This Is My Romy Empire

If I was a guest on the Las Culturistas podcast and they asked me when I knew culture was for me, I would say it was Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette.

When it was released, I was a 16-year-old girl already obsessed with France and 80s New Wave music. So the first time I saw this movie I thought, oh my God, movies can feel like my world! I had never experienced that before.

I think about a specific scene in that movie a lot. Our titular queen, played by Kirsten Dunst, is peacefully serenaded while she reclines on a chaise. At one point, the man sitting across from her hands her a single flower. She smells it, tilting her head back in joy as the camera pans away.

For the last two decades, Sofia Coppola has brought a distinct viewpoint and unique aesthetic to film. From The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation and The Bling Ring to Priscilla, she is a true auteur filmmaker with a singular grasp on what girlhood (specifically white girlhood) entails. If you have ever been so inclined to call her movies “boring” or “self-indulgent”…well, I hate to break it to you, but girlhood is frequently boring and self-indulgent.

Anyway, back to that Marie Antoinette scene. The group of men here are not a random assortment of extras. They’re actually the French band, Phoenix— formed in 1995 in Versailles, of all places.

Phoenix’s pop earworms have probably been stuck in your head for the last 15 years, especially the bangers “1901” and “Lisztomania” from their 2009 album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. You couldn’t go anywhere in the 2010s without hearing this album. It fit perfectly into that category of bouncy indie pop that dominated the late aughts and early 2010s—think “Daylight” by Matt & Kim, “Sleepyhead” by Passion Pit, “Kids” by MGMT.

Since I was obsessed with France, I felt like I had some sort of special claim to my love of Phoenix. “AND, they’re French” I remember proudly telling a girl during orientation week in college (and yes, I majored in French, shut up!)

The man in that scene who hands Kirsten Dunst a flower is Thomas Mars, the lead singer of Phoenix—and Sofia Coppola’s husband. I love this excerpt from an interview she did with Lynn Hirschberg for the introduction to the book, Sofia Coppola Archive: 1999-2023.

LH: You also fell in love with your future husband, Thomas Mars, lead singer of the band Phoenix, during Marie Antoinette.

SC: We had met before, but now we were both single. And in Paris. Lance Acord, the Director of Photography, would be trying to get me to pay attention to the shot, but I was distracted because I was texting Thomas. I put Phoenix in the film, and now I always have a Phoenix song in every movie for good luck.

Relatable queen! Falling in love in Paris! Texting your crush when you should be working! Putting your husband’s art in your art! If this isn’t girlhood, I don’t know what is.

In 2006, Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars welcomed a baby girl, Romy. She was named after Sofia’s brother, Roman. For a long time I knew that my favorite director had kids, but I never really thought too much about it.

Then one day in March 2023, Romy Mars posted a video on TikTok that immediately went viral and cemented her as an icon. The original has very obviously been deleted, but of course you can still find it online:

At this time, we had just reached the peak of “nepo baby” mountain and were about to climb back down the other side. In December 2022, New York Magazine’s cover story was “She Has Her Mother’s Eyes. And Agent.” You couldn’t swipe or scroll or click without seeing someone weighing in on “nepo baby discourse.”

This Romy Mars video was the cherry on top of a meandering and usually pretty boring conversation about the children of famous people. Yes, children of famous people are always going to receive special attention and access to opportunities that normies could only dream of and no, they are probably never going to admit that their lineage has opened professional doors for them!

In the video, Romy explicitly states that she is not allowed to have public-facing social media accounts because her parents do not want her to be “a nepotism kid.” And who understands this better than one of Hollywood’s ur-examples of a nepo baby: Sofia fucking COPPOLA.

The crux of the entire Hollywood nepotism discourse is a frustration when the children of famous people refuse to acknowledge that they have special access that other people don’t. It’s that simple!

Acknowledging nepotism, like acknowledging any other kind of privilege, is not a commentary on someone’s talent or work ethic or ambition. The children of famous parents face a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” attitude when it comes to building their own lives. And it’s turbo-charged with Romy Mars. Because whether you want to be an actor or an accountant, the fact that Sofia Coppola is your mom, Francis Ford Coppola is your grandfather, and Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are your cousins is always going to give you special treatment.

But where others celebrities eschew or demur the conversation when it turns to nepotism, Romy addresses it head on. In fact, I think she articulates her attitude about it perfectly in in this Teen Vogue interview:

“I think about nepotism a lot, like more than I should,” she says. “It's true there's so many talented people, more talented than me. I get the opportunity to record in a studio and have access to scripts and stuff because of my family. I can't forget that. I always try to think about how lucky I am to get the opportunities that I get, and not just [be] like, ‘Well, this is my life.’”

It’s blunt, humble, and not overly self-effacing. It honestly shows a level-headedness that I think a lot of “nepotism kids” twice—or thrice!—her age could learn something from.

So, when Romy Mars announced that she would be dropping music, I perked right up. What would it sound like? Would it be good? Would I, a non-famous adult woman, relate to anything this famous teen had to sing about? Did it matter? Was this just going to be more kindling for the unbearable nepo baby discourse?

She released her debut EP, Stuck Up, in May 2024. It was just two songs: “Stuck Up” and “From a Distance”, and guess what? They’re very good! It sounds reductive, but I mean it as the utmost compliment: if you married a Sofia Coppola movie with a Phoenix album, this is exactly what it would sound like.

I listened to the song “Stuck Up” so much that it made it into my Spotify Wrapped for 2024. It’s a catchy, beachy tune paired with the kind of moody, insightful lyrics that can only come from a teenage girl’s lived experience.

The chorus is particularly good:

It was like a dream or a nightmare
But I couldn't wake up
You said I'm too cool to feel fear
Now I'm stuck up

The word play on “stuck up” here has, well, stuck with me. “You said I’m too cool to feel fear and now I’m stuck up.” It’s a fantastic turn of phrase that hides the true vulnerability of the lyrics.

You can read this multiple ways. She’s “stuck up” as in aloof or arrogant. She’s “stuck up,” as in her wealth has insulated her from the kinds of negative experiences that can have you feeling “down”, so everything that’s “up” ends up feeling flat. But the deeper meaning here is that she is “stuck up” at night, lying awake and ruminating on being told that she’s “too cool to feel fear”: Is it a compliment? An accusation? Does she agree? Where does she go from here?

When you’re a teen, anything someone tells you about yourself feels like Gospel. It goes straight to your head and you try to figure out how it contributes to the persona that you are building as you desperately race to find out who you are. It’s a period of time when the opinions and ideas of other people take up much more space than they ever should. But it’s also a crucial part of developing your own identity—figuring out how to tune out the noise. “Stuck Up” nails this feeling perfectly:

Everything else fades away
I only hear the things you say

The fact that this kind of lyricism is what we’re getting on Romy Mars’ very first EP is incredibly exciting.

I don’t remember where I saw this—probably on TikTok, who am I kidding—but I’ll paraphrase the concept: the reason why so many famous and rich kids go into the arts is because when money isn’t a problem, you have the freedom to do what you want with your life. A hill I’ll die on is that some of our most brilliant artists and creatives are stuck in mind-numbingly dull corporate careers or working for abysmal pay in retail or customer service simply because they need to pay the goddamn bills.

So when a Romy Mars comes along, who is both a talented artist and a nepo baby, I think it just further proves that point. Is she genetically pre-disposed to a poetic mind, or has she simply been raised by two artists whose lifestyle nourished her own creativity? My mom is an interior designer, and she once told me that she can walk into a room and immediately know how to rearrange the existing furniture to make it flow better. I told her I can do the same thing with words. Nature or nurture, indeed.

Earlier this week, Romy released another song called “A-Lister.” The song is 1) a bop and 2) bigger and bolder than her previous two releases.

She dives even deeper into the tongue-in-cheekiness of her privileged life, and the emptiness of fame:

I love this golden sunny West Coast
Scenе-y plastic world
I miss being a real girl, sure
But I'm not a rеal girl anymore

See also:

Grant all of my wishes, riches to riches

I think there is a certain Gen Z je ne sais quoi about her approach to nepotism. She knows that people will always be interested in her life, even if that fascination doesn’t feel interesting to her. She seems to know where she stands, the privilege that has granted her access to this life, and how deeply fucked up fame can be. She’s already in on the jokes and the memes—you can’t really get ahead of someone who already has that sense of humor and level of self-awareness.

In Romy’s own words from “Stuck Up”: I don't need you to need me. I tried, believe me.