Rocketman: Inside Elton John

Tags

20th Century America, 20th Century Europe, Elton John, Homosexuality, Rocketman, Taron Edgerton

This past semester has just been exhaustingly busy, so I haven’t watched a lot of historical films, much less had any time to blog about them. But I did get an opportunity to watch Rocketman (2019, dir. Dexter Fletcher) recently and found its approach to historical storytelling interesting. So I wanted to make a quick post about it.

The film focuses on the life of Elton John from his childhood in post-war Britain to his getting sober in the 1980s. Between those two point, he of course became one of the biggest musical artists of the century (he is currently the fourth-best-selling performer, behind the Beatles, Rihanna, and Michael Jackson). The film opens with John (Taron Edgerton), dressed in a devil stage costume, walking into something like an AA meeting (but with a therapist). His conversation (mostly a monologue, really) in the group serves as the frame-tale for his life story, told in roughly chronological order. It doesn’t shy away from either his drug use or his sexuality. (In fact, the film contains the first full-out gay sex scene ever included in a major Hollywood film.)

The film, which John himself worked to bring to screen, does something quite refreshing for an historical biopic. While the film broadly sticks to the fact of John’s life and career, it doesn’t really try to present them in a standard factual narrative. Instead, at key emotional and career moments, John and the characters around him start singing his music, sometimes turning songs into duets, dance numbers, and the like.

The result is a film that tries to convey not precisely the facts so much as what it felt like to be Elton John. John’s childhood is expressed through “I Want Love”, sung by young John (Kit Connor), his rather self-centered mother Shiela (Bryce Dallas Howard), his distant and cold father Stanley (Steven Mackintosh) and his more attentive grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones), who recognizes his talent and helps him get a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. His first performance at an English pub when he’s 15 turns into the Bollywood-inspired dance number “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” When he gives his first American performance, “Crocodile Rock”, both he and the audience levitate off the ground, giving a sense of the transcendent feeling a great rock performance can create. “Rocketman” is used to convey his sense of profound unhappiness and isolation at the height of his stardom. His eventual sobriety is marked at the end of the film with “I’m Still Standing.” The result is a biopic that is more like a stage musical than a conventional Hollywood biopic.

Although the film roughly follows the facts, it departs from chronology in one very important way. The songs performed bear no chronological relationship to the moments they are used to illustrate in the film. For example, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” was released in 1973, but is used to depict John’s first public performance in 1962. His first American performance was in 1970, but “Crocodile Rock” wasn’t written until 1972. “I’m Still Standing” was not written while he was in rehab. So the film subordinates the chronology of John’s music to the goal of expressing John’s inner life, which is sometimes larger than life and sometimes deeply lonely.

Some of the people in John’s life have objected to the film’s characterization of key characters. His half-brothers have objected to John’s depiction of Stanley as cold and distant, asserting that Stanley had a much better relationship with John in his teen years than the film offers. The film depicts Sheila as basically too self-centered to appreciate her son’s remarkable musical talents, when in fact she was consistently supportive of him. But if the film is seeking to express John’s inner life rather than the strict objective facts these deviations are less problematic. John may have felt unloved even if his father was more loving than the film presents him as.

The film also does something quite nice during the closing credits. Throughout the film John performs in a range of increasingly outrageous outfits, including as Queen Elizabeth I. The closing credits include side-by-side comparisons of the film’s version of various outfits with photos of the actual outfits they were based on. While the film exaggerates the outfits slightly, in general the costumes hew fairly closely to the facts.

Taron Edgerton in one of the film’s more flamboyant costumes

Overall, Rocketman takes a clever and insightful approach to a work-horse genre and finds something rather new in it. It does a good job conveying the spirit of John’s music and is definitely worth a look.

Want to Know More? 

Elton John’s autobiography is Me: Elton John

Tales of the City: Compton’s Cafeteria

Tags

20th Century America, Anna Madrigal, Homosexuality, Netflix, San Francisco, Tales of the City, The 1960s

My favorite part of the new Netflix season of Tales of the City (2019, based on the novels of Armistead Maupin) is episode 8. Unlike the rest of the show, episode 8 is not an ensemble piece but rather a stand-alone episode that focuses on the history of Anna Madrigal, the free-spirited transwoman who is the landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. It looks at Anna’s arrival in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and the climax of the episode is the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, an important but not well-known moment in the history of San Francisco’s LGBT community.

Spoiler Alert: This post discusses episode 8, which reveals a critical plot point for the season, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to put off reading this post.

 

San Francisco in the 1960s

San Francisco began to develop into the gay mecca we think of today at the end of WWII. The US Navy used San Francisco as one of its most important West Coast bases. At the end of the war, it began a crackdown on homosexuals in the Navy, many of whom wound up dishonorably discharged at San Francisco. Because being homosexual was socially unacceptable in the post-War period (when American culture was entering an aggressively heterosexual phase that permitted only one normative version of male identity), many of these men chose to remain in San Francisco rather than return home and have to face their families.

However while the LGBT community began to grow, it met with little acceptance. Police raids on the few bars that catered to gays and lesbians were a regular feature of the 1950s and 60s. Things were particularly tough for the city’s community of transwomen, who in the parlance of the time were referred to as cross-dressers, transvestites, or ‘drags’. ‘Queen’ included both modern drag queens and modern transwomen, since the concept of a distinct transwoman identity barely existed at the time. (The now-derogatory ‘tranny’ originated in the 1980s within the community as an affirmative term to include both drag queens and trans women.)

There was some room for female impersonators, who performed cabaret acts professionally, but for the transwomen among these performers, the stage was a brief and limited opportunity to express their gender identity, since performers were expected to arrive and leave in men’s clothing, and the only ones who could practically pursue this occupation were those capable of ‘passing’, meaning they were sufficiently feminine that they could appear to be women by post-War standards. Female impersonation also required some degree of talent as a singer and dancer. Thus comparatively trans women were able to pursue that option.)

 

It was illegal for those considered men to appear in public in women’s clothing apart from professional female impersonation; the basic legal rule at the time was that a man had to be wearing at least three items of male apparel in order to be legal. Suspected transvestites could be detained by any police offer and forced to undergo humiliating inspections. Even wearing a shirt that buttoned up on the wrong side was enough to justify being stopped by a cop. “Female impersonation” was a crime, so cross-dressing was an offense that could easily land a queen in jail, in some cases for a couple of months, where they were likely to be subjected to humiliating treatment such as forced head-shaving.

Transwomen who wished to live as women had other problems as well. Their identity documents all used their male identity, so they struggled to find living space in respectable neighborhoods, since they were viewed as deviants. As a result, many had to live in cheap hotels in the seedier parts of the city. Most also struggled to find employment, for the same reasons. Those who tried to live as men struggled to find and keep jobs because they were often perceived as being too effeminate. Because of that, large numbers of transwomen were forced to resort to prostitution to support themselves. (This is still true today; about 19% of transwomen report having done some form of sex work because of a lack of social acceptance and job opportunities; for black transwomen the figure is 47%.)

Although some gay bars in 1960s New York were willing to admit at least a few transwomen and drags, the same does not seem to have been true in San Francisco. Gay bars in the city seem to have been unwilling to admit them because their presence made police raids more likely. One of the few places of relative acceptance of transwomen and drags in the city was the Tenderloin, a downtown district that had a lot of cheap, single-occupant housing (mostly cheap hotels), gay bars, strip clubs and porn theaters, cheap liquor stores, and other disreputable businesses. It was frequented by gay men, lesbians, transwomen, prostitutes, and drug addicts, and in this district there were more establishments willing to allow such people in.

Prostitute queens tended to ply their trade in the Tenderloin because the police were willing to partially tolerate it there. This unofficial policy meant that the prostitutes were less likely to work in other parts of the city but it also made skimming money off the sex trade easy to organize. Policemen often used their power to detain and inspect suspected transvestites and prostitutes to shake down the queens for money. Those who refused to pay up were likely to taken to jail, or simply roughed up or forced to provide a quick blow job.

Violence was a common feature in the lives of the Tenderloin queens. In addition to the problems of living in a neighborhood frequented by drugs addicts and other criminals, clients of trans prostitutes sometimes became angry and violent if they felt they had been fooled by “men disguised as women”. In the 1960s, there was also an apparently unrecognized serial killer who targeted transwomen, slitting their throats and mutilating their genitals before dumping their bodies. Smart transwomen learned to fight, often carrying bricks or bottles in their handbags to use as a weapon. And the police sometimes used violence to keep them intimidated and compliant.

In the absence of a welcoming business community, many queens frequented Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a chain restaurant with a location in the Tenderloin. Unlike other businesses, Compton’s was open 24 hours, which meant that transwomen prostitutes could congregate there late at night after turning tricks. “Compton’s Cafeteria was the center of the universe for us. It was a place where we could make sure that we had lived through the night…Compton’s was a place where you could go and you could see whether some girls had stayed, some girls had left, some people had been killed, raped, put in jail,” says Felicia Elizondo, who was part of San Francisco’s trans community in the 1960s. The food was cheap, which was another plus for the struggling queens.

The management at Compton’s did not appreciate being the gathering spot for transwomen. They worried that the presence of transwomen might drive away more desirable customers. So they frequently harassed the women, called the police, and imposed a service charge on queens.

 

The Riots

In 1965, a nearby church, Glide Memorial Methodist Church, began trying to close the gap between the LGBT community in the Tenderloin and the Christian community. It was led by Rev. Cecil Williams, a black minister who had come to the Tenderloin from the Civil Rights struggle in the South, and he brought with him the idea of organizing the transwomen for their rights. He helped organize a group of LGBT youth, many of them homeless, into an organization known as Vanguard. Vanguard met regularly at Compton’s, much to the management’s frustration. As a result of harassment from the staff at Compton’s, Vanguard organized an unsuccessful picket of the Cafeteria on July 18^th, 1966, to express their anger and frustration. The picket failed, but it was one of the first examples of the LGBT community actively conducting a protest.

On a weekend in August of 1966, just a few weeks after the failed picket, the management of Compton’s called the police because the queens were making a scene. One of the policemen attempted to arrest one of the queens (whether a drag queen or a transwoman is unclear—she’s never been identified), but she threw a cup of coffee in his face. That touched off a riot. The transwomen and drags began fighting back, throwing cutlery and sugar shakers at the officers, flipping over tables, and smashing the glass doors and windows of the Cafeteria. The queens used their handbags as weapons as well.

The police retreated to the sidewalk and called for back-up. But about 60 patrons of the Cafeteria poured outside and continued the fight, brawling with the officers who showed up and tried to detain the women in a paddy wagon. A police squad car had all its windows smashed, and a nearby newsstand was lit on fire. A large number of the women wound up being taken to jail.

SF Queens protesting

 

The next night, there was another picket mounted against the Cafeteria, which had replaced its doors and windows and re-opened. The management refused to admit the queens. As the protest escalated, the windows of the Cafeteria were smashed again, but the second night of the riot appears to have been smaller in scale than the first night. It’s unclear to what extent the riot was orchestrated by Vanguard and to what extent it was simply a spontaneous uprising of frustrated transwomen, drags, and street youth.

While Vanguard had orchestrated one protest prior to the riot, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in many ways marks the start of genuine organizing for the Bay Area trans community, which began to form some degree of genuine institutional awareness after the riot. It has been called the first act of LGBT resistance to police violence in American history although the 1959 Cooper Do-Nuts Riot in Los Angeles probably deserves that honor. (The 1961 Black Nite Brawl in Milwaukee also occurred prior to Compton’s, although that was a fight between patrons of a gay bar and civilians, not police.)

Although Vanguard broke up in 1967, a network of organizations and concerned individuals had begun to address the needs of the trans community and in 1968 the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first-ever peer-run support group for trans people was established. The SF police department began to look at trans people as citizens rather than criminals and gradually reduced their harassment of the queens. They appointed Officer Elliot Blackstone as a liaison with the gay and trans community. As a result, trans women were able to begin living more openly and move about the city with less fear of harassment.

So if the Compton’s Riot happened in 1966, why is it that Pride commemorates the more famous Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969 instead? The Compton’s Riot was largely forgotten until the mid-1990s, when Susan Stryker, a trans historian, ran across an article about it in a 1970s-era gay newspaper. As she conducted research, she discovered that the local newspapers had not reported on the riot because it was comparatively small, perhaps about 50-60 rioters. The police records from the 1960s no longer survive, making oral history the only route for learning about it. Because trans women were so vulnerable to violence and because San Francisco was an epicenter of the AIDS Crisis, many of the participants in the riot were already dead by the time Stryker began researching it. (One of the most-commonly cited sources about the riot in online articles is Felicia Elizondo, who wasn’t actually in San Francisco when the riot occurred, only returning to the city the year after the riot happened.)

In contrast, the New York LGBT community made a point of actively commemorating the Stonewall Riots the next year; Craig Rodwell, an early activist realized that there was political value in conducting a parade in 1970 to memorialize the riots. Additionally, there are numerous surviving documents about the riot, including newspaper accounts and police records. Rodwell, who knew a number of journalists, actively encouraged them to cover the later nights of the riot, thereby raising its profile significantly. In other words, activists like Rodwell recognized the value of Stonewall as a moment to build a movement around, whereas no one in San Francisco saw the Compton’s Cafeteria incident that way. That’s why Pride events take place primarily in June instead of August.

 

The Riot in Tales of the City

Episode 8 is a flashback in which Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis) recounts her early experiences in San Francisco. She arrives in 1965 as a middle-aged transwoman (played wonderfully by Jen Richards) and quickly finds a job in the City Lights bookstore. She is first confronted by and then becomes friends with Ysela (Daniela Vega), a young Latina trans woman who teaches Anna the rules of life in a transphobic city and helps Anna begin to recognize her ‘passing privilege’. As Ysela explains, she wants to know Anna’s secrets because she realizes that passing effectively is a survival skill; San Francisco queens die young. But Anna passes easily; straight people perceive her as a woman and not as a transvestite. So she doesn’t realize that an act as simple as shopping for a new scarf can be challenging because businesses routinely throw out queens who can’t pass. Ysela shows Anna how most trans women have to resort to prostitution and explains how the police harass the queens and extort money from them. She emphasizes that interacting with straight men is dangerous because they are liable to turn violent.

But the romantic and naïve Anna meets Tommy (Luke Kirby) and strikes up a romance with him. Then she’s stunned to discover that Tommy is a police officer. Fearful of what that could mean, she breaks things off with him, but he persists in courting her despite realizing that she’s a trans woman and promises to rescue her and give her the life of heterosexual romance and respectability that she dreams of. Tommy successfully presents Anna to his co-workers as his girlfriend and moves her into his apartment. But the price of this is Anna severing contact with the queens she’s come to see as her friends.

Then one night in August, the police harass Ysela and other queens at Compton’s, and Ysela throws her coffee in a policeman’s face. As the riot escalates, an off-duty Tommy is called in, and he warns Anna not to leave the apartment. But Anna wants to help and protect her friends, so she hurries down to Compton’s, where she is promptly arrested with the other queens. Tommy bails her out, but he is threatened with firing because being in a relationship with a transwoman means that he’s no longer seen as straight. He tearfully breaks up with Anna but gives her a parting gift, a stash of money that he’s been saving up to pay for her genital conversion surgery. Anna protests that she can’t accept the money because it was extorted from her friends, but Tommy insists that this is her only chance to escape the harsh life ahead of her. Anna chooses to use the money to purchase 28 Barbary Lane and then go to Denmark for her surgery.

Richards as a Young Anna Madrigal

 

The whole episode beautifully explores the struggles trans women experienced in the 1960s, and for me it’s the best part of the whole season. It captures the moment of pre-Stonewall America in both its potential and its harshness and it shines a spotlight on a segment of the LGBT community that is only just now beginning to be understood by wider society. It introduces the viewer to the Compton’s story in a way that makes it clear why the riot happened, although it leaves out Vanguard and the preceding picket, preferring to concentrate on the human story instead of the political one. This is Anna’s story, so the episode doesn’t position the riot as the seminal moment in trans history that it is.

And yet as wonderful as episode 8 is, it doesn’t quite work for me. It doesn’t really fit in with Anna Madrigal’s character as we know it from earlier seasons of the show. In the first three seasons, Anna is very much a care-free Bohemian hedonist, although she worries about revealing her “secret” to the characters in the first two seasons. But episode 8 frames Anna’s story as involving a growing awareness of her passing privilege and the violent consequences for those who don’t have it. At the end of the episode she makes the choice to take the tainted money and have her operation. If Anna has learned to recognize her passing privilege, why is she still fearful about outing herself to her Bohemian tenants and her worldly lover in season 1? Why has she apparently severed all her ties to her former trans friends if she’s had her awakening? Why isn’t she renting the rooms at 28 Barbary Lane to them so they don’t have to live in the Tenderloin? And if Anna is so venal that she would accept what the show explicitly frames as blood money, how has she become the care-free woman of season 1 while still harboring the guilt for the choice she’s made? And if she’s cut herself off from the trans community, how did she build Barbary Lane in the “legendary” queer space it’s become in the Netflix season without addressing her past actions?

It also feels rather pat that Tommy has the money to pay for Anna’s surgery. It’s a LOT of money, stacks and stacks of bills. Tommy seems to be fairly young, in his late 20s. In order for him to have extorted that much money from the queens during his short career, he has to have been bleeding them dry every chance he gets, which just seems implausible, especially since he and Anna can’t have been dating for more than a year at most.

It feels very much as if the writers of the Netflix season took a look at Maupin’s oeuvre and noticed that Anna is the only trans character and decided to correct Maupin’s omission by revealing that Anna is actually estranged from the whole trans community because of a corrupt decision she made in the 1960s. In other words, instead of organically integrating the new season with the facts and tone of the previous seasons, the writers chose to critique the previous seasons by suggesting that the tone of the earlier series was rooted in privilege instead of seeing it as a response to the oppression of the gay community in the 1970s. The original Anna enabled her tenants to discover and live their authentic lives, so making Anna a victimizer of her own community who must atone for her sins is a fundamental betrayal of her essential character. Instead of simply continuing the story told in Tales of the City, Lauren Morelli and her writing room have re-interpreted the story for a new generation at the expense of the original. It seems that Anna isn’t the only one who victimized her community.

 

Want to Know More?

The current season of Tales of the Cityis available on Netflix. The first season(the 1993) is available through Amazon. The second and third seasons can be found on Youtube. The novels are delightful and justly loved by many readers. You can get the first three collected as 28 Barbary Lane.

There isn’t much written on the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot beyond internet articles. The best thing is Screaming Queens, a 2005 documentary made by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. You can find it here, at the bottom of the page. It’s definitely worth watching.

Tales of the City: the Next Generation

Tags

1970s, 20th Century America, Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin, Charlie Barnett, Homosexuality, Laura Linney, Mary Ann SIngleton, Michael Tolliver, Murray Bartlett, Olympia Dukakis, San Francisco, Tales of the City

Netflix has released its first (and perhaps only) season of Tales of the City. Confusingly, it’s the first Netflix season, but the fourth season of the series based on the novels of the same name by Armistead Maupin that chronicle the lives of the residents of 28 Barbary Coast in San Francisco. The first three seasons were set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the AIDS crisis took hold and carved its way through the city’s gay community. The current season, however, is set in the present day (although it’s only been 20 years for the characters, allowing the series to bring back four of the six actors who led the show in its first season, which was filmed in 1993).

Spoiler Alert: This post will discuss major plot twists in the Netflix season, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to put off reading this post.

 

The First Three Seasons

The original series focused on the naïve Midwesterner Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney, in her breakout role); the young straight lothario waiter Brian Hawkins (Paul Gross); Michael “Mouse” Tolliver (Marcus D’Amico), the young gay man who craves romance; Mona Ramsey (Chloe Webb), a carefree bisexual woman; and their landlady Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), who is eventually revealed to be a post-operative transwoman and Mona’s father. Edgar Halycon (Donald Moffat), Mary Ann and Mona’s boss, and DeDe Halcyon Day (Barbara Garrick), Edgar’s daughter who is in an unhappy marriage, also have major parts.

The show focuses on the characters’ sexual adventures and search for meaningful relationships. The show was ground-breaking in its day in the frankness of its depiction of the sexual milieu of San Francisco. Michael’s sexual liaisons and dreams of marriage are treated with the same respect that Anna and Edgar’s romance receives, and his relationship in the second season is presented as entirely normal and appropriate. Brian visits a hetero bath house and two of the secondary characters go to a gay one. DeDe contemplates having an abortion after an adulterous fling. Most of the characters smoke pot freely and Mona and Mouse use cocaine and Quaaludes in a casual fashion. The characters are simultaneously decadent and innocent, enjoying the pre-AIDS hedonism of the 70s.

In many ways, Anna Madrigal was the first sensitive depiction of a trans person on television. Throughout the first season, it’s clear she has a secret and the revelation of that secret to the audience is a big part of the conclusion of the season, but the show doesn’t really sensationalize her identity, especially as the second season goes on. As Anna tells first Brian and then Mona and finally Michael and Mary Ann, none of them react badly; they just listen and discuss what she’s said. Mona in particular quickly begins to call out another character for misgendering Anna, long before misgendering was common idea or even a term. The only people who react poorly are characters already presented in negative terms, such as Mona’s mother, who is bitter about how Anna abandoned her two decades before. The only sour note in the whole series is that Anna presents her secret as “a lie” she’s been perpetrating on the people around her, instead of merely a facet of her personal life she has no obligation to disclose. While the choice to cast Olympia Dukakis as a trans woman feels regressive today, it’s worth pointing out that in the 1990s, it was standard practice to cast men to play trans women, so the casting of Dukakis was by the standards of the day moderately progressive.

Dukakis as Madrigal

The Current Season

The Netflix series showrunner, Lauren Morelli, has consciously sought to update the show’s depiction of San Francisco, introducing a crop of new main characters who capture the city’s diversity better than the original show, which has no non-white characters other than a maid, a fashion model who is eventually revealed to be a white woman using a drug to darken the pigment of her skin for career reasons, and a television reporter (in the third season). Michael (now played by Murray Bartlett) is dating the 28-year old African-American Ben (Charlie Barnett). Margot Park (May Hong) and Jake Rodriguez (Garcia) are a queer couple; Margot is a young lesbian whose lesbian partner has transitioned to male and who is now struggling with what his transition means for his sexuality. The bisexual Shawna Hawkins (Ellen Page) is Brian and Mary Ann’s adoptive daughter, but thinks she is their biological child. Mary Ann’s decision to leave Brian and Shawna for career reasons has estranged her from both of them. Shawna is casually involved with Claire (Zosia Mamet), a film-maker who is chronicling the decline of San Francisco’s queer spaces. Most of these characters are new creations, not drawn from any of Maupin’s books.

The result is a show divided between its strangely-young Boomers and its earnest Millennials/iGens and over which a certain tension between past and present hovers. The show presents three spaces of importance to the queer community: Compton’s Cafeteria, a now long-closed late-night gathering place for the trans community in the 1960s; 28 Barbary Lane, which is now a “legendary” place at which the LGBT community gathers for occasional parties; and the Body Politic, a queer feminist co-op Burlesque bar which is only the most recent incarnation of a string of lesbian bars and clubs stretching back decades.

The three spaces are strung together mostly by Claire, who is making a documentary about the loss of these spaces. The history of Compton’s Cafeteria plays a major role in episode 8 (I’ll deal with that in a later post) and Claire laments that all that’s left of it is a shuttered building and an historical marker. She interviews women at Body Politic who tell her about the importance of that space, including an unnamed lesbian (played by Fortune Feimster) who emphasizes that queer spaces like the Body Politic can literally save people’s lives. The main plot of the season involves a mysterious blackmailer who forces Anna to give them the title to 28 Barbary Lane so that it can be torn down. This is presented as not merely a threat to the residents’ living situation, but also as an existential threat to the San Francisco queer community, which rallies to stage a sit-in when the wrecking crew comes to tear the building down. So a central theme of the season is the historical value of spaces where LGBT people are dominant.

The show understands the importance of history, but it avoids directly addressing the biggest facet of queer history in San Francisco, namely the AIDS Crisis. The third season ends in 1981 with only the most subtle hint of the tidal wave that was about to hit; one of Michael’s lovers mentions having what he takes to be a hickey on his neck. The fourth season begins in the present, after AIDS has been brought under control, thus leap-frogging two decades of staggering death. In a series that aims for gentle humor, that’s an understandable choice.

But it’s strange that the show only addresses AIDS in indirect ways. Michael is HIV+, as is a former lover of his. They are both seen with a bottle of pills for treating HIV, but if the viewer doesn’t know what Truvada is, the significance of it will go over their head. Michael visits a doctor who confirms that it’s safe for him to have sex without a condom, but he frets about asking Ben to do that. At one point, Ben finds Michael’s ‘little black book’ and sees that many of the names are crossed out of it, but the viewer is left to intuit that this means that Michael has lost an enormous number of friends to AIDS. The only time we see the psychological weight of the AIDS Crisis is a passing comment, made after Anna dies, that mourning gets easier with time. For those familiar with the AIDS Crisis, this is reasonable storytelling, but for the younger generation of gay men, many of whom are unaware of the scope of the mortality, I’m not sure the show makes its point as clearly as it thinks it does.

The show does depict a generational clash taking place in the LGBT community. In the sharpest scene in the season, Michael and Ben attend a dinner party of gay men in their 50s and 60s. Ben, the youngest person in the room by about two decades, takes offense when one of the other men jokes about “Mexican trannies”. Another guest then lambasts Ben for not understanding how much of a struggle gay men had in the 80s and 90s, living under a government that literally didn’t care if they lived or died and suggests that Ben should recognize that his privileges as a gay man in the 2010s were won with the struggles of that older generation. In a different scene, when the unnamed lesbian tells Claire about her life history for the documentary, Claire asks to redo the interview and avoid what she considers problematic language; the lesbian essentially tells her to fuck off and walks away. Mary Ann challenges Shawna’s assertion that burlesque can be a feminist act, explaining that in the 70s, her generation was fighting to not be treated as sex objects.

Ben and Michael

But while the show is willing to depict this clash, its sympathies seem to be with the younger generation’s view of things. After the dinner party, Michael apologizes for not coming to Ben’s defense and Ben points out that as a black man, he knows very well what it feels like to have the government not care about his welfare. Shawna responds to Mary Ann’s challenge by persuading her to get up and perform a song, which Mary Ann finds a liberating experience. The unnamed lesbian doesn’t offer any persuasive response to Claire, just a rude one.

It’s hard for me to shake the sense that the show doesn’t really like its older characters. Their past choices are shown to be largely bad ones. In the books, Mary Ann and Brian part amicably, but in the show Mary Ann essentially abandoned Brian and Shawna, a decision that has left Brian unable to date for 20 years and which has left Shawna with a powerful sense that she is unworthy of love. The career Mary Ann left to chase never truly materialized and instead she’s wound up in a marriage that has soured on her. Brian and Anna have compounded Mary Ann’s bad decision by failing to tell Shawna that she is actually the biological child of one of Mary Ann’s friends who died soon after childbirth, as if being adopted was a shameful secret that Shawna needs to be protected from. The last three episodes excoriate Anna by revealing that she has lived for half a century with a terrible secret, namely that the money she used to purchase Barbary Lane and pay for her gender confirmation surgery was given to her by a police officer who had been extorting it from trans prostitutes. When Anna dies, she wills Barbary Lane to an old trans friend, with a note that it should have been hers a long time ago. Only Michael has nothing to apologize for in his past.

In my opinion, the scenarios the show creates are too complex for the easy answers it offers. Ben’s lack of racial privilege doesn’t automatically trump the lack of privilege gay men encountered in the 1980s during the AIDS Crisis; both groups suffered the indifference and hostility of the government in different ways. Anna’s choice to take the money has to be set against the potential life-or-death context of her decision (since it’s explicitly said that trans women don’t usually survive to Anna’s age), and the show never considers that, had she not taken the money, Barbary Lane wouldn’t have become the vital queer space that the show positions it as. Mary Ann’s second-wave feminism isn’t wrong; it’s just a different perspective on how women should relate to sex. The debate over terms such as “tranny” is still playing out in the LGBT community and hasn’t yet been resolved; it’s worth pointing out that for many older gay men, the word ‘queer’ is profoundly insulting while for the younger generation, it’s a reclaimed identity.

What the show offers as a clash of generations feels (at least to this cynical Gen Xer) rather more like the younger generation repudiating the choices made by the older one. It seems fitting that the season’s villain is an angry 20-something seeking to simultaneously chronicle and destroy 28 Barbary Lane.

Want to Know More?

The current season of Tales of the Cityis available on Netflix. The first season (the 1993) is available through Amazon. The second and third seasons can be found on Youtube. The novels are delightful and justly loved by many readers. You can get the first three collected as 28 Barbary Lane.

Pose: Life on the Margins

Tags

20th Century America, African Americans, Dominque Jackson, Evan Peters, FX, Homosexuality, Indya Moore, MJ Rodrigues, New York City, Pose, Racial Issues, Transpeople

FX recently debuted a new tv series by Ryan Murphy, and I’m really enjoying it, so I’m going to post about it, even though it’s only on its first season and I’ve only seen the first four episodes, which are all that’s been broadcast.

Pose is Murphy’s effort to present the ball culture of Harlem in the 1980s to modern Americans. The show serves as an examination of the lives of gay and trans black people in that period, the AIDS Crisis, and the whole ‘Greed is Good” era, all at once. Its four main characters are Blanca (MJ Rodriguez), a latina transwoman; Angel (Indya Moore), a latina transwoman; Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain), a young gay black man; and Stan (Evan Peters), a white stock broker who works in Trump Tower.

 

Ball Culture

Ball Culture has its roots as far back as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when an annual drag ball was an important social occasion in the black community. Modern Ball Culture was founded around 1968 when a black drag queen, Crystal LaBeija, became frustrated with the racism of mainstream drag pageants and chose to found her own pageant for black drag queens, the House of LaBeija Ball. By 1987, when the show opens, Ball Culture was flourishing within the Harlem gay and trans community (and it still continues today).

In this culture, a Ball is a combination fashion show and dance competition. Competitors participate in various categories such as Military, Royalty, Femme Queen Realness, or Butch Queen in Pumps. Competitors were judged on their costuming, their appearance and attitude, and their dance skills. There are two somewhat contradictory goals that need to be achieved in order to score well. First, the competitor had to demonstrate ‘realness’, roughly defined as the ability to pass as a member of the category within the boundaries of straight white culture. Second, the competitor had to demonstrate an ability to call attention to themselves in a dramatic way, particularly with the extremely flamboyant style of improv dancing known as Voguing (made famous in 1990 by Madonna’s Vogue video), which makes use of elements like catwalking, duckwalking, and exaggerated arm and hand gestures.

Two men voguing

 

Ball Culture was (and still is) an expression of the complex social needs of black and latinx gay and trans people. Since these people tended to be rather poor, the balls gave them a fantasy of being well-off and ‘respectable’, while at the same time poking fun at a majority culture they couldn’t easily participate in. But it also showcased an important skill that many blacks and gays have to learn within a wider white heterosexual majority culture, namely the ability to pass as whiter, wealthier, and straighter than they actually are. The ability to pass as straight and middle class, for example, might enable a poor black woman to successfully navigate an encounter with a hostile bureaucrat or enable a gay man to avoid getting beaten up or denied a job. So while the balls were extremely playful, they were also a sort of training ground in which those who can figure out how to pass were rewarded by winning trophies while those who cannot pull off the intended look are scorned with poor judges’ scores and snide comments. While a majority of the contestants were gay or trans, there were categories, such as Military or Business Suit, where straight black men might compete in demonstrations of traditional masculinity, and black women had similar opportunities to showcase traditional femininity.

Because such a large portion of the Ball Culture were social outcasts due to their homosexuality or their improper gender identity, Ball Culture developed the idea of the House. Houses acted as alternative families whose members supported each other and often lived together. Houses were typically led by older or more successful members known as Mothers or Fathers who provided guidance, training in key skills, moral and social support, and perhaps economic assistance to their ‘children’. Members of a House usually adopted the last name used by their Mother or Father. For example, Crystal LaBeija’s ‘family’ were the House of LaBeija, and when Crystal died in 1982, another member, Pepper LaBeija, became the new Mother. Since Pepper’s death, the current Mother of the House is Kia LaBeija.

 

Pose

Ball Culture is the background to Pose. In the first episode, Blanca is a rather frustrated member of House Abundance, whose mother Elektra (Dominque Jackson) is both acid-tongued and ‘legendary’, meaning that she and her children have won a lot of ball trophies. She’s a tough, bitter transwoman who has a keen understanding of both how to make a splash at a ball and how harshly life can treat transwomen. She takes out her frustrations on Blanca and in the pilot she steals Blanca’s idea for a Royalty walk and then literally leads her children on a stealing spree from a museum. Later in the episode, Blanca gets the news that she’s HIV positive and this, coupled with her irritation with Elektra, goads her to strike out on her own and form the House of Evangelista. She recruits Angel, Damon, and Lil Papi (Angel Bismark Curiel) into her house and moves them into a spacious but decaying apartment that she can somehow afford on her income as a nail technician.

Moore as Angel, walking in the category Royalty

 

In addition to its look into the world of Ball Culture, what I like most about Pose is its willingness to explore the tough lives and choices that gay and trans black people had in the 1980s. Damon, who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, is thrown out of his house by his parents because he’s gay, and he spends time homeless before Blanca invites him into her apartment and her House. Angel, like too many transwomen, is a prostitute and stripper at a peep show, at least until she meets Stan. Lil Papi is dealing drugs, despite Blanca’s ban on it. The show generally makes clear that its characters are poor and living a hardscrabble life, although it occasionally gets into a certain amount of fantasy about what’s possible; for example Damon’s homeless boyfriend somehow manages to keep his gorgeous jacket in pristine condition despite life on the street. But most of the characters engage in ‘mopping’ (shoplifting) to find items to wear in the balls.

The show is also particularly honest about its trans characters and the struggles they face. The show set a record for the highest number of trans actors in leading or recurring roles (five); Blanca, Elektra, and Angel are all played by trans actresses. These three characters all offer distinct viewpoints on the trans experience. Angel, despite being a prostitute, has a somewhat naïve longing for a traditional romantic life and when she meets Stan, she agrees to let him set her up in her own apartment and be a kept woman. Despite knowing that Stan is married with kids, she tries to engineer a semblance of a normal life with him, but cannot help but worry about his wife. She struggles to understand how a man who says he’s not gay can be attracted to a woman with a penis.

Elektra is also a kept woman, but she has years of bitter experience that have made her hard; she has a keen sense of the limitations that transwomen of color face and her prescription for climbing the ladder is to accept those limits and learn to game them. At one point, she uses her ability to pass as a woman of means to sweet-talk a police officer into releasing Blanca after the latter is arrested. At the same time, while she looks down on many of the transwomen in the show, she is not above resorting to criminal behavior to achieve her goals. She longs to have what the show refers to as “transsexualism surgery”, but her man warns her that if she goes through with it, he’ll end the relationship.

Rodriguez and Curiel as Blanca and Lil Papi

 

Blanca, however, sees a better world, a promised land for transwomen where they can at least be fully accepted in the gay community; early on she stages a defiant protest of a gay bar that caters to butch gay men and refuses to serve transwomen. This is a particularly nice touch. As gay culture has been presented in the mainstream media, gay men are generally depicted to being fully accepting of transwomen (if transwomen are depicted at all). In reality, transwomen have occupied a complex place in gay society. While queens and effeminate men were the driving force behind the Stonewall Riots, the more butch elements of the gay community have often been unwilling to fully accept them; draq queens and transwomen are celebrated as entertainers but often rejected as sexual partners and scorned for being too effeminate. (On contemporary gay dating sites and apps, it’s common for men to describe themselves as ‘straight-acting’ or to say ‘no fems’.) So it’s good for a show to explore that tension a little bit.

The show also explores the realities of the AIDS Crisis. Blanca’s realization that she doesn’t have a long life ahead of her spurs her to try to build up something that will last, namely a House that will become legendary but will also take better care of its children than Elektra does hers. In the fourth episode, Damon gets sick and Angel discusses the symptoms of seroconversion with him, one of the more frank discussions of HIV I’ve seen on television. The emcee for the balls, Pray Tell (the stand-out Billy Porter), has a boyfriend Costas who is dying of AIDS, and apparently he’s had more than one, as so many gay men in the 80s and 90s did. When he visits the hospital, he discovers that the nurse on duty has refused to bring Costas’ food into his room, and has just left it out in the hallway. That sort of callous, fear-driven treatment of AIDS patients was sadly common in the early days of the AIDS Crisis, and it highlights the need for chosen family of the sort that Houses provided. Thousands of gay men died abandoned by families and medical practitioners, often having to be nursed at home by a lover or gay friend because they either couldn’t afford medical treatment or because hospitals treated them so poorly. At one point Pray Tell discusses how the AIDS Crisis weighs on him and his sex life, and says “I’m scared.” Blanca replies “What is scared to people like us? It’s like water to a fish.” That’s probably the best one-sentence summary of gay life in the late 80s I’ve ever heard.

Refreshingly, the show avoids stigmatizing its characters’ sexual choices. Angel’s life as a sex worker is presented in a very matter-of-fact way, without any shaming of her for it. There’s no indication of how Blanca got infected; was it from a boyfriend, or did she, like Angel have to turn tricks at some point? Damon’s decision to give up his virginity to his boyfriend is explored as a serious choice, the same way it would have been with a straight white teen character, and Blanca gives him a very frank lecture about the realities of gay sex, even explaining that in gay sex there are ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’. Lil Papi admits to have allowing guys to give him blow jobs for money. Stan is shown using a condom when he has sex with Angel.

Meanwhile, Stan struggles with the suffocating materialism of 1980s corporate culture. He’s trying to work his way up the corporate ladder, keep his wife happy, and earn the bonuses that are a measure of status in his social group, and Angel seems like his lifeline to something real and genuine and only for him. James van der Beek plays his Gordon Gecko-like boss with crass enthusiasm; apparently Dawson grew up and sold his soul. The contrast between Stan’s wealth and the other characters’ poverty offers an implicit criticism of Reagan-era economics.

Overall, I really applaud Pose for its choice to focus on such an under-represented segment of society and for its efforts to be relatively honest about the challenges this community had to deal with. Thus far, the show has focused on its characters as sexual minorities and has not really looked at them as racial minorities. I hope it does, because understanding the layered nature of their minority status is key to understanding them. They are not just a sexual minority, they are also racial minorities and in several cases gender minorities as well. The gay community has not fully reckoned with the degree to which white privilege permeates its lobbying efforts, and Pose could help address that problem. Give the show a look.

 

Want to Know More?

Pose is on FX. The best introduction to Ball Culture is Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary Paris is Burning. It’s an excellent introduction to the major elements of the culture, told primarily through interviews. It is also a good window into the lives of black and latinx gays and transwomen, who discuss their dreams and aspirations.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: Secret Identities for Everyone

Tags

20th Century America, Angela Robinson, Bella Heathcote, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Luke Evans, Olive Byrne, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, Rebecca Hall, Superheroes, William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman

When I first heard about Professor Marston and the Wonder Women ( 2017, dir. Angela Robinson), I was really excited. The film is a biopic of William Moulton Marston, the Harvard-trained psychologist who was the creator of Wonder Woman. Marston lived a rather unconventional life and I was interested to see how Robinson, who also wrote the film, would treat Marston.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to see this movie, you might want to put off reading this until you’ve done so, because I discuss the plot of the film in detail.

The film tells the story of Marston (Luke Evans) and his ferociously intelligent but academically-thwarted wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall). They are trying to develop a prototype lie-detector at Radcliffe when they meet Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), the niece of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, who takes one of Marston’s classes. The Marstons are feminists and believers in free love (the early 20th century term for sex outside of marriage), and they are both attracted to Olive. Elizabeth figures out a way to make the lie-detector work, and after several rounds of lie-detector Truth or Dare, the three admit they are all attracted to each other and start a polyamorous relationship long before that was a thing,

Evans as Marston

 

Unfortunately, word of their unconventional (not to mention unethical) relationship leaks out and the Marstons are dismissed from Radcliffe right around the time that Olive announces she’s pregnant. Elizabeth takes work as a secretary and William starts trying to make a living as an author. Along the way he encounters a bondage fetishist and the threesome discovers that they’re all kinky; Elizabeth is dominant while Olive is submissive. (Magic lassos, anyone?)

All of this sparks an idea in William. He will write a new comic book involving a female superhero who defeats her opponents through love. As a psychologist, William developed what he called DISC Theory, which focuses on two dimensions of people’s emotional behavior: whether they perceive their environment as friendly or hostile and whether they perceive themselves as having control or lack of control over the environment. Control in an antagonistic environment produces Dominance, control in a friendly environment produces Inducement, lack of control in an antagonistic environment produces Submission, and lack of control in a friendly environment produces Compliance. His character, Suprema the Wonder Woman, was conceived as a demonstration of these principles, as well as an expression of his sense that women are inherently superior to men because they are not automatically aggressive.

Despite Elizabeth’s skepticism, William sells the character (sans her original name) to a comic book publisher and makes a good deal of money writing the character. Olive and Elizabeth both have children. But one day during a kinky romp in their house, a friendly neighbor walks in, discovers the threesome in flagrante delicto, and their world collapses around them. Elizabeth demands that Olive and her children leave to start a new life. William is investigated by a morality crusader; her ‘interrogation’ of him forms the film’s frame tale. William develops cancer, and is eventually able to persuade Olive to return by getting Elizabeth to drop her Dominance and enact Compliance with Olive. The film ends shortly before William’s death, with an epilogue text that explains that Olive and Elizabeth continued to live and raise children together for the next several decades until Olive’s death.

The film is very well-done, if not at all subtle about its themes. Olive and Elizabeth are together William’s perfect woman and both contribute components to Wonder Woman’s character. The film liberally peppers panels from early Wonder Woman comics into scenes of the trio’s life, illustrating how their sexual interests were freely expressed in the comic. When the three of them first make love, they do so in a theater prop room, which allows Olive to be dressed as the goddess Diana, Elizabeth wears a cheetah-print coat, and William is dressed in a WWII pilot’s outfit; anyone who knows Wonder Woman will immediately spot the references to Wonder Woman’s secret identity, her arch-nemesis the Cheetah, and her love interest Steve Trevor. William’s lectures on DISC Theory act as chapter headings for the film.

The three title characters

 

It’s interesting that in a biopic about William Marston, he’s not really the main character, which is not a bad thing, since as an actor, Evans is very pretty to look at but not really a very dynamic presence. The main focus is on Elizabeth and Olive’s complicated relationship, and Hall shines as Elizabeth. Every time she’s on-screen, she absolutely commands attention, which both fits the historical Elizabeth’s ferocious self-confidence and helps explain why William adores her so deeply. Heathcote’s Olive is a gentle woman but one willing to pursue her desires and stand up for herself against Elizabeth’s harshness. And the film handles their polyamorous relationship in a very sensitive way, never treating it as freakish while still acknowledging the difficulties it creates for them.

 

Unfortunately…

A lot of the film is made up.

Yes, the film is “based on a true story.” But that doesn’t mean it’s based very closely on it.

The film opens with William and Elizabeth already at Radcliffe, and in doing so glosses over a good deal of interesting stuff in William’s earlier life, including the fact that he wrote at least four screenplays that got turned into silent movies (including one directed by DW Griffiths). He claimed to have supported himself as an undergraduate at Harvard that way. He also spent a year in Hollywood working for a film studio. William’s natural gift for attracting media attention was quite useful there, but ultimately he returned to New England. The man lived a very interesting, if not entirely successful life, but much of it gets cut out in the interests of focusing on the relationships at the heart of the film.

William didn’t invent the Lie Detector. He invented a precursor to it that focused on systolic blood pressure. He repeatedly used it for experiments, some of which were basically publicity stunts, and both Elizabeth and Olive helped him conduct these experiments, but there’s no evidence that the trio ever used the device on each other to uncover their secret feelings. The actual Lie Detector, more properly called a Polygraph (because it measures several body functions, including systolic blood pressure) was invented by John Augustus Larson, whose protégé Leonarde Keeler improved on it and then patented it. William’s work was certainly important to the development of the device, and William frequently claimed to have invented it, but that’s a considerable exaggeration. It was Keeler who made all the money on it.

Marston doing a publicity stunt with three women at a movie theater

 

The film greatly simplifies William’s employment history. He never actually taught at Radcliffe, but did teach at several other universities, including founding the Psychology Department at American University. He was not fired because of his unconventional relationships; rather departments just stopped renewing his teaching contracts. It’s possible that word of his relationships played a role in this, because at least one letter in his file at Harvard hints at improprieties, but that’s as much as we can say about why his academic career faltered. He also had a law practice (since he and Elizabeth both went to law school) and tried to insert himself into various famous criminal investigations (such as the Lindbergh case) as an expert on lie detection. One of the cases he was involved in, the Frye case, resulted in an important appeals court decision about when scientific experts can be introduced as witnesses, a decision that still gets cited today. He worked for the FBI briefly. He also ran at least four separate businesses, all of which failed, and one of which got him charged with mail fraud, although he was found innocent (that trial is probably why American University dismissed him). All in all, William was something of a publicity hound and a bit of a grifter, which doesn’t come through in the film at all.

Also, he can’t be Professor William if he’s not working at a university. Professor is a job title, and he didn’t have it, except perhaps for a year at American University.

 

His Relationships

The biggest problem in the film stems from its misrepresentation of the relationship between himself, Elizabeth and Olive. The film suggests that the Marstons had an essentially conventional relationship until meeting Olive in the mid 1920s. In fact, by that point, the Marstons already had at least an open relationship, because while William was working for the Army during WWI, he met Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, a divorcée several years his senior. By 1919, she had moved in with the Marstons. For the rest of William’s life, Huntley moved in and out of wherever the Marstons were living; she had a permanent room in the house they raised their children in. The exact nature of the relationship is unclear. Although Margaret Sanger, who knew the Marstons’ circle quite well from the 1920s on, said that the relationship was non-sexual, Huntley herself described it as a “threesome”. She and William were certainly lovers, but there’s no clear evidence that she and Elizabeth were intimate, depending on how you understand “threesome”. The film complete omits Huntley, but it’s clear that the Marston trio was really more of a periodic quartet.

The Marston clan: Elizabeth is far left, Olive far right, the three boys are their sons, the girl on his right is his daughter, and the woman on his left is Margaret Huntley

 

Nor were Huntley’s sexual interests purely vanilla. When she met William, she was already a devotee of “love-binding”, what modern kinksters call bondage. The film claims that William stumbled across a group of bondage fetishists in New York some time after Olive had moved into his household, when in reality he was probably already familiar with bondage before he met her, thanks to Huntley.

Nor was Huntley the only sexual adventurer in William’s circle. His paternal aunt, Carolyn Marston Keatley, was a believer in an early form of New Age spirituality, maintaining that the world was entering an age of free love. She maintained a regular weekly gathering at her Boston apartment where about 10 people, including the Marstons, Huntley, and eventually Olive, would gather regularly. These meetings seem to have been devoted to exploring female sexual power; the women routinely went naked, and a set of meeting minutes from this group strongly suggests that group sex and bondage were a regular part of the activites. These meetings seem to have laid the foundation for the philosophy that Marston and his women used to govern their complex relationship. Instead of being a later development of their relationship, as the film depicts, bondage seems to have been one of its early components.

However, understanding what William, Elizabeth, and Olive (and Huntley, when she was around) did sexually is complicated, because there is conflicting evidence. The aforementioned evidence about Huntley and about Keatley’s meetings strongly suggests that kinky sex was a basic element of their dynamic, but the Marstons’ children have insisted in interviews conducted by historian Jill Lepore and others that they never saw any hint of bondage in their household and that neither Elizabeth nor Olive would have tolerated such things.

Even more problematic is the film’s central conceit that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers, because William and Elizabeth’s grand-daughter, Christie Marston, insists that this was not the case. Christie says that she knew her grandmother quite well and had many frank conversations with her. Christie insists that the two women lived together as “sisters” rather than lovers. She points out that Angela Robinson made no effort to contact any of the Marston family and therefore Robinson’s treatment of the relationship is entirely fictitious. We know that the two women maintained separate bedrooms, and on one occasion when they visited Sanger, she arranged from them to use a room with two beds (she was very emphatic that they not use her bedroom, which might point to a willful blindness on her part). There is no explicit evidence that the two women were ever lovers (and as we’ll see, their children had no clear idea that Olive was intimate with their father, even though one of the children caught the two of them having sex).

Elizabeth and Olive leaning into their first kiss

 

Despite that, there’s certainly reason to speculate that Elizabeth and Olive might have been lovers. William had a remarkably contemporary view of sexuality, maintaining that homosexuality was entirely natural and that sexual desire was not inherently connected to a person’s gender (which he considered more social than biological). He found lesbian sex arousing and claimed to have watched women having sex; it’s not a far leap to guess who those women might have been. The notes of the Keatley meeting group talk about a ‘Love Leader’, a “Mistress” and their “Love Girl” coming together to form a “Love Unit.” That certainly sounds like Elizabeth had some sort of sexual relationship with Olive. “The ladies” (as the family still calls them) continued to live together for decades after William’s death, and long after their children had moved out.

And while their children and grandchildren certainly knew the trio well, there’s reason to think that their testimony is not entirely reliable. As Lepore has documented, the Marston trio were remarkably dedicated to hiding the nature of their relationship, even from their children. Olive invented a husband who fathered two sons on her and then died. She never told her sons Donn and Byrne that William was their father; as adults, the sons finally pried the truth out of Elizabeth, who only told them on the condition that they never ask their mother about the matter again. Olive was, in fact, so dead-set against anyone learning the truth that she threatened to commit suicide if her sons pressed her on the subject of their father. William adopted both of Olive’s sons to help protect the family secret, and Olive was variously passed off as either a domestic servant or a widowed sister, to prevent neighbors from gossiping. But the fact that Donn and Byrne felt there was something their mother wasn’t telling them suggests that they had suspicions that they had been lied to.

Later in life, as Elizabeth was sorting through William’s papers, she aggressively culled the documents, and then very carefully decided which of the four children would get which papers. Lepore, who was able to see three of the four sets of papers, was startled to realize that Holloway had given each of the children a sharply different family narrative, as if she was trying to keep each of them from finding out the truth even from each other. Although William drew much of his inspiration for Wonder Woman from “the ladies”  and although Olive functioned as William’s typist and secretary, Holloway insisted that Huntley was much better informed about Wonder Woman’s origins than Olive was. So it seems that neither Elizabeth nor Olive wanted anyone to know the details of their unconventional relationship, and it seems entirely in keeping with that to think that Elizabeth might have lied to Christie in an effort to protect Olive’s privacy. So she may well have been sexually involved with Olive and simply chose not to reveal the fact. Given that the children had no clear awareness that William was Olive’s lover and Donn and Byrne’s father, it seems to me plausible that the trio might have successfully hidden a relationship between Elizabeth and Olive as well.

However, against that interpretation, we must set the fact that some of William’s co-workers at All American Comics (which was later sold to DC Comics) seem to have been fully aware that he effectively had two wives. In fact, William seems to have been quite the ladies’ man his entire adult life, and numerous people were aware of it. William’s mother was fully aware of what was going as, as were Margaret Sanger and Olive’s mother Ethel (and quite possibly two of Olive’s uncles, who performed as drag queens on the vaudeville circuit). So the family secret wasn’t so important that William didn’t tell anyone at all.

 

If I had to guess, I’d say that Elizabeth and Olive did have sex at least occasionally, since the meetings of Keatley’s group seem to have involved that sort of thing. But it’s a far cry from that to the film’s version of the relationship, in which Elizabeth kisses Olive before William does and the three regularly share a bed at night. William seems to have maintained separate sex lives with each of them, and given that there’s no concrete evidence that the two women saw themselves as lovers, it’s best to not read too much into things. However, as I’ve already laid out, the evidence is somewhat contradictory. Robinson’s speculation that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers is certainly possible, but it’s speculation, not provable fact.

In the film, Elizabeth only finally acquiesces to William’s relationship with Olive when Olive has a baby. She goes to work as a secretary because someone in the family has to be earning some money. In reality, Elizabeth was very career-oriented and had struggled to figure out how to make that work with being a mother, something else she wanted. Olive was the solution to her dilemma; Elizabeth would be a career woman, and Olive would be the stay-at-home caretaker for the children. Far from being a secretary, she was an editor at the Encyclopedia Brittanica and McCall’s, and eventually began the assistant to the chief executive at Metropolitan Life Insurance.

The movie claims that after about 5-6 years, the trio’s secret was revealed when a neighbor wandered into their house and caught them in a bondage scene together. The trio came under so much social pressure that Elizabeth forced Olive and her two sons to move out, and William was only able to reunite them at the end of his life by using the fact of his cancer to goad them into a reconciliation. That never happened at all. The trio’s secret was never found out by their neighbors (or if it was, it was tolerated). Olive never moved out of the Marstons’ household, and given that William and Elizabeth had legally adopted both her sons, she probably couldn’t have taken her sons with her if she had.

Elizabeth (left) and Olive late in life

 

Another problem with the end of the film is that it distorts what happened medically. About a year before he died, William contracted polio, and gradually lost his ability to walk, spending his last months bedridden. During that period, he developed cancer, but the family chose not to tell him about the diagnosis (secrecy ran deep in the Marston household, it seems), so that he died never knowing what he was suffering from.

 

Wonder Woman

The film also gets a chunk of the comic book side of the story wrong as well. In the film, William comes up with the idea for Suprema the Wonder Woman, despite Elizabeth poo-pooing the concept of a female superhero, and pitches it to MC Gaines (Oliver Platt), the head of All American Comics. In reality, William had already been working with All American for some time before he pitched his concept. Gaines realized that having a well-known psychologist who could say that comics were healthy reading for children was a good thing, so he paid Marston a monthly fee to act as a consultant. William was always good at making headlines, so they were a natural fit for each other.

When William invented Wonder Woman, Elizabeth was not against it. In actuality, she was the one who told him that the character had to be a woman. William was trying to express his ideas about submission to loving authority, and Elizabeth pointed out that because he was trying to create a totally different kind of superhero, it ought to be a woman. William was already essentially a female supremacist, so it made sense.

The film suggests that Wonder Woman was a combination of Elizabeth and Olive, and that may well be true. Elizabeth was an extremely strong and assertive woman, and Olive was much more docile in many ways, which would fit Wonder Woman’s aggressive nature and her docility when she is bound by a man. But William seems to have modeled Wonder Woman physically much more on Olive than on Elizabeth. In the film, Elizabeth is tall and athletic and dark-haired, while Olive is shorter and more soft-looking and blonde. In reality both women were dark-haired, and Olive was taller than Elizabeth.

The scene in which Olive puts on a burlesque costume and accidentally inspires Wonder Woman’s costume is false. William created the costume in co-operation with the artist Henry George Peter, who partly modeled her on pin-ups he drew. But Olive did contribute one element of the costume; William had given her a pair of bracelets that she wore every day and those were the direct inspiration for the Amazonian bracelets that deflect bullets.

Olive in the Wonder Woman costume

 

The film’s frame tale involves William being forced to meet with a committee run by Josette Frank (Connie Britton), who is disturbed by the sexual themes in the comic. Gaines says that he cannot protect William from Frank, so that if William can’t convince Frank that the comic is wholesome, Wonder Woman will be taken away from him. The truth is quite different. Frank actually worked on a committee that reviewed children’s literature. Gaines hoped for their stamp of approval, but Frank was troubled by the copious amounts of bondage, and never accepted William’s theories about willing submission to loving authority, which he fully admitted were part of what the comic was about. Eventually Frank resigned from the editorial advisory panel reviewing All American comics.

But Frank never had any real leverage that could have forced Gaines to take away the character from William. Gaines was making too much money off of William’s character to ever threaten his star author that way; by the end of his life, Wonder Woman was regularly appearing in three different comic books and an internationally-syndicated newspaper strip. William worked on these up until just shortly before his death, although his assistant Joye Hummel was increasingly scripting the comics from his notes. So the entire frame tale of the movie is made-up. Gaines did come under some pressure over Wonder Woman while William was writing her, but the real attack on comic books and Wonder Woman was just beginning to take shape as William was dying.

It’s not hard to see why Frank found material like this problematic

 

William would certainly have been very disappointed to see that the next writer to control the character was Robert Kanigher. Where William was a full-blown feminist convinced of women’s moral superiority to men, Kanigher was an outright misogynist who despised the character he was being asked to write, and reduced her to a love-starved simpering editor of a woman’s romance magazine, desperate for Steve Trevor to marry her. It was not until the publication of the first issue of Ms Magazine in 1972, which put Wonder Woman on its cover, that Wonder Woman really began to return to her feminist roots.

Despite being largely invented, I still like Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. It’s a well-done story that brings a fascinating and rather neglected trio of historical figures to the awareness of the viewers. It’s a moving portrait of a polyamorous family at a time well before that was a thing. And it doesn’t hold back from the original feminism that made Wonder Woman such an inspiration to many of the women of Second Wave feminism.

My next post will finish up looking at The Last Kingdom.

Want to Know More?

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is still playing in theaters, so it’s not available elsewhere yet.

If you want to know more about William Moulton Marston, his women, and his famous creation, I cannot recommend Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman highly enough. She painstakingly pieces together the secret life the Marstons worked so hard to keep hidden, and she does an excellent job setting Wonder Woman in the context of 1920s feminism, showing how the issues of birth control, suffrage, women’s right to work, and so on are played out in the pages of Sensation Comics. It’s honestly one of the best pieces of historical scholarship I’ve read in a long time. If you have any interest in Wonder Woman, this is a must-read.

Hidden Figures: Laudable Liberties

Tags

20th Century America, Civil Rights Movement, Dorothy Vaughan, Hidden Figures, Interesting Women, Janelle Monáe, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, NASA, Octavia Spencer, Racial Issues, Taraji P Henson, The 1960s

I know that I promised my next post would be with the historical consultant for The Eagle. But I just saw Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly) and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it down in blog form. So I promise I’ll get to the interview in my next post.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this movie, you may want to put off reading this, since I talk about major plot points.

Hidden Figures tells the fascinating story of three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. All three were originally hired to work as ‘computers’, women who did the low-status work of laborious mathematical calculating and double-checking the work of higher status male scientists in the era before the birth of electronic computers. Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is a mathematician whose calculations proved invaluable to the launch of the Atlas rocket that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the head of the ‘Western’ Computing group, a group of African-American female computers kept separate from the ‘Eastern’ Computing group, who were white women; realizing that her job will eventually be made obsolete by the arrival of an IBM computer, Vaughan teaches herself Fortran and becomes an expert in computers. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) pursues her ambition of being an engineer for NASA.

All three women encounter racist obstacles at NASA. Johnson struggles with the fact that the only bathroom African-American women can use is located literally half a mile away on the Langley campus where she works, forcing her to take extended breaks simply to use the bathroom and thereby drawing the ire of the division head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Vaughan is long overdue for a promotion; she has been acting as the supervisor of the Western Computing group, but hasn’t been given the title or the pay of a supervisor, and the woman she reports to, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) doesn’t seem to care. Jackson needs to take night classes in order to apply for the engineering position, but the only school that offers such classes is segregated, and she has to persuade a judge to allow her to attend the classes.

Monáe, Henson, and Spencer

Ultimately, all three overcome their obstacles. Johnson repeatedly demonstrates her invaluableness to Harrison, who increasingly bends the rules to allow her to participate in the work of getting Glenn safely into space and back. Vaughan masters the newly-installed IBM computer before anyone else, and then teaches the other members of the Western Computing group how to work with it, thus saving all of their jobs and giving them a future on the cutting edge of computer science. This convinces Mitchell to arrange Vaughn’s over-due promotion. Jackson persuades the judge to let her attend the night school classes she needs and by the end of the film is on her way to becoming an engineer.

The story is well-told all around. The script is funny and does a good job of making the mathematical problems of early space flight intelligible to a general audience. The performances are all solid, especially Henson’s. And the costume designer does a very subtle job of highlighting the exclusion of African-American women from NASA; the white men tend to vanish into a sea of identical white dress shirts and dark ties, while the black women stand out in demur but colorful skirts and blouses, highlighting the absence of ‘colored’ people whenever they’re not around.

Katherine Johnson

The story it tells is an important one. These three women all played important roles at NASA and made major contributions to American space exploration for several decades. Their story deserves to be told, and it’s exciting to see the movie do so amazingly well at the box office. All too often, American history is presented as the accomplishments of white men, and Hidden Figures does a good job of reminding us that women of color have made great contributions to the country as well. It’s particularly nice to see a biopic about African-Americans who aren’t entertainers or athletes. These women are important not because they’re pretty or can sing, but because they’re smart. And the film confronts the problems of segregation head-on, particularly in Johnson and Jackson’s storylines. Americans need a reminder of just how ugly and unjust segregation and Jim Crow were.

The problem with the film is that in the pursuit of its goal of highlighting the struggles these three women had with segregation and racism, it significantly misrepresents what was going on at NASA in the 60s.

NACA and NASA

The organization we think of NASA began life in 1915 as NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It existed until 1958, when it was shut down and replaced with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NACA began hiring African-Americans to work as computers already in 1941, but like many branches of the American government in the period, NACA was segregated. It had a system of bathrooms, cafeterias, and other facilities for whites, and less well-maintained parallels for blacks.

Henson as Johnson solving a problem involving the space capsule

However, when NASA was formed in 1958, it wasn’t segregated. For example, NASA abandoned the system of segregated bathrooms, even though many of its properties were carried over from NACA. The story about Johnson having to run back and forth between buildings to use the bathrooms is actually a story that Jackson told about NACA in the 1950s. In the film, Johnson has to make several bathroom trips, once in the rain, trying to do her calculating work on the toilet so as not to fall too far behind in her work. Finally, when she breaks down and complains to Harrison, Harrison angrily goes out and uses a crowbar to tear down the sign labelling a particular bathroom as being for colored women. It’s a great scene that produces cheers in the audience, but it’s simply untrue.

Similarly, Vaughan was denied the supervisory position she deserved for some time, but that was during the 1950s. By the time the film opens in 1961, Vaughan had already been a supervisor for 3 years. Jackson was offered a position in an engineering team and then had to find a way to get into those classes, whereas the film suggests that she is kept from applying for the position because Mitchell is somewhat racist and unwilling to bend on the rules. So far as I can determine, the film consistently projects the segregation of 1950s NACA half a decade forward onto 1960s NASA.

NASA in the 1960s was actually a tool for desegregation. Already when he was the Senate Majority leader, Lyndon Johnson saw NASA as a way to advance African Americans by hiring and promoting them into better-paying and more respectable positions. It’s no coincidence that NASA desegregated in 1958; Johnson was the head of the subcommittee that oversaw the passage of government act that created the agency.

Morgan Watson, NASA’s first black engineer

Katherine Johnson herself denied experiencing the treatment the film shows her receiving. “I didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research…You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job…and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.” Likewise, Jackson only recalled one instance in which she felt disrespected, and the man involved subsequently apologized when he realized that he was in the wrong.

So by painting early 1960s NASA as a strongly segregated environment, the film is somewhat unfairly tarring NASA for NACA’s failings, and denying NASA’s modest role in helping advance the interests of African-Americans. The real racism that the women experienced in this period seems to have been from the communities around Langley. Vaughn had difficulties find a place to stay. In the 1960s, many of the black male engineers encountered threats and violence from the white locals, and one white NASA employee was so badly injured and threatened that he left NASA entirely. Had it chosen to, the film could have made its point more honestly by contrasting the comparatively accepting environment of NASA with the much more racist environment beyond its gates.

 

Racism or Sexism?

The more I think about the film and read about the background, the more I find myself thinking that the real problem Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson experienced wasn’t so much racism (although they clearly did encounter some of that) but sexism. Consistently, there is a pattern of the men doing the important, high-status work (such as figuring out the physics of space flight and designing the capsules) while the women (both black and white) are relegated to the low-status work of computing, even though the film makes clear that doing so is a waste of their talents, especially Johnson’s. Apart from Johnson, the only other woman in the Space Task group, Ruth, appears to be a secretary, and there are no women at all in the engineering group that Jackson is involved in.

Dorothy Vaughan

Johnson repeatedly insists that she needs to be involved in the key meetings where decisions are made, because excluding her means that she has to wait to get the data she needs, which often renders her work obsolete by the time she’s finished it. She persuades Harrison to bend the rules for her to sit in on briefings with the Air Force, and eventually he invites her into Mission Control when Glenn’s flight happens (a decision that the film claims probably saved Glenn’s life). The issue here is not that she’s African-American, but that she’s a woman and the men around her are uncomfortable with her presence.

While the film suggests that the white computers earned more than the black computers, the truth is that the two groups were paid the same, but that their pay was 40% less than the equivalent male pay, even during the NACA period.

So I think that the real problem with the film, at least for me, is that it was trying too hard to make its point about segregation, a point it could only make by misrepresenting the degree of segregation at NASA. Instead, the real story in the material seems to be the way that NASA was excluding women of talent from important roles. Their obstacles were clearly intersectional, involving both their race and their gender, but the film discourages us from thinking too much about gender by highlighting a simultaneous divide of gender and race; the scientists and engineers are all white men and the computers almost entirely black women (the exception being Vivian, who leads the white female computers, but who is never shown making any intellectual contributions to the project and who mostly acts as an administrative obstacle to Vaughn). The result is that whenever gender emerges as an issue, race is almost always there at the same time. There is one scene when Johnson’s future husband (an African-American) makes a sexist remark, but that’s almost the only moment when gender is highlighted as an issue. So the film tends to subsume gender issues under race issues in a way that makes it hard for the audience to see the gender component of the problem.

None of this makes Hidden Figures a bad movie, merely a movie that privileges its message over the facts. It tells an important story that people need to know. I just wish it had been a bit more honest with the facts.

(I feel a need to point out that I’m not a specialist in either American history or NASA history. I’m basing my comments on information I’ve been able to dig up online, and it’s possible that I’ve missed evidence that NASA was a more segregated environment than I realize. I’m certainly not suggesting that NASA was magically free of racism in the 1960s. It clearly wasn’t. I’m sure that these women encountered many obstacles due to their race, but they weren’t the specific obstacles the film offers.)

 

Correction: An earlier version of this post described John Glenn as the first American in space. I should have written that he was the first American to orbit the Earth, since Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom both flew high enough to be in what is defined as space prior to Glenn’s flight, but neither of them achieved orbit. I regret the mistake. Thanks to T Rosenzveig for catching it!

Special Note: If you got to this post because some racist shitstain posted a link here in a rant about how the women depicted in this film made everything up, let me clarify the post. These women were not liars. Most of the racism they ran into in the film actually happened. It just didn’t happen in the 1960s under NASA; it happened a decade earlier under NACA. It was the film-makers, not the women, who misrepresented what happened when, in order to make a more dramatic movie. The problems they ran into in the 60s had more to do with ideas about gender than ideas about race. I absolutely 100% support the goal of abolishing racism, and I think it’s wonderful that this movie looks at the vital contributions a trio of little-known black women made to one of America’s greatest technological triumphs, because I think every white person in this country should understand that black scientists have made major contributions to America. So if you got here hoping to read some racist bullshit takedown of this movie, fuck off. You’re not welcome here.

 

Want to Know More?

Hidden Figures is still in the theaters, so it’s not available on Amazon. However, if you want to do some reading about these women, their story is told in Hidden Figures, by Mary Lee Shetterly. Another book about them is Sue Bradford Edwards’ Hidden Human Computers. Richard Paul and Steven Moss’s We Could Not Fail discusses the history of African-Americans in the space program.

Finally, you could look at Steven Moss’s unpublished master’s thesis, NASA and Racial Equality in the South, 1961-1968, which is available online.

Nina: The Trailer

Tags

20th Century America, Nina, Nina Simone, Racial Issues, Zoe Saldana

So last week, the first trailer for Nina, the biopic about the black jazz singer and activist Nina Simoe, was released. Here it is.

The trailer has re-ignited a controversy that first flared when it was announced that Zoe Saldana had been cast to play Simone. The reaction on Twitter from many black people was quite negative, using phrases like “I am disgusted”, “it made me physically ill” “truly heartbreaking”, and “a rogue SNL skit”. You can see some of the reaction here.

As a white guy, this reaction startled me. I had only just heard about the movie a week ago, and I hadn’t heard about the controversy over Saldana’s casting. Why would so many black Americans be upset about this movie, including Simone’s own daughter? So I decided to dig into it a bit. White Americans like myself can often be quite unaware of how black Americans experience American culture, and I firmly believe that it’s the job of white Americans to try to understand the complexities of race without just asking black people to explain it to us; it’s not the job of black Americans to explain race to us. So this post is really about me trying to understand race from the privileged position of whiteness. My apologies if I do a poor job of it.

I first really noticed Zoe Saldana as a performer when she was cast as Lt. Uhura in the Star Trek reboot (a misbegotten film in my opinion, for reasons having nothing to do with Uhura, but that’s a totally different issue). She was also cast as Anamaria is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, a Caribbean pirate queen. Why, I wondered, would black people object to a black actress playing a black singer?

Zoe Saldana

 

Except, as it turns out, Saldana is Puerto Rican and Dominican (although she does have some Haitian ancestry as well). (And see Update below.) I realized I had been perceiving her as a black actress because Uhura is a black character. And Saldana is very fair-skinned, whereas Simone was a very dark-skinned woman. Additionally, while Saldana is classically beautiful, with straight hair, and a thin nose and lips, Simone had curly hair, and a wide nose and lips. In order to play Simone, Saldana had to wear a prosthetic nose, a wig, and skin-darkening make-up. So the controversy is primarily that Saldana does not look very much like Simone.

As I thought about it, my reaction was that this objection was unfair to Saldana. Essentially, the film’s detractors seemed to be complaining that Saldana wasn’t ‘black’ enough to play Simone. But who gets to determine who’s black and who’s not? As I’ve commented before on this blog, what Americans think of as race is really a social construct far more than a biological fact. So asserting that Saldana wasn’t black enough seemed to me to be reifing race, asserting that it is somehow a biological category after all. And saying someone is or isn’t black is playing the game that racists used for centuries, a new iteration of the infamous ‘One Drop’ rule that said that anyone with a single drop of black blood was fully black.

Nina Simone

 

And furthermore, I thought, arguing that historical characters can only be played by actors and actresses who physically resemble them is a serious problem. That would arbitrarily exclude many brilliant performers from playing many of the greatest roles in film and theater. Only certain Italians would be able to play Julius Caesar, for example, because few others would have the proper coloration and aquiline nose for the role. Only a very tall man would ever be able to play Charlemagne, since he was about 6’5. And going just a little bit further, nearly every role in Shakespeare would be closed to non-white performers, since nearly all his roles are Europeans.

But then it occurred to me that I was essentially thinking that black activists didn’t have a right to be upset, that I wasn’t giving them credit for thinking deeply enough about an issue they live with on a daily basis much more than I do, skin color. So I dug a little deeper.

And then I realized that there was another layer to the issue, one much more about historical attitudes toward blackness. A key element of Simone’s story is that she was considered too ‘black’ to be attractive, because she lived at a time when beauty was defined by white standards. For a black women to be pretty, she needed to have fair skin, a thin nose and lips, and straight hair. In other words, she had to look like Zoe Saldana, and not like Nina Simone. Simone’s life was to some extent shaped the fact that she didn’t fit the racially-charged beauty aesthetic of her day. Her success as a jazz singer and as a civil rights activist allowed her to serve as a role model for generations of black women who, like her, didn’t and still don’t fit the beauty standard of American society.

And some of her work explicitly addresses these very issues. Her “Four Sisters” directly addresses the stereotypes around black women’s bodies. Her jazz version of the traditional folk song “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” played with the fact that the song is traditionally sung about white people rather than black people.

Nina Simone in later life

 

The intensely negative reactions on Twitter were expressions of anger and pain that Hollywood has taken an important role model for an alternative beauty standard and given it to a conventionally beautiful women who was then ‘debeautified’ with make-up and prosthetics in order to play the role. Why, many of these people asked, couldn’t this role have been given to an actress who naturally looked more like Simone? Why couldn’t the film validate Simone’s model of beauty instead of undermining it? Why did they decide to put Saldana in blackface, at a time when blackface is considered entirely unacceptable in almost any other context?

And it doesn’t help that most of the production team for the film is white.

My whiteness affords me the privilege of thinking about casting historical roles purely on the basis of merit. It allows me to assume that most white actors can easily substitute for historical figures who did not share their appearance. But the complex, ugly racial realities that we live with don’t afford that same privilege to many black actors, who are often perceived as being ‘too black’ for some roles (i.e. not pretty/handsome enough by white standards) or not ‘black’ enough for others (i.e. black gang members or hustlers or prostitutes). Racial attitudes shape black performers’ careers in ways they don’t shape white performers’ careers, and a prestige role like Simone could have gone to many actresses who have probably been considered too dark-skinned or too wide-nosed or just too ‘black’ for many other roles.

Does this mean that Saldana shouldn’t have taken this role? Does Simone have to be played by a dark-skinned actress? I don’t know. In an ideal world, where race isn’t an inescapable issue, any actress who has the skill for the part ought to be considered for it. But in the world we actually live in, things are a lot messier. Race pervades most facets of our society, and it shapes things like casting decisions and how we understand films and performers. Ultimately I don’t think I have an answer to the question, but I think I understand the position of the people who are upset a lot better than I did before.

As I thought about this whole issue, I wrestled with whether I ought to post about it. I’m a white guy struggling to think about race, an issue that I have the luxury of being able to ignore when I want to. Do I understand the issues clearly enough to be able to say something intelligent about it? I hope so. Am I missing some additional facet of the situation that black people can see? Probably. Have I just said something clueless about race? I really hope not.

But it’s clear to me that race and white privilege is a huge issue in this country, and it’s at least as much the job of white people to think about race as it is the job of black people to explain it to white people. So I decided that even if my thoughts aren’t entirely on the mark, I had an obligation of a sort to post this. Hopefully I’ve been able to cast a little light on the problem for my white readers who may be as puzzled as I was about this controversy.

Update: A point that I had intended to include, but forgot to. Saldana has said that she doesn’t identify as black because “people of color don’t exist ’cause in reality people aren’t white.” So she rejects the social construct of race. That’s certainly her right, but it has definitely offended some in the black community. As the post I just linked to comments, “Saldana’s decision to accept the role of Nina Simone as a labor of “love” makes her view of race and racism all the more puzzling. It appears as if donning Blackface and depicting Simone has done little to connect the actress with the crooner’s spirit. You can’t portray Nina Simone without realizing how intricately race was intertwined with her life and career.” And it’s worth pointing out that it’s easier for a light-skinned actress to reject the social validity of race than for a dark-skinned actress to.

Here’s another blogger writing on the question of Saldana’s race and responding to the same quote.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not out yet. But if you want to know more about Nina Simone, you could start by reading her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.

Chi-Raq: Do Sex-Strikes Really Work?

Tags

20th Century Africa, 20th Century America, Aristophanes, Charles Taylor, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Leymah Gbowee, Liberia, Liberian Civil War, Lysistrata, Nobel Peace Prize, Peloponnesian War, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

The plot of Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) involves the women of Chicago going on a sex-strike in an effort to get the gangs of their district to stop engaging in senseless gun violence. The strike spreads to the strippers, prostitutes, and gay men on the down low, and eventually to women across the country and the world (the wives of the mayor of Chicago and the US president both take the oath). And ultimately, the plan works. The two rival gangs lay down their weapons and everyone, including the large corporations who have been ignoring the south side of Chicago economically, sign a pledge to deal with the roots of the problem as well as its manifestations.

Chi-Raq is based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, first performed in Athens in 411 BC in the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and the Spartans. In this case, the story was pure fantasy. Greek women did not go on a sex-strike, and the war only came to an end in 404 BC, following the disastrous defeat of the Athenian navy at Aegospotami, which ensured that the Athenians would be starved into surrendering. But has the strategy been used successfully somewhere else?

Lee himself seems certain the answer is yes. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Lee suggested that such a tactic might be an effective response to sexually harassment and date rape on college campuses. See for yourself. The comment comes at about the 3:55 mark.

This implies that rapists are worried about what their victims think and want, which seems unlikely in most cases, and it suggests that there is a direct connection between women’s actions and rape, which there isn’t. But let’s assume that Lee was simply speaking carelessly during the pressure of a nationally-televised interview, and that he was intending to be empowering to women. But he says something else during the interview that is factually problematic.

Shortly before the comment about date rape (about the 3:10 mark), Lee mentions Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and claims that she used a sex-strike to bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War. He’s quite specific about this, and in fact, during the movie, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) googles Leymah Gbowee and learns that Gbowee used a sex-strike to end the war in her country.

Leymah Gbowee

The Second Liberian Civil War erupted in 1999 against president Charles Taylor and ran for four years, being brought to an end in 2003 by the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement (ACPA). In 2002, activist Gbowee helped found the Women in Peacemaking Network (WIPNET), and Gbowee used this group to organize Christian and Muslim Liberian women to publicly protest for peace, defying orders by President Taylor to stop.

WIPNET used a number of tactics. They staged pray-ins at churches and mosques. They occupied a soccer field that President Taylor’s motorcade regularly drove past. They wore white t-shirts to make themselves more visible. And they initiated a sex-strike. According to Gbowee, the strike lasted on and off for a couple of months. As she said in a book about the protest, “It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention.” Some of those involved were beaten for refusing to have sex (which again underlines the fact that it’s not a tactic likely to solve a problem like rape.)

During the peace talks, WIPNET staged a sit-in of several hundred women literally right outside the meeting room (which had a glass wall, making the sit-in visible to the negotiators), essentially holding the negotiators hostage, and refusing to let them get food or go to the bathroom. When the negotiators tried to leave the room, Gbowee and her supporters threatened to rip their own clothes off, taking advantage of a powerful African cultural taboo against female nudity; the action essentially threatened a curse on the soldiers who tried to physically move the women. After a few weeks of this, Taylor agreed to resign. Two years after the war came to an end, WIPNET helped orchestrate the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female African head of state.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor

Gbowee’s efforts were considered so instrumental to achieving the ACPA that she, along with Sirleaf and a third woman, received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for their work.

So by Gbowee’s own account, the sex-strike did not have any direct effect on the effort to stop the war. If that was its purpose, it failed. But the fact that it was an off-and-on affair suggests that it wasn’t actually intended to stop the war so much as to garner publicity and raise awareness, which it did a good job of. So while in Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, the sex-strike ends the violence directly, in Gbowee’s approach it was a way to strengthen the movement.

Other Recent Sex-Strikes

Liberia is not the only place sex-strikes have been attempted. Twice in the space of two years from 2011 to 2013, the women of Barbacaos, Colombia, led a Crossed Legs movement as a protest against the lack of a paved road leading to their community. They argued that the lack of adequate roads presented a serious health hazard and an economic obstacle for women who needed to get inland from the small port town. The catalyst for this as a woman’s issue was the death of a 23-year-old pregnant woman whose ambulance got stuck on the way to a hospital. Unlike in Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, however, the men of the town quickly came to support the Crossed Legs movement, presumably because they saw the road as something they wanted as much as the women did. The Crossed Legs movement raised enough publicity (something previous protests had failed to accomplish) that the government vowed to pave at least half the 57-kilometer road. But by 2013, the women decided that the last 30 kilometers also needed paving and resumed the strike. (I haven’t been able to find anything about how effective the 2013 strike was.)

The road into Barbacaos, Colombia

Poor roads were not the only reason that Colombian women have tried sex-strikes. In 1997, a male military official called for a sex-strike to try to get the various guerrillas and drug lords to work for peace. That effort failed. So too did a 2006 attempt by the wives and girlfriends of gang members in Pereira in an effort to get them to surrender their guns. That strike was called off 10 days later. It was claimed as a success, despite no evidence that it actually reduced homicides.

However, in 2011, a sex-strike in the Filipino town of Dado succeeded in ending separatist violence on Mindinao after just a few weeks. In this case, it was not simply a sex-strike though. The women of Dado maintain a sewing collective that was unable to deliver its products because of violence on the roads outside of Dado. So in addition to withholding sex, the women also withheld their income from their husbands. In Kenya and Togo, week-long sex-strikes were held in 2009 and 2011 as a form of protest, but the brief duration seems unlikely to have done more than demonstrate that women cared strongly about specific local issues.

From this survey of recent sex-strikes, a few things seem clear. First, sex-strikes are useful for attracting attention to a problem. The outlandishness of the gesture garners media attention, which shines a spotlight on a major issue. So when they are used as a tool to focus attention on an issue, they stand some chance of bringing results. Second, sex-strikes don’t seem very effective when used on their own to directly address violence, for the simple reason that a man who is willing to be violent will presumably consider using force against his wife or girlfriend, or else will simply seek out a prostitute or another willing woman. Third, they are more likely to succeed when they are combined with other incentives. The modest success of the 2011 sex-strike in Barbacaos was actively supported by the men of the town because they wanted the road too, and the Dado sex-strike was used to reinforce the fact that the violence was hurting Dado economically.

So Lee is wrong when he claims that Gbowee’s sex-strike ended the war in Liberia, and he’s probably wrong when he suggests that the tactic might be effective against date rape, unless he meant that it might be useful in raising awareness about what date rape is and why it’s wrong.

Spike Lee

But Chi-Raq is clearly a fantasy. I don’t think Lee is suggesting that a sex-strike would actually work to end violence (although one Chicago woman has decided to organize an actual sex-strike in response to the film). Too many scenes in the film are obviously unrealistic, such as the scene where Lysistrata seduces a National Guard armory general by getting him to strip down to his underwear and then dry hump a cannon while blindfolded and handcuffed, or the scenes where women across the world jump onto the sex-strike bandwagon. Instead, I think that what Lee is doing is what Gbowee actually did with her sex-strike, using it to generate media attention for a deadly serious problem. Lee’s a smart guy (as he reminds Colbert in that interview, he’s a tenured professor in film studies at Columbia), and it’s clear that he sees his film not as a literal solution to the problem but as a wake-up call to the nation. Let’s hope that his cinematic sex-strike has the same sort of success that WIPNET’s did.

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. There is also a documentary about her, Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

Chi-Raq: Ancient Athens in Modern Chicago

Tags

20th Century America, Ancient Greece, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Comedies, Jennifer Hudson, John Cusack, Lysistrata, Movies I Love, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) is a modernization of the classic Athenian comedy Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC during the Peloponnesian War. When I heard about Lee’s film, I was intrigued, since it’s not every day a movie based on an ancient play gets produced, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points, including the end of the film.

 

 

Lysistrata

Lysistrata was first performed during a war between the Athenians and the Spartans. The war began in 430 BC, and had continued ever since. By 411, the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Athenians. 4 years previously, they had opened a new front in the war with a disastrous invasion of Sicily; they had lost much of their navy and large numbers of citizen sailors had been captured. The failure of that invasion probably marked the point at which the Athenians should have decided to cut their loses and sue for peace, but the Athenians stubbornly refused to do so.

So in 411, Aristophanes, who was part of the anti-war faction at Athens, staged Lysistrata as a critique of the war. In the play, Lysistrata proposes to bring the war to an end by persuading both the Athenian and Spartan women to go on a sex strike. They vow not to have sex until the men arrange a peace. To advance their cause, Lysistrata’s followers occupy the Acropolis and seize the state treasury, which will hinder the war cause, since the city will not be able to pay its war expenses without it. During a conversation with one of the city’s magistrates, Lysistrata accuses the Athenians (who are literally sitting in the audience watching) of having made disastrous decisions in the war. Eventually a desperately tumescent Spartan herald arrives with news that the Spartans want to negotiate, and the equally desperate magistrate agrees to sit down and discuss terms with him. Lysistrata shows up with a young woman named Reconciliation and uses their lust for her as an incentive to keep the negotiations moving. The peace is celebrated with a feast. Throughout the play, choruses of Old Men and Old Women clash in bawdy ways, dramatizing the struggle between masculine lust and feminine chastity.

The play is often today read as an anti-war play, which is probably reading more into it than Aristophanes intended. The play does not condemn war in general, only this war in particular. By 411, the Athenians were clearly tired of war, but could not seem to find a way to extricate themselves from the conflict without damaging their pride. The play wittily suggests that male military aggression and male sexual desire are somehow combined.

Lysistrata is not an easy play to stage nowadays. In this period, Athenian comedy was extremely topical, and many of the play’s references no long make sense to audiences who don’t know who, for example, Hippias or Cleisthenes were. Many of the jokes are directed at men who were probably sitting in the audience, satirizing them for their personal foibles and reputation. The play also contains a lot of jokes so deeply connected to the exact situation that modern audiences won’t get them any more; during the negotiations, the herald and the magistrate treat Reconciliation’s body as a map of Greece, discussing which parts of it they want to claim, but without understanding the actual geography of the war, the double-entendres lose much of their punch.

Another challenge to staging Athenian comedy is that it is extremely bawdy, far more so than all but the most raunchy of modern comedies. This mixture of political satire and sex jokes is off-putting to most modern audiences. Imagine a Saturday Night Live political sketch crossed with American Pie and you start to get the effect. Athenian comedy is so frankly sexual that one scholar commented, “if you don’t find a dirty joke in a line of text, you’re probably not looking hard enough.” The women of Lysistrata want the war to end because it’s interfering with their ability to get laid and purchase dildoes. The Spartan herald’s erection is given almost an entire page’s worth of attention, as people try to guess what he’s got hidden under his cloak. This is not some genteel Victorian farce; this is comedy all about penises and vaginas.

 

Chi-Raq

Lee has transposed the action of the play to the south side of Chicago, often nicknamed Chi-raq by its inhabitants because there is enough violence for a war zone. The two warring factions are rival gangs, the Spartans, led by the rapper Demetrius ‘Chi-Raq’ Dupree (Nick Cannon), and the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). One day, Chi-Raq’s woman, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) stumbles across the scene of a gang shooting in which an 11-year old girl has become an innocent victim. She sees the girl’s mother Irene (Jennifer Hudson) grieve for her daughter and demand that something be done.

Lysistrata (center) persuading the woman to take the oath

Lysistrata gathers a bunch of her friends and arranges a meeting with some of the women who date the Trojans, including Indigo (Michelle Mitchenor), Cyclop’s woman. She persuades them to swear an oath. “I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!”

From there, the movement grows as even the strippers, prostitutes, and guys on the down low take the oath. Then the women seize control of a National Guard armory, and the movement goes global, much to the frustration of Mayor McCloud (D.B. Sweeney), whose wife takes the oath. From there, the story plays out to its conclusion.

Hudson’s Irene

But as the story progresses, Lee inserts scenes of Father Corridan (John Cusack) performing the funeral for the murdered girl and leading an anti-gun march. Although skeptical of Lysistrata’s tactics, he plays an important role in getting Chi-Raq to come to the negotiating table. He and Irene circulate posters offering a reward for information about who shot the girl. Finally, at the end, when it looks like the negotiations between the Spartans and the Trojans will collapse because of Chi-Raq’s resistance, he tearfully acknowledges that he is the girl’s killer. Accepting the magnitude of his crime, he is led away, calling on all the gang members to admit their guilt in the situation and work to end the violence.

On paper this all sounds heavy-handed and tendentious. But Lee manages to make the material work through a combination of three contrasting elements. The film is every bit as vulgar as the source material. Jokes about dick and pussy and blue balls abound. The Old Men of the film just want to get laid again and are determined to restore their masculine pride, while the Old Women aren’t entirely happy to give up sex but see the greater goal behind the strike.

But the coarseness of the humor is off-set by the fact that most of the dialogue is in rhyming verse. Although some of the verse feels a bit clunky, and can be hard to follow, at its best, it becomes Shakespearean, elevating the vulgarity to the level of high art. Chi-Raq’s speech at the end plays as a morality tale, in which the actor is exhorting the audience to learn from his mistakes. Here’s an example, in which Lysistrata confronts the Old Men:

 

And then there is the profound passion of the film. The film opens with a prologue text informing us that more Americans have been killed in Chicago in the past 15 years than in both the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. “This is an emergency!” a voice declares at both the start and finish of the film. Cusack delivers the funeral sermon with an urgency that grows to fury at “this self-inflicted genocide,” and it’s clear that he is voicing Lee’s own feelings about the situation. Both Lysistrata and her friend Dr. Helen (Angela Bassett) deliver powerful speeches about how they are fighting to save the lives of their community.

Cusack’s Father Corridan, preaching the funeral sermon

Jennifer Hudson’s performance is particularly powerful. Her own personal tragedy, in which her brother-in-law murdered her mother, brother, and nephew in their West Chicago home, hangs over the film, a profound reminder that this is not simply an exercise in entertainment. When Hudson as Irene leads an anti-gun march, she is surrounded by dozens of extras all carrying photos of the actual relatives they lost to gun violence. And the film is not afraid to point fingers. At different moments, it accuses the NRA, the prison-industrial complex, Indiana’s gun shows, the Republican party, the media, the banks, and the adolescent gang-bangers of all playing a role in the slaughter. The mayor is a thinly-veiled satire of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who reportedly opposed the film because it was bad for tourism.

Lee has quite masterfully managed to transpose Lysistrata for a modern audience, capturing the marriage of bawdy humor and serious intent and even much of the original’s structure. Both play and film are in verse, both make use of song and dance, and both have choruses that act to set the stage and keep the action moving; Lee’s chorus is Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson as Dolmedes, the film’s Greek chorus

Given the challenges of reproducing Classical Athenian comedy for modern audiences, Lee has pulled off an impressive feat. While Chi-Raq is not a perfect film (the verse is not always easy to follow, and a few scenes fall flat, including one where Lysistrata seduces the general of the armory), it’s a worthy effort, both in terms of cinema and in terms of the cause it serves, and you should definitely give it a viewing.

 

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers.

Hail, Caesar!: Fun with Hollywood Scandal

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1950s, 20th Century America, Alden Ehrenreich, Channing Tatum, Comedies, Eddie Mannix, Esther Williams, Films about Hollywood, George Clooney, George Reeves, Hedda Hopper, Joel and Ethan Coen, Josh Brolin, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Spencer Tracy, The Robe, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio

Hail, Caesar! (2016, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen) is a rather fluffy film set in 1950s Hollywood. While LA Confidential used the period as the setting for a thriller, the Coen brothers use it as a chance to explore the silliness of the period. The plot, such as it is, involves Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a ‘fixer’ who works for Capital Pictures, covering up scandals before they can get into the media. The studio is in the middle of making a prestige Sword-and-Sandal pic about a Roman general who undergoes a religious conversion when he accidentally meets Jesus at a well. But the star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) gets kidnapped, and Mannix has to scramble to find him. There’s not really much actual history here, other than the general setting, but I figured I’d dig into some of the characters and look at whom they might be based on.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points.

 

Eddie Mannix

Eddie Mannix was actually a real person, but Brolin’s character bares only a superficial resemblance to the real thing: basically, they’re both married, Catholic, and work as fixers, but that’s about it. The real Eddie Mannix (d.1963) was MGM’s comptroller and general manager, and worked closely with MGM’s head of publicity to control press coverage of the performers who worked for the studio. It was his job to fix the actual scandals by paying off witnesses and victims, getting the police to look the other way, and so on. He is alleged to have covered up a car accident that Clark Gable got into by making John Huston take the blame for it. (In the film, Mannix at one point alludes to covering up a similar incident.) He reportedly arranged for the destruction of a pornographic film that Joan Crawford had made while she was a teenager. When Spencer Tracy went on one of his periodic benders. Mannix had a system for how to deal with the star.

The real Eddie Mannix

And he was largely responsible for destroying the reputation of an unfortunate young dancer and actress named Patricia Douglas, who was hired to provide companionship at a drinking party for 300 of MGM’s salesmen. Douglas was raped during the party, and when she tried to pursue charges, first in criminal court and then in civil court, Mannix used his contacts in the legal system to make the charges go away.

Brolin as Mannix

Mannix also had an ugly set of relationships. He cheated on his first wife, Bernice, with a dancer named Mary Nolan, whom he beat so frequently that she required 15 surgeries. When she tried to sue him, he had the police run her out of town. He may have arranged Bernice’s death in a car accident. His second wife, Toni Lanier, eventually had a long-term affair with Superman star George Reeves, with Mannix’ blessing. When Reeves called off the affair in 1958, Toni was deeply distressed, and Reeves suddenly had a car accident after the brake fluid drained out of his brake line. Not long after that, Reeves committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Connect the dots if you’re so inclined.

 

Baird Whitlock and Hail, Caesar!

Whitlock is an established actor who, like Spencer Tracy, has a tendency to go on long benders from which Mannix has to retrieve him. Some reviews have suggested Whitlock is modeled on Kirk Douglas, apparently because of Douglas’ involvement in Sword-and-Sandal pics like Spartacus, but I think he’s actually based more on Richard Burton, because Hail, Caesar! seems to be a spoof of The Robe. Both films are about a jaded Roman soldier who converts to Christianity after a brief encounter with Jesus; both feature a scene in which the tormented soldier stares up at Jesus as he hangs on the cross, and both films have a strategy of only filming Jesus from behind and focusing instead on the soldier’s face. The bloated speeches that Whitlock gives sound a lot like speeches from The Robe. But Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are other obvious inspirations for Hail, Caesar!

Clooney as Whitlock

 

DeeAnna Moran

Scarlett Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, who is very obviously modeled on Esther Williams. Like Williams, Moran is a bathing beauty whose water ballet films are a major money-maker in the 50s. (In fact, the Coen brothers arranged for Williams’ tank to be restored so they could film Moran’s mermaid sequence in it.) Moran is on her second divorce, working on a film, and having an affair with director Arne Slessum (Christopher Lambert), when she discovers she’s pregnant. Desperate to protect her wholesome image, Mannix arranges for her to discretely surrender the baby to a third party, with the intention of then adopting the baby as if it weren’t her own. Similarly, Williams discovered that she was pregnant by her second husband while working on Pagan Love Song; she later divorced that husband. While working on Million Dollar Mermaid, she had an affair with Victor Mature. But the detail about Moran giving up the baby and then adopting it back is taken from Loretta Young’s life, when she got pregnant with Clark Gable’s child, reportedly during a train ride.

Johansson as Moran

 

Hobie Doyle and Carlotta Valdez

Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy. He’s an expert trick-rider and good with a lasso, but totally out of his league when he gets cast in a drawing-room romance as a playboy. Some have suggested that Doyle is modeled on Kirby Grant, best known for the tv series Sky King, but while Grant did singing cowboy films, his central shtick seems to have been trick piloting. Doyle’s more likely to be modeled on Gene Autry, who like Doyle is both a singer and an expert rider. Roy Rogers is another possibility.

Ehrenreich as Doyle, trying to act

Doyle gets sent on a studio-manufactured date with Latina dancer Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who is pretty obviously Carmen Miranda. She even makes a joke about being able to dance with fruit on her head. But Miranda’s heyday was the 40s (her career went into decline after WWII), and Carlotta is a young woman. The film doesn’t delve into Miranda’s abusive marriage, alcoholism, or drug usage at all.

 

Laurence Laurenz and Burt Gurney

Hobie’s movie is being directed by the stuffy British Laurence Laurenz (Ralph Fiennes), who is appalled at how poorly-cast his leading man is. In one amusing sequence, he finds himself forced to give Doyle elocution lessons so he can say the line “Would that it were so simple” without his Southern accent. Laurenz seems to be a version of Laurence Olivier, especially once it’s revealed that he’s having an affair with Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum).

Gurney is a song-and-dance man. We get to see Gurney perform a classic 50s dance number called “Dames”, which is filled with innuendo (it’s probably the best scene in the whole film). It’s clearly a riff on Gene’s Kelly’s Anchors Aweigh, although the Coens were also reportedly inspired by Fred Astaire and Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain. But I doubt there’s any evidence that Kelly (or Astaire or O’Connor) was gay, or that he was a communist sympathizer. And Tatum’s dance style is much more like Kelly’s working class masculinity than Astaire’s upper-class elegance.(See Update.)

Tatum as Gurney

 

Thora and Thessaly Thacker

Tilda Swinton plays twin sisters Thora and Thessaly, both of whom are gossip columnists in the mold of Hedda Hopper or Luella Parsons. Both women were famous for their ability to ferret out celebrity gossip, and although they had initially been friends, they came to hate each other and feuded for years.Hopper was both feared and despised in the late 30s and 40s for the damage her column could do; Tracy once kicked her in the ass after she revealed his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, while Joseph Cotton pulled a chair out from under her. Joan Bennett once sent her a skunk as a Valentine’s Day gift.

But the angle that Thora and Thessaly are also twin sisters was taken from Esther Lederer and Pauline Philips, better known as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. Landers reportedly became angry when her sister decided to start her own advice column just a few months after Landers had begun hers (without giving her any warning). For much of the rest of their lives, they had a stormy relationship (Van Buren reportedly one tried to persuade a paper to drop her sister’s column and run hers instead) and when Landers died in 2002, they were reportedly not on speaking terms, despite an apparent reconciliation in the 1960s.

Swinton as one of the Thacker sister

 

Update: As a commenter on this blog pointed out, the affair between Laurenz and Gurney probably owes something to the rumors that Olivier and Danny Kaye were lovers. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support the claims, but that doesn’t mean the Coens might not have gotten inspiration from the rumors. And Kaye was suspected by the FBI of being a Communist, which fits Gurney’s character.

 

Want to Know More?

Hail, Caesar! [Blu-ray]is available at Amazon. If you’re in the mood for another look at Hollywood in the 1950s, check out L.A. Confidential [Blu-ray].

Like I said, there isn’t much actual history here, but if you want to read more about Hollywood scandals, you can try The Hollywood Book of Scandals : The Shocking, Often Disgraceful Deeds and Affairs of Over 100 American Movie and TV Idols