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Halston: The Boys In The Bland

My best friend suggested that it's possible Ryan Murphy was put here to destroy all our icons, but I'll be slightly more charitable. Halston means well - unlike, say, Glee - but the combination of Murphy's expansive deal with Netflix and his usual hangups and tics when it comes to storytelling lay waste to what clearly could have been a dazzling, messy epic of gay life in the seventies.

Halston is, of course, one of fashion's great stories of success and self destruction, played out against the backdrop of Studio 54, the cocaine years, and too much too soon careers. Originally a hat designer much loved by the ladies who lunch crowd, Halston had to reinvent himself as hats fell out of favor in the mid sixties, and he launched a high end fashion line noted for his easy, breezy use of flowing fabric and a keen eye for distilling the key elements of American style. I remember the first time I saw Halstons at the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum in New York - what amazed was not the sense of their time, the height of seventies style, but the way most of them could have been taken out of a closet and worn today without a second thought.

It's very obvious that part of what's missing in Halston is just that sense of the clothes. The show keeps sort of showing them, as if somewhere, in a room just off camera, there's a collection of stunning clothes we've only been allowed to glance at. It's frustrating, and eventually exasperating - especially in key moments like the famous "Versailles Show" of 1973 - that what was boldly beautiful about Halston's work is mostly merely sketched at.

Yet the other frustrating element is that if this was then meant to be a juicy, dishy tell all of famous messes and their excessive ways, the series only sketches at that, as well. Halstoin swans around a lonely, oddly depopulated Manhattan that lacks grit or glamour or a sense of the city's energy, and that's just deadly for the story of someone who clawed his way to the top of New York's ultimate importance. Wearing Halston, knowing Halston, being Halston... it's hard to understate how off the wall his celebrity as a fashion icon was... and yet, somehow, that's what Murphy manages to pull off.

And all of that makes what works here all the more puzzling. Halston's genuine closeness to Liza Minnelli is beautifully portrayed, as is Liza's intelligence and sense of herself. Halston's ability to see women, and to get what they're looking for in clothes and style is instinctive and that clearly comes across. But too often the film both madly name drops and yet not enough. Where's Diana Vreeland? Grace MIrabella? Why is Eleanor Lambert coyly half revealed when every fashion person on earth will love the character on display here? why two mentions of Jackie O and then... nothing?

Meanwhile, what could and should be a frank assessment of drugs and louche behavior is just... wasted. Too often Halston's descent into addiction has the feel of the kind of music biopic lampooned in the Dewey Cox Story: some man of color Halston is having sex with pulls out poppers or coke... and off he goes. Clearly Halston's tastes were well established, but it's hardly surprising that more white gay men trying to make sense of Halston's dark skinned boyfriends comes off as pretty much as problematic as it could possibly be.

None of which is to fault the performers Krysta Rodriguez' Liza is indeed a delight, Rebecca Dayan's Elsa Peretti floats around the edges of scenes like any good Italian heiress of the seventies would. Halston's various louche bedmates are fine. And Ewan McGregor? It's not the first time he's played a toppy (not necessarily bossy) bottom - that would be Todd Haynes' lovely Velvet Underground, where he finishes the film getting railed by Christian Bale on a London rooftop - but I sure hope the intimacy coach made sure he had a safe word here in Halston. I've rarely worried so much for a star in sex scene after sex scene - getting pounded never looked so, well, pounding, and God knows, Murphy should know enough about that. To his credit McGregor goes balls to the wall (no, literally) on playing Halston at every level, but it's hard when a key role like this is so emotionally cut off from himself that it becomes hard to know what's going on in side his head at all. A better film wouldn't leave us wondering, if only by distracting with endless falderal, a party that seems to neither start nor end. Because that's what the seventies were, and the film just fails at it, utterly.

I suspect Murphy tried to impose all the lessons learned from remaking The Boys in the Band - itself a reminder that, armed with solid material, this Netflix deal gives Murphy room to fly - and on the one hand he's right: Halston, too, is a stunted boy from a deeply repressed background covering it up with style, wit and a lot of drugs and sex in pre and post Stonewall realities.  The trouble is, you can't tell Halston's story and mistake the former for the latter... that is, the story needs a lot of style and drugs and sex... and probably less psychologizing about What Made Him That Way. Halston - which could yes, use a lot less of people walking into rooms saying "Halston" - takes the racy, sexy undercurrent that both defined the seventies and the stylist who dressed it, and trades it for a morality tragedy of lonely people looking to connect. As Halston - or Steve Rubell or Liza or any number of seventies icons would say - "how boring." And, well, they had a point.

Then, too, a crowded messy orgy of a superstar existence is probably the absolutely wrong thing to expect to tell well when filming into the teeth of the pandemic. One wonders why launch a project like Halston right now, really, at all. And still, the bigger struggle of a Halston is when and how someone will step in and give Murphy the kind of feedback he needs to balance his ambitions in ways that deal more constructively with his limitations as a storyteller and producer. Big, beautiful, yet emotionally inert and off the mark, almost anyone can see what Halston lacks... except apparently, the person making it.

Critical Race Theater

What I really want to do is yell at my TV, pretty much all the time lately, either "you don't even know what Critical Race Theory is" or, in the case of an expert who does, "Nobody cares what actual Critical Race Theory is" (at which point I usually add "honey" or "Mary" because I'm gay).

That's just where we are, it seems. (No, not about me. Keep up, Mary.)

I'm not going to waste time trying to explain Critical Race Theory because for the purposes of this discussion it's irrelevant; nothing about this supposed "debate" has anything to do with the actual use of critical theory (and sure, I could then, as a critic, go deep into why I actually find a lot of Marxist or Marx derived critical theory to be exasperating... but again, not the point). And that, too, is kind of the point.

My best friend - in his brilliant, often poetic sense of creative wordplay - was the one who observed to me that this wasn't so much real as theater: "Critical Race Theater," a way to take a strange, unfamiliar, vaguely threatening phrase like Critical Race Theory and simply obscure its actual meaning until it actually means nothing at all, and becomes a kind of performance art aimed at reviving America's discomfort and tensions around any and everything having to do with race... not least of which, questions of race, education, and acknowledging the painful aspects of our history.

"We don't want Critical Race Theory taught in schools" means basically nothing at all; no American public school - and I'm guessing, no private one either - is teaching this at any grade level, not even high school, certainly not below that. Instead, at the precise moment where America was just starting to face up to  realities of our past - be it Juneteenth or the Tulsa race riot - the question of what we teach our kids has a much more basic, underlying objection: "don't tell my white kid that white people did bad things to black people and that racism and prejudice still have a role in our culture and society... because they might realize it's true."

In the course of my lifetime I have lived through both amazing progress on race in this country and enormous setbacks; and even so, this retrenchment to racist excuse making is mind boggling, never mind scary and depressing.  The architects of this Critical Race Theater - apparently ginned up by right wing think tankers in DC - really do deserve whatever hell eventually comes for them; it's disgusting to think that someone actively worked this hard (and this openly) to set back race relations 50 years for a mix of political amusement and supposed advantage.

That last part - the question of "who gains politically" off of this is both gross and ridiculous to discuss. No one is winning here, least of all the people who think - hatefully - that electoral success derives from prodding white racial hatreds. This isn't even "Southern Strategy" or "dog whistles" for modern times - we're way past that puppy. This is just flat out "let's scare white people into seeing every black intellectual as the enemy." Nothing good will come from it. Nothing.

Conservatives and Republican opportunists figure they will "win" this by "putting liberals on the defensive;" part of the problem is, outside of a few knowledgable university level academicians, there is no one to put up a defense. Few care; fewer can or will expound the energy to "save Critical Race Theory" for places it didn't belong to begin with. What this will do is confuse the development of productive K-12 curricula, especially in American History, a backlash against the 1619 Project and other reexaminations of history - again THAT'S NOT CRITICAL RACE THEORY - which was already under way, but much easier to sell in this "Critical Race Theater" performance piece.

And sure, trying to wrest political advantage on K-12 education is a desperate play for the right, one that casting Teachers Union as their mortal enemies wasn't quite getting done, nor the largely theoretical, though still hateful, stances against trans kids in sports. It's not clear that Critical Race Theater changes all that much either, bottom line: the "Karen" notion of suburban college educated white women that Republicans are apparently chasing to realign back to their worldview were pretty well turned off by Trump's uglier racist tendencies. And lurking behind Critical Race Theater is a "same old, same old" of white tropes just waiting to implode on the right, yet again. The net-net is that Critical Race Theater, while showy and damaging at a macro level for race relations, may not ultimately move the needles Republicans need to win in the midterms, without solid candidates and actual policy proposals. It surely destroys any vestige of GOP hopes in virtually any black, or racially mixed urban area.

Still, that this happening at all is disheartening and the group that I think may turn out to be most demoralized by it - beyond the reality of the many black people who maybe, kind of were just starting to hope that there was some progress - are those older white civil rights fighters of the left. And I'm just saying... they may not be the student agitators they were in their youth... but when they get pissed, they do know that you only have one choice: organize, and go out and do something. And if the right thinks that fight goes better for them on the field of Critical Race Theater... well, it's a theory.

Are We?

"Having Trouble Coping With Post Pandemic Life?" The headline blared at me this morning on my phone (side note - I am so dependent on Apple products at this point, it's hopeless), and yes, all around us are the questions and stories of "trying to get back to normal." But that headline prompted my most cynical morning affirmation... "Are we?"

Is this really "post pandemic"? It's a fair question, one we ought to ask harder and more often and not assume we know the answer. The logic for "post pandemic" generally goes: a) most of us are vaccinated; b) we're trying to get back to normal; and c) all those statistics about cases and hospitalizations and deaths are headed in the... right direction, right? So it's, you know, kind of over, right?

There are a lot of reasons o doubt that train of logic, questions and details and actual statistics that belie the hopefulness. More to the point there's a reality many Americans don't like: we've been trying to declare this thing over since literally before it began. Some of that, yes, was Trump, his team, and their incompetence. Some of it, yes, was other Republicans and folks on the right following Trump's lead or politicizing what really should have been based on science and public health guidance. All bad, sure. But the toehold that allowed those claims and complaints to take root was America's general impatience and the closing of our society, the most open and free moving in the world.

The point is, this isn't over when we say it is. We won't have "normal" because we insist that everything be "normal." The pandemic is over when we can say, safely, that the risk of contracting a deadly illness is no longer a major threat, when we can treat the disease and prevent death, and when we can fully and safely resume the lifestyle and behaviors we had previously, free from worry for ourselves, and others.

And most surely, we are not there. And here's a quick pass at why:

• The threat of variants: Covid 19 is highly contagious and easily spread. That has not changed, and the Delta variant is showing, yet again, that the disease moves faster than we can track. Given the concerns that variants may be vaccine resistant, it is way too soon to drop reasonable cautions.
• We Are The World. While America ranges from 40-70% adults vaccinated depending on region, almost no other country in the world is close to where we are, except Israel. Most obviously, this (still) affects international travel; but more basically, "post pandemic" is not just us. It is when a substantial majority of the world can resume, safely.
• What about the children? the pace and timing of vaccinations has meant that we won't resume anything like normal schooling until this fall, a reality that puts off for at least 3 months a lot of hard questions and unforeseen issues that may arise as we try to resume fully in person, 5 day a week schooling. For now, families are trying to set up normal kid summers around vacations and camp... and even that isn't quite working. It's cavalier to assume that we won't find, as August drifts into September, that simply restarting school is more complicated than anyone realizes.
• Staffing. And about that camp, and that restaurant, and that airline: what seemed at first like mere conservative hysteria has laid bare the complexities of "getting back to work": the workers aren't where they were, and they're not going back. It's hard to simply undo furloughs. And seasonal employment means nothing after 18 months of seasonless everything. Yesterday, I checked the local commuter train station parking lot, and while it's fuller... the lot was 3/4 empty at 9am. That says to me that we are far away from anything like what life was like before.

Yesterday the Washington Post sneaked a peek at an upcoming book detailing the failures of Trump and his team in managing the pandemic. I suspect, for many, it will be easy to make those bad actions the focus of our failures in this pandemic. And in many ways, he should. But even without him, or with him gone, we struggle to treat this pandemic as a pandemic - an ongoing problem that will, for the foreseeable future, impact our lives, our choices, and hinder attempts to restore normalcy. That, really, is still on us... the rebels, the privileged, the fortunate few who have endured some minor hardship, but come through largely health and intact. Are we "having trouble coping with "post pandemic life"? Or are we really, just, you know, the problem?

Nothing Matters. What If It Did?

This isn't a post about statistics or polling or necessarily hard evidence. It's just a feeling. And Feelings, as they say, are not facts. But stay with me on this one. Just for a minute.

On January 6th we watched a wild insurrection unfold at the Capitol. Many of us had been watching both the Congressional exercise of certifying the election, possibly in tandem with the "rally" being held on the mall, near the White House. Eventually, the rally became a "march on the Capital, and then the Capital became a mob scene... but throughout, there was an air of unseriousness. Crazy outfits, flags, people who seemed unclear why they were there or what they were even doing. I'm not trying to suggest there wasn't sinister intent. Just that some of it was, well, ridiculous.

Later, of  course, as we saw pictures from inside, we saw more of this. The guy with the antler horns headdress. The guys with painted faces. The frat party antics, albeit, violent out of control party antics. Yelling incoherently. Some more intent on stealing a lectern than making a statement. Pissing on statues.  Or making statements like "Stop the Steal" with no real indication they knew how or who to stop.

We treat the Trumpist right as a serious threat, and obviously, some are. Some of them are, clearly, true
believers, engaged with a dangerous lie fed to them by a corrupt, lying criminal enterprise, led by a failed real estate magnate desperate for attention and fame.

But some of these Trumpist folks are the guy with the antlers. And we really should ask why we're taking that just as seriously.

Lurking within the hard right is a group of folks - mainly middle aged or younger white men, some women - who really don't take any of this seriously. Who are enjoying the performative street theater of Trump rallies and the politics of the last 4 years because they like the show. They like being able to act out. And - here's a deep secret - many of them don't care if there was a steal, or whether Trump is lying or not. They probably even get that he is. But the point is... they don't care. And they think it's ridiculous that you or I do.

Liz Cheney was ousted from House leadership for challenging the Big Lie. And clearly, some wanted her out for being disloyal, for challenging the Truth of Trump, as they see it. But as Madison Cawthorn said "Na na na na, nana nana, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney." There was plenty of unserious, I just don't like her feedback out there as well. Liz is about as serious, and as wonky, as right wing policy gets these days (which, yes, is its own example). And part of what the party and its base are rejecting, and still replacing, is the sense of taking anything about federal government seriously.

Cawthorn... Marjorie Taylor Greene. Lauren Boebert. Josh Hawley. Ted Cruz. On both side of the Capital, the Republicans have bomb throwers and outrage machines, offering nothing, literally nothing, of substance to policy discussions. Just bullies and drama queens and fame whores looking for their latest five minutes of glory in the national news feed. The right considers Joe Rogan, a modestly successful comedian turned podcast host, who famously reiterates on a regular basis that he has no idea what he's talking about, an essential conduit for reaching a significant part of the right's voting base. Why? Because like his listeners, Rogan doesn't really get why we should be taking any of this seriously.

Or take the Fox Friends who play the merry pied pipers to this nihilist line - the Tuckers and Gutfelds and Watterses who offer up sarcasm as if it's serious analysis then say "it's just a joke" when challenged. Just today, Tucker's role as source for much of the Trump world gossip floating around current news reports and upcoming books revealed, yet again, how Fox's top star believes, essentially, in nothing except his own self absorption. Yes, what Tucker is selling, crass as it is, represents significant danger. But even he, really, doesn't quite believe that the rubes are really falling for it. But if they are... well, it pays the bills.

On the left, we frequently fret about the shrinking minority of this Trumpist base, because we take them seriously, and as a serious threat, not just to the left, but to the fundamental order and underpinnings of our representative democracy. We worry about their fealty to populists and authoritarians, frauds and liars and cheats. But the bigger problem is that along with the true believers is this group of absurd nihilists who really don't believe in anything at all. Not particularly interested in ideas, or critical thinking, prone to fall for conspiracy logic and eager to be in on the joke... it's the nihilists that we really can never reach. We will never convince them, or win them over. At best, one day they will decide something else is cool, some other online gewgaw will distract their attention, maybe one day something will matter to them... but don't get your hopes up. Conservatives have signed on to this nihilism with gleeful abandon. Because nothing matters. Because they've largely just given up.

Since the election, a lot of the fun has fallen out of this faction. Partly, that too is on Trump, since he was never really in on the joke of it all - too sensitive and too afraid of ridicule, Trump really has no sense of humor. He's not joking, and never has been. There's really much less of the "can't they take a joke" excuse making the right used to offer up when challenged on their most outrageous, out there catcalls and threats. Things are ugly, and mean, and getting meaner and uglier by the day. And without a Trump that airs on TV and major social media every day, more than a little of the entertainment of these Roman Follies is gone too. So the question remains, how long will the nihilists stay with this party if it's no fun and less popular?

My guess is that they're already slacking off - Republican identification numbers are cratering, hundreds of rioters are facing serious criminal trials, Trump is sidelined... some people don't know when the party's over, but it's sure looking like last call on some of this. Then again, when you can gin up outages over Dr. Seuss and imminent calls for veganism, when Tucker and Gutfeld and Jessie Watters still rule the roost at Fox... heck even Rogan still has his primacy. The show will go on. The nihilist appeal is, after all, eternal. Nothing matters. Life is just one sick, absurd joke. If anything, perhaps, the real point is this: majority white culture was in some ways always bound to find its way to this dead end. Smoke if you got em. You never had it so good.     

Instant Gratification Takes Too Long

The one thing that won't die in the internet age - the instant, and wrong, hot take - for me is actually the hopeful sign that our way out of the pandemic year isn't in fact written yet. The nearly cataclysmic changes we've all experienced in the past year aren't minor, aren't things you just "get over"... and the massive implications for our society and our economics (never mind our politics) are things we can only begin to start figuring out.

And that's why I don't mind the "jobs will instantly return to normal" and "everyone has to stop wearing sweatpants and put on real clothes again" type hot takes. The instant gratification culture of immediate analysis and pronouncements has been thoroughly up ended, even if the media may be the last to really understand what hasn't happened, and what isn't happening, and even start beginning to make sense of where we actually are.

At the most base level... people died. I've been stunned at the number of conversations of the past few months - you know, those reconnecting "hey, we haven't seen each other for a year" post vaccination convos, and dinners and re-gatherings - where that conversation veers into frank discussions of loss and pain and death. More than half a million people died of Covid (that we know of) - random, often pointless losses of family, parents, coworkers. But often, just as surprising, the losses people share turn out to be the other deaths - not covid, but the other stuff of cancer, heart attacks. The reckoning of these losses, over 18 months, has really only just begun, in part, yes, because Trump lacked the basic humanity to properly put the losses in context. But separation, and the near incomprehensibility of losses on this scale, is also a big part of it. No one in popular media, really, has yet found the words, the context, for all this loss. We're just beginning to grope for the words.

Then, too, I think of the enormous life changes so many have experienced as a result of this strange surreal, and yes, lost, year. People who have made major, significant life changes over the pandemic. All of the people who put significant life changes on hold because of it. And so many who have changed nothing... but for who everything has changed. Six months ago, I quit my job and embarked on this new course of writing and living differently. Only today, did it occur to me that perhaps expecting everything to be sorted after only six months is, well, not very realistic. Extrapolate that kind of major upheaval in so many lives... and really, our culture has no comprehension of what is and isn't happening in people's lives, and the ways those changes impact economic and social life. Are people "going back to work?" What does work even mean just now? What is "going back?" So much economic analysis just now is slapdash, lazy, and obvious. It will take months, if not years, to sort out all the forces in play, and what they mean.

And sure, it seems frivolous to relate these near existential issues - life and death, work and purpose - to the more superficial parts of our lives, the daily business of consumerism and consumption that make our American culture hum. But that's the point, isn't it? So much of the frothy, frivolous exercises merrily rolling along in early 2020... are just gone. if nothing else, the pandemic was a forced pullback to "is that really important" that offered many a chance to reassess all sorts of choices And that's just the beginning. Stores have closed that will never reopen. Dining has changed. Vacations have changed. New routines are part of all of our lives. And it's routines and habits that really guide our interests and choices. And again... we're only just beginning to figure out what these look like, what they might mean.

Just one obvious practical example to finish: "planes are full again." It's the hopeful, meaningless, deceptive storyline that will drive this summer's coverage of travel and leisure. Domestic air travel is still well below half of what it was before the pandemic, losses that have nothing to do with leisure or vacation travel (and don't even start on the embers of international). It's business travel that was the backbone, and profit center, of airline revenue. Will it resume? Sure; some of it will seem essential, some will argue that face to face beats Zoom and win. But many won't. At a moment when the whole concept of the "downtown office" is in flux, major city to city air travel looks like a relic.And again, that has economic implications no one wants to face and has gone largely undiscussed.

It's an odd moment, this juxtaposition of the "now now now" internet world we have and the almost luddite realities the pandemic placed on our existence. It's an odd, fascinating place none of us expected to be, and trying to intellectually sort out what it means is useful, and necessary... and all but impossible when we also want it all figured out, entirely, as of yesterday. As you peruse that Vogue telling you to get out of those sweatpants, and take in those reports that lazy workers are reluctant to give up unemployment to go back to work... just remember, no one, really, has figured any of this out. Instant gratification takes too long... and maybe the problem isn't "instant"... it's that maybe we're beginning to figure out this life needs more than just... gratification.