Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 204

Is the Government Wasting a Fortune on Art?

Even in this time of partisan tumult, two endeavors seemingly unite the Grand Old Party: cutting wasteful spending and fighting ’90s culture wars. The Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz from Utah’s third district has found a novel way to combine these traditional conservative interests.

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a wide-ranging probe this week to find out how much money the federal government is spending on art. Chaffetz, the chair of the committee, signed a letter dated March 21 and addressed to 25 different agency leaders, including every cabinet-level secretary.

“Art collections in federal buildings bring creative and artistic beauty to public spaces, and create attractive work environments for federal employees and the public that they serve,” it reads. “These taxpayer funded art programs, however, raise the potential for wasteful spending.”

How much wasteful spending, exactly, is something Chaffetz has recently been on a mission to find out. House Oversight is asking these 25 agencies to identify every artwork they possess, “including, but not limited to, paintings, mural and easel, photographs, prints, sculptures, artifacts, electronic-based artworks, textiles, ceramics, and stained glass.” The letter seeks to discover how much each agency and department has spent on artworks and artifacts, insurance premiums, contracts, and other related purchase since 2006 (which is, incidentally, the year the Democratic Party swept both houses of Congress). The inquiry further seeks details about the number of employees involved in managing and preserving these collections. By April 4, when these documents are due to be delivered, Congress will have a detailed register of the nation's federal artworks.

According to the letter, this probe was spurred by another, year-long investigation into the U.S. Department of State’s art-collecting expenditures. State runs the Art in Embassies Program, which sponsors exhibits and collections around the world—a vehicle for global diplomacy or a fathomless void into which taxpayer money is being shoveled, depending on one’s partisan affiliations.

In a January letter from the State Department to House Oversight, the assistant secretary for legislative affairs Julia Frifield complained about the number of ongoing investigations by Congress into the department’s activities, which she describes as “dozens of investigations by nine different committees, involving hundreds of specific requests for hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.”

Art in Embassies, the target of one of these investigations, is a public–private partnership that places artworks in more than 200 venues in nearly 200 countries and operates some 60 diplomatic permanent collections, according to its website. The program is akin to “smARTpower,” the groan-inducing title of a separate State effort that sends American artists abroad in the name of cultural diplomacy. State also runs the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, the American Arts Incubator initiative, Museums Connect, and other programs sure to set a fiscal conservative’s teeth on edge.

None of these likely represents any considerable strain on the federal budget. But if spending any amount of taxpayer money on art is deemed wasteful, then Chaffetz will uncover the landfill that he’s looking for. (A request for comment from his office went unanswered.) As his letter acknowledges, the federal government manages more than a quarter of a million different buildings, inside many of which paintings and photographs hang alongside portraits of federal functionaries. Government agencies each have different levels of commitment to fine art: NASA launched an artist-in-residence program in 2004, an easy A given the awe-inspiring images that agency produces year after year. What role art plays in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is harder to say, although it does administer the Cultural Property, Art, and Antiquities office, which investigates art theft and trafficking.

One agency missing from the current House Oversight probe: the National Endowment for the Arts. If Chaffetz is looking for a new NEA to beat up on—a new culture-war front that will produce as much heat as the Robert Mapplethorpe obscenity trial or the Piss Christ furore—he’s unlikely to find much of one lurking in the Office of Personnel Management or the Small Business Administration. He’d do better to simply attack the agency that spends its entire $146 million budget on art. But he might also discover that many Americans see the arts as more than just a frivolous drain on the federal purse.

With My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Film Finally Reaches Peak Reboot

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is being released over the same weekend that brings the launch of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. This feels, in its way, fated. Here we’ll be, with an epic battle on our hands: not just superhero versus superhero, but franchise versus franchise, genre versus genre, each one vying to become the film that will do the thing that previous, and very worthy, entrants—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jem and the Holograms, Battleship, any of the thousands of other films that conflate celebration of the past with cynicism about it—have failed to do: to take us, via a brazen belief in the power of nostalgia and a deep insistence on the circularity of time, to Peak Reboot.

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My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the sleeper hit of the early aughts: With a relatively unknown star and a $5 million budget, it ended up becoming, against all odds, a big fat Greek smash. “The film,” FiveThirtyEight notes, “spent almost a year in theaters and earned more than $360 million (inflation-adjusted) at the domestic box office to become the second-highest-earning romantic comedy in history (behind Pretty Woman).” The plot, if you don’t recall, was appealingly simple: Toula (Nia Vardalos), a hardworking and devoted daughter of Greek immigrants, falls in love with a non-Greek guy named Ian (John Corbett). They decide to get married. Toula’s meddling, overbearing family—walking cliches, each and every one of them, but charming nonetheless—meddles, overbearingly. Many jokes about Greek American culture later, Toula and Ian tie the knot. The end.

The first film was fluffy and forgettable, but it was redeemed by two things: first, its originality—the sense, permeating the film, that it was the writer and producer Nia Vardalos’s quirky and loving and deeply authentic tribute to her own wacky family—and, second, its formulaic adherence to the time-honored traditions of the rom-com. Those two disparate things ended up (also against all odds) complementing each other. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a big hunk of baklava: layered, nutty, shockingly sweet. Not the kind of thing you’d want to have every day, definitely, but totally fine in moderation.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the first one, was a big hunk of baklava: layered, nutty, shockingly sweet.

All of that helps to explain why My Big Fat Greek Wedding, despite its box-office success, did not go on to enjoy the afterlife, on cable and elsewhere, that its fellow successful rom-coms—Pretty Woman, Love Actually—did. It also helps to explain why Vardalos tried to make lightning (Greeced lightning?) strike twice, spinning the movie into a TV show, My Big Fat Greek Life. (The show’s life was very, very short.)

It also helps to explain why, some 14 years after the original came out, the team has gotten back together for a feature-film sequel to My Big Fat Greek Wedding: the bluntly named My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. And here is the case for that film claiming the title, from the laconic clutches of Batman v Superman, of Peak Reboot: It manages to rehash the original, almost entirely, while lacking nearly all the things that made the first film, despite its flaws, compelling.

The new Wedding finds Toula, now a mother of a 17-year-old daughter (who is named Paris), grappling with Paris’s impending departure for college. It also finds Toula grappling with what an empty nest will mean for her marriage to Ian, which has, in general, sacrificed passion to partnership. Toula,too, is grappling with the fact that, despite the independence she won for herself in the first film, she remains in the thrall of her Big Fat Greek Family. (The film is not subtle about this. As Toula narrates: “Families that are close, like mine, we make it through bad economies, and sickness, and war, because we stick together. But some of us just get stuck.”)

The big twist (spoiler, I guess, though it’s revealed in the trailer): The family, through a series of accidents, discovers that the person who married Toula’s parents never signed their marriage certificate. (“I’m a hippie!” Toula’s mother shrieks with glee.) And so: Mother and father, having lived together in their Big Fat Greek House for decades, must finally, fully, get married. The multi-adjectival Wedding in question here thus belongs not to Toula (or, as the film’s promotional posters might suggest, to Paris) … but to Toula’s parents.

For the most part, the film reflects the blunt “2” in its title: It reads as perfunctory—as a reboot in search of a reason.

This trick, on the one hand, allows the film to recycle many of the gags that made the original so, well, original. Hello again, bottle of medicinal Windex. Hello again, scene of middle-aged women getting hair-curled and face-spackled in a salon. (“Greek don’t creak!” an aunt announces.) Hello again, Toula’s dad’s obsession with proving that all the world’s words derive from ancient Greek. Add to all that the fact that Paris’s prom happens to take place at the exact same time as the wedding (a prom held in the afternoon? just go with it), and you’ve given Wedding 2 the opportunity to benefit from its own circularity: There’s one particularly poignant scene that blends Toula and Ian, Toula’s mother and her father, and Paris and her prom date (who is—surprise!—also Greek) together into a lovely, intergenerational triptych. It’s the circle of life, rendered through romance (and through John Legend).

There are certainly moments of humor and sweetness in all this. It’s hard not to experience vicarious delight when you’re watching a family who loves each other dancing together at a wedding. (Also, Toula’s yiayia (Bess Meisler)—an older woman who’s perhaps not as aged as she seems—steals every scene she’s in.)

Mostly, though, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 reflects the blunt “2” in its title: It reads as perfunctory. It reads as a reboot in search of a reason. The characters are thinly sketched (Corbett, in particular, is given very little to do; John Stamos and Rita Wilson, cameo-ing as a local TV reporter and his wife, have even less). The jokes are stale. The modern-day-ish updates (Toula teaches her dad how to use a computer, a relative comes out as gay, autocorrect changes “spanokopita” to “spina bifida”) are, for the most part, more “heh” than “haha.”

The original film, too, was bolstered by the ideas it considered, ideas that helped it to resonate among people who lack a Greek family of their own: the immigrant experience, that feeling of being both too much and not enough, the broader question of what it means, really, to belong. The sequel, given its plot, might have accomplished the same thing: What happens when marriage cools into mere companionship? What happens when the put-upon daughter becomes the put-upon mom? How do you balance the demands of aging parents with those of aging children?

Those are interesting questions, but My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 doesn’t have much interest in exploring them—or, rather, it’s too rushed, and too full, to squeeze in thoughts about them between all its jokes about the “seed” of Alexander the Great. The sequel, 14 years after lightning struck the first time, is neither thoughtless nor joyless nor offensive; it is neither too complicated nor too simple. It is, simply, fine. It is, simply, there. And that, of course, is exactly what it is supposed to be: a film that exists not fully on its own terms, but as a cheerful and dutiful reminder of what came before.

Marie Kondo and the Privilege of Clutter

At every wedding I’ve been to this past year, the event space has been decorated with family portraits—black-and-white photos of grandmothers and grandfathers, pictures of parents with giant smiles and ‘70s hairstyles. Meanwhile, the bride and groom wear family relics and heirlooms: jewelry passed from mother to daughter, cufflinks and ties passed from father to son.

As a child I used to cry when looking at those kinds of photos and mementos. But it wasn’t until this past summer when I was planning my own wedding that I understood just why these kinds of items inspired so many complicated feelings. When my now-husband asked if we wanted to make a slideshow of our family photos for our own wedding, I realized we barely had any. Both my grandmother and grandfather emigrated from Poland to Cuba in the years preceding the Holocaust: my grandmother by boat with her mother in 1930 when she was 8 years old, and my grandfather in 1937, at the age of 18. They fell in love with each other and the country that took them in, even as they grieved the family members who didn’t make it out alive.

After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, their lives changed once more. Their small store was closed for periods of time by the government (the boards covering their storefront were frequently graffitied with threatening swastikas, a sign that they may not have entirely escaped the frightening environment they tried to leave in Europe). As the revolution began, material comforts began to disappear. Eventually, their business and home were both shut down by the Cuban government and, in 1968, my grandparents, mother, and aunt came to the U.S., leaving everything but a few pieces of clothing behind.

In the U.S,. my grandparents and mother responded to the trauma they’d experienced by holding on to things. My grandfather was a collector who was prone to hoarding. He’d often find random trinkets on the street and bring them home, and he kept everything, from books to receipts to costume jewelry. My grandmother and my mother were more practical, saving and storing canned foods, socks, and pantyhose. In my home, we didn’t throw out food or plastic bags, or clothing that was out of style but that still fit us. We saved everything.

Today, when my mother comes to visit she still brings bags full of useful items, from Goya beans to cans of tuna fish and coffee: things she knows will last us for months and months. It doesn’t matter if I tell her we just went to the store, or that we have plenty of food, or that I don’t need any more socks or underwear. A full pantry, a house stocked with usable objects, is the ultimate expression of love.

As a girl growing up in the U.S., I was often exhausted by this proliferation of items—by what seemed to me to be an old-world expression of maternal love. Like many who are privileged enough to not have to worry about having basic things, I tend to idolize the opposite—the empty spaces of yoga studios, the delightful feeling of sorting through a pile of stuff that I can discard. I’m not alone in appreciating the lightness and freedom of a minimalist lifestyle. The KonMari method, a popular practical philosophy for de-cluttering your home, has tapped into a major cultural zeitgeist.

Since the Japanese “professional organizer” Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up  was released in 2014, it’s become a New York Times bestseller and sold over 3 million copies. Kondo’s tips on de-cluttering have been featured everywhere from The Today Show to Real Simple to The Guardian, and have inspired the follow-ups Spark Joy, an illustrated guide to tidying things up even more, and Life-Changing Magic, a journal where you can ruminate on the pleasures of owning only your most cherished personal belongings.

It doesn’t matter if I tell her we just went to the store. A full pantry, a house stocked with usable objects, is the ultimate expression of love.

At its heart, the KonMari method is a quest for purity. To Kondo, living your life surrounded by unnecessary items is “undisciplined,” while a well-tidied house filled with only the barest essentials is the ultimate sign of personal fulfillment. Kondo’s method involves going through all the things you own to determine whether or not they inspire feelings of joy. If something doesn’t immediately provoke a sense of happiness and contentment, you should get rid of it.

Kondo seems suspicious of the idea that our relationship with items might change over time. She instructs her readers to get rid of books we never finished, and clothes we only wore once or twice. She warns us not to give our precious things to our family and friends, unless they expressly ask for them. She’s especially skeptical of items that have sentimental value. In her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo says,

Just as the word implies, mementos are reminders of a time when these items gave us joy. The thought of disposing them sparks the fear that we’ll lose those precious memories along with them. But you don’t need to worry. Truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them … No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel in the here and now are most important.

Throughout Spark Joy, Kondo includes adorable minimalist drawings of happily organized bathrooms, kitchens and closets. Sometimes she even includes drawings of anthropomorphized forest animals lovingly placing items into drawers using the KonMari method.

Kondo is unfailingly earnest in her assertion that the first step to having a joyful life is through mindful consideration of your possessions. Emotions throughout both of her books are presented as being as simple as her drawings. You either feel pure love for an object or you let it go. But beneath some of the self-help-inspired platitudes about how personally enriched you’ll feel after you’ve discarded items you don’t need, there’s an underlying tone of judgment about the emotional wellbeing of those who submit to living in clutter. Those who live in KonMari homes are presented as being more disciplined: invulnerable to the throes of nostalgia, impervious to the temptation of looking back at something that provokes mixed feelings.

Though an article on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness website Goop claims that American culture is the embodiment of excess, it’s pretty clear to me why the KonMari Method has caught on in the U.S. A recurring emphasis on self-improvement and an obsession with restriction can be found in everything from diet trends (where we learn to cut calories in order to be smaller and less encumbered by literal weight), to the consumer culture fixation with replacing old things that no longer provide joy with new, “improved” things that will.

For affluent Americans who’ve never wanted for anything, Kondo sells an elegant fantasy of paring back and scaling down at a time when simplicity is a hot trend. The tiny-house movement, for example, urges consumers to eschew McMansion- style houses for the adorably twee simplicity of a 250-square-foot home.

If our life is made from the objects we collect over time, then surely our very sense of who we are is dependent upon the things we carry.  

Of course, in order to feel comfortable throwing out all your old socks and handbags, you have to feel pretty confident that you can easily get new ones. Embracing a minimalist lifestyle is an act of trust. For a refugee, that trust has not yet been earned. The idea that going through items cheerfully evaluating whether or not objects inspire happiness is fraught for a family like mine, for whom cherished items have historically been taken away. For my grandparents, the question wasn’t whether an item sparked joy, but whether it was necessary for their survival. In America, that obsession transformed into a love for all items, whether or not they were valuable in a financial or emotional sense. If our life is made from the objects we collect over time, then surely our very sense of who we are is dependent upon the things we carry.  

It’s particularly ironic that the KonMari method has taken hold now, during a major refugee crisis, when the news constantly shows scenes of people fleeing their homes and everything they have. A Vice article, “All the Stuff Syrian Refugees Leave Behind During Their Journey to Europe” shows discarded things ranging from trash to toys to ticket stubs. Each items looks lonely and lost: like evidence of a life left behind. For a project titled “The Most Important Thing,” the photographer Brian Sokol asks refugees to show him the most important thing they kept from the place they left behind. The items they proffer range from the necessary (crutches), to the practical (a sewing machine), to the deeply sentimental (photographs of someone deeply loved, treasured instruments, family pets).

Against this backdrop, Kondo’s advice to live in the moment and discard the things you don’t need seems to ignore some important truths about what it means to be human. It’s easy to see the items we own as oppressive when we can so easily buy new ones. That we can only guess at the things we’ll need in the future and that we don’t always know how deeply we love something until it’s gone.  

In this way, I was built for the KonMari method in a way my mother never was. I grew up in a middle-class American home. While we were never wealthy, we also never truly wanted for material things. As an adolescent, I would tell my mother that I was an American, and that, as an American, I didn’t have to be loyal to anything or anyone if I didn’t want to. I’d throw away the last dregs of shampoo or toothpaste, which my mom would painstakingly rescue from the trash before scolding me for being so wasteful. I’d happily throw out or donate clothing I didn’t want any more.

My quick disposal of things always made my mother irreparably sad. She mourned the loss of my prom dress (which I gave to a friend) and the pots and pans she gave me for college (which I left in the group house I lived in), and she looked horrified when I once dumped a bunch of letters from friends and family in the trash. For me, being able to dispose of things has always been one of the ways I learned to identify as an American—a way to try and separate myself from the weight of growing up in a home where the important things that defined my family had long been lost.

It’s easy to see the items we own as oppressive when we can so easily buy new ones.

To my mother, the KonMari method isn’t joyful; it’s cold. “Americans love throwing things away,” she tells me, “And yet they are fascinated by the way that Cubans have maintained their houses, their cars. Yes, growing up we took great pleasure in preserving things. But we also didn’t really have a choice.”

Today, of course, my mother has plenty of choices, but throwing things away still makes her anxious. Now that my grandparents have both passed away, my mother still struggles to decide what to do with all that stuff. It’s very painful for her, and my father’s encouragement that she sift through everything, organize it in some kind of clearly delineated way, often falls on deaf ears.  

A few months ago, when I was visiting home, my father asked if I would help go through some of the items. Now that he and my mom are older and my brother and I are grown, they’ve both expressed a desire to downsize. In the car, my dad recommended starting with my childhood bedroom, which looks exactly as it did when I was 14 years old, pink and purple, filled with childhood books and stuffed animals, half-filled journals, and never worn shoes. At first I was enthusiastic about the project. “We can give a lot of those things to charity,” I said.  

But at home, I sat in front of my bookshelf and did exactly what Kondo cautions most against: I started my project of decluttering by going through the things that mattered most to me: the books I loved when I was a child; the CDs made by dear friends and stacked high in no particular order; the college textbooks I never remembered to return. Objects imbued with memories of a person I once was, and a person that part of me always will be.

I didn’t want to give any of it up.

Kondo says that we can appreciate the objects we used to love deeply just by saying goodbye to them. But for families that have experienced giving their dearest possessions up unwillingly, “putting things in order” is never going to be as simple as throwing things away. Everything they manage to hold onto matters deeply. Everything is confirmation they survived.

Remembering Garry Shandling

Garry Shandling, a towering figure in American television history, died in Los Angeles today at the age of 66. His death is a tragically sudden end to a storied career that more than once redefined comedy: He was best known as the creator and star of the surreal 1986 sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which ran for four seasons on Showtime, and the landmark HBO series The Larry Sanders Show, a spoof of late-night talk shows that pioneered an age of darker, more adult humor on television and inspired a new generation of comedians.

Born in Chicago in 1949, Shandling broke into the industry in the early ’70s, writing scripts for sitcoms like Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter, before eventually moving into stand-up comedy, where he became a star on the L.A. comedy scene—particularly at the city’s famed Comedy Store. He was a regular guest and replacement host on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, assuming the persona that was at times neurotic, brittle, and anxious, but always blisteringly funny and original.

Rather than submit to the formula of the network sitcoms he loved to deride, Shandling created It’s Garry Shandling’s Show with the former Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel, airing on the then-nascent Showtime network from 1986 to 1990. The show was presented as a sitcom, but one in which Shandling was self-aware about being in a TV show, along with the rest of his cast. He would make surreal asides to the audience, zip years into the future without warning, and even air live episodes. The show’s famous theme song, by Bill Lynch, emphasized the show’s zany metatextual quality, a revolutionary concept at the time.

Shandling then moved on to create The Larry Sanders Show for HBO in 1992. The more straightforward comedy series took a look behind the scenes of a long-running talk show, in which Shandling played a character more loosely inspired by his own foibles. Surrounded by an incredible ensemble that included Jeffrey Tambor, Rip Torn, and Janeane Garofalo, The Larry Sanders Show became the premium network’s earliest original hit, collecting hordes of Emmy nominations over its six-season run and giving special guest stars the opportunity to play deranged versions of themselves on the show (David Duchovny’s turn remains a notorious highlight).

Throughout The Larry Sanders Show’s acclaimed run, Shandling was offered the chance at a real late-night gig by multiple networks, but he continually turned them down, more interested in the unfettered creative access offered by HBO. The Larry Sanders Show was acerbic, heartfelt, and consistently brilliant: It launched the careers of comedy luminaries like Judd Apatow, Peter Tolan, and Paul Simms, and it broke ground for “single-camera” comedies that didn’t stick to the rigid format of the classic American sitcom.

Once The Larry Sanders Show ended in 1998, Shandling went into semi-retirement, appearing occasionally in films like Mike Nichols’s What Planet Are You From? (2000), which he co-wrote, and Peter Chelsom’s Town & Country (2001), which was a notorious bomb. More recently, he showed up as an evil U.S. senator in two Marvel-Universe films (Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and wrote a book called Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host. Though he divulged very little about his personal life over the years and never married, Shandling remained a beloved figure in Los Angeles and an idol to comedians for whom he remains a remarkable influence.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Rubbish

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice begins where its 2013 DC-Comics predecessor, Man of Steel, ended: The titular Kryptonian is fighting his nemesis, General Zod, over the streets of Metropolis and, in the process, laying waste to much of the city. What we didn’t know before is that down there, amid the rubble, is the billionaire Bruce Wayne, trying with limited success to rescue workers at a local branch of Wayne Enterprises from the collateral destruction.

There’s the germ of an interesting idea here. The Man of Steel director Zack Snyder took a fair amount of grief for the way that movie casually depopulated an American city, however fictional. In Snyder’s retelling here, Bruce Wayne (a.k.a., obviously, Batman) essentially becomes the voice of those critics. Is Superman really a hero? Or is he just some alien interloper who brought his extraterrestrial vendettas to our humble planet, knocking down an entire urban skyline in the process? In the hands of another director—the Christopher Nolan of the Dark Knight movies or the Bryan Singer of the X-Men films come immediately to mind—this and other moral quandaries might have been drawn out in intriguing ways.

Instead, alas, we have Snyder, whose idea of a moral quandary is should I make this scene grim—or grimmer? Loud—or louder? Violent—or more violent still? It’s thus no surprise that after all its early, ostentatious handwringing, Batman v Superman ends almost exactly as its predecessor did, with another dull, city-smashing duel between super-beings. The only surprise is that the movie recalls its animating premise vaguely enough to bother explaining that the neighborhood being leveled this time around is “uninhabited.” No harm, no foul.

Such thematic carelessness is on constant display, which wouldn’t loom as nearly so large a problem if Snyder’s film didn’t advertise its aspirations to Moral Seriousness in almost every plodding, humorless frame. There are endless disquisitions about whether Batman is good for Gotham and Superman good for the Earth, and tedious evocations of the roles of “gods” and “men.” Yet the actual characters themselves never come to life as anything other than symbols to be clumsily bickered over.

We know, for instance, that Lex Luthor (played by Jesse Eisenberg as a young tech magnate) hates Superman (Henry Cavill) primarily because we knew as much before the movie even started. And other than a kind of whiny, inchoate envy, that’s all the motivation he evidently needs. Likewise, we know that Lois Lane (a thoroughly wasted Amy Adams) loves Superman because a) she keeps saying so; and b) that is her principal plot function. (Well, that and requiring the Man of Steel to rescue her from certain death at frequent intervals—there are times when it’s hard to believe that this movie was made in 2016.) As for Lois’s heartfelt question, “I just don’t know if it’s possible for you to love me and be you,” I would refer her to Larry Niven’s dispositive 1969 essay, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”

Batman v Superman ends almost exactly as its predecessor did, with another dull, city-smashing duel between super-beings.

And when it comes to Diana Prince (a.k.a., Wonder Woman, and played by Gal Gadot), over the course of two and a half hours we learn precisely nothing about her other than she fought in World War I, became disillusioned with mankind’s senseless cruelty, and has now reappeared 100 years later with a taste for high-end couture that displays large, strategically selected expanses of bare skin. (She reserves her famous red-and-blue one-piece for the final act.)

Which brings us to Batman/Bruce Wayne, played with grumpy intensity—and poor shaving habits—by Ben Affleck. The idea of the clash between him and Superman is loosely lifted from Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 comic series The Dark Knight Returns. In that telling, Batman was a bitter, 55-year-old super-retiree, whose vigilante methods were of such concern to the U.S. government that it enlisted Superman to rein him in. This time around, however, the roles are mostly inverted, with Superman as the potential threat to order—a U.S. Senator played by Holly Hunter pops up periodically to raise this question—and Batman the potential remedy.

But following the initial loss of life at Wayne Enterprises, Batman’s motivations become vaguely bordering on incomprehensible. The closest he comes to articulating them is when he explains to his butler Alfred (now played by Jeremy Irons, in a perhaps inevitable passing of the generational torch from Michael Caine): “He has the power to wipe out the human race. And if we think that there’s even a one percent chance that he’s our enemy, we have to treat it as an absolute certainty.” This may be the most ostentatiously shoddy logic deployed by a theoretically brilliant character in recent movie history.

Make no mistake: Batman doesn’t want merely to limit Superman’s super-prerogatives, or to come up with a contingency plan in case he goes rogue, or even to confine him somewhere. He wants, quite explicitly, to kill Superman. Again, in the proper hands (such as Frank Miller’s 30 years ago), the idea of a quasi-insane Batman might bear interesting fruit. But Snyder’s Batman is all over the map, suave and rational one moment and snarling belligerent threats the next. At one point, he taunts Superman like an overly theatrical WWF heel: “Tell me, do you bleed? You will.” What has Superman done to merit this degree of hatred? Leveled another city? Killed the president? Declared war on puppies? Nope. Alien monster that he is, he’s messed up the Batmobile.

Snyder’s Batman is all over the map, suave and rational one moment and snarling belligerent threats the next.

I will not go further into the plot of the movie, in part because Snyder has made an explicit plea that reviews avoid spoilers and in part because the screenplay, by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer, is a tangled mess of awkwardly entwined storylines. Even on questions as straightforward as whether this Batman is a continuation of Nolan’s Dark Knight or a reboot, the movie seems unable to decide. On the one hand, it presents us yet again with the robbery-murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents, perhaps the scene in all popular cinema that least needed to be portrayed anew. (This time, though, his mother’s pearls tumble to the ground in slow motion.) On the other, it presumes that we already know all about Alfred, the Bat Cave and so on.

As its subtitle announces, Batman v Superman is a setup for Snyder’s upcoming Justice League movie, in conscious apery of the world-building that Marvel Studios has been undertaking for almost a decade. But whereas Marvel produced five superhero features before assembling its heroes in The Avengers, Warner Bros. has no such patience with its DC properties. (Justice League Part One is due out next year.) Nowhere is this impatience more evident than in a remarkably lame narrative shortcut in which Bruce Wayne happens upon a “metahuman” supercut of footage that introduces Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg in the course of approximately two minutes. Glad that’s out of the way, guys!

Such shoddiness is characteristic of the entire script. Though there are several scenes illustrating the extent of Superman’s super-speed, he never seems to use it when it’s most needed—for example, as he stands around watching Batman prepare to hurl what he already knows to be a deadly kryptonite grenade. One crucial plot twist depends entirely on the coincidence of two characters having relatives with the same first name. (Though the moment is intended to be one of profound emotion, there was open laughter in the screening I attended.) And the biggest twist of all is one that was rendered implausible by a vision of the future that Batman had already experienced—a vision, incidentally, that will be utterly incomprehensible to all but the most devout DC fans.

Affleck is solid as Batman, at least insofar as the script allows him to be. Cavill, though, again fails to sell the Man of Steel persuasively, and Gadot makes almost no impression at all in her underwritten role. But it’s Eisenberg who really stands out in the film, and not in a good way. I’ve been a fan of the actor dating back to 2002’s Roger Dodger, but his twerpy take on Lex Luthor is almost unwatchable: Petulant, melodramatic, hyperactive, and entitled, he comes across like an improbable—and thoroughly unappetizing—blend of Tracy Flick and the Joker. One almost wonders whether Eisenberg’s mocking sendup of film reviewers in The New Yorker last December was intended as a bit of critical inoculation.

Ultimately though, the central flaw of Batman v Superman is Snyder’s trademark tone, which alternates between angry and maudlin with little in between. Almost the entire film seems to be set at night, as if it were taking place in Mordor, or perhaps Anchorage in December. And Hans Zimmer’s clamorous, punishing score was still reverberating in my fillings for hours after the movie was over. In the end, Batman v Superman is a tiresome, ill-tempered film, and one too lazy even to earn its dismal outlook.

The Catch: A Flimsy Effort From Shondaland

ABC’s new drama The Catch bears all the superficial hallmarks of a series from Shondaland, the production stable headed by the superstar writer and producer Shonda Rhimes. An impeccably dressed, beautiful cast works in a fancy, glass-walled office, drawing names and arrows on whiteboards as part of their glitzy jobs. Here, they’re not doctors or politicians, as in Grey’s Anatomy or Scandal, but investigators of some sort. The action is propelled mostly by an expensive-sounding soundtrack of current pop hits. But though it’s crisp-looking and well-cast like its predecessors, The Catch is mostly a flashy lot of nothing.

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Behind the Scenes in Shondaland

Like the smash hit How to Get Away With Murder, The Catch is only produced by Rhimes (and her Shondaland partner Betsy Beers). Created by Jennifer Schuur and Helen Gregory, the show follows a team of private investigators whose purpose is vague: The protagonist Alice (Mireille Enos) and her firm seem to provide security for their rich private clients, but unlike Scandal or Grey’s Anatomy, the cases of the week don’t get much screen time. And unlike the best Shondaland shows, it’s hard to grasp on to what’s so impressive about the work these people are doing—they’re presented as exceptional professionals, yet the overarching plot involves them getting swindled by a master criminal. The Catch appears to be aiming for the feel of Catch Me If You Can, a romp about tricky thieves and the spies who chase them—but thanks to a weak premise and even weaker characters, there’s nothing beneath the surface.

The central plot of The Catch is one of personal betrayal: Alice, engaged to the dashing financier Ben (Peter Krause), realizes halfway through the pilot that she’s been conned. Ben is a high-end thief who infiltrated her life just to steal her firm’s secrets. At least on this front, the extent of Ben’s double life is fun to behold; The Catch’s first episode is the ultimate 30-something nightmare, a tale of the perfect fiancée turning out to be a two-faced fraudster.

Ben, who swept Alice off her feet a year ago and started planning a wedding with her, is actually in league with another gorgeous thief (Sonya Walger), and once he’s executed his heist, he vanishes without a trace, leaving no hint of his real identity behind. In a particularly absurd (but brilliant) moment, Alice scrolls through her photo album looking for a picture she can scan into the firm’s criminal database, and realizes Ben always turned his face away from the camera in every picture she had of him. (Now that’s what the kids call “ghosting”—he didn’t even leave a selfie behind.)

Though it’s crisp-looking and well-cast like its predecessors, The Catch is a flashy nothing.

Ben, of course, actually fell for Alice during his long con, and their connection is supposed to propel the series through its first season as Alice chases down her firm’s stolen secrets. Enos (best known for her roles on The Killing and Big Love) and Krause (Six Feet Under, Parenthood) are charming enough as individuals, but they make an ill-matched pair onscreen. And the rest of the cast, which includes Alimi Ballard, Jacky Ido, and Rose Rollins, is a gorgeous, diverse bunch, many of whom cut their teeth on other Shondaland shows. But this collective talent alone can’t keep the show afloat. Alice’s job is thinly sketched, and the pilot’s spy-thriller set-pieces are annoyingly perfunctory (the show spends 10 minutes watching Ben lift an errant flash drive while Alice’s team bumbles around trying to figure out where he is).

Every Shondaland show follows the same storytelling model: A serialized romantic melodrama with a case-of-the-week format. Meredith Grey is a medical intern embroiled in a relationship with her boss. Olivia Pope is a D.C. fixer who also has a messy history with the President of the United States. Annalise Keating and her students fight cases in court while trying to cover up a mysterious murder on campus. But The Catch doesn’t have either of these elements covered, making it a pale imitation of the better shows it wants to align itself with.

Of course, a dull pilot doesn’t need to spell disaster for a series. But it’s hard to see how The Catch will furnish cases of the week that are interesting enough to sustain viewership (Alice’s firm needs to be doing more than chasing flash drives around town). It’s even tougher to reconcile the future of Ben’s plotline. His betrayal of Alice in the pilot is absolute and irredeemable, but the writers seem to hope their chemistry will be enough to suggest that a future reunion, or at least more double-crosses, can happen. The problem is, there’s no real chemistry—a fact made more brutally apparent by the show’s poor plotting. Enos and Krause may be magnetic actors, but Alice and Ben are no Olivia and President Fitz, nor Meredith and Derek. Whatever connection they had was destroyed in the first few minutes of the pilot. No amount of sexy spy games will get it back.

Is Argentina Healing?

On Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama and Argentine President Mauricio Macri visited Parque de la Memoria—Remembrance Park—to pay tribute to the victims of the dictatorship that brutalized the country from 1976 to 1983. The two took three white roses each, threw them into a nearby estuary, and then bowed their heads. The moment helped mark the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought the dictatorship to power; as Obama acknowledged, the precise role the United States played in that event and the crackdown that followed remains a matter of controversy.

Obama’s visit is the second stop on the president’s tour of Latin America this week, and follows his historic trip to Cuba, which marked the first visit to the island by a sitting U.S. president in nearly 90 years. But while the Cuba visit marked a particularly dramatic departure from decades of mutual antagonism between that country and the United States, Obama is looking to ease tense relationships elsewhere in Latin America as well. Argentina, which had been governed by leftist and anti-American leaders for many years, in November elected the center-right former mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, who has sought to mend relationships with the United States and others—a sharp contrast with his predecessor Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

When Obama arrived in Argentina on Wednesday, he was the first U.S. president to visit the country in more than a decade, and he praised its new leadership in a joint press conference. “President Macri is a man in a hurry because he has moved rapidly on so many of the reforms that he has promised,” Obama said on Wednesday.

Ahead of his Latin America trip, Obama moved to declassify U.S. government records that may give more details about U.S. policy toward Argentina during the 1976 coup and the crackdown that followed. In what came to be known as the “Dirty War,” the Argentine junta forcibly disappeared thousands of suspected opponents of the regime. Official estimates put the number of those killed or disappeared at roughly 13,000, but rights groups say the number is around 30,000.

In 2002, the State Department released 4,700 documents related to what a department press release called “human rights abuses and political violence in Argentina,” to help the country in its investigations of those abuses. A separately released batch of documents revealed a conversation between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Guzzetti in which, in The New York Times’s words, “Mr. Kissinger appears to condone the military’s crackdown.”

“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Kissinger reportedly told Guzzetti.

On Wednesday, Obama reiterated his pledge to release additional documents. “We’re absolutely determined to do our part,” he added. “I hope this gesture also helps to rebuilt trust that has been lost between our two countries.”

Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker: The Public Arena

If Gawker’s publication of a Hulk Hogan sex tape raised legal questions, it also raised ones about public opinion, social mores, and the fate of civilization. Why else would the two opposing sides, in the wake of a jury awarding Hogan $140 million, go on The View?

Accounts of the trial have created the beyond-farcical impression of a Florida jury being paraded with two extreme examples of elites behaving indecently. In one corner: macho celebrity culture, where a shock-jock secretly films what ensues when he opens his marriage to a national icon who’s gone around boasting about a fictional 10-inch penis. In the other: the high cynicism of New York media, epitomized by the editor A.J. Daulerio sarcastically quipping under oath that he’d be okay with publishing child pornography. In the days since the verdict, the litigants have taken to the public arena, allowing the rest of America to see why six Floridians sided with the wrestler over the website.

Hogan’s interviews on Good Morning America, The View, and elsewhere have emphasized the human, Terry Bollea, beneath the bandana. He burst into tears upon hearing the verdict; he had painful discussions with his children when the sex tape went public; he became absolutely terrified of Gawker founder Nick Denton during the trial: “Denton and I had a stare-down. He scared me staring at me, man.”

What about the vicious racial slurs Bollea was heard using on another tape that became public last year? “I said something horrible and I will live with it forever, but that’s not me, that’s not who I am,” he told the women of The View, pointing out that he attends an “Afro-American church.” But he said the case was not about those tapes, or even about money. It was about setting standards of privacy in the era of sexting and revenge porn. It was about precedent—about not allowing Gawker to do to you what they did to him.

The routine is pretty convincing, a fact that could be credited, as Daulerio argued to The Daily Beast, to Hogan being a professional actor. (“Not that Hulk Hogan is going to win an Academy Award anytime soon,” Daulerio added.) Or maybe it’s just attributable to the very hard-to-dispute idea that no one should have their private sexual acts broadcast to millions if they don’t want them to be.

This morning, Denton appeared on The View, a day after Bollea did the same. Wearing a beige zip-up cardigan over a shirt and tie, it seemed at first like the gossip kingpin might try and channel Mr. Rogers. But there wasn’t much rhetorical softening. He mostly restated Gawker’s line that footage of Bollea having a consensual sexual encounter in private was newsworthy because the wrestler had bragged about his sex life in public.

The argument baffled The View's panel. Whoopi Goldberg was most pointed, saying that while it would have been one thing to write about Bollea stepping out on his wife with a friend’s wife, posting video of it crossed a line. “There is no way you can justify the tape,” she said. “Even if it’s 10 seconds, once you did that [publish the video], you took yourselves out of from being news folks into being prurient—what is it called?”

“Tabloid?” “Sleazoid?” other panelists offered.

“No, no, not tabloid. It’s—voyeurs! Voyeurs.”

Whether on GMA or The View or CNBC, the fundamental, gut-level question of what notion of public good might transform stolen pornographic footage into protected free speech remains. High-profile celebrity sex tapes in the past incurred great expense from the outlets that published them, usually in the form of settlements. If there’s a principled case to be made, it’s been best articulated in public by The New Yorker’s general counsel Fabio Bertoni:

… on the Internet, at least, video is becoming the community standard of proof … We have seen many videos that are more newsworthy than this one, and it’s even possible to imagine a more newsworthy sex tape. The reported sex tape of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter could have been considered newsworthy, had it been released, and had the former presidential candidate denied the affair. If the Hogan verdict stands, would a media outlet that published that video be at risk of being put out of business?

Though Hogan is not a presidential candidate, Bertoni’s point is that there’s a chilling effect when courts get to decide newsworthiness. Free-speech scholars quoted in The New York Times don’t sound particularly perturbed by the verdict, though. “I think this case establishes a very limited proposition: It is an invasion of privacy to make publicly available a tape of a person having sex without that person’s consent,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law dean at the University of California, Irvine. “I don’t think it goes any further than that and I do not see a First Amendment basis for claiming that there is a right to do this.”

Denton has pointed out that federal judges have sided with Gawker on this issue before and says that the jury acted on an emotional basis, setting damages well beyond what the average wrongful-death award in America is. He says he’s confident that Gawker will win on appeal, when the choice is again up to a judge rather than a jury. After watching the past few days of publicity, you can understand what he means. The Florida jury even sat for a group interview on GMA, where they aired disgust at Denton’s lack of remorse. “It’s just amazing to listen to them,” one of the jurors said. “They have no heart, no soul.”

The Business Backlash Against 'Religious Liberty' Legislation

A high-profile consortium of companies, including Disney, Marvel, the NFL, Time Warner, Viacom, AMC, Coca-Cola, Delta, Salesforce, and others, have threatened to boycott or curtail business in Georgia if the state’s governor signs the Free Exercise Protection Act into law. Last week, lawmakers passed the so-called “religious liberty” bill, which its opponents argue is discriminatory and legalizes discrimination against the gay and lesbian community.

The bill, in essence, offers legal safeguards for faith-based organizations and businesses to refuse services to same-sex couples or avoid hiring employees based on their religious beliefs. The measure has support among conservative lawmakers and religious leaders and organizations within the state. Among its detractors is Georgia Prospers, an umbrella group comprised of hundreds of major companies with major business ties within the state.

This scenario echoes previous recent battles involving highly divisive so-called religious liberties laws in states like Indiana and Arkansas. Last year, in both cases, each state revised their bills after outcry in the business community against the measures forced lawmakers to reconsider.

In the past 24 hours, Disney, Marvel, and Time Warner became the latest companies to issue disapprovals about the bill. “Disney and Marvel are inclusive companies, and although we have had great experiences filming in Georgia, we will plan to take our business elsewhere should any legislation allowing discriminatory practices be signed into state law,” read a company statement.

Both Disney and Marvel have filmed major projects in the state in the past year, notes Jennifer Bendery at The Huffington Post, including Captain America: Civil War and Ant-Man, productions that generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the state and provided employment to tens of thousands of workers. Film and television production is a billion-dollar industry in Georgia.

Meanwhile, the NFL has implied that it will look unfavorably upon Atlanta’s bid for the Super Bowl in the coming years should the law be enacted. Representatives from the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta Braves, two of the state’s biggest professional sports franchises, also spoke out against the measure.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has until May 3 to decide the fate of the bill. The extended review period is part of what’s helped to galvanize the campaign against the measure.

As my colleague David Graham notes, North Carolina passed a state law on Wednesday that would prevent cities from passing their own laws that bar discrimination against the LGBT community. State lawmakers only announced that they seek to take up the measure on Monday, just days before the vote, and then North Carolina’s governor signed the bill into law on Wednesday night.

Radovan Karadzic's Day of Reckoning

A UN-backed war-crimes tribunal has found Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, guilty of war crimes during the Bosnian war of the 1990s and sentenced him to 40 years in prison.

Karadzic, who as the Bosnian Serb leader also served as the supreme commander of its armed forces, was convicted of genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, as well as nine other charges, including his actions during the siege of Sarajevo, which left more than 10,000 people dead.

He was acquitted of one charge: that of genocide in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. Karadzic, who was dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his actions, was captured in July 2008. The 40-year prison sentence will include the nearly eight years he has already spent in detention.

More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, which forced more than 2.2 million from the country. The war was Europe’s worst since World War II.

Karadzic has maintained his innocence. He said Wednesday that he’d only worked to uphold the peace.

“My permanent fight to preserve the peace, prevent the war, and decrease the sufferings of everyone regardless of religion were an exemplary effort deserving respect rather than persecution,” Karadzic said.

After the war, Karadzic, now 70, spent 11 years on the run. The former psychiatrist was arrested in 2008. He is the highest-ranking person to go on trial at the tribunal that was set up by the UN to try crimes related to the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.

Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, died while in custody at the tribunal in 2005. Ratko Mladic, who commanded the Serb forces at Srebrenica, is awaiting sentencing at his trial.