#troy patterson

[newyorker]

Amy Adams Unravels in “Sharp Objects”

In the evocatively pointed new HBO series, Adams conjures her woundedness without sentimentality.

In “Sharp Objects,” on HBO, Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) undertakes a homecoming and swiftly comes to inhabit a domestic thriller with a sultry sense of place. 

[insatiable-tv]

The Provocative, Preposterous Power of “Insatiable”

The new Netflix show “Insatiable” has been condemned as a thing even crasser than its controversial trailer promised. But the series still manages affection for all its craven goons and misguided saps.

Last month, the trailer for the Netflix series “Insatiable” arrived, inciting a smattering of indignation. The protagonist, Patricia Bladell (Debby Ryan), begins the series as a high-school student shunned for her fullness of figure and taunted by her classmates as “Fatty Patty.” Depressed, she eats her feelings and binges on TV until, in an early serving of cartoon violence, she initiates a fist fight with a homeless guy who insulted her weight. He lands a punch, which leads to her jaw being wired shut, which prompts three months of a liquid diet, which leads to the reveal, as in “She’s All That” and other local touchstones, of the scorned dork as a total hottie. The prejudicial scolding of the trailer—the presumption of fat-shaming—failed to appreciate that “Insatiable” is excitingly preposterous, but it did provide an early proof of the show’s provocative power. In the critical drubbing that has accompanied the series’ actual release, “Insatiable” has been condemned as a thing even crasser than promised, and not without reason. Crassness is often the subject, and sometimes the method, of this brazen slab of camp. “Insatiable” offers a deliriously rude tour of appetites, including teen lust, desperate housewifery, stage-motherhood, and the unfulfillable hunger for glory. (x)

Telling foolish sudsy stories with a dirty mouth, “Insatiable” pays tribute to the conventions of teen soaps and rom-coms. When the heroine, spying a cosmetics case, says, “Uh-oh, I feel a makeover coming on,” you can be sure that she is foreshadowing not just the application of eyeshadow but an homage to a staple montage. (Embedded within the series is a gloss on the career and star image of Drew Barrymore.) In the course of sassing its forebears by burlesquing their excesses and teasing out their subtexts, the show hoots at the clichés of pop fiction and real life even as it indulges them.

“Insatiable” has been received as a teen show, but is it, really? Though it may have a true and tender point to make about young friendship, its analysis of high-school cliques is largely limited to cueing up “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” on the soundtrack, reciting a familiar list of social types, and riding the coattails of “The Breakfast Club” to a soft chuckle. Certainly, the show’s attitude is adolescent, to judge by its cheaper gags (horse pucky, treadmill pratfalls), its regular boldness in risking moral gross-out comedy, and its zany characterizations. Alyssa Milano plays a status-seeking mom who drinks white wine and does a CrossFit-type workout at the same time; I thrilled at her refreshing directness when she woos an accomplice to her social climbing by saying, “What if I offered you a quid pro quo?” Christopher Gorham, of “Ugly Betty,” plays a golden-boy district attorney whose talents include flaunting his chiselled torso at the least opportunity; following arson investigators into a crime scene, he doffs his shirt, lest the scent of a charred motel room contaminate it.

At the center of “Insatiable” is the relationship between Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts) and Patty. (Debby Ryan deploys the direct sunlight of her Disney Channel-trained pluck to excellent ironic effect in the role.) Bob is a small-town lawyer in Georgia who, moonlighting as a pageant coach, trains teen-age girls in high-femme decorum and Vaseline-teethed feminality. A prologue explains how he came to be disgraced in both fields. During a pageant, one of Bob’s clients flunks a current-events question and fails to capture the tiara; her unhinged mother storms the stage to blame the daughter’s discombobulation on Bob, accusing him of inappropriately touching the girl. That there is a high degree of difficulty to the comic twistedness of such developments goes toward the nerve of the series’ creator, Lauren Gussis, whose confidence seems winning as long as the pace keeps up (and misplaced when episodes grow slack with meandering scenarios and repetitious dialogue).

Bob, working pro bono, because that is the only kind of work he can get, defends Patty against criminal charges stemming from her fight with the homeless man. He first meets her on the steps of a courthouse, where he sees not so much a person as an opportunity. “She was a diamond in the rough. A beauty queen just waiting to happen. Myyyy chance for redemption,” he effuses, his peachy voice quavering like he’s Ashley Wilkes. Bob returns often, and sometimes clownishly, to talk of redeeming himself, but the show is not simply ridiculing his narcissism or his vilifying as a patriarchal tool. Cynical though it is, “Insatiable” manages affection for all its craven goons and misguided saps.

The motion of the show’s sex-farce circle dance is such that Bob’s son is hooking up with the mother who fabricated the predation charge, until he gets back together with the daughter of the D.A., who elsewhere makes advances at Bob, who also is spurning the misplaced puppy love of Patty, whose own best friend is hopelessly crushing on her. There are tenuous alliances and demented obsessions—a panoramic rendering of folly. Patty emerges from her physical transformation as a bubbly sociopath: she believes that, when she ascends to fame on the pageant circuit, her former bullies will become “so jealous they can’t even breathe,” and her trembling hands clench as she says it. She is cruel and vain, an entertainingly horrible person who asphyxiates enemies in her imagination, one of the touches that lends this high-strung comedy an intriguing darkness, I think. Your nihilism may vary.

[insatiable-tv]

The Provocative, Preposterous Power of “Insatiable”

[insatiable-tv]

There are tenuous alliances and demented obsessions—a panoramic rendering of folly.  Patty emerges from her physical transformation as a bubbly sociopath: she believes that, when she ascends to fame on the pageant circuit, her former bullies will become “so jealous they can’t even breathe,” and her trembling hands clench as she says it. She is cruel and vain, an entertainingly horrible person who asphyxiates enemies in her imagination, one of the touches that lends this high-strung comedy an intriguing darkness, I think.

The Provocative, Preposterous Power of “Insatiable” by Troy Patterson

[morphiccompendium]

The Tiny Media Collective That Is Delivering Some of the Most Vital Reporting from Minneapolis

Like no other news outlet, Unicorn Riot brings an intimacy and intensity to its coverage of the protests against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd.

[davidrussellschilling]

Bloomberg in France Advising Startups

Bloomberg in France Advising Startups

C O N T E N T S:

KEY TOPICS

Natixis offers wholesale banking in the form of advising and financing, investment solutions in the form of asset management, insurance, private banking and private equity, as well as other specialized financial services.(More…)

Mr. Bard holds a Ma”trise degree in contemporary history from the University Rennes II, France, and is fluent in English and French.(More…)

De…

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[putthison]

“Some who expressed mixed feelings about the throwback shirt included hard-core traditionalists: men who embrace sack suits and rep ties as a shelter from the shifting winds of fashion, people harboring informed opinions about the collar rolls worn by William F. Buckley on ‘Firing Line’ and Miles Davis on the cover of “Milestones,” holdouts disdainful of Uniqlo’s of-the-moment oxford, with its paltry button-down collar.

The cost of the Brooks Brothers shirt — $140, from $92 — is their chief complaint: A shirt often treated as a workhorse is now valued like a thoroughbred, which is particularly scandalous to members of a sartorial subculture that makes a virtue of frugality, accruing social capital by finding Cordovan loafers at thrift stores.

On the other hand, a certain resentment of the merchants on which they rely (a state of perpetual laments that things aren’t as good as they used to be) seems to be a feature of the new trad worldview.

And the ready availability of the old-is-new shirt saves a lot of trouble for collar-roll connoisseurs who have been relying for decades on tiny mail-order shops with long waiting lists or troubling tailors to move their collar-point buttons by an eighth of an inch. It’s both lovely and risible at once, all this fussing over a collar prized for its unfussy appearance. ‘Nonchalance is everything to a preppy,’ Ms. Birnbach said. ‘It’s a virtue, a value, a trope and an aesthetic. As far as studied nonchalance is concerned, that’s how you learn.’”

- Troy Patterson in the NYT, on the new Brooks Brothers OCBDs

[putthison]

How the Motorcycle Jacket Lost Its Cool & Found It Again

Troy Patterson has an interesting article in the New York Times today on the history of the leather jacket. Specifically black leather motorcycle jackets and their role as signifying rebellion in everything from rock and roll to gay culture. An excerpt:

Just as actual 1930s gangsters aped the style of characters played by the actor George Raft, real-life delinquents turned to black leather. You didn’t need a motorcycle to be in a ‘‘motorcycle gang,’’ according to the moral-­panicky logic of the day. What is more, you didn’t even need a gang to enjoy the aura of a gangster, a fact attested by the many teenage rebels whose acquisition of a motorcycle jacket constituted the full extent of their rebellion. But for pseudogangs — that is, for rock bands and teen cliques devoted to them — the motorcycle jacket is an international uniform impervious to obsolescence. It is a garb for all tribes: goths in Kenya; rockabillies in Japan; you in your youth, wherever you wasted it.

Its signal plays on many frequencies, expanding its meanings when garbled. Writing about the Ramones, the critic Tom Carson once sketched the dynamics of the masquerade: ‘‘Their leather jackets and strung-out, streetwise pose weren’t so much an imitation of Brando in ‘The Wild One’ as a very self-­conscious parody — they knew how phony it was for them to take on those tough-guy trappings, and that incongruousness was exactly what made the pose so funny and true.’’ The Ramones’ imitators did not necessarily get this, and instead, reading the self-­parody as an uncomplicated statement of force, copied that. Or consider the curious intersection of gay leather and heavy metal. ‘‘The Wild One’’ was also a lodestar for sexual outlaws — for the homoerotic illustrator Tom of Finland, for instance, and lesbians who identified as ‘‘dykes on bikes.’’ Two decades before coming out of the closet, Rob Halford, the leader of the band Judas Priest, cultivated a stage presence that depended on the queer aesthetics of the leather daddy to entertain a furiously heteronormative audience of headbangers. Masculinity is pliant material.

You can read the rest here.