About 'Body of Evidence'
Madonna's been having a very good year. In July she released Confessions II, her fifteenth studio album, and it became a both a commercial and critical juggernaut. This past Sunday, she dominated the MTV VMAs, winning seven awards and giving a performance that managed to incorporate both a men's bathroom and Seth Rogen in full-body leather.
That's great, but in my personal opinion, it's not nearly as great as what happened to Madonna at the beginning of September. That's when the Criterion Collection made Body of Evidence available to the public as part of its "Starring Madonna" series.
As I have a soft spot for both bad acting and the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and '90s, I regarded this as something of an answered prayer. When Body of Evidence came out in 1993, I was in high school and most definitely not being let out of the house to see a movie with an NC-17 rating. So for decades, it was my white whale, an enigma that could be said to symbolize no less than god.
This is not a review of a 33-year-old movie so much as my attempt to metabolize what I saw but have yet to fully comprehend. It's easy enough to describe the film's premise: Madonna plays Rebecca Carlson, a woman accused of literally fucking a man to death.* She is defended by Frank Dulaney (Willem Dafoe), a lawyer who casts aside his doubts (and wife) just long enough to have a torrid affair with his client.
But how do you really explain a movie that poses important questions like this one:
...much less asks Madonna and Dafoe to simulate oral sex while the former is hanging from the ceiling of a courthouse parking garage?
Body of Evidence was decried as (among other things) a rip-off of Basic Instinct, which had come out the previous year. And that's fair, but wouldn't it also be fair to say that in some existential sense, Basic Instinct is ripping off Madonna herself? Both Basic Instinct and BoE are about a woman on trial for her sex life, which is more or less the story of Madonna's entire career, up to and including her VMA performance, which some scolds deemed too sexual to befit a 68-year-old woman. There is a tendency to romanticize the 1990s—I'm as guilty of this as anybody—but watching BoE reminded me of what a pruriently puritanical time that was, of how "the Madonna-whore complex" described not just an entire school of criticism directed at Madge but also the hoary (sorry) binary that dressed itself up in period-appropriate baby doll dresses and flannel without giving one lousy inch.
In BoE, Frank's wife is the madonna,** and Rebecca is the whore. We know from the beginning that Rebecca will be punished for her sin of targeting rich older men with dodgy tickers, to say nothing of corrupting a family man.*** That she does this all with the flattened affect of plywood is less a testament to the character's ruthlessness than Madonna's disinterested approach to acting. By the time comeuppance finds her, on the glass-enclosed luxury houseboat she calls home, Rebecca has all but promised she's gonna keep right on killing men with her vagina:
So all that's left for the movie to do is kill the bitch and send Frank into the waiting arms of his wife, who has shown up on the houseboat's pier to forgive him. The end.
As I said, I saw all this, but I still haven't made sense of it. To call Body of Evidence batshit crazy is to state the obvious but also concede the failure of language. The best I can say is that, like Ahab's white whale, Body of Evidence remains an unfinished quest for me, insofar as I don't think I will ever completely understand what cannot be understood, whether that be the movie's script or the societal and cultural mechanisms that encouraged a movie like this to exist.
But what I did understand, watching Madonna cavort with Sabrina Carpenter at the VMAs, is that nothing can stop her. Not Body of Evidence, not her detractors, not even her Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress of the 20th century. She is, above all, a survivor. Long after the glaciers have melted and the sun has set on humanity, she will still be here, along with the cockroaches and probably Cher.
But for those of us who survived watching Body of Evidence? The best we can do is testify.
*I still can't read this without laughing.
**She's played by Julianne Moore, who I hope pushed her agent into the La Brea tar pits over this.
***Casting Willem Dafoe as a family man is a little like casting a wolf as a golden retriever.
What I'm consuming this week:
Watching: Slow Horses is back! Slow Horses is back! Slow Horses is back!
Reading: A charming profile of the nonagenarian French actress Liliane Rovère, who stars in Call My Agent!
Also reading: Private equity ruins everything, especially cookies.
Listening: David Byrne, "Strange Overtones."
