Mad-Eyes - Madonna Interview

SALON.COM - OCTOBER 2003

Camille Paglia Speaks

CP: In my lifetime I've seen two moments when I felt we were moving toward an expanded perspective on life, a more flexible attitude toward issues -- authentic free thought, without this horrible, irreconcilable polarization between left and right. The first moment was the 1960s, when thanks to pioneers like Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan, you could say anything and be anything. You could be eccentric and opinionated on the left, but it was all shut down into the dogmatic, politically correct era that reached its height in the 1980s. The second liberating moment was the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton emerged as a moderate Southern Democrat. There were independent voices all over the political spectrum -- Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Madonna, who was at her zenith. And then it all shut down again.

Salon: On to another, possibly declining, important cultural figure: Madonna.

CP: Speak of schizophrenia! Within two weeks, Madonna can appear on the MTV Video Music Awards dressed in black leather as Vampira, Queen of the Night, and in her persona of polygamous dominatrix smooch Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the lips, then suddenly turn up in a matronly flowered dress in London kicking off her new children's book, pushing Kaballah as the future of mankind, and saying oh, pooh, it was just an innocent kiss between friends. [Sighs.] What can I say? Madonna remains a major star -- actually much bigger around the world now than she is in America. She got overexposed and lost ground in the U.S., then gravitated toward London and ended up marrying an Englishman. Because there are few real stars in the U.K., she created a big platform for herself there.

But I do feel there's something wrong with that kiss. Great stars have to learn to age gracefully. I loved it when Stevie Nicks -- who's a true artist -- zinged Madonna for "kissing girls half her age." She was right. Madonna was trying not only to compete with these figures she spawned but to overshadow and upstage them and suck them dry. It was very unfair to Britney Spears, even though she looked spectacular in white lace -- as nubile as a real bride. Jennifer Lopez was smarter and opted out.

It's crucial for the great stars to find a persona that allows them to mature with their fan base. Look at Cher! Just when Madonna's latest film and album were flopping, there's Cher on the charts for a year with her song collection. Cher has a natural warmth and rapport with the audience. But Madonna feels like she has to pound everyone into the ground like a steam hammer.

And that children's book! When I found out what the plot was, I was absolutely shocked -- and I'm rarely shocked, particularly by anything that Madonna does! But for someone who has been so concerned about shielding her child from the limelight to make Lourdes' problems with her London classmates the subject of a book -- and then to blame it on the other girls' "jealousy" because her daughter is so pretty -- and then to arrange a mega-wattage book launch with editions simultaneously released all over the world! Well, I haven't seen anything so gross since Al Gore used his son's near-fatal accident as a metaphor for America in the gutter in his speech at the Democratic convention. Anyone who exploits their children in this way is exposing a blindness to basic ethics. In the guise of helping, Madonna has crushed her daughter with her own ego -- hardly a way to help young people adapt to life's problems. I've prophesied for years that the cloud on Lourdes' horizon is the ghost of Tina Onassis, who also had too much too soon.

But these things are irrelevant to Madonna's permanent artistic stature. Her best compositions, like "Into the Groove" -- 20 years old next year -- never lose their freshness. Her videos are in the main line of the best of studio-era Hollywood. I personally feel that the video for"Vogue" is superior to anything produced in the fine arts worldwide in the last decades of the 20th century.

She's at least taking care of herself -- we're not seeing nervous breakdowns and drug overdoses. Madonna's drug is mania -- these monstrous intrusions into her husband's and children's lives. But all great stars and great artists are monsters. I'll be happily watching her to the end.

Salon: Who has emerged to eclipse her? Where is the next Madonna, the mass-multimedia star?

CP: I'm afraid that the great era of great stars and great personalities is over. American popular culture, which I thought was in a Renaissance, turns out to have had a natural organic shape to it, and this is its stage of decline. The entertainment industry is massive but fragmented. Video games have absorbed young people's creative energies and diverted them away from the study or practice of the fine arts.

The Web has also dealt a fatal blow to the culture of stardom because isolated types can now instantly express and exhibit their conflicts and find fellow sufferers around the world through the Web. But e-mail is evanescent. And the blog form is, in my view, the decadence of the Web. I don't see blogs as a new frontier but as a falling backwards into word-centric print journalism -- words, words, words!

The Drudge Report, on the other hand, is a true product of the Web. It's interesting how Matt Drudge still has no competitors. I used to think, how long can Drudge be king? Surely his rivals will spring up like mushrooms. But no, Drudge remains unique. He shows that the Web can be a medium for stardom, if you know how to use it. Unlike Madonna, he knows how to preserve his mystery.

But I'm very worried because young people are growing up without major role models in terms of stardom. Madonna was trained as a dancer and had independent ideas about music and performance. Too many young stars are bland Madonna clones without a thought in their heads. Because she was raised in a rigidly moralistic Catholic household, Madonna's use of sex had symbolic meaning -- she was challenging institutional tyranny. Now girls borrow her moves, but there are no ideas behind it. It's all glitz for the eye.

I like Britney Spears -- I find her very charming and athletic and sexy -- but she's not producing the kind of galvanizing songs that were Madonna's signature. And she also doesn't have Madonna's sophisticated, hypnotic skill for posing for the still camera -- which emblazoned her image into the minds of people who never heard a note of her music. None of these young women has that ability to master and manipulate the world media.