The easier it is to relate to for the white girls aged TikTok to thirty-five who dominate this market, the better, and what these girls are longing for most is milquetoast marginalization. They want their micro-identity spoken to in the language they are familiar with, regurgitated rhetoric, words like “neoliberal” and “late-stage capitalism.” They want to see a bisexual Jewish sugarbaby with an eating disorder and a useless liberal arts degree. This is the buzzword-happy logline of writer-director Emma Seligman’s debut 2020 film, Shiva Baby.
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We have long recognized the two sides of cinema: one, money-minded and corporate funded, recycles action franchises to ensure its investors of a prospective audience of the lowest common denominator. But the other side, the one supposedly driven solely by creative pursuit, has its own producers with brains for business. These producers know the independent audience: a niche market yearning to reflect all the books they just heard about in their other, more lackadaisical media consumption. Luckily, there is a new antidote for the striving intellectuals of a world that consumes its news in headlines and sells its products in three-word catchphrases: buzzword cinema, a genre defined by its sellable logline stuffed with references to gender, sexual, and cultural identities.
The easier it is to relate to for the white girls aged TikTok to thirty-five who dominate this market, the better, and what these girls are longing for most is milquetoast marginalization. They want their micro-identity spoken to in the language they are familiar with, regurgitated rhetoric, words like “neoliberal” and “late-stage capitalism.” They want to see a bisexual Jewish sugarbaby with an eating disorder and a useless liberal arts degree. This is the buzzword-happy logline of writer-director Emma Seligman’s debut 2020 film, Shiva Baby.
The words floating around the film are easy to critique – this is a rhetoric strangled by hauntology, crushed by the specter of a future imagined through the very lenses of social categorization and hierarchy it seeks to dismantle. As a cynic I was almost excited by how much I would relish hating this movie. As a bisexual Jewish girl with an eating disorder and a useless liberal arts degree, I was violently resistant to “feeling seen” by this film. And on top of it all, I especially hated that I could expect to see this exact premise crudely reconstructed by every girl with the displeasure of an NYU film degree for the next decade.
But upon watching the film, I was shocked to find that while the logline may have fallen completely flat to my proclivities, the tone and style of the film did not. The anxious suspense and black comedy of the narrative and dialogue were imbued in every moment of the film’s expertly timed punchlines, as well as the shaky and uncomfortably intimate cinematography. The film staggered between lingering and frantic pacing like a bad headache, growing progressively tighter and starker in composition to match a darkening mood. As a viewer, I felt as lightheaded and overwhelmed as Danielle, the film’s protagonist, berated left and right about food and weight with barely a bite to eat all day.
To be left with this queasy empty feeling at the film’s close would have led me to consider it an overall success. Instead, Danielle’s mom kisses her booboo and Danielle kisses her girlfriend, and the brightest dramatic sparks in the film dwindle to nothingness. Moreover, I was left with the feeling I was meant to be shocked by the protagonist’s torrid relationship to food, or at least ever so sympathetic to it. This too was an example of how the film was haunted by its attempted defiance of social expectations that the audience would no longer hold – having grown up, as Seligman undoubtedly did, in an enormous influx of anti-anorexia media campaigns, this is lost on me as a point of real conflict.
The true surprise of the film was its confusion of power dynamics in the sugarbaby relationship. Unlike another film I consider to be part of the buzzword cinema canon, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020), Shiva Baby declines to pass a final moral judgment on the practice of the main character or her sexual counterpart, Max, and instead includes a candid taste of both the allure and negative emotional consequences for both parties. On this point, Fennell can take a note from Seligman – it is possible to create a film that comments directly on a morally complicated condition or position without totally abdicating or condemning it. In this way the film escapes being haunted by the specter of social reception of sugarbaby relationships, which widely varies by census group.
The cynicism with which I approached this film should not come as a shock to Seligman, who likely anticipates the irony poisoning of her neo-intellectual audience. The funding that a nauseatingly topical logline earns at an independent studio is met with the double-sided coin of a cringe from the more cynical members of the target demographic. Seligman wins some of us back with her revival of Lena Dunham’s “delusional girl” persona in Danielle, who sports a self-crafted major and the false presentation of income and parental support typical for the creative New York twentysomething. Other audience members who, it might be said, lack a certain level of self-awareness, will blissfully and blindly identify with Danielle like the real-life delusional girls they are.
Ultimately, the directionlessness of Danielle’s character translates not only to the uneasy tone and edging suspense of narrative, but unfortunately in an anticlimactic ending with loose ends untied. The interloping dramas all crammed into one location promise to come to an explosive end, but instead remain the same as they began, only confined to a slightly smaller space. In the end, Shiva Baby tells the story of a cultural moment and its marketability, uncertainty and meandering journey to a crudely repackaged version of our origin.
More pressing than the film itself is the future of independent cinema that it promises to herald: bubblegum coming-of-age stories that will strike you as either terminally stale or terminally on trend depending on which podcasts you’re listening to in your metropolitan home office. This is the nostalgic future that A24 guided us toward with Lady-Bird and mid-90s in 2017, and this is the direction in which Seligman drives us with Shiva Baby in 2020. Whether we are haunted by the aesthetics of old skaters or the rhetoric of old academics, we must reinvent a future for independent film that does more than regurgitate references to the existing cultural zeitgeist.
