"...but where are her friends?"

Too Much and The Materialists are cautionary tales for what happens when you are an ambitious straight woman who does not prioritize female friendship and has a hard-on for charmingly adorable losers

The following contains Materialist + Too Much spoilers. Read at your own risk!

A few weeks back my oldest daughter and I went and saw The Materialists. We were both prepared to hate it because we had both been warned by friends that it was nonsensical, but we didn’t expect to react identically.

Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, is a professional matchmaker, and as much as that device feels cringe, the lack of women in her life — or even the acknowledgement of women who aren’t sniveling fools (her clientele) — is far worse. In contrast, Lucy glows with pick-me nonchalance.

“Does she not have… friends?” My daughter whispered to me, at one point in the movie when suddenly Dakota Johnson’s character leaves the man she has shacked up with and ends up at her exes door — because apparently there are no women in her life she can call post break-up, or rather, no women PERIOD, who exist in the city of New York who aren’t desperate, cloying, bores.

Lucy, it would seem, is the only living cool girl in New York.

This modern-woman-without-a-single-woman-friend-on-screen-archtype baits my rage like whoa, especially when women my age are at the helm of said projects and while And Just Like That is, indeed a trainwreck, at least it continues to prioritize female friendship even if Carrie isn’t exactly the kind of friend anyone wants.

I had decided against writing about The Materialists because I had nothing constructive to say until, over the weekend, after binge-watching the new Lena Dunham series, Too Much, a different teenage daughter asked the same question regarding Jessica (played by the brilliant Megan Stalter) and her lack of girlfriends.

“Does Jessica… have… even one girl friend?”

The answer, once again, was no.