This post contains spoilers through the May 27 episode of Game of Thrones.

In the world of Game of Thrones, the greatest challenge for the characters is often knowing how to behave in any given situation, whether it’s a court under siege, the front line of a battle, wildling captivity, or a sophisticated, depraved foreign court. Because the society is so rigidly constrained by class, gender, and martial roles, often characters’ survival depends on how well they’re able to conform to the roles that people expect or need them to take up. Arya’s ability to survive in Tywin Lannister’s employ involved a balance of servility and amusingness, while her sister Sansa needs to please some members of the Lannister court by her utter submission and others with flashes of spitfire temper that indicate a greater capacity than that normally exhibited by and allowed to noble ladies. But on rare occasions, transcending the role that’s been assigned to you and the accepted wisdom can change your life or save it. And as Stannis’s fleet converges on King’s Landing, sailing smoothly into Tyrion’s trap under cover of darkness, find what breaking character can win them.

First, there’s Sandor Clegane, who’s taken something of a smaller role in the show than in the novels. But as King’s Landing braces for invasion and seige, he steps forward to tell the truth about anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. “There’s women in the ground. I put some there myself. So have you. You like fucking, and drinking, and singing. But killing, killing’s the thing you love,” he sourly informs Bronn, who’s having a drink and a girl as preparation. “You’re just like me. Only smaller.” Bronn may be able to dispute the question of which one of them would win in a fight, but he’s unable to deny the essential similarity. And when he sees what Sandor fears, watches the bigger man paralyzed as a man on fire wheels towards him on the battlefield, Bronn saves his life with a well-aimed shot, an acknowledgement of fellowship, and that he knows Sandor’s weaknesses too. The obscene green light of that fire lets Sandor finally see his own limits clearly. “I lost half my men. The Blackwater’s on fire,” he tells the king he’s protected with dogged loyalty. When Joffrey orders him back into battle, Sandor liberates himself in a fashion so startling it allows him to escape. “Fuck the Kingsguard,” he declares in terms more definitive and sincere than Jamie Lannister could ever muster. “Fuck the city. Fuck the king.”
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The season of graduation is upon us, a time when those moving on to the next stage in their lives are deluged with cliche wisdom and even worse pop music. So to countervail all of that, here’s a reminder that growing up is awesome, you will stay in touch with all the right people (who mostly won’t be who you expect), and if all else fails, Beth Ditto will be there to bail you out.

First, a reminder: graduation is overhyped. People have been worrying about keeping friends and staying with their school significant others since the Paleolithic age, or at least since the Beach Boys were covering the Four Freshman a capella and having it count as pop music. You will survive, and the ties that endure will not be the ones you fret about the most:

Second piece of caution: fetishizing your youth is silly. Growing up is fantastic. You have more responsibilities, but also infinitely more freedom, and infinitely more sense of what you can do with it. Oh, who am I kidding. I just wanted to post this version of “Forever Young” that’s been turned into a Ron Paul-influenced screed about individual liberty:

But if you are worried, after hanging out with my best friend form high school in San Francisco, I can attest that Vitamin C was totally right that it is possible to stay in touch with folks, though good luck on the finding a job that won’t interfere with your tan thing. That may not be a reasonable thing to expect in your benefits package in this economy:

Blink-182 is criminally underrated. I sort of feel like “Going Away to College,” which acknowledges that you can both love someone and inevitably end up growing apart from them, should be mandatory listening for every high school senior in the country:

I would probably do almost anything that Baz Luhrmann told me to do, but Mary Schmich’s advice (often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut) is honestly dead-on, even if I recognized its value better in hindsight than I did when I heard it in middle school:

And for anyone for whom school wasn’t even close to the best year of their lives, Green Day has the perfect kiss-off:

Do people remember Semisonic? Does liking them make me an Old? Either way, as a follow-up to the whole life gets better when you grow up and go out into the world thing, “Closing Time” is a good reminder that sometimes a definitive, dignified exit is better than hanging around wishing that things wouldn’t have to change:

And Beth Ditto has just the anthem you need to move on to the next one:

Romantic comedy was once a noble genre, a place to work out not only will they or won’t they, but why or why not, and should they or shouldn’t they? The Lady Eve may be a goofy romp about a conwoman and her beer-heir mark, but Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s spiky courtship is all about how much we can overcome deeply ingrained prejudices about class and sexual experience. In When Harry Met Sally, the two main characters talked their way through what makes a good relationship for a decade—and worked out their attitudes towards their careers and themselves as friends—before they got together. And movies like Annie Hall defied the traditional meaning of comedy—it ends with a breakup, not a marriage—to acknowledge both the power and potential for heartbreak of modern relationships.

But in recent years, romantic comedies have gone timid. In the quest for PG-13 ratings, they can’t say much about sex. And in their desire to rake in dollars, an interchangeable array of blonde or blondish heroines with disposable jobs in PR and fashion have spent ninety minutes resisting an similarly dull assortment of disc jockeys, television producers, and businessmen. A few R-rated romantic comedies from Judd Apatow and the creators in his orbit have broken the mold, but they haven’t been enough to change the conventional wisdom of the industry.

All of this is the reason Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, about Mortimer Granville’s (Hugh Dancy) invention of the vibrator in Victorian England, is simultaneously a delight and a relief. There is a will-they-or-won’t-they couple at its heart, of course: when Mortimer, who believes in the germ theory of medicine, takes a job with women’s physician Dr. Charles Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), he meets Dr. Dalrymple’s very different daughters, dutiful Emily (Felicity Jones) and Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a socialist feminist who runs a London settlement house. While Mortimer plans to take over Dr. Dalrymple’s practice and becomes engaged to Emily, he’s drawn to Charlotte, whose ideals appeal to him even as she rejects the diagnosis of hysteria, which gives Mortimer his living, as an attempt to disguise the true dissatisfactions women experience. And when her political work gets Charlotte put on trial and branded hysterical, Mortimer must decide if he will let her be institutionalized and subject to an involuntary hysterectomy or maintain his devotion to the diagnosis that’s made his career. I spoke with Wexler about the declining stakes of romantic comedy, the importance of careers and values in successful relationships, and how she ended up making romantic comedy for men. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you brought up was the decline of the romantic comedy, and this is very much a romantic comedy. I was curious if you thought that reflected the inevitable homogenization of any genre when Hollywood gets their hands on it, or whether consumers have actually backed away from romantic comedies where the issues are larger than will they or won’t they?

I think a lot of romantic comedies revolve around will they or won’t they. And yes, will they or won’t they get together is where ours is, but it’s not quite the central question. It’s more how will they? I think a lot of the better writing in romantic comedies these days has tended towards the R-rated romantic comedies, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids…I think Knocked Up, they take the characters, you put them in really hard situations, and you see how they deal. I think that’s a good thing. But the kind of witty banter, the kind of Hepburn-Cary Grant stuff is just not around as much, and it just felt right for this story, with this quirk of history.

It seems like in a lot of romantic comedies, the characters don’t really get treated like adults. Their careers raen’t particularly important to them. It’s a little infantilizing. One of the things that’s fun about Charlotte is whoever she ends up with has to share her values.

And her passion for her work. I think that’s where they connect first and foremost is they’re passionate about their work and what they believe in. They’re both true believers in their own way…I think one of the things you try to figure out is what kind of movie you’re trying to make. And I knew, on a very core level, I was making a romantic comedy. In that, I think the fundamental kind of question is about how and who you fall in love with, what draws you to people.

The movie is a lot about progressives in different ways. Mortimer, his character is a medical progressive. The rest of his life, he kind of fits tidily into the box. It doesn’t make sense for him to buck the system because it’s set up for him. But in the end, he can’t deny the truth in front of his face. His friend Edmund, played by Rupert Everett, is a progressive in science and technology, and he also doesn’t fit neatly into the box as a gay character. But he is part of the aristocracy, and he’s wealthy, and has ways around it. And Charlotte is the girl who can’t help it. She knows it would be easier not to raise her hand in the back of the classroom, so to speak, but she still has something she has to say. She knows it would be easier for her, but she doesn’t know how to be anything else. She’s a truth-teller.

In this kind of film, what their job is illuminates their character’s journey. It’s also important because it’s how it all happens. Because he’s a doctor who gets a job treating women for hysteria, that’s how he meets her. I’ve been looking at a lot of other films right now, and we’re always trying to get away from anybody’s job because it’s about the relationship. And sometimes it can be very cheesy and stupid to resolve something about the relationship through they achieve something at work. It’s kind of sideways. But in this case, I think so much of the film is about acknowledging the truth that’s right in front of you even if culture wants you to pretend it’s something else. And the only way these two are ever going to get together, the big obstacle between them is their differing opinions about what the truth is and what’s acceptable. Until they can find a way to each other as passionate people who are true believers, they’ll never be together. And they’re not even trying to be together…It’s when he wakes up that their relationship starts to work out.
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By Andrea Peterson

My first reaction to hearing the Game of Thrones RPG was being published by Atlus was enthusiasm, despite early warning signs. Atlus is best known for the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series—and more recently the psychological to the point of bizarre horror platformer Catherine. But Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Persona 3 remain among my favorite games of all times, the latter marrying JRPG elements with a relationship building system that is best described as bordering on dating simulation. At first glance a publisher who specializes in JRPGs in contemporary settings might seem an odd choice to help bring the gritty medieval world of Westeros to videogames. But these games all share a common and strong linear narrative-focused game structures that gave me hope Atlus would guide Cyanide Studios into creating an experience worthy of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series (and the much-lauded HBO adaption). .

Atlus games’ emphasis on relationship development and pushing the envelope of using videogames as storytelling platforms about the good and evil in worlds where the line between reality and fantasy blur seemed a beautiful, if unexpected, fit for the intrigue-riddled saga of A Song of Fire and Ice. As another guest post on this blog noted, the strength of the Game of Thrones lies in the drama of the interactions between a rich set of characters with complex motivations, rather than on the battlefield in a hack-and-slash adventure.

Despite being set in a universe that shares more similarities with traditional western style settings of Skyrim and Dragon Age than most JRPGs, the intricate web of political alignments and betrayals that have already been set in proverbial stone as Game of Thrones canon seemed a prohibitive barrier to the more open concept exploration that define recent western RPGs. A game fleshing out stories in the extended universe of Westeros seemed a perfect stylistic companion to the rich personal narratives that so define the books and HBO series. JRPGs from the more traditional Final Fantasy to Atlus’ own Persona series tend rein in the sheer scope of settings and player options in favor of delving deeper into the quest at hand and character development, creating experiences defined by the story being told with combat as an important, but secondary, secondary aspect.

Unfortunately, the Game of Thrones RPG takes this tactic too far: The storyline is by far the highpoint, to the neglect of nearly all other aspects. The graphics feel dated, particularly compared to other recently released fantasy RPGs, and despite subtle strategy elements the combat is an exercise in repetition that left me at times wishing I could skip them a la Jennifer Hepler’s suggestion. This is especially true because the game follows parallel tales of a veteran of the Night’s Watch and a Red Priest returning to court after self-imposed exile and the way they cross pths with familiar faces from the HBO series. It would have been a satisfying standalone addition to Westeros lore if the gameplay and presentation weren’t so lackluster.

At the end of the day I became increasingly frustrated by the ways the game fell short of Atlus’s usual standards and Game of Thrones‘ potential. It does provide a platform for more engaging stories set in the Seven Kingdoms, but the execution of the game play falls short of its clear ambitions. I still enjoyed playing the Game of Thrones RPG because of my affection for the source material, but it left me wishing it had another year to incubate so it could develop a combat system with more nuance and graphics matching the visual polish of the HBO series. Ironically, the incompleteness of the experience probably was tied to a marketing decision to push the game out in time with the end of this season of Game of Thrones. The game is not a definitive failure and while I know better than to expect every licensed game is going to be a Chronicles of Riddick, it’s still disappointing to see a collaboration and concept with such promise pushed to market prematurely.

The bridge is yours.

-Season 2 of Homeland will begin six months after the events of the first season, and Carrie will be much more mentally healthy.

-Lessons from the 2011-2012 television season.

-Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as fan fiction, now has its own fan fiction.

-Further proof boy bands can go evil.

-Jay Smooth, folks, riffing off Alan Ginsburg to explain internet trolling:

Because I am deeply dedicated to exploring any and all pop culture phenomena for your benefit no matter the cost to my own sanity, (and because what else was I going to read poolside in California?) I spent part of my time away reading Fifty Shades of Grey*. The novel, a self-published best-seller that started as Twilight fan fiction and subsequently landed print publication and a major movie deal, is essentially a conventional romance about a broken man rescued by the love of a good woman. But Fifty Shades‘ embrace of BDSM isn’t tight enough to leave a bruise, or to open up a serious conversation about power in intimate relationships.

The potential submissive here is Anastasia Steele, possessed of one of the great stupid romance novel names of all time, a virginal college senior who hopes to go into publishing. Her roommate, the editor of the college newspaper, inexplicably asks Anastasia rather than another reporter to fill in for her at an interview with an elusive industrialist who is a major university benefactor. The interview is outwardly a disaster: Anastasia falls down, gets flustered, asks Christian Grey if he’s gay. But as in Twilight, her incompetence ignites a possessive urge and an erotic obsession in Grey. He asks her to sign a contract to become his submissive, divests her of her virginity, and gives her an education in erotic spanking, riding crops, and handcuffs, then begins breaking all his rules and forging an emotional relationship with her as well. While Fifty Shades of Grey has references to all sorts of toys in what Anastasia refers to as Christian’s “Red Room of Pain,” and some discussion of dominant-submissive power dynamics, overall the novel reads as if author E.L. James did what Christian encourages Anastasia to do after proposing that she become his sub: hit up Wikipedia.

The novel, told from Anastasia’s perspective, consistently insists that Christian, who was born to a drug-addicted mother and sexually initiated by a dominant friend of his mother’s at fifteen, is interested in BDSM because it’s a way of containing and channeling his psychological damage. And Anastasia constantly insists that Christian is an unreliable narrator of his own life. She describes him as “A young man deprived of his adolescence, sexually abused by some evil Mrs. Robinson figure.” When she thinks about his experiences with Elana, his first lover, it’s with distrust and disbelief: “I just can’t picture it. Christian being beaten by someone as old as my mother, it’s just so wrong. Again I wonder what damage she’s wrought.” Some of her jealousy is the result of a sense of inadequacy. Anastasia wonders “Did she have the best of him? Before he became so closed? Or did she bring him out of himself? He has such a fun, playful side.” But mostly, Anastasia firmly believes that Christian’s interest in dominance and submission is the result of profound self-loathing, something that Christian can grow beyond to heal rather than a source of what he needs: “He doesn’t even love himself. I recall his self-loathing, her love being the only form he found acceptable. Punished— whipped, beaten, whatever their relationship entailed— he feels undeserving of love. Why does he feel like that? How can he feel like that?”

It’s a weirdly condescending perspective for Anastasia to take towards Christian’s understanding of himself. She’s jealous and confused that Christian could consider Elana a friend, that he’s in business with her, that they have dinner together. “It wasn’t like that,” he tells Anastasia. “Okay, it didn’t feel like that to me…She was a force for good. What I needed…She’s not an animal, Anastasia. Of course she didn’t. I don’t understand why you feel you have to demonize her.” A more sophisticated novel might have delved into the question of what Christian believes that he needs. Anastasia is convinced that, for Christian, domination and submission are about associating love with pain. But the book never examines the idea that a dominant-submissive relationship might be about providing Christian with relationships that have an extreme clarity and predictability to them after the chaos of his childhood before he was adopted, about knowing exactly what he’s supposed to do or expected to do or allowed to do in one arena of his life, or about guaranteeing that he has someone who will be receptive to his offers of love and pleasure. Giving more respect to his perspective could have moved Fifty Shades of Grey beyond the romance novel conventions that form its skeleton, and into a more serious consideration of what people want from their relationships and the fact that pop culture ideals of love and sex are not sufficient to everyone’s needs.
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There’s been a lot of buzz about a new study in Psychological Science which suggests that people of both genders view men as people but women as objects. It’s a small sample size, and so worth taking with a grain of salt. But the science behind the study’s setup is interesting as a potential explanation for some of the more distorted depictions of women we see in popular culture.

The study, conducted by Philippe Bernard, Sarah J. Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi and Olivier Klein, is based on a fairly simple idea: we can recognize objects easily when we see them upside down, but not people. So “if sexualized women are viewed as objects and sexualized men are viewed as persons, then sexualized female bodies will be recognized equally well when inverted as when upright (object-like recognition), whereas sexualized male bodies will be recognized better when upright than when
inverted (person-like recognition).” When the researchers briefly showed subjects pictures of a man shirtless but wearing shorts upside down, they correctly identified him as a human man 73 percent of the time, while they recognized an upside down picture of a woman in panties and a bra correctly 83 percent of the time.

Apparently, part of the reason women are easier to recognize even when presented upside down is that “analytic processing, which is involved in object recognition, does not take into account spatial relations among the stimulus parts.” That would explain why comic book artists can get away with drawing hugely distorted images of women’s bodies—as long as the “stimulus parts” are all there, we’re getting the basic message that this is a lady. Fascinatingly, the researchers also cite a study that suggests that “focusing on targets’ appearance, rather than on their personality, could diminish the degree of human nature attributed to female targets but not to male targets.” I wonder if that’s because, as we’ve discussed some this week, showing men as strong implies capability and capacity, which can be extrapolated back into personality. But showing women as consumable tells us things about how we perceive them and what we want from them, not about who they actually are.

I’m excited for Lee Daniels The Paperboy, which explores a wrongful conviction in Florida, and I was intrigued by this little tidbit from The Hollywood Reporter’s Cannes review of the movie: “Working from the well-received 1995 novel by Pete Dexter (Deadwood, Paris Trout), Daniels and Dexter have stuck closely to the book’s storyline in their adaptation but have amped up the racial element by making one major character and two secondary ones black rather than white. This doesn’t create any fundamental differences but does thicken the deck with extra tensions and innuendo.” The value of black directors isn’t just their authority to speak about race in certain ways, but the fact that they can present challenges to default whiteness in a way that white writers or directors may be unable to see. Default whiteness isn’t just lazy. It can flatten a story, or remove opportunities for tension and conversation. If white directors turn characters of color white because they want to cast a certain actor, they may end up with movies that don’t just look more generic but are less powerful.

50 Cent, in an interview in which he endorsed marriage equality on the grounds that “If everyone else is for it, then hey, to each his own. I don’t have personal feelings towards it because I’m not involved in that lifestyle,” also decided it made sense to tell the world that:

So in process, we need organizations for straight men. We do. We need organizations for straight men in the case you’ve been on the elevator and somebody decides they want to grab your little buns. Times are changing. Those organizations are set up for at one point they were being attacked for those choices. Now its completely different. Obviously [homosexuality] is more socially accepted.

One of the hardest things about getting people to surrender their privilege is helping them to understand that giving some of it up isn’t going to materially change their living conditions. Asking that women be treated equally isn’t to ask that women have the right to sexually harass men or to invert the pay gap so women make more than men. Advocating for gay rights is in part about communicating that 50 Cent’s arrogant fear that gay men want to grab his ass is unfounded. Liberation, done right, can make things better for both people who have privilege and people who don’t. The people who are disadvantaged get access to the rights they see denied them. And then people who have privilege end up freed from their fears of what might happen if things change, benefitting from their contact with people they were previously separated from.

In this specific case, the wave of endorsements for marriage equality shouldn’t be mistaken for comfort with gay people. We normally talk about how contact with specific gay people makes straight people more receptive to gay rights: when you care for someone, it becomes emotionally difficult to support their continued legal subordination. But President Obama’s use of the bully pulpit reverses that process, and it means we’re seeing a lot of people coming out for substantive gay rights who don’t seem to have fully dealt with their homophobia. That doesn’t necessarily lessen the impact of their endorsements—indifference is better than aggression or loathing—but it is a reminder that progress doesn’t advance in tandem on all fronts.

Conservatives are apparently very upset that the Obama administration talked to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal for their upcoming movie about the campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden—despite the fact that Bigelow and Boal have been clear that the movie will cover the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations:

Complaining about the White House’s efforts to stall the organization’s requests for death photos of the Al-Qaeda leader, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “These documents, which took nine months and a federal lawsuit to disgorge from the Obama administration, show that politically-connected filmmakers were giving extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information, including the identity of a Seal Team Six leader.

“It is both ironic and hypocritical that the Obama administration stonewalled Judicial Watch’s pursuit of the bin Laden death photos, citing national security concerns, yet seemed willing to share intimate details regarding the raid to help Hollywood filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ to the Obama campaign.”

This is a silly complaint. First, the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, is coming out more than a month after the election precisely to avoid any suggestion that it’s an attempt to influence the campaign. Second, collaborating with a fictional movie project is as much of a risk for the Obama administration as it is a guarantee of an election slam dunk. Kathryn Bigelow is the inverse of a director like Michael Bay who’s willing to rent his opinions to the government in exchange for lots and lots of military hardware. She’s got a very specific vision, one that isn’t particularly triumphalist and is based more on the front lines than in the halls of power.

And finally, what this kind of objection really reveals is an attempt by conservatives to preserve the idea that only they can authentically represent the troops. When Act of Valor casts real Marines for parts in a silly, overdramatized movie, that’s supposed to be a move so dedicated to honoring members of the military that there’s no valid way to critique it. But when Bigelow and Boal do research to try to give their movie verisimilitude, they’re dupes who couldn’t possibly care about the truth of the story they’re trying to tell.

The bridge is yours.

-I hope Elton John is okay.

-Here are all of your summer TV premieres.

-Someone’s going to try to turn Shadow of the Colossus into a movie.

-Hipster X-Men.

-I am so excited to hear about this Christopher Guest series even if I’m not sure it’ll actually happen.

Won’t Back Down is careful not to speak the words in the trailer, but it’s clear from the decisions the characters make and the protest signs they’re waving that these moms are setting up a charter school:

This is the kind of movie that always give me pause about how well popular entertainment, particularly popular entertainment that’ll clock in at under two hours, can lay out policy solutions instead of articulating policy problems. Narrative fiction can be very, very good at the former. The Wire handled Baltimore public schools well over the course of a season. Brooklyn Castle, my favorite documentary from SXSW uses the jeweler’s lens of a competitive middle school chess team to examine New York City public school budget cuts and the city’s high school exam system. But the solutions it presents are all temporary, individual fixes rather than system-wide reforms. One student wins a scholarship through a chess competition, but that means of achieving escape velocity isn’t available to all students. The school manages to do some stop-gap fundraising, but not everyone has the extremely dedicated parent base and an extracurricular program that can be a massive rallying point.

I’ll be curious how much Won’t Back Down presents setting up a charter school as a difficult endeavor, and if and how meaningfully it acknowledges charter schools’ closure rates. Triumphal narratives feel good, and I’m all for movies that push back against stereotypes of poor parents as uninvested in their childrens’ education. But if you actually want to mobilize people, you have to valorize the effort, not just the end result. And promising outcomes that are far from guaranteed is a recipe for disappointment.

Dan Solomon follows up my post on D’Angelo and what happens to men when they find themselves treated like women with an important reminder that men talk about wanting to be objectified in a way that isn’t really supported by their behavior:

If they don’t put on a lot of weight, they do other things to mess with the way they look. They take on roles that reward them for looking unattractive, maybe, or they grow stupid beards, like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, if they’re able to let these things roll off their backs a bit. But it happens a lot, in any case, to men who are treated the way that women are — as objects, whose sexuality and appearance are public property…So much of the rhetoric from dudes who talk about the way women are objectified is that they’d love it if they were sexualized in the same way. And it sounds like a dumb hypothetical, something that has no real connection to reality, because there’s no real equivalence between the way society does (or even can) treat men and the way it treats women. Except, kinda, there is — and the way the men who do get treated that way tend to do whatever it takes to get out from under it. That’s probably worth considering, fellas, the next time you try to make that argument.

I don’t write about the way men’s bodies are portrayed in the media as much as I write about women, if only because women are treated so much worse. Women’s bodies are dressed up for others’ use, whether it’s to bring visual pleasure or physical pleasure to the people who see them or touch them. Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use, as sources of strength they can use to save the world, to fight injustice, to perform feats that are impressive and valuable in their own right. Now, of course, there are all sorts of culturally conditioned ideal bodies: a skinny Jewish nerd’s dreaming his way into Superman’s body and Superman’s tights is having a different experience from a black man raised in the Pentecostal church who is grappling with the connection between body and soul. But I’m intrigued by those self-perceptions, varied though they may be. I’m used to the constant struggle to think of my body as something that belongs to me, but I’m not personally familiar with my body not performing up to an arbitrary set of standards set for it. I can imagine there are difficulties I simply can’t fathom.

Ah, the joys of someone with power who just encountered their first bonkers comments section. Via Wired:

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.” No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved. Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”

It’s easy to make fun of the late Sen. Ted Stevens’ for his description of the internet as “a series of tubes,” or to get irritated with legislators who aren’t particularly tech-savvy. But this kind of inexperience has consequences: as ludicrous as this legislation is, and even if it would be struck down immediately, a bill like this eats up the energy of people who have to explain that it’s a bad idea, unimplementable, and ultimately unconstitutional.

But even beyond the bill itself, this is an interesting illustration of how inexplicable internet culture is to people who don’t actively participate it. I imagine it’s hard for Assemblyman Conte to imagine the incredibly dreadful things people are willing to say under their real names, and in forms that show up on their social networks. Maybe he doesn’t have things that he urgently needs to tell someone but that he can’t risk saying under his own name. And perhaps he’s never encountered a forum that he urgently feels the need to participate in, but doesn’t feel that he can join the conversation as himself, and by participating learned how self-policing works. There’s no lost age of internet civility that can be restored with legally unenforceable accountability requirements. There are just different kinds of intimacy that, if you haven’t experienced them, are hard to fathom and embrace.

Amy Wallace’s profile of D’Angelo in GQ is fantastic, and not least because it breaks down how the video for “Untitled,” one of the sexier things ever produced, contributed to his unraveling. In other words, D’Angelo got treated like a woman, and it was not exceptionally good for his mental health:

But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. “The video was the line of demarcation,” says Harris. “It sent him spinning out of control.”…The trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A. “It was a week of warm-up gigs at House of Blues just to kick off the tour, draw some attention, break in the band,” says Alan Leeds, D’s tour manager then and now. “And from the beginning, it’s ‘Take it off!’ “…

D’Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn’t look as cut as he did in the video, he’d delay shows to do stomach crunches. He’d often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn’t he an artist? Couldn’t the audience hear the power of his music and value him for that? He would explode, Questlove recalls, and throw things. Sometimes he’d have to be coaxed not to cancel shows altogether. When I ask D about this, he downplays his suffering. Watching him pull hard on another Newport, I realize that he finds it far easier to confess his addictions than his insecurities about his corporeal self. Self-destructing with a coke spoon—while ill-advised—has a badass edge. Fretting over what Questlove has called “some Kate Moss shit” seems anything but manly…

What’s fascinating about that Questlove quote is that it implies that you shouldn’t be affected by how other people perceive your body. It’s a perspective that makes men feel better about ogling, about demanding. If it’s flattery, there’s no ugly undertone to it, no sense that the person you’re telling to take it off owes you, that you could turn on them if they don’t comply. But when a man experiences, gets driven crazy by it, it’s not really “some Kate Moss shit” anymore, and it’s not complementary. So much of pop culture is like this. When a man experiences objectification, or stays at home with his kids, suddenly, this arena that women have been playing in for decades is a revelation. How does it feel, indeed?

EW’s Ken Tucker, in his season-end roundup of the year in television, is sick of anti-heroes, or more specifically, turned off by American Horror Story, which he calls “a deeply despairing show.” He writes:

Indeed, at this point, the edgiest thing a producer could do would be to mount a stylistically daring, well-acted show that was free of bleakness, snark, or the promise that we are being shown the corrupt underbelly of any given profession. Even though I’m not a great fan of it, Once Upon a Time exhibits a generosity of spirit I can applaud, and I’m glad it’s a success. While it comes on as a dark, edgy show, Person of Interest is another ratings hit that is actually, if you watched its progress over the season, quite open to the goodness of humanity — for what is this show really about, at bottom, if not the redemption of the wounded souls of Jim Caviezel’s Reese and Michael Emerson’s Finch, and those to whose aid they come? A Gifted Man might have been similarly uplifting in an interesting way, but something about the show took a wrong creative turn early on; perhaps that’s what star Patrick Wilson was at least in part referring to when he said the series was ultimately not what he “signed on for” in a tweet after it was canceled. And Smash: For all the carping that I and other critics did about it, there was never any doubt that creator Theresa Rebek wanted to share with network television viewers the same bursting joy for the musical-theater experience that she has felt, even if it was only Megan Hilty who occasionally came close to embodying it.

At Salon, Willa Paskin has noted something related, though not precisely the same: a return of moral clarity and easily hateable villains to shows like Downton Abbey, where good and evil are precisely delineated in sweeping, emotional terms, and Game of Thrones, where loyalties may shift constantly but Bad King Joffrey is the worst.

One of the things that’s interested me about the Age of Anti-Heroes is a sense in many of the great cable shows that it takes a bad person to accomplish certain kinds of things. On The Wire, Jimmy McNulty would be vastly less effective if he was a paragon, a knight of Baltimore flashing brass instead of Valyrian Steel. In Damages, lawyer Patty Hewes has to be ruthless to the point of murder because the corporations she goes up against are so powerful and amoral that someone has to sacrifice herself and her humanity to oppose them effectively. Breaking Bad initially considered whether cancer-stricken chemistry teacher Walter White had options other than cooking meth to provide a nest egg for his family after his death when his son set up an online fund for his treatment, but moved past that idea. And part of Walter’s evolution into a monster has been his inability or unwillingness to stop his life of crime once he’s laid away that money and his wife has found a way to launder it—he doesn’t just need to be the one who knocks, he wants to be. The Sopranos is entirely dedicated to the question of Tony’s efficacy: he enters therapy in the first place because his issues are making him ineffective, and Dr. Melfi ultimately decides she can’t continue to participate in perfecting him.

But in this new crop of clearer-hearted shows, there’s much greater trust in the idea that you can still be a decent person and beat the bad guys. On Once Upon a Time, Emma Swan may get a little feisty occasionally, but she’s fundamentally a good-hearted person, which is precisely what makes it possible for her to pick up a sword in the finale and slay a dragon. Her goodness gives her courage. Downton Abbey operates on a much smaller scale, but the show is fundamentally a romance that trusts Matthew and Mary to find their way to their hearts and to each other. Now that they’ve come around to each other and plan a union that will both satisfy their families’ financial needs and the pulls of their own hearts, does anyone seriously doubt that Sir Richard will emerge victorious? Revenge has an anti-heroine for its lead, but she also has a best friend who constantly tries to draw lines for her, who doesn’t want to see her debased both for her own good and for the success of her plan. On Grimm, Nick’s work against fairy-tale monsters has two purposes: it keeps his community safe, and brings him closer to a true understanding of his family. And of course Parks and Recreation finished its fourth season with an affirmation of the idea that a passion for public service and kindness can put you over the top, even in a world and in an arena that doesn’t often reward those values.

None of this means that anti-heroes can’t be good spiky fun (ditto for villains). But there’s something morally and artistically reinvigorating about the idea that there’s more than one way to tackle difficult problems, and that the struggle to hold on to goodness is a worthwhile enterprise to engage in and story to tell in and of itself.

The bridge is yours.

-Oh, hey, maybe True Blood‘s new showrunner will make the show less insanely racist…after one more season of Alan Ball.

-What studios can learn from Battleship and The Avengers, which shockingly have one thing in common.

-I’ll have more on Bring Up the Bodies soon, but it’s true that it’s excellent.

Over at Forbes, Adam Thierer ponders whether we could see a return to a model where companies sponsored entire shows or blocks of television, rather than networks selling ads to a bunch of different companies piecemeal throughout an hour or half-hour—especially in an era when consumers are increasingly fast-forwarding ads or skipping them entirely. While audiences certainly don’t like ads, whether becuase they break up storytelling or because they’re insipid, there’s no question that they’d probably like the alternatives to advertising support a lot less, whether that results in higher cable fees, higher iTunes purchase prices, or higher Netflix and Hulu subscriptions. Sponsorships could be less intrusive and could provide coherent framing to an episode of television, and could generate a great deal of good will for a brand if it’s seen to be keeping a show alive.

To a certain extent, Subway’s already done this with Chuck and with product placement in Community. And that brand’s work with NBC’s quirkier shows with more loyal fan bases raises an interesting question: how would such sponsorships work in a way that’s both good for programming and good for the companies that are buying in? Product placement can, of course, end up being more of a limitation than a help. It’s lovely to have a company provide cars for your characters, of course, but it can become awfully irksome if you want to tell a story about a car crash, and the company threatens to pull the cars if they’re shown crashing, crashed, or even if they’re stated to have crashed. An overly rigid approach to corporate and creative synergy can stifle storytelling and end up meaning we see less of the product on-screen.

Subway’s involvement in Chuck and Community, by contrast, always demonstrated an ability to be self-deprecating and a little obvious. On Community, the brand was willing to be the bad guy in aspiring small business owner Shirley’s fight to open up a sandwich shop in the Greendale Community College Cafeteria. The show didn’t have to disparage the sandwiches themselves, which were always implied to be a reasonable if corporate competitor, to use Subway as a specter of disappointment to a character. Similarly with Chuck, Subway’s presence was winking, a bit of placement that felt more like a compact between the company and the fans than two giant corporations.

If sponsorships become a popular model, I’m sure brands will be lining up to form affiliations with the biggest shows like Two and a Half Men and Two Broke Girls. But that’s actually missing the point. If companies want synergy and real, long-term relationships with the fan bases of shows, they need to shop around and pick programming that fits their sensibilities, and where getting what they want out of the relationship doesn’t cause harm to the show in the process. Buying a sponsorship is all about buying goodwill, and that means surprising an audience with the level or nature of your support for a show. It’s the rare situation where selling soap and making art could be well-aligned fo the companies that try to get sponsorship right.

I will admit to a serious soft spot for Baz Luhrmann’s pop-music drenched spectacles—I wrote last year that I think there’s something marvelous about the fact that we got Moulin Rouge and the iPod in the same year, the movie anticipating how much we’d come to love accentuating and heightening our lives by adding carefully curated soundtracks to them. I also quite liked OutKast’s underrated Idlewild, a visually gorgeous marriage of jazz age and hip-hop, and I’m happy to revisit that union, even in a movie that puts black music at the service of white characters in the same way white audiences once consumed jazz.

That said, I’ve always been left, perhaps heretically, a trifle cold by The Great Gatsby, and I’m curious as to how it’ll play when the movie is released in December.

The movie’s class politics are probably best described as universally disgusted. Gatsby makes the error of assuming that wealth can purchase him respect and love, falling into gauche error as a result, while the old monied Buchanans are revealed to be repulsive, crude people. But it’s a lot easier to shudder away from money as a source of happiness in favor of a more refined sensibility in a boom era than it is in a recession. This is neither a revenge fantasy nor a pure escape. But certainly, Leonardo DiCaprio’s exactly the right person to play Gatsby, even leaving aside that he was Luhrmann’s muse before he was Martin Scorsese’s. He’s achieved a kind of profound remoteness. And these days, the idea that someone could lever themselves from one class to another by sheer force of will is a more remote dream than ever.

I wrote yesterday about the news that DC Comics is preparing to have a major male character in their stable, previously assumed to be straight, come out of the closet. Today the news comes that rival comics giant Marvel, already ahead of DC in the movie business is one-upping DC once again when it comes to depictions of gay characters: Canadian superhero Northstar will propose to his non-superpowered boyfriend in an arc that will lead to the first superhero comics wedding between two men. Archie Comics got there months ago with the wedding of Kevin Keller and his boyfriend (the two met during their military service), but it’s still a big deal to see a superhero, a masculine ideal if there ever was one, marry a man, to show the superhero community standing up and celebrating that couple. Whether you live within the story or experience it from outside, that’s some heavy hitters to have in your corner. And the way Marvel’s talking about the arc is great:

“The story of Northstar and Kyle is universal, and at the core of everything I write: a powerful love between two people who have to fight for it against all odds,” said comic writer Marjorie Liu in a statement. “This is the quintessential Marvel story, one that blends the modern world with the fantasy of superheroes in order to tell an exciting story that begins with a wedding and continues in ways you can’t imagine.”

Although Northstar’s story marks Marvel’s first gay wedding, the X-Men comics are known for tackling civil rights — including gay, lesbian and transgender issues — in their panels. Much has been made of the parallels between the mutant outsiders of the comics and gay youngsters grappling with identity and stigma. Other gay and bisexual Marvel characters include Mystique, Colossus (the Ultimate version), Destiny, Karma and Graymalkin.

“The Marvel Universe has always reflected the world outside your window, so we strive to make sure our characters, relationships and stories are grounded in that reality,” Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso, said in a statement.

I said this about Jay-Z and I think it’s true here, too. Presenting stories about gay people and gay couples as if they are the status quo, and as if they’re consistent with your stated values, and putting people who disagree in the position of shaking you off that ground is one of the most powerful ways to change the tenor of gay rights debate. And when it comes to narrative, doing more than simply announcing someone’s gay is critical: giving them a full, rich lived experience and insisting that ought to be the norm because it’s good storytelling is one of the best way art can fight for equality and reconfigure the terms of our conversations and assumptions.

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