'Confessions II' Represents Another Peak Madonna Moment
The 13 minutes is packed with stars and self-references
June 8, 2026
Today is the day Madonna reasserted herself as the premier music-video artist of all time with the unveiling of her monumental visual film Confessions II.
A short as well as six truncated music videos, the piece — directed by two-man team TORSO — represents a return to form for the woman who gave us “Borderline,” “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl,” “Like a Prayer,” “Express Yourself,” “Vogue,” “Oh Father,” “Hung Up” and so many other compelling examples of the form. She’s had plenty of good videos all along the way, but Confessions II is a confident left turn away from anything safe or expected, yet is also a shameless collection of some of her greatest, most flattering looks in ages.
There’s a lot to unpack!
Join me as I commit Paglia-rism and mine every note and every frame for meaning — intentional and otherwise:
The first image we are offered is a close-up of Madonna’s famous eyes. The quality of the shot reminded me immediately of Old Hollywood framing, such as of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942). That comparison holds in that the introductory moments from “I Feel So Free” have a sadness, a star-crossed lonely quality.
Saying she likes to hide in the shadows to create a new persona, we are introduced to a team of women holding large, professional cameras. They are masked but their equipment has powerful lights. Their quality is invasive.
They stalk a hotel hallway, arriving at Madonna’s room, where they blast their way in, training their lights on her. Interestingly, Madonna looks simultaneously unnerved by the light (scrutiny) and vivified by it. She stands and begins to move to the music, ultimately looking flooded with beautifying light.
Telling us she feels free, the scene changes to a distant planet. Madonna, shot from below, looks like a giantess, the light of a sun beaming through her legs. She’s chanting about consciousness and the origins of life before ““ begins with the line, “Traveling through space and time.”
For me this echoes “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” a 1977 cover of Klaatu by the Carpenters. I suppose this piece is reminiscent of Madonna’s bonkers NFT experiment, but it’s still genuinely shocking to see female dancers lying spread-eagle in a grassy clearing as laser beams shoot from their vaginas and assholes. Still, it all still screams birth and creation to me, and feels feminist.
I love that Madonna carefully walks through the beams; there is something intimate or erotic about her touching a cold, scientific beam that is actually emanating from someone’s privates.
“We will be divine / All the spirits, they all intertwine,” she sings, noting it’s “Good for the Soul” to “let down your hair and breathe in the air.” This is dancefloor-friendly messaging at his finest, and also feels like it could apply to her recent gentle rant about putting our cellphones down.
Madonna is Earth Mother here — literally a mom from Earth, one with the nurturing light of the sun springing from between her legs, and also a nice lady who is spreading the women’s legs for their own light to shine, like a spiritual midwife.
A musical flourish that sounds a bit like “Rain” ushers in a short sequence of Madonna behind glass with rain coursing down the surface. We immediately jump to her saying, “People think that dance musical is superficial,” she says, “but they’ve got it all wrong.” She’s explaining the freeing quality of the dancefloor as if she’s a visiting lecturer, and the music and the visuals — now a car driving at top speed down a rainy high way — take on a “What It Feels Like for a Girl” quality.
She launches into “One Step Away,” a propulsive pop track that I have heard was going to be the lead single before “Bring Your Love” made more sense due to Coachella. It interpolates Larry Heart Presents Mr. White’s “The Sun Can’t Compare.”
There is an unmistakable visual quote from the “Vogue” opening of Re-Invention Tour, as well as that show’s “Nobody Knows Me” as she’s whisked off screen by a table-top conveyor belt.
Some of the choreo here appears to ape moves from “Die Another Day” shockingly closely. Can’t be accidental.
The car crashes and Madonna — having shed a red wig (hello, Confessions I!) — is now dashing into the first rave she finds in a warehouse.
When she flicks her hair, she morphs into Julia Garner, who Madonna wants to play her in a biopic about her life (called Blond Ambition, by the way). Julia looks stuh-nning, and is clearly in “Open Your Heart” drag — hair, makeup and conical bustier.
Interestingly, there is an innocuous close-up of a muscled male chest that really reminds me of “Express Yourself,” which had me thinking the whole scene in the warehouse has a blue-tinted, Metropolis/“Express Yourself” caste to it.
This makes sense, because then, when the rave turns into a fully glam “Bring Your Love” music video — seriously, the hottest Madonna’s looked in a music video since maybe “Sorry” — we are treated to a shot of Sabrina Carpenter crawling on the ground using the same Vincent Paterson “Express Yourself” quality that was intended to render Madonna, in that earlier video, as more cat-like.
Interestingly, as Sabrina is crawling, we hear a distinctive trill of “Lucky Star”!
The descending women with cameras here gave me Angels in America (1991) flashbacks.
At this point, Madonna — using invisible wires that she apparently very much enjoyed in real life — is launched into the air, flipping head over heels over the crowd. When she comes face to face with Sabrina, it’s like they’re mirror images separate by 40 years. (Okay, 25 years, because the photography is faboosh.)
Madonna flying through the air is absolutely an instantly iconic moment from this film; it’s no wonder it made the poster.
Segueing into “Danceteria,” there is a fragment of “Bring Your Love” used that I want as an extended mix: “I got something I wanna talk about. Talk about. Talk about.” Talk about a killer hook!
One she enters the men’s room, Madonna is drying off using a hand dryer, a total Desperately Seeking Susan moment.
This is the heart of the entire piece, where she becomes explicitly self-referential while singing about her origins as a club doyenne in the real-life Danceteria. It’s where she met the late Martin Burgoyne (name-checked in the song, and sort of played by Daniele Sibilli (who also stood in for him in the Celebration Tour), the late Haoui Montaug and the very-much-still-with-us Debi Mazar.
Debi dances with Madonna so elegantly — this is such a sweet moment for her, and marks yet another of her appearances in a Madonna video. She’s been in them for 40 years now, though this is her first time popping up in 26 years.
The cameos in this sequence feel random, yet they also feel wisely curated to attract interest from viewers who are not natural Madonna fans, but who might be curious to see Benedict Cumberbatch goofing off or two famous soccer players at a urinal or Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, who emerges from a stall in a Madonna-coded pinstriped suit.
“Danceteria” is one of Madonna’s most giddily effective songs in forever and ever. It sounds like a hit to me, and it confidently interpolates the great Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” (He’s credited as a co-writer.)
The choreo here is “Hung Up” blending into “Vogue.” When they freeze while posing, it’s sort of like the MTV Video Music Awards “Express Yourself” version of vogueing.
I’m hearing another bit of “Die Another Day” leading into “Read My Lips,” which — gulp — might be Madonna’s white whale, a flawless collab with a hot rapper (Feid)!
Finally, we see Madonna’s 29-year-old daughter Lourdes is unmasked as one of the women with cameras (the documenters following doer Madonna). Lourdes is known about fans for being really pretty tough, so it fits that she snarks, “I wish a motherfucker would.”
As “I Feel So Free” plays, there is one last, brief segment showing the camera girls unwinding in a hotel suite. This entire vibe, to me, is “Justify My Love,” though the their bored eating of bananas is the final reference: “Deeper and Deeper.”
Confessions II is a spectacular appetite-whetter for the album. It feels in some ways like the album is already here. Now that we’ve had a tour of Madonna’s musical past and present … let’s get her focusing on setting up an actual tour! ⚡️