Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 51

October 29, 2016

The Complex Humanity of Black Mirror

Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn’t mean he was cruel; there’s no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun of it. Similarly, Black Mirror likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn’t mean the show is cynical enough to endorse them. Instead, especially in season three, recently released on Netflix, a sort of humanity has entered that serves as a counterpoint to the particular version of Bleakworld on offer. “Fuck the plant, fuck the planet,” the main character in the first episode shouts at a wedding-gone-wrong, but the message is of course the opposite: We should care about the planet. We should care about each other—and we should engage, not look away.

I didn’t expect to go into season three thinking kinder, gentler thoughts in the context of a show that debuted in 2011 with an episode in which a British politician is forced to screw a pig for an hour. But there you go. Black Mirror surprises, and never more so than this season, written primarily by the show’s creator, Charlie Brooker, although each episode has a different director. Who could predict the love story at the center of the season, episode four’s “San Junipero”? Or, even, that the path of episode one, “Nosedive,” would lead to a callow main character—played wonderfully by Bryce Dallas Howard—being rendered complex by the end, in a scene in prison that’s deeply cathartic?

Some critics have noted Black Mirror becoming darker this season, but to me at least, the characterization has become ever more humane, as if to provide balance. After all, what is unrelieved horror but a form of boredom? What is dystopia unrelieved by humor or some contrasting element but a slog through wastelands that only differ by degrees and, perhaps, the weight of a particular baseball bat applied to a particular head?

The scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward, often past the point where a lesser show would end.

In season three we discover that even in the midst of technological forces beyond our control, the individual is still free—to strive to reject the oppressive, to stop being a hamster on a wheel as in “Nosedive,” or to break on through to the other side as in “San Junipero.” And most importantly, succeed or fail, the individual still has the choice to pursue an ethical path over giving in to darkness. “Hated in the Nation,” may be “dark”—as if somehow the real world right now is a continual laugh riot—but it features characters with a strong moral compass who possess a dogged endurance in the face of unspeakable bee-drone horrors.

Or consider episode three, “Shut Up and Dance,” in which every character is in trouble for failing to pursue a moral path, and each of them has been reduced down to a riveting quest that still allows a terrible chance at survival. We are riveted because we believe in the idea of empathy and the ability to atone for our sins. Even if it turns out someone we’ve expressed empathy for has sinned in a way too terrible to be redeemed, we often still give the benefit of the doubt to the next person.

What the best of these episodes share is a dislocation caused by opening up the context, as if experiencing a telephoto lens that keeps widening our perspective far beyond expectation. With an eerie precision, our sense of the context and characters changes because the scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward, often past the point where a lesser show would end.

In that context, it’s striking to examine why the worst episodes don’t work, while still being superior to similar examples from shows like Night Gallery back in the day. Episode two, “Playtest,” shares the season’s common thread of introducing a sympathetic or ultimately sympathetic character, Cooper (Wyatt Russell), someone not embedded in the power structures of the world. Black Mirror spends several minutes letting us see how likeable he is— even though careful viewers will deduce he’s probably a day-friend, not a week-friend, or a many-years-friend. So far so good.

But “Playtest” as an episode doesn’t share the quality of opening up, in a literal or thematic sense, that Black Mirror often excels at, where you can think of the opening up as a form of generosity. When you push past the expected point, you’re not just hopefully creating something more interesting, you’re also saying you trust the viewer. “Playtest,” on the other hand, tends to close things down into a personal context that’s less interesting.

When Cooper runs out of money in London while traveling across the world on a cathartic trip following his father’s death, he winds up volunteering for a simulated-reality experiment. While the acting is perfectly fine, what follows actually puts the character into a smaller and smaller box. We do not widen out into societal or cultural contexts, or even geographically into wider and wider physical spaces. There is less and less movement of any sort as the episode continues—until we’re trapped in a haunted house, filled with horrors specific to the protagonist but possibly not the viewer. That this includes Shelob with a human face like a cheap knock-off from the Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (formula = unsettling human face on animal body, causing general queasiness and a re-examination of foundational understanding of biological mutations) and a high-school bully dressed like somebody from the1800s is inescapably banal. That claustrophobia you feel is boredom—your own worst fear. You'd be better off dropping a spider with a human face into the middle of Knausgaard's My Struggle.

There’s a little red eye looking down on us, and it’s not Sauron, or God, but surveillance that anyone can tap into.

Although there’s fun to be had in how the episode comments on and messes around with over-used horror movie techniques like jump scares, even a horrible stink-sandwich like the movie Cabin in the Woods has played around with these clichés before, and been devoured by them. The entire episode may be impeccably shot and directed (by Dan Trachtenberg, who recently helmed 10 Cloverfield Lane), but, in the end, who cares—about the character’s attempts to survive, or about his mom? A thirty-second mom, really; for moms that last a lifetime, see Psycho.

Black Mirror has set such a high bar as an anthology series based on what you might call “an acute examination of dysfunctional tech horrors or the horror-implications of said tech” that a spider in a haunted mansion just doesn’t cut it, any more than the Disney ride does. Or maybe augmented reality just doesn’t cut it and that’s the point. Because once the episode reaches the VR-augmented mansion, there is really no resolution involving the unraveling of different levels of reality that will satisfy, even in an anti-cathartic way. Although, if you thought Jacob’s Ladder was brilliant, scintillating cinema, you may disagree.

In a similar but more successful vein, episode three, “Shut Up and Dance,” playtests a different kind of renovation: Taking the premise of a movie like Saw and placing it out in the wider world, with different types of connections and commentary. Part of the success of the episode is the actual physical motion that occurs within it, a widening out and a meeting up with other characters facing the same dilemma as our protagonist. There’s no yawn-inducing trauma from being chained in the same filthy, visually uninteresting room while a disembodied voice comes on over the intercom, followed by an announcement that today’s menu, like the day before and the day after, will be meatloaf. Thus, even this very simple idea of movement—while the info-age subtext makes clear everyone is chained together in a filthy room and fed on a steady diet of bloody meatloaf—makes the concept at least somewhat fresh. You don’t always need a torture room to be tortured in the age of globalization. Just beware: There’s a little red eye looking down on us, and it’s not Sauron, or God, but surveillance that anyone can tap into.

In fact, perhaps the least convincing aspect of the main character, Kenny (Alex Lawther), being blackmailed through video of him jacking off isn’t that, given our internet culture, he might’ve gotten 15 minutes of fame instead of shame had the video leaked. It’s that the video is captured from the webcam on the teen’s laptop and not, say, from the eye of a wireless Teddy Ruxbin cybertoy, or the eraser in a mechanical pencil, or a chronically depressed refrigerator bent on revenge for the stuff left rotting inside.

But that aside, as the photographer Kyle Cassidy—someone who’s not only photographed John Carpenter but watched a metric ton of horror movies—noted as we watched this episode together, “Shut Up and Dance” may not do anything particularly new, but it does it extraordinarily well—and unlike in “Playtest, “we do care about the main did-bad-things characters throughout, at least in the moment, and we are largely invested in the epic (to them) aspects of their struggle.

Here, it’s probably wise to mention that one reason Black Mirror works so well is it does a superlative job of casting episodes—there are topnotch actors in every role, consummately chosen and given great direction. If some of the old Night Gallery and Twilight Zone episodes no longer really work, sometimes it’s that the acting pulls us out of the story in a way that’s not as bad as Dark Shadows but might as well be. “Shut Up and Dance,” with its ultimate deus ex machina manipulation, is the best example of why that matters.

For one thing, Jerome Flynn, most famous for his rakish role in Game of Thrones, pops up gloriously and unexpectedly as the mid-life, middle-class version of his fantasy-realm character, harried and stressed and utterly convincing. Yet it’s his counterpart in an agonizing alliance of convenience, the teenager played by Lawther, who in all of his reactions is so excruciatingly perfect that you’re horrified, wanting to look away and yet mesmerized and for a long time really rooting for him to get out of this—while also wondering just how many acting awards he’ll be up for.

You could argue that “Shut Up and Dance” says something we already knew, because even those of us who have committed no crime are indentured to our insecurities and petty secrets. Those who don’t like the episode, including my wife, are right to think that ending with a montage of people in distress while a sad Radiohead song plays could be considered papering over a lack of formal closure. But, then, through our devotion to LOLCats, wise owl photographs bearing fortune-cookie truths, and other internet memes, we know everything already anyway, so every truth is banal and made fresh only by a new and different context. I may be half-joking, but Black Mirror isn’t; the final twist in “Shut Up and Dance” plays hardball with the idea of who you root for, and why you root for them in deeply uncomfortable ways.

If you need to beware of the devices around you that might surveil, you also need to beware of the propaganda put in your head, as in episode five, “Men Against Fire.” The episode fits comfortably into what I’d call the show’s renovation mode, inhabiting a horror, comic-book subgenre you might call “conflicted cybernetic soldier.” The fear of being altered to become the perfect weapon can take many forms in storytelling, from Dr. Moreau-like mutant scenarios to lost-Nazi-tech Hellboy versions. In “Men Against Fire,” a soldier (Malachi Kirby) experiences a glitch that, in a war setting that seems ur-Balkan, makes him see feral mutants as human. He then must make a terrible choice given to him by a psychologist played by Michael Kelly, infamous as the chief of staff on House of Cards. (Another great bit of casting—Kelly brings the memory of that terrifying performance with him, giving a minor role major depth.)

With its themes of wiping out genetic impurities and exploration of military conditioning, “Men Against Fire” contains harrowing and heart-felt moments, but the episode’s geopolitics are far outstripped by the complexities and horrors of modern regional warfare. Juxtapose episode five with a show like The Last Panther, which does a credible job of conveying the complex allegiances in post-war Serbia, and you realize “Men Against Fire” sorely needs some additional real-world grit, an amoral context, to muddy up and mess up the clarity of the central situation. Because, honestly, how can you not see this situation as Good versus Evil? The intricacies of a choice of whether or not to remember atrocity seems like small beer in the wider context. Nor are the victims in this episode given much interiority, which might have added depth. As a result, the episode rises above mostly due to a good twist at the end, an excellent performance from Kirby, and cinematography so fine-grained it seems deliberately to mimic a virtual-reality experience.

In considering these three “simple” episodes, it’s worth noting that most other anthology shows don’t display a tenth of the sophistication evident even in Black Mirror’s half-successes. It’s just that Black Mirror has spoiled us by so often being great, and so we keep pushing and prodding it to forever and always live up to its best. Some day Black Mirror will take a baseball bat to its best plot and we will rise as one to rage on social media, thus proving most of the show’s more obvious points.

Put another way, especially regarding the idea of renovation versus innovation, a flub like “Playtest “is an episode that uses element A (augmented reality) to comment only on element A (augmented reality, like this parenthetical) and possibly the psychology of element B, a specific character who in his Everyman-who-can-travel-cheaply-abroad aspects carries little societal weight. Even though more successful, neither “Men Against Fire” nor “Shut Up and Dance,” for all of their merits, quite rise above our baseline idea of average Black Mirror quality.

Black Mirror's 'Men Against Fire' Tackles High-Tech Warfare

But then you encounter an episode like episode six, “Hated in the Nation,” and you find ample evidence that Black Mirror’s best work displays complexity in a way that resembles the verdict of “good synthesis” scrawled by professors on English papers likely to get an A or B rather than a C-.

In “Hated in the Nation,” Black Mirror more or less fuses elements X, Y, Z1, and Z2 to create a focused mystery narrative that also comments on any number of issues critical to us now. Mechanical drone bees in artificial hives have taken the place of real ones to help fertilize flowers, in a near-future where colony collapse disorder has claimed all bees, and many other animals are extinct. Against this backdrop, someone hacks a bee to kill a public figure reviled on social media for hateful comments. The hashtag #DeathTo trends and turns out to have sinister origin and real-world effects, while people through the United Kingdom play along as if words don’t have consequences.

The complexity in episode six builds because the relationship between the two main women characters, both police detectives, largely doesn’t follow noir-fiction clichés, and this personal anchor of character is juxtaposed not just with exploration of the sociological dimension of how people behave on social media, but also the cutting edge of drone technology. And not only the cutting edge of drone tech, but also the cutting edge of ecological preservation. It then expands to include not just the general consequences of these elements “gone wrong,” but a specific catastrophic disaster: With a nice sly nod to the mass hysteria several decades ago over “killer bees” and other invasive species, the episode manages to fuse several themes at once into a whole that’s dramatically satisfying.

Drones as an invasive species, for example, is a wonderfully original way to think about them, and it jolts you out of the perspective that they’re just going to become part of the skyscape, as natural as a crow or a starling. The parallel structures of human social interaction and bee hives make a powerful statement in the context of recent scientific studies finding that bees express more originality than previously thought and that humans express less, more of so-called “conscious” thought consisting of automated responses.

So is episode six “just” a commentary on social media? No. The one individual the detectives question about the initial murder, who posted something harmful on social media, teaches a grade school class of giggling kids, and sees her free speech as something metaphorical. She clearly does plenty of good in the world. The words “Death to …” aren’t action, are they, when the single voice emanates from the middle of a hive mind? And the way in which the central action occurs in the context of mecha-bees tasked with the purpose of fertilizing flowers so agriculture can continue and millions of people not starve provides a wider environmental context that cannot be overlooked, even if many viewers forget it.

One idea I’ve seen expressed recently is that Black Mirror’s creators are somehow Dark Mountain acolytes unable to craft a subtle message about modern technology—and especially about social media (which, famously, hates to be critiqued by perceived luddites). But this idea seems refuted by “Hated in the Nation.” I would argue that episode one, “Nosedive,” also refutes it. The desperate search of the protagonist, Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard), for high ratings from her fellow human beings to sustain an overall rating that allows her to buy a new apartment, keep her job, and in general experience a better life is as old as civilization, or at least as old as capitalism.

If, in Black Mirror’s near-future scenario, you actually chock up points or demerits via your smart phones, then perhaps the point is just that social media can accelerate the process of being ever more caged within a Baudrillardian hegemony. Certainly, the point doesn’t seem as simple as modern technology is “bad.” Rather, it’s that modern tech may allow us to express terrible inherent built-in negative aspects of the human condition if we let those tools rule us. That there is a harrowing and a winnowing involved that makes the pace of life (and thus our insecurities and sense of place on the social ladder) more excruciating and deeply felt—and thus more visible and thus more repugnant. Perhaps even while reading this paragraph of an article you’ve grown to despise. (Please rate me three out of five if you must, but know how hateful that is because I love you, and rate you six out of five.)

The final scenes of “San Junipero” leave it up to us to think about what life means and where it resides.

The structure of “Nosedive” has a striking similarity to that of “Shut Up and Dance,” except instead of being pushed forward by an unseen person, Lacie is pushed forward by her own concern about her social standing. For this sin, she must embark on an odyssey of a trip to her childhood friend’s wedding, where she is to be the maid of honor. If she’s lucky, the high ranking of her fabulous friend’s guests will up her own ranking, overcoming a recent downturn in her social fortunes.

The irony is that in making the trek to the wedding, during which all sorts of misfortunes accumulate, Lacie displays fortitude and gumption. Along the way she meets a female Snake Plissken in a big-rig who gives her a counter-culture example to aspire to, she must fast-walk across highways, hitch rides, abandon broken rental cars, and in all ways she becomes reduced or perhaps lifted up by the experience. It’s a clever tightrope walk both for the script and the actor—to go from disliking someone to rooting for them—and it’s further evidence that Black Mirror isn’t cynical about its characters’ fates.

The moving “San Junipero,” though, takes a lack of cynicism to new heights for the series, with a tale of two women (Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who meet by chance in a mysterious city and whose lives become entangled in unexpected ways. You could call “San Junipero” Black Mirror’s penance for “Playtest.” The brilliance of the script lies in how neither character conveys the secrets of the city directly in an info-dump kind of way. Instead, they lay down breadcrumbs, alluding to the mystery in a natural way that keeps the foreground of the episode uncluttered by exposition. I find it hard to imagine Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, or most other anthology shows being able to resist a more explicit hint, and yet we understand very clearly what is going on. Exposition instead is reserved for emotional content, the underlying sadness of the lovers’ situation.

The speculative element is beautifully subsumed in the character development and, as with many Black Mirror episodes, this subtle use of the near future scenario allows us to experience the couple’s dilemma all the more acutely. In depicting an interracial couple and ruminating on aging and death, “San Junipero” also exemplifies a commitment to diversity and demographics not commonly served well by horror shows. The final scenes of “San Junipero” leave it up to us to think about what life means and where it resides.

Technology is hard to write about, whether on the page or on the screen, which is why in so much uncanny fiction (mine included) smart phones don’t work and laptops inexplicably die. The burden of showing modern tech visually in a way that doesn’t become dated is often insurmountable because the contamination is already in the creator’s subconscious. Even lauded recent movies like Midnight Special wind up reflecting a kind of entrenched 1950s Tomorrowland aesthetic. The challenge isn’t just the right look-and-feel, but often the right stand-in for an electronic reality that isn’t particularly visual. Do it wrong and you wind up with Tron-remake bastardizations or a kind of bulkiness or weight that means inert objects meant to be in the backdrop intrude on the foreground of the narrative.

So one of the crowning glories of Black Mirror—and yet another reason for its success—is that even when it has to find tech surrogates, the show has a lightness of touch and a seamless quality that has nothing to do with the kind of blank seamlessness of Apple productions. Much of it finds a kind of liminal space, too, that corrects much of the somewhat hamfisted True Detective approach to cinematography; for example, if Black Mirror maps a highway from above, you’re still getting the gorgeously dark thick-snake-like quality of that, but it has some actual damn meaning. The default for Black Mirror’s look-and-feel seems to be a varietal of Darth Vader noir most evident in the battleship scenes of The Empire Strikes Back; or, to put it another way, it’s a dark, rich Pinot Noir, if Darth Vader had owned a vineyard that made Pinot Noir, Cabs being a little too unsubtle.

But nor does Black Mirror seem wedded to a certain approach to cinematography, adapting to the needs of individual episodes. “Shut Up and Dance” has a washed out late-70s realism to it, while “San Junipero” commits, in the initial scenes, to a late ‘80s style that, for me, as someone who lived in that era, felt preternaturally real. Rather than replicating the actual 1980s, Black Mirror manages instead through set design, costumes, and blocking to replicate the feel of various iconic ‘80s movies. The stunning result imbues the scenes with a nostalgia not achievable by straight-forward historical reconstruction—a nostalgia important for believing in the beginning of the relationship at the heart of the episode.

Black Mirror’s episodes may feel claustrophic at times, make us paranoid about reality and our relationship with it, but that continual questing and changing of the equation—through layering, through cinematography, through inspired acting and the striving of everyman characters—is a form of hope and marks the best of season three. There is at the show’s base an essential curiosity about the world, even if expressed darkly, that drives it. Black Mirror’s themes are wide and broad enough they could easily switch to making the show about the 16th-century court at Versailles, with no speculative element, and still be making the same points about the human condition.

Do you want Black Mirror to have a less bleak view of tech? Well, did you want Breaking Bad to be Breaking Good? Do you want Westworld to suddenly become a kiddy carousel ride? Game of Thrones to never kill a character again? I thought not.

At the end of the last episode of the new season, we catch a glimpse of a dogged woman detective shadowing a mass murderer, under the glower of a distant forest crag. Despite so much, she is still driving herself forward, not allowing the horrors she’s seen stop her from doing her job. Fortitude. Endurance. When Black Mirror works, it’s because it makes the hard choices. Or, at least, not the expedient ones.

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Published on October 29, 2016 05:49

Solange and the Fading Tom Hanks: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos

Cassie da Costa | The New Yorker

“In ‘Don’t Touch My Hair,’ each scene falls into a loose, unhurried narrative, linked by tone. The stretches of Solange’s and Sampha’s improvised grooving that follow the choreographed sequences present not an interruption but an easy crescendo. Many moments in the video contain both still, tableau-like images and hypnotic, syncopated movements. Jafa doesn’t overdetermine the space he shoots but finds its best angle—often canted and filled with as much depth as proximity.”

The Slow Fade of Tom Hanks

Anne Helen Petersen | Buzzfeed

“To call Hanks ‘a classic Dad’ is to speak of a specific, goofy, white middle-class Dad—a trope built on the pillars of white privilege, asexual masculinity, and nostalgia for a straightforward history of great men. That Dad is also a Boomer Dad—who, like Hanks, came of age in the ’80s, ruled the ’90s, and who could still do little wrong in the 2000s. And today, that Dad is exhausted.”

The Gone Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on the Train

Emily St. John Mandel | FiveThirtyEight

“Who are these girls? Why are there so many of them? … A number of patterns emerged in our analysis: The ‘girl’ in the title is much more likely to be a woman than an actual girl, and the author of the book is more likely to be a woman. But if a book with ‘girl’ in the title was written by a man, the girl is significantly more likely to end up dead.”

The Paranormal Activity Series Milks Found-Footage for All It’s Worth

A.A. Dowd | The A.V. Club

“Peli’s true innovation is the adoption of the fixed camera, a device that allows him to play brilliantly with repetition, expectation, and escalation. The movie returns over and over again to the same static shot of Micah and Katie sleeping, the open bedroom doorway leading into an abyss of darkness. Because the layout of the room never changes, the viewer learns to study the frame for something amiss—the ghostly presence invading this safe domestic space.”

Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality

Wesley Morris | The New York Times Magazine

“A full century later [D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation] has lost none of its hypnotic toxicity. Even now, to see this movie is to consider cheering for the Klan, to surmise that every black man is a lusty darkie unworthy of elected office, his libido, his life. Its biases are explicit and electric. Griffith established a permanent template with this movie, not just for filmed action but for American popular and political culture—a fantasia of white supremacy, black inhumanity, and the tremendous racial anger that’s still with us today."

The Writer Who Was Too Strong to Live

Dave McKenna | Deadspin

“Mike Wise used his last audience to remind Frey of that time after a party in her Brooklyn apartment when they were looking out the window at the Statue of Liberty, when she told him life was good and he agreed. Things couldn’t be more different now. When he was alone in the hospital room with Frey, Wise says, she looked at him and said, ‘This is surreal, isn’t it?’ He agreed one last time.”

Where Is the Fiction About Climate Change?

Amitav Ghosh | The Guardian

“In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities such as Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance?”

Anthony Bourdain on Authenticity and Expectations

Oliver Strand | Vogue

“For all of his good living—the paycheck-destroying sushi, the visits to classical French restaurants, the terraces overlooking the Aegean Sea—Bourdain tends to look his happiest when he’s holding a takeout container of something perfect and delicious and entirely of that moment.”

Fierce Attachments

Elizabeth Newton | Real Life Magazine

“Writers cope with detachment by latching on to ideas: timeless texts and influential figures, or viral content. In this way, citations not only build our senses of self, but when accumulated, collectively reaffirm the power of the status quo.”

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Published on October 29, 2016 05:00

How Did Maajid Nawaz End Up on a List of 'Anti-Muslim Extremists'?

When earlier this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center and three other groups released a list of 15 “anti-Muslim extremists,” many of the names came as no surprise. They included Pam Geller, who led the fight against the misleadingly nicknamed Ground Zero mosque, and her ally Frank Gaffney, who has called Barack Obama a crypto-Muslim and assailed Grover Norquist as a Islamist agent. Others were more controversial, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is beloved by some as a truthteller and reviled by others as a bigot.

But one name in particular stuck out: Maajid Nawaz, a British activist who runs the Quilliam Foundation, which calls itself “the world’s first counter-extremism think tank.” (It’s named for Abdullah (né William) Quilliam, a British convert who opened the U.K.’s first mosque in 1889.)

Nawaz is a star in certain anti-terror circles, thanks to a compelling personal narrative: A self-described former extremist who spent four years in an Egyptian prison, he has changed approaches and now argues for a pluralistic and peaceful vision of Islam. He stood for Parliament as a Liberal Democrat in 2015, and advised Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron.

Nawaz’s work has earned him detractors—critics claim he has embellished or neatened his narrative, some attack him for opportunism, and others question his liberal bona fides—but calling him an “anti-Muslim extremist” is a surprise. Unlike the likes of Gaffney and Geller, he doesn’t espouse the view that Islam itself is a problem; unlike Ali, who now describes herself as an atheist, Nawaz identifies as a Muslim.

When I spoke to Nawaz on Thursday, he was both baffled and furious.

“They put a target on my head. The kind of work that I do, if you tell the wrong kind of Muslims that I’m an extremist, then that means I’m an target,” he said. “They don’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t have any protection. I don’t have any state protection. These people are putting me on what I believe is a hit list.”

Not that he took well to his inclusion on its merits, either.

“I’m the one who’s a Muslim in this!” he said. “I’m listed there with people such as Pam Geller? It’s unbelievable.” He pointed out that he does things like appear in an Intelligence Squared debate arguing for the proposition—against Ali, in fact—that Islam is a religion of peace. (“I lost the vote,” he said, with a tinge of bitterness.) He has also won praise for battling Islamophobes in the press.

The report cited several counts against Nawaz. One is that he tweeted a cartoon of Muhammad—an intentionally provocative act, given that many Sunnis find it blasphemous to depict the prophet, but one that doesn’t fit neatly into the “anti-Islam” category. (Most Shiites don’t object at all, but in any case, is simply committing a blasphemous act anti-Islam?) A second is that Nawaz visited a strip club in London during a bachelor party, which is true, tasteless, and seemingly irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Third is a Daily Mail op-ed about the niqab, or face veil. The report states that he “called for criminalizing the wearing of the veil, or niqab, in many public places.” Nawaz counters that he only called it inappropriate. But he did write that their should be a “policy” barring the niqab in certain spaces: “Let me make this clear: it is our duty to adopt a policy barring the wearing of niqabs in these public buildings. Here’s my test: where a balaclava, motorcycle helmet or face mask would be deemed inappropriate, so should a niqab.”

The most interesting is the fourth point, because it highlights a peculiar dynamic: The SPLC and Nawaz are each accusing the other of McCarthyism. The report states:

In the list sent to a top British security official in 2010, headlined “Preventing Terrorism: Where Next for Britain?” Quilliam wrote, “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.” An official with Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit told The Guardian that “[t]he list demonises a whole range of groups that in my experience have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism.”

Nawaz disputes the claim. Quilliam says the list in question was an appendix to a larger report, and simply a list of British Muslim organizations; in fact, he says, the point was to say that such groups should be legal, even if they were extremist, so long as they were not violent. “It wasn’t a terror list,” Nawaz said. “We were saying, don’t ban these groups. We’ve gone through the looking glass. It’s the direct opposite of my life’s work.” He pointed to an exchange on the floor of Parliament, in which then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown cited him in defense of the notion that Islamist parties such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, with which Nawaz was affiliated in his radical days, ought not to be illegal:

Even many of those who have left the groups and feel that they should be exposed are of the view that exposing them is not the same as banning them altogether. Maajid Nawaz, who talked about the matter on “Newsnight,” said: “My ideal scenario would be not to ban the party but it would be that through the … power of discussion and persuasion that eventually the party would fizzle out in this country.”

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at SPLC who wrote the report (and has a long resume of similar work on extremists), told me that Quilliam’s list of groups was the linchpin of the case for Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist. (Potok also noted that the list was compiled in collaboration with Media Matters for America, the Center for New Community, and ReThink Media.)

Nawaz, meanwhile, accused SPLC of “McCarthyism” for compiling the guide. “Who compiles lists of individuals these days?” he said. “Even if someone was an anti-Muslim bigot, there shouldn’t be lists of names of individuals.”

Potok rejected the argument out of hand. “If criticizing any number of people is McCarthyism, then I guess the only answer to never criticize anyone. One can disagree or agree with a particular listing that we’ve made. … In some sense, to make a statement like that is to say that we shouldn’t criticize.” He noted that SPLC was careful never to list addresses or contact information for those it labeled extremists. “Our point is not to make these people targets for violence, Potok said. “The point is to tamp down the really baseless targeting.” While Nawaz demanded a correction, retraction, and apology, Potok said none was coming.

One thing that seemed to particularly irk Nawaz was the fact that the report came from SPLC. While the group is controversial—and particularly loathed on the American right—Nawaz’s objection was that he has known and respected their work for years. “It lends the wingnuts a level of credibility,” he said.

Yet Potok surely has a point about lists, even if one rejects Nawaz’s inclusion on this particular one. If naming and shaming the likes of Geller and Gaffney is beyond the pale, how should one combat Islamophobia, which is a real and growing problem? Nawaz endorsed the work of Tell MAMA UK, an organization that tracks attacks on Muslims and other incidents of Islamophobia.

There are legitimate disagreements about the most effective way of fighting Islamophobia. There are also grounds to argue about whether what Quilliam is doing is truly making much difference. But what makes Nawaz’s appearance on the list so peculiar is that he and SPLC share the goal of fighting back against unfair targeting of Muslims. If even natural-seeming allies are preoccupied fighting each other about tactics, what hope is there prevailing in the fight against real bigots?

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Published on October 29, 2016 05:00

October 28, 2016

Good Girls Revolt Shows How Far We Haven’t Come

On first glance, Good Girls Revolt, a new Amazon series about a landmark 1970 gender-discrimination lawsuit, seems to offer a window into a bygone era for women, one in which they were routinely abused, paid less than men for the exact same jobs, and treated as second-class citizens both at work and at home. But although it luxuriates in the visual trappings of the free-love era, the show is sneakily focused on illuminating how so many of the issues plaguing women in 1969 haven’t changed at all. The ongoing battles for equal pay, the lack of affordable childcare, the pervasive reality of sexual harassment: Take away the graphic-print minidresses and the omnipresent ashtrays, and you’re left with a workplace drama that doesn’t always feel all that anachronistic.

Didacticism can only take a show so far, but Good Girls Revolt, created by Dana Calvo and based on a nonfiction book by Lynn Povich, is wise enough to ease into the analysis, first taking time to establish a compelling premise and cast of characters. Povich’s 2012 book was the true story of how she and 46 other female employees at Newsweek sued the magazine, alleging that they were systematically discriminated against because of their gender, paid three times less than men doing the same work, and denied opportunities for promotion. Calvo’s show fictionalizes the magazine and the women who work there (it’s retitled, somewhat unimaginatively, News of the Week), but otherwise the details are the same, right down to the ACLU lawyer, Eleanor Holmes Norton (played here by Joy Bryant) who convinces the women that they have a case.

The pilot, which debuted in 2015 before the full season was ordered, establishes the order of the magazine, where women are hired as “researchers” and paired with male “reporters.” This means, in the words of Patti (Genevieve Angelson), a researcher, that “we report, investigate, and write files for the reporters; they do a pass, write their names on them, and then the stories go to press.” In accordance with dramatic law, the researchers are divided neatly into stock characters: Patti is the freespirited, hippie one; Cindy (Erin Darke) is the repressed, mousy one; Jane (Anna Camp) is the blonde, snobby one; and Grace Gummer plays Nora Ephron, who gets hired in the first episode, quits after she’s refused credit for a story, and then disappears for much of the rest of the season.

The most obvious analog for Good Girls Revolt is Mad Men, if only because it’s a workplace drama set in a similar period, with similarly focused attention to detail and cultural references (the pilot revolves around a story about reports of violence at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969). But Mad Men, for all its brilliance, was so highly stylized that its consideration of gender politics often felt abstract, or like something viewed from a distance. Good Girls Revolt, by contrast, is entirely driven by its female characters, and much more committed to expressing the urgency of their cause. And not just in the workplace. Cindy, in the first episode, realizes her husband has made a hole in her diaphragm; a fleet of male editors dismiss a source willing to go on the record because of her record of sexual promiscuity; and a backup singer tells Patti she’ll be fired if she does anything beyond “look good and sound good” behind the band she’s been hired to serve.

When the show does consider its male characters more closely, it often falters. Finn (Chris Diamantopoulos), the editor of News of the Week, is a charming rogue intent on emulating the more groundbreaking journalism being published at rival magazines, namely Rolling Stone. But he’s oddly two-dimensional, while Wick (Jim Belushi) is a harrumphing stereotype of a sexist who rarely talks to a woman unless he’s asking her to get him a cup of coffee. (One exception is when one of them quits, and he sneers, “Your name is all you have in journalism, so good luck Nora Ephron,” a curse that’s comical now in its wrongheadedness.) The male reporters initially exist as antagonists to plague their savvier female colleagues, although gradually they get shades of complexity as the series progresses.

“Injustice hurts, doesn’t it?” she says. “It should. It’s your evidence that something is wrong. Don’t ignore it.”

Because a lawsuit isn’t enough to pad out a 10-episode series (like almost everything else on streaming services, Good Girls Revolt would materially benefit from having its hourlong episodes trimmed to 45 minutes or so), the show has extended subplots about the various awakenings its female characters are experiencing. Jane, one of the most stereotypically Anna Campish characters in Camp’s showreel, has her future ambitions (and her virginity) reserved for a guy whom she’s been dating for two years but who hasn’t proposed. Her WASP mother feeds her diet pills that are basically methamphetamine while her father encourages her to get a new job at a law firm because he’s concerned News of the Week is becoming too Jewish.

The most moving scenes concern Cindy, whose lout of a husband treats her like a servant, but whose unexpected encounter with a coworker (Michael Oberholtzer) leads her to reconsider sex as pleasure rather than obligation. And while the show underserves Denise (Betty Gabriel), one of the few black researchers in the office, it includes an emphatic scene in which she expresses her distaste at being asked to sacrifice her own job security for the cause of white women who, as she puts it, “are only here for finishing school before moving to Greenwich.” While Good Girls Revolt doesn’t ever use the word “intersectional,” it’s at least aware of the ways in which some kinds of activism end up excluding or overriding women of color in the charge toward “progress.”

Some of the most dynamic scenes involve Holmes Norton, who actually led the Newsweek lawsuit while heavily pregnant, and who inspires the researchers to really consider how they feel about being paid a third of what reporters make. “Injustice hurts, doesn’t it?” she says. “It should. It’s your evidence that something is wrong. Don’t ignore it.” Good Girls Revolt, in encouraging audiences to reconsider their own lives in the context of women who lived five decades ago, often seems to be counseling the same thing.

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Published on October 28, 2016 13:49

Women in Movies Running in Heels

There are several scenes, in the new movie Inferno, in which Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones)—Robert Langdon’s latest lady-sidekick—runs around Florence in a pair of wedges. Not full-on stilettos, to be clear, like the ones in which Jones’s co-star, Sidse Babett Knudsen, will end up sprinting later in the movie, but wedges that are, in Sienna’s case, multiple inches high, and made of patent leather.

It happens like this: Sienna begins Inferno as Langdon’s nurse, and the opening scenes find the pair suddenly fighting for their lives against baddies who have infiltrated the hospital where Langdon is recovering from a gunshot wound that was inflicted, ostensibly, by those same murdery baddies. The pair, having barely escaped the hospital, go back to her apartment to regroup. She changes from her scrubs into civilian clothes. At which point—knowing that her day from there will prooooobably involve more murdery-baddie-evading, and knowing as well that such evading often involves running—Sienna Brooks scans the contents of her wardrobe and decides, for reasons that are best left to the Illuminati and/or Dan Brown himself, to don not just a shirt of white silk, but also … those intensely impractical shoes.

Inferno is an absurd movie, its action revolving around a boil-in-a-bag version of the plague; but the most ridiculous thing in it is a pair of shoes.

Oh, and the shoes also have shiny little bows on them.

It’s a strange costuming decision all around, and firmly in the absurdist tradition of the heel-hampered heroine, which is to say of Ginger “backwards and in heels” Rogers, and also Claire Dearing in Jurassic World, and Lisa Reisert in Red Eye, and Juliet O’Hara in Psych, and Annie Walker in Covert Affairs, and Claire Underwood in House of Cards, lounging around her Washington home in her sky-high stilettos. But the sole-crushing costuming decision is also narratively strange. It really makes no sense at all that Sienna, who is a former child prodigy and a current Langdon-level genius, would choose, all things considered, to put on those silly shoes. No. Sense. At. All. Inferno is an absurd movie, certainly, its action revolving around sketchy character motivations and Bourne-borrowed action sequences and, ultimately, a boil-in-a-bag version of the plague; the most ridiculous thing in this decidedly non-divine Dante-themed comedy, though, is the shoes.

A Brief History of ‘Spooktacular’

It’s there, every day, in my elevator: a flyer advertising my apartment building’s “Howl-o-ween Spooktacular,” the latest of the monthly “yappy hour” for dogs and their owners (yes, it’s that kind of building). When you’re made to stare at something like that long enough, you begin to ask questions. Like, when did “spooktacular” become the Halloween pun of choice?

This year, events billed as Spooktaculars have been thrown at venues ranging from to elementary schools to wildlife sanctuaries to nightclubs to Sea World. There’s a spooktacular hot-air-balloon festival in Arizona. Here’s an article referring to Donald Trump jack-o’-lanterns—“Trumpkins”—as “absolutely spooktacular.” And here are eight spooktacular jello shots. The term’s so inescapable that in 2012, The Onion carped, “The Word ‘Spooktacular’ Used To Mean Something In This Country.”

That parody column implied that the word has become a meaningless Frankenstein stitching of spooky and spectacular into something garish and capitalistic and possibly tinged by internet-era irony. Google Trends indicates the term has grown in popularity online over the past 12 years, hitting a plateau in 2013, seeming to confirm my suspicion it started with a joke from The Office or something.

But Katherine C. Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press, found evidence that the term dates back to at least 1897. She sent me a 119-year-old Christian Observer article describing a Halloween party where blindfolded attendees were made to touch items that felt like eels or snakes or corpse hands but were actually just “some sausage links, a pinball, a ham bone, a piece of wet fur, and an old kid glove which had been filled with wet bran and laid on ice!” The article’s writer, Laura A. Smith, referred to the objects as “spooktacular.”

So it’s not new. But Martin said that according to the linguistic data she has, spooktacular didn’t really catch on popularly until sometime in the late 20th century, though it’s hard to pin down an exact date. “The fact that it goes back to 1897 doesn’t [necessarily] represent a continuous existence of the word,” she said. “Halloween comes around, people are flinging copy around, and many people may individually have thought they came up with this great idea for a word.”

Language evolves, in part, by just this process: people smashing up two old words to make a new one. But the practice of doing so has accelerated over the last century and a half, Martin said, pointing to recent neologisms like “phablet” and “mansplaining.” Most surprising might be the fact that “spooktacular” predates the term “trick or treating,” a phrase believed to have originated in 1927.

The American University linguistics professor Naomi Baron, author of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, told me that she might expect “spooktacular” to wear out its welcome due to sheer clunkiness—it requires a lot of movement of the tongue around the palate to say. But its virtues are that its meaning is obvious and useful, representing the specific meld that Halloween-time ephemera represents between fright and frivolous spectacle. And the fact that it connotes something other than true spookiness might explain why it’s so often used in business advertisements and children’s celebrations.

“Its increase reflects the increase in the commercialization of Halloween over the course of the 20th century.”

“It’s a funny word because it’s used primarily in a promotional context, in the name of an event or in a press release announcing an event,” Martin said. “So there’s not a lot of non-self-conscious use by people. It’s not the kind of thing you can say without archness.”

In its association with marketing, spooktacular’s story might be the same as Halloween’s story. “I think it’s not a coincidence we have a word associated primarily with the commercialization of Halloween celebrations,” Martin said. “Its increase reflects the increase in the commercialization of Halloween over the course of the 20th century.” Of course, any modern American holiday by now is a commercialized spectacle, which might be why when “spooktacular” won’t do in December or April, you can turn to “holidazzle” or “eggcellent.”

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Published on October 28, 2016 07:21

October 27, 2016

Trump's 'Voter Suppression Operation' Targets Black Voters

It would be unfair to call Donald Trump’s interaction with black voters a love-hate relationship, since there’s little evidence of African American enthusiasm for Trump. But the Republican campaign has pursued a Janus-like strategy on black voters—ostensibly courting them in public while privately seeking to depress turnout.

This tension is on display in the last 24 hours. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, advertised as an “urban renewal agenda for America’s inner cities.” Trump told the audience, “It is my highest and greatest hope that the Republican Party can be the home in the future and forevermore for African Americans and the African American vote because I will produce, and I will get others to produce, and we know for a fact it doesn’t work with the Democrats and it certainly doesn’t work with Hillary.”

Yet on Thursday, BusinessWeek published a big cover story, based on exclusive access to the campaign, that revealed that Trump’s team has decided that winning over black voters is a lost cause:

Instead of expanding the electorate, [campaign chairman Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

The reporters, Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, offer some more detail on what that looks like:

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as [campaign digital guru Brad] Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

This wasn’t entirely unknown—Monica Langley reported two weeks ago that Trump was aiming for depressed turnout. What’s incredible is that Trump’s advisers called it “voter suppression.” When you’re talking about “suppressing” black votes, it’s a good sign you’re not competing for them, and this is messaging malpractice, since it makes the work seem nefarious. That’s all the more true because Republicans around the country have spent the last decade instituting laws that make it more challenging to vote—measures that they say are necessary to prevent election fraud, but critics say actually amount to voter suppression.

In fact, trying to depress turnout is not that unusual. There’s lots of evidence that negative advertising is designed to depress turnout among certain, targeted groups. Certainly, the Clinton campaign has used negative ads—they’ve fired off a broadside of spots using Trump’s own words. If these ads convince Trump supporters to vote for Clinton, that’s great for her, but if they convince voters who might otherwise vote for the Republican that he’s just too toxic or mean or extreme, that’s just fine for her, too. It’s still one less vote for Trump. Obama tried a similar tactic in assailing Mitt Romney four years ago, as Ross Douthat points out.

Why Black Voters Are Rejecting Trump

This is, at least, the theory. Whether it works is a different question. The answer is probably no. A 2007 meta-analysis concluded that there is not “any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and possibly overall public mood.” (In a charming proof that your mother was right that you shouldn’t say anything unless you have something nice to say, another study found that while negative advertising was mostly useless, positive advertising was effective in running up margins where support was already strong.)

Even if Trump’s advisers are acting on a questionable theory, that theory does help explain some of Trump’s strange approach to African Americans. It confirms the suspicion of many observers, myself included, that Trump is more going through the motions of courting black voters more than actually trying to woo them. Many of his events aimed at African Americans have actually been in heavily white jurisdictions, in front of heavily white crowds.

His appearance in Charlotte Wednesday was no different. Although the city has become a symbol of racial tension since the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by police in September, the audience at Trump’s invitation-only event was mostly white, The Charlotte Observer noted. His speech was full of many of the same hamfisted overtures that have been met with everything from eyerolls to outrage by actual black Americans, from the implication that most blacks are living in squalid, violent “inner cities” to his deployment of false or misleading statistics to butress that vision of squalor. He has also used outdated and distancing language to discuss African Americans and other minorities.

The result of this halfhearted—or rather, insincere—outreach has been that Trump’s polling among African Americans is bad. He once boasted he could win 25 percent of the black vote, far outpacing the recent Republican high-water mark (Gerald Ford’s 17 percent in 1976). But with the election near, Fox News finds him trailing Clinton by 77 points. CBS found Trump at just 4 percent, with Clinton at 85 percent. That puts her a good bit behind Barack Obama’s 2012 pace of 93 percent, but Trump is also still behind Mitt Romney’s 6 percent, according to exit polls. (In one farcical turn, a major tracking poll turned out to be wildly distorted by a single 19-year-old black Trump voter, whose standing was heavily weighted.)

The Trump theory, as laid out in the BusinessWeek article, holds that this doesn’t really matter. He doesn’t need black votes! (His advisors admit in the piece that their polling finds them trailing, and they say their path to victory is real but narrow.) Of course, his aides might be wrong. In addition to the political-science literature casting doubts on turnout depression, Clinton has spent months trying to mobilize African Americans, especially in places like North Carolina or Ohio, where black turnout is likely the difference between a Democratic victory or a Republican win. If black voters vote in droves in Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, it might block Trump’s path to the White House altogether, and Trump’s decision to not even contest the bloc would look like a mistake.

Meanwhile, the BusinessWeek story made Republicans who aren’t affiliated with Trump practically apoplectic. That’s because even if Trump doesn’t think he needs black voters, future Republican candidates will. Trump has made clear that he owes no particular allegiance to the Republican Party and has little interest in its fortunes without him, which allows him to be blithe about writing off the demographic. Other analysts, including Republicans, have been warning for years that the GOP cannot survive as a rump party of whites (and, increasingly, white men). But voter relationships have to be built over time; a bloc written off or alienated can take a generation or more to win back. By not just passing on the chance to reach out to African Americans but actually bragging about their efforts to keep them from the polls, the Trump campaign isn’t just wasting an opportunity for outreach to blacks, but may in fact be setting back Republican efforts for years to come.

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Published on October 27, 2016 09:49

Trump's 'Voter Surpression Operation' Targets Black Voters

Yet on Thursday, BusinessWeek published a big cover story, based on exclusive access to the campaign, that revealed that Trump’s team has decided that winning over black voters is a lost cause:

Instead of expanding the electorate, [campaign chairman Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

The reporters, Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, offer some more detail on what that looks like:

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as [campaign digital guru Brad] Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

This wasn’t entirely unknown—Monica Langley reported two weeks ago that Trump was aiming for depressed turnout. What’s incredible is that Trump’s advisers called it “voter suppression.” When you’re talking about “suppressing” black votes, it’s a good sign you’re not competing for them, and this is messaging malpractice, since it makes the work seem nefarious. That’s all the more true because Republicans around the country have spent the last decade instituting laws that make it more challenging to vote—measures that they say are necessary to present election fraud, but critics say actually amount to voter suppression.

Why Black Voters Are Rejecting Trump

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Published on October 27, 2016 09:49

American Horror Story's Mind-Bending Experiment

American Horror Story has turned into something genuinely original and inspired this season, though it’s no simple matter to explain why. FX made a big deal about not revealing ahead of time what the sixth outing of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s slasher anthology would be about; it’s now clear this was less a marketing stunt than a way of dealing with the fact that the season doesn’t lend itself to capsule descriptions—and is exceedingly reliant on surprise. I’m now going to spoil the surprise. If you’ve not kept up out of a disinterest in butcher-knife gore and coerced cannibalism but do want to know about one of the most interesting experiments in TV right now, read ahead.

The first five episodes presented themselves as a true-crime documentary series called My Roanoke Nightmare, which had a married couple, Matt and Shelby (André Holland and Lily Rabe), testifying about moving to a house in rural North Carolina that turned out to be haunted by the spirits of colonists who vanished in the 16th century. Actors re-enacted Matt and Shelby’s story, with the people we recognize as Cuba Gooding Jr. and Sarah Paulson playing the couple, Angela Bassett playing Matt’s sister, Lee (whose “real” version is played by Adina Porter), and Kathy Bates, Evan Peters, Lady Gaga, and others as supernatural figures. The result were a straightforwardly harrowing tale of surviving ghosts and witches and evil hillbillies. Because Matt, Shelby, and Lea were giving interviews, a safety net underlay the action: Viewers knew who was going to survive. But by the time the characters escaped their perils at the end of episode five, the documentary gimmick had started to feel one-note. Where could the show go from there?

Episode six opened with text saying that “My Roanoake Nightmare was the television success story of 2015,” garnering “23 million viewers by its finale, topping that week’s airing of Sunday Night Football, Empire, and The Walking Dead,” adding that the network had asked the producer to create a follow-up series. Suddenly we were in the incongruous-feeling environment of Southern California, watching Roanoake’s producer Sid (Cheyenne Jackson) negotiate with studio heads, actors, and the documentary’s subjects to film a new show: Return to Roanoke, a Big Brother-like experiment where Shelby, Matt, and the actors from the original series go back to the house that was now festooned with hidden cameras as the producers would secretly create scares. Sid’s followed by a film crew at all times—“the camera never stops,” he instructs.

This conceit—a show within a show about the making of a show about the previous show within a show—is mind-bendy is all the right ways. The actors, film crew, and viewing audience within American Horror Story don’t seem to believe that Matt and Shelby actually encountered the supernatural. Quickly, though, it starts to appear they were wrong as horrible things start happening on set in North Carolina. Toward the end of episode six, on-screen text tells us that the show from here out is assembled from found footage because all but one member of the cast and crew died during filming. And indeed, episode seven begins with an axe-murder spree felling Sid and his producers—all told from the point of view of the victims’ cameras. But as you watch, you have to keep in mind the possibility that even this layer of action may be staged. Which is a funny thing to wonder about because, of course, it all is staged by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.

As the characters begin to live through a “real” nightmare, Murphy and Falchuk get grimier.

Less abstractly, the premise of Return to Roanoke lets American Horror Story get a lot scarier. The proposition of the first five episodes is flipped: Instead of knowing all the important characters survive, you know that all but one died, reintroducing crucial suspense. And moreover, as the characters begin to live through a “real” version of the nightmare portrayed in the “original” series, Murphy and Falchuk get grimier. No longer are vengeful spirits or crazed locals played by well-lit recognizable actors; the villains are more menacing and, for now, less knowable. The witch once played by Lady Gaga makes only a furtive appearance in the corner of the frame: She’s not mugging to the cameras. Cuba Gooding Jr., speaking as a professional actor, encounters a pool of blood and says he’s played in enough horror films to know it’s not cornstarch. And in an exquisite moment at the end of episode seven, Kathy Bates’s character—Agnes Mary Winstead, an actress who’s gone insane with the belief that she’s been possessed by the ghost she played in My Ronoake Nightmare—comes face to face with the actual ghost she played, who looks even less friendly than Bates ever did in the role.

In clear callbacks to The Blair Witch Project, the show is offering an exhaustive dissection of the found-footage trend that’s dominated the horror genre in the new millennium, while also working in the most garish tropes of slasher films and torture porn. And the reality-TV conceit allows for a savage satire of Hollywood profiteering, the social-media era, and the un-supernatural nastiness that drives most human conflict: Most of the killings so far have been by humans, not ghosts, with the most vivid one resulting from reality-TV’s manipulation of personal jealousy taken to disgusting extremes. A layer of suspense lies in the fact that the show may well fold in on itself again, revealing yet another layer of meta-filmmaking. Even if it doesn’t, and even if the plot now spirals into incoherence in the manner of all previous American Horror Story seasons, there’s no taking away from the daringness of what Murphy and Falchuk have attempted here.

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Published on October 27, 2016 08:31

Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End

I generally enjoy milk chocolate, for basic reasons of flavor and texture. For roughly the same reasons, I generally do not enjoy dark chocolate.

Those are just my boring preferences, but preferences, really, won’t do: This is an age in which even the simplest element of taste will become a matter of partisanship and identity and social-Darwinian hierarchy; in which all things must be argued and then ranked; in which even the word “basic” has come to suggest searing moral judgment. So IPAs are not just extra-hoppy beers, but also declarations of masculinity and “palatal machismo.” The colors you see in the dress are not the result of light playing upon the human eye, but rather of deep epistemological divides among the world’s many eye-owners. Cake versus pie, boxers versus briefs, Democrat versus Republican, pea guac versus actual guac, are hot dogs sandwiches … It is the best of times, it is the RAGING DUMPSTER FIRE of times.

Dark chocolate hasn’t had a glass of Merlot since it saw Sideways.

But back to chocolate. These micro-debates lend themselves especially well to candy, it turns out, which is probably why, this spoooooky time of year, candy rankings join heated discussions of the latest offensive Halloween costumes as seasonal Stuff to Talk About. (It’s controversial candy season, motherfuckers!) And so, cumulatively, 21 Kinds of Halloween Candy, Ranked and Ranking Of 40 Halloween Candies From Nastiest To Raddest and 52 Best and Worst Halloween Candies—Ranked and A Definitive List of the Best and Worst Halloween Candy, Ranked and their many other counterparts have combined to bestow judgment.

And the judgment, collectively, if I may sum it up, is that candy corn is disgusting and also weird-looking, and Mr. Goodbar is the superior selection in the Hershey’s Minis bag, and Mounds are proof that God loves us, and Raisinets are proof of the opposite, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are proof that even in these turbulent times it could turn out that committed monogamy makes a certain sense. Also: Nerds are warty nonsense; Whoppers are okay but why are their coatings so shiny; Butterfingers are delicious but also possibly Illuminati-left clues about impending apocalypse; the best M&M color is red and the blue ones are trying too hard and the oranges are trying not hard enough and let’s not even start on the green; Rolos are fine; Milk Duds are unacceptable; Smarties are good in an “actually...” kind of way; Twix are what they are, but—wait for it—also demand the plural verb; Snickers are, obviously, at the very tippy-top of the Halloween hierarchy, but only if they’re Fun-Sized, and if someone puts a regular-sized version into your bag, that person is most likely either over-compensating for something or trying to murder you with the tiny razor blade that has been lodged between the peanuts and the nougat, and it probably goes without saying but while we’re on the subject of Snickers, any candy that bills itself as Bite-Sized can GTFO, which means Go to Functional Overload, and if you have a different interpretation then you can go functional-overload yourself.

What these assessments haven’t fully accounted for, though, is the most fundamental division of all. Lurking at the heart of the Candy Controversies is the matter of milk chocolate versus dark chocolate, which is also to say Good Chocolate versus Bad Chocolate. Take this mini-ranking, from the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, which garnered approximately 5,000 replies, ranging from enthusiastic agreement to hot-fire objection, and started a small war of choco-partisanship:

The order in which Hershey’s minis get eaten:

1. Krackel

2. Mr. Goodbar

3. Plain

4. Maybe there is an apple in the fridge? No?

5. Dark

— Philip Bump (@pbump) October 25, 2016

So let’s settle it, once and for all—with the truth. Here, listed in no particular order, is definitive evidence that Milk Chocolate Is Superior to Dark Chocolate and If You Do Not Agree You Are Wrong Both Factually and Morally The End:

1. Milk Chocolate Tastes Good

I mean. I mean. This isn’t even a debate, right? Let’s move on.

2. Dark Chocolate Tastes Bad

Do you enjoy being reminded that the treat (“treat”) you are eating has been extruded from a crushed-up plant? Do you prefer desserts that go out of their way to remind you that they have been composed of beans? Then by all means, enjoy your Milky Way Midnight or whatever it is, but we really have nothing left to say to each other, because dark chocolate is bitter and aggressive, and, in general, I prefer my guilty-pleasure indulgences when they do not systematically attack me in the mouth. Also, dark chocolate is chalky. It doesn’t melt so much as it, for the most part, crumbles.

But I realize I am not an authority on this. So here is About.com—yes, the site so comprehensive in its knowledge of the world that only a preposition would do for its title—and its definitive Candy Glossary, which, it turns out, has already made the case for me (emphasis mine):

Dark chocolate is chocolate without milk solids added. Dark chocolate has a more pronounced chocolate taste than milk chocolate, because it does not contain milk solids to compete with the chocolate taste. However, the lack of milk additives also means that dark chocolate is more prone to a dry, chalky texture and a bitter aftertaste.

Right? Objective! And if you’re still not convinced, here is an actual academic paper that I did not purchase from Elsevier but whose abstract I definitely skimmed. It is titled “Sensory description of dark chocolates by consumers,” and its authors scientifically tested regular people’s assessments of the texture of dark chocolate. It concluded, scientifically:

With respect to mouthfeel, chocolate with a lower cocoa content was characterized as melting and creamy, whereas the product with the highest cocoa content was characterized as dry, mealy, and sticky.

Boom. Scienced.

3. Dark Chocolate Tastes Bad Specifically Because It Is Bitter

But, okay, to be fair, some chalky things are tolerable, right? Smarties, for one (see above). But, as About.com suggested, it’s the bitterness that really does dark chocolate in, since even the sweetest versions of the stuff are, in some way, sour. Those Special Dark bars they put in the Hershey’s Minis bags to offset the Krackels (they’re the worst of the milk chocolate options, Philip, I’m sorry) and/or make the whole selection seem a little fancier? If “special” means “bitter in flavor but also bitter because you could be having a Mr. Goodbar instead,” then yes, these bars are extremely special.

4. Dark Chocolate Is Snobby

I assume a) that there is a chocolate lobby, and b) that it has been working for many years to brand the more cacao-heavy versions of its products as luxury items. Just like DeBeers did with diamonds, Big Chocolate has seen to it that, while milk chocolate is accessible and ubiquitous, dark chocolate remains mysterious and exclusive. (See: the Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Intense Dark Midnight Reverie® bar and its 86 Percent Cacao. Can’t argue with reveries!) And the branding, to be fair, has gone extremely well: Dark chocolate now has an image to maintain. Dark chocolate reads The Economist, and regularly quotes Bagehot to make all that reading worthwhile. Dark chocolate was totally into the restaurant before it was cool. Dark chocolate stopped liking the restaurant once it got cool. Dark chocolate hasn’t had a glass of Merlot since it saw Sideways. But dark chocolate is thirsty, so thirsty (and only partly because its mouth is full of mealy, chalky bean-chunks).

4.5. Milk Chocolate Is Basic, and That’s Totally Fine and Quite Possibly Pretty Great

Do you enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Latte every now and then, and do you sometimes even refer to this beverage, simply for brevity’s sake, as a PSL, and do you generally not feel that either of these things should be treated as evidence of your moral turpitude? Would you sometimes prefer McDonald’s french fries dipped in barbecue sauce to some hand-cut pommes frites served with a thimble of aioli?

I agree. If you’d like, I have this amazingly delicious Hershey’s bar that I’d be happy to share with you.

5. Dark Chocolate Is a Marxist Nightmare

Dark chocolate celebrates, in the most literal way possible, conspicuous consumption. Which, fine, is Veblen and not Marx, but they’re related, and anyway, something something bourgeois something something “responsibly sourced” and just see point 4 again, I don’t know. Dark chocolate is bitter and gross, I can’t believe we’re still having this discussion.

6. Dark Chocolate Is a Lie

Oh! Right! Remember the Mast Brothers? The bearded hipsters who made a fortune selling fancy chocolate bars under the evil-genius, farm-to-table-y premise of “bean to bar”? The ones who, it turned out, just took regular old chocolate and put it in pretty paper and charged $10 a chunk and basically made a mockery out of everyone who has ever loved chocolate, which is very, very many people?

And remember when Hershey funded studies that suggested the health benefits of dark chocolate, and when Mars placed its chocolate products in health-food aisles at Walmart and Target, to give the impression that they were “nutrition bars,” because Big Chocolate really is everywhere?

7. But At Least Dark Chocolate Is Not White Chocolate

White chocolate, to be clear, isn’t even chocolate. It is a product of chocolate’s aftermath: It is composed largely of cocoa butter—vegetable fat—that has basically been remaindered from the Vaseline lotion factory and then mixed with sugar and then squirted into foil and sold at a markup under the guise of sweet indulgence, probably also under the direction of Big Chocolate.

So. Whatever your individual taste, whatever your random preference, whatever the complicated interplay of nature of nurture has led you to believe about what you happen to enjoy, candy-wise, this is the truth, and I will accept no other views. Except there is one tiny thing, I’ll concede, that dark chocolate and its dark arts have going for them. White “chocolate” is proof that there is only one thing worse than being bitter, mealy, untrustworthy snob-chocolate: not being chocolate at all.

* I also actively love Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, though, so basically take everything, when it comes to your correspondent’s culinary taste, with a grain of definitely-not-Himalayan salt.

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Published on October 27, 2016 08:17

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