Adam Serwer closes out his blog on a very smart culture note, musing over why comic book companies are skittish about married superheroes:

The decision to eliminate their marriages, I think, has a great deal to do with the level of vicarious aspiration involved in comic-book fandom. An essential part of the fun is being able to imagine yourself having Superpowers. There’s a reason the X-Men remains such a blockbuster property–giving superpowers to social pariahs makes the fantasy even more believable, because after all, most comic book geeks–including myself–have a vivid sense of what it’s like to be picked on.

A marriage then, adds an additional hurdle to the fantasy, and not just because it makes the character seem older. I suspect much of the backlash from white geeks to the new Blatino Ultimate Spider-Man has to do with assumptions about blackness being “cool,” and the fear that the new Ultimate Spider-Man will require more suspension of disbelief than they can muster…Divorce by reality altering retcons then serve a secondary purpose beyond making these characters more relatable. They preserve the idealized standard of monogamous heterosexual relationships (no infidelity, no falling out of love, no messy divorce) while giving the heroes access to their female supporting characters and their impossible, pornstar-like bodies. Because what’s the point of being a cool, superpowered social outcast if you can’t use it to get girls?

That strikes me as a core conflict at the heart of male fantasies, and an emerging conflict in some female fantasies. Marriage is desirable, but also the source of pretty profound fears about whether someone will care to stick with you until death do you part. Pulling girls (or guys) lowers the stakes to the level of whether someone will have you until breakfast the next morning, but it doesn’t actually satisfy that long-term goal of settling down.

Most of our romantic comedies succeed by reconciling these disparate impulses: we meet a hound, usually of the male variety, towards the end of his long period of carousing and womanizing, and follow him through the process of finding The Woman. One of the things Sex and the City does that it does not get nearly enough credit for is to have Samantha, the main character with the most active sex life, go through this process, settle down in a monogamous relationship at the end of the series, and then to have her walk away from that relationship in the movie to return to the single life. The reason these stories work is that they generally last from 90 minutes to a decade; the timing feels sort of realistic, and you don’t get tired of the characters either as serial or as happy couples. Superhero stories, by contrast, last for decades. Over that span of time, serial dating or one-night stands can feel like arrested development, while that many years of happy marriage might seem dull, or worse, smug to core audiences. Having superheroes get stuck in terrible marriages might be in keeping with the trend of putting people with powers through the perpetual wringer, but that might be a bit too on the nose. Better to get overwhelmed by world-consuming power than go through the agonies of martial stultification and divorce. At least that’s a way to go out in a blaze.

I’ve written a great deal lately about the way that nerds can be less than progressive, whether by failing to establish anti-harassment policies and ethos at conventions or by relying on continuity and fidelity to text as a way to disguise an antipathy to diversity. But if we want the nerdosphere to be a more progressive place, I think it’s important to mount critiques that will actually be effective, rather than ones that can make the critics feel self-righteous, which is why I’m so dismayed by Sady Doyle’s condescending and willfully misleading critique of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and the people who read it.

First, there’s the explicit statement that Sady thinks nerds are inherently inflexible morons incapable of accepting criticism or thinking deeply about the material they love with an eye towards its political flaws:

Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you! So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.

Shockingly enough, saying things like this doesn’t actually make you cool. It makes you another iteration of the kind of person who insists that feminists like, say, me or Sady Doyle are shrewish harpies incapable of nuance or conversation. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds in a way that they’re not when they’re deployed by misogynists against feminists.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of True Blood, “Burning Down the House.”

If True Blood had no pretensions to political meaningfulness, it might be possible to enjoy it as a dopey, campy soap opera, to ignore some of the larger plausibility gaps (like the fact that Sookie just never got around to figuring out her faerie abilities since the writers appear to have forgotten about them) in favor of the pretty people. The problem is that Alan Ball appears to have some ambitions for the show. True Blood was, at one point, a decent little metaphor for gay rights and broader sexual liberation. But by shifting it into a riff on the African-American Civil Rights movement, the show’s gotten disastrous in a way that ought to cast doubt on the accepted narrative that Ball is an important and clear-thinking artist.

It’s one thing to do a story featuring several black characters, to have good intentions about it, and to handle it badly out of a lack of ability or sensibility. It’s entirely another to badly misappropriate the Civil Rights movement in the service of a shallow metaphor. If I thought last week’s episode of True Blood, in which two literally Magical Negroes worked together to bring peace to a white family, I might even be more offended by the crassness of the conversation between Bill and Nan this week after the massacre at the tolerance festival. “Remember the civil rights movement. Sweeping social change inevitably accompanied by violence and the appearance of chaos, yadda yadda,” Nan declares. “That’s the spin we’ll give it.” But Bill isn’t having any of it. “We are going after the Necromancer and we are taking her out,” he shoots back, pulling a weak white man’s ghost of Malcolm. “By any means necessary.”

There is a really important story, or stories, to be told about the way that movements have learned from each other, and the ways that the gay civil rights movement has failed to learn from the black civil rights movement — and the ways it couldn’t have replicated that movement. A story that was more tightly focused on Nan Flanagan and her efforts to build vampire narratives, networks, and allies, might be a way to explore that dynamic, which is an important one for American politics. Even a narrower focus on the witch-vampire storyline that took a broader look at anti-vampire sentiment and splits within the vampire community might be a powerful way to explore the tension in civil rights movements between separatists and assimilationists, to illustrate the broad-based roots of events like Jason and Jessica’s failed tryst, which leaves her walking away declaring, “I am not going to glamour you just because you don’t want to feel guilty. What about my guilt? Who’s going to make me forget? Fucking humans. I’m going to go find someone to eat.”

There is a way to make this metaphor work. This is not a function of vampires being tapped out as a topic. It’s a function of carelessness and lack of imagination, of blood and guts and sex trying to stand in for racial and sexual sensitivity. And it’s something that the folks involved ought to be embarrassed about.

The bridge is yours.

-I really hope George Lucas doesn’t decide to be a jerk and shut down a proposed Death Star PR series.

-I hated The Help, but Viola Davis is definitely remarkable in it.

-I will watch anything Katee Sackhoff is in.

-Louis C.K.: predictably smart about what winning an Emmy would do for him and FX.

-The more the adaptation of The Hunger Games emphasizes its critique of reality television, the happier I will be:

I watched the first three episodes of MTV’s new teen show Awkward. last week, and it struck me that teen comedies do an astonishing amount to undermine our faith in public educators. The show follows the adventures of a girl named Jenna who, after sleeping with a popular boy while they’re both summer camp counselors, returns to school with a broken arm, an embarrassing cast, and a rumor that she tried to kill herself, but manages to parlay those deficits into a kind of halfway popularity. I like that the show goes beyond the increasingly baroque descriptions of cliques that have become a standard part of any teen comedy and recognizes that there are people who drift between groups and nerds who get cool-kid passes.

But it also features what has to be the most wildly malfeasant guidance counselor ever to appear on television, a woman so desperate that keep Jenna coming into her office that she insists that there must be something her charge feels bad about “Course load? Your body? Not even your big teeth? What about your breasts?” showing her a cell-phone picture of Jenna that some mean girls snapped in a locker room, totally missing that it could count as child porn. For all the use she is to Jenna, and for all she wants the approval of the miserably vicious cheerleader who’s targeted Jenna, the counselor might as well not exist.

The silly guidance counselor has been a trope since Allison Janney’s great comic turn in 10 Things I Hate About You:

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that teenagers can solve their own problems. But there is something odd about the idea that guidance counselors aren’t just squares, they’re actively incompetent and undermining. We might overpathologize kids these days, but it’s not totally crazy to think that it’s useful for kids to have an impartial, non-parental adult to talk to about their issues.

For this poll, I took the five books that didn’t win but that got the most votes other than American Gods, figuring those seemed to have strong constituencies. I should note that, because however much I love you all, this is not a cheerocracy, I excluded Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on the grounds that while you could do some interesting stuff with analysis of academia and professional societies, I think there just isn’t enough that I feel I can draw enough out of the novel that fits the overall mission of the blog. So, as with the last time, voting is open until noon on Thursday and I’ll announce our new choice and what we’ll read for next week on Friday:

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of Breaking Bad, “Problem Dog.”

One of the major themes of this season has been Walt, Jesse, and Hank’s struggles for, or with, visibility, even as they run from, or to, or hunt a man who balances a visible self and an invisible one with an ease none of them can muster.

Today, Walt makes another play for visibility with a child act of automotive destruction. After Skylar carefully negotiates the return of Walter Junior’s car for $800 in restocking fees, noting that “the law says they don’t have to take it back at all,” Walt throws a temper tantrum, does donuts with the car, and sets it on fire. When he calls a cab, he tells the dispatcher, “I’m sure he’ll see me.” At this point, Walt seems not to care what he’s seen for. It’s no longer a matter of establishing his genius, or his menace. He’d rather spend $52,000 on a bratty primal scream that gets him noticed than $800 on an act of prudence that lets him continue living as if he’s normal, invisible.

Skylar’s certainly had her realizations about her husband over the past few episodes, whether she’s finding out that he sees himself as a kingpin to figuring out tonight that his income is so large as to be unlaunderable. But I’m wondering if she understands that about Walt, that his need to be recognized is so strongly in conflict with her need to be normal that he will destroy her and himself to achieve it. It’s easy to understand that Walt might want to be recognized as a prodigy of some kind, whether good or evil, but that he just wants to be seen even if it’s to go out in a blaze, is wonderfully strange and particular. We’ve seen Skylar make all sorts of compromises, but I want to know what will spur her to decisive action. The tipping point is as interesting to me at this point as what she does once she reaches it.
Read more

A programming note: I’m finally on the list for movie screenings in the DC area, so expect more reviews. And feel free to treat these reviews both as guidance on whether or not to go see something, and as open threads for discussion over the weekend.

I went to see Colombiana, a movie about the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, the moral justifications for assassinating Bernie Madoff, and Zoe Saldana’s naughty bits, hoping for a slickly nasty little late-summer action movie in a year that’s been somewhat short on female heroines, and on gleeful darkness. There are bits and pieces of an entertaining film here, notably an interagency rivalry between the CIA and the FBI and a downturn revenge fantasy. But Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie, and the delightfully named Olivier Megaton, who directed it, are probably right to trust that the sight of Saldana dancing braless in her apartment or setting off plastic explosives in her skivvies are selling points in and of themselves.

The movie begins with a reasonably promising, if somewhat overacted, premise. After watching her family murdered by a drug cartel, a young Cataleya (a promising Amanda Stenberg, who has a key role in the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games and is a welcome reminder that not only white little girls can get tough) gets herself to Chicago and into the home of her uncle Emilio. “I used to want to be Xena: Warrior Princess,” she tells him. “I want to be a killer. Will you help me?” “Sure,” he promises, rather jauntily. I was hoping we might be on the road to a non-white version of Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s relationship in Kick-Ass, a gleefully twisted but genuinely loving father-daughter training movie. But after buying her way into a private school and shooting up a passing car to illustrate why she should attend classes, the movie skips forward 15 years, denying us the privilege of seeing Cataleya learn her stuff, and into the much less creative pleasures of letting us see her deploy it as she goes after Don Luis, the man who had her family killed, and the people who worked for and with him.
Read more

Commenter Carolyn tells me I should keep in mind that “Yes, their lifestyles can be mundane and shallow, but let’s not forget how it started. They left their lives in Queens, NY in order to help Vince become an actor in LA.”

I actually think the show would be a lot more interesting if it was a bit more directly about what it’s like to be not just upwardly mobile but explosively upwardly mobile. There are bits and pieces of their past in there: Vince saying he doesn’t need the toys he has but acknowledging that he likes them and would prefer not to live without them; the constant teasing about whether Eric’s community college experience is worth anything, particularly in comparison to Ari’s Ivy League education; the juxtaposition between Vince and Drama’s mother at home in Queens and her son calling from a radio studio in California to ask her to come to his premiere; Drama’s anxiety as he sees old colleagues working in catering, Party Down from a different perspective. But none of it’s exceptionally well-developed.

Ta-Nehisi wrote, about the main characters’ sexual conquests, that “It’s just that my fantasies don’t usually involve scooping the crumbs off the table from my better looking friends–or having a group of loser friends who would do the same with me. It’s really a buzzkill for the whole “hunter” aspect of male mythology. Indeed it replaces the ‘hunter,’ with the ‘moocher.’ If we’re talking about realism, and not fantasy, then I can get with that. But we aren’t, so I can’t.” But I feel like this is also true of the show’s depiction of upward mobility. Is it really that compelling to float along than to be demonstrably excellent, to have things come easy because you’re skillful not because you’re mooching? Maybe I’m a workaholic, and maybe this would be fun for a year, but it doesn’t seem like much of a fantasy for a life. It’s not as if the core characters escaped some sort of life of toil or crushing poverty. They might have been working-class, but it doesn’t seem like any of them every went dramatically without, and the characters are too young to have their present indolence be a reward for years of misery and debt. This isn’t retirement.

So it’s no mistake, now that I’m in the third season, that my favorite character is Lloyd, whose pep talk to Ari immediately after his boss’s epic defenestration is the single most meaningful thing in the entire show:

I’ve worked 18 hours a day to save up the money to put myself through Stanford Business School. While I was there, I cleaned the cafeteria during the hours I wasn’t studying and still graduated top of my class, only to take a job delivering mail to unappreciative overpaid little cocksuckers. And I finally get the big promotion that would allow me to answer your phones and be both racially and sexually harassed for the next nine months. But I know the end game. And you, Ari God, you are it. So stop your fucking whining…and figure out how you’re going to make both of our lives happen tomorrow.

Lloyd’s compromises are the most interesting thing in Entourage right now, his willingness to trade Ari’s insults based on the fact that he’s Asian and gay for apologies afterwards and the opportunity to continue to rise up in the world, to get to another kind of 18-hour days, and as far away from those cafeterias as possible. That scene hints at lost possibilities. Poor gay Asian guys deserve their fantasies, their dreams of glory, just as much as straight, white, and profligate ones do.

I was sorry that Diane Keaton’s show Tilda, in which she was set to play a Nikki Finke-like blogger terrorizing Hollywood, never went forward at HBO, and now that I’m watching Entourage, I’m even more sorry that we’re not getting an insider-y looking entertainment industry story from a woman’s perspective.

But I regret even more that this show, written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Marti Noxon, where Keaton was supposed to play “an old-guard feminist leader who tries to give new spark to the cause by starting a sexually frank women’s magazine,” never happened. It would have been the most explicitly feminist show since Maude, right? And even more so since it’s about doing the work of feminism, not simply living by and advocating its tenets. It’s one thing to air a documentary about Gloria Steinem and her role in the second-wave feminist movement and to treat it like history, and another to do a show that acknowledges that the work of that movement is far from finished, and that dives straight into the challenges of the transition from the second wave to the third wave.

I’m not remotely shocked that this show didn’t happen. But I am sort of depressed by the fact that it counts as a good thing that HBO actually considered it.

Spencer Ackerman, in the world’s most generous takedown of my review of A Dance With Dragons (warning, copious spoilers to follow), argues that I’m wrong to see Jon Snow as a visionary for redefining the realms of men by letting the wildlings settle in the Gift, and trying to save the Night’s Watch by bringing them, men and women alike, into his brotherhood. I’m going to return the complement by saying I think Spencer may actually have a more optimistic vision of George R.R. Martin’s project than I do. He writes:

But there’s a lesson in the stabbing of Jon Snow. (No one really thinks he’s dead, right?) The Realm, like the world, is made of institutions. If you wish to change the realm, you have to engage in the painful, arduous task of building legitimacy through these recognized institutions so that your changes don’t inspire the backlash that undoes them all. One of the strengths of George R.R. Martin is that he’s brutally consistent here. The same hubris that runs through Cersei when she cynically reconstitutes a group of religious warriors runs through Jon and Dany when they admirably attempt to focus on the White Walkers or banish slavery from Meereen. As a wise woman once exclaimed in a different story, “It’s Baltimore, Cedric!”

My understanding of much of A Song of Fire and Ice is as an inquiry into how you tell when institutions are so rotten that they need a radical regutting or replacement, and how to carry out that process. I do agree with Spencer that Martin’s consistent in this regard. Cersei’s reinstatement of the Warrior’s Sons is an error and an act of hubris that eventually turns against her because she’s foisting reform on an institution that is self-governing effectively, and doesn’t need external alteration. Similarly, Dany’s quest against slavery may be moral, but she disrupts institutions that however brutal they were, worked effectively from a pragmatic perspective, and were the lynchpin of a continent’s economy. Dany is a practical and a moral failure. She totally misunderstands the institutions she’s attacking and fails to replace them with viable alternatives, guaranteeing upheaval because she’s wrecked trade in the region. And her failure to rebuild those brace struts of society means she’s failed to provide the basis of a state that can exist without slavery or any moral investment in a vision of that world.

I think that Jon, by contrast, is dealing with an organization that’s wholly shattered. The Night’s Watch doesn’t have enough people to serve its function, and its mechanisms to bring more into it no longer function to bring either the numbers or quality in that the organization needs. The internal discipline and obedience to the hierarchies of the Watch are totally broken after Jorah Mormont’s murder, which would be the equivalent of fragging a general in deployed in Afghanistan. That the Watch manages to hold an election might be a sign that it has some respect for its own rituals left, though Sam only manages to force a resolution through trickery—he tries to build legitimacy through recognized processes and institutions, and his efforts help break the organization he’s trying to preserve. If the Watch was meant to be a neutral force that stood between the wildlings and the Realm, prioritizing the interests of the Realm, that relationship has become polarized in the face of a greater threat. A gradualist, reformist approach to rebuilding the Watch to serve its original purpose would be suicidal. I think Spencer is right about the process President Obama took to accustom the American military to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but I’m curious if thinks the existence of that policy means the American military was as shattered, illegitimate, and underresourced as the Night’s Watch appears to be.

So far Martin hasn’t given us a definitive answer for how we know if an institution has failed, and what we do if it has. The implication is that you need dragons and dreams to scorch a realm clean. But we haven’t yet seen proof of that, and we have no certainty that this story has a happy ending.

The post contains spoilers for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Voting for the next book club will begin on Monday.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone who’s read along with this book club so far that I don’t think this is a terribly successful novel. Gaiman tells far more frequently than he shows, doesn’t do nearly as much as he could with an utterly fascinating concept, and relies heavily on a twist ending that, while obvious, still leaches some of the pleasure from the journey and absolves him of actually having to resolve the conflict that he’s set up, because surprise, it doesn’t matter! That said, I think some of the best things in the novel happen in these final sections.

First, is the idea we’ve been waiting for all along: gods don’t survive well in America because America is itself a deity, and the rise of fall of gods in America is itself a sacrifice to the land that Whiskey Jack explains to Shadow after his vigil for Mr. Wednesday and his trip through the underworld, which as trips through the underworld go is a real snoozefest. That stuff should wrench, man. As Jack puts it:

I’m a culture hero. We do the same shit gods do we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay…This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the arth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win. So yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.

Read more

The bridge is yours.

-Oh, hey, adding ladies to groups might do more than give dudes cooties.

-Equal marriage rights come to The Elder Scrolls.

-The people behind Friday Night Lights are giving us a lady-centric Western. I demand the return of Calamity Jane.

-Adam muses on A Dance With Dragons and institutions, about which more to come this afternoon.

-Yup, Johnny Depp is still Hunter S. Thompson:

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 25 episode of Louie, but read it anyway. I want to talk to you guys about this.

Let it be said, before I get into any of the substance of this episode, that if the high point of this extraordinary season of Louie is seeing Louis C.K. find a baby duck in his luggage in a war zone, then I will be satisfied. It’s the kind of thing that I should have seen coming from the moment Jane’s teacher presented him with a ventilated cardboard box, but I was still surprised, and got an incredible amount of pure pleasure from it. Louie doesn’t operate in the key of joy very often, but one of the profoundly exciting things about this season is seeing C.K. pick new challenges and tonal modes for himself, in this case, cornpone American patriotism, and proving he can absolutely nail it.

I realized as Louis launched into his first routine that I was tense about how the audience of servicemen was going to respond. It made me realize I tend to think of both the comedian and the show as the property of a certain narrow cultural perspective, which is to a certain extent the truth. Those of us who are critics and fans recognize that something extraordinary is happening here, but not that many people watch this show, between 725,000 and a million on any given week. So I was anxious about how the routine would play outside what I think of C.K.’s target audience. And of course the episode was set up precisely to mess with those expectations.

Louis’ mournful routine is a hit, cracking up young soldiers with his lament that “I work out to keep this. That’s the best that I can hope for. I’ll always have this belly…Women get to be elegant during sex. They get to lie back with their hair arranged on the pillow…They get to go for a ride…We have to be disgusting.”

And then in the mess hall, he achieves a breakthrough with the cheerleader he was making awkward smalltalk with earlier, in exchanges like “We’re not allowed to date football players.” “Do you ever do it anyway?” She’s annoyed by his routine, wanting to know “Why can’t you say Christian things and be funny?” Louis’ mystified, in a way that’s a stand-in for our skepticism, when he gets the inspiration to show her the duck, explaining that “my daughter put it in my bag. She said to keep me safe. It’s not going to help against an RPG, but it’s a pretty badass duckling.”

But he’s been through this territory before, most notably in the episode where he spends time with an abstinence advocate, and he was clearly revisiting it to set us up for something bigger. And that moment comes when the genre of the episode switches again as the chopper stars wobbling and has to land, only to have a bunch of armed Afghans showed up, the servicemembers on the chopper to react by tensely ordering them to disarm, and it looks like the situation could turn bad. But then the duck gets loose, and Louis saves the situation with the simplest, most universal humor: the pratfall. And miraculously, this awkward, middle-aged white guy, burning under Afghanistan’s sun, and terrified that he’s going to become the first USO performer to die on the job has united American soldiers, a country singer, a crew of cheerleaders, and a bunch of rural Afghans.

In recent years, comedy’s often been a signifier of subcultural difference. Dane Cook represents bros, Jeff Dunham has middle America, Dave Chapelle was a signifier for white audiences who wanted to show off their racial sophistication. But increasingly this year, Louie feels like a conversation with audiences about our assumptions and their limitations that’s among the most politically and emotionally sophisticated things I’ve ever seen. There are no victims here for our benefits, and no easy outs for us that will let us leave with our assumptions intact. Louis C.K.’s humor is operating at a level where he can redeem Dane Cook, make us appreciate abstinence experts, and where he can make us laugh at the same things as people we’re fighting a war against. Someone in Hollywood should give him a movie deal. And the State Department might want to sign him up as a cultural diplomat. What’s happening in this show isn’t just important because it’s artistically astonishing. It’s meaningful, to me at least, beyond metaphor and allusion.

This Hollywood Reporter story about the abuses of the reality television industry in the wake of Russell Armstrong’s suicide does a really useful job of laying out the ways in which networks treat participants in this kind of programming badly, whether they’re dramatically underpaying them; showcasing their pathologies and mental illnesses without providing follow-up treatment beyond the duration; or encouraging them to showcase increasingly baroque and vulnerable parts of their lives without concern for whether participants truly understand what they’re consenting to. But one thing the piece doesn’t engage with at all is the question of whether there’s any remedy for this kind of behavior that doesn’t rely on the compassion and decency of studios, which is not likely to be forthcoming.

I did a little digging, and it’s not clear that reality show participants are entitled to receive even a minimum wage, which seems kind of astonishing. That and compliance with overtime rules really do seem like they should be mandatory. The shows will still be cheap, even if they’re somewhat less cost-effective. We might not be able to stop people from selling their experiences, or from valuing their own lives at the immediate prize of zero, but we should still set a minimum value on them by asserting that appearing on reality television is work and should be treated as such.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 25 episode of Burn Notice.

One of the things I find most interesting about a season of Burn Notice in which my interest is fading is the role of Madeline, his mother, in Michael’s life and in his operations. Particularly after he and Jesse get her involved in an operation where they dramatically underestimate the intensity of the crime being planned and the willingness of the people committing it to employ fairly extreme violence.

Maybe my favorite episode was the one, earlier this summer, in which Michael enlists her in an operation where she has to pretend to be a nurse treating a Yakuza agent Michael’s captured. As the situation escalates, Michael and Madeline act out the abusive dynamic between Madeline and Michael’s father. She’s both necessary to the operation, and the operation provides a setting where she and Michael can work out some deeper-seated psychological issues. It was a nice little bidirectional bit of plotting.

It’s interesting that an older woman without preexisting criminal tendencies would not only turn a blind eye to the activities of her son and his associates, but actively enlist in them for things like simple photographic surveillance, when it could risk her spending her retirement years in prison. Certainly Michael, for all of his extralegal activities, is the more functional of her two sons, and it makes sense that she would want to be close to Michael, even to understand better the son who left her at 17 by involving herself in his work. In this case, it seems like she might have taken an assignment from Jesse, her surrogate son, because it makes her feel valued by someone other than her preoccupied boy. And there’s no denying that by comforting hostages or duping criminals, she gets a kind of power and influence that would be otherwise unavailable to women in her life situation.

But it can be risky to have her there, as when she blows his cover trying to convince the hostages that Michael is credible and has a plan for their escape so they shouldn’t surrender. At some point, he’s going to get her in enough danger that he will have to make a choice and compromise an operation, or one of his other cohorts — or the show risks getting incredibly boring. Right now, Fiona can outrun cops chasing a guy under house arrest. Jesse can walk into a federal facility and impersonate an FBI official. Even vicious criminals never pull the trigger before getting taken out themselves. Burn Notice‘s lawless Miami-Dade County is increasingly uncomplicated, and as a result, uninteresting. It’s time for the characters to face some real costs, and I don’t mean murdered semi-anonymous CIA contacts.

I’m impressed that in this first season of Deadwood, the show’s managed to dedicate an emotionally significant moment or storyline to every character we’ve seen on-screen. In particular, I appreciated the way these last two episodes made Jewel a person, rather than a vehicle for the expression of Trixie’s nurturing nature or Al’s private inner goodness.

There are an amazing number of shots of the muck that constitutes Deadwood’s streets in this first season. People have it splashed on their nice dresses, are beaten to the point of brain damage in it, and jump into it after being threatened with their lives. Jewel may be the only person to fall in it, calmly get up, and keep going. There’s a serenity to her. “I came here on my own Doc,” she tells the physician, who is reluctant to listen to her ideas for a corrective brace. “I got something I want to show you.” “That boy was goddamn able-bodied before he got his leg shot-up,” Doc warns her, but he is excited in spite of himself, even prying the broom out of her fingers when the brace arrives as she jokes “You’ll have to remove it from my clutches.” The season ends with the two of them dancing, Jewel telling the Doc to think of himself as graceful as a woodland creature.

And that isn’t the only role Doc plays in the conclusion of this stage in Deadwood’s development. There’s something poignant about the divine sanctification of one Civil War veteran’s mercy killing in answer to another veteran’s prayers. Jewel’s book breaks something in the doctor as the reverend enters the final stage of his illness, leaving him crying in his office “What conceivable godly use is this protracted suffering to you? What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?” Al, for once, is the answer to someone’s prayers.

And even as Al commits another murder in his own interest, he also finally establishes legitimate law in Deadwood. After a long battle, Seth Bullock succumbs to the role of sheriff, in part because of his own impatience with the man who does take the role, and in part because he’s also succumbed to Alma’s charms. The latter event takes place upon the arrival of Alma’s scum-like father in town. The man starts out by telling his daughter “I always thought it was going to end like this, button. A rooming house in a mining camp in Indian territory, you caring for a Norwegian foundling and operating a bonanza gold claim.” Then, he tries to pimp her out to Seth even though he’s married, telling him “I’ve learned that no matter what people say or how civil they may seem, their passions rule.” And finally, he reveals to Alma that he’s racked up massive debts on the credit that her marriage opened up to him, threatening her with perpetual domination. Seth responds by removing a number of his teeth, taking Alma to bed, and putting his badge back on for the first time. “I know where it goes,” he tells Al. And he knows how to conduct a proper hanging, too. Seth may not have ended up with the role he wanted, but he’s found a home he wants to protect.

The awesome Todd VanDerWerff and his wife Libby Hill asked me and Myles McNutt to come on their TV on the Internet podcast to talk about summer TV surprises. Along the way, we discussed spoiler culture, The Hour, set up an Anchorman-like fight between rival entertainment publications, and figured out who John Galt is. Check it out.

Apparently, it’s romance day on the blog, because Adam Serwer has some interesting thoughts on Manic Pixie Dream Girls as ghostly projections of movie writers:

My theory is that the MPDG is a fantasy molded from the clay of an infinite number of adolescent rejections from the women of their youth. Precisely because the relationship never reaches the stage of genuine intimacy, the MPDG remains a two-dimensional projection of the desires of a guy who is progressive enough in gender matters to want a woman who is “interesting,” but not one that has an internal life of her own beyond the superficial qualities that made her “cool” and “not like other girls” to begin with.

Key to the MPDG is that the concept reflects the gender-based hostility of the nice guy. She frequently suffers from a form of (mental) illness, because this both proves that she needs the nice guy and shows why he has such a hard time acquiring her. Even if she’s not sick in some way, she is defined by some kind of glaring emotional vulnerability that makes her, in an abstract sense, a damsel in distress who needs rescue. Under the circumstances, the nice guy’s qualities become as heroic as he imagines them to be. She often suffers cinematically, because she refuses — like the unattainable women of the nice guy’s imagination — to recognize just how good for her he is.

He and I were talking about this a little bit a couple of days ago, and while I think it’s pretty clear why MPDGs are a fantasy for men, I also think the archetype has some utility for women. After decades of makeover scenes and unrealistic physical and behavioral expectations, there’s something kind of appealing about being told that the fantasy isn’t the Herve Leger bandage dress and the body that goes with it, it’s the quirky cardigan; that it’s not about having to fix yourself, it’s about someone else has to do the transformative work and all you have to do is help. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good trade, and I don’t actually think it makes for fully fleshed-out characters or exceptionally interesting movies, but I understand why it might feel worth it.

I’m not quite ready to get hysterical about this study that shows that Americans value fame and other “individualistic” values more than they did in 1967, linking those values to popular television shows:

As predicted, fame, financial success, and other individualistic values, notably achievement, rose in importance across the decades. Fame, the main focus of the study, made the most dramatic shift. Table 4 shows that fame rose from the bottom of the value rankings in 1967 (number 15 out of 16) to the top value in 2007. Financial success also rose in importance, as predicted; it was ranked 12th in 1967, rising to fifth in 2007. Two other individualisitic values showed a major increase in relative importance: Achievement rose from tenth place to second place across the decades, while physical fitness moved from sixteenth place to ninth place. In contrast, communitarian values, as predicted, declined in relative importance over time. Three communitarian values – community feeling, tradition, and benevolence – showed sharp declines in relative importance from 1967 to 2007 (Table 4). Community feeling started out as the top-ranked value in 1967 and fell to number 11. Tradition was ranked fourth in 1967 and fell to 15th place in 2007. Benevolence went from second place to 12th place across the decades. Of all the values assessed, these three showed the largest decline in relative importance from 1967 to 2007.

First, I’m not going to declare the decline of Western civilization on the strength of 60 people’s responses to a questionnaire. But more importantly, there are a lot of alternate explanations for those shifts in values. If you don’t think Social Security’s going to be around, being financially successful so you can be secure later matters. Achievement is so broadly defined as to be nebulous, but pressure to say, go to a good college is obviously up substantially from factors other than entertainment. Standards of physical fitness and what counts as an ideal body have certainly changed, as has our understanding of health and exercise, something our popular culture reflects and magnifies but isn’t solely responsible for.

And finally, it makes sense that fame would be more desirable as it seems more accessible. American Idol‘s popularity is part and parcel of a culture where you can become instantly extremely popular by hitting the fickle sweet spot of the viewing public (it’s also the result of a dramatically fragmented television viewership, so it’s worth looking at a bunch of other shows alongside it, the intensity of viewers’ attachment, etc.). I like the idea of having a luxury yacht, but that doesn’t mean that I aspire it.

Still, I do think there’s something interesting about the shift from television (and other popular culture) where viewers relate to the characters to television where viewers aspire to be like the characters. I remain hard-pressed to identify what caused the shift or what programming was the tipping point — the rise of celebrity reality TV shows seems like a possible, but not totally convincing moment — but there is a difference.