I sometimes feel like a broken record, repeating over and over that slashing arts, humanities, and broadcasting funding is part of the way Republicans are credentialing themselves for national races in 2012 and beyond. But I’m not going to stop, particularly when Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the latest and to my mind one of the most formidable entrants in the 2012 primary race, is doing precisely that. The Texas Tribune reports that Perry recently sent a fundraising appeal on behalf of Citizens Against Government Waste, singling out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with bigger-ticket items like federal travel and rail subsidies, as things he believes should be cut.

The funny thing about singling out federal spending on the arts as proof that you’re serious about cutting federal spending is that it actually demonstrates just the opposite. All the things on Perry’s list are fairly small-ticket items that have passionate but somewhat isolated constituencies. There are good reasons federal employees travel, but federal employees aren’t very popular right now, so it’s easy to target them. In an era of minimalist government, it’s an easier soundbite for opponents to make federal funding for the arts sound silly than it is for advocates to explain how public funding stimulates private giving and spurs arts-related growth. Cutting every item on Perry’s list would net us a measly $57.59 billion in savings. That’s not courage or tough decision-making. It’s bullying by budget cut.

One of the biggest challenges of a show or movie that depicts real historical figures is managing the space between the audience’s understanding of who those people were and how the other characters see those historical figures in their context. Thus far, one of the reasons Deadwood feels as powerful to me as it does is because of the way it deals with the myth and death of Wild Bill Hickock. There are characters like Calamity Jane and Alma Garret, who are at least partially bought into the idea of Hickock as a hero. “I don’t know if you ever should learn English,” Jane tells Sofia Metz, around whom she’s trying, and failing, to avoid cursing around. “But then I couldn’t tell you about Bill sleeping in the hallway out of thought for others.” Bill’s able to pull himself together around people who don’t, or can’t, or refuse to see the cracks in him, tickling Sofia, commissioning Seth Bullock to stand in his place to help Alma.

Then, there are people who see the gap between the myth of Wild Bill and the reality of the self-destructive man, like Charlie Utter, and they are those it’s most uncomfortable for Bill to be around. “I’m doing what I want to do,” Bill tells Charlie in one of the most touching scenes in the series so far. “Some goddamn time a man’s due to stop arguing with himself. Feeling he’s twice the goddamn fool he knows he is because can’t be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime without fucking it up. I don’t want to fight it no more. And I don’t want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”

And then there’s the person that Wild Bill seems to be most comfortable with in Deadwood, Seth Bullock, a man of action, someone who isn’t disappointed by Bill’s failure to be a legend and is happy to see him as a man. That Wild Bill will ride out to see what happened to the Metz family, that he’ll shoot a road agent, that he’ll help with construction, seems to be enough for Bullock. And Bullock’s the one person who is seen by Wild Bill as much as Bullock sees him — Wild Bill sees before Sol, or anyone else, does that Bullock isn’t going to be happy running a hardware store. “Pretty quick you’ll have laws here and every other damn thing,” Bill muses when he finds Seth hammering frame beams together in a fit of insomnia. “I’ll settle for property rights,” Seth tells him, only to have Bill respond with a skeptical “Will you?”
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I was actually prepared to like The Help, mostly on the grounds that I adore Emma Stone, and I think there’s space for movies about white allies in the Civil Rights movement (though such a thing is incredibly hard to do right and to my knowledge, no one ever has) and value in making interracial solidarity as aspirational as a nice handbag. The book is deeply flawed, but has some merits. But the movie, which I reviewed for The Atlantic, is worse on almost every count:

Stockett’s novel presented a vision of segregation in service of a feel-good story, but the film version of The Help is even more distant from the virulence of American racism. Its villains, Junior League bigots who wear smart little suits to cover their scales, are so cartoonish that viewers won’t risk recognizing themselves or echoes of their behavior in them. The heroines—a privileged, liberal, white Mississippi woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) and two black domestic workers, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (a particularly good Octavia Spencer)—are much easier to identify with. The project that brings them together, a secret oral history of maids’ lives in Jackson, may spotlight the domestic side of racism. But other than a mention of unenforced minimum-wage laws and a scene of the aftermath of Medgar Evers’ murder, the movie is disengaged with the public legal framework that let white women treat their white servants dreadfully in private. In The Help, whether you’re black or white, liberation’s just a matter of improving your self-esteem…

Indeed, the movie, which necessarily sacrifices some character development in the name of space and speed, also conspicuously cuts out powerful illustrations of racial violence. While we get soft-hued flashbacks to Skeeter’s memories of Constantine, the black woman who raised her, there are no such flashbacks to the violent, unnecessary death of Aibileen’s son. In another scene, Yule May, one of Minny and Aibileen’s friends, is arrested for stealing a ring from her employer. The shot shows white police manhandling and cuffing her, but when they swing at her head with a baton, the impact of the weapon against her skull is cut out of the frame. An incident of racial violence that illustrates the cost of the main villain’s quest for separate bathrooms for African-American servants is left out of the movie entirely. Even a notably gory miscarriage scene from the book is reduced to a blood-soaked nightgown and an artfully smeared bathroom floor visible only for a moment.

I do think there’s value in exploring racism from a domestic perspective on out rather than from a movement level on down to the personal one. But I don’t actually think you can separate the individual practice of Jim Crow segregation from the legal framework and social norms that sustained it. One woman underpaying her maid and failing to pay employment taxes is a bad person — the systematic exclusion of black domestic workers from the minimum wage and Social Security systems that allows her to do it is horrifying. It’s much easier to grapple with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, or with the death of an individual black man in the South, than it is to accept that the rape and murder of black people in large parts of this country was, for a long time, essentially legal. But it’s the latter truth that’s important. We can say that people who mistreat the people who work for them, who are sexually coercive employers, and who commit individual murders are not us, that we would never do such things. Facing the actual structures that enforced and perpetuated racism, and that have impacts that are felt to this day, means admitting our own complicity.

Mike Wall argues in Scientific American that alien movies might be back because we’re at a moment when scientific discoveries make the prospect of extraterrestrial life more plausible:

Just 20 years ago, scientists had yet to find a single planet beyond our own solar system. Now the count of confirmed extrasolar planets tops 550, with many more about to be added to the list. In February, for example, scientists announced that NASA’s Kepler space telescope had detected 1,235 candidate alien worlds in its first four months of operation. Of those, 54 likely orbit in their host stars’ habitable zone — the range of distances that could support liquid water. These candidate planets need to be confirmed by follow-up observations, but NASA researchers have estimated that at least 80 percent will end up being the real deal. And last year, astronomers reported strong evidence that the Saturn moon Enceladus likely harbors a huge and salty ocean beneath its icy crust. Subsurface oceans are also suspected to occur on other moons, such as Saturn’s Titan and Europa, a satellite of Jupiter. In short, the prospect that life exists beyond Earth — and perhaps even beyond our solar system — is becoming more and more likely. This is big news that affects the way many people view our species and its place in the universe.

All of that is true, though I’m not sure how much it penetrates the public consciousness. Our public space program is a policy afterthought, our anxieties about the math and science performance of American students in comparison to their foreign counterparts are more about winning the future on this planet than about building it on another one. If terrorism is our great foreign policy fear, that lends itself less to grand invasion metaphors and more to stealthy, unnerving small invasions and quick strikes. I wonder instead if some of the rise in alien movies comes from a sense of unease about what it means to be human.

One of the few interesting things about Cowboys and Aliens was the prospect, before it became clear how Daniel Craig acquired his nifty, alien-killing bracelet, that in captivity he’d become something other than entirely human, that he was standing between two species and two worlds but part of neither. Whether it’s Jason Silva calling for humanity to embrace the grandness of its ambitions and its potential; SyFy shows like Eureka and Alphas that suggest that rather than dividing us into binary categories of men and superman we’re all somewhere on a continuum; or the increasing integration of technology into our lives, affecting the way we live and think, increasingly, the aliens are us.

In my quest to educate myself more about video game design, I recently finished reading Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us. The book doesn’t touch on everything, and that’s not the point: it’s a slim one-volume guide to the people who had the key insights that created the video game industry, moved it forward, and brought it to where it is today. And if you want an understanding of which problems in the game industry have been there from the beginning, it’s an essential introduction.

Take the problem of profit-sharing and crediting. After turnover at Atari in 1979 Golberg writes, “They weren’t getting credit for the games the way the cast and crew did in each movie’s credits or the bands and their sidemen did in the liner notes of records. Nor did they receive a percentage of the profits, even though Atari was making hundreds upon hundreds of millions as one of the world’s fastest growing companies.” Similarly, when Tod Frye secured one of the first royalty deals, he only got 10-15 cents per game cartridge.

The same’s true of crash, which Goldberg describes as happening everywhere from Nintendo, where “the teams preferred to work late into the night during the increasingly brutal crunch times. They would go home past midnight and fall exhausted into bed, only to get to Nintendo again by eleven a.m. and do it all over again,” or at Naughty Dog when the company was developing Crash Bandicoot where one of the founders “was tired of holding the hands of game designers who would freak out and lose it during crunch time. Gavin understood that the tight schedule could lead to breakdowns. In video games, breakdown was the new black. But Naughty Dog was a team…’How dare anyone we brought in to work try to break up the team at deadline time?’ he thought…That’s just how it was. Long hours were what you signed up for.”

Those companies have very different artistic cultures — as Goldberg wrote me:

Electronic Arts was inspired by the passion of Charlie Chaplin and those who created United Artists. EA even today considers many of its workers artists, at least on some level. Nintendo’s culture is a Japanese culture, and by that, I mean it’s all about the company person and loyalty to the boss. That’s one reason why we only see the face of Shigeru Miyamoto promoting Nintendo games, when, in reality, hundreds of people make games at Nintendo. To a large extent, PopCap (recently purchased by EA for at least $750 million), likes to place its games on every device imaginable, so the culture is as much about, say, putting Plants Vs. Zombies on the upcoming Wii U or iPad 3 as it is about creating new games. Rockstar cares very much about American arts and popular culture, perhaps more than any other video game company. And Valve very much cares about its community and it downloadable games service, Steam.

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-Why would Matt Damon take Michael Moore’s suggestion and run for president when he gets to hang out Neill Blomkamp and wear crazy cyborg suits? Being POTUS is a really terrible job in comparison to being an A-list actor.

-You know who probably doesn’t need immigration waivers? Also A-list actors.

-I will only watch a Bewitched remake if it’s a horror story a la the episode of Charmed where Phoebe turns into Samantha.

-Pretty confident video games didn’t cause the London riots.

-Hell yeah steampunk lady scientists (also, SyFy’s H.G. Wells spinoff strikes me as the only way we’re going to get a lady Doctor).

In a deeply odd interview (HT: The Mary Sue) with AfterElton, J.J. Abrams sets new standards in equivocating when he discusses whether he’d have an openly gay character in a subsequent Star Trek movie:

I would say that it is, you know, something that I would love to do, but just the way I would be careful doing a story that would involve any of the characters and their personal lives. The balance is always, what how does that story relate to sort of the bad guy, which by the way is always going to be that critical thing, what are they up against? The question how do you get into literally these are personal sexual lives of these characters?

I just wouldn’t want the agenda to be … whether it’s a heterosexual relationship or a homosexual relationship, to tell a story that was, that felt distracting from part of the purpose of the story is. So I’m in complete open-minded, you know, I’m interested in finding a way to do that but it’s almost like, it’s a tricky thing, because it’s the right thing to do and sometimes so is a story about something that also has some kind of meaning but do it and if it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re doing it in order to make that point because then it’s almost a disservice. Because then it feels like “oh that stupid distracting subplot about you know, you know, that minority. Or those people… ” The thing that really matters to you as a writer. So the question is how do you do it where it doesn’t feel like why am I getting into that kind of detail about the character’s life if not just to make a point of it? So the answer is, I think it should be done and I’ve love to be able to do it. And the question is once we get through the bigger issues of certain structural things that are really the key to the show or the movie being done well.

I guess I must have missed something where Uhura and Spock’s relationship is integral to embodying the fight against Nero because dude came through a black hole to ban interracial relationships in the Federation. And Abrams, who says here that “I don’t know who’s assuming characters aren’t gay or are gay” in expressing concern about how fans picture the characters, doesn’t seem to have been so vastly concerned about the original conception of Spock and Uhura — in which Uhura hits on Spock and he blows her off — that he resisted pairing them up in his alternate continuity.

What worked about that pairing, in fact, was that Abrams and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci did something that movies rarely do, but that is, in fact, totally natural: showed two characters in a relationship using sexual contact as a means of expressing tenderness rather than desire. The fact that Spock needed comfort in the wake of extreme trauma was specific to the plot, but there was no reason the person he got comfort from also needed to illuminate the Romulan threat. The same could easily, and comfortably, be true of a gay character. Someone should tell Abrams that it’s not a victory over tokenism to keep gay people invisible, especially when that invisibility is increasingly obviously at odds with the Star Trek vision of a progressive future.

You people are wonderful and send me recommendations for things I ought to watch, read, or listen to all the time. The problem is Twitter feeds are hard to search, and the volume of comments here gets things lost. So I’ve created a Google Doc where you guys can leave recommendations, requests, etc. Feel free to leave requests anonymously, write me a screed about why I absolutely have to watch x, y, or z urgently or I will be missing out on the best thing ever, or whatever. All I’d ask is that you date your requests so I have a sense of when they came in. I’ll try to work through it at a reasonable rate, and give credit to y’all as inspiration.

It’s almost unfortunate that We Need to Talk About Kevin, both Lionel Shriver’s novel and the upcoming movie adaptation of it, are about a teenage spree killer, because even though it’s brilliantly written and originally structured, a serial killer origin story that names bad parenting as a root cause is ultimately a bit of a cliche:

But the idea that someone just wouldn’t like being a mother, or more specifically, would dislike one of her own children, is one of the more impermissible emotions out there. There’s less plot arc in simmering resentment, loathing, and mutual discomfort than there is in murder, but I’m glad that someone’s bringing prestige to bear in exploring the topic no matter how melodramatic the framing. We Need to Talk About Kevin is a drastic corrective to the saccharineness of our romantic comedies, but it’s a useful and forceful assertion that not everyone has the same happily ever after.