Hollywood – You played yourself

Hollywood (2020) – Ryan Murphy, 7 episodes à approx. 50 mins, streamable on Netflix.

Rating: 3/10
Entertaining – if  you can block out all the real-life-references, real-life-struggles and power dynamics and pretend this Hollywood plays in an alternate universe that has nothing to do with the actual US-film industry. 

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I sat with two friends in the park somewhere in Berlin and asked them what shows they can recommend. Even with the steady easing pandemic-related restrictions, I feel safer at home in the evening. Avoiding the streets has two advantages: firstly, Netflix and chill is a perfect way of not having to deal with self-entitled drunk almans and secondly, avoiding situations of having no place to pee.

One friend suggested Hollywood because someone suggested it to them as well. They described the plot like this: Hollywood is about an alternate Hollywood in the 1960s, where a movie is made that is written and directed by a person of colour and only stars actresses and actors of colours. 

“Wow!” I said, “that sounds interesting!”

“Some said the narrative was too good to be true though, turning the show into a mere fantasy, too far from reality”, they added as a disclaimer. I still decided to give it a shot and watched the whole thing within 3 evening sessions.

The first episode centres around Jack Castello (played by David Corenswet), a white wannabe-actor, who, instead of kicking off his career at the film production company Ace Studios, gets hired as a sex-worker at a gas station. If you were watchbaited like me by the description above you were probably very confused where this was heading. Also, I expected a more serious format, considering the topic of the show. So what immediately stood out to me was the goofy, almost musical like quality of the show. 

Gradually more characters of colour, all wanting to succeed in Hollywood, are introduced. Gradually you’ll see where this is going: Hollywood is a series that tries to tackle many patriarchal and race-related issues in a sensitive way, while at the same time being positive and cheerful as fuck. And while I understand that it can be liberating somehow to watch a happy-go-lucky show where straight and gay BIPOCs in the Jim Crow-era stand up and fight homophobic and racist Hollywood executives; those two things just don’t go well together. It’s like walking into a bathroom where someone just laid a turd and tried to cover the smell with air freshener. You’ll notice the good intention, but the scent is artificial, too forced and it achieves the opposite of what it wanted to: you will notice the smell of shit even more. 

The first wave of shit smell is the omnipresent narrative of White Saviorism. Every character who is prevented from setting foot into show business because of homophobia, sexism and racism, is enabled by a white or passing character. All characters of colour experience success only because of their proximity to whiteness. Camille Washington (played by Laura Harrier), the black actress who is sick of her minstrel-showy portrayals of “blackness”, is the girlfriend of white-passing, half-Asian newbie director Raymond Ainsley (played by Darren Criss). During a sex scene, she asks him if he can consider giving her the lead in his movie Peg, a movie about an unsuccessful white actress who suffers the disappointment of her lifetime in Hollywood. Archie Coleman (played by Jeremy Pope), the black writer of Peg, dates a white guy and through him turns from a hiding-in-the-dark closeted homosexual to a proud not-afraid-to-hold-hands-and-show-PDA gay man. Even Anna May Wong (played by Michelle Krusiec), who in real life lost the lead role in The Good Earth to a white actress in yellow face, gets another shot at her career because Raymond asks her to play a supporting role in Peg.

Wearing sunglasses indoors just so you can take them off dramatically and ask “YOU’RE ASIAN?”

If there was a Bechdel Test but with two characters of colour not speaking about a white person (is there? Someone enlighten me), I don’t know if the show would’ve passed the test. In a total of seven episodes, each running around 50 minutes, I can only think of two scenes in which two characters of colour – excluding the passing character of Darren Criss – genuinely talk to each other about something other than another white character. 

They even brought Eleanor Roosevelt into play as the boss character of White Saviorism. It’s not Camille’s touching screen test that earns her the part. It’s not even the fact that her only competitor, a white actress, gave an arbitrarily bad performance to basically hand Camille the role. It’s not the female interim-studio head’s own recognition that the only reason Camille would not get the part is because of the colour of her skin. But it needed Eleanor Roosevelt (who never even watched the screen test), to plead with the hesitant studio head in a highly emotional scene to do the right thing and let Camille be the lead. 

“Just think about what it might mean to a [insert all the well-meaning patronizing words to avoid using the n-word]”

My jaw dropped and I got goosebumps from the immense cringe when I watched that scene roll out. What is the message of this scene? That no matter how hard a person of colour tries, they’ll always need a white person to have their back?

So now that Peg isn’t a white lady anymore, the finale, in which Peg originally kills herself from disappointment and shame of being cut out of a movie, is rewritten. The producer, Dick Samuels tells the writer Archie that it troubles him to see the black lead die. Let me phrase that again: the white producer tells the black writer to change the script because watching a black person die on screen is “troublesome” (aka “problematic”).

Without any further ado, the movie title Peg is changed to Meg and Meg decides to continue living at the end of the movie. But, just like everyone in the show is rescued by a white character, even the fictional Meg in double fictional Hollywood is stopped from killing herself by her white boyfriend. His reasoning for not committing suicide is, even though she might not be a Hollywood star, at least she is his star. 

Which brings me to the second wave of shit smell: representation for the sake of representation.

There is this character, the talent agent Henry Wilson (played by Jim Parsons). He is written in a way so that the viewer has no other choice but to think he is a piece of shit: He uses his position of power to assault young, gay actors who struggle to make it in Hollywood.

Throughout the whole show, there is not one bit where you, the viewer, are encouraged to think otherwise. Even though glimpses of his own struggle as a gay man in Hollywood are tossed as crumbs to the audience at one or two instances to flesh him out as a dynamic character, the audience is clearly supposed to see him as an antagonist. Until the last episode, where he suddenly experiences the kind of remedy, only Hollywood (or in this case Netflix) is able to pull off: after briefly acting as a producer, a position he only got because he blackmailed the interim-studio head, he decides to work on a  “genuine romantic homo movie” and cast his previous object of power, the young gay, and very untalented actor Roy Fitzgerald (played by Jake Picking) as the lead. 

It’s an implausible and very out-of-character move, but it reflects the attitude and the real intentions of Hollywood: show executives who are willing to forget every single shitty thing Willson did just to let everyone - fictional and real - feel good about themselves. 

Another character experiences the same 180-degree turnaround. The original studio head, the owner of Ace Studios, who was a certified piece of shit 90% of the little screen time he had, only needs one final scene to revoke everything his character has established before; a scene where he isn’t even necessarily depicted as a good man, but a minimally decent one at best. All he had to do was having a near-death-experience to treat his wife – who ran the studio during his 3-episodes-absence – with respect, having a normal, yelling-free, conversation with her, and pronouncing her the co-head of the studio, but only after she demanded it.

Really her fault for not asking earlier.

That’s it. Suddenly you’re expected to believe he’s changed? You have to, because in the next scene after his pardoning he literally dies. This begs the question: What good does a romantic movie about a male, gay couple do, if the producer is a last-minute-pardoned asshole, who made powerless men his sex objects during his entire career? What good does a movie about a black actress “making” it in Hollywood do, if the producer is an old school sexist racist guy who only changed because he had a near-death experience? Is watching a show, where a fictional OSCAR goes to the first black female lead, just twenty years after Hattie McDonald won hers for Best Supporting Actress in Gone With the Wind, supposed to be liberating? When we all know that in real life it took Hollywood another whopping 61 years to present Halle Berry the award for best actress (who, to this day, is still the only black woman to receive an Oscar in that category)? Or is it really a fantastical fairy tale told by a mainly white male production cast, made to woke-bait a new generation of hopeful filmmakers and audiences of color? Was the fictional Oscar for Anna May Wong as best supporting actress an honest recognition of her work, or really just white men in Hollywood redeeming themselves from a real injustice they have committed? Even if it was the former, am I supposed to feel true pride to see an Asian woman making it in fake-Hollwood?

No, to me, Hollywood was really about Hollywood, not in the sense of a better Hollywood though, but the one that exists and exploits real stories about BIPOCs, only to whitewash them and sell them to a white audience, even when you are made to believe it’s finally a story truly for BIPOCs. Hollywood celebrates representation politics and white saviourism as it did in Green Book, The Help or Driving Miss Daisy. It tries to be something new when in fact, it stays very loyal to Hollywood’s legacy. 

And just like after spending too much time in that smelly bathroom, barely even noticing the shit smell anymore, once you step out of the room, take a few steps back and look at it from afar, you’ll see that that room will probably never smell any different because it was always designed to be shat in.