This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

In a decidedly dour season, Louise’s arrival, via an altercation with an Atlantic City matrons and a pack of “beach lizards,” is something of a delight. Angela’s been looking for an actual kindred spirit all season long, and while Richard’s too melancholic and too damaged to truly lift her up, Louise, who uses the fake names of one of the characters in her novels as an alias, and hollers, “Let ‘em gawk. They’re called knees, fellows!” at her pack of admirers on the beach, appears to be exactly who Angela is looking for. It’s nice to see Angela lit up a bit, galvanized both by overhearing Jimmy’s inept scheming, and by the kiss she shares with Louise at a joyfully bohemian party. And her conversation with Jimmy is bruising. When he asks her why she married him (after evading a question about whether he really loves her), she’s blunt: “Because we have a child together. It’s what society expected from me. Because you kept pushing it.”

And that’s sort of the key to Jimmy’s problems, isn’t it? He’s not a complicated man, and he’s not very good at seeing complexity in other people, or in assessing what people expect of him, particularly his mother. He’ll toss a fellow off a balcony for upsetting his party, incapable of thinking through what it might mean for a long game. In fact, Jimmy doesn’t particularly seem capable of seeing that there is a long game, that his moment of triumph is really Nucky’s victory. Inspired by a lecture from Arnold Rothstein, who tells him that “Some days I make 20 bets. Some days, I make none…so I wait, plan, marshal my resources. And when I finally see an opportunity and there is a bet to make, I bet it all,” Nucky rolls big. He quits his treasurer’s job, retires to private life, and prepares to unleash absolute hell on Atlantic City. “You sure this what you want?” Chalky asks when Nucky tells him to call a general strike and that Nucky will back him. “In about 30 minutes, it won’t be my problem,” Nucky says, relishing the thought of complicating everyone else’s life for a change — and planning a trip to Ireland to enlist Sinn Fein in his campaign.
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David Brin takes on Frank Miller’s anti-Occupy Wall Street rant and 300, arguing that the Athenians — and by extension the Occupy movement Miller seems convince is going to undermine our fight against Islamic terrorism — are vastly more bad-ass and effective than Miller gives them credit for:

The first invasion by Persia, ten years earlier—under Xerxes’s father—had been defeated by just such a militia army… from Athens… made up of farmers, clerks, tradesmen, artists and mathematicians. A rabble of ill-disciplined “brawlers” who, after waiting in vain for promised help from Sparta, finally decided to handle the problem alone. On that fateful day that citizen militia leveled their spears and their thin blue line attacked a professional Persian force many times their number, slaughtering them to the last man on the legendary beach of Marathon…Think about that for a moment. Can you picture it? Damn. Please pause here and Wiki “Marathon.” Even better, watch it computer dramatized. Prepare to be amazed there were once such men. Go on… I’ll wait!…

That Athenian triumph deserves a movie! And believe me, it weighed heavily on the real life Leonidas, ten years later. “300″ author Frank Miller portrays the Spartans’ preening arrogance in the best possible light, as a kind of endearing tribal machismo. Miller never hints at the underlying reason for Leonidas’s rant, a deep current of smoldering shame over how Sparta sat out Marathon, leaving it to Athenian amateurs, like the playwright Aeschelus, to save all of Greece. The “shopkeepers” whom Leonidas outrageously and ungratefully despises in the film.

To a certain extent, it seems silly to keep pointing out how warped Miller’s world-view is. There are no questions that there are problems with safety at Occupy encampment, and I’ve been particularly troubled by the early trouble the movement seemed to have dealing with the risk of sexual assault and women’s concerns. But that’s not really what Miller’s screed is about. It’s just another way for him to assert that he’s doing more than anyone else is to combat terrorism inspired by extreme interpretations of Islam, to sneer “Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.”

And if Miller was an isolated crank with totally implausible beliefs, I’d probably just ignore him. But his conviction that the folks who don’t have jobs could have work if they wanted it in a time of persistently high unemployment is similar to the views University of Pennsylvania students who responded to Occupy protestors by telling them to join the same tax bracket those students expected to enter. The creepy idea that a New York mosque is a cover for a nest of terrorists, an animating fantasy of his execrable Holy Terror, is the one that’s entangled the development of a community center in the real world. Miller’s views are self-aggrandizing, uniformed junk, but it’s junk that has a foothold in American society.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of The Walking Dead.

I’ve been somewhat frustrated by this season of The Walking Dead, but I’ve appreciated the flashes back to the process of society going to pieces, which I admit I tend to find more interesting than the wandering around post-apocalypse bit (a preference I suspend in the case of The Passage, which does both). And tonight’s started off with a bang, the sight of military helicopters napalming the roads into cities in an effort to contain the walkers, with a preview of the conflict to come: is it easier and more moral to protect yourself and embrace a biting realism, or to struggle to build a fragile society under great pressure. “The boy’s hungry. We can spare one box,” Carol says, in the first act that will truly bind her to the group that will become her family. “It’s called operational security,” Ed spits back at her. “How long do you think this stuff is going to last if you keep running your mouth off to every damn person we meet?” In the world after the apocalypse, will we be Ed or Carol? Rick or Shane? Daryl or Merle?

There’s right in both sides. Shane’s probably correct about the danger of reminiscing, when he says, “You shouldn’t be talking about that stuff. It’s gone. That life, and everything in it…It’s like we’re old folks. Everyone in our stories are dead.” And he’s also probably correct, even if he doesn’t know it, that there’s something dangerous about letting the members of the group get comfortable, especially if Hershel isn’t going to let them stay. But as Rick tells Lori, Shane is also probably wrong that “My good intentions are making me weaker…He says it’s math, basic survival…Not much room in that equation for being soft.” There’s no question that’s true, but physical survival isn’t the only kind of survival.

Daryl, after his accident in the woods, sees a hallucination of his brother that’s a perfect dramatization of that dilemma. “You his bitch now?” Daryl imagines Merle telling him. “You a joke, that’s what you are. Playing errand boy to a bunch of pansy asses, niggers, and Democrats. You’re nothing but a freak to them.” He stumbles into camp having eaten raw squirrel, with zombie ears on a thong about his neck. But Carol tells him, feverish and recovering, that “You did more for that little girl in a day than her daddy did for her in his whole life…You’re every bit as good as them. Every bit.” There’s worth in doing the right thing. Even after the end of the world, you can still make a difference in a kid’s life. But whether or not you can make a difference in a zombie’s? Well, Hershel may believe you can, but it seems to me, at least, like it’s an open question.

I haven’t watched Family Guy with any sort of regularity for years — the show’s sexism really became unbearable for me — but I did check in on last night’s 9/11-themed episode, and found it both charming and politically astute. The idea is that when Brian and Stewie travel back in time, they inadvertently prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks, but instead of creating a peaceful country, vastly worse things follow.

The thing that the episode gets, I think, is that even if thousands of Americans didn’t die on September 11 and the attack had been foiled mid-air, the chances are high that we would have done some bad things to ourselves and our country. In this case, George W. Bush loses a second presidential term, goes home, and refounds the Confederacy. “The new American Civil War you set into motion ended in a series of concentrated nuclear strikes along the eastern seaboard,” Stewie tells Brian in dismay. “They killed 17 million people. Including Cesar Millan!” That’s definitely worse than what we did to ourselves in the aftermath of the successful attacks: more people have died in the wars we started as a result than were killed by terrorists, and that doesn’t even begin to count the lost goodwill, moral authority, and monetary suck of our detention policies. I appreciate that Family Guy gets that the attacks may have been an initial victory for al Qaeda, but it’s a victory we consolidated ourselves.

Second, the scenes of Brian stopping the attacks are a pretty good parody of American revenge fantasies. “Ugh, you prepared catchphrases for yourself?” Stewie says, disgusted, as he watches footage of Brian whipping out a baseball bat and uttering platitudes like “Time to terrorize the terrorists!” and “Mohammed Atta stayed home.” What makes the people who foiled the attack on United 93 so heroic is not that stopping crime — whether it’s a mugging, or a vicious and unthinkably ambitious act of terrorism — is a chance to show off but because it’s absolutely terrifying.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

In “Death Row Tip,” everyone’s digging up the past as Lockhart/Gardner become tangentially involved in a death row case because Ricky Parker, the convict in question, gives information to the police (and a documentarian) about a gang murder. When the police dig up the body, they find the body of a missing young woman as well, and Lockhart/Gardner represents her boyfriend, who is arrested for her murder. They’re convinced that, instead, her murder is related to the gang killing, even though a 14-year-old gang member confesses to the latter. Parker suggested to the documentarian that he knew who really committed the crime, but he’s scheduled to be executed within hours. Lockhart/Gardner therefore agrees to help the defense attorney with Parker’s appeal in return for access to him. They do eventually solve the murders and exonerate their client, but that’s almost incidental; what the show cares about is the death penalty issues the case raises. No one really thinks Parker is innocent, so their appeal rests on testimony from his mother that she neglected him and testimony from his priest that he is actually a good person – and all of it is blatantly untrue. This prompts Alicia to examine her feelings about the death penalty, and, somewhat surprisingly, the show decided to make her one of the characters most in favor of it. The defense attorney and the priest both argue that it’s morally acceptable to say whatever needs to be said in the appeal because the death penalty is always morally wrong, but Alicia isn’t buying it, partially because the girls that Parker raped and murdered were Grace’s age.

It would have been interesting to have Will more involved in this case, because I’m not sure how his constant internal conflict between pragmatism and idealism would have shaken out in this situation. But he was distracted by being investigated by Cary and Dana, who now seem to suspect him of buying off a corrupt judge. He knows that Diane is watching him and Alicia closely, and suspects that Peter is going after him because of Alicia, but when Alicia shoots down his idea of “pausing” their relationship, he certainly doesn’t fight very hard. He still doesn’t seem to have told Alicia much about the investigation, and I can’t decide whether he’s trying to protect her or trying to keep her from discovering something about his past. In Alicia’s absence, Will’s main ally is Kalinda, which in turn calls into question Kalinda’s actual motivations in her escalating love triangle with Cary and Dana. Kalinda spends much of the episode flirting with Dana, and Cary is blatantly jealous, possibly of both of them. But after they have a close call when a suspect starts shooting, Cary and Kalinda finally kiss – and then he gives her a weird look and walks away. I suspect that Kalinda is actually letting herself feel things for once, but Cary has no reason to think she’s not playing him, so this turn of events should play interestingly into the investigation into Will.
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The bridge is yours.

-Presidential candidates as D&D characters.

-Millionaire behaves like millionaire, makes headlines.

-Olympia Dukakis as Clytemnestra is one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, so it’s always cool to hear her talk craft.

-Weegee in Hollywood.

-I may be sentimental and ridiculous, but Jennifer Lawrence looks amazing in The Hunger Games.

Mitt Romney’s staked out the entirely predictable position — based on both his record as governor of Massachusetts and his moderate position in the pool of Republican candidates — that federal arts funding should be cut in half.

I’ve written this before, but it’s worth saying again: if you start your discussion of dramatically cutting the federal budget with the arts, you’re probably not particularly serious about cutting spending in the first place. Cutting $155 million in arts and humanities spending, which is what we’d lose if Romney managed to pare down the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, or $310 million if both were eliminated, is almost laughably negligible, considering the federal government’s other obligations. And that smallness is precisely why conservatives frequently go after arts funding — and also, I think, why they fail. The assumption is that the arts don’t have much of a constituency, or they’d have more funding and more clout, so they’re a safe target, unlike, say, military spending. But that funding ends up spread out fairly widely, and attracting constituents in unexpected places — rural lawmakers, for example, in districts where the arts are fairly dependent on public funding can be pretty fond of it, even if they don’t have a lot of high-roller arts patrons among their constituency. And those folks who support the arts themselves tend to appreciate additional government support for their pet projects, or opera companies.

Other candidates who are still trying to stake out positions to the right of Romney will inevitably call for total elimination of these programs. Michele Bachmann already has. And we’ll keep spending time on a debate that we already seem to have a consensus on: that we won’t spend a huge amount of money on the arts, but we’ll try to make sure there’s enough funding for everyone to get a little beauty and enrichment. Instead, we’ll keep fighting the culture funding wars, forgetting that there are all kinds of government waste.

Well, the trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman looks visually bonkers in a way that I expect will force Tsarem Singh to up his game with Mirror, Mirror, his competing fairy tale adaptation also due out next year:

Also, it’s nice to see that Chris Hemsworth is getting to use his throwing-dangerous-objects skills from Thor in another movie: way to recycle, Hollywood!

When this trailer came out on Friday, Dodai Stewart over at Jezebel heaved a sigh over both Snow White movies, saying, “But despite looking at the story in a new way, both films feature overwhelmingly white casts. How new and twisty.” I don’t really think either of these adaptations is that new and twisty, though, and ultimately, I think that’s the key to both reinvigorating our fairy tale archetypes and to getting more diverse casting in those fairy tales. Sure, Snow White and the Huntsman has some action-y, monster-y stuff going on, but it’s still the same essential setting, a Christian, European feudal state, and the same basic conflict between two women. Mirror, Mirror, if anything, looks more traditional, with its Snow White in Disneyfied dresses rather than in armor.

You want a non-white or a mixed-race cast, and a genuinely fresh rethinking of the story? Switch regions or continents, and upset the dynamic between some of the main characters considerably. If Snow and the Seven ever gets made, we’ll get a kung-fu twist on the fairy tale, with Chinese warriors from different schools in place of a dwarf-run woodlands B and B. Want to stick to medieval Europe? Why not set the story in Al-Andalus, or during the Reconquista, and throw some genuine religious conflict in a story about a regime that’s trying to solidify itself in the face of an existential threat. Make Snow White a commoner rising up against the monarchy as the head of a peasant’s revolt, or a key player in a fictionalized version of the Haitian revolution. Or make the Evil Queen her mother, not just her stepmother, and use the story to explore mother-daughter rivalry in a much more direct and murderous way. I’m all for color-blind casting. But if we’re satisfied with the same old stories with different people schlepping through the same old parts, that feels like an awfully partial victory to me.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of Homeland.

I’m feeling rather pleased with myself for theorizing correctly — or so it seems for now — that Brody would turn out not to be a terrorist, but that Carrie’s initial information from her source would be correct, and that the two would have to find a way to work together. But I’m down in a paranoid enough place to wonder if Thomas Drake is really alive, or if there’s some sort of plant. And the mechanics of plot feel almost irrelevant in light of the larger questions posed by this extraordinary episode of television.

Carrie and Brody’s recklessness and tenderness are a marvel to behold. Just as an artistic juxtaposition, the contrast between the way Carrie plays a neo-Nazi in a bar, telling him “I love sucking Nazi dick,” with her confession to Brody that she wasn’t actually much of a mankiller in college is wonderful. Similarly, I love their tentativeness even though they’ve effectively run away together, Brody’s “Can we graduate to cabin sex?” their slow escalation from a quick fuck in a car to tender, sober, emotional sex, is great stuff. Even if the show didn’t have such enormous stakes, this would be the stuff of great romantic drama, of the negotiations between us. The heart is its own adventure.
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