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Review: Nope (ArtReview)

Nope (2022), a science-fiction western written and directed by the comedian-turned-auteur Jordan Peele, is that hairiest of things, a film about the process of filmmaking. It is also, albeit perhaps less explicitly, a film about the relationship between exploitation and the cultural or cinematic gaze, and about the circumstances that might lead to someone thinking it was better to risk being eaten alive than to miss out on their big break. ‘I will cast abominable filth upon you,’ the furious Bible verse in its first frame assures us, ‘make you vile and make you a spectacle.’ Who is speaking in this context, given that the quotation contains no direct reference to God, is unclear. Likewise, we are left to wonder who exactly will be turned into a spectacle, and – to paraphrase the tagline of another film about the risk of being eaten alive under the azure skies of the desert – what will be left of them once the credits roll. Our main players are Otis ‘OJ’ Hayward and his sister Emerald, played by Daniel Kaluuya and an effervescent Keke Palmer, and they are animal wranglers, operating the only Black-owned horse farm in Hollywood in the wake of the recent and mysterious death of their father. Instantly, the dynamic between the two siblings is established: OJ, taciturn and stoic, is reluctant to engage with their obnoxious human clients on an advertising shoot, focusing all of his attention on the stallion he is training; Em, arriving late, launches immediately into a peppy, goofy, thousand-mile-an-hour safety presentation that culminates in an advertisement for her other skills, which include singing, acting, modelling, and catering. Haywood Hollywood Horses, she explains, have a unique connection to the industry, and that connection is familial: the first ever moving image was a 19th-century assemblage of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, featuring a Black jockey on a horse, and that jockey was OJ and Em’s great, great, great grandfather, Alistair Haywood. “Since the moment pictures could move,” she chirps, striking a pose like a spokescartoon in a backwards baseball cap as if she’s said this several hundred times before, “we had skin in the game.”

A story about the direct descendants of the first actor, stuntman, animal wrangler and technical star in cinematic history, and perhaps about his experiences as a Black man in the earliest moments of that industry, would be compelling enough in and of itself to justify a decent runtime. Peele, though, has other ideas – a wealth of them, jostling thrillingly and eccentrically with each other, the result being a film that somehow manages to be at once an entertaining Spielbergian romp, and an elusive work of art. To fully describe the plot of Nope is to neutralise its power to surprise; still, I believe that the film is a great achievement, either in spite of or because of its shagginess and strangeness, and as such I can think of no other way to recommend it than by outlining some of the ways it works its deranged magic. Here is the sequence of events that sends us tumbling down the rabbit-hole, or, more accurately, sucks us up into the belly of the beast: at the advertising shoot, somebody holds a mirrored VFX ball to the horse’s eyes, and the horse – seeing itself, perhaps confused or perhaps mistaking its own reflection for a predator – panics and kicks, leaving the Haywoods short of yet another job, and even shorter on hard cash. That a mirror, or a screen, can have transmogrifying and life-altering powers is a common theme in Nope; down on their luck, drowning their sorrows at the ranch, OJ and Em see something impossible-seeming in the clouds, and when it dawns on them that it must be a UFO, they decide to shoot first and ask questions later. They need “the money shot,” Em grins, loading her shopping cart with security cameras. “The undeniable, the singular – the Oprah shot.”

Even once it becomes clear that their new guest has definitely not come in peace, both brother and sister maintain that obtaining footage must take precedence over their personal safety. As decisions go, this is prima facie bonkers, and would leave the audience struggling to suspend their disbelief if we did not have prior knowledge of the Haywoods’ financial and professional situation, built on the slippery foundations of a legacy that might have allowed for Hollywood nepotism if they had been white, but which instead has furnished them with few benefits other than the opportunity for Em to coin a catchphrase. A similar dogged obstinacy characterises their neighbour, an Asian-American former child star named Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park (Steven Yeun, making a strong case for a men’s magazine cover-shoot in which he’s outfitted entirely in Nudie-style rodeo suits). Jupe once played the adopted son in a dumb but popular sitcom in which his primary co-star was a chimpanzee named Gordy, and that sitcom was abruptly cancelled after violence broke out on its set. Peele brazenly opens Nope with an extraordinary scene of Gordy, soaked in blood, wandering around a soundstage made to resemble a family home, and he adds one permanently unexplained, maybe magical-realist touch: the abandoned sneaker of a child, who lies torn and beaten with her face entirely out of view, standing upright on its toe as if worn by a ghost en pointe. More extraordinary still is Peele’s refusal to point out this eerie tableaux’s actual connection to the plot for what must be the first thirty-ish minutes of Nope’s runtime – a relative risk that I think sealed my fealty to the film, which I watched in a commercial multiplex as if it were a conventional blockbuster. When Em and OJ drop in at Jupe’s cowboy theme park, ostensibly to sell him a horse, Em’s excitable nostalgia about Jupe’s former career encourages him to reveal another of his income sources, and he lets them into a locked room filled with lit vitrines housing remnants from the set of Gordy’s Home!, one of which is the child’s plimsoll from the opening scene. Em, sweetly tactless, presses him for information about what actually happened on that fateful day, and Jupe – his voice so smooth it suggests that he has rehearsed the monologue, but his gaze so distant that we know he is remembering something awful – tells her she should watch a sketch from SNL about the incident. “Chris Kattan,” he breathes, his eyes narrowing in what might be mirth but also might be terrible psychic pain, “crushed it.”

Jupe, in other words, can only bear to revisit his on-set trauma through the lens of a fictionalised sketch, just as he has chosen to experience life itself in the uncanny surrounds of a mocked-up Wild West town, a simulacrum of traditionally white American history that is so false and flimsy that it might as well be made from cardboard. If this bit of commentary about our mutually-sabotaging relationship with the screen and its mythology is a little paging Guy Debord!, it is also simply one of many similar devices, employed in a harum-scarum manner that prevents the film from coalescing into a didactic message movie in the manner of, say, Alex Garland’s recent Men (2022). As he demonstrated with The Sunken Place in 2017’s Get Out, Peele has an eye for the cinematic, and the line between spoofing the majesty of classic Spielberg and actually recreating it is very, very thin. You want to talk about another thing that’s prima facie bonkers: how about making a movie that is in part a critique of the tyranny of the spectacle that also happens to house several discrete images that are almost impossible to describe without resorting to the word ‘spectacular’? If I appear to be struggling to explain just what Nope is trying to say, it may be because Peele does not totally explain it, either; this is fine by me, since I would rather a film have too many ideas than too few. An auteur should be an artist, and not an interpreter, and if Nope is Peele’s response to the historically exploitative relationship between the media and non-white performers, it is not his job to draw me, a white critic, a blandly elucidative diagram. I understand that Nope has been divisive. All I can say is that it provoked in me an immediate feeling, an instinctive stirring of the gut.

Speaking of animal instinct, look away now if you are dodging heavy spoilers: it turns out eventually that the alien ‘ship’ is not a ship at all, but an enormous creature, and as such its aim is not abduction, but digestion. OJ realises, significantly, that the alien will not eat its quarry if that quarry makes eye-contact with it, flashing back immediately to the kicking of that frightened horse. The idea that alien life forms would decide to behave territorially over the one Black-owned horse farm in Hollywood is, in itself, a dark joke: even extraterrestrials, Peele seems to dryly suggest, think of Black land as being up for grabs, colonialism and racism proving to be not simply global sicknesses, but intergalactic ones. When OJ points out, vis-à-vis the rule that they must not look at the alien, that abiding by an untameable predator’s behavioural codes is the best way to survive, I thought back to Emerald’s presentation for that snotty crew – her eagerness to impress, her well-rehearsed friendliness, and the way Kaluuya, in the background, allows disappointment and embarrassment to flicker across his face. Predatory human beings have their behavioural codes, too, and some of them are abominably filthy. The film’s title, at first rumoured to be an acronym for ‘not of planet earth,’ is intended, Peele has said, to mirror the ideal reaction from his viewer to its most hair-raising scenes; it is what OJ, in a shot that plays homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), murmurs gruffly as he sees that unfamiliar form hovering right over his truck for the first time. Do note, though, that it is also what Em says immediately after asking the assembled film crew whether, given that most people in the movies know who Eadweard Muybridge is, they know her great, great, great grandfather’s name. Ultimately, Nope presents a fantasy – a science fiction – in which it is the one gawking, the consumer, who ends up being consumed.

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Review: Persuasion (The New Republic)

Jane Austen has the honour and misfortune of being one of the best-loved and most adapted novelists in cinematic history, and as such, the tropes that one associates with films based on her books are well-worn enough that they feel like prime material for subversion: the skirts dragging in the dreary mud of moors; the long wait for crucial letters; the dropped gloves and the erotic charge of fingers brushing against fingers; the terse, weaponized exchanges that reveal themselves to be either delicate, coded come-ons or sly declarations of domestic warfare. Faithful Austen movies tend to fall into two categories, the best digging deep into the emotional and social aspects of the novels to draw out a universal poignancy and sweetness, and the rest being nearly indistinguishable from each other.

Every now and then, a director decides to do things differently, as when Amy Heckerling sent Emma—Austen’s 1815 novel about a “handsome, clever and rich” socialite with a tendency to involve herself in other people’s love lives—hurtling into Beverly Hills circa 1995 for Clueless, throwing out the “costume” part of “costume drama” without sacrificing the actual drama in order to prove that its heroine’s knack for sexual and social scheming was still, like, totally relevant in the age of AOL and Azzedine Alaïa. (Memorably, brilliantly, even her name received a dumb Valley Girl upgrade, turning her from Emma into Cher.) It has been a while since we were gifted a genuinely unusual and modern Austen film, and this summer two have arrived at once. With Fire Island, Andrew Ahr pulled off a queer, present-day riff on Pride and Prejudice. I am less thrilled to report that the theatre director Carrie Cracknell’s new and quasi-modernised take on Persuasion, made for Netflix, is—as Clueless’ Cher Horowitz might say—a little wack.

Cracknell’s adaptation, which had already infuriated Austen lovers prior to its release, dares to ask: What if Persuasion took place not just in the early 19th century, but at wine o’clock? What if Anne Elliot had lived, laughed, loved, endured a stultifying and emotionally deadened eight-year period of romantic grief, and then lived, laughed and loved all over again? The essential story is the same as ever—Anne loves a man named Frederick Wentworth, is persuaded not to marry him because of his low station, and then meets him again after many years of quiet mourning to discover he has risen to the rank of Captain—but the tone is, I will grant you, unlike that of any previous adaptation, maybe because it is more or less the tone of Bridget Jones’ Diary. “I’m single and thriving,” Anne (Dakota Johnson) informs the viewer in voiceover, before a montage of her chugging red wine from the bottle, crying in the bath, and lying face-down on her bed. In order to foster intimacy with the audience, and in order to capitalise on the success of a certain popular dramedy about another messy British woman who is easily persuaded to make terrible, self-injurious decisions, she looks and talks directly into the camera, her elegant eyebrows leaping as if she is trying to communicate her distress and amusement to us in Morse code.

Whether or not there is a market for a “Fleabagged” Austen adaptation is uncertain; what is certain is that Cracknell must have hoped to ape the great success of Bridgerton, another cheekily contempo-Regency production with a knack for generating Twitter comment. The primary difference between Persuasion and Bridgerton, aside from the obvious matter of the source material, is that Bridgerton is effectively a soap-opera set in an environment that resembles a Georgian theme park from the creators of Westworld—a place where it is a truth universally (not to say frequently) acknowledged that singletons of both sexes must be in want of a rogering in a library or on a spiral staircase at all times.

In lieu of erotic titillation or fantasy fodder, what is meant to be on offer in Persuasion is relatability porn: a sense that in spite of her having lived two centuries before our current era, Anne Elliot is—as the tabloids say, erroneously, of stars—just like us. The conceit fails, for two reasons. The first is that in order for us to relate to Anne’s romantic plight, the film need only have used Austen’s actual language. The second issue is the inconvenient fact that Dakota Johnson, the daughter of Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, is not one iota “like us,” and her very difference from us is the source of all her charm.

The desire to bring Jane Austen closer to the present day is eminently understandable, if only because period dramas are too often made with such unfeeling deadness that they seem to forget that for their protagonists, this was in fact the present, just as fuelled by sex and “new” technology and fashion as our society is now. Austen’s heroines, too, are often in and of themselves ahead of their own patriarchal times, nurturing a kind of proto-feminist viewpoint and conducting themselves in accordance with it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if a historical subject is to be radically reimagined with a contemporary edge, it must be transformed either with such grace—like Greta Gerwig’s sublime Little Women, which drew almost all of its additional material from supplementary texts by Louisa May Alcott—or with such startling eccentricity—like Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, whose modernity had almost nothing to do with its dialogue, and almost everything to do with its acidic, frankly sexual and surrealist tone—that the result becomes less adaptation than homage.

Persuasion is not properly seditious, given that its set design and general visual style are faithful to the letter, at least by the standards of the typical Austen adaptation. The screenplay’s ill-advised tendency to refer to its yearning leads as “exes,” however, will no doubt rile fans of the original text, ensuring that it falls between two (handsomely upholstered) stools. Modernised dialogue appears only in places—not consistently, but piecemeal, as if the film is attempting to decide whether or not it’s really serious about the whole endeavour. “If you’re a five in London,” one character offers, “you’re a ten in Bath.” “A playlist he made me,” Anne nods to the camera, proudly showing off a handful of sheet music gifted to her by her lover in happier times. Jokes about the differences between the sexes and groanworthy innuendos, meanwhile, are intended to feel naughty and surprising by dint of their presence in an adaptation of a novel from the 1800s, but recall nothing so much as familiar gags from 90s sitcoms: Women should act dumb to land a man, men tend not to listen to their wives, Anne is not “interested in receiving instruction on where to put [her] bushel,” and so on, all of it adding up to suggest we might be watching a two-hundred-year-old episode of King of Queens.

The casting of Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, meanwhile, is at once one of the film’s most interesting choices, and one of its biggest stumbling blocks. “One’s family is only escapable by two things,” Anne observes dryly fairly early in the film: “Marriage, and death.” In Johnson’s mouth, the quip takes on a metatextual air of irony, since neither death nor marriage would negate the fact that she’s third-generation movie royalty—because a lover of cinema can look at her and immediately see sixty-odd years of Hollywood history, it is difficult to think of her as Anne, plain Anne, a lonely spinster. The assurance in her manner and the playful, wickedly dismissive attitude she brings to her best roles add up to a very particular charisma, no doubt moulded by the knowledge that while many other actresses have to adjust to being famous after beginning their lives as mere civilians, she has been born into the job as if “A Lister” were a hereditary title. The fact Johnson wears her stardom in the same light, enviable way a very wealthy person might wear a mink coat or a diamond bracelet makes her an intriguing presence, at her best when she is being dry and sarcastic, maybe even a touch ribald or unkind. It also makes her, on the face of it, an unusual choice to play Anne Elliot, a woman so wounded by the unravelling of a love affair that she has chosen to close off her heart and soul like unused rooms in a grand mansion.

There is, of course, a way to make a subtly modernized and playful Austen adaptation with élan, as Autumn De Wilde did with her 2020 take on Emma starring Anya Taylor Joy. Based on a novel that already lends itself far more to wicked humour than Persuasion, De Wilde’s film had the distinction of not altering the authenticity of the language, but still managing to maintain a current of thrilling electricity beneath its pomp. There is a charge evident in the way its stifling, Wes-Andersonian aesthetic emphasises its anti-heroine’s cruellest gestures, as if the entire movie were a candied apple with a razorblade inside it, or in the fact Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance sometimes veers towards the mannerisms of a noughties socialite, all modelesque strut and bratty pout and perma-scanning Terminator eyes. There is certainly a charge evident in the scene in which its dashing Mr Knightley, played by Johnny Flynn, is stripped bare by his servants for no reason other than to inject some rare sex appeal into the story’s central romance, eschewing double-entendres in favor of real flesh.

Above all else, De Wilde’s film pulled contemporary touches out of Austen’s prose itself, as in the scene where Emma bluntly says that she has no wish to be married because, among other things, she has no need for “employment.” What more could the men-are-from Mars-women-are-from-Fleabag winking of Persuasion possibly have to add to the conversation about marriage that Jane Austen, centuries earlier, had not already pointed out with characteristic rapier wit?

Speaking of currents of electricity: at one point in Cracknell’s film, Anne describes the experience of being listened to by Wentworth as “electrifying.” Of all of the film’s anachronisms, this might be the most intriguing, as electricity had not reached the domestic sphere in 1817 when Austen’s novel was first published. If this is deliberate, it is a fairly good joke, drawing attention to the fact that Anne is out of step with her surroundings, one adorkably clumsy foot placed on the slippery future. If it is an error, it is funny in a different kind of way. If there is any electricity in Persuasion, it is Johnson who is acting as the generator; it’s a pity the film fails to harness it effectively enough to be persuasive in its vision.

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On Birth (Texte Zur Kunst)

The fact that Jonathan Glazer’s *Birth* (2004) is a depressing film has less to do with the fact it is about grief than with the fact that it is about true love being a total sham—yes, Nicole Kidman’s Anna, who moves through the movie with the air of one half-dreaming, is so deranged by her longing for her expired husband that she’s willing to resort to theoretical pedophilia, but the film’s real tragedy is that all of this derangement is in vain. On its face, *Birth* is about the possibility of reincarnation, and it is also about the lengths a grieving person is willing to go to in order to reconnect with someone dead. Actually, it is about just how little we know about those we love, who are about as likely to reveal all of themselves to us in life as they are to, for instance, reappear to us a decade after dying in the new and unfamiliar body of a child. Its plot is, to say the least, provocative, a thought experiment about metempsychosis that seems poised to tip over into being an erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman and a ten-year-old boy. As it opens, Anna, who has just agreed to marry her tedious new boyfriend, is celebrating her mother’s birthday at a party when she is approached by a small, serious youth claiming to be the reincarnation of her husband, who dropped dead ten years earlier while jogging in the park. At first, she disbelieves him; later, desperately and irrationally, she begins to change her mind. Sean, the boy, knows things that only Sean, the man she married, could have known, and the child’s stillness and unsmiling manner are unnerving, making him seem preternaturally mature. Things take a turn for either the sickening or the darkly comic, depending on your perspective: Anna, hanging around Sean-the-boy, begins discussing their future, even asking him how he intends to please her in the same ways Sean-the-man did, given that he’s ten years old and presumably does not yet understand sex.

The film’s solution to its edgy central question is, ultimately, entirely un-supernatural, and has to do with a cache of buried letters that the child has unearthed in a nearby park; written by Anna for her husband, who then callously gave them unopened to his mistress for her to dispose of, their intimacy has bewitched Sean-the-boy so deeply that he has begun to believe his own lie about reincarnation. If this sounds like an extremely convoluted way for *Birth* to rationalize the first 90-or-so minutes of its runtime, it’s because it *is* extremely convoluted, and its convolution has led numerous critics to suggest that they do not entirely buy the answer Glazer has provided to the mystery. (How, for instance, does the child know where Sean died, given that this would not have been recorded in the letters?) Robbed of any spiritual dimension, however, *Birth* is an admirably dark film. When the boy tells Anna that he knows he is not Sean because, unlike Sean, he actually loves her, it is almost unbearably painful, a rebuke not only to the idea that there is life after death, but to the idea that life on Earth is beautiful or meaningful enough to be worth bothering to return to in the first place. The film’s visual style, gorgeous and stately but not all that warm or human, adds to *Birth*’s uncanniness, its suggestion of a world that is rich in the sense of being literally infused with cash, but not rich in experience or pleasure or essential value. Obviously, money cannot buy us happiness; *Birth* reminds us that it cannot buy us love or undo – or even defer – death itself.

*Birth*’s most iconic scene shows Anna at the opera, seconds after she has first begun to think that little Sean might be the real deal. Glazer lets the camera draw in on her face, and we watch huge waves of emotion crash over and over again on her features – anguish, ecstasy, anguish, ecstasy, and so on. The first time around, it seems as if we’re watching her begin to hope again in real time. Once we know the film’s conclusion, it becomes obvious that what we are watching is the gradual, unstoppable approach of madness. Over the years, Nicole Kidman herself has become more opaque and mysterious, and her age – physically, if not chronologically – has become indeterminate, all of these things springing from the apparent cosmetic freezing of her face. That it is considered to be more professionally advantageous for a powerhouse actress to immobilize her most valuable tool than it is for her to dare to be middle-aged is a Hollywood rule so terribly perverse that, much like Glazer’s final answer to the spooky mystery of *Birth*, any explanation for it feels inadequate. The opera scene is, I think, partly remarked upon as a result of the delicate mobility of Kidman’s features, and for the way it functions as a time capsule of her obvious skill. In this sense, the sequence is about something lost, too, and as such is capable of inducing a feeling like grief in the viewer. If actresses could die and find themselves reincarnated in bodies that were several decades younger, dying itself might become a popular cosmetic procedure – a means to escape the looping madness of continually trying to cheat time by trimming off five or ten years with fillers or Botox, and then having to redouble one’s efforts once the aesthetician’s spell wears off. As it stands, the only extant option is a kind of self-delusion, a willingness to suspend one’s disbelief, against all logic, and believe that it is possible to regain youth in increments.

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On Men As Movie Monsters (The i Paper)

When news of the release of the writer-director Alex Garland’s latest horror film first made its way to social media, its title was received with glee: in our post-Me-Too era, it was only logical that we’d eventually arrive at the chilling one-word Men, as if men themselves were following in the footsteps of The Mummy, Dracula, The Wolf Man and all of the other Universal monsters in becoming the titular antagonists of a very scary movie. Maybe Men would be expanded as a franchise, spawning sequels like Me(n) Too, or Men 3: Mensplaining; maybe we would see men storming shopping malls à la Dawn of the Dead looking for women to harass, or rushing in through open fireplaces like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds, shrieking phrases like “well, actually” at a deafening pitch. That it was set to feature an entire village of men played by Rory Kinnear, making Kinnear the de facto representative of terrible maleness, did not do much to dispel the idea that what we were about to experience was the birth of an almighty meme. Ah yes, the internet nodded, wryly, the two genders.

As it turns out, Garland’s film is closer to the version imagined by Twitter than one might have hoped, a Men Are Trash: The Movie riff on contemporary folk horror. It follows a woman, Harper, who has rented a remote Air B’n’B in a bucolic English village in the wake of a personal tragedy, only to discover that the townsmen may not be entirely what they seem. A blustering landlord, a nude wildman of the woods, a dark and unpleasant priest, an insensitive policeman and a bratty child, all either played by Kinnear or featuring Kinnear’s CGIed face, embody archetypes of awful maleness, unleashing microaggressions and more serious acts of violence more or less from the first minute of her stay. Subtlety is not the order of the day. (Garland, in a move that had me praying her character would not turn out to be called Eve, elects to show our heroine stealing an apple from a tree and biting into it when she first arrives at the house.) In spite of being played by the tremendous Jessie Buckley, Harper may as well be credited as Woman, her home life and history and work life all remaining mysterious to us in a move that feels surprising for a film about misogyny. Ultimately, Men shares certain qualities with Edgar Wright’s nominally feminist 2021 meta-horror Last Night in Soho, which starred Anya Taylor-Joy: both films waste talented actresses by casting them as broad feminine symbols to be terrorised by men, and both have the distinct air of being made by men who’ve only just discovered how terrible sexism is. “Can you believe men act like this?” Garland appears to ask his audience. “Duh,” the female viewer can’t help but reply.

Aside from anything else, is a horror movie about men really that new or radical in 2022, when gory genre films have been warning us about systemic misogyny for many, many years already? Cast your mind all the way back to February 2020, in those last innocent days before the Covid-19 pandemic, and recall the release of Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which pitted a brilliantly hysterical Elizabeth Moss against her character’s unseen and physically abusive ex, an evil tech billionaire who has developed an invisibility suit. The film takes the invisible man trope and applies it to the metaphorical invisibility of intimate partner violence—the suggestion that if women cannot definitively provide physical proof of their own suffering, they must be imagining things, or must be mad. As an allegory, it is airtight; its core message, though, is not all that dissimilar from that of the 2000 film Hollow Man, a sick riff on the invisible man character made by the director-provocateur Paul Verhoeven. In that movie, Kevin Bacon’s sleazy scientist takes immediate advantage of his unseen status to harass, stalk, sexually assault and generally peer at women, with Verhoeven heavily implying that the choice to do so was predictable as a result of his being, well, a red-blooded American man. Whannell’s film condemns abusers; Verhoeven’s comes dangerously, spicily close to saying “yes, all men.”

Often, men are cast as the antagonists in horror films because of their supposed greater strength, or their supposedly greater capacity for great violence; they are sometimes written as having been driven mad by women in the first place, shaped by terrible mothers or cruel lovers or romantic loneliness. Looking for a film in which a man—a husband, more specifically—is literally the emissary of the devil? Try 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, in which a terrified, gamine Mia Farrow is impregnated in a Satanic ceremony, then gaslit into madness. How about one in which a sexually inadequate man murders his wife for supposedly being unfaithful, and then shirks responsibility for the crime in his own mind by imagining he has transformed into someone else more masculine and cool? You must be thinking of Lost Highway, David Lynch’s 1997 film in which the embodiment of evil is a character called The Mystery Man. In American Psycho, Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, the social and cultural destructiveness of rich white masculinity on Wall Street takes deadly physical form, in the shape of a murderous Christian Bale; in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the 2020 Charlie Kaufman film also starring Jessie Buckley, the main female character is revealed to exist entirely in the mind of a male stalker, who alters her hour by hour to fit his moods and his desires like a terrible puppet-master. Even the often-misogynistic Lars von Trier, the most likely candidate to make a horror movie with the title Women, gave his male serial killer in The House That Jack Built a monologue that poked fun at a specific kind of men’s rights activist: the aggressor who mistakenly believes he is a victim. “Why is it always the man’s fault?” Jack whines irritably, moments before doing something truly awful to a woman’s breasts. “Women are always the victims, right? And men, they're always the criminals.” Turn your attention to the entire slasher genre, meanwhile, and you’ll find innumerable men chasing down women, huge suggestive knives gleaming in moonlight, looking to exact revenge for their own lust.

Thinking about what was not quite progressive or interesting enough about Men, it occurred to me that what it lacked was a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of how patriarchy affects men and women, beyond simply saying that men are scum. The critic Masha Tupitsyn once observed admiringly of Sam Peckinpah, the director of Straw Dogs, that he “understood one thing very well: everyone is afraid, and should be afraid, of men—a world of men—including other men.” Men, in other words, do not benefit from their supremacy as a monolith, and the pressure on them to embody a specific kind of masculinity is its own kind of horror movie. As it happens, Garland has already made one pleasingly unsettling movie about men and their impulses. In 2014’s Ex Machina, two men fight for the ownership of a woman, or a ‘woman’—a beautiful female robot played by Alicia Vikander, who has been built by an eccentric and mysterious CEO named Nathan Bateman (Oscar Issaac) in accordance with the sexual preferences of one of his dorky employees (Domhnall Gleeson). Ostensibly, Caleb, the employee, has been tasked with figuring out if the robot, Ava, is able to pass the Turing test, which determines whether or not a machine is capable of independent thought or feeling. What this means is that the central tension of the movie has to do with a decision about whether Ava should be treated like a person, and the two men who are making it are, respectively, a powerful sexist pig, and a Nice Guy who believes that chivalry and being patronising amount to the same thing. Ava, seeing her two options, has enough Artificial Intelligence to pander to the drippy Caleb, use him to break free, and escape leaving him trapped and Nathan dead. All, as the bard once said, are punished. In Ex Machina, there was no need for Garland to give every man the same terrible face—all that was needed was for us to watch as Ava broke into the human world, free at last, and know that she would meet a hundred or a thousand more men just like Nathan or like Caleb when she got there, all of whom would doggedly pursue her as if she was the last pretty girl on earth.

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Review: Angelyne (Artforum)

Now that the true identity of the eccentric Los Angeles personality Angelyne—the titular subject of a new five-part, lightly fictionalised biography on Peacock—has been thoroughly exposed, one question still remains: is she a celebrity, or she a performance artist? Known for appearing on a series of eye-popping billboards across LA, beginning in 1984 and peaking in the 90s with 200 simultaneous ads, she is a self-made, heavily augmented pin-up who has been famous for being famous since Kim Kardashian was in preschool. Barbie-like, almost comically pneumatic, she was never advertising anything on those billboards other than her own existence, making the whole project an interesting commentary on the hollow, facile nature of Hollywood stardom in itself.  If she is a celebrity, she is exactly the kind of celebrity that drives cultural purists mad, being both very sexualised and absolutely pointless. If she is an artist, how might I describe her? I would say that Angelyne is what might happen if, instead of being married and then horribly divorced, Jeff Koons and Cicciolina had been spliced together in an experiment and forced to occupy a single body. She is Cindy Sherman if, instead of slipping on a thousand different personalities, she had spent four decades embodying and re-embodying one, letting it overtake her until she eventually went at least a little mad.

In case you haven’t guessed, I think that Angelyne is probably a genius, and I also think it’s possible to argue that she is significant, a fascinating figure who deserves genuine art historical respect. Accordingly, I was somewhat nervous to watch Angelyne, which arrives at the peak of what I might describe as the Gillespiefication of the recent history of celebrity women. With I, Tonya and the recent series Pam and Tommy, the director Craig Gillespie has pioneered a distinctive, controversial style of biopic, focusing specifically on women who have weathered either scandal or derision, and injecting an irreverent, prankish strain of black comedy into their stories that can be read as playfully punk or terribly unkind depending on the audience’s viewpoint. Although Gillespie has not actually worked on Angelyne, its creator is his Lars and the Real Girl screenwriter Nancy Oliver, and the show shares some stylistic DNA with his material. Present are the brash and flashy needle-drops; the all-caps, brightly-coloured titles; the actress hiding underneath prosthetics; the humorously conflicting reports of events, delivered either via simulated interviews or through replayed and edited scenes. Happily, though, Angelyne diverges from the recent Pam and Tommy in particular in its handling of the buxom blonde babe at its centre: where that series’ Pamela Anderson was too often depicted as a simpering naïf, Angelyne is fully credited as the canny architect of her own image, describing herself “as a Rorschach test, but in pink.”

The show is in part an adaptation of a piece that ran in 2017 in The Hollywood Reporter, revealing that in spite of her previous claims that she had been born either in the U.S. or in outer space, Angelyne was the child of Polish Jews who’d met in the Chmielnik ghetto during WWII, and that her family had emigrated to Los Angeles in 1959. Wanting to reinvent herself as an American woman, it occurred to Angelyne in the early seventies that there was no more effective way to become American than to become very famous, and that being famous for being blonde and having an enormous bosom would be more American still. (Pamela Anderson, lest we forget, had a similar idea, having moved to L.A. from British Columbia.) “I'm something you have to feel, something you have to experience,” she tells an interviewer in the show, the line so smooth and generic that it might as easily be used to advertise a car, a chocolate bar, or a new brand of razors. Emmy Rossum, lacquered in a metric tonne of makeup, approximates Angelyne’s babyish purr and Betty-Boop-ish mannerisms to a tee; she also lends her an interesting blend of business savvy and dissociated otherworldliness, with the episodes dissolving into fantasy whenever Angelyne feels life becoming too real. Does Angelyne think of its titular platinum weirdo as an artist? Well, like many artists, its version of her lives almost entirely in her head, using pain as inspiration for her practice. Like some artists I can think of, too, she balances an avowed interest in “bring[ing] the consciousness of all mankind a few steps higher” with a passion for material goods and personal wealth. “Your car is supposed to be an extension of you,” she says about her famous pink Corvette, sounding for all the world like J. G. Ballard Barbie. Later in the show, appearing as talk-show guest, she proves that even if she was once the daughter of Polish immigrants, she is now as American as they come. The host asks why she wanted to be famous in the first place, and she looks at him as if he is an idiot. “Well, to make money,” she says, smiling. “Isn’t money adorable?”

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On Pleasure, Porn Sets And Larry Sultan (Pin-Up)

About an hour into Pleasure, Ninja Thyberg’s graphic, deeply unsensual new film about the adult movie industry, a pair of fledgling porn stars are shown hiking in the Hollywood hills with the eventual intent of seeing the Hollywood sign. Bella, a nineteen-year-old whose real name is Linnéa, has recently moved to Los Angeles from Sweden, and her dream is to become the most successful porn performer in the city, maybe in the world. If she has any other aspirations, Pleasure is not all that interested in exploring them, making it appear as if she had been born the moment her size 6 stilettoes first touched American soil outside the airport. Thyberg means for her pretty blonde lead, whose soft face makes her resemble a competitor-brand Chloë Grace Moretz, to represent an archetype, an ambitious girl being chewed up by an industry that runs on female flesh. In the hiking scene, she grumbles, stopping short, sounding like a whining child; her companion, a Floridian named Joy, turns on her heel to gee her up. “I’m just not interested in seeing that sign,” pouts Bella, ��I know what it looks like.” “Don’t you want to see anything in L.A. beside a fucking porn set?” Joy shoots back, annoyed. “No,” Bella grunts. Because Pleasure is set in the present day, the porn sets Joy and Bella see—and by proxy, the ones we see—are almost impossible to tell apart: white McMansions, leased out as Air B’n’Bs or rented on a daily basis, decked out in the manner of a model home. Always, there is an enormous slouching couch, either in a stain-revealing cream, or in functional wipe-clean pleather; always, there are one or two bright canvases that might well have been bought in haste at an IKEA, usually of abstract splashes. Often, there is an arrangement of cut flowers in a glass vase, looking worryingly like the kind of flower arrangement viewers might remember from the home of an elderly relative or, perhaps, a hospital. (If the sets were minimalist in a slightly chicer sense, we might have banked on an appearance by the famous LC4 chaise lounge, but the kind Bella performs on in the movie are more Walmart-cum-Wayfair than Le Corbusier.) All Pleasure’s simulated porn environments look, in other words, convincingly like many sets that currently appear on the front-page of PornHub, reflecting a move in current porn towards speedy and high-volume production, which necessitates that sets now look as empty and as transient as a hotel room one might stay in for a conference.

Perhaps contemporary porn sets’ nearness to the anonymous rooms of conference hotels is easily explicable—porn is, after all, a business, and although Thyberg portrays Bella’s experiences in the industry as a lurid arc and crash of brutality and disgust, Pleasure is at its heart a morality tale about sexism and mistreatment in the workplace. The anonymousness of the houses Bella works in, each one separated by long stretches of equally-anonymous L.A. freeway, are an interesting mirror for our heroine: however many times she insists that she isn't “like the other girls,” her success is predicated on her ability to do all the things the other girls do, and look conventionally sexy as she does them, so that any personality traits or signs of personal taste she does display eventually begin to seem like the equivalent of those bright IKEA canvases as far as individuality is concerned. (Overlook some of the body parts in play, and porn is not entirely different from Hollywood acting—to succeed, one has to be convincingly emotional, attractive in a way that fits into a very narrow set of parameters, willing to work hard and for long hours, and able to overlook a degree of harassment and, occasionally, trauma. One interesting, crucial difference, aside from the obvious: it is one of the few fields where women get paid more than men.) During scenes where Thyberg shows the action from Bella’s perspective—in particular, in one where she is looking at a middle-aged co-star’s feet on a white couch—I thought about the photographs of Larry Sultan, the Brooklyn-born, San-Fernando-Valley-raised practitioner who shot on porn sets in the early noughties, focusing not on the action but on the surrounding décor. The Valley, the resulting book, is full of beautifully composed and refreshingly un-alienating images of various porn performers, the mood often either contemplative or knowingly coy: a pair of shapely legs in black foam platforms kicking into shot beside an ultra-70s stone fireplace and a towering yukka; the pale curve of an ass offset by overlapping patterned throw rugs; a petite bleach-blonde girl perching on a sweep of pale-pink fabric on the bed, set into sharp relief by floor-length, purple curtains.

No two houses in The Valley look the same, even if they share a similar lived-in nouveau-riche aesthetic. Sultan first became interested in photographing porn sets after a 1998 magazine assignment during which, entering a Los Angeles family home that was still full of family photographs and domestic detritus, he was greeted by six naked women in slithering, fleshy heap. “It was as if the family had vanished,” he observed, “and this strange new family had come in.” “In The Valley, I wasn’t interested in pornography as a phenomenon,” he told an interviewer in 2008, “but in how it uses domesticity as a narrative. The sex industry can be such a tired, worn-out subject, but when it’s imported into kitchens and dining rooms of a middle class suburban home, something new opens up.” In other words, what drew Sultan to the sets he documented was a different kind of banality: one that had nothing to do with anonymity or emptiness, but with the fact that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families all express their individuality in their homes in ways that are alike, intending to telegraph good taste or status or domestic bliss. “The home,” he said, “is so much about theatre.” A lived-in home and an adult production, then, are not as unlikely a fit as one might think, since what is more about theatricality—the performance of a heightened version of a particular, universal facet of human experience—than porn? When we talk about “interiors porn,” what we mean are gratifying images that offer us a glimpse into somebody else’s home life, even if that life is staged; as in a sexual fantasy, we project ourselves into the image, what is or is not attainable being made irrelevant in the face of desire.

Near the end of Pleasure, Bella finally has a shoot in a house that more closely resembles something from The Valley, looking out-of-time and baroque in a way that, even if it is in bad taste, certainly reveals taste of some kind on the part of its inhabitants. Walking in, she passes an extraordinary living room decked out in pseudo-antique furniture, upholstered in pale velveteen, and a newel pole at the foot of a spiral staircase that is topped with a large sculpture of a cherub; her black heels rap out a rhythm on a milk-white marble floor, keeping time. In the bedroom where the film is to be made, there is a canopy bed in filigreed gold and deep royal purple, everything looking as if it had been purchased by Louis XIV if Louis XIV were a present-day pimp with no knack for colour-matching. It is Bella’s first scene with another, far more famous girl, a stuck-up professional rival; the director means the mood to be romantic, meaning that he’s presumably chosen the location to imply a certain classiness, a nod to paperback romance novels or to raunchy period movies in which this home might be the home of a tycoon, or a prince.  Because Bella has by this point been left traumatised by a rough shoot that seemed to tip over into something like rape, and because the other actress is her professional nemesis, she takes the opportunity to sour the scene, turning things dark—an intrusion of the painful and the real into a frothy theatrical simulation. If they are playing house, Bella has cast herself as the frightening, domineering daddy. The contrast between the action and the setting suggests what Sultan described as “domestic disorder,” a phenomenon in which “what is cozy and homey is made uncanny and unsettled.” Once the film was over, I felt moved to fire up PornHub and assess the accuracy of Pleasure’s set design, clicking through thumbnail after thumbnail of sterile white décor until finally, one clip stopped me short—a video by an amateur performer, seemingly made in her studio flat, in which the ubiquitous sectional couch had been appended with a single slogan cushion, turned so obviously to face the camera that I felt sure she had put it there deliberately to make a joke: THERE IS NO PLACE, it read, LIKE HOME.

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Review: Pleasure (Reverse Shot)

“Business, or pleasure?”, a petite and perky blonde is asked at airport customs, in the first scene of a new film about porn by Ninja Thyberg. It’s a funny, caustic opener for a movie that defies its title: Pleasure, which has struggled to achieve release since its Sundance debut in 2021 due to its thoroughly graphic nature, is all business, and its forthright sexual scenes are not technically pornographic in the sense that nobody entirely sane would find them pleasurable to masturbate to. Linnéa (Sofia Kappel), a 19-year-old from Sweden, has arrived in Los Angeles with the goal of making it in two distinct but overlapping senses of the phrase; her face, which has a babyish, Chloë Grace Moretz quality that suggests she might be perfect casting for an adult spoof of Clouds of Sils Maria, betrays no hint of anything but boredom when she answers “pleasure.”

Thyberg’s film appears to be as disinterested in exploring its principal character’s motivations as she is in expressing them to her peers, her co-stars, or her management. Linnéa is a gorgeous blank, physically interchangeable with hundreds of her bare and barely legal equivalents, and opaque enough that anybody watching her might find it easy to convince themselves that she is doing what she does for fun. “Like, seriously, my dad raped me when I was young,” she tells her minder when he asks why she’s in L.A. making porn, before laughing and suggesting that she’s actually out there because Swedes “just suck.” Her unwillingness to offer up a serious response reminded me of an essay by the brilliant writer and adult performer Lorelei Lee, in which they argue that doing sex work is “as good and as terrible as other, lower-wage work.” “I knew the work was not how anti-sex-work feminists described it,” Lee suggests. “I did sex work for the same reason I had always done wage labor: because I needed the money.” The most interesting and provocative reason Thyberg could have given for Linnéa’s career, in other words, is the un-thrilling reason almost everybody has for going to work: to pay the bills, to secure housing, and to live.

Renaming herself “Bella Cherry,” Linnéa throws herself immediately into performing, doing her first scene with a paunchy middle-aged man and then delightedly Instagramming a picture of her face covered in semen. She moves into an unpretty model home with a small band of other female porn stars, one of whom—a mouthy, thick-skinned firebrand named Joy—fast becomes her closest friend, with the caveat that they will eventually, inevitably become professional rivals. Men who work with Linnéa, whether co-stars or directors, often employ the same wheedling brand of faux-feminist coaxing to convince her to go through with acts she might otherwise not. “I feel like that’s all just part of stage fright, and so you just have to overcome it and push past it,” her first director informs her when she’s struggling to do the scene, adding airily but entirely unconvincingly, “no pressure.”

About halfway through the film, emboldened by an experience doing a rough scene with a female, feminist porn auteur, she agrees to do a gangbang she imagines will be similarly choreographed; instead, it turns into a situation she will later describe as a rape, not quite nonconsensual but not fully consensual, either. The first time she begs off, eyeliner dripping down her cheeks, she is met with coos and sweetness. “Are you okay, honey?” one performer asks. “It’s just a show, and you’re a tough girl, right?” “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” another adds. “You want to finish, don’t you?” When Linnéa does not, gentle encouragement turns swiftly to disgust: “You’re fucking with everyone else’s money,” the director snarls. “You think I’m going to pay for half a scene? Everything you just did was for nothing.” Linnéa, it would seem, is a honey and a tough girl and a rising star with agency right up until the moment her decisions start to cost her superiors money, at which point she reverts back to being a commodity, instead.

If Pleasure has very few antecedents as far as explicit films about the manufacture of pornography are concerned, it does fit into a long line of movies about young women traveling to Los Angeles looking for fame, briefly ascending to stardom, and then being eaten alive by the industry that made them. In this sense, it is an interesting blend of clever art-house edge and cinematic Chick tract, portraying our heroine’s experience in pornographic films as a classic rise and fall, and her willingness to hand over both her body and her soul as a devil’s bargain with the patriarchy. The image of a bright-eyed and hopeful starlet stepping off a Greyhound bus is an enduring cliché; if Linnéa does not have the innocence and Canadian politeness of one Betty Elms, the would-be actress in Mulholland Drive who disembarks at LAX and exclaims, sweetly, “I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I’m in this dream place,” she certainly ends up living out a similar nightmare, following Betty’s lead in taking out her fury on another woman by committing what amounts to borderline sexual assault. (Like Lynch’s Inland Empire, too, Pleasure is the tale of an aspiring star turned “woman in trouble,” and in places it suggests the moment in that movie where a terrified and terrifying Laura Dern exclaims: “I’m a whore! Where am I? I’m afraaaaaid.”) With the introduction of the icy and successful Ava, a high-ranking Spiegler girl with a delicate gothic look that recalls that of the adult performer Stoya, there are traces of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 Showgirls, with its Sodom and Gomorrah attitude to sex work and its warring female leads, one blonde and one brunette. “Must be weird, not having someone cum on you,” somebody tells that movie’s sort-of-heroine Nomi Malone after she graduates from working at a low-rent strip club to performing at the Stardust. For Linnéa, having only one person ejaculating on her constitutes a slow day at the office, bringing new meaning to the old inquiry “working hard, or hardly working?”

Pleasure’s closest cousin may not be a film at all, but a TV series originally made for Channel Four, then aired by HBO. Adult Material, a four-part drama based on an original screenplay by the playwright Lucy Kirkwood, tells the story of an adult actress who performs under the pseudonym Jolene Dollar. Unlike Linnéa, she is an industry veteran, and at 33 years old she is considered to be reaching the tail-end of her career. As played by Haley Squires, Jolene—whose real name is also Haley—is a fully rounded character, gentle and pragmatic and maternal and, beneath it all, as strong as steel. As in Pleasure, there are moments of high drama in Adult Material, and its A-plot is just as concerned with toxic male behavior in the workplace. (One character, a performer called Tom Pain who is eventually revealed to be a serial rapist, appears to be based at least in part on the now-disgraced pornographic actor James Deen.) Still, some of its sharpest moments are those in which Jolene’s work life is revealed to be as boring as most others, as when she offers a sympathetic ear to her male co-star as they gripe about planning permission and conservatory building while both naked from the waist down, or when she runs through a list of errands in her head in voiceover while being penetrated. When Jolene is called in to discuss her daughter’s bad behaviour at the private high school she attends, she is quick to point out to the supercilious headmistress that her money, whether or not she has earned it on her knees, is just as good as other parents’, if not better. “Do you know what Paulie’s dad does for a living?” she asks, jutting out her chin. “He makes bullets. And you named a sports hall after him.”

Jolene, who has by her own admission fucked a great number of men, has never made the tools with which to kill one—that her career is seen as more shameful than that of a man who manufactures bullets is reflective of a tendency to think of porn as inherently evil or corrupting, when in fact it ought to be seen as a specialized, demanding job whose workers deserve to be treated with appropriate dignity and care. In the final scenes of Pleasure, Linnéa books a scene with Ava, and because she has been scarred by her experience with the gangbang—and because she perceives Ava as being too stuck-up, too perfect, too unflappable—she begins to penetrate her with a strap-on so forcefully and so mercilessly that the act tips over from erotic to aggressive. Linnéa treats her co-star like a prop to be destroyed, and like a good girl Ava acquiesces without comment. Once the shoot is over, the two women sit together in the back seat of a car en route to an event, and Linnéa tells Ava she is sorry. “What for?” Ava replies, her snow-white face as expressionless as a doll’s.

It is possible that Linnéa’s continual blankness has been meant to lead up to this revelatory moment, in which Thyberg implies that the secret to success as a female adult performer is being able to do what the writer Kate Zambreno calls, in her 2011 novel Green Girl, the “magic trick of going dead inside.” Green Girl is another story about a young woman who is new to the unpleasant, tiring world of work, although its central character, Ruth, sells perfume at a counter rather than performing sex on camera. The principle, though, is similar: in order to sell the product, which is actually the girl, some emptying-out is needed to allow for the insertion of a fantasy. Pleasure is certainly a smart film, and it looks fantastic—in addition to its porn sets being appropriately soulless and Los Angelean, there is a hyper-millennial, candy-coloured lacquer to its various party and promotional scenes, approximating a dead-split between a Glossier photo-shoot and a mid-noughties music video. In an increasingly puritanical cinematic landscape, it also ought to be commended for its explicit nature and its literal nakedness. Thyberg’s screenplay, though, might have done a more thorough job of fleshing out Linnéa, who for all her suffering and tears remains in some respects almost as one-dimensional as a character in an actual pornographic film throughout. It would have been rather more interesting, too, if Pleasure had incorporated more of the kind of workplace banality that formed the bedrock of Adult Material, resisting the temptation to treat pornography as a hellish and near-uniform site of masculine violence in favour of treating it like a profession that, like many others, requires women to butt up against sexism as a matter of course. Most days, after all, labor is neither a nightmare nor a dream—it is simply about getting by.  

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Review: Conversations With Friends (BBC Culture)

Stop me if you’ve seen this one before: an unconventionally beautiful young brunette—who is only unconventionally beautiful in the sense that she does not resemble, say, Jennifer Lawrence—is underappreciated by her peers. She is shy and very smart and, crucially, extremely thin. She meets, and falls messily and nonlinearly in love with, a man who is so traditionally goodlooking that he’s frequently mistaken for an idiot. Happily, his perfect looks conceal not only a good brain, but a kind heart, so that even when he does things that are painful for the pretty, clever brunette, such as giving his affections to another woman, we still fundamentally believe he is an alright sort of guy. There are circumstances that prevent them from being an actual couple, and those circumstances make their assignations hotter; they have frequent sex in secret, and the sex is immediately, transcendently brilliant, to the point that when they sleep with other people it feels as if the machinery of their bodies is malfunctioning. There is a delicious note of melodrama in their coupling, played in the pleasurably agonising key of a sad song. Things end ambiguously, up in the air.

I am talking, of course, about the new television series based on Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends; although if you are fan of literary adaptations (or, perhaps, simply a person with a fondness for abundant, well-choreographed sex scenes), it will probably not have escaped your notice that I am also describing the events of 2020’s Normal People. Stripped of Rooney’s crisp, forensic prose, the author’s plots are pleasurable precisely because they deliver this specific brand of intellectual and romantic wish fulfilment, an additional sly undertone of commentary on class helping to shore up the impression of an Austen love affair playing out in a hip millennial milieu. In Conversations with Friends, Frances (Alison Oliver), the aforementioned brunette, is a poet, and she performs with her ex-girlfriend and current best friend Bobbi (Sasha Lane), a talented networker and party girl. When an older, more successful writer named Melissa (Jemima Kirke) corners them after a reading, it is glamorous, bohemian Bobbi she is immediately besotted with. This makes room for Nick (Joe Alwyn), Melissa’s handsome actor husband, to begin showing an interest in the timorous Frances, and the two begin a love affair. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” Frances insists—but then hasn’t she just shown up at a married man’s home when she knows his wife is out of town?

What Frances does or does not want is the central mystery of both this series and its source material, and her indecisiveness comes across as a realistic side-effect of her young age. Like many men in their thirties who believe that twenty-year-old women understand them better than their wives, what Nick adores about Frances is how impressive and adult he seems reflected in her eyes—both the novel and the show are smart enough to subtly imply the possibility that Nick has honed in on the less confident friend for reasons other than her intellect and charm. “He’s actually very passive,” Frances informs Bobbi, who shrewdly suggests that Nick’s passivity might be a smokescreen that allows him to shirk blame. Conversations with Friends is unafraid to move at a snail’s pace, the same slowness and attention to intimate, tender detail that characterised Normal People proving equally as rewarding here; the difference is that we are not watching the unfolding of cerebral puppy love, but of a tale as old as time. The first time they sleep together, Nick tells Frances afterwards “I can’t believe we did that,” and when Frances shoots back “yes, you can,” Oliver plays the line with a surprising note of melancholy, as if rather than being flirtatious or funny she is pointing out the terrible cliché of the scene.

Rooney’s dialogue, which sometimes has a tendency to make her characters sound like brainy, argumentative variations on the author, appears sparingly, and the cast—as in Normal People—do a fine job of inflecting it with genuine emotion. When I read the novel, I confess that I found Bobbi’s smug and verbose rant about the “transhistorical concept of romantic love” merely irritating; here, her rejection of the very concept of monogamy is tied in more explicitly to her distress over her parents’ ongoing divorce. “You two are such grown-ups,” she says flatteringly to Nick and Melissa at one point, the implication being that she and Frances aren’t. Onscreen, minus the constant clever barbs, the two girls show their youth more obviously than they do in Rooney’s novel, and that obvious youth breeds pathos. In a scene where Frances slips Nick’s overcoat over her bare skin and appraises herself in the bedroom mirror, it is unclear whether she’s doing so in order to feel closer to her married lover, or because she’s trying on adulthood for size. If Normal People was about two individuals who should have been together failing to achieve the right level of synchronicity, developing “like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another,” Conversations with Friends is about lovers who refuse to give each other up even when they ought to—it is about growth, too, but also about the wilful stunting of it.

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Review: The Northman (ArtReview)

What a piece of work is The Northman—how excessive in its violence, how infinite in its budget! In form, how muscular and masculine; in action, how like a blockbuster; in apprehension, how like a slightly smarter version of a blockbuster! The fact that Robert Eggers, the director of The Lighthouse and, previously, of The Witch, has been given tens of millions of dollars to produce a bloody, earthy Viking epic largely based on the same legend that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet is enough of an anomaly in the industry that on some level, its existence is a victory for cinema. Is it as profound as Hamlet? It is not. Does it feature Nicole Kidman with a wig and accent that, inexplicably, are more or less the same wig and accent she had in Nine Perfect Strangers, a TV series in which she was supposed to be a Russian? Yes, it does. Does it feature an entirely nude wrestling match between Claes Bang and Alexander Skarsgård, both of whom are impossibly jacked? Does it include a return to cinema for Bjork, who plays an eyeless witch? Does Anya Taylor-Joy have sex while murmuring in Icelandic? Does Ethan Hawke drink from a bowl of blood, pretend to be a wolf, and then belch at a deafening volume in order to prove his kingly mettle? Yes, yes, yes, and yes again. To quote another buff ‘n’ gruff slave-turned-avenging-warrior, equally enamoured of reciting his full name and familial heritage in the heat of battle: are you not entertained?

Well, yes and no—the key to fully losing oneself in The Northman is, I think, to understand that it is absolutely, unequivocally a popcorn movie, more accessible than Eggers’ previous efforts in spite of its chaptered format and its occasional flourishes of gothic eccentricity. If The Lighthouse, in which Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe both gave dazzlingly unhinged performances, was almost unbearably taut and claustrophobic, Eggers’ latest is designed to make the viewer feel like Pattinson’s pseudonymous, half-mad wickie when he finally holds a hand out to the light at that film’s climax: blasted with sound and fury, dazed enough to be knocked backwards by the spectacle and noise. Its plot, hewing closely as it does to that of Hamlet, is a straightforward revenge tale, following a prince whose father is assassinated by his uncle, and whose mother is then snatched up—unwillingly, it appears—to be his uncle’s bride. Unlike Hamlet, Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth is no academic, as ought to be obvious by looking at him. (Arms like these are not the kind that have been used to pick up textbooks at the library.) Accordingly, when he decides to disguise himself as a slave in order to get closer to his Uncle Fjölnir, we are primed to expect rent limbs, spilt guts, broken noses and lanced eyeballs, all of which are dutifully, if a little languorously, offered up—at two hours and twenty minutes, The Northman has a tendency to feel more extended than a Viking longship in the lulls between each brawl, although by the time the next eye-gouging or scantily-clad invasion by berserkers comes along, all is usually forgiven.

Fans of Eggers’ first two films might wish, as I did, for a few more scenes that played with Norse mythology: a shot of a white-haired Valkyrie wearing teenage-looking braces riding to Valhalla on a flying horse is one of the film’s best, a genuinely inventive image that glitters like gold in mud between The Northman’s more pedestrian passages of shit and blood and squalor. A flawlessly cast Willem Dafoe is featured in two scenes as a court jester who is also—logically, since he is played by Willem Dafoe—a wild-eyed wizard, emitting the kind of crackling, insane energy the movie could use more of, too. Dafoe and Anya Taylor-Joy, with their singular, almost otherworldly looks, avoid the curse of looking, as the writer Brandy Jensen once said, like people who know what text messaging is; less explicable is Kidman’s regulation Botox, to say nothing of a moment in which Skarsgård, a supposed savage and a wolf in human skin, has his teeth inspected to reveal a perfect set of white veneers. Such oversights might have been glaring in the writer-director’s earlier films—in The Northman, it is easier to accept them as a natural side-effect of Eggers’ move out of the arthouse and towards the multiplex, a trade-off in which the minute detail and aggressive inaccessibility of something like The Lighthouse is subbed in for more fun, more flash, more oiled-up, macho entertainment. True, nothing in it is quite as arresting or as likely to endure as, say, Black Phillip, or the sound of Willem Dafoe asking, plaintively, “you’re fond of me lobster, ain’tcha?” Still, consider this: the viewer gets a lot more naked Claes Bang for their buck.

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Review: Other People’s Clothes (The Nation)

Long before the advent of reality TV, the rise of social media influencers and the first invasive rush of 24/7 paparazzi, Jenny Holzer somehow managed to predict all these developments in one of her provocative and spooky fine-art texts. “A real torture would be to build a sparkling cage with 2-way mirrors and steel bars,” the artist wrote in Inflammatory Essays (1979-1982). “In there would be good-looking and young girls who’ll think they’re in a regular motel room, so they’ll take their clothes off and do the delicate things that girls do when they’re sure they’re alone. Everyone who watches will go crazy because they won’t be believing what they’re seeing but they’ll see the bars and know they can’t get in. And, they’ll be afraid to make a move because they don’t want to scare the girls away from doing the delicious things they’re doing.” Holzer cannily does not specify exactly who this set-up is a torture for—the audience, denied the opportunity to actually touch the objects of their voyeuristic desire, or the pretty prisoners who do “the delicate things that girls do” without realiz     ing they are caged. The resulting image, halfway between a runway show and the set-up of a stylised slasher film, suggests a balance between the observer and the observed that could explode into either eroticism or violence at even the slightest tipping of the scales.

I thought about Holzer’s piece when I read Calla Henkel’s Other People’s Clothes, a thriller about two beautiful young women who know that they’re being watched, and who decide to act deliciously, indelicately and dangerously regardless. Because it is set at the tail end of the 2000s, at the height of tabloid celebrity coverage and at the peak of reality television’s popularity, its protagonists Zoe and Hailey are the types to read that passage from Inflammatory Essays and see not a form of torture, but a perfect business model. Raised on Myspace and the Paris Hilton sex tape, up-skirt shots and America’s Next Top Model, they have come of age at a particularly strange time to be female—one in which the definition of “empowerment” has expanded to include, conveniently, the exchange of one form of exposure for another. By 2007, it has never been easier to be a woman who is famous for being famous, provided one can put up with being surveilled, bullied, and graffitied on by Perez Hilton.  

Zoe, who begins and ends the novel in a mental institution and relates most of the narrative via flashback in a conversation with her psychotherapist, is less affluent, more intellectual, and a little obsessed with Hailey. Hailey, an arresting redhead and the heiress to a supermarket chain, is rich, obnoxious, and addicted to the exploits of celebrities. The two women, both Americans and both students, become roommates in Berlin after enrolling at an art school, renting an apartment from a writer of airport thrillers by the name of Beatrice Becks. Beatrice, who is prim and serious and resembles Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, is intrigued by a salacious detail Hailey blurts out at their tenant interview: Zoe, who grew up in Florida, is dating the ex-boyfriend of her murdered childhood friend. “She had no filter,” Zoe thinks, disgustedly. “No breaks.” Hailey, a former child-model who became infected with the desire to be famous at a very early age, once smashed her nose with a lacrosse stick so that surgeons would replace it with one that was “perfect, like a children’s ski slope” after failing to book “like, four Neutrogena ads,” a detail that is illustrative of her willingness to suffer, to disclose, and to debase herself in exchange for what she perceives as her true destiny. She longs to be seen, to be worshipped, and to turn herself into a glamorous, Warholian “art star” whose very existence blurs the lines between e-Flux and InTouch.

There is an element of sadomasochism in Hailey’s pursuit of the spotlight, and in this sense she is entirely in step with the requirements of the era. The recent re-litigation of celebrity gossip coverage from the late 2000s has helped reaffirm its cruelty, women in particular being hounded for slight, sometimes contradictory reasons. A previously-unthinkable level of paparazzi coverage meant that starlets, not yet used to the idea that every action would be documented, drank to excess, went out without underwear, fed their babies Cheetos, and crashed cars as if nobody would be watching     . Hailey, insulated by her family money and her cocky, bratty attitude, seems to have been bred like a racehorse for this very particular brand of stardom, prizing strategic exposure over privacy or boundaries. When she and Zoe begin to suspect Beatrice of surveilling them in order to get inspiration for her latest novel, Hailey argues that the most artistic thing to do would be to behave not as subjects, but as bona fide collaborators, giving the omniscient author something shocking to record. “We have to become spectacular,” she says, her eyes “glittering” with mania. “We could build a real spectacle.”          

*

Other People’s Clothes is a very similar kind of book to the ones supposedly written by Beatrice Becks, swift and pulpy and relatively straightforward in its prose. It employs two classic literary tropes, the first being that of the wide-eyed, impoverished acolyte swept up in the excessive lifestyle of a hedonistic, wealthy extrovert, and the other being that of the symbiotic and stifling female friendship that turns dark. Zoe and Hailey have the kind of love-hate bond that would, in a romantic couple, be described as “toxic,” the line between regular pals and what tabloids often euphemistically describe as “gal pals” blurring until what we’re seeing becomes as unclear and fuzzy as a photo taken by a paparazzo from the bushes.    

“You get fixated, don’t you?” Hailey asks Zoe, teasingly. “You’re fixated on me right now, aren’t you?” Zoe, who has recently spent an intoxicated evening dressed in Hailey’s clothes and posing as her at a nightclub, can’t deny it. What makes Henkel’s novel interesting is its acknowledgement of the parity between damaging and obsessive female friendships, and the damaging and obsessive relationship many young girls had with the famous women of the naughts. When she isn’t busy trying to draw attention to herself, Hailey often theorizes about the societal function of both celebrities and celebrity gossip, seeing women who make “trainwrecks” of themselves, in tabloid parlance, as extreme performance artists. In doing so, she re-contextualises the worst moments of their lives as acts of radical empowerment, her thesis conveniently disavowing their humanity in favour of envisaging them as machines for entertainment. “You know she shaved her head on my birthday last year?” she says of Britney Spears. “It was a cosmic sign…She deserves more credit. She’s just out there living her fiction.” Later, she gushes about media coverage of Amanda Knox, the American student wrongfully convicted of a woman’s murder in 2007: “By far my favourite piece of performance this year… The thing is, Amanda looks like a sexed-up Joan of Arc.”

An international pop star publically rebelling and a pretty murder suspect, Hailey seems to say, are kin, both modes of being famous ultimately generating column inches and provoking conversation. We are left to wonder what kind of celebrity she hopes to be, exactly. To pique Beatrice’s interest, Hailey establishes a speakeasy inspired by Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City in the flat; the resulting parties, in spite of having been dressed up as bohemian “happenings” for the glittering Berlin art scene, end up being animated by the same ill-advised hook-ups, catfights, and vomiting fits that characterize The Real World or Jersey Shore. Other People’s Clothes is, in effect, a period drama about an extremely recent period in cultural history, and its occasional seediness cleverly mirrors the pervasive grubbiness of the 2000s, the same air of threat and judgement that hung over many of the decade’s “bad girls” taking root as Zoe and Hailey begin watching and commenting on each other just as mercilessly as they presume Beatrice has been doing. (When Hailey uncovers an interview online in which Beatrice teases that her latest novel, The Dull and the Dead, will be about “two young girls who…see themselves as celebrities…but of course, they are not,” she is less unhappy about the definite confirmation that their landlord has been spying on them than she is about the fact that Beatrice thinks she’s boring.) Every decent reality series needs a memorable bitch, and Henkel—like a good producer—spends most of the novel amplifying Hailey’s ugliest qualities, building her into the kind of monster that would make incredible TV. Still, Zoe, in spite of being outwardly less bitchy and obnoxious, is not only dating her dead friend’s ex-boyfriend, but admits that she first slept with him immediately after her friend’s funeral. By the time we reach the equivalent of the book’s season finale, which girl poses greater danger to the other is unclear.

Ultimately, one’s enjoyment of this novel will depend on the degree to which one buys into the merging of popular culture and fine art that Hailey preaches. For my money, even if her approach to the subject borders on the sociopathic, she is not exactly wrong. Britney Spears’ removal of her hair, as most scholars of pop culture admit now, certainly was a novelistic re-authoring of her narrative, her awareness of her audience suddenly so acute that she could think of nothing more appropriate to do than make herself “a real spectacle” with emphasis on the “real,” turning herself from Britney Spears the sexual symbol into Britney Spears the hairless punk. It was also the beginning of a very dark period of both literal and metaphorical confinement for the star, her conservatorship functioning more or less exactly like the mirrored cage Holzer describes in Inflammatory Essays, or like Zoe and Hailey’s mysteriously monitored apartment. Who would not begin to lose their mind at least a little under 24/7 surveillance?

For some years, I have remembered reading an especially scurrilous rumour on a messageboard about the reality series Newlyweds, which aired between 2003 and 2005—namely, that although we saw selected highlights of the marriage between the two Christian pop stars at its center, the house MTV had moved them into was in fact covered in hidden cameras, capturing shit and sickness, intimacy, extramarital affairs. While the rumour was presumably unfounded, in the climate of the 2000s, it did not feel that implausible. Stranger things, and crueler things, certainly happened to a number of female celebrities throughout that decade. I have always thought this particular bit of hearsay would make excellent material for fiction: two beautiful young Americans being secretly filmed for unknown purposes, maybe blackmail or perversion, doing the delicious things their audience always suspected them of doing while the show was off the air. Calla Henkel, writing Other People’s Clothes, might have beaten me to the punch.

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Review: Inventing Anna (The New Republic)

When watching a televised, fictionalized adaptation of a real crime story that describes itself as being “completely true, except for the parts that are totally made up,” as Inventing Anna does at the beginning of each episode, there is inevitably a point at which you find yourself having to pause to Google some or other freaky detail of the case. I believed that I was fairly familiar with the Anna Delvey story: her bad checks and skipped hotel bills, her attempted fraud on City National Bank and Fortress, the self-titled art foundation she claimed to be establishing in New York, her untraceable aristo-European accent, her secret Russian heritage, the stylist she employed to make her look appropriately innocent in the courtroom. For me, though, that moment of astonished disbelief came early in the opening instalment, in a montage that sees various people who have had contact with Delvey seem to describe three or four entirely different women.

“Her family’s the Delvey family, big in antiques, German,” a former mark suggests. “She’s Russian,” says another, “and her father is a major money guy, something about solar.” “I’ll say this for Anna, she knew how to dress,” a stylist who was briefly friends with her says, fondly. “Always chic Parisian couture.” “Zara off the rack?” says her personal trainer. “For someone with money, I didn’t understand it.” “Her family had some impressionist painting that was supposed to be sold for about 42 mil when Anna turned 25,” a gallerist nods. “It was real—I saw the piece. Or … I think I did.”

Suddenly, surreally, an extremely smarmy finance bro appears and mentions Anna Delvey defecating at his workplace, the startling shift in tone enough to give the viewer whiplash. “She came for a meeting in our office, and she used my bathroom,” he recalls. “I didn’t have any toilet paper, and she did a number two. She came down and spent time in a meeting, and the odour was incredible.” The anecdote is so specific, scatological, and unpleasant that I could not believe it had been invented for the show, which is otherwise exactly as glossily made and easily digestible as is expected for a Netflix series based on an article from The Cut about a kooky pretend heiress. Still, I could find no evidence online that this embarrassing incident ever occurred, and it is the only time Inventing Anna gets this bodily and real. Why, I wondered, would a screenwriter include this if the story did not come from life? The thought of it continued nagging at me until later, an epiphany struck: references to piss and shit were recently a mainstay in another show about the upper classes, HBO’s Succession, and those references, as Naomi Fry astutely wrote in the New Yorker, suggested that a casual attitude to such taboos might be way to display power. What could be more convincingly rich behavior than shamelessly forcing every other person in the room to put up—literally or metaphorically—with the “incredible odour” of your shit? Inventing Anna approaches the subject of the super-wealthy from a very different angle than Succession or, say, Billions, focusing not on the haves, but on a have-not who believes that she has somehow been miscategorised by fate. Nevertheless, it serves to emphasise a similar point: that being a civilian who exists in the same world as networking, tax-avoiding, untouchable millionaires and billionaires means, in effect, being perpetually scammed.

Inventing Anna is one of two duelling series about the con artist known as Anna Delvey, born Anna Sorokin, and its source material is an article by the journalist Jessica Pressler that chronicles Delvey’s reign of terror over New York’s upper classes. (HBO’s take on the case, based on a book written by one of Delvey’s victims, remains in production.) In her piece, Pressler voices some surprise that Delvey, as an individual, is not particularly special. “People kept asking: Why this girl?” she admits. “She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice.” In fact, Delvey’s ability to be openly unpleasant to her peers made her seem richer, her imperviousness to judgement and cast-iron confidence unusual for a girl who, as it turned out, had grown up broke in a small town in Germany, but not entirely strange for someone born into great privilege. Early in Inventing Anna, a short scene that originally appeared in Pressler’s article very effectively conveys the fascinatingly inhuman, quintessentially Rich Girl way Delvey made friends: hoping to catch the eye of a member of hotel staff who has intrigued her, she stands at the concierge desk robotically sliding $100 bills onto the counter, until her intended target has no choice but to abandon their existing client and refocus their attention. Delvey may not have been to the manor born, but her lack of manners helped suggest a person who was at ease with behaving as if those around her could be bought and sold.

Inventing Anna, somewhat misleadingly, opens with a voiceover from Julia Garner’s Delvey, insulting her audience and grandstanding about her “icon” status. “This whole story, the one you’re about to sit on your fat ass and watch like a big lump of nothing, is about me,” she spits, in an accent that blends Russian, German, and a little mid-Atlantic prissiness for good measure. “Anna Delvey’s a masterpiece, bitches!” (Delvey, in the show at least, is consistently fatphobic in a quintessentially noughties sort of way, a point of view that would have already seemed moderately outdated in 2017, and which seems prehistoric now.) The suggestion is that we are going to see a show about a mean, glamorous, self-aggrandizing scammer, narrated from her perspective and as camp as several Christmases at once. Unfortunately, this suggestion is itself a kind of scam, since the plot turns out to be as much about the competent but ultimately fairly uninteresting journalist proxy who is subbing in for Pressler, a heavily-pregnant girlboss by the name of Vivian. Vivian, who works at Manhattan magazine, has “moxie,” her determination to chase down her story at all costs half fuelled by an embarrassing fact-checking incident in her immediate past, and half fuelled by the fact she is a lady journalist in a TV show. She has a male superior who represses her, a neglected husband who is sometimes irritated by her passion for her job, and a coterie of plucky aging writer sidekicks at Manhattan who struggle adorably with Instagram, offering viewers the opportunity for a full house on their “fictional female journalist” bingo card.

It is Garner’s Delvey then, and not the earnest, serious Vivian, who makes Inventing Anna worth investing anything in. The Emmy-winning actress has a very different kind of face from the real Delvey, who was once described as looking “like a Sound of Music fraulein”—if from some angles Garner has the same soft, babyish features, she can also rearrange them into something sharper, almost wolfish, if the scene calls for her to look devious or calmly ruthless. Her strange accent, carefully wavering and cartoonishly haughty, calls to mind the one James Franco used to play the equally unplaceable Tommy Wiseau in 2017’s The Disaster Artist, in the sense that any viewer not familiar with the source material might struggle to believe that it was accurate. “Anna’s tongue is kind of flat,” Garner said, discussing her own meetings with the scammer in an interview with Town and Country. “It almost feels heavy and fat. I completely had to change how I moved my tongue… her voice gets less soft-spoken when she wants something.”

Delvey’s former friends described her as appearing to be several different women, and Garner literalises that divide in her performance, slipping unnervingly between vulnerability and frightening, glassy-eyed sociopathy depending on her audience. Rarely is it an advantage for an actor to keep us entirely closed-off from their character’s inner life, but by the last episode of Inventing Anna, I remained as unsure of her motivations as I had been at the start. Now and then, she provokes sympathy, a kind of tenderness; at other times, especially when Vivian visits her at Rikers, she feels closer to a tiny, redheaded Hannibal Lecter, as if at any moment she might tell the journalist that her cheap shoes make her look like a hustling rube.

Ultimately, Garner’s committed performance adds a layer of complexity to Inventing Anna that might otherwise be absent. The show follows the media narrative of Delvey’s crimes extremely faithfully, and it spends a great deal of its time on Vivian’s home life and career, and on the home lives and careers of Delvey’s former friends and victims. The one genuinely intriguing—and presumably invented—aspect of Vivian’s story is her ambivalence towards motherhood, despite being eight months pregnant when she begins covering the case. Parenthood, especially if it is thrust upon a woman more because she feels she ought to be a mother than because she desperately desires to be one, is enough to make even the sanest and most competent of people feel like frauds. (Not for nothing does a character in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood describe the act of becoming a parent as “the biggest scam of all time.”)

The show seems to gesture broadly towards a connection between Vivian and her subject on numerous levels. Vivian occasionally seems to feel maternal about Delvey, who has herself been abandoned by her parents; she may also identify with the petite, oddball scammer on account of neither of them quite conforming to the role they are expected to, even if their rejection of those expectations seems deluded and misguided. When Vivian notes that she is unable to tell if Delvey believes in her own outlandish lies, it is difficult not to think back to an earlier scene in which Vivian, at the OB-GYN and in denial, has to be informed in no uncertain terms that she will be giving birth to her baby very soon, whether she wants to go ahead with it or not.

Obviously, both the story and the baby are eventually released, Vivian’s water breaking as she works right up to deadline in the office at Manhattan, a towel thrown across her chair. That the story seems to thrill her more is, narratively, something of a bold move, giving her another thing in common with her subject: a cool, and thus unfeminine, kind of steeliness, prizing achievement over likeability. When she tells a colleague that her article is meant to say “something about class, social mobility, identity under capitalism, I dunno,” it might be a winky comment from the writers of Inventing Anna about the way that the show itself is also about class, social mobility, identity under capitalism, I dunno, while also not being about that much at all other than gossipy entertainment.

Still, there’s the kernel of a nastier and more psychologically rich series in Julia Garner’s dead-eyed stare and Vivian’s panic-attacks over her own pregnancy—in the way Vivian lends Delvey her own white dress for the trial, a strange little piece of journalistic tinkering that recalls Didion buying a dress for Linda Kasabian to wear to give her testimony in the Manson case. It is there in the depiction of the former Vanity Fair staffer Rachel DeLoache Williams, whose book My Friend Anna will be the basis of the HBO show, and who is made to look by turns naïve and completely craven, dizzied enough by proximity to money that she loses all good sense. Above all else, it is definitely there in the unpleasant finance bro and his anecdote about Anna Delvey’s smell, her carelessness with hygiene in a meeting about money—a reminder that class, social mobility, identity under capitalism, I dunno all ensure that someone somewhere is always being forced to inhale someone else’s stink.

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On The Futility Of Recreating Pamela Anderson (ArtReview)

“Women like you, Pam,” an actor playing Hugh Hefner tells an actress playing Pamela Anderson in Pam and Tommy, “come around once in a generation.” It is possible they come around even less frequently than this, given that whoever cast Hulu’s new, divisive series about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s stolen and circulated sex tape felt it necessary to enlist a woman who is more or less her polar opposite to play her, and then spend five hours a day burying that woman under make-up, hair, spray-tanning and prosthetics in order to close the space between them. If the hair and make-up and effects team who made Lily James—English, sylphlike, terribly posh, best known for appearing in period dramas, and unthreateningly lovely enough to have played the nameless second Mrs de Winter in a version of Rebecca—into Pamela Anderson do not receive every award the industry could offer them for their achievement, then there is officially no justice in the world. To look at, James is Anderson, a spooky, realistic carbon-copy of a figure who had never once aspired to look “natural.” Audiences who adore a transformation will no doubt be thrilled, and James does a fine job of making Anderson feel human underneath the latex. Something, though, is missing, impossible to recreate with lip-liner or a wig, or by studying YouTube videos to get her tics and mannerisms just right. I have no idea whether the real Hugh Hefner ever told the real Pamela Anderson that women like her did not come around too often, but I’d guess that if he did, it would be this particular quality he was referring to: a kind of outsized sensuality, paired with a savviness about her image that made it almost impossible to render her the butt of any joke.

Pamela Anderson, however many times she has been married, has not been and never will be anybody’s nameless second Mrs de Winter, even when she wears her hair cropped short enough that she believes she resembles “Anderson Cooper, or a Q-Tip.” The story of her discovery is so all-American that it is easy to forget she’s not American at all: captured on the jumbotron at a football game in her native Canada in 1989, wearing a t-shirt advertising Labatt beer, she unwittingly revealed her face and body to be perfectly adapted for the screen without so much as having to audition. If cinema did not benefit to quite the same degree as it did from the day a teenage Lana Turner was first scouted sipping soda at Schwab’s Drugstore, Anderson still quickly, cleverly parlayed her golden, more-American-than-American beauty into a modelling gig for Labatt, an extensive Playboy shoot and a career in television off the back of that first brief flash of exposure. The phrase “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore” invariably crops up when we talk about bona fide golden age Hollywood stars, making it unsurprising that a level of scepticism has surrounded the news that, say, Lily Collins will be playing Audrey Hepburn, or that Chris Evans will be playing Gene Kelly. In a sense, though, they do not really make them like Pamela Anderson now, either. Absolute fidelity should be the goal of a celebrity impressionist; it need not necessarily be the goal of an actor who has been cast as a real person, which is why Cate Blanchet, with her hoarse, ethereal swagger, made the best Bob Dylan of the seven cast in I’m Not There. More important than exactly resembling the celebrity at hand is the ability to channel, medium-like, their particular charisma, offering a reminder to the audience as to why they became so famous in the first place.

In truth, the space between the real Pamela Anderson and the one played by Lily James may have more to do with the way the creators of Pam and Tommy built the show itself than it does with James’ performance. It is a mortality tale that rubbernecks; a tragedy about a real woman’s real sense of violation at her sex tape being circulated that nevertheless also includes scenes of an actress made up as her having very explicit sex; an attempt to call attention to the sexism of recent cultural history that forces its female lead to simper, coo and giggle her way through at least its first four episodes. This depiction of Anderson as an erotic naïf, a babe in the woods whose very babeliness meant she was fated to be fleeced by horrid men, does not ring entirely true with my memory of her as a public figure. The theft and the distribution of that sex tape was, it is clear now, a genuine sex crime, leaving Anderson completely traumatised. Still, if the makers of this show wanted to re-contextualise her as a feminist icon, it might have been more effective if they’d done so by depicting her as cannier, sharper, something other than a perpetual victim of a patriarchal system. An episode entitled Pamela in Wonderland shows her getting her start in soft-core and appearing dazed and overwhelmed, but stops shy of showing the point just one week later when the real Anderson claims she’d got so used to being naked that “they had to stop [me] before I walked out of the studio door nude”; a scene in one of the goofier, more antic early episodes directed by I, Tonya’s Craig Gillespie seems to make a bimbo joke out of her favourite movies being mainstream rom-coms, but while I am sure she does love Sleepless in Seattle, she is also an avowed fan of L’Avventura. Flattening Anderson into a soft and sympathetic outline, Pam and Tommy manages to nix the minxish joi de vivre that made her, however much silicon she added to her body, feel entirely real. There is, too, the issue of the series’ iffy relationship with consent—however much its creators claim to want to empower Pamela Anderson, she herself has disavowed the entire project. “Pamela has no regrets about her life,” a source told Entertainment Tonight earlier this month, “but the only thing she would probably erase is this burglary. She feels so violated to this day. It brings back a very painful time for her.” After reading this, I turned the statement “Pamela has no regrets about her life” over and over in my head. Those seven words, even if they had been provoked by something awful, somehow managed to distil the real Pamela Anderson better than all eight hours of the Hulu series had.

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Review: Licorice Pizza (ArtReview)

“There’s no line that’s crossed,” Paul Thomas Anderson recently told The New York Times, on the subject of the age difference between the leads of his new film, Licorice Pizza, “and there’s nothing but the right intentions. It would surprise me if there was some kind of kerfuffle about it, because there’s not that much there…There isn’t a provocative bone in this film’s body.” There has, of course, been a kerfuffle—it is 2021, and the movie is about a sort-of romance between a (nominally) 20-something woman and a 15-year-old boy, making Anderson’s suggestion that there is nothing provocative about Licorice Pizza somewhat disingenuous. Actually, I think to say that the film is not provocative is to do it a disservice. Do the adult and the child have sex? Certainly not. Do they kiss? Perhaps, depending on how much you take the last ten minutes at face value. Ultimately, whether or not things are consummated does not cancel out the air of obvious and obviously-not-platonic tension that blooms slowly and inexorably between Gary and Alana, the film’s very shagginess and discursiveness letting what exists between them develop as gradually as the image in a Polaroid. On social media, the two loudest factions seem to be those who believe Paul Thomas Anderson has made a dreamy ode to paedophilia and thus should be cancelled, and those who insist that Licorice Pizza is in fact a giddy, feel-good ode to the unlikely friendship that develops between two lost souls. The truth, I think, is somewhere in between: that the film is about romantic-coded love, and that because it is about romantic-coded love between an adult woman and a teenage boy, is is a little messed up. Luckily, it is a movie and not an educational film about how to conduct a healthy, fully-functional relationship, making its freakiness an interesting feature, not a bug.

The first meeting between Gary and Alana both upends our expectations, and establishes their unusual dynamic in a few lines: Gary, nerdy-looking but possessed of a frighteningly adult smoothness, is a schoolboy with the patter of a 50-year-old conman; Alana, who at first demurs when she is asked her age and then suggests that she is 25, is a coltish woman who radiates a peculiarly teenage sort of fury and confusion. A photographer’s lackey at a company called “Tiny Toes,” getting her ass slapped by her boss and ultimately going nowhere fast, Alana has arrived at Gary’s school for picture day, not so much offering service with a smile as threatening service with a scowl. If the moment the two meet is not exactly what Inherent Vice’s Doc Sportello would call “cootie food,” it is certainly a moment, and Alana Haim does a fine job of making fictional Alana appear by turns irritated and intrigued by Gary’s dinner invitation. It is difficult to explain how elegantly Anderson engineers these characters so that each seems to exist at a similar point on the continuum of maturity without coming across like one of those unsettling guys who has the ages of consent in every country memorised, but their parity is the point—that this funny little latchkey playboy has any luck at all with somebody who claims to be ten years his senior speaks volumes about where Alana happens to be at, professionally and mentally, at the very moment he decides to chance his arm. What drives her is not necessarily attraction, but a longing for his seriousness and decisiveness to transfer to her by osmosis. Gary Valentine, with his Old Hollywood name and his pedigree as a child actor, has done something with his life already at a very early age, and Alana desperately wants “something”—anything at all—to happen to her, her passivity around the men she meets suggesting that she pictures herself as an inert object that can only be moved by external force.

And yes, it is a little creepy—we are meant to think Alana is not making a sane choice when she meets Gary at the restaurant, so embarrassed and bamboozled by her own decision to be there that she can’t look him in the face when she arrives. Male slackers drawn to teenage girls are hardly unusual in the movies, but the inverse is a little less familiar. “He’s actually a great businessman,” Alana says primly, later, the phrase sounding like an echo of the oft-deployed “she’s actually very mature for her age.” When Anderson depicts her driving an enormous truck down a steep hill in darkness, backwards, her tank empty and her view almost obscured, is a funny bit of symbolism—going in blind, running on fumes, struggling to keep the enormity of the situation under full control, Alana is barrelling through life and trying not to crash. Licorice Pizza is at once obsessed with inertia and with forward motion, with parked cars and fuel shortages and with endless, reckless sprinting. Of its two leads, it is Gary we feel least concerned for, and it is probably Gary who appears less vulnerable in spite of his being the kid. Every time the (soggy) bottom falls out of another of his enterprises—his career as a child actor, his attempt to make a fortune out of selling waterbeds—it hardly matters, since the point of being a teenager is to make copious mistakes, to fumble, to figure out what we may or may not want. For Alana, stakes are higher: when we see her slump down despondently on the pavement after guiding that careening truck to safety through the darkness, looking on as Gary and his friends make giggling jokes about the phallic nozzle on a petrol can, we are watching her approach rock bottom in real time.

I should say that I am not entirely sure Alana is the age she says she is, as Anderson leaves room for doubt—at one point she says that she is 28, and then corrects herself, and although this was apparently a flubbed line, he still chose to include it in the final film. I’m also not entirely sure that Gary and Alana’s sweet reunion in the last scene of the movie actually happens, its suddenness and its dreaminess a hair too close to the ambiguous end of Inherent Vice for me to buy it. Still, to look for loopholes is to some extent to deny Licorice Pizza’s genuine strangeness, and to do so is to minimise Alana’s genuine strangeness, her quarter-life crisis being the most fascinating aspect of her character. “Do you think it’s weird I hang out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends all the time?” she asks her sister at one point, an expression settling momentarily on her face that mirrors the self-flagellating look of shame she wears when she first meets him at the restaurant. “I think it’s weird I hang out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends all the time.” He may actually be a great businessman, the look says, but he is not technically a man at all, and she is painfully aware of it. Paul Thomas Anderson has always been adroit at writing fuck-ups, and it is a pleasure to see him applying his considerable talent to creating an extremely fucked-up woman—a Janey-come-lately who ends up being the central character of a coming-of-age film despite almost certainly being an actual adult.  

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Review: And Just Like That (The Los Angeles Review of Books)

I went long on the mostly depressing And Just Like That.

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Review: Happy Hour (The New Republic)

In Marlowe Granados’s novel Happy Hour, it is 2012 in New York, but not entirely as we know it. Isa Epley and Gala Novak, two best friends with suitcases stuffed full of clothes and heads stuffed full of schemes, have arrived to spend a summer in the city; they are a brunette and an ice-blonde respectively, the pairing classic as a mink coat and a pair of diamond earrings. (Isa, who is our narrator and who also happens to be one of the few non-white characters in Happy Hour, ends up being called “exotic” by numerous stupid men, as if she is a holiday destination rather than a human girl.) They both have the quintessential early-twenties big city experience, which is to say they go to bars, have very little cash to live on, dress flamboyantly, trick older men into paying for meals or covering their tabs, and live in squalor.

Still, something about the setting feels unreal, slipped out of time, as if an intricate and luxurious rug might end up being pulled from underneath the reader’s feet at any moment. Blurbs and press, both, have compared the book to various kinds of classic drink or cocktail— “a gin fizz,” “a cold martini,” “a glass of Prosecco ordered early in the night”—and have emphasised its bona fides as a text made for Party Girls. There has been an emphasis on its fizziness and its deftness, its deceptive and soufflé-like balance between weightlessness and craft. There has been applause for its acknowledgement of the financial vagaries of city life, its willingness to let its characters be poor and glamorous at the same time.

All of this is, I think, right. Happy Hour is a pleasurable book about repeated, small-scale scamming of the rich, and it can be consumed at a voracious pace, and one could certainly enjoy it by the pool of a five-star hotel one has not paid a single cent to stay in. While reading it, though, I could not shake the feeling that its author had a further goal in mind. I suspected Happy Hour would turn out to be a different kind of cocktail: one of those containing an unusual or unfamiliar ingredient to keep the drinker guessing, or to keep them on their toes. Somewhat unexpectedly, as I was trying to place its flavor, I found myself thinking of another coolly plotless novel about striving and surviving: Christine Smallwood’s savage The Life of the Mind. In it, an unhappy academic by the name of Dorothy is stagnating in her career, has a medical abortion, sets her students coursework about the apocalypse, attends a conference, and then goes to a friend’s party where, squaring the circle, she learns that the friend is also planning to abort a pregnancy.

To compare Isa and Dorothy might, at first, seem like a false equivalence—what do an academic in her thirties and a twenty-one-year old hedonist really have in common, aside from perhaps a penchant for the bottle? One thing might be that both women, who are not women of means, find themselves forced to spend time being amusing, pleasant or polite around those who are judged—however superficially—to be their betters. Another might be their mutual interest in constructing and projecting a very specific image of themselves, whether that image is that of a serious and successful academic, or that of a carefree socialite. Ultimately, however different the two novels may appear, each is powered by a sly acknowledgement of the inconvenient way real life eventually punctures fantasy, impeding the pursuit of dreams. As the title of Smallwood’s novel combines with its blunt fixation on excreta to suggest that it is impossible to lead a life entirely devoted to the mind without both human nature and biology, in their infinite messiness, encroaching on it, Happy Hour slowly reveals itself to be a book about living a bodily life—one fully devoted to pleasure and luxury—that cannot help but be encroached on by the mind.

**

In The Life of the Mind, Dorothy fantasises “that she might enjoy a notable career…be a scholar who taught at a top-tier research university and wrote books for the general reader that would be reviewed in the daily paper.” In practice, she is something of a mess. She is neurotic enough that she sees a second therapist in order to discuss her first therapist; in her home, a private sanctuary for her interior and exterior chaos, laundry covers every surface, and her hair litters the bathroom.

Where Happy Hour elides dirt, Smallwood’s novel revels in it to the point of ugliness, the body not just present but rebellious—the result of the abortion is “thick, curdled knots of string, gelatinous in substance,” a cyst produces “streams of white confetti,” menstrual blood is “drizzled syrup,” and Dorothy starts the book “taking a shit … her body busy fulfilling its potential like some warehouse or shipping center.” She assigns her students an apocalyptic sermon “hoping that [they’d] learn that hell was not something waiting at the end of life but something that could open its maw at any moment, pull you in, and devour you whole.”

“She couldn’t go on like this, she knew,” she thinks, about job opportunities having “dried into a dust bowl,” “but she also couldn’t not go on.” Frequently, she considers the possibility that the world will end at some point in her lifetime, making her feel guiltier and guiltier about her longing to excel in academia, and about the habitual laziness that keeps her from recycling adequately, or considering the greater good over her own needs and ambitions.

At the university library one night, she is unexpectedly moved by the sight of a man who looks like “a stock image of a young professor,” but who is in fact “an advanced graduate student… faking it till making it.” “The student,” she notes wistfully, watching him showily shake his fountain pen, is “performing his role, relishing the appearance of intellectual labor, aware…of having an audience.” Because status means the most to those who do not really have it, Dorothy is well-equipped to recognise “that most social interactions [a]re matters of function and role.” She performs, too, and is mortified when—in a neat reversal of her first mistaking the young student for a peer—the librarian confuses her with an unkempt graduate student. “Of course the librarian didn’t believe [that she was a professor],” she thinks, glumly. “She didn’t believe herself. She looked down at her clothes. They were shabby and studentish. Her hair was unwashed…[she] thought how naïve she had once been to believe there was anything glamorous about the life of the mind.”

If the life of the mind is not glamorous, it proves just as challenging to maintain as the life of a hedonistic, full-time party girl. Dorothy might not be as chic or as fashionable as Isa, but there is undoubtedly an academic style—clean, untouchable, successful and unflappable—that she aspires to as proof that she is worthy of the “top-tier” role she dreams of. (When Smallwood refers to Dorothy’s first real professional win as being the publication of a paper on Du Maurier’s Rebecca, it is hard not to imagine Dorothy feeling a greater kinship with the novel’s unnamed central character than with the mysterious, beguiling ex-wife of the title.) She has spent her entire professional career both furious with and in thrall to an older academic by the name of Judith, who was once her mentor and professor, and is now “a node in a large and impersonal system that had anointed her a winner and Dorothy a loser.” When the two meet at a conference in Las Vegas and she finds herself being coerced by a quietly sadistic Judith into crying on command, Dorothy notices that her superior’s “lipstick ha[s] faded and her lips look … dry and naked.” “It was an act of will,” she thinks, “to refuse to reapply lipstick in front of another person. That kind of will was another form of domination.” For Dorothy, it is imperative that she maintains a veneer of professional and intellectual worthiness, even as she is constantly reminded of her imperfection.

One night, Dorothy returns home after work and catches sight of her slack midriff in a mirror. Because she has a tendency to intellectualise when faced with embarrassment or inadequacy, she turns to her knowledge of art history for reassurance. “The ancient notion that art holds up a mirror to reality,” she thinks, “was complicated in the eighteenth century by the idea that the mirror of art ought to reflect only certain parts of reality, those that people should imitate.” With this in mind, she rehangs the mirror so that it does not show anything below her neck, allowing her to see only the parts of herself she desires to see. It is a rare moment of harmony between her physical and intellectual selves—one lasting only as long as it takes for Rog, her partner, to return home and accidentally break the mirror in half. “Now,” Dorothy observes a little ruefully, feeling once again as if she’s in a shambles, “whichever way you hung it, it split you in two—like a magician had come along, dazzled the crowd with half a trick, and forgotten to put you back together.”

**

Few women in literature, it must be said, have been more scrupulously put together than Marlowe Granados’s heroine Isa Epley. When I said earlier that Happy Hour felt unstuck from time, what I actually meant was that despite being located in the present day, stylistically, its invocation of another era is precise enough to suggest a knowing pastiche. Isa peppers her narration with deliberate, delicately mannered pronouncements on effective social climbing—“one should,” she often begins, or “one ought”—and speaks in aphorisms, usually pertaining to cultural mores, dating, New York living, or the temporary acquisition of a moneyed man. The book has no actual sex scenes, and aside from a passing allusion to a character once having taken ecstasy, there are no serious drugs; there is one reference to abortion, in the coyest and most elliptical terms. Men describe our two heroines as having “moxie,” or they call them “good-time girls.” Happy Hour may, in other words, technically be a novel about contemporary-ish New York scammers, but it can also be read as a novelisation of a theoretical gold-digging comedy from the 50s, minus the ultimate threat of matrimony. Its omission of more explicit material has less to do with squirmishness than it does with a tongue-in-cheek adherence to the Hays Code.

Now and then, when something less-than-glamorous appears in the text, there is a shift, as in a dream when some detail or other reveals to the dreamer that he or she is not actually awake. This phenomenon occurs when Isa, as she sometimes does, makes a casual observation about gendered violence, sounding knowing but resigned. “Sometimes when it’s late at night,” she says, “a girl turns into a moving target.” It occurs, too, when she overestimates the power of her charm. In one fraught encounter, she absconds to the Hamptons to stay with a WASP acquaintance with the very ‘50s name of Cooper Flemming. Cooper, an entitled brute, reads her diary and humiliates her. As she leaves, there is a skirmish about who will end up getting a free ride back to New York. “Coop held my [car] door open, his white knuckles tightening around the open window, and I sat there unbudged,” she says. “He shut the door and through the window said ‘You win this time, champ.’”

Isa’s façade of flawless and unbothered elegance endures, for the most part, all the way through Happy Hour, up until a very brief stretch when she ends up wearing the same clothes repeatedly, becoming greasy-haired and looking “ashen.” “Today is my mother’s birthday,” she reveals at the beginning of this fleeting downward spiral. “Death is not unspeakable, but it often feels that way.” It transpires that her mother, having first entered a coma, passed away from cancer two years previously, and that Isa moved away before she died. One of Isa’s enduring memories of her mother is of her propensity to sing “the standards,” in particular a song from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Pal Joey; another is of her tendency to remind Isa that “in life, you must familiarise yourself with what is glamourous.” “Six months after the fact,” Isa suggests, “everyone thought I was fine... I have always given a convincing performance.”

A fascinating fracture in the reader’s image of the novel’s heroine occurs, as we are offered a brief, tender glimpse of a still-young girl, brave but grieving, who has honoured the memory of her parent by adopting the same attitude to life as one of the fearless, fast-talking adventuresses that appeared in both women’s favourite movies. In a dazzling trick, Granados cracks the mirror she is holding up to Isa’s enviable version of reality, splitting her party girl in two. “Maybe,” Isa tells a man mischievously, “I belong to a different time.”

Happy Hour’s meticulous building of, then puncturing of, a retro-tinted fantasy turns out to be the thing that lends it its fresh, interesting taste: It is the unfamiliar ingredient whose lack of sweetness complicates the novel’s flavour. Many women without means, like Isa, put on good performances. Her sweetly bratty self-mythologizing, her insistence on The Rules, her ability to always have the right phrase on her tongue—all of this allows her to project an untouchable exterior, even when she is in pain. Eventually, she rallies, privately pulling herself together and emerging back into the social whirl of New York with aplomb. She won’t, she says, use grief as currency. “My mother told me that to be a girl,” Isa thinks as she is flying into New York, in the first line of the book, “one must always be especially clever.” In light of the novel’s final chapters, what was once a gently witty observation becomes extraordinarily poignant, making it especially clever, too.  

In The Life of the Mind, Dorothy—whose most burning desire is to be seen as especially clever—asks her students why someone might choose to reveal “their worst self.” “Do they want to die,” she adds, “or to survive death?” It seems fair to say that revealing one’s worst self becomes easier by far when one is operating from a position of power, helping to explain why an aristocrat might feel entitled to steal and read his civilian guest’s diary, or why a successful academic might feel capable of publicly humiliating her ex-protégé.

In Smallwood’s and Granados’ novels, nominally powerless women endure grief, death and professional calamity by presenting, or by trying to present, an ideal version of themselves. In the end, each of them ends up living something like the other’s dream. Granados has Isa meet up with a literary agent, the result being a sweet and cheeky lean into the trope of the heroine’s diary turning out to be the very book you’re holding in your hands. Dorothy, meanwhile, lets down her guard and experiences a quiet epiphany while drunk and watching karaoke at a party. “Her friends, and their friends,” she tells herself, “were so beautiful. She could see their souls shining; it was an unbearable burden, to love them so much.” It is a burden, sometimes, to remain a striver and an optimist in a world that can be unfair and merciless. Still, how else ought one behave if one wants to survive?

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Review: Titane (ArtReview)

What is Titane about? Famously, it is a film about a woman who has sex with, then is impregnated by, a Cadillac. To go into further, spoilerish detail: Titane is a film about a woman who behaves like a machine, dangerous and automatic and devoid of empathy or feeling, and who thus imagines herself to be incompatible with other human beings. Alexia, this woman, is a dancer who performs on tricked-out cars at underground conventions. She is singularly suited to her job not only because of her genuine desire for the vehicles she is grinding up against, but because of her total and dead-eyed indifference in the face of male attention. One night, when one of her fans follows her through the parking lot in total darkness and then leans in through her window for a kiss, Alexia—proving herself to be not simply a machine, but one designed for killing—stabs him brutally with a hairpin. A switch in the film has flipped—its engine, previously idling, roars into high gear. In quick succession, we see Alexia fuck the car she danced on earlier at the convention, and then begin leaking motor oil from her vagina; we learn that she is in fact a serial killer; and we see her set her parents’ house on fire, and then escape by disguising herself as a missing teenage boy named Adrien Legrand.  

Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s first film, Raw, was also about a young woman driven to kill, although if its cannibal heroine lacked humanity, it was not because she was too much like a sleek machine, but because she was too much like an animal. That movie was the opposite of Titane in its style, if not necessarily in the transgressiveness of its content—primal and warm-blooded rather than cool-skinned and hard, more concerned with pleasure and indulgence. Alexia does not kill because she needs to, nor does she appear to kill because she wants to. (When she stabs a female co-worker after first sleeping with her and finding the experience wanting, it’s implied that her murderous urges may stem from her sexual alienation, a frustration borne of wanting to be ‘normal’ rather than the kind of woman who ends up being impregnated by a car.) As soon as the real Adrian’s father, a stoic fireman named Vincent, turns up to collect the now-androgynous Alexia from the police station, the serial-killer storyline fades into nothing, the film devoting itself instead to the relationship between a parent and the cuckoo in his nest. Alexia, who in one scene smashes her face against a sink in order to give herself a more masculine nose, binds her pregnant stomach and her breasts, and remains mute; Vincent, who claims not to need a DNA test to prove that this pale-faced interloper is his son, enters into a delusion that has less to do with gullibility than it does with the unimaginable emptiness felt by a person with a missing child.

Here is the real question: what is Titane actually about? Certainly, it flirts with transmaculine iconography when Alexia is in disguise as Adrian, although since Alexia does not actually identify as male, and since the transformation has more to do with convenience than with need, it does not seem to me to work as an explicit allegory on this front. (As both Ducournau and myself are cis, at any rate, I am inclined to leave further analysis of this theme to critics who are actually trans.) Arguably, in aligning herself with coldness and machinery and violence, Alexia distances herself from what are typically perceived as feminine traits. The source of Alexia’s sexual preference at first seems entirely obvious—as a child, she had titanium plates screwed into her skull after a car accident—until we consider the fact that in a brief flashback of the incident, she is shown already fixating on the sound of the car’s engine, raising questions about nature versus nurture. In the broadest sense, Vincent and Alexia might be seen to be drawn together by the fact that each of them experiences a painfully unfulfilled desire, the former in the shape of her ‘aberrant’ objectum-sexuality, and the latter in the form of his desperate longing to be reunited with his son.  

Titane is about all these things, I think, and it is also about nothing—it is a beautiful provocation built to house a series of ingenious and upsetting images, and I mean this as the sincerest compliment. In recent years, there has been a move in so-called ‘elevated horror’ towards making each film into a fully-fledged allegory for some real and painful aspect of our actual lives, so that it’s possible to point to Hereditary and say “this is about trauma,” or to The Night House and say “this is about grief,” or to The Babadook and say “this is about mental illness,” and so on. There is something infinitely more interesting at this stage about a horror movie that toys with a plethora of themes, teaching its audience nothing in particular but sparking uncomfortable feelings, provoking debate, igniting something hot enough to burn. More refreshing still: Alexia is not an avenger or a girlboss, and the film—despite being the creation of a woman—is neither a feminist statement nor an un-feminist one, merely a statement. A machine, by its very nature, cannot be a hero or a villain. What truly drives Alexia remains mysterious, her frightening opacity as difficult to penetrate as steel.

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Fiction: A Haunted House (Forever Magazine)

Wrote a piece of flash horror fiction about Brittany Murphy’s house for Forever Magazine.