Diana, Princess of Wales in Russia in 1995. Photograph by Nick Parfjonov.
In “Spencer” — the third leg in a November Diana trilogy that includes Season Four of “The Crown,” now on DVD, and “Diana: The Musical,” now on Broadway — director Pablo Larrain does for the late Princess of Wales what he did for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in “Jackie” (2016) : He imagines a goddess at a tipping point.
Read MoreNancy Kwan on the set of “Flower Drum Song” (1961), in which her China doll character, showgirl Linda Low, sings “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” It’s hard to imagine the musical being revived today.
Pope Francis has blessed civil same-sex unions but says gays can’t be married in the church, because what they’re doing is a sin.
So gay people are good enough for the state but not good enough for the church. Good to know.
Whatever happened to religion’s famous “hate the sin but love the sinner”? That turns out to be an impossible needle to thread. For the sin is apparently inseparable from the sinner. Georgia’s Crapabble First Baptist Church has cut ties with Richard Aaron Long, who killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent., in the Atlanta massage parlor shootings because of what he described as a sexual addiction. (What is it with shooters and three names — Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth?) I make no excuses for this man, who belongs to the long list of the literature of rejection, filled with men, usually young and white, who have a sense of self-aggrandizement and a disproportionate rage at rejection or some other supposed grievance.
But perhaps if religion spent less time equating sexual pleasure with sin and guilt and more time concentrating on actual love for humanity, we would at least eliminate one motivating factor in Long’s hate crimes, for they are truly hate crimes in the deepest sense of the term — a hatred of self that he had to turn on others lest he implode.
Were his crimes, however, also racist?…
Read MoreDiana, Princess of Wales, and tenor Luciano Pavarotti at the concert “Pavarotti and Friends for the Benefit of the Children of Bosnia” in his hometown of Modena, Italy, in September 1995. Cut loose from the royal family, she had by then developed the elegantly economical look that crystallized her last years and our sense of a woman in full.
Winter, as Charles Dickens knew, is the season of ghosts. The holidays bring memories of those who are no longer with us, reminders of those who cannot grace our tables — never more so than during the pandemic when the table is often a table set for just one.
TV, too, the great American unifier and divider, plays a role in this with sad but uplifting holiday fare and series that reopen old wounds while underscoring that the past is never really over, because it is part of the continuum that informs the present and the future.
“The Crown,” Netflix’s addictive-as-potato-chips series about the British royal family, is now in its fourth season, which brings us to the Diana years and a reappraisal of her, her legacy and what went so horribly wrong. Why does Diana, Princess of Wales, haunt us still? More to the point, why do we still haunt her — for it is the living who haunt the dead, not the other way around.
Read MoreAmerican Vice President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United States Embassy, then in Tel Aviv, in March 2016. In congratulating Biden on being elected president, Netanyahu reminded him of their warm relationship. Netanyahu had been one of President Donald J. Trump’s biggest boosters, but in the words of French President Emmanuel Macron when he first met Trump: “Nobody is forever.”
“This is one of the happiest days of my life,” a business manager told me yesterday. I couldn’t but concur. I , too, was happy, proud and content to be an American — something I haven’t been for four long, dark years.
In their victory speeches, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris struct the right notes about unity and hope. President Donald J. Trump’s “American carnage’ may have been fine for some when they were making oodles of money. But when everyone’s actually in American carnage, as we are with the coronavirus, systemic racism, a crashed economy and climate change denial, people want change. They want a leader who can create a vision for going forward together, communicate that vision and execute it. And that’s what Biden laid out Saturday night, while Harris in suffragist white gave women of color in particular a symbol of belief fulfilled.
Read MoreHattie McDaniel as Mammy, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in a publicity still from “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Neither Clark Gable (Rhett) nor Leslie Howard (Ashley) initially wanted to participate in what they rightly intuited was a women’s picture in which the ladies would take the lead. Even after George Cukor, famous for directing fine actresses, was fired from the movie and replaced by Gable pal Victor Fleming, the female stars continued to receive secret coaching from Cukor.
As the Black Lives Matter movement galvanizes the nation, there are renewed calls to remove the names and statues of prominent Confederate leaders from the Capital (and the Capitol) as well as from Army bases throughout the South. As I have written in these pages— and as one young African-American woman put it recently on TV — this isn’t even primarily a case of black and white, even though the issue is pretty much black and white. The Confederacy lost, and the losers don’t get to dictate either the terms of their surrender or the trophies of their defeat. There are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin.
Still, as President Abraham Lincoln said, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.” The monuments and names of the Confederacy should belong to schools and museums — or at least photographs of them should be. We can’t preserve every one. There they can be curated and studied, so that present and future generations can understand how they came to be erected in the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras as a way to reassert white supremacy.
The issue of works of arts and entertainment is a more complex matter, however.
Read MoreBartholomeus Spranger’s “Diana-Luna” (1566-1611), oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. The work captures the way art eroticizes the virgin archetype.
With the passing of movie star Doris Day May 13 at her home in Carmel Valley, California, at age 97, much has been made of her goody two shoes image on film in the 1960s and the way it was pooh poohed in subsequent decades when attitudes toward women’s sexuality were expanding in the advent of feminism. (It was an image that Day, who had a number of troubled marriages, herself dismissed on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson,” and indeed she often played complex wives, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and as the torch singer Ruth Etting in “Love Me or Leave Me.” )
Read MorePhilippe I, duke of Orleans, in the robes he wore to his brother Louis XIV’s coronation in 1654, oil on canvas. Palace of Versailles. The Met’s “Camp” show would define the bisexual cross-dressing Monsieur as camp, but would he?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibit, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” (through Sept. 9) was inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” which she defined broadly as style over substance characterized by theatricality, irony, playfulness, masquerade and unselfconsciousness. It’s a definition and a show that cuts a wide swath, but in the end it turns out to be less about camp and more about identity — its mutability and its ownership.
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