Material Guy

I haven't done a completely random blog post in a while, so here goes ...

Tonight, Peter asked me to play him the "real song" version of a song he was playing an instrumental version of on the Wii Music game.  The song turned out to be "Material Girl".  I found him the video online ( see below ) and watched along with him.  It's probably been about 25 years since I last watched this video, and I just noticed something about it that I had never noticed before.


Watch Madonna - Material Girl in Music  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

To put it bluntly - the dude in the beard is really creepy.

Now, he's not creepy because of the beard ( though I must admit, it does look a little bit creepy on him ).  He's creepy because of his actions.

Perhaps it's because I'm getting old and my memory of the 80's is getting a little bit hazy, but the "Material Girl" video isn't exactly  what I remembered.  Sure, the "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" homage/ripoff was just as I remembered, but I always remembered this video as being a bit of counterpoint to the lyrics of the song.  In other words, while the speaker in the "Material Girl" song is an unapologetic materialistic gold-digger, Madonna's character in the video is a girl unimpressed by money who ends the video making out with a poor bearded schlep in a crappy pick-up truck.

There's just one problem with that description, however ...

The bearded dude wasn't poor!

In fact he was the opposite of poor.  He was apparently a rich and powerful Hollywood executive, as is evident by the way Arliss is kissing up to him in the opening scene ( BTW.  I don't care what Robert Wuhl is in.  Every role he plays is Arliss, even if it's something that was filmed a decade before Arliss premiered ( just like Danny McBride will now be Kenny Powers for the rest of his life ) ).

There nothing wrong with being rich, but there something creepy about a guy who misrepresents himself in order to get into a woman's pants.  Sure, he was pretending to be poor when he was really rich, which some might consider to be noble.  However, he was only pretending to be poor because heard Madonna character say she didn't like rich guys while he was eavesdropping on her ( The eavesdropping was only a small part of the bearded dude's constant stalking during the video.  It's also clear from the scene with Arliss, that this guy views Madonna's character as a possession rather than a woman.  Specifically, we see the following in the opening scene:


00:22 seconds: Creepy Bearded Dude ( CBD ) : I wanna meet her.


00:24 : Arliss: You got it. Anytime.  Name the place - name anwhere - any street - you got it!


00:27: CBD: Now!


00:27 - 00:31 ( Creepy pause )


00:31 - 00:32 ( Really creepy look from CBD.  He looks at Madonna's character ( on the movie screen ) the way a starving lion might look at an injured antelope. )


)

If you still doubt that CBD is a creep, watch the scene starting at 4:16, specifically what happens at 4:21.  CBD gives a poor farmer a wad of cash to buy/borrow his crappy pickup truck, and then dismissively waves him away.  He practically shoos the farmer away, the way somebody might shoo away a fly.  He's basically saying, "Get out my sight you poor piece of crap, so I can use your truck to get me some Madonna pussy!".  So, this guy is not only creepy, he's a world-class douchebag!

So now I don't know what the hell the message of this video is, other than perhaps "Madonna likes to get it on with douchebags" ( paging Mr. Canseco ).

In any case, it's time for bed.  Hope this post was random enough for you.

Rich