The Social World

Category: Culture

  • Woody Allen without the zingers: Materialists reviewed

    Celine Song’s first movie, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists. Perhaps way too high. And, yes, it’s a letdown. It feels like an early Woody Allen but blunter, shallower, with no zingers, and a lead character that’s hard to care about. Dakota Johnson is our lead, playing a matchmaker who has two dreamboats (Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal) vying for her hand and throughout I was thinking: I should have your problems, sweetie. 

    It’s billed as a romcom but those who expect that will be disappointed. It’s more an essay on modern dating. Johnson, whom we have forgiven for her horrible performance in that horrible adaptation of Persuasion – we don’t hold grudges – is Lucy. She works for a swanky Manhattan dating agency called Adore (ugh) that deals exclusively with the rich elite. She sees marriage as a business transaction in which people are buyers or sellers. The montage of clients’ demands and feedback from first dates – too fat, too short, too old, too balding, “I would never swipe right on that” etc. – is fun but only one client gets any real attention. This is Sophie, a 39-year-old lawyer who fears dying alone. She is played by Zoë Winters who steals the movie from under everybody despite it being a minor role.

    Lucy attends the wedding of one of her clients and here she meets Harry (Pascal, gliding into view in a way that put me in mind of Omar Sharif). He’s a “unicorn” – hot, rich, tall, full head of hair – but, what do you know? At the same event, serving as a “cater waiter,” is John (Chris Evans). He’s her ex, an out of work actor who – a flashback informs us – she left because they were always broke. He still wants her but Harry also now wants her. I wondered why, as she comes across as neither interesting nor especially bright. Midway through there’s an act of violence and she is forced to reflect on the nature of her work and you think, you’ve never reflected on that before? Wake up and smell the coffee, lady!

    Should she be seduced by Harry’s penthouse or return to broke John? (Harry! He has silk sheets!)

    As an exploration of the tension between love and money the movie is surprisingly unsubtle from the word go. The opening scene involves a prehistoric cave couple – I thought I was in the wrong screen! –  which even sets out the movie’s stall when it comes to marriage, albeit in a laughably clumsy way. Lucy, meanwhile, has the following dilemma on her hands. Should she be seduced by Harry’s $12 million penthouse or return to broke John? (Harry! He has silk sheets!) This leads her to question whether we might be worth more than our “tangible assets” but is that taking us anywhere new? What is new, I suppose, is how far people will go to “add value” to themselves these days but that involves a surgical subplot that I can’t go into as it would take us into spoiler territory.

    The characters feel like cinema characters rather than character characters. They have no friends, no family, no interests beyond the dating scene. The movie is talky, with some sharp dialogue, but no fresh insights. A good actor has something going on behind the eyes that the audience wants to know about and I’m not sure I ever get that with Johnson. Evans and Pascal bring A-list pizazz but no chemistry is ever ignited. I only ever felt for Sophie whom the movie abandons just as she’s always been abandoned. Poor Sophie. And why does Lucy have to choose? Why not neither? Is this saying marriage is the pinnacle of a woman’s achievement?

    It’s lushly photographed and beautifully framed and it’s not a nightmare to sit through but whereas Past Lives stayed with you, I can feel this leaving me already.

  • What the skibidi?

    What the skibidi?

    People whose minds stopped evolving 20 years ago are having a snit because the Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online lexicography, has added a few Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha slang terms to its more than 6,000 entries. The most controversial include “skibidi,” “delulu” and “tradwife.” You could argue that the latter is more of a millennial linguistic formulation for the extremely online, but the other two are definitely youth newspeak.

    Tradwife, as a term and a viral activity, is going to stick around for a while. “Skibidi,” derived from the YouTube Skibidi Toilet meme, is a word with as many meanings as “aloha” and “shalom,” and has the potential for a generation-spanning shelf life. “Delulu,” short for “delusional,” is a ridiculous babyism and is already about as cool and relevant as saying “cray cray.”

    In other words, the world changes, time and language marches on. I would advise against heading in the mental direction of writer and artist Lee Escobedo, who wrote in the Guardian: “Skibidi brainrot encapsulates a generation fluent in irony but starved for meaning. This kind of hyper-chaotic media serves as both entertainment and an ambient worldview for young men raised online. Their minds normalize prank-as-expression.”

    Kids today and their skibidi brainrot, amirite? This kind of stuffed-shirt intellectual condemning the kids’ vibe periodically emerges in generational cycles. Words come and go. But the real comedy comes when normies try to get hip with the youth.

    Since I’m the last surviving member of Generation X, the current mild strain of language controversy reminds me of the “Lexicon of Grunge” that the New York Times published in 1992. Times freelancer Rick Marin (author of Cad: The Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor), seeking to report on how the cool kids were talking, called up the offices of Seattle indie-rock label Sub Pop. He got receptionist Megan Jasper, one of the greatest Gen-X heroes, on the line.

    Jasper, who later ended up being Sub Pop’s CEO, proceeded to pepper Marin with a glossary of nonsense words. Despite some Times fact-checking, the terms got through the filter, leading Marin to write, “all subcultures speak in code.”

    And that’s how we learned that “grunge” people used “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” to refer to hanging out. A loser was a “cob nobbler,” though not as bad as a “lamestain.” Some of the terms, like “harsh realm” and “score,” actually entered mainstream vocabulary. Unfortunately, “bloated big bag of bloatation,” for drunk, didn’t. In a 2020 interview, Jasper, in typical Gen-X fashion, regretted the whole episode, but in particular regretted that Marin didn’t use the term “tuna platter,” which she’d offered him as grunge slang for “hot date.” Either it was too risqué or so ridiculous that it rang even the Times’ broken BS detector.

    The Gen-X irony here is that if she’d grown up in the age of TikTok, Jasper’s Grunge Lexicon might have gone mega-viral, becoming the actual lexicon, and fast. The world might have found itself calling old-ripped jeans “wack slacks.” There would be a “Bound and Hagged” entry in the Cambridge Dictionary, telling people that it meant “staying home alone on a weekend night.” But since it was Gen X, the words just fell into a pit, and will never see the light of dictionary justice.

    So here’s to aimless young men and their prank-as-expression. Hooray for brainrot. Our brains are going to rot anyway, so we might as well play Word Jabberwocky while we can. One of the joys, for me, of being alive for nearly six decades is watching the world change, sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly. You can wake up and find yourself immersed in a whole new culture, a completely different language, and you don’t ever have to leave the house. Any skibidi cob-nobbling tradwife who doesn’t enjoy that feeling is being completely delulu.

  • Donald Trump saved the UFC 

    Donald Trump saved the UFC 

    A new bombshell has fallen on the sports-media villa: Dana White cloaked in the glory of a whopping seven-year, $7.7 billion media-rights deal with Paramount to stream all UFC fights on Paramount+ in the United States and select simulcast events on CBS.

    For the love of everyone’s wallets, goodbye Pay Per View and hello to a new right-wing cultural shift in mainstream sports coverage. 

    Why is this new deal so relevant? Since the UFC’s inception in 1993, mixed martial arts existed as its own niche category. Critics openly said it wasn’t a real sport. They lampooned the more brutal style of MMA as less skilled and artistic than boxing, once a more revered American pastime. Even the late Senator John McCain of Arizona famously referred to the UFC as “human cockfighting” in the nineties. The sport struggled to even hold an event in its home city of Las Vegas. 

    One outsider, however, did believe in it. It was a businessman who threw the UFC a life-saving bone and welcomed it to Atlantic City for a game-changing opportunity.

    That lifesaver is the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

    When everyone else gave little more than a passing glance to the UFC, Trump welcomed it to his Taj Mahal hotel and casino around the same time White, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta purchased the organization in 2001. Thus began the entrepreneurial and future presidential bromance of White, Trump and the legion of 70 million American voters who voted for him. 

    As the sport gradually crept onto bar televisions and churned out such stars as Ronda Rousey, Conor McGregor, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones, White’s allegiance to Trump grew too. White appeared at the 2016 Republican National Convention, a relative newbie to the political world. He once briefly campaigned for Democrat and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. But with a fiery speech at that RNC, White shed any past party affiliation for Trump. 

    “My name is Dana White. I am the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I’m sure most you are wondering, ‘What are you doing here?’” White said to the Cleveland RNC crowd. “I am not a politician. I am a fight promoter, but I was blown away and honored to be invited here tonight, and I wanted to show up and tell you about my friend – Donald Trump – the Donald Trump that I know.”

    White continued the campaign favors into the 2024 RNC as well. In turn, Trump, a fan of the UFC, showed his support to White in 2020 when he filmed a video congratulating the sport for continuing to hold live events during Covid. He has also attended several events, making one of his most famous treks through Madison Square Garden following the election at UFC 309. The crowd erupted into chants of “USA,” and a video tribute showed Trump shaking his fist after an assassination attempt in July 2024.

    When the President of the United States begins hiring UFC executives into his administration, that sport stops being a niche Spike TV creation. Despite liberal sneers at the sport, its so-called manosphere audience continues to grow. And there’s been a jump in female viewership as well. Six times, women have headlined the PPV preliminaries on Fox Sports 1, earning ratings ranking within the top 20.

    Simply put, more and more people are watching the UFC, and the UFC loves the Donald. Trump’s even hosting a fight at the White House next Fourth of July. The sport will be synonymous with the image of America.

    The backs and eyeballs of many Trump voters landed this lucrative deal. Maybe the Democrats should take note and stop minimizing the cultural relevance of the sport and its people. Not so deplorable after all. 

  • The trouble with Fran Lebowitz

    The trouble with Fran Lebowitz

    Fran Lebowitz, the apparently acid-tongued commentator on Manhattan manners, will leave her island next month to dazzle the easily dazzled in the UK. Though to judge by the interview she granted an earnest lady in the Observer, other verbs leap to mind. From any distance it looks suspiciously like a fog of self-regard.

    According to the profiler, Megan Nolan, Lebowitz is “a poster girl for a certain kind of crusty but erudite and essentially good-natured New York archetype, intellectual and judgmental, and walking the line between rudeness and frankness with engaging grace.” Good grief! Is this a private ritual between consenting adults, or can we all join in?

    “America could be more like New York,” she says, oblivious to the fact that many Americans beyond the Hudson have no desire to hold hands with people who despise them. “It is my belief that the people in the cities should make the laws.” There’s erudition for you.

    As for her good nature, the wit of the West Village is clearly not the cheeriest singer in life’s bathtub. “The human being is a horrible species,” she tells Nolan, confirming Dickens in his view that those who rail most vigorously against humanity tend to rank among its most unpleasant specimens.

    She’s a philosopher, too. “There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who own Rembrandts, and the kind who are racing to get the F train.” As Lorenz Hart wrote in a lyric for Richard Rodgers: “I was reading Schopenhauer last night – and I think that Schopenhauer was right.”

    Hart was Jewish, like her; homosexual, like her; a native New Yorker, like her. Unlike her, he was witty rather than clever. His songs were not “judgmental.” They were for everybody, and will continue to entertain those who value wit above flummery until the East River flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

    Lebowitz does not lack company in the gallery of Manhattan pseuds. She was pally with Andy Warhol (of course), and nobody trapped the nerve of New York solipsism more painfully than that talentless berk. Robert Mapplethorpe, the trendy snapper, must also be numbered among the throng. All those penis-shaped flowers – so daring.

    Yet, as the restaurateur Keith McNally has written in his recent memoir, Mapplethorpe and his lover, the ghastly Patti Smith, were quite happy to berate waiters. Little people, you see. Not interleckshuals like us. And let’s not start on that thundering bore, Susan “I’ve read everything” Sontag.

    “America could be more like New York,” she says, oblivious to the fact that many Americans beyond the Hudson have no desire to hold hands with people who despise them

    Some witnesses saw what lay behind the curtains of celebrity. Tom Wolfe captured the madness in The Bonfire of the Vanities. “What are we going to do with these Republicans?” a guest asked Wolfe at a dinner party. “We could vote for them,” he replied.

    The man who really exposed the charlatans was Robert Hughes, the great art critic for Time magazine. Hughes, an Australian republican, was no stick-in-the-mud. He wrote The Shock of the New, that tour d’horizon of 20th-century painting, and always championed new work.

    Great were the howls of rage, therefore, when he denounced Julian Schnabel, the darling of the New York art scene, in language which still stings. Nor did he care for Jean-Michel Basquiat, a well-heeled drop-out who passed himself off as a street urchin. Basquiat fooled many New York intellectuals; not Hughes, who spotted “radical chic” at a hundred paces.

    What a gruesome crew they make, the salon society thinkers and drinkers who have tried to bag seats once occupied by Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, Robert Benchley, Cole Porter, P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Hitchens. But let’s be generous to Lebowitz, for she needs all the affirmation she can get.

    Nolan obviously sees herself as an understudy: Anne Baxter to Lebowitz’s Bette Davis. “I will tell you all about Eve,” George Sanders says in the opening scene of that great Broadway satire. I will tell you all about Fran, Nolan seems to be saying. Sorry, but we’ve heard enough already.

  • Trump is liberating the Smithsonians from ‘Woke’

    Trump is liberating the Smithsonians from ‘Woke’

    Back in March, Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.” Its aim was to counter the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”  

    Exhibit number one was the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks and assorted educational centers in and around Washington DC with affiliate institutions in 47 states. 

    Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian was the culmination of an earlier movement, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.” 

    The institution is named for the British chemist James Smithson, whose fortune was bequeathed to the United States in order “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men. Back then money made a physical impression. President Andrew Jackson deputed the diplomat Richard Rush to retrieve the pelf, which he did in 1838: 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns, worth about $500,000 at the time – $15 million today.

    Back then the phrase “useful knowledge” was touted everything. That’s what the Smithsonian was created to promote. That was then. “In recent years,” as Trump notes, the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” 

    Trump mentions an exhibition called The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture which purports to show how “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” What it really does is undermine any sense of patriotism and shared American identity.  

    Executive orders are one thing. Enacting or enforcing them is something else. Donald Trump understands this. Thus it is that his order to abolish the racist practice of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” industry was followed up by fines of hundreds of millions at Columbia, Harvard and many other institutions that continued the practice overtly or by stealth in defiance of the law. 

    And thus it is that Trump’s order to restore “truth and sanity” to the institutions charged with preserving and disseminating American history has just been given teeth. Yesterday, Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian, received a letter whose subject line reads “Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials.” Signed by Lindsey Halligan, Special Assistant to the President, Vince Haley, Director of the Domestic Policy Council and Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the letter announces a “comprehensive internal review” of the Smithsonian, its exhibitions and curatorial procedures. “This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” 

    How will that happen? Well, the administration will review “exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content to assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.” It will interview curatorial staff “to better understand the selection process, exhibition approval workflows, and any frameworks currently guiding exhibition content.” One major focus will be on how the Smithsonian plans to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary next year. Out will go the divisive anti-American racialist rhetoric that has disfigured so much official cultural patronage in recent years. In will come affirmative exhibitions that acknowledge America’s many achievements and that emphasize the traditions and historical realities that unite us.

    What is happening, and what is going to happen, at the Smithsonian museums may seem like a footnote to the larger Trump agenda of “Making America Great Again.” In fact, it stands at the center of that project. Donald Trump understands something that the left has grasped at least since the 1960s but that conservatives have grasped dimly if at all. If you want to restore society, you must commandeer the institutions that represent elite culture. Over the last several decades, those institutions have gradually become captive of a woke ideology that denigrates America while simultaneously celebrating the entire radical menu of racialist redress, sexual exoticism and political intransigence.  

    Back in January, I wrote an column claiming that Donald Trump was “a great man of history.” That occasioned a fair amount of ridicule. But as the months pass and Trump moves from one triumph to the next, doing beneficent things that no previous president would have thought possible, my description seems more and more apt. Trump is not only making Americans safer and more prosperous. He is also moving on several fronts to give them back their cultural and educational institutions. His actions at the Smithsonian are the tip of that liberating spear.

  • Wow! The Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever

    Wow! The Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever

    In the most-hyped announcement of Kennedy Center Honor nominees ever, President Trump appeared this morning at the Kennedy Center, or, as he put it on Truth Social last night, the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops.” Now all the teasing is done, and the nominees stand revealed as: country superstar George Strait, the original Broadway Phantom of the Opera Michael Crawford, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor and, yes, KISS. It’s 2025 and Donald Trump is enshrining KISS at the Kennedy Center. We live in the greatest timeline.

    While there will certainly be objections, this isn’t a particularly objectionable list. But it is the Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever. Last year, the Biden administration honored the Apollo Theater and the Grateful Dead, among others. Fat chance Trump would include those. In 2022, George Clooney, the anti-Trump, got the call. During Trump’s first term, honorees included Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sesame Street and Joan Baez. But Trump wasn’t in charge of our nation’s leading cultural institution then. He is now.

    The President had kind words about all the nominees, but he seemed most excited about Stallone, telling the origin story of the Rocky movie at great length. “He’s a little bit tough,” Trump said. “He’s a little bit different. He’s a little tough guy… The only one that’s a bigger name on the Hollywood Wall of Fame is a guy named Donald Trump. I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, believe it or not.”

    We believe it, sir.

    Then Trump fulfilled the dream of every 12-year-old boy from Detroit Rock City by reciting the names of the band members of KISS: Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss (the cat), all of whom, younger readers might not know, put out solo albums in 1978. “They’re great people,” Trump said. “They work hard. They’re still working hard. It’s an honor.”

    Trump spent many words tying in the revitalization of the Kennedy Center with his overall plan to make Washington, DC sparkling and safe again. “We ended the woke political programming,” he said. “We’re going to have the best entertainment in the world… We have completely reversed the decline of this cherished national institution. Look at this marble. These columns, the next time you see them, will be magnificent. The bones are so good. If you don’t have the bones of a building, you might as well forget it.”

    The Kennedy Center Awards ceremony will take place in December. The host will be Donald Trump. “It’s gonna be a big evening,” said Trump. “I said, I’m the President of the United States. Are you fools to ask me to host? They said, sir, you’ll get much better ratings.”

    Against all odds, the Kennedy Center board managed to persuade their chairman, a man who loves being on stage and on TV more than any other person who’s ever lived, to host the ceremony. It will be huge, Trump said, bigger than the Academy Awards, which has been bleeding audiences because it became too political. Trump said he finally agreed to do the show because he used to host live finales for The Apprentice, which were very successful and got ratings almost as big as the Academy Awards themselves.

    “I don’t want to make it political,” Trump said. “Maybe I will make it political. But it will be our kind of political… We’re going to have a tremendous day in December. It’s going to be very special.”

    This is an important moment for President Trump because he’s long coveted his own Kennedy Center Honors nomination. “I wanted one, but they never gave me one,” he said. “I waited and waited and waited. Instead, I became chairman. Maybe next year they’ll honor Trump.”

    Shout it, Mr. President. Shout it. Shout it out loud.

  • Did I underestimate Harry and Meghan?

    It is important for any self-respecting writer to admit when they get it wrong. So it is with an element of contrition that I must report that, despite my confident belief that the dynamic duo themselves, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, would not have their lucrative Netflix deal renewed, such an event has, indeed, come to pass. Amid what must surely be the raucous sound of organic kombucha bottles being opened in Montecito in celebration, it has been announced that Netflix and Hal & Megs will be in business for another five years, giving the haters and naysayers ample reason to weep and gnash their teeth.

    The treats on offer will include not just a second series of the Duchess’s largely unloved and unpopular lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, but a Christmas special – no doubt filmed about now – and a range of potential projects from Archewell’s hitherto undistinguished film and television production arm. This might potentially include their feature film debut, an adaptation of Carley Fortune’s romantic novel Meet Me At The Lake, and worthy-sounding documentaries, including one about orphans in Uganda, tentatively entitled Masaka Kids, A Rhythm Within. If all goes according to plan, then the schedules will be choc-a-bloc with Archewell programming over the next few years. Springtime for Netflix and the Sussexes; winter for the rest of us.

    Certainly, the smug quotes from all parties suggest that this particular fait accompli has worked out very well indeed. Meghan, forever with an eye on the prize, announced that: 

    “We’re proud to extend our partnership with Netflix and expand our work together to include the As Ever brand. My husband and I feel inspired by our partners who work closely with us and our Archewell Productions team to create thoughtful content across genres that resonates globally and celebrates our shared vision.” 

    Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria, meanwhile, gushed that:

    “Harry and Meghan are influential voices whose stories resonate with audiences everywhere. The response to their work speaks for itself – Harry & Meghan gave viewers an intimate look into their lives and quickly became one of our most-watched documentary series. More recently, fans have been inspired by With Love, Meghan with products from the new As Ever line consistently selling out in record time. We’re excited to continue our partnership with Archewell Productions and to entertain our members together.”

    So there we are. The wholesome, upstanding couple has been vindicated, sarcastic detractors like me humiliated, and we can expect a happy half-decade of shows ahead. Well, not quite. 

    Springtime for Netflix and the Sussexes; winter for the rest of us

    Dig beneath the PR carapace and in fact there’s a sting in the tail. The Sussexes have indeed signed a new five-year deal with Netflix, but it’s on considerably reduced terms from the original $100 million handout. Instead, it is trumpeted as a “multiyear, first-look deal,” which sounds impressive enough, but in reality means that Netflix are not obliged to make any of the shows that Archewell pitches, simply that they will be the first port of call for their offer. 

    Should, heaven forfend, they not meet with the streaming service’s interest, they can attempt to flog their wares elsewhere. But given the negligible viewing figures for all the non-Sussex shows – and the unexceptional numbers for the much-maligned With Love, Meghan – this is by no means an inevitability.

    Therefore, one cannot begrudge Harry and Meghan a moment of relief after what has been a largely rough and difficult year so far, particularly for the Duke. Yet it is hard to believe that this really does represent the triumphant return to our screens that this has been superficially marketed as. If most of these mooted shows and films do make it to Netflix, I will take pleasure in eating my As Ever-branded raspberry spread (“with a hint of lemon”) in public, with the smallest spoon I can find. But if they don’t, then this should be seen as a face-saving retreat rather than a progression in an increasingly tarnished media empire.

  • Is Hollywood’s woke tide finally turning?

    On reading that Dean Cain (the actor who played the television Superman) had become an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, I felt a thrill of insurrection – so hot on the heels of the revelation that naughty Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican! I imagined Rosie O’Donnell crying into her morning decaf, Lizzo swearing at her gender-fluid cat, Ellen DeGeneres taking it out on the help from sheer liberal frustration. Because celebrities aren’t allowed to be right-wing (‘right-wing’ now being dunce-speak for anyone against limitless illegal immigration and transvestite men colonizing women’s spaces.)

    Undaunted, Cain told Fox News:

    “I’m actually a reserve police officer… so now I’ve spoken with some officials over at ICE, and I will be sworn in as an ICE agent, ASAP. This country was built on patriots stepping up, whether it was popular or not, and doing the right thing. I truly believe this is the right thing. We have a broken immigration system. Congress needs to fix it, but in the interim, President Trump ran on this. He is delivering on this. This is what people voted for. It’s what I voted for and he’s going to see it through, and I’ll do my part and help make sure it happens.”

    Cain has previous on stepping up, whether popular or not. I think we can safely say that being a “liberal” (a liberal in the modern sense, being a censorious nag, rather than the old sense, one who is inclined to live and let live) has been for a long time the only political stance acceptable in show business and entertainment, especially in Hollywood. Often, especially when used by men, this is merely a “wokescreen” – think of Harvey Weinstein, of whom Rebecca Corbett (the journalist who oversaw the New York Times investigations into allegations of rape and sexual abuse by Weinstein) said in the 2020 Reuters Memorial Lecture:

    “At the beginning of the Weinstein investigation, we had no idea whether the producer had done anything wrong. He cast himself as a champion of actresses, a Democratic Party fundraiser, a feminist who joined marches – a man considered reliable enough that Barack Obama’s older daughter had worked as a summer intern at his studio.“

    Dean Cain needs no wokescreen from behind which to conduct evil deeds and is therefore refreshingly honest. He recently came out as a Hollywood outsider for mocking the latest Superman film as “woke” after director James Gunn described the character as an immigrant, telling TMZ: “How woke is Hollywood going to make this character? We know Superman is an immigrant – he’s a freaking alien… the ‘American way’ is immigrant-friendly, tremendously immigrant-friendly. But there are rules… there have to be limits, because we can’t have everybody in the United States.”

    Cain is an interesting man. He’s partly of Japanese descent, a Democratic voter as a youngster, teenage boyfriend of Brooke Shields when they were at university, dater of Playmates and swimsuit models, he also trolled Dylan Mulvaney in a spectacular fashion when he commented on a video of Mulvaney and another cross-dresser, saying “Neither of you are girls.”  “You were never Superman either,” snarked an “ally”. “Correct. I pretended,” Cain replied.

    In 2021 he gave a sparky interview after DC Comics had Superman’s son come out as a bisexual:

    “I say they’re bandwagoning… Robin, of Batman & Robin, just came out as bi or gay recently. And honestly, who’s really shocked about that one? The new Captain America is gay. My daughter in Supergirl where I played the father, she was gay… So I don’t think it’s bold or brave or some crazy new direction. If they had done this 20 years ago, perhaps that would have been bold and brave. Brave would be having him fighting for the rights of gay people in Iran, where they’ll throw you off a building for the offense of being gay… They’re talking about him fighting real-world problems like climate change, the deportation of refugees and he’ll be dating a “hacktivist”, whatever a “hacktivist” is… Why don’t they have him fight the injustices that created the refugees whose deportation he’s protesting? That would be brave.“

    Cain has a hinterland, it’s fair to say. What he doesn’t have – unlike most celebrities, are “luxury beliefs,” the phrase created by Rob Henderson as “ideas held by privileged people that make them look good but actually harm the marginalized.” These can be found in many professions, but it’s probably when they’re propagated by the massively-privileged showbiz “community” that they irritate most, preaching defunding of the police from their privately-policed gated communities.

    Regrettably, the stars who aren’t left-wing these days are a mixed bag. I was cheered to hear that we have Kelsey Grammar, Chris Pratt, James Woods, Alice Cooper, Gary Sinise (who, in parts both poignant and amusing, started up Friends of Abe, a support group for Hollywood Republicans) and the iconic ex-Runaways singer Cherie Currie. I am less happy with Mel Gibson, Kid Rock and Vince Vaughn. 

    But does which way entertainers swing politically really matter anymore? The last American election indicated not. As I wrote in May of the actor James Corden’s political ambitions in Britain, “How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements/involvements not work, but have an actual repelling effect? Beyonce and ‘The Boss’ sure helped cook Kamala’s goose; when the rich and famous swank around telling hoi polloi who to vote for, the masses have a habit of doing exactly the opposite.”

    When that wily old fox the tax-avoiding Mick Jagger allegedly said “My heart is Labour but my money is Conservative” he was being honest in a way most pop stars (see the financial behavior of U2) would never dare to, lest their fans turn on them. Entertainers follow the path they do because they want attention and they want to be rich. If they really cared about making things better for people, they’d have trained to become nurses or firefighters.

    Still, celebrity Democrats could learn a lesson from Republicans like Cain and Sweeney, who don’t see the non-famous as Deplorables put on earth to be preached at.

  • The rise of white signaling

    What is culture but an endless backlash against the backlash? Woke was a sustained war on whitey for his privilege and crimes, real or imagined. But now that woke is dead, killed by Donald and Elon, is it any wonder we whites now emerge increasingly ecstatically from our hidey-holes, rubbing our eyes to celebrate, er, Sydney Sweeney’s magnificent rack.

    I know, I know, there’s more to white culture than a perfect pair of breasts, but it’s been a while. Give us a moment, OK? Let us get used once again to guiltlessly celebrating the sheer pleasure of being alive and white. Yes, there’s other stuff to like about being Caucasian. But we’ll get to that. 

    In fact, we already are: white-signaling furiously to one another as we go to demonstrate the coast is as clear as it was in the Eighties. We’ve waited it out and the hard yards have been reclaimed. No more obese and hirsute multi-racial models selling us our Calvin Kleins, thank you very much. The bygone era is back, baby. And so are we. Good genes are good genes, right? 

    It’s not just registered Republican Sydney Sweeney getting ’em out without fear of consequence, either. Justin Bieber is at it, too, this week posting photos of himself like a regular redneck, stripped to the waist and firing his gun, tattoos on full display. That’s it, J-Dog. You fire that gun. No more crap about wanting with your music “to continue the conversation of what justice looks like so we can continue to heal.” He knows what time it is – less Kumbaya, more Hawk Tuah – and so the white-signaling conservative rebrand continues apace. 

    Once you start noticing it, it’s everywhere you look. Caitlin Clark is no longer punished for her whiteness – no one’s leaving her out of the US women’s Olympic basketball team in this new era. Instead, she’s celebrated as the face of the WNBA. In Sophie Cunningham, too, the Indiana Fever have provided her a white bodyguard/savior who is equal parts supermodel/Amazonian goddess to stop her being roughed up by the likes of Chennedy Carter and Angel Reese. The white signal couldn’t be clearer, and now suddenly women’s basketball is a very enthralling watch for white guys everywhere. 

    But it’s not just the sudden willingness of cynical marketing guys to start again pushing white beauty at us – shamelessly, even Dunkin is at it, using white heartthrob Gavin Casalegno in its latest campaign to shift donuts and muffins (Gavin’s washboard stomach presumably not included). The kids are doing it, too, all by themselves. The white tradwife phenomenon, whereby young women cosplay 1950s stay-at-home suburban femininity, is in full swing on social media. It’s a natural reaction, surely, to all the furious admonitions about cultural appropriation that until recently were all the rage. Can’t borrow anyone else’s culture, no matter how innocently? Fine, we’ll reclaim our own. Read the white signal and don’t come at us. 

    President Trump, who by now even his most committed enemies must concede is very possibly the most culturally attuned man ever to live, of course delights in white signaling. Why wouldn’t he? It’s yet more evidence that his victory over his enemies is total. 

    “Go get ’em, Sweeney,” he Truthed on Monday. “On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER! The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in total turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad. Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Lite, which went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company.”

    He went on to point out: “The tide has seriously turned – being WOKE is for losers.” 

    My theory is that none of this would be possible without Taylor Swift’s box-office melting 152-date global Eras tour of last year. In her sequins and her revealing outfits – with her extremely good genes – she seemed to girdle the Earth, broadcasting the ultimate white signal as she went. An irrefutable message to the billions watching: whiteness is OK. Whiteness is good. Whiteness is hot. 

    In her gentle but effective way, a beautiful wrecking ball, she rescued whitey from woke by clearing the path along which the rest of us can now follow. The shame of being white was removed – thanks to Taylor, white lives now matter, too. 

    It may be just getting started, but white signaling is here to stay. It will only gain momentum and power as a cultural force as white people more and more come to understand the repercussions – by which I mean cancellation – no longer exist as they previously did. 

    Until the backlash, that is.

  • The language of hair in 19th-century America

    The language of hair in 19th-century America

    In Whiskerology, Sarah Gold McBride combs through a bristling, tangled mess of data, facts and theories about gender, race, national identity and their relationship to – yep, you guessed – hair. Do not buy this book if you are looking for a fun read about vintage updos, goatees and ponytails; Ye Olde Horrible Haircuts it is not. It’s a book about hair as a kind of cultural text; readable, manipulable, highly permable and ideologically curled. One does not, it turns out, simply go and get a haircut: one enters a vast semiotic salon, more Saussure than Sassoon, where you’re lucky to get out without a scalping.

    McBride is a 21st-century American scholar writing about 19th-century American hair, but the manner is classic mid-20th-century French plait. Roland Barthes – remember him? – famously explained how everyday objects are invested with ideological meanings that serve to naturalize particular social orders: detergents symbolize the miraculous power of science to purify stuff; wrestling is a form of moral spectacle. And Michel Foucault – remember him? – traced how bodies become enmeshed in networks of knowledge and power, used to define, discipline and diagnose. Hair, in McBride’s telling, functions in exactly this mysterious, chic French way. A beard is not just a beard but a sign, depending on the beard-wearer, of the ruggedness of the frontier, say, or the honesty of the republic; or is a mark of untrustworthiness and racial otherness. Long, flowing locks may connote moral purity, but also erotic excess. Ideology flows hither and thither through the follicles.

    McBride organizes the book around four areas in which hair, according to her, was a “site of debate” in 19th-century America – long hair, facial hair, the scientific study of hair and hair’s role in disguise and deception. Each of these strands, she argues, is knotted with the kinks and tensions of an emerging nation convulsed by civil war, industrialization and new theories of the body, where hair was not only manipulated by its wearers but was also enlisted by the state and by science to stabilize or undermine identity.

    Her argument is both utterly straightforward and distinctly weird and wonderful, in that slightly perverse academic fashion which combines statements of the obvious – “for all its malleability, hair is not entirely of the wearer’s choosing, unlike clothing, hats, jewelry and other accessories” – with strange and fascinating examples that support her thesis. Basically, to cut a long story very short, or down to Number 1 all over, the 19th century saw the body increasingly subjected to empirical scrutiny through physiognomy, phrenology and, later, racial anthropology. And just as the shape of a skull or the angle of a jaw was believed to disclose character, so too might a beard, a lock of curls or a suspiciously cropped coif. In a brave new world where citizens were learning how to read one another, people grasped on to hair as a signifier and guide to “authentic meaning.”

    Long flowing locks may connote moral purity, but also erotic excess

    Facial hair provides one of McBride’s most convincing case studies. The “whiskerology” of her title is no mere whimsical coinage, but a serious account of how beards became a locus for negotiating masculinity, morality and political ideology. In early 19th-century discourse, the clean-shaven face represented Enlightenment rationality and moral clarity. By mid-century, however, beards had come to symbolize a more robust, muscular masculinity, tied and tethered to frontier mythologies and patriotic virtue. Yet this meaning was hardly stable. McBride shows how African-American men’s facial hair was subjected to racialized readings, portrayed as either effeminizing or dangerously animalistic. Even bearded women, exhibited in freak shows or circulated in medical literature, unsettled gender norms while also reaffirming them through spectacular exception.

    Similarly, the chapter on the scientific analysis of hair draws some interesting links between the nascent fields of trichology and forensic anthropology and the broader project of making the American body legible. In an era when everything from temperament to criminal guilt was thought to reside in bodily signs, hair offered a tempting form of evidence. It was classified, measured and often preserved as relic, sample and proof. As for hair fraud, the story of Loreta Janeta Velazquez disguising herself with a wig and false mustache in order to be able to serve in the Confederate army is just one of McBride’s entertaining examples.

    There is, apparently – but of course! – a whole “emergent field of hair studies,” which is where McBride situates her own work and which draws upon “anthropological, historical and black feminist hair scholarship” to provide “useful models for thinking about hair culturally, historically and materially.” Whatever the new models of thinking about hair – and let’s hope for all our sakes it’s not another return to the fringe or mullet – the breadth of McBride’s sources is admirable, ranging from medical treatises and beauty manuals to court records and visual ephemera.

    In a country undergoing seismic shifts – economic, political and demographic – hair, it turns out, is a site of both reassurance and anxiety. Hair-studies scholars of the future, examining the evidence of the early 21st century, will doubtless have all sorts of interesting things to say about Donald Trump’s long golden locks, Javier Gerardo Milei’s moptop and Keir Starmer’s overuse of gel. Hair may not tell the truth but it surely remains an indicator of character. For the record, if you can’t tell, I’m bald, while McBride has lovely pre-Raphaelite curls.