Everything we love, and don’t, about Martha Stewart

“Marta”, RJ Cutler’s film about the life and career of Martha Stewart (it’s out today on Netflix), is a beautiful documentary. It’s a film that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration of American culture seems, in retrospect, as inevitable as it is improbable. It describes how she started as a model, then became a stockbroker in New York and then moved to Westport, Conn., with her husband, a publishing magnate. moved, where they bought a fixer-upper, Turkey Hill Farm, whose revamp by Martha (she hand-painted the entire farm while listening to the Watergate hearings), became the prototype for her brand of obsessively tasteful, rustic “perfection” . It shows us how she launched a prestigious catering company and then, with the 1982 book ‘Entertaining’, launched herself as the doyenne of a new luxury lifestyle culture that would be – in a word – vicarious.

The film shows us that Stewart is a visionand that her creative genius for shabby-chic retro design and complicated but emphatically “user-friendly” recipes was matched by her business acumen, making her America’s first self-made female billionaire. The film then shows us how her empire fell apart when she was accused of insider trading, a controversial case (some think she was targeted just for being who she was) that led to her spending five months in prison . And it captures how, against all odds, she came back in the age of social media, remaking herself as a down-with-the-kids, down-with-Snoop Dogg icon of timeless cool.

She did all this, of course, by marketing the Martha persona: the self-empowered WASP goddess, direct and imperious, with an eerily serene grin of blissful power. She was a woman who radiated, who looked at the world through a luxurious glaze. In a New Yorker essay by Joan Didion quoted in the film, Didion makes it clear that Stewart was not just a superwoman. She was Everywoman – that is, she mythologized herself into the roles women were raised to play and then merged them with a self-empowerment that transcended those roles. She literally had her (beautiful) (designer) (made from scratch!) cake and ate it too. But there was a dark side to this Wonder Woman saga. How can that not be the case?

“Martha” tells a gripping story, and part of what makes the film so compelling is the way Cutler turns Stewart’s biography into a meditation on The Meaning of Martha. The film hails her as “the first influencer,” which feels right when you add that the world of “influence” is essentially a sponsor-driven grand illusion. It certainly was for Stewart, who created and marketed the idea of ​​a powerful housewife for women who no longer wanted to be housewives. The world of Martha Stewart Living – not just the magazine, but the ethos, the whole style of it Martha Stewart is alive – was grounded but virtual. Because who could actually do it? Who could do even a little bit of that? The first extended clip we see is of young Martha, back when she still looked like a flaxen-haired Emma Thompson as America’s country version of a British royal wannabe, talking about wrapping a turkey in puff pastry for Thanksgiving – and then we see the turkey, which resembles a fried dough sculpture with hieroglyphs.

The key word in all this is ‘ambitious’. That was Martha’s calling: to show you all the good things you can strive for. She created an aesthetic that appealed to many of us. But is aspiration always so good in that sense? Clearly this is possible in many ways ambitions – for your life, career, family, home, you name it – is healthy and human. But the aspirational culture of the 21st century tends to mean a certain unattainable proxy dream thing. (Two-fifths of twenty-year-olds today say they plan to become “stars.”) Martha Stewart was the forerunner. In a way, she stuffed a turkey in puff pastry so you didn’t have to (but could dream about it as if you were the one who did it). She turned ‘household’ into a hologram that is so real you can touch and taste it.

She was the first celebrity designer to sell her wares in K-Mart, which turned out to be a late capitalist inspiration. It spoke of a certain element of democratization in her empire. At the same time, in the documentary we hear a voice off camera saying, “She wanted to make it possible for people to have the homes and environments they wanted, whether you have money or not.” Well, it takes money to have those houses, features and environment – ​​but to the extent that Stewart might say, “Really, it just takes time and dedication,” guess what? Time is also money. She sold a fantasy of elitism to the elite.

Stewart, now a robust 83, is interviewed by Cutler throughout the film, and she is enormously likable: a source of fearless opinions and I-did-it-my-way charisma. Yet she has been caught in some revealing moments. Her marriage to Andrew Stewart lasted almost thirty years until it hit the shoals of his philandering. But Cutler asks Stewart about an affair she Maybe before her husband strayed – and after struggling on camera, she admits it but waves it away and basically says, that was nothing, it didn’t count. Stewart is a vivid narrator of her own story, but she cuts back. When Cutler asks her what she hates most, along with a list of reasonable things (waste, inefficiency, avoidance, impatience), she says, “I hate people who think they can do more than they can.” be able to.’ Hello? That’s her entire demographic. Her off-screen personality, which we see in a few clips, was so strict and controlling that it seemed as if her addiction to perfection had become a form of OCD.

It’s possible to like and dislike Martha Stewart at the same time, and for many of us, that duality seemed like the wisest response for her for a long time. She sold something that was unattainable and pretended it was real. In a sense, she was selling superiority: her superiority over you, your superiority over others if you followed her. Yet she did it with such style and beauty that she could make everyday life seem breathtaking. She made you believe in the illusion.

Her brand’s mirage, of course, came crashing down when she was accused of insider trading after dumping shares of ImClone stock on the same day that the company’s owner, Sam Waksal (a friend of hers), and his family members did that. Waksal had received a tip that the FDA would not approve his miracle drug. It seems like a straightforward case, but Stewart insisted she never spoke to Waksal — that she simply had a brief conversation with her real estate agent, who recommended she sell. And what’s strange about the case is that she wasn’t technically charged with insider trading. None other than James Comey (then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York) accused her of lying to the authorities. Which amounted to the same thing.

“Martha” kind of embraces the idea that Stewart was tortured because he was a rich, powerful woman. And there’s no doubt that the merciless, sneering way she was treated in the media supports this. She was dragged through the mud in a case of collective media schadenfreude. The actual lawsuit? I think she was treated in much the same way as non-famous people. The documentary uses illustrations to take us through the diary of her incarceration at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia (a minimum security facility that had the reputation of being “Camp Cupcake” but was rougher than that). It turns those 150 days into Martha’s Stations of the Cross. She was hurt, yes, but she was humiliated. The armor of her pride was ripped away and she allowed herself to grow through the experience.

The film then invites us to enjoy her deeply ironic moment of triumphant comeback. Her company’s stock price had fallen in the wake of the scandal; her time at the center of culture was over. How could Martha Stewart reinvent herself? On March 30, 2015, she appeared as one of the roasters on ‘The Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber,’ and she slayed. She spoke the language of the new America – shameless, vulgar, merciless – but she did it through that WASP glaze. It was brilliant. It opened the door to her collaboration with Snoop Dogg, and to her penetration of another audience: the (young) influencers she had so strongly invented. She was now the OG of flavor, someone who had found a place in the new world. By the end of “Martha,” you’ll probably agree that that’s a good thing.