Robert Farley suggested I weigh in on the Great Satan’s Girlfriend controversy, so over the weekend I spent a little bit of time poking around the foreign policy and milblog community where the buzz has been hottest. For the uninitiated, Great Satan’s Girlfriend is a blog about foreign policy, diplomacy, and military issues, ostensibly written by a woman named Courtney Messerschmidt, who illustrates her posts with images of scantily-dressed women and pop stars like Avril Lavigne. The upset comes partially from female commentators on those issues who feel that Messerschmidt’s schtick made it harder for other women in the field to be taken seriously. And most recently, it comes from the fact that Courtney turns out not to be a real person, but of four, two of whom are men, one of whom is the “brains behind the thing.” Bloggers like Starbuck at Wings Over Iraq have defended the project on the grounds that the product was useful no matter the source, while Carl Prine and Thomas Ricks (both of whom have published pieces by the collective in their spaces) have said they think it’s a brilliant bit of performance art.

I can’t really rate the quality of the collective’s thinking, though describing the disposal of Osama bin Laden’s body as “in a fun, friendly ‘forget you’ way—hauled off the body as booty and chucked it overboard from an American aircraft carrier (sovereign American turf—no less) as shark bait,” feels like a deliberately light reading of events with both solemn and dark overtones, but that’s not the point. What’s interesting to me is the ways in which reminds me of the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax, another case of a man taking on a woman’s identity to attract a readership for their commentary and observations on international events. Gay Girl in Damascus was arguably more damaging — the author wasn’t in Syria, and deliberately suggested the character was in danger because of her sexual orientation to garner sympathy. Great Satan’s Girlfriend apparently seemed like a performance rather than a reality to many readers even before the collective was unmasked, and looks (from my reading) like it was mostly reporting opinions rather than faked experiences. In addition, a Courtney was actually involved in the project, so it’s not solely a man pretending to be a woman.

Still, there’s something fascinating to me about men’s desires to take on minority status, whether it’s to be a rarer commodity in a male-dominated field as with Great Satan’s Girlfriend, or to exploit the solidarity of the vulnerable for fun, profit, and recognition as with Gay Girl in Damascus. It speaks to a blindness some men have to their own privilege, a resentful sense that attention to diversity means transferring unwarranted privilege to women, gay people, people of color, etc. And there’s something quite strange about trying to get a piece of that so-called advantage through the practice of non-consensual fiction. It’s not an impulse I particularly get, and in neither case do I think the results were wildly compelling on an artistic level. Instead, they were mawkish in the case of Gay Girl in Damascus and sort of overheated and exhausting in the case of Great Satan’s Girlfriend (at least to this outsider, who may not fully appreciate the way the blog riffs on existing military and diplomatic commentary). I’m all for men trying to get more sensitively and thoughtfully in women’s heads when they write fiction. But I’d sort of like to know they’re men when they’re writing so I can assess for myself how well they’re performing that experiment.

We’re done with this season of True Blood. Next week, we’ll be done with this season of Breaking Bad. So what do you want me to recap? Leave nominations for shows old and new (and I’ll be writing looks at about a dozen of the new shows the day after they air) in the comments, and I’ll try to come up with a workable schedule by the end of the week. I’ll be more inclined to recap shows that have strong support — I feel like I ended up recapping some shows this summer that folks really didn’t have that much to discuss — so be sure to second other people’s nominations if you want to see them make it in the final roster.

This trailer for Miss Bala makes the movie look pretty good, and also helps me put my finger on another thing that irritated me about Colombiana that I couldn’t articulate at the time:

Colombiana, despite ostensibly being a drug war movie, has absolutely nothing new to say about the relationship of American governmental organizations to drug trafficking, and nothing at all to say about the roles of cartels in day-to-day life in the countries where they operate. Miss Bala, by contrast, is set in Tijuana, and appears to have some sense (even if it is not journalism) of what it’s like to be in a place where the integrity of governmental organizations is not assured.

William Finnegan’s done amazing reporting for the New Yorker over the last couple of years in particular about things like the efforts to reclaim control of and reform Tijuana’s police force (its radio frequencies were hijacked by narcotraficantes, among other things) and by extension, the city’s streets; and the infiltration of cartels into a wide range of aspects of life and institutions, both in government and business, in Michoacán, and I’ve always wondered why we don’t have more good action movies that reflect and explore that reality, or more movies about the state of Mexico at all. The movies Mexico’s sent to the Academy Awards to compete in the Foreign Language Film category in recent year have a tendency to be either personal stories, or set in Spain: Silent Light and El crimen del padre Amaro fall into the first category; Biutiful, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Aro Tolbukhin; Al otro lado is the only one of these movies to address immigration. I’m not saying Mexican filmmakers have to make movies about the state of Mexican society, or that Mexico is obligated to put such movies in Oscar contention, but I do think it would be good for Americans to see movies that give them a sense of what’s going on one country over.

If our war on terror is abstract, Mexico’s war on drugs is dreadfully concrete, and much closer to our borders than our fights in Iraq and Afghanistan: between 2006 and 2010, it killed 23,000 people. Our movies about why people might want to come here and why we should let them haven’t done particularly well recently. Chris Weitz may be pushing his immigration movie A Better Life hard for Academy Awards contention, but it only made $1.8 million at the box office. Spanglish‘s $42 million domestic gross in 2004 almost certainly had more to do with Adam Sandler’s presence in the movie than any interest in the heartwarming immigration story. If filmmakers want Americans to be sympathetic to immigrants to the United States, illegal and otherwise, maybe they need to tell more stories about what people are coming from, rather than what they’re coming to.

I looked through the history of African-American Academy Awards hosts for The Loop21 and concluded that as long as Eddie Murphy doesn’t emulate Whoopi Goldberg’s plethora of imitations and sticks to Richard Pryor and Sammy Davis Jr. instead, he should do just fine:

The Academy Awards, which have not been exceptionally progressive when it comes to recognizing the work of black actors and directors, had an animated duck host the Oscars before they tapped an African-American emcee.

Donald Duck co-hosted the Academy Awards as part of a crew that included Bob Hope in 1958, but it wasn’t until 1972 that Sammy Davis, Jr. took the stage with Helen Hayes, Alan King, and Jack Lemmon. Diana Ross followed him in 1974, again as part of a group, and Davis reprised his role in a group the next year. Richard Pryor hosted with Warren Beatty, Ellen Burstyn, and Jane Fonda in 1977 and again as part of an ensemble in 1983. Whoopi Goldberg became the first African-American to handle the hosting duties on her own in 1994, a role she’d repeat in 1996, 1999, and 2002. And Chris Rock was the last black host to run the show, in 2005….If Murphy wants to remind the audience that despite flops like Norbit, he belongs among their number, he might do well to follow in Davis’ footsteps and draw on the skills that bolstered his Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls and sing.

I don’t think, as I know some folks do, that Murphy’s being set up to fail, that he’ll be asked to be edgy when the inevitable reaction of a bunch of privileged white actors to a politicized routine by a black man will be to take offense. Instead, I think Murphy has all the tools to be a fantastic host, but that he needs to make sure to put together a performance that doesn’t remind the audiences in the theater and at home that he’s used those tools in pure pursuit of money far more often (at least in recent years) that he’s applied them to the cause of art. His race will be a factor in how Murphy’s received, but so will the sense of how much he actually cares about movie greatness.

This post contains spoilers through the fourth season finale of True Blood. And lots of rage.

I should talk about the events of the season finale of True Blood, but before I do, I think it’s important to discuss something that didn’t happen. The most important — and most emotionally grounded — event that began this season was the brutal and repeated physical and sexual assault of Jason Stackhouse by the female werepanthers of Hotshot. The assaults themselves were tremendously uncomfortable to watch in a way I thought was powerful. The women involved, who are genetically and by means of acculturation effectively part of a patriarchal cult, were almost uniformly unaware that they were committing assault, with the exception of a young panther who helped him escape. The assault was set up to provide an interesting and useful gender-reversed set of issues, raising questions about Jason’s prior sexual reputation, the fact that men can respond physically even when they aren’t consenting to sex. And rather than dealing with it in any systemic way, the show essentially brushed it off with a scene where Jason decides God’s punishing him for sleeping around. Last night, rather than considering the lingering effects of the attack after Hoyt tells Jason there’s something fundamentally broken in him, the show just punted. Jason’s not a panther, so apparently, the lack of magical significance to his assault means it doesn’t have much emotional or human significance either.
Read more

The bridge is yours, especially if you’ll tell me which new TV shows you’re excited about.

-Cancellation bear!

-Totally called it with the Sex and the City prequel on the CW. It’s a go.

-Do movies have to justify the costs they run up, or does it just not seem like they do?

-Celebrities and children’s books.

-Welcome to the new economy, funnier than the old economy:

It’s a pretty strange move for a man who is seeking the Republican nomination for President in 2012 to spend any part of the 10th anniversary of September 11 doing anything other than commemorating the event. It’s even less strategic to have that “something else” be going to the opera, and worse still for it to be a $1,000-a-ticket fundraiser. But then, nothing about Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign suggests that he’s aware that while Republican voters might hope that they themselves will become rich, they don’t really want the evidence of other people’s wealth thrown in their faces.

There are additional reasons Gingrich’s long-time patronage of the Washington National Opera company rings the hypocrisy bell. His co-investor in that enterprise (along with a lot of other rich people) is the National Endowment for the Arts, which Gingrich once suggested transitioning into a privatized organization. If Gingrich has had a change of heart and is fine with the National Endowment for the Arts now, as an arts-lovin’ progressive, I welcome his conversion. But that’s probably not the case. He, like David Koch, is the kind of political figure who would like to see organizations like the NEA disbanded in theory but isn’t going to go so far as to boycott anything supported by public arts funding. Purity gets in the way of so many entertaining things.

Then, there’s the matter of the opera itself. You could make an argument that Tosca, the first performance of the WNO, is actually a totally appropriate piece of art to use to reflect on the 10 years since September 11. It’s got political prisoners, information extracted under torture, and politicized executions. But then, only a hippie liberal would spend Sept. 11, 2011 thinking about what we did to ourselves over the last 10 years, in addition to what al Qaeda did to us.

Reading yesterday’s blockbuster New York Times piece on the tax incentives available to the American video games industry, it’s interesting to see how moralism about video game content creeps into what should be a pure policy debate:

The United States government offers tax incentives to companies pursuing medical breakthroughs, urban redevelopment and alternatives to fossil fuels. It also provides tax breaks for a company whose hit video game this year was the gory Dead Space 2, which challenges players to advance through an apocalyptic battlefield by killing space zombies…The company with the defiant sales slogan, “Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2,” in effect gets financial help from moms and other United States taxpayers to reduce its federal tax bill…Video game industry officials say that by improving technology, they are indirectly helping society at large. Dean Zerbe, national managing director at Alliantgroup, said that the military had used some video game technology to train soldiers and pilots. Electronic Arts said it donated some games to the military, schools and charities.

As Matt points out, of course the actual point here is that subsidies to the video game industry, or other industries, don’t really achieve what we want them to, not that it’s anti-social to decapitate space zombies (How else are we going to achieve an appropriate level of readiness for the apocalypse?). It doesn’t really shock me, though, that other industries would try to shift the discussion away from jobs and taxes to the merits of the product, just like moralists who don’t like video games insist on no evidence that consoles are training grounds for killers. But insisting that video games aren’t really an important source of innovation, or aren’t really a legitimate art form hasn’t stopped the industry from getting huge (or benefitting from subsidies because it’s protean enough to fit into several subsidy categories) — it just makes moralists and industrialists feel better.

But if we’re going to look at the end product, not just jobs created and taxes paid, other industries might want to get worried. You can complain all you want that video games are anti-social, but there’s a lot more proof that the oil industry does concrete harm to our country than video games do.

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 11 episode of Breaking Bad, Bug.

One of my relatives always wears the same kinds of shoes that Walter White wears, those ultimate Dad shoes, and so there was something particularly shocking about the sight of blood on them tonight. Breaking Bad can be precious — I was supremely irritated by both the teddy bear in the pool and the absurdity of the second-season events that lead up to it — but tonight, the episode was both a masterwork of the menace of the everyday, and proof of deeply impressive long-range planning.

We’ve all seen a reckoning stalking towards Walt, but I’m not sure I saw anything coming for Skyler. It would have been enough if Ted was Skyler’s revenge affair, the weak man she took up with when her husband went through the first stage of his increasingly unnerving transformation. But there’s something magnificent about his reappearance at the moment when she’s faking transactions to launder drug money, down to the level of a faux-cheery, “Thank you. Please give this to your car care professional,” with every faked receipt. The man who gave her the respite from her husband when she needed it and the skills to join Walt’s criminal enterprise is now reaching out to pull her back to — and down with — him.
Read more