<\/p>\n
M<\/span>adonna\u2019s new video is called Confessions II because it\u2019s the follow-up to her album Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005. Nope, wrong: that was not more than 20 years ago. That was last week. Years are for little people. Madonna<\/a> can hold back the passage of time with the power of her imagination, and that has always been true. But what, exactly, in a 10-minute video that brought the house down at the Tribeca festival and has since been watched more than a million times on YouTube, is Madonna trying to say? It feels a bit rude to ask, like asking Jackson Pollock what all the squiggly lines mean. So think of it as a homage to the woman who invented rudeness.<\/p>\n It\u2019s otherwise a classic dominatrix frame: satin corset, pointy stilettos, praying-mantis body language, hair. The chair, however, is a complicating factor; she isn\u2019t bestride it in a coquettish, Christine Keeler way, nor upright like a woman in control. The pose is, rather, \u201cAsk me anything\u201d \u2013 invulnerable openness. \u201cBut don\u2019t ask me anything boring. I\u2019m still wearing a corset.\u201d<\/p>\n The Confessions II film is already going by the shorthand \u201cthe vagina laser video\u201d, in much the same way as the Vogue video<\/a> came by \u201cpointy tits\u201d (after the Jean Paul Gaultier bra, itself modelled on the 40s bullet bra, whose complicated stitching was intended to lead, inexorably, to the nipple, and yet which \u2013 by the time Madonna had immortalised it \u2013 didn\u2019t remind you of nipples in any way. You could have hidden nine nipples in one and you\u2019d still be thinking more of military hardware).<\/p>\n These green lights shooting out of everyone\u2019s vulvas and sometimes butts are there to signify life force and unstoppable orgone energy. Power is in desire, not in being desired though, unavoidably, the first carries the second as a side-effect.<\/p>\nThe chair<\/h2>\n
The lasers<\/h2>\n
The airbag<\/h2>\n