Now that Netflix is back up after its deeply unfortunate Christmas outage, there’s a lot of discussion of underrated holiday movies floating around the Twittersphere, and a consensus seems to be emerging around Gremlins. And because no on else has said it, I want to offer a few words in praise of the 2005 Christmas dramedy The Family Stone.

The easiest way to characterize the emotional tone of the movie is to say that it’s the perfect film for people who loved the sad, true parts of Love, Actually more than the dancing prime minister or the Portugese lessons. But more precisely, it’s a holiday story about what happens when you get what you thought want, and find out that it isn’t really what you were looking for at all. And that’s probably why it’s not more popular. This is not a story about a renewal of faith on a single night in Bedford Falls, or six weeks that lead everyone to marvelous realizations. It’s about a holiday visit where people confront the work they have to do to actually become happier people, and reconcile themselves to the insurmountable nature of certain obstacles, like a bad recurrence of breast cancer—and it’s often uncomfortable.

Sarah Jessica Parker is Meredith, a stiff, if successful, woman, who accompanies her boyfriend Everett (Dermot Mulroney) home for the holidays. Her style is a terrible match for his (sometimes self-congratulatory, even snidely) liberal family, and they for her. Little conflicts arise over things like Everett’s mother Sybil’s (Diane Keaton) decision to put Everett and Meredith in the same bedroom, though Meredith’s been raised to think it’s impolite for a unmarried couple to share a bed on a visit, or the intrusion of politics into a dinner-time conversation. Over the course of the weekend, Meredith becomes convinced both that she does not want to marry Everett and that he is planning to propose to her: the scene in which the events that lead her to that conclusion is genuinely painful. Sometimes the happiest ending is for two people not to end up together, a situation that’s often shunted aside in American movies though the road to that point is rich with drama, and it’s both difficult and fascinating to watch The Family Stone get there.

And while it can be a prickly movie, The Family Stone can also be a tender one. It’s one of the few movies I can think of to treat a woman, like Sybil, who has had a double mastectomy, as if she’s still a sexual, sensual being. Rachel McAdams, as Everett’s sharp-tongued sister April, is very good as someone who tells herself she’s defending her family, but in reality, is at least partially motivated by her intense dislike for Meredith. And Claire Danes, who starred in Shopgirl earlier that year, does fine work as Meredith’s sister, who both loves Meredith and finds herself drawn to Everett’s family’s more relaxed style.

Most Christmas or holiday movies let us look at these events as what we wish they were, a time when all our hopes and dreams are fulfilled, all our wounds bound up by the momentum and balm of the season. The Family Stone is about Christmas as it really is, a time when we make mistakes, hurt each other, and try to make amends, in part because we’re all trying so hard to make everything go right.

The first thing I did after getting home last night was to go to a performance of A Christmas Celtic Sojourn, an amazing group performance put on by Brian O’Donovan of WGBH up here in Boston. It’s a totally tremendous performance, and I highly recommend making it a stop on your holiday calendar next year, if you’re in the area. But I particularly wanted to pull out this poem, which O’Donovan read towards the end of the show, because it reminds me that, while I spend a lot of time writing about art’s ability to help us work through the worst in human nature, it can also be a light that holds back the darkness. More of that in 2013, I think:

Though There Are Torturers
by Michael Coady

Though there are torturers in the world
There are also musicians.
Though, at this moment,
Men are screaming in prisons,
There are jazzmen raising storms
Of sensuous celebration,
And orchestras releasing
Glories of the Spirit.

Though the image of God
Is everywhere defiled,
A man in West Clare
Is playing the concertina,
The Sistine Choir is levitating
Under the dome of St. Peter’s,
And a drunk man on the road
Is singing, for no reason.

I have my reservations about year-end lists—though I contributed to several, including HitFix’s TV Critics poll and Salon’s year in review, which will be out on Friday, this fall—because I have trouble distilling my pleasure in popular culture down to numerical rankings, much less picking ten of the things I liked in any category of entertainment out of the many things I loved this year. But I’ve had an awful lot of fun at the movies, in front of my television, and with my nose buried in books this year. So here are 65 of my favorite—not necessarily the best, but the things that gave me the most joy and food for thought—television shows, movies, books, documentaries, and people, places and things from 2012, with the caveat that I haven’t seen a number of things I expect to like very much, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. If you’re looking for a fun way to while away the hours over the next week—I’m off until January 2—all of these things come highly recommended.

Television

Alphas: The most charming superhero show anywhere on television, with one of the smartest, insightful portrayals of a character on the autism spectrum anywhere on television.

Appropriate Adult: Dominic West is terrifying as British serial killer Fred West in this British mini about West and the woman assigned to be his Appropriate Adult, a figure present at police interviews with people who may not be ruled competent.

Avatar: The Legend of Korra: This time out, the Avatar gets to be a teenage girl named Korra, and Republic City became the setting for terrific explorations of political extremism, self-sacrifice, and the greater good.

Bent: Cancelled far too soon and a victim of NBC’s scheduling department, this charming look at a stressed-out lawyer, her contractor, his poser of a father, and her daughter was one of the nicest shows I’ve seen on television in a long time—and that’s a compliment.

Breaking Bad: If only for Jesse Pinkman desperately trying to complement Skyler White’s cooking, I would have put the best show on television on this list. But as Breaking Bad winds down, the show has only gotten more visually potent, and more emotionally and morally terrifying.

Community: It could have ended this season and been marvelous—the video game! The Law and Order parody!—but I’m glad the Greendale study group will be back in February.

Game of Thrones: Do I need to justify this one? HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novels is beginning to edit them in smart ways, and has just gotten more emotionally rich and visually ambitious as it’s gone on.

Girls: The most emotionally precise show on television, with Robyn and accurate women’s health information in the mix.

Happy Endings: Eliza Coupe is a demented genius, and so is the show she stars on, the best live-action cartoon anywhere on television.

Homeland: It danced a Saul-inspired Hora all over my soul in the back half of the season. But damn if I don’t love seeing this group of actors at work, even if I wish they were being given material more fitting their talents.

The Hour: The show The Newsroom desperately wanted to be, and the one we all need so badly about what it takes to do truly hard, ambitious reporting, and to get it on the air.

Justified: The best exploration, anywhere in pop culture, of what it means to be a Southern man. Also, the funniest drama on television. Also, Walton Goggins.

Key & Peele: The best Obama impression anywhere, and a great, nuanced exploration of race, faith, and gender.

The L.A. Complex: Andra Fuller should get an Emmy nomination for his performance of coming-out-rapper Kaldrick King. And everyone who wants to know how Hollywood works should be watching.

Lost Girl: The heir to Charmed in the best, cheesiest, bisexual-succubus-y way possible.

Nashville: Team Juliette all the way, in this fascinating exploration of how the process of making music actually works.

Parks and Recreation: Leslie’s road to City Council was smartly observed and beautifully acted, and writer Aisha Muharrar is crushing it in the episodes she’s written this fall.

Political Animals: A soapy female power fantasy, and prep for Hillary 2016.

Sons of Anarchy: There’s still too much plot in this FX drama, but it’s never felt more like the brutal update to Hamlet it was always meant to be, and the strong cast is hitting its stride.

Treme: This was the year I gave in to the profound sensual pleasures of David Simon’s meditation on integrity and kindness in post-Katrina New Orleans.
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The sports world has been filled with tributes to the victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre, in which 27 people, including 20 children, were shot and killed. But while many athletes have chosen to honor the victims on their shoes and leagues have held moments of silence before games, two legendary men’s college basketball coaches took the opportunity to speak out about gun control.

Nobody would have faulted Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim for turning his post-game press conference into a celebration Monday, after he became just the third men’s Division I coach to win 900 games in a career. Instead, he chose to take on a topic that he knew would “offend some people” and called for tough restrictions on assault weapons:

“This will probably offend some people. If we in this country as Americans cannot get the people that represent us to do something about firearms, we are a sad, sad society. I’m a hunter. I’ve hunted. I’m not talking about rifles. That’s fine. If one person in this world — the NRA president, anybody — can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots in the thing. This is our fault. This is my fault and your fault. All of your faults if we don’t get out and do something about this.”

“If we can’t get this thing done — I’m with the mayor of New York City [Michael Bloomberg] — if we can’t get this thing done, I don’t know what kind of country we have. This is about us. This isn’t about the president or those other people down there [in DC]. We have to make them understand somehow that this needs to get figured out. Real quick. Not six months from now.”

Tuesday, Boeheim was echoed by Jim Calhoun, the retired University of Connecticut head coach who won three national championships and still lives in Storrs, just 70 miles from the Newtown school where the massacre took place:

“I don’t think there’s any politics about gun control,” the former UConn coach said. “In my opinion, nobody should have an automatic weapon unless they’re…protecting the country. The idea that children would be faced with that, or teachers that were trying to help them…there are other things in my lifetime that I can explain — a distraught kid, a fired employee. But this is so nonsensical.

We’re not asking to take away people’s rights. The right to bear arms was put in there for tyranny, the fact that the government could come back and abuse us…As a former American history teacher, I can tell you it wasn’t put in for us to shoot each other.”

Boeheim and Calhoun have always been known as frank, outspoken coaches, but they’ve been joined by coaches who don’t all come with that brand. Villanova’s Jay Wright spoke out against assault weapons on Twitter, and Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey delivered a heartfelt post-game speech after his team’s loss to Ohio State on Tuesday, saying now was “a time for change,” though he wasn’t sure if it was a “gun issue,” a “mental illness issue,” or something else.

But the prevalence of assault weapons shouldn’t be the only focus of coaches in college basketball and football. Not given the deep-seeded relationship between guns and athletes. “The sports world is filled with athletes at every level of competition who have been wounded, killed, lost loved ones, or otherwise been victimized by guns – or who have had their lives changed forever by turning to guns themselves,” the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence wrote in a report on guns in sports. “Entire rosters could be filled with star players who have been adversely affected by guns in some way.”

If coaches want to be real “agents of change,” as Kelsey said he would be, they won’t just speak out against gun violence when it is in the news or when the cameras are on them (though they are of course welcome to). They should also embrace their role as educators and role models for the 18- to 22-year-old young men they coach every day, and educate them of the dangers firearms pose not just to themselves but to their families and friends, and push them to avoid the trappings of the gun culture that is so prevalent in sports at the collegiate and especially the professional level, where many of their players hope to be one day. And perhaps they can take a page from Charlie Strong, the University of Louisville football coach who has not spoken out about the Newtown tragedy but has a “NO GUNS” policy for members of his team and preaches the policy as a core value of his program.

It’s great that coaches want to speak out on important issues. Here’s hoping they also take action on those issues in the areas where they can.

The bridge is yours.

-Game of Thrones will have longer episodes in its third season.

-Mind, blown (also, now I feel old): Homeland‘s Mike is in Mean Girls.

-I wish Jason Schwartzman was going to play his Moonrise Kingdom character on Parks and Recreation, but I’ll take him as a video rental store owner, too.

-The case for parents playing video games with their children.

-Homeland needs to replace its only female writer.

This morning, Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced legislation in the Senate “to arrange for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games and violent programming on children.” It’s depressing to see lawmakers rushing after diversions in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when the conversations we ought to be having should be about gun control and mental health treatment, among other structural factors. And it’s even worse when you consider that Rockefeller’s wholly redundant bill has hit the floor of Congress before any gun legislation was introduced.

Part of what makes Rockefeller’s request that the National Academy study video game violence so frustrating to watch is that the Academy’s done just this before. The 1999 Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children Protection Act included a provision that had the Secretary of Education contract the Academy to study the origins of school violence, including “the impact of cultural influences and exposure to the media, video games, and the Internet.” Katherine Newman, the Johns Hopkins professor who lead up that team, wrote in Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, her later book on the subject, that “Millions of young people play video games full of fistfights, blazing guns, and body slams. Bodies litter the floor in many of our most popular films. Yet only a minuscule fraction of the consumers become violent. Hence, if there is an effect, children are not all equally susceptible to it.” In other words, finding out why a very small number of consumers are overly influenced by popular culture may be more useful than trying to measure the uneven and diffuse influence of movies, television shows, and games.

And that isn’t the only work the National Academy has done on video games and other media. The National Academies Press has published Deadly Lessons, a study of school shootings, that is non-committal on the question of whether there is a causal link between consuming violent media and violent behavior. Academics have presented literature reviews of the work on media’s influence on children and young adults to the National Academies of Science National Research Council Board on Children, Youth and Families. This is not a question the National Academy needs prodding from Sen. Rockefeller to consider, or that’s been ignored by other research organizations.

But it is a question the National Rifle Association and other gun control opponents would love to see energy diverted to. In a Fox News story about the NRA’s much-delayed press conference that suggested the lobby would seek to shift the debate to culture rather than to weapons bans, an anonymous source was quoted as saying: “If we’re going to talk about the Second Amendment, then let’s also talk about the First Amendment, and Hollywood, and the video games that teach young kids how to shoot heads.” That’s different from the kind of measured research that might debunk a causal link between entertainment and shootings. But it demonstrates how easily this sort of conversation can be employed as camouflage.

I have no objection to the idea that we should take the time to consider issues carefully and to introduce closely tailored legislation that will best address our policy needs. And at least Rockefeller’s bill calls for a study, rather than, say, banning first-person shooter games outright. But if the lawmakers who represent us are going to rush to respond to urgent social problems to score political credit, it would be nice if they prioritized substance instead of distractions.

I’m always up for modernizing Nielsen ratings, but this new measurement the organization is rolling out isn’t exactly what I was looking for:

Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will measure the total audience for social TV activity, including participants and users who are exposed to the activity. According to Nielsen, this will provide the “precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.”

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen, said in a statement. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”

According to Nielsen, the Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings. The tool is described as “giving TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity.”

I get that networks want to see what kind of buzz their shows are generating. But it’s a measure of real-time engagement, which is the same measurement that’s been rendered so much less useful by the rise of DVRs and high-quality, legal streaming sites. And as anyone who has been dismayed by the gap between, say, the volume of Twitter conversation about a cult sitcom like Community and the actual ratings for that show, I think it would ultimately be much more useful to the survival of beloved but low-rated programs to measure the real viewership of those programs more comprehensively. To incorporate more data, Nielsen would have to trust self-reporting from legal streaming services like Hulu, and would have to work out windows for those reports to be delivered and combined with DVR data. But it would be much more useful for networks, and for those of us who love shows where we fear enthusiasm for them isn’t being captured by the current ratings system, especially those like the CW with younger audiences who are watching more television streaming and on mobile devices, to be able to sell package ad deals across platforms, than to know what people talk about Twitter on any given night.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I like Big Boi and Kelly Rowland’s “Mama Told Me” so much, other than the fact that it’s an utterly irresistible, summery jam that came out just as winter’s descending:

I think it’s mostly that it reminds me of a piece I’d like to see a hip-hop historian write, about the shift from sampling, which renders the sampled voice, be it male or female, passive, to the much more prevalent practice now of having female artists record original hooks and choruses for hip-hop songs that renders so many of them effective duets.

This is, of course, not, a new phenomenon. Jewell, in an oral history of The Chronic published last month in honor of the album’s twentieth anniversary reflected on her role in bringing women’s voices into hip-hop songs, saying ” It all worked. My singin’ over their hard rap lyrics; rap had never accepted that before. I put my soft, sultry R&B singing on their records. Now every rapper has to have a female on their songs.” My regular Twitter interlocutor Soul Honky, to whom I am much indebted suggested an earlier structural explanation: that the popularity of “It Takes Two,” which heavily sampled singer Lyn Collins, prompted a crackdown on sampling that made it legally and financially more expedient to have a female singer record original vocals for a track.

Whatever the origin is, there’s something fascinating about the fact that hip-hop, a genre that gets slammed for the misogyny of its lyrics by legitimate commentators and concern trolls alike, with hugely varying degrees of fairness, is also probably the kind of music that puts men and women in musical conversation within the same song with the greatest frequency. Part of what’s fun about “Mama Told Me” is listening to Rowland’s voice spill out from the limitations of the Solange-level-sunny chorus to take over the song in its second half. Part of what’s fun about listening to Estelle’s “American Boy” is to hear Kanye West, or at least the character he’s playing, flirt with Estelle based on the characteristics she’s laid out for what she’s looking for in a man. As a feminist, one of the reasons I love hip-hop so much is that it’s fun to hear men and women talking to each other instead of past each other, the way they so often seem to be doing in traditional pop and rock.

I’m all for viable funding mechanisms for projects, artistic and otherwise, that couldn’t get greenlit through conventional means. But as a CNN Money analysis of the top fifty most-funded projects on Kickstarter has discovered, enthusiasm for an idea doesn’t remotely translate to the ability to deliver on promises:

CNNMoney contacted the creators of the 50 highest-funded Kickstarter campaigns with estimated delivery dates of November 2012 or earlier to determine their shipping status. We found that only eight of those 50 projects hit their deadline. Sixteen of the 50 projects haven’t yet shipped. Among the 26 projects that shipped but went out late, the median delay was two months, although some outliers took much longer. The most delayed project in our data set, a home espresso machine being developed by ZPM Espresso, is nine months overdue and doesn’t expect to ship until mid-2013.

“To say we’ve learned a lot about engineering, design, manufacturing, marketing and customer service is … well … an understatement so extreme as to be laughable,” ZPM Espresso’s founders wrote in a recent update to their Kickstarter backers.

I’d hate to see donors start to turn away from the project of investments after getting burned, and I wonder if it’s time to start considering some restrictions that could lower the failure rate. In addition to setting a floor for the amount of money projects have to raise to go forward, maybe Kickstarter could offer an option to set a ceiling on the number of donations or donors a project will allow. That would both create a sense of urgency to get investors in the door, and set certain limits on the number of products that a producer, like the people behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, who intended to produce them by hand and had to figure out alternate, larger-scale production when they were deluged by orders that have lead to significant delays, can be required to deliver.

It’s probably also important to consider the question of refunds. If producers are about to blow deadlines, either a voluntary notification system that gives donors the option of withdrawing their investment, or a more structured appeals system that requires producers to justify the delays or be forced to refund donations to investors who want them. I’m sure these are not processes Kickstarter is interested in getting involved with, given the manpower they’d required, the fact that enforcement would probably scare some users off the site, and the dilution of the simplicity of the site in connecting inventors to investors. But preserving user confidence on the donor side may require that Kickstarter do some work to make sure the people pitching projects on it are actually capable of delivering.

Note: This post discusses plot points from the Hunger Games trilogy, Harry Potter, and Song of Ice and Fires series.

The death of Katniss’ sister Prim is the emotional climax of the Hunger Games trilogy: She dies a martyr, caught in a wave of explosives designed to target first-responders while working as a medic on the front lines of the final clash between the rebellion and the government in the Capital City. While there’s some dispute about who was behind her death, and whether it was necessary, there is no question left in most readers mind’s that the tactic used was monstrous. And yet outside the realm of young adult fiction, U.S. drone strikes uses a very similar tactic known as the “double tap,” against terror targets.

 

A joint report from Stanford/NYU on U.S. Drone policy released in September noted:

“There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,” in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike.

The same pattern emerged in @dronestream’s tweets of U.S. drone strikes from 2002-2012. So, while whether or not the double tap is official U.S. policy remains unclear due to the secrecy surrounding much of the U.S. drone policy, all of the evidence suggests the U.S. repeatedly employed a tactic that results in first-responder casualties. And it’s not just a questionable tactic: UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns calls the second strike in a double tap akin to a war crime. But while there are efforts to bring armed drone strikes “out of the shadows” for a larger conversation and widespread disapproval of U.S. strikes in the global community, there’s no sign of major changes to U.S. drone strike strategies on the horizon.

Of course, it’s not hard to understand why it’s easier to see the inhumanity of using tactics that hit first responders when the person in question is the protagonist of your favorite series’ sister (whose protection was the catalyst for the entire trilogy’s plot) than when those rescuers are people you’ve never heard of half a world away. By its very nature literature builds empathetic bonds between readers and sympathetic characters; we get to know them, care about them, and mourn for them if they’re lost. But literature can also explore our own humanity and help us have challenging discussions about the morality of the world we live in and the policies formalizing that morality.

And “double tap” is just one of many examples of the disconnect between the ideal morality we hold high (and try to teach our youth through young adult fiction) and the policies that define our culture. In the Harry Potter series using the torture curse, Cruciatus, carries one of the harshest penalties in the Wizarding world (though one that doesn’t appear to apply to our protagonist when he uses it in the name of good). But in our real world, the U.S. government used extraordinary rendition tactics a European Court recently said “amounted to torture” against a terror suspect and relied on “enhanced interrogation tactics,” the nasty euphemism for torture, throughout much of the war on terror.

Straying out of young adult fiction, A Song of Ice and Fire’s Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane is a brutal character living in a brutal world, but one of his most well known atrocities is the murder of two royal children during the collapse of House Targaryen. Even in this context, the moral characters such as Ned Stark think of the murder of the children (and the rape of their mother) as an ugly stain on Robert Baratheon’s rebellion, even if they acknowledge it as politically expedient. In our real world, most people’s gut reaction is that there is no context when the wholesale slaughter of children can be justified. And yet there are rumblings that children are being considered legitimate targets by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after a current military officer was quoted in a piece published in The Military Times titled “Some Afghan Children Aren’t Bystanders.”

There’s no question that these characters, and these bad acts, all provoke powerful moral reactions in readers. But it’s not clear yet whether these stories shape their fans’ opinions off the page as well as on it. As a generation of young adults grows up both on protracted American involvement in ugly conflicts abroad and fiction that tries to outline moral laws of war, it’ll be fascinating to see whether their moral imaginations stay fired after they close books and walk out of movie screenings.

In the wake of the murder of elementary school students and their teachers, as well as the mother of the shooter, Nancy Lanza, in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, Hollywood has struggled to demonstrate sensitivity in its programming and premieres. The Weinstein Company cancelled the Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s characteristically violent revenge period drama Django Unchained, which ends with a bloody gun battle at a slaveholding plantation. Though its finale depicted an act of terrorism rather than gun violence (though such violence was threatened, but did not emerge), Homeland put up a title card before the episode began that warned that some images in the show might be disturbing in light of the Newtown massacre. And shows from Family Guy to Best Funeral Ever have postponed episodes until later dates. It’s one thing for networks and studios to observe a mourning period. But the more interesting question is whether the massacre will prompt longer-term changes in the kind of material Hollywood considers both marketable and appropriate.

In a series of Tweets, Time television critic James Poniewozik laid out the problem with these short-term measures. “THR: TLC delaying BEST FUNERAL EVER bc of Newtown shootings. Apparently becomes appropriate again Jan 6,” he wrote in a series of messages. “This recurrent thing, postponing shows bc of sensitivities–I get it. But resist the idea that something is ‘inappropriate’ for like 2 weeks…Either it’s inappropriate in general or it’s not.” There’s something sadly perceptive in the cynicism of that proscribed period of sensitivity. Hollywood’s acting on the recognition that after these increasingly-common tragedies, the members of their audience not directly affected by the deaths are hyper-cautious for a brief period, call for changes in all sorts of culture and policy, and then return to their preexisting level of sensitivity and allow those demands for a different path to peter out. The studios that have pulled or labeled programming or cancelled events are acting like savvy marketers, rather than like moral agents.

This is, of course, their prerogative and purpose as large companies. But just as it appears that President Obama and members of Congress are, for the first time in political memory, renewing the push for gun control legislation, I’m wondering whether some networks may decide to change where the line is for what they’re interested in airing.

It’s been a period of intense cruelty to children on television. On Sons of Anarchy, the children of the main character, Jax Teller, have been kidnapped and in car accidents. This season of Breaking Bad reached a turning point when Todd, a newcomer to the meth cooking operation run by Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, shot a young boy who happened upon the men in the aftermath of a train robbery, though there was little evidence that the child understood what little he had witnessed. When children aren’t the victims of extreme violence, they are often being enlisted in those acts themselves. On Game of Thrones, while Sansa Stark is beaten by grown men and threatened with sexual assault, her sister Arya, on the run and disguised as a boy, kills another child to escape from King’s Landing, and must fight in battle to protect herself. And this season on The Walking Dead, Carl Grimes both witnessed his mother’s own impromptu caesarean section and then killed her to prevent her from turning into a zombie.
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I skipped over Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, about a fictional first lady substantially based on Laura Bush, when it was released in 2008, in part because in the final year of the Bush administration, I wasn’t in a mood to feel sympathy for anyone in the first family. But when I finally read the novel, four years removed from the Bushs’ departure from public life, and four years into the Obama administration, I found myself surprisingly touched. The journey of Alice Lindgren from small-town Wisconsin, to a job teaching public school, to marriage with Charlie Blackwell, the son of a prominent family, and eventually to the White House required me to confront the extent to which I’d put aside my tendency to be curious about people because of Laura Bush’s place at her husband’s side. And while the novel holds Alice accountable for her decision to subsume her independent political and moral instincts in her husband’s public life, it also makes clear the cost that she’s paid for a decision that, from the outside and in the real world, I treated as if it was despicable and idiotic.

First, there is the car accident. In real life, Laura Bush’s accidental killing of her high school classmate, a young man who has in some cases been reported to have been a current or former boyfriend of hers, when she ran a stop sign has sometimes been treated as a sign of frivolity or self-absorption. American Wife takes seriously the prospect that the boy Alice killed was, if not her boyfriend, about to assume that role in her life. In the novel, Alice kills Andrew, who had previously dated her best friend Dana, on the way to a bonfire that would have been their first official date. “I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back,” she writes of the plan for that meeting. “Or maybe this is only what I think now. But it was all we ever had! Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library—this was when I walked down the aisle and hew as waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, ever reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.” Alice Lindgren was a person before she was First Lady, and she continues to be, even as she becomes a symbol. It’s easy to forget that people we dislike deserve that minimal courtesy.

And it’s interesting to see how people we might once have extended the courtesy of considering their actions in the most charitable light become the people we stop extending any courtesies to at all. With Alice, her withdrawal from her life as a teacher, and from the public performance of her own principals, begins when she meets Charlie, who is initially charmed by her dedication to her job as a librarian, but who has enormous reservoirs of need of his own. Alice speculates that her husband pursued office not “Because he wanted to prove that he was as smart and ambitious as his brothers, journalists speculated, or because he wanted to avenge his father’s own humiliating presidential run in 1968…[But] because of his fear of the dark. Because if he were governor, and then president, he’d be guarded by state troopers and later by agents, he’d never be far from people specifically assigned to watch out for him; he might be assassinated, but he wouldn’t have to walk down a shadowy hallway by himself.” What the novel doesn’t say is that public office also allows Alice to share the burden of Charlie once she begins to learn what kind of person he is, the contempt with which he’s regarded by his family, the enormity of his need. “I felt such an intimate kind of anger,” she thinks of him during one of their fights. “Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable? Sometimes Charlie’s gestures and inflections were so mercilessly familiar that it was as if he were an extension of me, an element of my own personality over which I had little control.” His public life allows him to direct those gestures and inflections at other people, just as the arrival of Reverend Randy, the man who counsels Charlie through his addiction and brings him to born-again Christianity, lifts the burden on Alice to support Charlie where he is most unlikable.
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The bridge is yours.

-The holiday Hark! A Vagrant is absolutely wonderful.

-James Poniewozik is not fond of The Hobbit.

-Danny Boyle declined a knighthood.

-Hulu’s revenues are up 65 percent from the previous year.

-Now you can buy Game of Thrones beer!

I think about the way journalism is portrayed in pop culture quite a bit, and yesterday for Slate, on the occasion of the swan song of Gossip Girl, I spent some time writing about how television and movies fail to deal with a phenomenon the media itself has adjusted to: bloggers. In particular, I was interested in a bit of a gender split that seems to be occurring. Female bloggers are shallow, or gossipy, or in need of tutelage by older reporters (male and female), who are presented as a distinct species. But men may have it worse: they’re crazed conspiracy theorists:

If State of Play’s portrayal of Della was irritatingly smug, the way USA’s miniseries Political Animals treated its young female blogger was downright insulting. The miniseries countered old-school journalist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino) with blogger rival Georgia Gibbons (Meghann Fahy)—not just a shallow, style-obsessed chronicler of D.C. nonsense, but a selfish slut who was sleeping with Susan’s boyfriend. To the show’s credit, Georgia at least got a shot at proving she was competent, scooping Susan on a story when Susan’s old-school focus on source development lead her to delay the news too long. But even if Georgia got the story, she was still a bad girl, if personally rather than professionally, and Susan was the hero, even if she got so cozy with her sources that she ended up sleeping with the First Lady’s son. In this formulation, reporters get a free pass on crossing ethical lines, but their blogger counterparts are dumb little girls who need to be taught valuable lessons.

Male bloggers don’t fare much better though: While their female counterparts are merely unsubstantive, men who blog for a living are loons, and sometimes ones who do enormous damage. In Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, a disgruntled blogger who keeps getting his freelance pitches turned down by a newspaper editor. When a global pandemic strikes, Alan sees his chance to become a prophet: He spreads the rumor that he’s cured himself of the disease using forsythia as an herbal remedy, and urges his readers to ignore public-health officials. His misinformation renders the population more vulnerable—including that newspaper editor, whom he leaves to die in the street—and he’s ultimately found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company eager to profit off the crisis. When, at the end of the film, Alan’s arrested, he claims he’ll be bailed out: He’s evil, but the stupidity of his followers may be even more dangerous.

Either way, it’s interesting that movies and television haven’t accommodated themselves to the idea that bloggers and journalists can actually be the same thing. Maybe now that Hollywood went gaga for Nate Silver, we’ll get hero bloggers, or at least bloggers with integrity, in a couple of development cycles. I’m guessing Jim Sturgess ends up playing Silver.

The Black List, a list of the best unshot scripts of any given year, as picked by a group of almost 300 film executives, came out yesterday afternoon. Reading through it, I was struck by some trends—lots of scripts by guys, lots of bank robberies, lots of science fiction but almost almost no fantasy. But I was intrigued by a lot of the projects on the list, and these ten which most caught my eye are just a few of the scripts that seek out political resonance, or have settings like the Dust Bowl or Bleeding Kansas.

Script: Rodham
Author: Young Il Kim
Description: “During the height of the Watergate scandal, rising star Hillary Rodham is the youngest lawyer chosen for the House Judiciary Committee to Impeach Nixon, but she soon finds herself forced to choose between a destined path to the White House and her unresolved feelings for Bill Clinton, her former boyfriend who now teaches law in Arkansas.”
Why I’m Curious: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a fascinating figure. And people have asked for years why she chose to stay with Bill Clinton, it’s an intriguing question how she chose him, and life in Arkansas, in the first place. There are a lot of movies that attempt to capture election zeitgeists, and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to see Harvey Weinstein snap this one up for a 2016 release. But this is a smarter-than-usual way to approach a figure about whom so much has written that it seems like nothing new could be revealed.

Script: Story Of Your Life
Author: Eric Heisserer
Description: “Based on the short story by Ted Chiang. When alien crafts land around the world, a linguistics expert is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.”
Why I’m Curious: I’ve written about my obsessions with smart, alternative alien invasion scenarios over and over again. It’s been fifteen years since Contact, the last great movie about trying to talk to aliens instead of immediately going to war with them, and three years since District 9. We are long overdue.

Script: Shut In
Author: Christina Hodson
Description: “A woman who tries to raise her catatonic son on her own suddenly discovers a shocking secret about him.”
Why I’m Curious: Since Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, before heading off to massacre students and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary, there’s been renewed attention to mothers raising difficult children by themselves face, and what kind of support we could give them. I’m curious to see a strong psychological portrait that examines those kinds of challenges.

Script: Man Of Tomorrow
Author: Jeremy Slater
Description: “In an alternate 1940s reality, the US Government makes a deal with an indestructible gangster to kill Hilter in exchange for the city of Chicago, which he will build into his own utopia. Unfortunately his model city never comes to fruition and both he and his Bureau liaison get much of the slack for destroying one of America’s greatest cities and now the government wants him dead.”
Why I’m Curious: Urban planning, alternate history, and killing Hitler? I’m so game.
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The National Hockey League lockout is now 93 days old, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight, at least not with both owners and the NHL Players Association turning to the legal system to maneuver through negotiations. That is certainly bad news for owners (the NHL is losing an estimated $20 million a day), for players who aren’t being paid, and for people who just want to spend their winter watching hockey.

It’s also bad news for Canadian food banks and charities, who are starting to report that their donation levels are down heading into the holidays. Many charities in Canada benefit from food drives run by teams and by bars and restaurants around arenas, but the lockout has prevented many of those food drives from happening, the Canadian Press reports:

“We’ve received calls from 23 different businesses, mostly sports bars who last year collected food for Sun Youth and this year, because of the strike, they have to lay off people,” said Tommy Kulczyk, director of emergency services at the Sun Youth community centre in Montreal.

“They’re not in the mood to do any kind of collection.”

He also noted that wives of Montreal Canadiens players had in past years organized a successful food drive at a Habs game tapping a potential 21,000 donors.

“It’s not going to happen this year.”

The obvious reaction here is to yell at players and owners to set aside their differences and get back on the ice, but I don’t think it’s useful or accurate to paint labor disputes in sports as simple fights between spoiled millionaires and billionaires. There are important issues at stake, particularly for the players who gave up so much in a lockout just eight years ago, and the outcome of a labor dispute is important whether it takes place in the NHL or at a construction company.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the nature of the sports industry means labor disputes and work stoppages can have huge impacts on people whose livelihood depends on the games being played, from arena workers to front office staff to people who depend on donations to charities. And when those games aren’t being played, it isn’t just the owners and players who have to deal with the consequences.

After Adam Lanza shot twenty young children and six of the teachers and administrators who helped educate them in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, the massacre renewed the long-dormant national debate about gun control, and sparked a complementary—and in some cases diversionary—discussion about mental health funding and treatment. But it’s also revived another old conversation, about whether video games are too violent, and whether they play a role in encouraging, desensitizing, and even preparing mass killers for their rampages.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the outgoing independent from Connecticut who has long crusaded against video game manufacturers, said in his appearance on Fox News Sunday that “The violence in the entertainment culture—particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera —does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent…Doesn’t make everybody more violent, but it’s a causative factor in some cases.” Obama senior strategist David Axelrod tweeted “”In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot ‘em up video game. All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?”

As Annalee Newitz reminds us in a valuable post at io9, there is no conclusive evidence that consuming violent games, movies, or comics leads to violent behavior in the real world. And at the Washington Post, Max Fischer ran the numbers on video game popularity in countries with much lower rates of gun violence, and found no correlation between game play and real-world violence. And there’s something deeply sophistic, in the absence of that evidence, about pivoting away from questions of effective gun control to proposals for video game regulation or condemnation. At least discussion of the mental health care system is part of a reasonable tapestry of efforts, including gun control, that we ought to be considering, if not a substitute for conversations about magazine capacities and the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. Blaming video games or any other kind of violent media for causing violence in the real world is a dodge from policy solutions. And it’s a dodge from the conversation we actually need to have about the state of our popular culture, and the profound fears about justice, disempowerment, and the state of civil society that are reflected in it. Video games are easy to target. The things that actually, truly frighten us are much harder.

One of the things I’ve been turning over in my mind in recent weeks is why the renaissance in our television is so specifically concerned with, as NPR’s Linda Holmes put it, “avoiding being violently killed” to the exclusion of other concerns like finding a satisfying place in the adult world, a loving, complimentary partner, doing good, honorable work, or being a good citizen in difficult circumstances. But as much as I feel somewhat burned out by the gouts of violence on my television, it’s true that questions about deploying violence, avoiding it, and its moral and immoral applications, permeate our political culture and lived experience today.

If you’re a woman in the United States, you’re taught from a young age that you have to be careful to avoid having sexual violence visited upon you. I cannot imagine being African-American and considering how to speak to my child about the possibility that his or her interactions with law enforcement may become deadly, or that in some areas of the country, people may feel entitled to shoot them dead on slight, and imagined, provocation. There are people in this country for whom the best way to pay for college is to enlist to be sent to a protracted war that carries with it a considerable risk that they will return maimed or brain injured. We are waging a war from the skies in which our political leadership appears to accept the deaths of children as a reasonable level of collateral damage, and where 17 percent of the pilots who actually have to carry out our drone strikes are considered “clinically distressed” by their work. As many commentators have usefully pointed out, the massacre in Newtown is deeply disturbing in part because the community was not afflicted by a constant blight of gun violence like the one that spread like rot over Chicago this summer. We’ve lived through a political election in which obvious references to the lynching of the first black president were excused away as jokes.
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The bridge is yours.

-The family gamer gift guide.

-Maureen Ryan on the characters in Homeland as drones.

-We’re getting a Zorro TV show because why not.

-How pro wrestling’s storytelling fell apart.

-More Studio Ghibli movies!

This post discusses plot points from the second season of Homeland.

“Why do I feel like this?” Carrie asks Brody as he walks off into the woods, in pursuit of a tentative hope of redemption, at the end of the second season of Homeland. “‘Cause you gave it up to me,” Brody tells her. “Completely,” Carrie confirms to him. It’s a sentiment I share about this show, which I loved without reservation in its first season. But my sentiments at the finish of this one are somewhat more complicated than “Goodbye, love.”

I thought in many respects, this episode felt like a deliberate punting of issues down the road. First, Quinn declined to kill Brody, and then, when it seemed like the episode might be setting Brody up for self-murder, a suicide that would end only his own life, and the continuing prospect of shame to his family, sent him off to have his name cleared. The show appears to feel very little regard for the fact that Brody murdered Vice President Walden. And though Brody cleared the way for Mike to take care of his family, it doesn’t seem to me like Homeland is prepared to jettison Brody’s family and clean the slate, given Dana’s miraculous deduction that her father did, in fact, intend to be a suicide bomber, and the release of Brody’s suicide tape, whether by al Qaeda or by the mole.

It seems relatively obvious at this point that Saul must be the mole. His off-hand offer to Carrie to accompany him to Abu Nazir’s send-off, combined with the close-up shots on his wary face as the bomb at the CIA exploded the moment after Brody realized that something was wrong, but before he made the connection as to what it could be, seems to confirm that, and to set up the conflict for the show’s third season. But it’s unclear to me what his motives are. Does he hate Estes so much? His joy when Mira told him she would return from Mumbai in the wake of the bombing, that almost greedy “Yes. Please,” was a lovely character moment, but this is an awfully complex way for Saul to try to heal his own broken homeland. I expect we’ll learn more about who Saul is, but I suspect I’m going to have a difficult time making the shift from understanding him as Carrie’s devoted mentor, and a man with a particular, ethical view of American intelligence, to seeing him as a criminal mastermind who says Kaddish for his victims out of a kind of twisted guilt.

I think I also have some trouble with the idea that this is going to become a show whose primary means of moral interrogation is the emotional torture of Carrie Mathison. It would be enough for me, rich, and touching, and terrifying and joyous enough to simply let Carrie try to figure out how to be a whole person as she was in the first, and best, episodes of this season. “She told my dad she was going to CVS, and she never came back,” Carrie tells Brody during their brief respite at the cabin, the only night they have together as a true, and genuinely loving couple. “He has what I have,he just wouldn’t get treated…There’d be a message in the stars and we’d have to buy a camper and drive out to the Great Lakes for the miracle.” That tragedy of her father’s mental illness is stakes enough, particularly when it expresses itself in Carrie’s self-denial. “I understand,” she explained of her mother’s decision. “Living with that can eat you up.” Her fear of what her mental illness might do to Brody, and of what it might mean to give her whole life to the CIA, would be enough to carry a season of the show for me. “Maybe I’m just not giving it away to this place,” she told Saul. “Maybe I want other things.”
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