Mitchell Jackson

Cheerleaders save the world. Vampires gain souls. Ellen Ripley comes back to life as a half-alien. In the case of Willow Rosenberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s geeky, lesbian BFF, she’s a good witch one year, Southern California’s equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West the next, and only a year later, the key to stopping an apocalypse. One season, you’re good; the next, you’re bad; then, finally, you’re the savior. This is the world Joss Whedon envisions across six television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Bitches get a bad rap. In his new book, Ferocious Ambition, film historian Robert Dance recontextualizes the life, career and artistry of the most notorious bitch of them all, Joan Crawford. Crawford’s early twentieth-century rivals have faded into history (outside of the gayest of gay kids, does any Gen Z-er know the name Norma Shearer?), but Crawford is omnipresent for all the wrong reasons. Ryan Murphy reenacts her feuds on FX’s Feud. Drag queens imitate Crawford running around with an ax. And, every Mother’s Day, bloggers roll out posts and memes about her legacy as the worst mom of all time; the titular Mommie Dearest of Faye Dunaway’s campy, classic, child-abuse shlockfest.

The year was 1991. Actress Sean Young was trending — which in the Nineties means tabloids were dumping on her. The scandal: she barged onto the Warner Bros. lot dressed as Catwoman for an audition for Batman Returns. Two years earlier, Young was set to play Batman’s love interest in the first film, but she fell off a horse on set, fracturing her shoulder, so director Tim Burton replaced her with Kim Basinger. Young believed she deserved an audition for the sequel’s villain. After all, she was Sean Young. She played Chani in David Lynch’s original Dune (a role a not-yet-born Zendaya would reprise in a remake). She made love to future Yellowstone star Kevin Costner in No Way Out.

A decade or so ago, I was on the phone with the filmmaker John Waters, discussing Juggalos, Jesus and Justin Bieber, when I called someone “white trash.” The once-cult-now-mainstream director cut me off. I don’t remember exactly what he said — the transcript is long since deleted — but Waters berated me, called me racist, and rehashed some version of his 1994 statement that “talking trash about ‘white trash’ is ‘the last racist thing you can say and get away with.

The year was 2007. The Bush administration was launching bombs in the Middle East, the economy was collapsing and pop songstress Britney Spears was standing in a recording booth at Sony’s New York City office. As Spears waited to lay down vocals, producers Ezekiel Lewis and Christian “Bloodshy” Karlsson discussed the latter’s condo in Bangkok, Thailand. “Oh, Thailand,” Spears said, according to Lewis’s recollection. “Why don’t we go and do the songs in Thailand? Let’s go to Thailand. I have the plane coming tonight.” Lewis looked across the studio at Karlsson and mouthed, “What the fuck? Is she serious?” She was dead serious. “Well, why don’t we get this one down first, and then maybe let’s think about it tomorrow?” he said.

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone is embarking on her first greatest-hits tour, but she has forgotten why she was great. In her announcement video for the Celebration Tour, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Madonna’s self-titled debut, the queen of pop and a random assortment of B-list celebrities — Jack Black, Amy Schumer, Diplo and Meg Stalter, to name a few — reminisced about the queen of pop fellating an Evian bottle in her documentary Truth or Dare. A few days later, Madonna introduced Sam Smith’s and Kim Petras’s striptease at the Grammys. “Are you ready for a little controversy?” Madonna screamed at the crowd, holding a dominatrix cane in the air. The audience was too bored to respond.

Hollywood is America’s greatest export. Yet most museums either fixate on the industry’s tawdriness, as with the Hollywood Museum’s preservation of Marilyn Monroe’s pill bottle, or prioritize indie films over the artistic yet popular movies of Old Hollywood. MoMa’s film program can get so lost in Sundance obscurity that you wouldn’t know movies were a popular art form. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — aka the group that gives out the Oscars — opened the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, Americans hoped an intuition would finally document the products, people and dreams pumped out of La La Land. But the space was so preoccupied with twenty-first-century politics that it failed to honor the Jewish immigrants who built the damn town.

On a cold day at Disneyland, I walk through sugarplum-scented air, past a midcentury-modern poster for Alice in Wonderland, and beneath a plaque that reads, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” Walt Disney — the controversial impresario of twentieth-century animation and escapism, not the corporation that bears his name — intended his magic kingdom as an escape, a real-life never-never land devoid of the politics and troubles of the everyday. But on this visit to the park, I encounter the here and now around every corner. Passersby notice that an empowered female pirate has replaced the bride-auction scene in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (“Did anyone really believe pirates were role models?” one visitor asks.

From the moment Hayley Williams founded Paramore with three Christian boys in Nashville, she was consumed by Biblical levels of conflict. Williams signed as a solo artist with Atlantic on the heels of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” Her male bandmates performed and recorded without a contract. To counteract the narrative that a major label had engineered Williams, Atlantic released Paramore’s 2005 debut album, All We Know Is Falling, through the “sub-label” Fueled by Ramen. Critics caught onto the ruse, with Gigwise writing, “The band are an A&R man’s fantasy.” But Williams connected with angsty teens partially because the critics seemed to be bullying her. The bullying continued when Paramore changed their lineup and released the 2007 sophomore album Riot!

Half an hour or so into the new Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, two bros sitting next to me asked, “Why is gay Whitney in Black Panther?” They were in the wrong movie, but based on the other audience members screaming at the screen, the lone straight men weren’t alone in finding director Kasi Lemmons’s new film shocking. Sony promoted I Wanna Dance with Somebody as the feel-good biopic of the year. The trailer starts with the hook of the titular song and goes on to show Houston (Naomi Ackie) dancing to “How Will I Know” and singing her iconic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. Houston rarely speaks, but when she does, she talks about music: “My dream,” she purrs, “sing how I want to sing.