I’ll have longer thoughts on Breaking Bad when I finish the first three seasons. But when drug kingpin Tuco Salamanca shows up with his aging uncle, the first thing thought that came to mind was, “Huh, this reminds me a bit of Raising Hope.” One of the things I like best about that show, though it has a wacky initial premise (nice boy knocks up murderess headed for death row, raises the kid with his extended family) is that it’s a really touching look at what it’s like to have your relationship with your parents reversed by the advances of age and Alzheimer’s. Maw Maw’s very sharp and funny when she’s lucid, but she’s also often vulnerable, the second child in the household, and her condition forces the young people in her family to end their protracted avoidance of adulthood.

Similarly, it’s kind of funny that a wildly erratic drug kingpin would keep his fairly incapacitated uncle around — and if Tuco had lived, I would have loved to see Don Salamanca use the bell attached to his wheelchair to order up some retribution for the man who mocks him for knocking a plate over. But I actually think it’s not that unrealistic. In the past, the parents or older relatives of sitcom characters generally lived independently and popped in occasionally for wacky antics. But today, the combination of rising health care costs, people whose retirement savings aren’t recovering as fast as their retirements are approaching, and the impact of dementia as the population lives longer, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more shows with characters whose older parents and relatives live at home or nearby, and who require some kind of care or attention.

I don’t know if this means we’ll evolve away from sitcoms focused on hip young groups of friends in urban environments. But I do think that we might see more shows that are more multi-generational, and more interdependently multi-generational. I didn’t much like Tuco as a character (I’m torn between the fact that he seems like an incredible stereotype, and my sense that Breaking Bad is just cycling through storylines way too fast, especially given the show’s realistic timeline), but I would have liked to see that interaction as more than a one-off, especially giving that Don Salamanca still has pull. There are a lot of implications to longer life spans, be it need for care or slower turnover in family and business hierarchies, and they open up rich emotional storytelling territory.

It was a slow starter, but Neil Gaiman’s American Gods emerged as the clear winner in our book club election. Let’s read through the first four chapters for next Friday and kick off discussion then.

Because we had so many nominations in this round, what I’m going to do in future rounds is take these nominations, knock off any book that got less than 10 votes, and we’ll pick from what’s left.

Henry Farrell, in what I think is a totally fair critique of my Foreign Policy piece on international relations and A Song of Ice and Fire, points out what I think is a point that has implications for the series’ gender politics as well as its look at IR issues:

Marriages are the most potent instrument for creating alliances, even if they don’t always work as they should (the most recent book mentions a feud between two families that has gone on for centuries, despite numerous intermarriages which have mingled their blood. Numerous suitors believe that the way to control Daenerys’ dragons is through winning her hand.

But more subtly, intra-familial relationships have profound international consequences. Jealousies between brothers lead to the sundering of realms. Theon Greyjoy – one of the more unpleasant characters in the earlier books – becomes more sympathetic as we realize that his erratic nastiness is in part the result of his having been stranded between two families. Fostered and adopted as a hostage by the Starks after his father’s failed rebellion, he finds himself unable to find a place in his old family, but unable fully to become a member of his new family either. And none of this begins to touch on the political consequences of bastardry, of adultery (which, when committed by the queen, becomes high treason) &c&c. Martin doesn’t force this down our throats – it emerges only as necessary to the plot. But it really does speak to the differences between the mediaeval world and our own (he’s less successful by far at portraying non-Western societies – but that’s a whole different set of questions).

Independent of how Martin writes actual sex scenes, one thing he does very, very well is point out how forced marriages and the rights men have to sexual access to some women can lead to both emotional and physical degradation of women. Cersei Lannister is one of the most unsympathetic characters in the series, but Martin makes clear how poisoned she was by her marriage to Robert Baratheon, who threw it in her face that he was sleeping with other women and subjected her to repeated marital rape. Even if Sansa Stark thinks she wants to marry Joffrey Baratheon at one point, the marriage agreement between them subjects her to domestic abuse delivered by the Kingsguard and the perpetual threat that she’ll be raped once she loses her father’s protection. Roose Bolton’s decision to take Ramsay Bolton’s mother even though she’s already married because he thinks he has the right to have sex with her at least once leads to the birth of one of the most brutal characters in the series, who has violent and degrading sex with his wife against her will (of course, there’s the double cruelty of Jeyne Poole being married off in Arya Stark’s stead). Arranged marriage may be the “most potent instrument for creating alliances” in Martin’s universe, but every step of the way, he’s clear about the cost that women pay to ensure the stability of states.

There’s a lot of buzz about a new survey (of 2,000 people, conducted not by an entertainment firm but an insurance company that’s running a short movie competition) that purports to suggest that men and women can’t possibly have an amicable experience together at the movies because they value different things. Namely, the top 10 factors for each gender, as per the Telegraph:

Women

1) Happy ending
2) Sad/tear-jerker scene
3) Song and dance scene
4) Romantic comedy
5) Psychological thriller
6) Straight talking male/female partners
7) Musical
8) Animation
9) Tragedy
10) Disaster

Men

1) Car chase
2) Nude scene
3) Action sequence
4) Sex scene
5) Sci-fi/fantasy
6) Chase scene
7) Martial arts
8) Violent/gory scene
9) War
10) Interrogation

If I had detailed access to the data, I could probably pick it apart. But I don’t even think you have to do that to debunk the idea that these stated preferences mean you can’t make movies that men and women can both enjoy. Avatar, for example, has chase scenes, close-to-nude scenes, action sequences, implied sex scenes, sci-fi to to the max, war, AND a happy ending, tearjerker scenes, comedic elements in a romance, men and women who have pretty frank conversations, animation, tragedy, and disaster. Psychological thrillers often include many of the elements that are high on men’s lists. War movies are great vehicles for intense, tragic romances. Making multi-dimensional movies, and capturing multiple audiences at once, isn’t remotely as hard as this study, or Hollywood in general, makes it out.

I’ve enjoyed the spate of articles praising Hermione Granger as a total rockstar that have come out as the Harry Potter series have come to a close, though I think Sady Doyle goes a little overboard in chastising J.K. Rowling for writing under her initials and choosing to have Harry as a main character. Harry’s respect for Hermoine, and the fact that they manage to forge an extremely durable friendship without any awkward will-they-or-won’t-they questions is a really useful argument for the idea that boys should value girls and women for multi-dimensional reasons. Not every story has to be about girls to be feminist, and in fact, some kinds of feminist arguments might be better delivered by male protagonists.

But more to the point, I think Doyle misses the point of Rowling’s series. Both the Harry Potter series and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books are about what happen when you use young people as mascots and as instruments for larger causes. The reason Harry Potter is the main character in the series isn’t that he’s awesome — to the contrary, he’s a fairly average kid, and Snape’s assessment of his overall abilities as a wizard is probably correct. The idea that he’s extraordinary — and really, that extraordinary things can happen in the cause of righteousness — inspires other people to rise to and above their potential. Harry provides a motivating impulse for the Order of the Phoenix, and for Dumbledore’s Army. The most interesting moment in the entire series is when he’s presented as dead to the people who have been fighting for him — and they keep fighting, in particular Neville Longbottom, who exists as an illustration of the arbitrariness of Harry’s prestige, and who rises to the occasion, killing the hell out of Nagini even when he’s been set on fire. Ron dashes down to the Chamber of Secrets and just pretends he knows Parseltongue, and it works: again, Harry’s not magically special, but the special things he does inspire people to try crazy and unusual things. Hermione Granger might have been the smartest witch of her age even if Harry Potter had never come to Hogwarts, but Harry and Ron encourage he to become something more than an academic know-it all with rigid behavioral rules. All the characters need each other. It’s not a matter of Rowling having chosen the wrong main character, it’s understanding how that character functions.

If we understand Harry as a mascot whose function is ultimately to surrender, it’s interesting to consider The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen in the same terms. Katniss, who is a totally badass hunter, is probably more talented by the standards of her society than Harry Potter is in his. But the elevation of her as a mascot for rebellion against the leadership of Panem actually illustrates the weaknesses of the movement that elevates her. Despite her talents, Katniss is unsociable, and basically an unstable person. The leadership of District 13 never does a particularly good job of getting her on board with their specific program: they mostly just aim her and hope things come out okay. She’s good at being a general motivator, but at the end of the day, Katniss doesn’t fall in line when the movement really needs her to, and she ends up being cut out of future conversations about reform.

In the end, both of these stories are about what happens when political movements choose pretty vulnerable figureheads. It turns out that surrounding that figurehead with a strong educational system like Hogwarts and a mentor like Albus Dumbledore is a safer bet than forcing kids to work for a living and giving them a drunken veteran of a kill-or-be-killed contest. The anti-Voldemort movement has a more limited task — it’s easier to keep someone from rising to power than to topple and entrenched government — but they also do a much better job of organizing for it over the long term than the District 13 folks, who are isolated from most of Panem, hindering long-term insurrection planning, and who end up choosing Katniss kind of on the fly. Movement-building’s hard work. And in both of these franchises, but especially with the Hunger Games books, I’m actually more interested in the people who plan the grand architecture of insurrections rather than those who are the public faces of them.

-Felicia Day, on when Hollywood misses how society is changing.

-Deepak Chopra is going to design a video game.

-Are you a woman? Do you want to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Here’s how!

-Repeating Chinese history on film.

-The emotional inverse of a “Lazy Saturday”:

It’s very good news that the Affordable Care Act might eliminate copays for birth control—as Matt singles out, even the relatively small cost of those copays can be an obstacle to use. But I think making contraception cheap and readily available is only one part of the use equation. And one thing that would be incredibly useful is if pop culture showed more people actually using contraceptives.

I really like Love & Basketball for many reasons, including that it ends up being a story about a man who supports his more successful wife’s career, but the thing that’s stuck with me most is the fact that when the main characters, Monica and Quincy, have sex for the first time, the movie doesn’t cut away during foreplay, but shows Quincy getting a condom out of his dresser drawer and putting it on (SF my W, but your mileage may vary):

Sex and the City, which is theoretically super-frank about sex, shows condoms in Carrie’s purse and stored by Steve in Brady’s diaper bag, but I don’t remember a sex scene that actually includes a man putting one on. There’s one episode where a potential partner wants Samantha to have an HIV test before he’ll sleep with her, and of course Miranda and Steve don’t use protection when they have the sexual encounter that results in their son. But for characters who have as much as sex as they do, contraception and condoms are a surprisingly small part of the conversation.

Judd Apatow’s movies make contraception seem kind of bizarrely complex, whether it’s Ben, who’s too drunk to get a condom on in Knocked Up (and it makes no sense that Alison isn’t on oral contraception), or Andy, who finds condoms totally mysterious in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. It’s a confusion that sort of emphasizes the man-child nature of the characters, but that none the less doesn’t read as particularly true.

It goes without saying that most movie sex scenes aren’t particularly realistic period, nor are they particularly complete. But it would be pretty easy to incorporate that step into movies, or to have characters ask if someone’s on the pill when they sleep together for the first time. And even if stories aren’t romantic comedies or dramas, to include the fairly routine popping your pill before you brush your teeth or before dinner in the infinite montages of characters getting ready in the morning. Background is important here, and safe sex is both about the heat of the moment and about routine.

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.

Now that we’ve run through the Republicans, it’s time to look at how one last candidate approaches arts policy: the incumbent President Barack Obama. Obama didn’t take on arts issues much during his tenure in the Illinois state Senate, but as a candidate and as president, he’s pursued a fairly wide-ranging arts policy that’s met with mixed success because of the pressures of the recession. I’m not including a discussion of internal changes by the National Endowment for the Arts here, though I’m a fan of the Our Town program, because I want to focus on the things that Obama’s made significant priorities:

2008: In his presidential campaign platform, Obama supported the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would have let artists deduct the full market value of works they donated to charity on their taxes, rather than just deducting the cost of the materials that went into the work. He also committed to expanding cultural diplomacy through public-private partnerships and to make it easier for foreign artists to get visas to come to the U.S.; to increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; and to add block grant funding that would support arts education through the Education Department (he cited the Mozart effect in stump speeches). At the time, this was considered one of the more comprehensive platforms a candidate had ever offered on the arts. The question is, how well did he live up to it?

2009: The stimulus bill Obama worked out with Congress included $50 million in arts funding, including $20 million in funding that went directly to state governments. The National Endowment for the Arts was supposed to use the funding specifically to bolster arts non-profits that saw their budgets shrink in the recession. In the normal budget process, the NEA got its highest budget in 16 years, $167.5 million, and the Education Department got $38.166 million for its Arts in Education program.

When Obama adjusted restrictions on travel to and from Cuba, he made it easier for cultural programs to take Americans to Cuba and for Cuban artists to make it to the United States.

But the administration’s cultural efforts became a minor political kerfuffle when the NEA’s Yosi Sergant encouraged artists to work with the Corporation for Public Service on projects that would highlight the administration’s public service efforts. Sergant eventually left the NEA.

2010: Obama made good on his cultural diplomacy promises in a number of ways, allocating $1 million to help visual artists create public art works in 15 countries as pat of a new smART Power program; increasing the State Department’s cultural diplomacy budget 40 percent in 2010 to $11.75 million; sending Stanford professor Clayborne Carson to Israel to put on a production based on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writing.

At the same time, he proposed consolidating grants programs for education, leaving some advocates worried that arts programs would have to compete against science and literacy programs for funds. And the administration proposed cutting NEA funding by $6 million in is fiscal 2011 budget, both moves that drew criticism from arts advocates.

This year, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel presented Obama and Congress with the first national strategy on intellectual property law and copyright violation, which includes improved interagency cooperation, targeting of websites that distribute pirated material, and better economic analysis of the impact of intellectual property law and violations on American firms. That same year, at the Export-Import Bank, Obama gave a speech in which he promised vigorous IP protection: “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people…It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.”

2011: An Obama-commissioned study argued that creative classwork has an “unambiguous place in the curriculum,” though it acknowledged that there needs to be more research to quantify the impact of arts education on achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s made the case for keeping arts education even in a recession throughout his tenure in the administration.

And on the copyright front, the Obama administration helped broker the deal that got Internet Service Providers to start providing warnings to users who are caught downloading content illegally.

It’s clear the president and his wife enjoy the arts, and they’ve hosted lots of cultural events at the White House — though his stance on copyright allies him more with content producers than with consumers. Obama has called for tax reform, and it would be interesting to see, if comprehensive efforts happen, if he includes artists’ tax credits, the one item in his 2008 platform that he hasn’t really addressed while in office. Whoever the Republican candidate is in 2012 is, they may be able to rally support by attacking the existence of the NEA (it’s dubious any of them would break with him on IP issues), but it remains to be seen if any of them will match Obama for a sense that arts policy isn’t just a matter of funding.

I really prefer reasoned argument and wit to getting shouty about things, but the news that, after the sacrilege that is a Jim Carrey-starring Mr. Popper’s Penguins, I cannot restrain myself about the news that Ben Stiller is going to direct himself in a remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. STOP IT. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE? WHY ARE THE SOUREST, MOST CRABBED ACTORS OF THEIR GENERATION PUTTING THEIR HANDS ALL OVER THE THINGS THAT I LOVE?

James Thurber’s original short story is really wonderfully dark, and might actually be the basis for a terrific, unsettling recession movie. The main character is henpecked to death, emasculated by cabbies and cops alike, and gets through a day by imagining himself as more competent and powerful than he actually is. And at the end, it turns out that instead of using his fantasies as the basis to motivate himself to improve his life, Mitty instead uses his fantasies to accomodate himself to the unhappiness of his existence, envisioning himself bravely facing a firing squad. Of course, in the Danny Kaye movie adaptation, Mitty’s ends up having real-life adventures that rebuild his confidence and help him be assertive.

And I guarantee a Ben Stiller movie will have the same message. Stiller’s characters generally get away with treating other people badly, often for irrational reasons, and still get rewarded at the end of the movie. His Mitty interpretation seems likely to miss all the wistfulness of the original, and to pair Mitty’s fantasies with a strong sense of entitlement. In the hands of an actor with greater range, this gap between fantasy and reality could be a powerful reflection of our disappointed aspirations — and the gap between our pop culture and our reality.