“A Star Is Born” And “Peak Belief”
The two main themes of “A Star Is Born” are 1) how everybody has “issues,” but being in the ranks of “celebritydom” puts them under the glaring spotlight of fame for everyone to see and thereby has far profounder effects on your career (and your personal life) and its degree of success or failure; and 2) what elements/factors/dynamics are in play that form the “secret sauce” of the felicitous mix of both a) BEING a celebrity the public has chosen to idolize and b) being a truly gifted creative artist contributing massive value for the public’s appreciation? (This latter message is superbly delivered by, of all people, Andrew Dice Clay, in a supporting performance that, if you have no idea it is the comedian whose record for selling out Madison Square Garden two consecutive nights for a stand-up routine excoriated by every feminist in the land remains unchallenged, will hit you like a bulldozer when you learn the actor doing this role is that same politically incorrect prodigy of the 1980s, hilariously proclaiming “Everybody said I was just like Sinatra.”) It is at that moment you begin to realize that the creators of this film have very insightful notions about the mercurial peculiarities of fame and its very complex workings.
Brad Cooper does an amazing job portraying such a famous man—himself in the grip of personal demons he is caving into more than trying to outsmart, defeat or at least make peace with (even though he seems to be going through some motions of attempted reform)—and it appears his mission is almost something along the lines of accepting “I am a total fuckup and so I am going to find somebody who has the strength and gifts to take my place in the world so that I can give up trying to deal with all this and instead find peace in death, having passed the torch to someone who can handle the burden I can’t, and whom I trust as my proxy.” Lady Gaga portrays the woman he has targeted for this (and, by the way, has fallen hopelessly in love with, and vice-versa), and she does a magnificent job interpreting a role who is at once seemingly world-wise but who in the end has no idea the extent of what she has gotten herself into and how it will overpower her ability to control her own life. And yet she pulls it off and looks good doing it, without once looking the other way when reality is in full view.
I did not expect this to be a particularly impressive film when I sat down to watch it the other day, but it was the masterful performances of Cooper (including his direction) and Gaga that completely changed my mind. This is at the least a very good film and I am tempted to wager that in time it may be regarded as a great or near-great film.
All of us have either experienced the problems of alcohol and drug addiction or known/loved people who have—including permanently formative figures such as mothers, fathers, lovers, husbands, wives, neighbors, sisters and brothers, teachers, nannies and so forth. People with whom we were intimate and trusting enough to let break down our barriers and thus open ourselves up to their poisonous love and insinuations into our inner beings. People we erroneously believed in, and as a result were punished for having those beliefs. It is a hellish experience to grapple with all the contradictions of how to feel about such people, and equally hellish to look at and experience the indelible, intractable effects (especially the damaging kind) they bring us. These are the experiences of life that illuminate such adages as “it’s a thin line between love and hate,” and that weary us with how many moving parts human beings have. This is how we learn how exhausting life can be, and how that exhaustion is not a great distance at all from the things that also lift us to our highest emotional heights and create our most energized and memorable ecstasies. it's also, just maybe, the only way we ever learn anything.
They also reveal how futile analysis is, and how unpredictable events can be, as well as the consequences of events the effects of which are as unknowable as the events themselves. Analysis is just a hatrack for hanging a hat on. You can look at “point a” and you can look at “point b” and you can articulate a course that alleges how to get from one to the other, and you can especially do this in hindsight and say, “this is what happened and why,” but it is only one explanation, and there is no sureness that how events unfolded were the only way they might have unfolded—and that too is why “past experience is no guarantee of future success,” as it is no foolproof basis for identifying anything at all about the future (or even the present or the past), let alone gauging its effects. In the end, most of us in the analytical racket tend to do something vaguely along the lines of a Christian work ethic, thinking that if we pile up enough evidence here, play with enough numbers over there, have enough footnotes and scholarly references in a third location, that the things we want to believe and say are true are worth betting on. It is all far more backward-integrated to elicit a conclusion that was actually a subconscious presumption for leading to a desired outcome than we dared admit to ourselves when we set about going through the circus of making it look like a legitimate investigative/discovery exercise. Why? Because we want to believe we can understand and control what we can’t. That like every other aspect of life, it too is mortal and must eventually succumb to the things that all things succumb to, which we can neither fully comprehend nor overcome, harsh as that is to accept. These are not volitional matters or choices to accept/reject; they are nasty unremovable permanent facts of life and death, fixed objects.
How powerful is this desire to believe? Well, that all depends on how much you have riding on it. There is a point in this film when our hero’s love of his life does in fact actualize the stardom he got her to believe she was capable of. And there she is, on the stage, receiving the highest accolades of the music industry, and what does our hero do? He gets drunk as a skunk and makes a mess of the entire occasion. How much do we the audience have riding on the idea that somehow this is going to pass without significant damage? A lot. We want to wish it away, we want to believe that the achievement of her success still stands as “objective undiminishable reality” and that this ignominious intoxicated pimple marring the complexion of an awards ceremony won’t alter that true state of affairs: “her actual talent and genius.” Sorry, life doesn’t work that way. And no analytical measuring stick can lead you to a pretty result you can believe in. You can only believe in what actually happens, and the more you have riding on a hopeful outcome, the likelier you are to learn about the gap between measuring sticks and reality. How does the character played by Brad Cooper sozzledly stumbling around a Grammy awards stage differ from, say, Elon Musk smoking pot on a podcast, or telling the world on “60 minutes” he has “no respect” for the SEC? We can say, “He’s a genius, and geniuses are eccentric.” But when the cold light of morning reality comes up over the mountain and you see the human wreckage passed out on the sidewalk, or the glaringly bad math of not knowing the difference between a half-million run rate vs. a half million in actual deliveries, and also see the culpable emperor pointing an accusing finger at the little boy who merely exclaimed the emperor was naked, it’s very tough to assert that genius and “eccentricity” again as excuses, or supporting reasons to continue believing. And then you see a 15-point stock drop and a ~$1 billion convertible bond expense looming and, baby, that’s a great big bite out of your dumb butt. This is a CEO, after all. If a cluster of general counsels, top accounting professionals and other high-ranking managers are walking away, then why are shareholders hanging around?
So what are we to believe now? Is the stock market at such a state of “ ‘unanalyzable’ peak belief?” Do we have too much riding on things we have convinced ourselves to think are legitimate expectations to allow ourselves to admit this? Are we contemplating legitimate happy endings down the road that can really come true? Or are we confusing one kind of happy endings with the other kind that take place in shabby strip malls in Florida sought out by NFL team owners we never expected to behave like pathetic Avenue C crack addicts? Are we bagholders-in-waiting?
Maybe believing was plausible when we thought achieving the transition to electric cars could be pulled off in a decade. But now we’re also lulling ourselves into the idea that we can not only do that, but also feed all the cows and steer seaweed and stop their farting; rebuild every building; build great railroads with no diesel engines across the oceans, and get rid of airplanes? Is it possible we’re trying to believe too much, or that maybe we already do? How many other Teslas are out there?
The last time things looked this nutty to me, people were flocking to Broadway to see “Hair” and “Oh! Calcutta!” and the wags at the New Yorker magazine—always entertaining—were warning us that things purporting to be shocking and insightful were not. But, well, the music was good. And it was also fun watching actors and actresses running around naked on stage. Also, New York went bankrupt, the democrats nominated a nutcase who couldn’t even carry his home state, and lost to an incumbent president who chalked up one of the more successful reelections in history, ended the gold standard, opened the door to an unknown mystery called China and then resigned in disgrace two years later. Oh…the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam too, wasting 58,000 lives doing it. As I recall, everybody was trying to believe in a lot of things that never happened back then either.
And so goes the lyric in the Steely Dan tune,
“I cried when I wrote this song.
Sue me if I play too long.
This brother is free.
I’ll be what I want to be.”
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