The voiceovers come toward the final second of her breathtaking 1991 documentary (and in large part the birth of reality television to come) ‘Truth or Dare‘ – Madonna’s various entourage members are giving various snippets of commentary on her admittedly zany life, while she pads around her hotel room, alone and isolated, sipping a cup of coffee and reading the paper. So many people talking about her, while she is in such quiet and solitude. Say all the hateful words you want, it still rings of loneliness and power.
Everything is subject to her approval or disapproval.
Everything has to do with what she wants, what she doesn’t want, how it should look, where it should go, what it should be. It’s very tense. She’s unhappy a lot of the time. She’s a bitch sometimes.
Madonna can be mean, if she wants to. We all can. I love it when she’s mean.
She hasn’t been a bitch to me, I don’t think.
She knows what she’s doing. She knows how to work. That’s probably why she’s such a big star.
I feel like she’s a little girl lost in a storm sometimes. There’s just like a whole whirlwind of things going on around her and sometimes she gets caught up in it.
I think of this scene often, especially when life starts feeling overwhelming. How little credit we give the entertainers, the tricksters, the people who make life worth talking about. How quickly we condemn and heap hate on them for doing the only things they know how to do. And how much we love building people up to tear them down. It’s exasperating – the way the start of the holiday season often feels. When that happens, I pause and play the one song that never fails to lift me up.
Cue the music, cue the snapping, and strike a pose.
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