I liked this Racialicious piece on possible black models for Manic Pixie Dream Girls — there is something weird about the whiteness of that particular archetype, and the whiteness of the archetypal men who desire her. But I think it’s actually overly optimistic to assume that what makes a woman a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is actually her own qualities. I don’t know that a character is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl because she wears a certain kind of clothes, be they thrift-store duds and kinte cloth or tea dresses, that she’s good at idiosyncratic activities, like playing acoustic guitar or running turntables, or that she will hook you up with certain activities, be it backstage parties or playing house at Ikea. I’m not even sure that this is quite it: “If the notion is that Zooey Deschanel is an unreal amalgam of white male fantasies, female rappers like Nicki Minaj may offer that for Black males.” After all, the point isn’t really that Zooey Deschanel is a supermodel sex kitten — she’s an anime character, a pliable blank with eyes as big as movie screens, perfect for a certain kind of male character to project all sorts of ideas and emotions across. Why Manic Pixie Dream Girls like what they like, or self-present the way they present, or are the way they are, is never interesting to the movies or television shows that they’re in.

I’m all for the idea that we need more diverse images of black people, and of black couples, on our screens. The problem with Tyler Perry is not that he tells the same story over and over again — lots of stories told by white writers and directors, with white stars, are hugely derivative. But it matters a lot less if 90 percent of those movies with white casts and white writers and white directors and white producers are derivative when hundreds of those movies come out every year. It might be better if all of those movies were original and fascinating, but even if you get 20 fairly original, thought-provoking movies every year, that’s enough to keep most moviegoers fairly occupied, and a reasonable number of white actors in interesting work. But when Medicine for Melancholy, or Love Jones, is a once-every-couple-of-years event, you don’t get a chance to build and explore new archetypes across multiple works in the same way the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has come together in a relatively short amount of time. Instead, you’ve got the same manichean old struggles about class and righteousness. Which is to to say that how race is lived across class lines, or the role of the church, aren’t important to folks, but they’re not the only things that are important to all folks.

In any case, if we’re going to get more nerds of color, more quirky non-white people, on our screens, we should shoot for archetypes that actually focus on what it means to like different things than your peer group, or to conceive of beauty differently, or to mature before, or after, the people around you, rather than to turn those differences and uniquenesses as totems on someone else’s spirit quest. More Oscar Waos and fewer Zooey Deschanels.

On Mondays, progressive leaders from all parts of the movement, from the blogosphere to the Hill, take a break out of their schedules to tell us what they’re watching, reading, and listening to. Suggestions or requests? Email AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com.

As AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer, Liz Shuler’s the second-highest ranking person in the American labor movement — and she’s just 40. She helped lead the coalition that blocked an Enron-lead push to deregulate the electricity industry in 1997, trained election observers during the 2000 presidential election recount, and was elected secretary-treasurer in 2009. Last week, Shuler took lessons in assertiveness away from Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants, saw analogies to state-level fights over collective bargaining in a performance of Wicked at the Kennedy Center, and considered the plight of freelance artists, most of whom don’t have benefits, as she met with members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Monday, July 18

I started my week by finding advice from a somewhat unlikely source: Tina Fey. Little did I know that when I was looking for some “escape” reading on my Monday flight to Albany, New York, I would end up finding some truly insightful guidance from a woman who made it in the cut-throat business of stand-up comedy.

I laughed all the way through the first chapter of Bossypants. And as I read through Ms. Fey’s early years, and how she got her start in Chicago with Second City, I stumbled upon what was a rather profound insight for me: The rules of improv can help you in life. She talks about the importance of “respecting what your partner has created, and to start from an open-minded place;” saying “yes, and…” so no one is afraid to contribute; and sharing in the responsibility to find solutions by “making statements instead of just asking questions,” especially for women.

Sticky situation in the workplace? Draw on the rules of improv to lighten the tension. Forget your membership card at the gym? Don’t hesitate at the front desk — make a proactive, and perhaps offbeat statement, and move on to the kickboxing! Co-worker making some risky suggestions for the annual conference? Say, “yes, and… let’s talk about how that will double attendance,” and stay in that open-minded place (at least until you get burned). Great perspective to start the week.
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Captain America: The First Avenger is a totally delightful facsimile of a ’40s movie, the kind of thing where canvas truck coverings are thumped vigorously and bad guys are chucked out the back; where plucky kids tossed in the river urge the hero to focus on the villain rather than on fishing them out because they can swim just fine; where wartime romances are no less tragic just because one lover’s frozen in the Antarctic while the other succumbs to the ravages of time, rather than someone dying on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima. The most important thing about it, though, is that it demonstrates that there’s an actual narrative plan behind what A.O. Scott memorably described as Marvel’s Ponzi scheme with the multiple movies leading up to The Avengers. Whether it’s Tony Stark’s father hanging around with Captain America’s crew, womanizing (a running joke about fondue is one of the funniest recreations of forties humor) and tinkering; the appearance of the Cosmic Cube in Norway, and then in the Red Skull’s arsenal; or continuing to see Nick Fury wrangling a set of very talented men in very idiosyncratic circumstances, I can finally see how the personality clashes and the larger narrative are going to be fun (worth it remains to be seen) when they come together in a single movie.

But what really interests me most about Captain America: The First Avenger, and Marvel’s project in The Avengers more generally is how sharp the contrast between that franchise’s faith in the annealing power of America to bind together different people and to make them individually and collectively better, and the X-Men movies’ increasing skepticism about how far America’s stated commitment to diversity actually accommodates difference. It’s not as if these divergent storylines are a shock, or anything — Captain America is a concentrated expression of American patriotism (one that’s been usefully complicated by writers like Robert Morales) where the X-Men are the Swiss Army Knife of oppression metaphors. But it’s still striking to see these stories unfold next to each other, as they are this summer.

One of the things that struck me most about Captain America: The First Avenger was the movie’s insistence on the military as a meritocracy that transforms the people who join it for the better. When Bucky and Cap reunite after the former 90-pound weakling rescues his friend from a Hydra base, Bucky, reckoning with Cap’s transformation asks, “What happened to you?” “I joined the army,” Cap tells him. In the middle of that same rescue, when a white POW comes face-to-face with an Asian-American one and asks “What, we taking everyone?” the guy gives him a spectacular side-eye, thumbs his dog tags out from under his shirt, and tells his fellow prisoner, “I’m from Fresno, ace,” after which he’s fully accepted as a member of the team, and nobody thinks to voice any anti-Japanese sentiments. The movie even portrays Captain America’s division, the 107th, as an integrated one (Derek Luke, once again underused: can we please find something wonderful for him to do? Please?), even though General Eisenhower didn’t voluntarily let black troops serve alongside white ones until the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, and the military wasn’t formally desegregated until President Truman’s executive order in 1948. What really drives the Red Skull nuts is the idea that it’s not that Captain America is great, but the institutions that made him and the things he stands for. “Arrogance may not be a uniquely American trait, but I must say, you do it better than anyone,” he says, demanding, “What makes you so special?” expecting an answer he can laugh at or bat away. “Nothing, I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” Rogers tells him, provoking an attack. And when Steve Rogers wakes up in an altered America 70 years later, a governmental institution’s there for him again, Nick Fury showing some mercy and sensitivity as he tries to acclimate the latest member of his team to a drastically changed world.
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From the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the right-winger who murdered 76 people in Norway on Friday:

It is obvious that Nordic entertainment super-stars like Scarlett Johansson (60-70% Nordic purity), Gwyneth Paltrow (70-80%)Pamela Anderson (90-95%), Paris Hilton (70-80%), Taylor Swift (80- 90%) would have never been where they are today hadn’t it been for their distinct Nordic physical characteristics. They would have never, in a million years, managed to reach their current status of fame had they belonged to another ethnic group. Same can be said about several other superstars with Nordic physical features such as individuals from Marilyn Monroe to Megan Fox. So why not embrace their Nordic gift by contributing to preserve Nordic culture instead of throwing it away and robbing their children of the same opportunities they once received?

Scarlett Johansson has a Jewish mother. Megan Fox is Irish, French, and Native American. Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton have what enduring recognition they have less because they’re avatars of Nordic purity than because they made sex tapes and were canny enough to profit from them on their release rather than slinking away to die of shame. Marilyn Monroe was similarly willing to take her clothes off — and when she kept them on, could actually be fairly funny, a trait which has no distinguishable correlation with Scandanavian ancestry. Ditto with curviness — a quality that is purchasable as much as it is genetic — a propensity to get naked, or the ability to write universally appealing songs about being a teenager.

Breivik is a monster who deserves every moment of the time he’ll do, and more. But even if he’d never gone out and killed a bunch of innocent people, I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to sort your life into these sorts of categories, trying to twist the facts to allow yourself to like things that don’t fit into your worldview. It must be a constant struggle to be this virulent a racist, to perpetually exercise this kind of self-delusion.

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

Once upon a time, there was a television show that, unlike similar stories in the genre that were being told at the same time, used vampirism as an effective metaphor for both the intense pleasure and the terror of sex. The show could be insecure sometimes, because it was broadcast on a network with a lot of critically acclaimed programs that took on issues like structural corruption in government, and the societal cost of the drug trade and the war on drugs, and what it’s like to go to therapy when you’re a New Jersey mafia boss. So sometimes the show overcompensated, going a little heavy-handed on the metaphors, but its intentions were good, and its sex scenes were sexy, and the show plugged along until it was a genuine hit. And then, as so often happens when common people rise to positions of great power, True Blood went kind of nuts.

I was struck last night by how far the show has strayed from the parts of its metaphor that were convincing and powerful when Portia showed up in Bill’s office to try to convince him to keep seeing her, even after the nasty little genealogical surprise they got in the last episode. “Forty-two states have repealed their anti-incest laws, even in case of brother and sister. They have found no credible reason to ban sex between two consenting results,” she tells him. “There are married cousins in Bon Temps with more common DNA than you and me.” Obviously, the 42 states statistic isn’t remotely true, and while I don’t care much about realism in a fantasy show, if that’s one of the things Alan Ball thinks belongs in his alternate universe, it seems to me to reflect some fairly incoherent thinking about the way the world actually works. The emergence of vampires may give people in the world of True Blood license to explore the darker side of their own desires, and spurs others to lock those desires down, but vampire mainstreaming works to the extent that it does because vampires suggest to humans that they can live within existing law. The idea that there’d be a widespread relaxation of incest laws doesn’t really make sense by the show’s internal logic. And no matter how fast Bill shoots down Portia’s proposal, it’s a weird thing for the show to get behind, even for a minute, that plays into some rightwing logic about gay relationships and cheapens some of the work the show’s done in other areas.

Similarly, True Blood appears to be going in the least substantive possible direction when it comes to the ordeal that Jason just went through in Hotshot. “As much as I love it, every bad thing that’s ever happened to me is because of sex,” Jason explains his deep revelation to Hoyt. “Maybe God’s punished me for having too much sex.” And even that lesson sticks only as long as it takes for Jessica, whose blood helped Jason recover from the mauling the panthers gave him, to show up in Jason’s dreams wearing one of Hoyt’s shirts and an extremely covetable bra and panty set.

There are good little bits and pieces of things in this episode, whether it’s an increasingly angry (and rotting) Pam explaining, “I can put up with a lot, but you fuck with my face, it’s time to die,” or Tara’s mother telling Arlene, as she attempts to exorcise Arlene’s baby “You know, I was possessed by a demon, so I have firsthand knowledge.” But these asides work precisely because they’re matter-of-fact about the difference of this universe, rather than hollering at us about how strange things are all the time. You can tell more interesting stories about the limits of human tolerance and human social orders when you’re expanding what people have to accept a step at a time, then forcing them to accept something new again. When everything, from redneck panthers to vampire incest, is possible at once, and you’re reckoning with them without pause, there isn’t room to tell good discrete stories about every element in the mix.

-Why the economics of syndication mean we’ll get a fourth season of Community. (Also: Omar comin’.)

-Speaking of Omar, Renaldo is going to be Bosley to the new Charlie’s Angels team.

-The inevitable Chilean miner movie is happening.

-Nikki Finke on addiction and the entertainment industry.

-M.I.A.’s got a song out for Amy Winehouse, and other artists who died at 27:

I almost wonder if Ladytron’s “17″ gets to the point better, though:

Actually, with couplets that tack on an extra syllable past the rhyme, like “I’m the grandson of a man nothing less than legendary / That’s a lot of pressure so I Berry Gordy,” he’s kind of got a Parks and Recreation Jean-Ralphio thing going on, right?

In any case, laying down standard hip-hop braggadocio like, “I am very Motown / Bitch, I’mma get that crown / While I’m at it I might reinvent sound,” is always sort of dangerous when you’re 15, and doubly so when your grandfather is Bob Dylan. Jakob Dylan, at least, always seemed to know that he was middling and to be comfortable with that, though “It’s where I’m from that lets them think I’m a whore / I’m an educated virgin” is a pretty great winsome line that acknowledges his background:

But seriously, couldn’t one of these dudes be, like, a pioneering heart surgeon or NASA astronaunt or something? I feel like it would make family holidays a lot less awkward if there were fewer, “Grandpa, what did you think of my mixtape” conversations.

This post contains spoilers through the July 24 episode of Breaking Bad.

I’m almost through the preceding three seasons of Breaking Bad and will have a big essay on the show up tomorrow, so this week’s recap should be more informed than last week’s, and we’ll be all in the same place going forward.

Albuquerque’s always been a character on Breaking Bad, but that doesn’t mean the show has always been a Western. This week, however, Walt meets with an illegal gun salesman whose cadence is a product of another, unsettled age. The man warns him, of the first gun he straps on, “Any lawman worth his salt’s going to spot that. I assume that’s a dealbreaker?…This is the West, boss. New Mexico’s not a retreat jurisdiction…You do have a right to defend yourself. Some call it a moral right, and I do include myself within that class.” And with that as the starting premise, everyone falls into their roles. Skylar’s the speculator taking advantage of a small business owner. Jesse is the hooker with a heart of gold, filling his house with what looks like every woman who’s ever posed for Suicide Girls. The brim of Walt’s pork pie hat may not be as broad as that of a Stetson, but he’s wearing a black hat none the less. And by the time Mike leaves Walt on the floor of a saloon, it’s hard not to wonder if he deserves all the implications that go with it.

In a way, though last night’s episode didn’t bring anyone to the brink of life and death, it featured lots of smaller disappointments that illustrate the kinds of miscalculations they’re prone to. Skylar, dolled up in heels and suit, was prepared to make a killer deal, humiliating Walt’s former boss at the car wash, only to find out that just as she hasn’t liked her husband very much for a while, other people are upset with him, too, for things other than selling prodigious quantities of meth. Walt miscalculates, assuming that Mike is as angry at Gus as he is, and misunderstanding that like Gus, Mike is a pro. Gus isn’t going to emerge from the shadows to get shot just because it would emotionally satisfy Walter, and however it might satisfy Mike, he’s not going to let that happen. It’s not clear what Jesse hoped to accomplish by interrupting Skinny Pete and Badger’s respective rehabilitations, but from the way he folds into his high-performance speakers at the end of the episode, he’s hoping for an intersection between metaphorical and literal searches for oblivion. “Use [the money he's given her] to get you and Brock out of that shithole neighborhood,” he tells Andrea as his friends destroy his house with a raging party. “Or spend it on glass, and I’d have no way of stopping you. But I gotta believe you won’t do that.” He trusts his former lover, a former addict, more than he trusts himself.

And then there’s Marie, who tries to get Hank to sleep, only to have him snap at her: “The last I counted, there were four bedrooms in this house,” who cheers him on during his physical therapy, only to have him yell at her to get out of his room. Hank’s more able to connect with the minerals he’s collecting than the woman who is trying to will him to live, and there’s something very Western about that kind of attachment, about the increasingly mineral look of Walt’s face, with its carved valleys, its immobility. I’m curious what folks think of this arc, and how it contrasts with Skylar and Walt. To an extent, I think there’s an argument here that it’s not necessarily Walt’s meth production that made him so impossible for Skylar to deal with during his initial treatment. Maybe it’s just that wounded men are dangerous to anyone who gets too close.