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      in Theater

      When an Abortion Story Is Told as a Caper, Thriller or Farce

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      As Roe falls, new works including a documentary, a feature film and a comedy show disrupt the taboos and clichés around abortion.In 1969, when abortion was illegal in Illinois, an underground operation arose in Chicago. Officially called the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, it became known as the Jane network, because women seeking abortions were told to call a number and “ask for Jane.” As I watched “The Janes,” an HBO documentary about the service, I was struck by the buoyancy of the story. Though the women behind Jane were working under stress to provide secretive abortions to desperate and terrified women, a kicky sensibility pervades the film. There are weed jokes and anti-surveillance shenanigans and a soundtrack fit for a mod spy movie. As the Janes evade the church, the Mafia and the police to facilitate around 11,000 clandestine abortions, they emerge from anonymity as the stars of a new genre: the abortion caper.“The Janes” ends with Roe v. Wade being handed down in 1973. Within weeks of the documentary’s release, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe, which makes the film feel even more essential — not just as a road map for modern civil disobedience but as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk. Over the past few weeks, as I waited for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to drop, I sought out such stories compulsively, as if the ruling might seize them too. In addition to “The Janes,” I watched the French film “Happening,” about a student seeking an illegal abortion in France in 1963, and “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby’s one-woman show about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.In “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby talks about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe effort to control abortion has also had the effect of suppressing the stories we tell about it. Women seeking abortions are silenced by abortion bans, anonymized in court and moralized about onscreen. It is striking how often abortion has been obscured in films, presented as a quickly discarded option (as in “Juno”) or averted with a spontaneous miscarriage (“Citizen Ruth”) or deployed to facilitate another character’s arc (“Dirty Dancing”) or completely euphemized (“Knocked Up,” where it is referred to only as “rhymes with smashmorshion.”)When abortion stories are not stifled by shame, they might be celebrated as a brave act of speaking out — a tradition that has created its own clichés, as accounts of abortion are smoothed into politically palatable forms, in which the patient is fashioned as suitably desperate and her story is disclosed only reluctantly. Women have been made to barter their stories for their rights. In the documentary, a Jane member recalls women calling the service and listing their reasons for needing an abortion, but she would assure them this was unnecessary: “We would really try to make clear to them — they didn’t need to justify themselves.”What does an abortion story look like freed from justification? Abortion is a common procedure (one in four American women will have one, according to the Guttmacher Institute) that has been so flattened into an “issue” that it can feel revelatory to just recast abortion as an experience, one that can unlock unexpected insights into women’s private lives. If “The Janes” makes abortion into a caper, “Happening” turns it into a hero’s journey and “Oh God” renders it as a farce. Together, these works suggest that abortions are worth talking about because women’s lives are interesting in their own right.The French film “Happening” follows a university student’s search for an illegal abortion in the early 1960s.IFC Films, via Associated Press“Happening” follows Anne, a student of literature who becomes pregnant and seeks an illegal abortion while studying for final exams. As Anne is sabotaged by her doctors, shunned by her peers and preyed on by men, she watches her life’s potential narrow with each passing week. And as she pursues increasingly dangerous methods to end the pregnancy, she risks death to fight for her future as a writer. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells one useless doctor.The plot of “Happening” is driven not by Anne’s harrowing victimization but by her flinty resolve. When a doctor offers her sympathy instead of assistance, she refuses to leave his office. “So help me,” she demands. Like a great action hero, she endures physical trials while outwitting her adversaries. She works to compel her community to recognize her humanity through abortion’s veil of criminality and taboo.Anne finally makes her way to an underground abortionist, but the procedure doesn’t work, so she undergoes another, riskier operation that could kill her or else send her to the hospital, which could be her last stop before prison. She ends up convulsing over a dorm toilet, but the scene plays less like body-horror than a feat of strength. When one of her bullies comes upon her in the stall, Anne cannily implicates her in the event, instructing her to fetch a pair of scissors and sever the bloody tissue trailing from her body. The very existence of “Happening” confirms her triumph: It is based on a 2000 memoir by the writer Annie Ernaux.No such horrors await Alison Leiby in “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” whose self-described “simple and frictionless” abortion is worth examining mostly because it is a funny story. The 70-minute monologue begins with a startling joke — “My mom texted me, ‘Kill it tonight!’ and I’m like, I already did, that’s why the show exists!” — that feels crafted to immediately disarm the abortion taboo. Then the show rollicks through the experience itself, from the moment Leiby pees awkwardly into a glass tumbler in a Courtyard by Marriott to the first-trimester procedure she secures in a Planned Parenthood facility located across the street from a glaringly luxe maternity store. (“Who owns that?” she jokes. “Mike Pence?”)Within weeks of the release of “The Janes,” the film feels even more essential to our critic, as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk.HBOEven before Roe’s reversal, Leiby recognized that she was lucky, and that most women seeking abortion “do not stroll into Planned Parenthood with a Lululemon outfit and then take an Uber home.” Near the end of the piece, when her mother tells her that she was forced to go to the Mafia for an illegal abortion in the 1960s, Leiby hesitates to share her own experience. “I didn’t want to come off as bragging, like, A doctor did mine,” she jokes.Leiby does not belabor her own privilege, and her story gains power from that choice. Her abortion decision is still met with plenty of patriarchal condescension and ambient shame. But she resists the pressure to feel sad about ending her pregnancy, and she refuses to apologize for her right to do it safely and legally. “I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. Instead, she walks out of the clinic feeling “a little underwhelmed.”I attended Leiby’s show this month in New York while visibly pregnant. Though my expanding body now inspires rote congratulations from strangers, my own feelings about my pregnancy have been tumultuous, and it was invigorating to step into an environment where the condition was not immediately culturally affirmed.Much of Leiby’s story concerns her choice not to raise children — there is an interlude about perineal tearing — and though her abortion is far easier to secure than Annie Ernaux’s, the stakes have not been lowered. Leiby wants to pursue her career and to avoid the “painful and exhausting and scary” aspects of parenting, but she also just wants to be recognized as a full adult human on her own terms, not as a problem that only a baby can fix.“The Janes,” too, is a story about women claiming their potential, though the members of the Jane network fulfill theirs not by receiving abortions but by providing them. When they discover that their abortionist, “Mike,” is not a doctor but just a guy who learned how to perform a dilation and curettage (a procedure known as a D and C), they refuse to shutter the service. Instead, they begin to perform abortions themselves, largely for free, no Mikes necessary. They learn to assume responsibility, not just for their own lives but for the lives of others. In turn, they are driven to “share that sense of personal power with women,” as one member puts it. “We wanted every woman who contacted us to be the hero of her own story.”Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly last fall for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThese abortion stories represent just a slice of the experience (for one thing, they largely feature white women), and they have arrived at a time when abortion storytelling is at risk of being winnowed even further. Even if a patient does not disclose her abortion, digital surveillance threatens to tell the tale for her, through Google searches, menstruation app data and location tracking. (Such tools have already been used in criminal prosecutions).Stories that do emerge will often be shaped to withstand political pressure. Last fall, when Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18, she did it in support of legislation codifying Roe. “It felt like something was pressing down on me,” she said about the demands on her testimony, adding: “Whatever I say, it has to produce.”The decision in Dobbs tells its own story about women considering abortion. The court’s imagined modern pregnant woman can achieve total self-actualization while carrying her pregnancy to term, with the help of anti-discrimination laws, state-mandated parental leave and health insurance. “Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be,” Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi attorney general, said in an interview about the case. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”This woman can have it all, except she cannot have an abortion, and she can’t have a story, either. She is a straw man — useful only after she has been stripped of her subjectivity and drained of all substance. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Janes’ Review: Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

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      This HBO documentary spotlights the women activists who banded together to form Jane, a clandestine group providing safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade.“The Janes” is a straightforward, talking-heads documentary from HBO that provides a brief history of the Jane Collective, a clandestine abortion group working out of Chicago in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that protected a women’s right to an abortion, had not yet been handed down, meaning the procedure was illegal in most states, forcing women with unwanted pregnancies to turn to exploitative abortion providers (like the Mafia) or resort to dangerous methods to self-induce an abortion.This situation — and the can-do spirit of the times, cultivated by the civil rights and women’s liberation movements — sparked the members of Jane into action.The documentary, directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, relies primarily on testimonies from the Jane Collective’s women volunteers, tracing their efforts from the beginning — when the group was merely a referral service — to their final days contending with law enforcement.Ultimately, the Jane Collective provided close to 11,000 abortions by the time Roe v. Wade came into effect, at which point the group ceased its activities. (Though the renewed push for restrictive abortion laws today, and reports of the present Supreme Court’s ruling on a case that could overturn Roe, casts a sense of bleak uncertainty over the film’s otherwise triumphant conclusion.)Cookie-cutter though it is, “The Janes” does have something going for it: its interview subjects, the former Janes, who all speak about their beliefs and shared past with striking clarity. They remind us that their work — their commitment to ensuring the safety and well-being of other women — was not really all that radical, but a measured, intelligent response to the inadequacies of a system that refused to fend for its own.The JanesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      in Music

      Reconsidering the Spice Girls: How Manufactured Girl Power Became Real

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      In a scene from the 1997 film “Spice World,” the Spice Girls are rehearsing for the movie’s climactic performance at the Royal Albert Hall. Dressed in their signature looks, they sway their way through one of their hits, “Say You’ll Be There,” playfully poking each other and bopping along as they perform the R&B-infused track.“That was absolutely perfect,” the music director declares when they finish, “without being actually any good.” The Girls kind of agree, and kind of don’t care.It is a fleeting, self-deprecating punchline in the movie but one that encapsulates how the pop group has been perceived ever since it zig-a-zig-ah-ed its way onto the music scene in the mid-1990s. To a mostly young and female audience drawn to their messaging of self-empowerment, individuality and friendship, the Spice Girls were absolutely perfect. But to critics and commentators who wrote them off as “duds,” “manufactured” phonies and “shrill” bimbos, they were not actually any good.Twenty-five years after the release of the film, as some of the band’s most fervent fans have themselves grown up to be pop titans, the role of the Spice Girls in music history is still being rewritten.To be sure, criticism of the Spice Girls — most notably, that they were a superficial, manufactured, disposable pop confection — was not unique to them. Many pop acts, including the Beatles, the Monkees and Abba, initially encountered the same derision. But from the beginning of their ascent to superstardom, the fact that the five Girls — Victoria Adams (now Beckham), a.k.a. Posh Spice; Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice; Emma Bunton, a.k.a. Baby Spice; Melanie Chisholm, a.k.a. Sporty Spice; and Geri Halliwell (now Horner), a.k.a. Ginger Spice — were outspoken young women seemed to bring an added layer of skepticism.Perhaps nothing illustrates the conundrum of the Spice Girls more starkly than the reception to “Spice World,” their madcap mockumentary, which earned more than $70 million worldwide but received memorably withering reviews. Desson Howe in The Washington Post said it was “about as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.” In The Orlando Sentinel, the critic Jay Boyar described the movie as akin to “being kicked to death by a pack of wild Barbies.” Roger Ebert compared it very unfavorably to the film that inspired it, “A Hard Day’s Night,” writing, “The huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.”Horner, Brown, Beckham, Bunton and Chisholm arriving — aboard a double-decker bus — at a 1998 screening of their film “Spice World” in New York.Henny Ray Abrams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat’s become clear in the decades since the film’s release is that these five particular women could not, in fact, be duplicated. While all-female groups — from the Supremes to Destiny’s Child — have long been a celebrated part of pop music, Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger offered a specific combination of self-expression and brazen ambition that inspired a generation of artists. Contemporary performers such as Sam Smith, Little Mix and Haim have all been effusive in their praise for the Spice Girls.“I remember hearing ‘Wannabe’ on the radio and immediately falling in love with it,” the singer Rita Ora, who performed the Girls’ hit “Wannabe” in a 2018 appearance on “Lip Sync Battle,” said in a recent email. “To see women uplifting women who were doing it just as good as the guys, if not better, was incredibly inspiring as a young girl.”“They probably inspired me to pick up a hairbrush when I was like five and sing into it,” the British pop star Charli XCX, who remixed “Wannabe” for her 2019 single “Spicy,” has said of the group.The Spice Girls inspired a generation of fans that, decades later, still identify as a Scary or a Baby. Tens of thousands of fans came to Wembley Stadium in London for the group’s 2019 reunion tour.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesThe 15-time Grammy Award-winning artist Adele is also an avowed Spice Girls superfan. When the group announced its 2019 reunion tour, she shared a photo on Instagram of herself as a young girl, the wall behind her plastered with Spice Girls posters and photos.On an episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” as part of the segment “Carpool Karaoke,” Adele enthusiastically declared her love for the band. “It was genuine,” she insisted of her admiration, to an incredulous Corden. “It was a huge moment in my life when they came out — it was ‘girl power’ and these five ordinary girls who just did so well.”At their peak, the Spice Girls were a global sensation, and they remain, to this day, the most successful girl group of all time: Their first single, “Wannabe,” released in 1996, was a No. 1 hit in 37 countries, and their debut album, “Spice,” is still one of the best-selling albums by any female group. And even the Girls themselves are still coming to terms with just how much their brief stint at the apex of pop music affected a generation of fans and other artists.“At the time, in the ’90s, we were probably too busy, too young and too exhausted to fully realize what was happening,” Chisholm said in a recent interview with The New York Times. But, she added, “it’s really quite overwhelming, but brilliant, to process that we really did make a difference, in so many people’s lives. It was such a joyful thing to be able to do.”‘R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated’Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesOf the many criticisms leveled at the Spice Girls, perhaps the most potent was that they were not “real” musicians. This critique has often been used to belittle pop groups. Even the Beatles weren’t spared: When the band first crossed over to the United States in 1964, they were described as “a press agent’s dream combo,” “appallingly unmusical” and “a gigantic put-on.”But this line of criticism carried particular weight in the 1990s in Britain, where male, guitar-forward Britpop bands such as Oasis and Blur, who preached a gospel of authenticity, dominated the music scene.So let’s get something out of the way: Yes, the Spice Girls were manufactured. In 1994, Bob and Chris Herbert, a father-and-son music-management team based in Surrey, England, came up with the idea of creating a female version of Take That, the successful British boy band. The Herberts’ notion of injecting more femininity into the prevailing “lad culture” of ’90s Britain was “the one unarguable stroke of genius in their vision,” the music critic David Sinclair wrote in his book “Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame.”The Herberts placed an ad in a newspaper: “R.U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated.” After weeks of auditions, they selected five girls — Brown, Chisholm, Beckham, Horner and Michelle Stephenson (who was replaced a few months later by Bunton) — and moved them into a house in the English town of Maidenhead, paying for their voice coaching, dance lessons, songwriting sessions, media training and demo recording sessions.However, as the Girls worked together, Sinclair explained, they concocted an ambitious vision for their band that clashed with the Herberts’ approach. The Herberts wanted them to stick to the usual lead-singer-with-backup model, while the Girls distributed lines equally among themselves so that no single leader emerged. The Herberts imagined five girls with a uniform look; the Girls wanted to remain distinct.“We didn’t dress similarly in everyday life, and when we tried to do that in a performance, it just didn’t work,” Chisholm said. “Quite early on, quite naturally, we wanted to be individuals, and the management weren’t really feeling that.”Like the Monkees before them — another manufactured band that seized control of its own destiny — the Girls decided they wanted out. So the five of them crammed into Horner’s Fiat Uno and drove off with their master recordings. That bold decision “was a measure of how determined they were,” Sinclair said. It was as though the Herberts had “invented Frankenstein’s monster,” he continued. “They were completely floored by what their creation then did to them.”The Spice Girls were assembled by a management team but took steps to seize control of their destiny.Tim Roney/Getty Images“It was all a bit of an adventure,” Chisholm said. “At that point, we didn’t really have much to lose, so we just went for it. And then the band became a very organic thing. We felt quite unstoppable.”The Girls were already generating enough buzz in the industry — thanks in part to a showcase they had done — that they were in a position to audition new managers. They decided on Simon Fuller, who at that time was managing the Scottish icon Annie Lennox. In March 1995, they met him at his office and started belting out “Wannabe.”“It was quite unusual,” Fuller recalled in a recent interview, “to have these five young girls come bounding in the office with confidence and say, ‘You have to manage us, and we’re not leaving until you agree.’ It was just very contagious, that energy.”From the Girls’ perspective, “it just clicked,” Chisholm said. “When we met him, it felt very much like he got it.”Instead of turning the Girls into clones of one another, as the Herberts had intended, Fuller told them to focus on who they genuinely were and just dial it up. “If you like pink and fluffy and your mum is your best friend, then be pink 24/7, have fluffy on you all the time. If you’re the rowdy northern girl who has no airs and graces, sexy and dominant and noisy, then be that,” Fuller explained. This idea, Fuller revealed in a 2014 BBC documentary, was inspired by Lennox, who, upon meeting the Girls, encouraged them to “ham up” their personalities.The approach fit the Spice Girls perfectly.The band’s “girl power” message, Chisholm said, also gave the group a focus: “At first, we wanted to make music and have fun and travel the world and do all those fun things. But the messaging gave us more motivation. We were expressing ourselves, as young women, in the mid-90s. It was giving fuel to this fire.”Their first single, “Wannabe,” was released in Britain on July 8, 1996, and by the end of that year it hit No. 1 in more than 20 countries. Their debut album, “Spice,” released in November 1996, also went to No. 1 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best British or Irish album of the year.“It was like, you know, the preparation, the waiting, the frustration,” Chisholm said. “And then ‘Wannabe’ is released and bam — just two years of mayhem.”‘Firing on all cylinders’“I don’t want to be emotional,” the South African president Nelson Mandela told reporters when he met the Spice Girls in 1997, “but it’s one of the greatest moments in my life.”Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the primary fan base for the Spice Girls was young and female, others were not immune to their charms. In 1997, while in South Africa to perform at a charity concert, the band met Prince Charles and Nelson Mandela. Posing for photos outside the presidential residence in Pretoria, Mandela, the South African president, told reporters, “You know, these are my heroines.” (Horner quickly chimed in to affirm that the feeling was mutual.) The group’s extravagant self-expression, coupled with a straightforward message of empowerment, resonated with girls, who saw themselves reflected in the band members’ various personas, spawning a generation of fans who identified as a Sporty or Scary or Posh.“That’s kind of the beauty of the Spice Girls,” Ora said. “Each of them had their own voice and something different to offer.” (Those nicknames, by the way, were not coined by the group but imposed on them by a journalist at the British magazine Top of the Pops. The Girls, true to form, embraced the names.)The group’s theatrics and self-aware sense of kitsch also sparked an enthusiastic following among members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, which initially took the band by surprise, Chisholm said. “In our heads, it was like, right, we’ve got to do this for the girls! And then we very quickly realized that a huge part of this community was behind us as well,” she recalled. “I think it’s because people can feel lonely if they’re in an environment where they can’t fully be themselves, and the Spice Girls gave them something to belong to.” The band has since become a popular source of inspiration for drag acts and several of the Girls have appeared as guest judges on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”There was, however, one demographic that resisted them: the music media. “I think they were victims of their own success in the sense that, the more eyes are on you, the more critical people are going to be,” said Joe Stone, an editor at The Guardian who has written about the band.Traditional tastemakers often sniffed at the Girls’ music; one relatively charitable review characterized it as emblematic of “pop’s heart of lightness, a happy place filled not with music of good taste but with music that tastes good — at least to a substantial portion of the planet.” Others dismissed the Spice Girls themselves as Fuller’s pawns, earning him the nickname “Svengali Spice.” And much of the press, particularly the tabloids, picked apart not just the group’s work but their appearance and what they seemed to represent. “People were firing on all cylinders: They couldn’t sing, they couldn’t write music, they weren’t pretty enough, their feminism was hollow,” Stone said.When Beckham appeared on a British talk show eight weeks after she’d given birth, the host, Chris Evans, weighed her to see if she was back to her pre-baby weight. He subjected Horner to the same treatment when she appeared on his show; both women have since spoken about struggling with body image and eating disorders.“There is a real culture here in the U.K. that they really like to drag people down. We celebrate success to a point, and then it’s time to attack — kind of, ‘Don’t get above your station,’” Chisholm said. “But we always felt that the numbers don’t lie. We were breaking records.”Another frequent target of criticism was the group’s message of “girl power,” which was promoted not just in their music but also through their many marketing deals with brands like Pepsi and Chupa Chups lollipops. Activists raised concerns that the band was exploiting feminism for commercial ends. Many commentators were “very conscious of how feminism and pro-women sentiment was manipulated and weaponized, particularly by the media,” said Andi Zeisler, who co-founded the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch in 1996, the same year the Spice Girls made their debut.Against a backdrop of the punk riot grrrl movement and the women-centric Lilith Fair — both of which used music as a platform to advocate specifically feminist political and social changes — “the Spice Girls perhaps felt like a step back,” Zeisler said.But the notion that the Girls’ message was, by virtue of being broadcast commercially, inherently hollow now seems shortsighted. “I think it’s possible to say, on the one hand, the Spice Girls and girl power were this very contrived marketing technique. And that’s true,” Zeisler explained. “But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t very real for the Girls themselves, or for the audience. I grew up with feminism as an irredeemably dirty word. No one wanted to be associated with it. So just the optics of having a group of women talking about feminism in a different language, making it accessible — that’s really important.”‘That sounds like a hoot’The Girls at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, where they announced their movie, “Spice World.”Dave Hogan/Getty ImagesThe idea of a Spice Girls movie was first floated by Fuller and the band during their early publicity trips to the United States. The movie would be “a parody of ourselves,” Horner explained in a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival. “We are basically taking the mickey out of ourselves.”The Girls shot the movie in the summer of 1997 while also writing and recording their sophomore album, “Spiceworld.” Such was the allure of the band at the time that many renowned actors and musicians readily agreed to take part: The movie’s list of cameos reads like a who’s who of British pop culture, including Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Elton John and Elvis Costello (as well as Meat Loaf, an American).Richard E. Grant, who played the band’s manager in the movie, explained his decision to join the cast. “My then 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, was and remains a massive Spice Girls fan and begged me to take the role, so it was a slam dunk decision,” he said.Alan Cumming, whose character spends the film trying to make a behind-the-scenes documentary about the band, was similarly won over. “My agent called and, first of all, he asked me, did I know the Spice Girls? I was like, ‘Well, I am alive,’” he said. “I was really keen — I thought, that sounds like a hoot.”But when “Spice World” came out, it followed the same path as the Spice Girls’ music — commercial success on the one hand and critical derision on the other.“Half of the critics, especially the higher-brow ones, they’d already made up their minds before they watched the movie,” Naoko Mori, who played the group’s friend Nicola, said.For years, Chisholm said, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the film. But when her now 13-year-old daughter asked to watch it for her fifth birthday, they put it on and she was delighted. “I just adored it — I mean, it was hilarious,” she said. “We do take the piss out of ourselves and each other all the time.”The movie ended up being one of the band’s final acts as a fivesome. By the time it premiered on Dec. 15, 1997, the Girls and Fuller had already parted ways. A few months later, Horner also abruptly left the band.The rest of the Girls continued to perform as a foursome, including on a 1998 world tour, and released a third album, “Forever,” in 2000. They’ve appeared together in different configurations for various reunion performances, including two tours, over the last two decades. But the particular magic of their ascent had dissipated.The Spice Girls generation comes of ageThe reunited Spice Girls performed a rendition of “Spice Up Your Life” at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.Hannah Peters/Getty ImagesIn 2012, the organizers of the London Olympics crafted the opening and closing ceremonies to celebrate the best of British culture. There were odes to James Bond, the queen and Mary Poppins, but perhaps no act drew more cheers, and tears, from the crowds than the members of the Spice Girls — all five of them — reunited atop a fleet of tricked-out black cabs as the stadium sang along raucously to their greatest hits.Nearly three decades after their peak, critics have started to reconsider the ways in which the Spice Girls reshaped the pop-music landscape, in Britain and beyond.In 2019, Pitchfork revisited the band’s debut, “Spice,” for a series on significant albums the publication had overlooked. While the outlet still rated the record a 6.8 out of 10, it wrote that “the album was a meticulously crafted pop product, front-loaded with surefire radio hits,” concluding: “‘Spice’ remains an audacious achievement.”As for “Spice World,” the movie is now championed by some as a cult classic, with its campy, self-aware humor entertaining those viewers who can get their hands on a DVD. (The movie is not currently available for streaming.) “I think it’s really funny, and I’m really glad I did it,” Cumming said. “When people ask me for my favorite of all the movies I’ve made, I always answer ‘Spice World.’”Perhaps the most remarkable thing the Spice Girls achieved, however, was their empowerment of a generation of fans. These listeners first encountered them as children and responded positively to the band and what they represented — five women who remained true to what they wanted and how they were going to get it and had a lot of fun together along the way.In an industry teeming with stories of artists — particularly young female ones — being manipulated or taken advantage of, the Spice Girls can now be remembered as a rare example of an all-female band that took a strong hand in charting its own success. “A lot of times, it’s the management that holds all the cards, makes all the money, decides what happens, and the artist that goes away shortchanged if not totally screwed over,” Sinclair said. The Spice Girls, he noted, “actually kept a grip on everything, from Day 1.”Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesChisholm and the band have embraced their status as role models, both for women and for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It’s so humbling to have the opportunity to give people strength to just be who they are. That should be everybody’s human right,” Chisholm said. “Maybe we’re misfits, maybe we’re oddballs — we’re all different. But we come together, and our unity is our strength.”When, in 2019, the Spice Girls (minus Beckham) reunited for a tour, Adele — the fangirl whose childhood wall was once plastered with Spice Girls posters — visited them on the day of their final performance, at Wembley Stadium.“We went into the bar to see our friends and family after the show,” Chisholm recalled. “Adele had gotten everybody ready, and they all started singing ‘Wannabe’ when we walked in. She was leading the chorus!”It was a powerful, full-circle moment for the band, she said.“There’s so much talent out there, and if the Spice Girls had any part in inspiring and empowering these brilliant artists, then that is only a good thing,” said Chisholm, who is now a solo artist, with a self-titled album out now and a memoir coming later this year.For Ora, the band’s girl-power message has always been “about standing up and advocating for the women around you, because, at the end of the day, we have to look out for each other,” she said. “Who better to teach us that lesson than the Spice Girls?” More

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      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

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      Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. Then the pandemic hit. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

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      Sonia Sanchez Wins the Gish Prize

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      The poet, educator and activist will receive a cash award of about $250,000. The prize is for an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.”The poet and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the prize trust said on Thursday.The honor, which carries a cash award of about $250,000, is awarded to an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change and paved the way for the next generation.”Sanchez, the author of more than 20 books, is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.Her work champions Black culture, civil rights, feminism and peace.“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”This year, the five-member selection committee, led by Zeyba Rahman, the senior program officer of the Building Bridges program of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, chose Sanchez unanimously out of 50 finalists from various artistic disciplines.Rahman said in a statement that the award recognizes Sanchez’s “extraordinary literary gift and her lifelong commitment to speaking up for social justice.” On Nov. 11, Sanchez will reprise her role in Christian McBride’s “The Movement Revisited,” in which she will recite the words of Rosa Parks, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. More

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      Police in China Detain Canadian Pop Star Kris Wu on Suspicion of Rape

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      Kris Wu, a 30-year-old celebrity, is the most prominent figure in China to be held over #MeToo allegations.The police in Beijing said Saturday they had detained Kris Wu, a popular Canadian Chinese singer, on suspicion of rape amid a #MeToo controversy that has set off outrage in China.The police did not provide details of their investigation into Mr. Wu. But it comes several weeks after an 18-year-old university student in Beijing accused him of enticing young women like herself with the promise of career opportunities, then pressuring them into having sex.Known in China as Wu Yifan, Mr. Wu, 30, is the most prominent figure in China to be detained over #MeToo allegations.He rose to fame as a member of the Korean pop band EXO, then started a successful solo career as a model, actor and singer. Though he denied the allegations when they first surfaced, they set off an uproar that led at least a dozen companies, including Bulgari, Louis Vuitton and Porsche, to sever ties with the singer.The Chaoyang District branch of the Beijing police said in a statement on social media on Saturday night that it had been looking into accusations posted online that Mr. Wu “repeatedly deceived young women into sexual relations.” It said that Mr. Wu had been detained while the criminal investigation continued.Mr. Wu’s accuser, Du Meizhu, has said publicly that when she first met Mr. Wu in December last year, she was taken by the singer’s agent to his home in Beijing for work-related discussions. She said that she was pressured to drink cocktails until she passed out, and later found herself in his bed.They dated until March, according to her account of the events, when he stopped responding to her calls and messages. She has also said she believed that he targeted other young women.Mr. Wu’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Ms. Du could not be reached.It was not immediately clear if the police were specifically investigating Ms. Du’s claims. In a statement in July, the police had released what appeared to be preliminary findings about Ms. Du’s allegations. The police had said Ms. Du had hyped her story “to enhance her online popularity,” an assessment that was criticized by her supporters as victim shaming.The outpouring of support for Ms. Du was a sign that the country’s nascent #MeToo movement continues to grow despite the government’s strict limits on activism and dissent. After Ms. Du spoke out, her supporters flooded the social media pages of several brands, threatening boycotts if they did not drop their partnerships with Mr. Wu, a campaign that quickly forced the companies to distance themselves from him.The accusations have triggered a heated debate on issues like victim-shaming, consent and abuse of power in the workplace — concepts that had rarely featured in mainstream discussions before the #MeToo movement went global.The authorities in China often discourage women from filing sexual misconduct complaints, and sexual assault or harassment survivors are frequently shamed and even sued for defamation. Censorship and limits on dissent have also stymied efforts among feminist activists to organize, even as trolls are given cover to spew abuse.Yet the high-profile nature of the controversy made Ms. Du’s allegations impossible to ignore for Chinese authorities, who are always on the lookout for what they deem to be potential sources of social unrest.The police announcement, posted on the country’s popular Weibo social media platform, immediately started trending, drawing more than six million likes.Lu Pin, a New York-based feminist activist, said the detention of Mr. Wu was a major step forward for the #MeToo movement in China.“Regardless of what the motivation of the police may have been, just the fact that he was detained is huge,” Ms. Lu said.“For the last three years, a number of prominent figures have faced #MeToo accusations but nothing ever happened to them,” Ms. Lu said. “Now with Wu Yifan, #MeToo has finally taken down someone with real power in China — it has shown that no matter how powerful you are, rape is not acceptable.”The detention of Mr. Wu comes amid a broader government crackdown on the entertainment industry.In recent years, Chinese authorities have moved aggressively to clean up the industrywide problem of tax evasion and to cap salaries for the country’s biggest movie stars. In June, the country’s internet watchdog began a crackdown on what it called the country’s “chaotic” online celebrity fan clubs, which the government has come to see as an increasing source of volatility in public opinion.The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, depicted Mr. Wu’s detention as a warning to celebrities that neither fame nor a foreign citizenship would shield them from the law.“A foreign nationality is not a talisman. No matter how famous one is, there is no immunity,” the propaganda outlet wrote. “Remember: The higher the popularity, the more you must be self-disciplined, the more popular you are, the more you must abide by the law.” More

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      ‘Titanic’ Is My Favorite Movie. There, I Said It.

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      A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; this is mine.A year ago, I went on a date, and the guy asked me what my favorite movie was. A simple question, but I stammered. His brow furrowed. “Didn’t your profile say that you love movie quotes?” I didn’t want to reveal the truth — not so soon, at least — so I hid behind the Criterion Collection (“ ‘La Strada,’ ‘Rebecca,’ etc.”). Then a scene flashed in my head — a swell of music, an enormous hat: “You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic!” A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; my secret is that I love “Titanic.” This has been true since I was a 10-year-old in a darkened theater, weeping uncontrollably on my mother’s lap. Like the children onscreen waving farewell to the doomed steamer, I marveled at the grandeur of what was passing before my eyes: a sweeping history lesson and a devastating romance between a first-class passenger named Rose (Kate Winslet) and a below-decks dreamboat named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). Until then, my cultural diet had consisted of Rodgers and Hammerstein singalongs and the Disney canon. “Titanic” — rapturous, tragic, real — was an awakening. In just over three hours, the film colored all my notions of grown-up life: love, loss, the female struggle, the unbreakable bond of a string quartet.To my child’s mind, “Titanic” was impossibly vast: It felt as though the movie encompassed the entire mysterious range of human life. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10. I couldn’t fully understand this feeling of transcendence, so I just kept rewatching. I saw the movie three times when it was released in 1997. The following year, when it came out on VHS — a fat brick of a box set, neatly split into two acts of happy and sad — I routinely popped in the pre-iceberg tape to enjoy with my after-school snack. I began fixating on unlikely features of the film, delighting in its ancillary characters’ banal dialogue: the clueless graybeards (“Freud? Who is he? Is he a passenger?”); the poetry of the bridge (“Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch. Let’s stretch her legs”); the snobbery of Rose’s mother (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they’re not too crowded”). As I matured, I stopped my regular viewings, but the movie continued playing in my mind. I was a melancholy indoor girl myself, and Rose perfectly articulated my teenage ennui: “the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter.” Even in the face of more complex ideas and challenges — like the travails of gender politics or problems of class — I found myself leaning on its casual wisdom and glossy sentimentality. The film’s unsubtle gender commentary began to feel revolutionary. (“Of course it’s unfair,” the chilly matriarch says while tightening the strings of her daughter’s corset. “We’re women.”) In the late ’90s, everyone I knew adored “Titanic,” but I felt in my heart that my own love affair with it was something special. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10.Two decades’ worth of late-night jokes and revisionist hot takes, however, have coated my feelings of affection in deep shame. (Just last month, “the iceberg that sank the Titanic” appeared in a bit on “Saturday Night Live,” lamenting, “Why are people still talking about this?”) The older I grew, the more my enduring admiration felt like some sort of clerical error in my development, a box I had accidentally checked on my application to adulthood. I told myself it was just a guilty pleasure. How could it be anything else? Saying “Titanic” is my favorite movie would be like saying my favorite painting is the “Mona Lisa”: It suggests a lack of discernment. But for me, the movie’s broadness is kind of the point. What snarky critics don’t appreciate is that the movie is a meme because it is a masterpiece. The film has become a cultural shorthand, a way of talking about ideas that are bigger than ourselves — mythic themes of hubris, love and tragedy — while also making a joke. (Has any line captured our collective quarantine mood more than that old chestnut, “It’s been 84 years …”?) It also won 11 Oscars. This past January, I decided, for the first time in a decade, to watch the movie from start to finish. When I was young — in my Tape 1 years — I was dazzled by the film’s spectacle. And yes, watching again, I fell for it in all the old ways: Jack’s good looks, Rose’s Edwardian walking suit, the allure of a real party. But as the camera panned over the sleeping elderly Rose, I broke into sobs seeing the pictures of her post-Titanic life — riding horses on the beach, climbing onto a flying machine dressed in Amelia Earheart cosplay, posing in an on-set glamour shot. After a year of great loss, the pathos of that moment hit me differently. Never mind her heart — her life went on. She survived a disaster and ended up living a life so full that the experience became just a memory. It was the message in a bottle I needed, one of many that “Titanic” has sent my way over the years. I imagine I’ll be receiving these messages forever — even as an old lady, warm in her bed.Jessie Heyman is executive editor of Vogue.com. More