Vox Lux and the price of greatness

Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux has a lot on its mind. Offi­cial­ly sub­ti­tled ​‘A 21^st Cen­tu­ry Por­trait’, it cov­ers domes­tic ter­ror­ism, addic­tion, com­mer­cial rot, pop music and – in one mon­tage – sev­er­al decades of Swedish his­to­ry. It’s a capital‑M Movie with big per­for­mances and a stack of tal­ent: Willem Dafoe nar­rates; Sia wrote the songs; Scott Walk­er wrote the score; Lol Crawley’s cam­er­a­work feels focus-grouped to elic­it Stan­ley Kubrick comparisons.

But all this sound and fury hides a sur­pris­ing­ly sin­cere mes­sage. With all its mov­ing parts and know­ing provo­ca­tions, you’d be for­giv­en for peg­ging Vox Lux as a barbed cri­tique of The Way We Live Now. Actu­al­ly, its con­cerns are much more clas­si­cal, even con­ser­v­a­tive: it’s about the dan­gers of mis­tak­ing great­ness for goodness.

‘Good­ness’ here is quite lit­er­al­ly bib­li­cal. Celeste, the film’s pop star pro­tag­o­nist, is some­thing akin to a fall­en angel. In the first half, she’s a vir­ginal school shoot­ing sur­vivor played to docile per­fec­tion by Raf­fey Cas­sidy. In the sec­ond, she’s a pill-pop­ping, pro­fan­i­ty-sling­ing dervish of id and hair­spray played by a hard-nosed Natal­ie Portman.

The film with­holds details that might shed light on Celeste’s inter­ven­ing years, but we ini­tial­ly pin her fall from grace as a stan­dard-issue star­let implo­sion. Then, in the film’s extend­ed final con­cert sequence, Cor­bet throws a hell of a gaunt­let: via chilly voiceover, we learn that Celeste’s rise to fame has been orches­trat­ed by the dev­il him­self. Appar­ent­ly, he appeared to her in the moments after the shoot­ing and gave her a choice between death and glob­al fame.

This infor­ma­tion arrives so close to the film’s final frame that its dra­mat­ic impact is strange­ly flat. If noth­ing else, though, it clar­i­fies Corbet’s mes­sage and speaks to the grand­ness of his scale. Many have com­pared Vox Lux to the lat­est iter­a­tion of A Star is Born, but it’s tough to imag­ine Bradley Coop­er toss­ing satan into a draft of that script. The moral uni­verse of Vox Lux is less ​‘don’t lose your­self on the way to the top,’ and more ​‘the top is a soot-black hell-pit, so why aim there in the first place’?

Much has been made of Portman’s Stat­en Island drawl, par­tic­u­lar­ly because Cas­sidy plays Celeste with no such accent in the first half. It’s strict­ly by design: Super­star Celeste so dif­fers from her younger incar­na­tion that she hard­ly reg­is­ters as the same per­son. We see Cassey urge her man­ag­er to stop swear­ing in front of her sis­ter; Port­man calls her sis­ter a cunt with the casu­al ici­ness of an abu­sive partner.

This trans­for­ma­tion from ingénue to demon-diva goes beyond Celeste’s pat­terns of speech. Sev­er­al fea­tures of her pub­lic image fash­ion her trau­ma into cheap glam­or. Her heavy eye make­up direct­ly mim­ics the school shooter’s. An ever-present chrome cra­vat eeri­ly recalls the neck brace he put her in. In one scene, we learn that she’s spent sev­er­al months recov­er­ing from a moon­shine binge that tem­porar­i­ly blind­ed her left eye… the same eye that the shoot­er cov­ered with an all-black con­tact lens before shoot­ing her and her classmates.

The mes­sage that Vox Lux sends with these con­trasts – between nat­ur­al and affect­ed speech, the shock of trau­ma and the crude thrill of spec­ta­cle – is that good­ness and ​‘great­ness’ are fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble. Stature is the absence of humanity.

Bound up in this mes­sage is a pro­found fear of cen­tral­ized pow­er. Vox Lux presents an Amer­i­ca tat­tered by vio­lence, eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion (Dafoe wry­ly describes Celeste’s par­ents as ​“On the some­what los­ing end of Reaganomics”), and vicious con­sumerism. The nation puts is faith in Celeste (“Her grief became their grief,” Dafoe says) but pop music proves an insuf­fi­cient cop­ing mech­a­nism. You can’t help but fur­row your brow when you see a sea of teenage faces bright­en at Celeste’s emp­ty plat­i­tudes as she writhes onstage before them.

The big ask, then, is that we keep sev­er­al truths in our heads at once. Vox Lux is not anti-pop music, no mat­ter how mon­strous it makes Celeste; it’s anti-sin­gle-mind­ed­ness. Cor­bet has fash­ioned a warn­ing siren that urges us to think before we exalt a sin­gle per­son or idea to sav­iour sta­tus. In his film, a cul­ture obsessed with easy cathar­sis – a swipe of eye make­up, an insipid bal­lad about ​“crumbl[ing] like the Berlin wall” – is actu­al­ly on a one-way street to hell. Actu­al heal­ing, it argues, comes from a holis­tic under­stand­ing of the prob­lem at hand. Deifi­ca­tion is a flim­sy short­cut around unpleas­ant-but-nec­es­sary grunt work.

It’s a stark inver­sion of pop­u­lar wis­dom: in the world accord­ing to Vox Lux, the great, as we cur­rent­ly know it, is the sworn ene­my of the good.