Movie: Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985)
Remember Barbara Loden? After making Wanda, a very good film exposing all her potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses, she never got another opportunity to direct. Such examples should probably inform a bit more (the correct) criticisms of Beyonce's butchering of Jolene. Purely as a piece of music, I actually like Beyonce's version more than Dolly Parton's. but rewriting that song to present yourself as a badass queen who will wreck Jolene is rather pathetic and does indeed highlight that Beyonce is more interestend in being her own brand manager than in being an interesting artist. I have never cared much for her, but it is worth asking whether she would have been as big if she didn't present herself so forcefully as a strong powerful woman. Probably not, but still, Dolly Parton's (who is of course white) career is no slouch despite openly fearing Jolene's competition.
Anyhow, I've never much cared for Madonna for similar reasons. By the time I got into pop culture, she was already an institution, who seemed mostly interested in highlighting how much of an institution she was. Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she plays Susan, does make you understand how she could have become the biggest star in the world - it is not by projecting indestructible power. Madonna plays a cocky confident woman with a great sense of style, who knows her way around men and always comes off as the most charismatic and assertive person in the room. She is however also poor and on the run from criminals with guns. The police are not her friends and neither are the rich businessmen with expensive home decoration. Her people are her charming aimleslly drifting boyfriend Jim (Robert Joy), movie projectionist Dez (Aidan Quinn) who lives in a half-empty loft above the cinema he works in, desperate housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette, the film's actual lead), and Crystal (Anna Thomson), who is not even able to keep a job as a magician's assistant in a dingy magic club. In other words, Madonna is placed among the vagabonds and misfits of New York and presented as one of them,, always one stroke of bad luck away from the gutter. That makes her coolness and bravado come through more than any context in which she is presented as the effortlessly all-conquering queen of the world. I have mostly registered her songs as background noise, but her appeal here inspired a YoiuTube Madonna session. It appears Vogue, Material Girl (decidedly not a song presenting Madonna as an underdog) and Into the Groove are rather great!
Desperately Seeking Susan is a mistaken identity film in which various colorful New Yorkers, led by Roberta, frantically traverse the city streets without ever having the full or the correct information to find what they are looking for. Shenanigans and misunderstandings ensue, and because the audience is always one step ahead of the characters, all of this is often very funny, This the kind of film that I will always like, but for it to be truly great, it needs to either take its surreal absurdity up a notch or have a screenplay that is tight as a rock. As it is, Desperately Seeking Susan finds itself in the unenviable position of being the perfect companion piece to After Hours, without ever being able to measure up to it. It does have though absolutely exceptional costume and set design. One reason its screenplay is not as sharp as it could have been is because it features a lot of scenes which exist mostly to geek at Madonna and her outfits. Madonna released Like A Virgin during filming, and although the film was rewritten to cash in on her success, these scenes do have a purpose beyond just that. The film's fun comes from putting New Yorkers with different attitudes and of different walks of life together, and Seidelman is clearly interested in how their aesthetics clash and contrast. You may not be surprised to find whose aesthethics are presented as the way of the future, but you may reflect on how long it's been since a mainstream film/tv show presented such a progressive, loving and colorful view of life on the New York streets.
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