life for the modern woman is bleak and sexy
i'm hot on 'Materialists'. Sabrina Carpenter, i'm mostly okay with. a review of Celine Song's sophomore A24 feature + a long discussion about online feminism
[NOTES: If you have yet to see ‘Materialists,’ I recommend you read this piece. Think of it as an extended trigger warning. Mild spoilers, but the movie is hard to spoil. You kind of just need to experience it.]
You can also listen to me read this! I share my Substack writing process (AT LENGTH), give commentary on the piece, and share some extra takes after the voiceover @ [00:15:00]! If you want to listen on Spotify or elsewhere, go here.
The first surprise of Materialists is that its protagonist earns $80,000 a year as a mid-level matchmaker in New York City. In the film and its promotional materials, Dakota Johnson’s Lucy is never slouchy but always starched, pristine, and fresh. This salary reveal immediately changes the chemistry of the forthcoming love triangle. Lucy is not some high-powered executive choosing between a stay-at-home, broke boyfriend (Chris Evans) and a rich one who would make her job optional (Pedro Pascal). Instead, we can glean that almost all of Lucy’s money goes to rent, leaving very little capital to keep up appearances. With a job like this, in a city like this, with a salary like that, Lucy’s life is not one full of friends or relaxation. To craft her signature look, she likely relies on PR packages (she works at an all-women company called Adore), a Rent the Runway subscription, and a metric ton of credit card debt.
Materialists feels slightly out of time, and I almost imagine it occurring 10 years in the future or on some alternate timeline where dating for a middle-class working woman is a tad more hellish than it is now.
In its first 20 minutes, Materialists demonstrates that if you had $10,000 to burn, you still may not be matched with someone who checks all of your boxes and also happen to really love them. Once Lucy urges a distraught bride to get married despite that lack, her story with us begins. Celine Song asks, what would have to occur for a person equipped with the cold, calculating knowledge of matchmaking (and 9 weddings under her belt) to choose love over never having to do the “math” of being poor again?
Though divisive, I found this film slick, seductive, and consuming. A pleasure and release.
A few weeks ago, Sabrina Carpenter announced her upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, and with it a controversial piece of cover art. A faceless man holds a fistful of Carpenter’s hair as she’s frozen, on her knees, staring down the viewer like she’s been caught in some act. Around the same time this album art hit the discourse machines, ICE crackdowns spiked throughout the state of California. I could not get off my phone.
I live in Los Angeles. My feeds are an equal mix of global disaster and real, local struggles alongside pop culture discourse and arguments that only exist online. We can “Kim, people are dying” our way around it all we want, but the two are still in some ways connected. I find it hard to want to write about the state of things™ or the pop culture that happens concurrently when we reach these sorts of peaks, but I can observe how pop cultural discourse gets more agitated as a vent for people’s frustrations with one another.
With these two sets of issues, Materialist and Carpenter, I notice a divide amongst the liberal left that is more polarized and nasty than we’ve seen in a long time. The communication breakdown about women and feminism online is disturbing and but not something that was unpredictable post-2016 and post-#MeToo. We disagree on the male gaze, AND we disagree on white feminism, AND we disagree on the meaning of satire. On the left, we all agree something is wrong, but can’t quite agree how we’re allowed to express that wrong or the proper or worthy channels of correcting it.
When nothing is bleaker than the material reality of being a woman, and that reality worsens the farther you stray from being an “ideal”1 woman, the whole point of an online feminism gets murkier. The material harm always, without a doubt, exceeds the digital and pop cultural. In Carpenter's case, a reality (of dating as a straight woman) reflected back at itself is labeled transgressive when an awareness may just signal some progression. Even if awareness is not good enough on its own, feminism shouldn’t only work for those who “opt in” to it.
Treating Sabrina Carpenter as the default, blank version of a woman we can all project ourselves onto is the problem we’re having. She’s an outlier with a lot of influence, a rich white woman born in the United States who has her very own wealth-making apparatus. Her subjugation is already wildly different from her Black and brown pop star peers, let alone the entire spectrum of women who consume her music.
On the global scale, we have to understand that some, maybe most, women are not able to speak the language of feminism or play nice with its parameters the way we do in certain online spheres. This does not mean these women should not reap the benefits of feminism; in fact, they need this framework the most.
Sabrina Carpenter, alone, is the butt of the joke on her Man’s Best Friend album cover. She’s saying: You are all familiar with the fact I am rich, hot, successful, and autonomous, but why can’t I seem to avoid the trap of becoming a man’s pet? What if I kind of like it sometimes? Isn’t it strange that all this “power” I’ve accrued still keeps me on my knees? An ugly thought created by the tool of patriarchy to attempt to reflect the tool of patriarchy.
Materialists is full of these ugly thoughts. We hear daters share their desires. No uglies. No fatties. No men under 6 ft tall, and no women over 27 years old. I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. Blue eyes. I don’t want to hate you because you’re poor, but I’m starting to hate you because you’re poor. Basic stuff.
If you don’t date like Lucy’s clients, you’re lucky if you haven’t been on the receiving end of that oppressive scrutiny.
Materialists is the morally ugliest version of dating, and that New York Times “Modern Love”2 that circles around to shape the next crop of romantic media and ideals that trickle down the cultural pipeline. Love Is Blind, Jubilee, Barstool/Dave Portnoy, The Breakfast Club, and other “lower-brow” media share this interest in the roles of money, sex, and heterosexual dating.3 [The Love Island villa isolates its contestants from class stratification and makes sure everyone is skinny so the fun can begin.]
Despite its ugliness, Materialists is still romantic, sentimental, and fantastical in breaking open the feeling, the ideal, that drives why people opt into any of this dating stuff in the first place.
The film is totally broke boy propaganda, though! If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think the text supports Lucy and John staying together after the film’s end.4 My money’s out on if they’d even make it to the altar, which is one last doubt Song leaves you with. Though the surveys show over half of young Americans would marry for money over love, very few of us would ever have to choose. Song insists that Lucy’s love for John is unavoidable despite her protagonist’s best efforts and better judgment. Her take on love is that if you find it, there’s nothing (even a loveless marriage to a rich man who looks like Pedro Pascal) that could be better than having it.
My reading is in stark contrast to one of the only negative reviews of Materialists I take seriously.5 Angelica Jade Bastién writes:
[Materialists] glances at the structural issues warping heterosexual love, only to argue on behalf of the dishonest cliché that love is always enough if you choose for it to be, powerful enough even to overcome the pesky matters of class strife and misogyny.
While people claim the film’s message is repetitive or obvious, it’s clear some viewers would like that message to come as easily as it does in other films where people just happen to fall in love with people who are richer, just as rich, or just as upper-middle-class as they are.6 Those are not the same movies as Materialists, which uses hard numbers and the threat of financial instability to inform its characters’ romantic worldviews. Song multiplies and simulates that rom-com logic of monetary equity, and then demonstrates how it falls short. In Materialists, if love and wealth are the two rare conditions for a successful pairing, the statistics show that many will find love, many fewer will find wealth, and almost no one will find both.
Lucy is so troubled and unstable, because her existence as a full-time matchmaker is founded on the philosophy of selling that elusive7 both. She’s having a Truman Show style crisis of faith as she dates Harry the Unicorn, which drives her back into the arms of John whose love she couldn’t accept or believe in the past if it didn’t come with wealth. I call Materialists “fantastical” because it’s so literal about Lucy’s conundrum between the two men, like a Greek myth or an experimental play.8 Celine Song’s Materialists “syllabus” primed me to draw parallels between her film and a personal favorite, Mike Nichols’ melodrama Closer (2006). On my own, I think toward the manifesto-style dating commentary of Payton Reed’s Down With Love (2003), or (hear me out) an imaginary, really good episode of Black Mirror.
Maybe I have Black Mirror on the mind, because Materialists sits on the edge of the romance and rom-com until a darker turn that pushes it somewhere else. At the midway point of the film, Lucy finds out that one of her pickiest clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters), has been sexually assaulted on her most recent date. Though the reveal is jarring, it’s not more surprising or odd than what can happen to real-life women who date real-life men. This event is a catalyst for why Lucy finds the top of the dating mountain with Harry to be freezing cold. Her spiral shows the audience how depraved this kind of work, the commoditization of love, gets.
In the scenes where Lucy grapples with the “collateral damage” of her occupation, which drives her to seek out Sophie in person, I imagine her character as a physical embodiment of a dating app. In a costume straight out of Fincher’s The Killer (2023), Lucy trails Sophie and doesn’t let up when Sophie tells her to stop. We are not watching a good person attempting to support their friend. We are watching the tool of a company intimidate a victim and prolong their suffering. A scared, and under-informed Lucy performs the company’s dirty work to keep the system from collapsing under the weight of its unfulfilled promises: With all the money in the world and in the pursuit of the perfect match, no one can guarantee a woman finds love. No one can guarantee her safety either.
I’ve seen reviews cite Sophie’s initial portrayal as shallow, stuck-up, and undesirable as a reason her character feels unsympathetic. I wasn’t aware that victims of sexual assault needed to be morally agreeable to be worthy of our sympathy or narrative buy-in.
With the Materialists discourse, we’re seeing people get quite upset that they weren’t ready to take a rom-com (or a romance) that seriously. The film, and this plot point, is a Rorschach test for what parts of women’s experiences a viewer is tuned to consider first. If they’re attuned to the material and social realities of American dating mediated by apps, a sexual assault is a disturbing but logical progression of a fictional dating operation at scale. If one can only imagine dating for love, and is truly perplexed or even disgusted at women who earnestly try another way to consider a match, a sexual assault occurring plays like a woman’s punishment for choosing wrong, rather than an earned narrative choice that demonstrates no one can always “choose” right.
In our current world, right now, women trust services to look for love. Women isolate themselves socially in pursuit of romantic relationships. Women let their abusers walk them home. Couples get back together after five years for no good reason.
When John tries to console Lucy after she hints at something going wrong at work, he dismisses her. Lucy turns it back on him and asks if he can’t imagine something “that bad” happening, because it’s just “girl shit” to him. Dinners, flowers, wedding invitations. Once again, Materialists is very literal in pointing the finger back at us. Audiences want the girl shit, a fairytale about love and matchmaking, without the girl shit, uncertainty, danger, and women’s complicity.
If you want to calculate the material harm of Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover, that math is not for the faint of heart.
A few points for “man-hating” lyrics (+), and a few more for showcasing some kind of sex positivity (+).
Points off for having a man on her cover (-), but a few points back for the fact he’s faceless (+).
Points off for getting on her knees in public (-), but points for looking hot while doing it (+).
Points for using the ironic title of “Man’s Best Friend” (+), but only if she verbally clarifies her stance that women are not dogs in her next public statement.
Points off for having a man grab a fistful of her hair on camera (-), and additional points off if she even enjoys that sort of thing in real life (-).
I don’t think Carpenter’s album art is feminist or cleanly satirical. I also don’t think she set feminism backward by 100 years for releasing it, and it’s quite sad that many women think feminism can be toppled that easily.
While the impact of any pop cultural artifact is worth exploring, especially in an intersectional context, I have to reiterate that there is nothing bleaker than the reality of being a woman. Dating is worse than the fantasy of Materialists. An album cover of a wealthy woman simulating sexual submission is not so transgressive as to be the root cause of why women’s sexual subjugation continues to flourish.
A rape culture brainwashes women into thinking that if we play it safe and obscure the harmful patterns we’re forced into against our wishes or because of them, then men will be deprived of their pleasure. Men derive pleasure from women who wish to be submissive and women who don’t. Men sexualize a woman’s youth, purity, and innocence as much as they sexualize her dominance, power, and embodied autonomy.
Cool with the Madonna. Uncool with the whore. I don’t see how we can accept one end of things, purity and sexlessness, while pretending we’re safe from the other half as long as we don’t participate in those ways of being, such as sexy, brash, or even funny, in public or on purpose. Was Sophie in Materialists “just asking for it” when she thought she could buy a perfect partner? Is Sabrina “just asking for it” when she willingly puts herself in sexual positions?
If women live and die by men’s perception of them while making art, we will be stuck in time.
Materialists and the visuals for Man’s Best Friend make people uncomfortable. They make me uncomfortable, but it’s because they speak to some truth somewhere, that women are unsafe, and sometimes (even more likely if you’re wealthy) complicit in our current conditions. We have to be able to discuss that double bind even if the conditions of our current sociopolitical reality make that inconvenient or more high stakes. Most women, especially those in the global South, are used to their oppression being obfuscated and perpetuated regardless of who’s in office and whether or not the systems that kill them make headlines.
We have to imagine creating art for a world that will change for the better. We have to imagine we’re creating for women who will know better than to accept the basic moves of patriarchy at face value, even if they’re not equipped or ready to do so today.
In a few decades, if (or when) humans start mining landfills for precious metals, a woman will stumble upon the perfectly preserved hard plastic case of Man’s Best Friend. Maybe she’ll look back fondly. Or, maybe, she’ll look back with mild confusion about why we gave pop stars so much airtime while democracy died, and life for women and girls in the 99% got worse and worse.
pssst… song of the blog…
The left and right both have these ideals.
Long after writing this line, I learned that Celine Song appeared on the Modern Love podcast to promote the film (or maybe I found out, forgot, wrote that line, then was reminded). I haven't heard it yet, but I wonder if my reading is anything close to what she was going for.
Click those damn links!
Finding The Graduate on Song’s syllabus was so gratifying.
Like AJB, who dubs Dakota Johnson “more charming than usual here but moves like someone whose feet have never touched the ground,” your mileage may vary on the performances in Materialists. As someone who embraces their resting bitch face allegations and whose flat affect in romantic situations confuses people sometimes, I have a soft spot for our three leads and somehow found their quirks refreshing.
Two days before seeing Materialists, I watched 27 Dresses for the first time and that is totally important to consider here as another film very interested in marriage and work.
I found Pedro's performance where Harry explains how confusing he finds love really affecting! He can not be “worth” enough for Lucy to love him, Lucy’s clients cannot pay her to find someone they'll love. The real currencies in Materialists are true feelings and safety.
Fork found in kitchen Celine Song and weird ass plays.
just read, now i get to LISTEN!!! let’s gooooo, thanks for always making me think, feel, and question 🌀
loved this one very insightful sim!!