Women looking at women looking at their phones

Miri Gordis on Materialists, Too Much and alienated women. This post is syndicated from Small Wire.

Early on in 3 Women by Robert Altman (1977), Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek decide to become roommates. They work together at a health spa and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) has developed a hopeless infatuation with Milly (Shelley Duvall). As Milly drives her home, Pinky wonders what it would be like to have a twin: would you know which one you are? What if you got confused? What if you woke up one day and decided to switch your identity the way you change your dress? Milly is annoyed by the line of questioning. When Pinky reveals that her real name, like Milly’s, is Mildred, Milly snaps at her as if she has committed an unimaginable sin. 

Milly seems to live in her own sheltered fantasy world. She reads lifestyle magazines religiously, dresses glamorously, and imparts breathless wisdom on how to do things like make a tuna melt. She is convinced that every man around her is in love with her even though they all mock her behind her back. Her life is studiously picture perfect, in its specific ‘70s Southern California, lower middle class kind of way. But she is socially awkward, impersonal, and hopelessly self-involved. She cannot break out of her shell long enough to really talk to anyone else, let alone listen.

Pinky idolizes Milly but she is in many ways her opposite. She is a pupil of other people, intimately attuned to their quirks and mannerisms and to what makes them likable. When she develops amnesia and takes on Milly’s identity, she instantly conquers the neighborhood in much the way Milly imagines herself doing. Much has been made in criticism about the film of the ways the women rotate through more submissive and more dominant roles, but perhaps the largest difference between Pinky and Milly is that Pinky models herself after other people while Milly models herself after magazines, their lifeless counterpart.

Milly’s particular kind of strangeness portends something about our present world. It is not especially rare anymore to meet someone who seems to have drawn all their ideas about how to be in the world from media consumption. It is a morbid symptom of our chronically online and disconnected world. A few weeks ago, crossing Houston Street in Manhattan, I saw an amateur photoshoot happening in the middle of the street, ignoring the repeated blare of an ambulance waiting to turn. On social media, cookie cutter fashion, uncanny valley plastic surgery, and ridiculous standards for interpersonal communication are generally a ticket to success. In the real world, they read more as bizarre and delusional, even embarrassing.

I thought about this, and about Milly, when I was watching Celine Song’s Materialists over the summer. It is a film that is so wholly drawn from an anxious TikTok scroll that it washed over me like a blurry, vaguely offensive haze. It seemed fitting that Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova was cast in it, in a totally unmemorable and unnecessary role, like a nod to the dating discourse obsessed viewer for whom it is intended. It feels like the artistic equivalent of a Milly, a piece of media that is entirely modeled off of things you might see in a glossy and that is strangely out of step with the actual world.

Most strikingly, all the class signifiers feel slightly off. John (Chris Evans), one part of the film’s central love triangle, is a struggling stage actor in his late ‘30s, with a crippling commitment to artistic purity and no seeming interest in actual paid work. He lives in a shared apartment with a series of disgusting male roommates and works part-time shifts as a cater waiter. He comes off less as a poor person struggling to make it in a rich person’s industry, but hampered by the time suck and constraints of making a living, and more like Adam from Girls, who is snobbish about the theater and who gets monthly checks from his grandmother.

John’s romantic rival is Harry (Pedro Pascal), the wealthy businessman so concerned about his short stature that he apparently opted for disabling leg-lengthening surgery. It has worked out well for him. He can now date a whole range of women who would apparently not have previously considered him for his charming personality, otherwise good looks, and obscene wealth.

I would have wanted Lucy (Dakota Johnson) to cut off both of these men and walk off into the sunset alone at the end of the film, except that she was also so profoundly unlikeable. Her only quirk, which was in the first trailer I saw for the movie, was drinking beer and coke mixed as her drink of choice. What distinguishes the 19th century heroines who agitate for love over money from their materialistic peers is that they really earnestly believe in inherent human dignity. “Do you think,” Jane Eyre famously demands of Rochester, “because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennett have no choice but to marry or to live ignominiously, forever financially dependent on relatives. It is impossible to recreate the stakes of this in our contemporary world, which does not resemble Victorian England in this particular way. Marriage may still be a woman’s easiest route to financial stability, to life-changing healthcare access, or to the freedom and comfort to pursue artistic dreams, but it is generally not her only route and it does not have the same prevailing valence that it once did.

Materialists then is less a work of social critique and more a film entirely built out of received perceptions of the world. It treads the same thin, tired ground as Bridgerton, as regurgitated Austen fare, as Fifty Shades of Grey. It asks the pointless question: what if a billionaire threw himself at you but he was kind of messed up in the head and you didn’t really love him? Does any of this actually matter?

CLONE.FYI HEADLINES WE’RE FOLLOWING

• Won’t someone please think of the Groomzillas (Bustle)

• Laura Loomer and the limits of posting everything (The Verge)

• “The solipsism of low self-esteem is one of the wonders of the human psyche. So inexplicable is its grip, so binding its influence, it can feel almost mythic.” (The New Yorker)

• AI, Orality, and the Golden Age of Grift (Bloomberg)

• You can now lease an EV for less than $100 a month (Los Angeles Times)