This post discusses events from the February 6 episode of The Americans.

When The Americans debuted last week, it did something that distinguished it from your average spy story: it spent a lot of time making clear that you don’t go into the espionage business for the suits and the babes. Rather, the decision to give up your life, particularly to an institution that abused you, is a particularly self-abnegating one. This week as Phillip and Elizabeth commenced a new, and exceedingly difficult operation, bugging a clock in Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s office, and Phillip manipulated a source, a bored housewife who believes he’s a Swedish diplomatic attache, the show made a different, but complimentary point. Most spy work doesn’t involve going mano a mano with a baddie on top of a moving train with the whole world at stake. It’s about hurting people low down on the food chain to get crumbs of information from people higher up.

There was something precise, both to that point, and to the racial dynamics of Washington, DC, about the way Elizabeth and Phillip decided to go about getting that bug into Weinberger’s house: they poisoned the son of his maid, a young man who’s in college and on an upwardly mobile trajectory, and told the woman that they would trade an antidote for her taking and then replacing the clock. There’s an exceptional ugliness to preying on the woman’s love for her child—”He’s my life. He’s my life. I did everything you asked me to do.”—and forcing her to weigh it against the job that she presumably needs to keep him in school, and that may have provided the kind of social contacts that helped her get him there in the first place. His life is so valuable to her that she’ll even abandon her faith in God when Phillip begins to smother the boy in front of her. But even as Phillip and Elizabeth are doing awful things to this family, they also have a certain level of sympathy for and understanding of their victims.

“Don’t you worry about God?” the woman asks Phillip at one point. “No,” he tells her. “I worry about you. I worry about your son.” It’s a sentiment that would be utterly grotesque if the risks of the mission hadn’t gotten Phillip and Elizabeth talking about the possible consequences for their own children. “Henry. Henry would adjust to anything if he had to, don’t you think so?” Elizabeth asks Phillip. “If something happened to us, he’d find his way. But Paige. I worry about her.” The cruelty the KGB has subjected them to—and that they’ve constantly reupped for—is almost overwhelming. Expected to have children to maintain their cover, they’re now expected to put those children at risk of becoming parentless. But the organization understands that it provides a narcotic-like sense of accomplishment, an antidote to that pain and frustration that’s just as strong as the injection Elizabeth gives the maid’s son. “They shouldn’t ask us to do impossible things,” Elizabeth reflects after they’ve come through the mission safely. “But we did it,” said Phillip, who was initially angrier and more skeptical of the assignment than Elizabeth was. “And tonight we’re in the house of the secretary of defense.”

The damage the myth of espionage’s glamour does is clear in the second storyline of the night, as Phillip convinces Annalise, the bored Washington wife he’s seduced, to take pictures of Weinberger’s office, only to find her threatening him with exposure. She’s become convinced that life with Phillip would be a grand romantic fantasy, full of reindeer, hot cocoa, and sex on bearskin rugs—or better, at least, than a marriage that’s grown dull to her. “I’m stuck in a house, alone with him, and you’re out here doing whatever it is you do,” she pouts. But Annalise’s believe that spying is all camera harnesses that feel like bondage gear and pulling open your wrap-around top to snap pictures that you shouldn’t is a delusion that marks her not just as the kind of pretentious, silly person that Elizabeth seduced in the pilot, but a hopelessly naive sap. And her fantasies indict us, too. We’ve thrilled to James Bond, when in real life, he’d probably be off bullying a poor, African-American woman.

At Gawker this morning, Max Read did a thorough job of explaining why Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who appears to have shown considerable disappointment in real life that he’s not attractive to some of his very young colleagues, is perhaps not the person best fit to decry Daniel Craig’s chiseled physique and to praise retro, older sex symbols like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant as Cohen did his column yesterday. But reading through Cohen’s lament that ladies of roughly my age seem to dig Craig more than we do grizzled syndicated columnists, I think that Cohen, without intending to, is expressing an anxiety that’s worth examining. James Bond’s being treated like a Bond girl. The ascendance of young adult literature means that pop culture has more and more gorgeous young men who are offered up like a dessert tray for heroines’ pleasures. And as images of what makes a man attractive and successful as determined by female desires and standards proliferate in our culture, it makes sense that the guys watching at home would start to worry if they measure up, and to think about what would happen to them if they started facing ideals as rigid as those imposed on women.

That Cohen, whether he recognizes it or not, is not alone in his anxiety doesn’t exactly make his critique of James Bond in comparison to older, less athletic, but still super-rich and super-white guys thoughtful or incisive. Desirable masculinity, as Cohen outlines it, is a pretty great deal for men, or at least, men of a certain financial position and class upbringing. A world in which men can take the things they learned when they were young about how to “handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin,” or about how to be the kind of man who “knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning,” buy some style along the way, and have beautiful women fall into their laps is one that doesn’t force those men to suffer much in the way of anxiety or upkeep. There’s no female gaze or female judgement here—nor any concern for female pleasure, the question of what those male bodies might be good for. Men present the standards for manhood, and women effortlessly—gratefully, really—accept them.

Cohen dismisses the current crop of sculpted hunks that Daniel Craig represents as “some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer,” but the standards for what makes a man sexy that he’s describing are no more natural or objective. And I’m curious if he’d identify the beauty of the women he cites in his column, like Ingrid Bergman and Mary Astor, as effortless and natural, rather than the product of beauty standards and the punishing regimes and restrictive clothes that helped women accomplish them. One of the earliest contradictions I understood as a young teenage girl reading fashion magazines was that I was supposed to look “natural” and “effortless,” but that it took an enormous amount of work and money to recreate the looks that I was told embodied those standards. I learned that my own lip color and texture was less natural than a glossy pink, that the blush of my unadorned cheek looked less vital than a layer of foundation, powder, and blush. I’m glad I had that education so I could see the distance and the contradiction, enjoy wearing bright red lipstick for its artificiality and sense of performance, not because I believed that my own hue was an error or imperfection. But it’s not an easy education to acquire, or to shake off in favor of truly discerning what I want to look like and feel, and I don’t envy someone like Cohen coming to his own version of it later in life, or reckoning with the work he’d have to do to meet the standards laid out for him. I feel a lot more concern, however, for teenage boys who are turning to steroids or working out more than is actually healthy to meet those standards

In a way, I think we’re at an interesting tipping point in our culture, but one that still involves men and women (when those are the parties to the conversation) talking past each other. What’s interesting to me about Daniel Craig’s body is less how it looks than in what he does with it as James Bond. The contrast between the force he’s able to exercise (as James Poulos put it on Twitter, “Soooo to be clear, CraigBond’s muscles are things you have to have if you are a blunt instrument. Get the causal arrows right.”) and the tenderness and sensuality Craig in particular shows women is what’s attractive about him. Watching him curl up under a running shower with Vesper or bowl her, laughing, over a hospital bed, the delicacy of the way he unbuttons Eve Moneypenny’s blouse, or the rough hurry with which he pushes his unnamed paramour up against a wall in their lean-to on the beach—these all speak to an attentiveness to and experience with women’s bodies that’s far more relevant to the question at hand than Bond’s ability to deal with a formally trained waiter, though in Casino Royale, he seems to navigate fancy restaurants just fine. While neither Edward Cullen nor Christian Grey does it for me, I can understand why those archetypes are so attractive to some of the women who consume them, and not just because they’re described as very handsome: these are men who are bringing considerable physical power or substantial sexual experience to bear in service of their partners’ pleasure*.

The question of how we want our bodies to look, and how we want other people to react to them, has long stood in for how we want them to feel, how we want them to be touched, and treated. This isn’t to say that looks don’t matter, but they’re intertwined with a set of issues we’re much less capable of having productive public conversations about. I’m glad, to a certain extent, that more men are coming to an understanding of how culture contributes to this nasty bit of sleight-of-hand for women, particularly after what’s felt like a particularly intense decade of Beauty And The Slob pairings. But this is a case when turnabout isn’t fair play for people on either end of the equation.

*More thoughts on this tomorrow.

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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The rumors that Idris Elba will follow Daniel Craig as the next James Bond come and go, but they’re back again. I’m obviously in favor of this potential development on the grounds that Idris Elba is awesome (though I also think you could make great cases for David Oyelowo or Chiwetel Ejiofor) and it would give me an excuse to make a lot of “Able was I, ere I saw Elba” jokes. But there are a lot of reasons that it would be great to have a black Bond, and Elba in particular, beyond his simple excellence as an actor:

1. It would clarify that Bond is a rotating identity: James Bond is sort of like that other venerable British pop cultural institution, the Doctor. He’s been around for decades, he’s played by a rotating cast of actors, and there’s not the most rigorous continuity between incarnations, particularly between the old-school ones and the re-imagined version. But unlike the Doctor, Bond doesn’t have a clear means of passing the torch. A black Bond would be a clear break with tradition. The franchise could either nod at what this means for James Bond as an identity unmoored from a single man’s identity (it would explain why M likes Daniel Craig’s Bond more than Pierce Brosnan’s), or come up with a mythology for passing it on to the next man. Either way, this would permanently open up the franchise to different kinds of men, allowing for some experimentation in styles within the basic elements of Bond-dom.

2. It would be a nice reminder white guys aren’t the only people who can be hypercompetent national icons: It’s not as if Will Smith hasn’t been saving American bacon for a long time. But it’s one thing for a black man to be the unexpected savior of the world and for him to be anointed as the best a nation has to offer. It’s past time.

3. It would give Elba a chance to play a lover, as well as a fighter: I’ve written about this before in the context of Luther, but given how good Elba is at playing sensual, passionate, or nailing the contours of a difficult marriage, it’s too bad that so many of his roles have steered him away from being romantic or sexual and strictly towards the commission of a great deal of very stylish violence. Bond girls (or in Eva Green’s case, Bond Women) are an inherent part of the package. It would be lovely to have Elba in particular and a prominent black actor in general get a chance to play one of the world’s most famous seducers in a context where it’s evidence of his awesomeness, rather than a showcase for suspect stereotypes about black men and sexuality.

4. It might encourage the franchise to think more creatively about other elements of the Bond formula: Casino Royale worked so well because it upended almost every element of the excess that marked the Brosnan years: the villain was pegged to actual geopolitical realities, the decisive action sequences went down in a polite casino private room rather than on a grand tableaux, the violence was personal and painful rather than flashy and fake, the woman in question’s brain mattered as much as her breasts. Craig’s helped bring the franchise part of the way into the future. Maybe a black Bond would augur even further exploration of the limits of the formula.

5. It would be interesting to see a slightly older Bond: Daniel Craig remains under contract as Bond for a while, and I’ve seen some suggestions that Elba couldn’t take the role until he turns 46. Part of what was fun about Craig in Casino Royale was that the movie was an origin story about how a callow, confident young spy lost something and gained mastery as a result. It would be fascinating to see a movie that’s self-consciously about a great fighter and great lover entering the period of his decline, sort of a Casanova In Bolzano for the action world.

I’m unsure about the voiceover used to sell the movie, but I remain pretty excited for Zero Dark Thirty, in part because of its focus on the role of female intelligence operatives. I’d have a proclivity for these kinds of stories in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt that, as Eli Lake recently recounted in a great feature for Newsweek on women and espionage, is actually an accurate reflection of how the hunt for bin Laden went down:

The most human moment in the trailer may be Chris Pratt asking Joel Edgerton “What part convinced you?” and Edgerton’s deadpan response, “Her confidence.” It’s a relatively new thing, this idea that we could trust women to give orders to men in uniform, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of fascinating female intelligence operatives playing with that tension and those questions about reliability. In the current iteration of the James Bond movies, M stands for mother, to a certain extent, with Bond breaking into her apartment and playing fast and loose with her orders in a classic display of rebellious boundary-testing. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison is meant to seem unreliable because of her mental illness and the way it interacts with her gender, influencing her affairs with both David Estes, her boss, and Nicholas Brody, her target. But the show doubles up the reasons she shouldn’t be trusted, and then proves her right anyway. Now, Jessica Chastain, who doesn’t actually speak a word in this trailer, presented in profile, eyes huge or utterly obscured, is being presented as the person on whose shoulders the mission to get Osama bin Laden rested. That cleaving of the requirement that expertise be validated by machoness if not explicitly by gender, even by emotional stoicism, is fascinating and important. These are big, tense, horrible things the intelligence community sets into motion. And women seem to be the ones expressing the weight of that knowledge, and those decisions.

As Fifty Shades of Grey mania’s swept the country, film and television production companies have fallen all over themselves, first to snap up the rights to E.L. James’ erotic trilogy, and then to find the next Fifty Shades, whether it’s YA riff Beautiful Disaster (bought by Warner Brothers) or ABC’s efforts to develop Dress To Kill, an erotic mystery set in the fashion world, as a series. There’s just one problem: movies and television in particular are often terrible at depicting sex compellingly, even without the addition of floggers and sub-dom power dynamics to navigate and ratings systems to accommodate. But if television’s determined to get serious about sex, and networks want to compete with cable, which has far fewer restrictions on what it can show but still often demonstrates a basic cluelessness about what makes a scene genuinely erotically charged, here are five tips for how to shoot sex scenes that can pass Standards and Practices and still get viewers hot and bothered.

1. Leadup Matters: Short scenes in television often mean we see couples on a straight route from the front door to the bedroom. Hot and heavy’s fine, but it cuts out one of the most fun things about watching characters prepare to get it on, whether this is the first time they’re sleeping together, or whether they’re an established couple going to bed prepared to surprise each other all over again. Two instructive examples come from The Hour and Parenthood. The former spent its third hour on a number of plots, but the through line was rising sexual tension between Bel Rowley, the producer on the news magazine program The Hour, and Hector Madden, her married anchor. As they flirted on the drive up to London and wandered the halls of Madden’s wife’s palatial country home during a game of Sardines, watching Hector catch Bel’s hand or move in for an early kiss was as tense and thrilling as a full-on sex scene, and we didn’t even have to see them take off their clothes. In the second season of Parenthood, in the episode “Amazing Andy And His Wonderful World Of Bugs” Julia and Joel Graham end up delaying having sex until Julia is ovulating because they’re trying to get pregnant. Watching Joel lust after Julia is half the fun, in part because Sam Jaeger conveys longing so well. You don’t have to worry about what acts you can and can’t broadcast if you have actors who can plausibly sell desire even when they aren’t touching each other.

2. People Should Have Fun: Pop culture sex often looks so deadly serious, choreographed rather than spontaneous, attentive to the audience’s expectations rather than conveying the impression the people involved are actually enjoying themselves. The reason that the first sex scene in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is so effective (once you get beyond the stair-sex, which no one will ever convince me could possibly less than extremely uncomfortable) is that the characters get to be silly, and enthusiastic, and awkward. They laugh, fall off things, vamp a little. It’s actually plausible that they’re all wrapped up in each other, rather than thinking ahead to what they’ll look like when the editing bay gets done with them.
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The trailer for Skyfall, Sam Mendes’ James Bond movie, which arrives in theaters in January, sure looks pretty even if it doesn’t give even a hint of what the movie will actually be about, beyond some British flag-draped coffins and a trip to China:

At this point, Bond movies rise and fall for me on the quality of their villains. Casino Royale worked so well because it abandoned Cold War jockeying, something that had translated poorly as the movies tried to substitute China for Russia in Tomorrow Never Dies, for non-state actors like terrorists and their financiers, warlords, and freelance bombmakers. Rather than giant explosions and stupid doomsday devices, we had bruises and blood, crude methods of torture, conversations across tables between bitter enemies. Bond killed face-to-face. He, and we, felt the deaths he caused. After decades of Bond movies distancing us from the conflicts that birthed him, Casino Royale made them immediate and consequential again. Quantum of Solace wasted that momentum with a retreat to the generic, motivationless cabals that dominated the post-Berlin Wall period.

Part of the challenge, of course, is that the big, genuine rivalries in our geopolitics these days (as opposed to our entanglements) are economic rather than military. It didn’t matter if Bond movies demonized the Soviet Union because it wasn’t like the economics of the movie business required Bond to do substantial overseas gross there. Today, as movies jockey for access to the rapidly expanding Chinese movie market, which allows in only a limited number of American movies, studios are willing to bow to Chinese preferences and requirements, ranging from having characters speak Mandarin instead of Cantonese or moving shooting away from dissident-heavy locations. The economic incentives are for integration and collaboration on-screen in service of integration and collaboration in the real world, rather than exploration of tensions and challenges present on a broad scale.

More closely-kept conflicts would solve that problem and preserve a sense of Bond’s capabilities as realistically impressive rather than utterly cartoonish. And if the last decade of our geopolitics have taught us anything, it’s that big things have small beginnings, and the shadowy cabals behind them are lethally specific, rather than blandly anonymous.

I imagine I might get tired of him at some point, but for the moment, I’m enjoying watching Jeremy Renner infiltrate every single viable action franchise in America, from Mission Impossible, to The Avengers, and now, the Bourne movies:

In a way, the Bourne franchise has always reminded me, and with the change in main characters reminds me more than ever, of Spooks, the great British spy series. The genius of Spooks is that the agents in the field are somewhat disposable: they may be attractive and competent at violence, but by the nature of the job, they have fairly short shelf lives. The real main characters are the people who work on the grid, who spend their time in the office making decisions that get other people out in the world killed or exiled. It’s an acknowledgement that there are differing moral responsibilities and different psychological costs for those who originate orders and those who execute them. The Bourne movies, and to a lesser extent, Judi Dench’s M during Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond, have always felt to me like they’re grappling with that distinction in a way that’s been fun and sometimes even illuminating to watch. These bureaucrats aren’t just shadowy figures with fathomless motives whose importance lies in their impact on the hero. You can damage your soul from your desk, without ever shooting a gun.

I tend to agree with Amanda Marcotte that torture’s become a dangerous cliche in popular culture, though I think we come at it from rather different directions:

More importantly, torture scenes violate the audience’s trust that the characters onscreen, no matter how outlandish their surroundings, will behave like human beings. On TV, torture almost always works. The victim usually knows the information, and gives it up immediately. In rarer cases, they know nothing but are able to stop to torture by stating this fact. Either way, they respond positively to torture, and somehow the tormentor magically knows when their victim is speaking the truth.

I agree that it’s a problem that torture is shown as being effective in popular culture. But I think that should actually be a second-level objection to torture: the point that’s important to win, and the line it’s important to draw, is that torture is wrong. What actually scares me about torture and violence against prisoners and interrogators in pop culture is that there are settings in which it’s presented as at least somewhat justified. Almost all cop shows involve an officer of the law snapping and doing violence to a suspect at some point. But those actions are generally presented as failures of control, as was the case with Elliot Stabler’s beatings of suspects on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or of desperation, as was the case with the beatings of Bubbles on The Wire. When that’s not the case, torture can be an opportunity for a victim to prove their fortitude—specifically, their manhood. In the Casino Royale remake, Le Chiffre’s torture of bond provides an opportunity for him to prove his imperviousness to pain, and to make a joke that emasculates Le Chiffre.

What was interesting to me about the torture in this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, which Amanda focuses on, is the extent to which those scenes were about neither of those things. Joffrey and Harrenhal’s interrogators are torturing people not out of fits of temper, and not because they think there’s information for them to get out of the people they’re targeting. Joffrey doesn’t have questions that he wants to ask Ros and Daisy. The Harrenhal interrogators ask the same set of questions to every person they talk to, no matter where that person comes from or their likelihood of knowing any relevant information. These people are torturing their victims because they enjoy doing so. These scenes are all about giving us information about the torturers, to draw a line between the characters who behave like human beings and those who exist and act beyond the laws that govern the rest of us.

There have been on-and-off efforts over the year to get a stunts category into the Academy Awards, and apparently those conversations are starting up again. As someone who would like to see more movies like Casino Royale or District 9 to be in Oscar contention, and for action movies to have more incentives to think of themselves as Oscar-worthy and to raise their game correspondingly, I think I’m in favor of such an addition, pending what the final categories look like, of course.

I’m also in favor of this for the same reason that I support some sort of collaborative performance category to recognize performances like Andy Serkis’: such categories would serve as an important reminder that the movies are a craft as much as they’re an art, and that they can’t exist without the people who do things that stars won’t, either because they require a different set of skills, or because they’re dangerous. A lot of what funds the ability of pretty, elegant people to do pretty, elegant things on screen (or, alternatively, to surrender their beauty and poise in ritual artistic acts of self-abnegation) is the work that’s done by these people to make movies that are exciting, and propulsive, and that sometimes are dumb but don’t inherently have to be. Action sequences can be as compelling, and as witty, as good dialogue. Movies like Mission Impossible IV and Casino Royale have been particularly good at using fights to joke about and comment on characters from the first and third worlds. And Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a decidedly more mediocre movie without the fight that destroys the main characters’ soul-sucking suburban facade and resurrects their sexual connection. That’s work, and it draws a lot of people to the movies, and it should be recognized for that, though it might make sense to start the category out small to set a consistently high bar.