After the delights of its tussle over video games and what fiction is appropriate for children, I’m hoping that the Supreme Court will take a case that NBCUniversal has recently appealed to it, regarding idea-stealing in Hollywood if only so I can read the decision. But there are, of course, implications beyond my simple enjoyment As Eriq Gardner explains:

What makes the Ghost Hunters case possibly different is that the claims may go beyond straight copyright infringement with the easier-to-prove allegation that NBCU breached an implied contract. In essence, that would mean that when a screenplay is submitted and accepted for review, as is alleged here, there’s an expectation that if the material is later used, the writer will get something. We say possibly because that’s what’s subject to dispute. Is a stolen idea allegation a contract breach or a disguised copyright infringement claim? If it’s the latter, then federal copyright law usurps state contract law and aggrieved writers are out of luck. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has something called the “extra element” test to sniff out the difference. In the Ghost Hunters case, the appeals circuit overturned a prior decision by saying there doesn’t need to be an explicit promise of payment; Even an implied promise of partnership could qualify as an “extra element” transforming a copyright claim into a contract claim.

So, for the Hollywood writers in the audience (and lawyers, too), this is what I’m curious about. If the Supreme Court sides with Larry Montz and Daena Smoller, the people who claim their idea for a paranormal investigator show was stolen by SyFy, what does it do for the studios’ processes? Does this mean that more new writers with good ideas will get in the door? Require more original story ideas in-house? Lead to new and clearer contract terms? Create a low-value market for ideas that haven’t been turned into actual shows but that studios will want to lock up ownership of? Nothing? I’m curious.

I was lucky enough to make it to one of the last performances of the Sydney Theater Company’s production of Uncle Vanya at the Kennedy Center mid-hurricane this weekend, which was just an utter delight. I’ve spent dozens of hours watching Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett on-screen, but I had no idea that they were such gifted physical comedians. Weaving falls out a window and does Cossack dances in a tipsy exuberance like nobody’s business, and I’d love to see Blanchett play drunk and funny again. It’s a privilege to have seen them live and in person (ditto for Richard Roxburgh, who deserves to be known here for things other than wearing a pervy moustache and being a creep in Moulin Rouge).

I haven’t seen a lot of Chekov plays, so it struck me just how Russian the script was, which, yeah, obviously, but it still made me reflect on the way I watch things. I’m used to heavily interpreting how characters treat their servants, and to be suspicious of the idea that long-term retainers are actually treated as part of a family, something that Uncle Vanya obviously takes completely for granted without any particular critique. Similarly, it’s hard to watch the play and not hear an imminent serf revolt both in the references to the peasants and in the fact that the family’s spent the entire summer idle, collectively captive to Yelena’s charms. Without being terribly specific, the play is simultaneously tremendously a product of its times and general enough to offer a case study in comedy, tragedy, and general human misunderstanding. I always feel conflicted with this kind of thing: do I try to turn off the part of my brain that’s rummaging through context and just watch the play? Will I learn more about Russia by sinking into the myopia and desperation of the moment without the added knowledge of what’s thundering towards these characters just a few decades down the line?

Adam Serwer closes out his blog on a very smart culture note, musing over why comic book companies are skittish about married superheroes:

The decision to eliminate their marriages, I think, has a great deal to do with the level of vicarious aspiration involved in comic-book fandom. An essential part of the fun is being able to imagine yourself having Superpowers. There’s a reason the X-Men remains such a blockbuster property–giving superpowers to social pariahs makes the fantasy even more believable, because after all, most comic book geeks–including myself–have a vivid sense of what it’s like to be picked on.

A marriage then, adds an additional hurdle to the fantasy, and not just because it makes the character seem older. I suspect much of the backlash from white geeks to the new Blatino Ultimate Spider-Man has to do with assumptions about blackness being “cool,” and the fear that the new Ultimate Spider-Man will require more suspension of disbelief than they can muster…Divorce by reality altering retcons then serve a secondary purpose beyond making these characters more relatable. They preserve the idealized standard of monogamous heterosexual relationships (no infidelity, no falling out of love, no messy divorce) while giving the heroes access to their female supporting characters and their impossible, pornstar-like bodies. Because what’s the point of being a cool, superpowered social outcast if you can’t use it to get girls?

That strikes me as a core conflict at the heart of male fantasies, and an emerging conflict in some female fantasies. Marriage is desirable, but also the source of pretty profound fears about whether someone will care to stick with you until death do you part. Pulling girls (or guys) lowers the stakes to the level of whether someone will have you until breakfast the next morning, but it doesn’t actually satisfy that long-term goal of settling down.

Most of our romantic comedies succeed by reconciling these disparate impulses: we meet a hound, usually of the male variety, towards the end of his long period of carousing and womanizing, and follow him through the process of finding The Woman. One of the things Sex and the City does that it does not get nearly enough credit for is to have Samantha, the main character with the most active sex life, go through this process, settle down in a monogamous relationship at the end of the series, and then to have her walk away from that relationship in the movie to return to the single life. The reason these stories work is that they generally last from 90 minutes to a decade; the timing feels sort of realistic, and you don’t get tired of the characters either as serial or as happy couples. Superhero stories, by contrast, last for decades. Over that span of time, serial dating or one-night stands can feel like arrested development, while that many years of happy marriage might seem dull, or worse, smug to core audiences. Having superheroes get stuck in terrible marriages might be in keeping with the trend of putting people with powers through the perpetual wringer, but that might be a bit too on the nose. Better to get overwhelmed by world-consuming power than go through the agonies of martial stultification and divorce. At least that’s a way to go out in a blaze.

I’ve written a great deal lately about the way that nerds can be less than progressive, whether by failing to establish anti-harassment policies and ethos at conventions or by relying on continuity and fidelity to text as a way to disguise an antipathy to diversity. But if we want the nerdosphere to be a more progressive place, I think it’s important to mount critiques that will actually be effective, rather than ones that can make the critics feel self-righteous, which is why I’m so dismayed by Sady Doyle’s condescending and willfully misleading critique of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and the people who read it.

First, there’s the explicit statement that Sady thinks nerds are inherently inflexible morons incapable of accepting criticism or thinking deeply about the material they love with an eye towards its political flaws:

Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you! So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.

Shockingly enough, saying things like this doesn’t actually make you cool. It makes you another iteration of the kind of person who insists that feminists like, say, me or Sady Doyle are shrewish harpies incapable of nuance or conversation. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds in a way that they’re not when they’re deployed by misogynists against feminists.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of True Blood, “Burning Down the House.”

If True Blood had no pretensions to political meaningfulness, it might be possible to enjoy it as a dopey, campy soap opera, to ignore some of the larger plausibility gaps (like the fact that Sookie just never got around to figuring out her faerie abilities since the writers appear to have forgotten about them) in favor of the pretty people. The problem is that Alan Ball appears to have some ambitions for the show. True Blood was, at one point, a decent little metaphor for gay rights and broader sexual liberation. But by shifting it into a riff on the African-American Civil Rights movement, the show’s gotten disastrous in a way that ought to cast doubt on the accepted narrative that Ball is an important and clear-thinking artist.

It’s one thing to do a story featuring several black characters, to have good intentions about it, and to handle it badly out of a lack of ability or sensibility. It’s entirely another to badly misappropriate the Civil Rights movement in the service of a shallow metaphor. If I thought last week’s episode of True Blood, in which two literally Magical Negroes worked together to bring peace to a white family, I might even be more offended by the crassness of the conversation between Bill and Nan this week after the massacre at the tolerance festival. “Remember the civil rights movement. Sweeping social change inevitably accompanied by violence and the appearance of chaos, yadda yadda,” Nan declares. “That’s the spin we’ll give it.” But Bill isn’t having any of it. “We are going after the Necromancer and we are taking her out,” he shoots back, pulling a weak white man’s ghost of Malcolm. “By any means necessary.”

There is a really important story, or stories, to be told about the way that movements have learned from each other, and the ways that the gay civil rights movement has failed to learn from the black civil rights movement — and the ways it couldn’t have replicated that movement. A story that was more tightly focused on Nan Flanagan and her efforts to build vampire narratives, networks, and allies, might be a way to explore that dynamic, which is an important one for American politics. Even a narrower focus on the witch-vampire storyline that took a broader look at anti-vampire sentiment and splits within the vampire community might be a powerful way to explore the tension in civil rights movements between separatists and assimilationists, to illustrate the broad-based roots of events like Jason and Jessica’s failed tryst, which leaves her walking away declaring, “I am not going to glamour you just because you don’t want to feel guilty. What about my guilt? Who’s going to make me forget? Fucking humans. I’m going to go find someone to eat.”

There is a way to make this metaphor work. This is not a function of vampires being tapped out as a topic. It’s a function of carelessness and lack of imagination, of blood and guts and sex trying to stand in for racial and sexual sensitivity. And it’s something that the folks involved ought to be embarrassed about.

The bridge is yours.

-I really hope George Lucas doesn’t decide to be a jerk and shut down a proposed Death Star PR series.

-I hated The Help, but Viola Davis is definitely remarkable in it.

-I will watch anything Katee Sackhoff is in.

-Louis C.K.: predictably smart about what winning an Emmy would do for him and FX.

-The more the adaptation of The Hunger Games emphasizes its critique of reality television, the happier I will be:

I watched the first three episodes of MTV’s new teen show Awkward. last week, and it struck me that teen comedies do an astonishing amount to undermine our faith in public educators. The show follows the adventures of a girl named Jenna who, after sleeping with a popular boy while they’re both summer camp counselors, returns to school with a broken arm, an embarrassing cast, and a rumor that she tried to kill herself, but manages to parlay those deficits into a kind of halfway popularity. I like that the show goes beyond the increasingly baroque descriptions of cliques that have become a standard part of any teen comedy and recognizes that there are people who drift between groups and nerds who get cool-kid passes.

But it also features what has to be the most wildly malfeasant guidance counselor ever to appear on television, a woman so desperate that keep Jenna coming into her office that she insists that there must be something her charge feels bad about “Course load? Your body? Not even your big teeth? What about your breasts?” showing her a cell-phone picture of Jenna that some mean girls snapped in a locker room, totally missing that it could count as child porn. For all the use she is to Jenna, and for all she wants the approval of the miserably vicious cheerleader who’s targeted Jenna, the counselor might as well not exist.

The silly guidance counselor has been a trope since Allison Janney’s great comic turn in 10 Things I Hate About You:

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that teenagers can solve their own problems. But there is something odd about the idea that guidance counselors aren’t just squares, they’re actively incompetent and undermining. We might overpathologize kids these days, but it’s not totally crazy to think that it’s useful for kids to have an impartial, non-parental adult to talk to about their issues.

For this poll, I took the five books that didn’t win but that got the most votes other than American Gods, figuring those seemed to have strong constituencies. I should note that, because however much I love you all, this is not a cheerocracy, I excluded Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on the grounds that while you could do some interesting stuff with analysis of academia and professional societies, I think there just isn’t enough that I feel I can draw enough out of the novel that fits the overall mission of the blog. So, as with the last time, voting is open until noon on Thursday and I’ll announce our new choice and what we’ll read for next week on Friday:

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of Breaking Bad, “Problem Dog.”

One of the major themes of this season has been Walt, Jesse, and Hank’s struggles for, or with, visibility, even as they run from, or to, or hunt a man who balances a visible self and an invisible one with an ease none of them can muster.

Today, Walt makes another play for visibility with a child act of automotive destruction. After Skylar carefully negotiates the return of Walter Junior’s car for $800 in restocking fees, noting that “the law says they don’t have to take it back at all,” Walt throws a temper tantrum, does donuts with the car, and sets it on fire. When he calls a cab, he tells the dispatcher, “I’m sure he’ll see me.” At this point, Walt seems not to care what he’s seen for. It’s no longer a matter of establishing his genius, or his menace. He’d rather spend $52,000 on a bratty primal scream that gets him noticed than $800 on an act of prudence that lets him continue living as if he’s normal, invisible.

Skylar’s certainly had her realizations about her husband over the past few episodes, whether she’s finding out that he sees himself as a kingpin to figuring out tonight that his income is so large as to be unlaunderable. But I’m wondering if she understands that about Walt, that his need to be recognized is so strongly in conflict with her need to be normal that he will destroy her and himself to achieve it. It’s easy to understand that Walt might want to be recognized as a prodigy of some kind, whether good or evil, but that he just wants to be seen even if it’s to go out in a blaze, is wonderfully strange and particular. We’ve seen Skylar make all sorts of compromises, but I want to know what will spur her to decisive action. The tipping point is as interesting to me at this point as what she does once she reaches it.
Read more