Hemingway & Gellhorn, HBO’s splashy biopic of Ernest (a mustached Clive Owen) and journalist Martha (an ass-baring Nicole Kidman) has been thoroughly filleted by my fellow critics, and I’m not going to replicate their complaints against what I found to be an oddly trite movie. But there was one thing I found rather striking about it, though more as a cautionary tale than as a thing to praise: the shifts between dramatically different styles of cinematography. Watching Hemingway & Gellhorn felt more than a little like flipping through an Instagram stream, though to less evocative effect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with juxtaposing these different styles and signaling changes in tone for a pair of extremely mercurial people. When Hemingway battles a marlin in Key West, the frame is saturated in blues that in a final shot are soaked in red to mark his suicide by shotgun. In Cuba, and in the throes of marital bliss, they’re captured in blurry pops of color. The image takes on an HD sharpness when it lingers on the breasts and buttocks of dancers in a club who inspire Hemingway and Gellhorn to slip away from a drunken twist, the sight of these beautiful women in their act and changing costumes heightening their mutual desire.

But when it come to the couples’ work, the stylistic showiness of Hemingway & Gellhorn ends up distancing us from the emotion it wants to convey rather than strengthening it. When Hemingway and Gellhorn are working together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, she filing dispatches for Collier’s, he shooting The Spanish Earth, the movie captures them in the sepia tones and occasionally jerky moments that replicate the kind of footage he and his crew are capturing. When Gellhorn sees a burned baby in China or encounters a young girl with a pet turtle in an opium den, they’re in black-and-white, which lends a documentary cast to her encounters, but also means we don’t have to reckon with the full, horrifying state of the baby’s skin, the damage done to the young girl. And when Gellhorn flees the sight of the horrors at Dachau, she stumbles through a Brothers’ Grimm-style forest cast in mossy grays. Maybe the show’s budget prevented a full-scale or even minor-scale recreation of a concentration camp, but the sequence ends up treating her more like a fairy-tale heroine than a correspondent bearing witness. She sees ugliness, her capacity to bear witness to it is one of the things that defines her, but the movie can’t bear to show us anything but loveliness even in the midst of Gellhorn’s trauma. Both of these sequences would have had much more power had they been presented straightforwardly, if we saw what she saw with a Hollywood approximation of how she saw it.

The thing that’s fun about Instagram is that we can use it to make our lives look more heightened and dramatic than they usually are. But Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn’s lives are supposed to already be as exciting as we’d like to make ours look. The flashiness of the cinematography in Hemingway & Gellhorn feels like an indication of lack of confidence in their story, rather than the deployment of available tactics where they’re needed. Just because you can saturate something with color or swath it in sepia doesn’t mean you have to.

In case any of you haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to call your attention to Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker column on Community and Doctor Who, which is really a stealth argument that it’s time for those who look down their nose at genre fiction to reconsider, in part, perhaps, because genre fiction itself has changed:

The original “Who” dwelt on pure sci-fi obsessions, abstract questions of how society is organized and the line between humans and machines. But, as deeply as fans loved the show, its themes were rarely emotional. Instead, it jumped from Aztec civilization to Mars, as much an educational show for children as an adult narrative, with a British-colonialist view of the universe. (So many savages, so little time.) The series’ most striking feature was the Doctor himself: in contrast to “Star Trek” ’s Kirk—the Kennedyesque leader of a diverse society—the early Doctor Who was an alien iconoclast with two hearts and a universe-wide Eurail Pass. For a certain breed of viewer, this was an intoxicating ideal: the know-it-all whose streak of melancholy—or prickly rage, depending on who was Who—had to be honored, because he actually did know everything. Though that show had its charms, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that the modern “Doctor Who” has a very different emphasis: it’s a show about relationships, in an epic and mythological vein.

“It’s so much larger when you’re on the inside,” she writes of science fictional shows, though it’s worth remembering that emotional complexity and attentiveness to relationships aren’t the only thing that validate science fiction. There’s plenty of value in well-executed silly gadgets and drivebys to distant civilizations. The Daleks may be low-effects “Nazi-ish pepper pots,” but shabby exteriors and crude mechanically can be a vehicle for totalitarianism as well as glitz and glamor. Dropping in on a planet or a time per week can read like a survey of the Empire, but early Star Trek made those encounters melancholy, and strange, and sad (and occasionally silly) from the outset—those visits were less an affirmation of control but a reminder of how much there is out there. It’s not less worthwhile to dream about how we’ll interact with the strangenesses of the future than to ruminate on how we might have interacted with people we already know in the past. The world is changing rapidly, and even outwardly silly thought experiments may yield useful lessons and parallels. How we’d behave under siege may be a question that fluctuates only slightly if the invaders are orcs, or medieval humans, or Nazis, or cybermen. How we define humanity is a question that can be extended and expanded by science fiction in a way that realism or historical fiction may not allow us to access. Execution is one thing, but ambition itself is not inherently laughable or dismissable.

Genre fiction may become respectable when it’s seen to be answering the same sorts of questions as literature, and if it meets certain standards for prose or artistry. But judging fiction on the former rather than simply the latter says more about the gatekeepers of respectability—the New Yorker a week earlier banged the guilty pleasure drum to no particular effect or insight, saying “part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better”—than about the fiction that’s up for judgement.

In a much-circulated comment in a thread about this week’s episode of Girls, the AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, in response to a commenter declaring that Lena Dunham needs to be funnier because of how unattractive she is, laid out precisely how sad it is, and how much people deny themselves, when they default to careless, angry misogyny. It’s a powerful short essay, and I was most struck by these lines: “I don’t know what it is about this show that makes people make snide, misogynistic attacks against it. I don’t know what it is about this show that makes people unwilling to extend it even the most basic of critical charities, like accepting its central premises.” I actually think I know exactly why this is, and Todd’s exchange with this commenter is a jarring reminder for me that for a moment this spring, I forgot it.

Much has been made of Dunham’s willingness to display her body in both Tiny Furniture and Girls, her lack of fear about being subject to scrutiny that terrifies actresses whose bodies more clearly conform to Hollywood standards. But what’s radical about Dunham isn’t just her willingness to take off her clothes, but what kinds of stories she tells about herself, both clothed and nude.

This is a radical oversimplification, but Hollywood tends to sort women into two categories: those with bodies that fall within the generally accepted parameters for commercialized beauty, and those who don’t. If an actress’s body falls within those parameters, all kinds of stories are available to her: she can have a career, a child, be a warrior, a lover, a genius, a drunk. But if an actress’s body doesn’t meet those standards, most of the stories she will be allowed to literally embody will be drawn from the non-conformity of her looks. Melissa McCarthy can romance a man whose body is like hers on Mike and Molly when Hollywood decides it wants to affirm that everyone can find love, and a man who’s shorter and thinner than her in Bridesmaids when it wants to make a joke of her voraciousness. In Drop Dead Diva, about a model reincarnated as a non-thin lawyer, Brooke Elliott’s character acts as an education in inner goodness for a formerly vapid woman, as if goodness and an understanding of spiritual beauty increase in some sort of direct proportion with weight. With “sassy,” non-thin African-American women, fleshliness is supposed to be some sort of conduit to truth-telling—liberated from, or locked out of full societal acceptance, they’re granted a pop-cultural license to comment on and critique it—NBC’s Best Friends Forever even gave us a sassy elementary-schooler to judge everything from the main character’s pulled pork to her love life, cast into the role of perfecting a white lady at the age of eight.

Some of the stories in Girls are drawn from Lena Dunham’s body, of course. When she describes Marnie as a “Victoria’s Secret angel” and herself as a “fat baby angel,” or when Adam plays with Hannah’s stomach fat, her character is conforming to expectations. She is self-deprecating, aware that her body conveys different value than Marnie’s. But instead of telling a story about how Hannah learns she is worthy of love, or any of the other pre-approved storylines for women with non-Hollywood bodies, Girls isn’t really content to stay within that expected set of narratives. The geography of Hannah’s world isn’t boundaried by the countours of her body. When she and Adam have sex, it’s not her body that’s funny, it’s his pornified fantasies, and when she has sex with a nice-guy pharmacist, the joke is his extreme deference even though he knows very little about his own desires. In the storyline about Hannah’s boss the sexual harasser, it’s not supposed to be hilarious that she thinks he desires her because she’s unattractive, but that she’s mistaken his lazy familiarity for a desire for action.
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The bridge is yours.

-The evilest 1 percenters in television history.

-Even the most desperate broadcast networks don’t think they need older viewers.

-NFL players look beyond football to Hollywood.

-Alex Trebek on leaving Jeopardy.

-Who knew Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunger would be a critique of our heroic notions of the presidency?

It’s going to be very, very hard for Elementary, CBS’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation, to convince Sherlock diehards that it’s superior in any way to the miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in any way except in that there will be more of it. But every modern interpretation tends to pick one facet of the great detective’s personality and hone in, and so I think Elementary’s decision to focus on Sherlock as an addict will be a nice complement to Sherlock’s focus on Sherlock as someone with potential Asperger syndrome:

In the stories, Watson regularly discusses Holmes’ use of cocaine and morphine, but the stories tend to track away from these conversations rather quickly, as in The Sign of Four where Holmes admits he uses because “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Watson warns him to “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”

But his warning is diverted by the arrival of a mental exercise that puts Holmes off his second hit of coke. Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing stories on the assumption that we were more interested in the cases Holmes could solve than in Holmes and Watson themselves. In so much as the mysteries illuminated anything, they illuminated London and British society, and to a much lesser extent, the flexibilities that let said society tolerate a man as singular as Sherlock Holmes, and the limitations that led him, at the end of that case, to declare that “For me, there still remains the cocaine-bottle.”

Today, psychology is the point, and we learn about society and its attitudes through a microscope not a sprawling city map. And with Dr. House finally gone from Fox’s airwaves, there may be room for another cranky, brilliant addict on our airwaves. CBS may favor broad entertainments. But when it comes to gaging the market and looking beyond the PBC and BBC sets, it knows us all too well. Whether Elementary succeeds or fails may determine on how interestingly the show manages to update the narrative of the brilliant addict who turns to drugs to entertain himself in a society that moves too slowly for him to match our contemporary understandings of the science of addiction and the acceptable narrative paths to recovery.

From a Vulture interview with the actor who, to the delights of those of us who loved him in The Wire and Luther, is starring in Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel:

Just don’t ask if he blames a shortage of roles for black actors. “Next question,” he says when I raise the subject. “I’m so bored of answering that. Are there differences between black actors’ opportunities and white actors’ opportunities? Yes, there are. It’s been said. I’d rather a young black actor read about success as opposed to how tough it was. I get these roles because I can act and that’s it. Hopefully that’s it. The less I talk about being black, the better.”

He doesn’t mind talking about growing up poor, though. From the rough neighborhood of Hackney, the son of West African immigrants, he left home at 16 to join the National Youth Music Theatre, and toured with a production of Guys and Dolls. (He played Big Jule.) “We traveled the world,” he says. “I didn’t ever see a future in musicals, but I loved it.” It also kept him out of fights in Canning Town, the ostensibly nicer neighborhood where he went to high school, then a hub for the extreme right-wing party, the National Front. “Their beliefs are ‘Keep Britain White,’ ” he says. “Walking down the street, someone would call you a black cunt. I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ ” It was around that time that he shortened his given name, Idrissa, which he says means “firstborn son,” because he got tired of beating people up when they told him it sounded too feminine. “I quickly got well known because I was tall and wasn’t taking any shit.”

Of course, a lot of what the magazine describes as talking about class here is actually talking about race as inflected by class. But I do kind of take the point—in the quest to illustrate how Hollywood is denying itself talented leading men and women, great performances, new audience, journalists can run the risk of asking actors the same questions over and over again, that they find reductive and frustrating. And it’s a tactic that ends up doing the same thing that Hollywood does: treats whiteness as a natural default. I’d be curious to hear more white actors, particularly those playing characters who were people of color in life or in source material, asked to talk about race, and in those cases in particular, how they feel about participating in the homogenization of Hollywood products. And even more so to hear those questions posed to writers and directors. Making actors of color constantly relive their frustrations, especially when they feel they may not be able to be honest about those frustrations out of fear of limiting their future opportunities, may provide ammunition for making decision-makers embarrassed. But that’s not actually the same thing as asking people who make the decisions that make Hollywood whiter why they made those choices, and why they think they’re acceptable.

This post contains spoilers through the May 27 episode of Game of Thrones.

In the world of Game of Thrones, the greatest challenge for the characters is often knowing how to behave in any given situation, whether it’s a court under siege, the front line of a battle, wildling captivity, or a sophisticated, depraved foreign court. Because the society is so rigidly constrained by class, gender, and martial roles, often characters’ survival depends on how well they’re able to conform to the roles that people expect or need them to take up. Arya’s ability to survive in Tywin Lannister’s employ involved a balance of servility and amusingness, while her sister Sansa needs to please some members of the Lannister court by her utter submission and others with flashes of spitfire temper that indicate a greater capacity than that normally exhibited by and allowed to noble ladies. But on rare occasions, transcending the role that’s been assigned to you and the accepted wisdom can change your life or save it. And as Stannis’s fleet converges on King’s Landing, sailing smoothly into Tyrion’s trap under cover of darkness, find what breaking character can win them.

First, there’s Sandor Clegane, who’s taken something of a smaller role in the show than in the novels. But as King’s Landing braces for invasion and seige, he steps forward to tell the truth about anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. “There’s women in the ground. I put some there myself. So have you. You like fucking, and drinking, and singing. But killing, killing’s the thing you love,” he sourly informs Bronn, who’s having a drink and a girl as preparation. “You’re just like me. Only smaller.” Bronn may be able to dispute the question of which one of them would win in a fight, but he’s unable to deny the essential similarity. And when he sees what Sandor fears, watches the bigger man paralyzed as a man on fire wheels towards him on the battlefield, Bronn saves his life with a well-aimed shot, an acknowledgement of fellowship, and that he knows Sandor’s weaknesses too. The obscene green light of that fire lets Sandor finally see his own limits clearly. “I lost half my men. The Blackwater’s on fire,” he tells the king he’s protected with dogged loyalty. When Joffrey orders him back into battle, Sandor liberates himself in a fashion so startling it allows him to escape. “Fuck the Kingsguard,” he declares in terms more definitive and sincere than Jamie Lannister could ever muster. “Fuck the city. Fuck the king.”
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