I am still in sunny San Diego, where every day is eerily perfect and the idea of spending an evening indoors at a movie theater seems obscene. Perhaps Deeper Into Movies would not exist if I did not spend ten years in Minnesota, a state where scientists explored the full lexical capacity of English with weather events like “bomb cyclones” or “polar vortexes.”
But before I landed, I did catch two movies on the plane, and shreds of movies on the hotel television while getting ready to leave for the convention center. The movies I spent time with all dealt with themes of female survival in the workplace. Coincidence? Hm….
Molly’s Game (Aaron Sorkin, 2017)
Jessica Chastain is at a career best as the real-life Molly Bloom, an entrepreneur who ran an illegal poker ring with A-list stars.
For the first hour of Molly’s Game, I became convinced that this was the best movie I had never seen. Say what you want about Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War is dogshit) but when he is on, he’s on. Chastain is balletic with Sorkin’s battering-ram dialogue, and we watch her bring Molly from beleaguered personal assistant to confident casino boss. She is polished in every interaction, whether it’s fending off sexual advances from the players or pulling aside gamblers who have racked up insurmountable debts. Molly balances intelligence and ambition with unrelenting charm, graciousness, and manners while maintaining glossy femininity. In other words, she’s a sigma female.
Because, one hour into Molly’s Game and two hours into my flight, I finally understood the sigma male grindset that possesses men to post memes of Giancarlo Esposito and Christian Bale with quotes they have made up. If you are unfamiliar, the “sigma male” is a trope of the red pill manosphere that is hard to separate from parody.
The archetype describes a man who is successful, confident, desirable, and atavistically masculine. It is differentiated from the “alpha male” by existing outside of the alpha/beta hierarchy, despite also being a letter in the Greek alphabet. Most of the online content about sigma males exists solely to discuss fictional characters from film and television (the Joker, Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders).
For those in the grindset, it is cool to watch people in expensive clothes say things no person would actually say. It is cool to watch someone who everyone (including the movie) is in love with, and who seems to be good at everything, but is especially good at performing gender, particularly if that’s never felt like one’s own strength.
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Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, when Molly drops the all-time Sorkin Clanger, “And by this point, I was addicted to drugs,” the movie lost its sheen. I was not in a high rollers club with Molly and Player X, I was in the middle seat of a Delta airplane full of other book industry professionals. Trying to graph millennial womanhood onto vacuous Internet memes, even in jest, was a harebrained waste of time. I had let the elevation go, severely, to my head.
But as a Sorkin movie, Molly’s Game succeeds as an intricate character study from one of our greatest cinematic portraitists. As an airplane movie, it’s a moral fantasy about betting on oneself that is best served at high altitudes.
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)
Two American astronauts attempt to return to Earth when their shuttle is destroyed by space debris.
I did not see Gravity in theaters, potentially because of a lifetime aversion to Sandra Bullock (Demolition Man notwithstanding), but perhaps some part of me recalled that many of you said she was a necessity for a good airplane movie.
As Hollywood astronauts go, Bullock and George Clooney seem particularly ridiculous (I.S.S. available now on VOD) but the movie managed to remain a taut enough thrill to make the last ninety minutes of my flight bearable.
As much as I could stand of Sex and the City: The Movie (Michael Patrick King, 2008) …
The iconic foursome returns for cinematic adventures I’m not confident in because I’ve never watched this whole movie.
… and Burlesque (Steve Antin, 2010) while getting dressed in my hotel
Correctly derided as one of the worst movies ever made, Burlesque stars several wigs and Christina Aguilera in a pg-13 version of Showgirls.
As I have no interest in ironic Letterboxd lists that make jabs at toxic film bros, I have no reason to pretend these movies are anything other than terrible. But something drew me to them while at the hotel. No one made me turn the television on.
Maybe traveling for work made me subconsciously long for the hyper-confidence of the women in these movies, whether it manifested in surviving a spaceship crash or getting married to your #1 opp while wearing a bird on your head. Living out of a suitcase can make you wish you had a closet of Herve Leger, a safe of diamond jewelry, and a palatial apartment where one can transform.
There’s a reason women are drawn to girlboss grifter types, whether they’re MLM shills or Instagram influencers, even when we know better. As several hundred essays about Taylor Swift, and “that me Espresso,” and Brat summer have asked: what if femininity wasn’t a liability? What if glamor let us escape male-dominated systems of power? What if you could get paid to make Internet memes about being a “bad-ass bitch?”
Anyway, catch Molly’s Game streaming now on Netflix.
I genuinely and unironically enjoyed Burlesque because it’s so unintentionally hilarious.