Have I mentioned how much I adore Maureen Ryan? Because I adore Maureen Ryan a lot, and she makes a critical point about the representation of women in the television industry and the resulting content in her scathing review of I Hate My Teenage Daughter:

Before we all link arms and dance a jig of glee about the number of ladies in the realm of TV comedy, a few reminders are in order: First, this trend is long overdue, given that women have always been funny (yes, even before Tina Fey), and this fall’s uptick in female representation doesn’t erase the fact that, as I explored in this story, the overall number of female writers in the TV industry is shrinking.

Also, the sad fact is, women are as capable of writing a misogynist, soul-killing TV comedy as anyone else. Exhibit A: ‘I Hate My Teenage Daughter,’ a shrieky nightmare that premieres 9:30PM ET on Fox.

Sherry Bilsing-Graham and Ellen Plummer Kreamer are listed as the executive producers of this show, which takes as its premise that people will enjoy seeing two women relentlessly mocked and humiliated by everyone around them. In the unlikely event that that premise strikes you as funny, what’s on display here is so stale and mean-spirited that I urge you to avoid it at all costs.

The entertainment industry doesn’t need token ladies who will write things that conform to male perspectives. It needs a lot of women, some of whom will be one of the guys, some of whom will write stories that explore and illuminate female worlds, some of whom will work in established tropes, and some of whom will lay down new markers. Diversity isn’t about quotas. It’s about perspectives.

While I was up in New Haven this week, I swung by “Remembering 9/11,” an exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery. The show’s a bit too crabbed for its name — this is hardly a comprehensive look at the way we recall an event that’s traumatic not just in and of itself but for what it inspired to do to ourselves and others afterward. But I appreciated a hall that had both photographs and text from Leo Rubinfien’s Wounded Cities, a multi-media exploration of what the attacks meant from the perspective of someone who moved into an apartment next door to the World Trade center a week before the attacks.

The photographs are big and solemn and gorgeous, portraits not of the devastation of terrorist attacks around the world but of people who live in cities that have been the site of attacks, and moved on. An observant Jewish boy in Israel holds an half-eaten ice cream bar — it stuck out at me that it was the kind with nuts in the chocolate. The breeze blows strands of hair across the face of a woman in Seoul. Experiencing terrorist attacks gave New Yorkers and Washingtonians in particular something in common with these ordinary people. It was our military response after the fact that reasserted our exceptionalism, at terrible cost.

But it was actually the text displayed alongside Rubinfien’s photographs that struck me most strongly, a literary and detailed explication of our reactions to tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, a conversation between Rubinfien and a friend illustrates how big the emotions were: “A friend much worried about us asked me from Rio if I thought the attacks would mean the end of cities—if living in huge concentrations would be too dangerous now, and people would leave their Londons and Parises to wither.” Thank goodness we were resilient enough to resist that sort of apocalyptic scenario, which would have signaled a societal upheaval — and an al Qaeda-affirming rejection of modernity — even greater than two wars of choice. Rubinfien’s son Julian reacts on a smaller, more personal scale, asking his father, “But didn’t they know I’m good?” He’s convinced that Osama bin Laden wanted to kill him personally. There was logic and calculation in our response to September 11, but Rubinfien is trying to parse our emotional reactions. I’m not sure I agree with this: “Before Iraq, Henry Kissinger had said that the Americans would invade because Afghanistan hadn’t brought the relief they needed—their emotions were too big.” I don’t think our emotions propelled us into war on a national level, but I do think our emotions made us less inclined to resist the emotional and calculated drive towards the invasion by the Bush administration.

And I appreciate Rubinfien finding the beauty in the tragedy. “In the crevices on our roof,” he writes, “I found some history of the Kuomintang, several sections of Property Law, sheets and sheets of balances in yen. It was a lot of money; I couldn’t tell whose.” There’s something miraculous about the arrival of those things on his roof, the juxtaposition of them, even if there’s no question that the terrible thing that created that miracle is undeniably worse, undeniably not worth it. People freaked out in the immediate aftermath of the attacks when Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote that her aesthetic reaction overwhelmed her emotional or moral one to the sight of the Towers falling, saying: “I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought, ‘This is a really strange art project.’ It was the most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water.” But I thought it was a useful illustration of the bigness of the September 11 that they crossed the wires in our heads, rendered us temporarily unable to react to scale. And it’s an important reminder that our aesthetic reactions don’t always reveal the truth.

It’s pretty unfortunate that Questlove’s getting bombarded with racist insults after making the equally unfortunate decision to choose “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” as Michele Bachmann’s intro music when she appeared on Jimmy Fallon. But I think his explanation of his reaction to the uproar is sort of revealing:

The musician revealed that the decision to play the 1985 track wasn’t mulled over for very long. “It wasn’t like a chess move where you have to think 12 steps ahead; you’re just, like, ‘Fuck, all right, I’m gonna do it,’ in a kamikaze-type way,” he admitted. “And I really didn’t think about how it could be perceived as a misogynist swipe — it didn’t hit me until my [Twitter] timeline started showing up that it was seen that way. I was like, Fuck, I forgot ‘Bitch’ is actually in the title.”

I mean, first there’s the fact that “bitch” isn’t just in the title. The song lyrics refer to the titular woman as a “little slut,” in addition to a “little lyin’ ass bitch.” It’s a song about a really horrible-sounding woman, and it doesn’t exactly go easy on her, whether accusing her of emotional manipulation or sexual infidelity (I tend to think Bachmann’s career is built around the former, but I don’t think she’s guilty of the latter). You have to try pretty hard to miss the language if you’re already choosing the song to be a stinging rebuke to the person who’s entering to it.

Second, I think there’s something really strange about the insistence that “bitch” is a neutral term, something you can just miss when picking out a song, that of the more serious profanities, it’s the one that networks can use without bleeping out. I don’t think the fact that the insult has sexist origins means that no one should use it ever. But I think denying those sexist origins (as some folks did when we last discussed profanity and entertainment here — I’m not saying Questlove did this) doesn’t makes a lot of sense. And there’s something decisively strange about the fact that a gendered insult that’s meant to degrade women by comparing them to animals or to degrade men by comparing them to women is considered less obscene than other profanities.

By now, I’m sure you’ve all seen the trailer for New Year’s Eve, the latest multi-track ensemble dramedy that is the benighted offspring of Love, Actually:

There are many things that drive me nuts about these kinds of movies, from the ridiculous salaries people get paid to mail in a couple minutes of work, to the emotionally-manipulative storytelling, to the treatment of holidays as the most critically important turning points ever. But it’s also irritating because I think ensemble movies where stories are moving on several parallel, not always related tracks, can be a really powerful form of storytelling. Here are five books that, if adapted, could show us why:

1. Underworld, Don DeLillo: Nuns! Conceptual artists! The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Baseball games! It would be hard to corral DeLillo’s attempt at defining an age into a series of coherent narratives. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t provide a useful set of arresting images and emotional moments to set against each other. Eras can be defined by grand personalities, but they’ve also got their distinct tones. And who doesn’t want to see that baseball game sequence as a movie (or an episode of television) on its now, not even counting what comes after?

2. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks: Brooks’ interwoven narrative of a book restorer who’s taking care of the Sarajevo Haggadah in preparation of its exhibition and Brooks’ fantasies about how the extraordinary book came together over the centuries and survived despite its exposure to everything from the Jewish expulsion from Spain to the censorship of the Inquisition is more of a short story collection than a novel. And it’s a remarkable testament to the power of art and to interfaith collaboration. The stories don’t have to be directly connected to each other for readers — or viewers — to see how they support those common themes.

3. The Sparrow and Children of God, Mary Doria Russell: These narratives are related, of course, but how awesome would it be to juxtapose a Catholic investigation on Earth, a Jewish-inspired uprising on an alien planet, and the flashbacks to how both the rebel and penitent got where they ended up? Plus, throw in a parallel social history of two alien species — Andy Serkis can totally play Supaari.

4. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison: Hollywood should give us Song of Solomon anyway as an apology for The Help. And a fair number of these stories intersect. But these powerful, parallel tales, about the impact of faith and the strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible things that develop in our private lives, would be amazing to see spiral out on a big screen. And it would be awesome to see a big, prestige picture that would provide this many unusual, moving roles for black actors.

5. Canterbury Tales or The Decameron: Yes, I’m a ridiculous dork. But stories about the stories we tell ourselves under conditions of stress, or exploration, or extreme hope are revealing, moving, and as both of these collections reveal, often extremely funny. Plus, personal movies about ordinary and ordinary-ish people experiencing big events like plagues and pilgrimages would be a welcome break from all the Borgias and Tudors we’ve got running around.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 1 episode of Community.

Given the worst-case scenario that this is the second-to-last episode of Community that we’ll ever see, I want everything that we have before the end of the year to be perfect, both to go out on a glorious note and, in the case of cancellation, to mock NBC on the way out the door. It would have been hard for any episode of the show to follow up the last one, which I still believe will be a perfect coda of the series of it comes to that. And while this episode did one thing I liked, I don’t think it entirely worked.

People — including me — have expressed frustration about the way Shirley’s character has been portrayed this season, as she’s turned into an even more moralizing and judgmental character than she was previously, sacrificing the bits of interiority she’s been given as the show’s most perennially short-changed character. It’s tough because there have always been interesting things there. We know that Shirley was, at one point, if not an alcoholic, a drunk, and that she had tremendous anger issues over her divorce. Tonight’s episode was, however silly the engine of revelation, a valuable look at how far back that anger extends. Once, Shirley was a rejected, heavy little girl, and then she redefined herself as a wife and mother, only to have that identity smashed, too. Is it any wonder she clings to piety as a way to hold herself together and her pain and anger within as much as possible? When Shirley condemns things like foosball, or “Like out of town weddings with receptions that are in the same place in everybody’s rooms!” I have the sense that she’s speaking from experience. And if you’ve been some place really bad, “nice” might actually seem like a higher value.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-For the distinguished meth or television connoisseur in your life, Walter White sneakers.

-The cultural exchange that made the Tintin story The Blue Lotus so good.

-Watchmen 2 is a thing. Everything is terrible.

-Sounds like Valentine Wiggin’s going to have true grit.

-Are we on our way to usage-based billing?

This post contains spoilers through Chapter 25 of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For next Friday, let’s read through Chapter 35.

The theme of this week’s reading, entirely incidentally, turns out to be how different Jews — and by extension, different kinds of people — handle the brokenness of the world, the impossibility of perfect observance. The Law, it turns out, is not something you can game to get the perfect results: the rebbe’s diet doesn’t prevent him from turning into a human mountain, Mendle Shpilman’s arranged marriage cannot erase his homosexuality, and the Verbovers need the boundary maven to compromise for them so they can live with themselves. Inherent in observance is, as Landsman observed “a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.”

What makes Mendel Shpilman seem like the Messiah isn’t necessarily just his ability to confer blessing, but his ability to bridge the gap between desire and ability so smoothly: “Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel say all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark serge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life…He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.” Other people have other solutions. Bina has her miraculous purse — she may not be able to bridge the gaps in the human soul, but she’s able to make almost any other circumstances bearable: “If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass—Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.”
Read more

So, John Carter:

I haven’t read the books, and I’m not sure it would make a difference. But I find myself weirdly depressed by the idea of a movie where a character is magically transported from one vicious sectarian conflict (the Civil War) to another one, on another planet. Maybe there’s just no escape velocity from war and territorial violence. Or maybe the lessons of one world are meant to redeem another, a hope that seems vainly and permanently disproved — it’s too hard to see our errors coming at us from a distance to avoid them fully. Or maybe I’m overthinking this. But it does sort of put a damper on my enthusiasm about futurism and space travel to think that we’ll encounter the exact same problems all over again out there in the great beyond. I almost don’t care if there are bad things out there in our fiction if they’re new, and reveal something different about ourselves.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 1 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Earlier this season, we discussed an uncomfortable question to raise about television’s favorite insanely enthusiastic public servant: is Leslie Knope corrupt or unethical? I was glad to see Parks and Recreation take up at least a small aspect of that question, and even gladder to see it come in a surprisingly sweet episode that moved both Leslie and Ben forward. Also, my mother used to work for Bella Abzug, so any reference to her on any show ever automatically earns a piece of popular culture a half-grade bump from yours truly, even if no reference will ever be as awesomely surreal as the reality.

The thing that worked so nicely about this episode was that it allowed everyone to pay appropriate prices for their actions, while also moving them forward to better things. A lot of this season has been about Leslie acknowledging her limitations, whether she’s steamrolling Ben or reassessing her sense of her own history. Tonight, she had to face up to the fact that she’d done something wrong, not just in the fact of hiding her relationship with Ben, but in the process of it. Even if George’s wife “said my skin was luminous,” it wasn’t okay for Leslie to buy off another city employee to keep a secret that probably wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d just disclosed it in the first place. In typical Leslie fashion, she thinks she should get fired rather than get suspended for two weeks. And she probably will pay a price for it, electorally. But the self-knowledge is probably worth it.

And I also think it’s a good thing for Ben that he lost his job. The show’s acknowledged repeatedly that he’s not necessarily professionally fulfilled in Pawnee, a little town that would have been just another State of the Public Service cross for him as he attempts to rebuild his credibility. It’s good that he’s been shaken loose, whether because he can now manage her campaign openly, rebuilding a bit more of his credentials, or because he can do what I wish Parks and Recreation had done with Tom, and used him as a basis for expanding our sense of Pawnee, a necessary move to broaden and unify the world as Leslie moves out of the Parks department.
Read more