On that Céline doc, and other viewing
A poignant turn in the saga of the québécoise Giving Tree
I’m still trying to get back into regular posting rhythm, but today here’s an extra-long entry. It’s on the new Céline Dion documentary about her health crisis—which I also discussed this week on the Slate Culture Gabfest and a couple of weeks ago on CBC’s Commotion—as well as the Toronto 1969 Rock’n’Roll Revival concert documentary and some other (mostly) music-related stuff that’s passed before me on screens recently. Other than soccer, which is what I’m really mainly watching. (Go Canada! Go Spain!)
Céline Dion: I Am
A film remarkable less for what’s in it, though some of that is extraordinary, than for existing at all. From the experience of working on my book kind-of about her, I know that before Dion’s husband-manager René Angélil died in 2016, nothing with the faintest sniff of negativity was allowed to breach the ramparts of her citadel. This protectiveness was understandable: both in Québec as a teenager in the 1980s and in the wider media world in the 1990s, Dion had been the target of a lot of cruel backlash. But the defensiveness also no doubt came from the man who discovered a 12-year-old talent, guided her through her teens, and then began “dating” her (officially) when she was 20 and he was 45, eventually making her his third wife. There’s a common term for that today. In any case, while he was still alive, control, spin, and falsehoods were the rule.
But that never seemed to be his wife’s true nature, which was open and spontaneous almost to a fault. And soon after the official mourning period, she started making choices in fashion and public behaviour that would have been hard to imagine a decade earlier. This synched up with a generational shift, as millennials came of age who’d grown up with her music but had been too young to care if she had sophisticated cultural cachet. This was a North American generation especially attached to its 1990s childhood icons, from the last pre-internet phase of their lives, before their adolescence in the 2000s was overshadowed by terror, war, climate, recession, etc. For them, Céline Dion was as familiar, significant, and easy to celebrate as Spongebob Squarepants. Nostalgia meanwhile (and maybe a tincture of poptimism) had taken the edge off the formerly anti-Céline arbiters of hipness, who were probably less engaged with pop culture by now anyway. So suddenly, for the first time, Dion was kind of cool.
But during her last world tour in 2019, a lot of shows were cancelled for vague health reasons. Then in 2020, of course, the remainder was called off for the ultimate health reason, the pandemic. The rescheduled dates in 2022 were cancelled again, and finally in December that year, she revealed that she’d been diagnosed with something called Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS)—which sounded like a mean joke, but is just an unfortunate name for a serious and rare neurological disorder. As we learn in the documentary, she’d been showing the symptoms for a decade and a half, especially vocally. She’d just been finding ways to hide and lie about it, whether by saying she had a cold or laryngitis, or pretending there was a microphone issue when her voice went dry on stage. The SPS diagnosis wasn’t good news. But at least it replaced mystery with clarity, a treatment plan, and a small community of fellow sufferers.
Around the same time, Dion did something astounding, which again I can’t imagine having been sanctioned under René: She invited a camera crew into her home. They shot with her for eight to ten months, with Dion frequently out of makeup on screen for surely the first time ever in public. It included bearing witness to some severe moments of crisis. Director Irene Taylor has said that she offered to cut those scenes out, or at least soften them, and Dion refused. She seemed to be driven by the desire not to lie any more. (Perhaps, to be more sceptical for a second, she also knew as an entertainer what made for the better story.)
In part, Dion says she owes her audience an explanation for why she’s cancelled on them. “I can’t just do whatever I want.” In both admirable and disturbing ways, this is in keeping with a longstanding theme in Dion’s story that her life is not really her own. She’s been the vessel for her voice, the bearer of a gift. It’s a Catholic and patriarchal thing—Dion, hailing from a 14-child small-town francophone family, has always made her success theirs, both in how she tells the story and how she shares the profits. And for a broader family, too—she is the cultural envoy and high-value export of a Québec that was throwing off English-Canadian colonialism in the era of her birth, realizing itself as a nation within a nation, at first more communally and then in a more entrepreneurial, profit-seeking sense. She has always been in service to something greater than herself, playing the happy martyr. In the film she dehumanizingly describes herself as a tree whose job it is to serve up shiny apples, even if her limbs are beginning to wither. If there’s always seemed something un-self-actualized about her, it’s because she’s made herself answerable to so many others: a demanding and possessive nation back home, her showbiz-svengali husband and other family, and by extension her broader audience. “I didn’t create myself,” she says—a deep truth about all of us, but one that an artist needs to defy at least a little.
I believe her that she loves performing more than anything else, but as she tells one of her sons when she says that for all her travel she never really saw the world, it came at a price. She says she wishes she could have been one of the rock’n’rollers, staying out at the bar till all hours and cultivating a smokey rasp. But no: “Me, I drink water and I sleep 12 hours.” It’s easy to sneer at her materialism when we visit her storage warehouse in Vegas, fondling rack after rack of dresses and drawer after drawer of shoes and seeming to recall the story attached to each one. But it seems to me more like compensation: You don’t get a full life, but you can have these shiny toys. And as she points out, though not in so many words, the outfits are also part of her work, her stage costumes and for other public appearances—perhaps the part over which she often had the most say.
That her condition became disabling so early into the first period when she could finally claim more agency is a very cruel irony. So is the fact that what triggers SPS attacks coincides exactly with the life of a performer: intense stimuli, bright lights, loud sounds, crowds, etc. Or maybe these aren’t coincidences, given the mysterious ways of auto-immune conditions. The worst ordeal we see her go through in the film follows immediately on her first two days in a recording studio in four years, struggling to get one song down in the time she might once have done six. Her therapist says she was overly mentally stimulated. Though she keeps insisting that she is going to come back to performing (she doesn’t say it, but frankly nobody cares if she ever makes a new album at this point), that sequence makes one wonder if it will ever be possible.
She does briefly say that perhaps she could try singing a different repertoire, one that doesn’t demand a five-octave range, and we see a quick clip from a video of her doing a folky number from the era of her 2003 1 fille et 4 types album. (Her French repertoire has always had more stylistic flexibility.) But then, she says, the audience would have to decide whether they still liked her that way—again, always putting herself second, if not last.
The film has its dull domestic stretches and redundant performance montages, and doesn’t entirely escape the contemporary mold of the artist-controlled vanity documentary. But I was mostly grateful that it doesn’t follow the template of the typical 21st-century music doc, with Bono and Dave Grohl or whoever earnestly testifying to the subject’s world-changing importance. (At one point we see Dion taping a clip for just such a film, about John Farnham of Australia’s Little River Band—who seems to be what she meant by a cool rock’n’roller.)
The lack of contextualization does let us down a bit, however, on this question of Dion’s future options. The film could have considered other performers who’ve met this kind of crisis and what they chose to do. Linda Ronstadt and Linda Thompson come to mind as artists who have dealt with vocal dysphonia in recent decades. Thompson just put out a fine album wittily titled Proxy Music, on which she has artist friends and family perform her recent songs. This isn’t an option for Dion, who isn’t a songwriter—there’s an intriguing moment in the film where she says that a performance is “bigger” than a song, which I’d love to hear her expand on. But Thompson does at least model finding creative workarounds to apparent dead ends. I hope Dion finds hers. You certainly can’t watch this film without believing she’s going to keep trying. What concerns me more is whether she can find acceptance in her limitations instead of playing the Giving Tree and stripping herself down for parts. When the moment comes, I hope that she can tell herself, “You’ve done enough, faithful servant, let go.”
Revival69: The Concert That Rocked the World
I picked up a copy of Live Peace in Toronto 1969, with its rich azure sky and single conceptual cloud on the cover, sometime in my pre-adolescent Beatles fanaticism, probably when it was reissued after John Lennon’s death. It was especially exciting to a kid in southwestern Ontario to discover that Lennon’s first live performance after the Beatles quit touring was in September of 1969 at the Rock’n’Roll Revival Concert in Toronto. So I’ve felt like I know all about that gig at Varsity Stadium in Toronto my whole life.
Not so much, as I learned from watching Ron Chapman’s documentary Revival69: The Concert that Rocked the World, released to streaming this past week. (It’s on Crave in Canada, as well as Apple Music, YouTube, and no doubt others.) I either hadn’t known or had forgotten that Lennon and Yoko Ono were only persuaded to do the show a couple of days before it happened, when tickets weren’t selling for a bill featuring a rack of 1950s rock’n’roll pioneers (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and more, whose performances here are all stupendous) as well as the Doors (whose performance went unfilmed, maybe due to resistance from Jim Morrison, fresh off his indecent-exposure arrest). I definitely hadn’t known that even after the peace-activist couple signed on, the concert still wasn’t selling because nobody at CHUM radio, the fulcrum of publicity here at the time, believed the promoters that they’d gotten them. Or that Lennon and Ono only rehearsed their makeshift Plastic Ono Band—Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, and Yes drummer Alan White—that day, unplugged, on the cross-Atlantic flight.
Part of the reason the promoters were so desperate to salvage the concert was that they’d borrowed money from the head of the Vagabonds motorcycle gang, which, though this light-hearted film doesn’t tell us this, was also in the process of fucking up the Yorkville counterculture in general with hard drugs and violence. The bikers served as a motorcade for the limo from the airport, summoning the dark clouds of how biker security would bring death and disaster at Altamont a few months later (though again the film doesn’t mention that). Not so in Toronto, however—the show went well enough that Lennon came right home and quit the Beatles.
Chapman’s timing was great in getting a lot of the behind-the-scenes figures on record before they’re gone, and getting a lot of footage shot by D.A. Pennebaker that day but unseen in the concert film he made. (One of the talking heads here is Bob Christgau, who in his own newsletter this week reprinted the magazine feature he wrote about the Pennebaker production.) One of the few musicians interviewed is Alice Cooper, for whom the 1969 concert was a crucial one when his band was still mostly unknown. They come off as nearly as radical as Ono herself on stage. And the event turns out to be the source of the persistent rumour throughout his career that Cooper bit the heads off chickens in his act. I won’t spoil how.
Like a lot of docs, this one makes a few completely disproportionately grand claims for itself—the event was only a minor milestone in Lennon’s path out of Beatledom, and a small step towards the 1950s revivalism of the decade ahead. But it really is a hell of a story.
Joan Baez: I Am a Noise
I’m a folk-music fan but never was a Baez devotee, finding her voice and manner both a bit stentorian and parochial. I was still fascinated by this mixed bag of a documentary, where she was much warmer and more vulnerable than I expected, especially about her lifelong mental health struggles, as well as her relationship with her similarly troubled sister Mimi Fariña. What’s striking is just how much a creature of her times she was at every phase, turning from good girl to activist to militant to self-help in exact concert with the cultural tides, and perhaps making them as much as being made. In an unsettling twist in the tale, that includes a turn to repressed-memory-therapy in the 1980s. The never-resolved damage done to her and her family stands in evidence of the confused way North American culture then was trying to confront the realities of child abuse, as opposed to the confused way it’s doing so now. (See QAnon adrenochrome conspiracy theories etc.)
The Beach Boys
If you’ve watched previous docs and biopics about the Beach Boys and/or Brian Wilson, and said to yourself, “What I really want to know is what Mike Love thinks!” then this is the film for you. Which is to say, it was not the film for me. Some anecdotes and footage were new to me, and California culture scholar Josh Kun (a Pop Conference colleague) provides especially probing commentary, but otherwise skippable.
We Are Lady Parts, S2
I’m just starting the second series of this amazing Channel 4 sitcom from the UK about an all-female Muslim punk band. It probably can’t hit the giddy heights and novelty of the first season, a fact that it slyly acknowledges by having Lady Parts seething with resentment about an up-and-coming Gen-Z band copping their style in poppier form (called Second Wife, which even they have to admit is a great name). But from the first couple of episodes I have no doubt that it will continue sending up expectations about religion, immigration, identity, and culture in ways that bamboozle every binary—and it’s surprisingly realistic (though not scrupulously so) about the mundane business of band life, too.
Alex Edelman: Just For Us
This HBO comedy special has been out for some time, but I just caught it this week and have to recommend it. A long-running solo show (briefly on Broadway) that’s formally heavily under the formal influence of Mike Birbiglia, the content here is still distinctly original, as Edelman weaves in and out of one highly charged story dating from the (first) Trump administration to illuminate all kinds of questions about Jewish identity and antisemitism. Implicitly it might feel challenging to some people’s politics right now, though the show was developed years ago and there’s no reference to the current moment—apparently Edelman cut a line from the live version that went something like, “I could lose half of you right now with a sentence about Israel, and with two sentences, I could lose the other half.” Maybe, like me, you’ll find that kind of hinged perspective appealing. Or maybe you’ll also just appreciate how sharp and funny it is regardless.
All good, and as always, brilliant about Dion. Thanks.
First tell me all these falsehoods Rene gave us? And what about the years after his death when she lied? I am sure somehow that is Rene's fault too. Maybe you should look at all the specials she did over her whole career where cameras followed her around and in her home. Do you even think that the years after his death a lot of her behavior was missing him and dealing with this unknown disease and self-medicating. She even said she didn't know who she was anymore.
She has always been open and kooky and says what she means, you are just too elitist to have seen it, till it was the cool thing to do. Rene never stifled her or prevented her from doing things. If anything, it was the likes of you and other journalists that criticized everything she did till the world finally embraced the way she is that made it seem she was not cool. Celine did not change the world did.
Maybe you should learn to be objective like a journalist is supposed to be but as long as everything wrong was Rene’s fault you cannot be taken seriously.