During my trip to New Haven last week, I was fortunate enough to spend a morning at “Adapting The Eye: An Archive of the British In India, 1770-1830,” a terrific exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, curated by Holly Shafer, a PhD candidate in the University’s Art History Department, who someone should definitely hire on the basis of this show. It’s a fascinating look at the relationship between art and politics. And “Adapting The Eye” isn’t just about the way the British saw India — it’s about the way they saw themselves in India and what that meant for their colonial project.

In the absence of photography, painting played a critical role in documenting everything from gift-giving rituals to assessing military positioning. Surveyor Robert Mabon made jewel-like portraits of the presents that were part of diplomatic exchanges like the one to the right here and of techniques for saddling horses complete with painstakingly detailed notes. Warren Hastings, the British governor of Bengal, commissioned William Hodges to paint the fortresses controlled by Raja Chait Singh so he could assess the strength of the forces behind a rebellion — the results included both military useful information and an impressionistic sense of Indian landscapes. And art even became part of British and Indian diplomatic traditions. To both meet the requirements of their budgeteers and to avoid the perception that they were being corrupted by establishing the lavish, jeweled gifts that were traditionally exchanged in the Mughal court, British diplomats created a new tradition of exchanging portraits, creating a new Indian market for British painters.

And even when they weren’t creating art for the purpose of cultural exchange in Indian, British artists constantly wrote themselves into the images of India — and some of those portraits may have been more revealing than they were intended to be. In Thomas Danielle’s painting of Sir Charles Ware signing a treaty in 1770 with the Maratha Empire, British officers are seated on the floor of a palace in the style of their hosts, displaying attitudes that range from ease, to extreme dignity, to wondrous excitement at the circumstances. Painter James Wales wrote that Charles Warre Malet told him of his 40-day journey to see the Taj Mahal that “at first sight how well his journey was justified.” It makes sense that the British would want to see their efforts, even a more than a month-long site-seeing schlep, as worth the work, no matter how strenuous. Bathazar Solvyns, a Belgian who wrote a dubious anthropological survey of India, revealed as much about himself and his gaze as he did about his subjects when he wrote of dancing girls he observed that “their movements are confined, being either extremely rapid or solemnly slow, and their attitudes or gestures, which are sometimes graceful, are almost always indecent, there therefore disgusting; their general object is to excite desire, and where they succeed, there are not to be found much to envy.” In Arthur William Devis’ “Portrait of a Gentleman,” lawyer William Hickey both smokes a hookah and handles a letter of business — has he corrupted himself by going native? Or are the temptations of India no match for England’s energy in commerce?

And in Samuel Howitt’s 1807 “The Tiger at Bay,” British men load, aim, and fire at a tiger, while Indian men control the elephants that let the British get close to their quarry, an interesting if unintentional foreshadowing of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, made possible in part by tensions in the military forces made up of Indian soldiers and commanded by British officers. There was only so much that British self-portraits in India, especially those sponsored by British government and commercial organizations, could capture — and only so much that they could see into the future.

The charming and ridiculously smart Douglas Wolk did me the favor of sending me the Judge Dredd trilogy “America,” “America II: Fading of the Light,” and “Cadet,” about a singer, an anti-Judge activist-turned-terrorist, and the child they eventually have together, and then asking me to discuss it with him. Our very long conversation about the books, including their startlingly beautiful and fully-realized backgrounds, and their pretty awesome gender politics, as well as whether it’s possible for fascists to embrace reform, is up here. Some thoughts on the core story about pro-democracy terrorists taking on the Judges:

As a former student activist, I have a somewhat complicated relationship to America, the Democrats, and even to Total War. I should be clear that most of my activism was working through the democratic process—registering voters, agitating down at City Hall, asking questions in forums—though I did get arrested for occupying the admissions office at my college as part of an action to push the university towards more progressive financial aid reform. (Pro tip: singing the same folk song as a round for three hours will speed up the rate at which the university decides to arrest you, which can be useful when you’ve been sitting in the same hallway all day.) And so part of what strikes me about America and her cohort is that they’re kind of terrible activists. The march is a good idea—but the Democrats don’t plan for there to be instigators in the crowds, or to document their work. There doesn’t appear to be much of an organizing program. The terrorist campaign waged by Total War is fairly stupid as propaganda: yes, killing Judges demonstrates their vulnerability, but it’s guaranteed to bring down reprisals. And their plan to kill celebrities during an awards show without any plan for a communiqué is a huge wasted opportunity to reach the masses. I’m frustrated with them because I’d like them to be better.

And of course, that’s sort of the point of the book. We see the Democrats and Total War from the perspective of a very weak sympathizer. And we see the Judges from the perspective of their most articulate representative, who gets space to break down ideas about why democracy isn’t particularly representative. Nobody gets a fair chance for a rebuttal. The comic works for the same reason the Judges maintain an effective hold on government—they control the narrative.

This was my first go-round with Judge Dredd, but I’ll definitely be back. The character’s obviously been around for decades, but he feels particularly timely, a logical extension of both our law and order fetishes and our anti-hero obsessions in a way that subverts both.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 4 episode of Boardwalk Empire. And are there ever spoilers!

As Benjamin Freed said on the Twitters at the conclusion of last night’s episode of Boardwalk Empire, “so much for the all-Darmody spinoff.”

It’s actually fascinating to compare the approach that Boardwalk Empire and Shame take to incest narratives. While the latter shows us a brother and sister between whom the appropriate behavioral boundaries clearly and disastrously were shattered long ago, it never confirms the means of their destruction, or shows us the immediate aftermath of the breach. By contrast, Boardwalk Empire has been building up to the revelation that, while he was at Princeton, Jimmy had sex with his mother at her initiation, telling him, “There’s nothing wrong, baby. There’s nothing wrong with any of it.” Whether she’s been telling Angela that she used to kiss Jimmy’s penis when he was an infant; or her smooth slotting of him into the Commodore’s role; building his sympathy for her by discussing her sexual abuse at the Commodore’s hands; or in flashbacks tonight showing us Gillian trying to simultaneously destroy Angela’s budding relationship with Jimmy while forcing him to transfer his affections from his lover to his mother by telling him “Oh, baby. I’m just the loneliest person on earth. Do you love that skinny girl?” Boardwalk Empire isn’t really showing us the day-to-day routine between two people who have violated sexual norms. It’s been telling us that it’s going to tell us something even more shocking than what we’re seeing on screen so far. And so it’s not particularly shocking when we see the inevitable happen, when we learn the real reason Jimmy ran off to join the Army. Oversignaling is a problem in this show generally, and this isn’t the only plotline where that’s a problem tonight. The only genuinely shocking moment in this plotline was the implication that Gillian might target Jimmy’s son next, telling Jimmy that “One day soon, he won’t be a little boy anymore. It happens, just like that. I’ll put him to bed. And I’ll be upstairs.”

I’m actually much more interested in the prospect of Jimmy falling into heroin addiction. He’s always been a weak personality, shaped by Nucky, manipulated by his mother, eager for the Commodore’s affections when the old man reemerges to offer them. But this would be a weakness of his own choosing, to a certain extent. And if this is a story less about Prohibition than about the transition from alcohol to drugs in the role of public menace, it would be interesting to see Jimmy personify it. Certainly, had his confrontation with Gillian and the Commodore not fallen short of double murder, it would have had the flair of a crime of the century — the beautiful young mother, the spear, the old man, the blood on the brocaded wallpaper.
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I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Shame, a movie I think I admire more than I like. Other critics will and have said lots of things about Michael Fassbender’s performance, which is marvelously tormented (it struck me that one of the reasons he’s so powerful and unnerving in roles like this, or as Magneto in X-Men: First Class is that when he cries or gets angry or upset, his mouth tends to curve up in a rictus of a smile). For a man who spends much of his time pursuing an act that’s meant to be an expression of the life force, he looks frighteningly close to death. And there’s a debate to be had, I think, about whether Steve McQueen should have explored the roots of Brandon’s addiction, particularly the constantly-implied but never-specified “bad place” that Brandon and his sister Sissy come from. But I found myself struck more by things around the movie’s margins than at its center, by emotions other than the core of Brandon’s torment.

One thing I appreciated was the decision to have Brandon sleep with women of color as well as white women. There might have been something disturbing about depicting a very attractive white man using black and Asian women as disposable partners. But nobody ever exactly follows up with him — in some cases, because they’re pros, in some cases because he’s as disposable to them as they are to him. The most genuinely erotic sex scene in the movie happens between Brandon and his coworker, Marianne, an African-American woman he’s actually gone on a date with, and after an awkward beginning, seems to have made an emotional and intellectual connection with. Ultimately, he can’t bring himself to sleep with her. But I still appreciate that McQueen makes a non-white woman the most multi-dimensionally attractive person in the movie.

And while the Shame is about the fundamentally unsatisfying way Brandon sees the world, it’s also delicately about what it means to be the object of sexual desire. The opening sequence, in which he and a woman on a subway train trade increasingly intense glances, certainly communicates the ferocity of Brandon’s hunger. But it’s also a beautiful articulation of how it feels to be the object of that attention, in a way that respects ambiguity. In their initial encounter, the woman is first embarrassed, then reciprocates. His attention is both flattering and overwhelming, and there’s something honest in that lack of clarity. But when Brandon comes up behind her as she stands for her stop, chasing her through the commuter-clogged station, his behavior shifts from an implication of intimacy to frightening. There’s a difference between wanting to connect with someone and wanting to devour them.

Both Brandon’s failed relationship with Marianne and these subway encounters elevate the simple act of communication into an incomprehensible mystery. We can feel his fear. And even though Brandon is more sexually successful than his boss, a brutal caricature of a wannabe pick-up artist with a family at home, even all the practice he’s had doesn’t give him a fail-proof approach, or universally good instincts in selecting his partners. I don’t think a sequence where Brandon has a sexual encounter in a gay bar is actually as intense a symbol of his degradation as McQueen suggests it is. But it’s certainly testament to the persistent spur of his addiction, coming after he’s been beaten up by one of the boyfriends of a woman he’s trying to pick up, and before a night-ending threesome. Brandon may be more familiar with the varieties of human sexuality than a non-addict, but it remains a mysterious and unpredictable force for him.

And perhaps for us. I may have mixed feelings about the decision to leave the reason Brandon and Sissy’s boundaries are so disastrously degraded obscure. But I appreciate the decision not to pose a solution for Brandon’s addiction, or a model of functional sexual relationships. Is it a bad thing for the attractive blonde from the bar to have sex with Brandon under a bridge under any circumstances, or only unfortunate that it’s so easy for him to get his fixes? Shame doesn’t pretend to know, and doesn’t demand that we know either. Engagement is the only thing it asks for, whether of Brandon or of us.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Parenting Made Easy” starts with an arbitration in which Lockhart/Gardner is representing Pamela Baker, a professor who was fired and believes it was because she complained about her boss rubbing her shoulders. The boss, provost Daniel Clove, starts by claiming that he fired Baker because of negative student evaluations, but it turns out that the real reason is because she was outspoken about her conservative views. Clove says that the issue is that she was disruptive, regardless of what she was saying, but Lockhart/Garder argues that Baker’s civil rights were violated and that what she said about homosexuality (while defending Santorum!) was religiously-motivated speech rather than hate speech. It almost looks like they’ll win with this – until the defense proves that Baker hid her faith, so Clove couldn’t have known that what she said was religiously motivated. It was nice seeing Lockhart/Gardner representing a conservative, and the show did a good job of portraying her as a real person with firmly held beliefs rather than just as a stereotype or cliché. I also appreciated the way they had the character complaining about sexual harassment turn out to be a religious, conservative Republican, since all too often – especially in recent Herman Cain coverage – our national conversation sees sexual harassment as a pretend issue invented by liberal feminists.

The show also uses this case to remind us that all the characters on the show – including the ones we’ve assumed we won’t see again – live in the same world and intersect in a variety of ways. Alicia initially expects the arbitration to be routine, so she chooses it for Caitlin’s court debut – but it turns out that they’re up against Martha, who was Alicia’s first choice for Caitlin’s job. Martha is holding a grudge against Lockhart/Gardner, which in turn puts more pressure on Caitlin. Martha also ends up calling her boss to come help, and he is none other than Michael J. Fox’s Louis Canning. It seems that Canning and Alicia have developed, if not a friendship, at least a grudging respect for each other’s abilities, and Canning tries to convince Alicia to work for him. (Finally! It had been a whole few episodes since someone was trying to coax Will or Alicia or Kalinda away from Lockhart/Gardner!)
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The bridge is yours.

-How to keep Community alive — or at least give it a good shot.

-I’d dig a more diverse Starship Troopers, but it’s sort of hard to imagine a reboot of the franchise without Neil Patrick Harris as the one person who gets the joke.

-Ah, the roles actors take before they lock up ridiculously huge franchises.

-The rights fight over La Dolce Vita.

-MOAR AVATAR PLZ:

Father Gabriel Amorth, the former Vatican chief exorcist who’s been warning about the risk that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels will tempt children into Satanism since 2000, is at it again, and this time he’s inveighing against both kid wizards and yoga practitioners. Per the New York Daily News:

“Practicing yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” Father Gabriele Amorth said this week. Those seemingly “innocuous” Potter books convince kids to believe in black magic, he said. “In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses,” said Amorth. As for yoga, it leads to Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation,” the 86-year-old priest said.

In an odd way, I respect the honesty of this kind of statement, even as I think it’s ludicrous and somewhat paranoid to see the Harry Potter novels as anything other than a reaffirmation of the power of Christian theology. There’s a refreshing honesty in admitting both the power of ideas, and the fact that your doctrine may have trouble competing with other worldviews. I tend to want to be in the scrum, in part because I think well-articulated progressive visions tend to have a pretty good shot at winning the battle of ideas, and because I don’t think those ideas can survive only if they don’t face competition or opposition. But I do respect people who withdraw from the things they consider temptation entirely.

The problem for folks like Amorth is that abstinence, whether from sex or from generation-defining young adult fantasy series, isn’t likely to be a particularly effective pitch. And when you can’t convince people to abstain from culture voluntarily, bans or purges from libraries like the one instituted by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts parish school in 2007, who said he was just instituting a “spiritual peanut butter ban on Harry Potter,” like rules that are meant to avoid exposing children to possible allergens, seem likely to result even if only on a small scale. But if I were a member of the Catholic hierarchy, I look at book bans as a fallback position rather than a victory. There are only so many enclaves you can carve out that are untouched by the larger culture. And settling for enclaves at all is an acknowledgment that your ideas have a limited appeal.

We’ve talked about this a bit before, but Andy Serkis makes the case for why he should be eligible for acting awards — which I agree with, I just don’t know that we can nominate him alone:

There is no difference. Acting is acting. Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance. It’s very interesting being in two movies this year that are manifested completely differently but use the same process. The same visual effects company, Weta Digital, produced apes that look entirely real and a palette and a style that honors the source material of Tintin. What Steven was trying to do was to have the best of both worlds, where you can create the look and the feel and the sensibility of Herge [Tintin's cartoonist creator] but have emotionally truthful performances. The technology allows the actors to enter into those worlds…The technology has come to the point where we could shoot Gollum and the Hobbits in the same moment, as we did in Apes. In the original, I’d have to shoot against empty plates that were shot on the day, then repeat the process on the performance-capture stage, sometimes months later. Now we get it in one hit, so it’s much more actor- and director-friendly.

Obviously post-production and effects work exist on a continuum. But there’s a difference between technological alteration without which a performance could not exist, and post-production work that tweaks or modifies a performance or a set but that does not constitute the core of the work. Our current awards categories don’t provide appropriate recognition to the first category of technological and post-production work. I want Serkis to get piles of statues. I just think we have to find a way to acknowledge the interactive nature of the work. The fact that visual effects artists often don’t get properly credited is part and parcel of a system that involves visual effects studios giving up not just credit but profits in order to keep work, even though the industry increasingly relies on their work to satisfy audience expectations.

Maybe if Serkis gets a nomination or an award for a role where his face isn’t actually on-screen, it could trigger a special citation for the visual effects folks who translated his performance. I don’t know that it’s a perfect solution. But I think we need to reconsider the awards categories themselves, not just who fits into them.

This post contains spoilers for the Dec. 4 episode of Homeland.

After last week’s off-track, weirdly sentimental episode, I admitted to some anxiety about Homeland‘s core DNA. Fortunately, “Representative Brody” set the show squarely back on track. And as I tweeted while I was watching, “why can’t Henry Bromell just write all the television?” In between this and “The Good Soldier,” the man is having a year.

While what frustrated me about the last episode was its emotional and causal predictability, I appreciated the way “Representative Brody” made its characters do distinct, specific things that were surprising but not wildly illogical. You get the cliche in one scene, the vice president (who increasingly seems like a conspiracy suspect) telling Brody: “I would consider it an honor to work with a man who’s actually fought the war on terror, who’s lived with the enemy and understands them.” But even then, the cliche is revealing — there’s a profound hunger for authenticity in that request. And countering it, you have a Saudi diplomat who doesn’t respond to Saul and Carrie’s threats to reveal his debts and his homosexuality in the way they would have predicted. “I suck cock and I love it,” he snaps back at them. “My wives already know. They don’t care. They love me. So fuck it. Fuck you. Put it on CNN. I’ll admit to everything. Now, I would like to go back to my embassy.” Scripts are useful until they aren’t. In fighting the war on terror, in living your life, there’s only so much you can do to prepare and only so much you can predict. “We’re trying to find what makes them human, not what makes them terrorists,” Carrie tells Saul, and it turns out she’s right.

And the dissolution of Saul and Carrie’s plan to, as Saul put it with a hint of terrible foreshadowing, “eviscerate the motherfucker” also revealed a hidden and under-discussed advantage in the war on terror that also gets to that quest for humanity: modernity is a lot more appealing than the values of the Middle Ages. What Nazir’s collaborator may pretend to want for the world, he doesn’t actually want for his daughter. “We would deport her,” Carrie says, emphasizing the threat and drawing out the disgust he feels at the scenario she lays out for him. “And we would make sure that she was not welcome in England, or Germany, or France, or Italy, or even all-forgiving Scandinavia. We would make sure she had no choice but to go back to Saudi Arabia and get fat and wear a burka for the rest of her miserable life.” Radical Islam will lose not because our military is bigger but because the American idea is more broadly compelling than a return to the caliphate.
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