I always spending time in the novelist Teju Cole’s head, and I was struck by his most recent piece in the New Yorker, a meditation on how President Obama, whose billing of himself as a serious reader has been a way of selling him as a serious, empathetic man, has also become an active user of drone strikes to kill terrorists and suspected terrorists. He argues that enjoying the way literature makes you empathize with someone else, even someone very different from you, doesn’t necessarily mean that said empathy extends once we look up from a book, much less once we’re entrusted with immense power:

Toni Morrison, in her Nobel lecture in 1993, said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” This sense of literature’s fortifying and essential quality has been evoked by countless other writers and readers. When Marilynne Robinson described fiction as “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification” she was stating something almost everyone would agree with. We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa. We persist in this belief regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes…

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

I also think it’s worth noting that empathy, while a worthwhile value, is actually a fairly neutral tool when it comes to literature. Convincing your reader (or viewer) to suspend disbelief and to enjoy spending time seeing the world through your characters’ eyes is a basic task of fiction. But it can be employed to any number of ends. Which is why so many people fall for Atlas Shrugged, or end up with bad ideas about what sex should look like from Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.

Today in male body image news, David Beckham apparently has been using a stand-in for shots of his posterior during an ad campaign for H&M. The explanation the brand gave doesn’t entirely track to me: if Beckham has enough time to be ogled by tourists, jump in a pool, and have his shirt torn off by hedges that a couple of shots of him readjusting his trunks would be the thing that busted the production schedule and had to get left off the list:

But I’m totally sympathetic to the idea that even David Beckham wants to make sure when his body isn’t in motion, when it isn’t being celebrated for its capacities, but merely as a piece of meat, that even he might want a substitute. There may be more variety in archetypal male body types in popular culture than there are for women. But when it comes to the kinds of bodies designers want to put clothes on, whether they’re walking the runway or posing in print and video ads, the standards for men and women are both pretty brutal. There’s been a lot of work done to expose what women put themselves through to meet the physical standards required of them to model, but it would be delightful to make it clear that the expectations for men aren’t any more realistic or attainable, even for ones who stay in shape professionally.

Yesterday, Deadline ran a piece considering the impact of politics on the 2013 Oscar race, assessing factors from Congressional scrutiny of Zero Dark Thirty to various historical quibbles over Lincoln. Argo, the piece suggests, has one of the strongest campaigns linking the film to real-world events, and to real-world endorsers (though it’s sparked some quibbles by Canadians):

For Argo’s end credits former President Jimmy Carter turns up in an audio interview basically confirming the facts of the CIA mission he approved to get six American hostages out of the Canadian Embassy in Iran by creating a fake movie production. It was a very effective way of validating the events of the film set in 1979 and giving it added gravitas. It also didn’t hurt the film’s awards chances to have Tony Mendez, the real life CIA operative who hatched the scheme (and played by director Ben Affleck) appearing everywhere in praise of the film.

Even more than this roster of praise, the consensus seems to be that Argo, a relatively slight but definitely entertaining picture, racked up a string of awards season victories and became the leading contender for Best Picture at the Academy Awards because it’s the kind of movie that makes Hollywood feel good about itself. The ability to create fantasies compelling enough to make an audience suspend disbelief isn’t just a source of joy, the movie argues. It can be a service to the Republic!

But I think Argo has emerged as the consensus contender for Best Picture for even stronger reasons than that. In a pool of strongly politically themed-movies, Argo is at the intersection of two important trend lines. It has a gloss of relevance, but the movie exists at a safe distance from actual events, and from shameful, damaging policies, that remain the subject of heated political debate. For all that we talk about Hollywood liberalism, the Academy appears to be converging around a movie that allows us to feel as good as possible about the way the United States handles the blowback of our foreign policy.

The contrast between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty is the most obvious point of comparison between Argo and its other competitors, but it’s important. Where Tony Mendez, the CIA analyst who is the main character in Argo is safely a historical figure, an inventive hero by consensus before he became a Hollywood story, the CIA analyst who is the basis for Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) still works at the agency. More to the point, though, is that the tactics Mendez employed—convincing the Iranian government that he was shooting a wacky science fiction picture and smuggling out escapees from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran under the cover of that project—is amusing and anodyne, tradecraft that is only impeachable if you think that it’s wrong to lie to people in the name of espionage, which would be an awfully confusing position. The tactics Maya uses, on the other hand, include torture. It’s not fun to watch her watch a man be waterboarded, sexually humiliated, and beaten in the same way it’s fun to watch Tony jauntily fake a table read for his Trojan Horse of a movie. It requires a great deal more work to dig out what Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal want you to think about those horrendously uncomfortable scenes than it does to sit back, relax, and enjoy Affleck, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman engage in wacky, ethically clear hijinks. And where Argo gives us permission to revel in its finale, in which a commercial airliner races jeeps full of Iranian intelligence officers off a Tehran tarmac, Zero Dark Thirty withholds permission to enjoy an event that gave a lot of people a lot of pride in real life, the killing of Osama bin Laden, by turning that sequence into a tense, workmanlike effort that traumatizes a great many children.
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The bridge is yours.

-Ways to save NBC, or, a conversation on how to save network television, period.

-Etsy wanted to hire more lady engineers, and it turns out it was pretty easy for them to find qualified candidates.

-The average price of a movie ticket in 2012: $7.96.

-The news that Andre Braugher will be working with the Parks and Recreation executive producers is relevant to my interests.

-Details on Louis C.K.’s new standup special!

I don’t remotely agree with my sometimes-Slate colleagues David Haglund and Daniel Engber that this week’s episode of Girls, in which Hannah hooks up with a handsome doctor whose trash cans she’s been misusing, was “the worst episode of Girls ever.” But something that the two of them said that struck me as particularly truthful in a revealing way:

Engber: I felt trapped by my unwillingness to buy into the central premise. Narcissistic, childish men sleep with beautiful women all the time in movies and on TV, so why should this coupling be so difficult to fathom? I think it’s because Hannah is especially and assertively ugly in this episode. She’s rude (“what did you do?” she asks Joshua, referring to his broken marriage), self-centered (“I’m too smart and too sensitive”), sexually ungenerous (“no, make me come”), and defiantly ungraceful (naked ping-pong). In sum, the episode felt like a finger poked in my guys-on-Girls eyeball, or a double-dog dare for me to ask, How can a girl like that get a guy like this? Am I small-minded if I’m stuck on how this fantasy is too much of a fantasy and remembering what Patrick Wilson’s real-life partner looks like?…

Haglund: resumably there are things that Hannah would not, in any world that resembled our own, get. Such as Patrick Wilson, for instance. I want to suspend my disbelief—just as viewers have, for generations, imagined that Al could get Peggy and Homer could get Marge and Jim Belushi could snag Courtney Thorne-Smith. But the show needs to work harder to make that seem feasible. And not pile implausibility upon implausibility.

Why is it that we believe that Jim Belushi could plausibly be married to Courtney Thorne-Smith? Or that Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up, a beautiful, upwardly mobile entertainment reporter would end up with pre-weight-loss, unemployed Seth Rogen, simply because his character stepped up by performing the basic adult human task of obtaining a job? And why is it that we don’t believe a sexually available weirdo like Hannah Horvath could have a several-day fling with a depressive, divorcing, lonely doctor because he happens to be played by Patrick Wilson? Is it that in men, being funny is considered the equivalent of being beautiful for women? Are male characters are required to have one positive characteristic, whether it’s a sense of charm, or the expressed desire to not be a a deadbeat, where women need to be both a certain level of hot, as well as be desirable in other ways? Are movies and TV that feature pairing between schlubby guys and attractive women really doing the equivalent amount of work it would take to make long-term relationships between those characters credible that it would apparently require folks to believe that someone might want to keep Hannah around for a couple of days?

I can see how Hannah’s hookup with Joshua might not have been plausible for everyone in the audience. After all, who invites random strangers into their living room for lemonade, as Joshua did when Hannah showed up at his door after spotting him at Grumpy’s? How many of us kiss random strangers simply because we’re on a quest to have dramatic experiences that will be fodder for later fiction writing? But I think there’s a strong case that we’re simply more used to seeing men date and marry above themselves, at least when it comes to looks, in popular culture. That doesn’t mean that those pairings are, themselves, more credible, or that more work’s gone into making them credible, just that we’ve had more training in suspending disbelief when it comes to them.

Via The Mary Sue comes the news that Gail Simone, Freddie Williams II, Art Baltazar, Franco, and Ig Guara are working on a new project for DC comics, in which two superhero teamups, The Movement, done by Simone and Williams, and The Green Team, Baltazar, Franco, and Guara, represent the 99 percent and the 1 percent. I’m curious to see how that will actually shake out, because the early interviews don’t offer an enormous number of details. Jill Pantozzi writes:

“The Movement is an idea I’ve had for some time. It’s a book about power–who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse,” said Simone. “As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”

Simone didn’t name any characters in the interview but said The Movement would be an adventure story with some dark humor, and that it feels like a “very new kind of superhero book.”

“We’re not trying to preach platitudes at people. I happen to love superhero comics, especially the crazy glamor and thrills they contain,” she said. “But on the other, I think the backdrop is a slice of reality that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books. And I find that tremendously exciting.”

It’s amazing how many superhero stories involve said superheroes either having access to extreme wealth, or in the case of more working-class heroes like Peter Parker, ending up in proximity to it. It’s an assumption that goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the superpowers people manifest will be good for practical things, mostly fighting, and therefore monetizable, or at least worth controlling. And it also assumes that superpowers are relatively rare, and therefore a much more valuable commodity.

But it’s amazing how much interesting storytelling with superheroes comes when you get away from that wealth, or when artists start to explore the resentments that said wealth and power would inevitably engender. The central tension in The Incredibles is jealousy: Buddy Pine’s driven to try to democratize access to superpowers when he’s treated as ridiculous for aspiring to be as useful, and to get some of the social capital that Mr. Incredible is afforded. In Powers, superheroes have mixed status in society: some of them are public employees with the same somewhat-elevated status as cops, some remain tremendously famous and socially powerful, and others have adapted poorly to the restrictions based on them. Luke Cage, which I’ve been reading a lot of lately, derives much of its early power from the mismatch between how badly Luke Cage’s clients, some of them battling ordinary forces like housing discrimination and racial violence, need his services, and how little they’re able to compensate him for it. Luke is constantly short on rent and respect, and the business of superheroics is a rather grubby one.

If DC Comics wants to get at class politics, it seems like they should start by making superpowers much more common, and making some more highly valued than others, often in ways that don’t make immediate sense. It might also be fascinating to change the genesis of superpowers—rather than spontaneously manifesting themselves, or being the result of chemical exposure, a blood transfusion, or a wicked training regimen, maybe there’s a cost to getting powers that proves to be easier or harder to pay off, depending on which one you end up with. And maybe those inequalities have gotten suddenly and dramatically more intense. That’s a setup for a big event and new teamups that could be genuinely seismic.

In an absolutely amazing story, Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, went through the research notes that anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham took on his interviews with research subjects for Seduction of the Innocent, his book on the social and psychological impacts of comics—and discovered that he was faking the data. As a report on her work explains:

Wertham’s personal archives, however, show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History….

As she pored over his files, she began to recognize the case notes of children referred to in “Seduction,” and typing their quotes into her laptop computer. But when she returned to her hotel room and compared her notes to Wertham’s book, she found numerous inconsistencies. “I thought well maybe I’ve missed something, maybe I typed incorrectly,” Tilley said. So she began photocopying portions of Wertham’s files and comparing them closely to his book. “That’s when I realized the extent of the changes.”

For example, in “Seduction,” Wertham links “Batman” comic books to the case of a 13-year-old boy on probation and receiving counseling for sexual abuse of another boy: “Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: ‘Sometimes I read them over and over again. … It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy.’ ”

What Tilley found in Wertham’s notes, however, was that the boy preferred “Superman,” “Crime Does Not Pay” and “war comics” over “Batman,” and that he had previously been sexually assaulted by the other boy – all information that Wertham left out.

The whole thing is a wonderful reminder not to trust an argument just because it has an academic imprimatur—or because the people who advance it get an opportunity to present their ideas to Congress. And if our discussion of gun control continues to include calls to investigate a theoretical link between popular culture and gun violence—Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) is the latest legislator to get on that particular bandwagon—Tilley’s findings should be a cautionary tale for the researchers tasked with the study. I’d hope it’s harder to commit academic fraud today than it was in Wertham’s time.

But given that we live in a moment when 67 percent of Republicans think that violent video games present a “bigger safety threat” than guns according to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, the same kind of incentives to find video games guilty exist today that existed when Wertham went after comics. And even if a rigorous study does emerge from our current debate over guns policy, I’d be amazed if it was publicly accepted. The public doesn’t blame comics or video games for crime and violence because they have strong evidence and day-to-day demonstrations of the impact of that media. They blame comics and video games because they have relatively low levels of cultural capital relative to mediums like film and television, and because it’s easier to think about regulating culture than it is to go after other, more systematic elements of American life.