One of the salutary effects of reading entertainment industry trade publications is that every time I get depressed about our abilities to have serious conversations about major issues in American entertainment, I get a very specific reminder of the fact that things are much, much worse elsewhere. Today’s reminder comes from India, where the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has shut down the broadcast of a movie called The Dirty Picture. While the title might suggest otherwise, this isn’t like the Scary Movie franchise (though such a thing would be pretty entertaining to watch). Instead, it’s a biopic about Indian actress Silk Smitha. And specifically, it’s about the fact that Smitha was typecast into what, by Indian standards, counts as soft-core pornography even though she garnered critical acclaim for more straightforward work. And the televised broadcast of the movie’s been shut down precisely for its exploration of themes like typecasting and the way women can get trapped in their looks:

While The Dirty Picture does not show any graphic nudity, the film had run into controversies even before its theatrical release for its bold portrayal of a struggling starlet making it big as a sex symbol. Last week, a lawyer from the central Indian town of Nagpur filed a court order seeking a ban on the film’s telecast since it “contained obscene shots.” But the High Court cleared SET to go ahead with the screening after the I&B Ministry and the Central Board of Film Certification stated that the film had been re-edited with over 50 cuts.

“Whatever is shown on TV – whether it is a film, a serial or a commercial – has to be as per the program code of the Cable Television Network Regulation Act. As per the code, films that have U/A rating can be shown on TV… Some films have adult themes and the treatment and public perception is such that even after making many cuts the film retains its mature theme,” CBFC CEO Pankaja Thakur told a newspaper defending the government’s directive to reschedule the film after 11 p.m.. But Thakur also added that the incident will force the CBFC “to look at the whole process of cutting an adult film to make it suitable to be watched by children.”

I should note that The Dirty Picture did get theatrical play, and its director, Milan Luthria, has pointed out that it’s ridiculous that an extremely edited version of the movie, which would have aired at night and with significant notices of its rating, can live in theaters but is barred from broadcast. It’s a reminder that what counts as brave and what counts as difficult discussions aren’t the same everywhere. We take for granted a lot of what we can depict and what we can discuss.

Going into this season of Game of Thrones, I wrote a bit about how one of the challenges the characters face is how to govern by realpolitik in a world where various deities are beginning to intervene more aggressively in human affairs than they have in centuries. So the religion nerd in my heart is gladdened by this video in which George R.R. Martin and company discuss the religions at play in the series, and provide valuable context for some of the events we’re seeing:

One of the things I think the series has done nicely this year is show us the role of women religious in the wider world of Westeros, whether they’re treating the wounded on the battlefield or delivering Ned Stark’s bones to Catelyn as a gesture of respect and care. But I think there are times when a sense of religious awe’s been lost as the show has moved away from point of view perspectives on the events. Melisandre’s monstrous birth this week was one of the few moments the series has that’s conveyed a real sense of wonder and terror. And I’m excited to see more of that as the show progresses.

There’s something fitting about the fact that Tor, which publishes a lot of books in which people think about what the future might look like, has decided to remove digital rights management protection from their ebooks. From the company’s press release:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

I don’t think that all DRM protections are inherently evil, though I think the limits on the number of devices on which you can consume content from Amazon and Apple could be higher to be responsive to consumers’ needs. But ditching DRM is a sign that Tor trusts its customers and wants to meet them where they’re at. More signals like that would be a welcome thing from the entertainment industry. Something like the movie industry’s Ultraviolet effort to bolster DVD sales by packing discs and digital copies together are sort of missing the point. They’re trying to create a new space rather than going to the cloud lockers and the means of distribution and consumption their consumers are already using day to day.

At first glance, Lesley Arfin, the Vice contributor and writer on HBO’s sitcom Girls, and John Derbyshire, the former National Review columnist, have little in common. They’re a woman and a man, a naughty provocateur and a writer on, among other things, China and mathematics, whose work resonates in New York and Washington respectively. But in the last month or so, they’ve served as illustrations of the ugly fact that racism retains a certain cultural capital even among bastions of people who like to consider themselves enlightened.

Derbyshire got himself in trouble first after he wrote an astonishingly racist column for Taki Magazine (about which more in a moment) about telling his children to avoid black people as if that was some sort of sensible safety guide. He presented the piece as if he was speaking difficult truths that others dare not speak, a common framing tactic of racists who like to believe that their biases are grounded in scientific evidence and want to use that delusion to attach legitimacy and a claim of the moral high ground to their bigotry. After several days of controversy, National Review, which had previously tended to turn a blind eye to or to edit down Derbyshire’s more appalling proclivities, fired him.

Lesley Arfin seems to have been less commonly-understood to be a racist until, in response to charges that the show for which she works, Girls, is strangely white for a story set in Brooklyn, she tweeted “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” She subsequently added and scrubbed an apology. And evidence has quickly emerged that the tweet was hardly an isolated, insensitive mistake. Arfin is apparently the kind of person who thinks it’s clever to compare President Obama’s skin color to shit, or to say in an interview that the word “nigger” is the one that makes her feel proud to be a writer. Elspeth Reeve, in an elegant piece at The Atlantic Wire, suggested that Arfin’s comments spring from a common well, that this is “where this vein of hipster racism starts. It tests the idea that anything wrapped with enough irony can be transformed into something else. The more uncool the raw materials are—trucker hats, ugly T-shirts, mustaches, smoking crack—the better the trick.”

That’s true to a certain extent. But while there’s no inherent cultural capital in trucker hats or mustaches, there is a strong, if narrow thread of thought that is interested in making sure that racism stays nominally acceptable, and not because it demonstrates the ability of those thinkers to turn something ridiculous into a trend. Much in the same way that John Derbyshire peppered spectacularly illogical racist advice to his children with links to anecdotal stories meant to gloss his nonsense with a scientific veneer, Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice (and Taki Magazine columnist, it’s worth noting), responded to the criticism of Arfin’s behavior by suggesting that the people who were uncomfortable with Girls’ whiteness were deluded race-mongers desperate to turn a buck. “You can’t continue a mythical Cold War forever and it’s likely the days of randomly tarring and feathering people for ‘racism,’ real or imagined, are coming to a close,” he wrote in a post defending Arfin. “Not because it’s morally wrong, but because people are no longer buying it. And when people aren’t buying something, you can’t make money.” These two strains of thinking are complimentary and mutually reinforcing: people who see racism are deluded and have impure motives, while people who seek to assert racial difference are acting out of a disinterested commitment to scientific truth in the face of terrible opposition.

But there’s nothing brave or bold about clinging to racist ideas, to your supposed right to wound other people by being nasty and childishness. It’s the reverse, a desperate clinging to modes of thought that protected your own privilege and save you the inconvenience of having to engage with people in a way that might require compromise and growth. The immature and fearful people who huddle around the campfire of racism aren’t keeping a flame of secret knowledge alive. They’re hiding from a world they’re unable to cope with.

The bridge is yours.

-An awesome list of ten web series starring women of color.

-A superhero who’s teaching kids to overcome Tourette Syndrome.

-Not going to lie. Pretty excited for the new Fast and Furious movie.

-Jon Lovitz is not wild about President Obama.

-Ted Nugent may not be a threat to President Obama, but he is a danger to bears.

-So, the new G.I. Joe movie is basically In Like Flint, with the fake president?

When we got word that Anchorman 2 was finally happening, I wondered if the second movie would be as awesomely feminist as the first. Empire Magazine interviewed director Adam McKay, and while he says the script isn’t even close to done, the movie will tackle an entirely different kind of diversity:

So what will the sequel have in store for Ron and the team? Nothing good – at least, not if you’re a luxuriously-maned, change-averse ’70s sex dinosaur. “We know these guys never deal well with change,” says McKay, “and the good thing is that there’s a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We’re going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they’re not going to handle it well.”

So what does that sinister-sounding “regular timeline” mean for KVWN-TV? “It’s right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in ’78 or ’79,” McKay explains. “All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you’re talking about diversity and the Action News team, that’s always fun to deal with.”

That delights this progressive’s heart (it should be noted that McKay is a staunch progressive whose side project involves supporting liberal political songwriting). And it’s also a chance to riff off the utter genius of the news team rumble from the first movie, which remains an incredibly witty explication of weapons preference, if not the world’s best piece of fight choreography:

I really hope they can get Tim Robbins back as the leader of the public news team. But it would be nice if they didn’t have Ben Stiller pretend to be Latino.

Tom Hiddleston, who plays Asgardian god Loki in Thor and will be the main antagonist of The Avengers, pens a nice little reflection on the impact of superheroes on his own actorly ambitions, and the role superhero stories can play in exploring big questions:

Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths can be explored. In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good. The possibility of redemption is right around the corner, but we have to earn it.

The Hulk is the perfect metaphor for our fear of anger; its destructive consequences, its consuming fire. There’s not a soul on this earth who hasn’t wanted to “Hulk smash” something in their lives. And when the heat of rage cools, all that we are left with is shame and regret. Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s humble alter ego, is as appalled by his anger as we are. That other superhero Bruce – Wayne – is the superhero-Hamlet: a brooding soul, misunderstood, alone, for ever condemned to avenge the unjust murder of his parents. Captain America is a poster boy for martial heroism in military combat: the natural leader, the war hero. Spider-Man is the eternal adolescent – Peter Parker’s arachnid counterpart is an embodiment of his best-kept secret – his independent thought and power.

I don’t know if arguments like this will convince doubters like the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane to take superhero movies seriously. But it makes the point that these holdouts are a minority. All critics have biases, and perhaps it’s better that those biases be put on display by someone like Lane, who thinks that Battlestar Galactica is a waste of his infinitely precious time, or the New York Times reviewers who make their contempt for fantasy every time they write about Game of Thrones. I’m not saying that genre material should be turned over to reviewers who privilege science fiction or fantasy over other frameworks. But if you want to give culture that a lot of people take seriously a fair shake, it’s probably worth assigning it to a reviewer who is open-minded about it. Bad things can make a lot of money, or garner high ratings. But quality doesn’t automatically decline as profits and ratings increase. It’s a shame that some folks deny themselves great fun out of close-mindedness, and unfortunate when they try to dissuade others from that enjoyment as well.

My fellow critic Sean T. Collins has been championing the hell out of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” on Twitter, so I finally pulled it up yesterday and had a listen. It’s a really fun pop song with the same kind of emotional ambiguity as Miley Cyrus’s flawless “See You Again.” And the video contains a nice little surprise:

I think we can now safely say it’s a mini-trope to have a girl interested in a boy only to find out he’s gay, and to handle with it surprise and general good humor. That’s the basis for the introduction of Kevin Keller in Archie Comics, and it feels like a small sitcom staple. It’s a nice little illustration of the complexities of modern dating. And while it would be easy in these situations to portray gay men as competition for women, I think the best depictions tend not to do this. Here, the guy who turns out to be gay isn’t taking another fellow Carly Rae has a crush on away from her—he’s just into one of her bandmates, who is surprised, but not visibly grossed-out or hostile even though he’s pretty clearly not interested. And in the Archie world, Kevin’s coming out opens up a new possibility: instead of becoming another object of romantic competition between Betty and Veronica, he gets to become their friend.