Issue #98: He Taketh Away ❤️‍🔥

Have you seen Christopher Nolan’s latest film The Odyssey yet? Considering its monster box office draw so far, we’d hazard a guess that you have. And if you haven’t, you should get on that — in any format you can access. Even though we’ve been having fun discussing the film ourselves, this week we’re writing about two other texts that drew us in instead.

First, Cate on the filmic lyricism of Mother Mary. Then, Zosha on the painful pitfalls of the fifth and final season of The Boys.

And in the next issue, you just might find out what we think about the future 99th Best Picture winner. Until then, we can’t recommend the score enough.

Even though I’ve now seen the film twice, I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about David Lowery’s musical ghost story Mother Mary. 

The film explores the aftermath of a long-delayed reunion between pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) and her former costume designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Unhappy with her current collaborators, Mary is seeking a costume to wear during her long-awaited return to the stage, after a disturbing public accident sent her into hiding. As they discuss the nature of their earlier fallout, we learn that Sam was, in practice, the creative director of the project of “Mother Mary” but was slowly edged out of the team as Mary’s fame as a pop star grew. Since then, she has built herself a well-regarded atelier, and is now in the middle of finalizing her next collection.

Coel is transportive as the elliptical and esoteric Sam. Weighted by grief, and defensive in her refusal to engage with Mary’s music, she whispers dagger-shaped poems at her desperate former friend, pressing at the wound of her own betrayal. “Mother Mary” was art Sam created upon the canvas of her best friend’s career. And when she was dismissed, she was severed from the parts of her own history that she loaned to Mary’s image. It created psychic damage so profound that it manifested as a toothache that became the ghost of the love she and Mary once shared. 

Hathaway shapes Mary into a meek, self-scorned lover desperate for approval from the woman she once abandoned. As their creative partnership developed, Mary came to feel suffocated by Sam’s vision for her. Instead of making her needs clear, she let Sam fade to the periphery of her circle until Sam had been erased completely. Now, Mary has little to no sense of herself remaining, and that in part is why she’s chosen to seek Sam out again after all this time. She’s been possessed by a spirit since the night of her fateful show, when she stepped off a raised platform and nearly hung herself. And as it turns out, that spirit is Sam’s ghost.

Together Sam and Mary’s extended conversation makes for a fascinating chamber play. What we get is a feather-light take on creative authorship and ownership, through the frame of the emotional and temporal distance created by a fractured friendship. Connected by regret and rejection, the weight of their personal and professional animus becomes an ethereal tether in the shape of a ghostly bit of red fabric. Lowery did exceedingly well choosing this form to personify his chosen metaphor. The women’s joint haunting is unnerving and intriguing all at once. The specter is and remains every bit a tangible curiosity as it is an encroaching menace; an unmerciful savior.

Though some press materials have referred to the characters as former lovers, that’s not necessarily the impression the film itself would leave you with. Sam and Mary’s interactions are queer, but not gay; individually the performances could be coded as the experiences of a queer woman, but Hathaway and Coel’s acting choices orbit each other peripherally in a way that locates the objects of their respective affections as somehow, slightly offscreen. 

While my overall impression was positive, one of the things that challenged me about the film is the kind of pop star that it chooses to make Mother Mary. The music — created in collaboration with Jack Antonoff and Charlie XCX — is moody, breathy and light. Techno-inflected synth-backbeats dominate, as Hathaway’s lithe body marks choreography designed for a star vintage much older than she. The costumes on the other hand ape Lady Gaga in her Born This Way era. Dominated by halos and religious imagery, they bristle against the submitted sonic landscape just enough to always feel incongruent. Ironically, it made me realize why artist development was once so revered in the music industry. It’s really hard to reverse engineer a pop star. Thank goodness the album is good!

It’s hard to pull apart all the elements that make Mother Mary what it is. But Lowery’s chosen ending is a well-earned reminder that horror films are art too. And it makes a fitting reward for the film’s general opaqueness. In fact, this may be the clearest example I’ve seen of a text being greater than the sum of its parts. Thankfully in its final form, Mother Mary creates an enchanting and seductive world populated with longing, grief and desperation. It’s a more than worthy sandbox for two excellent actresses to play in.

The last episode before the series finale of The Boys features something America loves: Daveed Diggs dancing and singing. It’s fun stuff, goofy as he rehearses a number for an upcoming religious broadcast his character (a superhero pastor) is hosting and has to get just right or else Homelander will be upset. 

I can’t believe I’m saying this but: I’m kinda mad that The Boys wasted its time letting Diggs perform. I really don’t want to be on this side of history, I know it’s just a few minutes, but the way that The Boys has run itself in the final season—indulgently fanned out—wore thin with me. And taking that much time in the episode before the finale feels representative of the show’s general loss of steam heading into its endgame. 

Like Dallas, The Boys is more or less always an exercise in keeping the ball just in the air enough to up the ante without going all-in. Hughie, Butcher, and the rest of The Boys have been fighting the good fight against supes and the megacorporation behind them for five seasons now. Since their main antagonist is an Evil Superman character, the balance was always about nudging their efforts along just enough without dipping too bleak or too overpowered. 

And it mostly worked; while The Boys has certainly earned its reputation for edginess and bleak gutpunches, it had some fun satire at times and enjoyable characters to watch. You could get on board with the Disney jabs and gore and camaraderie and performances and just let whatever you liked most carry you through the bits you didn’t. 

But by its final season it just all felt a little tired. The show was going full tilt at whatever bugged it about recent culture all the time. Even as the story was more and more about a counterculture, The Boys, like Don Quixote, just drove at that same shimmering idea of ridiculing popular culture. Whether you liked it or not, its nastiness felt in service of setting up the next bit—be it gross out, parody, or obscene—and letting the characters fall where they may. 

And in that light, the characters more or less fell away. The final season is riddled with plotlines that felt like they came from real, grounded places for them, only to go nowhere at all. Annie reconciling with the things she’s had to stomach while on the run from the government as an enemy of the state? Drawn out for a few episodes and handled. MM’s feelings about never getting revenge for his family on Soldier Boy? Settled, so he can go get married now(?). Giving Kimiko the powers of a supe god so she can depower Homelander? Developed as an idea off-screen! It feels crazy to say I could stomach this if it were all in service of centering on Huey or Butcher, but even they feel shortchanged by the narrative. Yet somehow, it’s just, tidy endings all the way down—more than just saccharine, in the parlance of The Boys, but seemingly sacreligious. 

There was a minor social media uproar after the penultimate episode, where, after Homelander has crushed the skull of the president and made recurring character and vice president Ashley the new leader of the free world on the spot, users were kinda shocked there was no outcry or rebellion from the public. This doesn’t really surprise me—not in a “real world” implications way, but just that if there was an obviously crazy superpowered maniac who was impervious to harm running things the way Homelander is, I think we can safely assume there’s been a chilling effect on would-be protesters. But still, it feels representative of the problem with the final run of The Boys: There’s no world of the show anymore, just our real one. It’s so busy responding to or mirroring things from our own, it’s lost track of the thrust of the show. When Hughie first got recruited by Butcher, he was a regular person. His girlfriend had been run over by a superhero, and he felt there was an injustice to correct. He saw his chance, and he stepped up. 

He’s not alone; over and over The Boys has featured regular people whose lives have been disrupted and caused them to venture out to risky ground to try to make a difference. As the show wore on, it collapsed these characters in on themselves, webs of conspiracies forming like snakes all tangled up with each other. There was a time when The Boys remembered the world it was fighting for. In the end, it was just too focused on the one it was fighting against.

Jesus was a sailor. The rebranding of Charli XCX is annoying me. The failure of Lizzo’s album is about more than just her popularity. This is not an essay about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Madonna discovered what the death was for!!

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Zosha + Cate <3