Truth or Dare
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

    Madonna's "Truth or Dare" has hit the video store shelves.  If
you missed it in its theatrical run, you'll want to see it in video
because that's better than not seeing it at all, but it's a shame
because I think its power as a film--especially the power of the
musical numbers--is greatly diminished on the small screen.

    Let me say at the outset that I have never been much of a
Madonna fan; it's not that I have disliked her, but more that I'm
not in the right generation and I just haven't seen very much of
her until recently when she started turning up in some good films
such as "Dick Tracy" in which I liked her a performance a lot.  But
I probably wouldn't have gone to see "Truth or Dare" on my own
initiative if people from The Women's Show hadn't kept asking me
what I thought about it.  Finally just as it was fading out in the
local theaters I decided to go see what I thought about it, and was
glad I did.  I loved it.  It's one of the most entertaining and
engrossing films I've seen all year.  I see it as a kind of '90s
version of that venerable Broadway/Hollywood genre the backstage
showbiz saga right up there with "42nd St." and "Kiss Me Kate."

      But this is a documentary, you say, not some fictional tale
of backstage intrigue.  That's what they'd like you to believe.
But the more I study documentary fimmaking, the more I'm convinced
that as a medium it's as illusionistic as any Hollywood studio-made
fantasy ever was. In fact, it's even more illusionistic because
central to this style of filmmaking is the effort to convince the
audience that what they are seeing is the unmediated, unvarnished,
real-life truth; that the camera is just there as a window through
which we can see what's really happening.  And in "Truth or Dare"
the filmmakers (principally director Alek Keshishian and executive
producer Madonna, I suspect) go to incredible lengths to create the
illusion that what you're seeing is "the real Madonna,"  capturing
her live performance in the Blonde Ambition tour in vibrant color
and the backstage "real" life sequences in grainy black and white
(which due to years of conditioning and practice of seeing films
translates directly into our psyches as the vehicle of truth).

   If you stop and think about it, though, you'll realize that
there is yet another level of reality that we don't see in the
film--the level where the filmmakers go about their work and set up
the scenes that are being filmed as "spontaneous" and "unmediatedly
real."  So what we're seeing is not "reality" but staged versions
of reality packaged in ways guaranteed to make it seem like the
real thing.  I'm not arguing that it's all planned and acted or
that none of what is shown would actually have happened without the
filmmakers' presence.  But I am suggesting that most of the footage
used is of people who are "on"--who are "on display"-- and who are
aware of that fact at all times.  And this means they are not the
same as they would have been if they were unaware that they were
being filmed.  These sequences are not about Madonna they're about
what film theorists call "specularity"--standing up in public and
saying "look at me."  That's what our patriarchal society wants the
women it constructs along the lines of the "whore" stereotype to
do; here we get a Madonna (instead of a whore!) giving it back to
them "in their faces."  So forget about thinking that this is a
film that gives us the inside dish on what Madonna is really like
as a person.  This is Madonna on display as she wants to present
herself to us, and in the process adding to the myriad gallery of
wildly juxtaposed images she has created; blonde and ambition don't
usually go together in the male mindset, do they?  Madonna says
they do.

   Where the film does ring true for me is in the portrayal of the
life of a theatrical troupe on the road.  The exhausting work, the
kidding around, the feeling of almost familial closeness that
builds among people thrown together in an intense emotionally and
erotically charged atmosphere separated from the straight 9-5
world--this is the atmosphere I remember from my acting days, and
never have I seen it captured so well on film as here.

    One of the indications of the skill of the filmmakers is that
after seeing this film I thought that the musical numbers in The
Blonde Ambition tour must truly powerful and exciting music drama.
So I was really eager to watch the full performance when it was
broadcast over cable TV, but I found the complete performance to be
banal and boring.  Then I knew it was Hank Kashkishian's skill as
a filmmaker that transformed them into riveting drama.  And it's
his skill as a filmmaker that makes this one you'll want to see--
even if only on the tube.

    For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
Women and Film.