Since we’re going to be reading a book about some of the ways faith is lived in America (and how that affects how deities spend their time on the continent), I thought it was worthwhile to pull in some actual facts on the state of American religion. So I called on my long-time friend and resident theologian Chris Ashley, a Ph.D. student at Union Theological Seminary who works on, among other things, the relationship of gay people to evangelical faith, and who is particularly qualified to comment on this particular subject because he carried Neil Gaiman’s luggage at one of the book signings on the American Gods tour. Denominationally, we differ on our preferences in monotheism, and our baseball teams (he is a benighted Cubs fan), but he’s a great guy (some of you have met him in comments) and I’m grateful to him for pulling this together.

By Chris Ashley

The premise of American Gods is plausible because everybody knows Americans are highly religious, especially when we’re compared to the world’s other wealthy and powerful nations. But how religious are we, exactly, and how is that landscape changing?

Americans overwhelmingly identify with some form or descendant of Christianity. As of 2007, the figure was about 79 percent. (All numbers, unless otherwise cited, are from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Religious Landscape Survey.) Within Christianity, the three largest subgroups are evangelical Protestants (e.g. Southern Baptists, Pentecostals), Roman Catholics, and “mainline” Protestants (e.g. Methodists, Lutherans). Evangelicals are just over a quarter of the population, Catholics just under, and the mainline just under a fifth.

After Christians, the single largest religious group, and the fastest-growing one, is the unaffiliated, at just over 16 percent. This statistical construct includes avowed atheists and agnostics, as well as those who simply have no identification. The latter, some 12 percent of the United States as a whole, is larger than any single denomination other than the Catholics. There are approximately as many self-identified atheists as Jews or Mormons (1.6 percent for atheists; 1.7 percent for the others). The unaffiliated are a more exact cross-section of America than any other religious group, matching income and ethic proportions of the population as a whole very closely. Among other major world religions, there are about as many Buddhists as Muslims and slightly fewer Hindus (0.7 percent, 0.6 percent, 0.4 percent).
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Matt is, of course, correct to note the self-awareness fail that is the Republicans’ decision to psych themselves to cut a lot of social services by watching a) a movie about bank robbery, b) by a director who maxed out to Obama — Affleck spoke up today to note that he thought his recession drama, The Company Men, would be more appropriate viewing for the Republican Caucus. Dave Weigel has some joking suggestions for alternatives. Here are five serious ones:

1. Henry V‘s Saint Crispin’s Day speech is so obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to include it. But it’s an awesome whip speech, whether you’re riding into battle against the French, or telling people what you’ll do to them if they don’t vote with you. I mean, seriously, do you want to have these lines directed at you if you don’t get behind the Boehner plan? “He which hath no stomach to this fight, / Let him depart; his passport shall be made, / And crowns for convoy put into his purse / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us.” Bonus points for insulting the manhood of cowards, dissing the constable of France, and for the debt-ceiling applicable “Come thou no more for ransom, gentle herald: / They shall have none.”:

Or, if you prefer your Shakespearean brutality in straight gangsta mode, go with Exeter rather than Harry:

2. Okay, so, the debt ceiling isn’t the dividing line between the Borg and humanity. But if you’re going to silence doubters, or haters, Captain Picard’s bust-plate-glass-then-take-a-stand move is an awesome formula:

3. It’s unfortunately not available as a clip, but Harry Dean Stanton’s “Credit is a sacred trust, it’s what our free society is founded on,” lecture seems appropriate. Might have to cut it off before the “I don’t want no commies in my car. No Christians either,” line, though.

4. Barack Obama is so totally the Sheriff of Nottingham, what with the taxing, and the employment of deeply unpleasant sorceresses. Allen West can play Azeem if he’s just aching to put a hurt on someone, and help lead the fight against increasing revenue as part of a deal. Also, serves to argue that you don’t have to be a rich industrialist to go Galt:

And of course, if we just watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for advice on raising rapidly approaching ceilings, especially one with spikes, we could solve this mess in a jiffy:

Okay, it’s not exactly The Office, but The Ministry looks pretty similar, and delightfully biting.

I usually say that the reason The Office should end is that Jim and Pam got together, solving the main problem of the show, and the rest of the characters are so mired in stasis that the show is kind of miserable to watch if it’s just constantly rehashing their foibles. But I also think The Office came to America at a time when pop culture was fairly comprehensively addressing the miseries of cubicle life in works that ranged from Office Space to Dilbert. While characters like Ryan, whose spectacular rise and flameout illustration the hollowness of corporate ambition, occasionally exist to illustrate larger issues, The Office primarily exists to remind watchers that their workdays and coworkers could be less bearable than they are.

The Ministry clearly is going to do that, too. Afghanistan may have very specific problems, but fights over office supplies are universal. But because the office in question is at the intersection of a bunch of larger questions, ranging from the competence of the military, to the blind eye toward drug trafficking, to government corruption, The Ministry looks like it’ll have a lot more bite than The Office ever did. It’s easy to treat something like corruption in Afghanistan as miasma, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to be idealistic and end up working in a totally dysfunctional government agency.

-People who are developing daytime talk shows: Anderson Cooper and Kevin Smith.

-The importance of geography, economics, and legal regulation to arts criticism.

-Debunking the myths of the 1961 baseball season.

-Wesley Snipes could have been Geordi La Forge, and boy would that have been strange.

-Because more brass in pop music is always a good thing, this is my track of the day:

I’m a big Kevin Fallon fan, but I’m appalled that he left Buffy the Vampire Slayer out of his analysis of television shows that had to deal with their core cast graduating from high school part of the way through the run. The Sunnydale seniors’ fight against the town’s mayor, who turns into a giant monster midway through his graduation speech to them, is one of the all-time best metaphors for both the dangers of the real world and the challenges of taking up the mantle of adulthood. As their parents run screaming from the scene, the entire graduating class, prepped by the Scooby Gang, take up arms against the demon, defending the people who have previously defended and sheltered them. It’s fantastic, but I guess it’s not a reusable solution — as dearly as I wish he would, and as much as that show pulls out anything and everything from the grab bag, Ryan Murphy is probably not going to have Lea Michele and Corey Monteith devoured by a beast of legend at the end of the next season of Glee.

But much more important is what comes after. Buffy‘s comfortable, as almost no shows are, with treating college as if it’s not the right option for all of its characters, without treating Xander, who doesn’t join Oz, Willow, and Buffy at UC-Sunnydale, as if he’s stupid. The show is honest about the fact that it takes him a while to land on his feet, but once he does, the show treats Xander’s work as a carpenter and construction crew leader with a lot of dignity — in a sense, the show is an inheritor to the mixed-class casts of classics like Cheers. Similarly, Season 6 of Buffy‘s a tough look at what it’s like to try to support a family without a college degree and without skills other than poking vampires with the pointy end of sharpened stakes. Obviously, episodes like “Doublemeat Palace,” in which Buffy works at a hamburger joint that turns out to be a ripoff of Soylent Green but with a demonic twist, are a bit overdramatic, but the show really respects Buffy’s frustration, her sense that because she was forced to drop out of school, she’s out of synch with everyone else in her life. The episode “As You Were,” where she imagines life with her ex-boyfriend Riley, who has moved on from her, and from Sunnydale, to a successful career and a fulfilling marriage, is one of the most emotionally realized and piercing hours in the show. And even Willow, the character who’s theoretically most on the right track, in college with a loving girlfriend, isn’t immune to addiction. I don’t love the Evil Willow storyline (though I do love that Xander gets to save the world), but it’s a useful reminder that people on all sorts of tracks have problems.

That commitment to showing that people do different things after high school but that there’s no guaranteed safe path to adulthood may be the most reliable way to go may be the smartest bet for high school shows (or college shows, like Community) that have to move their characters forward but want to keep the gang together to spin out emotional threads and comparisons. It’s easier to keep folks together in a town like Sunnydale or New York City than it will be in Dillon or Lima, but it’s not impossible.

Adam Serwer thinks that I’m wrong on Captain America: The First Avenger‘s optimism about American institutions because Peggy Carter, Cap’s girl, has been rejected elsewhere*:

Peggy Carter, Cap’s love interest, alludes to institutional sexism briefly in one of her first conversations with Steve Rogers, saying that she knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in her face.” It’s easy to see how a similar scene could be constructed to explain the presence of Gabe Jones in Cap’s elite unit, something along the lines of Cap insisting that he be included because he knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in his face,” alluding to his earlier conversation with Carter. That would be entirely in keeping with the narrative context of the movie itself, and even Cap’s character, without requiring a lengthy tangent on segregation in the armed forces during World War II.

My assumption was those doors were British ones — Peggy is, after all, a U.K. transplant to an American unit. And it’s true that Col. Chester Phillips can be skeptical of Peggy’s judgement out in the field as part of a larger skepticism of what Cap, who up until his arrival in Europe has been a war bond-shilling show pony, can actually accomplish that’s of military value. But she’s entirely accepted as a partner by Howard Stark and Dr. Abraham Erskine, and she gets to shuck that pencil skirt and put on some pants to fight Hydra on the ground. (Erskine’s top secret lab is guarded by a lady with a shotgun, too.)

In a sense, that fact that Peggy gets to hit the front lines and defend her man is just as cheery and dismissive of actual history as the suggestion that World War II units were racially integrated. Women in both the WACS and the WAVES were kept out of combat (something that actually occasioned prejudice from men who thought they’d be taken out of combat and sent to the front lines), and the WAVES were confined to the continental U.S. and Hawaii. The names of both units signaled that they were meant to be temporary units rather than to pave the way for women’s long-term service in the military. Somebody may have shut a door on Peggy Carter somewhere, but in Captain America, it sure wasn’t the U.S. Army.

*He also notes that the Marvel universe as a whole has some nicely skeptical storylines about the American government. This is indisputably true. But they have chosen a more optimistic story for their major movie venture, leaving Sony to produce the more pessimistic X-Men arc. That was all I meant.

I tend to be skeptical of strands of feminism that claim that if ladies were just in power wars would end, we’d renew Gaia, and all that jazz. That said, if Matthew Weiner promised me that Mad Men* would end up with Joan, Betty, and Peggy joining the same consciousness-raising group, figuring out that their relationships with the men of Sterling Cooper were shaped by broader assumptions about gender and power, and founded a collective where they raised their own food, raised kids their kids together, and supported themselves with their hit book, Our Ad Men, Ourselves, I might actually be tempted to watch it:

*I know, I know. I should give Mad Men another shot. I promise I will catch up before the next season starts.

So, there’s a new study out that purports to find that conventionally attractive women are considered better role models than less attractive women when they’re in action roles. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to find out that was the case. But the study seems really wonky. There were just 122 people in it, which is not a particularly big sample size. And more importantly, the examples in the study seem to bias the outcomes pretty heavily. It’s not just that Angelina Jolie and Kathy Bates are totally physically different. It’s that Tomb Raider and Primary Colors aren’t really comparable. Jolie in Tomb Raider is a very straightforward, sexy action heroine:

Bates’ character in Primary Colors has spent a lot of time hospitalized as a result of her mental illness. In the scene where she brandishes a gun on a sketchy Arkansas lawyer, she explicitly uses the fact that everyone thinks she’s crazy to make her threat to shoot his genitals plausible. “I am a gay lesbian woman! I do not mythologize the male sexual organ!” she hollers at him. The violence in Tomb Raider is abstracted, necessary, presented as if it’s cool, whereas the threat of it in Primary Colors is visceral and ugly, not strictly necessary, presented with a combination of wry admiration and disapproval. There’s no way both movies would seem comparable even if Jolie played both roles.

I’d actually like to see a study like this that’s based in more viable comparisons. If we can find a way of presenting women kicking ass that helps expand audiences’ sense of what women can do, while still making for awesome action movies, it would be wonderful to be able to advocate for it. But I need better evidence than this.

President Obama’s been warning of dire consequences if Congress fails to meet a debt ceiling compromise. While calling your representative might push legislators in the right direction, we’d all be derelict in our duty if we didn’t start making personal preparations for the debt ceiling apocalypse that awaits us next week. Here’s a seven-part guide to preserving your financial future and your physical safety if the worst comes to pass:

As interest rates rise, avoid, at all costs, foreclosing on gypsies with adjustable-rate mortgages.

Hire Krysten Ritter to help you figure out how to get your credit card debt under control as quickly as is humanely possible before your APR goes up:

Keep a reserve of tuppence on hand to avoid getting crushed in bank runs — enough so you’ll feel financially secure in case of 401(k) fluctuations, but don’t withdraw so much that you’ll cripple the British tea industry:

As state budgets contract, public servants should steel themselves for the arrival of overenthusiastic department auditors:

If you’re in danger of losing your job, absolutely refuse to be terminated by anyone who is less handsome than George Clooney:

If all attempts at financial prudence are for nought, sign up for a chain gang (though run by someone other than Joe Arpaio). At least you’ll keep getting to go to the movies:

And if all fails, hole up in the Winchester:

After conservative commentators jumped the gun in assuming the heinous killings in Norway were committed by Islamic extremists, I went looking for something that would act as a literary palate cleanser, a reaffirmation that terrorism is a tactic that is freely, and tragically, available to people of all faiths, national origins, ethnicities, and political persuasions. So, of course, I picked up the copy of Bel Canto that’s been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years.

As it turns out, Bel Canto isn’t a terrific book about terrorism, because the terrorists in the novel are sort of incompetent, not particularly violent, and most importantly for the overall structure and argument of the novel, just as susceptible to the beauty of high and low art as the people they’ve captured. And that ability to be moved by opera, to fall under the sweet hypnosis of of a telenovela, is what enables captors and hostages to come together for a season in a sort of utopian society. There’s a magical realism about it — this isn’t finding a galleon stranded inland and covered in flowers or unusually long-lived gypsies, or anything. But in these fractured times, there is something miraculous about the idea that common knowledge of pop culture could save a life, as it does early in the hostage-taking:

The Catholic priests, sons of those murdering Spanish missionaries, loved to tell the people that the truth would set them free, and in this case, they were exactly correct. The General named Benjamin had cocked his gun and was prepared ot make an example by dispatching the Vice President into the next world, but the soap opera story stopped him. As much as he was sick to know that five months of planning for this one evening to kidnap the President and possibly overthrow the entire government were worthless and he was now saddled with two hundred and twenty-two hostages lying before him on the floor, he believed the Vice President’s story completely. Noe one could make it up. It was too petty and small-minded…But Maria, even in the jungle where televisions were rare, electricity sketchy, and reception nonexistent, people spoke of this Maria. Even Benjamin, who cared for nothing but the freedom of the oppressed, knew something of Maria. Her program came on in the afternoons from Monday to Friday, with a special episode on Tuesday nights which more or less summarized the week for those who had to work during the day. If Maria was to be freed, it was not surprising that it should happen on a Tuesday night.

I can’t actually decide if I think it’s more miraculous that the characters are united by low culture, which is not normally assumed to have transcendent, cosmic power, or that the power of opera, which is not the most accessible art form (and the book spends a lot of time meditating on both what it means to be able to communicate with everyone, and no one), could prove so universally appealing:

Too much time had been spent weeping on the sofa or staring out the window. Now there was music and an accompanist. Roxanne Coss had risked her voice on Gianna Schicchi and found that her voice was still there…no one could shoot her while they sang. By extension they were all safe, and so they pressed in close to the piano to listen…When she got the song exactly right she took it straight through to the end without a flutter of hesitation. it was impossible to say that her singing had improved, but there was something in her interpretation of the lines that had shifted almost imperceptibly. She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

Anyway, even if Bel Canto isn’t a realistic book about terrorism, it’s a beautiful, resonant book about culture and beauty. Even raving maniacs who kill children want to be able to claim certain transcendent artists as their own, no matter how they have to stretch to do it.

It’s fairly clear that the two big, competing Snow White projects that are under development have fairly different visions of the classic fairy tale. Tarsem Singh is directing Lily Collins in the title role as an update of the Disney version, but on visual acid:

While Kristen Stewart’s playing her as a warrior on a three-part journey “about being confronted with death,” of which Snow White and the Huntsman is apparently the first part:

I can get why vampires are big, a reckoning with the dangers and excitements of sex for the first generation of kids not to know a time before HIV, and I understand why angels, mostly in the form of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books and their attendant movie adaptations, would be the next big thing after that, a return to innocence, a sanctification. But I’m grappling with our return to fairy tales, which are back in a big way.

The competing Snow White projects suggest two different draws for that particular story: do you wake up gorgeous, to a handsome prince? Or do you wake up a warrior? Are you happy within the confines of your fate? Or do you rail against it? But then there’s the other half of the equation: how do you get to sleep in the first place? And who who or what wakes you up? Something like the modernized update of Sleeping Beauty that Emily Browning’s starring in gets very directly at the horror and fantasy of that kind of passivity:

I was crushingly disappointed by Red Riding Hood, which I’d thought had the opportunity to be a really searing look at arranged marriage, sexual violence and revenge, so I’m going to avoid getting overly excited about any of these projects before I actually see them. But I think io9 is right to push hard for the idea that if we’re walking back into the woods with the Brothers Grimm, that we should make movies that grapple with the terrors of the originals.

In recent years, we’ve spent a lot of time turning monsters of legend cute or sexy, which is a bit odd. It’s not as if disobedient children in a modern society are at much risk of running away into the woods, as if girls in most communities are endangering not just themselves or their property rights if they’re sexually active before they’re married. But that doesn’t mean that modernity eliminates monsters. And I’d love to see a fairy tale movie with an acute sense of what we fear most, whether it’s a new monster, or an old one.

“I’ve done a terrible thing. But I’ve done it for a good reason. I did it for us. That is college tuition for Walter Jr. And Holly, eighteen years down the road. And it’s health insurance for you and the kids. For Jr.’s physical therapy. His SAT tutor. It’s money for groceries, gas, for birthdays and graduation parties. Skyler, that money is for this roof over your head. The mortgage that you are not going to be able to afford on a part-time bookkeeper’s salary when I’m gone.” -Walter White

“New Zealand, that’s where they, uh, that’s where they made Lord of the Rings! I say we just move there, yo! I mean, you could do your art, right? Like, you could like paint the local castles and shit, and I can be a bush pilot!” -Jesse Pinkman

Pretty much as long as we’ve had television, we’ve used that medium to explore manichean struggles between good and evil. For much of television history, figuring out who’s on what side’s been relatively simple: cops and robbers, cops and rapists, cops and murderers. Perry Mason was a defense attorney, sure, but his clients almost always turned out not to have committed the crimes of which they were accused. If our moral art was about dividing the guilty from the innocent, that was a fairly easy project. The Wire basically preserved the distinction between criminals and the law, but suggested that there were people worth of sympathy on both sides of the divide. To a certain extent, Breaking Bad is the inverse of The Wire. Both criminals and the law are equally dislikable. And the key moral question of the show isn’t whether people commit crimes, or inflict vast damage on society. It’s about how clearly they see themselves, and what they’re doing.

I. Freaks

Where The Wire sketches a broad picture of the impact of the drug trade on society, the show doesn’t spend a lot of time with actual addicts. It’s a systematic show rather than an interior one. We see Bubbles on the nod, but not what it’s like to be on the nod. It’s characteristic of the interiority of Breaking Bad that we spend much more time with addicts, most important among them Jesse.
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-Are Nazis terrible movie villains?

-It’s not like I thought the Paradise Lost movie was going to be good, or anything, but this concept art looks uniquely unpromising.

-This is not a good week for video games moralism.

-Wener Herzog loves Comic Con.

-Snape says it gets better:

I cosign Matt’s eulogy for Borders, and for bookstores in general:

Where I grew up our local independent bookstore was a little place called Barnes & Noble that, obviously, grew and became one of the major national chains. So I never was quite on the chain-bashing kick. Then when I moved to DC, I was actually more in proximity to some Borders outlets, which were also cool. Consequently, it wound up touching me in a surprise way to wake up this morning to a Borders email saying “goodbye” to everyone who’d been on their spam list all those years. Like Dave Weigel, I credit browsing the magazine racks at the bookstores (“Already, I was into politics, but didn’t know much about the world outside Time and Newsweek. Here was a store with six magazine racks and unfamiliar offerings like The Nation and National Review and In These Times and Reason”) of yore for teaching me about the world. Here I perused issues of Foreign Affairs and Mother Jones and who knows whatever else. The world seems small when you’re young…Long live digital downloading and long live the library. People still need places to go to get away from parents, roommates, and the rest of it all, right?

One thing I’d add is that there’s something really wonderful about the social element of bookstores. My first summer in college, I held down a couple of jobs, one of which was working the register at the huge Barnes and Noble in Burlington, Massachusetts. My coworkers were a group of people, a number of whom held advanced degrees in literature, but some of my coolest interactions were with the customers.

One time, I checked out a couple who were buying easily $200 worth of books, including dozens of copies of the same science fiction magazine — it turns out the man had just published his first short story in that issue, one of which he autographed for me. It’s still at home in my childhood bedroom. The actual content of the story escapes me, but sharing his excitement was a gift, especially since my own first publications were still a couple of years in the future. On the day Lawrence v. Texas was decided, striking down sodomy laws across the country, I celebrated with a young man who was buying a copy of Out. We threw a huge party to celebrate the release (and sell lots of copies) of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and even though I knew, intellectually, that millions of people would be reading the book along with me the next day, there was something awesome about seeing all those shining, expectant faces gathered for the occasion, the idea that excitement surrounding the new book was so big that you had to be there, not just to get your copy as soon as possible, but to share it with other people. (Then, there was the dude shepherding a flock of teenage boys through the store so they could buy about a dozen identical Bibles. We didn’t have a lot to talk about.)

Social media means we all spend a lot of time signaling potential compatibility through the lists of the things that we like or don’t like. And it’s probably a more efficient process of figuring out who we’ll make a real initial connection with. But I kind of miss the days when we had less perfect information, and when it could feel really exciting to see someone buying or reading or browsing something you knew was just going to rock their world, and to risk a conversation with them on the basis of that. You can still do this on, say, public transit (though probably with a smaller chance of sketchiness if you’re a girl rather than a guy). But for me, bookstores will always be the places that introduced me to the idea that you can take a risk based on some slim public proof that you and another person share similar interior worlds.

I was watching Alien over the weekend with some friends, and one thing that struck me was the extent to which Sigourney Weaver’s allowed to cry, and freak out, and shake, and her having an emotional reaction to the fact that a giant alien is eating everyone she knows, and threatening her cat, and one of those friends turns out to be a semi-evil android is treated as if it’s in no way incongruous with her ability to absolutely kick ass.

We’re in this moment where there are a lot of action heroines, among them little girls, who execute extremely badass things, but with extreme calm and detachment. Hit Girl may take some deep breaths before she absolutely decimates a hallway full of mobsters, and she may cry when her father dies, but she appears to have very little emotional reaction to the things that are going on around her:

Similarly, the heroine of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Haywire reacts to Michael Fassbender’s (and other people’s) attempts to kill her — which I know at minimum would make me pretty sad, not to mention totally panicked — with fairly impressive aplomb:

I don’t know if Angelina Jolie’s the reason for this trend in female action stars who wreak enormous amounts of havoc while maintaining perfect composure, but she is certainly among the most effective practitioners of the form — in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, she only gets tearful when the fight is over:

I’ve been sort of skeptical of Colombiana, on the grounds that it’s yet another portrait of a traumatized killing machine, but I’m prepared to be a bit more enthusiastic if the movie uses the main character’s freakouts less as a juxtaposition with her efficiency than as an illustration of the cost of the violence that consumed her family, the tally she’s adding to now:

Of course, given that I don’t have a lot of experience in any of these circumstances, maybe the dichotomy in emotional reactions makes sense, and revenge killings are much less anxiety-inducing than being stalked by a psychosexual nightmare direbeast.

I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say that I think female killers in pop culture should bear a burden their male counterparts don’t, of anchoring us to the reality of what it would be like if the explosions and the blood were real. But Ripley and Alien are a reminder that sometimes, action sequences are more effective when they’re earned, when victory requires a lot of sweat and struggle, and sometimes, the only reward is your own continued life.

As I am an enormous geek, I cannot even begin to express how excited I am about Knights of Badassdom:

First, there’s the cast. I may be sore vexed with True Blood this season, but Ryan Kwanten is a funny dude who deserves to do more than play a slow Southern stud. I’ve always believed that someday, Jimmi Simpson’s going to break out and I’ll be able to say I told you all back in the day. I’m glad to see Peter Dinklage is getting to put his training as Tyrion Lannister to dual use. Ditto with Danny Pudi and Abed. Steve Zahn is just plain wonderful. Add in Sommer Glau and it’s pretty hard to believe this isn’t some dorky fan video that someone cut together.

But it’s not. Instead, it’s part of a growing canon of movies and television shows, from Big Fan to My Boys to The League to The Guild based on the idea that people form communities less around who they are, or how they worship, or where they work, but what they like. Ultimately, I think this will become fairly routine, and groups of characters who are united by common interests will end up being presented like they’re any other group of folks who hang out at Central Perk or wherever. But we’re still getting used to the idea that cosplay, or video games, or fantasy sports (sports fandom has always been the most accepted form of American fandom, so it’s kind of exempt) can be the basis for durable friendships and friend groups. Movies like this reflect the experiences of those of us who form friendships based on what we love — and translate those experiences for folks who are still getting used to the idea.

I liked this Racialicious piece on possible black models for Manic Pixie Dream Girls — there is something weird about the whiteness of that particular archetype, and the whiteness of the archetypal men who desire her. But I think it’s actually overly optimistic to assume that what makes a woman a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is actually her own qualities. I don’t know that a character is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl because she wears a certain kind of clothes, be they thrift-store duds and kinte cloth or tea dresses, that she’s good at idiosyncratic activities, like playing acoustic guitar or running turntables, or that she will hook you up with certain activities, be it backstage parties or playing house at Ikea. I’m not even sure that this is quite it: “If the notion is that Zooey Deschanel is an unreal amalgam of white male fantasies, female rappers like Nicki Minaj may offer that for Black males.” After all, the point isn’t really that Zooey Deschanel is a supermodel sex kitten — she’s an anime character, a pliable blank with eyes as big as movie screens, perfect for a certain kind of male character to project all sorts of ideas and emotions across. Why Manic Pixie Dream Girls like what they like, or self-present the way they present, or are the way they are, is never interesting to the movies or television shows that they’re in.

I’m all for the idea that we need more diverse images of black people, and of black couples, on our screens. The problem with Tyler Perry is not that he tells the same story over and over again — lots of stories told by white writers and directors, with white stars, are hugely derivative. But it matters a lot less if 90 percent of those movies with white casts and white writers and white directors and white producers are derivative when hundreds of those movies come out every year. It might be better if all of those movies were original and fascinating, but even if you get 20 fairly original, thought-provoking movies every year, that’s enough to keep most moviegoers fairly occupied, and a reasonable number of white actors in interesting work. But when Medicine for Melancholy, or Love Jones, is a once-every-couple-of-years event, you don’t get a chance to build and explore new archetypes across multiple works in the same way the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has come together in a relatively short amount of time. Instead, you’ve got the same manichean old struggles about class and righteousness. Which is to to say that how race is lived across class lines, or the role of the church, aren’t important to folks, but they’re not the only things that are important to all folks.

In any case, if we’re going to get more nerds of color, more quirky non-white people, on our screens, we should shoot for archetypes that actually focus on what it means to like different things than your peer group, or to conceive of beauty differently, or to mature before, or after, the people around you, rather than to turn those differences and uniquenesses as totems on someone else’s spirit quest. More Oscar Waos and fewer Zooey Deschanels.

On Mondays, progressive leaders from all parts of the movement, from the blogosphere to the Hill, take a break out of their schedules to tell us what they’re watching, reading, and listening to. Suggestions or requests? Email AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com.

As AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer, Liz Shuler’s the second-highest ranking person in the American labor movement — and she’s just 40. She helped lead the coalition that blocked an Enron-lead push to deregulate the electricity industry in 1997, trained election observers during the 2000 presidential election recount, and was elected secretary-treasurer in 2009. Last week, Shuler took lessons in assertiveness away from Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants, saw analogies to state-level fights over collective bargaining in a performance of Wicked at the Kennedy Center, and considered the plight of freelance artists, most of whom don’t have benefits, as she met with members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Monday, July 18

I started my week by finding advice from a somewhat unlikely source: Tina Fey. Little did I know that when I was looking for some “escape” reading on my Monday flight to Albany, New York, I would end up finding some truly insightful guidance from a woman who made it in the cut-throat business of stand-up comedy.

I laughed all the way through the first chapter of Bossypants. And as I read through Ms. Fey’s early years, and how she got her start in Chicago with Second City, I stumbled upon what was a rather profound insight for me: The rules of improv can help you in life. She talks about the importance of “respecting what your partner has created, and to start from an open-minded place;” saying “yes, and…” so no one is afraid to contribute; and sharing in the responsibility to find solutions by “making statements instead of just asking questions,” especially for women.

Sticky situation in the workplace? Draw on the rules of improv to lighten the tension. Forget your membership card at the gym? Don’t hesitate at the front desk — make a proactive, and perhaps offbeat statement, and move on to the kickboxing! Co-worker making some risky suggestions for the annual conference? Say, “yes, and… let’s talk about how that will double attendance,” and stay in that open-minded place (at least until you get burned). Great perspective to start the week.
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Captain America: The First Avenger is a totally delightful facsimile of a ’40s movie, the kind of thing where canvas truck coverings are thumped vigorously and bad guys are chucked out the back; where plucky kids tossed in the river urge the hero to focus on the villain rather than on fishing them out because they can swim just fine; where wartime romances are no less tragic just because one lover’s frozen in the Antarctic while the other succumbs to the ravages of time, rather than someone dying on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima. The most important thing about it, though, is that it demonstrates that there’s an actual narrative plan behind what A.O. Scott memorably described as Marvel’s Ponzi scheme with the multiple movies leading up to The Avengers. Whether it’s Tony Stark’s father hanging around with Captain America’s crew, womanizing (a running joke about fondue is one of the funniest recreations of forties humor) and tinkering; the appearance of the Cosmic Cube in Norway, and then in the Red Skull’s arsenal; or continuing to see Nick Fury wrangling a set of very talented men in very idiosyncratic circumstances, I can finally see how the personality clashes and the larger narrative are going to be fun (worth it remains to be seen) when they come together in a single movie.

But what really interests me most about Captain America: The First Avenger, and Marvel’s project in The Avengers more generally is how sharp the contrast between that franchise’s faith in the annealing power of America to bind together different people and to make them individually and collectively better, and the X-Men movies’ increasing skepticism about how far America’s stated commitment to diversity actually accommodates difference. It’s not as if these divergent storylines are a shock, or anything — Captain America is a concentrated expression of American patriotism (one that’s been usefully complicated by writers like Robert Morales) where the X-Men are the Swiss Army Knife of oppression metaphors. But it’s still striking to see these stories unfold next to each other, as they are this summer.

One of the things that struck me most about Captain America: The First Avenger was the movie’s insistence on the military as a meritocracy that transforms the people who join it for the better. When Bucky and Cap reunite after the former 90-pound weakling rescues his friend from a Hydra base, Bucky, reckoning with Cap’s transformation asks, “What happened to you?” “I joined the army,” Cap tells him. In the middle of that same rescue, when a white POW comes face-to-face with an Asian-American one and asks “What, we taking everyone?” the guy gives him a spectacular side-eye, thumbs his dog tags out from under his shirt, and tells his fellow prisoner, “I’m from Fresno, ace,” after which he’s fully accepted as a member of the team, and nobody thinks to voice any anti-Japanese sentiments. The movie even portrays Captain America’s division, the 107th, as an integrated one (Derek Luke, once again underused: can we please find something wonderful for him to do? Please?), even though General Eisenhower didn’t voluntarily let black troops serve alongside white ones until the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, and the military wasn’t formally desegregated until President Truman’s executive order in 1948. What really drives the Red Skull nuts is the idea that it’s not that Captain America is great, but the institutions that made him and the things he stands for. “Arrogance may not be a uniquely American trait, but I must say, you do it better than anyone,” he says, demanding, “What makes you so special?” expecting an answer he can laugh at or bat away. “Nothing, I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” Rogers tells him, provoking an attack. And when Steve Rogers wakes up in an altered America 70 years later, a governmental institution’s there for him again, Nick Fury showing some mercy and sensitivity as he tries to acclimate the latest member of his team to a drastically changed world.
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From the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the right-winger who murdered 76 people in Norway on Friday:

It is obvious that Nordic entertainment super-stars like Scarlett Johansson (60-70% Nordic purity), Gwyneth Paltrow (70-80%)Pamela Anderson (90-95%), Paris Hilton (70-80%), Taylor Swift (80- 90%) would have never been where they are today hadn’t it been for their distinct Nordic physical characteristics. They would have never, in a million years, managed to reach their current status of fame had they belonged to another ethnic group. Same can be said about several other superstars with Nordic physical features such as individuals from Marilyn Monroe to Megan Fox. So why not embrace their Nordic gift by contributing to preserve Nordic culture instead of throwing it away and robbing their children of the same opportunities they once received?

Scarlett Johansson has a Jewish mother. Megan Fox is Irish, French, and Native American. Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton have what enduring recognition they have less because they’re avatars of Nordic purity than because they made sex tapes and were canny enough to profit from them on their release rather than slinking away to die of shame. Marilyn Monroe was similarly willing to take her clothes off — and when she kept them on, could actually be fairly funny, a trait which has no distinguishable correlation with Scandanavian ancestry. Ditto with curviness — a quality that is purchasable as much as it is genetic — a propensity to get naked, or the ability to write universally appealing songs about being a teenager.

Breivik is a monster who deserves every moment of the time he’ll do, and more. But even if he’d never gone out and killed a bunch of innocent people, I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to sort your life into these sorts of categories, trying to twist the facts to allow yourself to like things that don’t fit into your worldview. It must be a constant struggle to be this virulent a racist, to perpetually exercise this kind of self-delusion.