ONE OF MY FAVOURITE FILMS TO REWATCH ON Netflix, even more so than Velvet Buzzsaw, is Vox Lux. It’s a deeply strange and in some ways quite baffling film that doesn’t present a clear theme, which often serves to give a film a frustrating, tantalising rewatchability.
Natalie Portman plays a wholesome Christian girl who becomes a pop sensation after surviving a Columbine-like massacre, writing and singing a song about it while still hurting from an ambiguous injury to her shoulder and/or neck. Years pass, and we meet her as a superstar, marked by the atrocities of not only Columbine, but 9/11 and a Sousse-like mass shooting.
The character she plays is something of an amalgam of all the female pop icons of the last twenty or thirty years: she dresses like Lady Gaga. The distinction between her Staten-accented real self and her iconographical stage persona evokes Madonna. Her songs were written for the movie by Sia*. Her hair makes her look like La Roux. Her naïveté and propensity to be manipulated by powerful men is similar to Britney. Her transformation from Christian schoolgirl to hypersexualised pop goddess has shades of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus.
*Imagine the phonecall! “Hi Sia, we want you to write songs that are like your songs, but a bit shitter than your songs, but not so shit that no-one would buy that they could be pop hits.”
Fact, Conjecture, & Occasional Jokes 