I waited a few days after watch-
ing “Pieces of a Woman” to write
about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was
going to be able to write anything
more about it than the non sequi-
turs I’d typed into the notes app on
my phone: “milk but no baby,” “spit-
ting out an appleseed,” “unfinished
bridge.” I wasn’t sure if I wanted
to get in the middle of the cultural
conversation about the death of the
artist, delve into the twisted feel-
ing in my stomach when watching
Sean, the male lead played by Shia
Labeouf (“Honey Boy”), eerily mir-
roring the addiction and abuse that
his actor has been accused of. I
wasn’t sure if it was even right for
me to criticize a film about mother-
hood when I don’t know the first
thing about it.
Of course, it’s my job. In Mar-
tin Scorsese’s 2021 documentary
“Pretend It’s a City,” essayist Fran
Lebowitz says that a story “is not
supposed to be a mirror — it’s sup-
posed to be a door.” But “Pieces of a
Woman” feels so gripping that I felt
deeply connected to the story, al-
though it’s not one I’ve experienced
firsthand.
The extended one-shots mean-
dering through tense scenes forc-
ibly immerse the viewer into the
lives of the two mothers at its cen-
ter, Martha (Vanessa Kirby, “The
Crown”) and Elizabeth (Ellen
Burstyn, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore”). Director Kornél Mun-
druczó (“White God”) invites you
through the door of the story and
into a hall of mirrors, simultane-
ously leading you through his own
creation while connecting you to
the universal experiences of joy,
pain, suffering and kinship. That’s
the paradox here: To offer up Leb-
owitz’s narrative doors to others,
someone somewhere along the line
has to stare at themselves in the
mirror and write down this story
that may have previously spent a lot
of time behind locked doors.
If I’m going to double down on this
door/mirror metaphor, stories about
motherhood have generally been
hidden behind a slightly translucent
door in your grandmother’s bath-
room. When you’re taking a shower
to get the smell of your grandmoth-
er’s perfume out of your hair, the
glass fogs up and you can only see the
other side if you open the door. But
if you wipe away the condensation,
you can see yourself — see the finger-
prints and smears from when your
mother and your mother’s mother
have looked themselves in the face in
the same spot that you’re standing in
just then. “Pieces of a Woman” isn’t
necessarily doing revolutionary work
by portraying the realities of mother-
hood, but it is pulling back the cur-
tains on ideas that we maybe didn’t
realize we were so naive about.
Obviously, everyone has a moth-
er, even if they’re not directly in
your life. You’d think that after all
this time, after all the Mary Karr
poems and “Lady Bird” viewings,
we’d have exhausted the vat of sto-
ries about mothers and daughters.
But “Pieces of a Woman” works
best when it’s lingering on the uni-
versality within the specific. We’ve
all heard stories about the excru-
ciating pain of childbirth and un-
bearable anxiety felt by first-time
parents, but Mundruczó dives into
the often overlooked parts of that
experience:
the
embarrassment
of waddling around with no pants
like Winnie the Pooh after Mar-
tha’s water breaks, the incessant
burping that comes from the rise in
progesterone during labor, the dia-
pers Martha has to wear when the
physical trauma of childbirth affects
her bladder control, the involuntary
lactation in the middle of a public
place. You’d think the observation of
normal bodily functions would get
old after a while (and at times the
film does fall prey to some cliches
of American drama like quivering
lower lips or ham-fisted metaphors),
but it’s still illuminating.
6 — Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com
By Steve Marron and C.C. Burnikel
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
01/20/21
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
01/20/21
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, January 20, 2021
ACROSS
1 Guthrie’s “Today”
co-host
5 Apple tablet
9 Easily bruised
Cajun veggie
13 Collectively
15 Possessive shout
16 Currency with
Khomeini’s
picture
17 “Same here!”
18 Greek salad
ingredient
19 Out of sight
20 It takes getting
used to
23 Note dispenser
25 Large tea
dispenser
26 Geese cries
27 Native American
leaders
31 Put a cap on
32 One of its first
customers was
a collector of
broken laser
pointers
33 IRS forms expert
36 Just slightly
37 Brown ermine
39 Born and __
40 Theater backdrop
41 High time?
42 “Shrek” princess
43 Exuberant
compliment
46 Some blue jeans
48 Sea-__ Airport
49 Observe
50 Morning news
deliverers ...
or based on a
hidden word
in each, what
20-, 27- and
43-Across are?
54 Late notice?
55 “The __ Report”:
1976 bestseller
56 Bangkok natives
59 Ticket stub abbr.
60 Meadow mamas
61 Fires off
62 Programmer’s
alternative to “if”
63 Yom Kippur ritual
64 Heavy homework
amount
DOWN
1 Most common
surname in Korea
2 Half of snake
eyes
3 Ryokan floor
cover
4 Political alliance
5 “Everything’s
OK”
6 Berth place
7 Initial poker
payment
8 Tie on a track
9 Instruments with
stops
10 Key-cutting site
11 Raging YouTube
posts
12 Sheltered from
the wind
14 Plumlike Asian
fruit
21 GoDaddy
purchase
22 Boris Johnson,
e.g.
23 Book with insets
24 Clichéd
28 Auction action
29 Africa’s
Sierra __
30 Trade name
letters
33 Flaky bakery
product
34 Tubular pasta
35 “Opposites
attract,” e.g.
37 Kitchen bigwig-
in-waiting
38 A.L.’s Blue Jays
39 Show __
41 Black, in Biarritz
42 Rhinestone
surfaces
43 __ Nicole Brown
of “Community”
44 Taking a breather
45 Monet’s May
46 Record company
imprint
47 Heroic tales
50 Sit for a portrait
51 Bygone audio
brand
52 66 and others:
Abbr.
53 Flightless bird of
the pampas
57 Altar affirmation
58 Phishing target,
briefly
SUDOKU
2
7
6
4
7
6
7
3
4
2
4
9
7
2
7
5
6
3
1
9
1
2
7
2
4
5
9
2
1
“Coaster!
Don’t mess up
the table!”
“I think that’s
wood polish...”
01/16/21
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
friend of Luigi in
43 __ energy
54 N.L. East player
Lesbian love in indie pop
Love, and feelings of any
kind really, have always exist-
ed very close to the surface for
me. They tend to be the main
force in my life, something I
find reflected in music. Pierc-
ing emotions are what drive
a tune — what music was cre-
ated as an outlet for. This is
why, one night recently, some-
thing about girl in red’s music
struck me, and began to bother
me. It felt synthetic, made like
a puzzle piece to fit a waiting
niche of consumers. And then
I looked around and realized,
it wasn’t just her. There was a
whole movement.
As a pansexual woman, it’s
really great to see more repre-
sentation for women-loving-
women (wlw) in mainstream
media, especially in danceable
songs. But I must admit, I have
a love-hate relationship with
what I’ve started to refer to
as “plastic lesbian pop.” This
is pretty much what it sounds
like: indie pop female artists
who often sing romantically
about other women in a way
that feels monetized — and,
as such, inauthentic — such as
Clairo, King Princess, girl in
red and Hayley Kiyoko.
On the one hand, I’ve always
been a huge fan of natural
LGBQ+ representation such as
the songs of these artists where
the love itself is the focus, not
as much the struggle of being
gay (although, of course, that’s
vital to see represented too),
as this normalizes the LGBQ+
experience. These songs don’t
scream “I’m gay,” but say it
slowly and steadily, without
any sort of nervous rush, tell-
ing us that the song is about a
woman in the same casual tone
that they would use were it
about a man. This simple teen-
age pop tells an easy, gay love
story — maybe just a highly-
edited version of one.
However, a lot of the time
it feels like the record execu-
tives said to themselves: “Oh,
the kids think it’s cool to be
gay? Ok, let’s give them that
and make lots of money off of
them.” As such, a lot of this
wlw music feels disingenuous,
like it was made to capitalize
off of peoples’ love, hypocriti-
cally monetizing that which,
not too many years ago, a lot
of people struggled to accept.
So, while I am really pleased to
see parts of the LGBTQ+ com-
munity be accepted and nor-
malized by being put into the
mainstream, I hold a place for
anger against this music and
its rote, churned-out feeling.
Overall, I struggle with the
fact that capitalism turns rep-
resentation into a much more
formulaic thing. When listen-
ing to this music, it makes me
question if there is a way for
the gay experience to exist
widely and successfully in me-
dia without feeling like a tool
being used for profit — like a
box to be checked off or like
there are defined pathways for
how to be gay.
Boiling it down to just one
way of existing as a queer per-
son, as this plastic lesbian pop
does, spoonfeeds this gayness
to the rest of a world in a way
that does not break its bound-
aries, and thus does not allow
for full expression and rep-
resentation. This pop lesbian
aesthetic is a clearly marked
path on how to be a cool wlw
that still fits into straight peo-
ple’s comfort zones. This is
accentuated by the fact that
this aesthetic is very present
on TikTok, where the app and
its users assign it a designated
place in the gayness of things.
Artists such as Clairo have also
been taken over by “straight”
TikTok, with not a lot of care
being paid to the sapphic lyr-
ics.
The emotional vulnerability
seems manufactured, the gay
experience exploited; not by
these artists, necessarily, but
by the capitalist culture that
consumes their work. It is im-
portant to note that the cre-
ators of the music themselves
are gay, and are sharing their
experiences and profiting from
this as well. However, part of
this trend of boppy, formulai-
cally representative music is
that straight people easily ab-
sorb this pop media without
paying attention to the strug-
gle it took for these gay artists
to get here, and will move on
to the next trend when this one
is over.
Trends are the essence of
pop culture, so it is inevitable
that anything that is part of it
will eventually pass. The les-
bian/bisexual
woman
iden-
tity, bursting onto the scene in
this particular manner, seems
to follow these hallmarks of a
social media event, enshrined
on TikTok, that will eventually
fade into the next craze. How-
ever, the straight relationship
has existed as a trusty constant
through
pop
culture.
Why
can’t the LGBTQ+ identity ex-
ist in the same way?
What it comes down to is
that this music is widespread
enough to almost be a genre.
It is one of the few gay expe-
riences widely accepted — one
sung in somewhat generic
chords, by attractive, mostly
white young women — and
does not capture the full won-
der of the LGBTQ+ communi-
ty. The beauty of the commu-
nity lies in the fact that there is
no one way to define “queer” —
queer arises as a blanket term
because there are so many dif-
ferent sexualities and gender
identities that each individual
interacts with in their own
way and on their own terms.
For some, it is a central part of
their identity, something they
feel compelled to discuss, or
else they feel they are not be-
ing true to themselves. For
some, it is a casual, factual
part of life that they will only
bring up if asked. For some, it
is a hidden, denied portion of
themselves.
It is difficult to give an exact
answer to my aforementioned
question of how to properly
represent the gay identity in
the mainstream in a way that
doesn’t feel boxed in. This is
because an opinion coming
from just one person could
never have a hope of answer-
ing for all members of the LG-
BTQ+ community. Sometimes,
it is more important that these
questions are asked than an-
swered, so that more people
may consider them. The beau-
ty of the LGBTQ+ community
is that there are so many dif-
ferent voices and experiences
to be celebrated and felt. This
plastic lesbian pop reduces
the community down to a sin-
gle kind of voice, one seraphic
and sapphic, sure, but one
kind all the same. This allows
straight people to comfortably
feel as though this makes for
enough representation, and
proceed to wash their hands
of the matter. If a gay person
complains,
this
music
be-
comes just another example
they can point to, giving the
LGBTQ+ community another
token.
While
writing
this,
my
thought
process
ran
into
many different walls, mak-
ing me turn back around and
reconsider constantly. I think
this attitude of consistently
considering and asking ques-
tions is important in matters
of representation; new voices
emerge all the time from all
different kinds of identities,
and to give one answer to all
of these would never work.
This plastic lesbian pop is a
gift in that it makes me cel-
ebrate how far representation
has come because this is pop-
ular at all, yet also makes me
think about how much further
it has to go. After all, there is
time, when thinking critically
about music such as this, to
smile at the joy and inclusion
it does inspire with its docu-
mentation of lesbian relation-
ships, and dance a little.
ROSIA SOFIA KAMINSKI
Daily Arts Writer
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Doors, mirrors and
‘Pieces of a Woman’
NETFLIX
MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON
Daily Arts Writer
michigandaily.com
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