A Decade Of Madonna's So-Called "Life"

Madonna’s American Life album put me on the path towards completing my very first screenplay, the title of which would go on to be the theme of every script I have written in the ten years since: Disillusion. The realization that I was fantasy-obsessed, and patterning my life after Madonna's career, was obvious to my loved ones ever since I poured all of my nine year old creative energies into that video tribute to "Vogue". But my own epiphany would not come about until the release of American Life, ten years ago today. I figured there would already be plenty of fellow SuperFans putting this album and its unprecedented commercial failure against the backdrop of the cultural climate that followed the horrors of 9/11 and preceded the horrors of The Iraq War. So instead of a sociopolitical context, I thought I'd do what I do best and put this album into the context of....Me.

Hi. 

Rather than a proper multimedia retrospective, I offer a random assembly of thoughts, linked by some of my favorite tracks from one of my favorite albums. It's me at my most honest and unstructured because American Life is Madonna at her most honest and unstructured. And who would I be if not someone who lives and breathes to pay tribute to Her? Whereas now I can say that as a tongue-in-cheek nod to my trademark penchant for idol worship, such a statement would have been a lot less ironic ten years ago. Up until “The American Life Era”, my devotion to Madonna could theoretically have been read as amusing, admirable, or pathetic. It was Madonna herself who not-so-subtly encouraged me to look deeper into myself and how I could contribute to the world with the same passion with which I contributed to her record sales. It was, specifically, a statement she made when performing before an audience of SuperFans at an HMV Record Store in London on May 9th, 2003. 

"In the process I forgot....that I was special too."

It was the sort of promotion one would expect from an artist at the launch of their career, not the relaunch. Fans slept on the street to get into that ultra-exclusive, never-broadcast mini-concert. Yet while Madonna thanked them for their worship, she also encouraged them to put it towards their own betterment, not just hers. As she worded it herself that day: 

“If you want to pay tribute to me, do something important with your life.”

Those three words rang through my head, for they gave me permission to love myself as much as I loved Madonna. Initially, “maximizing my own potential”, as a guru might put it, was the ultimate tribute to my idol. But in time (thanks to my impeccable taste in idols) the desire to do good had (roughly) as much to do with love for humanity as it did with worshipping a Goddess. Thanks to the impact that Madonna’s American Life had on my American life, today my devotion to Madonna is defined by self-respect and a commitment to my own growth as an artist and human being. It all began the summer after the album was released, when I sacrificed my busy social life to commit myself to the isolation I required in order to complete a screenplay. Whereas my life before American Life was dominated by watching movies, my life after American Life has been dominated by writing movies: nearly all of my film viewership since 2003 has, for better or worse, been a part of my own artistic process. And it was Madonna's "Life" which opened the creative floodgates. 

Thanks, Madonna!

Even though American Life continues the journey Madonna embarked upon with Ray of Light and subsequently Music, in many ways this is, in fact, a reboot of her career—hence those record store gigs on both sides of the pond.  If Confessions On A Dancefloor was the 21st century reincarnation of her eponymous first album, then this was the debut record of the artist who Madonna was before she ever signed a recording contract, back when she shifted between rock and disco in New York clubs. Her guitar work on this album is apparently amateurish (I wouldn't know one way or another) but it's also as painfully honest as an adolescent love letter (which I can vouch for with more assurance). Ditto her youthful, almost child-like singing, a far cry from the post-Evita vocal training that impressed and divided listeners of Ray of Light and Music. For the "calculating" SuperDiva to have been so vulnerable and unpolished remains among the ballsiest moves Madonna ever made. It also defined the "screw the career, I'm finally happy" quality of both the album itself and how it was sold to the record-buying public.

The first televised performance of one of my all-time favorite songs. 

I was convinced American Life would be a smash, though that didn't stop me from buying ten copies of the CD in its first week of release to help it debut at #1 in America—which it did, giving Madonna her first back-to-back #1 albums in the U.S. since the 80s. Alas, it was soon to tumble down the charts. Fearing my overspending was bad karma and lead to weak sales, I went on to buy another eighteen copies on CD, vinyl, and eventually digital download between 2003-2005. This meant a lot of people were gifted copies of American Life during the two and a half years when it was "the new Madonna album". I gave a copy to the security guard at my building. I handed out a few to fellow college stoners after passing around my old bong, “Veronica Electronica”, while not-so-subtly playing the full length album. (Cannabis has never diminished my ability to be a fascist host to my company.) I even mailed CDs to friends and relatives along with a wordy letter about how Madonna's new album was her best ever and yet was being totally ignored by radio stations and in turn record buyers. In fact, quite a few of those friends and relatives became bigger Madonna fans after they actually heard the album. I even gave a CD to one of the first guys I ever hooked up with on his way out my door. The encounter was lovely, but the greatest pleasure that came out of that afternoon was learning that the album made him a bigger Madonna fan, too.

"How could it hurt you when it looks so good?"

Like many fans, I often wonder where Madonna's career would have lead, or what completely new shape it might have taken, had American Life sold as many copies in America as did the two albums that preceded it. It could have been the political mood of the country. It could have been the hostile reaction to the panned performances Madonna gave onstage in Up For Grabs and on the big-screen in Swept Away and Die Another Day. Or maybe it was just the same good old-fashioned misogyny that made the life-after-forty years of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford an uphill battle against "you already made it, so now be quiet" ageism.

"Do I have to chaaaange?!"

Ultimately, American Life's commercial failure shaped the subsequent decade of Madonna's career. She began to embrace her "greatest hits" catalogue on The Re-Invention Tour, and returned to a full-on dance music album after American Life's commercial and promo-only remixes dominated the Billboard Dance/Club Play charts for two years. Like most fans, I thought Confessions On A Dancefloor was an even better album--in fact, it's my personal favorite of all time, and I imagine it always will be. But “Confessions” is not simply a great album: it is the perfect companion to the downtempo American Life, and I could never have loved "Confessions" if I had not first fallen in love with "Life". Personally, I have always regarded both as Disc 1 & Disc 2 of a haphazard Double LP sent from the Gods and Goddesses of Pop Utopia. You cannot fully appreciate the exquisite pleasures of one without the other, and you cannot deny that each takes the listener on a journey from hard thumping to pleasant release. (Feel free to view those words as an aural, lyrical, sexual, or spiritual reference: all four interpretations apply to both albums.) And so today I honor not only American Life, one of Madonna's best albums and one of my favorite works of art, but also the incomparable changes it lead to in my life. I cannot put into words just how grateful I am to Madonna for weathering an embarrassing commercial failure in the (X-static) process of inspiring countless artists like myself. And to think, it's only been ten years....I'm thrilled to imagine the influence that this truly timeless, ever-listenable album will continue to have on my life and millions of others in the decades to come.

"And the world can look so sad....only you make me feel good."

Birth Of An Angelo: The de Vries Side Of Me

I write films that are violent, romantic, and rooted in my fascination with sex and cinema. I think it’s ridiculous to ascribe artistic traits with an ethnicity, yet I cannot deny that I link being Italian with the passions that shape my work.

"Ik ben Angelo".

“Angelo de Vries” is the the name I use as a screenwriter. It is the purest side of myself, the constant essence of who I am, and it is only visible to people through my writing. I don’t want to suggest that I “created” Angelo to take some share of the load in a semi-schizophrenic, Stephen King’s The Dark Half kind of a way. It has more to do with presenting the sides of myself that won’t immediately come off to people unless they meet me through my work.

I first conceived of the idea for a new name after a humiliating experience that I had brought upon myself while living in Miami. After allowing myself to become romantically attached to someone whom I barely knew at all, someone who disappeared from my life with lots of my money and all of my self-respect, I felt like a different person. So different, in fact, that I wanted to separate myself from my lifelong identity by giving birth to a new one.

I created "Angelo de Vries" in Miami in August 2008. My birth name never felt like my own to begin with, but rather a gift which I inherited as the grandson of Robert Emerson Jeffrey. My father’s father was a fine man whose passing in 1976 left a gaping hole in my father’s family, one that I certainly could never fill. I’ve always felt a very literal closeness with my grandfather, whom I consider to be a guiding light in my life, but I’ve always felt a great insecurity about the fact that my name is really his name. I think that that must be part of why I have always felt such a need to be perfect—by “perfect”, I mean always able to make people feel happy, regardless of who they are or where they come from or how I feel around them. Robert Emerson Jeffrey is who I am, but it’s also a sort of post-modern riff on what I assume my expectations are. Coming up with a new name felt natural because I felt that there was a name out there which could describe "the real me"—I just had to find it.

When I was a child in the 80s, we spent summers on Cape Cod and frequented a grocery store that many will fondly recall: “Angelo’s”. Best known for their baked goods, I knew Angelo’s for their video section. That was the wonderful era when video stores thrived so much that supermarkets got in on the action. I still recall the now-classic films I could once only fantasize about as a child wandering down the 'Horror' aisle: The Company of Wolves, Demons, A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, Creepshow, Piranha, Eaten Alive. But above all other videos, I most vividly remember the Media VHS for Creepers, an infamous New Line Cinema re-edit of Dario Argento’s Phenomena. The cover art, of a beautiful girl with half of her face taken off by flying insects, stuck out to me at every video store I frequented in my youth. But those images stood out most within the wholesome, brightly-lit, air-conditioned little universe of Angelo's Supermarket.

My childhood introduction to my future favorite filmmaker in the horror aisle of Angelo’s Grocery Store was half the reason I decided upon "my other first name". The other half was based on a lifelong insecurity about my ethnic identity.  My ancestry is predominantly Irish-Scotch and Italian. My inherited face speaks to the former. But nothing about me physically speaks to the latter. So I chose the name “Angelo,  because it is a distinctly Italian word for “angel”. I believe in angels, I’m a huge Buffy/Angel fan, and writing “Angelo” flows more naturally than my own name does. What I did not realize at the time was that the full name of my father's maternal grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was Angelo Callandrella. I had unconsciously gone from being named after my grandfather to naming myself after his father-in-law.

My paternal grandfather, after whom I was named, and my paternal grandmother, 

whose father was also an 'Angelo'.

Sadly, there is no Dutch blood running through my veins, but the affinity I feel with The Netherlands and Dutch people goes much deeper than the flesh anyway. What I most connect with in the Dutch is the love of freedom, of tolerance, of embracing humanity and learning to flow with it, not against it.  As such, I adopted “de Vries”, an extremely common Dutch surname, which translates to “the free”. I also chose this name after Xaviera de Vries (aka Xaviera Hollander), one of my heroes and author of one of my favorite books of all time, The Happy Hooker.

Madame Xaviera: AGELESS! 

On April 12th, 2010, my favorite Dutchman of all almost literally Christened my creation at my favorite movie theater in the world. I attended a Q&A/screening at The Brattle Theater when my second favorite filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven, brilliantly paired a discussion of his book Jesus of Nazareth with one of the many Christian parables that define his film career: Robocop. I bought a copy of his book after a fascinating discussion and I asked him to sign it to “Angelo”.  It was the first time I publicly identified as Angelo and the first time that name had been written in relation to me—and in a book about Jesus, no less! This photo, taken by my friend Danielle, captures how truly delighted I was that Paul Verhoeven got to meet "Angelo de Vries".

4/12/10: When I met Mr. Verhoeven, I wore my "Marilyn Chambers For President" 

button in memory of a most beloved icon, one year after her passing.

Paul Verhoeven is a magnificent artist and a beautiful human being who has been a huge influence on my creative development since I was ten years old. But he is “my second favorite filmmaker" because I can only have one favorite. That person, my idol and my “artistic father”, is Dario Argento.

I should note that my pride in being Italian and my connection to Italian cinema is very Dario-centric. All of my favorite Italian filmmakers worked in either Argento’s giallo oeuvre or some other subgenre of Italian horror. And I can’t say I loved any of their works until high school, when I gained a truly life-changing appreciation of Argento. My desire to appeal to an Italian audience is largely a tribute to the auteur from whom I have learned the most. Thus, when I read that Dario Argento would be at the 2010 Weekend of Horrors in Los Angeles, I flew across the country to meet him. I stayed in LA for months, trying to launch a writing career, before going home disillusioned and broke in the grand tradition of failed East Coast transplants. But all the time and money were worth it to meet the man of my cinematic dreams.

5/23/10: From left to right, it's my sister, my idol, 

my muse, and me! :)

My sister Jennifer joined me in meeting Dario. She generously had him sign my copy of Opera, the film that most influenced my writing, “To Robert”. I am forever grateful to Jen for that, for it gave me the opportunity to have my copy of Phenomena, aka Creepers, signed from Argento “To Angelo”. That signature insures that I--as in Robert AND Angelo--will die with a smile on my face.