The always-excellent Maureen Ryan talked to Homeland executive producer Alex Gansa about the second season of the show, which stars Claire Danes as bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis as former prisoner of war who had been turned and returned to the United States as a sleeper agent. He told her what the lay of the land is at the beginning of the second season, which begins in September, after Carrie made a desperate bid to stop Brody from committing an act of terrorism, something he actually stopped himself short from doing after receiving a phone call from his daughter:

Well you have to understand the Brody has been completely exonerated in the eyes of the intelligence community and actually even Carrie. I mean Carrie had this sort of epiphany before the ECT about [Abu Nazir's dead son] Issa, but before that, I think she is fairly sanguine about the fact that she was wrong, which is what sent her into the ECT, into the mental institution. She said, “Look, I was wrong. I made a mistake. I intruded on this person’s life. I accused him of things that were not true.”

She had no idea about the vest. She has no idea that Dana made a call to Brody and talked him off a ledge. All she knows is that the bomb never went off, which in her mind and in the CIA’s mind and in her period of intense instability psychologically leads her to believe that she was wrong. Which is why she gets into the car with her sister at the end of the finale and says, “I can’t live like this anymore. I need help. I have to go get some help.”

I wrote about this earlier today with The Wire, but one of the things I find fascinating about both that show and Homeland is that they illustrate the limits of assuming that people behave predictably, and thus, the limits of law enforcement and intelligence gathering. The Wire is much more broadly focused, but one of the significant themes of the show is the cops’ uneasy relationship with Omar, someone who intervenes powerfully in the game, but whose motivations don’t map neatly on to the accepted dynamics of it. Brody, similarly, is someone whose motivations can’t be cleanly sifted from a mass of facts and intelligence. Even when Carrie figures out that he’d bonded with Issa and been turned after Issa’s death, he makes decisions that are opaque to her. It’s because Carrie’s brain is wired differently than David Estes’ or Saul’s, her superiors in the agency, that she’s able to read Brody at all. But even his mind isn’t clearly and easily fathomable to her. You can only do so much to analyze and predict the urges of the human heart.

I was on the road yesterday when Anderson Cooper, in response to an Entertainment Weekly cover story about celebrities who are coming out in increasingly casual ways, came out in an email to Andrew Sullivan. Gawker publisher Nick Denton, reflecting what seem to be sour grapes about not getting the story himself, has already complained that Cooper didn’t make a big enough deal of his coming out, as if a long and thoughtful email to the biggest blog at a major publication doesn’t constitute a significant enough event.

Celebrities’ lives are funny things: we enter them midstream and assume we know an enormous amount about these people who create selves they put out for our consumption, whether it’s old-school rooting for Rosie O’Donnell to find the right guy or the entire sector of the magazine industry that’s supported by speculation about what it means to Jennifer Aniston that she’s divorced. That intense attention and sense of ownership creates an opportunity for stars to either make major news events out of their lives or for them to slip new relationships or new information about themselves seamlessly into the news cycle. Cooper could have as easily just taken his boyfriend to an Oscar party or walked the red carpet with him and acted as if everyone already knew he was gay, as if the proper name of the person he’s seeing is the news, and not the fact that the person he’s seeing is a man.

There’s no question that we’re still at a point where the availability of out, happy, successful, and clearly-identifiable gay role models is important to young people, and where coming out is still changing hearts and minds by forcing people to confront whether they really feel differently about people like Cooper now that audiences know they’re gay. But I wonder if we’d be a lot better off with more casual celebrity coming-out stories that build room for flexibility and growth into the narrative. It would be awfully nice if people like Cynthia Nixon or Lindsay Lohan could go from relationships with men to relationships with women and have the news be the specific person rather than their gender. For some people, coming out is the stating of an immutable fact about themselves. For others, it’s a matter of a specific relationship. Not all coming out stories are the same, and the same formula of magazine covers and talk show sit-downs, won’t make sense for all people in the public eye. Knowing that there are famous, successful gay people among us is a first step. Recognizing that their experiences, as with the experiences of civilians, aren’t all identical is second, and critically important.

It’s nice to see geek deities like Wil Wheaton stand up for Whedonverse actress and web series creator Felicia Day after video game blogger Ryan Perez attacked her as a “glorified booth babe,” and use the clout he has to declare sexism an affront to geek values rather than an inherent part of them. Jezebel explains:

Perez’ tweets could’ve gone unnoticed a few months ago; if the U.S. had a dollar for every bitter, ignorant dude online, we wouldn’t be in a recession. But there’s been so much rampant misogyny in the gaming industry lately that people are justifiably on edge when it comes to sexism, and Perez woke up on Sunday morning to an onslaught of Twitter followers (he had around 50 when he first tweeted at Day, now he has almost 2,500) thanks to shoutouts from people like technology reporter Veronica Belmont and Wil Wheaton, who each have way more than a million fans following them on Twitter. “I have fucking had it with idiot asshole men being shitbags to @feliciaday because they’re threatened by her creativity and success,” Wheaton tweeted. “I’m sick of idiot men giving *any* woman grief in gamer and geek culture. Enough already, we’re better than that.”

Wheaton criticized Destructoid for employing an “ignorant misogynist,” and soon, the website cut ties with Perez. “Destructoid has ended its relationship with Ryan Perez, effective immediately. We again apologize to @feliciaday and all others concerned,” the website’s editors tweeted.

Both this incident and a recent, terrific video by Jay Smooth on situations when it makes sense to violate the internet maxim not to feed the trolls and to push back against them, are clarifying:

As Jay explains here, it’s one thing to take actions that solely give trolls the negative attention that they want. It’s another to resist engaging with them even when they’re gumming up the works of the internet and making it difficult for people to go about their daily lives. When people yell in comments sections, unless their language is threatening, it’s usually enough to ban them. One fun feature of Facebook commenting is that moderators can ban people without those people knowing they’ve been banned: they can write what they want, but none of the rest of us have to see them. These types of trolls can holler fruitlessly into the void and never know why they’re not getting a response. But if trolls are trying to prevent people from doing their actual work, whether they’re trying to get a Kickstarter shut down, harassing peaceful participants in comments sections, expecting that they’ll be able to use a position of power for trolling, or launching a denial of service attack, then it makes sense to push back against them and push back publicly. I don’t really expect to be able to reach into the darkest corners of the internet and reform people, or anything. But I do think that we can deny certain kinds of trolls footholds they can use to disrupt the operations of legitimate spaces online. Weeds may have the right to grow, but not to invade and take over walled gardens. And there isn’t a certain amount of social capital the voices and views of trolls are entitled to.

The bridge is yours.

-Video games are getting easier.

-Illustrations from a Soviet edition of The Hobbit.

-A TED YouTube channel makes a lot of sense.

-The rom-com fan in me is pleased to hear news of a Think Like a Man sequel, particularly if it means I get to see more shirtless Romany Malco.

-What, Dorne doesn’t get a sports logo?

-I hung out with the nice folks at A Podcast of Ice and Fire.

The only people The Amazing Spider-Man is remotely necessary to is Columbia Pictures, which decided to reboot the franchise shortly after Tobey Maguire finished up his run in the webslinger’s unitard in order to hold on to its rights to the character. It’s a by-the-numbers execution of the formula that worked so well in the prior trilogy, from Spider-Man’s skills as an exaggeration of the physical changes of adolescence, to the luminous, leggy girlfriend, to the scientist who falls too deeply in love with his creation who’s restored to himself by Spider-Man’s intervention. As formulas go, though, this is a pleasant one, and The Amazing Spider-Man is a charming, good-looking way to spend an afternoon, particularly give the chemistry between its co-stars, Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, and a typically fun performance by Dennis Leary as NYPD Chief George Stacy.

The Amazing Spider-Man’s innovation is to give the absence of Peter Parker’s parents some context: after a break-in at the Parker family home, his parents deposit young Peter with his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt Mae (Sally Field) and never return. Peter learns nothing about his family until years later when he discovers his father’s briefcase in the family’s flooding basement, and finds notes on a scientific project tucked in a secret project in the lining, which eventually lead him to his father’s former collaborator, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). Ifans, who lost his right arm, presumably to one of the reptiles he studies, has been investigating the possibility of crossing human and animal genes: he dreams of “a world without weakness.” Peter seeks him out with disastrous consequences: his father’s notes help Connors perfect his formula, and under pressure to prove the project is viable because his company’s founder, Norman Osborn, is gravely ill, experiments on himself, and becomes a giant, clawed lizard-man in the process.

For all this is a repetition of previous Spider-Man iterations, it’s still an interesting variation from other superhero movies. Batman fights ideological absolutists, the X-Men debate differing approaches to the same problems, intensified by the fact that the disputants are the best of enemies, and the Avengers wrangle gods. Spider-Man’s opponents are good men with big dreams who become intoxicated by the things their mistakes turn them into. Connors was clearly a hugely accomplished scientist even with one arm, but with not just two working arms, but superhuman strength, his fantasy of a world without outcasts turns into a dream of transcending humanity altogether—and forcing everyone else to come along with him, permanently. It’s never quite clear what these movies are trying to say about science other than that hubris and need can be dangerous things, though here there’s a whiff of criticism for companies that pressure scientists to bypass proper trials. Normally such imprudence just kills people, but here, the consequences are more dire—but the movie cuts away before OsCorp itself experiences any of them.
Read more

According to Latino Review, there’s going to big event movie before we get to The Avengers 2: it’s confirmed to be Guardians of the Galaxy, a team-up that will elevate a range of smaller-scale heroes and have them get with the Avengers to fight aliens. I’m enjoying Marvel’s commitment to do some of the more fantastical elements in its arsenal, especially because I hope it might empower other comic-book franchise, like Judge Dredd, to do some of the weirder stories in their catalogues.

But I have to admit, I’m sorry we’re not getting at least some contrast to these big pictures with smaller movies that are focused either on urban crime and urban blight, as Luke Cage could have been, or focused on characters with more singular problems like Deathlok, or frankly, that star a woman with actual super-powers. It’s telling that we live in a world where Marvel will dig into the weirdness of its back catalogue before making a movie or a television series about one of its recognizable, established female heroes, something Manohla Dargis pointed out this weekend was ludicrously old-fashioned in a world where the two most powerful Americans are a black man and a woman in late middle age. This big, galactic formula is comic book-y and it’s produced a lot of tremendously fun movies. But as I’ve written before, and I’m sure I’ll write again, it would be really nice to see Marvel diversify both to pull in new audiences, and to hedge against a day when their formula gets stale.

And I’d hate to think they were sticking with galactic stories because, at least as they’ve been executed so far, they’re a way to avoid political allegories, and to stay as broadly appealing as possible. Wacked-out gods don’t have much in the way of real-world analogues. A.O. Scott, in his chat with Dargis, said something about the rise of superhero movies in the eighties and their role today that I thought was telling:

It’s telling that Hollywood placed a big bet on superheroes at a time when two of its traditional heroic genres — the western and the war movie — were in eclipse, partly because they seemed ideologically out of kilter with the times. The studios turned to fantasy, science fiction and a kind of filmmaking that was at once technologically advanced and charmingly old-fashioned. Along with “Star Wars” and Indiana Jones there was Superman, played, starting in 1978, by the square-jawed, relatively unknown Christopher Reeve…Perhaps this is a reflection of the state of the world after Sept. 11, 2001. Certainly the superhero movies of today are, like the gangster pictures of the Depression and the westerns of the ’50s, a screen onto which our society projects its fears and dreams. But I also think that the grimness arises from another source. When hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, it is never a laughing matter.

Politics sneak in, of course, whether its in the willingness of a shadowy council to destroy New York, a superhero who asserts an old-fashioned belief in monotheism, or a woman who gets more out of a skillful interrogation than a man would out of torture. But while science fiction and fantasy are powerful tools for creating metaphors and exploring ideas, they can be used to create utterly detached threats and villains, which look good, but are as flat as the screens they’re projected on.

Because this is a holiday week, we’ll take episodes ten and eleven of season one for next Monday. As always, if you want to discuss events beyond these episodes, mark your comments as such.

“You follow the drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers,” Lester Freamon says in episode nine of The Wire. “But you start following the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s going to take you.” These episodes both undermine that idea and reinforce it in unexpected ways. Omar trades drugs to Proposition Joe, at this point an entirely unknown figure to the task force, to advance his revenge on Avon, a transaction so emotionally and financially unpredictable that the police never could have anticipated it, but that none the less has enormous repercussions for the Barksdale empire. Following the money leads Lester and Kima to Shardene, but it also leads Herc and Carver into error, driving a wedge between them and Daniels, and telling us as much about them as about Avon. And Bubbles’ attempt to scam a corner crew leads him to discover that they’re selling baking soda in place of heroin, and an arc that proves that finding addicts isn’t actually beside the point, depending on the relationships you forge with them afterwards. Following and followers are fluid things here, and these episodes reveal how little the investigation has turned up, and can turn up even operating at peak capacity.

Bubbles and Omar both try to steal drugs in this set of episodes, and their experiences reveal that while Lester might be right that money is the key to a criminal prosecution of Avon Barksdale, it’s a theory that has limits to its utility when it comes to curing what ails Baltimore. Bubbles, following Johnny to court-ordered AA meetings, finds himself unexpectedly moved by the testimony of Waylon, a recovering addict who tells the meeting “It’s good to be clean anywhere, even Baltimore,” a suggestion that the line between heaven and here could be demarcated by Bubbles’ addiction. He continues to use, panicking after he successfully makes off with a stash that turns out to be worthless. “I nearly got killed behind this caper, you know,” Bubbles tells Johnny, who informs him that “It’s all in the game, Bubs.” But Bubbles is questioning whether he needs to succumb to that logic, and makes for his sister’s house, who promises him blankets on the couch in the basement, but warns him that if he starts up the stairs to his little piece of heaven in her kitchen, she’ll call the police. That caution’s notable, particularly given the absence of a particular police officer from this arc. It doesn’t occur to Bubbles to reach out to Kima for help, and I’m curious how she’d react if he did, given how much utility she gets out of his continuing credibility as an addict. Both she and Johnny assume the rules of the game are fairly constant. Bubbles is considering opting out altogether.

While Bubble is a fairly minor player in the game, Omar is a much more volatile variable, and an illustration of the fact that the drug trade breeds motivations more complicated than those governed by markets. Omar is dismissive of the risks of snitching, telling Kim and McNutly “Anybody got a problem with me spending time with y’all, I’d be much obliged to stick a gun up in his mouth.” He goes after Bird both for personal reasons and because he doesn’t like the man, explaining, “Bird trifiling, basically.” He hangs out with junkies, but gives them their drugs for free and takes care of their children while they’re on the nod. Omar introduces new commodities into the market, trading hugely valuable caches of drugs for information from Proposition Joe. He’s a manifestation of the reasons that markets don’t behave purely rationally, and as such, he’s a risky ally for the task force, and proof that not all key transactions are conducted in cash or reinvested in real estate and political contributions.
Read more