Torchwood: Miracle Day is one of the most intensely political things I’ve ever seen on television. Through two episodes, everything from health care, to extraordinary rendition, to the death penalty, to drug stockpiling, to the ethics of abortion and contraception in a world where the population’s exploding. What’s exceptional about Miracle Day, though, is not just that it’s tackling the issues of the day, but the way it’s using science fictional conceits and our affection for existing characters to reframe key issues rather than simply to pose the same questions again.

Charlie Jane Anders has a wonderful outline of the show’s core dilemma: what happens to every aspect of health care, from management to chronic conditions, to disease control, to organ donation, in a world where no one dies? Miracle Day isn’t throwing out the world of politics — people are still opposed to abortion and contraception, and with swamped emergency rooms, there are still questions about health care rationing. But rather than fighting over death panels and mandates to purchase insurance, the events of Miracle Day totally upset the rules, making the question not about how we’re going to pay for health care, but how we’re going to deliver it at all when there aren’t enough beds, enough drugs, enough doctors. In the real world, of course, the payment question’s still there, and still important. But shifting the framework and the questions we ask about the issues, even temporarily, is the kind of thought experiment science fiction’s made for.

And on a smaller scale, I thought the rendition scenes were more effective than Charlie Jane did. It’s one thing to show the impact of extraordinary rendition on a family we’ve just met a couple of minutes ago, like in Rendition. It’s entirely another to see character’s we’ve gotten to know over three or more years torn away from their kids on a tarmac, dragged limp up a set of moveable steps and into a plane. It’s easy to abstract experiences we haven’t had, and that no one we know have had or are likely to have. Art can provide an emotional connection to those kinds of issues, things we oppose in principal but not out of an actual visceral objection to them.

Apologies for not getting to Louie until now — A Dance With Dragons kind of ate my brain last week. This post contains spoilers through last week’s episode, “Joan.”

This episode starts with a woman Louie can’t get away from fast enough, and ends with one he can’t get enough of. When he tries to order groceries from the corner deli, he’s interrupted in the middle of a complex negotiation over whether he was six or 60 bananas by a call from his sobbing sister, declaring, “Louie, I am so sorry I wasn’t a better big sister to you.” Maybe this is the way Louis C.K. sees the world, but there seem to be an awful lot of hysterical women in his life.

And it’s because of that it’s refreshing to see Joan Rivers show up after Louis bombs a gig in Atlantic City, resorting to begging his audience to stay by telling them “Folks, why are you giving your money to Donald Trump? He’s a billionaire and you work hard for your money.” But even though he’s cranky and depressed, Louis’ face lights up watching Joan do her shtick on the main stage. For once, this is a woman who isn’t using Louis because he’s famous, or inviting him over for spectacularly awkward sex, or getting mad at him in some old dude’s apartment. She’s in his field, and she’s incredibly accomplished, and as it turns out, she’s pretty cool — suddenly, Louis’ hanging out with her in her suite where “Cher had this place, she slept here. Madonna. Bette Middler.”

So it’s interesting to see the particular variety of gawky that Louis pulls out for the occasion. “Do you know how many blow jobs I had to get where I am now?” Rivers asks him. “I don’t want to guess,” he initially demurs, before venturing “40? Around 40?” It’s of course manipulative of Rivers to push him to answer, and it’s probably unfair of her to freak out when he guesses an insulting high number, but his answer does reveal something about how he sees the business and imagines it must be like for women. And then he ends up sleeping with her, but not before Rivers warns him not to tell anyone “for your sake, not mine. Nobody likes necrophiliacs. And if you meet Melissa, not a word. She still thinks I’m a virgin.”

Both Rivers and Louis operate in a kind of comedy that involves them saying things about themselves before someone else can say them. With Rivers, the things she says are outsized, like a bit where she complains that her breasts sag so much that she has to kick them out of the way when she walks. Louis, on the other hand, mostly says things about him that are true. The distorted version of herself that Rivers puts on display keeps people away from the real person behind the performance, while Louis is much more painfully vulnerable. I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s a gender inversion, but it’s a fascinating juxtaposition that says more than just a study in tradecraft.

Vote for the next book in our book club here:

Which book should we read for our next book club?
	A Visit From the Goon Squad
	The Windup Girl
	Persuasion
	The Diamond Age
	Spin
	Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
	Neuromancer
	The Road
	Green Mars
	The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
	American Gods
Results

I’ll keep the poll open until 5 p.m. on Thursday, and on Friday, we’ll figure out how much we’ll read of whatever we do next for the following Friday. Happy voting!

As sometimes happens when pieces from this blog make their way into the wider universe, some folks got verklempt about the idea that there could possibly be political meaning in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. This is sort of entertaining, given that Rowling has talked explicitly about the impact of working at Amnesty International on her fiction, written scathingly about class and Tory policies, and, as Zack Stentz points out, modeled the Black sisters on the Mitford sisters and Dobby the House Elf on the friend of Jessica Mitford’s who recruited her into the Communist Party. But I think there’s a larger issue here, the fact that some people are quite uncomfortable with the idea that art is political.

Andy Daglas, with whom I was discussing this, said he thinks that’s in part because “I think some don’t like the idea of politics having a moral dimension, which storytelling brings to forefront.” And the AV Club’s Rowan Kaiser agreed, saying, “I think a not insignificant number of people view politics as sports, and either are on one team or hate both.” There’s an extent to which that’s true, but I also think with works like the Potter series, or the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books, which draw an explicit line between capitalism and violence against women, folks who don’t share the politics of those authors have a choice between acknowledging those works’ politics and as a result enjoying the works less, or rejecting the idea that a specific piece of art or all art is political. Of course, that’s something that works in multiple directions. I love Gone With the Wind, even though its racial politics are awful*, but I can’t deny what’s in front of me for the sake of my own comfort. I find China Mieville’s nihilism in Perdido Street Station profoundly disturbing, in that I think it becomes an argument against struggling for justice, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate his world-building, and that frustration made me feel the climax of the novel intensely, even if it meant I was angry.

As Rowan put it later in the conversation, “I’m fascinated by the potential motivations of people who deliberately reject concepts of interconnectedness.” And that’s something Rowling herself addressed in her Harvard Commencement address when she said, “Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.” She was speaking about politics and empathy, but I think it’s true of fiction. If you pretend the scenes of torture in the Harry Potter novels are abstract, or that J.K. Rowling may dislike poverty but has no opinions on its actual effects and the policies that would ameliorate it, you may delay a reckoning with your own beliefs and the impact they have in the real world. But you’re also denying yourself the great moral and emotional force of the novel. Art isn’t grown in a vat to wander neutral into the world and retreat from it untouched and untouching.

*I think there is an argument to be made that the entire novel is a juxtaposition between slaveholders and people who do their own labor in the capitalist system, with Mitchell ultimately arguing that the latter are more suited to a modern era, making the novel a rejection of Confederate nostalgia. After all, Melanie Wilkes dies, and Scarlett ends up disgusted with Ashley and in love with Rhett, while her Cause-crazed Atlanta neighbors end up becoming more flexible, tough people when they start their own businesses. But I digress.

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

True Blood is a horror show, but last night’s episode of the show didn’t need need anything supernatural to get truly horrifying. This season on the show, the biggest monster in the equation is sex itself.

I’m still not sure how I feel about the Jason storyline this season. I think it’s useful that the show makes clear that what’s happening to him isn’t just somebody’s twisted interpretation of a fantasy: he’s being sexually assaulted. But I wonder how much the show is going to deal with the implications of being gang-raped for him. Jason still has power over the people who are attacking him, who are brutalized himself. The minute he names himself as a rape victim, one of the women attacking him backs off, crying, “My brother husband just bites the back of my neck and holds me down until it’s over. You’re the best I ever had.” And when his next attacker shows up, a very young teenaged girl, Jason’s able to talk her into helping him escape by giving her a gentle vision of what sex can be. “This ain’t the way it should be. Your first time should be special, with a boy you like,” Jason tells her. “You make love with him ’cause it’s the right time, not ’cause some man shoves you in a shed and says you gotta.” People react to being assaulted all sorts of ways, but it’s going to be odd if the deepest consequence of being violently attacked, sexually assaulted, and transformed from being human into something else is that Jason becomes a proponent of serial monogamy.
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-Mark Twain wrote an advice book for little girls, including the note that “Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.”

-I take full responsibility for the fact that Revolutionary War movies are now a trend — this latest one is about the Oneidas’ relationship with the Colonial Army.

-Guarding the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

-Bryan Cranston on Walter White’s transformation and the six movies he’s shot recently.

-We probably will have a News of the World hacking scandal movie, but when it happens, Tilda Swinton should play Rebekah Brooks:

I’m not quite sure how I feel about the news that Community’s looking to cast someone who just finished a jail term to teach the study group’s biology class next year. According to TVLine, “The show’s casting department is looking for an African-American male in his late 30s or early 40s to fill the role. He’s said to be an ‘imposing,’ sometimes scary guy who has just been released from jail — but is actually a darn good educator.’”

Now, I tend to think Community does racial humor fairly well. But the show’s done a more uneven job of dealing with the things that actually brought the characters to Greendale. Shirley may be taking classes so she can start a small Internet business, and the show occasionally alludes to how she wishes she had more time with her sons, but we never really see her having a hard time financially. Troy seems to have accustomed himself to not having an ongoing football career, but we don’t really know if there were things he would have wanted out of going to a bigger and better school other than the chance to continue playing. The tension between Abed and his father vanished early in the first season, and we’ve never really had a plot about the family’s financial needs and their business again. Annie is one of the only people where we actually see how difficult her life is outside of school, when Troy and Pierce visit her in her mediocre apartment in a bad part of town.

And so I sort of worry how the show’s going to handle a character who served a prison sentence. The incarceration rate for black men isn’t something comedic and wacky, like claiming your degree from a Colombian college was from Columbia University. If they ignore this new character’s background, then he risks being a stereotype. And if they explore it, I’m not really sure how the jokes are going to work. I have a lot of faith in Dan Harmon and his writers’ room, but this is an issue that’s worth taking some considerable care with.

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 intellectual property rights 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.

Rep. Ron Paul’s a libertarian, so it’s no surprise that he’s not fond of government funding for the arts. But true to his libertarian principles, he’s shown that he’s uncomfortable with government regulation of the arts more generally:

1997: Predictably, Paul was in the midst of some of the debates over the existence of National Endowment for the Arts after he returned to Congress in 1997. “It is clear that there is no place in the federal budget for the NEA, the NEH or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” he said after President Clinton asked for an increase in NEA and CPB funding in response to Congressional cuts the previous year. Later that year, he voted to disband the agency altogether.

2001: In a profile, Paul used the National Endowment of the Arts to illustrate his vision of the Constitution’s limits on government functions in an interview with Insight on the News: “If you say, ‘What we must do is cut back on the National Endowment for the Arts,’ instead of defending the constitutionally correct position that there should be no National Endowment for Arts, you have conceded. The Congress made a feeble intellectual attempt in 1995, but it failed because, all of a sudden, the constitutional principle spelled out clearly in the 10th Amendment was ignored. The 10th Amendment says: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’”

2004: Paul was the only Republican to vote against a bill that increased the ceiling on Federal Communications Commission indecency fines from $27,500 per incident for companies and $11,000 for individuals to $500,000, complaining “I’m convinced that the Congress has been a very poor steward of the First Amendment.”

2007: Paul may not believe that the federal government should fund the arts, but that doesn’t mean he dislikes them. He cosponsored a resolution that expressed the House’s support for music education as part of a balanced curriculum.

Support for arts education shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted one way or another, unless the candidate in question is Mike Huckabee, for whom it’s a top issue. And other than that simple resolution, Paul’s views on the arts are straightforwardly libertarian.

This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fourth season of Breaking Bad.

A quick note on this, and at least a few subsequent episodes of Breaking Bad: the show’s something I’ve been meaning to catch up with for a while, but in between a summer of Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter, I just haven’t had time. I’ll be making a concentrated effort to get right over the next few weeks, but please be patient with me as I work on this, and keep in mind that these recaps are going to be the observations of someone who’s read up, but is none the less a n00b. Also, new schedule: these will go up first thing on Monday, and the True Blood open threads will go up right after lunch.

Watching this first episode, it strikes me that one thing AMC’s made a hallmark across all of their major shows is silence. Whether it’s Don Draper letting smoke curl into the air, Detective Linden parsing a scene, or Rick Grimes walking a gas station, or tonight, Walter and Jesse watching Gus dress for a murder, AMC understands how incredibly uncomfortable an unbroken quiet is, especially when awful things hover on the other side of it.

I always love it when directors use horror movie tactics to communicate, like the scene in Heartburn when Meryl Streep, her hair half-teased, staggers out of the bathroom to confront Jack Nicholson about his infidelity, looking for all the world like the monster in the closet. So I loved all the details in tonight’s episode, the masks on Gale’s wall and the potato battery clock on his shelf, a tuber Frankenstein’s monster; the dark hallway Skylar stares down as she rattles the gate into Walt’s condo and the glass eye she finds in his pristine Ikea kitchen cabinets.
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