Over the past several days, we’ve heard a great deal, about the happy (if you can call the tend of ten years of torment straightforwardly happy) ending to a horrific triple—or maybe quadruple—kidnapping in Cleveland, and the man who brought it about. Charles Ramsey, who lived near the house in which Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus were held, raped, and tortured for a decade, became a hero when he responded to Berry’s calls for help, thinking he was intervening in a simple domestic violence incident. And he has become an internet celebrity thanks to an interview he gave about the case afterwards. The speed with which the latter status has eclipsed the former has been striking, and raised interesting and important questions about our willingness to turn people of color into memes rather than heroes.

At NPR, Gene Demby points out that the ways in which men like Ramsey become memes, and the grounds on which they’re treated as if they’re likable, are reductive rather than respectful, cute rather than heroic—and when those images crumble, the credit we extend to them and the rewards that follow tend to disappear:

But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That’s still weird and chuckle-worthy.

On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald’s — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.

And at Slate, Aisha Harris breaks down the ways in which the “memorable soundbites” uttered by people like Ramsey or Antoine Dodson becomes the most memorable thing about them, rather than the acts that brought them to public attention in the first place. She writes:

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

I think both Harris and Demby are correct, and that it’s worth sorting out both a conscious and unconscious set of impulses that are at work in meme-ifying people in these particular circumstances.
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This post discusses episodes 13 and 14 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

“I thought being a private eye was about shooting dudes and making out with sexy widows,” Wallace teases Veronica in “Lord of the Bling,” the thirteenth episode of the first season of Veronica Mars. “The widows come later,” Veronica promises him, but these two episodes of the show are about what happens when people refuse to conform to the tropes that they’ve been assigned to. First, there’s Bryce Hamilton, the son of Percy “Bone” Hamilton, a hip-hop producer, who sets up an elaborate scheme to prove to his father that being good at science doesn’t mean he’s “soft.” And in the second, there’s Carrie, “the gossip queen of Neptune High,” who uses her acute understanding of the high school rumor mill to take the brunt of a student-teacher relationship scandal for the girl who really got pregnant, an act of courage that demonstrates how Veronica, who normally keeps her detective’s toolkit sharp and clean, succumbs to bias when her own social milieu is the subject of an investigation that rubs up against her own sore spots.

“Lord of the Bling” traffics fairly heavily in stereotypes, but it gets away with its cliches with some deft attention to the extent to which stereotypes are useful to the people that embody them and to code-switching, and by making those stereotypes the subjects of the case itself. “You know that boy could stand to get hit in the head with a dodge ball or two. Toughen him up,” sighs Percy when we first meet him, signing a waiver that will let Bryce get out of physical education so he can pursue an independent study in science. “How did a man like me end up with National Black Velvet and Urkel?” Percy’s identity, as we’ll learn throughout the episode, is a creation rather than a natural outgrowth of his personality. “He didn’t advertise the fact that much of his success was due to his comfortably upper-middle-class Jewish attorney,” Mr. Bloom tells Keith Mars. Later, Yolanda, Percy’s daughter, whose disappearance is what prompts Percy to seek Keith out to look for her, explains that she’s disgusted by the way her father treated the drive-by shooting that left Mr. Bloom using a wheelchair. “You let everyone believe you ordered it because it gave you cred,” she tells him, after running off with Mr. Bloom’s son. His wife even teases him in the opening about his insistence that Bryce isn’t tough enough. “And the street was tough and you lost a lot of homies. But this is Neptune,” she tells her husband, suggesting that Percy is clinging to a trope that may have outlived its usefulness for his family.

But clearly, Percy’s attachment to that stereotype has done real damage to Percy’s family. Bryce—though he turns out to be the architect of the ransom demand for Yolanda—is bitter that his father is resorting to a private detective, rather than calling the police, a gesture he believes is meant to protect Percy’s reputation as not cooperating with the cops, rather than to expedite the search for Yolanda. “He’s been in jail a third of my life, but I’m the embarrassment? State science fair winner three years in a row but I’m the one that’s soft,” he tells Veronica, in what turns out to be the motivation for his hoax. When Veronica and Keith catch Bryce and march him back to his father to explain, Bryce tells Percy, “You can be mad, Dad. But you can’t call me soft.”
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Over at Slate, Joanna Weiss has a piece about the fascination with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that strikes me as working a bit backwards. She argues that anti-hero dramas have convinced us that we can understand mass killers:

We can’t fathom how a pot-smoking 19-year-old, widely liked by teachers and classmates, could place a bomb in a backpack a few feet away from an 8-year-old child. And so we look at his path from slacker teen to calculating killer and assume that it had some discernible arc, one that passed through some series of formative events. We imagine that his actions were preventable, if only something had gone differently or someone had intervened…

Tony had a psychiatrist to guide him—and us—through the process. But in plenty of Sopranos successors, it’s the show’s writers who connect the dots for us, helping the viewer process how a likable guy can do terrible things. Showtime’s Dexter is a serial killer because of the bloody trauma he witnessed as a child. On AMC’s Breaking Bad, a cancer diagnosis launches Walter White on the road from mild-mannered teacher to vicious drug kingpin. In the recent Mad Men season premiere, Matthew Weiner seemed to draw a straight-line between Don Draper’s womanizing ways and the time he spent in a whorehouse as an impressionable child, glimpsed in a flashback. And on Homeland, Brody becomes a true-believing terrorist—for one season, at least—after a child he loves is killed in a U.S. drone strike.

The thing is, fascination with mass killers—or really criminals of any kind—dramatically pre-dates the rise of the anti-hero drama. David Berkowitz, who confessed to the Son of Sam killings, was the subject of immense media speculation, and participated in it by writing about his motives for the New York Post. President Nixon accused the mass media of an unproductive obsession with Charles Manson, and Manson violated a gag order placed on him during the trial. Former Mafia underboss Sammy Gravano did an interview with Diane Sawyer and wrote a book about his work for the mob. Lots of killers have been eager to make themselves understood, and judging by the followers they’ve attracted, the ink columnists have spilled on them, and the armchair speculation the public has always engaged in about them, we’ve always been eager to engage in that project with them.

What I think anti-hero dramas actually do is engage with a different set of questions, namely, how people doing extraordinarily deviant things manage to conceal their actions from the other people in their lives, and how people who are friends or family of people who turn out to be terrorists or killers manage to overlook clear warning signs that the people they love have strayed far from the norms of human behavior. Tony Soprano, to a certain extent, lives out in the open, in part because mobsters have a certain cultural capital and system of plausible deniability that serial killers or terrorists lack. And Carmela Soprano knows who she married, but ultimately can’t resist the fur coats and the ability to purchase social status that marriage to Tony provides her. On Dexter, Deb’s love for her brother helps her overlook his oddities, but her skills as a detective help her understand what he is, and when she finds out, she has a reaction that’s perhaps more appropriate than any other anti-hero’s wife or family member: she vomits. Breaking Bad follows what’s perhaps the most realistic trajectory for an anti-hero’s wife: Skyler White sees that things are strange with her husband, but she can’t actually figure out what’s going on because it’s genuinely beyond her conception that her husband could be cooking meth. Once she learns the truth, she dallies with the idea of participation in Walt’s crimes until she fully understands what he’s become: then, she stays out of fear.

We’re all familiar with the idea that people’s minds can decay, that ideological and political grievances can turn toxic, that profit can induce otherwise unimaginable human behavior. I don’t actually think that confuses us much, even if we’re fascinated by the case-by-case specifics. But the real mystery—and the thing that scares us most because while almost none of us believe we’re at risk for becoming sociopaths, I’d imagine all of us are afraid that we’re being fooled—is the people who miss the signs or who know and stay. We may thrill to get in Tony Soprano or Walter White’s head because it feels naughty and exciting. But the parts of anti-hero dramas that really scare us are the ones that are potentially about ourselves.

Given how much—well, pleasure, might not be the right word—excellence he’s given us over the past five years, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is probably entitled to heighten our anticipation as the show heads into its final eight episodes this summer. Yesterday, he gave the Daily Beast the first sense we’ll probably get of what the finale might be like:

“Anyone anxious that there won’t be resolution enough at the end of these eight episodes can rest assured that the story very much reaches resolution,” Gilligan said Monday in his most extensive comments on the Breaking Bad finale to date. “It will not end in any kind of open-ended sense.”

Speaking from Los Angeles, where he was busy editing the final batch of episodes—”We’re about halfway through,” he explained—Gilligan struggled to “say something of substance” about the end of Breaking Bad without “giving anything away.” After much hemming and hawing, he finally settled on a single word to describe the finale: “victorious.”

“I’ll say this much,” Gilligan began. “I’m surprised by how victorious, in a certain sense, the ending feels to me.”

Obviously that’s not much to go on. But victory isn’t an uncommon emotion to Breaking Bad—it’s just that what those victories mean in the context of the show has changed over the years. When Walter White, the show’s chem-teacher-turned-meth cook survived his initial encounters with the violent criminals who run the Albuquerque-area drug trade, it was easy to root for him over them, and to be relieved that he was still alive to build his legacy for his family, and to hope that once he’d done his share of damage to public health and safety, he’d retire to a more decent end of his life. But as Walt’s own sense of right and wrong let him do things like watch an addict choke to death on her own vomit, it was harder to root for him relative to other characters on the show. By the time he blew Gus Fring, his boss in the meth business, to high heaven at the end of the fourth season, and was revealed to have poisoned a small child, the impressiveness of Walt’s technical prowess and the means to which he put it were no longer in alignment. It was easier to root for Gus, a man who had no compunction about slitting an employee’s throat with a box cutter or poisoning an entire cartel, than for the disappointed family man in the tighty whities.

So what would a victorious end to Breaking Bad look like. It could end in Walter White’s triumph and our utter despair. Though if that were the case, we wouldn’t have gotten Walt alone on his birthday making numbers out of bacon and a gun in the trunk of his car his only present. And the ending of last season, in which Walt sits back to launder his millions and throw family barbecues, his browbeaten wife reconciled to him, his son and daughter home might have been the place to stop, with a searing portrait of the rot that underlies his particular American dream, might have been the better place to stop. But it might also be too simple for Breaking Bad to turn out to be a classic morality tale told from the perspective of the villain rather than an anti-hero drama, and for Walt’s brother-in-law, Hank, to put him away or put him down. Death in a gun battle seems too fair for Walter White, and time to reflect on his megalomania in jail seems unlikely—under those circumstances, it seems like Walt might use his technical prowess to hack the prison and let Heisnberg rule over his fellow inmates, rather than recognize the enormity of his crimes. Maybe Walt will win by losing, his cancer coming back and denying anyone the satisfaction of imprisoning him or fully unraveling his schemes.

And the truth is at this point, Walter White’s victory over both his physical disease and the corruption of his ego don’t matter very much to me. Real triumph to me would be Jesse Pinkman finding a way to make a live with Andrea and Brock, having taken away from his time with both Walt and Mike that he has actual capacities, and finding a role for himself as something other than predator or prey. Victory would be Skyler White finding a way to make good, to protect her family, and in some way make recompense to Ted, her boss, who ended up crippled by Skyler’s fling with criminality. It might even be Marie and Hank finding a way to have a child after years of infertility, or Holly, Walt and Skyler’s daughter, growing up safe and under circumstances where she sees Scarface at an appropriate age. If the true source of Walter White’s criminality isn’t cancer but a need for greatness, maybe happy normality is the real victory.

As the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev unwound last Friday, one of the most common anxious jokes I heard was that when it was all over over, Ben Affleck, who grew up in the Boston area and made his bones with movies like Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone, and The Town was going to walk away with an armload of Academy Awards for whatever movie he inevitably makes about the Boston Marathon bombing—and bombers. Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner explain that it’s possible that Tsarnaev, who is recovering from serious injuries and has been indicted on charges of weapons of mass destruction use and malicious damage of property resulting in death, could try to hire an entertainment lawyer to negotiate the sale of his life rights, or to block a movie about him altogether:

Massachusetts is among many states these days that has a “right of publicity” law. This statute prevents unauthorized commercial use of an individual’s “name, portrait or picture.” Further, the law is described as similar to one enacted in New York, which is important because in a rather unprecedented move a few weeks ago, a New York judge temporarily blocked Lifetime Television from airing a movie about convicted killer Chris Porco after the subject sued. But the judge’s restraining order was stayed after Lifetime cried about the potential disaster to free speech.

For that reason, it’s almost guaranteed — although not totally because Massachusetts has no appellate case law on the topic — that Tsarnaev wouldn’t be able to stop any production company from making a movie about his life.

He makes clear that it would be hard for Tsarnaev to block a project entirely, or to guarantee that he got paid: courts have tended to side with filmmakers on free speech grounds, though some criminals and accused criminals have won the right to some compensation from projects that retell their stories. But the entire scenario raises uncomfortable questions about what it takes to lock down the rights to a good story in Hollywood. Would someone decide it’s worth it, even if it meant paying someone who is accused of killing and maiming dozens of people? And would they pay up if the money had to go to a compensation fund rather than to Tsarnaev himself, an arrangement that would be the equivalent of paying bombing survivors for their injuries, especially given the steep medical costs many of them are facing, and the fact that donations may not be enough to cover all of their needs? I hate the idea of seeing Tsarnaev get paid for the harm he’s caused the Boston area over the past two weeks. But as a moral exercise, I’m grimly curious what kind of price Hollywood would put on his story.