Trends on TikTok have a way of burning fast and hot. By now you’ve probably already heard or seen the clip of Julia Fox pronouncing the name of the Safdie Brothers’ 2019 film Uncut Gems in an odd way. The conversation happened while Fox, who at the time had been making media rounds due to her brief relationship with Kanye West, was a guest on the podcast Call Her Daddy. Podcast host Alex Cooper asks Fox if she considers herself Kanye’s muse.
If you
watch the whole clip, the conversation doesn’t seem that odd. We hear about Fox’s first date with Kanye (He really likes Uno! They go to Carbone!) But taken out of context, Fox’s comment that she was Josh Safdie’s muse, and specifically her pronunciation of the film’s title, comes off as odd and perhaps a little self-aggrandizing, which makes the clip ripe for meme-ification.
Putting aside the fact that
I thought we were done making fun of women for how they speak — both Cooper’s and Fox’s voices in the conversation include vocal fry and upward inflection — I am less interested in the meme aspect of this video, and more interested in the concept of being a muse, and how its meaning has changed over time. Cooper even asks Fox what it means to be a muse, a question that she never satisfactorily answers.
In Greek mythology, the muses were considered the font of inspiration for a variety of fields, and not just creative ones. The daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the nine nymphs represented epic poetry, love poetry, history, music, tragedy, sacred poetry, dance, comedy, and astronomy. In the time of oral traditions, performances of music, poetry, and storytelling were often preceded by an invocation to the nymphs. Mythology says that their presence
manifested as whispers into the ears of those that invoked them. In a 2013 paper called “Of Memory and Muses: The Wellsprings of Creativity,” Alissa Michelle Cook writes
The Muses are both story-keepers and story-creators— providing both guidance (rules for reproduction) and inspiration (pathways to production). Thus, their nature could be described as paradoxical. The nine goddesses stand in the place between memory and creativity. They take the old and make it new again, but they work according to their own purposes. They are rarely seen unless they choose to be seen. The Muses are sometimes fickle and often unpredictable. They are known for their elusive nature, and (Francine) Prose suggests that their elusiveness has contributed to their persistence in culture.
Author Elizabeth Gilbert recounts an evocative story about muses from poet Ruth Stone in her
Ted Talk (the good stuff starts at around 6:30).
She told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape… it would come barreling down at her over the landscape… and she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.”*
In other words, the Muses were the givers of the story. But in the modern era, the phrase has come to mean something more like the vessel onto which the story is projected.
I recently watched the film Star 80, based on the life of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten. Stratten was just 20 when she became Playmate of the Year, and on a meteoric path to stardom when she was brutally murdered by her husband, Paul Snider. At the time of her murder, Snider and Stratten were separated, and Stratten was romantically involved with actor and director Peter Bogdanovich, who was two decades older than her.
The film is based on a 1980 Village Voice article called “
Death of a Playmate”, which starts with the line “Dorothy Stratten was the focus and the dreams and ambitions of three men.” Even in death, Stratten has repeatedly been referred to as the muse for Snider, Bogdanovich, and Hugh Hefner, even th0ugh she disliked working for
Playboy and wanted to be an actress instead. (Ironically, Fox also posed for
Playboy in 2015.)
Bogdanovich expressed opposition to the film (even as he was writing his own book about Stratten’s murder), and refused to let director Bob Fosse use his name for the project. Fosse would later go on to say the film was actually about Snider, not Stratten — she couldn’t even be the subject of her own story.
The modern muse is stereotypically female, and often comes from a position of less power, not more, unlike the muses of Greek mythology. Stratten was a teenager, working at a Dairy Queen in rural Canada when she met Snider. We’ve all heard of painters’ muses of the 19th and 20th centuries, who were often mistresses or courtesans. Even the
manic pixie dream girl, a modern subgenre of muse, “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Instead of imparting creativity in whispers, the modern muse now exists solely to serve the male gaze. They’ve become a blank slate onto which men can paint their own ideas.
Fox has been a figure in her own right among New Yorks’s art scene, working as a clothing designer, painter, and photographer before her acting debut in Uncut Gems. She herself pushed back against the idea of muse-as-a-vessel in the Call Her Daddy interview, saying “I’ve earned my place to be there… I’ve put in the work. Everyone’s like ‘Look at her now, she’s at dinner with Madonna’, and actually, I set up that dinner and I invited Kanye. It looks a certain way but people don’t know the conversations happening behind the scenes.”
But in 20 years, whose name do you think will be better recognized? I would like to say Fox’s, but given the way her contributions have already been minimized thanks to a viral Tiktok sound bite, I think I know better.
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