I’ve always liked the story about two boys who grew up in Boston, wrote a movie about a sensitive working-class genius, and won an Academy Award for it. After they won that prize, the boy who played the sensitive genius went on to play a bunch of quirky roles, while the guy who played his laborer pal tried to parlay his not insubstantial jaw into an action career. But overtime, something strange happened: the sensitive boy became a superstar when he started taking roles where he hit people very hard and shot them with great precision, while the boy with the jaw sort of flamed out, and then started reinventing himself as a thoughtful director of movies about his home town. In other words, I have hopes for Ben Affleck.

And I’m particularly interested to see him step away from Boston with his next project. Argo‘s interesting for a lot of reasons. A big prestige movie about the U.S.’s tetchy relationship with Iran in the 1970s and 1980s coming at this particular moment is bound to provoke comment, especially since this is a story about the CIA pretending they’re shooting a sci-fi movie as a ruse to get diplomats out of the American embassy during the hostage crisis (something that actually happened). Rather than being a story about how the U.S. used overwhelming force to impose its will on an enemy, it’s a story about the efficacy of American cleverness, it’s foreign policy as heist flick. The film adaptation of Charlie Wilson’s War did this to a certain extent, there was an element of getting the gang together in that assemblage of Congressman, Texan do-gooder, and CIA operative. But the line between Wilson’s actions and our current involvement in Afghanistan, and the moralism of Wilson’s conviction meant the movie could never quite swagger.

But there’s an interesting space for stories about people who do the weirdest work in government because they need to accomplish things that can’t happen through the normal practice of diplomacy, intelligence, or defense. I’m amazed, for example, that no one’s optioned Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, his book about the eccentric group of British spies who spent months cooking up a plan to plant false plans about the Allied invasion of Italy on the body of a dead man on the off chance the plans might get back to Hitler. The story is, as Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed out, a good case study for why intelligence operations might be more trouble than they’re worth. But it’s also a valuable illustration of the fact that in addition to the big heroic stories, the assault on Normandy, the conference at Yalta, there are all these messy little bits of any nation’s interests that can’t be wrapped up through conventional means and channels. They’re not the majority of our foreign policy, or our defense policy, whichever category you prefer to put them in, by any means.

But they’re there—spare diplomats and CIA contractors, cloistered terrorists and non-existent men—and they’re rich dramatic and comedic territory. We don’t have a lot of upliftingly eccentric public servants on our screens. If you’re off a bit, you’re depressing or dangerous, Bobby Goren or John Luther (and if you’re a woman, the most eccentricity you’re allowed is crankiness). Or perhaps more to the point, we don’t have genuinely innovative and creative public servants in our popular culture. Whimsy shades over so easily into wastefulness, and we’re used to a small set of mostly stolid ways for people to do their duty. I’m not saying all of our foreign policy movies should be about wacky hijinks. But there’s room for stories that tell us more about the limitations of conventional foreign policy tools, and that government is more than men in gray flannel suits.

Glenn Beck says that George Washington has “almost been a cartoon to me until the last two years.” Really wish he was playing this on the final episode:

Do I really need to write a bunch of framing to explain why y’all should be excited about this Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie?

Seriously, this is the character actor nerd equivalent of those action movies that list a bunch of overmuscled stars by their last names: Oldman. Firth. Cumberbatch. Hardy. Hinds. Strong. And I’m also kind of compelled by the extent to which this looks like an old print of something from the seventies, as if it’s an actual historical document of another age in espionage. I like that firm visual definition between past and present, I think, though of course it might look like less of an artifact on the big screen.

I have really profoundly mixed feelings about the news that a coalition of groups is going to protest Odd Future’s performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival. Right now, Odd Future’s core brand is in being shocking, and so any opportunity for them to behave more shockingly, particularly by showing that they’re impervious to calls for decency by, for example, by telling two lesbians that “If Tegan and Sara need some hard dick, hit me up!” is an opportunity for them to reinforce the thing that’s been their most effective way of getting attention. And calling out people for listening to and supporting Odd Future might make some people embarrassed, but I think it’s more likely to reinforce the idea that liking Odd Future makes you edgy and transgressive, someone who can rise above moral and political objections to appreciate art, even when the artist is throwing temper tantrums at you.

There’s something to be said for standing up and saying that something is wrong, but I’m not sure that protesters are going to walk away from this with anything other than a sense that they’ve done the right thing. I just can’t work out the calculation in my head, the value of telling the truth versus that truth being swept away and dwarfed by the ridiculousness of whatever the response to it is.

If you want Odd Future to talk about things other than raping people, or to stop saying terrible things about gay people, the incentives for them need to shift. If Earl Sweatshirt came back, the focus could be on his technical skill, rather than on Tyler, the Creator being outrageous. If folks hire Syd and Tyler to produce songs and albums, the headlines about them could be about their role in revitalizing hip-hop’s sound—Frank Ocean’s already signed up to work on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne. When Ocean’s nostalgia, ULTRA gets its re-release in July, if it goes huge, or even pretty big, then the story about Odd Future can be how the group helped a bunch of folks with different sounds collectively promote their work (I actually think there’s a good chance Odd Future doesn’t last very long as a coherent entity once the individual members are on their ways to the careers they want). And if you can’t resist the urge to pick apart Odd Future right now, maybe it’s worth mounting an aesthetic critique of them (which might be difficult, there are some talented folks in the crew). One of the reasons Eminem’s been such a persistent force in American culture is that his technical skills as a rapper are patently undeniable, even if you’re horrified by the ends to which he’s sometimes applied them. I bet the members of Odd Future would be a lot more freaked out by a detailed and authoritative takedown of their artistic abilities than the fact that they use those abilities to say shocking things.

Or, you know, buy Lil B’s album I’m Gay (I’m Happy), which dropped today on iTunes. However watered down his backing off the original title, which was just going to be I’m Gay, however transparent a publicity stunt it is, declaring yourself even metaphorically gay in hip-hop is a lot more genuinely audacious than rapping about raping nuns:

There’s an extent to which Will Ferrell’s always been a political artist. Jacobim Mugatu’s a crude if effective satire on the cluelessness and grotesquerie of the fashion industry. Ron Burgundy’s the last gasp of the resplendent patriarchy. Ricky Bobby is the redemption and refinement of Red State America. There’s the Bush impersonations, which he took from Saturday Night Live to the stage. His turn as Bob Woodward in the spectacularly funny and underrated Dick. Not to mention the general portrayal of flailing, panicked, arrested development, which in and of themselves are an ongoing exploration of gender and dogma, be it Chazz Reinhold, a pathetic seducer with a grand theory in Wedding Crashers (itself a movie about the private lives of the power elite), or failed celebrity Jackie Moon trying to save a sports team in a failing media market in Semi-Pro.

But it seems that Ferrell’s turning to more explicitly political work. The Other Guys may have only been retconned to be about the financial crisis, but Ferrell’s next project, Swear to God, will have him playing a hedge fund manager who reconsiders his life and the impact of his life’s work on other people after what he believes is an encounter with the divine. And that comes after he shoots Southern Rivals this fall, in which he and Zach Galifianakis play rival politicians fighting over a Congressional seat. The movie’s set to come out in the midst of the 2012 elections. Given that he’s already played a figure of the establishment press (and man would I love to see Ferrell parody Woodward in Great Man mode), Ferrell’s really covering all the bases here.

And in a way, I sort of feel like Ferrell’s arrested development roles, his honing of his angry man schtick, is perfect training for taking on politics in this schizophrenic moment. Our political arena simultaneously wildly crude and elegant. You can stay on the air if you mock the President’s daughters, but then have to abase yourself and embrace your suspension if you call Obama a dick. We elect grace and dignity to the highest office in the land in one election, then choose fulmination and factlessness for our legislature in our subsequent trip to the polls. Ferrell’s very good at playing people with vast reservoirs of rage and crabbed perspectives, and it’s made him a very successful comedian. But that success is because there’s an extent to which that disparity is a distillation of our age, and I can’t wait to watch him make that darkness even more pointed and visible.

I’ve written before that the British are much better than we are at making movies about class because the British entertainment industry appears to accept as a first principle that working-class people exist and that they exist as fully realized human beings, so they can be specific and interesting about things like the culture of council housing, as in projects like Attack the Block. So it’s interesting to see this dreamy short movie that subs out the Afro-Caribbean poor in the 1981 Brixton riots for robots:

We’re pretty good at depicting actual oppressed people in other struggles here in the U.S., be it against racism or for gay rights. And for some reason, we’re okay with movie depictions of working-class people if they’re fighting fairly targeted campaigns against companies, whether it’s for protection against sexual harassment in North Country or for unionization — as long as it’s in the past, or even better, in the past and in a foreign country like in Made in Dagenham — or if they’re adorable children or surly teenagers who will presumably rise out of poverty via the transformative power of education as embodied in a single noble teacher. And it’s true we’ve got a couple of shows about characters who are not just working-class but struggling, Raising Hope and Shameless (which is, of course, a remake of a British original).

But I wonder if we might have more day-to-day depictions of genuinely working-class and poor characters if those characters weren’t always human. Obviously, the aliens in District 9 are a metaphor for the impacts of apartheid more than anything else, but one of the means of enforcing apartheid was economic: the so-called “homelands” weren’t exactly rich in mining or agriculturally productive land, and people who lived in the homelands were treated as migrant workers when they took jobs outside of those territories. The prawns are scary because they’re aliens, but South Africa’s able to stigmatize them by economically isolating them, charging them insanely inflationary prices for the cat food that they prefer, spreading rumors about their sexual practices, confining them to substandard housing and then evicting them from it.

Similarly, the robots of Brixton obviously aren’t human, but in a way, by removing factors like race from the equation, I wonder if it might be easier for audiences to feel bad about the idea of doing things to robots that we’re perfectly comfortable with businesses and governments doing to actual humans. Of course, the problem then is transferring that sympathy to actual people, and that outrage to actual policies. But if we can find alternative ways into conversations that won’t make people shut down, it’s a start.

-Stephen Colbert cuts campaign ads.

-One more movie, and Chinese sex movies getting international distribution will be a trend.

-It’s kind of amazing that Bill Simmons can write this many words about the lack of real male movie stars and never consider shifts in gender roles.

-Bristol Palin’s book isn’t that popular.

-Jason Bateman may be able to blend into anything, but he might try blending in to some better things.

Spoilers from last night’s finale.

I’d hoped we were going to see an out gay contestant win the first season of The Voice, a victory that for me would have clinched the show’s total superiority over American Idol as a more positive, more truly meritocratic show. I remain unconvinced by Javier Colon, so I’m doubly disappointed. But the fact that half of the final four were comfortably out lesbians, and that the show gave big platforms to three gay singers, all of whom will probably end up with record contracts, is without question a victory. If the threat of The Voice as a competitor for ratings and music sales makes Idol and Idol contestants reconsider the idea that being publicly out is a barrier to really competing or to iTunes sales, that’ll be a good thing too.

And I expect big things of Dia Frampton, too, especially if she keeps writing songs like this:

I’m intrigued by Daniel Snyder’s suggestions about how to fix superhero movies (though his condemnation of Hellboy is the rankest heresy). But I don’t really think the bizarre pro-war politics of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, truly one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time, are a reason for comic book movies to stay away from politics.

It doesn’t make sense for all comic book movies to be political allegories because not all comic book heroes are particularly well-suited for political stories. If I were Britt Reid, I would totally be trying to get out of the newspaper business and into the superhero industry. Super speed is not necessarily conducive to parables about the debt ceiling, or whatever. Similarly, a Rachel McAdams romantic comedy is likely not going to be a terrific vehicle for discussing the pay gap. Believe it or not, I’m totally OK with the idea that all of our entertainment doesn’t have to convey political value. Cotton candy is delicious, and sometimes I just want to watch Hugh Grant look all quizzical on-screen.

But if you want comic book movies to give us things other than origin stories (and I think it’s that lack of narrative diversity that is the biggest problems superhero movies face today), and you think politics should be in that mix, it’s relatively easy not to screw this up. Just pick the heroes whose quests are defined by politicized goals like the inadequacy of social services in Harlem, or a vigilante who is motivated by the idea that you need vast increases in militarized power to maintain order in a fractured city, and make politicized movies about them. And then make some movies about a rich guy with some cool stuff in his basement. Both things can coexist without having to be reconciled.

The South Carolina House and Senate voted 105 to 8 and 32 to 6 to override Gov. Nikki Haley’s veto of the $1.9 million in funding that will keep the South Carolina Arts Commission alive and running for another year—a figure that, as the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies points out, is 0.032 percent of the state’s budget.

Some folks poked me about the necessity or wisdom of state arts agencies yesterday, so I’ll reiterate that I think these agencies are important to make sure there’s some equity in arts access, particularly in rural areas, to help bolster arts education, to provide useful peer review and grants to projects that can then leverage them for private-sector fundraising, and to support public art that can improve overall quality of life. And also, if you’re thinking strategically about the long-term argument between progressive and conservative worldviews, it’s conceding a lot of ground to walk away from programs where government investment is small as long as we think it might still be useful.