We’ve talked before about the problem of giving people superpowers that actually bring out interesting things about their personalities, rather than magnifying already obvious things about them. In that vein, I’m curious what people think of Misfits, the British show about young offenders assigned to do community service who end up with superpowers during a lightening strike.

There’s something inherently interesting about empowering people who not only don’t have very much power in society, but who aren’t necessarily very nice people. And there’s something sort of tragic and uncomfortable about some of the ways powers get designated. A decent probation worker gets turned into a murderous zombie. Kelly, who can be unthinkingly aggressive, ends up having to hear everyone’s thoughts. Curtis’ powers are only activated when he feels intense regret, a more direct than usual actualization of the idea that powers are a blessing and a curse. On the other hand, there’s something punitive and uncomfortable about giving Alisha, who behaves somewhat provocatively, a power that essentially involves her getting sexually harassed all of the time.

Still, I think there’s something useful in the show’s assumption that you might not be able to use your powers to do good if you need them simply to get by, or to manage the things that you don’t like about yourself or that make it more difficult for you to assimilate in society. Regressing into a Jack Russell terrier genuinely doesn’t help you do anything in the outside world, but it might be a way of coping with the fact that you’re homeless. There is something sort of contrived about the fact that our five main main characters end up with what Nathan calls “something good, something from the A List,” rather than “those bullshit powers.” It would be funnier and more interesting to have five people bound together by a terrible secret with a range of skills of dubious usability. But I do think whatever its failures, the way Misfits doles out powers is a step in more interesting direction (if not necessarily a more progressive one). The American optimism that superpowers would both be useful and mostly used for good is really genuinely unrealistic. Or as Nathan puts it: “”You lot? Superheroes? But in what kind of fucked up world would that be allowed to happen?…That kind of thing only happens in America. This will fade away.”

I don’t think Falling Skies is the show to end all shows, but it does satisfy a craving I’ve had for a look at alien invasions that don’t just consist of a traumatic invasion that’s easily repulsed once humans figure out the aliens’ fatal weakness. Instead, it dispenses with the history of the invasion in a monologue by a group of children in the first minute and a half of the pilot: “I was in school when the ships came. They were really big. And they said we weren’t going to attack them with a nuclear bomb because they might want to be friends. But they didn’t want to be friends. Not at all…They blew up army bases, ships, the Navy, submarines, and all the soldiers are gone…Now the moms and dads have to fight…They kill parents. And they put harnesses on kids.” And then the show moves swiftly and efficiently into the question of what happens to individual humans and human society when it’s on the brink of extinction.

There are fairly obvious compromises. A criminal can be a useful addition to society if he knows how to cook, bringing some solace to everyday life — and if he’s developed a better theory of fighting the invaders. We’ll tolerate deviant behavior by doctors if they lead to medical innovation that can be an effective response to new threats. Shreds of normality, like a skateboard, can unify entire communities. Thank God America manufactured so much canned food.

But one of the things that’s most interesting to me so far is the debate over whether academic knowledge and theory or military expertise matter more in the current environment. That conflict’s embodied by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, finally finding a decent outlet for his penchant for playing bookish action heroes), a military history professor, and Captain Weaver (Will Patton), an actual veteran of both the armed forces and the military reserves. Mason’s not a fantastic commander: he gets his squad captured, he brings back an alien prisoner of war without a sense of whether it’ll be feasible or wise to hold one, and it’s not necessarily clear that his theories about whether the Skitters (as the invaders are known) can be harassed off Earth the same way the British were harassed out of the colonies during the Revolutionary War carry water. But Mason does understand that in order to win, the human survivors need more than a military campaign, telling one of his fellow survivors, “I think civilians are a liability and a hindrance. I also think they’re the best motivation we have to fight.” When he has to choose what books he wants to take with him, he picks A Tale of Two Cities.
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You know what American popular culture needs? Gay superheroes. You know what American popular culture doesn’t need? Gay superheroes who come to terms with their sexual orientation by a) beating the hell out of an army of their ex-girlfriends who b) of course have turned into a bunch of evil clones, I suppose by science and the trauma of being dumped:

There’s apparently more to Supergay than simply having the titular hero beat up women he used to date before he came out. But there’s still something distinctly uncharming about that particular choice of villains, particularly considering the impact of bashing on the gay community. I think there’s a debate to be had about whether a gay superhero should be a protector or an avenger, but in any case, women who are coming to terms with the fact that the man who used to date them isn’t actually attracted to them wouldn’t be appropriate targets.

Certainly, the prospect of retaliation over the disclosure that someone you used to date is actually gay (or more saliently, I think, transgender) isn’t totally unrealistic. But as folks come out earlier, those kinds of scenarios are less likely. And just like My Super-Ex Girlfriend, one of the more toxic movies I’ve had the displeasure to watch, there are some deeply weird assumptions about female overreaction and irrationality at work here. There’s no question that a gay superhero (or a black one) will be held to a higher standard, but it’s important not to build visions of equality on sexist or racist foundations.

Kathy Griffin is a somewhat inconsistently effective comedian, but she can be quite an effective demonstration of the political work artists can do that conventional operatives can’t. I think I’d have to see tape of this incident before I trust that it happened exactly the way Griffin says it went down, but the fact that she turned questions of heredity around on Michele Bachmann is funny and smart in and of itself. This is what Griffin says happens when she ran into Bachmann on an elevator and one of Bachmann’s aides started recording the encounter with a flip cam:

“I was just wondering, were you born a bigot or did you grow into it?” Are you ready for the answer? “Well that’s a good question I’m going to have to think about that”…So then, I lost it. I said “let me rephrase.” I said “do you feel you were born a bigot or do you think that its more environmental?” She goes “I’m going to have to get back to you on that one.”

Think kind of politicized comedy can be unfairly manipulative, and not that effective. I’m of the camp that believes that what Borat exposed more than anything else was the essential decency of a lot of Americans when faced with someone who’s behaving bizarrely, even if that means that they go along with something offensive. But asking someone if they were born a bigot is not the kind of thing that a debate moderator would ask, and it’s not something that a conventional political operative would ask because the potential for a high dungeon-inflected “No!” and looking like a jerk is pretty high. Griffin, though, can take the risk, walk away from it if it pays no dividends, and give everyone else a nice slice of footage if her audacity pays off.

I read Harlow Giles Unger’s biography of Patrick Henry Lion of Liberty over the weekend (I think the rest of this summer is going to be a lot of alternating between the Founding Fathers and big science fiction novels), and it struck me all over again how few movies we have about the Revolutionary War. I’d looked into this a couple of years ago, but it’s really kind of stunning. The success of America’s war for independence from Great Britain is incredibly remarkable, the people who prosecuted that war are referenced constantly in our current political conversations, and yet we don’t have more than a handful of movies about the conflict or the people who ran it. April Morning, Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor, The Crossing, John Adams, and Valley Forge are all television projects. The last big Revolutionary War blockbuster, The Patriot, came out in 2000, and even that wasn’t that enormous a success: it netted $113,330,342 at the domestic box office, just $3 million more than the movie cost to make.

So what’s the problem? I think there are a couple. First, Revolutionary War action sequences are a real challenge. We are too distant from the realities of musket and bayonet fighting, and there’s no way the scenes will seem as exciting as Michael Bay and the Siege of Chicago or any other big Transformers-style action spectacles. But if you get up close and personal with what it takes to kill someone else by sticking a large but not necessarily very sharp blade into them, you’re hitting hard-R territory. World War II battles are in closer accord with what we consider exciting, there are explosions, rapid movements, and larger-scale engagements. Plus, the stakes are familiar. America v. Hitler’s a debate that can be solved with unusual swiftness.

And therein lies the second challenge of Revolutionary War movies. America v. King George III is also a relatively easy debate to settle quickly, but George III isn’t really manifestable, the Atlantic Ocean dilutes the conflict a bit. And besides, the real debate is between the Founding Fathers themselves, and their successes and failures lay the groundwork for everything from the Civil War to the treatment of Native Americans. But those conflicts pay off down the road. And getting folks in their seats for a battle royale over the question of whether Locke or Plutarch’s more correct about the nature of law isn’t necessarily easy. Given the distorted debates about our Founders, their goals, intentions, and outlooks, movies about the nature of Americans’ origins could get awfully didactic and limited awfully quickly.

And finally, these are complicated men. Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings? Patrick Henry’s rather clueless move to take for his second wife a woman his son was in love with? The Founders are hard to make movies about if we treat them if they’re distant gods, so wise and so important as to be divine — we can’t reckon with that. But we don’t necessarily want to reckon with them as men either. We’d rather believe the Founding Fathers across the board had modern ideas about slavery than accept the messy, ugly compromises they made both in their personal and political lives. If we’re so anxious about their beliefs, we’re probably not ready to accept them as full persons.

-You get that 21 Jump Street reboot you’ve been longing for on March 16, 2012.

-With all the kerfuffle over white rappers, it’s interesting that a prominent hip-hop ghostwriter is a white dude.

-Star Wars nerds + academic nerds = the power of the Force to illuminate history. (Academics in the audience, I’d be curious how you feel about this whole trend in mashing up academica and popular culture.)

-AARP brings its marketing power to the cause of getting your parents to adopt digital music.

-I’ll be spending my lunch break watching Missy Elliot’s “Behind the Music”:

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Behind The Music, Reality TV Shows, Reality TV Shows 6

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Perhaps the most controversial thing Republican Mitt Romney’s ever said about the arts was his brief declaration in 2007 that his favorite book was Scientology classic Battlefield Earth — keeping in character and good sense, he soon reversed himself and declared that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn had pride of place on his bookshelf instead. But Romney’s also pivoted somewhat on arts funding and arts education issues since he left the governor’s office in Massachusetts.

2003: When Romney became governor in 2003, he inherited a difficult budget situation — particularly on the arts. The previous year, Republican Gov. Jane Swift and the state legislature cut funding for the Massachusetts Cultural Council 62 percent to $7.3 million. Rather than proposing further cuts, Romney advocated for keeping that budget steady. But that same year, he did propose privatizing the Massachusetts College of Art and Design as part of a larger plan to change the governance of the state’s public college system.

2004: An alternative to Romney’s plan for MassArt, proposed by the school’s president Katherine Sloan, is approved. Rather than returning the tuition it collects to a general fund, MassArts gets approval to keep it and begins fundraising that’s intended to make it more financially autonomous (when Romney first called for privatizing the school, MassArt didn’t have its own endowment). But despite these changes, MassArt continues to receive funding from the state of Massachusetts, and remains a public institution.

2006: Even as the economy recovers in Massachusetts, Romney proposed cutting $2.4 million from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s budget. When the legislature approved a $12.1 million budget for the MCC, he vetoed $2.4 million of that funding only to have the legislature override his veto.

2009: During the stimulus debate, Romney goes on CNBC and as part of a larger discussion, suggests that the arts aren’t an appropriate target of the bill.

Romney has questioned levels of funding for the arts, particularly in difficult financial times, and he has questioned government involvement in the arts as parts of larger conversations about the government’s core responsibilities. But unlike some of his competitors for the Republican nomination, Romney doesn’t seem to be an absolutist on the idea of government involvement in the arts. And that’s the Romney’s biggest challenge in the Republican primary: in a game of less is more, Romney’s got a lot of more in his record as governor of Massachusetts.

Well, this looks like my dream television show:

A British show about the news that’s explicitly being created as an attempt to compete with Mad Men on U.K. broadcast as that American import switches to another channel? Starring Dominic West as a roguish newscaster? Romola Garai as a British Peggy Olson, but with power over West’s Jon Hamm figure? And Ben Whishaw as an ambitious young investigative journalist? That’s partially about the challenges of covering the Suez Canal crisis? This is just absolutely engineered to appeal to me.

It’s not that Mad Man‘s unengaged with the social issues of the day, it just comes at them obliquely, mutedly, and I’ve always been most interested in the direct rebellions of the era, the point at which things break because they’re no longer sustainable. It sounds like The Hour is both moving the action back a decade into the ’50s but making it more explicitly political, situating the characters directly in the center of swinging London instead of putting them on the periphery of cultural upheaval, instead of having Greenwich Village be the site of pilgrimages. And while ad men create the consumerist world that ordinary Americans live in, that responds slowly to the societal shifts that are happening around, newsmen can’t help but be timely. The flaws are different, but I’m more excited about the prospects of stumbling headlong into the new world rather than holding it off, with inconsistent levels of success, for as long as possible.

This recap contains spoilers through the second episode of the current season of HBO’s True Blood.

If I have one major objection to HBO’s True Blood, it’s the way the show handles Southernness in general, and Sookie Stackhouse as a representative Southerner in particular. That hasn’t always been a problem for the show. Usually, it’s more of a matter of degrees in how Alan Ball shades the microcosm Charlaine Harris created to explore how humans would react if vampires revealed themselves. He’s made everything a bit darker, a bit more freighted. I realize this is a problem unique to me, and to other folks who read Harris’s books long before the show even went to adaptation. But I think it’s worth thinking about, given that HBO’s other current smash, Game of Thrones, is also an adaptation, and a much more faithful one. The alterations to Ball’s texts are major from a plot and characterization standpoint. And while I think that keeping Lafayette alive, while requiring plot adjustments down the seasons, hasn’t irrevocably changed the character of the series, some of the other things Ball has altered have really change the spirit of the show, and not always for the better.

I think the way that bothers me most right now is in how the show depicts Hotshot, the community on the edge of Bon Temps populated by werepanthers. In Ball’s interpretation, that unusual ability and that isolation translate into a kind of inbred stupidity, rather than a profound strangeness. True Blood‘s per-episode budget runs about $3 million, about two-thirds the price of an episode of Game of Thrones, and the show has to spend a lot more of that budget on the effects that are in almost every scene. It might have cost too much to try to make the folks in Hotshot look truly other all of the time, but it would have been pretty cheap to do some physical coaching to get them to walk differently, rather than have them say things like declaring that a refrigerator is their air conditioning. Treating poor Southern people like pathetic, dumb hicks is the laziest trick in the book, and cheaper than dressing folks up as Southern belles.
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