#but this professor changed my whole fucking perspective on what public relations can be and everyday of my life

[pr]

i feel so morally obligated (in ultimately a good way i think?) to use my underwhelming social media presence to draw attention to nonprofits that are underappreciated like for small mammals, or for last responders/morticians whom i love, or smaller musicians/content creators who have gotten us through this pandemic - but also i make myself feel so fucking guilty for not promoting other important and major nonprofits doing so much good in the world but other people promote them so i want to promote like the ones i personally want to get more engagement - and i know this is literally unfeasible but oh my god when i dont share every one of them/financially donate to them, i feel sick with guilt

[statusquoergo]

Credit where credit is due, Gabriel did a nice job directing this episode. He had more screen time that I’m used to from actors pulling double duty, and he seems to have handled the extra workload well.

That’s not to say the episode was flawless. Yeah, by Season 9 standards, it was pretty good overall, but I mean. Season 9 standards.

We start off at home with Louis and Sheila having a terse exchange over tea as I wonder, yet again, why they’re together at all if they’re always so goddamn pissy about everything. Louis bemoans his demotion as Sheila irritably directs him to drink his rooibos and asks him what the big deal is, being that he didn’t even want the job in the first place (true). Louis parries that he only said that because Donna offered it to him the same night he found out about Sheila’s pregnancy (true), but at any other time in his life, he would have taken it (false). On the contrary, you may remember this fairly unambiguous exchange from “Pecking Order” (s08e02) between Doctor Lipschitz and Louis: “As I recall, you accepted Harvey becoming managing partner after Jessica left.” “That’s when I realized I didn’t want to be managing partner.” I suppose I’ve never accused this show of internal consistency before, why bother starting now?

Louis then delightfully compares himself to a ball-less cat and laments that though “the job wasn’t sunshine and rainbows, [he] was getting really good at it,” and excuse me but what? Forget that disastrous hearing that summoned Faye to their doorstep, his most recent acts as managing partner include trying to bully Professor Gerard into letting him be the keynote speaker at Harvard’s Ethic Conference to talk up his failing firm, and going completely off the rails trying to fire the poor IT guy for failing to digitally break into the New York State Bar Association. Louis sucked at being managing partner.

Next up is a reminder that I need to be careful what I wish for as Donna and Harvey discuss his reflexive support of her impassioned but quite incorrect argument against Louis trying to fire Benjamin, and how much she didn’t appreciate it. Turns out it wasn’t so reflexive; he did it because she thought she would like it, which is its own magnificently flawed concept—thinking she’ll get mad at him for disagreeing with her doesn’t say much for his respect for her integrity—but then Donna realizes that he’s afraid she’s going to leave him if he doesn’t unconditionally support her, and you just know the writers thought they were being real clever with this. (Wait, isn’t one of Harvey’s defining character traits his ability to read people? “You read books, I read people” was actually one of the first things he said to Mike in the pilot… Gosh it’s been a long time.)

As I was saying about this show’s internal consistency, two things about this whole exchange: One, all through Season 7, Harvey had no trouble calling Paula out when she was being ridiculous and disagreeing with her about all kinds of shit. Two, as recently as “Everything Changes” (s09e01), Harvey cooed that “[he’s] finally where [he’s] supposed to be” when he’s with Donna, to which Donna replied “We both are,” and like, are they a match made in Heaven right out of the box or what? His trust in their relationship is wildly inconsistent. Unless he wants to forfeit his autonomy for some reason? I don’t know, it’s weird and I don’t like it.

I also take issue with Donna’s dismissive “Oh, my god. Of course. Harvey, I’m not gonna leave you.” This has been an issue for him since forever, as she well knows, but rather than ask him what’s wrong—is he really afraid she’ll leave him over something so small?—or point out that he needs to go to therapy (if she wants to be tactful, she could ask if he wants to “talk to someone” about this), she treats it as an endearing character quirk, and someone needs to save Harvey from all this shit yesterday.

The interruption to this…reconciliation isn’t quite as cringy as the can opener bit from the last episode, but I’ve gotta call it out for being just some truly lazy storytelling. Gretchen appears out of nowhere to tell them they “need to go see Louis,” on account of his demotion, and Donna’s deer-in-headlights response is “Oh, my god. We need to go to him right now.” Yeah, no shit, that’s what Gretchen just said, except this framing affords Harvey the opportunity to mount his noble high horse and declare: “No. You go to him. I need to go see Faye.” Which he does, dramatic music and all, declaring that “dammit, not everybody has to do everything by [her] book,” and I must point out that she demoted Louis for trying to fire the employee who he asked to perform an illegal activity that he failed to perform only because he was caught; in what book is that okay? He then asserts: “You want consequences, I’ll give you consequences,” which is delightfully reminiscent of that old classic, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” in that it makes absolutely no sense, and Harvey, you adorable impetuous dumbass, if your goal is to convince her to leave, I think you might be going about it in a little bit the wrong way.

Roll title crawl! (No seriously, that was all just the cold open.)

Anyway Donna does go to comfort Louis, already treating herself and Harvey as a unit when she assures him that “if [he] ever [needs her] or Harvey during any of this Faye bullshit,” they’re there for him, and dropping the much more interesting detail that she has a much older sister she doesn’t want to talk about who “turned every man she was ever with into an emotional doormat,” which I don’t have time to fic right now but I feel like might explain a lot. Then Alex and Samantha have an endearing little exchange wherein Samantha proposes doing something to help Louis and Alex clarifies that it has to be ethical, and it’s nice to know that at least a couple of people around here aren’t completely insane.

Speaking of things being insane, I won’t fault Gabriel for this because the direction itself is fine, but from a writing perspective, the narrative construct of this next scene is terrible. Harvey shows up at a meeting with Some Guy whose nondescript company is apparently, thanks to his board and the company’s lawyers, being taken over (by someone) against his wishes, and the only hint of context for any of this is that “the people” orchestrating this takeover are “related” to Faye. The obvious conclusion to this exchange is that Harvey is going to help this guy, who is apparently the CEO of this random organization, sue the company by acting as a shareholder rather than a C-level employee, and I still have no idea what the fuck is going on.

Back at the firm where I do kind of know what’s going on, Susan the Associate approaches Katrina with a problem she found in the VersaLife case Katrina’s working, and as soon as they gave her a name in the last episode, I know she was going to be important. More to the point, it looks like Katrina’s got herself an associate! (Remember when senior partners were required to hire their own associates? It was a whole big thing back in Season 1, I think.)

Next up, Louis is having lunch with an old friend, Saul the Judge, who informs him that some other judge is retiring or being fired or something, and offers him a judgeship, and there is so much wrong with this scene that I don’t even know where to begin.

Yes I do. Since when has Louis’s lifelong dream been to be a judge? This is literally the first time he’s ever expressed any interest in it, at all. And another thing, that is not how judicial selection works.

In New York State, judges, depending on the court, are either appointed by the governor and confirmed by the State Senate, nominated by a commission and approved by the governor, chosen at a partisan nominating convention and elected by the voting public, or appointed by the mayor. Qualified individuals can apply to be considered, such as by the Mayor’s Advisory Committee, but there’s no one-and-done offer/acceptance transaction between someone currently on the bench and his lawyer pal, so either this guy is offering Louis a job that doesn’t exist or, more likely, the writers don’t know shit about the New York City legal system.

Moving on. Harvey shoves a recusal form in Faye’s face as he informs her that he “got” a case against her old firm, and he’s “taking it,” as though he didn’t go way out of his way to hunt it down in the first place. He then throws a stupidly juvenile hissy fit, claiming he’ll use whatever he fucking has to to “win,” and prove his system his better than hers, but he won’t have to cross any lines because she de-balled (second reference, just as charming as the first) the guys at her old firm so much that “they’re shaking in their boots” at the mere threat of lawsuit. This whole exchange is basically a showcase of Harvey acting like a spoiled child, and I know he’s a passionate guy but I gotta say, I’m getting tired of this whole act.

Back to that clusterfucking disaster of a judgeship offer, Louis fesses up to Sheila but admits that he doesn’t want to accept the drop in salary with a kid on the way, or leave his friends in the lurch, and she in turn fesses up that she asked Saul to make the offer in the first place because “being a judge has always been [his] dream.” (SINCE WHEN?) Louis is incensed until she tells him that it was basically Saul’s idea, but that if he doesn’t take it now, he’ll never get the change again, which… Why? Well, I guess they haven’t pointlessly manufactured any tension in awhile. Anyway, Louis promises to sleep on it.

Elsewhere, Samantha proposes committing conspiracy to get Faye out of their lives and Alex shuts that shit right away, and I’m actually really enjoying their dynamic right now. Susan asks Katrina what she should do about a smart, funny paralegal she clicks with; Katrina, having “seen that before,” recommends finding a new paralegal, and I’ve never had this question before but is Katrina anti-Machel for some reason? Doesn’t matter. Susan proposes reaching out to opposing counsel, who just so happens to be an old family friend, and Katrina wisely tells her not to, but somewhat less wisely starts and ends her rationale with “Because I know,” which I’m sure won’t motivate Susan to act in any sort of way.

Now, I’m no dream theorist, but luckily this show has all the subtlety of a Liberace action figure, so it’s not too difficult to figure out what Louis’s subconscious mind is trying to say: He wants to humiliate Faye (for demoting him and taking over his firm), he wants to bang Donna (and maybe also Alex), he thinks of Harvey as his peer but also his inferior (who he wants desperately to impress and probably also to fuck), and his confidence is mainly derived from the approval and admiration of others. Also he wants to have sex with basically everyone. Maybe not Gretchen. But everyone else.

Dr. Lipschitz, to whom Louis was evidently relaying the events of this dream, finds the whole thing quite amusing, but points out that if Louis takes the judgeship, he won’t have his friends around him anymore. Double-edged sword and all that.

Part II

[bigmoneygator]

Gonna talk about some things! That have been bothering me! Without need or hope for anyone to reply because I feel like I'm bothering everyone with how much I've been talking about it lately!!!!!!! I love golden age cinema. No, I haven't watched most of the movies in the 'canon', but the stories behind them are what get me. I'm getting real frustrated, though, with the underreporting/erasure of queer people in Hollywood at this time. Not by the studios and the fixers and the morals police of the time, but by contemporary biographers and even just the general public. I'm fully immersed into the 'You Must Remember This' podcast (I even sat through the Manson murder season because of the tidbits I could glean that weren't murder related), and I'm reading a book called 'The Whole Equation' by a gentleman named David Thomson, who is a (rather old) film professor and Hollywood historian in various publications. Karina Longworth, of the former, doesn't seem to shy away from the implications of queer stars, while I have found not one reference to anything like this in Thomson's writings in the latter - to my recollection anyway, which is shoddy at best, so maybe I missed something. So maybe the book is more focused on the entirety of Hollywood and how it came to be, so it glosses over a lot of the seedier, juicier bits about the personal lives of stars - though it does go into some detail about Jean Harlow's death by uremic poisoning (Miss Harlean Carpenter comes back into play later in this rant), but I digress. I'm also losing the point of my ire and, therefore, the entirety of this massive rant. I'm just finding out that it's an agreed upon fact that Cary Grant, born Archie Leach and having spent some time in the Village in New York City before his time in Hollywood, was a gay man who only married and had dalliances with women to keep his contract signed and uphold his end of the morals clause therein. Some perspective: I arbitrarily fell in love with Cary Grant sometime after I had confused him for Gregory Peck during high school, then confused him for Clark Gable for a time, then watched a massive stack of his movies and found my affections with the right man. I've loved Cary Grant for a decade. And I'm just. Now. Finding this information out. I'm pissed. I'm livid. And I'm not pissed to find out that he was gay or that he was suppressed (though it does make my blood boil - just on a whole other level). I'm mad because somehow this information - though widely agreed upon by most biographers - is not even mildly commonplace knowledge. I've BEEN pissed off that people see fit to reduce Montgomery Clift's sexuality down to a simple sentence: He was bisexual, like many other stars of the time. You know what? Fuck that noise. That does not begin to encompass the raging wreck that was Monty Clift. The man felt wrong and ugly inside because he loved women but didn't want to sleep with them, and he put himself through years of conversion therapy and it presumably helped spark the alcoholism and addiction that took his looks and his life. Sure, we remember him as one of Liz Taylor's 'boyfriends', but we don't remember his 14 foot medicine cabinet or the fact that he's only remembered as bisexual because he used to get piss drunk and go home with anybody that would have him, regardless of whether or not he really was bisexual. Which brings me around to my mentioning of David Thomson's book. It's dense and it's wordy and it's filled with a lot of subjective narrative about Hollywood and its history, some raw facts about grosses and contract rates. It's a good read, though, especially for someone who's just at the beginning of their journey through Golden Age cinema (it contains a lot more stuff about the actual dawn of the technicality of movies and film, plus a little more about the magic of moving pictures, and it does so in somewhat manageable chunks of metaphors between the point of the story he's trying to tell and a relevant Hollywood figure). As I mentioned earlier, Thomson goes into some detail about Jean Harlow and her upbringing and death, and mentions her marriage to Paul Bern. He mentions Bern's death. He fails to mention that Bern was quite possibly deeply in the closet. Okay, so maybe the man doesn't believe it. Then, he gets into insulting Marlon Brando quite a bit. That's okay. The man was a bear to work with, an odd duck method actor at his best and a literal destroyer of sets at middling and an actual sexual predator at worst (see: 'Last Tango In Paris'). He goes on to blame, somehow, Brando's attitude on therapy. Weird. Then I recall that in Montgomery Clift's Wikipedia article, his sexuality is compared to that of two other actors: James Dean, and Marlon Brando. I haven't done any research into Brandi's bisexuality or lack thereof, but I'm willing to bet there's some merit there. He mentions Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Kaye Francis - but fails to mention that all of these women were confirmed to be (at the very least) bisexual. He might have mentioned Katherine Hepburn's habit of wearing pants, but I don't think the man even mentioned that her first on screen kiss was WITH ANOTHER WOMAN. The first nail in the 'Whole Equation' coffin for me came in the form of two mentions of Monty in the text: one in which Thomson makes some claims that while working together, John Wayne says that he found Clift 'feeble' but tried like hell to keep up or even outpace him in their filming. Personally, this makes no sense to me, because have you ever seen young John Wayne? He's a dead ringer for Montgomery Clift at his peak. But, okay, Wayne was a hard worker and I can buy him giving the young bucks a hard time. Then, Thomson gives himself the second nail: "[...] Clift would have made [Joe, of 'Sunset Boulevard'] Gillis insidiously charming instead of a desperate scrambler. You would have wanted to save Clift (that was his trick); [William] Holden knows that Gillis is beyond salvation." (p. 250) I'm not going to bother dissecting the part of the paragraph before this quote in which Thomson paints Clift as someone solely turning down a role due to vanity and his own carefully crafted image, because for all I've learned in my time as an amateur historian, this is probably true. Stars were crafted after they were found, and studios did their best to keep stars into the molds they were poured into. I'm gonna talk about the part where Thomson seems to deride Clift for 'tricking' people into saving him. I take this quote as derision as opposed to a compliment to the actor's ability to play a role because of the overall scorn it appears Thomson has for someone who can't seem to live up to the studio's farm factory system, and because he seems to have so much scorn for Clift himself. Could it be that perhaps Clift had this knack for 'tricking' people into thinking they could save him because of his own tortured inner workings and his need for support and validation due to the turmoil he felt because of his sexuality? Maybe I'm just an asshole here because I don't have a degree in psych or film history, but I don't think it would be a stretch to consider that maybe Clift's close friendship with Elizabeth Taylor and his own film roles all contributed to trying to reach out to someone to ease his pain. And maybe - just maybe - Thomson has some kind of problem with this. (DISCLAIMER: I haven't read anything else by this author and I haven't looked into his own personal history and I don't know if he's changed his tune about all of this so I can't be sure.) So, in all of this, somehow and somewhere, what I'm trying to say is: contemporary LGBT people deserve to know their history. There's that post floating around about walking down a hall of history and finding it blank, being told it doesn't exist and that's what it's like for a queer person in this day and age. And I agree. So let's start by acknowledging that Hollywood has been filled with queer people from day one, and go from there. Okay, raging queer nerd out ✌🏻 byeeeee