When a director arrives at a filming location, they have a lot of important tasks before the real work can begin. Department heads to consult. Actors to be prep. Schedules to lock. When Noah Hawley got to Bangkok to direct the first episode of Alien: Earth, he immediately had to have some suits made.I've been posting diatribes against emulation and affectation, plus confessions re: my piss poor poseur skills (I wrote here that "I'm quite good at doing things, but horrendously bad at posing as a thing-doer. There are specialists for that! Thousands of them! And they're good! They can do something I can't, and I truly admire them! Me, I could never fool anyone into imagining I could do something notable. Even if I actually have.")
“One of the first things I did upon landing was go to a tailor and work up, not a full wardrobe, but a way, through linen and cotton, to try to manage the heat, in a way that was the most stylish and comfortable,” explains Hawley, 58, the Emmy-winning creator of Fargo and Legion.
Most TV showrunners would throw on a T-shirt and cargo shorts to accomplish that goal in temperatures that were upwards of 118 degrees. But Noah Hawley is not most showrunners. Hart Hanson, who gave Hawley his first regular TV job, writing for the Fox crime drama Bones, remembers thinking on the day they met, “He’s too well-dressed to be a writer.” He doesn’t recall ever seeing Hawley in jeans or a polo shirt.
The bespoke wardrobe serves two purposes. One is, Hawley believes in dressing for the part when that part involves leadership. “We can get in trouble as artists who are also managers when we don’t understand the power of symbols,” he says. “The boss looks like the boss. No good comes from ‘I’m just like you.’”
But this story struck me. If the great Noah Hawley at age 58—superbly accomplished, and firmly atop his game—feels obliged to dress up in a steaming jungle for a job where he's essentially God to all his underlings, anyway, then maybe there's something to it.
Perhaps I should have diverted effort to the Seeming, even at the expense of the Doing. It would be against my religion to sacrifice an iota of quality, but in collaborative endeavors this might have earned more cohesive collaboration—and with it, better quality. And it surely would have elevated a project's public profile.
My mind's eye flashes on Tom Wolfe in that goofy white suit, and Hendrix plucking guitar strings with his teeth. Those guys—and Hawley—might have had surplus bandwidth to devote to self-signaling. Me, I've always felt like I was skating just ahead of failure, so it would have been a grave misuse of assets—like a morbidly fat king reigning over an impoverished tribe.
But maybe that's what it takes to be King.
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