"Express Yourself" is the embodiment of "queer chic," a bombastic masterpiece that heralds Madonna's uncanny ability to use her consumer-driven image to code her feminist politics. Something this inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis is not without theoretical implications. Here, Madonna plays the high priestess of a futuristic wage-slave community who celebrates the power of her repressed mechanism via self-love. The clip's infinite metaphors are intricate and delirious without ever being pedantic. While Madonna looks for a way to vicariously penetrate the slave kingdom below her secret tower, sexual frustration begets physical aggression. Director David Fincher evokes the glamour and exoticism of male-on-male competition via the slave community's constant flexing and cockfighting. Inside her postmodern living quarters, the 5'3" Madonna towers above the crowd, slithers under her dining room table and asserts her feminine wile. Madonna's prissy, henpecked husband tries to control her with his false idols (a musical diorama that seemingly tightens her S&M vice) but is ultimately no match for the video's alpha male, Guess model Cameron. Conflicted, her boy-toy revolts against the machine that simultaneously angers and teases him with the power of its pussy. She's powerful and dangerous (her cat is black for a reason) and gets to choose the man who will control her. "Express Yourself" is as conceptually audacious as Metropolis because it celebrates both the power of the female sex and its ability to cripple the machine that dehumanizes it.

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All reviews by Ed Gonzalez and Sal Cinquemani
© slant magazine, 2003.