It’s been a long couple of years. After being nestled into a role that required me to pretty much keep schtum on social media, I headed over to become an editor, where I got to read loads of other people’s writing. And now I’m back doing writing, which is my favourite thing. I’m adding to it some more Sidenotes, where I’m going to try to give some cultural recommendations and takes. Now, it’s not my full time job, so some of the takes will be slow or out of the news cycle. I might even be sporadic in my delivery, but hopefully when you get it, you’ll get it.
So this is going to continue to be a repository for long-form versions of thoughts that I can’t fit elsewhere, as well as some cultural recommendations of stuff I’ve engaged with or created that I think you might enjoy, too.
I have to say the entire ridiculous Barbie discourse has compelled me to watch as many films as possible before the Oscars - what great marketing! As I pointed out in a little TikTok of mine, Ryan Gosling didn’t beat any of the women in his category - which is a category of men - rather two Asian men in the form of Teo Yoo from Past Lives and Charles Melton in May/December. That goes before we even think about who Margot Robbie could have shoved out of the running for Best Actress - perhaps Lily Gladstone, the first ever Native American woman to be nominated for an Oscar?
Here’s a little prattling on about a couple of films I’ve seen recently and some I’ve not seen in decades.
All Of Us Strangers
Can I just say how much I love that during the entire press tour of this there’s been no gunning for Paul Mescal for playing gay. Is that because (a lot of ) gay guys fancy him? I mean, genuinely, I’ve long thought this is precisely why so many straight women get to play lesbians without any furore from the community. Or is it because he’s just a very sensitive and nuanced actor? Now, this is not to insult campness, rather lazy people’s assumptions that to be gay and to be camp are one and the same, but I liked that he didn’t play his character as camp, rather just made his movement a touch more languid.
As for Andrew Scott, I oscillate between finding him self-satisfied and pompous and also finding him utterly charming. And in this, I of course loved him, the king of grinning-sad goodbyes with people he just cannot, on a spiritual level, continue any contact with. Both him and Paul’s character getting to know each other against this spooky and isolating backdrop of some new build flats out in Stratford made me think it would have been so easy to set the whole thing in a cold, blustery winter. Instead, though, the director Andrew Haigh opted for one of those hot and sweaty feverish periods that captures London every now and then and, just like its complete opposite of the freezing cold, forces everyone to scuttle away into the shade.
And despite being based on an 1987 Japanese novel, the film made so many great points about so many contemporary issues; the shadiness of newer drugs, the thoughtlessness of the London housing market, the coldness of developers’ big plans, the political divisions of gay-queer culture, the transience of dating. As for what it said about grief and death, it was such a refreshing way of telling the same old mantra; enjoy what you have while you have it, because you never know when it might disappear. It’s up to us how callous we believe Scott’s character to be, or how deranged - those beautiful shots of him, all distorted by his reflection in a curved tube window, screaming like an Edvard Munch! My only big wonder is, if you disappeared in the ‘80s then had a chance to speak to someone from the future, someone who, the last time you’d seen them, been up to their ears in synth-pop, wouldn’t you ask them what happened to Madonna?
Poor Things
Emma Stone is marvellous, the world that Yorgos Lanthimos and his wonderful set designers create is transfixing and a small twist at the end is quite fitting. But all this, for me, was clouded by my wondering: what is cinema’s continuing obsession with the born sexy yesterday woman? I thought we sort of buried that trope in the hot take wonder years of the late 2010s. In both Barbie and Poor Things, however, we’re still seeing naive beautiful women entering boldly into the real world, to learn, quite suddenly, of sexism’s absurdity.
I am so sure so many jokes in Poor Things really are hilarious. I’m certain that just outside my realms of decency, the jokes were there. I was cusping on laughing so very much! But with the central tenet being the mind of a baby stuffed into a woman’s head I’m just not sure where the baby began and the woman ended. And I’m also not sure who the jokes were at the expense of. I’m grateful that the only people who did seem to be laughing in my screening of Poor Things were women. But I’m not entirely convinced that the male written and directed film was aiming for that.
Bella’s naivety, physical pliability and unquenchable sexual obsession all collude with the story’s seeming inability to truly undo a male fantasy of a thin, pretty and childlike woman thrown about a series of bedrooms. We never see Bella do loopy stuff with her own period blood, she has two separate bushy eyebrows and no armpit hair. Her teeth are so perfect and clean! She comes through penetration alone and for a good slog of the story is happily bent into whatever position Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, easily twice Emma Stone’s size) would like her to be in.
How can a film that so upholds both a traditional understanding of sexist beauty standards plus a misogynist-pornographic understanding of sexual scripts ever convince me that the belly-laughs are at the sexists and misogynists?
The film has given such a wide berth to the possibility of a true exposition of patriarchy that one has to wonder if it ever set out to do any of it in the first place.
Barbie, of course, did set out to do it. But when we laugh at the moment where Barbie meets the Venice Beach construction workers, are we laughing at how arbitrary their sexism is, or how stupid she is for rolling right into it? Similarly, are we laughing at Wedderburn falling to pieces when he finds out other men have done with Bella what he’s done with other women? Or at we laughing at Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) for so matter-of-factly, proudly, even, telling him about the fact she’s been charging other men, so many gruesome creatures, to insert themselves into her, to tie her up and beat her tiny frame up? Is the subject of the hilarity ever going to be the ludicrous house of cards that is the patriarchy, or the silly woman who’s not noticed it all a lot sooner? ‘It all’ being the threat simmering up around her.
There’s a suggestion from some reviewers that Bella Baxter is enlightened, that she’s thrown off the shackles of society’s expectations of women to reach a higher place than us mere female mortals. In fact, Emma Stone, who produced the film as well as stars in it, kind of said it herself in one: “She’s inspired me a lot because she has no shame or prejudice, she’s so open-minded and is so interested in every aspect of life” or two interviews: “the idea that you could start anew as a woman, as this body that's already formed, and see everything for the first time and try to understand the nature of sexuality, or power, or money or choice, the ability to make choices and live by your own rules and not society's—I thought that was a really fascinating world to go into”
So Bella fearlessly, without any worry about shame or stigma, ventures into untold sexual encounters with random men, setting and following her own rules not based on what any elder woman has warned her of, rather what she sees, and what benefits her insatiable sexual appetite. And you get the impression that the underlying message is one of - just loosen up, women! You could have fun with your life, with your body especially if you just forget all the bad things we told you about men! Ignore the warnings, grab life as if sexism doesn’t exist and see how it just collapses in front of you!
This messaging sort of flies in the face of the fact that a major problem with the sexes today isn’t that women are taught to be unnecessarily wary of men and their motives, rather that so many untold men have such motives. And while both films show the born sexy yesterday woman encountering men who show relatively few signs of seeking violent retaliation, we all know that’s not how precious male egos work, time after time. That’s why the warning comes barrelling down the generations, from mother to daughter, time and time again.
I got a press release this week from an antifeminist men’s rights activist identifying a line between women’s poor mental health outcomes and their willingness to identify as feminists. I quote: “So why are young feminists experiencing mental health problems far more often than the rest of the population? The answer lies with three feminist core beliefs – what therapists refer to as ‘cognitive distortions’ -- that revolve around the Marxist-inspired theory of ‘patriarchy’.” This group’s argument is that feminists have drawn ourselves into malaise by falling for the ruse that women have it worse off than men. And so the antidote is held in the understanding that actually, women’s lives aren’t that bad at all. The truth will set us free etc.
While I agree that we can all - man, woman, animal, mineral, whatever - send ourselves into a misery spiral if we fixate on the harms we’ve come to, and that when in those situations we could do with asking ourselves not so much ‘why me?’ but ‘what now?’, women’s heads are not the battlefield here. The conflict isn’t and shouldn’t be between women who can let go of the truth and women who choose to hold onto it.
True liberation isn’t in ignorance of society’s oppression, it’s in knowing how to step around this oppression where possible, and tackle it where necessary. Yes, that means we’re not always free to do what feels good, but we do need to know the risks of seeking what feels good. We need to know that we can’t look out for it like men can - not just because of the judgment we’d face, but because of the violent ways men like to express that violence. Poor Things posits itself as a delightful riposte to the boring, frigid supposedly sex-negative women who warn too much and laugh too little. However, I’d like to think I’m so positive about sex that I think it should be worth not money but enjoyment. And transactional sex shouldn’t be the only lever for women to communicate their boundaries and wants in bed (and beyond, oh my god, aren’t there other avenues that Baxter could have explored with that innocent boldness?). Wedderburn is the guy Poor Things told us not to worry about, and he’s a tyrant. While it’s fun to laugh at him, just like it’s fun to laugh at a lot of the men in this film, I’m just not sure the film is doing enough to make them the butt of the joke. What would have been funnier, I think, is Baxter choosing the path that doesn’t actually benefit men.
Born Sexy Yesterday’s men
I couldn’t help but wonder - why does Ken have such a better storyline than Barbie in Barbie? Because he’s a born sexy yesterday man! Here are some others - maybe I’m just applying a selective memory but I do wonder why they disappeared around the late ‘90s. Did George W Bush put us all off the idea of a stupid man?
Here’s California Man, which is apparently so unknown that it’s actually called Encino Man and no-one had ever thought to correct me. Beautiful Brendan Fraser lands in California where two teenagers Sean Astin and Pauly Shore take on the task of evolving him. However, this is the early ‘90s, where evolution will only take him so far. Rather than discovering feminism, he discovers the familiar parts of the world.
There’s also Big, where a haunted carnival game turns a young teenage boy, Josh Baskin into a grown man played by Tom Hanks. He suddenly experiences all the freedoms of premature post-puberty as well as the setbacks and soon begins to show how much a grown woman will accept the kidult excesses of a grown man.
And of course Jumanji, where Robin Williams’s character is summoned into the real world decades after disappearing into a haunted children’s game. He’s endowed with knowledge of the dangers of the jungle, but blissfully unaware of the real world.
As for me
I’ve written a piece about my obsession - hopefully, by the time you read this, past-tense - with vaping for the i paper
I’ve also written about monster periods for British Vogue (alas this did not feature alongside 39 iconic women on Edward Enninful’s last-ever print cover)
I’ve started doing little to-camera op-eds on TikTok, basically because it’s more fun than Twitter/X
And finally
While the Saltburn legacy lives on, I’d love to hear some more love for Princess Superstar, whose trash-rap soundtracked so many of my nights out at university and would surely be enjoyed by house fans the world over all over again once they heard it. The drop doesn’t come in until at least one and a half minutes - long enough to give you time to get out of the toilet, whatever you were doing in there, and make your way to the dancefloor. It’s all so far from today’s Tik-Toked intros, and testament to how long it’s been since great dance music last evolved a notch forward. SOPHIE’s loss is all of music’s loss. RIP!