Culture

What remains unsaid about The Closer? In the past two weeks, countless thinkpieces have tackled the controversy around Dave Chappelle’s new special by trying to determine where its content falls on the line between funny and offensive, provocative and hateful, punching up versus punching down. Some analysis has been thoughtful; some has been shallow and reactionary. But virtually all of it centers on the question of whether Netflix should have removed or censored the special for being “harmful” to vulnerable people. That notion is one that Netflix executive Ted Sarandos summarily rejected in a statement sent to employees, writing that “while some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.

A few years ago, the American artist Barbara Kruger covered the facade of Frankfurt’s Kaufhof department store with a pair of huge eyes. It was as if Big Brother had come out of retirement. Above that unsparing gaze was the slogan, in Kruger’s signature Futura bold italic font: ‘You want it. You buy it. You forget it.’ It was a typical work of art by Kruger. She made her career from what’s called culture jamming, subverting media messages by transforming them into their own anti-messages and by indicting the business of capitalism. In 1987, for instance, she took an advertising image of an all-American boy flexing his juvenile biceps before his admiring sister and subverted that message with the overlaid words ‘We don’t need another hero’ for a billboard.

Dave Chappelle is a member of a dying breed — a remnant of an age that has been drifting into history. That’s right. Dave Chappelle is a comedian who does not have a podcast. I do not begrudge comedians their podcasts. (After all, I am a writer with a Substack.) As a comedian who has not blessed us with his every thought and memory, though, Chappelle has maintained his mystique. His specials are events, and his last special, The Closer, is doubly so. Critics and reporters have been focusing on its allegedly offensive jokes at the expense of trans people. I would like to shove these subjects to one side for a moment and ask the most vital questions. Is it funny? Yes. Is it very funny? No. Chappelle is a tremendous performer.

The most eagerly anticipated television series of 2021 has finally returned. There are no dragons, or homicidal drug lords, or anachronistically liberal Georgian aristocrats in sight. Instead, the protagonists are a bunch of squabbling, backstabbing multi-millionaires so obsessed with obtaining advantage over one another that the casual cruelties they inflict on the 'little people' around them pass unnoticed. Welcome to the third season of Succession, the wittiest, most vicious show in recent memory. There are numerous reasons for its success.

First, the good news. Despite the recent death of drummer Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones are back among us, playing a series of sold-out US stadium shows between now and Thanksgiving. It’s not just that the three surviving band members, now all in their seventies, refuse to grow up. They seem actually to live in a time warp: in an era when most rock stars dress like they work at UPS and offer a relentless diet of screwed-up nihilism and phony salves, the Stones are still out there in their skimpy, Day-Glo T-shirts and leather pants, serving up great meat-and-potato rock songs garnished with lyrics about sex and drugs, and generally carrying on like it’s 1967 all over again. Now the bad news.

Netflix’s biggest hits to date have been solidly middlebrow fare with a contemporary twist: Bridgerton, The Crown, Lupin. It’s surprising, then, that its all-conquering new success is an ultraviolent South Korean thriller laced with social satire. Squid Game isn’t just the Battle Royale/Hunger Games rip-off that its premise suggests. Instead, it combines cartoonish brutality with provocative digs at a society in which the acquisition of status has become all-important. This is served up in an addictive, cliffhanging format, which allows the audience to gasp in surprise at each new twist, even as the net tightens inexorably on its hapless protagonists.

As a fitfully employed, freelance hack, there are few jobs I consider beneath me. I’ve peered anxiously over the boundary wall of Eric Clapton’s English estate to the approaching noise of guard dogs to see if Clapton might care to supply an impromptu quote or two in lieu of the formal interview his management had aggressively denied me. I’ve been informed by a source close to Roman Polanski that he considered me a ‘nosy fellow’ — enough, perhaps, to give pause to anyone who happens to recall the director using that same phrase to Jack Nicholson immediately prior to inserting his flick-knife in Nicholson’s left nostril in a scene from Chinatown.

The Emmys last night produced several controversies, as usual. The only person of color to win an acting award was Courtney B. Vance, for Lovecraft County, and there were complaints about predictability and a lack of daring. The dominance of Netflix and other streaming services suggests that the once-mighty HBO and other premium cable providers are now fighting for relevance and survival (although we can expect White Lotus to put up a strong showing next year). But the biggest story came in the regal dominance of The Crown, which swept the field with 11 awards. The fourth season of The Crown attracted both plaudits and controversy.

Hark, groundlings: Shakespeare, after decades of being found to be Problematic, is now being reclaimed as the wokemeister-in-chief. New York’s Shakespeare in the Park company returned to Central Park this summer with a staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor, adapted by the Ghanaian-American playwright Jocelyn Bioh. The action, traditionally located in the white-supremacist purlieus of 17th-century Windsor, is now transposed to 116th Street in Harlem. The cast is mostly black, the script has been updated to contain references to Black Lives Matter and the Bronx, and Jacob Ming-Trent portrays the portly knight-about-town Falstaff as a wannabe gangsta. The critics love the production.

Norm Macdonald claimed to have coined the phrase ‘fake news’ two decades before Donald Trump brought it into the political lexicon. That’s just one of dozens of examples of how the late Canadian-born comic left a mark on American culture. As host of Saturday Night Live’s long-running ‘Weekend Update’ segment during the mid-1990s, Macdonald often used the term when welcoming audiences. ‘I’m Norm Macdonald,’ he would begin, ‘and now, the fake news.’ What followed, however, almost always jumped the rails of what could reasonably be described as news satire.

Paintings so nice you’ll see them twice. That’s the gambit of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the gargantuan ‘simultaneous retrospective’ that’s currently split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. OK, so the concurrent presentations of painting and sculpture by the neo-Dada, quasi-proto-Pop artist aren’t exactly duplicates. The museums promise a sort of imperfect symmetry: ‘each half of the exhibition will act as a reflection of the other, inviting viewers to look closely to discover the themes, methods, and coded visual language that echo across the two venues’.

In 1576 Venice was gripped by plague. The island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, on which the afflicted were crammed three to a bed, was compared to hell itself. In the midst of this horror Tiziano Vecellio, the greatest painter in Europe, died — apparently of something else. He was in his eighties and working, it seems, almost to the end. Titian: Women, Myth & Power, now on view at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, contains several of the greatest masterpieces of his old age — and also of European art. It comprised just six canvases (a seventh was unable to travel to Boston), all done for Philip II of Spain — a villain of English history, the man who launched the Armada but, as far as Titian was concerned, his most discerning patron.

Blue-collar folks are having a moment in Hollywood. Multiple directors and actors have dropped the usual disdain we see on television and the silver screen for the working class, instead unpretentiously telling the stories of down-on-their-luck rural Americans. Nomadland, which won Best Picture at the 93rd Academy Awards in April, followed a woman who started living out of a van and working seasonal jobs after losing her job due to the closure of a local construction materials plant. Kate Winslet adopted a Yinzer accent in HBO’s Mare of Easttown, playing a small-town Pennsylvania detective that vapes and drinks her way through family trauma and a grisly murder case.

There are many things that Britain has given America for which the United States will forever be grateful. The English language; representative democracy; irony; Monty Python; Downton Abbey. And there are other things which have been regarded with considerably less indulgence. I am unsure that there are many true-born Americans who weep into their breakfast cereal and wish that Piers Morgan could return to assure them that they are, essentially, second-class citizens. But to their number must be added another name. James Corden, it is time to pack your bags, say farewell to your Beverly Hills mansion, and return to Primrose Hill. Your days as an American entertainer are — must be — behind you. I bear no personal animosity towards Corden.

When the Soviet Union still existed, visitors to Eastern Europe would smuggle illegal books and magazines to visitors. As the Chinese government announces that young people are to be banned from playing video games for more than three hours a week, it is tempting to imagine people sneaking copies of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto into the PRC — perhaps inside DVD cases of lavish propaganda films such as The Founding of a Republic. OK, I’m aging myself here. I know most gamers now play online. I also know the Chinese are big fans. More than half the population enjoy gaming and China has the world’s most substantial market for games.

There can be few terms in the English language more debased than ‘rock star’. Nowadays, it seems, the press makes a fetish of every halfway plausible such chancer to appear over the horizon, regardless of whether their art will endure, or their generally slim recorded oeuvre instead be among the detritus one eventually takes to the nearest Goodwill store. But the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died today aged 80, truly merits a place in the pop pantheon. He wasn’t just an original among the standard tub-thumpers of his profession. He was unique. Back in 1963 the Stones’s first manager, Eric Easton, fastened on the essential thing about Watts, which was that he was ‘totally unpretentious’ and ‘perfect at his job.

Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle (1887-1933) never won an Oscar or saw his name emblazoned on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but he should be remembered as a movie pioneer. Despite his considerable physical size, he was a remarkably versatile and agile actor, and his best films are weirdly droll as much as slapstick funny. He predated both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a master of physical comedy played with a straight face. Arbuckle was also an accidental pioneer of cancel culture. Exactly a hundred years ago, he found himself sitting in a cell on ‘felony row’ at the downtown San Francisco jail, held without bail for the alleged rape and subsequent death of a 26-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe.

I was well into my thirties when my parents acquired a television set, for no good reason that I could discern after they’d gone so many years without one without obvious damage to their health or intellects. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my sister and I were permitted to watch two television shows while visiting with relatives. One was Topper. The other was Perry Mason, which they occasionally joined us for: a small family grouping that was the closest thing the Williamsons ever came to resembling a painting by Norman Rockwell. Over the past year and a half, I have been re-watching episodes of the original show starring Raymond Burr as Mason, Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg and William Talman as Hamilton Burger.

C’mon, guys: you know how Natasha Romanoff feels about having red in her ledger. Marvel's long-awaited Black Widow movie finally arrived in theaters in July. But the excitement of the release has been sullied by bad blood — and bad debts. Scarlett Johansson, who gave 10 years of her life to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Avengers saga before getting a film of her own, sued Disney for breach of contract after they released Black Widow in the ‘Premier Access’ category on the Disney+ streaming service on the same day it hit theaters. According to Johansson and her reps, her Black Widow contract guaranteed an exclusive theatrical release.

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... The list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of 'Other' deprived of its disturbing Otherness. We should add to this series another key figure from our cultural space: a decaffeinated protester, a protester who says all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge.

'Imperious’ comes to mind in describing the great American fashion designer Halston. ‘Perverse’ does too; ‘grand’, ‘haughty’, ‘intimidating’ also fit. But, once you got to know him, it was apparent that he was a sweet and clever boy from the corn fields of the Midwest putting on a show for the big city sophisticates he sought to impress — and impress them he did. I met Halston in the summer of 1971 when I was brought to a party at the fashion illustrator Joe Eula’s by Andy Warhol, who had made me editor of his new magazine Interview the previous fall at age 22. Halston terrified me.