This post, obviously, discusses plot points from Skyfall.

I. The Bulldog

Skyfall is supremely British movie. M writes Bond’s obituary with a bottle of whiskey and a china bulldog painted to look like the Union Jack as company at her desk. After the bombing of MI6 headquarters, Bond grouses “The whole office goes up in smoke and that bloody thing survives?” “Your interior decorating tips are always appreciated,” M tells him tartly. When MI6 relocates, it’s to Winston Churchill’s old bunker: “Quite fascinating, if it wasn’t for the rats,” M’s aide Tanner (Rory Kinnear) says. During a free-associative exercise as part of his field assessment, Bond’s asked to respond to the world “Country.” His immediate response, of course, is “England.” When he and M return to Skyfall, the family estate Bond hasn’t visited since he left for school, they’re met by a fabulous old-school retainer, Kincade. “Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first,” Bond informs him. “Then we’d better get ready,” Kincade replies stoutly. When the first henchman meets Kincade’s shotgun, he dispatches the man with a hearty “Welcome to Scotland.” Even the language of daily conversation feels more staunchly English than usual, whether it’s Bond telling M “Just changing carriages,” as the back half of a train is violently torn away behind him, or M sourly suggesting, on Bond’s return from a long absence that “I suppose they ran out of drink where you were.”

That vigorous emphasis on cultural signifiers of British national character makes sense. Skyfall is a film that’s explicitly concerned with the blowback to British imperialism, and implicitly structured to bridge the gap between the UK’s two great contributions to spy culture: the bureaucratic knife-fight and the secret agent with the Walther PPK.

“England. The Empire. MI6. You’re living in a ruin,” Skyfall’s antagonist, Silva (Javier Bardem) tells Bond when he finally arrives on-screen. Much more so than a traditional Bond film villain, Silva is a photo-negative of Bond, a man whose faith in MI6 has been shattered, who abandoned British soil to live on a Japanese island that looks like a dreamscape in Inception, complete with a tumbled Ozymandian statue, who wears white and cream to Bond’s black, who fights his battles with server farms instead of his fists, and whose sexual ominvorousness extends even beyond Bond’s own. It’s possible he’s meant as an allusion to Julian Assange, who recently caused the UK some measure of annoyance, in both physical presentation and weapon of choice. But Skyfall makes the interesting choice to give Silva grievances against his government more legitimate than any Assange suffered personally. When M ran him as an agent in Hong Kong during the transition of control from the British to China, she handed him over to the Chinese government after he was discovered doing offensive hacking outside his brief. “I got six agents in return, and a peaceful transition,” M explains to Bond without sentiment. Silva was tortured, and when he tried to take his cyanide capsule, it failed to kill him. “Life clung to me like a disease,” Silva tells her, revealing the destruction of his dental plate, the ruined face he conceals with prosthetics. “Do you know what hydrogen cyanide does to you? Look upon your work.” Hong Kong isn’t the only element of British foreign policy history that Skyfall alludes to: as Silva stalks M through London, the movie brings up the dreadful specter of that city’s subway bombings. Who needs doomsday devices when you have reality?

The chase ends, where it has to, in a Parliamentary hearing room at Westminster. John Le Carre, the creator of some of the greatest heroes of bureaucratic British spydom, has explained that he dislikes James Bond because “It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context.” Much of the best of British spy fiction has responded to Bond in the same way, from George Smiley’s disinfection of the Circus, to the men and women working inside the Grid in Spooks. And among the other work of the Daniel Craig era in the Bond franchise has been the reconciliation of that “international gangster” with British politics and bureaucracy. In Casino Royale, M is disgusted at being called in to testify as to Bond’s conduct after he shoots up an embassy in Africa, both because she has to deal with the oversight, and because Bond’s given Parliament reason to demand it:

Who the hell do they think they are? I report to the Prime Minister and even he’s smart enough not to ask me what we do. Have you ever seen such a bunch of self-righteous, ass-covering prigs? They don’t care what we do; they care what we get photographed doing. And how the hell could Bond be so stupid? I give him double-O status and he celebrates by shooting up an embassy. Is the man deranged? And where the hell is he? In the old days if an agent did something that embarrassing he’d have a good sense to defect. Christ, I miss the Cold War.

In Skyfall, she’s back at it again, this time on even more serious grounds. After Bond fails to stop Patrice, a terrorist who managed to steal the encrypted identities of NATO agents embedded in terrorist organizations, M finds herself called to heel by Mallory (Ralph Feinnes), a former soldier-turned bureaucrat. “Are we to call this civilian oversight?” M asks him. “We call it retirement planning,” he tells her. “I’m here to oversee the transition period leading to your voluntary retirement in two months’ time.” After those agents are unmasked and begin to be killed, M is called before an inquiry to explain herself, an act that both makes Bond and his colleagues answerable to a political context and gives M an opportunity to explain why the kind of political context Le Carre called for is less clear-cut in a post-Cold War era. “Our enemies are no longer known to us,” she tells the minister. “They don’t exist on a map. our world is not more transparent, now. It’s more opaque. That’s where we have to fight. In the shadows.” As Silva makes his murderous way towards her, she quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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On November 18 and 19 at 8 PM, PBS will be airing the next documentary from Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl. The two-part series is shattering account of the real estate boom and beliefs about climate change that lead homesteaders to destroy Midwestern sod, and the drought that turned that soil into dust storms resulting in a devastating, years-long environmental catastrophe. Burns and his producer Dayton Duncan were able to track down children who lived through the Dust Bowl, never-before-seen photographs and home movies of dust storms, and to weave them together with historians’ testimony to explain how the Dust Bowl influenced everything from American environmental science to women’s abilities to live up to their gender roles in a place where it was impossible to keep homes clean and children safe.

In July, I had a long conversation with Burns and Duncan about the research that made The Dust Bowl possible, why they relied on first-hand accounts rather than scientists to help advance our understanding of climate change, why art can be a better vehicle for communicating difficult ideas than journalism, and the role of government in American life. This interview has been edited for clarity.

I actually want to start out by asking you what attracted you to the material in the first place. Watching both parts of the documentary I was really struck by the parallels between our present situation and the regulation that leads to businesses encouraging people to overreach, and then the reluctance to contract with the American dream.

Burns: Well first of all, I should say my interest is born in my best friend’s interest, Dayton Duncan, who has been talking about this for more than 20 years as a subject. It’s something that comes down to me sort of with a kind of shorthand, the conventional wisdom that suggests just the most superficial of associations. So for us it’s always the ability to dive deep into a subject and find a human and intimate dimension to it that belies those conventional wisdoms and supplants them with something that’s more enduring and more, I think, impressive in a way.

Now, the thing we’ve discovered in every film we do is the way in which it always mirrors the contemporary. Whether it’s the Civil War or our most recent film on prohibition, they seem to be what Ecclesiastes said, that there’s nothing new under the sun – that they mirror political tendencies, economic tendencies, human foibles, human strengths –

For everything there is a season except the seasons come over and over again.

Burns: Exactly. They do indeed, and they tend to repeat themselves. I’m not a firm believer so much in that, as I am in the sense that human nature remains the same. And so what we watch in creatures is the same mixture of greed and generosity, the same degree of sort of mean spiritedness and courage. So all of these things are in play if you’re willing to, as public television allows us, dive deeper into a subject than the sort of dramatic, superficial retelling. We keep the drama, but we dive down deep.

And so in this case, we have an oral history of more than two dozen individuals—children—who survived the devastation of their parents’ farms, and their lives and sometimes even the lives of their siblings. This is an amazing story, and I think without pointing neon arrows at it, it can’t help but remind us. It’s not just ripped from today’s headline, about a a severe drought that’s afflicting a good deal of the country, but in all the intricacies of that political and economic … political and economic dimensions you brought up in your excellent question.

Well, one of the things I thought was fascinating – and I didn’t realize it until after I’d seen the movie – is that you put out an appeal for people to send photographs and films.

Burns: We had just finished a film about the Second World War, and we had been dealing with people at the very end of their lives…We were quite anxious that we had maybe missed it. And then I recorded some appeals that were played in the local stations in the area of “no man’s land,” in Colorado, Texas, and Kansas, and Colorado and New Mexico, and also the Central Valley in California that permitted us to at least use the resources of this extraordinary grassroots, bottom-up network to sort of reach out to people. And then our co-producer, Julie Dunfee, and another researcher, Susan Shumaker, went down on the ground and spent the shoe leather necessary to find the people to talk to them, to see if they were viable, to visit nursing homes. And what we realized is that we would be able to recreate the Dust Bowl through the memories of children and teenagers. Their parents are long gone, but their memories are as vivid and as accurate and as, in some ways, compelling, as ever because they were children watching this apocalyptic ten year period happen around them.

Did you get much in the way of photographs or actual video footage from them directly?

Duncan: Well, you know, central to the research was the PBS network and Ken’s appeal on that. And it’s surprising, he’d say “Send your stories or things to this station – not to us.” And then they would willow through it and send us the things. Cal Crabill, [one of the documentary's subjects], that’s how we found out about him. He saw it on a station in California and decided to write, and tell us about his story…Because it took place in the 30s in a relatively poor and sparsely populated part of the country we have a couple of home movies that are in the film. We have a lot of footage that was taken by newsreel companies once the catastrophe was becoming more self-evident. But we’ve got lots of photographs in the film and in our companion book that have never been published before – that people brought to us, and also from the historical societies that might have them in these folders. A couple of the ones of the storm descending on the town of Elkhart, Kansas, one of it descending over Hooker, Oklahoma, nobody’s ever seen those before.

So we were really pleased at the amount of material to add to the things that are already available, though took some searching from the FSA photographers, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein and others. So we had a great amount of terrific visual material to choose from. We had about 6,000 photographs that we collected-

Burns: Which is surprising.

Duncan: -and we used about 400.
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This post discusses plot points from the November 15 episode of Parks and Recreation.

When Parks and Recreation debuted in 2009, Leslie Knope’s ambitions were something of a joke. The idea that she could join the company of the women whose pictures hung on the walls of her office at the Parks Department was laughable. And framing her as an object of derision was one of the reasons the show wasn’t particularly good. Now that we’ve had four seasons establishing Leslie as competent, it’s much easier for the show to revisit her dreams without mocking them, in part because Parks and Recreation is at a point where everyone else’s ambitions are up for debate as well.*

The opening of the show framed that tension perfectly. “2020,” Leslie tells Ben, looking at the White House when she comes to Washington to help him move back to Pawnee. “Fine. 2024. I win. We move in there. I’ll take the West Wing. You take the East Wing. You can be the first gentleman.” “That actually sounds kind of great,” Ben tells her. But like First Spouses before him, when Ben gets back to Pawnee, he starts to reckon with the fact that First Gentleman is a job title, not a job description. And he doesn’t actually know what he wants that description to be.

Leslie, meanwhile, is having to deal with the fact that she can’t everything at once—and that she hasn’t made much progress on what was once her signature goal, turning the pit behind Ann’s house into a park. April, whose love for animals moved her enthusiasm meter a tick last season, has finally seized on a project she cares about: the creation of a dog park. And the best location is the former pit. Leslie is torn, thrilled to see April, who, as she explains to Ron later in an attempt at disgusing the situation, “He’s smart and he’s beautiful, and I think of him in many ways as a daughter,” showing some ambition. “Can you say per capita again?” she asks gleefully. “I want to take a picture of you saying per capita!” But as is often the case with Leslie, she doesn’t see her way around the corner that April’s proposal presents, seeing only the threat of April’s proposal rather than the chance for them to combine projects. “That lot is mine,” she tells April, trying to justify the fact that she hasn’t done anything with the lot. “I’ve been doing slow, painstaking work. I don’t want to whip out the legalese on you, but I got dibs.”

It’s nice to have an episode where Leslie’s problem is one of her own creation, but also one that gives her an opportunity to figure out how to do what she hasn’t done so far this season—maneuver effectively on City Council. Councilman Jamm, who’s caused Leslie so much trouble earlier in the season, cleverly maneuvers to take advantage of the rift between Leslie and April, promising to back the dog park proposal, only to reneg and suggest selling the land to a Paunchburger franchise because “You don’t even have to be Asian to do math that simple.” But his perfidy—aided by an Ann Perkins-lead intervention and vow that “No one leaves the Octagon!”—brings the two back together with the obvious idea that a dog park and a human park would double the constituency for the pit project. They discover Jamm’s weakness is his yard—”Get that thing off my gnome!” he orders one of the dogs and humans who invade it for lack of a real park—and get him to give them 90 days to make their proposal work. Leslie’s reinvigoration is a delight to see, and her “I just said let’s get to work. How else do people enjoy things?” is perhaps the line of Leslie’s I’ve most identified with in a long string of Lesleyisms.

Tom, meanwhile, is discovering that having a genuinely strong idea for a business isn’t actually the same thing as getting it off the ground. He may tell Ben that “We specialize in making stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks,” and his Ron-vetted business plan may be strong. But that doesn’t mean, particularly given Tom’s streak of failures, that he has either the credibility to automatically attract the kinds of backers he really needs to get Rent-a-Swag up and running. And of course it’s frustrating for him to watch Ben’s efforts on his behalf do more to demonstrate Ben’s competence than to move his business forward. Sweetums wants Ben to run their foundation. Channel 46 tells Ben “We’re launching a new political chat show and we need correspondents.” But they manage to help each other. Ben helps Tom reconcile himself to the prospect of the work it’ll take to get his first real, legitimate business off the ground, and Tom reminds Ben that even though accounting is a stable career, “If it was remotely interesting there would be a show on A&E about it.” In the end, they decide to take a gamble together. Or as Ben puts it, “Life is short. Why be an accountant? Except for the stability and the benefits and the above-average pay. Oh, God, this better work out.”

While Ben’s figuring out that he has no idea what he wants to do, Andy is coming to terms with the fact that his dream of being a Pawnee police officer may be less Bert Macklin, FBI, and a little bit more Louis C.K. “Andy, I love your enthusiasm, but we don’t have the resources to launch an expansive investigation,” Chris warns him when he lays out an elaborate plan to catch the thief who’s stealing City Hall’s terrible computers. “This is what most police work is, just writing stuff down,” the officer Andy’s reporting the crime to explains to him. “Maybe you should do something else?” Andy’s still convinced that part of his dream is alive, telling Chris “I get a gun and I can point it at people’s faces!” only to have Chris tell him: “Incorrect.” Andy’s sense of wonder has carried him through a lot of life, even through his marriage to April, in whose studied distaste for everything he sees awesomesauce. But it might be time for him to have a similar reckoning with the prospect of adult employment, and I wonder how he’ll change as a result.

*Also, the Joe Biden cameo was just obviously awesome. Leslie lecturing the Secret Service that “You are guarding precious cargo!” is just straight-up delightful.

The bridge is yours.

-All the academic movements that have claimed Twilight.

-Why we’re going to have Transformers in China.

-More on this later, but Jim Poniewozik is right about how good Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl is.

-Is it really so hard to think of a single woman who could direct a new Star Wars movie?

-This looks too nice to be fathomed:

As I wrote yesterday—and have said many times before—I’m deeply uncomfortable with many of the ideas in the Twilight series. But it’s easy for people to forget that those aren’t the only novels Stephenie Meyer ever wrote, and if they do, for them to assume that The Host, her science fiction novel, is as unnerving as Twilight. It’s not. In fact, while far from perfect, there’s some genuinely interesting world-building and stories about alien species in the novel. And I’m excited for the movie in part because it’s about how corrosive it is to deny someone control of their body and their mental autonomy:

The story is told from the perspective of Wanderer, a Soul, a member of an alien species that seizes control of the bodies of the species on planets it invades. But the Souls find that humans have stronger wills than great whales, or sentient flowers. And in particular, Wanderer discovers that Melanie, the woman whose body she occupies, has memories and a will, and is struggling to survive as an autonomous, uncontrolled being. Wanderer eventually comes to sympathize with her, and even to try to find a way to give Melanie control over her body and life again. And though there is a love triangle in the novels, it’s a much more nuanced one between Melanie/Wanderer, Jared, the man who loved Melanie before her body was given over to Wanderer, and Ian, who comes to love Wanderer for herself. It’s an important corrective to the drive towards bodily negation of Twilight, though I don’t know how much crossover there is between the readerships of each set of books. But if you were tempted to dismiss The Host because of who wrote it, it’s worth reconsidering at least the movie, even if you don’t want to commit to the novel.

I’ve always found the controversy over so-called Fake Geek Girls more than a little preposterous, given the variety inherent in geekdom. My midichlorian count may be off the scales when it comes to Star Wars, but I’ll freely admit that my favorite Star Trek movie is the one with the whales, in part for its SDS references. I haven’t read the Wheel of Time, but I’m probably the mainstream feminist critic who’s spent the most time over the last few years writing about A Song Of Ice And Fire. And for anyone who doesn’t want to stamp my geek card until I’ve satisfied his or her knowledge of his favorite franchise, I’ll show you mine as soon as you break down the treatment of social inequality in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall novels. There is no Grand High Geek Council issuing citizenship papers, no border fence, and that’s one of my favorite things about joining the particular voluntary communities that have been so important to me over the years.

But it’s become clear that there are a lot of people who would like there to be. And the debate over whether there are women who are “fake geeks” or not has become a proxy for the conversation. The thing is, though, at the root of this conversation isn’t really about the inclusion of women, or certain kinds of women, in geekdom. It’s about a slow and uneven shift in which some geeks and some kinds of geekdom have accumulated an enormous amount of social capital. And that shift has revealed that we don’t always know how to spend it wisely, magnanimously, or in ways that don’t repeat the ugly marginalization of geeks that came before.

In a post on io9, Rachel Edidin, who is an associate editor at Dark Horse Comics explains why some geeks, like those who complain that female cosplayers only want attention—by which, of course, they mean those women only want certain kinds of attention and want to draw certain boundaries about how they’re treated in costume—explains why fandoms and geek communities can be so resistant to change:

Geek culture is a haven for guys who can’t or don’t want to fall in step with the set of cultural trappings and priorities of traditional manhood in America. At least in theory, geek culture fosters a more cerebral and less violent model of masculinity, supported by a complementary range of alternative values. But the social cost of that alternative model—chosen or imposed—is high, and it’s often extorted violently—socially or physically. The fringe is a scary place to live, and it leaves you raw and defensive, eager to create your own approximation of a center. Instead of rejecting the rigid duality of the culture they’re nominally breaking from, geek communities intensify it, distilled through the defensive bitterness that comes with marginalization. And so masculinity is policed incredibly aggressively in geek communities, as much as in any locker room or frat house.

It’s tremendously difficult to make the transition from being culturally powerless to being culturally powerful. And it’s even harder when a societal shift happens, when Steve Jobs is everyone’s favorite CEO, J.J. Abrams can do whatever he wants in film and television, when hackers become heroes and supervillians, and those social inversions don’t actually filter all the way down. Just because lots of geeky traits, like knowledge about technology, obsessive interest, and superheroes, have become assets doesn’t mean that, say, our preferred male body types have radically shifted, or that, movies like 21 Jump Street aside, high school’s shrugged off the quarterback of the football team for the captain of the Mathletes, or that on OkCupid, a figurine collection is suddenly more valuable than a job on Wall Street. Geeks are getting asked to be magnanimous, to be self-reflected, to open up communities as if they possess privilege that it may not always feel like they do. Of course, the question of whether you feel like you have privilege isn’t solely determinative of whether you do, and whether it’s acknowledged or not, having your cultural fantasies catered to is a kind of privilege. But the point remains: the range of how much social capital and privilege individual geeks have is gigantic. And that makes it very hard to move a community as a whole.
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