Lily Allen’s graphic post-divorce album is making it difficult to separate the art from the artist. Can we ever look at Hopper the same way again?
I had been looking forward to the final series of Stranger Things. Three years on from series four and I was ready for more 80s jumpers, awkward teen romances and Upside Down action, with the first episodes due to drop on Netflix at the end of this month. It didn’t even matter that I can’t remember a single thing that’s happened, because I come to Stranger Things mainly for the vibe – except, oh dear. That vibe has been dampened by the release of West End Girl, Lily Allen’s blow-by-blow post-divorce album, ubiquitous since its release two weeks ago.
Like Allen, I have no intention of getting sued, so who’s to say whether the album’s references to her “sex addict” ex, with his “pussy palace” and its bag full of Trojan condoms, his gaslighting (“You let me think it was me in my head / And nothing to do with them girls in your bed”) and mistress “Madeline”, are specifically about her ex-husband David Harbour, who plays Hopper – the sheriff and Eleven’s adopted father – in the show? Certainly not me; Allen has wisely said the album is a “mix of fact and fiction”.
Either way, the album places the action firmly in the couple’s famous Brooklyn brownstone (which we’ve all seen for ourselves on Architectural Digest’s YouTube channel) and includes one too many references to manipulative conversations and secret butt plugs. The long and the short of it is this: I’ve got the ick.
Perhaps it’s my fault that I’m struggling to see how this won’t affect my experience of the show. Actors are actors, and for the most part I like to think that their real lives should have little bearing on my enjoyment of their work. But Harbour’s problem is that while he is by all accounts a successful actor – with small to middling roles in Revolutionary Road, Quantum of Solace, Brokeback Mountain and, most recently, Marvel’s Thunderbolts – Stranger Things was his big break, and for many people, including me, he is inseparable from Hopper. We’ve watched his character develop over the years from a cynical borderline recluse to father figure and action hero. In this world of walkie-talkies, plaid shirts and self-sacrifice, it’s difficult to know where all the lube and lies fit in.
The social media furore around the album hasn’t helped. A resurfaced photo of Harbour’s note to Allen on the opening night of her play, Hedda, which Allen posted at the time, is enough to bring a bit of bile to the back of your throat: “My ambitious wife,” he wrote, “these are bad luck flowers ‘cause if you get reviewed well in this play, you will get all kinds of awards and I will be miserable”.
In the famous AD video he talks over Allen and peacocks outlandish design choices she clearly loathes as she hangs back with a rictus grin. I don’t think I’m alone in my general feeling of “ew”.
Though Harbour has not, as far as I can tell, been out-and-out “cancelled” (that may be about to change, as a source told the Daily Mail this week that Harbour’s Stranger Things co-star, Millie Bobby Brown, accused him of harassment and bullying before they began filming the final season), somehow this ick feels like a more terminal diagnosis, precisely because it’s so subjective.
There is a depressingly long list of famous men who have done bad things, some with a capital B – but, perhaps counterintuitively, when there is a legal case, there is room for dissent, room for opposition, room and distance in general. The fact is that here, we have simply been told a story as though we’re sitting over the table from Allen at brunch.
While separating the art from the artist is a deeply personal exercise that depends on what both their art and their actions mean to you, it’s also true that a public consensus generally forms pretty quickly. Yet in more extreme examples of reputational damage there are, again, counterintuitively, groups of people who will remain doggedly loyal to the subject either on principle or in denial. I fear there won’t be many people willing to stand up publicly for Harbour’s right to live it up on Feeld while Allen was working in London. There are plenty saying the articles about the album have already got tedious, or that they’re both awful people – but not jumping to his defence. The stakes simply aren’t high enough. In fact, precisely what makes the record so sad is its mundanity – the way it all unfolds with grim predictability.
So, the ick. It’s a complicated feeling. I don’t think Harbour’s career should be destroyed because of implications and speculation that he behaved like a prick to his wife. But Allen has written an intimate album that’s designed to place us right in the action with her, and, reactive and emotional creatures that we are, it seems to have worked. As Stranger Things shows us, sometimes a vibe can speak louder than a thousand complicated flashback scenes.
