This post discusses plot points from the April 7 episode of Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones, in keeping with its title, spends much of its time meditating on how people maneuver to acquire power. Whether it’s dragons, whispers, sex, or brute force, the show does an excellent job exploring which tools different kinds of people choose, and what happens to them once they adopt their chosen ends. But not everyone in Westeros and Essos is meant to or intends to sit the Iron Throne. And “Dark Wings, Dark Words” is a strong episode of the show because it poses a rather different set of questions. What does it mean to be brave in the world of Game of Thrones when you don’t have armies, or dragons, the right name or gender, or even the physical capability to defend yourself?

It makes sense that an episode concerned with these issues includes a figure who once thought of himself as brave and powerful, but has been stripped of his armor, weapons, and authority. “Where am I?” asks Theon Greyjoy, shackled to a wooden cross, alone in the dark. “Who are you? What do you want?” “I want to do this,” one of his captors tells him, taking a knife to his hand. The man with the weapon has power, but it’s not brave to torture an unarmed and disconcerted man. And even as Theon disintegrates, there’s a certain amount of courage in the little integrity he’s able to hold on to. “Tell us the truth,” his interrogator asks him. “About what?” Theon begs him, still not at the point of simply talking. “I don’t know what you want!” When he breaks down after being hooded, there’s no particular shame in his plea “I’ll tell you anything. Just take it off. Please, please, just take it off.” Invulnerability is a kind of foolishness.

Brienne’s entrance into the season is a reminder that physical strength can be paired with emotional vulnerability, and that sometimes emotional openness can be a kind of strength. Jamie Lannister, irritated by her uprightness, tries to bait her about her loyalty and focus, saying: “You think Lady Stark’s going to want a giant, tow-headed plank following her around for the rest of her life?” What he doesn’t count on is that Brienne’s open to the possibility of rejection. “If Lady Stark is unhappy with any aspect of my service, I’m sure she’ll let me know,” Brienne tells him. “She’s an honest woman.” The only subject on which Jamie manages to get a rise out of her is Renly.
“I did not fancy him,” Brienne insists, giving herself away. “Gods, you did. Did you ever tell him?” Jamie jabs at her. “You’re far too much man for him.” But having elicited a reaction from her, Jamie backs down, in part because it’s a subject on which he, too, is vulnerable. “I don’t blame him,” Jamie tells Brienne. “And I don’t blame you, either. We don’t get to choose who we love.” But he should have recognized that just as loving Cersei hasn’t made him less of a warrior, loving and losing Renly hasn’t made Brienne soft. When he gets her sword and taunts her “See. If you were willing to hurt me, you might have had me there,” Jamie’s forgetting that holding back can be a form of testing someone, that it can show a respect for violence not to use it except when you usually meet it. And when Brienne beats him, she doesn’t need to even look at him to know she’s won. Self-knowledge is as great an asset as a second sword.
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Won’t Back Down is careful not to speak the words in the trailer, but it’s clear from the decisions the characters make and the protest signs they’re waving that these moms are setting up a charter school:

This is the kind of movie that always give me pause about how well popular entertainment, particularly popular entertainment that’ll clock in at under two hours, can lay out policy solutions instead of articulating policy problems. Narrative fiction can be very, very good at the former. The Wire handled Baltimore public schools well over the course of a season. Brooklyn Castle, my favorite documentary from SXSW uses the jeweler’s lens of a competitive middle school chess team to examine New York City public school budget cuts and the city’s high school exam system. But the solutions it presents are all temporary, individual fixes rather than system-wide reforms. One student wins a scholarship through a chess competition, but that means of achieving escape velocity isn’t available to all students. The school manages to do some stop-gap fundraising, but not everyone has the extremely dedicated parent base and an extracurricular program that can be a massive rallying point.

I’ll be curious how much Won’t Back Down presents setting up a charter school as a difficult endeavor, and if and how meaningfully it acknowledges charter schools’ closure rates. Triumphal narratives feel good, and I’m all for movies that push back against stereotypes of poor parents as uninvested in their childrens’ education. But if you actually want to mobilize people, you have to valorize the effort, not just the end result. And promising outcomes that are far from guaranteed is a recipe for disappointment.

Even before Meryl Streep, playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, beat Viola Davis, in a performance as a Mississippi domestic even The Help‘s detractors couldn’t help admire, for Best Actress, it was a racially awkward night at the Oscars.

The off notes began when Billy Crystal resurrected his Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonation for a Midnight in Paris sketch at the beginning of the show. The bit is just fine, but on a night that featured Octavia Spencer and Davis as acting nominees for The Help, and Gabourey Sidibe reflecting on how few women like herself she sees on-screen, it was an unfortunate reminder of how few parts are available for actual African-American actors. It didn’t help when, later in the telecast, Crystal joked that after seeing The Help “I wanted to hug the first black woman that I saw, which from Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” It might have been a crack on white, wealthy Los Angeles residents, but the joke didn’t have quite enough self-awareness about the persistence of segregation.

That same unease showed up in an otherwise very funny sketch about Hollywood focus groups that featured a group of cranky moviegoers dissecting The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know that it was unintentional, but an attendee played by Fred Willard kept talking about how he’d love a movie with more monkeys in it—and suggested the upcoming Gone With the Wind would benefit from the same additions. It was an unfortunate choice, pairing up that particular animal with the movie for which Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actress to win an Academy Award. As Chris Rock reminded us, “If you’re a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.”

And the awkwardness wasn’t all black and white. Daniel Junge, who won an Academy Award for Feature Documentary for Saving Face, announced that as a white guy, he really ought to get out of the way for his Pakistani collaborator, journalist and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy—and then kept talking, though he did let her have the majority of the time. The biggest missed opportunity of the night was the Academy’s chance to recognize Demian Bichir’s marvelous performance as an undocumented immigrant in Chris Weitz’s A Better Life, a profoundly personal issue movie that went underwatched this year. I don’t begrudge Jean Dujardin his Best Actor win, but it’s much more interesting to confound the Academy’s preconceptions about the people who are still acting as the help than it is to cater to their nostalgic self-conception.