commodification | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” as a Story of Love In the Time of Capitalism…

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every second Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. This week, we took a look at Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

In interviews around the film, Soderbergh has returned time and against to thirties romances as a point of reference, and it shows. Magic Mike’s Last Dance is movie very firmly tied to the traditions and roots of those classic romances, right down to making the butler a supporting character. As with a lot of Soderbergh’s recent films, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a movie fascinated with commodification and globalisation, in particular the idea of the packaging and selling of intimacy and emotional connection. It’s a film about sex, power and money – and the intersection of those three things.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: capitalism, Channing Tatum, commodification, Magic Mike, magic mike's last dance, money, pleasure, power, recession, salma hayek, sex, Steven Soderbergh | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Cam

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Darren

The most horrific aspects of Cam have little to do with the literal monster lurking at its core.

It is almost half an hour before the central plot of Cam kicks into gear. It is a credit to both director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei that Cam sustains itself as a horror even through this (relatively) long establishing stretch. There is something inherently skin-crawling about that extended introductory sequence, which is essentially a depiction of “business as usual” for central character Alice. The opening scenes of Cam very skilfully and very creepily capture the commodification and performativity of both cam-girl-ing in particular and social media in general.

Time for reflection.

Watching the opening stretch of Cam, the audience might read social media itself as the monster, a horrific force capable of warping and bending individuals to its will. Even before Alice realises that something is wrong, there is a sense that the audience has taken a trip through the looking glass. The pink neon glow, the way the camera snakes down hallways, the casualness with which Alice picks up her dinner from a delivery man while covered in corn syrup (and little else), the repeated framing of shots to emphasise mirrors and screens as images trapped and projected.

Indeed, the obligatory bridge between the second and third acts of the film might be the biggest issue with Cam, the clumsy in-universe explanation of the strange entity lurking at the centre of the story and function that it performs. However, this is a testament to the quality and imagination of the rest of the film around that exposition. The monster in Cam is so familiar and so relevant to contemporary society that it almost needs no explanation at all. Cam is so effective a horror story that it arguably doesn’t even need its monster.