The news yesterday that Warner Brothers had given Rob Thomas, the television writer who created Veronica Mars (he’s also an extremely strong young adult novelist whose work is well worth a look), permission to crowdfund a movie continuation of the show, was met with some disgruntlement that viewers were being asked to be the investors in a corporate product from which they’d recognize no profits, and, at the point of this writing $2.761 million in donations, more than enough to get the movie made. Willa Paskin is obviously correct that consumers’ ticket dollars already fund the production of movies. But in between her argument and the view of critics of the project lies an important point: if consumers are going to get asked like investors by mainstream media companies, they should think about what they want out of the bargain other than the simple creation fo the product.

The idea that investors deserve something more than the existence of whatever product or movie or show they’re funded is embedded in Kickstarter’s rewards system. If you give at different levels, you might get a t-shirt, tickets to a premiere party, or even an opportunity to name a character or appear in a film or game. Those rewards tend to be set by the people who are proposing the project, based on what they think they can manageably offer (though a considerable portion of crowd-funded projects ship their core products late, and some developers are running into problems when demand or unexpected costs for rewards means higher burdens for delivery than they expected). Where consumer choice enters into the process is the selection of the reward level, rather than the offerings themselves.

One thing that’s striking about the Veronica Mars Kickstarter is that you have to give at least $35, more than four times the cost of the average American movie ticket in 2012, to get a digital download of the movie. You have to give $750 to get a ticket to the premiere of the film in Los Angeles. If the Kickstarter was really inverting the process by which ticket sales fund the production of movies, going from taking the profits from one project and plowing them into the creation of another, to letting people put that ticket money up in advance, then the campaign would have to get tickets or downloads to all of its donors. It would be a method that would be fair to fans, who after all, want to see the thing they’re funding, and it might make a lot of sense for both the studios and for third-party retailers like Fandango. Nothing sells tickets like advance buzz, and getting people to commit to see the movie in advance is probably a good way to get them to bring their friends along as well. And while tickets and downloads require initial coordination with Fandango or iTunes, they’re less costly and work-intensive than say, printing and mailing t-shirts.

That’s a small example of the sorts of material things that fans could and should express that they want out of projects like this. But there are a lot of other ways to think about these kinds of investment opportunities. I might have been more excited, for example, to invest in buying back the rights to create new work in the Veronica Mars universe for Rob Thomas, if Warner Brothers could have been persuaded to sell it. I’d love to see a block of fan investors who prioritize projects that commit to work with union crews and pay actors union wages.

And I’ve written about this before, but I’d frankly love to see fans move beyond investing in single projects. Given all the discussion we have about the whiteness of movies and television, and, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and I have written, the lack of black investors who are willing and able to lose money financing projects, I’d be excited to see a crowd-funded film investment fund that only backs projects by creators of color or featuring non-white actors, perhaps that’s structured as a non-profit*. Ditto for an investment fund that could back projects by women. There’s nothing wrong with passionate attachment to single franchises, or single creators, but those aren’t the only ways that fans think about popular culture. And limiting our demonstrations of investment power to single artists or single projects ultimately limits our reach, and our ability to affect the culture. I don’t think fans are ever going to put together Megan Ellison money, for example. But I think ordinary viewers, over time, and perhaps through subscription, could put together enough to fund a series of projects that would be good enough to attract notice at places like Sundance and SXSW.

All of these approaches mean thinking through an awful lot of logistics and organizational questions. But those are all much less difficult to do than that getting fans to think of themselves not as supplicants but as an economic force. It’s easy to feel disempowered in the face of show cancellations and fired showrunners and huge delays in movie adaptations. But at a moment of extraordinary chaos in the television industry, and of new and emerging distribution models in both movies and television, this is the perfect moment for viewers with money to spend to assert ourselves, and not just to buy a speaking part in a Veronica Mars movie.

*

The most recent episode of Girls aired while I was at South By Southwest, and in a way I’m glad I’ve had some time to watch the episode slowly, and to think about it before writing about it, given the flood of reaction and debate to the half-hour of television.

The storyline that’s provoked the most commentary has been a sequence towards the end of the episode in which Adam, after running into Hannah while on a date with his current girlfriend Natalia, falls off the wagon, takes Natalia back to his apartment, and when she expresses some dismay at the state of it, orders her on all fours and has her crawl to her bedroom. What commences there clearly makes Natalia uncomfortable from the outset. When Adam pulls off her panties and begins trying to get her aroused, she notes she hasn’t showered that day, which Adam interprets only as an expression of concern for him, rather than as a tactful attempt to ask him to stop. They have short-lived penetrative sex, at which point Adam pulls out and prepares to ejaculate on Natalia. Though she only tells him not to come on her dress, an injunction he complies with, she is obviously deeply distressed after the event, telling Adam “I, like, really didn’t like that.”

Much of the analysis of the episode has centered on the question of whether Adam committed a sexual assault against Natalia. “‘No means no,’” wrote my friend Amanda Hess at Slate, “is not the only measure of consent.” “This episode asks us why we’re so, so careful not to call things rape, or why we think there’s an acceptable level of reluctance, coercion, or intimidation that can be part of a sexual encounter,” Margaret Lyons writes at Vulture. Adam is clearly a man with boundary issues, someone I’ve found creepy enough to justify the cops showing up and creating some distance between him and Hannah. And while I think that the fact that this episode has been so upsetting, confusing, and sparked such a powerful debate about the space between an outright no and a clear yes that’s so often interpreted as consent to sex or sexual acts, I actually found myself focusing on something else: the fact that Adam was also portrayed as miserable and upset at the end of the encounter, too.

This is not to say that Adam’s feelings about his encounter with Natalia are more important than her feelings. But in his question to Natalia after she made clear how upset she was, “Is this it? Are you done with me?” there are some interesting issues, and potential answers to the question of how to train men, not just women, to prevent sexual assault.

Part of the reason I was so struck by this episode of Girls is because I’ve been rewatching How I Met Your Mother for a piece on what that show says about contemporary relationships. And I’ve been struck by the extent to which that show both fetishizes Barney Stinson’s (Neil Patrick Harris) conquests, and how much his technique has to do with impairment and manipulation of consent. On New Year’s in the first season he picks up Natalya, whose most important trait seems to be that she hails from “The former Soviet republic of Drunk-Off-Her-Ass-Istan,” as Barney puts it. Lily asks Barney at one point “they’re blonde and drunk, isn’t that your type?” But I can’t think of a moment when the show ever discusses the impact of sobriety on consent—it’s just a running joke that Barney likes to, and is very good, at taking advantage of women who are heavily intoxicated. He’s also a liar, changing his presentation of himself so women will be more likely to consent to sex with him. ” I’ve told some outrageous lies. I have told women that I was famous, a war hero, that sex with me would cure their nearsightedness,” he explains in season seven. And at one point, these deceptions do seem to cross over into a clear, and what ought to be ugly, taking of sexual advantage, when Barney explains that he likes to meet women new to New York “with no idea what a casting director could legally ask her to do, hold, or lick during an audition.”
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The bridge is yours.

-Chris Hayes will be on your MSNBC at 8pm on weekdays now!

-Storytelling advice from Pixar.

-Chris Orr responds to me and others on what went wrong with romantic comedies.

-The origins of the Coach handbag.

-Keith Olbermann and Current have settled their lawsuit.

As the New York Times reported today, Chris Hayes, the Nation editor-turned-MSNBC-weekend-host, will be moving from his Saturday and Sunday morning show to take over the 8 PM primetime slot on the network, replacing Ed Schultz, who will shift to the weekends. It’s a great development for people who like their news wonky rather than driven by a culture of gaffes and win-the-cycle mentality. And it’s also good news for another group of people: Hayes’ roster of guests, who will get exposed to a much bigger audience in primetime.

As Rob Savillo reports at Media Matters, Hayes’ show has booked strikingly more diverse guests than any of its competitors on Sunday morning. From January 6 of this year to March 10, the breakdown looks like this:

Up With Chris Hayes is close to booking white men in proportion to their actual presence in the U.S. population, 41 percent to 39 percent. All the other morning weekend shows on other networks are booking mixes of guests that are more than 60 percent white and male.

What’s important about this isn’t just that Hayes’ show could compete with other primetime news coverage by drawing in audiences eager for a different tone in news coverage, and eager to see experts who look like themselves on screen. It’s that the show demonstrates the lie that other shows aren’t diverse just because the pools of people available to pontificate on cable news are largely white and male. Even if they are, Hayes and his bookers have been able to find engaging guests with good insights who are capable of performing well on camera who aren’t primarily white guys. And if they can, the question is why everyone else seems to be having so much trouble? It’s one thing to go along with the accepted status quo in your industry without interrogating it. It’s another one entirely to be caught out as lazier than your competition, which has beaten you at something like representing a wider spectrum of opinions, experiences, and backgrounds, just by trying.

It’s absolutely true that the Kick-Ass franchise is cartoonishly violent, and the plotline in the first movie in which Dave saves a white girl from menacing black drug dealers was downright racially irresponsible. That said, I’m really relieved that there’s at least one franchise out there that’s focused on the problem of escalation between superheroes and supervillains:

In a way, the arms race between superheroes and supervillians is like the real-world cycle in which police forces get more militarized in response to the perception that they’re outgunned by criminals, something that’s been a glancing subtext of pop culture since Hans Gruber took out the LAPD’s armored truck with a rocket launcher. In the end, nobody wins. You just get fireballs. Or two women in a pickup truck getting shot up by the cops, and a police department that then can’t even be bothered to replace their vehicle. Kick-Ass 2, like all superhero movies, will end up shying away from the idea that shutting down this escalatory cycle is a good thing, if only because the entertainment value—or, shall I say, kick-ass value—of it is so high. But more than most other franchises, Kick-Ass is comfortable at least acknowledging that there’s real ugliness there, and testing how comfortable we are embracing that.

This post discusses plot points from the March 13 episode of The Americans.

Last week, I posited that on The Americans, the working definition of marriage is that “the person you love is the person whose secrets you keep.” The show seemed to double down on that theme this week, showing what happens to marriages, the real one between Sandra and Stan, and the one between Elizabeth and Phillip, which Elizabeth wants to become real, when one partner in each relationship carries a secret he can’t share with his wife.

The possibility of Irina has been there since the early episodes of The Americans, when we watched Phillip crumple up a photograph of her and commit with a bright-eyed enthusiasm meant to transmute grief into joy to getting to know Elizabeth. I’m torn on the idea that the KGB would have taken the risk of pairing the two of them for the assignment, unless either the organization doesn’t know about their romance, which seems unlikely, or it needs to use it. If much of The Americans has been concerned with Phillip’s reaction to the news that his wife is a survivor of sexual violence and his difficulty dealing with the fact that he can’t protect her from it happening again, this episode reversed that dynamic. Phillip may be the only person Irina could handle doing something tremendously ugly but necessary to her, beating her face and then having sex with her to leave evidence that would make it plausible that she’d been raped after she was unable to seduce the Polish dissident who was their target. Trusting someone to hurt you without going so far as to render the pain, emotional or physical, unbearable, is the flip side of trusting someone to protect you.

And the assignment leaves Phillip with two secrets. First, he’s had sex with Irina again, though I think it’s an open question whether or not the context of it means Phillip is telling Elizabeth the truth when he insisted that “Nothing happened.” And second, Irina has raised the possibility that she and Phillip have a son. I’m not sure whether I believe it’s true that they have a child. Irina’s decision to go off the grid would have terrible consequences for her son, if only likely forestalling his military career, once her KGB handlers realize that she’s given them the slip. And when Phillip asks if it’s true they have a child, Irina’s bitter response that “Only duty and honor are real, isn’t that what we were told?” is ambiguous. Maybe she means the boy doesn’t exist. Maybe she means that while Phillip got her pregnant, she can’t really think of her son as his child. Maybe the idea of him is a test for Phillip, to see if he’s still loyal to Elizabeth after their shared ideal. But in any case, he’s an unresolved question, and it’s difficult for me to imagine Phillip exorcising the possibility of another child of his from his mind, much in the same way he never really forgot Irina. What consequences that shard of an idea has for his ability to commit to Elizabeth remains to be seen.

Elizabeth doesn’t know about Phillip’s newly-acquired secrets, but back in Washington, as she, Henry, and Paige join the Beemans for dinner, Sandra Beeman confesses that knowing Stan has secrets is eating at their marriage. “I miss talking,” she confides in Elizabeth. “I mean, I understand. The crazy hours. National security, it’s not like you can turn it on and off.” When Elizabeth commiserates in the understatement of the year that “Marriage is hard,” Sandra lays out her philosophy of building a family: “Well, it’s not for sissies. That’s for sure. But at the end of the day, you just choose to keep going or you don’t…we’ve been married for 20 years. That’s a lifetime. It has to count for something.”
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