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    Two New Books Consider Comedy and the Culture Wars

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    The authors of “Comedy Book” and “Outrageous” argue that culture-war worries about what’s a laughing matter have been overplayed.COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work, by Jesse David FoxOUTRAGEOUS: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph NesteroffDid you hear the one about cancel culture?Of course you did, several times over, if you’ve paid any attention to modern comedy and its purveyors, many of whom have groused about how hard it is to be funny in today’s climate. But two new books share an exasperation with the common sentiment that there’s never been a worse time to express oneself than the present. Taking them, well, seriously can liberate us from repeating the past.Kliph Nesteroff’s fact-packed “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars” finds American entertainers in a perpetual state of despair over the censorious climate of their day — whatever day it happens to be. Steve Allen, the original host of “The Tonight Show,” complained about the “very touchy times” in 1955; in 2015, Jerry Seinfeld said he’d been warned away from playing colleges because of students’ sensitivities.Social media “gives the impression that people are more irrational, humorless and overly sensitive than in the past,” Nesteroff writes, but vintage letters to the editor contain “remarkably similar” sentiments.To Jesse David Fox, the author of “Comedy Book,” the risk of backlash is part of the point. Fox, a senior editor at New York magazine’s Vulture and a podcaster who regularly interviews comedians, puts it this way: “Does political correctness make comedy harder to do? Sure, in the sense that it would be easier to run for a touchdown if you didn’t have to worry about holding the ball, but that’s the game. It’s what makes it more exciting than watching a bunch of men sprinting with helmets on.” This is just one example of Fox’s keen insight in his energetic and wise book, which focuses on the ’90s and beyond, when, the author reckons, comedy became an “ever-present, important, valued societal force.” (Fox points out that before “Seinfeld” premiered in 1989, no comedian had ever headlined a show at Madison Square Garden’s arena, yet by the time he wrote his book, 18 had.) Within broadly named chapters (“Truth,” “Context,” “Audience”), he crams vivid examples; his “Timing” section, which explores 9/11 jokes and the notion of “too soon,” is particularly adept at illustrating the use of humor in the face of tragedy.Like many of his subjects, Fox knows his way around a pointed one-liner. “A roast might sound mean, but it’s another way of saying ‘I see you’” is one. “If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all onboard, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally” is another. That such rigorous thinking should at one point lead him to defend an Adam Sandler poop joke is a great gag in itself.Fox is allergic to the kind of snobbery directed at broad comedy, maintaining that “if it’s funny to anyone, it’s funny.” Still, he’s interested in parameters — how “8:46,” Dave Chappelle’s Netflix monologue inspired by the murder of George Floyd, functions as “a piece of work in conversation with the history of comedy,” and why the same comedian’s jokes targeting queer people fall short.Comedy, Fox writes, is fundamentally play, and in his deft hands, the analysis of comedy can be playful, too. Fox knows that grand pronouncements on what makes funny things funny is dicey territory: “The sense of what is funny is so subjective — so completely built into your person — that it feels objective,” he writes.His own life experiences and tastes are integral to his reporting. The first and last chapters of the book recount the deaths of immediate family members, which, he says, comedy helped him process. “Comedy Book” is not the definitive history of the past three-plus decades. It’s Fox’s history, and better for it.“Outrageous,” the product of herculean research, has a wider purview than just comedy. Nesteroff touches on rock ’n’ roll, talk radio, the initial blowback received by early critics of Hitler and more.However, what does and doesn’t, should and shouldn’t, make us laugh does take up a lot of space (Nesteroff’s 2015 “The Comedians” is a full-fledged history of the form). Sometimes the laughs are inadvertent, as in a 1959 complaint from a viewer of the TV series “Lassie” who compared its portrayal of a litter of puppies to a sex show.In no-frills prose, Nesteroff races through some two centuries of expression and backlash — from blackface minstrelsy (criticized early on by Frederick Douglass) to the (formerly Dixie) Chicks (the country music trio whose titanic profile shrank several sizes after its lead singer publicly criticized President George W. Bush) — rarely pausing for analysis and sometimes breezing by useful context. The book tends to home in on the moment when each brouhaha reached a fever pitch, which can give a distorted picture of the controversies and their ensuing fallouts.“Outrageous” is nonetheless a useful compendium. Placing so many outrages next to one another exposes a call-and-response pattern, in which both sides of the political divide have tried to dictate acceptable speech for all. We may be partial to the intentions of one side, but the mechanics often look identical.Unsurprisingly, it’s those already in power who often succeed. If there is a main character in Nesteroff’s sea of stories, it’s Paul Weyrich, a John Birch Society alum who helped build “an elaborate Culture War infrastructure” with corporate cash and evangelical muscle, eventually cofounding the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.In sometimes clandestine ways, those groups have had a major impact in seeding American culture with conservative ideology, raging against what Weyrich called “the Cultural Marxism of an elite few to dictate words, language and opinions” while, Nesteroff writes, doing precisely that.“Outrageous” portrays a country divided; there’s no shortage of strife in Fox’s book, but he believes fundamentally in the unifying power of comedy, which “smooths conflicts and unites disparate groups.” His faith is contagious. Comedy is not stifled, he argues, but has “enmeshed itself in how millennials and now Gen Z communicate.” Superstars like Chappelle and Amy Schumer are endowed with the kind of trusted status once reserved for those in the purported truth business, like journalists, public intellectuals and politicians.“Can comedy make everything all better?” Fox asks in conclusion. “Of course not. But it makes it easier.”COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work | More

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      Pensacola Christian College Cancels Concert Over Gay Singer, Drawing Backlash

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      Pensacola Christian College called off an appearance by the King’s Singers, citing the “lifestyle” of a member.The King’s Singers, a renowned British a cappella ensemble, looked forward to its appearance last week at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, the final stop on the group’s four-city tour of the United States.Instead, the college informed the ensemble two hours before the concert was to begin on Saturday that it was being canceled because of concerns about what it called the lifestyle of a singer, who is gay. Students, parents and staff members had complained to the administration, saying that hosting the group would run counter to the college’s Baptist values.The school’s decision has drawn backlash, with artists, gay rights activists and the ensemble’s fans denouncing the college for homophobia and discrimination. The King’s Singers issued a statement on Monday expressing hope that “any conversations that follow might encourage a greater sense of love, acceptance and inclusion.”In an interview on Tuesday, Jonathan Howard, a member of the six-person group, called the cancellation “really shocking” and “hurtful.” The singers led a workshop for Pensacola students on Saturday and had started rehearsing for the concert — a crowd of more than 5,000 was expected — when they were pulled aside by college officials and informed of the cancellation, he said.Howard said it was the first time in the group’s 55-year history that an engagement had been canceled for reasons other than bad weather, war or the coronavirus pandemic. He also said the group had performed at Pensacola before.“Our mission is always the same: Can we bring people together, connect them and heal them through music?” he said. “Usually that’s received with open arms, even if our politics and personal beliefs are different.”Two members of the ensemble are gay, Howard said, though a statement by Pensacola Christian College made reference to only one. The statement provided by the school said it had canceled the concert after learning that one of the singers “openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture.” It said it had treated the artists with “dignity and respect,” and that they were paid for the performance.A section in the school’s articles of faith that refers to several verses in the New Testament says the community believes that “Scripture forbids any form of sexual immorality including adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography.”The cancellation comes amid growing concern about discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people in parts of the United States, including Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed legislation last year prohibiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that opponents have called “Don’t Say Gay.”After news of the cancellation spread on social media, several performing artists posted messages in support of the King’s Singers.“Such a misguided, closed, short-sighted decision, which you met with dignity, love, comprehension, grace, and class,” the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato wrote on Twitter. “Let the music PLAY. Love is love, and true compassion is what endures. Thank you for showing the way!”The King’s Singers will continue their tour in Canada this week, appearing in Montreal; Toronto; Ottawa; and London, Ontario. More

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      John Cleese to Reboot ‘Fawlty Towers’ With His Daughter Camilla Cleese

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      Mr. Cleese will write and act alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese in a revival of the renowned BBC comedy.“Fawlty Towers,” the renowned 1970s British sitcom that starred John Cleese as a surly and snobbish hotel owner, will be rebooted with Mr. Cleese returning alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese, Castle Rock Entertainment announced on Tuesday.The original show, which Radio Times declared the best British sitcom of all time in 2019 after a survey of comedy experts, ran for two seasons of six episodes each, in 1975 and 1979. Mr. Cleese, now 83, played Basil Fawlty, who was forced to contend with disasters and ludicrous situations while displaying all the kindness and hospitality of sandpaper.In the reboot, Mr. Cleese’s character will open a boutique hotel with his daughter, whom he has just discovered he had, and deal with a more modern set of problems.Mr. Cleese, an original member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, has recently been dealing with a more modern set of problems in his real life as well.On social media, he has frequently railed against “cancel culture” and what he has deemed “woke” behaviors. He has signed up to host a show on GB News, a British right-wing television network, in which “no one will be canceled — and no topic will be too controversial for discussion,” the network said.In 2020, an episode of “Fawlty Towers” was removed from some streaming services because it contained racial slurs. Mr. Cleese called the decision “stupid,” telling the newspaper The Age that “if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them.”Some fans have also accused him of transphobia for his comments in support of J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series.As with other British series in the 1970s, the original “Fawlty Towers” was shown in the United States on PBS. Despite interest from American broadcasters, the show’s small number of episodes and half-hour run time, without commercials, made it unable to fit American TV schedules.Castle Rock Entertainment did not say where the new series would air.Mr. Cleese said in a statement that he and his daughter developed the concept for the reboot with one of its executive producers, Matthew George, a producer of the films “Wind River” and “A Private War.”“When we first met, he offered an excellent first idea, and then Matt, my daughter Camilla, and I had one of the best creative sessions I can remember,” Mr. Cleese said. “By dessert, we had an overall concept so good that, a few days later, it won the approval of Rob and Michele Reiner. Camilla and I look forward enormously to expanding it into a series.”Mr. George, the Reiners and Derrick Rossi are the executive producers of the new “Fawlty Towers” series.“John Cleese is a comedy legend,” Mr. Reiner said in a statement. “Just the idea of working with him makes me laugh.”Amanda Holpuch More

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      One Indelible Scene: the Master Class in Ambiguity in ‘Tár’

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      When Lydia Tár arrives at the Juilliard School to teach a master class in conducting, we know her about as well as the students do. Like them, we are aware — about 20 minutes into the film that bears her name — of her fame and exalted status. They, of course, live in a fictional world in which her celebrity is established, to the extent that their own professional aspirations are shaped by her example. But now they have a chance to encounter her in person. It doesn’t go well.The Juilliard episode is the fourth extended scene in “Tár.” Like the ones that come before, it presents Lydia, a prominent conductor and composer, in a more-or-less public setting. In due time, we’ll peer in on her private life and ponder its relevance to her work and reputation, but for now we know her as a poised paragon of artistic accomplishment. We’ve watched her converse onstage with the writer Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, flirt with a fan at a reception and spar over lunch with a colleague who is also an important philanthropic patron. In between these lingered-over moments are snippets of cellphone video with anonymous text commentary. The source and meaning of these words and images are unclear, but they produce a tremor of paranoia. We’re not the only ones watching Lydia.Later, a deceptively edited video of the master class will go viral, contributing to the collapse of Lydia’s career as her abusive and dishonest behavior comes to light. The scene itself, among those who have seen “Tár,” has achieved a similar notoriety. It’s become one of the most talked-about parts of the film. The main conflict — an argument between Lydia and an earnest, anxious student named Max, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.But like everything else in “Tár,” this episode of generational and ideological strife is more complicated than it might seem. And also simpler. Lydia, a one-time protégé of Leonard Bernstein, insists on the power of music to produce states of feeling and modes of experience that can’t easily be reduced to anything else. Todd Field, the director of “Tár,” has similar intuitions about film. He and Cate Blanchett, who as Lydia occupies nearly every frame of this 158-minute film, reverse the usual patterns of text and subtext. It’s not that there’s more to “Tár” than meets the eye and ear, with extra meanings hidden beneath the surface. Everything is right there on the screen and the soundtrack, arranged to confound and complicate your expectations.Lydia’s too. She strolls onto the classroom stage as eight young musicians, conducted by Max, are laying down what Lydia will call the “bed of strings” of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ro.” Commanding the students’ attention effortlessly, Lydia is comfortable in her own charisma, confident in her opinions and intellect — to the point of hubris, but we don’t know that yet.The first thing she does is establish her dominance, preparing for Max’s thorough humiliation. He’s nervous, smiling, eager to oblige as she asks him why he chose Juilliard and then suggests that it might have been for the “brand.” Her tone is jocular, but her aggression is unmistakable. She ridicules his choice of music — we’ll come back to that — and pleads with him to consider exploring older, more canonical figures. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, for example.That name turns out to be a provocation. Max, who defines himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” says that Bach’s reputation for misogyny and his cisgender white male identity make it hard for him to appreciate the composer’s music. At this moment, the script edges toward an easy satire of the young. There are Gen Xers and baby boomers who have encountered — or at least heard stories about — members of succeeding generations who refuse to read the novels of Edith Wharton, see the films of Woody Allen or worship at the altar of Pablo Picasso. Their critique of the canon is often caricatured and misunderstood, and Max may embody the shibboleths of his elders as much as he does the attitude of his peers. His objection to Bach, in any case, serves as bait for the audience and for Lydia.She seizes on it as a teaching moment, and her response is itself a mini-course in the dos and don’ts of contemporary pedagogy. At times, she is bullying and sarcastic, haranguing the class about the fallacies of identity and failing or refusing to read the sensitivities in the room. But she also tries, in good faith, to reach the students where they are. Rather than revert to an argument from authority, browbeating Max with the eternal fact of Bach’s greatness, she invites him to sit next to her at the piano while she demonstrates the complexity and power of his music. In Bach, she says, the question — illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice — is always more interesting than the answer.This is true of art in general. The puzzles, paradoxes and mysteries are what keep it alive. A lot of cultural criticism — by which I mean not only the considered responses of professionals but the immediate reactions of viewers — tacks in the opposite direction. We are eager to find an answer, assign a meaning, take a side. This scene seems to be urging us to do just that, to share Lydia’s irritation with Max, so shallow in his certainty and so ill-equipped to defend his position.We might also, in the moment and especially when we look back on it, squirm at Lydia’s self-satisfaction. She treats the master class as an occasion to perform her own brilliance, a temptation that can be fatal to the actual work of teaching, which finally rests on the canceling of ego. The vanity Lydia displays here, which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing, and we may feel a premonition of that as we watch her pacing and preening, unaware of the puzzlement and indifference in the eyes of her spectators.Really, though, the scene — like the movie — is much weirder than that. It may seem that Field and Blanchett are collaborating in a topical tale of crime and punishment, which the debate about the relevance of Bach’s behavior to his canonical status recapitulates in miniature. Later, we will find Lydia arguing the other side of the question. At lunch in a Berlin restaurant, she reminds a retired maestro that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Her much older male colleague wonders what that has to do with Schopenhauer’s thought. The argument, as at Juilliard, reaches an impasse.As will any similar argument about Lydia herself, who is a formidably talented artist and also a narcissistic, amoral monster. But neither her greatness nor her awfulness is what is most interesting about her. Shortly after “Tár” opened, The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article by Brooke LaMantia, who claimed to have watched the movie under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person. Anthony Lane began his review in The New Yorker with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be. More recently, Dan Kois wrote an essay in Slate suggesting that the last part of the film — the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing — takes place in her head, which is to say in a reality distinct from the literal, social world in which the rest of the movie is set.I don’t really buy that, any more than I believe that anyone really thought there was a real Lydia Tár, but Kois, Lane and LaMantia get at the essential uncanniness of “Tár,” which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.And that brings us back to the unseen person whose presence is felt in that tense session: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an actual living Icelandic composer who may have acquired new fame as Lydia Tár’s nemesis. The trashing of Thorvaldsdottir occupies much of the scene. Lydia sneers at her “au courant” trendiness, her “hot” good looks, a score notation that “sounds like René Redzepi’s recipe for reindeer.” A conductor performing her music is like a salesman “selling a car without an engine.” At one point Max meekly notes that Thorvaldsdottir conducted an earlier master class in the same course, and it seems possible that poor Max is an innocent victim in a high-powered music-world beef.Maybe it’s also the case that Lydia is a proxy in a similar war. Maybe Field can’t stand Anna Thorvaldsdottir, or maybe Hildur Gudnadottir, the Icelandic composer who scored “Tar,” feels that way. Iceland is a small country; contemporary classical music is a small world.I won’t speculate further, except to note that Thorvaldsdottir might function as what devotees of a different kind of movie like to call an Easter egg. Adam Gopnik is another, as are Leonard Bernstein and the Juilliard School itself. They appear as tokens, clues, nudges at the viewer who might not be paying the right kind of attention. They all belong to the world outside “Tár” — our world — and their presence inside the movie is more than merely allusive.Lydia Tár exists as if on a folded-over page in that world, where the correct answer to the perennially misunderstood question about the distinction between art and life is written in invisible ink. She’s as real as it gets. More

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      Morgan Wallen’s Career Seemed Over. Now He’s Broken a Billboard Record.

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      The country singer was rebuked by the music industry after using a racial slur. Still, “Dangerous: The Double Album” has logged 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s 200 chart.Nineteen months ago, it seemed that the music career of Morgan Wallen — primed as Nashville’s next crossover star — might be dead. Instead, he is now playing to sold-out arenas and has broken chart records set by the likes of Adele and Bruce Springsteen, in a success story that highlights the power of fan loyalty and the challenges of cancel culture.“Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s second LP, came out at the beginning of 2021 and shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, with big streaming numbers that demonstrated his power among a new generation of country performers. The album was in its third week at the top when TMZ published a video of Wallen using a racial slur. The rebuke was immediate and strong, with Wallen’s songs removed from radio and streaming playlists, and Wallen’s label, Big Loud, saying it would “suspend” his recording contract “indefinitely.”Yet “Dangerous” would hold at No. 1 for a further seven weeks, and since then it has become an unusually enduring hit. The album has now spent 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s chart — dipping to No. 12 only once, when it was pushed out by holiday albums last December — and has been in the Top 5 for 65 of those times.“Dangerous” stands at No. 2 on the latest chart, beaten only by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” another streaming blockbuster that came out in May and has just matched Wallen’s 10-week run at No. 1.Wallen has now beaten the 1964 record set by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary for the longest Top 10 run for an album by a single artist. (In the 66 years of the Billboard 200 album chart, seven other titles have had longer stretches in the Top 10, but those are all movie soundtracks or Broadway cast albums; the longest run of all albums is 173 weeks for the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” which came out in 1956.)In the wake of the controversy last year, Wallen issued multiple apologies, but was otherwise largely unseen in the mainstream media — a rare test of the commercial appeal of an artist without the benefit of supportive TV interviews or magazine covers. But for many in Nashville, he remains a symbol of a pervasive racism that exists just below the surface of the country music business.To hear it from executives at Big Loud, which functions as Wallen’s label, management company and music publisher, the success of “Dangerous” is proof of Wallen’s broad cultural appeal and the quality of his music, which blends beer-soaked bro-countryisms with mellow melodies that at times recall classic rock like Eagles.“We’re having our Garth Brooks moment, our Taylor Swift emergent moment,” Seth England, the chief executive of Big Loud, said in an interview, “of just an artist so big, everyone is getting used to it. Pop is short for popular culture, and he just is popular culture.”When asked how “Dangerous” has managed such extraordinary success, Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, added simply: “There’s only one explanation. The music is that good.” (Wallen’s suspension from Big Loud, which continued to sell his music, was temporary. Through a representative, Wallen declined to answer questions for this article.)Yet from the beginning, Big Loud — and Republic Records, the division of the giant Universal Music Group that has a deal with Big Loud to promote its artists — has pursued smart strategies to make “Dangerous” a success in the streaming era. Most obvious is the album’s length; taking a page from hip-hop albums that have been exploiting this aspect of the streaming economy for years, “Dangerous” has 30 songs on its standard edition, each of which contributes to the album’s overall numbers each week.Second, Wallen stoked his fans by releasing batches of new songs ahead of the album’s release, sometimes a few at a time, which helped foster the fan loyalty that sustained him in his fallow months of promotion.With Republic’s help, Wallen has also had some success as a pop crossover act, though that process has been slow. Two of his songs, “7 Summers” and “You Proof,” his latest single, have gone as high as No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. According to data from the tracking service Luminate, a little more than half of Wallen’s radio airplay has been on country stations, with pop stations a distant second.In the wake of Wallen’s use of the slur, musicians and journalists debated the role of racism in country music. Wallen gave an interview to “Good Morning America” in which he characterized the incident as a mistake among close friends who “say dumb stuff together.” He added: “In our minds it’s playful. That sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from.”Gradually, the Nashville world, and beyond, has largely welcomed him back. In an interview with The New York Times published this month, the country singer Kane Brown, who is Black, said: “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” Late last year, Wallen appeared on Lil Durk’s track “Broadway Girls,” a hit on the rapper’s No. 1 album “7220.”Despite the intensity of the criticism levied against Wallen, fans remained loyal. According to Chartmetric, a company that tracks data from streaming and social media, Wallen’s followers on Facebook and Spotify increased at the height of his controversy.Within months, his songs were back in force on the official playlists of major streaming platforms. And according to Luminate, radio stations are now playing Wallen more than at any point since “Dangerous” was released, with his songs being played about 19,000 times a week this summer.Also on this week’s Billboard album chart, the veteran metal band Megadeth opens at No. 3 with its first studio release in six years, “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!” DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4, and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Verdict: The Actual Malice of the Trial

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      In this post-#MeToo moment, misogyny and celebrity go hand in hand.The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial was, from gavel to gavel, a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle. Now that it has ended with the jury finding in favor of Depp on all questions and in favor of Heard on only one, it’s clear that the confusion was the point.Why did Depp, who had already lost a similar case in Britain, insist on going back to court? A public trial, during which allegations of physical, sexual, emotional and substance abuse against him were sure to be repeated, couldn’t be counted on to restore his reputation. Heard, his ex-wife, was counting on the opposite: that the world would hear, in detail, about the physical torments that led her to describe herself, in the Washington Post op-ed that led to the suit, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”Even before the verdict came in, Depp had already won. What had looked to many like a clear-cut case of domestic violence had devolved into a “both sides” melodrama. The fact that Heard’s partial victory, which involved not Depp’s words but those spoken in 2020 by Adam Waldman, his lawyer at the time, can be spun in that direction shows how such ambiguity served Depp all along. As one commenter on The New York Times site put it, “Every relationship has its troubles.” Life is complicated. Maybe they were both abusive. Who really knows what happened? The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy. And so we found ourselves in the familiar land of he said/she said.The Depp-Heard trial was a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle, both inside the courtroom and out. Craig Hudson/Associated PressWe should know by now that the symmetry implied by that phrase is an ideological fiction, that women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault have a much harder time being listened to than their assailants. I don’t mean that women always tell the truth, that men are always guilty as charged, or that due process isn’t the bedrock of justice. But Depp-Heard wasn’t a criminal trial; it was a civil action intended to measure the reputational harm each one claimed the other had done. Which means that it rested less on facts than on sympathies.In that regard, Depp possessed distinct advantages. He isn’t a better actor than Heard, but her conduct on the stand was more harshly criticized in no small part because he’s a more familiar performer, a bigger star who has dwelled for much longer in the glow of public approbation. He brought with him into the courtroom the well-known characters he has played, a virtual entourage of lovable rogues, misunderstood artists and gonzo rebels. He’s Edward Scissorhands, Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, Gilbert Grape.We’ve seen him mischievous and mercurial, but never truly menacing. He’s someone we’ve watched grow up, from juvenile heartthrob on “21 Jump Street” to crusty old salt in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. His offscreen peccadilloes (the drinking, the drugs, the “Winona Forever” tattoo) have been part of the pop-cultural background noise for much of that time, classified along with the scandals and shenanigans that have been a Hollywood sideshow since the silent era.Depp is someone audiences have watched grow up onscreen, in movies like (clockwise from top left) “Edward Scissorhands,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”Clockwise from top left: 20th Century Studios; Paramount Pictures, via RGR Collection/Alamy; Universal Pictures, via TCD and Prod.DB/Alamy; Disney, via Moviestore Collection Ltd/AlamyIn his testimony, Depp copped to some bad stuff, but this too was a play for sympathy, of a piece with the charm and courtliness he was at pains to display. That he came off as a guy unable to control his temper or his appetites was seen, by many of the most vocal social media users, to enhance his credibility, while Heard’s every tear or gesture was taken to undermine hers. The audience was primed to accept him as flawed, vulnerable, human, and to view her as monstrous.Because he’s a man. Celebrity and masculinity confer mutually reinforcing advantages. Famous men — athletes, actors, musicians, politicians — get to be that way partly because they represent what other men aspire to be. Defending their prerogatives is a way of protecting, and asserting, our own. We want them to be bad boys, to break the rules and get away with it. Their seigneurial right to sexual gratification is something the rest of us might resent, envy or disapprove of, but we rarely challenge it. These guys are cool. They do what they want, including to women. Anyone who objects is guilty of wokeness, or gender treason, or actual malice.Of course there are exceptions. In the #MeToo era there are men who have gone to jail, lost their jobs or suffered disgrace because of the way they’ve treated women. The fall of certain prominent men — Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves, Matt Lauer — was often welcomed as a sign that a status quo that sheltered, enabled and celebrated predators, rapists and harassers was at last changing.A few years later, it seems more likely that they were sacrificed not to end that system of entitlement but rather to preserve it. Almost as soon as the supposed reckoning began there were complaints that it had gone too far, that nuances were being neglected and too-harsh punishments meted out.This backlash has been folded into a larger discourse about “cancel culture,” which is often less about actions than words. “Cancellation” is now synonymous with any criticism that invokes racial insensitivity, sexual misbehavior or controversial opinions. Creeps are treated as martyrs, and every loudmouth is a free-speech warrior. Famous men with lucrative sinecures on cable news, streaming platforms and legacy print publications can proclaim themselves victims.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      in Theater

      Meat Loaf, Britney and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Musical

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      At Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best in German-language performance, music plays a profound, and intelligent, role.HAMBURG, Germany — During the five and a half hours I spent immersed in “Die Ruhe” (“The Calm”), a performative installation that was one of the 10 productions selected for this year’s Theatertreffen, I put a live worm in my mouth, cut off a lock of my hair and held a giant African snail.I also participated in a group therapy session, during which a severe doctor pushed us to share our secrets and fears, and drank bitter mushroom tea (non-psychedelic, I hope), vodka and schnapps.Along with the other 34 ticket holders for that day’s performance in the Altona district of Hamburg, I had checked in as a prospective patient at a fictional facility for people exhausted by modern life.At once intimate and visionary, “Die Ruhe” was far and away the most unusual and daring title in the remarkable first live Theatertreffen since the start of the pandemic. After spending the past two years online, the festival, which celebrates the best in German, Austrian and Swiss theater, came roaring back to life with a wide-ranging and eclectic lineup that highlighted the creativity, resourcefulness and persistence of German-language theater in 2021.Originally staged by the Deutsches Schauspielhaus theater here, “Die Ruhe” was the brainchild of SIGNA, a Copenhagen-based performance collective led by the artist couple Signa and Arthur Köstler, which has specialized in large-scale, site-specific performance installations for the past two decades. SIGNA was previously invited to Theatertreffen, in 2008, with an eight-day performance held in a former rail yard in Berlin. This time around, the installation was too complicated to transfer to Berlin, where all the other Theatertreffen performances have taken place, so in a break with tradition, “Die Ruhe” has been mounted in the former post office in Hamburg where it was originally seen in November.With the other members of my small group, I was guided through a sinister sanitorium whose inhabitants — patients and doctors alike — seemed to have all suffered a psychological collapse. Upon entering the post office, we were welcomed to the institute by being asked to lie down on mattresses on the floor. Shortly afterward, we changed out of our clothing and into the institute’s baggy uniform of gray hoodies and sweatpants.Simon Steinhorst in “Die Ruhe,” which was staged in Hamburg.Erich GoldmannAs I was led with the group through dimly lit corridors and rooms — including a simulated forest filled with damp earth and dry leaves — by a fragile and haunted guide, Aurel, it became clear that the institute was the center of a threatening and shamanistic sect. Over the multiple floors of the post office, SIGNA and its large cast (there’s an almost even number of paying participants and institute members) formulated a holistic worldview for the cultlike institute, complete with an origin story and a rigid creed that its adherents, even the mild-mannered Aurel, were fanatically devoted to: a vision of Edenic return symbolized by becoming one with the forest.Aesthetically, this stylishly designed immersive experience seemed to take inspiration from movies: from recent films of dystopian horror, including Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Lobster” and Ari Aster’s “Midsommer,” as well as Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, masters of atmospheric dread. As a marathon plunge into a complex and intricate world, “Die Ruhe” resembled another recent and more infamous project: the scientific institute DAU, devised by the Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky in Kharkiv, Ukraine, between 2009 and 2011, which was recreated in Paris in 2019. Like that controversial performance, “Die Ruhe” contained deeply unsettling elements: a strong, pervasive atmosphere of menace, as well as a demanding (and at times exhausting) format that forced the viewer-participant into disturbingly close confrontations with cruelty, manipulation and violence.Back in Berlin, none of the other Theatertreffen shows I saw came close to “Die Ruhe” in sustained intensity and startling originality, but the productions I caught were of a consistently high caliber, and formally innovative.A scene in Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” an exploration of texts by the experimental Austrian writer Ernst Jandl.Nikolaus Ostermann/Volkstheater One of the lineup’s most striking features was how profoundly, and intelligently, musical many of the shows were. In several of the best plays, live music played a fundamental role in generating a distinctive aesthetic as well as meaning. In thinking so musically about theatrical practice, it seemed that many directors at the festival were pushing against the limits of language.From the hits by Britney Spears and Meat Loaf crooned by the cast of Christopher Rüping’s “Das neue Leben — where do we go from here,” to Barbara Morgenstern’s vast and haunting original score for Helgard Haug’s “All right. Good night,” a hypnotic and mostly wordless production about the 2014 Malaysia Airlines disaster, this Theatertreffen seemed to insist on the primacy of music both to conjure and to enrich intellectual and emotional states.The single most astonishing show on a traditional stage was Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” a surreal and dazzlingly inventive exploration of poetic and dramatic texts by the experimental Austrian writer Ernst Jandl.Bauer is one of Germany’s leading directors, and she created this breathtaking theatrical immersion in Jandl’s playful linguistic cosmos at the Volkstheater in the poet’s native Vienna, which is where I caught the production several months ago. (It remains in the company’s repertoire and is also available to stream on Theatertreffen’s website until September.)In “humanistää!,” 10 works by Jandl attain new vitality through conventional monologues, onstage projections and elaborate vocal performances reminiscent of Jandl’s radio plays. Bauer complements the torrent of highly musical texts with startling visuals and energetic performances that beautifully match the rhythm of Jandl’s sound poems. Eight actors perform vigorous and highly choreographed pantomimes and dances amid Patricia Talacko’s shape-shifting set, which is spectacularly lit by Paul Grilj. Throughout, Peer Baierlein’s propulsive music, performed live, accompanies the performers as both their bodies and their voices twist through Jandl’s linguistic games.Lindy Larsson in Yael Ronen’s “Slippery Slope,” an English-language musical about cancel culture.Ute LangkafelText and music combine in a much more straightforward, yet no less riotous, way in the Israeli director Yael Ronen’s “Slippery Slope,” an English-language musical about cancel culture with infectious songs and foul-mouthed lyrics by the singer-songwriter Shlomi Shaban. When it premiered at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in November, it was an immediate cult sensation. It’s not hard to see why.The plot, about a disgraced Swedish pop star (Lindy Larsson) trying to stage a comeback, and his protégé (Riah Knight), whose meteoric rise is inversely proportional to her mentor’s fall, is both sordid and deliriously enjoyable.What’s more, the five actors in the show can actually sing — a true rarity at German theaters — and they belt out Shaban’s rousing and cheeky numbers with gusto. For perhaps the first time I can remember, Broadway-caliber musical entertainment has come to a German dramatic stage. (It’s the only production from a Berlin repertory theater at the festival.)Cultural appropriation, political correctness, #MeToo debates and social media trolling are gently skewered in a production that is eye-popping and outrageously glam. At the same time, everything is so loopy and chock-full of schlock that there’s little danger of anyone’s taking offense at this vulgar and punchy musical burlesque. Although its themes are urgently contemporary, “Slippery Slope” handles them with a lightness and wit that are rare in theaters here. I’m glad that the Theatertreffen jury, a high-minded bunch of tastemakers if there ever was one, selected it alongside the festival’s more straight-faced entries. It’s a sign of their belief in theater’s ability to startle, to provoke and, yes, to entertain.TheatertreffenThrough May 22 at various theaters in Berlin, and at the Paketpostamt in Hamburg; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      in Television

      Frank Langella Blames ‘Cancel Culture’ After Firing From Netflix Show

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      The actor said his dismissal from “The Fall of the House of Usher” followed a love scene in which the actress playing his wife accused him of touching her leg.Frank Langella, who was fired in April from his leading role in a Netflix mini-series after a misconduct investigation, said on Thursday that his dismissal followed a love scene in which the actress playing his wife accused him of touching her leg — an action not in the script.“She then turned and walked off the set, followed by the director and the intimacy coordinator,” Langella wrote in a column for Deadline, about a March 25 incident on the set of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The series is based on works by Edgar Allan Poe and created by Mike Flanagan.“I attempted to follow, but was asked to ‘give her some space.’ I waited for approximately one hour, and was then told she was not returning to set and we were wrapped,” Langella wrote.Langella said he and the actress were both clothed during the scene. During the ensuing investigation, he said, someone in human resources told him that the intimacy coordinator had suggested where the actors should place their hands during the scene. Langella called the instructions “absurd,” he said.“It was a love scene on camera,” Langella said. “Legislating the placement of hands, to my mind, is ludicrous. It undermines instinct and spontaneity.” Referring to the human resources employee, Langella wrote, “Toward the end of our conversation, she suggested that I not contact the young lady, the intimacy coordinator, or anyone else in the company. ‘We don’t want to risk retaliation,’ she said.”Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday evening.Langella said that he had been “canceled,” and that the harm to him has been “incalculable,” including losing a thrilling part, facing a stretch of unemployment and suffering a tarnished reputation. These indignities, he said, are “the real definition of unacceptable behavior.”“Cancel culture is the antithesis of democracy,” he said. “It inhibits conversation and debate. It limits our ability to listen, mediate, and exchange opposing views. Most tragically, it annihilates moral judgment. This is not fair. This is not just. This is not American.”The production plans to recast Langella’s role as Roderick, the reclusive patriarch of the Usher family, and reshoot the scenes in which he had already appeared. The series also stars Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell and Mark Hamill, among others.Langella, 84, known for his performances both onscreen and onstage, shot to fame in the title role of the 1979 film “Dracula” after starring in a Broadway production as the count. He also played President Richard M. Nixon in both the stage and screen versions of “Frost/Nixon,” earning an Oscar nomination as well as a Tony Award for best actor in a play in 2007. Recently, Langella appeared as the judge in the Netflix film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” More