Nick Baumann, the news editor at Mother Jones, wrote a terrific piece about the way marketing has eaten South By Southwest, and was kind enough to come on my Bloggingheads show to discuss it:

One of the things I’ve found personally fascinating about South By Southwest is the extent to which the interactive portion of the festival actually demonstrates the limitations of social media: it’s a terrific place to have in-person conversations with people you know primarily online, but it’s also a reminder of the limitations of email, chat programs, Twitter, etc. And for all the discussion about the festival itself, one thing Nick and I talked about that I’ve rarely seen discussed is the impact of having the music, film, and interactive festivals running both concurrently and next to each other. Of course, it’s not new to have music festivals get dominated by big acts, but what does it mean to have a tech start-up mentality leach over into music and film? Or to have dealmaking come first to one part of a festival and then the others, even if the buyers are different? I don’t think anyone’s averse to people making money, but what happens when properties that have already made money—or, at least, say, movies that have already been acquired for distribution—crowd out the things that are supposed to get their shot at making a more modest amount?

Since Independent Women’s Forum advocate Gayle Trotter testified against gun control on the grounds that guns give women a necessary means to defend themselves, the debate on this question has gotten heated and often ugly. When Zerlina Maxwell said, entirely reasonably, on Fox News that perhaps it made more sense to try to minimize the risk of rape by educating men and teaching them to seek consent more rigorously to prevent assaults like date and acquaintance rape, she became the target of a vicious coordinated campaign to silence her. Into this space, though it’s not likely to change Trotter’s mind, or convince the chorus of trolls threatening Maxwell with rape, comes Loves Her Gun, an unusually thoughtful movie about firearms ownership, violence against women, and the impact fear has on our decision-making, that premiered at South By Southwest yesterday.

Directed by Geoff Marslett and set and shot significantly in Austin, Loves Her Gun follows Allie (Trieste Kelly Dunn), a young woman working menial jobs in New York who, on the way home from a concert, is robbed and beaten two blocks from her East Williamsburg apartment. Met with suspicion from the police because Allie insists that her attackers were wearing animal masks, or because her extreme fear transmuted them into animals, angry at the boyfriend who ditched her to attend a concert, and feeling unsafe in New York, Allie abruptly decides to decamp for Austin with the band she saw before she was attacked. On their beautifully-shot road trip back to Austin, Allie seems to have achieved a measure of peace. But once settled in Austin, crashing first with Zoe (Ashley Spillers), then with Zoe’s best friend Clark (Francisco Barriero), and taking a landscaping job working for Sarah (Melissa Bisagni), Allie’s unable to sleep, terrified of country noises unfamilir to her in New York, the neighbors quarrelling next door, what she believes to be the expectation that she have sex with Clark, who nurses a Nice-Guy crush on her.

Allie is a nightmare for both responsible gun owners, and for gun control policy advocates. She has neither a criminal record or a history of mental illness that would trigger a background check and prevent her from buying a firearm. She pays careful attention to and appears to take to heart Sarah’s instructions about handgun safety, including Sarah’s injunction that “You never point the gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy.” But Allie’s reasons for wanting a gun are themselves the kind of warning sign that policies could never be designed to catch.
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One of the reasons William Shakespeare’s work is so enduring is that it’s perceived to be timeless. Romeo and Juliet are stand-ins for every teenage couple that perceives themselves to be or actually is pulled apart by family or other societal forces. Hamlet is every son with a dead father and an uncertain sense of himself. Bands of brothers will continue to charge into battle from this day to the ending of the world, and they and we will need to believe they do so for a greater cause to enable them to keep doing it. But while many of Shakespeare’s psychological insights may feel unmoored from time, in the same way Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy could have met, sparred, and found each other in almost any time period, with adjustments along the way, the means by which Shakespeare delivered those insights vary widely in how tightly they’re tied to particular historical circumstnaces and mores, and in how much structres from the past have reinvented themselves for new eras. This poses enormous challenges for the success of a contemporary Shakespeare adaptation: it’s easy to turn the Capulet and Montagues’ relatively amorphous family fued into a gang rivalry or a spat between business empires, but rather harder to come up with a modern equivalent of the Salic Law that will get audiences juiced.

I say all of this as a roundabout way of approaching Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, a play that’s a perfect example of a relatively modern relationship that’s brought together under difficult-to-translate circumstances. Beatrice and Benedick, two wits who have each other as their favorite targets, are brought together in a horribly traumatic moment that’s difficult to imagine today: Beatrice’s cousin has her chastity impugned at the altar on her wedding day, is left at the altar, and her family pretends that she’s died of shame in order to build time to restore her reputation. The process by which Hero’s wedding is ruined is essentially a timeless one—she’s framed for cheating with another man on the night before her marriage to Claudio—but the reaction to this news is not. Claudio isn’t just disgusted by the idea that Hero has cheated on him: the fact that she has sexual experience at all is at the root of Claudio’s complaint to Hero’s father at the altar:

Sweet prince, you learn me noble thankfulness.
There, Leonato, take her back again:
Give not this rotten orange to your friend;
She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Comes not that blood as modest evidence
To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shows? But she is none:
She knows the heat of a luxurious bed;
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

I wrote on Friday that this is a scenario that’s exceedingly hard to move into the modern era, and I thought the success of Much Ado About Nothing would depend on the ability of the movie to find a contemporary scenario into which this conflict fit without seeming jarringly anachronistic, making it easier to suspend disbelief about the characters’ reactions. While there’s no question that cheating on your wedding night is a big deal in modern society, we’re—fortunately—not a society where it would be a reasonable test of your lover’s affections to ask him to kill his best friend for besmirching your cousin’s sexual reputation. There are options here, of course. I would have been curious to see a slightly larger social context where Hero and her family are Christian, and the film took seriously the idea that her honor is valuable to her because she’s been taught it’s the most important thing about her. And even more interesting could have been a setup where Claudio’s reaction seems to come more from a sense of anxiety about the revelation that his bride has more sexual experience than he does than from the idea that Don Leonato has offended him by pretending to honor him but offering him “this rotten orange” as a sign of that honor.”
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I’m hoping to catch Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing at South By Southwest, though it looks like scheduling may not allow for it. But looking at the trailer, I’ve got two thoughts:

First, I love me some Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker, but I think it’s going to be hard for me to see them not in the context of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s performances in those roles in from twenty years ago. Acker’s so good at retiring roles that it’s hard for me to really imagine her with a delightfully poisonous tongue.

And second, I’m curious as to how the adaptation is going to handle Hero and Claudio, played respectively by Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz. Their story, in which Hero’s chastity is called into question, the wedding between the young lovers is called off, and Claudio is made to feel guilty by being told that Hero’s literally died of grief is a much harder thing to bring into the moder era than a clash of wits between a much more contemporary couple like Beatrice and Benedick. There’s very interesting stuff to be done with Hero and Claudio about anxiety about relative sexual experience, slut-shaming, and the anxiety of marriage. But getting there and doing it right in this setting probably means jettisoning the set-up in which Claudio believes that Hero is dead. I’m curious to see how Whedon will work it all out. Giving us modern screwball with Beatrice and Benedick is awfully fun, but it’s the easy lift here. Transforming Hero and Claudio and doing it well will be the much more impressive feat.

I had a lovely time at SXSW talking Islam and pop culture this spring, and I’m hoping to head back next year. Slate’s proposed a panel involving me, Slate editor Hanna Rosin, The New Republic’s Noreen Malone, and Girls executive producer Jenni Konner talking sex and raunch involving women on television. If it happens, I think it should be a good conversation. In between Louie, Girls, Don’t Trust the B—- In Apartment 23 and movies like Bridesmaids, I think we’re at an interesting moment where female characters are playing with dignity, instrumentalism and aggression in sex in challenging ways, and the reaction to these sex scenes and approaches to sex demonstrate how early we are in these sorts of conversations. If the right to be undignified without having it reflect on every member of every group you’re a part of is a marker of true equality, then this conversation gets at something particularly important. If you agree, I’d appreciate it if you’d take a moment to support the panel through SXSW’s Panel Picker. And if we get to go, I’ll be sure to arrange a meetup in Austin, especially now that I have a better sense of the city.

The Special Program that Rescues Inner City Children From Their Plight movie is an ancient staple, whether it’s the summer pre-calculus class in Stand and Deliver, the flash and flair of Mad Hot Ballroom and the Step Up franchise, or the off-screen phenomenon of the P.S. 22 Chorus. And while the wonderful documentary Brooklyn Castle, which I saw at SXSW, about the nationally competitive middle school chess program at Brooklyn’s I.S. 318 follows the same basic formula, it’s a much more sophisticated take on the genre:

The movie follows the team at I.S. 318 during a year while they try to reclaim their national junior high chess championship. But adding another banner to their already-impressive display (the team had won 26 national championships going into that season) is only part of the drama. The team is threatened by massive recession-induced budget cuts and some members are taking the exam that will determine which competitive high school they’re able to attend next year. In addition to those larger political arcs, there are smaller ones: Rochelle, a ninth grader, is working to become the first black female chess master, as well as win the scholarship that would let her go to college; Justus, a gifted sixth grade player who transferred to I.S. 318 to take part in the program, withers under the pressure; Pobo, an outrageously personable eighth grader, is running for school president; and Patrick, struggling ADHD, simply wants to win a tournament match.

These are staple tropes of Afterschool Activities movies, but Brooklyn Castle‘s bright insight is to treat its students not as passive actors who are worked on by the system until a teacher comes along to save them, but as political actors in their own rights. Pobo bases his campaign for president on a promise to push back against budget cuts—and he’s not living out a 12-year-old’s fantasy, he actually organizes letter-writing campaigns and walkathons. Alexis, one of the best eighth-grade players, struggles with how to prioritize his school preference list, suggesting that he should include the training program for the FDNY on his list so he’ll have a path to steady work if the economy continues to tank and his other options don’t work out well. Patrick’s progress helps turn his mother into an advocate as well. Brooklyn Castle doesn’t suggest that everything will be fine because I.S. 318 has a chess club. It makes the much more realistic and important argument that something like the chess club can help prepare students to be their own advocates in a world that shows no interest in saving them.

By far one of the best things I did at SXSW was stop by a conversation yesterday morning between Mark Mothersbaugh and BMI Records’ Doreen Ringer Ross. Of course, I’ve listened to Devo, and it’s very difficult to imagine what movie scores of the last two decades would be like if Mothersbaugh hadn’t gotten into the soundtracking business. But I didn’t really have a sense of Mothersbaugh’s history and inspirations, so it was fascinating to hear him talk about both that and the role that technology’s played in guiding his work.

Among other things, I didn’t know that Devo started in the wake of the shootings at Kent State, where Mothersbaugh was studying in the art department at the time. “They shot kids who were protesting. We were trying to explain what was going on around us,” he said. “If protesting was obselete, what worked? We looked at Madison Avenue and how they got people to buy things happily. Their techniques were scary and impressive and usually involved subversion.”

In terms of what Devo and Mothersbaugh actually went on to create separately and collectively, it was clear that the emergence of new technologies and the knowledge or lack thereof that Mothersbaugh had of technology have played significant roles in opening up new directions for their work. The rise of the laserdisc, for example, made the band realize “it had music and visuals on one disc and we wanted to make content for that” format, Mothersbaugh said. And he explained how he came to pay such careful attention to movie soundtracks: “My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up by the television…I’d have a couple of 90 minute cassette tapes so I could tape my favorite movies and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn’t have the visuals. And I think that made me really pay attention to the soundtrack.”

When he started scoring Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Mothersbaugh said he was essentially ignorant of the conventions that governed such work. “An engineer called and said ‘I like your music, but why don’t you have time cue on your tapes?’” Mothersbaugh recalled. “And I said, what’s that? Second year I learned about time code and the made it so much easier.”

And he said that scoring video games required thinking about music in many more dimensions—and assuming a much different user experience:

Movies, you see it once, maybe twice. If you’re a kid, you see it 6 times…Video games can go on hundreds of hours, it can consume someone’s life…You’ll record maybe just bass lines that are legato and it’s the beginning of a game, and Homer Simpson’s running around looking for things to eat and as he gets more things, it gets more frantic, and more sections come in…Whenever someone meets a goal, or goes down an alley, or explodes an alien’s head, the tone of the music changes…You get more time because of the gestation process. And they need the music earlier than they do in films, so you’re involved earlier in the process.

It’s refreshing to hear that kind of thoughtfulness, and that eagerness to expand into new forms and new kinds of experiences. And there’s something fun about hearing Mothersbaugh discuss everything from scoring the Rugrats to dealing with the fact that Wes Anderson is finicky: “He didn’t like bass sounds. He didn’t like brass.” There’s no particular division there between adult and kid stuff, between movies that nod towards art and whipsmart cartoons, which makes sense: all of them are yearning towards a kind of loony joy.

A programming note: posting’s going to be a bit slow for the rest of my time at SXSW. There are just too many panels to go and people to see. Thanks for being understanding. I’ll keep the content coming as best I can.

“In Hollywood, the douche is louche. The douchebag, as opposed to the meathead or the jagoff, is a viable hero in cinema,” Slate’s Dan Kois said at a panel on SXSW on Sunday. “Usually, a douchebag could only be a hero if he was redeemed, usually by the love of a good woman…[But now we have] Iron Man, the world-historical first superhero douchebag franchise…[In The Hangover movies]Bradley Cooper plays an unrepentant douchebag who is terrible to his friends.” The panel didn’t entirely get into it—instead, it devolved into one of the more committed piece of performance art I’ve ever seen at a conference—but it’s an interesting question. What does it say about us that we’ve got so many movie heroes who disregard everyone around them in pursuit of their own interests?

There’s something Randian about the perspective that Kois and his fellow panelists, Robyn Sklaren, P.E. Oppenheim, Eliza Skinner offered up. “We’re all animals. We go after our wants and needs,” Skinner said, arguing that in a moment when we put a premium on authenticity, “A douchebag feels so much more authentic that anyone else. A douchebag is honest about the fact that he wants to fuck that girl. Everybody wants to fuck that girl.” Kois said that Michael Mann’s movies have thrived on the fact that “they all demonstrate the charismatic amazingness of douchebags.” And Skinner suggested that, in contrast to your everyday deeply unpleasant person, “you have to be charming to be a douche. People have to want to talk to you.”

The thing is, most people don’t actually meet that charmingness threshold. And most people don’t possess the other attributes, like insanely good looks or extreme wealth, that allow them to ignore the wishes, needs, and even rights of others, and still compel people to continue interacting with them, much less fulfilling their needs. Being able to be utterly impossible and still get everything you want isn’t a remotely obtainable fantasy for almost any of us. For all that romantic comedies get blamed for feeding unrealistic conceptions of what love and relationships look like, it’s more plausible that flawed people will make accommodations for each other than that the average person can get through life being entirely anti-social without ever once being called effectively to account and forced to alter their behavior to get something that they want.

Because I think the truth is, conditioning or no, most people actually want certain levels of interconnection. At worst, that manifests as a desire for credit for being compassionate and thoughtful, which means you’ve at least got to go through some of the motions. At best, we crave actual intimacy and emotional interdependence. These things are messy, and strange, and not uniformly rewarding, but we do often want them. Fantasizing about wanting interactions without the possibility of experiencing pain may not result in attractive fantasies. But it’s a rational response, if not a classy one, to great fear, and great want.

I’m off this morning to SXSW, coming back on Wednesday. The plan is for blogging to continue apace, but I will be running around to movies and panels and things so if I slow down a bit or am pokey on responding to email, forgive me.

If you’re going to be in Austin, two things. First, you should come to my panel on Monday. I’ll be moderating a conversation about Islam, popular culture, and whether it makes sense for minority groups to use character tropes as a wedge to force open a larger conversation. And afterwards, I’m up for coffee, or a late lunch, or anything else folks want to do. If there are going to be enough of you in town to meet up, leave comments here or email me and we’ll plan something for this weekend.

So, we’ve got a new trailer for Joss Whedon’s upcoming horror movie The Cabin in the Woods. And is it me, or is there a faint whiff of the Initiative, the research lab and paramilitary team gone somewhat wrong, in all of this:

It may just be the underground lab and the secret conspiracy vibe getting to me. But one of the things I think Whedon does very well is debunk the dangerous pretentions of people who believe they have exclusive access to esoteric knowledge and have built up bureaucratic structures to help them maintain their hold on power. The Watcher’s Council is the first example of this: they’re a group of men who have very little empathy for the young women they’re supposed to be training and helping, and who have turned the existence of the Slayer into a justification for them to accumulate knowledge and authority rather than a cause they’re genuinely dedicated to. When their headquarters is destroyed at the beginning of the seventh season of Buffy, it’s simultaneously tragic and semi-irrelevant. That they couldn’t find a way to modernize, work with Buffy, and move into a model where the goal is to make sure the Slayer lives beyond her early twenties is genuinely sad, both for an institution that broke rather than being willing to bend, and because it denies Buffy and the new Slayers generations of knowledge that could have made their fight more effective and less dangerous.

Then, there’s the Initiative, which is a perfect example of what happens when you have a government operation without effective oversight (side note: I would love to see a dorky spin-off of the Inspector General’s report about the Initiative). Maggie Walsh gives her soldiers drugs that ultimately undermine their long-term efficacy. Her Adam project ends up resulting in a huge number of casualties and no discernible benefit. And the program’s only shut down after it’s incurred an enormous amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. There’s a clear analogue for the creation—and coverup of—the Reavers in Firefly and Serenity.

Now, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with those cameras, and that force field, and those creepy hydraulics in Cabin in the Woods. But I’m hoping to find out on Friday at SXSW. Either way, being very suspicious of people with a lot of power and unlimited resources is very much a Whedon hallmark.