Coachella recently wrapped up its 25th edition, and the main takeaway was that women ruled. Superstars such as Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae reaffirmed their global dominance, offering energetic sets highlighted by expert choreography, arresting songs, and a compelling sense of scale and drama. Very cinematic, too.
Pop music is the culture’s soundtrack, and while there is no shortage of blockbuster male artists—Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran—to my ears, their female peers have proved to be more thrilling. Taylor Swift remains the queen of the music industry, but acts like Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Lady Gaga, Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, and Chappell Roan are all royalty as well. At a moment when women’s rights are severely threatened in this country, the mere presence of so many bold, sexually assertive, sometimes politically outspoken female artists would alone be worth cheering. That they’re also among music’s most electrifying and innovative acts is inspiring.
But it’s not just on stage and on Spotify where female pop stars reign supreme. Over the last few years, they’ve also been regularly featured in theaters—and I’m not talking about Swift’s, Beyoncé’s, and (coming soon) Eilish’s big-screen concert films. Fictional female superstars have been the focus of several movies, the latest of which features Anne Hathaway as the titular troubled superstar in “Mother Mary.” The movie joins a disparate trio of recent films about women pop stars: “Vox Lux,” “Trap,” and “Smile 2.”
But there’s another thing these movies have in common: They’re all directed by men. Thankfully, though, you won’t see a lick of misogyny in these stories. The male filmmakers may view their female pop stars through various prisms—artist, cultural symbol, enigma—but there’s a clear respect and even awe for their characters’ real-life counterparts, who are so captivating in part because they’re so unknowable. Like many fans, these directors are obsessed with these women and their exalted, occasionally precarious standing in the world.
Men have been making movies about iconic women since cinema’s earliest days. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” perhaps the greatest of all silent films, starred Renée Jeanne Falconetti as the 15th-century French teenager in her final hours as she is put on trial. A hero of the people who believed she was acting on divine orders, Joan of Arc is depicted as saintly, otherworldly, a warrior wrongfully persecuted by the cruel, unthinking masses. Joan meets a bad end in Dreyer’s classic, but she never loses her dignity or fiery spirit.
That dynamic—an imperiled public woman seen through the eyes of a male filmmaker—is expressed in different ways in “Vox Lux,” “Trap,” “Smile 2,” and “Mother Mary.” Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux” stars Natalie Portman as Celeste, a veteran superstar with a traumatic past—she was one of a handful of survivors of a childhood school shooting—and an uncertain future. M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap” is unique in this quartet of films for two reasons: His pop star, Lady Raven, is not the main character, and she’s played by the director’s pop-star daughter, Saleka. (The thriller concerns a serial killer, portrayed by Josh Hartnett, who takes his daughter to Lady Raven’s sold-out show, unaware that the concert is an elaborate sting operation to catch him.)
Parker Finn’s sequel to his hit 2022 horror film “Smile” shifts to a new victim, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is mourning the death of her boyfriend and recovering from addiction when she starts seeing visions of people with menacing grins. And David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” casts Anne Hathaway as a legendary performer who, like Skye, is in the middle of a comeback, visiting costume designer and former friend Sam (Michaela Coel) to create a killer outfit for her (hopefully) triumphant return.
Each of these fictional pop stars is put on a pedestal, their ecosystem of fame, money, and privilege an alien environment. But there’s nothing snide or dismissive in these portrayals; the filmmakers never treat pop music as synthetic or superficial. The clearest indication of this is how lavish each fictional pop star’s concert performances are. All four films contain at least one seismic number that demonstrates the singer’s sizable talent on stage.
The effect is especially palpable in “Mother Mary,” for which Lowery tapped veteran choreographer Dani Vitale (who has worked with Rihanna and Katy Perry) to nail Mary’s moves and enlisted Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs to craft bangers worthy of a star of her stature. “Mother Mary’s” concert scenes convey the staggering ambition that real-life pop icons bring to their mammoth stadium shows, and the same is true in “Vox Lux,” “Trap,” and “Smile 2,” all of which emulate the energy and grandeur of a modern pop show.
Although Mary was not based on any one musician, Lowery has talked about being inspired by Swift’s epic “Reputation” tour. “The scale of it was something I’d never seen before,” he recently enthused about Swift’s shows. “I couldn’t wrap my head around how she and her team put that together. It truly felt monumental.” In the years before poptimism, it was hard for pop stars—especially female pop stars—to be taken seriously. Those days are now long over.
This admiration for the scope and spectacle of a pop concert is matched by an appreciation of the modern female pop star’s sexual confidence. Female singers flaunting their sex appeal is nothing new—Carpenter was honoring her spiritual foremother by bringing out Madonna during Coachella’s second weekend—but so many contemporary performers parade their femininity not to be shocking but, rather, to express a natural aspect of everyday life. The modern pop star’s dance moves may be titillating, but they’re also celebratory and playful, less concerned with getting a rise out of moral watchdogs than in proudly reflecting the joy and challenges of being a sexual person.
Indeed, although it might be a slightly paternal instinct, a recurring theme in these movies is that these women, despite being at the top of the pop world, are struggling. Lady Raven is doing fine, but Celeste, Skye, and Mary are either at a crossroads or rebuilding after professional or personal setbacks. In “Mother Mary,” Hathaway’s aging singer is fighting against strange supernatural occurrences—most notably, the four films possess horror/thriller elements —and viewing celebrity as a potentially fraught proposition, while simultaneously seeking to reclaim her iconic status alongside younger, hotter pop stars.
Whether it’s the background swirl of deadly gun violence in “Vox Lux” or the terror engulfing Skye in “Smile 2,” looming danger surrounds these singers. (Even poor Lady Raven has no idea she’s about to meet a mass murderer.) It’s almost as if these female superstars are being punished by a patriarchal society that wishes to tear them down, connecting female beauty to suffering and tragedy.
The tendency goes back to “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” but it also extends to the funereal works of Edgar Allan Poe, who once observed, “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Only one of these fictional singers actually experiences an untimely demise, but both in the 19th century and today, men do love telling stories of gorgeous women going through hell.
And just like Joan of Arc or Poe’s Annabel Lee, these pop stars agonize from a distance, just out of reach. In “Mother Mary,” Mary may be the main attraction, but it’s telling that we actually experience the film from Sam’s perspective, with Mary always a remote figure, even when the scenes put her in the foreground. As much as these movies are enthralled by their singers, the directors know they’ll never fully grasp these icons—not because they’re women, but because they’re insanely famous, the person behind the well-honed persona an eternal riddle.
As a result, these movies frequently conceive their pop stars as symbols of something larger than themselves. Before “Vox Lux,” Portman won an Oscar for playing another performer in a downward spiral—the dancer Nina in “Black Swan”—but Celeste is less a metaphor for an artist’s drive to be extraordinary than an avatar for our complicated relationship with celebrity.
“The movie is about the desire to be iconic,” Corbet told The Guardian at the time, later commenting, “[W]e expect celebrities to be our representatives. … [T]here’s a strange expectation of Taylor Swift to take a political stance and support the female Democratic nominees. Even if that’s who I support, why should she have [to have] an opinion about it?”
That fascination/perplexment is echoed in Finn’s conception of Skye, saying in a “Smile 2” interview that he was curious about “what it’s like to be one of the stars who get sort of elevated to godlike status. I think we put so much pressure on some of these women to always be playing this persona in public and always be performing even when they’re not onstage. I think that takes a major toll. It’s a toll that is hard for them to show to the world. … [T]here’s something really intriguing about the parasocial relationship we have with celebrities.”
In “Vox Lux,” “Trap,” “Smile 2,” and “Mother Mary,” these women come to represent the mysteries of fame to those of us on the outside. The galvanic concert scenes, the allure of celebrity, the currency of young female beauty, the ineffable tractor-beam pull of the pure star: These actresses embody the seductive magnetism that impels fans to worship their favorite performers.
The specific pop icon who comes up most often when male directors discuss the model for their fictional musicians is Taylor Swift, a sign not just of her popularity but also of her role in defining our cultural moment. No artistic lightweight, no Kewpie doll puppet controlled by others, she’s a savvy businesswoman who runs a global empire, long ago making her name by refusing to take any guff from a man, whether it be Jake Gyllenhaal or Scooter Braun. It’s only fitting, then, that Corbet, Shyamalan, Finn, and Lowery would be so entranced by the cinematic sweep of Swift and others’ stadium shows, which are the most visible display of their creative and professional mastery. And the bigger these stars get, the more beguiling and inscrutable they become, reaching levels of success and wealth never before imagined.
No wonder “Mother Mary” ends with a dreamlike image of Hathaway, playing this perfect pop star as a nearly celestial figure, still beyond the understanding of Sam or the audience. For male filmmakers, female pop stars are the closest thing we have to angels in our midst. And angels aren’t meant to be possessed, merely venerated.