Thanks so much for reading. If you’re regularly enjoying this newsletter, would you consider upgrading to a paid subscription? I can only do this work with your help. Paid subscribers get full access to my weekend roundups, as well as a discount on Dire Straights, my new podcast with Amanda Montei. To have and to hold and to horrifyAccording to the marketing campaign for 'Together,' starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, intimacy means human-hair floss, toenail clippings, and drinking sweat.
This is not a movie review. It’s a movie marketing review. I haven’t seen Together, the new supernatural body-horror film starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, but its publicity campaign has been following me around the internet. Each new interview or viral stunt feels like a commentary on love and relationships—but more so on how the movie’s marketers are analyzing current attitudes toward love and relationships. The tl;dr of the film is that Franco’s character is “something of a man-child,” as one reviewer put it, who fears losing himself, and his “rock-star dreams,” to his relationship. But after drinking from a pool of water in a mystical underground cave, he starts to crave his girlfriend (played by Brie, Franco’s real-life wife). In Variety, Owen Gleiberman writes, “Their two bodies literally want to merge.” And they do. The earliest promotion for the film emphasized the horror of this bodily fusion. A poster featured an extreme closeup of their faces pressed together, eyeballs almost touching, and eyelashes overlapping, maybe even growing together. Another poster showed their hands seeming to burrow and fuse under each others’ skin. In a trailer, Brie’s character seemed to prepare herself to separate their bodies with an electric saw. It was after this initial marketing blitz that things got interesting. A billboard in Los Angeles featured a still from the film in which Brie and Franco kiss and their lips get stuck together. The actors reenacted the kiss in front of the billboard and called on people to similarly recreate this scene in order to enter a raffle for tickets to the film’s Los Angeles premiere. But then the marketing team was like: How about going beyond pretending and actually getting stuck together—in holy matrimony? Neon, the film’s production company, launched a raffle for a free wedding. “We want you TOGETHER FOREVER,” read an Instagram caption announcing the contest. “Propose at your favorite movie theater and enter to win a Vegas wedding courtesy of NEON.” I mean, marriage doesn’t actually fuse two people together, but it is a legal agreement designed to make separation supremely challenging and painful.
This marketing ploy is very tongue in cheek, but it plays into a real, wry, and pervasive sense of marriage as a prison into which we willingly lock ourselves. This sensibility isn’t new—just consider the notion of “the old ball and chain.” But there are plenty of cultural indicators to suggest that straight women are increasingly talking about attraction, relationships, and marriage as a trap. Neon has seized on the ironic, sarcastic, and even campy qualities of this heterofatalistic moment that we’re in. They are making the trap of intimacy, codependency, and domesticity feel terribly fun—emphasis on terrible. It’s a perfect approach for the horror genre, which traffics in aversion and disgust, but also arousal and excitement. Fittingly, Neon screened the film while recording the audience “using technology that scans pupil dilation, a biological indicator of excitement, fear, and shock.” They then released the footage, which showed closeups of people’s massively dilated pupils. (By the way, just know that I could totally write a 6,000-word essay on the “excitement, fear, and shock”—the body horror!—of hetero porn.) The campaign is ever teetering on the edge of violence. Neon is staging a pop-up shop in Los Angeles, where they will not only be selling a conjoined hoodie, but also a body saw, which is billed as, “The perfect gift for codependent lovers everywhere.” Of course, the body saw shows up in the film when they desperately try to separate themselves, but removed from that context, it starts to uncomfortably raise the specter of intimate partner violence. I know, I know, it’s meant to be absurd. It’s a joke! But it makes me think about the barely-concealed resentment and rage in so many relationships—hetero ones, especially. Is that not part of why the joke works? Is that not part of why the movie’s premise works? To go along with this view of marriage as misery, Neon offered free couples therapy for a limited time for anyone “traumatized” by the movie. They also partnered with OurRitual, an online platform for “relationship support,” to offer 20 percent off couples therapy. The landing page for the promotion features a quiz that asks, “What did you realize after watching TOGETHER?” The multiple-choice answers:
It doesn’t matter what you answer; you’re redirected to a generic intake form. If marriage means being stuck together, then you better make it work. One of the popular ideas underwriting couples therapy. is that marriage is work. This self-imposed suffering can feel masochistic and repulsive. But so, too, can intimacy and desire, and the campaign has leaned into that with a series of voyeuristic on-the-street videos posted on TikTok that are very obviously staged. One shows Franco and Brie appearing to leave a yoga studio. He grabs her workout towel, presses it to his face, and takes a big huff of it. Then he holds it over his face and appears to wring her sweat into his mouth. This is the kind of abject behavior that desire makes possible. Arousal literally reduces disgust; when we’re turned on, we’re less likely to be repulsed. In another video, they wear matching t-shirts and share a cone of soft serve, licking from it in tandem before licking at each other’s tongues. Another clip shows them lounging on a picnic blanket in a park while she clips his toenails for him.
Many of us have experienced the boundary-blurring nature of both desire and cohabitation. Toenail clippings? No big deal. How about pulling a wad of hair from the drain or wiping beard trimmings from the sink or getting a pube stuck between the teeth? Speaking of, Neon is now selling “human hair floss” at a pop-up shop in Los Angeles.  It’s a reference to a scene in the movie where Brie’s hair grows into Franco’s mouth as part of their supernatural merging, but it also feels like a nod to more prosaic experiences. The body horror of intimacy isn’t just a sense of fusion—through sex, emotional dependence, or a shared identity. It’s the reality of bodies, experienced day in and day out, in close proximity. In a video for Glamour, the couple rolled a pair of dice that, like a gross-out version of sex dice, listed everyday body parts, like “teeth” and “armpit.” They then begrudgingly licked each other’s eyelids and bit each other’s armpits. There is a grotesque sweetness implied in all of this—flossing with your partner’s hair and drinking their sweat. That contradiction is the point. It feels like the marketing team surveyed the cultural landscape and concluded that current attitudes toward love and relationships lean ambivalent and darkly humorous. I just imagine the remains of this campaign ending up in a museum in the future: human hair floss, a conjoined hoodie, a buzz saw, gross-out body dice. Yes, this is how we talked about relationships in 2025.
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četvrtak, 7. kolovoza 2025.
To have and to hold and to horrify
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To have and to hold and to horrify
According to the marketing campaign for 'Together,' starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, intimacy means human-hair floss, toenail c...
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