Political(?) Sports & Gay(?) Cinema
Thoughts on American sports fans' political leanings, Saltburn, Maestro, and All of Us Strangers. Plus that NYT Taylor Swift op-ed.
Cansler Culture is back, baby!
Long story short, one of my new year’s resolutions was to bring this newsletter (now over two years old, if you can believe it) back from the near-dead—albeit with a few changes.
First, Cansler Culture will now be biweekly. (As in every two weeks, so actually maybe I mean semiweekly? bimonthly? fortnightly?)
Second, because I’m already writing longer-form pieces over at World Politics Review (read my latest here), Cansler Culture is going to prioritize quick-hit thoughts. There will still be plenty of pop culture and politics to chew on—it’ll just be more bite-sized.
So without further ado, the first edition of 2024:
Sports are Political(?)
Just before Christmas, Sportico dropped the results of a survey connecting Americans’ political leanings to sports fandoms.
It’s a fascinating chart, and it’s really easy to start finding interesting takeaways from the data: LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed tour, leans liberal? Women’s college basketball is more conservative than men’s college basketball?? Formula 1 is more conservative than NASCAR???
But if you look above the nicely arranged logos on top of blue and red backgrounds at the actual numbers, it seems clear that the biggest takeaway is how not partisan sports leagues’ fandoms are—the most conservative fandom sits at just 58% conservative; the most liberal sits at just 52% liberal.
That’s a pretty small difference in the grand scheme of things, especially considering that the same survey—as well as other surveys—found a pretty significant gap between the partisan leanings of sports leagues’ fandoms and how partisan leagues are perceived to be.
Rather than try and learn something from the partisan revelations, my personal takeaway from this data is that despite how all-encompassing the culture wars can seem in the sports industry, the effect of the culture wars discourse is indirect for most fans. Discourse doesn’t dictate whether they watch, but rather what their viewing experience ends up being.
(This is where I add the usual caveats: this is just one poll, and one where the sample size is on the smaller side.)
The Latest in Gay Cinema
Let’s wade, for a moment, through the swimming pool of some recent queer(ish) films I’ve seen.
On the shallow end: Saltburn
I want to be clear right off the bat—I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in a dark theater last month and watching this film.
There are so many creative choices that worked for me, that got my heart racing just a little. The aesthetics, combining the setting of a huge British estate in the summertime with costuming of the mid-2000s. The soundtrack of (only somewhat anachronistically) 2007 bangers. The cast of B-listers doing The Most. The scenes that are clearly designed to provoke, to make you think “oh wow they really did that on screen.”
And yet, I couldn’t tell you—then or now—why exactly those choices were made. I’m not convinced that any of the things that make Saltburn so riveting to watch actually serve any creative or thematic purpose. Saltburn is without a doubt heavy on spectacle, low on substance.
I’m not the first person to say this—critics’ favorite word to describe Saltburn is “shallow”—and fans have been quick to respond that plenty of films are heavy on spectacle and low on substance without being criticized for it. But the issue with Saltburn isn’t simply its shallowness. It’s that it purports to be deep—the script, the plot, even the aesthetics all seem like they’re trying to say something. Then they just….aren’t.
In the middle: Maestro
I am, generally, a biopic hater.
I’ve found that, too often, these films simultaneously try to cram too much information in while simultaneously dramatizing the main figure’s life in order to make the story more captivating, all while using the crammed information to make the dramatization seem real. Somehow, most biopics have too much fact, too much fiction, and too much fiction pretending to be fact.
I liked Maestro, then, probably because it doesn’t have those specific problems. Co-written, directed and starring Bradley Cooper, the movie tells one cohesive story rather than explaining all of Leonard Bernstein’s life and, because it is so heavily stylized, it never seems like a visual Wikipedia page. Maestro is just one story—not the whole story—about one facet of a clearly very complicated man.
What is that story? Most reviews would tell you that the main focus of Maestro’s story is Bernstein’s bisexuality, with the story of his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (played by a stupendous Carey Mulligan) a necessary extension of that focus.
I think it’s actually the other way around—Bernstein’s sexuality isn’t examined nearly as closely as his relationship with Felicia is. If anything, Maestro is to me a bit of a trojan horse, tricking you into seeing a film about Lenny that is really a film about Felicia. Admittedly, this may simply be because Mulligan has a better performance than Cooper. But either way, the film is better for it.
The deep end: All of Us Strangers
I put this film in the deep end of the swimming pool for two reasons: (1) It’s easily the most queer of the three films and (2) it’s easily the deepest thematically, digging into some really complicated themes and ideas regarding loneliness, connection, grief and simply how we relate to one another.
As Alison Willmore wrote for Vulture, All of Us Strangers has two overlapping and connected plotlines, both centered on Adam, a man who has just moved to a brand-new apartment building outside London. Neither plotline subscribes to easily understandable sequences of events—the cinema here is more poetry than prose.
The first plot shows Adam repeatedly taking the train to his old childhood home, where he visits and reconnects with his deceased parents, who appear to somehow be alive again. The second plot shows Adam’s budding romance with seemingly the only other person living in his building, a man named Harry.
Their love story is portrayed refreshingly, not reliant on sappy supercuts and sentimentality as so many love stories, and specifically gay love stories, are.
And yet, I have to agree with Willmore that the love story plotline is far weaker than the story of Adam and his parents. Harry’s relationship to Adam feels more like an afterthought—a distraction, even—from the more compelling plotline, the one which is also doing the heavy thematic lifting.
This is all to say: I’m sorry to report that All of Us Strangers would have been a stronger film were it a little less queer.
Speaking of…did you hear that Taylor Swift might be queer?
I was going to jump headfirst into the debate that’s been lurking beneath online Swiftie communities for years and which jumped to the forefront of culture last week due to a controversial op-ed in the New York Times.
But then I read a piece by Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic, which said everything I was going to say in much smarter terms. Here’s a free link.
That’s all for this edition of Cansler Culture.
Got thoughts on anything in this edition? On the new format? On ideas for me? Drop me a line.
Otherwise, until the next fortnight passes.