Aaron's Thoughts
I’ve been a bit bummed watching the online discourse around this over the past few days. Some criticisms are doing nothing but furthering the whole point of the film.
It’s no mistake that Song opens Materialists with images of what she imagines the first marriage looked like. In a world where survival was the primary focus on & marriage didn’t even exist - the first people got together because they liked being together & genuinely loved on another. Sure, it was partially a business deal to help with survival, but love was on the table & likely the whole reason they even chose to be together.
Throughout the rest of the film, characters remind us what marriage ultimately progressed towards as society progressed - being used to unite kingdoms and a large dowry being involved. In other words, marriage quickly became more of a business deal with little to no love on the table.
If you think about what happened after that, there was a whole wave of empowerment that shifted marriage from being about a business deal to marriage being about love. In fact a whole wave of romance films through the years portrayed this very idea. It all of a sudden wasn’t cool to marry for anything but love.
As technology has progressed and society has shifted, we are now at the point where we have come all the way back around to marrying purely for business. Sure, it doesn’t look as antiquated as a dowry or uniting kingdoms, but it really isn’t that different. Song smartly uses matchmaking as a stand in for the dating apps and algorithms that shape modern dating. People are refined to metrics that can be filtered and boxes to be checked. The person themselves doesn’t even matter as much as how many boxes they check. Marrying for status, money, and image is the new business deal where love is often not only off the table, but rarely even a consideration.
Which is why it’s so funny to be that people are pointing out that Pedro and Dakota have no chemistry in the film, which is entirely the point! Or that people are calling it poor man propaganda. Or that people are calling it a rom-com. Sure there are some funny moments, but all of the laugh lines are outside of our three main characters because nothing about their lives or situations are funny. It’s actually tragic for most of the movie. The film is almost more of an anti-rom com than an actual rom-com
Not every movie is for everyone, but it’s bizarre to see so many incoherent takes on a genuinely great film!
