Author: Max Thornton

Quote of the Day: Nico Lang On Gaycism

A month ago, Lauren Bans coined the term gaycism, defined as “the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere.” Bans fingered the sitcoms Modern Family, The New Normal, Partners, and Two Broke Girls as major offenders.
The case of Two Broke Girls is especially frustrating. I want to see a show centering on two women who have ambitions beyond the romantic. I want to see an awesome show about female friendship which tackles class and economic issues and has characters of color. I want to watch and like that show; Two Broke Girls is not that show.
Two Broke Girls is like your white gay friend who thinks he’s entitled to say whatever he pleases because he’s been oppressed, so he’s allowed to oppress other people and call it being an “equal opportunity offender.”  He’s earned the right to be a racist, insensitive asshole, because I guess he asked Audre Lorde and she said it was okay?

Lang also criticizes The New Normal, which comes to us from the mind of Glee‘s Ryan Murphy:

Remember hipster racism?  This is that turned up to 11, like Murphy throwing a big blackface party on TV.  However, the biggest issue with pointing it out is that people often don’t realize that such “ironic racism” is still just racism.  And what actually makes the show’s gaycism so doubly troubling is that the act of being systemically oppressed should make people more aware of the ways in which they have the ability to marginalize others, because they have experienced the same thing themselves.

Read the whole piece; it’s great, and full of links to other great pieces.
Television right now is a bitter disappointment. It gives with one hand while taking away with the other. You can have a show about female friendship, but only if it’s full of racist stereotypes. You can have a show about gay parents, but only if it’s crammed with racist jokes. You can have one nice thing, but only if it’s garnished with horribleness.
My television will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. This year, the networks seem to have picked bullshit.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

E.T. – Queer Space Jesus

People love writing stories about Space Jesus. The Ur-example is, for me, Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still (believe it or not, the scriptwriter thought he was being subtle with that one, bless his heart). An alien stranded, alone of its kind, on another planet is the very archetype of a stranger in a strange land, of the returning repressed other, of that liminal hybridity that’s so often figured as monstrous, holy, or somehow both. As a cultural trope, Space Jesus makes perfect sense.

I admit, I just needed an excuse to post this picture, because it’s awesome.
All my life, E.T. has been a favorite Space Jesus of mine, and it’s not just because the film’s human protagonist is, like me, burdened with a severe case of Middle Child Syndrome. E.T.’s Space Jesus characteristics are thunderingly obvious – the magical healing powers, the precious too-good-for-this-sinful-earth-ness, the death and resurrection – but he can also be read as a specifically queer Jesus figure.
Queer theology is a pretty young discipline, but queer figurations of Jesus have always abounded. The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich wrote passionately about Jesus as Mother, endlessly giving birth to us. (As an aside, I would encourage anyone who’s Christian and depressed to read Julian: “God did not say you will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted; but God said, You will not be overcome.”). Renaissance artwork depicting Jesus is fairly bursting with homoeroticism. Early-twentieth-century attempts to portray Jesus as ruggedly masculine were a direct reaction to a nineteenth-century Christ popularly associated with traditionally feminine characteristics.
What’s new in queer theology is not the act of queering Jesus as such, but the conscious employment of analytical tools taken from secular queer theory: a deconstructionist methodology, a critical focus on subjectivity and embodiment, and a dedication to problematizing the gender binary.
E.T. definitely problematizes the gender binary. According to IMDb, “Spielberg stated in an interview that E.T. was a plant-like creature, and neither male or female.” Elliott codes him male while Gertie dresses him up femme – both of them projecting their own gender identity on the squashy little guy. Like the Jesus of queer and postcolonial studies, E.T. functions as a blank slate for people to project themselves onto. He is what they need him to be.
This is what a Queer Space Jesus looks like.
There’s also something very queer about the connection between E.T. and Elliott. It’s not just a psychic link – it’s somatic: when E.T. falls ill, Elliott falls ill; when E.T. gets drunk, Elliott gets drunk. The embodied yet mystical link between boy and alien has notes of the in-dwelling Holy Spirit that joins believers to the body of Christ, which is arguably an inherently queer concept anyway.
Medic: “Elliott thinks its thoughts?”
Michael: “No, Elliott feels his feelings.”
(And that scene where he asks the frog if it can talk and then releases all the frogs? Not just psychically-drunken shenanigans. I think it shows Elliott gaining a heightened awareness of the value of non-human life – borderline ecofeminist theology – and it also recalls the plague of the frogs in Egypt. People often spot the Christiness of E.T., but they rarely seem to note the Exodus undercurrents. Which is ironic, given that Spielberg’s Jewish.)
There are other Jesus connections to be made – am I reading too much into it if I note that Elliott’s mother is named Mary, and that the kids occasionally seem to address her as such? That, in an upending of the Mary and Martha story, she plays the Martha role as she bustles around putting groceries away, too busy even to notice Gertie playing with E.T.? And I note that Jesus has always seemed to me like kind of an asshole in that story, and that Elliott’s mom is presented with a good deal of sympathy for how hard she works as a newly-single mother of three, and that seems like a useful queering of a problematic biblical text.
What, then, do we do with our queer Space Jesus? I think it’s important that there’s no dogmatic answer to that question. If there were, he wouldn’t be very queer. Queer Space Jesus isn’t about providing neat answers, or even necessarily about making life easier or better. What we can get from him is a renewed sense of wonder and awe regarding our vast starry universe, our tiny blue planet, and the amazing mystery of life; a promise that we are not alone, that our alienation is understood on a profound and compassionate level by other life-forms on our own world as well as perhaps on others; and an everlasting assurance that, come what may, he’ll be right here.
   
Excuse me. I have something in my eye.    
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Max’s Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows

The rosterof newtelevision shows premiering each year in the fall ought to be an exciting time for any TV fan. Unfortunately, I am a jaded, cynical curmudgeon, burned by my previous experiences in the field of new fall shows, and I read the previews with dread roiling in the pit of my stomach. In our age of podcasts, webseries, and countless other competing forms of entertainment, the networks seem to be getting more and more desperate, scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the barrel.
Broad stereotypes? Check.
Dominated by straight white men? Check.
God help us all, a new Ryan Murphy show? Check.
It’s predictably depressing and depressingly predictable. Once upon a time, as a starry-eyed viewer full of hope and gillyflowers, I had a “three-episode rule” for judging any show whose premise piqued my interest even a tiny bit. This year, I don’t expect to watch any of the new shows unless critical opinion snowballs in the course of the season.
However, fall still brings its sweet gifts even unto the cantankerous television fan, in the form of returning shows. Someof these shows have spiraled so far down the U-bend that I can’t even hate-watch them anymore, but there are still enough watchable returning shows to compensate for all the awful new ones (and to wreak havoc on my degree). In the absence of new shows that don’t make me want to claw my eyes out, here is a list of returning shows worth watching.
The Thick Of It (9/9)
I already covered this. It’s on Hulu. Watch it. (N.B. Because it is full of swears, Hulu will make you log in to watch it, and for some reason this entails declaring yourself male or female. If this disgusts you as much as it does me, and you wish to, ahem, seek out alternate methods of watching, I will turn a blind eye.)
Boardwalk Empire (9/16)
A questionable creative decision last season nearly made me rage-quit this show, but it drew me back in with a jaw-dropping finale. Slow, dense, and luscious, this isn’t a show to everyone’s taste, but I remain compelled by the epic-scale world-building of 1920s New Jersey, and especially by the way the show explores the lives of not only the rich white men who run things but also marginalized minorities: people of color, women, queer people. This is not a perfect show by any means, but it fascinates me.
Parks and Recreation (9/20)
Yaaaaay!

This, on the other hand, might well be a perfect show. Leslie Knope, April Ludgate, Ron F—ing Swanson… Just typing the names gives me a big goofy grin. Every episode is a half-hour ray of blissful sunshine, brightening my spirits with a healthy dose of feminism, Amy Poehler, and laughter. Roll on Thursday (by then I might even have stopped crying about the breakup of the century).
How I Met Your Mother (9/24)
I still watch this show, I guess. I can’t really remember why.
Bob’s Burgers (9/30)
The charming adventures of the most delightful animated family since The Simpsons deserve a full-length treatment on this site at some point. For now I simply say: Watch it. If the hijinks of close-knit siblings Tina, Gene, and Louise don’t fill you with joy, you have a shriveled husk in place of a soul. Also, Kristen Schaal! Eugene Mirman! H. Jon Benjamin, for crying out loud! (HEY, FX, WHEN IS ARCHER COMING BACK ALREADY?)
Tina’s my favorite. No, Gene is. No, it’s Louise. Oh, don’t make me choose!
The Good Wife (9/30)
For a sitcom-loving sci-fi nerd like myself, a legal drama is well outside the comfort zone, but this is about as good as they come. The juxtaposition of title and premise alone should grab any feminist’s attention: When her husband is embroiled in an Eliot Spitzer-style scandal, Alicia Florrick returns to the bar in order to make ends meet. The rich ironies and tensions suggested by the show’s title play out on Julianna Margulies’ understated yet beautifully expressive face as she navigates personal and professional life when she has so long been defined as Peter Florrick’s wife. And sometimes Michael J. Fox guest stars, and it’s awesome.
30 Rock (10/4)
For several seasons now, 30 Rock has been but a pale shadow of its best self, but laughs are still guaranteed, and my love for Liz Lemon is fierce and undying. I will almost certainly complain vociferously about every episode, but I wouldn’t dream of missing out on bidding farewell to the TGS crew.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (10/11)
In some ways, this is the anti-Parks and Rec: A crass and often vicious show about crass, wholly unlikeable people. You won’t see anyone hailing the Sunnygang as feminist icons anytime soon (though, for what it’s worth, the jokes are usually on the holders of prejudice rather than the victims thereof). I’d like to revisit the episodes featuring Carmen, a trans woman, to see how they stack up against the generally appalling mainstream pop-culture depiction of trans women, but I’m honestly a little afraid to do so. When Sunny misses, it misses hard, but it’s also capable of making me laugh until I cry; and, unlike a certain other 2005-premiering show mentioned above, I’m actually optimistic about the chance for creativity and entertainment in Sunny‘s eighth season.
Community (10/19)
The date is on my calendar and on my heart. Friday, October 19th, 8:30pm: The stars will align. The cosmos will come into harmony. Wars will end. Justice will prevail. God will be in his heaven and all will be right with the world.
ASDFSDALF;HDSLGJKHSJDK

‘Gravity Falls’: Manliness, Silliness, and a Whole Lot of Awesome

I am too old for the Disney Channel. The bright candy colors, the rapid-fire pacing, the saccharine music and headache-y flash-cuts and forced zaniness – it all adds up to one massively hyperstimulating, sugar-coated migraine. Half an hour of all that on a Saturday morning and I am ready to bounce off the ceiling before crashing to earth semi-comatose for the rest of the day.
If you can overcome (or, better, avoid entirely) the excruciating commercials and the overstimulation of the Disney Channel milieu, however, you can experience maybe the most exciting television debut of 2012. (Not, I’ll admit, that the upcoming fall season looks to offer stiff competition.)
Welcome to Gravity Falls.
In the nine episodes aired so far, Gravity Falls has already established a pretty dense mythology for itself, jam-packed with occult imagery, cryptograms, conspiracies, clever callbacks, and hidden Easter eggs (and there are already plentyof websitesdevoted to deciphering this stuff). It’s an enormously fun show, chronicling the supernatural adventures of twelve-year-old twins Dipper and Mabel in the creepy, not-quite-right town of Gravity Falls, Oregon. The level of care and detail lavished on the world-building is matched by the depth and – if I can say this of an animated Disney Channel show – realism of the characters.
Dipper and Mabel, voice by Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, are wonderfully characterized as not just siblings but true friends: despite their personality differences, they enjoy spending time together, and although they needle and mock each other they always have each other’s back. As somebody whose siblings are my best friends, I find it rings very true to life, and the only other show I can think of with a comparably close sibling dynamic is Bob’s Burgers –where, coincidentally, one of the siblings is also voiced by Schaal.
The twins’ age is a savvy writing choice that allows for some spot-on exploration of themes of growing up, pitching the show niftily at the crossover-hit sweet spot for both younger and older viewers. A grown-up trying to convince other grown-ups to watch a Disney Channel animated show can certainly relate to the twins’ swithering between the childish excitement of their supernatural adventures and their desire to prove themselves cool enough for the local teenagers (including Dipper’s hopeless and completely understandable crush, Linda Cardellini-voiced Wendy). Two specific episodes of Gravity Falls work well as companion pieces exploring Dipper and Mabel’s respective struggles to establish their identities.
Episode 6, “Dipper Vs. Manliness”
A cutie patootie.
Dipper is the more introspective, bookish twin – as Mabel puts it, he’s “not exactly Manly Mannington.” When an old “manliness tester” machine at the local diner declares him “a cutie patootie,” Dipper’s insecurity about being a man goes into overdrive, and he seeks training in the ways of manliness from a group of Manotaurs (“half man, half… taur!” “I have 3 Y-chromosomes, 6 Adam’s apples, pecs on my abs, and fists for nipples!”).
Anyone who’s been a feminist longer than five minutes knows that the enforcement of gender roles harms men as well as women, and this episode features a lot of great jokes lampooning the sheer absurdity of what’s considered manly in our society: the pack of REAL MAN JERKY emblazoned with the slogan YOU’RE INADEQUATE!, the Manotaur council that involves beating the crap out of each other, Dipper convincing the reluctant Manotaurs to help him (“using some sort of brain magic!”) by suggesting they’re not manly enough to do it.
In the end, it’s Dipper’s love for a thinly-veiled “Dancing Queen” pastiche that causes him to defy the Manotaurs’ stereotypical definition of manliness. His enjoyment of something considered “girly” opens his eyes to the nonsensical restrictiveness of traditional gender roles. As he says in his climactic speech to the Manotaurs: “You keep telling me that being a man means doing all these tasks and being aggro all the time, but I’m starting to think that stuff’s malarkey. You heard me: malarkey!”
Rejecting the Manotaur’s version of manliness does not, however, answer Dipper’s agonized question about the nature of masculinity: “Is it mental? Is it physical? What’s the secret?” (And how many times have I myself asked that question?) Although the episode puts a neat bow on Dipper’s arc by offering a pat moral – “You did what was right even though no one agreed with you. Sounds pretty manly to me” – it’s made fairly clear that masculinity and femininity do not have to be discrete, oppositional spheres rooted in stereotypes, and the question of what makes a man is left open – as, perhaps, it should be.
Episode 8, “Irrational Treasure”
Mabel is the best. She’s my favorite character, and with every episode I love her even more. Her quest for self in “Irrational Treasure” is not a direct counterpart to Dipper’s search for manliness – Mabel is pretty comfortable with both the ways in which she is conventionally feminine and the ways in which she is not (reflecting the sad reality that girls’ freedom to express masculinity is not mirrored by an equivalent freedom for boys to express femininity). In the show’s fourth episode, “The Hand That Rocks the Mabel,” she confronts the societal pressures around dating while female, as she struggles with how to extricate herself from a coercive romantic relationship with the creepy Lil Gideon – an object lesson in how messed up are our society’s ideas of the romantic pursuit of uninterested women by persistent men – but in this episode she faces a less explicitly gendered problem: how to convince everyone that she’s not silly.
The delightfully goofy hijinks of this episode – involving a conspiracy to cover up the existence of Quentin Trembley, the peanut-brittle-preserved eighth-and-a-half president of the United States – are propelled by Mabel’s quest to prove her seriousness to rival Pacifica Northwest. Pacifica is a pretty stereotypical stuck-up-rich-mean-girl archetype thus far, but it seems distinctly possible that an interesting character arc could await her in future. “You look and act ridiculous,” she tells Mabel with scorn, and Mabel takes her peer’s cruelty to heart the way only a pre-teen can. “I thought I was being charming,” she says dejectedly, “but I guess people see me as a big joke.”
Don’t worry Mabel, you really are so so charming.
As it was Dipper’s non-manliness that ultimately proved him a real man, so it’s Mabel’s silliness that saves the day here, allowing her to crack all the clues for the conspiracy and help President Trembley escape the local police (who, despite being called serious by Mabel, are in fact extremely silly). By the episode’s end, Mabel is impervious to Pacifica’s jibes: “I’ve got nothing to prove. I’ve learned that being silly is awesome.”
Figuring out who you are in the face of societal pressures that buffet you every which way is the trial of growing up, and helping people to do that is one of feminism’s goals. It’s also at the heart of Gravity Falls, which helps cement this for me as the most exciting new show of 2012. (Plus, it’s apparently indoctrinating kids into occult symbolism. Cool.)

Buffy Week: The Incoherent Metaphysics of the Buffyverse

Contains spoilers for Buffy and Angel. Not the comic books, though. Those never happened.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was famously asking the question: what if, in a typical horror-movie monster-chases-girl scenario, the girl turned around and kicked the monster’s ass? But it’s also, perhaps less wittingly, asking the question: what happens when an atheist – someone who disavows the existence of all things super- or preternatural in the real world – writes a show about the supernatural?

Of course, American TV, and especially the WB in the late 90s, is perhaps not the best forum for a nuanced discussion of faith and religion. Even so, it’s striking how one-dimensional the perspectives on the supernatural are on Buffy. Maybe I know too many seminarians (I know a lot of seminarians), but it seems very odd to me that nobody we know in Sunnydale reacts to the presence of demons and vampires by turning to religion. Especially once the show’s mythos expanded to encompass an elaborate lore of gods, resurrection, heaven and hell, and de- and re-ensouling, the big G remains notable for its total absence. Even after experiencing a heavenly afterlife, Buffy’s only comment about God’s existence is “Nothing solid” (S7E7, “Conversations With Dead People”). And I for one would find this profoundly unsatisfying. Once you have come across the First Evil (as worshiped by an ex-priest, no less!), would your first question not be: So is there an equivalent primordial good?
On a metatextual level, of course, this all makes perfect sense. The premise of the show is not God, religion, or Manicheandualism fought on a cosmic scale. Metatextually, we know that the Buffyverse is a world where the supernatural forces of evil operate, but the question of God is moot, and the source of goodness is people’s love for each other and their willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of what’s right. From the perspective of a viewer looking in on this world, we can accept this, but once we try to imagine ourselves truly inside the Buffyverse, the cracks in its metaphysics begin to appear.
These cracks show themselves most clearly in late-period Buffy, when the series starts to sink under the weight of its own mythos. The show, which had once so brilliantly and wittily allegorized the trials of growing up as horror-movie monsters, lost its focus and its direction in the final two seasons. Buffy tries not to simplistically equate soul with good and soulless with bad, attempting to explore gray areas and moral ambiguities, but this winds up pulling the show in hopelessly contradictory directions: if vamps and demons have the potential to be good, if they are redeemable to the point of being able to want a soul, then how is Buffy justified in constantly staking them? Add what we learn from Angel, and things get even less coherent. If ensoulment and goodness/evilness are, as Angel the supposedly more grown-up show would have us believe, much more complicated than that, how come Angel yo-yos between Good, ensouled Angel and Evil, soulless Angelus with, frankly, comical facility?

Come on, it’s a bit silly.
When Darla, staked as a soulless vampire, is brought back as a human, the soul question gets even more inexplicable. If, as established very early on, “When you become a vampire, the demon takes your body, but it doesn’t get your soul” (Buffy S1E7, “Angel”), then why does the resurrected human Darla even remember her life as a vampire? Is the vampire a new, evil creature occupying the formerly ensouled body, whose soul is now at peace (as that line of Angel’s would seem to suggest); or is it the same person, the same consciousness, with some fundamental part removed? Is the soul the individual’s consciousness, their moral compass, an ineffable that somehow endows humanness? What, finally, is a soul?
This is, of course, a hugely complex question, to which I do not expect a coherent real-world answer. In a TV show, however, where the quality of ensouledness apparently determines whether you deserve to live or die – whether or not it’s morally acceptable for our protagonist to kill you – we damn well need our terms defined.
This is… what a soul looks like?
Perhaps this kind of moral and metaphysical incoherence is simply an inevitable result of the Chosen One narrative. (I’m reminded irresistibly of Harry Potter, and of the fancritiquesthat read Dumbledore as a nasty, manipulative figure who deliberately programs Harry to do his bidding, rather than as the wise and kindly mentor Harry sees. There are counter-readings of the Bible that find traditional atonement theory similarly abhorrent, arguing that only an abusive God would sacrifice his own son.) Noting the Powers-That-Be who guide events on Angel, I wonder to what extent it’s possible to engage questions of Chosen Ones, prophecies, destiny and so on without resorting to a Calvinistdeterminism.
Naturally there is a metatextual Calvinist element – it’s called the writers’ room – and Whedon occasionally nods to this. Of Buffy S6E17, “Normal Again,” he has said: “the entire series takes place in the mind of a lunatic locked up somewhere in Los Angeles, if that’s what the viewer wants.” In that same interview he admits that the role of the soul in the Buffyverse is often simply a matter of narrative convenience; and that, I think, is kind of cheating. When we watch a show, our assent to its premise is a kind of contract: we will accept this premise, provided that the show does not flout the narrative rules on which it is predicated. If a show flouts its own narrative rules – say, retconning an entire season as a dream – audiences tend to feel that the contract has been violated. Altering something as crucial to the show’s whole premise as the function of the soul according to narrative diktat is, I think, a similar violation.
As a lover of Buffy and a theologian, I want Buffy to be theologically and metaphysically coherent. I want it eitherto establish one metaphysical system as true for the world it portrays, or to represent a believable variety of metaphysical beliefs among its characters. The former is an entirely lost cause; the latter is frustratingly undercooked. Willow’s Judaism is wholly Informed, and her turn to Wicca is entirely to do with magic. There is no sense at all of Wicca (or any other religion) as an ethical code, as a way of making meaning, as a way of personally relating to the world and others in it.
Ultimately, this is the same problem I have with the show’s self-professed feminism. Joss Whedon is a proud feminist, and yet in the course of Buffy some very unfortunate tropes appear – Bury Your Gays, Psycho Lesbian, No Bisexuals, Token Minority, general racefail – which cumulatively suggest a writers’ room that just didn’t necessarily see the implications of everything it was doing, perhaps because it lacked the diversity of viewpoints necessary to provide checks and balances on overwhelming privilege. Established metatextually, the show’s feminism is taken for granted by all characters in-universe, and it requires extra work on the part of the viewer to critique its problematic elements. Perhaps this fundamental incoherence of Buffy‘s feminism is tied to its fundamental metaphysical incoherence. Both seem to stem from the same failings.
But also, there were really really awesome things.
 

Movie Riffing: A White Man’s World

Last week, there was a RiffTrax live event all across the country. If you’re not familiar with RiffTrax, it’s what some of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew do now. If you’re not familiar with MST3K, well, you’re in for a (possibly life-changing) treat.
In all of its iterations – MST3K, the Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic, RiffTrax – the basic premise is the same: comedians watch movies and make fun of them. It’s a premise so simple, yet so relentlessly compelling, that it’s no wonder the eight main performers from MST3K are all still involved in the movie-riffing business, nearly 24 years after the show first premiered.
As well as releasing DVDs, video-on-demand downloads, and downloadable audio commentaries, both Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax regularly perform live shows. In the case of last week’s event, the RiffTrax crew mocked MST3K stalwart (and current #4 movie in the IMDb Bottom 100) Manos: The Hands of Fate with all new jokes from a theater in Nashville, broadcasting the event to movie theaters nationally. It was a terrific good time – and if you missed it, never fear: it’s happening again in October, this time with a movie even dearer to my heart, the gloriously incompetent Birdemic: Shock and Terror– but, as devoted a fan as I am of these guys and their hilarious work, I am troubled by one thing:
They are almost all white dudes.
RiffTrax: funny white men.
Cinematic Titanic is composed of four white men and one white woman. RiffTrax comprises three white men and occasionally guest stars such as “Weird Al” Yankovic, Joel McHale, or Neil Patrick Harris.
Why is the movie-riffing business so white? Why is it so male? (Why is it so straight and cis?)
Of course, MST3K got its start in the late eighties in the Midwest, so that might explain why it was very white and mostly male. But it’s now 2012, and I live in the Bay Area. When I saw the RiffTrax live show at SF Sketchfest in January, the guest riffers were David Cross, Bruce McCulloch, Eugene Mirman, and Paul F. Tompkins. All very funny people whose work I enjoy enormously; all white men.
MST3K / Cinematic Titanic: mostly funny white men.
The broader problem, of course, is that the mainstream comedy world is still profoundly white-male-centric. Women and people of color are still tokenized on The Daily Show. Popular sitcoms like Two and Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are squarely focused on the white male experience, while shows that attempt diversity get it appallinglywrong. Even my beloved Community is a show created by and centering on a white man.
And who are the comedians who get their own basic-cable TV shows? Stephen Colbert. Russell Brand. Louis C.K. Daniel Tosh. W. Kamau Bell (which gives me some hope; are you watching Totally Biased? You should be!). The people who don’t get their own TV shows are Maria Bamford, Kristen Wiig, Margaret Cho (well, she once had a show, but let’s not talk about that).
OH MY GOD GIVE HER A SHOW ALREADY
 Of course, the success of 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation has spawned a number of sitcoms with female protagonists, but there still seems to be an entrenched cultural opposition to most feministcomedy. We feminists tend to put the weight of impossible expectations on any comedy that looks to be even the slightest bit feminist – remember how much of the discourse around Bridesmaids last year was centered on the notion that this movie provided proof positive now-and-forever-amen that women could be funny? Or the phenomenal outpouring of commentary this year on Girls? – and, with every passing internet-comedy twitstorm, it becomes clearer that we need to keep having this immensely frustrating conversation, assuring the wider world that comedy can indeed be both feminist and funny. The self-styled defenders of free speech, who seem to think that critique is the same as censorship, excuse the ugliest and most offensive jokes as fair game. Our best way of combating that is to keep proving that you can fight for justice andbe funny at the same time.
And I think movie riffing could be a very good way of doing this. It’s become a bit of a truism that riffing is at its best when it comes from a place of some genuine affection for the material being mocked, when it’s “funny and clever and occasionally a little more generous … not just too mean-spirited and sour.” MST3K and its successors are great because they’re made by people who love movies. The jokes express a sincere wish for the movie under scrutiny to be good.
In the same way, feminist pop-culture commentary isn’t just about slaying all fun so that we can all be miserable subjects of the fiefdom of Nofunnington. It’s a sincere cry for things to be better, a way of telling humankind: You can be better than this.
MST3K improved my critical analysis of film and TV. Feminist commentary improved my critical analysis of the kyriarchy, the myriad -isms woven throughout our culture. If there was a more overtly feminist-slanted, equally hilarious movie-riffing team, you can bet that I would be their biggest fan.

For F—‘s Sake, Watch ‘The Thick Of It’

The fourteen episodes of Armando Iannucci’s brilliant BBC show The Thick Of It appeared on Hulu a couple of weeks ago, and the upcoming fourth season will stream there as well. I am having a bafflingly hard time convincing even my most devoted Anglophile friends to watch it. Maybe the pace and intensity are off-putting: it’s a show that demands your full, rapt attention to decipher its rapid-fire dialogue (and British accents, if that’s a difficulty for you). Maybe the unrelenting cynicism is discouraging for my starry-eyed friends (I know a LOT of Aaron Sorkin devotees). Maybe the Westminster setting is daunting to Americans who assume that familiarity with the ins and outs of UK politics is a prerequisite, when in reality all a non-Brit would miss are throwaway jokes about odds and ends of British culture (Mark Kermode’s flappy hands, anyone?). Whatever it is that’s giving people pause, I wish they’d overcome it, because this is a really, really good TV show.
As a cynical comedy about the relationship between a hapless government minister and a Machiavellian civil servant, The Thick Of It is naturally a spiritual successor to excellent 1980s sitcom Yes Minister– but it is a very 21st-century successor. The archly satirical wit of Yes Minister isn’t wholly absent from from The Thick Of It, but it is rather overshadowed by, well, the gloriously colorful and endlessly creative obscenity. A viewer conducting even the most casual compare-and-contrast of the two series will notice two interesting trends:
1. Twenty-first-century Westminster is no less white than 1980s Westminster. This, unfortunately, is a reflection of reality: people of color currently comprise 4% of MPs (a figure that was significantly lower when The Thick Of It began in 2005), and Parliament’s own website admits that even though “[t]he House of Commons is more reflective of the population it represents than ever before […] it remains the case that more than 400 MPs, 62% of the total, are white men aged over 40.”
2. There is a far wider variety of accents, and a hell of a lot more swearing, in the newer show. This is something that cannot be explained without a brief discussion of the deeply complex question of class in British politics, so please bear with me. UK politics has always been an old boys’ club. The traditional track to Westminster runs through a private school, ideally Eton, and a top-tier university, ideally Oxbridge. That same Parliament webpage notes that over a quarter of current MPs went to Oxbridge, and over a third went to private schools. This is vastly disproportionate to the general population – but it is an improvement over the past. In 1982 Yes Minister could include lengthy rants about Greek and Latin quotations and jokes mocking a minister who attended the LSE; one suspects that that simply wouldn’t fly today.
The delicate subtleties of regional accents in the UK are far beyond my capacity to explain; suffice it to say that, first, regional accents are historically the marker of a working-class background, and, second, they are much more acceptable in politics and media today than they were 30 years ago. There is, then, a more or less explicit class dynamic at play in The Thick Of It between the RP-accented ministers and the very Scottish Peter Capaldi, who stars as very terrifying government spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.
Good God this man is terrifying.
Malcolm is the core of the show, and he is a wonder to behold. In creating Malcolm Tucker, Iannucci seems to have drawn from both his own Scottish heritage and from the well of “terrifying Scot” archetypes that populate the British imagination: from Wallace bellowing “FREEDOM!” to Miss Jean Brodie to Professor McGonagall to the monstrous Manda in Alan Warner’s The Stars In The Bright Sky (get a copy; you’ll thank me later), echoed in US pop culture through figures like Groundskeeper Willie and Shrek. An explosive hurricane of Caledonian fury, Malcolm tears through Westminster, bullying, threatening, effing, blinding, and occasionally punching anyone unfortunate enough to oppose his will. He’s the kind of villain who’s an absolute joy to hate, reveling in his own evil machinations and spouting quotable profanity like it’s going out of style.
Not that the other characters lack for memorable quotes. The writing for this show reminds me of Oscar Wilde (in a potty-mouthed, 21st-century kind of way): all the characters essentially speak with exactly the same voice, but it’s such a very funny voice that nobody really minds. And, of course, a great strength of this style is that the women characters sound as though they were written to be characters first, women second. Our culture is swimming in female characters who sounds as if they were written by someone who, at best, has never actually interacted with a woman, and, at worst, genuinely believes women to be a completely different species than human beings. Armando Iannucci’s women are not like this at all, and it’s depressing how refreshing that is.
In my opinion, The Thick Of It only really hits its stride with the introduction of Rebecca Front as Nicola Murray, MP, in the third season. (The first two were only three episodes each, so she’s still in more than half the series.) This was a matter of necessity, owing to Chris Langham’s ignominious fall from public grace, but it gives the show a dynamic it really needs. When Langham’s Hugh Abbott was the hapless minister struggling to hang onto his job in the face of mockery from special advisers Glen and Ollie and relentless terrorism from Malcolm, the cast was just toohomogeneous. Nicola has to deal with not only the pressures Hugh faced as an overworked, underprepared, perpetually outgunned minister trying desperately to be relevant; but she also has to cope with the specific challenges of being a woman in a profession that is still 78% male-dominated. Dubbed a “glummy mummy” by the press, Nicola is caught in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t position of the woman in the high-pressure job – expected to prioritize her work while simultaneously being the World’s Greatest Mother, in a way that men are simply never expected to do. Being at the nexus of such impossible expectations never overwhelms Nicola’s character or turns her into a straw person of any kind, but it is a constant presence in the dynamic of her interactions with others, to the point that even the ferocious Malcolm appears to have a little sympathy for her.

Poor Nicola.
Iannucci seems to have recognized how interesting this dynamic is, and attempted to replicate it this year in his HBO show Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a (once again) hapless vice president. Veep is an intriguing attempt to transplant the magic of The Thick Of It to a US context (foreshadowed to some extent in the transatlantic hijinks of 2009 alternate-universe spin-off film In The Loop), but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a fully successful one. For one thing, the US televisual landscape is so prudish that, even on HBO, the swears don’t roll off tongues as organically as on British TV. For another, the lack of a truly nefarious Malcolm Tucker figure, while an understandable artistic choice to create distance from The Thick Of It, in my opinion undermines the show’s cohesiveness. And I question the wisdom of choosing to piss away a potentially really interesting pregnancy subplot offscreen.
My reservations notwithstanding, I will be watching Veep‘s second season, because it’s pretty funny, and because I trust Armando Iannucci. But I’m much more excited for The Thick Of It season four, and it would be nice if the rest of America cared too.
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Max Thornton is a grad student who doesn’t really like pronouns but won’t object to either ey/em or he/him. Too British for the US and too American for the UK, Max currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area but dreams of London and New York. Max likes theology, intersectional feminism, and pop culture, and blogs about these things at Gay Christian Geek.

New Bitch Flicks Regular Contributor: Max Thornton

Hello all. I’m Max Thornton, known in other corners of the web as Rainicorn or Gay Christian Geek. My previous Bitch Flicks contributions are No Country For Old Men and Growing Up Queer: Water Lilies (2007) and Tomboy (2011), which prove that I can appreciate good films even though my heart really belongs to Syfy original movies, zombie flicks, Ed Wood, and anything with “shark” or “piranha” in the title.
I am a third culture kid who grew up in the USA, Kenya, and Great Britain. I am a trans* queer person who gets angry a lot. I am a grad student in theology, which I define broadly as the processes by which people create meaning in their lives, and my especial interest is the interrelationship of politics, culture, and religion.
I love film, books, and sci-fi in any medium, and I have an especial passion for television. My favorite show of all time is Mystery Science Theater 3000; my favorite show currently airing is Community; the list of shows I love is ever expanding with series both new and new-to-me, but among my very favorites are Adventure Time, Archer, Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, The League of Gentlemen, Parks and Recreation, Phineas and Ferb, Pushing Daisies, Spaced, The Thick Of It, Venture Bros, and Wonderfalls.
I tend to critique things relentlessly and love things unreservedly, usually in equal measure, and I look forward to doing plenty of both at this terrific website.
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Max Thornton is a grad student who doesn’t really like pronouns but won’t object to either ey/em or he/him. Too British for the US and too American for the UK, Max currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area but dreams of London and New York. Max likes theology, intersectional feminism, and pop culture, and blogs about these things at Gay Christian Geek.