Celine Song’s Materialists Tries to Subvert the Rom-Com
In Lucy’s line of work, everything begins with the quantitative. Client lists of nonnegotiables read like a barrage of demographic data, familiar to anyone who has ever used a dating app: six feet; BMI under 20; income over $500k; not a day older than 30. This numerical fixation is so pervasive that Lucy likens being a matchmaker to working at the morgue or at an insurance company. But among present or future clients, she flips a switch, pivoting to her sales pitch: the dream of a lifelong love. “Who our partner is determines our whole life,” she says to a gaggle of rapt young women at the wedding reception, handing out her business card. Whenever someone assumes she must have some preternatural instinct for romantic compatibility, Lucy dispels the suggestion with a pithy refrain. It’s just math, she repeats, over and over—which is how we know it isn’t. As any good salesperson can tell you, you need to buy into the fantasy, even just a little, if you really want to sell it.
It should be simple. Harry is, in Lucy’s words, “an impossible fantasy.” He’s tall, handsome, generationally wealthy, the sole proprietor of a $12 million penthouse, and insistent on dating Lucy. Ever the savvy rom-com heroine, Lucy thinks she knows what she wants (to marry a very, very rich man), and what she’s worth (not much, according to herself). But on their early dates, as they traverse one pricey, candlelit joint after another, she equivocates: “I don’t know if I like you, or if I like the places you take me.” If Lucy’s job has overexposed her to the vast pool of eligible women and calcified her low self-esteem, it’s amplified a confidence in her own canniness. She sees her appearance as less of an asset than her knowledge of its comparative worth, and believes her hard-won self-awareness will be enough to protect her, like the carapace of her pessimism.
Contrary to the clamor around contemporary dating and its miserable vernacular of objectification, market metaphors for courtship are nothing new. In 1941, an issue of the now-defunct Senior Scholastic magazine quoted two unnamed boys who shared their thoughts on dating: “Going Steady is like buying the first car you see—only a car has a trade in value later on.” Early in Materialists, Lucy and a co-worker insist that, when it comes to height, “six inches can double a man’s value on the market.” The language of commodity persists. Your love life is a major investment; you’re looking for someone who’s the whole package; you’re either on or off the market.
It’s no coincidence that the emergence of dating as a social phenomenon (at least in the West) is roughly contemporaneous with major economic transformations in the early twentieth century. Prior to the last century, the pairing of two individuals was most often mediated by family members or community leaders. The practice of moving through a roster of potential partners corresponded with more women entering the workforce, a growing leisure class, and mass urban migrations, among other shifts. The historical transformations in how we conceptualize dating and marriage should generate friction in their contradictions. In one direction, the pull of pragmatism; in the other, love as sacred and ineffable. But in Materialists, what is it about “modern dating” that Song hopes to articulate?
