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    A History Professor Takes On Hollywood

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    The life of a scholar used to be simpler, with success or failure whittled down to an easy dictum: “Publish or perish.”Today it’s more like publish and podcast or perish.“The definition of ‘public intellectual’ has really changed, and I’m proud to be a part of that,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela said, moments after delivering a lecture to a class of undergraduates.Dr. Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School in New York, belongs to a group of scholars who are fluent in pop culture. In addition to publishing her work in peer-reviewed publications, she often presents her research through podcasts and other media outlets. And in a nod to her embrace of the new media economy, she has a side hustle: fitness instructor.But her decision to mix it up beyond the halls of academe has also landed her in the middle of a nasty social media drama and a Hollywood dispute. “This is the price of participation in a public sphere that is enormously different than academia,” she said.Estelle Freedman, a history professor at Stanford University who advised Dr. Petrzela on her Ph.D. thesis, described her as “a very serious scholar and a public intellectual who is quite unique in imagining, ‘How do we get scholarship out into the world and affect social change?’”Dr. Petrzela said she aims to be a “history communicator,” someone who’s able to reach large numbers of people with deeply researched works on the subjects that interest her. “I’ve got to meet the established standards of publishing in journals and being peer-reviewed,” she said, “but I’m also doing this other stuff and fighting for the legitimacy of topics that venture outside of politics and policy.”In her book “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” Dr. Petrzela describes the cultural significance of fitness celebrities including Jack LaLanne and Richard Simmons and traces the rise of jogging, Jazzercise, yoga and Peloton. The book was published last month by the University of Chicago Press.Fitness is a topic that can easily be denigrated as an expression of trendy vanity, Dr. Petrzela said. “For that reason, I thought it was important that it was peer-reviewed and released by an esteemed press,” she said. “I don’t want to give fodder to skeptics who would say, ‘This is not serious.’”Cultural history is not a new discipline, but the academics who have ventured into that territory have tended to focus on eminent men, according to Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.“Historians have studied popular culture throughout the 20th century and beyond, but the topics that have been taken seriously are those like Bob Dylan, his songs and political change,” Dr. Hemmer said. “Taking a serious look at the socioeconomic genesis and impact of Orangetheory and Peloton is pretty novel, and Natalia has put herself on the cutting edge of a realm of scholarship.”Dr. Petrzela’s wanderings from traditional paths of academia have also led her to podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and another historian, Neil J. Young, she is the host of “Past Present,” a weekly show that analyzes cultural trends. In recent episodes, the three have taken a historical lens to “nepo-babies” — that is, the role of family relationships in Hollywood — and Ozempic, a diabetes medication that has gained popularity as a weight-loss drug.She has also found herself in the middle of the furious debates that are a daily part of social media.Late last year, Time magazine published an interview with Dr. Petrzela that included a mention of her research indicating that, in the early 1900s, amid an influx of immigrants into the United States, some exercise proponents encouraged white women to work out so that they could be strong enough to populate the country with white babies. Time’s headline seized on that point: “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness.”In a post on Instagram, Donald J. Trump Jr. reacted to the article, saying, “Remember folks if it’s not climate change it’s white supremacy.” Amid the criticism that followed, Dr. Petrzela said she received death threats. “It escalated into a Twitter storm about ‘the woke professor’ who says exercise is racist, which was not the way I dreamed of introducing my book to the public,” she said.Dr. Petrzela was raised in Newton, Mass., the child of two professors of comparative literature at Boston University. Growing up, she hated sports and earned P.E. credits by taking a step-aerobics class at a Jewish Community Center. It was love at first v-step. “I couldn’t believe how much joy I felt doing something I previously thought I hated,” she said.After graduating from Columbia University, she completed stints as an analyst at an investment bank and a public-school teacher before earning a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University. Around the time she was defending her doctoral thesis, she became a Lululemon ambassador. The thesis became the basis of her first book, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex and the Making of Modern Political Culture,” published by Oxford University Press in 2015.While working on “Classroom Wars,” she moved back to New York, where her boyfriend (now husband) lived. They joined an Equinox gym, where she encountered Patricia Moreno, a well known instructor in the New York fitness world who had created a program called intenSati, which blends roundhouse kicks and grapevines with shouted affirmations — think Jane Fonda at a self-help tent-revival.After studying under Ms. Moreno, Dr. Petrzela became a certified intenSati instructor. “She is the only fitness instructor of mine that I can securely say has a Ph.D. from Stanford,” said Tara Abrahams, an executive at The Meteor, a feminist media company, who has been attending Dr. Petrzela’s classes for about 10 years.As she built her career at the New School, publishing papers and essays in academic journals (History of Education Quarterly, The Peabody Journal of Education, Pacific Historical Review) and mainstream publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate), she continued teaching intenSati. She also began to consider the role of physical fitness in American history and cultural life.And she dug deeper into podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young, she created a limited podcast series, “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” that told the story of Steve Banerjee, the impresario behind the male dance club Chippendales, and the murder-for-hire charge that preceded his 1994 suicide. Dr. Petrzela was the host.Billed as a Spotify Original, and co-produced by Gimlet Media and Pineapple Street Studios, “Welcome to Your Fantasy” was a seamy, steamy true-crime drama that took place against a backdrop of the sexual, feminist and fitness revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s. Upon its release in 2021, it was a hit with listeners and earned glowing reviews from The Times, The New Yorker and The Financial Times.But Dr. Petrzela was not prepared for the sharp-elbowed culture of show business.Nearly a year before the “Welcome to Your Fantasy” podcast dropped on Spotify, a producer working with Pineapple Street Studios shared early episodes with Hollywood writers and producers to gauge their interest in a screen adaptation. As part of this effort, a producer sent episodes to the actor, screenwriter and stand-up comic Kumail Nanjiani and his wife and frequent writing partner, Emily V. Gordon. Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that she and her husband were not interested in optioning “Welcome to Your Fantasy.”“Kumail and I listened to the podcast and it’s such a fun story, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s the right project for us to write,” Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that Dr. Petrzela shared with The Times. “As much as we love watching crime stories, I don’t know if that’s a strength that we have as a writing duo. It didn’t spark an immediate take in our brains.”Pineapple Street Studios, Dr. Petrzela and the other producers involved with the podcast ended up signing a production deal with Netflix.A few months after the podcast became available, there was a plot twist: Hulu announced that Mr. Nanjiani would play the lead in a dramatic series based on the story of Mr. Banerjee, the Chippendales founder.He would also serve as an executive producer, as would Ms. Gordon. According to the show’s closing credits, it was “inspired by” “Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders,” a 2014 book written by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca and published by Kerrera House Press, a small independent publisher in Los Angeles.Netflix canceled its plans for a series based on “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Hulu began streaming its series, called “Welcome to Chippendales,” in November 2022. The show was created by Robert Siegel, a writer and director who headed another Hulu series, “Pam & Tommy.”Dr. Petrzela, Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young said they were struck by the similarities between the Hulu show and their podcast. They also said that the series included details that did not become public knowledge until listeners had heard “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” which included interviews with key players in the saga.“You don’t own history, and the lines of intellectual property can be really blurry,” Dr. Hemmer said. “But it raised big questions about what we do as scholars and what happens when that work becomes part of the entertainment field.”A spokesman for Hulu declined to comment. Mr. Siegel, the show’s creator, also declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Nanjiani and Ms. Gordon said in a statement that, though the two were executive producers for the series, they were not creatively involved in the production. They added that their involvement “was limited to casting consultation, communication with the studio/network, marketing and editing.”Eleanor Kagan, the senior producer of “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” created a spreadsheet that laid out more than a dozen similarities between the podcast and the Hulu show. She and her fellow producers said they suspected that the Hulu series made use of their original reporting and narrative focus. In addition, they said, at least two key characters in the Hulu show were based on people who were interviewed extensively for “Welcome to Your Fantasy” and not mentioned in “Deadly Dance.”One of those people was Candace Mayeron, who once worked as a producer for Chippendales. She appears to provide the basis for “Denise” in the Hulu series, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Ms. Mayeron said that she tried to contact the writers and producers of “Welcome to Chippendales” (as well as representatives of Ms. Lewis) by email and phone to offer her consulting services free of charge, but no one replied to her.“There is no doubt that they relied on the podcast,” Ms. Mayeron said of the Hulu production.Dr. Petrzela’s latest book examines the history of fitness movements in the United States.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHodari Sababu, the first Black Chippendales dancer, seems to be the basis of the character named Otis in the Hulu show, portrayed by Quentin Phair. Over the years Mr. Sababu has given interviews about his Chippendales experience, but said he never went in-depth, as he did when he spoke with Dr. Petrzela for “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Mr. Sababu also does not appear by name in “Deadly Dance.”Among the stories that he shared in the podcast was one in which Mr. Banerjee called a church to warn of the godlessness of Chippendales, resulting in a protest of the club that drew media attention. That incident is portrayed in “Welcome to Chippendales” as well. “I only watched part of the TV show,” Mr. Sababu told The Times, “but I thought, ‘How do they know that?’ The only way that they could know that is if they heard that podcast interview I did.”Dr. Petrzela is now focused on the classroom. This semester, she is teaching a class based on the research that went into her book on fitness, as well as a course called historical sources and methods. But she won’t forget her scrape with Hollywood.“I found myself really flabbergasted by this whole situation,” she said. “But then again, I come from a world of footnotes and source citations.” More

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      Donald Trump Lost His Battle. The Culture War Goes On.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCRITIC’S NOTEBOOKDonald Trump Lost His Battle. The Culture War Goes On.The reality-TV president was a practitioner, and a product, of a style of pop-cultural grievance that will outlast him.President Trump gloried in inviting conservative celebrities like Kid Rock, right, to the White House.Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesDec. 14, 2020You could say that the Trump presidency effectively ended when the polls closed election night or when news outlets called the contest for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four days later. You could say that it ended when the Electoral College voted on Monday to make Mr. Biden the president, or that it will end when Mr. Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.But by one measure, the Trump presidency ended in mid-November, when online conservatives went bonkers over a picture of Harry Styles in a dress.The photo of the British singer on the cover of the December Vogue prompted the YouTube personality Candace Owens to tweet, “Bring back manly men.” To Ben Shapiro, the photo shoot was an assault on the concept of manhood itself: “Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum on masculinity for men to don floofy dresses is treating you as a full-on idiot.”What does all this have to do with the president’s impending exit? First, it suggests that other conservatives are retaking the role of Troll-Warrior-in-Chief that Mr. Trump conferred on himself.But it’s also a reminder that the kind of button-pushing cultural politics that predated him — that in many ways helped make a President Trump possible — will survive his tenure.‘Duck Dynasty’ PoliticsA million years ago in the Obama era, proxy wars over culture were handled on the periphery of conservatism, in social media and right-wing talk. It was the era of the Gamergate attacks on feminists in the video gaming community, of umbrage over the foreign-language lyrics of a Coca-Cola commercial and over a female-cast reboot of “Ghostbusters.”With the election of President Trump, a pop-culture figure himself who intuited the connection between cultural fandom and political tribalism (he himself made a “Ghostbusters” outrage video the year he announced his campaign), the political and culture-war wings of conservatism merged.For four years, we had a president whose portfolio of concerns included protests at N.F.L. games, speeches at TV awards ceremonies, the loyalty of Fox News and the reboot of “Roseanne.” He scoured and fretted over Nielsen ratings — his own and those of shows he saw as allies and enemies — with the intensity a wartime president might devote to troop movements.Now, with a waning Mr. Trump self-soothing with OANN and Newsmax and tweeting out the elaborate sci-fi serial that the election was stolen from him, command of that battle is returning from the White House to the field.Phil Robertson, who was briefly suspended from the reality show “Duck Dynasty” in 2013 for homophobic and racist comments, with Mr. Trump at a 2019 rally.Credit…Larry W Smith/EPA, via ShutterstockFor decades, the expression of politics through culture war has been a staple of conservative media. Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing online publisher, declared that “politics is downstream from culture” (borrowing an idea from Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci). Fox News made an annual production of the “war on Christmas” (with occasional spinoffs like “Santa Claus and Jesus are white”).The appeal was emotional; people have a personal connection to family holidays and their favorite shows that they don’t to, say, marginal tax-rate policy. But it was also a way to appeal to a specific audience in a country where, increasingly, people had not just different political beliefs but entirely different cultural experiences.As far back as the early 1970s, the “rural purge” in TV — which eliminated bucolic sitcoms like “Green Acres” to make room for urban ones like “All in the Family” — reinforced the idea that there were different Americas with different, and even competing, popular cultures. This dynamic only spread with cable TV and the internet, which sliced and diced us into a nation of niche demos, sharing a geography but occupying different psychic spaces.As the historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer write in “Fault Lines,” their study of American polarization since the 1970s, all this led to “a world with fewer points of commonality in terms of what people heard or saw.” This was true in politics and in entertainment, and the two often overlapped.There was now identifiable red and blue pop culture. A 2016 Times study found a TV divide that mirrored the rural-urban split in the election. “Deadliest Catch,” the reality show about Alaskan crab fishing, was popular in red America; in blue zones, “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix drama and critique of the prison system.The brief suspension of Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” clan, had divided the country.  Credit…Gerald Herbert/Associated PressA 2014 poll found that 53 percent of Democrats, compared with 15 percent of Republicans, believed “Twelve Years a Slave” should win the best-picture Oscar. Neither party had taken a position on the movie; the culture war was just well-enough ingrained that people could intuit where their side would land, just as the Iraq War movie “American Sniper” became a conservative favorite and liberal target.Knowingly or not, audience members enlisted in the culture war as volunteers. For conservatives in particular, the liberal tilt of Hollywood was a useful font of grievance, allowing them to claim cultural victimhood no matter how much political and judicial power they held.And people increasingly saw their favorite stars as their proxies and champions. When Phil Robertson, the bayou patriarch of “Duck Dynasty,” was briefly suspended from the reality show in 2013 for homophobic and racist comments, one America saw it as political correctness taking down a beloved star for speaking his mind. Another America — if they had ever heard of “Duck Dynasty” at all — saw a bigot getting what he had coming to him.The Culture-Troll-in-ChiefAll of this, in retrospect, was an advance trailer for the it-came-from-“The Apprentice” Trump era.Politicians, especially on the right, have dabbled in culture war before: George H.W. Bush vs. “The Simpsons,” Dan Quayle vs. “Murphy Brown,” Bob Dole vs. rap. But their forays tended to be awkward, tone-deaf and often as not, self-defeating.But Mr. Trump, a child of TV who made himself into a TV character as an adult, understood media instinctively. It was where he lived, ever since he gave up his youthful fantasies of running a movie studio, vowed to “put show business into real estate” and forged his tabloid persona in the 1980s.Having used media to build a reality-show career and a business-success myth, having experienced the rush of primetime celebrity, he knew that culture makes the kind of gut connection that mere politicians can only dream of. Ordinary politics argues: Those other people don’t believe what you believe. Culture-war politics argues: Those other people don’t love what you love.So Mr. Trump’s campaign, as much as it was about wall-building or Islamophobia or “law and order,” was also about a promise to defend and uphold his followers’ culture over the enemy’s. His rallies combined a concert vibe with the theatrics of pro wrestling (another genre Mr. Trump had experience with).To an audience that had been told for years that showbiz celebrities disdained their values, here was one of their celebrities, a real celebrity from TV, taking their side. An alt-rightist essay on Breitbart.com hailed the erstwhile NBC host as “the first truly cultural candidate for President” since Patrick J. Buchanan, the CNN “Crossfire” co-host who declared a “cultural war” for “the soul of America” at the 1992 Republican National Convention.Ted Nugent performed at a campaign event for Mr. Trump in Michigan in October.Credit…Rey Del Rio/Getty ImagesTrump’s 2016 RNC didn’t have a lot of high-profile politicians, but it did have a “Duck Dynasty” star. As president, he gloried in inviting conservative celebrities like Kid Rock and Ted Nugent (who once called President Obama a “subhuman mongrel”), as well as the newly conservative-curious Kanye West, to take photos in the Oval Office.The pictures felt like spoils of war, a political end-zone dance. And his fiercest celebrity critics often played into his me-vs.-Hollywood narrative, cursing him out at the Tony Awards or feuding with him on Twitter.He praised Western culture as superior because “we write symphonies,” tooting a white-nationalist dog whistle from the orchestra pit. And he threw himself wholeheartedly into fights like the one over ABC’s reboot of “Roseanne,” whose star, Roseanne Barr, had become a real-life, vituperative Twitter Trumpist, and which worked her politics into the story lines.He didn’t, like previous presidents attending the Kennedy Center honors or sharing a something-for-everyone Spotify playlist, see culture as a way to find common ground. He saw it as a battleground with winners and losers, and one full of opportunities to inflame divisions.When the “Roseanne” premiere dominated the ratings, he crowed about it as his team trouncing the enemy. “It’s about us!” he told a crowd of supporters.Later, when ABC fired Ms. Barr from the show over a racist tweet, Mr. Trump joined the argument, not to condemn Ms. Barr’s remarks but to accuse the network of hypocrisy because of “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.” It echoed his Twitter attack on the network in 2014 when it picked up the sitcom “black-ish”: “Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘Whiteish’! Racism at highest level?”His bellyaching against Hollywood wasn’t just a bread-and-circuses distraction. It was political messaging. Pushing back on Ms. Barr’s firing — for likening a Black former Obama aide to an ape — echoed the right’s fixation on “cancel culture.” The message: Your stars are being canceled. Your shows are being canceled. You are being canceled. Only I am the network executive who can ensure your renewal.After ABC fired Roseanne Barr from the reboot of “Roseanne” over a racist tweet, Mr. Trump accused the network of hypocrisy.Credit…Brinson+Banks for The New York TimesHis fixation on ratings (dating back to “The Apprentice,” whose ratings he routinely lied about) vibed with his worldview of competition and scorekeeping. Fights about representation, American identity and the boundaries of acceptable speech aligned with messages expressed, in more blunt and ugly ways, by Mr. Trump’s campaign and supporters — especially the insidious language of “replacement.”“Now they’re making ‘Ghostbusters’ with only women. What’s going on!” was a way of telling men that he would protect them from becoming superfluous. “We can say ‘Merry Christmas’ again” was a way of saying: Your culture used to be the assumed default in America, and I’m going to bring that back. The enemy wants to demote you to a supporting player; I’m going to make you the star again.The Tug-of-Culture-War Goes OnMuch of this, of course, was a reaction to the expansion of the American story implied by the election of America’s first Black president and by the representative pop culture of Obama’s era, like “black-ish” and “Hamilton.” Often, there’s a sense (at least in retrospect) of a new cultural era beginning with a new presidential administration: JFK, the New Frontier and youth culture; Reagan, “Family Ties” and “greed is good.”Though the Biden administration has yet to begin, it doesn’t feel like that kind of definitive shift at the moment, so much as the flag moving to the other side of the centerline in a continuing tug of war. Things may get quieter on the surface; Mr. Biden is neither as big a pop-culture guy nor as zealous a culture warrior as the president he’s replacing.But as every tempest over a Vogue cover proves, the fight goes on. The divides are too deep, the incentives for widening them too great. Whether Mr. Trump continues to have a major part in this after he leaves office, or whether his ratings ragetweets simply echo in some musty corner of the internet, the ongoing narrative he has left us with will continue.The secret of a long-running show, after all, is that it can survive a cast change.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More