Over the long weekend, I went to see both of the Andy Warhol shows that are being staged in Washington right now, “Warhol: Headlines” at the National Gallery of Art and “Shadows” at the Hirshhorn. Taken together (and it’s easy to do, the museums are within a few minutes walk of each other), the shows expanded my sense of Warhol as an artist — and my sense of the age.

One of the things that struck me most about “Warhol: Headlines” was the extent to which our concerns repeat across the years. In a copy of the National Enquirer, then labeling itself the “liveliest paper in the world,” a headline declares that “Connie Francis Tells Why… Hollywood Took One Look At Me and Said ‘ Too Fat.’” In an episode of a television show Warhol produced, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter interviews him about a recent trip to Afghanistan. He calls it the forgotten war, whips out Kipling. The conflicts never change, from Madonna’s nude pictures, to royal weddings and reproduction, to celebrity gossip, to the latest fulminations of the latest president. Sometimes, the extraordinary happens, and Warhol rises to the occasion, as when he intercuts reports of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder, with prints of the late president.

But in “Shadows,” Warhol’s far and away from his pop obsessions, repeating a shadow on the wall of his office over and over again, in neon series that look like the eighties, in grays that look like the edge of the New England woods at sunset, in demonic reds, in one particularly memorable image, in green and black swirls that felt like a malachite cave. I could have stared at it for hours. So much of Warhol’s work is about surfaces that it’s easy to forget about the depths he’s capable of creating — and everything those surfaces conceal.

In yesterday’s conversation about how to make retellings of Snow White more interesting, some commenters suggested, entirely correctly, that we not just transpose Western fairy tales into new settings, but that we try to tell stories from new mythologies. I agree with that suggestion, though I don’t think we’re going to stop telling Western fairy tales to Western audiences and so it’s important to see them as vehicles for more creative and multicultural storytelling as well. Instead, we need to both reform and refresh what we’ve got and look for new materials. So here are five awesome non-Western fairy tales that deserve movies of their own.

1. The Seven Chinese Brothers: The number of brothers vary in retellings of this story, but the principal remains generally the same: a group of super-powered brothers stand up to the Emperor (in some retellings, they do so because he’s mistreating workers building the Great Wall of China). When he tries to execute them in succession, they prove impervious to his punishments. It’s a nice inversion of superhero stories: these are extraordinary people who have chosen essentially ordinary lives, but bring their powers to bear against injustice, using both strength and cleverness to discredit a corrupt and powerful ruler. Grant Morrison and some of his coworkers created a superhero team with a little resemblance to the Brothers, but it would be nice to have a modern interpretation that challenges the Chinese government, rather than working for it.

2. Tokoyo: I have a particular weakness for stories about fathers and daughters, so this Japanese folk tale, about a girl who vows to return to her father after the Emperor banishes him is right up my alley. She visits forbidden islands, spies on imperial gossip, and offers herself up as a sacrifice to save a young girl — though instead of dying, she frees the Emperor from a powerful underseas curse. And I appreciate that it’s a story that’s about both social justice and filial love, rather than yet another story about a princess whose greatest accomplishment is getting successfully married. It’s a role that could produce a Japanese or Japanese-American Jennifer Lawrence, and how fantastic would that be?

3. Anansi, and Trickster and Culture Hero Tales More Generally: Speaking of being mired in marriages, getting away from an overreliance on the Western folk traditions would let us escape the omnipresence of marriage plots, and give us stories that up the stakes a bit. Anansi’s all about keeping — and sometimes upsetting — the balance of natural and intellectual resources in the universe. Culture hero stories are harder to sustain in an era of scientific reasoning — we don’t really need the invention of the wheel or other seemingly-inexplicable advances explained to us—but they can still be powerful statements about identity, divinity, and progress.

4. Nanabozho — and Paul Bunyan: I know Bunyan’s Western, specifically American. But Nanabozho, an Ojibwa spirit, threw down with one of the founding American culture heroes and in some versions of the story, killed him. A grand story of the frontier that’s told equally from the perspective of American Indian and American Gods, done right, could be an astonishing American epic. And it would certainly be more interesting than, say, Hell on Wheels.

5. Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Ravana, et.al.: If you want a team-up, it’s hard to get cooler than the Ramayana. You’ve got exiles! Kidnappings! Monkey deities! Demon kings who could be interpreted sympathetically (If we can have Magneto Was Right shirts, we can so have Ravana Was Right Ts)! The gender politics are kind of retrograde, but maybe Sita can organize a rebellion while in Ravana’s captivity, and an update could give Surpanakha motives other than being sexually rejected, though having your nose cut off is decent motivation for revenge.

Bonus: Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. John Steptoe’s retelling of Cinderella in Zimbabwe is one of the most stunningly beautiful picture books I’ve ever read. A movie that captured its gorgeous vision of African civilization would both be a treat, and a fantastic starting point for a conversation about alternatives to medieval-influenced High Fantasy. And maybe it could get us to a point where we could have a Black Panther movie, too.

There was something sad, but unsurprising, about the report that during the raid on Occupy Wall Street last night, the New York Police Department threw away the books that had been donated to the OWS library. Fortunately, it’s turned out not to be true. I’m not of the position that we’re going to build a whole new sustainable society at the Occupy encampments — or even that we need a revolution. But I do think that as a spur to volunteerism, and to thinking about how to get services, from legal counsel to literacy education, to people who need them, the encampments have been valuable. And that cities from New York to Oakland could quash the movement best by — as Erik Loomis describes the strategy of the Albany, Georgia government in responding to civil rights protest—killing the protestors with kindness. It’s good that the Zuccotti Park eviction ended up including a plan to box up the library’s books.The image of police throwing away books would have been of a narrative that includes attempts to keep reporters away from the eviction to blunt the coverage of it; the arrests of journalists; and a critically injured veteran of the war in Iraq.

It’s not as if artists have been uninvolved in the Occupy movement previously. Jeff Sharlet and the other folks at Occupy Writers are putting the moral force of art to the wheel, whether they’re writing original work about movement or holding storytelling events at the site of the now-dismantled library. And I don’t think that artists are myopic enough to need a library’s destruction to get angry — the images of last night’s eviction, and the terms of that eviction, seem to have been galvanizing enough. “Reads like progress for the movement, seeing city’s odd press release about ‘free speech’ versus ‘pitching tents.’ Issue coming to fore..?” Community‘s Dan Harmon tweeted, adding, “I’m nervous, too. Nervous that it will fizzle, nervous that it won’t.” Questlove broke the news for a lot of followers that the eviction was starting when he drove by last night. Raising Hope star Martha Plimpton (who is pretty politically engaged on Twitter anyway) is retweeting Rachel Maddow producer Jamil Smith on the language of cleanliness and the encampments.

And so I hope that the eviction, the attempt at a press blackout, and the dismantling, however temporary, of the library inspire some vigorous exercises of free speech,. I hope we don’t just get one-off essays — though many of the pieces up at Occupy Writers are phenomenal. I want to see novels, and television shows, and movies, and plays that take on income inequality, and financial regulation, and debt. You can shut down an encampment, and I imagine lots of cities will. You can ban and arrest individual reporters and throw out individual donated books. But inequity, suppression of protest, and violence tend to be pretty good fodder for art, whether it’s high or low. Artists can help make sure that clearing a park doesn’t mean the end of a movement.

Homeland is by far the best new television show of the fall, and to my mind, one of the best characters in it is Virgil, the surveillance expert who acts as CIA agent Carrie’s exasperated colleague and big brother figure as they spy on suspected terrorist and former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody. I spoke with David Marciano, who told me about Virgil’s backstory, his motivations for acting, and what Virgil has in common with the cops he played on Due South and The Shield. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell me more about Virgil’s relationship with Carrie. He appears to be very loyal to her, even when he’s chewing her out for crossing a line.

We discussed, prior to shooting the pilot, we had some rehearsal sessions, and there was a meeting with [writer] Michael Cuesta, [showrunner] Alex Gansa, and Carrie [Claire Danes] and we went over a lot of issues. We decided that Virgil went to the New Jersey Institute of Technology and studied engineering, and when he graduated, he wanted to work for the CIA and he applied for a job, and Saul was the guy I interviewed with, and he turned me down. And he hired somebody from MIT. So I just kind of was on my own, doing my own sort of freelance audio-visual surveillance, I met Carrie, and we became friends, and I sort of became, over time, like her big brother. My guess is, because I studied a little bit of behavioral psychology, Virgil was an outsider as a kid. And he grew up in a neighborhood in New Jersey where it was brawn over brains, and Virgil was a little bit of a tech nerd. And he was a brainiac and he had a sharp tongue, and you take a few beatings. You take a few shots to the ego and shots to your manhood, so to speak. And therefore, when you get older, you want to take care of people who are being abused or being ostracized. So it makes sense that Virgil would look after [Carrie], because she is an outsider, she is an outsider in this community. Also, everyone had someone to answer to. Saul has to answer to someone. Estes has to answer to answer to someone. Virgil has her back. Virgil’s going to look after her and take care of her. He doesn’t want what happened to him to happen to her…

As an actor, I have to justify how I’m behaving in the present. Everything we do as human beings in the present is the result of things that have happened to us in the past. People who become nurses are usually people who had to take care of their father or their mother. Archetypically, if you’re a caregiver, you’re a caregiver from a very young age. We choose these professions subconsciously.

Is that true for you, in terms of deciding you wanted to act?

In terms of me choosing acting, I needed to be recognized. As a child, I wasn’t recognized by my parents. My parents were divorced by the time I was 3. My father was around, I could never get his approval. My mother, she was a single mom. I was also an only child. So I had to make a lot of noise in order to be recognized. And as an actor, we choose acting because it’s an opportunity for you to hear me and to be recognized…when I first came to town, I would interview with agents, and I would say “I didn’t come here to go swimming, I didn’t come here to go fishing, I didn’t come here to get laid. I came here to win an Academy Award, an Emmy, and a Cleo. So let’s get to work.”
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Back in September, when my friend and colleague Alex Seitz-Wald, saw Werner Herzog’s death penalty documentary Into the Abyss at the Telluride Film Festival, he wasn’t particularly fond of it. But I’ve seen it twice now, and while I think there is a more politically pointed movie to be made out of some of the characters in Into the Abyss, the movie is both artistically lovely and lends an important rigor to our debates about the death penalty.

The movie centers around Michael Perry, a death row inmate who was executed in Texas this summer, Jason Burkett, who is serving life in prison for the murders they committed together, and the families of their victims. There isn’t any real question about whether Perry and Burkett are guilty, or that the people whose brothers and mother they murdered remain shattered more than a decade after the crimes were committed. And there aren’t racial disparities at play: Burkett and Perry are both white, and they murdered a white woman and two white teenagers over a mediocre convertible. In most artistic considerations of the death penalty — and in most of the cases taken up by activists — there would be some doubt about their guilt or whether the system works, and that doubt would be the basis for the arguments against the death penalty. But Perry is not only guilty, he’s reptilianly unsympathetic. After confessing to the crime, Perry maintained his innocence before his death, telling Herzog at one point during their interviews that Herzog should get out of Texas as soon as possible so they don’t execute him too. He’s a useful test of Herzog’s — and our — commitment to the idea that the state should not kill human beings. When Lisa Stotler, who lost her mother and her brother to Perry and Burkett, says that “some people just don’t deserve to live,” Perry is probably not the most effective of all possible refutations to her belief.

What the movie does very well, though, is to suggest that the death penalty is part of a larger messed-up tapestry, a world where people get stabbed with screwdrivers and go to work; where kids of school age can essentially slip off the radar of their families and the system; where a car is worth committing murder for. The movie can veer into Southern gothic, a bit. Interviewing one of Burkett’s friends from before the murder, Herzog questions him with anthropological interest about his inability to read before a prison term, and he has a tendency to put words in his subjects mouths, taking the frequent “Yes, sir” responses he gets to leading questions as actual assent. Burkett’s wife, who’s become pregnant despite the fact that she and her husband aren’t allowed to do more than kiss and hold hands during his prison bid, and insists that she isn’t a murder groupie despite some deeply odd romantic comedy notions of dating a prisoner, is decidedly unnerving.

But some of the movie’s best moments come not out of those more grotesque moments, but when Herzog manages to suggest there’s something deeply wrong with the world at large. When he has a detective who investigated the case walk him through the crime scenes, Herzog shoots the man against Crater Lake, where Perry and Burkett dumped Sandra Stotler’s body: the shot is framed so the trees surrounding the lake are reflected upside down, a vision of a world confusing and reversed. And watching Fred Allen, the former captain of the death row squad that executed Perry, talk about how he’s only become able to appreciate the world again after quitting the job is heart-rending—and probably would have made a better coda than the sloppy epilogue Herzog tacks on at the end.

Into the Abyss won’t work for everyone, and it doesn’t precisely do the work of the death penalty abolition movie. I could have watched an entire movie about Allen’s decision to give up his pension and give up the work of executions. But the death penalty is a strange thing, existing in defiance of logic or the rules of sound public policy. Some movies should make arguments. And some should make manifest the strange, powerful impulses in the American psyche.

The bridge is yours.

-I’m not a huge short story person, but the new Don DeLillo sounds fantastic.

-Michael Fassbender has ideas for a new X-Men movie, but I just want to see Wolverine fight the Spanish Civil War.

-I wonder what it would mean for TV storytelling if the Supreme Court dramatically limited indecency regulation.

-The IMDb age discrimination suit heats up.

-I can retire now. I have everything I’ve ever wanted:

I watched both Bob Costas’ interview with Jerry Sandusky on Rock Center and 20/20′s feature on Gabrielle Giffords last night. I imagine I’m not alone in doing that, and feeling stunned by the juxtaposition, but it’s worth pointing out the phenomenal journalism on display in both pieces last night.

I think there’s often a sense that toughness and an adversarial approach are signs of principled journalism, and Costas’ questions to Sandusky certainly illustrated why, in certain cases, that can be the only route to integrity. To hear Costas ask Sandusky about reports that he showered with a particular boy and conceded to his mother that his genitals may have touched the boy, and to hear Sandusky pause (as he did often), and say, “I can’t exactly recall what was said there. In terms of what I did say was that if he felt that way then I was wrong,” is immensely revealing, even if it doesn’t elicit specific information. Even if you’re Costas, even if you’re in a position of power, even if you’ve landed an interview that a sensible lawyer would have declined, even if your audience is sympathetic, it’s not exactly easy to ask someone if they’re a pedophile point-blank, but Costas did it. “You feel horrible,” Costas asked at one point. “Do you feel culpable?” “I’m not sure what you mean,” Sandusky told him. I imagine he’ll want to rehearse his answers better before he goes on trial.

By contrast, Diane Sawyer’s approach to Gabrielle Giffords was significantly gentler, listening patiently, helping her through answers and working with Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, to help her make herself understood. As a piece of explanatory journalism, the segment was, for me at least, an extremely useful look at the therapy that can help someone recover from brain injury, and the extent of the uncertainty involved. But the show also made clear that even if Giffords’ is still intellectually capable and curious, her ability to communicate remains significantly compromised. Sawyer could have asked directly — and she did ask Kelly if, given the brutality of the attack, he was reluctant to see his wife run again — but she didn’t necessarily have to in order to get the point across:

Both approaches were perfect for their story, and both pieces were examples of the kind of thing that television journalism does best. We got to see Giffords rebuilding her body and her brain, and then the results of that work in front of us. And Jerry Sandusky was a ghost, a man who can’t bring himself to show his face even as he ventured out in an astonishingly ill-conceived attempt to defend his reputation.

I suspect a lot of folks are going to be quite upset by the news that Community‘s being put on hiatus, along with Prime Suspect, though both shows are supposed to return to the air. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that either show is taking a break — given NBC’s failures in the early going, it was inevitable that things would get moved around to make space for some of the shows the network has yet to try out, like The Firm and Smash. And I tend to agree with Todd VanDerWerff that this probably doesn’t mean anything particularly new or different for Community‘s chances of a renewal. More to the point, though, the tenuous status of the show seems to make the case for more single-season shows or shows with a defined number of seasons from the beginning. Even if something like Community could have gone on forever, it does seem like it could be a fairly neat four-season story, and that treating it that way from the beginning could have made it seem less like a low-rated risk and more like a contained, wildly innovative project.

And honestly, though I love Community, I’m just as sorry that Prime Suspect is gone, and seems less likely to come back. I was skeptical of the show the entire time it was in development, and I was wrong. It’s a smart, funny, serious procedural that’s also found a way to be consistently intelligent about workplace sexism, at a time when sexual harassment has become an issue in the presidential campaign and sexual assault allegations at Penn State have become a national scandal. At a time when the Law & Order franchise has been winking out, it would have been wonderful to see a modern, intelligent cop show, especially one that’s as well-acted as it is by Maria Bello, Peter Gerety, Kirk Acevedo, and Tim Griffin. In a fall full of exasperating girl-children, Jane Timoney’s the most exciting woman on network television. We should root for both shows, one for experimenting wildly with genre, one for sticking to form and elevating it.

Christopher Hitchens’ ridiculousness about men being funnier than women has been debunked by science:

While men were deemed ever so slightly funnier (0.11 points out of a theoretical possible score of 5.0), they were mostly considered funnier by other men. There goes the peacock theory. Other differences? Men tended to use profanity and sexual humor slightly more often than women (only slightly, thank you, Melissa McCarthy), though neither sex necessarily considered those types of jokes funnier.

In a second, related experiment, the judges’ memory bias was tested to see whether men were given more credit for their witticisms than women. Predictably, men and women remembered the funny captions better. But when asked which captions were written by men and which by women, both sexes tended to misattribute the funny ones to male authors and the unfunny ones to female writers. Moreover, women were far less confident about their gag-writing abilities than men. When asked how they thought their efforts would rank, men believed they would receive a 2.3; women, a 1.5.

It’s particularly interesting that men would be given more credit for being funny even though they tend to rely more heavily on categories of jokes that aren’t considered funnier than average. But then that’s sort of the point of this whole stupid debate, which in a way I’m frustrated we’re still having — men aren’t objectively funnier than women for all audiences. Different people find different things funny, but larger industry trends mean that men are given a wider range of opportunities to be funny in different ways — I can’t really imagine a woman getting a chance to do a true equivalent of Louis C.K.’s routine about how ridiculous men look during sex and not encountering a wave of body criticism, or being treated like she’s pathetic rather than hilariously honest. But as with all things, in entertainment and elsewhere, the fact that things are a certain way — or that dude columnists believe them to be a certain way — isn’t proof that they’re immutably true.