Cory's Reads #26: Don't Worry, Starling
A crisis of celebrity (and sex).
Some things just aren’t up for debate. For example, Harry Styles is an attractive man.
Some other things are less certain. For example, Harry Styles may not have much of an acting career in front of him.
And even with the British heartthrob’s undeniable good looks, it’s those debates, mysteries, and controversies that seem to grab our attention and hold on with an ever-tightening grip.
Controversy has been a familiar sight for Styles in the last couple months, as is the case for all of Don’t Worry, Darling’s cast and crew.
From love triangles to press junket mishaps to red carpet no-shows to alleged spit attacks, there is a lot of ground to cover as it relates to the drama surrounding Olivia Wilde’s latest film.
And cover it, we have. Who can blame us? These are the moments that remind us what Hollywood is all about! Indeed, the last decade has ushered in a new kind of celebrity, in which the country’s rich and famous insist that they are just like us (Jennifer Lawrence was the poster child for such a prototype, even after she peaked as the highest-grossing actress in Hollywood). And so there’s something oddly refreshing about Olivia Wilde’s on-set affair with Harry Styles, or her detached defense of her new film’s depiction of sex and female pleasure.
Of course, the former is really none of our business, but our preoccupation with the personal and the petty is simply part of the fun! Why do you think we established this whole star system in the first place?
Wait…why did we establish this whole star system in the first place?
It’s a worthwhile question for a number of reasons, not the least of which have to do with Wilde’s aforementioned comments in Variety on the sex scenes in Don’t Worry, Darling. Absolutely convinced of her own innovation, Wilde suggests that her film’s approach to sex is unique in that “men don’t come in this film.” She goes on to argue that female pleasure is limited to queer cinema nowadays, and that only men get to receive pleasure in onscreen depictions of heterosexual intercourse.
Wilde’s observations are not entirely without merit. The unfair prioritization of the male experience in all facets of life (and therefore, cinema) is indisputable. Wilde’s attempt at a feminist course correction for sex in the cinema should then be admirable, if not for its irrelevance to the film she actually made!
Sex in Don’t Worry, Darling may play a somewhat consequential role, but Wilde’s skills as a director do not allow for any unique centering of her female protagonist, nor do they introduce sex as anything more than an onscreen spectacle. And considering Wilde initiated a relationship with Harry Styles during production, one might imagine the ease with which she’d get swept up in that spectacle.
After all, some things just aren’t up for debate. Harry Styles is an attractive human being, and his co-star Florence Pugh is too. There’s really no shame in admitting it, nor is there any shame in inviting audiences to indulge in a bit of sexual fantasy here and there. Celebrities tend to be beautiful people, and such beauty is a natural part of their allure. Pugh has understandably pushed back on the public’s sexual preoccupations, commenting in Harper’s Bazaar that sex is “not what I’m going to be discussing because [this movie is] bigger and better than that.”
The Midsommar star also acknowledges her co-star’s sphere of influence, admitting that “the nature of hiring the most famous pop star in the world” is going to draw attention to some of the film’s more base elements. Pugh’s comments may seem prudish to viewers for whom voyeurism and living vicariously are valid means of interpretation (which, believe it or not, is most of us), but they are perhaps best understood as a rebuke of Wilde’s unnecessary emphasis on Don’t Worry, Darling’s erotic side.
Besides, like any performer would, Pugh wants to be seen and heard for the entirety of her personage, a difficult feat for any celebrity, and an even harder one for Pugh, who has just arrived at a new juncture in her young career. If Midsommar was the film that declared the Oxford native one of our generation’s greatest talents, Don’t Worry, Darling is simply Hollywood signing on the dotted line. Pugh’s talents have been well-known for years now, evidenced by award nominations from both the BAFTA and the Academy. But her prowess as a supporting actress in studio fare has finally given way to a leading role. With Don’t Worry, Darling, Pugh has become the bankable star Hollywood studios so deeply covet.
Even as the film is inundated with bad press and negative reviews, Pugh’s powerhouse performance has kept the whole ship afloat. Although the film has not proven the box office draw Warner Bros. Pictures likely hoped it would be, the positioning of Pugh and Styles as an unprecedented onscreen duo still evokes the Hollywood star system of old, in which audiences are encouraged to see a given film on the basis of its star power alone.
Wilde can pretend that onscreen intimacy between her two leads is groundbreaking — never mind their complete lack of chemistry — and Pugh can pretend a famous pop star going down on her is meaningless, but sex remains an irresistible attraction, particularly in today’s rather sexless cultural environment. If nothing else, Wilde deserves our praise simply for reminding us that onscreen intimacy exists. Part of what makes her comments on sex seem so silly and out-of-touch is that sex barely even graces the silver screen in contemporary cinema. If her orchestration of supposed female pleasure is subversive in any way, it is not in its rejection of past tropes, but rather its embrace of the birds and the bees altogether.
The idea that cinematic sex needs to justify itself is rather absurd. Pornographic film occupies more of our collective attention span than traditional film ever could, so why treat sex as something to be scared of? Why treat it as a hidden indulgence or an illicit act?
In some ways, Hollywood might have been at its most permissive in its era of classical continuity. From the 1930s through the 1960s, sex played an essential role in American cinema, challenging the country’s puritanical roots. The erotic thriller emerged as a vital genre in these decades, coinciding with a moral panic over the rise of pin-up models, sweater girls, and bombshells.
Of course, there is a gendered component to Hollywood’s willingness to get sexy, and it is this double standard that Wilde seems to be exploiting. But wouldn’t she be better served exploiting tensions in, say, contemporary America? Don’t Worry, Darling struggles in several different areas, but its attempts at social analysis feel bizarrely obsolete. It engages not with femininity and masculinity as we know them today, but as they existed in the mid-twentieth century (even as it makes half-baked passes at the present in ways that won’t be spoiled here).
Still, the uplifting of Pugh as the film’s central star remains a rare bright spot amongst a sea of disappointment. At just 26, Pugh joins a long history of bona fide movie stars. And her meteoric rise over the last four years might cast doubt on actor/director Ethan Hawke’s latest assertion that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were — in fact — The Last Movie Stars.
Hawke’s HBO Max docuseries reflects on the shared life and legacy that Newman and Woodward left behind. But it perhaps more accurately acts as a referendum on celebrity as a whole. By employing the likes of George Clooney, Laura Linney, and Sam Rockwell to recreate archival recordings, The Last Movie Stars invites us to consider the relationship between celebrities then, and celebrities now. And while there is little doubt of an actor like Clooney’s cultural staying power, as its title suggests, The Last Movie Stars holds some existential concerns regarding that relationship.
Even without the internet, Newman and Woodward lived their lives at the mercy of the public eye. Fame absolutely entails a similar loss of privacy today, although it often coexists with the understanding that our invasion of such privacy is inappropriate and wrong. There is a kind of shame baked in to our parasocial bonds today. We can obsess over our favorite celebrities, but we do so with a guilty conscience.
This is a good thing. If Newman and Woodward once served as societal spectacle, an actress like Pugh is not quite so passive. Her awareness of the fishbowl in which she is floating is made explicit, and the result is a far healthier form of celebrity for her and for us.
Indeed, the self-aware celebrity is a relatively new phenomenon. One might view Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here (2010) as one of our earliest introductions to this new mold of celebrity, and films like This is the End (2013), Vox Lux (2018), and Her Smell (2018) have similarly reassessed our notion of what a celebrity should be. A famous figure’s reclaiming of privacy will always be a work in progress, but the intimacy afforded by the internet and social media has forged a more honest dialogue on the matter.
One wishes such a dialogue was available to our favorite celebrities of old. The Last Movie Stars traces Newman’s struggles with alcoholism, loosely connecting the dots of what could drive a man to that point. And director Andrew Dominik paints a similar picture for the life and career of Marilyn Monroe in his new film Blonde (2022).
Like Don’t Worry, Darling, Blonde is a deeply misguided film. But whereas the former at least masquerades as a feminist film, the latter is outright misogynistic in its look back at one of the most iconic figures in pop culture history.
Much like the world’s treatment of Monroe, Dominik’s delirious swirl of black & white photography, talking CGI fetuses (yes, seriously), and Ana de Armas’ tits is downright offensive. Dominik may cite its roots in fiction as an excuse — the film is based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name — but its mean-spirited manipulation of Monroe’s psyche remains difficult to ignore.
Of course, what’s fascinating about the film’s attempt to dredge up a celebrity’s corpse and rehash all of her life’s trauma is that Monroe may be the only famous figure in history for whom we might allow it. Few figures have drifted so far from their humanity in our collective conscience. As Blonde points out in the bleakest of terms, Monroe was a full-fledged human being, but her presence in pop culture today is that of a symbol, a simulacra several times removed.
The provocative nature of the film therefore remains tempting. Monroe has belonged to all of us for a long, long, long time. How dare a male director try to take her away from us! How dare he force a distorted (and arguably pro-life) narrative upon her! A film this aimless and evil should be easy to ignore, but it can be difficult to ignore that which feels so personal.
That dynamic makes Blonde feel all the more invasive as it encroaches upon its vulnerable (and often nude) protagonist. Dominik adopts the subtlety of a jackhammer in demonstrating how carnivorous and cruel the male-dominated entertainment industry was towards Monroe, using what can only be described as a Snapchat filter to accentuate onlookers’ eyes and mouths as they ogle at the beauty before them. And yet, Dominik’s camera ogles alongside them, earning its NC-17 rating with a bevy of vaginal POV shots (once again, seriously).
Anyone who claims Monroe as their own certainly maintains an admiration for her beauty — in some ways, her looks are all we have ever let her be — but if Blonde aims to implicate us in its oversimplification of Hollywood’s most enduring sex symbol, it does so with embarrassing obsession.
And in today’s cultural climate, it is that kind of embarrassment that most of us are trying to avoid. But even as it eroded her own sense of self, Monroe’s celebrity persona permitted this kind of overt carnal desire. She leaned into her status as a blonde bombshell, becoming synonymous with the ensuing sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. She helped to normalize sex and sexiness in a way we’ve struggled to recapture since.
But at what cost?
A fate like Monroe’s was perhaps on Pugh’s mind when she downplayed the role that sex played in her latest film. Celebrities may be our most essential trendsetters, but there are serious stakes involved in establishing our cultural tones, resulting in necessary concern for the overall wellbeing of those in the public eye. Such concern has facilitated the more nuanced celebrity-spectator relationships we have come to understand today, but that’s not to say Hollywood has given up on the movie star in its traditional form.
We now face a crisis of celebrity, where the comforting rise of a Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, or Anya Taylor-Joy is still an infrequent phenomenon. These are movie stars for whom the built-in prestige of their profession has merged with more modern sensibilities. But for every one of them, we get a “wife guy” or a TikToker.
We get entertainers who are the one thing they absolutely should not be: boring.
Whereas Hollywood once manufactured our heroes, it now finds itself lagging behind. The industry has struggled to keep up with current trends, trying and failing to invest in the young Gen-Zers for whom a simple dance in their childhood bedroom is enough to achieve “celebrity” status.
In this vein, Hollywood’s hopes for Harry Styles check out. He has been one of the most famous pop stars in the world for over a decade now, so capitalizing off of that momentum and transferring his flamboyant stage presence to the silver screen makes a world of sense. And even as the industry shies away from it, sex appeal will never go out of style (pun absolutely intended).
Unfortunately, Styles’ lack of acting talent has rendered his screen presence nonexistent. And so the crisis continues, pink pants and gem-adorned jumpsuits left in its wake.
The economy of celebrity seems dire. And as I am wont to do, I blame Marvel. Few career trajectories can steer clear of the behemoth these days, projecting onto each actor and actress a very narrow set of expectations and attributes. Styles himself became an MCU member in 2021’s Eternals, with just under six minutes of screen-time in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) to his name at that point. The best blockbusters project their star’s persona onto the picture, not the other way around. It’s why Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man was such a successful initiate for the MCU, and why Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series remains the high water mark for franchise filmmaking. Other successful blockbusters might go in the opposite direction, disregarding celebrity. The re-release of James Cameron’s Avatar served as a reminder of how far striking visuals and self-assured characters can carry a film. Although a little Sigourney Weaver doesn’t hurt either.
So as that central question of the star system’s very existence hangs in the balance, I return to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and its discussion of “the holy moment.”
A holy moment, according to Linklater and his rotoscoped philosophers, is film’s defining trait. For all its narrative ambitions, film’s strength lies not in its storytelling but in its divinity. Put more practically, film requires a specific shot of a specific person in a specific place at a specific time. And in that specificity sits a moment that exists only in the here and now. “Film is the record of God,” suggests an animated Caveh Zahedi. He goes on: “It shouldn’t be based on the script. It should be based on the person…and in that sense [Hollywood] is almost right to have this whole star system because then it’s about, like, that person.”
According to Zahedi, film’s power is wasted on literary pursuits. Film triumphs in its capturing of a singular person in a singular moment, and reproducing that scene for all to see. Sex scenes, celebrities, and even sarcastic superheroes all begin to make a bit more sense in this context. So as we welcome a new generation of movie stars and continue to negotiate the cultural norms of a fractured world, may we all work to make this moment holy.
And the next one.
And the next one.
And the next one.
If you made it all the way down here, you have my deepest gratitude. Just a bit of housekeeping: Cory’s Reads is going to be published a bit more infrequently moving forward. I’m working on some other exciting projects that I cannot wait to share with you all in the near future. And for that reason, the newsletter is permanently free! A special shout-out to anyone who was ever crazy enough to give me money. Of course, when a new film blows my mind or pisses me off to no end, you will all be the first to know about it. As always, thank you for your support.
Until next time,
Cory Reid
Incredibly insightful