Last week, I suggested that if the superhero comics industry actually wants women readers, it should advertise to them, do promotional work to get characters and storylines in magazines oriented to women, and engage in other sensible forms of marketing outreach. A great example of what one such a campaign might look like turns out to be underway in Mozambique, where superheroines are illustrating breast cancer self-examination techniques in a sensible, non-prurient manner. The illustrations, which are quite attractive and have the heroines set up to be reasonably proportional (though I wish they’d shown their faces), have the tagline, “When we talk about breast cancer, there’s no women or superwomen. Everybody has to do the self-examination monthly. Fight with us against this enemy, and when in doubt, talk with your doctor.”

io9 suspects that the ads might not have official Marvel and DC approval, but the campaign is sponsored by Vodacom and Mozambique Fashion Week, both of which I’m assuming have some sense of copyright, so I’m hoping they actually got official signoffs. If that’s the case, maybe Susan G. Komen for the Cure or another women’s health organization should see if Marvel and DC would be willing to collaborate on similar campaign in the United States. It seems like there could be some real mutual messaging there: women as supeheroines, superheroines as accessible women.

In the midst of our ongoing discussions about Lowe’s pulling its ads from All-American Muslim, there’s something fitting about the arrival of the trailer for Rock of Ages, complete with a band of perpetually-offended pearl-clutchers led by Catherine Zeta-Jones:

There’s something profoundly odd — and perhaps deeply privileged — about the presumption of a right not to be offended, which framed in any other way reveals itself to be ridiculous. Even if one assume that you’ll get decent parenting and a fairly good education, I can’t imagine expecting that the world beyond school and childhood home will not just give you a fair shot but wrap you in cotton wool. It may be reasonable to expect a good shot at finding employment. It’s not reasonable to assume you will get your dream job and get it quickly, that you will never clash with a supervisor, that you will never fail. It may be reasonable to assume that you’ll get to go out into the world and date. It’s not reasonable to assume that you’ll find your soulmate, that you live in a world without divorce, infidelity, early widowhood, or childhood illness. We’re promised the pursuit of happiness, not a guarantee that we’ll never experience another emotion. Boycotts based on opposition to the ideas expressed in a piece of culture are an expression of the idea that the world can and should bend itself to fit your preferences, and that others’ preferences, values and aspirations are simply not as important.

That, or the boycotts themselves are a means less of changing culture than perpetuating a cycle that allows organizations with no other dicernible purpose to survive. My colleague Zack Ford has done a nice job of documenting how the Florida Family Foundation, the organization that got Lowe’s to buckle, does little other than manufacture fake — and presumably revenue-generating — outrage. The Parents Television Council and I may not always see eye-to-eye, but at least they provide parents with their assessments of the appropriateness of various media products and other tools to help adults make decisions about what they want their children to see and do parenting work. That said, their advertiser boycott calls certainly seem to generate the most light around the organization, and they, like the Florida Family Association, have the bad habit of claiming they’ve convinced advertisers to pull ads when they actually haven’t.

This is all unfortunate, because as Tod Kelly points out, they’ve diluted the power of actually meaningful boycotts. If a product is in itself unsafe, or if it is produced in a way that poses a danger to participants — reality shows that require participants to sign contracts that absolve networks of responsibility if they get raped — seem like they’d be a good example of an entertainment product that meets these standards. People have the right to be safe from bodily harm and psychological abuse. They don’t have the right to be free of ideas that are difficult for them. I don’t like virulent sexism and Islamophobia, but people have the right to express those ideas and to present themselves to be exposed as narrow-minded bigots.

President Obama, in his continuing quest to be both perfect parent and semi-hipster in his pop culture consumption habits, told People Magazine that his favorite television shows are Modern Family, Homeland, and Boardwalk Empire. Two of those three are about government (or the people who live in opposition to it), but all of these shows offer lessons for the man who holds the World’s Hardest job.

1. Drama never gets you anywhere (Modern Family): No Drama Obama’s alternately been praised for rising above Washington nonsense and pilloried for supposedly failing to fire up his base. But if there’s one thing ABC’s hit comedy preaches, it’s that getting all fired up generally isn’t worth it. Whether you’re freaking out on a bird in your living room, your overly-sexy, age-inappropriate step-mother, or letting Eric Cantor bait you, keeping your focus on your desired outcome rather than a perceived slight is the quickest route to getting what you want while expending minimal energy.

2. Listen to Women (Homeland): Earlier this fall, Obama took heat when Ron Suskind’s most recent book on the administration suggested that the Commander in Chief and his closest male advisers blew off the counsel of high-ranking female staffers. Now, I assume no one quite as mentally unhealthy as Carrie Mathison is working in the Obama White House. But the show’s a reminder that if we can overlook Rahm Emanuel’s temper tantrums, we should try to look past charges that women are “emotional,” too. Insights come from all sorts of places.

3. Sad but true: minority constituencies will be pretty patient (Boardwalk Empire): Boardwalk Empire started its second season with Nucky Thompson playing Atlantic City’s white and black communities off against each other. He supports Chalky White’s strike, but only when the black community tells Chalky they’re done being patient with him — and when stirring up the city coincides with Nucky’s own interests. And the season ended (in part) with Jimmy Darmody delivering more compensation money — and three Klansmen — to Chalky for judgment and distribution to the victims’ families. But he could have bought himself a meeting with Nucky with less. Leadership like that is what gets us the administration’s decision Plan B.

4. Diversity is strength (Modern Family): The show’s having a bit of a shaky season. But it’s at its best when devoted to storylines that show us people who thought they were different bridged by common interest, whether Cam and Jay bond over football or Gloria peps Claire up to run for local office. The message isn’t just that our differences are bridgeable — it’s that we’re stronger when we can make common cause on those shared interests and convictions.

5. National security and foreign affairs involve huge shifts — but individual actions matter too (Homeland): Just because the home-grown terrorists who periodically make headlines generally don’t seem to be all they’ve cracked up to be doesn’t mean that individuals can’t change the course of foreign policy and international affairs. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia helped set off the Arab Spring. On the season finale of Homeland, Tom Walker and Nicholas Brody may make terrible history, as did the September 11 hijackers. We can try to make ourselves safer and our institutions stronger. But we probably can’t reduce the complex motivations that lead people to protest or to terror to predictable algorithms.

One of the best things about writing about multiple media is that you’re not subject to the tyranny of Best Of lists. I could no more decide between Shame and Hugo for a numbered slot than I could pick between Revenge and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (though can we please get Kanye writing rhymes for and about Emily Thorne? I need an update on Snoop Dogg and his Sookie Stackhouse obsession). However, there were a lot of things that made me happy this year, and because Oprah’s not rockin’ it anymore, here is a semi-chronological-but-unranked list of my 26-odd favorite things to consume or discuss in 2011. A similar list of my least favorite things will follow tomorrow.

1. Frank Ocean makes us all hurt so good: I’m more irritated than anything else by the antics of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. But it’s worth it for Frank Ocean, who rocks specific melancholia like nobody’s business. “Novacane” was one of my favorite songs of 2011.

2. Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch: Before y’all accuse me of getting all Armond White up in the business, let me be clear. I don’t think Sucker Punch is an affirmatively good movie or that Snyder is a visionary director (though I appreciate that he actually has a distinctive visual style). But as aestheticized meditation on the horrors of lobotomy, a frightening and overlooked part of American mental health history, I found it unexpectedly moving. Plus, Snyder circumvented a ban on female leads with the movie.

3. Cedar Rapids sets Ed Helms loose: Up In the Air, but for people who actually live in flyover country, and Parks and Recreation with a deeper undercurrent of bitter darkness and isolation. There should be more popular culture about the struggle to be fundamentally decent.

4. War photographers movie The Bang-Bang Club and HBO’s biopic of the Louds, Cinema Verite: After the death of Tim Heatherington and as Joao Silva recovered from his injuries, The Bang-Bang Club offered a look at what it takes not just to put yourself in danger as a war photographer, but at what it means to be an observer rather than someone who intervenes. Conversely, Cinema Verite went back to the invention of reality television to explore what it means to be watched — and dissected — by a mass audience.

5. Game of Thrones is brilliant, and even the frustrating A Dance With Dragons is grist for the mill: I worry that George R.R. Martin’s universe is spiraling completely out of control, too big for any series to contain. But the first season of the HBO adaptation featured great performances, particularly by a host of very young actors and a smart sense for cuts and world-building. I don’t know if we’ll reach the end of this fascinating, maddening saga any time soon. But the ride looks like it’s going to be delightful.
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Next week, we’ll watch and discuss 12 Angry Men.

The thing that everyone remembers about To Kill a Mockingbird is the trial. Atticus Finch is one of the most beloved characters in fiction. Watching him break down the accusations against his black client* is masterful and tragic: the mangled arm, the angry father, the hysterical, clearly lying but also clearly brutalized, victim. But while I put this movie on the list as a way of sparking discussion about lawyers who defend clients who are facing the death penalty and the jurors who decide those cases, I found myself thinking far more about the person watching her lawyer father work: Scout Finch.

I’d forgotten how young Scout is in the novel and the movie — she’s just six. And the movie is both about her increasing awareness of the world around her and the way the world reaches out for her, the fact that the innocence of childhood is an imagined and impossible-to-maintain state.

There’s no question that, for a while, Atticus Finch buys into the idea that he can protect his children from his defense of Tom Robinson. When Del, the neighbor boy who is a stand-in for Harper Lee’s real-life neighbor, Truman Capote, suggests, “Let’s go over and watch!” the opening stages of the trial, Scout has a clear sense that her father wants her to stay away from his work. “He wouldn’t like that,” she says uneasily, but she and Jem follow Del anyway, listen to him explaining that through the courtroom doors that “There’s a whole lot of men sitting together on one side and there’s a man pointing at the colored man and yelling. They’re taking the colored man away.” When Atticus catches them, he sends them home immediately.

But that doesn’t really keep Scout away from the house. And even when Scout comes home, having whipped Cecil Jacobs for the sin of declaring that her father “defends niggers,” Atticus tries to draw the line, telling her, “There are some things that you’re not old enough to understand just yet. There’s been some hard talk around town.” But when it’s clear that his inquisitive daughter, the one who wants to know why she can’t inherit his watch, isn’t going to let it go, Atticus tries to give her the tools to deal with what’s going to happen to her, saying: “You’re going to hear some ugly talk about this in school. But you have to promise me one thing: that you won’t get into fights over it, no matter what they say to you.”
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The bridge is yours.

-Linda Holmes on the people you meet in year-end list comments sections.

-An analysis of credits sequences inspired by Homeland.

-Apocalypse planning as reality television show. Nelson Van Alden, I imagine, would have words for Glenn Beck.

-The FCC is going to try to make your television ads less ear-destroying.

-Barack and Hillary are going to take out Sacha Baron Cohen:

I assume almost none of you have seen A Better Life, which is too bad. Chris Weitz’s remarkably tender, tense chronicle of a few of days in the life of Carlos Galindo, an undocumented immigrant who sees his fortunes rise with the chance to purchase a truck that would let him start his own landscaping business, only to see them crumble when it’s stolen, is one of my favorite movies of the year. And Demian Bichir, who some of you may know from Weeds, just landed a Screen Actors Guild nomination for his performance as Carlos. It’s a remarkable performance, to a certain extent the inverse, and maybe the superior, of Michael Fassbender’s turn in Shame. Brandon spends most of his time in a forced placidness, and when his facade breaks, it shatters. Carlos, by contrast, is astonishingly, painfully open. In him you see that the tremendous privilege of the ability to be generous, the shock of the betrayal of that generosity, and the struggle to raise a son in a different life without losing him entirely.

Chris and Demian were kind enough to sit down with me for half an hour last week to discuss A Better Life and the politics of immigration reform in the United States. Our conversation appears here:

Not a lot of details on this yet, but I’m rather pleased to hear that NBC is moving forward with a science-fiction show about a human society where humanoid androids act as an economic underclass. Given our conversation yesterday about the importance of choosing metaphors carefully, I think robots may be a better way to go than zombies if we’re going to talk about folks who do service work: they’re other, but without negative or disease-vector connotations. It might also be interesting to tell a story about robot self-advocacy that isn’t just narrated via flashback a la the Matrix franchise or the Battlestar Galactica remake. And it would be especially fascinating to see that as a movement story, a stalemate a la Robots of Brixton rather than a violent overthrow and shocking transition to our new overlords. A balance between putting labor and capital in more direct conflict with each other than they are now, but also stretching that conflict out, would be more realistic and also more revealing about how we treat the people who work for us than a story where we’re immediately the underdogs.

More broadly, this kind of genre show strikes me as a smart move for NBC. Grimm, a genre show about a world that is slightly but not entirely different from our own, is both moving steadily in what I think are some intelligent directions, and more to the point for the struggling network, actually winning the demo in its hour on a regular basis. After Chuck finishes its final season, it would be wise to try to continue the nerd-momentum but roll it into a more popular show. And after Fox ran into trouble with Terra Nova, which was the unholy trinity of awful, expensive, and not wildly successful in the ratings, there’s genre credibility up for grabs in network-land, especially as HBO goes hard on fantasy with Game of Thrones and American Gods. If NBC is going to take Gavin Polone’s advice and try to regain market share by rebranding itself as a dude network, it could do worse than to go a sci-fi/fantasy route rather than trying to turn this fall’s bro-show failures into pyrite and pass it off as gold. Genre may be stereotypically guy territory from the industry’s perspective, but it’s also not inherently alienating to female viewers.

I know some folks couldn’t tune in to yesterday’s event, so here’s me and Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Chris Dodd talkin’ copyright, thanks to our wonderful CAP video guru Andrew Satter:

I tried to draw from a lot of different tranches of issues here, and thanks to many of you for your help. Because of some timing issues, I had a bit less time than I expected — Q&A starts around the 25 minute mark. But I hope it will be rewarding to those of you interested in everything from the relationship of independent producers and the MPAA to whether we should rule out the uses of certain technologies like circumvention of IP and DNS blocking to preserve America’s moral example in the world. There’s a lot to talk about, not just this week, and not just on this legislation. And I appreciated the chance to get some initial questions in as Dodd begins his tenure at the MPAA.