-demand out-of-print books in the world. But the prudish backlash of the early 90s was real. As a result of the hypocritical controversy, Erotica would be Madonna's

first record since 1983 with no number one hits. With all the noise, the time seemed right for focusing fully on her acting career. As an actor, Madonna, despite her more than incapable turns and desperately seeking Susan in a league of their own, alongside Rosanna Arquette and Tom Hanks, respectively. Critics never considered Madonna a serious actor. Madonna wasn't supposed to act. She wasn't supposed to write books. She wasn't supposed to push boundaries on film. She was supposed to make records and videos to show off her belly above a boy toy belt buckle and tour and make the power players in the music industry more and more money every time she got a creative itch to scratch, so long as it was the right itch.

She was supposed to inspire critics to write lofty, over-intellectualized reviews and long-form think pieces, dissecting the motive and meaning behind her lyrics in her evolving image. She wasn't supposed to make movies. Look what happened to Elvis. Singles, records, tours, that's where it was at. Everything else was just noise, over-exposure. But Madonna would not be put in a box. She knew she had the goods for the screen, and she wasn't going to let self-important critics or the showbiz patriarchal power structure dictator creative station. The reviews for Body of Evidence, the 1993 crime drama Madonna starred in alongside Willem Defoe were vicious. To follow it up, Madonna chose to go deeper, darker, agreeing to co-produce and star in, notoriously tough and controversial director Abel Farah's dangerous game, opposite Harvey Keitel. The story tracks a famously uncompromising director, played by Keitel, who must cast a commercial starlet played by Madonna in order to get his film fining. META enough for you yet?

It gets better. There was one more turn of the screw. The film inside the film's lead is played by James Rousseau, a real-life good friend of Madonna's ex-husband, Sean Penn. The project with Ferrara, Keitel, and Rousseau was a snake pit of masculinity, the production, an underground dogfight that Madonna pushed herself into the middle of to answer her critics. And the results, electric, thrilling, transcendent.

As a director, Abel Ferrar believed in breaking. down as actors, berating them on set, forcing them through take after take to act in mentally and physically challenging situations, humiliating them when necessary, all in an effort to strip the actors at any contrived stage artifice and to hopefully bring raw emotion to their performances. The idea was that once they had been so beaten down, they'd forget they were actually acting. Ferrar's method was one that Harvey Kytel and James Russo bought into wholeheartedly. Nothing was out of bounds. Improvised lines. thrown out to push the actors, mainly the female lead on the set.

The only one on set, by the way, who was an actual A-list celebrity, Madonna, were meant to not only sting, but to break her. Russo's character calls her a cunt. He goes on to say, she's a fucking horn, she can't act. Kytel calls her a commercial piece of shit. Those last two daggers were meant to cut deep, given that they were essentially more concise, more profane versions of the criticism that the press had been hurling at Madonna on a regular basis. The situation was beyond intense, horrific in some ways. The line between art and real

life was being obliterated. Madonna grew paranoid, anxious, tense, insecure. Violence was imbued into the nature of every shoot. Volatility was heavy in each direction. The insults from Kytel, Russo, Ferrar, continued. This was not what Madonna had signed up for. The attacks would not let up. She felt humiliated, the shame. That feeling was familiar, reminded her of something she did not want to be reminded of. She could taste the fear in her mouth, the adrenaline. She felt violated, scared. She questioned herself. She blamed herself. She tried to play it cool, pull the act off, but it was too much, too intense. And she was afraid, afraid that her worst nightmare was happening all over again. The assailant kicked the door open. It happened so fast that she

she didn't have time to react. Take your clothes off, he shouted. She stood, stunned. He forced her to the ground. Her body was so stiff that he couldn't make it happen. Even forcibly, he couldn't get it in. So he lost it. And the insults continued.

He called her a disgusting lesbian, a stupid dyke, a pathetic piece of shit, and claimed that if he couldn't get it in her pussy, he was going to make her suck it. But when it was over, she remembered the choking feeling, gagging on it.

And then being dragged over to the side of the roof by her hair and the feeling of the knife against her throat. She heard the rapist say that he didn't know if he should slit her throat or push her off the building. That's what Madonna's character said anyway. That's how she detailed her rape to Harvey Keitel's character in the film and in real life, on set, answering her co-stars and directors off-screen abuse and creative taunting by digging deep into her past, into her own real-life rape, detailing the most traumatic event of her life, pushing herself deeper and deeper to deliver

a tour-to-force of an acting performance, it is the best reason to revisit the movie today. Only a year later, Quentin Tarantino would unveil Pulp Fiction and eat Abel Ferrar's lunch as Hollywood's go-toll-celluloid provocateur. But the Boys Club running the set of Dangerous Game thought they were truly cutting-edge badasses and blamed Madonna for the movie not working, and they were wrong. Even mainstream gatekeepers Siskel and Ebert in their two thumbs-down review called out the movie's blatant misogyny against Madonna. It wasn't subtle. A film about a film by a provocative director,

made by a provocative director, where the story dead ends into all the men calling the female lead a bad actress, a female lead played by the heavily criticized Madonna, insulting her on and off screen as harshly as possible, just to see if they could break her. Most people would have buckled in the situation,

broke. Madonna dug in. She pushed. She triumphed. She lived to tell. Dangerous game didn't work as a movie when it came out, but 26 years later, it holds up in another way, as an accidental documentary about how Madonna is an unbreakable force of nature.

Throughout the entirety of her career, men thought they could control her, rapists, record producers, A-list movie star boyfriends, directors drunk on their own testosterone, and especially the critics, but there is no controlling a true artist, especially one's true blue as Madonna. underestimate Madonna and you invite your own disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis.

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