In an interesting essay about fantasy, especially about how teenagers respond to fantasy, Adam Gopnik compares White and Tolkien, saying that the former revels in moral dilemmas while the latter subsumes emotion and choice in the sweep of history, and Christopher Paolini and Stephanie Meyer, the former of whom he says has perfected an epic means of letting his characters level up without requiring them to grow while the latter uses the gloss of fantasy to slightly heighten realistic emotions. Some of the thinking’s a little reductionist, but it’s a good way at posing an important question that has animated a lot of our debates here: does fantasy help us engage with moral questions, or escape them? He writes:

What substitutes for psychology in Tolkien and his followers, and keeps the stories from seeming barrenly external, is what preceded psychology in epic literature: an overwhelming sense of history and, with it, a sense of loss. The constant evocation of lost or fading glory—Númenor has fallen, the elves are leaving Middle-earth—does the emotional work that mixed-up minds do in realist fiction…White, too, modernizes and sweetens his epic story, but he more overtly moralizes it, and he makes it emotionally ambiguous as well: What is right? Who gets to decide? Does duty come before passion? White worries about ambiguity and halftones: the impotence of the idealist King; the beauty and doom of the adulterous lovers; the capacity of good law to make bad judgments—it is Arthur, not Mordred, who has to sentence Guenevere to death…[Twilight is] “My So-Called Life,” with fangs and fur. The genius of the narrative lies in how neatly the familiar experiences are turned into occult ones; the Cullens, for instance, are very much like the non-vampire family in “Endless Love”; even the terrifying Volturi are the Italian family you go and stay with in Europe. The tedious normalcy of the “Twilight” books is what gives them their shiver; this is not so much the life that a teen-age girl would wish to have but the one that she already has, rearranged with heightened symbols…Eragon never really grows from boy to man, as he might have in another kind of book; he mostly just learns how to be a dragon rider and contend with mysterious helpers, half hostile and half friendly, as kids do at school. Kids go to fantasy not for escape but for organization, and a little elevation; since life is like this already, they imagine that it might be still like this but more magical.

This actually strikes me as an explanation for the appeal of A Song of Ice and Fire. The characters are swept up in world-historical events, but they aren’t entirely agents of history. Things happen to them that are out of their control, and they have recognizably human emotions. Robert’s mercy towards Cersei or Arya’s inability to give mercy to the hound are motivated as much by quirks of personality and conceptions of honor as they are by strategic considerations. There are prophecies, but it’s not clear that there is fate. And the way the characters gain skills is directly linked to their emotional growth, if not always in attractive directions. Sansa’s education in political manipulation is directly linked to the sexual abuse that shows her how the system can be manipulated by powerful people. Arya’s education in assassination is directly connected to her giving up her sense of self and the remainders of her innocence. It’s possible for people to regress as well as to grow. And in the midst of all this history, there are discernibly human moments with real-world parallels, be it Jon Snow’s loss of his virginity, Sam making love in the wake of a funeral, or monks at dinner.

This is the thing about life in wartime, in world historical transitions: it goes on. And this is the thing you can’t always keep straight when you’re sixteen: that there are things other than the vampire and the werewolf, that you’ll get distracted from the epic quest of your own existence by a girl or a boy. Growing up isn’t just about your relationship status or the acquisition of new skills: it’s about the ability to balance more than one big conflict at once, and to see how they interact.

As the arguments over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act continue, a report from the Swiss government illustrates why even if the SOPA passes and it becomes harder to download content you’re not paying for in the United States, it will still be very hard to establish a consistent international copyright regime.

Ars Technica reports that after considering a three-strikes law like the one in effect in France, or an internet-filtering system like the one proposed in SOPA, the Swiss Federal Council takes the position that the status quo, in which Swiss citizens can download copyrighted content they don’t pay for as long as they only use it for personal entertainment, is just fine. First, the report says that the money that its countries citizens aren’t spending buying DVDs and CDs end up coming back to the arts and entertainment industry anyway, because rather that diverting that spending to other kinds of goods, they spend it on concert and theater tickets and entertainment merchandise. And second, according to Ars’ translation of the report (which is in German), “piracy is only a significant concern for ‘large foreign production companies.’”

As you all know, I’m not particularly sympathetic to “let’s screw the man!” arguments against restrictive copyright laws. “Large foreign production companies” employ middle-class people as well as extremely wealthy ones. 73 percent of the Directors Guild of America pension plan, 60 percent of the health plan for the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and 23 percent of the Screen Actors Guild pension and health plans are funded by residuals. I imagine they care what happens to those residuals, whether they’re thinking about uncompensated downloading or the structure of those funding plans. But the fact that those arguments have taken hold not just at the consumer level but at the national one illustrates a real challenge for advocates of stronger copyright law: it’s not going to be easy, or even possible, to get all countries on board with the same copyright norms. Blocking sites that offer pirated content in the U.S. may lock down part of the market, but if you can’t get China on board, content producers still have a problem.

This is not to say that getting innovative delivery mechanisms that can help cut down on piracy adopted internationally is going to be totally simple either. Netflix is moving forward country-by-country (it’s not in Switzerland yet, and it’ll be interesting to see how norms in that country change when it arrives there), but it isn’t just automatically available everywhere. Hulu is only available in Japan, and the site explains that “we don’t have a timetable or any news regarding expansion beyond Japan at this time…Our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide as quickly as possible. This requires working with the content owners to clear the rights for each show or film in each specific region. It’s a long-term project.” It’ll be interesting to see how the combination of legislating and enticing new norms works, both here and abroad.

I’m on record as thinking Men In Black is pretty wonderfully progressive about immigration, focusing on assimilation and accommodation rather than demonization. So I was already prepared to love Ugly Americans when I watched the first season this weekend. Mark Lilly, the main character, is the inverse of Will Smith’s agent in every way: he’s a social worker rather than an asskicking cop, a slightly out-of-shape white guy rather than a sleekly-dressed sexual specimen, a guy who’s dating a demon who is totally out of his league rather than engaging in unexpected flirtation with a nerdy-yet-alluring mortuary worker. Given how good the show is at riffing on its immigration metaphor, as Lilly tries to help vampires, disembodied brains, and pumpkin-headed aliens into New York society, it’s almost a shame that it keeps veering off into parodies of things like reality television, which now seems like it’s a mandatory stop for any sitcom, animated or no.

Ugly Americans is an almost perfect example of the power of substitution and juxtaposition humor, particularly when the show is riffing on anti-Semitism. When Mark finds his law enforcement colleague, Frank Grimes, harassing a squid by exposing him to the air even though the squid has papers, Mark puts a stop to it, snapping “I know they look the same to you, but I happen to have been at this squid’s bar mitzvah.” The joke works because it’s not like squid are coded Jewish, so it’s a very silly line delivered with intense sincerity, but it also gives the squid an immediate context, not just in humanity, but in a specific corner of it. Later, Grimes complains of vampires that “They control the television news, the press, and the weather,” taking the paranoia a step further in a way that reinforces the mythical power of the universe. And later, when Mark’s zombie roommate Randall gets on a reality show, one of his faerie roommates titters in confessional that “I totally have a crush on Randall, but my dad would kill me if he found out he’s not Jewish.” It’s a line that’s as much about the persistence of the differences that we cling to, their power even in a world where we’d have potentially more substantial things to worry about.

The show’s also very good on the question of employment for immigrants, and the power of state bureaucracies. King Kong, as it turns out, is depressed over a wrongful termination. “I was hired to clean the Empire State Building and that’s all I was doing. When can I get my job back?” A human parking attendant apologies for one of her employees, a troll, telling human customers “I’m so sorry, sir. He’s a diversity hire. That’ll be $4.75. And zip up your vest. This is a work environment.” Later, when he’s fired, the troll becomes fodder for a reality television stunt. Mark’s clients aren’t just vulnerable to their employers—they’re vulnerable to him and Frank, too. “What say you to a trip to the Natural History Museum to visit the man-bird exhibit?” Mark asks enthusiastically at a citizenship class. “Technically, he can have us deported!” one of his clients warns another before they answer. In another episode, a family of pumpkin-headed creatures tells trick-or-treaters that “We don’t celebrate that vile and racist holiday,” only to have a militant Frank pop up, declare “It’s called Halloween!” and threaten the family into giving the kids candy.

Ugly Americans doesn’t really shy away from the weirdness of its aliens, it accepts that just as it might be somewhat weird to find your zombie roommate sleeping with a disembodied brain, big turnovers in neighborhoods and influxes of new customs might bring some discomfort along with them. What it doesn’t accept is that such discomfort should be permanent, or impossible to overcome. It’s a respectful, useful position. Integrating immigrants into American society involves work both for the people who are coming and the folks who are already hear. But just because it involves work doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

The CW, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that its next comedy will be about a young woman who marries her best friend to get around rules about roommates that would forbid said friend from moving into the main character’s “swanky New York co-op.” And I’ve had enough of fake pop culture gay people.

It as one thing to give us I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which managed to be about the unfairness of two sets of laws, one that made it difficult for widowers to preserve pension benefits and another that denied gay couples the same rights available to straight ones, while also putting its two somewhat boorish male characters in a position that forced them to sympathize more deeply with gay people and to understand their own gender roles better. This, by contrast, is about maintaining access to a nice apartment, a kind of fraud that doesn’t exactly help the cause of law-abiding real gay people. The characters get a domestic partnership even though New York is a marriage equality state. And it’s a fake lesbian fantasy, written and acted, in this case, by Sarah Rue, who is in real life married to a man.

It’s a lot worse than that still not-great storyline on Community where Britta fancies herself sophisticated for having a lesbian friend without ever actually ascertaining if said friend is gay (which says volumes about how deep that friendship actually is)—only to find out said friend is doing the exact same thing. But they have some things in common. They’re stories that treat gay people and gay rights struggles like commodities, cool and credibility to be appropriated when necessary for wacky storytelling. Fake gay people let straight people try on tolerance without ever actually having it tested. And they push actual gay people out of the frame. Networks and studios can do better. It’s easy to engage with real gay people than to make up eccentric fake ones.

The bridge is yours.

-The EFF is pushing to get device jailbreaking exempted from copyright law.

-The room of one’s own problem is still a problem.

-If Showtime wants to dominate my mid-season TV calendar, they are making a pretty effective pitch

-Ahh, the nerd economy.

-Given the way he treats characters, getting all his favorite actors and subjecting them to terrible things in a haunted cabin seems like an inevitable destination for Joss Whedon.

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Sady Doyle points out something critical in her latest In These Times column on the power of Bridesmaids and the greatness of Melissa McCarthy:

Critiques of this development are worthwhile. In her Bridesmaids review, critic Michelle Dean points out that “almost every joke was designed to rest on [McCarthy’s] presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type.” That’s fair. But it reminded me, in a comparison that would horrify Dean, of Christopher Hitchens’ infamous 2007 essay in Vanity Fair on women and humor, which concluded that men are funny because humor makes them attractive, whereas funny women are… well, read for yourself: “There are some impressive [funny] ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” Obviously, this is offensive. But it left me wondering whether Hitchens had ever actually seen a photo of Rodney Dangerfield, John Belushi, Woody Allen or Patton Oswalt, or, or…
…
McCarthy is hefty, and yes, part of her performance is a certain blunt pragmatism that could be read as “butch.” She’s also playing a key Apatovian role – Jonah Hill’s role, in fact. She’s a twin sister to Hill’s characters in Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall: aggressive, hypersexual, crude and given the broadest, most popular bits. Hill’s not conventionally sexy, or conventionally well behaved. Neither is McCarthy. They’re comedians; being pretty and nice is not their job.

What makes comedians transgressive, from Lucille Ball to Ken Jeong, is their willingness to look bad in public. Women have never been encouraged to cultivate this fearlessness. There are exceptions – Ball or Joan Rivers come to mind – but they tend to prove the rule. Lady Loser Comedy opens up the game. Women who have the profane deadpan of McCarthy, or the cool prickliness of Fey or the off-rhythm intensity of Wiig: They’re not excluded any more. They embarrass themselves, they’re completely inappropriate, and that’s fine; it’s comedy.

The interesting question, though, is whether comedians like McCarthy and Fey can get entire careers at the level they’d like to have out of playing obscene, or sloppy, or unapproachable, or emotionally unstable. Fey, after all, went through a very deliberate transformation, involving losing a bunch of weight and rebranding herself as glamorous, as part of her move in front of the camera, and her movie career’s involved playing her sex appeal to the edge of its capacity. McCarthy won her Emmy for a role that posited her as conventional-but-heavy object of romantic attention, and the branding around her since has played her up as an unconventional beauty queen. Sarah Silverman is an interesting counterpoint: she’s built her brand on a combination of immaturity and sexual unease, but she’s pitching a network show based on her breakup with Jimmy Kimmel that will have her in a more conventional role.

When Seth Rogen started losing weight and taking on different kinds of roles, the sense seemed to be that it wasn’t actually a necessary transition, that he could carry the amiable schlub thing as far as he cared to. Could a woman do the same thing? Or is this just another realm where women have a sense that they have to try to have it all, and as a result, aren’t quite as good at either plumbing disgust and embarrassment or embodying the highest standards of glamour?

There are personal reasons that I’m averse to watching people fight each other. But the New York Times three-part series on Derek Boogaard, the former enforcer for the Minnesota Wild and the New York Rangers who died of an accidental overdose earlier this year, gets at the specific reasons I’ve always had such a difficult time watching men’s professional hockey, even though I like women’s hockey quite a bit:

There is no incentive to display weakness. Most enforcers do not acknowledge concussions, at least until they retire. Teams, worried that opponents will focus on sore body parts, usually disguise concussions on injury reports as something else. In Boogaard’s case, it was often “shoulder” or “back,” two chronic ailments, even when his helmet did not fit because of the knots on his head.

“I hid my concussions,” said Ryan VandenBussche, 38, a former enforcer who estimates he had at least a dozen concussions, none of them diagnosed. “I masked them with other injuries. I’m not a huge guy, by no means, but I fought all the big guys. And I certainly didn’t want to be known as being concussion prone, especially early in my career, because general managers are pretty smart and your life span in the N.H.L. wouldn’t be very long.”…

Boogaard likely had dozens of concussions before his death in May. No one knows.

Up to a certain point, I believe people have a right to do what they like with their bodies to make a living, and I understand the appeal of professional sports salaries, even on the lower end of things. But I think it has to be a genuine choice, and that players and fans have the right to know the risks involved in taking up a profession and what we support by watching it. I struggle with football, but at least the league is at least moving in the direction of treating concussions as something other than a necessary outcome of the game, whether it’s donating money for brain damage research or trying to enforce policies that give players time to recover from the injuries. And while there may be guys who hit hard, there’s a difference between landing a tough, solid tackle and taking off your helmets and gloves and fighting each other in bare-knuckle matches.

I can pay the price in football, and live with the effects, particularly as a fan with a platform to stand on top of and holler about rules and regulations and enforcement. I’ve found that I can’t live with the fights in hockey. And the NHL’s initial response to push back on the link between blows to the head and CTE, rather than thinking about curbing fights through increasing penalties or other methods, isn’t wildly attractive either. The question of whether there is, as NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, “an overwhelming appetite or desire to go in that direction” isn’t the only factor to consider when thinking about fights and head injury. The game as it is may work for some people. It doesn’t for me.

Jamie Weinman makes what I think is a good point—the essentially centrist perspectives of mass-market television don’t mean that characters can’t have opinions or that shows can’t portray political debates:

There are certain issues mainstream TV will always have trouble addressing, and there’s no use complaining about it; TV is basically a centrist medium, held back from taking a definitive stand on almost anything divisive. But that doesn’t mean every character has to be completely without defined political views. It’s often hard to tell what political affiliation a character has—even when that character is a politician. In an era when almost everything is politicized in one way or another, and even a schoolgirl’s tweet can lead to an incident with the governor of Kansas, it can be limiting for characters to be without opinions on these things. We don’t need to know who every character votes for, but there are story possibilities when some of them are Republican or Democrat or Tory or NDP. After all, when families get together, one of the things they argue about is politics; if you take that away, you’ve mostly got arguments about technology and sex. And as TV is currently proving, there are only so many stories you can get from technology and sex.

While I’d prefer a world where television programs weren’t afraid to have clear worldviews that settled somewhere other than the absolute center of the political spectrum, I’d rather shows have characters who represent a range of definitive political opinions than that they have no politics whatsoever. The idea that political neutrality or uncertainty is a default position, and that viewers will identify more with characters who have no politics whatsoever, strikes me as rather strange. Sure, when it comes to opinion polling, people may pick at random to avoid admitting that they’re underinformed or haven’t reached clear opinions on issues or candidates. But that indicates at least a sense that having an opinion is more desirable than not. If people are having even cursory conversations in their own lives about politics, there’s no reason to believe that they’d shy away from watching such conversations on screen—people both watch television and talk about current events for pleasure, so there’s no reason to believe they’re mutually exclusive.

And at the end of the day, viewers are going to like some characters more than others for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t seem to be a vastly greater risk to float a character who has definitive political views than to put one out there who is so gratingly annoying (a la many of the supporting characters in Whitney, for example) as to be unbearable. The more television from the eighties and nineties I watch, the more convinced I become that the “technology and sex” problem Jamie’s describing is real: the aperture of what non-cable networks seem to think they can portray is narrower now than it was when Tip O’Neill swung by Cheers or Max ran for borough council on Living Single:

That’s a shame, and I think it’s one of the reasons the networks have lost so much critical ground to cable. It’s not just a sex and violence differential.