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Mary Gabriel: Madonna: A Rebel Life book (2023, Little, Brown and Company)
Smithereens (1982, Susan Seidelman)
One downside of reading most books digitally these days is that the format erases some of the distinctions between short and long books. Usually, this is a good thing. I always hated reading a book so thick I couldn’t hold it up with one hand, but my ebook reader is the same weight no matter what I’m reading. Also, when you’re buying a book, you have to look into the metadata to notice whether you’re picking up a pamphlet or a tome, and sometimes I don’t think about doing that. That’s what happened with the book I’m reading now. The book I just finished was pretty heady and dense (William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels, which drew parallels between the lives and work of philosopher Immanuel Kant, physicist Werner Heisenberg, and writer Jorge Luis Borges), so I wanted something lighter. I chose this recently-published biography of Madonna by Mary Gabriel, which weighs in at about 900 pages. I guess I’ll be reading it for a minute.
The length of Madonna: A Rebel Life is kind of nice, really, because it allows Gabriel to go into the kind of detail I want from a biography. I’ve only made it up to the final years of the 80s so far, but Gabriel does a really great job of immersing you in the settings that shaped Madonna’s early life: her childhood in suburban Michigan, the cocoon of late 80s LA, and most of all the deeply troubled artistic playground that was late 70s / early 80s New York. Obviously, being super into punk, that’s a time and place that I’m interested in. Whenever I see movies made or set in that period of New York, they always suck me right in. I wonder if, had I been of age at that time, would I have been drawn to it enough to move there? I certainly would have loved all the art that was happening, but I can’t imagine how exhausting it must have been to live in such a tough, uncompromising environment.
Having read so much about the punk scene, it’s nice that Gabriel’s biography focuses largely on a different corner of that world. That corner certainly abutted the punk world, and figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hell, Fab 5 Freddy, and Madonna drift between them (Madonna briefly played drums for a band that played at CBGB). However, in Madonna’s New York of that period, the gay dance clubs like Paradise Garage and the modern dance scene figure more prominently. Gabriel’s book pulls you into that world and gives you a taste of how it operated.
In addition to detail, another luxury afforded the very long book is the ability to digress. One digression in Gabriel’s book that interested me was about the work of director Susan Seidelman, who made Desperately Seeking Susan, the 1985 film starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette. In contextualizing Seidelman’s work, Gabriel also mentioned her feature-length directorial debut, 1982’s Smithereens. Gabriel mentioned the film was set in the New York punk scene and featured a number of scenesters as actors and extras, including Richard Hell as one of the main characters. I looked it up, found where I could stream it, and checked it out.
As soon as the film started, I was pulled in. It has that distinctive color palette of New York movies of the period and plenty of establishing shots of a city with pockets of decadence sprouting up in a vast landscape of decay and neglect. As for the plot, IMBD summarizes it as “a talent-challenged girl tries to promote herself to stardom in New York’s waning punk music world,” which isn’t exactly right. There’s no indication of whether the lead character Wren has any talent or not… she never sings or plays because none of the other characters have any interest in whether she has talent or not. And there isn’t really as much punk as I’d hoped there would be either. The Feelies song “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness” serves as a kind of theme song, there are a lot of cool punk fashions, a couple of scene shot at the Peppermint Lounge, and of course Hell plays a punk musician for a group called the Smithereens, but that’s about it. The movie isn’t really about punk, because the character Wren isn’t really in the punk world… she’s basically a poseur trying to gain entree.
What stuck with me more than the punk content was the sexual politics of Smithereens. Every man in this film, to a person, is a total fucking creep, and Wren barely has a moment on-screen when she isn’t the object of a man’s sexual interest, with these situations taking on a threatening, violent air more often than not. Richard Hell’s character is an obvious creep using her for what he can get, but even the apparently wholesome young portrait artist from Montana makes physical advances Wren clearly has no interest in. In the film’s enigmatic closing scene, a defeated Wren walks, dead-eyed and defeated, along the highway, apparently toward the Holland Tunnel and her childhood home in New Jersey, where she’d vowed several times over the course of the film she’d never go. As she walks, a creep slows down his car to proposition her, refusing to acknowledge her complete lack of interest in him.
I’m too soft for the New York of 2023, much less 1982. But to be a young woman in that time and place… I can’t even imagine the kind of resolve and toughness it would have taken to exist in that world day in and day out. I guess that’s why so many women who came from that world—Madonna included—were so extraordinary. They would have had to be, just to exist.