Beauty or Truth
Dissecting the role of reality in the Trashy Romance.
Let me start by telling you something you already know: The Idea of You (Showalter, 2024) is a bad movie.
The concept of the bad movie can, and should, be complicated. Bad to whom? Compared to what? Romantic comedy is a genre that has always resisted being pinned down on either side of the line — some have become classics, others have faded with the fonts on their old-school tacky posters — but on the whole, it's easy to tell when something is being marketed as “trash.” With The Idea of You, it’s in the idea itself: the story is adapted from One Direction fanfiction. This is a concept that's treated with all the artistic dignity it deserves, which is to say, it’s a very poorly made film and it’s a lot of fun — fun is one of the hallmarks of trash, and why it’s so enduring as a metagenre. “So bad it's good.” Trash is enjoying a moment in the sun right now, with the popularity of Sarah J Maas and colleagues, and the market saturation of self-published hyper-indulgent romance novels. Evidently, there's an appetite for good mindless fun — these days I read pretty slowly and I mostly value prose in fiction, so I’ve managed to avoid the trash wave in fiction, but that doesn't mean I’m immune to the social forces that have brought trash back to the fore. So The Idea of You seemed like a nice idea (I will not stop making this joke), and I went into it with an open mind. I was not there for high art. I was there to have fun.
And, for the most part, I did have fun. The Idea of You appears to have been hacked together by an editing team with about as much artistic integrity as a room full of monkeys on typewriters, but the actors are giving it their all — lest we sniff at romcom stalwart Anne Hathaway, or the emerging comic charm of Nicholas Galitzine, who was an absolute treasure in Bottoms. In the same way that it is very easy for me to enjoy a middling plot so long as I like the writing, I am able to derive some joy from even the most derivative of cinema (or television) if it seems that the cast have bought into the lack of vision and made it their own. We must also mention the elephant in the room: The Idea of You is very consciously inverting a familiar narrative, the older man/younger woman romance. Part of the reason I was able to buy into the idea of The Idea of You is because it is, in the beginning at least, gleeful about its mission statement, allowing an older woman (and a single mother, at that) to be the romantic lead, the object of desire to the world's most eligible bachelor. There is even a cursory attempt to bring nuance and compatibility (beyond simply sexual magnetism) to their relationship, and it works because it plays on the reality that everyone is aware of, from the viewers to the characters — that this is something completely unexpected, something which, basically, society does not have a blueprint for. It stretches our sense of reality.
This brings us to my biggest issue with The Idea of You, which is not that it's a trashy movie, but that it would like to have its cake and eat it too. (Bad idiom — why would you deny yourself cake if you had already got your hands on it? But anyway.) The Idea of You plays on this unreal scenario but then fails to ask us to suspend disbelief. It’s hard to imagine what this paradox means in a practical sense, so I’m afraid I will have to walk you through the plot of the movie to provide an example, as tedious as recaps tend to be. Basically, when Solène (Hathaway) and Hayes (Definitely Not Harry Styles) go public with their relationship, it takes an immense mental toll on her sixteen year old daughter, as she’s subject to extreme bullying at school and the subject of online mockery for her mother's relationship. Solène, in a moment of remarkably poor visual storytelling, sees her daughter choosing safety at her comically reprehensible ex-husband’s house, and immediately after decides to end her relationship with Hayes, for her daughter's sake. (I mention this mainly because it heavily implied that she was more concerned about getting one last win over her ex than anything else, which seemed like a moment of total narrative collapse, even for a trashy movie.) She and Hayes then decide to part ways but reconnect in five years if they haven’t found anyone else in the meantime. The last five minutes of the film are a real Debbie Downer of an ending. We flash forward those five years, the daughter is away at college, and Solène is smiling but it doesn't reach her eyes. Earlier in the film, Solène’s friend tells her, “People hate happy women.” I couldn’t think of a better illustration of that thesis statement than this ending. The Idea of You reinforces the real to an extreme: instead of allowing the audience to become absorbed in the unlikely romantic fantasy that forms the heart of the story, we are swiftly (and lazily) brought back down to Earth. The movie’s quest for realism despite its outlandish premise is the very thing that makes it, ultimately, a failure.
Actually, there was one moment where I, at least, had to suspend disbelief. At one point, Solène is showing Hayes a painting by one of her clients — a work of art that we are told has moved her deeply. “What does it make you feel?” he asks. She replies, “Everything.” I cannot be polite about this painting. It is some of the ugliest shit I have ever seen in my life:
If I were being polite, I would call it dentist’s waiting room art, or made-for-Instagram. But really it is dross. This painting comes from the school of thought that more colours means more artistic value, a kind of neon maximalism that mostly appeals to people whose hobbies include Tweeting about how we should avoid criticising anything because we might upset someone who likes it. The landscape subject tethers the painting to reality, and the colour palette elevates it to fantasy, along with the thick cartoonlike outlines on the trees. The biggest compliment I can pay this painting is that it looks kind of like the stuff neural network art generators used to spit out, back when they were still weird... except we are expected to believe that a middle-aged woman from Los Angeles painted this. We are expected to believe that another middle-aged woman looked at it and felt “everything.” If that's not bad enough, the painting is apparently called “Unclose Me,” as I discovered when I went searching for an image, and there was a legitimate artistic director employed to make the choices that would ultimately lead to its creation. I mean, “Unclose Me,” seriously? I can handle bad art existing. I am a huge fan of trash, as evidenced by the fact that I spent the majority of this movie having the absolute time of my life. But I cannot let this slide: I cannot take this painting seriously.
I’m fixated on the painting as metonymy for the rot at the core of the movie: the storytelling and the art both present an unresolvable dichotomy, a zero-sum-game of beauty and truth. We cannot have both in one object. The narrative of The Idea of You pursues realism at the cost of letting us indulge in a trashy, fun fantasy world; the painting is so unbelievably ugly that it is hard to take the realism seriously. This is the movie’s idea of what we should believe. I suppose my argument falls apart if you like the painting, and I guess more power to you. But the total disconnect between intent (deeply moving painting) and execution (ugly) points to a broader issue with the intent and execution of the movie itself. We like trash because it allows us to escape into a world where the stakes are embarrassingly low. It doesn't need to be deep.
I am going to say something controversial now: Challengers (Guadagnino, 2024) is a bad movie. It belongs to the grand tradition of trash.
This is not a negative statement — I see this as value-neutral, especially if I include the context that I gave Challengers four stars on Letterboxd. Nevertheless, I am aware that almost everyone who reads this is going to disagree with me, and that is fine. I take my seat at the table of pariahs, and I make my peace with it. Challengers is a trashy, mass-appeal fantastical romance — that is, its central premise requires a degree of suspension of disbelief. It is almost outrageously indulgent. (About 20 minutes too indulgent for my liking, but so it goes.) If you are still reading and interested in being convinced, there are two key points that seal this for me. The first is the product placement. Obviously all sports are branded, both in equipment and sponsorship on uniforms — I don’t have a problem with that. However, the conspicuous brandedness of Challengers seeps off the court and into every other scene, which lends it a certain air of tackiness that I’m not sure is necessarily the point. Challengers is extremely slick and well-directed, but at times this becomes sublimated into the visual messaging, all of which gives it the panoramic gloss of a big-screen car ad before the main feature. The second point is the fact that, while people are talking about how well-made Challengers is, they're not taking about it because of that. People are talking about it because the central relationships are so compelling. We are all, in essence, shipping. And the propulsive water-cooler force of a good ship is one of the hallmarks of trash, because of its ability to supplant the need for other artistic merits.
Not that Challengers is in any way without merit — the directing is very clever, and everyone has already said how hard the soundtrack goes. But I would argue that the reason Challengers has succeeded is also secondary to the fact that it’s well-made; it’s down to the complete synthesis of beauty and ecstatic truth, a selective rejection of realism that encapsulates a total understanding of which parts of a story must be tethered to reality, and which can be allowed to float free in the ether of suspended disbelief. The mechanics of tennis are largely left untouched, except when the actual game itself is being played, at which point it becomes something closer to ballet. It doesn't matter if they’re playing realistic tennis or not. Challengers tells us that “tennis is a relationship,” and in this sense its language of visual metaphors is not subtle. These moments of hyperreal action are the strongest parts of the film, an electrical back-and-forth set to a pulsing techno beat. Challengers is best when it pursues the goal of making truth beautiful, rather than wasting its time on logistics or anything so trivial. It understands that the most important part of a trashy, indulgent movie is that it’s fun, and that to pursue fun, you must let go of petty concerns such as the real-world consequences of fictional actions. This is why there is so much trashy fantasy — because the connection between trash and reality is already wafer-thin. Challengers is not outright fantasy but it shines when it leans into the magic of coincidence and the dramatic unreality of a good narrative.
It might seem borderline insulting to compare Challengers to The Idea of You, and on some level I guess I am being deliberately provocative. But I also think there’s some kind of lesson to be learned by looking at why one of these romance-forward movies, both released in the same year, has received near-universal acclaim, and the other has largely been the target of mockery, and for us to momentarily put “art” aside — especially because the majority of praise I’ve been seeing for The Idea of You has emphasised how fun it is. Clearly the bummer ending didn’t ruin it for everyone. But ultimately it’s hard for me to see it as a “fun” movie, because it took pains to seem like something that could actually happen. Where Challengers transcends is in the realm of the uncanny. Even the sleek visuals, which I was quite rude about, reinforce this. (Maybe I’ve talked myself around a little.) Often, it is the role of good art — good filmmaking — to fall into the background, to become invisible and undistracting, to allow the compelling narrative to come to the fore. And beyond realism, it is the key failure of The Idea of You that it cannot hide its bones: the ugly painting is there to remind us that this is a tacky film, with limited cinematic merit — and for losers like me who care about things like that, this is more insulting than the incursion of reality into fantasy.
