The Rom-Com as Ideology: Why Love Feels Like Marketing?

Rom-coms lied to you: love isn’t blind, it’s branded. This is what happens when Marx writes your dating profile.

If you’re still out here looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes…

Think twice because A24’s newest rom-com Materialist, it here to sabotage your dating expectations.

I’ll admit, I don’t usually crave on romantic comedies. But Materialist really caught my attention, not just because it stars Pedro Pascal doing a parody of late-stage capitalism , but because it dares to ask: What happens when love becomes a product?

Behind its glossy surface and viral worthy cast, this film stages a quiet intellectual revolt. It’s a rom-com built on socialist ruins , a genre critique disguised as emotional comfort food.

So if you’re ready to put on your leftist reading glasses, join me. Let’s dissect this algorithm of attraction, the market of desire and the emotionally volatile investment portfolio we still dare to call “romance.”

The One-Dimensional Match

The story of Materialist centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a seemingly charming New Yorker working as a professional matchmaker. On the surface, she’s doing God’s work: helping lonely people find love. But as we quickly learn, this isn’t Pride and Prejudice , this is love as a business model, and Lucy is its most loyal employee.

Her day-to-day involves filtering human beings through the cold algorithms of compatibility, quantifying desire and assigning value based on income, aesthetics, and status. She’s a material girl in a material world, except her product is real people.

As the film unfolds, Lucy’s seemingly sweet job reveals itself as a dystopian assembly line of emotional commodification. Her work alienates her, not just from others, but from herself. Like Marx’s alienated worker, she becomes estranged from her own humanity. She produces relationships, but owns none. She becomes a machine of matchmaking , ironically loveless…

But Lucy isn’t just a capitalist girl , she’s also a casualty of patriarchal conditioning, echoing the ideas of bell hooks in The Will to Change. The men around her are valued for dominance, control, and status. The film suggests that under patriarchy, men are emotionally gutted and women are reduced to emotional managers.

And here, Materialist becomes even more subversive. Like Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, it depicts a world where people have lost depth, flattened into consumers of dating apps, producers of curated personas, and performers in a never-ending dance.

In the world of Materialist, no one is really falling in love ,they’re shopping for compatibility.

One of the film’s most quietly subversive moments arrives when Lucy, seated at a wedding table, orders a Coke and a beer. What seems like a bizarre whim reveals itself as a metaphor: a refusal to choose between two distinct male archetypes, each offering a different kind of capital. In this act, Lucy embodies the consumer caught in a market of curated partners, desiring not connection, but possession.

The film forces us to ask a disturbing question: Is love still sacred or has it been reduced to surplus value?

Filler, Fantasy, and Feminism

Materialist performs a high-wire act. On the surface, it sells itself with the sweet appeal of a rom-com. But beneath the charm lies a serrated critique of romantic ideology, particularly the kind fed to women through decades of cinematic spoon feeding.

The film juxtaposes two visions: the rom-com fantasy of “unicorn men” and the cynical realism that quietly acknowledges those ideals are artificial constructs. And yet, it doesn’t fully escape the gravitational pull of the very formula it critiques.

It flirts with sincerity, only to undercut it with irony. It mocks love’s transactional dynamics, yet plays them out with a wink. I believe this tonal whiplash isn’t just accidental, it’s the point of the movie.

But where Materialist truly earns its weight is in its feminist Ideology. From frame one, the film engages with the legacy of the male gaze as a societal structure. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, wrote:

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

Lucy is a watched woman, trained to view herself through the lens of her perceived value to men. Her worth is a reflection, not an essence. She’s a curated profile, a mirror held up to the male gaze. In this world, beauty becomes a form of labor. A woman’s body is capital, and like any good investment, it must be improved, optimized, maintained.

Naomi Wolf warned us of this in The Beauty Myth: As women gain power in public life, beauty standards intensify as a backlash, a soft and seductive form of oppression disguised as empowerment. Feminine power becomes permitted only in exchange for bodily conformity.

The film, at its sharpest moments, critiques this system without slipping into didacticism. It mocks the absurdity of cosmetic perfection but never fully dismisses the emotional violence behind them.

In the algorithmic dating world portrayed here, the female body becomes both bait and brand. The ultimate cruelty isn’t that women are judged by their beauty; it’s that they are taught to judge themselves by it too.

Love, in this context, it’s about compliance. And the romantic comedy, historically, has been the most glamorous propaganda machine for this ideology and the Materialist knows this.

The illusion of Marriage

By the third act of Materialist, you’d think we’re deep into satire, a deliciously dry takedown of capitalist romance. But then, without warning, the film does the very thing it swore it wouldn’t: it buys the bouquet, signs the contract, and sells us the ending we’ve been taught to crave.

And suddenly, we’re not watching a critique. We’re watching another rerun.

Lucy, our anti-heroine spends most of the film unraveling the fantasy of love. Her job is to assess, analyze, and optimize human connections like they’re investment portfolios. She believes in data over destiny. She doesn’t fall in love! She always performs value assessments. In her worldview, marriage is not a fairy tale. It’s a contract.

And she’s not wrong. The movie articulates this beautifully: that modern love, especially among the upper class, is often a merger of social capital and emotional labor. A contract of mutual benefit dressed up in white lace and curated Instagram posts. Marriage, in this sense, is the final acquisition: a long-term investment in status, security, and societal approval.

This isn’t a new idea. As Friedrich Engels once noted in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, marriage in bourgeois society is rooted not in love but in property:

“The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife… It is the economic basis of marriage which determines its form.”

The film takes this idea seriously. Lucy is a product of this economic cynicism. She packages love into algorithms, reduces men into résumé bullet points, and treats emotional intimacy like brand equity. Even her eventual love interest is assessed on risk vs. reward.

But then comes the ending…. 😣 ✳️SPOILER ALERT✳️

Instead of breaking free from this machine, the film closes with Lucy choosing to marry!

A decision that contradicts everything she’s spent the film establishing. It wants to show us “growth.” It wants us to believe she’s changed. That love is real. That people are more than commodities.

But the truth is, Lucy didn’t change, she just adapts. And worse, the film asks us to cheer for it.

Where once Materialist positioned itself as a subversion of the rom-com genre, its conclusion plays by the rules it once mocked. We’re offered a feel-good, formulaic ending, not unlike a rebranded product rollout. The satire melts into sincerity, and that sincerity is laced with sugar so sweet it could rot your brain.

It’s not that marriage can’t be sincere. It’s that this marriage after all that critique, feels like a surrender. A betrayal of the film’s own self awareness.

In the end, love is still a brand. But maybe that’s the final joke…

Maybe Materialist is less about exposing the machine and more about showing how seductive the machine really is. That no matter how smart, how radical, how cynical we become, we still want to believe in love. Even if we know it’s just another product we’re too addicted in to return.

🎬 Final Thoughts:

Materialist is a brilliant contradiction. A neoliberal rom-com dressed in socialist theory. A movie that critiques the system while cashing in on it. Its ending may be hollow, but its questions echo. It’s messy, hilarious, occasionally hypocritical.

Final Rating: 7/10 stars.

Perfect for a date night, followed by an existential crisis. 💘