Hidden in John Ridley’s castigation of Hollywood for resisting rational evidence (and box office numbers) in refusing to cast more black leads is this interesting tidbit:

In the concisely titled study “The Role of Actors’ Race in White Audiences’ Selective Exposure to Movies,” Indiana University professor Andrew Weaver writes, “Movie producers are often reluctant to cast more than a few minority actors in otherwise race-neutral movies for fear that the white audience will largely avoid such films.” Weaver found that white audiences tended to be racially selective with regard to romantic movies, but not necessarily when it came to other genres. So, sorry, Hollywood. You can’t blame it on the ticket buyers. And as the bankability of comic book franchises begins to cool — did we really need four hero-in-tights movies this summer alone? — you have to wonder if studios will ever get hip to the possibilities of going after multi-cultural audiences.

I’d be extremely curious to see why racial preferences continue to exist in romantic stories. Is it that we’re still harboring anxieties about interracial relationships? That we think people of other races much have vastly different courting processes and preferences to our own such that we couldn’t possibly see ourselves in other people’s journeys towards happily ever after (the wild success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding would seem to give the lie to this, at least to a certain extent)? Whatever the reason, it’s fascinating that white audiences are entirely comfortable watching black and Latino people, say, use a lot of concentrated firepower to fight aliens, but draw the line at watching them date.

Well, this is kind of nifty. The Star Trek theme park that’s opening up in Jordan is apparently going to incorporate a bunch of renewable technologies. Given Jordan’s reliance on oil imports, this actually makes a great deal of sense on a practical level, and it’s cool that the park’s going to have exhibits about various environmental issues, taking the show’s social messages seriously on both a design and programmatic level.

Unless King Abdullah starts inviting his fellow Gulf States monarchs over for all-night debates about the campy awesomeness of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (I can’t resist the idea that Spock was in Students for a Democratic Society) and the viability of producing dilithium crystals, the impact of the park will probably be more international than regional. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this is a viable tourist attraction at all: folks’ll make pilgrimages to San Diego, but Jordan’s a slightly more expensive plane ticket, even when you book a year in advance.

On July 9, Daily Show creator, former Air America host, and comedian Lizz Winstead hit the road for a stand-up tour benefitting Planned Parenthood. She took a break from the show and finishing work on her forthcoming memoir to talk to me about what she’s learned about support for reproductive rights from her audiences; why conservative comedians aren’t very funny; how we can back up Planned Parenthood workers; and her dream television show in the post-Bridesmaids boom for women in comedy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How’s the tour gone so far? Are there things you’ve learned from your audiences along the way?

Really great! We did this sort of first leg, and I’m taking almost all of August off except for the 19th of August because I have to finish my book. It’s no longer a joke and nobody thinks it’s cute it’s not finished…[I've learned that] it’s still taboo to tell your story. I don’t know if taboo is the right word. There’s still fear…People have come up to me, at least 20 after every show, and said ‘I feel like I can tell my story.’ It’s sort of the Harvey Milk story…Once someone puts a face on a subject it makes it that much harder to demonize it. It changes the conversation a lot. I’m glad that it gives people some pause to think about what they’re doing with their own story and their relationship to Planned Parenthood.

The other thing that’s equally awesome and equally heartbreaking is how generally overwhelmed with thanks that the staff is. Because it makes me feel like more people need to be stepping up and helping them fight the fight. Those people are in their doing their basic job every day. That should be their job, not to be tortured every single day by these terrible people who protest in front of their clinics and terrify them.

In terms of telling more stories about abortion, what do you think accounts for our pop culture squeamishness about abortion and reproductive health more generally?

I think it comes down to advertising dollars. It’s still such a taboo subject. The extremists will boycott and they’ll rally and they’ll do that kind of stuff. When you go to a local market, [it's a struggle] for the local press to write about the show. We’ve had to rely heavily on people like you, people like the progressive blogosphere. You have a wider reach, and you don’t care if they attack you. It’s really interesting how people shy away from it. You’re marked. You have to make a decision. I turned 50 on Friday, and I’ve had a really nice, fun half of my career, and what am I going to do? If I can’t use the voice I have to get people to pay attention to the news, than what am I doing? That’s kind of given me a clear path to other things that I want to do in the second half of my career.

It seemed to me as someone who had been watching the progression of anti-women and anti-women’s health care legislation, watching the complete escalation of it with this new Congress made me feel like I can’t sit there and let this happen. I have a voice, and I have a show that people like, they pay money to come see it. To be able to share this personal story, that it encourages other people to say so. It seems that humor, here’s a a completely obvious statement, has become a real driving force for conversations about the issues in the world.
Read more

ABC’s been selling the idea that their new terrible-things-happen-to-people-in-the-Hamptons show is going to be popular because America is ready for pop culture that soaks the rich. I think that’s entirely possible. And it also reminded me that I’ve been meaning to watch The Joneses, in which David Duchovny and Demi Moore play the heads of a fake family who move into an affluent neighborhood and stimulate spending by showing off fancy products and setting a new standard in aspirationalism.

The movie did quite badly: it only made $1,475,746 at the box office. And that actually kind of makes sense. It’s not a terrible movie, but it is a pretty uncomfortable one. What these fabulously amoral people do is juxtaposed, though not aggressively, against the backdrop of the recession. And it’s explicitly a rebuke to the product placement that Hollywood relies on, to the broader project of pop culture as a vehicle for setting unrealistic lifestyle standards.

What’s effective about the movie is how relentless it is about how faking being a family takes a toll on the characters who are pretending, and about how the lifestyle they’re selling hurts the people in their neighborhood. Duchovny’s character Steve is secretly in love with Moore’s, but she keeps him away from her, constantly reminding him that there is no genuine connection between them. The man who plays their teenaged son is secretly gay, which is of course OK in the real world, but not necessarily as marketable as heterosexuality, and he gets punched in the face when he hits on the brother of the girl he’s been pretending to date — on the same night that he gets the girl gets drunk and carelessly lures her into a drunk-driving accident. The woman playing their daughter gets involved with a married man to her own detriment.

And their next-door neighbors max out their credit cards chasing the Jones’ lifestyle, buying cars that the Jones immediately make look outdated, giving each other gifts they can’t afford because the Jones’ preach that random gift-giving is the key to marital success. “Larry, you did not make the house payment last month,” says the wife, a desperate social climber who wants nothing more than to become a successful cosmetics saleswoman. “Why are you telling me that I don’t need to worry?” They keep on going to the point of ruination and foreclosure, and when Steve tries to warn Larry, Larry insists that Steve’s just trying to undermine him, that he’s jealous. And ultimately, their neighbor commits suicide.

Having killed a man, Steve’s left alone in the empty house he doesn’t own, abandoned by the woman he thought he’d sold on the idea of loving him, relationships, of course, being one more marketable product. She comes back to him, of course. But I wonder how well the knowledge that they’re no longer doing the wrong thing makes up for the knowledge of all the terrible things they did do.

I’m not particularly surprised to hear that Felicia Pearson has plead guilty to heroin distribution: as her lawyer put it, “I can’t say she would have been found not guilty.” And it sounds like her plea deal, which lets her avoid a seven-year sentence as long as she doesn’t violate her three-year probation, was reasonable.

David Simon is a wonderful artist, and he’s created genuinely revealing work that has, in some small way, managed to move the conversation about the war on drugs. But the changes he wants to see happen in the real world are necessarily going to come about much more slowly, no matter how much he tells Attorney General Eric Holder that if the Justice Department ends the drug war, he’ll make another season of The Wire. And at the end of the day, as much as The Wire may have gained some real verisimilitude by adding people like Pearson to the cast, that didn’t mean that Pearson, much less the experienced actors involved with the show, were going to find steady work after it. Acting is not necessarily a stable alternative profession that will get someone away from the drug trade.

-London’s riots claim a major record distribution warehouse.

-I’m going to miss Eureka.

-White men can’t jump.

-Here are all of your television premieres this fall.

-Captain America testifies on his steroid abuse:

Like a lot of other culture writers, I’m a nerdy Anglophile, so I’m sick over the riot reports coming out of London. And from a cultural perspective, it’s particularly devastating to hear about the burning of Sony’s distribution warehouse and the impact it’ll have on independent artists and independent record stores. So if you want to support British artists, and in particular, to consume some art that’s about the socioeconomic and racial divisions that have played a role in British unrest over the past year, not just the past few days, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Prime Suspect, Series Two: The second season of the show that made Helen Mirren a star is all about underinvestigations of crimes in London’s Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods — and about the role that race and gender expectations play in the way police officers present themselves in the larger context of the force:

2. Logic’s “For My People.” I’m not comfortable with everything the conscious rapper Logic is saying on Twitter about the riots—I don’t think celebrating burning police stations is productive — but “For My People” is a great explication of how difficult it can be for poor people and people of color to get a place at the policymaking table, or to get media attention by peaceful means:

3. Spooks, Series One. American spy shows tend to focus on foreign threats rather than domestic ones. This show, about a fictional MI-5 unit, is all about the threats to British stability from within, whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, racists who want to forment ethnic conflict in England as a means of cleansing it, and even a post-Buffy Anthony Head as racial environmentalist.

4. Misfits. I’ve written about Misfits before, but if you’re looking for pop culture that will force you to empathize with people who are not inherently likable, or a show about the unfashionable parts of London that are in the process of getting torn up, it’s worth checking out.

Can someone just give Cee-Lo Green a contract to write a Hairspray-style period musical already?

I saw The Help last night (about which much more to come tomorrow) so I’m particularly in this space, but I would love to see a great-looking early ’60s period piece starring African-American characters as something other than than the soundtrack to or catalysts for white people’s moral awakenings. That’s not to say that white people didn’t play a role in the Civil Rights movement, or that they didn’t pay terrible costs for doing so. Of course they did. But at the end of a big struggle, there’s a difference between feeling good about yourself for participating, and being able to work, or eat, or take the bus wherever you’d like without fear of violent death. I’d just like to see something where a black character gets the makeover, the guy, the ’60s-ified soundtrack, and, if it’s that kind of story, credit for a civil rights victory.

But if it’s not, that’s OK too. It would be a mistake to tell a race-blind stories set in the ’60s, but that doesn’t mean that every single story about African-Americans at the time has to be primarily about the Civil Rights movement. I would love to see what Cee-Lo, who seems substantially invested in proving his period bona fides, did with some sort of mandate like this. OutKast’s bootlegger musical Idlewild was, I thought, an interesting but imperfect experiment. I’d like to see more people working in this space, trying to figure out how to tell different kinds of black stories — and, as a musical theater nerd, to keep pushing for hip-hop’s place in the musical world. Especially if it means more dancing Jaleel White.

There’s something funny about the fact that it remains reportable news that a science fiction movie, in this case, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, is getting released as if it might actually be a contender for Academy Award nominations. When it comes to the movies that win Best Picture, in recent years we’ve tended to like stories that are from worlds not precisely our own, be they pre-World War II England, the specific milieu of military bomb defusers, Indian television studios, a moralized modern West, Middle Earth, or a musical-theaterized Chicago (Crash, The Departed, and Million Dollar Baby are notable exceptions over the past 10 years, in that they lack an element of distance or strangeness to them) and that have either a specific message of contemporary social significance or a metaphor for it. There’s precisely no reason that science fiction and fantasy can’t hit those sweet spots other than genre snobbery: exploring a vision of industrialized space is at least as useful and realistic as exploring a gangland Chicago where everyone bursts into song all the time.