Whatever you thought of Drew Westen’s op-ed earlier this year, he’s an interesting thinker, and I wasn’t surprised (and from the perspective of getting politics and art in conversation with each other, rather gratified) to find him on a panel at Sundance with Sen. Barbara Boxer, Margaret Atwood, and director Mark Kitchell. Fittingly for an event on the power of narrative, Westen said that one of the things his research had uncovered was the extent to which people shut down when you give them statistics about policy issues, while stories kept their minds opened.

“In Florida, over 10 percent of the homes have been foreclosed. When you say something like that, it’s an interesting thing…But it doesn’t tend to draw the feeling that a story would draw,” he argued. “It means one in ten parents in Florida has gone to their child and said ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t your room any more.’… Unconsciously, it is extremely difficult to live with the idea that the world is unjust…we all know victims of diseases, and catastrophes, but to live in a world where we honestly believe that things are capricious and things just happen and there’s nothing you can do about it is a really awful place to be…Never talk about the unemployed. Because when you talk about the unemployed, you take real people with pain-lined faces, and you turn them into a nameless, faceless abstraction…People start to go with the just world hypothesis, and asking ‘what did he do to lose his job?’”

Obviously, I don’t think this means that you should never use statistics in policy discourse: we don’t do private bills in the United States, and you’ve got to prove the magnitude of a problem in addition to its emotional impact on a single person. But I wonder if it makes sense to start with stories, and then hit folks with the numbers? Or does that risk overwhelming listeners with emotions that they can’t accept exist on a large scale because it’s simply too much to process?

In any case, I think there’s no question that structuring narratives is critically important to give people a hook into issues. And while humans may be the most effective protagonists, there are other ways to set up drama. Mark Kitchell, the director and producer of environmental documentary A Fierce Green Fire pointed out that telling a story doesn’t always require that narrative to be character-driven, or driven by a single main character. I’d argue that March of the Penguins did perhaps the best job I’ve ever seen, outside of Pixar movies, of creating non-human protagonists and creating drama out of its protagonists’ struggle to reproduce. It didn’t need a baroque villain: the forces at work were unfamiliar enough to most people to be dramatic standing on their own.

As a new Judge Dredd convert, and a big fan of innovative action movies, I’m actually starting to get excited about Karl Urban-starring Dredd even though the production’s hit some difficulties. What really got my juices going was the news that Olivia Thirlby’s going to be playing Judge Anderson, which I would guess mean that the Big Bad in the movie is going to be Judge Death and the Dark Judges, who hate crime so much they’ve decided the best way to stop it is to wipe out all life in the universe. Now, there’s no question that the Judges are totalitarian, but I kind of appreciate the idea that the movie will show what the end consequence of a policy aimed at getting crime to zero.

I also appreciate that apparently, Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson will work together, but won’t kiss, staying faithful to a narrative in which the big emotional reveal is that Judge Dredd considers Judge Anderson his friend. That’s a welcome diversion from the standard stressful situation=smooches narrative, and it’d be nice to have a story where men and women actually get to focus on building their professional relationship and friendship rather than figuring out when they’re going to get down. Of course wartime romances are a thing But if you’re going to really go in on building the world the Judges live in, it makes sense that the standard emotional narratives that operate in that realm would be different. And cutting the Judges off from a range of human experiences emphasizes both the unnaturalness of what they’re being asked to do and their distance from the people they pass judgment on.

My friend Neda Ulaby has a cool piece about how Fox has beefed up its investment in making movies overseas for the markets where they’re produced — and how that’s going to affect what we see on U.S. screens:

“China is the second or third biggest market in the world at 50 percent local,” [Sanford Panitch] says. “India the fourth biggest at 90 percent local, France at 40 percent local, Germany at 30 percent local, Korea a billion dollar market 50 percent, Japan — actually, Japan [is] the biggest international market in the world, 60 percent local.”

Fox International Productions actually started off three years ago with a Japanese version of the movie Sideways — that’s the one about two guys touring wine country. “When we originally got into the business,” Panitch says, we thought, ‘We’ve got this great library, let’s take advantage of it.’ And ironically, local markets don’t want recycled Hollywood content.”

And really, why would they? Bollywood hardly needs need old American ideas. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has refreshed Hollywood’s interest in stories from abroad. That’s not a Fox picture, but Panitch says his division is introducing foreign books, scripts and directors to the larger Fox system.

“There’s a new aesthetic that’s coming out of people that weren’t schooled in traditional Hollywood ways,” he says. “There’s an incestuousness creatively here where we’re all reading the same publications and listening to the same music.”

It’s always nice when economic incentives line up in favor of creative storytelling. We’re already seeing something like this on television in the melancholic dramas we’ve imported from Israel and remake as In Treatment and Homeland. And it would be fascinating to see what conventions developed in international market end up sticking with American audiences. Could an Indian norm of chaster but emotionally charged romances find favor with devoutly Christian or Jewish movie-going audiences? Could grittier action sequences like the ones in Miss Bala, which Fox brought to the U.S. after one of the company’s executives based in Mexico found it and promised the director it wouldn’t be changed for American audiences, take the place of pyrotechnics? I haven’t watched enough recent Chinese movies to speculate on patterns there, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon certainly suggests there’s an American market for Chinese martial arts movies, a steady supply of which have reached our shores since.

It’s been a big couple of days on the international copyright-enforcement front, as Lamar Smith put SOPA on hold, Harry Reid postponed the vote originally scheduled for next week on the Protect IP act, and the federal government shut down Megaupload, prompting a wave of Anonymous attacks. Over at the Technology Liberation Front, Jerry Brito makes a point that I think ties all of these moves together (though his conclusion ultimately goes in a somewhat different direction). He writes: “The Megaupload folks are not the most sympathetic defendants, to say the least. They likely knew very well they were profiting from piracy, and they probably induced it as well. Anonymous’s attacks in retaliation for the arrests and domain seizures, therefore, threaten to destroy the good will the Internet community generated the previous day with the SOPA protests.”

As Brito points out, the Megaupload move proves that the federal government already has quite a bit of power when it comes to shutting down sites that are intentionally profiting off the distribution of copyrighted material for free. But I’d also be curious to hear if there are strong solutions companies could be using to detect pirated material before users are able to distribute it. I know that scanning every upload would be incredibly burdensome. But if there was some way to crawl enough material to act as a deterrent, and to give tech companies a way to both ban offenders and report them to appropriate government agencies, that seems like something the tech community might want to look into developing if it hasn’t deployed it already. I have no idea if that’s possible — my screener copies of things tend to have a number imprinted on the image that would be an immediate red flag. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of enforcement beyond U.S. borders. And it would be hard to get an overall consensus to adopt such techniques — someone’s probably always going to consider it worth the risk to keep distributing pirated material. But it would be a way for the tech community to go a step beyond the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which requires creators to give notice that their work is being ripped off, and to stand in clear solidarity with artists — and also demonstrate that the tech community can handle problems without government intervention.

Since I’ve been traveling so much, we’ll restart both of these projects in February. There will be no book club next Friday, and we’ll return on February 3 with All the Kings Men. I’ll post the reading for that next week. And similarly, I had a hard time getting my hands on Judgment at Nuremberg, so we’ll watch that for February 8, and I’ll post an updated syllabus at that time.

Based on this evidence, we should totally decide the 2012 general election in a The Voice-style singoff:

This post contains spoilers for A Vist from the Goon Squad.

There may be something sentimental about the idea that we are all connected, affected by each others’ actions and worldviews in ways we can’t see until later. But for a novel that’s ultimately about how art helps us collectively and individually overcome the traumas of September 11, it’s a fitting ideological framework. The events of that day came about in part because of reactions to our actions that we didn’t see, or take seriously enough, in part because a small group of poisonously angry men wanted to make themselves seen, and felt. In the years since the attacks, we’ve mostly responded by trying to regulate the world in a way that’s more advantageous to us, to see everything, even at the expense of privacy and liberty. The power of Egan’s novel comes from asserting a positive vision of interconnection, one governed not by power and victory but by compassion and openness.

Because it turns out, of course, that Alex’s bad night with Sasha in the early years after the attacks ends up becoming the key to his ability to appreciate the event that changes — and maybe heals — a nation. As the New Yorker of longer vintage, she is part of his initiation into city. And years later, her experience of loss will refract back to him:

Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty…The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse.

He’s right to be anxious, maybe even more than we can understand. Egan’s very, very good at evoking the future. She places us in time with the reference to a 15-year war and the baby boom that followed, though whether it’s our involvement in the Middle East or another conflict remains unclear. Her description of social networking gives us a sense of vaster, though still personal, webs of connection, of earlier adoption of technology by children. Both the war and the spread of technology have enabled the expansion of the state security apparatus, though whether the fear is legitimate or justified also remains open to question. And the reaction to Scotty’s performance, the moment when “ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched,” are so strong that they suggest that things got truly bad. It might still be possible to make rock music, and to market it, but there’s something shimmering off the page.
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ABC has been very, very good at building diverse casts and rosters of characters for television shows, and minority media groups recognized them for it earlier this week. When the nominations for the NAACP Image Awards came out, ABC was in the mix in prime time with Modern Family in Outstanding Comedy Series, Vanessa Williams in Desperate Housewives, Damon Wayans, Jr. in Happy Endings, Sofia Vergara for Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy for Outstanding Drama Series, Taye Diggs in Private Practice, Chandra Wilson, Sandra Oh, Loretta Devine, and James Pickens, Jr. for acting on Grey’s Anatomy. And the network snagged an additional eight nominations in the GLAAD Media Awards, including Grey’s Anatomy and Pretty Little Liars in Outstanding Drama Series, Happy Endings and Modern Family, and the episode “Acceptance” on Man Up!.

I’m particularly glad to see the love for Happy Endings, which has its flaws, but I think is the best group-of-friends comedy on television right now. At the Television Critics Association press tour, I asked creator David Caspe how he came up with the character of Max, who I think is one of the most balanced portrayals of a gay man anywhere in popular culture right now. Caspe said that while he knows Max has gotten praise for avoiding being either totally nelly or totally butch, he just based the character on a friend of his. It’s evidence of the fact that pop culture will get more diverse not only as the country does, and generational turnover (hopefully) makes the entertainment industry less white and dudely, but as white dudes have more diverse groups of friends and more contact with other kinds of people.

Similarly, Revenge, about which I really should be writing more, has done a nice job of getting different kinds of people into what’s typically seen as a hegemonic enclave. They’ve got both race and class in Ashley, who is trying to make her way in a world that looks down on her more for her economic station than (at least explicitly) her skin color. And Nolan is gay and techie and something entirely behind the standard menu of gay stereotypes. Tyler’s bisexuality was handled as if it was no big deal — neither he nor Nolan have ever had a conversation about their sex lives that’s about orientation, just individuals. Sometimes, I think TV shows get themselves hung up on the idea of diversity because they think they’d have to tell stories that are explicitly about the experience of being diverse. But it turns out that black people and gay people want things that don’t have to do with being black and gay.

This post contains spoilers for the January 19 episode of Parks and Recreation.

All of this season, Leslie’s been in an oddly ambivalent place about her campaign. It’s the dream of her life to be on the way to elected office, but there’s always been something in the way of her complete happiness about it: being forced to break up with Ben, the scandal after she and Ben come out, trying to figure out how to make the campaign actually happen. But tonight, the show finally got her in fighting trim, by giving her opponent who offends her sense of decency and public service. Played, in a fun move, by Paul Rudd.

I’m always somewhat amazed that Parks and Recreation doesn’t do a bit more with Sweetums, given the potential for political storytelling provided by a company town. There could be labor strife! Pollution of the parks! Mass layoffs! But I do appreciate that they’ve brought the company back in the form of Bobby Newport (Rudd), the endlessly cheerful and empty-headed heir to the company who also serves as Vice President of Nougat. Bobby’s had everything handed to him and has no practical experience, but he’s handsome, effortlessly rolls out lines like “I don’t know why they call it a campaign. Because so far, it’s been a campleasure,” and hands out Bobby Bars.

He’s also smoking Leslie in the polls even with ads that feature the dog given him by “My buddy, the pretender to the crown of Alsace Lorraine,” a fact that spurs her to start cutting ads herself. Some of the best bits of this feature the team acting like an actual team without Leslie present, particularly Ben, Tom, and Jerry working together to come up with the most ominous negative ad voice they can. I also appreciated the little flash of tension between Anne and Leslie, with the latter telling the former, “Anne, I painted your garage pink!” in an attempt to sway her vote on the ads, and Anne reminding her, “I did not ask you to do that.” And the ad they ultimately cut is great, featuring a 10-year-old Leslie telling the camera, “I love Pawnee, and I want to make it even better” with, among other things, “a more progressive tax on residential properties,” juxtaposed with Bobby acting like an idiot.

And I think it’s well-done that Leslie, who wants to see the best in everyone, finally gets angry when she comes face-to-face with Bobby’s entitlement. “It was mean. You guys are mean,” he complains when he finally takes a meeting with Leslie. “My friends keep sending me links to that ad and making fun of me…It would be so cool of you to quit. Then I could win. And I’d have a big party, and I’d put you both on the guest list…I need something to do to get my dad off my back. This seemed easy.” Appalled, Leslie warns him that when they debate, she’s going to crush him. And he still doesn’t get it.

I think this is precisely what the show needs, a sense of the stakes not just for Leslie, but for Pawnee. The show’s always done best in plotlines like Chris and Ben’s arrival in town, the Harvest Festival, or Lil’ Sebastian’s funerals where it’s clear that Leslie sees something important to her city going on and fights for it, even in the face of opposition or low budgets. The prospect of a truly terrible City Councilman is a step up from any of those one-off challenges or projects. I’m glad we get to care about whether Leslie wins for a reason other than that we like her.