Monday, October 22, 2018

A STAR IS BORN


After a term spent studying popular culture, this movie speaks to me about singers being commodified, dehumanizing the person who owns the talent. The male protagonist was a well-known musician who apparently was allowed to be himself while his female counterpart was quickly commodified into a profitable pop culture icon for entertaining the insatiable appetite of mass audiences with little interest in appreciating the deeper message in her songs which once formed the heart of her performance.

This movie is also about two pop culture icons crossing paths: one near expiry date and the other one just starting out. Without giving anything away, the finale especially, is a poignant symbolism of the person that has to bow out to the star that is being born for mass consumption. Ironically, the price for a star to be born is very high indeed.

It is interesting that I had a pre-movie conversation with another woman friend about the movie Pad Man (the movie about the Indian man who made low-cost sanitary pads and was rejected by women steeped in traditional thinking), feminist activism, and how women can be their own worst adversaries without being even aware of how much they are playing roles prescribed by paternalistic systems, traditions and cultures. The right to deeper thinking about the messages circulating in our lies, the right to deeper self-reflection and the right be caring and humane to anyone who crosses our path on a day-to-day basis are often qualities of person hood that are obscured by what we imagine to be more important and louder rights for women to be heard. As women, it is worth cultivating the habit of deeper thinking so that how we live as women will add greater meaning to conversations about empowering other women. 

I found myself forgetting that it was a movie because I had seen a documentary of Lady Gaga before and in the movie, she appeared as down-to-earth as a star could on the big screen which made the story real. Best type of movie to go with company that doesn't mind the movie dialogues being interjected with your sniffles of over-identification with the movie characters.