Warning: This review contains spoilers for “Materialists” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”
I don’t need to remind you how awful dating is right now. But despite the trials and tribulations of gamified, post-pandemic love, Hollywood is churning out romance media faster than Nora Ephron ever could. From Netflix’s film “My Oxford Year” and series “Too Much” to reality TV favorites like “Love Island,” this year’s releases have given us plenty of reasons to fixate on other people’s love lives instead of our own.
But what happens when a show or film displays a relationship that’s too reminiscent of our failed Hinge matches or awkward bar encounters? See the audience response to A24’s summer release “Materialists.”
Celine Song’s film focuses on a love triangle between matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), wealthy tech mogul Harry (Pedro Pascal) and Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a down-on-his-luck actor. There are multiple scenes of a flashback of Lucy and John duking it out over money juxtaposed by swanky sushi dates and makeout sessions in Harry’s multi-million dollar Financial District apartment.
But by the film’s end, Lucy throws financial anxieties to the wind and reconnects with John because of their history and emotional foundation — things she never established with Harry. Her choice earned the film a measly 3.0 star average on Letterboxd and countless reviews chalking it up to “broke man propaganda.” Instead of viewing “Materialists” as a heartfelt true love tale, audiences of hopeless romantics felt it was telling them to settle — an all-too-familiar experience outside of the theater.
So, where are these disenchanted viewers turning to get their fix of romantic escapism?
They’re tuning into the now-airing third season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” The Amazon Prime Video series — adapted from Jenny Han’s romance novel trilogy of the same name — is the most-watched show for women ages 18-34. Just like “Materialists,” it’s a love triangle, in this case between Belly Conklin (Lola Tung) and brothers Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney). But unlike Song’s film, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is successfully rallying audiences behind its leading man.
Seasons one and two set Conrad up as your run-of-the-mill shitty high school boyfriend. He gets into drunk fights and, when not dating Belly, crashes her dates for fun. His inability to process his mother’s death prevents him from showing his true love for Belly, leading straight to a breakup.
However, Conrad quickly sheds the old version of himself during the third season — and not just because he’s now a Stanford Medical School student. In the episode “Last Season,” we sit in on Conrad’s therapy sessions, hearing him process his grief, take responsibility for mistreating Belly and acknowledge the danger of his lingering feelings about her dating Jeremiah. Combine this emotional maturity with countless scenes of him pining after Belly and heated love confessions, and you get an entire Internet fandom dedicated to gushing over Conrad.
It goes without saying that the character tropes Conrad reflects are nothing new, but set during our current loneliness epidemic, media like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” offers a type of love that audiences are losing faith in. We simply aren’t dating the way we used to, which only encourages our skepticism surrounding genuine, expressive romance. Look at the season three ratings of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and compare them to those of “Materialists.” Clearly, we’re drawn to characters like Conrad because they directly challenge today’s dating norms rather than embracing them. We want our love interests — particularly men — to yearn and feel deeply because we doubt these capabilities exist in ourselves.
The more alienated we feel in our romantic lives, the greater our obsession with yearning in media grows. This fixation bleeds into spaces like reality TV, where fans craft narratives about real people as proxies for their own romantic endeavors. The slow-burn romance between “Love Island USA” season seven runners-up Nicolandria — Nic Vansteenberghe and Olandria Carthen — took viewers by storm this summer, largely in part to Nic yearning for Olandria throughout the season.
In confessionals, Nic teased his secret admiration of Olandria, leading audiences to ship the couple long before they actually got together. Fans acted like producers, capitalizing on the pair’s chemistry during steamy challenges to simulate a buildup of romantic tension. It’s this behavior online that kept Nicolandria on the show even after they were dumped from the villa during Casa Amor. Viewers at home were so desperate to see Nic pursue Olandria that they even took to the Love Island USA app and voted to keep them in the running.
Even if you aren’t obsessed with teen heartthrobs or reality TV stars, it’s impossible to ignore our collective enamorment with idealistic romance. And when we aren’t the main characters in our own love stories, we overinvest our time into shows and movies, whether or not we have any say in their outcomes. At a time when the possibility of a genuine connection seems bleak, we find — or manufacture — the next best thing: media that convinces us to keep believing in true love.
Contact Dani Biondi at [email protected].
