Resurrector: Glitter

In 2001, ten days after the 9/11 attacks, Glitter premiered in theaters. In the film, Mariah Carey stars as Billie Frank, a gifted vocalist and club dancer who makes it big in early 1980s New York City, after she is discovered singing background vocals for a plastic diva. Billie and her manager, the downtown DJ who plucked her out of the club, a tortured artist and impresario named Dice (Max Beesley), gamble big on her talent. Predictably, they also fall in love. Owing to its thin plot, misplaced mood, production delays, and what Carey has characterized as extensive rewrites and meddling from producers and other bigwigs, including her ex-husband Tommy Mottola, who was then a powerful music executive, Glitter is considered one of the worst movies of all time. Indeed, it fails to capitalize on a tried-and-true Hollywood romantic formula. It’s A Star Is Born, dimmed, demoted, sent straight to video; Mahogany unvarnished; The Bodyguard’s badly coordinated body double; Sparkle sputtered, snuffed out.

To paraphrase a line from an old Dave Chappelle skit, what can you say about Glitter that hasn’t already been said about Cinderella’s glass slipper? It is a shiny piece whose condition of being lost in the shuffle and in the unfurling of mythos—in this case, the tragedies of the 9/11 attacks, and the national storytelling associated with it—is its central symbolic feature. What can you say about the movie that hasn’t already been observed about confetti splooged out of canons and trampled in Times Square? It’s a fucking mess that sometimes looks great. The camerawork zips, fast-forwards, zags, whiplashes from one dead-end plot point to the next, one enervating set piece to another. Its speed is just kinetic emptiness, like the ragged, nonstop motion of an activity induced by uppers. To employ one last, ridiculously belated description of its character, Glitter is an upturned sugar stick, its sparkly sediment shimmering in the sun, still sticky on your hands hours—in this case years—later.