In keeping with our discussion of women in the movies, and the odd fact that in the movies, men are the vessels for universal emotions while women can only carry the freight of specific ones, Manohla Dargis has a typically brilliant essay on these tensions, particularly as they refract through Kathryn Bigelow:

Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly [sic], because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur. It’s a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it’s also predictable because the stakes for women are high and the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn’t her fault that women’s stories are routinely devalued any more than it’s her fault that these days female directors and female stars in Hollywood are too often ghettoized in romantic comedy.

I don’t mean to harp on this (and I feel guilty for feeling like talking about issues of gender in the movie constitutes harping at all).  But I really feel like there are important issues at stake here.  There is nothing dumb, or shallow, or…I don’t know, irrelevant about wanting to see stories about love, and female friendship, and marriage and family on screen.  Those things are central and pivotal and not the products of Ladies’ Fevered Brains.  And at the same time, the story of a movie like The Hurt Locker is not exclusively a story for men.  It’s a story that belongs both to people who have experienced things like the events depicted in the film, and also to people who want to understand the emotional content events, which is why I think the debate over slavish faithful recreation of detail in the movie is besides the point. It’s why I’m always so relieved (pathetically, I think) when I read some guy like Ta-Nehisi saying he loves romantic comedies unashamedly and unreservedly, thinks their stories and their depictions have meaning.  The concerns in romantic comedies and in action movies speak to all of us.  

One thing the “Telephone” release made me realize is how much I want Gwen Stefani to release a new album, both for the songs, and so she can start making music videos again.  As high-glam prisons go, I kind of like the Rapunzel-by-way-of-Harajuku-fellow-prisoners-and-commandos vision of “The Sweet Escape”:

It’s definitely a case where I wish there’d been an actual extended dance sequence, but it’s sweet, and odd, and really funny.  I like Stefani’s look of anticipation when her rescuers cut her hair.

And there are direct antecdecents to Gaga’s sexy poisoner in the Chicago-style video for “It’s My Life”:

I think there is something a lot more disturbing about seeing Stefani hysterical and restrained than in Gaga conquering prison.  And thinking about it, Gaga is vulnerable in her videos sometimes, but she never loses.  She always gets the guy or poisons the guy or whatever she wants in that particular situation.  It’s a narrative limitation.

And while it’s definitely not her most innovative video, it’s striking to me how much Stefani looks, physically, like a bridge between a young Madonna and Lady Gaga in the clip for “Cool”:

I really would love Stefani back.  Love. Angel. Music. Baby. was such an excellent album, as much as I enjoy Lady Gaga, more musucially sophisticated than her work on The Fame or The Fame Monster.

So, kind of on a whim, I popped up to New York last week for what turned out to be a pretty great panel on superheroes’ relationship to New York.  And because I’m a crazy workaholic, I wrote it up for The Atlantic, and added some thoughts about the necessity of urbanism to superheroics:

It’s impossible to visit the top of the Empire State building for the first time, particularly on an unseasonably warm, clear night in early spring, and not believe something momentous is about to happen. Is that the buzz of biplanes harrying an oversized and misunderstood ape? Namor the Sub-Mariner tearing off the building’s spire in an act of spite against New York’s land-dwellers? Spider-Man catching a breather on the spire? A young comic-book artist experiencing his first kiss with the man who plays his most famous character on the radio?

That sensation was particularly strong last week after I left a presentation at the New York Center for Independent Publishing. There’s no denying the case that comics artists Danny Fingeroth, Frank Tieri, and Billy Tucci, and long-time comics commentators Gene Kannenberg, Jr., and Peter Gutiérrez made at the forum—that New York City has played an extraordinary role as a backdrop, home, and battleground for superhero comics great and small. But New York’s persistent role in the comics raises an intriguing question: can there be superheroes without cities?

Really do check it out: the panelists were excellent, and I always enjoy the big-picture stuff on the comics.  Art Spiegelman’s multi-hour History of the Comics lecture is one of the best things I’ve ever been privileged to attend.  And a travel note, the Empire State Building at night on a weekday is astonishing: relatively uncrowded, quiet, and astonishingly gorgeous once you get to the top.  I’d never been before this trip, and when it’s not packed with tourists, the lead-up to the elevators is like the world’s biggest and most elegant movie theater: yards and yards of velvet rope, deco details on the walls, decorous elevator operators.

Over at Fitful Murmurs, Kyle Deas jumps off my post on Disney’s gender issues and comes up with a good exploration of how Pixar’s writing staff influences the kind of characters its movies focus on.  It’s not just that they make movies about men, but that they make them about certain kinds of men:

When you’re a screenwriter, you write what comes naturally to you – that’s what makes you good.  Stanton, for example, obviously feels at home writing about duos: his films usually feature a conservative, neurotic character (Woody, Marlin, Sully, Wall-E) who finds himself unexpectedly paired with a rogue outlier (Buzz, Dory, Mike Wazowski, EVE) who throws his life into disarray and sends him on some sort of zany quest.  It takes serious talent to write films as good as Stanton’s; it’s little wonder that Pixar has tried to mess with his style as little as possible.

Ditto for Brad Bird, whose men are stifled, or undiscovered, geniuses.  I think that’s a useful insight that Pixar’s invested in very particular kinds of maleness.  And I don’t think they’re malignant gender conceptions.  Stanton’s movies tend to strike for a middle ground: his duos tend to emphasize that pure adventurism can be irresponsible and delusional, while making the case that a life lived without risk is incredibly and depressingly circumscribed.  Bird’s movies may focus on men, but Mr. Incredible is clearly depressed about his wife’s acquiescence to the anti-superhero regime, and Colette is clearly a full partner in Linguini’s success.  I think Kyle and I both agree that the problem isn’t the particular characters and conceptions, but the idea that only male perspectives can be universal.