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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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took to his Huffington Post blog last week to review Girls. While I think he has some points worth considering about his show, I was actually more struck by his follow-up, in which he writes about the reaction to a professional basketball player writing cultural criticism—much of which ignored the fact that Abdul-Jabbar has both acted and written history. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Some questioned why a man my age would watch a show about girls in their twenties, as if they’d just discovered me hanging around a school playground with a shopping bag full of candy in one hand a fluffy puppy in the other. Of course, these critics are right. When I read Moby Dick I first had to convince the bookseller that I was a former whaler named Queequeg. When I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I had to pretend I was a depressed white woman with daddy issues. Don’t worry, I used a fake ID.

One of the strangest, and most persistently irritating assumptions in popular culture is, as I’ve written before, the idea that white men are general interest, while women and people of color are niche subjects. It’s bizarre to me that we would think that women are interested in stories about men, and how they view sex, work, and power, all subjects that affect us, whether we have male lovers and partners, male bosses and coworkers, or simply male relatives and friends, but that men wouldn’t be interested in what insights fiction can give them into their families, friends, lovers, coworkers, or objects of distant desire. It’s a framework that assumes that men are hopelessly myopic, which is awfully condescending, but it’s also one that gives men who pay attention to culture created by and about women extra points for reaching out beyond the range of their own experience. It’s nice to see Abdul-Jabbar give that thumb on the scale precisely the bemused side-eye it deserves.

This post discusses plot details from the October 23 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

I remain deeply ambivalent about this season’s treatment of Gemma, which appears to be coming to a head in this episode. I understand what the show is trying to do with her: tell a story about a woman unmoored from the sources of her identity and increasingly self-destructive as a result. It’s telling that it’s Nero, someone from outside that family, who diagnoses her problem for Jax. “She’s still your mother, jefe, and you got to respect that,” he warns the younger man, having promised to stay away from Gemma but still seeing her clearly. “She’s stuck in between a husband she hates and a son she thinks hates her. Women like her don’t do so good without family.”

But I wish that Sons of Anarchy had found a way to tell that story that didn’t involve treating Gemma like she’s a shameful whore, down to her choice of poison. “Since when do you drink banana vodka?” Jax asks his mother after she becomes the target of Joel McHale’s conman, adding “Jesus Christ. Who are you?” when he finds out she can’t identify the man who robbed her by name. He even apologizes for her to Nero, telling him “I’m sorry you got pulled into this. She’s a goddamn train wreck.” Jax, of course, is not exactly one to preach to his mother about chastity—he slept around on the road even when he was in a relationship with Tara, and Gemma has far more right to go out and have fun without obligations than he did on that unfortunate occasion.

I understand that much of Sons of Anarchy is about how a deeply retrograde, patriarchal subculture that’s survived into the modern era affects both the men who are sworn to the culture and the women who end up participating in it by proxy. And Katey Sagal has always acted the hell out of every line of material written for her. But I’m not sure there’s enough, or sufficiently delineated, distance between how the show views Gemma and how Jax views her right now for Sons of Anarchy to make this very tricky storyline work. The show is pulling it off intermittently. The moment of her weeping in the motel bathroom at night, wrapped in a blanket, was one of the best moments in this arc of letting Gemma sit with her own decisions, as opposed to filtering them through the eyes of her son, or her lover, or her ex-husband. And there was something extremely touching about watching Gemma reminisce to Tara about Luann Delaney, the best friend she lost to murder motivated by SAMCRO’s business dealings in the second season of the show (both the best Sons of Anarchy has ever done, and not coincidentally, the one with the best long-arc Gemma story). “He liked to watch her movies,” Gemma told Tara. “But I’m guessing they’re not to going to let you bring a stack of old videotapes in there. Perfume. Otto loved that goddamn perfume. Smelled like cum and patchouli, was godawful. But he wouldn’t let her wear anything else. It came in a blue bottle, it was Blue Roses, Blue Violet, something like that.” Even in death, Luann, like all the SAMCRO women, is defined by her relationship to a man.

But I thought the show whiffed again when Gemma and Jax finally spoke. “After my Thomas died, I did the worst thing a mother could do,” she told him. “I made you make up for the love that he couldn’t give me anymore. I’m sorry, Jackson. I’m sorry that I’ve always been too much.” Gemma’s committed her crimes and kindnesses, but I really, profoundly wish the show would allow her a deeper reckoning with both her guilt for the sins she’s incurred in the service of SAMCRO, and for the huge damage the club has done her. Gemma got raped and kept quiet about it for the club, she lost Luann, she saw her grandsons kidnapped, she took a beatdown by her husband. But instead, this episode reduced what Gemma’s working through to the nature of her relationship with Jax. “Yeah, when he died, I felt so bad,” Jax tells her. “It wasn’t because he was dead. It was because I would have you all to myself. I knew how wrong that was. I love you, Mom. And we’re going to get through all of this, I promise.” If Jax wants to help his deeply traumatized—and guilty—mother get through what’s ailing her, they’re going to have to learn to talk to each other more honestly than that. As Gemma tells Unser about his profession of love, “Too many people feeling shit. What you said was the truth. More people did that, there’d be less bodies lying on floors.” Terrifyingly—if frustratingly, given the way the show uses Abel to gin up drama—this episode ended with the suggestion that the bodies on the floor could be Gemma’s grandsons.
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I was rewatching The League in preparation for the new season, which started last night, and because my amazing-on-paper fantasy team has been underperforming and I needed a pick-me-up, and I started thinking again about the show’s gender politics. The League is probably the show I watch regularly and deeply enjoy with the highest rate of characters saying terrible things about or doing bad things to the women in their lives (Game of Thrones is a serious competitor). But while I think Game of Thrones is, and will continue to be, long-term, an exploration of the cancerous impact of sanctioned violent misogyny on society, The League is rather different: it’s a story about basically likable men who say bad things about women or do bad things to women largely out of fear or venality. Sexism less looms big than it makes them look small.

Perhaps the best example of this is Shivakamini Somakandarkram, the high school valedictorian in the same graduating class as the male members of the League. The League absolutely objectifies Shiva: an awkward picture of her from high school adorns the League’s championship trophy. Her name is invoked as if she’s some kind of exotic goddess, which is particularly gross and othering given her South Asian heritage. In last night’s episode, Jenny MacArthur, the League’s sole female member, even fantasized about a sexual encounter with Shiva while her husband was away on a pre-season visit to the Dallas Cowboys training camp. In almost any other show, this kind of behavior would be gross beyond belief.

But the League’s doing something careful with Shiva’s character, namely revealing that the League’s memories of her and the idol they’ve built her up to be have nothing to do with her actual person. Far from being a hopeless, awkward nerd, Shiva’s grown up to be a beautiful, accomplished urologist—in fact, she’s probably matured more and better than any of her high school classmates, who for some reason cling to the high school vision of her as if it remains a reality. We learn over the course of the show that even though the League treats Shiva like she was a weird object of study in high school, she at least played an important role in the life of Kevin MacArthur, Jenny’s husband: he lost his virginity to her. Their memories of Shiva aren’t true to who she is now, or what she was to them then.

And the show has progressively reinforced the gap between who the members of the League make Shiva out to be and who the audience at home knows her to be. The first season brought the reveal that she had grown up gorgeous and smart, and that Andre, a member of the League, was dating her. The second brought the news about her prior relationship with Kevin. In the third season, her appearance brought about Ruxin’s miraculous recovery after a stroke, a scene that reveled how inappropriate and irritating the League’s fetishization of her is when Ruxin planted a series of kisses on her after he recovered his inability to walk. And in an upcoming episode this season, Shiva tells Ruxin directly how irritating she finds her presence on the League’s trophy and directly asks him to remove it. Things don’t go as planned, of course, Ruxin being Ruxin, but it’s nice to see Shiva call the League’s behavior out for what it is. The League has made the case that Shiva would be a pretty awesome person to have around, in the flesh and on the regular if only the members of the League could be mature enough to know her as a person, rather than as a fading photograph and a silly myth.

This post contains spoilers through the September 18 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

Wayne Unser has always been one of my favorite characters, on any television show. His backstory with the Sons would make a tremendously rich part of the backstory if Kurt Sutter ever makes his First Nine show, both personally and politically. And after four seasons of reaction and declining power, there’s something tremendous about watching him rise from a beating with new purpose. He starts from a low point. “You really come over to feed the bird?” Clay asks him as they confront Gemma’s ruined home, Wayne not entirely able to stand on his own power. “She’s on her own trip these days,” Wayne admits, acknowledging what his gestures of loyalty have often meant to a woman who has often been attracted to more violent, unstable men.

But he peels himself literally and emotionally off of Gemma’s floor and takes himself back to his old office for a conversation with Eli Roosevelt that brings both their races and their visions of the governance of Charming. Wayne kept quiet when Clay insisted that the attack must have been further black retaliation for Tig’s killing of Pope’s daughter, but it’s because he’s saving a theory for himself. “This wasn’t black retaliation,” he tells Roosevelt. “It felt more white to me.” Roosevelt is skeptical, asking him: “Really? And what does white feel like?” “Sloppy. Clumsy,” Wayne explains. “The beatdown was obligatory, not angry.” Much like Homeland and Carrie’s suspicions of Brody, this is a case where we know Wayne is right, given that we see white men dumping Clay’s safe, a white man reading the paperwork recovered from it. But it’ll be fascinating to see him prove it, and along the way, forge an identity that doesn’t involve the Sons, or Gemma. “I learned how to make it work with the Sons,” he tells Roosevelt, who has been resisting precisely that in a repudiation of Unser’s term. “And yeah, I got a little more comfortable with them than I should have. But I never did dirty work. Still don’t. I’m going to be poking around these home invasions. I find anything, I’ll let you know. I’d appreciate the same.”

That’s an idea of a partnership, rather than a real one. And it’s interesting to see that wisp of a relationship in the air, especially as Jax is finding a new mentor. Jax may be at the head of the table, but his vision for what he’ll do once he’s there remains considerably underdeveloped. Now that Clay is in exile and John Teller’s vision is in doubt, Jax needs someone new. And in Nero, he finds an ally who isn’t enmeshed with the club or its business deals, someone who’s developed an effective, independent business model, a man who seems at peace with himself and his family. He doesn’t need to scramble for more money from the Sons, telling Jax that he’s letting them hide there because “Let’s just consider this networking, okay? Maybe at some point, you get to help me.” He explains to Jax that his business deal with the women he runs doesn’t involve a huge profit margin because the long-term stability of the business is more important than the short-term gain. “I take 25 percent in house, 30 for house calls,” he says. “It don’t pay to be greedy. You got to treat your girls good. They stay happy. They got regulars. The money stays steady.” And unlike Jax, whose sons live at home, with their mother, Nero makes time for his son, who is severely disabled and lives in a facility. “My first boy was born with his insides upside down. His mother was a junkie. I wasn’t paying attention, either,” Jax admits. And despite Nero’s laid-back attitude, his mild, “Sorry. I don’t get out much,” to Jax, he’s more than capable of handling the car chase. The Sons’ model may be polluted. But Nero represents a vision of criminality governed by respect, even kindness. It doesn’t surprise me to see Gemma come back to him either. One of her husbands is dead, the other nearly dead to her. Nero, who had fun with her, gave her son shelter, found him an officiant for his wedding, represents a third attempt at a possible family.
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This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy.

“What if I don’t want to be in charge?” Laroy Wayne’s deputy asks Damon Pope’s number two after seeing Laroy’s body in a railyard pit. “Rise to it, brother. With great power comes great responsibility,” the man tells him, only to calmly shoot him later and promote another man, citing the dead lieutenant’s reluctance to take up the mantle of leadership. It’s a fascinating little play in the mist of everything else going on as Sons of Anarchy begins its fifth season, a warning about commitment for Jax Teller, the prince become the king, and who, having faded into an image of his father in the final frame of the last season, has taken up not just his patch, but his pen. “Finding things that make you happy shouldn’t be so hard,” he writes to his sons. “You have to find the things you love. Run to them.” But for Jax, as it always has been, the question is what he loves best. Is it his club? His wife? His mother? His father as he remembers him? Or, through all the hate, the deeply broken man who raised him? Damon’s daughter is freshly dead at Tig’s hands. John Teller is long gone. But as both men struggle to balance their rage and their leadership obligations, it seems this season of Sons of Anarchy may be a meditation on what it means to be a leader and a man, at home, and in the world.

Just as that weathered photograph would have suggested, the woman at Jax’s side, and the woman the show has suggested she would turn into are at odds as the season begins. “I’m training my new replacement. Starting my new duties,” Tara tells Jax sourly at the beginning of the episode. She may have smashed her hand and turned down her transfer, like Prospero “deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book,” and chosen Charming, but Tara doesn’t seem reconciled to her choice. Jax is deferring to her on questions like day care for their sons, attempting to adapt Charming and the norms of SAMCRO to some of her needs.
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Lots of folks have joked, on seeing the trailer for Zack Snyder’s newest movie, that they’re excited to see Terrence Malick’s Man of Steel:

The thing that actually strikes me as most powerful about this trailer, though, is that Pa Kent’s speech is one a mortal man could easily give his human son. Our superhero movies have gotten kind of disconnected from masculinity in general. Bruce Wayne has a particular violent experience in childhood that spurs him to superheroism, and even more particular resources with which to finance his ambitions. Peter Parker may be the only person to be bitten by a radioactive spider, but great responsibility doesn’t come only with great power—sometimes that relationship is crushingly inverse. The X-Men are valuable precisely because they’re a metaphor for otherness. But the truth is that white men are more likely to possess money and privilege, the currency that can purchase or convey the closest things we have to superpowers, and how they use it matters.

It’s easy to treat Superman as an alien, or even as a kind of bodhisattva. But he’s potentially even more interesting as a man, a kind of sober Ron Swanson, a vision of masculinity divorced from contempt for women or concerns about heterosexual credibility. I don’t know that there’s anything in Snyder’s ouvre that suggests he’s up for that. And after The Dark Knight Rises, I have significant concerns about David Goyer’s ability to handle big ideas with much in the way of deftness or commitment. But it’s a thought, and I’ll be curious to see if either of them rise to the occasion.

I was watching the fairly funny trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man who lives with a crude and belligerent teddy bear he’s had since he was eight:

And I realized it reminded me of FX’s show Wilfred, and not just because both the movie and the show feature adult men who take bong hits with their imaginary friends:

Both Ted and Wilfred are squarely in the tradition of Harvey, the 1950 classic about Elwood Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) a likable potential alcoholic who insists that his best fried is an invisible rabbit of that name (a remake was in the work three years ago but seems to have foundered). In that movie, Elwood’s family considers having him institutionalized or receive medical treatment that will make him stop seeing Harvey, but ultimately decide that they would rather have his kind, imaginative self than a normalized shell of a man. But they have a sharper edge than Harvey does—Ted and Wilfred both cause genuine problems in their human friends’ lives other than making them appear odd, and the show and movie appear more willing to treat these lingering attachments as a sign of real pathology. In that sense, they’re also a somewhat way of moving beyond the valorization of manchildren that’s been something of a staple of pop culture for the last five or six years. These men haven’t just coasted charmingly along. There’s something specific holding them back, and it’ll require a difficult, unpleasant decision to reckon with it.

I tend to be suspicious of studies or articles that proclaim the end of men, or of the gender gap—after all, the hecession turned into the hecovery, and sexism looks relatively entrenched to me. But I’m kind of intrigued by Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex. That book notes that 40 percent of married women now outearn their husbands, and starts thinking about how our sense of masculinity might evolve if men and women switched their roles.

There’s already a fair bit of pop culture that explores the lives of stay-at-home dads, of which the best, I think, is Up All Night. But a lot of those depictions are still rooted in the idea that fathers taking on primary responsibility for their children or women supporting their husbands and families as the sole breadwinner is a strange and new thing. And in these worlds, what we understand to be masculine and feminine is pretty much the same thing, with a dose of daddy grooming rituals to keep things hot at home.

This goes hand in hand with our conversation from a couple of weeks ago about world-building. But I’d love to see someone take a book like The Richer Sex and use that as a basis for thinking about a science fictional world. We’ve had some good science fiction, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men that’s come out of a rethinking of the value of women’s fertility: when it goes up, women tend to be in even more danger of finding themselves under men’s control. But I wonder if we can imagine a future where women are more economically powerful men that is culturally different but not inherently antagonistic. What does masculinity look like when it’s divorced from the exercise of power? And what does femininity mean when it’s divorced from domesticity. I’d imagine different in the short-term and long-term, but that’s a thought experiment worth doing.

A programming note: posting’s going to be a bit slow for the rest of my time at SXSW. There are just too many panels to go and people to see. Thanks for being understanding. I’ll keep the content coming as best I can.

“In Hollywood, the douche is louche. The douchebag, as opposed to the meathead or the jagoff, is a viable hero in cinema,” Slate’s Dan Kois said at a panel on SXSW on Sunday. “Usually, a douchebag could only be a hero if he was redeemed, usually by the love of a good woman…[But now we have] Iron Man, the world-historical first superhero douchebag franchise…[In The Hangover movies]Bradley Cooper plays an unrepentant douchebag who is terrible to his friends.” The panel didn’t entirely get into it—instead, it devolved into one of the more committed piece of performance art I’ve ever seen at a conference—but it’s an interesting question. What does it say about us that we’ve got so many movie heroes who disregard everyone around them in pursuit of their own interests?

There’s something Randian about the perspective that Kois and his fellow panelists, Robyn Sklaren, P.E. Oppenheim, Eliza Skinner offered up. “We’re all animals. We go after our wants and needs,” Skinner said, arguing that in a moment when we put a premium on authenticity, “A douchebag feels so much more authentic that anyone else. A douchebag is honest about the fact that he wants to fuck that girl. Everybody wants to fuck that girl.” Kois said that Michael Mann’s movies have thrived on the fact that “they all demonstrate the charismatic amazingness of douchebags.” And Skinner suggested that, in contrast to your everyday deeply unpleasant person, “you have to be charming to be a douche. People have to want to talk to you.”

The thing is, most people don’t actually meet that charmingness threshold. And most people don’t possess the other attributes, like insanely good looks or extreme wealth, that allow them to ignore the wishes, needs, and even rights of others, and still compel people to continue interacting with them, much less fulfilling their needs. Being able to be utterly impossible and still get everything you want isn’t a remotely obtainable fantasy for almost any of us. For all that romantic comedies get blamed for feeding unrealistic conceptions of what love and relationships look like, it’s more plausible that flawed people will make accommodations for each other than that the average person can get through life being entirely anti-social without ever once being called effectively to account and forced to alter their behavior to get something that they want.

Because I think the truth is, conditioning or no, most people actually want certain levels of interconnection. At worst, that manifests as a desire for credit for being compassionate and thoughtful, which means you’ve at least got to go through some of the motions. At best, we crave actual intimacy and emotional interdependence. These things are messy, and strange, and not uniformly rewarding, but we do often want them. Fantasizing about wanting interactions without the possibility of experiencing pain may not result in attractive fantasies. But it’s a rational response, if not a classy one, to great fear, and great want.