it's all about the movies, babygirl!
Behold! I have had a thought.
Hello!
Hi! Decided to do a themed edition this week. We’re all about cinema right now. The pictures are good again! Awoo! By which I mean: I went to see A Real Pain last week and oh it’s just perfect. It’s a tight 90-minute and a very small movie - few locations, few characters - but every scene is good and nothing is ever wasted.
The acting is terrific and it’s very full of heart, but also quietly devastating. I sort of saw the last scene coming but it still punched me in the gut. Also: it’s very funny. You should go watch it! You’ll have a good time!
Elsewhere I cannot wait to watch The Brutalist, which lasts for three and a half hours - not very chic - but has a mandated interval of 15 minutes in the middle - EXTREMELY chic. I do believe the interval will be needed, as there’s only so much of Adrian Brody’s face one can look at continuously without getting overwhelmed.
Looking back to the end of last year, I also meant to say that I hugely enjoyed this piece on Conclave, and the girls that get it:
“The optimal audience member for this movie is someone who was struck with a ruler in Catholic school for saying “heck” and now, as an adult, says “serving cunt” as commonly as they say “hello.” I was reminded of this after I left the theater and the man behind me asked his girlfriend, “why was the score so campy, though?” That is a question I would simply never think to ask. It’s like asking why the pope is wearing a dress. Upon this rock was built the Legendary House of the Lord, Kyle.”
You can and indeed should read it here, even if you’ve not seen Conclave, I think. It works well as a standalone column. Speaking of which -
A column
Note: this goes in quite heavy on the Babygirl spoilers, as it’s pretty hard to write about a movie without getting into what happens in the movie. For what it’s worth, I’d say that it’s not one of those films that would get thoroughly ruined for you if you knew what to expect plot-wise, but obviously you’re welcome to skip if you want to keep the surprise for yourself.
If you want a spoiler free TL;DR, just picture me tapping a big sign that says “it’s about desire, not about sex, they’re very different things”.
If you want to understand Babygirl, you have to think about the point at which Romy tries to launch herself at Samuel. Their affair has barely started - they've only kissed once, briefly, in the office - and they've just met up in a dingy hotel room, chosen by him. He pushes her away and says that he doesn't want to do it like this; isn't interested, if that is how it's going to be.
Not long afterwards, Romy finds herself on all fours, fully clothed, sharp heels against the cheap carpet. A lot of reviews have pointed out that Romy is a successful CEO, wife and mother, and for once she just wants to be told what to do. That's the essence of most BDSM relationships, at least the ones portrayed in popular culture.
The submissive partner wants to lose themselves in the orders given to them by their dominant counterpart, because so much of their life involves being in charge, and taking decisions. That's definitely one of the angles through which we can look at Romy's choices, but I'm not sure it's the most interesting one.
I may be wrong, of course, but Kidman's character didn't strike me as someone purely desperate to surrender control. It's something she only ever does awkwardly and resentfully in the movie, mortified, giggling, or both. Instead, I think she falls for Samuel because she desires him, which is something she had not felt in a long time.
Romy is a woman with a successful corporate career. As the movie likes to remind us, that remains rare, especially for a woman of her age. In one of her early conversations with Samuel, she talks about having excelled at university, suffered through a tense job interview, worked like a horse, then launched her company while still in her twenties.
In that moment, early on, it becomes clear just how driven she is. She wanted to get to the top - to have the power, the money, the underlings - and we can only assume that it wasn't an easy journey. Such careerist yearning is often seen as unsightly for a woman, but she didn't care. It isn't mentioned in the film, but one can imagine that she had to fight tooth and claw to get to where she has ended up. It probably was gruelling, stressful, and occasionally undignified.
Of course, she succeeded in the end, and Romy clearly enjoys her career, but what happens once you reach the summit? Similarly, it felt striking to me that her husband was both handsome and successful in his own right. That he frequently, lovingly initiated sex despite having been married to her for two decades is also worth mentioning. She has it all. She has it all! What do you get the woman who has it all?
You get her on her knees and you make her beg, so she can show you how much she wants it. The attempted kiss I mentioned earlier is important, I think, because it's what the rest of their relationship is pinned on. It's not as memorable as her drinking the glass of milk he sent her, but it fulfills a similar purpose.
You could probably argue that the tenet of their dalliance was always going to lean towards the dominant/submissive, mostly because you'd seen the trailer, but Samuel's rebuke is the moment at which it becomes clear. She wants to sleep with him and so does he, obviously, but he refuses to just let her have it.
That's when the dynamic becomes interesting. As I see it, Romy doesn't merely get turned on because she gets humiliated by Samuel. Instead, the debasement is nearly self-inflicted, and works because it reminds her of just how much she desires him. She has the job and the title and the face and the clothes and the husband and the kids, but the only way she can get the intern is by bending over and lapping milk from a saucer, like a cat.
The submission shouldn't really be taken at face value, especially as we see, briefly, that the sex they do end up having is essentially normal. Instead, her submissive behaviour should be seen as symbolic of the strength with which she yearns for him; yearns for his touch. He calls her “power-hungry” in an early meeting and you may want to focus on the power part of it, but her hunger, in this context, is what defines her.
We can imagine her starting her company, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, and knowing that far away on the horizon, there is a shiny CEO job waiting for her, if only she can make it. We can see her as a fifty-something, Botoxed to the gills, having identified something else that she pines for, and doing everything in her power to get it.
The sex doesn't look wholly unlike the sex she has with her husband, but that's because the sex itself isn't the point. Desire is. That Samuel is much younger than her and she keeps mentioning it is also key; professional drive is unseemly for a woman, but so is wanting, so acutely, to sleep with someone half your age.
Ambition and submission go hand in hand in Babygirl, as they're both driven by a similar impulse. If anything, the risk of being discovered and losing everything only adds to the resemblance. Becoming a self-made tech CEO as a woman surely must entail a thousand and one small decisions which may lead to ruin. Going clubbing with the twenty-something who works for your underling's underling's underling surely triggers a similar sense of terrified thrill.
This must also be one of the reasons why so many powerful men seek out the services of dominatrixes. They can have everything they want in the real world, and over time that is likely to corrode the soul. It must be refreshing, once in a while, to artificially create a world where the distance between what you desire and what you have briefly feels unbreachable.
The only problem for Romy is that she is not a man, as the last third of the movie reminds us. She may have reached the top, but there are many people - men and women - who will keep trying to yank her back down. That the affair is ended by a usually peppy, now sombre and calculating millennial woman is interesting.
She says that she wants to work for a woman she can look up to and, purposely or not, the viewer never quite finds out whether she means that or not. Is it acidic cynicism or bona fide puritanism? In any case, the blackmailing works, and the assistant gets her promotion. Perhaps one day she, too, will start lusting over the interns.
Romy, on the other hand, gets given two endings. In the first, she tells a man at the company that, if she ever wants to get sexually humiliated again, she'll just pay for it instead, as it's easier. In the second, she has her first ever orgasm with her husband, as she lays flat on her stomach and he fingers her while covering her eyes with his other hand.
The first conclusion isn't entirely satisfying, as it's hard to picture Romy settling for professional services when she's experienced the real thing. The second disappointed me even more as I watched it; reducing two hours of thought-provoking plots around the complexities of human desire to "just take me in that way that I like" felt cheap.
Since then, however, I've started wondering if that scene isn't the most relevant one. Romy's relationship with Samuel gets defined by the time she tries to kiss him and he refuses, and perhaps the ending of the movie begins when her husband finds out about the affair, and kicks her out of the house. She'd taken him for granted for so long that it had dulled her desire but, suddenly, she realised that losing him suddenly was a very real possibility.
In that one moment, he becomes someone she wants to be with, but who won't surrender himself to her willingly. He becomes someone - something - she wants and, for a while, cannot have. There's a distance again and, like all career-minded people, the distance is what keeps her going. Maybe she doesn't have everything she'd ever wanted after all, and isn't that a turn-on?