I realized that it might seem that I’ve been advocating a couple of contradictory positions this week: that Bert and Ernie shouldn’t get married because the Sesame Workshop has stated definitively that neither character is gay and they are not in a relationship, and also that J.J. Abrams is acting with cowardice in throwing up barriers to adding a gay character to the Stark Trek universe to complement the franchise’s racial diversity. There’s a complicated web of issues here, all of which deserve careful consideration and respect: the rights of artists to define their own creation; the powerful desire of minority groups to see their experiences represented and validated in the culture that’s important to them; and the role of popular culture in normalizing non-white, non-heterosexual experiences and imagining how the future will be different from the past.

I should say up front that I think the folks who create characters have a right to determine the basic facts around them and not to have them reversed. This is why the Star Wars Holocron makes sense both as business decision and as narrative device: it simultaneously protects George Lucas’s rights to determine the basic facts about Luke, Leia, Han, and company while opening up other space for people to experiment and produces a grand narrative that, though it differs stylistically, can be read as a whole without being confusing or contested. The Sesame Workshop has said that Bert and Ernie are not gay, and I don’t think, however much we wish it were true, we have the right to contest that definitive laying down of continuity. We can rage against the tide as much as we like with fan fiction, but as consumers, we have to accept the limitations of the universe that are laid down for us. That said, if a creator leaves room for a character to be shaded in and expresses no particular discomfort with additional detail, I’m comfortable with character expansion. George Lucas may have created a fighter pilot named Wedge Antilles, but for all we knew, he could have been the gay son of Corellian glitterstim smugglers. Lucas left it to Michael A. Stackpole to fill in Wedge’s history, to give him an attraction to strong, intelligent women and the lost dream of opening up a fueling station with his dad. If there are no objections from Gene Roddenberry’s family to filling in Hikaru Sulu’s — or another sexually undefined character’s* — background and fleshing them out as gay or bisexual, I think that’s fine and consistent with respect for artist-defined continuity.

If there were objections, of course, then I think they should be respected, however unprogressive I think those wishes are. But I do think if a universe is being rebooted, or expanded beyond its original conceptions, or if it has a tradition of adding new characters, then it is entirely appropriate for folks who want to see themselves and their experiences represented in those remakes or expansions to advocate for that. Archie Comics’ introduction of Kevin Keller has been handled beautifully in this regard. He was introduced in a way that was consistent with some of the core themes and storylines of the universe — as an object of rivalry between Betty and Veronica — but that added dimension to those old themes in a way that reflected not just the desire of Archie Comics to be more progressive but the actual lived experiences of teenagers today.

Julian Sanchez argues persuasively that the assertion that the Muppets don’t have sexual orientations# is an embarrassing dodge, and I agree. But it might be best to have two new characters who are introduced as a couple from the start and who are entirely no-nonsense about it. And if children are meant to model the Muppets’ behavior, it might also useful for the audience to see the Muppets treat an adult human gay couple (and perhaps their children) with love and affection as we’d hope they would in real life. Similarly, it makes sense for an Archie comics character date someone of the same sex, or deal with having a crush on someone who isn’t attracted to them, because those are the issues that the target readers are dealing with. In Star Trek, it’s less a matter of dealing with the specific characters’ relationships than it is establishing and reaffirming the values of the universe the audience is buying into. It makes sense to push for more diversity in art for the sake of realism and pulling new audiences and merely for its own sake, but if that representation can also accomplish strategic specific goals, so much the better.

*One weird thing to me in these conversations: does no one assume that the characters we see in heterosexual relationships could be bisexual? The persistent invisibility of bisexual in our culture, pop and otherwise, is fascinating.

#Another group of people who are invisible and our society and culture? Asexual folks.

One of the reasons I think that there’s a case to be made that Deadwood is superior to the other television shows in its class is how committed it is to exploring the various ways that women fight for their self-determination. In The Wire, we have Kima and Snoop, but they’re fairly similar in their gender expression and the amount of status they hold in the organizations of which they’re a part. In Mad Men, the main female characters are fairly tight variations on a theme, our three graces being a non-working housewife, a wife in a low-status, gender-bounded job, and an unmarried woman pushing the boundaries of what jobs are appropriate for women. Skylar and Marie are tightly-wound opposite faces on a coin in Breaking Bad. Carmela Soprano is a fantastic, richly textured character, but her circumstances are not precisely relatable. None of this is to say that these other women are not important, and sometimes immortal, creations, but none of these shows have as broad a conception of womanhood as Deadwood.

The show’s done a beautiful job of bringing together three of its female main characters together in protection of Sofia Metz, the one survivor of the raid by road agents. Jane is her initial, rough-hewn protector, who may be a drunk, and drunker than usual due to Bill’s death, but is together enough to leave Sofia with Alma, who may be a laudanum addict, but at least has her own room rented up for the time being. And Trixie, who until now we’ve mostly seen as a victim of violence at her johns’ hands or at Al’s, joins Alma initially as part of Bill’s scheme, but decides to help Alma get clean and to take care of Sofia. The ties of gender and addiction are stronger than fear. “First I was afraid I was going to die,” she tells Alma about her withdrawal. “And then I was afraid I wouldn’t. And then one day I woke up free.”
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It’s always laughable when Republicans try to demonstrate how serious they are about cutting spending by going after the relatively minuscule budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But it’s also a reminder that what Republicans oppose isn’t all funding for the arts — it’s just funding for some kinds of projects.

Among the things included in the defense spending that until the debt ceiling deal was such a sacred cow? Support for a wide array of military groups and the United States Armed Forces School of Music, which essentially represents the direct purchase of art by the U.S. government. I’m sure there are good arguments to be made for the existence of these musical groups, including unit cohesion and service pride, preservation of musical traditions, and really awesome covers of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”:

But if you don’t think government should support the arts, it probably shouldn’t matter if the artists are servicemembers or starving.

Today in the Atlantic, because I have absolutely nothing left to say about Jersey Shore itself, I watched a bunch of the first spinoff of the show, the UK’s Geordie Shore, and wrote about what happens to the show’s formula when the cast is brought together along class lines instead of along fake ethnic ones:

England’s always had a fine-grained taxonomy of working-class sub-cultures. Geordies—a term for people from the Tyneside region of Northeast England—may not have always existed in their current form, but the regional nickname stretches at least all the way back to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and certainly was in current usage by 1793. The stereotype Geordie Shore exploits is, as MSN TV Editor Lorna Cooper puts it in an email, that “all Geordies are thick, drink brown ale, say ‘why-aye-man’, have women that look like brick houses.” Of course, this has driven Geordies who aren’t on TV crazy. Part of the problem, Cooper says, is that the show and its audience have conflated a regional stereotype with a class one: While “Geordie” refers to the many residents of a geographic area, the Geordie Shore stars are all working class people who engage in all sorts of hard-partying anti-social behavior. They’re considered chavs.

“Ordinary working class people abhor both the moniker and the association,” Cooper says. “For us, chavs are akin to a level of underclass we look down on; the type of people that go on The Jeremy Kyle Show (think a British equivalent of Maury) for DNA testing to discover who’s the father.”

…

The Geordie Shore crew doesn’t seem to have figured out how to live as cartoon characters as easily as their American predecessors. A Brit’s Veet addiction may be mildly amusing, but it’s nothing to the panic of a Guidette in Italy with only eight cans of bronzer to last her through Grand Tour, or the delights of Pauly D’s blowout. The Geordie Shore cast also has more traditional working-class occupations, whether they answer phones in call centers or lay tile, while the Jersey Shore cast members who worked at all were club promoters or DJs or fitness-center managers. In a sense, they’d been in professional training for their star turn, ready to define Guido-ness for an eager nation. The precise elements of Geordie culture, though, remain something of a mystery after one season.

I don’t write that much about Jersey Shore both because the problems with it are so glaringly obvious and so baked into the formula of the show that it’s not worth much critique, and because for all of that, it is wildly, wildly entertaining. The show is kind of this wonderfully, awfully pure test of the belief that folks ought to be able to do whatever they want for money, and of the absolute imperviousness of these people to shame. I don’t think Snooki is going to be famous in 10 years, but I also think she’s going to be essentially OK. And I think part of that is Jersey Shore‘s basis in faux-ethnic identity rather than class. The show’s a piece of postmodern performance art that doesn’t really reflect back on anyone. The outrage about it seems largely feigned. It won’t be totally humiliating to have been on it 10 years later because of the self-aware quality of the whole enterprise. But folks in the U.K. seem genuinely upset about the Geordies.

This post contains spoilers for the two episodes of Louie that aired on Aug. 11.

I should note that I tend to hold jokes made by liberals about evangelical Christians to a higher standard. If you’re going to venture into an arena of humor where it’s easy to take low roads and cheap shots and still be rewarded fairly handsomely for it by your audience. So it’s evidence of Louis C.K.’s genius that he took a scenario where he could have relentlessly mocked a character who enters the episode declaring that masturbation’s as terrible as Hurricane Katrina or Rwanda because “those events, while certainly serious, affected people in only one region or area,” and made the entire episode an extended joke on himself.

“You don’t know the darkness that you live in,” the anti-masturbation advocate tells Louis. “Oh, I know the darkness,” he says, and it goes from there. What follows is possibly the most hilarious and depressing masturbation fantasy ever put to film, and that definitely includes anything in the first American Pie movie, which for all that it’s become kind of ridiculous is actually great that first time out. In trying to get himself off to a memory of a hot girl in an elevator, only to find himself imagining an absurd scenario involving a shopping bag full of penises, and another occupant in the elevator who ends up telling him that “American women are very complicated.”
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-I’m not particularly excited for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I am excited for Trent Reznor’s soundtrack.

-George R.R. Costanza.

-Men are more valuable to TV networks than women.

-Someone needs to stage a sci-fi intervention at AMC.

-If you’re going to blow a lot of money on something silly, this looks like a reasonably enjoyable way to do it:

This post contains spoilers through the first 12 chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through chapter 16.

One thing that I struggle with in American Gods is that this is a story about mysteries that always seems to stop short of really expressing the strangeness and power of worshiping and being worshiped, of sacrifice and sacrificing and being sacrificed to. When Mr. Wednesday and Shadow visit Las Vegas, Gaiman tells us that “The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts.” The space between what people say they believe, and what they actually believe, is interesting, but Gaiman doesn’t really explain why that space exists, or what people get out of making that kind of sacrifice and treating its holiness as a kind of secret.

Similarly, we don’t really know what the entity at the heart of the casino gets out of that loss, those sacrifices. Wednesday promises him a drink that he describes to Shadow as “like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love.” It’s an OK metaphor, but not a sufficient one to really convey what it would be like to receive those small offerings on a regular basis. And while honey’s wonderful, it’s not the same as existence. The magnitude of the metaphor doesn’t match Wednesday’s petulance, which I think is one of the nicest moments in the novel at showing what happens to diminished deities: “What the hell else can I do? They don’t sacrifice rams or bulls to me,” Wednesday complains after Shadow objects to him shortchanging a waitress in San Francisco. “They don’t send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. Isn’t that fair?”
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I’ve been traveling a lot lately, so I’m playing through Portal much more slowly than I’d hoped, but as the levels have gotten harder and I’ve started negotiating around poison moats, I’ve figured out one of the things that kept me from playing games regularly for a long time: I find dying in-game incredibly stressful.

So far, nothing too terrible happens to Chell. If I screw up, I hit some brownish water, and I get a loading screen, and we start over again. But I’m invested enough in Chell, despite the fact that I am her and only rarely see her around corners and through portals, that I don’t have much sense of how she ended up at Aperture or why she — or me — has been left alive and alone. Thomas Bissell in his profile of video games voice actress Jennifer Hale in this week’s New Yorker (which I think is good, but feels somewhat truncated, and is behind the paywall) talks about how effective she makes Commander Shepard’s death seem in Mass Effect, and the incentive that is to keep playing—you don’t want to leave her there, or leave on that note. My anxiety is about getting there in the first place: I get frozen up by the possibility of harm coming to my character.

I don’t know if there’s anything to this, or just my own particular nervousness. But for all the overblown talk of what video games do or don’t make us comfortable doing, I’m surprised that there isn’t more conversation about what dying in game makes us feel about our own deaths.

This post contains spoilers through the August 11 episode of Burn Notice.

I’m getting to the point with Burn Notice, like with House, where I don’t really care about the case of the week, so I want to take this week to talk about my favorite character on the show as it exists now: Fiona. Fiona strikes me as an interesting — and underdiscussed — action heroine. Sure, she fits some of the stereotypes that people criticize in the genre. She dresses beautifully, uses her sex appeal on targets, and is preternaturally talented. But she can also take damage in the field — she gets shot, and recovers — and she’s flawed in reasonable and interesting ways.

Among them, she’s impulsive, and has a genuine appetite for destruction. “A timer attached to a depth finder,” she sighs, examining the bomb that was meant to take out Michael. “I’m kind of jealous I didn’t think of it myself.” She doesn’t fit lady-like stereotypes of only using violence when it’s absolutely necessary. She’s got an appreciation for the craft of violence, and more restrained people like Pearce envy it in her. “As an employee of the U.S. government, I’m probably not supposed to say this, but wow,” Pearce tells Fiona when they meet, a meeting that’s already giving Fiona anxiety given how pretty Pearce is. For most of her relationship with Michael, Fiona’s had a way to channel those appetites in a way that’s in line with Michael’s interests. But it would be interesting to see what happens when they reach an actual impasse. Michael’s already pushed Fiona by having overall goals that differ from hers. If their conceptions of justice diverge, they’re in real trouble.

And there’s the long-term question of what happens if Michael does get fully reinstated. Does Fiona settle down and become a well-behaved CIA wife? Do they split up? We’ve seen Fiona consider alternatives to Michael, Jesse in particular. But with Armand, we see a guy who values Fiona for her darkness. “After all the effort you put to get to Miami, I expected something more,” Armand asks Fiona when he arrives at the loft she shares with Michael bearing fancy guns in lieu of flowers. “Are you happy? Was it worth it? To come here and live with an absentee boyfriend?” He’s not the only one — Michael’s mother thinks Michael needs to take Fiona out more.

And when he does, their dinner turns poisonous, and their fight is interrupted, unresolved, by the arrival of Michael’s mother and her new boyfriend Ben. “To supportive partners,” Michael toasts. But if he’s going to reduce Fiona to that, he might as well give her up. And he might not like the cost if Fiona demands equal support, no matter what her goals are, in return.