Materialists, a new movie, tells us a lot about Doug Ford’s Bill 5

In the new film, Materialists, the main character, an upmarket match-making professional played by Dakota Johnson, sells desperate singles what they want more than anything else in the world: status.

Charlotte B, Mark P, Sophie L and other entitled serial daters hire the Adore agency…to be adored. The name doesn’t quite capture the status needs of the stylish New York firm’s high-end clients, who calculate their value in the dating market using a combination of physical score, upbringing, education and income potential.

One bride, hooked up thanks to Adore, breaks down on her wedding day and confides to her match-maker that the only reason she’s marrying the man is to feel “like I’ve won”; specifically that she has beaten her sister, whose husband isn’t as tall, handsome or upwardly mobile. “He makes my sister jealous.” 

The setting–Manhattan–is intentional. It represents the global soul of materialism. Marriage is the ultimate goal of the Adore agency’s customers, but they are nothing more than “Materialists”, and the world functions as little more than a construct where their deepest desires for status are fulfilled…or dashed.

Perhaps Ontario and Canada generally aren’t the most accurate fill-ins for the place where Madison Avenue consumer-culture has been perfectly sculpted over the past 70 years.

But the underlying message of the movie is universal: society has collectively spiralled out of control in a way that philosopher Allan Bloom foreshadowed in his best selling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. 

Materialists is the consequence of the conditions Bloom described as they were taking shape in their nascent form. 

The primary preoccupation with deeply entrenched social class that still defines much of England’s culture today, had been replaced in North America by “self-fulfillment”, a type of “survivalism” that Bloom described. Young people, he wrote, were increasingly led to define themselves using a series of economic measurements, while participation in civic life, the protection of communities with shared values and the pursuit of politics as a virtue, slowly disappeared from emerging generations.  

Materialists, based on the script of playwright, writer and director Celine Song, is a blunt message to millennials and Gen Z (and their Gen X moms and dads)—the life being shaped for you by the real or perceived expectations of parents and by the constant messages from marketers and social media influencers, creates a status dream that renders people. Song warns viewers not to be turned into consumers competing with their peers and siblings in a never ending race for an elusive status that is purposely impossible to obtain.        

So how is Materialists relevant to the legislation recently passed by the province's PC government—Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act?

The controversial legislation strips away environmental regulations and a range of policies that protect species and habitat from unchecked development. 

It allows Doug Ford to circumvent local planning processes that place the public at the centre of decision making around land use and growth. And it removes requirements to consult Indigenous groups and First Nations communities regarding projects that directly impact lands they are supposed to control.

Ford has framed the controversial move as a need to put economic interests above all else. 

Last week he addressed concerns about Bill 5 raised by Aroland First Nation Chief Sonny Gagnon. “Mark my words in this room, he will be moving forward with us, not because of me, not because of pressuring me, because he's a smart man, and he understands his community needs to prosper.”

Ford’s political bet has paid off since he was first elected in 2018. Like the characters in Materialists, he has calculated that, above all else, most Ontarians desire the type of security that protects their status. 

Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, the film’s conscience—and perhaps the organizing principle of Song’s life—represents a very different motivation.

(A24 films) 

A good-guy romantic interest competes for the affection of the main character. His competition is an older private equity professional whose life is a menagerie of experiences and possessions ostensibly meant to showcase his blend of sophistication and kindness (Song can’t resist inevitably revealing him as just another vacuous finance bro). The man who eventually wins her heart is a struggling actor living in a crumbling New York apartment with roommates suspended in adolescence. 

Johnson’s character knows she is trapped somewhere between her entitled clients and the man she loves. She knows the perfectly curated penthouse apartment of her Wall Street paramour and evenings at upscale restaurants appeal to her need for status and security. 

“You don’t want to be with me because I’m not a good person,” she tells the good guy. “I’m judgemental. And materialistic. And cold. I broke up with you because you’re broke.”

Ford is also hedging. 

He believes Ontarians care more about their economic status, the dream not of owning a nice starter bungalow in a quiet neighbourhood; but of being able to afford the Manhattan penthouse that will make them the envy of all their friends…and that competitive, jealous sister.

Bill 5 is not a plan to create better housing, to protect the public programs that provide insurance for a rainy day, or to grow our economy by creating the jobs of the future. It is a giveaway to a mining sector angling to strip lands that belong to our First Nations with no oversight, and developers who want to build high-end housing that fewer Ontarians can afford in places where they don’t belong. It is being sold as a way to make all of us richer.

Ford has not put forward a plan to reduce food insecurity or find you a family doctor. Bill 5 does nothing to revive our stretched public education system, or create affordable housing. It appeals to those being sold a path to a gilded life.

If the legislation was intended to help Ontarians struggling with under-employment, housing or a lack of access to healthcare, the PCs would have reached out to groups desperately trying to help shape badly needed policies. Instead, they were completely shut out while the government steamrolled the Bill through Queen’s Park to the applause of large developers and the mining industry.

We have a collective decision to make: keep buying into Ford’s empty promises of economic gains and the type of life he was lucky enough to be born into; or start protecting what makes many of us feel truly fulfilled and secure. 

In Materialists, the main character makes a decision. She drafts a resignation letter for the match-making agency, leaves the wealthy Wall Street player and stands in front of the man she loves. 

He asks her, “How would you like to make a very bad financial decision?” while sitting on a park bench surrounded by majestic trees, then gently slides a ring made from a flower onto her finger. 

She pulls him in for a kiss that seems to say the things that mean the most to us in life don’t come with a price. 

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