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Circe Ciccone's alluring attitude is not just a simple sexual defiance but a symphony of rebellions laced with a deep sense of responsibility: now she is undraped in Penthouse, now she is doing a benefit for AIDS research, now she is doing a Pepsi commercial, now she is the dutiful wife, now she is the brazen divorcee. Serious feminist scholars defend her intelligent womanliness. Bluenoses sniff at her every bump and grind. The Vatican has denounced her. Academics spin doctoral dissertations based on her canon. The Queer Nation beatifies her. Wannabes still, well, wanna be.
Now 32, the Michigan-born Madonna has three world tours, 20-plus music videos, seven feature films and eight albums under her Boy Toy belt. She has single-handedly created a boom in music-video sales. That the image refracted in the media-crazed mirror never settles is hypnotizing. Her throwaway line "Experience has made me rich/ And now they're after me," from her tune Material Girl, seems more a wily prophecy than mere egoistic cant. Her latest public catharsis -- a quantum artistic growth spurt, if you will -- is Truth or Dare. It is a panoramic, emetic, beauty-marks-and-all, feature-length autobiographical documentary shot during her Blond Ambition tour. The film, which opens nationally on May 17, is a celebrity voyeur's feast that draws its substance from the dark well of Madonna's life. It is her bid for serious consideration as a multimedia artiste who is more attuned to the aesthetic ideas of Martha Graham (whom she plans to play in a forthcoming film) and Isadora Duncan than to her contemporary pop-star peers. To recast a line of her favorite playwright, David Mamet: "She's eating at the Big Table now." Quoth Circe:
"I present my view on life in my work. The provocation slaps you in the face and makes you take notice, and the ambiguity thing makes you say, Well, is it that or is it that? You are forced to have a discourse about it in your mind."
/ Madonna has many of the classic characteristics of both the responsible, rule-oriented eldest daughter and the mediator-rebel middle child. She has the looks and name of her late mother, who died of cancer when Madonna was only five. She has now learned the craft of spinning autocinematic tapestries out of the yarn of her private anguish. Her mother's death left her to cope with a father, two older brothers and a stepmother ruling over her, and ample chores helping to raise her five younger siblings. She grew up with considerable maternal responsibility but little actual power. So she rebelled and eventually hearkened to a destiny. Or so she says.
"Sometimes growing up I felt like the unhired help. I was the oldest girl and always got stuck with the main housekeeping chores. I changed so many diapers that I swore I'd never have kids. I felt like I didn't really have a childhood. I was forced to grow up fast. Everybody should have a few years where they are not feeling too responsible, guilty or upset. I really saw myself as a Cinderella with a wicked stepmother.
"My family life at home was very repressive, very Catholic, and I was very unhappy. I was considered the sissy of the family because I relied on feminine wiles to get my way. I wasn't quiet at all. I remember always being told to shut up. I got tape put over my mouth. I got my mouth washed out with soap. Mouthing off comes naturally.