The entire time I watched the new movie Materialists, I tried to put my finger on what this film was.
Parody? Satire? Director Celine Song, whose first feature Past Lives was so beautiful and wrenching that I watched it on a long international flight and then immediately went back to the beginning and watched it all over again, has followed up with a bigger-budget buzzkill. Dakota Johnson plays a modern matchmaker so focused on the numbers (height, income) that she makes Yente from Fiddler on the Roof look sentimental. Her winning pitch is that what you’re looking for in a match is a “grave buddy”: not someone to build a life with, but someone to decompose near. She’s feted at the office for her ninth successful match, or at least marriage—the attachments are so tenuous you expect even these will be repeat customers.
In a piece for The Free Press, Kat Rosenfield compares Materialists to Jane Austen’s Persuasion, noting the unfortunate plot inversion that has Captain Wentworth’s jilted lover stand-in—that is, Chris Evans—completely unchanged in the eight years since the heroine was forced to reject him for being unsuitably poor. Meanwhile, Pedro Pascal plays the romantic foil, his main personality trait being the fact that he is loaded. Still, to really understand how Materialists misses the mark demands a closer reading of Austen’s greatest rom-com of all time, Pride and Prejudice.
You might ask: Haven’t we had enough of Pride and Prejudice? Well, no. There’s a reason Pride and Prejudice was insanely popular in its day and continues to be now, and in understanding what makes it—in my opinion—perfect, we can see why Materialists does not in any way fill the same cultural place or, to be frank, need.
When it comes to pairing up, rational arguments fall flat. If we had depended on them for the survival of the species, humanity would have died out long ago. Intellectual browbeating or religious haranguing to “get it on” is romantically off-putting, to say the least. Mimesis, or observing the adults around us pursue married bliss in real life, may be even more so. There’s a malaise that can descend on couples especially when they’re in the throes of childrearing—it’s hard!—and what are the chances that their children won’t have noticed that, too?
So to convince human beings to make the effort to fall in love, pursue romantic partners, and stick with it demands some serious propaganda. You need feel-good and feel-lots stories, and the rom-com is the perfect medium. And even though we are no longer required to procreate—family planning and its accoutrements are the norm in the developed world—the rom-com also sets us up to do that better than any pro-natalist tract ever could, partly by keeping actual babies and children out of the frame.
In the early modern, bourgeois-inflected world of Austen, romance had just been freed from the restrictions of aristocratic matchmaking and father-brokered arranged marriages. Austen’s heroines—though still constrained by society’s norms—were beneficiaries of this new freedom. They discovered they had agency, and they used it. They could decide how practical or mercenary they wanted to be (Charlotte, Mrs. Bennett), but with some luck and good character, even a girl with relatives in Cheapside (Jane, Elizabeth) could hit the jackpot (Bingley, Darcy). Romance, Austen communicates over and over again, can’t be coerced.
But more recent modernity’s tilt into economic overdrive—with its bottom lines, “human capital,” market prices for any and everything, and relentless pursuit of efficiency—doesn’t leave much room for romance, even if we’re technically free to pursue it. Girlboss aesthetics—as glamorized by Materialists—unhelpfully exacerbate the problem by teaching young women that agency means you can, and maybe even should, sell yourself to the highest bidder. Sugar daddies, OnlyFans, “sex work”—women may not find themselves socially shamed for these things as they would have been before the sexual revolution; now, they’re more likely to be mocked for feeling any shame at all.
In this sadly literal and cynical age, we have unwoven the rainbow so completely that romance in real life seems unattainable. But why should that be? Don’t women have more options than ever before? The problem, it turns out, isn’t having too few options; it’s having bad options. And these bad options are compounded by bad stories—including pessimistic anti-romcoms like Materalists—that feed into the hopelessness and suspicion that make modern dating more bitter and less funny than ever. Memes about women looking for “finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes” men—note there is no mention of whether they are good men—on one side, men consuming dehumanizing porn on the other. No wonder “romantasy” is such a popular genre. The real world has become inhospitable to natural human feelings.
The reason Austen is classic and beloved is that she observed these human feelings—and human nature—closely and described them accurately and with humor. Of course men are attracted to beautiful women. Of course women are seeking men who will be some kind of protector. Evolutionary biology and psychology can explain how we developed this way. But this is only the literal reading of the text; romance is the interpretation, the story we tell that makes the whole endeavor profound.
The real world has become inhospitable to natural human feelings.
In a good romantic story, you don’t know exactly what will happen in the end. People reveal themselves over time with their actions (Darcy) and you can change your opinion when the facts change (Elizabeth). You are more than your résumé, if you seek to be worthy of love, and more than your looks, too. Darcy went from declining to dance with Elizabeth at a ball to thinking her “one of the handsomest women of [his] acquaintance.” Elizabeth acknowledges that Darcy had always been “in essentials” the best of men, though her prejudice against him blinded her to his merits. The facts changed for everyone involved.
So that’s the Austen romance. What about the comedy?
Like the joke at the beginning of a speech, comedy is the icebreaker that lets us slip into the bit, suspend disbelief, and allow ourselves to be swept away from the mundane to the sublime. It’s the happy feeling that keeps us open to new possibilities. If you want to analyze it, there are physiological reasons for this, but you probably don’t want to analyze it. You just want to enjoy it.
Mrs. Bennett, Lady Catherine, and Mr. Collins are all funny. Elizabeth overhearing herself called “tolerable” is hilarious, and she has the biggest laugh over it of anyone. Part of what makes Collins ridiculous is how he lays out the reasons for wanting to marry Elizabeth to her during his proposal—he’s inheriting her father’s estate, he makes a good living with Lady Catherine de Bourgh—and only last, almost an afterthought, mentions how ardently he admires and loves her. Elizabeth turns down Collins, though he very rationally points out that she may never get another offer. And she is allowed to.
Darcy, in his first proposal to Elizabeth, is equally ridiculous—though not nearly so funny. (Jokes are only funny when they land.) He notes his compunctions were reasonable, and even if in calmer moments Elizabeth would entirely agree, romance shouldn’t be a calmer moment. In romance, as in comedy, timing is everything. The worst version of Darcy thought that he could buy Elizabeth Bennett because he was, on paper, an offer she couldn’t refuse. But—surprise! She refused.
Elon Musk apparently buys many women to have children for him—as Pedro Pascal unsentimentally tries to purchase Dakota Johnson as a partner—but the women who enter into these agreements are not and can never be the heroines of a rom-com, and Pascal and Musk are definitely no Darcy. That’s because Darcy understands that Elizabeth is worth the trouble of making himself more agreeable, more gentlemanlike, of trying harder. Yes, he was better than she realized in fundamentals, but he still wasn’t good enough. And Elizabeth is the heroine because not only would she not sell herself cheaply to Collins, but because she wouldn’t sell herself at any price. Heroines value themselves above rubies. Heroes know that and make themselves worthy.
That’s why Song’s Materialists fails as both romance and as comedy. There is neither a hero nor a heroine in sight, and the best they can muster isn’t romance but a shrugging “Oh well, I guess they deserve each other?” which is not in the least bit funny.
In a real rom-com, people compromise, but never on what’s essential, and everyone changes for the better. And, like a good Shakespearean comedy, it ends with a wedding. Fortunately, like heroines, we have a choice—particularly in the stories we choose to live by. If we are open to learning that people are better than we thought, or even just different or more than we believed at first sight; if we keep our humor and live our lives honestly; if we care about the people we love and also respect and value ourselves, we can all flourish again—with rom-coms lighting the way.
