At the end of the second season of Enlightened, HBO’s strange, precise show about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a former corporate drone who has an awakening and decides she has to bring her employer, Abaddon Industries to justice, Amy finds herself in shock after she is caught stealing corporate documents and turning them over to Jeff (Dermot Mulroney), a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “They just fired me,” she tells him on the phone, clearly frightened despite her show of bravado to the company’s president. “They said they were going to sue me.” “Well,” said Jeff, who had been putting up some pretense of dating her to enhance their emotional bond while she continued to feed him documents, “we knew that was going to happen.” “We did?” Amy asked him. “Amy, this story is going to shift the paradigm, man,” Jeff tried to reassure her, appealing to her rather grandiose ego and desire to be an “agent of change” on a massive scale. “They can’t stop it, okay? It’s all worth it.” When Amy told him “We’ll see,” she sounded more sobered, and more realistic, than she has at any other point at the show, even at the moment of her biggest triumph.

Enlightened is a beautiful, wonderful, extraordinarily difficult show on any number of levels—I find it so hard to watch even though I think it’s remarkable that I marathoned the entire second season yesterday so I could enjoy and get it over with at once. And Mike White’s long and quietly been doing critically important work about how hard it is to live out your principals in America, whether he was writing about Dewey Finn (Jack Black) finding another way to make a career out of his love of music in School of Rock or showing Amy crumple in the first season as she learned that the salary for her dream job at a non-profit would leave her bobbing around the poverty line. But even though Enlightened had a semi-triumphant finale, it made one of the most painful points White’s ever gotten across: that you can be right on the merits, you can even win a major political or social battle, and still be treated like a pariah, fired, sued, or jailed. Winning doesn’t save you from consequences—in fact, your continued suffering may be the price of your victory.

This is a point that—with the exception of martyr stories like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—is often significantly absent from our popular understanding of history and our mass culture. We remember Harriet Tubman’s heroic work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and never bother to learn that she had her arm broken by a train conductor while white passengers called for her to be thrown off the train, that she didn’t receive a pension for her Civil War service until 1899, and that she was the victim of a kind of prototypical 419 confidence fraud. After Frank Kameny was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service after his arrest in Lafayette Park for cruising, he was never employed again, friends and family supported him as he pursued activism, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry apologized to Kameny on behalf of the government and gave him the Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Seeing the gap between the public impact of activism and the private consequences for activists unfold in Enlightened hit me in a particularly painful way because I watched the show’s second season on the same day that the New Yorker put Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Aaron Swartz, the activist and programmer who committed suicide in January, online, and the day after The Atlantic published Swartz’s former partner Quinn Norton’s account of her involvement in the federal case against him for downloading documents from JSTOR. I would never compare Swartz to Amy Jellicoe as activists on the whole, because Amy’s talents and understanding of political systems are so nascent, and because she fundamentally lacks the talent for making friends that Swartz, in my and many others’ experiences, possessed. But in that lack of full cognizance of the consequences of their actions, they seemed to have something in common. MacFarquhar writes:
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This post contains spoilers for the Nov. 20 and Nov. 27 episodes of Boardwalk Empire.

I apologize for the delay in writing last week’s recap, but in a sense I’m glad I get to consider both of these episodes, in their predictability and very strong moments together. I also appreciate a chance to highlight Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent essay on Boardwalk Empire‘s misplaced priorities when it comes to gender, privileging fairly conventional if convoluted gangster stories over the richer domestic dramas that the show mostly uses as pretty window dressing.

Working backwards, I agree with him that Angela’s death at the hands of Manny Horvitz, who has arrived in Atlantic City intending to kill Jimmy and shoots Louise, stealing a clandestine night with Angela, instead, was emotionally striking. Manny’s shock, and his recovery via the intensely cold like, “Your husband did this to you,” was one of the more precisely-executed emotional moments of the season. And yet, I’m disgruntled by the decision on two levels. First, it’s the equivalent of J.K. Rowling killing Remus and Tonks in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a moment when a piece of art needs some deaths to winnow the cast and illustrate emotional costs, but its creators don’t have the guts to lower a truly devastating blow on the audience by killing a main character. Second, there’s something really distasteful about the show’s regression to the norms of the past, where gay relationships inevitably end in death. It’s of a piece, I suppose, with the show’s generally punitive attitude towards sex. But I resent both the specific decision to kill off Angela and with her, one of the show’s legitimately interesting avenues of social exploration, and the general decision to default to killing the depressed lesbian.

The decision to have one of Margaret’s daughters struck down by polio seems to come from a similarly vengeful place. Whether she needs to confess that she’s sheltering with the man who murdered the father of her children, or that she’s betraying Nucky, Margaret clearly believes her sin is responsible for her misfortune. But at least that plotline gives rise to a more interesting speculation: in living with Nucky, has Margaret lost not just the health of one child, but the moral direction of another? Teddy plays a cruel joke on her when he pretends he’s stricken, too, and earns himself a slapping for it, while a weeping Margaret tells Nucky, “God help me, but he has his father’s cruelty,” only to have Nucky insist that he just wants attention, and knowing that his sister’s hospitalized “isn’t the same as understanding” the true magnitude of what’s befallen his family. But on their father-son trip to New York, Nucky realizes that something deeper than genetics or the loneliness of a little boy may be at play when Teddy reveals that he witnessed Nucky burn his own father’s house down, a poisonous revelation that ends with a deceptively sweet, “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell.” Maybe Teddy’s just a child. But maybe in Nucky’s house, he’s learned that secrets are powerful, that there is something to be earned by keeping them.
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Hendrick Hertzberg joins my call for more Revolutionary War movies, saying in particular that we should have a definitive Alexander Hamilton biopic. I agree, though I might recommend an adaptation of David Liss’s The Whiskey Rebels instead of a more straightforward approach. But I also think this points to a larger problem: we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating. To wit, ten suggestions from American history.

1. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad is one of the coolest things to happen in American history, and it’s only part of what makes Harriet Tubman awesome. Tubman made 13 runs on the Underground Railroad, an act of outrageous courage given the fate that would have awaited her as a conductor were she ever caught. She was the first woman to head up a Union military expedition—which involved guiding ships past a river Confederate forces had mined—during which she helped free more than 700 slaves. And she did all of this despite having seizures and headaches. And it might be fun to see Viola Davis cut loose a little bit post The Help, or to see C.C.H. Pounder deploy her glorious steeliness on an iconic portrayal of Tubman.

2. Ida Tarbell, Ida Wells and Nellie Bly: I’m a sucker for movies about journalists, and these three women are best in class. From Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, which set the standard for document-based investigative journalism going forward; to Wells’ reporting on lynching in America; to Bly’s expose of the state of mental health treatment for the poor, all three were absolutely fearless, telling stories about bureaucracies and norms and prompting reform or efforts at reform. Too often, journalism movies and television shows have to gin up absolutely ridiculous plots to up the stakes—sorry, State of Play, I love you, but it’s true. But sometimes journalists go where the government won’t, even within our own country, at considerable risk to themselves. All three roles would be juicy, but I’d particularly like to see Kerry Washington, so wonderful in The Last King of Scotland, play Wells, who was just a few years younger than Washington is now when she gave her seminal speech on lynching.
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