Category: Uncategorized

Quarantine Viewing: “On Becoming a God in Central Florida”

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m beginning to think this “capitalism” thing might not be as great as we thought. That is the primary lesson in the first season of Showtime’s On Becoming a God in Central Florida, an entertaining dark comedy for and possibly by Bernie Sanders supporters. Kirsten Dunst (who endorsed Bernie) stars as Krystal Stubbs, a young mother in early 90s Orlando who is working at a water park for minimum wage when she gets wrapped up in Founders American Merchandise (FAM), a multi-level marketing scheme that seems to more closely resemble a cult than an actual business.

The concept of FAM offers plenty of comedic fodder for the series, starting with the eccentric Obie Garbeau (played with hilarious intensity by Ted Levine) at the top, who rallies his downline troops with tapes touting the power of “The Garbeau System.” One true believer inspired by him is Cody Bonar, played by Theodore Pellerin, who is fanatical about the system, worships Garbeau, and is desperate to make it to the top of the pyramid. His character starts as one-dimensional in the first couple of episodes, but the slow peeling of his layers of personality and backstory ends up being one of the strengths of the series.

Dunst is the anchor of the show and gives a performance that should receive some awards attention. Her Stubbs character is determined, resourceful, and intelligent without ever becoming a Strong Independent Woman fantasy. She has flaws that feel real, and her desperate struggles for money and respect are played straight, even in goofy situations, which is part of the show’s tight balance of comedy and dark drama. And even when Stubbs is “winning” in the context of her goals from episode to episode, the viewer is left wondering if the victories are real, or if she is just becoming the type of dirty capitalist player that caused her to be in poverty to begin with.

Rounding out the strong supporting performances are Mel Rodriguez and Beth Ditto (a familiar name for music dorks) who play a married couple that is friends and neighbors with Stubbs. I recognized Rodriguez from the underrated HBO show Getting On and he gives a similarly sympathetic performance here as a well-meaning sad-sack guy who hides his despair beneath a veil of surface-level positivity. Ditto is fantastic in one of her first acting roles, and the two have a chemistry that makes them feel like a real couple (which is also aided by them looking like normal people, not glamorous actors).

Not everything quite works in this first season; a reporter character with a drug addiction who tries to investigate FAM feels underwritten and one character becomes Stubbs’ friend and babysitter in a relationship that is never quite fully fleshed-out on screen. Still, this show has stand-out performances, a lot of good twisted laughs, and a compelling plot that gradually gets stranger while saying a lot about how the concept of the American dream can be exploitative. There is also a second season on the way and a lot of room for growth with this premise and the main characters, so this would be worth watching even if we weren’t all stuck indoors.

Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” is a Not Horrible Pop Album

My ignorance of chart-topping pop music is such that I had no idea who Dua Lipa was until about a week ago, when her new album Future Nostalgia was released to rave reviews. I decided to give it a shot, partly to keep myself up to date on what the children are listening to in sort of an undercover journalist way, and also due to boredom. I mean, what else am I going to do right now, read a book?

It turns out that Future Nostalgia is a pleasant surprise: a chart-topping pop album that doesn’t fill me with anger and resentment towards the youths, with their Instagrams, Tik Toks, and generally uncivilized taste and manner. It instantly vaults Lipa squarely into contention for my coveted “least worst pop star” title, currently held by Billie Eilish. It partly succeeds for me because of its lack of pretension — it’s great to hear a pop album that knows what it is and isn’t really trying to do anything other than get some catchy jams stuck in your head.

One reason I tend to resist the recent trend towards “poptimism” is that I find it embarrassing to hear critics wax poetic about pop music that is clearly designed for kids. They don’t feel like they can enjoy music mindlessly, so they search for deep meaning in these assembly-line produced songs, because if they just said “these songs are good and catchy,” they wouldn’t have a job. Future Nostalgia requires no analysis or critique beyond that, though — these songs aren’t designed to be anything more than airy pop confections. While other pop artists like Lana Del Rey have sought to “make a statement” in their music, overestimating their own ability and embarrassingly overreaching, Future Nostalgia at all times delivers exactly what it promises.

There is no intellectual value to this music whatsoever, but I don’t see how anyone can listen to it and not get at least one song stuck in their head. “Hallucinate” is the track that got me, with its upbeat disco sound and earworm chorus. “Break My Heart” and “Love Again” are also stuck in my head, though that is partially due to their “borrowing” of classic hooks (from INXS’s “Need You Tonight” and White Town’s “Your Woman” respectively), which feels to me like cheating.

It occurred to me listening to those songs that the cheating was kind of the point. Every pop trick and shortcut to make you addicted to a song is used on this album, and it’s devilishly effective. While Dua Lipa is the face of this project, and I don’t want to underestimate her input, it definitely feels like the work of smoothly operating pop machinery, and I wasn’t surprised to see roughly 1000 different writers and producers credited in its making. Lipa is a more low-key personality who is content to blend into the slick productions, which makes it feel cohesive and also refreshing compared to the more aggressive personal branding of most pop stars. There is no ego on this album, just an endless parade of pop hooks from the past and future.

Wrestling Without Fans is the Last Entertainment Standing

Part of why wrestling is a somewhat in-demand TV product right now is that it has new content every single week no matter what. There is never an off-season and the whole business has a deeply engrained “the show must go on” mentality — WWE often touts how it has had a new episode every week for the last 20+ years. This is why, even during a global pandemic that has shuttered sporting events across the globe, wrestling keeps on happening in its cockroach-like way. In the last couple weeks, both WWE and AEW ran shows without an audience for the first time, with limited personnel on hand. The results have been weird, to say the least.

Wrestling’s lifeblood is the crowd reactions, and most of my posts have centered on how the art form is so heavily based on manipulating the audience and getting them invested in matches. One of the reasons I watch is for those really heated emotional moments on either end of the spectrum, whether it’s the entire crowd hating Brock Lesnar or rejoicing when he gets beaten. Needless to say, without a live audience, those moments don’t exist. So what’s left?

As it turns out, there have been obvious downsides, but also some surprising revelations from this experiment. To start with the negatives, the matches are tough to get into without a crowd reacting at specific spots. AEW’s first show without fans seemed to solve this issue by having wrestlers serve as a de facto audience, rooting on the good guys or bad guys based on their alignment, which led to a show with much more energy than WWE’s approach that had empty chairs in the background at their Performance Center and a clear apocalyptic vibe. But due to the CDC recommendations on crowd gatherings, that was nixed last night, so now both shows are running with as few people around the ring as possible.

AEW’s matches have suffered less, because they tend to be more focused on athleticism and back-and-forth action than WWE’s, which are typically about advancing a story and engaging the crowd in a battle of good against evil. With so many hours of TV to fill and with not a ton of people on hand, WWE has been using their extensive back catalogue of old pay-per-view matches to fill time and pace the shows a bit, seemingly recognizing that the no-crowd matches weren’t particularly fun to watch. Both shows have tried to find creative ways to mimic a crowd. AEW had a backstage room with wrestlers cheering for others, while WWE has put various people on guest commentary and had them cheering for specific wrestlers and advancing a story. These are decent band-aid attempts given the restrictions, but nothing that really comes close to matching the feeling of a live crowd being into a match.

This hasn’t all been negatives, though. In fact, one part of the show has actually improved. WWE has let loose their best promo people in these weeks and they’ve thrived without having an obnoxious crowd interrupting them or trying to make the show about themselves. As a huge fan of promos, this period has been a goldmine for me: wrestlers like Bray Wyatt, Edge, and Becky Lynch have cut some of their better promos, because the quiet setting lends an intimacy and intensity to the proceedings that isn’t there typically. Instead of playing to a crowd, these confrontations are just between the wrestlers, and it makes them feel more like real-world conflicts. I noticed even non-wrestling-fans on Twitter were observing that no-audience wrestling resembled some kind of bizarre stripped-down theater production.

WWE has the advantage of currently building up to WrestleMania, their big stadium spectacle that will now take place in an empty arena. AEW has less of a clear direction (and just doesn’t emphasize promos as much as WWE), so they haven’t been as successful in this regard. I also have felt since the beginning that AEW’s boisterous crowds have covered up a lot of the show’s flaws — when an audience is cheering wildly, it has a psychological effect on many where they convince themselves it’s great, and a lot of fans are so happy for a major league non-WWE show that they cheer for everything.

I really felt this in the final segment of AEW’s last show, which involved Broken Matt Hardy, a ridiculous, campy character that caught on with wrestling fans because of its over-the-top wackiness. Hardy signed with WWE a few years ago, they never “got” the character, so now he’s jumped ship to bring it back and show off his brilliant creative mind. His first promo, with no audience, felt like the worst segment in the history of wrestling to me — it was like watching really bad children’s theater. Without fans going wild for Hardy and cheering for his outlandish character, shouting his catch phrases, the curtain was pulled back and I realized this is an idiotic gimmick that already feels stale. In the moment, I hated this segment more than anything, but I can’t even tell if it’s a fair assessment because of the lack of fans. My guess is a lot of stuff I have loved in wrestling would not seem nearly as good if it had played to an empty arena.

These shows feel like they’re on borrowed time: both have been operating in Florida, which is going to enforce a stay-at-home order, and obviously if a wrestler tests positive for Covid-19 it all likely stops. WWE has recorded a bunch of their shows in advance through Wrestlemania, at which point we will probably enter the first wrestling hiatus in forever. When the wrestling stops, that’s when you know things are going really bad.