The McConnaissance: An Alternate Reading

IN EPISODE TWO of HBO’s stunning new series True Detective, the laconic Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, spends a significant amount of car time with his partner, Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), trading quips and offering the audience veiled truths about themselves. It’s a trope of the procedural: cops, even female ones, are aspiring always towards a masculine ideal of laconicism. The only time it’s safe to talk about feelings, therefore, is within the bounds of the car, heads faced forward, and even then, those feelings are hidden beneath a heavy layer of insult.

true-detective-poster

But in True Detective, the trope gets revised: you have one traditional cop who doesn’t like asking or answering personal questions and another who not only speaks freely about himself, but the area, the universe, our fates as mankind, etc. etc. He’s like a one-man Cormac McCarthy novel, dropping poetic, sparse observations the way most of us talk about the traffic or the weather. It’s a hypnotic performance, and anything Rust Cohle lacks in realism he makes up for in gravitas.

During one of these drives, Cohle meanders about some of his history, eventually arriving at the quiet declaration that “I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s victory in that.” That self-knowledge, and lack of shame concerning it, is part of what makes Cohle so compelling. But it’s a statement that we could easily be applied to McConaughey himself, who is currently taking what can only be described as a magnificent victory lap around Hollywood.

As Chris Ryan termed it in a recent Grantland podcast, we’re living through a veritable McConnaissance: nearly twenty years after McConaughey first made his indelible mark in Dazed and Confused, he’s being trumpeted as a serious and important actor — maybe even one of the best of his generation.

For those who haven’t followed McConaughey’s career, this isn’t just a case of a decent actor proving his chops, or a teen heartthrob taking a Method role. McConaughey went through the late 20th/early 21st century version of the studio system and emerged a vanilla shell of his original charismatic self, and his actorly “rebirth” is not just a reflection of a maturing star, but the broken state of the star system and, by extension, the film industry at large. Without a system that misjudged, exploited, and ultimately rejected him, there would be no McConnaissance....

Read the rest here. 

Pre-Christmas Media Endorsements

My quarterly media endorsements, now up at Virginia Quarterly Review! Previously: Summer 2013, Spring 2013, Winter 2012.

The Christmas Movie: A Need/Hate Relationship

Here's the thing no one wants to admit about televised Christmas movies: they’re all horrible. Don’t get me wrong, there are beautiful moments in every Christmas movie: when Kevin rigs the entire house to look like a party dancing to “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree,” for example, in Christmas classic Home Alone, or every time White Christmas gives up the facade of being an actual movie instead of a Bing Crosby showcase.

But Christmas, at least in its modern, capitalist, de-Jesusified form, is an ideological construct that’s supposed to connote “family” and “love” and “celebration.” Many times, those feelings do arise — for me, it happens in the moment when my brother and I decorate Christmas cookies precisely in the style of our five and eight year old selves, which is to say like an expressionist hyper-sugared art project — but they’re almost accidental, or incidental, to the larger, awkward, passive aggressive interactions that attend family Christmas. It’s not our fault so much as the realities of modern society: most of us don’t live near our families, so when we all get together once (or twice) a year, it’s obviously going to be replete with frisson, which generates both positive and negative heat. The static, bland, overly positive rhetoric of Christmas thus helps paper over the dynamic, piquant experience of it.

And if Christmas is an ideological construct, then Christmas movies are its handmaidens. In each Christmas movie, “Christmas,” as a nourishing, essential event, is threatened in the first act, nearly lost in the second, and regained, in newly valuable, even more cherished form, in the third.

And once the Christmas movie migrates to television, repeating every year, often days on end, its purpose only amplifies. The Christmas movie, which itself underlines the importance of Christmas rituals, becomes part of the Christmas ritual! We can’t deal with our own complications of the Christmas ideology, so we retreat to watch others grapple with — and crucially, successfully address — those same problems. We feel better not because our Christmas woes have been solved, but the movie suggests that they are, ultimately, solvable.....

You can read the rest of the piece here.

How to Make a Music Video About Nothing: Ke$ha, Pitbull, & “Timber”

We watch music videos for three overarching and often related reasons: hotness, dancing, and story. You might not like to admit to the first one, but the amount of hotness in videos can only suggest that we like it. Whether the video is for Drake or Tim McGraw, Miley Cyrus or Celine Dion, one of its goals is to reaffirm the singer’s overarching attractiveness. The camera fetishizes different body parts depending on the singer and the type of music he or she sings: Rihanna’s videos focus on her thighs and stomach, One Direction’s focus on their smiles, Adele’s focus on her highly emotive face. Even the video for, say, Nirvana’s “Teen Spirit,” with its slo-mo headbanging and anguished close-ups, is invested in fetishizing their particular brand of alternative hotness.

Not all videos have dancing, but those that do are addictive. Think of the best videos of the last 30 years: dance figures prominently in 72% of them, with noted exceptions for a “story” entries described below. All of Michael Jackson’s videos, Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?,” Britney’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” N*Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye,” Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover,” Janet Jackson’s “If,” Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Shoop,” Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend,” Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” — we watch them again and again, because the dance, in singular or group form, is hypnotic.

But the hotness and the dancing are (very rarely) narrative: they’re the descendants of what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions.” Gunning used the term to describe the style of very early film shorts (think “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” and “What Happened on 23rd Street”) that didn’t adhere to established forms of narrative established by the theater. These films were operated like a game of “now you see it, now you don’t,” manipulatively addressing and arousing the spectator’s curiosity. Whereas “normal” narrative pretends like it’s a world unto itself, the cinema of attractions always knows it’s being watched. It presents a scenario, builds the tension, and then lets it explode. The muscles of Sandow the Strongman were an attraction; same for Annabelle and her Butterfly Dance. They’re on the stage; they even sometimes stare into the camera. They’re performing for the camera gaze rather than maintaining the subterfuge that the camera doesn’t exist. It’s vaudeville instead of theater, the variety show instead of the soap opera.

As camera technology became more sophisticated, the cinema began to adopt the three-act structure we now associate with narrative film, but the cinema of attractions never completely disappeared. Instead, moments of self-conscious spectacle integrated themselves into several genres: you see it especially in the musical number, the five minute fight scene, the never-ending gross-out joke. Even the slo-mo male gaze on a female body is a cinema of attraction, willfully violating codes of realism.

The narrative tries to paper over just how weird and implausible it is for, say, an entire school to know the choreographed danced moves to a song (hey Step Up), sometimes more successfully than others. But those moments of spectacle become the moments that matter: they’re the meat of the film trailer and the stuff you’ll find clipped on YouTube. They make SO LITTLE NARRATIVE SENSE, but we love them.

Finish the article here.

A Brief Note on Paul Walker and Genre Acting

The first time I saw Paul Walker, he was being incredibly hot in Varsity Blues. He had a bit of a vicious streak -- something I recognized from certain football players at my own high school -- but he was far more attractive than mopey-eyed James Van Der Beek. Then there he was in She's All That, and his image was solidified: hot, cocky asshole.

Walker worked ceaselessly to undo that image: see, for example, Eight Below. But even in the Fast and Furious franchise, he's just a hot, cocky asshole who drives cars instead of quarterbacking. He's no great actor, but he never had to be: he had the swagger that comes with ridiculous handsomeness down. If his teen movies and the Fast and the Furious franchise were all "genre films" -- films that hew perfectly to what we expect of them, are relatively cheap to make, and because of the way they do what we want them to do, always have dependable grosses -- then Paul Walker was a genre star. You saw his face, and you knew exactly what kind of film you were stepping into. The parameters might change, and adversaries and sidekicks and love interests could as well. But his presence was much of guiding narrative force as any car or football game.

At first, I thought the similarities between Walker's death and that of James Dean were just too uncanny: both were a particular brand of handsome, characterized by high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and something almost too beautiful about them. Both made their name in car racing films; both died in accidents -- in Porsches -- outside of the Los Angeles area. Both, of course, died young. But Dean died while speeding between 75 and a 100 MPH on the way to a drag race, and Walker died on after attending a car show to benefit the Philippines disaster effort. Dean was 24 and railing against the world, and Walker was 40 -- a grown man -- and even if his onscreen persona still raced cars, his image, onscreen and off, had matured past the petulance of his Varsity Blues persona.

Dean's image represented anger and regret and unhinged emotionality, and his death simultaneously reified and amplified those characteristics -- one of the many reasons he became a cult figure. On its surface, the means of Walker's death fits his image: it could be the conclusion to the next film. But that's a fundamental misreading of the genre and Walker's place within it. The great thing about genre film, and the genre actors like Walker who populate it, is that it replays the same scenario over and over again, often time rifting on fundamental ideological problems to do with class, race, gender, politics, etc., but each and every time, we're given some modicum of closure. The rift exists; the movie shows it and then closes it. Each and every time, Walker steps out of the car in one piece. What's unsettling, then, and is his inability to do so here. And so his final genre performance shifts, uncontrollably, to one of tragedy.

The Definitive List of Classic Hollywood Stars Who Should Host SNL

I've been sorting through this question on Twitter all morning: which classic Hollywood stars would dominate Saturday Night Live? It was prompted by my recent piece for Dear Television, entitled "Good, Giving, and Game: Towards a Theory of SNL Hosting," in which I work through who's a good host (Timberlake, Hamm, etc.) who's a bad host (Taylor Lautner), and why. Short answer: you have to be versatile as shit. Here's what I said about Josh Hutcherson's hosting turn from last Saturday, and what lead me to the idea of classic stars:

Here’s a guy who, on paper, should be a horrible host. He’s the (relatively) boring straight man from a franchise (albeit a better franchise than most) and his acting, at least in the first one, isn’t noteworthy. If there’s one thing people know about him, it’s that he’s not whothey would’ve cast as the hot, strong-armed baker-turned-Katniss love interest.

From the beginning of the episode, Hutcherson was all about redeeming himself. In the first sketch, he roundly ridicules the passivity of his Hunger Games character, and in the digital short “Matchbox 3,” about a crew of subway performers who do their acts in very, very confined spaces, he not only makes fun of his height, but gives himself over fully to the role.

And then there’s the most bonkers skit on the show, in which Hutcherson brings home his “new girlfriend” for Thanksgiving, only to surprise his family with the fact that she’s….a turkey.

It’s a classic example of weird, end-of-the-night SNL. It’s not funny, exactly, nor is it entirely satire, but Hutcherson’s ability to straight-facedly make out with a turkey should make us consider him as something more than sad-faced Peeta.

Because Hutcherson is, indeed, more than just a franchise star: he was convincing and embarrassed in The Kids Are Alright, and he’s been slogging through bit roles and kid parts since 2003. Like Hamm, Timberlake, and other recent SNL charmers Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Miley Cyrus, Hutcherson is a workhorse — in classic Hollywood, they called actors like them “troupers” because they’d paid their dues, often since they were young children, in vaudeville troupes, where they’d laugh, cry, sing, dance, do stunts, and then do it all over again 24 hours later in the next town. They were GGG because their very livelihood depended on it. Cary Grant was a trouper, so was Judy Garland — and both would’ve made superlative SNL hosts. Because when it comes down to it, SNL is the vaudeville show for the 21st century, with the ability to bring out the best and worst in its hosts.

For my purposes here, I'm not going to include classic Hollywood comedians -- just like my piece didn't talk about comedian hosts. Those people are good because they're raised in the tradition. I'm more interested in which stars have the chops to do something as versatile as hosting SNL, and thinking about just how superlative that experience would be. All of the stars below have proven versatility -- some of them were raised as vaudevillians, like Garland and Grant, and some are just equally at home in comedy and drama, like Katharine Hepburn. They're all "good" actors, they all have charisma, and none of them are too serious about themselves or their images: as I say in the piece, they're "good, giving, and game." And so, in no particular order, with tremendous assistance from Twitter.....

Classic Hollywood Stars Who Would Be Amazing at Hosting SNL

1.) Cary Grant

2.) William Powell

3.) Carole Lombard (this one I just can't get over)

4.) Marlene Dietrich (host AND musical act)

5.) Gene Kelly (although he'd be very self-congratulatory/Justin Timberlake about it)

6.) Jimmy Stewart (watch A Philadelphia Story and you'll understand)

7.) Katharine Hepburn (see above)

8.) Frank Sinatra (w/the rat pack on assist)

9.) Mae West

10.) Talullah Bankhead

11.) Edward G. Robinson

12.) Peter Lorre

13.) Montgomery Clift

14.) Marilyn Monroe

15.) Barbara Stanwyck

16.) Sammy Davis Jr.

17.) Judy Garland

18.) Fred McMurray

Classic Hollywood Stars Who Could Either Be Amazing or Truly Horrible, Depending

1.) Ingrid Bergman

2.) Marlon Brando

3.) Elizabeth Taylor

4.) Rita Hayworth

5.) Ava Gardner

6.) James Dean

7.) Vivien Leigh

8.) Debbie Reynolds

Classic Hollywood Stars Who Would've Been Stiff, Boring, or Horrible

1.) Audrey Hepburn

2.) Greta Garbo

3.) Joan Crawford

4.) Humphrey Bogart

5.) Lauren Bacall

6.) John Wayne

7.) Clark Gable

8.) Gary Cooper

9.) Laurence Olivier

10.) Jean Harlow

11.) Doris Day

12.) Rock Hudson

13.) Clara Bow

14.) Harry Belafonte

15.) Deanna Durbin

And a few I can't decide: Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Burt Lancester, and James Cagney. I'd love your help -- and other suggestions -- in the comments.

You Must See 12 Years a Slave, and You Must See It in The Theater

But not for the reasons you think. In today's movie economy, we tell people "they must see something in the theater" when something indelible, something crucial to the film itself, would be lost without seeing it in the theater. This season's unanimous theater must-see is Gravity, with its gorgeous, revelatory use of 3D. But the maxim also applies, albeit less regularly, to a certain type of comedy film -- rewatch Borat or even The Hangover without a theater full of infectious laughter, and you have a profoundly different experience of the movie.

You must watch 12 Years a Slave in the theater, but not for aesthetics, and not for some sort of communal energy. You must watch it in the theater for a very simple reason: once it's on DVD, or streaming, or AppleTV, it'll be all the harder to decide to see it. It is a sad, devastating, incisive, and fiercely important movie and, to my mind, the very best of the year. And those are the hardest movies to get yourself to watch on a Friday night on the couch.

We all want to watch these movies on a Friday night at home. These are the movies that stick around in Netflix queues for years or, once delivered to your home, get so dusty that Netflix eventually emails to ask if you've lost the DVD. You want to be the sort of person who watches A Separation, or 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, or The Hurt Locker, something that everyone's told you you should see, but when it comes down to it, you just keep choosing that week's DVRed episode of Scandal or the latest relatively innocuous hipster rom-com (see: Drinking Buddies).

Don't get me wrong: my use of "you" here not somehow excluded myself from this practice. You do it, I do it, many, many people do it. And it's not because you're morally weak so much as fortified by choice: when there's so much out there to choose instead, and you're already in your pajama pants and have a glass of wine in your hand and want to be asleep by 11 pm, the laws of inertia are simply against you. 9 times out of 10, you will choose the thing that will not challenge and fundamentally alter your world view. Again, it's not because you're lazy, it's because submitting yourself to art that alters you is hard.

Someone once told me that the way to judge whether a piece of art is "good" or not is whether or not you're a different person when it's over. You don't have to be a profoundly different person, but a person who sees him/herself and the surrounding world in a different way, however slight. And 12 Years a Slave isn't simply good art -- it's the very, very best sort of art, it's frankly criminal not to watch it, and since I'm still recovering from seeing it earlier today (and weeping, uncontrollably, for the last thirty minutes of the film), I can only tell you to read Wesley Morris's superlative review on Grantland.

But please, just for a moment, be honest with yourself: when you decide to go to a movie, it's intractable. You could get to the parking lot or the ticket window and suddenly change your mind, but the inertia, in this case, is against you: you will go to the movie you decide to see. All you need to do is tell someone else that you'd like to go, and then you're accountable, just like telling someone that you'd like to go running at 6 a.m.

And when you're in the movie theater, you can't check your phone, you can't turn it off, you can't retreat, and a film of this caliber deserves that. 12 Years a Slave isn't just aesthetically beautiful; it's morally and politically necessary. Set yourself up to the path of least resistance to seeing it: even if you only see one movie a year in the theater, let it be this one. Sometimes it's hard to choose to consume the things that matter most, in no small part because it's difficult to submit ourselves to media that indicts and questions the status quo, whether that relates to the present, the past, or the cathartic, hope-inducing narratives that depict it. Make this one small thing easier for yourself: see it in the theater, and do it now.

The Making of Lorde

Ella Yelich-O'Connor is a 16-year-old girl who sings. Lorde is a pop star. The difference between the two? A whole bunch of well-crafted publicity. What's different with Lorde, then, is that her publicity is marketed as anti-publicity: here's a girl who hates manipulation, who exercises meticulous control over her image, and has no qualms about speaking her mind.

And I have no doubt that Yelich-O'Connor does all of those things. But the celebrity apparatus takes those very things -- that commitment to non-manipulation -- and turns it into overarching theme of Lorde's image. And that image is so persuasive, especially to a certain cadre of consumers, because it effaces itself: non-image as image.

Many Hollywood stars have accomplished similar feats. Most recently, Jennifer Lawrence's seemingly unmediated "cool girl" antics have been held up as an example of what natural stardom can look like. (When I asked my Twitter feed for examples of unmediated stardom, I received 20 suggestions of Lawrence). Anne Hathaway was polished and over-prepared; J-Law was natural and off-the-cuff and, as such, much easier to like. (I write more about them here).

Lorde has really only been on the (American) scene for a few months: her hit song "Royals" slowly took over the late summer, but it wasn't until the release of her first full length album, Pure Heroine, on September 30th that she really drew the attention of the American press. (If you're unfamiliar with her style, see "Royals," "Team," and my personal favorite, "Tennis Court.")

From the beginning, Lorde was differentiated from her peers. The lyrics of "Royals" did much of the heavy lifting: here's a girl who, instead of buying into the dreams of consumption proffered by most hip-hop, finds herself alienated. Lorde was 16 (she turned 17 last week), but she was no Disney product: she's from New Zealand (!) and actively resisted the sort of bubble-gum packaging that typifies her contemporaries. She writes her own songs; she calls the shots. In early interviews, reproduced across the internet, she criticized the holy three of teen pop: Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Taylor Swift. But these weren't offhand comments -- they were rooted in overarching criticisms of the industry:

On Bieber: ”I feel like the influences that are there in the industry for people my age, like Justin Bieber or whatever, are just maybe not a very real depiction of what it’s like to be a young person.”

On Gomez (and her song "Come and Get It"): “I’m a feminist, and the theme of her song is, ‘When you’re ready come and get it from me.’ I’m sick of women being portrayed this way.”

On Swift: "[she's] too flawless and unattainable."

Every celebrity has image has two major components: their product and the discourse about them and their product, also known as publicity. Even reality stars have the "product" of their program and the way they "appear" (read: perform) on it. Usually the product is more important in dictating the tenor of the celebrity image, but sometimes the publicity overwhelms the product. Hollywood stars rely on publicity to keep them in the public eye between projects; reality stars generate stories and photo-ops, usually through relationships and pregnancies, to keep them relevant between new reality opportunities.

Until recently, Lorde had blockbuster product but little by means of publicity. A collection of quips, sure, but those had started to overdetermined her meaning. Until, that is, last week, when the Australian music site Faster, Louder (think Pitchfork) published a longform, all-access profile, entitled "Lorde: Pop's New Ruler," the result of months of reporting. This reporter had gotten in at the ground floor -- before "Royals" became anything big -- and stuck around to the very recent past. He spent a lot of time with "Ella," as he refers to her, and talked with all of her managers, had dinner with her family, and traced the trajectory of her rise to fame.

Now, I'm not suggesting that this profile is going to be as widely read as, say, a Vanity Fair cover story. I do, however, think it will function as a sort of ur text of her celebrity -- the first large scale piece from which other profiles, however brief or lengthy, will draw. Like all skillful celebrity profiles, it establishes a few new themes in her image and reifies existing ones. It's fun to read -- like getting to know your best friend -- and never descends into fluff. It is, in other words, an excellent example of the genre and, as such, an amazing piece of image management.

So let's take this apart.

Over the course of the profile, several overarching themes emerge: Lorde is a natural, Lorde is extraordinary, and Lorde is authentic.

AS 'NATURAL':

You know how you prove that someone has natural talent? You tell a story about them as a child. But Lorde wasn't just singing to the video camera. She was a genius:

LATE one night, years ago, her mother Sonja was woken by a light going on in the room Ella shared with her sister Jerry. She shook her husband awake. “Oh my God, Vic! Someone’s just gone into the kids’ room!”

“He opens up the door and there’s this 18-month-old, at two or three in the morning, with a pile of books. Just sitting there, reading them......"

[Description of counselors encouraging Lorde's parents to take her to aptitude testing when she was six or seven]

....The resulting report is couched in restrained academic language, but remains arresting reading.

“[Her] artwork demonstrates not only a high skill level but a mature perception of the world and a highly original perspective… Clearly a busy and highly creative mind at work… demonstrates leadership skills… sets high standards for herself and does not tolerate mistakes… Extremely advanced reading and writing, verbal, reasoning, listening and processing skills.”

By some measures, she had the mental age of a 21-year-old.

The profile goes on to emphasize the 1000 (yes, 1000) books Lorde had read as a child, which accounted, according to a friend, for her mastery of words and "natural" songwriting ability.

The profile also emphasizes her perfectionism, but it's not a perfectionism born of parenting style or industry pressures. Lorde just has the perfectionism innate to many gifted kids, complete with an intolerance for shoddy work or incompetent collaborators. She has what it takes to succeed as a pop star, but it's not from effort -- it's just always been there.

AS 'EXTRAORDINARY':

Before you get 500 words into the profile, you learn that "Ella is no ordinary 16-year-old, and ‘Royals’ no ordinary hit single." To back up the claim, the author, Duncan Grieve, goes into the past. Lorde's parents had unique New Zealand upbringings (her mother is Croation; her father is Irish) with little room for creativity, and when they met, they were determined that their children would have the artistic freedoms and voices they were denied. It wasn't a coddling, per se, just a celebration of imagination and creativity. Lorde's mother is a celebrated poet; her father is an engineer -- which, we can extrapolate, is how Lorde came to be so artistic and precise.

We're also to understand that Lorde is no ordinary teen. She acts like an adult, and converses naturally with adults:

“She was exceptional in every way,” says [family friend] Allen. “Not an extrovert by any means, but she couldn’t be thrown.” From drama she learned to interact with adults, and to retain poise on stage, attributes which would prove handy in years to come.

And then there's the way she interacts with the interviewer himself. During one of many days in the studio, he dared to make a small production suggestion:

When I forgot myself and issued an opinion on a production effect at the studio, she turned and said “So you’re Rick Rubin now?” quick as a cat. It’s pretty disconcerting being reprimanded by a teenager when you’re in your 30s.

She's not afraid of adults! She has quips, really great quips! Can you imagine yourself at age 16 with that sort of poise? I was still way, way too concerned with my acne.

AS 'AUTHENTIC':

Part of Lorde's extraordinariness comes from her authenticity -- unlike other pop stars, she's rooted in her "true" identity. When we talk about celebrities and authenticity, we're talking about a sense of unmediated realness. What we see is who they are, the "real thing." The problem with this understanding is pretty clear: that sense of authenticity is, itself, mediated. Meeting the star in person is often thought of as the only means to access the "real" real -- first hand celebrity accounts are used as a means to buttress a certain understanding of a star -- but even those are mediated through the lens of the celebrity's self-awareness. Put differently, the celebrity knows she has an image to uphold; he/she's not going to suddenly "be real" because you're standing in the elevator with her. The desire for the real is why we love scandal: it sheds light onto the part of the celebrity that was truly never meant to go public. The more hidden, the more real.

Lorde's authenticity -- or, more precisely, her image's authenticity -- stems from her vocal and unapologetic rejection of the music industry and its publicity apparatus. The profile is riddled with soundbitey comments:

“I don’t care about hair and makeup.”

[A manager] pulls Ella aside to inform her that EDM star David Guetta wants her on his next album. “No,” she says sharply. “Fuck no. He’s so gross.”

When Maclachlan first watched that Belmont Idol performance, he thought he’d find her a song and have her sing it – “that classic A&R equation”. Failing that, she could knock out a set of ’60s-styled covers. He met Ella and Sonja at a cafe and later gave them a CD to serve as a reference. It ended up in a dumpster. “I was just so not interested,” says Ella. This 12-year-old wasn’t content to sing covers. She wanted to write songs.

Jason Flom is head of Universal Music subsidiary Lava Records. In the ’90s he had a hot streak like no other: Tori Amos, Counting Crows and Matchbox 20. He was sent a link to the recording early on. “Immediately obsessed”, he became determined to sign Lorde to Lava. “I can’t wait to make you a star,” he wrote in an email not long after the songs went live. “I was like, ‘Bleurgh’,” says Ella.

The irony of an anti-materialistic single doing that is not lost on them, although money is not Ella’s motivation. “If I didn’t tell her the state of her bank account, she’d never know,” says Vic, the trustee of her company.

If she's that frank, it must be her real self. (If Kanye West is that bombastic, it must be his real self.....If Jennifer Lawrence is that clumsy, it must be her real self.) Etc., et. al. Even if we do acknowledge that these authentic celebrities are mediated, we read them, in the words of my brilliant friend Phil Maciak, as "authors of their own mediation." Which at least in part explains her popularity with teens: she lacks the artifice, the bullshit, the adult-control that teenagers come to despise. And in this way, control, or the appearance of it, becomes conflated with authenticity.

And Lorde seems to control everything:

Ella is deeply interested – some might say obsessed – with all the line-by-line stuff.

Ella, self-confessed perfectionist, can’t stand to let someone else make decisions for her. It’s not without tetchy moments. Maclachlan mentions a “cover reboot” for the deluxe edition of the album. “That’s very ‘record company’,” says Ella acidly. “I don’t know if we have grounds to completely rehash everything.”

On Merchandise: “Yes! I’m excited about that. Sweatshirts and short-sleeved T-shirts. Black and grey marl. That’s it.”

Cain says that in 20 years in the industry he’s never come across an artist so engaged with the minutiae of their presentation. He points up at a giant poster of Lana Del Rey. “With her, we could do whatever we liked,” he says.

Ella is frequently compared to Del Rey, though it infuriates her. Both are white women making pop music soaked in the rhythm and attitude of hip-hop. But Del Rey has a much more conventional narrative — she had an image makeover prior to her breakout Born To Die album, and co-writes her songs with some of the biggest producers and writers in the industry. Ella’s songs, meanwhile, are very much her vision, and hers alone.

The piece doesn't address criticism that she has a co-writer/producing partner -- but it also doesn't shy from it. So long as the songs are "her vision and hers alone," she's the authentic author. You see this exacting control, whether on her part, as the profile suggests, or on the part of her manager, manifest the visual publicity for Pure Heroine. She performs in t-shirts and long skirts; publicity photos are different variations of one stare-straight-ahead pose.

As you can see below, her video for "Tennis Court" is just her staring at the camera in black lipstick, an anti-video to the high production values of her peers' short-films-posturing-as-music-videos.

While Lorde embodies each of these categories (natural, extraordinary, authentic) in specialized ways, the categories themselves are nothing new -- they've been the hallmarks of star publicity since the beginning of Hollywood and serve to substantiate our fandom. We thought she was special, in other words, but this proves it. They're also the building blocks of charisma: that ineffable something that separates attempted stars from bonafide ones. But charisma also serves a political function: to very broadly summarize the social theorist Emile Durkheim, it's what makes us okay with other people having much more money and privilege than we do. Charisma validates their dominance -- it makes it seem like they deserve to have what they have, and we shouldn't rise up and steal it from them. Lack of charisma can be fatal, then, because it breeds antipathy. Most reality stars don't have charisma. Justin Bieber is rapidly losing his charisma. George Clooney has a neverending supply of it. And Lorde, at least in this moment, has a ton of it.

But all of these themes are pretty straightforward celebrity profile fodder, as is the interlude at the raucous family dinner table, which economically underlines the "just like us" ordinariness to go with Lorde's extraordinary talents.

I'm most interested, then, in the way that the profile accentuates Lorde's cultural capital -- and the way that accentuation has endeared her to a certain swath of adult fans.

It's clear that Lorde is precocious. She's smart, she's uber-literate. But she's not just reading the classics, and she's not checked out of popular culture. Take a look:

At the same time, Ella’s own taste was evolving fast; she moved from Grizzly Bear to Animal Collective to James Blake. All the while, though, she remained fascinated by mainstream pop like Justin Timberlake. “It’s magical,” she says. She’d pick apart songs, latching on to production elements and vocal melodies. “Why is it shameful to like this music,” she thought, “or write this music?”

Thanks to all that reading she came to the current golden age of television late, but fell hard. She adores The Sopranos, and one of the best lines in the statement of intent ‘Bravado’ — “I was raised up/To be admired, to be noticed” — is paraphrased from Mad Men’s Joan Holloway. Most of her cultural references she tosses out are similarly adult — author Michael Chabon, essayist Laura Mulvey.

Early on she implores I read a profile of the porn star James Deen written by Wells Tower, a favourite short story writer of hers. It’s magnificent, but also deeply, savagely sexual. I don’t know how to talk to a kid about something like that, so I leave it. With Ella, you’ll always blink first.

She's a hipster! A learned, culturally literate, upper middle-class hipster. Many of her teen fans may not know who Laura Mulvey is, but whooo boy does a certain swath of her adult fans. By underlining her cultural capital and broad intelligence, it becomes all the easier for adult fans to embrace their fandom of a teenage artist. This is no guilty pleasure; this isn't secretly listening to the new One Direction song on your headphones at the gym. Lorde is cool, and you're cool for liking her.

And then there's Lorde's feminism:

One thing Ella doesn’t often sing about directly is love or lust – the subject matter of the vast majority of hit singles. She quotes Del Rey’s ‘Blue Jeans’ with disgust: “I will love you till the end of time/I will wait a million years”, and recently decried the sentiment of Selena Gomez’s ‘Come and Get It’. Suffice to say, she’s a feminist.

“Absolutely. Wholeheartedly,” she says. “I think women who say, ‘No, I’m not a feminist — I love men,’ I think that is just… You don’t know what it means. You think it means that, ‘I don’t shave under my arms, I burn my bras. Fuck men!’ How could you be so uneducated, and so unwilling to learn about something which is so important to you?”

For me, this is the kicker: I knew I liked her songs, I liked her even more when she said that she culled lyrics from Mad Men, and then she goes demonstrates unapologetic feminism: sold. She endears herself not only to the entire Tavi Gevinson/Rookie/teen feminism audience, but to an entire swath of feminist adults frustrated with various celebrity's reticence to embrace the label of feminism (talking to you, Beyonce).

Lorde's music is deeply infectious and cultivates its own natural audience, but it's the publicity that makes her more than the sum of her musical parts -- that makes her a celebrity, and someone who will endure and matter in the cultural landscape. The purpose of this post is neither to decry nor celebrate, although I certainly haven't attempted to mask that I'm a fan. Rather, it's to highlight the potent ideological and industrial work of a single profile, and how even the anti-image is, always, an image in and of itself. Don't mistake me: I'm not saying that Lorde is fake. I'm saying that she, like any other public artist, is a mediated product.

Whenever you're interpellated by a product, you feel like it's more authentic. Put differently, when the product seems to speak directly to you and your concerns, you're more prepared to believe what it's selling. That's why I "buy" the images of Barack Obama, Jennifer Lawrence, Brangelina, Matt Damon, Kanye, Lorde -- that's why I'm so ready to believe. Maybe Lorde's speaking to you, maybe she's not. But if she is, it's smart to think about how and why it's so easy to buy what she's selling.

Back during my Freshman year "Great Books" class, my professor started his lecture on the Bible this way: close reading and interrogation isn't blasphemy. It's respect: if the text, and your faith in it, can't stand up to that, then what is it worth? In the end, that's how I feel about celebrities -- and why I don't think analysis is tantamount to the destruction of pleasure. If there's something substantial there, if there's more than a shiny surface, the thing that speaks to you will remain. And thus far with Lorde, I can still hear her singing.

Don Jon and the Digital Porn Dystopia

I can't get away from the postfeminist dystopia. I've written about it here, here, and here; I just gave a presentation on its application to Girls; I just submitted a conference panel proposal in which three other very smart scholars and I apply it to Girls, Us Weekly, the star image of Katherine Heigl, and Spring Breakers. It's all over; it makes more and more sense. But I also think it's not operating in a vacuum: it affects men, too, even if not as directly as women. But men have their own dystopia with which to grapple: borne of the ubiquity of digital, streaming porn.

With the rise of New Media, porn has become ubiquitous, free, and amazingly accessible -- and that ubiquity has come to structure both sexual and gender relations. In this era of ubiquitous porn, men deal with an equally contradictory ideologies of masculinity that call for them to be sexually aggressive, dominating, and muscular....while also abandoning physical labor (because it's not longer a feasible lifelong income) and not being misogynist assholes. You shouldn't beat your wife, but rape jokes, those are chill. You should be romantic with the lights on, but when they go off, you should behave like a porn star, because that, at least as far as you've seen, is what women want. Objectifying women is Bad, but seemingly every media text, including those directed at women, openly invites you to do so.

The overarching contradiction: how do you live life as a feminist -- espousing the straightforward ethical belief that women are equal to men -- when the world that surrounds you pummels you with encouragement, both implicit and explicit, to act and think otherwise?

Which is why I love Don Jon. I get the critiques: it's somewhat hamfisted in its use of repetition to emphasize points; I agree with those who say that the "guido-face" of the performances compromise its power. But it's the first text I've seen that both honestly and extensively interrogates the realities of both living in the post-digital porn world....and trying to forge relationships with women living within the postfeminist dystopia.

Let's look at the life of our main character, Jon:

As he says in the trailer (and the beginning of the movie), "there's on a few things I care about in life: my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, and my porn."

My Body: American culture -- and not just 'guido' culture -- dictates that the dominant understanding of "hot" = "jacked." Now, "jacked" is an exaggerated physicality that's actually a fetishization of the working class body: a body that looks like it labors. But since most of those jobs of disappeared, most men, working class or otherwise, go to the gym and lift heavy things in order to approximate the bodies that their jobs would've created for them. Jon is a working class guy, but he works, in his words, in "service" -- he bartends. But in order to obtain a desirable body, he has to spend his off hours doing pull-ups.

My Pad/My Ride: Consumption isn't somehow a new part of masculinity. It's a holdover compunction -- what you own, and how it's kept, says something about what kind of man you are. But you have to consume in a very particular way: consume too much, look like you care too much, and you're feminized. There's a brilliant scene between Jon and Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) at a Pier-1 type store, shopping for curtain rods. After helping Barbara in her own consumer fantasy, Jon excuses himself -- not to go sit in the car because he's bored, but to go get some Swiffer pads. He maintains his apartment diligently -- how else is he going to make his one-bedroom pre-fab apartment look good? -- but Barbara is absolutely aghast that he do something as unmasculine as clean his own floor. The real sin, in fact, is buying the Swiffer pads in the first place, committing the ultimate sin of emasculating yourself in public. But it's a double-bind: consume, but look like you don't.

My Family: Jon's mother lives in a fairytale. Some people have complained about the facile characterization of the parents, but I think it serves a pretty compelling purpose: clear distillations of the first wave of postfeminism. It's doubtful that Jon's mother ever "gave up" on feminism (we only see her cooking dinner; we have no indication that she works outside the home) but her life seems to rotate entirely around her son's ability to fulfill a fairytale. To come home, in her words, and tell her "I've found her." A beautiful girl, a beautiful wedding, beautiful babies. She's already had her supposed fairytale -- which resulted in a home where her husband yells incessantly and watches football instead of engaging with others -- so she remaps the scenario on her son. He brings home the "perfect girl" (read: the type of girl her father finds attractive and her mother finds appropriately feminine), but the problem is that that girl is nothing but a set of attributes that add up to "perfection." As Jon's sister points out in her one line in the film, "she doesn't actually know a thing about you." She's too busy being a princess, and cultivating the "perfect relationship," to pay attention to anyone else, even her counterpart. But more on that later.

Last crucial point: Jon has clearly adopted his fetishizing tendencies from his father, who mirrors him in both looks, wardrobe, and temper. As we learn from the story of Jon's parents' "meet cute," his dad saw his mom and said "that's mine." His attitude towards women is thus one of fetishization and possession, of dominance and control. He may not be watching as much internet porn as Jon, or any at all (he doesn't know what a TiVo is), but the porn attitude is a natural extension of his gender politics. But he's also not happy -- and neither is Jon.

My Church: The film is not unsubtle with this point: Jon is a hypocrite. Every week, he drives to church screaming obscenities, punching in windows with rage. We never hear the sermon because Jon never really hears the sermon -- church is all ritual and symbolism. We see the stained-glass windows; we seem him making the sign of the cross and kneeling. He goes to confession, but treats it as a game to be won or lost, visibly pumping his fist when he receives five fewer Hail Marys and Our Fathers than the week before. Church tells him he is a good person simply for attending, not for actually acting out the principles of Christianity. Appearance, not acts.

My Boys: Don actually seems to have pretty healthy male friendships, all things considered. Sure, all they talk about are women, and spend most of their time rating those women based entirely on their physical attributes. But you don't see much of the traditional tension in films like these (and life): how to still be a "guy's guy" when you're devoting your life to your girlfriend. Jon's friends build up his masculinity -- he's better at "smashing girls" than both of them; he's taller and better looking -- but they also ratify his life choices. When Barbara breaks up with him for watching porn, his friend supports him in his belief that that's ridiculous. Chances are, if these movies would've shifted focus, these men are dealing with the same impossible contradictions that affect Jon.

My Girls: These are postfeminist girls. We only really get to know Barbara, but she's the part that stands in for the whole: reared on rom-coms that suggest that consumption and self-objectification, with the ultimate end goal of a fairytale wedding, is the path to happiness and fulfillment. She's a virgin and a whore, a ball-buster and a princess; she gets what she wants....only what she wants is not only self-serving, but hollow. Granted, we don't see figuring out that that life is hollow. But our only grown woman is Jon's mom -- a woman who clearly sees Barbara as a kindred spirit -- and who, as emphasized above, now fulfills herself with the fantasies of the next generation. When Jon points out that Barbara spends just as many hours engrossed in her own implausible, destructive fantasies (read: the rom-com), he's not wrong.

My Porn: Jon has never known a world without porn. When Esther (Julianne Moore) asks him if he's ever masturbated without porn, he honestly cannot think of a time. His sexuality was entirely shaped by porn and the dynamics it celebrates. But he can't find pleasure with actual women -- probably because he's acting out the scenarios he's seen in his videos, scenarios that look fulfilling but, in practice, are just the opposite.

But it's not entirely Jon's fault. Postfeminist women have been equally affected by the ubiquity of porn: teens are now reporting that they're expected to engage in "porny" behaviors (I'll let you fill in the blanks yourself) very early on, in large part because their partners have been immersed in media that depicts and normalizes those behaviors (or at least makes them standard). A woman thinks that men want a porn star, so a woman behaves like a porn star. Her pleasure is faked; his pleasure is never what he wants it to be. Lose, lose.

Jon tries to quit porn, but soon discovers that porn surrounds him: the objectified, fetishized female body has become so normalized that even women's magazines, exercise videos, and fast-food restaurants use it to sell products. Again, this isn't anything new, but it's amplified with each passing year. How can Jon give up porn and the sexual dynamics it promotes when seemingly every piece of media invites him to continue the practice? The anti-porn feminists used to say that "porn is the theory; rape is the practice." That's powerful rhetoric, and I'm not sure I entirely agree. But I do think that the idea of "porn as theory" is incredibly compelling, especially given its current ubiquity. It becomes the de facto guide for how you should treat a woman in the bedroom,which consciously and unconsciously dictates how you'll treat women outside of the bedroom.

I realize I'm treating porn as a monolithic being. There's a fair amount of porn that's not aggressively masculine, focused on male pleasure, or reifying the dynamics described above. But most porn -- the dominant form of porn -- is just that.

But that's not even the real problem. The real problem is that porn, and the mainstream "children" of porn, tell you to behave one way -- and another strand of media tells you to behave another. It's like the virgin/whore complex, only for men: let's call it the prince/dick dichotomy. A guy must both be what women want him to be (kind, respectful, willing to be a stay-at-home Dad, generous in the bedroom, takes up half of the household chores, a feminist) and what dominant, porn-influenced says he should be (aggressive, disarticulated from the domestic, selfish in the bedroom).

To be clear, women contribute to this dichotomy. Think of Marnie in Girls, speaking about her ostensibly perfect boyfriend: "It's like he's too busy respecting me that he looks right past me and everything that I need from him." What she "needs" from him, at least at this point, is for him to act like a dick. When an dickish guy comes on to her ("The first time I fuck you, I might scare you a little, because I'm a man, and I know how to do things) she's so turned on that she flees to the bathroom to masturbate. But the dick turns out to be much to much of a dick -- he doesn't satisfy her in bed, as much as she really wants that scenario to bare out, and he ignores her outside of it.

The digital porn guy wants a fantasy that doesn't exist, but the postfeminist girl wants one as well. Usually, movies don't deal with this impossibility, but that's precisely where Don Jon excels: it shows just how unfeasible the ideology has become. The montage of Don Jon undergoing a furious, seemingly weeks-long masturbation marathon isn't hot; it's dystopic.

In my recent presentation on the postfeminist dystopia, I divided my analysis between texts that know they're dystopic and those that do not. Girls knows it's highlighting the contradictions; Revenge does not. Jersey Shore doesn't know it's highlighting the contradictions of digital porn masculinity, but that Don Jon clearly does. That's why it so clearly interrogates porn, which usually goes unnamed in depictions of contradictory contemporary masculinity. Instead of shying from it because it's dirty or unacceptable, it faces it head on. In that way, it's a spectacularly honest film, which is part of the reason I can forgive it its various faults.

But Don Jon also offers a sort of solution. It isn't giving up porn, exactly, so much as embracing an understanding of sex and love outside of the ideologies of porn masculinity. Society is the way that it is; there is no outside of ideology. But you can choice to negotiate your own way within those existing ideologies, and the more texts like this highlight the dystopia, the more these dominant understandings of "proper" behavior, sexual and otherwise, are compromised. Don Jon doesn't advocate for a life without porn, per se. But it does suggest that a life immersed within it is no fantasy -- for men and women alike.

Entertainment Tonight: The First in Entertainment News

As a full-time academic, my work is split in three: I teach, I write for academics, and I write for the internet (where academics also hang out). Sometimes, however, I'm able to bring all three of those interests together -- which is precisely what happened with my contribution to How to Watch Television, edited by Jason Mittell and Ethan Thompson. With the encouragement of the press and the editors, you'll find my piece (on Entertainment Tonight and how it altered the landscape of television -- no seriously) below, but to contextualize the project and its purpose, I'm excerpting Mittell's introduction (including the table of contents), which he posted to his excellent blog Just TV earlier this week. Read on, get the book, be awesome.

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I am quite excited to announce the publication of my latest book, How to Watch Television. Of course, in this instance, “my” should really be “our,” as the book was edited by me and my friend Ethan Thompson, and features 40 essays by an all-star line-up of media scholars young and old, familiar faces and new names. I’ve been itching to share my own chapter, about Phineas & Ferb, so you’ll find that essay previewed below the fold. But first, here’s some background on what we were trying to accomplish with the book, and why you might want to read it.

The idea (and title) was Ethan’s, and he approached me as a potential contributor to a volume that would be designed for the undergraduate classroom, with short essays each focused on a specific television program to model a critical approach within television studies. Too often, students lack models for how to write smart, accessible, engaging works of academic television criticism—most journalistic examples lack historical context and scholarly argumentation, and most academic examples are too long, too dense, and more often focused on larger theoretical arguments than close analysis of television texts and contexts. I was so taken with the idea, and excited about how it might dovetail effectively with my introductory textbook Television and American Culture, that I signed on as co-editor. Ethan & I spent months in 2011 soliciting essays that span a wide range of genres, historical eras, authorial perspectives, and authors in different stages in their careers. We ended up with a remarkable table of contents featuring 40 (!) original essays by great writers on an array of topics, arranged by broad categories of television analysis. The line-up really needs to be seen to be believed:

I. TV Form: Aesthetics and Style

1. Homicide: Realism – Bambi L. Haggins

2. House: Narrative Complexity – Amanda D. Lotz

3. Life on Mars: Transnational Adaptation – Christine Becker

4. Mad Men: Visual Style – Jeremy G. Butler

5. Nip/Tuck: Popular Music – Ben Aslinger

6. Phineas & Ferb: Children’s Television – Jason Mittell

7. The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling – Sean O’Sullivan

8. Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!: Metacomedy – Jeffrey Sconce

II. TV Representations: Social Identity and Cultural Politics

9. 24: Challenging Stereotypes – Evelyn Alsultany

10. The Amazing Race: Global Othering – Jonathan Gray

11. The Cosby Show: Representing Race – Christine Acham

12. The Dick Van Dyke Show: Queer Meanings – Quinn Miller

13. Eva Luna: Latino/a Audiences – Hector Amaya

14. Glee/House Hunters International: Gay Narratives – Ron Becker

15. Grey’s Anatomy: Feminism – Elana Levine

16. Jersey Shore: Ironic Viewing – Susan J. Douglas

III. TV Politics: Democracy, Nation, and the Public Interest

17. 30 Days: Social Engagement – Geoffrey Baym and Colby Gottert

18. America’s Next Top Model: Neoliberal Labor – Laurie Ouellette

19. Family Guy: Undermining Satire – Nick Marx

20. Fox & Friends: Political Talk – Jeffrey P. Jones

21. M*A*S*H: Socially Relevant Comedy – Noel Murray

22. Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum – Heather Hendershot

23. Star Trek: Serialized Ideology – Roberta Pearson

24. The Wonder Years: Televised Nostalgia – Daniel Marcus

IV. TV Industry: Industrial Practices and Structures

25. Entertainment Tonight: Tabloid News – Anne Helen Petersen

26. I Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer – Miranda J. Banks

27. Modern Family: Product Placement – Kevin Sandler

28. Monday Night Football: Brand Identity – Victoria E. Johnson

29. NYPD Blue: Content Regulation – Jennifer Holt

30. Onion News Network: Flow – Ethan Thompson

31. The Prisoner: Cult TV Remakes – Matt Hills

32. The Twilight Zone: Landmark Television – Derek Kompare

V. TV Practices: Medium, Technology, and Everyday Life

33. Auto-Tune the News: Remix Video – David Gurney

34. Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content – Suzanne Scott

35. Everyday Italian: Cultivating Taste – Michael Z. Newman

36. Gossip Girl: Transmedia Technologies – Louisa Stein

37. It’s Fun to Eat: Forgotten Television – Dana Polan

38. One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling – Abigail De Kosnik

39. Samurai Champloo: Transnational Viewing – Jiwon Ahn

40. The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics – Henry Jenkins

It’s a remarkable line-up, and everyone managed to produce essays that run counter to many trends of academic writing: tightly focused, clearly written for general readers, jargon-free, not too long, and submitted on time! After a editorial and publication process, we’re thrilled to announce that New York University Press is now shipping the book at an incredibly reasonable price of $29 (for a well-designed 400 page book of original content!). You can order it at the NYU Press website, along with previewing the introduction or requesting a review copy for faculty thinking about adopting it in a class. You can also order it on Amazon, where the already low price is even more discounted or the Kindle version is even cheaper (note that Amazon says it will be released on Monday, but I think they might already be shipping it). Or please request it at an independent bookstore near you, if you’ve got one.

Even though it was designed for classroom use and I’m quite excited to teach it in the spring, we’re happy that the essays do not read as academic homework—our secondary goal was to create public-facing intellectual criticism, demonstrating what some of our smartest colleagues and friends have to teach anyone about television. If you’re a television scholar, this is the book you show your mother to explain what it is that you do! And if you’re not a television scholar, I hope this book gives you a sense of what the field has to share with a general readership.

For a taste of that type of criticism, a few of us contributors who are regular bloggers will be sharing our chapters online (I’ll link to them in the Table of Contents above once they go live). Mine is below, offering an account of one of my favorite children’s programs, Phineas & Ferb. If you like the essay, remember that the book has 39 more chapters of similar work. (And if you don’t like it, I guarantee you that many of the other 39 are better…) I hope you read the book and enjoy!

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ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT: TABLOID NEWS

Until the early 1980s, “first-run” syndicated programming—that is, programming created for initial airing in syndication, not reruns—was limited to a “ghetto of game shows, talk shows and cartoons.”¹ Entertainment Tonight (syndicated, 1981–present) gentrified that ghetto, changing the way that both television producers and stations conceived of first-run syndication and its potential profitability. Indeed, if you flipped through the channels between the evening news and the beginning of primetime during the 1980s, you would almost certainly happen upon a now-familiar sight: the wholesome face of Mary Hart, reporting on the latest happenings in Hollywood. As the host of Entertainment Tonight, Hart helped popularize a new mode of celebrity gossip in which stories on the private lives of stars and celebrities comingled with reportage of box office receipts and on-set exclusives.

Since its debut, ET has become one of the longest running, most consistently profitable programs on the air. In the 1980s, it readied the way for a profusion of entertainment news programs and venues that now form a major node in the media landscape, from E! to Entertainment Weekly. Yet Entertainment Tonight’s success must be situated amidst a constellation of technological and regulatory changes, from the spread of cable and satellite technology to the gradual repeal of the Financial and Syndication Rules and other anti-monopoly regulations. This essay positions ET within the greater industrial climate of the 1980s, underlining the ways in which the program’s unmitigated success fundamentally altered the landscape of first-run syndication.

Beginning in the days of early radio, the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) blocked Hollywood studios from entering into broadcasting, fearing the consolidation of entertainment media into the hands of few. This practice continued when broadcasting expanded from radio to television, as the FCC blocked film studio attempts at entering into television, station ownership, cultivating “Pay-TV” options, or starting their own networks. At the same time, the FCC was wary of the existing networks, their growing power, and their apparent negligence of the mandate to use the airwaves for the public good. By the end of the 1950s, ABC, CBS, and NBC relied on programming which they owned or had invested in—a practice that may have streamlined profits, but also resulted in a schedule replete with derivative game shows and Westerns.²

The resultant crop of programming, famously deemed a “vast wasteland” by FCC chairman Newton Minow in 1961, encouraged FCC passage of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, otherwise known as Fin-Syn, in 1971. Fin-Syn prohibited the networks from securing financial interest in independently produced programming and syndicating off-network programming. Coupled with the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), Fin-Syn also limited the amount of programming that each network could produce for itself (such as news) and freed a portion of primetime from network control. The resultant time slots, dubbed “prime access,” would allow affiliates to program independently, hopefully with shows serving the local interest.

In short, the FCC blocked the networks’ attempt to vertically integrate, barring them from producing the content they distributed. With the passage of Fin-Syn and PTAR, the FCC also hoped to free broadcast hours from network-induced repeats, opening the airwaves to local interests and concerns. In several crucial ways, these regulations served that purpose, but failed to encourage local programming. When tasked with filling the hours vacated by PTAR, local stations usually opted for syndicated offerings from studios or independent production companies, which not only cost less, but brought in higher ad revenue.³ Without Fin-Syn and PTAR, Entertainment Tonight—a show produced by a major studio (Paramount) and broadcast during prime access—would not have been possible.

Entertainment Tonight was conceived by Alfred M. Masini, a former advertising executive and the creative force behind the hit music program Solid Gold. Masini came up with the idea for ET by studying what was not on the air—no one was providing “entertainment news” in the form of information on box office receipts, upcoming projects, Nielsen ratings, gossip, and personality profiles.⁴ But the particular brand of “news” that ET was prepared to offer was a commodity that consumers had no idea they were supposed to desire. Indeed, before 1981, “almost no one, outside of pencil pushers in the business, had heard of television’s upfront ad-selling season” let alone attendance figures, production deals, and industry machinations.⁵

But if ET provided that news, Masini hypothesized, audiences would watch. As longtime ET host Mary Hart recalled, “Do people really want to learn all these details—the weekly TV show ratings, the top-grossing movies? If we present it concisely and regularly, the answer is yes, people do want to learn.”⁶ Hart’s rhetoric reproduced the implicit message of the program, which suggested that entertainment news, when offered concisely on a daily basis, accrues gravity and importance. In other words, ET supplied entertainment news and figures with such regularity that such information no longer appeared superfluous but necessary to make sense of the entertainment world.⁷

While Entertainment Tonight was introducing a new genre of programming, it was also proposing a novel model of distribution. ET, like Maisani’s other hits, was syndicated. For the previous thirty years, syndicated programs had been “bicycled” from station to station, airing in one market, then sent, via the mail, to another. As a result, the lag-time between production and airing could be weeks—unacceptable for a program promising up-to-date Hollywood news. Paramount offered a solution in the form of satellite technology. In exchange for control of the show, Paramount offered to install and lease dishes to any station willing to air the show.⁸ The offer resulted in a collection of 100 local stations equipped to receive the ET feed and a reach unthinkable without Paramount’s infusion of capital.⁹

Satellite distribution also allowed Entertainment Tonight “day and date” transmission, meaning the show could be aired the same day it was filmed. This promise of immediacy would prove quintessential to ET’s image. In the early 1980s, the weekend’s box office figures came in at noon on Monday. ET would tape its segment at 1:30 p.m., and the finished product would be seen across the nation within hours.¹⁰ As a result, ET even beat the long-established Hollywood trade papers Variety and Hollywood Reporter in announcing figures crucial to the industry. In truth, such immediacy mattered little to ET’s audience, the vast majority of whom had no fiscal investment in the media industry. But the distinction of ET as the “first in entertainment news” bestowed its viewers with the status of insiders and experts and, by extension, encouraged dedicated viewership.

ET’s cost and market penetration were unprecedented. Three months before it aired, ET had already been cleared in 100+ markets, reaching 77 percent of U.S. homes with all advertising spots sold for the year.¹¹ In its first week on the air, ET made good on its promises to affiliates, earning a 12.6 national rating—enough to make it the highest-rated national newscast.¹² But early reviews were not kind. The hosts were “dreadful”; the news was “so soft it squishes”; it was “People Magazine without that fine publication’s depth.”¹³ One critic deemed it a “press agent’s dream,” calling out a recent on-set visit to Paramount-produced Grease II as pure promotional propaganda.¹⁴ In decrying ET’s intimacy with the industry, critics were in fact criticizing the designed cooperation between the production cultures at ET and the studios. In other words, ET was intended to be a press agent’s dream and serve as a promotional vehicle for Paramount, not an independent journalistic outsider. These functions were not intended to be visible to the average viewer, only the savviest of whom would even realize that the show was produced by the same corporation as Grease II.

Over the next decade, critics would continue to criticize ET’s relationship with Hollywood. According to one Time reviewer, “ET is a part of the phenomenon it covers, another wheel in the publicity machine it seeks to explain.”¹⁵ ET has built a “cozy, symbiotic relationship” with celebrities, and “[t]he show has dropped almost all pretense of being anything but an arm of the Hollywood publicity machine,” filled with “fluff indistinguishable from advertising.”¹⁶ Such assessments were not inaccurate, but perhaps missed the point, as ET had never aspired to function as a source for hard news or investigative journalism. From the start, ET’s tone has mirrored that of a traditional fan magazine, offering fawning, flattering portraits of the stars and Hollywood delivered by Hart and her various co-anchors in a bright, cheery fashion. While ET would not shy away from reporting on an existing celebrity controversy or scandal, the tone was never derogatory or denigrating. Most importantly, ET did not break such stories itself, lest it risk alienating a celebrity or publicist. The addition of entertainment news and figures helped ET gain credibility and attract a broader demographic, but it did not change the character of the relationship between the program and its subjects.

That relationship, however, was one of ET’s biggest assets. As Variety observed, the program is “a big wet kiss in terms of promotion of projects.” A single appearance on ET could reach double, even triple the audience of a network morning show or late-night talk show.¹⁷ Such reach gave ET tremendous leverage, especially over publicists eager to place celebrity clients on the show. ET producers exploited this leverage to exact a host of demands, including exclusive footage, access to stars, and the right to air a film trailer before any other outlet.¹⁸ But ET needed celebrities and their publicists as much as they needed ET. “The reality is that we’re all in bed with each other,” said one top talent manager. “So nobody can tell anyone off. I need them. They need me.”¹⁹

ET attempted to make up for lack of hard content with snappy editing, musical accompaniment, and fast-paced storytelling. Producers livened up its otherwise soft approach with flashy graphics, sound effects, and quick cuts that add “portent” and attract audience members who are “video fluent,” thus manifesting a graphic mode that John T. Caldwell has termed “exhibitionism,” in which stylization and activity take precedence.²⁰ In 1983, a typical program began with seven to eight minutes of industry news, delivered in the style of a nightly news program, followed by a “Spotlight” on celebrity and an on-set exclusive (a “Never-Before-Seen glimpse behind Johnny Carson’s desk!”). The show generally closed with an “in-depth” report on style, an industry trend, or “a look backward at entertainment of the past.”²¹

From time to time, a longer, more investigative piece or multi-part series would replace the final section. Because ET was shot on video, producers could easily and cheaply manipulate graphics and other visual framing devices (bumpers heading to and from commercials, “Next On” previews, logos). The cluttered aesthetic compensated for the otherwise “low” production values and, more importantly, guided viewer response and discouraged viewers from changing channels. The carefully orchestrated mix of content, oscillating between headlines and statistics, eye-catching imagery, and slightly longer interviews and features likewise prevented viewer fatigue with a particular segment.

Over the course of the 1980s, ET continued to grow. By September 1983, it trailed only Solid Gold (1980–1988) and Family Feud (1977–1985; 1988­–1995; 1999–present) among syndicated programming with an 8.9 weekly rating, while its weekend show, Entertainment this Week, earned a 14.4.²² By the end of the decade, ET had established itself, in the words of one Hollywood observer, as “such an important component in the way the industry is covered by press and television that it would be difficult to imagine its absence.”²³ According to Ron Miller, a journalist for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, ET’s concept had “revolutionized the TV syndication business and proved that expensive, original non-network programming can be profitable to everyone.”²⁴ ET prided itself on its success, collecting both of the above quotes for a full-page Variety advertisement that trumpeted the program’s success. With its placement in the leading Hollywood trade, ET was effectively advising other Hollywood entities that the program had taken on a crucial promotional role within the industry and could not be ignored.

With the potential and profitability of the genre firmly established, imitators followed. Between 1981 and 1990, more than a dozen shows and pilots attempted to emulate the ET formula, including Metromedia’s All About US (1984); Paramount’s America (1985); King World’s Photoplay (1986); Tribune Entertainment’s Public People, Private Lives (1988–1989); TPE’s Preview (1990); Twentieth’s Entertainment Daily Journal (1990–1992); and Viacom’s TV Star (1980), Entertainment Coast to Coast (1986), Exclusive (1988), and America’s Hit List (1990). Some shows, such as the pilot for All About US, were clear attempts to create cross-media promotion for print publications, while others, such as Twentieth’s Entertainment Daily Journal, attempted to provide promotion for parent companies, in this case Fox/News Corporation.

Imitators also struggled for a reason that had little to do with Entertainment Tonight. ET was innovative and addictive, but its initial clearances and subsequent growth took place during a period of high demand for syndicated programming. As the number of independent stations was growing (from 106 to 215 between 1980 to 1985), the number of shows being sold into “off-network” syndication (commonly known as reruns) was decreasing.²⁵ The networks had become increasingly quick to cancel high-budget shows with mediocre ratings, and without at least a season or two already produced, a program could not be profitably sold into syndication. The lack of rerun material thus bolstered the first-run syndication market, which included shows like ET, Solid Gold, and a raft of game shows such as Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune 1983–present).²⁶ ET and the game shows were joined in the late-1980s by televised tabloids— A Current Affair (1986–2005), Hard Copy (1989–1999), and Inside Edition (1988–present)—that distinguished themselves through interest in the weird, the tawdry, and other sensational subjects otherwise at home in tabloid journalism.²⁷

Each station’s schedule had a finite amount of “prime access” space between the evening news and primetime. Depending on the time zone and the length of the local news, a station had room for two, three, or maybe four half-hour “strips” at most. By the end of the 1980s, ET, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! (1984–present), A Current Affair and Inside Edition had claims on all of the quality access time periods.²⁸ A program might settle for a moderate number of access clearances, slowly building its audience. Yet any program attempting to emulate the ET formula needed to expend a similar amount of capital, which, by 1988, was $21 million per year, or $400,000 a week. In order to turn a profit, a new program required prime access clearance in a similar number of markets, generally upwards of 100. With so few access spots available, competitors faced nearly insurmountable odds. Entertainment Tonight’s success throughout the 1980s was thus a result of its novelty, innovations, and the ruling logic of the conglomerate media industry.

In 2011, Mary Hart stepped down from Entertainment Tonight after twenty-nine years as co-host. While the show goes on, Hart’s exit signaled, however unofficially, the end of an era. The mode and speed with which ET disseminated “entertainment news” for the majority of Hart’s tenure was a thing of the past, replaced by online video, breaking news sent to mobile phones, and celebrity Twitter updates. The transformation was gradual: over the course of the 1990s, a raft of similarly-themed programming (Extra, Access Hollywood, the entire E! channel), all with backing from major media conglomerates, cut into ET’s market share. In the mid-2000s, the rise of gossip blogs further compromised ET’s hold. These early blogs—Perez Hilton, Gawker, Just Jared, The Superficial, and dozens of others—offered immediacy, a markedly snarky attitude, and a distinctly new media style of breaking and proliferating content that attracted millions of visitors.²⁹ In contrast, despite a content-sharing partnership with Yahoo, ET’s web presence was negligible, attracting a mere 609,000 visitors in July 2007.³⁰ Of course, ET has historically catered to a different (older, less technologically savvy) demographic, and most viewers were content with a self-contained, twenty-two-minute television program.³¹

But in 2007, TMZ on TV expanded the parameters of the market. As the televised extension of TMZ.com, then garnering over 10 million unique visitors a month, TMZ on TV enjoyed a massive built-in audience, backing from Time Warner–owned Telepictures and AOL, and a clearance deal with FOX stations across the country.³² After one year on the air, it was available in 90 percent of American households, garnering an average Nielsen rating of 2.3. TMZ still trailed ET, but it brought in viewers who were both younger and male, and thus more valuable to advertisers.³³ Most importantly, TMZ modeled a form of convergence in which content transitioned seamlessly from the web to the airwaves, edited to fit the specifics of each medium and its audience.

ET had to change its attitude towards breaking news and digital content lest it be left in TMZ’s dust. Between 2007 and 2010, it began broadcasting in HD, expanded to partner with MSN.com, and significantly updated its website to include many of the features found on TMZ, including streaming video, breaking news, photo galleries, Twitter updates, and the ability for users to share stories through social media.

While ET no longer enjoys the uncontested dominance that characterized its rein in the 1980s, perhaps we can gauge its importance somewhat differently. In 2011, ET maintained an average of 5.9 million viewers (more than the CBS Nightly News) and ET-style reporting on celebrity couples, movie grosses, and industry deals now infuses everything from The Huffington Post to CNN.³⁴ With Hart’s departure and the continued surge of web-based content, including “intimate” access to celebrities via social media, ET may decline. Or it may endure, catering to those who like their celebrity coverage cheery and fawning, working to adapt to the increasingly convergent media culture. Regardless of its eventual fate, it is clear that Entertainment Tonight fundamentally altered the landscape of first-run syndication, paving the path not only for Extra, Access Hollywood, and TMZ, but the infusion of “entertainment news” in all its various manifestations across the contemporary mediascape.

Notes

1. Aljean Harmetz, “TV Producers Discover New Path to Prime Time,” New York Times, July 5, 1988, C16.

2. See Michele Hilmes, ed., NBC: America’s Network (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Janet Wasko, “Hollywood and Television in the 1950s: The Roots of Diversification,” in The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, Peter Lev, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 135–46.

3. Marilyn J. Matelski, “Jerry Springer and the Wages of Fin-Syn: The Rise of Deregulation and the Decline of TV Talk,” Journal of Popular Culture 33 (2000), 64–65.

4. Peter Funt, “One Man’s Formula for Sure-Fire Hits,” New York Times, April 6, 1986, 14.

5. Kevin Downey, “ET: It Changed Show Biz and Changed the Syndie Biz as Well,” Broadcasting and Cable, November 17, 2003, 22.

6. Michael E. Hill, “Entertainment Tonight: On the Air Fan Magazine,” Washington Post, May 27, 1984, 5.

7. See Michael Joseph Gross, “Famous for Tracking the Famous,” New York Times, June 23, 2002, A1.

8. The show’s ownership was a “patchwork” of production companies and cable providers: Paramount owned 40 percent, Cox Broadcasting-owned Telerep held 40 percent and Taft Broadcasting had the remaining 20 percent. Paramount was viewed as “the principal production entity,” in part due to its role in funding the installation of the satellite network.

9. Funt, “One Man’s Formula,” 14.

10. Rick Kissell, “ET Innovations Now Taken For Granted,” Variety, September 8, 2000, A6.

11. Entertainment Tonight Ad, Variety, June 24 1981, 57; Morrie Gelman, “Par TV’s Entertainment Tonight Marks a Major Step in Networking,” Daily Variety, June 23, 1981, 10.

12. “Entertainment Tonight Wins Big-Par TV,” Daily Variety, October 6, 1981, 12.

13. James Brown, “All the Fluff That’s Fit to Air,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1981.

14. Howard Rosenberg, “Relentless Pursuit of Fluff,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1982, G1.

15. Richard Stengel, “Turning Show Biz into News,” Time, July 4, 1983, 72.

16. Gross, “Famous for Tracking the Famous,” A1; Richard Zoglin and Tara Weingarten, “That’s Entertainment?” Time, October 3, 1994, 85.

17. John Brodie, “ET’s New Competitor Sets Flack a-Flutter,” Variety, July 25, 1994, 1.

18. Ibid.

19. Susanne Ault, “ET: The Business Behind the Buzz,” Broadcasting & Cable, July 2, 2001, 14.

20. Gross, “Famous for Tracking the Famous,” A1; Peter W. Kaplan, “TV News Magazines Aim at Diverse Viewers,” New York Times, August 1, 1985, C18. John Thornton Caldwell, “Excessive Style: The Crisis of Network Television,” in Television: The Critical View, 6^th ed., Horace Newcomb, ed. (New York: Oxford, 2000), 652.

21. Stengel, “Turning Show Biz into News,” 72.

22. “First Run Syndication Leader,” Variety, September 21, 1983, 82.

23. Ibid.; David Gritten, quote attributed to Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. See Entertainment Tonight Advertisement, Variety, February 1, 1984, 67.

24. See Entertainment Tonight Advertisement, Variety, February 1, 1984, 67.

25. Michael Schrage, “TV Producers Woo the Networks,” Washington Post, January 15, 1985, E5.

26. Ibid.

27. See Kevin Glynn, Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

28. "Entertainment Tonight turns 3,000," Broadcasting & Cable, March 8, 1993, 30.

29. See Anne Helen Petersen, “Celebrity Juice, Not From Concentrate: Perez Hilton, Gossip Blogging, and the New Star Production,” Jump Cut, 2007, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/PerezHilton/index.html.

30. Paige Albiniak, “New, Improved Access,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 10, 2007, 9.

31. While numbers for all television viewing had steadily declined with the expansion of cable and new media, ET still earned a 5.4 Nielsen rating in January 2006. Ben Grossman, “Entertainment Mags Rock,” Broadcasting & Cable, January 23, 2006, 17.

32. For more on TMZ, see Petersen, “Smut Goes Corporate.”

33. Paige Albiniak, “TMZ Stays in the News,” Broadcasting & Cable, November 26, 2007, 12.

34. Brooks Barnes, “After Hart, a Deluge of Meaner Celebrity TV?” New York Times, May 19, 2011, C1.

Further Reading

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Glynn, Kevin. Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Petersen, Anne Helen. “Smut Goes Corporate: TMZ and the Conglomerate, Convergent Face of

Celebrity Gossip.” Television & New Media 11, 1 (2009): 62–81.

In Defense of Boardwalk Empire

People love to rag on Boardwalk Empire. The generalized complaints: it’s boring, it’s all the prestigious packaging without the gravitas, its lead (Nucky Thompson, played by Steve Buschemi) isn’t interesting. But mostly: it’s boring.

Are these the same people who say that Mad Men is boring? Or, more specifically, the same people who really only like Mad Men because of Jon Hamm’s face? Because I don’t get it: just because a show is 60 minutes long and doesn’t jump between six different fantasy worlds, all peopled with women in various stages of undress (read: Game of Thrones), does not a boring show make. Is it boring because there’s intricate dialogue? Because the suits are too pretty? Because there’s more diversity, both in terms of class and race and ethnicity, than not only most shows on television, but most shows on HBO? Is it boring because there’s a character who wears a mask over half his face but still manages to be a sex symbol? IS THAT BORING?

Point is, I have very little tolerance for the ‘boring’ argument, in part because I don’t think that all television has to have the pace of Breaking Bad. I like Top of the Lake, I liked the exquisitely slow Rectify. I feel the same way about the “it’s boring” complaint as I do about the “that movie was too long” complaint -- there are bloated blockbusters that really are too long, and then there are movies that take longer to tell their story. Have some patience. Calm the eff down. Be expansive and imaginative with your expectations of how a plot can unfurl.

I also want to bolster my defense of this show, which I find pretty criminally underrated -- in part because people think it’s one type of show, when in reality, I think it’s another. So I’ve asked Angela Serratore of Lapham’s Quarterly to join me in unpacking this defense. (I know she was the one to do it when her early morning Facebook post read ‘HAPPY BOARDWALK EMPIRE DAY!’)

AHP: Angela, when you talk about Boardwalk Empire, how do you talk about it? Like when someone says “what’s that show about,” what do you say?

AS: All the post-David Chase shows are about America and what it means to thrive here. I think BE is, more than Mad Men or Breaking Bad or pretty much any other show on television, about America and the banal ugliness of what it meant to make it here in a time before the middle class existed, in a time before Irish, Italians, and Jews were seen as fully white, and in a time when the idea that we’re all entitled to some piece of the pie hadn’t yet coalesced.

I suspect part of the reason people find the show boring is because most of the characters fall somewhere on the sociopath spectrum, and what we’ve come to demand from ‘difficult’ characters (I’m talking to you, Don Draper) is some degree of moral anguish. People on Boardwalk Empire don’t have that luxury. Irish-Catholic Margaret, who LEAVES HER HUSBAND because she’s got qualms about his involvement in crime, gets what is probably the most matter-of-fact abortion on the history of television because, well, what else is she going to do? I think this sort of pragmatism can come across as boring, in part because most of us don’t want to believe we’re capable of it.

AHP: I’m vigorously nodding my head here. I love how tribal and prejudiced this show is (or, rather, the culture it mediates is), and not because it makes me feel like we’ve moved past it, the way that Mad Men can (oh remember the ‘60s, when kids didn’t even wear seatbelts! Look how far we’ve come!) but because it serves as an invitation to see those things in our current society. Texts about history, of course, are always as much about the present moment as they are about the past, and I think Boardwalk Empire does a great job of showing the ways in which things like blatant racism and misogyny can be taken on and off, like a piece of Nucky’s very refined wardrobe, according to the demands of the market.

AS: That is an excellent point. Racism and misogyny (or their absence) are, for these characters, essentially tools of business. Nucky doesn’t have the luxury of considering whether or not Chalky’s family deserves the same chances as anyone else’s because he needs Chalky to help him kill people. Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky (who are quickly becoming some of the show’s most interesting characters, in my opinion) don’t have the luxury of being loyal to their Italian and Jewish bosses because they want to move organized crime into the modern era (read: sell heroin).

AS: What about the violence? Is it any more or less jarring than the violence of its peers?

AHP: Gangster violence, especially in the Coppola/Scorsese mode, has always fascinated me - and I’m not a person to tolerate much violence. Gangster violence is always so religious and primal, or at least that’s the way it’s shot and edited, and there’s something about framing violence in those terms that seems more meaningful, more of an act of a repertoire, than most other violence. It’s not that I think it’s beautiful, per se -- it’s just that the violence, and the way it’s enacted, is always replete with meaning. Like in S02 (spoiler) when they scalp that dude -- that’s to send a very specific message, much in the same way that the horse head in the bed sent a very specific message in The Godfather.

I think that some might argue that that’s stylizing, but I don’t think so --- Tarantino stylizes violence; Michael Bay stylizes violence; postmodernism in general stylizes violence….and thus evacuates it of its meaning. When someone gets beat up in Boardwalk, it doesn’t look like a cartoon. It looks like that person was pummeled, and the bruises last. I’m not necessarily arguing for BE’s realism so much as its unflinching commitment to show violence as a tool that wounds both the aggressor and the victim. The “winners” in BE are fucked; the losers are fucked. In that -- and its truly complicated take on its female characters -- I think it’s most like Deadwood, which I miss like crazy.

AS: To be female on Boardwalk Empire is fascinating because it isn’t a death (literal or metaphorical) sentence! It’s taken Matt Weiner (and I really do love MM, I should point out), what, six seasons to really beat everyone over the head with the fact that Peggy is Don, but I think it’s evident from Boardwalk’s first episodes that, say, Margaret is just as ruthlessly pragmatic as Nucky. Joan sleeping with the Jaguar executive is the more polite version of Gillian murdering Jimmy’s clone so she can claim ownership of the house. The women on this show know what the men capable of and THEY’RE capable of. The ‘man acts bad, woman acts bad to punish him’ scenario doesn’t have a place on this show, because everyone is a striver, and that’s incredibly refreshing.

I will say that while I think the show’s treatment of females is fascinating, I’m unsure of its attitude towards femininity and qualities associated with the feminine. It was clear from the first season that Sensitive Jimmy was not someone who could make it in this world. His wife, the Lesbian Painter with Feelings, and her female lover are brutally executed because they have no leverage to offer their executioner. Paz de la Huerta’s showgirl can’t figure out how to be anything but a sex object; she’s summarily discarded by Nucky and, after becoming pregnant, falls into a state of physical and emotional collapse. Margaret, who moves in with the man who orders her husband’s murder, knows from the beginning of her relationship with Nucky that to fall pregnant would be inadvisable; it’s when she later lets her guard down and seems to feel genuine affection for the Hot Irishman that she gets into trouble. This is misogyny but it isn’t chauvinism--it’s the very simple fact that for most of history, to be feminine means to be in danger.

AHP: You are totally correct about Femininity as Weakness, but I will say that Nucky is the least masculine yet still masculine leading man I’ve witnessed (see further discussion below). And from a feminist perspective, I’m really grateful for the way the narrative has attended to the social and cultural realities of being a woman at this time -- like the fact that the female-dominated teetotalers didn’t hate alcohol because they were prudes, but because their husbands kept using all their wages to get drunk and beat them. (I realize I’m being semi-reductive here, but I feel like that history really gets passed over in favor of harpy women who wanted to take away all the booze) And Season Three’s sex ed clinics, spearheaded by Margaret, that get off to a woozy start and then get her in trouble -- if this were a different type of story, we’d have a montage of Margaret basically teaching every woman how to use appropriate birth control methods culminating in lots of happy tears. Instead, we see how impossible it was for even a woman of substantial means to do something like this -- and how stultifying social institutions remained, even amidst the rise of the so-called “New Woman.”

And as for Margaret going soft with Soft Irishman and both of them being punished for it….I’m going to articulate an unsophisticated yet totally true opinion that every superb narrative needs a love story. It doesn’t have to be a traditional love story -- the love story of Breaking Bad, after all, is kinda between Walt and Jesse -- but you need two people to root for. Some people are rooting for Margaret and Nucky, but I’ve always had a soft spot for an Irish revolutionary, and I spent the bulk of the last season and a half rooting for Owen and Margaret. Clearly they were doomed, but that was part of the pleasure, like watching Romeo and Juliet for the fifteenth time.

AS: I agree with you. I love a love story, and I really love a revolutionary Irishman, and of course I can see how Margaret would have fallen for him, though their sex scenes are curious--if I’m remembering correctly, on virtually every occasion they’re intimate she demands it from him, sometimes rather coldly.

But I think her anguish over his death is brilliantly ambiguous--is she upset because she fell in love and her lover was delivered to her husband’s house in a box? Or is she upset because she needed a way out of Nucky’s Atlantic City and now that way out is gone (and she’s pregnant, too)? On a lesser show it would clearly be the former, but on this one, where the women are allowed to be just as pragmatic as their male counterparts? I’m not so sure.

AS: It’s always a dicey proposition to include real-world characters in your fictional story. I’d argue that BE does this better than pretty much any other show I watch, but is that off-putting?

AHP: You know, the Girls in Hoodies podcast was talking about how historical accuracy limits what this show can do, both in terms of character development and general plotting, but I think that it’s like the Classic Hollywood Studio System: a healthy set of constraints actually allows you to focus on establishing depth, instead of breadth. Like we know what happens with Al Capone, and the writers have to hew somewhat closely to that narrative -- but they can also do a ton of exploration with how to get him there, and how the character playing him develops….like the stuff about him and his deaf son, I just love.

AS: Also, as historians I think we’d both agree that implying that Real People of History can limit a story’s progress/development is to overlook that history is fiction is history, etc. etc.

AHP: YOU COULD NOT BE MORE CORRECT, ANGELA. Which segues nicely into BE’s depiction of race, which most texts focusing on this period just ignore entirely in favor of jazz age spectacle. In fact, the casting of Michael K. Williams as Chalky White was one of my major attractions to the show, even before it began airing [COMPLETE ASIDE: Is Richard Harrow the Omar of Boardwalk Empire? Discuss]. I was fairly unimpressed with Chalky’s screentime, or lack thereof, throughout the first two seasons, but his storyline last year was just explosive. I couldn’t look away. Part of that is Williams’ insane acting ability, and part of it is the willingness to portray a black character with the same sort of nuance as the white characters. Chalky is at once incredibly charismatic and incredibly flawed -- not unlike Nucky.

AS: I’ve seen some fans of the show give Nucky too much credit for being business associates with a black man (it’s not like he’s being invited to dinner parties, you know?). But I think of all the male relationships on the show the one that’s caused me to hold my breath the most is that of Nucky and Chalky. Last season, when Nucky had nowhere else to go and Chalky took him in and agreed to throw his manpower behind him? That was a careful bet on Chalky’s part, one based on desire for future favors from Nucky, concerns about what another white person in charge might demand from Chalky’s operation, knowledge that the shrewd Nucky should never be counted out, and, maybe, a little bit of friendship or mutual respect?

In most media that deals with crime, races are allowed to unite exclusively for transactional reasons, with race itself being at the forefront of the alliance. That Chalky and Nucky are allowed to have this relationship at all is a testament to Winter’s understanding of how people climbing up the ladder deal with each other.

AHP: I’m super excited about the casting of Jeffrey Wright as Dr. Valentin Narcisse, a Marcus Garvey-ite rooted in Harlem who’ll serve as counterpoint to Chalky. Andy Greenwald recently interviewed Wright for the Hollywood Prospectus podcast, and his description of this character and what he gets to do with him over the course of the season, sounds incredible. Wright comes off as wicked smart and super learned in the politics of 1920s Harlem, including the discourses of the “New Negro” and the “Talented 10th” (and how they butted up against those of Marcus Garvey), and it sounds like the writers of the show are positioning his character to reflect and engage in that cultural moment in a highly textured way.

AS: Can we talk about where Nucky lies on the leading-man spectrum now? Anyone who knows me IRL knows about my powerful attraction to Steve Buscemi. I also think he (and Nucky, by extension), is sort of a litmus test: anyone whose initial response is to call him weird-looking or dull is immediately written off as a person with no imagination.

But I think something that separates him from the rest of the pack (and makes him more than a little frightening, quite frankly), is that he’s got very little in the way of a backstory and yet it doesn’t matter. Don Draper is all id, doing whatever he wants because he was birthed and raised by whores, and that’s something that informs virtually every decision he makes. Nucky had distant parents and a dead wife, and yet we rarely wonder about them, which I think is a further testament to the idea of the show as about what it meant to be American at a time when people were still deciding what that even meant. Nucky doesn’t waffle over notions of who he is--why bother with that when you can get on with the much more interesting business of winning?

AHP: It’s a fascinating example of attention to period psychology: in the 1950s, it makes sense that everyone around Don Draper is trying to figure out “who he is,” because the spread of pop-Freudism positioned childhood as a key to unlock identity. But Nucky is defined by his Irishness heritage (and the Catholicism that accompanies it) and the fact that he doesn’t speak with an accent (read: second-generation, and thus more wholly American). Which is part, I think, of why he has no qualms about dealing with gangsters, whether they be Jewish or Italian or Black, and also why he attends so mindfully to his clothing. He may always be Irish (and remember, we’re still 40 years away from having an Irish president, and even he had to promise the American public he had no allegiance to the Pope in Rome), but living in American capitalism, at least during this specific time period, means that he can indeed transcend his class. But bottom line, at least for me: Nucky is hot because he’s very smart.

AS: Yes, which is a nice segue into what we’re looking forward to this season, because I think the question almost always is: Nucky is smart, but do smarts last forever?

Nucky has gotten by on his wits and his ability to convince other people that he’s a sound bet--is that going to hold? He’s got incredibly fragile relationships with Chalky, Rothstein, Capone, Luciano, and Lansky. Is he going to look ahead well enough to choose the right sides, or is the rapidly approaching end of Prohibition going to throw him off his game? We saw last season that Luciano and Lansky were looking beyond booze and into hard drugs, and this represents a huge shift in a system of organized crime in which bosses at least pretended to have boundaries. Will Nucky have boundaries? Will he pretend to have them?

I’ve read in early reviews that Margaret is absent from the first few episodes, which makes sense--she and Nucky are estranged at the end of last season, and Kelly Macdonald was pregnant during the filming of much of this season. Still, I wonder about her possibe return to the fold. Will Nucky find another showgirl (and another one after that?) Or will the both of them realize what they are and what they can be together, a la Tony and Carmela?

I am also interested to see how Ron Livingston fares. Part of why this show looks so good is because everyone in it looks like they belong in the 1920s--will the introduction of someone with a modern face change the landscape?

AHP: You stole all my questions, save one: WHAT WILL BECOME OF RICHARD? He is the heart of the show for me, and the way they handle him will say a lot about how I handle the show.

With that, I hope that we’ve proven that Boardwalk Empire is anti-boring, or at least that only boring people are bored, etc., et. al. We’ll clearly be watching tonight and commenting up a storm tomorrow, and hope you’ll join us freaking out over Nucky’s newest tie choices.

Recent Writing All Over the Place

For The Hairpin: "No Theoryheads Allowed" (on theoryheads, grad school, and Wayne Koestenbaum's superb new collection)

A behemoth of a Scandals of Classic Hollywood on Hedy Lamarr, "The Ecstasy Girl" and some very, very beautiful pictures in "Robert Redford, Golden Boy."

Yammering on about Christian summer camp songs in "Lord I Lift Your Camp On High"

Applying my theory of the postfeminist dystopia to Sex in the City in "Sex and the Dystopia"

The latest "Remembering Lilith," this time on my personal favorite Fiona Apple (plus one from all the back in May on Jewel)

On Slate: Write-ups of two superb 1930s fan magazine pieces -- "Katharine Hepburn Needed Those Spankings!" and "Ronnie Reagan: New Answer to Maiden's Prayers."

Over at Laptham's Quarterly: a piece on Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties featuring the best 15-part bathing suits of all time.

For The Toast:

"In Defense of Cheerleading" (funny) and "There Are Things of Which I May Not Speak" (sad).

Here on the Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style site:

"The Pop Star Immunity Problem"

"Taste, Class, Fetish Object: The Curious Case of Olivia Wilde"

An update from July on the process of writing my book, Scandals of Classic Hollywood (further update: I'm done!)

"Angelina Jolie Controls the Narrative"

and "The Enduring Postfeminist Dystopia of Bachelorette"

For the Whitman College Film & Media Studies Podcast:

I talk about my most important film at age 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 in Episode 11 of The Cold Open.

I'm also going to start writing at the amazing Dear Television next week-ish -- if you don't follow on Facebook, get on that.

Finally, the latest round of Summer Endorsements, including lots of Instagram Dog Recs, over at Virginia Quarterly Review.

Enjoy -- and I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of the pieces above!

The Pop Star Immunity Problem

By now you've heard all about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs -- and whether you think it was a minstrel show, an example of the double standard exacted on women, or simply in bad taste, the overwhelming reaction has been negative.

Take a look at Jody Rosen's incisive critique for New York Magazine:

Cyrus has spent a lot of time recently toying with racial imagery. We’ve seen Cyrus twerking her way through the video for her big hit “We Can’t Stop,” professing her love for “hood music,” and claiming spiritual affinity with Lil’ Kim. Last night, as Cyrus stalked the stage, mugging and twerking, and paused to spank and simulate analingus upon the ass of a thickly set African-American backup dancer, her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism: a minstrel show routine whose ghoulishness was heightened by Cyrus’s madcap charisma, and by the dark beauty of “We Can’t Stop” — by a good distance, the most powerful pop hit of 2013.

A doctoral dissertation could (and will) be written on the racial, class, and gender dynamics of Cyrus’s shtick. I’ll make just one historical note. For white performers, minstrelsy has always been a means to an end: a shortcut to self-actualization. The archetypal example is in The Jazz Singer (1927), in which Al Jolson’s immigrant striver puts on the blackface mask to cast off his immigrant Jewish patrimony and remake himself as an all-American pop star.

Cyrus’s twerk act gives minstrelsy a postmodern careerist spin. Cyrus is annexing working-class black “ratchet” culture, the potent sexual symbolism of black female bodies, to the cause of her reinvention: her transformation from squeaky-clean Disney-pop poster girl to grown-up hipster-provocateur. (Want to wipe away the sickly-sweet scent of the Magic Kingdom? Go slumming in a black strip club.) Cyrus may indeed feel a cosmic connection to Lil’ Kim and the music of “the hood.” But the reason that these affinities are coming out now, at the VMAs and elsewhere, is because it’s good for business.

It's gross, it's exploitative, it's unfortunate. But what fascinates me isn't the critique -- although there's much more to be said, especially in terms of gender and self-exploitation and postfeminism -- so much as Cyrus's immunity to it. These critiques may shade our understanding of her image; when someone writes a star study of her, decades from now, this performance, and the response to it, may or may not hold as much significance as, say, her turn as Hannah Montana. But her stardom will endure -- and not even because of the old maxim that 'all publicity is good publicity.'

Cyrus, and other pop stars with negative publicity swirling around them, are immune for a rather simple reason: their power, and resilience, doesn't stem from their images. It's in their music. And so long as you can turn on your Top 40 radio station and hear a super catchy song -- catchy enough that it overrides your personal politics -- it doesn't matter what they do, so long as the music remains infective.

Take the most blatant example of a Pop Star Behaving Badly: Chris Brown. In what has now become well-trod public knowledge, on the night of February 9th, 2009, Chris Brown physically attacked then-girlfriend Rihanna. The severity of the beating only became evident when a picture of her battered face, leaked to TMZ, quickly spread across the internet. In the years since the event, Brown has managed to make himself look like even more of an asshole, tattooing a picture of a battered woman, who just happens to look like Rihanna, on his neck, and making all matter of equally egregious statements. But I don't need to convince you of Brown's douchery: it's common knowledge.

And yet, his records still sell. And not just a little, amongst the Brown defenders, but a lot. Number One album, Number One Singles, tons of award nominations a lot. His video for "Look at Me Now," released in 2011, has received over 220 MILLION YouTube views. "Don't Wake Me Up" was EVERYONE last summer.

Now, I love Top 40 radio. I've always loved it. I love its comforting repetitiveness; I love how it familiarizes me with the newest pop, for better or for worst, while I'm driving to the grocery store. But I loathe Brown and the choices his image represents, so I change the channel when one of his songs comes on -- even the implicit, passive endorsement is too much for me. But I can't change the channel when I'm pumping my gas and the loud speaker is playing that same Top 40 station or when it comes on during a sports game.

Do all these Clear Channel radio execs endorse domestic abuse? Does the owner of the gas station? Do the players on the sports team? Do most of the kids listening at home or playing the YouTube video in the background while they do their homework or chat online? Do the moms who let their kid use the song for her ringtone? Probably not, no. But the songs are catchy. And because you're not looking at Brown's face as the song plays in the background, you can deal. It's the banality of catchy Top 40, and it's very easy to tolerate. If Brown's music were shitty, he'd no longer be popular. Simple.

But why doesn't this disarticulation of performer and product work with other celebrities? Why can't we tolerate what Paula Deen does in her private life, with the understanding that she's a "good" cook? What about Mel Gibson, who's still a decent actor, but has arguably behaved less abhorrently than Brown? Because celebrities in general -- and film and television actors in particular -- are wed to their actual faces. Every time I see Mel Gibson onscreen, I'm reminded of the infamous mugshot. Every time I hear his voice, I hear the transcript of racial epithets. Every time I see Paul Deen's face, I see her clumsy, back-handed apology for her own racial epithets. The thing that makes the star a star -- the talent -- is yoked physical appearance.

Granted, pop stars are pop stars in no small part due to their ability to manufacture an image to accompany their songs. Without her boyfriends and break-ups and best friends and bitch face, Taylor Swift would not be Taylor Swift. But the source of her power and charisma is not in her appearance, per se, or her speaking ability -- as clearly evidenced last night at the VMAs. It's in her catchy-ass music that worms into your head and refuses to leave. Britney's a great example here: now that she's basically become a recluse, her new releases still sell like crazy. It's not because she's a good singer -- she's not, really -- but because she has great production. Max Martin, Dr. Luke -- if they make it, it doesn't matter who sings it, or what the body behind that voice has done, you'll listen to it.

Or take the so-called "song of the summer, "Blurred Lines," which may or may not be "rapey." If it were a poem, submitted as assignment by a student, I'd probably go for the later. But put it with a Pharrell beat, and every time it plays at a summer wedding, you'll be on the dance floor -- it's easy to forget about how condescending the video is when it's that easy to move to.

There are dozens of other singers who have committed crimes, cultural or literal, that we ignore. And as much as Cyrus's performance engenders intelligent conversations about race and sexuality, the fact remains that her song -- "We Can't Stop" -- is infectious. Cyrus herself may not understand that the song's power and poignancy stem from its sadness (someone on Facebook said "it sounds like the funeral music for a young person"), but that infectiousness makes Cyrus, the industrial earner, immune.

Cyrus won't make money because of this performance -- she makes money because of the song that undergirds it. And so long as she continues to make that much money, big name, super talented producers will continue to make songs for her, which will continue to dominate the radio and top 40 charts. She could become a lesbian, she could date a guy twenty years older than her, she could leak a sex tape, she could convert to Scientology, she could cloister herself in a Buddhist monastery, she could appropriate the signifiers of yet another culture, she could join the Occupy Movement, she could change her name to a symbol -- so long as this was still her single, and she still had the muscle of a major label behind her, this song would still be one of the major hits of the summer.

You know the one thing she probably couldn't do? Become an outspoken, radical feminist. Which, contrasted with the embrace of Brown, should tell you something about what our culture will and will not tolerate from our idols.

Taste, Class, Fetish Object: The Curious Case of Olivia Wilde

It’s easy to dislike Olivia Wilde. I should know, because I’ve done it for the last decade with very little effort. And it’s not because she’s beautiful -- I have tremendous affection for dozens of beautiful stars -- and it’s not because she had those horrible bangs as Marisa’s girlfriend on The O.C. My dislike stems from a general feeling of beige vapidity: she, like the rest of her similarly proportioned & styled cohort (most notable members: Megan Fox and Jessica Biel) has presented herself as the plaything of blockbuster boys, a Barbie to be repositioned, given less and less clothing, and stand around and look side-kick-ish. In Alphadog, in Year One, in Tron, in Cowboys & Aliens. . .on the cover of Maxim, GQ, and Esquire. . .it’s the same song, fiftieth verse. She’s so objectified that it bores me.

But look closer, I’ve heard -- she’s smart. She’s from a well-established family. She was an Italian Princess. She reads! What I want to think about, then, is the way in which these twin understandings -- of hotness and culture -- twine together to form a sort of antidote, or at least alternative, to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s the new Thinking Man’s Pin-Up, similar to the Gillian Flynn’s “Cool Girl,” but with the distinct connotations of glamour and class that accompany our current understanding of Classic Hollywood. And her popularity, specifically with men, reflects the complicated cultural politics of the moment -- specifically, the desire to be a male feminist and reject the notion of the very notion of pin-up. . . . . and the ubiquity of the male gaze, which trains everyone -- men & women, audiences & celebrities -- that beauty isn’t beauty unless it’s fetishized. Olivia Wilde is the compromise of the enlightened man (or woman) who can’t help but live within patriarchy. If you’re going to make a woman into a sex object, in other words, at least she’s a smart woman -- and makes you feel better about it.

The intelligence wasn’t always that clear. When Wilde first popped up on the cultural radar, her image was almost wholly defined by sex. First, there was her high-profile turn as a bisexual on a network television show, which prompted the following lead for a cover article in Complex Magazine:

Olivia Wilde turned heads when she tongued-down Mischa Barton on The O.C., but now this sex-oozing 22-year-old officially steals the show in Alpha Dog. Complex caught up with the No.1 stunna and got her to spill the beans on full-frontal nudity, making out with Mischa, and what's eating Emile Hirsch (hint: not her!).

And then there was her body. There wasn’t much of it on display in The O.C. -- mostly a lot of skinny arms in tank tops -- but there soon was. Just take a look at the series of photoshoots from this middle section of her career:

Choice quote: “I’m happy being sexy.”

The photos were all sex -- I don't think I could find a better contemporary example of fetishization -- but the articles and interviews were keen to distinguish her from the likes of Fox and other eye candy. Five themes, repeated again and again, established her class:

1.) She’s from intelligent stock.

Not just smart, but high brow, investigative journalism stock. Her parents are “lefty journalists” Andrew and Leslie Cockburn; her grandfather is “lefty journalist” and novelist Claud Cockburn, who was buddy buddy with Graham Greene and fought alongside Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War. We’re not talking “stringer for the local paper” journalists -- we’re talking in depth overseas investigative reporting on the Middle East, nearly a dozen books to their names reporters.

2.) She herself is intelligent.

She went to one of the most elite boarding schools in the U.S., and was ready to go to Bard before she convinced her parents to let her spend a year in Hollywood. But the intelligence is mostly modeled through acts, not words: she went to boarding school; she arrives to an interview with a heavy tome in her hand; she cites intelligent, older female actors (such as Christie) as her role models. She “performs” intelligence incredibly skillfully, with quotes like “I think I have a strong journalistic streak in me—I’m really critical and analytical” and, concerning how she changed her name at the age of 18, ‘It’s not a renunciation of my parents – God, no. I go around bragging about my incredible family. But I wanted a pen name and I was inspired by Oscar Wilde, as he never compromised his identity even in the face of persecution. And he’s a fellow Irishman.’

I don’t mean to suggest that Wilde isn’t actually intelligent -- it’s hard to know, really, actually, as hard as it is to really “know” anything about a celebrity -- but that the signifiers of intelligence are all there.

3.) She’s married to a Prince.

Sure, they got married at age 18 in a school bus. I get that they were quasi-burn-out hippies. But you know what betrays class, and the opportunities it affords? Marrying an Italian Prince and becoming a Principesa. Her sister-in-law was A GETTY. They had a CASTLE, which Wilde talked about freely, at least before their divorce: I'm into European history, so it's exciting to trace our family back to the 14th century and beyond. How many people get to say "This castle has been in our family since the 1400s"? Her very prominent gold ring was even embossed with her husband’s family seal.

4.) She has taste.

Money + Education = Taste. “Good” taste -- highbrow taste. Thirty years ago, highbrow taste meant opera, poetry, avant garde theater. Today, at least within the realm of celebrity, you can signify highbrow taste through evocations of the classic and the vintage. She doesn’t have a Land Rover or a BMW -- she has an ‘58 Chevy, which was a close second to her “dream car,” the ‘54 Bel Air. Her Chevy, which she periodically drove to premieres, was “a little funkier looking than the Bel Air, and I was like, That’s more like me. I love it. I love my car.” She loves Oscar Wilde; her favorite actress is Julie Christie; she wears a bracelet with a Pablo Neruda quote. (Neruda: the new Kahlil Gibran?) (But is Neruda actually now middlebrow? DISCUSS).

Sometimes, like when she’s promoting a new (highbrow) play in the (highbrow) New York Observer, she’s depicted wearing turtlenecks, almost entirely from the neck up, as if to encourage us to focus on her brain, not the body that made it famous.

Usually, however, the discussion of her background, education, and taste are paired with images that aggressively fetishize her.

The problem was that none of Wilde’s films worked. Seriously: that list above, the one that starts with Alphadog, is like a roll call of notable flops of the last ten years. Lainey Gossip even gave her the worst insult a gossip columnist can give, asking “Why IS Olivia Wilde?” (Translation: What makes her a celebrity despite lack of merit?)

Wilde’s films may not have been delivering, but she gave good gossip: after breaking up with her husband in 2011, she was seen with every hot male star in town. Gosling, Pine, Gyllenhaal, Cooper, Timberlake -- she was playing all of them. Her flirtation with Timberlake was especially notable, given his recent celebration from Jessica Biel -- a star who, as Lainey was keen to point out, would’ve loved to have the sort of work (and play) that Wilde was getting.

Somewhere in there, she met and fell in love with Jason Sudeikis, right as rumors of Sudeikis’ role in January Jones’ pregnancy began to circulate. (Jones still opts not to name the father of the child; Sudeikis is adamant that the child is not his).

Wilde’s career was stagnant. She was working like crazy -- in 2012 alone, she appeared in Butter, Deadfall, People Like Us, The Words, and The Longest Week, but apart from Butter’s persistent appearance on my Netflix homepage, her work was distinctly below the radar. And not “highbrow art fair” below the radar, but “trying to be good but actually mediocre” below the radar. And therein lies the inherent contradiction of Wilde’s image: for someone with such good taste, how did she keep picking such bad roles?

At some point, Sudeikis told her to check out the work of Mumblecore darling Joe Swanberg, who happened to be casting for a new movie, Drinking Buddies. Swanberg’s movies had made waves in indie, film festival circles, but were by no means mainstream. Wilde pursuing the role was like Halle Berry doing Monster’s Ball, Entourage’s Vince doing Queen’s Boulevard, or Tom Cruise doing Magnolia -- a way to change the conversation people were having about her. It wasn’t a Terrence Malick film, but it was something.

And, to be fair, Wilde is pretty great in the role: she plays a total Cool Girl, so cool, in fact, that she’s the manager of a microbrewery, the only girl in the entire building. She wears sexy jeans and tank tops and Chuck Taylors; her hair is relatively unwashed and always up in a ponytail, and her only make-up is a smear of eyeliner. She flirts mercilessly with everyone she works with, she ices out her boyfriend, she has that light of charisma that attracts everyone into her orbit . . . . and makes every other girl feel self-conscious, less-than. It’s extremely easy to dislike this type of girl, both in movies and in real life, but Wilde -- and Swanberg’s direction -- help paint the reality of her situation, the self-deception and hollowness of it, in a way that, at least for me, definitely worked.

Drinking Buddies is receiving a limited release, but most people will watch it, as I did, on VOD or iTunes or whatever, as it is the perfect VOD movie: just cute enough, just thought-provoking enough, just beautiful enough, that when you sit down on a Friday night you’re like this, this is what I want to charge to my boyfriend’s cable bill.

But Drinking Buddies won’t get Wilde an Oscar nomination or anything close to it. It’s just enough indieness to help bring her textual personal in line with her extra-textual one: to better match the girl onscreen with the girl who reads books and campaigns for Obama and dates Jason Sudeikis. Critics, though, are making it hard for her: a recent review in The Dissolve, the exact sort of publication that she would want endorsing her, claims that

Wilde delivers a credible performance as a woman whose external brassiness and rock-star swagger bely an underlying vulnerability, but she nevertheless feels painfully miscast. Wilde possesses an exotic, otherworldly movie-star beauty that makes her a natural for popcorn fare like Cowboys & Aliens, Tron: Legacy, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, but seems distractingly out of place here. Casting a glamorous movie star might be good for the film’s commercial prospects, but it harms its aspirations to verisimilitude.

She’s too pretty, in other words, to be in anything other than a blockbuster. But I think this is a minority opinion: the vast majority of people want beautiful people playing all of the parts; screw verisimilitude. But the film makes you feel better about liking her: see, she is smart; she does have better taste than Cowboys & Aliens. It’s not unlike how I defend The Gos: sure, he did The Notebook and it’s a piece of schlock (that I will watch over and over again), but then he went and did Lars and the Real Girl and Half Nelson -- and that’s how you know he’s a man of integrity and intelligence and worthy of my desire.

In Lars and the Real Girl, Gosling is almost unrecognizable, hidden behind twenty extra pounds, thick sweaters, and a Dad moustache. In Drinking Buddies, Wilde might not be glamorous, but she is still very much her beautiful self, and her body is still on display, arguably unnecessarily. She runs around the beach in a small black bikini and goes skinny dipping, her body belying the amount of dark beer she consumes on a daily basis. Cool girl indeed.

This division between “classy” and unclassy stars is nothing new: even in silent Hollywood, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, once married, became paragons of class and good taste, hosting salons in their Hollywood mansion that included Einstein and various Presidents. Garbo was classy because she was European; Norma Shearer was classy because she was married to studio exec and very upright and proper. But Clara Bow was flirty and bouncy and refused to lose her Brooklyn accent -- she tromped around town without stockings and loved to go to USC football games. She played working class girls; she wasn’t scared to have fun and drink out of the bottle. Furs and jewels don't make you classy, especially with a look like that one below.

Joan Crawford was totally unclassy until she married Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; Gloria Swanson made everyone forget about her unclassy days as a Bathing Beauty and married a Marquis. Bette Davis was classy because she was from New England and the stage; Katharine Hepburn was classy for the same reasons, plus the fact that she was a snob. Jean Harlow was super tacky, with her platinum blonde hair, her guileless vampiness, and her dalliances with gangsters. Hedy Lamarr was classy because she was Austrian; Betty Grable wasn’t because she was solely a pin-up.

Look at that list, and you see that class and glamour meant shielding your body -- suggesting, rather than flaunting, sex. . . . and cultivating an image that hinged on acting ability, witty dialogue, and intelligence. Sex objects, however -- the ‘It’ girls -- were the opposite.

This dichotomy has muddled somewhat post-studio system. Jane Fonda, for example, moved between images defined by sex and others defined by activism, but she rarely occupied both simultaneously. Olivia Wilde is arguably the closest we’ve come to the conflation of the two qualities: body and mind, both beautiful; the classy and the pin-up, all in one. (The other recent example = Rachel McAdams, who I first called the thinking man’s pin-up five years ago).

The problem, however, is that this bifurcation endures. Because no person is “just” their body or “just” their mind -- but even in our allegedly progressive moment, it’s impossible to combine the body and the mind. It’s not the Virgin/Whore dichotomy, but it’s close: a star is either a Dumb Bombshell or a Homely Smart Girl.

I still don’t know how to feel about Olivia Wilde, but maybe the reason I feel so unsettled is because her image, and its evocation of both intelligence and beauty, is so rare. But a beautiful smart girl, that’s threatening: who knows what she’ll do. Which is why, of course, she must be fetishized -- visually reduced to the sum of her beautiful parts, even as the interview that accompanies the piece proclaims her aptitude and taste.

It’s a negotiated victory, and one I’m hesitant to celebrate. Our stars, and the ideologies their images embody, are reflections of ourselves, and the ideologies that structure our lived reality. Wilde -- and, by extension, all of us -- can break the dichotomy -- but only if we still play by the rules. Lean In indeed.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Book, The Update

You know why I haven't posted anything for a month? Because I've been writing the crap out of my book. And now, having just sent in the middle section to my editor, is a good time to pause and tell you a bit about it, how it's going to be different from the blog posts, and how I've been putting it together. As many of you know, it's being published through Plume, which is an imprint of Penguin Books. I have a fantastic editor there whose idea of what the book would be was very much in line with my own, and after signing the contract in December, I spent the Spring (and my luscious two week Spring Break) putting together the first third of the book, which details five major scandals of the silent era. The book is set-up in "volumes," each with two or three scandals/stories/stars, but whose stories rotate around the same theme: Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino are in one "volume," each with their own chapter, but the overarching theme of the volume is SEX (and desire) SCARES PEOPLE. I call all the silent era stuff, which I turned in sometime in April, "the first chunk."

Since Whitman's graduation in mid-May, I've been working on "the second chunk." There's the "Blonde Menace," which covers Jean Harlow (You guys! The scandal! I had (only a very limited) idea!) and Mae West, and an as-of-yet unnamed section on classic Hollywood romances. Next up: sad sack '50s masculinity and deviant '50s femininity, in all its various valences.

When people ask me about the book, I say it's an academic-popular hybrid: I'm researching everything the way I would for an academic text, not to mention drawing on the years of Hollywood and cultural history I've consumed over the last ten years, but I'm writing in a style that's purposefully at odds with many academic texts. In short: you don't have to have attended graduate school to understand what I'm saying. It's somewhat akin to the the tone of the posts on The Hairpin, but in the words of my editor, "less bloggy" -- there's no all-capslock (SORRY I KNOW I LOVE IT TOO), no asides about my personal life.

If you're one of the people who mourns that loss, have no fear, I'm going to keep disclosing embarrassing things about myself, probably in all caps, for the rest of my internet life. But recall that I hold a weird, tenuous place in the academy: I really like being a professor, but I also really like writing outside of the academy: I take it as an ethical obligation to take the knowledge that the government has in no small part funded and make it accessible outside of the so-called Ivory Tower. That's not dumbing my stuff down, per se, but providing proof that the Humanities, writ large, have a place in the future of education in this country. But in order to prove that, at least right now, I understood that I needed to talk a bit less about the Boys of My Youth.

For the posts on The 'Pin, I always do a fair amount of research. I think popular misconception is that I just pull this stuff out of my brain -- which, I mean, that would be rad -- but I usually spend about a week collecting details and thinking through the place of the star and his/her scandal. I watch the movies I haven't seen; I rewatch the important ones I have. If there's a milestone academic article that's been written about a star, I revisit it and think about how I can do (hopefully a lot more) than simply reiterate the points within. But I never felt the need to read everything, know everything.

With the book, I'm still not obsessed with knowing everything -- that's how books don't get written, after all -- so much as reconstructing the star's reception, at the time, the very best I can. I avoid star biographies, as they often read like hagiographies with a very solid dash of unsubstantiated rumor. What matters to me, and what I'm committed to writing, isn't what "really" happened so much as how the story of what happened unfolded -- and the industrial and cultural specifics of why it unfolded the way it did. Because here's the thing: all the people who know what "really" happened are dead. People who carry those stories along with them are unreliable. I'm not an investigative journalist, and have no desire to "get to the bottom" of these stories. Rather, I'm more invested in what each star scandal says about the time, what we expected and tolerated of our stars, and the fascinating mechanics of Hollywood and the gossip industry that manufactured specific narratives that sometimes worked very well, and other times not so much. This stuff is so juicy and fascinating, just not in the way we've come to expect star tell-alls to be.

But if you read and like Scandals of Classic Hollywood, or this site, you know that already. So how am I excavating how these stars, and the scandals that surrounded them, were mediated at the time? Ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to -- at least not without a lot of expensive trips to archives.

But three things have changed:

1.) I have access to all of the major newspaper coverage of the United States in PDF form. ProQuest, I can't thank you, and my college library that pays so much money for your services, enough.

2.) I have access to full text searchable fan magazines via the Media History Project, which scans magazines that have gone out of copyright. I need to write an entire post on how this site has revolutionized both my star studies classroom and my own work, but here's the concise version: most libraries don't collect or archive fan magazines, because they were cheap, pulpy, and feminized. Thus the only way to get your hands on one was to either hope that your library had microfilm of Photoplay (which some did, because it was the People Magazine of old school fan magazines) or travel to the Herrick Library in Los Angeles, or buy them via eBay.

But magazines pre-1945 are expensive -- we're talking anywhere between $20 and $100 a piece -- on eBay, in part because there's a huge collecting community of the hand drawn covers. For my dissertation, I had to rely almost wholly on microfilm of Photoplay from the UT library; for this project, especially the stuff from the '20s and '30s, I have half a dozen magazines to choose from, including magazines directed at different class levels, thanks to MHP. Here are some choice examples from New Movie Magazine, the most popular fan magazine in the early '30s and also one of the cheapest, sold at Woolrich's --

3.) I've received funding from my college to buy a crap-ton of post-1945 magazines on eBay. The Media History Project currently only goes up to 1943, which means that for some stars, I have a pretty big gap. I've returned to the Photoplay microfilm (this time at the University of Washington), but post-1945 is such a crucial time in scandal meditation, as the power to control the narrative shifted from the studio, working in close concert with the gossip press, to the star. I need scandal mags (of which I already have dozens, thanks to some careful estate sale shopping in Austin), I need fan mags of all sorts, I need stuff from "popular interest" press, aka Saturday Evening Post, Life Magazine, Coronet, Look, Time, Newsweek, I need stuff from more niche publications -- Ebony for my research on Dorothy Dandridge; Ladies Home Journal and McCall's for my work on '50s femininity. Most of the last half of that list I can get via Inter Library Loan, as they're are middle class publications and thus deemed worthy, historically, of collecting and archiving. Life Magazine is even gloriously available, in full color, via Google Books.

But what I can't obtain through the library, I buy: thus a constant stream of very Granddad's-basement smelling magazines have been arriving at my door. Because sellers rarely list the table of contents, I have to rely on luck to see if the piece promised within is a one page pictoral (unhelpful) or a five page profile (very helpful). Either way, these magazines are usually around $10, and they'll prove very useful in future classes. Now I just need to come up with a nerdy star scholar database to figure out all that I have.

So what do I do with all this material? I'm a type-A researcher, which means that I read it all, figure out recurring themes and crucial details, come up with a quasi-outline, and then transcribe pertinent passages, along with citation (this is key, whether you're writing a 2 page paper or a book -- when you transcribe quotes, never forget the citation). I use Scrivener, a wonderfully intuitive program that allows me to create little mini folders, and mini documents within them, of all the stars and the themes, events, etc. that compose their images. Then, when I write the piece, I can split the screen in half horizontally and keep whichever set of notes I'm working with visible below.

I write fast but sloppily -- I like to sit down and pound out 3,000-4,000 a words a day -- and then I go back and clean it up, buffing out the ridiculousness, making the narrative more coherent, figuring out how to put in a compelling personal detail that I'd left out. I tighten the prose, try to make myself sound like less of a blowhard, and take out any accidental super-academic-speak. Then I send it to my editor, who takes a few weeks to go through it with a fine-tooth comb and sends it back to me for more revisions -- some on the level of the word, others pertaining to the overarching sweep of volume as a whole. I hate the edits (it's like pulling teeth -- I can sit there and stare at an edit for an hour convincing myself that it can't be done before finally just doing it) and love the first drafts, but editing is what makes a string of words into writing, and I'm very fortunate to have someone so generous and perceptive serving the role for me.

After I finish a chapter, I go back and do it all over again. It's a great way to avoid the tedium (transcribing for two weeks would give me carpal tunnel) and, since I have to read piles of material, I can readily do that outside, in my sweet lawn chair, while watching my tomato plants grow. It's not a bad summer -- and I'm completely amazed by how much I thought I knew about each of these stars and didn't. My hope, of course, is that you will be too.

I'm turning in the final draft, final edits and all, at the very end of August....which means publication sometime in Spring or Summer 2014. Get excited, and thanks, as ever, for your support. Questions about the process? Let me know below!

Angelina Jolie Controls the Narrative

The Basics:

Late last night, an editorial by Angelina Jolie, entitled "My Medical Choice," went live on the New York Times. In the editorial, Jolie revealed that she had undergone a double mastectomy as a preemptive protection from breast and ovarian cancer. Jolie, whose mother died of breast cancer at 57, also revealed that she is a carrier of the BRCA1 gene and, in her words, "My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman."

In the editorial, Jolie vividly describes the specifics of the procedure:

My own process began on Feb. 2 with a procedure known as a “nipple delay,” which rules out disease in the breast ducts behind the nipple and draws extra blood flow to the area. This causes some pain and a lot of bruising, but it increases the chance of saving the nipple.

Two weeks later I had the major surgery, where the breast tissue is removed and temporary fillers are put in place. The operation can take eight hours. You wake up with drain tubes and expanders in your breasts. It does feel like a scene out of a science-fiction film. But days after surgery you can be back to a normal life.

Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.

She also explicitly encourages women to explore their options and closes with an explanation of her decision to publicize her own surgery:

I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.

What It Means:

Just to be clear, analyzing the release of this news -- and its effect on Jolie's star image -- does not take away from the actual, lived experience of a mastectomy, the difficulty of Jolie's decision, or the power of her decision to write about it. I am in now way attempting to trivialize Jolie or her decision.

But as star scholar Richard Dyer explains, actors becomes stars when their images "act out" what matters to broad swaths of people. For many years, Jolie acted out deviance and rebellion; for many years after, she acted out motherhood, multiculturalism, and philanthropic engagement. Those valences are all still very much a part of Jolie's image, but today they're emboldened by a very conscious decision to publicize a procedure that literally removed a primary locus of her star power. And that decision -- the very fearlessness of it -- is actually very much in line with her image up to this point.

The first thing to note about the op-ed is just how surprising it was. This wasn't the culmination of weeks of rumors of hospitalization. Rather, the entire procedure was kept under wraps, even though it was performed at a clinic in Los Angeles. We'll likely never know how they leveraged that level of silence -- most likely a combination of non-disclosure agreements and capital -- but what matters is that the secret held. As a result, Jolie could release the story completely on her terms. She set the narrative and the tone and, in so doing, the way people would talk about her today and for years to come. In publicist's terms, she was able to "own" the story from the very beginning.

Because of that ownership, the announcement isn't of an action star losing her breasts, but of a woman gaining courage and acting on the desire to watch her children grow. It's not a tragedy, but a triumph.

If you've followed the history of Pitt and Jolie, then you know that this type of control is nothing new -- ever since the photos of the pair playing with Zahara [EDIT: MADDOX] on the beach first hit the cover of People, they've controlled the narrative of their romance and their family. Whether or not you're Team Brangelina, the fact remains that they leverage publicity better than any other high-profile star today.

When the gossip magazines pitted them against Jennifer Aniston, they sold those same magazines -- well, specifically, People -- photos of them with their children...and then donated the millions to charity. But those photos of companionship and familial bliss spoke the language the minivan majority wanted to hear, and helped placate any remaining resentment of the couple that supposedly broke the heart of the girl next door. They sell art photos to W; Pitt talks about architecture to Architectural Digest and industry to Vanity Fair. They know where certain narratives belong and to whom they speak.

Which is why it's no accident that this announcement appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times. The Times screams "last bastion of serious journalism" -- and, of all the mainstream news publications, it's the least enervated by celebrity news. (Clearly there's some, but far less than, say, the Los Angeles Times or Time). Most celebrity health stories / triumphs make the cover of People, replete with photos of the star looking resilient and surrounded by family. They are, in most cases, publicity: a means of keeping the star in the public eye during his/her absence....or, more tragically, a paycheck to leave behind to surviving family.

Choosing the Times has myriad benefits, publicity-wise. The audience dwarfs that of People or the audience of, say, the Today show. But it also de-feminizes the story: People, Us, and the morning shows are all primarily directed at women. They are "feminized" media products which, in our contemporary media environment, means they're considered fluffier, less legitimate, more trivial. (I'm not saying I like this distinction, but so it is). But for Jolie, a double mastectomy -- and this decision in general -- isn't just a woman's issue. It's a family issue, and one that requires societal support.

Because the implicit message of the op-ed is stunning: Jolie is one of the most beautiful women in the world. Her breasts, in no small part, made her a star. But she doesn't need them to be beautiful, or to be loved, or to maintain that stardom. Women have been hearing this message for years, but with this editorial, Jolie not only makes it available to men, but proves it through the very existence of her resilient, still sexual body.

And this is no tell-all interview, no banal celebrity profile. There's no fawning description of Jolie's children surrounding her, or how peaceful she looks in her bed. It's a narrative in her voice, with her story, her decision, her description. Because of the length constraints of the op-ed, it's unembroidered, to the point and, well, persuasive. There's no glossy photos attached, nothing to distract you from Jolie's words. It's short enough that few will skim. The lede might still be "Star Famous For Boobs Has Double Mastectomy," but because of the brevity of the piece -- and the sheer desire to read more about the procedure -- millions are actually reading her words, rather than simply seeing the announcement on the cover of a magazine.

The op-ed persuades readers of the legitimacy of Jolie's decision. It also works to persuade others to consider this decision for themselves, effectively legitimizing the option for millions. But the op-ed also serves a secondary persuasive purpose, and I dont' think it's trivial to highlight it. As I've watched thousands react to this story online, I've witnesses an outpouring of support, of course, but also respect, especially from women. Jolie has never been a "girl's girl." She's that girl who always did her own thing, who hung out with the guys, who never had a ton of female friends. She's so beautiful that she alienates; she's so different that she intimidates. But this op-ed makes Jolie seem humble, thoughtful, and conscious of the way that publicizing a private decision can benefit more than just her career and image. Jolie has long been a public advocate for peace and women's rights on the global level, but for many, that work seemed to exotic, too altruistic, only further contributing to her distant, intimidating exoticism. Jolie was never "just like us" -- her life was nothing like ours.

There are still some elements of that exotic otherness in the op-ed -- "my partner Brad Pitt," for one -- but the overall tone is one of warmth and identification. There's not even a photo to remind you of the beautiful symmetry of her face, or the eclectic and overwhelming cuteness of her kids. It's just a woman talking about her breasts, her family, and her decision to sacrifice one in hopes of holding on to the other. The two lines of the piece reads "Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of." I've never seen Jolie use a collective "we." But this might be the moment in her star narrative when fans began thinking of themselves and The Jolie in the same sentence.

The Enduring Postfeminist Dystopia of Bachelorette

I've written about postfeminist dystopia before -- specifically, as it applies to Revenge, which now seems to be withering on the vine in its second season on ABC. But just because Revenge isn't succeeding doesn't mean that the dystopia it manifests isn't alive, thriving, and doing some very complicated ideological negotiation. Here's what I said about postfeminist back when I wrote about Revenge:

Postfeminism is, most explicitly, the idea that feminism is no longer necessary. Feminism accomplished its goals in the ’70s and ’80s, and we’re ready to move on and just “be” women, whatever that means. (Suggestions that we live in a “post-race” society often hinge on the idea that a black president means that racism is no longer an issue in our society, let alone a defining issue). We don’t need feminism, we just need “girl power” – a very different concept than the “grrl power” that undergirded the Riot Grrl movement of the early ’90s (which was, itself, a response to the rise of postfeminism). Postfeminism is forgoing freedoms or equal rights in the name of prettier dresses, more expensive make-up, and other sartorial “freedoms” to consume. Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman is postfeminism manifest — a self-sustaining (sex worker) who meets her prince, who will allow her to consume (and become her “true” self). Sex & the City is postfeminist. Bridget Jones is postfeminist. 27 Dresses is postfeminist.

In short, the idea that consumption and self-objectification (which usually leads to romantic monogamy) = equal rights and equal treatment is postfeminist.

In text after text of the last twenty years, postfeminist philosophy, for lack of a better word, is portrayed as the path towards happiness and fulfillment. Until, in a text like Revenge, it doesn’t.

Since I wrote that post last year, I've come to seem postfeminist dystopia all over the place, perhaps most poignantly in Girls (see also: The Mindy Project). Here's what it's like to live in the world that postfeminism brought us, Girls suggests, and shit if it's not a mix of impossibile contradiction, the impossibility of being both a sex object and a self-respecting woman attempting a career, ostensibly independent yet wholly dependent upon the validation of societal structures that privilege very specific types of bodies, attitudes, skin colors, and attitudes towards consumption.

Here's the implicit, if never explicit, message of these dystopian texts: if this is what first and second wave feminism was for, if this is what our REJECTION of feminist was for -- this SUCKS.

Crucially, however, these texts are never explicitly feminist. They're not didactic. They might not even mean to project the message they're projecting. But it's like a great New Yorker profile that never tells you what to think about the subject; rather, they just let the subject live his life, say his piece, transcribe it, shape it, and let you make the devastating judgment yourself.

Your eyes, however, need to be open. Otherwise, it just seems like "real life," and we all tell ourselves all sorts of stories to justify and perpetuate the way "real life" operates. In other words, our media projects ideological norms -- and sometimes they do it in a way that suggests that everything's working well (see: postfeminist fantasies, enumerated above), but at some point, the seams of these productions began to stretch and fail. Postfeminist is an ideology of how women should be in the world, and all ideologies are contradictory, impossible, unlivable, and impossible to replicate in real life. But we still like to consume things that suggest that they are achievable -- hell, that's how aspirational, capitalist-based media culture works.

At some point, however, they stop working. The veneer begins to crack, with the unseemly underbelly emerging. You see this in occur in the form of noir in the '40s and '50s, a clear counterpoint to the glossy depictions of post-World War II consumerist culture. You could even say that postfeminist media itself was a response to the ways in which feminist media, at least in its fractured 1980s manifestation, failed to adequately address the lived realities (and fantasies, and desires, and struggles) of women's lives at the time.

People throw a tremendous amount of criticism at Girls (some of it very earned, re: privilege/race). But some is rooted with general disgust at the depiction of sex, relationships, living conditions, struggles with career decisions, etc. Girls' picture of life is not pretty: it is uncomfortable and fucking rough. And that's part of the reason I love the show: it's honest, if not always holistic, about what it's like to be a 20-something (straight, white, privileged, educated) woman in the world today. Because I am a straight, white, privileged educated, woman, I feel a tremendous amount of identification with the characters; the shame, the humor, the competition, the difficulty of maintaining female friendships, all of it. But that shit is ugly. And I don't think it's a coincidence that its primary artistic force is a smart woman with an "untraditional" body shape, simply because she has investment in portraying the destructive disconnect between how we wish postfeminism manifested and how it actually does.

Bachelorette, too, is ugly. It is also the product of a woman -- Leslye Headland -- who apparently has not yet produced enough (save, oh, a cycle of seven plays) to merit her own Wikipedia page. The plot is straightforward: four girls were bestfriends (or frenemies, depending) in high school. They called themselves the B-Faces which, by all accounts, seems appropriate.

There's The Off-Beat One (Lizzy Caplan), The Ditz (Isla Fischer), the Ice Queen (Kirsten Dunst), and the Fat One (Rebel Wilson). (I'm not trying to be offensive here -- that's how they're defined for us). Each has grown up into the adult version of that stereotype: Caplan is a bit of a fuck-up who hooks up with random dudes that she loathes; Fischer works at Club Monaco and inadvertently insults the customers; Dunst is ostensibly living the perfect life, complete with med school boyfriend, but is a pile of passive aggressiveness, flat out aggressiveness, and discontent; Wilson, the bride (and the unfunniest of the lot, here) is concerned that everyone thinks she's too fat for her hot husband-to-be.

They come together for the wedding, which includes an impromptu bachelorette party the night before. But even before the bachelorette party, it's clear that life is complicated and shitty for all of our postfeminist bridesmaids:

Gena (Lizzie Caplan): She fell in love in high school (with Adam Scott -- dude, I can get behind that); they had sex; she got pregnant; she needed an abortion. Scott's character didn't show up to the abortion, so she had to have her best friend take her -- a moment that traumatized her, led to the demise of her relationship, and has stuck with her since, with the implication that she can't invest in a serious relationship because of the trauma. Instead: she does a lot of drugs, wears short dresses, and eats very little. Postfeminism encourages women to think of their bodies, and the objectification and sexualization thereof, of a means to power -- and, of course, romantic coupling. Feminism sought to give women control over their bodies and reproduction -- which is why Gena could a.) have sex before marriage without 'ruining' her life and b.) have an abortion -- but living with the realities of abortion in postfeminist culture, that's fraught: you're expected to move past that moment and resubmit yourself to the male gaze in order to gain power. And so Gena does -- she regiments her body, she wears short dresses, she does all the things you're supposed to do to get guys. And she gets them, but she hates them, and hates herself. She's figured out how the contemporary romance economy works, but it's utterly unfulfilling to her. But she's also internalized it: when grown-up Adam Scott tells her that he loves her, he's so sorry, he was a coward and was too sad to come to the abortion, she's still reticent to believe him....in part because she's become so accustomed to a certain type of behavior from men, a type of behavior instigated by her own self-objectification. Also: no apparently job, because her sense of self-worth has, understandably -- given the ideology in which she resides -- become secondary to how she looks and her ability to attract men.

Katie (Isla Fischer): WHERE DO I START. As becomes clear over the course of the film, she has creative skills -- she can sew, she understands tailoring, she has an eye for design. Where she's accumulated that skill is unclear, but now she's using it half-assedly working retail at Club Monaco and maxing out her credit cards. Actual skill -- and a vocation that might give her pleasure -- has been traded for a service job, helping other women max out their credit cards in an attempt to keep up with the dictates of fashion. Women's fashion sells a version of what femininity should be: in the case of Club Monaco, that version is svelte, put together, feminine, intended for a closely regimented body, and expensive. The irony, of course, is that Katie can only afford its fashions -- and its version of femininity -- because she receives an employee discount; what's more, she's so in debt that she'll never be able to quit her job and actually investigate her talents. It's the double-bind of postfeminism: empowerment through consumerism turns into stifling debt that ensures docility and dis-empowerment in the work place.

Katie's guy issues are laughable, if they weren't so plainly reflective of the realities of postfeminist dating. She's self-objectified, and expects to be treated accordingly. When the "nice guy" former-nerd who's had a crush on her since high school takes her back to the hotel and declines to have sex with her -- because he likes her TOO MUCH and doesn't want to have sex when they're both drunk -- she feels rejected. Postfeminist sex culture in a nutshell: self-objectification leads to objectification, e.g. hook-up culture. On every campus where I've taught over the last seven years, I've heard (mostly female, also male) students bemoan "hook-up culture" and the sort of behaviors it requires, but REAL TALK: hook-up culture is, at least in part, the legacy of postfeminism. Sexual freedom + sexual self-objectification = hook-up culture. That sort of sexual freedom can certainly be empowering, but it can also, especially after several years immersed in that culture, be profoundly empty. I'm not a prude; I'm not suggesting that everyone my age should be married (I'm certainly not) -- but I am suggesting that the lack of intimacy "liberated" by postfeminist culture is unsatisfying, as clearly evidenced by Katie's tears. Hooking up, and the implicit validation from male's, is the measure of validation -- not actual pleasure (see: Girls).

Regan (Kirsten Dunst): Regan's postfeminist dystopia is the most stereotypical, and the most stereotypically horrible. She has a "perfect" boyfriend, she has a "perfect" volunteer diversion, she has "perfect" party-planning abilities. But she's also soul-less, mean, hates her boyfriend, doesn't really like her friends, and resents her best friend for getting married before she does. She has power, but its a power built on divisiveness. She's willing to sacrifice friendship (and the potential for feminist coalition) for her own reputation. She helps her good friend plan her wedding, but only because she's so bitter that she's not the one getting married first. Her postfeminist fantasy is in stark contrast to those of Katie and Gena: she's fulfilled the domestic, the passively feminine, the body-regiming qualities required of her, and she's so unfulfilled that she's PISSED. Regan's anger is just on the surface throughout, and periodically bursts forth -- in moments that we, as an audience, are supposed to consider humorous or, alternately, just bitchy. But she's a bitch because ideology is fucked: she's done what her culture, her media, her resultant ideals told her to do -- and it SUCKS. She's so unsatisfied, so angry. We don't even know what her job is -- because it DOESN'T MATTER, because postfeminism could give two shits about your job.

Like Marnie in Girls, she wants a guy who'll just have sex with her and "show her her place" -- but that sex proves ultimately unsatisfying, in part because both Regan's and Marnie's potential and sense of self make that type of sex feel good in the moment but sour in the aftermath. Postfeminism suggests that passivity and the endurance of patriarchy is AWESOME; in the moment, that may be true, but over time, it makes you feel approximately the same way I feel after eating a quarter pound of candy corn. In other words: barfy, hollow, horrible.

Ultimately, I'm fascinating by what I'm labeling as a new genre of postfeminist dystopia -- a genre to which the makers of these films may or may not ascribe. It matters little whether these filmmakers or actresses know what they're doing, though. Instead, what matters is how clearly they're articulating the various dystopian valences of postfeminism. Whether they realize it or not, they're poking holes in the ideology -- and that, and the conversations it engenders, including this one, are what matters. Bachelorette isn't a perfect film. It's very funny, but it's also terrifying. My hope, then, is that you'll be able to watch it -- and other texts that speak to the postfeminist dystopia -- and experience both.

Nashville Roundtable to End All Roundtables: Round Two

YOUR PERFECTLY LIT RAYNA/DEACON SHIPPING PHOTO:

YOUR ESTEEMED PARTICIPANTS:

Karen Petruska Simone Eastman Jane Hu Allison Wright Jorie Lagerway Jia Tolentino And me, AHP.

AHP: First off, I’d like to acknowledge that the show has finally hit a bit of a stride. There was a period there -- oh, about seven episodes ago -- when I was just like SEPARATE ALREADY. And then Rayna went two-stepping with Liam and had to have that moment by herself in the bathroom [BEEN THERE, RAYNA] and things just started rolling. At last.

Jia: I am trying to think of a better way to phrase this, but... Gunnar and O.C. Luke are totally going to bang. In my mind at least. That scene when they cheat death and get all ecstatic and screamy as the train rolls by?

Jorie: They are for sure going to bang.

Jane: Homosocial bonding! (And all those scenes from old films where a passing train so obviously signifies pent-up erotic desires.) (AHP: Good Hitchcock call, Jane.) (Jane: Yes! Hitchcock, Renoir, and my favorite BRIEF ENCOUNTER.)

AHP: O.C. Luke! THAT’S WHERE HE’S FROM!

Jia: He is 33 and does not look a day older than 33. Luke, actually, is a helpful reference for me (in terms of characters getting rewritten out of left field) as I process Dante’s INSANELY QUICK and HIGHLY HILARIOUS character transformation from Mild, Reasonable Sober Companion to High-Powered Major Label Pop Star Manager. Over the course of the last episode, Dante’s hair got 500% greasier as he fully inhabited his new Addicted 2 Biz life. I cannot wait for this very unrealistic storyline to just explode all over the place, although I am sad for Juliette, because she has regressed back to her Toddlers & Tiaras persona. (Allison: I like to think about character consistency from one role to the next, so the same Jay Hernandez who was Brian Chavez in Friday Night Lights has somehow become Dante. And the same Chris Carmack who was Luke Ward in The O.C. has made it to Nashville. And obviously I think of Juliette Barnes as an extension of Claire Bennet from Heroes.)

I am also sad for Scarlet, even though Gunnar is being nice to her, because in the last few episodes she has reached new heights of drippy milkmaid passive “I’d be much happier if I could just make you dinner and clean the house” bad-accent Wig Madness. I hope she gets an assertive hair-wardrobe-and-attitude makeover on Rayna’s label (YAY THAT PLOT).

SE: Scarlett kind of reminds me of a Lifetime movie lead, but I can’t decide if she’s the Lifetime movie lead who boldly remakes her life in a “becomes the man she wanted to marry”/Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves kind of way, or in a “Lifetime as the ‘Women Having A Hard Time Channel’” kind of way, like at any moment she could say/warble, “But he’s a GOOD MAN!”

Jane: Oof, Scarlett’s character is almost painfully stock Sacrificial Maiden, and while I’m excited for the Gunnar/O.C. Luke (aka Nashville Will Lexington), I wish it wasn’t at the sake of Scarlett. (That knowing look on Gunnar’s face when Scarlett flounces away, happy that Will has been a “good influence” on him.) Like, very many levels of character sacrifice here! And I want to trust Khouri, but, yes Jia, Scarlett makeover a la Thelma -- anytime now.

KP: I’m concerned about Scarlett/Gunnar in that I actually prefer them singing together (they are sort of making me feel better about the break-up of The Civil Wars). The music is one of the best parts of the show, so if that is ever threatened by plot, I sort of get annoyed. (AW: Yes, Civil Wars! I heard a rumor they’re getting back together. Fingers crossed.)

Also, does anyone else agree that Panettiere is becoming a much better singer? Seems less nasal now.

AHP: I feel like she’s still nasaly and a bit too Carrie Underwood on the power ballads, but I love it when she’s doing the quiet Deacon-inspired stuff -- “Consider Me” is gorgeous. They’re also doing an okay job with getting around the, er, frailty of Connie Britton’s voice (see: “Stronger than Me.”)

Jorie: I think we mentioned this last time, but the frailty of Connie Britton’s voice is actually kind of destructive to what is ostensibly the central conflict of the show. Cuz Juliette is actually better than she is. Especially, as you said, when she sings with Deacon.

KP: I’m gonna step in here to ask if country singers need good voices. I know Carrie Underwood has us all thinking that, but isn’t frailty a great attribute in a country singer. I know she’s Mrs. Coach, so I’m likely super biased, but I sort of love Connie’s voice. It is much more vulnerable and poignant. Her singing (like her acting) requires risk.

AHP: My subjective opinion based on nearly two decades of country music listening: yes. In fact, I can’t think of a single female country star (or male star, for that matter) without a powerhouse voice. Taylor Swift, maybe, but that’s another story. The problem is that Britton’s supposed to be the Faith Hill in this equation battling it out with Carrie Underwood, and Hill has effing PIPES.

KP: I liked that Juliette fired her manager. I think that could have been a good way to go -- how does a child star grow up (important, useful topic for the actual world), but instead they’ve chosen to go down a less satisfying track.

Jorie: Can we discuss why Scarlett wears a wig? She has hair. WAIT. The Civil Wars broke up?!

KP: What does her actual hair look like? ... Oh, sorry to break the news, Jorie. It is pretty tragic.

Jorie: I have no idea what her real hair looks like, actually.

Jia: (I am doing some Clare Bowen research right now and A. her Twitter is actually 50% cupcakes [that is a joke I would have made up about her but it’s true] and 50% adorable photos of her and her menagerie of animals, B. she was the lead in an Australian production of Spring Awakening, with Cate Blanchett as the artistic director! I hate musicals! But I would have LOVED to see that!)

Jane: Compulsory Defense of Musicals Interlude: WOWWWW. I would love to see that, and if Bowen played Wendla (originated by Lea Michele of Glee fame) then we know she can handle nuance. Can someone please make Scarlett’s character just a wee bit more round, and not on the verge of tears all the time? (Also recently learned that Spring Awakening is a DUNCAN SHEIK production, but that makes soooo much sense. "The Mirror-Blue Night"? So Sheik.) (Jia: She was Wendla! [And my hate of musicals comes solely from having spent my entire childhood putting my hair in sausage-curl rollers for them.] And I actually love that Spring Awakening was Duncan Sheik -- if there was a more naturalistic pop sensibility to contemporary musical theater, i.e. Nashville basically, everyone would get on board. I think the band Fun. is a flop sophomore album away from writing a decent musical. ALSO, ALSO, the actor who plays Gunnar is British - so Scarlett, the accent, PLEASE!) (Jane: FUN IS WRITING A MUSICAL? That makes so much sense; the lead singer’s voice screams musical theater (no pun intended), and I think his uncle has roots there? OK, Jia, the next time we meet, we will have a Musicals With Pop Sensibilities marathon. You will be converted; I can already tell. Aaaand Musical Interlude Scene.) (Jia: Sadly that is just my Fun. fantasy. Let me conclude my off-topic interlude here with THE MOST FUNNY clip of O.C. Luke dancing to Rooney and singing very terribly - hiding, clearly, the polished country twang that he unveils on Nashville.)

KP: The thing with the hair is that it reinforces the whole unrealistic Disney Princess nonsense. Disney Princesses are faux feminist, so the idea that Scarlett has to be fragile, beautiful, and soft (as represented by the hair) bums me out.

Jia: DO we think that Scarlett is going to hook up with Luke? Whose name is WILL, I keep forgetting, but he will always be Luke to me. I feel like such a complication is inevitable--they are inserting him into the Scarlett-Gunnar relationship in a very direct way. I would like to see Scarlett do something selfish and bad, is why I’m asking this.

Jorie: Do you not think he and Gunnar are going to do... something?

Jia: I WISH! I wish they would just all have a threesome, to be honest, and Luke and Gunnar have more intense chemistry than a lot of other couples on the show! But, you know... doubtful.

Jorie: I live in a delusional world where, until it doesn’t happen, I believe network television will do things like put the two hot guys with great chemistry in bed together and have the milkmaid come in with breakfast and just join them. But yeah, probably not. And in that case, I would say she would hook up with Luke, but this show is SO BAD at making people who should be having sex (for story’s sake, for melodrama’s sake, for entertainment’s sake) have sex.

Jia: Definitely. I also wonder if Luke is a sign that Avery is getting written off soon. That was a bit of a low point for me in terms of plausibility, when he burned those master tracks in a trash can like he was Taylor Momsen on Gossip Girl or something -- I don’t think the writers really know what to do with him. (AHP: JIA I AM DYING)

Jane: I was wondering why they were still keeping Avery around -- I mean, they show even had the out of firing but, but they’re keeping him so... I think there’s some dramatic criss-crossing left to happen there.

SE: It’s because he wears a leather thong necklace.

AHP: Well that’s it Simone, now that we’ve discussed the leather thong necklace, this Roundtable is Complete.

SE: Kill your idols, etc etc.

Jorie: But wait: Avery might turn back into a human now that he is forced, Tyler Perry style, to face good clean working class work. (Jia: TYLER PERRY STYLE *faints happily*)

KP: Yeah, I think they know they have a good actor as Avery, and he has a lovely falsetto. So if they can find a way to redeem him, he can someday sleep with Juliette (cause this show ultimately has the personal goals of all characters subsumed by sex).

Jorie: It claims to have all the personal goals of all the characters subsumed by sex. But then it doesn’t do it right. I couldn’t care less who Juliette sleeps with, since she clearly will sleep with every male cast member eventually. But either put Rayna and Deacon together, or move on. Make something actually shocking or interesting happen. Be more like Scandal. I’m frustrated with the show. I agree with AHP that it’s hit its stride more, but still could be so much better.

Jia: I have a feeling, though, that the sustained and excruciating separation of Rayna and Deacon is going to carry this show from season to season, as much as I wish it wouldn’t.

Jorie: But it’s not excruciating. That’s the problem. It’s gone on so long I don’t care. Although I am happy to see Deacon happy. Poor guy never catches a break.

KP: (raises hand) I care about Rayna and Deacon. Though a flashback episode (please, done better than #TVD and that one Gilmore Girls episode) would be sort of awesome to fill that out--why Rayna betrayed her lover of years to find security with the most boring man on the planet.

Jia: True. They’ve lost a lot of momentum. And gained a Labrador puppy. I was quite pleased at the shamelessness of that. “Meh, let’s just give him a puppy or something,” said some writer in response to “How can we keep the audience interested in Deacon now that he has a girlfriend that people will like but not root for because she ain’t got that Tami Taylor steez.”

Jane: I find this genre of character so interesting, Jia! The romantic obstacle between the two fated lovers that isn’t captivating or interesting enough for us to hate (or love).

AW: I really hate that Deacon’s girlfriend is also the CIA agent’s wife on The Americans. Like, cannot handle it. She doesn’t have a big role in either, but it still freaks me out. If the shows were not on at the same time, I would apply my rule of linear progression referenced above and just say that the CIA agent’s wife became a veterinarian after divorcing him--or she entered witness protection and this is her new life -- but the concurrent viewing precludes that.

Jane: But she does have the sort of Semi-Clueless Significant Other vibe in both roles, at least!

AW: True--she is consistent. Which makes it even easier to believe it’s all the same person.

KP: I loved the scene with Deacon and Rayna in the hospital. Yes, the elevator kiss was super hot, but I prefer these two as friends nevertheless. For a woman as confused as Rayna, it is nice to have one person get her. Speaking of, the sister is getting redeemed a bit, too. I wish they could pull that off with the father -- give him something more to do than laugh evil-y.

Jorie: YES. I loved that scene. It was tortured and nice and appropriate. While the sister’s turn around is abrupt, I get that your dad having a heart attack could soften your edges temporarily. Plus, it seems like she’s going to take his place as schemer in chief. Which brings me to AHP’s topic list: Powers Boothe acting like he’s on Deadwood. Yes. What’s up, Powers Boothe?

Jane: When Boothe sat down in his leather armchair -- glass of whiskey in hand -- before his blazing fireplace, I felt like I was getting a glimpse of Don Draper’s future.

KP: I am not familiar with Powers Boothe, but everything I read tells me he is a great actor. Wish the show knew that.

Jorie: I wish the show knew that about the whole cast. See above re: Scandal. There is SO MUCH POTENTIAL. It just doesn’t have the writing chops. There is a moment or two in each episode that I really like, and the rest, meh.

AHP: Here’s what I like about what’s going on with Deacon and Rayna: it’s what actually happens when you’re friends with someone whom you’ve loved and lost. They’re best friends, and they know and understand each other in a way that no one else will. Rayna is seriously lonely -- her sister is suddenly offering all sorts of insight and Rayna is suddenly heeding it -- but, as is all too typical on network television, here’s a lady with NO FEMALE FRIENDS.

KP: Postfeminist BS Bingo. No female friends.

Jia: No kidding. Scarlett, too - that brief gesture towards female friendship when Hailey bought her a Cleavage Dress and took her out on the town was so quickly stifled by Gunnar’s Boner of Rage, which was my least favorite Gunnar moment in the show to date. Actually, it might be a more general failing that people on this show - aside from Rayna, who is good at warmly insinuating history in brief moments of interaction - just do not appear to have many friends, period. Fame and power are isolating, sure, etc, but that’s not enough of a justification - it’s like in literary fiction when characters ostensibly don’t hold jobs.

KP: So here’s the show’s dilemma -- some real potential, and from what I can tell, reasonable success with the music. So how do they get more viewers? Do they want the country folks, and if they do, what makes them happy? I hate when a show is in search of an audience, because they just throw pasta on the wall without realizing they forgot to put the pasta in the water in the first place.

AW: Speaking of tension with Deacon and Rayna, how long are they going to draw out the paternity issue? Deacon rescues Maddie (the older daughter?) during the stampede at Juliette’s concert, he hangs out with her (and the new girlfriend) during Rayna’s concert, acting all fatherly. When is the big reveal? (Jane: Oh man, during that hug, I thought Rayna was going to look down and have a moment of “that’s the family I could have had” and stumble through the performance or something, but it was very much taken as a given! And Rayna’s tears by her father’s bedside at missing all those years they could have had? Is Rayna going to hint do the same with Maddie?)

Also, I wonder how everyone consumes the show -- do you have TV, watch it live, DVR it, wait until it’s available online, etc? And do the answers to this question get at KP’s question re: increasing viewership?

SE: I watch it in Hulu binges when Grey’s Anatomy and SVU both have an off week. (Those are the weeks when I think, “I really miss my friends.” Which.)

Jane: Same! Hulu binges, so it’s not at the top of my list, though I am haaaanging on. (I missed a few episodes during that deep lull and might even recommend that to future viewers?)

Jia: I do not have a TV, but I solicit TV access from a friend for this show - Nashville and basketball are the only two things that I will get in front of a real TV for. I will say, though, I have a sense of this show as having a much broader audience than I would have expected - or maybe my college best-of-bro friends are just anomalously broadening their taste from Workaholics and the like - but I’ve been surprised at the demographic variety of the people I know who watch it.

AHP: I watch it via Hulu on my iPad, but almost exclusively while exercising. It is the PERFECT exercising show. I’m also somewhat surprised by how many of my (female) students watch it -- probably because a.) it’s on Hulu and b.) I got them all addicted to Friday Night Lights last semester. NOTE TO ABC: YOUR 20- AND 30-SOMETHING AUDIENCE IS WATCHING VIA THE HULUS; DON'T GIVE UP ON THAT PLAN.

KP: Hulu but not so much a binge. My partner watches with me, but he’s not really that into it. If I didn’t make him, he wouldn’t watch. And is that a possible issue, too? Is there a reason for guys to watch this show? I mean, Deacon is sorta manly, but while we complain about Scarlet, at least the other females are relatively in charge of their lives. Are there any 3D male characters on this show?

AW: I have been wondering the same thing about Girls, though my question there expands to include what men who watch that show (if there are any) think of the representations of themselves vis-a-vis dating. I’m not sure there’s a similar question to be asked here, though maybe there is and I’m just not ferreting it out. (AHP: I don’t know where it’s sourced, or if it’s just internet legend, but apparently 60% of Girl’s audience is male. Fascinating).

SE: I think this is an important question but I must first insist that we introduce Lean In analytic. WHICH LADIES ON THIS SHOW ARE/ARE NOT LEANING IN? Part of me thinks all of them are. Like, Juliette, for all her rebel bullshit, is leaning in, right?

Jia: Juliette leans in so hard all the time. Every morning Juliette wakes up and tells herself to lean in at such a deeply acute angle that her powerless childhood (which here can be pictured as a congealed bowl of trailer pink mac-and-cheese) can never again haunt her in the present. Rayna’s hair is the ghostwriter for Lean In so there are no issues there. However, Scarlet only leaned in for this solo contract because her Authoritative Man gave her approval to do so. (SE: Connie Britton’s hair: never not leaning in. Also, congealed mac-and-cheese is kind of the best, so you CLEARLY MEANT Tuna Noodle Helper.)

AW: Scarlett totally leaned in once she got the head nod from Gunnar!

SE: Isn’t that the real problem with Lean In, that the Leaning Lady has to have always already had a dudely head nod before shit takes off?

KP: Dude(tte), that is so troubling. Could Sandberg only lean in when that little pipsqueak Facebook founder let her? The parallels there are troubling (yet apt). Scarlet needs help, STAT. Like, cutting off her hair, Felicity-style, help. Like, being killed and having her twin sister take over, unbeknownst to everyone around her. Like, is there any help for this character other than her voice (which hides a great chest voice most of the time)? How about this--let Deacon and Rayna be starcrossed forever (that’s fine with me--the tension works). How about letting Deacon mentor HIS ACTUAL NIECE? Now that could be interesting, and there would be no nonsense about his trying to sleep with her, like every other storyline on the show.

SE: Can we talk about what this show does with/about addiction? I say this mostly because I am “watching” Elementary while I work and that show ALSO has a “sober companion.”

KP: Really enjoying Elementary (though not sure why Angelina’s ex always seems to be shouting). That is all.

AW: I have not seen Elementary (I have also not seen Deadwood, which I realize is a travesty that must be remedied immediately) but I do watch Nurse Jackie and Californication, two shows that very clearly address addiction. This seems like the Disney hand-holding, didactic version. Of course, it’s network compared to Showtime. How many characters struggle with addiction? Deacon, Coleman, Juliette’s mom. Anyone else? Juliette’s mom seems to struggle more than Deacon and Coleman, at least in the present. Are we to make anything of that? (I’m trying really hard not to make it about gender and/or class, so mostly I want y’all to save me from myself here.) (SE: You are perfect and beautiful.)

KP: Ways to improve this show: 1) no more sex. For any characters. Only longing, which is more dramatic anyway. 2) Scarlet is only allowed to sing with Gunnar, though in all other aspects of her life she must make her own choices. In fact, she should start telling him how to live, cause his choices are crap. 3) Avery needs to be redeemed. That actor is too cute not to be on the show. And I’m sorry, Annie, but “Kiss” is a damn hot song. 4) More about songwriting, performance anxiety/mechanics, and the business of music. The damn thing is set in Nashville, so let’s get some insider dish (beyond dumb guest star spots that give the guest stars nothing to do). 5) More scenes with Rayna and Juliette, as long as they never cat fight or enact any other cliches. Genuine jealousy, competition, understanding, achievement, collaboration only. 6) More of Rayna’s sister being a real person, not a cartoon. She can be conflicted (but I’m a business woman, too, and therefore must make money!!), but she still needs to be, you know, a human. 7) Dad should have died. Sorry, but the character was never developed beyond the twirling mustache. He and Teddy should accidentally shoot other in a twisted sex game.

AW: Booth should have died, YES. Great idea to have Deacon mentor Scarlett, though I want to see Scarlett and Rayna write and sing together. And I want to see Scarlett leave Gunnar and live alone. Figure your shit out, girl. I wonder if the writers are shying away from the music industry in an effort to appeal to a broader audience in the same way that FNL writers avoided too much football talk. “It’s not really about football” (except of course it was).

KP (cont):I actually really, really, really like Nashville. I think Mrs. Coach has a character with interesting conflicts and a great acting partner in Deacon. Juliette has redeemed Panettiere, which is pretty much all I need to say about that. Gunnar and Scarlet have great (musical) chemistry. How albums are made. What are the challenges of the business. How hard it is to balance work and home. All of that is awesome. So just go do that and cut the silly melodramatic. I’m a girl, and I like romance, but I don’t need dumb. [Oh, and Ms. Khouri--you are working with your husband. I imagine that is an interesting relationship. So put Rayna with Deacon, and let them act out your life for us. That would be a damn good show]

AHP: [DROPS MIC; PICKS IT UP AND PASSES IT TO THE REST OF THE INTERNET]

New Writing All Over the Place

Where to find it: New Spring Endorsements, including lots of broccoli recipes, on Virginia Quarterly Review. Plus my long form piece on "The Rules of the Game: 100 Years of Hollywood Publicity."

On Slate: Photoplay's feature on "The Best Figure of 1931." (Winner: Lupe Velez!)

For The Awl: "You, Me, and Star Trek: The Next Generation," "What Your Gap Fragrance Said About You," and "Crash: The Most Loathsome Best Picture of Them All."

For Laptham's Quarterly: "The Hollywood Canteen" (Bette Davis ran that game).

On Avidly.org: "Trade in Your Sexiest Men."

The most recent Scandals of Classic Hollywood on The Hairpin:

"Ronald Reagan Plays the President"

"The Most Wicked Face of Theda Bara"

"In Like Errol Flynn"

"The Many Faces of Barbara Stanwyck"

And what I'm most excited about: writing about the artists of Lilith Fair with Simone Eastman, also for The Hairpin. Tracy Chapman is already published; Natalie Merchant is forthcoming in a matter of days.

Oh, did you know I have a book COMING SOON-ISH?!?

Finally, the chair of my department and I have been doing a podcast, and we're finally not totally embarrassing. In our latest episode, we talk about the premiere of Mad Men and Spring Breakers, amongst many other things. Subscribe if you feel inclined.

A Quick Note on Scandal and Morality Clauses

Just a very quick note on this week's episode of Scandal, a show that's doing some of the most interesting (network) work in storytelling, female desire, postfeminism, race, and the intersections between all of the above. But what I found interesting about this week's episode had nothing to do with those qualities and everything to do with it's evocation of "morality clauses" in contracts -- a page straight from the playbook of classic Hollywood.

If you don't watch Scandal, the basic premise is as follows: Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) is a "Fixer," a term borrowed from classic Hollywood and meant to connote her behind-the-scenes, treading the line between legal/illegal, "fixing" of various potential scandals. She also works on political campaigns, but that's another story.

Within this particular episode, Pope is hired to help spin the scandal from the revelation of an old affair between a female CEO and her former law professor. When she was a law student and he was a law professor, they engaged in an affair; now said affair is coming to light because the law professor is nominated for the Supreme Court. Not an altogether unfamiliar scenario.

But what really interested me was how the company of which the female participant in the affair (nicely played by Lisa Edelstein, formerly of House) is subject to censor from the company of which she is the CEO, which threatens to fire her for violating the terms of her contract, specifically, a "morality clause." Even though her "transgressions" occurred fourteen years in the past, her Fortune 500 company could still fire her for actions that did not adhere to the moral standards of the company. Or, more bluntly, any actions that, once revealed, would incite negative press coverage and make the stock price drop.

The board of this company seems to have the CEO cornered: her actions violate the morality clause, even if they were committed years ago, and they're about to vote to fire her. But at the last minute, some associates of Olivia Pope barge into the board room and threaten to all sorts of dirt on the other members of the board, all of whom have also signed contracts with morality clauses.

In truth, these Pope Associates have nothing. No dirt. I'm sure they actually could find something, but they had a time crunch. But the very suggestion that they had dirt was enough to make all of these (male) board members feel very guilty and quietly rescind their threat to invoke the morality clause in her contract. As close up of individual board members makes abundantly clear, the vast majority of them have also violated their own morality clauses.

And here's where we return to Classic Hollywood. Morality clauses never (or very rarely) actually govern the behavior of the contracted individual, whether a member of a board or a Hollywood star. Instead, it's all about appearance -- and surveillance. Companies publicized morality clauses much in the same way that the studios, following the scandals of the early '20s, publicized their own clauses. Ultimately, adherence to the clauses mattered very little -- indeed, no star was every fired. What mattered was the appearance of strict moral regulation.

Perhaps even more importantly, the knowledge of such clauses legislates behavior. Or, rather, makes it go underground, ostensibly immune to surveillance. In classic Hollywood, this meant relying on Fixers employed by the very company that had made you sign the contract with the morality clause. Today, it means that individuals, whether on the corporate or celebrity level, understand that their behavior will be surveilled. Crucially, however, it doesn't mean that they will actually alter their behavior. Humans do "immoral" things, broadly defined. Humans have affairs; humans do drugs; humans have peccadilloes. Morality clauses persist not to actually change behavior, but to a.) make outsiders believe that the company/studio/whatever does not endorse that behavior and b.) to force that behavior underground.

It's a totally screwy system. But that's ideology and the realities of American conservative values.