Materialists: A Heroine's Journey

The Wire

2 days ago

Paromita Ghosh
a minute ago
Sometimes, the most subversive act as a storyteller is to show characters breaking the barriers that constrain their existence and acting without regard for the consequences.
Dakota Johnson in 'Materialists'.
Homo economicus. That is the term for humans who are apparently rational, self-interested and utility-maximising. It was all well and good till the time the homo economicus were confined to their economic home, the markets. However, the quarantine has been breached, and the strain has leaked all over our societies. Even to places where it should not perhaps have reached. For instance, education, healthcare, leisure and dating. It is not exactly breaking news; small and big changes over the last half a decade have mainstreamed it. That all aspects of our social and personal lives should be run like profit-seeking enterprises is somewhat of contemporary common sense. And all of us, ergo, ought to behave like economic actors if not turn ourselves into outright investable and tradable commodities and brands.
In the Indian context, as perhaps elsewhere as well, there was a discernible and fiercely defended line between samaaj and bazaar. It is worth thinking about what is lost when this boundary is blurred. To be sure, there was never really a time that society was immune from market shenanigans – after all, society needs the market to distribute goods and services – but it is entirely a different ballgame when society is completely overtaken by the market and its logic. Today, we are, almost always, performing for an invisible audience of potential stakeholders, turning our everyday lives into carefully curated investment portfolios. It would be funny and absurd if it were not so utterly corrosive for our sense of self and social fibre.
In Celine Song's latest film-of-manners, Materialists, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) and Harry (Pedro Pascal) completely understand each other because while they may come from different walks of life and professions, they are both portfolio managers of sorts. Lucy manages a bevy of subscription-paying marriage-ready candidates. And Harry is in private equity. It is precisely for this reason that, after the initial spark, they both quickly realise that they do not quite want their private lives to be governed by the same cold, hard logic with which they run their day jobs. They may be traders, but they are somewhat uncomfortable thinking of themselves as tradable goods.
Lucy is the first to realise this because while she may help people 'marry the love of their lives', she knows it is not what she delivers. She, like the desi high-flying matchmaker Sima Taparia (of Netflix fame), is good at gauging the personalities and needs of her clients and, in customer-care speak, managing their expectations. Lucy is also, as the scene involving a client with pre-wedding jitters demonstrates, not above manipulating them into closing the deal. All of this is to say that she does not want to be caught in a situation like her clients. She genuinely wants to marry for love. And Harry is not it. In what is an endearing scene between the two, Lucy does a great job, like a consummate professional she is, of disabusing Harry of the notion that he needs to optimise, so to speak, himself for the marriage market. He is, after all, a unicorn – rich, good-looking, and charming – and will find love. He should not settle for less.
The class difference between the two is staggering. While he can whisk her away for a short vacation to Iceland at short notice, she does not even have a passport. She sublets her apartment for the week when she will be away to make some extra money. Climbing up the economic ladder, even with the marriage shortcut, is hard work. The beloved becomes both intimate and foreign, requiring you to perform versions of yourself that feel simultaneously authentic and artificial. The constant code-switching demands loads and loads of emotional labour. It involves learning new vocabularies of taste, navigating unfamiliar social rituals, and explaining your background without defensiveness or shame. A person can wing it once in a while, even master it. But to do it day in and day out till death do us part is exhausting. This, one assumes, is another reason for Lucy spurning Harry's interest in her.
Lucy and John (Chris Evans), on the other hand, are what Phoebe Buffay would call "lobsters" – creatures who mate for life and grow old together, claws intertwined. Questionable science, but the sentiment holds. Even when they meet years after their acrimonious breakup, there is a palpable charge between the two. He remembers her choice of drink is beer and Coke. Not mixed, but together. She likes his face, she even likes his beat-up car. He always picks up her calls, listens, and even settles down on the pavement when he thinks the conversation is going to be longer. Their relationship, when they were young, had all the trappings of lasting love except for the persistent discord over money.
Both had arrived in the city with acting dreams, but while Lucy took a lucrative position in New York's luxury-driven dating culture, John clung to his struggling artist identity. On most days, he could be found lurching between his cramped living arrangements, auditioning for indie stage productions, and waiting tables at weddings, all with a certain principled pig-headedness. It is only when, in a moment of vulnerability, Lucy tells John that she is still very much the same person who wants not riches but a modicum of economic security, that he begins to see her point. While her $80,000 a year job can take care of the proverbial bread, she expects her prospective partner/husband to bring roses and just a little bit more. Her ask from John is very simple: Can he not actively sabotage the life they may share by working at cross purposes? Can they, coming from backgrounds where they often heard their parents fight over money, aspire and work towards a better shared life?
The social media chatter, by and large, has been mostly critical of the note on which the film ends, calling it, among other things, a cop-out. Some think that while Lucy may or may not have done a smart thing in rejecting Harry, it is stupid on her part to fall again for broke-ass John. After all, in a context where economic necessity masquerades as moral choice, those without means ought not dabble in romantic idealism. Such reactions are not surprising, given that marriage is still widely considered to be an easy route to upward mobility, Jane Austen and a couple of centuries of women's movement notwithstanding. Marrying for affection or advantage is, to put it very plainly, a false choice. In a society where women possessed genuine economic independence, would we still frame marriage as a choice between heart and security? The very existence of this question indicts systems that force such calculations.
Many have also commented unfavourably on her seeming reluctance to accept the offer to become the country CEO of the match-making agency. Even if we were to ignore her transformation as a result of the experience of one of her clients and, of course, her own situationship, it may just be that she is taking time to assess her life choices afresh. For all we know, she may just take up the top job and rethink the way they do business even after she gets married to John. We approach marriage as a narrative conclusion because it historically marked the end of women's independent legal existence.
"Settling down," "tying the knot," "being taken off the market'; these phrases reveal how deeply we have internalised marriage as termination rather than transformation. Marriage need not be narrowly conceived as the end of aspirations and life choices. If it genuinely ended agency, then either path of wealth and love leads to the same destination: diminished possibility. Such a reading assumes marriage operates as a final verdict rather than an ongoing negotiation. Real relationships involve continuous choice-making, constant renegotiation of terms, perpetual opportunities for growth or resistance. The person Lucy becomes within marriage – whether to wealth or poverty – remains her possibility to opt for and explore. Her agency lies less in her initial selection than in how she exercises power within whichever system she enters.
Materialists, after all, is the heroine's journey. From a young woman desiring material things, she is shown becoming a person who can see things for what they really are, beyond hype and social expectations. A real materialist, as it were. The world wants her to see love as business, but she eventually chooses not to.
Materialists does not argue for specific political positions. Song simply demonstrates that other ways of organising life remain possible. Sometimes, the most subversive act as a storyteller is to show characters breaking the barriers that constrain their existence and acting without regard for the consequences. The choices we are trained to avoid – quitting jobs, pursuing dreams, prioritising feeling over security – are not inherently unwise or destructive. They are simply incompatible with systems that require predictable, risk-averse behaviour.
By watching characters like Lucy and John (and even Harry) live differently, not as Homo Economicus, humans who calculate, but perhaps as Homo Reciprocans, humans who feel and care, we may be able to conceive alternatives to status quo arrangements.
Paromita Ghosh is a Mumbai-based media professional working across linear and streaming platforms.
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