The Only Girl in the World: On Madonna and “Desperately Seeking Susan”

Brontez Purnell pays tribute to Madonna through a close reading of her performance in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 43, “Fixation.”

By Brontez PurnellDecember 10, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Music

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

THE VERY FIRST gay bar I regularly attended in San Francisco was this little hole-in-the-wall called Aunt Charlie’s. In 2003 (the literal second I turned 21), I began to attend their Thursday night party (a party that went on for 20 years, mind you). It was all post-disco freestyle, Hi-NRG, urban—the span of music was from about 1978 to 1982. To paint a picture, the songs would be shit like Gwen McCrae’s “Keep the Fire Burning,” Carol Hahn’s “Do Your Best,” Erotic Drum Band’s “Touch Me Where It’s Hot”—you get the idea. One day, the resident DJ pulled out the 1983 single of Madonna’s “Everybody,” with the iconic collage cover done by Lou Beach.  At the time I was in an electroclash band—electroclash being an era of 2000s music that imitated the ’80s. I danced to this Madonna song that I had heard all through my childhood. Now I was an adult, drinking in bars, wondering how a song from 30 years ago felt more like “the future” than anything my friends and I were currently doing. This here is the magic of Madonna. All classics defy time. Every time “Everybody” is played, I come alive on the dance floor.

I will be very clear about how I feel about Madonna at the top of this so we get it from the jump. “Controversial,” “culture vulturey,” “appropriative” are some of the lower-blow critiques thrown at her these days. I mean, sure, what pop star isn’t? Commercial art by very definition is carnivorous: remember that. That said, what you could certainly never call her is boring, and that alone is worthy of celebrating. Madonna’s Lower East Side of the late ’70s–early ’80s was the peak of stylistic creative fusion. Punk and disco were mingling to wild effect. When “Everybody” was released, some believed Madonna was a Black artist, if for no other reason than at the time the average white girl pop sensation bended toward the arc of Olivia Newton-John. Madonna had that defiant eclectic feel that would soon be the landscape of all pop. These days, for all our identity pageantry, there are few things that we can truly call “groundbreaking.”

What I mean is, it’s easy to try and diss Madonna. I have loved her ever since I was a little boy. I would sit on my great-grandmother’s porch and practice Madonna’s classic over-the-shoulder “come hither” stare. The one she did on the gondola in the canals of Venice in the “Like a Virgin” video. At the ripe age of 41, I still hold a soft spot for her. She raised a generation of faggots, in a world where most people pretended we didn’t exist. Hell yeah, I tip my hat.

Of all of the many-headed hydra of Madonna’s artistic output, the thing that remains the strangest is her film career. Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) was one of those movies that played every night at two a.m. on the late-night movie station throughout the ’80s (Fox 54 for me in Huntsville, Alabama). It also played nearly weekly on any given channel. It was so elemental to my childhood that I just remember always having a bowl of cereal in front of me and watching it.

Recently, it occurred to me that I only remember certain iconic scenes but couldn’t tell you what the actual movie was about. I finally watched it again, after not seeing it for over some 25 years. Holy shit, that movie is a goddamn mess. Let me just get some of the plot out of the way: Madonna plays Susan in her signature Lower East Side art girl garb, Richard Hell dies in the first 10 minutes, there’s a subplot involving a pair of stolen ancient Egyptian earrings (??????), and it seems like one of those movies where the script was still being written as they shot it. Susan’s stalker (this Republican housewife from Jersey, mind you) gets amnesia and then somehow flawlessly assumes Susan’s identity. It’s a movie from a time when there was a clear line between the normies and the counterculturalists. These days, in a world where you can buy Nirvana shirts at any Target, the lines are so blurred that it would be impossible to remake.

The true beauty of the movie is the part halfway through where Madonna is in a Lower East Side post-punk dance club standing by a jukebox dancing to her own song. The movie was clearly only meant to be a vehicle for her hit “Into the Groove” (my favorite of her songs, by the way). The absolute vibe—that this movie was built around this one scene. It’s the only part of the movie that has deep catharsis or makes any real sense. Madonna was the multi-hyphenate of the ’80s—and around her there was always this swirling chaos, punctuated by moments that could be described as nothing less than magical. This scene alone is triumphant, and it sums up Madonna perfectly.

Rewatching it, I was reminded of all the underground warehouse parties I’ve been to, how maybe I wanted to be Susan too. I remember being in my twenties surrounded by freaks and dancing. Sometimes my own band’s song would play in the club and it just felt so singular—like I was the only girl in the world. I can only imagine Madonna feeling this feeling but on a whole other godlike level.

I’m always dismayed at whatever 20-year-old is dissing Madonna, when their investigation of culture comes from half-hearted internet research. Certain artists defy any modern critique. Madge was a Midwestern girl who came to New York in the 1970s, took classes at Martha Graham, played in punk bands (like who was that hot Black dude who was the drummer for her band the Breakfast Club?!). Keith Haring was her gay best friend and she was fucking Basquiat. There’s no real way to understand the urban fairy tale/fever dream this woman inhabited unless you were there. The contemporary critiques that Madonna was “always chasing the culture”? Like no, sweetie, you chase the culture on TikTok. Mother was from that hyperspecific portal of time where she simply had to walk down the street to the culture. Do you understand what I’m getting at? Take, for instance, her most critiqued hit, “Vogue”—a white girl from the Midwest, landing on the underground scene of Ballroom culture. Even I’m obsessed with how problematic that is; it’s truly unparalleled. But these days, hell, who isn’t voguing? Dear God, you even see them voguing in Hallmark movies these days.

In all honesty, the thing that I think I have always admired most about Madonna is her work ethic. This conveyor belt of constant work and conviction—maybe not always perfect, but goddamn, so unstoppable. In a canon, Desperately Seeking Susan is up there with the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) or the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music (1980). It showcased and capitalized on Madonna’s image and her fame, but it also reimagined what an It girl could be. Sultry but aloof, all-American but worldly, downtrodden but deeply glamorous. She touched every point on the grid. You couldn’t ignore her. Desperately Seeking Susan was basically new wave Breakfast at Tiffany’s (if you threw in a murder mystery, diamond heist B-plot). It is a total trainwreck, and yet there she is in the middle, dancing to her own song, the light that makes it all worth watching. We sit a little too comfortably in this “kill our idols” era of the internet, safely tucked away behind our phones. But for all the hoopla spent tearing Madonna down, I have to say: You can’t murder that which is immortal.