Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 30

26

_ThePo£ular_CuIlt^

Madonna and the male lover frequently looking on), cross-sexual, and
despite the breathy and seductive lyrics ("you put this in me"), non
explicit. The sequence that brings an end to the video and generates
Madonna's extended silent laugh presents two mirrored, feminine
figures touching up their drawn-on mustaches. The giggle Madonna
mimes begins as she looks upon their degendered faces. A cut shows
her returning down the narrow hall, a la trenchcoat and suitcase, no
longer weary, but laughing at the wonderful mix of transgressed
taboos she has been privy to as dreamer, viewer, and participant.
Conspicuously absent throughout the black and white video are
boundaries, distinct representative organs, or the clear delineation of
past/present, female/male, and reality/fantasy. Visually there are
surprising alterations in the field and ground, such as when the
mustached figures break apart to reveal the laughing Madonna just
behind them. The song's refrain to "Justify my love" ends with an
overlap of the audio material in visual representation: "Poor is the
man/ whose pleasures depend/ on the permission of another"
("Justify My Love").
In discussing the implications of the oedipal myth to the
structure of narrative, de Lauretis claims that the nature of Oedipus'
crime in the Greek myth is that "in committing regicide, patricide,
and incest, [Oedipus] has become 'the slayer of distinctions,' has
absorbed difference and thus contravened the mythical order" (1984,
119). Jessica Benjamin further suggests that it is the initial formation
of gender polarity, rooted in the repudiation of femininity during the
oedipal phase of psychic development, that underlies all the ntany
polarities endemic to our culture—independence/dependence,
strength/weakness, etc. (172). Given the politics of difference
relegated by the oedipus narrative, and the gender polarizations
essential to that schema, it is not surprising that MTV would find the
"Justify" video too hot to handle. Totally dispensing with such
distinctions is a serious breach of capitalistic protocol, even for MTV.
Benjamin proposes that "the changing social relations of
gender have given us a glim[>se of another world, of a space in which
each sex can play the other and so accept difference by making it
familiar" (169). However, to posit such a configuration is to be a
"traitor to the world of dominant significations" (Deleuze and
Pamet, 41), because breaking up gender^ images tampers with the
entire structure of discourse and culture. Madonna reclaims her female