In an interesting nod to Hollywood’s influence, tech titan Peter Thiel has suggested that his industry is being hurt hurt by its portrayal in Hollywood as a source of advancements with post-apocalyptic consequences:

Thiel, who made billions as a co-founder of PayPal and as an early investor in Facebook, told a standing-room only audience Monday that the high-tech industry is in “deceleration” due in no small part to movies like Avatar and The Matrix that make technological innovation seem “destructive and dysfunctional.”

Hollywood keeps making movies where “technology is going to kill you,” Thiel complained at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. He said the “Star Trek retread movies” are an exception. Thiel said other factors — like government regulation and a “risk-averse” business culture — also are hampering the tech industry, but it will be a “very good sign” when Hollywood stops making movies about scary new technologies.

I think this calculation is a bit off. Hollywood tends to portray technology in three broad categories: as a source of miracles and certainty in day-to-day life, as an industry that has large concentrations of smart, if socially awkward, people, and as a force that operates independent of its creators. Those first two categories are almost uniformly positive. And I think that the real damage would be done if science fiction suggested clearer connections between the current state of science and the possibility of future developments gone terribly wrong.

Technology really is everywhere in pop culture depictions of contemporary life, and almost uniformly portrayed as a source of good or an extremely useful tool. DNA matching is presented as so reliable on televised crime shows that it affects how juries view evidence, and how lawyers decide their cases. And it’s hardly the only technological miracle to make regular appearances on crime shows. Bones, a procedural I enjoy quite a bit, features everything from the Angelator, a computer simulation tool that can recreate all sorts of crime scenarios, crack codes, match faces, and pour through data, to the inventive experiments of Jack Hodgins who’s presented as a genius at analyzing particles and organic materials. And that’s just in the matter of biological science. Pop culture has adopted rapidly from presenting computers in and of themselves as magical portals—an early Veronica Mars episode treats the Internet Movie Database as if it’s something of a miracle—to treating them as tools that ordinary people can achieve wonders with, whether they’re empowered by blogging or tweeting (or sleuthing through social media), or hacking publications, databases, or processes, be it for good or evil. These are all tools that can be used for any number of ends, be they cruel or kind, but the capacities of technology are firmly under the control of the human beings who employ them, rather than independent entities with wills of their own.
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Jason Collins may be the first man to come out of the closet not just to people in his immediate circle, but to the country as a whole, while still actively pursuing a professional career in Major League Sports, but he wasn’t the first man out in baseball. That was Glenn Burke, who in the seventies was out to both Dodgers management and his teammates, and who came out nationally after his retirement. And apparently, Jamie Lee Curtis and her production company have been trying to get an adaptation of Burke’s autobiography into production, and are hoping the momentum of Collins’ announcement might help them make it happen. As Deadline summarizes the story:

Drafted by the Dodgers and touted as a potential star, Burke got off to a flying start when he became the only rookie to start in the 1977 World Series. Burke also took credit for inventing the high-five in 1977. Waiting on-deck at Dodger Stadium, he was first to congratulate teammate Dusty Baker with that up-high slap, after Baker hit his 30th home run in the last game of the season. While his adversity was nothing compared to what Dodger predecessor Jackie Robinson faced when he broke baseball’s color barrier, Burke’s decision to come out of the closet probably hastened his demise. In his autobiography, Burke wrote about how Dodgers GM Al Campanis offered to pay for a pricey honeymoon if Burke would get married in a Rock Hudson-like charade, but the ballplayer wasn’t going along with the sham. Campanis later was fired for appearing on Nightline and making outlandish racist remarks. Burke’s stats show he did not live up to the potential expected of him, but he seemed at peace with his decision to not hide his off the diamond life. “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it,” he said. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and died a year later at age 42.

One of the most important things movies can do is get under-acknowledged history to a mass audience. Milk, for example, mattered so much precisely because it introduced a mass audience to the idea that the gay rights movement was, in fact, a long-standing effort, and one that involved heroes and martyrs who fit into conventional narratives about sacrifices for social progress. A biopic of Burke could similarly help combat the idea that sports were a previously heterosexual zone that was somehow colonized by gay people, reminding mass audiences that there have always been gay athletes, even if they didn’t choose to share that fact with fans, or if fans weren’t astute enough to pick up on it.

And I’m also excited about the possibilities of a Burke biopic precisely because the audience would come to it with few assumptions and expectations. One of the things that I found deadening about 42, and what ultimately would have sucked the air out of any Jackie Robinson biopic was how familiar everyone was with the story. It’s mandatory to have set-pieces like Pee Wee Reese’s public embrace of Robinson or Leo Durocher’s dressing-down of the Dodgers who didn’t want to play with a black man, no matter how well or how human each of those moments has the potential to be. But with a story about Burke, nothing will be mandatory. Everything will be new. And as a result, the movie can be more human and relaxed, less stiffly conscious of history, something that serves good art, as well as humane arguments for equality.

Over at NPR, Sami Yenigun has a story that points out while the debate over whether popular culture inspires real-world violent actions is far from settled, there is one concrete link between the entertainment industry and the gun industry: product placement in films and licensing of gun images in video games:

Last year, Call of Duty earned half a billion dollars in a day. That same game features the long barrel and angled cartridge of a .50-caliber sniper rifle that’s a virtual copy of a real Barrett gun. According to Vejay Lalla, a lawyer who works with clients to clear brands in video games, that’s very much intentional. “Game developers essentially want to make sure that games are as realistic as possible,” he says.

So if the makers of Madden NFL want to use, say, the New England Patriots in their video game, they have to strike a deal with the NFL; and if the makers of Need For Speed want a bright orange Camaro in their game, they’re going to have to talk to Chevrolet.

Lalla hasn’t personally brokered any deals between gun companies and video game companies, but he says product placement for guns works the same way. Video game makers use realistic, brand-name weapons, and then depending on how the brand is portrayed, they decide whether to license the name. “If the gun is instrumental in the game or visible or used often, then typically there is a clearance process involved,” Lalla says

Obviously, the use of guns in video games, movies, and television, and the use of other implements of mayhem, including fists, have their own distinct appeal. Hand-to-hand fighting lets a character in film or television demonstrate their toughness in myriad ways, from their ability to take a punch to their willingness to inflict damage on someone else in a direct way—The Americans has done an excellent job of this with Elizabeth Jennings character, whether she’s fighting back against an attacker in training or beating Claudia, her handler, and an older woman, in retaliation for Claudia ordering Elizabeth and her husband interrogated. Similarly, fighting games let players step into someone else’s body and take on someone else’s capacities. And fist fights can be a way of making entertainment violence more visceral and more personal, closing the physical gap between combatants, or between assailant and victim. Or it can abstract, showing characters who have the capacity to take inhuman amounts of damage and keep going. But whatever they do, they can’t really burnish the image of or encourage the purchase of a particular product. We all have fists already.

If the entertainment industry wants to distance itself from the gun industry and from real-world violence, there are a couple of things they could do that would improve their range of storytelling as well as cleaning up their consciences. They could stop licensing images of specific weapons and, in products that aren’t live action, design their own weapons. Directors could change the way they shoot weapons as aesthetic objects. Writers and directors could vary the ways that guns are used and cause harm, including incidents where they’re brandished but not discharged, their use in suicides, and accidental gun deaths, rather than portraying them as objects that are only associated with heroic competence. The Good Wife‘s first-season episode “Bad,” for example, did a nice job of exploring a range of feelings about gun possession ranging from Kalinda’s ease to Diane’s discomfort—the episode didn’t deny that guns can be used effectively in self-defense, but it acknowledged that Diane wasn’t comfortable using a gun that way and that she had a perfect right to stay as far away from guns as she wanted to. And Lord of War, one of the more underrated elements of Nicolas Cage’s ouvre, did an extremely effective job of parsing both our fascination with guns and our revulsion with what they can actually do to human bodies and human beings. Like any story-telling element, guns can get monotonous if they’re used the same way every time. Acknowledging their power and mixing up their use could be a path to creative revitalization, and to giving Hollywood a stronger position than pulling episodes of television shows in the wake of disaster does.

Pain and Gain, the action-black comedy hybrid about a team of Miami bodybuilders on a violent crime spree that’s baed on a true early 1990s case that opens this weekend, is an impressive chronicle of the persuasive power of American dumbness. That it’s directed by Michael Bay, a man who’s amassed a considerable fortune by purveying the kind of dumbness at which he now takes cockeyed aim does nothing to diminish the considerable, sick charms of the movie. In between the movie’s engagement with male body image and entitlement, its portrayal of the way the American dream can deform like candle wax, crackerjack performances by Mark Wahlberg, Dwanye Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shaloub, and Rebel Wilson, and the rather provocative question of Bay’s level of self-awareness, Pain and Gain may be the smartest dumb movie of the summer.

The story follows three Miami-based bodybuilders, Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), who work together as trainers at Sun Gym, and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ex-convict who’s chosen Miami, of all places, to try to maintain his sobriety. They turn to crime when Lugo, who’s obsessed with the results of self-improvement if not precisely conversant with the means of achieving it legitimately—he served time on an investment scam—decides that one of his clients, a businessman named Victor Kershaw (Shaloub) , is living the life that ought to be Lugo’s own. “I didn’t hate him. I just thought it would be cool to see France,” Danny explains to us initially. But his resentments harden into a kind of entitlement, one based in part on the disparity between the amount of time he spends working on his body and the time Kershaw devotes to his own physique. “We’re supermen,” Danny tells Adrian. “Don’t you think we deserve better? Because I do.” After recruiting Paul to their cause, the three men kidnap Victor, lock him up in his own sex toy distributorship, and proceed to torture him until he signs their assets over to them. But while the movie’s plot is a crime story, its themes are self-delusion, incredulity, and their related consequences.

Everyone in Pain and Gain is obsessed with the movies, and one of the film’s running jokes is the way people take the wrong lessons away from their favorite movies. “Michael Corleone didn’t become the Godfather by following rules,” Daniel insists, missing the point that Daniel’s transformation into the Godfather is a tragedy that upsets generations of planning, rather than his actual goal. “He did it by keeping a gun behind the toilet and knowing what he wanted.” “I knew the only place a woman like me could be appreciated in the United States,” says Sorina (Bar Paly), a stripper at the club where the gang likes to hang out. “I saw Pretty Woman.” But her assessment of that movie is that Julia Roberts got a shopping trip by showing Richard Gere her vagina, rather than that she got her way out of poverty and sex work by being appealing and emotionally open. Sorina gets her shopping spree, in part because she doesn’t know to want anything else. And they collapse the distinction between the movies and reality on a regular basis. When Danny wants to reassure Paul that his ideas for kidnapping and extortion are viable, he tells the more naive man “I watched a lotta movies, Paul. I know what I’m doing.” Pain and Gain, to be clear, serves up many of the same vulgar pleasures that have lead its characters astray, from gorgeous, unclothed women, to the sick joke of a small dog chomping down on a dismembered toe, but in a movie that’s partially about about the power of such provocations, it’s hard to accuse Bay of hypocrisy—he’s telling us what works, and challenging us to distance ourselves from our enjoyments.
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After the success of Rob Thomas’ efforts to crowdfund a Veronica Mars movie through Kickstarter, it was inevitable that some other auteur with a significant fanbase would follow his lead. That person is now Zach Braff, who as of this writing has raised about $954,000 out of a $2 million goal to make Wish I Was Here, a movie he’s described as a follow-up to Garden State. Not surprisingly, a lot of people are irked, mostly on the grounds that Braff is rich and could have, in their estimation, funded the project himself. I’m less certain of that, because in my experience, even having a lot of money by normal-person standards doesn’t allow you to fund a string of high-quality Hollywood productions, and I understand the desire to look for a funding base you could go back to time and time again. But I am anxious about the idea that Hollywood projects will start flocking to Kickstarter in droves to get financing for another reason: we’re a long way from making sure that these arrangements will be truly fair to fans who are investing in their dream projects.

Movie projects aren’t the only businesses where crowdfunding is increasingly seen as an attractive alternative to other funding options. As Kylie MacLellan wrote earlier this month, “As banks rein in lending due to tougher capital rules and greater regulatory scrutiny, crowdfunding, which originated in the United States as a way to raise money for creative projects, has expanded rapidly as an alternative source of finance.” But even though President Obama in 2012 signed into law a bill that would pave the way for crowdfunders to get equity in the projects they invest in, the Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to complete writing the rules that would regulate that process. That means there’s still no legal pathway for people who contribute to projects through Kickstarter or through other portals to get equity in said projects, or for the people who set up those projects to give equity to them. There are powerful interests, including venture capital firms, who would prefer not to see crowdfunding become an alternative to them. And apparently the SEC has concerns, including about fraud, that it’s still resolving in its rule-writing process.

Frankly, I can also see a situation in which Hollywood projects would prefer not to be able to offer equity to the people who are willing to pony up to support their projects. It might be irritating to do rewards fulfillment, particularly if a large number of people invest. But Warner Brothers is helping Rob Thomas and the crew of the Veronica Mars movie handle that element of the funding process. And giving out those rewards, even if it takes some manpower, is ultimately cheaper than having to give up a stake in the profits. If a movie project neither has to pay back a large investor, be it an individual or an institution, and is prohibited by law from giving crowdfunded donors equity in the movie, then the people making that movie will get to keep more of the profits from it, and will get to the stage where they can make profits much more quickly. In other words, crowdfunding may let audiences support projects they’re enthusiastic about. But they also eliminate the need to pay anyone back.
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As the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev unwound last Friday, one of the most common anxious jokes I heard was that when it was all over over, Ben Affleck, who grew up in the Boston area and made his bones with movies like Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone, and The Town was going to walk away with an armload of Academy Awards for whatever movie he inevitably makes about the Boston Marathon bombing—and bombers. Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner explain that it’s possible that Tsarnaev, who is recovering from serious injuries and has been indicted on charges of weapons of mass destruction use and malicious damage of property resulting in death, could try to hire an entertainment lawyer to negotiate the sale of his life rights, or to block a movie about him altogether:

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

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

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

This post discusses the ninth and tenth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I’m coming to really enjoy about Veronica Mars is the way, compared to other television shows and movies about being a teenager, social groups are relatively fluid. This was an insight that Mean Girls, which made its bow in theaters five months before Veronica Mars debuted on television, made brilliantly at its conclusion: that being a Plastic was a temporary condition rather than an ontological one, and it could pass with the end of a school year or on the occasion of a momentous bus accident. Veronica Mars actually takes that idea a step further in these two episodes, which serve as an illustration of how porous the 09ers are as a clique. They’re people, after all, rather than rigid a fraternal order, and their social group can’t actually provide everything they want, whether it’s support in being more compassionate than their parents or someone who’s willing to ante up for a genuinely high-stakes poker game. Veronica herself has always been a reminder of that fact, but these two episodes are a reminder that she’s not an exception—she’s actually more of the rule at Neptune.

The Moon Calves subplot in “Drinking The Kool-Aid” is a little half-baked, unfortunately—it’s an over-the-top way to get at a concept that might have been fleshed out on a smaller scale, that being one of the 09ers, and being part of one of Neptune’s wealthy families, is actually a corrosive and disillusioning experience. Casey (Jonathan Bennett, who played Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls), has come to realize that, as he puts it, “I wrote the Jackass Bible, the Jackass Koran, the Jackass Talmud.” His parents, who have been wealthy their whole lives, let the desire to keep consolidating their wealth corrupt their interpersonal relationships, particularly with Casey’s grandmother. “My parents, who call her Grandmonster behind her back, stopped paying attention to her,” he explains. Having him work out those issues through a cult gives Veronica and her dad a case, but it’s also a kind of quick way to dispense.

By contrast, the person who appears to be working out those issues on a relatively large scale and over an extended period of time is Logan Echolls. The show’s taken time to establish the misery that lies behind the gates to his family home, some of the tension between him and his friends, and the ways in which managing his pain at Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried, another link to Mean Girls) has lead him to tweak Neptune’s establishment by helping Veronica subvert the whitewashed memorial the Kanes had planned for her. And one of the things the show is doing now that we know these things about him is showing how his relationships with Weevil and Veronica, the main people he hangs out with who aren’t 09ers, are shaping up like fencing matches, shaped by the participants’ needs and the ground they’re willing to surrender.

“What if I run into a pack of you white boys on some clean, well-lit street? I could be bored to death,” Weevil tells Logan when he’s trying to get in on his poker game. The language of the negotiation between them is similar to what it was when Weevil was going after Logan’s car in the pilot. “You people can hand-roll like nobody’s business,” Logan tells him of the Cuban cigars he’s passing around, and when Weevil wins big, Logan tells the other player “Sean, the money box so I can pay the pool boy?” But the fact that Weevil’s seeking out the invitation at all, and that Logan’s willing to grant it—and that when the theft goes down, Logan’s willing to let Weevil search his friends rather than calling security and having him tossed out—demonstrates how far the two of them have come. I’m not sure how their relationship will shape up long-term given that there seems to be a great deal we don’t know about Weevil’s relationship to Lilly, and how Logan might react when he—and we—find out what the truth is there. But the fact that they were both drawn to the same girl, that they both have parental figures who are willing to sacrifice them for their own good, whether it’s Logan for his good name or Weevil’s grandmother who believes he can do shorter time as a juvenile, suggests a similarity to them that is obvious to us, even if they can’t see the extent of it.

And that’s also true for Logan and Veronica as well. Of course, they were friends for real, once. And it means that Logan’s willing to let Veronica back in when she volunteers to investigate the poker game theft. “Annoy, tiny blonde one! Annoy like the wind!” Logan tells her, more affectionately than anyone else. “You are a natural at this,” Weevil tells Veronica when they stop by the Echolls’ ill-fated Christmas party. But the truth is that it’s just as normal for Logan to want people like Weevil and Veronica in his life as it would be for Weevil and Veronica to want in to the mansion, with its catering and its horribly over-the-top Christmas decorations. As Sean’s experience faking it as a member of the 09ers illustrates, it’s exhausting and ultimately unsustainable to posture all the time, even when you do have the money and social position to back up your bravado. Negotiating the minefield of high school is tiresome no matter who you are. And sometimes the best friendships can survive in the clandestine spaces in between cliques, where nothing is clearly expected, and as a result, everything is possible.

According to Deadline, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the producers of the Academy Awards, apparently have mistaken a flat, ugly Oscars hosting performance by Seth MacFarlane for “relevance,” and asked him back to host again next year. Given that part of the reason MacFarlane was asked to host this year is because he has a side musical career and this was supposed to be a salute to the Oscars in music, an idea that was conveyed much better by Shirley Bassey straight killing it than by anything MacFarlane himself did, I wonder what the rationale is this time around. Is it going to be a salute to animation, a kind of filmmaking the Academy has traditionally refused to treat as if it’s as serious as live-action movies, hosted by a bunch of MacFarlane’s creations?

Word in Deadline’s story is that we might be saved a repeat if only because MacFarlane already said no to coming back, and because he’s very, very busy doing other things that will make him much more money. But in any case, that Zadan and Meron would ask again has me hoping that someone is smart enough to hire Retta to live-snark the ceremony MSTK3000-style. It may be the only way I get through this thing next year.

On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

Joshua Alston has a terrific piece at the AV Club about how white critics have treated Tyler Perry movies and television shows. He argues that there’s been a strong tendency to treat Perry with deference because white critics either feel a need to extent points to Perry given that he’s one of the primary filmmakers who is interested in serving African-American audiences in general, or feel that their whiteness disqualifies them from specifically discussing Perry’s treatment of race. And Alston suggests that the dam has broken on Perry in recent weeks in part because his treatment of HIV has given critics another way in to criticize Perry on content grounds:

Temptation has given white critics free rein to trash Perry with impunity, because it allows them to skirt the racial implications of the work, and instead go after his harmful messages about HIV and women’s bodies. Even that is kind of an accident; the reaction to Temptation doesn’t exist in a bubble. The movie was released less than two weeks after the verdict came down in the Steubenville rape case. Any other time, Temptation might have won the types of confused, perplexing mainstream reviews Perry’s movies usually get, but at a time when rape and the politics of women’s bodies were commanding the zeitgeist, Temptation’s implication that women are complicit in their victimization by men couldn’t have been a more unwelcome message. It was so unwelcome, it was enough to encourage white critics, who are generally all too happy to stay out of the knottier conversations about Perry’s work, to attack once the dialogue moved to a topic they felt more comfortable engaging.

I’ve written a great deal about white television and screenwriters’ reluctance either to create characters of color at all, or to design characters of color who have any personality elements or perspectives drawn from their experiences as people of color, out of grave—and not necessarily misguided—fears of giving offense, speaking for others, or getting wrong experiences that are not their own. And I’ve also argued that the best way to give over that fear is to recognize that whiteness is a race rather than a neutral default. In other words, it’s as easy and thoughtful to think about what a Southern African-American family might serve at a typical dinner as it is to consider whether your Jewish characters keep kosher, or about how an Irish-American family might handle their kid getting in trouble in ways that are different from a Chinese-American family.

I think this is an approach that might serve white critics well, too. This is not to say, of course, that white critics should be some sort of final arbiters on the handling of race in America—critic corps need to diversify as much as the writing staffs of the industries that we cover. But I think we’d do well to write more about how shows constitute various kinds of whiteness as well as they do any other race, and to be intersectional in our approach when we write about class, gender, and sexuality. The construction of cops as Irish in The Wire—even to the extent of Lester Freamon singing The Pogues at a wake—is as important and interesting as the many conceptions of blackness on that show. One of the reasons Max on Happy Endings is so striking is not just that he defies physical types and standards of behavior for gay men, but in the way he defies physical types and standards of behavior for Jewish men. Justified has made strong use of Boyd Crowder’s racism, as well as his stints as a miner and a preacher, to depict a man in search of an identity, and who treats his race as a potential source of it. I’m excited to catch up on Shameless at some point precisely to see how the Gallaghers are treated. One of the reasons I think Mad Men would be a better show if it was willing to bring the racial friction of its time period closer to the center of the show, or even to just once treat it as a significant plot point, is because I think it would be interesting to see it explore gains and losses of privilege not just along gender lines, but racial ones as well—what did it really mean for Paul Kinsey and Lane Pryce to be people who could pursue relationships with black women? Is Peggy mentoring her African-American secretary, or merely treating her well, something that was implied in the last episode and that I’d like to see explored in greater detail.

If white critics or film and television writers are afraid of writing about race because we’re afraid of speaking for or about other people, the simplest solution is to stop and realize that writing about race means writing about ourselves as well.