I’m off to the cheery task of finishing my (very long) Zero Dark Thirty review, so have an early look at Pixar’s latest short, which proves they can anthropomorphize anything:

Although I do think it would have been a bit more of a test of their abilities to make any possible object have a personality if the umbrellas weren’t in gender-coded red and blue. Step it up, Pixar, and give us some green and yellow! Or even a nice, jaunty orange!

Writing about Harriet Tubman, who’s been a subject of his in recent days, Ta-Nehisi Coates took up a subject near to my own heart, the lack of support for biopics about people of color. And he identifies an important point about one of the hurdles for getting such movies made:

Moreover, movie-making is risky and expensive. Any discussion of the lack of a Harriet Tubman biopic should begin with the shameful fact that median white wealth in this country stands at $110,000 and median black wealth stands at around $5,000. It would be nice to think that this gap reflected choices cultural and otherwise, instead of the fact that for most this country’s history its governing policy was to produce failure in black communities, and most of its citizens supported such policies. It would be nice if Hollywood were more moral and forward-thinking than its consumer base. But I would not wait around for such a day.

It’s absolutely true that there isn’t an African-American or Latino equivalent of Megan Ellison, the daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and the head of Annapurna Pictures. In 2012 alone, Ellison gave us two movies that I think would have been hard-pressed to be financed by more conventional production companies, and certainly not at the length and pacing that they’ve made it into theaters, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Part of what makes Ellison important is not just that she can afford to finance pictures like these in the first place, but that she can afford to lose money on some of them. That’s actually the most necessary criteria to get truly daring movies made, because it means there’s space to focus on a figure who isn’t necessarily a four-quadrant subject, to approach someone who might be broadly fascinating from a novel perspective, as Anderson did with the founder of Scientology in The Master, to give a filmmaker the space they need to tell a story with nuance and completeness, or to accept an unusual arc that doesn’t hit the emotional beats of a conventional three-act structure.

George Lucas, at least with Red Tails, showed that he was prepared to spend $58 million—which doesn’t actually count as an enormous amount of money for an action movie anymore—to tell an under-explored historical story. But that’s not the same thing as spending money repeatedly, or pulling together other groups of investors to commit to a series of projects aimed at building an audience for a different kind of movie.

And at the end of the day, financing the production of a movie is only half the battle. Movies need to find distributors who will put them in theaters, or to find video on demand placement. Advertising costs, which aren’t built into production budgets, are enormous—Reuters estimated in 2010 that studios were spending between 55 and 58 cents for every dollar they spent on movie production and release costs on marketing. That’s a daunting hurdle for movies that are being made and distributed outside of that system: word of mouth about a movie’s excellence or importance go only so far when they’re up against reams of television spots, wrapped buses, and giant billboards.

With, say, a Harriet Tubman biopic (if such a movie could get made without Zoe Saldana in the starring role, and without being turned into a ludicrous action picture), it would be nice to get the movie made in the first place, but the real goal should be to get that film in front of a whole bunch of people. And it takes more than some rich people and some visionaries to achieve that. It takes an infrastructure that’s willing to take risks and absorb losses with people like Ellison because they want to be in business with those rich people and those visionaries, and to be associated with the critical buzz and awards that can come from working with those people, even if the financial returns aren’t there. Black wealth is part of the equation. But the infrastructure part of the lift is heavy, too.

At some point in my mid-teens, I bought a paperback copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch at my local independent bookstore, inspired by its subtitle “In Praise Of Difficult Women” more than by any particular familiarity with the content, which ranged from Anne Sexton to The Seduction of Joe Tynan. The book, which draws from many different pop culture media to weave together a tapestry of the ways women women can be complicated, uncompliant, mentally ill, and other ways, considered “bitchy,” is a significant inspiration to my criticism. And it’s meant that even as Wurtzel, who’s written memoirs about her depression and her drug addiction, has spent much of the decade and a half since being awfully difficult herself, I’m always curious to see what she has to say next.

In this case, it’s a messy, very sad essay in New York Magazine about how miserable Wurtzel is, how much she cases intense sensation since it seems to be the only thing she can feel any more, how she’s made decisions that have left her without any safety net, and she claims this is some sort of principle. The piece is an embarrassment, rather than accomplishment, but a compulsively readable one—whatever you think of the content, a sentence like “I knew David Foster Wallace pretty well*, and he was pretty smart, but David Boies makes David Wallace look like, well, some other lesser David, maybe David Remnick,” is tremendous in its audaciousness and construction—and over at Slate, my fellow columnist Amanda Marcotte wrote that the piece is “as lengthy as it is incoherent, so the question arises: Did Nolan pay off Wurtzel to make his point for him?”

The Nolan to which she refers is Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan, who recently wrote a piece called “Journalism Is Not Narcissism,” in which he implored young writers not to mistake confessional writing for the stuff of a career. “By plundering your own life for material, you are not investing in yourself as a writer; you’re spending the principal,” he wrote. “Soon, it will all be used up. There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time.” Putting aside the fact that there are very few writers other than Wurtzel and Susan Shapiro, a memoirist and professor Nolan uses as his lead, who make a living, or who want to, solely by dining out on the lunch that they are simultaneously eating and writing about, there are more substantive objections to the idea that reporters should segregate themselves from their stories.

Ann Friedman, who published my favorite long form story of the last year, a story about a woman in Alaska trying to obtain an abortion in which her experience is the incredibly compelling vehicle for an exploration of the policy reasons it’s so difficult for her to get the care she needs, argued in response to Nolan that journalism is always shaded by perspective, and it’s a matter of revealing that perspective honestly and carefully, rather than covering it up. “I cringe every time I read a New York Times story in which the reporter awkwardly refers to herself as ‘a visitor.’ Really? You can’t just say “provided me with directions to her Craftsman bungalow”? Please,” Friedman wrote. ” journalists were always a part of the story. Why not just own up to the fact that three-dimensional humans are doing this work? We have always brought our personal histories and political opinions and casual biases with us while reporting. We just tried to pretend we weren’t with stupid stylistic conventions.”

Another thing that struck me while reading their pieces is the reminder that confessional journalism can serve as a means to reveal that experiences people once thought were singular are actually common, and not a cause for fear or shame. As much as Nora Ephron didn’t like her consciousness-raising group when she went in the seventies, her writing about her breasts and her sex fantasies, and about writing for Cosmopolitan, and about feminine hygiene sprays that were harming women mattered because they spoke aloud things that previously weren’t spoken of at all. Making people realize that problems they thought were personal are actually political and cultural is powerful work.

And that’s why Wurtzel’s essay comes across as intermittently powerful and infuriating and ramblingly bizarre. It’s not about that synthesis, that call to action. It’s aimed at making the rest of us feel like we are a herd of mundanes while Elizabeth Wurtzel is singular and special. “But this is it for me. I am a free spirit,” she writes. “I do not know any other way to be. No one else seems to live as I do. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.” Maybe. But it’s also a cliche, and not nearly as special or rare as Wurtzel seems to think it is. Young journalists should get the same lesson in confessional writing as they do in all else: why does it matter to anyone but you? The answer that they’ll want to consume your special snowflakeness is almost never true, and even more rarely enough.

*Apparently, Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” is about Wurtzel, and boy does that make things click into place.

The biggest star of Monday night’s college football national championship game wasn’t victorious Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron, who threw for 264 yards and 2 touchdowns, in leading the Crimson Tide to a 42-14 shellacking of Notre Dame. Nor was it Alabama’s two-headed rushing attack, made up of Eddie Lacy and T.J. Yeldon, who combined for 248 rushing yards and 3 touchdowns. And it wasn’t Nick Saban, who has now won three national titles in his six seasons as Alabama’s head coach.

No, the biggest star was Katherine Webb, the reigning Miss Alabama USA and McCarron’s girlfriend, who was spotted by an ESPN camera during the first quarter. When Webb appeared on the screen, ESPN announcer Brent Musburger began drooling.

“When you’re a quarterback at Alabama, you see that lovely lady there? She does go to Auburn, I’ll admit that, but she’s also Miss Alabama, and that’s A.J. McCarron’s girlfriend,” Musburger said. “Wow, I’m telling ya, you quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women. What a beautiful woman! Whoa! So if you’re a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with pops.”

Musburger’s reaction isn’t puzzling in the beer-wings-and-women culture of college football, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t troubling. There is a culture of domestic violence and sexual assault in football, and one need look no farther than the game Musburger was announcing to find evidence of it. At the NFL level, instances of domestic violence and sexual assault outpace the national average.

Painting Webb as merely a perk of the job, as nothing more than the Alabama beauty queen dating the quarterback of the Crimson Tide, only enables that culture. It’s a culture that views women as nothing more than chattel, a commodity to be won by the best player even if she isn’t a willing participant. It fosters a sense of entitlement to women and their bodies that only ingrains the rape and violence culture deeper into the game. Before the end of the game, for example, an NFL player had already tweeted his phone number to Webb’s account and offered to take her to a strip club.

That sense of entitlement contributes to, if it doesn’t cause, incidents like the Steubenville rape case, the murder of Kasandra Perkins, and the cover-up of a potential sexual assault on Notre Dame’s campus. It contributes to efforts to redefine rape, to block laws like the Violence Against Women Act, and to tell a raped woman that she should have shut that whole thing down. And it’s a sense of entitlement that is only encouraged every time we tell a young boy that enough practice passes in the backyard will get him his beauty queen.

In Hollywood, executives are notoriously reluctant to admit that they’re on the lookout for viewers of color. For some reason, it seems to be conventional wisdom that, say, the kind of content that African-American audiences are looking for overlaps in no way with anything any white viewer might be engaged by, ever. And so expressing a wish for a black, Latino, or Asian audience is apparently to express a wish to make a niche product.

So there’s something really refreshing about seeing MSNBC president Phil Griffin tout the fact that his network, which was already number one in cable news for African-American viewers, grew their African-American viewership in 2012 by 60 percent, in a year when CNN’s grew 23.7 percent and Fox’s declined by the same number.

“I think we made a commitment, we decided, that in order for this channel to succeed, that we had to reflect the country. This meant that we had to be part of the country in ways that the other channels weren’t,” he told Mediaite. “People want to know that we reflect their world. And it’s not just a single show – its across the board. You look at the guests every hour and we make sure that we have women, African Americans, everything, and I think to spend a day watching MSNBC is to see America as we have seen it.”

It’s not just a relief to hear Griffin say this—it’s smart strategy. I don’t know why it’s surprising to anyone that as a nerdy lady, I enjoy seeing a reflection of that identity in Rachel Maddow when she’s on the air, rather than needing the news delivered to me by an authoritative white dude my father’s age. And I’m not sure why it’s surprising either that people might like to see an African-American woman like Melissa Harris-Perry lead discussions of, among other issues, race, because we’re interested in the particular perspectives she brings to the table that we don’t happen to possess on our own. Enjoying seeing myself on screen, and enjoying the insights and experiences of people who are not like me, and whose perspectives I can’t magically situate myself into are not actually mutually exclusive impulses.
Read more

It’s incredibly sad to hear of the death of the writer Richard Ben Cramer from lung cancer. Many, many appreciations of What It Takes, his book about the contenders for their parties 1988 presidential nominations, will be written in the days to come. But what always struck me about the book is the relationship between objectivity and empathy in it.

Cramer believed that every candidate deserved a fair analysis, not a fair conclusion, and the book is richer for it. Details like George H.W. Bush’s penchant for writing thank-you notes or Michael Dukakis’ turkey tetrazzini are there not because they’re focus-grouped or blandly “colorful,” but for what they tell a reader about the candidate, from the strength of Bush’s network, to Dukakis’s tendency to get bogged down in details. The balance of the book stems from Cramer’s genuine curiosity about all the men he wrote about, and that curiosity has a way of opening up even settled minds. I’d always thought Bob Dole was simply mean until I read about his rehabilitation regime after his service in World War II and his work on the food stamps program. But in a fair analysis, not everyone is equal, and Cramer is honest about each man’s weaknesses and strengths, be they stylistic or risk-taking, like the idiot daring that lead Gary Hart to the deck of the Monkey Business.

We talk a lot these days about the win-the-morning mentality in political journalism. It’s a frustrating dynamic because it encourages an obsessive focus on perceived gaffes or individual debate performances, rather than fundamentals like the quality of President Obama’s reelection team’s ground campaign and sophisticated use of technology. But What It Takes is also a reminder that the most important campaign fundamental is the man at the head of it, and that he’s the product of thousands upon thousands of mornings.