From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: M A D O N N A
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 92 15:00:42 GMT


In article <1b3h51INN13m@mizar.usc.edu>
adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (Arne Adolphson) writes:

>The career of the It Girl herself, Clara Bow, lasted about 8
>years before she slid into schizophrenia.  I suppose I
>should note for our friend from Apple with the mind of an
>accountant that Clara Bow received more fan mail (according
>to the Postmaster of Los Angeles, she received 33,727 fan
>letters in May 1928) than any other star in Hollywood
>history.

Your mind is obviously a Cesspool of Incidental Fact (this
is a compliment!).

>Dietrich's active film career lasted about 30 years
>(1923-1952), but then she appeared all over the world in her
>nightclub act until the mid 1970s.  Do you think Madonna
>will still be jiggling her titties before appreciative
>audiences all over the world 40 years from now?  

We can virtually guarantee that the trademark costumes will
have been left behind long before.  I sincerely hope she
does have appreciative audiences 40 years from now.  If she
does, she will necessarily have to have changed no small
amount in the interval and brought her audience through all
that intact.  What she does now, I think, will not appeal to
the then new audience, though it's a precarious kind of
prediction to make.

In contrast, Dietrich did not have to change, for she
reached deeper (I think much deeper) into the human psyche
and found a self-expression with more nearly universal and
I'm sure more lasting resonances.  The 70-year woman was
every bit as appealing -- including sex-appeal -- as she
had been 40 years before.

This not having to change, of course, is part of the dynamic
of becoming an icon, a real one, I mean.  Indeed, the "with
it" kind of imagery that substitutes mere popularity for
fame in the age of MTV (I mean, is Vanilla Ice still alive
and why would anybody other than his mother care?) is
anti-iconic, supporting (wasn't it David Carleton's?) view
of Madonna as iconoclastic, actually.

>I, for one, can't wait to see the 70 year old Madonna
>reprise, for the 100,000th time, Express Yourself or Open
>Your Heart or Justify My Love or Like a Virgin.

That *music* isn't very likely to last.  But contrast "Lili
Marlene" or "La Vie en Rose." And the latter song brings to
mind another quite different icon, Edith Piaf, about whom
much of the same sorts of arguments could be advanced, in
quite another context.

To pick a star who's less iconic than Piaf and considerably
more so than Madonna, I think (if you're a certain age and
used to gay bars, you might now wince) Barbra Streisand will
still appeal iconically a long time yet.

<> We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of our exploring
<> Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.
<> -- T.S. Eliot
-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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