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The fragile symbiosis between art and commerce is as fraught as it is long-standing.
I cannot live under pressures from patrons, Michelangelo was quoted as saying, let alone paint.
And yet without Pope Julius II and the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Its what connects Nick to the old masters: da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, De Noia.
Steve Banerjee is in (pre-Mumbai) Bombay, calling the new Mrs. Irene Banerjee from a telephone booth.
Is this a metaphor for how the advent of male strippers threatens traditional marriage?
Or is this unhinged choreography just designed to make me giggle?
But lets start with the sobering scene on the far end of the phone line.
Steve is visiting India for his fathers funeral the first time hes seen his family in six years.
If Steve hadnt left home, his father would have retired from the family business by now.
Its a cruel thing to say, but intriguingly its fueled by rejection as much as grief.
The Banerjees were a middle-class family in Bombay.
Why wasnt that enough for Steve?
Meanwhile, in Tinseltown, Nick is anxious at the top.
Irene steps in to stroke Nicks ego.
With Steve away, Irene even takes the chance to bond with her colleagues.
Here is young (pre-Steve) Somen, learning the printing press in sepia tones.
When Steve flies home to Los Angeles, its with the baggage that he will never be enough.
He reacts to this existential panic by trying to prove to everyone else how big he already is.
This is why Steve screams like really loudly and terribly and inappropriately when presented with the opusDr.
Its a vision sprung from Denises drug-addled dreams and refined by Nicks balletic sensibility.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
And even his wife isnt safe from this explosion of shame and ire.
But its the fissure between art and commerce at Chippendales that has never run deeper than in this moment.
Even when Steve has calmed down from his hostile outburst, his instinct is to make the situation worse.
Were printing wall calendars with Chippendales dancers in place of Hindu deities.
Nick is fuming when he finds out about the calendar shoot, but that was Steves point all along.
Whats less clear to me is that Steve predicted how extreme Nicks reaction would be.
