I’m glad we’ve got the first trailer for Don Jon, the directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about something I’ve been thinking about since I saw it at SXSW this year. As romantic comedies have hit a financial and creative rough spot, one of the best responses to that lacuna has been a crop of movies about failed relationships and the things we learn from them that could be termed unromantic comedies:

The unromantic comedy isn’t precisely new territory for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who starred in one of the most resonant examples of the genre, Marc Webb’s 2009 hit (500) Days of Summer in which Tom (Gordon-Levitt) pursued Summer (Zooey Deschanel), falling in love with her in defiance of her repeatedly stated lack of seriousness about him. When they inevitably broke up, Tom was devastated and blindsided, especially when it turned out that Summer was capable of being serious about someone, just not about him. But the movie ended with him meeting another woman and sensing the prospect of a new relationship. The triumph in the film, and the indicator of Tom’s growth, wasn’t that he got together with Summer, but that he got over her.

Don Jon, which explores what happens when Jon (Gordon-Levitt), a porn junkie pickup artist with some serious road rage, meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who appears to be the girl of his dreams, but in a parallel to his own addiction, aspires to live out one of the romantic comedies she loves. It’s evident almost from their first meeting how terrible Jon and Barbara are for each other. Jon’s the kind of guy, as he tells us, hilariously and profanely in voiceovers, who believes things like “In real life, if you want to get head, you have give head. I know there are guys who like to eat pussy, but the thing about that is, they’re f—–g crazy.” Barbara, by contrast, measures her power over Jon by seeing how much she can get him to change his life and behavior for her, asking him “You take one class for me, just one little class?” when they make out at her doorway, and luring him to a ridiculously girly princess party for one of her relatives. Part of her behavior-modification program includes insisting that Jon give up porn and taking him to rom-coms with her instead, including a truly brilliant parody starring Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway under assumed names. As Barbara puts it “Movies and porno are different, Jon. They give awards for movies,” a distinction that’s both wrong in fact and ignores the extent to which romantic comedies have shaped Barbara’s worldview, and not for the better. The tension in Don Jon comes not from the idea that Jon might be unable to overcome his addiction to porn and as a result, lose out on Barbara, but that these two horribly mismatched people might end up together because it’s what they expect they’re supposed to do.
Read more

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

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

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

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

Chaplin refused to say which actress it is.

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

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

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

This post discusses plot points from the May 19 episode of Game of Thrones.

If last week’s Game of Thrones was a meditation on what makes for a good relationship between romantic and sexual partners, or between friends, this week’s episode narrows its focus to ask what makes a good friend. It’s a question that gets introduced in a conversation between Arya, who’s sulking that her attempt to run away has lead her into the custody of a man who’s on her kill list, but who she doesn’t quite have the courage to try to take out. “There’s no one worse than you, she tells the Hound as they ride towards a river so placid that it seems the war has never touched them. “You never knew my brother. He once killed a man for snoring,” the Hound tells Arya, before moving from the specific to the general. “There’s plenty worse than me. There’s men who like to beat little girls. Men who like to rape them. I saved your sister from some of them.”

“Second Sons” has many reminders that the men from that terrible day in King’s Landing aren’t alone, and the bloodlust that griped the crowd isn’t the only thing that can move men to downgrade consent. Mero, the commander of the Second Sons, the sellswords hired by the Yunkish slavers to keep Dany out of their city, immediately moves to try to make Dany feel powerless by sexualizing her. First, he tells Dany he’s sure that he had sex with her in Lys—and suggests that she’s a prostitute, not a leader of her own people. “Take your clothes off and come and sit on Mero’s lap and I may give you my Second Sons,” he tells her jovially, then asks to see her vagina as the measure of whether she’s worth switching sides to support. He sniffs at the genitals of Missendi, Dany’s translator, and warns both Dany and the younger woman that “The Second Sons share everything. Maybe after the battle, we’ll all share you. I’ll come looking for you when this is over.” Sex for someone like Mero isn’t just preferable when the woman doesn’t really have agency. It’s a way to deny women agency in the first place.

And Essos mercenaries aren’t the only people who downgrade the consent of the women they have sex with. “I’m a mistake,” Gendry reflects of his parentage on Dragonstone. “I’m only here because my father grabbed my mother instead of the next girl in the tavern.” And Robert Baratheon’s son in name if not by blood shows off his nasty streak again at Sansa Stark’s wedding to Tryion Lannister when Joffrey tells Sansa that his engagement to Margaery Tyrell hasn’t shifted his interest from Sansa, and makes clear that her marriage to Tyrion Lannister doesn’t bring her under protection meaningful enough to give Joffrey pause. “Congratulations, my Lady,” he tells her in a sickening tone. You’ve done it. You’ve married a Lannister. Soon you’ll have a Lannister baby. It’s a dream come true…It doens’t really matter which Lannister puts the baby into you. Maybe I’ll pay you a visit tonight after my uncle passes out. How’d you like that? You wouldn’t. That’s all right. Ser Meryn and Ser Boras will hold you down.”
Read more

This post discusses plot points from the May 12 episode of Game of Thrones.

The third novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire is titled A Storm Of Swords, but through much of this third season of Game of Thrones, the battles have happened off-screen or between the wooden troop markers on Robb Stark’s map and in his mind. Instead, the game of thrones is being played in a more literal sense, as the great lords and ladies of Westeros negotiate who will sit not just in the great chairs of the realm, but beside the people who occupy those chairs—in other words, through marital alliances. It’s only fitting, then, that Game of Thrones should spend an episode grappling with marriage and sex, with the very real difficulties of people who get to choose who they love, as well as with the fears of those who have no choice at all, and with the question of bonds between men and women outside of marriage in a society where friendship across gender lines is almost inconceivable.

The last episode of Game of Thrones, “The Climb,” ended with a transcendently romantic embrace between Jon and Ygritte after they survived a harrowing ascent of the Wall. It was a nasty little tease for a show where no one gets much in the way of happiness, a dare to the audience to continue believing in true love after an episode that brutally eviscerated the possibility of hope. So it’s fitting that their moment of joy immediately comes into question as Jon and Ygritte move from her country beyond the Wall into his in Westeros, and Jon’s choice whether or not to be “loyal to his woman” or to the vows of his that remain to him comes closer and closer.

“Is that how you lot do your fighting? You march down a road banging drums and waving banners?” Ygritte teases him about his country, which seems impossibly civilized to her. “You mean right foot left foot right foot left foot. You lot can’t remember that?” But even though Ygritte pretends not to be impressed by Westeros, her inexperience with civilization is clear. “Is that a palace?” she asks Jon of the first windmill they pass on their trek. “Who built it? Some king?…They must have been great builders, to stack the stones so high.” “If you were impressed by a windmill, you’d be swooning if you saw the great keep at Winterfell,” Jon teases her back. Their banter is a negotiation. Jon is still coming to terms with his liaison with a woman who tells him things like “Why would a girl see blood and collapse?…Girls see more blood than boys.” And Ygritte, for all she sees the wilding in Jon, is still unsure of the solidity of their relationship. “I know that you’re beautiful, and fierce, and wild. I’ll be good to you,” a painfully Jealous Orrell tells her. “You love him? Cause he’s pretty, that it? You like his pretty hair and his pretty eyes? You think pretty’s going to make you happy? You won’t love him so much when you find out what he really is.” And he’s not wrong. “I know it. If you attack the Wall, you’ll die. All of you,” Jon warns Ygritte on the road, unwilling to tell her the full truth of his continued allegiance to the Night’s Watch, but hoping to dissuade her from a mission he sees as suicidal. “All of us,” Ygritte tells him in a declaration that’s also a question. Ultimately, they delay their reckoning. “You’re mine,” Ygritte tells Jon. “And I’m yours. If we die, we die. But first we’ll live.”
Read more

We’re halfway through the third season of Game of Thrones, a year that’s seen the elevation of female characters—and consensual sex—suggestions that one religion, the worship of the Lord of Light, could be gaining precedence and validity in Westeros, and some of the best swordfighting the show’s ever seen. I talked to executive story editor Bryan Cogman about how the show’s handled changes in characterization from the page to screen, how he wrote those steamy sex scenes in last week’s episode, and how the action choreography of the show comes together. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

To get started: halfway through the third season, Game of Thrones remains largely true to George R.R. Martin’s novels, but there are diversions in both plot and characterization. As the story editor, I’d be curious what the conversations about those changes look like. And in the case of characterization changes, do they tend to be driven more by the actors cast in the roles? The need to pace the story? Or a mix?

Oh, good you started with an easy one! Well, for one thing, now that we’re in Season Three — a lot of the changes stem from changes/alterations we made in previous seasons. Now, Margaery Tyrell, as we’ve talked about before, is an important character in the novels in terms of plot but she isn’t a point of view character and you don’t really get to know her until later in the saga. And even then, she’s not really driving her own storylines. Now, in Season Two, we always planned to go behind the curtain, if you will, with Renly and his relationships, but even with that, Margaery was still planned to be (more or less) a minor character. Now, Natalie Dormer was original considered for another role. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to have her be Margaery, but casting her immediately changed the character and the possibilites for her before we even started writing. It allowed us to move up the Cersei versus Margaery dynamic–that’s a big part of a later book).

And this solved a few problems we needed to deal with as we started adapting A Storm of Swords. If you break down A Storm of Swords, there isn’t a ton of King’s Landing story in the first half of the book, and virtually nothing for a few characters (Cersei, Littlefinger, Varys) to do. So having Margaery be a greater presence on the show (coupled with her arrival of grandmother, Lady Olenna) allowed us to dramatize the arrival of the Tyrells and their effect on the Lannisters (and Cersei, Joffrey) in particular. And the idea of Margaery as a sort of Princess Di type was very interesting–and that’s definitely in the books–her popularity with the people is mentioned, we just took that ball and ran with it.
Read more

Over at the Daily Beast yesterday, I wrote about a television phenomenon that officially became a trend over the weekend: the prestige television male virgin. I explained:

On last night’s Game of Thrones, after getting seduced by wildling warrior Ygritte (Rose Leslie), Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) confessed that “There’s been no one else.” Ygritte knew that as a man of the Night’s Watch, the celibate brotherhood who guards the Wall which marks the border of Westeros, Jon was forbidden from having sex after he swore the vows she asked him to break. But she assumed that he’d had sex before he joined up, and was surprised to learn she’d been mistaken. “A maid! You’re a maid,” she teased him.

An hour later on Sunday night’s television line-up, Mad Men copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), whose father sprung a blind date with a pretty schoolteacher on him, confessed during a bout of logorrhea at the diner where he took her that “I’ve never had sex, not even once.” His confession was inexplicable, even to him. “What am I doing?” Ginsberg moaned. “I ordered soup. I just said that.” And Jon and Michael are in good company. Much of the third season of Downton Abbey, which aired on PBS earlier this season, concerned the sexual awakening of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) after he marries Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), ending years of sexual yearning and passing into the realm where, in the words of his bride “all things are permitted.”

As I wrote earlier in our discussion of lies pop culture tells us, one of the biggest is that everyone’s having sex all of the time, and that everyone started having sex sometime late in high school or early in college. It’s worth noting that all three of these stories which have acknowledged that there isn’t a set age at which everyone is miraculously divested of their virginity are in some form or other period pieces. Game of Thrones is set in a world where youthful marriage means that a lot of people do have sex for the first time at a relatively early age, but often not in a truly consensual fashion. Downton Abbey is set in an environment where nice people of both sexes are expected to come to marriage inexperienced, and when the slow burn of sexual tension is a key source of cultural drama. And one of the things that Mad Men captures with great perceptiveness is the uneven arrival of the sexual revolution in different characters’ lives depending on their level of privilege and the conditions of their upbringing.

It would be nice to see some shows attempt to tell similar and similarly respectful stories about characters in contemporary settings, and about women as well as men. High school and college may be the point by which the majority of people have sex for the first time, but they aren’t the only times that people decide to—or get a chance to—have sex for the first time, and there are different concerns and different anxieties about it at different ages. I’m not saying that pop culture should abandon teen and young adult sex stories. But Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Downton Abbey all serve as a reminder that there’s rich material in different kinds of first time stories, whether someone’s having sex for the first time at a different point in their life, or having sex for the first time with a new partner, which can be just as momentous as the first time period.

Bull Durham, which lies about sex less than most pop culture.

This morning’s post on the problems prestige television continues to have with sex inspired a rather epic conversation about the assumptions movies and television shows make about sex and sexuality, and the lies that a lot of them told us. A number of folks were kind enough to help me curate the conversation, including Jess Zimmerman, who Storyfied the section of the conversation on the very specific misconceptions about sex my followers took away from pop culture, Monica Reida, who captured, among other things, a long section of the conversation on young adult fiction, fan fiction, and respect for characters, and Heather McLendon, who produced a comprehensive roundup of the discussion I’ve embedded here*:
Read more

My friend, New York Magazine television critic Matt Zoller Seitz has a novel solution to the complaint that Game of Thrones makes gratuitous use of female nudity: get the guys naked more often. He argues:

Since its 2011 debut, Thrones has been attacked for “gratuitous” nudity and labeled sexist for stripping its women more often than its men. These are two different complaints, though; intertwining them muddies each. The first concerns the appropriateness of graphic sex and/or nudity; the second is about the show’s “gaze,” which is undeniably heterosexual and male. But it’s possible to enjoy sex and nudity without guilt or bluenosed justifications while simultaneously pointing out that the scales of spectatorship are out of whack. I’d like Game of Thrones to enlarge the scope of its fantasy­ — to show more same-sex couplings and male nudity — as Starz’s Spartacus series has done with such panache. For all its tough, complicated women characters, Thrones is rightly perceived as too much of a ­sausagefest. The producers could change that perception by adding more sausage.

I think he’s on the right track, but has arrived at the wrong destination. What Game of Thrones needs isn’t more anatomy of any variety—and, as I’ll discuss at greater length in my full review of the season, which will be up on Friday, I think the show has actually absorbed that criticism in a productive way and is stronger for it. Instead, it needs more consensual sex, preferably in situations where one partner isn’t paying the other. At its best, Game of Thrones can be a terrific story about sexual violence in wartime. But for the full weight of that argument to be felt, and for sexual violence to register with the horror it’s meant to elicit—particularly given the troubling use of rape as a way to generate drama on prestige television without thought to larger context—we need to see the alternative, to see some of the happiness and normality that gets destroyed by war. It may be harder to depict good sex than the embarrassment of bad sex or the numbing fear of sexual violence. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, in part to remind those of us watching at home what kind of good world our friends in Westeros and beyond are fighting for.