Deadline, in the course of writing up Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty, which chronicles the efforts of the team that finally found and killed Osama bin Laden, notes a juxtaposition the movie makes between the Obama administration’s stance on torture

There were charges that in the heat of the Presidential campaign the Obama administration was givng unprecendented cooperation since obviously a positive film about the capture of Bin Laden couldn’t hurt his re-election chances. The filmmakers always denied that and in fact in the finished product unveiled today Obama is only seen or heard one time in newsreel footage talking about how the U.S. would never tolerate inhumane means of torture in order to elicit information even as the film’s early scenes vividly shows such uses as waterboarding and other horrific acts to get the info they desire. Not exactly a pretty picture.Other than that there is no mention of President Obama and his efforts to make this happen except occasion references to the intense interest of the President as to how this operation was going to be enacted. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is never seen or mentioned.

I can’t tell from this description if the movie’s conclusion is that torture works, or if it’s presented as a tactic that failed and is replaced by others that produce higher-quality information. This was a debate that began immediately after President Obama announced bin Laden’s death, and however it shakes out, Zero Dark Thirty will reignite this enormously difficult conversation, which has lapsed somewhat in fact of bin Laden’s death. Either way, this—and advertising for the movie that suggests that our invasion of Iraq was part of the hunt for bin Laden—suggests that Zero Dark Thirty‘s politics are going to be much more complicated than an Obama reelection vehicle would have been. Anyone who knows Bigelow’s work at all would have known how ludicrous thinking she’d produce that kind of movie is: she’s far too cagey a filmmaker for that. And it suggests that the Obama administration’s assistance to the filmmakers is something more complicated than a collaboration with a friendly filmmaker, and certainly more of a gamble.

Stoner comedies are a venerable staple of cinema, and have been for a long time, but marijuana enthusiasts have tended to hover around the edge of television, particularly on the networks, where they’re more a fodder for jokes than serious contenders for main characters. But as marijuana legalization has become a political reality at the ballot box, pot may move to the center stage on television, too. Entourage producers Rob Weiss, Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson, whose tenure on the HBO sitcom gave them some sense of how to make lighting up a bong, or the possession of marijuana, or a dearth of marijuana, funny, just sold a show to Fox , The Happy Tree, about a burned-out lawyer who becomes a spokesman for a marijuana legalization movement. Whether the show ends up making it to the air or not, and if it does, being any good or not, it raises an interesting question: why haven’t we cracked how to make political procedurals?

In recent memory, we’ve had two effective shows that would meet that description, West Wing and Parks and Recreation. Both of those shows illustrate what makes it harder to do a political procedural than a crime show: the fight isn’t the same every week, and the episodes can’t hit the same satisfying rhythm of discover a body, fix on the wrong suspect, find the right suspect, trial, and verdict. On the national level, the dilemmas on West Wing ranged from bringing a recalcitrant Congress to heel, shutting down an advocate who could make trouble for the administration, deciding whether to go to war, or dealing with an assassination attempt. But the throughline was the power of the presidency and how it could be deployed. On Parks and Recreation, the episodes frequently revolve around event planning and execution, a flexible structure that’s carried the show through everything from sister city visits, to weddings, to reunions of Parks Department directors, to campaign stops.

It’s trickier to come up with that kind of structure for a story about a movement, because the tasks are different when you’re outside of government and seeking power rather than wielding it. That doesn’t mean that episodes can’t be organized around the kinds of events Leslie Knope takes on: movements need rallies, and meetings, and election days, which make for terrific climaxes. But rather than a straight episode-by-episode procedural with little continuity across the course of a season, it probably makes more sense to structure a story about a movement like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, setting up an elected official, a judge, a ballot initiative, or a commission as a Big Bad, and devoting much of the season to a meeting, a change of heart, a defeat, or a victory. Not all the episodes have to deal exclusively with whatever the drive towards victory is, but that fight will give a spine to each season of the show, without which it would be easy for a program like this to become a baggy, bleary collection of jokes about sparking up. It’s not that I don’t like those. But if you want momentum and stakes for something like The Happy Tree, you have to understand that marijuana isn’t just a matter of fancy Hollywood dealers and Harold and Kumar’s business hippies, and figure out how to make questions of enforcement, cultivation, taxation, and distribution interesting beyond Johnny Drama’s desperation for a dispensary hat.

There’s been a lot of furor in Hollywood over a Christian witness video made by Angus T. Jones, who for ten seasons has played the half man on Two and a Half Men, in which he calls out the show that’s been his paycheck, asking viewers:

Please stop filling your head with filth. Please. People say it’s just entertainment. The fact that it’s entertainment. Do some research on the effects of television and your brain and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to the television…It’s bad news. I don’t know if it means any more coming from me. But you might have heard it otherwise. But watch out…A lot of people don’t like to think how deceptive the enemy is. He’s been doing this a lot longer than any of us have been around…You cannot be a true, God-fearing person and be on a show like that.

The video itself is a rambling splice of several conversations, in which Jones discusses how he came to Seventh Day Adventism, what the series of study videos he’s endorsing in this clip means to him, and, in fairly generic terms, what he’s learned about the impact of entertainment on viewers:

I understand why this is an entertainment industry story—Jones is effectively pulling an inverse Charlie Sheen, whose meltdown-fueled insults to the show’s producers got him fired, and explaining why he’s too rectitudinous to continue working on Two and a Half Men, which maybe says something about a past expiration date for a show that was once one of CBS’s biggest hits. And certainly it’s fair for critics to ask whether Jones intends to stop cashing a paycheck and live up to his standards for being “a true, God-fearing person.”

But I’d actually like to hear in more detail what Jones thinks about the show where he effectively grew up. How did Two and a Half Men affect Jones’ views of women? What did the show’s perspective teach him about what it means to be a good man, and a successful man, if the two ideas are different? When he interacts with fans of the show, do they seem to be taking away different messages than the ones he thought he grew up conveying? How does he feel about Jake, the character he’s playing, specifically? I’d imagine Jones’ critique of the show might skew more towards the show’s deviations from Biblically-ordained gender roles, where mine might focus on the show’s dismissive attitudes about women. And I’m more likely to blame the work of Man rather than the Adversary for creating those images and disseminating those attitudes. But I don’t think Jones is wrong to take culture, or his role in producing it, seriously.

Amid the fog of scandal and shame at some of our biggest institutions, the role academics play in the big business of college athletics has come under more scrutiny. With players taking made up courses in made up schools, and with schools fudging grades to keep players eligible, the NCAA has taken steps in recent years to bolster academic standards. But it continues to ignore the most important fact that is staring top-level college sports in the face: many of the athletes are in school because the model we have created makes going to college the most logical step toward becoming a professional athlete. Many “student-athletes” are students simply because they are athletes, and the education they truly care about is the one that occurs on the field, not the one that happens off of it.

Whenever athletes make that clear, the NCAA and its proponents stir it up as a major controversy. But former professor David Pargman, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, thinks we should cater to athletes who want to become professionals by making an athletics major available to college players. That’s not a new idea, but few have gotten as specific as Pargman, who argues that if theater and music students who face similarly long odds of a professional career have their own majors, perhaps athletes should too:

Why do we impose upon young, talented, and serious-minded high-school seniors the imperative of selecting an academic major that is, more often than not, completely irrelevant to, or at least inconsistent with, their heartfelt desires and true career objectives: to be professional athletes?

Acquisition of athletic skills is what significant numbers of NCAA Division I student athletes want to pursue. And this is undeniably why they’ve gone to their campus of choice. Their confessions about their primary interest are readily proclaimed and by no means denied or repressed. These athletes are as honest in recognizing and divulging their aspiration as is the student who declares a goal of performing some day at the Metropolitan Opera or on the Broadway stage. Student athletes wish to be professional entertainers. This is their heart’s desire.

In Pargman’s view, an athletics major would consist of the standard two years of general studies that most undergraduates take as freshmen and sophomores. After that, it would get more specific to their field, as they would take classes like anatomy and physiology, exercise science, contract and business law, and public speaking. Physical education, physical therapy, and kinesiology majors are still common at our colleges and universities, and while those are available options for college athletes, Pargman’s proposal improves on them by requiring skills like public speaking, business courses, and contract law that are especially important for soon-to-be professionals. By mixing in sport-specific labs (or by giving credit for on-field practice and game time), such programs would also acknowledge that the actual playing of the sports is in itself a part of the student’s job training experience. Many athletes already major in physical education or kinesiology, but giving them the option to fine-tune their coursework would make for an even stronger academic experience while theoretically increasing their interest level and therefore the value of the education they ultimately receive.

Critics of an athletics major would be quick to point out how few of our college athletes go on to professional careers. But Pargman compares his hypothetical athletics major to concentrations in theater, music, and art. Few of our theater majors end up on Broadway, few of our art majors have paintings in the Met, and hardly any music majors end up in the Boston Pops. But they still take courses specific to their craft, and proponents of such programs (myself included) are quick to defend their social and academic value. Given that sports and physical education have social and academic value as well, why should they be treated as less worthy of academic study than theater, art, and music — or religion, philosophy, anthropology, or any other social science majors that often have little practicality for a student’s long-term career prospects?

As for the athletes who “go pro in something other than sports,” the athletics major doesn’t have to be a waste. As Pargman argues, students who fall short of professional athletics will simply deal with their college choice the same way other students who chose specific majors do: by applying the skills they have learned in another career path of their choosing. For those who don’t make it, many of the course Pargman proposed would have practical application in fields like education, behavioral sciences, or communications. Such majors could even have further concentrations (like many broad arts and sciences majors do) to push athletes closer to their interests, making it easy for an athletics major to transition his or her skills to physical education, coaching, contractual law, or business and marketing should they not fulfill their goal of becoming a professional athlete.

College education, in the end, is an experiment for all students, and degree programs aren’t necessarily job training programs. The NCAA has focused its academic reforms on increasing standards for incoming athletes and increasing oversight on athletes once they get on campus, but none of that addresses the purpose or function of academics in big-time college sports, or how to make the academic side work in tandem with the athletic side. Letting athletes pursue their interests the way we let other incoming students (particularly those focused on a craft) pursue theirs could address the tension that currently exists between the student and the athlete. Pargman’s proposal may not be perfect, but given the obvious failures of the NCAA’s recent attempts to make academics a serious part of the college athletic experience, it is at least worth considering.

Sometimes, it can seem like pop culture is converging on real life: romantic comedies highlight a vein of unproductive thinking, a movie about an aging parent highlights the path forward through a dilemma, an origin story makes certain bits of psychology make sense, even if they lead a character to different and more dramatic ends than our own. So it was with me and high school reunion movies this year. In addition to shooting guns and kissing girls, Channing Tatum starred with his wife, Jenna Dewan-Tatum in the reunion drama Ten Years. The folks behind the American Pie franchise decided that Jim, Michelle, and company had let their reunion slide a couple of years, and held their ten-year reunion thirteen years after Paul was ushered into manhood by Stifler’s mom. Ben and Kate broke with Thanksgiving’s traditional dominance of sitcoms—though there was a turkey-stealing cold open—and sent its characters back to their high school days. Even when I was in high school, I suppose I was looking forward to who I’d be a decade or more after graduation—after we got back from senior prom, my friends and I somehow ended up watching Grosse Pointe Blank*. But even for someone who was born looking forward to adulthood, being reminded that I actually was going to go back to be a grown-up with people who knew me when I was 17, and seeing how awkwardly it all played out on screen proved to be a little much as the actual day approached.

But I survived! And as someone who is in recovery from the social deficiency elements of my geekiness, if not my affection for cultural ephemera that, when I was in high school, carried less social capital than Dawson’s Creek, the experience left me with some insights. Because so many of you were so helpful in preparing me to go to a suburban hotel and drink not very good bourbon with people I haven’t talked to in ten years, I thought I’d pay them forward for those of you in the audience who are contemplating returning to your hometowns in the year to come, but are as nervous about it as I was**.

1. You Weren’t As Bad As You Thought You Were: Most of my memories of high school are of it as a place I was eager to get out of, mostly so I could start over in place where (almost) nobody knew how awkward I was. It turns out, though, that I’m a pretty unreliable narrator of my own life, as I suspect many of us are as well. And it turns out we’re more generous in our memories of each other than we are in our memories of ourselves. Walking through the door of that hotel, I remembered things I hadn’t thought of in years: marathoning Wild Things and the Usual Suspects on weekend afternoons with a friend I’d lost touch with while we were in college, dancing at prom with another, passing notes—these things we Olds had before cell phones—so thick it was hard to fold them up small enough to palm or slip through locker slots. Going to my reunion let me have back good things that I’d forgotten, including my sense of who I was in high school.

2. No Power In The ‘Verse Can Make You 17 Again: As the evening wore on, one of the guys in my class and I confided to each other that there was something supremely strange about revisiting a part of our lives that none of the people we’re close to now know much about. But the thing about going back is that it didn’t transform us: he didn’t get his long-surrendered hair back or lose his awesome wife, and I didn’t suddenly revert to my high school pixie cut and standard wardrobe of a short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt. Our high school selves aren’t people who are lurking in the shadows, waiting to take over our bodies with all the force of demonic possession. The past, in this case, is pretty much past. And we can revisit it in safety.

3. The Things That Made You Geeky Then Are Your Superpowers Now: Okay, this may be more literally true for me than most people. But while not everyone is going to turn their high school obsession with the Star Wars Expanded Universe into a paying job, the number of former geeks in my graduating class elevated by their passions, and the number of formerly popular people who ended up pursuing geeky professions is impressive. They’re working as camera techs on great television shows, actually making music full-time, doing amazing biology research, even working as literal rocket scientists. This isn’t really a Revenge of the Nerds scenario: it’s that after graduation, no matter where we were in high school, we came to a common consensus that sincere enthusiasm is an asset. It’s not about who’s cool and who’s not anymore: it’s about who’s interesting.

Now, none of this will help you confront your high school mean girl or bully, or consummate some unfinished business with a high school crush, or kill it on the dance floor, because I didn’t do any of those things, and I don’t really think they’re essential checkmarks on the reunion list. But the easiest way to trip yourself up in anticipating your reunion—and I certainly did this to myself—is to think that it’s some sort of climactic rebellion, an emotional Battle of the Trident. But the truth is the war is history, and reunion’s just a tournament: done right, everyone survives to go home.

*We also may have gone to IHOP for late-night pancakes. My sense of adventure in high school was calibrated to the same frequency as Liz Lemon’s.

**Which is to say really, embarrassingly terrified, given there was no chance that, unlike in American Reunion there was no chance I’d end up in front of my high school friends in fetishwear a la Michelle and Jim.

This post discusses plot points from the November 18 and 25 episodes of Homeland.

During last night’s episode of Homeland, as Peter/John removed his silenced revolver from his coat, preparing to dispatch with Brody should he no longer prove necessary, I grabbed my boyfriend’s wrist so hard he told me it actually hurt. It was an interesting moment for me and my relationship to this sometimes-miraculous, sometimes-confounding show. The moment was tense and well-constructed, but the prospect of Brody’s death was viscerally upsetting to me not because of the plotting and counterplotting taking place around him, but because of the simpler questions Homeland has obscured this season. What does it mean to be alienated from your country, your family, and the values you once devoted to yourself to protecting? What does it mean to understand the motivations of a terrorist?

Homeland has always been somewhat uneven when it tries to answer those questions, but that it tries to answer them at all has always made it a rather different animal from its counterparts and predecessors. In the first season, and in an inversion of how these things normally work, the show did better when Brody talked about what Abu Nazir meant to him than in the brief flashbacks that outlined his relationship with Issa. In this week’s episode, the discussion between Carrie, Peter, David, and Saul about whether the plot Brody had outlined to them made sense produced one of the most interesting moments the show’s had in some time: Carrie explaining that it made sense because of how it met Abu Nazir’s emotional needs and standards. It was mirrored by Abu Nazir’s explanation to Brody himself, that he could be hunted and killed like bin Laden, his legend reduced by the manner of his death, or he could bring his fight to American soil himself, carry out a plot on his own terms. Nazir’s explanation of his own motivations—apart from the actual plausibility of the mechanics of it—was one of the smarter attempts I’ve seen to imagine how bin Laden’s death has changed the world. Homeland‘s genuine interest in mysteries both large, like why Brody would turn on his country, and small, like how Nazir feels about his place in the world, is the thing that sets the show apart for me even when it delves into more prosaic territory.

And as niftily-constructed as Nazir and Roya’s plot against the vice president is, it’s prosaic. It’s a standard fantasy of hyper-competent terrorism that ignores how small-scale and ineffective plots against America have actually become, and how easily-thwarted those that actually make it to the execution stage have been. I understand that the demands of plot keep some of these fantasies alive on-screen. But those fears also animate policies in the real world: they’re kept alive by interests more powerful than American audiences’ addiction to artificially high stakes. And just as those fears crowd out rational conversations about everything from the Defense Department budget to airline security in the real world, the plot this season has crowded Homeland, too. Last year, the construction of a vest and Tom Walker’s possession of a sniper rifle were comparatively simple logistical concerns that served the contrast between the two men, how they’d responded to torture, and what waited for them on their return. This year, the complexity of the plot against America, and America’s plots against its potential attackers, has put layers in between Brody and his motivations, Roya in between Brody and Nazir, the munitions expert in between Brody and Walden, Quinn in between Carrie and Brody.

The scenes between Brody and Carrie are a constant reminder of how excellent Homeland is when it strips away that clutter and focuses on what draws the two of them together: their shared inability to truly and seamlessly integrate into the roles set out for them. Their difficulty makes them valuable, to a certain extent: Brody can play the hero tenably enough to be of use to Nazir, and Carrie is right often enough to be worth some of the trouble she causes David and her other colleagues at the CIA. But both of their masquerades have expiration dates. Carrie’s already hit one of hers. And Brody is very, very close to his. “I’m going to be in the cell next to you. Which, I have to admit, isn’t the future I imagined for us,” she told him during their sojourn to the motel. “If we saw this through togehter, if we finally stopped Nazir once and for all, that you’d be a real hero. And that fact would somehow make everything you did before not matter. That it would all just be about getting to there.” Quinn may hear “a stage five, delusional getting laid” in the sex he overhears between Carrie and Brody. But they’re clearer-eyed, if more wistful, than he imagines.
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The bridge is yours. And welcome back! I missed y’all.

-SEK, as always, is indispensable on Game of Thrones.

-Paul Greengrass is back directing MLK biopic Memphis.

-Hollywood’s trademark troubles.

-Now I need to read Vader’s Little Princess to see how much Darth Vader’s relationship with Leia has in common with me and my father.

-Planning Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope’s weddings.

It says a lot about the penetration of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes into public consciousness that the folks who cut the trailer for Dwayne Johnson’s new action movie, Snitch, use scenes where characters talk about sentencing guidelines twice in the first minute:

Were this a different movie, I’d take a look at the cliche cartel villains (though I do love me some Benjamin Bratt) and the chase sequences, and I’d probably write it off. But the decision to portray mandatory minimums as both cruel in and of themselves—which,in addition to being applied in racially disparate ways, they are—and to demonstrate the ways in which they can be used to push people in vulnerable circumstances into becoming confidential informants, is astute, and different. Both the New York Times and the New Yorker published blockbuster pieces on the use and misuse of confidential informants earlier this year. The former, by Ted Conover, followed the experiences of one such informant, Alex White, while the latter, by Sarah Stillman, took a more systematic approach. But they both make the point the drug war in particular is increasingly reliant on a system that puts people who have committed small crimes in great danger for very chancy results.

Most of our crime movies operate by showing us the flaws in the law-enforcement system and using the victories and examples of noble exceptions to those flaws to reaffirm our faith in the police and in the courts to keep us safe, combat evil, and act with mercy. Snitch could be that rare crime film that works in a different direction, arguing that systems meant to produce consistency in inconsistent circumstances inject further instability into our government’s efforts to control the flow of narcotics. Even if it’s not willing to indict the war on drugs—and it’s true that there are cartels, and they can be brutally violent—or the law enforcement system as a whole, I’m glad to see movies like Snitch that are more closely rooted in the ambiguities and real impact of our criminal justice system even if they devolve into by-the-numbers shoot-’em-ups. There’s drama to be drawn from the experiences of people whose lives are ruined by an inflexible system, and by the bad deals that prosecutors offer up to them, and stories worth telling about those failures. The setups to our action movies matter, even if a lot of them end the same way.

I agree that Hollywood often does a rather sappy job when it tries to tell stories about people with disabilities, but unlike Ian Buckwalter, writing on The Sessions, which I reviewed in February (when it had a different title), I don’t actually think the answer is that our depictions of disability need to get more despairing:

There’s no rule that says the tougher film has to be the better one, but the problem with Intouchables and The Sessions is that they achieve their sunny dispositions by pulling punches. Any hint of difficulty is immediately tempered so as not to upset the lightly comedic tone of both films. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene in The Sessions when a power outage causes a failure in the iron lung that allows Mark to breathe. While it’s in character for the devoutly Catholic Mark to greet potential death with the same beatific acceptance he carries through much of the rest of his life, that doesn’t mean the film can’t recognize the dire nature of the circumstances. This should be a tense moment, but The Sessions refuses to acknowledge highs and lows, tension and release. It flatlines from start to finish, even if Mark doesn’t.

Audiard strikes a better balance in Rust and Bone, demonstrating that one can take a pat inspirational story and infuse it with the hardship required to make that inspiration feel earned. Following the loss of her legs, Stéphanie is nearly as defeated as the stroke victim of Amour. As a whale trainer, she makes her living on her feet, and her character’s despair is palpable. More importantly, Audiard makes it impossible to turn away from that despair, unlike the glossed-over expository conversations in Intouchables and Sessions about how their characters dealt with that loss.

The thing is, there’s a difference between a story about someone learning to cope with a newly-acquired disability, and a story about someone with a disability doing something else, like having sex or falling in love. In that first category of story, the goal of the movie is presumably to communicate to a majority able-bodied audience that their negative expectations for what their lives would be like if they suddenly lost, say, the ability to walk, aren’t accurate or complete, and that joy, love, and physical pleasure are still possible. As much as I dislike the idea that movies about people with disabilities need be tragic, I understand why these categories of films include that register of emotions, because they’re a way of hooking in audiences who fear the idea of grave accidents or infections that suddenly change their capacities.

But I don’t think The Sessions is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability—in fact, it’s a movie about a man who’s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it’s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead, The Sessions is a sex comedy with Mark’s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity. It’s a more concrete explanation than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the tone is kinder and more emotionally attuned than that movie (Legit, which FX plans to put on its schedule at some point, has a pilot that is basically a glorious mashup of The Sessions and em>The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But it’s essentially a similar concept.

And I don’t see why a movie like that has to be dark, or despairing. In fact, way the arcs for a lot of the best sex stories work is that there’s a lot of anticipation, and then an anti-climax, rather than an enormous climb and an inspiring victory. The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends with relatively brief sex and a goofy sing-a-long: the emotional work’s done, the victory achieved. Rats Saw God, one of my favorite young adult novels, actually draws some wonderful drama from the main characters’ reactions to the first time they have sex: the fact that it isn’t a transformational experience leaves them feeling confused and somewhat alienated from each other. In The Sessions, the obstacles are Mark’s anxieties, premature ejaculation, his desire to give pleasure as well as to feel it. These are not the things of triumph-over-disability movies: they’re things that a lot of us experience, and Mark’s confinement to his iron lung is the particular thing that inflects his journey through them. But that doesn’t make these experiences and emotions unimportant—if anything, that Mark is concerned with giving pleasure even though it’s harder for him to, say, touch his partner, makes him a hero in comparison to less thoughtful people, whether they have physical limitations or none at all. Sex comedies shouldn’t have to automatically move into a tragic key because a person with a disability is involved in them. Rather, how persons with disabilities—not all of whom acquire those conditions dramatically or suddenly—navigate circumstances that they share with those of us who don’t have disabilities tells us about the universality of those experiences, rather than offering testaments to the resilience of the human spirit.

There’s something disquieting about the idea that the only uses of characters with disabilities should be to provide those testaments. As with, say, gay characters, telling stories about difference is only a first order accomplishment when it comes to diversity. By all means, tell stories about what it means to suddenly move into the ranks of people with disabilities, the legions of wheelchair users. But remember that people are born with disabilities too, and people who have disabilities do far more with their lives than accommodate themselves to the limitations and difficulties they face.

As I do every year, I want to post late Connecticut Governor Wilbur Cross’s 1936 Thanksgiving proclamation, which remains one of the most beautiful pieces of public language I know:

Proclamation

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of

Public Thanksgiving

for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth — for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives — and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land; — that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.

I hope you’re all happy, healthy, and safe, wherever you are today.

The University of Maryland announced Monday that it is abandoning the Atlantic Coast Conference, the league it helped found in 1953, for the Big Ten, a move that was rumored to be in the works last week and came to sudden fruition yesterday afternoon.

The reactions to Maryland’s moves were swift and strong and negative, mostly focused on the lost traditions that would ensue from Maryland’s move to the Midwest. Gone are the Terrapins’ fabled Tobacco Road basketball rivalries with Duke and North Carolina, and gone too is whatever semblance of tradition Maryland had established in other sports. The reality, though, is that this was little more than a business decision, and in the business of college sports, tradition and the nostalgia that goes with it simply doesn’t matter because only money does.

Maryland needs money and the Big Ten has it. The Big Ten has money and Maryland will only make it more.

When the Big Ten created its own television network in 2007, it gained the ability to charge subscriber fees to cable companies that wanted to carry the network in certain states. Maryland will allow it to expand that network and those fees into Washington D.C. and Baltimore, two populated East Coast markets it didn’t have. It hopes the addition of Rutgers will do the same for New York City (remember, the fees aren’t based on how many people watch, but on how many cable subscribers there are).

Maryland is a financial winner too. The school’s athletic department has been swimming in red ink for more than a decade, but the move to the Big Ten will make it an extra $100 million in conference revenues between now and 2020. Nostalgia and tradition and the rivalries of old might be nice, but they don’t pay for the seven non-revenue sports Maryland cut last year because of budgetary concerns, and they surely don’t bring in an extra $100 million. There simply isn’t an argument that this isn’t a smart move from the university’s standpoint, not when it, like any other State U., has felt the crunch of state budgets in recent years and had to raise both tuition and taxes to keep the school operating.

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I’m taking the week of Thanksgiving off to hang out with my family, cook all the veggie dishes for our dinner on Thursday, celebrate some birthdays, see old friends, and generally start trying to save up energy for the insane sprint that is the Television Critics Association Press Tour and Sundance in January. I’ll post on Sunday’s Homeland, and Tuesday’s Sons of Anarchy at some point, but I’ll mostly be off the blog, and I hope you’ll all be getting to spend as much time as possible relaxing.

And I hope you all know how thankful I am to all of you. When I started this blog three and a half years ago, I don’t think I ever could have imagined I’d get to know so many of you, or that you’d be so wonderful. Talking to you, in comments, on Twitter, and via email, is a total joy. Thank you.

This post, obviously, discusses plot points from Skyfall.

I. The Bulldog

Skyfall is supremely British movie. M writes Bond’s obituary with a bottle of whiskey and a china bulldog painted to look like the Union Jack as company at her desk. After the bombing of MI6 headquarters, Bond grouses “The whole office goes up in smoke and that bloody thing survives?” “Your interior decorating tips are always appreciated,” M tells him tartly. When MI6 relocates, it’s to Winston Churchill’s old bunker: “Quite fascinating, if it wasn’t for the rats,” M’s aide Tanner (Rory Kinnear) says. During a free-associative exercise as part of his field assessment, Bond’s asked to respond to the world “Country.” His immediate response, of course, is “England.” When he and M return to Skyfall, the family estate Bond hasn’t visited since he left for school, they’re met by a fabulous old-school retainer, Kincade. “Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first,” Bond informs him. “Then we’d better get ready,” Kincade replies stoutly. When the first henchman meets Kincade’s shotgun, he dispatches the man with a hearty “Welcome to Scotland.” Even the language of daily conversation feels more staunchly English than usual, whether it’s Bond telling M “Just changing carriages,” as the back half of a train is violently torn away behind him, or M sourly suggesting, on Bond’s return from a long absence that “I suppose they ran out of drink where you were.”

That vigorous emphasis on cultural signifiers of British national character makes sense. Skyfall is a film that’s explicitly concerned with the blowback to British imperialism, and implicitly structured to bridge the gap between the UK’s two great contributions to spy culture: the bureaucratic knife-fight and the secret agent with the Walther PPK.

“England. The Empire. MI6. You’re living in a ruin,” Skyfall’s antagonist, Silva (Javier Bardem) tells Bond when he finally arrives on-screen. Much more so than a traditional Bond film villain, Silva is a photo-negative of Bond, a man whose faith in MI6 has been shattered, who abandoned British soil to live on a Japanese island that looks like a dreamscape in Inception, complete with a tumbled Ozymandian statue, who wears white and cream to Bond’s black, who fights his battles with server farms instead of his fists, and whose sexual ominvorousness extends even beyond Bond’s own. It’s possible he’s meant as an allusion to Julian Assange, who recently caused the UK some measure of annoyance, in both physical presentation and weapon of choice. But Skyfall makes the interesting choice to give Silva grievances against his government more legitimate than any Assange suffered personally. When M ran him as an agent in Hong Kong during the transition of control from the British to China, she handed him over to the Chinese government after he was discovered doing offensive hacking outside his brief. “I got six agents in return, and a peaceful transition,” M explains to Bond without sentiment. Silva was tortured, and when he tried to take his cyanide capsule, it failed to kill him. “Life clung to me like a disease,” Silva tells her, revealing the destruction of his dental plate, the ruined face he conceals with prosthetics. “Do you know what hydrogen cyanide does to you? Look upon your work.” Hong Kong isn’t the only element of British foreign policy history that Skyfall alludes to: as Silva stalks M through London, the movie brings up the dreadful specter of that city’s subway bombings. Who needs doomsday devices when you have reality?

The chase ends, where it has to, in a Parliamentary hearing room at Westminster. John Le Carre, the creator of some of the greatest heroes of bureaucratic British spydom, has explained that he dislikes James Bond because “It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context.” Much of the best of British spy fiction has responded to Bond in the same way, from George Smiley’s disinfection of the Circus, to the men and women working inside the Grid in Spooks. And among the other work of the Daniel Craig era in the Bond franchise has been the reconciliation of that “international gangster” with British politics and bureaucracy. In Casino Royale, M is disgusted at being called in to testify as to Bond’s conduct after he shoots up an embassy in Africa, both because she has to deal with the oversight, and because Bond’s given Parliament reason to demand it:

Who the hell do they think they are? I report to the Prime Minister and even he’s smart enough not to ask me what we do. Have you ever seen such a bunch of self-righteous, ass-covering prigs? They don’t care what we do; they care what we get photographed doing. And how the hell could Bond be so stupid? I give him double-O status and he celebrates by shooting up an embassy. Is the man deranged? And where the hell is he? In the old days if an agent did something that embarrassing he’d have a good sense to defect. Christ, I miss the Cold War.

In Skyfall, she’s back at it again, this time on even more serious grounds. After Bond fails to stop Patrice, a terrorist who managed to steal the encrypted identities of NATO agents embedded in terrorist organizations, M finds herself called to heel by Mallory (Ralph Feinnes), a former soldier-turned bureaucrat. “Are we to call this civilian oversight?” M asks him. “We call it retirement planning,” he tells her. “I’m here to oversee the transition period leading to your voluntary retirement in two months’ time.” After those agents are unmasked and begin to be killed, M is called before an inquiry to explain herself, an act that both makes Bond and his colleagues answerable to a political context and gives M an opportunity to explain why the kind of political context Le Carre called for is less clear-cut in a post-Cold War era. “Our enemies are no longer known to us,” she tells the minister. “They don’t exist on a map. our world is not more transparent, now. It’s more opaque. That’s where we have to fight. In the shadows.” As Silva makes his murderous way towards her, she quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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On November 18 and 19 at 8 PM, PBS will be airing the next documentary from Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl. The two-part series is shattering account of the real estate boom and beliefs about climate change that lead homesteaders to destroy Midwestern sod, and the drought that turned that soil into dust storms resulting in a devastating, years-long environmental catastrophe. Burns and his producer Dayton Duncan were able to track down children who lived through the Dust Bowl, never-before-seen photographs and home movies of dust storms, and to weave them together with historians’ testimony to explain how the Dust Bowl influenced everything from American environmental science to women’s abilities to live up to their gender roles in a place where it was impossible to keep homes clean and children safe.

In July, I had a long conversation with Burns and Duncan about the research that made The Dust Bowl possible, why they relied on first-hand accounts rather than scientists to help advance our understanding of climate change, why art can be a better vehicle for communicating difficult ideas than journalism, and the role of government in American life. This interview has been edited for clarity.

I actually want to start out by asking you what attracted you to the material in the first place. Watching both parts of the documentary I was really struck by the parallels between our present situation and the regulation that leads to businesses encouraging people to overreach, and then the reluctance to contract with the American dream.

Burns: Well first of all, I should say my interest is born in my best friend’s interest, Dayton Duncan, who has been talking about this for more than 20 years as a subject. It’s something that comes down to me sort of with a kind of shorthand, the conventional wisdom that suggests just the most superficial of associations. So for us it’s always the ability to dive deep into a subject and find a human and intimate dimension to it that belies those conventional wisdoms and supplants them with something that’s more enduring and more, I think, impressive in a way.

Now, the thing we’ve discovered in every film we do is the way in which it always mirrors the contemporary. Whether it’s the Civil War or our most recent film on prohibition, they seem to be what Ecclesiastes said, that there’s nothing new under the sun – that they mirror political tendencies, economic tendencies, human foibles, human strengths –

For everything there is a season except the seasons come over and over again.

Burns: Exactly. They do indeed, and they tend to repeat themselves. I’m not a firm believer so much in that, as I am in the sense that human nature remains the same. And so what we watch in creatures is the same mixture of greed and generosity, the same degree of sort of mean spiritedness and courage. So all of these things are in play if you’re willing to, as public television allows us, dive deeper into a subject than the sort of dramatic, superficial retelling. We keep the drama, but we dive down deep.

And so in this case, we have an oral history of more than two dozen individuals—children—who survived the devastation of their parents’ farms, and their lives and sometimes even the lives of their siblings. This is an amazing story, and I think without pointing neon arrows at it, it can’t help but remind us. It’s not just ripped from today’s headline, about a a severe drought that’s afflicting a good deal of the country, but in all the intricacies of that political and economic … political and economic dimensions you brought up in your excellent question.

Well, one of the things I thought was fascinating – and I didn’t realize it until after I’d seen the movie – is that you put out an appeal for people to send photographs and films.

Burns: We had just finished a film about the Second World War, and we had been dealing with people at the very end of their lives…We were quite anxious that we had maybe missed it. And then I recorded some appeals that were played in the local stations in the area of “no man’s land,” in Colorado, Texas, and Kansas, and Colorado and New Mexico, and also the Central Valley in California that permitted us to at least use the resources of this extraordinary grassroots, bottom-up network to sort of reach out to people. And then our co-producer, Julie Dunfee, and another researcher, Susan Shumaker, went down on the ground and spent the shoe leather necessary to find the people to talk to them, to see if they were viable, to visit nursing homes. And what we realized is that we would be able to recreate the Dust Bowl through the memories of children and teenagers. Their parents are long gone, but their memories are as vivid and as accurate and as, in some ways, compelling, as ever because they were children watching this apocalyptic ten year period happen around them.

Did you get much in the way of photographs or actual video footage from them directly?

Duncan: Well, you know, central to the research was the PBS network and Ken’s appeal on that. And it’s surprising, he’d say “Send your stories or things to this station – not to us.” And then they would willow through it and send us the things. Cal Crabill, [one of the documentary's subjects], that’s how we found out about him. He saw it on a station in California and decided to write, and tell us about his story…Because it took place in the 30s in a relatively poor and sparsely populated part of the country we have a couple of home movies that are in the film. We have a lot of footage that was taken by newsreel companies once the catastrophe was becoming more self-evident. But we’ve got lots of photographs in the film and in our companion book that have never been published before – that people brought to us, and also from the historical societies that might have them in these folders. A couple of the ones of the storm descending on the town of Elkhart, Kansas, one of it descending over Hooker, Oklahoma, nobody’s ever seen those before.

So we were really pleased at the amount of material to add to the things that are already available, though took some searching from the FSA photographers, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein and others. So we had a great amount of terrific visual material to choose from. We had about 6,000 photographs that we collected-

Burns: Which is surprising.

Duncan: -and we used about 400.
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This post discusses plot points from the November 15 episode of Parks and Recreation.

When Parks and Recreation debuted in 2009, Leslie Knope’s ambitions were something of a joke. The idea that she could join the company of the women whose pictures hung on the walls of her office at the Parks Department was laughable. And framing her as an object of derision was one of the reasons the show wasn’t particularly good. Now that we’ve had four seasons establishing Leslie as competent, it’s much easier for the show to revisit her dreams without mocking them, in part because Parks and Recreation is at a point where everyone else’s ambitions are up for debate as well.*

The opening of the show framed that tension perfectly. “2020,” Leslie tells Ben, looking at the White House when she comes to Washington to help him move back to Pawnee. “Fine. 2024. I win. We move in there. I’ll take the West Wing. You take the East Wing. You can be the first gentleman.” “That actually sounds kind of great,” Ben tells her. But like First Spouses before him, when Ben gets back to Pawnee, he starts to reckon with the fact that First Gentleman is a job title, not a job description. And he doesn’t actually know what he wants that description to be.

Leslie, meanwhile, is having to deal with the fact that she can’t everything at once—and that she hasn’t made much progress on what was once her signature goal, turning the pit behind Ann’s house into a park. April, whose love for animals moved her enthusiasm meter a tick last season, has finally seized on a project she cares about: the creation of a dog park. And the best location is the former pit. Leslie is torn, thrilled to see April, who, as she explains to Ron later in an attempt at disgusing the situation, “He’s smart and he’s beautiful, and I think of him in many ways as a daughter,” showing some ambition. “Can you say per capita again?” she asks gleefully. “I want to take a picture of you saying per capita!” But as is often the case with Leslie, she doesn’t see her way around the corner that April’s proposal presents, seeing only the threat of April’s proposal rather than the chance for them to combine projects. “That lot is mine,” she tells April, trying to justify the fact that she hasn’t done anything with the lot. “I’ve been doing slow, painstaking work. I don’t want to whip out the legalese on you, but I got dibs.”

It’s nice to have an episode where Leslie’s problem is one of her own creation, but also one that gives her an opportunity to figure out how to do what she hasn’t done so far this season—maneuver effectively on City Council. Councilman Jamm, who’s caused Leslie so much trouble earlier in the season, cleverly maneuvers to take advantage of the rift between Leslie and April, promising to back the dog park proposal, only to reneg and suggest selling the land to a Paunchburger franchise because “You don’t even have to be Asian to do math that simple.” But his perfidy—aided by an Ann Perkins-lead intervention and vow that “No one leaves the Octagon!”—brings the two back together with the obvious idea that a dog park and a human park would double the constituency for the pit project. They discover Jamm’s weakness is his yard—”Get that thing off my gnome!” he orders one of the dogs and humans who invade it for lack of a real park—and get him to give them 90 days to make their proposal work. Leslie’s reinvigoration is a delight to see, and her “I just said let’s get to work. How else do people enjoy things?” is perhaps the line of Leslie’s I’ve most identified with in a long string of Lesleyisms.

Tom, meanwhile, is discovering that having a genuinely strong idea for a business isn’t actually the same thing as getting it off the ground. He may tell Ben that “We specialize in making stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks,” and his Ron-vetted business plan may be strong. But that doesn’t mean, particularly given Tom’s streak of failures, that he has either the credibility to automatically attract the kinds of backers he really needs to get Rent-a-Swag up and running. And of course it’s frustrating for him to watch Ben’s efforts on his behalf do more to demonstrate Ben’s competence than to move his business forward. Sweetums wants Ben to run their foundation. Channel 46 tells Ben “We’re launching a new political chat show and we need correspondents.” But they manage to help each other. Ben helps Tom reconcile himself to the prospect of the work it’ll take to get his first real, legitimate business off the ground, and Tom reminds Ben that even though accounting is a stable career, “If it was remotely interesting there would be a show on A&E about it.” In the end, they decide to take a gamble together. Or as Ben puts it, “Life is short. Why be an accountant? Except for the stability and the benefits and the above-average pay. Oh, God, this better work out.”

While Ben’s figuring out that he has no idea what he wants to do, Andy is coming to terms with the fact that his dream of being a Pawnee police officer may be less Bert Macklin, FBI, and a little bit more Louis C.K. “Andy, I love your enthusiasm, but we don’t have the resources to launch an expansive investigation,” Chris warns him when he lays out an elaborate plan to catch the thief who’s stealing City Hall’s terrible computers. “This is what most police work is, just writing stuff down,” the officer Andy’s reporting the crime to explains to him. “Maybe you should do something else?” Andy’s still convinced that part of his dream is alive, telling Chris “I get a gun and I can point it at people’s faces!” only to have Chris tell him: “Incorrect.” Andy’s sense of wonder has carried him through a lot of life, even through his marriage to April, in whose studied distaste for everything he sees awesomesauce. But it might be time for him to have a similar reckoning with the prospect of adult employment, and I wonder how he’ll change as a result.

*Also, the Joe Biden cameo was just obviously awesome. Leslie lecturing the Secret Service that “You are guarding precious cargo!” is just straight-up delightful.

The bridge is yours.

-All the academic movements that have claimed Twilight.

-Why we’re going to have Transformers in China.

-More on this later, but Jim Poniewozik is right about how good Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl is.

-Is it really so hard to think of a single woman who could direct a new Star Wars movie?

-This looks too nice to be fathomed:

As I wrote yesterday—and have said many times before—I’m deeply uncomfortable with many of the ideas in the Twilight series. But it’s easy for people to forget that those aren’t the only novels Stephenie Meyer ever wrote, and if they do, for them to assume that The Host, her science fiction novel, is as unnerving as Twilight. It’s not. In fact, while far from perfect, there’s some genuinely interesting world-building and stories about alien species in the novel. And I’m excited for the movie in part because it’s about how corrosive it is to deny someone control of their body and their mental autonomy:

The story is told from the perspective of Wanderer, a Soul, a member of an alien species that seizes control of the bodies of the species on planets it invades. But the Souls find that humans have stronger wills than great whales, or sentient flowers. And in particular, Wanderer discovers that Melanie, the woman whose body she occupies, has memories and a will, and is struggling to survive as an autonomous, uncontrolled being. Wanderer eventually comes to sympathize with her, and even to try to find a way to give Melanie control over her body and life again. And though there is a love triangle in the novels, it’s a much more nuanced one between Melanie/Wanderer, Jared, the man who loved Melanie before her body was given over to Wanderer, and Ian, who comes to love Wanderer for herself. It’s an important corrective to the drive towards bodily negation of Twilight, though I don’t know how much crossover there is between the readerships of each set of books. But if you were tempted to dismiss The Host because of who wrote it, it’s worth reconsidering at least the movie, even if you don’t want to commit to the novel.

I’ve always found the controversy over so-called Fake Geek Girls more than a little preposterous, given the variety inherent in geekdom. My midichlorian count may be off the scales when it comes to Star Wars, but I’ll freely admit that my favorite Star Trek movie is the one with the whales, in part for its SDS references. I haven’t read the Wheel of Time, but I’m probably the mainstream feminist critic who’s spent the most time over the last few years writing about A Song Of Ice And Fire. And for anyone who doesn’t want to stamp my geek card until I’ve satisfied his or her knowledge of his favorite franchise, I’ll show you mine as soon as you break down the treatment of social inequality in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall novels. There is no Grand High Geek Council issuing citizenship papers, no border fence, and that’s one of my favorite things about joining the particular voluntary communities that have been so important to me over the years.

But it’s become clear that there are a lot of people who would like there to be. And the debate over whether there are women who are “fake geeks” or not has become a proxy for the conversation. The thing is, though, at the root of this conversation isn’t really about the inclusion of women, or certain kinds of women, in geekdom. It’s about a slow and uneven shift in which some geeks and some kinds of geekdom have accumulated an enormous amount of social capital. And that shift has revealed that we don’t always know how to spend it wisely, magnanimously, or in ways that don’t repeat the ugly marginalization of geeks that came before.

In a post on io9, Rachel Edidin, who is an associate editor at Dark Horse Comics explains why some geeks, like those who complain that female cosplayers only want attention—by which, of course, they mean those women only want certain kinds of attention and want to draw certain boundaries about how they’re treated in costume—explains why fandoms and geek communities can be so resistant to change:

Geek culture is a haven for guys who can’t or don’t want to fall in step with the set of cultural trappings and priorities of traditional manhood in America. At least in theory, geek culture fosters a more cerebral and less violent model of masculinity, supported by a complementary range of alternative values. But the social cost of that alternative model—chosen or imposed—is high, and it’s often extorted violently—socially or physically. The fringe is a scary place to live, and it leaves you raw and defensive, eager to create your own approximation of a center. Instead of rejecting the rigid duality of the culture they’re nominally breaking from, geek communities intensify it, distilled through the defensive bitterness that comes with marginalization. And so masculinity is policed incredibly aggressively in geek communities, as much as in any locker room or frat house.

It’s tremendously difficult to make the transition from being culturally powerless to being culturally powerful. And it’s even harder when a societal shift happens, when Steve Jobs is everyone’s favorite CEO, J.J. Abrams can do whatever he wants in film and television, when hackers become heroes and supervillians, and those social inversions don’t actually filter all the way down. Just because lots of geeky traits, like knowledge about technology, obsessive interest, and superheroes, have become assets doesn’t mean that, say, our preferred male body types have radically shifted, or that, movies like 21 Jump Street aside, high school’s shrugged off the quarterback of the football team for the captain of the Mathletes, or that on OkCupid, a figurine collection is suddenly more valuable than a job on Wall Street. Geeks are getting asked to be magnanimous, to be self-reflected, to open up communities as if they possess privilege that it may not always feel like they do. Of course, the question of whether you feel like you have privilege isn’t solely determinative of whether you do, and whether it’s acknowledged or not, having your cultural fantasies catered to is a kind of privilege. But the point remains: the range of how much social capital and privilege individual geeks have is gigantic. And that makes it very hard to move a community as a whole.
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I’ve been reading the story of Savita Halapannavar, an Indian woman who died of blood poisoning in in an Irish hospital after doctors refused to remove the fetus she was miscarrying until its heart stopped beating, with growing horror. Galway Pro-Choice has the dreadful narrative of her death:

Savita was first admitted to the hospital on October 21st complaining of severe back pain. Her doctor initially told her that she would be fine, but she refused to go home. It became clear that her waters had broken, and she was having a miscarriage (spontaneous abortion). She was told that the foetus had no chance of survival, and it would all be over within a few hours.

However, her condition did not take its expected course, and the foetus remained inside her body. Although it was evident that it could not survive, a foetal heartbeat was detected. For this reason her repeated requests to remove the foetus were denied. By Tuesday it was clear that her condition was deteriorating. She had developed a fever, and collapsed when attempting to walk. The cervix had now been fully open for nearly 72 hours, creating a danger of infection comparable to an untreated open head wound. She developed septicaemia.

Despite this, the foetus was not removed until Wednesday afternoon, after the foetal heartbeat had stopped. Immediately after the procedure she was taken to the high dependency unit. Her condition never improved. She died at 1.09am on Sunday the 28th of October. Had the foetus been removed when it became clear that it could not survive, her cervix would have been closed and her chance of infection dramatically reduced. Leaving a woman’s cervix open constitutes a clear risk to her life. What is unclear is how doctors are expected to act in this situation.

The thought of a woman sucuumbing infection because the child that she wanted, and which she was miscarrying, wouldn’t finish dying quickly enough for doctors to decide that they could intervene to save her, is horrific enough. It’s even worse knowing that her husband, Praveen told the Irish Times: “We had heard Ireland was a good place to have a baby.” But, though it’s taken me a few days to think it through, there’s something particularly awful about reading this story the same week millions of women around the world will go see Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2.

When we last saw Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, Bella was suffering from a pregnancy that was killing her. Her fetus was starving her of nutrition and giving her pregnancy cravings for blood. Despite the extreme danger to her life, Bella insisted on keeping her baby. And ultimately, her child snapped her spine in one of the few genuinely horrifying scenes in this vampire story and had to be removed by emergency—and bloody—Caesarean section. But instead of dying, Bella was transformed into a vampire. Bella was more beautiful, stronger, more sexual than she’d ever been as a human. Her disregard for her own life earns her a vastly improved version of it.

Millions of people will get that message in a movie theater this weekend. But what they should really know is that callous disregard for a woman’s life doesn’t transform her into a higher being, even if both she and her baby survive hardship. Instead, it can leave her in delivery for three days. It can lead to doctors who ignore a woman’s wishes, endangering both her own life and her future opportunity to bring more viable life into the world. It leads to a dreadful answer to a nightmarish question—as Katha Pollitt put it, “Who is more valuable, a living woman or a dying fetus? The Catholic Church has given its answer, and Savita Halapannavar is dead.” It leads to an arithmetic where the value women’s lives and women’s decisions is degraded even when there isn’t a choice between her life and her child’s. I can’t bear to cheer Bella Swan’s transformation when Savita Halapannavar has been sacrificed.