Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 26

22 The Popular Culture Review However, Kaplan stops short of discussing the historical context from which the narratives are derived and the one in which they are presented, thereby understating the feminist power of the video. Both narratives occur against the backdrop of viewer/Iistener expectations in a long-standing narrative tradition. First of all, the two narrative lines represent traditional paths for women—that of love (the madonna choice) or money (the whore choice). In fact, the "Material Girl" landed on music charts just as the United States began institutionalizing what many have come to call the "feminization" of poverty. Increasingly for women in America, to choose love means to choose its inevitable consequence, poverty. While forced to rely on men for economic health-is it still only 62 cents to every dollar a man makes?—women are never supposed to acknowledge that economics enters the equation when choosing a partner. Here is a sacred prescription as old as capitalism itself, a narrative posited for women by men who want to be loved in spite of the power they hold over women and without fear of having to relinquish that power. Indeed through the pastiche. Madonna refuses to endorse the love-over-money narrative and permits the video's most accurate representation of the lyrics to obtain greater weight. Moreover though, the commodification of men suggested by the lyrics represents a reversal of the terms upon which our culture is based: the exchange of women (Irigaray, 84). The balance between the two narratives is nnaintained, when, in the song's last stanza, the material girl laments that "Experience has made me rich/ And now [the men]'re after me" ("Material Girl," Like A Virgin). This involution implicates the poor director's desire as he ushers the non-nnaterial girl into his truck. Yet, once seated in his truck, she turns her body away from him and the standard oppositions he unites under the last stanza. While the pastiche may not take a definite position toward the oppositions offered, it hardly fails to take a stand against the polarization which demands the elimination of any one of the terms. Alone, neither position is viable for women as it completely excludes the other. Inde^ such a refusal is a departure from the requirements constructed by this traditional narrative. Here the two valorized images of Wontan are both playfully embraced. Women recognize the choice (madonna or whore) presented to them and the selection they are expected-in fact, required—to nrtake. The appropri