Materialists Is Hopelessly Romantic

When I was twentyfour, I desperately wanted to get married.

But it was also the worst year of my life. My boyfriend of nearly three years and I began a longdistance relationship; I moved to another city for graduate school and discovered that the film industry is, by and large, a big scam. At the same time, I got braces (for which I had four teeth extracted) and gradually lost faith in my orthodontist. She never even assessed whether my temporomandibular joint could handle the treatment, and sure enough, I developed TMJ problems during the process. At some point, I asked my dad for help. He was kind about it at first, but eventually he got tired of me and said, “If it’s making you this anxious, just stop the orthodontics.” I retaliated, “Fine, but what about the four big gaping holes in my mouth?” He suggested that I could get implants after I graduated and started making money.

Only my boyfriend kept assuring me that everything would be okay—but we were 1,300 kilometers apart, and we couldn’t see each other often. All I could say to him at the time was, “Let’s get married after graduation,” and he always agreed.

Eventually, I wrapped up the orthodontics more or less smoothly—not without some minor aftereffects, but nothing I couldn’t live with. I found a job that supported a decent life, though it technically wasn’t related to the film industry. And I gradually put some distance between me and my parents. But by then, my boyfriend and I had already broken up. Towards the end of our relationship, he fell for someone else. However, he waited for me to be the one to call it quits.

After that, I never entertained the idea of getting married again. I didn’t even really feel the need to be in a relationship anymore.

Of course, I realized that my faded devotion to marriage was rooted in the mistaken belief that I needed someone to lean on—because I didn’t trust myself to survive such a wearisome stretch of life, and I was sure there’d be many more bad times ahead. But over the past four years, I’ve learned the most important life lesson: I have to rely on myself to get through every single day—whether it’s terrible, mundane, or peaceful.

These days, although I still love watching unrealistic chick flicks, my views on love and marriage have completely changed: first, I no longer think one choice is above the other—both are just lifestyle choices; second, neither is truly reliable; third, they’re not a binary choice you must make.

That explains why Materialists strikes me as such a strange film. 

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I know modern romantic storytelling is used to setting love and marriage in opposition, denigrating the latter by tying it to materialism and the former to true feelings. But the person in question is Celine Song—the director who gave us one of the most exquisite explorations of emotional ambiguity in Past Lives. Why fall back on that tired binary?

Why would the heroine never fall for an almostperfect man—who is wealthy and handsome, measures six feet tall, comes from a loving big family, and works in finance? Honestly, has anyone paused to ask whether her “unworthiness” runs so deep that only a struggling actor—the penniless thirtysomething who can’t afford his own apartment and lives paycheck to paycheck—can make her heart skip a beat and convince her that he’s her soulmate? Frankly, I suspect she’s just a sucker for looks—Chris Evans is peak white guy fantasy.

Sometimes I marvel at how ingrained these tropes are for female creators. When Dakota Johnson’s client sobs, “I’m gonna die alone,” I want to jump through the screen, shake her by the shoulders, and shout, “Everyone dies alone! Even if you have a husband, parents, children, and friends, you still go to the grave by yourself!”

And when Evans is making an offer to Johnson? I’d pull her aside and say, “Sure, I’d choose him too (he’s way hotter than Pedro Pascal, in my opinion). But it’s not because he promises to love you till the day he dies. Just as he says, love is the easiest thing in the world because it needs no reason to appear. By the same token, you should know that it needs no reason to vanish. You stay with someone because you feel something for him, and being with him makes you happy. But you should also know that you can thrive on your own and that you’ll be okay even if your relationship ends. You must accept that, no matter how dependable your partner may be, you still have to face many challenges alone, and you’re not afraid of that.”

I know I sound fired up, but I’m not saying I hate the movie. On the contrary, I’d rather watch women chatting casually on a terrace than watch another Superman flick.

Yet just as love and marriage aren’t binary opposites, and calculation and true feeling aren’t mutually exclusive, I think we can enjoy Materialists’ daydream while still being unafraid to pop the bubble.

That, to me, is exactly where Song loses her sharpness in this film—she’s just busy blowing bubbles.

By the way, when Pascal talks about his limblengthening surgery (which involves breaking his legs to extend them and letting the bones heal themselves), it takes me right back to my orthodontic ordeal—I nearly had a gastric spasm. Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend anyone undergo any cosmetic surgery. Problems that require surgery aren’t problems surgery can fix. Look at Harry (played by Pascal): even after undergoing limb lengthening and becoming a “unicorn” on the dating market, he still doesn’t believe he can find love. At the end of the day, people like him can’t accept their real selves—or rather, they don’t love themselves, let alone love someone else.

But do I know what love is? Honestly, I don’t. I’m only just beginning to learn to love myself.