One of the things the controversy over an old blog post by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn last week raised for me was a common dynamic on the internet. First, someone will write something that’s patently offensive, people will discover it and have a justifiable—and predictable—reaction to that content, and defenders of the original writer will claim that the writing is satire, and the people who are offended are merely humorless and incapable of recognize what’s going on around them. In the case of Gunn’s original post, Gunn himself has acknowledged that his attempt at satire was ineffective, writing in an apology that “A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings.” And the conversation around the post has raised what I think is actually a really useful conversation about what satire is and what it takes for it to be effective.

On Tumblr, SciFiGirl47 offers what she calls the Subway Test, arguing that satire of misogynistic material isn’t actually effective if the language it uses would come across as genuinely threatening to someone who hasn’t been informed in advance that it’s satire. She asks readers to imagine themselves on a subway car, alone, with someone they don’t know:

What you do know is that you are alone with him. And it’s a long way to the next station. Your cell phone doesn’t work on this line. For all intents and purposes, you are trapped with this man. There is no where for you to go, you can’t get out and you can’t call for help, and you have to judge what is happening.

I want you to read James Gunn’s comments and imagine you are trapped in a subway car, alone and isolated with a man who is saying these things to you. I want you to imagine that he is looking at you, maybe looking you straight in the eye, not even glancing at your body, but he is staring you down, and he is saying those words. Do you feel ashamed? Afraid? Do you want to get away? Do you want to get your mace out? Then this piece of ‘satire’ has failed the subway test.

Over at her blog The Nerdy Bird, Jill Pantozzi argues that it isn’t enough for satire to be visible: it has to reveal something about its target.

Merriam-Webster has two definitions of the word:

1. a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2. wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

What human vice is Gunn holding up to ridicule or criticism here? What vice or folly is he using sarcasm or irony to deflect? The one answer I’ve heard to those questions is Gunn was attempting to ridicule the many comic fans online who write this type of gross list regularly but if that was his intent, he failed. The list is not satire, at best, it’s base humor.

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Whatever else To Rome With Love, Woody Allen’s latest continental romp, turns out to be (and while a critique of Italian media is a worthwhile subject, Roberto Benigni’s reappearance makes me cringe a bit), there’s something really delightful about the fact that the movie’s seductresses are Penelope Cruz and Ellen Page. Way to recognize that sexy doesn’t come in a single package:

The bridge is yours.

-More music from Stew is always good news.

-Dystopian teen fiction: still the big thing.

-Joss Whedon’s approach to the Hulk.

-The News International hacking scandal has apparently driven two journalists to attempt suicide.

-Woody Allen and John Turturro will play Hasidic gigolos.

I didn’t write anything on the occasion of Christopher Hitchens’ death, because I didn’t feel like I had much to add. I never met him, though we were neighbors, and I occasionally saw him getting out of cabs. There are candles, flowers, and bottles of whisky in a makeshift shrine outside his building. And I wasn’t overly influenced by his writing, though this line from a review of Philip Roth remains an all-time great: “When Raymond Chandler felt things going limp in a story, he would have the door open and then it would be: Enter a man carrying a gun. When Roth is in the same fix, we know that some luckless goy chick is about to get it in the face. Exit reader.” But I’ve rather enjoyed watching the people who did know first Hitchens glorify him — and by extension themselves — and then dissect him. And I love this parody, by Neal Pollack, of the whole arc:

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.

It’s rather wonderfully reminiscent of Woody Allen’s “A Twenties Memory” (and by extension Midnight in Paris):

I remember one afternoon we were sitting at a gay bar in the south of France with our feet comfortably up on stools in the north of France, when Gertrude Stein said, “I’m nauseous.” Picasso thought this to be very funny and Matisse and I took it as a cue to leave for Africa. Seven weeks later, in Kenya, we came upon Hemingway. Bronzed and bearded now, he was already beginning to develop that familiar flat prose style about the eyes and mouth. Here, in the unexplored dark continent, Hemingway had braved chapped lips a thousand times. “What’s doing, Ernest?” I asked him. He waxed eloquent on death and adventure as only he could, and when I awoke he had pitched camp and sat around a great fire fixing us all fine derma appetizers. I kidded him about his new beard and we laughed and sipped cognac and then we put on some boxing gloves and he broke my nose.

Hitchens seems to have been singularly successful at setting up his approval and friendship as highly valuable commodities, less Orwell than the version of Gertrude Stein in Allen’s story. I can understand why, I suppose. In an age of specialists, generalists hold a special fascination. A capacity for alcohol can seem like an important marker of physical tolerance in an intellectual community (though I think Katha Pollitt does a particularly nice job dismantling why that should be true). And if you know someone with the capacity to pronounce loudly and emphatically on your fitness as a person and a thinker, all the better to have them pronounce in your favor. It’s fun being a sage or judge. But I’m always curious about the impulse to make yourself an acolyte.

I finally saw Midnight in Paris this weekend, which I liked much less than I had hoped, if not expected, to. The movie, about a dissatisfied screenwriter who would rather be a novelist and begins to time travel back to Paris in the ’20s while in the city with his awful fiancee and her even more awful parents, is essentially an adaptation of two Allen short stories: “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a bored New Yorker pays a magician to send him into a novel so he can cheat on his wife with Emma Bovary, and “A Twenties Memory,” a rather more cutting story about what it would be like to hang out with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway in Paris.

There are two basic problems with the movie. The first is the idea that Owen Wilson, who was much better playing a pretender to literary genius in The Royal Tenenbaums than he is here, playing the real thing, could plausibly have written a novel that would knock Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway on their collective keisters. It’s a real waste to have Kathy Bates play Gertrude Stein and then have her be nice. (Some of the other collected impersonations, among them Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald and Corey Stoll as Hemingway are quite good, but it’s a schtick rather than an actual period piece, cheap laughs rather than profound ones).

But even more annoying is the fact that Wilson and Rachel McAdams’ characters are just never a plausible couple, and the way Allen signals that McAdams and her parents are Bad, Terrible People is to reach back to 2003 and to pretend they’re Republicans who still hate the French over the war in Iraq. Her father, John, is a man who would have insisted on ordering Freedom Fries in 2003, but because he’s in the wrong socio-economic class, spends a lot of time saying things like “I will always take a California wine [over a French one] but the Napa Valley’s 6,000 miles away,” or complaining that “I didn’t like his remark about Tea Party Republicans…They are decent people trying to rescue the country, not cryptofascists.” This, despite the fact that Wilson’s character does things like gratuitously insult his future father-in-law’s politics over dinner. And when Wilson’s character steals a pair of McAdams’ character’s earrings, hoping to give them to the woman in ’20s Paris he intends to sleep with, he gets caught, but tries to make sure she doesn’t blame the theft on their maid, only to have McAdams respond, “You always take the side of the help. That’s why Daddy says you’re a Communist!”

I say this not to defend Republicans, but to note that this idea of Republicans is the smuggest, most self-satisfied liberal conception possible. And that, as much as Allen’s recycling of his own material, that shows the filmmaker’s age. Nothing about Midnight in Paris is illuminating or morally searching in the way either Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona were. It’s an old filmmaker relaxing into ideas and biases that feel comfortable for him, and apparently for a lot of other moviegoers.