You know, I understand that overly restrictive copyright laws are a bad thing that stymie innovation and empower corporations. But if they’ll save me from having to see a remake of The Wizard of Oz, that’s a powerful argument in their favor. As the Hollywood Reporter’s Eriq Gardner reports, Warner Brothers yesterday won a court decision in an unrelated merchandising case that says the characters in movies that are adaptations of other works can be copyrighted independent of the copyrights on those individual works:

There are nine Wizard of Oz projects currently in development, by one count, including a big-budget 3D film by Disney directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco that’s meant to be a prequel to the classic film. Might these films have to be very, very careful going forward? One lawyer believes so.

“The court’s statement that the film copyrights cover ‘all visual depictions’ of the characters recognizes that there is often a quintessential version of a literary character that exists in the public’s mind as a result of a popular film adaption,” says Aaron Moss, the chair of litigation at Greenberg Glusker. ” Any filmmaker that wants to create a new version of a literary work—even one in the public domain—needs to be careful not to use copyrightable elements of characters that first appear in protected motion picture versions of the works. Of course, when it comes to characters depicted by live actors, this may be easier said than done.”

Obviously, I don’t actually believe there should be a law against making crappy, derivative knockoffs and revisitations of classic movies (and even non-classic movies) even as I wish there were a lot fewer of them. In any case, I tend to think that there are some works so powerful that there will never be a straight remake of them — variants on Oz projects probably wouldn’t want to ape the original too closely in any case, and I don’t think we’ll ever see another attempt to make Gone With the Wind. And if this decision stands and becomes an anti-competitive tool, it’s more likely to have studios seeing how close they can get to the line where they’d trigger a copyright violation (are we ripping off Lara Croft if we take her down a cup size?) rather than embracing originality as a way to stay lawsuit-free. But man are there times — a moment when we have NINE Oz projects going at once, not to mention the millions of Snow White projects that are underway — when I despair for original content.

I’ve complained in the past that nobody knows how to do the divine in movies and television any more. And Gods Behaving Badly, which involves a bunch of Greek deities hanging out in a Manhattan brownstone may not exactly inspire a sense of awe and wonder. But the casting sounds straight-up awesome, and for once, decently representational: Phylicia Rashad as Demeter is nice, as is Rosie Perez as Persephone. And Nelsan Ellis, who is far and away my favorite part of True Blood, as Dionysus is just genius. (Ditto for picking World’s Twitchiest Catholic John Turturro as Hades, and Christopher Walken, who will be the most dour Zeus ever.) It’s not perfectly proportional representation, but having three out of ten gods be played by people of color is a step up from pure tokenism.

I can’t quite make up my mind if I think the quest to make Hollywood’s outputs look more like America is better served by a focus on original content, remakes that racebend in the opposite direction (something I’m working on a separate piece about), adaptations, or historical dramas and biopics that shade in the country’s history so it’s not all white. The obvious answer is a combination of all of these categories, though I wonder if original content has an advantage because folks can’t have preconceptions about the race or ethnicity of characters they’re not already familiar with.

Idris Elba’s performance as Stringer Bell in The Wire is what made him a sensation in America, but he hasn’t found the next iconic thing on this side of the pond yet. But back in the U.K., he’s absolutely burning up screens in Luther, a co-production with the BBC and BBC America, about a cop on the edge of psychosis. It’s an astonishing performance compressed in a much smaller space than his stint on The Wire (the first season is streaming on Netflix and the second begins airing on BBC America in October), raising important questions about everything from the allure of violent relationships to psychopaths’ capacity for empathy. And though it’s a very different show, watching Luther made me revisit both my understanding of Stringer Bell and the way I see The Wire as a whole.

Where Stringer’s a selectively brutal man who would like to see the overall violence of the drug trade diminish to make it easier to do business, John Luther’s a habitually violent man who’s built a magic circle around his wife, Zoe. There’s this scene in the first episode where Zoe invites John over for what he think is going to be a conversation about rekindling their marriage after a separation. Instead, she informs him that she’s seeing someone else. He responds by tearing down a door in her kitchen. It’s terrifying in precisely the same way Jeremy Sisto slapping Kerri Russell in Waitress was terrifying: that the character is doing something violent isn’t surprising, but where that violence is going to stop is entirely unpredictable. In the course of the series, we’ll see Luther struggle with a man who is playing a dual game of Russian roulette with him, we’ll see him casually and viciously punch a suspect in the face while he’s walking down the street in order to get enough blood to take the man’s DNA sample. But there’s an intimacy to Luther’s violence around Zoe: it’s a demonstration of the intensity of his feelings for her that he’ll destroy her door, that he’ll shatter one of the glass walls of his office, that she makes him totally out of control. That’s frightening, and it’s meant to be.

But it’s also powerfully alluring, the major metaphor for the attractions of darkness in a season that makes Law & Order: Criminal Intent look tame. In all the world, the show suggests (probably unrealistically), Zoe is the one person John wants to keep safe, even from himself. The intensity of his violence to the world around him is matched by his tenderness to Zoe when she seduces him, and the extent of his grief when she is murdered. Luther’s love for Zoe is so powerful that it becomes a kind of fetish object for Alice, a serial killer Luther began the season working to apprehend but who, by the end of it, becomes his only friend. Alice is invested enough in Luther and Zoe’s relationship that she will kill to protect it, and ultimately, to honor it. Even as the show infuses an obsessive relationship, one that’s violent even if Zoe’s never physically struck, with a kind of dark beauty, Luther suggests that the only person who could hold up Luther and Zoe’s relationship as an ideal — and the only person who can connect to Luther as he becomes the truest and most fractured version of himself — is someone who is fatally damaged herself.
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I’m reading Bill Ivey’s Arts, Inc. in between hard sci-fi and biographies of the Founding Fathers (Ron Chernow’s Washington is, by the way, awesome great), so I was excited to see that Ian David Moss and the good people at Createquity are restarting their Arts Policy Library series with a look at the book. I’m glad to see them starting this series up again in any case — one of the best things about the current state of the blogophere is how it has elevated policy debates and research, particularly around health care, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic crisis. And it’s good to have a basic primer on the arts policy literature out there for those of who are trying to catch up with blogging experts in the field like Gabriel Rossman.

I think it’s a sign that Ivey, who argues that government has abdicated its role in securing cultural rights, which are being eroded by expanding corporate ownership, is essentially correct on some level that most of my thinking—and the thinking of most people who care about pop culture—about how to make our culture better involves demonstrating that there are markets and other incentives for companies to make more shows and movies about Latinos, or to make movies for women that aren’t gratuitously sexist. We have conversations about copyright, remixing, and things, but we mostly skip over questions of heritage and cultural rights, and our conversations about cultural diplomacy are mostly confined to the market, the question of what makes it overseas in stores and theaters. I don’t necessarily agree with everything Ivey’s saying, but the book is an important reminder of how cramped our debate over art and cultural policy has become. It’s worth reading as a way of forcing the door open, even if we eventually decide on a narrower role for government.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the way pop culture in the recession, rather than defining what our aspirations should be, is helping reconcile us to our compromises. So it was with that in mind that I absorbed the news that Bridesmaids has finally beat out Sex and the City at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated comedy starring women ever made.

Vats of ink have been spilled condemning the consumerist ethos of Sex and the City and of fans who aspire to relive the show in every last detail, fetishizing the mediocre cupcakes of the Magnolia Bakery, ponying up for Sex and the City tours and experiences. I do think that the first Sex and the City movie is better than it’s given credit, both as a portrait of friendships and as a rejection of the series finale’s awkward embrace of monogamy for all. But the movie’s consumerism hit new heights, with all couture dresses, overreaching on real estate and abandoned hideously expensive pairs of shoes, and a subplot that treated one character’s obsession with expensive clothes and public displays of wealth as the cause of the downfall of her relationship acting more as a minor moral correction than a permanent adjustment. Yes, it might be a cute gesture to get married at the courthouse in a vintage store suit, but it’s not meaningful if you’re going home to that hedge fund penthouse.

Bridesmaids isn’t exactly where I’d like lady comedies to be either, in that at the end of the movie, the main character’s capacity for romantic connection is revitalized, while the question of whether she’ll revive her small business and her professional ambitions is essentially unaddressed. Maybe having Annie give running her bakery another try and getting the guy would have been too much. And maybe having her get the bakery and not the adorable Canadian-accented cop would have confirmed stereotypes about career women and their inability to get dudes. But I think it’s as much of a fairy tale to suggest that ending up with the right dude will resolve everything as either of those two options are. Bridesmaids could have resurrected Annie’s professional confidence tentatively, perhaps via a loan from Megan, with the affirmation that it’s going to be very hard, but that it’s worth persisting. As we figure out what’s going to happen to us in which I’m increasingly sure is going to be a permanent period of economic readjustment, we’re going to have to balance between pop culture that encourages us to want too much, and pop culture that suggests we’d be better off not hoping for anything at all, even through hard work.

-Louis C.K. on his time with his kids and taking a later slot to avoid catering to advertisers.

-Racebending: the beat goes on.

-I’m continually amazed by the extent to which people want the state to do their parenting work for them.

-The perpetual crisis in rock.

-This is great, but I wish folks would remember that there are Chumbawamba songs other than “Tubthumping”:

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba

I’ve written in the past, and some of you have agreed in comments, that it’s been interesting to observe the developments of webcomics like Questionable Content and Girls with Slightshots. Unlike comics like Doonesbury, where the characters age and experience current events at roughly the same rate as readers, time is moving much more slowly for Jeph Jacques’ Marten Reed or Danielle Corsetto’s Hazel. I started reading both comics while I was in college, at a time when Marten and Hazel’s struggles to figure out what they wanted to do were things I knew were in my immediate future.

But as the years have gone by, Hazel’s been laid off, and Marten’s moved from one dead-end job to another, I’ve wondered how these characters — and how these comics — are going to move forward. Danielle Corsetto, who has been drawing Girls With Slingshots since 2004, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about what’s next for Hazel, who lost her newspaper job in a recession, her other characters’ hopes and dreams, and who her influences are in the world of webcomics.

As a young journalist, I’ve spent a lot of time sympathizing with Hazel and Thea. Any plans to get either of them back into the profession? Have Hazel start a partying and drinking blog? Have Thea start her local Patch site? And if so, why not? Did you want to get the two characters beyond journalism? Or was having them be unemployed simply a convenient way to do some character development?

Ooooh, damn you for figuring out my ploy!

Most of the horrible things that happen to my characters are a means of developing themselves for their audience. I mean, I’m sure that in their off-panel lives they’re laughing, crying, getting into trouble, and having life-changing moments, but those moments aren’t disclosed in the comic until you’ve been thoroughly acquainted with the characters.

When you meet someone for the first time, you generally don’t know much about them until they’re made vulnerable in a situation. I can attest, as I’ve watched my own friends go through breakups, layoffs, and deaths of loved ones. People don’t open themselves up until they feel it’s safe. I tend to think that, if you’ve been reading Girls With Slingshots long enough, it’s safe to share their struggles.

To answer your question, though, I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen to Hazel or Thea! Originally I wanted them to develop an website/blog called “Girls With Slingshots,” but now I’m not so sure. It’s a little too close to Danielle’s Life Story, and this isn’t an autobiography.

Guess you’ll have to keep reading. ;)
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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.

Michele Bachmann’s career in politics has been fairly short, and her record on the arts is correspondingly fairly flimsy. But what record she does has indicates staunch opposition to any government role in supporting the arts.

2006: As a GOP state senator, Bachmann opposed an amendment to the Minnesota constitution that would have raised the state’s sales tax to fund development of outdoor spaces and the arts. At the time, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Bachmann said: “Republicans support the arts just as much as Democrats support the arts. The only question is who will pay for it? We don’t want government choosing which arts are subsidized and which ones aren’t.”

2009: Now in Congress, Bachmann votes against the omnibus appropriations bill. Her reasoning? “Even more incredulous is the fact that this omnibus appropriations bill contains funding for many of the same agencies and programs that already received funds in the so-called ‘stimulus’ bill—162 programs in fact,” she said, according to the States News Service. “We also have funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which, fresh off receiving $50 million from the ‘stimulus,’ is now in line to receive $138 million in this latest proposal.”

2010: Bachmann cosponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn that would have eliminated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

2011: When Bachmann proposed an alternative to President Obama’s budget earlier this year, the MN Progressive Project noted that her outline would have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts. Later that year, she voted for passage of H.R. 1076, which would have stripped all funding from National Public Radio and banned the federal government from spending money on radio content.

None of these are particularly novel or surprising positions for someone of Bachmann’s stated beliefs. She may have genuine policy eccentricities, but when it comes to the arts, Bachmann’s a predictable small-government conservative.

The AV Club’s observation that Toby Keith’s latest reminds them of Built to Spill reminded me that I’ve always thought that Keith is one of the more misunderstood politicized musicians out there. Some of that’s self-inflicted. Yes, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” is an incredibly unsubtle revenge song, too easily repurposed as a war cry rather than a call for taking out the actual perpetrators of 9/11 (Most Wanted List references notwithstanding), and one that Keith probably rode on a bit too long and let obscure his actual views on things like the war in Iraq (he’s against it, and is generally supportive of Obama’s Afghanistan policies — ironically, James Jones was the person who told Keith to actually record the song) a bit too much:

But as much as it’s totally obnoxious, it was interesting to see how near-universal the emotions in it were when American troops killed Osama bin Laden. The song of the night might have been “Party in the USA,” which if anything, is an even more dissonant soundtrack, a distraction from the fact that folks were celebrating a man’s death. But the emotions were pure Keithisms. In the run-up to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it made sense to treat revenge as if it was an unacceptable emotion because it seemed to legitimatize a wider field of military action (particularly the perception that the invasion of Iraq was payback for Saddam’s anti-Bush I animus). But if “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” had been released in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s death, I can’t imagine it would have been as remotely controversial as it was when it was released in 2002.

Interestingly, “Made In America” has a hedge against controversy in its encomium to a man who “breaks his heart seeing foreign cars / Filled with fuel that isn’t ours / And wearing cotton we didn’t grow,” cautioning that “He ain’t prejudiced / He’s just / Made in America”:

Made In America by Toby Keith by michealminton

It’s a fairly straightforward articulation of why it’s admirable to dig a little deeper to support American industry, which I suspect will go entirely unnoticed by the hipsters who buy American Apparel for the local production.

Then there’s Keith’s reconciliation of evangelical Christianity and premarital sex:

Now, Toby Keith is not one of America’s great political thinkers. He’s much more conservative than I am on lots of issues. He was at least briefly seduced by the clarion call of Sarah Palin. But he’s a valuable illustration of a basic fact: conservatives are much better at uncomplicated expressions of patriotism than liberals are, even as liberals are (with the exception of drilling in the Arctic, etc.) much better than conservatives at the substance of supporting the troops and people who work in American industry. It should be enough to win policy debates on the merits, but messages are powerful.