James Woods’ review of Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel Back to Blood is a fairly comprehensive dismantling, taking on everything from the way Wolfe overcooks every sentiment until they blend together in a grey mush to some of the creepy racial attitudes in Wolfe’s depictions of the overmuscled physiques of his characters of color. But beyond the novel itself, Woods makes an argument about how research can serve fiction, or undermine it:

Over the years, Tom Wolfe has campaigned strenuously on behalf of the journalistic role in fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and elsewhere, he has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because American novelists aren’t looking at the world. According to him, they’ve retreated from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, because they’ve exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn, Wolfe claims, when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. Not only will such reporting produce the little details, “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude”; it is essential for literature’s greatest effects. American fiction, grounded in “a highly detailed realism,” will properly emulate the Zola who went down into the mines in Anzin, in 1884, to do research. While underground, Wolfe says, Zola discovered that the pit horses lived and died in situ; when he transfers this found detail to the pages of his novel “Germinal,” the reader is moved and aghast….

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and “Hotchkiss, Yale . . . six-three.” At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys “a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, ‘little pies’ of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it. . . . He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy.” It’s a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes. But the detail about the pastelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research. Like everything else in this book, it is imparted information, and is thus the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt. Ivan’s French prunes come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus: Why prunes? Why French prunes?

This is something I consider a great deal, and I tend to think that research should serve three main purposes in fiction, whether it’s fiction that means to comment on the real world, or to dream beyond it, both equally valid aims:

1. It should identify conditions and conflicts that provide rich drama: So much of what’s important about research, whether it comes through formal reporting or new life experiences, is identifying new stories and conflicts in the first place. David Simon’s reporting is the reason he could identify bureaucratic tensions and criminal rivalries that would be the basis for The Wire. Thomas Mann might not have seized on sanatoriums as a subject, one of the examples Woods offers up, had his wife not ended up in one. Whether you think they should have happened at all, t’ll be interesting to see how Kathryn Bigelow’s conversations with the Obama administration end up affecting Zero Dark Thirty.

2. It can be a source of unexpected details that make characters more fully-rounded people: Woods’ complaint about Wolfe’s use of pastelitos is not that the description of them isn’t accurate, but that it’s unsurprising. Knowing that a Cuban character enjoys traditional Cuban food doesn’t necessarily add much to our sense of that character as a distinct person. But learning, as was the case with the opening of this season of Mad Men, that Madison Avenue advertising executives were stupid enough to throw water balloons at Civil Rights protestors, both creates a powerful little anecdote and exposes the gap between the sophisticated facade of self-appointed masters of the universe and the reality of their behavior.

3. It should avoid errors that take knowledgable viewers out of the story: It may be a little thing to complain about, but one of the most irritating things that television, in particular, does, is name a location where something is happening in the name of credibility, and then show a place that is patently not that location. Homeland committed a particularly egregious violation of this sort last season when it said an attack was going to take place in Farragut Square in Washington, DC, and then used a location that had precisely nothing in common with the block-sized park. Slips like that may not matter for the majority of viewers of any given cultural artifact. But it’s silly to gesture at realistic detail and immediately undermine the attempt. I’m not saying that everything in fiction has to function exactly the way it does in the real world—fact-checking is an awfully boring way to watch television. But if you’re commenting on the world as it is, or putting characters in a familiar world, considering whether the choices you’re making and the details you’re including pull consumers out of the universe you’ve created or create internal contradictions will serve you as well as them.

University of Southern California wide receiver Robert Woods — one of college football’s top pass catchers — took a nasty hit in the first quarter of the Trojans’ victory over Utah last Thursday. Woods, who was downfield blocking on a punt return, hit the ground face first after taking a hit to the head. He immediately got to his feet and attempted to head to the sideline — the wrong sideline — before stumbling and collapsing back to the turf:

A play later, Woods was back in the game. That drew an immediate reaction from sports blogs and other reporters — one of whom said on Twitter that he witnessed Woods fail a concussion test (he later said he couldn’t be sure Woods failed). Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke wrote that he was scared for Woods throughout the remainder of the game, and multiple columnists took USC coach Lane Kiffin to task for Woods’ quick return.

Woods, for his part, told reporters this week that while he got “jacked up” and was “kinda like gone” after the hit, he hadn’t felt ill-effects afterward and passed a balance test, a math test (“100 minus 7, minus 7 minus 7 a couple times,” he said), and answered a couple other questions. He was ultimately fine to return, he said. That Woods only answered a few questions before he was deemed fit to return to the game also drew a strong reaction from columnists, and the entire episode has been the subject of sports fodder for several days now.

A criticism I haven’t seen, however, is that the NCAA doesn’t have a standard procedure for evaluating potential concussions on the sidelines. The NCAA does have a standard policy for players who can be immediately diagnosed with a concussion, and it mandates all schools have a “concussion management plan” for such players. What it doesn’t seem to have is a standard process outlining exactly how players like Woods should be evaluated. Here’s what the NCAA Football Rulebook says about concussion evaluation:

CONCUSSIONS—Coaches and medical personnel should exercise caution in the treatment of a student-athlete who exhibits signs of a concussion. See Appendix C for detailed information.

Appendix C adds a list of symptoms commonly associated with concussions. It says (emphasis theirs) “athlete who exhibits signs, symptoms or behaviors consistent with a concussion, either at rest or during exertion, should be removed immediately from practice or competition and should not return to play until cleared by an appropriate health care professional.” Here is section 3 of Appendix C, the most relevant part of the rulebook for situations like Woods’:

Allow the student-athlete to return to play only with permission from a health care professional with experience in evaluating for concussion. Allow athletics medical staff to rely on their clinical skills and protocols in evaluating the athlete to establish the appropriate time to return to play. A return-to-play progression should occur in an individualized, step-wise fashion with gradual increments in physical exertion and risk of contact. Follow your institution’s physician supervised concussion management protocol.

None of this is meant to demonize the NCAA, which has been proactive in recent years about protecting football players from head injuries. For that, it deserves credit. But it seems, in the wake of the Woods case, that rather than leaving the process up to each individual school, standardizing the process for evaluating and diagnosing a player who may or may not have suffered a concussion would be another step in the right direction (the NCAA, when it mandated concussion management plans, recommended minimum evaluation techniques but does not appear to have standardized them).

I am hopeful that USC’s training staff took the necessary steps to evaluate Robert Woods before he went back into the game (USC, as Kiffin noted, has a fairly cautious record on serious injuries). But letting medical professionals develop a standard evaluation procedure — or implementing pieces or all of the standard recommended procedures that have been developed — would go a long way toward removing any doubt about when, and if, players like Woods should return to the field.

Normally, when celebrities embarrass the networks who are about to dedicate programming hours to them, it’s something of a shock. VH1 had no idea Chad Johnson would batter his wife, Evelyn Lozada, shortly before a reality show about the couple was slated to air. And normally, when something like that takes place, the network responds quickly: VH1 cancelled “Ev and Ocho” before a single episode of it had even aired. But the Discovery Channel is in a decidedly different situation with Ted Nugent, the subject of an hour-long special called “Ted Nugent’s Gun Country” which airs on the network at 10 tonight.

Nugent, in the course of promoting the special, tossed in an accusation that the Obama administration had participated in a treasonous “criminal complicity to murder” American citizens by not upping security somewhere on September 11. If it were anyone else, Nugent’s comments might be shocking. But it’s not as if the Discovery Channel didn’t know what they were getting when the decided to collaborate with him. For a long time, Nugent’s stock in trade has been indulging the ugliest impulses that occur to him. He’s your go-to guy if, for example, you think Hillary Clinton is “a worthless bitch” and get excited to hear someone say it out loud. Discovery won’t pull the special because comments like these don’t reveal anything new or surprising about Nugent’s character, opinions, or sense of what constitutes appropriate public discourse.

What is sort of depressing is the way Discovery’s presenting the special, and Nugent, as “a strong and vocal advocate for guns, hunting and all things America.” There is not actually consensus that gun ownership or hunting are essential American pursuits. And I wasn’t aware that denigrating women in public life or engaging in violent fantasies about people you disagree with politically, both staples of Nugent’s rhetorical and on-stage arsenal, counted as “all things American.” Nugent may declare, in promotional material for the show that appears on Discovery’s website that “Our American Dream is measured in ballistics.” I’m not sure Discovery realizes how crabbed and depressing that formulation is. It would be unattractive for Discovery to work with Nugent under any circumstances, but if the network is going to do a special on him, it would be nice if they could find their way to a more limited characterization of him, unless, that is, the network finds his politics as interesting and worthy as his enthusiasm for firearms.
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The bridge is yours.

-Stan Lee’s old company is suing the Disney Company for $5.5 billion in copyright damages.

-Yekaterina Samutsevich of Pussy Riot is out of jail.

-Game of Thrones is specifically looking to cast people who have had legs amputated for a critical scene.

-Dreamworks will start making two movies a year in China.

-Yay! Bridesmaids writer Annie Mumolo is working on another movie.

A documentary about the life, work, and opponents of the late conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart, Hating Breitbart, is on its way to theaters, and its director, Andrew Marcus, is perturbed that the movie received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. He told the Daily Caller that the rating should have come from “gutter behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus and their enablers in the progressive institutional left media” depicted in the movie because ““The hatred aimed at Andrew and the tea party was pornographic!” But like Bully, the documentary about children who are tormented for reasons ranging from their sexual orientation to simple social awkwardness, Hating Breitbart was rated R for the language that appears in the film. And like Bully, which eventually cut a number of incidences of the word “fuck” to earn a PG-13 rating, Marcus is trimming Hating Breitbart to try to bring the rating down.

The best argument for giving both Bully and Hating Breitbart PG-13 ratings even with all the original language in them intact is that it’s a realistic, honest look at the behavior of both sets of subjects. There was something perverse about protecting children from words in Bully that were spoken by children in the target demographic. And Breitbart’s use of language was a part of his style, as the Daily Caller suggests in a description of one of the scenes in the movie:

But Breitbart is the one uttering a few choice adult words. During one sequence early in the film, he looks into the camera and inveighs against what he saw as a conspiracy among liberal media elites to cast conservative politicians and commentators as Neanderthal throwback villains.

“What the left has stood for with political correctness,” he says on screen, looking into the distance, “is to try and get those with whom they disagree to shut up. And the tea party movement, and Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and Allen West and all the people who have gone out there against the mainstream media and said, ‘You’re going to call us racists? You’re going to call us potential Timothy McVeighs? Fuck you!’”

Then Breitbart looks into the camera and takes a pregnant pause before half-whispering his conclusion.

“War.”

Marcus may be irritated that his movie got an R rating, but the decision is in no way inconsistent with the MPAA’s previous decisions. I’d be in favor of a standard that recognizes that life, even as 12-year-olds are exposed to it, is sometimes obscene. But as it is, the ratings are fairly consistent in shielding younger viewers from obscene language, if not the ideas that animate it.

Chicago Fire, a new procedural about firefighters and the EMTs who work with them which premieres on NBC tonight at 10 PM, is intentionally a bit of a throw-back. “What we’re trying to do here is a very, very classic, adult, NBC platinum drama,” executive producer Dick Wolf said of the show at the Television Critics Association press tour in July. By that, he means a procedural with a large ensemble cast, full of flawed professionals with good intentions, in this case, the residents of a single Chicago firehouse who are dealing with broken engagements, a foreclosed house, who’s cooking dinner, and an upcoming visit from Mayor Emanuel. I spoke with the show’s creators, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, about the pop culture tropes of fire-fighters and first responders, why they chose Chicago, and how Wolf responds to reminders about diversity from executives. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The expectations audiences have for police and medical procedurals are very well-established, but the character beats and story arcs are less clear for firefighters and EMTs. Were there shows you looked to as models? Were there things you could do because those tropes aren’t as calcified?

Michael: One thing that got us interested in doing television was the idea of going back to some of the classic NBC dramas. For us, the drama on network television right now is almost reactionary in terms of how good Law & Order was. We were thinking in terms of ER and Hill Street Blues, where you had a big ensemble. It doesn’t matter if it’s a firehouse, or a hospital, or a police station. Those ideas work. Thematically they work. You have a family, and like any family, they have problems internally, but when the shit hits the fan externally, they come back together.

The Law & Order franchise played a key role in both defining New York and giving New York actors work. Can you talk a little bit about your vision of Chicago? And to what extent will fire and accident victims be actual characters on the show?

Derek: We picked Chicago a because it was a city that was born out of fire, the entire city was knocked down and had to start anew. And the fire service has a history here that seemed a perfect setting and then what we constructed was a firehouse that, when you turn left, you’re in a really poor, dangerous neighborhood, and when you turn right, you’re in the middle of downtown, and skyscrapers, and luxury apartments. [Firefighters] will hear a very short description of what they’re rolling up on. They might hear building fire, they might here man down from unknown causse. For us to throw out an address and for you not know what these guys are rolling up on, are they going to be smashing out of a high-rise? Or rolling up on a gang fight?

Micheal: When the show first came to us, NBD and Dick had decided they wanted to do a firefighter show, and said what city would you want to do it on, and we walked through options. New York is so tied up with 9/11. Los Angeles really doesn’t have enough weather to make it interesting. Chicago’s a city where you can put a camera down and point it anywhere and see something interesting.
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This post discusses plot points from the October 9 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

“You’re unbelievable,” Jacob Hale tells Jax towards the end of this episode of Sons of Anarchy as he agreed to Jax’s proposal to blackmail a member of City Council to get him to vote through approval on Charming Heights in exchange for Jacob agreeing to rent one of his properties to Nero so Nero and the Sons can restart his companion business. “Oh, I’m just getting started, Jake,” Jax tells him. It’s a fitting epigraph for an episode that began the necessary process of separating Jax’s conception of himself from objective reality. There may be part of him left that’s still the little boy who drinks milk from the carton. But more and more, he’s a man who writes letters to his son about trying to avoid caving to his hate while taking delivery of a woman’s breast and finger in an ice chest delivered by his mother.

First, there’s Jax’s dealings with Jacob. It’s a smart move for the show to translate manipulating votes around the table in the SAMCRO clubhouse to Charming politics—I’m only surprised it’s taken the show longer to do so, and I hope it does more, something that Damon Pope’s model of leadership would suggest for the Sons’ future. “I know how important Charming Heights is to you, to this town,” Jax tells him smoothly even as he proposes an ugly campaign of blackmail. “We’re going to make your dream come true.” The promise to Jacob, and to the club, is much prettier than the reality. Bobby may dream of a future that’s “pink, wet, and tastes like sunshine,” with Tig singing the glories of “Pussy. Or Italian ice.” But it’s going to take ugly work to accomplish, and the home invasions by the Nomads sworn into the charter may sink the Sons’ credibility for good. It’s not much fun listening to Clay these days, but he’s right that “the hate swings that far out, it may not swing back.”

It’s also worth considering how Jax’s plan to blackmail City Councilmen will pay off for the club in the long run. This was a tricky sequence, and I know not everyone in the audience thought Sons of Anarchy pulled it off, in particular because of the casting of Walton Goggins to play a transgender woman. The debate about whether male actors should play trans women is an important one, and I think worth separating from the discussion of this particular episode, but to me, Goggins’ turn as Venus was bravura and funny. There’s no question that Jax’s plan, to knock out a key swing vote and stage pictures of him engaged in a raunchy session with Venus, is a form of sexual assault, and I thought the show did a decent job of making that clear, particularly as Jax moved smoothly into blackmailing the man’s stepson, offering him oral sex with Venus and then telling him “How’d you like these bad boys blowing up your Facebook page?” The plot is a nasty one, and if I have a quibble with it, the plan seems too sophisticated for the Sons. But I did think that the show managed to walk a delicate line between articulating the ugliness of what the Sons were doing and its portrayal of Venus herself, who came across as self-aware about what she was participating in, and determined to extract every penny she could from the Sons. Jax may have thought he was presenting himself as liberal-minded (or at least putting up a good front for the scheme) when he told the teenager he was talking into sex with Venus “Doesn’t mean you’re gay, man. We’ve all been there.” But I appreciated the kiss Venus planted on him on the way out the door—Jax may be willing to hire a transgender sex worker, but he’s not as comfortable with her as he pretends to be.
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