It’s a pretty reasonable assumption that every time Meryl Streep steps in front of a camera, she’s gunning hard for an Academy Award, or at least a nomination. And that’s doubly true for her turn as Margaret Thatcher:

Looking at this, it struck me that there’s an odd imbalance between Best Actor and Best Actress nominations when it comes to whether the actors in question are playing real people from the U.S. or the U.K. In the last 10 years, the real-life roles for which women have been nominated have relatively evenly split between Americans and Brits. On the American side, women have been nominated for playing consumer safety advocate Erin Brockovich, semi-obscure serial killer Aileen Wuronos, singer June Carter Cash, mother of murder victim Christine Collins, football mom Leigh Anne Tuohy, and cookbook revolutionary Julia Child. On the British side, they’ve been nominated for playing Iris Murdoch, Virigina Woolf, Laura Henderson, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II.

Men, on the other hand, if they’re nominated for biopics, are heavily nominated for playing American men. They’ve gotten nods for playing Jackson Pollock, John Nash, Muhammad Ali, Bill the Butcher, Charlie Kaufman, Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, Truman Capote, Johnny Cash, Edward R. Murrow, Chris Gardner, Harvey Milk, and Richard Nixon. The exception to the other side of the pond is Johnny Depp who was nominated for playing J.M. Barrie.

What makes the gap interesting, I think, is that the British roles for women are for the most part, so much meatier than the American ones. June Carter Cash and Julia Child are obviously both very famous, but Erin Brockovich, Leigh Anne Tuohy, Aileen Wuronos, and Christine Collins are much more minor or transitory ones, who aren’t nearly as powerful or as long-lasting as English queens or Virginia Woolf. With a few exceptions, like Chris Gardner, the American biopics for men are about men who were very famous before their stories were told on film.

It’s not like there aren’t good stories about famous American women that aren’t worth telling. How awesome would a Harriet Tubman biopic be? What about Martha Washington or Abigail Adams? If you want Terrence Malick to make something dreamy, what about Emily Dickinson? Something sensationalistic, fun, and quietly feminist? Do Annie Oakley. I’m a nerdy Anglophile, and there are a lot of awesome British women. But it’s funny that we tell more stories about powerful British women than powerful American ones.

American divorce and annulment rates have been ticking downwards since 2001, so I was interested to read the always-excellent Heather Havrilesky’s piece on the odd turn towards cheery depictions of divorce in popular culture, riffing on everything from Happily Divorced to Real Housewives to Men of a Certain Age. I’d have expected the opposite, that if divorce was becoming more common, that we’d have a stronger need for positive images of divorced people that would help folks who are already divorced or going through splits convince themselves that they’re going to be okay.

As Heather puts it, “These children of boomers may be avoiding (and denouncing) divorce more vehemently than their parents did in part because they know, from personal experience, the blunt emotional impact it can have on children. And the current cheery cultural take on divorce may be an odd product of this renewed stigma. We don’t want our kids to repeat our experiences, and we certainly don’t want to relive those experiences on our TV or movie screens.” But if that’s true, wouldn’t we have more depressing visions of divorce in our popular culture, not fewer ones? And wouldn’t we have more pop culture that’s skeptical about marriage in the first place? Instead, most comedies still abide by the traditional definition of the term, steering happy couples towards the altar or toward the implication that it’s in the future. Instead, something like NBC’s Whitney still feels sort of fresh and surprising for its open skepticism of marriage:

Maybe the folks who are making pop culture don’t want their children to make their mistakes. But there’s something odd about the idea that the only mistakes that can lead to divorce happen after folks get married, instead of before decide to march down the aisle.

Virginia Rep. Jim Moran’s still hammering away at his proposal for a Museum of the American People on the National Mall with the idea that it would focus on the role of immigration and migration have played in American history. It’s an absolutely critical theme, but I’m concerned about any museum that’s built more on a swell of interest group support than on curatorial imperatives about what will make a strong, cohesive ongoing set of exhibits. If you look at the groups that Moran has signed up to support the museum, almost none of the organizations are primarily concerned with historical preservation and curation. There are a few exceptions, including the Chinese Historical Society of America, the NSU Creole Heritage Center, the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA, the American Irish Historical Society, the Swedish-American Historical Society, and the Great Plains Welsh Heritage Project (which I now kind of have an overwhelming desire to check out). I’m sympathetic to demands for representation on the Mall. But I don’t know that the German-American Citizens League of Greater Cincinnati is necessarily well-equipped to do more than demand representation.

It’s worth considering two examples of representational museums, one of which I think works fairly well, one of which I think is a considerable failure. The Holocaust Museum has an incredibly narrow mandate, which I think serves it well. And it serves that mandate by devoting most of the gallery space to a single permanent exhibition, so there’s less pressure to fill rotating gallery space with weaker narratives or exhibitions. There is rotating space, though, and when I was there, it was filled by an excellent exhibit on the route out of Germany through Asia some Jews were able to take due to accommodating customs officials. It was a part of the story I haven’t known anything about, and it was a good narrative exhibit.

By contrast, I’ve always been amazed by how weak the Museum of the American Indian is. Part of it is that the architecture doesn’t actually create a lot of gallery space, but I’ve never been exceptionally impressed by how that space has been used. One of the problems with creating a museum out of a sense of representational obligation is that you run the risk of ending up with fairly milquetoast exhibits in an effort not to anger any of your stakeholder. While it’s nice that there’s a Museum of the American Indian, and the cafeteria food is good, I’ve always wondered if Native Americans might be better served by much stronger integration of Native American history and culture into existing Smithsonian museums. A National History Museum exhibit about the Founding Fathers’ experiences on the western frontiers of colonial America and their later failures on Indian policy might reach a lot more people, and be a lot tougher and more informative.

It’s not that I don’t think that there’s a curatorial mandate for a museum about immigration and migration and how both forces shaped America. There are a lot of stories there to tell. But I want to hear the case from curators and historians. It would be a failure to get the Museum of the American People only to have it be accountable to too many groups with competing agendas to actually produce compelling exhibits.

There was something sort of sweet about Republican contender Tim Pawlenty’s admission last week that he’s fond of Lady Gaga, particularly the acoustic rendition of “Born This Way” from her HBO concert movie:

But however charming I find the Minnesota candidate’s confessed affinity for the pop phenomenon who’s also been one of the more politically active and effective celebrities of recent years, it’s entirely predictable that Republican commentators are jumping all over Pawlenty for it. Specifically, Laura Ingraham took to the airwaves this morning to declare that it was “idiotic” for Pawlenty to say he likes Gaga because both she and Rihanna are contributing to “cultural decay” in America.

If by “cultural decay” Ingraham meant a death of creativity, she has a point. “Born This Way” has clear and much-remarked upon similarities to Madonna songs. And David LaChapelle and Philip Paulus are suing Rihanna for ripping off their fashion photography for the video for “S&M,” the song that has Ingraham in a snit:

But freighting two 20-something pop queens with the downfall of American society? Not hardly. Gaga’s music is full of a deep skepticism about sex. In her personal life, she’s said that she didn’t enjoy sex until she was in a stable, monogamous relationship, a more realistic compromise on the evangelical promise that sex will be better if you wait for marriage. As for Rihanna, I don’t think Ingraham has to worry has to worry that teenagers are going to rush out and buy designer ball gags and harnesses. That stuff is expensive.

Given our debates here over whether the sex scenes and depictions of gender politics in HBO’s Game of Thrones are sexist, I thought it was interesting to see what George R.R. Martin told my friend Rachael when she interviewed him in advance of the release of A Dance With Dragons tomorrow (programming note: I’ll try to have lots of blog posts in the queue, but I intend to spend much of the day knocking the book off so I can write on it). Martin said of the charges that the sex scenes are gratuitous:

Well, I’m not writing about contemporary sex — it’s medieval.

There’s a more general question here that doesn’t just affect sex or rape, and that’s this whole issue of what is gratuitous? What should be depicted? I have gotten letters over the years from readers who don’t like the sex, they say it’s “gratuitous.” I think that word gets thrown around and what it seems to mean is “I didn’t like it.” This person didn’t want to read it, so it’s gratuitous to that person. And if I’m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I’m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I’ve tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it’s a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.

I guess I find that answer partially, if not entirely, satisfying. I’m a big believer in the idea that period pieces should reflect the sexual norms of the period rather than being fantasies of consent, reciprocal pleasure, and mutuality if those things don’t make sense for the relationship and the circumstances in question. But I think this is a bit of a dodge, and doesn’t answer a larger question about Martin’s intentions. Does he write sex scenes the way he does because he’s telling stories about women coming into their power after they’ve been mistreated in gendered ways? Or does he write medieval fantasy because he’s engaged by images of women being brutalized? I tend towards a charitable reading of A Song of Ice and Fire, but this is one case where I’d really like to have that reading confirmed by the author.

-So, the Murdochs fired a bunch of people to save a business deal that now looks like it’s dead? Charming.

-Our television shows are officially ageless — or at least, the advertising in them will stay updated.

-Well, this is one way to make Archie comics seem edgy again.

-Your regular re-up of Kelly Clarkson singles has arrived.

-Still think The Adventures of Tintin would have been a lot better as a live-action movie:

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.

Herman Cain’s had an interesting career, whether serving as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, as a director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, or a Naval mathematician. None of it, however, has given him much background on arts issues or intellectual property rights, leaving his stances in these areas — as with many others — something of a mystery. Literally the only clue to his position on anything arts-related is a comment he made on an appearance on Eliot Spitzer’s CNN show, when the former governor of New York asked Cain what kind of spending cuts he’d make, cautioning, “I’m not talking National Endowment for the Arts, I’m not talking about everybody’s got their favorite target.” Cain refused to say he’d eliminate NEA.

That’s it. Nothing on arts education, nothing on public broadcasting, nothing on intellectual property or piracy. Zip. Cain won some early momentum, mostly due to an empty field. But unless he comes up with actual ideas — on the arts or anything else — I’m hard-pressed to see how he stays a remotely serious candidate, even in a cycle with a lot of silly options.

When I talked to Eliot Mizrachi, the director of communications at the Entertainment Software Rating Board, about the ESRB’s new ratings system earlier this year, one of the things that confounded me most about the system was the presumption that the more control a player has in a game, the higher the rating ought to be. But some new research is a reminder that, especially as socially responsible — or at least socially-themed games — continue to enter the market, intensity can be about inculcating values and skills as much as it can be about the jolt people get out of shooting marks or beating up hookers. GamePolitics notes this in a piece about video games as useful training ground for crisis management:

“With popular film, you are mentally engaged in understanding the story and keeping in mind different scenes to understand the big picture,” she said. “Even more so with video games, because you have an active role in designing the story, to a certain extent.”

But in studying plot, narrative and metaphor, Furtner found that not all films and video games work well in training. Those with a strong narrative and deep storyline tend to be better than traditional training methods. Furtner says that she plans a new study that she will modify to influence player behaviors. In the long run she hopes that her work will help lead to more integrated ways for agencies, companies and organizations to implement useful crisis management training.

“I want to help people to be able to say, ‘I’m not going to react, I’m going to respond,’” Furtner said. “I think it’s important to make a shift in the way we are teaching our employees so that they are able to remember this a week, a month, a year from now.”

I don’t really see a world of games where players, say, work in a combat hospital and have to make life-and-death choices about how to save their patients are going to eclipse first-person shooters. So I can kind of understand why the ESRB defaults the way it does. But intensity works in a lot of directions and to a lot of different ends. It’s worth keeping that in mind.

This post contains spoilers through the third episode of this season of True Blood.

Last night’s True Blood was an illustration of how unsettling tenderness can be when it’s unexpected, and all the unnerving places love can take us when we treat it as a higher power.

Sookie found herself on the receiving end on a lot of surprising—and not necessarily wanted—attraction last night. First, there’s Eric, who murmurs that she smells “Like wheat, and honey, and sunlight. What are you?” She assumes he plans to assert his old power over her, and to assert it forcefully, showing his true nature as what Lafayette describes him: “Eric Northman is a thousand years old. Ain’t no police can touch him…The best thing we can do is forget this ever happened.” Instead, he’s a large and unintentionally dangerous kitten, vulnerable enough to apologize for tracking mud on Sookie’s carpet, playful enough to notice that the water she washes his feet with tickles, mild enough to stammer “Sorry. Sorry, that was rude. Sorry,” to Sookie after pushing Pam away from her. That vulnerability and gratitude could be the basis of a different dynamic between Eric and Sookie, but it raises important questions. Is Eric the the majestic owner of Fangtasia, an ancient and powerful amoral being? Or is he a gentle and protective man who happens to be a vampire? And does Sookie like him better neutralized or majestic? Do humans really want the excitement of contact with vampires? Or do we want the Twilight-ized fantasy, a very limited amount of danger injected into sex and day-to-day life?

In a way, the second person who is taking a sudden interest in Sookie is even more disconcerting. In Sookie’s year-long absence, Debbie Pelt has returned, and she tells Sookie, “I got the program, and I got Jesus on the side.” Eric, at least, has been changed by magic. But Debbie’s claiming to have changed on her own, to want Sookie’s forgiveness and a more generalized chance to do right. Being a good person requires Sookie to give her the benefit of the doubt, but prudence and history suggests that she might be better off being a bad person, and staying suspicious.
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