On Friday, Motion Picture Association of America president and CEO Christopher Dodd took the stage at the National Press Club to talk about his first several years on the job. It was an interesting talk less because of policy issues that Dodd focused on, or that he discussed during the question-and-answer period, but because of the way he talked about movies, and what they’ve come to mean to him as art during his almost two years at the association. In arguing for movies’ unifying role in a politically divided country, and movies and television as key tools of cultural diplomacy, Dodd’s talk raised some fascinating questions for me about how we approach and analyze movies, and what levels of responsibility we want to assign an art form that claims that potential impact.

Dodd admitted that before coming to the MPAA, “As a father of two very young children, 7, now almost 8, and 11, my movie selections were limited.” But as he’s reconnected with the product that his member companies produce, Dodd made an argument that both serves to burnish the reputation of those companies, and potentially exposes them to higher standards than your average producer of widgets.

“They tell stories, stories that help us make sense of our world and ourselves…Consider the focus on racism in To Kill A Mockingbird or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dodd said. “The best movies ground us in common values and ideals. America’s a big place, as we all know, with red states and blue states…But gathered together in a darkened theater, regardless of our differences, we become, in spite of our differences, one place.”

The ability of movies to achieve that unity or provoke that kind of thought doesn’t mean that all movies have to meet that aspirational standard. But it does suggest that movies that do aim to tackle big ideas deserve to be taken seriously, which means being examined critically. Often, debates over accuracy get dismissed as nit-picking, which if the only question at stake is whether a movie is a literal translation of historical events or not, is potentially fair. But the questions of why and when movies choose to diverge from the historical record is can be rich ones, particularly when those questions happen in the realm of character interpretation, as in the presentation of President Lincoln’s attitudes toward black Americans in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As a critic who writes about the politics of entertainment, it’s been exciting to see academics, policy reporters, and political commentators enter the debates around Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty because their desire to play on this turf is a reaffirmation of the idea that gives life to my career, even if I’m not always thrilled about how these arguments have functioned. The battles over how to interpret Zero Dark Thirty , for example, seem to me to have narrowed down to debates about whether the film is an accurate transcription of a murky historical record, rather than exploring the more revealing questions of how the script and directing choices shape the movie’s message about the immorality of torture, and why Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow felt compelled to portray the movie as an unbiased piece of reportage in the first place. That latter choice in particular says as much about the state of our debate about the use of torture as the movie itself.

If we’re going to take film seriously on the grounds that it has a unique power to influence audiences, we need to examine how well it does at getting audiences to do interpretive work—and leaving them space in which to do it—to open themselves up to new ideas, and to inhabit new perspectives. The blunt statements of opinion writing or cable news appearances, or the clear conclusion-drawing of long-form journalism aren’t necessarily the things that serve those goals well in film, where an indirect approach may lead otherwise-resistant audiences to a point they might not have accepted when presented bluntly, and manifestos can make characters seem like strawmen, rather than flesh-and-blood humans.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

Is morality a luxury? One might think that, in a world overrun by zombies, setting up an ethical code should take a backseat to survival. But the strongest moments in Sunday’s othewise lackluster Walking Dead made the opposite case, using a breakdown in the relationship between brothers Merle and Darryl as a case study in why morality would and should be a central concern in a post-apocalyptic world.

The brothers begin feuding in the woods, as the meager spoils of their hunting efforts lead Darryl to question whether they shouldn’t make a beeline back for the well-stocked prison. But the real rift emerges when they spy a small group of survivors fighting a losing battle against a group of walkers. Darryl sees people in trouble who need his help. But Merle sees useless dead weight to whom he owes nothing. “They ain’t never cooked me a meal,” he sniffs.

However close Darryl and Merle may have been at one point (even morally speaking, as they apparently planned to rob the prison group when they first encountered it), the conflict over the embattled group on the highway reveals how far they’ve grown. Darryl believes human life is something worth protecting irrespective of utility. Like a normal person, he believes leaving people to die when you can save them to be a grave moral ill. It’s such an important part of his moral character that he barely hesitates to run in, crossbow blazing, and save the day. Merle is left little choice but to follow his brother but, in a nice touch, he saunters towards the battle in a fashion resembling nothing more than a walker’s shuffle, his move away from humanity reflected in his actual movement.

Darryl finally snaps after Merle attempts to stick up the terrified survivors for food. Demanding “an enchilada” from the Spanish-speaking “beaners,” Merle’s moral ugliness is on full display, and Darryl can’t take it anymore. He points his crossbow at his brother, demanding Meryl let them go and deciding to march back to the prison irrespective of what his brother wants. Merle’s Randian selfishness has made him toxic, so untrustworthy and morally repellent that his own brother can’t stand to be alone with him.

The underlying point here is that morality isn’t just a luxury in this world: it’s something people need, both a survival adaptation and, more importantly, one of the only things that makes their apocalyptic life worth living. Last week, it seemed like family ties were the most powerful motivating force for survivors, shredding group bonds as if they were paper. But Darryl’s move back to the prison suggests ethics run deeper than blood. Merle’s utter lack of humanity makes it impossible for Darryl to depend on him; he needs to be with people who place the same value on his life as he places on theirs to survive in a world where no one can really provide for themselves.

In a clever bit of dialogue, this point is directly connected to Merle’s racism. When Darryl sets off for the prison, Merle pleads with Darryl that he might not be welcome: “I tried to kill that black bitch…damn near killed that Chinese kid.” Darryl’s pithy response — “he’s Korean!” — points to the fact that he’s bothered to get to know these people, while Merle’s refusal to see them as anything other than stereotyped cartoons keeps him out of a community defined by shared trust. Human kindness isn’t a relic of a bygone world. It’s a necessity.

But Darryl’s moral revolt isn’t just about the fact that he can’t trust Merle in a tight spot. Darryl appears to simply not want a life in which he either leaves innocent people to die or thieves from them. In his mind, Merle has abandoned the very things that make life good and valuable, the values and beliefs that make humans noble and underpinned their brotherly love itself. “I may be the one walking away,” Darryl tells his brother, “but you’re the one who’s leaving.” As they’ve both returned to the prison by the end of the episode, the central question going forward is whether Merle can return from this moral exile as well.

Conservatives are overjoyed at the news that boxer Manny Pacquiao is refusing to fight his next bout in the United States because he doesn’t want to pay taxes, and anti-tax groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform are already using it as an example of how America’s “punitive” tax policy makes it less competitive with other countries around the world.

ATR first worries that the American tax code will make it more likely that other boxers follow Pacquiao’s lead, then expands into a broader critique of taxes on ordinary American investment:

Fewer boxing matches per year would mean fewer vendors, a decrease in tourism, and less money being spent in host cities. Hosting a major sporting event has proven to create jobs and insert economic life within the city. The federal government needs to follow the examples being set by GOP governors seeking to reduce their respective state’s income tax burden or risk losing investments across every industry.

At the end of the day, people migrate and invest in places where they will receive the most for their services and skills. The higher the income tax, the less return these same people will see. By continuing to have this excessively high income tax, the U.S. continues to discourage businesses and workers looking to make profitable investments.

The most obvious problem with this thinking is that the Marquez-Pacquiao fight is somehow going to bring great benefit to Las Vegas. It won’t. Fight or no fight, Vegas hotels and casinos are going to be full of high-rollers and ordinary gamblers and non-gamblers alike, because it’s Las Vegas. The utility of a sporting event in that type of economy is almost certainly even smaller than the utility of bigger sporting events, and gearing tax policy toward the attraction of sporting events is a terrible idea anyway.

The real problem, though, is the idea that tax policy is somehow the only factor in where future fights will take place. Fight promoters are going to lose a substantial amount of money if Pacquiao and Marquez fight in Asia, because more people will pay to watch if they fight in the U.S. That means there is an advantage for promoters and even most boxers to fighting in the U.S. even if they have to pay higher tax rates. It even extends in Pacquiao’s case, since lower tax rates aren’t the only reason he wants to fight in southeast Asia: nearing the end of his career, the Filipino boxer sees it as an opportunity to broaden his global fan base.
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The bridge is yours.

-Jamie Weingman on the history of the television tie-in album.

-Ken Tucker takes his leave of Entertainment Weekly.

-Jason Momoa will be in Guardians of the Galaxy.

-Resurrecting dead languages with software.

-I am sick of a) serial killer stories, b) exhaustive extensions of franchises, and yet am excited by the prospect of more Mads Mikkelsen on my television:

The case of Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who has been charged with the shooting murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, has shone a dispiriting light on everything from the horrendous rates of violence against women in South Africa to the media handling of Pistorius, a famous athlete, and Steenkamp, who was a model. But while this is a decidedly minor concern, I’ve found myself thinking about the gap between Pistorius’ legend and what appears to have been the reality of his domestic life alongside the decision by the executive board of the International Olympic Committee to recommend that wrestling be dropped from the games starting in 2020.

The official declaration that one of the foundational sports of the Olympic games doesn’t have enough interest from the public to justify its continued inclusion in the competition, and an accusation of murder against an athlete who transcended the loss of his legs to compete against the best runners without disabilities in the world, may not seem to have much in common. But collectively, they’re an illustration of the financial and commercial stake has in burnishing the reputation of someone like Pistorius.

Because the Olympics—and NBC, which owns the broadcast rights to the games in the United States—can’t trust that extremely large audiences follow many of the sports involved, and thus that they’ll develop rooting interests on the merits, they need something else to pull those viewers in, to help them decide which competitors they’ll back if there are multiple candidates on the American national team, and to help them identify which athletes they’ll root for if no Americans are available. Inspirational stories are the primary mechanism of doing this, and to a certain extent, the main product NBC is actually selling. It may be frustrating to some viewers that life stories and interviews with athletes take up so much broadcast time, and make it harder to broadcast competitions live. But without them, it’s hard to imagine that the ratings of the games would be so high, and thus so financially valuable.

The Olympics and its broadcast partners have a direct financial interest in Oscar Pistorius being an extraordinary young man who transcended the loss of his legs below the knee, rather than someone who had had the police visit his house on multiple occasions because of “domestic incidents.” They have an investment in the idea that competitive ice skaters are nice little girls, rather than women with ex-husbands who solicit assaults on their competitors—Olympic athletes have financial interests, rather than simply national honor, at stake, too. Sometimes those interests mean that the Olympics get behind a useful story, championing someone like Gabby Douglas, and as a result, highlighting the whiteness of that sport, and bringing in new audiences for it. And sometimes it means obscuring what it means to live in some place like South Africa, and the extent to which overcoming some of the limitations his disability placed on him doesn’t mean that Pistorius was somehow exempt from participating in or becoming a victim of the violence, particularly the violence against women, that plague South Africa.

The Olympics were initially supposed to bring the world’s countries together. But it’s one thing to get the nations to set their differences aside and observe a truce, and another to use uniformly cheerful stories about adversity overcome to paper over the differences in where athletes come from, and even their own varied humanity. That anyone’s surprised that an Olympic athlete could end up charged in a domestic violence murder is a testament to the success NBC does in creating a uniform product, and to how deeply and easily we buy into it, over and over again.

Emily Nussbaum, in this week’s New Yorker, argues that ABC’s Scandal, an evening soap opera by Shonda Rhimes about the inner circle of a moderate Republican president, is the more compelling show about politics than Netflix’s remake of the British classic series House of Cards, which follows the machinations of an apolitical but Democratic Majority Whip. “Like much genre fiction, ‘Scandal’ uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs,” she writes. “What if everyone but the President knew that the election was fixed? What if the President tried to divorce his pregnant wife?”

What she doesn’t say, but what her piece helped clarify for me, is the what-ifs that make all the difference. House of Cards asks us to imagine a tired question: what if the people who run things in Washington were amoral manipulators interested only in the accumulation of their own power? It’s a scenario we’ve considered before, and the results are the same: the show’s conviction that its come to new and enlightening conclusions mostly seems smug. Scandal‘s big what-if, by contrast, is genuinely fresh, and actually advanced by the utterly bonkers conspiracy theory at the heart of the second season. As it’s emerged that President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) is the beneficiary of the decision by his wife Mellie (a tremendous Bellamy Young) and his top aides, including his now-chief-of-staff Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) and his sometimes-lover Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), to steal the election in collaboration with a nefarious billionaire manufacturer of voting machines, Scandal‘s asked, over and over again, what makes someone a good vessel for the talents and ambitions of other people, not what makes a man a great leader in and of himself. It’s a terrific question, and one that exposes the central lie of the presidency, that someone can do it alone and do it well, and that the person who sits in the Oval Office actually has the full capacities to make decisions for the country.

It’s a question that presents a problem for the show, because its main character, Olivia, a fixer of Washington scandals, has no particular political ambitions, or policy convictions—she appears to not have been of Grant’s party, but was talked into working for him—and the main reason she is so passionate about Grant’s ascendency was that she fell for him. Scandal began as a problem-of-the-week show in which Olivia’s genius helped all manner of unsavory Washington types get themselves out of trouble, and occasionally caused justice to be done. But as the show’s become a much more serialized drama, and the problems have moved out of Olivia’s office, she’s become less interesting, even less necessary, to the show that was ostensibly built around her.

But it’s in the supporting cast that the answers to that question of why Fitz, a man with a great head of hair and a corrosive relationship with his politician father, but no particularly discernible mind for politics and a tendency to get distracted by his emotions, is worth supporting even to the point of criminality and utter moral compromise, get truly fascinating. Cyrus, who is gay, believes that living his life openly and honestly with his husband James means that he never could have fully exercised his political talents fully. “I was not made to be chief of staff,” he told James in an agonizing scene in which he confessed to stealing the election. “I was made to be the president.” Fitz’s emptiness, even his distraction by his affair with Olivia, were part of what made him perfect for Cyrus to attach himself to. His lack of interest in policy or judgement in matters of foreign affairs made Cyrus essential to Fitz. It wasn’t merely that Cyrus could ride Fitz’s coattails to the White House—it was that he would have something to do when he got there.
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This post discusses plot points throughout the third season of Downton Abbey.

It’s profoundly irritating that Downton Abbey was railroaded into perhaps the most soap operatic ending in its existence by Dan Stevens’ demand to be let out of the show. Having Matthew run off the road by a country burgher driving a truck down a narrow road, the accident perhaps facilitated by Matthew’s distractingly powerful joy over the birth of his son and heir, is a cheap solution to a problem created by Stevens’ assessment of his market value, an event without any of the larger points or ideas that normally attach to developments at Downton Abbey, even in a superficial way. It’s cruel to see the show reach a logical, happy closing point, only to torpedo it: “We’ve done our duty. Downton is safe. Papa must be dancing a jig,” Mary told him when she presented their child to him in the hospital. “I’m dancing a jig!” her husband declared. “I feel like I’ve swallowed a box of fireworks.”

But as irksome as it is to see Downton succumb to its sudsiest instincts, Matthew’s death raises a fascinating question that the show has been unable to pose before. Who is Lady Mary, and what does she want, now that she’s not required to secure Downton Abbey’s financial future or line of succession. Without those obligations, Mary’s sisters were able to explore various answers to those queries, from nursing, to Branson, to Sir Anthony, to a newspaper column, to Mr. Gregson. Mary was turned sour by her inability to even consider what she might want, lead into misadventure with Mr. Pamuk, and only after marrying Matthew, found a version of herself that both let her fulfill her responsibilities and that she actually liked. “I hope I’m allowed to be your version of Mary Crawley for all eternity,” she told Matthew, immediately before his death. But who is Mary’s version of herself? What is the life she can be pleased with that she’s also truly chosen? And what can she choose, now that she has a child, and the time her sisters spent in various experiments has passed her by? As irritated as I am by Matthew’s death, this is genuinely rich dramatic territory, and I’m encouraged to see Downton explore it, along with the fact that Lord Grantham is left with Branson as his only son-in-law, and one he might find acceptable in comparison to Michael Gregson as Edith’s lover.
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