"The Dark Knight Rises" is not all that political, and that's okay

***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE DARK KNIGHT RISES***

I understand that it's tough to discuss The Dark Knight Rises without discussing the tragedy in Aurora, CO; that said, I'm not going to go into that in this post, because trying to detach myself from something like this long enough to try to analyze it any scholarly fashion isn't really something I'm emotionally capable of, particularly after reading about Jessica Ghawi; that said, I did want to talk about the movie itself, even though I think to some extent it will always be associated with the shootings (much like its predecessor was inextricably linked to Heath Ledger's death even before it came out).

 Before the Aurora incident, it seemed like the movie's politics were going to be a flashpoint; Christopher Nolan considered filming footage of Occupy Wall Street at one point before deciding against it, and Rush Limbaugh infamously took a break from calling women who use birth control prostitutes to claim that the movie's villain, created in 1993, was named Bane as an attack on Mitt Romney. And when The Dark Knight was released four years ago, there was a lot of speculation that that film was meant as an apologia for Bush-era War on Terror policies (I'm of the belief that those connections are intentional, but not as a promotion of them, simply confronting us with the fact that if someone like Batman was real, those would probably be the kind of tactics he used.) It's somewhat surprising, then, that the movie itself doesn't really have any clearly-defined politics, so much as vague political undertones that drive an apolitical story. Bane's plan, in which he engineers an uprising using economic inequality and the fallout from the revelation of how Harvey Dent really died, and exploits that to create something approximating the Reign of Terror in France (Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon actually reads from A Tale of Two Cities late in the film), seems vaguely like reactionary warnings about things like the Occupy movement, but there's far more to it than that.

Nolan's Bane, you see, is effective at what he does because he's great at getting people to see them how they want him to see him. When he begins putting his plan into place, he's allied himself with a corporate weasel (the criminally underrated Australian actor Ben Mendellsohn), who doesn't seem to think of him as anything more than muscle.  When Bane inevitably turns the tables, Mendellsohn impotently rages that he's "in charge". "Do you feel in charge?" Bane asks, looming over him, in one of the most effectively chilling moments in the film. So it goes with Bane's army, and the civilians he inspires: he gets people to believe they want the same thing, and then uses it as a way to get what he really wants. He's not an actual true believer among either the 1% or the 99%; he simply manipulates everybody. (Appropriately enough, his first act onscreen is killing Petyr Baelish.) Once Bane has actually put his plan into place, establishing martial law, cutting Gotham off from the rest of the country and burying its police in the sewers, the class conflict aspect becomes immaterial; in fact, after the uprising, we never see any further civilian participation in Bane's plan.

It's not as though the film is unsympathetic to the have-nots; in one quietly brutal scene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's rookie detective, asking questions at a boys' home, learns that most of the residents simply age out and end up in the streets, and that the home is short on resources because it's run by profits from the business that a now-reclusive Bruce Wayne has been neglecting. (This, incidentally, is, I think, one of the major weaknesses of Nolan's Batman films; we're repeatedly told secondhand about how the economic downturn has ravaged Gotham's citizenry, but we really have no human window into those effects. The closest we've got is Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle, and can we really call a master thief emblematic of the commoners?)

Really, the film's overarching themes are far more universally applicable than anything political; this is largely a film about chickens coming home to roost, and the undeniably populist idea that people should be trusted with even the ugliest of truths. Even though he doesn't genuinely care one way or the other, Bane is perfectly right that Gotham's new status quo is based on a lie (the film depicts Gordon-Levitt's sympathetic character as outraged about it himself), and mending the damage caused by it not only requires acknowledgment of the truth (and also a big-ass tank-plane), but leads to further acknowledgment of the truth (Batman finally being considered a hero). It's a movie that takes a lot of the questions we thought The Dark Knight was posing and then answering for us and removes that certainty, which is appropriate for a franchise (or at least, an incarnation of one) that has been, in large part, about turning our ideas of what a Batman movie, and a superhero movie, should be on their heads. Of the three, I'd still say The Dark Knight is the strongest, but this is a helluva way to end Nolan and Bale's tenures.

"Breaking Bad" and the continual fascination of villain protagonists

The following contains spoilers for AMC's Breaking Bad.

This post is not a post about how gosh, there sure are a lot of anti-heroes on cable. Those are played out, and have been played out since the first wave of them were written when The Sopranos first started to hit its stride, and again in response to The Shield. Rather, this post is about a character who's distinct from the anti-hero, and understanding this distinction is key to understanding a show like Breaking Bad. See, Walter White, the chemistry teacher cum cancer patient cum meth kingpin who is the series' protagonist, is not, strictly speaking, an anti-hero at this point; an anti-hero is a character who lacks heroic qualities, but is, in most cases, working towards a goal we can get behind. Gregory House is a douchebag to pretty much everybody, but that doesn't mean we're against him helping patients, or that that isn't a worthy goal on his part; Dexter is either a sociopath or a psychopath depending on how he's being written (TV writers and people who know anything about psychology don't seem to be demographics with a lot of overlap), but if there's such a thing as a constructive outlet for that, he's found it. Nucky Thompson is a bootlegger and a crooked politician who murdered the closest thing he had to a son (well, second-closest), but we're still rooting for him because he's kind to his wife and her children, he can't abide spousal or child abuse and his adversaries are, for the most part, total bastards.

Compare that to guys like Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey. Tony was probably the most compelling character on his show, certainly the most charismatic and entertaining, but did anybody really want him to achieve his goals? We rooted against people like Phil, Livia and Ralphie who threatened to fuck up his world, but it wasn't because (with the exception of the latter) they were necessarily worse people than he was, it was that Tony was the guy we were along for the ride with, and he was fun-or at least interesting- to watch.  There's a similar situation with Cersei Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire; even now that we're seeing things from her perspective, she's not a sympathetic character, but she's turned out as such an epic fuckup that we want to see what happens next. But despite all that, if a character like Tony or Cersei were to be killed, it would be hard to argue they didn't deserve it.

What's interesting about Walter White is that he's essentially migrated from anti-hero to villain protagonist. For the first 1.5 seasons, nobody's going "fuck yeah! Cook that meth, Walt!" but we certainly don't judge a dying man who's doing drastic things out of a desire to provide for his family too harshly. As the series progresses, though, we see Walt let a woman die an easily preventable death because she's blackmailed him, bully his protege into murdering a decent guy (not out of any malice, but because his continued existence puts Walt in danger) and, most infamously, in the finale, poison a child to get Jesse back in his corner. And the worst bit, of course, is that Walt has been cancer-free for a while now; he's in the game for no real reason beyond the fact that it makes him feel more powerful.

That's the Walt that we open the show's fifth season with, and yet the show's as compelling as ever; it's an artful bait-and-switch that it's hard to imagine many shows pulling off.  Dirty Harry is one of the all-time great anti-heroes, but would you watch a movie where he joins the mob? Or if Tyrion Lannister decided Joffrey had the right idea about things? That's the thing about this particular show; even though it still has some sympathetic characters (coming from the other direction, did you ever imagine in the early episodes that there'd come a time when Jesse was more vulnerable and sympathetic than Walt?), so much of its continued appeal is morbid curiosity about how Walt is inevitably going to fuck up his newfound dominance (I mean, has the man EVER had a triumph that didn't lead to him vastly overestimating his ability?). And it still works. Even in an age where TV anti-heroes have become the rule rather than the exception, it takes some great writing and acting to have a TV show make us want to keep watching for a full season after they've blown their apparent Big Bad's face off. Because really, if you had a choice between going inside the head of Al Capone and the head of Eliot Ness, which one would you be likely to go with? Assuming you know you could leave when you were done, of course.

What Daniel Tosh doesn't get about comedy (besides the obvious)

This post contains potential triggers, but chances are that you've already heard the anecdote it derives from; if you don't find that triggering, you should be fine.

I've been putting off writing something about this ugliness with Daniel "Joel McHale is already doing my job" Tosh, simply because it pisses me off to write about it and you don't want to read a blog post that's nothing but keyboard-mashing Irish rage, and if you did, you are probably already busy following Lawrence O'Donnell on Twitter. But anyway, for anyone fortunate enough to have not followed this, a Tumblr user posted that she and a friend had been to the Laugh Factory during a set by Tosh (by her telling, she didn't know who he was prior to attending):

Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape. After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”

LOL! Because, you see, then she would no longer be interrupting Daniel Tosh, and would instead be violently sexually assaulted!

As is often the case when comedians do shit like this, the line Tosh's apologists (who, disappointingly, include Louis CK, somebody knows how to ACTUALLY do edgy, assumption-challenging comedy instead of just trolling and thinking that's what he's doing) have been trotting out is some variation on "Comedy is about pushing buttons and making people uncomfortable, brah, and no topic should be off-limits". The thing is, I do kind of agree with that. But that's not Tosh's transgression here. I mean, first of all, if Tosh had said, over the course of his pre-prepared act "Wouldn't it be funny if a woman got gang-raped?" it still wouldn't have been funny (or even really a joke), but what he actually said was in response to a heckler, and when a comedian engages a heckler, the idea is to intimidate them into not heckling anymore. And usually that intimidation is accomplished by encouraging people to laugh at them, but in this case, it was by endorsing the idea of someone being gang-raped, which is, needless to say, a pretty fucked-up way of telling somebody "shut up while I'm talking".

Second of all, yes, a lot of comedy is about saying things society doesn't want you to say, or is made uncomfortable by, but there's more to it than that: edginess derives from shooting up, at people more powerful or influential than you. That's why, even as someone who's left-of-center, I find Jon Stewart consistently hilarious no matter which side of the aisle he's taking shots at because these are people who make decisions that affect all of our lives, and it's fun to see someone with no actual power over them refuse to make them seriously. When you make fun of or humiliate someone, via comedy, who is already marginalized and degraded in a non-comedic context, someone who's already an underdog (i.e. rape victims, minorities, LGBTQIA folk), you're not challenging or upending anything, you're just using an entertainment medium to reinforce the current system. And that makes you the comedy equivalent of an animated short about table manners.

Chris Rock addresses something like this in his routine about white people who get upset that they're not "allowed" to say "nigger". Rock's response is "Okay, you can say it when I can raise interest rates". In other words, do you want to make your hilarious joke about rape or gay-bashing or lynching or whatever the hell without being made to feel guilty for it SO badly that you'd give up your privilege to make it? A guy like Daniel Tosh's attempts at humor are all about smugly affirming his privilege and the lack thereof of the people he mocks (a lot of his defenders have pointed out that, besides his racist humor, he also invokes white trash stereotypes, as though classism is any less lazy coming from somebody like him). And, I'm sorry, but that's just not objectively very funny.

Oh, for fuck's sake, 50 Cent

Despite my being whiter than Mitt Romney jerking off on a polar bear skin rug, I'm a fan of a lot of rap. Jay-Z, Nas, Immortal Technique and (when he remembers that he does, in fact, make music) Kanye are all among my favorites. I'm writing this preface so that you understand that I'm not doing some hipster "it should be called CRAP music!" thing when I say I really don't get 50 Cent's appeal.

I mean, yes, I get his appeal; he has the mystique of his actual history, and that makes the kind of stuff he raps about seem more authentic. What I don't get is how that outweighs his tone-deafness and the fact that he is, by all appearances, a major asshole (yeah, I know I mentioned Kanye above, but Kanye doesn't sound like Tom Waits with his wisdom teeth out). Fitty's musical mediocrity aside, his online presence is so obnoxious that it was the namesake of an article about the dumbest celebrities on Twitter. So no, I can't exactly act surprised by the fact that last week [Stewie voice] Mr. CENT Tweeted, in response to a fan heckling him about an album release "“yeah just saw your picture fool you look autistic", which he later followed up by saying “I don’t want no special ed kids on my time line follow some body else.” I could say something about how apparently Fitty's vastly superior non-special ed didn't teach him that "timeline" and "somebody" are both single words, but then, if he wasn't a fucking moron, I wouldn't be writing this post in the first place.

Cent's comments were noticed by actress Holly Robinson Peete, whose son is autistic; Peete posted an open letter on her website in response. Some choice excerpts:

Do you even know what autism is? And what exactly does “autistic” look like? Do you know how wildly prevalent autism is? 1 in 88 have it. That’s 1 in 54 boys. Families suffer a social stigma you will never know.

[snip]

I hope you can see how what you might see as a benign insult-or not- was so randomly hurtful, immature and misinformed. Maybe you are naive or indifferent as to how many of your fans might be deeply and personally offended by your insult. At the very least-can you please delete it? If you’ve read your mentions today I am sure you have felt the wrath of autism parents. We are no joke. Neither is autism. We are not about to let you attempt to make “autistic” the new “R-word” under our watch.

Ms. Peete says a lot that I'd have said in her position, in a much more eloquent, mature way than I could have (nary a joke about presidential candidates masturbating in the entire letter, for example); I'm particularly grateful she addressed the stigma of autism, even as diagnoses are on the rise; if I had a nickel for every person I've told I was on the spectrum who had acted shocked and said something like "I just thought you were smart", I could put all of those nickels in a sock and hit them with it while yelling "Disabilities and intelligence aren't mutually exclusive, you dick!" And Cent has since posted a bizarre mea culpa that seems half sincere apology, half fake one (actual quote: "it was not my intention to offend anyone and for this I apologize".)

That said, I think Ms. Peete is misconstruing 50 Cent's motivations; it's probably true that he doesn't understand what autism is, but I doubt that's why he said what he said; he probably said it because he's kind of a douchebag.  And people like that don't need to be told what autism is; they need to be told it's not clever or "edgy" to use disabilities as insults. And possibly hit with my nickel-sock, if time allows; God knows Fitty's been through worse.

"The Amazing Spider-Man" and Asperger's

Above: Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

Sorry for the post delay, ladies and gents. Much like a labor analyst, the first week of the month is always the hardest at my job.

Anyway, it's come to my attention that I have yet to write anything relating to Asperger's, even though it's right there in the damn masthead. (Do you call it a masthead for a blog? I dunno.) I'm sure it'll come as no surprise that I'm a pretty big comic geek, but it was way more a part of my life in middle school and early high school, largely because (as I suspect is the case for a lot of people, whether they read comics or not) that was the stage in my life at which I was most in need of the escapism inherent in the medium. (Dear God, that might be the most pretentious-looking sentence I've ever written.) I think that had a lot to do with why Captain America and Spider-Man were probably my two favorites over at Marvel; they were superheroes who started out as essentially the same kind of people who read comics. But what always made Spidey in particular appealing to me was the fact that, even though he fought crime out of a combination of altruism and guilt (if you have anything resembling inner peace, you were probably not created by Stan Lee), he is, to put it bluntly, a sarcastic little shit, even while fighting crime. He was essentially what I always wanted to be: a guy who was great at both snarking on people who deserved it AND backing it up physically where necessary. Even though I've got a lot of affection for Sam Raimi's original films (yes, even the third), I always felt like they suffered for not including that aspect of the character.

This is largely, I suspect, to do with my own experiences growing up. I've discussed the idea that I think my tendency towards sarcasm is a defense mechanism in response to my own difficulty with non-literal, non-verbal communication, but I think it also developed in middle school in response to the realization that, if there was an argument (and there often was), I wasn't going to win it with physical force. In theory, sarcasm and wit seemed like the Great Equalizer. But, as is so often the case, I was up against the gulf between what's in my head and what comes out of my mouth. One of my most painful memories is telling a clutch* of bullies on the bus, in my best deadpan, that they were "absolutely hilarious", assuming they'd be devastated. It sounded so great in my head.

But anyway, despite my initial reservations about the need for its existence, one of the things that caught my attention in Marc Webb's reboot of the Spider-Man film franchise was its inclusion of the proportionate snark of a spider**. And Webb's film, for this and for other reasons, rings a lot truer for anyone who's been through high school than Raimi's original. A lot of this is also to do with the central performances; even though Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are 28 (!) and 23 respectively, they're a lot more believable as high schoolers, not just physically but in the way they interact. And true to form, Garfield is particularly great when he tries to put his feelings into words to Stone's Gwen Stacy, giving it an awkward, puppy doggish quality that is familiar not only to Aspies but, I suspect, to anyone who's ever been in high school. I don't get any particular Aspie vibe from Garfield's performance, but still, I think it's fair to say that Spider-Man is essentially someone who has all the drawbacks of Asperger's by day and all the strengths of it by night (and also Spidey-Sense, which is nice).

If we interpret Spider-Man as an Asperger's analogue (and we don't have to, but let's just say for the purposes of the discussion), that makes the film's choice of villain interesting as well; on a surface level, there's nothing particularly novel about him (as the Playlist points out, this makes three out of four "Spider-Man" movies where the villain is a scientist and an erstwhile mentor of Peter Parker's), but Rhys Ifans' Curt Connors is motivated not by greed or generic scientific zeal, but by his own disability, in his case a missing arm. As his attempts to grow it back mutate him into the Lizard (oh, quit whining, he's in half the ads), he at one point speaks of the desire for "perfection". And yet, look at Connors' life before his transformation; he's still a brilliant, accomplished scientist (the film makes clear that he lost his arm at least a decade ago), and the only time we ever see his disability inconvenience him is when Peter has to hand him his coffee. So TL;DR, we can read the film as the story of someone who embraces his disability and becomes a hero and another person who refuses to accept it as a part of him and lets that refusal turn him into a monster. If a teenager on the spectrum is watching this film and he or she takes that away from it, it's hard to find fault with that.

There's a lot more to like about the film, particularly the city-porn shots of New York, the performances from Stone, Denis Leary and Martin Sheen (the latter gets a tearjerker of a closing speech that works beautifully) and the really organic-feeling comedic moments, and there's plenty to criticize as well (the villain's potential is largely untapped, there's a pointless deviation from Spidey's origin story and the use of a tall, sinister Indian bagman as a secondary villain feels pretty dated), but I feel like I'm already running long, and other reviewers and bloggers have covered these aspects better than I can. But I'd definitely recommend it;

*A group of bullies is called a clutch. Look it up.
** This is not an actual thing.

You ruined analysis of "Brave" for everyone, Adam Markovitz

So I saw "Brave" with the lady-friend Friday night, and I'd been planning to write something about it in the meantime, be it about the meaning of the complaints that it's too "generic" a story for Pixar or the fact that it explores mother-child relationships in a way Pixar and Disney in general haven't really done before or something else of that nature. But then Adam Markovitz over at Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch wrote this post, about how Kelly MacDonald's Princess Merida is secretly a gay gay homosexual lesbian who is gay.  His evidence?

She bristles at the traditional gender roles that she’s expected to play: the demure daughter, the obedient fiancée. Her love of unprincess-like hobbies, including archery and rock-climbing, is sure to strike a chord with gay viewers who felt similarly “not like the other kids” growing up. And she hates the prospect of marriage — at least, to any of the three oafish clansmen that compete for her hand — enough to run away from home and put her own mother’s life at risk. She’s certainly not a swooning, boy-crazy Disney princess like The Little Mermaid’s Ariel or Snow White. In fact, Merida may be the first in that group to be completely romantically disinclined (even cross-dressing Mulan had a soft spot for Li Shang).

Arguing against something like this can be kind of a tightrope-walk, similar to arguing with people who think the president is a Muslim: one the one hand, the suggestion is patently ridiculous; on the other, when you're arguing that something is ridiculous, it's easy to make it seem like you think it's somehow slanderous to suggest someone is gay or Muslim, which can be offensive in and of itself. My main issue with Markovitz's thesis is its reliance on stereotypes, and the fact that he essentially is interpreting anything not traditionally feminine as lesbian subtext.

Obviously, Markovitz is pretty confused about human sexuality if he expects "cross-dressing" to automatically discount heterosexuality (especially since, in Mulan's case, it was entirely for practical purposes rather than a preference); I must admit I'm kind of surprised that he paints with such a broad brush just because, even beyond one's personal experiences, feminine lesbians have been part of the cultural landscape for YEARS. Yes, admittedly, some of them are of the fan-servicey Katy Perry "aw, two chicks, hawt!" variety, like Lucille from "Sin City" or "Sherlock"'s reinterpretation of Irene Adler, but there are plenty of three-dimensional, well-developed ones as well, such as Willow Rosenberg, Joanie Stubbs,  Angela Darmody or Blue Rain.

The second part of his "theory", the fact that Merida doesn't want to marry any of three guys who even Markovitz describes as "oafish", manages to be even more of a reach. Yes, deciding a woman is a lesbian because she doesn't have any interest in one guy has been useful to frat boys throughout history, but it's not exactly "evidence" of anything. Even beyond the fact that the film goes out of its way to establish her suitors as unappealing (hey, I guess Jasmine was a lesbian for the first half of "Aladdin" by Markovitz's logic), it's made explicit that the reason Merida is uninterested in marriage has far more to do with wanting to be free to do the things she enjoys without the expectations of being a wife or a queen. And yet Markovitz sees that and his response is essentially "More like MeriDYKE, lol". Shit, Adam, they have her going "I want my freedom" in pretty much all of the trailers. You didn't even have to see the movie.

Now, just to say something nice, there may well be some merit to Markovitz's idea that Merida not fitting into her society could be analogous to growing up gay. That kind of parallel is one that's been made in fiction for a while, sometimes much more explicitly. But beyond that, Markovitz's reasoning is a prime example of Sherlock Holmes' warning not to "twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts".

Mike Bloomberg is way worse for sex workers than Big Gulp enthusiasts

***Potential triggers. ***

I wrote a column last week for Style Weekly about how enthusiastically eager our society is to pronounce certain women "unworthy" of protection against violence or sexual assault. This could be because they've committed a crime, it could be because they [eek!] enjoy consensual sex (or, as it's more popularly known, WHORESWHORESWHORESWHORESWHORES), it could be because they're sex workers, et cetera.

Well, as is the case a disturbing amount of the time*, the column was followed almost immediately by another incident that made my point. On Friday morning, New York mayor and possible Sontaran Michael Bloomberg signed a bill into law that would fine cab drivers for knowingly giving prostitutes rides. The bill is being heavily sold as an anti-sex trafficking effort, and Bloomberg assured his constituents that it was cool, bros, cabbies wouldn't have to learn to distinguish between prostitutes and "party girls" (a statement that is notable for being insulting to every single noun in it).

Except here's the thing, Michael Bloomberg: much like, even though you're the mayor of New York, you on occasion drive places to do something other than be mayor (quite a lot of occasions, seemingly), sometimes prostitutes get cab rides for reasons other than to have sex for money. Like, for instance, given how disgustingly common sexual and physical violence against them is, a prostitute might- stay with me here- just MIGHT need a cab ride because she's being pursued by someone who intends to do her- or continue to do her- serious harm, or to get to a hospital  after said serious harm has been done to her (speaking as someone who's ridden in an ambulance before, I can assure you a cab is cheaper) and for a cab driver to help her extricate herself from that situation is now against the law.

And even beyond that, how ridiculously fucking vague is "knowingly"? You know that myth that it's entrapment if you ask an undercover cop if he's a cop and he lies and says no? That doesn't apply to prostitutes either. And on top of that, what's to stop a cab driver from deciding that since he doesn't approve of how a woman is dressed, he "knows" she's a prostitute? I mean, it's not as though the taxi industry has demonstrated a willingness to discriminate or anything.

Anyone who's had the misfortune to interact with some "men's rights" loudmouth has probably noticed that they get REALLY defensive when you bring up the concept of rape culture. But I ask you- in all seriousness- what else can you call it when we decide that a woman, because of what she does for a living, has relinquished her right to get to safety, or seek medical attention, as quickly as possible?

Oh, and as you've probably heard, Mayor Bloomberg has also proposed a ban on the sale of sodas over 16 ounces. Guess which one people are more outraged about?

*Seriously. Last year I wrote this a couple days before this happened, and a  month or so ago this was immediately followed by this. I think I might be a jinx.