The College Beat: Article III
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Every girl wants a Unicorn.
The Materialists, a rom-com by Celine Song released over the summer, highlights a problematic phenomenon in modern dating life: the checklist. The Unicorn is the man who checks all the boxes. He has the ideal body, income, education, and personality. Believing that he’s out there somewhere waiting for her, no woman would settle for less.
But while The Materialists highlights the discomfort and danger of the checklist phenomenon, the analysis stops there. Try as it might, the film fails to offer a compelling alternative to the pervasive attitude of consumption encouraged by dating apps and professional matchmakers.
The landing point of the film—marry for love—falls as flat as Dakota Johnson’s emotionless voice.
When the film opens, main character Lucy Mason, played by Johnson, has successfully matched nine couples in her role as a professional matchmaker at her NYC-based company, Adore. She herself is a “voluntary celibate” and prefers to help other women find The One rather than look for her own match. But when she meets a new, rich suitor and runs into her ex-boyfriend the same night, she’s torn.
Harry Castillo, played by Pedro Pascal, is a Unicorn. Tall with good hair and a job in private equity, he checks all of the boxes. Most importantly for Lucy, he’s rich—“mind-numbingly, absurdly, achingly rich”—and owns a twelve-million-dollar apartment in New York City. Meanwhile Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John Finch, played by Chris Evans, is a struggling stage actor living with roommates and picking up shifts with a catering company to help pay the rent.
Spoiler alert: In a story arc that surprised no one, Lucy dates Harry and lives in his luxurious apartment before breaking it all off to return to the ex who has no money but vows his love for her has a lifetime guarantee.
At its best, the film recognizes a problem. Dating has become a box-checking effort:
- 6’2’’
- Ripped
- Brown eyes
- Investment banking
- $200k minimum
And when everything comes down to criteria, the dating scene isn’t even a field to be played, it’s a market to be manipulated. Lucy helps men and women maximize their market values.
One of Lucy’s clients marries a man because she says he makes her feel valuable. Lucy later uses the same phrase to justify dating Harry: “You make me feel valuable.” When a relationship boils down to status and how another person makes you feel about yourself, the checklist makes sense as an efficient way to sort through the options on the market.
If being soulmates doesn’t come down to shared economic background and both voting for Bernie, what else is there?
Anyone can be soulmates, Lucy says, if they have similar economic backgrounds, political alignment, and are well matched in attractiveness. Investing in plastic surgery for a few extra inches in height or a straighter nose can help a man or woman achieve a higher bracket in the market. It’s all just math, she says. But the relationships shown in the movie, including her own, are marred by a dating world that sells men and women to each other as commodities in a business exchange. In one scene, Lucy, in bed with Harry, asks him how much his apartment costs.
The scales fall away when one of Lucy’s clients is raped on a date with someone who was a “great match” for her. The matchmaker’s career and personal life spiral as the ideal of the perfect match shatters, and she lashes out at one delusional client when the woman offers her a one-pager on the ideal man. But if being soulmates doesn’t come down to shared economic background and both voting for Bernie, what else is there?
“Why does anybody even get married?” John asks Lucy as they watch a wedding from a distance.
“Because people tell them they should. And because they’re lonely. And because they’re hopeful,” Lucy responds. “They want to do it differently from their parents.”
That’s about as deep as the film gets.
“Love is easy,” Lucy says elsewhere. “You can’t help it.”
The Materialists knows what love is not. But the film offers no alternate vision of what love is. When John proposes at the end of the film, he gives Lucy a flower instead of a ring and asks, “How’d you like to make a very bad financial decision?” Against the weight of the problem, the happily-ever-after-in-squalor alternative feels starry-eyed and naïve.
Pope St. John Paul II offers the missing piece The Materialists can’t put its finger on when he presents the relationship between man and woman as a relationship centered on self-gift that affirms the inherent value of another person. In his essay “Meditation on Givenness,” John Paul II speaks to young people seeking marriage and echoes the words of the angel to Joseph of Nazareth: “Do not be afraid to take Mary to yourself.”
Relationships require a posture of self-gift—recognizing and affirming the value of the other person who is entrusted to us as a gift.
“‘Do not be afraid to take’ means do everything to recognize that gift which she is for you,” the pope writes. “Fear only one thing: that you should try to appropriate that gift. . . . Perhaps God wills that it be you who is the one who tells her of her inestimable worth and special beauty.”
“You make me feel valuable” is a compelling falsity because love does affirm value in the beloved. But it’s a two-way street.
“Each person carries within himself an inestimable value,” the pope writes. “He receives this worth from God, who himself became man and revealed the divine life that he confided, as it were, to man. Thus, he created a new order of interpersonal relationships.”
Relationships require a posture of self-gift—recognizing and affirming the value of the other person who is entrusted to us as a gift. Men and women should have standards in dating, but the first step toward meeting those standards requires encountering the other first as person and gift, not a list of criteria or a status symbol.
The topic is more timely than ever: Dating apps offer to sort men according to height, race, and religion. Pornography separates personhood from sex and gives men and women unrealistic and harmful sexual expectations. AI companions offer emotional support ordinarily supplied through friendships and romantic relationships.
The Materialists senses the falsity of imposing checklists and market value on persons. But I wanted it to go further. Unable to make the leap from hunting Unicorns to an alternative vision of love and gift of self, the film falls back on a cliché.
Every girl wants a Unicorn.
But she is worthy of so much more.