Olivia Rodrigo’s Saturday Night Live performance of “all-american bitch” last December started innocently enough. Posted at a dining table covered in a white tablecloth and cakes, Rodrigo—clad in a dress the color of Pepto-Bismol, a saccharine smile on her face—places a cube of sugar into a teacup. Then another, and another, and another; she plunges her whole hand into the sugar bowl. Rodrigo betrays a moment of aggression, and then switches back to her smile. But now her refinement looks creepy: uncanny, like a robot.
The mise-en-scène of the performance literalizes the crux of Rodrigo’s oeuvre, which often presents itself as ambivalence, filled with lyrics like “Seein’ you tonight, it’s a bad idea, right?/Seein’ you tonight, fuck it, it’s fine.” “all-american bitch,” a track from her recent GUTS album, finds her playing demure at one moment—the next, unhinged. By the end of the SNL performance, Rodrigo has gone from cosplaying a smiling bobblehead to raging on top of the table with red-velvet cake smeared all over her face to retreating back into table-appropriate etiquette. But the crumbs and stains remain. She looks like a doll when she coos, “I am built like a mother and a total machine”; she looks like a monster when she yells, “I don’t get angry when I’m pissed/I’m the eternal optimist/I scream inside to deal with it.”
Anger, a province off-limits to women, plays a key part in her GUTS tour. During “all-american bitch” she instructs the audience: “When the lights go down, I want you to think about something or someone that really pisses you off. And I want you to scream your heart out about it.” The end of the Saturday Night Live performance finds Rodrigo sitting on the table and swinging her feet back and forth. With her mouth lined with cake that looks like blood, she sticks out her tongue. While Rodrigo, like other Gen Z and millennial pop stars, expresses the rage and disillusionment of living in a culture made of mixed messages, her work also shows a deep level of engagement with women’s cinema, namely the work of Karyn Kusama, Věra Chytilová, and Chantal Akerman.
Rodrigo engages this legacy to show how obscuring knowledge that enables another person to make an informed decision is a form of coercion. GUTS walks its listener through the workings of American scripts that leave girls and women feeling confused, misled, and exploited—foolish to think that they could follow their own agenda. In leading her audience through this dynamic, Rodrigo’s music tries to offer young women solutions for outsmarting those who seek to destroy them.
There are hints of this interest in Rodrigo’s first album, SOUR. In “good 4 u,” she pays homage to Karyn Kusama’s cult-classic Jennifer’s Body (2009), in which a hot cheerleader (Megan Fox), falling prey to a heartthrob’s hex, becomes a succubus driven by thirst for male flesh. Jennifer’s best friend—literally named Needy (Amanda Seyfried)—narrates the film from solitary confinement after she murders Jennifer, who has killed Needy’s boyfriend. Before her death, in self defense, Jennifer bites Needy, turning her into a vampire. The film’s end finds Needy breaking out of prison thanks to the demonic powers Jennifer has transferred to her. And after Needy’s escape, she slaughters the men who turned Jennifer into a demon in the first place.
Kusama’s film is largely about women’s hunger. When Jennifer learns the heartthrob, Nikolai (Adam Brody), is only interested in virgins, she’s game to play the part: “Well if Nikolai wants innocent, I can do innocent,” she says. “I’ll be Little Miss Fucking Sunshine.” She gives him what he wants under the assumption she will get sex in return. Instead, he attacks her and turns her into someone who needs blood to survive, someone who is punished for her neediness with more neediness. Jennifer’s Body was dismissed upon release, but by 2021, Kusama’s film had been embraced by the Criterion Channel and cinephiles alike.
Rodrigo’s “all-american bitch,” both in the song itself and subsequent performance, shares a tone with Jennifer’s Body. The film is both campy and deadpan in its engagement with the virgin/whore dichotomy represented by Needy and Jennifer—a binary Jennifer tries to play with herself, to her demise. But Rodrigo, unlike Jennifer, is able to play these personas off of each other in her performances. She is someone who, in one breath, wants to “key his car” and “make him lunch” and “break his heart” and “be the one to stitch it up.” Jennifer plays “Little Miss Fucking Sunshine,” while Rodrigo belts out, “I’ve got sun in my motherfucking pocket, best believe.” Both deliver these lines with a knowing vengeance: they will give men what they purport to want. But both come out feeling angry—like they have been taken for a ride.
The Saturday Night Live performance also calls to mind the iconic food-fight scene in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), a film from the Czech New Wave in which two young women, both named Marie, exaggerate their femininity to seduce men, wreak havoc, and reflect the contradictory messages of the social order back to itself. In it, the girl-woman protagonists sneak into a dining room, revel in the food, and make a mess. Reviews were mixed: upon its premiere, the film was popular with Czech audiences and critics, but The New York Times dismissed it as “pretentiously kookie.”
Daisies, like Jennifer’s Body, went underappreciated upon its release, but is now hailed as peerless by the same paper that once dismissed it. Rodrigo, in her SNL performance, samples Chytilová’s visual language but adds a twist. Through leading her audience into the seductions of perpetual girlhood—where it is easier and cheaper to get baby botox than see a gynecologist—she gives her fanbase, composed primarily of Gen Z and generation alpha girls, an outlet for experiencing the traps lying in wait for them. In showing the fallout of these seductions, Rodrigo allows her audience some foresight into the gap between promises and realities they may encounter as they move into womanhood. And once they recognize that gap, she encourages them to express their anger.
But Rodrigo also updates the tensions driving films like Jennifer’s Body and Daisies for women coming of age in the 2020s, mobilizing the language of the gig economy to trace the way timeworn scripts—particularly those around romantic love—leave her feeling separated from herself. In “vampire,” Rodrigo speaks to a love interest, an older man, lamenting, as though looking back on the experience of being a gig worker, “you sold me for parts.” (Some fans have argued that the song also references Taylor Swift’s request for credit on Rodrigo’s song, “deja vu.”) Repeating the word “sold,” she decries feeling misled by the “Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise” and asks about “the castle you built off people you pretend to care about.” Her lover’s castle appears again in “logical,” when she sings: “You built a giant castle/With walls so high I couldn’t see.” As in “vampire,” the speaker was misled into this ostensible paradise, recalling “The way it all unraveled…You lied, you lied, you lied.”
Perhaps the darkest shadow of the world Rodrigo paints is not simply how rhetorical trickery erodes trust between Rodrigo and her environment, but between Rodrigo and herself, as she tries to recall whether she made it all up in her head. But at this point, it’s too late. Unlike Swift, who in “All Too Well,” asserts, “It was rare/I was there/I remember it” over and over, as if to convince herself of her veracity, Rodrigo shows how others’ narratives cloud her judgment and memory: “You convinced me, baby/It was all in my mind,” she sings. In this way, “logical” echoes Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For,” in which the latter mourns, “I used to know but I’m not sure now/What I was made for.” In the end, Rodrigo tells how, “You got me thinking/Two plus two equals five,” that the “sky is green, and the grass is red.” Her depiction of the bait-and-switch narrative becomes so real and suffocating that when her bridges arrive, they pierce through like freedom.
GUTS’ third to last track, “the grudge,” chronicles the move from disorientation to explosive resentment. Here again Rodrigo addresses the bloated words that drew her in in the first place: “You built me up to watch me fall/You have everything and you still want more.” Taken together, “vampire,” “logical,” and “the grudge” lay out the perils of a seductive dynamic: big promises, followed by isolation from one’s context. Soon you are living in a land where it is easier to believe other people’s stories—to cater to others’ agendas for you, even if they are exploitative—rather than fight for, or even figure out, your own.
The line accusing her listener of “building me up” to “watch me fall” is characteristic of the up-and-down direction of Rodrigo’s work, which it shares with its influences. In Jennifer’s Body, the men who seduce and put a hex on Jennifer have killed her former self. But the film’s climactic scene shows Jennifer rising out of a pool, covered in blood, and hovering in the air after feasting on Needy’s boyfriend. Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” Jennifer “rises from the ash” and “eats men like air.” Like Rodrigo’s work, Plath’s poem and Kusama’s film convey how it feels when an outside force places you on a pedestal before pulling it away, forcing a kind of reliance on them to stand back up. It is a dynamic Megan Fox has spoken about in interviews: being worshiped, killed off, and then trying to resurrect herself. In a conversation with Alex Cooper, Fox talked about how, through her celebrity persona, “people built up this character and then decided to destroy her—I don’t know why there’s a need to worship and then destroy, worship and then destroy.”
Rodrigo, in “making the bed,” builds on Chytilová’s work to touch on the way this cycle “changes my machinery.” Slicing through clichés about the purported pleasures and freedoms of early twenty-something life, she sings about “Gettin’ drunk at the club with my fair-weather friends,” admitting, “I tell someone I love them just as a distraction,” while “They tell me that they love me like I’m some tourist attraction.” While Rodrigo declares that “I’m playing the victim so well in my head,” the subtext of the song’s titular line cuts against the agency Rodrigo proclaims to have: “But it’s me who’s been making the bed.” The Spotify visuals accompanying the song show Rodrigo pulled between scripts of girlhood and womanhood. Lying in her bedroom—long a domain of girlhood—she sports pigtails in her hair but also wears lingerie and full makeup. An aerial shot depicting Rodrigo on her bed is reminiscent of a scene in Daisies that lingers on the girls in bed, also from a bird’s eye view. In Chytilová’s film, quick cuts depict the girls rolling each other up, burrito style, in their shared bed, chanting phrases such as: “Die! Die! Die” and “What will become of us?” One of them pulls out scissors, and soon the girls look two-dimensional, as though cut from a magazine. Their heads become disembodied and float above the scene, cartoonish and psychedelic at the same time. It’s a scene that delights and disorients, messing with the conventions of fragmented female bodies Laura Mulvey, almost a decade later, outlines in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Mulvey’s words, close-ups of women’s faces and body parts “[destroy] the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative,” flattening the woman character into “a cut-out or icon,” rather than a human who possesses her own subjectivity. Daisies and “making the bed” evince the violences that accompany the transition from girlhood to womanhood.
In performing suffocating domestic tasks, “making the bed” also pays homage to Chantal Akerman’s Saute ma ville (Blow up my town) (1968)—her first film, which she made as a teenager. Akerman is the short’s star, and she orbits around a kitchen, putting water on the stove and feeding her cat. But soon, just like “all-american bitch,” things take a turn towards the unsettling. Akerman, like Rodrigo, smears stuff on her face that is not makeup; like Rodrigo, she makes a mess of herself and her space. Although Akerman’s character hums gently in the beginning while moving about the kitchen, the hums begin to resemble screams, even as she keeps her mouth sealed shut. Like Rodrigo, who “[screams] inside to deal with it,” Akerman’s screams are muffled. At one point, she throws her cat out the window, bringing forth the possibility of escape—through landing or death. The end of the film finds Akerman using her kitchen and stove as agents of suicide: she seals herself in the kitchen using tape, then turns on the gas stove. When she lights it, we hear an explosion. She “blows up her town,” killing herself in the process. The gas chamber Akerman seals herself inside of is a clear reference to intergenerational trauma: her parents were Holocaust survivors, and she had family who died in the camps. At the same time, the film denaturalizes women’s domestic roles, much like Rodrigo’s SNL performance does.
The work of Kuasama, Rodrigo, Akerman, and Chytilová dance around the ways scripts structure our lives. Often these scripts are misleading, this work seems to say, but there are few ways out. In Jennifer’s Body, Nikolai invites Jennifer into his van under the guise of protecting her. A fire has broken out at the bar where they meet: he observes that it is “dangerous” to be outside watching the flames, and, like any creep, claims that his van is “safer” and “a familiar place.” The viewer knows this is a trap: it is literally a white van, straight out of SVU. But the movie, like its interlocutors, mourns whether Jennifer has other options for feeding her hunger. It also mourns the gaping silences that characterize what happened that night; we only learn what actually happened an hour into the movie, when Jennifer finally recounts it to Needy. Akerman’s work, too, is characterized by silence. Saute ma ville defamiliarizes women’s domestic roles, while Akerman’s most known work, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, chronicles what happens when these prescriptions fall away: how—without the distraction of ritual, of romance scripts, of productivity—life, especially within capitalism, can feel aimless. Sometimes, it feels like the only option is to get in that van, even if the outcome doesn’t look like it will be good.
At the same time, Rodrigo, like her predecessors, fights to find the agency within these scripts. And the result is often political. Daisies was banned in Czechoslovakia for “depicting the wanton.” According to Chytilová, censors did not pick up on the fact that the film casted the Maries as heroines and critiqued them at the same time. Rodrigo’s work is similar. In an age where social media gives us the rhetoric we need to do what we want, often invoking “self-care” in order to avoid complicity, Rodrigo’s lyrics are startingly self-aware. “Yes, I know that he’s my ex/But can’t two people reconnect?/I only see him as a friend/Biggest lie I ever said,” she sings in “bad idea right.” In “logical,” she mourns, “I know I’m half responsible/And that makes me feel horrible.” She successfully toes the line between calling herself on her bullshit while expressing real, earned rage. At the same time, Rodrigo’s work is political: abortion rights groups have a presence on her GUTS tour. Rodrigo is clearly searching for ways that women can satisfy their hunger without punishment—ways for them to have a say in the direction of the narrative, in the outcomes of their lives, especially in a post-Dobbs America.
While “making the bed,” like Akerman’s Saute ma ville, frames death as the only way out of timeworn paths, a track in the middle of Rodrigo’s album departs from expressions of self-harm. “lacy,” one of the GUTS’ strongest tracks, veers into the possibilities of the untrodden. In it, Rodrigo sings about her envy of, and devotion to, another woman. While some have taken “lacy” to be Rodrigo’s expression of lesbian desire, the song is more complicated than that. This is not a relationship of sexual attraction, or of friendship, but of sublime admiration. “I see you everywhere/The sweetest torture one could bear,” she sings. The song has an uneasy relationship with whiteness: Lacy as a name, with all of its white, virginal connotations, is not a coincidence; her eyes are “white as daisies”; she looks like Brigitte Bardot; her skin is like “puff pastry.” But Rodrigo’s insistence on placing herself in the subjective position—always an I, always a gazer—undercuts what could be a song that upholds white femininity. As she belts out “it’s like you’re made of angel dust,” a sparkling bridge explodes like PCP-induced transcendence.
Rodrigo has done the near-impossible, maneuvering her career from girl actress to woman pop star, without falling into the familiar traps—appropriation, addiction, tabloid fodder—that have ensnared her predecessors. While self-aware cinema by women has been around for a long time, the genre has often occupied a space in the periphery. Rodrigo brings the form to a mass audience: rather than reappraising her in the future, pop culture, today, is ready to meet Rodrigo on her terms and take seriously what she has to say.
A pleasure and a provocation, Rodrigo’s album excavates art, some of which was once misunderstood, to crystallize the experience of coming-of-age as a woman in a disorienting world. As one viewer commented on the “vampire” music video, “olivia is like really relatable to the teenage audience like an elder sister who has been through all the phases we’re currently going through<33333.” For girls trying desperately to navigate the contradiction-paved path to womanhood, GUTS is a road map, the tourist traps and joys marked with care in glittering gel pen.