Gamely, the star embraced her negatives. If the world understood her to be abrasive and somewhat soulless, she would display just those characteristics under the harsh midday sunlight of the opening scenes. Then, steadily she would soften in the kinder moonlight and warm, dark arms of the film's final act.

At least, that was the plan. But Madonna never completed the sale.

On screen, a toned, tensed Madonna seemed past her sell-by date. The 40-something face had hardened into a mask of made-up eyes and down-turned mouth. Worse, Madonna had lost her nerve. Rather than play the rich-bitch role with any sort of insight or nuance, she decided to parody it, as if to make sure we would not confuse the real with the fake.

The problem is when it came to Madonna we never had.

In a sense, Madonna was too transparent to be an actress. She was, instead, a star. Actresses slip in and out of many identities -- we may admire their skill but it is always from a distance, coolly, analytically. Stars play only one character: themselves.

It's a mistake, for instance, to imagine Madonna "reinvents" herself. In fact, she is always Madonna, and being Madonna means being crisp and fresh at all times -- just as, say, being Julia Roberts means being pert and cunning in film after film, though in one movie people call her Erin and in another Tess. Stars, by being constantly the same, have an emotional legitimacy, a visceral reality for us that only gets diluted when they put on an accent and a costume.

As I say, Madonna is transparent. When we see her, we see through her to a pushy, glittery creature that is never quite at ease with the world, that wishes to shock it or, lately (and quite tiresomely though children's books that retell stories taught to her by a kabala teacher), to save it.

Her discomfort in being part of the world, a discomfort that made her nervy and forever on the offense, connected powerfully with gay kids. She was like a great diamond that had this tiny flaw, a flaw that was quite fascinating in its perversity: Madonna, though she was always exciting, was at the same time always totally charmless.

How then to account for a reign at the top longer than any other woman's in Popdom? The two rivals that come quickly to mind are Cher and Tina Turner. Cher can boast of a hit in every decade of her long, uneven career; Tina, that even during that nasty stretch when she faded from the Top 40 and was looking squaring at welfare, she was still the favorite in-taste among rock heavyweights.

Madonna, meanwhile, has never been less than Top 10 in every year of the last 20 years. Phenomenally -- and I can think of no one else of whom this is true -- Madonna has never had to do a comeback show or lean on a greatest-hits medley. She is always touring behind new material with its own new hits.

She has been --until recently -- indestructible and the reason, I think, is her superb musicianship. I didn't say singing. As a singer, Madonna is merely competent. She benefits from a modest talent that is recognizable from song to song; still, you couldn't pick the voice out in a crowd. It is Cher, instead, who is the great rock-belter with the big distinctive sound -- problem is Cher has really corny taste in music. And right there is what makes Madonna so supreme:

Madonna is not so much a voice as an ear. She has terrific taste in music.

The infectious hooks, the talent-search for cutting-edge producers, the mainstreaming of electronica or dj-fads and just as quickly leaving them for dead: Madonna juggles pop vocabularies with the reckless mastery of a Phil Spector. Like Spector, she has a prophetic set of golden ears that picks up on the higher frequencies vibrating just above the culture at any given moment.

Madonna has a willingness to hear any sound as a note of music, a willingness often manifest in her choice of quirky catch-phrases -- "strike a pose", for instance, or the startled "God?" that hilariously punctuates Like a Prayer, or, my favorite, the loony nonsense of "music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel."

But now, alas, the girl has fallen thuddingly into irrelevance. Dethroned by the Britannys and Beyoncés and -- oh it's too terrible to contemplate!

Is there a cure, is there hope? Well, we know that in aspiring actresses sudden seriousness is a grave condition; in pop stars, always fatal. But Madonna is a special case. She is a superstar -- super in that her "real" life at home is as interesting as her pop life on stage (both, of course, are equally fictions.) To get a measure of the sort of crater such a superstar can leave when she crashes in flames to earth, let us remember that the monotonous American Life album still managed to eke out two "hits" -- after a fashion that is, in the marginal boutique category, Dance Music.

Also, that one of her children's books enjoyed first-week sales second only to Harry Potter. Swept Away -- which cost 10 million to make but barely grossed a threadbare 500 thousand when it was yanked from theaters in its third week -- was still sold to HBO, where it plays in high rotation, keeping Madonna, again after a fashion, alive.

Madonna, out of the headlines and out of our dreams? Perhaps. But then, isn't the mark of a true star...the comeback?

John Calendo is a frequent contributor to Nightcharm and our new Pop Critic @ Large. His work has appeared in Playboy, Blueboy and boy oh boy everything in between. 

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc. and John Calendo.