Winners:

-Donna Summer: In the single best moment of the debate, Herman Cain cribs from the disco diva’s “The Power of One,” previously best known for its association with Pokemon cartoons, in his closing statement:

Runner up is Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, who had his admonition that “with great power comes great responsibility” repurposed by Tim Pawlenty, who given his filleting by Michele Bachmann, might have been better to opt for his own disco anthem and declare “I Will Survive.”

Losers:

-Mickey Mouse, now firmly associated with Newt Gingrich, things people want other people to think are silly and unsubstantive.

-Supervillains. Herman Cain shot down the idea of an alligator-filled moat as a means of border protection, disappointing those of us who basically want to live in an America that is the equivalent of Doctor Doom’s Latvernian castle.

A note, because of debate coverage, some recaps may be a bit slow tomorrow.

No sooner do I ask whether narrative horror’s viable on television than NBC greenlights an updated Frankenstein show by Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner, the producers behind House.

I always get anxious when I hear about this kind of project because I worry that “modern-day take” on Frankenstein means grave-robbing in Los Angeles rather than London, and in a sleek lab rather than a dank basement, rather than any actual engagement with our contemporary anxieties about science. It’s pretty easy to forget that the dude with the scalpel is the monster, not his creation. I feel the same way about the news that Bradley Cooper of all people is starring in a Paradise Lost movie (incidentally one of the works Frankenstein’s monster finds most compelling), though whether it’ll be completely cosmic and fantastical or set in some version of the real world. Whether you think Paradise Lost is a statement of repentance for rebellion against the Crown or the work of a former censor who knew how to get the official approval he needed to publish the first edition of the work, it’s a monumentally compelling examination of what it feels like to find yourself on the wrong side of what appears to be God’s will that has no particular modern analogue. I actually think Torchwood: Miracle Day has the closest thing to a contemporary Satan I’ve seen in Lauren Ambrose’s impeccably-dressed-in-red PR hack, Jilly, who has absolutely no values except buzz and worships at the altar of the news cycle.

I do think there’s a chance that Fried and Lerner will do a good job with their Frankenstein, though. House, when the show was good as opposed to completely insane, was very good at exploring how someone like Sherlock Holmes would fare in an age where scientific knowledge was vastly more widespread and extreme anti-sociality was considered less charming and more diagnosable. House may usually be right about what’s ailing his patients, but the show is a useful modern rebuke to the idea that we’d be better off in a world where the rest of us are scientifically blind and a one-eyed man is king, or that there’s anything charming about misanthropes who use their genius to bludgeon other people. I only hope they come up with as useful a framework for their Frankenstein project. I’m glad to think about the interaction between scientific expertise and compassion, and about scientific ethics, but I do worry that it’s hard for pop culture to critique specific scientific practices without casting a skeptical eye on scientific endeavor as a whole.

It’s a question that seems to be popping up with increasing frequency. Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, has been sued on the grounds that she ripped off the life of Ablene Cooper, who worked for Stockett’s brother’s family for more than a decade (and a major plot point in The Help itself hinges on the question of whether you can defame someone if they can’t prove it’s them you’re writing about). And now an Iraq veteran’s case against Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, arguing that they misappropriated his life as the source material for The Hurt Locker and defamed him in the process, is going forward, though it seems likely that the defamation claims will be thrown out and the case will end up focusing on the charges that they used his story without his permission.

I come down fairly hard on the side of artists’ free speech rights here, in part because of a sense that the market provides a certain level of protection. Stockett’s book is very popular, but it’s always going to be haunted by the accusation that she stole an older African-American woman’s life story and used it for her own gain. But I also think this is just a smaller part of an ongoing conversation about whether we have private lives at all any more. Ablene Cooper, who is in her 60s and thus less likely to say, broadcast much of her life through a Facebook account, may well have the expectation that her life is private and it’s up to her to broadcast and rebroadcast the details of it. But does a hypothetical younger military veteran with an active and public social media presence?

Commenter Jason remarked yesterday, given the avatars involved in a particular conversation, “that there’s something funny about Ayra Stark and Vash the Stampede discussing racial and gender equality… just the weirdness that Alyssa’s blog can conjure. Next up, Rand Al’Thor and Goku will be discussing progressive taxation!” I agree. And that’s what I love about you guys. So much so that I want to do it again in person. To celebrate the three-month anniversary of this blog (kids grow up so fast, you guys), let’s meet up for happy hour on Wednesday, Aug. 31, at 6:30pm. Holler in comments if you’re coming (and drink preferences), and I’ll figure out a venue based on rough numbers.

I haven’t actually seen The Playboy Club (though I’ve got a request in to NBC for screeners), but it strikes me that Gloria Steinem’s call for a boycott of the show on the grounds that it romanticizes a place she found to be sexist and unglamorous is overblown. The network’s decision to sell the show as a parable of women’s empowerment also seems to be overstating the case — in part because I don’t think it’s necessary.

The very thing that’s interesting about the sexual revolution is that it’s contradictory, right? Getting to a place where your sexuality isn’t your father’s to withhold or give away, and where the way you dress and present yourself is governed by your preferences rather than by norms of what’s appropriate is an important first step. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be sexually harassed, or misinterpreted, or end up in a liberation movement where you’re told that your role is to provide sexual comfort for the men leading it. What’s interesting about the ’60s is the process people went through over and over again, whether they thought they’d escaped sexism, or racism, or homophobia, only to find that they hadn’t, and that they had to try in new and different ways to build a more perfect world.

It’s entirely possible both that the women of The Playboy Club thought that setting themselves up as sexual icons, and that they could be harassed and humiliated on the job. In fact, the first big plot arc of the show, in which Amber Heard accidentally kills a customer who tries to sexually assault her, looks like it’s pretty squarely situated in just that dilemma (even if the death itself is of the One Tree Hill Dog Ate My Heart Transplant variety):

And perhaps more to the point, I don’t think Steinem has to worry. This is a show that posits Eddie Cibrian as a poor man’s Jon Hamm. I’m not particularly worried that it’s going to garner a lot of viewers and critical acclaim and stick around for a long time.

Over at the League of Ordinary Gentleman, guest-poster Ryan B. thinks I’m being too hard on J.J. Abrams:

In defense of Abrams, he clearly wants to use Star Trek, a show that really is about what the future would be like if liberalism won and became the dominant ideology of humanity, to both portray the reality of same-sex love and advance the cause of gay relationships in a larger cultural sense. And he is struggling, in a way I think Rosenberg doesn’t give him credit for, to figure out how to make that work in a movie that has to be simultaneously a blockbuster, a work of art (for some definition of “art” – don’t interrogate this too much, please), and apparently now also a liberal clarion call. That’s hard!

The thing is, I don’t know that it is clear that Abrams is particularly engaged with Star Trek‘s progressive legacy on this or any other issue. Rather than being about exploration or governance, the plot of his 2009 movie is about security, and the security threat doesn’t actually say much about the nature of the universe. Nero isn’t the Borg, who want to impose a totalitarian vision of perfection on the universe: he’s just angry and destructive. Nero believes that the Romulans were sold out by the Federation, but Nero’s wrong — the destruction of his planet is an accident, rather than, as might have been more interesting, the result of Federation ineptness, callousness, or strategic coldness. I’m sort of entertained by the idea of Nero as an intergalactic Don Blankenship using the tools of mining for evil, but that’s a stretch beyond even the kind I’m comfortable with. The closest thing the movie has to politics is the idea that the Federation and the Academy are more welcoming of folks of mixed heritage than the Vulcan High Council is, but that’s pretty weak tea if we’re trying to imagine an awesome progressive society of the future.

And more to the point, as Zack pointed out in comments on my original post, you can include a gay character in a franchise without having the story be a story about that character’s gayness. If Abrams decided to give Sulu a sex life, he could do as little as include a funny throw-away reference to the boyfriend Sulu’s got back in port in the same vein as Sulu’s confession that by combat training he meant fencing lessons. It would shade in our vision of the future in a usefully progressive way. It wouldn’t actively disrupt continuity. And the inclusion of gay people in the background of a story who aren’t actively angsting over their sexuality isn’t tokenism. It is real, and it’s true, not just in the future, but today.

In the Recommendations for Alyssa Google Doc (which seriously is so much fun, and I’m percolating a bunch of post ideas in there already, so stop by!), someone asked if we could have a regular open discussion thread. I’ve always meant for this post to serve that function: no matter what I toss in here as grist for the mill, feel free to talk about whatever, leave questions or requests, and I’ll try to make sure I spend at least some time hanging out here during most lunch times.

-This sounds like a great, non-boring journalism movie.

-NPR reveals its reader-selected list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books.

-Woo cultural diplomacy!

-Battleship wants you to know that it’s thought out the concepts involved really seriously!

-A Coriolanus adaptation seems oddly appropriate for a moment of recession and poisonous populist tensions. Also, Jessica Chastain!

Lizz Winstead mentioned this when I talked to her on Tuesday, and it’s something I think about fairly frequently as well: what do you do when you come up against a movie or television show you’re not sure you’re going to like, but that you think you should watch to prove there’s an audience for that kind of movie or television show? My sense is that you take a deep breath and go as often as you can, or set your DVR to record things you don’t really intend to watch just so you can juice the numbers a bit. Sometimes, what feels like it might be a duty watch, turns out to be a delight, as was the case with Bridesmaids. Sometimes, it turns out to be 2 Broke Girls, which looks like it’ll be generally frustrating but with the occasional thing that is so funny and true that I get sucked back in all over again:

But it’s a risky strategy. Proving there’s a market for one thing won’t necessarily convince studios that there’s a market for things like it, but rather that there’s a rigidly defined market for that single thing, as has proved to be the case with the announcement that Lionsgate is giving Tyler Perry his own network. Perry is not exactly known for giving projects that might be better suited to other artists, like For Colored Girls, to other directors and writers, so it remains to be seen if he tries to write and program the entire network himself. We can only hope that it’s too much even for the famously productive studio head, and that he has to let other creators handle some shows, and put some new ideas out there.

Facebook’s commenting system appears to be finicky this morning—I think they might be pushing new code live—so if you have a comment get eaten, that’s why. Please be patient with us, and if something doesn’t show up, try posting it again in a few minutes.

There’s a lot of hysteria surrounding the announcement that Kenny Ortega, director of such notable projects as the High School Musical movies, is going to helm a remake of Dirty Dancing. There are complaints that you can’t mess with perfection (you can’t), or that you can’t replace Patrick Swayze (also true). But for me, the biggest problem is that any remake is likely to miss that the point of the movie isn’t the core romance — it’s about politics.

Irin Carmon, in what remains my favorite essay about the original movie and one of my favorite pieces of nostalgia criticism ever, explains that the greatness of the movie is in part that Baby “Can dance with the owner’s son and thaw a little when she learns he’s going freedom riding with the bus boys, then see how he treats Johnny. She can find out that the supposed prize, Yale Medical school and out-WASPing-the-WASPs Robbie, is also an Ayn Rand-reading cad whose life philosophy is, ‘Some people count, some people don’t.’ She sees this [and what happens when abortion isn't readily available], and she isn’t cowed, even if she has moments of doubt.”

Anyone who think Johnny and Baby’s affair is really going to last beyond the summer, or even optimistically, beyond her first of college, is fooling themselves, high on hormones and the giddiness of that final lift. And that’s part of what makes it a great romance — both Baby and Johnny are fully immersed it in, passionate without concern for the final shape of it. There’s no romantic comedy nagging about putting a ring on it, or need to put Jennifer Grey through a makeover session, to tear her down before she can be built back up. Baby is a great, but very human person, who grows into her adult greatness through an affair, through breaking the law to help someone secure an illegal abortion with serious consequences, through spending her summer working (even if her work is a kind of play) rather than just relaxing. Johnny is the mirror in which Baby comes to see herself as a whole person. It matters that her vision of herself and her clarity about it last, not that she and Johnny get married.

Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights is not a good movie, exactly, and it’s counts as one of a number of odd decisions that Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal made with their careers after Y tu mamá también. And even if it’s not entirely successful at engaging with them, the show has clear and defined politics. Instead of class in the Catskills, it’s capitalist imperialism in Cuba that’s supposed to keep the two characters apart. The Cuban character, of course, isn’t actually a revolutionary — he’s just related to one — just as the American may have all her pretty dresses paid for by her businessman father, but that doesn’t mean she’s signed on to big business’s agenda in Cuba. Interestingly, the movie’s drawn from a much more political script which was commissioned, killed, and repurposed years later to fit the Dirty Dancing format, which may explain why it has a coherent, if weak, political perspective. It would be interesting to see what the original movie would have been like, or what would have happened if the story involved the heroine developing not just pro-choice and good class politics, but politically and economically radical ones.

I’ll be curious to see if they even try to concoct a political scenario for the remake. But if they do, I hope someone remembers that this isn’t a story where Romeo and Juliet defy their stupid family feud because the other person is just too awesome to resist. This is a story where the Montagues and the Capulets have really and substantive differences, and Juliet sides with the Capulets on substance, not on hormones.

Peter King, America’s most successful attention-whoring congressman, is upset about the prospect that the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, in the course of briefing Kathryn Bigelow on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden for her upcoming movie about just that, may have revealed classified information. This is, of course, a deeply goofy concern. The Defense Department and intelligence agencies have a reputation for being extremely available to Hollywood, and presumably know how to brief filmmakers without damaging the national interest.

More to the point, if Hollywood was ever going to try to get something right, the assassination of the architect of the most devastating one-off attack on American soil and goader of America into two wars would be it. And Kathryn Bigelow, who has made movies about servicemen before, presumably has some interest in national security and the safety of the men and women who provide it for us. If King wants to get upset about a Navy SEALs movie, he might do better to focus on Act of Valor, in which the team had much greater access to actual SEAL teams who are themselves acting in the movie, and which is based on actual SEAL operations. The details of the bin Laden raid were always going to be public, but showcasing the details of other operations seems more likely to compromise security than presenting accurately a story that would have been revealed anyway.