143: crème de la crème
THIS WEEK: are you in your prime?
In case you missed it: Friend of the Report,
and I are hosting a book club for Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. We’ll be sending out our first conversation about the Preface and first three chapters of the book on July 17th. If you’re joining us and have questions or comments, you can leave them in the comments of the original post or in the chat we opened for that purpose. I just finished chapter two and I’m finding it largely readable, so if you were interested but daunted, I encourage you to join us!
If Marxist feminist critique is not your thing but 19th century Russian lit is, friends of the Report, Heather Akumiah and Leah Abrams of Limousine, are hosting an Anna Karenina book club that’s starting this week.
Trying to avoid getting sick (or sicker than I was already feeling), I spent a Sunday in bed reading Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with breaks to FaceTime a friend and scroll through TikTok. The novel tells the story of a young, single teacher, Miss Jean Brodie, at a Scottish prep school who takes six students under her wing. It is her aim to guide them, to influence them in the Classical ways, and, of course, against the approved curriculum. She’s chosen them because they’re, she claims, “the crème de la crème,” though from the early descriptions we get of the girls, it is more likely that she chooses them because they are more easily influenced. Just as frequently as she claims to be shaping “the crème de la crème,” Miss Jean Brodie (you really have to say her full name) is also constantly claiming to be “in her prime,” though one might not look at her life or her messy love affairs and claim the same. If you say something enough times, it might start to be true. In story and themes, as well as tone, it’s a great companion to Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress—narrating your own life to make it feel more important, developing (and grandly expressing) a code for living that embraces “tradition” over what is currently accepted, bucking against the conventional while maintaining a tinge of conservatism. I’m not sure if I enjoyed the novel; I found Sparks’ style to be a little too sparse for my taste. However, I can see the appeal of its subtleties and sense of mystery.
I had sub-zero expectations for Materialists so when it was over, I just had a laugh. Two chicken over rice? OK, I got it—they don’t have any money. I saw the movie on opening weekend at Nitehawk, where the flurry of people moving about and food getting delivered can really take you out of what you’re seeing. But it didn’t really matter at Materialists, so one-note and frictionless that I could have been watching just about anything in those 100 minutes. Everyone wants to come for Dakota Johnson being affectless, but this is the most effort I’ve seen her make since her brief appearance in The Social Network (an incredible performance from her btw).1 Song’s writing is unsubtle, the various ideas that she finds intriguing totally undigested or contextualized within any real situations. Whether it’s leg-growth surgery or measuring your desirability by your bank account or a dream date gone horribly wrong, it’s clear that Song assumes that her audiences are as unfamiliar with these ideas as she is, depending on their shock or surprise to make up for the fact that her movie doesn’t really say or mean anything. This has been clear in Song’s press (the little I’ve seen of it) whether it’s making claims about how we value certain on-screen topics over others or the movies that inspire Materialists. Apart from the fact that they’ve all been subjected to endless reblogs on Tumblr and deal with romance, I find it very hard to see how movies like Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice or Mike Nichols’ Closer could have influenced Materialists. Neither in cinematic language or musical score or even directorial effort do I see the influence of either of those movies, or any other ones that Song lists. Closer, for example, is a true-blue movie that is so alive and bizarre and distinct (like who could have made that movie but Mike Nichols), that totally challenges its audience. Materialists is barely even a movie—just three vague ideas bundled up in Dakota Johnson’s The Row trenchcoat.
The squabble about the press images from Ryan Murphy’s American Love Story’s season on JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy made me think of Namwali Serpell’s “The New Literalism,” which has been knocking around in the back of my mind since I read it a few months ago. Using a handful of films from 2024, Serpell identifies an impulse in contemporary cinema to be “literalist,” whether that is in scripts that are overly expository or in formatting choices such as Brady Corbet using VistaVision on The Brutalist because it was a format used in the same time period that the film is set in. The latter impulse—to use the actual forms from the time period your work is set in—is what I saw in people’s claims that Murphy’s show should be buying archival CBK pieces from eBay for the show’s costumes, implying that there would be something more authentic about that than the Abercrombie fits that appeared in the press photos.2 First of all, let’s not forget that this is A RYAN MURPHY SHOW! But besides that, as Serpell points out, this desire to reproduce history in such a way is not really about authenticity but about the production of images that are “familiar and formulaic.” She continues: “This will to copy and paste the images of history in effect occludes its alien beauty and force—the simulacrum devours its source.” Serpell also notes that this legibility is often seen as “democratic,” as a way to make a work accessible to everyone. But what we’ve seen is that it only contributes to the increasing “expertification”3 that we see online. As Rachel Tashjian pointed out, everyone imagines that their access to images of CBK make them an expert on the woman and the legend. (I love this line from Rachel: “Streaming and platforms such as Substack, Instagram and TikTok have made it easy for us to think that toiling in the nostalgia factory makes us experts on the cut of 20-year-old trousers or the originality of Carrie Bradshaw’s style.”) Being able to reel off a series of facts about something or someone in an authoritative manner does not an expert make. Showing off how much you know about something isn’t the only way, or even an interesting way, to demonstrate your interests. Life is really nothing like Materialists—it’s not all a numbers game.
Are all Dakota Johnson’s best roles when she plays a blonde? See also A Bigger Splash (2015).
I hope people know that’s as weird as Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s archival dress on the red carpet.
Apologies for participating in the of the “-ification” of every word.
Exceptional