Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 201

No Charges in the Shooting of Jamar Clark

Yet another highly scrutinized police shooting has ended without charges for police. Mike Freeman, the prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota, announced Wednesday he had decided not to charge officers who mortally wounded Jamar Clark in Minneapolis in November.

Police responded to a domestic-violence call on November 15, 2015, and ended up shooting Clark while trying to apprehend the 24-year-old black man. They said he was interfering with their work. The incident happened across the street from an Elks Lodge, so there were several witnesses. Some of them said Clark had been handcuffed when he was shot. While there was some cellphone video of the incident, no publicly revealed film showed clearly what happened.

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How Did Jamar Clark Die?

Freeman, in announcing his decision on Wednesday, said the evidence did not support charging Officers Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze, because their actions were justified. “Schwarze reasonably believed that if Clark had succeeded in removing his firearm from his holster, Clark would have shot both officers as well as exposing third parties to danger of injury by firearm,” Freeman’s report states. He also said Clark was not handcuffed at the time of the incident and was reaching for one of the officers’ guns.

The StarTribune summarizes:

Officers told Clark to put his hands in his pockets and he wouldn’t. Officer Mark Ringgenberg put his gun back in the holster and grabbed Clark’s right wrist. Officer Dustin Schwarze grabbed Clark’s other arm and dropped the handcuffs while trying to cuff him. Ringgenberg then tried a takedown move and they both fell to the ground and Ringgenberg’s back was to Clark’s stomach. Ringgenberg felt his gun go from his hip to the small of his back. Ringgenberg reached back and felt Clark’s hand on his gun. He repeatedly told Schwarze: “He’s got my gun, he’s got my gun.’

Schwarze unholstered his gun, put it to Clark’s face, and demanded he drop the gun. Clark reportedly responded, “I’m ready to die.” Schwarze pulled the trigger twice, but the pistol’s slide caught the first time.

Clark’s death set off a round of protests in the Twin Cities, where relations between African Americans and the police were already frayed after racially tinged incidents. The department had paid out a staggering $14 million in misconduct suits, but inquiries had seldom held officers accountable. After Clark’s shooting, activists staged occupations outside police stations, and in one incident five Black Lives Matter demonstrators were shot by apparent counter-protesters.

Freeman’s decision is unlikely to spell the end of the case. Protests are already planned for Wednesday afternoon.

But activists had also demanded that officials release video from the incident that might offer insight into what happened. Freeman’s report states that prosecutors reviewed many videos. A camera at the Elks Lodge, which it was thought might provide a useful angle, turned out to be nonfunctional. Freeman released five videos from ambulance cameras. One shows some of the struggle between Clark and the two officers, but doesn’t clearly capture the shooting.

Freeman also released various other videos, most of which are viewable on YouTube. Hennepin laid out the evidence and his rationale in a 24-page report.

Even as the video was being shown at Freeman’s news conference, activists objected. In footage from the conference, voices can be heard crying out as the tape rolls that Clark was not resisting arrest. Minneapolis NAACP president Nekima Levy-Pounds criticized Freeman for adopting the police’s view, the Strib reports.

The DA previously won praise from activists for his decision a few days ago to decide on charges himself rather than bring the case to a grand jury, citing the opacity and lack of accountability in the grand-jury process. Grand juries have failed to produce indictments in several of the most high-profile police violence cases, including the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice.

Shakespeare’s 21st-Century Makeover

How do you create images that encapsulate William Shakespeare’s plays? For years, the answer was to slap a picture of the Bard or a staid Renaissance-era painting on book covers and call it a day. But in the late 20th-century, publishers started to mix it up, hiring design giants to lend their individual styles to the book covers of each new edition of his plays. The graphic designer Milton Glaser’s Shakespeare covers look artfully half-finished, a combination of black line and brilliant color; the British artist David Gentleman worked on his cartoonish wood engravings for nearly a decade; the Italian artist Riccardo Vecchio created dynamic color-block illustrations for editions in the late-’90s.

Still, it’s time for an update. The first volumes of the Pelican Shakespeare’s latest iteration, which hit bookshelves this week, are bold and very different from their more traditional predecessors. Designed by the 24-year-old Indian-born artist Manuja Waldia, each new cover features a single graphic icon, interpreting works including Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet through a contemporary, minimalist lens. Waldia brings a design sensibility shaped by the clean-lines aesthetic of the digital world to centuries-old classics: Inspired by modern imagery—app icons, street signs, maps, statistical visualizations—as well as ancient symbols like hieroglyphics, she translates Shakespeare’s work into the visual language of the 21st century.

Manuja Waldia / Penguin

The challenge when it comes to designing Shakespeare book covers lies in creating images that encapsulate the essence of each story for new readers, while also offering returners the chance to see something new in the old text. Waldia told me that distilling each play’s characters, plot, and themes into a single image was like fitting together puzzle pieces. Her cover for Macbeth, for instance, is an abstraction composed of symbols: A tiara pours blood onto a nobleman’s crown to signify Lady Macbeth’s influence on her husband’s bloody motives, while a crossed scepter and dagger nod toward the intersection of violence and power.

Manuja Waldia / Penguin

Paul Buckley, Penguin’s executive creative director, said he chose Waldia for the commission because her clean, linear style effectively offers a new visual spin on the Bard’s timeless stories.

“It amazes me how very easy it is to be so distinctive with material we all have built-in ideas of,” he says. “When you find a mashup that should be so wrong but comes out so right—that’s what art can do with material you thought you knew.”

The cover for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which will be released this summer (Manuja Waldia / Penguin)

The new covers speak to the ongoing efforts over centuries to better understand and appreciate Shakespeare. My colleague Megan Garber recently reported that the scholar David Crystal is introducing Shakespeare readers to the plays’ original pronunciation in order to help readers understand their myriad layers of puns. Waldia’s hope is that her work can offer a different degree of illumination.

“The Bard’s influence reaches far and wide and we want these covers to resonate with the whole spectrum of his fans,” Waldia says. “Sure, formats and presentations are tweaked to resonate with modern audiences, but it’s still all Shakespeare at the core.”

Changes to Newark's Troubled Police Department

The U.S. Department of Justice and New Jersey’s largest city, Newark, announced a settlement Wednesday that would correct the excessive use of force, as well as what the federal government described as illegal and discriminatory policing practices, by the city’s police department.

The settlement is the result of an 2011 investigation, and the findings of a 2014 Justice Department report, which, among other things, said 75 percent of the time, Newark police had murky or insufficient legal reasons for stopping people; black residents bore the brunt of these unlawful stops; police used excessive force; and that Newark’s gang and drug units stole personal property from people.

The terms of the settlement––which will be overseen by former New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey––will bring changes to the police department’s search and seizure policies, train officers to use de-escalation techniques rather than force, and will require officers to wear body cameras. It also forces the police department to collect information on stops and arrests to prevent race-based, discriminatory policing, and creates a civilian oversight committee. The changes were announced by Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

The complaint that led to the Justice Department investigation was brought originally by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. The organization’s executive director, Udi Ofer, called the settlement “50 years in the making”—especially the enactment of a civilian oversight committee, which Newark residents had asked for after the 1967 riots in the city.

Newark is diverse––about 53 percent black, and 34 percent Latino––and the Justice Department said that in “high crime areas” police frequently stopped people for no reason, and essentially made “living or simply being in a high-crime area” an offense. In one case the report cited, officers stopped and questioned two people hailing a cab for no reason except that they matched a description of a robbery suspect––they were black, male, 15- to 20 years old, and wearing dark clothing. In another case the Justice Department cited, police stopped a man after he’d been reading a newspaper in his car. He then got out and paced, “acting agitated.”

This type of action—which is called “stop-and-frisk” policing (The Atlantic wrote about it in depth in its April 2014 issue)—is meant to prevent crime through a constant reminder that officers are watching. It’s come under much scrutiny––especially in New York––because so often officers focus their force on poor, black and Latino neighborhoods. As was the case in Newark.

The Justice Department report found that 80 percent of the department’s stops were of black people. If you were black and lived in Newark, the report said, you had a 2.5 times greater chance of being stopped.

“This undeniable experience of being disproportionately affected by the NPD’s unconstitutional policing helps explain the community distrust and cynicism that undermines effective policing in Newark,” the report said.

The settlement follows similar agreements reached in Miami this February, and in Ferguson, Missouri, earlier this month.

In its 2014 report, the Justice Department pointed out Newark had adopted a system that would have allowed it to track arrests based on race, but the city chose not to include race as part of its record keeping. The department called the decision “unusual, and at odds with sound policing practices, for a police department in a major city, especially one with such diversity.”

Two weeks ago, the Newark City Council voted to put in place a civilian complaint review board, which, per the agreement, is required. Ofer, the ACLU executive director, said Newark’s civilian oversight committee will have “real teeth,” because it’ll have the power to subpoena and audit the police department’s data, so it can review patterns of racism and enforcement disparities.

“We believe that when it’s finally implemented,” Ofer said, “it could be a model for the rest of the nation.”

Right to Life and a Case of Mistaken Identity

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of Britain’s decision not to charge police officers who shot and killed a Brazilian electrician in 2005 after mistaking him for a terrorism suspect.

In its ruling Wednesday, the court, in a 13-to-4 decision, ruled Britain had not violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which covers the right to life. A cousin to Jean Charles de Menezes, the 27-year-old electrician who was killed, had complained to the court that Britain “had not fulfilled its duty to ensure the accountability of its agents for his death.” A British investigation into de Menezes in 2009 resulted in no charges being filed against the officers who killed him.

“The decision not to prosecute any individual officer was not due to any failings in the investigation or the State’s tolerance of or collusion in unlawful acts,” the European court ruled on Wednesday. “Rather, it was due to the fact that, following a thorough investigation, a prosecutor had considered all the facts of the case and concluded that there was insufficient evidence against any individual officer to prosecute.”

On July 7, 2005, suicide attacks on London’s public-transportation system killed 56 people. Then, on July 21, two weeks later, unexploded bombs were found on three London Underground trains and one unexploded device was found on a London bus. London, already reeling from the attacks, was on edge. Police feared a suicide bomber might try—and succeed—in targeting the city’s public- transportation system.

Enter de Menezes.

On July 22, a day later, the Brazilian electrician left for work from his home in London and made his way, eventually, to Stockwell Underground station. Two terrorism suspects lived at the same address as de Menezes and were being watched by police. But the officers, seeing de Menezes emerge from the address, assumed he was one of the suspects (one of the officers later said he was convinced de Menezes was their man because he had “Mongolian eyes.”). The officers followed him as he made his way to Stockwell station. Here’s how The Telegraph described what happened next: “The armed officers followed him onto a Northern line train, pinned him down and shot him seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.” They avoided his chest, it later emerged, because they feared de Menezes was wearing a suicide vest, which might explode upon impact.

De Menezes died on the scene.

The next day, July 23, Metropolitan Police acknowledged de Menezes was not carrying explosives and wasn’t connected in any way to the attempted bombings of July 21. They called his killing “a tragedy.”

Britain’s Independent Police Complaints Commission said de Menezes’s death was caused by a series of avoidable mistakes, and it identified a number of possible criminal offenses the officers involved might have committed. British prosecutors concluded no charges would be brought because the officers didn’t stand a realistic prospect of conviction. But prosecutors did charge the Metropolitan Police with breaching health and safety laws—a charge that led to an approximately $252,000 fine. De Menezes’s family reached a separate settlement with the department.

De Menezes’s cousin brought the case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, in 2008. But it was heard for the first time only in June 2015. The cousin maintained that Britain had violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court disagreed.

“The facts of this case are tragic,” , “but the government considers that the court has upheld the important principle that individuals are only prosecuted where there is a realistic prospect of conviction.”

The End of the Plan to Strip French Terrorists of Their Citizenship

A measure proposed in France in the aftermath of last November’s terrorist attacks that prompted vocal support, ardent opposition, passionate debate, the resignation of a Cabinet minister, and which was being watched worldwide for its potential implications is now dead.

President Francois Hollande, a Socialist, dropped the plan to strip some French militants convicted of terrorism of their citizenship. Also gone is a proposal to expand emergency powers. Both measures would have required changes to France’s Constitution.

“Parts of the opposition have been hostile to a revision of the Constitution,” after a weekly Cabinet meeting. “I deplore this attitude. I have decided to end this debate.”

The measures were proposed in the wake of the November 13 attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. France was shocked not only because it was the second major terrorist attack on Paris in a year—in January, gunmen targeted Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical publication, and a Jewish supermarket, killing 20 people—but also because many of those who carried out the attacks were French citizens. ISIS claimed responsibility for both attacks. In response, Hollande proposed sweeping changes to enhance security, including the measure to strip some convicted terrorists of their citizenship and expanded emergency powers.

Although the measures had support in the aftermath of the deadly attacks, the debate quickly became heated. Critics pointed to history when the French citizenship of Jews and members of the Resistance was stripped by the wartime Vichy government. Legal experts, on the other hand, pointed out that international treaty obligations prevent states from stripping people of the citizenships if it makes them stateless. France had signed this treaty, but hadn’t ratified it. To get around this, the French government proposed stripping only those convicted terrorists who possessed dual citizenship of their citizenship. This, critics pointed out, would largely target the children of Muslim immigrants to France, and in essence would create a two-tier citizenship in a country that prides itself on its liberté, égalité, and fraternité. As Heather Horn explained in The Atlantic: “It’s not hard to understand why some on the left, including anti-racism activists, are so angry: Why should someone of North African descent, who’s been a French citizen all his life, have a less durable claim to citizenship than his white multi-generational French neighbor if they both get involved in terrorist activities?”

That wasn’t all. Although the French proposals were powerful, they were merely symbolic. France, as a member of the European Union, has an open-borders policy with fellow members of the bloc. Stripping convicted French terrorists of their citizenship, critics of the proposal argued, would do nothing to prevent  militants from other European countries from entering, plotting, and carrying out attacks inside France. Indeed, many of the attackers in November were French-speaking Muslims who were Belgian citizens.

In the end, it’s these sorts of questions that couldn’t be resolved by France’s two houses of parliament. France’s National Assembly, the lower house, removed the reference to dual nationality when it approved the bill. The Senate, the upper house, restored the language. The debate played out in the French government with Christiane Taubira, who, like Hollande, is a leftist, resigned in January from her post as justice minister in protest against the measures.

In the end, Hollande’s decision Wednesday suggested the proposed constitutional changes didn't have the required three-fifths support in both chambers of Parliament.

“A compromise,” the president said, “appears out of reach.”

The Forgotten Female Action Stars of the 1910s

A city editor orders an armed female reporter to chase down a con man and “get the story.” A railroad telegrapher seeks vigilante-style justice against two robbers who attacked her. An adventure-seeking heiress outruns a giant boulder Indiana Jones-style … decades before Harrison Ford was ever born.

In the current movie landscape, female action heroes tend to be so few and far between that their mere existence seems like an accomplishment (think: Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, Rey in Star Wars, or the four stars of the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot). But more than a century ago, before women had even won the right to vote in many countries, actresses headed up some of the U.S’s most popular and successful action movies—even if they performed stunts in skirts that ended only a few inches above their ankles.

During the early years of cinema in the 1900s and 1910s, men starred in action films such as westerns, but women dominated the so-called “serial” or “chapter” film genre. These were movies in which the same character appeared over several installments released on a regular basis, with plots that were either ongoing or episodic. The story lines typically featured female leads getting into danger, getting out of danger, brandishing guns, giving chase in cars, and battling villains. The film scholar Ben Singer estimates that between 1912 and 1920, about 60 action serials with female protagonists were released, totaling around 800 episodes.

What’s most striking about the category, Singer says, is its “extraordinary emphasis on female heroism.” Protagonists exhibited traditionally “masculine” qualities like “physical strength and endurance, self-reliance, courage, social authority, and the freedom to explore novel experiences outside the domestic sphere.” Then, by the early 1920s, those films and their stars, the so-called “serial queens,” disappeared.

What happened? The answer may have to do with the early film industry’s short-lived tolerance of greater female involvement at all levels of the filmmaking process—a phenomenon that helps explain why today, even after women have shattered so many cultural barriers, action movies still continue to be dominated by male stars.

An image from the 1914 book version of the serial The Adventures of Kathlyn (Wikimedia)

To understand what happened in the 1910s, it’s necessary to put the emergence of the serial film into context. During this period, two film formats jostled for dominance: what we’d now call “shorts” and “features.” But short films weren’t labeled as “short” at the time—they were simply the industry standard, and were usually described by their length (in number of reels). Features, meanwhile, were the newcomers, with higher production values, more ambitious plots, and greater production costs. Serials were something of a bridge between the two formats. Each episode in a serial was the length of a 15- or 20-minute short film, but over several weeks, a serial could tell a more complicated story.  

Serials focused on women action heroes from the start, possibly thanks to the format’s tie-ins with magazines and newspapers, which aimed to draw female readers because they were attractive to advertisers. In 1912, Thomas Edison’s film company teamed up with Ladies’ World magazine to put one of the earliest instances of a serial film, What Happened to Mary?, into print. This example of cross-promotion would continue as other “chapter films” were serialized in newspapers. The Chicago Tribune printed the story of The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) while the film episodes played in theaters. (Incidentally, Kathlyn was the first film serial to have a narrative thread that continued from week to week instead of relying on the same leading character to provide cohesiveness.)

Why do the 2010s lag behind the 1910s in terms of a robust body of films with female action leads?

The focus on heroines seems also to correlate with the film industry’s fascination with the “New Woman.” “She wore less restrictive clothes,” the film curator Eileen Bowser notes, “she was active, she went everywhere she wanted, and she was capable of resolving mysteries.” The proliferation of women in all areas of the film industry during the 1910s—not just as actors, but as screenwriters, theater managers, gossip columnists, film producers, and directors—reflected the increasing number of women in the American workplace, and also the efforts of the vocal and energetic women’s suffrage movement. It’s important to note however, that the abundance of serial-queen films in the 1910s wasn’t caused by women producers or directors pushing for them; the female stars of these movies often provided ideas and sometimes directed, but for the most part, serial films were written and directed by men.

In 1914, a breakout year for the category, the actress Mary Fuller played a daring reporter in The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies. The same year, Grace Cunard appeared in Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery, which was billed as the “Most Sensational Series of Pictures Ever Produced … AEROPLANES—LION—TIGERS—CANNIBALS—SHIPWRECKS …” Also in 1914, Pearl White, perhaps the best-remembered serial queen of all, made headlines as the fearless heiress Pauline Marvin in The Perils of Pauline, and Helen Holmes began her stint as the brave railroad telegrapher in The Hazards of Helen, which went on to become the longest-running serial, with 119 episodes over six years.

Helen Gibson in a 1916 episode of The Hazards of Helen (Wikimedia)

A clip from a 1916 episode of The Hazards of Helen exemplifies the heroism on display in “serial-queen” films. In it, Holmes, the railway telegrapher, battles vagrants, who’ve caused her to lose her job, atop a moving train. She spies them from a distance, makes her way across beams suspended above the tracks, jumps onto the moving train, grapples hand-to-hand with one of her antagonists and falls into the water with him. In the end, she gets her job back.

Perils of Pauline, which established White as one of the era’s most popular stars, features a different kind of bravery: one in which the lead character pursues her explorations to the point where she has to be rescued—usually by her beau, Harry. Over the course of the series, White (in the title role) is set adrift in a hot-air balloon and kidnapped on horseback by bandits. In an episode titled The Goddess of the Far West, Pauline charges down a steep hill to avoid being crushed by a massive boulder hurtling behind her, like Indiana Jones would do in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark nearly 70 years later.

Harry lassoes her out of the way in the nick of time. But make no mistake, it’s Pauline, not Harry, who carries the show. Although she’s bound and gagged and subjected to every sort of danger, her agility, resourcefulness, and strength are constantly on display as she runs, jumps, tumbles, fights off villains, or burrows her way out of a cave. The challenges she faces are the result of her own desire to push the boundaries, and she returns in each episode, unharmed and eager for her next adventure.

Though these serial queens are rarely remembered today, in their time, actresses such as Grace Cunard, Gene Gauntier, Ruth Roland, and Kathlyn Williams all boasted their own devoted followings. White’s enthusiastic audience of all ages and genders voted her as one of their top three favorite actresses from 1916 to 1918 in a Motion Picture magazine survey. Her fandom was also global: She was particularly beloved in France where she was seen as the incarnation of the “athletic, good-natured young American girl,” and she inspired spin-offs as far away as India, where the actress known as “Fearless Nadia” channeled “Fearless, Peerless Pearl” in her movies for the producer Homi Wadia.

Unfortunately, the celebrity of White and her cohorts would be short-lived. Serials like The Romance of Elaine and A Daughter of Uncle Sam adapted to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 by introducing plotlines featuring German saboteurs and spies as villains, with women starring in patriotic roles. But by 1919, after the war had ended and women had won the vote, serials and their female stars faded from popularity. The action heroine didn’t really make the transition to features. Or if she did, then as now, it was only in sporadic titles.

The challenges Pauline faces are the result of her own desire to push the boundaries, and she returns in each episode, unharmed and eager for her next adventure.

World War I also sparked a seismic transformation in the American film industry. Previously, the United States had been just one of several nations that produced and exported films. While the war crippled its European competitors, the U.S. film industry, now firmly based in Hollywood, succeeded in flooding foreign markets with its product. Movie-making became a big American business, and expensive-to-make features were Hollywood’s calling card.

Serial films were, like short films, demoted to a cheaper, less prestigious B-genre. The once-plentiful mom-and-pop production companies couldn’t compete with new studios that could finance and distribute large slates of lavish features, and serial queens, along with a legion of female directors and producers, also found themselves out of work. By the late 1920s, the movie business, which had once been relatively welcoming to women at all levels of the filmmaking process, now relegated them to only a few behind-the-camera roles, such as screenwriter or costume designer. Those who directed, like Dorothy Arzner in the late 1920s to the early 1940s, were in the minority, and no women headed major studios.

As movies became big business, filmmaking became more of a boy’s club, and women were pushed to the sidelines, with their disempowerment behind the camera reflected by female characters’ shift away from action roles. This persists to some extent today, even though, as movies like last year’s Mad Max and Melissa McCarthy’s Spy or the Hunger Games franchise show us, there’s certainly an audience out there for female-driven action movies.

So why do the 2010s lag behind the 1910s in terms of a robust body of films with female action leads? No doubt, industry experts could pull out a formula filled with box-office returns to explain and justify this. But perhaps looking to the past provides an equally compelling, if less intuitive, answer—that when women flourish in all aspects of the filmmaking process as they did during the early days of the business, when the current massive gender imbalance in the industry is corrected across the board, the conditions will be ripe for female action heroes to once again take over the big screen.

How Many Bernie Backers Would Refuse to Vote for Hillary Clinton?

Susan Sarandon is like a lot of Bernie backers: She finds the Vermont senator to be a paragon of probity, doesn’t totally trust Hillary Clinton, and she’s upset about the status quo in the United States, which she fears Clinton would perpetuate.

Unlike most Bernie backers, Sarandon is an Oscar winner who owns a chain of ping-pong lounges. But it turns out those are not the only ways she is atypical.

Sarandon appeared on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show Tuesday night, where she made her case for Sanders, citing his record on free trade, prisons, genetically modified foods, and more. Hayes pointed out that elections are choices, and asked whether she would vote for Clinton in a general election matchup against Donald Trump.

“I think Bernie would probably encourage people [to vote Clinton], because he doesn’t have a lot of ego in this,” she said. “But I think a lot of people are, ‘Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to do that.’” As for herself, “I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens.”

“Really?” an incredulous Hayes asked.

“Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately,” she replied.

Hayes accused her of adopting “the Leninist model of ‘heighten the contradictions,’” and she happily agreed. Isn’t that dangerous, he wondered?

“If you think it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo,” she said.

There are a variety of critiques one could level of Sarandon’s argument. If you’re interested in sampling them, simply look at Twitter, where many users took issue with Sarandon’s strategy while others simply posted GIFs of the closing scene from Sarandon’s Thelma and Louise. (Spoiler alert, I guess, but c’mon.) Suffice it to say that in terms of risky political strategies, whatever you think of the status quo, it’s hard to imagine that a violent revolution would do much to solve the country’s problems, as other nations that have experienced constitutional crises can attest. (There’s a reason Sanders is pushing for “revolution” through the ballot box and not other means.)

Setting aside the polemic, however, is Sarandon especially representative? Polls consistently show Clinton leading Sanders nationally, and more votes have been cast for her in the primary so far. In a tight election, though, a bloc of Democrats who refused to vote for Clinton or crossed over could cost her a win. Are there really “a lot” of people who support Sanders now but who, given a choice between Clinton and Trump, would either sit on their hands or pull the lever for Trump?

The answer is almost certainly no.

For example, take a Quinnipiac poll released last week. In that poll, 78 percent of Democrats said they had a favorable view of Sanders. But 80 percent had a favorable view of Clinton. Now, more had an unfavorable view of Clinton than of Sanders—15 to 9—but that doesn’t suggest there’s a huge groundswell of anti-Clinton Democrats.

The latest CBS News/New York Times poll suggests something similar. There’s a definite enthusiasm gap between Clinton and Sanders. Forty percent of Democrats said they were “enthusiastic” about a Sanders candidacy, versus just 34 percent who felt the same way about Clinton. But add in the number who say they’d be satisfied with Clinton and the gap shrinks to almost nothing: 81 percent would be enthusiastic or satisfied with Sanders, while 79 percent feel the same way about Clinton. (And that’s with a +/-4.5 percent sampling error.)

The Republican Party is encountering a parallel dynamic with the #NeverTrump movement, but it looks far more real. In the same CBS/NYT poll, a full 20 percent of Republicans said they’d be actively dissatisfied with a Trump candidacy, and 35 percent said they’d want a Republican to run as a third-party candidate against him in a general election. Other surveys have found even higher totals. Some political scientists maintain, based on past experience, that many of these people will rally around the eventual nominee even if it’s Trump, thanks to the polarized partisan climate.

In any case, there’s no polling to suggest any such groundswell on the Democratic side. Of course, you don’t have to go very far back to remember something akin to what Sarandon is describing in the Democratic Party—but last time around, it was in support of Clinton, not against her. The PUMAs (“People United Means Action” or, by some accounts, “Party Unity My Ass”) were such diehard Clinton supporters that they flatly refused to support the upstart Barack Obama eight years ago. So how did that turn out in 2008? Obama cruised to victory with the highest popular vote total in U.S. history, and a nearly 10 million vote lead over Senator John McCain. Sarandon is feeling the Bern, but perhaps there’s more heat than light to her claims about Sandersistas sitting 2016 out.

Brazil’s Deepening Political Crisis

The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), Brazil’s largest political party, has left the ruling coalition, raising the odds that President Dilma Rousseff will be impeached.  

The centrist party’s decision to quit the government immediately, a step that was taken Tuesday at the party’s national leadership meeting in Brasilia, came a day after Tourism Minister Henrique Eduardo Alves, a PMDB leader, said he was resigning from Rousseff’s Cabinet.

David Fleischer, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Brasilia, told Bloomberg that PMDB’s departure may spur other coalition members to follow suit.

“The PMDB leaving is a big game change,” he told Bloomberg. “This makes her impeachment much more likely.”

The Brazilian opposition is pushing to impeach Rousseff on allegations she doctored fiscal accounts to help her re-election in 2014. She denies those charges. But with the PMDB’s departure, the Senate is likely to suspend Rousseff as early as May. If this happens, she will be replaced by Vice President Michel Temer, who heads the PMDB, while the Senate decides whether Rousseff should be removed permanently.

Bloomberg adds that Temer “hasn’t publicly opposed the president and didn’t participate in Tuesday’s meeting. Yet he is, in fact, one of the intellectual authors behind the strategy to split from the government, according to a person briefed on the discussion.”

Reuters adds:

Temer aides said the vice president is ready to take over and move fast to restore business confidence in Brazil, in an effort to pull the economy out of a tailspin. Brazilian media reported over the weekend that a team of Temer aides is drawing up a plan for his first weeks as president.

Brazil's stocks and currency rose Monday on the prospect of Rousseff's removal. Many blame her for running Latin America's largest economy into the ground, while Temer is widely viewed as far more business friendly.

The impeachment scandal is merely one of several that Rousseff is battling. Far bigger, as we previously reported, is the Petrobras scandal, which has ensnared some of Brazil’s biggest political and business leaders, raised questions about Rousseff, and cast a shadow over the legacy of her mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whom she succeeded as president. Rousseff is also under fire ahead of the upcoming Summer Olympics in Rio and the fears raised by the Zika virus.

How Amazon Made the Leap to Cannes

The news that Woody Allen’s new movie Café Society will open the 2016 Cannes Film Festival is hardly shocking. It’ll be his 14th film to screen out of competition at the festival, and the third to open it, after Hollywood Ending and Midnight in Paris. But for all that, a milestone is still being set: Café Society will be the first Amazon film to occupy that coveted position, the beginning of what should be a make-or-break year for the streaming studio, as it looks to establish itself as a major player in the indie-film world along with its online competitor Netflix.

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Not much is known about Café Society, other than that it’s a 1930s Hollywood-set comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, and apparently required a $30 million budget because of its period trappings. That’s where Amazon comes in. The studio paid a reported sum of $20 million to secure the rights to the film, helping to offset its costs while shutting out traditional independent distributors. Last year, Amazon released Spike Lee’s satirical comedy Chi-Raq, and in the coming months it’ll feature films from established directors like Allen, Whit Stillman, and Kenneth Lonergan. So far, theaters (and viewers) have been largely resistant to the streaming-movie model, but 2016 could be the year that changes.

Allen usually works with Sony Pictures Classics, an established indie distributor that reportedly advanced figures in the low millions to obtain the rights to his films. His last, Irrational Man, cost them $1 million and grossed $4 million in the United States and $27 million worldwide (a typical balance for Allen’s minor-key films, which always play better internationally). Sony Pictures Classics has a good relationship with Allen, since his Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine became their second- and third-highest grossing films of all time, but it couldn’t hope to match Amazon’s offer.

Amazon has released films before, most prominently with Chi-Raq. But that was initially released in theaters by Roadside Attractions, only streaming on Amazon a month later. Amazon was apparently looking for the same deal with Café Society, with Sony Classics releasing the film on U.S. screens before it jumped to streaming. But Sony turned down the offer—partly due to contractual commitments and partly because Allen’s films don’t make the kind of money stateside to make the deal worthwhile. Amazon’s $20 million offer was absurdly high, but it was the only way to get noticed by a director loyal to a particular studio (it also helped that the studio is producing a TV show with Allen).

Amazon’s $20 million offer was absurdly high, but it had to be.

Café Society will get a full theatrical rollout from Amazon before jumping to streaming. But it’ll be a tough balance for the studio to strike with cineplexes, which remain loudly hostile to the incursion of online movie distributors into their business. Amazon also nabbed the rights to Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, one of the best-reviewed films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, with a $10 million bid—it’ll come out in November for an Oscar run. Stillman’s Love & Friendship, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan, will be released by Amazon in May. Elvis & Nixon, a dramatization of the meeting between Elvis Presley (Michael Shannon) and President Nixon (Kevin Spacey), is out on April 22.

Allen, Lonergan, and Stillman are the kind of established indie directors who don’t guarantee major box-office takes, but command automatic attention from critics and awards voters, which is exactly what Amazon wants as it looks to make its name as a serious distributor. It has money to burn right now, but it can’t be making $20 million bids for Woody Allen films forever; once these releases gain legitimate traction, the model can shift. The same is true for Netflix, which was also a major player at Sundance but ran into a problem when trying to acquire the rights to The Birth of a Nation, the Nat Turner biopic that won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize.

Netflix reportedly offered $20 million for the rights to The Birth of a Nation, but lost out to Fox Searchlight, who bid $17.5 million. (Fox Searchlight is yet another established indie distributor that mounted a successful Best Picture Oscar campaign for 12 Years a Slave.) Netflix, meanwhile, has struggled to attract a theatrical viewing audience for any of its films so far. Beasts of No Nation made a minuscule $90,777 in its two-week theatrical run because it simultaneously debuted online: Most theaters refused to show it as a result, and those that did likely lost their audience to home viewers.

The same went for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, which grossed nothing domestically (but at least earned a solid take worldwide). Netflix isn’t concerned with theatrical grosses; it boasted about Beast of No Nation’s 3 million online views shortly after its release. But filmmakers want their work to be seen in theaters, and more importantly, by Oscar voters, a conservative bunch who snubbed Beasts of No Nation last year despite heavy buzz for its star Idris Elba. Netflix also has a huge slate of films coming down the pike in 2016, part of its dramatic push towards original content. But its proposed revolution—a world where major films hit multiplexes and homes on the same day—may take longer to arrive.

Nigeria’s Mission to Free Boko Haram’s Hostages

Nigerian troops have freed hundreds of hostages held by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram in recent counter-terrorism efforts in Nigeria’s northeast.

The military missions, aimed at driving out terrorists and rescuing their captives, freed 829 people last week. The army rescued 520 people in the village of Kusumma, and 309 others from 11 other villages. Troops have also rescued 72 people held captive in northeast villages in two “clearance operations,” army Public Relations Director Sani Usman said in statements Sunday. The group still holds an unknown number of hostages.

“The gallant troops cleared the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists hibernating in Kala Balge general area,” Usman said of one of last week’s missions.

Soldiers also destroyed a terrorist training camp, warehouse, and factory in Tilem, a northeast village, he added. Twenty-nine insurgents were killed and troops recovered weapons from Boko Haram hiding spots in the operations that freed 72 people.

Since 2013, Boko Haram has carried out mass abductions in Nigeria and neighboring countries in its quest to drive out Western influence and establish an Islamist state. The kidnapping of 276 Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 brought the group to global attention, birthing the viral hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. Two years later, 219 girls are still missing. Last week, one of two girls arrested in north Cameroon carrying explosives claimed to be one of the kidnapped girls.

The human-rights organization Amnesty International estimates Boko Haram has abducted about 2,000 girls and women over their seven-year history. Women are forced into marriage and sexual slavery, and are often made to carry out suicide attacks—at times in their own villages.

Earlier this month, two women blew themselves up at the Molai-Umarari mosque on the outskirts of Maidugrui, a northeast city that has long-endured Boko Haram’s violence. Twenty-four people were killed, and Nigerian officials suspect Boko Haram was responsible for the attack. The mosque had reopened just days before the attack after a near-identical bombing in October forced it to close. Two suicide bombers killed six people in that incident. One of the attackers was reportedly a woman.

Boko Haram has recently increasingly targeted public places like mosques, markets, and schools. The Global Terrorism Index 2014 Report found “terrorist activity in Nigeria has more in common with the tactics of organized crime and gangs, focusing more on armed assaults using firearms and knives than on the bombings of other large terrorist groups,” but recent months show an uptick in suicide bombings for Boko Haram.  The group’s violence is said to be responsible for the displacement of more than 2 million people since 2013.

Four days after the mosque bombing in Maiduguri, Nigeria’s Information Minister Lai Mohammed said Nigerian army efforts have reduced Boko Haram’s ability to carry out large-scale attacks, in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“Before these villagers (in Maiduguri) were under the control of Boko Haram insurgents; today they have been dislodged, now they’re attacking soft targets, which is what happens with a insurgency on its way out,” he said.