Wizened provocateur and all-round song legend Madonna is set to direct a film about her own life and career, co-writing the movie with Diablo Cody. After 30 years of floor fillers and ballads and Catholic controversy she wants to “convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer—a human being, trying to make her way in this world.”
As tired as it sounds, Madonna is truly the queen of reinvention, a chameleon, who established a nationwide, no global, template for unapologetic multifaceted femininity in all its possible guises—virgin, dominatrix, material girl, Kabbalah-goddess. She resisted being pigeonholed as a type, always ready to defy our expectations. I assume the forthcoming film will cover her early life, those heady days in New York, a city that, like Madonna, cycles through new iterations like it’s swiping Tinder on a Friday night. There’s Frank Sinatra’s New York, all rat pack suits and discarded vagabond shoes. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s New York, with malformed rats and pizza. There’s Truman Capote’s New York. Patrick Bateman’s. Carrie Bradshaw’s. New York never settles.
Madonna’s New York is gritty, accessed by rickety fire escape rather than Uber, where clubs never close and you could vogue into the wee hours. You might wake up next to Tupac, or Basquiat, or even Sean Penn. La Isla Bonita (Manhattan) was dirty and dangerous in the 1980s, lacking safety and ease, a city thriving on great non-expectations and the daily jeopardy of unoptimized living. You can think of this as a better or worse time, depending on your capacity for danger and how long you’ll legitimately wait for a subway home before completely losing your shit. In return for a lot of downtime, you get singularity. Local stores that are single links in their own chains. Huddles of people dressed in a way you’ve never seen online. You get trash. You get vaudeville. You get rumors about the rat meat in your hotdog. Crime is up, and gang warfare, but let’s pretend that’s romantic like a Stephen Sondheim musical. You also get the serendipity of tetherless roaming without a phone or map. Life takes more effort, sure, but maybe that’s more rewardable? Maybe getting lost is the point?
A New Yorker isn’t so much a person, as a mood. An understated but extroverted coolness. A way of drawing you in while warning you to fuck off. A visceral untouchability. Despite modern folklore, New Yorkers aren’t all conceived by moonlight under the Brooklyn Bridge (the queen of pop emigrated from Michigan), but they’re united on one thing: New York is brilliant. They will defend it to the death, or until such point as they move upstate or to LA, as if that was always the plan.