Material Girl - Music Video

Music Video

The music video was inspired by Madonna's admiration of Marilyn Monroe and mimicked the latter's performance of the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It featured an appearance by actor Keith Carradine, who played Madonna's love interest. The video was the first to showcase Madonna's acting ability, as it combined the dance routines of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with the storyline of a man who impresses Madonna with flowers, rather than diamonds. In a 1987 interview with New York Daily News, Madonna said:

"Well, my favorite scene in all of Monroe's movies is when she does that dance sequence for 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend'. And when it came time to do the video for the song, I said, I can just redo that whole scene and it will be perfect. Marilyn was made into something not human in a way, and I can relate to that. Her sexuality was something everyone was obsessed with and that I can relate to. And there were certain things about her vulnerability that I'm curious about and attracted to."

The music video was shot January 10 and 11, 1985, at Ren-Mar Studios in Hollywood, California, and was directed by Mary Lambert, who worked with Madonna in the videos for "Like a Virgin" and "Borderline". It was produced by Simon Fields with principal photography by Peter Sinclair, editing by Glenn Morgan and choreography by Kenny Ortega. Actor Robert Wuhl appeared in the video's opening. Much of the jewelry is sourced from the collection of Connie Parente, a popular Hollywood jewelry collector. The music video was at the same time an exegesis and a critique of the lyrics and Madonna herself. It was on the set of the video that Madonna met her first husband, actor Sean Penn.

The video opens with two men watching a rush in the screening rooms of a Hollywood studio. On the screen, an actress played by Madonna sings and dances to "Material Girl", dressed like Monroe from "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend". One of the men, played by Carradine, is a director or a producer and is immensely rich. He falls in love with the actress and wants to express his passion for her. He tells his employee, played by Wuhl: "She's fantastic. She could become a star." The employee answered: "She could be. She could be great. She could be a major star." The former then concludes by saying: "She is a star, George." Madonna is in a pink sleeveless gown and has her hair in blond locks ala Monroe. The background is a reconstruction of the Monroe video, complete with staircase, chandeliers and a number of tuxedo clad chorus boys. Madonna dances and sings the song, while she is showered with cash, expensive jewellery, furs and is carried by the men over the stairs. At one time, she alludes herself from the men, by dismissing them with her fan. As the producer tries to impress Madonna, he comes to know that she does not like material things, but rather prefers simple romance. He pretends to be penniless, and brings her hand-cut flowers while paying a poor man a large amount to borrow (or possibly buy) his dirty truck to take her on a date. His plan seems to work, because the final scene shows him and Madonna kissing in the truck in an intimate position.

It was in the video of "Material Girl" that Madonna began to accept and utilize herself being compared to Monroe. However, she established a safe distance from those comparisons and developed inside the same pastiche. Details like the usage of different gloves or different fans in the video brought forth the connections between these women, but Madonna alluded to herself in subtle ways. The fan in Monroe's hand for the original video was an iconography of the Sudarshana Chakra (wheel) held by the Indian God Vishnu. Scholar Georges-Claude Guilbert, who wrote Madonna as postmodern myth: how one star's self-construction rewrites sex, said that the fan symbolized fiery desire aroused by Monroe as well as ritual sacrifice, eerily foreshadowing her untimely death in 1962. Madonna's fan, which appeared at the end of the video, signified that Madonna – while paying her tribute to Monroe – was signaling that she had no intention of being a victim like her, and that she was on the path of becoming a feminist post-modern myth. Author Nicholas Cook commented that the video promoted Madonna's identity as the song suggested, with the purpose of shifting "Madonna's image from that of a disco-bimbo to authentic star." Lisa A. Lewis, author of Gender, Politics and MTV said that with the video, Madonna achieved the rare distinction of being accepted as a literature medium by the music authors. "Material Girl" was nominated for best female video at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards but lost to Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do with It". The video was ranked at position 54 on VH1's 100 Greatest Videos.