Monday night’s Met Gala theme — “Sunday best,” pegged to the Met’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” exhibition — was practically tailor-made for Madonna. Madge hit the runway in a look that was relatively tame compared to her bombastic history of irreverent outfits, but nonetheless paid homage to the blasphemy that has long been a cornerstone of her art. On a night intimately tied to the Catholic Church, her presence at the event underscored the subversive politics of her often-sacrilegious relationship with Catholic imagery.
Madonna’s love affair with desecration began with her 1989 “Like a Prayer” music video, where she danced provocatively before an altar with a Black saint, who in the video is later imprisoned. The visual cues she used — including Ku Klux Klan imagery, like burning crosses — was meant to critique the ways religious fuels racism and racist extremist groups. Whether this was Madonna’s imagery to utilize in the first place is up for debate. But the backlash that followed ended up costing her a $5 million Pepsi ad and solicited condemnation from the Vatican.
Madonna only continued exploring blasphemous themes, however, staging mock crucifixions of herself at her live performances and even going so far as to try to do one in Rome, at the Vatican’s doorstep. This prompted a Vatican Cardinal to call for her excommunication, saying, “This concert is a blasphemous challenge to the faith and a profanation of the cross.” Over time, she has paired crucifixes with bras and mesh tops. Even as recently as 2015 and 2016, she performed with her dancers in nuns’ habits as she sang “Holy Water,” which features the lyrics, “It’s sacred and immaculate / I can let you in heaven’s door / I promise you it’s not a sin / Find salvation deep within / We can do it here on the floor.”
In a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, Madonna spoke about what drives the visual themes in her music, and their roots in her religious home growing up. “Once you're a Catholic, you're always a Catholic — in terms of your feelings of guilt and remorse and whether you've sinned or not,” she said. “Sometimes I'm wracked with guilt when I needn't be, and that, to me, is left over from my Catholic upbringing. Because in Catholicism you are born a sinner and you are a sinner all of your life. No matter how you try to get away from it, the sin is within you all the time.”
Over the years, Madonna’s religious themes have provided fuel for the culture wars. The Church, of course, has condemned her use of the imagery, while many in the secular public have written her antics off as a ploy for attention. But those conclusions don’t allow for much consideration of the star’s interior — for the possibility that as an artist, her profane impulses might be driven by something deeper. Her mother, she told biographer Lucy O’Brien, was a religious zealot. The Catholic guilt that figured into her upbringing no doubt had an outsized impact on a young Madonna, and as any artist would, she used fashion and performance to exorcise it.
It’s a common double standard encountered by female performers: Their work is often reduced to their bodies, which are then reduced to mere vessels of pleasure, scorn, or often both at once. It’s Catholic, in a way. The religion and its stories often dichotomize women into the virgin and the whore. As Madonna has aged, her status as provocateur-in-chief has waned, as memes about her arms and jokes about her supposed desperation to be young have proliferated.
But ageism and sexism haven’t stopped Madonna from being culturally relevant. She remains an icon in the gay community, as evidenced by the “Night of 1,000 Madonnas” runway theme on seasons 8 and 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (the first runway featured too many kimonos). At the Met Gala on Monday night, she walked the red carpet last, as if the public was primed to expected something big from her.
To be clear, other celebrities at the event embodied subversion and sacrilege much better than Madonna’s relatively straightforward black lace and mesh dress with a Byzantine crown on her head. Lena Waithe showed up in a rainbow cape, complete with a brown stripe symbolizing the inclusion of Black people and people of color in the LGBTQ+ community. Rihanna showed up dressed as the pope, and the look was so strong that she might actually be the pope now. The night belonged to LGBTQ+ and Black women, which is worthy of celebration. But if Madonna looked tame at the Met Gala, it’s because Madonna paved the way for this very imagery to saturate the mainstream. That’s impact.
Nonetheless, there’s a debate to be had over whether Madonna’s subversive performances have accomplished the task of turning the status quo on its head, and certainly not everything she’s done can be condoned. She’s been called out for her use of an anti-Black slur in an Instagram post about her son. She’s appropriated from faiths like Hinduism in her work, in ways she has little context to do so. And while her impact as a queer icon can’t be denied, she has also appropriated from LGBTQ+ people of color, as we saw her do with ballroom culture in her smash hit Vogue.
So, no, Madonna’s attempts at cultural subversion have not always punched in the right direction. But it would be wrong to say that Madonna has never risked anything in her pursuits. Aside from condemnation from the Church she once considered herself a part of, and aside from losing deals with companies, her vocal support for LGBTQ+ people, for example, saw Vladimir Putin threatening her with jail time.
In the end, when it’s done right, that’s what subversion is all about. It’s about making powerful people and institutions uncomfortable by embracing the taboo, by wreaking moral havoc on social mores. It tells them that they can’t control you. That, if anything, seems like an important message for our present day — one that’s reverberated all the way from 1989 to the age of Trump like a clarion call, or perhaps like a Church bell’s ring.
John Paul Brammer is a New York-based writer and advice columnist from Oklahoma whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, NBC, BuzzFeed and more. He is currently in the process of writing his first novel.
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