"There's nothing to say off camera," goes Warren Beatty's famous roast of Madonna in the 1991 documentary Truth or Dare. "Why would you say something if it's off camera? What point is there existing?"
He's mocking Madonna, his then-girlfriend, and the "insane" atmosphere her film crew added backstage during her 1990 Blonde Ambition Tour. The apparent generational divide in the exchange between the Hollywood legend and the savvy media manipulator has only amplified in the time since the movie's release. What once seemed like a fair point seems terribly quaint in these heavily documented times: who among us doesn'twant to live off camera? Or, at the very least, who would be surprised to find out that someone you know doesn't?
Madonna has rarely had her finger directly on the pulse—it took her years to dabble in electronica and new jack swing and French house—but over 20 years after its release,Truth or Dare is relevant as ever. (It's out on Blu-ray for the first time today.) It's as close to a memoir as Madonna has ever gotten, and it's brilliantly fitting that the music video master stuck with the trusted audio-visual format that catapulted her to success. Why write when you can be? Madonna's life banged the dust out of vérité entertainment, suggesting the documentary didn't have to be stuffy, that it could be wildly entertaining and overwhelmingly trashy. Echoes of it are apparent in reality TV today, particularly that which focuses on stars (if Truth or Dare was the slightly sinister but mostly good-humored Mondo Cane of celebrity portraits, Being Bobby Brown was Faces of Death).
The film reflected our intensifying fascination with all facets of celebrity life. We see Madonna repeatedly flanked with cameras, we see throngs waiting for her outside of Chanel, we hear rabid fans on the ground from her hotel room. Madonna told Good Morning America that with Truth or Dare, she aimed "to explode the myth that we raise up on a pedestal people we turn into icons. We make them inhuman and we don't give them human attributes so they're not allowed to fail, they're not allowed to make mistakes." Not every star today cosigns on this level of invasion, but those who do (Dina Lohan, Paris Hilton) often talk about reclaiming their public image from the public, echoing Madonna.
A collection of human attributes and mistakes, Truth or Dare predicted the real-women-being-real-bad subgenre of reality TV. Throughout the movie, Madonna acts like a monster. She laughs when she finds out her makeup artist was raped and then explains, "All I can think of is that she started talking about how she's on tour with me, she's staying at the Ritz Carlton and those guys got it in their mind they were going to fuck with her." She tells those who appear with her onstage how much she loves them to their faces and then talks behind their backs about how her backup singers annoy her and hanging out with her dancers gets boring. She mocks Kevin Costner (who to be fair is sporting stringy hair, shoulder pads and a mock turtleneck) for calling her show, "Neat," as soon as his back his turned. She throws unexplained shade at Belinda Carlisle, Janet Jackson and, most confusingly, Oprah (Chicago's conservatism is a reason "to not wanna live in Chicago — beside for the fact that Oprah Winfrey lives here"). She laments Antonio Banderas' marriage in front of his wife. She throws tantrums and is oblivious to the manipulation of her manager, who calms her down with flattery.
Ahhh...memories. If you were young/old enough to remember this epic moment in tv history, please share. This was so exciting at the time to watch. I was 13 years old and I could not wait to see this spectacle. I will never forget watching the it with my brother and the 'Like a Virgin' bed scene came on. YIKES - we thought we would be in BIG trouble because it was so sexual and we knew our parents were watching it on the tv upstairs.
I live in Canada and at the time we did not have HBO and get a chance to watch this performance from Nice, France. Instead we got to watch her performance from Barcelona, Spain a month later. She had really frizzy hair, lol. The August 1 show in Barcelona, Spain was taped and aired on television in Europe, Australia and Canada by SACIS-RAI. This show is known by fans for numerous technical mistakes (including Madonna forgetting part of the lyrics to "Sooner or Later" and "Material Girl," getting her monocle caught on her headset microphone at the beginning of "Express Yourself", and not realizing that her headset microphone was still live as she exited the stage after "Where's the Party," resulting in her command at a backstage crew member to "get the fuck out of my fuckin' way"). LOL