NAOMI: In Fashion Exhibition

13.07.2024

Dr. Suneel Mehmi

I did not pay attention to fashion when I was a child. I never read any newspapers or watched the news until I had my Cambridge interview coming up when I was seventeen and I was told I had to start doing that because no one had ever told me to read a newspaper before. I was not exposed to Western culture except in pop music, largely American TV shows and commercial films. So, the first moment I will always remember of Naomi Campbell is in a music video: Michael Jackson’s ‘In the Closet’ in 1992 when I was ten years old. Despite all the allegations and the overtly sexual nature of the song which sometimes threaten to spoil the delight of the music and singing, this is one of my favourite songs by Michael Jackson whose music I grew up with as a small boy. I was dazzled by Naomi, her perfect looks and her statuesque body in this song, her exhilarating dance moves. The curves of her impossibly long legs. She was the kind of woman I had never seen before in my life, me who lived outside of London in a white area with very little diversity. She was the kind of woman that made you notice that there were women in the world. She did not look like she was real. Looking at her was like looking at a different, glamorous, ideal world.

The next moment with Naomi is again something that I would never forget my whole life. The year was 1994. Now, I was twelve years old. We were watching Top of the Pops which I watched regularly because I have always loved singing for as long as I can remember. Suddenly, Naomi Campbell came onto the screen in an Indian sari. I had watched Hindi song and dance routines with women in saris my whole life in Hindi films (‘Bollywood’ – a term I don’t like to use because it is so derivative of Western cinema and Hollywood). But here, instead of the fair skinned Indian actresses that I had always seen, who were usually petite and curvaceous, here was a statuesque, dark skinned woman in Indian dress. It was an unexpected, dazzling, amazing sight. Back then, you didn’t really see women in saris singing songs on Top of the Pops. There wasn’t diversity on British television (has anything really changed there?) The performance was absolutely unique. And Naomi was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my entire life and looked even more beautiful in the sari, because that was from our culture.

You can see this performance here:

That moment is how I will always remember Naomi Campbell. She often wears saris. Because her ethos in fashion is to promote diversity and to celebrate the style that Western fashion has ignored – India and Africa.

As you can imagine, my visit to the Naomi Campbell exhibit at the Victoria and Albert museum was a trip down memory lane, with perhaps one of the most remarkably beautiful women that had made an impact upon me as I was entering puberty. I got a chance to see what I had not seen at the time – Naomi walking on the catwalk, Naomi the activist. Naomi on the magazine covers. I had only known her as a dancer and a singer. Now, I finally got to see what she was as a supermodel.

I was wary of these celebrity exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert museum before. That is because I was not really a fan of any of the celebrities that they were showing. Now, here I was, a fan of the exquisite beauty of Naomi Campbell. The exhibition made you feel close to her passage to fame and to her. It showed you the life that she was living, the clothes that she wore, the people who she was friends with. The exhibition enhanced the sense of connection you feel to remarkable people, the basking in the glory of their achievement that makes you rekindle the love you feel for your idols. More than this, the exhibition showed you the impact that your idols made on the world around them at the time, the fans that shared your passion for this amazing human being.

In the exhibition, they said that Naomi was seen as being able to wear any kind of fashion costume and make it look good, to pull it off. That wonderful athletic dancer’s body that she has, the imposing tallness, the statuesque quality, it works on everything. Whatever she wears looks dynamic and fluid, and, in fact, many of her clothes were figure-hugging. You could sense the powerful quality of being able to wear anything when you looked at the clothes on the mannequins. The clothes, beautiful as they were, looked lifeless without her in them. She exuded power and confidence, the energy of the noble beauty that she has in her appearance and within her. The style.

People often remark on my clothes. But some of them are very cheap clothes from market stalls and most of them have been bought at a sale because no one else wanted them, or could wear them. It is not the clothes themselves that make them look good. It is the body. I tell people this whether they believe me or not – the clothes look good because I am within them and I have absolute confidence in myself, despite being short, thin and not being particularly broad. Someone once told me that I look good in anything and a professional male model half my age once told me that he wanted to look like me and dress like me when he was my age. Naomi Campbell had even more of this quality of super confidence than me, perhaps more than anyone else. And with her, she has the kind of body that only a supermodel can have. Whether it is posture, gesture on the face, the apparent, easy athleticism of the body, or some kind of unconscious signification, perhaps to do with the connotations of ethnicity in a white universe, she has the body of power and visual display.

The exhibition was spectacular in every sense. And the appeal of it was that women want to imitate the power and confidence that Naomi has. There was a catwalk where you could walk like Naomi, become her in a sense. Watch yourself in a video as you become her. She is a role model for so many women and for women that are non-white, proof that you can rise to the absolute top despite prejudice, racism and a lack of real diversity in this society. However, I did note to myself how she was able to achieve this success: by being absolutely extraordinary. By being one of the most beautiful people alive. By having that air of absolute confidence, dynamism, power. These qualities are rare and not easy to replicate. And they show you how ethnic minorities have to achieve this level of success in this society: by being a million times more talented than white people, this being the ‘fairness’ and ‘meritocracy’ of this society.

Exhibition: The Time is Always Now – Artists Reframe the Black Figure (Some Notes)

National Portrait Gallery

02.05.2024

https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/the-time-is-always-now

Summary: Artwork from the African Diaspora. The website says:

”As well as surveying the presence of the Black figure in Western art history, we examine its absence – and the story of representation told through these works, as well as the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which they were produced”.

Notes:

– The title ‘The Time is Always Now’ comes from James Baldwin in the 1960s writing about the civil rights struggle.

My comment: So the aim of the exhibition is to combat racism and this is what it should be judged on – if it is giving dignity, equality and positivity to the black figure. Is it?

Overall impressions:

Goes through quite a lot of the current thinking about racism like ‘double consciousness’ when non-white people have to look at themselves through a white perspective as well as their own non-white perspective, etc. Educational for people that haven’t experienced racism and don’t really understand what it is like.

The art is presented as educational and as being completely resistant to racism. Can art be unambiguous and not contradictory like that? How easy is it to escape racism and to be free in terms of artistic vision and in your expression?

And how beautiful are the artworks? Were they captivating? Art does not have to be apolitical to be beautiful. But I wonder whether there were any pieces of great beauty in this exhibition.

Some Works Which Caught My Attention

As Sounds Turn to Noise (bronze sculpture)

Thomas J Price

https://www.galleriesnow.net/artwork/as-sounds-turn-to-noise

The artist says this is a composited fictional character ‘which really looks at the value systems contained within portraiture and monuments’. He was supposed to be giving power and grandeur to ‘fictional everyday people’, the under-represented black people excluded from art history and classical sculpture.

My Comment: Why closed eyes? The artist says she is embracing ‘the inner world that she’s manifesting there and trying to bring clarity perhaps, to all this noise around us’.

I wrote a book about the valuation of symbolic blindness in imperialistic, racist and misogynistic Victorian Britain. When blindness stood for power. Are the eyes closed because of this association from the past? Devaluation of sight in this system of valuation as in Western culture – when for Indians it is the queen of the senses and the motor of revolution.

The statue stands right at the front of an exhibition where we are looking – a guide to how we are supposed to see the rest of the exhibition?

Composited photographs from Victorian Britain by Galton were used to isolate supposed ‘racial features’ – how distanced is this sculpture from that process of racism and essentialisation when we are talking about race and the black figure reframed?

Ivan (painting)

Jennifer Packer

https://www.studiomuseum.org/artworks/ivan

My favourite painting in the whole exhibition. This is an intimate portrait of one of the artist’s friends and family. It is about a ‘human relationship’, not a person.

The face is caught in a mood of introspection. A thinking man. A reflection on thought and on the minds that give us our personality, that create our relationships with others. The restricted palette of pink is beautiful: textured, cloudlike, dreamy. Details make up the piece, there are no flat colours, many many colours. Complication. Nuance in technique. The enigmatic meaning of the feet – one clothed foot, one bare. The play between the spectacle of the body and the covering of the clothes, the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’. A drip of paint falls from the black figure as it escapes into liquid from form. There is an air of insubstantiality, dissolution, as though everything is melting away.

The thoughts of this thinking man are what are highlighted by the artist in the personal relationship. So is she connected to him because he thinks? And what is the emotion here about that connection and his thinking? It is a mysterious image, a puzzle. Maybe her thoughts about him are unresolved, oscillating between definite form and the cloudiness that informs the image. An ambigious, contradictory and paradoxical image.

Seeing through Time

Titus Kaphar

Seeing Through Time, 2018

A painting I found very beautiful too.

This is supposed to ‘dismantle’ an exclusionary Western visual representation and to subvert it. The artist is replacing the white female figures from neoclassical style paintings with black women. The artist deconstructs the western representation and removes it from the picture through cutting, etc. Then, he inserts the black figure – inclusion.

In this painting, the black serving figure for the white woman then serves the black woman instead, so the racial power disappears from the image.

The white figure disappears and becomes a black face. However, there is a sophisticated point to this image: the white figure is still providing the frame for the black face. Blackness is still being seen through the frame of whiteness. If you look carefully, one of the eyes is cut off by the outlines of the white figure that has been cut out. The black eye is limited by the white outlines that have been given to us from history. There is a tired self-awareness in this image.

The black face inside the white frame looks sad. Her own body is missing – the black body. Even her hair – with all of its power and symbolism – is not being presented. We are seeing the fragment of a black woman’s body – she still hasn’t achieved full representation. The image conveys the sadness of racism and the artist’s rendition of the black figure. It is still a work in progress, still unattained. The Time is Always Now…

Internalising Stereotypes: Suggested Identities, Individuality and Free Choice

25.04.2018 –

Abstract: Oppressed groups in our society internalise negative constructions of identity and learned sets of behaviours transmitted in media which override personal responsibility and individuality. They do this because they are required to exhibit such identities and behaviours on the public stage because of the constraints imposed upon them by culture.

Keywords: Stereotypes, Cultural Brainwashing, Free Will, Personal Responsibility, Negative expectations

Elaboration. Clarification. Evidence.

Speculation, even that of the armchair theorist, has to be sustained by the holy trio I have just cited. The last time I wrote, the topic was how the justice of the oppressed has been constructed as inevitably having a violent and bodily conclusion. The argument that I made was that the identity of the violent individual and even the framework of action of this individual have been transmitted across Western culture and time as a model for the behaviour and personhood of oppressed groups in our society. This is a model which they turn to in order to construct ideas of justice and individuality and to deal with injustice in this society since it is conceived of as “their own justice”, a justice that is peculiar to them and in which constructions of personhood and difference are inherent. Another reason why they turn to these models for identity and action is because they have been systematically denied any other form of expression in this society so that they cannot become factors in public thought, politics and in the apportioning of power.

There is a big assumption in the argument that I made. Instead of talking about individual responsibility, consciousness and so on, I cited the phrase “cultural brainwashing” in the key terms at the start of the speculations. I argued that individuals take up the identity and framework of action evident in the plays of Shakespeare and such productions as the recent Black Panther movie because they have been insidiously insinuated to them from the time before they have even been born.

Why have I assumed that the identity of the violent avenger is suggested to oppressed individuals and can override conventional notions of individuality, free will, conscious choice and personhood? Is there any proof of this? Just because something is there in Shakespeare and the Black Panther movie, and a similar thing seems to happen in real life, does that prove that my speculations are correct?

While I was pondering whether fiction can be invoked to prove something that happens in real life, I thought I would make a few notes on the topic of suggested identity and the internalisation of stereotypes and how both relate to free will, choice and conscious thought. To introduce the topic, I want to write about a recent change in advertising standards which you can read about here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40638343

As the BBC writes, the Advertising Standards Authority have set out a mission statement to “crack down on ads that feature stereotypical gender roles.” There were particularly aggravating examples that were cited:

One example was an advert for Aptamil baby milk formula that showed girls growing up to be ballerinas and boys becoming engineers.

Complaints had also been made about adverts for clothing retailer Gap that showed a boy becoming an academic, and a girl becoming a “social butterfly”.

What was the justification for cracking down on such adverts? As the BBC journalist writes:

The review suggested that new standards should consider whether the stereotypes shown would “reinforce assumptions that adversely limit how people see themselves and how others see them.”

“Portrayals which reinforce outdated and stereotypical views on gender roles in society can play their part in driving unfair outcomes for people,” said Guy Parker, chief executive of the ASA.

“While advertising is only one of many factors that contribute to unequal gender outcomes, tougher advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole.”

There is a simple idea at the heart of the justification of the advertising crackdown: media plays a role in constraining individuals to adopt certain identities and schemas of action. Media can determine and limit notions of personhood and action. Media can override ideas about free will and choice to produce certain types of individuals that act in a certain kind of way. Stereotypes in the media can be internalised and magnify and build on societal expectations to influence behaviour and identity. There is a qualification: media is just one factor in contributing to “unequal gender outcomes”.

The question remains, however, whether this justification is valid or not. The ASA suggests that media is just one aspect of an entire societal apparatus which is producing gender and gendered forms of identity and behaviour. They make the same claim about cultural brainwashing that I do, that such cultural brainwashing produces zombies that lack responsibility and free will. How exactly is this process of cultural brainwashing played out?

As I was thinking over this topic, trying to work out how individuals internalise expected identities and learned sets of behaviours, one persistent image kept on coming to mind. I am talking about the case of the athlete with the home crowd advantage. There is no need to focus on a particular example, since everyone knows exactly what I am talking about. Here is the typical scenario. There is a home crowd which is composed of people of the same nationality. The home crowd have one athlete in the final who is of the same nationality as them. If one looks at the past record of this athlete, there seems to be very little chance that they will win anything. The athlete’s ranking is not that good. However, the crowd expects the athlete to bring home a medal. Somehow, amazingly, the athlete performs better than he or she has ever performed in their life. They fulfil the crowd’s expectations and bring home a medal. It is the same with teams as it is with individuals.

Here, then, is the prime illustration of how a society’s expectations can be internalised in order to produce a certain identity, that of medal winner, and an expected set of behaviours, a medal winning performance. But what isn’t remarked on and what is brilliantly weird about this phenomenon is that it actually happens. How can someone whose body hasn’t ever and seemingly can’t perform at that level suddenly do what it does in the final? Why does their body and their behaviour change so radically? It is precisely because of the societal expectation that they act in a certain way and become medallists. And this societal expectation is based in nationalism and ideas of national identity. These athletes are drawing on notions of shared and constructed identities in order to behave in a certain way. All the training that they did in their life never allowed them access to a medal winning performance before. It required an internalisation of shared national identity and a meeting of the expectation and demand of the nationalist crowd in order to achieve that result.

One can see then, that individuals can internalise identities and behaviours which are expected of them by society and which themselves radically transform them and their actions in a way that is nothing short of miraculous. The expectations of a group can change the very fabric of reality. These expectations can override conscious thought – the athletes have always consciously tried to win but were never able to gain the victory, however much they trained and tried. It is the adoption of a shared cultural identity and set of behaviours by athletes which, although they are seemingly unrelated to the task in hand (after all, it is not a requisite qualification of being British that one is a gymnast or fast runner) completely changes performance and result and, indeed, alters the body at a fundamental level.

Well. Let us return to our ideas about how culturally shared negative expectations of oppressed individuals can transform their behaviour and override conscious thought, free will and choice. If the scenario in the athlete example can be seen as analogous to how a culture works, then we can see how and why negative expectations fundamentally change the character of individuals. Such expectations, transmitted though media, are internalised and are too powerful to resist. They do away with ideas about free choice, individual responsibility and individuality. Such ideas crush the very stuff that persons are made out of to reproduce stock types. They are too powerful. The group’s expectations completely overwhelm and defeat the individual. The individual can then only exhibit learned behaviour. The word exhibit is important. I think the athlete situation is analogous to the situation in culture because of one important point. Both the athlete and the oppressed individual are on display. They have to perform as though they were in a play to a society that is watching since their actions take place in public. This is why I think that the justice of the oppressed is a form of communication and perceived as the only way to express ideas about justice and the resistance to injustice.

Well, such are the speculations of the armchair theorist. What is the importance of such idle speculations and this short note on the matter? I think the significance is that in Western media, there are only really negative representations of oppressed peoples. They are always shown as violent, barbaric, backward and criminal. Where are the positive role models? When was the last time you saw a British Asian as a hero in western media? The fact is that it is negative expectations of us that are always channelled in the western imagination. If people then internalise and act on these negative expectations, which are not just in media, but everywhere around us in this society, are these people really to blame? If personal responsibility and individuality are really obliterated by group expectations, can we point the finger at perceived criminals? Surely our ideas about law and justice, which rely on notions of free will, choice and individual responsibility have to change?

Indian man out of love in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’

The Failure of Diversity: The First Indian Superhero Out of Love in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’

I was standing in a noisy, barely contained line of schoolboys outside a classroom, indulging in my usual habit of stand up comedy. It was the mid-90s. My routine consisted of an imaginary scenario where the top heroines of the time pestered me with phone calls and visits at my house. Suddenly, a teacher, a bespectacled white woman with a nasal voice, figuratively pulled me by the collar into a classroom where the sixth form girls – the only female students – were vegetating. The teacher asked the several white girls if they would ever go out with me on a date. Politely, looking down at the short ethnic minority man wearing his older brother’s cast off blazer, the girls declined.

The point of this bizarre ritual was to humiliate me, the ethnic minority man, to show that we were unworthy of romantic love. It was meant to destroy my confidence in myself. But the performance did not work. It failed. Even at the time, I knew that I had got the reaction from the girls because they were white. Everyone knew that white women thought we were undesirable. What do I mean by ‘we’? We call ourselves British Asians in England if we hail ethnically from the subcontinent. A brief quote about a male, British Asian character from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth in 2000 shows that the Western presumption is that we are not attractive:

Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till. (1)

British films like Bend it Like Beckham extend these conceptions when they represent sexual freedom and desire for British Asian woman as a release from coupling with British Asian men. America is hardly innocent of these characterisations. In The Big Bang Theory, the Indian Raj is the only one that cannot get a girlfriend, much to the amusement of the audience it would appear, who could not get enough of this running joke. In light of such racist, unspoken assumptions, the bizarre ritual that I was subjected to should not be seen as an isolated incident. As I will argue, it informs the representation of us on the screen. Ethnic minorities that have historically come from the subcontinent. Even when lip service is being paid to ideals of ‘diversity’, used as a tactic of selling movie tickets.

Kingo: The First Indian Superhero and Western ‘Diversity’

The Indian character in the Marvel Eternals team is Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani). This is a historical role, the first superhero from South Asia on a Western screen. In an interview, Nanjiani spoke of the grave responsibility of portraying Kingo in a representative way that accorded with ideals of diversity:

The responsibility is a real thing, because there haven’t been other South Asian superheroes in the MCU, or any other Hollywood mainstream movie for that matter… I can’t represent every South Asian person in the world, because we’re all completely different, right? So while there is that responsibility, I want to do a good job. (2)

Eternals itself has been marketed as a positive ‘diversity’ film. Salma Hayek (Ajak) says, “the Eternals film is a “huge” step forward for diversity and inclusivity in the film industry”, sentiments echoed by Gemma Chan (Sersi). (3) This marketing tactic has indeed influenced audience reactions. Oliver Jones of the Observer says that “one of the most impressive aspects of the Eternals is how the culturally representative team’s identities play into the theme and story in powerful and essential ways”. (4)

However, for all the talk, Kingo carries the racist, Western association of undesirability and failure at love. That is, Kingo is a failure in Western diversity, a continuous failure which is always represented, tragically enough, as a success. A short reflection on how Kingo is related to the other Eternals reveals that Kingo loves no one. Kingo is loved by no one. He is an Indian man completely out of love in all its variants, romantic and non-romantic.

Everyone else in the team of Eternals either loves a team mate, is loved by a team mate, or has a partner, as in the famous gay pairing between Phastos and his partner that showcases homosexual couples for the first time in a Marvel movie. Except, that is, for Kingo. Sersi and Ikaris love each other and have even been married at one point. Makkari and Druig are falling in love. Sprite secretly loves Ikaris. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is in a relationship of love and protection with Gilgamesh. Even Ajak, who appears to be solitary and celibate, has been described as a beacon of love by writer Chloé Zao, who comments, that the role called for “a woman with the heart the size of the ocean” and represents a powerful, maternal love. (5)

So this is Western ‘diversity’. Even when we are portrayed as superheroes, we are unattractive, out of society, unable to form not only romantic relationships, but other loving relationships. In fact, as we see when his film posters are shown, Kingo conceals his immortality by reproducing asexually in his Hindi film avatars where he is his own grandfather, father and self. He is like some virus outside of normal sexual reproduction. Ironically, one poster is for a Hindi film (‘Bollywood’) entitled ‘Yuva Prem’ (Young Love), where Kingo plays a romantic lead. It is only in another non-Western cinema and space of imagination that he can be recognised as a lover.

In contrast to Kingo (and the other ethnic minority men in the movie), the white man is constantly loved romantically by women. The main character, Sersi, only falls in love with white men. There is not only a love triangle between Sersi and two white men, but also a love triangle between Sersi, Sprite and Ikaris for the white man. The white man is repetitively, irresistibly desirable, the Indian man is supposedly not. Not only this, but in the ending of the movie, the white man’s love is the ultimate saviour of all humanity, in a reworking of the trope of the white saviour. Ikaris fails to stop Sersi’s plan to rescue humans which he believes is counter to the mission of the Eternals because he still has feelings for her. To add insult to the negative and racist depiction of an Indian man and white love supremacy, Sersi and Ikaris have an Indian wedding, attired in Indian costume. Emphasising the point that, even on the Indian’s own terrain, the white man is the victor in love.

Kingo is not absolutely, entirely excluded from the domain of love. In fact, he is the only one that can see the secret love that Sprite has for the white man, Ikaris. He is relegated to just looking at the field of love and not being a part of it. Like a sexually frustrated viewer who seeks solace in pornography, Kingo can only look at the love of others as an outsider. Also, Kingo dreams of being in the position of the desirable white man. While Ikaris steals Kingo’s sexual and romantic identity by having an Indian wedding, Kingo can only unsuccessfully play at being the desirable Ikaris on film. Thus, Kingo is introduced via the ‘Bollywood’ song sequence, for a film called “Shandaar Daastan-e-Ikarus” (The Splendid Story of Ikaris). Predictably enough, the dance performance is strained and comical.

Conclusion

The bizarre ritual that was played out in my youth, ‘proving’ my undesirability as a South Asian is a mainstay in British and American media, although it has received little critical attention. Because it is such a solidified set of implicit assumptions. When we were finally able to be seen as superheroes on a Western screen, all the old prejudices were added to our representation. The worst thing is that all of the female directors, authors and screenwriters that I have cited above all have something in common. Those that cast us as undesirable are mixed race or ethnic minority women themselves. Perhaps showing that racism against the self by such women is tactfully exploited by the Western system of representation.

Yet, Marvel has taken over the world and is celebrated for being ‘diverse’. So this is what diversity means in the modern world? In fact, Western ‘diversity’ is a continual and embarrassing failure of real representation and real inclusion. The on-screen portrayals of us in the West and their bizarre, racist rituals have always and will always fail in my eyes. Because I do not hate myself. I have been given love and status as a loving being in this world. At home, my nickname is ‘Sonu’ (‘handsome’).

1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), 273

2 Anon, “Eternals actor Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo is a genuine Bollywood superstar in these retro posters, also starring his father and grandfather”, November 12, 2021, Indian Express, https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/hollywood/eternals-kumail-nanjiani-kingo-bollywood-superstar-retro-posters-see-photos-7619071/, accessed 03.01.2022

3 Anon, “Eternals has ‘most diverse cast’ ever and is ‘huge’ step forward for film, says Salma Hayek”, Thursday 4 November 2021, https://news.sky.com/story/eternals-has-most-diverse-cast-ever-and-is-huge-step-forward-for-film-says-salma-hayek-12459569, accessed 03.01.2022

4 Oliver Jones, “Eternals’ Is a Refreshingly Romantic Reminder of the Power & Purpose of Event Films”, 10/24/21, The Observer, https://observer.com/2021/10/marvel-eternals-review-chloe-zhao-angelina-jolie-richard-madden-gemma-chan/, accessed 05.01.2022

5 Tracy Brown, “Why ‘Eternals’ cast Salma Hayek as a Marvel superhero who leads with love”, NOV. 5, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-11-05/eternals-salma-hayek-marvel-chloe-zhao-superheroes, accessed 05.01.2022