Podcast Rodeo #2: Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything & the Auteur Theory of Audio

Podcast Rodeo is an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO in which I muse on one of the 44 podcasts (the actual, current number) that I subscribe to.

The logo of Ben Walker's Theory of Everything. I find it very cool.

1. In Which Are Discussed Gilmet and Radiotopia, Their Differences

    Last time here on Podcast Rodeo, we talked about Gimlet Media’s flagship show, StartUp, and its growing pains. Gimlet was launched in the late summer / early fall of 2014, and rapidly became the gold standard of for-profit podcasting networks, hosting not only the popular (if artistically somewhat lost) StartUp, but also Reply All (a personal favorite), Mystery Show, and several other much-downloaded offerings. I have no idea if Gimlet impresario Alex Blumberg is getting rich off of it, but it appears to support his burgeoning family in New York City, and they’re hiring new people all the time. (Despite several applications, I have never been one of these hires. I never really expected to be, though.)

    The world of narrative audio — which is pretty much what Gimlet does — there is one personage, and one show, that hovers ever-present behind every discussion: Ira Glass, and his ever-changing, mould-shattering, first-of-its-kind show, This American Life. TAL pioneered the style that dominates narrative audio storytelling: casual, music-rich, accessible, funny. Glass, with his nasally, very Baltimore and very Jewish voice, did not sound like the other people on public radio; he stuttered his lines, had an essayist’s eye for detail, was unafraid to laugh or go on the air with bronchitis or come off as less than authoritative. It can be hard to understand how unusual this was back in the mid-late 90s, when TAL first came on the air, because Glass made it part of his mission to get unusual voices on the air. Early regulars included Sarah Vowell, whose nasal, girlish voice is so odd she eventually lent it to a Pixar character; David Sedaris, whose lispy, faintly southern speech was unapologetically homosexual in its affect; and Scott Carrier, whose haunted monotone was by far the biggest influence on my own radio line readings.* Spiritual heirs include Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal; Live Wire’s Luke Burbank; Snap Judgement’s Glynn Washington; Invisibilia’s Alix Spiegel (a TAL alum) and Lulu Miller; and Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. In short, without Glass and his show, the world of audio we know now just doesn’t exist. We are all kicking against its pricks and stealing its tricks.

*Not to brag, but I actually have a classic radio voice, and my Carrier imitation is actually a method of making myself sound less authoritarian and intimidating.

    I mention this here not only because Blumberg’s Gimlet shows are the clearest progeny of TAL’s revolution — Blumberg himself might be the Glassiest radio host other than Glass himself, but other shows on the network are hosted by other TAL alums, and Blumberg has clearly decided to coöpt his former show’s breezy, upbeat style (one, in fairness, he helped create) and use it to make relatable, listenable output that will keep his company profitable. I mention it also because I want to talk about another network, one that is home to many of podcasting’s most self-consciously artful and challenging listens: Radiotopia, which launched a couple of months before Gimlet. The thing is, Radiotopia is home to a bunch of great shows, and it resists Gimlet’s tendency to make all of its shows sound the same, and it has several creators who not only had nothing to do with TAL but actually predate and influenced that show themselves, such as the legendary Kitchen Sisters — and still, much of of its output is completely impossible without This American Life and the way it opened up audio storytelling to new vistas. This is true of Radiotopia’s flagship show, 99% Invisible, which as broadly about “design”, but is largely about its own production and sound design; it’s true of Phoebe Judge’s Criminal, which is a great true crime show that comes out of North Carolina; and it is especially true of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, an indescribably weird catchall show that encompasses science fiction, philosophy, futurism, tech industry inside baseball, autobiography, and more straightforward narrative storytelling.

2. Benjamen Walker and the Auteur Theory of Audio

    As Walker freely admits, Theory of Everything is a show that cannot be easily packaged, pitched, sold, or advertised. Recent episodes include:

    + “The Future”, which features an interview with a tech journalist who may have been the inspiration for an old TV show of which Walker is a fan.

    + “A light touch and a slight nudge” [sic], including fiction about Donald Trump as CIA plant, and nonfiction about conspiracy theories and why people believe them.

    + A series called “Instaserfs”, in which ToE intern Andrew Callaway — who may or may not actually be an intern — takes a series of “sharing economy” jobs in the Bay Area, including driving an Uber, delivering food, and doing duty as a manservant. This is then followed up by a definitely fictional storyline in subsequent episodes in which Callaway becomes an instacelebrity for his exploits.

    + Another series called “Dislike Club”, which is basically about what a horrorshow the internet is.

    You can see why the show is hard to describe. It’s discursive and uneven; the fictional aspects, in particular, tend to be less effective than the rest of the show. But it is undeniably fascinating, and it appears to be the product almost entirely of Walker’s warped imagination — well, that, and his ability to find interesting stories in strange corners of the world.

    One of the things I find interesting about it (and several of the other shows on Radiotopia) is that it is clearly intended to have one, specific author, in a way that even This American Life, whose guiding light was always the inimitable Mr Glass, never did. Walker finds the stories, he conducts the interviews, he edits the tape, he digs up the music, he does the sound design, and he writes the narration, which veers between philosophical musing, memoir, and speculative fiction, often in the course of just a few lines. The only way I can think to describe this is the squishy, nonspecific word sensibility, which I often try to avoid because it seems to me like a bullshit dump. Walker’s sensibility drives the show’s twists and turns. His level of inspiration seems to dictate the production schedule. He usually churns out a new episode every two weeks . . . or every three weeks . . . or every month or so . . . it’s hard to tell. This is actually a model that kind of only works with, not only an on-demand form of media consumption, but one like podcasting, where several episodes can pile up in a row and not take up too much time or space for you to ever catch up.

    I was talking (well, kibbitzing on Facebook) with some friends about authorship and why people are so desperate to believe in it when it comes to works of collaborative art. (The convo was inspired by Beyoncé’s new record, Lemonade, but equally it could have been inspired by pretty much any movie ever made, or This American Life, or any of a number of other things.) Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t really have a lot of use for most postmodern theory, and I don’t take “the death of the author” particularly seriously; but it is true that in our perpetual search for that elusive (and probably non-existent) concept, authenticity, people really, really want to impute works of art to a single creator if at all possible. I think this probably has something to do with evolutionary psychology and our need for clean, cause-and-effect stories that flatter the instincts that keep us alive (and allowed us to build this culture we all dig on so much in the first place). I have some tedious thoughts on what this may or may not have to do with various notions of God that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that it seems to me that people are looking for a single creator almost as soon as they’re aware that something has been created.

    I think this has done a lot of damage over the years, including the radical disempowerment of the screenwriter in filmmaking.** It’s also done many great things, including empowering writer/directors to take control of a medium was once engineered and make corners of it creative. It’s a really complicated move, and I could probably write a whole book about it that nobody would read. But what I find interesting is that it’s only just now starting to crop up in audio.

**NB that I’m the brother of a screenwriter, so I may not be wholly impartial here.

    While on the one hand I think this has some bad effects — the conflation of Ira Glass with his show in the popular imagination has really taken a lot of credit from a lot of creative people who helped him make the show what it was, as Glass would probably tell you himself — it also indicates, I think, that the genre is growing up a little bit, and people are starting to take it seriously. It’s right there in the title of Walker’s show, the full name of which is Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. On the one hand, this title is completely tongue-in-cheek, as no doubt the diffident and modest Mr Walker would avow. At the same time, it’s an accurate representation of the way the show is sculpted and directed, as Walker himself, irrespective of whether or not he ever really had an intern, is definitely ToE’s homo magnus and guiding light in a way that even Glass couldn’t be at TAL.

3. Radiotopia and the Theory of Everything

    The interesting thing that Radiotopia does that Gimlet doesn’t is treat its creators as artists, more or less. I have no doubt that Alex & PJ at Reply All, or Starlee at Mystery Show, genuinely do operate their shows largely as they see fit; but at the same time, they are indelibly Gimlet, always accessible, chatty, music-rich. I don’t want to denigrate these shows, because Reply All in particular may be my very favorite show currently going; but they are recognizable, and they’re similar.

    On Radiotopia, the auteur is regent. Walker’s show sounds nothing like Nick van der Kolk’s Love + Radio, which sounds nothing like Lea Thau’s Strangers, which sounds nothing like Nate diMeo’s Memory Palace. Much like Theory of Everything, each of those shows defies classification, other than that it has a controlling creative consciousness who runs the show (with some subordinates). Even the more clicky, pitchy shows, like 99% Invisible, offer unique sounds that are related to, but not the same as, the obviously TAL-inspired fare available on Gimlet, or on public radio shows like Planet Money or Invisibilia. I sometimes wonder how they make their money; the product is much harder to market than Gimlet’s, which I think both the Gimlet guys and the Radiotopia guys would tell you they’re proud of. But I’m glad they’re around.

Recommended episodes of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything:

“New York After Rent” — about Air BnB, the musical Rent, and the gentrification of NYC

“Secret Histories of Podcasting” — three versions of how the podcast became an artform

“Dark Karma” — an extended interview with a man who grew up in a cult

Podcast Rodeo #1: Startup

    I’ve decided to start an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO, called “Podcast Rodeo”, in which I review podcasts I either do or don’t listen to. The reviews will be peripatetic and sometimes unusual; some of these shows are not things I feel like doing a breakdown on, so there will just be a little story, faintly inspired by the show or its hosts. Some might cover more than one show — at last count, I was subscribed to 43 podcasts, from NPR offerings like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me to obscurities like Scott Carrier’s Home of the Brave.

    This first one, though, is pretty much gonna be a review, based on some thoughts I had while listening to Startup this afternoon, fighting the ever-worsening traffic of NE Portland as I attempted to return the cable box (that’s right, I’ve cut the cord — take that, Comcast). So, without further ado, some thoughts and ideas about Startup and its place in a world it helped create.

The Startup logo, replete with annoying capitalization.

Startup: What Is It?

    Because I’m a podcast hipster, I feel the need to clarify that I’d been listening to podcasts for years before Alex Blumberg left his gig at the NPR show Planet Money (itself the first podcast spinoff of This American Life) to found a podcasting company. I think I first discovered podcasts during the 2008 presidential election, when Slate’s Political Gabfest was in its infancy (more on that at another juncture); Blumberg went solo sometime in 2014, and Startup first hit the internet airwaves that autumn, around the same time as Sarah Koenig’s Serial. Arm-in-arm, the two shows, both helmed by graduates of TAL, ushered in a podcast boom — people had been making podcasts for years and years, some of them quite good, but something about these two shows — and the plugs they received on the radio from This American Life, which aired both show’s pilots in its regular timeslot — woke a whole bunch of people up to just what was possible in audio if what you were doing wasn’t constricted by the FCC, the need to fill exactly an hour between Radiolab and Prairie Home Companion, or the pressures that go along with being officially associated with a stodgy enterprise like National Public Radio or Public Radio International.

    Gimlet and Startup had one huge advantage: the core concept for Startup was completely ingenious. Blumberg decided that what he would do is document the very process of starting the company that would host the show, an act of meta-gonzo-journalism that gave that first season immediacy; Blumberg was doing something risky, possibly crazy, and recording himself doing it as he went. There were cringe-worthy moments as he gave disasterous rehearsal pitches to angel investors; there was genuine pathos as he and Gimlet cofounder Matt Leiber found themselves in the fraught territory that lies between friends and business partners (the first season’s most memorable episode featured Blumber and Leiber’s discomfiting negotiations about who would own how much of a burgeoning company that was still little more than a notion); there were late night conversations between Blumberg and his no-nonsense wife, public radio veteran Nazanin Rafsanjani; and, in the end, there was success — Startup was a runaway hit, and Gimlet rapidly became the gold standard in for-profit narrative audio. The first season of Startup was a memorable listening experience, a sprawling story of real risk and real reward, in which an everyman protagonist comes within inches of failure before succeeding. In the long run, though Serial was a bigger sensation, Startup was a better show.

Growing Pains

    As Gimlet grew, Startup shut down for a while, as Blumberg started hiring people to do other shows (notably the great Reply All), looked for a cohost, and tried to find another company to profile. Last summer, it came back to peer behind the curtain with Dating Ring, a dating website that came out of famous startup accelerator Y-Combinator, which helped incubate Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twitch, among other companies. Blumberg had taken some steps to find a different flavor for the second season, including bringing in Planet Money vet Lisa Chow to cohost, and choosing a company that was owned and operated by young women rather than a pair of middle-aged dudes. Chow has been a welcome addition, more confident and less nebbishy than Blumberg, but also a little more traditional in her role as cohost — she’s never the star of the show, and doesn’t insert herself in the story nearly so daringly as Blumberg did in his first season.

    And therein lies the problem that Startup has had ever since the end of its first season: without the daring conceit that the host himself was putting everything on the line for the very show you’re listening to, it loses a lot of its energy. Startup’s second season is perfectly competent, sometimes far more than that, and the Gimlet guys did a great job of finding real characters to star in it. But it’s not deeply urgent or compelling, not the way that first season was, when some episodes would be taken up largely by a sleepless Blumberg muttering semi-coherent panic thoughts into a microphone while his wife and children slept on the other side of a door. It’s great that the show made moves to include more female voices, but by picking people who were so young, with so much less to lose, and with so much less personal connection to the audience, it lost something.

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the show’s best episodes since season 1 were the ones from the little “mini-season” that came out last fall, and which were a sort of status check on Gimlet itself. It pondered the uncomfortable question of the thin line between advertising and endorsement. It tackled head-on the company’s racial dynamics. And, hilariously, it used Chow’s maternity leave as a vehicle to get honest about what a shitshow the company can be.

And What Now?

    This season, the show is clearly suffering from mission creep, at least if you ask me. It was clear that they couldn’t just go out and profile a nother fledgling company; they’d done that twice, and the second time through hadn’t been nearly as much fun as the first. Would they profile a failing company? They’ve been kicking that around, and keep mentioning it, but it hasn’t happened at all. Instead, the first two episodes have been a gimmicky, not-that-great profile of the streaming video company Twitch — the gimmick being that they don’t tell you it’s Twitch they’re profiling until the very end of the second episode, though if you’re a sharp listener who ever had reason to stream TV back in the late 2000s, you’ll have figured it out by the end of the first episode. This story lacked the immediacy of either of the first two seasons, because (A) it’s told entirely in the past tense, and (B) the main characters come off as fairly straightforward tech douches, who think that because they made a billion dollars, anybody in the world can. (Yeah, they all went to Yale and then Y Combinator. Not exactly just “anybody”.)

    Now, Startup is promising to move on to other companies, possibly ones that haven’t fared so well, though I must admit that I’m a little skeptical. The show lost something real when Blumberg ceased to be its main character, and now seems to be casting about for reasons to exist. Maybe the problem, at least for me, is that I’m actually not that compelled by stories of businesses qua businesses — the word entrepreneur is an epithet in my household, and a lot of the people who would use the word for themselves tend to rub me the wrong way. I was on-board because I had an established relationship with Blumberg going back to his days hunting down his childhood babysitter on This American Life, and because the first season was such a high wire act that I was mostly curious about whether he — or anybody — could pull it off.

    Ultimately, I think the problem is that Startup was a brilliant idea for a one-off show, but it is not evergreen at all. The reason Reply All (which bills itself as “a show about the internet”) can continue to churn out great content week after week is that its purview is so broad; “a show about the internet” can be about practically anything, because it’s actually about the people who use the internet, why, and how. Startup has to be about, well, startups. And though no two startups are the same, so far the show has failed to prove that they’re different enough to be interesting, either. Gimlet might do well to retire its flagship show, or only bring it back for the kind of self-reflexive status checks like last fall’s “mini-season”. Because what they’re doing now isn’t really working.

Susan, Who Is Desperately Sought

    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.