Eat Pretty

Properly #eatpretty, this is curatorial horror that, like the rest of its stablemates in the 2019 We Are The Weirdos touring programme from Final Girls, leverages patriarchal expectation (or more properly feminine responses thereunto) and the conventions of genre to startling and good effect.

If I weren't aware of how well cask of amontillado material did on tumblr I'd wonder if there were other Poe's laws at play in social networking - here the perfect moments of self turn a product photographer into something else.

There are shades of Ballard - crystal kingdoms, chrome (or at least rose gold) framed (black) mirrors, a chorus of bloggers, a chorus of dates.

It's hard not to think of a certain subgenre of commodification of beauty given the nature of the jewellery on display, objects of desire and desire for objects hand in selfie-taking hand.

Rebecca Culverhouse's film is somewhere in a the realm of tableaux vivants, of stereogrammatic .gif sets, of brief moments somewhere around the repeated rustle that Vine left. Things, though few of them, move, though slightly, such that when there is something more resembling normal motion our expectation of pose and poise makes the conventional aberrant. Vice versa, perhaps, and not averse to vice. Gluttony of sorts, covetousness of others, and in between the flesh, the oyster pulse, shaved chests on otherwise edited torsos, stomach rumble, manicures and dead ichors, a really, and I mean really, big Jammy Dodger.

Written, directed, edited by Rebecca, harnessing not just sound design but a taut (all senses) performance by Roseanna Frascona, #eatpretty will speak to audiences in a way that links the distortions of the polished gems of social media (viz capitalism) with something harder edged, exploitative, hollow.

#eatpretty screened at the 2019 Glasgow Film Festival as part of the Final Girls programme.