She’s lying back with her arms behind her head, smiling because she knows everything. She’s wearing a spangly jacket and glowing, a bit. Renaissance painters used to mix crushed quartz into their paints to achieve such an effect, but for Madonna, I think it’s natural. At 13, I have a magic trick of imagining myself into photos. I’m in the moment before, or the moment after. I am just out of frame, receiving Madonna’s wisdom on love affairs and how to achieve “smokey” eyes.
Like a Virgin had landed. That video, the canals in Venice, the lion, the bed-hair, the belly button. When Molly Meldrum interviewed her on Countdown I watched, transfixed. “Who is Madonna?” he asked, quite seriously. She laughed. “Madonna is me.” Molly confessed that he’d overlooked her first single, but now that he had some context he could see she was going to be huge. Madonna did not dispute this. “Maybe you just needed more of a picture,” she said, as if trying to make him feel better.
Early Madonna style appeared to be achievable. Soon I was decked out in bracelets (black elastic from Mum’s sewing cabinet), crucifixes (Mum’s, Nana’s), a floppy black bow (pantyhose, Mum, again – sorry!), a lace curtain (op shop) worn as a poncho over a mesh vest (Dad – why?). My plundering created the desired effect, but only if I stood back from the mirror and squinted. Still, it was something to come home from school, whisk off my hated uniform and change into my secret, glamorous identity. It was a private, tremulous glamour. If anyone else were to see it, it would disappear instantly.
I read about Susan Seidelman’s Madonna-starring Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) long before it arrived in Australia. “A Life so Outrageous it Takes Two Women To Live it”, the tagline read. I was waitingwaitingwaiting. Movies took forever to cross the ocean, and when I finally saw it, three months after its US release, I loved it even more than I imagined possible and immediately went to see it again.
Madonna as Susan is a glittering vagabond and object of obsession for New Jersey housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette). Roberta’s been following Susan and Jim’s correspondence in the personal ads – “Desperately seeking Susan. Meet me, four o’clock, Battery Park. Keep the faith. Love, Jim” – and one day, she leaves the suburbs to stake out their rendezvous. Roberta tails Susan around Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When Susan trades her used-to-belong-to-Jimi-Hendrix pyramid-eye jacket for some bedazzled pixie boots, Roberta buys the jacket and wears it home. (“You’re buying secondhand clothes now? What are we, poor?” cries her yuppie husband.) Thus begins her emancipation.
At their next would-be meet-up, Roberta knocks her head, suffers amnesia and is mistaken for Susan, who we learn is being chased by a gangster. (She stole some earrings from him that turned out to be ancient Egyptian artefacts.) The rest of the film has Susan seeking Roberta seeking herself, with the gangster in hot pursuit, and hapless love interests futzing on the sidelines.
In her recent memoir Desperately Seeking Something, Seidelman writes about her journey from a Twiggy-obsessed teenager in the suburbs of Philadelphia to indie filmmaker in the 1980s New York punk/No wave scene, alongside people like Jim Jarmusch and Kathryn Bigelow. Seidelman’s low-budget debut film Smithereens (1982), which has a similar girl-versus-city set-up, brought her momentum, and Leora Barish’s script for Desperately Seeking Susan. “It spoke to two sides of myself,” Seidelman writes. “The suburban girl I was and the woman I could have become, and the person I moved to New York City to be. I’m not Madonna, but I was someone making her own unique way through life in New York.”
Rosanna Arquette and Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan.
Seidelman knew Madonna from the club scene and pitched for her over other, more established actors because she looked more authentically downtown. By the time the film was released Madonna’s star had exploded.
The production company, recognising her teen-girl appeal, quickly churned out Desperately Seeking Susan merch: figurines, lace gloves, even a copy of the pyramid-eye jacket. Some of those original copies must still be floating around, or for $400-plus you can buy an upcycled imitation on Etsy. I can’t say I’m not tempted.
Loading
Even in my dreamiest dreams I knew I couldn’t be Susan, but it was enough to think I might be like her. I might inhabit a world of street art and sidewalks and strangers and ambience. Melbourne was not Manhattan – not even close – but I began to consider its possibilities. You could come from nowhere, arrive fully formed, like Athena popping out from the head of Zeus. You didn’t need money to survive, you just needed self-belief, attitude and a pirate’s wily heart.
In Jungian terms, Susan fits the female trickster archetype: lawless, playful, an agent of change. She typified film critic Carrie Rickey’s “eighties new-girl heroine”. The new girl was like the younger sister of the ’70s feminists, “more radically tak[ing] feminist values as their assumption”. New girls understood that there had been a shift in the social strata, but that no one quite knew what that meant yet. Maybe their older sisters got shafted, but that wasn’t going to happen to them.
New girls were ambitious, not necessarily for money or status, but for something. Rickey cited Jackie Mullens (Jo Kennedy) in Gillian Anderson’s Starstruck (1982) and Wren (Susan Berman), from Smithereens, as examples.
Jo Kennedy as Jackie Mullens in Starstruck.
Loading
Seidelman saw Susan as a more successful Wren. They share similar traits, but the key difference is that where Wren is constantly rebuffed, Susan holds power in nearly every scene. Wren’s vagabond ways ultimately skew tragic: she walks the streets in her pink marabou jacket and sleeps in some hick’s van, even sleeps with the hick (to stay warm), while Susan bounces from a fancy hotel, to her friend’s pad to Roberta’s house, where she swims in her pool and wears her clothes. Every step takes her to the next place, and the next place is always better.
Desperately Seeking Susan stands out about amid a flurry of ’80s films with kooky, quasi-criminal femmes: Michelle Pfeiffer in Into the Night, Melanie Griffith in Something Wild, Rosanna Arquette in After Hours. I can trace a line from Anita Loos’ Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (“She’s a phony, but she’s a real phony, you know?”) to Susan and beyond.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag.
The noughties were awash with manic pixie dream girls but their lack of agency strips them of any Susan-ness. I see hints of Susan in Fleabag and Villanelle – it helps that they are round characters, that they are unconventional and tricksy by nature. Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West (2017) is Susan-esque in its themes of grift and doppelgangers, but it goes dark.
Aubrey Plaza plays Ingrid, a young woman fresh out of a mental institution who moves to Los Angeles to start a new life. She stalks influencer Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen), tracks her via Instagram and attempts to co-opt her life. It’s a sharp take on the hall of mirrors that is social media, the human tendency to dream of another, better life, the pleasure and danger of fantasy.
Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid Goes West.
I think of my own desperate seeking, 40 years ago. I think of Madonna/Susan as a girl-bomb detonating my staid suburban existence. It wasn’t easy trying to fashion a self from all the mixed messages the media was sending out in those pre-internet, know-little days. And wasn’t I just like Roberta, filling up on someone else, trying to find a path? Maybe the mesh vest looked stupid and the lace tablecloth smelled of mothballs, and certainly my sisters were laughing at me, but it was a start.
Desperately Seeking Susan streams on Apple TV+.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
