An Intimate Chronicle of Kanye West’s Fall from Grace
One simple way to think of Kanye West is as a genius stuck in the body of a child who’s always on the verge of a tantrum. He takes out his crayons, scribbles on a napkin, then declares the result a masterpiece—and often, implausibly, it is—and yet he may tear up the napkin a few seconds later if his mood changes, or if he receives anything other than instant and unmitigated praise. In the new documentary “In Whose Name?,” an intimate chronicle of West’s long fall from grace, from 2018 to 2024, we see this pattern repeat again and again, at times almost literally. While being driven to the White House for a televised Oval Office meeting with President Trump, West, in much the same tone that he used while crashing Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, shouts over his go-between, Jared Kushner, “I need to go the exact way that a foreign dignitary would go!” In Uganda, on a safari vacation with his then wife, Kim Kardashian, an entourage, and an extremely attentive security detail, West, wearing a bulletproof vest overnight and practically vibrating with paranoia (“I don’t feel comfortable here”), makes everyone pack up and fly back to the U.S. (One thing the documentary corroborates, if it wasn’t already clear, is that it took superhuman reserves of patience for Kardashian to stay married to West as long as she did.) He refers to “my mental health,” and to medication that he has been prescribed but has decided not to take. (The cover of his 2018 album “Ye” reads “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome.”)
In Basel, Switzerland, he walks around with the architect Jacques Herzog, who showers him with platitudes about timeless spaces and organic forms. Then they sit for a meeting with some of Herzog’s associates, and West’s mood suddenly turns combative. He makes a few barely coherent remarks, then turns to one of Herzog’s female associates and demands her reaction. “Not what are you thinking—what are you feeling?” he says. “And when’s the last time you actually had a feeling?”
“I’m excited,” she says, sounding terrified, “because I want to understand who you are.” The backing score is a dirge-like drone, treating West’s casual bullying like the approach of a stalker in a horror film. At one point during this scene, West is sketching something (the shape of a roof?) and, at the merest insinuation that his sketch is not a masterpiece, he tears it up. “I’m not really asking your opinions,” he tells the architects that he has flown to Switzerland to meet. “I know I’m right.” He goes on like this for a while, adding, “I am Picasso.” Picasso was also a megalomaniac, but at least he was self-aware enough to stick mainly to visual art. In the documentary, West spends months flying around the world, talking about his plans to design a church, a school, a “sustainable city that runs off of air, fire, earth, and water”—almost everything except his plan to make another good album.
For now, the only way to see “In Whose Name?” is to go to a movie theatre. At an afternoon screening on opening weekend, the Regal Union Square was about half full. Most of the crowd seemed to be Kanye completists, maybe, but not Kanye loyalists, if there are any of those left. When they laughed, they seemed to be laughing at West, not with him.
We see him before he takes the stage at Soldier Field, in Chicago, wearing light-colored contact lenses and a black leather coat, looking like a surly teen who has been given a blank check and let loose in Hot Topic. (The effect is enhanced by the fact that he’s standing next to Marilyn Manson.) Backstage, after the show, West greets Elon Musk and escorts him into an empty, all-white room, which he describes as “the idea of a bedroom.”
“Interesting,” Musk says.
They lie down next to each other, looking up at the ceiling, then stand up and make awkward big-boy small talk. “So are you and Kim, like, off and on, or something?” Musk asks. He laughs, filling the time, then presses on: “Claire and I—Grimes—we’re sort of . . . In the same text stream, she’s, like, ‘I love you,’ and then like, you know, a day later, like, ‘I hate you.’ ”
“I don’t have answers,” West says, his whited-out eyes staring into the distance. “[I have] answers to everything except for that.” The audience laughed throughout this exchange, as if we were being treated to outtakes from “This Is Spinal Tap.”
Even when West’s home life is at its most placid, it continues to be risible. The house he shares with Kardashian, in Calabasas, is a mausoleum-like structure with marble walls and almost no furniture. It seems like a terrifying place to live, but it provides the perfect acoustics for Kenny G to come over and play “Over the Rainbow” on soprano sax, surrounded by long-stemmed roses, as West and Kardashian watch—one of the few domestic activities we get to witness, aside from screaming fights. On his way to celebrate Halloween with his kids, West says, “I’ve suffered so much trauma. The fact that I’m still here . . . every day is a blessing.” It’s hard to pay attention to his words, though, because he’s in a full-body costume, his face obscured by a dog mask. Later, when he sits for a remote interview on MSNBC, he is covered again, this time in a sort of tin-foil burka. A few seconds into the interview, feeling disrespected by the host’s innocuous questions, he tries to stand up in a huff and leave, but the drama of his exit is undermined by the slapstick sound of crinkling foil.
