Materialists, a delightful film, especially for people who are not wounded, wants to say that beautiful women want to marry wealthy and tall men, and wealthy men want to marry beautiful young women. And people who are not so sought-after choose others like them. So the marriage of the undesired, too, is of two equals, of their two equal handicaps.
“Marriage is a business deal, and it always has been, since the very first time two people did it,” says Lucy, the protagonist who rates herself as too good for most men but not worthy of a multi-millionaire who is in good shape and six feet tall.
Can people who don’t have a business make a business deal? Do beggars marry? Can it be that marriage, too, came from the rich, like morals, beliefs, literature and college reunions? And the others imitated it in a senseless way, as usual, not knowing the origins of what they are aping.
Marriage as a business deal is at the heart of world history. Indian emperors married, more than once, as a form of alliance. If at all they married for love, it was because they could marry for business often. The marriage of Marie Antoinette to the French dauphin Louis was arranged to solidify an alliance between Austria and France against Prussia and Britain. Catherine was married to Arthur, Prince of Wales, to unite England and Spain. Even today, the wealthy tend to marry the wealthy. The idea that marriage unites two social equals to make them more formidable loses meaning the moment it percolates down the classes. For, is it worth the torture of a loveless marriage that results when a mechanic marries a nurse just because there is some vague commonality between their families?
Across the ages, in many regions, formal marriages were a thing of the rich, while the poor, if at all they did ‘marry,’ had more informal arrangements. All considered, I cannot help but feel that marriage came from the rich and love came from the mad. That is why neither marriage nor love makes sense to most people.
In my theory of love, I see it as a primordial mental illness. Love’s feverish excess in some people is the illness; and its moderation in most people gives it the power to transmit itself as a great human virtue, like devotion, that everyone can attain if they are so lucky as to meet a magical being. So, those who were afflicted by too much love sang about it, melting hearts and sending into the world one more quality of the mad that those who are not mad try in vain to acquire. All our turmoils are about this—the sane trying to imitate the insane. But the madness is so powerful that it has endured centuries, matching the longevity of the cold practicality of the arranged marriage.
There is, of course, a sort of love that can happen to sane people. Love is someone you want to keep looking at and, for this reason, abduct this person for so long that you can’t bear to look anymore.
Materialists, which is written and directed by Celine Song, argues that love, if it happens at all, is fleeting. On the other hand, an alliance with a reasonable person who may not necessarily change your heartbeat but whose material possessions can make you feel valuable can last a long time. This is not what has made many people uncomfortable with the film, no matter what they say and their claims of being romantics.
The film unsettles many because it clearly defines the undesirable in the highest circles of the American marriage market – short and poor men, and any woman over 29.
Usually, the IMDB ratings of a film are a fairly accurate indicator of how enjoyable it might be, something that is almost impossible to glean from most critics. But some films, usually comedies, that upset a segment of people receive a lot of angry one-stars affecting its overall rating. So, the rating for Materialists, reflects not its quality but the irritation of men and women at being reminded of how unattractive they are by their own measures of what makes a person attractive.
The film is brutal about physical and economic attributes. Even men who are 5-foot 9-inches are reminded that they might be shorter than they think —that’s probably most of the male population of India. And men who are not millionaires are reminded that they wouldn’t stand a chance of being with the women they want. And unremarkable women are reminded that they need to seek niceness as there is too much competition for high net worth men. Considering all this, the film must have been very well received by the self-assured to have earned a 6.5 IMDB rating.
Yet, the film has a quality that all mainstream films possess: it is cowardly towards the end. All its exciting discomforts are at the start. In the end, it recognizes that most of its viewers are ordinary people who need to be comforted by the myth of love.
It reminded me of a line from Game of Thrones: “…everything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.” In ‘bold’ mainstream cinema, it is the reverse. It begins with what it really wants to say; then it loses its intellectual courage and makes a compromise. So does Materialists. After showing the brutality of the marriage market, it veers into the magic realism of love. Thus, a girl who wants to exchange her beauty for money and status discards a great catch who does not excite her at all. This part is believable. I have seen it before in real life. Women and even men find their theoretically perfect mate, but they are not excited enough; they try hard to find reasons to be with that person but get bored by them. Maybe that is the evolutionary purpose of boredom. That is the only way a billionaire can be rejected.
But then, Lucy chooses a loser for reasons she and the film concede they cannot fully explain.
(My latest book has been released. It’s called, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’.)