I’m sure many of you have heard of the Black List, a project to round up the best unproduced movie scripts, based on recommendations from executives at movie studios and production companies. Getting a script on the Black List is a mark of esteem, something that might get a script into production that had been previously been overlooked, and that marks a writer as a creative and original thinker. So I’m excited about a new endeavor* that’s creating a similar list of scripts that pass the Bechdel Test, and trying to get producers to commit to reading at least two of the scripts on the list.

I’m excited by the prospect of turning rich female characters from something that’s seen as a way to placate a certain number of vocal women or to get a certain kind of critical acclaim to an objective measurement of quality, creativity and intelligence. And I think it’ll be fun to see the scripts themselves: it’s interesting to see what people come with outside the established formulas of Hollywood genres. But I think I’m also curious to see how long it takes for the list to take off, and many of these scripts get picked up as compared to Black List scripts. If nothing else, that’s useful data about what kinds of smart and creative Hollywood values, and how far we have to go to make fascinating female characters part of that equation.

As a piece of political thought, I really, really like Jasiri X’s and Rhymefest’s latest track, “Who’s Illegal?”:

it’s a great explication of the work done by the word “illegal” when it’s used to describe immigrants, both in terms of how we view history, and how we judge present actions. If people are, themselves, inherently illegal, it becomes harder to judge violence done to establish and expand American borders in the past as a violation of both law and norms. And if people are illegal, the illegality of their personhood supersedes, in the imagination, illegal acts done to them by supposedly legal persons like Joe Arpaio. The idea that a person can be illegal is, of course, incoherent. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve ugly uses.

I’ve mentioned Beyond the Wall, a collection of essays about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am a contributor, which is available on Amazon now and in stores tomorrow. I’ve got an excerpt of my essay, which explores sexual assault as a critical element in Westeros’s understanding of monstrosity, here (WARNING: WITH HEAVY SPOILERS FOR A DANCE WITH DRAGONS):

The first thing we know about Ramsay Bolton, born a bastard but legitimated by his father, is that he abuses his wife. After he is recognized by his father, Ramsay marries Lady Hornwood to gain control of her ancestral house, then leaves her to starve to death in a tower cell…the Bastard of the Dreadfort takes up the unpleasant habit of hunting down women in whom he’s interested: “When Ramsay catches them he rapes them, flays them, feeds their corpses to his dogs, and brings their skins back to the Dreadfort as trophies. If they have given him good sport, he slits their throats before he skins them. Elsewise, t’other way around” (A Dance with Dragons)…When Theon Greyjoy falls under Ramsay’s control, the sadist gelds him, partially flays him, and forces Theon to participate in sexual assaults, most notably on a servant who is impersonating the late Ned Stark’s younger daughter, Arya. So while women are not Ramsay’s only victims, his crimes sooner or later seem to involve them.

Eventually we learn that the Bastard of the Dreadfort is, himself, the product of sexual violence. Roose Bolton raped Ramsay’s mother in an exercise of his first night rights, a story he relates in A Dance with Dragons with a casualness that’s chilling:

“I was hunting a fox along the Weeping Water when I chanced upon a mill and saw a young woman washing clothes in the stream. The old miller had gotten himself a new young wife, a girl not half his age. She was a tall, willowy creature, very healthy-looking. Long legs and small firm breasts, like two ripe plums. Pretty, in a common sort of way. The moment that I set eyes on her I wanted her. Such was my due. The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger [. . .]. So I had him hanged, and claimed my rights beneath the tree where he was swaying. If truth be told, the wench was hardly worth the rope. The fox escaped as well, and on our way back to the Dreadfort my favorite courser came up lame, so all in all it was a dismal day.”

In A Storm of Swords, Roose admits to Catelyn Stark that Ramsay’s “blood is tainted, that cannot be denied.”…While it may be decidedly antimodern to blame children who are the product of rape for his parents’ sins, there’s something to the idea that unpunished rape is a sin that carries implications far beyond individual victims and perpetrators, a crime that comes back to haunt the society that permits and enables it. This is the one moment in the novels when the characters acknowledge an argument that Martin’s been building for us all along: rape produces damage that lingers beyond a single act, a single victim. It can produce monsters that contribute to the destabilization of entire societies.

And Sean T. Collins and Stefan Sasse were nice enough to have me on their Boiled Leather podcast to discuss the essay and to discuss both sexual assault and portrayals of consensual marital sex in the franchise. Talking to them, and after recently re-reading A Dance With Dragons, I realized how struck I was by Alys Karstark as a transformational figure. This northern girl runs away from a marriage she can’t abide, but she doesn’t abandon the idea of a marriage that’s also a strategic alliance. Her marriage to the Magnar of Thenn is nothing if not strategic. The union of a Northern noble lady and the leader of the one group of wildlings most likely to integrate well into Westeros’s system of governance and nobility is the first bridge between these two cultures that will have to learn to knit together. Alys’s marriage also means she denies anyone else the ability to use her as a pawn: she can’t be used to cement another allegiance, thrown away on another one of the swiftly-fracturing alignments that will sew enmity among Westeros’s noble houses for generations even after this war is over.

And her marriage to him is one of the only ones in the franchise that isn’t tainted by violence, and suggests some of the only joyful, unconflicted sexual heat we’ve seen in the franchise in a long time. When Melisande asks her, “Alys, do you swear to share your fire with Sigorn, and warm him when the night is dark and full of terrors?” Alys promises “Till his blood is boiling.” Her new husband’s feelings seem to be mutual: “The Magnar all but ripped the maiden’s cloak from Alys’s shoulders, but when he fastened her bride’s cloak about her he was almost tender. As he leaned down to kiss her cheek, their breath mingled. The flames roared once again.” And she gets him at the dance floor at their wedding. Maybe it’s drink, maybe it’s that they’re comfortable with each other. But it’s lovely to see that Westeros’s sexual and marital institutions aren’t a total bulwark against happiness, that there are people who work within those institutions, pursuing peace in the realm and at home at the same time.

The bridge is yours.

-Getting increasingly excited for 12 Years a Slave, due to things like this.

-I do like that Michelle Williams was the person who got escape velocity from Dawson’s Creek.

-This is apparently the year that actors slightly older than me figure out marriage and divorce:

When I like to look for gay subtext in cultural artifacts, I tend to look for actual sexualized interactions between characters, rather than equating whether or not someone conforms to gender stereotypes with their potential sexual orientation as EW does with this piece on Brave:

But could Merida be gay? Absolutely. She bristles at the traditional gender roles that she’s expected to play: the demure daughter, the obedient fiancée. Her love of unprincess-like hobbies, including archery and rock-climbing, is sure to strike a chord with gay viewers who felt similarly “not like the other kids” growing up. And she hates the prospect of marriage — at least, to any of the three oafish clansmen that compete for her hand — enough to run away from home and put her own mother’s life at risk. She’s certainly not a swooning, boy-crazy Disney princess like The Little Mermaid’s Ariel or Snow White. In fact, Merida may be the first in that group to be completely romantically disinclined (even cross-dressing Mulan had a soft spot for Li Shang).

One of the things that’s brilliant about Brave is that it puts off the question of Merida’s sexual maturity, and her need to do her duty to her family by marrying, until a more appropriate age. The movie decouples Merida’s mother’s desire that she act the princess and fulfill that role by marrying from what Merida herself actually wants and feels, and Merida’s triumph in the movie is delaying the question of who she’ll marry until she is ready to answer it on her own terms, and in accordance with desires she actually feels. The movie takes a strong stand against the idea that the best way for girls to be good daughters, or to perform girlhood correctly, is to become sexually available when they’re expected to. The prize to be won isn’t a prince. It’s autonomy and self-knowledge. Merida’s primary relationship during the events of Brave is with her family, and in the schema of the movie, that’s perfectly fine: it doesn’t portray her as behind or a failure.

And I really wish that anyone, anywhere, would stop reading a girl’s desire for physical activity or pleasure in the abilities her own body gives her as a sign of potential incipient gayness. Girls who like playing sports are just as likely to grow up loving other women as the girls who cheer them from the sidelines, or the girls who are off in an art studio or a college newspaper office. Sexuality and gender performance are not the same thing. And if a girl is defying the gendered norms laid out for her, that should be a sign that we question the adequacy of the norms in capturing the diversity of girls’ experiences, rather than the girl herself.

I know I went hard on The Newsroom on Friday, but now that y’all have seen it, I want to talk about the way the show treats reporting, something I wrote about at length for the lovely people at Press Play:

The staff of Will’s show figures out earlier than anyone else that Deepwater Horizon will be a major environmental catastrophe because Neal (Dev Patel), whom Will has earlier identified as “the Indian stereotype of an IT guy” proves to have exceedingly useful insights into the workings of offshore drilling rigs. He gained this knowledge, possessed by no one else on any staff of any publication in all the land, because, my hand to God, he “built a volcano in primary school.”…Jim, possessed of the world’s most coincidental personal connections, turns out to have a college schoolmate working at BP (who makes time to give Jim a ring in the midst of a massive disaster) and a sister who works at Halliburton…The Newsroom cuts away as soon as anyone on staff has a source on the phone. The show is supremely uninterested in the actual and lengthy processes of source development and research. Maybe it’s a tactic to keep the focus on Sorkin’s fast-talking, fact-spewing sock puppets, or to make sure the show whips through a story from the near-past each week, but it lends an airless quality to the proceedings. Everything we need to know, apparently, is already here in this glass and chrome box.

The rarity with which pop culture gets reporting right remains a mystery to me, particularly given the extent to which television has cracked procedurals. Reporting a complex story is exactly like cracking a crime: you have either a precipitating traumatic event or a hint of a secret system at work, pursuit of credible leads and dead ends, development of trust, attempts to build an airtight case, and often, revisions before the final presentation. Sometimes the story changes the world, as with Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the FBI’s use of virulently anti-Islam training materials, which got President Obama to order them scrubbed. Sometimes all a reporter gets is the satisfaction of a job well-done. Whether on an episodic basis, or on a story-as-season-long arc basis as the original British State of Play did, this should be a relatively easy thing for television to just nail.

The thing that I find genuinely disturbing about The Newsroom is its narrow identification of cable news as the problem and Will McAvoy as the solution. Cable news polarization is a problem, but it’s a problem that ultimately affects a fairly small number of Americans day to day and year to year. The larger problems are ones that affect all sorts of news programs and publications: shrinking staffs and budgets that support less-ambitious reporting, government secrecy and control of information, increasingly stultified and PR-controlled interviews that decrease the possibility of honest conversation and homogenize reporting. Tone and presentation are issues that float on top of this sea of larger challenges.

This post contains spoilers for episodes 1 through 6 of the first season of The Wire. Feel free to discuss events that happen beyond these episodes in comments, but if you do so, label your comments as such for new readers.

The Wire, in retrospect, derives much of its critical reputation from its deep roots in David Simon’s reporting on Baltimore’s ills, which is often code for it as a grim show. When the show gets additional credit, it’s often for being bitterly funny. But in watching these three episodes in the first season, I was struck by their illumination of a critical theme: what level of justice and fairness these characters still expect from a profoundly broken system.

That thought lodged in my mind for the first time watching Bodie, having been snatched up into the juvenile detention system after knocking down Detective Mahone, walks out of Boys’ Village and tries to hitch a ride home. There’s something oddly touching about his disappointment when no one stops for the African-American boy who shows evidence of an obvious beating. Bodie’s at genial war with Detectives Herc and Carver, he has a sense of being treated unfairly by law enforcement, but he still holds out hope for some sector of society. It’s clear, when Herc and Carver crash in to his grandmother’s home, that there’s some sort of family resemblance. “Would you like to sit down?” she asks a clearly ashamed Herc. “Preston came to me when my daughter died. He was only four years old. But even then, I could tell he was angry. His mother lived out there. After a while, he couldn’t see nothing else.”

That she’s not entirely right is the basis for the transformation of Bodie’s feud with the two detectives into a wary joviality. Herc apologizes to Mrs. Preston, telling her, “I’m sorry, m’am. And I’m sorry for the way he came through here. If Preston comes past, give him this, and tell him we need to talk. I’m sorry.” Later, he’ll lose at pool to her grandson, who teases him, “That might be your whole salary, but I clock that shit in minutes.” Herc’s gesture of reconciliation to Bodie’s grandmother doesn’t bear precisely the results he expects: Bodie has Herc’s card on him when Herc and Carver pick him up. But it seems to have brokered at least a temporary truce between Bodie and the cops he’s vexed so greatly (perhaps because of how similar they all are). “Fuck you and your tight-ass advice,” Bodie tells him when their fragile peace is interrupted by the need to return to Bodie to detention. “But, that sandwich was good.”

Bodie’s boss is having graver doubts than his deputy is. D’Angelo begins these three episodes bragging about committing a murder on behalf of his uncle, Avon, who needed a troublesome girlfriend silenced. “I ain’t seen a female that fine since,” he muses. But the camerawork gives the lie to his braggadocio, making him float in front of an eerily shifting view of the Pit behind D’Angelo as he tries to establish his credibility. Trying to reconcile these acts with D’Angelo’s sensitivity is an inherently nauseating task.
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