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Heather Havrilesky assesses the questions tackled by Chuck Klosterman in his new book, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined):

If Batman were real, and you knew that a vigilante was killing criminals without due process, would you root for him or want him arrested? What about Bernard Goetz, who became a hero to many New Yorkers in 1985 for stopping four black teenagers from mugging him on the subway (by, uh, shooting them) but who fell out of favor as soon as people figured out he was “weird,” as Klosterman puts it? Why is Batman seen as a hero, when Goetz is seen a villain? Could it all boil down to a strong jaw, black tights and an excellent sports car?

Obviously, it’s more complicated than that. But one thing you can say about Klosterman is that he’s unafraid of complications. In exploring why “the qualities that we value in the unreal (Batman) are somehow verboten in reality (Goetz),” Klosterman analyzes 1) the state of crime in New York City in 1985; 2) the pressures on Goetz after becoming an “overnight” celebrity; 3) the plot of “Death Wish“; 4) that Goetz said, after the shooting, “I wanted to kill those guys”; 5) the subsequent crimes committed by the teenagers in question; 6) Goetz’s alleged history of racist statements; 7) the ways public perceptions of Goetz split down bipartisan lines, 8) Goetz’s habit of sharing his New York City apartment with squirrels; 9) that Batman is cool and can’t be interrogated by reporters.

Once Klosterman has sifted through all these factors and also considered Ted Bundy, French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, sci-fi novelist Norman Spinrad and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,” he finally concludes that, “[t]he reason things unacceptable in life are acceptable in fiction is because fiction is the only way we can comfortably examine the morally obscene.”

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Twenty years after the release of The Firm, Sean Fennessey asks why the legal thriller “has almost completely disappeared from the movies”:

Much has been made in recent years of the loss of the mid-tier adult drama, a category that the 30-to-49-year-old demographic once came out for in relative droves, to see their (beautiful) peers endure pain and loss in the face of love. For all the hand-wringing in Hollywood lamenting the loss of, say, a contemporary Terms of Endearment at the hands of Iron Man 3, the genres that have truly been shed are the legal thriller and its cousins, the erotic thriller (save the occasional Steven Soderbergh or Danny Boyle homage) and the rarely executed comic thriller. …

Fewer big-studio films are in production than have been in decades. It’s never been harder to get the somewhat expensive movies in the middle ground made without fantastical source material. This week, the New York Times reported that the number of employed screenwriters in Hollywood has dropped for a third consecutive year. The superhero economy has boxed out opportunities, to be sure. TV writing gigs, coincidentally, are up. That’s also where you’ll find all the legal thrillers. ABC’s breakout Scandal? Legal thriller. Homeland? Kind of a legal thriller. Castle? Believe it. The Good Wife? You get the picture. Though, harking back to Grisham is likely not the answer. (See: last year’s drab The Firm TV reboot.) Hollywood has long exploited the inefficiencies of storytelling, seizing on the hidden popularities of its stories. There’s room for a revival. Go make some more movie stars, and let them speechify.

Sharan Shetty argues the big-screen courtroom drama is in even worse shape:

The courtroom drama has been subjected to some misguided genre mixing, as in 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which bizarrely used a trial as the framing device for, you guessed it, an exorcism. But even the comical takes that were big hits not that long ago–My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde, for example–have stopped getting made, and a movie like The Lincoln Lawyer, which Fennessey correctly praises, is an exception to the rule. The law film–whether legal thriller or courtroom drama–may make an occasional appearance, but its death sentence, issued some time ago by Hollywood executives, has clearly been passed. You’re more likely to find celebrity-centered courtroom drama outside the silver screen than on it.

“Instruction art” is a way for exhibitions to continue ad infinitum:

Art created from instructions—or the idea that instructions can be a part of the process—has fascinated Hans Ulrich Obrist, a curator, for decades. Instruction art offers the possibility that art can live on through instructions the way that music lives on through compositions. This is the idea behind “Do It”, a concept Mr Obrist came up with, which calls on artists to create instructions for making art. Twelve artists participated in his inaugural “Do It” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Ritter in Austria in 1994. Since then shows of “Do It” art have taken place in cities around the world. More than 250 artists have contributed instructions to the project, including Louise Bourgeois, Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Anna Halprin, Marina Abramovic and others.

To mark the 20th anniversary of “Do It”, Independent Curators International and D.A.P. have released “Do It: The Compendium”, a thick, orange, 448-page manual, like an art recipe book, filled with artists’ instructions and essays. …

Meant to be executed at a gallery, museum, at home—anywhere really—some of the instructions are direct and easy to realise. Ugo Rondinone tells the reader to sit down, “light a cigarette” or not, and look out the window or at a wall until something happens. Ai Weiwei offers directions on how to construct a device that can be used to spray paint on CCTV surveillance cameras. Tracey Emin instructs readers to place 27 bottles of different sizes and colours on a table and then wrap them in a reel of red cotton, “like a strange web that joins them all together”.

Other instructions are more bizarre and conceptual. Maurizio Cattelan, a practical joker in the art world, instructs curators to wear only underwear and shoes to a show’s opening. Ms Abramovic offers a recipe for mixing breast milk with “milk of the sperm” to drink during earthquake nights. Nicholas Hlobo tells an ambitious curator to “install a work of mine on the moon”.  “Most of [the instructions] can in theory be realised,” says Mr Obrist, though he concedes that “some are unlikely to be realised.”

Laura Bennett flags a hilariously overacted Snowden biopic:

She considers the dramatic appeal of whistleblowers:

Some of these characters, while prickly, were redeemed by the moral straightforwardness of their crusade; others were clearly propelled by murkier intentions. Their onscreen treatment reflects the full spectrum of cultural attitudes toward whistleblowers: derision, suspicion, tentative admiration for the sheer commitment to a cause. … From Snowden’s earliest interview there were echoes of [“Enlightened” protagonist] Amy Jellicoe: half prophet, half loose cannon. There was something of Amy’s deluded narcissism in his ridiculous claim that he was going public with his identity so as not to make the story about himself, while the media cloud around him swirled. And like Amy he seemed partly driven by the numbness and the tedium of office life, his own sense of being a drone in the service of evil.

Meanwhile, Brad Plumer charts evidence that people are indeed far more interested in Snowden’s own saga than the programs he revealed:

He adds:

Maybe that’s not too surprising. The Snowden story is, after all, genuinely fascinating — not least after he disappeared into the bowels of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and was then thought to be hiding on the president of Bolivia’s plane (he wasn’t, in turned out). But a few weeks ago, some reporters were worried that the Snowden circus would distract from broader coverage of the NSA’s surveillance programs themselves. “Snowden’s flight and its surrounding geopolitics are a good story; what he made public is a better one,” wrote Ben Smith. And, at least for now, the flight seems to be crowding out everything else.

Recent Dish on Snowden here and here.

In light of the new film I’m So Excited – which makes use of the gay flight attendant trope – Forrest Wickman provides a history of the profession and its relation to gender roles:

When commercial flight first started, the job of the flight attendant was thought to be appropriate only for (presumably straight) men. As Phil Tiemeyer points out in his book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, a new book which proved an invaluable resource for this post, the first flight attendants, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were actually men, and were expected to be traditionally masculine. Since aviation had been associated primarily with war and engineering, it had been considered a man’s industry, and the cabin crew, too, was expected to fit that role.

Because of this, early uniforms for crew and pilots were also often military-inspired, featuring stripes, pilot wings, and caps (some of these elements persist in uniforms today). The work was also often physically demanding, with the crew being asked to help haul luggage and row the passengers into shore from seaplanes. The first flight attendant for Pan Am was a man, Amaury Sanchez, and before the airline advertised stewardesses in miniskirts it advertised itself, in 1933, with “Rodney, the smiling steward.”

However, the responsibilities of the stewards in flight were often more stereotypically feminine—a steward might, for example, lend a hand in changing a diaper—and it was only a few years before it began to be seen as a woman’s job. The woman who broke down the cabin doors was Ellen Church, the first female flight attendant, who had been trained as a pilot but who only found work with Boeing Air Transport (the predecessor to United Airlines) as a stewardess. She was able to convince Boeing to hire her in part because she was also a registered nurse, and soon other airlines also saw nurses as ideal candidates, as long as they were also young, unmarried, and in possession of a dainty figure.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar reflects on the components of a successful movie comedy:

Timing in comedy is not like rational time. When the actor gives his reply, he hasn’t had the physical or mental time to assimilate the previous line, but he has to deliver his reply at full speed. No one is going to wonder if he’s understood what was being said to him. If the audience does wonder, it’s a bad sign. Within comedy, the style that teaches you about rhythm (as do all of Woody Allen’s films, but I think that’s because the New York director is in a hurry) is screwball, the crazy American comedy.

Think of Midnight (Mitchell Leisen), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks), Ninotchka (Billy Wilder), The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges), To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch), Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen), Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges), or in general any comedy where the comeback is delivered by Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, or Katherine Hepburn. …

Timing. Rapid-fire dialogue. Rehearsals. Otherwise, even though the situations are funny, and the actors excellent and with resources, the film becomes long and so do the scenes. I don’t want to point the finger, but one example of this problem is Bridesmaids. The director lets the actresses improvise until they come up with the right joke. You shouldn’t improvise in front of the camera. It should happen long beforehand. To crown it all, both the editor and the director are in love with the actresses and the material shot. The result is an attractive film, but one that lasts 125 minutes; it is saved because Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are wonderful comedians.

Update from a reader:

God, Pedro Almodóvar is so enormously full of crap. He has taken the entirety of comedic cinema and defined what is “good” according to an arbitrary speed value supported by nothing more than “here are a select group of movies that I like.”  He then dismisses Bridesmaids, a fantastic movie by the way, as saved only by great comediennes.  Is he so enamored with his deeply flawed thesis that he can’t see that these two great comediennes have … wait for it … comedic timing that stands in stark and wonderful contrast to his narrow preferences?

Look, I loved the West Wing, but I could never immerse myself in it to the point where I could quiet my discomfort with the obvious falseness in dialogue.  To put it bluntly: no one talks like that! No one! And yet Pedro thinks that everyone in comedy movies should speak in that ludicrous rapid fire, beyond human comprehension manner.  His preferences are precisely why I am ambivalent towards so much classic cinema: a forced and artificial depiction of human conversation nearly unrecognizable by those of us who actual talk to other people.

Rich Juzwiak gleans some interesting insight on the subject through his conversations with four guys who have sex with both men and women – but who don’t necessarily consider themselves bi. From his profile of “Allen”:

When we first met, he wasn’t entirely open. When he refused to kiss me on the mouth, I joked that he was acting like a whore in Pretty Woman. “What’s that?” he asked. He is, after all, 19. “Kissing men kind of skeeves me out a little bit,” he explained. “I would be completely fine blowing someone over making out with him. It’s just one of those little tweaks I guess. I just don’t like kissing guys.

Yet, I should say. I know one day I will. It’s the whole transitional thing again.”

Allen is out to his family and friends in college. He says that they didn’t have a hard time accepting him. If anything, the hardest time has been had by Allen, as he accepts their acceptance. “I’m really comfortable with the situation, but it’s new so I’m insecure about it,” he says, having come out a little over a year ago. “I have no problem telling people I’m bisexual or I like guys, but I’m not used to being called bi or gay. When people say that, I still get a little defensive about it.”

So is he gay or what? “Gay and bisexual are just labels,” he told me. “People are people. I don’t really like the whole label thing. I think when you label someone gay, straight, or bi, you’re judging them. It’s just people. People are people. Your sexuality doesn’t make you who you are.”

He finds sex with women to be a “more emotional” experience, and with men, sex is more physical. (“Guys just need a release, really.”) “I don’t really run into many vers[atile] guys,” he said. “I think more people should be vers, it’s a lot funner. More people should be bisexual, it’s a lot funner.”

Rich also pens a postscript about Allen and his Pretty Woman hangup.

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A reader writes:

Simple question: How many American liberals, especially the knee-jerk doctrinaire folks, have ever googled “European abortion laws” and spent more than five minutes researching the results? I’m constantly gobsmacked by the vehemence of pro-choice left in this country, and the support they receive from traditional media.  If anything, I’d draw a direct parallel between them and the right-wing pro-gun crowd. Yes, some slopes are slippery on occasion, but those two sects seem to live in a world where anything and everything ends in tyranny, patriarchy, powerlessness, damnation, or worse. Whatever happened to legitimate compromise on fundamental social issues?

Another quotes a previous reader:

Obama is clearly no leftist. In the last five years, which might as well be the last 20, I find it very difficult to find even a single issue where I – a dyed in the wool, Greenpeace-supporting, union-dues-paying leftist – can look at the actions of the Democratic party and applaud.

And I say THANK GOD!

The sentiments expressed by this reader were killing the Democratic party and needed to go. I find it odd that this reader takes Obama to task as no leftist, and yet we now have near-universal healthcare in this country, a goal of liberals for close to 70 years.  This reader honestly doesn’t applaud that?

The problem with this kind of thinking is it is so enamoured of itself and its righteousness that it can’t get out of its own way to actaully change something – hell, anything. Clinton had the good fortune of presiding over a booming economy and his centrist ways allowed him to not fuck it up. Obama has presided over a terrible economy against the ruthless liars and fools that make up the GOP today, and yet his centrist ways have allowed him to effect more change than any Democratic president in recent memory that I can think of.

Well, Maggie and K-Lo are calling last week a new Roe. Unconvincingly. I’ve been more struck by the far right’s fatalism, silence and identity politics victimology. David Link believes that the “shift back to abortion for the old guard of the GOP is some evidence that this cultural shift on same-sex marriage is taking hold”:

Less than two days after the ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals took the final step to permit same-sex marriages again in California, and while a very few of the usual suspects showed their faces to television cameras at the subsequent marriages throughout the state, there are no signs of outrage among the voters whose will was thwarted.

Opposition to same-sex marriage is different from opposition to abortion. There is a real and substantial moral question with abortion: At what point does human life begin? In the 40 years since Roe, that moral question has remained alive and vibrant, and the constitutional argument about abortion has seldom flagged. Moral feelings about abortion start strong and tend to stay strong.

Not so for same-sex marriage, where moral feelings may have started strong, but have weakened substantially over time.

A reader quotes me:

Does this mean gay male couples should publicly challenge the social norm of monogamy? I don’t believe so. What we can do – and what some straight couples do – is contain the details of our relationships to one another. It’s called discretion.

I know you’re a conservative, and you’re framing this as a conservative stance. But as a woman in an open marriage, I think you’d really be doing us girls a solid by going ahead and challenging the social norm of monogamy. Monogamy is part of a larger set of stories that we tell women about how their desire works that are not particularly true because we want to control them.

My experience closely follows the experiences and ideas laid out in some newer books that take on female desire, including What Women Want and Sex at Dawn. My actual desire has an almost inverse relationship to the stereotypes and norms and expectations that surround me. I am visually stimulated. I get attracted to lots of different kinds of things. I walk around feeling kind of sexy all day long on most days. I crave casual sex. And most importantly, I need novelty, or my libido tanks.

Like a number of the women profiled in What Women Want, I did not have a very honest relationship to my sexuality for a long time. I assumed that I need romance and companionship in order to want sex, that I should therefore want my husband – and that if I don’t, I must not like sex. I’ve figured out how to listen to what I actually want, rather than what society tells me I want. And my conservative counterargument is that my marriage is stronger and more meaningful because I cat around.

My real issue, though, is with discretion.

If this were just about me and my pleasure, then discretion would be appropriate. But we control women by diminishing their sexuality, and this hurts! It is actively disempowering to feel as separated from your own desire as most women in our culture feel. It is terribly diminishing to assume that you’re messed up/frigid/broken because you don’t want to have sex with someone you love anymore.

Sex is social – this is why you talk about it so much on your blog! As a gay man, you live in a world where everybody gets the privilege of being straightforward about desire. Women, on the other hand, are charged with this impossible task of simultaneously inhabiting two social sexual spheres: the one that affirms your desire, in which short skirts or red lipstick are expected and rewarded because they signify sex, and the one that denies your desire, in which you are inexplicably expected to be wearing that lipstick for the same person that you regularly fart in front of.

Challenging monogamy challenges this double standard. Women deserve this!