There are a lot of pop culture landmarks that I missed as a result of growing up largely without a television and with a cultural worldview that was obsessively centered on books for the first eighteen years of my life to the exclusion of almost everything else. As longtime readers of this blog will know, that’s something that I try to make up for, mixing in classics with a firehose-like stream of new movies, television shows, books, and movies. And over the winter break, I knocked one of the titans off the list when I finally sat down to watch The Godfather. It’s a tremendous movie, and watching it made me want to revisit an unexpected but surprisingly logical companion piece: the 1994 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

If The Godfather is about Michael Corleone’s inability to escape his father’s business, and about men’s desire to become their fathers, Little Women is about the ways women help their daughters transcend their own experiences. Just as women are nearly invisible figures in The Godfather, from the passivity of Vito’s wife to the movie’s relatively slim treatment of Kay’s motivations for accepting Michael’s proposal after his return, men are relatively secondary figures in Little Women. The girls’ father and Marmee’s husband is absent for almost the entire first half of the novel and the movie, Mr. Lawrence, their wealthy next-door neighbor is a kindly but distant patriarch, his son Laurie is an interloper, if a beloved one, and Mr. Brooke and Professor Bhaer are suitors rather than fully-developed characters.

Instead, the main drama is between the sisters themselves, and in the question of their mother’s hopes for them. Where Vito Corleone dreams that his son Michael will become not just legitimate, but a legitimate leader in society, Marmee harbors more modest aspirations, governed by both gender and time period, for her little women. She hopes that her daughters will be able to marry for love, that they’ll have the opportunity to see something of the world beyond Concord. All of Vito’s dreams are frustrated, his son Sonny is gunned down while doing the family’s work, his adopted son Tom enters the family business even though his ethnicity might have excluded him from it, his great hope Michael kills a police officer and a Mafia rival and ends up becoming the next Don Corleone, and his son Fredo ends up dead on Michael’s orders.

But in their own ways, Marmee’s daughters fulfill her aspirations. Meg, her oldest, marries modestly, but for true love, and for a husband who is more present in her life than Marmee’s husband was in hers, and who, unlike Meg’s father, doesn’t impose difficulties on the family in pursuit of his political ideals. Beth dies young, a fate no mother would choose for her daughter, but she leaves the world in a perfect and brave communion with her family’s Christian ideals. Amy, her youngest, marries both well and for love, gaining security for her whole family without compromising her ideals. And Jo, her second-oldest daughter, travels furthest beyond the bounds of the role proscribed of her as a woman, tasting modest literary success and finding a husband who eventually helps her found a school where she educates the scions of wealthy families in a way that comports with Marmee’s ideals and also gives poorer children an opportunity for social promotion and intellectual advancement.

In a way, and certainly not intentionally, these very disparate works have ended up capturing the dynamics of masculinity and feminism that we live in today. Women have, through very difficult work, carved out new paths for ourselves and passed them down to the generations of women that have followed after us. Men keep getting handed down the same old archetypes of how to be a man, the same demands to avenge violence done against their families, to provide, to take responsibility that isn’t theirs, to pass judgement, to provide strength. We’ve got a lot of culture that argues that this is a tragedy in and of itself and that it can lead to dreadful ends, that the diversion of Michael’s considerable talents from the sphere where they were supposed to be useful—American public life—to another one where they’re applicable—organized crime—is a terrible waste, that the rechanneling of Walter White’s talents from science and teaching to meth production results in monstrosity. But we don’t have enough triumphs and new models, enough stories of boys growing beyond their fathers in a way that produces incredible joy for both parties. It’s no mistake that Louisa May Alcott, who gave us Little Women gave us her Little Men, the story of a woman who, having transcended the limits laid out for her, raises surrogate sons who are allowed to be more than angry, more than greedy, more than merely brave.

I wrote yesterday about how darkly, sickly hilarious it is that National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre decided to try to divert calls for gun control by blaming decades-old pop culture ephemera like Mortal Combat and American Psycho for recent mass gun killings. And after I hit publish on that post, the Hollywood Reporter pointed out an even more pointed hypocrisy: the NRA may hope that everyone blames media violence for inspiring killings, rather than guns for being the instruments of them, but it’s had multiple exhibits celebrating famous movie weapons at its National Firearms Museum, and apparently has no immediate plans to take the current one down.

Media Matters for America, jumping on the case, grabbed an amazing video of Phil Schreier, the curator of the NRA Museum, talking about the exhibit, which has since been deleted from the NRA’s YouTube feed:

Notably, he doesn’t exactly draw a distinction between the guns employed by good, law-abiding citizens, and badass, deeply transgressive villains: guns used for mayhem against innocent civilians are apparently just as awesome as guns used by law-abiding citizens in self-defense or officers of the peace in pursuit of criminals. “We have the Joker’s shotgun, the one that Heath Ledger used in The Dark Knight, a role that he won the academy award for,” Schreier says. “And speaking of Academy Awards, we have the silent shotgun that Javier Bardem used in No Country For Old Men.”

Now, maybe the NRA has reversed itself and decided that it no longer wants to be seen expressing enthusiasm for the Joker’s gun and his deployment of it the week before the preliminary hearings in the trial of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, who reportedly drew inspiration from Ledger’s depiction of the Joker for his attack on the audience of a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Maybe it’s going to pull the exhibit in accordance with its new principals, and stop selling the catalogue of it, Hollywood Guns, for $14.95 in the museum gift shop. Maybe the NRA’s member companies will have a massive change of heart, and stop licensing images of their products for use in films and video games, on the grounds that no one should see a gun being used to commit violence against innocent people or authority figures who are portrayed as duplicitous in a way that’s framed as admirable, lest they be inspired to commit bad acts of their own in the real world.

Or maybe they’ll ultimately conclude that it’s worth more money to them to keep people showing up at the museums to look at outlaws’ weapons, to keep raking in those licensing fees, and to stop talking about how deplorable pop culture violence is. I’d bet on the latter, more because the NRA likes money than it likes a sober, common-sense assessment of risk.

In a bit of news it reports with an appropriately ginormous block of Salt, I Watch Stuff passes along a rumor that Star Wars Episode VII could be set at the Jedi Academy at on Yavin 4:

In an article about both the Mayan apocalypse and how George Lucas used Guatemalan temples and forests as a backdrop for the moon base Yavin 4, it’s casually claimed that Disney’s recently-announced new Star War will be one “in which Skywalker comes back to [Yavin 4] to build a Jedi Knight academy.”

It makes sense as an idea, and seems to match up with what the Wookieepedia claims is Star Wars canon for Yavin’s future, but before we start dreaming of the many hilarious pranks to be played on mean ol’ Dean Skywalker, it’s probably worth noting that the article gives no source for their information, and it seems pretty likely this is not official, as Disney is not the type to reveal their top secret projects to guys writing about a loose connection between Star Wars and the Mayan apocalypse. Still, something to think about. At least for the brief time we have left before the Mayan calendar and Star Wars claims us all.

I may have more ambitious wishes than this scenario for this attempt to move the Star Wars franchise forward. But rumor though it may be, this actually strikes me as a reasonably smart way to bridge the old franchise and the possibility of new stories. A Jedi Academy setup would let Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford play reduced roles or make cameos, and let the movies continue or sum up their stories, while not tethering the films to their original lineup too securely. A number of the major characters in the Expanded Universe pass through there, including Corran Horn, the Correllian cop-turned-fighter-jock-turned Jedi, who trained there under an assumed name, Mara Jade, the Imperial agent who becomes a Jedi and Luke Skywalker’s wife, Han and Leia’s children, and people who eventually play key roles in their lives. The setting could be a jumping-off point to treat Corran as a new main character, or to chronicle the rise of Jacen and Jaina Solo, and to tell the story of their adventures in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, a pain-worshipping alien species that invades the galaxy, or in the years after, as they become preeminent in the Jedi order. Whatever Disney ultimately chooses to do, providing a dignified bridge between the iconic cast and a new generation of stars, without getting too caught up in cutesy—or racist—alien races at the margins, needs to be the priority here. A Jedi Academy story seems like a promising way to achieve that goal which is modest, but that’s been awfully hard to achieve in the past.