It’s exhausting to spend so much energy focusing on the lives and concerns of rich people in so much of our art. But consider one of the men who introduced us to such obsessions. Truman Capote wasn’t the first writer to build a career from the window he gave his readers into American high society, but – as FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans tries to illustrate – he was one of the few who blew up his considerable social capital in such a spectacular way. That’s what makes it such compelling television: here’s a man who amassed all the power in the world, only to set it ablaze as everyone watched. And no one, not even him, knows exactly why.
The second season of one of FX’s many Ryan Murphy anthology dramas (the first, Bette and Joanpremiered astonishingly seven years ago), Feud focuses on infamous celebrity tabloid battles and uses them to explore the dark impulses that drive fame and our obsession with it. Capote vs. the Swans is a little harder to summarize than the season 1 hook “Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford,” but this season’s more direct and juicy melodrama makes it a little more accessible, even if a viewer may find the topics darker than some Old Hollywood films. legends.
Capote is probably the name that will be most familiar this season Feud, simply because of his important literary contributions. While he wrote a number of successful novels, many of which were made into films (such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s), he became famous with the publication of the 1966 ‘non-fiction novel’ In cold blood – perhaps the first true crime hit. Capote vs. the Swans is set largely in the decade following this success, as the author becomes a fixture in New York high society and ingratiates himself with a group of wealthy socialites, the titular Swans.
Image: FX
It won’t take long. Capote is a writer, “always listening, always recording,” he reminds them, as excerpts from a novel in the making are published: salacious and thinly veiled accounts of the Swans’ tumultuous personal lives, leading them all to vow revenge. But if the conflict is simple, Feud‘s exploration of it is anything but.
The series jumps forward and backward through time, based on the book by Laurence Leamer Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era — constructs a portrait of Capote (Tom Hollander, who absolutely disappears into the role) via mosaic. In one scene, he is a confidante to women like Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), wife of media mogul William S. Paley, and Slim Keith (Diane Lane); in the next part they are at odds, especially after the publication of his first book excerpt leads to the suicide of their former friend Ann Woodward (Demi Moore).
On paper, this all reads like a prestige soap, thickly lathered. FX’s marketing of Feud does not discourage this; the series is billed as a story about “The Original Housewives.” The actual implementation is much more complicated than that. In their constant flitting around, writer/showrunner Jon Robin Baitz and director Gus Van Sant (who helms most, but not all, of the series) carefully build a thesis by allowing the opposing forces to continually define each other, informed by their biases, insecurities, and self-deceptions .
Image: FX
Capote wants to enjoy all the riches of the jet-setting crowd, but can never stop seeing himself as an observer, no matter how much he participates. He is a man fascinated by the secrets of high society, “the dance of old money mixing with the new, all the rules they have… American royalty and the rituals enshrined in it.” And yet he empathizes with the women he uses to fuel and poeticize their “ballerina pain,” the “gnarled feet” behind their perfect performances.
The Swans are equally compelling in their performances and in their anger: at Capote’s violation of decorum, in their attempts to reaffirm it, in the homophobia that bubbles to the surface once the author is no longer of any use to them. It’s a collage of self-loathing, a dinner at the edge of a knife. Capote vs. the Swans thinks about many things as it explores the central conflict, some deftly, some less so. But in the age of the untouchably wealthy 1%, it strikes a remarkable chord – one that harks back to a time in America where the upper class was careful not to let the public know how much of their wealth was a farce, a tightly choreographed dance . That led the public to believe that if they worked hard enough, they could be just like them, even though they built the walls so high that none of them would ever be admitted.