Recently, I overheard a young woman tell her friend about a man that she had just met on vacation. She described the encounter: his invitation to go outside for a smoke and her decision to join him even though she doesn’t smoke. She said that she was just being polite. She thought she’d go for a short while and then go back to her hostel since she had a return flight the next day. She certainly hadn’t planned to stay out late. But despite all this, she and the man ended up talking for hours.
The young woman’s voice was high and replete with excitement. She sounded breathless and I could hear how much she enjoyed relaying the events. Her voice expressed so clearly how wonderful it is when you connect with a stranger.
I have wanted to write about love for sometime but I find the subject slippery. How can you describe a state? For years and years, I was single and then suddenly I was not. He and I fought over everything until we settled into what feels like and appears to be boring domesticity. And yet this domesticity is the product of our love. It is what we produce every day.
Judging by what I’ve seen, reviews of Materialists are mixed. I found the film a bit contrived, but I think that’s because it’s a polemic about the folly of trying to optimize love dressed up as a romantic drama. The jokes in the film are cutting but its heart is as soft as jelly.
Celine Song’s second film is about loving and being loved. She sets out the math inherent in the conception of marriage today before throwing out the careful equations.
One thing is clear: Celine Song has been in love and she has been loved. Materialists may be set in modern-day New York City but the themes that the film explores are older than time itself, which is why the film starts with a fictional encounter between cave people.
Before you fall in love, you imagine your lover. You think you know what you’ll want. In the film, Song shows us what people think they want with montages of clients making demands: specific heights, races, jobs, incomes, ages. It is assumed that the right person is the one who meets all the demands.
But people are famously bad at knowing what they want.
When you fall in love, the object of your affection will not meet your list of demands because, as Lucy tells a prospective client, “this is not a car or a house, we’re talking about people.” The gap between the object of your affection and your list may cause rancour, but if you are smart, you will decide to throw the list away.
Eventually, you find that love is easy. The obstacles tend to be everything that isn’t the feeling that unites two lovers: money, careers, locations, languages, expectations.
Song’s decision to give the poor lovers a happy ending appears to have caused some people on the internet to claim that the ending is unrealistic. Of course, Lucy should have married Harry. Harry is a rich! Except that Lucy appears to barely know Harry. When she has a problem, she calls John. What she likes about Harry is his money and the fact that he appears to like her. Song raises the question of whether wealth is sufficient for happiness before deciding that it is not.
Whether you agree with Song depends, I think, largely on whether you’ve ever been in a mutually loving relationship. If you haven’t experienced such a relationship then it’s difficult to see why Lucy would give up access to millions of dollars to be with John, especially at a time when it’s clear that the government hates anyone who isn’t rich.
With Harry, Lucy could stop working, she could open up her own agency, she could have fancy dinners every day and pay off all her debts. She could live in a $12 million apartment and fulfill every material desire. For anyone who has experienced the feeling of not having enough, the attraction of limitless plenty is obvious. The unspoken question is what happens afterwards.
Life is what happens. In life, having someone who is indisputably on your team is priceless. There is no amount of money Lucy can pay to find someone who will make her feel the way that John does. Song shows that John can be counted on to help when Lucy is in need and to listen when she needs to talk.
The film ends with marriage because that is how a romantic drama ends and because it is nearly impossible depict what happens during happily ever after. “Ever after” is the stuff of life and death. All relationships, no matter how loving or happy, will have their ups and downs before coming to an end.
I struggle deeply with the knowledge that there will never be enough time with my partner. At some point, both or one of us will die. If one of us does survive, they will be left with the task of rebuilding a shattered existence.
Note: I wrote this a while ago and never posted it. I think it's still relevant so I'm posting it now even though the events described in the post occurred some time ago. I have started writing again so new posts coming.
I’ve wanted to write something but have been unable to conjure up the words to describe the hell that we now live in. The list of calamities that continue to befall us is long: a pandemic (of denial), unsuppressed transmission of various airborne viruses, the collapse of public health, a genocide, an illegal war waged by the US and Israel against Iran that the western world tacitly supports, an oil shock that has yet to fully hit the west but which is fully in view, the strong likelihood of a hot and smoky summer.
The Globe and Mail is doing its utmost to convince people that nothing matters anymore. At the start of the illegal war on Iran, the paper published an editorial about how the US attack against Iran was illegal but shouldn’t have been. The problem, per Baron Thomson, was with international law, which needs to be changed because Iran is somehow uniquely evil unlike states that condone genocide like Canada.
After Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership race, the Globe appeared determined to destroy any semblance of intellectual rigour through their efforts to Corbynize Lewis. Despite Lewis being famously Jewish, the Globe ran an op-ed claiming that the NDP has an antisemitism problem. The screed itself is antisemitic as it seems to tie being pro-Jewish with being pro-genocide.
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise then that the least ideological party on earth, the Liberal Party of Canada, has decided to lean into this void by welcoming all Conservative party floor crossers and diluting what little meaning “being a Liberal” had to begin with. The news that Marilyn Gladu – famously a far-right, homophobic, anti-choice, COVID conspiracist and antivaxxer – is now a member of the Liberal Party of Canada is both a shock and fits entirely within our corrupt meaningless present.
The Liberal Party of Canada appears to be conducting a soft, parliamentary coup (what a Canadian way to coup). It doesn’t matter how you voted. Carney will sweet talk the elected representative of the most right-wing and Conservative of ridings into joining his ever more right-wing party.
The next step involves barely bothering to hold elections. We can all be members of the Liberal Party of Canada, whether we want to or not. The LPC will be the Canadian CCP except at least the Chinese Communists believe in something. The LPC believe in nothing but the power to continue to strip the country for parts and sell them off to the lowest bidder.
The future for ordinary Canadians is continued dispossession and immiseration. Carney is spending a lot more on the military. Perhaps he is goal is to become an Anglo-Canadian El Duce except Carneybarely has a train system to run. The money for this is being and will be taken from social programs and services. At a time when the system works only for the rich and the old (an overlapping demographic), the young and the middle-aged (read millennials and younger) have nothing to look forward to.