By Alyssa Rosenberg

I’m not saying anyone should care about the upcoming Royal Wedding, but if you want to understand why people get insane at the prospect of tiaras and titles and the possibility of an Alexander McQueen wedding dress, I cannot recommend Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles highly enough. Whatever you may think of her as editor of various American magazines, when it comes to royal gossip, she is absolutely aces. And her dissection of the gender politics of Diana and Charles’ marriage explains both the genuine nationalist enthusiasm for William and Kates’ nuptials and the sick fascination with the whole spectacle.

Reading the book, the thing that struck me most was that between their first social meeting with her as prospective bride for him and their wedding, Diana and Charles got together thirteen times. The royals are so far behind ordinary society that it’s considered progress that William met Kate at university, rather than through the social whirl she’d have gone through as a debutante a generation ago, or through machinations that pushed them together because she checked the virgin box on the “qualifications for potential bride of the future king” list. That this nonsense is state-sanctioned, even a function of the state (the reason Charles and Diana were pushed to divorce is that their obvious enmity created a constitutional crisis over whether she could be crowned if she hated and wanted to undermine the King) gives audiences permission to have one of two reactions: to luxuriate in ordinarily square nostalgia for fairy-tale weddings, or to pretend that our horrid fascination with the rich and famous is at least nominally serious.

Brown does a great job of teasing out how emotionally awful it was to be a member of the royal family: this is a group of people who doesn’t understand that someone who’s had three strokes might not be able to make it to formal meals on time; or postpartum depression; or the idea that it might not be super-sensitive to keep your mistress when you’re trying to build an emotionally meaningful marriage. Yes, the Royal Family is insanely privileged, but Brown builds a fairly persuasive case that the money and status might not be particularly worth it. A Royal Wedding, particularly one that brings a commoner into the Royal Family, resets the clock on that speculation: for Diana, becoming a Princess was the start of a rotten-at-the-center fairy tale. If Kate Middleton likes it better, it’ll restore and maybe modernize a very tattered fantasy.

I am vastly curious to see which critics roundly condemned Sucker-Punch for its sexism will embrace Sleeping Beauty:

Sleeping Beauty from Pollen Digital on Vimeo.

It’s not, as I’ve said, that I really think that Sucker-Punch is a good movie, or one that you should pay to see. It’s just that I think there’s a tendency to assume that if a male director presents girls looking lovely while they’re being whored out that he’s doing it for his own gratification, whereas if a female director does the same thing, she’s doing it for our edification. If the point of Sleeping Beauty is that men like women young, vulnerable, even comatose, and that such desires are despicable, it won’t actually have more to see than Sucker-Punch, though of course it might express those points more eloquently.

“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ads are undeniably hilarious, if a biiiit gender essentialist:

And the question, of course, is how much hay Isaiah Mustafa will be able to make out of them. He’s already landed a role in Tyler Perry’s next Madea movie. And now he’s pitching Marvel on a Luke Cage movie. These strike me as incredibly savvy career moves. Love them or hate them, Tyler Perry’s movies guarantee a steadier stream of roles for black actors than any of the major studios. If you’re trying to build a loyal audience that will buy tickets to your semi-niche movies if you don’t make it mainstream Hollywood, but might follow you to movies set in wildly different contexts, Perry’s extended professional family is a good place to start (and honestly, no matter how much I think Perry is treacly, I wish there was an equivalent for smart, funny female actors).

Just as Perry’s movies traffic in certain tropes, Cage is, and is a connector to, a bunch of very specific tropes: he grew up in Harlem, did prison time for a crime he didn’t commit, was raised by a tough grandmother, fights criminals within the black community, and his seventies blacksploitation origins, dates a clinic director. I don’t know if the audiences who go to Perry for family values piety would watch a Luke Cage rock-’em-sock-’em flick, but I’m a big believer in movies that can draw multiple audiences, and I would love to see nerds and church ladies come together at the box office.

As her mixed tenure as the anchor of CBS’s evening news comes to a close, Katie Couric’s said to be considering launching a syndicated talk show. That’s a tough, crowded market, and as the struggle of Oprah’s OWN network to find a dedicated audience suggests, there’s not enough pent-up demand for anyone to jump into the arena and succeed. But there’s an alternative out there that would be a great match for her skills — and for another network’s needs.

When CNN signed Piers Morgan to a multi-year deal last fall, he was expected to bring a British tabloid pop to Larry King’s sclerotic interview slot. That hasn’t exactly happened: he’s boosted ratings some, but his numbers are still relatively low. He’s responded touchily to mixed reviews. And it’s arguable that he’s overextended — his contract negotiations with CNN were so complicated because he wanted to be able to keep working on America’s Got Talent and a British TV network. It would be a gamble, but maybe a smart one, for CNN to consider cutting Morgan and replacing him with Couric, who is available, not overemployed, and most importantly, a killer interviewer with a record of great gets. Obviously, her annihilation of Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign is the interview that most shapes how people think of her — and it showed how much better she is face-to-face with a guest than looking out across an anchor’s desk:

Similarly, her sit-down with Lil Wayne, probably the best middle-aged white lady interview of a rapper ever, is further proof of why she’s so good at her job:

Obviously why Weezy smokes a lot of pot isn’t as important as why Palin thought proximity to Russia made her a foreign policy expert, but Couric doesn’t let either one of them off the hook, she just does it in different ways. With Palin, she’s steely because she’s ferreting out high-stakes nonsense. With Wayne, both parties to the interview knew that the exchange was patently ridiculous, so she could side-eye him, let himself ramble on about migraines, and know that everyone gets the point. That ability to do high and low, to rely on her credibility in serious interviews, and to lend it out in less important ones, would make her great in King’s old slot. I doubt CNN will actually dump Morgan, but I’d like to see Couric find a match for her skills in a historically male slot as she tried to do at CBS, rather than retreating to a daytime talker.

We’ll be having them every Monday over at ThinkProgress. Here’s the first one.

After seeing the trailer for The Help, I went out and read the book this weekend. It’s an uneven novel, and some of its more visceral moments probably won’t make it into the movie—I think this Janet Maslin review of the book’s racial politics is largely accurate, if it underestimates the book’s portrayal of the difficult relationships between sources and journalists.

But one sort of side element of the novel that really stuck out for me was the role of culture and fashion in the main character Skeeter’s transformation. Some of the choices are a little obvious, like when she hears “The Times They Are a-Changin’” on the radio before, and says it’s the best thing she’s ever heard. But I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a world without knowing about Bob Dylan, or the possibility of someone like him, or of music that sounds like his did. Music does open you up like that. And I love a scene where, shopping in New Orleans, Skeeter finds herself whisked off to a showing of Emilio Pucci‘s new collection. Sure, dress shopping is frivolous compared to the civil rights movement, and the book never tries to pretend they’re equivalent, but those dresses, those colors, those cuts, they give Skeeter the sense that she can present herself differently, that she doesn’t have to fit her hair and her body into styles they would never be able to bend enough to accommodate. Her real work is journalism. But the discoveries she makes through culture may be personal, but they’re not unimportant.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Since there are clearly a lot of Game of Thrones fans in the audience, I thought we’d open up discussion of the most recent episode every Monday (if folks watch Treme and want to talk about it, let me know, and maybe we can do that too). If you’ve read the books, please try to avoid posting spoilers, or at least be cool tell people at the beginning of comments that you’re discussing future material.

One of the things that struck me about this episode is how the show is magnifying the ways women endure uses of force, and how they use it themselves. In George R.R. Martin’s universe, and feudal societies generally, men have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It’s a no-brainer that Bran would be trained to use a bow, no matter how much or how little aptitude he shows for it. When the Hound rides down the butcher’s boy who was practicing sword-fighting with Arya, what’s offensive within the context of Westeros’ values is less that he killed the boy, but his attitude about it: “He ran,” the Hound tells Ned Stark of the dead child, “but not very fast.” On the other hand, when women want to use force, they have to be sneaky about it. Having failed to persuade her husband to punish one of the Stark children after Arya’s wolf bites Prince Joffrey, Cersei Lannister manipulates King Robert into killing one of the wolves. She can’t hurt the Stark children because they’re protected by their father’s position as Hand of the King, and she can’t kill the direwolf herself, so she has to come up with a compromise that will persuade someone else to commit violence on her behalf.

When women defend themselves, they’re circuitous about it: no matter how much she wants to be a warrior, Arya can’t bring herself to stab Joffrey after she disarms him, throwing his sword into the river instead, removing the potential of real violence from the equation. Dany’s decision to get herself sexually educated so her husband isn’t, in the parlance of one of her handmaidens, taking her “like a dog takes a bitch” is explicitly framed as her rising out of metaphorical slavery by becoming sexually dominant. And when a mysterious assassin attacks Bran, Cat doesn’t stab or disable him: instead, she grabs the blade of the knife, taking on the pain meant for her child in an act of self-sacrifice, rather than self-defense. If men are defined by their capacity to inflict pain thus far in the series, women are defined by their capacity to endure it.