What begins as an Job-ian comedy of misplaced belief and apparently meaningless suffering molts into a more potent autocritique, cinematically asserting that the nearly universal prevailing direction of culture is the equivalent of the pathetic final squirmings of a greedy idiot. One could even begin to perceive this dissonance in the way Daniel Lopatin’s score, itself a dubiously transformative reworking of older forms, is quietly slotted in to the film in ways that run directly counter to its oversaturated synthesized mawkishness. Howie’s pure, untainted need for excess is what ends his life and the film (although his acquisitive spirit lives on in Julia (Julia Fox), to whose perspective the movie takes a late-stage shift), gesturing towards the aesthetic suicide that pastiche essentially represents when it takes on the dominant, maximalist shapes that it has tended towards in post-aughts Anglophone culture. His total, blind faith in the very acts of spending and making money, in and of themselves, is the engine generating Gems’s labyrinthine forward momentum, and he therefore becomes aligned with the film’s self-annihilatory conscience as the arc of narrative bends back towards inevitable collapse. One might call it the perfect antiparticle to Stranger Things in the cosmology of artistic nostalgia, a positively hateful treatment of its own formation, an anti-movie with none of the tedious handwringing ( a la Dogme 95) implied by the term.įrom this primordial soup of cultural flotsam emerges Howard Ratner, one of the most memorably devoted acolytes of capitalism put to screen in the past decade. Jewish faith, the highly recognizable patterns that our culture imagines for divorce, sports trivia, mob movie tropes, and The Weeknd are all swept up in the grasping, avaricious tendrils of the narrative engine, and reassembled into a grotesque, late-capitalist ooze. Uncut Gems is a repulsive movie, from its first gesture to its last, relishing in the violent and juvenile with gleeful disregard for the superficial import afforded it by the weight of borrowed tropes and signifiers. This is the overarching project of the film: to dismantle the predominating sociocultural forms of the decade. Such obsessive ethnographic documentation of a moment is typical of backwards-looking art, but here it is transformed into a scalpel for the dissection of said moment – historicist analysis being the first step towards dismantling. However, rather than the empty rearrangement of signifiers in affectively novel but intellectually stale patterns, which is so often the fate of such retrograde projects, the omnivorousness of Uncut Gems suggests an (aesthetically) accelerationist critique of nostalgia’s codependence with capital.Īs Adam Sandler’s Howie lovingly recounts the historical significance of his prize opal (extracted, as all wealth and culture in the West is, through the labor and suffering of the Third World, which the Safdies clarify in the very first sequence of the film), so does the film trace its lineage through a series of temporally disjointed referents spanning decades, from the 80s textures evoked in the title screen and score to the fussily recreated, unmistakable milieu of 2012. It is in this cultural space, shared with the vaporwave that soundtracks it, that the Safdie brothers’ new film, Uncut Gems, operates. The same day, TikToker posted an impression of Fox, gaining over 87,000 likes in the same timeframe (shown below, right).Approaching the end of the decade, no shortage of critical ink has been spilled on the way the typifying aesthetic form of the 2010s was pastiche – or, perhaps more accurately, a form of pastiche which relates to its forebears in a mode situated halfway between reverence and parody. On February 14th, TikToker posted an impression of Fox using the sound, gaining over 102,000 likes in less than 24 hours (shown below, left). The clip began spreading on TikTok shortly after, as people began lip-dubbing the quote and doing impressions of Fox. Julia fox honestly seems smart but why did she say “uncut gems” like that □ /fWMdKweV1k The clip quickly began spreading on social media as people began to poke fun at the way Fox said " Uncut Gems," thinking it sounded more like " Uncut Jams." For example, on February 12th, 2022, Twitter user isolated the clip, saying "why did she say 'Uncut Gems' like that?" (shown below). Later that day, Spotify uploaded the clip to TikTok where it became an original sound (shown below). When asked if she considered herself West's "muse," Fox replied that she was Josh Safdie's muse in the film Uncut Gems, pronouncing "gems" similarly to "jams" (shown below). On February 9th, 2022, Julia Fox appeared on the podcast "Call Her Daddy" to discuss her relationship with Kanye West.
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