Bad Movie Diaries: Throwing a Hissy in Glitter (2001)

 

Name a worse love story than Glitter, I'll wait

            At the beginning of December, journalist and podcaster Sarah Marshall took to Twitter to make the following observation: 

Her followers wracked their collective brains to add Fargo and Hidden Figures to the list, along with The Adams Family and Adams Family Values, but only if we count “being a hot goth” as an important job. And that’s it! Marshall went on to lay out the rules of the Marshall Test:

            These do not appear to be very stringent criteria, and yet a movie that passes the Marshall Test is extremely elusive. While movies that star women doing important jobs are increasingly common, the real obstacle to passing the Marshall Test is the insidious ubiquity of a shitty archetype: the Boyfriend Whomst Throws a Hissy. And no movie depicts this archetype in its purest form quite like Glitter (2001).

            I’ve long believed that, to figure out what stories have seeped deepest into our collective psyche, we have to turn to bad movies. While there are the rare bad movies that, from sheer derangement, manage to tell a story unlike any that’s been told before or since, most are constructed out of cliché and the detritus of good movies. Without the craftsmanship of the filmmakers and charisma of the stars to distract us, we can see the bones of the story laid bare. Glitter is that kind of movie, sleepwalking through what Mariah Carey and her collaborators think a showbiz movie is. And it’s pretty fucking dark.

            What, according to Glitter, are the necessary components for a tale of musical stardom? It’s your standard rags-to-riches fare. Mariah Carey depicts a hard-luck singer, Billie, abandoned by her talented but troubled mom, who through force of raw talent alone rises to the top of the industry. The original title of the film was All That Glitters, suggesting that it’s supposed to be about the emptiness of fame. But even this classic story is hindered both by weak characterization of its central character and Mariah’s weirdly listless performance. Undoubtedly a compelling singer capable of projecting emotion, Mariah displays none of those abilities in her acting. Her Billie is a Zenlike figure, seemingly without wants or desire. She doesn’t seem to particularly want to be a singer, but is regularly coaxed to sing and that steamrolling Mariah Carey voice belts out of her as if through supernatural intervention. Her principle desire seems to be to find the mother who abandoned her, and maybe fame will help her do that, but when she discovers a homeless women who seems to be her mom (turns out she isn’t), Mariah serenely lets her pass on by.

 

Mariah can’t help but sing!

            Without the protagonist’s career ambitions to drive the plot, the movie turns to a charmless toad of a man named (I shit you not) Dice. It’s Dice who discovers Mariah’s talent, gets her out of her lame gig providing vocals to lip-synching future celebrity chef Padma Lakshmi, scores her record deal, writes her songs, and drives her career. Mariah seems disinterested in all these machinations. When the record label hires Mariah a different producer because Dice’s songs all sound the same (a surprisingly self-aware dig at the movie’s own hookless soundtrack), she’s bummed but accepts it. Dice rolls with it too, but you can tell he’s pissed. When she shows her first bit of agency, approaching a good-looking male performer she admires, Dice (you guessed it) throws a hissy.

            Oh, he throws the mother of all hissies. He insults her talent, the song she wrote about her mom, the clothes he picked out for her, and says racist shit to her friends when they try to defend her. Her friends, understandably, storm off, leaving Mariah to gaze wistfully after them. When she cries in the bathroom of his apartment, Dice offers up a limp apology. You can tell it’s useless because he fails to name any of the numerous things he did wrong or describe how he will do better in the future.

            It’s not until Mariah learns of the shady dealings Dice did to get her out of her contract that she yeets for good, taking her cat with her (the same cat she took with her to the orphanage as a ten-year-old, we can assume). This seems to happen not because she has recognized Dice’s terribleness and realized she deserves better, but because the movie thinks it needs a big break-up before the reconciliation. As the movie drags itself to the climax, said reconciliation seems inevitable, as Mariah moons over Dice and the two, through unexplained psychic connection, write the same song. But then Glitter, gloriously, shatters the mold of its cliché story, taking a turn for the “tragedy” (or accidental triumph).

            See, Dice got Mariah out of her contract by promising to pay an extensive sum of money to her former producer. Evidently, they never got this deal in writing because the latter’s only recourse when Dice flakes is to threaten him with violence. As Mariah prepares for her big Madison Square concert, the ex-producer makes good on his promise and shoots Dice dead. I cheered. No movie death has ever given me such joy.

            The show goes on anyway. Afterwards, through contorted movie logic, we learn that  Dice, in a final act of benevolence, found Mariah’s mom. The limo driver takes her to her mom’s very nice house in Maryland, without even stopping for a change of clothes. Turns out mom’s no longer an addict, and is very much not homeless either. She’s doing fine, which I’m sure will cause a tough conversation later about how mom failed to keep her promise of reuniting with her daughter for literally no reason at all. But this harsh truth remains off screen. It’s such a baffling ending that my girlfriend thought perhaps Mariah had died and gone to heaven. That explains why Dice isn’t here; he is in hell.

            Glitter is the heartwarming story of an abusive little Phil-Spector-in-training who dies before he can ruin the life of a talented woman. But of course, that’s not what the movie wants us to think. Dice’s well-deserved death is supposed to make us weepy. By this movie’s logic, terrible men will always deserve forgiveness, and the happiest possible ending is a heterosexual coupling, even if the man is an abusive asshole and the woman a cardboard cutout. Denied this bliss, Mariah gets the consolation prize of motherly love, but this ending is supposed to be bittersweet. Given the long history of music producers treating their female stars with cruelty and violence, isolating them from their friends and family, and entrapping them in horrific relationships, I felt very strongly that the movie’s Mariah had been spared a terrible fate. Dice isn’t even talented! His sole achievement in the movie is that he exercises his good taste and sharp perception to recognize that…Mariah Carey is a talented singer. Glitter is hardly the only movie of its era to romanticize a bad relationship, but without any charisma or chemistry between its stars, it’s blindingly obvious just how terrible that relationship is – and how poisonous the whole archetype is in its noxious resemblance to real-life tragedies.

            In a movie that spends its first ten minutes setting up relationships between women – Mariah and her mom, Mariah and her comic relief friends – it’s perplexing that Dice is in the movie at all. I can only guess that, in its big box of showbiz cliches, Glitter couldn’t find an ambitious and talented woman that fit Mariah’s sweetheart persona. Better to keep her bland and passive, especially since bland and passive is Mariah’s default acting mode, than to present us with a woman who wants something, and, in wanting, comes across as bitchy or cutthroat or shallow. Afraid to make Mariah a diva, the movie instead makes her nothing at all. And since Mariah is such a passive figure, Dice needs to be as terrible as possible for her leaving to be believable, but for his death to be emotionally impactful, she has to still want him. The result is a movie in which Mariah doesn’t seem to believe she can do any better, and a movie that tells her she’s right.

            Glitter is constantly on the verge of being about something. The most interesting, if cringy, scene, comes when a music video director urges Mariah to show her breasts and is eager to exoticize her mixed-race identity. Mariah is visibly uncomfortable, but her discomfort with being objectified never returns to the film. Neither does the fact that she has to give up her best friends as backup dancers. The film constantly hints that the life of the pop princess may not be so perfect, but only plays this out in the way that Mariah’s success makes Dice uncomfortable and creates obstacles for the love story. I’m not quite sure why this movie chose to prioritize the uninteresting love story over anything else except perhaps its easiness, its blandness, and its emptiness save the movie from having to be about something.

We’ve all seen an early-MTV-era music video like this, right guys?

            But I will say one nice thing about this movie. If you’ve ever harbored a secret fantasy of hopping in a time machine and murdering Phil Spector before he can lock Ronnie in that mansion, this movie will make you feel warm inside, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

Fun Facts:

·       I don’t know how much responsibility for this mess to put on director Vondie Curtis-Hall, especially since his debut film is considered to be pretty good, but I do want you to know that he’s married to Kasi Lemmons (best known for her extraordinary debut, Eve’s Bayou). I watched Eve’s Bayou and Glitter the same week, a coincidence and a double-feature that suggests a serious talent deferential within this couple.

·       This movie is set in the ‘80s! You would not guess this by the musical stylings, but the first thirty minutes of the film feature some lovely and decadent scenes inside the ‘80s New York club scene, only to abandon these glittery pastures for unremarkable music studios and poorly-decorated apartments.

·       Speaking of glitter, the movie’s sole acknowledgement of its title is that in most but not all of her scenes, Mariah sports an unexplained stripe of glitter on her collarbone or shoulder.

·       And speaking of apartments, Dice’s apartment is an enormous black-and-red-decorated monstrosity. He’s supposed to be a broke DJ; where did he get all this money? He has a trust fund, doesn’t he? Asshole. His apartment also includes a bowl of fruit which I thought was decorative until Mariah is shown purchasing fruit to refill the fruit bowl.

·       Dice and Mariah first have sex when Dice impresses her by playing the marimba. I played the marimba in high school, and it did not get me laid.

·       Before moving in with Dice, and after leaving him, Mariah lives with her friends in an apartment in which she shares a bedroom. Mariah’s singles may be charting but I don’t think Mariah is seeing a cent of that money, and that concerns me.

·       The esteemed Youtuber Todd in the Shadows does a delightful job breaking down the many abandoned plot threads in this movie. He, like me, is very concerned about the cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icYqOoR8GD8

·       The soundtrack to this movie was released on 9/11. I mean, this would have tanked anyway, but that sure didn’t help.