Plastic Fantasic [john calendo] Madonna

Face it, we loved Madonna when she was blonde, crass and rolling around in a wedding dress. Now she's gotten so veddy tweedy, meeting with the queen, living in a castle, writing uplifting books for the kiddies. Any wonder why John Caliendo has pronounced her
irrelevant in his latest pop column? Read it and weep...

We have now reached a year when Madonna is finally irrelevant. We need not rehearse her annus terribilis in full except to mention its two low points: The release of the worst-selling album of her career, and a husband-and-wife vanity film that flopped to the evil glee of nearly everyone.

Actually, the high points were just as embarrassing. Madonna made her biggest impact on pop culture last year by writing children's books. Children's books. Her one moment in the sun came when she recycled one of her oldest gimmicks at the MTV Video Awards: The tonguing of Brittany and Christina, though it made every paper in the world on a slow news day in August, though it was ogled over in every clueless Highlights of 2003 List at year's end, was, nevertheless, ho-hum Madonna. She'd done it all before and so exhaustively that such girl-on-girl kisses no longer carried any transgressive spark or ironic kick. It looked, sadly, like a formal passing of the torch, the wily, old sex mechanic giving her benediction to younger, duller apprentices on the occasion of a retirement.

The problem was all too clear on a recent Letterman Show. What was once a battle of headline-grabbing zingers between the singer and the sardonic comic was now a stately walk through a garden of middle-brow conventions. The dry face of a schoolmarm looked out at us, her arms crossed impatiently, as Madonna wondered when Dave was going to marry his live-in girlfriend. The couple, she observed solemnly, had just brought into the world that holy thing, a ba-by.

Madonna has lately picked up the mantra of the Republican Family Values crowd, and now everything in the world must be dumbed down so as not to startle a 4-year-old. For this reason, she tells Dave, she will not let her own children watch TV. "So they didn't see you on the MTV Awards" he marvels as the audience titters lasciviously. No, they did not. Little Lourdes, who was backstage, was whisked away into a limo during the event, while tiny Rocco was safe asleep back at the hotel. When the children are especially good, she allows, they get to watch a pre-screened, child-proofed DVD, but no more than one a week. Similarly, no newspapers or magazines ever darken the doorstep of the misty Scottish castle that Madonna calls home. "The gossip, Dave."

Can this be the same woman -- the once gloriously profane baby Marilyn -- that the world first tripped over in 1984 when she was spazzing around on the floor in a bridal gown? Can this be the author of Sex, the singer of "Papa, don't preach, I'm keeping my baby?" The girl that told us that, just like a prayer, she was down on her knees, and that she would take us there?

And that in a nutshell is why Madonna is irrelevant. She now suffers from an aging, arthritic condition known as sudden seriousness. That the title song of her album, American Life, is a plodding anthem of repudiation, in which the blond ambitions of Material Girl are denounced and regretted, is by this point widely known. What is not widely known is how much of the past Madonna was renouncing in her more telling failure of last year, Swept Away.

Madonna knew, for a while now, that she had aged out of her bouncy pop-icon image; progressing to movie star was a persistent Plan B. But it was more like Plan B from Outer Space because sustaining a likeable character on screen always defeated the singer. She might be thrilling in fast, flashy videos, but a little Madonna went a long, long way.

One imagines the strategy session at Castle Madonna when she dreamed up Swept Away. Here was the plot: A nasty boss lady and her cabin boy get washed up on an island, where the power dynamic switches: the woman must cater to the whims of the man, on whom her survival depends -- in effect, a tropic Taming of the Shrew.

Certainly the story was pointed enough -- a cold material girl would be warmed up by, what else, a real man. Perhaps this is what had happened in Madonna's own life when she married a studly trophy husband, the edgy, balls-to-the-wall director Guy Ritchie. He would direct the film, and so both on camera and off, the Madonna persona would be re-translated through the eyes of love.