The Only Winning Move

Best news of the week: the incomparable RightWingTrash.com WILL CONTINUE!

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know about it. I only learned of its existence about a month and a half ago - via Todd Seavey’s excellent (but now somewhat emasculated) blog. And so it was with much massiveness of chagrin that I realized that as soon as I started reading regularly it was closing shop.

Only now it’s not going away at all, merely being reformatted. Mind you, I’m not too keen on the new format. I preferred the old way of doing reviews of completely obscure B-movies That Happened to not be Leftist, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Just wanted to say to J. R. Taylor and crew - glad to have you back on (almost) any terms! (And I will watch Gnome 2 … someday …)

Bounty isn’t one of series one’s high points, but it’s interesting that it’s nowhere near as bad as it probably should’ve been.

Even if I hadn’t read the story on the internets, I would’ve had my suspicions. Bounty, it seems, is a bastard child filler episode. Terry Nation apparenty turned in a script that was inadequately short - filling barely half the alotted time - and so Chris Boucher had to fill in the gaps. Which he did by writing a completely separate script and unceremoniously gluing them together. It’s amazing that it works - and, OK, it doesn’t really - at all. Somehow it manages to be the same good ol’ show.

The plot goes something like this. As the story opens, Jenna and Blake are on some planet somewhere looking for some important prisoner who lives in a goofy castle and drives - erm, is driven - around in a 20th century motorcar. Blake and Jenna sneak in to find that he isn’t directly aware of being a prisoner at all. He prefers to think of the Federation troops that follow him around everywhere as a kind of honor guard - personal protection or something. He seems to think that Blake has come to kill him and is strangely not disturbed by the idea. It turns out that he’s the disgraced president of a planet called Lindor (any relation to the chocolatier is purely coincidental I’m sure). Blake seems to think the Federation rigged the election that deposed him as a way of generating strife - apparently the former president is the only candidate who forms an acceptable compromise for the most powerful factions. By sowing strife, the Federation is hoping to trigger a civil war that will give it a pretext for annexation. So far so typical.

Sarkoff (the former president) doesn’t want to go back and fight. Blake won’t take no for an answer, and eventually coerces Sarkoff into coming back with him to Lindor by smashing all his toys (no, really). Can’t have our toys smashed, so we’re off.

Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated plot development, the Liberator has been captured by some of Jenna’s old pals who are from the Negative Arab Stereotype planet. They tricked Liberator into thinking that they were a distressed civilian liner, so naturally Gan teleported over. They then synthesized his voice to order Avon to teleport “Gan” home and seized the ship from there, putting booby-trapped collars around the necks of the crew in the process. Zen is typically uncooperative throughout, but doesn’t seem to mind taking orders from the Arabs. Jenna pretends to betray the crew to gain the Arabs’ trust and then feed them a flimsy story about having hidden treasure on the ship to split them up so that she can knock them out and go rescue the crew, which is being held in a nondescript room somewhere. Since this is Blakes 7, she’s only in the middle of her plan when the crew gets out on its own and they all make it to the bridge to overpower the pirates just in the nick of time to blast Liberator out of the way of approaching Federation ships. They deposit Sarkoff and daughter on Lindor as per original plan. Since the show continues from here, we deduce that Lindor isn’t that vital a strategic asset, but maybe the Federation has to eat a little crow.

OK - so the plot about Sarkoff and the plot about Jenna’s faux “betrayal” have nothing to do with one another. At all. But we know what’s up: Chris Boucher wrote one (the political plot, I presume) and Terry Nation the other, and they then grafted them together with a soldering iron. Both plots are, in their own way, filler stories. The story about Jenna’s “betrayal,” in which she fails to do anything the crew doesn’t end up doing for itself without her help, seems mainly a vehicle for giving her something to do besides agree with Blake. And the story on the planet exists primarily to remind us that Cally (a) exists and (b) is telepathic. The fact that it’s Gan that needs to teleport over to the approaching ship just rounds out the unholy trinity: this is the week where the actors who play the minor characters earn their salaries.

Each of the two plots are pretty forgetable on their own - and since Boucher and Nation never really make them depend on one another, all things equal this episode should’ve gone down in the annals of Blake fandom as one of the worst. But I see from discussion on the internet that a lot of people like it (it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s favorite, mind you!) in spite of its many flaws, and I am inclined to agree. What follows is my assessment of its redeeming (”redeeming” in its literal meaning, for once) qualities.

First - the treatment of the politician Sarkoff is a showcase of what makes Blakes 7 unusual. In a way that is both understated and accurate, we’re given a believable figure for the role. Sarkoff is no one’s idea of an inspiring politician, and it’s difficult to see how he could’ve united anything, let alone channeled an entire planetary government’s will to resist annexation. He plays with 20th century artifacts, for cryin’ out loud! But unlike in most TV SciFi, where collectors of 20th century “artifacts” and appreciators of 20th century “culture” are one of the least plausible cliches in the genre’s miserable closet of embarassing tics, Sarkoff’s habit actually makes a believable point. This is a chastened boy who, hurt by his planet’s rejection and frightened of responsibility, retreats to his bedroom to live in a fantasy world. The implication is clear: Sarkoff isn’t an inspiring or visionary figure - he’s a typical politician to whom popularity is everything and principle a distant second place. This has the double benefit of making Blake’s story believable: the planet is descending into civil war not because their chief visionary has left them directionless, but rather because the only acceptable compromise in an inherently unstable situation (presumably the one all factions believe they can manipulate to a satisfactory degree, and who offends none of them directly) is no longer on the ballot. It helps immensely that in the one scene where the two otherwise completely unrelated plots tie together - where Sarkoff and his daughter Tyce are discussing the inevitable handover of Blake to the Federation for bounty with the pirate king Tarvin - Sarkoff speculates that winning is more important than being morally correct:

SARKOFF Nothing was further from my mind. I welcome Blake’s capture.

TARVIN Why? What’s he done to you?

TYCE He didn’t give up. He fought. Blake shamed him.

SARKOFF And in the end lost, it was inevitable.

TARVIN Inevitable. I am the better man.

TYCE You? Selfish, greedy, vicious–

TARVIN I WON.

SARKOFF Yes, my dear, you see, it’s a, it’s a paradox. He won because he is not the better man.

TARVIN What?!

SARKOFF And yet by winning, it seems, he becomes a prince among people.

TARVIN Among MY people.

SARKOFF Does it matter which people, Tarvin? Do you care?

Sarkoff is trying to make a virtue out of his loss in a way that frees him from the responsibility of taking the chance Blake has offered him. It’s a cowardly mental evasion - but a perfectly believably one for a throwaway politician character. Star Trek’s version of Sarkoff would’ve been a genuine hero beaten down by circumstances who, after a few choice words from Kirk to appropriately dramatic background music, would’ve rediscovered the will to fight and gone back to do so - a man of destiny. Blakes 7’s Sarkoff is just a man, and pretty mediocre one at that. But since that’s what most politicians seem to be, I’ll take Blake’s realism over Star Trek’s camp any day. As a bit of an aside - I think Sarkoff may be meant to be a bit of Jim Callaghan satire. You know, the amiable, likeable but not particularly special or heroic man who happens to be on duty when the ship starts to sink and does what he can, but everyone suspects isn’t trying as hard as he should. Airing on 13 March 1978, it would’ve preceded the Winter of Discontent by half a year or so, meaning that the splintering of the pacts with the trade unions that caused it was well underway. The “warring factions” on Lindor may well be a reference to the public and private-sector trade unions, and Sarkoff as the hapless only acceptable compromise may be a reference to the widespread perception in Britain at the time that Callaghan’s greatest and only virtue was that he was more or less acceptable to both the militant and moderate wings of the Labour Party and - as a Labour PM - someone the trade unions would actually listen to. That is, the only acceptable compromise, despite (or perhaps because of) being ironically pretty ineffectual on the whole.

Second - I absolutely adored the fact that Jenna’s heroic faux betrayal and rescue attempt turn out to be completely unnecessary. The story goes that Jenna pretends to betray Blake and crew to the pirates (whom she apparently knows from her own smuggler past) in order to avoid capture herself, hoping to gain an opportunity to free them. And on any other space opera, that’s exactly how things would’ve unfolded. There would’ve been some stock confrontations where the crew laments ever having trusted Jenna, a camera focus on her conflicted face, and then she would’ve pulled off her rescue attempt flawlessly. As it happens, her rescue attempt is constantly frustrated by pirate guards finding her sneaking about and her having to come up with explanations for them. This delays her long enough that Avon and Villa have time to break the locks on the door and the collars all by themselves: they don’t end up needing Jenna’s help, so her “betrayal” act is for nothing in the end. The other nice twist is the ambiguous feelings of the rest of the crew toward the whole thing. No one’s attitude toward Jenna changes much, and they seem to have no trouble accepting that her betrayal was just an act. And that is, of course, as it would be. The relations among this crew are shaky - and all of them, each to differing degrees, would probably accept that Jenna was just her keeping her options open. The pirates were her old pals, after all, and there’s no reason not to exploit that loophole when the alternative is certain capture by the Federation. They all seem to tacitly respect her right to self-preservation. When it turns out that her betrayal was a ruse, no one seems surprised, and there is no visible damage to their trust in her. They all understand it according to their own predilections (Avon probably on the principle that pirates aren’t very trustworthy people, and so Blake is the safer bet - Blake of course on the belief that they’re really friends, and you do what you can to help your friends), and the writers have enough faith in the audience to get that we understand this without needing to resort to expository dialogue.

Indeed, I think the main reason why everyone seems to like this episode in spite of its obvious and many flaws is that the character development was all right on point. Much has been made of the fact, for example, that Avon and Jenna leave Vila alone on the bridge and responsible for blasting the approaching ship to bits with Gan on it at the first sign of treachery, even though he’s the least likely of the three to actually follow through on the plan. It’s argued that Avon in particular wouldn’t have trusted Vila to follow through and so would’ve insisted on remaining behind himself. And yet - to me this seems perfectly consistent, in a sly way, with what we know about Avon. Avon’s self-image as the cold calculator, always willing to sacrifice his friend if it’s in his interest, isn’t exactly “all bark and no bite,” but it’s still as much image as it is substance, and there are plenty of instances where Avon prefers to bark if he doesn’t have to bite. This may be one of them. Avon may be less willing to kill Gan than he lets on, only if he stays on the bridge and it turns out to be a trap he know he’ll have to kill Gan, and further that he really is capable of doing it. Leaving the bridge allows him to kid himself that he’s every bit as cold as he says without having to put it to actual test - NOT in the Star Trek sense that he’ll “fail” the test by turning sentimental at the last minute, but in the Blakes 7 sense that he really will end up killing Gan if it comes to that and possibly regretting it. And yet, Avon would be right kill Gan to save the ship. Like the politician Sarkoff, in other words, he’s allowing circumstances to take control so that he doesn’t have to assume responsibility for doing something that he’s just as comfortable not having to do. Avon wants Gan to live, and he’s even willing to take the associated risks to give Gan a fighting chance. What he ISN’T willing to do is admit that that’s what he’s doing - and so he leaves Vila in the hotseat knowing good and well that Vila won’t fire. Very interesting.

Likewise, I didn’t find it at all unrealistic that it was Avon who chastised Jenna in the most explicit terms for betraying her friends in that scene in the holding room.

GAN Hello, Jenna. [The prisoners are sitting around the walls, with their hands behind their backs as if still bound. Jenna walks about the cell, "inspecting" them. She comes across the discarded manacles, pauses, and moves on.]

JENNA I’m glad to see that you are all behaving yourselves. Tarvin doesn’t want you damaged, unless necessary.

BLAKE We’re touched by his concern.

JENNA It’ll be more impressive if he can hand you over alive.

GAN A man who takes pride in his work.

CALLY What do you take pride in, Jenna?

JENNA Survival.

AVON At the expense of your friends?

JENNA I didn’t know that you cared, Avon.

VILA He didn’t. And he was right. [Jenna exits.]

It’s a nice touch, of course, that this dialogue goes on mainly for the guard’s benefit: Jenna already knows they’re mostly finished freeing themselves (though they don’t know she knows). A lot of people have complained that it’s Avon - the one who values friendship the least - who is the quickest to chastise Jenna for betraying her friends. But I find it completely believable. Admittedly, the show is still in its infancy at this point, but as the show plays out Avon comes to learn about friendship and to make an uneasy peace with it. The writers have this EXACTLY right: if Avon is the one talking about it now in the most explicit terms, that’s because he’s the one who understands it the least. All the others already believe in friendship (to varying degrees) - take it for granted, even. Avon’s the one who would like to believe in it, but can’t quite bring himself to trust anyone enough. He’s in a space where he’s not entirely sure whether to trust in the bonds forming between him and his companions, or to stick to his philosophy of never taking anything on faith and always doing what’s in his immediate self interest. It isn’t that he’s the one most hurt by Jenna’s “betrayal,” it’s that he’s the one who most needs to know whether she really has betrayed them. Blake, the man of faith, is predictably unphazed:

CALLY [Listening at the door] They’ve gone. [Avon goes back to work on the door lock.]

VILA [Works on Blake's neckband] I wouldn’t have thought it of Jenna.

BLAKE I’m still not sure that I believe it.

AVON What does she have to do to convince you, Blake — personally blow your head off?

VILA If this goes wrong she won’t get the chance.

Lots will read that as Avon’s typical cynicism. But notice what it’s about: information. I think behind the sarcastic quips there is a level at which Avon means this question quite literally. He really would like to know on just what basis it is that Blake continues to hold out hope that Jenna is his friend.

Bounty doesn’t REALLY work, of course. However much of a Jim Callaghan reference Sarkoff might be, it’s not really plausible that planetary survival comes down to the one man. Nor is the way in which the pirates located and overpowered Liberator entirely believable. And we certainly don’t buy that Tarvin would buy Jenna’s story about there being treasure on the ship. It helps that they play the scene in such a way that he seems to genuinely not believe it: he’s just playing the lottery in the “what do I have to lose?” sense. But of course he DOES have a lot to lose, and that’s why I don’t htink he would’ve listened much. The low point of the episode for me, though, was the cheesy “greedy Arab” stereotyping of the pirates. I get that racial sensitivities weren’t so high in the 70s, but even then they surely could’ve seen through THIS degree of selfishness. The line Tarvin gives about how he sold his grandmother - “but only because she was going to sell me!” - is the kind of low-grade camp that should be below Blakes 7. It might make a nice throwaway joke if it weren’t such a cliche - but it really does undercut my ability to suspend my disbelief here in exactly the same way the Ferengi always do on Star Trek. No society that ruthlessly acquisitive makes it to the stars.

Still, given that they were working under the gun while Terry Nation was fighting some serious writer’s block, this is much better than we might have hoped for. Like most of the reviews I read, I give it two stars. Not good, not bad - watchable.

I’ve read a number of opinions on the Sotomayer nomination over the last couple of days, and so far Will Wilkinson’s is the least useful. It wants to make two points - either of which could’ve been expanded into something informative with even a modicum of research, but neither of which is.

The first is that hysterics in politics are annoying and counterproductive. Well, right - nothing terribly original here. It’s true that the usual suspects are already engaging in all the expected hyperbole and insinuation - “going crazy right on cue,” to take a line from the post. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Wilkinson - who doesn’t bother to even quote or link any of it, much less engage and refute it. As such, Mr. Wilkinson’s paragraphs have the character of a beauty pagent contestant talking about world hunger. “In my happy tomorrow, there will be open and informed discussion in place of partisan bias, and no one will deceive their fellow man for petty political gain!” Sounds great, Will, but how do we get there from here? I admit I don’t know either - but I’m pretty sure aimless complaining isn’t the way.

The second point is that since Sotomayer is the best we could’ve hoped for from a president Obama, any rhetorical effort on this issue is probably misplaced anyway. This is asserted with a cheerful acknowledgement that he’s done no research to verify that Sotomayer is acceptably moderate - that, indeed, he barely knew her name before the nomination. So we hate politics because it’s full of deceitful hyperbole and base manipulation, but having said so we’ll give politician Obama the benefit of the doubt on his political appointee without further inquiry? Wha…? Even if Wilkinson can’t manage to be consistently cynical, surely the default Libertarian position here is to assume that any nomination from someone as libertarian-UNfriendly as Obama is something to be suspicious of? It’s a bit like the customer in a used car dealership saying “look, I know all about used car salesmen - know how slippery you guys are - so instead of haggling or comparison shopping I’m gonna just assume that you’re making me as fair an offer as can be expected, given who you are.” FAIL!

A thoughtful article from a for-real libertarian would be just about the opposite of this. If it mentioned the predictable Republican griping at all, it would at least put it in the context of how recently the Republicans found themselves on the other side of the gun and offer some suggestions for how to break the cycle. What it certainly WOULDN’T do is assume - based on no evidence whatever - that Obama’s nominee is acceptable and that there were probably no better compromises available. And if it couldn’t be bothered to do the careful research required to say something informative about the nominee herself, it could at least avail itself of secondary commentary from other prominent libertarians, nearly all of whom have given good reasons why people who share our political concerns would be wary of Sotomayer. Attaboy, Will, take Obama’s word over Richard Epstein’s, or Damon Root’s, or even the Cato Institute’s - yes, THAT Cato Institute, the one that pays his salary. THAT’s how we hold up the Libertarian cause - by trusting the motives of Democrat politicians over our own commentators!

The thing is, when he’s picking apart political philosophers, Wilkinson does sometimes post really thoughtful stuff. But I grow increasingly suspicious of blindspots where traditional leftist causes are concerned. The M.O. is always the same: he never says anything that’s wrong, per se, but rather omits a lot that’s right and relevant. Like now - when he can’t be bothered to do a quick Google search involving the names of libertarian legal scholars plus “Sotomayer.” Maybe we could all get together and scrape up a bunch of money and bribe some prominent Democrat to give Wilkinson an award of some kind - complete with ceremony, plaque and celebratory dinner with obligatory keynote speech about liberalism in the post-conservative meltdown or something. Having the praise from the left he so obviously craves hanging on his office wall, maybe he’d feel better about delivering the libertarian commentary he gets paid to deliver?

Apparently there’s talk in Tinseltown of redoing Buffy without Joss. io9 has the scoop AND (*gasp*) even cautiously approves.

I was cocking my gun when I got to the bit about it being the original 1992 movie and NOT the TV show they were talking about. That’s good. That’s very good.

I’m a rabid fan of the TV show, but I have no real attachment to the original movie. I enjoyed it when it came out, don’t get me wrong - but it was forgettable, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the TV series they ended up making, so there’s that.

And … alright … it does seem a bit unfair that Joss Whedon doesn’t get a second crack at it, considering how much he felt he’d sold out to commercial and producer pressure in the making of the first one. In a more just universe, I guess he’d have been able to go back and fix his mistakes. But in other ways I think I’ll take io9’s side on this one: it’s probably a good thing if they make it without him. Here’s my thinking:

(1) How talented is he still? Buffy the TV series was brilliant - a one-of-a-kind gem. I’ve seen it (way too) many times, and I get something new out of it with each viewing. Hats off - absolutely - to the captain and creator. But the stuff he’s made since has been … well, a little on the mediocre side. Angel was just horrible - erm, the bits of it I could stomach, anyway - I admit I didn’t make it very far. I’ve heard nothing but bad news about Dollhouse. And Firefly … what to say? It was good, I enjoyed it, it had potential. But it also had a tendency to slide into corny and easy stories, and the worldbuilding just wasn’t all that convincing. Now - we only got the one season, and there was clearly potential for greatness there. Mr. Whedon doesn’t have the best of luck with his first seasons - let’s not beat about the bush here. That’s almost certainly because his stories are refreshingly character-driven, and it’s hard to write great stories with characters that are still embryonic, as season one characters on any show tend to be. So maybe Firefly would’ve gone on to great things. The final (Whedon-penned) episode - Objects in Space - was by far its best, after all. But there was also the movie Serenity - which was just terrible. Torture from beginning to end. I’m inclined to say any second season of Firefly would’ve been a failure. It’s not unusual for writers to burn out a bit once their opus magnum is complete. Having done Buffy and done it damn well, it may well be that Whedon doesn’t have anything special left.

(2) It keeps the movie separate. Buffy is a closed cannon as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I’m even pretty iffy about season seven, which in general I didn’t much like (despite some real brilliance at the begining), and I’ve never read the comic books. I like Buffy just as it is. TV shows are hard to get right, and when you get one this right, it’s best to leave well alone. If the intention is to keep the movie separate from the series - which I think is absolutely the right choice - then not having Joss Whedon on the project just makes that separation easier to maintain. The way there are some bands that were great in their day but just really shouldn’t get back together … well, you get the idea.

(3) This isn’t a genre he created anyway. One of the annoying things about Joss Whedon is that he has a creative formula: take any two seemingly incompatible genres, mix them, and then claim that you’ve invented something new. For example - I got really sick of hearing about how creative it supposedly was to take the western genre and mix it with the space opera genre and spit out something “unique” like Firefly. Truth be told, “unique” is not a word that applies to Firefly because people have been mixing westerns with space opera since the 30s. That you haven’t heard much about it only goes to show how unstable the solution is. Ditto the mixing of gothic horror and film noir for Angel. Those are two genres that work quite well together if you ask me - but again, we didn’t have to wait for Whedon’s auspicious birth to get there. Horror and mystery are well related to begin with - dealing, as each does, in slow buildup to a final, preferably shocking, revelation that plays on one’s sense of security - and it isn’t too much of a stretch to take a dark sensibiilty from one genre and make it work with a dark sensibility from another. “Teenage girl fights vampires” just seems … inevitable in this feminist age. This is a genre that belongs to the culture at large - it isn’t the sole preserve of one Mr. Joss Whedon. Poaching should be encouraged at this point.

(4) Whedon is bad at paying his intellectual debts. Call this one the “petty reason” - because it IS petty - but I take a certain satisfaction in seeing someone poach from Whedon in particular. OK, granted, it’s the Kuzuis doing the movie - and they worked on the TV show - so it’s not as blatant as it could be. I’m just saying. One of the more gratifying drive-by comments I’ve seen on the internet was one that said “I used to watch Firefly back when it was called Blakes 7.” I’m pretty sure I gave an audible cheer. Not to mention the bits of poaching from Twin Peaks (not just the admittedly excellent dream episode with the red drapes - look also in the background in the first episode and tell me if you don’t see a student dance across the hall in exactly the way it happened in the Twin Peaks pilot) that went on in Buffy and which Whedon denies to this day. Ideas are free for borrowing in genre fiction (well, unless you’re borrowing from His Royal Insecurity Complex Mr. Harlan Ellison, who invented everything let me tell you what), but you’re supposed to leave some hint where they came from. So nice of Joss, for example, to reference Forbidden Planet in Serenity (a ship C-57D has crashlanded on a planet called Miranda), but since he wasn’t imitating Forbidden Planet in any way it doesn’t count. Dropping some reference to “Liberator” or “Avon” or “Star One” or “Spike Spiegel” would’ve been a more honest choice.

So as long as it’s not TV’s Buffy they’re remaking, I have no particular objections to doing it without Joss.

Better is still not to make it at all, of course. I’m against remaking things that were got right the first time, or which don’t seem to suggest a second treatment - and Buffy is one of those things. The original film doesn’t need remaking because it wasn’t all that … erm, sorry … original to begin with. And the TV series is near-perfect as is. So while I don’t object to remaking the film, with or without Joss, neither do I see the point - and that alone is an argument against.

My attention occupied by the Sotomayer nomination, I’ve neglected to post anything on the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8 - so a couple of quick words. First, whatever you think about gay marriage, the ruling is clearly a victory for the rule of law. The function of courts is to interpret the law as written, not to make law itself. For better or for worse (for worse, in my opinion: I don’t think the ballot initiative system is a healthy one), California allows its citizens to change their constitution though ballot initiative; the court would be overstepping its bounds (to put it mildly) to simply ignore that reality on a specious technicality. Gay marriage proponents will have an opportunity to propose a counter-initiative sometime a few years from now, and sometime a few years from now they’ll probably win.

As for the 18,000 or so same-sex marriages that retain their legal status, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, at the time they were married, gay marriage was legal in California (by judicial fiat, granted, but one can hardly expect the Court to rule, on the basis of popular approval of a constitutional change that had not yet been made at the time the original decision on gay marriage was reached that they had gotten the legal particulars wrong when they issued the fiat). It has the character of an ex post facto law to go back and remove privileges that people were granted in the past - sort of like raising the inheritance tax and then charging everyone who received an inheritance under the old regime the difference. On the other hand, I tend to think that John Scalzi is right that the existing marriages make a mockery of the amendment. The amendment says “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” But this is patently not true for the 18,000 same-sex marriages that California does recognize. So I haven’t quite worked it out yet - but my gut inclincation is to come down on the side that sees it as a good thing overall that these marriages continue to be recognized. Avoiding the ugliness of revoking a privilege that was valid at the time granted weighs heavier with me than total consistency here - especially given that divorce will no doubt bleed a lot of these marriages away with time - and also with time California voters either change their mind yet again about all this, or the 18,000 couples die off or move away. Either way, full consistency comes in the end. I say this, of course, with the sinking feeling that I will come to lean the other way as gay rights activists exploit this for whatever specious legal loopholes they can find as the basis for neverending lawsuits.

Incidentally - the Scalzi blog post that I linked above (here it is again) is a goldmine for anyone seeking to understand why the gay marriage issue annoys a lot of us who are genuinely inclined to let people define their own lifetime partnerships without interference from the state. Scalzi’s blog is one that I enjoy reading, but he does tend to turn into a complete douchebag when talking about this - in the following ways:

(1) He seems to think that the California Supreme Court is “on his side” on this, and that they’ve done “the best they could” to make California as gay-marriage friendly as possible given the circumstances. Here’s the paragraph that gives me that impression:

It seems like the California Supreme Court has upheld the amendment to the California Constitution embodied in Prop 8 to the bare minimum that they could without actually throwing it out (which, I am led to understand by a number of lawyer friends, would have been very difficult to do), and in doing so have made it as toothless as they could.

Now - I think that Scalzi is probably right that the Court is “doing its best” to keep gay marriage as close to legal as possible in California. This is, after all, the Court that issued the fiat in the first place. But notice what an inappropriate attitude about the judicial branch this is! The judicial branch interprets the law, Scalzi you blockhead, it is not responsible for making it up. It’s like he not only slept through 12 years of secondary education Civics, he’s also never even entertained any independent thoughts about the purpose of separating the legislature from the judiciary besides. If the judiciary is allowed to stretch and bend the law willy-nilly to do its best to get it to mean what its representative officers would personally like it to mean, why bother having indpendent courts at all? Why not just send constitutional cases directly to the legislature to be decided? Or better yet, why not just let the justices make the laws? One really is put upon to see the purpose of the separation of powers if the Court feels free to tailor its interpretations to suit the personal preferences of the judges (over and above that which their professional analysis would require). Anyone looking for a definition of judicial activism - or a source of the general suspicion that left-wingers in general see it as a tool in their arsenal - could do worse than reading what Scalzi’s written here.

(2) He openly celebrates gay marriage as culture war weapon - again, as though this were a legitimate purpose for the courts to be serving. Here’s the bit that gives me this impression:

In the meantime, I will revel in the fact that every time one of the people in those 18,000 real live actual legally recognized in the State of California same-sex married couples does something associated with the state recognizing the legal status of their marriage, they will taking one of their fingers — the one with the wedding band on it — and poking it directly into the eye of bigotry.

Maybe so - but again, affording this vehicle is not what the courts are for, and it is not what marriage laws are for. This is surely an infantile view of the framework of laws - the kind of thing Sir Keith Joseph (albeit in much different context) had in mind when he derided British Socialism as a “pocket money society.” We do not live on a playground, and the purpose of the law is not to act as a kind of giant teacher telling us which children have the right ideas and which wrong. The law simply states what kinds of behavior are proscribed. That’s ALL. It is up to us - as mature adults - to work out our cultural issues for ourselves. Certainly there is something satisfying in seeing bigots get their comeuppance. But not everyone opposed to gay marriage is a bigot, and in any case it is a dangerous box to open to let the government and the courts play referee where cultural attitudes are concerned. It isn’t always your culture that’s in vogue, you know - and as cultural attitudes can be fickle, you may find yourself on the other end of the gun sooner than you think. We should applaud and decry court decisions on the basis of whether they maintain or erode the integrity of the law, not on the basis of whose tongue gets to stick out at whom. “Nyah-nyah-na-boo-boo” is not a legal framework.

As I’ve said many times before - I think the best solution to all of this is to take away the government’s gun on this issue completely. People should be allowed to draw up their own contracts regarding their lives and property, and the state should not be placing arbitrary limits on these contracts for cultural reasons. I feel Scalzi’s pain as far as he’s frustrated that one group of people gets to use the word “marriage” in its legal sense while another doesn’t purely on the basis of which mating preferences happen to be in vogue. It IS unfair - but not for the reasons he thinks. Indeed, it’s pretty clear that Scalzi’s proposed solution is no less bigoted than the people he flatters himself for opposing. Scalzi merely wants to extend the domain of what the state considers acceptable to include a lifestyle he approves of - he has no particular problem with the state deciding which lifestyles are and are not acceptable (anyone who “revels” in the fact that the state has decided that some people are “married” regardless of what the majority chooses to believe does not lament the state’s power to force cultural attitudes on the population, he celebrates it). The right answer is to recognize that “marriage” is not a political word, and to take it out of the political lexicon. Let individuals and corporate entities decide what counts as “married” for them - hetersexual, homosexual, or polygamous - and scale the government’s influence here back to its proper role of enforcing property contracts.

Let’s get one thing straight: Sonia Sotomayer said what she said, and she meant it how it sounds. Here’s what she said:

Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Some chumps are suggsting that if you read the statement in context it’s not really all that bad. The New York Times is kind enough to give the full context, so read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions - but if you can come away with a reading of that line in the context of that speech that doesn’t mean “Latinas are generally wiser than white men and should be preferred for judicial appointments on that basis” then you’re much, much smarter than I am.

She said it, she meant it, context won’t help it (see Ilya Somin’s thoughts on the matter for deeper analysis) - those seem to be the facts. The question at this point is whether its relevant?

Well, obviously it is to some degree. The trouble with Supreme Court Appointments it that they’re for life; we can’t just yank her in four years if she turns out to be a crackpot. Questions of temperament are more pertinent for Supreme Court appointments than for most other positions, I’d say.

However - and maybe I’ll have to burn my LP membership card having said this - I don’t think it matters enough to make or break her appointment, and I kinda wish conservatives would shut up about it for that reason - at least for now.

Let’s be fair here: if Larry Summers is within the pale of legitimate scientific discourse to suggest that women and men might have different genetic endowments on average, and if Michelle Malkin and Thomas Sowell can repeatedly point to Asians and Jews as outperforming the averages on standardized test scores despite being marginalized minorities (by some definition, anyway), then I think it’s really OK for Sonia Sotomayer to hold the opinion that Latinas are wiser on average than everyone else. If that’s the generalization her various acquaintances and life experiences have brought her to, then that’s the generalization her various acquaintances and life experiences have brought her to. What’s relevant for her appointment to the Supreme Court isn’t whether or not she holds politically correct views on race, it’s whether and how her views on race will influence her decisions. When Larry Summers says that women are just not as good at math as men, he doesn’t mean that for every given pairing of a man and a woman the woman will fare worse. No - he’s just making a generalization. It is in the nature of generalizations that they capture trends in the data without guaranteeing that each new data point will fit the pattern. If Summers’ generalization does not lead him to unfairly discriminate against qualified female mathematicians in his hiring decisions, I don’t see any problem that the Harvard faculty need have concerned itself with. To the extent that Sonia Sotomayer understands that not all Latinas are wise and not all white men fools - and, more importantly, to the extent that she is capable of handing down rulings that fit the demands of law as written impartially and without regard to the races of the plaintiff and defendant before her - then this statement hardly disqualifies her from serving on the Court. It makes me dislike her personally, I suppose - and since my impression of Latinas is something like the opposite of hers I guess it also makes me question her judgment - but appointments to the Supreme Court should be made primarily on the basis of one’s legal resume and only secondarily on character speculation born of fishing expeditions in the arcana of the candidate’s public speeches. If nothing in Sotomayer’s public case record (and it is considerable - she has been on the District and Circuit benches for almost 20 years) suggests that she makes prior racist assumptions in her rulings, then there is little reason to worry that her private generalizations impair her ability to do her job.

I am not saying the infamous quote is off the table, mind you. I don’t really have any problem with someone raising the concern at her confirmation hearings and getting assurance from her that she won’t favor Latinas over whites in her rulings. After all, no less would be expected of a white man who had implied, a la Larry Summers, that women were less mathematically inclined than men. But I do hope that public discussion of this candidate can quickly progress to her actual judicial record. I really don’t want to see this quotation dominating the whole discussion, as it is largely beside the point.

So what of her judicial record? Well, not having read it I can’t really say - but preliminary rumblings suggest that she’s a Libertarian’s nightmare. She comes in for questionable copyright claims (in this case, that publishing a book of Seinfeld trivia is not “fair use” of facts that are available for everyone to see in endless reruns!), highly selective ideas about incorporation which seem designed to legitimize a personal preference for stricter state gun control laws, really scary ideas about eminent domain latitude, and - relevant to the discussion above about whether Sotomayer’s privately held pro-Latina racism will bleed over into her court decisions - a “see no evil hear no evil” approach to so-called reverse discrimination claims.

As I say, I haven’t carefully perused her record. Picking apart and discussing the merits of that record is what public discussion from here out is meant to accomplish. (Although certain useful idiots on the left suggest that it’s really just to provide an opportunity to declare yourself on the right side of the tide of history. See Matt Yglesias for a particularly odious reactionary interpretation.) This cannot happen if conservatives insist on making that single statement from 2001 the entire substance of the debate, so I sincerely hope they drop it for now and revisit it only then when some pattern in her rulings can be marshalled to suggest that it’s a real problem. The view at this point suggests they can - and that there are numerous other problems with Sotomayer as well. But the point remains: it’s only relevant when it can be demonstrated that there’s cause to worry that Sotomayer confuses personal impressions about the general wisdom of various groups with a license to reorient the law to their advantage - NOT BEFORE.

Being only a semi-regular Will Wilkinson reader, I missed this bit when it aired:

By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.

As an Ayn Rand fan myself, I’d say he’s got what he’s got right, but he’s only got half of what there is to get.

I’ll admit that Eddie Willers was always a problematic character for me. I was never clear on what lesson we were supposed to be drawing. He’s quite a decent guy - as Wilkinson says, his function in the novel seems to be to represent a commoner who “gets it.” Or, as Wikipedia puts it, “Willers is generally assumed to represent the common man: someone who does not possess the promethian creative ability of The Strikers, but matches them in moral courage and is capable of appreciating and making use of their creations.” And yet, it gets him nowhere. His moral courage is directly responsible for his ending up “weeping on abandoned train tracks” in the middle of the desert by the end of the book. Wikipedia (at the time of writing, anyway) says that it’s unclear whether Dagny or anyone is comming to save him. To me it was clear that NOONE is coming to save him - he dies in the desert. Some reward for doing the right thing!

There’s any number of ways we could explain this, of course. Maybe Eddie is in the story for pure shock value. We the ordinary are supposed to identify with Eddie, and since he comes to a bad end, maybe the point is to shock us out of our complacency and make us realize that talking back to the collectivist nonsense that we hear on TV and see in our universities every day is important. It isn’t enough just to do our jobs and do them well - we have to fight the power too. Kudos to me, then, for writing this blog, eh? Except - this can’t be the right interpretation because everything that Ayn Rand ever says concerns the heroism of just doing what you’re good at to the best of your ability. Her mass appeal comes from taking quite ordinary jobs - like the construction worker (Mike Donagan in The Fountainhead), a line-cook (great philosopher Hugh Akston is found working as one in Atlas Shrugged), middle management (Dagny Taggart) or even Roark’s job as architect - and making them heroic. Eddie Willers and Mike Donagan are clearly sympathetic characters, and partly because they both happily work overtime without pay to make sure they get their jobs done right. So it can’t be Eddie’s stellar work ethic that’s the problem!

Or maybe Eddie is in the story as a kind of warning against false idols. Even through to the end of the story he fails to appreciate - and to be fair, it takes Dagny some time to appreciate it too, though she does eventually get there (albeit maybe by accident) - that the railroad he ends up dying(?) for is only as good as what it symbolizes. Material things only have meaning in context - as tools to man’s ends. Once the railroad is perverted to an instrument of corrupt ends, the logical conclusion of defending it is that the defender die (for Rand, ethics has its basis in the affirmation of life). This is the more consistent interpretation, I think, and what I have always assumed she meant. I’m not comfortable with it. It’s one thing to rail against false idols, but Eddie’s sin isn’t that he’s worshipping the wrong God. That is, he doesn’t actually value the corrupt government or the cult of collectivism; he values what he’s always valued: the achievement the railroad represents. His sin is just failing to appreciate that the railroad he serves no longer exists. Dying seems like an awfully high price to pay for merely missing the point.

Or maybe Eddie is in the story as a testament to love. He’s secretly in love with Dagny Taggart, and he knows that circumstances that he doesn’t fully understand have forced her to abandon the railroad. He also knows that she can’t have completely abandoned the railroad in her heart, so if she can’t keep it alive he will. And if that means making the ultimate sacrifice, then what choice do his values leave him? This may well be what Rand meant by Eddie. As a self-proclaimed romantic, her more tenuous mental acrobatics come from trying to define “rational self-interest” in a way that still lets her write the kind of harlequin novels where Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine for Lucie in the end. I’m completely uncomfortable with this interpretation - not because I think romantic love is corny (I don’t), but because Eddie’s sacrifice is so pointless. Sydney Carton at least saved Lucie’s lover; what has Eddie saved? Dagny will come back and rebuild the railway someday, and so she doesn’t need his sacrifice in any case. If Eddie is dying for the glory of love, what is the point of so thoroughly writing off his contribution?

Or maybe Eddie is meant to be what Anton Checkhov would’ve called “the tragedy of life’s banalities,” sometimes translated “the tragedy of being ordinary.” On this interpretation, Eddie’s fatal flaw isn’t so much that he’s not John Galt but that he never tries to be. Eddie is someone congenitally happy to be just who he is, and is ultimately doomed by his lack of striving. There’s some indication that Dagny was about to invite him to escape with the Strikers, but she never does - and perhaps it’s because she senses that Eddie only ever does what is expected and never asks for better. At some point early in the book, someone (James Taggart?) derisively calls Eddie a serf. He responds that he is a serf. At the time, the point seems to be that he’s confounded the questioner, who is trying to taunt Eddie into rebellion for subversive purposes. But perhaps the point, by the end of the book, is that Eddie hasn’t actually counfounded the questioner at all - that a working class hero really ISN’T something to be. If he’d wanted a little better for himself, he would have been saved.

There is probably some grain of truth in all of these interpretations. Eddie is meant to put a human face on the pointlessness of the sacrifice that is the logical end of collectivism. Eddie is also meant to be an uncompromising illustration of what is at stake in applying philosophy: he might not have bothered to realize that the railroad had been perverted, but it was nevertheless his responsibility as a thinking individual to do so. Eddie is also meant as a testament to love. The meaning of love isn’t in the end that the sacrifice achieves, but just in the willingness of the lover to hold the object of his affection as his highest value. And Eddie is indeed meant to symbolize the tragedy of life’s banalities.

It’s the last point, in particular, that I think Wilkinson is missing. Yes, Mr. Wilkinson, the point of Atlas Shrugged is that we’re NOT John Galt. And yes, Eddie dies on the train tracks in the end. But Atlas Shrugged is still a deeply optimistic novel, and I don’t think any honest reading of it comes away with the point that we’re all supposed to just lay down, wallow in our inferiority, and die. It’s true that there’s a Nietzschean element in Rand that she never fully purged from her soul. And it’s true that the last 1/3 of Atlas Shrugged is pretty problematic as novels of ideas go. Biographies of her that I’ve read suggest that she rushed through the end to make her deadline - and that rings true for me. Nietzschean misanthropy is an instinct that she had to supress, and when you’re under the gun it’s harder to keep things under control. Taken as a whole, the novel is still my favorite, though, and it’s not because I have a fatalistic interpretation of life where I’m doomed to engage in meaningless pursuits until I die. I like Atlas Shrugged because it’s the opposite of that - a celebration of invidual purpose.

The novel is useless for people who are already John Galt. If you’re already John Galt, you just keep on keepin’ on - no point in wasting your time with diversions like novels. I agree with what I think Wilkinson’s purpose here probably is (and, more to the point, I’ll bet Ayn Rand would’ve agreed too): you don’t get to be John Galt just by reading Rand’s novel and declaring yourself a fan, right. It is precisely this kind of Ayn Rand fan - the kind who thinks he’s already there and that the rest of us are just insects - that gives Objectivism a bad name.

But the novel is also useless for people who don’t want to be John Galt, who are resigned to never being John Galt. If you think you’re Eddie Willers and the best you can do with your life is die on the train tracks in the desert, then you’re better off letting John Lennon rot your brain for you until you don’t even want to save Taggart Transcontinental from the looters. Bob Dylan is a great poet. Really. Just listen hard enough and you’ll get there someday, kid.

No - Atlas Shrugged is a novel for people who are not John Galt and know they’re not, but would like to be. Galt is an ideal - which means he doesn’t actually exist, but the closer you get the better off you’ll be. He’s a symbol of what’s essential to man - which isn’t the complete picture of our species because we’re mammals too. Just what’s essential, what defines man, sets him apart from everything else. He’s a moral beacon - and like with every moral beacon you’re not expected to get it right all of the time, you’re just promised that you’ll be happy to the extent that you do get it right. Eddie Willers’ presence in the novel just means that you don’t get paid for sleeping on the job. It’s one thing to want to be John Galt, but if you don’t actually try to be you don’t get any cookies.

OK - now let me drop the Objectivistspeak, lest I be misinterpreted by succeeding generations when the cities are laid in dust and posterity finds an errant laptop with this blog still open. I don’t actually want to be John Galt. I don’t know the answer to the novel’s great opening one-liner, and I don’t even care, because when I say the last 1/3 of the novel was “problematic” I mean mostly that that character is the problem. All the other heroes in the book are believable and likeable. Despite endless descriptions of John Galt’s perfect physique, though, I can’t even get a clear visual image of him focused in my mind because he’s such a walking literary device that it’s hard to see him as a person. I find that every time I reread Atlas Shrugged, I will have remembered every detail - almost down to knowing verbatim the words used to describe them - EXCEPT those regarding John Galt. What I remember about him from last year, for example, is that he stands around at parties and spoils everyone’s fun by giving philosophy lectures while they’re trying to drink wine. Great.

No, what I’m doing here is not really defending the idea of a John Galt cult, since I don’t know what that would mean. The point is just that Wilkinson, as usual, has got a piece of the puzzle but never the whole picture. Atlas Shrugged is not a giant sneer at humanity for its imperfections. Nor is it an instant transporter beam to paradise. It is what every other morality tale is, really - good advice that’s best when taken, but with no attached expectation that its readers will always manage to get it right. Ayn Rand herself never managed it, and indeed if you read closely there’s a bit of self-parody in the form of a writer who comes to see the Phoenix-Durango on its maiden run.

I write this as one in what I expect to become a long list of reasons why Libertarians can’t really trust Will Wilkinson. It isn’t that he gets Atlas Shrugged wrong. It’s more that I don’t believe this is really his interpretation of it. It’s that I don’t think anyone thoughtful can have read the book and honestly come away with what he’s claiming as its point. As is usual with him, he has cover in the form of never saying anything that’s wrong, per se. But the most insidious way of being wrong is not giving a complete picture of what you know is right. That’s what’s probably going on here.

This weekend I saw the bookends of Steven Soderbergh’s career: 1989’s sex lies and videotape and this year’s The Girlfriend Experience. I wonder how long it will take mainstream critics who didn’t happen to see them back-to-back to notice how similar they are?

sex lies and videotape - the senstaional indie hit of 1989 - is good but massively overrated. It’s the definitive classic of my least-favorite genre - the “girls are deeper than guys because they don’t kid themselves” genre. I’m sure someone has thought of a clever name for it somewhere along the line - but you know what I’m talking about. Some girl manages to get out of a bad relationship that she was really committed to, and the guy only realizes when it’s too late just what a good thing he’d had. In sex lies and videotape the villain is John Millaney, who’s in a loveless relationship with the frigid Ann and is sleeping with her sister. A college roommate named Graham shows up who couldn’t be more different from the shallow John. You’d almost wonder they could’ve roomed together. Graham has no money, he’s an “artsy” type, and his pet art project at the moment turns out to be filming women giving confessionals about their sexual experiences - ostensibly as a way to cure his impotence. The sister who’s sleeping with John, incidentally, is only doing so to get back at her sister, of whom she’s always been jealous. Alright - so we get the leaden point. John’s bad because he loves money and has sex purely for physical pleasure. If Ann’s frigid with him it’s because she knows deep down inside - and we know and the director knows - that she deserves better. She needs somenone to “make love” to her - not just to fuck her. So John doesn’t measure up, but his deep “friend” will do. By the end of the movie, she’s divorced John and is with Graham. The sister feels appropriately guilty, they have a heart-to-heart and show signs of reconciling. Everything goes badly for John, who is apparently going to lose his job, and so we the audience can delight in his downfall.

This movie isn’t nearly as good as everyone thinks it is - mostly because it doesn’t really work. The only reason it’s gotten as much praise as it has is that the acting (espcially James Spader as Graham - I mean … just … wow) and direction are so good we don’t have time to notice that the plot doesn’t really work. And actually, if the plot were anything else we probably would have noticed - but since this movie is in the critics’ favorite genre and it reaches all the conclusions they like to see (wife good/deep, husband bad/childish), noone is really looking too hard.

The problem with this genre - let’s call it the “making love” genre - is always the same two things: (1) the woman is implausibly never to blame for her situation, circumstances freeing her from having to make any really hard choices, and (2) her devotion to Mr. Horrible is always overstated to the point of being just the other side of plausible. sex lies and videotape would’ve been a considerably more interesting movie if we didn’t have the easy out of John sleeping so much with Cynthia. Ann, being a Superior Woman with Superior Intuition, of course figures the whole thing out using her special Woman’s Spider Sense before she has any evidence - but since she has no evidence John’s silver tongue gets him technically off the hook. There follows a hugely implausible scene where she finds some hard evidence and is actually surprised and hurt. See - we’re expected to forget that she’d already figured it out emotionally. And since she only sleeps with Graham AFTER she has ironclad proof of all this, it’s all OK and NOT HER FAULT - crucial points for fans of the “making love” genre. It isn’t that any of this is all that implausible, mind you, it’s just that it gets rather tiresome there always being a trap door of this kind of the heroine. A weightier and more realistic story would show us a breakup where blame is more evenly distributed. And as for point (2), it’s - typically - a bit difficult to buy that she’s actually all that upset to find that John is cheating on her. It’s pretty clear that they don’t love each other, and it’s convenient that there doesn’t seem to be much to love about John at all. He’s a walking yuppie stereotype - handsome, selfish, materialistic, bragging to his friends that his wedding ring is a chick magnet. In the real world, Ann would surely have asked herself by this point why she married him at all, if they have anything in common, and whether she is really in love with him. But of course, that would tend to complicate things by making her more equally complicit in the situation, which would spoil things for our genre fans.

There are additional problems, of course. Graham is really shady, but no one seems to notice. It’s just the way “deep” people are? And then there’s embarassing dialogue here and there. Graham actually says - no really! - “this wasn’t supposed to happen” when he realizes (oh, but since this is a sophisticated film we’re meant to add here in the parentheses that we might not be able to trust him completely here) that he’s falling in love with Ann. And of course he’s only admitting this because Ann - being the emotionally clear-sighted woman of the story - has *gasp* turned his own camera on him and asked him to tell his own story! Shocker!

Yeah, it’s a pretty crappy story. But Soderbergh gets away with it because, as I said, the acting is really well above average, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s clearly a talented director.

What’s doubly pleasing about The Girlfriend Experience - compared with the aforementioned debut - is that it’s a more thoughtful entry in the same genre. It’s the same annoying “making love” genre alright - but the treatment is a bit more honest and mature. Our “emotionally clear” heroine in this movie is Christine - or maybe Chelsea, we’re never really sure - and she’s in the genre-typical relationship with the shallow guy that she’s more serious about than he is about her. As is proper for this genre, she ends up leaving him, and it’s all his fault. We get the obligatory “test scene” - where she confronts him that she’s leaving and things could’ve worked out for them if he’d given a more genuine reaction, but he doesn’t, and so they don’t, and that’s that. So far, so normal. What makes this one better than average are the following things. First, the guy, for once, isn’t all bad. He isn’t cheating on her (that we know), and he’s at least a little bit understanding to put up with her profession (she’s a call girl). The reason he’s nevertheless “in the wrong” is just because he’s shallow and acquisitive. He’s landed someone who’s just slightly out of his league, he knows it, and it’s for THIS reason that he doesn’t want to let her go (it probably also flatters his self-image to put on a show of not being jealous). By the time he realizes that he really likes her, it’s too late, and in any case he can’t get past his wounded pride. But at least, in contrast to more typical films of the genre, the decision to leave him isn’t made for the girl. She actually has to give something up. By the same token, we don’t have the typical problem of wondering what a wonderful girl like her was doing with the shallow sleaze in the first place. He’s shallow, but he’s not a sleaze that we can tell - they’re comfortable together, he doesn’t rib her about her job, etc. This setup is, for once, believable. She doesn’t love him, and he doesn’t love her, but it’s easy to see what they both get out of the relationship.

The rest of it is typical, though. Chris goes on a trip to Vegas with some fellow shallow materialistic types after giving Christine/Chelsea an unsuccessful ultimatum. Naturally, the purpose of this trip is to put him through hell - because the dictates of the genre require that the guy realize just how horrible a mistake he’s made by ever letting that angel go. He has to listen to people just as shallow as him rationalize their ways out of real relationships, and of course in Vegas he gets to be one of the guys on the other end of the prostitution thing, presumably realizing just how special it was that one of these girls who knows all about men once saw something in him. Well, there ya go, buddy. That’s what you get for appearing as a character in one of these dressed-up chick flicks. There’s no point her leaving you if you don’t suffer for it!

As for Christine, she’s leaving him because - what else? - she’s met a guy and in a flash of Absolutely Correct instinct realized that she doesn’t really love Chris and she might be able to love this guy. He’s a client, so of course the whole thing is hugely irrational - but the vanity of this genre is that women are superior because they are unencumbered by rationality - rationality being a tool that incomplete people use for making excuses for base emotions. Naturally, her instinct is right on point. The guy is a good guy, and he really does care for her … even though he’s only just met her under hugely dubious circumstances, but that’s how Real Love works, right? Here’s the second twist that makes this one better than most. We KNOW he’s a good guy because he never consummates his relationship with the little prostitute because he video-calls his kids at the last minute and realizes that he has responsibilities. Yes, he was going to hire a prostitute, but he ends up not doing it, and for all the right reasons. In other words, the girl doesn’t end up either (a) alone but OK or (b) with Mr. Right after all as is par for the course in these films. She actually saw, and missed, a catch, and missed him because he was such a good catch. In the process she loses her stable relationship (though one doubts she will ultimately regret that) and has to ask herself tough questions about her job.

If The Girlfriend Experience were merely a genre-bender it would be above average - but I think it qualifies as great in spite of itself. Yes, it gets off to a pretty miserable start. At first, you think it’s just a political hack job. All of her clients are, of course, materialistic Republicans who are worried about their bottom lines and Obama. They all want her to vote for McCain. It’s hugely yawnworthy (though it hits a bit home, I have to say - I’m similarly unforgiving of political dissention from people I date, and I do think this is a personal flaw). But it picks up. We get to see a wide range of the kind of man that dates this kind of girl, and it’s pretty believable. We get to see the seedy underside of her profession in the form of an unscrupulous reviewer. And we ask ourselves more questions than we get answered about how a girl like her manages to take love seriously at all. It’s a credit to the film that we believe she does - though we’re really disappointed we can’t talk to her for 3 hours about all the stuff she knows about human relationships! Most of all - and I put a fine point on this because internet opinion seems squarely against me here - I think Sasha Gray is PERFECT for the role. It’s Soderbergh’s great strength: getting a performance from an actor that’s much, much better than he should be able to deliver, and so saving a movie that would otherwise be ridiculous. Like all of Soderbergh’s art movies, this one stands or falls on how well the central actor does his job, and Soderbergh works his typical magic here. Complaints are made that she’s too wooden - doesn’t have any real feeling - acts bored. But how would you honestly expect a prostitute to act around her clients and her sham of a boyfriend? Her impossible job is to seem interested in these people - but we all know that she can’t be. It’s an inhuman demand. The only reason any protitute meets it ever is because the client is desperate enough to hire her. If he weren’t kidding himself already, he wouldn’t be with a call girl to begin with, and so she really only has to meet minimum standards here. Where Gray shines is in her body language. Yes, she’s bored and feigning interest. Yes, she appears to be acting. And if all that were going on is that Soderbergh had cast a second-rate actress for the purpose of getting a fakey performance, I think the complainers would have a point. But watch again - she’s much better than all that. She does a great job exuding a zen-like guarded calm. She’s calm and comfortable, and her deliberate movements do a lot to soothe her clients - but they also betray a wariness that I find completely believable for someone in her profession. She’s ripe for exploitation, and she has to be ready for anything. Perhaps the only reason Gray pulls this off so well is that she’s a porn star in her day job. I don’t care - she pulled it off, and it’s fair to say that her having done so is what made this movie watchable.

So Soderbergh grows up. sex lies and videotape was huge amounts of talent without much in the way of maturity. In The Girlfriend Experience, we finally get the whole package.

Having just rewatched season one of Babylon 5, it was a bit of serendipity to come across this excellent essay on the show by Abigail Nussbaum, Israeli computer scientist and (hobbyist?) genre literary critic.

Like Nussbaum, I have a complicated history with Babylon 5. I missed (didn’t even know about) the pilot when it aired - apparently around the same time the execrable Deep Sleep Nine hit the waves (this one I watched with friends as it broadcast). Which is just as well, because it turns out to be wince-inducing to an almost unbelievable degree. More on this later. The following year the series proper went on the air, and being the nerd I am me and my equally nerdy roommates counted down the days to showtime. So imagine my disappointment when they opened with Midnight on the Firing Line, which was pretty god-awful in its own right. I decided immediately I was done with the thing. My somewhat more forgiving roomies talked me into watching the second episode, but about halfway through I realized I had forgotten to check that the number of bristles in my toothbrush was some multiple of a prime. I’m pretty sure they watched episode three before giving up themselves, but in any case Babylon 5 ended up symbolizing for all of us everything that’s ever been wrong with TV SciFi.

Several years later, when I guess the show was somewhere near the beginning of season 3, unrelated friends started telling me they liked it. And since these were people I respected who were not necessarily science fiction devotees, I eventually decided to give it a second chance. I found some reruns on one of my trips home on TNT and watched them and was - well, I was going to say “pleasantly surprised,” but “shocked” is more like it. It was suddenly really engaging. I cared what happened, was curious about even minor plot details - and yet, it was so clearly the same awful show I remembered from 1994. Cognitive dissonance is a bear, what can I say? When I told my old roomies I was watching it I mostly got smirks. I’m pretty sure to this day they haven’t gone back and given it a second view.

I ended up buying all four seasons (like Nussbaum, I’m reluctant to count season 5 as part of the same show, though unlike her I recognize a couple of good episodes in there) as they came out on DVD to get caught up, and I’ve seen the whole thing through a couple of times now. But that was all pre-gradschool. Since I’ve been here (i.e. since 2003), I’ve had to budget my time a bit better, and so it was only recently that I thought about going through it all again. But I did over the last couple of weeks rewatch season one and … well, damned if I don’t feel like I’m back at square one.

Here’s Nussbaum:

Up until now, I’ve always thought of B5 as a better-than-average show with a poor first season, an execrable fifth season, and three deeply flawed yet ultimately successful middle seasons. And as it turns out, I was wrong, because Babylon 5, from beginning to end, both sucks and blows.

It does at that. And she’s even right about why:

More than anything else, Babylon 5 is a show for teenagers. The overblown dialogue, the broad humor, the melodramatic plots, the frequent monologues and speeches, and just in general the show’s palpable sense of its own profundity must have been irresistible to the teenage set–to viewers looking for something grand and inspiring who weren’t too interested in, or capable of, noticing the bad writing and obvious plotting.

All correct. And I’d like to leave it at that, I really would. But this all puts me in quite a difficult situation. If the show is such crap, and I know it’s crap, and it’s obvious that I always knew it was crap even from day one when I could barely make myself sit through the first episode … then why do I still enjoy it? And why do I still enjoy it not in the “guilty pleasure” sense of watching something like That 70s Show, but enjoy it as for-real escapism?

The only thing I can come up with in which MY BRAIN isn’t simultaneously inhabited by a 48-year-old Pakistani shoplifter is that Babylon 5 did manage to accomplish something in its own accidental way. Certainly not in any way that Joe’s Mighty Senseofselfimportance thinks it did. To read any of his chatroom quotes from back in the day on The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 and keep a straight face you’d have to believe he was Shakespeare reincarnated come to make television respectable. But no - I mean just in the quiet way of managing to be one of those epic space opera/fantasy novels that we geeks like to read while also being on television.

The point to get here is that while there is plenty of genre television, and while there is plenty of escapist television, there is precious little escapist television for space opera fans. Television - in America, anyway - is and always has been horribly prejudiced in this way. There is no shortage of tear-jerkers for people who like that sort of thing. There is no shortage of sexual melodrama for people who like that sort of thing. There is no shortage of action-adventure for people who like that sort of thing. Police procedurals, courtroom dramas, locked-room mysteries, you name it. Everyone gets what they want - except scifi and fantasy fans.

Or at least, that’s how it was back in 1994. The reason me and my roommates were excited about Babylon 5 wasn’t because we’d actually heard anything about it or had any idea what it was going to be about. We just saw the spaceships and the space battles and had some vague notion that there would be interstellar political intrigue, and that was enough for us. And it was enough because genuine space operas are so rare on television that beggars can’t be choosers. We’ve never had the luxury of - as, say, mystery fans have - of looking at the 5 or 6 new series guaranteed to be out in the fall and deciding which of them we’d like to see. Babylon 5 was just all there was.

Yes, yes, Star Trek. What about it? If you want to count the original series as space opera, I guess I’ll let you get away with it - but that’s precisely the point, you see. That show ran from 1966 to 1969 for a whopping total of 72 hours of campy television (that I love, don’t get me wrong!) that we more or less had to make do with for 30 years. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was plain horrible. And while I guess back in those days we all had some affection for the original Battlestar Galactica, try catching it in reruns … or taking it seriously when you did. Everything else either wasn’t space opera, or found some way of massively apologizing for itself. Yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’m talking about YOU.

Massively apologizing for itself. That’s the part that sucks so bad about being a scifi fan. In the magical world of paperbacks, people aren’t so selfconscious. Straight-ahead space opera exists, and it even reaches a profit-generating audience. Sure, there are those annoying authors who can’t say often enough that SF to them is “Speculative Fiction,” and that they sleep through space battles. And some of them even aren’t annoying and write really engaging fiction that does deserve to be called “high art,” sure. But there is good old fashioned space opera too, and I’m glad of it. Try to put it on TV, though, and suddenly up is down. Suddenly you need all kinds of treknobabble to flatter the audience’s vanity that it’s all on the scientific up-and-up. Suddenly you have to devote whole episodes to please-mix-glass-shards-in-with-my-corn-flakes pop psychology to convince the producers and the critics that you do “character studies.” And don’t even get me started on the endlessly irritating self-parody shows. It didn’t even take X-Files a whole fucking season to start strapping on its tapshoes, flashing its huge white teeth and saying “yesSUH!”

So sure, Babylon 5 was crap. Just as Nussbaum says. Yes, she’s right that there’s nothing at all plausible about a seasoned politician like Londo accepting Mr. Morden’s sketchy offer to mysteriously wipe out a whole Narn fleet for him without first checking what the bill would come to. Sure, I’m not buying it either that an EarthGov politician actually says “peace in our time” without being aware he’s just struck a Chamberlain bargain (only has he really? Another annoying thing about that arc is that there’s no real sense in which Earth comes to regret its cowardly decision. Earth has other problems of its own making, so it was a misplaced reference in any case). And yeah, Sheridan’s “weighty” decision - between holding out a hugely ephermeral hope of finding his wife versus saving the galaxy - isn’t actually weighty at all, and all the misplaced Churchill reference does is call attention to just how unearned the gravitas here is.

That’s all true - and yet I’m right with Nussbaum on this bit too:

I can’t put my finger on it–maybe it’s just that unearned sense of profundity, getting to me as thoroughly now as it did when I was a callow teenager–but I care about this world. I may be cracking snarky comments every five minutes, but when it comes down to it, and the music swells and the heroes strike their pose and the lovers are reunited, I’m touched, and I want more. I can’t stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole.

I can’t stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole. What a brilliant way to put it. Yes, that’s what it is for me too. All I do when I sit and rewatch Bablyon 5 is nitpick about what’s wrong with it, but when the episode ends I find I’ve enjoyed myself immensely - NOT for the ironic pleasure of picking apart bad drama, but because I’m really glad to have seen this story with these characters in this world.

Here’s where she and I finally part ways a bit:

Maybe, in much the same way that Ronald D. Moore has extracted the beating heart of something as campy as the original Battlestar Galactica and transplanted it into a better, smarter body, someone will come around one day who can take whatever it was about Babylon 5 that worked, the core of the story that’s still bringing me back, and give it the treatment that J. Michael Straczynski couldn’t.

I don’t think so - because I don’t think there’s actually anything beating at the center of Babylon 5. There is nothing intrinsically special about this show at all. The only reason it’s watchable in the first place is beacuse Straczynski managed to somehow cast Andreas Katsulas as G’Kar, Stephen Furst as Vir, Bill Mumy as Lennier, and, what the hell, Peter Jurasik as Londo and Michael Doyle as Garibaldi. And really - out of that lineup - just Andreas Katsulas. He’s the only truly brilliant actor on the show, the first one to find a way to take his wooden lines and make them sing - and gradually the others got the courage to follow. No - I don’t think there’s anything special about this story or this world or these characters. There WAS something special about Battlestar Galactica. It was a really intriguiing premise really poorly told. If any show in the history of television deserved a second chance, it was that one. I don’t think Ronald Moore had to scratch very deep to see that the diamond in the rough of the original campy mess was how people react to an existential threat.

By contrast, the “diamond” in the rough of Babylon 5 is nothing special to this show. It’s all in the “meta-”bits. The theme of evolution by violent chaos versus evolution by slow deliberation has been done before, and better, by other shows and novels. No doubt someone (anyone!) could do a better job with it than Straczynski - but no matter because it’s been done before and will be done again. No, what’s special about Babylon 5 was just that it was unapologetic space opera at all. It was the first - and to date ONLY - time I’ve seen space opera on television by a genuine space opera fan who never felt the need to pass it all off as allegory. That isn’t to say that there isn’t allegory in Babylon 5 - obviously there’s plenty. The point is that it isn’t allegory as a way of apologizing for being space opera. It isn’t allegory as a means of legitimizing our fun. It’s allegory only to the same degree, and tackling the same grand historical themes, that allegory is always at the heart of space opera. We aren’t kidding ourselves with literary mumbo-jargon about how the epic scale brings the weight of individual decisions into stark relief. No - what we’re doing when watching Babylon 5 is daydreaming about being the kind of person whose decisions change something as big as the universe.

As much of a self-important, ego-inflated gasbag as I think Straczynski probably is in real life, I can’t ever feel too bad about him for the simple reason that he did what no one else, that I can tell, has ever done. He put Lord of the Rings on TV AS Lord of the Rings - AS the kind of literature that we genre fans like - and not with some moronic sop to the mainstream viewer.

There’s something about being a genre fan that’s like having a sexual fetish, I think. We’re all human, and we all have our quirks, and some people’s quirks are more acceptable to society at large than other people’s. For whatever reason, science fiction isn’t one of the acceptable quirks. And so liking science fiction is a bit like being gay. You can pass yourself off as normal if you have to, but there’s always something about your tastes that’s just slightly “off” enough to tip people off to what you are. And you can go all out and embrace it, but then you’re giving up friendships with ordinary people forever. Most of us spend most of our time doing something like those gay activists assuring people that gay marriage is just like regular marriage, only with two completely committed guys rather than a guy and a gal. Some people buy it - more people pretend to buy it so as not to look bigoted - but here in scifi fandom we all suspect more than the outsider even that SF literature is not literature by the same standards at all - just as gay marriage isn’t marriage by the same standards. And even while we spend so much time producing perversions like “Next Generation” to show just how normal we are, in the privacy of our own minds we prefer stuff like Babylon 5.

So I think of Babylon 5 as space opera’s “comming out” party on mainstream TV. And the same way that while not all gay men like disco music, there are few gay men who don’t miss that scene - I think while we space opera fans might privately think Babylon 5 was cheap and over the top, we do miss the days when we could turn on the TV and see something that was made for us.

There’s nothing special about Babylon 5 itself, and so there’s no need to remake it. Making ANY similar space opera - i.e. NOT one like Ronald Moore’s reimagined Battlestar that only pretends to be science fiction while actually being a hippie gaiafest - would be a better tribute than trying to find something unique to this one that just isn’t there. Babylon 5 was almost entirely derivative. The Minbari were the Japanese, the Centauri the Romans, the Narn proably the Arabs, etc. etc. The Chaos vs. Law fight of the Shadows and Vorlons was straight out of Doc Smith. Sheridan back from the dead is pure Lord of the Rings. And all the stuff with the PsiCorps - the most interesting and least-explored part of the series - flirts with Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester. Stracynski, in other words, is a genuine science fiction fan remixing his favorite songs. If there’s something in Babylon 5 we like, it’s that we’re proud that one of our own made it on TV without selling us out. So it wasn’t the best it could be. It was what it was, and that in itself is a kind of minor miracle.

Heartfelt thanks for that, Joe!

Adam Roberts’ review of True Blood Season One is correct in much of what it says, but it so spectacularly misses the point about the central theme of the show that I’m kind of awestruck. This is worth mentioning because I think Mr. Roberts’ misunderstanding is the result of a cultural blindspot that is underdiscussed.

Some background. True Blood, should anyone have missed it, is an HBO series about to go into its second season. It’s based on Charlaine Harris’ gothic mystery novels set in a version of our world where vampires are real and have recently “come out” owing to the development of a synthetic blood substitute that enables them to feed without killing. An intriguing premise to be sure. Naturally, since there are vampires involved, the story is stupider than it has to be; you’ll find no counterevidence to the generalization that people who read and write about vampires tend to be those who like to play with fire in complete safety. Well, OK, that’s not entirely true. Since you twisted my arm, there is a handful of scenes that get at something like making fun of your stock vampire fans. That is, we see some pretty naive people at Fangtasia (yes, that’s its name), the “Vampire Bar” in nearby Shreveport. But for the most part the vampires and their relations with normals in the show serve The Larger Point.

The Larger Point being that 500lb. battle axe that Adam Roberts had to bend over, cover his head and kiss his ass goodbye to miss being conked over the cranium with.

Here’s Roberts:

By the end I found myself thinking that the show just doesn’t handle its symbolic overtext very well: for the “vampire rights movement” stands, in some obvious way, for the civil rights movement. Vampires get the verbal abuse and day to day hassle—being pulled over by the police, being refused service in bars and so on—that in the real world of the US Southern States are the preserve of blacks. The show, in other words, is attempting something of the same trick that gave Planet of the Apes the resonance to make it a culturally significant text, rather than just a bunch of actors in simian makeup: the apes in that film (and TV series) worked both in terms of the logic of their particular worldbuilding (as cool, talking apes) and as symbolic signifiers articulating the racial anxieties of 1960/70s America. I’d go further and say that Planet of the Apes managed that articulation with a winning degree of sophistication and penetration.

Well, yes, Mr. Roberts, Vampires are a standin for something, but I don’t think it’s the Civil Rights Movement. They’re a standin for gays.

C’mon, this isn’t difficult, right? They’ve only recently shown themselves to the world for what they are. Many of them, in fact, choose to remain hidden - something they can do because to all outward appearance they are the same as anyone else. And as far as we can tell, they don’t reproduce in the normal way, but rather by converting people to their “lifestyle.” And just in case anyone out there in TVland was thick enough to have missed it, this thoroughly unsubtle show even includes a bit of “God Hates Fangs” signage in the (excellent) opening credits sequence. Any resemblance to a favorite slogan of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church is not at all coincidental and entirely intentional. (Alright, fair enough, there are pictures of Klansmen too - but followed almost immediately by scenes of blacks and whites baptising each other at the same revival. To the extent that the race relations images in the opening serve any purpose beyond establishing the setting, I’m inclined to think it’s to establish the connection between the Gay Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement that gay rights activists are so fond of drawing - NOT to imply that this is a show about the Civil Rights Movement itself.)

Indeed, given the critical tradition of intepreting all things vampire as having to do with repressed sexuality, it would be a bit surprising to see them suddenly standing in for race relations instead. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done. How much room established cultural symbols give an author to reinterpret and maneuver is not entirely clear, but no doubt a skillful writer could make vampires fit the “oppressed racial minority” trope. But I’m pretty sure he’d have to alter them in some way, because your run-of-the-mill vampires are about as white as it’s possible to be. I’m not just talking about the unearthly pale skin that so many writers make so much of - it’s everything to do with their tastes and habits as well. Indeed, “oppressed” is not usually a word that springs to mind where vampires are concerned. One is more apt to think of them as privileged and aristocratic - generally socially and politically superior to those they feed on.

And that is certainly how the writers of True Blood paint them. The story’s two most prominent vampires - Bill and Eric - are a landed gentleman and a warrior king respectively. And the others of lower caste still have massive superiority complexes where normals are concerned. We don’t, as far as I remember, see a single vampire that wishes to be normal - but we see plenty of normals who are fascinated by vampires. No - these vampires aren’t blacks, and this isn’t a story about the Civil Rights Movement. Sookie isn’t the plantation owner’s daughter who ran off with one of the slaves, and if 911 is a joke to vampires its because they don’t seem to WANT normal doctors getting too close a look at undead anatomy. To the extent that vampires have neighborhood watch meetings, they don’t seem to waste much time complaining about their oppression and rallying the troops to do something about it. It’s something like the opposite of that, actually: the bigger concern among vampires seems to be that they’d be lowering and indeed confining themselves by joining mainstream society. Lack of general acceptance certainly doesn’t seem to be something they think of as denying them any opportunities, and vampire culture is hardly something they’re eager to share. Quite the contrary, the seem to think normals unworthy of sharing their culture and allow them to as explicit inferiors. It’s hard to imagine they would ever have allowed a vampire Buckwheat or Mr. Bojangles in the movies, and you certainly don’t get the feeling you’d ever catch them telling Br’er Bunnicula stories to normal children.

No, vampires don’t have black concerns, attitudes, or problems, and that’s because they’re not meant to be blacks. Roberts has simply got it wrong. Think of them instead as homosexuals and it all falls into place. Homosexuals are oppressed, sure, but not in anything like the same way or for the same reasons that blacks were (which is why, incidentally, it is disingenuous of gay rights activists to compare their struggle to the much more difficult Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s). These vampires don’t seem to lack educational opportunities, for one thing. If anything, like gays, they’re more educated on average than the normals. Also, like gays, they seem to be financially considerably better off. There’s a freedom and hedonism in their current culture which they are afraid of losing if they go completely mainstream - the main reason why it’s not obvious to them that going mainstream is such a good idea, actually. There are all the “coming out” parallels, and the not-so-subtle suggestion that the normals all harbor repressed desires to be like them - a repression that manifests as equal parts revulsion, fear and fascination.

So how did Mr. Roberts miss this? I think the following complaint sheds some light on the matter:

Tara, driven by her unrequited love for Jason (something which, incidentally, I never believed for a moment) at one point pretends to be his girlfriend so as to give him an alibi. “You think that since the Vampires came there’s no racism anymore,” she tells the police. “But you don’t know the sorts of looks a mixed-race couple get in this town.” But the problem here is that, despite occasional assertions like this, the show itself dramatizes no black-white racism at all. It could do, of course; it just doesn’t. Black characters and white characters are friends; they work together; they date and socialize entirely without tension (in one scene the—black—short order cook responds assertively to abuse from a group of rednecks; but the abuse is on account of his homosexuality, rather pointedly not about his skin colour. Because, you know—rednecks are famously scrupulous about their bigotry like that). This leads to a rather peculiar set of representational logics. Racism is — clearly — a problem. But in Bon Temps, racism is only a problem for vampires.

That’s because, you blockhead, it isn’t racism that’s the problem - the problem is what the politically correct like to call “homophobia.” What’s wrong here is in the line “Racism is - clearly - a problem.” Oh? And how does a Londoner know this about Louisianna? Why, because he’s seen it on television, of course! Mr. Roberts - who apparently only knows the American South through stereotype - is frustrated because television isn’t playing to his preconceptions. The show is set in Louisianna, therefore any political statement in it must be about blacks, and furthermore any failure to show constant racial tension must be inauthentic and an oversight on the part of the writers, a serious flaw in the show. But is it really? In that scene where Tara plays the race card to get Jason out of trouble, it’s not a commentary on real racism, it’s a commentary on playing the race card. The sheriff and his deputy both know, as Tara knows, and as we the audience have seen, that there is no longer a problem with whites and blacks dating in this town, though there presumably was in the past. Tara is improvising, and all concerned seem to know that the sheriff’s white guilt is only good for so long (Jason will be picked up again shortly). As for rednecks and their bigotry - what parallel universe is Mr. Roberts living in where white racists have a problem with blacks cooking for them (in the scene Mr. Roberts is refering to, the rednecks send their burger back because they ordered it “without AIDS”)? Indeed, if he’d ever met any actual southerners or been to the actual South, he’d know that local stereotypes hold blacks to be much better cooks than whites, that in fact southern cuisine is about 2/3 black and 1/3 white - even among the white population - and that in any case it would be basically impossible to avoid eating food cooked by a black short-order cook if you frequent those kinds of restaurants. And whence comes this golden rule of discrimination that Mr. Roberts seems to be quoting whereby truly bigoted people are required to focus on all marginalized groups their victim might be a member of simultaneously? I’ve certainly never heard of such a thing. Bigots I know are generally happy to focus on whatever characteristic it is they’re focusing on and leave the rest alone - for example, picking on a black girl because she’s a woman and not mentioning her blackness - or vice versa, as the situation suits. Notice, incidentally, that I say “bigots” rather than “rednecks,” because it is in any case offensive that Mr. Roberts thinks he knows enough about rednecks to decide in what manner and to what extent they’re “famously” bigoted. No doubt his daily experience in London gives him ample opportunity to study such people in their native environment that he has knows their habits to a level of expertise?

The truth about “rednecks,” and the South in general, actually, is that they are much less racist than television gives them credit for. 40 years ago the South was everything that Mr. Roberts seems to still think it is today. But 40 years ago is a long time - and the intervening 40 years have been nothing if not a time devoted to confronting and remedying the racist past. The South has focused a lot of attention on this problem - and I defy anyone to now plausibly claim that the South continues to be more racist by ANY measure than the rest of the US - or even the UK, for that matter. It’s a bit like the way Germany has become one of the safer places to be a Jew in modern times. There are PLENTY of places in the world where anti-Semitism remains a problem - even to the degree that there is physical danger for Jews travelling there - but Germany just isn’t one of them, and the reason it isn’t one of them is because there is real guilt in Germany over what happened in the 1940s and real commitment to seeing that it doesn’t happen again. That isn’t to say that there aren’t German anti-Semites. Certainly there doesn’t seem to be any trouble getting them on TV. But German culture itself has been struggling with its anti-Semitism quite openly since the late 50s, and succeeding. The South is like that too. It isn’t that it’s hard to find Southern racists - it’s just that it’s not noticeably easier than finding them anywhere else. Stigmatizing “rednecks” as especially racist is, more often than not, merely cover for people from other cultures who don’t like to look the racism in their own towns straight in the eye.

Indeed, I don’t mind saying that something like that is probably what’s going on with Mr. Roberts. Check this bit out:

I don’t mean to say the acting is bad, mind. Several characters are played by actors who can really act. Lafayette the short-order cook (Nelsan Ellis) and the chip-on-shoulder Police Detective Andy Lefleur (played by bobble-faced Chris Bauer, who ran the docker’s union in season two of the incomparable The Wire) are both excellent. As Tara (Sookie’s best friend), Rutina Wesley also does good work, although she is much much too beautiful for the part. She needs, according to the logic of the narrative, to be a regular girl, and to fit neatly into the background spread of players surrounding Sookie; instead of which every scene in which she appears naturally to arrange itself around her, in the way that inevitably happens with unusually beautiful people. Adina Porter makes the best fist she can of the role of Tara’s mother, a part that feels like it was written in about 1924—drunk black woman who rolls her eyes and talks about Jaysus and who has her alcoholism cured by a weird voodoo ceremony that casts out the demon of drink within her. That she retains some pathos, and even believability, as a character says a lot about Porter’s actorly chops.

In other words, 3 of the 4 actors he likes on the show are also the only black ones. Which may just be how the chips fell, for all I know - except that I saw this show too and I can’t really agree here. Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette - sure. That was a standout performance. But Rutina Wesley? Really? Her accent is HORRIBLE - and while it’s true she’s pretty, is she really “unnaturally beautiful?” Anyway - he’s got the point about her being the center of attention wrong too. Tara’s character is most certainly NOT meant to fade into the background. She’s meant to be the kind of person that every scene “naturally wraps itself around” NOT because she’s “unnaturally beautiful,” but rather because she’s an attention-whoring loudmouth. Tara has a massive amount of anger inside (suggested to be supernatural, in fact) and tends to respond disproportionately to any perceived slight. Such people have a way of ending up in the center of things no matter how beautiful they’re not. Finally, I’m not sure which Adina Porter he saw, but the one I saw looked just like the part that feels like it was written in 1924. The character was such a walking stereotype it was painful to watch, and nothing that I saw from this particular actress made it anything other than what it was written to be. I dunno - maybe Mr. Roberts saw something I didn’t - but it sounds more to me like the black actors aren’t held to the same standards - typical of someone fighting racist demons of his own.

But alright - that’s all ad hominem - what of the actual case? Sorry, but I didn’t see any evidence that True Blood was trying to deal with the race issue. If anything, it’s doing just the opposite - baiting people like Mr. Roberts into saying exactly the things he says, but meaning something quite different. The scene where Tara plays the race card to get Jason out of jail was just playing the race card. In the scene with the rednecks who order their burger “hold the AIDS,” they’re not “pointedly” avoiding the race issue - it only seems that way to Mr. Roberts because of his preconceptions about how rednecks should behave. Tara turns down a pass at an all-black party and then turns around and propositions her white manager - clearly showing no hangups about interracial dating (nor, for that matter, does the white manager). Bill’s overreaction to the cop pulling him over is just that - an overreaction - and it even seems out of character as it happens. Failure to dramatize any racial tension therefore seems more like a deliberate choice than an oversight. The authors (”pointedly,” one might say) have no shortage of opportunities to dramatize it - if they meant to do so they surely would’ve gotten around to it. There’s only so lazy even lazy writers can plausibly be!

Other parts of Mr. Roberts’ essay I rather liked. For example - the fact that Bill falls so completely for Sookie IS a bit hard to believe. He’s an order of magnitude older, and there’s just nothing particularly special about Sookie that I can see either. Certainly Anna Paquin’s performance doesn’t help me see it - another point Mr. Roberts gets right. And he accurately characterizes Sookie’s problem as that she ” confuses annoyingness and occasional snarkiness for assertiveness and independence.” The dialogue is indeed “expanded polystyrene” for the most part (with occasional flashes of brilliance the exception that proves the rule).

Unfortunately, none of this makes up for missing the main theme - which he does. And how does an otherwise insightful essay get the main theme so thoroughly wrong? I can only think, for the reasons I’ve outlined, that it’s because he’s thinking with his stereotypes and letting that get in the way of what’s before him on the screen. If anything good comes out of True Blood - let’s hope its that people such as Mr. Roberts come to realize that they’ve been baited on the race issue where the South is concerned, and that the reason they are baited so easily is because of bigotry of their own toward southerners. The “New” in “New South” is more than a tourist ad.