The first in an occasional series in which I consider what a movie from the past says about art and politics now.

I’m not really sure where I got the idea that The Man With One Red Shoe was a good movie. I imagine it’s mostly because it’s part of the narrative of the rise of Tom Hanks into that mid-career period before stuff like The Terminal where it seemed like he could do absolutely no wrong. But it’s not very funny, either as a comedy about a naif, or as a comedy about the intelligence. In some ways, it feels like the same “Oh, goodness! There’s a dead body in the closet!” joke, repeated over and over again, though the choreography in a scene where a bunch of CIA agents accidentally sap each other is a nice bit of physical comedy and reasonably entertaining.

I think the problem is largely that, while The Man With One Red Shoe is based in a specific sort of conflict, as a CIA director tries to ward off a coup by embarrassing his departmental rival, the specific circumstances the CIA is in are actually rather general. The movie came out in 1985, a couple of years after Ronald Regan’s “Evil Empire” speech. And while the movie’s villains are meant to be stupid for thinking that Hanks’ naive violinist is actually a Soviet spy, the movie stops short of insisting on the goofiness of faceoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the way, which is what the conflict between KAOS and CONTROL did so effectively in Get Smart.

And though the initial scene involves drug smuggling, there’s nothing about the humor that’s particularly derived from the War on Drugs. The movie comes out just a few months too early to be based on the big Associated Press investigation of the CIA’s involvement in the Contras’ cocaine trafficking, but clearly the possibility that the federal government might be running drugs was in the wind, and it might have been a specifically funny route to try out. Instead, there’s a “we get everyone in a shipyard high” joke, and the movie’s on to the next one:

When it comes to both fear and laughter in movies about intelligence and national security, specificity is useful. And political specificity can lend a particularly sharpness to that bite.

-A defense of spoilers in the context of Game of Thrones.

-Summer jams, though not necessarily work-safe ones, from The-Dream.

-Darren Aronofsky is on a boat.

-Tech-lust and public service come into conflict.

-Grantland is here. I guess I’ll give it a couple of days to decide if the world feels different.

Covert Affairs, which I liked last season for its plot arc focused on intelligence community leaks to the Washington Post and its generally amiable cast, returned last night with yet another story about the wacky problems of hiding the fact that you’re a spy from your sister when you happen to live in her guest house. I understand that the whole reason the character lives in her sister’s house is to have a convenient mechanism of generating exactly those kinds of storylines, though of course there would be more variety if Annie had friends, or a boyfriend who didn’t sport stubble that does more to indicate he’s a jerk than any of his acting, or a cat, or visiting relatives who produced actual wacky hijinks a la Maxwell Smart’s experience in “My Nephew The Spy.” But there’s something a little odd that the show has never tried to invent an actual character justification for why Annie lives with her sister, much in the same way it’s never clear why Alison lives with her sister and her family in Knocked Up.

If male characters did this, it would be a clear signifier that they’re slackers, but both Annie and Alison are bright, upwardly mobile, even professionally extraordinary. On Twitter last night, someone I was talking to suggested student loans, but the CIA’s currently running a student loan repayment pilot program, there’s good public service debt forgiveness, and starting CIA salaries aren’t peanuts, so Annie could probably afford a place on her own even if she’s not in one of the fancier neighborhoods in DC. Do we feel differently about the prospect of women living with their sisters or with family on the grounds that they need chaperoning? Again, in Annie’s case, the people who probably need protecting are actually Annie’s family, especially if she becomes a target, and the presence of all those other people poses a real risk to Annie’s stash of passports and foreign currency. I wonder if the show’s setting up a plot arc to that effect with Annie’s panic about a break-in last night. Or maybe Annie just really likes her family.

Either way, in a world where a lot of young people are moving home in a miserable economy, it would be nice to see a show or movie do actual character work around that particular life setup. It doesn’t have to be a huge part of the story, but it’s a quick way to add some insight into who a lead is. Moving home isn’t something most people see as optimal, and filling in the little irritations of coming back home after college isn’t hard but it is relatable. But if a character is choosing to move home either out of insecurity or love for their family, that’s unique, too, and worth drawing out a bit.

Back in May, I mused a bit on the difficulty of crafting an arts policy beyond the question of fund/not to fund. What I want to do over the next couple of weeks is to lay out some basic questions on the subject along with some initial thoughts as I start to pull my thinking together and shaping some of my reporting, something I think will obviously be a long process. Feel free to prod, poke, argue, send links, etc.

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to Ian David Moss, the research director at Fractured Atlas and the founding blogger behind Createquity. In the course of our conversations, he sent me a post he wrote a year and a half ago questioning whether or not it makes sense for the arts community to try to rebrand their issues as partisan issues. Ian writes:

What might this look like? As nonprofit organizations, most arts groups are limited in the amount of direct lobbying they can do, and they cannot endorse specific candidates. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about seeking a shift in the dialogue of the thought leaders on the left. I’m talking about making the arts a “progressive” issue in the same way that environmentalism, health care, reproductive rights, and labor are considered “progressive” issues. To be sure, this would lose us some fans and invite lots of confrontation, both of which are in a vacuum Very Bad Things. But it would bring with it an advantage, a huge, huge advantage: the machinery, infrastructure, and commitment of one of the two major political parties in the US–the one that at the moment just happens to have led in party identification among voters nationally for the past four years running. This is no small matter. For all the vitriol (and sometimes worse) that has been hurled at abortion-rights supporters since 1973, Roe v. Wade still stands. And where do you think the labor movement would be in this country without the strong support of Democrats through the years?

An alliance between the arts and the left makes a lot of sense on both sides. Most artists themselves identify as anywhere from moderately liberal to borderline Marxist, as do their core audiences…Part of the reason culture conservatives hate the NEA so is because so much art speaks to largely progressive groups: homosexuals, atheists, people of color, the sexually liberated, the alienated, the outsiders. One could even make an argument that art and creativity are inherently progressive values: they require and celebrate a capacity to think critically, to question convention, to consider different viewpoints. Is it time for us to come out of the political closet and show the world who we really are?

I think the obvious initial question to ask here is what the arts community would actually get if support for the arts as a public good, and as policies that promote and subsidize the production of more art, became a specifically Democratic issue. Obviously if there was no party in support of abortion access or policies that benefit organized labor, abortion might be even more unavailable than it is now, and the percentage of the workforce that has union representation would be smaller. But powerful outside groups have had to use hot pincers to obtain much of the support labor and women’s organizations have obtained from the Democratic lawmakers, and still experienced dramatic contractions of labor rights, union memberships, and abortion access. Throwing in with a political party may get the arts community access to machinery and infrastructure—but it would require arts organizations to build formidable new organizations and fundraising capacity to earn a seat at the party table, much less a favorable slot in the list of Democratic priorities.

Even if the arts community was willing to make that shift in priorities and in how they direct their fundraising efforts, it would still be a tough sell. “Authoritarians have always been the enemy of ‘degenerate’ art. What’s far more distressing is the unwillingness of progressives to defend it,” Ann Powers wrote in her classic “In Defense of Nasty Art.” “The reason for this hesitation is clear: We don’t know if we believe in this stuff, and even if we do, we don’t know how to deal with it.” I’ll say this over and over again, but it is so vastly easier to argue that something shouldn’t exist than to argue that something should exist even if we feel weird or outright bad about it. The “safe, legal, and rare” formulation is as much of a challenge as a defense of art we find truly unpleasant or downright morally objectionable*. This is a structural disadvantage progressive arguments face on dozens of issues. Art and artists are not alone, but it is a barrier to entry.

But most of all, if this is a good idea, and I remain undecided as to whether it is, I still think we need to define the broader arts agenda first, and to be dead sure there aren’t conservative allies who we’d lose if the arts got more partisan who we can afford to lose. Do advocates for arts education really want to walk away from Mike Huckabee’s support? Could David Koch be convinced to sign on to arts subsidy programs? Being inside the party structure can be helpful, but there are times when living outside of it can be an advantage.

*NB: Well worth reading, the AV Club’s Steven Hyden on what is morally objectionable in popular culture.

I’ve said before that I try not to download content by means other than those in which it’s made legally available to me, so I’m glad iTunes is making it easy and cost-effective to retroactively pay at least some of the cost of music people downloaded illegally in the past. The music industry’s never going to recover all the money it lost to downloading in the period before pricing and technology caught up with consumer demand (and I imagine the fights over fair value for downloaded music would be pitched). This seems reasonable: the industry and artists recover some money and gets a revenue stream that presumably will last in perpetuity as long as consumers keep ponying up their $25 a year. The price threshold is low enough that a lot of people will probably do it, even if not everyone does. And we all get another experiment in getting people to pay for content as we continue to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I’m reading Red Mars this week (as should you be for the kickoff of our book club on Friday), so I took a break from thinking about how you build a new society from a foundation of 100 eccentric geniuses to start watching 3%, a self-produced Brazilian television pilot that’s hoping to leverage internet support into an actual production deal. I’m embedding the first third of the first episode here, but if you don’t speak Portugese, you’ll want to click over to the YouTube site, where the right-most button under the video will give you streaming subtitles:

We always assume it’s the best and the brightest who are going to head our expeditions to found new worlds. I didn’t love Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City, but the book’s an interesting, if exceedingly incomplete, look at what happens if the leader of such an expedition is a sociopath. 3% looks at what happens if you start your new world with a bunch of cannon fodder to absorb the initial risks—or if you’re in a society so damaged that people in it will do anything for the chance at a new world, even if it doesn’t exist.

Either way, this looks intriguing, and I’d like a chance to see if it’ll get very good. If there was a Kickstarter account out there, I’d pony up something towards that end.

Rep. Anthony Weiner may be worried about keeping his current job at the moment, but he’s also got to worry about his next one. Weiner has long wanted to be mayor of New York. And now, the Daily’s reporting that he may have a high-profile rival. Alec Baldwin, who has also long said he wants to run for some sort of political office (he also says 30 Rock is ending, that he’s not doing Rock of Ages, etc.), may be considering getting into the race.

All the reporting’s at the “friend of the actor” level. But this wouldn’t be an insane way for Baldwin to float the prospect of getting into the race, a story in a medium targeted at the kind of elite readers who would be important supporters. And the prospect of Baldwin as a candidate isn’t insane either. The worst scandal in his life is his divorce from Kim Basinger and their ensuing extremely nasty custody dispute. Baldwin himself has kept the issue alive by publishing a book about that fight, but having a tough divorce isn’t the same thing as ending up shirtless on the cover of the Post. Basinger’s lawyer once said Baldwin had been accused of domestic violence, which is a pretty nasty charge to sling without factual basis, and would certainly impact Baldwin’s political chances if it came up again. And Baldwin faces the same obstacle Al Franken did in his campaign for Senate, which is that he’s got a long record of saying things he probably didn’t mean, but that he’ll have to constantly reassert were jokes, including his Clinton impeachment-era statement that “we would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they’re doing to this country.”

But I think both of those things are surmountable. And 30 Rock‘s certainly prepared Baldwin for some of the more important roles of a lawmaker, including wearing tuxedoes:

dealing with hostile lawmakers:

and maintaining your dignity when under attack by experimental weaponry at a Pentagon briefing:

I will certainly not be subscribing to Glenn Beck’s new video network, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the success of its business model. Given the news that the number of households that only use free web television services ticked up from 14 to 15 percent of homes over the last year, I imagine I’m not the only person in the industry or outside of it who will be keeping an eye out.

Beck has a fairly obvious advantage, in that part of his shtick is getting people to buy things, from Christmas books, to gold, to Groupon-style deals, to a new fashion line (which looks to be Founding Fathers meets fratboy chic), so a fairly inexpensive television subscription service is just another thing to toss into the shopping cart. That model is probably one that will work better for individual auteurs, like Joss Whedon, who can convince their dedicated audiences to pay for products they create than for whole networks. But finding ways to accustom consumers to pay for some things, whether it’s special access to interview sessions with actors and writers, seriously quality tie-in merch, other media that advance the story, early access to episodes, or whatever, is a way to get them ready—if the television economy shifts radically, which it might not—to pay for core content. Shilling isn’t dignified, and marketing can go overboard, but as Sondheim reminds us, whether it’s high or low, art isn’t easy.

In Richard and Florence Atwater’s 1938 children’s novel, on which the movie is nominally based, Mr. Potter is an impoverished but self-educated housepainter who is fascinated by the wider world he’ll never be able to visit, particularly by the exploits of the famous Admiral Drake. In Jim Carrey’s movie, Mr. Popper is a Wall Street dealmaker who has alienated himself from his family, and really needs a novel intervention, like a flock of penguins, to help him relax and reconnect with his kids. In the novel, caring for his expanding brood of penguins comes at substantial cost, and in one case, serious humiliation, to Mr. Popper and his family. In the movie, apparently, turning your luxury apartment into an open-air winter wonderland is proof that you’ve acquired a sense of whimsy and got your values back. In the novel, Mr. Popper eventually sets sail with Admiral Drake, getting the adventure he’s always wanted, but on the way to give up the penguins that meant so much to him, after which he’ll presumably return to painting houses and dreaming of far-off lands. I will be shocked if the movie ends in any way other than Carrey rediscovering himself as a family man and as a man of business, and some solution like a large donation to an aquarium keeps the penguins within visiting distance of his kids. That’s some of the worst of our pop culture in a 90-minute family movie: no working-class heroes, no compromises, no costs.