Quoted

"The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise."

- Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
"40 Years After Watergate, Nixon Was Far Worse Than We Thought" from The Washington Post

I'm trying to keep from venturing too far down the rabbit hole on Mad Men, but in the past few days I keep wondering whether the general air of foreboding and cynicism creeping into the show is pointing right towards Nixon. There's of course the first-season dealings with his first presidential campaign, and Henry's continued presence has kept Republican politics on the show's periphery in a way that could easily shift into more prominent plot points. I thought all the malaise was going to be about mirroring the decline of New York City as the seventies approach. But the events of the last two episodes suggest that there are also some questions being brought forward about what happens when your success is derived from being complicit in a corrupt enterprise. 

Quoted

Honestly, there was talk around base camp right at the start of the season, literally in the first couple of days, of something happening to somebody. I'm not sure what it was, maybe people intuited it, there was just a feeling going, that someone was man overboard. I'm not sure where that came from. For me, when I went to all the costume fittings, I saw that he hadn't been taking as good care of himself. There were stains in his shirts and his waistcoats. I would point them out, "This is dirty," and they'd go, "Yeah, that's what we're doing this season." And I'd go, "Yeah, that's not good."

- Jared Harris, Interview from HitFix

They're thinking about all this on a level that we in the audience can't even really see. That's a little mind-boggling, to be frank.

"Killing Lane is the most agonizing thing we’ve ever done, both emotionally and professionally as writers. Jared Harris has been, and indeed still is, a beloved member of our Mad Men family. He is an incomparable actor and friend. Just wrapping our heads around and committing to his suicide took months. We spent weeks in the writers’ room debating the merits and consequences, and hours in his office choreographing the deed. Every detail was meticulously mapped out—from the placement of the rope and body, to the application of the make-up, to the suicide note (we actually wrote six).

"In the end, all we can say is that the experience is not over. There is still one more episode to digest and consider. And what a brilliant one it is from Matthew Weiner. A season-finale glimpse into Lane’s (and Don’s) tortured soul awaits. We don’t think anyone will be disappointed."

- Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, from Slate

I'm a bit scared, wondering what more could possibly be coming tomorrow night.

Quoted/Screened: May 2012

"My personal hope is that he lets a hundred (or maybe a dozen) Whedons bloom. Let's hope he repays the loyalty of his fans by opening the doors of the entertainment kingdom to the kind of writers and creators who might not get a crack at the big time without his backing. Nobody's done more than Whedon to create and inspire a generation of TV writers; many of the best scribes working today got their start on Whedonverse programs and most of the rest were powerfully influenced by his shows. I hope he throws his weight behind those writers' most impassioned passion projects..., backs those writers' pitches, gets their shows on the air and brings more fine entertainment products to the Web."

- Maureen Ryan, "Avengers Fans: Thank TV for That Awesome Movie (And What Joss Should Do Next)" at Huffington Post

I thought I'd let this stand as my Screened post for May, since the bulk of my movie viewing was contained in three trips to the theater to see The Avengers. (All 2D) (The only other movie I saw was We Bought a Zoo, which was much more charming than I expected.) The best was the first showing I went to, on Saturday the fifth, where the opening-weekend crowd responded to quips and plot developments with raucous laughs and cheers. The quippy banter of the script was perfectly suited to the viewing experience - it felt joyous to be among the crowd in a way I seldom feel in a packed theater. I rewatched some of the lead-up movies in the week before I saw The Avengers; while my opinion of Iron Man 2 hasn't really changed, I can see how The Avengers benefitted from letting that movie do a lot of heavy lifting in establishing SHIELD's presence in the broader plot and defining Tony Stark's relationship with them, and I think the weaving together of the various plot strands actually elevates the first Thor and Captain America movies a bit.

I also liked this LA Times interview with Joss Whedon - I think the comparison of Bruce Banner with Oz from Buffy is a really interesting one to make among the many "how does The Avengers fit in the Whedon-verse" analyses floating around. That was the other great feeling I had watching the movie for the first time - in that much-heralded shot that tracks from hero to hero in the midst of the final battle, my cult-TV-loving self couldn't help but think, "Holy crap, he really did it."

Quoted

"Maybe because the show is a comedy, some viewers can’t help believing the show “wants” us to sympathize with Hannah in stealing the money, but I think that couldn’t be less true. The interest of the show is in showing her as an intelligent, unformed, selfish, self-pitying young screw-up. She’s funny, and she’s irritating. She’s sometimes perceptive, and yet stunningly un-self-aware. She cares deeply for her friends, and sees her parents as ATMs. The show is not about seeing her as a good person, it’s about wanting to see her—hopefully, by taking on some responsibility, growing up and seeing beyond herself—become one."

- James Poniewozik
from "From Tony Soprano to Hannah Horvath: What Does a TV Show 'Want' You to Think of Its Characters?" at Tuned In


I've been working a lot recently trying to articulate what exactly it is I want to focus on in my studies going forward, and I think part of what I want to achieve is the kind of breadth of knowledge Poniewozik draws upon here to make his point. I particularly love the comparison of the character moments in the respective pilots of Girls and The Shield. (I'm currently in the middle of the sixth season of The Shield - knocking shows off of this list like a champion, if I may say so, and on the verge of tackling Nos. 1 and 2 in the aforementioned process of deepening my body of knowledge.) So much has been said about the pilot all over the Internet that I think I'll save judgement on Girls for a few weeks, but based on Sunday's episode I agree with this assessment of the level of self-awareness involved in presenting the show's characters.

Quoted

 "A period transplant would change the historical details, pop-culture references, and mores, but not the characters, tone, or themes. Mad Men would still be Mad Men because the show isn’t about history. It’s about mystery — specifically the mystery of personality. Weiner practices sawdust-and-footlights dramaturgy. Scenes go on longer than TV’s norm and let significant action play out in wide shots that turn the edges of the screen into a proscenium. For all its snappy dialogue, the show’s most piercing moments are silent: Don, AWOL from his daughter’s birthday party, parked at a railroad crossing while a train rumbles past; ex-lovers Peggy and Pete regarding each other through a glass partition; Don and Peggy curled on Don’s office couch like shipwreck survivors on a raft."

- Matt Zoller Seitz "What Makes Mad Men Great" from Vulture

I agree with a lot of what he says, particularly about the show's true appeal being its function as a character study. However, I don't know that all the characters could translate as easily to other time periods as he claims. Namely, I think that a lot of what shapes Joan and Betty as characters is rooted in cultural expectations of women at the time and how they shape their lives around those expectations. (After recently watching "The Mountain King" again, I also think that this plays a part in why Anna decides to let Don get away with his identity fraud. But that's sort of a half-thought-out tangent.) They're both educated women who ultimately see their paths leading to the domestic sphere whether that best serves their personalities or talents or not, seemingly because it's what they're "supposed" to do. I'm not saying that this type of woman is exclusively tethered to the sixties, though The Feminine Mystique made her a sort of archetype of the era. I guess my question is what different experiences might result in a Joan or a Betty in, say, 1980?

Quoted

"So where does that leave us? On the precipice of a brand-new movie morning. One of the great joys of the first moments of Oscar aftermath is that it affords all of us an almost limitless amount of optimism. The year 2012 will bring us Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables. We’ll see major new films from Kathryn Bigelow and Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, from the Wachowskis and Ang Lee and Christopher Nolan and Ben Affleck and Wes Anderson and Alfonso Cuarón and the suddenly blessedly prolific Terrence Malick. And something or someone will explode out of Cannes or Toronto, an event as unforeseeable today as The Artist was a year ago. I hope they’re all great. 2012 doesn’t feel like a year for the mild or minor or gentle, but a year in which filmmakers are prepared to swing for the fences. It’s about time."

- Mark Harris
"Oscarmetrics: A Good-bye to Awards Season" on Grantland

Quoted

"But Comfortable History is asymmetrical warfare it needs only a smattering of facts, and need not guard against a lack of context, presentism, or other facts that might undermine its arguments. Instead it breezily proceeds through hypotheticals and abstract thought experiments  which somehow satisfy our desire to be in possession of a dissident intellect. Comfortable History is like the computer virus that poses as the shield--it positions the espouser as a brave truth-teller, even as it infects us with lies."

- Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Crowd-Sourcing American History" from The Atlantic

Quoted

"It was very important for me—and for Tate—to not make this into a Civil Rights piece, but they were being infiltrated and hunted down for their color." - Kathryn Stockett (author)


"One thing that Tate wanted to make sure of was that kids under age 30 don’t really have any idea of where the Civil Rights movement was at its most violent and Jackson, Mississippi, was right in the middle of it. So it shows that for the women, writing this book is putting them in a life-threatening situation without beating it over our heads and having a noose in the tree." - Brunson Green (producer)


From "The Help: An Oral History" on The Daily Beast


Actually, the idea that somehow a story about black maids in Mississippi in 1963 can be understood as separate from "Civil Rights" explains a lot about the issues I had with this movie. And I would suggest that people being unfamiliar with a history means that they do need to be beaten over the heads with it to some extent, but that's just me. Independent of any depiction of "the Civil Rights Movement" under its narrowest definition, if people can't see the continuities where the movement is, at its core, about reacting to experiences like the ones depicted in The Help, then you're not making a substantive contribution to their understanding of how those things fit together.

Quoted

I do think...that over-decorating is a lady thing but with misunderstood origins. It’s like when I wear a dress and someone says, “You’re dressed up today,” and I’m all, “A dress is one choice.” It’s actually less effort. Similarly, I built and stained the bookshelves in my apartment and this actually came up at breakfast with a friend this morning. She said, “You must really not sleep.” And I thought, “I must really not write.”

- Sloane Crosley

Interview from HelloGiggles

Quoted X

"You can't show up and watch True Blood with the same criteria you'd show up to watch The Shield. Style, theme, pace, rhythm, all those things are never arbitrary in good shows. To judge all shows by the same set of expectations is ridiculous."

- Kurt Sutter

Quoted

"Undoubtedly, though, what I'm really getting at is this: Since the bridegroom's permanent retirement from the scene, I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead."

-J.D. Salinger

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

When I got home from work and saw that Salinger died, the above quote popped into my head; it's always stuck with me as a simple invocation of the fundamental irreplaceability of a singular human presence in one's life. Maybe I'll say more later, for now I'll just leave it there.

Quoted IX

"My experiences as a fan have changed how I think about media politics, helping me to look for and promote unrealized potentials rather than reject out of hand anything that doesn't rise to my standards. Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it."

-Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 258

There's nothing more insanity-provoking that being caught in a race-to-the-finish project for class when you're actually really interested in the source you're reading. I had to sort of blow through this one, but I look forward to returning to this work in the future.

Quoted VIII

"No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university. Every horror movie seems to be about penalizing people for values. There’s a certain iconography of the vampire, a certain iconography of the werewolf, the zombie. That seems to be the core audience for slasher films—metalheads and collegiate professors."

- Chuck Klosterman, A.V. Club interview

I knew it had been a long time since I last wrote here, but I was kind of shocked to see it had been over a month. I thought intermittently about writing some different posts, but they sort of faded into the ether as I got dragged into an exhausting fall schedule. My resolution for November is more writing (both academically and here) and I've got some Best of the Decade lists in the works.

Quoted VII

"Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

-Frederick Douglass

"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

1852

As I keep studying and learning more, the challenges of the past continue to make me hopeful for the future, that we can progress without forgetting. Happy Fourth.

Quoted VI

"I am still almost as avid a television and film watcher today as I am a reader. I hasten to add that now my pleasure in being engaged by this media is bound up with the pleasure of the interrogating gaze that I direct toward it. My critical spectatorship, then, as astute cultural critic, bell hooks might say, involves the pleasure in being entertained in part by actively viewing and deconstructing representational strategies, in interrogating the politics shaping the 'power of the image,' to paraphrase visual studies feminist Annette Kuhn. What fascinates me about television and film culture is the power of these media to present appealing versions of realities and fictions, to perpetuate and create consumer desires, and to veil the reality of their political implications through the allure of the entertainment mask. Particularly interesting as well is the relationship they suggest between the political and cultural environment, specifically how television and film create, fictionalize, reconstruct, and/or presume to record contemporary social realities."

-Stephane Dunn

"Baad Bitches" & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U. of Illinois Press, 2008)

I don't have much to say beyond the fact that I love reading things that describe how I feel about why I like some of the media I like. Some things are just more fun when you deconstruct them.

Quoted V

"Is that the devil?"

-Tina Fey, on Robert Pattinson, in a shot of them sitting behind Mickey Rourke at the Oscars

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, March 4

Quoted IV

This one is kind of lengthy, but it's so spot-on that I had to include it all. For real, this just makes me want to see Doubt all that much more:

"[With white actresses,] people see the possibilities. There are so many different types. You have the young 18/19-year-old types, the Amanda Bynes, or the early-20s, Hilary Duffs, the Lindsay Lohans, and the Miley Cyruses—teens. And then you get in the thirtysomethings, the Cameron Diazes, the Kate Winslets, the Reese Witherspoons, they’re all different! And then the older, the over-50, over-60, Helen Mirrens, Meryl Streeps, Diane Keatons, Sally Field. The fortysomethings, Nicole Kidmans, Julia Roberts, we can go on and on with this, and they’re all different. Some of them are quirky. You have the geek princess, you have the off-centered beauty, they don’t even have to walk in looking like Grace Kelly or Charlize Theron, they’re considered classically beautiful. They can be off-centered, their nose can be a little big, they can look ethnic, but there’s something in their eyes, or in the way they talk, that can make them kind of attractive. The girlfriend, the wife that the guy loves, but he sees the hot babe on the beach and decides to go with her, then ends up going back to his wife. The possibilities, the range.

I don’t see that with black women. And I very rarely see the over-50s, over-60s. Very few of those exist, even with Caucasian women, but they almost are nonexistent with us. And so that’s what I see. So if you don’t fit in the three categories that they have, then you don’t exist. You almost take all those qualities that you have, because you know they’re not going to see it, you almost try to cover them up. Because you know that if you show them, they’re going to be confused by that in an office, in an auditioning room. And at the end of the day, you try not to let it hurt your feelings, but it does. It hurts. And I’m hopeful that it will change, because I think that all of those women do exist. The woman who inspired me, Cicely Tyson, I saw as very beautiful. She was dark-skinned, she had full lips, she had high cheekbones, she was a fantastic actress. I saw it."

-Viola Davis

A.V. Club Interview

Quoted III

"Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe."

- Charles McGrath, "Still Paging Mr. Salinger," New York Times, 12/30/08

This article kind of epitomized the slow news day ("Salinger: Still a Recluse" is not exactly breaking or urgent news), but as a Glass family devotee, the above sentence made my heart skip a beat. I hope against hope that he ultimately decides to share whatever his output has been with the fans who love those characters.

Quoted II

"I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too."

-Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

I had a delightfully Brit-tastic afternoon, huddled under my covers because my bedroom at home is frigid in a way that seems to completely defy that whole "heat rises" concept, reading Hornby's essays about reading and listening to Coldplay. My favorite part of any break from school is having time for recreational reading - reading about reading just epitomizes the temporary freedom from academia's shackles.

Quoted

"The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It's certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein." - Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

This is like an explanation of my own personal methodology and what I love about American Studies.