Don't Call 'Materialists' 'Broke Man Propaganda' to Celine Song's Face

Writer-director Celine Song is riding high off the success of her sophomore effort, Materialists. The romantic dramedy, starring Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal, has earned over $67 million worldwide from a $20 million budget, and it's still to be released in several major territories. She has a ton of good projects lined up and is inspiring a lot of interesting conversations with her stories of modern love and identity. Just don't get too dismissive in your opinions of her work.

Materialists is about a matchmaker to New York City's upper classes who is torn between the 'perfect' rich guy and her loving but poor ex, whose financial issues exacerbated her own monetary stresses. In an interview with Refinery29, Song was shown a Letterboxd review of Materialists that the interviewer thought was funny. It said, 'broke man propaganda?? in THIS economy???? I don't think so.' To Song's credit, she gave an excellent answer to this moment:

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'Well, thank you for asking me about it. I think that it doesn't make me laugh 'cause it really, uh, is disappointing to me that, I think that there is a very real confusion about feminism and the history of feminism. Because of intersectionality, so much of feminism has been about anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, and of course it was always at the forefront of fighting classism. So I'm very concerned about the way that we talk about people who are poor. The thing that is very important to me is to stress that poverty is not the fault of the poor.

And I think that given that, it is very brutal and I find it very cruel to talk about John as a character who loves Lucy and who is a beautiful character played beautifully by Chris [Evans] and to talk about him in such cruel terms as 'broke boy' or 'broke man.' There is something about that, the classism of that, the kind of hatred of poverty, the hatred of poor people, who, again, it's not their fault, that they're poor. I think that's a troubling result of the way that the wealthy people have gotten it into our hearts about how it's your fault if you're poor, that you're a bad person if you're poor.

So, it doesn't make me laugh, actually. It just makes me feel very concerned that anybody would talk about my movie and my characters, and to think about it in such a classist terms, you know, the whole movie is about the way that capitalism is trying to colonize our hearts and colonize love.'

Solidarity forever, Celine.

Whatever you think of Materialists and how well it accomplished Song's goals, I think you have to cheer on this answer. It's a proudly political clap-back to a strain of pseudo-ironic classism that has engulfed the internet and so much discourse around this film (and, indeed, many romantic narratives made for women).

I also think a lot about how so much of the promotional circuit for any artist is now an endless cycle of wannabe viral moments. The hunt for clicks means you're more likely to see an actor or director playing with puppies and reacting to TikTok dances than interviews of substance. Poor Liam Neeson seems to be spending most of his junket season for The Naked Gun being forced to look at Labubus and it's exhausting for us all. I empathise with the journalist here, who is just doing what we all do now. If I were the journalist, my heart would have fallen out of my backside with her incredible answer. Reacting to Letterboxd reviews is commonplace for actors and directors alike. Letterboxd itself has videos dedicated to it. But it still must suck for someone like Celine Song to have to position her hard work through the lens of cheeky online jokes and a total lack of seriousness. It's okay to take some things seriously, you know?