Entering the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2023 as an exemplar of the film heritage of the United States, the 1985 Susan Seidelman film Desperately Seeking Susan also marks the first major acting role of global popstar Madonna.

Yet, amidst Desperately Seeking Susan’s enduring fame, continuing popularity, and not infrequent analysis by scholars and critics, its rather extensive Egyptomania has not been widely recognized or fully appreciated. Quite oddly, this situation has persisted for decades, despite the Egyptomania’s structural prominence in the work and its close connection with many important topics of regular discussion.

Desperately Seeking Susan‘s under-the-radar Egyptomania is best understood as a manifestation of director Seidelman’s career, sensibilities, and recurring concerns. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the New York City transplant and film school grad found herself professionally and artistically located at the intersection of several trends: as women were increasingly making inroads into the male-dominated film industry, auteur directors also had a growing presence in Hollywood, including through proven indie directors migrating to studio work. In Seidelman’s case, her first feature film Smithereens (1982) was invited to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, making her the first American indie director so honored. Afterwards, Seidelman’s talents were tapped by Hollywood, and for her next project and mainstream debut, she ended up helming Desperately Seeking Susan, overseeing a noticeable adaptation of the original Leora Barish script and increasing its Egyptological content. Filmography-wise, Desperately Seeking Susan patterns with Smithereens and much of Seidelman’s later directorial work like the Roseanne Barr – Meryl Streep picture She-Devil (1989) or the pilot of the television series Sex and the City (1998-2004); it features a quirky but accessible narrative and highlights female characters and feminist themes. Intended as a modern recapitulation of classic screwball comedies with their strong and savvy female protagonists, Desperately Seeking Susan’s emergence as a vehicle for Madonna was entirely accidental, since her career only happened to skyrocket while the project was already in motion. In fact, of the two female leads, Rosanna Arquette entered the project as the greater star, while the then-relatively unknown Madonna was chosen as a representative of the now-legendary counterculture of the Lower East Side (e.g. punk rock, artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat). Tellingly, the film’s famous inclusion of Madonna’s hit song “Into the Groove” was the fluke result of self-promotion and happenstance; according to Seidelman’s 2024 memoir, Madonna handed off a cassette tape to be used as filler music to coordinate the dancing of background extras in a scene set in a hip downtown club, and then Seidelman simply chose to keep the tune as an apt soundtrack for cool youth. However different it might look in retrospect, Desperately Seeking Susan is very much the zeitgeist-y product of an unconventional cross-over feminist director making full use of newfound opportunity, in order to spend time with female characters and to share with the world the urban culture that she loves.

Fig. 1: While “Into the Groove” plays as non-diegetic music, Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) and Susan (Madonna) receive recognition for returning stolen Egyptian antiquities in the film’s very final image (Screenshot by author)

Desperately Seeking Susan’s most explicit Egyptomania is its plot device of some earrings of Nefertiti that have been stolen from a traveling exhibition of “the Cairo Museum” when on display in New York; these stolen antiquities unknowingly come into the possession of the heroines and cause conflict with the mafia, before they ultimately return them to the Egyptian government. In fact, a celebratory press conference with the ambassador forms the very last scene of the theatrical release; as “Into the Groove” plays in its soundtrack reappearance, the press conference transforms into an above-the-fold newspaper story, which American culture scholar David R. Shumway has identified as a shout-out to the still photographs that end the legendary Cary Grant – Katharine Hepburn screwball comedy The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940). In line with the director’s concern to depict women as multi-faceted and complicated, Madonna’s character Susan in particular can be ethically ambiguous or even wrongheadedly manipulative. Yet, the climactic return of the earrings forms the resolution of an understated feel-good morality tale, where the two female protagonists reverse the course of profit-driven artifact theft and facilitate restoration of heritage objects to internationally-cooperative cultural institutions that prioritize preservation and the public good. Prior to their reunification and return, the single earring worn by each woman also resonates with the film’s intricate thematics around female identity and the dynamics of desire and becoming whole, as film professor Lucy Fischer has observed.

Originally, the movie featured a different final scene, a post-press conference sequence in which the two women use their cash reward for a trip to Egypt and are pictured on camel-back in the desert while accompanied by multiple walking attendants in ethnic garb. Since the closing parts of the film also include a stereotypical resolution with heterosexual romantic fulfillment, this turn-of-events was intended to show that the women were still capable of having audacious fun together without any need for men. However, test audiences became confused by several successive scenes that appeared final only for other scenes to appear. Thus, the trip to Egypt was omitted from the theatrical release, although it is available as a DVD special feature and it occasionally surfaces in various media, whether via mention or through reproduction in full or in part. Thematically, this Egyptomania underscores the importance of Ancient Egypt-related tourism to the modern state and invokes the region’s exotic associations, in particular its colonialism-tinged conceptualization as a setting for adventurers from “the West.” Notably, incidental dialogue reveals the destination as the choice of the wealthier- and higher class-coded New Jersey housewife Roberta. In a hint of social satire, she remarks on the landscape’s beauty, while Susan whines and wishes out loud that they had gone to Jamaica. Both, however, seem oblivious to the hired hands who live there, not to mention the economic differences underpinning their exciting travels. In combination with the earlier emphasis on Nefertiti’s earrings, this trip indicates that ancient history and natural grandeur predominate as Egypt’s calling-cards, overshadowing contemporary inhabitants and post-pharaonic civlizations.

Fig. 2: Susan (Madonna) rides a camel through the Egyptian desert while accompanied by attendants, in the alternate ending (Screenshot by author)

Desperately Seeking Susan’s other major manifestation of Egyptomania is a distinctive black jacket whose back features the American dollar bill-derived design of a pyramid with an eyeball pyramidion. Originally worn by the somewhat materialistic bohemian Susan, it is acquired by the voyeuristic housewife Roberta, and her growing ability to convincingly wear it helps signal her progression into new ways of being. Specially created by costume designer Santo Loquasto and now an iconic part of Madonna’s image during the 1980s, this jacket “with a pyramid and the Eye of Providence – the all-seeing eye – surrounded by rays of light… represented divine providence, exotic adventure, and also, money,” according to Seidelman’s 2024 memoir. In terms of Egyptomania, the jacket’s pyramid serves as a cinematic wink reinforcing the Egyptian plot device of the stolen Nefertiti earrings, much like a brief, otherwise incidental background appearance of a modern map containing the Delta and the Fayyum. More importantly, however, the jacket’s design is reception history twice over. The image itself resonates with sophisticated symbolic interpretations of the culture of Ancient Egypt, in a tradition that stretches from Greek writers like Plutarch and Horapollo onward through the Renaissance. Now, though, this august tradition has been incorporated into modern fashion in a novel act of reception history, graphically signaling a new and alluring elite consisting of people who are “in the know” about the cutting edge of urban culture. Rather than timeless secret wisdom, this Egypt intimates the privilege of acquaintance with the freshest, smartest frontiers of realms like fashion, art, music, and cinema itself.

Fig. 3: Susan (Madonna) walks the streets of Manhattan in a pyramid-emblazoned jacket (Screenshot by author)

During a 2025 film festival appearance and book-signing tied to the 40^th anniversary of the release of Desperately Seeking Susan, Seidelman stated that she has never personally received any real feedback specifically related to her movie’s treatment of Ancient Egypt.

The exact reasons for this lack of attention to Desperately Seeking Susan’s Egyptomania are a bit unclear, although possibilities include selective cultural memory and uneven scholarly uptake. Informal conversations with people who saw the film on release or later on video reveal that people tend to remember the jacket, which is visually striking and very central to the movie, but which nevertheless constitutes a somewhat elliptical reference to Ancient Egypt. In contrast, these viewers only recall the subplot of antiquities theft when prompted – something that is fairly understandable since the earrings are less thematically central than the jacket, but also a little odd since the return of those artifacts ends the movie. Following the intellectual tendencies of much work on film in general, critical and scholarly analysis of Desperately Seeking Susan has tended to focus on its feminist themes and adaptation of genre conventions, with only very spotty and incidental mention of the film’s Egyptian material insofar as it intersects those other concerns. For some strange reason, Desperately Seeking Susan has also never made waves with Egyptologists, at least to the point where acquaintance with its existence has become part of the continuing knowledge base of the discipline among those interested in reception history. One factor there might be that the movie’s Egypt-heavy alternate ending does not seem to have become widely known until relatively recently, rendering Desperately Seeking Susan’s Egyptomania confined to the jacket and earrings and thus more easily overlooked. Nevertheless, however much it might pale in comparison to recognition from places like the Cannes Film Festival or the Library of Congress, Desperately Seeking Susan also deserves a place in the hearts and minds of everyone who is fascinated by Ancient Egypt and its continuing cultural impact.

Author: David Mihalyfy

Scientific Bibliography:

Fischer, L. 1990. The Desire to Desire: Desperately Seeking Susan, in Peter Lehman (ed.) Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism: 200-214. Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press.

Shumway, D.R. 1991. Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage. Cinema Journal 30(4): 7-23.

Wales, A. 1996. Jackets: Engendering the Object in Desperately Seeking Susan, in Pat Kirkham (ed.) The Gendered Object: 172-183. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.