“Want to go again?” a choreographer asks Charli XCX in the beginning of the mockumentary The Second. It’s the most recent access within the pop famous person’s swiftly increasing cinematic empire, propelled via the stratospheric cultural have an effect on of her 2024 album, Brat.
He’s asking if she’s able to practise a gyrating, strobe-heavy regimen yet another time. However this query additionally gestures in opposition to the central conceit of the movie: what if “Brat summer” was once driven past its herbal expiry date? To not discover “the tension of staying too long”, as Charli has described it, however in a cynical try to additional monetise this fleeting second of dad cultural hype.
Conceived via Charli, The Second gives a semi-fictionalised mockumentary account of the publish Brat summer season comedown. It positions her on the centre of a number of cynical makes an attempt to increase its lifespan thru questionable endorsement offers, social media posts and an ill-fated live performance movie. The movie’s occasions map eerily onto the actual post-Brat timeline, inviting understanding audiences to query the boundary between fiction and truth.
Charli’s unsure reaction to the choreographer’s query − “Err … yeah?” – from the ground of her practice session area (in that starriest of locations, Dagenham) crystallises the movie’s understanding subversion of dominant tendencies within the female-oriented pop famous person documentary.
The trailer for The Second.
As cultural theorist Annelot Prins has defined in a paper, pop famous person documentaries like Woman Gaga’s 5 Foot Two (2017), Kesha’s Rainbow (2020) and Taylor’s Swift’s Leave out Americana (2020) generally tend to offer “empowering narratives of talented and hardworking women who used to be constrained by different factors but overcame them with resilience […] and are now self-determined agents”.
This technique to feminine superstar has persisted in a up to date glut of area live performance motion pictures launched via stars together with Swift, Beyoncé and Olivia Rodrigo. Those area spectaculars mix polished excursion photos with behind the curtain glimpses into the inventive procedure. It’s a mix of intimacy and varnish engineered to substantiate their original skill within the face of the relentless industrial calls for of the pop global.
The “resilient pop documentary” is a part of a much wider pattern known via feminist media students: representations of superstar ladies overcoming setbacks reminiscent of sexual attack (Kesha), dependancy (Demi Lovato) or sickness (Woman Gaga).
Feminist sociologist Angela McRobbie’s paintings presentations how those photographs of “resilient” feminine celebrities block collective resistance to misogyny, racism and classism, via making ladies consider they may be able to triumph over oppression thru “self-management and care”.
It is a development that those documentaries repeat with their emphasis at the inventive survival of the broken feminine pop famous person. The Second invokes and satirises those narrative templates via appearing Charli’s fictionalised self’s lack of ability to keep an eye on the runaway momentum of her personal stardom.
Resilience to reflexivity
Whilst The Second has been located as Charli’s pivot from pop to the silver display screen, it extends the subversions of her oft-forgotten first cinematic undertaking: 2022’s Charli XCX: On my own In combination.
Inverting The Second’s narrative construction, On my own In combination opens with Charli’s arrangements for her first area excursion, charting the results of its abrupt cancellation within the wake of COVID. The rest of the movie depicts Charli’s manufacturing of her fourth studio album over the process a whirlwind six-weeks of the primary lockdown.
This bold enterprise will have supplied the very best alternative to emphasize Charli’s resilience, however On my own In combination takes a distinction tack. It specializes in the emotional toll the album’s manufacturing took on Charli and emphasises the virtual areas of care and group that enabled her and her fanatics to live on the pandemic.
Whilst The Second and On my own In combination way subversion otherwise, each knowingly undermine the resilience usually celebrated in pop famous person documentaries, exposing the never-ending efficiency of “overcoming” on which feminine pop stardom is based. The finishing of On my own In combination positions Charli because the unmoved client of the overall album. A post-credit series presentations her straight away at some other free finish. “I just feel a bit, like, bored … What am I going to do now?” she says to digicam, guffawing.
The trailer for On my own In combination.
The Second’s last scenes echo On my own In combination’s feeling of anti-climax via finishing with the trailer for the Brat live performance movie and its invitation to “be a 365 Party Girl from the comfort of your own home”. Hilariously, that is soundtracked via the Verve’s Sour Candy Symphony – an overplayed Britpop anthem that confirms the fictitious XCX’s fall from cool in pursuit of mass enchantment.
The movie’s quasi-documentary taste compounds its problem to the kinds of authenticity upon which resilient pop stardom is based. In a voice be aware to her group, Charli explains that she is finishing the movie to “kill Brat” and loose herself to pursue different inventive endeavours. Right here, the movie makes use of the intimate framing used to put across original company within the typical pop documentary. This serves to blur the paper-thin line between the “real” post-Brat hype engineered via Charli and the trite, opportunistic spectacle she embraces in The Second.
That we’re left without a transparent sense of what the variation really is alerts that, a long way from being a “shallow” tackle pop superstar, The Second turns the conventions of the pop famous person documentary towards themselves. In doing so, the movie cleverly exposes the artificiality inherent in even probably the most reputedly original of dad performances.
Taken in combination, those two motion pictures cement Charli XCX’s standing as our perfect chronicler of modern feminine pop stardom and the position of her movie texts in exposing the artifice at play in supposedly “authentic” resilient pop cultural efficiency.
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