In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer, who has covered the industrialists Charles and David Koch extensively, chronicles the fate of two documentaries produced for PBS, Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue, which explored the lives of both wealthy residents of a single building on one end of the street and poorer New Yorkers at the other, and Citizen Koch, which examined the consequences of the Citizens United decision. Both movies ran into trouble for the same reason: fear of offending David Koch, who has been a major public television donor, and was until recently on the board of New York public television affiliate WNET. While Park Avenue eventually made it to air on PBS, albeit with a recut introduction and a discussion afterwards that excluded Gibney, Citizen Koch, which was initially supposed to be part of the Independent Lens series, ended up off the lineup. Whether or not David Koch was involved, Mayer’s story would still be interesting as an illustration of what happens when two different philanthropic models bump up against each other.

On one side are the foundations. Gibney’s documentary, Mayer reported, “had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation.” And both Park Avenue and Citizen Koch were projects of the Independent Television Service, “the small arm of public television that funds and distributes independent films…ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure. Its mandate is to showcase opinionated filmmakers who ‘take creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on public or commercial television.’” These foundations represent a mission rather than a personal interest, and that mission is to create space and provide support for a range of ideas, rather than to advance particular arguments or worldviews. It’s a critically important role to fill, but it also means that those organizations have some disadvantages when they come up against the other funding model at stake here, in this case, the support of private donors.

As Mayer explains, in addition to his donations to Lincoln Center—where the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, bears his name—” In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.” Unlike ITVS, for example, which is designed specifically to produce content for public television, there are a lot of places David Koch can spend his money. And unlike ITVS, which has an ongoing mission of making sure that new points of view make it onto public television, a setup that means it’s going to have to expend political capital on behalf of its filmmakers on a regular basis, private donors like Koch are more likely to concentrate their leverage on a few issues, or a few pieces of content. If Koch can make a “seven-figure donation,” which Mayer reported he had planned to give to WNET before he resigned from the board, contingent on two hours of programming, while ITVS has to fight for many films—PBS has already aired 15 movies through ITVS’ Independent Lens program in 2013—ITVS is understandably going to be at a disadvantage, as is the Gates Foundation, which may be all too happy to fund a single film, but doesn’t necessarily want to be in the postion to cover a multi-million dollar hole.
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Alex Ross has a long and fascinating essay in the New Yorker on gay equality and culture change writ large, and I thought this section of the piece, about how camp culture has become something that everyone wants access to, rather than a refuge for people who were excluded from other aspects of culture and civic life, was particularly important:

In the nineties, there was a vogue for the phrase “post-gay,” signifying life outside the ghetto, and in 2005 Andrew Sullivan announced the “end of gay culture.” Yet, like Sarah Bernhardt, camp always seems to be coming around for one more farewell tour. Chris Colfer, the fearlessly swishy young actor who has become the star of “Glee,” has revived the cult of Judy and Babs for the post-millennial generation. Curiously, Halperin doesn’t mention “Glee,” but he says that his gay students lap up all that antiquated lore, effortlessly unravelling its codes. He also notes that the gay audience tends to lose interest when coded messages give way to explicitly affirmative ones. Lady Gaga tried to write a new gay anthem with “Born This Way,” yet the song failed to ignite the clubs and bars as “Poker Face” had before it. Subtext is sexier.

In the straight world, meanwhile, the mortal fear of being mistaken for gay is weakening. Halperin could have added a chapter on the semiotics of “Call Me Maybe,” the pop ditty by Carly Rae Jepsen that became a monster hit this past summer, thanks in part to YouTube videos where everyone from Justin Bieber to Colin Powell was seen singing along. The official video gave the song a queer vibe from the outset: the singer sees a half-naked young man mowing the lawn, requests a possible telephone connection, and then discovers, to her dismay, that he prefers his own kind. (His “Call me” pantomime to another guy is more than a bit camp.) The most popular of the lip-synch videos features members of the Harvard baseball team, in all their macho splendor. Such gayish cavorting would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Likewise, you knew that the days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were numbered when soldiers stationed in war zones uploaded videos of themselves prancing suggestively to Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah” and other dance hits. At certain moments, straight people can seem gayer than the gays.

The interesting question here, and the one that other liberation movements could learn from, is how gayness and gay culture were successfully sold to mass audiences as aspirational and compelling, something that everyone wanted admission to, rather than a response to exclusion. Will and Grace may have started Joe Biden on his road to marriage equality, but it’s not as if it was one show, or one song that was the tipping point. And this isn’t a simple story of one half of a binary taking its place as desirable while the other half spent its time in darkness. It’s about how camp and heterosexuality learned to live together, how we learned to decouple cultural signifiers from our identities. That’s a major achievement, and one I’m not sure we’ve totally reckoned with yet.

The debate over whether genre fiction can ever count as literature is back, this time in the form of an essay from Arthur Krystal at the New Yorker. I don’t much agree with the piece, because I think it’s totally ludicrous to say that “Writers who want to understand why the heart has reasons that reason cannot know are not going to write horror tales or police procedurals. Why say otherwise?” when environments of stress, grief, or transitions between old worlds and new ones are precisely those that expose the reasons that reasons cannot know. But I actually think it’s a great example of the dodge people like Krystal perform to justify treating genre as lesser than an amorphously-defined “literature.” He writes:

The science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, announced that literature “is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.” Is that so? A novel by definition is “written art”? You know, I wrote a novel once, and I’m pretty sure that Le Guin would change her mind if she read it…

What I’m trying to say is that “genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it. Commercial novels, in general, whether they’re thrillers or romance or science fiction, employ language that is at best undistinguished and at worst characterized by a jejune mentality and a tendency to state the obvious. Which is not to say that some literary novels, as more than a few readers pointed out to me, do not contain a surfeit of decorative description, elaborate psychologizing, and gleams of self-conscious irony. To which I say: so what?

What he’s doing here is clever: essentially, Krystal is holding genre responsible for the worst stuff written in its name, while literature doesn’t have to be responsible for, say, romance novels, or Nicholas Sparks weepies. Genre is determined to be genre because it includes certain kinds of plots or takes place in certain kinds of settings. Literature is a determination of quality. Treating them as if they’re similar categories for sorting out novels, film, or television is a brilliant dodge on the part of people who don’t want to recognize that genre fiction can be literature. Why they’re resistant to that recognition is the really interesting question.

On Friday afternoon, Gawker published a long profile of a Reddit moderator who went by Violentacrez. A Texas programmer in real life, Violentacrez has helped shape Reddit’s norms, mentoring and writing documentation for moderators, scrubbing the site for patently illegal content, but also helping establish some of its most distasteful subsections, some openly racist, and others devoted to posting and discussion of sexualized images of very young women taken or republished without their consent. It’s very, very ugly behavior, and Violentacrez, who became a Reddit star, represents the outer limit of speech Reddit will defend. Reddit subsections have responded to the profile by collectively banning links from Gawker sites. But whatever your opinion of publishing Violentacrez’s real identity, the profile and the conversation around it have furthered discussions about a range of misogynistic behaviors, from the belief that men are entitled to images of women, even those obtained invasively, to the idea that men have a more valid right to protection of their identities or to sexual gratification than women have to be free of harassment or to name harassing behavior for what it is.

In the midst of the discussion of the Gawker piece, New Yorker television critic and friend of this blog Emily Nussbaum tweeted “The whole Gawker/Reddit expose is reminding me how thoughtful & prescient Buffy Season 6 was about exactly this type of geek misogyny.” It’s a brilliant observation, and I’d take it a step further. The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the titular demon hunter and her friends find themselves harassed by three young men, Jonathan Levinson, Andrew Wells, and Warren Mears, who call themselves The Trio. These characters are each an important example of three different and damaging kinds of views men can have of women, and what toxic and tragic things can come to pass when those different worldviews are conflated and intermingled.

When we meet Jonathan Levinson, the member of the Trio who has the longest history with Buffy and her friends, he seems awfully like some of the men on Reddit and elsewhere who express profound yearning for emotional and sexual connection with women (in particular), but are afraid such connections are permanently beyond their grasp. His failed high school relationships, which take place on the periphery of Buffy’s adventures, read like a litany of stereotypical complaints about the true motivations of women. There’s the reincarnated Inca princess who wants him for his life-force rather than his person. Cordelia Chase, a popular and beautiful girl, uses him to get over her own feelings of rejection with little regard for Jonathan’s emotions. Later, he has a date to prom who apparently doesn’t last. Jonathan struggles with suicidal impulses that Buffy initially mistakes for murderousness, an indicator of his profound self-hatred. And while Jonathan recovers enough to want to live, to honor Buffy for protecting him and other students at prom, he remains profoundly alienated and insecure.
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James Woods’ review of Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel Back to Blood is a fairly comprehensive dismantling, taking on everything from the way Wolfe overcooks every sentiment until they blend together in a grey mush to some of the creepy racial attitudes in Wolfe’s depictions of the overmuscled physiques of his characters of color. But beyond the novel itself, Woods makes an argument about how research can serve fiction, or undermine it:

Over the years, Tom Wolfe has campaigned strenuously on behalf of the journalistic role in fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and elsewhere, he has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because American novelists aren’t looking at the world. According to him, they’ve retreated from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, because they’ve exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn, Wolfe claims, when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. Not only will such reporting produce the little details, “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude”; it is essential for literature’s greatest effects. American fiction, grounded in “a highly detailed realism,” will properly emulate the Zola who went down into the mines in Anzin, in 1884, to do research. While underground, Wolfe says, Zola discovered that the pit horses lived and died in situ; when he transfers this found detail to the pages of his novel “Germinal,” the reader is moved and aghast….

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and “Hotchkiss, Yale . . . six-three.” At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys “a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, ‘little pies’ of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it. . . . He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy.” It’s a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes. But the detail about the pastelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research. Like everything else in this book, it is imparted information, and is thus the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt. Ivan’s French prunes come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus: Why prunes? Why French prunes?

This is something I consider a great deal, and I tend to think that research should serve three main purposes in fiction, whether it’s fiction that means to comment on the real world, or to dream beyond it, both equally valid aims:

1. It should identify conditions and conflicts that provide rich drama: So much of what’s important about research, whether it comes through formal reporting or new life experiences, is identifying new stories and conflicts in the first place. David Simon’s reporting is the reason he could identify bureaucratic tensions and criminal rivalries that would be the basis for The Wire. Thomas Mann might not have seized on sanatoriums as a subject, one of the examples Woods offers up, had his wife not ended up in one. Whether you think they should have happened at all, t’ll be interesting to see how Kathryn Bigelow’s conversations with the Obama administration end up affecting Zero Dark Thirty.

2. It can be a source of unexpected details that make characters more fully-rounded people: Woods’ complaint about Wolfe’s use of pastelitos is not that the description of them isn’t accurate, but that it’s unsurprising. Knowing that a Cuban character enjoys traditional Cuban food doesn’t necessarily add much to our sense of that character as a distinct person. But learning, as was the case with the opening of this season of Mad Men, that Madison Avenue advertising executives were stupid enough to throw water balloons at Civil Rights protestors, both creates a powerful little anecdote and exposes the gap between the sophisticated facade of self-appointed masters of the universe and the reality of their behavior.

3. It should avoid errors that take knowledgable viewers out of the story: It may be a little thing to complain about, but one of the most irritating things that television, in particular, does, is name a location where something is happening in the name of credibility, and then show a place that is patently not that location. Homeland committed a particularly egregious violation of this sort last season when it said an attack was going to take place in Farragut Square in Washington, DC, and then used a location that had precisely nothing in common with the block-sized park. Slips like that may not matter for the majority of viewers of any given cultural artifact. But it’s silly to gesture at realistic detail and immediately undermine the attempt. I’m not saying that everything in fiction has to function exactly the way it does in the real world—fact-checking is an awfully boring way to watch television. But if you’re commenting on the world as it is, or putting characters in a familiar world, considering whether the choices you’re making and the details you’re including pull consumers out of the universe you’ve created or create internal contradictions will serve you as well as them.

There could not have been a more striking week for Salman Rushdie to discuss how his life changed after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on him for writing The Satanic Verses than this one. His piece in The New Yorker is written in the third person, which makes sense as a way of examining events that must have been so disassociating that I can imagine it seemed impossible to Rushdie that they were happening to him. And it is a powerful articulation not just of how profound and real the threats can be against people who articulate ideas that fundamentalists find—or pronounce, anyway—abhorrent, but of how these kinds of disasters come to pass, and the dreadful alchemy ideas are subject to when they do.

“Where Americans prize individual choice, Egyptians put a greater emphasis on the rights of communities, families and religious groups,” David Kirkpatrick, Helene Cooper, and Mark Landler wrote in the New York Times today, explaining President Obama’s calls to Egypt in an effort to control the spreading protests at American embassies. And Rushdie writes about attempting to navigate some of those values in his own life as he tried to evade the fatwa: “Yes, we should be conscious of the sensibilities of others, but that did not mean we should surrender to them,” Rushdie writes as the thing he wanted to say when he issued his public statement, on the advice of the British government, after he went into hiding. But this is the crux of the problem that the Times reporters articulated. How do we forge an agreement when one party to a negotiation is demanding the right never to be offended and the other is demanding the right to speak and to be read seriously and thoughtfully?

“The British edition of ‘The Satanic Verses’ came out on Monday, September 26, 1988, and, for a brief moment that fall, the publication was a literary event, discussed in the language of books,” Rushdie reminisces. “Soon enough, the language of literature would be drowned in the cacophony of other discourses—political, religious, sociological, postcolonial—and the subject of quality, of artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous.” As much as the right to write and to speak, Rushdie’s Personal History here is about the need for both sides in these conversations to be equally engaged. Just as it’s tragic that the people who pronounced a fatwa against Rushdie failed to read his respect for Muhammad’s repudiation of the Satanic Verses, or to recognize that the insults against Muslims in the novel are spoken by villains rather than heroes, it’s infuriating that the people protesting against Innocence of Muslims, the crude trailer for an unfinished film, produced in a way that deceived even the people who were acting in it, are refusing to consider the film’s utter irrelevance in measuring their anger. If only the people who riot against books and movies, who bomb libraries and attack diplomats, would read them and watch them.

Salman Rushdie and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the force behind Innocence of Muslims, are very different men. The former is an artist, the later a check-kiter, a meth cook, a fraud. And the thing that divides them most is their intentions. “It did not strike his opponents as strange that a serious writer should spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult,” Rushdie writes of the frustration of watching the reality of his novel sink under the waters of public conversation. “This was because they refused to see him as a serious writer. In order to attack him and his work, they had to paint him as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist who ‘attacked Islam” for his own personal gain’…He did it for money. He did it for fame. The Jews made him do it. Nobody would have bought his unreadable book if he hadn’t vilified Islam. That was the nature of the attack, and so for many years ‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. And he became the Insulter, not only in Muslim eyes but in the opinion of the public at large.”

Nakoula is, to a certain extent, the thing that Rushdie was accused of being. He described his film as explicitly political—its intent was to provoke, though I doubt whether it will be judged to have met the threshold for inciting violence. A Coptic Christian, he initially presented himself as Israeli and the film as financed by Israeli backers, perpetrating the kind of lie of a Jewish conspiracy to insult Islam Rushdie was accused of being part of. And while, as Rushdie says of his novel in the wake of the fatawa, “the subject of quality, of artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous,” it remains relevant here, if only because it is emotionally easier to defend a man like Rushdie than it is to defend a man like Nakoula. The truth, though, is that we must accept the possibility of Nakoulas if we are to have our Rushdies. The challenge, as it was in 1989, is whether it’s ever possible to explain to people who accept the existence of neither why we value the latter enough to tolerate the former.

Tom Hiddleston, who plays Asgardian god Loki in Thor and will be the main antagonist of The Avengers, pens a nice little reflection on the impact of superheroes on his own actorly ambitions, and the role superhero stories can play in exploring big questions:

Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths can be explored. In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good. The possibility of redemption is right around the corner, but we have to earn it.

The Hulk is the perfect metaphor for our fear of anger; its destructive consequences, its consuming fire. There’s not a soul on this earth who hasn’t wanted to “Hulk smash” something in their lives. And when the heat of rage cools, all that we are left with is shame and regret. Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s humble alter ego, is as appalled by his anger as we are. That other superhero Bruce – Wayne – is the superhero-Hamlet: a brooding soul, misunderstood, alone, for ever condemned to avenge the unjust murder of his parents. Captain America is a poster boy for martial heroism in military combat: the natural leader, the war hero. Spider-Man is the eternal adolescent – Peter Parker’s arachnid counterpart is an embodiment of his best-kept secret – his independent thought and power.

I don’t know if arguments like this will convince doubters like the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane to take superhero movies seriously. But it makes the point that these holdouts are a minority. All critics have biases, and perhaps it’s better that those biases be put on display by someone like Lane, who thinks that Battlestar Galactica is a waste of his infinitely precious time, or the New York Times reviewers who make their contempt for fantasy every time they write about Game of Thrones. I’m not saying that genre material should be turned over to reviewers who privilege science fiction or fantasy over other frameworks. But if you want to give culture that a lot of people take seriously a fair shake, it’s probably worth assigning it to a reviewer who is open-minded about it. Bad things can make a lot of money, or garner high ratings. But quality doesn’t automatically decline as profits and ratings increase. It’s a shame that some folks deny themselves great fun out of close-mindedness, and unfortunate when they try to dissuade others from that enjoyment as well.

There’s no publication in America that does more with its cover and interstitial art than The New Yorker, whether it’s Art Spiegelman’s lovely, heartbroken commemoration of the September 11 attacks, his commentary on the Crown Heights riots in 1993 or Barry Blitt’s wicked satire on the so-called “terrorist fist bump.” So it’s a pleasure to see them do it again this week with a series of illustrations interrogating Geraldo Rivera’s idiotic declaration that wearing a hoodie made Trayvon Martin seem more legitimately suspicious to George Zimmerman.

The magazine’s hoodie-wearing figures include an older man with a cane, a woman in elegant heels, a child, a vigil attendee. In their quiet way, they illustrate how irrelevant the piece of clothing is—a hoodie can be a tool for a playful peekaboo or a shy glance out at the world, a solemn frame, or a simple convenience. And you can look beyond the hoodie, and still fail to see the full humanity of the person underneath it.