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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