Election Dinner Preview, The Apprentice, and Portraying Empty Men
What I’m cooking on election night and thoughts on the Donald Trump origin movie
For all the talk of making a voting plan, there isn’t as much talk about making an election night plan. We’re all just a bit (or a lot) anxious about tomorrow, right? During last week’s Halloween festivities, I’ve been asking my friends what they’ll be up to on Tuesday night. (I’m fun at parties in that way). Some people are staying at home to watch the news, maybe with roommates or with loved ones. Some are going to a bar. Quite a few are going to bed and hope to wake up to good news. And a couple people are hosting small gatherings at home, a cozy place to celebrate or cry. All fairly low key, chill evenings.
I am the only person that I know of who is throwing an election-themed dinner party. Maybe because I am dumb, maybe because I subsume my stress through cooking. The game plan is to have dinner at my place, and then, depending on everyone’s mood, hang out at home to watch the results come in, or go to a nearby bar. I’m currently leaning on staying put, though if Trump wins, I’m worried that my apartment will be psychologically tainted and my friends will never want to come over again.
We’ll see how it goes — both the dinner and the election results — I only hope that if I wake up on Wednesday with a hangover, it’s for a good reason.
Election Dinner Menu
Normally I would publish dinner party recaps, but I don’t think anyone is gonna want to read about this after the fact. Here’s what I’ll be cooking tomorrow, with recipe notes, if you feel like doing some last-minute stress cooking. I have not tested any of these revisions. Each dish is tied to someone on the Republican and Democratic presidential tickets, but I didn’t think too deep about it.
Kamala Harris: Jerk Chicken Biryani
This one should be a layup: a fusion of Harris’s Indian and Jamaican heritage! I’m largely following the Serious Eats biryani recipe, replacing the yogurt-marinated lamb with jerk-marinated chicken (to make it easier to serve, I’m deboning the thighs and drumsticks, then chopping into large chunks).
The biryani will be layered with Jamaican-style rice and peas. (With that recipe, I’ll cook it about halfway through, then drain half of the mix to add to the biryani pot. The remaining half will be cooked to completion as an additional side.)
Donald Trump: Haitian Spaghetti
“They’re eating the hot dogs” was the idea here, since the taco bowl was two election cycles ago. Coincidentally, Haitian spaghetti has chopped up glizzies, in addition to epis, which is more or less a Haitian sofrito. This is easily made vegan if you use a fake hot dog.
Tim Walz: His Award-Winning Hot Dish
I have zero familiarity with the cuisine of the midwest, and have never had a hot dish before, much less made one. The Minnesota Governor’s recipe was published online, and I can already tell that this weird casserole of ground turkey, green beans, mushrooms, cheese, and tater tots is gonna be disgusting. And delicious.
J.D. Vance: Doughnuts
Tomorrow I will bike up to Fan Fan Doughnuts and get a dozen doughnuts, whatever makes sense.
Snacks and Drinks
For snacks: plantain chips, McDonald’s, duck fat fried “couch potatoes.”
For drinks: a covfefe martini, something involving this delicious coconut rum from Planteray (formerly Plantation), and Diet Mountain Dew + vodka shots.
If you have any ideas for this cursed election party, please send them my way!
Notes on The Apprentice
A few days ago I watched The Apprentice, the Donald Trump origin story. If you haven’t heard about this movie, which stars Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova, and shows the ascendancy of the real-estate developer in the 1980s, I don’t blame you. It made waves at Cannes, only to get an underfunded release after no major distributor wanted to touch it. The film's screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, detailed how hard it was for The Apprentice to find a distributor, and it’s worth reading even if you don't care to see the movie itself. Anything Trump related has been studio kryptonite. Despite releasing a movie about a speculative Civil War, A24 buried a documentary about the real-life January 6 insurrection. Hollywood is incredibly cowardly when it comes to any subject matter that can impact the bottom line. Entertainment companies are not in the business of entertaining or informing you. They are in the business of making money.
After some legal wrangling (the producers conned Republican megadonor Dan Snyder into funding this film, lol), The Apprentice wound up with Briarcliff Entertainment, which has a track record of picking up films that no studio will touch. They put out The Dissident, a documentary about Jamal Kashoggi’s murder by the Saudis, after other studios passed in fear of pissing off the country that funds a lot of their projects. Briarcliff also bought the rights to Magazine Dreams, a Jonathan Majors vehicle that was dead on arrival after, well, you know.
But about the movie.
The Apprentice was an ill-conceived project from the jump. But on its own terms, Ali Abbasi successfully delivers a solid biopic that only appears sympathetic to Donald Trump. As young Donald learns the dark arts of the deal from Roy Cohn, I thought a lot about Benjamin Wallace-Wells' new profile of J.D. Vance. Both of these works — one about Trump's new apprentice, the other about when Trump was one himself — expose their subjects to be men with no center. They are simply the products of their influences, driven only by ambition and petty grievances.
Take out all the winks and nudges to Trump's future presidency ("quid pro quo" dialogue, Roger Stone cameos, etc.) — and change the names — you'd end up with a respectable but unremarkable prestige drama that would not have had such a brutal journey to finding distribution. A.S. Hamrah's excellent review is worth the read:
The Apprentice is aligned here with Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, also a fable of transformation and success. Like the domineering city planner Cesar Catilina, Trump sees himself as a visionary builder. But he is a Catilina in negative, an unromantic one with a crimped vision that extends only to his own wealth and fame. Instead of opposing the men who run the city by coming up with better ideas, he uses Cohn to expose them as sordid hypocrites. It’s a project in which Cohn delights. For him, vengeance is a form of justice.
Jeremy Strong is terrific as Roy Cohn, mining the depths of the hard-nosed lawyer. He is the film's most sympathetic figure: Dr. Frankenstein in Manhattan, eventually tormented by a monster of his own creation. Sebastian Stan is a very fine Trump, some would say the best. Anyone who saw Stan in A Different Man knows that the actor is excellent at portraying vapidity.
The Empty Men
I had the concept of a piece that would address three young actors — Sebastian Stan (in The Apprentice and A Different Man), Joe Alwyn (The Brutalist), and Jacob Elordi (Oh, Canada) — whose surface level performances of empty men add depths to their films, even though their characters are so shallow. But I don’t have the tools to analyze acting in any real depth, so here are my off-hand talking points. First draft, best draft. Don’t be surprised if some of this material turns up in future pieces…
Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice: early-stage Donald Trump, never has any life behind his eyes. A passive figure, molded by Roy Cohn. Sympathetic at first (domineering dad, drunk brother). But you never really understand why Donald becomes the way he is, but that’s the point. There is no understanding of a sociopath. I think it takes a lot of skill for an actor to realistically portray someone who is empty on the inside.
The same actor, in A Different Man: also sympathetic at first (facial deformity, can’t connect with others). But once he gets what he wants (good looks), revealed to be a shallow, shitty guy. By the end, with everything that happens to him, he still hasn’t changed a bit. Edward/Guy is far less monstrous than Donald, but both are driven by wanting more, to fill a hole that will always remain empty.
Joe Alwyn in The Brutalist: the son of Guy Pearce’s wealthy industrialist. He is very much a daddy's boy. His suits are too big, he defers to his father, he has no personality. See how quickly his character jumps up to his father’s defense, violently denying the accusations lobbed at papa. (Of course, he’s just jealous that his dad could pull off what he couldn’t; I’m dancing around plot spoilers here.) Very mannered, stilted line delivery, which is in the same style as Pearce, but less convincing. Intentionally so! Pearce walks and talks like a stiff from a 1950’s flick, a surface level performance that makes an outstanding contrast to Adrien Brody’s humanist approach. Alwyn is trying to copy Pearce’s style, but it feels like a shallow parody. (And this works for the movie!)
Jacob Elordi in Oh, Canada: last year, I wrote briefly about how his appearances in Priscilla and Saltburn trade on his good looks and charisma, but it wasn’t until his performance in Paul Schrader’s newest that I realized that what united these characters — Elvis Presley and Felix Catton, along with Leonard Fife in Oh, Canada — is that they are all blank slates whom the other characters project their lusts onto. Emptiness seems to be what these directors see in the young man!
What’s interesting about Elordi’s deployment in Oh, Canada is that he only exists in flashback. An older Leonard Fife, who is played by Richard Gere, attempts to recant the myths built up around his life while being interviewed for a documentary. The man was not a principled draft dodger who fled to Canada. He was just scared of raising a family and ditched his pregnant wife the morning after cheating on her. When we see Elordi as the young Leonard, he’s hard to read, as he’s just a vessel for the older Leonard to tell a new version of his story. But his wife doesn’t want to hear it, or at least hear it said publicly. One wonders why Leonard is trying to correct the record on his deathbed. Is it to atone, or is it a final fuck you to the world?
Consider the most recent films from Paul Schrader, the director of Oh, Canada, and we could say that this guy really wants to get right with God. But the movie isn’t about Paul Schrader, it’s about (the fictional) Leonard Fife. But if he’s just trying to turn his final breath into a final spit, what is the source of that grievance? It’s just as mysterious as what drives Donald in The Apprentice. There is no center.