The New Look

The New Look: On men, women, war, and creation.

            I’m no Hollywood fangirl. Ask anyone who knows me. But I cannot get over actor Ben Mendelsohn’s performance in the brilliantly written Apple TV series, The New Look.

            I haven’t been as enthralled with an actor—or the art of acting—since Michael J. Zazlow played Roger Thorpe on the CBS daytime series, The Guiding Light. He, along with Oprah Winfrey and John Grisham, got me through my mind-numbing, 1990s adventures with babies and small children. I read aloud from Grisham to all my nursing newborns.

Mendelsohn first got my attention as Danny in the Islamorada, Florida-based TV series, Bloodline. He stole the show. When your fellow cast members include Sam Shepard and Sissy Spacek, that’s not an easy trick.

Count me freshly mesmerized by the talent of the Australian-born actor. The New Look is a twin biopic that follows the stories of Christian Dior (played by Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel, through the two fashion designers’ respective survivals of World War II. The show is set, for the most part, in Paris.

Nazi-occupied Paris.   

Juliette Binoche’s portrayal of Chanel is the sharp black-and-white to Mendelsohn’s softer grays. The characters’ parallelism is a study in gender and gender roles, juxtaposed against the stark, unforgiving background of the carnage wrought by men. Straight, European male privilege looms throughout the series, as it did (does) in life. Binoche’s Chanel is no stranger to playing on the whims of men—or going to war with them. Her performance is a brilliant testament to adaptation. One moment she’s coquettishly savvy. The next she is ripping off someone’s head. One understands, watching her, that “bipolar” or “borderline” women do not necessarily exist outside the confines of mankind’s historic and continuing abuse of female people. How dare she determine her own future!

But back to Mendelsohn. (May I call him Ben? I mean, good Lord, I’ve never seen anyone so vulnerable on camera. So intimate.)

Mendelsohn’s subtle-yet-evocative character-building gives us a sensitive creator, scarred by his mother’s death, and rejected by his stern, homophobic father. One imagines the actor–so proficient with the emotional building blocks of his craft–must have been through the wringer himself, in real life.

After all, we either make peace with our trauma, or we’re sentenced to live a different, less sustainable, life of acting: masking, code-switching, fawning, tiptoeing, shock-absorbing, or what-have-you. Anyone not born into the dominating position in the dominant culture knows what I’m talking about. And it’s exhausting.

It is Dior’s relationship to his younger sister, Catherine, which defines this inspired-by-history version of the designer. We learn in the first episode she is a member of the French resistance. We flash back to Christian as a boy, inexplicably enamored by the feminine—his mother, his baby sister, the family’s garden.

In efforts to avoid an outright spoiler, I’ll say Catherine Dior’s femininity, much like Coco Chanel’s, is useful to men on both sides of the war. Perhaps Chanel’s story is defined by the lack of protective men in her life. She’s on her own from a young age.

But Catherine Dior has Christian. And the burden of being protector, as Mendelsohn shows us, is no picnic. Given what women faced in Nazi-occupied Paris, the role is nearly unbearable, if not impossible. Mendelsohn brings to life a side of masculinity rarely seen on screen. He shows us what it is for a man to be, in moments, utterly broken. He shows us a man both crushed and resilient amid the horrors of Nazi aggression, amid the expectations laid out by the world. By civilized society. By our fathers. By women.

The show is also full of characters who embody anti-heroes and hybrids, just as World War II Paris also contained anti-heroes and hybrids. There were resistors, collaborators, and those who needed, given the circumstances, to be both. The entire cast rises to the demands of the ambitious story—every single actor.

Dior survived, we learn early on, because his boss’s shop made dresses for the wives and girlfriends of Nazi higher-ups. Coco Chanel, on the other hand, closed up her atelier. She too is motivated by instincts to protect her family, choices which will ultimately corner her, leaving her to be judged by the double standards of the male world.

Dior’s love for his sister transcends his role as protector. Catherine becomes metaphoric for what it is men fight for—brutishly or otherwise—in the first place: Home, hearth, gardens, beauty, culture, cuisine, music, and art. In his struggle to bring beauty into the world as a fashion designer, Dior fights for nothing less than civilization.

He tells us, from the start, an artist’s act of creation is an act of defiance and resistance in itself. These acts are, in fact, survival. Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison, quoting another unknown artist friend, said it this way: “[War, strife, conflict are] precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”

Morrison is later quoted as saying:

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.

For me, The New Look is just that kind of art. And Mendelsohn, much like Dior, is just that kind of artist.