Susan, Who Is Desperately Sought — Touched with Fire Media

I decided to watch Desperately Seeking Susan because I listened to a couple of episodes of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This about Madonna’s early career, during the period when she was making elaborate, outlandish videos like “Vogue” and “Material Girl”, which traded directly on pomo rehash/remix of classic movies, from Metropolis to Diamonds Are Forever. You should listen to the episodes. Longworth’s skills as an editor have improved greatly in the two years she’s been doing the podcast — the levels are sometimes off, and her narration is somewhat artlessly Radiolab-y, which is often the sign of someone who hasn’t had much experience with ProTools or Hindenburg — but she has a passion for the subject borne of growing up in a media world that seemed, for almost a decade, to belong wholesale to the Material Girl. (Longworth and I are about the same age, which makes me feel incredibly unaccomplished and lazy.) Longworth’s thesis is that Madonna in some degree composed her fame of shifting, shifty images of female beauty, in order both to appeal to and subvert the wanton desires of pop culture. I have long been an advocate of Madonna, both as a songwriter and as a sort of auteur of the culture, and so I find myself in sympathy with Longworth’s arguments, even if I’m not all-in on the idea of Madonna-as-subversive. Longworth’s mastery of film history, though, combined with her obvious enthusiasm for the subject mattter (despite her dry delivery) helps her construct the argument far better than I ever could.

I watched Desperately Seeking Susan in a mood of curiosity. The film came out before I was making my own moviegoing decisions — I was five in 1985 — and then, when I was in my serious film-buff phase, it didn’t have the kind of advertising that called out to me. I will admit that the teenaged me had not yet really put any critical thought into Madonna, either as a musician or a media phenomenon, and I mostly viewed her as an omnipresent, plastic non-factor, whose entire role in media was to appeal to male satyriasis in order to make money. (This was before I had realized that authenticity is a bullshit dump, and was still mostly in thrall to overwhelming male geniuses like Kurt Cobain and the young Van Morrison.) I also suspect that the film’s reputation was not high in those days. It certainly seemed to have been marketed as a fizzy, frivolous romp for the sister set, starring a pair of stylish young actresses whooping it up. I think I assumed that it was a sort of Thelma & Louise for nincompoops.

It’s certainly not that. It’s not a truly great movie, really; it is, in fact, somewhat frivolous and fizzy. But it’s those things in a much cleverer way than I had ever before imagined. I think you could call it a postmodern farce, in the best sense of the word.

I’m not really going to recap the plot here, because the plot qua the plot is not really the point of Desperately Seeking Susan. It centers around a series of mistaken identities, amnesiac events, and crime-caper MacGuffins that serve to set two characters — Rosanna Arquette’s timid housewife, Roberta; and Madonna’s impulsive party girl/con artist,* Susan — adrift in social environments to which they are not used: Roberta touring the seamy side of Manhattan on the arm of an extremely handsome film projectionist played by Aidan Quinn, and Susan lolling about in the lap of luxury in a suburban mansion in a tony New Jersey suburb. It’s a story of a young woman saving herself from the savage doldrums of a life defined by roles she didn’t invent. By becoming Susan — that’s one of the mistaken identities — Roberta comes to realize that there’s a lot more, not only to life, but to herself, than she had previously understood. It’s not a revolutionary plot, but it’s given a feminist spin that seems to have been lost on a lot of its contemporary reviewers, and certainly wasn’t hinted at in the ads.

*In fact, Susan reads, in the current pop-psychoanalytical environment, as a classic sociopath, not unlike Ferris Bueller, with whom she shares a lot of personality traits.

You’ve heard of the Bechdel Test? It was invented by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and it contains one simple criterion: a movie passes the Bechdel Test if it features two female characters who have a conversation about something — anything — other than a man. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard a test to pass, but if you invest about 30 seconds’ thought in it you’ll find that not many movies do. The Godfather? Hell, no — I’m not even sure its three female characters are ever onscreen together. Pulp Fiction? Nope, there’s never a scene without a man in it. Boyhood? Not a chance. Not that a movie can’t be good without passing the Bechdel Test. It’s just something to think about.

Desperately Seeking Susan casually and easily passes the Bechdel Test, despite the fact that its two main female characters don’t really meet until the film’s climax. It does this in a way that would seem simple, except that so many movies fail to do it: it gives its female characters identities and jobs and things like that. Madonna’s Susan is a hedonist, an unapologetic club kid, an opportunistic thief. When the last of these lands her in a pot of hot water, she goes to a female friend who works as a magician’s assistant in Manhattan for help. What do they talk about? What do you think? They talk about Susan’s crime and her friend’s crappy job. Then they go to the movies. The scene makes so much sense that it doesn’t stand out at all, until you begin to think about the movie with 30 years of cultural criticism in between you and the film’s release.

Another subtle, but I imagine purposeful, sequence happens at the end of the film, when Susan’s misdeeds have started to catch up with her, and she’s abducted at gunpoint by a creepy bleached blond dude, who thinks she has a pair of earrings he wants. They creep along through a warren rooftops and fire escapes, hotly pursued by Susan’s sometime boyfriend. But when a blow comes to the bad guy’s skull, it’s not Susan’s boyfriend who delivers it, but Roberta, newly empowered and more assertive after a brief walk in Susan’s shoes. It’s not didactic — if I hadn’t been clued in by Longworth’s podcast that watching the movie through a feminist lens might be interesting, I almost certainly would have missed it — but it’s about the most spectacular way to pass the Bechdel Test there is. Two female characters save the day, all without talking about a man.

Over and above its political aspects, the movie has one really big asset: Madonna, as Susan. Kind of famously, just about the only thing that Madonna ever set her sights on and didn’t get was movie stardom. She married a movie star (Sean Penn) and later a movie director (Guy Ritchie), and in between conducted a torrid affair with a rapidly-fading movie star (Warren Beatty). But despite several bids at stardom, it never quite happened — her Breathless Mahoney was alluring enough, but Dick Tracy was a fatuous vanity project, all surface and no depth. She was good but distinctly outshone by Rosie O’Donnell, Tom Hanks, and Lori Petty in a comedic turn in A League of Their Own. The closest she came was the starring role in Evita, for which she won some awards and good reviews, but the film was a fairly forgettable adaptation of a minor Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that (in my opinion) the world would have been just fine without. Desperately Seeking Susan would suggest, at least to me, that the reason Madonna never became a huge star was not because she wasn’t capable, but because she was miscast. Maybe she chose to be miscast; one of the signatures of Madonna’s career, once she hit her stride, is that she rarely did anything she didn’t want to do. But all the same — miscast.

It’s tempting to assume that Madonna is playing a version of herself as Susan, not least because the overlap between Susan’s crucifixes-and-fishnet fashion sense and Madonna’s own was basically one-to-one. Who knows if that’s true, but somehow I doubt it. Susan could be a total cipher, with a lesser performance, or worse, a floozie — she’s almost nothing but self-interest and hedonism. But Madonna imbues Susan with a magnetism, a cynicism, an intelligence, and — yes — a lissomeness, that make her scenes hard to take your eyes off of, even when they’re sort of easy spoofery of upper-middle-class suburbanness that was fairly common in the 1980s.** When she dances in the club with an older man, mocking him for his squareness, his sobriety, his fundamental lack of life force, part of the reason it works so utterly is because she is completely the opposite. Madonna, whether or not she had the chops of Meryl Streep, was not to be ignored.

**One thing I hadn’t known, or perhaps had forgotten, was just how beautiful Madonna was when she first hit. I mean, of course, I was aware that she was an attractive woman, probably even before I began to understand what that really meant. But by the time of my own sexual awakening, Madonna had remade herself as an unapproachable blonde, a woman of complete glamour, which was the sort of thing that did not really appeal to me. The Madonna of Desperately Seeking Susan, punky and less calculated(-seeming), though, was a great, undeniable beauty.

The film, of course, is not perfect, either aesthetically or politically. A lot of the stuff about Roberta’s buffoonish husband is cartoonish, and not in a particularly good way. Some of the storytelling choices seem hilariously — but not self-consciously — absurd. And, of course, this being a movie, Arquette’s Roberta somehow manages to go on a days-long adventure through Manhattan without ever meeting a person of color who isn’t a servant or a thug. (Hell, I’m not sure she meets anybody at all who isn’t either white or black, meaning the Manhattan of Desperately Seeking Susan has been largely flushed of its Chinese, Indian, and Puerto Rican populations, among others.) And it does belong, at least in its second half, to a genre of film that was popular in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which I’m not always in love with: the city-as-hell movie. (Usually this hell is New York, though sometimes it’s Los Angeles. Has it been Chicago? I’d bet it has.) You know this movie: The Warriors, Escape from New York, New Jack City, Grand Canyon, Taxi Driver, etc, etc, etc. I’m not saying that these movies are all the same, or that they’re all bad. In fact, the list I just named has one stone classic, three cult classics, and one decent-if-pablumy offering on it. But I find the genre tiresome, after a while. Though I realize that America’s cities went through a distinct rough patch in the mid-late 20th century, with crime skyrocketing, white flight causing dereliction, and so forth, sometimes it seems to me that Hollywood processed what was happening in urban America entirely through the lens of white anxiety about black people. I mean, come on. R&B music was, for a long time, called urban. For a while, I was hoping that Desperately Seeking Susan would resist the meme that cities were scary and bad and plagued by dangerous black people — early in the film, Manhattan is a place of excitement and discovery for Roberta — but soon enough there were three black dudes leaning on a white guy’s car when he came out of the shop. And then Roberta was being chased through a weirdly abandoned SoHo, and the city-as-hell thing was in full swing.***

***Two key caveats here: (1) Manhattan really was a rough place in those days, as Madonna herself could attest — she was sexually assaulted at knife point in the early 80s, long before she was famous, outside her building in the East Village. (2) City-as-hell is not really completed in Desperately Seeking Susan — ultimately, Arquette’s Roberta elects to stay in Manhattan, preferring it to the suffocation of the suburbs. In most city-as-hell movies, the (almost always white) protagonists either escape the city, or are killed by it. Think about frequent Madonna collaborator David Fincher’s dreadful Seven, in which Gwyneth Paltrow complains bitterly about living the city with her cop husband, and is rewarded with decapitation.

All in all, Desperately Seeking Susan left me lamenting a Madonna movie career that moved along more natural paths, playing to her strengths as a comedian. There’s no guarantee she would have become an world-bestriding movie star, but I think she had it in her. Maybe the mistake was in trying to do movie stardom in her pomo remix style — instead of following her strengths as an actor, trying to manufacture herself as Marilyn-style glamorous blonde. (Madonna was always far too cynical and knowing to play the Marilyn part. It’s part of her appeal.) Perhaps Madonna was always too much in control for the moment — maybe there was no way for a woman to be a movie star without relinquishing the driver's seat in those days. (Or these ones.) Who knows.

Ah, well. The road not taken. Here, I’ll leave you a video of with her best song.