Women Looking at Women Looking at Their Phones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Materialists is not alone in this treatment of its subject matter. In Lena Dunham’s new series Too Much, the other noted rom com of this summer, Meg Stalter’s heroine, Jessica, also floats around in an isolated and self-sabotaging bubble, brazenly out of touch with everyone around her. I wondered why neither Jessica nor Lucy seemed to have any friends. They did not debate the pros and cons of their romantic interests or their female romantic rivals with a confidant — one of the staples of a classic romantic comedy (think of the four-way phone call in When Harry Met Sally). Instead, both characters only interact with coworkers who they don’t seem to like very much. Both treat other women almost exclusively as threats to their prospects.

The lack of female friendships is particularly striking in Too Much because it is in such sharp contrast to Lena Dunham’s previous series, Girls, which is all about friendship. (Dunham recently told The New York Times that Girls was about sex and Too Much is about love, but this is blatantly false.) The titular girls are also famously socially inept and self-involved and self-sabotaging, but they always have each other to fall back on. Hannah flashes her boss, grifts off her parents, goes hot and cold on her love interest Adam, quits her magazine job in a self-righteous storm, drops out of her MFA, alienates everyone around her. At the end of the series, she moves in with her best friend Marnie upstate and they raise her baby together, messy, imperfect, but still forging ahead.

Put differently, Hannah’s problems, her low self-esteem, her solipsism, her directionlessness and inability to have the kind of artistic career she wants, drive her to engage with the world. She has friends because otherwise she would be alone. She yearns to be admired and validated and it is other people who offer her that. Ten years later, Jessica in Too Much turns to her phone. She obsesses over her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend (Emily Ratajkowski), a content creator who makes quirky knitwear videos. In one video, Ratajkowski asks her boyfriend if he would love her if she were a worm, echoing a TikTok trend. Of course, babe, he replies (or something). Jessica flashes back to when she asked him the same question only to get an impatient brush-off. This must be evidence of something, but who knows what?

Jessica finds her ultimate validation when her locked Instagram account, a series of filmed responses to the new girlfriend, which range from supplicating to hostile, accidentally goes viral. Suddenly, there is a chorus weighing in on her rights and her wrongs. Suddenly, her ex’s perfect new girlfriend, a girl’s girl, sees her side of the story and decides to be her friend instead of her rival.

Materialists almost scrupulously avoids phone use. Lucy has no friends in the film because she has no personality. No matter. The entire lexicon of the script is taken from the internet. What it replicates above all is the sense of a looping echo chamber, one in which your decisions fit neatly into predetermined categories. Everyone in Materialists is eaten alive with insecurity. It is the driving feature of the film. None of the matchmaking clients trying to be matched up can find love because none of them understand what they want. Lucy does not understand what she wants either. She wants to marry rich because she thinks she wants a life of luxury, although she can already afford a nice one bedroom in New York on her $80,000 a year salary. The guy she is in love with seems stuck and bitter and immune to attempts to improve his life conditions. The one she is dating but not in love with is obsessed with his height and with making money. All of this is structural because the film tells us it is structural and because in the real world, most people’s material conditions are structurally determined, but what is actually shown on screen is a series of individual choices that don’t really say anything about our world because also in the real world, no one acts this way.

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What is this bleak and miserable vision of things? It may be an accurate representation of the current state of the world, but romantic comedies have never been especially concerned with the truth. The glut of recent writing about phones and atomization and loneliness tends to focus on the forms of psychosis allegedly induced by AI chatbots, fringe internet forums, and the far limits of internet addiction that lead to extreme isolation and aberrant behavior. Yet plenty of people across the social spectrum do leave their houses most days and go to drinks with coworkers and see their families at Christmas. They still go on the internet and receive most of their ideas about how to act and what constitutes healthy aspirations (in work, love, and life generally) from the desperate and embarrassing videos made by content creators seeking to capture the attention of a monetizable audience. Some of those people descend into a right-wing funhouse version of the world. Some go to Turkey for plastic surgery and die of blood clots. Some only want to date men who make 6 figures, are over 6 feet tall, and will provide them with the lifestyle they think influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman are living.

All of this delusional aspiration is a kind of radicalization. It turns you not only into a consumer, the basic model of the internet, but also into a salesperson reproducing this economic (and ideological) scheme in your own right. It’s a kind of MLM for people with no friends. The internet rewards cruel, antisocial behavior with clicks and virality and attention. It’s not simply that the hit of dopamine is addictive or occasionally financially rewarding; it also alienates you from the norms of social life, which require collaboration, generosity, empathy, and an ability to, at times, reconcile the conflicting needs of others with your own.

Much of the criticism of Too Much has described it as Netflix slop (New York Magazine called it Lena Dunham forcing herself into “an Emily in Paris–shaped box.”) This is also indisputably true of Materialists, which is a much worse film than Song’s previous effort, Past Lives. Yet this genre of impoverished filmmaking is not simply representative of a lazy reliance on tropes. It is a low-effort, mass-produced way of making art, but it is not that alone. Too Much undoubtedly had a much higher budget than the first season of Girls, or Dunham’s first feature film (and best work, in my opinion), Tiny Furniture, which cost $25,000 to make in 2010. Materialists had star power and nearly twice the budget of Past Lives (20 million vs. 12).

But neither project feels generative or original or expansive. Neither offers anything personal or individualistic or strange, anything grounded in a perspective outside of this narrow and diminished worldview. Instead, both feel like regurgitations of existing videos and TV shows and content trends, passed through a series of distorting filters, and affixed into a depressing narrative framework. It is less that they espouse “harmful” views, morally or politically, and more that they tacitly accept harmful framings. They offer a fatalist world, constrained and unhappy, where everyone is staring into a selfie camera and watching themselves talk. There is no friendship, no desirable life path, and nothing to aspire towards. The most you can dream of is having some kind of mid-career job, falling in love with someone sort of likable, and endlessly working on yourself in the futile pursuit of self-optimization. No wonder the rom com is dead.