This is a great, great interview with Maurice Sendak in The Guardian. I hadn’t known he was gay, and it’s sad to hear his parents were not great about his relationship with his long-term partner, but interesting to see how it affected his work:

His relationship with Eugene, who was a psychoanalyst, lasted almost 50 years. His parents never knew – not officially. “Of course, they knew. Especially my father. My mother was so bewildering and strange and lived in another world, I don’t know what she knew. Nothing was said, but if something had been said, I would have been thrown out of the house. And yet they met him and respected him. Strange.”

Is it any wonder, he says, that his work pitches against euphemism and whitewash in favour of the unvarnished truth? It was a cousin who first encouraged Sendak to look beyond his narrow life in Brooklyn. She was a communist and they weren’t supposed to associate with her, but he and his sister would sneak off to see this woman, who recognised his talent for drawing.

Folks who think that literature for young adults and children is necessarily dumbed-down should read this. The delivery mechanisms may be different for kids than they are for adults. But that doesn’t mean the messages themselves have to be.

By Jess Zimmerman

Let me start by saying I really liked the Doctor Who finale. But it was also emblematic of the Lady Problems the show’s been having, where otherwise good female characters keep getting turned into The Girl Who Waited or The Doctor’s Wife — people who are defined in the negative space of the central male character. We’ve found out a lot about River Song this season, which culminates in this episode as she both marries and kills the Doctor — but she does both as part of his character development, not hers.

River and Amy, most of the time, are fully-realized, interesting, flawed, admirable characters. At minimum, they look like someone really tried. But writing a character who’s some caricature dippy socialite or gross nouveau Stepford wife isn’t the only way to be sexist. You could also, for instance, forget that your fully-realized female characters are supposed to be fully-realized, just as soon as the need arises for them to fulfill some symbolic function.

Last season ended with a wedding, where the hoary old “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” rhyme actually SAVED THE UNIVERSE. Existence depended on Amy and Rory not only tying the knot, but doing it in the most heteronormative of possible ways — if they’d just gone to the courthouse, everything would have been wrong forever. (Other important plot points in the following season: Amy and Rory get pregnant, Amy and Rory get a house, the Doctor stops calling Amy “Amy Pond” and calls her “Amy Williams.” Ugh.)

In this episode, a wedding has to save the universe again, although I’m honestly not certain why. This time it’s a little less traditional — whatever the Time Lord version of the Wedding Industrial Complex is, I’m guessing it doesn’t involve bow ties. But the symbolic weight of the wedding is the same as it was last season. These weddings aren’t just plot, they’re allegory: they bring friends back together, heal broken memories and broken universes, knit fragmented timelines, put time back in its proper place. Which is pretty okay! Weddings are fundamentally symbolic anyway — why not put that cultural significance to use? Let them stand for unity and harmony and all those nice things.
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I’m not actually sorry The Playboy Club has been cancelled, because it is not at all a good show, and I am excited to be able to go to bed earlier on Mondays rather than stay up and watch Amber Heard and Eddie Cibrian try to act. The show was tonally inconsistent; shortchanged plotlines that didn’t deal with its weakest element, a melodramatic and poorly-acted murder mystery; and had some profoundly awful dialogue writing. It deserved to die, totally independent of concerns about how it dealt with women, or glamorized sex, or was essentially a marketing campaign.

That said, there is a really good show buried in The Playboy Club that I’d like to see someone try to resurrect: a period show about early gay rights organizations. This is a story that can, and should be told, and that lends itself beautifully to multiple dramatic arcs. In fact, you could keep the kernel of that story that exists in The Playboy Club, blow it up, and adapt it, so that the story centers on the Mattachine Society chapter. Have one character who works at The Playboy Club (or a comparable fictional institution), hiding her lesbianism in an institution dedicated to the promotion and celebration of heterosexuality through extremely gendered performances. And have her fall for a society figure who’s trying to stay in the closet. Have another character be on the rise in city politics, building political power he hopes to call in later. Have someone be a federal employee fired for their sexual orientation — Frank Kameny’s still around after all, and I’m sure would be a feisty assist to anyone playing a young him — a turn of events that forces the society to action.

Seriously, this would be such a good show for HBO, or for LOGO, if they wanted a high-end period drama. The storylines that could come out of the core drama of people struggling to grab their dignity and fight for their civil rights at a time when their existence is criminalized would be incredibly powerful. We should rewrite the narrative that shows gay people cringing in their individual closets in the late 1950s or early 1960s not because that wasn’t anyone’s experience, but because it wasn’t the sum total of all gay people’s experiences. It’s almost a gay version of The Help. African-Americans didn’t win their civil rights because kindly white people saved them. And the gay rights movement didn’t spontaneously generate at Stonewall.

It really cannot be emphasized enough that the Republican party is in a strange enough place that as ridiculous figure a Donald Trump could be taken seriously, however briefly, as a candidate for the party’s presidential nomination. His latest absurdity is declaring to Erin Burnett that Amanda Knox, the American university student who was acquitted yesterday of charges that she assaulted and murdered her roommate in Italy after an international media sensation and years of imprisonment, might be able to “become a big star and build some dividends from this … absolutely outrageous” experience.

In a way it’s clarifying about his values that the best thing he can think of is for Knox to make a lot of money, rather than, say, finishing her interrupted education (she’s apparently become an impressive linguist in prison), or do what she’s said she wants to do: work for the Innocence Project. If what Knox wants to do is cash in, I wouldn’t judge her for it. But no matter what the rise of reality television and famous-for-15-minutes on social media might suggest, celebrity is not everybody’s highest value. Trump’s classlessness in asserting a connection to her family is really quite impressive. That someone of his crassness was even briefly considered a viable candidate by even a small number of people speaks to a certain poverty of ideas and of values.

I like Charlie Jane’s post at io9 on how to avoid the too-many-supervillains problem, but I want to offer a slight variation on two of her proposals for how to solve it. She suggests:

It’s not the number of villains, it’s the number of stories. There’s a limit to how many subplots your average movie can contain, especially subplots which are about the villains of the movie. In the end, the antagonists of the movie have to tie into the main storyline, and there has to be one of those. So if there’s more than one villain, the villains still have to work together as part of the central story, thematically and from a plot standpoint. The Dark Knight does this brilliantly, by making the Joker’s effect on Harvey Dent a central part of the film’s arc…

Each villain is a different lesson. This is another way to go — it’s a bit of a cliche to say your enemies are your best teachers, but it’s still definitely true. And if you’re going to go having more than one villain in a film, then each villain ought to be teaching a different lesson — or at least, a different version of the main lesson. Maybe there are different weaknesses that each villain plays on — or different wrong-headed ideas on the hero’s part that each villain represents.

I’d suggest more specifically that it’s a matter of figuring out what the core issue in a movie is. Spider-Man 3 is exploring two totally divergent issues: the question of whether power’s made Peter Parker a jerk, and the issue of whether his narrative of his origin story is true. These are both full-sized stories that could interlock, but aren’t made to, and as a result, the movie feels squashed. Thor, by contrast, is a movie about one issue, the responsible use of power, but the multiple obstacles Thor faces are all ways to explore that issue. The Dark Knight is about the failure of institutions and norms, all of which are tested in different ways by the Joker, the police department in Gotham, and ultimately even Batman himself. The X-Men movies, which use huge teams to explore the notion of citizenship, have always understood this incredibly well: every character on both sides represents a facet of that ancient argument between assimilation and separatism. The point being: pick your issue first, and the best villain or villains to explore it second. And as a side note, I’d really like to see some superhero movies from the villain’s perspective.

The bridge is yours.

-How do you tell if a show is so bad it’s good?

-A basic tutorial on Lifetime movies.

-”Television is for lazy and tired people, while the active and young choose the Internet as it gives them more interactive opportunities.”

-Mindy Kaling is back and blogging. Though mostly about shopping.

-The combination of a tough action director portraying the violence of a repressive regime should be interesting. Not sure about the dialogue, though:

This was supposed to be a great fall for women on television, but several weeks in, it feels like it may be better at the cause of getting women acting jobs than at providing entertainment aimed at women viewers. With that odd disconnect in mind, my friend Lux asked me what I thought made a show woman-oriented a while back, and I was reminded of it again reading Nellie Andreeva’s meditation on The Playboy Club, Charlie’s Angels, and Prime Suspect*’s ratings troubles when she wrote:

For Playboy, there was a lack of clarity who the show is for. With a popular mens magazine in the title and the promise of scantly-clad bunnies, the series seemed to be targeting men. But it was at its core a female soap. The confusion with its mixed identity was clearly visible in the pilot, which looked like a soap, felt like a soap and behaved like one until it suddenly veered into dark territory with a murdered mafia boss’ body being dumped in the river.

As with most of these things, I think it’s easier to narrow down a definition by figuring out what’s not aimed at women. New Girl, despite its name and female protagonist, really don’t feel to me like it’s aimed at women at all. The show’s advertising focuses on how the character is perceived (thus, “adorkable”) rather than who she is. Most of the episodes I’ve seen so far are on the surface about problems Jess resolves, but are actually about the things her male roommates learn from helping her solve problems — the show is about their emotional growth more than hers. Up All Night, by contrast, could work for either gender of coastal elites, but I think is slightly more aimed at women. It’s not that Will Arnett’s stay-at-home dad Chris doesn’t have a character arc, because he clearly does. But there are also women wrestling with a whole range of career and life issues, and the core couple’s storylines are, obviously, interdependent. Raising a small human tends to do that. And I can’t quite figure out if 2 Broke Girls is supposed to be aimed at women or not: it’s got female protagonists, but it remains unclear whether they’re meant to be points of entry or objects of consumption (which may be more a problem of execution than artistic intent).

Tone isn’t really determinative, either. New Girl may be all Dirty Dancing-themed sing-a-longs and sunshine, while Prime Suspect looks gritty and muted, lots of grays and washed-out purples, plus, you know, omnipresent brutal murder. But the show is essentially a funhouse version of what it feels like to work in a bad male-dominated environment. It’s kind of a horror story with a female protagonist who gets to be a hero without having to be a virgin. And it’s not really tone that’s wrong with Playboy Club. It’s that the show puts women’s bodies on screens but no concrete ideas in their heads to relate to. Finding your dad by posing for Playboy is not an idea Viewers at Home can relate to, or analogous to any situations we are likely to face in real life.

*You should watch Prime Suspect. Maria Bello is very good, and the show deserves to survive.

Rumor has it that, after failed attempts, Madonna’s finally going to be the halftime show at the Super Bowl next year. This strikes me as terrific for a couple of reasons.

First, the accidental exposure of a black woman’s nipple by a white man at the 2004 Super Bowl — I’ve always thought Justin Timberlake, who pulled off the relevant bits of Janet Jackson’s clothes, should get more blame for the incident than her — so traumatized the nation that there hasn’t been a female solo artist on that stage in the seven games since. The last woman to perform in a group, Fergie, got on stage in an outfit that covered her so carefully it looked like she’d need a squire to remove it. Not that that kept sex off the program. Bruce Springsteen is wonderful, but America is now probably better-acquainted with his be-jeansed crotch that we strictly needed to be. So I have to say I really appreciate the idea that the next woman to get the opportunity is one whose whole career has been about exploring sexuality and sexual self-presentation. It may have taken forever, but at least when a woman comes back, the one who gets to lead the charge isn’t one who’s totally neutered.

Second, I just love that a gay icon’s going to get headline heterosexual masculinity’s national holiday. Madonna’s fanbase isn’t obviously gay, of course, but it’s a nice little pop culture reminder that just as large men crashing into each other is a symbol of the nation, so is an insanely driven woman who’s never forgotten her gay fanbase, and that those two things and impulses can coexist quite cheerfully over beer and wings.

All of that said, I’m trying to figure out what she’s going to perform that will not cause somebody, somewhere, to freak out. Maybe she can rewrite “4 Minutes” to be a reference to the two-minute warning? And to be Timberlakeless?

Though I sort of feel like if Michael Jackson gets to do “Billie Jean,” Madonna should be able to hit us up with “Like a Prayer.”

Tim Carmody asked for a feminist interpretation of this video running around the internet in which a four-year-old reaches the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back, the attention to which has focused on the slack-jawed little boy rather than his slightly older sister:

I sort of appreciate that his sister, even if she’s seen this before, smiles when she gets the news. There is something pretty satisfying satisfying about the reveal. Luke is pretty much impossible in Empire Strikes Back, being stupid about riding late, ditching the Rebels pretty much sans explanation (I bet Mon Mothma was most seriously displeased), underestimating Yoda, and ditching his training. Finding out Vader’s his father isn’t just a validation of Yoda’s teaching, etc. It feels kind of like the just reward for being semi-bratty. Of course, the whole getting-your-hand-chopped-off thing is a little much, and serves us to remind us that Vader is not exactly good parent material. That Luke and Leia ended up being reasonably decent people is testament to Obi-Wan’s skills as an adoption agent.