Halston Netflix Movie, Halston Documentary, Halston psychology, psychoanalysis of Halston
Halston is a Netflix series casting Roy Halston Frowick (Ewan McGregor), the man
who became Halston, as a victim of his addictions to cocaine and sex, but more
centrally as a victim to corporate greed.
While I think there is merit to this narrative – and not a little truth,
the documentary made a few years earlier, also called Halston, tells a more
complex tale, one that suggests a bio pic could have interpreted Halston’s life
in various ways.
I took some likely well deserved heat from a reluctant friend
of mine for writing about Ray Kroc based on his portrayal in the movie The
Founder. My weak rejoinder to her
was that I was interpreting the movie.
I, in fact, knew very little beyond the movie about Kroc and his life.
With Halston, I have the documentary to provide some
balance. If you have seen the Netflix
film and haven’t seen the documentary, I recommend it, if only because it
includes images of the original dresses that Halston created at the height of
his powers worn by the models in his shows – and they are truly
remarkable. The copies in the Netflix
film pale in comparison, even though the Netflix film does a nice job of
explaining the artistry that went into their creation.
Halston began his career as a milliner. He made hats for his mother – in part to
assuage her pain when her drunken husband abused her. His wish to clothe her is a thread that runs
through the series, but I think it one that could have been amplified and could
have taken the narrative in very different directions.
Halston designed Jackie Kennedy’s pill box hat for Jack’s
inauguration, and that could have been a trap for Halston – and for a short
while it was what he was known for. Women
of a certain rank wanted a hat from Jackie’s milliner. Fortunately (or not – the biopic could have
been made as a Greek tragedy, pointing out how Halston’s character leads to his
inexorable fall, but it was more in the American tragedy vein – where the fault
lies in the culture he inhabits) hats went out of fashion, and Halston worked
on becoming first a couturier, and then a purveyor of fashion to the masses.
The Netflix series; however, ends up feeling to me like a
failed psychoanalysis. This doesn’t mean
that a lot of good work isn’t done – it is, generally, in my experience, in a
failed analysis and certainly in this series.
In a psychoanalysis, as opposed to a psychotherapy, one’s entire life is
in play – or should be. And, because we
are dealing with something as complex as an entire life, there are all kinds of
narratives, themes and material that emerge - creating a swirling, messy,
internally inconsistent landscape that can feel, at times, more like a Turner
than a Constable landscape and that can, at times, veer towards being more like
a Jackson Pollock canvas than anything representational at all.
The analytic process, like the work of the playwright or the
film director, identifies themes and brings some organization to the chaotic
process that is our lives. The challenge
to the playwright and to the analytic pair is to organize without
reducing. And we can err on either
side. Where The
Founder may have erred on the side of reducing (and my post followed the
writer/director down that rabbit hole), the failure of the Netflix series may
be in allowing the threads of Halston’s complicated life to have remained raw,
exposed, and never quite organized enough that they can be reduced enough that
we can appreciate or hang onto the person that he was.
The first episode of the Netflix series
A lot gets packed into this episode. We have Halston’s childhood care for his
mother, Jackie’s pillbox hat, and his break away from Bergdorf Goodman (where
he made his hats) to building his own haute couture shop with a team that
includes a group that he sees as misfits who find a home together. He has his first designing failure – a show
that sells not a single dress – and his first success – the use of microsuede
in a trench coat that goes viral.
Halston meets Liza Minelli (Krysta Rodriguez) and
designs a dress for her – and they bond over having been determined by their
past connections with powerful women – Liza by Judy and Halston by Jackie. This interaction introduces us to the sweet
and vulnerable part of Halston – who can connect with Liza, but also with all
of the women who come to his richly textured lair. Halston’s interactions with
his team, on the other hand, where is mercilessly cruel helps us see his more
sadistic side. Here, the sadism is
balanced by a delicately empathic connection to his junior partner (when he is
not mercilessly berating him). He has a
lovely connection with his first, sympathetic lover – but then expresses
disdain towards him before replacing him with the crass and sadistic lover Victor
Hugo (Gian
Franco Rodriguez).
The transition between charming and cruel is dramatized as
Halston works on his own signature look and sound. He dons a black turtleneck, dark glasses,
slicks his hair back, and affects an accent that, unlike the Indiana twang that
would suggest the vulnerability of a country boy in the city, exudes the
confidence and unapproachability of the all-knowing, cultured genius.
Psychoanalytically, what is happening here is that the
vulnerability is being repressed – buried under the cultured veneer; and the
anger – the disruptive fury that is part reaction to and part identification
with his father and all the other bullies he has confronted, is projected – or more
precisely carried by projective identification – into the person of the second
lover, the boorish presence that is never owned or acknowledged by Halston, but
always there – seemingly like a stone around his neck, but more secretly
maintaining a connection with the hated father – whose love he so desperately
craves.
To unpack that last sentence a little bit: Halston contains
within his character both the vulnerable and abused little boy/rube from
Indiana and the sadistic, hateful father figure/homophobic tormentors of his
youth. Part of how Halston experiences
love is feeling hated (I am hypothesizing).
He knows that his father loves him.
We could even posit something really complex – that his tormentors are
not just homophobic, but drawn to and repulsed by their fascination with
homosexuality. Halston “hires” Victor
Hugo to be the cruel person who will love him – but also hurt him. Hugo will also be the rube that Halston can
distance himself from by publicly disdaining Hugo and remaining aloof from him –
as if he has no idea where this rube comes from or what he has to do with his
regal self.
Episode 2
The band takes the show on the road. They head to Europe for a benefit for Versailles where five American Designers take on Five French Designers to see who is king of the design hill (Three years later there would be a similar tiff to rate French vs Californian Wines depicted in Bottle Shock – in both cases those plucky Americans win hands down. Ouch. The French are now kings of neither fashion nor wine). Halston is reluctant to go, in part because he needs to get his financial house in order. Two birds get killed with one stone as fashion maven Eleanor Lambert steers him to a relationship with businessman David Mahoney (Bill Pullman).
In this episode, Halston’s underlying vulnerability is more
directly in evidence as he freaks out before the show and needs Liza’s soothing
– she is there to star in a musical number that will be part of the show - to
get back in there. More centrally, he
connects with Mahoney apparently for the dollars, but also for the unconditional
and eternal support that he expects that Mahoney will give him (and that
Mahoney promises). That is a quite
volatile mix – especially for someone with a very deep well of unmet
needs. How much stuff will be needed to
fill or tap that well? We will see that
no amount of fame, cocaine, success and sex will quite do it.
I think this is one of the places where the analytic/tragic
thread could have been woven in to good effect.
Yes, Halston is needy. Yes he
thinks that unlimited resources – corporate bucks – will help meet that
need. But what is the need, really? When Halston set up his salon in the previous
episode, one of the central things that set it apart, aside from his designs,
was the kind of relationships that he built with his clients. He wanted to provide for them what they did
not receive elsewhere – he wanted to hear them and to connect with them. I think this is reflected in the dresses he
created. The dresses create a platform
for women to stand on and declare themselves.
From a male gaze perspective, the women look naked in the dresses he
designed. From an empowerment
perspective, they allow them to be seen for who they are. The dresses expose the women’s power by
calling attention to the women wearing them, not to the dresses themselves.
I think it would have been possible to weave in the allure
that Halston may have felt to giving this kind of platform to women everywhere –
to women like his mother – whose allure he surely felt. In the documentary, when he is announcing his
partnership with J.C. Penney – something that will result from the relationship
to Mahoney – he sounds quite convincing when he talks about J.C. Penney being
the place that clothed his mother – and his wanting to create fashions for
people like the people he grew up knowing in Indiana. Halston’s megalomania for sex, cocaine, and
fame seems to me to also be a megalomania focused on caring for not just the
elite women – this was the goal of his mentor.
His goal is, I think, to provide succorance to all women. Wow.
No small feat. This, I think, could
be the stuff of tragedy.
Episode 3
This is by far the best episode in the series. In his first venture into mass marketing,
Halston works with a perfumer, Adele (Vera Fermiga) to create a
signature fragrance. This is a fun
episode. We learn something about the
art of perfuming – we need a top note – something floral and bright – Halston’s
constant companions, orchids; we need a middle tone – shaving cream, Halston’s
father’s stuff – a symbol of the love he yearns for and the man he would like
to become fill that slot; and we need a bass – and here Halston brings his
lover’s jockstrap and Adele gamely breaths it in – filled as it must be with
musky tones. These smells need to be in
harmony and, at least according to this depiction, they should evoke something
from the person who is smelling them, so they should be constructed from the
memories of the creator. It is as if, by
rummaging in one’s own attic, one will find the nostalgic elements that others –
even if they don’t know why – also desire.
We certainly have evidence for this in the ways that analysts have drawn
on their own narrative histories to describe personality architectures – with
the amazing generalizability that flows from the careful depiction of the
particular.
In addition to the scent, there is the package for the
scent. The bottle must be phallic – and Halston
is stung when the design of his lead model, Elsa Peretti (Rebecca Dayan) is dismissed
as missing the requisite phallic components.
Plus it will cost extra to produce it the way he wants. “You business people always say the talent
can’t pay, and yet we do, constantly, in ways you can never and will never
understand,” he says as he writes a check to cover the costs of producing the
bottle, something that they pay back when the perfume becomes a huge hit.
The success of the perfume fuels Halston’s entry into the
world of Studio 54 and the cocaine fueled rush of the late 1970s. We are poignantly treated to Halston
discovering Victor Hugo having sex with another man overlooking the dance floor
at the disco, and we realize that the intimacy – the closeness – that the
perfume promises has eluded Halston.
There is something perhaps a bit over the top in the angst
that Halston feels about each of the elements that he brings to Adele, but it
is dramatically and, I think, psychologically resonant to see behind the
curtain that Halston has constructed to protect himself to glimpse what it is
that he is protecting. This is the
privilege of the therapist/analyst – to, at particular moments, inhabit the
space that the patient protects and to help expand that space. In this case, Adele helps Halston expand the
space to include millions of women, and the men who enter the aroma cloud they
create. Halston is supporting women and
seducing men – what could fit him better?
Halston continues, both with his dresses and with his
perfume, to help women have the allure that they need to help men see
them. Halston is creating the promise of
connection for others while failing to achieve it in his own life. I also think there is something deeply
poignant about the confines of gender roles that is being obliquely
depicted. Halston’s personal coolness is
the masculine coolness of Clint Eastwood – the cool of being in control and
having everything figured out. That this
cool is a veneer means that he is vulnerable to being exploited, and this is
the arc that that final two episodes of the drama follow.
Episodes 4 and 5
I really didn’t want to watch the rest of this series. I knew essentially nothing about Halston
before watching this series. I had come
by this point in the series to feel deeply connected to him – and to appreciate
clothing design as an art form in a way that I would never have expected
to. I think my definition of art was
undergoing a transition as I worked to create space to include clothing (I keep
wanting to write costume) design as part of it.
The writing was on the wall, though.
Halston was teetering. He is not
a household name now. The end was near –
and this being the 1980s in New York, it was almost certainly going to include
AIDs. Somehow the last two episodes
salvaged something and they were an integral and important part of the series,
but I wonder how much this had to with the writers and the director working
together to avoid disappointing us too much, and, in the process, perhaps not
allowing enough room for us to experience the catharsis we might have felt if
this had become a Greek/Shakespearean tragedy.
Halston becomes more and more strung out on coke. He comes to work later and later, and he is
less and less productive, and he prevents others from doing work on lines that
could keep things afloat. If his name is
on it, he wants to design it – whatever it is.
David Mahoney loses the ability to protect Halston when his strategy of
buying the business that owns the Halston line (and the Halston name) is
sniffed out by a competitor who outbids him by a hair, and now Halston has to
answer to an accountant. Personal
expenses that were charged to the business (such as flying dinner into his
house on Long Island from a New York restaurant) are no longer approved. Ultimately the business is taken from him.
This is depicted in the film as being the result of
corporate/frat boy politics. If only
Halston had the usual corporate appetites – for things like deep sea fishing
and, presumably, golf, perhaps he could have survived, the film seems to be
saying. There is a kind of envious
hatred that seems to be at play – as if it were Halston’s appetite for things –
and particularly for queer things – that was his undoing. The psychological desire – for love, for
acceptance, but even more, to bestow love, seems to get lost. So does Halston’s sadism and his own version
of corporate control – where he throws a continual party that HE controls.
This is played out in the loss of relationships with those
who have been closest to him as he alienates one after another of them,
belittling their talent and accusing them of living off of the reflected glory
that comes from his genius. And even
this seems contrived – the others feel less pain from his wrath than pity that
he is thrashing. We are in danger of
joining them, especially when his name is stripped and he is forbidden to use
it after being paid to leave the company.
The saving grace is an invitation from Martha Graham to
design costumes for her dance company.
He re-engages with his art and becomes once more entranced by the human
form and the ways in which it can move.
And this time he looks forward to hearing how the critics receive his
work – and they rave about it. So he
uses this as his own platform to fly from New York to the west coast where he
spends his few remaining days driving up and down the coast highway
appreciating its beauty.
And it feels like we are left to pick up the pieces and put
them together into a coherent narrative.
And I guess it is in this sense that this feels like a failed
analysis. There are questions at the end
of every analysis. And almost all
analyses are terminated before the end of the patient’s life – so how that life
will be lived out is a mystery. But in a
failed analysis, the analyst is left with a sense of uncertainty. Not only is it uncertain how the analysand’s
life will turn out, but it is uncertain how it has been stitched together.
In a successful analysis, there is enough known about the
person that there are multiple narrative arcs that support the life trajectory and
the analyst and analysand can traverse them together, checking on them,
elaborating on aspects of them, acknowledging that some aspects continue to be
unknown. And, at least in my own
experience of my own analysis, continuing to fit pieces together, to make sense
of who it is that I am – including how it is that the analysis itself fits into
the structure that I have come to appreciate undergirds me.
Perhaps the failure of this series to create that kind of
substructure is a mirror of the failure of Halston himself to do that. Perhaps he was depleted – by drugs, by his
own failure to integrate his ambitions with what he was truly capable of doing,
and perhaps ultimately by his failure to introspect. He remained focused, as so many artists are,
on the surface – the surface of the cloth, how it draped, and how it moved with
the person wearing it – and ultimately on the surface of the ocean – how the
waves and the colors created a kind of awesome beauty – that he didn’t weave
the kind of integrated story that might have allowed the threads to create a
more coherent tapestry.
So I am left wondering whose job it is to do the weaving. In my field, despite the inordinate attention
we pay to training, it is ultimately the patient who is the best predictor of
the outcome of a treatment. Could it be
that someone this complex outdoes the capacity of the writers to create a
satisfying narrative? Or is the
dissatisfaction in the narrative a way of communicating something essential
about the experience of the subject? Was
these something about Halston’s experience that was ultimately communicated by
the failure of the narrative to coalesce?
Was he feeling that he was at the mercy of the corporate world and
somehow unable to see his own role in his undoing? Would it have been false to have him
articulate something that was beyond his ken? Perhaps we are, like so many in his life, left
to put together the pieces and to clean up after the mess that he has created.
If Ray Kroc's life wasn't as dastardly as it was depicted as being in The Founder, I think we learned something about corporations and corporate greed. This series, in contrast, did not teach us as much as it might have about personal greed, and the hunger behind it. We came close to understanding the pathos of personal hunger in the third episode, but the series couldn't quite master just how darkly that very human vulnerability may have been expressed in the life of someone who flew as close to the sun as Halston did.
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