My streaming gem: why you should watch Catfight
Onur Tukel’s 2016 “black and blue comedy” Catfightis catharsis by proxy. It goes without saying that the world is absurd and there’s a lot to be mad about. It’s far from a new sentiment but still, it’s one most keenly felt this year in particular. Pandemics, protests, presidents – it barely scratches the surface of the things we’re getting riled up about in 2020, whether righteously or not. But where to turn to release all that building tension? You watch someone else do it in your stead, of course.
Catfight is simple in concept and execution – two entitled, upper-class women meet multiple times over the duration of the film to do little more than beat the absolute living snot out of each other. There’s more to it than that, sure – most glaringly, a pointed if a little boggling indictment of US imperialism and the war on terror, but if we’re being honest, there is nothing so thrilling as watching Anne Heche beat up Sandra Oh so badly that she ends up in a coma.
It’s hard to believe that Veronica (Oh), a haughty, wine-fuelled trophy wife to a not-so-secretly closeted businessman, used to be friends with Ashley (Heche), a struggling lesbian artist who berates her baby-voiced assistant and doting wife, alike. But college is a far cry from the cutthroat nature of New York high society and when Veronica sees Ashley working as a caterer at her husband’s party, the smugness she doesn’t even attempt to hide at seeing her old friend fall so low, is truly deserving of the finishing KO Ashley will deal her in under five minutes’ time.
But with the final blow does not come absolution, there is no sense of vindication or justice. The film and the actors alike go a long way to conveying the nuances of both women – Ashley is not an underdog dishing out just deserts and Veronica isn’t some black-hearted villainess. Ashley’s ambition and demand for recognition is her worst quality but her desire to start a family with her wife, Lisa (Alicia Silverstone), slightly softens her sharp edges.
Veronica on the other hand is sniping and conceited but her ignorance over the state of her marriage and regret over not engaging with her son more bring a needed element of sympathy to the character, due to Oh’s earnest portrayal. Granted, these two women are largely unpleasant but the film makes it pertinent to understand that neither are more or less deserving of support or what hardships await them. And many hardships there are.
The next fight, years later, doesn’t take you by surprise like the first one does, but it’s just as brutal. To call it the female version of David Fincher’s Fight Club at first seems flippant but soon feels quite apt. While the men in Fight Club are bored with their lives and seek release in basement brawls, the women of Catfight do not have such a luxury – overwhelmed by what life has dished out, they have hit a limit, with no other choice but to lash out and not without consequence too (as there often are for women). The fight does not bring glory or peace of mind, just heartache and more pain than maybe it’s worth – and what is more womanly than that?
Catfight is sexy in title alone – there are no barely clad women pawing and scratching each other. It’s mesmerising but not remotely romantic. These aren’t two well-oiled gladiators stepping to the plate to defend home and honour, they are two big cats, brutish and volatile, swiping at each other’s necks. Their instincts are base and they are out for blood, which they get in abundance.
The fights are a cacophony of comic book-esque jabs and hits, interspersed with Beethoven’s Symphony No 5. Both the cracking impacts of the punches and the sheer gall to get involved in a street fight while wearing white jeans will leave you wincing. It’s horrific but feels inevitable, natural, even.
There’s little room in Catfight to hash out the morals of wrong and right. Both parties do untold damage to each other, both deal with loss, helplessness and rage – “You remind me of someone” says the orderly assisting Ashley in her physiotherapy at the same hospital Veronica was ejected from two years prior. She snipes at him much in the same way Veronica did – quite frankly, both these women are as bad as each other. But the thought of comeuppance is at the back of this film’s mind, there is far more consideration of the violent act itself, the matter of rage and the ways in which we release it, being the focal point. Which in itself is a thrill to witness. It is unimportant why you’re angry, just that you are. At a time when collective rage has hit a new peak but propriety dictates that regardless of how you’re feeling, no, you really shouldn’t start a fight club to deal with pent-up frustrations (for one, it wouldn’t be social distancing compliant), Catfight gives you permission to feel the upset and simultaneously provides an acceptable outlet. There’s a lot to be mad about in this world we live in, sure, but at least this film isn’t one of them.
Catfight is available on Netflix in the US and UK
been accused of being artificial, but they acquired their talent for turning their lives into entertainment naturally.
The Kardashians are often used as a shorthand for all that’s wrong with modern celebrity culture, invariably by people who never watched the often funny, always surreal show. They’ve been blamed for the rise of selfies, butt implants and Botox. (The family are coy about what changes they’ve made to their physical appearance, but it is shocking to compare photos of the parodically glamorous family now with ones of them pre-2007 in which they appear jarringly human.) In an era when the fashionable pose for female celebrities is to encourage “body positivity”, the Kardashians promote appetite-suppressing lollipops and “waist trainers”, and none of it dents their popularity. They are not woke, and arguments over whether they are selfempowered feminist icons or “a bunch of talentless narcissistic brain-dead bimbos” entirely miss the point of them. They are capitalism in human form, utterly meaningless except for the meaning onlookers place on them.
Never mind, for the moment, the Trumps: the Kardashians are America’s true 21stcentury family. No one else has come close to their omnipresence, their bizarre rise and their fascinating back story. Trump made his money by family inheritance, which feels positively European. The Kardashians, who admittedly were never paupers, made their billions by making themselves over entirely, and then selling themselves wholly, and there’s nothing more American than that. Many take a lofty pride in affecting not to know all the family’s K-prefixed names, and for the record, it’s Kris the mother, Kourtney, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, and then – from Kris’s second marriage to Bruce, now Caitlyn, Jenner – Kendall and Kylie. (There is also a little seen brother, Rob, but men rarely hang around for long in Kardashian world, whether they’re boyfriends or siblings.)
Yet no matter how hard some might try, the Kardashian influence is unavoidable. Open the New Yorker and there is a profile of Kim’s makeup artist, Mario Dedivanovic; turn on the news and there’s Kim giving a press conference at the White House about her efforts to reform the criminal justice system.
“Even if you’ve never seen a single episode of their show, chances are that you’ve bought a Kardashian-fronted or backed something (Pepsi? Calvin Klein? Proactiv?),” one New York Times journalist wrote last year. Kim is married to arguably the greatest musician of the 21stcentury, Kanye West. Her sisters have been married to or dated some of the biggest hip-hop and sports stars. Whatever you’re interested in, it’s highly likely it’s been Kardashianised.
They are not the first people to become famous via a reality TV show and sex tape. They aren’t even the first people they know to take that route: Paris Hilton, Kim’s sort-of friend, went there first. But the family realised there was far more potential in this path than Hilton mined, partly because their rise coincided with the rise of social media. They can earn up to $1m (£770,000) every time they promote a product on Instagram; last year, Kendall, 24, reportedly earned $26.5m with just 53 sponsored posts on Instagram. The youngest, Kylie, famously caused Snapchat to lose $1.3bn in value when she tweeted: “Soo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me … ugh this is so sad.”
Kim has three times as many followers on Instagram as all of Conde Nast’s US magazines combined. Thanks to social media, the Kardashians are one of the most powerful media companies in the world, and that is how they now make the majority of their money, thereby rendering their TV show pointless. The Kardashians showed the true potential of reality TV and also made it obsolete. Now all wannabe influencers and celebrities use social media to build their brands.
“Are Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Kendall and Kylie America’s savviest CEOs?” the New York Times asked last year. An even savvier one is their mother,
Kris, who is generally referred to as her daughters’ “momager”. In an early episode of the show, Kris supervised Kim’s nude photoshoot for Playboy: “You’re doing great, sweetie!” she called out encouragingly. (In Klassic Kris style, she trademarked the phrase last year.) When it was announced that Kylie, then 20, had unexpectedly had a baby, it was reported that her mother was “concerned” how this would affect Kylie’s makeup line (she needn’t have worried: despite the baby, the makeup made Kylie a billionaire, just as Kim’s makeup line later did for her.)
The reality show was originally Kris’s idea. “She said: ‘We will be vulnerable at all points of impact, no matter what presents itself,’ and that struck me,” the TV producer Ryan Seacrest later recalled. This decision to embrace drama, rather than present solely aspirational versions of their lives, distinguished the Kardashians from Hilton, and helped them to overtake her. Kim’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries, her tearful retelling of the time she was held up at gunpoint in her Paris hotel room, the infidelities of the sisters’ boyfriends and husbands: all were captured on the show, and helped the family sell more products.
They have been – often unwittingly – at the forefront of social trends, such as when Bruce came out as transgender in 2015. The release of Kim’s sex tape, as well as her penchant for posting topless photos of herself, sparked discussions of “slut-shaming”. Most of the Kardashian/Jenner women are in mixed-race relationships, reflecting how normal this has become in America, although they have also been accused of “blackfishing”, or appropriating African American aesthetics, in their photos.
Not even the Kardashians can be blamed for the election of Donald Trump, but it doesn’t feel coincidental that the rise of America’s first reality
TV president coincided with the rise of America’s first reality TV family. KUWTK – with its often semi-scripted feel – bent the definition of reality to its will, just as Trump, who repeatedly managed to bankrupt casinos, played the part of a smart businessman on The Apprentice. The Kardashians and Trump are a simulacrum of authenticity, and the distance between them can be measured with a finger. They present a vision of dynastic power, unlimited wealth and gleeful tackiness, and they have proved there is a huge appetite for this artifice in the US. Although her husband’s bid for the presidency has stumbled, there has long been speculation about Kim’s political ambitions. While appearing on CNN in 2018 to talk about her prison reform campaign, she was asked if she’d ever run for president. “I guess, never say never,” she replied. At this point, few things would be less surprising.