Idris Elba talked to Vulture about Pacific Rim, the monster movie by Guillermo Del Toro he’s starring in, and wow does it sound incredible:

He’s yet another man of authority, but this time much higher up. He’s the head of the army and the army is the essential fighting force against these monsters. The world is crumbled and this alien lived underneath the surface of the Earth for a long time. Our only defense has been these massive robots that fight back — they’re basically tanks that are put together to look like men and can walk. I play the leader of that sort of movement. Then we lose our funding, basically, and the world decides to build walls around countries, which basically means the rich can get in and the poor can’t. So our characters go, “No. We’re going to fight this our way.” It could be a box-standard, fight-against-the-aliens sort of film, but not with Guillermo.

It sounds like it’s almost a commentary on class and immigration.

Well, it’s certainly a commentary on if the world were under attack who would survive and who wouldn’t. Interestingly enough, the poor would probably more survive than the rich.

Why is that?

Because they have less and are used to less; therefore, more resilient and more tough. If an alien attacks a big skyscraper, people in the skyscraper are going to die. The people on the floor may not.

It’s often splashier and scarier to pit humans against aliens in science fiction, and to portray alien invasion as an engineer of a new, happy, human solidarity. But we’re a lot likely to get fierce international and inter-class struggle and competition before we end up in a fight with spacemen. That Del Toro is acknowledging that and giving us his signature awesome monster design has me very, very excited indeed.

My affection for the finale of Mad Men has increased the more I’ve thought about the episode, even as I wonder if I might look back on it as a better series finale than jumping off point for anything new. For a show that’s been blunter than previously about its themes in any given episode, the fifth season of Mad Men is a fairly subtle look at how and why men of a certain era failed to anticipate the rise of feminism, or to recognize that a rearrangement of gender roles could do anything to ease their lingering discontents.

The end of the finale emphasized, as clearly as was humanely possible, that Don Draper is a limited person. That’s not to say he’s incapable or weak, but that he’s settled deeply into certain patterns and is profoundly bounded by certain desires and fears, which really may be a way of explaining that he’s feeling middle age hard. When Megan gets drunk and tells Don “This is what you want, isn’t it? For me to be waiting for you? That’s why you won’t give me a chance,” she’s partially right. Don wants not to want that, but he can’t help himself. The stay-at-home wife who he failed to satisfy intellectually or emotionally left him. The work wife he nurtured professionally moved on without him. Don may be at peace with Peggy’s departure—”I’m proud of you. I just didn’t know it would be without me,” he tells her before the beginning of Casino Royale. But his privilege means he’s never developed the capacity to work his way through personal situations that are difficult for him. Of course he only likes “the beginnings of things.” Everything else requires skills Don doesn’t have. And the finale of the show seems to emphasize that he will never develop them.

We can see that fundamental, but it’s an uncertainty that’s invisible to many of the men around him. Don’s walk off Megan’s set and towards the bar begins with a nifty bit of lighting that transforms him briefly into the silhouette from the credits sequence, a featureless archetype of masculinity. Don Draper may be an individual, but he’s a role model to the men around him, and he may be a void, but they see the strong, clean lines, the cut of the suit, the swoop of the hair, the success.

That archetype’s always been appealing to Pete Campbell in particular, a man who’s always looking for someone to emulate. Pete is somewhat closer than Don to articulating why he’s unhappy, and more active in pursuing alternatives, whether it’s his vigorous attempt to eclipse Roger at work, sleeping with a prostitute at a classy brothel, or pursuing an affair with his neighbor’s wife. When Beth returns to his life, Pete’s reaction is a combination of an attempt at Don-like suave and something new. “This is not a joke,” he says in an evocation of Don’s California reset button. “Let’s go to Los Angeles. I’ve been there. It’s filled with sunshine.” She’s not buying it, and Pete’s attempts to stand up for her autonomy don’t stick a landing either. His insistence that “Howard can’t make you do this. He can’t control you. He’s a monster,” doesn’t acknowledge that Beth might want shock therapy. Instead, his real goal is keeping her sexually available to him. He didn’t like the idea that she was ignoring him or had forgotten him voluntarily after their first encounter, and the prospect that he’s literally been erased from her memory permanently drives him into a rage. “You are the most disgusting person I’ve ever seen,” Pete spits at Beth’s husband on the train, provoking the first of two fights he’ll lose within five minutes. “You just couldn’t wait to get her in the hospital and erase her brain.”

Unlike Don, who sees only the newness of things as they come into their lives, Pete’s ahead of the curve only in that he sees the disappointments immediately. He feels Beth’s distance immediately after sleeping with her, but he can’t seem to process that Beth’s treating him like men in this series often treat women: she wants to sleep with him and then make him disappear. When Trudy, lured in by Pete’s story of how he got his injuries, relents and decides he should be allowed an apartment in the city, he’s ceased wanting it before they’ve even signed a lease: he doesn’t have an idea of who he wants to have an affair with there anymore. But whether he can see the rot earlier than Don is doesn’t mean that Pete’s gotten the shock that would make him realign his goals and values. The incentives to stay within the protective shell of patriarchy, to retain the right to blow off Joan in partners’ meetings and cheat without getting caught, are simply too great. If anything, the man who got the sharpest shock this season, aided by LSD and Pete’s condescension, is Roger Sterling. And the closest he comes to progress is an affair with an age-appropriate woman who sets her own terms for their encounter.
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As should be obvious, there are massive spoilers for Prometheus in this post.

I’ve been thinking about many aspects of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien movies, but the one that’s stuck with me most is the clearest continuation of the Alien franchise’s themes: the movie’s exploration of bodily invasion and specifically women’s bodily autonomy. In New York Magazine, David Edelstein describes one of the movie‘s most harrowing and original sequences “a bit of grisly self-surgery that should inspire the pro-choice movement for millennia to come.” Livejournal user cavalorn, in a long and much-circulated analysis of the movie that’s the closest I’ve seen for a compelling argument for the coherence of some, but not all, of its ideas, writes: “I’m not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don’t think they’re clear, and I’m not entirely comfortable doing so.” I’m still considering this element of the movie, and suspect I will be for some time to come. But for the moment, I feel like Prometheus is a movie that attempts to describe the quest for bodily autonomy as a sign of extreme toughness that ends up reaffirming the persistence of patriarchy and rape culture, even in the future, even as we travel beyond all we know.

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about the android David’s (Michael Fassbender) motivations for dosing Holloway, the colleague and lover of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the movie’s main character: does he know that it will result in her pregnancy? Is he experimenting for his own purposes or at the behest of Peter Weyland, the father he also wants dead? To a certain extent, his motivations and reasoning are irrelevant. The end result of David’s actions is that Shaw ends up with a metaphorical pregnancy against her plans and will, and when she expresses a wish to end the invasion of her body, David forcibly prevents her from doing so.

The scene of Shaw’s—abortion isn’t really the right word for it, because she isn’t pregnant, but rather infected, and the result of the surgery isn’t the termination of her pregnancy but a premature birth—seizing control of her body is undeniably, viscerally powerful, even as it’s sacrificed in small ways to the movie’s other needs. The surgery would have been urgent enough even without the medpod’s initial warning that it isn’t programmed to treat women, a nonsensical restriction on its programming that causes a slight delay in the midst of great urgency but really exists as another clue that Peter Weyland is still alive. Similarly, the revelation that Shaw has been unable to conceive a child with Holloway ends up functioning as foreshadowing, rather than as nuance. Her instant reaction to David’s diagnosis of her pregnancy is to want to terminate it. The movie isn’t interested in the possibility that, given her profound upset over her inability to have a child with Holloway, she might have some sort of connection to the thing growing rapidly inside her. Those emotions might have been uncomfortable given how that creature came to be inside her, but it would have been a fascinating, uncomfortable conversation for the movie to engage in.
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The bridge is yours.

-Of all the teen X-Men, I love the return to mohawked Ororo more than anything.

-How arts groups in Kansas beat Sam Brownback.

-I like Ken Tucker’s list of Emmy nominations he wishes would happen.

-I cannot wait for the Judge Dredd movie.

-The Dirty Dancing reboot is mercifully on hold.

I had the enormous privilege to spend my Saturday talking about the employment of women in pop culture and the impacts it has on the representations we see in media with Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, Harmonix video game designer Alli Thresher (who you should know from her appearances around these parts), and Graphic Policy podcast co-host Elana Levin. We talked about a lot of things—Girls, Game of Thrones, DC Comics’ New 52, Naughty Dog’s video game designers, and the kinds of conversations that make guys realize what sorts of images they’re putting out into the world. Plus, the marvelous Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action, and the Media made a guest appearance to help us field questions from what turned out to be a conservative blogger who wanted to convince us that all dudes are just horrible sexist rapists, or something. It was pretty great:

It was a great conversation, and the questions from the audience (which we restated for the cameras when they were actual questions rather than “I actually have more of a comment” sorts of things) got my thought processes going. Netroots may be over for the year, but the posts inspired by it are just getting started.

There’s been a lot of discussion of Scholastic Books’ How to Survive series, books that are labeled “Boys Only” or “Girls Only,” and that purport to teach kids of each gender how to navigate events ranging from being cursed with a brother to a zombie attack. It’s been slammed as sexist, because the boys’ book is ovewhelmingly stacked with chapters that involve adventuresome situations—the sudden appearance of a T. Rex, space travel—while the book aimed at girls deals more with emotional situations. It’s certainly unfair to treat girls as solely domestic creatures who would take a backseat in disaster while boys save them. But the books does a disservice to boys, too, by assuming they don’t face the same sorts of challenges that girls do in finding their places at school and at home.

We’ve spent a lot of pop culture energy telling girls that they can be strong as well as sensitive, that femininity can be a powerful force in the world as well as a way of governing the domestic sphere. But we’ve done much less to let boys know that it’s not unmanly for them to be emotional or sensitive, and to create modes of pop culture masculinity that help boys navigate the disparities between what they’re told they’re supposed to be and what they actually feel.

Scholastic’s books may reinforce old stereotypes about boys being adventurers while girls are focused on their interior lives. But the kinds of advice it advertises as on offer to girls is much more immediately applicable than the scenarios it sets up for boys. “How to Survive a Broken Leg,” “How to Survive in a Forest,” and “How to Survive a Fall” are among the few things that boys might actually be able to use from these books.” It’s not like there aren’t boys out there who couldn’t use “How to Survive Shyness” or “How to Survive a Crush,” and we’d be better off if entries like that appeared in a matter-of-fact way on the boys’ list as well as the girls’ list, and were written to be gender-neutral.

In contrast to the boys who are getting trained up for a science fictional future, girls are getting advice on scenarios they’re likely to face today, from “How to Survive Soccer Tryouts,” to “How to Survive a BFF Fight.” Obviously some of the advice and topics are basic and condescending. But we should be delighted, in an environment where we often talk about women needing to pitch more stories to magazines, ask for raises like their male colleagues, and seek out leadership positions, that girls are getting instructions on “How to Turn a No Into a Yes,” and “Top Tips for Speechmaking.” It’s nice to know that Scholastic thinks that both boys and girls need to figure out how to survive a zombie apocalypse, the one item that overlaps on both lists. But until that grim day arrives, Scholastic is doing much more to treat girls like they’re whole people and to prepare them for real-world success.

I still hold out hopes that someone will get a superhero television show right—superhero stories are, after all, procedurals with weirder criminals and more vigorous apprehensions, so it shouldn’t be that hard. But as NBC’s The Cape stuck too close to the tone of actual comics without adding enough humor to avoid utter woodenness, it looks like with Arrow, the CW is hewing to its airbrushed hunks formula, and I’m not sure the hunk can act:

It’s also amazing how much the trailer screams “let’s redeem this guy’s privilege by giving him superpowers!” That’s a long-standing superhero tradition, of course. But it plays as kind of a dodge here. The way to make up for having sex with your girlfriend’s sister on a cruise and getting her killed, or tooling around like a rich playboy jerk is not actually to kill all the corrupt people in your city: it’s to not be the kind of person who cheats on your girlfriend because you’re entitled to do so. It’ll actually be interesting to see if The Dark Knight gets into this at all, and explores the extent to which being Batman gives Bruce Wayne an excuse to continue enjoying the fundamental inequalities he benefits from.