Severed with Mickey at the White Lotus

As I explained to a friend, I can’t NOT watch/read the news because as a former full-on neurotic it’s scarier for me to NOT be in touch with what’s really going on than to imagine what is truly going on. As bad as the world might seem to be at the moment – and what it seems to me is pretty bad – I know from experience I’d conjure up a hell of a lot worse left to my own devices.

Still, this was a week.

So after hearing about:

The 30-year-old gay male makeup artist from Venezuela who was grabbed by ICE because of a few meaningless tattoos and deported to an El Salvador prison where no one has heard from him in more than a week.
The mid-forties U.S. military veteran with terminal cancer whose experimental treatments keeping him alive were cancelled by Elon Musk’s DOGE bros because they were too….something.
And the nice old ladies in red states across the country singing protest songs, or screaming, at town halls over the closing of local Social Security offices and the very real prospect that their earned benefits will soon disappear…

I turned to the movies and television.

This is not unusual and reminded me of the time I binge-watched the first four and a half seasons of Breaking Bad in nine days. Ostensibly it’s because my sister told me I would never be able to catch up before the last six episodes aired but also and equally important was the fact that I knew I had to endure my first colonoscopy the following month and wanted something, anything, to do to keep my mind occupied.

Following this reasoning, I took myself to see the new Bong Joon Ho movie, Mickey 17. Yes, I had assigned it to my students over spring break but, really, what better way to get reality out of your mind than to watch a film where Robert Pattinson gets to play 17 (Note: Actually there’s 18) versions of the same character? Even the trailer made me laugh, and that’s an achievement in itself these days.

Armed with no more information than that, wasn’t I surprised to see Mickey 17 was all about the dystopian future of the have and have nots, populated by one particular cult type leader who for no discernible reason at all seems able cast a spell over the masses and get them to follow him. He does this with promises of exceptionalism he never plans keeping to people whose welfare he cares nothing about unless said people can help him expand his own wealth or psychological value in a place, nee planet, where you can become an expendable for experimentation.

Meaning you get copies made of you multiple, and many, times. Meaning you DIE, but not really because somehow they make copies of you from your dead body/carcass, though don’t ask me how. Of course not everyone does this, most of the people just enable it through their everyday tasks. But this is done on a planet/alternative universe that it takes 4 years to get to in a scientific endeavor headed by a failed politician played by Mark Ruffalo, by way of Donald Trump.

How do I know it’s Trump? Well, he sounds like him, moves like him and, perhaps most importantly, is married to an ice princess wife who doesn’t really know much of anything except satisfying her own pleasures and propping up her delusional husband in order to do so.

Pattinson is indeed hilarious in the title role(s) (Note: Comedy? Who knew?) and the movie is chock full of ideas. But it’s a narrative mess that has more tangents than a Trump speech. Nothing is quite cohesive but it’s never uninteresting and always feels original. Unlike a Trump speech.

Anyway, I was trying to get away from all that and, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. #Godfatherisms.

This made me think, or shall I say turn to, television for some order, since TV has so many platforms we all in Hollywood love talking about, that give us so much more to choose from these days.

But instead of watching a rerun of The Nanny, which for me never fails to delight, or The Twilight Zone, which can be scary but at least has clear characters and surprise twist endings I can get behind, I decide to stay with different and original because that’s generally my taste in what passes for good writing.

As one studio development executive who liked my writing told me in the nineties, this kind of multi-layered intelligent stuff just might be my downfall in the 21^st century. And while I can’t say she was correct overall, in this case I do have to give her points.

Because The White Lotus, season 3, episode 5 offered both the KISS and the MONOLOGUE. The latter was brilliantly delivered by Sam Rockwell, playing a guy’s guy with access to guns and drugs, who seriously sits down with his middle-aged white guy friend and delivers one of the better written speeches on TV in quite a while. In it, he basically confesses that besides being promiscuous with hundreds of women in Thailand he has also been enjoying anal sex with an equal number of men, and more than one at a time, and that eventually he added different women to stare at him while he was receiving, which then led him to further question his sexual identity, and wonder whether he really wanted to be a….Well, let’s just say he goes into sexual territory that has been scrubbed from every Trump-led government website because, according to current U.S. law, it doesn’t exist.

Also kudos to Walton Goggins for some of the best reaction acting ever

As if that wasn’t enough to bring me back to our present unreality, there was no outraged reaction to it the next day. Instead it was seen as wild and interesting, which I applaud but at the same time don’t understand because aren’t these the kind of thoughts that MAGA voters find reprehensible? I guess not. But you know what was found to be intolerable – the KISS between two ultra drugged and ultra drunk brothers (Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola) who were mercilessly egged on to kiss each other by two women they were trying to bed all night in a brain-breaking montage towards the end of the episode. The kiss lasted mere seconds but the next day social media was virtually exploding in horror with phrases like, ICK, ICK ICK!; I won’t watch any White Lotus after THAT; or WHY????

No, I am not advocating for homosexual incest between siblings (Note: Though if they are both past the age of consent if really isn’t my business), but…

YOU CONFUSE ME AMERICA. Though perhaps that is the point? Or is it? Now, well, I’m really confused.

Which leads perfectly into the finale of Apple’s Severance, a streaming series that I like but often leaves me confused. I spoke about it with my tv writing students this week and a few confessed they were obviously not “smart enough to understand it.” I quickly corrected them, saying that they were since I, myself, am a “smart enough” viewer and I don’t fully understand either.

Here you have a show with a clever concept – a futuristic, dystopian world where there is technology that enables you to split half your day with a doppelganger of yourself, via brain chip implant, that won’t feel the pain or anxiety you are enduring and will also somehow tame your own misery and anxiety in the real world. Yet in this doppelganger world, run by the nebulous and suspiciously evil company Lumon, you are a business dressed worker, a cog in a creepily obtuse corporation, clustering onscreen numbers into onscreen boxes inside an onscreen computer system for reasons you don’t fully understand.

Nevertheless, a job’s a job and what you find is that at least it’s a task to keep your wandering mind occupied from the true reality of pain. Though, truly, you don’t really know what life is like for your “outie” (Note: The you that lives in the outside world) because you’re an “innie” (Note: The half of that person who just lives to sort and type).

The series is a slow roll out and through the first season asks the question of what happens when the “innie” of you actually starts to care about the people you work with, forms relationships and even falls in love. What agency do they have in their life outside of what they are programmed by their world to do? This, of course, is a question many of us are asking ourselves these days – though in a different way than people did in the 1960s and 1970s (Note: A fact I can testify to since I was there).

Anyway, Severance always intrigues, even if you have little sense of what this fictional company with these innies is up to. Clearly, it’s evil but what is their end game? The 1% that run Lumon seem to be making lots of money but the sheer disregard for human life, the glee over the punishments they mete out to those in their way, and the total lack of empathy they have for any person or thing or institution that dare questions their actions keeps reminding me of one nagging question for the writers and, ahem, Lumon. Among others.

Why? Why do this? What do you hope to gain? Are you not human? Wait, we know you’re human. But what kind of human are all of you? There are gaggles of people at Lumon who feel this way and play along with the game. So much so that it becomes a little hard to believe since even in the season two finale – where we get nebulous clues about the backstory of a few – that major dramatic question of why is never answered.

And that is when I once again think about the gay makeup artist, the veteran whose cancer treatments were no longer accessible to him due to the abolishment of that NIH program, and the terrified senior citizens who are showing up to town hall meetings screaming about the gutting of social security workers, offices and what seems an inevitable interruption, or dissolution, of the guaranteed pension they spent their life paying into.

Which prompts the answer to all of it.

It’s because…THEY CAN.

They may want to do it for various personal reasons. They’re angry, resentful, prejudiced against one group or another or perhaps were never hugged by their fathers or mothers.

But as Severance has rightly decided in this year’s finale, that’s not the point.

When those with power decide they want to do something, it’s not about figuring out their motivation and then trying to reason with them. Because you’re being treated like an “innie.” And if recent disapproval ratings for this administration are to be believed, that represents the clear majority of people in the country.

That’s why at the end of the day it’s only about one thing – YOUR RIGHTS.

Demanding those in power give them to you – or give them back to you – and when their actions say NO standing up to thwart them with EVERYTHING you have.

While you still can.

Before they put your number in a box and delete you, too.

Cynthia Erivo – “Stand Up”

04.14.19

by notesfromachair

And All That Buzz

Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon were special talents. He is still the only artist to win the Oscar, Tony and Emmy awards all in one year (1973) and she was the first musical theatre actress to win four Tony Awards.

More to the point, it’s not every estranged married couple who kept working with each other years after their estrangement that has an eight part miniseries aired about their lives decades after their deaths.

When you watch Fosse/Verdon on FX, and everyone should, it’s difficult not to marvel at the sheer breadth of their work that will forever live on long after all of our deaths. Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Damn Yankees, Chicago and All That Jazz, to drop a handful of legendary landmarks, are only a few highlights.

Both director/choreographer Fosse, and Broadway star, muse and behind-the-scenes facilitator Verdon did all kinds of work in a wide variety of genres. But what unites them, more than anything, is their dedication to a disciplined, single-minded type of artistry that seems to have disappeared from the cultural zeitgeist these days.

Let’s not get it wrong; there are contemporary artists with the type of discipline that both Verdon and Fosse shared with us all through their lives. But in both their cases they left far more than that, as the miniseries shows us.

OK yes, him (and he’s producing Fosse/Verdon… go figure)

In a sense, Fosse/Verdon, and their lives, gives us a timeless roadmap to the world pre #MeToo. It was an existence where men consistently had the upper hand, the best opportunities AND usually got sole credit for ALL of the work even when that wasn’t necessarily the case.

When females actually managed to shine in their own spotlight far brighter than their male counterparts, it was in the midst of the age-old expectation that they would eventually dim their bulbs and take time off from doing their own thing in order to help the guy’s light to shine just as bright (and often brighter) on a project of their own without basking in the glory.

Who is holding up whom? (hint: It’s Gwen)

It was either that or turn the other cheek when the man brooded and strayed into the arms of many other women because, well, how could HE not when SHE wasn’t around. For those women choosing to go solo, well they might make it alone for a bit but much sooner than later they’d mostly age out and be left alone – a fate few would be able to happily survive when left to their own devices in the real world.

We’ve come a long way from those times, though likely not as far as we think we have, one suspects. As one watches Ms. Verdon endure her husband’s serial infidelities as she bails him out in too many ways to count on Cabaret, it occurs to us, hmmm, and why didn’t I ever know that, how come she never got any credit? As she continues to serve as his creative sounding board on so many other future projects and successes (Note: And notably doesn’t on several of the failures) we become clear of the extent of their partnership, and just how much we DON’T know about who did what and just how much on any uber successful project of any artist or in any artistic collaboration.

Truly a singular sensation #yesiknowthatfsromChorusLine

None of this is to take anything away from the miraculous creative vision and accomplishments a talent of the caliber of a Bob Fosse leaves us. It’s one thing for a chorus boy/dancer to turn expert choreographer and then director of Broadway musicals. It’s another to then become a sophisticated movie director who not only reinvented the onscreen musical with the movie Cabaret (Note: Beating out Francis Coppola’s work on The Godfather to win the best director Oscar that year) but then two years later go on make the critically acclaimed, black and white non-musical, biopic of Lenny Bruce, Lenny, and use a non-linear narrative from which to tell it.

Not to mention the release of the autobiographical biopic All That Jazz five years later, a thoroughly original multi-Oscar nominated film success he co-wrote and directed that pretty much presaged the reasons behind his own death (Note: 12 years later) for all the world to see in glorious living color on movie screens all across the world.

JAZZ. HANDS.

Gwen Verdon was at Fosse’s side in various ways all through those artistic leaps and bounds and together they define a certain type of show business special that today too often feels sorely lacking.

Though the special is still there. In fact, you see it every day, all around. But the show business special – hmmm, that’s another story.

I, for one, am soooo tired of hearing young talent is not what it used to be, not special, not on the level of a Fosse or a Verdon anymore.

Well, of course ability like theirs was, indeed, rare, as were their complex sensibilities and intellect for telling a sophisticated yet human story. But there are many people who are special in all kinds of different ways now, some of them even similar to a Fosse or a Verdon, whose work has little chance of gaining recognition. Even when it does, it almost never gets that same kind of mainstream acceptance.

This EXACTLY

For one, there is not the mass attendance for a single form of media that we once had. There was a time when Broadway theatre was IT and it tackled primarily new and exciting subjects, or at least fresh and entertaining/thought-provoking ones that often broke into the cultural zeitgeist.

Movies also told primarily real life human stories sans gaping plot holes, and for decades later it was not unusual for the biggest successes to say something about our lives as we knew them (Note: Or didn’t know them) that year. Sure, there were disaster films, spectacles, horror, sci-fi and mindless comedies, but they were not the overwhelming majority of the work. Yes, they had special effects but to have a really SPECIAL affect on the world you had to do a lot more than simply launch a starship into an infinite universe or create a colorful costumed villain whose one goal in life was an unmotivated ambition to blow up the universe.

I mean.. is it really even the end?

Right, right, we can hear the hiss and boos about this type of grousing from this computer screen already. Well, no one is saying these shows and films shouldn’t exist. Or that it’s a shame that television has expanded to the point where there is so much programming that no one show ever seems to be particularly special to most of us.

But the facts are that in an age when media is so diffuse and so plentiful there is almost no young person that can create the level and sheer amount of narrative work or performance with the same amount of staying power, depth of story and cultural intensity of a Fosse or a Verdon. There isn’t the mass popular audience for that kind of sophisticated worldview, that type of show biz special. It’s just not how the industry is set up these days.

We have international stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and, dare I say it, Jordan Peele?? But can they do the kind of deep or stylized work of Fosse or Verdon and break through? Schindler’s List was 25 years ago. Raging Bull came out FOUR DECADES ago.

I’m…. I’m… OLD

Star Wars is not Cabaret, or even The Godfather – it can’t be and wasn’t meant to be. Because the truth is there is no longer a mass-market avenue for the latter two projects. But even fluffier Broadway shows that catapulted Ms. Verdon to stardom like Sweet Charity and Damn Yankees would doubtless be made into theatrical films in the 2000/10s. Chicago, her final starring vehicle finally was, but decades after the original closed on Broadway and barely broke even. It was only when a stripped down, TV/movie star driven revival was launched and kept afloat with a rotating name cast that Hollywood came calling and a film was produced that was safe enough to appeal to mass acceptance.

To look at that film in light of Fosse/Verdon one realizes that despite its Oscar win it’s the anti-Cabaret. Rather than move forward the medium or the film’s story it merely waters it down with an eye towards the present as it pastiches various Fosse-like moves from the past. And it was released a full 17 years ago. Get Out, for all its cultural significance, (Note: And add on Us) is nowhere near the class of storytelling of any of Fosse’s best work, or that of a Scorsese or a Spielberg. #PlotHoleCity

For these reasons and many more, one can’t help but mourn a bit for the past during the Fosse/Verdon miniseries. It gives us so much show biz special in an age when it’s not the thought behind the show, but the delivery system by which it comes to us, that feels the most special to us.

Liza Minnelli – “Maybe This Time” (from Cabaret)

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: sam rockwell

Severed with Mickey at the White Lotus

And All That Buzz