I’ve been generally bullish on Zack Snyder’s forthcoming Superman reboot, Man of Steel, or as I’ve been jokingly calling it given the long shots of waves and broody atmosphere of the trailers, Terrence Malick’s Superman. So I was excited to see this latest trailer in the form of a calmly-voiced demand from General Zod (Michael Shannon), demanding that Clark Kent be turned over to him:

It’s also a reminder that while Marvel’s done a much better job of developing its full roster of heroes into a gigantic franchise that runs in multiple tracks that converge into event pictures like The Avengers, DC has its rival beat all hollow when it comes to the development of generally frightening and distinct villains. Marvel’s villains have tended to relatively cartoonish and disposable. Iron Man has faced off against Obadiah Stane, who despite Jeff Bridges’ generalized acting chops was a relatively generalized industrialist, the Ten Rings, who were relatively generic jihadists, and Ivan Vanko a reasonably generic Former Soviet Bloc Crazy With Eccentric Teeth. Captain America went up against the Red Skull in The First Avenger, and the bonkers makeup didn’t do much to conceal that Hugo Weaving’s villain schtick has seen better days. Only Thor has had a truly worthy adversary in his half-brother Loki, but it took two movies for him to morph from standard-issue petulance to achieve his “brain like a bag full of cats,” an unsettling combination of imbalance and precise manipulation.

DC, by contrast, has been extraordinarily lucky to have Christopher Nolan designing its villains for the better part of the last decade in his Batman films, which have anchored the DC franchise even as Marvel seemed ascendant. The Scarecrow may have been the least of Nolan’s creations, but it was an unsettling performance that made the best possible use of Cillian Murphy’s sharp, almost pretty features. As the Joker, Heath Ledger was so unsettling and so fully committed to the role that it remains uncomfortable to watch him. And if The Dark Knight Rises made some miscalculations in the handling of Bane, it provided Anne Hathaway with a career-shifting role that let her be sensual and angry in ways she’s never been on film before. These villains are indelible, rather than disposable—I think, not matter how unsettled they make us feel, they’re characters we’d happily spend time with on their own, and certainly ones who offer specific insight into facets of Batman’s personality and mission in a way Marvel villains rarely have. We’re still a long way from knowing how Man of Steel will shake out, but DC’s been wise to know that you can’t know superheroes without knowing their nemeses, and that’s a strong insight DC will have on its side as it tries to play catchup to its own rival.

I’ve been a little worried that Iron Man 3 was going to repeat the cycle of Tony Stark being an entitled, self-regarding rich bro before rising to the occasion that’s become the character’s signature arc, but this trailer has my mind at ease:

If you’re going to have a giant, years-long story, continuity should be a benefit of The Avengers franchise, rather than a hindrance. So I’m excited to see that Shane Black, who directed Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which helped bolster Downey’s comeback, is making a movie that’s deeply engaged with the impact of the events of The Avengers on Tony Stark. “Nothing’s been the same since New York,” Tony reflects in the trailer’s voiceover. “I experience things and then they’re over. I can’t sleep, and when I do, I have nightmares.” It makes sense that a man who enjoys life as much as Tony does would be shaken by his own decision to sacrifice himself, and that, powerful he is, he’d be unnerved by his first glimpse of the world beyond the one he’s known and dominated on almost every level. “Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist,” as Tony laid out his resume in The Avengers, doesn’t count for quite as much in a world where there are giant alien armies prepared to descend on Midtown.

I’m less immediately stoked about Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, both because it would have been nice to see an actor of Chinese, rather than Indian and British origin, play the role, and because there’s a bit too much Bane in at least what we’re seeing here. “Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. Lesson number one. Heroes? There is no such thing,” said in a funny voice, feels like Black and company picked it up off the cutting room floor for The Dark Knight Rises. Loki’s been so much fun in The Avengers because, as Bruce Banner put it, “his brain is a bag full of cats.” He’s twisty, unpredictable, and we’re a long way from his end game, but perhaps most importantly, his motivations, courtesy friend of the blog Zack Stentz and company, have been clear going back to Thor. Coding a villain as intellectual is not actually a substitute for explaining who they are and what they want.

It used to be that mass shootings prompted calls for gun control and disappointment when, despite the fact that the we had ample evidence of the damage of large gun magazines that have no plausible role in hunting, or the gun show loophole, or any other part of our laws that make it easier for people who want to kill to get the tools to do it, nothing happened. Now, when someone goes to a movie theater, or a school, or a Sikh Gurdwara, and commits murder, we talk about the fact that we can’t even have a conversation about reasonable, sensible limits on the sale of guns and ammunition. It certainly seemed like we’d followed that pattern after James Holmes killed 12 people and wounded 58 more in July, after Wade Page murdered six people, and wounded four others before being shot by officers at the scene. But now, Stephen Barton, who was shot in Aurora, is appearing in an ad pegged to the presidential debates asking voters to demand gun control plans of the candidates:

Whether it has an impact or not is an open question. But I think there’s something important about Barton’s decision to speak out. In our gun control debate, responsible legal gun owners (of which there are many) are granted much more authority and credibility than the victims of gun violence. It would be nice to see that balance restored, and to require opponents of gun control to explain why their need for certain magazines, for speed in purchasing, for any number of other restrictions they object to, outweighs the possibility of the great harm those weapons can do.

I spent a good chunk of my long weekend in a nostalgia-fueled fugue state, watching back-to-back-to-back-to-back episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. It’s a fascinating show to watch as an adult, as the show’s best episodes are full of highly, sometimes eerily subversive social commentary that was largely invisible to my five year old self. Batman aficionados are of course used to a dark Gotham, but the show’s Saturday Morning Cartoon status meant that the disturbing text in some comics and the Nolan movies becomes subtext in the cartoon. I’d argue that makes it one of the purest distillations of a quintessentially Batman approach to social commentary.

Reviewing B:TAS over at the A.V. Club, Oliver Sava makes a perceptive point: Batman’s most enduring and effective villains work as characters because they represent a twisted version of an element of Batman’s identity. For example, Two-Face embodies the inherent risks in developing a dual identity and The Scarecrow is a perversion of Batman’s use of fear as a weapon against Gotham’s criminals. The Joker headlines the supervillain pantheon because he is Batman’s polar opposite, sharing only an obsessive, ingenious commitment to the struggle for Gotham’s soul. By reflecting evil versions of Batman’s identity, Sava suggests Batman’s opponents sharpen the viewer’s understanding of their hero’s psychology. The villains are the windows into Batman’s soul.

This approach to the relationship between hero and villains parallels a broader approach to the relationship between Gotham and the real world. Gotham is a disfigured version of our reality, where concerns like crime and terrorism are intensified and altered in order to give us some insight into their real-world equivalents. Christopher Nolan’s films, as I’ve argued, used several different variants of this funhouse mirror approach to make a broad-based argument for the moral worth of liberal democracy. While The Dark Knight trilogy deals in a broad dramatic arc, B:TAS applies the twisting tactic in micro-moments, the lack of serialization allowing for short explorations of particular topics. While not every episode of the show pulls off this trick effectively, and the weaker ones don’t even try, the show is at its best when it uses Gotham’s bizarre environs as a means of making us think about very real problems.

Perhaps one of the most affecting of these episodes is “Harley and Ivy,” an episode focusing on the relationship between the Joker’s lieutenant/girlfriend Harley Quinn and ecoterrorist Poison Ivy. After a near-miss escape from Batman, the Joker blames Harley, ultimately throwing her (literally) out of the gang. A dejected Quinn accidentally meets up with Ivy, and the two become friends and successful crime partners. The Joker and Harley dance around getting back together, and everything culminates a free-for-all fight with Batman at Ivy’s home base.

The thematic crux of the episode is the Joker and Harley’s abusive, one-sided relationship. B:TAS’ Joker straddles the traditional divide between depicting the Clown Prince as a playful prankster or a psychopath, but this episode tones down the character’s cartoonish characteristics, casting the Joker in the all-to-real role of a violent and dominating boyfriend. Over the course of the episode, he verbally abuses Harley, physically throws her out of their residence, taps her phone to find where she’s living, and then ambushes her and attempts to poison the friend (Ivy) who’s protecting her. Quinn, for her part, is hopelessly infatuated with her abuser. She pines over him and seems to truly believe his wheedling compliments represent sincere emotion, even as Ivy (who’s cast as an outspoken second-wave feminist) tells Quinn again and again that he’s only going to keep hurting her.

That this terrible psychodrama is obvious only to the show’s adult viewers is part of the point. Domestic violence is a crime that hides in plain sight, something that people outside the relationship often either miss or choose to ignore. The abusive structure of the Joker-Quinn relationship being obvious to adults but invisible to the show’s young audience reminds the adult viewer of how societal blindness perpetuates actual instances of horrific abuse.

Further, the fact that both the victim and her support network are violent criminals serves to metaphorically undermine the sort of victim-blaming that’s sadly common in conversations about domestic violence. Harley and Ivy nearly kill Batman and commit several robberies over the course of the episode, but these crimes seem entirely irrelevant to the nature of the former’s relationship with the Joker. The Joker’s abuse seems no less horrific in light of Harley’s criminal predilections; his violence is not a consequence of her actions. No one is “asking for it.”

The central relationship in “Harley and Ivy,” then, uses the fact that we’re watching a children’s show with fantastic characters as means of exploring deeply rooted social phenomenon surrounding domestic violence. It’s a perfect execution of the funhouse mirror strategy that pervades Batman stories, and exemplifies one of the many ways in which speculative fiction can be used to cause us to check our basic assumptions about the world around us.

I want to like Lupe Fiasco’s “Bitch Bad,” on the grounds that I like Lupe Fiasco himself, and because I, like many female hip-hop listeners, would be happy to find articulate male allies in the genre:

There are a lot of things that are off about the song. Its chorus hook, “Bitch bad, woman good / Lady better, they misunderstood,” sounds like remedial English, which whether it’s directed at women who apply the word to themselves or the men who sling it around, sounds exhaustingly condescending. In The Atlantic, Mychal Denzel Smith has a terrific breakdown of the song’s problematic gender politics, from the simplicity of that core heirarchy, to its unwillingness to assign men responsibility for their judgement of women.

But what irritated me about “Bitch Bad” is its desire to get credit for bringing up a provocative issue without the accompanying responsibility for calling anyone out. “Disclaimer: this rhymer, Lupe, is not usin’ ‘bitch’ as a lesson,” he rhymes, “But as a psychological weapon / To set in your mind and really mess with your conceptions / Discretions, reflections, it’s clever misdirection.” But the only meaningful discussion between “lesson” and intellectual provocation is the responsibility the speaker has for making a point at the end. Given how heavily the rest of “Bitch Bad”‘s lyrics rely on media psychology—in the verse about how girls consume media, he might as well be cribbing from the Parents’ Television Council—he’s on particularly shaky ground in terms of declaiming having any particular message. Watching him dig deeper on that insistence that he can’t be taken too seriously, telling Rolling Stone “I’m not trying to say this is what’s going to happen, or potentially what’s going to happen. Because you don’t know, the characters are fictional, based on true events. I know personally what has affected me, but that’s me personally,” is irritating.

The thing is, as a woman, Lupe Fiasco’s personal experience with the impact of the word “bitch” is nice to have on record, but his willingness to take an actual stand would be a lot more useful. I’m not really in a mood to give him credit for calling out misogyny in hip-hop if he doesn’t actually want to be seen as calling out misogyny in hip-hop. Fiasco told Rolling Stone that the album from which this song comes was inspired by James Baldwin because “he was such a powerful figure. He was a homosexual, he was an atheist, he was black, he was a writer, he was a down brother, he lived in Paris and grew up in the slums of Harlem. And he was a preacher. So he had all these things that made him Public Enemy Number One, but he was also loved and adored by the public at the same time.” But part of what made Baldwin powerful is that he took action, in his life and his art. He moved to Paris in part to escape discrimination, and wrote bluntly and frankly about discrimination against gay people in Giovanni’s Room and about American racism in essays like The Fire Next Time. His work was powerful in part because it was explicitly, courageously political, something Lupe Fiasco is apparently afraid to be.

I’m tired of this. I thought I was tired enough after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a perfect encapsulation of how Nolan manufactures credit for alluding to big issues while preserving a critical incoherence about politics that let him avoid offending any potential customers. And I’m even more tired after a stint at the Television Critics Association where people said repeatedly that the shows they’d created had no politics. By that, they mean that their shows are not partisan, which is something I can see legitimately avoiding (though having politicians on television have no party affiliation or fake party affiliation is disingenuous). But they end up implying that they’re afraid to claim their own ideas instead. It’s okay for pop culture to have ideas. In fact, it’s necessary. And pop culture can be deeper, and riskier, and more exciting, the action and the relationships it portrays can have higher stakes, when those ideas are about how the world should be run, about what conditions are necessary for equity, and stability, and justice.

This weekend, Comedy Central will air its roast of Rosanne Barr. The timing for the comedienne seems simultaneously painful and fortuitous. Her NBC pilot Downwardly Mobile, an attempt to recreate the magic of Roseanne with its portrait of recession-wracked resident of a trailer park, wasn’t picked up. Her previous show, a reality program about her macadamia nut farm in Hawaii, was an embarrassment and failed to earn a renewal. Twitter’s provided Barr with a platform she’s frequently used in service of obscene and counterproductive political rants. And her campaign for president’s continued long past the point when it could be either a career-revitalizing stunt or a sharp jab at the major-party contenders. The roast will either be an embarrassment, or a chance for Barr to demonstrate a gameness that could revitalize her public persona.

But leading up to the taping and in the aftermath of it, the coverage has been dominated by insult comic and Friar’s Club Roastmaster General Jeffrey Ross, who showed up to the red carpet dressed as Joe Paterno and then joked that Seth Green, who is a redhead, hadn’t “gotten this much attention since you shot all those people in Aurora.” (Comedy Central subsequently said it would cut the joke.) I understand that the schtick is meant to be offensive, but in both cases they’re so anemic and grasping that it’s hard for me to muster much in the way of reaction to them. Especially given that they’re sort of lame by the kind of standards Ross has laid out for himself.

I’ve been spending some time with Ross’s I Only Roast the Ones I Love: How to Bust Balls Without Burning Bridges, in part because I recognize that insult comedy is not a form that I feel naturally comfortable assessing. And his intentions in it, as stated, make a lot of sense. “It is the Roastmaster’s belief that gracing someone you admire with unfiltered honesty is the highest form of respect you can pay them—especially when it’s delivered in the form of a well-crafted joke,” he writes.”When I was asked about producing a roast for boxer Mike Tyson I felt like I had to decline because under my own criteria he just didn’t seem a worthy recipient. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around honoring a convicted rapist and part-time cannibal.” That’s a really interesting intention, especially partnered with the mandate Ross lays out to insert some deep and genuine kindness in a roast, both to hammer down that the event is an honor, and because in the midst of peeling the skin off someone, saying what you love best about them has a greater impact.

The problem comes for insult comics, I think, when their jokes don’t live up to those intentions, which themselves lay out really rich and sensitive comedic territory. It’s not actually true, I don’t think, to say that Seth Green doesn’t have a lot of fun, because he seems to have a pretty awesome job for a grown person and a generally satisfactory life, and the joke doesn’t get at anything about either him, or the man who killed twelve people in Aurora, Colorado. Similarly, Ross cites Larry the Cable guy’s joke as part of what he’s learned to armor himself against, “I get a lot of flak from critics for being homophobic, but lemme tell you somethin’…I think having invited Jeff Ross here tonight proves how much I love the queers,” fails to live up to Ross’s roast standards. What ends up being revealing about that joke is precisely its dishonesty: Larry isn’t willing to declare himself either gay-friendly or a homophobobe, so he employs a “some of my best friends are” ruse that ALSO doesn’t reveal anything true about its subject.

I really think most comedy that fails and ends up being offensive or hurtful is reaching, in its tellers’ intentions, for some kind of truth, and fails when people have profoundly different visions of what’s true, or what the comic wants to argue against. Daniel Tosh set himself up to battle a straw feminist in suggesting that rape always is funny when all he had to argue is that under certain circumstances, jokes about sexual assault can be funny and powerful. He ended up singed, and apparently, rethinking his act. I think Dane Cook wanted to say something true about the awful mundanity of the Aurora shootings, but didn’t ground the routine in commonly-held feelings about The Dark Knight Rises, and was too soon besides. The mistake in situations like these is thinking the truth is obvious or close by, when in reality, it tends to require more careful excavation. That doesn’t mean comedians can’t play a part in that process, but that they sometimes deny themselves a useful role in it.

I’ve been enjoying animated superhero actions as much if not more than their live-action counterparts in recent years, so I was excited to see the trailer for The Dark Knight Returns, the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s take on Bruce Wayne’s decision to come out of retirement as an older man:

Mostly, I think I’m excited to see Carrie Kelley as Robin, a self-made superheroine in glasses and with moxie to burn. I want grown-up female superheroes, of course, the female counterparts to Tony Stark’s midlife crises and Thor’s struggles to become a god worth taking seriously. But just as Spider-Man has given us superheroism as a metaphor for teenage awkwardness, and the process of self-definition through gadgets, costumes, and fights with petty criminals, it’ll be fun to see a girl take up the mantle herself. It’s been a long time since Rogue and Kitty Pryde in the X-Men movies, and there, they were a bit subsumed by the drama of the adults around them.

I’ll also be curious as to how the depiction of Carrie plays into some of the debates we’ve been having about the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman, and Batman in general. In Miller’s comics—unsurprisingly—Carrie’s parents are neglectful stoner hippies, representative of the rot of the activist impulse, and Bruce Wayne becomes her surrogate father, training her for adulthood. I’m not sure the production will stick with that, if only because hippie-punching isn’t likely to resonate much with the network’s target demographic. But this could be an even more cynical Batman than we’ve seen in Nolan’s movies, given that line about Batman’s having crippled a young man. How that hardbitten approach plays out in his larger battle with the mutants will be a fascinating question.

ABC News President Ben Sherwood said, in the wake of errors in and disputes over his network’s coverage of the shootings at The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, his network had no immediate plans to change standards and practices, but would look at how to make sure staff followed them in tense breaking news situations.

Sherwood faced sharp questioning from the Television Critics Association at a presentation in California on Thursday about Brian Ross’s initial report that a man who shared the name of the accused shooter was a member of a Tea Party group, and about reports that ABC News had mischaracterized the reaction of the suspect’s mother when she was called for comment about his involvement. In the former case, the James Holmes Ross identified as a Tea Party member was not the same James Holmes who will be tried for the murders of twelve people at an Aurora theater. And Holmes’ mother has suggested that her remarks to ABC News that “Yes, you’ve got the right person,” were meant to confirm that she was, in fact, his mother, not to indicate that she believed it likely that her son would have committed the crimes of which he is accused.

“What happened was we put something on the air that we did not know to be true, and the part of it we knew to be true was not germane to the story we were doing and the story we were covering,” Sherwood said of Ross’s initial report on Holmes’ political affiliations. “That was a violation of our standards.” But he declined to provide a narrative of how ABC came by the information and made the decision to air it, saying only that the report was Ross’s error rather than an indication of a systemic failure. That lack of a narrative made it difficult to determine which ABC standards or practices were violated, and which procedures Sherwood and his team would seek to improve.

In a press scrum after the main conference, Sherwood suggested that one change might be to give on-air reporters more information about the quality of data and reports.

“I’ve asked our team to look at ways in future breaking news situations that there’s even more clarity, as things are going around, as we’re pulling things off the web, as we’re pulling things down from social media,” he said. “Let’s make sure we’re even more clear with everybody who’s about to go on the air and involved in reporting, what is reportable, what is confirmed, what is only for background…It’s a blizzard of information, there’s all this stuff going around. We can be more clear in our internal communications so that we put only on the air what is confirmed.”

Sherwood said that Ross has personally apologized to the man he misidentified on-air, but said that he would not be suspended, sanctioned or formally reprimanded, though Sherwood said “I had a very serious and stern conversation with him, and I can assure you that Brian feels sick about this.”
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There’s a lazy, irritating strain running through the critical reaction to The Dark Knight Rises. It assumes that because the protagonist is a rich philanthropist and the villain an Occupy-soundalike terrorist, the film is taking a hard-right stand on today’s political issues. You see this move from some on the left, who go as far as calling the film fascist. Others on the right are eager to deny the supposedly legitimizing Bat-mantle to liberals or to tie the Occupy movement to Bane’s unremitting violence.

It’s true that Christopher Nolan’s films blanch at armed revolution, but it’s also true that his films have nothing specific to say about the main debates that define popular American politics. Rather, the real message of the trilogy is philosophical in character: Nolan is mounting a layered defense of liberal democracy against its authoritarian opponents. The Dark Knight trilogy is saying something that most Americans assume implicitly – that best government is one that respects the rights of its citizens.

To start with The Dark Knight Rises, if the is film a dig at advocates for economic justice, it’s an extraordinarily anemic one. Virtually no screen-time is dedicated to Gotham’s social dynamics or violence by the people against elites. It’s not clear if regular Gotham citizens, or just Bane’s mercenaries and hangers-on, are participating in mass looting depicted on screen. There’s no evidence of downtrodden masses cheering Bane’s arrival. By contrast, the film is peppered with little asides about the consequences of inequality: the traders at Gotham’s stock exchange are arrogant and self-absorbed, Selina Kyle’s jabs at Bruce Wayne’s wealth have bite, and Bane’s bankrollers are vulture capitalists. Viewed in this light, what’s wrong with Bane isn’t his left-wing “motivation:” indeed, that’s almost immediately shown to be an insincere fig leaf for public consumption. Rather, Bane is a villain because he uses the slaughter of innocent people as a means to attain his ends.

Giving Bane some slightly sympathetic lines is par for the course in this morally complex trilogy. Indeed, one clear continuity between the three films is that Nolan consistently puts legitimate critiques of Gotham in the mouths of the trilogy’s villains. No one, not even Batman, would argue with Ra’s Al Ghul’s claim that Gotham was a thoroughly corrupt city. Rather, Al Ghul’s mistake is concluding this entitles him to serve as Gotham’s executioner. In Batman Begins’ first act — in a scene suffused with class tension — Wayne refuses an order to behead a working class farmer as punishment for a crime. In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman’s first rule for Catwoman is “no killing.” Neither as Batman nor himself does Bruce Wayne argue that Gotham’s social structure as it stands is morally defensible. Rather, he suggests that the city is worth reforming rather than destroying.
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I’m sitting in the airport waiting to hop a plane to Los Angeles, and Twitter’s exploded with the news that, in the wake of this morning’s terrible shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, some folks on Fox have suggested banning costumes at movie screenings. AMC has already moved to do so:

AMC Theatres said it will not let any guests in costumes or face-covering masks into the theaters, and issued a ban on fake weapons. The company added that anyone wanting a refund in light of this new policy will be granted one. “We are taking necessary precautions to ensure our guests who wish to enjoy a movie this weekend can do so with as much peace of mind as possible in these circumstances,” AMC Theatres said in a news release.

I get this as a matter of company practice, and the ban on fake weapons may even be sensible, both from the perspective of preventing people from walking in the door with the real things disguised as fakes (although as Aurora tells us, that’s hardly the only way to get guns and gas into a theater) and from the question of where they put them once the screening starts. But it does make me pretty sad to think that theaters would start banning costumes altogether. Whatever a lone murderer does, the impulse to play, and dress up, and pay creative homage to culture you love is not the problem here.