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Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Halston: A Life in Search of a Narrative Arc

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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