Just before her career is about to skyrocket her into the realm of irrevocable fame that perhaps only a few pop stars with the rare quality of longevity can fathom, fourteen-year-old Celeste (Raffey Cassidy, who most recently appeared in The Killing of a Sacred Deer) lies in bed with the lead singer of a punk rock (or as punk as punk can be now) band. She has thus far been somewhat embarrassed to share her music with him as he knows that “pop music”TM® is just the sort of thing that someone with his taste would hate. But no, turns out, even he can’t deny his enthusiasm for the demo that Celeste’s manager (Jude Law, appropriately just billed as The Manager) has successfully shopped to both a record label and, in turn, radio, as the record label spreads the new gospel of Celeste.
And yes, of course, there is a constant religious undercurrent throughout the thread of the film, divided into four parts (Prelude [1999], Genesis [2000-2001], Regenesis [2017] and Finale). For what is pop music–and the stars that serve as vessels to the expression of froth–if not the ultimate twenty-first century religion? It’s certainly more tangible than money. And, in truth, more evocative of emotions, or what little society may have left of them. That Celeste and her sister, Ellie (Stacy Martin, a.k.a. the young Charlotte Gainsbourg in Nymphomaniac), are both “good Christian girls” from the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island (hence the botched accents of both Cassidy and Portman) also adds to the irony of Celeste enduring a trauma that sends her on the trajectory of becoming the very antithesis of spirituality in her new role as pop powerhouse. Said trauma occurs as our narrator, Willem Dafoe, explains that, after being one of the only survivors of a shooting at her school, she finds herself, with the help of her more talented sister, at the epicenter of the event, a symbol of tragedy turned marketable. As Dafoe says of her rather unremarkable first composition, “Wrapped Up,” which Celeste chooses to sing at a church vigil in order to better express herself in lieu of a speech, “It was not her grief, it was theirs.” And as the years go on, all of Celeste, her body, thoughts, feelings, become public property. Because being a source for idolatry doesn’t come for free. Nor does the shedding of skin and the old life that it existed in.
For Celeste, that shedding begins in Stockholm (which Dafoe is all too happy to give some backstory on, leading ultimately to the explanation of why all the best pop music has originated from there, including ABBA, självklart). It is there that her first album is produced by a guru of the genre whose fledgling talents are reawakened by the purity and innocence of Celeste, her sister and their close-knit relationship that inspires him to compose the best work of his career. That the Swedes were taught classical music in school as an initiative to stave off the “wickedness” of modernity is yet another twist of irony in helping Sweden turn into a factory of pop hits, reflections of the greatest modern wickedness of all: not thinking too much. And yes, there does seem to be a nod to Britney Spears’ path to fame, her first single, “…Baby One More Time” being produced by Max Martin (who is still responsible for most of what we hear on Top 40 radio), in addition to Celeste going out on “in-store” a.k.a. mall promo tours at the outset. Then again, Celeste is nothing if not an amalgam of every pop star, writer-director Brady Corbet’s statement on the banality of the musically reductive enterprise and that which it churns out.
In the background of it all, the good girl image Celeste has been conveying to The Manager is at odds with her introduction to the nightclub/party life and all of its wonderful accoutrements, including loss of inhibition and with it, any serious thought, this latter aspect being the most alluring to Celeste. In fact, it is during that aforementioned moment while lying on the bed of her hotel room with Rocker Guy that she breaks down her love of and need to create pop music. “I don’t want people to think too hard. I just want them to feel good.” And yes, isn’t that what the perception of pop music has always been about? Emphasis on “the perception.” For anyone who has ever written a truly memorable song for the annals of pop greatness knows that there is an art to it. Like Sia, for example, charged with writing the music for the soundtrack (and yes, that is Natalie Portman singing) scored by Scott Walker. Though billed as the epitome of vacuity, there can be no denying that pop music appeals to, if nothing else, the most rudimentary feelings and desires within all of us. Or at least those of us still willing to admit both 1) we want love and 2) we’ve been burned by it so many times in the past that we’re undeniable fools for wanting it still.
To that point, Celeste’s predictable and inappropriate crush on The Manager marks the true dismantling of her innocence (surprisingly no, it’s not the school shooting), timed to coincide with the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center while she and Ellie are still in Sweden finishing the first album, prompting her to rush into her sister’s room and declare, “A plane crashed into a building in New York.” It is only her state of panic and fear that forces her to ignore the very compromising visual of The Manager in bed next to Ellie. So it is that Dafoe iterates Celeste lost her innocence just as the nation did. Then again, didn’t America lose its innocence when, say, Kennedy was assassinated? Yet another confirmation of just how selfish each generation increasingly becomes in their conviction that their pain has been the realest and most profound.
As we enter the Regenesis period of 2017, we’re introduced to a far more jaded Celeste. One who exhibits the signs of all her last nerves being deteriorated in the face of being nothing more than a conduit for personifying nothingness. The strained relationship between her and her sister, ironclad before the betrayal of 2001, is manifest in her curt and clipped exchanges as she takes her daughter, Albertine (also played by Raffey Cassidy because why not? It’s yet another example of the film championing the nihilistic “nothing really matters” mantra), off her hands to go to lunch.
Albertine appears almost more fragile and fraught than Celeste during this exchange, concerned that her mother is “skinnier than I am” (Albertine, too, has gone the pop music route–also with the help of Ellie’s songwriting skills–therefore can’t help but be perpetually aware of image). It is during their diner conversation that Celeste rips the collective of society a new one by blaming the financially beneficial need to “appeal to the lowest common denominator” on her music’s (and any accompanying videos) increasing badness. Of one video in particular, in which she appears to be being born out of a “digital flower,” Celeste remarks, “I thought it would ruin me.” Turns out, no, it was one of her most viewed endeavors.
Her sixth album, called Vox Lux (now you understand the movie title), is what Celeste is calling a collection of “sci-fi anthems,” a culmination of the past as it melds with the present and future. As her intended comeback (despite her expected insistence that she never stopped making music therefore never left the spotlight) after a Mel Gibson-esque rant involving racial slurs after injuring someone in a car accident while on a peak bender, Celeste and her team know that she can’t make any mistakes on this media blitzkrieg to promote both her latest record and associated tour. Unfortunately, it just so happens that Celeste, in still another cruel turn of irony in terms of her own career being incited by calamity, has served as inspiration for terrorists wearing the same glitter masks from the “Hologram” video to shoot at random on a beach in a coastal Croatian town. Celeste is, thus, instructed by The Manager to be prepared to answer questions about the “incident.”
As for the video and song for “Hologram,” it all goes back to that hotel room scene, during which Celeste explains to Rocker Guy that she keeps having a dream where she’s going through a tunnel and sees body after body. “Are they dead?” Rocker Guy asks. “Not dead, but lifeless,” she responds, adding “It’s versions of me, myself at different ages.” Rocker Guy, trying his best to be poetic, offers, “Maybe it’s because once you’ve almost died you can imagine yourself dead at any age. “No, I don’t think that’s it.” The dream turns out to be the concept for her “Hologram” video, and an exemplification of the notion that pop’s hollowness stems from its faux ability to be “interpreted,” as though there truly is some profound meaning contained within lyrics like, “I wish to disappear, now I’ve seen enough of your dirty love” (words that work quite nicely as a reaction to seeing Ellie in bed with The Manager).
At the press conference, Celeste does her best to stay positive, as instructed by The Manager, but ultimately snipes, “I used to believe in God, too. But if they want something to believe in, they can believe in me.” This constant reversion back to the idea of pop stars as modern gods (need one be reminded of John Lennon’s taken out of context “The Beatles are bigger than Jesus” comment), of religion as worshipping at the altar of pop music is Corbet’s way of saying, “Look at what we’ve become. It isn’t all our fault, it’s what we’ve been sold our entire lives.” Himself thirty, just a year younger than Celeste is supposed to be in 2017 (though Portman doesn’t quite carry this off as well as Jennifer Lawrence might have), Corbet has experienced in real time the very expanse of the decades he is speaking on and railing against. For who can comment on the shit we’re in better than a millennial, the very generation that has watched and been the most sensitive to the shift from twentieth to twenty-first century?
With drugs as the only way to cope through the insanity, Celeste, so far from Celeste Montgomery now (every pop star must have a one-word moniker and fuck their manager, after all), talks The Manager into letting her have her fix and, in exchange, “You can fuck me a little while we do it.” Utterly devoid of emotion, this particular bedroom scene is almost something of an alternate reality sneak peak of what it might have been like for Dan and Alice a.k.a. Jane in Closer had they stayed together.
Somewhere within Celeste, this fraught “diva” with a foul mouth and a tough exterior, is the guilt of being at war with what a pop star is and the message she wants–or at least wishes she was capable enough–to send. But, as she snaps to her sister at one point, even if she did have the courage to send out a truthful message, “In this day and age, who will believe what you say anyway?” It’s easier to swallow the lies told to us by pop music than to accept the harshness of music that incites the average school shooter to carry out his rage through gun violence.
Closing with the caption, “A Twenty-First Century Portrait,” all we are left with is the idea that pop music–the very entity so constantly balked at and ridiculed for its emptiness–is the only thing we have to numb ourselves to the pain of which this genre superficially speaks on.
