Truman Capote died in Joanne Carson’s Bel Air home on August 25, 1984. Decades after first having dreamed up his Proustian magnum opus, Answered Prayers, he left behind no discernible manuscript of said project. There were bits and pieces, yes. Snippets and jotted ideas — some semblance of chapters. Even those who have read the posthumously published version of Answered Prayers (primarily a collection of published excerpts, “La Côte Basque” included) know it to be not just unfinished but arguably fragmented. You get the sense that Capote may never have figured out how best to string together his many ideas for this ambitious endeavor.
If you’re watching Feud’s finale episode (or reading this recap) thinking, We know this, and?, you’re not alone. We have known and seen this and seem to be (re)treading familiar ground with very little that adds to this fictionalized retelling of what remains, even in hindsight, as a petty feud blown out of proportion. So what can Feud: Capote vs. the Swans offer us in its final installment that doesn’t feel like a rerun of things we’ve seen and heard for the past seven episodes? Not much, as it turns out, though writer Jon Robin Baitz tries his best to offer a fitful epilogue for this meta meditation on the end of an era and the difficulty of writing endings — and apologies, in turn.
And so, with this final episode, “Phantasm Forgiveness,” Feud season two takes a stab at imagining what the many versions of Answered Prayers could have been, offering us examples of what Capote’s oft-promised triumphant treasure trove of literary gossip could have looked like. Equal parts eulogy for a time gone by and thinly veiled narrative versions of “I’m sorry,” these vignettes of P. B. Jones (Capote’s autobiographical protagonist) and his swans are, as Capote’s ghostly mother taunts him throughout the episode in drunken bouts of hallucinatory hazes, of varying quality.
“There’s no discernible raison d’être,” as Jessica Lange’s Lillie Mae puts it at one point. She could well be talking about “Phantasm Forgiveness,” which borrows the picaresque structure of Answered Prayers to reunite Truman (a.k.a. P. B. Jones) with his swans after setting up the novel and episode as a good-bye to their time together. Truman, egged on by Jack once more (now dating a much younger man who’s all too eager to meet Truman) gets to writing an opener that finds his characters gathered back at La Côte Basque before the famed restaurant closes its doors. As Truman tells Jack, he knows he’s seeking forgiveness and can only hope his swans understand he’s offering them a heartfelt apology. From La Côte, P. B. Jones surveys his friends and then daydreams about possible endings for everyone (but Babe). Let’s look at the endings Truman dreams up.
C.Z. a.k.a. Kiki
Given how close C.Z. and Truman remained, it makes sense that Truman’s imagined sojourn with Sevigny’s laced-up socialite (who, let’s not forget, once posed nude for Diego Rivera!) would be a road-trip romp out west. But not before C.Z. berates Truman for having so soiled his reputation and his friendships. It wasn’t just that he’d aired everyone’s dirty laundry. It was that he’d done so without an ounce of the literary flair — let alone the literary success — that would’ve made it worth it. “Two-dimensional cave scratchings,” she calls his writing. That’s what he should’ve apologized for.
It’s all rather didactic, both for Capote and for Baitz, a way to vocalize what Feud has been presumably showing us this entire time. That it then leads to a spur-of-the-moment trip out west, where C.Z. and Truman end up gifting C.Z.’s infamous Rivera nude portrait to a random bar outpost in the desert, feels, well, light. Or, as Lilli Mae puts it, rather stiff. “Let’s try and make it a little less fruity,” she venomously suggests. Maybe a drink will help. Yes, in Baitz’s imagination, Capote’s alcoholism is figured by his mother’s ghost; he has little agency in all of it, merely accepting drinks from her without much protestation.
Slim a.k.a. Lady Ina Coolbirth
The drinking leads Truman to conjure up a happenstance meeting with Slim, who spews angered bile Truman’s way in the middle of the streets of Manhattan. She’s clearly still furious over what he wrote. But all she needed, it seems, was a way to let it all out. After the screaming match, she allows Truman to follow her home, where she’s packing her very expensive china ahead of her upcoming move. Not that anyone will care about it where she’s going: Why not smash it, then? Truman insists; no better way to release all that anger, no? If the plate smashing that follows feels clichéd and a bit beneath Capote’s literary prowess, it’s because it does have the feel of a rather stilted reconciliation, the kind a drunken writer would resort to if he’d hope to make the most easily achievable reconciliation.
Lilli Mae, here standing in as Truman’s literary conscience, insists he tries harder and plumb deeper. Maybe some pills will help. Okay, so maybe she’s less his literary conscience than his unconscious, all guilt and baseless desires wrapped into ghostly recriminations.
Lee (as herself)
As one of the few swans who was name-checked as herself in the original “La Côte Basque,” Lee here again needs no alter ego. Truman first imagines her dining with Jackie, whom she clearly despises, thinking her more famous sister purloined everything she ever wanted and prided herself on. But her encounter with Truman finds the hustler turned writer gifting his former friend the memoir she’d always hoped to write — and goes one step further, offering to help her get rid of her most recent mistake (that husband of hers who cruises for boys left and right). Channeling Capote’s more mordantly morbid sensibility, this vignette finds Truman and Lee planning on poisoning her husband, Herbert Ross, with a shot of nicotine to the back of the ear — a trick Truman had learned long ago — and which would, perhaps, free Lee to find her footing once more.
These phantom chapters are proof that Truman is losing his grip on reality — and has, perhaps, also lost touch with the literary Zeitgeist. We keep seeing him trying to write in his New York City apartment as Lilli Mae (and later Ann Woodward) taunts him. His mother eggs him to confront their own family history. He should write about her, the “Black Swan.” Wouldn’t her suicide make for a juicy tale? Why has he shied away from it? Might Answered Prayers be a way not to merely atone for what he did to Babe and her friends, but a way to avenge his mother, to eulogize the world she so desperately wanted to belong to and yet could never feel at home in? As ever, all of these theories are merely thrown into the ether and not examined further; instead, we see Truman going out west to spend time with Joanne, where he’ll hopefully finish the book. Or maybe he has finished but has decided to burn it at the behest of Ann’s fashionable ghost? That’s the image Feud gives us: a completed manuscript burnt to a crisp as Capote hopes that gesture will allow him to keep his soul.
But we know what happened after all: He did go west. He did try to write more. He failed. He drank. He (as Feud tells it) imagined seeing his mom and Ann taunting him. He almost drowned. And then eventually died. Since we’d already witnessed much of this last week, “Phantasm Forgiveness” mostly skips through Capote’s final days and Joanne’s slight guilt at not being able to help him in the end.
This brings us to 2016. That’s the year Capote’s ashes (part of Joanne’s estate) were auctioned. Kate Harrington, who we imagine was able to benefit from Truman’s stewardship after all, is shown trying to nab them but ultimately loses the bid to an unknown buyer in New York. The swans, dressed to the nines as in their prime, look on, aghast in their ghostly presence at what their beloved city has become (“Nothing’s a little like New York anymore. Not even New York”), and exit into a white light as if their time has finally come now that Truman’s ashes will return him to the city he so loved. They’ve not been reunited with him, alas, but now, thanks to Baitz and this show, they will be further tied to his legacy. It all amounts to a rather maudlin swan song, literary fan fiction given the prestige-TV treatment. It’s a series that should have heeded Capote’s love of the short story and embraced a brisk brevity that would have made its retelling all the more impactful.
“I don’t want love; I want forgiveness,” Truman says at the start of the episode. It’s unclear whether Feud rewards the late writer with either, both within the tale here being told or in 2024, when audiences may be first introduced to the In Cold Blood author. He is given the final word on this feud with his swans (Sevigny’s C.Z. had said as much in last week’s episode), but I don’t know that Baitz eventually settles on a particularly satisfying final word for him.
Wit vs. Beauty
• I’ll admit, I’m struggling to see any cemetery scene these days without flashing back to Saltburn, though here, at least Truman kept his clothes on while lying next to Babe’s plot.
• If nothing else, let Feud remind audiences (and casting agents!) of Demi Moore’s dazzling screen presence. Her Ann Woodward may have been the swan we spent the least amount of time with, but my God, did she make every gesture and every scathing line feel like an event. And in her scenes in this episode, with fabulous black, almost funereal ensembles, she’s never looked as great.
• I’m never one to begrudge more airtime for Jessica Lange, here doing her best in a bit role as Truman’s mother, but did we really need to see those flashbacks where a young Truman is locked out of his mother’s bedroom as she seduces a new beau to understand why a drunken grown-up Truman spent his life pursuing women who would serve as surrogate mothers and yet who clearly harbored a distaste for him and his effeminacy?
• If I’m taking anything away from Feud’s finale episode, it’s the constant fear that someone will critique my writing as “frilly,” which I long thought would have been a compliment. However, as Lange delivered, it does feel like the worst review any writer could get.
Manuel Betancourt , 2024-03-14 03:12:26
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