Norwich
August 6th
On what I am genuinely willing to admit is the fourth day of being hungover from [redacted], I am tasked with watching and reviewing the three-hour Netflix show Cooking with Paris, which sees Paris Hilton bringing guests into her home and forcing them to make various glittery foods with pink utensils, sometimes uttering a catchphrase in a bid to shift some Paris merchandise. If this sounds like a reductive summary, it is because I cannot bring myself to be somebody who has written about Paris Hilton’s cooking programme twice, and it is also because there is no there there—the show, mildly irreverent but not funny enough to be seen as a full-blooded spoof, is limp as a marshmallow.
Early afternoon, in an attempt to shake it off, I watch 2020’s Mainstream, an already-dated screed against the evil of celebrity and the internet directed by the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter. The plot, a bizarre, boomerish bit of kvetching about social media stars and their vapidity, is an update of A Face in the Crowd, a 1957 film by Elia Kazan about a drifter who becomes a TV star after being “discovered” by a female radio journalist. Andrew Garfield—who attended prep school and then RADA, but who does at least have parents without Wikipedia pages—is the best thing in the movie, doing a credible impression of the most obnoxious man ever to grace the landing page of YouTube. There’s a scene in which his character makes an appearance on a live-streamed panel show with other influencers, one of whom is Johnny Knoxville playing a prankster named Ted Wick, and another of whom is Jake Paul playing himself. The fact that Knoxville is a famed quasi-performance-artist who has stretched the very boundaries of taste, and that Jake Paul once had to issue an apology for having filmed a YouTube video near a corpse, demonstrates why Coppola’s film cannot succeed on its own terms: even its most transgressive moments are less shocking than real life. Few things outpace satire faster than the web, and although Coppola manages one or two montages that make interesting use of social media’s visual style, she does not seem to know a great deal about what an influencer actually is. Never mind: she is only a year older than I am, and I have no real idea what an influencer is, either.
That evening, out of an intense and unwavering loyalty to the world’s sexiest crypto-zoological investigator, Megan Fox, I watch Till Death, a new and bloody marriage thriller that resembles, as my boyfriend aptly said, “an adult take on Home Alone.” Fox, who is brilliantly deadpan, does not take the film any more seriously than it takes itself. Afterwards, falling asleep, it occurs to me that Fox would have been interesting in the Kirsten Dunst role in 2012’s Bachelorette, a terrifying type-A bitch whose name is Regan. Making the kind of connection that seems more profound at 1am than it actually is, it then occurs to me that Regan is the name of the intimidatingly cool pharma representative Fox played in New Girl, and also the name of the most frightening daughter in King Lear. I make a quick note in my iPhone to remind me to look up what “Regan” means, which—as it turns out in the morning—is apparently “little ruler.” When I think of having woken up and immediately Googled this, I find myself forced to agree with Gia Coppola that having constant access to the internet is ruinous to the mind.
August 7th
Having spent all day dragging furniture around and emptying various boxes, my boyfriend and I sit down to watch Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1968 drama La Prisonnière. The film, which in English has the far sexier title Woman in Chains, is about the art world and is also, in a very 1960s Gallic way, about highly-aestheticised sadomasochism, making it—from my perspective—an extremely taste-affirming mix of business and pleasure. It follows a beautiful young film editor named José who has an open marriage with her oafish husband, an op-artist named Gilbert who sleeps with female critics in exchange for coverage. (Not once have I experienced even the suggestion of this exchange in my professional life, but it is possible that I have not been going to the right gallery openings.) At a private view, José meets Gilbert’s gallerist Stanislas, a slender, cruel-eyed mod with a penchant for S&M, and begins wondering whether she might have a penchant for it, too. There are mind games, fraught with psychosexual tension; José, humiliating herself for once rather than being humiliated by her husband, feels alive. When she asks him which specific kind of person is turned on by being ashamed, he says coolly “everyone,” and the remark hangs in the air like a chick hanging by her wrists—what José fears is unnatural is perhaps the most natural and logical extension of the devil’s bargain of heterosexuality, hot specifically because it makes a sexual burlesque of gender norms. Although La Prisonnière has a tedious middle-section that devolves into romantic melodrama, it remains progressive for its time by casting Gilbert, and not José, as the fool.
After finishing La Prisonnière, we watch the 2019 film Nina Wu, a masterpiece both written by and starring the Taiwanese actress Wu Ke-Xi, and directed by a man who goes by “Midi Z.” It makes the argument that certain kinds of shame, far from being invigorating, are unmooring enough to make short shrift of sense and temporal logic. The titular Nina, an amateur actress who receives a sudden call inviting her to an audition, is a cam-girl who has made a few short films, perfect to look at but a little stiff and shy. Her agent, when she raises some concerns about the amount of nudity in the film, suggests that no “serious” actress would be bothered by the sex scenes; having no reason to doubt him, she tries out and gets the part under mysterious circumstances. The rest of the film, divorced from normal narrative order and made with a healthy dash of both Mulholland Drive and Perfect Blue, is a hazy kind of sexual whodunit. Nina’s mind, fracturing wildly, continually throws up images—an injured dog, a hotel hallway, a strange woman in the same dress Nina wore to her audition—setting out a scavenger hunt towards what eventually reveals itself to be a major trauma.
As a double bill with Clouzot’s film, Nina Wu forms an interesting dialogue about the murky relationship between power, degradation, and consent. Afterwards, I look it up and am a little stunned to find an Indiewire review that talks about the active role that Nina plays in her debasement, then considerably less stunned to see that the review also refers to her female ex, who she is very obviously still in love with, as her “childhood friend,” as if it were a Daily Mail article about Kristen Stewart’s latest “gal pal.”
August 9th
After watching the most recent episode of The White Lotus, I (in tabloid parlance) “take to Twitter” to announce that I am having trouble parsing something in its tone. “Torn between thinking The White Lotus is a little heavy-handed,” I suggest, “and thinking that it's cleverly spoofing the way that empty social justice language has bled into the conversations of even the most privileged people without actually changing anything.” On and off, I think about this tonal uncertainty for the next few hours, eventually coming down on the side of “cleverly spoofing” rather than “hopelessly pandering.” From there, I wonder why I did not bother to extend the same courtesy to the recent HBO Max reimagining of Gossip Girl, which saw characters decrying misogyny and discussing the ethics of their personal brands in such a way that I would not have been surprised to learn that an AI had gone through and inserted Twitter talking points into the script. The simplest explanation is that where the Gossip Girl reboot felt almost entirely toothless, The White Lotus has a nihilistic outlook, painting eighty-percent of its characters as broken, avaricious ghouls—if Mike White’s previous series, the almost-peerless Enlightened, was about how impossible it was for a good deed to shine in a wicked world, The White Lotus seems to think that there is no shine left in anything, and that the rich are not just wicked, but wicked in such a way that they have learned to hide their cruelty beneath a respectable veneer of liberal jargon. When Steve Zahn’s Mark informs his daughter’s friend that “obviously, imperialism was bad” before adding “but it’s humanity. Welcome to history. Welcome to America,” he is like Krusty the Klown saying the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet, rushing through a half-assed mea culpa in order to reveal what he really thinks about the world.
In the evening, I watch an extremely low-budget found footage horror film, salaciously called Murder Death Koreatown, which has been marketed with an updated form of The Blair Witch Project’s pretence at authenticity. The plot is simple: a man, after witnessing a murder in a neighbouring apartment complex in L.A.’s Koreatown, believes there is something not quite right in the authorities’ solution for the case, and in trying to make sense of it, goes mad. The film is tedious, and because the murder being referred to may or may not be a real one, it is also made in questionable taste. It has one quality in its favour, which might be entirely accidental—its hysterical off-camera narrator, a white man, is so hilariously afraid of Korean food, the Korean language and certain Korean people that the movie morphs halfway into a pitch-black comedy about the horror of white gentrification. A scene showing his girlfriend’s Korean co-worker translating some “spooky,” “occult” graffiti that turns out to be a recipe for a traditional Korean dessert is such a perfect, funny snapshot of Caucasian othering that it might as well have been written by Mike White.
August 11th
Today, I am unable to think about anything except for Britney Spears’ most recent post on Instagram, which depicts Jude Law as Pope Pius XIII in The Young Pope lounging and smoking on a lawn chair with the caption “When he says let’s hang and you're like [eyeroll emoji].” Spears, who said several days ago that she is “Catholic now,” has of late been posting more freely than usual, revealing herself to be more or less the person fans had probably imagined her to be: a delightful little nut with a wicked sense of humour, a middle-aged mother’s love of Facebook memes and eccentric emoji strings, and a passion for slush cocktails. It is strangely perfect to imagine Spears being Catholic, in the same way that it is perfect to imagine her watching The Young Pope. Always religious, always interested in the dramatic symbolism inherent in things like snakes and roses, she is offbeat enough to enjoy Paolo Sorrentino’s surrealist streak. One has to guess, too, that she is more qualified than most to identify with a character whose beauty and religious purity have been conflated by the slavering general public.
More than anything, it amuses me to picture Spears’ reaction to the scene where Sister Mary, played by Diane Keaton, appears in a t-shirt that reads “I’M A VIRGIN, BUT THIS IS AN OLD SHIRT.” Who could possibly be more inextricably linked with that slogan than Britney Spears? I am haunted by the idea that when Spears is finally set free from her conservatorship, there will be a rush to make a TV adaptation of her story, and that when that moment comes, there is a chance that Ryan Murphy will employ his considerable wealth and power to secure the rights for American Crime Story: Britney Spears. It seems to me that Paolo Sorrentino might end up doing a better job of canonising Britney, making something as unusual and bright and extroverted as the kooky star herself.
Philippa Snow is a writer. Her reviews and essays have appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The New Statesman, The TLS, and The New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and is currently working on a book about pain for Repeater Books.