I’m impressed that in this first season of Deadwood, the show’s managed to dedicate an emotionally significant moment or storyline to every character we’ve seen on-screen. In particular, I appreciated the way these last two episodes made Jewel a person, rather than a vehicle for the expression of Trixie’s nurturing nature or Al’s private inner goodness.

There are an amazing number of shots of the muck that constitutes Deadwood’s streets in this first season. People have it splashed on their nice dresses, are beaten to the point of brain damage in it, and jump into it after being threatened with their lives. Jewel may be the only person to fall in it, calmly get up, and keep going. There’s a serenity to her. “I came here on my own Doc,” she tells the physician, who is reluctant to listen to her ideas for a corrective brace. “I got something I want to show you.” “That boy was goddamn able-bodied before he got his leg shot-up,” Doc warns her, but he is excited in spite of himself, even prying the broom out of her fingers when the brace arrives as she jokes “You’ll have to remove it from my clutches.” The season ends with the two of them dancing, Jewel telling the Doc to think of himself as graceful as a woodland creature.

And that isn’t the only role Doc plays in the conclusion of this stage in Deadwood’s development. There’s something poignant about the divine sanctification of one Civil War veteran’s mercy killing in answer to another veteran’s prayers. Jewel’s book breaks something in the doctor as the reverend enters the final stage of his illness, leaving him crying in his office “What conceivable godly use is this protracted suffering to you? What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?” Al, for once, is the answer to someone’s prayers.

And even as Al commits another murder in his own interest, he also finally establishes legitimate law in Deadwood. After a long battle, Seth Bullock succumbs to the role of sheriff, in part because of his own impatience with the man who does take the role, and in part because he’s also succumbed to Alma’s charms. The latter event takes place upon the arrival of Alma’s scum-like father in town. The man starts out by telling his daughter “I always thought it was going to end like this, button. A rooming house in a mining camp in Indian territory, you caring for a Norwegian foundling and operating a bonanza gold claim.” Then, he tries to pimp her out to Seth even though he’s married, telling him “I’ve learned that no matter what people say or how civil they may seem, their passions rule.” And finally, he reveals to Alma that he’s racked up massive debts on the credit that her marriage opened up to him, threatening her with perpetual domination. Seth responds by removing a number of his teeth, taking Alma to bed, and putting his badge back on for the first time. “I know where it goes,” he tells Al. And he knows how to conduct a proper hanging, too. Seth may not have ended up with the role he wanted, but he’s found a home he wants to protect.

The awesome Todd VanDerWerff and his wife Libby Hill asked me and Myles McNutt to come on their TV on the Internet podcast to talk about summer TV surprises. Along the way, we discussed spoiler culture, The Hour, set up an Anchorman-like fight between rival entertainment publications, and figured out who John Galt is. Check it out.

Apparently, it’s romance day on the blog, because Adam Serwer has some interesting thoughts on Manic Pixie Dream Girls as ghostly projections of movie writers:

My theory is that the MPDG is a fantasy molded from the clay of an infinite number of adolescent rejections from the women of their youth. Precisely because the relationship never reaches the stage of genuine intimacy, the MPDG remains a two-dimensional projection of the desires of a guy who is progressive enough in gender matters to want a woman who is “interesting,” but not one that has an internal life of her own beyond the superficial qualities that made her “cool” and “not like other girls” to begin with.

Key to the MPDG is that the concept reflects the gender-based hostility of the nice guy. She frequently suffers from a form of (mental) illness, because this both proves that she needs the nice guy and shows why he has such a hard time acquiring her. Even if she’s not sick in some way, she is defined by some kind of glaring emotional vulnerability that makes her, in an abstract sense, a damsel in distress who needs rescue. Under the circumstances, the nice guy’s qualities become as heroic as he imagines them to be. She often suffers cinematically, because she refuses — like the unattainable women of the nice guy’s imagination — to recognize just how good for her he is.

He and I were talking about this a little bit a couple of days ago, and while I think it’s pretty clear why MPDGs are a fantasy for men, I also think the archetype has some utility for women. After decades of makeover scenes and unrealistic physical and behavioral expectations, there’s something kind of appealing about being told that the fantasy isn’t the Herve Leger bandage dress and the body that goes with it, it’s the quirky cardigan; that it’s not about having to fix yourself, it’s about someone else has to do the transformative work and all you have to do is help. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good trade, and I don’t actually think it makes for fully fleshed-out characters or exceptionally interesting movies, but I understand why it might feel worth it.

I’m not quite ready to get hysterical about this study that shows that Americans value fame and other “individualistic” values more than they did in 1967, linking those values to popular television shows:

As predicted, fame, financial success, and other individualistic values, notably achievement, rose in importance across the decades. Fame, the main focus of the study, made the most dramatic shift. Table 4 shows that fame rose from the bottom of the value rankings in 1967 (number 15 out of 16) to the top value in 2007. Financial success also rose in importance, as predicted; it was ranked 12th in 1967, rising to fifth in 2007. Two other individualisitic values showed a major increase in relative importance: Achievement rose from tenth place to second place across the decades, while physical fitness moved from sixteenth place to ninth place. In contrast, communitarian values, as predicted, declined in relative importance over time. Three communitarian values – community feeling, tradition, and benevolence – showed sharp declines in relative importance from 1967 to 2007 (Table 4). Community feeling started out as the top-ranked value in 1967 and fell to number 11. Tradition was ranked fourth in 1967 and fell to 15th place in 2007. Benevolence went from second place to 12th place across the decades. Of all the values assessed, these three showed the largest decline in relative importance from 1967 to 2007.

First, I’m not going to declare the decline of Western civilization on the strength of 60 people’s responses to a questionnaire. But more importantly, there are a lot of alternate explanations for those shifts in values. If you don’t think Social Security’s going to be around, being financially successful so you can be secure later matters. Achievement is so broadly defined as to be nebulous, but pressure to say, go to a good college is obviously up substantially from factors other than entertainment. Standards of physical fitness and what counts as an ideal body have certainly changed, as has our understanding of health and exercise, something our popular culture reflects and magnifies but isn’t solely responsible for.

And finally, it makes sense that fame would be more desirable as it seems more accessible. American Idol‘s popularity is part and parcel of a culture where you can become instantly extremely popular by hitting the fickle sweet spot of the viewing public (it’s also the result of a dramatically fragmented television viewership, so it’s worth looking at a bunch of other shows alongside it, the intensity of viewers’ attachment, etc.). I like the idea of having a luxury yacht, but that doesn’t mean that I aspire it.

Still, I do think there’s something interesting about the shift from television (and other popular culture) where viewers relate to the characters to television where viewers aspire to be like the characters. I remain hard-pressed to identify what caused the shift or what programming was the tipping point — the rise of celebrity reality TV shows seems like a possible, but not totally convincing moment — but there is a difference.

The bridge is yours.

-Not excited about about this autobiography, but pretty excited for this one.

-Reality stars don’t count as stars, apparently.

-No, Ashton Kutcher’s character on Two and a Half Men won’t make any sense.

-Hack rap.

-Some folks can, apparently, walk away from Hollywood money.

Reading Chloe Angyal’s lessons from a summer’s-worth of romantic comedies, I was particularly struck by this:

This is surely one of the most bizarre lessons Hollywood rom coms teaches us about sex: You can only be open about your sexual desires with someone if you’re not dating them. In Friends With Benefits, Jamie and Dylan are delighted by the fact that they can speak freely about their wants and needs—like where they do and don’t like to be touched—because, it’s implied, they could never be that open with a significant other. Jamie is relieved that she doesn’t have to limit sex to a location with good lighting, the way she would with someone she was dating. In other words, Hollywood still wants us to think that honesty about sex is impossible in romantic relationships. When you’re having sex with a friend, you don’t have to fake orgasms, withhold constructive criticism of sexual technique for fear of offending your lover, or camouflage your repulsive body with flattering lighting. When you’re having sex with a romantic partner, however, those things are par for the course.

However much we may say the evangelical myth that if you wait to have sex until you get married the sex’ll be better is precisely that, a myth, we really do buy into a modified version of it in our pop culture when we assume that sex will automatically be awesome if you have it with someone you’re in love with because of…spontaneous synchronicity, or something like that. In The 40 Year Old Virgin, Andy may be quick to the finish line when he finally consummates his marriage, but when they have sex a second time, it’s implied to be a tantric, transcendent experience. You don’t need practice to make perfect, just true love.

The movie’s sexual politics aren’t perfect, but the scene in Chasing Amy where Alyssa*, Banky, and Holden talk about what it’s like to sleep with someone who won’t give you feedback and directions may be the most honest romantic comedy scene ever filmed:

Maybe the idea of other movies is that the quest for love is so overwhelming and titanically difficult that it only seems fair that sex should come easy. But that’s not true, and even if characters sleep together before they’re married, the romantic comedy promise that falling into bed is as easy as falling out of it is just another myth, and one that’s rooted in some considerably conservative assumptions.

*Probably the first significant movie with a character with my name. Came out when I was 13. I had some cognitive dissonance.

Frank Stasio was kind enough to have me on his WUNC show yesterday to talk about divorce in pop culture. You can hear the full audio of the show here. But in prepping for it (and we talk about this a bit on the program), I realize there’s a weird gendered dichotomy to how divorce appears on television. For women, the damage happens before the divorce, while they’re still married, and divorce is an opportunity for renewal. But for men, the damage comes afterward, as they try to recover from the failures of their marriages.

In Happily Divorced, as Heather Havrilesky wrote earlier this summer, Fran Drescher’s amicably divorced from her gay husband, a situation in which the failure of her marriage is something she can’t possibly be responsible for. In The Starter Wife, Debra Messing obviously had been through hell at the end of her marriage, but her stylish single life made divorce look pretty good. The Real Housewives may be fooling themselves, but whichever unlucky woman has her marriage fall apart on-screen generally appears ready to rock and roll once she’s kicked out her husband or signed the papers.

By contrast, in Louie, Louis C.K. can’t find a new girlfriend, his daughters don’t want to stay at his apartment, and when he tries to be the cool parent, he gets them scared on Halloween. This season on Entourage, it seems like Ari can’t do anything right, including finding a way to spend time with his kids. This fall on Free Agents, Hank Azaria will attempt to get over his divorce by sleeping with a coworker who doesn’t really want to be with him.

There are exceptions, of course. On Modern Family, Jay seems pretty happily divorced and remarried to Glorida, and his ex-wife is supposed to be a bit of a mess because she still hasn’t gotten over their split. And in Good Christian Belles, Leslie Bibb’s divorce looks like it’ll affect the reception she gets when she returns to Dallas, giving all the people she tormented back in the day an excuse to judge her:

But it is interesting for all we lionize men on the prowl before they’re married, but if they get married and their marriages break up, we think of men as totally adrift.

My sense is that the reason so many people are so shocked and upset about the layoffs that claimed Jack Shafer, Tim Noah, Juliet Lapidos, and June Thomas’ jobs at Slate yesterday is not just that those journalists are beloved (and while I don’t agree with everything Lapidos wrote, I think her writing on friendships between men and women is significant and shouldn’t be forgotten). But I wonder if some of the shock comes from the fact that Noah and Shafer in particular were institutions, independent of Slate, and so the idea that Slate can fire them feels like a shock. There’s this idea in the age of new media that if you write a column or a blog under your own name, or if your brand is honed to a particular fineness, that you can never really be fired, you can just take your brand and your product somewhere else with you. It’s easy to think of Andrew Sullivan getting fired as a magazine editor, because it happened. It’s nigh-impossible to imagine someone firing Andrew and the apparatus he’d built up around him. I hope and believe that Shafer, Noah, Lapidos, and Thomas will end up fine, but their firings are significant not just for who they are, but for how it makes people feel about the power of brand and reputation in the age of Internet journalism.