Every morning I ride my bike by a fire escape with a Hillary 2016 sign on it.I’ve tracked the sign’s longevity, thinking either my neighbor is lazy or they’re clinging to the Resistance. Yesterday, shocked, I noticed a new addition: a Bloomberg 2020 sign alongside it. It was the timeline of events that made me stop my bike in the middle of Irving Place and actually stare up at this fire escape. First, there was no sign. Then, there was wall-to-wall coverage of Bloomberg's unmistakably cynical strategy to buy the Democratic nomination. Then, a Bloomberg sign appeared. For so long I thought we embraced obviously self-serving celebrity propaganda because we were gullible or naive. Now I’m starting to think it’s the cynicism that we actually want, the strategy that we actually love, rather than any message or emotion. In the case of my neighbor with the Bloomberg sign, the strategy was so refreshing and welcome they decided to fly a flag in support of it, no matter how flagrantly self-interested it is. "This," the sign said to me, "is a sound way to restore order to the world by dethroning Trump and I support it."Taylor Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana is all strategy.
Not much aesthetically, the film reads as a series of transparent business motives, brand decisions, and narrative-framing choices. Swift takes us with her as she argues with a group of insanely out of touch suits, one of whom is her father and another of whom references Bing Crosby, over her right to take a political stance. She opens up about her intense need for validation and an eating disorder. She even shows us her self-loathing. The film is judged, and even praised, not for its feeling or content but for these choices, the choices Swift makes about what to signal and reveal to the world, namely that she’s ready to be more than just a singer-songwriter. To people who like the movie, she makes the right choices. They know the film is self-serving, but they love it because she chose a great strategy. The cynical triangulation of the documentary is refreshing. Justin Bieber's YouTube documentary "Seasons" serves the same purpose, reframing the narrative around a pop star, but its strategy is being panned where the Swift doc is mostly loved. On the surface, the two documentaries are almost exactly the same. Both are selectively honest and revealing.
But Justin's is honest and revealing about the wrong things, apparently. There are peeks behind the curtain, with Justin's friend/creative director Ryan Good asking some handler off-screen, "Can I say that?" And there are medical and psychological revelations, with the Justin show actually spending more time with these subjects than the Taylor movie. It's not really the content of "Seasons" that is any worse than Miss Americana, it's the strategy behind it. Everyone accepts that Justin is trying to rehabilitate his image with the show. But the documentary seems to fall short because it shows us so much of his happy marriage to Hailey Bieber without showing us the loneliness that came before, or because it show us Justin recovering from drugs without showing us the darkness. It's not that the show itself is a career chess move that makes us dislike it, it's that we disagree with the move itself. We're all trained celebrity strategists, less concerned with the content or the message than the effectiveness of it. If we see more Bloomberg signs, we'll know where we learned it from.
The shorter stuff
This is some great PR for a deck. (TNYer)
HQ's Scott Rogowsky absolutely ripped into his old bosses. (Twitter)
I actually thought this The Batman reveal was good because of the music. (YouTube)
Speaking of The Batman, which Ben Affleck famously ditched, I think an underrated element to Affleck's sobriety comeback story is that his first post-recovery movie sees him rekindling some of that The Accountant magic. (NYT)
I did not expect 10k. Caash to cite Little Richard and Sir Mix-A-Lot as influences over Drake. (NYT)
Tired: Facebook. Wired: Netflix. (WSJ)
I'm a music nerd and I've never met someone who's passionate about making streaming playlists. Hulu's "High Fidelity" reboot seems to be premised on this. The only people I can imagine being really into making playlists for Spotify are the same kids who make those really long "lo-fi beats to study to" videos for YouTube and they probably do it for clout, not because they love it. (Vulture)
More proof, beyond Jojo Rabbit, that if it's satire it must be explicitly spelled out. (NYT)
Out of all the recent coverage of the new Condé Nast memoirs, this line from Dan Peres' book actually hit: “I was hungry for validation. I had a long-simmering desire to be both noticed and invisible at the same time. This was my struggle—the bizarre by-product of a crippling insecurity and an inflated ego.” (TNR)
"Nathan For You" really was one of the best TV shows of the last decade. (AVClub)
I feel like this news item was actually written as Stupefy bait for me personally. They're turning the central song, "Karn Evil 9," from the classic Emerson Lake & Palmer album Brain Salad Surgery, into a movie. Watch a little bit of Keith Emerson stabbing his Hammond B3 with knives, as a treat. (Deadline) (YouTube)