Flares and Flavors in the First Lady Michelle Obama’s “The Light We Carry” Posterior: A New Look at “Today”
A book tour is not just a book tour. When it is a platform for the refashioning, literally, of a major public figure — when it is a way for someone whose image at one stage of her life has been memorialized for posterity to signal that it is time to move on.
It seems that this is the case for the case of Mrs. Obama, who was in a promotional junket for her new film “The Light We Carry” when it wrapped up this week. That something new was going on (and not just a new book) was obvious not just to those who made it to a theater to listen to her discuss her memoir/self-help tome with such figures as Gayle King, Conan O’Brien, Ellen DeGeneres and Tyler Perry, but to anyone following along on social media.
The first lady — the one preserved in oils by the painter Sharon Sprung wearing a sky blue off-the-shoulder evening gown, her shoulder-length hair styled in soft, straight wings around her face — has been left framed on the White House wall. Instead, Mrs. Obama has, in multiple public outings, traded her floral dresses, corporate sheaths and J. Crew cardigans for edgy trouser suits, T-shirts and braids, as if declaring independence from the constraints and conventions heaped on her when she was in the Executive Mansion. There was a lot of flair happening. And flares.
The transformation began with the yellow pantsuit she wore for the “Today” show. She wore a Versace zebra print shirtdress with her cargos in Washington, D.C., and was given notice that something was happening with the Ganni denim she wore in Philadelphia. Reached peak fly girl nostalgia with a multicolor Roksanda x Fila zip-up sweatshirt, what looked like a one-shoulder periwinkle blue bodysuit and baggy black pants in Atlanta.
The delight of Allison Williams: How do we enjoy life? A conversation in the dark about M3GAN, a collaboration between a feminist and a Canadian actress
On a chilly but humane November night in Toronto, Allison Williams and I slip into an expansive conversation about the polite ways one can manipulate an audience. Williams is an actress, one of the more self-aware of her generation; audience manipulation is her not-so-secret weapon. And I’m abundantly aware that, as a writer profiling her for a magazine, I’m an essential part of that audience.
I have interviewed Williams several times over the years, and each time is as lovely and warm and full of mutual compliments as the last. I would say, at this point, we like one another. But also, do we? Can we? It is possible to have a connection between two people with the same personality machine that are both trying to maximize their own benefit, Is it possible? Is it gauche to admit you’re both trying to have a nice time? Let’s just lean in the ambiguity for now and enjoy ourselves.
Williams and I are sitting outside in the dark, with only a few dim streetlights providing visibility in a narrow space between talent trailers. I’m here to talk about M3GAN, a killer thriller starring Williams that comes out in January, but she’s already shooting her next project, Fellow Travelers, a limited series set at the height of McCarthyism. Williams’ hair is still curled and pinned for a midcentury dinner party, but filming is done for the day. We’re wearing sleeping-bag-sized coats, both of which she provided. The fantasy and the reality of Hollywood collide.
The age-old metric of success for a celebrity profile is the degree of authenticity achieved, the partial or total unmasking of artifice in pursuit of truth. In an era of simulations and para social relationships, the artifice is more important to me. It might be too cynical a word. It doesn’t make sense to have a public and private version of a celebrity. When your work by definition sets you in the sights of millions of people who can access reams of personal information about you, creating a you you can share with the masses but check at the door when it’s time to go home seems more like a survival tactic than a vanity play.
The delight of Allison Williams is how game she is to pick the entire process apart. She knows people have preconceived notions of her, so why not play into them? “For me to think that we live in a world where people are coming in tabula rasa—like, ‘I forget everything I’ve ever seen the person do, everything I know about her’—that would be inhuman!” she says. You know that coconspirator dynamic formed when a stranger leans into close at a party and starts bonds with you over the vibe of the party? It feels like talking to Williams about her life in the same way, just two people in a quiet corner, trying to figure out who she is. You don’t know if you will ever see each other again but you are the best of friends right now. By the end of the night you’ll even have inside jokes, and since you’re comfortable you’ll wander into strange conversational tangents like this:
The metaverse would want us to be comfortable abandoning the authentic, physical, human, the grounded, the stripped away, the bare bones, for a persona of our very deliberate creation according to Williams. “I have found that dance, that conversation between two versions of preferred reality, to be very interesting.” She presents this in what I have come to recognize as a key feature of her conversational parlance, scholarly analysis befitting her English degree from Yale but delivered in a casual, unpretentious cadence. Williams is smart but not so much that it causes an affect. She is dancing in her own way. She is modeling a new way of being. She is a very deliberate creation.