Adding to her ‘cool mom’ credentials following her Instagrams of her son Rocco pictured with a bottle of gin, Madonna has screened the Oscar-winning drama Whiplash for her children.
In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, she says she “totally connected” and “resonated” with the film, about a young jazz drummer in thrall to a violently pushy teacher. “When the character said, ‘I’d rather be a 34-year-old genius who did something with his life, dead of a heroin overdose, than live to be 93 and do nothing’, I totally was like, ‘Yes’,” she said. “That really resonated with me... I’ve had teachers like that, for sure.”
She decided her children, aged between 9 and 18, should see it: “I watched it with all my kids, and they were all very mesmerised by it, and I think a little speechless afterward. My son David was the most vocal about it... He said, ‘Wow, I want to make my hands bleed’,” referring to a scene in which the drummer practises so hard and long that he’s left with cuts from his drumsticks.
The irony is that Madonna actually suffered whiplash after falling off stage at the Brit awards last week – an Armani cape she was wearing failed to detach and she was sharply pulled down a set of steps. “I didn’t hurt my butt, but I hurt my head,” she told Jonathan Ross in a TV interview. “I had a little bit of whiplash, I smacked the back of my head. I had a man standing over me with a flashlight until about 3am to make sure I was compos mentis.”
Elsewhere in the interview she also further outlined her relatively liberal approach to parenting, saying she wouldn’t ban her daughter Lourdes from taking drugs. “I just ask my daughter to make wise decisions and to do things in moderation and to try not to mix her alcohol,” she said. “I am not going to say ‘no, don’t do it’ because that is just absurd. And it is not fair. Yeah, I did it.”
Meanwhile the 18-minute prototypical version of Whiplash has been unofficially posted on YouTube. Director Damian Chazelle made the short film with Oscar-winning star JK Simmons to try and drum up financial support for a full feature – it screened at the 2013 Sundance film festival and subsequently secured its funding.
