I’m headed out tonight to the Television Critics Association Press Tour in Los Angeles, and I’ll be there until August 5. Posting will proceed as usual, though Breaking Bad open threads may be a little sporadic depending on what I can catch in between events, and I may be a little slow to answer emails.

But if you have questions about any new shows debuting this fall, or questions for the networks about their strategies or decision-making, let me know in comments here. I’ll do my best to get them answered, and to bring you everything I can about what’s going to be on your television this fall.

I’m sitting in the airport waiting to hop a plane to Los Angeles, and Twitter’s exploded with the news that, in the wake of this morning’s terrible shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, some folks on Fox have suggested banning costumes at movie screenings. AMC has already moved to do so:

AMC Theatres said it will not let any guests in costumes or face-covering masks into the theaters, and issued a ban on fake weapons. The company added that anyone wanting a refund in light of this new policy will be granted one. “We are taking necessary precautions to ensure our guests who wish to enjoy a movie this weekend can do so with as much peace of mind as possible in these circumstances,” AMC Theatres said in a news release.

I get this as a matter of company practice, and the ban on fake weapons may even be sensible, both from the perspective of preventing people from walking in the door with the real things disguised as fakes (although as Aurora tells us, that’s hardly the only way to get guns and gas into a theater) and from the question of where they put them once the screening starts. But it does make me pretty sad to think that theaters would start banning costumes altogether. Whatever a lone murderer does, the impulse to play, and dress up, and pay creative homage to culture you love is not the problem here.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on whether the statue of Joe Paterno standing outside Penn State’s football stadium should stand or fall, and I find the competing arguments — that it should be immediately removed or that it should stand, at least for a little while, as a shameful reminder of Penn State’s mass institutional failure — interesting and compelling in their own right. There are conflicting reports about whether the statue is coming down this weekend, but either way, this latest protest is another shameful chapter in an ongoing series of them for the university and its students:

A group of Penn State students have started a vigil intended to protect the Joe Paterno statue from vandals.

Seniors Mike Elliot and Kevin Berkon formed the group after they saw a plane fly over the campus earlier this week displaying a banner that read: “Take the statue down or we will.”

Clearly, at least for some students, the necessary realignment of Penn State’s cultural priorities that should have taken place after this scandal hasn’t yet happened. It’s enough to make you wonder if any of this would have been necessary had anyone in State College rushed to defend Jerry Sandusky’s victims with the same vigor these students have for defending a man whose reputation was shattered long before his statue will be.

The excellent Emily Hauser was kind enough to invite me on Bloggingheads with her to talk about pop culture. We taped this before Rotten Tomatoes shut down their comments section in reaction to commenters threatening critics who didn’t like reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, but we ended up talking about fandom as identity and the need to move towards an ethic that values discussion and critique in fan communities rather than fealty or affirmation:

There is no one unified fandom, which is why it’s both lame for critics like Anthony Lane to paint all people who like superhero movies as mouthbreathing basement dwellers, and for fans to turn on people, within their community and outside it, who want to analyze material rather than bow down to it. More genuinely self-confident, self-critical fandoms will be healthier fandoms in the long run, and more respected ones, too.

The bridge is yours.

-The real question about Bane and Bain.

-Aaron Sorkin appears to have fired everyone on The Newsroom staff except the source of the actual problems with the show.

-The map of the movie nerd brain.

-Leslie Knope is chilling with John McCain and Barbara Boxer.

-My friend, the artist iona rozeal brown is working with Erykah Badu on a movie project. Their Kickstarter is here. And concept art is here:

A critic friend pointed me to Molly Haskell’s 1997 essay on the cognitive dissonance of The Godfather, which I in turn wanted to pass along to all of you. It’s an amazing meditation on the movie and the environment in which it was released, and I think it’s directly relevant to the conversations we have about culture as provider of comfort and repressive nostalgia in a time of great social change. She writes:

If we had a split screen we would show opposing images: On one side, the sun shines and the music plays on the veranda during Connie’s lavishly traditional family wedding in 1945, while in the darkness of Don Corleone’s study, petitioners and those who pay homage file through and the Don (Marlon Brando) dispenses favors and justice. Fathers arrange marriages for their daughters, revenge on their enemies. Hulking in the shadows of the house, Luca Brasi, one of Corleone’s enforcers, practices the tribute he will pay when he gains an audience with the Don: ”May their first child be a masculine child.”

On the other screen: In 1970, the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, a commemorative march down Fifth Avenue, with 50,000 women pouring out of office buildings in spontaneous support. Also in 1970, Kate Millett publishes ”Sexual Politics” and her portrait, by Alice Neel, is on the cover of Time. In 1971, the year-end issue of New York Magazine announces the birth of Ms. magazine, whose first issue will appear in July 1972. The Supreme Court legalizes abortion in 1973.

I’m trying to think what the modern equivalent is: the superhero as acclaimed protector? the slacker dudes claiming their manhood? Either way, it’s a striking piece, and a critical reminder that our fantasies don’t always move us forward.

I woke up to the news this morning than 50 people had been shot by a young man at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, and at least twelve are dead.

Sean Collins is right that, to a certain extent, Batman is a fantasy about turning violence that is random, or in this case, unpredictable, into something that can be predicted and contained by the great efforts of a single man. Anthony Lane is correct that movies and murder have been linked before and will be linked again, though I think he is in more tenuous territory in discussing ugly threats against critics who did not like The Dark Knight Rises, which are themselves symbols of a brokenness I think fan culture has to deeply reckon with, and this act of violence. If you think The Dark Knight Rises is the greatest expression of cinema of all time, your next step is unlikely to be to kill people who, by their decision to show up for the first possible screening of the movie, give some semblance of agreeing with you.

Mostly what I feel is this: Midnight screenings are big, hyped, advertiser-driven events that have become a source of new information to feed the Hollywood data beast, by indicating how motivated audiences are to see a movie. But they’re also a product of genuine enthusiasm and an expression of collective joy. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has meant a lot to an enormous number of filmgoers. And as someone who writes about movies, and who cares about the big, flawed thing we call fandom, I’m saddened by someone turning that shared enthusiasm into a weapon. And even if this tragedy hadn’t happened at the premiere of one of a dwindling number of genuinely mass cultural events, I hate the idea of using an audience’s suspension of disbelief, their openness to and absorption in the spectacle unfolding before them, as cover—the gunman reportedly started shooting during a sequence involving gunfire, meaning the audience was slower to react. We are vulnerable when we go to the movies, open to fear, and love, and disgust, and rapture, surrendering our brains and hearts to someone else’s vision of the world. We don’t expect to surrender our bodies, too.