I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  “I call this ‘palatial kitsch,’ ” Liberace declares as he shows off his home to Scott, a blond hunk played with dopey sweetness by Matt Damon. “Don’t you just love that?” Liberace sweeps through the mansion in a translucent ankle-length lounging robe with a Nehru collar, and he clearly gets a kick out of his stardom and everything he owns and controls—a confidence that is narcotic to Scott, who grew up in a series of foster homes. In many ways, theirs was a typical Hollywood marriage: A powerful star spots a young blonde, drapes her in jewelry, foots the bill for plastic surgery to suit his fetishes, and makes promises of security that ping all her daddy issues. To further amplify the May-December vibe, he’s her sugar daddy, the one who calls her Baby. She’s sweet on animals, and dabbles in music, but mostly she’s on call 24/7, at once his accessory and his pet. At first, they have a blast—cuddling, sipping champagne in a hot tub with solid-gold fixtures. But in the long run, they have sexual issues: He wants it, she doesn’t. (She was never in it for his body, after all.) She gets hooked on diet pills. He proposes an open relationship. She hocks her jewelry. He calls her a gold digger. The star finds himself a new blonde—this one colder-eyed—and it all blows up in court.

  The difference, of course, was that, because they were two men, Liberace never called Scott his husband. He was his “chauffeur,” right through the humiliating tabloid headlines that mocked Scott’s post-breakup lawsuit as a case of “palimony”—and Liberace never came out. (When he won a lawsuit against a British paper for a review that implied he was gay, he adopted a catchphrase: “I cried all the way to the bank.”) One scene features an insane charade of a deposition, during which Liberace describes his lavish gifts as mere perks for an assistant. In happier days, he’d offered to adopt Scott, an idea that everyone mocked. (“Really, you can adopt someone you’re fucking? That’s a great law,” Scott’s drug dealer says.) But it had a poignant legal logic: Without marriage, fatherhood could make their love public and official. “I want to be everything to you, Scott,” Liberace tells him, as the two snuggle in bed. “I want to be father, brother, lover, best friend. Everything. You know I love you….Maybe all those years, all those foster homes, maybe I’m your real family.” Scott practically leaps into his arms.

  There’s been a long, headache-inducing debate about the question of straight male actors “playing gay”—whether it’ll ruin careers, whether audiences will find the actor hot, and on and on. It’s a nonsense issue that social progress has begun to render irrelevant, and Michael Douglas’s spectacular performance as Liberace demonstrates a rarely discussed benefit. Freed from his trademark macho sulk, Douglas gains all sorts of unexpected charisma—he’s genuinely funny and surprisingly sexy, even with his toupee off, looking like an unshelled tortoise. His eyes lit with amused intelligence, Douglas’s Liberace is your classic “bossy bottom,” a gleeful narcissist who treats his hangers-on as a mirror (sometimes literally; he pressures Scott to get plastic surgery to look like a younger version of him). And yet, the man’s a charmer. He’s playful, even when he’s selling the world a line. In bed, the two have loving, affectionate exchanges, candid about their histories. Liberace jokes with Scott about the rumors—ones he encourages, of course—that he’s engaged to the Olympic champion Sonja Henie. “As if I would marry an ice skater,” he scoffs. “Please. I mean, those thighs!”

  The movie is frank, and often very funny, about Liberace’s sexual appetites, which he pursued without seeing any contradiction between them and his devout Catholicism. He has a penis implant, likes porn, and late in their relationship, he pressures Scott to take risks that seem crazy for a closeted star, like sneaking into a sex store in ankle-length matching furs. When the camera captures Liberace peeking over a booth with a grin, the movie doesn’t pathologize his good time—from one perspective, he’s a sex addict; from another, a madcap adventurer. During an argument about what Scott will and won’t do in bed, Liberace does a hilariously profane imitation of the couple as a gay Ricky and Lucy. “Why am I the Lucy?” Scott complains. “Because I’m the bandleader,” Liberace explains, with impeccable logic. “With the nightclub act.”

  Damon is excellent as Scott, a vulnerable Rocky Horror, right down to the gold lamé skivvies. And I have no idea what Rob Lowe did to his pretty punim to turn himself into the sick Dr. Startz, an insidious plastic surgeon and pill-pusher, but he steals every scene he’s in. (One of the film’s best moments is a shot of his eyes blinking drunkenly from above his surgical mask as he slices into Scott’s face.) Cheyenne Jackson has a tiny, delicious turn as Scott’s bitter predecessor; the wonderful Scott Bakula lounges around in tight jeans and a mustache the size of a small dog. Soderbergh’s entire production is impeccable, from the makeup—which traces Liberace’s face-lift and illness as well as Scott’s transformation from young buck to Frankenstein’s monster with a chin dimple—to the glittering cinematography, including re-creations of Liberace’s stage act. There are scenes, particularly during the breakup, that will be catnip for drag queens, but Soderbergh’s overriding perspective is neither arch nor cruel. The camerawork, peering from doorways down empty, opulent halls, captures the paradox of palatial kitsch, its blend of liberation and claustrophobia. For all that aesthetic razzle-dazzle, Candelabra has an underlying restraint. When Liberace’s much catered-to mother dies, Scott asks him how he feels. “I’m free,” Liberace snaps, then strides away—a moment that is undersold, not underlined.

  Bret Easton Ellis recently published a screed in Out, a lament against the constrictions of what he calls “The Gay Man as Magical Elf”: the out celebrity who is so wholesome, so spick-and-span, that he’s a credit to his sexuality. Hollywood has an even stronger insistence on commercial heroism, to the point that Soderbergh couldn’t get funding to make this project at a movie studio; only cable television offered him the freedom to be fully adult. Behind the Candelabra succeeds precisely because it doesn’t care much about health or what constitutes a good role model—it shows respect for a complicated marriage simply by making it real.

  WHAT ABOUT BOB?

  The Jinx

  The New Yorker, March 23, 2015

  I wrote this column before I’d seen the finale, in which they nailed Robert Durst with that notorious “I killed them all” bathroom tape. The news came through as a New York Times “Breaking News” alert, igniting a debate about spoilers—and further blurring the line between new and fiction.

  In The Jinx, a six-episode HBO documentary series, the director Andrew Jarecki investigates Robert Durst—multiple-murder suspect, Manhattan real-estate scion, and shark-eyed master of the throwaway epigram—and emerges with evidence that might put him in jail. This isn’t the first time that Jarecki has suggested Durst might be guilty: In 2010, he directed a feature film called All Good Things, in which Ryan Gosling, as Durst, commits every bad act that Durst has been accused of, plus a few bonus ones, like the implied bludgeoning of a lovable husky. All Good Things wasn’t great, probably because it was inspired by the facts of Durst’s life, few of which seem plausible as fiction. This is a man, after all, who, long after the mysterious disappearance of his first wife, Kathie, fled to Galveston, Texas, disguised himself as a mute woman, and then, while out on bail for the murder of a neighbor—whose corpse Durst dismembered with a bow saw—was arrested for shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich at a Wegmans. (At the time, Durst had thirty-eight thousand dollars in his car.)

  But even if All Good Things got a 32 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it impressed the one critic who counted. Upon its debut, Durst—who was independently wealthy, out of prison, and in no clear need of further publicity—contacted Jarecki and agreed to be interviewed. I haven’t seen the finale of The Jinx, so you’ll have to discern for yourself whether this decision was worth it for Durst. For Jarecki, it paid off in spades. The Jinx is wickedly entertaining: funny, morbid, and sad, at once exploitative and high-minded, a moral lasagna of questionable aesthetic choices
(including reconstructions of ghastly events) and riveting interviews (of Durst, but also of other eccentrics, like his chain-smoking, hot second wife). The series acts as an extension of the legal process and as a type of investigative journalism. For viewers, however, it’s primarily a noir striptease, flashing revelations one by one—a method that has proven appeal to viewers who like to feel both smart and titillated. Guilty as charged.

  Clearly, I’m not alone, judging by the smash success of Serial, a podcast hosted by NPR’s Sarah Koenig, which examined the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 2000 of the murder of his ex-girlfriend. The creators of Serial were, in turn, inspired by The Staircase, from 2004, an eight-part TV series about the trial of the novelist Michael Peterson, who was accused of killing his wife; it was filmed by the French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, who added a two-hour addendum in 2012. In the past several decades, true-crime documentaries have emerged as a kind of secondary appeals system, among them Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line; the three Paradise Lost movies; and the damning Deliver Us from Evil, in which Amy Berg got a pedophile priest to confess. The first two projects got their subjects out of prison; the third one helped put the priest back in.

  These projects have an afterlife online, where amateur detectives reinvestigate both the crimes and the documentaries themselves. Look up The Staircase and you’ll discover critiques of its filmmaker’s bias and, also, strangely convincing theories suggesting that an owl killed Michael Peterson’s wife. Serial, too, had its critics, but part of the appeal of the podcast was its transparency: Koenig placed her anxieties center stage, even when this risked making her appear credulous or uncool. Jarecki, who wears a goatee so sketchy that it might as well be another suspect, could easily seem like a questionable figure, given his slick ability to plug his films as studies in ambiguity (his others include Capturing the Friedmans and Catfish, which he produced). He’s a showman, it’s true, but he wins our trust with a few wise choices, among them folding in enough material about two victims—Kathie Durst and Susan Berman, an old friend of Robert Durst’s who was shot execution-style in Los Angeles—that they become more than chalk outlines. Yet, perhaps inevitably, the most watchable participants are the bad apples.

  This is particularly true of Durst. He’s an indelible character, mesmerizing in his strangeness: He’s parchment-skinned, blinky-eyed, lizardlike, but he has a quality of fragility, too, along with a disarming, if often peevish, directness. When he feels misunderstood, a Larry David–like querulousness creeps into his voice. He answers questions about whether he hit Kathie (yes, he did—but, hey, it was the seventies) with a candor that no sane or diplomatic individual would use. Maddeningly, this makes him seem open, even when he’s almost certainly lying. Much of the pleasure of watching The Jinx is simply being immersed in the stubborn illogic of Durst’s worldview, which is often less cagey than surreal. Asked why he lied to the police about his behavior on the night that Kathie disappeared, Durst explains that he thought if he offered up a false alibi (one easily exposed) he’d be left alone. Then again, he wasn’t wrong: One of the lessons of The Jinx is that you don’t need to be a brilliant criminal to get away with a terrible crime. You just need a cop who never follows up, plus the money for a legal team that’s savvy enough to play to the sensibilities of a Texas jury.

  There is, of course, a queasy undercurrent to any show like this: We’re shivering at someone else’s grief, giggling at someone else’s crazy. Many of the best documentaries have this ugly edge, which may be why we cling to the idea that their creators (or, at least, those not named Werner Herzog) are as devoted to truth as to voyeurism. (Documentarians don’t get paid enough to do it for the money.) Yet in this context, there’s an uneasy, funny-awful solemnity in this speech, from a Galveston detective: “Nobody deserves to be killed. Their head cut off. Their arms cut off. Their legs cut off. And packaged up. Like garbage.” When asked whether he purposely shaved his eyebrows while on the run, Durst’s response is impeccable as both humor and logic: “How do you accidentally shave your eyebrows?” At times, the moral of The Jinx seems to be that an air of dry wit, however inappropriately leveraged, is likely to win you allies.

  * * *

  —

  It’s illuminating to compare the methods of All Good Things with those of The Jinx: Both show footage of Durst as a happy child, swimming with his mother, and the adult Durst saying, “She died a violent death.” In The Jinx, the footage is wrenching because it’s presented as real: The voice-over is audio from the Texas trial, played over grainy home movies. Then these images (scored with eerie singing saw) segue into an overtly reconstructed flashback, one that shows Durst’s mother’s suicide: a grotesque image, jolting the viewer with its tackiness. The transition was unsettling enough to make me wonder whether those home movies, too, had been a reconstruction. At the same time, there was something useful about the coarseness of this technique, which was Jarecki’s own “tell.” It was a reminder that everything in a documentary is contrived, even one with a fancy HBO imprimatur. The most sincere people still know they’re talking to a camera.

  Against this Barnum-like theatricality, spontaneous gestures stand out. There’s a poignant scene in which Durst is found not guilty of his neighbor’s murder: He turns to his lawyer and says, uncertain, “Did they say ‘not’?” The most unsettling example comes in the fourth episode, when Jarecki suggests that he and Durst take a break from discussing his testimony in Texas. Durst has confirmed that his lawyers hinted he could answer specific questions about the dismemberment with “I don’t know”; that way, he’d sound less coldhearted. As soon as the filmmaker leaves the room, Durst, who is still wired for audio, lowers his head and mutters a sentence to himself: “I did not knowingly, purposefully lie,” he says, and then pauses, considering, to add a word: “I did not knowingly, purposefully, intentionally lie. I did make mistakes.”

  Durst was rehearsing the interview, the way one might rehearse one’s testimony—but does that make him seem more guilty or just more realistic about documentaries? His lawyer tells him that his microphone is hot. Durst is fascinatingly unconcerned. He says again, “I never intentionally, purposefully lied. I made mistakes.” Then, with the shrug of an honest man, he adds what might be the tagline for the series: “I did not tell the whole truth. Nobody tells the whole truth.”

  THE AMERICANS IS TOO BLEAK AND THAT’S WHY IT’S GREAT

  The New Yorker blog post, March 18, 2015

  The rare ambitious drama to nail the landing.

  In last week’s episode of The Americans, a woman in a fake marriage—Martha, a secretary at the FBI—began to understand the truth about her life. The surveillance equipment that she had snuck into her workplace, at her husband’s request, had been discovered. Back at home, that husband, “Clark,” a man who was, in reality, Philip Jennings, a Russian spy, began spooling out the usual hypnotic, reassuring spiel about their bright future as soul mates. This was the potent drug he had used to keep her on the hook for years, despite the fact that Philip was never around, the two of them lived separately, and he was unwilling to have kids. “If you’re asking me, do you think things will get better?” Philip, as Clark, said, peering through his nerd glasses, “then the answer is yes.”

  As any viewer of The Americans knows, the answer to that question is almost certainly no. Martha wasn’t in the mood, she told Clark, for the wine he was opening—but, really, she meant, for the talk itself. Her face, downcast, suggested something awful, which was that the anesthesia was wearing off. It was the beginning of the end of a powerful arc about intimacy and betrayal that began two seasons ago. But Martha’s was just one of many plots on The Americans that is hard to imagine with a happy ending: There’s the one about the teenager Philip is seducing; there’s the one about the recovering alcoholic whom Philip’s wife, Elizabeth, has been befriending, hoping to ensnare her in espionage; there’s the one about their daughter, Paige, an idealistic
young Christian who is being stealthily recruited, by her own mother, to become a spy; there’s the one about their son, an innocent, blind and open to the killers who are raising him. There’s the one about the fate of Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage—a deep bond between two well-trained fakes—and the one about the fate of the Soviet Union itself, which is due to collapse soon, not long after the show’s eighties setting.

  The Americans is a bleak show that ends each episode with heartbreak. It’s also a thrilling, moving, clever show about human intimacy—possibly the best current drama out there (at least of the ones I’ve been able to keep up with). Dread is its specialty and also its curse; it’s what makes The Americans at once a must-watch and a hard sell. This is a surprising conundrum because, judging by a plot summary, the series sounds like it should be a fun watch for anyone. It stars two attractive actors, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, as married spies with secret lives. By day, they pretend to be mild-mannered travel agents raising kids. By night (and sometimes by day; they have great babysitters), they put on crazy wigs, have sex with other people, participate in complex espionage schemes, and occasionally murder someone. There are memorable “eww” scenes, too, including a brutal sequence involving amateur dentistry and another in which a corpse was folded, with alarming realism, into a suitcase. But The Americans refuses to do what similar cable shows have done, even some of the good ones: offer a narcotic, adventurous fantasy in which we get to imagine being the smartest person in the room, the only one free to break the rules. Instead, The Americans makes the pain linger.