Celine Song’s newest film Materialists is a sleek and sexy piece of liberal feminist propaganda. Billed as a traditional romantic comedy, Materialists’ global box office earnings surpassed $45 million as of July 6, already outpacing the international haul of Song’s breakout film Past Lives. Before directing movies, Song worked as a matchmaker, an experience that she mines in order to explore the crass calculation that goes into modern dating.
Starring A-listers Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and former Captain America Chris Evans, Materialists provides a colossal, unintentional Exhibit A for why women have better sex under socialism, as I argue in my book by the same title. Although Song succeeds with an astute commentary on the dehumanization of singles, her film’s implied solution is individual professional success rather than any kind of systemic transformation, accidentally reinforcing the idea that only the beautiful and wealthy are worthy of love.
The plot of Materialists revolves around the “voluntarily celibate” Lucy (Johnson), a former actor who now works for a multinational company called Adore, a luxury matchmaking service for elite urbanites who can afford its fees. Her success as a matchmaker derives from her aloof devotion to “the math,” algorithmically determining whether people are compatible based on factors like education, class background, relative attractiveness, and income. At the ninth wedding resulting from one of Lucy’s matches, she meets Harry (Pascal), the filthy-rich brother of the groom. Moments later, she runs into her ex-boyfriend John (Evans), day-jobbing as a cater-waiter at the reception, who describes himself as a broke guy from a “shitty family” who “voted for Bernie.” The tuxedoed Prince Capitalism works in finance. The scruffy underdog aligns obliquely with millennial democratic socialism.
A flashback reveals that Lucy and John once shared a deep love, but his persistent poverty…
Auteur: Kristen R. Ghodsee
