Posts Tagged ‘movies’
“It is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.”*…
Sydney Sweeney is an actress who gained early recognition for her roles in Everything Sucks!, The Handmaid’s Tale, Sharp Objects, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reality, Anyone but You, and Madame Web. She received wider acclaim for her performances in the drama series Euphoria (2019–present) and the first season of the anthology series The White Lotus (2021), both of which earned her nominations for Primetime Emmy Awards.
But in a way that’s quite apart from her art, Sydney Sweeney has also emerged as an avatar of, a heroine of sorts to, right-wing culture warriors.
B. D. McClay has a thoughful essay in The Lamp on this divergence…
… The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.
And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.
As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?
The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.
Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.
Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie [Immaculate] in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.
The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!
Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question.
There is, however, some subtext here, too: These particular people, who are, I regret to say, not all men, need Sweeney to be elevated so that they can go back to cultivating a particular kind of lustful derision. They are owed women whom they can view as stupid bimbos. To the extent that they have been deprived, it’s not because hot people were made illegal. It’s because their moral disapproval, no matter how disingenuous, doesn’t matter anymore. If the vogue in women’s clothing was, for several years, loose and unsexy garments, strictures promoting modesty have little to do with it.
So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.
But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk.
There is a familiar type of maneuver that one can expect in response to articles like this, which says little about Sydney Sweeney but a lot about horny racists who are too online. It is to pretend otherwise: “How can you say that about Sydney Sweeney?” St. Félix commented, correctly, that these people wish “to recruit [Sweeney] as a kind of Aryan princess,” which was presented by others as a case of her trashing Sweeney herself as an Aryan princess. After pretending that this article is attacking Sweeney, the field is open to sift through the writer’s old work, old tweets, relationships, and so on. If the writer is female, one can also expect looks and hypothetical fertility calculations to enter into the mix.
It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.
That world does not exist, nor has it never existed. The A.I.-generated family has to be generated by A.I. because there are no photographs of this sort of idyllic life, with an angelic and eternally youthful wife untouched by reality or work. That is just the product of half-remembered Norman Rockwell paintings and Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Indeed, most of the imagination here is really an endless series of ads, slowly distilled into one giant advertisement, one Sydney Sweeney is not even in. It’s a tape that simply says RETURN over photos of cheerleaders and imagined past prosperity. Like most advertisements, this one is selling poisonous trash people don’t need that can only be produced at a human cost that is too high. I suggest not buying…
The selling of Sydney Sweeney: “The Uggo Police“
* George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
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As we ponder personae, we might send commercially-viable birthday greetings to another “beautiful blonde” actress, Gwyneth Paltrow; she was born on this date in 1972. Born into the business (the daughter of filmmaker Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner), she had a long and successful career as a film star. But in 2017, she “stepped back” from acting (though she still ocassionaly appears) in order to focus on her health-wellness-lifestyle-fashion business Goop (out of which, she has recently spun a new fashion line, GWYN). Goop has grown into a formidible company selling a wide range of products, and hosting “wellness summits” and conventions. It has also faced broad criticism that faced broad criticism for marketing products and treatments that are harmful, described as “snake oil,” based on pseudoscience, and lacking in efficacy.
“Present at the creation”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on what we can learn from our elders…
There are a lot of stories about the intense conflicts between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. An oft-told one says that at a party Dennis Hopper went up to George Cukor, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “We’re gonna bury you.” This sense that the new Hollywood was at war with the old one — that the new could only live if the old died — was a commonplace idea at the time. But it was not a view held by one of the hot new directors of the Sixties, Peter Bogdanovich…
… When he came to Hollywood, Bogdanovich made a point of getting to know the people who had made so many of the movies he loved. He compiled a book of interviews with old-time directors — he also did one with old-time actors, but the one with directors is particularly noteworthy.
Of all those interviews, the most fascinating is the very first one, with Allan Dwan, because Dwan was present at the creation. He had played football at Notre Dame, got an engineering degree there, worked on designing lights for early filmmakers in Chicago — no one had thought of going to Los Angeles yet — and gradually drifted into making movies himself. He sold some stories, then became a scenario manager (that is, someone who sought and recommended stories for turning into screenplays) and ultimately a director, making dozens and dozens of films — none of them especially famous. His attitude towards movie-making was workmanlike, and he just accepted the tasks set before him.
(He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.)
Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did — but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.
He tells another story about getting his car repaired and talking to the mechanic, who turned out to be interested in photography. Dwan hired him as a cameraman because he desperately needed one and in those days they weren’t easy to find. That mechanic-turned-cameraman eventually became a director — his name was Victor Fleming, and one of his pictures was Gone with the Wind. Dwan remembered a prop man who liked to wear fake teeth and prosthetic noses. Dwan asked him, “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be on the other side of the camera?” The guy said, “Well, kind of.” That was Lon Chaney.
He also tells of watching a pickup baseball game near the Paramount lot and seeing a girl — maybe 11 or 12 — who was the best player out there and made sure everybody knew it. She was whacking the ball all over the field and taunting the boys mercilessly. Dwan talked to her; he thought she’d make a great impression in the pictures. Her name was Jane Peters, but eventually a studio changed it to Carole Lombard. (Lombard, by the way, was quite an athlete: Clark Gable fell in love with her after she thrashed him in a tennis match.)
Dwan had a thousand stories like this. It’s fascinating to see how this industry — this art form — developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised — and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.
And when you put all the improvised and then repreated techniques together, you get the dominant artistic medium — and the dominant form of entertainment — of the 20th century. But nobody could possibly have guessed any of that when Dwan was just getting started. It’s to Bogdanovich’s great credit that he listened to these people…
“Allan Dwan’s stories,” from @ayjay.bsky.social.
* a reference to the belief that Jesus was involved in the creation of the universe, appropriated by Dean Acheson as the title of his memoir.
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As honor those on whose shoulders we stand, we might recall that it was on thus date in 1985 that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure premiered. Following the success of The Pee-wee Herman Show in 1981, Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) was hired by Warner Bros. to write (ultimately with help from Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol) the script for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Impressed with Burton’s work on the short film Frankenweenie (1984), the producers and Reubens hired him to direct. The film was scored by Danny Elfman, marking his first among many collaborations with Burton. It was a success in its initial release and has, of course, become a cult classic.
“Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”*…
While William Faulkner spent most of his life in the Oxford, Mississippi area that he made famous, he did a considerable– and fascinating– stetch in Hollywood. John Meroney reports…
… It all started in 1932, when, riding on the success of his novel Sanctuary, Faulkner got word that Leland Hayward, a prominent Hollywood talent agent, had secured for him a $500-a-week contract (the equivalent of $8,500 today) to write scripts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Faulkner was a modernist, and film was still a new, exciting form of storytelling. But that wasn’t the reason Faulkner accepted. It was the money.
At the same time Faulkner received the offer from Metro, he got news that his publisher, Cape & Smith, was bankrupt. Faulkner had been planning on $4,000 ($68,000 in today’s money) from the company for Sanctuary but was informed he wouldn’t see any of it. Suddenly, he was broke. Word apparently got around Oxford. When he tried writing a check for three dollars at a sporting goods store, the owner told him, I’d rather have cash. All at once, Hollywood became attractive. Faulkner didn’t even have the money to send a wire to answer yes. Eventually MGM advanced him some cash and paid for his train ticket, and days later he arrived in Culver City.
He was so naive about the industry that he entertained hopes he would be writing for the famous movie star Mickey Mouse. But the folks at Metro informed him, No, Mickey lives at another studio out in the Valley—we want you for a Wallace Beery picture. “Who’s he?” Faulkner asked…
… Faulkner completed four story treatments in four weeks. That kind of productivity earned him a meeting with up-and-coming director Howard Hawks [see almanac entry here]. He liked Faulkner’s writing and purchased a Saturday Evening Post short story by him that he wanted Faulkner to adapt into a script for Hawks to direct. Over a “couple of quarts of whiskey,” as Hawks recalled in an interview, they clicked and found common cause. “[Faulkner] got up the next morning and started to work, and in five or six days, he had a script,” Hawks said. “It was one of the finest scripts I’ve ever read.” Hawks showed it to Metro’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, who concurred. “Go out and make it!” he ordered Hawks. The result was Today We Live, a drama starring Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford, released in 1933. William Faulkner now had a hit movie to his credit. And, more important, the beginning of what would become an ongoing professional connection with Hawks…
…Faulkner sometimes hunted with Hawks, and on one dove hunting trip recounted by the director, Hawks invited along Clark Gable, already a star. Faulkner and Hawks began discussing literature and eventually Gable asked, “Mr. Faulkner, what do you think somebody should read if he wants to read the best modern books? Who would you say are the best living writers?” Faulkner replied, “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself.” Gable asked, “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Faulkner replied, “Yeah. What do you do, Mr. Gable?”…
And so much (so very much) more: “William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey” from Garden and Gun.
* William Faulkner
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As we fathom fish out of water, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in Faulkner’s honor. Very early in his career, Faulkner had briefly served as Postmaster at the University of Mississippi, and in his letter of resignation in 1923 wrote:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
“This is, if not a lifetime process, awfully close to it”*…
Shani Zhang paints weddings (and other events). Along the way, she’s drawn some fascinating conclusions…
Painting weddings for a few years now, I have spent a fair bit of time observing strangers move through a room. Seeing someone new, I always have a feeling of noticing their internal architecture. I did not realize that some people do not feel this way, at least not as intensely.
- By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.
- I hear the speed at which they metabolize information and the nature of their attention. Attention falls on the spectrum of jumping bean to steady stream. Where it falls depends on a person’s nature, and also how much they want to be in that conversation. Someone’s quality of attention is evident from the questions they ask (how much they diverge from what the speaker is saying), if their gaze is wandering elsewhere, if they are fidgeting, restless. The outlier is dissociation, when someone is noticeably vacant, their attention completely absent.
- Sometimes I see their feelings towards me when we talk, but that has the largest room for error in retrospect. Maybe the person I have the hardest time seeing clearly is still myself. I can see people more clearly when I am watching them talk to others.
- I watch the person with the loudest laugh. The most striking thing isn’t the volume—it’s the feverish pitch. As the night goes on, it begins to sound more like desperation. Their joy has a fraying quality; it is exhausting to carry because it comes with a desire to seem happy and make others happy at all times…
Read on for all “21 observations from people watching.”
* “This is, if not a lifetime process, awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, ‘Huzzah! Eureka! I’ve got it!’ and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it’s hard.” – Rod Serling (and here and here)
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As we look, we might send observant birthday greetings to Howard Hawks; he was born on this date in 1896. A key film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Hawks explored many genres– comedies (screwball and straight), dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, war films and Westerns– in films including Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), and Rio Bravo (1959). His frequent portrayals of strong, tough-talking female characters came to define the “Hawksian woman“. Relevently to this post, Hawks directed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), which of course, ends with a double wedding.
A close observer of human behavior, Hawks transmuted what he learned into unique, powerful, and wonderfully-entertaining work. Critic Leonard Maltin called him “the greatest American director who is not a household name.” Roger Ebert called Hawks “one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material.”
“Just the facts, ma’am”*…
It’s getting harder and harder to sift the wheat from the chaff– the truth from the misinformation, disinformation, and just plain noise. Here to help, Rocky Parker, with a collection of verification tools– aimed at journalists, but available to us all…
Presenting accurate information to readers is crucial to journalists maintaining trust with their readers. But despite journalists’ best efforts, trust in the media continues to be an issue. The latest American Views report from Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount.
The explosion of AI-generated content on the internet has only added another layer and more complications as readers and journalists work to determine who (or what) created a piece of content and if it’s accurate. And if you’re sourcing story ideas from social media, the recent removals of fact-checking teams from several platforms will make your verification even more difficult.
In light of these challenges… we thought it’d be a good time to round up a few verification tools that journalists should bookmark…
“20 Helpful Verification Tools for Journalists” (and the rest of us).
* Stan Freberg’s parody of “Sgt. Joe Friday” (Jack Webb) on Dragnet
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As we confirm, we might might recall that it was on this date in 1941 that Orson Welles’ first feature film, Citizen Kane, premiered at the Palace Theater in New York. A quasi-biography (based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, with elements of those of Joseph Pulitzer and Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick), it was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories, winning Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for Herman Mankiewicz and Welles.
Considered by many critics and filmmakers to be the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane was voted number 1 in five consecutive British Film Institute Sight & Sound polls of critics, and it topped the American Film Institute’s 100 Years … 100 Movies list in 1998, as well as its 2007 update.
Citizen Kane is particularly praised for Gregg Toland‘s cinematography, Robert Wise‘s editing, Bernard Herrmann‘s music, and its narrative structure, all of which were innovative and have been precedent-setting.
- Kane (in his role as owner of The Inquirer): Read the cable.
- Mr. Bernstein (Kane’s business manager): “Girls delightful in Cuba. Stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery, but don’t feel right spending your money. Stop. There is no war in Cuba, signed Wheeler.” Any answer?
- Kane: Yes. “Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the war.”
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