John Oliver: US unemployment chaos is 'the result of deliberate choices'
John Oliver trained his focus on the dysfunctional, maddening unemployment system on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, nearly a year into a pandemic recession which has left millions of Americans without jobs or a functional safety net. The pandemic exposed widespread failures in America’s diffuse, patchwork unemployment system: dysfunctional websites, hours of on-hold phone calls and even physical lines for unemployment benefits that, for many, arrived too late.
Economists generally agree that unemployment insurance is “one of the most effective policies to aid recovery”, Oliver explained, “which does make sense because when you give the unemployed money, they tend not to hoard it offshore in the Caymans; they spend it on shit they need”. Nevertheless, as of January 2021, it’s estimated that unemployment systems reached at most 30% of all unemployed workers, leaving an estimated 8 million unemployed Americans not receiving benefits.
While some of the chaos “was because states’ antiquated systems were simply overwhelmed”, Oliver continued, it would be “a mistake to think of this merely as a technological problem. Because the system underneath that shitty technology has been broken for years now, and sometimes deliberately.”
Even before the pandemic, unemployment programs in the US, which vary greatly by state, made it difficult for unemployed people to access benefits. Only about 10% of unemployed residents of North Carolina and Florida, for example, received benefits. “Just think about what that means,” Oliver said. “Out of every 10 unemployed people in those states, only one is actually receiving benefits. If you boarded an airplane and learned that only one in 10 seats had an oxygen mask, you would wonder: who designed this system, why did they make it this way, and how do I get the fuck out of here
right now?”
And, true to virtually every government program in the US, racial inequities were baked in from the beginning; in the 1930s, agricultural and domestic workers were purposely excluded, shutting out 65% of black workers. “It seems in the US, you can basically point to anything and ask, ‘how is that racist?’ and get a specific historical answer,” Oliver said. “Freeways? Demolished black communities. Mickey mouse? Based on minstrel shows. This toddler?” he said over a picture of a generic white baby, “well, his name is Kendall, so it’s only a matter of time.”
Fundamental design flaws aside, the failures of American unemployment in 2020 “were the result of deliberate choices”, Oliver continued, especially changes made in the wake of the recession, when numerous states fixed budget shortfalls by reducing access to benefits with onerous work requirements rather than raising taxes on businesses.
Oliver turned to a perennial state case study of poor trends in governance: Florida. The state’s former governor, Rick Scott, bragged in 2019 that he reduced the number of Floridians on employment to 61,000 people out of 22 million unemployed. Those staggering numbers were achieved by numerous restrictive measures: Florida started documenting contact with five potential employers per week, slashed the number of weeks one could receive benefits, and threw in extra obstacles such as requiring a 45-minute online exam that tested math, reading and research skills.
Oliver played footage of nervous Floridians lined up during a pandemic to apply, again, for unemployment, with reasonable expectation of being denied crucial benefits. “It’s a testament to both this pandemic and
Florida’s ridiculous system that I feel the same white-knuckle terror watching people line up for unemployment applications as I do when watching a daredevil jump a motorcycle over a row of buses,” he mused. “Although to be honest, it’s probably only a matter of time before Florida makes bus-jumping a requirement for filing for unemployment there, too.”
Oliver urged short-term changes to unemployment programs, such as funding to upgrade their broken technology and the removal of “stupid obstacles that prevent applicants who need help from getting it”. But he ended the monologue with a call for radical, long-term change to a fundamentally broken system – namely, nationalized standards for benefits and, short of that unlikely scenario, legislation to set basic unemployment standards that states cannot drop below.
“All of which is really just a long way of saying that we need to take all of the energy that we have been pouring into making sure people who don’t deserve payments don’t get them, and put at least as much energy into making sure that people who really need them do,” he concluded. “To not make big changes after the flaws of this system have been so brutally exposed over the last year would be unforgivable.”
David Chase, creator, writer and producer
I was still writing the pilot episode when Steven Van Zandt – who would go on to play strip-club owner and secondin-command Silvio Dante – came to read for the part of Tony Soprano. I thought: “With Steven, it could be more like The Simpsons: more comedy, less nasty bits, more absurd.” But once we hired Jim Gandolfini for Tony, it all went back to where it started.
The first draft was for Fox. They turned it down. I realised it was because I hadn’t put any murders in. People watch mob shows because they like to see murders and betrayals. So when I went to HBO, I completely rewrote it. Had Fox said yes, it would have been a calamity of competing agendas, a total piece of crap. The only time I ever had a problem was in episode five of season one, College, when Tony takes his daughter to various colleges in New England and spots a guy who ratted out the mob. The guy’s murder was very graphic and brutal and HBO got nervous. But I said: “People aren’t going to accept this guy as a real mobster if he doesn’t kill a rat.”
I’m an Italian-American from New Jersey and we shot in the woodsy suburb I grew up in. My family was not in the mob but I had a cousin who was connected. I remember my aunt went to a wedding at the home of the big New Jersey boss. I was just a kid and couldn’t believe it when she told us they had a champagne fountain.
The series was accurate about the American mafia and the RICO statutes that had come in to fight racketeering. In the old days, guys busted for cocaine trafficking used to go away for five years. Anybody could stand that. Now they went away for 30, so the mafia started to inform on each other to avoid sentences and the whole system fell apart.
I’ve heard of people who have watched all 86 episodes six, seven, eight times. People relate to Tony’s problems with his work and home life. It gives an accurate picture of life, suburbia and US commercialism in the early 2000s. Even though there are clunky old cellphones and old-fashioned TVs, it’s stood the test of time. It was the high point of my career. It’s not going to get better than that.
Vincent Curatola, plays Johnny Sack
I’d known Jim Gandolfini for about six years. We used to hang out in this restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village called Marylou’s that was full of budding actors like me, Jim and Tony
Sirico, who played Paulie Walnuts. I’d only become an actor very recently. My agent submitted me for the role of Johnny Sack – and the rest is history.
David Chase is a quiet, pensive guy, a man of very few words but extreme talent. The scripts were so specific that acting like a mobster was easy. The trick was in the subtleties. Smiling with your eyes is one thing. Smiling with murder behind your eyes speaks volumes. I never really looked at it as organised crime, though. They could just as easily have been part of corporate crime, which I think is a lot bigger.
I remember walking into a diner the Monday morning after my first episode. People were staring at me like I really was a New York crime family underboss. In season four, Johnny beats up a guy who’s making fun of his wife Ginny’s weight. Then in the final series, he is allowed out of jail to attend his daughter Allegra’s wedding and orders Tony to do a hit. After that, the looks of fear I got in real life were even stronger.
There was a story in the New York Post that said some alleged members of organised crime had been captured talking about The Sopranos while under wire surveillance. I thought that was hilarious – these actual mobsters wondering: “Is that our restaurant they’re talking about?” And: “Is that supposed to me?”
We were all very close. We all happened to be neighbours and did a lot of personal appearances together in casinos and hotels. Jim’s passing in 2013 was a horrible ripple through our lives. He was a fun and loving guy – and of course not at all like Tony Soprano.
The show still attracts generations of new fans. I liken it to going to a museum and seeing a 300-year-old painting. I think that’s how The Sopranos will be viewed in the future – as an iconic piece of art.
• David Chase and cast appear in Celebrate the Sopranos.
I’m not here to defend the accent. You can have that. I am not going to say that in PS I Love You, Gerard Butler – whose real accent will remain a secret until the day he dies – does a good impression of an Irishman. Although it’s a lot better than reviewers gave it credit for, that is not a hill on which I will get wounded, let alone die. But I have to stand up for one of the most unjustly smeared films of the last 20 years, nay of all time.
PS I Love You is based on the Cecelia Ahern novel of the same name. It’s about Holly (Hilary Swank) trying to cope after her husband Gerry (Butler) dies in his 30s of a brain tumour. It doesn’t sound like thigh-cracking stuff, which is what makes its success all the more fantastic.
Rewatching the film, I basically start crying about 12 minutes in. A long first scene shows us Holly and Gerry arguing as they walk into their toosmall New York apartment, unconsciously undressing for bed as they snap and bicker. The argument and reconciliation, which Empiredescribed as “one of the worst scenes of the year”, is utterly believable: the frustration at the parallel conversations sailing past each other; the extraordinary way in which the couple make up, breathlessly kissing each other by way of apology. Knowing that Gerry is soon to die paints these moments a sickly grey, and the sentimental trap of pretending the relationship was perfect is skillfully avoided.
There’s a peculiar snobbery that taints the reception to films like PS I Love You. It’s about love, I think. There can be immense self-satisfaction in pissing on films that honestly try to capture the ugly ecstasy of all-consuming love. Reviewing for the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw slapped the label “necrophiliac high concept” on this film about a woman trying to deal with the paralysing grief of losing the love of her life. Richard Curtis once pointed out that his films are criticised for being unrealistic but “If you make a film about a soldier who goes awol and murders a pregnant nurse – something that’s happened probably once in history – it’s called searingly realistic analysis of society.” You don’t have to like Curtis or PS I Love You to see his point. This doesn’t mean that every film about love is a good film – Ryan Murphy’s The Prom proves this – but it’s harder to admit that you were moved by a tender portrayal of love than it is to say that a show about gangsters is good. By 2007 it was cool to mock romcoms, especially ones that dared to say more than one thing.
Another odd criticism of PS I Love You was that it varies wildly in tone. In scoring an easy point, this accusation missed something blindingly obvious: life varies weirdly and wildly in tone as well. If it didn’t vary in tone, the film would be unrelentingly depressing. That is one of the points of the film: even if you are at the bottom of a barrel of misery, contemplating your husband’s death, humour will find you. At every funeral someone is desperately trying to hold in a fart.
To paint the film as a weird romance between a living woman and a dead man is to deliberately misunderstand it. It isn’t just because of the morbid cloud hanging over the film that the flashback scenes of Holly and Gerry meeting for the first time almost move me to tears. They are also gorgeously realised, rosetinted depictions of love blossoming. Meeting the couple in their 30s and then rewinding 10 years is clever: when they say goodbye after that first encounter, we know they will see each other again. But Gerry doesn’t know – and the agonised longing in his eyes is all too convincing.
I write about bad films from time to time. One of the things that unites them, I think, is that they elicit a response from their audience entirely divorced from the one they intended to. PS I Love You does the exact opposite. It is heartbreaking when it wants to be heartbreaking, and hilarious when it wants to be hilarious. In what sense it’s supposed to be a bad film therefore remains a mystery.
There are times when the majority is right. But, as 2016 taught us, there are times when it is wrong. It was wrong in 2007 as well. I am not pretending that PS I Love You is The Godfather. It’s better than that (I’m kidding). But there is just as much skill in making people laugh and cry as there is in making people stroke their chin in approval. And no amount of snobbery can disguise that.
PS I love this film.
PS I Love You is available on HBO Max in the US and on Amazon Prime and Netflix in the UK
Paris fashion week is as theatrical as ever, even while playing to an empty house. Instead of their customary stadium-sized catwalk show, Dior filmed a dark fairytale in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, for an audience mostly watching on their phones.
The opulent venue was Dior’s answer to the challenge of how to make an event out of a show which is, in reality, not an event.
When lockdown ruled out the sociallydistanced catwalk show for a small audience which she had planned to stage, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri took the opportunity to upgrade to a location which could not have accommodated a distanced physical show, but which could be used as a film set.
“This is an important place in French culture, and we were all very happy that Versailles agreed to support our creativity,” she said in a Zoom call before the show.
From Alice and her looking-glass to Snow White’s stepmother, fairytales are full of mirrors. In fables, as in life, mirrors are as much about delusion and insecurity as they are about beauty or truth.
“The mirror is about attraction, but also about repulsion,” said Chiuri, whose favourite fairytale, Beauty and the Beast, features a mirror which allows Beauty to glimpse the family she has left behind.
To put a dark twist on Versailles sparkle, the Italian artist Silvia Giambrone was commissioned to revisit her 2018 work Mirrors with a site-specific installation, The Hall of Shadows. Giambrone placed a huge brass mirror in front of each of the room’s 17 arched windows, the glass of each smeared with wax and spiked with acacia thorns, which threatened to pierce the models passing by.
Giambrone, whose work includes a performance-art film in which an embroidered collar is stitched on to her skin, drawing blood, has said that her art explores “the relationship between beauty and violence”. During the show, models in Dior bar jackets remade for Little Red Riding Hood and fairytale tulle gowns shared the space with a troupe of dancers in flesh bodysuits, led by the Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal.
If a blockbuster short film poking at the underbelly of our obsession with beauty and glamour seems prickly territory for a luxury house whose fortunes rest on clothes, makeup and fragrance, Chiuri is comfortable with the friction.
“We all know that there are things about fashion that aren’t good for us. Fairytales show us that these are part of being human. And in the end, what every fairytale teaches us is that what matters is love,” she said.
The surreal is bread and butter at the house of Schiaparelli, whose founder Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with her friend Salvador Dalí on catwalk collections almost a century ago.
Under American creative director Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli has been enjoying a fashion moment since long before Paris fashion week. It began at President Biden’s inauguration, where Lady Gaga performed in a bespoke Schiaparelli gown featuring a giant gold dove holding an olive branch – a reference to Biden’s theme of unity – and sculptural gold ear-jackets designed to conceal her in-ear monitors.
A film showcasing Roseberry’s new Schiaparelli collection, released as part of Paris fashion week, opened with a model answering a phone sculpted in the shape of a giant gold ear in a nod to Dalí’s Lobster Telephone.