I was kind of hard on GQ earlier in the summer, so I want to give credit where credit is due and encourage everyone to read the great Louis C.K. profile they have in this issue. It’s not so much that the piece is about C.K. — in fact, I wish there was more information about his divorce, and the failure of his friendship with Marc Maron, or what he’s like as a father other than extremely attentive. But it is a very good look at what makes comedy work, particularly the kind of comedy that C.K. excels at, that makes people uncomfortable, and occasionally crosses way over the line (usually by failing to be funny):

It’s dumb to speculate on why anyone’s relationship falls apart—what seem like the obvious factors aren’t always the truest ones—but you wonder what it must have been like to be married to a guy who makes his living doing jokes about his wife’s disdain at giving him a hand job or his daughter’s vaginal rashes or, more broadly, to someone who’s just so compulsively driven to talk about our darkest impulses. “It’s a positive thing to talk about terrible things and make people laugh about them,” he said during one of our conversations. “The problem is, the more famous you get, the more people see you who didn’t choose to. And that’s when you start pissing people off.” This led to a discussion about the one joke that he worried was too much—a bit about how, if we were all “somehow okay with kid-fucking,” pedophiles wouldn’t kill kids after they raped them. “It’s a hard thing to hear,” he said. “But it’s true. If we were less hating of kid-fucking, less kids would die. That’s true. I don’t know what to do with that information. But it’s true.”

There’s not even a joke there, I don’t think. And yet I found myself laughing—not so much at the shock of it as the way he was taking the “Aren’t humans dopes?” aspect of so many comic bits and applying it to the grimmest act imaginable. There’s a deep anti–moral-hypocrisy vein running through C.K.’s work, which is organized as much as anything around the idea that to not speak openly about our capacity for ugliness is to further enable it. This, I think, is part of what other comics are talking about when they describe him as being “brave” and “fearless” onstage. Or it’s this combined with what we know about his life, that he has two young daughters, and—when he’s not traveling for a gig or shooting his show or going on the radio, as he did a few months back, to ask Donald Rumsfeld over the phone if he was a lizard who eats Mexican babies—he’s making the girls breakfast and taking them to school and otherwise operating in full domestic-dad mode. It’s something about the completely permeable membrane between those two versions of himself, the loving dad and the guy whose life appears to be an ongoing piece of performance art devoted to expressing every twisted thought that surfaces in his brain, that makes him either the most honest comedian in the world or kind of a disturbing freak. (As one comic who’s worked with C.K. said to me, “I like Louis. And I appreciate his brilliance. But the idea that he’s expressing thoughts that we all think doesn’t seem totally right to me. I don’t actually think those things.”)

It’s true, I don’t think that every twisted thing that comedians come up with is something that secretly, a lot of people are thinking. But it’s also partial self-protection to convince ourselves that our neighbors are sane and decent people who don’t think crazy nonsense because we live in a functioning society, if they don’t think those things, surely we wouldn’t think those things. People really love humor that acknowledges a little bit of our secret badnesses and excuses them, like the number “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” from the musical Avenue Q, which is based on the idea that we can think bad things about people of other races without contributing to institutionalized racism. Louis trafficks in something darker and more pointed. And I think even if he gets uncomfortable, or inappropriate, or unfunny — as I think much of his Sarah Palin stuff was — C.K., unlike a lot of comedians, does enough good with that darkness to excuse his missteps.

I have some ambivalence about watching privileged white kids play at being gang members, and Best Coast is way to tween for me, but I love me some Chloe Moretz who is (along with Abigail Breslin) my favorite young teenage actress working today, so I kind of dig this video Drew Barrymore directed for “Our Deal”:

There’s something nice about the acknowledgment that girls can commit physical as well as emotional violence, too, that they’re actors, not just acted upon. Moretz has carved out a real little niche in Kick-Ass and Let Me In as an actress who can do very bad things while remaining sympathetic. I’ll be curious to see if she develops into that rarest of all female action stars, as commenters suggested in our conversation last week, one who can not only dish it out but take it.

I’m taking a little time this week to look at some of the earliest pop culture examinations of the Internet. Yesterday, Erica Newland wrote about the extreme prescience of Ghostwriter. Up today: Hackers.

Hackers, which came out in 1995, is not exactly what you’d call a good movie. It’s got ridiculous animations that are meant to make the Internet seem comprehensible to the legions of Americans who were beginning to sign up for web access as the Internet went commercial. Jonny Lee Miller seems so gummed up by the complexities of pulling off an American accent that when Angelina Jolie asks his character, early in the film, “Do you speak English?” the correct answer is really “No, but he’s trying very hard.” The hacker glam is ridiculous in the extreme. But I got obsessed with the movie in high school, Hackers was the perfect aspirational movie for angry smart kids everywhere who spent a lot of time on the Internet, whether they were hacking corporations or spending lots of time talking to teenagers from other states who participated in the same dorkily intellectual after-school activities that they did. And even though I no longer sign into chat programs under my deeply embarrassing first handle, Hackers had some real sense of where the Internet was going — and where we were going with it.

PCWorld gives Hackers credit for having at least some sense of hacker canon:”Before the core crew of hackers allows Jonny Lee Miller’s Dade to enter their group, they challenge him to identify a series of technical manuals considered essential reading among real hackers in the early 1980s. Dade aces the test, which culminates with the Ugly Red Book That Won’t Fit on a Shelf.” But Hackers gets its longevity less from specific demonstrations of technical foresight—the hardware the characters drool over is laughably antiquated today — and more from its portrayal of what would become the dominant attitudes about the Internet and the way we live our lives on it.
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One of the arguments that came up frequently in our conversations about unionization of the video game industry (about which more to come as I do some reporting this week) is that it would be impossible to organize the industry because too many people want jobs developing video games, and so folks who currently have those jobs wouldn’t risk them to stand up to management and organize. The invaluable Zack Stentz and others pointed out that a lot of people want to work in movies and television, and that hasn’t prevented those industries from staying organized, though I think it’s an interesting and related question about whether it would be possible to organize those industries today, and whether the people who work in them would think of themselves as the kind of people who belong to unions if the actors’ and writers’ guilds weren’t already so established.

With all of that in mind, I think it’s useful to consider the example of the Onion News Network, whose writers were just organized by the Writers Guild of America, East, and who have already negotiated their first collective bargaining agreement. This is exactly the kind of position that you’d think would be hard to organize — a job that’s creative, highly desirable, in a contracting industry (to be fair, the fake news industry seems to be doing better than the real news industry), and relies on talent rather than on specialized skills that would limit the applicant pool some. But it didn’t prove impossible to organize it. The video game industry is bigger and has much more, financially, at stake if its employees were to unionize, and I don’t want to minimize the idea that it would be difficult. But I don’t know that it would be impossible, if people wanted it. And these are the kinds of events that should give advocates of better treatment of video game developers hope and maybe some confidence.

As Robert Bork joins Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as an adviser on judicial issues, it’s worth a reminder where he stands on the First Amendment and art. Namely, that he doesn’t think the former protects the latter: “Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote in the Indiana Law Journal in 1971. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

This is silly, of course, and invites all kinds of brightline questions: art is a means of speech, but the fact that speech is screened in a movie theater, or on a television, or written in a book sold in the fiction or literature section, or webcast, doesn’t mean that it inherently cannot be political. Under Bork’s definition, would there be a certain threshold art would have to meet to be considered political? Would you have to devote a certain percentage of song lyrics to political expression, or minutes of a television show to gain protection for it? Does art have to be electoral, or in support of a particular piece of legislation or regulation, to count as political and protected?

The news this week that The Daily Show was censored Britain because it’s in contravention of U.K. law to air parliamentary footage if your intention is to use it for the purposes of “light entertainment (including satire) or drama programmes” is a useful illustration of that kind of brightline challenge (and a worthwhile reminder that for all that the phone hacking scandal is terrible, British expression laws are really restrictive). Would general mockery of Parliament be protected? Or of Congress? Our political debates, which in addition to featuring funny-looking procedure, are eminently mockable for the ridiculous things our lawmakers say, are badly in need of satire and critique.

-Nikki Finke is the new Christopher Hitchens.

-Yes, my lifestyle is going to kill me.

-If we’re going to keep turning products into narratives, I’m okay with Emily the Strange being on the list.

-Haven’t had enough of the awesome debates over the phone hacking scandal? Play Prime Minister’s Questions.

-More reasons not to watch the next season of House.

I was so wrapped up in the emotional tension of Breaking Bad that it wasn’t until about a week after I finished watching the third season that I realized something that’s been itching at me: I’m not sure what the show’s politics are. Breaking Bad is meant to be a personal story rather than a systematic one, but that doesn’t mean it’s apolitical, especially when that personal story puts a drug dealer and a Drug Enforcement Administration in close proximity to each other. And especially when that personal story is essentially a long-term examination of masculine ideals. I’m not sure Breaking Bad is a profoundly conservative show, but it seems to me it’s not a liberal one, in that it buys fairly deeply into some existing assumptions and power structures.

First, the question of the DEA and the War on Drugs. Unlike The Wire, Breaking Bad isn’t really engaged in structural analysis (I’d be curious to see someone do that with meth, though). To the limited extent that it explores drug organizations, Breaking Bad tends to portray dealers as violent psychopaths like Tuco and the extended Salamanca family, or as shadowy amoral operators like Gus. It’s hard to see the kind of people who would cut Danny Trejo’s head off, put it on a turtle, and rig the turtle with bombs as anything other than desperately in need of prosecution. More importantly, the way Walt’s storyline is set up reinforces the idea that we shouldn’t have sympathy for people in the industry. He may start out manufacturing meth out of a sense of financial need, but he keeps cooking after he goes into remission out of sheer cussedness and pride—pretty much like everyone else we see in the industry. It’s harder to treat the War on Drugs as if it’s manifestly unjust if you reject or obscure the idea that the drug trade is the product of larger societal structures.
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I was sort of being flip yesterday when I tweeted that Game of Thrones was engaging in a little reverse racebending by casting a quite dark-skinned black British actor to play a character who George R.R. Martin describes as “pale as milk” in his novels. But I do think that it’s important to see adaptors raise questions about why characters need to be white in the first place.

There are all kinds of characters for whom, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, don’t absolutely need to be white. And really, that’s the way things should work when we’re assigning characters’ races: the default shouldn’t be white. There should be no default. If you’re making a movie about Minnesota Lutherans, or something, then I’m fine if your cast ends up all white. But if you’re making a show about, say, a group of friends who all live in an urban environment, making them all white is as lazy as making every women in pop culture a publicist or an event planner. All sorts of sloth in character design should be embarrassing.

PBS, in making an animated spinoff of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, discovered that its target audience doesn’t know what trolleys are—but thinks of them as adorable characters none the less. “In research, the trolley has become a very big character with the kids we’ve tested this with,” Kevin Morrison, the chief operating officer at The Fred Rogers Company told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “They’re 3 and 4 and have no clue what a trolley is but they like it and it plays a role in the Neighborhood.” Policymakers, the youth of the future have spoken. Get cracking on that high speed rail corridor or risk losing whatever generation comes after the millenials!