Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 8

Saturday Night Live, Lobbyist

This weekend, just before Saturday Night Live began its show, a commercial aired on NBC in Washington, D.C. The ad featured a man in a home gym, lifting weights. “President Trump, I hear you watch the morning shows,” he said. “Here’s what I do every morning.” The camera panned out to reveal that the man was missing a leg. “Look, you lost the popular vote, you’re having trouble drawing a crowd, and your approval rating keeps sinking,” he said, still directly addressing the president. “But kicking thousands of my fellow veterans off their health insurance by killing the Affordable Care Act and banning Muslims won’t help. That’s not the America I sacrificed for.” He paused. “You want to be a legitimate president, sir? Then act like one.”

The anonymous veteran—or rather, the ad he starred in, from the political action committee VoteVets.org—was embracing one of the most common clichés of the young administration of Donald J. Trump: that this is a president who, forged in the fires of television, remains malleable when placed in the vicinity of that medium’s particular kind of heat. Trump owes much of his national fame to TV in general, and to NBC in particular; he is also, journalistic reports and his personal Twitter feed have long suggested, a regular viewer of cable news, from the “fake” to the “less so.” He is also a regular watcher of Saturday Night Live. After a December sketch, starring Alec Baldwin, mocked the then-president-elect’s impulsive tweeting, the actual Donald Trump, my colleague David Sims pointed out, offered a condemnation of Baldwin’s impression. Via, yes, a tweet. One sent at 12:13 a.m. East Coast time—about halfway through SNL’s live broadcast.

The episode was meant to make its at-home audience laugh, but also to make its White House audience angry.

Saturday Night Live has learned from this situation roughly the same lesson that VoteVets.org did: The show is recognizing that it can be a platform not just for satirizing the president, but also for, more simply, talking to him. That recognition came to a head during SNL’s most recent episode—the one hosted, for a record 17th time, by Alec Baldwin. It was a show infused with a sense of its own influence over the doings of the West Wing, one calibrated not just to make its at-home audience laugh, but also to make its White House audience angry. It was an episode that had, like the ad that preceded it, a strong message to send to the president about the way he has been doing his job.

Things started, in the cold open, with Melissa McCarthy, making an unsurprising re-appearance as White House press secretary Sean Spicer. McCarthy took the impression she gave last week—“Spicey” as a gum-gulping, podium-pounding flurry of sentient testosterone—and exaggerated it even further. She/he, this time around, was even angrier. The gum being chewed was even more comically enormous. Instead of picking up the briefing-room podium in a rage, this Spicer zipped around upon it, Segway-style.

But the key element of the sketch came near its conclusion, when Melissa McSpicer was discussing the dustup between the Trump administration and Nordstrom, after the department store severed its relationship with the Ivanka Trump clothing and accessory brand. Spicer pointed out that “he” was wearing a lovely tennis bracelet from the Ivanka collection, as QVC-style purchasing information flashed below him. And then: McCarthy raised her leg, in a Megan-in-Bridesmaids manner, to reveal that Spicer’s footwear choice for the day had been a pair of whimsical Ivanka-brand heels.

The gender-bending was absurd, but it was also extremely pointed. The sketch was aiming its satire not just at Spicer, but also at his boss—and, specifically, at an article Politico published in response to McCarthy’s initial Spicer parody claiming that “more than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes.” That revelation, which was attributed only to “sources close to” the president but which went instantly viral, got people on social media talking and giggling and strategizing, many of them in the name of #TheResistance: SNL should just get women to play all the Trumpian roles, people suggested. Rosie as Steve Bannon! Ellen DeGeneres as Mike Pence! Kristen Wiig as Jared Kushner! Rachel Dratch as Reince Priebus! And—sorry, Mr. Baldwin, but—Meryl Streep as Donald Trump!

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'Recruit Rosie': When Satire Joins the Resistance

That satire-driven feedback loop—people offering casting advice to SNL, and SNL winking back at them for the effort—ran as a knowing refrain throughout the Baldwin-hosted SNL. Kate McKinnon, playing on all the “enlist a lady” stuff, made an appearance during the cold open as a laconic Jeff Sessions. Leslie Jones played herself, lobbying Lorne Michaels to play Trump—another casting choice that was laden with real-world ironies and meanings. During a segment that mocked both Trump’s “SEE YOU IN COURT” tweets and his reality-TV associations, the show presented Baldwin-Trump facing off against three federal judges in The People’s Court; the sketch culminated in him being silenced by a no-nonsense judge—played, natch, by a woman (in this case, Cecily Strong).

During the episode’s Weekend Update, too, Michael Che, making the show’s sense of its influence plain, addressed the president directly, in the second-person. “In just the span of one day,” Che said, Trump “was in a losing battle with three federal judges, a decorated war hero [John McCain], and a department store.”

And then: “Dude, pace yourself!” Che advised. He added: “It’s sad, man. I hope he quits. I mean, Donald: Is this really how you want to spend the last two years of your life?”  

I mean, Donald. It was a small moment, but a striking one. Here, after all, is one more cliché: Donald Trump is, steadily but also extremely suddenly, changing the American presidency. And the satire that has long served as a back-channel to the American presidency is changing, suddenly and steadily, along with it. It used to be that SNL’s presidential parody took aim at the public perception of the president: Gerald Ford, slapsticking klutz; Ronald Reagan, behind-the-scenes genius; George W. Bush, champion of the fine art of “strategery.” Its impressions tried to insinuate themselves, subtly, into the public’s sense of their presidents; their respective sketches exercised the same kind of soft influence that, for example, would lead many Americans to assume that “I can see Russia from my house!” was something the real Sarah Palin, rather than Tina Fey’s finger-gun-toting impression of her, had uttered.

Perhaps an armistice has been reached in the cold war of cold opens. Or … perhaps not.  

The kind of satire SNL engaged in this weekend, however, was different. It wasn’t playing the long game, of public perception or historical sensibility. It was playing, rather, an extremely short one: This was SNL using its platform to speak directly to the president. The show had an audience of many, definitely, but also, it seemed to realize, an audience of one: This SNL, even more than its predecessors, was trying to anger President Trump, and make him indignant, and encourage him to question the telegenic fitness of Sean Spicer, and Jeff Sessions, and perhaps even himself. If Trump hates seeing his staffers portrayed by women, the logic went, then what better way to encourage him to doubt those staffers than to have them played by Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon? What better way to create chaos in the mind of the president than to present him with the televised image of his iconic hairdo sported, cheerfully and subversively, by Leslie Jones?

President Trump may well be aware of the game(s) SNL was playing with him, and at him; as of Sunday morning, he has yet to tweet about the episode. So perhaps an armistice has been reached in the cold war of cold opens. Perhaps SNL will be overcome with the anxiety of influence; perhaps President Trump will find better things to do with his Saturday evenings than to watch comedians who, like so many others, want something from him. Or perhaps SNL will remain as a political platform as well as a comedic one. Perhaps PACs will keep buying the show’s ad slots as a way to talk to, and influence, the new American president. Perhaps a show that airs “Live from New York” will be aimed, ever more, at a viewer who watches its episodes live from Washington, D.C.

Whitney Houston and the Actor-Musician: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Whitney Houston Was Too Perfect to Stay

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib | MTV News

“The message is that greatness can only be unexpected for so long before it becomes routine and pushes the great to some collapse. With Whitney, the first decade-plus seemed impossible. She was polished and presented in a way that set her firmly on the edge of titanic and fragile. She was a black pop star in the era of Michael, Prince, and Janet. But she was a black pop star who, at first, avoided the societal pitfalls of being black, a woman, famous, and powerful in a country that is often only comfortable with a person being one of those things at a time, and sometimes not even then.”

Lydia Davis and Jhumpa Lahiri Learn New Languages

Charles Halton | The Millions

“Dictionaries can be detrimental crutches for those learning a new language. They are psychological hindrances to fully grasping vocabulary. If you know that a dictionary is only a keystroke away, you’ll likely not spend as much effort driving new words into your head as you would if you had no safety net. Furthermore, discovering words in context gives a deeper understanding than scanning an abstract definition.”

How Anna Nicole Smith Became America’s Punchline

Sarah Marshall | BuzzFeed

“If the heroine’s allure is the product of not just blind luck but sustained effort and intent—let alone strategic surgical alteration and courtship of wealthy benefactors, as Anna Nicole Smith’s was—then she is too powerful to remain sympathetic, and becomes an object of jealousy, rather than aspiration. It’s one thing to be chosen as a goddess; it’s quite another to claw your way to the top of Mount Olympus. And when the public finds out a goddess is in fact a striving mortal, this revelation will push her into a very different kind of myth: one whose satisfying conclusion comes not when a woman is exalted, but when she is destroyed.”

The Promising State of the Actor-Musician

Bridget Minamore | Pitchfork

“Even those actors and musicians who bypass accusations of artistic hubris and achieve success in their second field will still find themselves viewed primarily as one profession or the other. It is rare for the two sides of the creative career coin to be held in equal esteem, particularly at the same time. Instead, successful crossover artists tend to transition between acting and making music, with the peak of one career coinciding with a lull in the other.”

Alec Baldwin, James Baldwin, and Apocalyptic Exceptionalism

Matt Seybold | Los Angeles Review of Books

“The humor in Baldwin’s sketches does not originate from the antics of their central figure, but from his foils, who elicit laughs primarily by reacting to Trump’s un-ironic vulgarity with open exasperation, horror, and disdain. Many previous presidential impersonators found unmistakable joy in playing their characters, but Baldwin makes palpable his revulsion towards the character he inhabits. Portraying Trump is an act of endurance, even penitence, which every fiber of his being resists.”

How Scorsese Made a Film That Went Against Hollywood’s Rules

Stephanie Zacharek | Time

“Scorsese’s insistence on thinking everything through in advance makes a cinematographer’s job easier, though nothing is ever set in stone. It can’t be, because so much of filmmaking is problem solving, particularly when vagaries of weather, or even just shifting light, enter the picture. Besides, all working relationships between directors and their cinematographers are different, and even when a director-cinematographer duo work together on another movie—or on many more movies—the nature of that relationship shifts with the material.”

Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast

Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker

“[Bourdain] once described his body as ‘gristly, tendony,’ as if it were an inferior cut of beef, and a recent devotion to Brazilian jujitsu has left his limbs and his torso laced with ropy muscles. With his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo, there is something of the aging rocker about him. But if you spend any time with Bourdain you realize that he is controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.”

The Big Short: Sarah Manguso’s Aphorisms in an Age of Alternative Facts

Rachel Syme | The New Republic

“The aphorism has come back into vogue, or at least into the cultural conversation, because we are currently enmeshed in short-form writing, which is flourishing on Twitter and in the proliferation of political soundbites, both true and false. We are engaged in big cultural battles for truth and where to find it, and we are all searching for verified phrases that we can repeat over and over in order to maintain a sense of sanity as facts shift beneath our feet.”

Culture on Culture

Bryan Washington | The Awl

“Trap music, as an idea, started as one thing — utilizing the sparest assortment of beats on-hand to deliver the gruffest, hardest rhymes at an artist’s disposal — and through the phantasms of the music industry, it’s since become a similar other. The same permutations have occurred with what we’d have originally identified as screw, and dub-step, and dancehall, and other forms that’ve been molded away from their original variables by the market’s demands. But, in this way, the genre becomes akin to other hyper-specific forms (like reggaeton, or k-pop), and the trick becomes retaining the particularity, while capitalizing on the variables that draw so many folks in.”

Is My Novel Offensive?

Katy Waldman | Slate

“It’s not hard to imagine why sensitivity readers could potentially put authors in a difficult position. After all, where would we be if these experts had subjected our occasionally outrageous and irredeemable canon—Moby Dick or Lolita or any other classic, old, anachronistic book—to their scrutiny? Plenty of fiction—Portnoy’s Complaint, or Martin Amis’s Money—is defined in part by a narrator’s fevered misogyny. Novels like Huckleberry Finn derive some of their intrigue and complexity from the imperfections of their social vision.”

The Future of Deportations Under Trump

The deportation of Guadalupe García de Rayos in Phoenix, Arizona, may be giving the undocumented population in the U.S. its first sense of what the next four years will feel like. Rayos is a 35-year-old mother of two who has lived in the U.S. for 21 years. In 2008, local deputies caught her using a fake social security number after they raided her work, and since then she has been required by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to show up at regular interviews. Every year she’s talked to an agent, then been released back to her family in the U.S. But Wednesday Rayos was arrested, and on Thursday agents put her in a van to be deported back to Mexico.

In January, President Trump signed an executive order that vastly expands who the U.S. considers a deportation priority. The order received little immediate media attention at the time of signing, likely because of the many other controversial orders the president released simultaneously. The order is full of vague language, and interpreting it has left a lot of questions as to what’s in store for the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Trump’s administration has said the changes were done to make the U.S. safer, ridding communities of criminals. This may, in part, be true, but it will be so because Trump’s order greatly increased the number of people considered criminals worthy of deportation. An estimate from the Los Angeles Times says Trump’s order could include as many as 8 million undocumented immigrants, all of whom would be eligible for deportation at any moment.

“This is designed so Kellyanne Conway and [Sean] Spicer can stand up and say, ‘Well, we’re prioritizing criminals,” said David Leopold, an attorney and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, referring to the counselor to the president and the White House press secretary, respectively. “But in reality they’re going after anyone they can get their hands on—period. It’s a ruse.”

Rayos was 14 when she crossed the border in Nogales, Arizona. In Phoenix, she married, raised two children, and for a while she worked at Golfland Sunsplash, a water park in a city suburb. This was in 2008, when Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies carried out regular immigration raids, and Rayos was one of those arrested. To get the job she used a fake social security number. So, when she was arrested, she was charged with a felony and spent six months in an immigration jail. After this she had an open deportation order, meaning ICE could her back to Mexico at any time. It chose Thursday to act on that order, and as she left the ICE facility in a van a group of protesters blocked its path. One man even tied himself to its tire.

People like Rayos were seen as the reason why, in 2014, Obama developed levels deportation priorities. Obama deported more people than any other president—2.5 million—which earned him the nickname “deporter-in-chief” from immigration advocates. But Obama also prioritized who he deported, focusing on the “Bad Hombres,” to use a Trump reference. His plan created three strata of deportable offenses: at the top were violent felony offenders and people apprehended at the border; next were those with multiple misdemeanors, offenses like DUIs and domestic abuse charges, and also recent arrivals; lastly were people who’d come to the U.S. prior to 2014 and who’d been charged nonviolent crimes. The policy left enforcement up to ICE’s discretion, and it seemed for eight years Rayos fell in that lowest priority.

Immigration attorneys are still trying to make sense of the Trump’s order, mostly because of its vague language—probably done intentionally. The order, as Leopold pointed out after Trump signed the order, will follow through on Trump’s campaign-promise of mass deportations.

There is no priority anymore. The language in the order says that any unauthorized immigrant convicted of any crime can be deported. It makes no distinction between what type of crime this will be, which Leopold said has the potential to put murder on par with rolling through a stop sign.

One of the most controversial terms in the order is a line that makes acts that might “constitute a chargeable criminal offense” deportable. This has been interpreted as meaning an immigrant doesn’t have to be convicted of a crime, doesn’t even have to be charged with a crime, they just need to have probably committed one. Lawyers say this will likely be used to deport anyone who crossed the border outside of an immigration checkpoint. The distinction lies in whether someone overstayed a visa, and or if the person crossed the border through the desert.

Migrants who come to the U.S. on a visa, then overstay their visa, pass through immigration checks. And because overstaying a visa is a civil offense, this would not be a deportable crime, Leopold said. But migrants who crossed the border through the deserts of any border state, avoiding customs checkpoints, would have committed a criminal offense by entering the U.S. illegally. If ICE agents can get an immigrant to admit they crossed this way, it could be taken as a “chargeable criminal offense,” and therefore a deportable offense. Leopold called it a “tool to criminalize the undocumented population.”

Trump’s order could also return the U.S. to a policy not in national use since 2007, when the Bush administration raided worksites and paraded handcuffed migrants in front of national media. These raids were used to reinforce the concept of self-deportation, an immigration philosophy that many Trump officials support. Its weapon is intimidation—creating the fear in undocumented communities at their home, while on the road, or at their job, with the specter that an ICE agent, and ultimately deportation, loom as a constant threat.

Another tool implemented by George W. Bush, and that Trump will likely use, is giving back 287 (g) authority to local law enforcement. Trump’s order said explicitly that he wanted “to empower State and local law enforcement agencies across the country to perform the functions of an immigration officer.” The 287 (g) authority enabled any local jurisdiction with the right to question a person on their immigration status. If they couldn’t prove citizenship, local authorities handed them over to ICE. This was used most pervasively, and attracted the most attention nationally, in Phoenix.

There the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, led by Arpaio, descended upon mostly-Latino neighborhoods and stopped people for trivial traffic violations, emptied out restaurant kitchens, even arrested workers at local water parks, like in the case of Rayos. This authority was used as a way to question anyone who looked like they might be in the country illegally, and Arpaio’s office was later found by the Justice Department to be in violation of racial profiling laws.

Rayos has been called the first display of Trump’s new executive order. If that holds, then the rest of the nation may look a lot like Phoenix did this past decade, a time where undocumented communities lived in constant fear of deportation from local law enforcement, regardless of their crime, or if they were a mother who’d spent their entire adult life in the U.S.

Katy Perry Proclaims a New Era of 'Purposeful Pop'

Lo, the singer most associated with poorly trained shark dancers and weaponized bras and the last forthright celebration of homophobia on the pop charts has mentally molted: “Artist. Activist. Conscious,” reads Katy Perry’s recently updated Twitter bio. In late January she hinted at a change, writing, “Sometimes it’s scary opening up to consciousness … makes you realize how asleep you were, and how ok you were with it … ” Now comes her new single, “Chained to the Rhythm,” released to the world with Perry announcing, “We gonna call this era Purposeful Pop,” adding an eyeball emoji at the end.

A tropical-inflected disco anthem imploring the listener to dance, dance, dance, “Chained to the Rhythm” can pass into and out of the ears without forcing its Purpose on you. But listen close—maybe while watching the lyrics video about a hamster gourmand—and the politics are clear. It’s not just that Hillary Clinton’s No. 1 pop surrogate is mourning the election; it’s not just that she hired Skip Marley to sing “it is my desire to break down the walls / inspire,” which can’t help but be read as a Trump dig. It’s that Perry’s fed up with the complacency of the capitalist entertainment culture that she has thrived off—though, of course, she is going to try and keep thriving off it.

Perry’s gift for mixing metaphors, refined so exquisitely on “Roar,” returns within the first moments of the song: “Are we crazy? / Living our lives through a lens / Trapped in our white-picket fence / Like ornaments.” On a literal level, each line has nothing to do with the last, but taken together thematically, it’s Babbit. The pre-chorus makes like any given Atlantic columnist post-election and laments people “living in a bubble,” and the chorus says we sheeple “think we’re free free” but remain “chained to the rhythm.” Singalongs, the daily grind, social convention—all collapsed into one numbing hum. How to break out? An alt-righter might call the solution in Marley’s bridge downright antifa: “Up in your high place, liars / Time is ticking for the empire.”

Perry always celebrated the image of a plastered-on smile, but now the cheer is meant to read as false.

A song like this was inevitable: Amid the ongoing drama of the Trump era, pop’s biggest stars have become more activist, headlining rallies and sending tweets of protest. Wouldn’t it be hypocritical for them to keep serving up the same distracting confections as before? Perry’s solution is to make music as perky as ever, and videos as cheeky-cute as ever, but to ladle in some malaise. Hit-making legends Max Martin and Ali Payami co-wrote the tune, and the way you can tell is that within three listens it becomes clear this song will be in heavy rotation at grocery stores for the next 16 months. But Sia also co-wrote, and the way you can tell is that something is going on with the chords so that even as you tap your toe you may also feel pangs of dread and consider the inevitability of death.

But it’s Perry’s involvement that is the most interesting. Her work always evoked a plastered-on smile, but despite her winks to the camera there was little irony within her music itself. This time, though, the false cheer is definitely meant to read false. It’s a vision of how liberals might be able to keep partying in the Trump era: sadly.

Who Will Be the First Victim of White House Chaos?

It is a truth universally peddled by wisemen and -women in Washington, though not necessarily obeyed by presidents, that when the White House is in trouble, the best cure is to hoist the head of an adviser on a spike of the fence encircling the executive mansion.

Firing—sorry, accepting the resignation of—an adviser makes for an easy way to demonstrate that the administration understands it has a problem and is working to fix it. That person doesn’t necessarily need to be the root of the problem, though it’s helpful if they’re at least somewhat involved. Other times, some bad press offers a useful pretext for pushing out someone who was already on thin ice.

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Michael Flynn's Disaster

If President Trump wants to find a sacrificial lamb, he’s got options. There’s Sean Spicer, whose bumbling performances as press secretary have earned him a brutal mockery on Saturday Night Live and, reportedly, the dissatisfaction of the president. There’s Kellyanne Conway, who has proven a more effective spokesperson for the Oval Office but is also more prone to major blunders, and who finds herself in the crosshairs of congressional overseers after exhorting people to buy Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing.

But as of Thursday evening, the betting pool for who gets voted off the island first has a new favorite: National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It had long been known that Flynn had spoken with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak prior to Trump’s inauguration. That raised eyebrows, given Trump’s positive comment about Vladimir Putin’s regime, Putin’s more or less open cheerleading for Trump, and what the U.S. intelligence community says was Russian hacking intended to help Trump during the campaign. Flynn confirmed the conversations, but insisted he had not discussed sanctions that the Obama administration levied on Russia in retaliation for that hacking. Such a conversation would risk violating the Logan Act, which bars citizens from negotiating with foreign governments without authorization.

The Washington Post now reports that Flynn did, in fact, discuss the sanctions with Kislyak. The paper’s sources are anonymous but numerous: “Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.” They told the Post that Flynn explicitly discussed elections-related sanctions, and some of them said that Flynn had given the impression that the penalties would be reversed or lightened once Trump entered office.

Flynn long denied any discussion of sanctions, including as late as Wednesday. What he should have known, as a former intelligence official, is that American intelligence operatives track phone calls by people like Kislyak, so they were listening in. On Thursday, a spokesman told the Post that while Flynn “had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

Even worse for Flynn, he seems to have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to make misleading statements publicly. Pence, prior to the inauguration said that there had been no contact between campaign officials and Russia during the campaign, and as for Flynn’s talks with Kislyak, “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.” It now appears both those statements are false. (The Kremlin, for whatever it’s worth, says sanctions were not discussed.)

The retired general has always been a lightning rod. He was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration for, reportedly, being a mercurial and difficult manager, though most people who have worked with him agree he is a brilliant intelligence officer, if one prone to conspiracy theories. He was a strange fit on the Trump campaign, a registered Democrat, but one who was willing to say what other Trump allies would never say publicly or in such blunt terms. (“Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” he once tweeted.) On the campaign trail, he happily led “Lock her up!” chants.

Since the national security adviser position is not subject to Senate confirmation, Flynn avoided the same gauntlet that other top Trump aides have faced, but his spell in the White House has already been rocky. His son, also Michael Flynn, was pushed out of the Trump transition team after spreading bizarre conspiracy theories. Flynn père reportedly clashed with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, another former general, over staffing at the Pentagon. When senior Trump aide Steve Bannon was added to the National Security Council—a move that drew a sharp backlash, given Bannon’s lack of national-security expertise—some reports said the move was mostly intended to backstop Flynn’s poor management of the council. David Ignatius reported earlier this week that 60 positions on Flynn’s staff are still open, a fact “that may reflect wariness at the State Department and CIA, where many career officials are reluctant to work for Trump.”

Given the widespread reservations about Flynn, his reversal—and the fact that he allowed Pence to make a false denial on national television—might present a good opportunity to push him out and move on.

But Flynn is hardly the only candidate for scapegoat. Take Sean Spicer, the press secretary. Spicer’s shaky tenure began on January 21, when he trotted out, or was trotted out, to insist that the crowds at Trump’s inauguration the day before had been of record size—despite copious, clear evidence to the contrary. That may have been the low point, but Spicer hasn’t yet found his sea legs. Recently, for example, he said of a raid in Yemen, “I think it's hard to ever say something was successful when you lose a life.” But when Senator John McCain criticized the same raid, Spicer said that anyone who criticized the raid as a less than a success was doing a “disservice” to the life Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL who died in the raid.

It’s hard to imagine Spicer is having much fun defending a president whose views can change from day to day, and who has no compunctions about lying or simply making things up. Meanwhile, there have been so many leaks about Trump’s views on Spicer that it’s impossible to recall them all. The New York Times reports that Trump thought Spicer’s post-inauguration performance was too strong; the Post reports Trump thought it too weak. Axios reports that Trump just hates Spicer’s wardrobe. CNN says Trump regrets choosing Spicer for the job, and is seeking to layer over him with a new communications director. One Politico report so outlandish it beggars belief said that Trump was rattled by SNL’s spoof of Spicer—more than anything because a woman was portraying him. With so many leaks directed at Spicer, it seems practically futile to try to suss out which are real and which are not. But the gusher shows that Spicer has enemies who are seeking to undermine him with the leaks.

The White House seems to have two major power centers, one an establishment pod around Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the other an insurgent pod focused on Bannon. The two men recently gave a painfully protesting-too-much dual interview to New York denying any rivalry. Flynn hails from the Bannon side of the White House, while Spicer, who previously worked for the chief of staff at the Republican National Committee, is part of the Priebus orbit. A firing of either man would represent a victory for the rival team in the power struggle.

That brings us to the third potential scapegoat, Conway, who publicly at least seems to have avoided the factional war. She’s also been subject to few of the sniping leaks that have afflicted Flynn and Spicer. Her problems are essentially public. It was Conway who defended Spicer’s inauguration debacle by insisting he was offering “alternative facts,” which is one of the more creative terms for lies to emerge from Washington in decades. She’s offered her own alternative facts, such as her invocation of a fictional “Bowling Green massacre” to justify Trump’s immigration ban.

Somewhat improbably, the real danger to Conway right now comes after she recommended that people go and buy Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing, following Nordstrom’s decision to drop the line. That appears to violate a federal law that bars government employees from using their office to boost private companies. (Trump did the same, but as president, he is exempt.) Spicer said in Thursday’s briefing that Conway had been “counseled” about her statement, and Conway herself declined to comment during a Fox News interview Thursday evening. But Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings, the top Republican and Democrat, respectively, on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the head of the Office of Government Ethics, expressing “extremely serious concerns” about Conway’s statement and asking that OGE recommend a punishment.

As Chaffetz and Cummings acknowledged in their letter, it’s a touchy situation, since the person who would have to execute any penalty would be Conway’s boss—i.e., Trump. But the fact that Congress is getting involved, as it has declined to do in other cases so far, is notable, and puts some pressure on the White House, perhaps even to fire Conway.

Although the White House firing is a time-honored ritual, it seldom occurs this soon in an administration. George W. Bush’s first major firing was Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, that came after nearly two years, and amid serious policy disputes. The Clinton administration fired several employees of the White House travel office in May 1993, amid the “Travelgate” scandal, though they were career employees, rather than political appointees. White House Counsel Vince Foster committed suicide in July 1993, apparently disconsolate over the scandal.

Of course, Trump could simply choose to fire no one. He shows little regard for public pressure and trusts his base to back him up. When he’s not on the set of The Apprentice, he doesn’t demonstrate a great appetite for firing people. Although he went through two campaign teams before settling on the Bannon and Conway duo that led him to victory in November, both previous campaign managers—Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort—were allowed to linger well past their expiration dates, and were finally pushed out after other insiders, and particularly Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushed for their firings.

In other words, a firing would likely require some sort of even more heated factional battle inside the White House, before a clear winner emerged. Given the pace of leaks from the West Wing, there could be plenty more anonymously sourced stories to come before anyone is forced off the island.

Your 2017 Grammys Crib Sheet

Faced with the unenviable task of summing up an entire year in a huge art form, “Music’s Biggest Night” is often music’s awkwardest night. The 59th Grammy Awards may be even weirder than usual: Some stars are sitting it out for “irrelevance,” and Donald Trump’s culture-warrior presidency has made events like this feel more fraught than ever.

Nevertheless, the Grammys command an audience of millions for good reason: The show can deliver great performances, kick off fascinating conversations, and expose new talents to a wide audience. Below are thoughts on the four general awards categories, a few of the genre-specific categories of particular note this year, and the likely trends of the night’s performances.

The Big Four Awards

Album of the Year

Contenders: Adele, 25; Beyoncé, Lemonade; Justin Bieber, Purpose; Drake, Views; Sturgill Simpson, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth

Last year’s winner: Taylor Swift, 1989

The state of play: The conventional wisdom says that this year’s ceremony is a clash between two recent Grammy titans, Adele and Beyoncé—and that Adele’s best-selling but unspectacular 25 is a safer bet than Beyonce’s provocative Lemonade. But watch for Sturgill Simpson. Though the relatively unfamous alt-country singer seems like an underdog, as the sole white guy with a guitar he may benefit from a split vote among the four commercially minded radio stars, recalling when Beck beat Beyoncé’s self-titled release in 2014.

A Sturgill win wouldn’t be undeserved; A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is gobsmackingly beautiful, a bittersweet chronicle of new fatherhood. But Beyoncé’s politically charged, sonically diverse, and tabloid-scrambling Lemonade was a seismic cultural event, and the album’s celebration of identity in the face of disrespect would resonate even in loss: The Grammys haven’t selected a young black artist’s album as best since 2004, and they haven’t picked a black woman since 1999.

Record of the Year

Contenders: Adele, “Hello”; Beyoncé, “Formation”; Lukas Graham, “7 Years”; Rihanna ft. Drake, “Work”; Twenty One Pilots, “Stressed Out”

Last year’s winner: Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson, “Uptown Funk”

The state of play: If there’s ever been a hit that’s more a great recording than a great song, it’s Adele’s “Hello,” whose repetition on the page becomes an avalanche in the ear thanks to Adele’s pipes and Greg Kurstin’s production. Nightmare scenario: Grammy voters’ fetish for old-timey authenticity rewards the Danish band Lukas Graham’s “7 Years,” a bit of treacle that uses old-timey authenticity as affectation.

Song of the Year

Contenders: Beyoncé, “Formation”; Adele, “Hello”; Justin Bieber, “Love Yourself”; Lukas Graham, “7 Years”

Last year’s winner: Ed Sheeran, “Thinking Out Loud”

The state of play: There are two brilliant pop songs in this category, “Formation” and “Love Yourself.” Beyoncé’s melds rap swagger and pop flash and social subversion. Bieber’s inverts campfire strum-along tropes for a nasty kiss-off that’s perfect for a performer whose persona continually flits between angelic and demonic. Between those two, “Love Yourself” has the better shot; Fox News never declared war on it.

Best New Artist

Contenders: Kelsea Ballerini, The Chainsmokers, Chance the Rapper, Maren Morris, Anderson .Paak

Last year’s winner: Meghan Trainor

The state of play: In this class of legitimately promising young stars, the legitimately irritating electronic-dance bros of The Chainsmokers may be hard to beat. Even if you set aside their insane chart success and factor in the “EDM Nickelback” backlash against them, the “Closer” duo benefit from vote splitting: Ballerini and Morris are climbing up the rungs of country music, and Chance the Rapper and Anderson .Paak have fired up the hip-hop/R&B world.

Other interesting categories

Best Rock Performance

Contenders: Alabama Shakes, “Joe (Live From Austin City Limits)”; Beyoncé ft. Jack White, “Don’t Hurt Yourself”; David Bowie, “Blackstar”; Disturbed, “The Sound of Silence (Live on Conan)”; Twenty One Pilots, “Heathens”

Last year’s winner: Alabama Shakes, “Don’t Wanna Fight”

The state of play: In perhaps a sign of commercial rock’s malaise, this is one of the strangest nomination fields in Grammy history: Alabama Shakes performing a song they released two years ago, Disturbed turning Paul Simon into nu-metal on late-night TV, Beyoncé in Led Zeppelin drag, Bowie dabbling in jazz and musical theater for six minutes. Even Twenty One Pilots, the closest thing to new rock stars in a while, draw heavily from hip-hop and reggae. Personally, I can’t get enough of their spooky-catchy “Heathens,” though a Beyoncé victory might deliver a much-needed jolt to the genre.  

Best Alternative Music Album

Contenders: Bon Iver, 22, a Million; David Bowie, Blackstar; PJ Harvey, The Hope Six Demolition Project; Iggy Pop, Post Pop Depression; Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool.

Last year’s winner: Alabama Shakes, Sound and Color

The state of play: Bon Iver had his mainstream coming-out at the 2012 ceremony (remember “Bonnie Bear”?), and Radiohead are competing for their fourth trophy in this category. But Bowie’s masterful final release, Blackstar, was snubbed in the Album of the Year category, and he only won two Grammys over the course of his entire career. The space aliens will riot if he doesn’t triumph here.

Best Rap Song

Contenders: Fat Joe & Remy Ma, “All the Way Up”; Kanye West, “Famous”: Drake, “Hotline Bling”; Chance the Rapper, “No Problem”; Kanye West, “Ultralight Beam”

Last year’s winner: Kendrick Lamar, “Alright”

The state of play: Kanye West perpetually feuds with the Grammys over shutting him out of the general categories, but maybe he takes comfort in dominating the rap field. Two of his own works are up for best rap song, plus one from his protégé Chance, who also features on “Ultralight Beam,” the best and most forward-thinking tune of the category. Drake is a real contender, though: Though “Hotline Bling” might scan more as wedding-dance fare than great rap, and though it peaked ages ago (it’s eligible because it was tacked onto his 2016 album Views after becoming a hit), it’s the category’s only crossover smash.

Best Country Solo Performance

Contenders: Brandy Clark, “Love Can Go to Hell”; Miranda Lambert, “Vice”; Maren Morris, “My Church”; Carrie Underwood, “Church Bells”; Keith Urban, “Blue Ain’t Your Color”

The state of play: Country music recently waged a very public battle of the sexes over radio programmers hesitating to promote female artists. So it’s remarkable to see four out of these five contenders be women, representing both established talents (Lambert, Underwood) and exciting new ones (Clark, Morris). Clark’s song is particularly gorgeous, but there’s a strong Nashville push to make Morris a Taylor Swift-level star—a win here could reflect and boost that effort.

The Performances

The divas

The firmament of young female pop superstars has remained more or less unchanged from around 2011, and many of its members will be trying to keep it that way on Sunday. After a period of radio absence, the newly woke Katy Perry will launch a new disco-tastic single. Lady Gaga shall follow up the Super Bowl by playing with Metallica for some reason, possibly pushing “John Wayne,” the new video for which resurrects vintage gonzo-pop Gaga. Beyoncé will show off her new baby bump, perhaps while trying to introduce Lemonade’s lovey-dovey ballad “All Night” to the charts. And Adele will take the stage a year after technical glitches marred her last Grammys performance.

The team-ups

The Grammys will continue their tradition of often-dubious, sometimes inspired collaborations. On the less surprising side of the ledger: The Weeknd with Daft Punk, who produced two standout tracks from his smooth-and-fun album Starboy; A Tribe Called Quest will play with R&B newcomer Anderson .Paak, who sang on their brilliant 2016 farewell release. On the stranger side: The aforementioned Gaga/Metallica gig that follows the metal band’s 2014 Grammys with pianist Lang Lang; the established R&B singer Alicia Keys teaming up with the new country talent Maren Morris; a Bee Gees covers medley, mentioned below.

The tributes

After a year of major losses for music, Bruno Mars and The Time have been in talks to tackle Prince, and some yet-unannounced performers will memorialize George Michael. Odder: a Saturday Night Fever anniversary Bee Gees spectacle featuring Little Big Town, Demi Lovato, Andra Day, and Tori Kelly. John Legend and Cynthia Erivo will take the general in-memoriam segment, and there’s no reason to think it won’t be cryworthy.

The Trump factor

It sounds like the Grammys are nervous that Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes may have set the new template for awards-show conduct. Rolling Stone reports that CBS execs “are scrutinizing scripts and award introductions more closely than in past years and ‘going out of their way to not inadvertently shoot the first bullet’ against the Trump administration.” Longtime Grammys executive producer Ken Ehrlich said, “We expect that artists will have things to say and while we’re not a forum for that, we also don’t feel that it’s right to censor them."

“We’re not a forum for that” is a funny thing to say given that awards shows have long benefited from the potential for controversy. The Grammys’ political history includes Kendrick Lamar’s black-liberation bonfire, Madonna and Macklemore’s mass gay marriage, and Bruce Springsteen shouting “Bring ‘em home” amid the Iraq War. With Democratic campaigners like Beyoncé, Q-Tip, Chance the Rapper, John Legend, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga taking the stage, will this year be the protest-music Grammys? Or will these often-outspoken stars cause controversy simply by remaining silent?

Fifty Shades Darker: A Spoilereview

“I want you back. We can renegotiate terms.”

Ah, love.

The above line is delivered to Anastasia Steele by Christian Grey near the beginning of Fifty Shades Darker, the second movie adaptation of the trilogy of zillion-selling erotic novels by Erika Mitchell (pen name E. L. James). But one imagines similar words being spoken by executives of Universal Pictures to Mitchell herself following the completion of the first installment in the series, Fifty Shades of Grey.

That film was directed by the respected artist Sam (short for Samantha) Taylor-Johnson, and she and Mitchell reportedly fought over almost every aspect of the production, the latter having been granted uncommon creative control when she signed over the rights to her books. The result was a very bad movie, but one considerably less bad than the book it was based on.

This time out, Taylor-Johnson has been replaced with gun-for-hire James Foley, best known for directing Glengarry Glen Ross a very long time ago; meanwhile, the previous screenwriter, Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks), has been replaced by Niall Leonard, a television writer who also happens to be Mitchell’s husband. The result is that there is no one to mediate or improve Mitchell’s appallingly crass, childish, and retrograde exercise in wish fulfillment.

A movie this bad deserves to have its flaws enunciated clearly, so what follows is one in a periodic series of spoilereviews. (Past examples of the genre included Lucy, Fantastic Four, The Happening, and The Gunman.) Those who would prefer to avoid spoilers should stop reading now; those who want a sense of the awfulness to come, or would rather spend a few minutes reading about that awfulness than two hours experiencing it firsthand, read on.

1. A brief catchup for those joining the story midstream. In the last movie, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson), a virginal 21-year-old college student, was swept off her feet by Christian (Jamie Dornan), a 27-year-old billionaire entrepreneur with the abs of an underwear model. An S&M enthusiast, he made her sign a contract to be his “submissive.” Eventually, after a lot of tame bondage sex and one serious whipping, she left him.

2. Which brings us to the present film. Ana, now graduated, has just gotten a job as an assistant at an independent Seattle book publisher. Accordingly, she receives a couple of dozen stunning white roses from Christian in congratulation. She briefly contemplates throwing them out, then changes her mind and keeps them. Get used to this particular two-step when it comes to Ana’s tentative gestures toward almost-independence.

3. Ana attends a photography exhibition by a friend, José (Victor Rasuk), only to find that, to her surprise, it is filled with wall-sized portraits of herself.

3a. This is a good moment to note that virtually all the men in this movie are gross (even when they’re not presented as such) and treat Ana as an object. José is a perfect example. In theory, he’s supposed to be a good guy. Yet he fills his show with pictures of Ana without her knowledge or permission and then sells them for his own considerable profit. Who knows what kind of pervy stalker might be buying those prints?

4. Well, we do, of course: It’s Christian. He shows up at the exhibit, buys all the photos, and begs Ana to go to dinner with him. She agrees, “but only because I’m hungry.” At the restaurant, when he orders steak for her, she contradicts him and asks for the quinoa salad instead. This will prove to be one of vanishingly few occasions on which she gets what she wants, rather than putting up token resistance and then letting Christian have his way.

5. Ana explains that she left him following last movie’s whipping in his Red Room of Pain, because “you were getting off on the pain you inflicted.” I feel obligated to note that this is the exact phrasing used by Steve Martin in the song “Dentist!” from Little Shop of Horrors, making Christian literally a knockoff of a parody of a sadist.

6. Nonetheless, Ana is clearly warming back up. It seems to help that after the dinner date, Christian gives her a brand-new iPhone and MacBook, as if he were some creepy blend of Santa Claus and Steve Jobs.

7. As noted, one way the movie tries to make Christian seem less creepy is by making all the other men creepy, too. Chief among them is Ana’s boss at the publishing house, Jack (Eric Johnson), who leers at her so ostentatiously that he might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says “sexual harasser.” He pressures her to go out for drinks. She declines, citing plans. He takes her out for drinks anyway.

8. At the bar they run into Christian, and he and Jack face off with proprietary zeal. “I’m the boyfriend,” says Christian. “I’m the boss,” says Jack. It is clear at this moment—and will only become clearer over time—that the movie considers these two words completely interchangeable.

9. Christian and Ana leave the bar and she tells him she’s upset with the way he insulted her boss. Christian explains, “He wants what’s mine.” That evening Christian tells her that he plans to buy the publishing house. “So you’ll be my boss?” she asks. (What did I tell you?) He replies, “Technically, I’ll be your boss’s boss’s boss.” Ana is momentarily unhappy about his insinuating himself into her work life. Then they have sex anyway.

10. The next day she asks him to take back a check he gave her for $24,000. He tells her to keep it, as he makes that much money every 15 minutes. She rips up the check. He calls his office and has $24,000 direct-deposited into her checking account. She is briefly upset that he knows her bank account information. But then he invites her to a masked ball his parents are throwing, and everything is okay again.

11. He takes her to have her hair done at a salon run by the older woman, Elena (Kim Basinger), who long ago initiated him into S&M. Ana is furious and wants to go home. He tells her to come to his house instead, adding, “You can either walk or I’ll carry you.” She opts for walking. This is, I kid you not, presented as a victory of self-determination for her. (He will, however, carry her over his shoulder at multiple other points in the movie.)

12. Back at his apartment, she discovers that he’s had private detectives follow her and fill an extensive dossier with her comings and goings. Moreover, he’s done this with other “prospective submissives” as well. In a rare moment of lucidity, she tells him, “This isn’t a relationship, it’s ownership.” He tells her to come to his bedroom. She replies, “Sex is not going to fix this right now. Are you insane?” Still, she goes to his bedroom. Sex fixes it.

13. There are several more such episodes between Christian and Ana, but for the sake of brevity, let’s not belabor the point. He tells her what to do; she rebels halfheartedly for a moment and then settles for 90 to 100 percent of his original demand, however unreasonable.

14. Before taking her to his parents’ Venetian-themed masked ball, he has her insert some ben-wa balls. Because that’s what you do before a fancy event at your parents’ house.

14a. A quick rundown of the sex. In addition to the ben-wa balls, Christian outfits Ana once with a spreader bar. He shows her nipple clamps, though they go unused. He spanks her. He fondles her in an elevator. They have sex in his childhood bedroom. They have sex in the shower, twice. This is all meant to be shocking and transgressive, but it’s about as dull and unsexy as it is possible for sex to be. Basinger herself pushed the envelope further 30 years ago in 9½ Weeks.

15. Christian takes Ana out on his grand three-masted yacht. She is amazed when he lets her hold the wheel while she sits on his lap and he guides her hands. “I can’t believe I’m doing this! I’m the captain!” she enthuses. A reminder: This character is meant to be in her twenties, not eight years old.

16. Back at work, Ana’s boss Jack tells her she has to go on a business trip with him to New York. When she tells Christian, he forbids it. She explains that it’s necessary for her job. He says that if anyone is going to take her to New York it will be him. I initially took this to be a compromise in which she would go on her business trip and Christian would accompany her. (Yes: domineering, possessive, and mistrustful—but still a compromise.)

17. I was, of course, wrong. The next day Ana tells Jack that she can’t go to New York, pretending that she has a prior commitment.

18. Lest we start to believe that Christian’s jealous sabotaging of Ana’s career makes him a bad guy, Jack shows what a real bad guy looks. The long-awaited sexual harassment and assault take place, with Jack telling Ana, “I just think if you’re going to fuck your way to prominence you do it with someone who makes you smarter, not just richer.”

19. Ana knees Jack in the balls and rushes out of her office into Christian’s arms. Christian immediately calls in a favor from a friend and has Jack fired. No one spends one second wondering whether this is the best way—as opposed to, say, filing a report, talking to HR, or pressing charges—to deal with workplace assault.

20. But now that Jack’s been fired, who will take over as fiction editor? His assistant Ana, of course. After one staff meeting in which she recommends that the publishing house seek out “new voices,” she’s given the job by the editor-in-chief.

20a. Said editor-in-chief is, of course, a man. I’ve wracked my brains without luck to come up with a single moment in the film in which a man is presented as subordinate to a woman. Men are bosses; women are assistants and housekeepers and submissives.

20b. Everyone celebrates Ana’s great achievement in becoming fiction editor. No one seems to recall or care that it was the direct result of Christian having had her boss fired.

21. A former submissive of Christian’s (Bella Heathcote) who’s been stalking the couple shows up at Ana’s apartment with a gun. The two women take turns trying to be more pitiable than one another. Ana: “I’m nothing.” Stalker: “I know you love him. I do, too. We all do.”

22. Christian again arrives to save the day. He commands the stalker to kneel, and when she obeys, he puts his hand on her head as one might on a disobedient dog’s. He orders Ana to go to his apartment.

23. Ana goes to his apartment, but not for a couple of hours. “Where the fuck were you?” Christian demands, expressing his tender concern for her well-being.

24. Christian explains to Ana, “I’m not a dominant. The correct word is a sadist. I get off on punishing women that look like you, that look like—” Ana interrupts him: “Your mother.” Later, Christian asks Ana to marry him. There is no sign that she considers the former admission any serious obstacle to the latter proposition.

25. When Christian repeats his proposal a second time, Ana replies “Why me?” This is in fact an excellent question. In the books, it essentially answers itself: She is the first-person narrator, and as such implicitly rooted for. (We are all our own first-person narrators, and for the most part imagine we have due whatever might come to us.) Onscreen it’s harder to say, except that she seems to have the precise ratio of momentary defiance followed by total capitulation that Christian requires.

26. Christian has to take a business trip to Portland with a female subordinate (I know: redundant). While he’s flying his own helicopter back, the engine explodes and the chopper begins falling out of the sky. Back in Seattle, his friends and family are horrified by TV news reports that Christian is missing and presumed dead. Oh no! This isn’t going to be like season three of Downton Abbey, where the happy ending is spoiled in the final minutes by the leading man’s sudden, completely accidental demise?

27. Of course it’s not. Christian walks in the front door unscathed. Everyone is so happy that nobody even thinks to ask why he didn’t phone ahead to say he was safe, or alert the authorities who, according to the television, are still searching for his remains in the woods of Washington state. This may be the single feeblest late-act bid for suspense I’ve ever seen.

28. Ana accepts Christian’s proposal by giving him a keychain that says “yes” on the back. She asks him to take her back to the Red Room of Pain. There, with great ceremony, he subjects her to … massage oil? Really? Is that the naughtiest concluding kink this franchise can come up with? Ana may need to find herself a more committed pervert.

29. At his birthday party, Christian tells everyone they’re getting married. All are overjoyed, except for the wicked Elena, who confronts Ana. Christian again comes to the rescue, declaring, “You taught me how to fuck, Elena. She taught me how to love.” I can see the Hallmark card already. Christian takes Ana to a greenhouse filled with flowers to offer a proper proposal, including a ring with a diamond the size of a nickel. There are fireworks. Literally.

30. But danger still looms for next year’s upcoming sequel, Fifty Shades Freed. Watching the fireworks from a nearby hill is Ana’s old boss, Jack. Now you might think that an unemployed former book editor does not really make for the most terrifying of villains. But he’s smoking a cigarette. And it looks like he hasn’t shaved for days …

The Lego Batman Movie Is the Funniest Superhero Movie in Years

Moviegoers’ first look at the Caped Crusader in Tim Burton’s 1992 gothic masterpiece Batman Returns was a peculiar one. Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) sits in his desk chair, brooding silently in a giant, dark office, with seemingly nothing to do. Suddenly, the Bat-signal flashes into the sky; Bruce’s head jerks up, and he leaps into action, energized by the grim purpose of his secret crime-fighting identity. It’s a brilliant gag on Burton and Keaton’s part—a sly nod to the reality that, when he’s not cleaning up the streets of Gotham, Batman is a sad, lonely man, a billionaire unfulfilled by anything except putting on the mask.

The Lego Batman Movie is, on one level, a work of crass commercialism, just like its predecessor The Lego Movie. It is also, however, a terrific adaptation of Tim Burton’s gag—a take on Batman that sees the sitcom humor in his absurd lifestyle, brutalizing criminals by night and wasting his days in a cavernous mansion with only an elderly butler to talk to. It’s a one-joke movie that’s based on a really funny joke. As such, it’s a wry piece of meta-commentary that deconstructs (no pun intended) everyone’s favorite moody hero using the anarchic animated style of the Lego world.

As the film begins, Batman (given the same gravelly voice that Will Arnett ably provided in The Lego Movie) is the hero of Gotham—always handily defeating a familiar list of supervillains led by the demented Joker (a gleeful Zach Galifianakis). When he’s not out in Gotham, though, he’s whiling away the time in the gilded cage that is his mansion, watching romantic comedies alone (Jerry Maguire is a perpetual favorite), warming up lobster thermidor in the microwave, and barking at his butler Alfred, waiting desperately for that Bat-signal to show up in the sky again.

Moviegoers have been besieged with Bat-content in recent years. There was Christopher Nolan’s gritty Dark Knight (Christian Bale), a practical, grounded, yet still undeniably unhinged vigilante far removed from Burton’s pulpier excesses—who starred in three films. Last year, we saw Zack Snyder somehow attempt to combine Nolan’s forbidding darkness and Burton’s cartoonishness into one hero (played by Ben Affleck) in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. How much more Batman could anyone possibly stand? But The Lego Batman Movie works precisely because it knows audiences are sick of its hero. It’s a reassessment, an intervention, an effort to try and remember what’s fun about him and what maybe needs to remain on the cutting-room floor.

The film’s story, such as it is, is rooted in Batman’s obsessive desire to be left alone. When the Joker proclaims himself Batman’s arch-nemesis, the hero blanches, not willing to commit to such a label. When the new police commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) suggests that the Gotham cops partner with Batman, rather than simply turning on the Bat-signal whenever they need him to deal with a supervillain, he scoffs. And when young orphan Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) ends up in his care, it takes Batman a week to even notice he’s living in the mansion.

So Batman, over about an hour and 45 minutes, has to learn to let people in, even the villains who clearly bring him great joy. Somehow, the film (credited to a horde of writers including Community’s Chris McKenna and the novelist Seth Grahame-Smith) stretches this into a feature-length story, though it feels a little thin at times. The film works best when it’s furiously lobbing jokes at the screen, à la Airplane!, rather than trying to construct a meaningful action-movie narrative. The expected happy ending feels a bit more pat than The Lego Movie’s radical meta-twist, but it’s largely earned (partly because Cera’s voice work as young Robin is surprisingly, and hilariously, heartfelt).

The director Chris McKay, the animation supervisor on The Lego Movie, retains that film’s look and feel. Every action sequence crackles with childlike energy, making viewers feel as if they’re in the hands of a kid playing with his toys. That rebellious delight is somewhat counterbalanced by the extreme, and somewhat disturbing, brand management on display—the studio, Warner Bros., finds a way to cram all of its big-name titles, from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings, into the film. But The Lego Batman Movie is so eager to pop its egotistical hero’s bubble that it’s easy to be won over. I’ll save my revulsion for whenever the Lego brand wears out its welcome—as of right now, there’s still plenty to love about it.

The Wistful, Sharp Return of Girls

In “American Bitch,” the remarkable third episode of the sixth and final season of HBO’s Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham) has a confrontation with a writer (Matthew Rhys) who’s been outed online as a sexual predator by several female college students. He insists that the women all pursued him, followed him to his hotel room, saw a sexual encounter with him as something they could bank internally as life experience. “What do writers need?” he says. “Money,” Hannah replies. “Stories,” he counters. But Hannah disagrees. The woman who published the most scathing takedown didn’t sleep with him “so she has a story,” she argues. “It’s so she feels like she exists.”

Throughout its five years on television, Girls has shown Hannah pursuing degrading life experiences while telling herself it’s in the service of art. Like doing cocaine and having sex with her ex-junkie downstairs neighbor Laird so she can write about it for a $200 assignment from a website called JazzHate, or following a buff, manic yoga instructor into a sauna at a women’s consciousness-raising weekend. But in its last season, in an episode that deliberately echoes a number of the show’s finer moments, she seems to have finally achieved an amount of self-realization. While Hannah still doesn’t reliably feel or act like a grownup—and who among us ever really does?—her mission has evolved, from living out bizarre experiences so other people can read about them to writing “stories that make people feel less alone than I did.”

The first three episodes provided for critics diverge wildly in terms of topic and tone, with the first acting as a swift re-immersion in the lives of people who appear largely unchanged since last season. Hannah’s reached a professional milestone by selling a Modern Love column to The New York Times about Jessa and Adam; Marnie (Allison Williams) reads it on the toilet, pumping her fist triumphantly for her friend; Adam (Adam Driver) reads it while gnawing his fingers; Jessa (Jemima Kirke) doesn’t read it at all. Jessa and Adam are still living together in an environment Ray (Alex Karpovsky) describes poetically as “a boundary-less hinterland of sexuality and emotion, it’s disturbing, and they’re always somehow reheating fish.” Hannah meets an editor who tells her, “You’re just perfect for the aesthetic of Slag Mag,” and gives her an assignment—to attend a yuppie female surf camp in the Hamptons that’s “super chill but disgusting.”

The 42-minute episode is an extended showcase for Hannah at her worst: lazy (she won’t even try to surf), slovenly (she spills drinks everywhere and barfs all over someone else’s bedroom), and manipulative. But then she forms an unlikely bond with a surf instructor (Riz Ahmed, trying manfully to play a spacey, dumb beach god) and starts to wonder why her immediate instinct is to try to hate things. “All my friends in New York define themselves by what they hate,” she explains. “It’s like everyone’s so busy chasing success and defining themselves they can’t experience pleasure.” More than once, her face forms itself into a smile before relaxing into something more like wistfulness.

There are other lightbulb moments like this that seem to point to Hannah’s future being outside New York, like an encounter with a woman in an antique shop who left her stressed-out life in Queens after she fainted on a subway platform and was pulled from the tracks by Chris Noth. And if the first three episodes of the new season have anything in common, it’s that they benefit hugely from leaving Brooklyn, even if it’s only for locales as perilous and unfamiliar as Montauk, upstate, and the Upper East Side. When Hannah, Marnie, and Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) end up on a trip to Poughkeepsie in the second episode, the show flirts with the conventions of horror, although it’s laced throughout with Girls’s more typical bravado. (Infuriated with Desi, Hannah at one point says, “He looks like someone in the Pacific Northwest knit a man.”)

But it’s the third episode that stands out, and that seems most poised to provoke a maelstrom of responses. Like the second-season episode “One Man’s Trash,” set almost entirely in a Brooklyn townhouse owned by a divorced doctor (Patrick Wilson), it takes place in a vast, gorgeous apartment owned by Chuck Palmer (Rhys), a Serious American Novelist whose more dubious sexual exploits have been recounted all over the internet in first-person form. Hannah, who’s written about the furor, is summoned as a kind of representative of young female writerhood, although exactly why is unclear. The two engage in a thoughtful, nuanced debate about reputation, art, and consent that seems like an effort to engage with the potential and the limitations of online discourse—something Dunham herself has frequently experienced. “People don’t talk about this shit for fun—it ruins their lives!” Hannah says. Palmer is more concerned with his own pain, and how “a website called The Awl called me ‘Throatpiercer.’”

Like “One Man’s Trash,” the episode functions as a kind of one-act play, removed from the typical context of the show but informed by it (it also shares the same director, Richard Shepard). But it displays, too, some of Hannah’s more intriguing contradictions: her rudeness coupled with her odd sense of propriety, her surprising strength with her terrible decision-making. And it’s enormously striking from a visual perspective, setting up shots of Palmer’s apartment that look almost like optical illusions and lingering on the art on his walls. In its final stretch of episodes, Girls still contains all the perfect details that have defined its world in the past—Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) expounding on the limitations of Paul Krugman, Ray reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. But its ambitions, like Hannah’s, seem to have benefited from realizing that the best stories have a deeper purpose than simple entertainment.

Trump's Illusory Answers to Imaginary Crime Problems

Jeff Sessions issued a de facto mission statement within moments of being sworn in attorney general on Thursday.

“We have a crime problem,” the former Alabama senator said. “I wish the rise we were seeing in crime in American today were a blip. My best judgment, having been involved in criminal law enforcement for many years, is that this is a dangerous permanent trend.”

Years of experience or not, Sessions’s statement is belied by the facts at worst, or wildly premature at best. The violent crime rate did tick up in 2015, the latest available year, coming in slightly higher than 2014. But it remains more than 16 percent below where it was in 2006, and far below its peak in the early 1990s.

Despite the fact that there’s reliable data, gathered by the federal government, Trump and members of his administration keep misleading with their statements on crime. During the presidential campaign, Trump claimed repeatedly that the streets of the nation were in chaos. On Tuesday, while meeting with members of the National Sheriffs’ Association, the president falsely claimed, as he has repeatedly before, that the national murder rate is at its highest point in 47 years. Murder rates increased in 2015, too, but they also remain well below their recent peaks.

What is true is that violent-crime rates in some places are extremely high. Chicago is dealing with a consistently high rate of gun violence. Baltimore is averaging a murder a day in 2017, after a bloody 2016. Yet New York City saw a historic low murder rate in January. The high rate of violence in some places is cause for concern, but it’s simply not the case that it equates to a national crime wave like the one that began in the 1970s and crested in the early 1990s.

These willful misstatements of fact are not harmful simply because they’re false. Overheated rhetoric about rising crime tends to inflame the populace, and indeed, concern about violent crime has increased far faster than the rate of violent crime. Gallup finds that there is little direct relation between the rate of violent crime and citizens’ concern about it. That in turn creates a demand for action to meet the illusory skyrocketing threat of crime—demand that can produce policies that distract from bigger problems at best and are counterproductive at worst.

Enter the three executive orders that Trump signed Thursday, at the same event where Sessions was sworn in. According to the new White House’s custom, the text of the orders was not released until hours after they’d been signed.

One simply creates a task force to study crime-reduction and public safety, though it offers some sense of what to expect among enforcement priorities of the Sessions-led Justice Department, especially “illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime.”

A second emphasizes the importance of enforcing the law on transnational cartels. The order reflects Trump’s view, expounded frequently on the campaign trail, that drug cartels are a major source of crime in the United States, thus necessitating stronger controls on the border. The order says the executive branch will “pursue and support additional efforts to prevent the operational success of transnational criminal organizations and subsidiary organizations within and beyond the United States, to include prosecution of ancillary criminal offenses, such as immigration fraud and visa fraud.” Examining immigration fraud and visa fraud could be a central element of creating the lists of crimes by illegal immigrants that Trump mandated in an earlier executive order.

The third order focuses on violence against police officers. The order says the Justice Department will develop strategies to improve protection of officers, including proposing legislation creating new federal crimes for perpetrating violence against officers. This order also offers little that is concrete, but Congress could take up legislation that emerges from its recommendations. (Former Attorney General Eric Holder tartly noted on Twitter that his Justice Department had pursued some protections for officers years ago.)

During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to make killing a police officer a death-penalty offense, although that would probably not be legally feasible. Protecting police against violence is politically popular, but it’s not clear that it addresses a worsening problem. In 2016, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 135 officers were killed in the line of duty—the highest number since 2011, but still lower than any year between 1964 and 2008. That is surely too high, but it is not clear what this latest initiative will do to reduce it.

It’s also not the only problem facing law enforcement, but the Trump administration has not been as eager to address others. There are multiple examples of egregious, systemic abuse of civilians being perpetrated by police departments in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland, and Chicago. During his confirmation hearings, Sessions expressed misgivings about the Justice Department’s investigations into those departments, arguing that a few bad apples were to blame. He said that federal lawsuits “undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness.”

One thing that’s disconcerting about the overall downward trend in crime over the last two decades (sorry, Attorney General Sessions) is how little is understood about—there’s no clear explanation for the dive. Given how mysterious crime rates are, it’s hard enough to make good crime-fighting policy. Making it based on false and misleading statements about that data is nigh unto impossible.