MADONNA, MICHAEL JACKSON AND THE LOSS OF IDENTITY
By Avi Davis

Many people who reach the age of 50 use their birthday to reflect on the course of their life and its purpose.   But  how many contemplate the nature of their identity at this age and the degree to which that identity has contributed to their success in life?   We all use certain benchmarks to assess the impact we have had on the world:  Building a successful career, marrying the right partner, raising a family and contributing to the welfare of one’s community.  But most of us don’t spend too much time examining who we actually are.  How do our values, moral codes shape the person we have become?  What role does religion or a moral code play in controlling our impulses and desires?   And then, if you are a high profile celebrity or  entertainer, someone whose public image does not necessarily reflect your true self and yet who is trapped in your public identity,  what benchmarks do you use to gauge the extent of your success and what means do you employ to measure the strength of your own self -identity?

That could have been a question that Madonna Ciccione-Ritchie, the singer and performer known as Madonna might have asked herself this week.  The media star who turned 50 on August 16 is in England on the first leg of her Sticky and Sweet World Tour.   She has endured considerable derision for a video screened at her shows which suggests that John McCain is the equivalent of some of the world’s most brutal dictators.  Played as part of the concert, the video  montage grouped McCain's picture alongside those of Adolf  Hitler and Zimbabwe's dictator, Robert Mugabe.

Madonna, of course, is no stranger to controversy. Raised a strict Catholic in an Italian-American home, for twenty-five years she has expertly cultivated a controversial image, using taboo subjects, outrageous public acts and contrarian opinions to generate attention for herself and her music.

Her 1984 video for “Like a Virgin” created a sensation when she was filmed squirming suggestively in a gondola while mouthing platitudes about her desires for sexual fulfillment.   Her 1989 song "Like A Prayer," made suggestive links between religion and eroticism, causing Pepsi-Cola to cancel a sponsorship deal.  Her 1992 soft porn book "Sex" offered nude pictures of the star that portrayed her as an insouciant ingénue rather than a calculating business woman, which was closer to the truth.    In 2003, her same-sex kiss with Britney Spears at MTV's Video Music Awards was a springboard for intense media speculation about the nature of her sexuality. In 2005, rabbis criticized Madonna over a song, "Isaac," which they claimed used an inappropriate reference to Isaac Luria, a 16th Century Kabbalist from Safed. Madonna also has repeatedly drawn the ire of the Vatican over sexually suggestive acts in public such as simulating group sex and masturbation on stage.

Madonna learned early on that the more she offends, the more it pays.  In designing her strategy, she was reading straight from the playbook of predecessors such as Mick Jagger and David Bowie, sexual provocateurs who also found that there was great financial mileage to be squeezed from mixing the personal with the professional. In the process, Madonna outdistanced them all.  Today, she is a cultural icon, a woman seen as in command of her own destiny, whose opinions and ideas are valued and  who can flit effortlessly between identities whether as a sexual predator or as a best-selling children’s author. She coats her individual expressions of individuality with the patina of spirituality, having become a devotee of the Los Angeles based Kabbalah Center.  For many of her teenage fans and followers in the 1980s and 90s, she became and continues to be  a symbol of personal liberation and the effective debunking of any notion of modesty or self control. 

Madonna’s “success” at age 50 has therefore been to far exceed the boundaries of her own personal strategy for riches and fame. She has successfully assisted in reshaping Western identity.  She has used her persona to deconstruct and debunk key aspects of religious identity -  modesty, humility and temperance -  and treat them as outdated aspects of a repressive culture. She has done this while parading as a religious figure. The conflation of these identities – pious woman and lustful vamp – has given a kind of spiritual stamp to the rampant nihilism that reigns unopposed in the entertainment industry.   The deconstructive urge – to break down sexual taboos, to shuck identity and to challenge authority – must be counted among the most serious challenges to social cohesion in our generation. 

Her example can be contrasted with the life of another cultural icon who turns 50 this week.   Michael Jackson, whose birthday falls on August 29th, is one of the most successful recording artists in history.  His 1980s albums Off the Wall and Thriller alone are still regarded as landmark events in the music industry, setting records for a black recording artist that have never been equaled.   But Jackson’s personal life and now, it seems, professional career has turned into a startling tragedy.   Beginning as an impish partner to his four brothers in the Jackson 5, we watched him morph over 40 years from child star to athletic teenage performer to reclusive media star to a hunted and haunted public figure whose own identity is a confusion of race, appearance and role as a responsible parental figure.

How Jackson lost control of his life and career is a subject for tabloids and gossip columns and does not concern me here.  What is more disconcerting about the Jackson saga is the way in which he too adopted a role in life that was at odds with  the social framework within which he had been raised.  He rejected not only the sexual identity he had vaunted in his songs (dogged as he has been for years by reports of pederasty and child molestation)  but the racial identity that had been so much a part of his persona and contributed so meaningfully to his success.  How, we asked, could a handsome young man damage himself with such excessive plastic surgery as to become almost unrecognizable and continue his own defacement by draining the pigment from his skin?   After continued treatments, Michael Jackson began to resemble more a mannequin than a human being and in the process also drained much of the color from his career and music.  The answer is that Jackson, for all his personal quirks and idiosyncrasies, was as much a victim of the challenge to authority and identity as any of us.  Accepting the belief that  a human being should be able to adopt any persona or identity he or she feels appropriate at any given time, he has become a case study in how terribly wrong a man’s life can go when he shakes free of his  moral and social  moorings and responds to his impulses.  Unlike Madonna, whose outrages were and still are tightly orchestrated media stunts (and who only gives the appearance of responding to her impulses) Jackson is a slave to his basic drives and a sad reminder of the collapse of the moral boundaries that were the part of the world into which he was born.

When we think today about the 1950s, we conjure up images of the beginnings of  suburban America, the Cold War and a quaint patriotism that now seems all too outdated.  Hollywood has produced several movies portraying the prudish 50s as a period of sexual and political repression.  The most famous of these was Pleasantville, a time travel piece featuring Drew Barrymore which skewered small town America in much the same way Sinclair Lewis did it in Babbit, two generations earlier.   In that movie, the sexually precocious 15-year-old character played by Barrymore, arriving form a liberated 1990s, educates a 1950s jock about the values of defying his moral codes and sexual restrictions.   The result is, of course, revelatory for the jock and quite rewarding for the Barrymore character.   The message couldn’t be clearer.  We modern citizens of Western civilization have evolved into liberated individuals who are not going to be controlled or restrained by meaningless religious strictures or arbitrary moral boundaries.

That indeed is the position taken by the two stars, born in the 1950s and who share birthdays within weeks of one another.  One became a controller of image and cultural identity and the other its victim.  But are either aware of what they - and we - have lost on the path to personal liberation and individual fulfillment?  I can’t answer that question for them.  But as their fellow traveler from the distant 1950s, I can state that without the values, ideals and moral codes which were part of mainstream culture in those bygone years, we have somehow lost an identity which once anchored us and  which should have been treasured as one of our most valued assets.  That is the great sadness of our times and one that I mourn for our culture as a whole in this personal landmark week.

The Western Word - An International Weekly Digest   8-29-2008