To read the awestruck mainstream press on the subject of the Madonna tour documentary Truth or Dare—breathless features, interviews, and reviews marveling at the movie’s unparalleled frankness—you wouldn’t suspect that the film is actually the most baldly manipulative and scarily dishonest piece of propaganda to be recorded on celluloid since at least the Reagan campaign’s “Morning in America” commercials and possibly since Triumph of the Will. Far from being a first-of-its-kind backstage look at the rock-star psyche, the film has about half a dozen precedents, notably D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back on Dylan, Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues on the Rolling Stones, and, more recently, Sting’s Bring on the Night. Like Truth or Dare, all three of these were produced under the real or de facto aegis of their stars, and at least one ran into trouble because of it.
Truth or Dare‘s “plot” follows Madonna, two backup singers, a phalanx of dancers, and various other courtiers from Japan, where the film begins, through America and into Europe. The episodic nature of the backstage scenes and the anonymity of the live-show venues make it difficult to differentiate between cities, so transitions are accomplished by means of scripted voice-overs from Madonna. (“When we got to Europe there was an overwhelming sense of relief.”) The film’s main stylistic conceit is putting the onstage sequences in color and the “real” parts in black and white—perhaps the hoariest of all MTV cliches, but Keshishian does it up aggressively, using absurdly grainy black-and-white film. (The film and erratic lighting give some of the black-and-white interviews the look of some horror movie by Georges Franju.)
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What I don’t understand is why this movie exists. If Madonna went on tour to make the movie, she could have just as easily stayed home. And if it was an afterthought—that is, if the tour was scheduled and then Madonna said, Hey, let’s film this puppy—why didn’t they actually do it?
Such manipulations become most reprehensible in the movie’s tasteless trip to the grave of her mother. The real story about the grave scene remains muddy: Keshishian has said in interviews that he miked the site without Madonna’s knowing it, and that the cameras were “unobtrusive”—the implication presumably being either that (a) Madonna might not have noticed them, or (b) because they were unobtrusive Madonna would have been more sincere. In the event, Madonna, who has no shame, plays to the cameras and the mikes, lolling on the grass in a fetching black outfit and attempting to add a philosophical vein to her remarks: “I wonder what she looks like now, just a bunch of dust.” I’m not sure I understand the motivation behind wanting to be filmed at one’s mother’s grave. It seems to me that you’re either at peace with a dead relative or friend, or you’re not. If the former, you realize how utterly plastic posing at a grave is; if you’re not, you’d only use such a scene to mask your true feelings. But there’s a third possibility as well: your mother died when you were five, you have a top-dollar shrink to work out your feelings with, and you’re cynical enough to put a fake grave scene in your movie.
She resorts to shock because she doesn’t have anything else to say. Madonna as a lyricist is a great dancer. What meanings you can derive from even her most famous songs are invariably mundane. In the video of “Material Girl” (a rewrite of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”), what could have been a ferocious commentary on the differences between Marilyn Monroe and our Madonna is diluted and finally undermined by a clumsy story line that sees the singer ride off in Keith Carradine’s jalopy at song’s end. Y’see, she really wasn’t a “material girl” after all.
