Join Andrea and Alex live from Salem Horror Fest for feats of strength (!) and a discussion of the horrors of beauty standards, the weight of celebrity culture, and the algorithms that are out to get us.
REQUIRED READING
The Substance. Dir. Coralie Fargeat, 2024.
EXTRA CREDIT
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Sarah Wynn-Williams account of her time at Facebook.
On Women. Susan Sontag’s essays on women and their physical relationships to the world.
How Ozempic shaming illuminates complexities of treating weight problems from the Harvard Gazette.
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After I saw “Warfare” a little while back I went online to see if the “Call on Me” music video was real or something invented for the film. I discovered that it was indeed real, sampled from Steve Winwood’s “Valerie and inspired by the 1985 film “Perfect”. The music video was apparently so successful that not only did it get a “sequel” featuring the same cast but a different musical artist, but also it got defictionalized (also with the same cast) into real workout DVDs. The first of those was titled “Pump It Up”, and the song in this film is a remake or remix of that Belgian title track.
My biggest problem with the film is that despite the repetition of “You Are One”, the film doesn’t seem to indicate they share the same consciousness. Sue is surprised when she sees the mess made in the apartment, as if she didn’t simply remember it was there from her time as Elizabeth. Nor does Elizabeth simply remember the interview of Sue she watches on TV. This being the case, it raises the question of what Elizabeth is getting out of any of this, since her own consciousness doesn’t get to enjoy Sue’s life.
I have heard people compare the relationship between Elizabeth & Sue to that of a mother to her daughter, but there is the glaring difference that Elizabeth can’t do any mothering. She’s always unconscious whenever Sue is conscious, until the climax when they fight to the death.
I haven’t heard anyone give a “racialized” interpretation of the film, but then I wouldn’t expect a film from France but ostensibly set in Los Angeles to have much to say on the topic of race.