How a Salary Figure Changes Everything in ‘Materialists’

We live in a world where young women talk openly on social media platforms about how to get men to send you money, how to find a sugar daddy, activities with a veneer of romance that both parties know are actually centered on money. But even for women who are determined to earn their own money, there’s little shyness left.

a post-90s dynamic in dating: the commodification of people on dating apps, just another place to find made-to-order goods. The matchmaking service that Lucy provides does much the same thing, filtering out and matching candidates by numbers on a spreadsheet: age, weight, height, income. Characters constantly talk about feeling valuable, which here... See more

Song has said that although she embraces the escapism inherent in the genre, she included the concrete figure quite deliberately, prodding audiences to talk about money openly even if culturally it’s still considered impolite. “Let’s be realistic about that: It’s not polite to people who don’t want you to know how much money they have,”

Nobody talks salary in rom-coms — or really in movies at all. That’s probably in part to avoid dating a film too much. But it’s also because concrete numbers are startling, even distracting. Suddenly you’re tabulating Lucy’s lifestyle, trying to conjure up a mental balance sheet. And for “Materialists,” money is in every frame, in a way we’ve rarel... See more