On Tuesday, Erica Newland wrote about how Ghostwriter beat the competition in its prescient depiction of the internet. Yesterday, I revisited Hackers, and explained why that movie’s attitude towards openness became the norm for the rest of us, even if we’re not elite computer nerds. Up today, You’ve Got Mail, the first mainstream romantic comedy about internet dating — of a sort.

Online dating is a sufficiently established part of American culture now that publications like the New Yorker devote long features to the algorithms behind different pairing services, and it doesn’t actually feel like hucksterism when Match.com claims that one in five relationships now begin online. Part of what’s fascinating about watching You’ve Got Mail again is because the characters were still figuring out things like instant messaging, much less the conventions of getting to meet someone online and figuring out the tipping point at which you were interested in meeting them in the real world. The truth is that some of the questions the characters ask, like “Is it infidelity if you’re involved with someone on the internet?” are ones we still struggle with today. But some things have changed — today, urban New Yorkers don’t have to worry about a busy signal making it impossible to make a cybersex date.
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The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation just named ABC Family the network that does the best job at portraying gay characters — and as portraying them as something other than simply white urbanized men. Apparently, 55 percent of the network’s original programming hours have images of LGBT people, which seems like an impressively high ratio considering the actual number of gay people in the population, though it would be interesting to see also what percentage of their characters are gay, and how many of those programming hours feature gay characters instead of having them in the mix or in the background.

But that’s sort of splitting hairs — ABC Family’s managed to work gay characters into shows as racy as Pretty Little Liars and as conservative as The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and that commitment is an important kind of accomplishment. I write a lot here about the things that adding character diversity to pop culture can bring to stories, but it’s an important second-level realization to understand that there are a lot of kinds of people within a minority grouping like “black” or “gay” or “women.” Pop culture may think to look for gay men, for example, in hair salons, but they also do things like run the Republican National Committee, just as lesbians may attend WNBA games but they also have their own entertainment empires. The presence of gay people, for example, in places culture and stereotype have suggested we shouldn’t expect them says something about the flexibilities and limitations of those organizations and settings as well as about the characters who inhabit them.

The reason someone like Glenn Beck gets verklempt about the possibility of a mixed-race, or as he put it “half-gay,” Spider-Man is not just that folks get weirdly grabby about continuity and crabby about characters who they don’t feel represent their struggles (because, of course, it’s the color of Spider-Man’s skin that makes him unlike white readers, not the ability to eject webs from his body). It’s because fitting black or gay or female heroes smoothly into superhero storylines suggests that the superhero community as a whole are comfortable with people Glenn Beck isn’t comfortable with, that it might not be the place he imagines it to be.

It’s not like I expect Two and a Half Men to be a documentary, but there’s something profoundly strange about the way CBS is framing Ashton Kutcher’s character on the show, who will debut this fall in the wake of Charlie Sheen’s messy exit. The character, named Walden Schmidt, is apparently an “Internet billionaire with a broken heart,” who, for reasons unbeknownst to me or the gods of plausibility, is apparently moving into a Malibu house with a divorced single-father chiropractor and his son to whom he is in no way related.

Now, rich people do strange things. They spend money on products of questionable utility that don’t actually sound enjoyable. They hire people to handle the most intimate details of their lives but get paranoid about their privacy even though they’re giving it a lot up. They do things like start private spaceflight companies (which, given how our government’s cut down on space exploration, may end up being a real public good). If they’re depressed, they hire expensive therapists, and if they’re single and don’t want to be, having billions of dollars (as well as looking like Ashton Kutcher) is a pretty easy way to find a pool of candidates to help you solve that problem.

The thing that’s annoying about having a very rich character (it doesn’t sound from this description like Kutcher’s character will have lost his money in recession or anything) move in with friends or relatives is not that it’s implausibly wacky. It’s that it’s implausibly wacky in a way that makes a very rich character seem more like characters of low to moderate incomes. If it’s scandalous when Eric Schmidt, Google’s married CEO, is seen out with a woman not his wife, it would be profoundly and stock-price-affectingly odd if a billionaire just moved in with a chiropractor and his kid for kicks. I’m sure being a billionaire has its inconveniences, but needing to move home or in with roommates is not one of them. Given how much of our politics is devoted to the idea that the very rich are somehow put-up, or that they’re just like everyone else, when in fact their resources mean that they don’t have to face the same challenges and concerns as everyone else, this kind of fantasy may not be uniquely damaging, but it does reflect something pernicious.

Super-commenter Gabriel Rossman pointed me in the direction of University of California, Davis professor Greta Hsu’s work on movies that span multiple genres a while back, and in the wake of Cowboys and Aliens, it seemed like an opportune time to dive deeply into a couple of her papers. Her research into the relationship between how active movie watchers assign categories to movies, and the commercial and critical reception of those movies, demonstrates a fairly unsurprising conclusion: “Producers who target a broad area of the market have access to greater potential revenue; the extent to which they capitalize on this potential, however, depends on the clarity with which they communicate their fit with targeted genres.”

This makes a lot of sense. If you take a gander at the top 10 all-time grossing movies (leaving aside for the moment factors like problems in calculation, the growth of the industry, the high cost of 3D tickets), they’re all very clean, effective genre-bridging movies. Avatar is a sophisticated science fiction adventure story that’s animated in part by a gooey romance. Titanic is a gooey love story facilitated by intense action sequences. James Cameron is a visionary film director who is pushing movie technology forward, but he’s also the undisputed master of working across genres. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is an epic struggle that’s also substantially concerned with whether our Bearded Hero Other Than The Short Dudes will get his elfin princess. Pirates of the Caribbean entwines its love story with its adventure story — Will falls in love with Elizabeth essentially at the moment that she steals a piece of cursed pirate gold from him when they’re both children. Toy Story 3 doesn’t really feel like a genre movie at all to me — it’s the only move in the top 10 that doesn’t fit into an easily identifiable genre category, which demonstrates the strength of that sort of simple categorization. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides brings back one of Jack Sparrow’s lost inamorata. Alice in Wonderland is the reverse of most of the movies on this list, which are largely movies men could take women to and the women wouldn’t mind, accomplishing this gender switch by turning Alice into a warrior. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 would have been a giant hit no matter how good or bad it was, but it’s also the movie in the series that is most a genre mash-up: it’s an intense adventure, during which the main characters’ romances come into full flower. The Dark Knight is perhaps the movie on the list that has the smallest amount of genre-crossover; Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne aren’t together in the movie, and while her death is a blow, it’s definitely a B or C plot in the movie, which is otherwise a very focused action morality play. And I don’t even know what to make of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
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Sorry this is late, y’all. I’m a little under the weather, so apologies if things are slow today.

-Virginia Woolf’s literary advice for young writers.

-Ghost in the Shell v. the real Hong Kong.

-Zach Braff is an interesting person to get this defensive over.

-Henry Cavill is Superman.

-But really, I want to see what Ken Loach would do with a Superman movie now that I’ve seen this (H/T: the invaluable Zack Stentz for this one):

I’m excited to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes this weekend, but while we’re waiting for it to make it into theaters, Jonathan D. Moreno, who teaches bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, kindly offered to give us some perspectives the cinematic tradition of science critiques the movie is heir to. This post is published in collaboration with Science Progress

By Jonathan D. Moreno

Hollywood has done it again. The latest film about creepy scientists setting us on the path to the end of the world as we know and, more or less, love it will soon be in a movie theater near you — Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Since we’ve been warned for so long by filmmakers and novelists about the dangers of science run amok, we really have no good excuse not to believe them. From The Island of Dr. Moreau to Brave New World to Blade Runner, Gattaca, Splice, and now the inevitable prequel to the iconic The Planet of the Apes, we learn anew why we should never tempt biologists with the latest science.

Don’t pass that apple, Eve, just transfect that genome.

Why are we so anxious about biology? Considering how sci-tech crazy the world is, including the convergence of physics, engineering, and genetics, basic biology would seem to be commonplace. That’s the question I pose in my forthcoming book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America* (Bellevue Literary Press, 2011).

Through the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosophers largely set the tone of growing admiration among the educated classes for the importance of science for social improvement. By the early 19th century, the growth of knowledge itself provoked anxiety. Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been a touchstone of popular resentment of overreaching science and scientists. Lately, it has functioned as a standard reference point for the critiques of an arrogant scientific community that messes around with stem cells and cloning.
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Since the end of the Cold War, Russia hasn’t really been a plausible antagonist country. But unlike China, it doesn’t appear to be a country that we’re worried about antagonizing by showing them as an enemy country, or as a country where really terrible things happen because we’re worried about turning off an important consumer market and trading partner. Take the new Mission Impossible movie, where blowing up the Kremlin, which would have been a trigger for global thermonuclear war two decades ago, instead is the semi-random site of an act of terrorism that mostly seems to be an excuse to throw around stupid movie terms like Ghost Protocol and to create tension between Tom Cruise and Jeremy Renner, to whom he’s handing off the franchise:

Or The Darkest Hour, where Moscow is the kind of semi-anonymous foreign city where you go to have a decadent vacation, much like the random tropical countries in the Hostel movies, and where dreadful things are allowed to go down:

When bad things happen in Russia, it’s obviously more significant than if they happen somewhere truly random and implausible. But that significance relies mostly on ghostly memories rather than persistent anxieties. The Cold War is generations ago in Hollywood terms.

EW’s Darren Franich has a post up about the reaction to some of the big reverse racebending reveals this week that ends with a really lovely observation about the full implications of Zack Snyder’s decision to cast Laurence Fishburne as the editor of the Daily Planet — and why it’s unfortunate that the movie likely won’t use the full potential of that decision:

Laurence Fishburne was born in 1961, which means that the version of Perry White who appears in Man of Steel grew up during the era of the Civil Rights Movement.

If we assume that he has been working in the media for most of his adult life, that means that Perry White has been a journalist during landmark moments in the history of American race relations. Journalists are opinionated loudmouths. White probably has an opinion about the Rodney King beating, and about the election of Barack Obama, and about the horrible statistics about African American men in prison. But none of this will come up in Man of Steel, because it is a movie about an illegal alien who wins over the American public by virtue of looking handsome a superhero. The well-intentioned M.O. of Hollywood entertainments is to essentially pretend that racial differences don’t exist.

It’s just another iteration of Ta-Nehisi’s “Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig” maxim. We shouldn’t have character diversity because it’s a nice thing to do for minority groups, or because it’ll stop people from asking you one kind of tough questions at cons, or because you think it’ll let you appeal to another demographic and make more money, though it’s true, and those are all things I’m happy to use to convince people to incorporate broader worlds in their storytelling. Instead, diversity of characters means diversity of life experiences, and of decision-making processes, and of storylines. A Perry White who covered seismic changes in race relations in America might not just win his first Pulitzer for revealing that Superman’s an alien — he might let the illegal immigrant in his employ tell his own story on the pages of the Daily Planet, unlike some other editors at some other newspapers I could name.