In the shallow: why does Hollywood hate pop music?
Natalie Portman’s new film Vox Lux is the latest to convey the genre as empty and miserable, while country, rock and rap are revered
“In 2011, Celeste had drunk herself blind … during a stint of binge-drinking household cleaning products.” So states Willem Dafoe’s narrator in the final act of Vox Lux, the new Natalie Portman-starring film about a globe-straddling pop star. Rather than the glitz of stardom, this is a film that lurks in the dark underbelly of the pop world.
In the first half of the movie, Celeste is a teen star-in-the-making (played by Raffey Cassidy); in the second, Portman plays a messy pop diva with hints of Madonna, Britney, Gaga, Ariana and – according to the film’s director, Brady Corbet – Kanye West. At points in between she has a daughter while still in her teens, disgraces herself with a racist meltdown and becomes implicated in a terror attack. At no point does she seem to be having fun. Maybe that’s what 21st-century pop is all about, at least in the movies, where losing credibility and suffering a tragic downfall are recurring themes.