This post contains spoilers through the February 12 episode of Downton Abbey.

As part of the ongoing debate over Downton obsession, Reihan Salam’s theorized that we like the show because it gives us elites who have higher aspirations than the ones we’ve got today. After this episode, I’d amend that somewhat and suggest that Downton Abbey is satisfying because it puts characters who seem to have earned reprimands in their place through the lens of class. The show actually exploits our ingrained class prejudices by aligning them with character development.

Take Thomas, for example. I am not any particular fan of everyone’s manipulative gay former servant, but I thought what happened to him this week was genuinely tragic. I’m with O’Brien that going into the black market is an awfully risky move, but I sympathize with Thomas to a certain extent. What legitimate enterprise would let him get to a place where “I should have enough to go into business properly”? As progressives, our instincts should be to support Thomas in his attempts to rise above a position he believes he’s too clever for—something he may have legitimately proved in his management of Downton Abbey during its period as a convalescent home. When he finds out “I been tricked. I been had. I been taken for the fool that I am,” that ought to be a moment of profound sympathy. Because Thomas has never been given the tools to make his way in legitimate business, he’s particularly vulnerable to such deception. And yet, the show suggests that having concrete ambitions just made Thomas worse. “You made such a point of not being a servant anymore, our ears are ringing with it,” Carson grouses, when Thomas asks if he can stay longer at Downtown. His redemption comes when Carson is felled by Spanish flu, and Thomas takes up his duties, acting as—and retreating into the role of—the perfect servant. The show provides a double message: service is Thomas’s place both because he’s born to it and not to anything else, and because he’s been awful in the past it’s proper penance.

And while I don’t think it’s as overt—or perhaps even as intentional—there are more examples of that kind of setting people back in their proper position, but in a way that suggests it’s more the result of their character than the constrictions of class. Ethel, after busting her way into lunch with the grandparents of her child, can’t come to an accommodation with them that would allow her to stay in her son’s life while also getting financial support for him from them. Cora falls ill with Spanish Flu shortly after she announces she’s going to help Isobel out with her refugee project. Anna stands up for herself with Mr. Bates, telling him “If she can do it, so can we. I have stood by you through thick and thin. Mr. Bates, if we have to face this, than we will face this as huband and wife. I will not be moved to the sidelines..denied the right even to be kept informed. I will be your next of kin. You will not deny me this.” But she’s rewarded for her persistence by seeing her newly-minted husband hauled off to jail. Lavinia, who’s always been more of a plot device than an actual person, is dispatched in a properly ladylike fashion, dying of a broken heart.

The only people who are allowed to transcend class boundaries are Branson and Sybil. And then he’s allowed to move one step up, from chauffer to journalist, a limitation in keeping with our sense that he’s a bit pushy, while she’s required to move many steps down—Lord Grantham is clear that he’ll only help them a little. Because we wouldn’t want to incentivize nobly born young ladies to embrace the idea that things are better when they’re independent and have meaningful things to do with their lives, or as Sybil puts it, ” I don’t want to get used to it. I know what it is to work, to have a full day, and be tired in a good way,” now would we? Violet’s explanation at the end that “The aristocracy have not survived by their intransigence,” and the solution that follows, is the epitome of Downton Abbey’s politics: Branson can be ennobled in character, but not in substance. The nobility may change styles, but their grip on their privilege remains quite firm, thank you.

I’m a deeply committed Peter Dinklage fan, both because he’s a marvelous actor, and because I think his sex appeal and sense of humor and advocacy for folks of short stature offer a way forward for depictions of people in pop culture that go beyond the pathetic. So I was delighted to see The Surrogate, an affectionate sex comedy based on journalist Mark O’Brien’s article about his experience with the sex surrogate who helped him lose his virginity after a life largely spent confined to an iron lung after a childhood bout with polio. There’s a lot to like in the movie: John Hawkes, killing it in a lead role that will get him awards attention beyond his great performances in smaller projects like Deadwood; a lot of compassion and serious thinking about sex by able-bodied and disabled characters alike; William H. Macy as Mark’s friend and confessor Father Brendan. And when all of that comes in a movie that’s dedicated to seeing folks with disabilities as fully human, you’ve got a special and important movie, even if it’s one that hews to general romantic comedy conventions.

Part of what’s fresh about The Surrogate is the movie’s efforts to actually get us inside Mark’s head for the minor irritations as well as the traumas. “Scratch with your mind,” he tells himself during a long night in his iron lung. “Scratch with your mind.” When his iron lung is disabled during a blackout and he drops the stick he needs to call for help, his reaction is muted and practical, rather than panicked, even though he lands in the hospital. When he meets Susan (Deadwood coworker Robin Weigert), who is working as a volunteer in the hospital, she asks him, “Are you religious?” “Yes,” he tells her, with humor rather than bitterness. “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for all of this.” Mark’s disability has neither canonized him or crushed him.

When it comes to sex, the movie is quietly resolute on the question of whether people with disabilities can have fulfilling sexual lives or can be sexually desirable. Mark decides to see a sex therapist and then a sex surrogate when his reporting for another piece introduces him to Carmen, a woman in a wheelchair who tells him how good her sex life is (in somewhat hilarious detail). He gets a sign-off from Father Brendan, the new priest at his Catholic church, explaining “this isn’t exactly a confession. I haven’t done the deed. I’m hoping to get a quote in advance.” Once the process is underway, The Surrogate has respect for Mark’s stress, good intentions, and utter lack of experience—even in scenes where he’s experiencing premature ejaculation or behaving awkwardly with Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the surrogate he agrees to work with. Good sex, the movie argues, is a matter of practice for everyone, whether they’re able-bodied or not. When Mark’s caregiver Vera explains to the clerk at the hotel where Mark and Cheryl that the two are working on simultaneous orgasms, the clerk, who has full use of all of his limbs if somewhat attenuated social skills, has no idea what she’s talking about.

There’s no question that The Surrogate follows some predictable arcs. But it’s an illustration of the fact that those dramatic forms can still be powerful if they’re used to frame different kinds of stories about different kinds of people. And with its careful attention to what actually constitutes good lovemaking, The Surrogate is a rebuke to in-heat movie love scenes everywhere. Actually talking about sex is, it seems, still a radical act.

Sundance is an overwhelming event, and I heard from some veterans of the festival that this was a somewhat difficult year to encapsulate, despite Robert Redford’s call to watch serious movies for serious times. But most of the best movies I saw at Sundance had a certain joy to them, even when discussing difficult ideas or events, and the very best had a marvelous sense of humor. I haven’t published full reviews of all of these movies yet, though I’ll catch up in coming days, so bookmark this page if you want a guide to the best independent movies that will be coming to theaters this year.

DOCUMENTARIES

Under African Skies: It says a lot about how wonderful I thought the music-making part of this story about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and his return to South Africa decades later, that I’m willing to forgive its less-than-stellar work on the cultural boycott of South Africa. It’s a debate about the responsibility artists owe politics that’s too heavily weighted in one direction. But the video footage of the recording sessions is amazing, as are the interviews with South African musicians about everything from what it was like to have this strange Paul Simon dude show up and want to work with them to what it was like to be able to go to Central Park without a pass.

The Invisible War: There’s nothing particularly stylistically innovative about Kirby Dick’s documentary about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. But the movie falls with the force of a sledgehammer, exposing as ineffective and dishonest the brass in the armed forces responsible for keeping women and men safe, and making it clear that an epidemic of sexual assault is hurting both men and women, and driving out of the armed forces exactly the people the Pentagon should most want to keep there.

The Atomic States of America: Based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir of growing up in a town on Long Island polluted by atomic runoff, the movie is the story of an agency captured by powerful interests and backed up by powerful presumptions of authority, and the ordinary citizens who have fought back against the industry they believe is poisoning their communities. I’d have been curious to hear more about how citizens in other countries that are more dependent on atomic energy than we are, but it’s amazing looking into our past romance of the peaceful atom—and thinking about what it means for our uncertain energy future.

Love Free or Die: Bishop Gene Robinson’s story has been told before, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop is hardly a retiring figure. But Macky Alston’s wonderful documentary isn’t just about him. It’s about the difficult process of organizing within the Anglican church, which shut Robinson out of the Lambeth Conference, to make it a more welcoming and affirming institution for the gay people who have kept faith with it. And the movie argues that a gay rights movement without the faith community is leaving power and influence on the table, and risks making gay people choose between love and faith.

The Queen of Versailles: Tons of ink and miles of film have been devoted to chronicling American excess in a recession age. But it’s hard to imagine that anything will do better than this story about David and Jackie Siegel, who built an empire selling time-shares to people who couldn’t afford them and then pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin by building what would have been the largest house in America. Whether it’s expertly breaking down the housing crisis’ role in the crash or chronicling the horrifying wastefulness of the Siegel’s consumer spending, The Queen of Versailles is funny, biting, and utterly American.

FICTION
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This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey spends much of its time exploring changing roles in a world at war, particularly for women. But this week’s episode, one of the best in the season, seemed to me to be particularly good at exploring what choices were and weren’t available to these women we’ve come to know and care about so much, and the way the people around them conspire to limit their choices, ostensibly for their own good. It’s fitting that the episode began with images of Daisy and Mary bound by fate rather than choice as Matthew and William are terribly injured in France. “Someone walked over my grave,” a suddenly stricken Daisy tells Mrs. Patmore, and Mary drops a cup of tea in the drawing room, telling the family startled by her loss of composure that “I suddenly felt terribly cold.”

I wrote two weeks ago that it was awful to see Daisy trapped into marriage by everyone at Downton’s sense of her own good. This week, everyone conspires to make William’s dying wish to wed her before his death come true. “He was happy to think they were true!” Mrs. Patmore says of the lies she encouraged Daisy to tell. Daisy isn’t the only one whose true consent is not considered particularly important. When the vicar worries about a gravely injured William’s ability to truly express his intentions, a riled-up Violet, who’s already taken on the medical establishment and the military, takes him to task. “Can I remind you, William Mason has served our family well? At the last, he saved the life if not the health of my son’s heir,” she lays down the law. “You cannot imagine that we would allow you to prevent this to happen…You living is Lord Grantham’s gift. Your house is on Lord Grantham’s land…I hope you can find some way to overcome your scruples.” In the end, it’s really only William who is thinking of Daisy’s ability to have choices, even if they’re choices after he’s gone, when he says that they should marry so she can have his pension after his death. “It won’t be much, but I’ll know you have something to fall back on,” William tells Daisy, becoming truly worthy of her love, or at least her affection. Seeing Ethel and Jane’s plights in a world without a man, that’s no small thing to leave Daisy, who lacks both those women’s force of personality.

While Daisy’s getting railroaded into a wedding, Lavinia’s being denied the one she badly wants. It’s striking that Dr. Clarkson takes Lord Grantham aside to inform him not just as Lord Grantham says, “You mean there can be no children?” but that there can be “no anything.” The continuation of the family line takes precedence over any individual woman’s happiness. And once again, a man makes decisions that he insists are for a woman’s own good. “I love you so much for saying it,” Matthew tells Lavinia when she insists that despite his paralysis, she wants to be with him. “But there’s something else that may not have occurred to you. We can never be properly married…It’s not important now. But it will be. And it should be.” It’s a terrible knot: there’s something admirable in Matthew insisting that Lavinia has a right to sexual happiness. But it’s dreadfully paternalistic in him making that decision for her despite the fact that she isn’t allowed to have the life experience that would give her the knowledge to weigh all the elements of her choice. “I couldn’t marry her now. I couldn’t marry any woman,” Matthew tells Mary later, revealing the challenge may be less his concern for Lavinia’s well-being than his own self-loathing. “And if they just wanted to be with you?” Mary asks, cleaning up his vomit and tending him with a solicitousness that would have been impossible when we first met her. “On any terms?” “It’s nothing,” Mary tells Isobel of her nursing when Isobel finally arrives at Matthew’s bedside. “Sybil’s the nurse in the family.” But Isobel knows something important has occurred. “It’s the very opposite of nothing,” Isboel insists, referring less to Mary’s specific actions and more to her arrival into being the kind of person who can truly think wisely about her own and other’s happinesses.

Evidence of that inequality between men and women is everywhere. The Major can refuse to acknowledge his child with Ethel and reap nothing but the disapproval of Mrs. Hughes: his ability to choose comes at the price of a double cost to her, the inability to do anything but have the baby, and the choices that event robs her of in the future. As much as Vera Bates is totally the worst, Sir Richard’s manipulation of her is a stark reminder of what happens when the advantages of gender are multiplied by the advantages of money and class (Violet, of course, is a reminder that those same factors can erase the gender gap). And Branson’s continuing to insist that everything rests with Sybil, without really acknowledging the costs she faces, telling her ” Sometimes a hard sacrifice must be made for a future that’s worth having. That’s all I’m saying. It’s up to you.” Would that it were. Would that it may be.

It was a dull show, though I appreciated Meryl Streep calling out the long list of wonderful roles for women in 2011 (and I bet Pariah, which is on my list to see soon, will get a nice bump from this). But for my money, Peter Dinklage had the most powerful moment of the evening when he suggested people Google the name Martin Henderson. It turns out he meant not the actor, but a British man with dwarfism who may be spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair after he was picked up and tossed. The attack on him came in the wake of a visit by members of England’s Rugby team to a dwarf-tossing competition in New Zealand (in a deeply uncharming proposal, a Florida Republican lawmaker proposed last fall that dwarf-tossing should be legalized as a job creation measure—the practice was banned after someone who was being tossed ended up dead as a result), and Henderson suggests that the team’s visit may have legitimized the practice. I’ve had some folks tell me that dwarf-tossing is an established cultural practice in New Zealand, but there’s no question that it would have been possible to decline without being disrespectful. And given that a lot of people don’t have contact with either people of short stature or people with disabilities in general, I actually think it’s reasonably plausible that if your’e dumb enough, seeing sports heroes be amused by abusing people with dwarfism could legitimate a practice that you could only participate in if you saw the people involved as less than human, an object of your own entertainment.

Dinklage didn’t have to deliver a sermon: he intrigued people into researching a terrible story on their own, one that ought to remind them that while he’s lucky enough to be winning Emmys, aspiring actors like Martin Henderson are at risk of terrible violence and discrimination because of their stature. And that’s a critically important thing to remind the rest of us about. I think people are aware that it’s physically difficult and frustrating to be physically disabled. But I don’t know that most people know the other ways discrimination against disabled people plays out. Just 20.7 percent of people with disabilities participate in the labor force, compared with 69.3 percent of able-bodied people. Disability magnifies the impact and risk of domestic and sexual violence. And students with disabilities drop out of school at twice the rate of their able-bodied peers. These are critically important issues, and ones that I think often go invisible.

For that reason, I’m excited for Sundance Channel’s Push Girls, a reality show about four women in Los Angeles who also happen to be paralyzed. I haven’t seen my screeners for the show yet, but the stars—Angela, Auti, Mia and Tiphany—were the standouts of Saturday’s presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour. In part, it was because they were a striking contrast to the images of disabled people we normally see in popular culture: gorgeous, super-groomed (they all had fantastic shoes), even dancing on stage in their chairs. But the show, in the clips they showed us, also made clear how terrifying it must be to do something you used to love after you lose some of the physical abilities that let you do it. I think seeing Mia get back into the pool and start swimming laps for the first time since she was paralyzed was one of the most emotional moment many of my fellow critics had on tour.

These women, and Peter Dinklage, are important. In their own ways, they’re forcefully asserting that people with dwarfism and with physical disabilities can be competent, can be sexy, can be an awful lot of fun, can be advocates. If moronic behavior in the public eye did, in fact, contribute to the acts that paralyzed Martin Henderson, strong, powerful countervailing images are more necessary than ever.

A number of you have been telling me to watch Switched At Birth, and after today’s panel at the Television Critics Association press tour, I can see why you’re all so enthusiastic (I also have the first season DVDs now, so I’ll get on that, likely on the plane home). The show’s creator Lizzy Weiss said it was so important to her that the character of Daphne Vasquez be played by an actress who was deaf or hard of hearing so they would both be fluent in ASL and have a sense of the cultural implications and perspectives of deafness that she limited casting to candidates who didn’t have all their hearing and searched beyond established actresses to find someone who would be right for the part before eventually casting Katie Leclerc, who has Meniere’s disease, for the part.

“It was important to me that the character feel and sound more deaf than Katie is,” Weiss said. “Having a deaf accent is part of being distanced from someone deaf, and I wanted her biological family to feel uncomfortable around her at first…Katie will tell you she worked with people to get that accent right.”

It was genuinely touching to see the rest of the cast talk about what learning ASL — or working on an ASL-friendly set, in the case of Sean Berdy, who had an ASL translator working with him — had meant to them. Vanessa Marano, whose father is a language professor, said she grew up being taught that it was important to be bilingual, and since the show has started, she’s been touched by the fact that the show is used to teach students about ASL and to consider learning it as a second language. Constance Marie, who plays Regina Vasquez, teared up talking about the conversations she’s had with deaf people who have been moved by her portrayal of a hearing woman learning ASL to communicate better with her deaf daughter. All in all, it sounds like a show where the cast ended up having a particularly good experience by learning about a world that wasn’t their own. I’ll check back in once I’m caught up with some thoughts whether that’s made for good TV, too.

A great question comes in to the blog from always thought-provoking commenter Jason Byrd Marshall: “Do you mean shows that star ‘people of color’ or stories about ‘people with color’? It would seem that we have a few of the former (there should be more!), while the latter has failed again and again (see Cane with Jimmy Smits).” That actually gets at a question I raised slightly in the post Jason commented on. Simply having people of different races, religions, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, and abilities (disabled folks are probably the most underrepresented constituency in American popular culture) is a first step towards true diversity. But it’s not the only kind of diversity. And it’s an opening of the door, rather than the end of the journey.

The imperative for diversity, beyond the simple fact of its rightness, is the fact that if you have characters with different experiences and perspectives, you ought to get a more interesting set of stories. If 2 Broke Girls didn’t seem committed to being flagrantly racist, Earl’s presence at the diner check-out could be an entry-point for conversations about gentrification in Brooklyn. Ugly Betty was a show both about the weirdnesses of the high fashion world and about the process by which you become a citizen. Avatar would have been a creative if somewhat generic action movie if not for the specific perspective Jake Sully had as a result of losing his mobility in an accident (not a perspective that all wheelchair users share, of course).

The challenge, I think, in making shows that fall into Jason’s second category (and pop culture more generally) is convincing majority white audiences that shows that don’t just have black characters but that are about blackness and black experiences, or that are about, in part, being Latino, or Muslim, or disabled, or whatever, are shows that they will enjoy. This shouldn’t be as hard a sell as it is, of course. Audiences drawn from racial majorities should be, and fairly demonstrably are, interested in stories about social movements and fights for justice by minority groups, even if they like to consume them in problematic forms, like The Help.

The heavier lift actually seems to be with pop culture that’s about not painful stories of oppression where majority audiences might have to acknowledge some complicity with racism, sexism, or homophobia, but about the day-to-day lives of people who are not white, straight, etc., and who are not the sole minority representative in a group of friends or couples who are mostly white and straight. I don’t know if that stems from ideas that, say, black or gay families or couples or groups of friends are in some way fundamentally different from pairings and groups with other compositions; a fear from audiences that they won’t get the jokes or references or background assumptions; or what, but it’s often unfounded. I may have been the only white person at the showing of Jumping the Broom that I attended, but I liked it plenty. The specifics of jumping the broom may not be part of my traditions, but stomping on glasses, which is just as silly, is. I don’t know how to strike a balance between coming up with a diverse set of stories and depictions of universal experiences like weddings and friend-based sitcoms that are inflected by a diversity of experiences and traditions, while simultaneously convincing majority audiences that the differences aren’t that big. The impulses to explore diversity and to minimize its important is can be contradictory. In the entertainment industry, expanding curiosity and sympathy to a wider range of stories is a heavy lift. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to try.