EPISODE 1018: SISTER MARY VIRGIN AND THE NAKED FORCE GHOST
Also, Patti LuPone, there's a call from your agent on Line 1.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow. And Happy Pride!
This week we’ve got Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Rosie O’Donnell as a gay nun, and Patti LuPone as well, herself. Let’s get into it!
THE WOWND UP(SIDE DOWN)
Last week news broke that the parents of these three adorable children have agreed to put their kids through over a lifetime of questions about transgender people and endless comparisons to Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint in the slow motion train wreck that seems to be Max’s TV reboot of the Harry Potter series. In a better world I’d love a show that would allow many of the other children from the books to be given their own stories and relationships. But author and TV executive producer J.K. Rowling’s announcement last week that she is establishing a “Women’s Fund” to further encourage and support others who care to oppress and demonize transgender people only underlines further how deep into the Upside Down we are.
Meanwhile Patti LuPone, seen here looking at the rest of her life go down the toilet, went full “racist crazy lady next door” in the pages of the New Yorker last week, saying horrible and also just kind of strange things about Broadway stars Audra McDonald, Kecia Lewis, and others. Over 500 members of the Broadway community responded by signing an open letter calling upon LuPone to be banned from this weekend’s Tony Awards and citing her behavior as an example of a long-standing pattern of “public actions that demean, intimidate, or perpetuate violence against fellow artists” on Broadway that gets largely ignored when it comes from powerful or well-known people. LuPone has since apologized, weirdly saying she was “devastated that my behavior has offended others” but taking “full responsibility” and committing to “making this right.”
And in Hollywood, while doing press for his fantastic new movie The Life of Chuck, Mark Hamill revealed that he did not plan to ever go back to Luke Skywalker again, and he didn’t think Star Wars should, either. “I am so grateful to George [Lucas] for letting me be a part of that back in the day, the humble days when George called Star Wars ‘the most expensive low-budget movie ever made,’” he told Comic Book. “We never expected it to become a permanent franchise and a part of pop culture like that. But my deal is, I had my time. I’m appreciative of that, but I really think they should focus on the future and all the new characters.”
Hamill also argued that if he were to ever play Force ghost Luke, he would have to be naked, and that is not happening: “When I disappeared in [The Last Jedi], I left my robes behind. And there’s no way I’m gonna appear as a naked Force ghost.” (But naked or not, I bet we see him at least once in the new Rey film New Jedi Order.)
SISTER MARY VIRGIN
…And Just Like That, the HBO sequel series to Sex and the City, started its third season last week with the laugh-out-loud post-coital reveal that Mary, the meek middle-aged tourist from Winnipeg that picks up Miranda in a bar, was in fact a nun and, until now, a virgin. Rosie O’Donnell plays the role with a combination of sincerity and detachment that I found really fascinating. Even as she’s immediately professing her devotion for Miranda, there’s also a kind of watchfulness to her, like she’s outside of what’s happening somehow. It can seem a little creepy, in fact; throughout the episode you’re not quite sure what this woman might do next. But in the end she’s not a stalker; she’s just completely outside her experience of reality.
O’Donnell did a great interview with Variety last week about the part. Asked “Have you known people like Mary who are isolated from their sexuality, even as they get older?” she had this to say:
100%. I know many women who only come to it in their 40s, and how hard it is when they set up a life with a man and children, and then they come to realize this basic thing about themselves. I understand their struggle. It was a relatable character — somebody who, for all different reasons, wasn’t able to be in touch with who they were, and then came to find the beauty that awaits the rest of her life.
I can remember when I first moved back to New York going to this queer singalong piano bar Marie’s Crisis which I’ve written about here before. In retrospect I think one of the things that made Marie’s feel like such a safe space for me as compared to other bars was the fact that it wasn’t a pick-up joint. People came there to sing and to hang out with their friends. It was a place I could go and just be able to kind of quietly settle into the reality of myself as a middle-aged gay man.
(Some gay men in New York seem to love telling you that Marie’s isn’t queer at all, because it gets a lot of straight people going to sing Wicked. And to them I say…
The few times that someone did try to flirt with me at Marie’s in that first year, it always freaked me out. I had no sense of how to handle those moments. At times I’d literally jump out of my seat if a guy touched me.
Much of that has changed in the last couple years, although with more experience I’m realizing some of my reaction was not about me having to get more comfortable. It’s just that I’m not a fan of people putting their hands on me without asking. My skin literally crawls when I’m in a conversation with someone who feels the need to keep touching me. A hand shake or a hug is great, but then leave me alone.
(This may be the most New York thing I have ever written.)
I’ve been learning that part of growing more comfortable with myself is also realizing that it’s okay to not be okay with some things, that my past experience has not left me some kind of deficient human who doesn’t have the capacity to know what’s good or bad for me. If I don’t like it, I don’t like it.
At times, I do also feel a little like O’Donnell’s Sister Mary, sort of bemused in the face of the experiences I’m having. It’s almost too bad that this was just a one-episode cameo, a hook up of the week. There’s so much story there to tell. (Trust me on this.)
WAIT, IS NATHAN FOR ME?
Last week Superintendent of Wow Andy Bouvier-Brown wrote encouraging me to check out the new season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO show The Rehearsal if I hadn’t as of yet. He said it was the kind of show that he thought I would definitely have things to say about.
When I wrote back thanking him and saying that I would definitely check the show out, the thing I didn’t share is that I definitely have things to say about Nathan Fielder’s style of comedy, specifically that I don’t like it. Between The Rehearsal and his prior show Nathan For You, Fielder has made a name for himself doing reality-based shows in which he concocts elaborate scenarios and convinces normal people to play a part in them. My feeling from the few Nathan For You episodes I had watched was that underneath his deadpan earnestness Fielder was mostly interested in putting people in situations where they look foolish, which I think is generally one of the most contemptible forms of comedy, punching down in the extreme. I had not only not watched The Rehearsal, despite the many great reviews it had gotten, I wanted nothing to do with it.
But then there I was at 10:30 on Sunday night feeling like I needed one more piece for the Wow. And so I started the second season, which is turns out was going to tell one long story about something horrifying—plane crashes. Having researched many crashes, Fielder had discovered that at the heart of many of them seemed to be a lack of communication between the pilot and co-pilot. And with that in mind, he was going to spend the season trying to understand that relationship better, see where the problems are, and try to find a way to help improve the situation, all while maintaining the same sort of elaborate scenarios he had perfected on Nathan For You.
So, in the first episode, when he wasn’t allowed into the pilot’s lounge in the Houston airport to see how real pilots and copilots interact before they get on the plane, he recreated an entire area of the airport on L.A. sound stages and populated it with actors who he sent to the real Houston Airport and had follow and study the people they would be playing—everything from TSA agents and fast food clerks to pilots.
In some ways, the scale of the conceit is so absurdly enormous that it’s hard to believe that Fielder is in fact serious about his underlying concern. Also, it quickly became impossible to know what was real and what was being staged. At one point in the first season he calls United to ask for permission to get into the pilots’ lounge. But then as he’s talking on the phone with them, he walks into another room, where we find the woman he’s talking to, an actor playing a United employee (and dressed like one), and this all just a…wait for it…rehearsal of the real call, which he then makes.
But Fielder proves very willing to be critiqued for his approach. In the second episode, he asks a group of co-pilots to judge contestants for a singing contest, and the rejected contestants to then score the judges for likability, in an effort to find techniques that some co-pilots have to say difficult things in a way that doesn’t undermine their relationship with their pilots. And in the midst of it he turns to exploring a hard conversation of his own that has not gone well, with Paramount+, which pulled from its catalog an episode of Nathan For You in which he created a line of clothing to promote Holocaust awareness. And Fielder creates another one of his rehearsals, this time of the offices of Paramount+ Germany, which first requested the episode be pulled, to try and understand their point of view and practice expressing his own. And at some point he invites the actor playing the head of Paramount+ Germany to improvise. The actor delivers a scathing critique of the way that Fielder has presented the German offices and actor. (I’m not going to spoil Fielder’s approach, because it comes as such a surprise it needs to be witnessed.)
Was the actor really improvising or was this, too, a part of the script? I have no idea. I’m going to guess the latter, but either way, it’s a fascinating moment, and one that shows Fielder digging deeper and deeper into the important questions of connection and communication at the heart of this series.
Two episodes in, I feel like I walked through a very normal-looking door into a world that I can’t quite understand. It’s a funhouse hall of mirrors, and yet somehow what it’s revealing seems to be headed somewhere profound. I’m hooked.
I’ll have more to say about The Rehearsal next week. Thanks Andy!
MOMENT OF WOW
I have no idea what this is, but it stars my absolute favorite human, Bob Mortimer, and I am now intent on finding out more.
See you next week!