Anora, Babygirl, Companion, The Last Showgirl—just four of the most recent films over the last few months to capitalize on shades of blushing pink and a serif font, preferably italicized, borrowing from the Sofia Coppola playbook of coquettish cinema. The current upsurge of pink at the pictures can be attributed foremost to 2023’s Barbie, but what it is about this trend that has it sticking around for so long? And why is it attaching itself to psychosexual feminist dramas that critique commodified female sexuality—18+ affairs rather than the original kid-friendly Margot Robbie hit?
Each of these films ostensibly rework the ‘male gaze’ in favour of woman-centred narratives, and the use of pink ‘feminine’ aesthetics seems to emphasize this diversion from masculine cinematic stylings. Babygirl turns a dominate woman into a sexual submissive; Anora draws on femininity in a reclamation of sexualized womanhood. However, they fall into a paradoxical problem—the very commodifications of femininity they critique also enable their success, relying heavily on normative, idealized notions of womanhood to buoy their gender politics.
This seems to be a continual problem in Hollywood depictions of femininity—an inability to divest girlish aesthetics from critical commentary—leaving us with a series of films that, in tone and aesthetics, feel eerily similar. For a moment, more drawn to the aesthetics than the complexities of plot, I find myself asking: do these films undermine feminist storytelling through their continued valourization of girlish aesthetics? Or, in utilizing the trappings of tradwifery and girls’ culture, do they offer subversion?
These aesthetics are particularly prevalent online today, with a notable return to girlishness—either seen as regressive or transgressive depending on who appears on your FYP. This return is just as present in the reclamation of the bimbo as in the cottagecore-to-tradwife-to-republican pipeline. Pink is in, as are coquette-ish white dresses, bows and dolls hanging from expensive bags. Trends like “I’m just a girl,” “girl dinner,” and “I dress for little girls not for the male gaze,” can offer liberating strategies to explore the female experience as modulated by patriarchal norms. By saying “I’m just a girl,” women can expose the paradox of men expecting them to be responsible housewives while also denying their capacity to care for themselves. Here then, is a sign that perhaps the rosy aesthetics of films about women might actually be a critique of patriarchal femininity.
There is something insidious about pink bows and hyper-femininity when it is often utilized as a technique to attract women to traditionally oppressive lifestyles, just as the ‘girlboss’ of the previous decade attempted to romanticize capitalist servitude. It’s worth noting that this trend is reflected in films tackling feminist issues, documenting archetypal cultural figures such as the girlboss, the sex worker, and the mother—cloaking them all in girlish aesthetics.
Whilst nostalgic, girlish femininities are trending at the moment, they’ve been popular in depictions of what you could call ‘women’s issues’ since the turn of the century. Tracing the genealogy of cinematic girlhood is a project beyond the scope of this article, but for a quick TLDR, Sofia Coppola has had a lot to do with it. Being a Coppola in cinema is big business, and Sofia is big in the business of sentimental-izing white, middle-class girlhood.
Coppola has shaped the girlish aesthetics that are now beloved by women online—cute tchotchkes and dreamy remnants of childhood, being a princess and a doll. In many ways, her work allowed lonely teenaged girls to see themselves on screen, and her corpus stood out against cinema ostensibly for women, yet lavished in masculine narratives and sexualizing aesthetics like the boy-centric teen cinema of the noughties. In doing so, she has to be credited for making girlhood an acceptable cinematic subject, legitimizing her aesthetic approach to storytelling, and turning kitsch into something desirable—evident in how many films draw on her palettes, aesthetics and stylings today.
Coppola does, however, paint a very specific picture of girlhood innocence, beauty, and grace. Not unlike much of the divine feminine energy, balance your hormones, homemaker content we’re subject to today, her films fairly consistently feature blonde, middle to upper-class girls that can afford the visual aesthetics of romantic femininity because of these privileges. The struggles of girlhood ennui and entrapment often resemble a gilded cage—certainly relatable for many women, yet only scratch the surface of the multiplicities that girlhood has to offer.
The persistency of pink and white representations of adolescence in media suggests that marginalized femininities, those outside of WASP culture, are seen as insufficiently aesthetic or less interesting to directors and audiences. There have been endless online discourses about whether aesthetics like coquette, cottage-core, and Lolita are exclusive to privileged white women, and this resonates with the broader concerns for this type of media—are the only women whose sexualities are worth being made cute, girlish, and feminine, those who are white?
And since we’re asking questions, we may want to ask whose stories are worth telling, according to the models we see on the big screen? And whose stories are worth telling beautifully? Cinema is more attracted to the glamour of performance and sex work, as in Anora and The Last Showgirl, than it would ever be in the lives of women who engage in these less aesthetically-pleasing labours. Recent films that embrace pretty pink hues overwhelmingly centre on white privilege, reinforcing the idea that these stylings are for the few rather than the many.
Of the films I have highlighted as bearing the stamp of girly femininity, their focus on female loneliness and isolation risks an insular perspective that overlooks the intersections shaping our lives, and in turn are telling stories that can be construed as one-note. By indulging in aesthetics that are already exclusive to a select few types of people, this risk becomes heightened.
Two decades in to Coppola’s reign over teenage girls’ bedrooms and we’re now in a particularly regressive period of gender politics. The girlboss, for all her sins, died and was replaced by the newer—yet somehow older—prototype of clean girls and conservative values. There seems to be a rejection of the more androgynous femininities of the nineties, aughts, and 2010s, in favour of elegance, 1950s nostalgia, and dominant men (if BookTok is anything to go by). Stories about women increasingly wrapped in dreamy, nostalgic imagery, the enticing muted pastels of Babygirl and Companion exemplifying this romanticized tinge on the female character study.
To some extent, it feels like cinema needs—or wants—to hide character studies and explorations of power and sex behind the shiny veneer of girlishness and normative femininity. We are stuck telling the same stories of transactional sexuality (whether it be a CEO or an escort) from the perspective of women who can play the part—women who are conventionally feminine and white, for whom the pink aesthetic was made.
Their cutesy appeal may serve to lure women in and then set fire to a latent feminist awareness in them. The aesthetics could be read as a reclaiming of femininity that has been forced upon women—but can fem white women ‘reclaim’ something that was always theirs? I worry this encourage a focus on aestheticized storytelling over substance, and by repeatedly returning to the same aesthetics, we remove the possibility of exploring the stories of less represented women: queer women, masculine women, women of colour, disabled women, fat women—for whom the Coppola aesthetic wasn’t made for, and who, therefore, seem to be pushed out of today’s girly cinematic preferences.