Netflix's Hollywood didn't reimagine enough
Image description: Jeremy Pope, a Black actor with short dark hair, wears a white button-up with a black tie. We can see him from his chest up and there is a rotary phone visible in the right of the frame. He is visibly shaking and says “What about my dream?” The subtitles also note that his voice is shaking. Screenshot captured by the author, image courtesy Netflix.
Even if a Ryan Murphy show is bad, he knows his TV fundamentals. But boy, oh boy, was the new Netflix limited series Hollywood bad.
Hollywood’s mostly-fiction, modified-reality reimagining of 1940s Hollywood with Black, Filipino, Chinese, and white Jewish women characters had potential. But no amount of optimism can erase what we see today, in 2020. The #OscarsSoWhite campaign that jumpstarted an overdue examination of the racial (and gender) disparities of Hollywood just recently began. Netflix still has a colorism issue with Black talent. There are still too few woman directors, queer directors, and disabled folks in many roles. These truths make the individual wins of these underdogs and the impending structural changes that the show previews just feel, as another writer stated, hollow. The rest of this essay contains spoilers and contains a discussion of the sexual violence of the show.
Let’s take Archie Coleman (played by Jeremy Pope), a gay Black man who wants to just be “a writer.” Through the series, Archie successfully sells his film to Ace Studios, the fictional stand-in for the big studios of the day. The studio does not know that he’s Black at first, but they know they like Peg. Peg tells the story of a white woman who died by suicide when she jumped off of the Hollywoodland sign. Archie is not particularly excited about the story or the script, but he wrote it based on his own lows and the correct intuition that a tragedy about a white woman would get picked up.
Enter Jack.
Jack Costello (played by David Corenswet) has recently returned from the war, has twins on the way with his wife, and wants to make it as an actor. He’s got that “classic American” white look that was and still is popular, but no acting training or experience. Extra work is difficult to book and low-paying, so Jack reluctantly gets a job as an escort at a gas-station-turned-jiggalo-service. When his boss tells him that the job includes serving men, he is faced with the ultimatum of quitting or finding a man who will work with this forcibly closeted clientele.
Enter Archie.
Archie gets caught engaging in sex work in a movie theatre by none other than Jack. Jack wears a police uniform and has a [prop] gun that he wields in order to pressure Archie to turn tricks with him at the gas station. I could say that this moment between a white would-be cop and a Black gay man is particularly stressful given the time period, but that would be disingenuous. A different kind of stress, definitely, but police are still beating and killing Black people today.
Flash forward an episode or two and the two are working together. Archie is dating a white client he met on the job, the naive and rather flat version of a real person, Rock Hudson (played by Jake Picking). Jack asks Archie to help him get a screen test because at this point Rock has a sleezy agent and is dating Archie, the writer. Archie delivers an impassioned monologue in response to Jack about how difficult it is to be Black and gay in the industry, how “ain’t nobody ever chosen” him. Jeremy Pope does his damn thing with the monologue, but the accelerated pacing of the show forces scenes like this on the audience prematurely instead of earning them through genuine character-building and an evenly-paced narrative arc.
Enter Henry.
Henry Willson (played by Jim Parsons) is the aforementioned sleezy talent agent and one of real people from that time. But with the Twitter tagline “what if you could rewrite the story,” I wondered where Henry Willson’s sexual violence fit in. This is a man who told Rock Hudson, ‘nice cock, can I suck it?’ as a command, not a question. This is also a man who made Rock watch him dance if he wanted to get a screen test for the boyfriend role in Peg. The idea is that if men actors want to do well in Hollywood, one of the only avenues is through being coerced into Henry’s sexual violence.
Now, there are limits on what the writers can respectfully change given that the harm portrayed onscreen actually occurred in similar ways at the hands of that man in real life. And thinking as an abolitionist, I do not advocate for writing a story where Henry is locked up for his sexual violence. But just because I wouldn’t want him—or anyone—in prison, does not mean he should be celebrated or never face accountability for his actions. But the only form of atonement we hear of is some therapy and we witness an apology to Rock, just one of Henry’s many survivors.
Rather than some form of true restorative justice, Henry actually gains more power by the series finale when the new studiohead greenlights his film about two men falling in love. The prospect of an openly queer film during that era is fantastic, but it seems particularly cruel that it is written by a known abuser, stars one of the many men that that abuser violated, and is written by the survivor’s partner.
Arcs like Henry’s made me wonder what would have happened if Murphy and Mock went full magical realism. We get glimpses of how that could look, but we do not get full commitment to this principle throughout the series. Take the rendezvous where the powerful studiohead, Ace Amberg (played by Rob Reiner), lies to his wife to see with his ‘other woman’, Jean Crandell (played by Mira Sorvino). Jean complains upon Ace’s arrival that he wants to jump right to sex. He bends her over without any warmup, gets a stroke or two in, orgasms, then suffers from a heart attack that leaves him incapacitated for a significant amount of time. The scene plays out like an I Love Lucy sketch, slapstick and all. This series of comical events allows his wife Avis (played by Patty Lupone) to take over the studio and get Archie’s film, Peg, made.
By this time in the series, Camille Washington (played by Laura Harrier), has convinced her white-passing Filipino partner—director Raymond Ainsley (played by Darren Criss) to let her audition for the title role. Her screentest proves to be the best, according to the script, although the movie-within-the-series did not feel particularly compelling. Gorgeous, but not compelling. Either way, Camille ultimately lands the title role in Peg over Avis’ daughter, Claire Wood (played by Samara Weaving). Avis admits that she is the best, but recognizes the race relations of the moment. A meeting with her friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, sways her. So Peg now becomes Meg, starring a Black woman and her white man love interest. And because of the race optics, they change the ending: she does not die by suicide, she decides to continue living. Now, if the events up to this point have not made you tilt your head in confusion, the next part might.
Hollywood then takes us from the Klan protesting the miscegenation in the film to racial harmony as a result of the film with very little explanation. The KKK quite literally leave a burning cross on the lawns of folks involved with Meg during production. They throw bricks. They throw burning shit. Avis and her team double down on protecting their stars, their director, and their writer, despite her initial hesitance to move forward with a Black woman actor as the lead. They face budget challenges and sabotage, but they eventually make an Oscar-winning film and people get to pat themselves on the back. Now I’m all for a fantasy world where women, queer folk of any gender, Black folk, and Asian folk win. But…girl.
The series dropped before the current wave of Black uprisings against centuries of anti-Black violence, but the quick jump from “what are we going to do about this film” to “Meg becomes an overnight success across the nation” bothered me well before the killings of Geogre Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Interracial relationships were illegal in California until 1948’s Perez v. Sharp and illegal nationwide until 1967’s Loving v. Virginia. People still face dire consequences today for interracial relationships, even though public opinion has shifted more toward acceptance. Cinematic representation might open a heart here or shift a mind there, but a beautiful interracial love story has not and will never directly lead to structural change regarding white supremacy, anti-Black racism, misogynoir, and settler colonialism in the United States.
Actor Michelle Krusiec, who played Anna May Wong in the series, recently noted that Asian actors still deal with the issues discussed in the series. She did not tell one lie. U.S. cinema includes the release—and multiple re-releases—of racist Disney propaganda in Song of the South (1946), Charlton Heston’s brownface in A Touch of Evil (1958), Mickey Rooney’s yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and blackface as recent as Robert Downey Jr.’s Tropic Thunder (2008). And Sacheen Littlefeather faced boos from the audience when she represented Marlon Brando in rejecting the 1973 Oscar in protest of racist portrayals of Native Americans. These are just a few troubling examples of how white supremacy and patriarchy show up in entertainment.
For all my criticism, I did watch the whole series and appreciate the work that went into it. I do genuinely hope that people experience what Krusiec felt when she saw Sandra Oh on screen for the first time. And hope that we can continue to use entertainment for escapism. I just hope that we do so while being honest about the reality in which we live.