The Idol and The Regime
“The Idol was one of HBO’s most provocative original programs, and we’re pleased by the strong audience response,” the spokesperson said. “After much thought and consideration, HBO, as well as the creators and producers, have decided not to move forward with a second season.”
Last week saw the cancellation of The Idol, the HBO series created by Sam Levinson and Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye about a recovering pop star falling in love with a nightclub owner and cult owner with two names. The show was destined to be panned by a consensus of professional journalists, pop music stans and content creators, who cannot stop talking about their venom towards it before it even released its first trailer. It had muddled ratings, meaning that it wouldn’t be enough to convince HBO, run by David Zaslav, to give it more juice.
There was a lot of confusion when The Idol aired and what it’s supposed to be. Part of which was the presumption that it was a miniseries, rather than a continuous show, which is why when critics, whose logic concludes with the latter assumption, were more than gloatful about the outcome.
The Idol has very few defenders, which includes myself. In The New York Sun, I assessed the show against every controversy it encountered, and how it wore its cinematic influences under its sleeve. I had a conversation with a colleague who asked me what was so controversial about it, to which I answered, ‘Not that much.’
Levinson and Tesfaye anticipated any backlash with the show, and they weathered a lot of it through their awareness of any dissension, either by pushing back against the industry norm that is, in turn, patronising to the performer (intimacy coordinators being thrown in the wardrobe is one example) or treat it like a joke that much of its critics seem to have taken too seriously.
It is post-modern with a capital P, and its aspirations to be like Paul Verhoeven makes a lot of sense. Verhoeven is a director whose workmanship is not as straightforward as many of its admirers or detractors think. He’s famous for delivering Starship Troopers, Showgirls, Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Elle, in a way that’s either too easy or difficult to interpret, because they are layered with intense irony and earnest objectification. The Idol doesn’t want to be loved, but they’re less interested in being hated.
But what is perhaps The Idol’s biggest contribution to the current state of entertainment? Given that, the writers and actors are still striking, the cancellation means that for WarnerDiscovery, it’s content, not art. The Idol, however you feel about it, does feel unique. If it’s not good, then it’s something you couldn’t find in 2023, and it’s thanks to one of the world’s biggest musicians and its enfant terrible prominent enough in the mainstream to expose it.
Tesfaye, whose performance attracted a lot of (unfair) ire, won’t lose his cultural footing after The Idol. His music still stands, but it does show that his pursuit of being an actor and retiring as The Weeknd is off to a rocky start. He was accommodated with a cameo as himself in Uncut Gems and will appear in another A24 production directed by Trey Edwards-Shults. In music videos, he brings a grandiose character arc that’s supposed to speak of his album’s larger meanings. He’s blurring the line between being a pop artist and a movie star, and he’s not the first person to try doing that, nor will he be the last. But Tesfaye is not David Bowie or Lady Gaga, whenever we watch them act. My impression, thus far of his acting, is that if ever Hollywood gets the chance to adapt JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures, he would be perfectly cast as Mohammad Avdol.
The Idol is hard to recommend because critics already suggest that it’s bad enough to be content. But it’s also the kind of thing you indulge for a bit, before moving on to another mediocrity while the cycle continues to make fewer pieces of art. But the things that are raised to look like the higher echelons of art have been broken, are forced to play into this game into feeding a recommendation algorithm that’s psychopathically efficient and so, when something seems good, social media are more than determined to provide the Emperor with their new clothes, because it’s the safest thing to do.
Art is not supposed to be good; it’s supposed to push your buttons. And whatever The Idol is supposed to be, we don’t deserve it flopping.
After Barbenheimer
I have been watching films for more than a decade now and I never had encountered a phenomenon like Barbie and Oppenheimer being released on the same date. Both are diametrically opposite films in tone and theme. They have directors who adapt the material in distinguishable styles, one of whom had a bitter departure from the studio that usually produced his previous films, which pitted their film against his with highly saturated marketing. Each raked in more than $2 billion at the box office together, with the presumption that Barbie’s release helped Oppenheimer exceed all financial expectations. It matters a lot more, in a post-pandemic world, when these films enable people to watch theatrical releases. The last time that happened was Top Gun Maverick, which harkened to the days when movie stars could carry a film over, instead of a pre-determined IP.
Nowadays, the slate of releases has been dry, thanks to the Hollywood strike resulting in these delays, so Barbie and Oppenheimer are here to stay until Bart Simpson finally becomes Supreme Court Justice. That wouldn’t mean that the films outstay their welcome at some point. There’s a possibility that the Barbenheimer could end if both films become prominent during the prestige season. Oppenheimer, perfectly fits in the criteria of Oscar bait material, but Barbie could score some nominations on the basis that everyone agrees, regardless of how they feel about the film, that Ryan Gosling is having a ball as Ken and should be recognized for it.
Mark Harris wrote Pictures in a Revolution, which argued how the Academy Award nominees of 1967 (held in 1968) cemented the ideas of New Hollywood and its advocacy for auteurism over studio control. The system is not created in a vacuum and is influenced by and reflects multiple societal and cultural factors. The ceremony was postponed due to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., America was in the midst of an upheaval - from the moratorium of the Vietnam War to numerous riots to the Democratic National Convention protests to the assassination of Robert F Kennedy.
If Barbenheimer continues to carry over at the Oscars, it would have to reflect the current state of Hollywood, but also society widely at large. The Writers and Actors Strike is just the beginning, but it also reveals the fallibility of streaming services and that the traditional model of movie theatres can still survive. Barbie presents gender politics in a witty, yet unsubtle way while Oppenheimer presents the individual mind getting tortured by his own creation that he unleashed with major human casualties. What it does seem to show is that the progressive causes do not go away, or the question of war is out of the table.
Studios attempting to capture lightning in a bottle twice by emulating Barbenheimer as a release strategy are playing fool's errand. It completely ignores that the phenomenon was designed by organic, and the joke about the two being together can be malleable. They can be adored or put in competition as it was originally intended. But as a norm, distributors don’t like the idea of making two movies together.
For as much as I am critical of online film culture over here - its platforms and forums, the professional writers that could afford to review these films for a living and its clout-chasing users - I think Barbenheimer showcases its greatest possibilities, in that it’s purely a love out of film. After that, it won’t be the same again.
You Must (Read) This: The Abject of Everything by Niles Schwartz and Oppenheimer Was a Communist by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
I haven’t expressed my full thoughts on Oppenheimer, but to keep it short, it’s going to be the film of the year for me and one of the best biopics in a long time. The strength of Christopher Nolan’s latest is its subject J. Robert Oppenheimer. A brilliant scientist who had flirted with the Communist Party before he worked with the Manhattan Project to build the bomb, and afterwards feeling a lot of guilt on that. Nolan doesn’t cover the political aspect that succinctly, instead focusing it through the security clearance hearings that he is subjected through the accusations that he was a communist spy. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote a brilliant cover essay for Commentary about the true nature of Oppenheimer’s politics, as well as who Lewis Strauss actually was.
Finally, just because Oppenheimer did not pay regular dues did not mean he was not a Communist. In August 1939, a senior CPUSA official gave a report to the Communist International in Moscow on the organizational status of the American party. He presented three levels of membership. The first was made up of “enrolled” members. These were people who had joined the CPUSA and were carried on its membership rolls. Next came “registered” members. These were persons who had newly registered or reregistered with a local party unit. Finally, the smallest number represented “dues-paying” members. So whether you paid dues, annually registered with a local party unit, or had enrolled in the party in the previous few years, you were a Communist in the eyes of the CPUSA. The party regarded all three definitions as signifying membership with different degrees of current participation. Now note how Bird and Sherwin view it. They acknowledge that the financial records of the Bay Area party obtained by an FBI surreptitious entry (or burglary) show that contributions by someone code-named X-1 totaling $1,800 a year (the equivalent of close to $40,000 today) were made by Oppenheimer, but Bird and Sherwin insist that “he made contributions to causes, but never paid dues at all”—as if contributions well in excess of dues were not accrued by the CPUSA. Following Bird and Sherwin, Christopher Nolan shows Kitty testifying during the 1954 hearing on the revocation of Robert’s security clearance that his contributions went through the Communist Party but not to the CPUSA—and portrays this bizarre act of hairsplitting as though it were obviously and undeniably true.
For a non-political take that aligns with mine, I like to direct you to Niles Schwartz’s brilliant essay on how it is a meditation of Oppenheimer’s character.
For an audience, to be hurled back into space and time is to say we’ve safely returned to the conventional confines of movie plot. Between moments of chilling contemplation, Nolan’s film moves forward with a feverish briskness, stomping—sometimes clumsily—through the busy history it chronicles. The film has two interlocking narratives: the first, titled “Fission,” is shot in richly hued color and shows the perspective of Oppenheimer himself, in a sometimes experimental, stream-of-consciousness style. The second, “Fusion,” centers on Strauss and is more narratively straightforward, filmed in noirish monochrome. Nolan cuts between Oppenheimer’s journey toward the Trinity detonation and a pair of hearings: his security clearance hearing presided by the Gray Board in 1954, and the U.S. Senate’s confirmation hearing of Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce nominee, Strauss, who engineered Oppenheimer’s 1954 downfall. Because the film is so engrossing, the structure never comes across as a gimmick, instead playing like a natural reflection on themes of cause and effect, the chain reaction of events set in motion filtered through the problems of motive and memory, pointing to the difficulty of adequately assessing an individual and a historical moment. True, with all the film’s density of incident and character, one sometimes wishes that Nolan might slow down and let things breathe, giving his characters less rapid-fire, fact-laden talk, and I can’t help feeling his penchant for rushed scene transitions sometimes does his actors an injustice. But this splintering rapidity also seems to serve a purpose: underscoring the transience of ego in the longue durée of history. We see a murderer’s row of “that guy!” supporting players (Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Tom Conti, Josh Peck, Jason Clarke and so on)—all brilliant and distinguished, worthy of their own probing close-ups, but here merely impressionable faces consumed by the film’s own gravity, like stars sucked up into the darkness of one of Oppenheimer’s hypothesized black holes.
I highly recommend you give these authors a read.
The Kino Around The Corner: Mishima in Four Chapters (1985)
If I’m asked what is my favourite biopic of all time, Mishima in Four Chapters is definitely going to be the first answer. Paul Schrader takes an approach to Yukio Mishima, a Japanese author whose novels and political activities strongly provoked the country, by portraying some of his novels with his real life. Mishima fits into the mould of Schrader’s list of morally dubious male protagonists and while his literature deserves to be celebrated, it’s interesting to see that Mishima’s nationalism and wrestling with his homosexuality is another side that resonates with a segment of thinkers, particularly among the dissident Right. Four Chapters crisscrosses on these dual themes, revealing the morally complex man that he was. But it also shows that biopics have to be visually compelling to bring those objectives forward, and the film’s color scheme brilliantly illustrates Mishima’s visions, both in the literary and political realms.