In an article published in PopPolitics magazine, Sarah Yahm ponders why the reincarnated “Battlestar Galactica,” a show that consistently raised complex and challenging questions over its four seasons, decided to fall back on pat answers in its devastatingly reactionary series finale:

Frederick Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, argues that pop culture consistently provides us with interesting rich alternatives to the status quo and then in the end rejects them. We can escape into alternate (even at times radical) possibilities without actually having to challenge our own cultural system. Because of pop culture, we can go to Oz while simultaneously renewing our commitment to not leave Kansas.

I know I wasn’t alone in hoping that “Battlestar Galactica” was going to break that pattern. Throughout the past four seasons, “Battlestar” has consistently raised rigorous questions about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the importance of community, the definition of family, and the correct relationship between humans and technology.

I had faith the writers were going to resolve these questions in the only way possible — by not resolving them at all and instead forcing us to continue to grapple with them alone. They weren’t going to raise questions and then give us pat answers, I insisted. Frederick Jameson was one smart cookie but he was wrong about “Battlestar.”

But sadly, Jameson was right once again, because Ron Moore gave us some really pat answers. He retreated to an old but faithful amalgam –- the purity of nature, monotheism, the sanctity of traditional hetero families, and, yikes, colonial expansion

Continue reading “Is Lee Adama the New (And Not So Improved) Thomas Jefferson?  Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale.”

Part of me rolls my eyes, and another part of me cringes when I contemplate the premise of “Dollhouse,” Joss Whedon’s new television series for Fox which premieres tonight. Joy Press at Salon sums up the premise of the show:

It stars former “Buffy” star Eliza Dushku as Echo, a young woman — known on the show as an “Active” or “Doll” — sapped of her memories and free will, who is sold to rich clients to fulfill their needs and fantasies. For each assignment she is imprinted with a fresh personality, complete with new skills, intelligence and neurological information; sometimes she morphs into a sexbot, other times she takes on the life of a highly methodical negotiator. Echo and her fellow Actives live in a giant Zen loft called the Dollhouse, blissfully unaware that they are being remote controlled by a shadowy organization.

It sounds like a science-fiction extension of Law and Order: SVU. Do we really need another show where women = victim — and she looks sexy while she’s being exploited/manipulated/killed?

Even if we see this new show’s lineage more in shows like Charlie’s Angels or Alias, that doesn’t feel any more promising. In some ways, these types of shows are more insidious, purporting to revel in female empowerment and agency while really just exposing how television executives can’t imagine a powerful woman who isn’t a cartoonish, supermodel superhero.

Fox’s marketing of “Dollhouse,” moreover, seems to revel in all of my fears. In combination with their “Terminator” series, Fox decides to evoke 70s sexploitation films as it points out that “Friday’s Got Grindhouse,” starring the “Dames of Deception.” It might be a light-hearted parody, but the satire has no point other than to emphasize that you can “Double Your Pleasure” with women who are “Hotter than Hades.”

In this context, it should come as no surprise that …. I cannot wait to watch the “Dollhouse” premiere.

There’s a new Joss Whedon show on television! Hallelujah!

If you are not familiar with Whedon’s work already, here’s just two things you need to know:

(more…)

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how the underappreciated “Mimic” trilogy of sci-fi horror films has a lot to say about postmodern America:

The other day, I found an October 2007 story by R. Colin Johnson on the EETimes Web site that sounded like something out of the Weekly World News: “Darpa hatches plan for insect cyborgs to fly reconnaissance.” According to the article:

Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its ‘”HI-MEMS” program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS — a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) — aims to harness insects the way horses were harnessed by the cavalry. … The final milestone … will be flying a cyborg insect to within five meters of a specific target located some one hundred meters away using remote control or a global positioning system (GPS). If HI-MEMS passes this test successfully, then Darpa will probably begin breeding in earnest. Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors — video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more — could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.

Not surprisingly, the article cites this project’s origin as being rooted in science fiction:

This vision of enhanced animals with electro-mechanical controllers was imagined in a 1990 novel called “Sparrowhawk,” in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering enlarged birds and insects to use as beasts-of-burden. … In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more — all predicted by Easton’s 1990 book.

While privacy rights issues are discussed in the context of a techno-insect world, the later half of the article reassures the reader that Darpa’s plan has more than a few bugs in it. “If Darpa’s track record is any indicator, then we have some breathing room before we have to start worrying whether that insect crawling on the wall is conducting unwarranted surveillance,” it states. “Only a fraction of the wide-ranging programs that Darpa sponsors are successful — at least in the way they were originally imagined.”

Reading this piece reminded me of the “Mimic” trilogy, a series of science fiction/horror films that began on the big screen in 1997 and was followed by two direct-to-DVD sequels. All three movies were loosely inspired by a short story of the same name that was written by Donald A. Wolheim in 1942. The central premises of the “Mimic” trilogy — humanity biologically manipulating organisms for explicitly human purposes and technologically altered insects infiltrating human populations unnoticed — are similar to Darpa’s cyborg bug project and other projects that focus on genetic engineering.

This article examines the “Mimic” films, particularly how the plot device of the “Big Bug” monster is still relevant to public discourse on scientific issues. In particular, concepts and issues that are specific to genetic research and their related environmental and political impacts permeate the “Mimic” films, thus making them different from their irradiated Atomic Age predecessors and worthy of unique consideration.

Continue reading “Pictures of Insect Men: A Retrospective Analysis of the “Mimic” Trilogy.”

A quick New Year’s kudos to NPR for bringing more depth to our discussions of modern pop culture. Their new series In Character explores how authors develop indelible characters and, more significantly, how those characters reflect our broader cultural values. While the series is appearing on “All Things Considered,” NPR is also maintaining a companion blog with plenty of supplementary material and space for audience interaction.

While students of cultural studies might feel that the series is only scratching the surface at best or being outrageously reductive at worst, I think it’s always worthwhile when a mainstream media outlet (yeah, I’m calling NPR mainstream) attempts to engage its audience in a conversation about the social and historical context of what is usually relegated as “entertainment.”

Besides plot, characters are the major way in which readers and viewers process the stories around them. But it’s easy for most people to judge a character simply on whether they relate to him or her — or, if the character is from a completely different walk of life, whether the actor was able to represent the character realistically.

So to get us thinking about the psychological motivations behind our attractions to certain characters is a great starting point to some advanced cultural criticism. Elizabeth Blair, in her introduction to the series, suggests in her conversations with various writers and actors that even the characters who are seemingly most different from us might reflect our own individual and collective desires:

These fully conceived characters often do the things we couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. The superhero flies. The wisecracker says things we think about saying, but don’t. The villain does the unthinkable.

And when we get to know them, we learn something about ourselves.

With this perspective in mind, the first full installment in the series focuses on “Mudbone,” the alter ego that comedian Richard Pryor created to say more than he could say himself.

We’ve posted a ground-breaking article today in the magazine: “Haunting Our Homes: Nightmares of Gentrification” by Sam J. Miller.

The article discusses the ways in which the modern horror film — and specifically, the subgenre of the haunted house film — acts as an allegory of gentrification and all the class and racial, public and private dilemmas it brings:

The modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification. Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

This thriving subgenre depends upon the audience believing, on some level, that what “we” have was attained by violence, and the fear that it will be taken by violence. In the process, because mainstream audiences are seen as white, and because gentrification predominantly impacts communities of color, the racial Other becomes literally monstrous.

Read the full article here.

We are very excited to welcome Jesse Miksic as a new contributing writer to PopPolitics. When he is not writing fiction or criticism, taking photographs or making his living as a graphic designer, Jesse is pursuing his MA in media studies at the New School.

Check out his occasional political rants at BlogCritics.org or peruse his essay, fiction and design work at miksimum.com.

At PopPolitics you can look forward to his takes on everything from films and literature to video games and graphic novels.

Enjoy the conversation.

A Virtual Moral and Spiritual Crisis: Mitt Romney’s latest campaign ad identifies video games as part of “a cesspool of violence and sex and drugs and indolence and perversions” in which “our children now swim.” Matt Peckham of PC World (yes, PC World) correctly tags Romney as just the latest in a long line of politicians that have fomented a “climate of fear” to create a more malleable populus.

By the way, is gambling “indolence” or a “perversion”? In either case, Romney will probably be happy to know that the producers of Second Life have outlawed gambling in their virtual world — which is beginning to feel like a “ghost town,” according to ValleyWag.

On the other hand, evangelizing is making a much smoother move into that same world — at least for the Jesuits. Father Antonio Spadaro tells the Financial Times: “This virtual Second Life is becoming populated with churches, mosques, temples, cathedrals. synagogues, places of prayer of all kinds. And behind an avatar there is a man or a woman, perhaps searching for God and faith, perhaps with very strong spiritual needs.” (Thanks, Lede, for the lead)

And whether it’s Second Life, MySpace or Facebook, Henry Jenkins, building off of Danah Boyd’s research, wants us to consider the “participation gap” among online users.

Drawing Well: Tim Cavanaugh of the Los Angeles Times is surprised to learn that sales of comic books have been increasingly steadily for the last five years. He’s been used to hearing only of the impending death of the genre:

If it’s striking how many movies are based on comic book properties these days, it’s even more striking how few of those properties were minted within the last decade or so … A favorite sport of industry watchers is figuring out just how the form went from being something youthful and dynamic to becoming something fearful, risk-averse and cramped.

He sees some hope in — you guessed it — the web, where sites like PvP and Modern Tales are pushing the envelope and turning a profit.

Comic books, of course, have always been a strange mixture of regressive and forward-looking ideologies. Lyle Masaki at AfterElton is sure to spark a conversation with his list of “ten of the coolest gay superheroes you (probably) haven’t heard of.”

Adhir Kalyan as Raja in “Aliens in America”

Aliens in Hollywood: Lisa de Moreas, whose laugh-out-loud columns make me feel like she’s a stand-up comedian in a television critic’s body, is having her usual fun at the summer press tour in Beverly Hills. But the story she tells in the second part of this column is both funny and revealing.

De Moreas loves the upcoming CW sitcom “Aliens in America” — in which a Pakistani exchange student finds both friendship and prejudice in America. She sees it as the next coming of “Freaks and Geeks” (and from the hilarious trailer, I’m probably going to agree).

Other critics, though, took great offense at its portrayal of a bigoted Middle America. De Moreas’ transcription of the critics’ confrontation with “Aliens in America” producers could be the basis for a sitcom itself.

Black is Intellectual: African American public intellectuals are not a rare breed — the incestuous mainstream media just make it feel that way, according to David A. Love’s insightful analysis in The Black Commentator.

Mark Anthony Neal’s defense of Michael Eric Dyson in PopMatters makes a similar point from another direction. Dyson, according to Neal, has been the source of scorn both for his popularity and for presenting too reductive and celebratory a picture black life: “This widely circulated and decidedly worn ‘poverty pimp’ thesis has been applied to figures as diverse as Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and the current cadre of hip-hop generation intellectuals, who supposedly, as the critique goes, wallow in victimization and refuse to hold the black rank-and-file, particularly black youth, accountable for bad behavior.”

But Neal says we should show praise Dyson and others who have “leveraged the appeal of popular culture” — whether that’s television, hip hop, etc — to fight the good fight. Neal brings up BlackProf.com and Professor Kim’s News Notes — which we have been long fans of here at PopPolitics — as examples of how black intellectuals have harnessed the blogosphere.

Finally, Cornel West himself reinforces both Love’s and Neal’s perspective in a recent interview with the Washington Post, where he defends Dyson and his own forays into music and other modes of cultural expression.

I Want My Culture Back: David Browne and Alan Riding, from two very different perspectives, are lamenting the demise of serious culture — art that challenges us, both intellectually and politically.

Browne, in his “Anti-Cheese Manifesto” for the Huffington Post, admits his own obsessions with low-brow pop culture but refuses to celebrate them: “The danger in perpetually embracing the awful is the way it trivializes sincerity and makes earnestness seem mawkish and old-fashioned. It says: Don’t take it all so seriously, since nothing matters … Perhaps it is simpler to chuckle than invest genuine feeling in anything, since that can be too chancy, too uncool, and too emotionally risky.”

And Riding, in a column for the International Herald Tribune, writes from a more nostalgic perspective, recalling the way the arts in the past have directly challenged corrupt and repressive governments. He sees recent spectacles like Live Earth as symptomatic of a culture that values performance over action.

Viva Ruth Frankenburg: Speaking of intellectuals, culture and political engagement, it’s worth reading some of the homages to the recently deceased Ruth Frankenberg, a ground-breaking British-born sociologist. Donna Haraway, an exemplary intellectual in her own right, wrote the obituary for the Guardian, in which she praised her feminism and anti-racism — and her nuanced exploration of the complicated intersection between the two. Dana Goldstein has a more personal response to Frankenburg’s work on her blog, Une flâneuse.

This week the National Post of Canada goes where very few media outlets have gone before: an academic conference.

Here’s the editor’s note that appears above the first report in the series:

When 5,000 academics gather this week in Saskatoon for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, everything from the geography of shopping to gender in governing will be on the agenda. In a week-long series, the National Post explores some of the most interesting research being showcased.

Now, usually I’m not one to make generalizations about how attitudes in other countries are radically different from those in the United States. Most of those assumptions are made by either a very biased personal experience or from a very small sample of elite members of the respective societies.

But can you imagine an American newspaper — let alone an American TV news channel — making this same commitment?

Of course, this is at the core of what’s wrong with American news. When it comes to politics and culture (as opposed to scientific or medical topics), American media refuses to acknowledge that there are experts in the field that can provide research-based answers to many of our questions. Instead, we rely on “pundits” who are experts at looking good and providing the catchy soundbite.

Ironically, Zosia Bielski’s first report from the conference for the National Post — in which she reviews recent “findings” concerning the current state of feminism — shows that academics don’t always have the right answers.

East Carolina University Professor Donna Lillian’s research on the increasingly infrequent use of the word “Ms.” is fascinating and ultimately depressing — especially when it’s the younger generations who are the ones less likely to being using “Ms.”

But Jennifer Crawford — a Ph.D. student at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax — misses the mark in her criticism of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” campaign:

“Is this — this slogan on the fuchsia baby tee, or italicized in screen-print across a cute tote bag, or pinned with good intentions on to the lapel of a jacket, this shut-down of communication — is this what feminism looks like?” asks Ms. Crawford in a session called “Who Cares What a Feminist Looks Like? Inscriptions of Gender, Sexuality and Personal Politics” [...]

She admonishes the campaign for feigning accessibility with four ethnically diverse women, a clear message that “feminism is for everybody,” but launching it with freshly scrubbed Ashley Judd, the “conventionally aesthetically pleasing and feminine actress.”

Ms. Crawford also notes that all four women are “beautiful, successful, affluent and reasonably sized,” which in her mind excludes the “man-hating, hairy, angry queer,” one of the most “political and passionate demographics of the feminist community,” the “devout feminist” she insists has been discarded as a negative stereotype.

Yes, these women are celebrities — not “ordinary” people. But that’s the point. The celebrities that everyone knows — either admires or hates — also happen to be feminists.

And considering that they were going to celebrities, it’s hard to imagine four more “real” women — not all stereotypically “beautiful,” not all “reasonably-sized.” Certainly Ashley Judd can be considered an image of traditional Hollywood glamour in some of her movies and on the red carpet, but I have seen just as many pictures of her attending benefits and other socially conscious functions with short hair, a t-shirt and jeans — the uniform, I’m presuming, of Crawford’s “devout feminist.” She appears that way, in fact, on the cover of Ms.

I’m aware of the dangers of dumbing down or commercializing feminism (although these days I’m more worried about the demonization of feminism). It just isn’t happening here.

And even though I’m taking issue with this particular academic argument, I appreciate the fact that the National Post is giving me something to ponder. The news rarely does that these days.

I should note that a couple of months ago I took the National Post of Canada to task for their well-intentioned but somewhat simplistic and reductive look at the “Menaissance” — what they claimed in a series of related articles as the return of “guys being guys.”

What I should have recognized back then — and praised — was the significance of Post’s willingness to provide a broad, in-depth analysis of a complex issue. I’ll try not to make that mistake again.

I must admit that one of my almost infallible rules for deciding what movie to see on a given evening is to check Michael Wilmington’s review in the Chicago Tribune — and then do the opposite. When he is inspired by a film, all I feel is cheesy melodrama. When he sees profundity on the screen, I see triteness and cliches cloaked in pseudo-sophistication.

But I never question Wilmington’s credentials as a film historian — or, for that matter, his reviews of more classic films.

So I was drawn to his celebration of John Wayne’s career in honor of the 100-year anniversary of Wayne’s birth.

Well, the bad Wilmington showed up. While his ratings of retrospective John Wayne DVD boxed sets are surely invaluable, his look back at Wayne’s life feels like a desperate attempt to justify Wayne’s many shortcomings.

Wilmington glosses over — and virtually excuses — Wayne’s “arch-conservative” politics (as a fervent supporter of the Blacklist, for example). More disturbingly, though, Wilmington doesn’t see any problems with the ideals of Wayne’s persona on screen:

Wayne’s on-screen character and persona, especially the aging paterfamilias and genial warrior he increasingly played from “Red River” on (his years of maximum popularity), reflects something crucial and important in the American character — and he probably had to reach middle age before he could start expressing it. He’s a father figure with an emotional kink, someone who’s faced the dark side, a character capable of rage and tenderness, rebellion and tradition. He can be kind or a killer, and often only a hairsbreadth separates the two.

We never wondered about the rectitude of Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck; they were born heroes. But the classic Wayne part, as in “The Searchers,” can embody both good and some bad qualities, though he’s always finally on the side of good (at least as the movie sees it).

In Wayne’s less interesting movies, he’s a conventional hero. In his great ones, he helps redefine the concept and image of heroism, to show how contradictory and volatile it can be.

I would argue that playing a tough guy who can’t always control his temper is hardly a “crucial and important” contribution the annals of American heroism. It’s the American heroic cliche, in fact, one that George W. Bush and others have unfortunately adopted without question.

If the world of pop culture criticism were like the Hollywood it covers, then Robert Thompson would be George Clooney, Martin Scorsese and, oh, Scarlett Johansson — all wrapped into one. He’s not just our greatest celebrity. On days when a story breaks with a pop culture angle, it feels like Thompson is our only celebrity.

Are you sensing a little jealousy? Well, it’s not there, to be honest. Maybe it’s because even though it feels Thompson is the only person the media looks to for opinions about pop culture, his analysis is usually right on. He’s always ready to give pop culture credit for its complexity and depth — and, at the same time, he’s willing to question the often questionable ideology behind some of it. And he does it all in very accessible, yet still eloquent and original, language.

Of maybe it’s because, as AP reporter Jocelyn Noveck explains, he’s a genuine, friendly guy who really knows his stuff.

Ironically, the dominant theme of Noveck’s story about Thompson is that Thompson is a media darling. The irony is not lost on Noveck, though, who points out that many media outlets, including her very own AP, have an unofficial moratorium on using him in their stories:

So often has Thompson been quoted, over 17 years at Syracuse, that some news organizations (including The Associated Press) have lately tried consciously NOT to quote him.

But nobody said we couldn’t write ABOUT him.

How often has he been quoted? “At The New York Times alone,” Noveck writes, “an archive search shows Thompson quoted more than 40 times in the last four years, by writers in a wide range of areas. At the AP, he’s been quoted close to 20 times in the past year.”

And David Rubin, dean of the Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where Thompson works, give first-hand testimony to Thompson’s popularity: “I’ve seen Bob get 60, 70, 80 media calls in one day. I’ve seen him in a hallway on his cell phone for hours. You could go so far as to say Bob is the most quoted academic in the United States.”

Besides reveling in Thompson’s hyper-popularity, Noveck also gives a lively synopsis of how Thompson got to his present position. A primer, perhaps, for the rest of us? Unfortunately, as with most things in life, including quality pop culture and pop culture criticism, it’s a combination of inspiration and hard work:

He did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, where he initially planned to be an art history professor. But on Sunday nights, when the dorms didn’t serve food, he would eat takeout in front of the TV. He found that he chose “CHiPs,” with Erik Estrada, over PBS, and became fascinated with the question: “Why do smart people watch dumb TV?”

He did his thesis on Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” but came to believe that “art could be something that came out of a TV set.” That led to a broader interest in popular culture. “I realized that to understand TV you needed to understand the network radio era. And vaudeville. And the circus. And comic strips. Every year I would binge on something.” [...]

Thompson, who’s written or edited six books of his own, gets up each day at five to read; he consumes three new books a week, not to mention uncounted hours of TV. (He also has a family that he spends time with.) He’s constantly becoming enamored with new areas of pop culture.

A couple years ago, for example, he realized he didn’t know enough about Shakespeare — a pop culture figure of his time, after all. He decided to watch all existing plays on VHS or DVD. In three months he watched 113 plays and read 25 books on the bard. “I was crazed,” he says contentedly.

In case you think his interests aren’t diverse enough — or that he’s all about TV — it’s good to know he’s also gone through an obsession with aluminum lawn chairs, which he believes are “really taken for granted.”

That’s not something that’s likely to happen to Mr. Thompson any time soon.

A new Henry Jenkins' book — “The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture” — came out this past December, and we never like to pass up an opportunity to promote one of our favorite academics — and one of the most original and nuanced cultural critics. And that's even true when his book is simply a collection of previous essays.

As Mikita Brottman of PopMatters notes, while some of the essays are less insightful than others, the mix between the popular, political and the personal (who knew Jenkins was a fan of superheroes, Lassie and Pee Wee — all subjects of distinct essays?) creates a fresh critical approach.

Instead of seeing the emotional response to pop culture as a symptom of pop culture's appeal to the lowest common denominator, Jenkins justifies the joy and wonder that pop culture often elicits by revealing what the "wow" means (pdf):

Most popular culture is shaped by a logic of emotional intensification. It is less interested in making us think than it is in making us feel. Yet that distinction is too simple: popular culture, at its best, makes us think by making us feel …. Popular culture can generate a fair amount of effortless emotion by following well-trod formulas, but to make us go "wow" it has to twist or transform those formulas into something marvelous and unexpected …. To fully appreciate a piece of popular art, you need to have seen enough other examples to observe the ways it builds upon and breaks with existing formulas. The ability to fall back on the tried and the true frees the best popular artists to take risk with their audiences and experiment with their materials in search of the more elusive wow.

Tony Soprano opened “The Sopranos” with this lament: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I am getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

If you decide to check in on “The Sopranos” for the first time tonight, you will probably have a similar complaint. But to get even the late-comers in the mood, let me suggest a couple of ways to look back while looking ahead.

First, Alessandra Stanley has a review of both the show itself and its role in changing television — and pop culture as a whole. Although she attempts to temper some of the critical enthusiasm that has greeted the show over the years (pointing out its many predecessors, for example), she does give it high praise:

The series lowered the bar on permissible violence, sex and profanity at the same time that it elevated viewers’ taste, cultivating an appetite for complexity, wit and cinematic stylishness on a serial drama in which psychological themes flickered and built and faded and reappeared. The best episodes had equal amounts of high and low appeal, an alchemy of artistry and gutter-level blood and gore, all of it leavened with humor.

To me, though, the wonder of the show in its early years was the way it put its sense of irony at the service of a very poignant social commentary on, above all, the trappings of masculinity in modern American culture.

In one of the inaugural pieces for PopPolitics — “Just When Men Thought They Were Out …” — Bernie looked at how “The Sopranos,” along with many other texts (remember the 2000 election!), uses “the spectacle of violence” to displace a growing insecurity over increasingly contradictory definition of manhood: “One of the chief preoccupations of ‘The Sopranos’ will be men’s feelings of inadequacy, and those feelings are considered a reflection of a long-standing national struggle.”

Once you start feeling bogged down in all that weighty, analytical stuff, though, check out the “Seven Minute Sopranos” video (see below) — which provides one of the quickest and funniest recaps of a television series you will ever see. Virginia Heffernan has the back story behind the creators.

The movie “300” has already had its day in the sun, but I just ran across this belated assessment by M. Duss at Alterdestiny.

Duss avoids seeing the film through the simplistic swords-and-sandals/freedom-vs.-tyranny lens through which most critics, whether they liked or not, have viewed it. Instead, he believes it is “as good an illustration of Edward Said’s ideas about Orientalism as I ever expect to see on film”:

I find Said’s work most compelling when he focused on the use of literature and art in the production of knowledge and the maintenance of Western popular assumptions about the Orient. 300 could function as Exhibit A in this regard. The Greek (rational, well-organized, frequently bathed, and white) and Persian (prone to magic, a horde, much less frequently bathed, non-white) ethnic and cultural stereotypes are so blatantly offensive that they come very near subverting themselves. There were parts of the film that really made me wonder if the filmmakers were indeed winking at the audience, such as the Spartans’ “Before we sally forth in defense of reason, let’s consult the Oracle!” bit, but I don’t think so.

[...]

I find it interesting that quite a few people I’ve spoken to have criticized the movie’s representation of the Persians in terms that that I can only describe as Saidian. That is, they recognize the role that popular culture plays in reinforcing assumptions about the Other, and the way that these assumptions service certain political ideologies. The fact that some tech dudes at a party, who had never heard of Edward Said, were casually pointing these things out to me between tequila shots can, I think, be seen as a victory for the better parts of Said’s work.

I’m a sucker for a good allegorical reading.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Make Me Dance Around the Question: Watch the Democratic candidates squirm when asked, in light of Gen. Peter Pace’s comments, if they too believe that “homosexuality is immoral.”

When are the Democrats going to realize that backbone is a turn-on for voters? Even if they might disagree with you on a specific position, nothing shows character like having real values.

My Cousin Pookie: Speaking of Obama’s awareness of audience, he said the following during his recent Selma sermon: “If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.”

Wondering who Pookie is? Jonathan TiLove of the HNIC report has the complex, nuanced answer:

In their interviews and e-mails, Pookie emerges as a stock character of the black popular imagination, a name that has come to personify the kind of layabout kin who, if endearing, is also a source of some embarrassment and consternation to his more successful relations. And, it turns out, in his use of Pookie, Obama reveals something about himself …. In dropping Pookie’s name, Obama is signaling to those who question his blackness — because his mother was white and his father an African without slave ancestry — that he is not an outsider to black life.

Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, claims, “It’s a way of Obama getting purchase on that brand of black self-critique and establishing … his bonafides as a black figure willing to be critical of his own.”

Mark McPhail, an expert on rhetoric at Miami University of Ohio, see it somewhat differently: “This is the type of appeal that reveals Obama’s willingness to play on the worst type of stereotypes.”

The Real Black Youth: Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago professor, is the author of the Black Youth Project, which interviewed 15 to 25 year-old African American women and men about their attitudes and actions. Their “Topic Area Primers,” which provide very accessible and well-organized results of their research, should be required reading for anyone who strives for accurate image of possibly the most stereotyped demographic in America.

NPR’s News and Notes has held repeated conversations with her and other academics about the state of black youth. The latest installment on the role of sex in their lives is what triggered my interest.

Free Love: A University of Alberta study found that one third of Canadian boys are heavy users of pornography:

Ninety percent of males and 70 percent of females reported accessing sexually explicit media content at least once. More than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count,” compared to eight percent of the girls surveyed.

The great majority of the students surveyed use the Internet as their main conduit to the pornography.

Conservatives have latched onto the study as proof of our collective moral decline. Sonya Thompson, the author the study, however, has a more relevant question: “What kinds of expectations will these young people have going into their first sexual relationships? It may be setting up a big disconnect between boys and girls and may be normalizing risky sex practices.”

Between the Thought and the Act: From Scientific American: “People who play car racing video games may be more prone to drive recklessly and get into accidents, according to a study that adds to evidence that video games can influence the behavior of some players.”

Which brings us to the age-old question of the power of media in altering behavior, particularly of youth. Jonathan Turley, writing in the Washington Post, considers himself a “weapons-tolerant parent” who is not concerned about his sons playing with toy guns. Citing a few disparate psychologists — but mainly ruminating — Turley believes their games model “notions of courage and sacrifice,” work out “more basic emotions in more basic ways,” and, in the words of child psychologist Penny Holland, make sense of the world through “timeless themes of the struggle between good and evil.”

Oh, for a world so simple.

*See update at end of post.

This past December, in a post about authentic explorations of masculinity, Bernie took the opportunity to praise “Friday Night Lights” and its unique, complex portrayal of young men searching for their “deeper, sensitive identities.”

Like mother, like daughter: Tami and Julie Taylor on “Friday Night Lights”

Now, as the season is coming to a close, we could easily do another post about the show’s varied and nuanced representations of women — both young and old.

The season’s second half shifted subtly by giving more depth to Tami Taylor (Connie Britton), school guidance counselor, coach’s wife and mother struggling to stay protective of her teenage daughter; Julie Taylor (Aimee Teegarden), the smart, self-aware daughter; Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly), the popular cheerleader slowly coming of age; Tyra Collete (Adrianne Palicki), the tough outsider who has come of age too fast; and, to a lesser extent, Waverly Grady (Aasha Davis), the preacher’s daughter whose mix of political activism and poetic sensibility expands a football player’s horizons.

The layers and internal conflicts of these characters now drive the series. While they bump up against stereotypes and social expectations, none of them fully succumbs. And they all exhibit a great deal of agency, which is all too rare among adolescent female characters.

But let’s hold that analysis for another day. I want to yield the balance of my time to encouraging you to do two things:

1) Watch “Friday Night Lights” (if you haven’t already). All episodes are available — and free — on the NBC website. It will grab you from the opening scenes, guaranteed.

Part of what makes it work is that it gives serious consideration to both adult and adolescent concerns, which overlap naturally. If the multiple teen crises feel like they’re slipping into a soap opera dynamic, rest assured the moment will pass quickly — and you’ll probably be genuinely surprised by their complex negotiations of everyday life. The writing is consistently authentic, and the characters are always remarkably human in their individuality.

Maureen Ryan compares it to two critically acclaimed HBO shows, and the praise is well-deserved: “The world that ‘FNL’ has created feels so real by this point that the characters’ interactions feel organic and unforced — just as they do on ‘The Wire’ or ‘Deadwood,’ or any other show that manages to get every single detail right without being showy about it.”

2) Once you realize how special it is, join the movement to save the show — which has always struggled rating-wise (no thanks to its impossible Wednesday night time slot across from “American Idol”) and which has recently been rumored to be in a precarious position for a second season.

Obviously, by watching the episodes online, you are sending the clearest message possible to NBC that this show is something that has enduring popularity — but you can do more. Letters and other “gift bags” (inspired by the show’s mantra: “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose”) can be sent to Kevin Reilly, president of NBC entertainment. And an e-mail to NBC wouldn’t hurt as well.

This type of grassroots campaign has worked before for “Veronica Mars,” among other shows. It reveals the power of fans who are not simply satisfied with consuming culture but who want to be active, critical agents in its construction.

“Friday Night Lights,” by encouraging viewers to appreciate the full social and cultural contexts surrounding hallowed American traditions and values, is a show that deserves this type of attention and engagement.

As Stuart Levine of MSNBC affirms, “‘Friday Night Lights’ came to be labeled by many viewers and critics as the best new series of the year. But it’s moved way beyond that now. Forget ‘new,’ it’s now the best show on TV, bar none.”

Update: Maureen Ryan today notes that Bravo is going to re-air the entire series through March and April on Fridays and Saturdays AND there’s a new save-the-show site: FightForLights.com.