This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the second season of Homeland.

“Tonight is Thursday. I make dinner for the family on Thursdays. I’m making vegetable lasagna with vegetables I picked from the garden this morning,” Carrie Mathison says, with increasing desperation when the CIA comes for her, six months after they came for her job, six months after she burned out part of her brain to try to silence it. “I don’t want to see him. I’ve put all of this away.” Homeland, which won the Emmy award for best drama last weekend, much to my delight, is a plot-heavy thriller, but it’s also a deeply humane show about the pleasures and connections war denies us. And it makes sense to me that as it begins its second season, “The Smile,” from its titles to its details, constantly returns to questions of how its characters feel about their roles in the Great Game of story, and of the war on terror.

When we first met Carrie a year ago, she was living alone in a relatively anonymous town house, pursuing one-night stands, and flouting the rules of her agency to set up surveillance on Nicholas Brody, a recently-returned prisoner of war who triggered an old warning from one of her informants. The Carrie we meet outside of the agency is someone who has acknowledged her mental illness rather than managing it erratically in secret, who lives with her father and sister rather than by herself, who teaches rather than interacts, and who sees that Israel has struck Iran’s nuclear development sites, but observes rather than acting. When her mentor Saul recalls Carrie to active, if temporary, duty because one of her sources, a Lebanese woman who “had a weakness for American movies. She loved Julia Roberts,” there’s a deep cruelty and kindess in the call. Carrie has sacrificed the nimblest part of her mind (if not the best of her self) to the maintenance of her sanity, had it treated like trash by her mentors and enemies. Saul’s call offers a chance for Carrie to serve, and to reclaim some of her damaged reputation, but it’s freighted with two terrible possibilities: Carrie could fail and have her brokenness reaffirmed, or she could succeed but remain shut out of the place that to her was once a kind of tortured heaven.

In a sense, Carrie begins this second season in the same place Brody began the first: believing that she is the vessel for a mission she has neither the desire nor the political capital to shape. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be going if I had a choice,” she tells her sister, shoving choice away from her the way Brody initially did on his return to the United States. “You do have a choice. You always have a choice,” her sister begs her, but Carrie tells her “Not this time.” If last season was about Brody’s coming into a power he didn’t know he had, and in the process separating the CIA from its most valuable asset, this season of Homeland could follow Carrie on a similar journey, gaining the hard intelligence, the credibility, and the mental strength to prove Brody guilty and her detractors deadly wrong, restoring the proper balance to the situation. Her weapons are paltry: a fruit basket from Saul, a phone, a bad brown wig, a flimsily-constructed story about hockey fandom, a headscarf, the ability to throw a knee. And her only victory in this first episode is to throw a tail. Carrie catches no terrorists or torturers, but she does, crucially, catch herself when she falls, and watching her, I cheered, even though I know that for Carrie to return to the CIA would put her further from lasagna, from the garden, and the blue books, and her father’s gentle concern about her lithium.

At home, the plot lines, and the emotions, are more complicated. When I initially saw this episode, and I’ve watched it several time since, I didn’t like the decision to make Brody a potential vice presidential nominee because it struck me as a bit of implausibility that isn’t actually necessary to any of the points the plot seems to be trying to make. It’s one thing for John McCain, who was held as a prisoner in Vietnam, to be a viable presidential candidate years after his return home, and long after the conflict that resulted in his imprisonment and torture had ceased to carry the specific sting and suspicion for the American populace that the September 11 attacks still have for ordinary Americans. Brody is a fresher victim of a rawer conflict, six months into his service in an abruptly-vacated Congressional seat. His only political asset is also a potential liability, even for people who don’t suspect Brody as Carrie once did: his experiences in Abu Nazir’s custody.
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Someone knows how to get my attention with a meme:

That said, the entire Tumblr this poster is from, RomCom 2012, is brilliant both as a deconstruction of Romney’s troubles on the campaign trail and of romantic comedies. Romney’s essential unlikability is the core liability of his campaign in the same way that romantic comedies always start with a man and a woman who dislike each other for some reason. In screwball comedies, it’s often because the guy is a sap, like beer heir in The Lady Eve, or the naive movie producer in Sullivan’s Travels. In contemporary romantic comedies, it’s often because the guy is a man-child, as in Apatown movies like Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or hiding his essential decency behind a facade of distaste for women like the misogynistic radio hosts epitomized by Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth. The movie turns when the woman involved discovers that the sap is sweet, the man-boy is capable of growing up, the woman-hater is wounded. In Definitely, Maybe, a man who switches identities along with girlfriends figures out what kind of man he wants to be, and which woman he wants to be with. That’s a dilemma that should land with analysts who have watched Romney run for president over the last two cycles.

And Mitt Romney’s problems reveal both the problem with his candidacy and the weakness of romantic comedies. Some guys are never going to shuck off the nerdy professor aura and be miraculously attractive to women. Some man-boys are not going to be suddenly inspired, and find it easy to assume a semblance of adulthood. Some guys genuinely hate women. And some candidates are genuinely stiff rich guys who, at 65, are not going to spontaneously develop a capacity for empathy or an understanding of what it is to struggle.

I called my mother on my way home from a dinner party last night to let her know that Nora Ephron had died. Or at least, if she already knew Nora Ephron had died, to reassure her that I still had her copies of Crazy Salad and Wallflower at the Orgy, books that I’d sneaked off her shelves years beforehand, and that followed me to college and to Washington, DC. Lots of people are remembering Ephron’s movies, and I’m watching Sleepless in Seattle as I write this, but I knew Ephron as a writer and reporter on media and the women’s movement before I knew her as a screenwriter and director, and it’s hard for me to see her movies in any other context than that writing and reporting.

Ephron wrote powerfully about the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Doing the former, covering the activities of the National Women’s Political Caucus at the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami, she captured something about the subordinate position of women in left politics that persists to this day when she wrote that “In a sense, the major function for the N.W.P.C. was to be ornamental—that is, it was simply to be there. Making its presence it felt. Putting forth the best possible face. Pretending to a unity that did not exist. Above all, putting on a good show: the abortion plank would never carry, a woman would not be nominated as Vice-President this year, but the N.W.P.C. would put on a good show.”

She could turn anecdotes into a powerful litany, as she did when writing about the feminist self-help movement in health, which in some cases advocated for untested technologies Ephron found unnerving, even as she said that women had legitimate cases against the doctors who treated them. “Ever week, it seems, I hear a new gynecological atrocity tale,” she wrote. “A friend who asks specifically not to be sedated during childbirth is sedated. Another friend who has a simple infection is treated instead for gonorrhea, and develops a serious infection as a side effect. Another woman tells of going to see her doctor one month after he has delivered her first child, a deformed baby, born dead. His first question: ‘Why haven’t you been to see me in two years?’”

She gutted executives who made dangerous so-called feminine hygiene sprays for injuring women when they couldn’t even say the word vagina. Her assessment that “Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up” is still one of the most cutting one-line portraits of the nation’s capitol, and one that remains more than a little true. And her profile of Barbara Mandel, the wife of the governor of Maryland who, when her husband decided to leave her for another woman, refused to depart the governor’s mansion in an act of defiance is an amazing meeting point of the domestic, the political, and cultural theater.

One of the reasons I write about culture is because of the way Ephron did it. She profiled the first woman to get close to becoming a professional baseball umpire, in a piece that begins, “Somewhere in the back of Bernice Gera’s closet, along with her face mask and chest protector and simple spiked shoes, is a plain blue man’s suit hanging in a plastic bag. The suit cost $29 off the rack, plus a few dollars for shortening the sleeves and pants legs.” The rest of the piece examines the real price of that mostly unworn outfit. In a visit to the Pillsbury Bakeoff, she wrote about a dated institution’s attempt to jump generations: “There was a lot of talk at the Bake-Off about how the Bake-It-Easy theme had attracted a new breed of contestants this year, younger contestants—housewives, yes, but housewives who used whole-wheat flour and Granola and sour cream and similar supposedly hip ingredients in their recipes, and were therefore somewhat more sophisticated, or urban, or something-of-the-sort than your usual Bake-Off contestant. There were a few of these—two, to be exact: Barbara Goldstein of New York City and Bonnie Brooks of Salisbury, Maryland, who actually visited the Los Angeles County Art Museum during a free afternoon.” In Ephron’s remembrance of reading The Fountainhead, she recalls that “I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, and architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect.”She understood that cultural details didn’t mean everything, but as with New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff’s stinginess with Christmas bonuses and preference for serving dry roast beef sandwiches to guests, they signified something, and were worth examination.
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Over the weekend, Audrey Bolt, Miss Ohio caused a bit of kerfuffle during the Miss USA pageant when, asked to name a movie she thought portrayed women positively, named Pretty Woman and gave this explanation:

I think it depends on the movie. I think there are some movies that depict women in a very positive role, and then some movies that put them in a little bit more of negative role. But by the end of the movie, they show that woman power that I know we all have. Such as movie Pretty Woman. We had a wonderful, beautiful woman, Julia Roberts, and she was having a rough time, but, you know what, she came out on top and she didn’t let anybody stand in her path.

Mediate and company have juiced the story by saying she thinks that a prostitute is a positive role model. That kind of misses what is wrong with Pretty Woman. It’s not that being a sex worker inherently shuts you out of inspiring stories. I’m finding Connie Riesler’s efforts to get clean on The Shield compelling. One of the most fun side characters in Hysteria is a former prostitute. I could go on.

The problem with Pretty Woman as a positive portrayal of women is that the “woman power” it shows is limited to being vivacious and sexually attractive. Vivian (Julia Roberts) does demand that she be treated with basic decency, whether she’s trying to convince Kit to stop using and to get away from her pimp, or refuses to submit to the advances of Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander). Those are good things to demand and to aspire to, and I appreciate that the movie insists that being a sex worker doesn’t mean surrendering your right to consent.

But the movie is relatively lazy about a fundamental point: Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) essentially purchases a new life for Vivian, starting with a dress, scaling up to a new wardrobe, and finally an amount of cash that is meant to function as Vivian’s escape velocity from her life. It’s a nice fantasy of salvation if you can get it, and perhaps if you’re competing in pageants, you can (Pretty Woman‘s fantasy of a man picking a woman out from a crowd has much more in common with beauty pageants than with actual sex work). But it’s more a portrait of a man seeing something in a woman that she doesn’t see in herself than it is of empowered womanhood.

Romantic comedy was once a noble genre, a place to work out not only will they or won’t they, but why or why not, and should they or shouldn’t they? The Lady Eve may be a goofy romp about a conwoman and her beer-heir mark, but Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s spiky courtship is all about how much we can overcome deeply ingrained prejudices about class and sexual experience. In When Harry Met Sally, the two main characters talked their way through what makes a good relationship for a decade—and worked out their attitudes towards their careers and themselves as friends—before they got together. And movies like Annie Hall defied the traditional meaning of comedy—it ends with a breakup, not a marriage—to acknowledge both the power and potential for heartbreak of modern relationships.

But in recent years, romantic comedies have gone timid. In the quest for PG-13 ratings, they can’t say much about sex. And in their desire to rake in dollars, an interchangeable array of blonde or blondish heroines with disposable jobs in PR and fashion have spent ninety minutes resisting an similarly dull assortment of disc jockeys, television producers, and businessmen. A few R-rated romantic comedies from Judd Apatow and the creators in his orbit have broken the mold, but they haven’t been enough to change the conventional wisdom of the industry.

All of this is the reason Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, about Mortimer Granville’s (Hugh Dancy) invention of the vibrator in Victorian England, is simultaneously a delight and a relief. There is a will-they-or-won’t-they couple at its heart, of course: when Mortimer, who believes in the germ theory of medicine, takes a job with women’s physician Dr. Charles Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), he meets Dr. Dalrymple’s very different daughters, dutiful Emily (Felicity Jones) and Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a socialist feminist who runs a London settlement house. While Mortimer plans to take over Dr. Dalrymple’s practice and becomes engaged to Emily, he’s drawn to Charlotte, whose ideals appeal to him even as she rejects the diagnosis of hysteria, which gives Mortimer his living, as an attempt to disguise the true dissatisfactions women experience. And when her political work gets Charlotte put on trial and branded hysterical, Mortimer must decide if he will let her be institutionalized and subject to an involuntary hysterectomy or maintain his devotion to the diagnosis that’s made his career. I spoke with Wexler about the declining stakes of romantic comedy, the importance of careers and values in successful relationships, and how she ended up making romantic comedy for men. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you brought up was the decline of the romantic comedy, and this is very much a romantic comedy. I was curious if you thought that reflected the inevitable homogenization of any genre when Hollywood gets their hands on it, or whether consumers have actually backed away from romantic comedies where the issues are larger than will they or won’t they?

I think a lot of romantic comedies revolve around will they or won’t they. And yes, will they or won’t they get together is where ours is, but it’s not quite the central question. It’s more how will they? I think a lot of the better writing in romantic comedies these days has tended towards the R-rated romantic comedies, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids…I think Knocked Up, they take the characters, you put them in really hard situations, and you see how they deal. I think that’s a good thing. But the kind of witty banter, the kind of Hepburn-Cary Grant stuff is just not around as much, and it just felt right for this story, with this quirk of history.

It seems like in a lot of romantic comedies, the characters don’t really get treated like adults. Their careers raen’t particularly important to them. It’s a little infantilizing. One of the things that’s fun about Charlotte is whoever she ends up with has to share her values.

And her passion for her work. I think that’s where they connect first and foremost is they’re passionate about their work and what they believe in. They’re both true believers in their own way…I think one of the things you try to figure out is what kind of movie you’re trying to make. And I knew, on a very core level, I was making a romantic comedy. In that, I think the fundamental kind of question is about how and who you fall in love with, what draws you to people.

The movie is a lot about progressives in different ways. Mortimer, his character is a medical progressive. The rest of his life, he kind of fits tidily into the box. It doesn’t make sense for him to buck the system because it’s set up for him. But in the end, he can’t deny the truth in front of his face. His friend Edmund, played by Rupert Everett, is a progressive in science and technology, and he also doesn’t fit neatly into the box as a gay character. But he is part of the aristocracy, and he’s wealthy, and has ways around it. And Charlotte is the girl who can’t help it. She knows it would be easier not to raise her hand in the back of the classroom, so to speak, but she still has something she has to say. She knows it would be easier for her, but she doesn’t know how to be anything else. She’s a truth-teller.

In this kind of film, what their job is illuminates their character’s journey. It’s also important because it’s how it all happens. Because he’s a doctor who gets a job treating women for hysteria, that’s how he meets her. I’ve been looking at a lot of other films right now, and we’re always trying to get away from anybody’s job because it’s about the relationship. And sometimes it can be very cheesy and stupid to resolve something about the relationship through they achieve something at work. It’s kind of sideways. But in this case, I think so much of the film is about acknowledging the truth that’s right in front of you even if culture wants you to pretend it’s something else. And the only way these two are ever going to get together, the big obstacle between them is their differing opinions about what the truth is and what’s acceptable. Until they can find a way to each other as passionate people who are true believers, they’ll never be together. And they’re not even trying to be together…It’s when he wakes up that their relationship starts to work out.
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In tonight’s finale of Parks & RecreationThis post contains spoilers through the season four finale of Parks and Recreation.

When I was 19, I ran to be Democratic Party co-chair of my ward in New Haven. In a lot of towns, that might have been an appointed post, but in New Haven it was a job you had to actually campaign for, and so for months, I made like Leslie Knope has for the past season of television, hitting up churches and senior centers and community meetings, and posing for some truly hilarious campaign literature. After shaking hands at the precinct for twelve straight hours on Election Day, I couldn’t bear to be in the room when the vote totals were read out, and so I waited outside in the cold. The sight of my running mate and campaign staff running screaming outside to tell me we’d won was one of the weirdest, most cinematic moments of my entire life. I was not nearly as good at politics as I trust that Leslie Knope will prove to be—there’s a reason I write—but I tell you this to explain that I feel a special kinship with this season, and with this character despite its flaws. I know how this feels, and this episode of Parks and Recreation captured this moment’s terrors and joys perfectly. And this season of Parks and Recreation pulled off an extremely tricky transition for this marvelous show beautifully.

The election itself is governed by Pawnee’s marvelously specific manifestation of the oddities that plague all local elections. “In the event of an exact tie, the seat is awarded to the male candidate and the female candidate is put in jail,” the registrar explains to the candidates and their campaign managers. “I don’t think it would hold up in court, but it is city law.” There are a lot of candidates for a relatively minor office—Leslie’s moment of despair that Brandi Maxxx might win was a perfect example of the possible spoiler, the thing every campaign can’t possibly predict or prepare for. And while the show didn’t spend time on the hilarities of checking off voter rolls (usually with all the campaigns monitoring ID checks and crossing off the names of voters who have made it alongside some doughty poll workers, it’s so fitting that Leslie’s epic contest against Bobby Newport came down to a recount. The only way it could have been more perfect is if Bobby’s support for Leslie—”Another awesome point by Leslie. It’s why I’m voting for you,” he tells a crew of reporters at a poll-opening press conference—made up for Jerry forgetting to vote in his enthusiasm to hand out Leslie’s flyers and ended up handing her the election.
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It took me a while, but I took advantage of a slow Thursday to hit up Think Like a Man. While there’s no question that the movie has elements of an infomercial, in the moments when Steve Harvey isn’t imparting wisdom from various bar-mounted televisions and the characters aren’t discussing his book, the conversations between the characters feel surprisingly fresh, and the stakes of their relationships feel like the real way people sabotage themselves, rather than invented obstacles.

The movie follows a series of friends who happen to represent helpfully-delineated archetypes, and the women they begin to fall for. Cedric (Kevin Hart) is divorcing, a prospect he insists makes him happy, but is actually the source of incredible misery. Zeke (Romany Malco), a former musicians and a consumate player (he irritates his friends by making omelettes shirtless, which in his case would be a killer morning-after move for a lucky lady) meets Mya (Meagan Good), who is fresh out of a series of hookups with an utter creep played by Chris Brown, and intends to stay celibate until she knows that Zeke is serious about her. Dominic (Michael Ealy), an aspiring chef, begins dating Lauren (Taraji P. Henson), a successful career woman and the movie’s worst stereotype. Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara) is happily nesting with Kristen (Gabriel Union, who should play a sometime-stoned semi-nerd more often), forgetting to move forward in his career and decorating like he raided the set of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And mama’s boy Michael (Terrence Jenkins) begins dating single mother Candace (Regina Hall).

There’s also a white character called Bennett, who isn’t featured in any of the movie’s trailers or posters. A happily married man, he hangs out with the main characters at their favorite bar, plays in their thrice-weekly basketball game, observes their romantic travails with tolerant amusement, and periodically dispenses clarifying advice. In other words, he’s a token white friend, a character who serves the same genuinely functional function as sassy black friends and wise black men. Because Bennett’s comfortable watching Oprah (a confession that prompts Cedric to warn him “You gotta say no homo when you say shit like that at a divorce party,” in one of several moments of minor, but sadly realistic-feeling homophobia), which means unlike the men he’s hanging out in a party van with, he’s able to figure out that their girlfriends are relying on Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man for romantic advice. And when Bennett explains, without disclaimer, shame or insecurity that he’s leaving the bar to go home to cook dinner for his wife because, shocker of shockers, he enjoys doing it, it’s a catalyst for the rest of his friends to get their acts together.
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I’m going to try to catch Think Like a Man this week, so I’ll be able to report back on whether this romantic comedy, which boasts a mostly-African American cast, is actually any good. But I am very, very curious to see how the coverage of it plays out over the next several weeks, and whether any projects get greenlit as a result. Think Like a Man was on track to make $33 million this weekend even though it only opened in 2,017 theaters, or $15,369 per theater. By contrast, uber-white The Vow, which starred Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams, substantially bigger stars, opened with $41 million in 2,958 theaters, or $13,860 per theater.

So what’s the lesson going to be? Will it be that if you do the marketing right—a lot of the trailers were from the perspectives of the male characters rather than the women—men will turn out for romantic comedies? Apparently, audiences for Think Like a Man were 37 percent male. Will it be that romantic comedies with black stars can cross over? I haven’t found breakout data on the racial makeup of audiences, though the studio appears to be claiming that racial crossover is part of the movie’s success. Will it be that there’s pent-up desire for romantic comedies, or movies period, with black casts? That if you court black journalists, students at historically black colleges and universities, and similar outlets and constituencies, you’ll get exceedingly strong turnout for a movie that actually engages with the target audience rather than tokenizing it? Will it be that maybe it’s time to see if Michael Ealy and Romany Malco are viable romantic comedy stars? Hollywood was willing to do a fair amount of work with Tatum before he became both a box-office monster and started getting nice reviews from people who aren’t observant ladies like me. Maybe Ealy, Malco, and the other men in this movie have proved they’ve earned the same amount of patience?

I would be shocked if this was the movie that made the difference and made Hollywood wake up. But I’d like it to be really clear the lessons that they should take. No one should get to claim a passing grade because they burned all the copies of the test papers.

Vulture has a very interesting piece up on the marketing campaign for the romantic comedy Think Like a Man, which apparently is scoring some of the highest audience approval ratings in early screenings ever. And Sony Screen Gems has apparently decided that since both majority-black and mixed-race audiences seem to love the movie they will, in a rare and welcome departure, try to sell Think Like a Man to all the viewers they think might possibly like it if only they could be got in the theater door, irrespective of race. One non-Sony executive told Vulture “it looks like a Nancy Meyers movie, with black people. Which is fine …. All it has to be is funny, and make it clear that the concept has no race.” But another, in full snipe mode, says of the marketing campaign, “There’s no general audience stuff.”

So I decided to take a look at the trailer and find out what it is that studio executive think it is that black people do and are attracted to that couldn’t be of interest to a general audience:

Who knew that only “urban” people (and really, can we retire that term? It has to be the most tiresome misconflation in the pop culture marketing dictionary), as that second executive put it, do or relate to the following experiences:

-Play pickup basketball

-Buy coffee in the morning

-Sometimes sleep with people they don’t actually want to date

-Can be overly attentive to their mothers and fail to set boundaries

-Work in restaurants

-Are flustered by attractive people of the opposite sex

-Get frustrated with their dating prospects

-Read self-help books

-Get sexually frustrated

-Think of Steve Harvey as kind of a square

-Get judgy about class

-Have friends who say awkward things at inopportune moments

If that’s true, then I am definitely not a white lady. Now I have to reassess everything.

This is fascinating in concept if not precisely in execution: Lifetime is remaking Steel Magnolias, that redoubtable weepie of Southern women, beauty shops, and diabetic comas, as a television movie. But it’s doing so with an all-black cast that includes Queen Latifah, Phylicia Rashad, and Jill Scott. Latifah will play M’Lynn, taking Sally Field’s role in the original, and her daughter Shelby, portrayed by Julia Roberts in the original, will be played by Rashad’s daughter Condola. All the casting discussion aside, this project raises a number of questions* that I feel like I don’t have answers to.

Should we embrace remakes of movies that originally had black casts with white leads?

Or should we wait until original stories about characters of color can get into production, even if there’s little likelihood that studios will do the work to get those projects to cross over?

Television gets a lot of hype as a place where creators can be more innovative than they are in movies. Is that really true when it comes to race? It feels as if it’s less true now than it was in, say, the early nineties.

If a remake moves a concept from the movies to television, does that count as a demotion?

And will a remake of Steel Magnolias just slot Latifah, Rashad, and Scott into essentially straight rewrites of the original? Or will it be mindful of the ways in which the black and white southern experiences are different for women? It’s true, of course, that both black women and white women visit beauty parlors. But if you get that far and think you’ve figured out that folks are the same, you’re missing some rather important things.

*As a side note, I will be fascinated to see if the movie includes the original’s pilot about taking Shelby off life support, or if in our moment of resurgent pro-liferism and after Terri Schiavo, even that’s become too controversial.