Over at NPR, Linda Holmes has a lovely post about the fallacies of pretending that “the masses” or “Middle America” are some sort of homogenous block of cultural consumers, or that “the lowest common denominator” is something we should have contempt for, rather than embrace:

I’ve always found the lowest common denominator kind of a cozy concept, particularly because you kind of do it by feel — it’s a translator that lets you take two things that seem to be vibrating on different frequencies and unlock them so they can fit together instead of bumping into each other.

But somehow in culture, “lowest common denominator” has become a way to describe not what’s unifying but what’s worst, as if we all come together where we are awful and stupid. In fact, when we do all come together in large numbers, it’s usually not where we are awful and stupid, particularly not because we are awful and stupid. We come together where there’s enough commonality to let people talk to each other about the same thing. How did that become a slam, unless we assume that the purpose of culture, and of our own tastes, is to efficiently separate those who favor wheat from those who are more into chaff?

The lowest common denominator on a huge scale, in fact, is probably something like The Avengers or the Oscars or the Super Bowl, none of which is embraced for its scandalous or scatological qualities, but all of which are popular simply because lots of people think it’s fun to watch them. And as silly as those things are, their commonality is actually their most redeeming quality — that it’s the lowest common denominator across surprisingly diverse populations is the best thing about the Super Bowl, not the worst. It’s certainly the best thing about the Oscars.

To paraphrase some of the rest of the piece, we watch Community in red states and worship at the altar of Mark Harmon in NCIS in blue states.

I have to say, I wonder if some of this divide comes from shifts in business models that have divided both television and movies into things with massive audiences and tiny audiences, without much space in between. In movies, we’ve increasingly got tentpoles, many of which are genre movies—which face an inherent critical bias and are siloed into “low” culture no matter how self-serious they get—and smaller independent or foreign films, with smart, adult, not very expensive movies vanishing from the scene. 2012 felt like a rare movie-going year in part because there were a number of mass hits, like Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Django Unchained that have both done good or pretty good box office and have received good reviews and been the subject of spirited intellectual debates. The things among our common denominators weren’t inherently the lowest. But I do understand how, if you’re a devotee of those $30 million movies that are vanishing, or if it’s becoming harder for you to find independent and foreign films in theaters and they’re slow to make it to video on demand or to streaming, you might feel a certain amount of resentment. It’s not just that other people want and support other things—it’s that it feels harder to get what you want.

The same is true in television, where there remain some massive hits like Dancing With The Stars, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory, but where the ratings for new comedies in particular have quickly shrunk to the point of invisibility. Watching the struggle of something like Community to stay alive, I don’t blame people for being frustrated that more people aren’t tuning in. But the truth is that something like Community, or Happy Endings, or even 30 Rock, all the self-aware, self-referential, pop-culture examining comedies out there—they have an inherent audience ceiling. And that’s totally okay! One of the blessings of a diversified media environment is that networks will create and keep running weird shows with wacky premises and strange-but-endearing characters long after they would have been nuked in a previous era of television. What fans of those shows want is less for everyone to suddenly ditch Leroy Jethro Gibbs and discover the joys of Dean Pelton, and more for NBC to find a way to make money on its wonderful little curiosities, whether it’s an adjustment to the Nielsen ratings that gets advertisers excited about more delayed watching, or richer syndication deals with Hulu and Netflix.

In other words, if folks are still turning up their noses at what “Middle America” watches when Dan Harmon gets his eleventy-billion new shows on the air in coming seasons, the heck with ‘em. But if folks are upset about what’s getting mass audiences because they’re afraid it threatens what they like, I have more sympathy for people’s desire to get their hands on and provide support to content than they love.

There were a lot of things that were ridiculous and offensive about yesterday’s hearings on gun control, from the Independent Women’s Forum Gayle Trotter’s articulation of a fantasy world in which women defend themselves with guns more often than they’re killed by them, to the National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s representation of himself as an advocate for individual gun owners rather than the giant companies that manufacture weapons. But for the most part, we were spared one of the more ridiculous features of our debates over gun violence, the sight of gun control opponents throwing out video games as a distraction like a moldy steak in a piranha tank. What the hearing did reveal, though, is that the people who tend to blame video games for violence have some of the same fantasies about using weapons in real life that make the abstracted violence in first-person shooters so attractive.

That’s not to say that video games were completely absent from yesterday’s hearing. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) took himself to MSNBC to declare that “I think video games is a bigger problem than guns because video games affect people. But the First Amendment limits what we can doing about video games.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) lamented “Where is the artistic value in shooting innocent victims?” And LaPierre, listing what he described as common-sense solutions to gun violence, included “Stop putting out violent video games that desensitize.”

But at the same time that they were lamenting the idea of young men sitting at home working themselves up to kill by playing video games, both witnesses and senators were engaging in some of the same fantasies of heroic deployment of guns against imaginary enemies. Trotter imagined a Mr. and Mrs. Smith-like fantasy of a housewife brandishing high-caliber weapons in defense of her family: “An assault weapon in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon and the peace of mind that a woman has as she’s facing three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home with her children screaming in the background, the peace of mind that she has knowing that she has a scary looking gun gives her more courage when she’s fighting hard and violent criminals.”

LaPierre’s fantasies justifying gun ownership were more post-apocalyptic, including dreams of a national disaster or a sudden breakdown in government, scenarios Baltimore Police Chief Jim Johnson called “scary, creepy and just not based on logic.” But Sen. Lindsey Graham backed up LaPierre’s argument, saying that the risk that “You could find yourself in a lawless environment in this country,” like the 1992 Los Angeles riots, justified the continued legality of higher-capacity magazines. LaPierre and Graham may not have gotten idea of emerging as a hero when the world descends into chaos from media like AMC’s zombie show The Walking Dead, but their arguments for minimal gun regulation and the reason people enjoy watching Rick Grimes go from mild-mannered sheriff to zombie-killing badass are one and the same.

Maybe there’s a difference between pretending to shoot targets in Call of Duty and going to the firing range, feeling the recoil of a weapon, and learning to appreciate what Walter Kirn, in an essay for The New Republic, calls “the power over the power of the gun.” But if yesterday’s gun control hearing proved anything, it’s that you don’t need to pick up a console to fantasize about emerging a hero by using guns to kill people who you believe are victimizing you. And when it comes to setting policy, the fantasies of people like Gayle Trotter and Wayne LaPierre have far more impact in the real world in the form of things like Stand Your Ground laws than the dreams of people who pick up pixelated weapons and head off into battle.

This post discusses plot details from the January 30 episode of The Americans.

As I wrote in my review of the show yesterday, I’m excited about the potential of The Americans for a great many reasons: its use of geopolitics to ask questions rather than assign solutions, its sick sense of humor, its portrait of domestic life, its louche use of eighties music. But what bowled me over in the pilot the first time I watched it, and what I didn’t expect from The Americans, was a deeply nuanced portrait of what it means to be a sexual assault survivor. The revelation midway through the pilot that Elizabeth had been raped by the man who was then her trainer, and now is a high-profile defector explains a great number of things we’ve seen her do so far. And the fact that she hasn’t been able to tell her husband about it is a shocking illustration of the fundamental cruelty of their arrangement: the KGB’s paired Elizabeth and Phillip for life, but forbidden them from exchanging the kind of information that could give them a shot at building a happy and functional marriage.

From the first sequence in the show, The Americans‘ approach to sexuality is part of what makes it clear that the show is engaging with spy conventions rather than simply replicating them. It’s a lot of fun to watch Kerri Russell in a blonde wig and a leather dress seduce a mouthy federal official, who brags to her “At this level, there aren’t many people he can trust,” or to hear, later, on a recording, her get more information out of him by explaining “If I was going to see you again, I’d want you to be a little—I don’t want to hurt your feelings—but stronger, maybe?” He may not be able to dominate her sexually, but he can demonstrate his importance verbally. But what most movies or shows wouldn’t give you is the moment after the seduction, Russell taking off the wig in the car to reveal strands of her own hair stuck to her forehead, her mouth twisting with at least momentary disgust. This isn’t a story about people who got into the spy game so they could sleep with beautiful women and gratify their own sense of attractiveness. Using her sexuality is part of Elizabeth’s job, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it.

And the idea that her sexuality is not her own to control as a condition of her employment becomes even more horrifying the show explains that Elizabeth’s sexual availability was taken to its logical conclusion during her training as a KGB agent. Timosheev first tells Elizabeth, who is still learning to speak English naturally and without an accent, to say “I’m sorry. Use the contraction.” And then, when he defeats her in their fistfight, he rapes her—presumably he isn’t stopping in part because she tells him no in Russian, rather than in English. Later, desperate, Timosheev tells Elizabeth “I never meant to hurt you. They let us have our way with the cadets. It was part of the job. A perk.” It’s both a pathetic excuse, an attempt to avoid responsibility or agency, and it lets Phillip know, for the first time, what happened to his wife before the KGB paired them up in a much warmer and fuzzier exercise of control.
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