Over at The Atlantic, I took a look at NBC’s reboot of The Munsters, Mockingbird Lane, and beyond that, the question of what monsters are for and whether they can have any actual impact when they’ve become ubiquitous:

So if we aren’t supposed to be frightened of the Munsters, what are they for? Mockingbird Lane has stripped away the working-class symbolism of The Munsters, which at the time was meant as more direct commentary on a kind of family sitcom that doesn’t quite exist anymore, replaced by self-aware, upper-middle-class juggernauts like ABC’s Modern Family. Herman no longer works at a funeral home, or even seems to work at all, and Lily’s so ethereal—she appears in clouds of smoke and wears designer frocks weaved for her by friendly spiders—it’s hard to imagine her starting up even so posh a business as a beauty parlor. Grandpa may disdain the neighbors, but that’s just because they’re human and not for any more-revealing reason. Marilyn, the sole member of the family who doesn’t exhibit any monstrous traits, is presented more as a chipper agent of the Munsters’ interests than, as she was in the original, someone whose values and sense of self turned out very differently than they might have otherwise had she grown up in a fully human family. There’s no real sense of darkness Marilyn is either drawn to or has to conceal from the world at large: Everything happening around her is too brightly lit and flip in tone for the show to communicate any sense of danger.

If every person, every anxiety, every repressive impulse, is monstrous, then it’s awfully hard to distinguish what should actually be frightening, what’s actually momentous, what actually requires a major battle.

It’s difficult to write about Cloud Atlas, the sweeping adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 nesting doll of a novel, by Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, if only because it’s doing so many different things, telling stories that range from the slave trade to multiple post-apocalypses, testing the limits of how big an independent movie can be and still be viable, and exploring the power of reincarnation and liberation movements. I don’t really think that Cloud Atlas works–it’s simultaneously too much, and too little–but while its characters are reaching for better lives, there’s a lot in Cloud Atlas that suggests what a better movie-going landscape might look like.

To summarize briefly: a core group of actors and a huge band of extras act out six core stories. The movie begins with a lawyer traveling home from a slave plantation on a ship where he’s being poisoned by a venal doctor and forming a friendship with a runaway slave, continues on to a 1930s love affair between a young scientist and composer that’s conducted mostly by letter as the composer seeks to write his masterpiece, into the seventies where the young scientist, now old, will help an investigative journalist go after an oil company that plans to sabotage the movement towards nuclear energy, into the present, where a publisher deals with a difficult author and his ultimate entombment in an old age home, on to Neo-Seoul, a city more than a hundred years in the future where cloned “fabricants” serve consumers born through normal biological means, and on to an island in an indeterminate but even more distant, and even more thoroughly post-apocalytic future. The actors, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Ben Whishaw, and James D’Arcy, among others, switch races and genders, portraying souls who move from existence to existence. If the plot and tracking the characters is complicated, the ideas that animate Cloud Atlas are even more complex.

To a certain extent, Cloud Atlas is a deeply religious movie in search of a theology, and its incoherence about what the interconnectedness between its characters actually means or what their cycles of reincarnations are working towards can make the film feel more squishy than moving. One of the most interesting and effective facets of the movie, if not the main one, is how cultural fragments gain meaning and power over time and in new settings. In our present, aging publisher Timothy Cavendish’s (Broadbent) huffy declaration to a nursing home attendant that “I will not be subject to criminal abuse,” sounds petty and overblown. That same scene, recreated in a movie recounting that man’s life, gains a grandeur and patina: the nursing home isn’t an antiseptic prison but a red velvet-draped lounge, and the person speaking the words isn’t Jim Broadbent in a snit but Tom Hanks mustering all the dignity available to him.

What looked intentionally ridiculous the first time around to those of us sitting in a movie theater seems magical in its recreation to Sonmi-451 (Bae) and Yoona-939 (Xun Zhou), two cloned women for whom the movie is their first glimpse of life outside the cafe they were grown to provide labor for. And when Yoona-939 spits those same words at a customer at the cafe who is pretending to ejaculate on her body, they achieve the power Cavendish meant them to have in the fist place.

Sonmi-451 and Yoona-939, born into slave labor, limited to service, and destined for a future in which they’re recycled as meat, are genuinely oppressed in a way that and by means of technology Cavendish couldn’t possibly imagine. Asserting their humanity takes courage he never could have mustered. But this silly, selfish little man gave Yoona-939 the words she needed to demand decent treatment. Even the smallest, flimsiest artifacts can be objects of right power in the right circumstances, when they encounter the people who need them most.
Read more

From the pros to college to high school, football players across the country have donned pink uniform accessories (and sometimes even pink uniforms) to honor Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In the National Football League, players are required to wear pink accessories for the first week of October, and the gloves, towels, and wristbands are optional for the remainder of the month. Most of the gear is then auctioned off to raise money for breast cancer programs.

But in Corbin, Kentucky, a high school football player who wore pink gloves and a pink towel during one game says he was disciplined by his coach and school for doing so:

A Corbin High School football player is upset because he was disciplined for wearing pink gloves on the field and using a pink towel during a recent game.

School officials say pink gloves go against their uniform policy.

“My best friend’s mother died. She had cancer,” said sophomore Austin O’Neill, the starting cornerback for the Corbin Redhounds.

O’Neill didn’t wear pink because he wanted to look cool or show off. He wore it because he wanted to highlight the terrible effect breast cancer had on the life of his best friend’s mother. And because he wore the gloves (and because the school punished him for it), his personal story is getting out in a way it otherwise wouldn’t have. The NFL can learn from that. There are countless stories like O’Neill’s in the NFL too, like that of Larry Fitzgerald, the Arizona Cardinals’ wide receiver who lost his mother to breast cancer and started a foundation to fight it.

But the average fan tuning in on Sunday afternoons won’t hear stories like Fitzgerald or O’Neill’s. Fields are flooded with pink gear, pink ribbons, and even pink penalty flags. But all of that serves as one big dose of ambiguity, since for the average fan, the meaning of “awareness” is unclear. So too, is how much money the campaign generates for awareness, prevention, and research. I watch football every Sunday, but until I dug around the NFL’s pink web site and found quotes from NFL officials in other news stories, I had no idea what specifically the NFL’s campaign was meant to achieve or how it was doing it. To be honest, I’m still not quite sure.

The pink campaigns also seem to paper over what exactly we need to be aware of. The disease itself, after all, is well known. What we need to be aware of is the fact that mammograms are hard to get for uninsured women, that cheap providers like Planned Parenthood are being shut down, that for all the “awareness” we see, there still isn’t a cure and there is still a long way to go in the fight to find one. Seeing pink gloves and pink towels on a football field isn’t enough to make any of that clear.

The NFL deserves credit for highlighting and fighting the disease. But it could afford some clarity in its mission to help the American Cancer Society provide breast cancer screenings in underserved areas (again, a fact that isn’t clear to the average viewer) and its overall fight against the disease. It could afford even more clarity in how much money it donates to research and prevention, and why it doesn’t donate more. The league runs advertisements throughout the year highlighting its charity work with United Way, but while it has public service announcements from players like Fitzgerald on its web site, similar ads about what its breast cancer campaign is doing don’t seem to exist.

Breast cancer “awareness” is important, but it’s also ambiguous. By using players who have been personally affected, who are wearing pink because it means something personal and not just because it’s cool or required, to clarify and publicize its mission, the NFL could go a long way in making the campaign more effective — and more aware — than it already is.

The bridge is yours.

-I’ve been stressed about November, but knowing I get a new Solange album makes things at least a little bit better.

-James Poniewozik nails Ryan Murphy’s style.

-I wrote about Angel Haze yesterday. Now, you can download her mixtape.

-It makes so much sense that Adam Carolla is going to be a Fox News contributor.

-John Hawkes is, indeed, totally fantastic.

Whatever you think of Lena Dunham, or the actual efficacy of the playful voter turnout ad she cut for President Obama in which she compares voting for the first time to losing your virginity—which, if you’re a civics nerd, may be a more valid comparison than even she intended—it really is kind of amazing to watch Erik Erikson lament that “If you need any further proof we live in a fallen world destined for hell fire, consider the number of people who have no problem with the President of the United States, via a campaign ad, ridiculing virgins and comparing sex to voting.” Or to see Minnesota Republican deputy chairman Kelly Fenton declare that the ad is proof that President Obama and Vladimir Putin share Satan as an adviser. Not to mention the sadly predictable comments raining down on Dunham’s appearance and weight.

I just hope someday we live in a world where Dunham and company can someday extol the virtues of having your first time with a great guy or girl. Someone who might have something to say about that is Lesley Gore, who after years of making teen pop songs about heterosexual romance in 2004 revealed that she’d been with her partner since the early 1980s.

I don’t know if it’s scarier to be fighting the same battles that were on the table in the 1960s, or the fact that we still don’t have a national Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Either way, the prospect of losing ground on either women’s issues or gay rights in this election is pretty horrifying. For those of us who see the potential for concrete losses in our future, it’s not so unreasonable to see the person who will guide the country for the next four years as just as important as the first person you have awkward, first-time sex with.

As Deadline notes, there’s a huge untapped potential to get more viewers watching streaming programming:

The research firm says that in September, 3.1M unique users streamed TV Everywhere programming at AT&T, Cox, Comcast (Xfinity), Verizon, Cablevision (Optimum), Time Warner Cable, and Dish Network. That comes to just 5.1% of the roughly 60M customers who could have accessed TV Everywhere videos at those companies. The data suggest “relatively weak TV Everywhere awareness among cable, DBS and telco video subs, most likely due to the lack of any serious marketing campaigns to promote the product,” analyst Tony Lenoir says. It also means the services have a long way to go to catch up to other streaming video providers. For example, Hulu had 21.3M unique users in September, while Netflix had 16.2M.

I actually think this could be a critical way to get customers to be quite loyal to cable. The streaming landscape is a deeply confusing place right now: on Hulu alone, NBC puts up everything the day after it airs, Fox delays episodes unless you’re a Hulu plus subscriber, and CBS holds everything on its own site, which has an unbelievably terrible proprietary streaming player. Then, there’s HBO GO, which is a stand-alone service to HBO subscribers, but that is slightly unreliable. And Showtime is working with cable providers to have Showtime Anytime service work through their streaming players. Netflix gets new seasons of things at uneven rates. That’s confusing even for an obsessive consumer like me. If RCN developed a streaming service that made all content available on a consistent basis, with extremely high-quality visuals and fast-loading streaming, that alone would make me affirmatively loyal to the company for the first time in my career as an adult cable consumer. And I bet it would be a real value ad for people who don’t spend ten hours a day watching television and movies.

This post discusses plot points from the October 25 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I got to see this episode of Parks and Recreation last week, which gave me a chance to go back and watch “The Master Plan,” the episode where Leslie met Ben when he first arrived in Pawnee as a state auditor. I’d remembered the basics of their inauspicious introduction: Ben arrived just in time to interrupt Leslie’s chance to fight for her department’s budget, and with the ominous news that she might even have to cut jobs. What I’d forgotten was how quickly he found himself compelled to reach out to her, and how well he read Leslie, even when she was angry at him. “Do you want a beer?” he came into her office to ask her. “You look like you could use a beer.”

Almost three seasons later, I cried at my desk watching Ben go down on his knee in the house Leslie thought she’d have to give up to let him pursue his dreams. “What are you doing?” Leslie asked him, overwhelmed. “I’m thinking about my future,” Ben told her. His touching proposal elicited some of the absolute best acting Amy Poehler and Adam Scott have done during Parks and Recreation‘s impressive run, but it was more than Leslie telling Ben ” I need another second, please. I need to remember every little thing about how perfect my life is right now, at this exact moment,” as she glanced around the empty house, that brought me to tears. Leslie and Ben are one of the most unusual couples on television, and they represent an archetype that touches me deeply: a pair where the man consistently makes sacrifices to help the woman in his life achieve everything she’s capable of, and where their relationship doesn’t always call for the woman to make symmetrical sacrifices.

Almost from their first meeting, Ben’s been deeply concerned with Leslie’s happiness. In their second episode together, he paid to keep her prized Freddie Spaghetti concert going even in the face of looming cuts to the department. When the exposure of their relationship threatened Leslie’s campaign for City Council, Ben sacrificed his job so she could keep hers and continue her run unimpeded by scandal. He devoted himself to running her campaign. And now, even with the great, amoral Jennifer telling Ben “There aren’t a lot of people that can manage a campaign. But you, Ben Wyatt, are one of them,” Ben is choosing Leslie.
Read more