I’m very curious to see Casey Affleck’s Joaquin Phoenix documentary, which I think raises a couple of interesting questions:

First, I think Phoenix’s behavior during the time this movie was made has been viewed with some suspicion because it wasn’t clear whether he’d really experienced a sudden personality change, or if his behavior was some kind of Dadaistic stunt, specifically for the movie. Given that he was essentially born into a religious cult, was a child street performer to help support his family, and had to experience his brother’s death and the 911 call he made that failed to save him played out publicly, it’s not inconceivable to me that Phoenix would have some serious issues, but there has always been that doubt there. Second, I think there’s a gender disparity when it comes to public interest in people going crazy in Hollywood. When someone like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears has serious mental problems, they tend to show up underdressed, to seem more sexually available, to be vulnerable and a mess in a way that invites rescuing and sexualized, salacious judgement. When someone like Phoenix goes off the rails by gaining weight and forgetting to wash his hair, that’s not something that people want to get close to and understand. But the means of expressing depression or despair, and the gender of the person experiencing it doesn’t actually add up to a hierarchy of seriousness or legitimacy.

I find something unbelievably sad about the fact that Bristol Palin is going to be on Dancing With the Stars. Whatever my differences of opinion with her mother and concerns about whether an abstinence message is appropriate or effective for teenagers, she seems like a decent kid who got herself in a situation she didn’t particularly want to be in, and has been used in unfortunate ways by her mother and her on-again, off-again boyfriend ever since. She also seems to have worked hard to take care of her son, and that’s admirable. But I find the idea of parents who turn to reality television, or write tell-alls, or whatever, as a significant means of supporting their children truly depressing.

It’s got to be a shock to end up with eight children, but is putting them on television, after which your marriage breaks up and you’re investigated for violation of child labor laws really the best way to provide for them? If you’re committed to raising your kid in a stable environment, and the place you’ve chosen to make your home is Alaska, is it a great idea to uproot yourself for the salary you’ll make from a competition reality show? Is the financial gain actually worth it if you have to expose yourself and your child or children in ways they can’t actually consent to or fully understand? I tend to think adults have the right to expose themselves, or to sell as much of themselves, as they want and at whatever price the market will pay for. But I don’t think money is the only thing children need. Kate Gosselin will probably set a better model for her kids and provide them with a healthier environment by going back to work and busting ass to raise additional money she needs to care for them than she will by continuing to put them in television specials. Given his father’s unattractive predilection for celebrity, Bristol Palin’s son will probably be better off the further his mother stays from Hollywood. Easy money’s attractive. But it’s not a village, or even a single stable home environment.

Goodness, am I excited for The Walking Dead, AMC’s upcoming tale of zombies and the humans who survive their depopulation of much of the United States. First off, Andrew Lincoln was really quite appealing as one of just a few people in Love, Actually who didn’t get a happy ending, and who struggled with a love that wasn’t going to be realized. Laura Linney overshadowed him, because her character’s role was sadder, but Lincoln added some life and pathos to a much more common story. Now, he gets to strap up and be a hero:

But the project’s also part of a trend I’m seeing that I think is serious and significant, and that deserves further thought: American pop culture is increasingly giving us stories of depopulating cataclysms that leave only a few survivors alive. I think part of that tendency comes from the need for an American frontier. With the country filled up, the only way to explore ideas of manifest destiny, exploration, and the unsettled wild in an American context is to destroy the country’s population and to force characters to survive, and start over. I think there’s also a strain of thinking that our present course of life is unsustainable, and that disaster is inevitable. I tend to believe that alien invasion movies are a manifestation of this strain of dread, rather than a separate category of it, except that alien invasions have the possibility of being repelled, while cataclysm movies and shows rely on the worst coming to pass. More to come on this. And if you’ve got examples, send ‘em along.

I wrote more about how Hackers predicted social networking and online self-creation.

While I was home this weekend, I did one of my regular dives into the bookshelves of my youth and surfaced with Madeline L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light. Vicky Austin seems very young to me now, and the book short-shrifts teenage sexual desire, I think. But it’s still remarkable how much L’Engle expects of her target readers: the book is full of complex discussions of science, theology, and morality, hinges significantly on challenging poetry, and is full of references to different poetic forms. Some of these are details that young readers could gloss over, of course—it’s not actually significantly important to the novel that readers fully understand the kinds of poems Vicky considers when she sits down to right. But the book feels richer if you do.

I think it’s striking to me, because some of the megaseries aimed at young people of recent years have asked quite a bit less. The Harry Potter universe contains all kinds of delightful in-jokes and references for people in the know, but it hinges on rather simple understandings of good, evil, and familial love, both sealed by blood and by choice. There’s a sense in which it operates like most animated movies do today, keeping audiences engaged and entertained on different levels. I think one of the reasons the Twilight books, apart from the thing that vexed me about them, didn’t feel very interesting is that while Bella’s supposed to be super-smart, she’s not actually reading anything particularly sophisticated, or performing at a particularly high level in her school. The books would have been better if they’d surrounded Bella with more complex ideas and had her engage with more complex literature, because she would have seemed more plausibly special and sophisticated.

In a way, A Ring of Endless Light is kind of the book I wish Twilight had been. Vicky thinks she’s less pretty than her sister, but she still ends up with three men competing for her affections. She’s got dolphin-triggered ESP, which is a lot more useful than super-tasty-smelling blood. She’s got an attachment to her family that isn’t easily discarded in favor of something more glamorous, and gives back as much to everyone in her life at least as much as she receives. In other words, she’s a worthy object of that competition in her own right, grappling with the world instead of being desperate to escape it, or transcend it.

I didn’t watch the show, since I was out at dinner with friends, but I am completely thrilled that Claire Danes won an Emmy for her performance as Temple Grandin. The role is in some ways a conventional biopic: character overcomes struggles, emerges triumphant. But it’s a strikingly original movie about a strikingly original woman. Visually, the movie works hard to show us the world through Grandin’s eyes, and to make clear how differently she sees and experiences things, and that we’re not merely being asked to sympathize with a loner, or someone who is misunderstood—we’re being asked to surrender the way we see and feel the universe around us. That’s a significant demand for a piece of art. And for all of Grandin’s triumphs, the movie is absent the kind of personal developmental signposts that we’ve been trained to look for. There is not a love story here, and the triumph involves something most of us will not experience directly, the improvement of industrial agriculture. Temple Grandin is without question one of the movies I’ve enjoyed most this year, and I’m glad to see Danes’ excellent work it in recognized on a night when Emmy voters made so many other deeply conventional choices.

I wrote about an aspect of Sookie Stackhouse that I think Charlaine Harris handles particularly well, the fact that the character is self-educated, a rarity in popular fiction.

Why doesn’t the notion that vampires are really kind of horrifying and scary stick? We’re in a period where vampires are cuddlier than ever; I was at drinks with someone this week who literally started banging on the table in vexation over the cuetification of bloodsuckers in Twilight. We’ve got chaste hunks in that series, decidedly unchaste vampire hunks in True Blood. We had redeemable individual vamps in Buffy and Angel. And yet what I think is notable is that during the time all of these interpretations have become so popular, we’ve had plenty of depictions of vampires that make them seem creepy as all hell. The Blade movies, anyone, where the vampires looked good and behaved badly? 30 Days of Night and Daybreakers, which erred on the zombie-vamp hybrid interpretation side of things? And we’ve got the remake Let Me In and the film adaptation of The Passage coming up, both of which are popular interpretations of the vampire myth that stay on the ugly-and-terrifying side of the debate, too—The Passage in particular presents vampires as zombie-like entities that operate in some ways like a hive mind.

And yet I feel those individual works will be successful, compelling, and still totally unsuccessful in ending our romantic fascination with vampires. I understand the popularity of the idea of some entity that is glamorous, and exceedingly dangerous, but makes an exception for a character that’s an avatar of us. And I get the death wish thing, too. But I also wonder if we like to believe that dangerousness can be beautiful because we like the idea that death, if it has to come for us in a violent and unexpected way, might come in a glamorous and sexual package so at least we feel good on the way out. I think it’s possible that vampirism is less an expression of suicidal ideation, and more of a compromise with our fears about things that go bump in the night. We love beautiful vampires, because the ugly ones are a bit too true to life.

Reading this profile of Katy Perry, I had a moment of regret that her faith doesn’t actually play a more prominent role in her public presentation and music. One of the things I find vexing about coverage of evangelical Christianity is that it consistently expresses shock that individual observant Christians can also be thoughtful and witty about sex and sexual presentation in ways that don’t involve extreme moralism about sexual expression and sexual contact outside of marriage. It’s a silly, and not exceptionally thoughtful stereotype to assume that evangelical Christians are inherently, and necessarily, prudes.

I think one of the reasons Perry’s presentation has been so commercially successful is that she gets at the fact that trying to come across as a bombshell is an inherently slightly silly enterprise. Unlike Dita Von Teese, who is an actual, honest-to-God pinup, Katy Perry is playing one, pretending just as much as the Vanity Fair Vanities Girls are. As annoying and as disrespectful to gay people as “I Kissed A Girl” is, the sentiment “just wanna try you on” in one of the lyrics speaks to some genuine, and I think not necessarily condemnable, sexual curiosity. There’s no reason that being an evangelical Christian, which Perry seems to be, precludes you from that kind of curiosity or play, and though I think most thinking, reasonable people both inside that faith and outside it understand that, I think it’s easy to forget. I’d like to see Perry drawing out the contradictions she lives in more, because they’re interesting, and useful to talk about, and I think it would be useful for people, whether they come from any faith or none at all, to recognize that the beliefs of people who adhere to any one set of practices come in a spectrum, and one that’s consistently expanding and contracting.

So, I was rewatching Star Trek over the weekend, and it struck me for the first time what an incredibly sarcastic movie it is. In an era dominated by snark, a style of commentary that involves the same kinds of take-downs as sarcasm, but with much less emotional investment, it’s actually a bit odd to see a movie so full of biting sarcasm, drawn from a well of deep engagement. From the angry “live long and prosper,” the young Spock bites off at the Vulcan Science Academy admissions panel that’s just dismissed his human heritage, to the “enlighten me,” Kirk spits at Spock during his academy trial the movie’s full of angry, funny people. I think it’s a characterization tool that works remarkably well for the group of ambitious, insecure characters the movie throws together.

It’s possible that sarcasm is just a less successful means of emotional distance and disguise than snark is, but it’s also more interesting to watch on screen. Making fun of things for the sake of making fun of things is fun in conversation, particularly if said conversation revolves around light one-upsmanship, or say, writing on the internet. But sarcasm’s far more engaging to watch on screen, because it’s an underused way of signaling character emotion and rawness. Not everything has to be tears, or anger, or passionate declaration. Misdirection, failed or successful, and caginess are just as effective, and often more revealing.

I’ve written in the past about how frustrating I find the fact that The Social Network purports to tell us something revealing and important about Facebook’s founders, despite the fact that it’s based on fictionalized source material. Unsurprisingly, the founders turn out to find that frustrating as well. The actual events that they’re arguing over including in the movie—including a “mostly made up” scene involving bare breasts and strippers—aren’t that germane to understanding Facebook’s nature and development, but the fact that they’re arguing over them is.

The internal logic the Facebook founders guide their personal lives and their business by is fascinating, and contradictory. To some extent, there’s a free-market element to this all. Facebook users are given the tools to humiliate themselves, but there’s certainly no requirement that they do so. At the same time, even discretion isn’t enough to ensure that your privacy will be protected, given the company’s internal controls, or lack thereof. The founders seem to largely operate on principals of self-protection; they abide by their own internal rules. But they also seem to dislike it when other people force them to live by the second part of the functional rules that govern their product: there’s only so far you can lock up information. The debate might be different if the movie was based on credible source material, instead of a book so speculative that it gives Zuckerberg & Co. an excuse to cast doubt on true events as well as falsified or misemphasized ones. But it’s still an intriguing one. If you build a big chunk of the world, you tend to get stuck living in it.

Or must Vegas residencies be good financially for artists, but less than awesome quality of life-wise? If you’re going to be rich and famous and on tour, one of the benefits has to be the variety. And if one place is going to be your home base, anywhere near the strip on Vegas has to be awfully unpleasant. (That may just be my bias speaking, I didn’t particularly like Vegas when I went there for the first and only time last June, although seeing a Cirque show was rather fun and Mario Batali and Tom Colicchio sure run them a pair of fine dining establishments). And most importantly, perhaps, you’re committing to years with a shifting audience that only wants the most familiar of you, rather than stuff you liked but that didn’t take off, or new material you’re working on; if they’ve come there, and paid as much as Vegas shows cost, they want only your greatest hits. I can’t imagine Madonna ever taking one, or really any other artist who is still recording and promoting new material.

I wrote about how psyched I am for Travis Barker’s solo album.

I feel like The Next Three Days would be a much more interesting movie if a) Elizabeth Banks’ character was guilty of the murder for which she’d been incarcerated or b) she was breaking Russell Crowe’s innocent character out of jail:

This just feels like a variation on a damsel in distress story, otherwise. And not a very interesting one at that, particularly since Crowe’s character doesn’t appear to feel a lot of concern or doubt about his wife’s innocence.

Add this electro-metal cover of “Eleanor Rigby” to the list:

I am always super-curious about the perspectives on the universe that lead someone to think, for example, “Hey, this song might sound a lot better with a howled chorus, and a context that makes the ‘wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door’ line sound a hell of a lot scarier.” It’s all of a piece with the fact that every artifact of culture has so many possible interpretations. Getting to the question of whether something is good or bad is personally useful, for sure. But it’s equally interesting to figure out how things can be effectively reinterpreted, remixed, and even heard differently on the first go-round. What I hear, and what I see is radically personally, and I find that both kind of isolating and extremely intriguing.

I may read romance novels and I’m not ashamed of it, but I’m also not particularly sympathetic to Jodi Picoult’s complaint that the New York Times in its book reviews “loves its literary darlings, who tend to be dudes w/MFAs … In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance.” 


I think there’s a narrow line to walk here. Obviously, domestic spheres are as important as the public sphere, and matters of the heart affect many of us as deeply and as frequently as matters of public policy. But I do think there is a difference in literary merit between a novel that, say, provides a reader with an avatar of themselves, be that avatar a chubby actuary or a plain, shy girl, or a misunderstood computer nerd, or whatever, and thus makes them feel less alone, and a novel that asks the reader to consider larger societal questions, and to attempt to understand the world around him or her. I understand the desire to escape into the former kind of fiction and regularly do it myself, but I also understand that the latter kind of fiction is more rigorous, and that it requires me to do more work not simply because it uses big words. I also think that all sorts of novels can fall into both categories. White dudes from Brooklyn can create Mary Sues, and genre fiction nerds can force us to reconsider the world we live in.


Is it possible that white dudes from Brooklyn, or whatever other enclave, may have more financial resources and societal encouragement to write big, outward-looking books? Sure. But prove it. And it’s much more important who gets the opportunity to write what, than what the times says about it in the end.

I speculated about whether Cody Rhodes will be the next pro wrestling fan to cross over to mainstream acting. And given his performance on Warehouse 13 last night, I think that is a definite possibility.

Where have you been all my life? I realize, dear readers, that as a bureaucracy nerd and as someone who keeps a careful cultural eye on Washington, that I am a tad in the tank for Covert Affairs, even recognizing that it’s not more than smart, fizzy fun. But one element of the show I think deserves for credit above and beyond the call of a USA Network summer series is Kari Matchett, the wonderful actress who plays the main character’s boss, and the wife of a competing CIA directorate.

Part of it is it’s just a very good role. Joan struggles between competing with her husband because she wants to beat him and because she’s interested in the fate of her directorate. She is a failure at being “a good CIA wife,” who accepts that she simply must trust her husband precisely because she’s a good CIA employee, conditioned to distrust. Her desire for a good marriage and a good life conflict, leading her to waste resources, and occasionally to put her sympathy for other betrayed women above organizational imperatives. Despite her failures, she’s competent and tough, and she’s a good role model for Annie, her newest employee. The setup is a novel twist on the professional woman’s balance between marriage and career, tackling the dilemma by making both elements inextricably linked. I like that Joan’s errors don’t make her a bad person, but the show doesn’t hesitate to outline the gravity of them. Tying up NSA spying capability to keep tabs on your husband’s communications is both a bad idea because it’s a waste, and because it speaks to an embarrassing, but sympathetic, neediness.

Her husband (played by the inestimable Peter Gallagher) is, in many ways, a less decent person than Joan is, but like Joan, his decency is tied up in his role at work. He is probably cheating on his wife, but we don’t quite know, because the line between personal and professional use of tradecraft is so thin. He leaks to the press, mostly because he feels it’s his responsibility to try to control the agency’s media coverage. And he fights with Joan over control of Annie’s time and mission because he sees a valuable asset in her.

On both sides, it’s a deft portrait of a marriage. And I’m particularly pleased for Matchett because it’s one of only a few regular roles she’s had. She’s done stints on ER, Studio 60 and 24, but I’m turning into Covert Affairs increasingly for her. More folks should make use of her.

ALL YOUR EMOTIONS ARE BELONG TO US:

One thing I’m genuinely curious about: why hasn’t some smart American female star picked her up for a collaboration? Not that working with Snoop Dogg, or Royksopp, or I Blame Coco isn’t awesome, but you’d think someone with a taste for indie cred and emotional sincerity would enlist her? I feel like she and Lady Gaga could do incredibly heartfelt covers of standards and hang out and Robyn could be Gaga’s older sisters who’s graduated from her acting-out-via-fashion stage, or something.