Apparently, in The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman “has a history of abuse and works as a stripper and is also a pickpocket.” That Catwoman is or has been an abuse victim is, of course, canonical — though she’s introduced as an amnesiac flight attendant, that is later revealed to be a cover story for her flight from an abusive husband, from whom she stole her jewelry, launching her career as a cat burglar.

I feel some ambivalence about this. Trauma is a frequent trigger for a turn to superheroics, and of course women are more likely to be subject to certain kinds of trauma than men are. But if you’re going to use trauma as a motivating factor, it’s awfully easy to fall into the trap of using it as shorthand rather than as an opportunity to tell a personalized story. And abuse victim —> stripper is an awfully cliche sort of shorthand. It also perpetuates the idea that the only reason anyone could possibly have for doing sex work is because of trauma in their past.

The key is to hit upon a certain alchemy, a combination of signifiers that will give audiences a general idea of where the story is going, while having enough specificity and idiosyncrasy that they don’t actually know where it’ll end up. I actually thought Batman Returns did quite a nice job with this, using workplace harassment and violence instead of domestic violence for variation. And in the end, her murderous, electrified smooch isn’t straight retaliation, and is couched in an insight that “the law doesn’t apply to people like him, or us.” She won’t let herself get bought by the fairy tale, which by the expectations of conventional storytelling is surprising, discomfiting, and ultimately satisfying — being wrapped in cotton at Wayne Manor ultimately doesn’t satisfy her need for justice. I don’t think Nolan’s Bruce Wayne is going to get his kinky happy ending either. But it matters why that happens.

There are a lot of television shows that I haven’t seen, but not many of them are about the rise of law and capitalism from the muck of anarchy, with a lot of race, class, and gender politics thrown in. I’ll be blogging my way through Deadwood two episodes at a time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Dust off your DVDs or ready your HBOGO logins, and let’s rock and roll.

There’s a common assumption among minor Deadwood characters that the absence of the law and governance augurs a capitalist paradise in the town they hope to settle. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” Clell Watson says from his cell, trying to talk Seth Bullock into letting him out of jail and on his way. “No law at all, gold you could scoop from the streams with your bare hands, and I got to go fuck myself up by supposedly stealing Byron Sampson’s horse.” Similarly, Ellsworth, celebrating his latest strike in the Gem Saloon declares that “I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker and working a paying fucking gold claim. And not the U.S. government saying I’m trespassing or the savage fucking red man himself or any of these limber-dicked cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors better try to stop me.”

Al Swearengen’s central insight seems to be that it’s a false distinction, that a little regulation and law and order can in fact make it easier to do business. “If that longhaired loudmouth had held his end up, we could be operating here in peace,” he grumbles of Custer at one point. And when he finds out in “Deep Water” that road agents, rather than Indians, appear to have killed the Metz family on the Spearfish road, Al is furious at Ned Mason’s companion, telling him “So you let Ned run, you leave a squarehead alive, and me to clean up. Those are the only loose ends.” There’s no question that Al is a violent man, but in these first two episodes, most of his violent acts, whether he’s beating Trixie as punishment for murdering a customer in self-defense, or stabbing one of the murderous road agents, is a way of preserving the order that he needs to operate his business successfully. He’s not alone in desiring some sort of return to the protection of the state. “We who have pursued our destiny outside law or statute will be restored to the bosom of the nation,” declares a drunken A.W. Merrick. “And…that’s what I believe!”
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Alan Moore has the imprisoned WikiLeaks collaborator’s back, saying in a statement:

With any legitimate trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning still being at an unspecified date in the future, it would seem that what is presently on trial here is Western culture itself. When the persecution of an individual who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.

There is no third option. Bradley Manning and others like him everywhere are vital to our continued moral health and well-being as a people, and unless we offer them our full support in their often dire and isolated circumstances, it is we, as a people, who will end up the losers.

This isn’t particularly surprising. Alan Moore is not, shall we say, particularly inclined to place his faith in institutions*, so this sort of suspicion seems fairly natural. I agree with Yglesias that Manning shouldn’t be in solitary confinement, and I do wonder if the clock is ticking on his constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial. But I’m not particularly sympathetic to the idea that trying Manning and sending him to jail for a long time is unjust or a way of distracting ourselves from the rot of Western culture. Some good things, among them the Arab Spring, may have their roots in material Manning disclosed, but it remains to be seen what the full impact of those leaks will — or won’t — be. Unlike Moore, I’m comfortable with many, though by no means all of the ground rules and conventions that make up our society, so I don’t really think we should determine Manning’s treatment by the justice of the end results of his actions.

*Proposition for debate: Alan Moore is the inverse of Frank Miller.

Joe Quesada, the Marvel Comics Chief Creative Officer, says that the creation of Miles Morales, the new mixed-race Ultimate Universe Spider-Man, was informed by debates over education reform:

Miles was starting to take shape. We discussed his family and upbringing at length and slowly you could see how he was becoming his own person and not just a copy of Peter. Now while I don’t want to give too much away, over the years I’ve been really intrigued by the revolutionary work being done by educator Geoffrey Canada, and as we looked deeper into Miles’ character, I suggested to Brian that he watch the documentary, “Waiting For Superman” (ironic, I know!). Bri loved it, and the wheels started turning. Pretty soon he was building a world and cast that would support Miles in some fantastically intriguing ways that were relatable but also different from Peter Parker’s world. I have a sneaky suspicion that Brian is going to make people fall in love with Miles very quickly.

Obviously I can’t pass judgment on how those themes play out until I see it happen, though it would be pretty weird to see a comic book where Morales fights a teachers’ union that’s secretly entirely made up of Skrulls or something. But no matter how it turns out, I’m glad to see this kind of thinking be part of the comic book process. Assuming that getting bitten by radioactive spiders doesn’t induce amnesia, there are factors in Spider-Man’s past other than Uncle Ben’s dying words that influenced him. And while many superhero stories propel newly-made supermen and women into larger worlds, whether it’s from a gated mansion into the slums of Gotham, or from Westchester County to the Blue Area of the Moon, there’s something to be said for superhero stories that take on problems closer to home. It may take a single bug bite from a very special arachnid to make a hero, but it takes a village to raise all the kids who are only lucky enough to get nipped by mosquitoes.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 7 episode of True Blood.

Tonight’s episode started out as a light meditation on the petulance of people who can’t stand not to be the center of attention. “Can we go back to how I’m a medium?” Lafayette complains while Jesus has it out with his uncle. Debbie’s jealousy of Sookie leads her and Alcide into the woods — and to the revelation that Alcide may be more emotionally involved with Sookie than he wants to acknowledge. And Tara sends her girlfriend off, explaining, “I’m barely hanging on to my own life. I don’t want to be responsible for yours too.” But then it takes a very different turn, justifying at least some of the sillier things we’ve been subjected to this season.

We’re finally getting some intersection between the parallel storylines that are running together this season, as Antonia/Marnie appeals to Tara as a fellow survivor of assault by vampire, telling Tara that her sympathy with Marnie’s cause is evident because “it’s in your face, it’s in your rage.” And Hoyt shows up to check in on Jason. Initially, he tries to break through his friend’s facade of stoicism (which is exists, in part, because Jason can’t get the thought of sex with Jessica off his mind), telling him, “You were raped. And maybe turned into a werewolf. How are you doing?” But instead of having an actual conversation about any of the things that have happened to Jason in the past few episodes, Jason shakes off Hoyt’s concern and they end up talking about Hoyt’s girlfriend problems instead. Similarly, Antonia’s recruitment of Tara has nothing more than a surface rhetorical engagement with her experiences as a victim, which is one of the biggest problems of the show —True Blood loves putting Tara through terrible things, but has no interest in providing her with any healing or growth.

As much as I’m so totally bored and even made angry by this Antonia storyline, and for what it means for how lax the enforcement of the rules of this universe are, it does make for some nice symmetry in the main storyline. When Sookie met Bill four seasons ago, he was tied up with silver chains by people who wanted to do him harm, and Sookie wrapped herself in those same delicate chains to create a distance between herself and the thing she wanted and feared. Now, her former lover is telling her to wrap her new ones in silver chains, to mortify Eric’s beautiful, dead flesh because “If you care anything for him, you will do this, or it will be his last day one earth.” And Bill’s wrapping Jessica tenderly in silver, holding back because he’s afraid to cause her pain.

As it turns out, there is a deadly cost to that kindness, as Jessica rips off her chains, and in the most moving sequences in this entire sequences, drags her burned and bleeding body towards the sunlight. For all the work the special effects team is doing to make Pam look disgusting, and it is stomach-churning and considerable, none of it as affecting as the sight of something as simple and elemental as sunlight shot as if it’s a narcotic, a marvel, one of the seven wonders of the world — and death.

-Shocking news: there is a market for comics by ladies, so much so that people will pay for something that’s not even out yet.

-Setting up Zodiac as a role model for FX’s Powers adaptation absolutely guarantees that I will watch it.

-Lucille Ball is a goddamn hero.

-Really curious as to when we’re going to get more 90s period movies other than Definitely, Maybe and The Wackness.

-I don’t even have children and the prospect of Jonah Hill taking care of them fills me with horror:

I’m not a Ryan Murphy fan — neither increasingly grim plastic surgery nor singing after-school specials are really my jam (though I love me some Brittany and Santana) — but I admit I’m intrigued by his new show, American Horror Story, about a couple who, in the wake of a miscarriage, move to Los Angeles for a fresh start only to find out that their new house is haunted. He’s already hit the obvious button with all his might by declaring that “the monster in the closet is infidelity,” which should be a change for star Connie Britton after the end of Friday Night Lights. And I’m less interested in this show in particular than in the possibility that it could take horror shows mainstream.

Glee succeeded less by founding a new genre of television show, or firmly establishing it for the first time, than by revitalizing a genre that’s had its ebbs and flows. America has always been pretty fond of its musicals. But with the exception of Twin Peaks, if that counts, I’m hard-pressed to think of a horror television show that a) develops a story from episode-to-episode rather than being a showcase for one-offs, b) that is considered a television classic, c) that is scary in the way that horror movies are scary and visceral. So American Horror Story, if it works, could break new ground even if it’s on cable TV rather than the networks, where you’d have to compromise quite considerable on sex and violence a la Buffy to avoid the wrath of the FCC.

I’m curious about horror in part because I have an extremely hard time watching it myself, and am tentatively working towards understanding it better. When I was quite young, a friend’s mother read me a graphic novel version of Frankenstein that shook me so deeply that I had very traumatic nightmares for a long time, and I tend to avoid the kind of imagery and scenarios that would trigger those kinds of dreams again. I’m trying to get better — I did survive all of Drag Me to Hell in theaters, and I’m planning to see the Straw Dogs remake, if that counts as horror. So take everything I’m about to say here with an enormous grain of salt.

But I do wonder if there’s something about horror that’s better suited for movies than for television. It’s hard to sustain the tension of a horror action sequences (is that the right thing to call murders? Or attacks?) from week to week if you’re cliff-hangering them. It’s a genre that involves getting incredibly wound up incredibly quickly and then getting a fairly quick release. It’s hard to buy the idea of a family staying in a house of horrors for a long time before they get killed or are driven out of it, unless the terrible things that happen to them are calibrated in such a way that they’re either drawn into the darkness or don’t realize what’s going on for a while. And I also wonder if some of the social issues that horror movies bring up, like extremely violent sexual assault, or violent crime, are the kinds of things that mass American audiences can only bear to look at for a short time, and which, psychologically, we need our pop culture to provide quick resolution to. There’s a difference between watching Doctor Melfi get raped, knowing she’s alive, and watching her struggle emotionally with the consequences of that assault over a television season; watching two teenage girls get raped, tortured, and violently murdered, only to have their parents rape, torture, and murder their killers in return for two hours in a movie theater; and watching extremely violent, or extremely tense things happen over 12 to 22 hours. For certain kinds of very bad things, we tend to demand that our pop culture anesthetizes us with distance, or salves us with revenge. It’s not that you couldn’t spread out I Spit On Your Grave over a 12-episode season, but would you want to?

Obviously Buffy worked, but that was in part because the show was very funny rather than straightforwardly frightening or shocking, because it was a procedural where at least some monsters were vanquished every episode, and because the special effects were calibrated at a point where they were immersive enough to suspend disbelief but not realistic enough to be genuinely disturbing. For American Horror Story, and any successors it has, I imaging much will depend on what tone the show settles on, and how precisely it manages to stay on whatever sweet spot it finds. Given Ryan Murphy’s tonal track record, that may be difficult.

Ramsin Canon was tweeting glumly over the weekend about the prospect of a second Great Depression, and cheered himself — and me — up with the reminder that before the first Great Depression, the Greatest Generation was “sitting on flagpoles and drinking paint thinner before that business crept up on them.” That also had the effect of reminding me how much I like Harvey Danger, and that I should listen to them again, and eventually that “Pike St./Park Slope” is both very prescient about the real estate market in Brooklyn and a really great song for shaming people who resent the idea of paying taxes:

I feel like the line about people who “hate it when their friends become successful” is particularly relevant to the Cantor-Boehner rivalry.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 7 episode of Breaking Bad.

I’ve learned a lot of things about being a criminal from Breaking Bad, including “bring extra water if you’re going into the desert to cook meth,” and “you probably can’t maintain an addict’s sobriety if you’re going to put him in proximity to a large meth cooking operation.” Tonight’s lessons: don’t bring a machine gun to a fight with a man wearing a snow suit and with a considerable tolerance for pain, and your own karaoke performance of “Major Tom” is probably not actually the thing you want to leave for posterity. But in addition to those lessons (and the show’s Yglesias-friendly case for relaxing barbering regulations so Jesse can find alternate, if less lucrative, employment), this was, to me, the best episode this season in the way it pushed the awful emotional and plot momentum of the show forward.

The linchpin of these developments was Skylar’s decision to force Walt to deliver a plausible version of a story in which he won enough money gambling to buy the car wash — and secretly, so far, pay for Hank’s physical therapy (As Skylar tells Walt about Marie’s decision to keep their secret, “I seem to recall you’d rather sell drugs than take help.”). It’s a good remedy to the plausibility problems of the previous episode (though presumably Walt has to gamble somewhere — they’re not that good at thinking this through yet), and more importantly, it lets Walt and Skylar have it out over the terms in which Walt’s willing to apologize to Skylar for the events of the previous three seasons. “‘I’m terribly, terribly ashamed of my actions,’” Walt asks, reading through the script she’s written for him. “Two terriblies?” “It’s supposed to show contrition,” she snaps back, only to have Walt fall back on the same excuse he always falls back on “And why am I so ashamed?…I was, and am, providing for our family.” But Skylar’s ready to speak the brutal truth about her husband, and what it means to her to concoct this narrative, telling her husband: “For a fired school teacher who cooks crystal meth, I’d say you come out ahead.”
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