[Hot Tea] December 27th - January 9th
Serving #8
A new calendar year dawns, with newly streaming entries into the past year’s film canon and the current moment’s cultural zeitgeist.
On our plate we have two quiet actor-directed adaptations to film from literature, two reality shows air-brushing our social faces, and a popular interview (for which it helps to be camera ready) from the early ‘90s.
The Lost Daughter
Netflix - Drama - Spectatorship
Synopsis
An austere comparative literature professor inveigles a young mother into an imbroglio concerning their respective daughters.
My take
Familiar to us more in psychosexualized dramas like Eyre and Marber’s (2006) Notes on a Scandal or any version of Highsmith’s (1955) The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story of the prismatic spectator turned interloper finds reïnvention in Gyllenhaal’s new (2021) The Lost Daughter. Reminiscent otherwise strongly of Ozon, Bernheim, and Kelly’s (2003) Swimming Pool (minus, again, the steeping eroticism), the new film is interesting but ultimately fails to find a suitable replacement for the tension of an erotic climate in heating the drama of the central narrative. Were it not for the superb leading performance at that center, I’m sure I’d give this film a yawning pass, despite the underlying intelligence of the original material.
Brava, Ms. Colman.
Temperature check
Hot
Queer Eye (Season 6)
Netflix - Reality Make-over - Fairy Dust
Synopsis
For the sixth time, a group of queer artists intercedes in the doldrums of everyday, helpless but hopeful “heroes” in order to improve the quality of their lives — this time in Austin, Texas.
My take
Think what you will about their dramatization (i.e., Farrelly, Hayes Currie, and Vallelonga’s Greenbook, 2018), but Don Shirley’s concert tours of the Deep South were instrumental — excuse the pun — in making connections across subcultures within our country. The power of the tours, he knew, was to quietly demonstrate the potential of artistic expression to unite people across their preconceived boundaries (and, hopefully, persist that union beyond the transience of any performance).
In its original instance, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Collins & Williams [creators], 2003) took up a similar mantle and promised to entertain while delivering boundary-cutting blessings, as Shirley did, from a minority to the majority of our nation’s population. For that show, airing at a time when queer representation was still in its early stages on television and other media channels, presence was enough; showing up was enough; visibility was enough. As if to say clearly, neatly, and proudly (as had many by that point in myriad marches and assemblies in localities around the country) “we exist,” the original cast members found a way to integrate themselves as queer exemplars *safely* into the lives and homes of straight and largely homophobic men (and women), well before Barack Obama even started his political campaigns, no less commented as President that his views on gay marriage were “evolving.” However frivolous you want to think the actual material changes the original Fab Five brought to each straight man they visited, you can’t deny the pivotal impression their popular presence in American homes left on American mindsets. That impression was the true gift of the show.
When Netflix rebooted the series in 2018 with a new Fab Five, a shorter title, and a shift in at least nominal focus from “straight guys” to the genderless “heroes,” the production also refocussed (smartly) the larger cultural point of the series from ‘mere’ presence to distinction. The production team seemed to know, as we did, that, society having moved on since the run of the original series to the extent that queer people and characters had become relatively commonplace (if still relatively background) in mainstream media, bridging cultures would require more than entertaining visibility. In a phrase, “we’re here and everyone knows it” *but* — crucially — not everyone is happy about it or comfortable with it — and not only because we’re queer. Sure, queerness is still part of it; the existence of HBOMax’s literally titled We’re Here is testament enough to how particular slices of the queer community (e.g., drag queens, trans people) still encounter resistance to merely showing up authentically in places across our country. However, even that show knows, the real work to be done lies in breaking down the internal walls people hold up (out of fear, shame, sadness, anger…) against what they perceive as threats to their own safety — even from their own most intimate contacts (e.g., parents, close friends).
To this end, the most powerful moments of the premiere season and later seasons of Netflix’ Queer Eye have been those occasions when integration happens through conversation, incidental or intentional, between presumed opposites. The conversation black Fab Five member Karamo Brown has with white police officer Cory Waldrop on interracial violence in the third episode of the first season comes brightly to mind.
Unfortunately, Queer Eye has over time gradually lost more and more of the thread. Shifting its focus on storytelling away from confronting the difficult questions over the merging of presumedly conflicting subcultures and toward the superficial material changes alone that supply the series with its entertainment, the show has become largely just a make-over show, directly contrary to the marketing copy promoting it. Only in perhaps two of the eight new episodes in the series’ sixth season do the Fab Five actively reach out to touch lives more than just aesthetically with who they are and what they bring to the table. A persistent premise from the earliest days of the entire series, old and new, is that each relatively ephemeral avenue of our culture a Fab Five member represents actually matters, like arts education, to living a well-balanced and rewarding life. The series never stops trying to prove out that premise; it only stops tying queerness and its greater sociocultural themes (e.g., freedom, equality, expression) explicitly to that premise when it delivers it, hand over brush, to those mainstream people who need it.
If Queer Eye doesn’t refind that important practice, the series, I fear, will return queerness to the shelf, boxed and undersampled and peeking out only partially from behind the securing cellophane, keeping it from those already unwilling to purchase.
Temperature check
Tepid
The Tender Bar
Amazon Prime - Drama - ‘Street Smarts’ to ‘Book Smarts’
Synopsis
A young novelist reflects on his childhood, learning by word and counterexample from his eccentric working-class family, especially his pragmatist uncle who owns and operates a neighborhood bar.
My take
George Clooney follows Robert DeNiro and Matt Damon into the band of Hollywood leading men who reflect on their own experiences through the avatars of exceptional young men who rise from their disadvantaged youths through hard work and careful attention to respected stations of wisdom in their individual fields. However, in comparison with DeNiro’s (1993) A Bronx Tale and Damon’s (1997) Good Will Hunting, Clooney’s new (2021) A Tender Bar feels like a knock-off. Perhaps intent on riding the wave of last year’s similarly themed Hillbilly Elegy (Howard & Taylor), though this year for the tough urban set, A Tender Bar postures, going through the motions of coherent and compelling storytelling without ever actually delivering it. Scenes feel static and predictable, choices almost twee for their familiar roundness, and an overall sepia tone of nostalgia prematurely compliments a pocket of American culture we as an as yet unfamiliar audience don’t yet know whether to esteem.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given Clooney’s history in acting, Ben Affleck’s “troubled” but reliable uncle is the best part; but even it feels like a Xerox-ed collage of roles he and others have played elsewhere before.
For my money, have a drink elsewhere, readers; this bar recycles from the well.
Temperature check
Cold
Hype House
Netflix - Reality Lifestyle - “Influencing Is Working?”
Synopsis
Early twenty-something content creators, “famous” for their presences on social media, roll back the curtain over their decadent and carefree lives to reveal the stress and in-fighting they experience over perceived threats to their reputations and consequently their revenue streams from each other, their “fans,” and their own choices of work.
My take
For me, readers, the appeal of reality television series that “pull back the curtain” on “aspirational” subcultures is their anthropological curiosity and value. I don’t aspire to social media fame, or even value it more than as a tall platform for communication, nor do I follow or find interesting the content created by any of the housemates on this new show. I’m not even a member of the same generation. So, the chance to see the “behind the scenes” life of Charli d’Amelio’s ex-boyfriend and the lives of his crew carries no tempting celebrity for me whatever. However, what it does carry instead is interest, specifically in the social economy that can create and has created such a figure plus a discipulary entourage. Watching Hype House is witnessing the downstream consequences of that economy and thereby deducing its truths.
Watching Hype House is essentially coming to understand what it must have been like in the inner circle of Louis XVI of France and his wife, Marie Antoinette, in the years following their coronation, when they both were in their early twenties. The social currencies in which they traded, the casual attitudes they exchanged, and the whipped cream of their entire lives must be so close to the similarly situated strifes and pastimes of the Hype House crew, a set of early twenty-something people whose lives and well-beings are bound up in managing their appearances and lavish lifestyles on large (here, virtual) stages that they afford only by the implicit consent via attention of their audiences.
Apart from this modern everyday simulacrum of hyper-elite decadent past living, the intense tribalism of the social dynamics is also fascinating for me. Crew members test and flex their wings at policing each other’s judgments and superseding each other’s primes in a small-scale play of broader social interactions determining what is politically correct for the mass culture. Ambassadors seek audiences with local fiefs and trade on knowledge and clout in exchange for what they want, while earnest toilers absorb the brunt of loafers’ spilth. It’s medieval monarchy at its finest — and, without education or an alternatively based super culture, it’s the natural state of our social world, scarily enough.
And, to cherry it all, what creeps in along the edges is the sneaking sense that the aspirational nature of the lives of the Hype House members belies their truth: Content creating isn’t fun anymore, when it becomes work. The salivate-worthy desire of not just the current young generation but all generations, past and future included, is to receive fame, acclaim, status, wealth, and power all passively, for not working at all. Never before has that mirage of a dream felt so near to people as it probably has to most of the young people in Hype House and their avid followers, to whom it appears one can get paid handsomely to hang out with one’s friends, brag about it where others can see, and occasionally perform for the cameras. As any successful content creator however would surely tell such a dreamer, however, that tempting appearance is an illusion; content creating for and influencing a large following is work, as much as any other career — but no one wants to hear that, and the consequences of that blissful ignorance crop up on full display here.
Since it’s hard to predict, however, readers, how well my take and thoughts along the above lines match your own, I’m not sure how to translate this steamy little cup of tea for me into relatable terms for you. Certainly, there are those who’d watch the show without any of the connections I found interesting and find it a vacuous waste of time. Still, I lean on my own reading here:
Temperature check
Hot
Retrospective
Interview with a Vampire (1994)
Netflix - Drama - Gothic Fantasy
Synopsis
A conscientious vampire divulges the secrets of his centuries-old life in vivid detail to a naïve reporter, that it may provide meaning to whoever hears it.
My take
Fresh off an Oscar win for his screenplay for The Crying Game (1992), for which he was also Oscar-nominated in Directing, Neil Jordan took on the ambitious task of translating Anne Rice’s cherished (1976) novel Interview with a Vampire from page to screen, this time from the director’s chair only. (Rice herself wrote the screenplay.) Working with an all-star cast led by a romance-novel-handsome Brad Pitt, a proto-maniacal Tom Cruise, and a petite ingénue Kirsten Dunst, Jordan transliterates Rice’s plot points beat by beat into the action on the screen. A documentary-like style that refers to the chronicling nature of the story, the technique is sensible, if a bit dry. Pitt’s Southern plantation owner turned conscientious activist (of sorts) crumbles in the mouth like a sandy wafer, while Cruise’s flamboyant Lestat merely suffices in ecstatic wickedness. The juiciest pieces are Dunst's, who though only 10 years old at the time of filming nevertheless pulls off severity and gravitas in her performance that keep it harmonically in tune with the character on the page and the audiences in their seats, to the extent that watching her surrenders little disbelief that she is a person of experience, despite her novice appearance. Watching her delight in trapping with excelsior cunning the self-involved Lestat in a striking bid for her own autonomy was, I confess, my primary motivation to revisit this cultural classic this episode. That she got to do it in front of the Oscar-nominated sets of Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo, to the Oscar-nominated tune of Elliot Goldenthal, and in the delicate costumes of subsequent Oscar-winner Sandy Powell was just the icing on that frosty little tart of a cake. I suppose, if Jordan’s once extremely popular film should stand the test of time for anything of its own merit — setting aside the solid impression a sensual story humanizing vampires left on the culture, thanks to writing from Anne Rice — it’d be that taste, of blue icing on red velvet cake.
So, twenty eight years later, there’s still heat on this tea tray, readers — just not quite enough to wake the dead.
Temperature check
Tepid
This inveigles a young mother into an imbroglio with a frosty little tart of a cake.