So, there’s a new study out that purports to find that conventionally attractive women are considered better role models than less attractive women when they’re in action roles. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to find out that was the case. But the study seems really wonky. There were just 122 people in it, which is not a particularly big sample size. And more importantly, the examples in the study seem to bias the outcomes pretty heavily. It’s not just that Angelina Jolie and Kathy Bates are totally physically different. It’s that Tomb Raider and Primary Colors aren’t really comparable. Jolie in Tomb Raider is a very straightforward, sexy action heroine:

Bates’ character in Primary Colors has spent a lot of time hospitalized as a result of her mental illness. In the scene where she brandishes a gun on a sketchy Arkansas lawyer, she explicitly uses the fact that everyone thinks she’s crazy to make her threat to shoot his genitals plausible. “I am a gay lesbian woman! I do not mythologize the male sexual organ!” she hollers at him. The violence in Tomb Raider is abstracted, necessary, presented as if it’s cool, whereas the threat of it in Primary Colors is visceral and ugly, not strictly necessary, presented with a combination of wry admiration and disapproval. There’s no way both movies would seem comparable even if Jolie played both roles.

I’d actually like to see a study like this that’s based in more viable comparisons. If we can find a way of presenting women kicking ass that helps expand audiences’ sense of what women can do, while still making for awesome action movies, it would be wonderful to be able to advocate for it. But I need better evidence than this.

President Obama’s been warning of dire consequences if Congress fails to meet a debt ceiling compromise. While calling your representative might push legislators in the right direction, we’d all be derelict in our duty if we didn’t start making personal preparations for the debt ceiling apocalypse that awaits us next week. Here’s a seven-part guide to preserving your financial future and your physical safety if the worst comes to pass:

As interest rates rise, avoid, at all costs, foreclosing on gypsies with adjustable-rate mortgages.

Hire Krysten Ritter to help you figure out how to get your credit card debt under control as quickly as is humanely possible before your APR goes up:

Keep a reserve of tuppence on hand to avoid getting crushed in bank runs — enough so you’ll feel financially secure in case of 401(k) fluctuations, but don’t withdraw so much that you’ll cripple the British tea industry:

As state budgets contract, public servants should steel themselves for the arrival of overenthusiastic department auditors:

If you’re in danger of losing your job, absolutely refuse to be terminated by anyone who is less handsome than George Clooney:

If all attempts at financial prudence are for nought, sign up for a chain gang (though run by someone other than Joe Arpaio). At least you’ll keep getting to go to the movies:

And if all fails, hole up in the Winchester:

After conservative commentators jumped the gun in assuming the heinous killings in Norway were committed by Islamic extremists, I went looking for something that would act as a literary palate cleanser, a reaffirmation that terrorism is a tactic that is freely, and tragically, available to people of all faiths, national origins, ethnicities, and political persuasions. So, of course, I picked up the copy of Bel Canto that’s been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years.

As it turns out, Bel Canto isn’t a terrific book about terrorism, because the terrorists in the novel are sort of incompetent, not particularly violent, and most importantly for the overall structure and argument of the novel, just as susceptible to the beauty of high and low art as the people they’ve captured. And that ability to be moved by opera, to fall under the sweet hypnosis of of a telenovela, is what enables captors and hostages to come together for a season in a sort of utopian society. There’s a magical realism about it — this isn’t finding a galleon stranded inland and covered in flowers or unusually long-lived gypsies, or anything. But in these fractured times, there is something miraculous about the idea that common knowledge of pop culture could save a life, as it does early in the hostage-taking:

The Catholic priests, sons of those murdering Spanish missionaries, loved to tell the people that the truth would set them free, and in this case, they were exactly correct. The General named Benjamin had cocked his gun and was prepared ot make an example by dispatching the Vice President into the next world, but the soap opera story stopped him. As much as he was sick to know that five months of planning for this one evening to kidnap the President and possibly overthrow the entire government were worthless and he was now saddled with two hundred and twenty-two hostages lying before him on the floor, he believed the Vice President’s story completely. Noe one could make it up. It was too petty and small-minded…But Maria, even in the jungle where televisions were rare, electricity sketchy, and reception nonexistent, people spoke of this Maria. Even Benjamin, who cared for nothing but the freedom of the oppressed, knew something of Maria. Her program came on in the afternoons from Monday to Friday, with a special episode on Tuesday nights which more or less summarized the week for those who had to work during the day. If Maria was to be freed, it was not surprising that it should happen on a Tuesday night.

I can’t actually decide if I think it’s more miraculous that the characters are united by low culture, which is not normally assumed to have transcendent, cosmic power, or that the power of opera, which is not the most accessible art form (and the book spends a lot of time meditating on both what it means to be able to communicate with everyone, and no one), could prove so universally appealing:

Too much time had been spent weeping on the sofa or staring out the window. Now there was music and an accompanist. Roxanne Coss had risked her voice on Gianna Schicchi and found that her voice was still there…no one could shoot her while they sang. By extension they were all safe, and so they pressed in close to the piano to listen…When she got the song exactly right she took it straight through to the end without a flutter of hesitation. it was impossible to say that her singing had improved, but there was something in her interpretation of the lines that had shifted almost imperceptibly. She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

Anyway, even if Bel Canto isn’t a realistic book about terrorism, it’s a beautiful, resonant book about culture and beauty. Even raving maniacs who kill children want to be able to claim certain transcendent artists as their own, no matter how they have to stretch to do it.

It’s fairly clear that the two big, competing Snow White projects that are under development have fairly different visions of the classic fairy tale. Tarsem Singh is directing Lily Collins in the title role as an update of the Disney version, but on visual acid:

While Kristen Stewart’s playing her as a warrior on a three-part journey “about being confronted with death,” of which Snow White and the Huntsman is apparently the first part:

I can get why vampires are big, a reckoning with the dangers and excitements of sex for the first generation of kids not to know a time before HIV, and I understand why angels, mostly in the form of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books and their attendant movie adaptations, would be the next big thing after that, a return to innocence, a sanctification. But I’m grappling with our return to fairy tales, which are back in a big way.

The competing Snow White projects suggest two different draws for that particular story: do you wake up gorgeous, to a handsome prince? Or do you wake up a warrior? Are you happy within the confines of your fate? Or do you rail against it? But then there’s the other half of the equation: how do you get to sleep in the first place? And who who or what wakes you up? Something like the modernized update of Sleeping Beauty that Emily Browning’s starring in gets very directly at the horror and fantasy of that kind of passivity:

I was crushingly disappointed by Red Riding Hood, which I’d thought had the opportunity to be a really searing look at arranged marriage, sexual violence and revenge, so I’m going to avoid getting overly excited about any of these projects before I actually see them. But I think io9 is right to push hard for the idea that if we’re walking back into the woods with the Brothers Grimm, that we should make movies that grapple with the terrors of the originals.

In recent years, we’ve spent a lot of time turning monsters of legend cute or sexy, which is a bit odd. It’s not as if disobedient children in a modern society are at much risk of running away into the woods, as if girls in most communities are endangering not just themselves or their property rights if they’re sexually active before they’re married. But that doesn’t mean that modernity eliminates monsters. And I’d love to see a fairy tale movie with an acute sense of what we fear most, whether it’s a new monster, or an old one.

“I’ve done a terrible thing. But I’ve done it for a good reason. I did it for us. That is college tuition for Walter Jr. And Holly, eighteen years down the road. And it’s health insurance for you and the kids. For Jr.’s physical therapy. His SAT tutor. It’s money for groceries, gas, for birthdays and graduation parties. Skyler, that money is for this roof over your head. The mortgage that you are not going to be able to afford on a part-time bookkeeper’s salary when I’m gone.” -Walter White

“New Zealand, that’s where they, uh, that’s where they made Lord of the Rings! I say we just move there, yo! I mean, you could do your art, right? Like, you could like paint the local castles and shit, and I can be a bush pilot!” -Jesse Pinkman

Pretty much as long as we’ve had television, we’ve used that medium to explore manichean struggles between good and evil. For much of television history, figuring out who’s on what side’s been relatively simple: cops and robbers, cops and rapists, cops and murderers. Perry Mason was a defense attorney, sure, but his clients almost always turned out not to have committed the crimes of which they were accused. If our moral art was about dividing the guilty from the innocent, that was a fairly easy project. The Wire basically preserved the distinction between criminals and the law, but suggested that there were people worth of sympathy on both sides of the divide. To a certain extent, Breaking Bad is the inverse of The Wire. Both criminals and the law are equally dislikable. And the key moral question of the show isn’t whether people commit crimes, or inflict vast damage on society. It’s about how clearly they see themselves, and what they’re doing.

I. Freaks

Where The Wire sketches a broad picture of the impact of the drug trade on society, the show doesn’t spend a lot of time with actual addicts. It’s a systematic show rather than an interior one. We see Bubbles on the nod, but not what it’s like to be on the nod. It’s characteristic of the interiority of Breaking Bad that we spend much more time with addicts, most important among them Jesse.
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-Are Nazis terrible movie villains?

-It’s not like I thought the Paradise Lost movie was going to be good, or anything, but this concept art looks uniquely unpromising.

-This is not a good week for video games moralism.

-Wener Herzog loves Comic Con.

-Snape says it gets better:

I cosign Matt’s eulogy for Borders, and for bookstores in general:

Where I grew up our local independent bookstore was a little place called Barnes & Noble that, obviously, grew and became one of the major national chains. So I never was quite on the chain-bashing kick. Then when I moved to DC, I was actually more in proximity to some Borders outlets, which were also cool. Consequently, it wound up touching me in a surprise way to wake up this morning to a Borders email saying “goodbye” to everyone who’d been on their spam list all those years. Like Dave Weigel, I credit browsing the magazine racks at the bookstores (“Already, I was into politics, but didn’t know much about the world outside Time and Newsweek. Here was a store with six magazine racks and unfamiliar offerings like The Nation and National Review and In These Times and Reason”) of yore for teaching me about the world. Here I perused issues of Foreign Affairs and Mother Jones and who knows whatever else. The world seems small when you’re young…Long live digital downloading and long live the library. People still need places to go to get away from parents, roommates, and the rest of it all, right?

One thing I’d add is that there’s something really wonderful about the social element of bookstores. My first summer in college, I held down a couple of jobs, one of which was working the register at the huge Barnes and Noble in Burlington, Massachusetts. My coworkers were a group of people, a number of whom held advanced degrees in literature, but some of my coolest interactions were with the customers.

One time, I checked out a couple who were buying easily $200 worth of books, including dozens of copies of the same science fiction magazine — it turns out the man had just published his first short story in that issue, one of which he autographed for me. It’s still at home in my childhood bedroom. The actual content of the story escapes me, but sharing his excitement was a gift, especially since my own first publications were still a couple of years in the future. On the day Lawrence v. Texas was decided, striking down sodomy laws across the country, I celebrated with a young man who was buying a copy of Out. We threw a huge party to celebrate the release (and sell lots of copies) of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and even though I knew, intellectually, that millions of people would be reading the book along with me the next day, there was something awesome about seeing all those shining, expectant faces gathered for the occasion, the idea that excitement surrounding the new book was so big that you had to be there, not just to get your copy as soon as possible, but to share it with other people. (Then, there was the dude shepherding a flock of teenage boys through the store so they could buy about a dozen identical Bibles. We didn’t have a lot to talk about.)

Social media means we all spend a lot of time signaling potential compatibility through the lists of the things that we like or don’t like. And it’s probably a more efficient process of figuring out who we’ll make a real initial connection with. But I kind of miss the days when we had less perfect information, and when it could feel really exciting to see someone buying or reading or browsing something you knew was just going to rock their world, and to risk a conversation with them on the basis of that. You can still do this on, say, public transit (though probably with a smaller chance of sketchiness if you’re a girl rather than a guy). But for me, bookstores will always be the places that introduced me to the idea that you can take a risk based on some slim public proof that you and another person share similar interior worlds.

I was watching Alien over the weekend with some friends, and one thing that struck me was the extent to which Sigourney Weaver’s allowed to cry, and freak out, and shake, and her having an emotional reaction to the fact that a giant alien is eating everyone she knows, and threatening her cat, and one of those friends turns out to be a semi-evil android is treated as if it’s in no way incongruous with her ability to absolutely kick ass.

We’re in this moment where there are a lot of action heroines, among them little girls, who execute extremely badass things, but with extreme calm and detachment. Hit Girl may take some deep breaths before she absolutely decimates a hallway full of mobsters, and she may cry when her father dies, but she appears to have very little emotional reaction to the things that are going on around her:

Similarly, the heroine of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Haywire reacts to Michael Fassbender’s (and other people’s) attempts to kill her — which I know at minimum would make me pretty sad, not to mention totally panicked — with fairly impressive aplomb:

I don’t know if Angelina Jolie’s the reason for this trend in female action stars who wreak enormous amounts of havoc while maintaining perfect composure, but she is certainly among the most effective practitioners of the form — in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, she only gets tearful when the fight is over:

I’ve been sort of skeptical of Colombiana, on the grounds that it’s yet another portrait of a traumatized killing machine, but I’m prepared to be a bit more enthusiastic if the movie uses the main character’s freakouts less as a juxtaposition with her efficiency than as an illustration of the cost of the violence that consumed her family, the tally she’s adding to now:

Of course, given that I don’t have a lot of experience in any of these circumstances, maybe the dichotomy in emotional reactions makes sense, and revenge killings are much less anxiety-inducing than being stalked by a psychosexual nightmare direbeast.

I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say that I think female killers in pop culture should bear a burden their male counterparts don’t, of anchoring us to the reality of what it would be like if the explosions and the blood were real. But Ripley and Alien are a reminder that sometimes, action sequences are more effective when they’re earned, when victory requires a lot of sweat and struggle, and sometimes, the only reward is your own continued life.

As I am an enormous geek, I cannot even begin to express how excited I am about Knights of Badassdom:

First, there’s the cast. I may be sore vexed with True Blood this season, but Ryan Kwanten is a funny dude who deserves to do more than play a slow Southern stud. I’ve always believed that someday, Jimmi Simpson’s going to break out and I’ll be able to say I told you all back in the day. I’m glad to see Peter Dinklage is getting to put his training as Tyrion Lannister to dual use. Ditto with Danny Pudi and Abed. Steve Zahn is just plain wonderful. Add in Sommer Glau and it’s pretty hard to believe this isn’t some dorky fan video that someone cut together.

But it’s not. Instead, it’s part of a growing canon of movies and television shows, from Big Fan to My Boys to The League to The Guild based on the idea that people form communities less around who they are, or how they worship, or where they work, but what they like. Ultimately, I think this will become fairly routine, and groups of characters who are united by common interests will end up being presented like they’re any other group of folks who hang out at Central Perk or wherever. But we’re still getting used to the idea that cosplay, or video games, or fantasy sports (sports fandom has always been the most accepted form of American fandom, so it’s kind of exempt) can be the basis for durable friendships and friend groups. Movies like this reflect the experiences of those of us who form friendships based on what we love — and translate those experiences for folks who are still getting used to the idea.