Books
One Nightstand With Celine Song
The director of Materialists shares four books that have shaped her understanding of love.
In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.
For director Celine Song, the cure to the loneliness epidemic is actually pretty straightforward. “Loneliness has always existed, and a solution to that has always been love,” says Song, whose 2023 movie Past Lives was nominated for two Academy Awards. “But then, I’m like, well, is there any attempt that we’re making to make it possible for us to love?”
Her new movie, Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal, explores all those obstacles we’ve put in our own way. “We increasingly are told that we don’t need love,” she says. “To need it is weakness and desperation. But in fact, it’s very brave to say to somebody, ‘What I need is love.’”
In Materialists, Lucy (Johnson) works as a matchmaker, connecting clients with potential partners whose viability is determined almost exclusively by numbers: weight, height, salary, age. In her own life, Lucy wrestles between the love she feels for John (Evans), an out of work actor, and Harry (Pascal), a charming multi-millionaire who offers her all the things she thinks she wants. What should she do? Theatergoers will no doubt have their own take — and that’s the point.
“I really believe that every choice somebody makes is the right choice for them,” she says. “You’re making that choice, because that that’s the kind of life that you want to live.” Nevertheless, Song does have her own point of view. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to have the practical and the romantic,” she says. “But the truth is, when push comes to shove, the most practical thing is the romantic.”
The tension between love, money, and power is what drives Materialists, and it’s also a common through line in Song’s favorite books. “Love is one of the great mysteries of life,” says Song. “When I was in college, I was trying to understand what it is as a psychological problem and emotional problem, but also as an existential problem.” The Art Of Loving by Erich Fromm, Song’s first choice, offered an interesting theory. “[Love] is not a gift to give,” she says. “It’s not a thing to take, but it’s a thing that we do.” The book is now one she recommends often. “When somebody asks me, ‘Oh, I want to know more about love, I want to think more about love more deeply,’ [The Art of Loving] is a book that I gift.”
Her second choice, The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham, goes deeper on the theme. “The time period that the book is set is a pretty messy time for how we’re going to handle gender, and how we’re going to handle romance and marriage, and I love the chaos of that,” she says. “The central character, Larry, is somebody who is in pursuit of something that the world does not want him to be pursuing.” Larry rejects a life of ambition to “loaf” around Europe, with his fiancé Isabel leaving him for Gray, a career man. “She’s saying, how can you be so unserious?” says Song of Isabel and Larry’s dynamic. “And he’s like, no, I’m the most serious person here.”
Song’s third book, How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti, offers a similarly complex examination of romantic love and selfhood. “I haven’t read a book that reflects my womanhood as well and as deeply as this particular book,” she says. “I don’t totally know why, but there’s something about its relationship to erotic desire, its relationship to being a girl, ambition, and greed. Plus the greed of wanting to be desired — or the wanting to be wanted, and wanting to have power and control. There’s something in it that I always feel very connected to, like, Oh, this really is so honest.”
Finally, Song chose the canonical paean to the tensions between love, class, and money: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. “The fantasy of that book is that the solution to your practical problems is also the love of your life,” says Song. “Something that I know I was contending with when I was working on Materialists is a balance in the contradiction between the practical and the romantic. It’s a question of, how practical is this movie and how romantic? The truth is that it has to be both for you to reflect the way that love works in the modern world.”
Warning! This episode of One Nightstand contains spoilers for Materialists — to avoid, skip 45:10 to 49:49 and 1:05:00 to 1:05:36.
