By Alyssa Rosenberg

Speculation about whether Osama bin Laden’s death will provide a lift to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 strikes me as unseemly, and sort of unnecessary—the movie is going to open huge no matter the circumstances. But if folks are going to go there, it’s worth remembering, especially given the emerging meme that the information that lead to bin Laden’s death was initially obtained by enhanced interrogation techniques (a claim former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has debunked), how J.K. Rowling feels about torture. Rowling worked at Amnesty International before she was a globally famous author, and her commencement speech at Harvard in 2008 pulls goes into some depth about the impact that experience had on her. She said:

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.….

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

In the Harry Potter universe, characters who torture other people are, without exception, morally crippled. The damage done to the Longbottoms by the Cruciatus Curse, Bellatrix Lestrange’s torture of Hermione Granger in Deathly Hallows, the ongoing stain on wizarding society that is the use of dementors at Azkaban (Rowling is clear that Barty Crouch, Jr. is insane and evil, but also that the threat of the dementors contributed to his insanity), or the tortures house-elves are forced to inflict upon themselves, the Harry Potter books are adamantly anti-torture. Harry’s actually admonished at one point to preferring disarming his opponents to causing them pain, but he sticks to it fairly stubbornly. If we’re going to look for wildly speculative parallels between Rowling’s fictional universe and our own, it’s worth remembering that this is one area where the two struggles against evil don’t match up.

-Terry Pratchett talks about life as a writer when you’re losing your ability to read.

-Kathryn Bigelow has a bin Laden movie in the works.

-Mike Huckabee isn’t going to buy the latest Superman comic book.

-I like that Amber Tamblyn and Hugh Laurie hang out in real life.

I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes a certain amount of sense that a movie adaptation of The Hunger Games might be the thing that knocks free the long-stalled development of an Ender’s Game. Superficially, of course, the stories are similar, tales of children forced to do brutal things by their governments, only to surprise the people who have cultivated them so carefully. But Ender’s Game has endured in a way I suspect The Hunger Games will not because it’s much more politically sophisticated, and in its own way, much more brutal.

The great failing of The Hunger Games is that it’s a didactic story: the Capitol is the bad end of a gradient, and District 12 is its opposite pole. Ender’s Game starts out with one set of assumptions, that humans are good, and the buggers are bad. But within the subset of humans, goodness and badness are essentially replaced by efficacy: Peter Wiggin’s sociopathy is bred into him, and worse when he can’t find a way to be useful. Ender Wiggin is a good boy, but he’s better for humanity as he becomes less sweet, more a killer. And the book builds gradual and powerful moral reversals that The Hunger Games never quite manage to achieve: people are essentially who they first seem to be. A Gamemaker might turn out to be an architect of rebellion, but the spirit of whimsy and manipulation are the same, no matter what end they’re applied to.

And Ender’s Game treats children as if they’re morally responsible in a way that The Hunger Games never really does. Both Ender and Katniss are tools who make shocking final decisions, but Ender is constantly cognizant of what he’s doing, while Katniss is often obtuse or willfully ignorant. There are no equivalent characters to Valentine and Peter in The Hunger Games, children who understand compromise, strategy, and tactics in the manner of adults who have been through disappointment, not of people young enough to expect moral clarity, the way Katniss does. Katniss’s purity and little rebellions are comforting, they’re familiar, but Peter and Valentine’s calculations are unsettling. A smart Ender’s Game adaptation will be rooted in that sense of discomfort if it wants to be a great movie, not just a successful one.

We’re at an interesting moment for women in comedy. It’s been well-articulated and acknowledged, at the level of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Times magazine, you name the organ of cultural influence, it’s been comprehensively laid out, that the spaces for men and women in comedy are profoundly unequal. In response to that, there’s a minor bump in comedic projects centered around women that attempt to broaden the kind of jokes that women can embody, whether they’re big-screen projects like Bridesmaids and What’s Your Number, or the spate of comedy pilots by and about women being developed for fall. And in that environment, I feel sort of conflicted about my responsibilities as a consumer and as a critic. I both want these projects to succeed so there will be more of them, but I also feel that because the window of opportunity is smaller, it would be a really shame if any of these projects are mediocre, or outright bad, because this is the moment when we have to win enough opportunities that we can afford to squander some later.

So I’m not quite sure how I should react to the trailer for What’s Your Number. From a formulaic romantic comedy perspective, it looks fine. But unless something outrageous and challenging and moving is happening off-screen (and given that moments like that are exactly how the studio is selling Bridesmaids, it would be odd if they were hiding them), a formulaic romantic comedy is all it is. Having produced this is not going to advance the sense that Anna Faris can do something different from a million other blondes. And the reliance on her ability to embody cringing, baby-voiced optimism isn’t going to expand anyone’s sense of what she can do as an actress. She’s emphatically not funny like a guy here, in that her character doesn’t have permission to be either genuinely eccentric or genuinely unpleasant while still having the movie insist on her basic likability. Bridesmaids works because it does that, but then, Kristen Wiig has Paul Feig, Judd Apatow, and Lorne Michaels in her corner. If women have to assemble that level of credentialing to redefine women’s roles even a little bit, the spectrum’s going to expand very, very slowly. So do I back this because it might let Faris do something weirder in the future? Or tell the guys who want my dollars from this that it’s not good enough, that if they want my money, they actually have to earn it?

I’m sorry, but if the Autobots are too stupid to do some surveillance on the moon and surrounding planets after an episode where they got got pwned by a group of robots led by one who was rusting out in the Mid-Atlantic ridge, maybe they deserve to lose a modern-day Siege of Chicago:

At least the robots look moderately cooler this time around and there’s no desert?

By Alyssa Rosenberg

As the details of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden, it was inevitable that somebody would observe (as many people did), that the operation was going to make a really fantastic action movie. Such a movie would be really hard to get right: it could easily be a cheap action picture, when this coda to the brokenness of our last ten years deserves a profound piece of art.

Fortunately, Kathryn Bigelow, who is responsible for The Hurt Locker, an Iraq war movie that’s both profoundly moral and tremendously gripping, is already working on a project with the working title of Kill bin Laden. Her Hurt Locker collaborator, Mark Boal, who also wrote the magazine story that formed the basis for In the Valley of Elah, is working on the movie with her. The project is actually about an earlier American attempt to capture bin Laden that failed, but The Hollywood Reporter notes that Boal and Bigelow are mulling a change in direction.

I hope they do, and that they take on the raid holistically (though maybe not too ensemble-y — we don’t need a Crash for the War on Terror). Bigelow’s great at the awful tension of conflict:

But she can also do emotions that are quiet but no less emphatic for being quiet:

There is going to be a movie about bin Laden’s death, that’s not even really a question. I’d like to see two people with a broad perspective on what the last ten years have cost us in human terms to set the standards for everything else that follows.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Before I begin, a brief reminder to start your comment with a spoiler warning if you’re kicking off a discussion of something we know from the books but not from the episodes that have aired so far. Thanks!

To me, “Lord Snow” is the episode where HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones genuinely becomes its own creation independent of George R.R. Martin’s work. But the adaptations and additions work because, now that the plot is well and truly underway, they tease out and expand upon Martin’s themes in really effective ways.

One of the things this episode does best is illustrate the futility of good intentions. Some of the errors people make are the inevitable hurts of parenting and friendship. When Ned tries to make Sansa happy with an exquisite doll, a toy she’s far too old for, and that in any case wouldn’t make up for the fact that he killed her pet, his disappointment is what’s most revealing about the scene. Ned’s exposed himself as dangerously sentimental, underestimating the extent to which his children have grown up into people with independent motivations, desires, and agendas. There’s a similar strain of nostalgia when Littlefinger brings Cat to his brothel. It’s meant to be a gesture of consideration, but Baelish can’t resist showing off that he’s sexually appealing to other women, even if they’re women that he essentially owns. He doesn’t get any of what he wants out of his grand gesture, though: Cat’s annoyed at his high-handedness, and she’s not jealous, just insulted. Everyone has someone who instantly returns them to the awkwardness of their teenage years.

But those failures aren’t always personal, sometimes they’re the result of the paranoia and institutional dysfunction of the circumstances the characters find themselves in, whether they’re in King’s Landing or on the Wall. I thought it was an interesting choice to have Varys, the King’s spymaster, make two social errors in this episode, the first when he tells Ned that he’s praying for Joffrey’s recovery, only to have Ned tell him he should pray for the dead butcher’s boy, and the second when he takes Cat’s wounded hands and murmurs over them. For all his knowledge, Varys doesn’t seem to be able to read people correctly. Ned’s angry reaction to the news of the crown’s debt is right, from a policy perspective (even if you haven’t read the books, it’s clear that to be on the wrong side of the Lannisters’ accounts in any possible way is a very bad thing), but entirely wrong when it comes to court politics. And Jon misunderstands the way meritocracy works on the Wall, angering both the men training with him and his uncle by focusing only on his existing talents, rather than what he has to learn.

All of these misunderstandings are the result of institutional rot. Varys goes wrong with the Starks by assuming they’ll operate by the same twisted rules as everyone else at court. Ned goes wrong by assuming that it’s possible to govern by principles other than the whims of the king and a court that’s engineered to satisfy them. And if the Night’s Watch was the force it’s supposed to be, Jon would be in a cohort of men he had something to learn from, rather than stuck in a system that’s oriented towards imposing basic order on people who got there in the first place because they couldn’t or wouldn’t abide by society’s rules. It’s striking that the only thing that anyone does right in this episode is in defiance of societal conventions, when Ned decides to get his youngest daughter a rather unorthodox dancing teacher. It works because Ned’s paying attention to Arya’s true desires, rather than convention. And it’ll be useful in a world where neither embracing principal nor playing by playing by artificial morals and rules work out very well for anyone.

I hope Osama bin Laden’s death brings comfort to the families of people killed by al Qaeda in Yemen, New York, Tanzania, Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. I pray that it brings about a moment of rapprochement, of disentanglement from fruitless conflicts, of a true binding up of the wounds of our last fractured decade. And I mourn, still, for everyone lost. As always, John McCrae said it best:

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.