I am pretty excited to see Item 47, the short film that Marvel is packaging up with the DVD release of The Avengers, in which Jesse Bradford and Lizzy Caplan get one of those crazy energy weapons that Loki’s troops used in their invasion of New York and rob some banks:

I totally get why Marvel wants to keep building heroes in Phase 2. But it is kind of bizarre to me that they don’t make these very smart, lower-budget stories about the people whose lives are affected by living in a work with superheroes, whether they’re ordinary people who have sudden access to extraordinary technology, or the bureaucrats who have to manage both the lives of superheroes and the fallout surrounding their existence, as hedges against the possibility, as the release dates suggest, the Phase 2 movies only make hundreds of millions of dollars rather than billions.

Nelson Mandela had been an athlete for most of his life, but he had never played the game that would ultimately play a major role in saving the country he led out of apartheid and into democracy. With his nation immersed in racial tension and on the brink of civil war, and with white, army-trained men angry at the shift in the balance of power, Mandela — who is celebrating his 94th birthday today — embraced the South African national rugby team, a bastion of white society hated by blacks as a symbol of oppression and racism, before the country hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

The improbable embrace of the nation’s nearly all-white rugby team by its first black president, and the success the team found thereafter, created an even more improbable moment of racial unity that was unimaginable before the tournament began, as John Carlin detailed in 2008:

The Springboks beat France, Australia and others to reach the final against New Zealand, then the best team in the world. But the day’s crowning moment came before the game had even begun, when Mandela went out onto the field, before a crowd of 65,000 that was 95% white, wearing the green Springbok jersey, the old symbol of oppression, beloved of his apartheid jailers. There was a moment of jaw-dropping disbelief, a sharp collective intake of breath, and suddenly the crowd broke into a chant, which grew steadily louder, of “Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!” [...]

The whole country, black and white, sang and danced into the night, united for the first time in its history around one cause, one delirious celebration. There was no civil war, no right wing terrorism, and Mandela achieved his life’s goal of creating what remains still today, and would have seemed almost impossible then: a stable, multiracial democracy.

Years earlier, sports helped spark social change movements that ended de facto apartheid in the United States, and though the fight for racial harmony was a long one — it began years before Jack Johnson and ended, if it has, years after Jackie Robinson — it was one Mandela continued in his own country.

Two decades later, South Africa is still fighting to put apartheid fully behind it, but Mandela is still using sports to create change. The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund started a “Sport for Good” program to promote social justice and to increase participation in sports among Africa’s youth — particularly in South Africa’s still underrepresented black communities. And around the world, sports organizations continue to do the same. The International Olympic Committee, for instance, pressured Saudi Arabia to send female athletes to the Olympics for the first time in history as part of its push to break down barriers for women in it and other countries.

“Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela once said. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers.” Sometimes the games we play are just the games we play. But as Mandela’s past reminds us, sometimes they are so much more.

I really love the idea of Electric City, the web series Tom Hanks is doing through his Playtone production company with Yahoo. The show is set in its titular dystopia, a place where criminals are sentenced to time on generating bikes, mail’s delivered by footbound couriers, reliable electricity access is a class issue, and a secret society of older women called The Knitting Circle really runs everything:

The thing is, though, it’s hard to set up a dystopia in five-minute chunks, and hard-boiled dialogue often goes down better if its silliest-sounding pronouncements are surrounded by some more normal conversation. The first episode of Electric City begins with a voiceover about how utopia is “The place of security. The illusion of freedom. Humankind gets in the way of perfection…It’s best to ask no questions and be told no lies, here in the Electric City.” That last sentence might have been better as a piece of advice from one character to another, earned after we’ve actually had a chance to see how the city works. But instead, it comes across as a thunderous cliche that distracts from what’s specific and interesting about the show.

The best of those things are the ominous members of the Knitting Circle, whose members actually bust out their crochet hooks and knitting needles while they plot in a building called the Camera Obscura that gives them a view of the entire city. “A source of our trouble has yet to become a responsible resident of our city. he is again a free man,” Mrs. Orwell declares, after a man named Vernon is released from his sentence generating electricity and has returned home where he’s commenced beating his wife again. “We only get so many chances,” one of Orwell’s compatriots tells her. “Get rid of him.” I imagine that the show will flesh this out, but not knowing what the Knitting Circle’s official role is in Electric City makes it hard to know how to feel about their actions and their tone even as a baseline. I like the idea of this show a lot. But folks who want to make web shows have to figure out how how to get context and setup in much shorter episodes, and to tell shorter story arcs. It’s not just a matter of making cuts at the five-minute mark. The episodes have to work on their own.

The bridge is yours.

-Awesome superhero splatter art.

-A disappointed Sorkinite reflects on The Newsroom.

-Ah, telling the story of the “real” Blackwater, in collaboration with Blackwater.

-Games that pass the Bechdel Test.

-When bad title sequences happen to good shows.

I’ve been watching a lot of The Shield lately, and I’ve just hit season four, so I think I’ll have a lot of things to say about asset forfeiture and corruption (not to mention female leadership styles) soon. But I wanted to take a minute to write about one of the things I’ve found most striking about the show: the storyline in which a male character is sexually assaulted. In between them, The Shield and Sons of Anarchy have really put on a master class on telling sexual assault stories not simply because they want something dark and ugly to happen and that’s what they lighted on, but because both shows have very specific things to say about sexual assault and how we respond to it.

In The Shield, Captain David Aceveda gets jumped by two criminals who manage to disarm him and force him, at gunpoint, to perform oral sex on one of them while the other snaps pictures on a cell-phone. The assault is hugely upsetting, if not explicit: we can hear Aceveda choking, and later, back in the Barn, gagging in the bathroom. And his trauma doesn’t end with the attack. One of the most shocking and upsetting things about Aceveda’s experience is how his wife treats him when she finds out what’s happened to him, shaming him for “letting” the men emasculate him, acting as if it’s impossible that he would be disarmed, and turning away from him rather than comforting him. Later, when he struggles in therapy and she feels like he isn’t making sufficient process, she tells him “I’m tired of feeling like I was raped, too.” It’s a nasty line, and one that gets at the assumption that rape victims are wallowing or oversensitive. Aceveda is presented as a canny operator, a strategic man who is able to put a good face on tough challenges. That he’s this affected by a sexual assault is a statement about how devastating the experience is, no matter your gender. A failure to recover from a sexual assault in a pre-determined time period is not a mark of weakness (nor, I should mention, is bouncing back more quickly a sign of denial).

Sons of Anarchy does something similarly powerful in the second season when Gemma Teller, the queen of the SAMCRO motorcycle gang, is raped by white supremacists as a warning to her husband and son. The plot point is important not just in the ongoing jockeying for position among the gangs, but because the show has something to say about sexual assault, and that’s the reason the arc remains the best thing Sons of Anarchy‘s ever done. As I wrote in a longer consideration of Gemma Teller back in February, Gemma keeps the assault a secret both to deny the racist gang its desired impact on the men in her life, and because she believes it’s rendered her disposable. “Clay’s never gonna… want to be inside something that’s been ripped up like me,” she says. “Love don’t mean shit. Men need to own their pussy. His has been violated. He’ll find another. It’s what they do.” The show goes on to her belief in her own ruination, showing multiple men attracted to her even though they know she’s been attacked, and demonstrating how devastated her husband and son are when they learn she was assaulted. Rape affects men in this storyline too, and not simply as a matter of strategic positioning.

A lot of cable networks seem to think that a license to show and say things means that they should, or that saying or depicting them is inherently meaningful. With both of these storylines, Sons of Anarchy and The Shield demonstrated what can happen when a show is thoughtful enough to use its latitude to convey an idea, not simply an atmosphere.

Because it’s The Dark Knight Rises week, I wanted to flag this post by Jim Emerson on the facileness of “Good v. Evil” as a superhero movie theme. He writes:

What I really want to talk about here are how some superhero movies develop their themes. “The Amazing Spider-Man” touches on the issue of vigilantism, but only superficially — certainly not as seriously as in either Tim Burton’s or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. The psychology of the (anti-)hero is usually interesting — and Peter finds himself repeating patterns of denial and abandonment he’s suffered at the hands of his own father and Dr. Connors. What drives someone to put on a unitard and try to catch criminals? That’s always an underlying question. Tony Stark puts on a whole metal suit in an effort to atone for his military-industrial sins.

What’s not a theme is a simplistic formulation of “good vs. evil,” although I see critics, fans, pundits and filmmakers announcing it as if it were supposed to mean something all the time. It might be a simple math problem, or a wrestling match (ask Rev. Harry Powell about Love vs. Hate), but it’s not a theme. Good and evil exist only in the human heart and mind and cannot be artificially separated — one always contains the seeds of the other. I’d argue that the idea that the world can be broken into such categories is, perhaps, essential to the very definition of evil itself, which is at least more provocative than pretending that it’s so easy to tell one from the other. It’s not always so clear-cut. And it makes for lame drama, because if the choice is clear, nothing is at stake. The Big Lie about the Holocaust, to use the most extreme popular example of the 20th century, is that it was perpetrated by people whose only motivation was to “do evil.” I see that as a form of Holocaust denial, an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to deal with the realities of human nature.

I think this is exactly right and deeply important, and it gets at one of the things that frustrates me so much about so many superhero movies. Cheering for someone who we are told is a hero, even if we have no idea what they stand for and what they stand against, feels good, but it’s ultimately a distraction, an experience that produces the feeling that we stand together with the people cheering alongside us in the theater even if we understand ourselves to be championing totally different things. What does Spider-Man, in his latest iteration, stand for? The idea that the police are an institution limited by both resources and perspective whose work should by the work of vigilantes, even if their agendas compete? What do The Avengers stand for? The idea that the world should not be blown up by fanatics and also that Nick Fury is better-equipped to make decisions than the council that oversees him, which has total screen-time amounting to less than the shortest fight scene in the movie? Good v. evil is a convenient distraction from having to talk about actual issues, like civilian control of superpowers as a stand-in for the military, or the impact of corporate influence on the scientific process, on which people in the audience might actually disagree. If the thing on which we can reach consensus is that it would be better not to be involuntarily turned into giant lizard-beasts and/or devoured and conquered by them, that is a pretty low baseline from which to start.

Via Deadline, a report that notes declining viewership for broadcast television even with DVRed viewing within three days, has one positive observation:

Still, Nathanson has some encouraging news for networks concerned that ad skipping will become a lot more commonplace as the number of DVR households grows from 40% now to 47% expected in 2015. New users don’t appear to be as fast on the trigger: The percentage of broadcast commercials skipped by DVR users dropped to 46.7% in the 2011/2012 season from 58.8% in 2007/2008. For cable, 50.4% of the ads were skipped this past season vs. 52.8% in 2007/2008.

There are some elements of the cost of television that are obviously inflated, like escalating carriage fees that aren’t driven by climbing costs of operations and maintenance. But the labor that it takes to put together a television production that genuinely looks good isn’t cheap, and you can see the difference between productions where people are working for scale, and where someone’s hired the full complement of staff needed to make things work, and productions that aren’t working with a full lighting crew, or who are working under waivers from the guilds to pay less than scale, a practice that isn’t sustainable and shouldn’t be what we expect. In other words, there are probably some cost savings television could achieve, but the productions themselves are probably not going to get less expensive, and certainly not if we want television to tackle the kind of grand-sweep stories that have often been the provenance of television precisely because of their costs.

The choice, as it’s always been, is going to be paying more for content up front, whether for something like Hulu Plus or cable, or accepting a lot more monetization of our content. I’d like to think folks are watching ads they have the capacity to skip with their DVRs because they recognize it’s a way of keeping the shows they love in business by convincing advertisers they’re still going to capture impressions. But if laziness gets folk sitting through more commercials, I suppose I’ll take that, too.