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Tag: Culled Culture

  • Masks! Innuendos! Double Cigarette Smoking!: Addison Rae’s “Aquamarine”

    Masks! Innuendos! Double Cigarette Smoking!: Addison Rae’s “Aquamarine”

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    While Addison Rae might have only been five going on six years old when Aquamarine came out, clearly it had a lasting subliminal impact on her. For the title of her latest single to follow up the Lana Del Rey-“coded” “Diet Pepsi” doesn’t just seem to be an allusion to the color of the ocean (or at least the parts of it that haven’t been ravaged by human-helmed pollution), but also a mermaid or mermaid-like creature.

    That’s the perspective Rae definitely sounds like she’s speaking from as she sensually coos phrases such as, “Aquamarine/Honey, dive into me/I’m not hiding anymore/I won’t hide/The world is my oyster/Baby, come touch the pearl” (it’s only slightly “subtler” than, “Yeah, you fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy”). Clearly, the word “cookie” has some new competition now that Rae has used “pearl” this way (not that Mia Goth’s Pearl would mind). And to play up the sensual nature of the song, where else would Rae film the video but in Paris?

    Reteaming with her “Diet Pepsi” director, Sean Price Williams (who also did the cinematography, as that’s been his long-standing métier), parts of it were shot in deserted streets and alleyways at night, while the rest was filmed in The Peninsula Hotel (which gets a thank you in the listed credits). It is in the latter milieu that Rae takes advantage of the most, sporting an “Eyes Wide Shut-worthy” mask as she prances around at a party, spritzing Chanel No. 5 on herself (again, playing up Paris, not Camila Cabello’s lackluster single) and splashing around in the bathtub while spewing water out of her mouth like a fountain (or like Aquamarine, the mermaid).

    As for the sonic landscape, created by producers Luka Kloser and Elvira (Anderfjärd), it mimics the lulling nature of being underwater or simply floating in it. Which is precisely Rae’s enchantress-y intent as she sings in her most siren-meets-Ariel (à la “Part of Your World”) voice, “I’m dancing in my own reflection/I’m the ray of light” (re: that phrase, Madonna has been quite the influence lately on lyrical language, from FKA Twigs’ “Perfect Stranger” to Shygirl and Saweetie’s “Immaculate”). Of her overall prowess/embracing her feminine power, Rae also adds, “I’m transforming and realigning [something MARINA knows all about]/I’ll take you with me high, high, high, high.”

    To show off part of why she’s feeling so confident, Rae engages in all manner of well-choreographed acrobatics—whether on a chair in the middle of the sidewalk or a bridge overlooking the Seine (which comes across as being suspiciously shimmery and romantic in this context). As for the chair dancing, it of course harkens back to Britney Spears in the “Stronger” video (itself riffing on the chair dancing of Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” video). And Rae has very much been in “Britney mode” lately with her Spears circa 2003 attire. So it’s no wonder she starts chanting (like some sort of “Daddy”-conjuring love spell), “Give me more” toward the end of the song—something Spears already illustriously chanted in her own sensual way on 2007’s “Gimme More.” At the same time, it doesn’t seem like Rae needs anyone to give her more (unless it’s more nicotine) in order to validate her self-confidence.

    Case in point, in contrast to Rihanna telling a man, “Want you to make me feel/Like I’m the only girl in the world,” Rae is quick to assert that feeling for herself by declaring, “The world is my oyster/And I’m the only girl.” It certainly appears that way as she struts down the street blowing smoke in the direction of a wowed onlooker. In point of fact, it seems as though the real reason she homed in on Paris as her filming location was for the cigarette appreciation there—hence, smoking two cigarettes at the same time in one scene. A “feat” that was highly appreciated by the Cigfluencers account on Instagram.

    Elsewhere, a reference to Titanic serves as a romantic nod paired with a more “profane” suggestion in contrasting lyrics that describe, “Heart of the ocean around my neck/Don’t have to say it/You know what’s next.” (Hopefully, being painted in the buff…not drowning.) During the third act of the video, Rae does a costume change into a nude-colored ensemble as she dances in an alley with backup dancers (among them being Belen Leroux, Jal Joshua, Lea Vlamos and Patric Kuo) that also seem to have watched some of Madonna’s more orgiastic choreo (e.g., the end of “Deeper and Deeper” from The Girlie Show or pretty much any performance of “Hung Up”). And yes, there is an instance where it looks like Rae and company are giving their own update to vogueing with those hand gestures of theirs.

    The video concludes with her leaning against one of her dancers as though not only surrendering to the night and the proverbial pleasure, but as though to accent her final declaration of the song: “I’m free.” Sort of like the original Aquamarine at the end of the 2006 movie of the same name.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Shygirl and Saweetie Birth “Immaculate” (A Song, Not A Collection)

    Shygirl and Saweetie Birth “Immaculate” (A Song, Not A Collection)

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    Madonna might have released The Immaculate Collection (a riff, obviously, on “the immaculate conception”) in 1990, but she surprisingly never did offer a song called “Immaculate.” That honor, instead, has been left to Shygirl and Saweetie (on a side note: considering that Shygirl has cited Madonna as one of her primary influences, it’s not “reaching” to make the connection between the song’s title and the Queen of Pop). And while it might seem as though this duo is an unlikely pairing, Shygirl’s ascent into the mainstream has been written in the stars thanks to her long-standing link to Charli XCX, who tapped Shygirl as an opening act on the Sweat Tour, which swept through an array of “all-American” cities this fall.

    Indeed, Saweetie even joined Shygirl onstage during the San Francisco date of the tour to debut “Immaculate” live (because, while Saweetie might be a SoCal girl, she has ties to SF thanks to her uncle, Willie Harper, being a former linebacker for the 49ers). Their performing energy together was more electric than expected, displaying a chemistry that doesn’t always come off in “duets” (see: Britney Spears and Iggy Azalea on “Pretty Girls”). As for Saweetie potentially “boosting” Shygirl and vice versa, it’s worth noting that, while Shygirl has more EPs and an actual studio album under her belt, Saweetie is the more well-known between the two of them. Especially stateside, where hits like “Icy Grl,” “My Type” and “Best Friend” featuring Doja Cat are more recognized than any of Shygirl’s many bops.

    This includes tracks like “Slime,” “Tasty,” “4eva” and “Mr. Useless” (the latter two singles being from her recent Club Shy EP). But, like Charli XCX before her, Shygirl’s music has long been deemed too “fringe” to make it out of the niche she’s currently locked into. With the addition of Saweetie into her musical repertoire, however, there’s a chance Shygirl could cast a wider net to a new range of listeners. For she isn’t exactly associated much with the rap genre. The closest she might have gotten to such a “realm” was on the Tinashe-featuring “Heaven” (a video that often looks as though it’s trying to imitate TLC’s “Waterfalls” on the visual effects front—and as listeners found out again this year, Tinashe clearly likes TLC). Yet Tinashe’s vocal stylings are hardly rap (save for on rare instances like “Nasty”), instead sounding more like they’re in the same register as Shygirl.

    But with the “clout” of Saweetie on her side, she’s opening herself up to a different set of ears, (particularly West Coastian ones, as that’s Saweetie’s “turf”). Even if the co-producers on the song, Oscar Scheller and Blue May, are decidedly not of the rap/hip hop bent. Nonetheless, they meld the divergent vocals of each thirty-one-year-old (one a Taurus, the other a Cancer) seamlessly to a rhythm that is “Shygirl” through and through. Not to mention the braggadocious chorus that repeats the phrase, “Pussy be the gun” like a mantra after saying, “Hold a nigga hostage.”

    And of course pussy is the gun when your other personal philosophy goes, “Yeah, this pussy is immaculate/Wetter than the ocean/I can tell you cannot handle it/Well-spoken, got its own vernacular/Suck a nigga dry, better call this pussy Dracula.” An “on-theme” name check considering the single’s release a week before Halloween (with another Charli XCX favorite, Tove Lo, also recently paying homage to the month with “Cave”).

    Saweetie soon joins in to put her own stamp on the single by asserting, “I’m so hot, hot, hot/Couture/Big look, pose, walk/Dior/IVin the morning, I be going too hard/I’m the it girl of the it girls [though some of the “brats” mentioned by Charli on “360” might beg to differ]/Yeah my Venus a Taurus.” And yes, that’s not just a nod to Shygirl being a Taurus, but also Saweetie’s rising sign being that as well. To that point, it’s no surprise when she adds, “I’m a foodie/Gobble up a bitch/Miss Chew Chew,” later admitting, “I’m a Cancer, a lil’ cuckoo.”

    Both “crazy” and “foodie” qualities are displayed by both women in the accompanying visualizer (though perhaps a “real” video will arrive eventually), wherein they prowl the streets of Hollywood in between visiting a convenience store filled with snacks galore. There are additional interspersed moments (filmed in night shot) of the two in the back of car dancing, posing and generally looking smug. After all, why shouldn’t they when their pussies aren’t just “wet ass,” but immaculate? Though that doesn’t mean conception is. Unless what one is referring to is the immaculate conception of this song, an unlikely empowerment anthem between two even unlikelier collaborators. And hopefully, its earworm of a beat and chorus will further aid Shygirl in ascending to the coveted mainstream like one of her other partners in crime, the Brat herself.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Change Your Gender, (Maybe) Change Your Life: Emilia Pérez

    Change Your Gender, (Maybe) Change Your Life: Emilia Pérez

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    If some story aspects of Emilia Pérez seem familiar, it’s because writer-director Jacques Audiard was inspired by a particular chapter in Boris Razon’s 2018 novel, Écoute. But if some of the visual aspects seem familiar, it’s no doubt because viewers recognize the style as inherently “Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.” Right down to the movie poster with its neon heart framing two guns with crosses on the grips. Indeed, Luhrmann’s seminal 1996 movie (almost as seminal as the William Shakespeare play itself) has appeared to have a noticeable influence on pop culture lately, if one is to go by the aesthetic of Emilia Pérez and the recently cancelled Netflix series, Kaos. The latter even goes so far as to use the same storytelling “shtick” by updating something “ancient” to fit into a modern (therefore, more resonant) context. With plenty of cheeky attitude.

    Emilia Pérez marks Audiard’s twenty-fifth film as a screenwriter and his eleventh film as writer-director (a dual role he started to take on in 1994 with See How They Fall). And it’s clear that he’s never been more confident and secure in his abilities—not just because this is the first time he’s written a script without a co-writer credited, but because he took a chance on experimenting with the musical genre (which, as audiences saw this year, didn’t work out so well for a movie like Joker: Folie à Deux). Or, more precisely, an opera libretto. And yet, perhaps because of some of the more “absurd” elements of the story, a musical is the best way to diffuse the audience’s potential incredulity. Within the genre of a musical, anything goes—because everything feels inherently more fantastical within this type of world.

    Cue Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora Castro, an overlooked yet indispensable lawyer who defends the guilty-as-sin dregs of society with grudging skill, singing a song like “La Vaginoplastia.” A little ditty about all the different parts and procedures that go into switching genders. She engages in this back and forth with doctors in milieus that include Bangkok and Tel Aviv (this movie being made before choosing to get gender transformation surgery was an undeniable political affront). All on behalf of Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the jefe of a Mexican drug cartel who briefly has her kidnapped to tell her that he can no longer live this life. Not because he’s trying to avoid arrest or even because he has some sort of moral compunction about the things he’s done, but because he needs to exist in the body he was always meant to. To live his life, as it is said, “authentically.” And obviously, he’s got the money required to make that change, forking a good chunk of it over to Rita to be his go-between as she eventually settles on the Israeli surgeon, Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), to realize Manitas’ dream. The catch? She must deal with his “highly emotional” (always a euphemism for “woman”) wife, Jessi Del Monte (Selena Gomez, sporting a terrible Spanish accent that’s slightly less noticeable when she’s singing).

    It’s all part of the lead-up toward faking Manitas’ death so that Emilia Pérez can emerge. This is the identity that Manitas has been waiting to step into for years, having already started the process of taking hormones long ago. He is thus ready to “kill” Manitas, and Rita is the key to unlocking his previously unfulfilled wish—even though he knows that, in exchange, he must give up his family. Not just his wife, but their two children. The latter relinquishment being the most painful aspect of all. And yet, Manitas maintains, not as painful as continuing to exist as a man. Let alone such a brutal, often cruel one. It is in this sense that Emilia Pérez proffers the black-and-white notion that to become a woman is to stamp out the ruthlessness inherent in being a man. Not a radical idea, but likely one that still causes offense amongst both genders. Not to mention certain critics of the film—case in point, the Little White Lies assessment: “Any time Emilia ‘reverts’ to her ‘old ways,’ Gascon lowers her vocal register as if to equate masculinity with evil and femininity with good.” Well, if the vocal register fits…

    Not to say, of course, that women can’t be just as malicious and terrible (in their own unique ways) as men. But the likelihood is, let’s say, much slimmer. And so, after Manitas becomes Emilia, there is a certain veracity to the mantra “change your gender, change your life.” And maybe even your entire personality. For, all of the sudden, Emilia becomes a beneficent philanthropist/activist. A person committed to helping undo some of the harm she caused while acting as the leader of a violent cartel by tirelessly working to find the location of missing persons (usually just their bodies) kidnapped by the cartels. This is where yet another “leading woman” enters frame: Epifanía (Adriana Paz). And yes, her name is a bit on the nose, with Emilia seeming to have the “epiphany” that she’s fallen in love for the first time as her authentic self. The same seems to go for Epifanía. And so, it can be said that Emilia’s bodily transition has had a ripple effect/significant impact on the more metaphorical/emotional transitions of the three primary women in her life.

    By this point in the movie (when Epifanía enters the mix), it’s also abundantly clear that Audiard has taken more than a dash of inspo out of the Pedro Almodóvar playbook (for example, The Skin I Live In) via-à-vis convoluted melodrama. But Almodóvar’s more personal connection to the queer and transgender community is what Audiard lacks in terms of carrying off the “authenticity” that he wants to…or rather, that certain viewers want him to. But that doesn’t negate the emotional response that Emilia Pérez can evoke. As it did for Madonna (who has worked with the movie’s choreographer, Damien Jalet, on her own projects, including select songs from The Celebration Tour). Indeed, her reaction left such a mark on Gascón that she told The Guardian, “Madonna was crying so much after the screening in New York. She told me: ‘You’re amazing!’ She was crying and crying. I said: ‘Madonna, please. It’s only a film. Be happy!’” The same thing one of the actors in Romeo + Juliet might have said to an audience member who reacted particularly viscerally to the well-known ending of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

    And, like Romeo + Juliet, Emilia Pérez isn’t exactly being praised by everyone (side note: who could forget The New York Times’ shade-drenched review title of R + J that read, “Soft! What Light? It’s Flash, Romeo” or Roger Ebert giving it one of his worst reviews of a movie ever). Least of all the trans community. In fact, despite Gascón being transgender, not everyone sees the movie as a positive representation. Just another cartoonish one that wields tired tropes. A PinkNews review summed up the movie as “having no nuance when it comes to trans identity.” But maybe it does show some nuance in terms of how, no matter what gender you are, it’s still possible to be neither wholly “good” or “bad,” but filled with numerous contradictions as varied as life itself. As Gascón put it, “You can be LGBTQ+. You can be a man, a woman, an astronaut, an electrician. But if you are stupid, you are stupid.”

    And those that want to ignore the many layers of Emilia Pérez based on criticisms rooted in literalness, not understanding/appreciating the nature of opera and musical theatricality or simply insisting that the transgender element is “offensive” (though surely not more offensive than Gomez and her “Spanish”) are missing the film’s brilliance. Not least of which is the undercutting theme of how living in a patriarchal society begets violence among all genders, all colors.

    Gascón distilled it down to this: “There has always been an explicit violence toward others in parts of male heterosexuality, and that has also been taken up by a part of women’s feminism to crush a certain section of the population.” Whether that crushing will be allowed to further thrive in the aftermath of the U.S. election in November remains to be seen. But one certainty is this: changing gender is not necessarily the key to changing one’s mentality. That would take decades of deprogramming for many people. Especially women who have been conditioned to be misogynists themselves.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Tinashe Brings It On In Her Update to TLC’s “No Scrubs,” “No Broke Boys”

    Tinashe Brings It On In Her Update to TLC’s “No Scrubs,” “No Broke Boys”

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    Cardi B might have recently reiterated, “Broke boys don’t deserve no pussy (I know that’s right!),” but it was TLC who helmed that message best on one of their biggest singles, “No Scrubs,” from their FanMail album. Pointedly released in the weeks just before Valentine’s Day of 1999, the song caused an immediately polarizing reaction between the sexes. For women, it was a long overdue roasting of men who presumed that women should “bow down” simply because they were men. For the latter, it was their worst fear realized: the opposite sex not only calling them on their bullshit, but insisting they wouldn’t tolerate it anymore if there wasn’t even any money and associated lavishing to be had out of the deal.

    Thus, T-Boz, Chilli and Left-Eye changed womanhood forever with five simple words, “I don’t want no scrub.” The definition being a guy who’s “always talkin’ ‘bout what he wants and just sits on his broke ass.” Tinashe clearly took that message to heart (as much as Cardi B on the aforementioned “Up”) with “No Broke Boys,” her third single from Quantum Baby. Just how much is made apparent when she declares, “Run up the cost, ‘cause I need me a spender/Love is never really for free.” Such a transactional view of “love” almost makes it seem as if she watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes before writing those lines (and yes, she is blonde in the video).

    In contrast to her last music video and song, “Getting No Sleep,” Tinashe has opted to tap very much into her hetero side for this particular concept, even going full cheerleader in the accompanying visual, directed by Aerin Moreno (a frequent collaborator of Madison Beer’s). But more than just dressing in a cheerleader uniform, Tinashe seeks to evoke the vibe of 2000’s Bring It On, complete with her squad going pom-pom to pom-pom with a rival one. And the callback to that era makes sense considering how “00s hip hop/R&B” the backing track—co-produced by Zach Sekoff, Phoelix and Ricky Reed—sounds (it even has occasional tinges of Nivea’s “Don’t Mess With My Man”).

    Opening with the verse, “Ex on the line, just as I suspected/No one really gets over me/I’m unaffected, why would you try to ever put me second?/You just another groupie to me now,” there’s something in Tinashe’s tone that recalls Mýa, even though the sentiment isn’t “Case of the Ex,” so much as bearing a similarity to (again) Cardi B flexing, “I like texts from my exes when they want a second chance” on 2018’s “I Like It.” As for the Bring It On “codedness” (read: totally overt callback to said 00s masterpiece), Tinashe and co. appear on the football field and on the bleachers to perform their lively choreo with ample confidence.

    In one of the only scenes off the field, Tinashe—in the “costume” of a football player rather than a cheerleader (perhaps a subtle nod to her “swinging both ways”)—teaches her fellow women what she calls “Our Standards.” This done in a manner and mise-en-scène that also harkens back to another 00s movie: Mean Girls. Specifically, when Coach Carr (Dwayne Hill) warns his students in “health class,” “Don’t have sex. Because you will get pregnant and die.” Here, what Tinashe is ultimately saying to men is: Don’t be broke. Because you will be dead to me otherwise.

    As for the standards Tinashe lists for her own far more attentive pupils than the ones in Coach Carr’s class, they are: 1) Not broke, 2) Under 1K followers (an interesting “ask”), 3) Big dick, 4) Not a DJ/promoter, 5) Six inches (or “6’s”) minimum, 6) Good with his hands and 7) Emotionally available. Not just a lot to require of any “modern” man, but additionally rather cliched and outmoded at this point in terms of conveying a stereotype about “what women want.” Nonetheless, as her squad takes notes, even the team led by the other head cheerleader (the one who looks like a version of Megan Fox in the earlier stages of her plastic surgery) has to stop and pay attention. So on board with the list, in fact, that they even put aside their differences/competitiveness long enough for them to nod in agreement, smile and infiltrate the class.

    During the “big finish” of the video, the two groups join in together on their presently shared choreography, having found peace and common ground through this understanding of the “no scrubs” code that has, evidently, been updated to “no broke boys.” A concept Destiny’s Child also spoke to on “Bills Bills Bills,” which, incidentally, was released the same year as “No Scrubs”—but the former put their single out in May of 1999, two months after “No Scrubs” had already caused shock and delight around the world (though mainly in the United States, where a “response song” like “No Pigeons” “had to be” released in order to “keep women in check,” or some such bullshit male logic).   

    But Tinashe actually succeeds more deftly than Destiny’s Child at distilling and repurposing what TLC already said, refreshing their message with the upbeat chorus, “No broke boys, no new friends/I’m that pressure, give me my tens/Ain’t no lie, ain’t no shade/Fuck on me, then you know he paid/Looks so good, makes no sense/Bad ass bitch, with my bad ass friends/No broke boys, ain’t no shade/Fuck on me, then you know he paid.” All sung in a very “cheerleader chant” sort of way.

    By the final frame of the video, however, Tinashe is walking all alone down the fifty-yard line—yet another indication that she’d rather be a “lone” wolf/cheerleader than settle for some dusty football player who’s going to end up as a used car salesman rather than a Travis Kelce. Hey, no one ever said capitalism and “love” weren’t inextricably linked. Least of all TLC.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Dom Dolla and Tove Lo’s “Cave”: A Vampire’s Anthem in Time For Spooky Season

    Dom Dolla and Tove Lo’s “Cave”: A Vampire’s Anthem in Time For Spooky Season

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    Still fresh off bringing the heat from her EP of the same name, Tove Lo has nonetheless graced her fandom with yet another danceable ditty. This time, one that’s seasonally appropriate—a.k.a. “spooky.” After all, what could be more ominous than a cave (especially at night)? Except, in this instance, the word refers to “succumbing.” In other words, “caving in” to something…or, more precisely, someone.

    With the help of DJ and producer Dom Dolla, the frenetic backbeat of the song lends urgency to Tove’s simultaneous resistance to and gravitational pull toward the object of her affection. And to establish the tone for the moody ambience of the single, Dom Dolla and Tove set their video, directed by Grant Spanier, in the darkness of some creepy woods (but then, all woods are creepy, whether it’s dark or not). Driving through them at exactly 3:33 a.m.—because the time 6:66 doesn’t exist—a shot of Tove coolly wearing her sunglasses at night in the front seat is the first indication that this is a vampire story. That and, well, bats live in caves, so the song title is more than a slight “Easter egg.”

    As for the driver, Dom, he needs no sunglasses, wearing only his baseball hat as a shield for his eyes from the night. It’s then that Tove opens the track with the ethereal, hyper-romantic verse, “I’ve got this hunger/Are you alone?/Make me feel better/Fuck to our song/I can feel my walls coming down/Late at night when I fade/You can cut me deep with a line/Like a cold sharp blade.” While it might initially be presumed that the pair is each already a vampire on the prowl, we soon see there’s more to the narrative than that.

    So it is that, jostling around in what Tove calls a “buggy thing,” the two roll up to what looks like an abandoned warehouse where an underground rave is in progress. Albeit one that is in rather scant attendance. Even so, the red lasers flitting around the room almost make up for the fact that this is a vampire rave, as the attendees’ pointy ears immediately indicate (less cliché than a baring of fangs, to be sure). It is at this moment that Tove and Dom pull out their crossbows—suggesting they’re vampire hunters and not yet vampires (maybe this is why Tove is dressed like she got inspired by The Matrix)—and aim to kill…or at least tranquilize.

    Alas, their dart is easily caught by one of the vampires, prompting the two to look at one another in horror as the subtitle “run.” shows up at the bottom of the screen for a touch of silent movie cachet (after all, Nosferatu is one of the most classic silent and vampire movies of all time).

    Having poked the bear—or rather, vampire—Dom and Tove flee the scene back into the woods, with many subsequent shots channeling The Blair Witch Project thanks to unsteady handheld camera work and plenty of scenes done in “night shot” mode. An overhead shot with the camera going into the woods as though it’s a 3D model also lends an eerie “this is a simulation” quality to the narrative.

    But if it is, it doesn’t make it any less daunting/frightening for Dom and Tove to be “turned.” To have to “cave” to their pursuers by eventually becoming one of them. Hence lyrics like, “I can feel my walls coming down/Late at night I forget/You can make me weak with a line” and “I know all your tricks and you lick your lips ‘cause you know I’m gonna cave/I’m gonna cave/You pull me closer I feel your skin/Memories wash over, I let you in.”

    But not without a fight as Dom and Tove run through the woods during Spanier’s chaotic, intercut scenes of the woods appearing as though turned upside down while he focuses in on the male vampire who then gets the subtitle that warns them, “Game over.” His cohorts also join in pursuit of the duo through trees punctuated by giant cobwebs—as though their method for ensnaring humans is decidedly spidery.

    In the end, we can see that Dom and Tove have, indeed, caved. This indicated by the flashing of vampire fangs (it was bound to happen sooner or later). And also, in Tove’s case, red eyes. The final scene then shows them hanging upside down in what appears to be the very same abandoned warehouse where they first tried to overtake the vampire ravers. But hey, as it is said: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” In other words, surrender Dorothy. Cave.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • FKA Twigs’ “Perfect Stranger” Offers Only Pros to Meeting Strangers, While Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger” Is More Cautiously Aroused

    FKA Twigs’ “Perfect Stranger” Offers Only Pros to Meeting Strangers, While Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger” Is More Cautiously Aroused

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    Madonna as the titular character in Desperately Seeking Susan once said, “Good going, stranger.” It seemed, in its odd way, to presage a song of hers that would come out fourteen years later: “Beautiful Stranger.” While it was the lead single for a less than elegant movie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Madonna’s message on the track (which sounded like a holdover from the Ray of Light era, but was actually recorded the same year it was released, 1999) captures a timeless message: love at first sight. Or, at the bare minimum, lust at first sight. The thrill of initial attraction that can only come from not actually knowing someone. From being able to project all of your fantasies and expectations onto them. And yes, this is usually based on looks alone as opposed to “energy radiated.”

    At the time, Madonna’s inspiration for the song was reported to be Andy Bird, a British “regular person” posing as a “filmmaker” (which was a loose way of saying unemployed). Obviously, he was Guy Ritchie 1.0, a set of training wheels before Madonna unearthed a more legitimate Brit in the world of film. Nonetheless, you didn’t see Madonna being inspired enough by Ritchie’s looks to write such a song about him (instead, he got “Push”). Indeed, Bird typified the phrase “tall, dark and handsome” or, even better for Madonna’s songwriting purposes, “tall, dark stranger” (this being a common vague description for fortune tellers to assure, “You will meet a tall, dark stranger” [a cliché that Woody Allen turned into a title for one of his “late era,” particularly bad movies]).

    And yet, despite the attraction she feels for this stranger, Madonna knows that she’ll pay the piper later if she ignores her instincts about him being fundamentally dangerous. For, as it used to be said before the arrival of apps like Uber and Airbnb: “Stranger danger.” What’s more, some of Madonna’s most formative years were at the height of AIDS in the 1980s, when sex with strangers suddenly started to feel more dangerous than ever (regardless of being gay or not). This fear of the risk that came with “casual sex” (the latter practice seeming to reach a crescendo in the late 70s) is also inherent in Madonna’s 1993 video for “Bad Girl,” which riffs on the premise of Richard Brooks’ 1977 movie, Looking For Mr. Goodbar. Itself a cautionary tale of what can happen when one falls down the rabbit hole of meeting beautiful strangers almost every night (especially as a woman). And going home with them.

    With FKA Twigs’ latest single, “Perfect Stranger,” it’s difficult not to recall Madonna’s 1999 song also highlighting the agonies and ecstasies of encountering someone new (for sexual or romantic purposes, needless to say). Except that, in Twigs’ case, there seems to be no drawback whatsoever to a perfect/beautiful stranger. In fact, throughout the song, she riddles off all the ways in which keeping someone at arm’s length skillfully enough to remain a stranger is the hottest thing since latex. So it is that she sings, “You’re perfect, baby/My perfect stranger/You’re beautiful, you’re worth it/You’re the best, and you deserve it/You’re a stranger, so you’re perfect/I love the danger/You’re the perfect stranger.”

    In another instance of ostensible Madonna homage, Twigs ruminates at one point during the outro, “What is this human nature?/No answer, I’m infatuated.” Madonna’s own song, “Human Nature,” also has a video punctuated by Madonna and her backup dancers in “boxes” (just as the “Perfect Stranger” video is characterized by “box rooms”). Not to mention the same S&M aesthetic that Twigs wields during one particular “vignette” from the Jordan Hemingway-directed video.

    In contrast to Twigs’ lustiness in the song, Madonna approaches her stranger (and strangers in general) with much more cautious arousal. Which is why she self-deprecatingly says, “If I’m smart, then I’ll run away/But I’m not, so I guess I’ll stay.” She also notes that one has to have a predilection for the dangerous (as Twigs does) in order to give in fully to an attraction to a perfect/beautiful stranger, singing, “You’re some kind of beautiful stranger/You could be good for me/I have a taste for danger.” If one doesn’t have that taste, however, things could get dicey. From Madonna’s perspective, anyway.

    As far as Twigs is concerned though, “That’s okay with me/To live my life with some mystery/Please don’t say that I must know/And that’s alright, I say/We’re all getting through this our own way/I’d rather know nothing than all the lies/Just give me the person you are tonight.” Madonna, conversely, seems to want her expectations of the perfect/beautiful stranger to eventually pan out in some way once the two get to know one another more fully. Even if more than part of her expects to be disappointed…if the following lyric is anything to go by: “I looked into your eyes/And my world came tumblin’ down/You’re the devil in disguise/That’s why I’m singin’ this song to you.”

    But the reason Twigs is singing her song to her perfect stranger is to emphasize that disappointment can never come if you never truly get to know someone. Thus, the dual definition of “perfect stranger” to mean, on the one hand, simply “a total stranger” and, on the other, someone being “perfect” solely because they are a stranger, and one therefore doesn’t have any awareness of their “defects” yet. It’s also interesting to hear Twigs’ predilection for incorporating the sound of 90s house and dance music into the production, whereas Madonna’s song, actually made in the 90s, is deliberately intended to be more sonically reminiscent of music from the 60s. While this might have been because it was made for the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me Soundtrack, there’s also another element at play: the idea that meeting a stranger in the 60s—especially the late 60s—was infused with just as much of a sense of danger as it was titillation, what with Cold War paranoia besetting everyone.

    In the here and now, Twigs’ chooses to ignore all the paranoia associated with the present (from catfishing to being scammed in some other egregious way) and play up the sheer romance of encountering a stranger, particularly on the dance floor. The not knowing is what makes it sexy rather than scary (“I don’t wanna have the anxiety/Please don’t say so I won’t know”). And besides that, “What we don’t know will never hurt.” Granted, it didn’t hurt Twigs to “meet” (a.k.a. invite) former stranger Madonna and “powwow” with her at the Central Saint Martins BA fashion graduation show back in 2022. Surely, that meeting of the minds might have helped with the genesis of “Perfect Stranger,” if Twigs happened to brush up on M’s back catalogue afterward. Not that she wasn’t already pole dancing to “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” and incorporating “Vogue” into live versions of “Give Up” well before the fashion show came along.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • FKA Twigs Lets Her Projections Run Wild on “Perfect Stranger”

    FKA Twigs Lets Her Projections Run Wild on “Perfect Stranger”

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    The theme of projection in romance seems to be trending at the moment. At least if one takes Dua Lipa’s “Illusion,” Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux and, now, FKA Twigs’ “Perfect Stranger” as signs o’ the times. Granted, “Perfect Stranger,” the latest single from Eusexua (following up the song of the same name) is likely to be far more warmly received than the sequel to Joker, even if both pop culture offerings focus on how projecting an idea of who someone is onto them without really knowing who they are is the key to stoking “romantic feeling.” Because once you find out more, you’re certain to lose the same level of fervor you had when you could envision your “crush” to be exactly who you thought they were/wanted them to be (just ask Lady Gaga’s version of Harley Quinn a.k.a. “Lee Quinzel”).

    Reteaming with director Jordan Hemingway (who also directed “Eusexua”) for the video, Twigs lays out that premise by offering up a series of imagined scenarios with different people in various “box rooms” (which are eventually presented as said “boxes” via the pan out method, sort of like the presentation of the rooms in the “dollhouse” [that turns out to be inside of a snow globe, for added Black Mirror effect] of Taylor Swift’s “Lover” video). In the first room, she’s on her own, sporting what will now forever be known as the “eusexua haircut” when fans look back on this era. It is in this state of aloneness that she can let her projections run wild, and this is conveyed by the camera panning down to reveal the first “fantasy”: Twigs loving up on some similar-looking woman (at least in terms of having a thin frame) as both wear next to nothing. After all, you can’t spell “eusexua” without “sex.”

    At the start of the song, Twigs already announced, “I don’t know the name of the town you’re from [in contrast to Lana Del Rey singing, “I come from a small town, how ‘bout you?” on “Let Me Love You Like A Woman”]/Your star sign or the school you failed/I don’t know and I don’t care.” The reason she doesn’t care, obviously, is because to know anything concrete about a person is to have them demystified. “Debunked,” as it were. And since Eusexua is an album inspired by the grimy, no-holds-barred, no-inhibitions-left dance music that Twigs heard while going to various underground clubs in Prague (while filming The Crow, the only movie more condemned than Joker: Folie à Deux this year), the sound and motif of “Perfect Stranger” caters to one’s sentiments while experiencing a night out in this type of environment.

    Drenched in the sweaty debauchery of the dance floor, it’s no wonder Twigs also insists, “I’d rather know nothing than all the lies/Just give me the person you are tonight.” As mentioned above, this smacks of Dua Lipa’s “Illusion,” during which she sings, “Yeah, I just wanna dance with the illusion.” Being that both British chanteuses favor music tailored to “the clerb” (Charli XCX isn’t the only one), it’s to be expected that some of their lyrical themes would align. And this year, each prefers dancing with their illusions/projections of someone.

    The camera pans sideways next to reveal a version of FKA Twigs cooking in the kitchen (albeit ineptly). Even though this scene doesn’t coincide with the line, “I don’t know the food that’s your favorite now/Your work or what you’re working around/I don’t know and I don’t care/And that’s okay with me/To live my life with some mystery/Please don’t say that I must know.” In point of fact, Twigs’ entire thesis statement on this song is in direct contrast to the overexposed nature of living in the internet-fueled world of today, where no mystery at all is left about what a person is like. Or rather, what the image they want to project is like. Maybe that’s why Twigs goes for a 90s feel with the song’s production (courtesy of Koreless, Stargate, Ojivolta and Twigs herself) in addition to the aesthetic of the video, which could, at times, double as a CK One commercial with all its “slick” panning.

    Twigs then gets more psychological by presenting a twin self in the same room with her, almost as though to subliminally indicate that perhaps by not fully knowing herself, she can keep thriving and surviving. Either that, or she’s determined to promote the notion of sologamy through cloning. But that doesn’t appear to be the case in another “box room scenario” wherein FKA is the mother to a baby, her husband or baby daddy sitting solemnly behind her as he gives her what looks like a really bad massage whilst she rocks the child in her arms (in truth, it looks like something out of a 90s Janet Jackson video). The camera then pans horizontally back over to the first pair of “perfect strangers” we were introduced to (Twigs and the woman who has the same thin frame she does) before panning down to reveal a new “box room” altogether. This one being decidedly S&M-centric.

    Considering Twigs used this particular scene as a teaser for the video, it’s likely among her favorites. And why wouldn’t it be? She gets to wear scanty leather lingerie while walking on a mini treadmill, of sorts (clearly, Charli brought the treadmill back with the “360” video), as her dom gives her a stinging spanking with a riding crop. At which point she pronounces, “I love the danger/You’re the perfect stranger.” Quite the opposite of the millennial mantra, “Stranger = danger.”

    The camera pans down once more to unveil the final “box room” setup: Twigs in an orgiastic, tribal-themed sort of scenario. Writhing in ecstasy amid her final projection, the end of the video shows all of the “box rooms” stacked atop each other and side-by-side (again, it makes for the aforementioned “Lover” dollhouse effect). All of these perfect strangers prompting Twigs to announce, “Oh, we can make it work/What we don’t know will never hurt/‘Cause you’re a stranger, so you’re perfect.” That is, until you get to know said stranger.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • “…And Good Business Is The Best Art”: The Apprentice

    “…And Good Business Is The Best Art”: The Apprentice

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    Although director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman are certain to put a disclaimer title card at the beginning of The Apprentice that notes creative license was taken in retelling the story of Donald Trump’s (played by Sebastian Stan) rise to power in New York during the 70s and 80s, it’s no “embellishment” that Andy Warhol and Trump orbited orbited the same circles. In fact, the two first met at Roy Cohn’s birthday party on February 20, 1981 (Cohn was turning fifty-four, and would only have five years left to live), which Warhol would mention in one of his diary entries two days later, commenting of the event, “Black tie. The Mafioso types weren’t in black tie, though… There were about 200 people. Lots of heavies. Donald Trump, Carmine DeSapio, the D’Amatos, David Mahoney, Mark Goodson, Mr. LeFrak, Gloria Swanson, Jerry Zipkin, C.Z. Guest and Alexander, Warren Avis, Rupert Murdoch and John Kluge.”

    The significance of these two theoretically “divergent” types encountering one another in a Cohn-curated environment is taken the utmost advantage of by Sherman, who uses this kernel of hobnobbing history to create a scene of dialogue between Warhol and Trump in The Apprentice that allows the former to wield a riff on one of his famous aphorisms, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say ‘money is bad’ and ‘working is bad.’ But making money is art, and working is art—and good business is the best art.” (Trump conveniently seemed to gloss over the word “good” in good business though, even if he chose to cite the quote in 2009’s Think Like A Champion.)

    On this matter, Trump can agree with someone as “liberal” as Warhol. Even if, like Cohn, Warhol’s politics (just as his sexuality) leaned more toward “a.” As in amoral and apolitical. That two so ostensibly “different” personalities could converge in a milieu with Cohn as the common denominator spoke to something about both Cohn and Warhol. In Warhol’s case, that his bottom line wasn’t just ahout making more money, but also attending any event with name-dropping potential for his diary. As for Cohn, an association with Warhol was yet another “Easter egg” about his so-called hidden sexuality. A sexuality that Trump, like so many things, chose to ignore. Or at least turn a blind eye to. After all, his friendship with Cohn was much too beneficial to let homophobia get in the way (until it finally did because of Cohn’s overt AIDS symptoms). Besides, Cohn literally made his career out of persecuting the LGBTQIA+ community during what was known as the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, a “companion piece” to the Red Scare, if you will. Of course, the irony was obvious considering Cohn’s own homosexuality. And the irony quotient was further upped because of how enthusiastic fellow homo J. Edgar Hoover was about Joseph McCarthy and Cohn’s concerted effort to expel anyone suspected of homosexuality from government.

    Even after McCarthy was disgraced and the tide turned against him and his tactics, Cohn was able to rise from the ashes and become the fixer to turn to in New York when someone had legal issues. And Trump had plenty of those starting in 1973, when the Department of Justice brought a civil rights lawsuit against the Trump Organization for its discriminatory practices against Black applicants attempting to rent an apartment at various Trump properties. It is at this point in time that Sherman sets the stage for the story to commence, for it is where Donald Trump truly starts to get on the path toward becoming Donald Trump. A “persona” that fully congeals and peaks in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan had taken control of the government and turned America into a “neoliberal paradise” (in other words, hell for most people), much to the delight of men like Trump. And even men like Warhol (who was a capitalist before he was a gay man).

    Warhol and Trump’s paths would cross again amid this “new world order,” soon after meeting at Cohn’s birthday party. In fact, Trump actually stopped into The Factory to discuss more of their favorite thing: “business.” Or the art of business (clearly, Trump would later take from that Warholian sentiment in titling his first book The Art of the Deal). At the time, there was talk of Warhol furnishing paintings for the then “still in production” Trump Tower. He did, indeed, create a series of “portraits” of the building (that meta flair) to be displayed in the lobby, but, per his August 5 (the day before his birthday), 1981 diary entry, “I showed them the paintings of the Trump Tower that I’d done. I don’t know why I did so many, I did eight. In black and gray and silver which I thought would be so chic for the lobby. But it was a mistake to do so many, I think it confused them. Mr. Trump was very upset that it wasn’t color-coordinated.”

    Eventually, “The Donald” side-stepping use of Warhol’s paintings in the building would yield even stronger reactions to him and his then wife, Ivana, with Warhol writing flat-out (on January 15, 1984), “I still hate the Trumps because they never bought the paintings I did of the Trump Tower.” Interestingly, his hatred of them doesn’t seem to stem from what they represent, but from what he failed to be a part of/get paid for. Though surely that wouldn’t have stopped him from attending the black-tie opening gala for Trump Tower in the fall of 1983, as The Apprentice shows him to. While Cohn is, obviously, the true Trump foil/mentor of the film, there’s no denying the pointed inclusion of Warhol, however briefly. For, lest anyone forget, Warhol single-handedly altered the perception of art into something viewed as an assembly line business—from both the artist and the consumer’s standpoint. And that odious word, “consumer,” in relation to art really didn’t start to be in vogue until Warhol made art into something designed for mass consumption.

    And, unlike, say, Keith Haring, Warhol’s intent was not for the “noble purpose” of disseminating art to people from all walks of life, but to make as much profit from it as possible. The same went for Trump in terms of buying up as much real estate as possible at a time when buildings in New York were selling for peanuts. It certainly wasn’t done as a “beneficent” way to “bring prestige back” to NYC, as Trump and his cohorts wanted to position it for their own “good PR” ends. One such key early cohort being Cohn (played to perfection by Jeremy “Kendall Roy” Strong). To be sure, the crux of The Apprentice—and where it gets its name apart from Trump’s shitty 00s reality show—is the Orange One’s formative relationship with Cohn. As such, The Apprentice reiterates that every dirty trick for “success” that Trump learned, he learned from Cohn, who took him under his wing as a client when few others would have bothered. Granted, it was Cohn who requested “an audience” with Trump first at what is supposed to be Le Club, a members-only place for somebodies and social climbers—Trump was clearly in the second camp.

    As for why Cohn summoned a then “Robert Redford-looking” Trump over under the pretense of congratulating him for becoming the youngest member to join the club, Sherman explains it best when he says, “There clearly was a father-son dynamic to their relationship. On another level, there was a homoerotic subtext. One of the things I found in my research is that a lot of Roy’s lovers were young, blonde, blue-eyed men who bore a striking resemblance to young Donald. I think Roy was attracted to Trump, in a way, and this movie is sort of a love story.” Needless to say, a very fucked-up love story involving a gross betrayal from the “student who has surpassed the teacher” in terms of merciless cold-bloodedness. It’s a slowly mounting callousness he’s proud of, too, telling Ivana (Maria Bakalova) during their “courtship phase” (a.k.a. he relentlessly pursues her to the point of stalking) that there are only two kinds of people in this life: killers or losers.

    Britney phrased it better when she divided the two kinds of people into “the ones that entertain and the ones that observe” on “Circus.” And yes, that’s what Trump turned his life into after securing the renovation of The Commodore hotel next to Grand Central, partnering (always a loose word with Trump involved) with Hyatt’s Pritzker family to reinvent it as the Grand Hyatt. It is Cohn, of course, who is speculated to have “silently” helped Trump push this deal through, complete with his standard brand of blackmailing select politicos. And while there might be no direct evidence to support that narrative claim in The Apprentice, sometimes, a bit of deductive reasoning is all it takes for something to be believable.

    The same goes for the allusion to Trump being an avid user of amphetamines throughout the 1980s, another key component in The Apprentice to comprehending his gradual mutation into a Frankenstein monster—with Cohn as his Dr. Frankenstein. Sherman’s script is essential to unfolding that arc, along with his previous experience writing about another conservative monster, Roger Ailes, which eventually became a bestselling book called The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country. Sherman came to see Ailes as “a real-life modern-day Citizen Kane figure and someone who had been so kind of corrupted and corroded by his own lust for power.” This, too, is how he sees both Cohn and Trump, but especially the latter. And, as though to “subtly” underscore that point, the set design for one of Trump’s pre-80s yuppie apartments features a poster of Citizen Kane in the living room area. Undeniably, Trump has that same ego and empire (even if said empire is built on smoke and mirrors) as Charles Foster Kane. The New York Times thought so long ago, titling a 1983 article about the “mogul,” “The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump.” In it, the eponymous subject gives the telling quote, “‘Not many sons have been able to escape their fathers,’ said Donald Trump, the president of the Trump Organization, by way of interpreting his accomplishments.”

    And yet, if Cohn is to be viewed as his “surrogate father,” Trump most certainly hasn’t escaped his “daddy” at all, having adopted every tenet Cohn imparted and then some. Among those tenets (apart from “always attack, never apologize”) penned by Sherman being, “This is a nation of men, not laws,” “You create your own reality. The truth is malleable” and, not one to exempt physical appearance from his advice, “You’ve got a big ass, you need to work on that.” To that, er, end, Sherman delivers the ultimate Frankenstein scene during the film’s coda, as Trump proceeds to go under the knife for some liposuction and alopecia reduction surgery (all as “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” is eerily sung by a children’s choir at Cohn’s funeral). The “source” for confirming that Trump underwent these procedures (apart from having eyes)? Ivana’s divorce deposition. Along with her stating that Trump raped her—a scene that is harrowingly recreated in The Apprentice.

    Although, in 2015, Ivana amended the statement she made (saying, “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense”), Sherman was determined to include this scene, insisting, “I couldn’t stand behind a movie that didn’t explore Trump’s misogyny. I needed the film to engage with that, and this scene is the most powerful and visceral way. Sexually assaulting somebody you love is such a transgression. Dramatically, it showed the depth to which Donald Trump had sunk at that point in the story.” Sort of like Elvis with Priscilla (who also refers to a rape in Elvis & Me). Except that Elvis actually had a talent and Trump was, more than anything, threatened by Ivana’s star eclipsing his in a way that Elvis’ never was by Priscilla.

    As for Cohn, he felt threatened by Ivana long before Trump. Not just because of his romantic jealousy, but because of his fear of Trump losing half of his “hard-won” assets, thus drafting an ironclad prenup that ends up offending Ivana in The Apprentice. But not as much as Cohn himself will end up being offended by Trump’s cold shoulder as he grows wary of associating with a “known fag.” AIDS being the ultimate outing device in the 80s (just ask Rock Hudson, summarily abandoned by his “good friends,” the Reagans when his condition became too much of a “political hot potato”). Even so, Trump offers one more “act of goodwill” by inviting him for a “goodbye forever” sendoff (thinly disguised as a “birthday celebration”) at Mar-a-Lago in early 1986, which Trump had freshly purchased in 1985. It is here that Trump gifts Cohn a pair of diamond platinum cufflinks. Ivana is the one to tell him that they’re fake and that “Donald has no shame.” This little detail layers the scene with heightened tension and emotion, as Cohn suddenly grasps the gravity of what he’s created through the revelation of how effortlessly Trump not only lies, but delivers those lies with such conviction. Sherman noted of these types of absurd moments in The Apprentice, “A lot of scenes in this movie seem so crazy that you think maybe a screenwriter invented them, but there’s actually a record of them happening.”

    Sherman chooses to end the film just after Cohn’s death, with Trump in his office going over “talking points” for what would become The Art of the Deal. Written by Tony Schwartz (though Trump was sure to put his name on the book), who was hired by Trump precisely because of the unfavorable article he published in New York Magazine about the “real estate titan,” Trump is depicted as someone scrambling for anything of substance to say to his “ghostwriter” as material for the manuscript. Right out the gate, his past and childhood is something he doesn’t want to delve deeply into, saying there’s nothing “to” people other than wanting to make a lot of money and be winners—no psychoanalysis required to see that. With little else to probe, Schwartz tries to draw out some of the simple steps for making a “good deal.” Trump then regurgitates the three rules for success that Cohn had taught him long ago, listing the “rules” as though he thought of them himself.

    And it’s a scene that’s entirely believable as fact, what with Sherman remarking, “People who have known Trump since the 1980s told me that Donald was using both the techniques and words that Cohn taught him. That’s really when the inspiration for the movie came about, thinking about the ghost of Roy Cohn inhabiting the body of Donald Trump.” Again, Trump hasn’t escaped his “father.”

    Matt Tyrnauer, director of the 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, already established what Sherman reemphasized by stating to NPR, “Donald Trump is Roy Cohn. He completely absorbed all of the lessons of Cohn, which were attack, always double down, accuse your accusers of what you are guilty of, and winning is everything. And Trump absorbed these lessons and has applied them in every aspect of his life and career.” The one lesson Trump didn’t seem to absorb from Cohn, however, is that the truth always—but always—catches up to you. Granted, Cohn avoided paying fully for his sins by dying before he had to. Perhaps the same will be true of his protégé.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Lindsay Lohan Once Again References Past Movie Glory in Yet Another Commercial

    Lindsay Lohan Once Again References Past Movie Glory in Yet Another Commercial

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    Despite Lindsay Lohan’s rather limited filmography, it hasn’t stopped her from continually homing in on the main three movies that launched her into the spotlight—The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday and Mean Girls—as premises/allusions in her various brand deals over the years. And, if not referencing one of those movies, Lohan has always been able finagle a brand partnership by making fun of her party girl past. She did as much in 2015 with an Esurance commercial, in 2018 for a brief stint as lawyer.com’s spokesperson and again in 2022 with an ad for Planet Fitness that was sure to play up how healthy and vital she is now. So “vital,” in fact, that she still needs to do commercials because of how few and far between the film roles are (and no, one isn’t counting her “Netflix comeback” with Falling For Christmas and Irish Wish).

    This much was further emphasized again in 2022 when she released yet another ad that paid Mean Girls homage galore, this time for a shoe brand: Allbirds. Then, in 2023, she went back to Mean Girls again via a Peter Thomas Roth ad that found her playing a “customer service representative” (a.k.a. herself wearing a headset) to answer the call of a woman asking, “What can Peter Thomas Roth eye patches help me with?” In reply, Lohan gushes, “Hydration, depuffing, anti-aging…the limit does not exist!” Nor does the limit exist for the amount of products that Lohan will shill while simultaneously hammering home the point that the height of her movie career was in the 2000s (even though The Parent Trap came out in 1998). The Mean Girls milking didn’t stop that year either, with Lohan really going for broke (a.k.a. money) via a Wal-Mart commercial that would be as close as she could get to a sequel (something she had been blabbing about for years on various talk shows, only to be saddled with an embarrassing cameo in the eventual movie version of the Broadway musical).

    In her latest to bid to remind people of her relevance by recalling the past (something Lohan’s longtime frenemy, Paris Hilton, is defter at), Lohan concedes to riff on The Parent Trap for a Nexxus hair product commercial titled “The Style Swap”—surely, you get the similarity in title. Obviously, this is because Mean Girls is too exhausted by now and she’s waiting to release the sequel to Freaky Friday (Freakier Friday) before she starts fully milking that again, too. Hence, reverting to The Parent Trap, her very first feature. After all, not many people are going to get a Just My Luck or even Life-Size reference. So that leaves a concept that starts with Lohan sitting at her vanity as someone calls from offscreen, “Lindsay! Ready to go?” “Give me five,” she calls back. Gazing into the mirror, she then “muses,” “Hmm, who do I wanna be today? I’m feeling twinspired…but, as I always say, let the hair decide.”

    She then has a “fantasy” of two hairstyles meant to embody the personality types of Hallie Parker and Annie James, the twins separated at birth in The Parent Trap who end up reuniting at the same summer camp. While Annie is a polished and sophisticated Londoner, Hallie is a loose, casual California girl. Thus, Nexxus takes advantage of the hairstyle “contrasts” by showcasing one version of Lohan in a slicked-back ponytail narrating, “Do I wanna go understated with a sleek pony?” She then saturates her hair with a “slick stick” (not suggestive at all) and declares, “The Nexxus slick stick is my go-to” before breaking the fourth wall and asking (in Annie’s British accent), “Where was this in the 90s?”

    The Hallie persona then enters the picture by way of Lohan lying on her back (no stranger to said position) on the bed with a deck of cards fanned out in her hands—an automatic callback to the poker scene in The Parent Trap. She muses, “Do I wanna go bold with hair as big as my personality?” “Hallie” then douses her tresses with a spray and explains, “This Nexxus XXL hairspray gives me major volume.” It’s at this point that she stares into a Beauty and the Beast-like hand mirror and tells herself, “You never looked better.” This being what amounts to an almost exact re-creation of what she does in the Peter Thomas Roth commercial with a hand mirror, also telling herself, “Honey, you never looked better.” Unless this is just her new occasional catchphrase (à la Paris Hilton with “sliving”), it seems ill-advised to use it in commercials for two separate brands. But then, Lohan is known for being somewhat sloppy.

    Winking at the camera after repeating what she already did for Peter Thomas Roth, she’s then joined in the next scene by her “twinspirations,” with ponytailed Annie insisting, “Well, I think the choice here is obvious.” Hallie chimes in, “Yep, very obvious. Have you ever seen hair this bouncy?” The “real” Lindsay then announces, “I have a beyond brilliant idea [this being a Hallie quote from the movie]. Sorry girls, you’re dismissed.” Snapping her fingers, she disappears the two and proceeds to meld the best of both styles while cringily continuing her narration with, “Brat summer is over. Flawless fall is now.”

    And, apparently, “flawless fall” means looking like Meredith Blake (Elaine Hendrix)—oversized black hat (granted, Meredith’s wasn’t that oversized) and white dress included—instead of either one of her twin selves. When Lohan finally shows herself to the person who was waiting for her, someone intended to be her daughter, one presumes, the girl says of her overdressed appearance, “I thought we were just going to the grocery store.” Lohan shrugs, “We are.”

    Now out on the sidewalk in front of her brownstone (how Carrie Bradshaw), Lohan looks at the camera again and instructs, “Darling, always live like the cameras are watching” (because, frankly, they are—and who remembers that better than the formerly-stalked-by-the-paparazzi Lohan?). This being a statement more in line with her Lola Steppe character from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Perhaps the next movie that Lohan will resort to referencing in a commercial, since Mean Girls and The Parent Trap are growing increasingly stale and there are few things that the I Know Who Killed Me storyline could work for in terms of advertising (even though that story, too, involves twins separated at birth).

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Dionysus Beware: Party Girl Gods Charli XCX and Kesha Finally Join Forces

    Dionysus Beware: Party Girl Gods Charli XCX and Kesha Finally Join Forces

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    Perhaps saving the best for last in terms of who she wanted to unveil as a collaborator on her Brat remix album, Charli XCX has at last given fans an overdue Kesha feature. Really, it should have happened long ago, but perhaps Kesha wouldn’t have been “at home” in the Number 1 Angel or Pop 2 universe (even if, somehow, Lizzo managed to fit into the latter). On Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, however, any style—anything goes. And Kesha is undoubtedly one of the OG brats (along with Blackout-era Britney Spears)…embodying the definition long before Charli fully crystallized what it meant.

    After all, Kesha was the one singing solely about partying and waking up hungover only to do it all over again on her early albums, Animal, the Cannibal EP and Warrior. Hell, she even had a song called “Sleazy” (on Cannibal) that spoke to the core of what “being brat” is all about. And yes, she was also all about glitter (this was before that particular party girl accoutrement started to get more flak for its anti-environmental properties). And Kesha, too, understood the value of a remix album, releasing a successful one in 2011 via I Am the Dance Commander + I Command You to Dance: The Remix Album (which rolls off the tongue about as easily as Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat).

    This early period of back-to-back albums for Kesha (from 2010 to 2012) would have still been at a time when Charli had yet to even release her first studio album, True Romance, in 2013. However, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t still plenty busy making and putting out music, including her first two mixtapes, Heartbreaks and Earthquakes and Super Ultra, both released in 2012. Music that, in some way or other, was informed by pop songs of that moment as much as Charli’s own predilection for the “underground sound.” And, of course, Britney Spears.

    In fact, some listeners might not be able to avoid pointing out that the most perfect choice for a collaboration on this particular song would have been Spears (snatches of Britney crooning the word “everytime” from her 2003 song of the same name are, after all, prominently featured throughout and she was referenced multiple times in Spring Breakers, including with use of that single). Even so, Kesha is undeniably the second-most perfect choice (besides, Spears only exits her semi-permanent retirement for Elton John remixes). She being just as associated with “party girl antics” as Charli.

    This even in spite of all the trauma and sadness she also became associated with amid her endless Kesha v. Dr. Luke legal battle. Indeed, because the case was only recently settled (in June of 2023) after being tied up in court for nearly ten years since the time when Kesha first filed a lawsuit against her erstwhile producer in 2014, most of her career has been underscored by this legal battle. That said, her newfound sense of liberty from a man whose shadow loomed over her for years is apparent in the first single she released, “Joy Ride,” on her own independent label, Kesha Records.

    That jubilant aura of freedom is also present on her contribution to “Spring Breakers.” A movie which came out at the height of her party girl image in 2012. Which also marked the same year Icona Pop and XCX’s “I Love It” reached number one on the Billboard charts (and entered the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100), launching the latter into the spotlight as a key player in the music industry. And as XCX’s party girl image began to rise, Kesha’s party girl image started to wane. Not just because she was effectively blocked from making new music, but because her next album after a five-year hiatus was Rainbow, a more contemplative record compared to the party bops of her past.

    When she pivoted back to dancier music with the release of High Road in January 2020, her attempts at connecting with her audience again on tour were foiled by the pandemic. Gag Order then served up a mix of styles in 2023, bringing us to the present, with Kesha seeming to get fully back into the dance/pop genre she started out in, albeit with far more experimental flair. Something Charli XCX knows all about. Hence, the lyrics, “Every time, I make it so outrageous/Always gonna lose to people playin’ safer.” But, in the present, playing it safe no longer guarantees the success it once did (just look at Katy Perry), with XCX noting that “the niche” is being rewarded more than ever.

    As for Kesha’s own “unsafe” added verse, she sings, “Ooh, these bitches, we tied/Art is not a competition/Rating go up when the clothes come off/But a real bitch come when the dick goes up, like/Ooh, these bitches rip off/Wish they could be OG, but they not/We going psycho, we going off/Yeah, me and Charli, we the party girl gods.” So it is that Dionysus has been duly informed. And while insisting that art is not a competition while also noting that the new bitches on the scene will never be OG (ergo, truly “legitimate”) sounds like a dichotomy, well, it just speaks to the Brat manifesto of a song like “Girl, so confusing.” You can have occasional contempt for another girl while also respecting them. Again, dichotomies. That’s what Brat is all about—apart from “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra.” Accoutrements Kesha has presumably gotten on board with in lieu of glitter.

    Elsewhere, Kesha braggadociously adds, “Oh baby, you mad watchin’ me win/Do it again ’cause I’m Kesha, bitch/Makin’ me sick, nominated/All the motherfuckers better be prayin’/Singin’ my song, singin’ along/TikTok [the song, not the app] bitch ’til the kingdom come/Give ’em a hit, they can eat shit/Choke on my name when you suck on my dick.” A fine sentiment, to be sure…especially when directed at Dr. Luke or anyone else trying to stop Kesha’s party. Or Charli’s Brat autumn.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Italians (More Like Italian-Americans) Should Be Happy to Unclaim Christopher Columbus

    Italians (More Like Italian-Americans) Should Be Happy to Unclaim Christopher Columbus

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    As far as Italian-American “heroes” go, they’re pretty few and far between. Mainly because all of them seek to represent an embarrassing interpretation of what an Italian is (this includes all involved in The Godfather). However, most embarrassing is the formerly-perceived-as-a-real-Italian Christopher Columbus constantly being claimed as a symbol of Italian heritage, regardless of how long his origins have been contested/questioned (even a New Jersey radio station was willing to admit Columbus’ wasn’t “Eye-talian” back in 2016).

    This claim to Columbus has been made annually in various Little Italys throughout the U.S., but most especially in the so-called Little Italy of New York. And yes, plans for the Columbus Day Parade are still going strong despite the further confirmed revelation that Columbus wasn’t Italian at all, but a Spanish Jew who likely switched religions to avoid persecution (in what amounts to one of the biggest examples of irony ever). In fact, the parade is even more “auspicious” this year because it marks the eightieth anniversary of its existence (though the origins of celebrating Columbus extend even further back than that, particularly in New York).

    And yes, it still insists that it “celebrates Italian-American heritage” despite the now irrefutable evidence that Columbus was not Italian, but born in the Kingdom of Aragon (a.k.a. Spain). Nonetheless, the repeated story is that he was born in Genoa. This despite the fact that there is no known documentation of Columbus ever writing in Ligurian, let alone Italian. His letters were always in Spanish. What’s more, being a Sephardic Jew, it made sense that he would conveniently choose to sail for the “New World” in 1492, the same year that Jews were ordered by the Spanish monarchy (via the Alhambra Decree) to either convert to Catholicism or leave Spain. For while no one might have known his “secret,” one can imagine the phobia of being “outed” as a Jew at that time in Spain.

    Funnily enough, many of the Jewish people who did flee Spain in 1492 went to Italy, creating a new influx of Jewish last names that had never existed in the register before (e.g., Faraggi). Not Columbus though, even if Genoa was supposedly his “home.” Instead, he set sail for “Asia,” ending up in the Caribbean. But either way, it was a place where he could be the discriminator rather than the discriminated against.

    Despite Columbus’ waning cachet as a “hero” and “discoverer of America”—and now as an Italian altogether—Italian-Americans haven’t bothered to let go of their “emblem.” Their “totem” for a parade meant to symbolize “Italian pride.” In fact, this clinging to Columbus as an Italian hero was immortalized by a 2002 episode of The Sopranos called, what else, “Christopher.” Opening with a shot of the usual congregants outside the meat shop, Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa) reads aloud a news report about Native Americans (then still being referred to as “Indians”) intending to protest the parade in Newark. Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) becomes irritable, pronouncing, “Columbus Day is a day of Italian pride. It’s our holiday and they wanna take it away.”

    One wants to reach through the TV screen in this moment, shake him and scream, “Let them! Let them take it away!” Because not only is Columbus not Italian, but he didn’t really do much to warrant admiration. Never mind Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) screaming at his son, Anthony (Robert Iler), “Look, you had to walk in Columbus’ shoes to see what he went through. People thought the world was flat for crying out loud. Then he lands on an island with a bunch of naked savages on it. I mean, that took a lot of guts.” Anthony ripostes, “Like it took guts to murder people and put ‘em in chains.” The Soprano matriarch, Carmela (Edie Falco), then chimes in, “He was a victim of his time.” Anthony balks, “Who cares? It’s what he did.” Unwilling to listen to more of his son’s “sacrilege,” Tony finally declares, “He discovered America is what he did! He was a brave Italian explorer, and in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero! End of story.”

    Over two decades later since that episode aired, and there are still many Italian-Americans willing to die on this “Christopher Columbus was a hero” and “brave Italian explorer” hill. And yet, if any “day” should belong to Italians (read: Italian-Americans with zero conception of the real Italy) in America, the better choice/commemorative effort at this point is August 23rd, the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 without receiving a fair trial for a crime (robbery and murder) they may not have been responsible for. This due to the undeniable taintedness of America’s perception and treatment of Italians at that time. That Sacco and Vanzetti were unabashed anarchists also didn’t help their cause.

    This is the better set of Italian “heroes” (/martyrs) to honor not just because it’s “chicer” to play up one’s historical victim status in the present, but because it’s one of the most well-documented instances of anti-Italianism in the U.S. That faux Italians should like to say that “taking away Columbus” from them is “taking away their holiday,” therefore an example of anti-Italianism, well, it just goes to show how fewer and fewer Italian-Americans (itself a dwindling population that only appears to delight in continuing to caricaturize itself for profit) seem to be in touch with their history. But if scientific evidence has officially proven Columbus wasn’t Italian at all, the reaction from Italians and Italian-Americans alike should be more pride than ever in the fact that their heritage has been wiped clean of this mostro.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • “ADHD” According to Paris Hilton: “That’s Hot”

    “ADHD” According to Paris Hilton: “That’s Hot”

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    Building on the growing arsenal of singles and videos that Paris Hilton has thus far released from her second album, Infinite Icon, “ADHD” marks the fourth single from the record. And, noticeably, it’s the first single to not rely on a feature from someone more legitimate in the music industry to buttress it (with “I’m Free,” it was Rina Sawayama; with “Chasin,” it was Meghan Trainor; with “BBA,” it was Megan Thee Stallion). As such, it makes sense that Hilton would pull out even more stops than usual for the video, directed by photographer/graphic designer Brian Ziff (who was responsible for Hilton’s album cover visuals, and has previously worked with the likes of Cardi B and Rico Nasty on other photoshoots).

    To mimic the “vibe” of what it feels like to have ADHD, the video immediately starts with a frenetic barrage of various images behind Hilton as she starts to get overwhelmed by all the thoughts she’s having—all the synapses that are firing back and forth. She then appears against a black backdrop (as though to indicate that the noise has briefly quieted) wearing light-up fairy wings (or butterfly, depending on your personal preference). Indeed, Hilton is known to wear such a winged prop for various events and photo opportunities, but, in truth, her fellow 00s icon, Britney Spears, has always been the one with the fairy fetish. And, speaking of Spears, “ADHD” definitely bears the sound of a cheesy Spears ballad from one of her earlier albums (think: “Don’t Let Me Be The Last to Know”)—though it clearly wants to believe it qualifies as being of an “Everytime” caliber (Spears’ strongest ballad, unquestionably).

    On the subject of “Everytime,” the video for “ADHD” also does its best to convey a certain “mental illness steez.” This being played up by a slew of dancers outfitted in white lace body stockings and matching face coverings that lend a “creepy” (for Paris Hilton standards) aura as they writhe and wriggle erratically in a manner intended to connote the manic nature of ADHD (though it kind of looks like the similarly erratic choreography from Jennifer Lopez’s “Hearts and Flowers” segment in This Is Me… Now: A Love Story). This happening as she “belts out,” “Sometimes I can’t deny it/So I just keep on trying/Sometimes I wanna crumble/Sometimes I’m gonna stumble/My mind is always running/Sometimes I feel like crying.”

    In the end, of course, she realizes that her “superpower” all along has been ADHD. Not a curse, but a blessing that makes her see and process the world in a much more “special” way than everyone else (well, that and being an Aquarius). Hilton remarks upon this “special,” extrasensory worldview right at the outset of her memoir, Paris, when she says, “Dr. Edward Hallowell, author of Driven to Distraction, says the ADHD brain is like a Ferrari with bicycle brakes: powerful but difficult to control. My ADHD makes me lose my phone, but it also makes me who I am, so if I’m going to love my life, I have to love my ADHD.” Of course, it’s also easy to love one’s life—ADHD or not—when they have oodles of cash, but anyway…

    While some might be wondering what a Lolitacore aesthetic (rampant throughout the video) has to do with ADHD, they obviously don’t understand that “looking hot” is not out of the question for such a serious subject matter. As Hilton also notes in her memoir, “My brain chemistry craves sensory input. Sounds, images, puzzles, art, motion, experiences—everything that triggers adrenaline or endorphins—that’s all as necessary as oxygen for the ADHD brain.” That certainly explains the barrage of sensory overloaded, sexually charged images in “ADHD,” complete with Hilton also seeming to take some inspo from Spears’ 1999 Rolling Stone photoshoot with David LaChapelle, especially via her “boudoir” scenes being punctuated by pink hues and satin sheets (on another side note: LaChapelle directed the abovementioned “Everytime” video).

    Other “scenarios” in the video find Hilton standing in the middle of a hall of mirrors or against a black backdrop seemingly projecting “vintage” scenes from the 00s (there even appears to be a moment where Lindsay Lohan is projected on one of the screens behind her—unless, of course, it’s just a lookalike. And yet, it wouldn’t be out of the question considering Hilton recently said she wouldn’t rule out doing a remix song with Lohan à la Charli and Lorde).

    She serves more Britney imagery by perching on a swing in a style that harkens back to Spears in the “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” video…and Lana Del Rey during the “Video Games” portion of any live show she plays. Granted, Paris’ “special swing” has a giant half-moon decoration on it and, in contrast to Britney and Lana, Paris is, naturally, sporting more Lolitacore lingerie while on it.

    As for the continuation of subliminally projected images behind her that seem to borrow from TMZ’s vault of 00s footage, there’s another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it image in particular that shows Paris on the illustrious November night in 2006 (you can tell by the outfit) when her photo was snapped thousands of times as she drove away from the Beverly Hills Hotel with Spears and Lohan in tow. And so, perhaps projecting these images of the past behind her in a fast-paced, extremely subconscious way is meant to prove another point about ADHD from her book: “Because my attention span is limited, I don’t see time as linear; the ADHD brain processes past, present and future as a Spirograph of interconnected events…” Either that or she knows that playing up her 00s era at any chance she gets will always be her bread and butter (“Is butter a carb?”).

    It also seems as though Hilton has been of the belief that ADHD is a superpower for a while now, having immortalized that thought in her memoir with the declaration, “Some of us have discovered that ADHD is our superpower.” So clearly, the lyrics have been brewing for quite some time. Though she seems to have lifted the uber narcissistic line, “My superpower was right inside, see/So thank you to me/Thank you to me/Thank you to me,” from Snoop Dogg accepting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018. Or Meghan Trainor on this year’s “I Wanna Thank Me,” which samples Niecy Nash’s Emmy award acceptance speech (itself ostensibly inspired by Snoop). But, occasionally narcissistic or not, Hilton wants everyone to know that ADHD is what got her to where she is today, not winning the birth lottery.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Charli XCX’s Most Ambitious “Mixtape” Yet: Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat

    Charli XCX’s Most Ambitious “Mixtape” Yet: Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat

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    Being that the intention of Brat was always to get back to Charli XCX’s musical roots (especially after her intentionally hyper-commercial album, Crash), it seemed inevitable that what amounts to a “mixtape” version of it would come out. Of course, it’s instead being referred to as a “remix album.” A genre that can be a notoriously hard sell unless you’re Madonna with You Can Dance or Dua Lipa with Club Future Nostalgia. But, in Charli’s case, there are two things in her favor: 1) the unstoppable nature of Brat summer that has turned into Brat autumn and 2) XCX long ago established herself as a mixtape queen with Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 (hell, even 14, Heartbreaks and Earthquakes and Super Ultra). And Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat (a riff on the title of Brat’s deluxe edition, Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not) still has that “at the cutting edge” feel. Except, this time around, her roster of guest musicians is even more A-list, including Ariana Grande, Lorde, Julian Casablancas and Billie Eilish.

    Regardless, Charli hasn’t gone full-tilt diva by totally ignoring lesser-known artists (at least within the mainstream circuit) on the record. For example, BB Trickz, Bladee and The Japanese House. Perhaps all part of XCX’s bid to prove that, while she might have effectively “gone corporate,” she hasn’t forgotten the importance of the underground. Not just in terms of how it helped her come up in the world, but also to its ongoing influence on her creativity (in that sense, XCX is very Madonna-esque indeed).

    To kick off the album, XCX opts for Robyn and Yung Lean to accompany her on “360,” one of the earliest remixes to show up (though “von dutch” featuring Addison Rae was the true OG of the Brat remixes) before anyone knew for certain that Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat was going to be a reality. Combining the “old” and the “new” in terms of selecting these two specific collaborators seems to be a pointed choice on Charli’s part, a “hat tip” to the idea that there is no new without recognizing those who came before to blaze a trail. And there’s no better epitome of that in the dance world than Robyn. Besides, as Charli once said, “When I listen to a Robyn pop song, I don’t feel like she’s just kind of saying something and not thinking; I feel like it’s really emotional.”

    Plus, Robyn was an early supporter of Charli, with the latter having once told her idol during an interview, “I’ll never forget when we were on tour in Australia together years ago… You came over to me at some party where I was feeling really nervous and you said, ‘Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks of you. We’ll have fun together, being ourselves.’” And that’s just what they continue to do on the “360” remix (which retains its musical core, unlike most of the other remixes on Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat), with Robyn boasting, “Your favorite pop star [Charli] is into me” (smacking of Chappell Roan bragging, “I’m your favorite artist’s favorite artist” [oui, a Sasha Colby homage]).

    It’s with “Club Classics” featuring BB Trickz that the listener finally notices the true essence of a remix album, for the song sounds entirely different. Even if producers George Daniel (a.k.a. Charli’s fiancé) and TimFromTheHouse are sure to incorporate the now signature refrain of “365,” present in the lyrics, “When I’m in the club, yeah, I’m (bumpin’ that)/When I’m at the house, yeah, I’m (bumpin’ that)/365, party girl (bumpin’ that)/Should we do a little key? Should we have a little line?/When I, club, yeah I’m (bumpin’ that)/When I’m at the housе, yeah, I’m (bumpin’ that)/365, party girl (bumpin’ that).”

    BB Trickz’ Tokischa-like inflection later shines through in her Spanish portion of the song that translates to, “Bb xcx is an automatic classic/Brr-brr, fashion killa even if the outfit is basic/I’m a brat even if I don’t have any plastic/Bounce like that, your boyfriend is a fanatic/I’m still a princess even if I walk around the hood/I’d give you a date, but I’m not in the mood/Baddie in the club, brat in the club/In the club, huh, I’m playing on loop/In the club (club, club), in the club.” Just as Charli has been…and not only during Brat summer, but for the majority of her career. So, yes, it’s only natural that she’d want to “dance to [herself],” what with such an impressive oeuvre of danceable ditties.

    Ones that are even danceable when the subject matter of the lyrics happens to be more serious. As is the case on both the original and remix versions of “Sympathy is a knife.” And while many speculated that the song was about Taylor Swift (as they alternated between guessing if “Girl, so confusing” was about Lorde or Marina), therefore that Swift might pull a Lorde and “work it out on the remix,” the presence of Ariana Grande instead makes it seem all the more possible that the song is about Taylor. And that she didn’t actually “shake it off” the way she led the public to believe by praising Charli’s brilliance post-Brat. However, perhaps to take attention away from the whole “Taylor theory,” the new iteration of “Sympathy is a knife” centers on the altered perspective on fame Charli has gotten since her “overnight” success with Brat. So it is that she opens the song with, “It’s a knife when you know they’re waiting for you to choke/It’s a knife when a journalist does a misquote/It’s a knife when a friend is suddenly steppin’ on your throat/It’s a knife when they say that you’ve been doing things you don’t.” Suddenly understanding that she doesn’t exist in the same niche bubble anymore, XCX has had the same rude wake-up call about fame this year as Chappell Roan (who has been around for far less time). Addressing the complications of this newfound popularity, XCX adds, “It’s a knife when your old friends hate your new friends/When somebody says, ‘Charli, I think you’ve totally changed’/It’s a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me/And I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is she?’” This question also seems to be a foil to her asking, “Who the fuck are you?/I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that” on “365.”

    Dissecting the pains (sharp as a knife) that have come with the pleasures of fame, Charli expresses the rightful fear, “‘Cause it’s a knife when you’re finally on top/‘Cause logically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom.” Perhaps that’s part of why XCX already announced her intention to take a break from music for a while during The Brat Interview with Zane Lowe, citing her desire to focus on acting now (indeed, she has starring roles lined up in Faces of Death and I Want Your Sex). And yes, she also discussed her hyper-awareness of the fact that everything she does musically in the future will now be compared to this. Her blessing, thus, also being her curse.

    As for Grande, she has her own unique set of knife digs to explore via the lyrics, “It’s a knife when you know they’re counting on your mistakes/It’s a knife when you’re so pretty, they think you must be fake/It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page/It’s a knife when they won’t believe you, why should you explain?/It’s a knife when the mean fans hate the nice fans/When somebody says, ‘Ari, I think you’ve totally changed’ (no shit)/It’s a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me/And I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is she?’” Because, needless to say, there is this constant pressure that musicians—particularly female ones—undergo to reinvent yet also “stay the same” a.k.a. appeal to their audience in the same way. Which makes for a double-edged sword more than a mere knife.

    In typical Brat fashion, the track starts to sound like an entirely different song by the end, with Grande layering on her “uhs” and “mms” as Charli admits, “All this expectation is a knife.” In other words, when it comes to success, be careful what you wish for. A theme also present on “I might say something stupid.” Because, yes, to add further “insult” to Taylor’s “injury,” “Sympathy is a knife” is followed up by a song featuring her The Tortured Poets Department muse, Matty Healy. Billed, of course, as The 1975 (along with production from Jon Hopkins, credited as part of the feature). Indeed, it feels as though Charli has “gifted” this entire song to him as a space to explore some of the emotional and reputational fallout that occurred after his dalliance with Taylor Swift—during which he was picked apart for being far too skeevy for such a “nice girl.” Now engaged to Gabbriette (name-checked in the “cool/mean girl” anthem that is “360”—likely first and foremost for her A-plus resting bitch face), it’s obvious that in the divide between Healy and Swift, Charli has far more allegiance to those in the Healy camp (including her own fiancé, who serves as The 1975’s drummer). So it is that she gives him the opportunity to reflect on his post-Swift feelings as she, too, joins in on the verse, “Rot in my house in L.A./Thinkin’ of givin’ up everything/Now I’m watchin’ what I say/These interviews are so serious/My friends went through this before, yeah/It happens to lots of guys/Medicine makеs him a problem/‘I’m famous, but I’m not quite.’” After each musician’s tumultuous past year, the latter sentiment no longer applies.

    To lighten the mood of existential dread on the previous two tracks, Charli brings in her go-to, Troye Sivan, for a feature on “Talk Talk.” Like Healy, he’s given plenty of vocal time to paint the picture, “Are we getting too close?/You’re leaving things in my head/I’ll be honest, you scare me/My life’s supposed to be a party (do you ever think about me?)/‘Cause we talk that talk, yeah we talk all night/And the more I know you, the more I like you/Can you stick with me, maybe just for life?/And say what’s on your mind?” Considering the song is an homage to Charli’s feelings of shyness around George Daniel before they started dating, it holds a special place in her heart. Maybe that’s why she secured Dua Lipa to contribute her own Spanish and French vocals to the track. As a matter of fact, Lipa was generous enough to do so without even wanting to be credited as a feature on the song. Because what’s more Brat than being aware that everybody is going to know it’s your voice anyway? No attribution required.

    For “von dutch,” however, all the credit goes to Addison Rae for remaking it into something entirely new—while still maintaining the braggadocious vibe of the original. So it is that she flexes, with Lily Allen-esque brattiness (think: “URL Badman”), “I’m just living that life/While you’re sittin’ in your dad’s basement/Bet you’re disappointed that I’m shinin’/I’m just living that life/Von Dutch, cult classic, but I still pop.” Charli then brings the conversational meta tone present on many of these remixes by describing, “Linked with Addison on Melrose [a phrase that has since been immortalized in t-shirt form]/Bought some cute clothes and wrote this in the studio.” The two then speak to the overarching theme of the song—that you can “hate” someone and still be obsessed with them, ergo, “If you don’t like me and still watch everything I do, bitch, you’re a fan”—by concluding with the verse, “All these girls are like, ‘Ah, can I get a picture?’/And then they go online like, ‘Just kidding, I hate you’ (Von Dutch, cult classic, but I still pop)/‘Cause we’re just living that life.”

    A romantic life, in addition to a glamorous one. But lately, the romantic aspect for Charli has been tinged with a bit of taint thanks to the whole global fame thing. To that point, as mentioned, it is with this remix album/mixtape that Charli also had a chance to speak on how her perspective has changed since her post-Brat existence. Something also particularly explored on the new version of “Everything is romantic” with Caroline Polachek (paying back the favor of Charli remixing “Welcome to My Island” back in 2023). Among the most standout remixes, Polachek’s ethereal voice delivers instantly classic lines like, “Late nights in black silk in East London (everything is)/Church bells in the distance/Free bleeding in the autumn rain/Fall in love again and again.” Obviously, that line about free bleeding is super witchy just in time for “spooky season.” For yes, the “spooky aesthetic” is also very Brat.

    Compared to the unabashed romantic portraits Charli gave in the original (inspired by a trip to, where else, Italy), there is a more bittersweet, macabre tone to the “romantic” imagery in this version (e.g., “Walk to the studio soaking wet/ACAB tag on a bus stop sign”). And that gets played up by a dialogue exchange between Charli and Caroline (not unlike the conversational tone in “Girl, so confusing” with Lorde) that starts, “Charli calls from a hotel bed/Hungover on Tokyo time [Billie Eilish will also refer to Charli’s Tokyo predilections on “Guess”]/‘Hey, girl, what’s up, how you been?’/‘I think I need your advice’/‘That’s crazy, I was just thinking of you, what’s on your mind?’/‘I’m trying to shut off my brain/I’m thinking ‘bout work all the time/‘It’s like you’re living the dream/But you’rе not living your life.’” Polachek’s wise aphorism cuts Charli like a knife (comme sympathie) as she replies, “I knew that you would relatе/I feel smothered by logistics/Need my fingerprints on everything/Trying to feed my relationship/Am I in a slump?/Am I playing back time?/Did I lose my perspective?/Everything’s still romantic, right?”

    Suddenly questioning, in many ways, her own “street cred” now that she’s gone full-tilt mainstream (unintentional or not), Charli acknowledges being consumed by the competitiveness and vacuity that comes with being an international pop phenomenon. Complete with the Skims and H&M campaigns. At the end of the song, all Polachek can offer is: “All things change in the blink of an eye/Charli calls from a photo set/Living that life is romantic, right?” Alas, probably not with a million cameras on everything you do.

    The sense of regret and wistfulness on “Everything is romantic” also appears on “Rewind” featuring Bladee (another Swedish rapper à la Yung Lean). And while XCX might have excised her body image issues out of this version (e.g., “Nowadays, I only eat at the good restaurants/But honestly, I’m always thinkin’ ‘bout my weight”), she still has plenty to say about the fresh slew of inadequacies she feels with her elevated fame status. So it is that she admits, “Maybe I need a reality check/Sometimes now I just gotta say less [the curse of being far more scrutinized than ever before]/Wanna see my face all up in the press/When I don’t, sometimes I get a little bit depressed.” Ah, such a Leo sentiment, to boot. As for her honorary home, Charli remarks, “L.A. makes me so competitive/Sometimes I wanna wake up dead.” As one can hear, the lyrics are even more candid (and slightly Lana Del Rey-esque) than on the original Brat.

    Charli then even throws in a nod to Britney Spears and Cher with the lines, “I must confess, I’m under stress/Turn back the time again.” For added elegiac effect (not just for the way her life used to be, but the person she was at that time), the two woefully chant, “Requiem for everything/Rewind, remind me” to close out the song. In many regards, as a matter of fact, this remix album feels like Charli ringing the knell for the period of her life that came before Brat. One she’ll never be able to recreate now that “being fringe” isn’t something she lay can claim to any longer.

    Another reason to want to rewind to that time when it was all much less complicated? SOPHIE was still alive. As the core subject on “So I,” the remix version with A.G. Cook is possibly even more bittersweet as Charli reflects on some of their best times together. For while the original’s lyrical focus was on the absence of SOPHIE, the remix wishes to replicate the experience of her presence by remembering the formative experiences they shared. Thus, Charli sings, “Now I wanna think about all the good times/Me and A.G. on Mulholland/Crazy Uber, straight from a video shoot/Got birthday cake on the way.” The birthday cake was for SOPHIE and the video shoot was for “After the Afterparty.” As Charli told Lowe during The Brat Interview, the cake was shaped and styled like a burger and was one of those “gross” grocery store kinds (even if Gelson’s isn’t exactly a cheapo grocery store). But surely, to SOPHIE, it was the thought that counted. And she undoubtedly would have been touched by the numerous ways in which XCX still continues to carry on her musical legacy in her own music (with the “So I” remix sounding decidedly SOPHIE-esque from a sonic standpoint).

    As for the the next song, a remix of “Girl, so confusing” with Lorde, the internet already “went crazy” for it. But hearing it within the framework of the entire remix album revitalizes its potency and further cements it as a truly standout moment in the Brat universe (rounded out by Lorde joining XCX onstage to perform it during the Sweat Tour at Madison Square Garden). As is “Apple” thanks to its viral TikTok moment that had people of all ages imitating the choreography. Alas, the entire tone and motif of “Apple” is altered with the presence of The Japanese House (who, incidentally, got her start with some help from Matty Healy). For, rather than continuing to be a song about generational trauma, it becomes a song about relationship trauma, with Charli and The Japanese House lamenting, “When you made me (I’ve been looking at you so long, now I only see me)/You made me so sad, so sad.” The idea that someone can “make” you in a relationship—as though you never really existed before—is not uncommon among women, who so often can’t help but think that “another half” will be the solution to the inherent emptiness they feel.

    Hence, when that half is lost, one winds up with sentiments such as, “Sometimes when I go home/It doesn’t feel like home/Don’t know if you can hear me/Inside this conversation/Sometimes when I go home/It doesn’t feel like home/Silently pack my things, get in the car/I just wanna drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive.” So even if “I think the apple’s rotten right to the core/From all the things passed down/From all the apples coming before” didn’t make the cut—despite being a key part of the original—at least “I just wanna drive, drive, drive” did. The Japanese House also further, that’s right, drives home the failed relationship point with the verse, “Somebody asked me how you’re doing/And I make excuses and I say you’re fine/I keep trying not to think about you, but I/Seem to think about you all the time.” So it is that “Apple” is no longer really “Apple” at all.

    Less jarring in terms of its musical (though not lyrical) transformation is “B2b” featuring Tinashe—herself coming off a year when she was finally given more credit and recognition thanks to the viral success of “Nasty.” Charli refers to each of their “sudden blowups” in the lyrics, “‘Hey, Tinashe, wanna do this song?’ [Brat always has to keep it text-level conversational]/Two days later, got the vocals cut/Oh my god, we really blew the fuck up/Now everybody wants what we got.” Of course, Britney Spears fans would argue that Tinashe already blew up long ago by being a feature on 2016’s “Slumber Party.” And yes, her debut album was all the way back in 2014, yet the masses only seemed to catch on with Quantum Baby’s “Nasty” this year—much the same as they did with Brat. Charli and Tinashe have made six and seven albums, respectively, but it took all the way until this moment to be celebrated on such a scale. This is why Tinashe has a perfect right to boast, “Look at me now, better than before…/Didn’t come out of nowhere, they been sleeping on me, I’m bored.”

    While the term “back to back” had a different connotation in the original (including the allusion to B2B DJs—a.k.a. two DJs “spinning” at the same time), here it refers to the endless slog of work it takes to get to the career high Charli and Tinashe are currently experiencing, with Charli declaring, “All the way from Los Angeles to France/Dix ans plus tard et toujours en place/Yeah, we work hard, yeah, we work hard (back to back), in addition to, “I travel ‘round the world to fifteen countries in four days and/After I get off stage, I’m on set shooting ‘til the a.m./I’m fuckin’ tired, but I love it and I’m not complainin’/Oh, shit, I kinda made it (yeah, we work hard, yeah).” All of this is to say, of course, that Charli is a believer in the inherent tenets of capitalism.

    As for the next track, Charli got the rightful notion that Julian Casablancas would be the ideal collaborator for it. After all, in the original version of “Mean girls,” Charli alludes to a New York scene queen via the depiction, “Yeah, she’s in her mid-twenties, real intelligent/And you hate the fact she’s New York City’s darling.” Just as Casablancas and his fellow band members in The Strokes were for a good portion of the 00s. Something Charli alludes to during The Brat Interview when she says, “It was fun on the remix album to bring all of these people in, some of whom aren’t particularly connected to the club world…when you would think about it on the surface, but actually, Julian Casablancas, for example… When I think about Julian, [he] has this sort of history with Daft Punk and also…you talk about New York downtown, it’s like, people were, like, partying then.” That is, in the 2000s. Before the obscene digital documentation wrought by social media took over everything and scared people out of being full-tilt debauched (lest the evidence showed up later on the internet).

    “Mean girls,” suffice it to say, sounds like the perfect soundtrack for one of the antagonists in a 2000s movie (Regina George being the leader of the pack, duh). As for the remix, it brings the middle part breakdown of the song (the one that sounds like Mr. G from Summer Heights High composed it) to the beginning, thus taking on a new life and meaning with Casablancas in the driver’s seat. Naturally, when one utters the name “Julian Casablancas,” the automatic meaning is “The Strokes” (and vice versa)—just as it is the case with “Matty Healy” and “The 1975.” That said, there is, of course, an undeniable The Strokes tincture to the song. At a certain moment, both Charli and Casablancas seem to be channeling their inner empathetic mean girl energy by announcing in the bridge, “I won’t break down, I won’t/Not I, oh no/It is my fault I know it now, oh no/I gave you everything/Too much, it’s true/Then took it all away/In front of you.” And yet, in another verse, Casablancas seems to be the one who was slighted by a mean girl when he recounts, “I don’t understand/What you’re gonna do/I followed the rules/I took the abuse/I don’t understand/Where you’re coming from/I downed all my pills/I love you the most/Be with, with me/Thought you could talk.” The last sentence bearing a faint hint of the same earnestness of wanting to communicate with the object of one’s desire/affection in “Talk Talk.”

    The nebulous, arcane nature of the lyrics are almost inscrutable as a mean girl herself—not to mention the origins of how she became so mean. That said, Casablancas seems to taunt, “Kept it vague so you could guess.” Alas, “Guess” doesn’t appear for two more tracks, with the emotional “I think about it all the time” following “Mean girls.” And who better to exude the kind of emotionalism necessary for this particular song than Bon Iver?—even though it’s a bit of an odd choice to feature a man on a song about one’s biological clock ticking. Though maybe it’s a subtle way of showing Taylor she’s not the only one who can get Bon Iver featured on a song. What’s more, Iver once covered the Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time,” itself a song that speaks to women’s fear of it being “too late” vis-à-vis having a baby. With the Raitt reference in mind, it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the song has undertones of an 80s power ballad. And in contrast to other remixes, one of the more recognizable verses were kept: “So, we had a conversation on the way home, ‘Should I stop my birth control?’/‘Cause my career still feels small in the existential scheme of it all.”

    Despite that, Charli can’t help but get caught up in the vicious circle of her increasingly successful career, adding in the new verse, “First off, you’re bound to the album/Then you’re locked into the promo/Next thing, three years have gonе by (scared to run out of time)/Me and Gеorge sit down and try to plan for our future/But there’s so much guilt involved when we stop working/‘Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working, no.” More candidly still: “I’m so scared to run out of time.” Then putting none too fine a point on the Raitt tribute, XCX concludes, “I think about it all the time (time, time, t-time, t-time, time)/I found love, baby (time, time, t-time, t-time, time)/‘Cause our love ran out of time (time, time, t-time, t-time, time)/Love in the nick of time (time, time, t-time, t-time, time)/I found love (time, time, t-time, t-time, time).” So did Rihanna, albeit in a hopeless place. And she managed to have two children, so surely Charli can do the same (even if Rihanna appears to have given up music altogether as part of focusing on this new era in her life…granted, she had stopped putting out albums long before the kids came along).

    The closer on the original Brat, “365,” now benefits from Shygirl’s presence on Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. And yes, the pair already showcased the track all over the U.S. during the Sweat Tour (with Shygirl serving as Charli and Troye’s “special guest”). This remix is also among the few that preserves a large portion of its original self, with Shygirl contributing just one new verse: “Too hot, when I sweat, just lick me/Touch and squeeze when the bassline hits me/Are you gonna ride me?/Harder than a BPM, beat match me (yeah, I’m lovin’ that)/Can’t see straight, yeah, I love it when the pill hits/Back of the booth, bitch, guest list, VIP/Party don’t start ‘til a bitch come find me/Party girl, party girl (yeah, I’m lovin’ that).”

    That “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish should now serve as the coda for this edition of Brat is part and parcel of the album being Brat’s “Bizarro World” flipside (complete with the font on the cover literally being flipped). The Black Lodge to Brat’s White Lodge (now that Kyle MacLachlan has been deemed “Mr. Brat” by the Brat herself). With Charli perhaps figuring that going even more niche again might get her back to “herself”—who the fuck is she?, to quote the new “Sympathy is a knife”—after all this accelerated fame.

    By the same token, Charli remarked during The Brat Interview, “From before I made Brat I knew, I was, like, ‘We’re gonna do a remix album.’ Because we’re gonna make so many edits that it’s gonna just…we’re gonna want to do it because they’ll be so much music and it will be really cool to have, like, kind of a channel to put it all out there.” “Cool” it is. And also perhaps even cooler and more ambitious than any of her previous mixtapes.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Doreen Savage Gives Marty Mendelson A Run for His Dolls

    Doreen Savage Gives Marty Mendelson A Run for His Dolls

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    On July 9, 2000, a theoretically small role in the “No Ifs, Ands or Butts” episode of Sex and the City left an indelible imprint on anyone with a phobia of dolls (a.k.a. pediophobia…not to be confused with pedophobia [fear of children])—not mention an imprint on anyone who can’t unsee and unhear the part of the narrative where Samantha (Kim Cattrall) dates a Black guy. However, perhaps even worse than dolls in and of themselves is dating someone who happens to be obsessed with them. Naturally, it would be unlucky-in-love Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson) who would end up in such a bizarre scenario. And this after so generously playing Cupid to Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Aidan Shaw (John Corbett) by making her go to his furniture store after seeing him splashed across The New York Times Styles section.

    And what does Stanford get for his good deed? A so-called meet-cute with Marty Mendelson (Donald Berman) at the same furniture store where Aidan’s dog, Pete, does all the heavy lifting for Carrie in terms of “aligning” them (by humping her leg). While Carrie is crushing hard and things seem to be going well (until Aidan realizes she’s a trashball smoker), it’s immediately clear to Stanford that his would-be Prince Charming is some kind of freaky. And not in the good way. This discovery made after Marty suggests they move their makeout session into his bedroom, whereupon Stanford is met with the eyes of seemingly hundreds of dolls staring back at him judgmentally (and yes, this was long before anyone had an inkling of Prince Andrew’s teddy bear fetish).

    Marty unabashedly approaches the bed, throws up his arms and proudly announces, “These are my dolls.” He then gushes, “I’ve been collecting them for years.” Stanford does his best not to seem creeped out as he smiles, “I had no idea.” Because, obviously, if he did, he wouldn’t have come over. Worse still, Marty asks him to help clear the dolls off the bed. Which he really shouldn’t have…considering how particular he is about the way his dolls are touched, moved and arranged. This, let’s say, fastidiousness (or “fagtidiousness,” as an edgier SATC writer might have punned) is what leads Carrie to say in one of her voiceovers, “Stanford wondered if he was enough of a queen to make love to a queen who collected queens” (most of his dolls being from Madame Alexander).

    Turns out, he is. Or at least tries to be the next time he goes over to Marty’s apartment, determined to do away with the boner-killing ritual of having to individually remove each doll from the bed. To this burst of devil-may-care carnality, Marty at first screams, “No wait, the dolls!” But Stanford gets the better of him, and Marty lets his guard down long enough to allow for one of the dolls to fall off his bed thanks to Stanford’s churlish ways. Thus, the dolls put a stop to their union before it can even start because “to Marty Mendelson, a broken face was a deal breaker” (side note: the entire episode is centered on various deal breakers in relationships). For Charles-Haden Savage’s (Steve Martin) younger sister, Doreen (Melissa McCarthy), in the seventh episode of Only Murders in the Building’s fourth season, it’s not that much of one. Especially if it means she might get a little action from Charles’ friend and co-podcaster, Oliver Putnam (Martin Short).

    Along with Mabel (Selena Gomez), Oliver has found himself at Doreen’s house in Patchogue, Long Island because it’s the “safest” place Charles can come up with after they’re threatened yet again by whoever Sazz’s (Jane Lynch) killer is. From the moment they arrive at Doreen’s, it’s apparent to Oliver and Mabel that she’s more than slightly eccentric—though Charles bills her as being “spontaneous.” And if her bombastic appearance and comportment wasn’t an instant tipoff, then her vast collection of dolls is. Hence the episode title being “Valley of the Dolls” (indeed, SATC probably would have titled the Marty episode that were it not for the fact that they had already titled a season one episode “Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys”). Carrie is, of course, sure to make use of that reference in a voiceover instead, narrating, “Meanwhile, back in the Valley of the Dolls, Stanford decided there was something even more rare than a porcelain French face: his passion.”

    But it’s Doreen who will be the passionate one in the Only Murders permutation, with Oliver, the non-doll-collector (therefore theoretically in the Stanford role) unwittingly turning her on by making the Psych 101 assessment, “So I guess you replaced your children with dolls, huh?” For the rest of the episode, filled with its eclectic backdrop of life-size and baby dolls alike, Doreen will try to make something happen with Oliver, who is mercifully spared by the sudden appearance of Loretta (Meryl Streep), his long-distance love. And yet, that still doesn’t stop Doreen from expressing her over-the-top ardor with gusto, even using one of the life-size dolls’ set of braids to fashion pigtails on her short hair in the style of Loretta.

    All of which is to say that doll collectors—if Marty and Doreen are anything to go by—definitely seem to share a particular characteristic: sexual hang-ups, limitations and perversions that make actually having sex with one of them all but impossible. Not that Stanford or Oliver really wanted to in the first place…especially not after they saw all those dolls. Thus, it would appear that, in addition to the term pediophobia, there ought to also be one for a phobia of people who collect dolls in the extreme (no shade to those who do in moderation, one supposes). For it can make for a very harrowing attempt at a sexual encounter. Regardless of whether the collector in the scenario cares about any potential damage done to their dolls during the tryst or not.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • The Substance Joins The Ranks of Death Becomes Her With Regard to the Lengths Women Feel They Need to Go In Order to Stay Young

    The Substance Joins The Ranks of Death Becomes Her With Regard to the Lengths Women Feel They Need to Go In Order to Stay Young

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    As far as movies about female aging go, Death Becomes Her has long been the gold standard (as Sabrina Carpenter recently wanted to remind in her video for “Taste”). With the arrival of Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film, The Substance, however, Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 classic has a bit of competition. But that’s not the only movie Fargeat seemingly pays homage to/draws from. Being someone who has cited David Cronenberg, David Lynch and John Carpenter as key influences, it’s easy to see these auteurs’ mark on her work as well. Regardless, Fargeat clearly delivers her own unique take on the subject of female aging in general and female aging in Hollywood in particular as no man possibly could.

    Focusing on a formerly adored starlet named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who, yes, has lost her sparkle, Fargeat opens the movie on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (well, after a shot of an egg yolk “generating” another egg yolk out of itself—foreshadowing). Specifically, during the creation of Elisabeth’s star. Its freshness, of course, is ripe with the metaphor that Elisabeth herself is still fresh. And as she stands on her own star to “inaugurate” it, the crowd that surrounds her is reverent, laudatory. In short, lapping her up because she’s still young and beautiful (indeed, it was a missed opportunity not to sardonically include Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” at some point during the movie). To show the usual trajectory of a beloved star—particularly an actress—Fargeat then lapses the time to show decreased foot traffic approaching Elisabeth’s star or bothering to take a picture of it. The scene finally culminates with snow falling on it (an obvious metaphor for Elisabeth’s youth having turned to the “winter” associated with being old) before another passerby drops his burger, fries and ketchup all over it. He then smears the ketchup into the star as though trying to clean up, but the lingering effect is one that looks like somebody’s blood (strategically covering up her last name, to boot).

    To be sure, Elisabeth has put a lot of blood (sweat and tears) into her career, only to end up as an aerobics instructor for a decreasingly popular workout program called Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth (which has nothing on Sheila Rubin’s [Rose Byrne] aerobics show on Physical). Being that aerobics is automatically associated with the 1980s, viewers might, upon initial glance, assume this is a “period” piece. Instead, however, Fargeat’s aim seems to be creating a world that exists unto itself while still being contemporary (previously noting the abilities of certain films to do this—namely, Mad Max and Kill Bill). Hence, the presence of modern devices like smartphones.

    As it happens, Elisabeth is turning fifty the day we’re first introduced to her (and yes, Demi Moore, despite approaching her sixty-second birthday, really doesn’t look a day over forty-something—plastic surgery aids or not). Perfect timing for her to be summarily “dismissed,” as far as the producer of the show, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), is concerned (side note: the name Harvey—now synonymous with Hollywood ignominy—doesn’t seem like a coincidence). However, before the viewer bears witness to her cruel firing, they’re given a glimpse of yet another overt influence on Fargeat’s filmic style: Stanley Kubrick. This occurs after Elisabeth wraps up filming what will turn out to be her last show, walking out the door of the studio and into a hallway that’s outfitted with a nearly identical carpet to the one in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. On either side of her is a wall featuring posters of her younger self (Moore’s actual 80s self dressed in aerobics attire) during the heyday of the show. Making her way to the bathroom, she sees the women’s is out of order and, thus, goes into the men’s. The audience is then given another nod to The Shining with the stark red and white color palette that mirrors the bathroom setting in which “Mr. Grady” (Philip Stone) tells Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) that he’s always been the caretaker.

    Elisabeth is faced with some similarly grim news while in the bathroom, overhearing Harvey tell someone on the phone that she’s finished, screaming, “This is network TV, not a fucking charity. Find me somebody new. Now!” He then very undiplomatically and indirectly tells her that she’s finished over a lunch during which he grossly eats the heads of his shrimp (a scene Moore described as “by far the most violent scene in the whole movie”—which is definitely not true). Driving back home afterward, Elisabeth notices a billboard for toothpaste that she’s the spokeswoman for is being taken down, distracting her long enough to get into a car accident. Finding herself in the hospital for a check-up afterward, the doctor notices it’s her birthday on her chart and brings it up, prompting her to start crying. Luckily for the doctor, he gets called to another patient so as to avoid the awkwardness, while the younger nurse (Robin Greer) stays behind to observe her.

    Like Mr. Chagall (Ian Ogilvy) in Death Becomes Her, this nurse is the conduit—the “connect,” if you will—between the woman willing to do anything to look younger and the youth that can be given via some Faustian pact. In Elisabeth’s case, that pact comes in the form of “the substance.” Something she’s tipped off about when the nurse slips a hard drive wrapped inside a piece of paper that reads, “It changed my life.” It’s tantamount to the staid white business card that Chagall slips Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), featuring the cursive script that reads only: 1091 Rue La Fleur. A.k.a. Lisle Von Rhuman’s (Isabella Rossellini) address. The woman who holds the supernatural key to youth and beauty. For it does take nothing short of magic to make Madeline (and Helen Sharp [Goldie Hawn]) look as young as she wants to.

    As Chagall puts it, “Unfortunately, we are mere mortals here. We are restricted by the laws of nature.” In The Substance, Fargeat doesn’t treat the idea of a loophole to staying “forever young” as necessitating anything supernatural, so much as scientific. This being, perhaps, a sign o’ the times in terms of how much further advancements in anti-aging treatments have come since 1992, when Death Becomes Her was released in theaters. It’s just a matter of having the massive amounts of money required to obtain that youth. Funnily enough, though, there is no mention of money being paid for this service in The Substance, whereas Madeline is upfront in declaring that money is no object. She’ll pay whatever it takes to get her youth back. With Elisabeth, though, it seems as though she’s part of some elaborate “pay it forward” ring. Albeit one with a much sicker notion of what it means to “give back.” For while it might initially appear to be a “gift” to share a consciousness with a younger, “better” version of herself named Sue (Margaret Qualley), it doesn’t take long for Elisabeth to realize that Sue’s existence has made her become even more self-loathing when it comes to her age.

    In fact, it’s almost like “the substance” should be free since it comes across like a sadistic experiment designed to prove that no aging person, least of all an aging woman, can resist the urge to erase herself the way society has effectively done so. Alas, as the disembodied voice on the hard drive forewarns, “You can’t escape from yourself.” Something Elisabeth can’t ignore even after she initially throws away the “business card,” writing it off as some bullshit scam. But in the wake of a lonely night out and staring at her haggard appearance in the mirror back at home, she’s compelled to finally call the number.

    Of course, the process for “duplication” is much more than Elisabeth bargained for as Fargeat brings the Cronenbergian body horror to the extreme for the moment when Sue “hatches” out of her back. And, like any “baby” birthed by “Mother,” Sue proves to be an immediate physical drain. Because it is while she inhabits the consciousness of Sue that she can’t resist the temptation to stay younger, violating one of the only rules of the system: each self is allowed only seven days to be that self before needing to switch back (in some regards, it reminds one of the Severance premise). If the amount of days is surpassed, an irrevocable mutation occurs on the “matrix” self (because, of course, the matrix self isn’t trying to surpass her seven days, wanting to immediately toss the baton to Sue, fiending for that time as her younger self like a crackhead).

    After understanding how addictive it is to feel young—ergo, how cruel it is to make her return to her old body after a week—Elisabeth finds herself being stalked into a diner by the older version of the nurse who informed her of “the substance” in the first place. Goading her under the guise of “commiserating,” his old self remarks, “It gets harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist. That this part of yourself is still worth something, that you still matter.” It’s a scene that is decidedly Lynchian in tone, with Elisabeth running off as she gets increasingly creeped out, but not before the nurse shouts, “Has she started yet? Eating away at you?” This further horrifies Elisabeth as she runs of in her Hitchockian-coded yellow coat (because, needless to say, Hitchcock was a fan of leading ladies wearing a signature article of clothing in a signature color). Horrifies her not as a suggestion, but because it cuts to the core of what’s been happening, with her youthful self becoming greedier and greedier for more time as her older self starts to become more and more resentful, acting out in her own destructive ways…like overeating (resulting in another body horror sequence involving a chicken leg that Sue has to pull out through her belly button).

    Fargeat, however, saves her ultimate pièce de résistance body horror for last in a denouement that reeks of a similar kind of denouement in Brian Yuzna’s Society. Let’s just say that, yes, there’s a grotesque mash-up of body parts and flesh. And yet, Seth Meyers said to Demi Moore (when she sat down to be his guest as part of her promotion of the film), “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” But the fact of the matter is that The Substance is an amalgam of many things that have been seen before (including The Picture of Dorian Gray or even Norma Desmond [Gloria Swanson] in Sunset Boulevard going through the marathon ordeal of various “miracle” beauty/anti-aging “remedies”). This even extends to the South Korean film styles that Fargeat mentioned during her promotion of Revenge, telling Jezebel, “I was more sensitive to South Korean extreme movies like Oldboy or I Saw the Devil. I think also what I like is to escape from reality in a way, and I think South Korean movies have had such a strong impact on me, or directors like Cronenberg for instance. They escape from reality, they build a totally different universe, and it’s not realistic horror.”

    But through the “unrealistic,” Fargeat shows us the reality of just how distorted our own thinking has become with regard to staying young at any cost. Even at the expense of our own mental and physical health. Something that Death Becomes Her also acknowledged “back in the day,” but with far more levity. In The Substance, the darkness beneath the “absurdist” comedy is too impossible to ignore. This, again, indicating that female body image has only worsened over the decades rather than improved. Which, one would think, shouldn’t be the case with a theoretically more progressive worldview among the “collective.” All the more reason that a film like The Substance has arrived at a time when its scathing message is as needed as ever to shake society out of its youth and “perfect body” obsession.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • On Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn as An Exemplification of Being a Poverty/Mental Illness Tourist

    On Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn as An Exemplification of Being a Poverty/Mental Illness Tourist

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    While people have chosen to lambast Joker: Folie à Deux for all the wrong reasons (mainly because it doesn’t fit in any way with the fanboy expectation of the DC Universe—much the same fate that befell Marvel’s She-Hulk series), no one appears to be looking at all the very clear trolling Todd Phillips is doing. Not just of the so-called fans, but of a certain kind of person…as embodied by Harley “Lee” Quinzel. And while, obviously, Lady Gaga’s iteration of the character could never have been as iconic as Margot Robbie’s, Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver wield her for purposes beyond merely having Halloween costume cachet (which, by the way, this version of Harley does not).

    To mirror the phoniness of everyone who claims to be a supporter of Joker (Joaquin Phoenix), it seems inevitable that Lee should turn out to be a total poseur as well. Accordingly, she initially tells Arthur at Arkham, “I grew up in the same neighborhood [as you]. Me and my friends used to take that staircase to school every day.” This said when Arthur steals a moment with her after being placed in the same B Ward music class, despite his assignation to the E Ward (a.k.a. where the dangerous and violent are relegated). Because, for whatever reason, one of the usually bullying security guards, Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson, still bearing an Irish name in character, naturally), decides to get him into the class. (Based on certain information given later, who’s to say that Lee wasn’t the one to make that happen?)

    Having encountered Lee while walking past that class a few weeks prior, Joker is only too eager to attend—especially since Lee flashed him a flirtatious sign by wielding her index finger and thumb as a gun and pantomiming killing herself with it. Talk about love at first sight. Or so she wanted to manipulate him into believing….

    This comes complete with further laying it on thick with her “poor me” backstory so that Joker will feel even more “kindred” with her as she tells him, “My parents didn’t give a fuck about me either. My father beat the shit out of me.” And then died in a car accident. An elaborate sob story, to be sure. Along with her explanation for being at Arkham: “I set fire to my parents’ apartment building.” As a result, “My mother had me committed. She says I’m psychotic.” Per Lee’s version of events, anyway. But even before she expresses contempt for her own matriarch, Arthur, apparently feeling comfortable in her midst, confesses, “Nobody knows, but I also killed my mother.” Lee smiles at him fondly, as though he’s just told her the sweetest thing ever (though, based on some women’s mothers-in-law, the smile isn’t totally out of left field). She then makes him feel even safer about parading his crazy around her by responding, “I should have done that.”

    Although Lee’s secret intention is to make Arthur bring out his “true” self—Joker—the effect she ends up having on him is quite the opposite. For he falsely believes that Lee loves the “real” him, not the man who took leave of his senses for a few days, culminating in the murder of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) on live television. To Lee’s dismay, that’s not who he is—because, like many of us, he gave in to a single moment that caused him to snap. A blind rage-sadness that made him do something he wouldn’t have ordinarily done. And now everyone, including Lee, wants him to be that guy. The one Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) describes on the news as follows: “His depraved acts of violence are only admired by his followers, not only in our city, but all over the country… And they are still willing to commit acts of violence in his name. Now these people, they believe Arthur Fleck to be some kind of martyr.”

    Soon after Dent’s public declaration, Fleck appears on a TV special with interviewer Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan). This arranged by his lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), as a means to funnel a bit more goodwill in Arthur’s direction. Indeed, Maryanne seems to be the only one in Arthur’s life who actually wants him to “just be himself.” Paddy, on the other hand, wants to invoke the beast for the sake of his viewership. Even after Arthur firmly tells him of the person that killed five (er, six) people, “That’s not me anymore. That’s not who I am.”

    When Paddy demands what’s changed, Arthur announces that he’s not alone now. Paddy, like most of Gotham, is aware of who he’s referring to, with Lee’s overt displays of affection for Joker making headlines everywhere—especially since she’s out of Arkham and ready to talk to whoever will listen. Of course, she tells Arthur that the reason she’s being “sent home” is because “they’re saying you’re a bad influence on me.” This after the two “escaped” (a.k.a. danced a bit outside the confines of the prison) together when Lee insisted they ditch a screening of The Band Wagon, with Phillips strategically homing in on the scene during which “That’s Entertainment!” is sung.

    Perhaps not aware of just how meta that choice would be, it bears noting that The Band Wagon was initially regarded as nothing more than a box office disappointment before going on to garner the eventual respect it deserved (one can only hope the same might happen for Joker: Folie à Deux). The choice is overt in its pointedness, placing especial emphasis on the lyrics, “Anything that happens in life/Can happen in a show/You can make ‘em laugh/You can make ‘em cry/Anything, anything can go/The clown/With his pants falling down/Or the dance/That’s a dream of romance/Or the scene/Where the villain is mean/That’s entertainment!”

    Making mention of a “clown” isn’t the only thing that applies to Arthur, with his own dream of romance causing him to be blind to the fact that, as Maryanne warns him, “She’s playing you for a fool.” And even though Arthur tells Paddy, “You’re just like Murray, you just, you want sensationalism. You don’t care about—you just wanna talk about my mistakes, you wanna talk about the things I did in the past, not about who I am now, not how I’m different now,” it’s something he could just as well be saying to Lee. After all, she just wants him to be the bad boy that will assist her in securing her own fame. A viable fear of Arthur’s that leads into one of Joker’s musical fantasies of the two doing a duet as Sonny and Cher (except they’re Joker and Harley).

    Soon, Lee starts to get a little too interested in her solo—a rendition of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody”—with the crowd going quiet when Joker stops singing to tell her, “You weren’t even looking at me anymore. You were making it all about yourself. And the song is about loving meeeee!” The two then make nice as Lee agrees, “You’re right, let’s give the people what they want.” Joker assumes this to mean they’ll take it from the top again with their lovey-dovey song and vibes, only for Lee to pull a gun out and shoot him. For that is, in the end, what the people want. Because the Joker they had in mind didn’t live up to the ideal, with Lee, too, feeling exactly the same way after seeing far too much Arthur shine through.

    And, in the end, her only motive for checking herself into Arkham was for the purpose of “seeing” Joker, like some sort of private museum display meant solely for her to enjoy and exploit however she wants. In the end, she doesn’t “see” him at all though. Nor does Arthur really see her. Not for what she is. That unveiling is left to Maryanne, who informs her client, “She didn’t grow up in your neighborhood. She lives on the Upper West Side with her parents [this clearly being a nod to the frequent shade thrown at Gaga’s own real-life background]. Her father is not dead, he’s a doctor. She voluntarily committed herself to the hospital and then just checked herself out when she wanted to.”

    Arthur is still insistent that the lies Lee told him are true, prompting Maryanne to then ask, “Did she mention she went to grad school for psychiatry?” Needless to say, she’s a mental illness tourist—someone who likes to pick and choose certain facets of the DSM and try them on to see if it might make them more interesting. Not to mention a lover of poverty porn (à la Nicola Peltz-Beckham with Lola). Incidentally, Arthur sings a lyric from “Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered)” that cuts to the core of who Lee is even before he finds out the truth, singing to Paddy, “She’s a fool and don’t I know it/But a fool can have her charms,” then shrugging, “Lost my heart, but what of it?/She is cold, I agree.”

    And it’s true, her coldness knows no bounds by the end of Folie à Deux, when she emotionally gut-punches him right on the very staircase that made him iconic, breaking the news, “We’re not going away Arthur. All we had was the fantasy, and you gave up… There is no Joker, that’s what you said, isn’t it?” In effect, because he doesn’t want to play along with the fantasy that she and everyone else has of him, she’s got to move on. This by way of singing “That’s Entertainment!” to convey that spectacle is all anyone truly wants—from him and in general.

    Arthur begs, “I don’t wanna sing anymore. Shh. Just talk to me.” He tries to cover her mouth while urging, “Just talk, please stop singing.” But she can’t be stopped. “That’s Entertainment!” must be sung in all its glory. Even though Phillips opts to leave out the additionally applicable lyrics, “The world is a stage/The stage is a world/Of entertainment!” and “The dame/Who is known as the flame/Of the king/Of an underworld ring/He’s an ape/Who won’t let her escape.” Funnily enough, that last line speaks to the version of Joker that Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn gets wet for. The one that Lee wants to enjoy, too.

    Only she’s instead saddled with this flaccid incel type who hardly lives up to previous images of Joker played by the likes of Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and even Jared Leto (panned as Suicide Squad was, Leto still delivered on being the kind of “sexy” Joker Lee wants). A disappointment that effectively ends Lee’s “tour” of how the other half lives.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Madonna Endures a New Era of Survivor’s Guilt

    Madonna Endures a New Era of Survivor’s Guilt

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    Throughout her life, Madonna has frequently talked about having survivor’s guilt. Namely, when it comes to all the people she lost in the 1980s to the AIDS epidemic. And then, later on in life, as she pointed out somewhat “flexingly” during her 2016 Billboard Woman of the Year speech, her contemporaries started to die, too. Hence, her remark, “Michael is gone, Tupac is gone, Whitney is gone, Prince is gone, Amy Winehouse is gone, Bowie is gone…and I’m still standing.” Sure, Amy and Bowie weren’t her contemporaries (and Tupac was “just” a lover), but the message was clear: Madonna continued to have survivor’s guilt. Managing to outlive the majority of the musical artists she came up with, in addition to those who inspired her before and after she became famous.

    As for the “before” part of being famous, her younger brother, Christopher Ciccone was instrumental to this phase. Which is why, in the wake of his death—at just sixty-three years old—Madonna reflected, “He was the closest human to me for so long. It’s hard to explain our bond. But it grew out of an understanding that we were different and society was going to give us a hard time for not following the status quo. We took each other’s hands and we danced through the madness of our childhood. In fact, dance was a kind of superglue that held us together. Discovering dance in our small Midwestern town saved me and then my brother came along, and it saved him too. My ballet teacher, also named Christopher, created a safe space for my brother to be gay. A word that was not spoken or even whispered where we lived. When I finally got the courage to go to New York to become a dancer, my brother followed.”

    Christopher tells it somewhat differently in his 2008 memoir (though more “tell-all”), Life With My Sister Madonna, noting that Madonna was the one to lure him, “siren”-style to the big city, insisting, “Come to New York, and you can stay with me in my apartment. I’ll introduce you to people. I’ll take [dance] classes with you. I’ll get you into a company.” Christopher then does as he’s told only to be greeted by Madonna bluntly telling him, “‘Hi Christopher, you can’t live here after all.’ Straight and to the point, with no sugarcoating. ‘What do you mean I can’t live here? I just gave up my life in Detroit. My apartment, my job, everything.’ Madonna shrugs, ‘Whatever…’ Seeing my crestfallen face, she relents slightly, ‘You can sleep on the floor for a couple of nights but that’s it.’”

    Madonna’s reasons weren’t entirely callous, for Christopher later learns that the building owner supposedly found out about her intentions to have a permanent houseguest and put the kibosh on it. Or who knows? Maybe it was just Madonna’s fucked-up way of pushing her brother out of the Midwestern womb so that he could be born into his complete gay self. And, like professional dancing, Madonna was convinced New York was the only place to do that. Turns out, for Christopher, however, that it would be Canada, with an Ottawa-based company called Le Groupe de la Place Royale hiring him for three hundred dollars a week. A rather cush job (at least for a dancer) that Madonna ended up “siren-ing” him out of as well, promising him a gig as her backup dancer for the club performances she was planning to do around the state and nation in order to promote “Everybody” and her debut album, Madonna.

    Naturally, after Christopher already gave up his steady dancing gig, Madonna told him the day he arrived back in New York that the position was actually filled. But, as he said, that time, she let him live with her—so that was a step up. For a while afterward, Christopher got a job as a “card counter” at a greeting card company before Madonna finally decided she did need him to accompany her on this mini tour. One gets the sense that, through all the shade about Madonna’s blasély cold comportment, Christopher was always looking to her as the catalyst for what to do next in his life. And being a catalyst or galvanizer is what any older sibling worth admiring tends to embody.

    Still, that didn’t stop Christopher from a very pointed dedication at the beginning of the book that reads: “For my father, Silvio, and to Joan, who has always been a mother to me.” That latter part of the dedication was an automatic knife dig into Madonna, who never warmed all that much to Joan, painting her as the wicked stepmother early on in her career as she told stories of their housekeeper-turned-mother figure that depicted an oppressive portrait. Case in point, informing Carrie Fisher in a 1991 interview for Rolling Stone, “My stepmother told me I wasn’t allowed to wear tampons until I got married. Can you imagine?” Joan Gustafson (before she became Ciccone) also sewed the Ciccone daughters the same uniform clothing with no personality that Madonna despised. Prompting her to make distinct amendments in order to stand out. As she said in her 1985 interview with Time, “I really saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella. You know, I have this stepmother and I have all this work to do and it’s awful and I never go out and I don’t have pretty dresses. The thing I hated about my sisters most was my stepmother insisted on buying us the same dresses. I would do everything not to look like them. I would wear weird-colored knee socks or put bows in my hair or anything.”

    But if Christopher’s dedication to Joan at the beginning of his book is an indication, perhaps he never felt as hostile toward their stepmother as Madonna did (or, again, the effusive nod was just a means to goad Madonna). Maybe, like Silvio Ciccone, he was simply grateful to have a maternal replacement. Madonna, however, would not forget her real mother, her namesake. And she was determined to free herself of both Michigan and Joan when the time came. Ultimately, her freedom would extend to breaking Christopher out of the Midwest as well, taking him along for her crazy ride in New York and then into the moated world of fame and fortune. It was his attraction to this world, he admits, that inspired him to withstand so much abuse. Like anyone would be, he was seduced by this realm of privilege and influence, especially as a formerly middle-class Midwesterner.

    In many ways, Madonna seemed to “choose” Christopher as the lone member of her family to join her in this embarkment upon success precisely because he seemed so “malleable,” so willing to go with the flow. Alas, Madonna had another thing coming if she didn’t think Christopher, a Sagittarius cusping Scorpio the day before his birthday (November 22—also JFK’s assassination day), wasn’t going to say something eventually. Though perhaps she didn’t imagine it would be as public and immortal as a book.

    Whatever catty ills he speaks of her in Life With My Sister Madonna, though, he knows, in the end, that he would not “exist” without Madonna, his “maker,” of sorts. So it is that he states, “I finally understand and accept that one aspect of my life will never change: I was born my mother’s son, but I will die my sister’s brother.” Eerily prescient words considering headlines like, “Christopher Ciccone, artist and Madonna’s brother, dies at age 63,” “Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone, has died at 63” and “Madonna’s Brother Christopher Ciccone Dies at 63, Less Than 2 Years After Brother Anthony’s Death at 66.” Indeed, Anthony Ciccone was the eldest of the brood, and, like Christopher, portrayed by the media as having a highly contentious relationship with his sister—that is, if and when they ever spoke at all.

    Around 2014, Anthony lashed out by telling the media, that his sister “doesn’t give a shit if I’m dead or alive. She lives in her own world. I never loved her in the first place, she never loved me. We never loved each other.” Harsh words, and something of an ultimate betrayal with regard to the Italian-American view of family as sacrosanct. At least Christopher had the decency to mention at the outset of his memoir, “…when all is said and done and written, I am truly proud that Madonna is my sister and always will be.” Just as Madonna will be of him, regardless of the rift they endured starting at the end of the 90s, just as Madonna was taking up with Guy Ritchie, a man Christopher has no problem mocking in the memoir and, in turn, his sister’s egregious mistake in marrying him. As Madonna put it in her “Instagram obituary,” alluding to the memoir, “I admired him. He had impeccable taste. And a sharp tongue, which he sometimes used against me but I always forgave him.” Even if it might have taken Christopher getting prostate cancer for her to do so.

    In another part of the book, Christopher corroborates some of Madonna’s contempt for her stepmother by illuminating some of Joan’s harshness toward the eldest female Ciccone in an anecdote that details her telling M, “Shut up and put it on” of the aforementioned banal dress she sewed from the same Butterick pattern for all the sisters. Even with Joan’s recent death of cancer at the age of eighty-one, it’s difficult to imagine Madonna forgiving her for that sartorial slight. No matter that it probably subliminally helped pushed her to be the style queen she is today. With Joan’s death occurring just weeks before Christopher’s, the tectonic shifts in Madonna’s family of origin are palpable.

    And while Madonna has endured a triple wallop of familial loss in the past two years, it is Christopher’s death that has undeniably affected her the most—thereby leaving her with that nagging sense of survivor’s guilt she’s long been known to possess. Further compounded by Christopher being her younger brother. His death before hers defies the “natural” order—even if Madonna has every intention of living until at least a hundred. Something her father is also hopefully poised to do, now currently ninety-three. Because, in truth, Silvio’s death anytime soon would be an emotional blow Madonna might not be able to take on the heels of all this loss.

    Whatever ill will this brother and sister duo had, Madonna was quick to commemorate Christopher’s life by additionally remarking, “We soared the highest heights together. And floundered in the lowest lows. Somehow, we always found each other again and we held hands and we kept dancing. The last few years have not been easy. We did not speak for some time but when my brother got sick we found our way back to each other. I did my best to keep him alive as long as possible. He was in so much pain towards the end.” This description evokes the image of 80s-era Madonna at the bedsides of her gay friends dying of AIDS, all while she funneled funds into keeping them alive (or at least comfortable) for as long as she could. Mercifully, Christopher was not lost to that epidemic—though Madonna’s ex, Sean Penn was sure to make him feel dirty anyway when he asked him if he had AIDS years after the two had apparently done a “blood brothers pact” at the behest of Sean.

    In some regards, the ire Christopher had for both of Madonna’s husbands was a sign of his fueled-by-protectiveness jealousy. After all, he himself once noted that their relationship oftentimes felt like a marriage—complete with all the bickering and fights that one entails. And maybe, in some sense, Christopher was the only man who ever could be “married” to her. For, to quote a Vietnamese proverb used in Christopher’s book, “Brothers and sisters are closer than hands and feet.” Christopher, indeed, always acknowledged his position as the “feet” a.k.a. “humble servant” to his big sister while working in such wide-ranging roles as dresser (during The Virgin Tour), tour director and set designer. Not to mention his interior design efforts on multiple Madonna abodes. And with each “auxiliary” role, he excelled as only someone who knows another person so well could. Maybe too well, hence Madonna eventually getting spooked by their closeness and pushing him out (as he also posits in his memoir). Only to let him back in when it was at the “too late” stage.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Bad Romance: Joker: Folie à Deux Shows That Projection in Relationships Always Results in Dashed Expectations

    Bad Romance: Joker: Folie à Deux Shows That Projection in Relationships Always Results in Dashed Expectations

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    In many ways, the real reason the sequel to Joker is called Joker: Folie à Deux has little to do with a shared delusion between Harley Quinn and Arthur “Joker” Fleck, and more to do with Todd Phillips and Scott Silver calling out the delusions that fans have about those they worship. A delusion that can be shared by both parties in the situation only so long as the “revered” obliges the projections being cast onto them (see: Taylor Swift). Once they stop, however, the fans’ “love” for them suddenly disappears, turning often to hate—hence the expression: “there’s a fine line between love and hate.”

    In Harleen “Lee” Quinzel’s (Lady Gaga) case, the love she claims to feel disappears as soon as Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to be “the guy” (read: Joker). The one she fell “in love” with when she watched him blow Murray Franklin’s (Robert De Niro) brains out on live TV. Or the one who was portrayed in the “really good” (Lee’s words) TV movie about the entire course of events (presumably including dramatized scenes of Fleck’s hyper-shitty early life). So it is that, like fans with celebrities, Lee’s first connection with Arthur is entirely parasocial.

    At first, of course, he’s only too willing to play the part she expects of him, knowing on some level that her attraction is rooted in what she knows of him through the media’s portrayal—which only focuses on his “Joker era.” As such, he’s often reluctant to be “full Arthur” around her, while simultaneously being amazed that she could possibly be interested in him in any capacity—Joker or otherwise. And yet, like many who have been glamored by lovebombing, Joker falls for Lee’s flattery easily, letting her beguile him with the notion that they’re both two broken souls who can “mend” one another. To boot, that he is powerful and can do anything he wants—a feeling that becomes even more adrenaline-boosting when buttressed by notions of “two against the world”-type love. As for Lee, she sees in Joker someone who can be her diabolical savior. The “sexy” solution to all her “psychotic” woes because he accepts them, is unfazed by them. And because his are so much worse.

    Accordingly, it doesn’t take long for the pair to start projecting all of their unhinged ideals and fantasies onto one another—with Joker in particular constantly fantasizing about Lee in various musical settings that often remind one of a sort of “macabre La La Land” (particularly that sequence when they’re dancing with a giant moon behind them). Indeed, in one of many contrasts to the usual telling of Joker and Harley’s story, it is so clearly Joker who is more obsessed and smitten with Harley than the other way around (as Margot Robbie’s version elucidates in Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey). Because, as he tells his interviewer, Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan), he’s a changed man now thanks to “not [being] alone anymore.” Falling prey to the old adage, “You’re nobody until somebody loves you” (which really should have been a musical number in the movie at some point). Or until you create a sinister alter ego and go on a killing rampage like Joker. Thereby becoming a magnet for freaks and faux freaks alike. Lee, as it turns out, subscribes to the latter category—ostensibly looking to Joker to make her “legitimate” on the disturbed and deranged front. As it transpires though, she’s ultimately more fucked-up than Joker in terms of callousness and plotting. Discarding him with ease once he renounces his Joker identity on live TV.

    Up until that moment, however, she was willing to do whatever it took to be with him based on her false projection, hoping against hope that he’ll take her cues about how he’s “supposed to be.” Case in point, she even insists upon Arthur wearing the Joker makeup she smuggles into his prison cell. So committed is she to upholding this projection of hers. Joker, meanwhile, is still too blinded by his “love” for her (read: his own false projection), dumbly remarking, “You brought makeup.” Lee asserts, “I wanna see the real you.” She then starts to apply the signature Joker colors to his face. This apparently getting her “wet” enough to not be totally repulsed when Arthur asks her, “Can you do it?” before they start to fuck. As in: can she guide him/his penis on how to even “do sex”? The scene is among the grimmest in the movie, with no fantastical/musical elements added to it as a means to mitigate the drab, grotesque “consummation” of their “relationship.” A relationship that is a folie à deux in that each person has their own separate but shared delusion about the other.

    Perhaps one of the most overt examples of this from Lee is her wording of the phrase, “When I first saw Joker—when I saw you on Murray Franklin… for once in my life, I didn’t feel so alone anymore.” That she has to remind herself that the pathetic, maquillage-free person in front of her is “technically” Joker—not Arthur—seems telling of the fact that she’s already noticed a disconnect between the man on the screen and the flesh and blood man in front of her. Who, if she’s being honest, can’t quite measure up to the projection she already saw and then built further up as her own.

    Arthur’s parallel belief in Lee as a kindred spirit (especially since she lies to him and says she’s from the same neighborhood and also had an abusive childhood) is also doomed to be dashed sooner or later. Particularly since his “living in a fantasy world” tendencies start to ramp up as he dreams of the two of them together in various musical scenarios, singing such love songs as “Folie à Deux” (one of the original songs on Harlequin) and “To Love Somebody” (originally sung by the Bee Gees). The lyrics of the former are most telling of each person’s respective projection as Lee lackadaisically sings, “In our minds, we’d be just fine/If it were only us two.” This line indicates that without the inevitable outside influence of others, maybe their delusions about one another could stand a chance and the relationship could still survive…albeit on a bed of lies.

    Lee then adds, “They might say that we’re crazy/But I’m just in love with you.” And yes, it is an adage widely disseminated in various art forms that the word (and act of) “love” is synonymous with “crazy.” To name a few examples, “The things we do for love,” “Love makes you do crazy things,” “Your love’s got me lookin’ so crazy right now,” etc. But the “crazy” in Joker: Folie à Deux is all about the insanity of projection rather than true love itself being the thing that makes a person go “crazy.”

    Then again, isn’t every form of falling in love ultimately a product of projection? People fall in love with the version of someone they build up in their head only to unearth some form of disappointment after they’ve already convinced themselves it’s love. Gone too far down the rabbit hole to turn back. But for Lee, it isn’t too late (as it never is for rich girls) once she realizes that Arthur refuses to be “who he really is.” Or rather, who she and everyone else so desperately wanted him to be: Joker.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Joker: Folie à Deux: The Symbol Becomes More Powerful Than the Real Person Behind It

    Joker: Folie à Deux: The Symbol Becomes More Powerful Than the Real Person Behind It

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    It was Todd Phillips himself who said that Joker was never intended to have a sequel. In many regards, that’s not what Joker: Folie à Deux is, so much as a “second act” or “companion piece” that follows up the rise of Joker with the fall of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). Regardless, a large majority of viewers and critics haven’t been able to receive Joker: Folie à Deux in the spirit with which it was intended.

    From the beginning of the announcement of the movie’s existence, the automatic reaction upon hearing that a “sequel” to Joker would arrive in the form of a musical was met with more than slight hesitancy on the part of many “purists.” That Lady Gaga was going to be cast in the role of Harley Quinn—brandishing the diminutive “Lee” instead, as though to differentiate from Margot Robbie’s untouchable performance—was meant, perhaps, to assuage those who were nervous about the film’s viability. Granted, there are just as many who lost even more faith in it upon seeing Gaga’s name next to Joaquin Phoenix’s. And yet, it is not really supposed to be taken seriously as a musical (those who do are naturally going to pan the movie). That genre merely being a tool to exemplify the artifice and spectacle that ensues after a person achieves notoriety-turned-laudability/“respectable” fame. As Arthur Fleck does in Joker after going on a killing rampage spurred, ultimately, by his total ostracism from society.

    Ending up at Arkham Asylum at the end of Joker, Arthur has developed more than a mere cult following for his presumed anti-Establishment, anti-wealthy, generally anarchic tendencies. Whether he wanted to or not, he becomes a symbol. Something that the alienated and disenfranchised can project their disillusionments onto. And, although Arthur was seemingly happy to become that symbol at the end of Joker, his reluctance about being some kind of figurehead for chaos and misanthropy has waned in Joker: Folie à Deux, as he realizes that, once again, no one is actually seeing him—Arthur. They just want Joker, and he’s no longer sure if that’s who he “is,” or if it was who he became during a moment of weakness/a general nadir.

    Taking place two years after the rampage he went on in 1981 (even though five years have lapsed since Joker came out in 2019), the movie, nonetheless, has a decidedly 1970s feel and aesthetic, complete with sartorial choices—particularly during the fantasy sequences—and a blatant nod to The Sonny and Cher Show (hence, calling it The Joker and Harley Show) when Lee and Joker are singing the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” on a TV stage in front of a live audience. By this point in the movie, Arthur has fallen hopelessly and blindly in love with Lee, forced to question that love when his lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), reveals to him that everything she’s told him about herself is a lie—particularly the fact that she grew up in the same neighborhood as Arthur with similarly abusive parents when, in fact, she’s from the Upper West Side (a meta detail considering Gaga’s own origins there) and her father is a well-to-do doctor. It is after this moment that he not only has The Joker and Harley Show fantasy (wherein said fantasy is tainted by the reality that she might not be all that she seems), but also starts to comprehend that maybe the only reason anyone is interested in him at all is because of their false projections. Much as he falsely projected onto her the ideal of a perfect “other half” who might save him from his misery.

    The misery that Phillips and his co-writer, Scott Silver (who also co-wrote Joker), highlight in the very first few minutes of the movie via an “old-timey” WB cartoon called “Me and My Shadow,” in which Joker struts into the Franklin Theater (in ironic honor of Murray Franklin [Robert De Niro], one imagines) with his shadow starting to act out in ways far more sinister than Peter Pan’s. Eventually, the shadow self overtakes the real Joker long enough to go out onstage, wreaking havoc before and during the performance so that when he finally is subdued by the real Joker again, it is that real Joker who is blamed for everything his shadow self did.

    It also bears noting that, in the title card of “Me and My Shadow,” while the flesh and blood Joker is wielding his index finger and thumb in the shape of a gun, his shadow self is toting a real gun—this being the ultimate clue that Joker is merely Arthur’s id, not who he really is a.k.a. who everyone, including Lee, wants him to be. That musicals themselves are entirely rooted in fantasy and fantastical elements further accentuates the idea that Arthur is now living in a distorted reality, a nightmare that he didn’t entirely create. For it is the public that has perpetuated this image of him as Joker…even if he’s no longer necessarily certain that’s who he wants to be (hell, if that’s who he ever was). And even if that acknowledgement means not getting the girl in the end as a result.

    And yes, it becomes increasingly difficult for Arthur not to notice what a “social climber,” for lack of a better word, Lee is. Which is ironic considering she’s already at the top of the social stratum. But what gets her off is “slumming it” with Joker, who she visits in prison at one point to wistfully encourage him, “You should see it out there, they’re all going crazy for you” (Gaga loves a Madonna reference, after all). Only they’re not going crazy for “him,” but rather, “Joker.” A man who doesn’t really exist. When Arthur finally admits that to everyone in the final courtroom scene, any “public sympathy” he might have had by pleading some “insanity defense” by way of the “it wasn’t me, it was my alter ego” excuse disappears entirely. And with it, his devoted following who wanted him to be “that guy.” The guy that could represent all of their ideals and beliefs because he, too, possessed them. In the end, however, Arthur is still the confused, emotionally insecure incel that audiences first met in Joker (even if he does get to give Lee a few pathetic thrusts during an impromptu conjugal visit).

    Yet, even though this very public admission should have been the death of Joker and all that he “means,” it instead opens the door for those who simply want to cherry-pick various “tenets” of his message to form their own factions, leaving the title available for a new, truly nefarious Joker who will take the helm without hesitation or any “pussy” qualms about doing what “needs” to be done. Because the Joker can be anyone, everyone. In some sense, it’s akin to how Trump is the latest symbol for white supremacy and fascistic conservatism, yet his “acolyte,” JD Vance, is the next-generation, more extreme version of it, poised for a takeover with Trump being too decrepit (and concerned with being “liked”) to maneuver his so-called beliefs toward an “optimum” level.

    In another sense, Arthur’s reluctance to accept his notoriety without questioning why people are so obsessed with him (or rather, his false image) also echoes another au courant occurrence: Chappell Roan renouncing fame and insisting she’ll abandon music altogether if her fans keep acting batshit. Arthur, too, has these same kinds of feelings, but doesn’t have the, let’s say, “likeability” aspect that Roan has going for her to carry it off. What’s more, Roan has yet to be knocked off her “pedestal” the way Joker is in Folie à Deux. Though that does seem inevitable since, to loosely quote Madonna, there is nothing the public loves more than elevating and then desecrating those they “worship.”

    This, in part, is what makes the reaction to Folie à Deux so predictable, with critics lining up to condemn it despite how in love they were with Joker in the first film. And perhaps that was Phillips’ intent in making Folie à Deux: to show something to the world about itself and the way it treats their “gods.” Even if they still can’t seem to see it.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Beyond Brat Summer, Or: Why It Was A Summer of Americana Via The Bikeriders and “Tough”

    Beyond Brat Summer, Or: Why It Was A Summer of Americana Via The Bikeriders and “Tough”

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    In many ways, Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders and Lana Del Rey x Quavo’s “Tough” achieve the same dichotomous thing: acknowledging the death of what America used to “mean”/represent, while also making one nostalgic for it now that it’s gone. Or at least, that’s the intent. Some, however, are immune to such feelings of nostalgia, knowing full well that America was never anything other than what it currently is: a false promised land built on a literal Native American burial ground. (Hence, all the haunting things that consistently happen on it.)

    In The Bikeriders, which was released at the beginning of summer (specifically June 21st—which, not so coincidentally, happens to also be Lana Del Rey’s birthday), the slow then gradual decline of the greatest marketing scheme ever created (read: the United States) is starting to make itself known through the “fringe,” embodied by bikers like Benny (Austin Butler) and Johnny (Tom Hardy). Only the so-called fringe has become the mainstream during the late 60s/early 70s period that The Bikeriders covers. Having increasingly come to represent the disillusioned and displaced everyman in America. Particularly as those who survived the throes of the Vietnam War were starting to come back with all manner of disenchantment when it came not only to the United States, but to the “American dream” itself. The veneer cruelly unmasked by the things they saw “over there” and could not then unsee back at home. Itself a battleground between the rich and the poor, the “normals” and the “freaks.”

    This is part of why Johnny’s biker gang, the Vandals Motorcycle Club, started to turn sour as this new “element,” freshly returned from ‘Nam, began to render the nature of the club into something dark and violent. Something that Benny’s girlfriend, Kathy (Jodie Comer), must bear the brunt of in many ways. In fact, she can easily be seen as the “Lana Del Rey figure” of the outfit, all melancholia and style.

    Of the sort that finds its way onto “Tough,” yet another ode (whether country or trap or however one wants to bill the genre) to Del Rey’s favorite subject: Americana. More specifically in this case, American resilience (also present on a song like “When The World Was At War We Kept On Dancing”). So it is that she paints the picture in the opening verse: “Tough like the scuff on a pair of old leather boots/Like the blue-collar, red-dirt attitude/Like a .38 made out of brass/Tough like the stuff in your grandpa’s glass/Life’s gonna do what it does/Sure as the good Lord’s up above/I’m cut like a diamond shinin’ in the rough/Tough.” As for the “blue-collar” mention, it’s no secret that Del Rey also likes to play up her “poverty” angle, therefore making herself a stronger representation of the American dream—i.e., pulling oneself up by their bootstraps and creating success of their own no matter what sort of background they come from.

    Were it not for the fact that The Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets” is the constant (and era-appropriate) refrain of the film, LDR’s “Tough” could have fit in perfectly (though only as a supplement to “Ride”) with the overarching theme and “feel” of The Bikeriders. Which is that, through all the pain and agony of what it is to live in America, Americans still have the uncanny ability to “endure”—mainly by repeating, as though it’s a Jesus Prayer—that America is the “greatest country in the world” (much as New Yorkers like to repeat the same thing about their specific shitty city). Granted, this has become a much more difficult mass delusion to uphold in the twenty-first century. A difficulty that began far sooner than the aftermath of the 2016 election, arguably all the way back in 2000, when George W. Bush actually did steal the election (as opposed to Donald Trump insisting that’s what Joe Biden did in 2020).

    As a matter of fact, in 2000, Del Rey would have been fifteen years old, turning “sweet sixteen” in time for 9/11 the following year. Bearing witness to these two indelible political events—the “election” of George W. Bush and the destruction of the World Trade Center—would have been formative to her obsession with a simultaneous elevation of Americana and continuous “hat tip” to American decay. A decay that many baby boomers would, in turn, trace back to the 1960s, when the conservatism and repression of the decade before that had to be blown to bits in order to “deprogram” from the lie of it all, as it were. Hence, Joan Didion famously quoting W. B. Yeats when she pronounced “the center will not hold” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

    In the American summer of 2024, the same sentiment remains. Especially as the latest fraught election plays out like yet another bad soap opera (except this one has life-altering effects on a global and individual level). Perhaps that’s why the alignment of these two palpable homages to Americana and the decay of America itself (more notably in The Bikeriders) showed up during a season of theoretical “levity.” Alas, there is no such thing anymore in the climate of the U.S. at present. For even “light” fare like Charli XCX’s Brat has to be laden with the analysis that during times of recession, people just want to party to forget their troubles. And by “troubles,” one also means the existential dread of being an American forced to keep living the lie that insists the place is a “dream.”

    The thing is, America has long been in a recession…only not the kind that anybody wanted to address until the elephant in the room (no Republican pun intended) became so big, it ended up trampling over everyone. Now no longer able to ignore it. At least not quite so easily. Which is precisely why two pop culture moments like The Bikeriders and “Tough” coincided during the same season. Because when the erstwhile “glamor” of Americana is paraded in the current era, even the suits in charge know that it’s too great an insult to the audience’s intelligence to not include some tinge of the bleak reality that belies it. In fact, such an acknowledgement is all in keeping with the old capitalism-related adage, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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