Party Down & Failure

Hollywood loves its myths. Not only adapting or borrowing from the classical ones, but their own myths. The ones that built that city and industry.

I won’t pretend to be above them. I love Karina Longworth’s outstanding podcast You Must Remember This, I love biographies of old Hollywood, and stories behind how films were made. I love these things because I love movies and television (perhaps to an unhealthy degree).

In my years spent consuming these legends, I have often come across the same idea, talent is always discovered in the end. This, as much as anything else, is the foundational myth of that city. As an industry they don’t want to admit (to themselves or the world) the truth. That it’s chance. That the universe is chaos and the ones who make it are no better or worse than the ones who don’t.

Now, this isn’t to say there aren’t talented people in Hollywood. It isn’t to say they didn’t work hard (we won’t get into the nepo babies that so populate that industry). It’s just to say that for every talented, hard-working person who made it, there are dozens more who didn’t.

And that’s what makes Party Down (the short-lived Starz show that just received a revival) so wonderful. The characters in that show aren’t going to make it. Casey isn’t going to become a famous comedian, Kyle isn’t going to be a movie star, Roman isn’t going to be the next George Lucas (who he hates for not being hard sci fi). It’s a show about the failures that litter the streets of Los Angeles. They are each, as the show so elegantly puts it, “just another grain of sand on that endless fucking beach.”

No, Party Down isn’t the only piece of media from Hollywood that details the lives of those who won’t make it. Notably I would point to the noir masterpiece Sunset Blvd. as another example. But Sunset Blvd.uses the failure as a catalyst. Joe Gillis, the languishing screenwriter in the film, needs to be driven away from the town and his craft for the film to unfold. His great failure is minor in the grand scheme of things. He’s already, in many ways succeeded. He’s had films made, he works on another during the film, and, in the end (and the beginning) he meets a spectacular fate.

No one is meeting a spectacular fate in Party Down. No one is taking a long, deep swim in the pool of a former film star. They’re all just there, working in the food service industry, trying desperately to believe in Hollywood’s foundational myth.

This is why I had mixed feelings about the revival. I loved the show when I first watched it (years ago when I was parking cars at events like the ones depicted in this show), but a part of me was happy it ended when it did. If it had continued, they would’ve felt the need to advance the characters, to show them succeed.

Think of The Office or Parks and Recreation or Community, other shows ostensibly about failure. As they dragged on into the later seasons, they needed to give their characters victories. They needed to transform themselves from shows about failure into shows about success.

I think there was a subtle pleasure in the fact that Party Down didn’t do that. That it was cancelled before it devolved into some saccharine parody of itself. There was something poetic about it, like this show about failures needed to fail to be true to itself.

I’ve only seen the first episode of the revival (already too many of them have succeeded for my taste) and I’m holding out hope that it’ll deliver. There’s a part of me that’s thrilled to have it back, to get to return to those characters after all these years. To get to see what new and creative ways the writers have found for them to fail. But there’s another part of me that wishes it had stayed what it was, a show about failure that failed.

(Also, I already miss Lizzy Caplan.)

Presidential Biographies

So, along with being a big reader, I’m a bit of a history dork. I love a good, long, extensive biography. A few years ago, right as the pandemic began, I really dove into audiobooks loving their convenience, especially my ability to both consume a book and cook at the same time (something that’s very difficult and messy with a physical book). I was aimlessly listening to various books I’d always meant to get to (the list of classic works I hadn’t read were quite frankly embarrassing), when I started to listen to biographies of famous historical figures. I immediately in love. I loved the breath and depth of the work, the narrative structures the writers used, and the inspiration (and anger) these works inspired in me. I do not believe I would be a writer today if it weren’t for many of these biographies and the brilliant individuals who wrote them.

During this period my father told me about a colleague of his who had set out to read a biography of every president of the United States. Naturally this idea appealed to me. It was a goal, a solitary contest. It was like running a marathon but without the shin splints.

I should mention that at this point in my life I felt rather rudderless. I’d fallen in love, gotten sober, quit smoking, finished school, learned to cook, found a job, but something was missing. In the end, I would fill that hole with writing, but first there would be biographies.

They were something to discuss about at social functions. Safety valves for me to fall back on when my friends and family talked of their career successes. This may sound silly, but these things are important for someone who was in the position I was – nearing thirty with seemingly little to show for it after a decade thrown away through alcoholism.

It turns out other people don’t find random facts about presidents nearly as interesting as I do, but the people in my life were good sports about it and indulged my obsession. Given my work schedule (which often involved data entry where I could listen as I worked) and speeding up the audiobooks (I might’ve missed some stuff if we’re being honest), I got through the biographies in a year. Some were excellent, some were terrible, some were just ok. Some surprised me, some left me wanting more, but I’m glad I listened to them all.

I took some notes as I went and over the next 45 weeks (yes, its 45 Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th president making him a great trivia question), I will let you know the biography (or biographies in a few instances when I went with a multivolume selection) I read and a very short review of the book. I’ll try to include one fun (or not so fun) fact about each president so you can have something to say at your next party (but be prepared for people to not care). I hope you follow me on this journey and please comment or get in touch if you have questions or want to yell at me about something.

You can read these blogs here or you can subscribe to my substack for all my blog updates. Also, if you have someone in your life who likes to drone on about Teddy Roosevelt, please let them know about me and my blog. I would really appreciate it.

History is an important thing. I increasingly worry that we are losing our connection to the past. We often tend to over glorify or condemn it and in doing either, we tend to destroy it. There’s both good and bad in every person and in every time period. I hope that over the next 45 weeks I can spark an interest in history for you or, at the very least, you can get some fun facts and trivia answers.

Charlie Cale - A Post-Truth Superhero

We’re introduced to Charlie Cale as she lies in bed and scrolls her phone. Her face is impassive, her arm at a right angle, the morning sun just barely touching her. We all know this moment, a modern affliction, the scrolling paralysis that overtakes you before your day begins.

She puts the phone down and gets up, but in the next scene she’s back at it, stuck again in that endless scroll. Only this time she has an audience, her friend Natalie. Charlie proceeds to tell her about a child porn ring she’s been seeing online. Natalie isn’t having it and tells Charlie to stop worrying about things she can’t change. But Charlie refuses. Her action? Commenting on a twitter post, the most performative of all acts of defiance.

What I didn’t think about when first watching this all-too-common conversation, was that Charlie might know that the child porn ring exists. She might’ve seen a video of a girl who’d been abused or a man claiming the ring didn’t exist, and Charlie would’ve known whether those statements were true or not. Not suspected, but actually known.

I couldn’t stop thinking of what a curse that would be. To live in this post-truth age knowing how often you’re being lied to. Think of how angry that would make you. I get angry enough watching politicians and billionaires and social media influencers lie so brazenly, and I’m not even sure they’re lying. There’s always a chance, the George Costanza theory if you will, that they might believe their lies.

But not for Charlie. She knows it’s a lie. Knows that they don’t believe what they’re saying, not even for a second.

Mostly Poker Face deals with individual lies. Someone claiming that an important phone call was nothing or that they wrote a song that they didn’t. This is more effective for the show. We want to watch Charlie solve a mystery every episode and getting bogged down in larger societal lies would muddy things. But you get moments, traces where you see Charlie for what she is – a cursed, post-truth superhero.

Often Poker Face seems to take place outside of time. We know its set in the present, but the unique circumstances of Charlie’s situation allow us to forget that. She doesn’t use a smart phone outside of the first episode for fear of being tracked. She spends times in small towns and places seemingly untouched by the internet. She connects to the world through the radio and survives by taking off-the-books minimum wage work. This all serves to place her in insular communities which allows every episode to have its own feel to it. And, in the end, we receive a sense of finality when the mystery is solved and the villain’s taken down.

But that isn’t life. The great villains are still out there. They’re still lying to us. And much like Charlie, we know it’s a lie. We all agree that the truth has lost its meaning and we’re all helpless to do anything about it. A world full of Cassandras, vainly howling at the moon.

I think that’s part of what makes Poker Face so satisfying. At first the truth doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough to catch the murderer. It seems like Charlie lives in the same void as us all. She knows the truth but seemingly can’t do anything about it. Only Charlie doesn’t give up. She pushes on and catches the criminal. She shows us that, at least in her world, the truth matters.

No, this isn’t reality. No, I don’t believe that we’ll get the villains and criminals in our society. But for one hour every week I know Charlie will. And there’s a comfort in that.

Sequoia Speaks Spring 2023 Guest Fiction Editor

I am absolutely thrilled to be joining Sequoia Speaks, a brilliant literary magazine, as their Guest Fiction Editor for Spring 2023. I have long been an admirer (and occasional contributor) to this magazine and cannot wait to get to work helping to put it out.

Thank you to Daphne Rose, Sequoia Speaks’ founder, editor, and general life blood, for this opportunity.

Poker Face & Spoiler Culture

I, like much of the country, have been watching Rian Johnson’s excellent Poker Face and it’s led me to contemplate a few different things. Would it be a gift or a curse to know if people are lying? How would I use this skill? Why does someone who hates sand live in a dessert? And, of course, what defines Natasha Lyonne’s distinct and inescapable charm?

But these aren’t the questions that drove me to write this, my inaugural blog post. That question is more to do with the modern state of pop culture discourse.

It was during the, then still excellent, run of Game of Thrones that I began to notice it. I’d wait all week not only to watch, but to discuss that show. And those discussions, which had once stretched on for the entire week, had become compressed, stilted, one note.

“It’s just not surprising anymore,” one of my friends would say, and everyone would agree.

“No one dies,” someone else would say. More agreement.

No discussion of the acting or the set or the biting dialogue. No comments on the interpersonal relationships that spawned complex webs of chaos and deceit. No belief that television was about the journey and not the destination alone.

And yet, even as so many people began to bemoan the seeming boredom of that show, one truism remained. Someone in the room wouldn’t have seen the episode, and would quickly, and aggressively, shout, “I haven’t watched yet, no spoilers.”

Sometimes they were seasons behind. Sometimes they hadn’t even begun the series. But it wouldn’t matter. Spoiler sanctity had to be observed. And with that sanctity, I watched as conversations died.

It started before Thrones. Maybe it was Breaking Bad, maybe The Sopranos. Maybe people were shouting at each other not to spoil NYPD Blue back in the 90s and Dallas in the 80s. I don’t know. I can’t say when it began, but it’s infected us. And it’s an epidemic.

People shout about spoilers for films from the 70s. People get angry when you let a minor plot point slip from a show that aired a decade ago. People put their fingers in their ears when you mention how a book they were never going to read ends. Our discourse has been so strangled by this spoiler culture that conversations die on the vine.

Combine that with the new model where in shows release entire seasons at once, thus nullifying any shared ground for viewers, and we never talk about television.

Yes, I understand that we talk about it constantly. It’s one of the go-to topics at social gatherings. But the conversations are short, surface level. You ask the other person where they’re at in the show, you try to remember what was happening then, and, when you can’t pinpoint it, you give up and say you like the lead. Then you move on, unsatisfied.

No one learns anything, no one puts forth an interesting idea that changes the way you viewed the show. People simply say if they liked or disliked it, as if that is all there is to discourse.

Then, just when I thought spoiler culture had won, along came Poker Face. A throw back to a bygone age of bumbling, trenchcoated, detectives and a land devoid of spoilers. Because how can you spoil a show that spoils itself?

Poker Face opens every episode with a well-crafted scene in which the killer is revealed. You learn the players, you see the motive, and the air from that spoiler balloon leaks out.

Does this diminish the tension of the show? No. At least not in my opinion. Instead, it focuses the viewer. You’re not sitting there, as my father does with everything he watches, trying to guess the end. You already know it. So, you just sit back and enjoy the ride. Enjoy the aforementioned Natasha Lyonne’s charm, the elegant camera work, the litany of well-cast guest stars, the settings – throwbacks to classic Hollywood genres. You get to focus on world being built instead of the action to come.

And you still get to revel in her both solving and proving the case.

It’s a simple formula. As so many have pointed out, it’s Columbo. It’s Law and Order with the reveal at the beginning. It’s episodic, procedural. It’s the very thing that the golden age of television taught us to revile. And it’s exactly what we need. Spoiler proof television for an age infected with spoiler culture.

Next week, I’ll have another post on this show (sorry for being so one note here at the beginning). Moving forward I will discuss other films, television, books, and, of course, my own writing. I might even talk about cooking or baking or, if you’re lucky, my cat. I don’t really know yet. But I hope you keep reading.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any thoughts and thank you for taking the time to read this.