In a recent column for the Huffington Post, Richard Stearns wrote about a kind of diversity pop culture hasn’t integrated particularly well into its characters and storylines. “The vast majority of television and film characters seem to have no faith,” he explained. “People rarely attend church, pray, or make decisions based on religious beliefs. It is hard to find any Christians on popular television shows who are not belittled. There are virtually no television characters who I can fully identify with.” But one of the things that’s been striking this summer at the movie is how many characters have faith, and how often it’s implied to be Judeo-Christian.

In The Avengers, when Black Widow explains to Captain America that Thor and Loki are basically God, Cap’s response is a nod to his religious belief as part of what makes him an avatar of a certain kind of American traditionalism. “There’s only one God, m’am,” he tells her. “And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The movie doesn’t spell out whether he’s a professing Christian, in part because there isn’t another really opportune moment to discuss theology, but the trail is there for people who want to follow it. In Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart’s Snow White says the Lord’s Prayer in captivity. When she lies in a near-death state, the Huntsman’s (Chris Hemsworth) response is prayer, an attempt to speed her into heaven and to find solace for himself. And Elizabeth Shaw, the hero of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, is a Christian whose scientific exploration is directly motivated by her faith. The symbol of her Christianity, the cross she wears around her neck, becomes something that’s traded back and forth, a totem of trust between characters who have little other reason to see each other as sympathetic.

Whatever the virtues and failings of the first two movie, the careful integration of the characters’ beliefs into moments of emotional strain or the world opening up, is very smart. This is the way that a lot of people live their faith: it informs their decision-making as they make their way in the secular world. These aren’t niche movies, meant only to speak to a very faithful minority who view themselves as embattled by the secular world. They’re meant for hugely mass audiences, and their characters’ Christianity is self-confident, both in that they don’t have crises of faith, and that it doesn’t have to be the only element that defines the characters’ personalities. It stands on its own. This strikes me as a smart way forward for people outside of Hollywood who’d like to see more Christian characters in mass entertainment, and for people in Hollywood who’d like to give their characters religion without writing solely religious stories.

Part of the reason Prometheus doesn’t work as well is that Shaw’s religion is the only thing we know is her motivation, but the movie doesn’t flesh out the relationship between her belief and her work as a scientist, and doesn’t bother to establish any consistency in her worldview. If a character’s going to be faithful, what we see of that faith should be consistent in and of itself, and consistent with the other things a character uses to make decisions and to evaluate the world. People of all religions should want to see smart depictions of faith, whether it’s a minor part of a character or their main motivation. And folks who want to create good religious characters need to spend time thinking through theology. Belief is a complicated thing, and getting it right is an essential part of worldbuilding.

Novelist Chuck Wendig wrote a post on the difference between being offensive and being mean last week that I think is worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to pull out this section of it:

I don’t want to hurt anybody. That’s the thing. Offending people? Happy to do it…But I don’t want to be mean. Or cruel. Or conjure up words that ding a person’s armor. I care little about minimizing offense, but I care quite a lot about minimizing people.

That’s why I don’t think the Tomb Raider thing is about political correctness — because I think it’s about minimizing women and, in a way, minimizing the men who play those games. That’s also why I don’t think that profane “in-your-face” blog posts that use words like the ones I noted are in what you might call “terribleminds-style” — sure, I’ll mock things within the industry or the bad habits of writers, but I won’t call those “retarded.” First, because it’s lazy. Second, because while that word may not seem to mean what it says, it still says what it means — and it’s short-code for being mentally handicapped no matter how you slice it. Third, and most importantly, because I don’t want to hurt people.

I think that one of the common defenses whipped out by people who make art—or hell, say things in any forum—that’s sexist or racist or transphobic is to say that they’re brave, speaking truths others dare not utter. The thing this, these people rarely speak these so-called truths to unfriendly audiences. And the easiest thing you can do with any audience is to confirm the beliefs they already hold. Sometimes, that can be a useful thing to do. Confirming that people aren’t alone in their beliefs or reactions to things can be a powerful way to bring marginalized people together. And telling people that their beliefs matter and are actionable in the world is a major mobilizing tool. But there’s a difference between those kinds of conversations and affirming people’s fears, prejudices, and need to be superior to someone. If you view giving offense as a sign of courage, it’s much more courageous to poke at your allies rather than the people weaker that you’ve determined to keep that way, to take a broad view, really see what the conventional wisdom is, and then challenge that. There are pieties in every movement, be it left, right, or center. But if you want to skewer them, you have to do better than “bitches be crazy” or “trans people are gross.” Smashing things and causing pain are not the same things as making a point.

I’m sure many of you have heard of the Black List, a project to round up the best unproduced movie scripts, based on recommendations from executives at movie studios and production companies. Getting a script on the Black List is a mark of esteem, something that might get a script into production that had been previously been overlooked, and that marks a writer as a creative and original thinker. So I’m excited about a new endeavor* that’s creating a similar list of scripts that pass the Bechdel Test, and trying to get producers to commit to reading at least two of the scripts on the list.

I’m excited by the prospect of turning rich female characters from something that’s seen as a way to placate a certain number of vocal women or to get a certain kind of critical acclaim to an objective measurement of quality, creativity and intelligence. And I think it’ll be fun to see the scripts themselves: it’s interesting to see what people come with outside the established formulas of Hollywood genres. But I think I’m also curious to see how long it takes for the list to take off, and many of these scripts get picked up as compared to Black List scripts. If nothing else, that’s useful data about what kinds of smart and creative Hollywood values, and how far we have to go to make fascinating female characters part of that equation.

As a piece of political thought, I really, really like Jasiri X’s and Rhymefest’s latest track, “Who’s Illegal?”:

it’s a great explication of the work done by the word “illegal” when it’s used to describe immigrants, both in terms of how we view history, and how we judge present actions. If people are, themselves, inherently illegal, it becomes harder to judge violence done to establish and expand American borders in the past as a violation of both law and norms. And if people are illegal, the illegality of their personhood supersedes, in the imagination, illegal acts done to them by supposedly legal persons like Joe Arpaio. The idea that a person can be illegal is, of course, incoherent. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve ugly uses.

I’ve mentioned Beyond the Wall, a collection of essays about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am a contributor, which is available on Amazon now and in stores tomorrow. I’ve got an excerpt of my essay, which explores sexual assault as a critical element in Westeros’s understanding of monstrosity, here (WARNING: WITH HEAVY SPOILERS FOR A DANCE WITH DRAGONS):

The first thing we know about Ramsay Bolton, born a bastard but legitimated by his father, is that he abuses his wife. After he is recognized by his father, Ramsay marries Lady Hornwood to gain control of her ancestral house, then leaves her to starve to death in a tower cell…the Bastard of the Dreadfort takes up the unpleasant habit of hunting down women in whom he’s interested: “When Ramsay catches them he rapes them, flays them, feeds their corpses to his dogs, and brings their skins back to the Dreadfort as trophies. If they have given him good sport, he slits their throats before he skins them. Elsewise, t’other way around” (A Dance with Dragons)…When Theon Greyjoy falls under Ramsay’s control, the sadist gelds him, partially flays him, and forces Theon to participate in sexual assaults, most notably on a servant who is impersonating the late Ned Stark’s younger daughter, Arya. So while women are not Ramsay’s only victims, his crimes sooner or later seem to involve them.

Eventually we learn that the Bastard of the Dreadfort is, himself, the product of sexual violence. Roose Bolton raped Ramsay’s mother in an exercise of his first night rights, a story he relates in A Dance with Dragons with a casualness that’s chilling:

“I was hunting a fox along the Weeping Water when I chanced upon a mill and saw a young woman washing clothes in the stream. The old miller had gotten himself a new young wife, a girl not half his age. She was a tall, willowy creature, very healthy-looking. Long legs and small firm breasts, like two ripe plums. Pretty, in a common sort of way. The moment that I set eyes on her I wanted her. Such was my due. The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger [. . .]. So I had him hanged, and claimed my rights beneath the tree where he was swaying. If truth be told, the wench was hardly worth the rope. The fox escaped as well, and on our way back to the Dreadfort my favorite courser came up lame, so all in all it was a dismal day.”

In A Storm of Swords, Roose admits to Catelyn Stark that Ramsay’s “blood is tainted, that cannot be denied.”…While it may be decidedly antimodern to blame children who are the product of rape for his parents’ sins, there’s something to the idea that unpunished rape is a sin that carries implications far beyond individual victims and perpetrators, a crime that comes back to haunt the society that permits and enables it. This is the one moment in the novels when the characters acknowledge an argument that Martin’s been building for us all along: rape produces damage that lingers beyond a single act, a single victim. It can produce monsters that contribute to the destabilization of entire societies.

And Sean T. Collins and Stefan Sasse were nice enough to have me on their Boiled Leather podcast to discuss the essay and to discuss both sexual assault and portrayals of consensual marital sex in the franchise. Talking to them, and after recently re-reading A Dance With Dragons, I realized how struck I was by Alys Karstark as a transformational figure. This northern girl runs away from a marriage she can’t abide, but she doesn’t abandon the idea of a marriage that’s also a strategic alliance. Her marriage to the Magnar of Thenn is nothing if not strategic. The union of a Northern noble lady and the leader of the one group of wildlings most likely to integrate well into Westeros’s system of governance and nobility is the first bridge between these two cultures that will have to learn to knit together. Alys’s marriage also means she denies anyone else the ability to use her as a pawn: she can’t be used to cement another allegiance, thrown away on another one of the swiftly-fracturing alignments that will sew enmity among Westeros’s noble houses for generations even after this war is over.

And her marriage to him is one of the only ones in the franchise that isn’t tainted by violence, and suggests some of the only joyful, unconflicted sexual heat we’ve seen in the franchise in a long time. When Melisande asks her, “Alys, do you swear to share your fire with Sigorn, and warm him when the night is dark and full of terrors?” Alys promises “Till his blood is boiling.” Her new husband’s feelings seem to be mutual: “The Magnar all but ripped the maiden’s cloak from Alys’s shoulders, but when he fastened her bride’s cloak about her he was almost tender. As he leaned down to kiss her cheek, their breath mingled. The flames roared once again.” And she gets him at the dance floor at their wedding. Maybe it’s drink, maybe it’s that they’re comfortable with each other. But it’s lovely to see that Westeros’s sexual and marital institutions aren’t a total bulwark against happiness, that there are people who work within those institutions, pursuing peace in the realm and at home at the same time.

The bridge is yours.

-Getting increasingly excited for 12 Years a Slave, due to things like this.

-I do like that Michelle Williams was the person who got escape velocity from Dawson’s Creek.

-This is apparently the year that actors slightly older than me figure out marriage and divorce:

When I like to look for gay subtext in cultural artifacts, I tend to look for actual sexualized interactions between characters, rather than equating whether or not someone conforms to gender stereotypes with their potential sexual orientation as EW does with this piece on Brave:

But could Merida be gay? Absolutely. She bristles at the traditional gender roles that she’s expected to play: the demure daughter, the obedient fiancée. Her love of unprincess-like hobbies, including archery and rock-climbing, is sure to strike a chord with gay viewers who felt similarly “not like the other kids” growing up. And she hates the prospect of marriage — at least, to any of the three oafish clansmen that compete for her hand — enough to run away from home and put her own mother’s life at risk. She’s certainly not a swooning, boy-crazy Disney princess like The Little Mermaid’s Ariel or Snow White. In fact, Merida may be the first in that group to be completely romantically disinclined (even cross-dressing Mulan had a soft spot for Li Shang).

One of the things that’s brilliant about Brave is that it puts off the question of Merida’s sexual maturity, and her need to do her duty to her family by marrying, until a more appropriate age. The movie decouples Merida’s mother’s desire that she act the princess and fulfill that role by marrying from what Merida herself actually wants and feels, and Merida’s triumph in the movie is delaying the question of who she’ll marry until she is ready to answer it on her own terms, and in accordance with desires she actually feels. The movie takes a strong stand against the idea that the best way for girls to be good daughters, or to perform girlhood correctly, is to become sexually available when they’re expected to. The prize to be won isn’t a prince. It’s autonomy and self-knowledge. Merida’s primary relationship during the events of Brave is with her family, and in the schema of the movie, that’s perfectly fine: it doesn’t portray her as behind or a failure.

And I really wish that anyone, anywhere, would stop reading a girl’s desire for physical activity or pleasure in the abilities her own body gives her as a sign of potential incipient gayness. Girls who like playing sports are just as likely to grow up loving other women as the girls who cheer them from the sidelines, or the girls who are off in an art studio or a college newspaper office. Sexuality and gender performance are not the same thing. And if a girl is defying the gendered norms laid out for her, that should be a sign that we question the adequacy of the norms in capturing the diversity of girls’ experiences, rather than the girl herself.

I know I went hard on The Newsroom on Friday, but now that y’all have seen it, I want to talk about the way the show treats reporting, something I wrote about at length for the lovely people at Press Play:

The staff of Will’s show figures out earlier than anyone else that Deepwater Horizon will be a major environmental catastrophe because Neal (Dev Patel), whom Will has earlier identified as “the Indian stereotype of an IT guy” proves to have exceedingly useful insights into the workings of offshore drilling rigs. He gained this knowledge, possessed by no one else on any staff of any publication in all the land, because, my hand to God, he “built a volcano in primary school.”…Jim, possessed of the world’s most coincidental personal connections, turns out to have a college schoolmate working at BP (who makes time to give Jim a ring in the midst of a massive disaster) and a sister who works at Halliburton…The Newsroom cuts away as soon as anyone on staff has a source on the phone. The show is supremely uninterested in the actual and lengthy processes of source development and research. Maybe it’s a tactic to keep the focus on Sorkin’s fast-talking, fact-spewing sock puppets, or to make sure the show whips through a story from the near-past each week, but it lends an airless quality to the proceedings. Everything we need to know, apparently, is already here in this glass and chrome box.

The rarity with which pop culture gets reporting right remains a mystery to me, particularly given the extent to which television has cracked procedurals. Reporting a complex story is exactly like cracking a crime: you have either a precipitating traumatic event or a hint of a secret system at work, pursuit of credible leads and dead ends, development of trust, attempts to build an airtight case, and often, revisions before the final presentation. Sometimes the story changes the world, as with Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the FBI’s use of virulently anti-Islam training materials, which got President Obama to order them scrubbed. Sometimes all a reporter gets is the satisfaction of a job well-done. Whether on an episodic basis, or on a story-as-season-long arc basis as the original British State of Play did, this should be a relatively easy thing for television to just nail.

The thing that I find genuinely disturbing about The Newsroom is its narrow identification of cable news as the problem and Will McAvoy as the solution. Cable news polarization is a problem, but it’s a problem that ultimately affects a fairly small number of Americans day to day and year to year. The larger problems are ones that affect all sorts of news programs and publications: shrinking staffs and budgets that support less-ambitious reporting, government secrecy and control of information, increasingly stultified and PR-controlled interviews that decrease the possibility of honest conversation and homogenize reporting. Tone and presentation are issues that float on top of this sea of larger challenges.

This post contains spoilers for episodes 1 through 6 of the first season of The Wire. Feel free to discuss events that happen beyond these episodes in comments, but if you do so, label your comments as such for new readers.

The Wire, in retrospect, derives much of its critical reputation from its deep roots in David Simon’s reporting on Baltimore’s ills, which is often code for it as a grim show. When the show gets additional credit, it’s often for being bitterly funny. But in watching these three episodes in the first season, I was struck by their illumination of a critical theme: what level of justice and fairness these characters still expect from a profoundly broken system.

That thought lodged in my mind for the first time watching Bodie, having been snatched up into the juvenile detention system after knocking down Detective Mahone, walks out of Boys’ Village and tries to hitch a ride home. There’s something oddly touching about his disappointment when no one stops for the African-American boy who shows evidence of an obvious beating. Bodie’s at genial war with Detectives Herc and Carver, he has a sense of being treated unfairly by law enforcement, but he still holds out hope for some sector of society. It’s clear, when Herc and Carver crash in to his grandmother’s home, that there’s some sort of family resemblance. “Would you like to sit down?” she asks a clearly ashamed Herc. “Preston came to me when my daughter died. He was only four years old. But even then, I could tell he was angry. His mother lived out there. After a while, he couldn’t see nothing else.”

That she’s not entirely right is the basis for the transformation of Bodie’s feud with the two detectives into a wary joviality. Herc apologizes to Mrs. Preston, telling her, “I’m sorry, m’am. And I’m sorry for the way he came through here. If Preston comes past, give him this, and tell him we need to talk. I’m sorry.” Later, he’ll lose at pool to her grandson, who teases him, “That might be your whole salary, but I clock that shit in minutes.” Herc’s gesture of reconciliation to Bodie’s grandmother doesn’t bear precisely the results he expects: Bodie has Herc’s card on him when Herc and Carver pick him up. But it seems to have brokered at least a temporary truce between Bodie and the cops he’s vexed so greatly (perhaps because of how similar they all are). “Fuck you and your tight-ass advice,” Bodie tells him when their fragile peace is interrupted by the need to return to Bodie to detention. “But, that sandwich was good.”

Bodie’s boss is having graver doubts than his deputy is. D’Angelo begins these three episodes bragging about committing a murder on behalf of his uncle, Avon, who needed a troublesome girlfriend silenced. “I ain’t seen a female that fine since,” he muses. But the camerawork gives the lie to his braggadocio, making him float in front of an eerily shifting view of the Pit behind D’Angelo as he tries to establish his credibility. Trying to reconcile these acts with D’Angelo’s sensitivity is an inherently nauseating task.
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In our age of anti-heroes and fabulous villains, niceness has often fallen along the wayside as an embodiment of dull virtue, evidence of a distasteful unwillingness to commit to strong emotion or decisive action. It’s no mistake that Steve Carrell’s emerged as a surprisingly significant movie star during this past decade. He’s the one person who can get away with making nice interesting, the end goal of hard-fought battles for control in a world that often takes advantage of or mocks decency. And Carell’s rarely used his core strength to better effect than in Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, a lovely, emotionally precise apocalypse romantic comedy that seems at unfortunate risk of being drowned out by this summer’s louder, cruder entertainments.

Seeking a Friend begins with a news announcement that immediately sets it apart from other movies about the potential end times: “The final mission to save mankind has failed.” Upon hearing that awful pronouncement, Dodge’s (Carell) wife Linda bolts from the car they’ve pulled over to the side of the road to hear the radio report on a last-ditch effort to divert an asteriod that’s headed towards earth with cataclysmic consequences. She, as it turns out with, wants to spend her final month on earth with someone other than her husband.

But Dodge wasn’t harboring a secret yearning—unlike the other guests at a dinner party thrown by his unhappily married friends, a very funny Connie Britton and Rob Corddry, he doesn’t want to have an orgy or try heroin—or an alternate plan. So he goes about his job as an insurance adjustor at an increasingly-depleted office, telling callers “Sorry, sir, I’m afraid that’s not covered under your current policy. Yes, the Armageddon package is extra,” and attending meetings where is boss lets the dwindling staff “know of a few positions in upper management that have become available. Anyone want to be Chief Financial Officer?”

It seems Dodge will continue to wind down the end of his life and everyone else’s with these small acts of decency—he adopts an abandoned dog as his sole act of adventure, and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince his housekeeper to spend more time with her family—until a neighbor he’s never spoken with breaks up with her boyfriend and ends up crying on his fire escape. The real source of her heartache, it turns out, is that she isn’t going to be able to spend her last days with her family. “I missed two planes,” Penny sobs. “I missed them all. The end of the world and I’m still fifteen minutes late.” Along with her woes, Penny brings Dodge’s undelivered mail, which includes a letter from a woman he loved and lost years ago, giving him sudden forward momentum. Penny has a car, and Dodge knows someone with a plane, and they strike a bargain: Penny will help Dodge find his old girlfriend, and he will help her make one last attempt to cross the Atlantic home to England.

What’s striking about their roadtrip is its warmth. When they’re arrested for speeding, another cop lets them out of jail in the morning with an apology and a plea for understanding: his colleague is reacting badly to the end times and trying to restore as much order to his universe as he can. Dodge and Penny stop by a Friendsy’s restaurant where the employees are hilariously, cultishly high and reveling, determined to satisfy as many customers as possible before they close forever. “Everyone’s welcome!” the host tells them. ” A dude brought in a wolf last week.” And they’re brought closer, and Dodge comes entirely out of his shell in an almost worldless sequence when he and Penny run across what appears to be a mass baptism on a gorgeous beach. The scene could have been played for sneers or rank sentiment, but instead, it’s a quiet testament to the power of connection. Who wouldn’t want to spend one last perfect day at the beach with someone they love before the world ends, surrounded by people who are eager to share the small bounties in their possession?

The fact that the end is inevitable liberates Seeking a Friend from the cliched, last-minute heroics that consume so many apocalypse movies. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the world to keep on turning, but those stories are in service of future love and kindness, rather than appreciating what you have. The movie gently pokes fun at that kind of planning when Dodge and Penny stop by to see one of Penny’s old boyfriends, a hyper-prepared survivalist who asks Dodge to convince Penny to stay in his bunker because “Can we restart society without her? Sure, but she deserves to be one of the top-quality females in contention.” Seeking a Friend is a movie about the people who aren’t really in contention, and about the fact that whether you can save the world or not, it’s possible to be the hero of your own life.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom has a character, news executive Charlie Skinner, who says nice things about ThinkProgress in the third episode of the show. I wish I could return the complement to my employer, but The Newsroom, which debuts at 10 PM on Sunday on HBO is a show full of deeply unpleasant characters. That might be excusable if the show had something genuinely new to say about how to report and present the news, and about the temperament it takes to do great reporting in the present environment. But it’s a bizarre combination of naive and condescending. I wrote, in a review for The Atlantic that’s was based only on the pilot (HBO got me the other episodes just this morning):

The Newsroom appears to operate on a hierarchy of condescension. At the top is executive Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), who describes MacKenzie as if she’s a fragile flower rather than an experienced war correspondent. He says, “She’s mentally and physically exhausted…and she’s been to way too many funerals for a girl her age. She wants to come home.” Will, a notch below him, is unpleasant to everyone in sight, starting in the opening sequences, when he tells a college girl, “You are, without a doubt, the member of the worst period generation period ever period.” (The show later validates Will’s nastiness to her by making her seem spoiled and entitled: She sues her college for emotional distress.) Don (Thomas Sadoski), Will’s soon-to-be-former executive producer, can’t risk snarking on MacKenzie, his replacement, “She’s like a sophomore poli-sci major at Sarah Lawrence.” Jim, MacKenzie’s deputy, snaps back: “She’s exactly like that. I guess the only difference are her two Peabodies and the scar on her stomach from covering a Shiite protest in Islamabad.”

Sorkin’s characters are often accused of sounding alike. Here, what they have in common is a sense that they’re superior to someone who hasn’t submitted to their needs, wishes, and worldview.

At the bottom of this miserable totem pole is Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), formerly an intern, promoted only recently to be Will’s assistant, who is condescended to by everyone. “He didn’t promote you, honey. He thought you were his assistant,” Don, her negging nebbish of a boyfriend tells her at the beginning of the episode. Will, trying to prove he’s attentive to his staff, insists that her name is Ellen. MacKenzie declares that Maggie is “me, before I grew into myself and got hotter with age!” And when Maggie volunteers for a reporting task, both Don and Jim treat Maggie like an idiot. “Can you do this? You can’t just look it up on Wikipedia,” Don tells her. “It’s true, Maggie,” warns Jim.

The subsequent episodes didn’t improve things. Sorkin’s given us perhaps the worst new female character to debut in 2012 in MacKenzie, who gives tendentious speeches, pretentious lectures on news reporting, and whose behavior is so unprofessional it gave me a physical twitch. When it isn’t condescending to women, The Newsroom makes a fetish of nastiness. Will’s aggression is what’s presented as admirable, his ability to fillet someone dumb, rather than his ability to elicit new information. And that’s a huge problem for the show’s presentation of the news business. There’s not actually anything admirable or interesting about gutting a college student for asking a dumb question at a forum, or lecturing Tea Party adherents about the wealth of the Koch Brothers: instead, it’s an attempt to appeal to the mean, superior, lizard parts of our brains. Sorkin wants Will to be an alternative to the shouty creeps who literally are meant to make Will—and us—feel physically ill in the opening sequence. Will may be an ass of Sorkin’s creation. But that doesn’t mean he’s not an ass.

The bridge is yours.

-The Thin Man remake may not happen.

-Pretty excited to see Casey Affleck’s Josh Hamilton movie.

-Also to see David Tennant and Emily Watson play a successful British politician and her husband.

-The weird sexiness of Hollywood’s approach to Mexico’s struggle against the cartels.

-Sex in Game of Thrones and video games.

Pixar movies are, in so many ways, what I hope for movies to become: visually stunning, narratively inventive, and often about issues like aging, masculinity, fatherhood, and responsibility, but with a confidence that the audience will derive those themes from an excellent original story, rather than needing them clearly articulated. Marlin’s search for Nemo is about the recovery of his own bravery and sense of adventure, a chance to overcome the worry-wart tendencies that have plagued him since his wife’s death, as much as it is the recovery of his son. Carl Frederickson’s adventures in Up are about rectifying what he sees as his two failures as a husband, his diminished dreams of adventure and his inability to become a father. Wall-E is about the power of love, from a young robot’s perspective rather than a young man’s. These men’s emotional experiences are specific to them and influenced by their gender, but their adventures are not particularly male or female experiences: there is nothing gendered about surfing with sea turtles, hanging out with talking dogs, or running around a space ship. And so it does feel like Pixar’s denied us something in giving its first female protagonist a uniquely gendered catalyst for her adventure—in other words, by making her a fairy tale princess—by not making her the subject of a more truly universal story, and in doing so asserted that the default in such settings need not always be male.

But it would be a shame to dismiss Brave on those grounds. Pixar isn’t the only standard for greatness. Brave plants a flag in much-derided territory and makes something visually gorgeous and emotionally rich out of the familiar rhythms of fairy tales. And while the wars between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons may be fought on different ground, Brave should stand as a reminder that those battles can be equally lacerating, and equally resonant, no matter the gender of the participants.

Brave begins with a tiny, flame-haired Scottish princess at peace with both of her parents, Elinor (Emma Thompson), the mother who plays hide and seek with her, and Fergus (Billy Connolly), the father who gives her a bow of her own for her birthday and patiently teaches her how to shoot. Their peace is shattered when a bear breaks up their family gathering, scattering Merida (Kelly Macdonald) and Elinor, and costing Fergus his leg.

As Merida gets older, the tensions between her and her mother grow, too. Elinor (Emma Thompson) isn’t a bad mother, but the tension between them is inevitable. Some of the training Elinor gives Merida hints at a greater role for her—”A princess must be knowledgeable about her kingdom”—and some of it carries tinges of the kind of innate cruelty of mothering. “Hungry, are you?” Elinor asks Merida when she brings a plate of desserts to the dinner table. “You’ll get dreadful collywobbles.” Some of the power of Brave is the way it gives depth and power to those ordinary motherly slights. Elinor’s comments come after Merida’s spent a day ranging through the woods with her horse Angus in one of the more powerful sequences I’ve seen of a girl enjoying her body’s capacities and the pleasure of being very, very good at something. Elinor’s words undermine Merida’s pleasure in her strength and exercise, aimed at making her physically and emotionally fit the corset she’s stuffed into for the Highland Games.
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I’ve been reading a lot of Judge Dredd comics thanks to the nice people at 2000 A.D.—the new collection of the Complete Casefiles is gorgeous and well-curated—so I was particularly excited to see the trailer for Dredd, the second attempt to make a movie about the lawgivers who attempt to bring order to the post-apocalyptic dictatorship of Mega-City One:

From what I can tell, the moments we see in the trailer are extremely faithful to the script for the movie that’s been circulating for a couple of years, which to my mind is a good thing. The story looks to be simple: Jude Dredd, the best street patrolman in the Justice Department (which, for the unfamiliar, took over the remnants of the United States in a coup, and gave its Judges the power to act as judge, jury, and executioner to combat crime), is meant to spend a routine day assessing Judge Anderson, whose scores would mean she’d fail out of the program, but given her other abilities, the Chief Judge wants her to have a second chance to pass. But their day on the streets takes an unusual turn when Dredd and Anderson investigate a series of murders in a giant housing block called Peach Trees, the provenance of a ruthless drug lord named Ma-Ma (Lena Heady in a role that should make terrifying use of her experience as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones).

My only real reservation with the story is that I think Judge Dredd is most interesting when he’s questioning the system that’s empowered him, or pushing for a more expansive or humane vision of Mega-City One citizenship. Ma-Ma is an unambiguous villain, not someone to make Dredd question the hyper-violent exercise of his authority, though the script makes pretty clear how dehumanizing life in the blocks is, and how the violent war on crime takes its toll on civilians. The only real discretion he exercises is in his evaluation of Anderson. I’m hoping this will be a success and that we could see a franchise grow out of this, both because I think the character is excellent, and because I think with success would come confidence to tell some of the more ambiguous, and more cosmic, Judge Dredd stories. If The Avengers universe can get Thanos, surely the American public is ready for a Judge Death movie.

We’ve been having a lot of conversations on the blog about feminism this week, and a reader wrote in asking for suggestions of non-fiction if he wanted to give himself a basic primer on feminism as intellectual tradition. Lots of you wrote in with good suggestions, so here are my favorites and the books that were recommended most often by the masses.

1. Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft: The foremother of feminist philosophy, Wollstonecraft used this piece to push back against arguments that women should only receive domestic education, and to lay the foundations on which other women would build the argument for equality between the sexes.

2. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf: Woolf is arguing for educational access and economic independence as necessary preconditions for women who want to write, but her arguments are applicable to women seeking self-determination in any manner of arena.

3. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan: There’s no question that Friedan is a problematic figure, particularly given her attitudes towards people of color and lesbians, but her analysis of the gap between what society wanted women to aspire to and the happiness it actually brought them played a critical role in the national feminist conversation of the last century.

4. Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde: Friedan’s flaws are Lourde’s triumphs: a black woman, a lesbian, and the child of immigrants, Lourde’s work makes a major contribution to a vision of feminism that isn’t the sole preserve of and salve for the wounds of white, heterosexual, middle-class women.

5.Gender Trouble, Judith Butler: Butler’s critique of the idea that femininity is natural rather than constructed is a perfect introduction to gender theory for first-timers.

6. Justice, Gender, And The Family, Susan Moller Okin: Reccomended by philosopher friends, Moller Okin takes the concept of justice from public life and applies it to the private sphere.

7. The Second Shift, Arlie Hockschild: A landmark examination of how domestic labor is divided in families where both parents work.

8. This Bridge Called My Back and Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa: The former is an essay collection including work by Anzaldúa and other women of color, the latter a collection of prose and poetry by Anzaldúa, recommended to me by Chicana friends in college and vital reading.

9. Ain’t I A Woman?, bell hooks: Another critically important book about the intersections of race and gender, examining the magnifying impact of sexism on slavery, sexism in the black community and racism among feminists.

10. Backlash, Susan Faludi: Particularly valuable context on the War on Women, which is not precisely new.

11. Crazy Salad, Nora Ephron: Lots of folks think of Ephron solely as a creature of Hollywood, but her reporting on the women’s movement as it came into flower in the twentieth century is vital, and funny, and very much gives a sense of what it must be like to have lived through the contradictions, victories, and failures of the moment.

Title IX became law 40 years ago Saturday, and while it wasn’t specifically geared toward sports — it includes not a single mention of athletics — we have come to associate it with the opportunities it has provided women in the realm of athletics.

Those benefits aren’t small. Female participation in high school and college sports has increased by more than a thousand percent since 1972, and the number of female high school athletes now tops 3 million nationwide. Title IX, according to one study, is responsible for roughly 20 percent of the increase in women’s education and about 40 percent of the rise in employment for 25-to-34-year-old women. Women who play sports, according to some estimates, will make 14 percent higher wages than non-athletes over their lifetimes.

Still, significant challenges still face women in sports. At the collegiate level, 91 percent of the athletics directors who oversee women’s sports are men. There are only three female athletics directors at top-tier Division I colleges and universities; there have been only nine in history. Just four percent of collegiate athletics directors at the Division I level are female. No team in the big four American professional sports has ever had a female coach, neither has a men’s football or basketball team at the top college level. There has never been a female general manager in any of the major American sports.

Even in women’s sports, opportunities are declining. Forty years ago, females made up 90 percent of the coaches in women’s college sports. That has dropped to 42 percent, the lowest number on record. Successful female coaches have struggled to find new jobs, and they make significantly less than their male counterparts.

Perhaps, then, it’s time for the NCAA and major professional leagues to adopt a “Rooney Rule” for women. Facing a dearth of African-American head coaches, the National Football League instituted the Rooney Rule in 2003, mandating that franchises had to interview at least one minority candidate for any coaching vacancy. The rule later spread to include senior-level front office positions.

Though it was criticized by both blacks and whites at the time, the rule’s success is undeniable. In the 13 years preceding the Rooney Rule, NFL teams hired just four black head coaches. In the decade since, there have been 11 black head coaches, and two others were named interim coaches in that time. In front offices, the story is much the same. The NFL received its second consecutive “A” grade for diversity hiring last year, and minorities hold 25 percent of the league’s senior football operations positions. Minorities in the NFL still face challenges, but the Rooney Rule has created opportunities that were scarce, and often didn’t exist at all, before.

There may not be a large enough pool of candidates yet to mandate that females be interviewed for head coaching jobs at the top levels of men’s professional sports. But enacting such a rule could boost female coaching opportunities in women’s sports, and it could increase the number of women holding top-level positions in professional sports franchises and college athletics departments. Eventually, it could lead to breakthroughs for women in male sports — creating opportunities for women to coach men’s basketball, baseball, and football teams, just as men coach women in softball, women’s basketball, and other sports.

Sports leagues have taken large steps toward increasing participation of women over the last decade, but a glass ceiling not unlike the one once faced by black coaches in the NFL still exists. A Rooney Rule for women may just be the key to breaking it.

It’s bizarre to watch the Supreme Court’s decision in its fleeting obscenities case today get reported as some sort of victory for broadcasters. Yes, the court, in a decision written by Anthony Kennedy, voided three Federal Communications Commissions decisions against Fox and ABC, declaring that the FCC hadn’t given the networks proper prior notice that the things they broadcast—two incidences of expletives spoken, unscripted, by stars during awards broadcasts and seven seconds of female nudity from behind—could be considered obscene. It’s a nice reprieve for Fox and ABC, but the Court decided it didn’t need to address the First Amendment issues involved. The does nothing to change what networks can broadcast or the FCC’s general ability to determine what’s obscene. As the Parents Television Council pointed out in a statement on the ruling, there are 1.5 million pending indecency cases that the FCC, because it did give proper prior notice to those broadcasters, is now free to rule on.

But the decision does reveal how capriciously the FCC behaved during the period when these penalties were assessed.

“The Govern­ment argues instead that ABC had notice that the scene in NYPD Blue would be considered indecent in light of a 1960 decision where the Commission declared that the ‘televising of nudes might well raise a serious question of programming contrary to 18 U. S. C. §1464.’,” Kennedy explained. “An isolated and ambiguous statement from a 1960 Commission decision does not suffice for the fair notice required when the Government intends to impose over a $1 million fine for allegedly im­permissible speech.” Well, no kidding, but it’s amazing that the commission was brazen enough to think that would cut it. Particularly given, as Kennedy notes, “a Commission ruling prior to the airing
of the NYPD Blue episode had deemed 30 seconds of nude buttocks ‘very brief’ and not actionably indecent in the context of the broadcast.” That the Commission didn’t acknowledge that is testament to either sloppy work and ignorance of its own precedents, or a conviction that the FCC can dramatically change tack at will.

That isn’t to say that new commissioners won’t be more rigorous and less capricious. But Kennedy did insist that “There is no need, however, for an agency to provide de­tailed justifications for every change or to show that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the old one.” It’s a sentiment that should unnerve both decency advocates and those of us who’d like to see more creative freedom for television writers.

In the meantime, I’d love to see more shows do what Parks and Recreation and Southland do: write dialogue that reflects how adults actually speak to each other in times of stress and excitement and pain and love, and bleep as necessary. It’s a workaround that avoids the—oh, the horror—prospect of expanding a child’s vocabulary in an instant, while acknowledging the adulthood of the target audience—and it’s a nice little rebuke visual rebuke to the confused standards we have today, a reminder that the FCC thinks the sight of Leslie Knope uttering the occasional obscenity is a threat.

My dear colleague Alyssa said perhaps all that needs to be said about Adam Corolla’s pathetic excuse for a comedic mind, but his continued presence in the mainstream media this week — a bizarre phenomenon I’m convinced owes entirely to the fact that he is straight, white, male, and loud — unfortunately demands a bit of further discussion. In an appearance on CBS’s The Talk this week, Sara Gilbert (the Roseanne star who came out as a lesbian in 2010), confronted Corolla on the offensive way he talks about the LGBT community. He gave this illuminating response:

COROLLA: If somebody says to me, ‘What do you think of your mother-in-law,’ and I go, ‘Oh, she’s a delight, I love her dearly,’ nobody laughs. So if they say, ‘What do you think of Chaz Bono,’ I have to say something that’s horrible, so I can get a laugh. And everyone goes, ‘oh, that’s what you think?’ Nice doesn’t get laughs, especially on stage…When did we start holding comedians up to the level of politicians and teachers? We’re supposed to say these things…we make no policies. I don’t control anything. I just tell jokes.

Watch it:

It’s refreshing to hear Corolla confirm that the only way he knows how to get laughs is to be horrible, but his remarks are telling. (For the record, plenty of straight comedians — Louis CK, Dave Chapelle, Lewis Black, Jon Stewart, etc. — have no trouble getting laughs with LGBT-friendly bits.) The entire reason he believes he can say whatever he wants about women, LGBT people, or whoever is because in his understanding of the world, he bears no accountability for his words. Unfortunately, in this regard, he seems to be correct. He can’t lose an election like a politician, nor can he be fired like a teacher. In fact, the entertainment industry rewards him for his poor taste and outlandish remarks, as evidenced by this very interview.

The Adam Corollas (or Tracy Morgans) of the world don’t have to care about the trans kid whose parents reject her or the gay kid whose classmates bully him, because nothing in the entertainment industry compels them to. But they’re wrong if they think what they say doesn’t have a profound influence on society and public discourse. If Adam Corolla truly believes that the only impact of his “jokes” is the uncomfortable laughter he derives from his audiences, then he is as narrow-minded about the world as he is unfunny.

The bridge is yours.

-We’re getting a Sesame Street movie, apparently.

-This show should only be allowed to happen if David Cronenberg hires Mary Roach to be in the writers’ room.

-James Poniewozik being typically smart on what people will and won’t pay for in a digital media environment.

-I like Jamie Weinman’s thoughts on Andrew Sarris.

-It’s been That Kind of Week, so you get Carly Rae Jepsen and Owl City because I’m in the mood to be happy:

The Invisible War, the Kirby Dick-directed documentary about the sexual assault epidemic in the military, was one of the best movies I saw at Sundance. Its exploration of the culture of which scandals like the Tailhook case are just a symptom is powerful. And the movie takes on a rarely-discussed subject, how sexual assault affects men both as victims and as through their wives’, daughters’, and parents’ trauma. The Invisible War is a difficult movie to watch, but it’s a moving and bracing one, and it’s helped spark a national conversation about the damage done by indifference and abdications of responsibility within the chain of command. I spoke to the movie’s producer, Amy Ziering, about finding men and women who were willing to come forward about to share their stories, and how the military can lead society—if it decides it wants to change. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m curious how both of you came to this subject matter.

We read an article in Salon about four or five years ago, and we were kind of shocked and appalled by what we’d read, and started doing our own investigating, and found [the story] was correct if not worse. Of course, we’d been aware of things like Tailhook and Aberdeen, and these scandals that were reported in the press. But we hadn’t been aware that it was an ongoing problem in the way that it was. The statistics were one of the things the article helped us point us towards. These flare-ups that were reported in the press as these one-off situations were symptoms of an underlying chronic condition. They would get attention when there was this cluster issue that rose to the surface. It’s misperceived in that way…It’s served the military and promoted what we we have called a coverup. Its ideal situtation is [assaults are] presented as a strange, aberrant occurrance as opposed to something that’s ongoing and daily. They do temporary damage control and everything moves on.

How did you find your subjects? Given the consequences women often face for speaking out about being sexually assaulted, it couldn’t have been easy.

We did extensive investigative work. we went to VA centers and put out flyers. we talked to everyone who was an advocate in any way, we used social media, we had a Facebook page. One reason this issue hasn’t come forward is it doesn’t breed naturally outspoken advocates. The nature of the trauma is so severe and radically debilitating that people are reticent to speak up because of the retaliation they’ve experienced, and because of the difficulties they’re having in their day to day lives. It’s hard to become an activist when you can barely get out of bed…That was a very long process. By the time we decided who we were going forward with as our main subjects, we built a good, trusting relationship. We were careful to preselect people who we thought would have the stability, wherewithal, fortitude to handle public scrutiny when the film came out. The last thing we wanted this to do was negatively affect anybody. Any interview, we said your mental health comes first, we can stop and start.

How have they reacted to seeing the movie?

Hugely positively. It’s been life-changing just to feel like they’re not alone, they have this community, and to feel suported and believed. That’s a huge difference to someone who’s been marginalized. Two of them said it saved their marriage. Many of them, when they’ve shown relatives, the change in the relatives’ attitudes really improved all their family relations…We’ve had several people offer to fix Kori’s jaw, and we have three families that have banded together to undertake that.
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