MATERIALISTS Broke Me

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Fifteen minutes before the credits hit on Celine Song’s Materialists, I realized I was full-on crying. ¹ I wasn’t sad, or moved, or swept up in romance. I was scared, the way you get scared when you are in a room alone with a lover who suddenly feels like a stranger. I felt a hole forming beneath my sternum. I scanned the actor’s faces. I hoped that something - some shred of vulnerability, some quirk - would reveal a coherent, recognizable perspective on love. Every moment I spent watching this film I fell into deeper despair. I was horrified that anybody could see themselves reflected back on the screen. This is not snarky hyperbole. This movie broke me. I cannot wrap my head around it.

For the blissfully uninitiated, Materialists follows Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker for the wealthy elite of Manhattan. At a wedding for one of her clients, she meets the brother-in-law, Harry (Pedro Pascal). He’s what those in her line of work call a “unicorn:” rich, handsome, educated, well-mannered, tasteful, and tall. Harry goes about courting Lucy, though her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), has also re-entered her life. John’s a failing actor and sometimes cater-waiter, the exact opposite of Harry. Calling it a love triangle is giving the script too much credit.

Of the three characters, Lucy is the most substantial - though this is to the film’s detriment. Dakota Johnson, who has been compelling in solid flicks like How To Be Single or the first Fifty Shades, is mostly inoffensive here. The real problem is that Lucy follows an insane, irredeemable pathology where the logic of capitalism are the direct, literal analogues to her own romantic desires. She wants to exploit others and feel financially valuable and waft in constant quiet luxury. She does not just resent John for being broke; she resents herself for wanting someone who is broke because wealth is her moral and carnal north star.

The two heartthrobs are total non-events. John is a masochistic bore. Chris Evans is unconvincing as a dork and speaks like he’s proud he could memorize his lines. Pedro Pascal is miscast, though he’s so underutilized that it takes a while to register. Beneath Harry’s old money charm, he harbors a profound insecurity that he papers over with his business acumen, which is the only thing that makes him feel confident. Harry works in “private equity” and you can tell because of his obsession with Lucy’s “intangible assets.” Anybody who has ever spoken to a successful man in his 40s could spot this type of guy from a mile away. Nobody involved seems to realize that Harry is a supervillain and his subplot winds up little more than a gentle diversion.

In case it wasn’t obvious, Materialists is bad. It is limp and weird. It is a soft movie with a few scattered pleasant moments (a fleeting conversation about Lucy’s parents arguing in the street is electric). But that breezy atmosphere gets shakier the longer the film goes on.

The movie is pretty and bright like a commercial or a Squarespace template. The soundtrack has Cat Power and Japanese Breakfast. Lucy makes 80k a year, which in moviespeak means she lives like she makes 130k a year. The film is well-versed in signifiers of money; Harry and Lucy have expensive taste that can pass the muster of the least cultured, most well-to-do customers. Everybody is beautiful, even the people who aren’t supposed to be. If you told me every interior was shot at the same Soho House I would believe you. We are told repeatedly that the restaurants characters visit are fancy though we only see food once.² Materialists is a New York movie, surely; It just so happens to be focused on the city’s least appealing, most anonymous surfaces.

Tonally, Materialists is a cross between a New Yorker story and a classic rom-com. Both of these forms have strict conventions, and Song is not deft enough to link the two.

Like the fiction in The New Yorker, Song presents the domestic plight of a petit-bourgeoise woman, with incidental detail and dramatic ironies which hint at some statement on the nature of society which is never resolved. Lucy broke up with John because he couldn’t afford city parking, she likes Harry because his money makes her feel valuable, she talks about her matchmaking clients like quantifiable assets. This is commentary without a target, empty signifiers for an unformed argument. This is not particularly worse than your average O. Henry winner, a straight-up slice-of-life about the domestic plight of the petit-bourgeoise. But I think those are usually asinine and this is too.

ohhh you’re shooting handheld and making the sound design louder to show John has a rougher life because he’s poor?

Materialists is not really a romantic comedy. There are very few proper jokes, and none of them are funny. The script’s best scenes follow the clockwork hijinx of a Nora Ephron movie (of course you meet your perfect new boyfriend at the same party where you run into your ex). But Song is resistant to abandon her arthouse tics. Characters speak slowly, wistfully. Every gesture is a small gesture. Every conversation is written like the last scene in When Harry Met Sally played at half-speed. Song is happy to kill the momentum of her thin dialogue, or subvert any formulaic catharsis, just to give her actors the opportunity to imbue scenes with pathos. Playing heightened situations with low-key realism is a tricky maneuver, and Song is not up to the task. Basking in these endless monologues and awkward quips makes the characters seem little more than stupid and cruel.

There are sporadic hints of a thornier picture. There are moments where Lucy fetishizes John for his poverty as much as she loves Harry for his wealth. There is the suggestion that Harry could grow to resent Lucy for not pursuing what he deems optimal growth. There is the possibility that John’s self-esteem is so tied up in his own money that he sees Lucy’s resentment of him as the motivation to build a better life, that toxic romance is the path to financial literary. Song includes this stuff because it is interesting, not because it is important to the story she is telling. Unfortunately, these tangents far outshine the film she chose to make.

WARNING: Actual Spoilers Below - Scroll Down To Skip

I have tried to avoid specifics in the rest of this post, but I must discuss the subplot where one of Lucy’s clients is sexually assaulted on a date. I think this is probably the most ill-advised, poorly executed story of sexual violence I have ever seen in mainstream American media. Lucy’s incredulous, naive reaction to date rape culture is about as thoughtful as an episode of SVU. The aforementioned tonal wobbliness comes to a head when Lucy stalks her client in an effort to apologize, something that would be a fine beat in a sillier movie but here reads like the precursor to a psychotic break. Most damning of all is the revelation that this is only important because it teaches Lucy that there are other things to consider when it comes to dating (i.e. not being a rapist, or, like, making sure you feel that special spark). At least it is too baffling to feel gross.

END SPOILERS

Like in Past Lives, the notion of “love” remains fantastical, elusive, and inexplicable. Song has plenty of ideas about marriage, all of them bleak and unambiguously presented in the text. But love…love is magic and needs no reason to justify its sudden appearance. When characters talk about their helpless, messy affections, it is indistinguishable from the obvious lies that Lucy tells her clients. In a movie whose characters are defined by hysterical attachment to pragmatism, the earnest shift towards mystic sentimentality makes the whole movie feel alien. What is the fantasy here? Who is this fantasy for? I am being held hostage by the Benadryl dreams of a 31 year old with a hybrid job and an Audible subscription.

John’s arc is, of course, to realize he is so irrationally in love with Lucy that he will put himself through a life to hell to remain with her. Lucy’s arc is to accept that you can’t “do the math” when it comes to romance, and that is somehow virtuous and correct for her to pursue a man she loathes and will mistreat because he does not give her what she wants out of a partnership. Harry’s arc is to accept that his money has made him perfect, no matter what insecurities he may have. At this point, sure, whatever, fuck it.

Materialists upset me deeply. I repeatedly texted my friends, “I think every character in this movie ought to kill themselves because they will never be happy.”³ For all the speechifying that bloats the film’s runtime, its politics and themes only become more inscrutable the longer I sit here writing. Even approaching it from the critical dead end of “What if it’s all satire?” can only offer equal irresolution.

The obsession with capitalism and the transactional nature of dating is meant to be “grimly realistic,” a little bait-and-switch from the genre trappings. But Song has real empathy for these lunatics, considers their vapid quarrels grounds for a little Antonioni tryst. I am not so generous. Song achieves an ambient bitterness at the cost of depth. Her characters are nothing without their devotion to narcissistic dissatisfaction. Yet that spiritual sickness offers no great philosophical insight. The tragedy of Song’s heroine is not that she is so fixated on money that she forgets about romance. It’s that she is a manipulative, anti-social bootlicker enamored with consumption above connection. Spending time with Lucy made me feel claustrophobic. Her life is so small. She is content to live detached completely from any form of reciprocity, equity, or community. She has no friends - thank god, because she would not deserve them!⁴

Look, I am working class and a girl and a romantic; I just don’t think about money or love like this. I have plenty of unpleasant, dark, selfish romantic desires. I cannot comprehend what kind of life would lead you to find this movie relatable. I flat-out do not know how Song gets here. My issue is not that this is a movie with a sad, fractured fantasy - it knows full well the bleakness of its own delusions. My issue is that the fantasy is absurd and worthy of outright condemnation, not just navel-gazing pity. I find this movie repulsive and pathetic. It freaks me out a lot.

Over the coming weeks, there will be countless think-pieces on Substack, Tiktok, and Youtube interrogating the film. They will debate whether or not it is feminist, whether rom-coms are inherently conservative, where this fits into the (already waning) class satire fad. There will be heteropessimism rehashes and personal essays about dating older rich man. Materialists is the perfect springboard for such discussions, a great excuse to put those essays out in a timely fashion, to maximize engagement. But all those hot takes on dating and class in the modern era could go up without seeing the movie itself. Materialists is a movie that could only come from 2020s American culture - our relationship to class, to our bodies, to nostalgia, to romance, to middlebrow populist art. It is also worthless.

…whew. Thank god I got that out of my system. See you next week with the Q&A. Please send some questions in if you’ve got ‘em!

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx

1. I sat in the front row because that was the last available seat in the house. I was next to a bunch of teenage girls and some older gay men. It did not hurt my neck or my eyes but it was very intense. Going to the Alamo Drafthouse feels like a time machine to 2014. I always forget how much the vibes are “fake blood, riot grrl, and graphic tees.”

2. I am not sure what to make out of the fact that the movie’s entire aesthetic feels built from a pro ana pinterest board.

3. Another text I sent: “This is a crazy pull but u know the scene in Oslo August 31 where he’s thinking about relapsing on heroin and he looks around the cafe at all the people and feels so detatched from the joys of life and can’t stand it? Every character in this movie feels the same way because they don’t have an Amex black card”

4. This movie does not pass the Bechdel test. That doesn’t matter ofc but it’s a little funny here because sometimes 80% of the convo will be about a woman and you’ll be like eh alright I give up. Then at the last second, BOOM they bring up a man she could date. This happens four times.