Given that the DC Metro system can’t turn down advertising just because they contain ideas the organization or its leaders find distasteful—which, for the record, is a state of affairs I approve of—this is probably the best possible solution to the problem of what to do with prominent Islamophobe Pamela Geller’s nasty ads which suggest that Israel is civilized and the Muslim world is decidedly not:

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said it is adding a line of text distancing itself from all new “viewpoint” ads that reads: “This is a paid advertisement sponsored by [sponsor].The advertising space is a designated public forum and does not imply WMATA’s endorsement of any views express.”

The agency was urged to add a disclaimer to a set of ads that went up earlier this month that opponents said equated Muslims with savages. The agency started to add the disclaimers to all new noncommerical ads last week as the controversy grew, with counter ads and counter-counter ads.

“Metro advertising space is deemed a public forum by the courts, and the ads you see on buses, trains, and in stations comply with existing guidelines and are protected by the First Amendment,” General Manager Richard Sarles wrote in an internal memo. “However, we want to make sure customers know we don’t endorse any of these messages.”

It’s worth noting that WMATA ads, for those of you who don’t live in Washington, are a great expression of the bizarro world that is our city’s dominant industry. You’ll see entire stations covered in military hardware or lobbying campaigns—the Capitol South Metro, which is the dominant stop on the Hill, gets particularly saturated—in addition to universities targeting the kind of kids who intern in Washington with ads telling them that they can be fifteen different kinds of wonk. But Gellar’s ads set a new standard in ugliness and crassness. I’m glad they inspired WMATA to point out that while the system may be obligated to take almost everyone’s money, that Metro is on board with every sentiment that gets splashed on subway cars and station’s walls. And in an environment of unusually heightened political and lobbying competition, there’s something appealing about the idea that the new disclaimers will mark all the other opinion ads that come along in Gellar’s wake. Washington may be the site of heated political contests, but its leading industry isn’t the sum total of the region.

As Clint Eastwood appearances in politically charged content go, I’d rate this American Crossroads ad substantially above Eastwood’s meandering, bizarre rant to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention and somewhere below the “Halftime in America” spot he cut for Chrysler that aired during this year’s Super Bowl:

Part of it is just that the production values on the “Halftime in America” spot are much more attractive: better lighting, the more dramatic shot of Eastwood in the tunnel, the facade still standing even though the building behind it has been gutted, a diverse array of contemplative faces.

It’s also just much easier to make platitudes sound uplifting than specific but not-very-well substantiated claims about President Obama’s record. It’s easier to sell a car than it is to sell Mitt Romney at this stage in the game.

Lana Wachowski’s astonishing, warm, funny speech at a Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco is the best thing I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m glad to see it get passed around so widely today:

One of the things that’s so remarkable about Lana’s address—in addition to its artlessness, the result of her first major stint as a public speaker—is the way it addresses the inadequacy of everything from the gender binary, to our media culture, to the language we use to describe ourselves. She’s supporting HRC’s work even as she’s calling out the limitations of the current conversation about and tools for advancing equality. When she first uses the term “transition” to describe her physical transformation, she notes that “this is a very complicated word for me because of its complicity in a binary gender dynamic that I am not particularly comfortable with.” Lana explains that she has a horror of talk show culture because she can’t stand the idea of dealing with a host “whose sympathy underscores the inherent tragedy of my life as a transgendered person.” Recounting an incident in which her mother rescued her from the abuse of a nun at her Catholic school, Lana says that when her mother asked for an explanation of what happened, Lana explains “I have no real language to describe it…I am unable to understand why she can’t see me” And given the flights of imagination in her movies, Lana explains how difficult it was, as a child, to feel like “I was stupid and a liar because I myself was unable to imagine a world where I would ever fit in.” The world, in so many ways, is not enough. And the tools we have to improve it can only take us so far.

Lana’s explanation of her own approach to her coming-out process is also novel in an era when coming-out stories have become a highly valuable commodity with an established roll-out process. She’s approaching it from an extremely different angle, from the perspective of someone who has carefully guarded all aspects of her life to the extent of doing almost no publicity for her movies with her brother. “I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it seemed that my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others,” she says of her childhood. “If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value.”

The bridge is yours.

-Kanye Wes Anderson.

-Does the Apple iPad mini make any sense?

-Denny’s, as co-branding with The Hobbit, will serve elevenses.

-Lots and lots of spoilers about Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World.

-And this is what happens when Chinese tycoons get to make their dream movies:

I’ve turned into a total and utter Nashville junkie—fights about economic development and race and politics interspersed with singing is my version of network television Nirvana—so I was excited to read Willa Paskin’s interview with the show’s creator, Callie Khouri. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in their conversation, but I wanted to pull out this excerpt, which I found striking:

People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.

Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” It’s like … I don’t think you want to hear my opinion about this.

I want to hear your opinion! Even though it’s probably not very nice.

No, it’s not. I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.

I think there’s an extent to which this is true. But there’s also a certain overlap between programming aimed at women and shows that are considered “soapy” and melodramatic, two tones and methods of storytelling that I think tend to be considered less serious. That’s not to be said that soapiness can’t be done badly: putting children in danger, having plots gyrate wildly, and throwing new elements into the mix to generate emotion that a show isn’t earning are bad things that can be done by masculine-coded shows like Sons of Anarchy, too. But I don’t think, for example, that realism is inherently a better tone than well-executed archness or camp, and I’m not entirely sure that’s something that’s reflected in our consensus of what makes for great television.

But I do think in our past decade of television, violence gets more credence than romance (which is part of what makes Homeland‘s mix of the two so fascinating), business and war get taken more seriously than personal revelation. Nashville, I think, works in part because Khouri and her colleagues are using business and politics as tools to put pressure on deeply felt romantic relationships: they’ve added forces that lend a sense of scale to love. I do agree that it’s progress that you don’t have to humiliate a woman on television in order to let her win, and that women, like the awesome leads of Happy Endings, can be delightfully weird without being defeated or in need of reform. But I don’t think that means we’ve entirely won. When we’re at a point where sentiment is as prized as hardness and purely domestic stories are taken as seriously as explorations of public lives (not to mention better roles for women of color and women with bodies that deviate beyond the mean), then I think women’s television will be in a place both with its audience and in terms of critical acclaim that would make me happy.

Via The Mary Sue comes the news that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as well as Mad Men and Glee) veteran Marti Noxon has been hired by Pixar:

Joss Whedon isn’t the only Buffy alum with big things going on. Writer Marti Noxon, who’s worked on Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, Glee, and last year’s underrated Fright Night remake since leaving Sunnydale behind, has just been hired by Pixar to work on one of their upcoming films.

It’s unclear exactly what Noxon will be working on; Pixar currently has several films in pre-production, including a Dia de los Muertos-inspired flick and the latest from director Pete Docter (Up, Monsters, Inc.), listed on IMDB as “The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind.” (I’m envisioning Monsters, Inc. meets Inception—I can hope, can’t I?)

Many of Pixar’s best movies have been about adult men who are unmoored from the sources of their identities, or have them challenged. In The Incredibles, Bob Parr’s been stripped of his right to work as a superhero. In Finding Nemo, Marlin feels that he’s failed to protect his family when his son Nemo is scooped up in a net, and as he journeys to find him, has to explore what and who he is without Nemo around to occupy all his attention and interest. Much of what made the introduction to Up so shattering was its demonstration of how much Carl Fredricksen built his sense of self around his wife Ellie, and how that idea deepened through disappointments like the failure of their travel plans or their inability to get pregnant, an event that would have expanded Carl’s understanding of his role. Wall-E’s encounter with Eve puts his work processing trash in a new context and gives him new things to yearn for.

The company’s made strides with young female characters, both in Brave, which did a lovely job of exploring the complicated relationship between a teenaged girl and her mother, and in the Pete Doctor movie mentioned in the article I quoted, the brain the film explores is supposed to be a girl’s. But it’s notable that both of those projects are about girls rather than adult women, who have never been so fully realized and sympathetic in a Pixar movie since we saw Elastigirl reckon with her husband’s secret-keeping and temper, and then kick into superheroine high gear to protect her family. I’ve always thought that the sixth season of Buffy, which Noxon executive produced, never quite got enough credit for its depiction of women who were in similar senses of crises about their identities. Whether Buffy was reckoning with her lack of job credentials in “Doublemeat Palace,” her lack of prestige relative to her ex-boyfriend Riley in “As You Were,” exploring a new kind of sexual relationship with Spike, or dealing with a dramatic realignment of her sense of her friendships and her sister Dawn after she was forcibly recalled from heaven, Noxon helped craft a portrait of what it means to be reconsidering every element of your identity in your twenties.

If she can identify these kinds of crises and find stories that make them universal (rather than aimed just at ladies) in the same way Pixar’s done for men who are widowed, separated from their children, or fired from their jobs, she’ll bring something special and important to the company—and to our standards for popular, high-quality entertainment. And if she can’t, that’s still something Pixar should pursue as a goal. If the company can sell audiences on the identity anxieties of a middle-aged man gone to fat, a cranky retiree, a voiceless robot, or a fish, it ought to be able to turn them out for stories about a woman.

This post discusses plot details from the October 23 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

I remain deeply ambivalent about this season’s treatment of Gemma, which appears to be coming to a head in this episode. I understand what the show is trying to do with her: tell a story about a woman unmoored from the sources of her identity and increasingly self-destructive as a result. It’s telling that it’s Nero, someone from outside that family, who diagnoses her problem for Jax. “She’s still your mother, jefe, and you got to respect that,” he warns the younger man, having promised to stay away from Gemma but still seeing her clearly. “She’s stuck in between a husband she hates and a son she thinks hates her. Women like her don’t do so good without family.”

But I wish that Sons of Anarchy had found a way to tell that story that didn’t involve treating Gemma like she’s a shameful whore, down to her choice of poison. “Since when do you drink banana vodka?” Jax asks his mother after she becomes the target of Joel McHale’s conman, adding “Jesus Christ. Who are you?” when he finds out she can’t identify the man who robbed her by name. He even apologizes for her to Nero, telling him “I’m sorry you got pulled into this. She’s a goddamn train wreck.” Jax, of course, is not exactly one to preach to his mother about chastity—he slept around on the road even when he was in a relationship with Tara, and Gemma has far more right to go out and have fun without obligations than he did on that unfortunate occasion.

I understand that much of Sons of Anarchy is about how a deeply retrograde, patriarchal subculture that’s survived into the modern era affects both the men who are sworn to the culture and the women who end up participating in it by proxy. And Katey Sagal has always acted the hell out of every line of material written for her. But I’m not sure there’s enough, or sufficiently delineated, distance between how the show views Gemma and how Jax views her right now for Sons of Anarchy to make this very tricky storyline work. The show is pulling it off intermittently. The moment of her weeping in the motel bathroom at night, wrapped in a blanket, was one of the best moments in this arc of letting Gemma sit with her own decisions, as opposed to filtering them through the eyes of her son, or her lover, or her ex-husband. And there was something extremely touching about watching Gemma reminisce to Tara about Luann Delaney, the best friend she lost to murder motivated by SAMCRO’s business dealings in the second season of the show (both the best Sons of Anarchy has ever done, and not coincidentally, the one with the best long-arc Gemma story). “He liked to watch her movies,” Gemma told Tara. “But I’m guessing they’re not to going to let you bring a stack of old videotapes in there. Perfume. Otto loved that goddamn perfume. Smelled like cum and patchouli, was godawful. But he wouldn’t let her wear anything else. It came in a blue bottle, it was Blue Roses, Blue Violet, something like that.” Even in death, Luann, like all the SAMCRO women, is defined by her relationship to a man.

But I thought the show whiffed again when Gemma and Jax finally spoke. “After my Thomas died, I did the worst thing a mother could do,” she told him. “I made you make up for the love that he couldn’t give me anymore. I’m sorry, Jackson. I’m sorry that I’ve always been too much.” Gemma’s committed her crimes and kindnesses, but I really, profoundly wish the show would allow her a deeper reckoning with both her guilt for the sins she’s incurred in the service of SAMCRO, and for the huge damage the club has done her. Gemma got raped and kept quiet about it for the club, she lost Luann, she saw her grandsons kidnapped, she took a beatdown by her husband. But instead, this episode reduced what Gemma’s working through to the nature of her relationship with Jax. “Yeah, when he died, I felt so bad,” Jax tells her. “It wasn’t because he was dead. It was because I would have you all to myself. I knew how wrong that was. I love you, Mom. And we’re going to get through all of this, I promise.” If Jax wants to help his deeply traumatized—and guilty—mother get through what’s ailing her, they’re going to have to learn to talk to each other more honestly than that. As Gemma tells Unser about his profession of love, “Too many people feeling shit. What you said was the truth. More people did that, there’d be less bodies lying on floors.” Terrifyingly—if frustratingly, given the way the show uses Abel to gin up drama—this episode ended with the suggestion that the bodies on the floor could be Gemma’s grandsons.
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