Vagina lasers, bananas and an awkward Cumberbatch: 10 surprising moments in Madonna’s new video
Sabrina Carpenter, a car crash, a urinal, Kate Moss and, of course, those perplexing green lasers: Confessions II has it all. Let’s make some sense of it …
Madonna’s new video is called Confessions II because it’s the follow-up to her album Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005. Nope, wrong: that was not more than 20 years ago. That was last week. Years are for little people. Madonna can hold back the passage of time with the power of her imagination, and that has always been true. But what, exactly, in a 10-minute video that brought the house down at the Tribeca festival and has since been watched more than a million times on YouTube, is Madonna trying to say? It feels a bit rude to ask, like asking Jackson Pollock what all the squiggly lines mean. So think of it as a homage to the woman who invented rudeness.
The chair
It’s otherwise a classic dominatrix frame: satin corset, pointy stilettos, praying-mantis body language, hair. The chair, however, is a complicating factor; she isn’t bestride it in a coquettish, Christine Keeler way, nor upright like a woman in control. The pose is, rather, “Ask me anything” – invulnerable openness. “But don’t ask me anything boring. I’m still wearing a corset.”
The lasers
The Confessions II film is already going by the shorthand “the vagina laser video”, in much the same way as the Vogue video came by “pointy tits” (after the Jean Paul Gaultier bra, itself modelled on the 40s bullet bra, whose complicated stitching was intended to lead, inexorably, to the nipple, and yet which – by the time Madonna had immortalised it – didn’t remind you of nipples in any way. You could have hidden nine nipples in one and you’d still be thinking more of military hardware).
These green lights shooting out of everyone’s vulvas and sometimes butts are there to signify life force and unstoppable orgone energy. Power is in desire, not in being desired though, unavoidably, the first carries the second as a side-effect.
The airbag
Due to some complicated edits between a car interior and a table, it’s never completely clear whether Madonna is the driver, the passenger or is on top of the car, menacing its inhabitants, but one way or another, this leads the car to crash, whereupon somebody – indicated by a beautiful, slightly 80s, red lipstick bow – snogs the airbag. Doesn’t really matter who. It’s reminiscent of Daniel Bergner’s book about the omnivorous female libido, What Do Women Want? So you could read the book, or you could take the short answer. She wants everything. She’ll crash your car and get off with your airbag. To be real, it’s probably her own car.
Sabrina Carpenter
The absolute poppet of bubblegum modernity, Carpenter appears giving off very much her own vibe. She isn’t a mini-me or a 2.0: that would be trashy. Nevertheless, the choreography and camera angles create a lot of strategic ambiguity. You’re often not sure which one you’re looking at, particularly when Julia Garner gets spliced in, looking very like Madonna in her Marilyn days. It’s emphatically not a statement of batons passing and the ages of womanhood; it’s about the metaphysics of clubbing, the strobe-lit disorientation, the bliss. “Who exactly am I looking at? Never mind. I’m completely here.”
Kate Moss
Doing her lipstick, looking definitively like herself, the supermodel’s arrival coincides with the line “Hide the cocaine”, although it’s unclear whether she is hiding it or an unseen narrator is hiding it from her. That’s because it doesn’t matter and it’s none of your business.
Odessa A’Zion
Odessa sports a darker, more layered, more grumpy look: she looks like the kind of gen Z who would call a millennial a “pick me”, and then the millennial would have to go and look up what that meant, and finally reply, “Well, yes, I want everyone to pick me; what of it?” It’s a continuation of the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom theme. There is room in this version of humankind for everyone to be a bit different.
The toilets
A line of men innocently try to use a urinal trough while a bunch of women come and bug the hell out of them with lewd gesture and importunate physicality, then some men are snogging in the cubicles, while elsewhere women are also snogging, and admiring themselves, and admiring each other, and sometimes just walking about, and Debi Mazar is there looking more snatched than ever, and sometimes you can’t tell who’s female and who’s not, and nowhere on this public lavatory is there any indication of whether or not it’s unisex, and it would be beyond tedious to walk through the politics of this, except to say: don’t you wish your toilet was hot like mine?
Gwendoline Christie
You wouldn’t expect to casually run into Christie in a Madonna video; the actor looks cleaner and a lot more Glyndebourne than everyone else, she’s vaudeville-shocked by the cubicle antics, yet it plays out as a subversion of the classic rivalrous messaging, where you put a prim woman into a debauched scene in order to lampoon her. Nobody is mocking Brienne of Tarth; she is fully part of the living, breathing organism. It has a very communitarian atmosphere, this film.
Benedict Cumberbatch
It’s really hard to say whether he looks awkward because he got dressed thinking he was going to show a couple round an overpriced two-bedroomed flat, only to discover that Madonna was going to grab him by the jaw in her long blue gloves and force him to dance; or whether he looks awkward because that’s the cue. And that, friends, is what they call acting.
The camerawomen, gimp masks, nepo babies and bananas
We close with the camerapeople finishing up – futuristic masks, ring lights, G-strings, more stilettos, poses held – it looks a little bit robot dystopia, a little bit OnlyFans, a lot of gear changes. The champagne drinking is quite pornified but the cigarettes just look like regular, fun smoking. One cameraperson is maskless and it is Lourdes, because of course Madonna’s daughter has to be in it. Don’t be stupid. Everyone else is in it. She uses her boredom as a weapon, ending the film with a magisterial: “Cut, bitch.”
Just before the end, they all start eating bananas, which sounds like it would be suggestive, but I think is actually the universal language of parenting, that when your daughter is in a really bad mood, you give her a banana.