Maestro, cultural politics, and the Nose

I have watched this trailer a few times and looked at the promo pictures and I have a Take.

This Jewish guy thinks the nose is a bad mistake but an honest mistake. The distinction is worth making.

Criticisms like this widely-circulated comparison of images by Joel S <@jh_swanson> go one step too harsh.

Left: Bradley Cooper with his prosthetic nose, playing Leonard Bernstein.

Right: The actual Leonard Bernstein.

This isn’t about making a non-Jewish actor look more like Leonard Bernstein; it’s about making a non-Jewish actor look more like a Jewish stereotype.

I vigorously agree that in historical and cultural context, a Jewish character with a cartoonishly exaggerated nose — especially a real person whose appearance we know — is Doing Antisemitism. There are shots in that trailer where the prosthetic makeup on Cooper’s nose is way too much. The trailer is Doing Antisemitism.

My partial defense of The Nose

So where do I differ from readings like Joel S’s? Why call this an “honest mistake”?

I imagine that a lot of folks have an image of Leonard Bernstein in their mind much like mine. I picture him in late middle age when — as with everyone as they grow older — his nose was a discernible bit bigger than when he was young:

Did you catch that two of those photos are of Bernstein and two are Bradley Cooper? One can identify which is which if one looks attentively, but I think those examples demonstrate how in some framings, at least as Older Bernstein, the nose works, helping a famous-and-thus-recognizable actor like Cooper to inhabit the role rather than read as himself. I understand why folks like Joel S read Cooper as making the bigoted assumption that Jewish person must be portrayed with an outsized nose, but the many shots which land well persuade me that the makeup prosthetic was a more thoughtful choice than just a manifestation of hard bigotry.

“Thoughtful” does not mean “thoughtful enough”, but carelessness is a meaningfully different problem from minstrelsy.

Plus I have to name how very uneasy I feel about folks I have seen using Joel S’s photo of young Bernstein to say “pshaw, Leonard Bernstein did not have a big nose”.

Notice a similarity in the framing in these early photos? I cannot help but suspect that this is because portraits which survived de-emphasized his nose. Because of antisemitism. I do not take these commentators as playing a trick, but I sure do want to steer well clear of criticizing the makeup in Maestro in a way which implies something wrong with Bernstein’s actual nose. I want to stand with the Adrian Brody Faction Of Handsome Ashkenazi Schnozz Pride.

Any biopic is hard

Portraying a famous real person in film is inherently tricky. There are legit reasons to avoid trying to make an actor resemble the real person they portray … or to work hard to try to achieve as good a semblance as possible. I think the two best Movie Nixons are Philip Baker Hall just looking like himself and Frank Langella in prosthetics looking the part.

The way this always-tricky choice is further fraught with the cultural politics of representation makes me think of an interview I saw with Denzel Washington back when Spike Lee’s Malcolm X film was new. He said something about how they worked to make him resemble Malcolm as much as possible, though “obviously” they could not lighten his skin to match the man he was portraying. I was an attentive enough young white guy to see why a white director must not change a Black actor’s skin tone with makeup, and why a Black director would hesitate to do it … but it was not obvious to me that it was entirely out of bounds for Black director. I say “not obvious” not because I am skeptical of Washington & Lee’s judgement but because it is entirely outside my lane. As an attentive white guy, I need to stay aware of my ignorance and reflect on what I can learn from surprises.

The opacity of Lee’s choice to my white eyes shows how the overlap between filmmaking and cultural politics produces choices as subtle as they are important.

This moment is hard

All this comes on the heels of recent lively conversation about media representation in general and of Jews in particular, which makes it sensitive. My own antennæ are up because of some recent examples:

• I am cool with goyim making Mrs. Maisel because by my lights it lands in the Good Enough To Be Worth Criticizing range. And I respect Jews who feel betrayed by it.
• I think Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder dances closely with antisemitic minstrelsy but succeeds in taking refuge in audacity. I personally love it, but I also have enough of a visceral understanding of Jews disgusted by it that I wonder whether maybe it should not have been made.
• I hate Hunters with a purple passion. I wanted so badly to love a pulp adventure story about Jews hunting Nazis! But in a way I doubt I could ever truly communicate to someone who is not Jewish, the characters talk and act so much like a gentile’s idea of Jews, so lack a Jewish sensibility, that I find it repulsive. And yet there are Jews who delighted in it, and more power to them.

I imagine that Cooper wanted to tell a story about love — of friends and family and music — rather than about Bernstein’s relationship with Jewish life in America. But the context forbids ignoring it.

Plus I must add that despite having less personal stakes in the portrayal of Bernstein’s romantic life, I am actually more upset that the trailer implies that Leonard Bernstein was heterosexual. I sure hope that is misdirection.

Where I am coming from

Given all the cultural politics here, I must situate myself, to inform how one might read my read.

Do not infer that I claim to have the one true analysis. I stand in solidarity with Jews who have less forgiving readings. They deserve attention and support. I plan to attach links to good commentaries as I find them.

Though I refuse the position that only Jews have a right to comment on this at all, I expect readers to respect the heft which comes from me being an Ashkenazi Jew interested in questions of Jewish representation in pop culture. I have a long rant on this site about the cultural politics of Superman’s hair and his Jewish creators, for Rao’s sake.

In talking about not-Jewish Bradley Cooper’s responsibility here, I want to avoid the common move of faulting actors too readily. An actor needs to place enormous trust in a director making their performance function in the context of a work as a whole, so I believe we need to place responsibility for how characters are represented on directors’ shoulders, not actors’. (Uh, except Scarlett Johanssen, who needs to back up and examine her choices.) Cooper bears responsibility because he directed this film.

I differ from some social justice advocates in how strictly I think we need to watch who tells stories about whom. Obviously we need more stories about marginalized people authored by creators from those groups. And I want creators to embrace a cocktail of diligence and adventurousness in telling stories which include people who come from a different background from their own. When a work is thoughtful enough to be worth criticism for its inevitable failings, let us show our respect by criticizing those failings unsparingly without rendering the entire work illegitimate.

Plus anyone misrepresenting this thread by saying “golly, JK is Jewish and said this is No Big Deal” can fuck right off. That would be dirty pool even if that were what I was saying.

Do better, Cooper

I quite liked director Bradley Cooper’s ambitious, flawed A Star Is Born, I like that he took his swing at Maestro, and I suspect that the picture will prove to be pretty good on the artistic merits. I consider it legitimate for goyish Bradley Cooper to direct a film about Jewish Leonard Bernstein, cast himself, and try to increase his resemblance. But legitimate is well short of good. It does not look like Cooper did his homework carefully enough. He needed to involve and listen to Jews who would tell him ya gotta dial back that schnozz, Bubbeh.

I will reserve strong judgment of the cultural politics until after we have the entire film to consider, but there is already enough cause for concern that Cooper needs to address hard criticisms like these now.

Other commentaries

Daniel Fienberg, the Hollywood Reporter’s film critic, snarks about early set photos:

Sigh. My question, “How many pounds of latex would it take to make Bradley Cooper into an elderly Jewish man?” was supposed to be rhetorical. The answer, BTW, is “Enough latex that somebody should probably find it a hair problematic.”

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My critiquing of Bradley Cooper converting to Latex Judaism caused me to fail to even notice Carey Mulligan as Leonard Bernstein’s first wife, who was Chilean-Jewish. That’s a lot of ethnic cosplay for one movie.

What Bradley Cooper’s Makeup Can’t Conceal from Yair Rosenberg:

If you haven’t heard about the controversy surrounding Bradley Cooper’s nose, you’ve made better choices than I have. (Well, until now.) Here’s the short version: Maestro is a forthcoming biopic about the renowned Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein. The film stars Cooper, who also co-wrote and directed it. Last week, the trailer for the film was released, revealing that the actor’s nose had been … enhanced for the screen. Outraged social-media users and the websites that write about outraged social-media users quickly turned on the movie, creating such consternation that Bernstein’s own family felt compelled to publicly defend Cooper and his creative choices.

As a Jew with a big nose and even bigger mouth, I have some thoughts.

First off, this debate isn’t really about the nose. It’s about a non-Jewish actor playing a famous Jewish figure. Few people would have complained if a Jewish performer—whether with a noticeable natural nose or a fake one—had been cast in this role. Rather, the problem was casting a non-Jew and then accentuating his features in a stereotypically Jewish fashion. At a time when Hollywood is obsessed with representation, such a casting decision compounded by the attempt to disguise it felt like a cartoonish affront to the entire enterprise. Cooper’s artificial nose is not anti-Semitic, but it is understandable why many found it off-putting. Something need not be bigoted to be a bad idea, especially in an industry that today claims to take care to avoid evoking stereotypes of minority groups. That the studio did not anticipate the fuss over Cooper’s prosthetic suggests an institutional blind spot.

But although Cooper’s critics have a point, their proposed solutions would actually make the situation worse. Our cultural conversation is enhanced, not diminished, when diverse performers inhabit other communities and humanize them for audiences. And Jews should know this better than most. After all, though they comprise just 2 percent of the American population, Jewish actors have been able to portray a wide variety of non-Jews on-screen, to the great benefit of both American Jews and American culture (just ask fans of Harrison Ford, Daveed Diggs, or Natalie Portman). Insisting that Jewish roles go exclusively to Jews could constrict rather than broaden the space for Jewish performers, and relegate aspiring Jewish actors to a narrow niche.

The truth is, just as it’s possible for Jews to sensitively portray non-Jewish characters, it is possible for non-Jews to empathetically embody Jewish ones. The merit of Cooper’s portrayal will be determined not by the nature of his nose but by the quality of his performance. The real question is not whether non-Jews can play Jews, but whether they can do the Jewishness justice. To take one example, the problem with the 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex, is not that the trailblazing Jewish judge is portrayed by the non-Jewish Felicity Jones. It’s that the feminist jurist’s deep and abiding Jewish identity was almost entirely effaced from the story.

Leonard Bernstein’s musical career similarly cannot be disentangled from his Jewish commitments. In a 1989 interview, the conductor spoke of how his calling was first kindled in synagogue, recalling how “I felt something stir within me, as though I were becoming subconsciously aware of music as my raison d’etre.” Bernstein’s first complete surviving composition was a setting of Psalm 148. Over the course of his life, he wrote more than 20 Jewish works. His first symphony, Jeremiah, was named and modeled after the biblical prophet of lamentation. His third symphony is called Kaddish, after the Jewish mourning prayer, and alternates between the Hebrew and Aramaic of the original text and Bernstein’s haunting English words, which are rife with biblical references to sources as diverse as the Song of Songs and the Book of Job.

Bernstein saw the piece, in which the speaker argues openly with God, as fundamentally Jewish. “Our great Judaistic personalities of the past, including Abraham, who founded Judaism, and Moses and the prophets, all argued with God,” he said in a 1985 interview. “They argued with God the way you argue with somebody who’s so close to you that you love so much, that you can really fight.”

As the conductor’s longtime assistant Jack Gottlieb put it, “Bernstein may not have been traditionally observant, but he was deeply Jewish in every other way. In fact, he once described himself as a ‘chip,’ not off the old block, but ‘off the old Tanach,’ the Hebrew acronym for the complete Bible. As a teenager he even briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a rabbi.” Judaism was not incidental to Bernstein’s life; it was essential.

Hollywood has shown that it can manufacture a Jewish nose. But can it tell a Jewish story? A mass-market feature film is unlikely to dive deeply into its subject’s Jewish background, which might be confusing to general audiences. But that doesn’t mean the movie can’t make artful allusion to the material. If Maestro manages to encompass Bernstein’s Jewish commitments, then it will have truly captured a reflection of the artist. If not, no amount of makeup will obscure the absence.