This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 16 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

Tonight’s episode is all about knowing where you fit and the consequences of refusing or failing to fit into that role — and in one shocking reversal, a usurpation of the role someone else has established for you.

First, there’s Chalky, caught in an impossible situation after he gets out of jail. At first, things seem to be going well as he gives permission for an aspiring doctor to court his daughter and promising to help an elderly woman with noisy neighbors and a younger man with an abusive employer at a community meeting. But then, as that meeting’s almost over, the women of his community challenge not just Chalky’s conduct as a community leader but the very nature of his role. “Those white men cut his throat while he was loading your trucks with your illegal liquor,” one woman tells him bitterly. “You walk around, take a bite out of everyone else’s plate. Don’t get nothing back but a summer clambake and a Christmas turkey.” Largesse is not enough in the face of systematic racism, a point Chalky makes to Nucky later, who responds by insulting him, saying, “It’s always about money, Chalky…you can thank me by being a good boy. I gave you my word. Now save your strength. And enjoy your family.”

Is it any wonder Chalky melts down (after maintaining his composure earlier when his daughter’s request that he help her with her homework almost reveals his illiteracy) at that family dinner he’s supposed to be enjoying when his wife serves duck instead of Hoppin’ John to his daughter’s suitor so the family will look upscale? “It’s my house. And my country ways put the food on this goddamn table,” he curses, before declaring that it’s clear who the field hand in his house is and retreating to the garage while his family plays piano. The roles he’s being asked to play are impossible: his capacity for violence is critical until it’s shaming, his ability to earn buys his family’s passage into a future where he doesn’t have the skills to join them or to fit in. And I still can’t figure out his relationship with Nucky, who seems to regard Chalky as his equivalent, but lesser shadow, in a mirror, lesser land.

An outwardly sustainable relationship, Margaret and Nucky’s, appears tested this week as well. Nucky insists on giving bonuses to the servants despite Margaret’s insistence that they can’t really afford it. But when she gives them the money before warning of a coming pay cut, they aren’t grateful, and she resorts to brittleness with the women she was on the verge of drinking away her sorrows with last week: “I believe it’s customary to say thank you. What is it, ladies? Speak your minds.” When they tell her that a sloshed Nucky promises them raises, Margaret says coolly, “Well, it’s a special kind of fool who relies on the promises of a drunkard.” And later, she asks Nucky for $100, ostensibly for new clothing for the children, but mostly to see if she can get it.
Read more

My friend Douglas Wolk was kind enough to show me around Comic Con during press and professionals day on Thursday, and after we’d wandered through Artist’s Alley and the Cultyard, and I’d spent entirely too much money on comics (seriously, I ended up with a 13-volume, foot-high stack of books home on the train Saturday), he asked me for my ethnography of the festival. His Kindle Single about the interaction of fan culture and marketing at San Diego Comic Con is a must-read and captured a lot of what I was thinking.

My experience of pop culture, other than buying movie tickets, or books, or music, is not particularly consumptive. I’ve never gotten into action figures, or costumes, and while I have some 1950s and 1960s Archie Comics in plastic at home, I don’t collect the vintage stuff either. So the level of consumption was, if not surprising, exactly, forcefully striking. There are people walking around with bags half the size of my body specially designed to hold everything they buy, and apps that show them all the free comics they can get. It’s really easy to get convinced that you genuinely want to buy, say, a wooden sparring sword or a beautiful pocket watch (I resisted. I didn’t get the drunken She-Hulk tattoo I warned I might fall for, either.) when you’re surrounded by stuff. And I can imagine that Cons might be kind of stressful experiences if you don’t have the luxury to, as I did, get a little financially carried away. And I appreciated that for every booth trying to get me to buy Buffy pint glasses and extremely expensive manga action figures, there were places selling off inventory, or vintage comics for a dollar or 50 cents.

The other thing that stuck with me was the experience I’ve never had before, of being in a place essentially without a visible social hierarchy. Some of that is because this is a temporary community, and some of it’s because everyone there is pulling a Clark Kent, taking off their workaday clothes and putting on what makes them comfortable and most them, whether it’s Chuck Taylors or some really fantastic ladies-fit purple Mandalorian armor. But despite the fact that the audience ranged from black teenaged hipsters, to parents with their kids, to the standard, stereotypical white-dude comic fans, as well as up and down the age spectrum, it was essentially impossible to tell who had power among the attendees. Cosplayers? They get looked at, and praised, and have their pictures taken, but getting what you want out of an experience isn’t necessarily the same as having power in it. Consumers? To a certain extent, yes: you might have to wait in a lot of lines, and pay money, but the entire experience exists for your stimulation. But by the temporary nature of the situation, there’s no way to tell who’s cool, maybe because for once, for a couple of days, it just doesn’t matter.

***

Oh, and if you want to see the panel I moderated with the fabulous Jane Espenson and the stars of Husbands, well, compliments of the lovely folks at Buffyfest, here you go:

The novelist Colson Whitehead isn’t new to science fiction and speculative fiction—his 1999 debut novel, The Intuitionist, was set in a world of competing schools of elevator inspectors and the dream of a elevator that could take riders to a perfect society. But his new book, Zone One, on bookshelves today, an elegaic tale of plague, zombie hunters in New York, and the limitations of efforts to build new societies is the result of Whitehead’s longstanding plans to write a monster novel. We spoke at New York Comic Con about choosing average narrators rather than heroic ones, making monsters sympathetic, and the persistence of corporate sponsorship in the apocalypse. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why a zombie novel?

People are wondering. It was reading comic books, and watching horror and science-fiction movies, reading them, H.P. Lovecraft that made me want to be a writer. I’ve never seen much of a division between so-called genre fiction and literary fiction. So when I went to college, I wanted to write werewolf novels. I remember applying to college and saying this to the interviewer, and he’s like ‘No, what do you really want to write?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, no.’ In retrospect, an elevator inspector novel obviously turned out not to be a bestseller. I knew that I would do a horror novel, book seven or book eight. It turned out to be book six. And zombies in particular, seeing Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead when I was nine or ten, too early to be that state-of-the-art makeup, the idea of zombie terror stayed with me.

I’m not prepared to talk about the larger social currents and why they’re big now among twenty-somethings and teenagers. For me, the terror of zombies and also covers Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the idea that your family and friends and neighbors and teachers could suddenly overnight become monsters, or reveal themselves as the monsters they’ve always been, that’s sort of my bad, Freudian interpretation. And it’s what brought my conception of the book to mind.

In a lot of these zombie stories, the hero is someone who’s really extraordinary, someone who’s going to find the cure, or lead the people to freedom. Mark Spitz, the nickname of the main character through whose eyes we’re seeing the world, is sort of relentless about his averageness. I was wondering how deliberate that choice was to make him representative rather than aspirational?

Yeah, there are the shambling dead, he’s like shambling mediocrity. I think when I was conceiving of the book, I figured, if you’re really high-functioning and really cognizant of what’s going on, you’d jump off a building. And if you’re a C or D person, you’d be killed off quickly. For me, the survivors are all mediocrities. He’s like a mediocrity among mediocrities. I’m not sure what kind of person ought to be in an apocalypse. I’m sure I’d be cut down pretty quickly. But it seems that someone who has always muddled through in organized society, his inefficiency to succeed becomes, actually, a successful adaptation.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the October 16 episode of The Walking Dead.

Well, The Walking Dead is back, and grimmer than ever: Andrea’s suicidal, Sophia’s lost in the woods, Lori and Shane can’t quit each other, and God appears to hate Rick Grimes.

In an interview with Colson Whitehead about his new zombie novel, Zone One, that I’ve got going up a little after 4 p.m. today, we spoke a bit about what happens to social norms when society collapses: do people try to build societies based on radically new rules? Or do they preserve their traditions. A milder version of that tension is present in tonight’s episode. Lori expresses some discomfort when the characters come upon a huge number of cars full of the dead — and of valuable supplies. “This is a graveyard,” she says. “I don’t know how I feel about this.” But where Lori sees desecration, Carol sees a small potential for liberation. “Ed never let me wear nice things like this,” she remarks, holding up a pretty red blouse. And Lori’s moment of nerves doesn’t mean she’s consistently committed to upholding old norms, or that it’s easy for her. She’s struggling with her attraction to Shane, who she doesn’t want to sleep with, but she can’t quite walk away from either. “Just trying to be the good guy, Lori,” Shane tells her, informing of his intention to leave the main group. “Even if you don’t see it.”

Andrea’s similarly struggling with her relationship with Dale, and her larger need to find a reason to keep living after the loss of her sister. Dale confiscates her gun after she fails to put it back together in time to protect herself from the walkers, but also because he believes she’ll use it. “You chose suicide,” Dale protests when she demands her gun back. “What’s that to you? You barely know me,” Andrea spits back to the man who’s come to think of himself as related to her. “I didn’t want your blood on my hands…What did you expect? That I had an epiphany? Some life-affirming catharsis…I wanted to die on my terms, not torn apart by some drooling freaks. You took that away from me…You took my choice away from me. And you expect gratitude?”
Read more

By Kate Linnea Welsh

No good deed goes unpunished on The Good Wife this week as Alicia takes on the pro bono case of a witness to a convenience store robbery-turned-murder who is accused of being the perpetrator. (We actually see the crime as the first scene of the episode – rare for this show – and like another memorable scene, it’s set to a backdrop of NPR, this time an episode of Car Talk.) Alicia is again up against Cary Agos as a proxy for her husband, but this time there’s a wrench in the works: Assistant U.S. Attorney Imani Morehouse has been assigned to work with the State’s Attorney’s office because of concerns over racial bias in sentencing. Peter assigns Cary to show Morehouse the ropes, and she responds: “He already has. Maximum sentence to black drug dealer. Discount to a white killer.” Peter deadpans “‘kay. Off to a great start.” The case against Alicia’s defendant is weak, but because of Morehouse, Cary is less open to negotiation than he might otherwise be. Morehouse miscalculates by assuming that Alicia’s colleague Julius will be on her side in the sentencing argument because he’s black; what Julius cares about, of course, is winning the case.

The judge, played to hilarious effect by Harvey Fierstein, is known to be something of a hippie, and this works in the defense’s favor until it doesn’t: all Morehouse has to do to turn the tables is mention that her grandfather was a Civil Rights leader the judge idolized. Alicia makes some headway by bringing up the issue of cross-racial identification for the second time this season, and in this case, she informs the detective she’s cross-examining that it can cause problems for black witnesses identifying white suspects as well as the better-known opposite scenario. But the case doesn’t really break open until, with help from Kalinda (of course), Alicia and Julius prove that the witness was doing exactly the thing of which their defendant was accused: committing a crime and then, when escape proved impossible, pretending to be a witness.

The case of the week, however, is really just an entry point into the political maneuverings and crises of faith that are consuming Lockhart/Gardner. Eli is threatening to leave the firm if he can’t have Kalinda and Alicia full time, but when Diane, playing her favorite role of The Adult In The Room, realizes that Alicia is currently working on a pro bono case rather than making money for litigation or for Eli, she goes into full panic mode about the economy. “Double dip recession” is her phrase this week, and she convinces Will that if they don’t want to be kowtowing to Eli in all things, they must bring in a bankruptcy department – specifically, Celeste Serrano’s bankruptcy department. (Will: “Have you noticed no matter how high we go, we’re still dancing to someone’s tune?” Diane: ‘Welcome to leadership.”) Diane knows that Will is the best tool she has for getting to Celeste, so sends him to a conference where she’s speaking, and she decides to go tell Legal Aid that Lockhart/Gardner lawyers won’t be able to do any more pro bono work until the economy picks up.
Read more

First, thanks again to Kate, Tyler, Jess, and Kay for holding down the fort last week. I can’t say how much I appreciate it. And I missed you guys—it’s good to be back!

-Really excited to see Patty Jenkins’ spin on Thor.

-Remakes don’t always have to be bad things.

-As great as it would be to move away from the standard television season and its inefficiencies, Jamie Weinman is probably right that it won’t ever change.

-I feel like Shame is going to make a lot of us with crushes on Michael Fassbender feel less than great about ourselves:

I’m writing this post as a reminder that the Pop Culture and the Death Penalty Project starts on Wednesday, so be ready to get your Richard Wright on, but also because I wanted to ask a more general question before we begin. To what extent are criminals’ experiences effective arguments for criminal justice reform in popular culture? Of course there really aren’t a lot of ways to argue criminal justice reform other than to show the experiences of people going through the system. But an argument that depicts the innocent and relies strictly on the idea that bad things might happen to good people leaves open the idea that it’s just fine to do bad things to bad people.

This was something that struck me while I was watching Mesrine: Killer Instinct last weekend. The movie is wildly entertaining: Vincent Cassel’s always a pleasure to watch, but he’s particularly good as an irrepressible Frenchman whose experience executing Algerian terror suspects during his country’s war there becomes something of an excuse for him. He’s the kind of guy who cusses out his father for getting him a decent job, calling him subservient and unmanly. And when he’s run out of France (and runs, rather dramatically, out on his gorgeous Spanish wife, into whose mouth he appears to like sticking a gun to get her to behave), he lands in Quebec where he hooks up with independence-minded terrorists while working construction; kidnaps a billionaire; and eventually gets extradited back to Canada while joyriding through America. In other words, it’s entirely possible to be entertained by him, but impossible to think he’s a good person. And yet the movie is very good at putting us in his position when he’s put in solitary, denied his clothes, and sprayed with a firehose. He doesn’t deserve it, but those actions are more an illustration of the rigidity and arrogance of the director of the infamous prison where Mesrine’s being held. And when he escapes, flees, and returns for his fellow prisoners, there’s a nutty bravado not just to that, but to the fact that his experiences there became a spur for changes at the prison. But instead of being a systematic argument for prison reform, the fact that the prison was changed is part of Mesrine’s legend, rebounding to the advantage of a sexy narrative rather than a fun one. He can be that bad, a veritable model for people getting what they deserve, and get people to consider treating prisoners differently.

It reminded me a bit of the sequence in Public Enemies, when a bunch of angry, raw FBI recruits, having snagged John Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie, handcuff her to a chair, slap her around, and keep her there until she wets herself. Billie is less obviously, ridiculously guilty than Mesrine, but she is dating and providing shelter to a known criminal. But women are subject to a multi-directional bind when it comes to criminality: crimes against women, particularly if they’re sexual, are treated as if they’re “especially heinous,” in the parlance of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but women who commit serious crimes are often seen as either weak and manipulated or unsexed. In this case, Billie’s relatively low level of culpability, her beauty, her fragility, and the fact that she’s been forced into a position that violates her decorum, all suggest that the hunt for Dillinger has rotted something in the FBI agents chasing him. But it raises the issue that if she’d been more involved, or had she been a man, it might have been to permissible to push her as hard, or harder.

If we’re talking about crime and punishment, we’re never going to get away from the fact that we’re talking about the most useful way to deal with people who aren’t very sympathetic protagonists. I don’t know how to get away from this problem. But stories that manage to illuminate the systems where they take place may be more effective advocates for reform than stories that are just about one person’s mystique.

Tom Morello’s best known for his work as a guitarist in Rage Against the Machine, but this fall, he’s debuting in a new medium with the release of his comic book Orchid. Set in a dystopian future where the devastating effects of global warming have ravaged society and ushered in a brutally divided class system where the rich own the poor as slaves, and everyone’s at risk from newly-risen dinosaur-like monsters. The title character, Orchid, is a teenaged prostitute with “Property” tattooed across her chest and “Know Your Role” branded into her forearm. In the first issue, which was released on Oct. 12, Orchid is arrested for skimming profits from her pimp to support her family — and thrown into a paddy wagon with the leader of a small resistance movement. I spoke with Morello at New York Comic Con about the perils of drawing “empowered” female characters who exist for male gratification; his experiences with sex workers in Los Angeles; and the meaning of Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I was curious how you got the idea for the strip in the first place. Had you been wanting to do something about sex workers for a while?

Yeah. About 3 years ago I had a story in my head. I wanted to do something that combined the epic sweep of stories like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars but that combined class politics of movies like the Battle of Algiers, or my own worldview. That’s one thing I thought was missing from Dune or whatever. It’s always getting the king back on the throne, and the princess back into the castle, and I’m not into that.

There’s a lot of race and gender but not a lot of class in fantasy.

Yes, exactly. That’s one of the things about the world of Orchid, it’s absolutely race-neutral. So it was very important to me with this story for there to be epic battles, and cool monsters, and narrow escapes, but to have a class politics to it that is sorely missed in a lot of other work.

So how did you decide to have Orchid be someone be someone who was doing sex work?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was not accepted in the rock community. I wasn’t the right color, I didn’t have the right length of hair. This was like the mid-’80s. And the first LA community that accepted me was the East Hollywood underground rock community where there were a lot of drug addicts and prostitutes. And Orchid’s based on people that I knew who were very hard in some ways, but had huge hearts and were very generous people…They’re composites.

I’m curious. Did you do any research on sex work more generally?

The research I did was first-hand. I also, not that that I need to trumpet it, but I used to be an exotic dancer myself, but that’s not exactly the sex trade, but it borders on it. I would not say I drew on that experience writing Orchid, just to be perfectly clear, but full disclosure. It was a long time ago.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 16 episode of Homeland.

I’ve been incredibly impressed thus far with the way the show has handled Brody’s reintegration into his family, particularly the rivalry between Jessica and Dana for his affections. There’s a genuine discomfort to the fact that Nicholas will laugh with his daughter behind a closed door but won’t let his wife touch him while he’s masturbating to her, that Nicholas is able to be more patient with Dana than Jessica is. “She’s obviously got a secret life out there,” Jessica says, worried, only to have Nicholas laugh it off, saying “She’s sixteen…Didn’t you have a secret life when you were that age?” “Yeah, with you! That was different,” Jessica tells him, but it’s not, not really. Similarly, Dana takes Jessica’s relationship with Mike as a kind of visceral betrayal: her mother is cheating on not just Nicholas, but on her, exposing her to the evidence that she has an undomestic sexuality.

And it’s Nicholas who reins Dana in, implying to her that they can have their own secrets, that she is perhaps more relevant than her mother to his endurance. “You know when I went over to Afghanistan, you were in third grade…That’s what I took over with me. You were in a play that year, the Wackadoo Zoo. You were so good,” he tells her. “Honey, it’s practically all I thought about for eight years. It kept me alive. But now I’m back, and all those things that kept me going, they’re gone.” I’m trying to decide if there’s something genuinely queasy there, or if it’s just the dichotomy between a man who can get his teenage daughter to be good for Lawrence O’Donnell and the man who sees himself powerfully distant from his family in the mirror.

Speaking of Lawrence O’Donnell, I thought there was something pretty game about his agreement to be a pleasant dupe in this episode. “I was told Lawrence O’Donnell gives everyone a hard time except guys in uniform,” Nicholas tells his family, explaining why he’s not afraid of the interview. And true to this expectation, O’Donnell serves up softballs disguised as emotionally difficult questions. “What did they want?” he asks Brody about why he was tortured. “They want you to lose faith,” Brody tells him, swinging incredibly hard at the soft toss. “To lose faith in your country, which they say is the devil. In your brother marines who they say aren’t coming for you because you have no military value. In your wife, who they say has got your arms wrapped around someone else.”

Carrie’s also getting some tough love and tender treatment from the men in her life, namely Saul and Virgil, who is rapidly becoming my favorite character on the show. Carrie’s prickly about the fact that the CIA isn’t protecting Lynn, telling one of her colleagues who describes her as a hooker that “If by hooker, you mean someone who’s off risking her life while we’re sitting around a conference table.” But she’s not doing well in meetings, reacting badly to Saul who wants to know “You think that when I ask you the same exact question I’d ask anyone else, I’m giving you a hard time?” He’s angry at her for treating him like all the other people they work with, but also for sexualizing their relationship. I really want to know more about Carrie’s backstory in the department. And after she asks Lynn to take a risk, it turns up nothing. She snaps at Virgil, who, after suffering through the yogurt in her fridge, decides to make them both a real meal, saying “There’s some spaghetti in the closet. It’s only 10 years past its expiration date. I’m sure it won’t kill us.”

But they never get to dinner. Lynn’s death didn’t strike me as particularly surprising, and I would have liked to see her fleshed out a little bit more so her murder hit harder. But I do appreciate that it opened up another thread of the mystery, a case where we know slightly more than than Carrie and Saul but where we have absolutely no idea how they’re going to get there. It’s a perfect example of why spoilers don’t matter: the journey, rather than the destination, is what’s going to be tremendously exciting.