TRUTH OR DARE
DICE RULES
“I know I’m not the best singer or the best dancer. I’m interested in pushing other people’s buttons.”
Truth or Dare, which comes on as if it were truth and dare, sets out to give us both the “real” offstage Madonna, shot in grainy black and white, and the performing Madonna during her “Blond Ambition” tour, shot in color. But our sense of documentary reality is limited in a number of ways: by offscreen past-tense narration from Madonna identifying and contextualizing what we see, by jazzy crosscutting between color and black and white that prevents us from fully taking in either (occasionally the film breaks its own rules by offering brief offstage segments in color), and by Madonna’s relentless determination to theatricalize her life–or at least those parts that are lived in front of cameras.
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There’s another, much more subjective contrast between the Madonna and Clay movies. Even though I regard Truth or Dare as something of a con game–neither truth nor dare in any rigorous sense, but a skillful promo–I was charmed, entertained, and won over by most of it. But even though I regard Dice Rules as grotesquely straightforward about its own agenda, I found it horrifying, saddening, and ultimately sickening–though by no means uninteresting.
Madonna purports to be presenting her true self, warts and all–Madonna Louis Ciccone, who hails from a middle-class Catholic family in Detroit. Though her R-rated movie can be credited with a certain amount of candor, it’s important to bear in mind that she financed it herself and it is fully under her control. Clay, by contrast, has often insisted that the persona he presents onstage–and presents here, in a NC-17 movie–is not his true self but a fabrication; assuming that this is accurate, we have no access at all to the real Andrew Clay Silverstein, who hails from a working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. What we get instead is “A Day in the Life,” which, apart from being the clumsiest piece of filmmaking I’ve seen this year, is striking mainly for its utter lack of believable social reality. The only allusion to his ethnic background is the Yiddish that punctuates the rap of his older Jewish friend and the urban setting, which loosely resembles Brooklyn. But the behavior that everyone exhibits, while it may illustrate some vague emotional principle, makes Jerry Lewis look like a naturalist.
To my surprise, I found myself enjoying the offstage Madonna much more than the concert Madonna, largely because the material is much fresher. The numbers onstage suffer from being twice dismantled and reassembled: music videos that are “re-created” on the stage are splintered again by director Alek Keshishian’s music-video strategies; the effect is not to bring them back to square one but to serve up a third-generation spin-off. Intercutting this footage with the black-and-white documentary footage only further fragments whatever dramatic continuity the original number had. (A fancy cutter in the MTV mold, Keshishian manages his best effect in a backstage segment, when he cuts from a movement of Madonna’s masseuse to a crack of thunder outside.) Most of what we see onstage and off is about sex, but it’s debatable how sexy the numbers themselves are. The sweaty gymnastics and struck poses are more cerebral than suggestive on any visceral level; it’s the idea of stardom as orgasm more than the style or the content of the performances that constitutes the erotics–another unexpected trait that Madonna has in common with Clay.
