Well, it’s Friday and this is pretty much the best thing ever:

One thing I’ve always found fascinating is how sexy Disney movies can get when the characters are animals rather than people. The can-can dancers in The Great Mouse Detective would be considered way over the line for children if they were human rather than anthropomorphized mice. And “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” from The Lion King is probably as close as the company’s animated children’s movies will ever get to an actual sex scene.

As one does in the ThinkProgress blog HQ from time to time, I was listening to t.A.T.u., which struck me as surprisingly un-Auto-Tuned — and weirdly committed to a vision of heterosexuality as war — for a cutesy fake lesbian Russian pop duo:

Yglesias and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s pretty hard to get a hit out of Russia or Eastern Europe unless it’s sold as extremely high camp, a la t.A.T.u. or “Dragostea Din Tei,” (which has the distinction of inspiring the single best New York Times headline ever committed to print, “Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa“):

Or totally ripped off, as with the song “Around the World” is based on:

That’s kind of sad. When Scandanavian people make uber-earnest and insanely catchy dance music, we call them Robyn and love them. Russians and Romanians have it tough. This, however, was probably not ever going to have a lot of appeal in the West:

The rap against superhero comics is often that they don’t understand women. But I was watching the otherwise quite good Batman: Year One with some blogger friends on Wednesday night, and we noticed something strange. The movie appears to have no idea of how long a typical pregnancy lasts. Jim Gordon’s wife is visibly pregnant when they move to Gotham in January, and doesn’t give birth until November. It’s not the absolute end of the world or anything, but it’s a weird thing to get wrong, and the kind of error that’s immediately jarring to women or to men old enough to know women who have gone through pregnancy. And because baby Jim is just a couple of weeks old when he’s dropped off a bridge (though of course Batman saves him), it’s even more anxiety-producing than I think might have been intended: I know I was doing all sorts of calculations about a Gwen Stacy-like fall on a kid whose skull hasn’t closed all the way up yet.

That aside, the short is quite good, particularly Brian Cranston as Gordon and Katee Sackhoff as Sarah Essen, his partner and, for a while, his lover. It would be fun to see Cranston apply the toughness he’s developed playing Walter White on Breaking Bad to a role where he’s nominally on the right side of the law. And if some subsequent Batman director wants to bring in Katee Sackhoff, who really should not be relegated to Lifetime series post Battlestar Galactica, for some sort of role in some sort of subsequent Batman universe, I think that’d be a fine choice. Nolan’s trilogy has been wonderful, but so male.

June Thomas has what I think is a largely convincing critique of this fall’s procedurals, noting that many shows have abandoned a focus on the core case in each episode to pursue larger mysteries related to the investigators:

Why are TV writers making their mysteries less mysterious? I think it’s because lots of new procedurals try to fit more than just a case of the week into the 44-minute running time. Most shows also have a serial element, a mystery—usually a quest for elusive information—that lasts throughout the whole series. In the case of Unforgettable, it’s Carrie’s attempt to remember the day her sister was murdered; on Person of Interest, it’s a driven cop’s attempt to capture Reese, who is wanted for a number of serious crimes around the world. Person of Interest’s writers are also trying to draw our attention to that Big Brother machine and the principals’ back stories: Why does Finch have a terrible back injury, and why is Reese such a loner? These larger arcs are supposed to encourage fans to keep tuning in each week, but they can’t be so intrusive that they alienate casual viewers and send them stretching for the remote. That’s why most shows relegate the serial to a tacked-on coda.

Inadvertently, I also think this suggests something about the persistence of procedurals in an age of declining crime.

To back it up a second, when I moved to Washington, I was living by myself for the first time, in a bigger city than I’d ever lived in before. And shortly after I moved here, I was in the public library when a woman had a violent psychotic breakdown an aisle over. I may have been a little anxious. Over time, I got vastly more comfortable, but I will admit that part of what helped was watching enormous amounts of Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I recognize the ridiculousness of that, but they reassured me that as long as I took cabs home after midnight, locked my fire-escape-adjacent windows, and obeyed my instincts in relationships, I would probably not end up dead in an alley or locked in a sex dungeon. This 2002 Michael Kinsley column about women and Law & Order? That was basically me.

But my nerves were basically about the overall challenges of adjusting to a new situation, with all the commuting and budgeting and everything else adult life implies, not about realistic concerns about violent crime. Between 1991 and 2010, violent crimes overall went down from 758.2 per 100,000 to 403.6 per 100,000. Murders and non-negligent homicides fell from 9.8 per 100,000 to 4.8, and the rates of forcible rape (which, really? Is there voluntary rape?) went down from 42.3 per 100,000 to 27.5 per 100,000. Perceptions of crime risk haven’t gone down quite as consistently. In Gallup polling on whether respondents thought their was more crime in their “area than there was a year ago, or less?” the last year where a majority thought their region had gotten more dangerous from year to year was 1992, hitting a low of 26 percent in October 2001, and heading back up to 47 percent in 2005. In that same survey, 67 percent of respondents said they thought crime was rising across the country, a number that hadn’t been that high since 1996, when 71 percent of respondents said they thought crime was increasing.

But the point remains: as the actual risk of being a violent crime victim has declined, and as people perceive themselves to live in safer or at least neutral eras, it makes sense that our procedurals would move to a place where we’re less concerned with the resolution of the case and the incarceration of individual criminals and more concerned with the people who provide this bulwark of safety. I’d really like to see more successful mainstream shows that meditate on the tactics that those people use (I need to check out Person of Interest, which I’m told is surveillance-y, and also based on a dear friend’s work). If you’re going to have a long-running mystery or issue a cop or doctor has to resolve, why not have it be the reaction they got after working in Internal Affairs, a la Commissioner Gordon? Or for killing abusing or killing suspect, which could very well be part of Deena Pilgrim’s arc in Powers? One tends to think that the worst parts of our criminal justice system affect the people who commit its wrongs, as well as are the subjects of them. Not all shows about cops have to depict them as bad people. But it might make sense to draw drama from actual problems, instead of inventing absolutely ridiculous ones.

The Mary Sue is serializing a project by Emily Schorr Lesnick on the experiences women face as improvisational performers, and this anecdote stood out to me:

Two improvisers happened to (independently) share the same story to illustrate the ways that women are placed into stereotypical roles and not given the agency or space to get out of them. A friend of my two interviewees, the only woman in a ten-person improv team that touted their cutting-edge style, entered an ongoing scene between two men. Her “walk-on” initiation was a clear assistant dropping off important papers to a supervisor, entering to say “here are your papers, boss,” and then leave. However, when she entered the scene, her male scene partner labeled her a prostitute, exclaiming “You must leave, sir, my prostitute is here!”

Bad improv, yes. But let’s dissect further:

This line of dialogue made this improviser into the object of laughter (and, as a prostitute, an object of sexual desire) and destroyed her initiation into the scene as another character from the business setting. This improviser’s adherence to rules of agreement in improv scenes effectively silenced her, as she negotiated her visible hurt and frustration with her desire to
support her teammates.

I think it was striking in part because I can’t think of a way that a man could be put into a similar situation, something that’s simultaneously reductive and ridiculous, but that people won’t immediately dismiss as implausible to the point of unfunniness (for the same reason 30 Rock can make lots of nasty jokes about dead hookers and still be considered feminist). We’re better at finding ways to make women seem ridiculous and accepting it because we have more practice. I don’t think that means we’re always required to treat female characters with extreme and stiff dignity because that would be excessively boring, but we need some equal opportunity here.

The bridge is yours.

-Joss Whedon + Warren Ellis = web series.

-Some thoughts on the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy.

-An all-star financial crisis drama.

-Preserving the Muppets’ core brand.

-Can Christian Bale unite Chinese and American audiences by being a combination of Laurie and Batman with a dose of Catholicism and prostitutes?

This post contains spoilers through “Day 4″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Feel free to spoil beyond that in comments, but please label your posts as such. For next week, let’s read through “Day 7″.

So. Abdallah Jones. I tend to think that Stephenson is doing a nice, if slightly exaggerated, job of discussing masculinity, femininity, desirability, and the Midwest. But how I feel about this book is, I suspect, going to depend on how well Stephenson walks the line in telling a somewhat silly, exaggerated story about fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, an issue that’s serious not because it has a nasty tendency to kill people, but because of how the existence of it affects other people’s behavior and decision-making.

What we learn about Jones in these chapters is this. He’s competent enough to escape Ivanov, Sokolov, and their gang, which even if it was Sokolov alone would be no mean feat. We know he has a sense of humor, however dark its direction. Telling Zula that “I would suggest an end to pluck, or spunk, or whatever label you like to attach to the sort of behavior you were showing back on that pier, and a decisive turn toward Islam: which means submission. Just a thought,” is scary and evidence of a midset distinctly unlike our own, but undeniably funny. Ditto for their exchange: “What’s the only thing more attention getting, on the streets of Xiamen, than two niggers handcuffed together?” “I give up.” “Two niggers handcuffed together with a Kalashnikov.” We know he’s a creative, improvisational thinker: thus the deal with the pilots. And we have his basic biography, which is sort of a combination of George Jackson and Osama bin Laden:

..The Welsh terrorist Abdallah Jones, who was of particular interest to Olivia because he had once blown up Olivia’s great-aunt’s bridge partner on a bus in Cardiff. He was (as she learned) of West Indian ancestry, that is, the descendant of slaves brought to the Caribbean to work on sugar cane plantations. He had grown up in a Cardiff slum where he had acquired an addiction to heroin. He had kicked that addiction with the assistance of a local mullah who had converted him to Islam. Chemically unshackled, he had taken an undergraduate degree in earth sciences at Aberystwyth and followed that up with graduate instruction at the Colorado School of Mines, where he seemed to have learned a hell of a lot about explosives. Returning to Wales, he had fallen in with a radical cell of Islamists and cut his teeth blowing up buses in Wales and the Midlands before migrating to London and graduating to tube stations. When those activities had rendered him the object of intense police curiosity, he had moved to Northern Africa, then Somalia, then Pakistan (the site of his largest single exploit, killing 111 people in a hotel blast), then Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Manila, Taiwan, and now—strange to relate—Xiamen. All those steps had made perfect sense except for the last two. To say, as people frequently did, that Abdallah Jones was to MI6 what Osama bin Laden had been to the CIA was to miss a few important points, as far as Olivia was concerned. It was true that Jones was MI6’s highest-priority target. So to that point, the comparison served. Beyond that, as Olivia took every opportunity to point out, comparing Jones to bin Laden was dangerous in that it minimized the danger posed by Jones. Bin Laden’s best days had been over on September 12. One of the most famous men in history, he’d spent the rest of his life huddled in various hiding places, watching himself on TV. Jones, on the other hand, was little known outside of the United Kingdom, and even though he had blown up 163 people in eight separate incidents before his thirtieth birthday, there was little doubt that he would kill many more than that in the future.

Read more

One of the reasons I was gone last week is because I was moderating a panel with Friends of the Blog Zack Stentz, Douglas Wolk, and Ta-Nehisi Coates on superheroes and the American idea run by my mothership, the Center for American Progress. You can watch it here:

Video games folks in the audience may appreciate the moment towards the end when CAP President and noted sci-fi fan John Podesta asks about video games and progressivism. My response is practical, but Ta-Nehisi’s is pretty priceless. In all seriousness, though, this panel was a wonderful experience. Superheroes are a big, messy, inconsistent space, but they are very powerful tools. As Douglas writes in his book, and as I said in the introduction to the panel, “Superhero comics are, by their nature, larger than life, and what’s useful and interesting about their characters is that they provide bold metaphors for discussing ideas or reifying abstractions into narrative fiction. They’re the closest thing that exists right now to the ‘novel of ideas.’” People will do a whole variety of things with these tools. But we’re lucky to have them.

It seems that Sony is sufficiently concerned about whether Kathryn Bigelow’s much-more-hotly-anticipated-as-of-April movie Kill bin Laden could swing the 2012 election that they’re considering moving its release date as far back as 2013. This strikes me as somewhat silly. Whether or not there is a Hollywood movie about it, or many Hollywood movies about it, as the case may be, released in any proximity to the election, the fact remains that President Obama gave the order to have Osama bin Laden killed. I’m reasonably certain we will be reminded of that fact through other media, perhaps including paid campaign advertisements.