Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker convene an emergency podcast recording to react to this mind-bending, possibly immoral HBO comedy docuseries, wherein Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult personal confrontations, but this plan goes off the rails after 1.5 episodes out of the six that made up its first season.
This series builds upon Fielder’s previous show where he comedically tried to help businesses, Nathan for You, whose ground-breaking finale (“Finding Frances”) discovered The Rehearsal‘s format. Is Nathan himself the main butt of the joke, or is he punching down? Are there better ways to show the failings of reality TV? How does this kind of embarrassment humor differ from Borat and its ilk? Maybe the show is not as much about these people going through their rehearsals as an examination of the process of rehearsing itself that Fielder has devised.
Feel free to listen to us to find out what it’s all about, but you will be best served by watching this indescribable show yourself before experiencing this episode.
A few relevant articles also considering the show include:
Given the end of Better Call Saul, your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer, plus NY Times entertainment writer/philosophy professor Lawrence Ware, novelist/writing professor Sarahlyn Bruck, and philosopher/musician Al Baker discuss this strange TV “franchise” that amazingly produced a prequel that was arguably better than the original. We cover the characterization and pacing, novelistic TV vs. not having a plot roadmap in advance, and whether we want to see another installment in this world.
France has long been known for the cultural prominence it grants to its philosophers. Even so, such prominence doesn’t simply come to every French philosopher, and some have had to work tirelessly indeed to achieve it. Take Simone de Beauvoir, who most powerfully announced her arrival on the intellectual scene with Le Deuxième Sexe and its famous declaration, “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient.” Those words remain well known today, 36 years after their author’s death, and their implications about the nature of womanhood still form the intellectual basis for many observers of the feminine condition, in France and elsewhere.
Le Deuxième Sexe was first published in English in 1953, as The Second Sex. By that point de Beauvoir had already traveled extensively in the United States (and even written a book, America Day by Day, about the experience), but her readership in that country had only just begun to grow. An avowed feminist, she would through the subsequent decades become a more and more oft-referenced figure among American writers and readers who sought to apply that label to themselves as well.
One such feminist was the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who’s best remembered for coining the term limerence. A few years before she did that, she traveled to France to conduct an interview with de Beauvoir — and indeed “in her Paris apartment, provided the TV crew was all-female.”
Aired on public television station WNED in 1976, this wide-ranging conversation has Beauvoir laying out her views on a host of subjects, from abortion to homosexuality to feminism itself. “What do you think women feel most about feminism?” Tennov asks. “They are jealous of the women who are not just the kind of servant and the slaves and objects — they are themselves,” de Beauvoir says. “They fear to feel an infériorité in regard with the women who work outside, and who do as they want and who are free. And maybe they are afraid of the freedom which is made possible for them, because freedom is something very precious, but in a way a little fearful, because you don’t know exactly what to do with it.” Here we see one reason de Beauvoir’s work has endured: she understood that man’s fear of freedom is also woman’s.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
At the 45th Academy Awards, Marlon Brando won the Best Actor award for his performance in The Godfather — but sent a Native American civil rights activist named Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it on his behalf. “The twenty-six-year-old activist took the stage in a fringed buckskin dress and moccasins,” writes the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman. “When she explained that Brando’s reasons for refusing the award were Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans and the standoff in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, there were loud boos and scattered cheers.”
More seventies things have happened, but surely not many. With time, Schulman writes, “the whole thing cemented into a pop-culture punch line: preening actor, fake Indian” — the “crying Indian” environmental PSA had aired just a few years before — “kitschy Hollywood freak show. But what if it wasn’t that at all?”
Almost half a century later, this notable chapter in Oscars history has come back into the news in the wake of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ official apology to Littlefeather. It’s now more widely understood who Littlefeather is, and what Brando was going for when he made her his emissary that night in 1973.
Brando wasn’t especially hesitant to explain his actions even at the time: less than three months after the event, he laid out all his reasons on The Dick Cavett Show. “I don’t think that people generally realize what the motion picture industry has done to the American Indian,” he tells Cavett. “As a matter of fact, all ethnic groups.” He then runs down the “silly renditions of human behavior” delivered nightly on television, highlighting the phenomenon of “Indian children seeing Indians represented as savage, as ugly, as nasty, vicious, treacherous, drunken.”
Such clichéd portrayals were what Brando meant to address by speaking through Littlefeather. But the public’s immediate reaction, as Cavett puts it, went along the lines of, “There’s Brando jumping on a social-cause bandwagon now, getting in on the Indians.” They’d forgotten that the actor’s connection with Native American causes went back at least to 1964, when he was arrested at a Pacific Northwest “fish-in” by the Puyallup tribe protesting the denial of their treaty rights. And as Littlefeather’s fêting by the Academy shows, that connection has long survived even Brando himself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final leader of the Soviet Union, died last month at age 91, a news event that triggered responses ranging from “Who?” to “Wow, was he still alive?” The first response reflects poorly on the teaching of history: journalists reporting on Gorbachev’s death have been obliged to explain his significance to many American readers just a few decades after his name filled U.S. headlines. But it’s also true that Gorbachev left a thoroughly ambiguous legacy that seems to grow only more muddled with time.
As historian Richard Sakwa wrote on the 20th anniversary of the short-lived Soviet empire’s collapse, Gorbachev is remembered in the U.S. — depending on who’s remembering — as either a “magnificent failure” or a “tragic success.” Some former Soviets, especially those more partial to the authoritarianism of a Stalin or Putin, omit any positive descriptions of Gorbachev’s major achievement – to wit, reforming the U.S.S.R. out of existence in the late 1980s with little need, really, for Reagan’s extravagant nuclear posturing.
Putin himself calls the fall of the U.S.S.R. “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the previous century, an assessment shared by many who agree with him on nothing else. At the end of the 80s, however, an emerging generation of Russians had no clear sense of what was happening as their country fell apart. “I was 6 when the Soviet Union broke up,” Anatoly Kurmanaev writes at The New York Times. “I had no idea at the time that the person most responsible for the overwhelming changes transforming my hometown in Siberia was a man called Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember standing in line for bread in the dying days of Communism, but I don’t remember much discussion of his ‘perestroika.’ ”
Mixed admiration and contempt for Gorbachev trickled down to a younger generation a few years later. “The snatches of conversation I could hear were about people being fed up,” writes Kurmanaev, “not about the man with a distinctive birthmark sitting in the Kremlin…. Ironically, my first distinct, independent memory of Mr. Gorbachev, as perhaps for many of my generation, dates to a 1998 commercial for Pizza Hut,” an ad made by the U.S. fast-food company to celebrate the opening of a restaurant near Red Square, and made by Gorbachev because… well, also ironic, given the ad’s premise… he needed the money.
Written by Tom Darbyshire of ad agency BBDO, the commercial stages a debate between patrons at the restaurant before Gorbachev’s arrival calms things down. “Meant to be tongue-in-cheek,” Maria Luisa Paul writes at The Washington Post, the ad intended to show that “pizza is one of those foods that brings people together and bridges their differences,” says Darbyshire. In yet another irony, Gorbachev himself — who negotiated for a year before agreeing to the spot — refused to eat pizza on camera, allowing his granddaughter the honor instead.
Though he wouldn’t touch the stuff, Gorbachev defended himself against critics, including his own wife, Raisa, by saying “pizza is for everyone. It’s not only consumption. It’s also socializing.” What was the talk at Gorbachev’s local Pizza Hut on the day he popped in with his grandchild to socialize? Why, it was talk of Gorbachev.
“Because of him, we have economic confusion!” one diner alleges.
“Because of him, we have opportunity!” retorts another.
“Because of him, we have political instability,” the first responds.
An older woman breaks the impasse by stating their obvious mutual affinities for pizza, to which all reply, “Hail to Gorbachev!”
Try as they might, not even Pizza Hut could heal the wounds caused by the country’s economic confusion and political instability.
The ad has circulated on social media, and in history classes, before and after Gorbachev’s death as an example of mass media that “still reflects his legacy,” writes Paul. Gorbachev may be largely forgotten — at least in the U.S. — decades after the Pizza Hut ad aired, but it wouldn’t be his last attempt to leave his mark in advertising, as we see in the 2007 Louis Vuitton ad above, featuring a product much less accessible than pizza to the average Russian.
The twenty-first century encourages us to regard ourselves as having evolved beyond heroes, to say nothing of myths. Such things were only useful in the pre-modern world, as yet unblessed by the conveniences, pleasures, and certainties of science and technology. What, then, explains how devoted people are to Star Wars? For scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, George Lucas’ blockbuster space opera — and the trilogy it began — demonstrated modern man’s undiminished need for myth. Lucas returned the compliment, saying that could never have made it without the knowledge of archetypal heroes and their journeys he drew from Campbell’s work.
At that time, Moyers says in an updated introduction, “when millions of people were yearning for a way of talking about religious experience without regard to a religious belief system, Campbell gave them the language for it.” For decades — for centuries, really — once-inviolable narratives of the world and man’s place in it had been breaking down. The inability to trace a mythological arc in their own lives has driven people in various directions: toward cults, toward health fads, toward therapy, toward pop culture.
In the mid-to-late twentieth century, this created the most opportune of conditions for Campbell’s rise as a public intellectual. Though formed by the Depression rather than the Age of Aquarius, he could adapt his teachings about ancient myth, as if by instinct, for listeners hoping to raise their consciousness. “Follow your bliss,” he said, thinking of the Hindu Upanishads, and the New Age made into a cliché. But the Campbell of The Power of Myth has much still-relevant wisdom to offer, even for those who feel plunged into a despair unique to our moment. “The world is a wasteland,” he admits. “People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth.” But “the way to bring it to life is to find, in your own case, where your life is, and be alive yourself.” A hero’s journey awaits each of us, but never has there been so much to distract us from making it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
In 1963, Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” proved that a song sung in Japanese could top the charts in the United States. Not that the American recording industry was quick to internalize it: another Japanese single wouldn’t break the Billboard Top 40 for sixteen years, and even then it did so in English. The song was “Kiss in the Dark” by Pink Lady, a pop duo consisting of Mitsuyo Nemoto and Keiko Masuda, better known as Mie and Kei. In 1978 they’d been the biggest pop-cultural phenomenon in their native country, but the following year their star had begun unmistakably to fall. And so, like many passé Western acts who become “big in Japan,” Pink Lady attempted to cross the Pacific.
Mie and Kei made their American television debut performing “Kiss in the Dark” on Leif Garrett’s CBS special in May 1979. Accounts differ about what happened next, but less than a year later they had their own primetime variety show on NBC. Officially titled Pink Lady, it tends to be referred to these four decades later as Pink Lady and Jeff. This owes to the role of its host, rising (and NBC-contracted) young comedian Jeff Altman, who brought to the table not just his comic timing and skill with impressions, but also his command of the English language. That last happened not to be possessed to any significant degree by Mie or Kei, who had to deliver both their songs and their jokes phonetically.
In the video at the top of the post, you can see a compilation of the highlights of Pink Lady and Jeff’s entire run. Then again, “highlights” may not be quite the word for a TV show now remembered as one of the worst ever aired. “Pink Lady and Jeff represents an unpalatable combination of institutions that were on their way out, like variety shows, disco, and the television empire of creators and puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft,” writes the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin. The Krofft brothers, creators of H.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost, tell of having been tapped to develop a program around Mie and Kei by NBC president Fred Silverman, who’d happened to see footage of one of their stadium-filling Tokyo concerts on the news.
Sid Krofft remembers declaring his ambition to make Pink Lady “the strangest thing that’s ever been on television.” The startled Silverman’s response: “Let’s do Donny and Marie.” Donny Osmond himself ended up being one of the show’s high-profile guest stars, a lineup that also included Blondie, Alice Cooper, Sid Caesar, Teddy Pendergrass, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lewis, and even Larry Hagman just a week before the epochal shooting of his character on Dallas. None of them helped Pink Lady find enough of an audience to survive beyond its initial six episodes (all available to watch on Youtube), a discomfiting mélange of generic comedy sketches, unsuitable musical performances (with precious few exceptions, Mie and Kei weren’t permitted to sing their own Japanese songs), and broad references to sushi, samurai, and sumo.
The main problem, Altman said in a more recent interview, was that “the variety show had run the gauntlet already, and really was not a format that was going to live in the hearts and homes of people across America anymore.” Not only had that long and earnest television tradition come to its ignominious end, it would soon be replaced by the ironic, ultra-satirical sensibility of Altman’s colleague in comedy David Letterman. But here in the twenty-first century, Altman guesses, the time may be ripe “for a variety-type show to come back.” We live in an era, after all, when a piece of forgotten eighties Japanese pop can become a global phenomenon. And however dim the prospects of the variety show as a form, Mie and Kie themselves have since managed more comebacks than all but their most die-hard fans can count.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Alfred Hitchcock specialized in films about marked men: innocents, more or less, who suddenly find themselves pursued by sinister forces to the ends of the Earth. Little wonder, then, that Salman Rushdie would count himself a Hitchcock fan. The novelist references the filmmaker more than once in Salman Rushdie: Writing Under Death Threats, the DW television documentary above. He remembers a sequence from The Birds that cuts between students in a classroom and the playground outside: in one shot a blackbird comes to sit on the jungle gym, and just a few shots later it’s been joined by 500 more. “The case of what happened to The Satanic Verseswas, it was something like the first blackbird.”
Rushdie refers, of course, to the fatwa called down upon him in response to that novel’s supposed blasphemies against Islam by Ayatollah Khomeini. As a result he had to spend most of the subsequent decade in hiding, under the protection of the British government. By the time of this documentary, which came out in 2018, the danger seemed to have passed.
“What’s happening now, as the scandal goes away,” he says of The Satanic Verses, “is that people are able to read it as a book, rather than as some kind of scandalous text.” But the danger had not passed, as we learned earlier this month when Rushdie was stabbed onstage at a literary event in upstate New York, avoiding death by what’s been reported as a narrow margin indeed.
This story has its ironies, not least that Rushdie’s attacker was born in California a decade after the Iranian government’s disavowal of the fatwa. But for Rushdie himself, the attempt on his life can’t have come entirely as a surprise: he saw the gathering blackbirds of violent fanaticism as well as those of metropolitan complacency. Reflecting on the 2015 attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, he laments that “even people who are on the liberal, progressive, leftist end of the spectrum now find ‘problematic’ the idea of supporting people who make fun of religion.” Always and everywhere, writing has been done under the threat of one kind of punishment or another; more than 30 years after The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s case remains the most harrowingly extreme illustration of the writer’s condition.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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