I didn’t write about the dumbest, most sexist thing about Star Trek Into Darkness, because there were a lot of discussions of drones and extrajudicial killing to talk about, and because sometimes a lady gets exhausted of pointing out, yet again, that you know that thing you did you think is clever? Actually, it’s pervy. But Star Trek Into Darkness does indeed have one of those moments, when scientist Carol Marcus (Alice Eve), in the course of explaining her father’s secret photon torpedo program to Jim Kirk (Chris Pine), inexplicably starts changing into a jumpsuit she needs to wear down to a planetoid to open up one of said weapons. Why she needs to do this right now rather than in three minutes, when the U.S.S. Enterprise has apparently decided to hang around Klingon space for a while anyway, or why she needs to wear a special jumpsuit down to a planet where the air is apparently completely breathable, is unclear.

But what does happen is this: she tells Kirk to look away when she changes, and because he’s Jim Kirk, and apparently desperately needs to try to convince everyone that he’s heterosexual at every possible moment, he looks anyway. Instead of him getting slapped, the camera decides to collaborate in Kirk’s absolute need to see his colleague in her kit, and shoots her from an angle that suggests it’s hovering slightly below her genitals, giving the audience a nice long look at Marcus in her black silk underwear and nothing else, because while apparently we’ll leave poverty in the present, Victoria’s Secret is forever.

All of this is a long way of getting to what Star Trek Into Darkness writer Damon Lindelof told MTV reporter Josh Horowitz when the latter asked why Carol Marcus had to get undressed:

Why is Alice Eve in her underwear, gratuitously and unnecessarily, without any real effort made as to why in God’s name she would undress in that circumstance? Well there’s a very good answer for that. But I’m not telling you what it is. Because… uh… MYSTERY?

It’s this kind of thing that always makes me want to curl up under my desk with the dragon’s egg and Ron Swanson bobblehead on it and rock back and forth for a while.

Because if you’re one of the many wonderful people who consumes or works in genre fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and wishes that those genres could escape their second-class status because of the work they do to explore big issues and to create great characters, Lindelof is not helping. First, he’s reaffirming every stereotype in the world about geeks who are more likely to see a grown woman get undressed on screen than in the flesh, and who get all cranky and entitled about their need to said fictional characters take off their clothes, story, character, agency, and reciprocity be hanged.

And in a way, I resent Lindelof’s “Because… uh… MYSTERY?” even more than his refusal to seriously engage the question of why he and his fellow writers made that choice, because it shows such a rank contempt for the very things that make science fiction and fantasy so powerful: the ability to build new worlds and new rules. Lindelof and Star Trek Into Darkness director J.J. Abrams have long been known as people who prioritize mystery and grandeur over coherent systems or rules of the universes in which they work, and it’s made them very, very successful. But it’s also what makes their ascension in genres where the rules of the universes in which stories operate are a lot of what make those universes interesting, and how characters navigate those restrictions a major engine of character development so irritating. I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no or few stories have gone before. But if you think that working science fiction and fantasy relieves you of your obligations to coherent plotting and character behavior, or if it’s an engine to deliver free naked ladies, then you can stay in your mom’s basement, and off my bandwagon.

The New York Post treats a reveal it got yesterday as a guess-that-name gossip item, but the word that a Game of Thrones actress didn’t want to do any more nude scenes raises more interesting and important questions than the simple question of who it was:

One of the stars of “Game of Thrones” is refusing to appear in any more nude scenes, according to a cast member.

“One of the girls in the show who got her [dress] off the most in the first couple of seasons now doesn’t at all,” Oona Chaplin, who plays the noblewoman Talisa Maegyr on the show, told reporters in London over the weekend.

“She said, ‘I want to be known for my acting not for my breasts.’ ”

Chaplin refused to say which actress it is.

I absolutely support any actress who doesn’t want to do nudity, particularly given the disparate pressure on women to take their clothes off on-screen, and how often that nudity is used as fan service rather than for narrative emphasis or to grow characters. But I do think it’s depressing that we’re at a point where actresses feel that they’re faced with a choice: getting nude, even when said nudity might provide an important character moment or punctuate a scene in a moving way, or be taken seriously. Game of Thrones, in its first several seasons, particularly through its use of sexposition—sex scenes that appeared in the show to make more visually, er, stimulating, scenes where characters explained backstory or politics—helped make that feel more like a choice.

But it’s done a great deal in this third season to make nudity equal-opportunity across genders, and more importantly, to demonstrate that you can be naked and do serious acting. Seeing Brienne of Tarth lunge, nude, out of a bath to confront her antagonist and former prisoner, Jaime Lannister, wasn’t about presenting her body for our consumption as a sex object, but to demonstrate that she wasn’t afraid to be naked in front of a man who had sexually shamed her for loving a king who would never want her. Seeing Robb Stark and his wife Talisa naked together after a bout of marital sex was a display of their intimacy and comfort with each other, as well as the fact that they were still in the early stage of their relationship, when their nudity was still novel to each other. And seeing Jon Snow stripped of his furs was also to see him stripped of the vows he swore as a member of the celibate Night’s Watch: wildling Ygritte’s seduction of him rendered him emotionally and physically naked.

Getting naked is a serious business, something that happens consensually between adults, non-consensually a way of victimizing someone and making them feel powerless, non-sexually as a way of demonstrating comfort, or necessarily to provide care to someone who is vulnerable. Nudity can be funny without making the person who is nude risible, and sensual without making the person who is naked an object. That we still have trouble with those ideas suggests we have a lot to learn as viewers, and that our popular culture has to be more precise in the way it teaches us to absorb the nudity it puts on screen.

“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
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The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s annual survey of how women are represented in the 100 top-grossing movies from the previous year is out, and much has been made of the study’s finding that the percentage of female characters has declined to a five-year low, from 29.9 percent in 2007 to 28.4 percent in 2012. But it’s not just notable that the number of female characters with speaking parts has fallen to a low—after all, there were better years in between 2007 and 2012. The survey says a lot about what kinds of women successful movies include, and what those movies think women are for. My colleague Adam Peck put together a graphic representation of some of the most revealing statistics in the study:

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This post discusses plot points from Star Trek Into Darkness in some detail.

Starships and Klingons and tribbles, oh my! I’d expected that Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to his 2009 alternate-timeline reboot of the venerable franchise, with returning writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, could have been any one of a number of things: a confident coming-of-age for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), a return to the tradition of space exploration that defined the original show and movies, with some unintended consequences thrown in to accomodate the tastes of modern action audiences, and even continuation of the sci-fi screwball romance between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana). What I didn’t anticipate is that as a blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness would be impressively generic, but that in a summer when drone strikes and extrajudicial killings appear to have been on many screenwriters and directors minds’, it would do one of the clearest (if not deep) jobs of outlining the debates over the American drone program for a mass audience.

When we meet up with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise again, they’re on a planet inhabited by a primitive species that’s about to be destroyed by a volcano. Spock, in a potential violation of the mission directive to explore the world, uses cold fusion to stop the explosion, but not without endangering his own life in a way that prompts Kirk to come to his rescue by means that blow the Prime Directive not to speed up that species’ technological development quite literally out of the water, or without hurting Uhura, now firmly established as Spock’s girlfriend. Their actions, and Kirk’s filing of a fudged report of them while Spock tells the truth, get Kirk demoted to First Officer under Christopher Pike, who returns to command of the Enterprise, and Spock reassigned to the U.S.S. Bradbury. But their split it short-lived after a man identified as Starfleet officer John Harrison induces a fellow member of Starfleet to bomb what appears to be an archive, an attack that turns out to be a trap to lure Starfleet’s top commanders to a single for a strategy session. When Harrison attacks that session from the air, killing Pike and other high-ranking Starfleet commanders, Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) gives Kirk back his ship and permission to go after Harrison, who turns out to be rather more than he seems.

The details of what how they do so are remarkably noisy and remarkably forgettable. But the nature of Marcus’s commission to Kirk and company provokes the movie’s strongest throughline and most clearly-developed ideas. The question in Star Trek Into Darkness is whether or not Kirk should follow strategic detail of Marcus’s orders to, using new and advanced torpedoes, “park on the edge of Klingon space, you fire, you take him out, and you haul ass,” or comply with Starfleet rules and make sure that Harrison receives a fair trial back on earth. That Star Trek Into Darkness presents that choice at all, outlining the debate in very similar terms to the arguments about the use of drone strikes to carry out extrajudicial killings of accused terrorists outside of the United States, differentiates it from the other pop culture explorations the subject, which has become a strikingly common feature of movies and television this year, including Iron Man 3 and Fox procedural Bones.
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National Review roving correspondent Kevin Williamson is in the process of congratulating himself for, in response to having been repeatedly interrupted by a phone-using patron at the theater last night, grabbing her phone, hurling it away from her, and getting himself slapped and ejected:

The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort. To the theater-going public of New York — nay, the the world – I say: “You’re welcome.”

Let’s leave aside the facts that making grand statement’s like Williamson’s is almost certainly more disruptive both to fellow patrons and to the actors on stage than the use of a cell phone in the audience, and that sending someone else’s phone across the theater at great speed is a much more efficient way to make a martyr of said terribly rude person than to strike a blow for civility. Williamson is right on two points: the use of cell phones in live performances in particular is inexcusably rude, and theaters need to do much more to protect both audiences and performers from interruption.

Theaters tend towards politeness for the most part, asking people to turn off their phones, cameras, tablets, etc., rather than telling people directly that device use will get them automatically ejected and even banned, or, less coercively, using what’s been found to be a psychologically effective tactic of telling audiences what percentage of their peers turn off their phones. But theaters are private establishments that are allowed to set their own rules, and have plenty of good grounds to do so, including the safety of performers who could be distracted by a bright cell phone screen in the audience, and the pleasure of the vast majority of patrons who come to shows hoping to be uninterrupted. And it would be nice to see them be far more proactive to set clear ground rules, to have ushers monitor the house from the back and proactively warn and then eject patrons who use their phones, and even to consider bans on people who don’t comply with stated rules. Such a policy might risk losing some business, but a theatergoer who’s spending all night on the phone should be judged a less valuable customer than one who pays attention.

Or theaters could take a different approach and circumvent the problem of phones in the seats altogether. I attend critics’ screenings of films all the time where the people running the screenings require people attending the film to check their cell phones in paper bags, mostly as an anti-piracy measure. It seems to work just fine, and people seem to submit without much hassle. Theaters for staged plays have two advantages on movie theaters: they already have coat checks, for the most part, and they’re dealing with far fewer performances, so handling the volume of checked phones, whether patrons have to put them in lockers or hand them over directly, shouldn’t be impossible. If the slight inconvenience protects well-intentioned patrons from both cell phone use and the squabbles over it, it’s well worth it.

Brave‘s Merida is one of the few Disney princesses—along with Mulan—who gets to be physically active, and really the only one with a physique to match her love of riding horses, shooting things, and her ability to stand up to a bear. But Disney, as it’s done to other women in the official Disney Princess pantheon, decided that to mark her inclusion, Merida needed a new dress that was off-the-shoulder, and a belt instead of a quiver for her arrows. Unlike the other Disney Princesses, it also decided that she needed to get a lot skinnier for the occasion.

The website Disney debuted as a portal for Merida merchandise seems to be sticking with the original design for Merida, kinky red hair, forest-green dress, and bow ready to fire, a move that some advocates are claiming as a victory. But the products themselves seem to be a mix of Merida ready for action—at least holding on to her bow, as in this nightshirt—and Merida in party-wear, as on this mug. Change.org petitions may feel good, but it’s hard to get a big corporation like Disney to junk an entire product line on a moment’s notice.

But hopefully, as Disney considers the reaction to the Merida art that circulated, and as they consider how to make even more money out of the Brave universe, Disney could consider that dresses and princess crowns aren’t the only things that you could sell to little girls through their parents. Get into the archery sets game. Get into weaving kits, even. If “princess” is a title you can give Native American advocates, Chinese warriors, and Scottish tomboys, then the things princesses can do don’t have to be limited to going to parties.

It’s taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and not just because the cinematography during the many scenes in it set in automobiles made me carsick. It’s an enormously overstuffed movie, with party sequences that turn on my latent claustrophobia, a cacophonous soundtrack, and so many baubles it’s easy to feel like you’re watching a jewelry store—and there’s a great deal of Tiffany product placement in the movie, particularly of Daisy’s “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” and a headpiece she wears to a party—rathe than a movie. But one thing that Luhrmann’s adaptation gets right, and that brings out one of my favorite performances by Leonardo DiCaprio in a long time, is the way Gatsby marries conspicuous consumption, subtle class-based knowledge, and social awkwardness.

One of the best scenes in the movie stems from a situation where Gatsby’s (DiCaprio) set up a situation that’s guaranteed to be awkward: he’s asked Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) to ask his old flame Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), now married to a wealthy boor named Tom (Joel Edgerton) to tea so he can just drop by and reconnect with her. It’s an attempt to be casual in a situation that requires deliberation and a direct approach, and it puts Nick, who is Daisy’s cousin, in an awful social position. As Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) puts it in Fitzgerald’s novel, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. it was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad.”

In the movie, Luhrmann’s delight in conspicuous consumption illustrates just how badly Gatsby is going about orchestrating this meeting. He has Nick’s small house landscaped overnight, then descends on it with a team of umbrella-toting butlers to jam it full of orchids and a multi-layer cake, as if he’s catering a society wedding rather than being invited to his friend’s home. The makeover is simultaneously an insult to Nick and the modest home he’s able to rent and a total sabotage of Gatsby’s attempt at casualness. He’s desperate to seem spontaneous, but he can’t relinquish control of the moment to achieve it, insistent that the moment be perfect, but completely out of things to say. Watching DiCaprio wander in and out of Nick’s house, into the rain and out of the rain, and then totally forget that he’s soaking wet and in a small living room that looks like a greenhouse is a scene as precisely bizarre as the moment demands. And it gets at one of the central reveals of the scene: how little Gatsby is actually thinking about Daisy, or what she might be feeling. The tableau he’s set up is all about him, and he’s shocked when Nick points out part of the reason he’s going wrong. “You’re just embarrased, that’s all,” Nick tells him. “Daisy’s embarrssed too.” “She’s embarrassed?” Gatsby wants to know. He’s assumed both that Daisy is so poised that she couldn’t possibly be rattled, and that his return to her life will be a source of uncomplicated joy. It never seems to have occurred to Gatsby that Daisy is not, in fact, a princess in a tower, and that there might be a reason she hasn’t come looking for him.
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Given that there’s much more pressure on women to take their clothes off for roles in film, theater, and television than men, I wouldn’t normally go on the record rooting for a female actor to do nude scenes. But following Angelina Jolie’s announcement today that, in response to learning that she has a BRCA1 gene mutation that increases her likelihood of developing breast and ovarian cancer, she had a preventative double mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery, I’m hoping that Jolie won’t feel like she can’t do nude scenes in the future, if she feels drawn to roles that include nude or sex scenes.

Jolie is a strong dramatic actress, and is justly recognized for her international humanitarian and human rights work. But she also is also a strikingly good-looking woman whose film career has included a number of emotionally and physically naked sex scenes. And it’s because of that, as Amanda Hess wrote in Slate, that some observers are reacting to the news of her decision to take preventative health measures as if her career is over, or as if it’s a sign of some sort of desperation:

Commenters snarked that Jolie had received a “boob job.” Some suggested that her medical emergency was just a tabloid ruse to cover up elective breast implants. Others morbidly asked after the whereabouts of the breast tissue removed from her body. “RIP Angelina’s boobs” was a typical ignorant comment. Said one commenter on a Jezebel post about the op-ed, “How many guys stopped reading as soon as they realized Angelina Jolie has no breasts—she’s dead to me!”…perversely, some fans feel as if a part of Jolie has been stolen from them. One well-meaning but misguided commenter told me on Twitter yesterday: “Happy to hear she’s giving herself much better odds. As a guy, I will miss her lovely curves though.” (The reconstructive surgery she described presumably restored her curves.)

But as Hess pointed out, and Jolie herself clarified in her New York Times Op-Ed, her children “can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was.”

And I wonder if there might be some social value to mass audiences seeing those scars, too, and seeing that a woman who has them can still be sexual and sexy. It’s not as if pop culture never takes on the issues of women, breast cancer, and sexuality, but they often do so in a way that presents sex as a sign of recovery, or an act of tenderness before death. In Sex and the City, Samantha’s (Kim Cattrall) chemotherapy treatments diminished her famous libido, and when her boyfriend Smith returned from a movie shoot to visit her, they had rather comparatively tender sex to celebrate her recovery and their decision to commit to their relationship. Parenthood followed Kristina Braverman (Monica Potter) through her breast cancer treatments this season, and let her dress up in a hot pink wig for a date with her husband in a sign that her illness may have taken its toll, but it hadn’t robbed her of her of her femininity or her sexuality. And the 2005 romantic comedy The Family Stone included a sex scene between Diane Keaton, playing Sybil Stone, and Craig T. Nelson (who also stars in Parenthood) as her husband Kelly that was one of the few mainstream depictions I can think of a woman with a double mastectomy—but without the kind of reconstructive surgery Jolie experienced—who was treated as sexual and desirable.

Now, if Jolie has decided that she’s done with nude scenes or with sex scenes, that’s entirely her decision, and all of us should respect that. But if she does accept such roles in the future, I hope that she, and the writers and directors she works with, see her scars as a feature of her body, rather that some sort of grotesquerie to be hidden by shot angles or erased in post-production. Mastectomy scars should be treated like a physical characteristic that could inflect characters Jolie plays in the future without requiring major plot alterations or commentary. And it would be good for audiences, particularly of the kind that snarked on Jolie today for her brave revelation, to see that they don’t make her any less stunningly gorgeous.

I’m sure that some of you in the audience have experienced this before, whether Sally Draper gave you flashbacks on Mad Men, or movies like The Wedding Singer, Take Me Home Tonight, and Hot Tub Time Machine revived painful memories of eighties fashions. But I think it’s finally my turn to have pop culture make me feel old: we finally have enough instances to make a trend, and 1990s period pieces are officially a thing.

The evidence started building in 2008 with the release of the underrated* romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe, which starred Ryan Reynolds as a former Democratic political operative turned ad man who lost and found the loves of his life while working first on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and later in New York Mayoral politics. Then came Notorious, the 2009 biopic of rapper Christopher Wallace, who released the seminal album Ready to Die in 1994, only to be murdered three years later. And now, it seems, the dam has broken. A biopic of the R&B-pop crossover group TLC is in the works. And the nineties have crossed over to television, where Fox has picked up Surviving Jack, a comedy that stars Law & Order: Special Victims Unit veteran Chris Meloni as a father raising his son in Souther California “in a time before ‘coming of age’ was something you could Google.” It’s a fascinating moment, even if it makes my bones feel creaky, because I have no idea how Hollywood is going to decide are the signature conflicts and causes of this decade.

To a certain extent, it makes a lot of sense that the early attempts at 1990s period movies have been biopics, and particularly biopics about hip-hop and R&B artists. The rise of those forms, and the conquest of popular music by forms invented, popularized, and perfected by African-American artists are two of the signature cultural shifts and conflicts of the decade, and it’s wise of Hollywood to have identified them. Movies like these are appealing, too, because audiences are already attached to and interested in their subjects. Wallace’s murder remains unsolved, and his death remains a subject of fevered speculation a decade and a half after the fact. The death of Lisa Lopes, one-third of the original lineup of TLC, in 2002, has a clearer cause—she died in a car crash—but given that she was only 30 at the time, her early demise makes fans eager to cling to the period of her life that remains available to them.
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