Issue #76: Life's A Party 🪩

Lizzo: Live In Concert + Babylon

Happy New Year! As promised, we’re back with our first issue of the year. (Even if we’re a little bit late.) Later this month we’ll be bringing you coverage of the Sundance Film Festival. But in the meantime, we’ve got reviews of two brand new films all about having your best, hedonist time. First, Cate writes about anti-fatness and Lizzo’s radical existence in Lizzo: Live In Concert. Then, Zosha tackles Babylon and the disconnected vision of director Damien Chazelle. And as always, happy movie yelling!

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Cate on Lizzo: Live In Concert

HBO Max

It has to be said: I’m on a bit of a fat-radicalization kick. Anti-fatness is pervasive in ways both big and small. And media is one of the most pervasive ways that anti-fat bigotry — and it is bigotry — is perpetuated and reinforced. Whether it’s portraying fat people as lazy and slovenly or putting slim actors in fat suits, or portraying fat people as lazy and slovenly by putting slim actors in fat suits, the dominant form of representation afforded to fat people is created by thin people, without fat people’s input, for the express purpose of validating their own anti-fat bigotry.

But then there’s Lizzo.

After the wonderfully enriching season of her Emmy-winning Prime Video competition show Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls and her recent documentary Love, Lizzo, I was already primed to be a big fan of her concert film. Lizzo: Live In Concert is pure, unadulterated FUN. But it’s also a testament to how radical it is that a fat black woman is one of the most recognizable and successful pop stars of our time.

The concert film is 90 minutes of fat affirmation, healing and joy. The entire show is a haven for the fat and femme, explicitly naming that they are welcome in that space. With tracks like 2 Be Loved, Tempo, Soulmate, Jerome, If You Love Me and Good As Hell, Lizzo runs the gamut of what it’s like to be fat in public. From feeling sexy and confident to doubting if the love you’re receiving is real, she paints a full picture of not just the lives of fat people, but of the prejudice we face every day. During the performance of her song Naked, Lizzo stands — onstage bare except for a skin-colored body suit. Then, with lights, she projects beauty onto her fat body — light, flowers, love. She couldn’t be more literal if she tried. And yet the significance of her work is rarely acknowledged.

The show also unearths the reason behind the progressive format of Watch Out For The Big Grrrls. Her dancers aren’t just there to dance. They’re there to be a visual totem proving that Lizzo’s not the only one. She’s not an anomaly. You can’t make her an exception because the proof she’s not is right on the stage. They are also fat, (mostly) black women who are doing what they love in an industry that tells them the only people who can find success in them are skinny. They’re on the same journey as she is.

The concert also makes space to welcome queer people into the fold. Lizzo makes space in Like A Girl to acknowledge the girls whose girlhood isn’t recognized, and in Everybody’s Gay, she introduces the concept of a queered body — as in, any body deemed too deviant from the thin, white, hetero norm. Her gay disco pop song is an invitation to imagine a world in which our existence wasn’t questioned. To lay down the burden of marginalization and be free — if only just for three minutes and thirty five seconds.

Lizzo stands in our culture as a figure of radical possibility. Her existence and success is proof positive that the lies replicated about fat people through the media, are in fact lies. It’s precisely why she so often faces unprovoked scrutiny and condemnation from other corners of our culture. Admitting that they were wrong about fat people means examining the other bigotries we’ve organized our lives around.

Lizzo challenges the very foundations of everything we’ve convinced ourselves is innate and unchanging. We’ve been craving for someone to give us permission to divest from the need to be skinny. And as usual, a black woman is pioneer — at great emotional cost to herself. It’s a silly comparison, but Lizzo is our Mockingjay. The more she becomes a symbol, the more she’s able to undo the very systems that oppress us.

Lizzo exists as a direct rebuke to 90s and 2000s era of Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson and others of their time. Not to their music, but to the idea that a woman needs to be white, and skinnier than a sliver of hair in order to have any chance of being a pop star. And the ironic thing is that all the young upstarts of that era have confirmed that the ongoing pressure to be thin did intense damage to their bodies, and left a lasting effect on their mental health.

But what could we be achieving if we weren’t all so preoccupied with the size of our bodies? What systems could we topple or bigotries could we undo? It’s a genius way to keep both thin and fat people oppressed — if you’re thin, you must remain so, and if you’re fat you must disappear until you’re thin.

And that’s what makes Lizzo so radical. Every single form of media Lizzo engages with has an explicit focus on self-love. Nearly everything she does is a minor revolution. And I find that I’m much more sympathetic to her public missteps when viewed through that lens. It’s hard to shoulder an entire society’s-worth of disordered ideas about fat bodies. It makes sense that every now and then she’d succumb to the same forces that pressure the rest of us to make our bodies smaller at any cost. Why would she alone be immune to those harmful messages?

When we tell the story of pop music in this decade, Lizzo’s contributions will be an integral part of that history. I sincerely believe that Lizzo: Live In Concert is the most culturally significant concert film since Beyoncé’s Homecoming. It joins the ranks of the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and Madonna’s Truth Or Dare as a exemplary addition to the genre, and a time capsule of the climate in which it was produced. 

Lizzo: Live In Concert is an incredible fat liberation project, and a revolutionary example of refusal. She refuses to hate herself in a world that tells her she should, and she encourages the rest of us to do the same.

There’s just no one doing it better than Lizzo.

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Zosha on Babylon

Paramount Pictures

It’s hard to say if this season (2022, for our purposes; bear with me) feels more full of movies with a runtime of more than three hours, or if we’re just noticing it more. Either way, it feels like there’s a three-hour movie for every flavor — RRR if you want something that absolutely whips; The Batman if you’re looking for a pulpy comic feel. Avatar 2 for a blockbuster delight. And then there’s Babylon, one for those interested in Hollywood hedonism and lengthy, largely empty statements. 

You probably know the one, though, frankly, I’ve had at least a few conversations of people confusing this one for Amsterdam, so let’s review: This is the Margot Robbie movie where she plays up and coming starlet Nellie LaRoy, desperate to make it on the big screen (which, in 1926 LA, is silent). She crashes a party at Jack Conrad’s (Brad Pitt) house, where she meets Manny (Diego Calva), Conrad’s assistant who also dreams of playing a bigger role in the pictures. Their three stories track the nascent, changing industry as the movies become talkies, and aspirations converge with reality. 

Though that logline would suggest a story carefully built on the persistent climb anyone must undergo to make it in the Industry, director and writer Damien Chazelle usually focuses his story on the punctuation marks at the end of these moments. Between scenes Nellie moves from chirpy indifference at her mother’s incarceration to bursting indignation at the way people underestimate her. It’s an outburst rooted so deeply in Robbie’s performance, able to almost fill and smooth the cracks in the story that break up her character’s arc. But it’s never quite enough. Though Chazelle is reaching for frantic, barely contained debauchery, his fuggy approach often just leaves things far too sedate and on the wrong side of conventional. 

There are moments when Babylon flirts with truly interesting ideas — frequently even. The way a lewd song recurs, no longer sung by Lady Fay (played to exquisiteness by Li Jun Li) about her lover’s pussy but now man, dated over the phonograph. Or when Nellie’s first-ever sound scene goes dangerously awry, frying mics and nerves all at once. Or even an extended sequence in the Valley, showing the utter controlled chaos that was a silent film production. There’s something to these moments, where Hollywood genius is rendered raw, untested, and a bit more knotty than we’re accustomed. 

But ultimately they’re few and far between, fighting for air in a movie chockablock full (again, to the tune of more than 3 hours) of boring choices and disjointed plot swings. When Nellie finally acknowledges Manny’s feelings for her, it seems like maybe yet another way she’s grasping onto something, anything to validate her image of herself. And yet, Babylon wants us to believe in them as star-crossed lovers, flung out of space and a different time, wooden dialogue and questionable chemistry be damned. 

Chazelle can’t help himself, and draws direct comparisons from his movie to Singin’ in the Rain, which (as eagle-eyed readers, or just anyone whose parents made sure they saw the classics, might attest) seems fairly close in basic concept to that of Babylon. As the movie goes on, these connections become more concrete, and Chazelle’s stiff approach to such fame and indulgence is rendered all the more moot. The ahistoric nature of the story — its costumes or the way its characters talk about film as something that will be preserved (it wasn’t!) — ultimately feels less important than the fact that the movie just kind of doesn’t care about much more than trying to build a more tragic edition of Singin’, its own version of cinematic Camelot, and it can’t even do that right. In a season crowded with movies that feel exciting or noteworthy, even when they fall hard, Babylon feels like three hours of empty air. And you’ll feel every goddamn second of it.

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Assorted Internet Detritus

CATE: An oral history of the elephant poop scene in Babylon, how tipping got weird, defining non-binary work wear, Netflix is in its flop era, a video countdown of the 25 best films of 2022 (subjective!), running through NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour yelling about fat suits, Cosmo allowing me to keep making the case against fat suits, and three pieces about the writer, marketing and merits of the deranged instant classic, M3gan.

ZOSHA: Do you have a human name or a dog name? Avatar 2 is the most 4DX movie of all time (and what the format of the movie means for you). Bones and All’s screenwriter on how to make a demystified cannibal love story. How do you actually support your local artists?

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Zosha + Cate <3
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