“it is with a heavy heart that i must announce that the celebs are at it again” ―dril
Sometimes famous white men get into their thirties, have marital problems, run off with lithe Asian-American women, and go on extensive benders. It’s not always in this exact order of events, but it’s a thing. Two new pieces of media deal with aspects of this. “The Lost Weekend”: A Love Story” (dir. Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels) is about the tumult of John Lennon’s early ’70s, including his myriad Hollywood indulgences and his 18-month relationship with his young assistant May Pang. That’s in theaters now, but over on Netflix, comedian John Mulaney debuts “Baby J,” the hour he’s been fine-tuning for two years, largely about his recovery from a now-quite-public drug addiction.
In May 2021, when Mulaney was a few months out of rehab and freshly divorced, and the world was taking baby steps to reopen from the darkest days of lockdown, he started testing out bits at NYC’s City Winery, and I got to see a very VERY embryonic version of what evolved into his new special. The special is polished, savvy, stunningly smart, but I’m glad I got to catch it when it was still a pile of pointy shards.
The City Winery set was a good show but a weird one, and the venue took away our phones and Mulaney kinda embargoed us from saying anything. (He was in a mood; e.g., an audience question about his sexuality prompted a curt “the crowdwork portion of the evening is over.”) Of the “Baby J” material, the intervention was there, the GQ article, and the line about killing himself, and I think the haircut at SNL. Mostly he prowled the stage, edgy but also loose, like an unmoored ship that kept trying to right itself — although he did steer into a rant about how the FBI are racist and he’s glad Trump is gone so he doesn’t have to root for Mueller anymore, and took a dig at “beta male white podcasters trying to reenact their fantasy of writing for Grantland.” These comments did not make it into the special!
In a way, I’m not finding myself with much to say about this finished version. He’s grinded like a mofo to get it right. You can see that he’s a workaholic, and he’s talked before about why — it’s either the hyperfocus or drugs. As a confessional, I do appreciate his honesty on multiple fronts, whether it’s admitting lingering resentment toward his friends who interventioned him, or his extended aria about a desperate, irrationally circuitous ploy to finance cocaine. The self-deprecation and shame fueling these anecdotes feel legitimate, not just played up for relatability. Yet he’s real careful about the darkness he’s willing to daylight. He is not Richard Pryor, and he’s just not gonna. Plus, he went to Georgetown. His dad’s a partner at Skadden Arps. He just radiates winner energy. He’ll always be fine. It is written. So I laughed, a lot, but no fucking shit John Mulaney’s back on top. Boys keep swinging.
Big mixed feelings about “Lost Weekend” as well. I enjoy that it’s so trashy and hate that it’s so trashy. Obviously it’s from May Pang’s point of view since John can no longer offer one, but “I was John Lennon’s girlfriend in his crazy Harry Nilsson era when he and Yoko Ono were separated” is a narrative she’s deployed multiple times over the decades and it’s sort of her meal ticket at this point. Re the crazy Harry Nilsson era, it’s never addressed whether the teetotaling Pang might have been enabling Lennon’s alcoholism and drug use, whether she had any role in her positions as “assistant” and “production coordinator” in helping acquire drugs for Lennon and his gang (including a terrifying-even-then Phil Spector). If there’s any accountability she can take, she elides it. To be fair, she was not the only person who should have been looking out for Lennon’s well-being, and it’s moot because he soon cleaned up anyway. But given what she’s told us, it feels like she could have done more than just be the hot passive 22-year-old on his arm at discotheques.
And from her perch in the present, the petty Pang is determined to undermine all the wider good-faith efforts in recent years to clear Ono’s name of the demonization the musician and conceptual artist has long endured, and it’s a bad look. Pang is a mean girl with queen bee aspirations, ushering Ono’s personae non grata to her own side, and the second half of the documentary is a long infomercial selling how nice Pang has been to Lennon’s estranged son Julian and Julian’s mother, Cynthia. It’s all somewhat pukey.
Two thumbs trending up for the Mulaney, two more thumbs respectively at half-staff and fully down for the Pang.
