An unruly mob living in tents, regularly forced to relocate, demanding respect from corrupt elites, beaten and sometimes killed by the de facto authorities. Until we get a closer look at the style of tents or the way they dress, we could be watching a scene in Zucotti Park, Tahrir Square, or the latest original show on AMC, Hell on Wheels. Mark my words, lives will be lost, and pepper will get in someone’s eyes.

AMC couldn’t have picked a better time to air a show about desperate people working killer industrial jobs for “The One Percent.” When conservative pundits write off Occupy Wall Street protesters as hypocrites for owning iPhones or other brand-name gadgets, Hell on Wheels is the show that should be running on those devices to keep them motivated.

At first glance, the show fits the typical Western formula: our anti-hero Cullen Bohannon wants revenge on men who murdered his wife. But much of what we see is his day job with the railroad, taken as a cover so he can get close to the murderers. Like most of us (somewhat less than 99%?), he sells his labor to get by, but he’s alienated from the product and the profits. It’s a day job which he barely maintains, sometimes shirking his work duties in pursuit of a man who needs killing. As a bonus for viewers who hate crappy jobs and crappy bosses, we follow Bohannon as he attempts to murder his immediate superior in the first episode. Another disgruntled worker beats him to it. Later we get to see a worker take down his boss in a bare-knuckle boxing match.

Lily Bell almost gets killed with her surveyor husband because of an unsafe work environment, or you could call it a failure to clear their development plan with disgruntled local residents (the Cheyenne). She spends a few episodes letting her late husband’s employer dangle before she hits him up for workers’ compensation pay for the death of her husband, using his precious survey maps as leverage.

Other working stiffs on the show include several ladies of negotiable virtue and some Irish brothers in the Magic Lantern entertainment industry, already making forays into pornography. They may be independent operators, but presumably all of them have to pay protection to madams, pimps or local bosses like the Swede. There’s a young man facing the dilemma that many of us have with jobs, whether to follow the traditions of his family (become chief like your father, defend against invading white men) or his chosen career path in the church.

The reason 99% of these people are sweating and straining in the mud is that Thomas Durant and a few faceless investors stand to profit from it. He’s our Wall Street whipping boy. An abridged list of Durant’s crimes or dick moves on the show include demanding his men keep working when payroll is two weeks late, bilking the government, extorting and bribing a senator, embezzling, and pushing extra arrows into a dead employee so it will look like a more brutal massacre in news photos. Although his second in command The Swede believes Bohannon committed murder, Durant effectively pardons him, not because he considered the merits of the case, but because building the railroad is more important to him than justice.

If Durant hasn’t demonstrated every transgression the Occupy movement attributes to Wall Street, he probably did it off-screen or hasn’t got around to it yet.

Hell on Wheels doesn’t show protests in forms familiar to a modern audience, but it’s a history of the One Percent giving the 99% good reasons to protest. Only a few of these characters behave in ways that you’d confuse with protesting. Reverend Cole’s message of nonviolence and morality makes him sound like a modern activist, but he doesn’t focus on the morality of economics like Occupiers do. He’d be content if all the workers got baptized, quit their whoring and drinking, and peacefully continued building Durant’s railroad through Indian Country. Ferguson might be the closest thing to an activist on the show, constantly pushing for more rights, becoming apparently the first Black “walking boss” in the company, brazenly attempting to desegregate the whore house, and walking off the job when payroll is delayed.

The other character who would fit perfectly into an Occupy encampment is Bohannon. In some episodes, he’d be the cop telling protesters to unlink their arms, pick up their junk and clear out. Like the modern enforcers for Wall Street, Bohannon doesn’t share the massive wealth of Durant or the One-Percent, but he’s compensated by them for keeping workers in line. He’s willing to get down in the dirt and wrestle with Ferguson to stop even one person from striking.

In other ways, Bohannon seems to have a lot in common with Occupiers. He has legitimate grievances like they do. His wife was killed and probably raped by Yankees, who also burned down his barn with his son and the freed slave who raised him hiding inside. Bohannon knows he won’t get justice by working through the Yankees’ system. Like Occupiers, he faces a monolithic, entrenched enemy that stands in the way of his goal. Unlike the Occupiers, he might be able to get a taste of justice without directly confronting the system.

I don’t know exactly what the Native American storyline has to do with Occupation, or marginalized people pushing back against an overreaching ruling class. Okay, maybe they’re a little related. The Cheyenne don’t seem to include non-violent direct action in their repertoire of protest tactics, so they’re different in that way. Like the protesters, their chances of unbalancing the One-Percent seem slim, but they will probably do some damage before the dust settles.

Enough with the similarities. What lessons does HoW have for #OWS?

First, contrary to what Bohannon advises the freedman Elam Ferguson, don’t forget your past. You probably won’t be able to anyway. Go ahead and dwell on it. If you’ve been treated like property or three-fifths of a human all your life, use that to fuel your fight with the system. Ferguson and Bohannon bring a lot of pain down on their own heads while trying to get justice, because they can’t forget their past. But so far they’re making progress toward their goals.

More importantly, Occupiers can learn from Hell on Wheels that violence gets results. Reverend Cole tries to head off violence with negotiation, but he’s only delaying the confrontation. Bohannon resorts to violence in the very first scene of the series, and plenty of situations along the way. So far it’s helped him get information, rescue Mrs. Bell and get revenge on a few killers. It didn’t get the results he wanted in the boxing match with Ferguson, but we see lots of success from Ferguson’s perspective when he resorts to violence. He gets revenge against Johnson and wins the fight against Bohannon. Without his threat to walk off the job and backing it up with a fight, he might not have been promoted to walking boss by Bohannon, and Durant wouldn’t have given ten cases of whiskey to the workers as a kind of interest on their delayed payroll. The Swede even allows freedmen into the saloon for the fight, “for one night only,” presumably the first time it has been desegregated, again thanks to Ferguson’s willingness to fight.

The one situation where aggrieved characters might not get positive results from the use of violence is when the Cheyenne eventually confront the Army. So far, their use of violent tactics has generally paid off. Maybe the lessons will change in future episodes.

The last lesson is that this historical fiction about our past could be a vision of our dystopian future. In lawless lands, before law was established in a territory, an organization like the Union Pacific took it upon themselves to act as local sheriff and executioner. They fill the gap where laws should be. Durant issues laws. The Swede and other middle-managers enforce Durant’s law. After the attempted lynching, it seems like Bohannon and Ferguson have become outlaws and fled. But there is no law in the camp, no one authorized by the government to enforce laws. They’ve violated the will of the Swede, and have to act like outlaws because the Swede acts like a lawman.

But that’s history. At some point, law was established and everything got better. Laws were written by people fairly elected, who authorized police or military or bureaucrats to enforce the laws, and it was about as good as it could get. Maybe we’re still in that heyday.

(To say that law was “established” when Whites conquered the territory assumes that the humans already living in that area had no laws of their own, or that their traditions were not cool enough to count as laws. Maybe the attacks by the Cheyenne count as enforcing their laws. Without trying to pin down a definition of “law” or looking up a history of actual Cheyenne traditions, let’s just say that not many Whites would have obeyed the laws of the Cheyenne either way, so it was lawless land as far as they were concerned)

In a fantastical future world where corporations and One-Percenters acquire more power and elections become more entangled with money, elected officials or their appointees would no longer represent the will of the people. Corporations would take over. Or they’d keep the government around as a public relations department, to convince their subjects that it’s still a democracy and everything is fair. Their arbitrary rules would lack the authority of laws created by a democracy. It would become a lawless land where plutocrats could take it upon themselves to write their own rules and appoint sociopaths like the Swede to enforce their rules.

But maybe there are some actions Occupy Wall Street could take to make sure that wacky dystopian vision of the future remains as implausible as Zardoz or Robot Holocaust.

[Does Bohannon represent the modern dilemma to either climb the social ladder or embrace one's proletariat roots? Should these laborers be telegraphing their grievances, 160 characters at a time? Sound off in the comments! - Ed]

A screen test report on Rob Northrup by the serials department of Republic Pictures is reported to have read: “Can’t sing. Can’t mashup videos. Can write a little.”

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• The Overview: They Live
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• The Impact of an Arrow to the Knee
• L.A. Noire and the Video Game Value of Work
• Open Thread for November 4, 2011

Episodes 1 and 2

THE MIDTERMS

While Josh recovers from surgery, the staff launches support for midterm Congressional races. Charlie gets distant with Zoey, Toby obsesses over the extremists responsible for the attack, Bartlet obsesses over a former rival, and Sam urges a friend to run for office.

From the standpoint of craft, I admire the use of the midterm races as a narrative device to speed up time and get Josh back on his feet. It’s eminently plausible that the White House would spend twelve weeks in crisis mode, defending incumbents and boosting challengers. This keeps the audience from having to jump back and forth between Josh’s bedside and the Oval Office, which is fortunate.

I also admire how Sorkin tells the story of Charlie shying away from Zoey almost entirely off-camera. When I saw how that arc began, I grew dangerously bored. There are few tropes more rusted than a hero choosing to keep his love at bay because of (bitter sigh) his enemies. Thankfully, not only is it resolved within an episode, it’s resolved almost entirely off-camera! Zoey passes through rooms, looking for Charlie but not finding him, and at one point even addresses a question to Leo, off-screen, while another scene is starting. We forget all about it until the happy ending, where they make out on the White House porch.

(Since these are the first episodes of The West Wing I’ve seen, I never realized how much of a coup it was when Matthew Weiner landed Elizabeth Moss for Mad Men. She’s a gem of an actor)

Speaking of anticipating my objections, the plotline with Sam recruiting his college buddy to run for office is a refreshing change from last week’s idealism. Sam brings Tom and his wife Sarah to the White House, pitching them on a golden opportunity: the chance to run for Congress with the President’s endorsement. Given Bartlet’s record approval ratings, it seems like a sure thing.

Except, of course, it isn’t: a few sticky details in Tom’s past prevent the President from endorsing him, which costs him the race. The scene where Leo breaks the news to Sam hurts, especially because of its inevitability. Sam made the promise to Tom in good faith, but can’t back it up. It’s not a case of him choosing between his friends and the White House – he can’t choose. It has to play out the way it does, in disappointment. Serving the interests of an institution forces you to make shitty calls sometimes.

That said, while I love the direction I have a hard time with the tone. I’m glad they didn’t make Tom an overt racist, instead sprinkling his past with spinnable elements – a preference for white juries, membership in an all-white fraternity. This is good, because we shouldn’t be supporting Sam for casting aside his racist chum; we should be sympathizing with him for letting a friend down. And yet – jury selection? an old fraternity? These are the elements that cost a candidate the Presidential seal of approval? Did Sorkin actually know who was in Congress at the time of writing?

Also, while the scene where Tom and Sarah confront Sam in his office is great, Sarah unloads an awful lot of venom. This over a Congressional run that wasn’t even a dream of theirs three months earlier. I have several friends who’ve made failed Congressional bids, and they all have successful careers, happy marriages and the support of their friends.

But, of course, the point of the scene isn’t to be realistic but to forebode. Something tells me that this is going to come back to haunt Sam, perhaps the thunder pounding outside and the dark-eyed woman snarling, “If we ever get a chance to screw you in the future …” Is this what passes for foreshadowing in Sorkin’s writing? Was the gun that Josh got shot with stolen from above his fireplace in S1, perhaps?

I find Toby’s concerns about the legality of his proposed witch-hunt even more quaint than Leo’s concerns about Tom. What would an 18-year-old watching this show for the first time – someone whose political consciousness was formed during the War on Terror – think of this story arc? There might be a statute that prevents the FBI from going after people tangentially connected with an extremist group? Cheap shots at the [last / current / next] administration aside, this was old news even when The West Wing was being written. The Clinton Administration had no problem going after domestic terrorists (of which there were a few in that time), or using tools like extraordinary rendition.

I can’t swallow that someone who researched the details of the White House as meticulously as Sorkin did could be so wrong on the tone of its staff. But of course, Sorkin isn’t wrong, because he’s not telling a story about real White House staffers. He’s telling a story about conflicted, passionate heroes who happen to work in the White House. Sorkin’s protagonists are always deeply passionate people, whether they’re working in sports broadcasting (SportsNight), sketch comedy (Studio 60 …) or social media (The Social Network). Sorkin’s acknowledged embellishments in the story of the founding of Facebook don’t make The Social Network a less compelling story and, I suppose, neither do Sorkin’s embellishments of how Democrats act when they have power.

This is also the episode where Bartlet goes off on a rant to a Dr. Laura stand-in. I mention it now but I’m going to talk about it later, because it ties in better with “And It’s Surely to Their Credit.” But here it is, since I know you love it so:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD52OlkKfNs

The episode ends with the staff sitting on Josh’s stoop, passing a bottle of wine and saying, “God bless America.” And they mean it, too. I would have written it off as cheap fluff were it not for my girlfriend sitting next to me, who observed (unprompted) that that’s the sort of thing White House staffers probably say. And while I’m not sure I agree with that, it’s definitely the sort of thing we might hope White House staffers would say (especially if it’s an administration we like). And to take it one further, it’s the sort of thing a White House staffer might say, not out of deep sincerity but out of a conscious imitation of what they imagine a White House staffer is supposed to say. We are all conscious of the roles we’re expected to play to varying degrees, and sometimes we make choices based on the role rather than our desires. I imagine you can’t get to the White House, the most powerful office in the history of the human species, without being very conscious of the meaning of roles and images.

Sitting around with your coworkers and saying, “God bless America” with throaty solemnity is simultaneously unrealistic and very likely to happen. That’s the sort of weird pageantry that the White House and The West Wing demand of us.

IN THIS WHITE HOUSE

Sam’s humiliation on TV at the hands of a conservative writer gets compounded when Leo offers her a job. CJ panics over a slip of the tongue to a junior reporter. Toby and Josh coordinate a summit between the President of an African country and a panel of pharmaceutical CEOs on lowering the price of HIV drugs.

You wouldn’t think a show this dense with plot, character and verisimilitude would need to pad out a script with fluff. But consider this exchange between Leo and Ainsley Hayes when he offers her a job:

AINSLEY
Yes, sir. I’ll ask again: for what purpose was I brought here today?

LEO
So I could offer you a job.

AINSLEY
I’m asking because I do not think that it is fair that I be expected to play the role of the mouse to the White House’s cat in the game of, well, you know the game.

LEO
Cat and mouse?

AINSLEY
Yes. And it’s not like I’m not, you know… the fact that I may not look like some of the other Republicans who have crossed your path does not mean I am any less inclined towards…

LEO
Here it comes.

AINSLEY
Did you say offer me a job?

LEO
Yes. Associate White House counsel. You’d report to the Deputy White House Counsel, who reports to the White House Counsel, who reports to me.

AINSLEY
I’m sorry… A job in this White House?

I know that’s Sorkin’s attempt at being clever, but it just drags. It adds nothing to the narrative. We know, before the scene even begins, that Leo’s going to offer Ainsley a job. We can guess, based purely on what we know of her character, that her feelings will be conflicted. There’s no reason that this scene had to take three minutes. There’s no reason it couldn’t take 30 seconds.

This is one of my least favorite Sorkin tricks. It’s his homage to screwball, the machine gun patter of Cary Grant comedies of the 30s and 40s, but it rarely works. I never thought I’d find myself missing the laugh tracks of Sports Night, but at least they gave a script room to breathe.

It’s not purely a stylistic flourish, of course. It’s important that everyone in a Sorkin script be smart. We see lots of characters who act as villains, or as obstacles, or as comic foils, but they’re very rarely stupid. Ainsley may be confrontational, and she may be defending people that Sam considers reprehensible (gun owners), but she doesn’t mouth hollow rhetoric. She has smart, or at least clever, rejoinders to every point he makes, rejoinders that she deploys with lightning speed in her Round 2 with Sam outside Leo’s office.

You think because I don’t want to work here it’s because I can get a better gig on Geraldo? Gosh, let’s see if there could possibly be any other reason why I wouldn’t want to work in this White House? This White House that feels that government is better for children than parents are. That looks at forty years of degrading and humiliating free lunches handed out in a spectacularly failed effort to level the playing field and says, ‘Let’s try forty more.’ This White House that says of anyone that points that out to them, that they are cold and mean and racist, and then accuses Republicans of using the politics of fear. This White House that loves the Bill of Rights, all of them – except the second one.

This works even with the pharmaceutical company CEOs, who make it out of “In This White House” without being painted as venomous lizards. Yes, they’re stiff white assholes who are out of touch with the people their HIV medication serves – sub-Saharan Africans, who have a rate of HIV infection that makes the Black Plague look choosy. But there are legitimate reasons why flooding the nation of Kundu with HIV drugs won’t work. The CEOs may be callous but they’re not villainous.

No character in The West Wing, whether on the side of the angels or not, ever lacks for a comeback. This makes for stimulating dialogue and gives everyone depth, or at least the appearance of depth. But it can also make the conflicts fake and stagey. When all you have is Final Draft, everything looks like a monologue. No one expresses their feelings through a hurt look, or quiet reflection, or a wordless gesture, when there’s an opportunity to rant.

“The Midterms” was a sharp, strong episode, because everything flowed into one theme: the merit of holding fast, even when it seems like your efforts are futile. Sam’s faith is tried when he has to disappoint his friends; Toby’s faith is tried when the FBI can’t hunt down extremists. But everyone cleaves together because they believe that the system has merit.

In contrast, “In This White House” doesn’t have as strong of a theme. Ainsley tries to provide one with her clunky capstone monologue – that, despite disagreements, the staff of the Bartlet Administration are “righteous.” But where does CJ’s adolescent evasion of a feared felony charge fit into that theme? Or the existentialist muddle that comes from trying to aid African politics? The moral of this story is …?

AND IT’S SURELY TO THEIR CREDIT

Ainsley Hayes deals with her first week of working in a hostile White House. CJ chases down a disgruntled general. Sam tries convincing Josh to sue the white supremacists behind the men who shot him. Bartlet tries recording the weekly radio address despite several distractions.

If “In This White House” was a setup to the developments in “And It’s Surely to Their Credit,” I get what Sorkin was trying to do. It’s not the best choice, since an episode should stand or fall on its own merits, but it makes “And It’s Surely …” that much stronger. There is a theme to this episode, unlike “In This White House,” and it’s a theme that strikes right at the heart of the series.

This episode is replete with people rattling off trivia to win arguments. When CJ is facing off with the retiring General Barrie, she answers each of his criticisms of the President, and of recent defense strategy, with not just a string of facts but with meaningful insight as well. Sam tries to excite Josh about suing the Klan by delivering a series of precedents (all real, by the way). Abbey forestalls Bartlet’s excitement by launching into a list of historical women whom the U.S. has yet to honor. And there’s a recurring debate over whether a lyric came from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance or H.M.S. Pinafore.

GENERAL BARRIE:
Two divisions, the 10th Mountain Division at Ft. Drum and the 1st Infantry in Germany, have been rated C4. That’s the lowest of four possible readiness grades. It means, “Unfit for service.”

C.J.: No sir. Again, with all respect, I hate to disagree, but it means unfit for service based on the Pentagon’s “two war” doctrine. It’s based on how fast these divisions would be able to extract themselves from their peacekeeping mission, retrain on home bases, and ship off to a second of two, full-scale Gulf-War-sized conflicts.

In three of these four instances, victory goes to whoever has the best grasp on the trivia at hand. Abbey gets Bartlet to mention women who need to be honored in his radio address. C.J. gets the general to back down, not only answering his points but also leveraging some knowledge about military history to extort his silence. And Sam convinces Lionel Tribby that “He is an Englishman” comes from Pinafore, not Penzance by citing his history with the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

Having a more complete knowledge of precedent is the key to victory over your opponents in The West Wing. We see that in a few other places, and will doubtless see it again, but it’s bold here. You prove that you’re right by proving that you know more about the subject than the other guy, and you prove what you know by reciting it at hummingbird speed. He who has the best memory for quotes wins.

This brings me back, as promised, to Bartlet’s rant to the Dr. Laura stand-in at the end of “The Midterms.” Bartlet proves he knows the Bible better than she does by rattling off a number of barbaric punishments, chapter and verse. The implication, unspoken but obvious, is that Exodus and Leviticus are full of lots of monstrous trivia that nobody lives by today. The President wins because he has more data on his side. “That’s how I beat him,” he tells Toby at the end, referring to an earlier political opponent he’s been stressing over.

I’m leaning on this point because it’s a distinctly Sorkin choice. The staffers of the Bartlet administration are heroes because they have facts and precedent on their side. But we could just as easily imagine a staff that was heroic because they disregarded precedent. “To hell with tradition,” Sam might say. “So what if no one’s ever sued the Klan because of a tenuous connection to some lone wolf assassins? Let’s beat a new trail!” It wouldn’t even be that jarring of a story. We’re more accustomed to our heroes doing new things than wrapping themselves in the mantle of the old.

Or let me put it another way. Suppose Leviticus 18:22 said homosexuality was an abomination, but none of the other chapters of Leviticus said anything too bad. Would Dr. Jenna have won that face-off?

But The West Wing isn’t about breaking with tradition. It’s steeped in tradition. The staffers aren’t pioneers; they’re magistrates. They know all the twists and turns of the institution of democracy, and they prove it by keeping every obscure detail at their fingertips.

This, I suspect, is a large part of The West Wing‘s appeal. It tells smart people that their mastery of details is not only valuable, but a sign of goodness. It’s a Kantian ethic: right emerges not from right ends, but from correct action. Correct action – fidelity to the facts; knowing Pentagon readiness standards or Leviticus verses better than anyone – naturally flows into right ends. The categorical imperative tells us to keep our eyes on the path; that way, we’ll know we’re doing the right thing.

We must live and act morally, per Immanuel Kant, not because it makes us feel good but because it is our obligation. Acting to attain pleasure or satisfaction or just the warm certainty of rightness is utilitarianism, the way of Locke and Bentham and J.S. Mill. But doing right simply because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of how it makes us feel, is deontological. We do the right thing not because we derive pleasure from it, but because it is our duty.

Duty is the other major theme of “And It’s Surely …”. When arguing with Ainsley about Penzance, Lionel cites “Penzance or Iolanthe … one of the ones about duty.” “They’re all about duty,” replies Ainsley. This observation pops up more than once in the episode. Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals are all about duty. They all involve formal societies, whether under the flag of England, Japan or a pirate fleet. The protagonists are torn between their hearts and the obligations of their social status. Fortunately, comic twists at the end allow them to fulfill both (you’re secretly a noble! everyone marries everyone else!).

Ainsley Hayes joins a Democratic White House out of a sense of duty. She feels drawn to the pomp and tradition of American government and will jump at the chance to serve it, even if it’s under an administration she disagrees with. General Barrie claims that it’s his duty to alert the public to “staggeringly dangerous vulnerabilities” in the American defense posture. CJ points out, however, that the General is following his heart, not his duty, and that his own sense of protocol is weak. Everyone argues about and wonders over what their duty entails and how best to live up to it.

And that’s one of the most striking tones of The West Wing. Conservative critics may have struggled with the show due to Sorkin’s liberal politics, but the characters are hardly radical. Nothing they propose is radical. Rather, they spend significant portions of each episode arguing over which of them hews closest to tradition. Toby looks for a legal precedent to justify sending the FBI after the Klan. CJ panics because she thinks she’s leaked grand jury information. And everyone in the White House staff has an opinion on Gilbert and Sullivan.

It’s easy to throw an old framework up against the wall and put a bullet in its head in the name of revolution. It’s hard to work within the system and still get the changes you want. And while yours truly would say that working within the system isn’t always worth it, I still recognize the appeal.

Related Posts

• OverWinging It: Season 2, Episodes 1-2
• Underthinking It: Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
• The Death of the Author and of Katy Perry
• The West Wing: Where To Begin?
• Episode 170: Guy who makes the craft services who feeds Aaron Sorkin

Is it Katy Perry herself, drawing on her intensity of emotion to speak truth to her own condition? Is it the social psychology of gender, speaking from a deep rooting in the minds of many? Is it an echo of Paul Simon? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? Russell Brand?

"I will be part of your interpretive discourse. Always."

Roland Barthes begins his seminal essay “The Death of the Author” with a similar question related to Balzac*. His answer to his own question seems extendable to the literature of celebrity, from the accounts of their thoughts an actions, to their own statements in the public sphere, to the murmuring curiae across all professional, amateur and social media, to the very names and identities that appear in our lunchtime conversations:

We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

That is to say, nobody is really “saying” that Katy Perry unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter. We are reading it, but once it is down in text (or really, any medium that is subject to interpretation by a reader), it is no longer attributable to an active, talking person capable of will and intent. Because she is not alive in this context, “Katy Perry” is dead, as are any individuals who might claim to speak for her or about her with authority. Their intentionality no longer exists with regards to this story, or in the collected discourse that makes up the myths, tales, gossip and songs around the literature of Katy Perry’s celebrity existence.

(Russell Brand the celebrity is also dead in this same way, but because of social forces and also because he is somewhat less well-liked, more controversial, and more prone to self-destruction, this is somehow less shocking.)

Dammit Jim, I’m a Doctor, Not Perez Hilton.

Bones McCoy needs a Zooey Deschanel-esque portmanteau, a la "adorkable", that combines "spacefaring doctor from the future" with "homespun country wisdom" -- and also "grizzled."

Announcing the deaths of things people like is one of the ways philosophers and theorists socially alienate their involuntary readers — so to step away from Barthes’s postmortem, let’s talk about what it means — in the act of literary interpretation — for identities to shuffle off their mortal coils, for intention lose its claim on meaning, and for the writer to be “dead.” The death of the author is to one degree or another taken for granted in the trendy study of literature these days, and at risk of making the jump from good blogger to bad graduate student,  it seems just as clearly so in the interpretation of celebrities.

After all, the interpretation of celebrities and the argument over the meaning of celebrities are a great deal more popular and enthusiastically practiced these days than up-close-and-personal encounters with Balzac*.

But let’s be clear what we’re talking about, because if we don’t, we end up feeling sheepish next to the Wolfenstein 3D enthusiast in the “Neitzsche is dead… God” t-shirt.

We are not saying Katy Perry does not exist as a corporeal being — that she no longer walks, breathes, lives, loves or feels in her brain, a distinct object with its own phenomenology. No, Katy Perry’s physical existence can be experimentally confirmed (though only the very creepiest of logical positivists would make the attempt).

We are not saying Katy Perry deserves no credit for her work, that she is unpraiseworthy, or that she shouldn’t necessarily be paid royalties for “California Gurls,” so long as we live in a society where people possess intellectual property rights — and/or the authority to extend such rights — for which currency is exchanged.

We are not saying that she is irrelevant, or that what she does is meaningless or unimportant.

We are saying that, with regards to the literature that is Katy Perry — and specifically interpreting and attempting to discern the meaning of that literature — Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.

More importantly, since Katy Perry isn’t generally in the business of this anyway, nobody else can step forward and claim to derive that same authority from knowing her intentions.

“I know what this article means, because I am Katy Perry’s number one fan. I know her heart, and I know how she feels about Russell. This is what it really means,” is nonsense.

In saying Katy Perry is dead, we say she isn’t alive and present as a celebrity exerting her intentions through celebrity gossip about her. The many influences on it and the maelstrom of ideas, preconceptions, echoes, references, marketing meetings, Facebook wall posts, and everything else associated with it, once they are literature, aren’t really derived from the willful acts of a celebrity anymore. There are too many intermediaries between the writing and the reading of a text (or, again, any interpretive medium) for the reader to allow for this sort of authorial authority to preside over meaning and interpretation.

The Walking Tall Tale

But what do I mean when I say “the literature that is Katy Perry?” Katy Perry is a person, right? And all this talk we go about doing with regards to her being a person doesn’t make her any less a person, does it? Let’s look back to Barthes:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

Definitions of literature in literary theory, whether relative or absolute, tend to flock around this general area — literature is information that doesn’t have to correspond to reality, but can have an effect, whether that is beauty, truth, tension, sublimity or any of the other familiar or exotic goals of literary pursuits, without needing to do anything else.

Poetry is a form of literature. Drama is a form of literature. Film is a form of literature. I’m positing, and I can’t reasonably be the first person posit it, but that doesn’t matter, (especially in discussions of the death of the author — because, after all, as you read this, I am not present in or in relation to it as a living being either) that celebrities themselves have these days so far transcended a relationship with reality that they have become a form of literature themselves, supported by the discourse around them across media and platforms.

Why do these people have a show? They’re just famous for being famous.”

- Every curmudgeon who thinks he is clever but is really just having a bad day, including me sometimes, about the Kardashians

By “the literature that is Katy Perry” I mean that Katy Perry as we read and interpret her — the body of information that we encounter that has this name associated with it in which we look for a certain meaning and/or significance — is far less a corresponding description of a person than a literature in itself, endeavoring in these same familiar and exotic literary pursuits.

Dasein In the Membrane (A.K.A. I Don’t Know If This Rhymes, Because Nobody Uses This Word In Actual Conversation)

As I’ve noted in previous articles and podcasts, I find the term Dasein, drawn from Martin Heidegger’s Being And Time, useful in discussions like this, because it doesn’t bog us down in scientific argument over the qualities of a person or of cognition, or of the functionality of the mind, and concerns us primarily with the thing capable of  experiencing “stuff.” Dasein refers to an entity which, “in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being.”

Sein und Zug

People who are alive in the world are Daseins. Philosophical zombies, theoretical beings who are materially indistinguishable from people but who do not possess subjective consciousness (which I find to be a problematic term because it sidetracks us into discussions of emergent properties and information theory), are not Daseins. Trains are not Daseins. Thomas the Tank Engine, were he to be real, would be a Dasein.

Daseins can be authentic or inauthentic. It is generally believed to be a good thing to be authentic as you’re going about the business of being-in-the-world. Celebrities, especially heavily managed and choreographed ones, with teams of publicists, stunt marriages, scripted interviews, meaningless but lucrative endorsements of useless products, and other such Kardashian endeavors, are often seen as inauthentic. They are fake, phoney, and emotionally detached, their pictures are heavily Photoshopped, their bodies are virtually cybernetic — the litany is familiar; they are not being honest.

I would take it one step further and say that when you see something like this:

"You gotta have blue hair." - Strong Bad

You’re not looking at an image of an inauthentic Dasein — Hell, you’re not even looking at a person anymore. There is so much interference and cultural interplay in this information that you return to an act of reading as described by Barthes, divorced from the act of writing. You are looking at something “narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself” — you are looking at literature with a dead or absent intentionality.

Why Arguments About Objectification So Rarely Actually Go Anywhere Productive

Now, this of course, brings up a major problem. The idea of the death of the author runs afoul of complaints about objectification.

And as much as it may sidetrack me, I have to mention it here, because after posting that picture people are going to yell at me about it anyway in the comments (except I’m not here! And my intentionality does not exist in this work as you read it, ‘natch!).

The idea behind objectification is that by understanding a representation of a person as less than a fully realized person, we instrumentalize or use that person, which, in a Kantian sense, is a crime against the dignity they ought to be afforded as rational beings, and in a Marxist sense, sets up a dialectic that subjugates and alienates them, most likely for the economic benefit of your own class of people.

However, if you want to look at an image of Katy Perry (or even a darker, sparser corner of the Internet where people actually look at Balzac*) and employ judgement in relation to the “thing-in-itself” through any number of rational formulations, or if you are seeking to lift up Katy Perry from her subaltern place in socioeconomic discourse, you will be sorely disappointed, because you are knocking on the door of an empty house. And, no I’m not saying she’s dumb (I’m sure she’s very smart).

Katy Perry isn’t actually there. That image is a literature of Katy Perry, and if you’re looking at it, the intentioned Katy Perry with whom you are seeking to interact with is already dead.

So, arguments about objectification often run into this problem, as for political reasons people continue to will that literature be capable of producing its causal agent for redressing, redefinition or redemption, when that agent is long absent and even asking for it is an incoherent act.

This of course does not mean objectification is good, or that protesting it is bad — but just that most of the time it is quite difficult to do anything about it, except to try not to allow systematic trends in its use to create deleterious effect on people’s standards of living.

The important thing to remember here is that these problems are intrinsic to the act of interpretation and finding meaning. One of the ways to try to get out of this is to not try to find the meaning in things, but to engage in art in different ways. That in the rest will have to be covered in another article.

Katy Perry Is A Commercial Enterprise

You may notice this advertisement exemplifies pretty much everything I've been saying. You might.

You might have stopped earlier in this article when I said something that was clearly and knowingly incorrect, or at least incomplete:

Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.”

-Me, “Earlier In This Article (We were all so young then. Look at the hair I had! Crazy!)”

If you’re paying attention, you might have stopped here and said of course she can! Dammit, she is Katy Perry!

And indeed you would be right — Katy Perry could indeed step forward and make an authoritative statement about what the article saying she unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter actually means, and she’d have the power to back it up. She could have her lawyers send a cease and desist. If you did the wrong thing with her celebrity, of which she did not approve, she could sic Chris Dodd on you. I don’t get the sense that Katy Perry is mean-spirited enough to do these things, but people who would lay some claim to her celebrity intentionality would.

Regardless, let’s say she did do it, would she be doing it because she is correct?

Far from a refutation of the death of the author, this power is one of the big reasons why the essay “The Death of the Author” exists — because this sort of act is not an act of interpretation, but an act of intellectual tyrrany — that if you aspire at all to freedom or dignity in the human mind, you should find it abhorrent that in capitalist societies and other similar societies people of wealth, power and influence get to step forward and claim to everybody else what something means just by virtue of them being the “author,” which is of course cognate with the word “authority.”

If celebrities are the modern-day folk heroes — the lenses through which people see their own lives, craft their relationships, and plan their own rituals, it the literature of their day-to-day is in celebrity gossip — what right that derives from truth rather than power does Katy Perry or one of Katy Perry’s lawyers have to come along to a random dude or lady reading People magazine at the checkout line and insist on what it means?

It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author… The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author…”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

If celebrity is literature, and I think it is, and the act of interpreting celebrity is confined to the reader of celebrity, which I think it is, and if all the confounding factors make intentionality in the creation of celebrity untransferable, which I think they do, then for an interested party (including the Dasein associated with celebrity of the same name) assert authority over readings of the literature of that celebrity by virtue of authorship or celebrity itself is an act of economic and social power — not interpretive value, reading, or meaning.

It’s bullying. It’s not nice. And I’m gonna tell Roland Barthes**, so nyah.

Let’s finish with something from the end of Roland’s essay, for symmetry:

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

**- Roland Barthes is dead. Unfortunately. PBUH

*- Always pun intended. Always.

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Does Alec Baldwin exist in the 30 Rock universe? As in, the actor, separate and apart from the character Jack Donaghy?

Read on for arguments both for and against this, and vote at the end of the article!

First, a quick recap: at the end of Season 5 of 30 Rock, Jack’s wife is kidnapped in North Korea. Since this was prior to Kim Jong-Il’s passing, this allowed for a few hilarious Margaret Cho performances of the Dear Leader as the self-aggrandizing moviemaker-cum-dictator. The episode gives us two clips of the movies he made with Tracy Jordan. The first an untitled spy-action thriller:

"I defuse bomb, black partner! Hasta la vista, baby!"

It’s hilarious in its own right, but the second one is even better: Kim Jong-Il’s version of Glenngary Glen Ross:

"Put that coffee down! Coffee for closer only!"

(Note: YouTube clips of these scenes are unavailable, but the entire episode is available on Netflix Instant Streaming.)

Yes, that’s Kim Jong-Il in Alec Baldwin’s famous role from the movie. Alec Baldwin, as in, the actor who plays Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock. The movie Glenngary Glen Ross clearly exists in the 30 Rock universe. But does that necessarily mean that Alec Baldwin does too?

The real Brian Williams on a fake NBC show on the real NBC

Before we answer that question, let’s consider how 30 Rock handles awareness of real-life pop culture. For the most part, it is highly aware of it. The show-within-the-show The Girlie Show is on real-life network NBC, and NBC personalities like Brian Williams and Jerry Seinfeld have made cameo appearances on 30 Rock as themselves. The dialogue is littered with references to real NBC shows, other networks’ shows, and real movies.

But explicit references to TV shows and movies that feature 30 Rock stars are typically off limits. Instead, references come in the form of thinly-fictionalized versions of the real thing: The Girlie Show stands in for Saturday Night Live, and Tracy Jordan’s movies and antics borrow heavily from Tracy Morgan’s real-life movies and antics. We as the audience can fill in the blanks and make the connections between the fictional version and the real-life version, but we still require that separation in order to maintain the suspension of disbelief required to accept that this fictional slice of NBC can exist in an otherwise real-life media environment.

So given those rules, how do we handle the existence of Glenngary Glen Ross within the 30 Rock universe?

One option would be to discard it entirely. This scene plays during the end credits, which is separated from the rest of the episode by a commercial break. It’s a portion of the episode reserved for throw-away jokes that most people won’t even see because they’ve moved onto something else or the DVR stopped recording. But that wouldn’t be very Overthinking It of us at all to dismiss it outright. So let’s move to the next option: to consider that both this movie and Alec Baldwin exist in the 30 Rock universe. If this is the case, the show has chosen to avoid the Alec Baldwin issue entirely. To my knowledge, outside of the Kim Jong-Il scene, the show has made no explicit references to Alec Baldwin, either through his movies or his real-life persona. This works fine from the point of view of us, the audience, watching a TV show. We don’t have to deal with the jarring collision of a character and the actor that portrays him/her like we did in Oceans 12, in which the characters attempt to pass off Julia Roberts’ character as…Julia Roberts. There’s even a Bruce Willis cameo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN3IqLnwLVc

But consider the media-savvy characters of 30 Rock. They’re constantly referencing pop culture and would surely be familiar with Alec Baldwin’s movies and his many memorable roles and lines. They would point out the physical resemblance between Donaghy and Baldwin and the resemblance between Donaghy’s cutthroat business sense and the Glenngary character’s “Third prize is ‘you’re fired’” cutthroat business sense. It would be a constant source of material for Liz in situations when she’s trying to gain the upper hand on Jack.

But they never do these things. So maybe Alec Baldwin doesn’t exist in the 30 Rock universe after all. This is our third option: that an actor other than Alec Baldwin plays the “Coffee is for closers” role in Glenngary Glen Ross. This is a more convenient scenario, and it avoids all of the issues mentioned above. But it brings up its own set of issues. Based on Kim Jong-Il’s affinity for the scene, this mystery actor turned in a memorable performance in Glenngary. Did he go on to do other work? Is he a substitute for Alec Baldwin in his other movies, like The Hunt for Red October and Beetlejuice, or do they not exist at all? What about the other Baldwin brothers? Do they and their movies exist? And what about Team America: World Police? Who is Kim Jong-Il’s #1 actor shill in that movie?

"Arrec Barrwin!"

Does it even exist at all? I hate to think of a world in which Toofer, Lutz, and Frank haven’t seen Team America: World Police.

Troubling questions abound in all three options, which is why I’m not settling on any of them and leaving it to you, the readers! Consider the evidence carefully and cast your vote in our poll:

Also, duke it out in the comments and attempt to persuade others of your choice. Everyone who votes for the first place answer gets a Cadillac El Dorado. Everyone who votes for second place…you know the rest. I don’t think you want to be left in third place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVQPY4LlbJ4

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• 30 Rock: The Most Liberal Show on TV?

The idea of someone using dreams to affect our waking life is a terrifying thought. We are most vulnerable when we’re sleeping, at risk both from being attacked by other people as well as from nightmares. On the other hand, there are also advantages to our subconscious having the chance to express itself. It allows our dreams to become places stripped of limitations. While the closest we can get to controlling our minds while we dream is through lucid dreaming, two films imagine settings where people can control their dreams to create new worlds.

The first is the recent blockbuster success Inception (2010), directed by Christopher Nolan. In a near future where people can share dreams and impact each other’s thoughts through them, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a master extractor. Through dreams, he can both withdraw information from his subjects, as well as insert a thought into their minds – a process called “inception.” Hired to enter the mind of a major CEO’s son and plant the idea to break up his father’s company, Cobb assembles a team of people to help carry out the mission. At the same time, he battles his own demons and guilt, trying to keep his uncontrollable subconscious projections from endangering himself and his teammates.

The second film is Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006). It follows the story of Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal), a Mexican who moves to France after his father dies. An artist with a tenuous grasp of the French language, his mother lured him to the country by lying about the dead end job she’d lined up for him. He suffers from a lack of creativity in his life until he meets his neighbor across the hall, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a composer who gets his juices flowing. However, he has a hard time connecting with her because of vivid and trippy dreams that encroach on his waking life and give him a warped sense of reality.

These two films each deal with dreams in very different manners. For one thing, they’re categorized in different genres. Inception is undoubtedly science fiction, featuring realistic technology that allows movement within other people’s minds. There’s mention of it being used to train soldiers in the army, since they can kill each other during combat exercises and then wake up. As such, the film is very grounded in what feels real and people losing sight of reality, causing the viewer to constantly keep track of what is real and what is fake. Sleep, on the other hand, is a film grounded in the present day. It may have long fanciful sequences of psychedelic proportions, but it is still contemporary fiction, with nothing unrealistic actually happening outside of Stéphane’s own mind. And although he does invents a one-second time machine and he puts a mechanism into a stuffed horse to make it gallop, they seem like fanciful imaginings he’s convinced Stéphanie to play along with.

Now, there is no question that Inception outclasses Sleep in terms of overall star quality. Gondry’s ammo consists of a good-looking French actor and cars made out of toilet paper rolls. Nolan has the actors, the action and the complex plot. His work is sleek and sexy and it never questions itself, always knowing where it’s headed. In contrast, The Science of Sleep is a bit of a mess. There’s hardly any plot at all, the action of the film amounting to Stéphane wanting to be with Stéphanie and a few convoluted reasons why that can’t be. The visuals themselves are harsher, taking place in small apartments and oppressive basements, when they aren’t blaring neon colors and volcanoes from within Stéphane’s subconscious.

However dissimilar these two films are, though, they both share a common law: that dreams can be controlled. They are not meaningless entities independent of us; rather, they are intrinsically linked to our thoughts and beliefs and can be exploited as such.

In Inception, dreams can be controlled by a person outside of yourself. The architect designs the dream and can allow others into it. As long as the details of the dream are as close to reality as possible, the architect has free reign in his subject’s mind. The complexity increases when the interlopers fall asleep within the dream, waking up in another dream level closer to the subject’s core subconscious. The exception to this is that when Cobb reaches that last level of pure subconscious, he and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) stay down there and build cities together for years, their own architects, suspending reality for so long that Mal forgets they’re dreaming at all.

In Gondry’s film, Stéphane creates a new reality in his dreams as well. The people of his reality are all there, but in kinder, sycophantic forms. When a claymation volcano destroys the world, they beg Stéphane to rebuild it. He does, from the ground up, the construction shown through stop motion leveling of the ground to the building of skyscrapers. His time machine really works, sending a river flowing backward, and the mechanized horse is life-sized and can carry him and Stéphanie on its back.

The films also differ on how dreams affect reality. For Nolan’s characters, any effects are exclusively in their minds. Mal commits suicide because she’s convinced she’s still dreaming and needs to wake up. Robert (Cillian Murphy), the CEO’s son, changes his mind about his father’s inheritance because the team was successful in playing on his emotions. On the other hand, Gondry’s Stéphane deals with changes to his physical situation. In his sleep, he writes Stéphanie a letter and slips it under her door. He dreams that his feet are frozen in the ice of a ski slope and wakes up to discover his feet actually iced over, resting in the freezer of a mini-fridge somehow stationed at the foot of his bed.

The problems begin when the dreams get out of hand and control is taken away from the controller. In Inception, Cobb can’t know the layout of the dreams because then his subconscious projection of Mal will know, too, and she’ll act independently to keep him with her. In Sleep, Stéphane sleepwalks and does things in his real life while he’s asleep, eventually escalating to the point where he accidentally asks the real Stéphanie to marry him. He thinks he’s still dreaming and talking to her doppelgänger, but he has in fact already woken up and now faces her, having freaked her out beyond repair.

Up until that point, Stéphane’s dreams defied the rules of Nolan’s world: he, as well as the audience, always knew when he was dreaming. The people of Inception are constantly worrying about being able to tell the difference, knowing from Mal’s example how easy it is to make a mistake. They have personalized totems to inform them whether or not they’re dreaming or waking. When Stéphane confuses his dreams with reality, he seems to be falling into a situation such as the world described in Inception, but in less of an absolute: we get a gnawing sensation that Stéphane could be going mad, dreams infiltrating his reality rather than him being in one or the other. And yet, the end of Sleep seems to say that this is okay; that the only place Stéphane can find happiness is actually in his dreams, riding a stuffed horse with Stéphanie. And, some would say, that’s how Inception ends as well.
The difference between Stéphane- and Cobb’s situations is that Stéphane is yearning to share his dreams with someone while Cobb would optimally be working alone. Stéphane latches on to Stéphanie when he thinks they share a common brainwave in hopes that they can share their creativity with each other and shape new worlds together. On the other hand, Cobb wishes he could do everything alone. Unfortunately, his subconscious keeps getting in the way with Mal trying to trap him in his dreams, so he brings someone else in to be the architect in an attempt to get around those issues.

What these two films most agree on is that everyone has the capacity to be happy on a subconscious level, even though that goal may be unrealistic. While Nolan’s approach is to have a character trying to distract himself from the tragedy and hopelessness surrounding him, content to turn away from his truth-telling totem at the last moment as long as he has his children with him at last, Gondry focuses on a character whose intense, artistic personality forced him to pursue his heart’s desire with wild abandon. Stéphane’s mistake in Sleep is that he thinks he somehow communicated his sleep-written note to Stéphanie, when in reality she actually read it before he got it back. Unfortunately, he think this makes them soul mates and so he relentlessly chases after her until at last he has to admit they cannot be together.

The fact of the matter is that Nolan treats dreams as a plot device. Aside from the beautiful scene when the city folds in on itself in Cobb’s subconscious and the floating fight scenes in the second level of Robert’s subconscious, Nolan never really takes pleasure in the possibilities of dream life. The action sequences dominate the film, with the dream motif serving as a set of rules to follow. Gondry, on the other hand, plots with overemotional, very French indie dramatics that then explode onto the screen in technicolor. Stéphane is an especially hard character to relate to, since he starts out as an adorably subpar multilingual but then slowly progresses to become unreasonable and alienating.

The lasting feeling is that Nolan may have taken the risk with his budget, but Gondry seems to be the one to push the envelope on the subject matter. However, even though both films agree that their characters need to confront their loss of control and accept it, they are still allowed to turn away from reality and find peace elsewhere. While it is problematic for the larger picture, it is nonetheless a beautiful place to leave them, existing equally for the audience as it does for them.

Alisa Ungar-Sargon is a developing writer currently based in Chicago, IL. When she’s not hunched over a laptop or eating cupcakes, you can find her driving along Lake Michigan and brainstorming new ways to sound clever.

[Do the protagonists of Inception and Science of Sleep accept their loss of control? Or have they retreated into a reality of their own making? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

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Watching Season 2 of The West Wing, Sorkin’s magnum opus, helped me lay a finger on it. I haven’t been turned around all of a sudden from a Sorkin skeptic to an Aaronite. But I’m able to better articulate my feelings. And since that’s one of the core missions of Overthinking It – putting inarticulate feelings about an unexamined work of pop culture into academic language – I think my time was well spent.

Onto the analysis! This inaugural entry examines the two-parter that kicks off Season 2, “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.” Future entries will hopefully have more than two episodes, because otherwise we’re here for a while.

S2E1 starts off seconds after the finale of S1, with gunshots ringing out from a window as President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) exits some public event. The President catches a stray round. Secret Service rushes him to the hospital, where he’s quickly treated and saved. Josh Lyman isn’t so lucky, however, taking a direct hit and going into surgery. As he lingers in critical condition, he (and apparently other members of the staff) reminisce on how they joined the Bartlet campaign a few years ago.

This episode focus a great deal on protocol. It’s easy enough to say, as showrunner, “the President gets shot and is rushed to the hospital.” But Sorkin chooses to focus on how the President is treated at the hospital. How does the Secret Service call ahead? How does the head nurse handle the sudden boost in security and medical attention required for the President as an inpatient? We get a few scenes devoted to this: someone making the call for ambulances to be diverted to other hospitals; the Vice President being spirited away from a photo op; Bartlet being wheeled in under heavy guard.

Why is process so fascinating? Why do we as an audience willingly sit through scenes of secret agents walking through layers of security (True Lies, the James Bond series), or lab technicians moving evidence from plastic bags to glossy monitors (CSI, NCIS), or code words being exchanged and nuclear launch keys being turned (countless examples)? Because process is evidence of reason. It means someone sat down and thought, “How should the launching of a nuclear missile (for example) be structured?” And it means the structure has been taught and rehearsed.

Reason is reassuring; chaos is frightening. If the President gets shot, we don’t want to see people screaming, crying or shoving each other out of the way. We want calm, commanding men with Southern accents and unflattering haircuts, like Secret Service agent Ron Butterfield, saying things like “GW! Blue, blue, blue!”

As the crisis at the hospital unfolds, a crisis of conscience plays out in flashback and in parallel. Leo McGarry, former Secretary of Labor, tries to poach Josh Lyman from John Hoynes’s team for the upcoming Presidential race. Lyman has just blown up in a Hoynes strategy meeting. “I don’t know what we’re for!” he says. McGarry asks him to come to Nashua, New Hampshire, to hear Bartlet speak.

On the way, Lyman stops off in New York to say hi to his pal Sam Seaborn, working for a law firm that’s helping to construct a nest of shell corporations and legal transfers to protect an oil company from future liabilities. Seaborn seems disappointed that Lyman is still working for Hoynes (“he’s not the real thing, is he?”).

It turns out, of course, that Bartlet is the real thing. He gives a speech at a VFW in Nashua that maybe twenty people attend. The few bits we overhear are bafflingly dry economics lectures, the sort of thing we’d expect from a “liberal New England academic” (Lyman’s words, not mine). The turning point, however, comes when Bartlet is grilled by a constituent on voting against a milk subsidy:

Yeah, I screwed you on that one. I screwed you. You got hosed. And not just you. A lot of my constituents. I put the hammer to farms in Concord, Salem, Laconia, Pelham, Hampton, Hudson. You guys got rogered but good. Today for the first time in history, the largest group of Americans living in poverty are children. 1 in 5 children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, back-breaking, gut-wrenching poverty any of us could imagine. 1 in 5, and they’re children. If fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received. Let me put it this way: I voted against the bill because I didn’t want to make it harder for people to buy milk. I stopped some money from flowing into your pocket. If that angers you, if you resent me, I completely respect that. But if you expect anything different from the President of the United States, you should vote for someone else.

This is the speech that convinces Lyman to jump ship. This is also the speech that angers Bartlet’s other aides enough to the point that Bartlet fires them, leaving no one but Toby Ziegler and Leo McGarry on his staff. This leaves room for the enthusiastic Lyman to recruit Seaborn, while Ziegler flies out west to pick up C.J. Cregg. So this, right here, is the turning point that puts Bartlet in the White House.

First, could someone please explain what “if fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion, then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment” means? Diagram it on a whiteboard. Rewrite it with synonyms. Something. As far as I can tell it’s gibberish. If Sorkin writes Bartlet like this to make him sound impressive, it’s a con game.

Of course, maybe Sorkin writes Bartlet like this to make a deeper point: that Bartlet is too smart for his own good. Bartlet means well – he voted down a milk subsidy so that poor kids could buy milk, after all – but he’s too ivory tower. This is why he needs the dream team of Ziegler, Lyman, Seaborn, McGarry and Cregg around him. He has all these great ideas, but he needs more savvy operators to help him communicate them.

Communication is a key theme of The West Wing; the first two episodes (I’ve seen) make that obvious. Three of the key cast are staff members tasked with communicating, not setting, the President’s agenda: Ziegler, Seaborn and Cregg. When you have a show that reflects the creator’s values that closely, such focus means something. Sorkin clearly believes that his beliefs are of immense worth to America, but that they haven’t always been communicated as effectively. If only the right people said the right words at the right time, America’s opinions on (say) civilian gun ownership would turn around overnight.

There were 36 homicides last night. 480 sexual assaults. 3411 robberies. 3685 aggravated assaults, all at gun point. And if anyone thinks those crimes could have been prevented if the victims themselves had been carrying guns, I only remind you that the President of the United States was shot last night while surrounded by the best-trained armed guards in the history of the world.

So says C.J. Cregg in a press briefing, early in the afternoon on the day after Bartlet has been shot (S2E2). Let’s take the stats Cregg reads off at face value, even though I strongly doubt that the DoJ would have its act together enough to collate the police blotters of even the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the United States and present the findings to the White House Press Secretary within eight hours of the President being shot. I also find a few grains in “the best-trained armed guards in the history of the world”; I imagine some of the more paranoid dictators of the Eastern hemisphere could match the Secret Service. Hell, SO14 has been dealing with Provo IRA bomb threats for years, and they have their act together.

But, again, take those facts for true. Assembling them in time for a press briefing must have taken a heroic effort. Reeling them off, in parallel with a shooting attack on the President, is a conscious choice. Why bring it up? Because Bartlet is such an ideal leader that every part of his life is a reflection of his values. His shooting demonstrates how common handguns are in American culture and how they can be used to violent ends – the unspoken conclusion being “better efforts to control them would have kept those people, and the President, safer.”

Note, however, that Bartlet’s shooting does not demonstrate the increased need for surveillance of suspected violent offenders without a warrant. It could. If Cregg can assemble a list of shooting victims overnight, she can surely assemble a list of crimes that could have been prevented if only the cops had tapped the perpetrator’s phones. But she doesn’t. Two shooters coordinated with a third spotter to take potshots at a Presidential convoy, a feat that takes planning, communication and audacity. They all shared ideological ties (white supremacy) that encourage violent action against the administration of the U.S. The lesson here? Relax surveillance restrictions against terrorist cells Keep handguns out of the hands of criminals.

So why does the Second Amendment get the red pen and not the Fourth? Because Bartlet’s life has to be a reflection of his values. Everything he does, he does for a reason; everything that happens to him happens to him for a reason. Even if the reason doesn’t touch him directly – Bartlet wasn’t the target of the attacks; his African-American aide, Charlie Young, was – things gravitate toward him because of his importance. It’s not that Bartlet’s staff had to seize the opportunity to speak out against gun violence because he was the victim of it. Bartlet was a victim of gun violence because he supports gun control. Not rationally – it’s not like the white supremacists were making a pro-Second Amendment stand – but metaphysically. It’s guns vs. Bartlet and Bartlet has to win.

In the face of such a supernatural power, the appropriate response, of course, is faith. Lyman sees Bartlet give his amazing speech and he believes. But even greater than Lyman’s faith is Seaborn’s, who sees Lyman react to Bartlet’s speech and is convinced to jump ship as well. Similarly, Cregg is willing to pack up and move east based on Ziegler’s conviction that Bartlet is a good man.

But faith doesn’t merely inspire decisions. Having faith is a transforming alchemical process. Donna has no real experience with a political campaign and little grounding in her life, but she believes, more than anything, that she can help Lyman. “I think I can be good at this,” she says. “I think you might find me valuable.” On that, and on the look in her eyes, Lyman is willing to take her on.

As a public service announcement to the students who read us, let me assure you: this never works.

Throughout the S2E2 flashbacks, we’ve also come to grips with Bartlet’s stubborn grumpiness: his tendency to snap at subordinates when pushed to a conclusion he doesn’t like. Lyman and McGarry correctly diagnose this as stage fright: Bartlet’s fear of the pressure of running for President. At the end of the episode, after seeing Lyman off to the airport, Bartlet turns to McGarry and says, “I’m ready.” Not, “I need your help” or “We can do this” or “I have a secret plan to turn this country around” (all of which are implied) but “I’m ready.”

“The readiness is all,” to use the same line from Hamlet that Martin Sheen himself uses in The Departed. What distinguishes these characters from other characters is not their qualification for the job. Lyman’s a Congressional aide for Hoynes, but Congressional aides can be bought in bulk at the Falls Church Costco. Ziegler, as he confesses in a bar in New Hampshire, has zero successful political campaigns under his belt. Seaborn is coming off a stint as a corporate lawyer and Cregg has just been fired. The only thing that qualifies them for their job is the choice to take it. They saw the light – the promise of putting a good man in the White House – and chose it with enthusiasm.

To step out of analysis mode and into personal taste for a moment: this is what bugs me the most about The West Wing. The West Wing is about the Presidency of a man who perfectly embodies middle-class liberal values. I’m bothered not because I find those values distasteful, but because the man championing them is such an avatar. He’s as realistic as John Galt, the hyper-rational embodiment of Ayn Rand’s values in Atlas Shrugged. I can’t picture Bartlet smoking a cigar, or yelling at a valet, or coming to work upset because the Patriots lost last night, or anything else that doesn’t flow organically from his beliefs. (I may be proven wrong later this season, but that remains to be seen)

If The West Wing is supposed to get me excited about democracy or America again, Bartlet is the wrong guy to do it. If the system needs a perfect man surrounded by a perfect team in order to work, then the system doesn’t really work. I would be much more impressed with a show about a centrist compromiser and his team of shopworn hacks who happen to produce progressive policy against everyone’s expectations. But I don’t expect that.

And yet.

I kept comparing The West Wing to The Wire while watching. This is an unhealthy habit and one that’s unfair to Sorkin. Since I already believe that The Wire is the single greatest thing that the medium of television has yet to produce, every other show will pale in comparison.

But keeping the comparison in mind forced me to be honest. Both The West Wing and The Wire rely on ensemble casts. Both are about ancient offices that most Americans think they understand (the Presidency; cops and crooks) but still have a lot to learn about. Both grapple with serious issues. And while Leo McGarry’s pronouncement of “Don’t mess with us tonight” may be sententious, it’s no worse than “This is Baltimore, gentlemen; the gods will not save you,” spoken by Deputy Commissioner Burrell in S1 of the latter show.

Finally, watching the team put up with Bartlet’s crankiness in S2E2, the parallel hit me: The West Wing is The Wire if Baltimore were a person.

Just once, I'd like to see a non-allegorical game of chess played in pop culture.

After a few seasons of The Wire, the endemic institutional failures of the city of Baltimore start to grind on you. The cops can’t get their job done, because the Mayors who appoint their commanding officers need headlines to get elected. Workers can’t feed their families because Baltimore is no longer a sustainable port. Kids can’t get enough education to break the cycle of poverty. After a while you will doubtless turn to your significant other and say, “How can anyone live there?”

And I get that. But as a Baltimore native, The Wire speaks to me on a far more personal level. That’s not just some fictional narrative about a city falling apart; that’s my hometown. That’s where I grew up. That’s my actual city sliding into the abyss, even if some of the names and faces are changed for HBO. And while I’ve moved away from Baltimore, I can’t turn my back on it.

Josiah Bartlet occupies a similar role in The West Wing. All the other characters are trying to make sense of him, figure out how to live with him, and live up to the potential he represents while gritting their teeth at his foibles. He’s an infuriating aspirational figure. Everyone wants to be worthy of him, even as they also wish he would sometimes shut up and get out of their way.

Being able to slot characters into those positions gave me the resolve to go on. So I’m not abandoning the experiment yet. More The West Wing next time, Overthinkers.

Appendix:

• S2E2 begins with a skinhead watching the early morning news of the President’s assassination, smirking around his cigarette. As he puts out the butt in his fried egg, we see a swastika tattooed onto the fleshy part of his thumb. I wonder if this is a bad guy. Were there frames on the cutting room floor where he kicks a box of kittens into a Girl Scout?

• I could not care less about the National Security Letter that Barlet was supposed to sign before going under, or why Bartlet didn’t leave under a tent, despite S2E2′s efforts to make me care very much. The idea that lack of legal precedent would stop a President from doing something seems quaint in the Age of Terror, for one. And not only do I not care about the policy implications, I don’t care about them as sources of drama. No one is taking the Oval Office to task for not having answers on these issues, except for some gentle, slow-pitch, compassionate questioning by Danny Concannon. What would be the consequence of leaving these questions unanswered for a day, or a week, or for all time? I sincerely hope that no further screentime is wasted on these.

• No one in the Sorkinium is ever at a loss for statistics. Seaborn can rattle off the specs of oil tankers without pausing for breath or referencing his notes. Cregg has her overnight shooting stats right at her fingertips. It’s a writing conceit, of course, but I like it. It makes people seem smart and TV needs more of that.

• When Bartlet was delivering his dry economic answers in Nashua, muted in the background while Ziegler is grilled by a campaign manager, I wrote down “Bartlet = Ron Paul for Dems” in my notes. Tell me I’m wrong.

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“Rock of Ages” is pretty much the platonic ideal of an 80s period jukebox musical. It’s the story of a kid who wants to play hair metal on the Sunset Strip. There’s a band on stage, and they rock really hard. The costumes and music perfectly evoke the aesthetics and mood of the time period.

So my question is, what would the ideal 90s period jukebox musical be like? I’d argue that the 90s don’t have as clear of an identity as the 60s, 70s, or 80s. Would it be set in Seattle and feature grunge music? Or what about LA with early 90s hip hop? It could even use the LA riots as a current events backdrop (which Rock of Ages lacked) and would have the side benefit of allowing for Asian characters (I’ve always seen myself as playing a gun-toting Korean grocery store owner in my Broadway debut).

The latter also raises the question: could a hip-hop musical ever make it to the Great White (ahem) Way?

Perich
I would mortgage my future to finance a musical about the golden age of hip-hop, so long as it was set in Brooklyn.

Lee
Well, we can have the best of both worlds. Make it an East Coast vs. West Coast story with thinly fictionalized versions of Biggie and Tupac.

Forget mortgaging your future. I bet something like this could catch fire on Kickstarter.

Belinkie
It would obviously have to be bi-coastal. You might even have to split the stage in two visually, with Cali on the left and New York on the right. Atlanta could have a balcony, but honestly I don’t know how heavily the south or midwest would feature in a golden age hip hop musical.

Perich
Too late! Future mortgaged!

Also, which story are we telling—a rags-to-riches success story about a rapper rising to the top (which would have to be one coast) or a West Side Story tale of two studios, both alike in dignity (which could feature both coasts)?

Fenzel
You can represent the South with a James Brown figure who appears to one of the characters as he wrestles with his place in the historical legacy of music. You do a medley where a soul/funk song is first played straight, then sampled and incorporated into the corresponding hip-hop song.

Belinkie
Okay, so it’s about two friends that grow up in the Brooklyn projects together. They grow up performing “Rapper’s Delight” on a street corner, free-styling to impress the girls. When one of them is twelve, he gets moved out to Compton. Maybe an aunt adopts him after his mom gets shot. Then they meet again at a rap battle ten years later. They want to resume their friendship, but there is tremendous pressure from their entourages to start a rivalry, show some east/west coast pride. Maybe they each have a hotheaded sidekick/protege who is a little more aggressive and does the violent dis songs.

Oh, and there’s a girl who grew up with them who is now an exec at Atlantic Records. She’s the love interest, and also the “Hey, maybe hip hop could go mainstream!” person. And cast a famous white comedian as some shady promoter type.

Personally, I’d shy away from the “they both are shot” ending, and also the “let’s put aside our differences and record an album together” ending. Maybe we can stuff the girl in a fridge to get the boys to stop feuding.

Fenzel
You can have the East Coast and West Coast rappers at a standoff, guns drawn—and they fire at each other nine times. At the last second, a Midwestern rapper leaps between them, taking all nine bullets and falling in a crumpled heap on the ground, which convinces the two other rappers that violence isn’t the answer as they see its terrible toll.

The Midwestern rapper then gets up, dusts himself off, and sings “Candy Shop.”

Sheely
Matt’s description of the female character reminds me a bit of the song “I used to love H.E.R.” by Common.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C99iG4HoO1c

In the song he personifies hip hop as a woman and uses her story to tell the story of the evolution of the genre. In the musical, this could be played out literally in this character, tracking the changes in hip-hop and changing with the times, kind of like the Jenny character in Forrest Gump.

Instead of a promoter, the shady white dude could be a record company A&R, the position charged with identifying and signing new talent. I’d very much like if he happened to be a mountain climber who played the electric guitar.

Perich
All right, Belinkie has convinced me the bi-coastal thing can work. (Blessed are those who hadn’t yet seen Belinkie’s response and still believed) Now what’s the tracklist?

Belinkie
Making good progress here. So of our two main characters, the one whose mom was shot and moved out west has a harder, gangsta style. (He’s the one who would do “Gangster’s Paradise.”) Let’s call this guy Otis. To balance him out, his sidekick is a more mellow, fun-loving, Snoop Dogg stand in. He’ll do “Gin and Juice,” obviously, and some of the other goofier rap classics. Maybe he does “The Humpty Dance” trying to mock the comic relief rap promoter.

Meanwhile, his east coast friend is more of a “socially-conscious” Talib Kwali/Eric B/Mos Def type rapper. He’s got better rhymes and better flow, but he’s not as commercial. Maybe he feels pressure to sell out a little once hip hop starts to take off. That’s his character’s dilemma—do you rap what the public wants to hear, or what’s in your heart?

And I realize that “Gangster’s Paradise” is by no means a “hard, gangsta” song. But it would definitely be in the musical, right?

Perich
Whereas the West Coast protagonist’s dilemma is: do I keep rapping what’s true to me (violence on the streets, anger at the cops) even as it inspires younger generations to imitate a gangster lifestyle that puts them in danger?

Sheely
I’d love to have the female character do Lauryn Hill’s “That Thing”, as I can see it working well as a ensemble number (the lead girl warning the others to “watch out”).

When the two characters are about to reunite, I’d love to have “Going Back to Cali” and/or “California Love”, possibly in medley?

When the character moves from Brooklyn to LA, could “Straight Outta Compton” be his introduction to his new environment? The only issue with that song is that many of the lyrics and references are very specific to the members of N.W.A.

Stokes
There are at least three related ways that musical lyrics and rap lyrics are not alike.

First, musical theater songs usually have a really tight focus: they are ABOUT something. It can be something stupid and irrelevant to the plot, but the songs don’t usually run off on tangents. Rap songs are usually all about tangents. The Rick Ross song “Hustlin’” is, uh, unusually specific in its focus, but it’s still all over the place by Rogers and Hammerstein standards. Put a line like “I know Pablo/ Noriega/ The real Noriega/ He owe me a hundred favors” into a musical, and what can you do with it? Either you let it hang there feeling out of place, or you introduce Noriega as a character, and establish the relationship he has with the Rick Ross character, and see some of those favors called in.

And it wouldn’t stop there. Where’s Jose Canseco? Where’s the guy serving a hundred lives? Where’s the lil’ Mama who claims to be twenty-two? That’s all in one song, remember. Take any two songs, and the problem will escalate. And when guest rappers start dropping by contributing unrelated guest verses… (Granted, you could probably do an interesting jukebox rap musical set up along the lines of Company if you make Ludacris the main character and limit yourself to songs where he does a guest verse.)

Second: Within one show, you typically only get one or two songs about any given topic. One song about working through grief, or clambakes, or whaling, or June busting out all over is fine. Two is pushing it. The only exception is love songs — these go back and forth all night — but even then you only get one or two for each of the couples, and the songs end up being about their relationship, or even about a specific moment in their relationship, rather than about relationships in general.

But rap songs, especially gangster rap songs, focus on the same limited territory: you show off not by finding new things to talk about but by finding a new and better way to say the same things. West Side Story has exactly one song in it that is about how awesome the protagonist’s crew is (“When You’re a Jet”), and exactly one song about how tough life on the streets is (“Gee Officer Krupke,” kind of). It would not work at all if every song were about those issues. But a rap album that didn’t have that kind of thematic unity would feel kind of sloppy. We wouldn’t call Illmatic one of the great artistic statements of the medium if it had a random song where Nas’ girlfriend talks about how much fun it is to put on pretty dresses.

Third, some songs in musicals are just distractions from the narrative, and rap would work fine for that. But there are also a lot of very important songs that do relate to the narrative, and these function by stretching out and intensifying a particular moment. (Sticking with West Side Story for a minute, the “Tonight” montage is probably the best example of this.) Rap doesn’t work for this purpose at all. When rap songs have a narrative element, they accelerate time rather than slowing it down. In “Gimme the Loot,” it only takes a couple of minutes for Biggie to 1) get out of jail, 2) meet up with his old accomplice, 3) decide to go out robbing, 4) reminisce with his buddy about what incredible hardasses they are, 5) find two victims, 6) rob them, 7) get noticed by the cops, and 8) shoot up said cops. A musical would need two songs at absolute minimum to get through that territory (1-4 and 5-8), and could squeeze eight or even nine songs out of it without breaking a sweat.

Belinkie
So at the very end, the two rival crews are poised for a climactic shootout, on the very corner where Otis and Wrather (I’ll go ahead and call him Wrather for fun) learned to rap as children. They stare each other down, knowing the insanity of what they’re doing, but unable to see a way out. There’s no common ground. Then, all of a sudden, a beautiful woman crosses the stage, oblivious to the standoff. For ten seconds, everyone just watches her pass.

Finally, one of them speaks. “Oh. My. God,” says Otis. “Look at her butt.”

“It is so big,” says Wrather, nodding. Then, he smiles a sly smile. “She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends.”

Otis glares at him and tightens his grip on the pistol, wondering whether to take it as an insult or not.

Suddenly, he cracks up. The tension is broken, and everybody laughs.

“But, you know,” Otis chuckles, “who understand those rap guys anyway…”

Cue the bassline.

OK, guys, I think we’re ready. What do we call this? “Dropping English?” “Smoking Aluminum?”

Think we’re onto the next Broadway hit? Want to improve the plot or track list? Is Stokes right after all? Sound off on the great hip-hop musical in the comments.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USxhXb5VC5E

…and are at least familiar with the broad outline of the plot of the original stage musical:

Set in LA’s infamous Sunset Strip in 1987, Rock of Ages tells the story of Drew, a boy from South Detroit, and Sherrie, a small-town girl, both in LA to chase their dreams of making it big and falling in love. Rock of Ages takes you back to the times of big bands with big egos playing big guitar solos and sporting even bigger hair!

But you may not be aware of a major change in the plot: in the stage version (which I saw recently), the owners of the Bourbon Room rock club face off against greedy real estate developers who want to bulldoze the seedy Sunset Strip and replace it with “clean living.” As you can see in the trailer, these developers are replaced by a pack of Bible-thumping prudes who oppose the “sex, hateful music, and sex” of the Bourbon Lounge as epitomized by rock god Stacee Jaxx.

Lord, have mercy! What’s going on here? Why the change in villains, and pray tell me, what does it mean?

We Built This City on Rock and Roll

First, let’s unpack the conflict of the stage musical a little more. Is it a simple story of corporate greed run amok, similar to what we saw in The Muppets? Is it a simple story of the downtrodden 99% rising up against the 1%, similar to what we saw in Newsies? It’s actually neither. It’s really about the importance of urban planning.

We built this city on eminent domain seizures

No, seriously. Allow me to explain. In the brief synopsis above, I left out a couple of important details: 1) the developers are German and 2) they effectively bribe the mayor of Los Angeles to gain approval for their project and the eminent domain property seizures that spell doom for the Bourbon Room. As far as I know, their portrayal as Germans isn’t connected to any specific historical threat of German real estate developers (if they were going for an existential overseas threat from the 80′s, the Japanese would have been a more appropriate choice). Instead, it’s done to accentuate their “other-ness”: they’re not of the community and have no interest in understanding its values. They bring their predisposed ideas about what’s best for people (and what will make them rich). As for the significance of including the bribing of the mayor and the eminent domain property seizures in the stage show, they show how the political process that’s meant to protect local communities from bulldozers has been corrupted and circumvented by moneyed interests.

Imperious developers ignore local contexts, use their money to influence political support for their plans and steamroll opposition, and destroy unique local communities. I could go on all day about this, but instead, I’ll point you to the Wikipedia articles on Le Corbusier and Robert Moses and leave it at that.

Le Corbusier did not build his cities on rock and roll.

Back to what the Rock of Ages stage version is about: it’s about the importance of urban planning on a more micro level, but on a more macro level, it’s about the ability of hegemonic forces like deep-pocketed corporations and governments to squelch the artistic expression of unique local culture and replace it with stifling homogeneity under the guise of “economic development.”

So why exactly was all of this discarded for the movie version?

Sister Christian, Overtime Has Come

Based on the trailer, the movie tells a simpler story than the one I outlined above. Bible-thumping prudes hate rock ‘n’ roll. They don’t want people to party, to get laid, to play awesome rock music, or otherwise have a good time. These culture warriors have roots in the Tipper Gore-instigated Senate hearings on the subject matter of pop music, which led to the awesome sight of Dee Snider testifying before Congress:

He's not gonna take it...

Twenty years prior, Christian groups were burning Beatles records:

...no! He ain't gonna take it!

And on top of this cultural legacy of conservative opposition to the content of pop music, we have our current conservative culture warriors who generally oppose sex and having a good time:

...he's not gonna take it, anymore!

These are all good reasons for making the villain of Rock of Ages a Bible-thumping prude, but they don’t give us a reason for making the villain a Bible-thumping prude at the expense of the greedy developers and the message on cultural homogenization brought on by poor urban planning and corporate/government greed.

Perhaps the filmmakers thought that the culture war story would be more relatable and appealing to a 2012 audience than that of the greedy developers. The culture war has a more specific set of symbols, institutions, and leaders than the more amorphous concept of “greedy developers” and will therefore resonate more with viewers.

I mostly buy this justification, but I also can’t help but consider a more cynical motive: in becoming a major motion picture, Rock of Ages is now part of the “movie industry,” which is one of those corporate hegemonic forces that spreads stifling cultural homogeneity. When the moviemakers realized that this was at odds with the central conflict of the stage version, they rewrote the nature of the villain in a way that both removed this conflict and setup the movie industry as being on the same side of the scrappy Bourbon Room owners. Sure, Hollywood may be an agent of cultural homogeneity, but at least they want you to have sex and rock out. You know who wants to prevent you from having sex and rocking out? The Bible-thumping prudes.

Any Way You Want It

We’ll have to wait until June to see how exactly this new story gets told in the movie version, but until then, we can debate the finer points of urban planning, the culture wars, the hegemonic forces of stifling cultural homogenization, and monster guitar riffs.

So what do you think? Is the stage version really about bad development policies? Will the movie’s culture war theme resonate more with the audience than German real estate developers? And most importantly, why are we still taking it, when Twisted Sister said almost twenty years ago that we are most definitely not going to take it anymore?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q16_LDI-tsU

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If you Google Working Girl, you’ll discover that it’s described as a “romantic comedy” and “an inspiring tale”. If you watch it, you’ll probably think of Tess McGill’s story as “feel good”. If you spend a weekend, like I did, thinking critically about why Katherine Parker is painted as a venomous villainess and why Kevin Spacey and Oliver Platt’s characters get away with pressuring women into prostitution, then you start to look at the film as a disturbing glimpse into the double standard that permeates business culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv-0mmVnxPA

The lesson of the film isn’t that women can succeed in a man’s world by working together; the lesson is that women have to destroy each other to ensure only middling success.

Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is the heroine of Working Girl and Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) is clearly painted as the villain, but upon further inspection the morality of both characters and their actions falls under suspicion. Katherine steals one good idea from Tess, but Tess steals Katherine’s entire life. She moves into Katherine’s home and into her office at work. Tess goes through Katherine’s home office, medicine cabinet and closet, taking whatever she likes. Tess even steals Katherine’s lover. Granted, Jack Trainer is a grown man who can choose whom he loves for himself. However, it should be noted that Katherine stole one idea from Tess’s brain and Tess stole Katherine’s entire identity. Katherine certainly deserved some kind of comeuppance. Plagiarism is most definitely both a legal and moral offense, but Tess’s revenge goes beyond even an eye for an eye. It’s an entire body for an eye.

It is fun to watch Katherine get her comeuppance, but Katherine is the only character in the entire movie who actually gets any payback. The men in Working Girl get away with complete moral bankruptcy. In fact, they are typically rewarded for their terrible behavior. Kevin Spacey snorts cocaine and sexually harasses Tess, but he gets to keep his job. Oliver Platt pimps Tess out and only suffers the fleeting shame of being a mid-day punchline. Even Tess’s horrible boyfriend, as played by Alec Baldwin with his trademark smarm, gets rewarded for being an asshole. She walks in on him cheating on her and by the end of the movie, they’ve become friends They both are advancing in their careers and Baldwin’s character gets to date the woman he cheated on Tess with. Finally Harrison Ford’s Jack Trainer gets to be a sleazebag and the romantic hero.

When we first meet Jack Trainer, we believe that he is going to date rape Tess. The fact that he doesn’t—that he takes her home with him, undresses her and lets her sleep in his bed—is supposed to be proof of his moral compunction. This is after he liquors her up, refuses to tell her his name and pretty much makes it clear that his only interest in her is physical. It’s supposed to be a compliment when he says, “You’re the first woman I’ve seen in one of these damn things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”

There is definitely something to be said for the fact that much of Katherine and Tess’s individual power comes from their ability to be a woman. Both use sex(uality) to finesse their way into meetings and alliances. Jack’s comments and both Katherine and Tess’s behavior illustrates that women are not equals in the business world. If they were, they could be seen not as sexual objects, but intellects.

Even the title of the film is rife with tension. Maybe it wasn’t as controversial in the 1980′s, but nowadays the use of the word “girl” to describe a grown woman is a huge source of contention. Is the word “girl” truly demeaning, or is it threatening? There’s a moment when Katherine and Tess meet where an unspoken power battle takes place over the issue of their ages. The much more successful, sophisticated and urbane Katherine is slightly younger than Tess. Tess sheepishly (and Melanie Griffith did deserve an Academy Award nomination for the wide spectrum of conflicting emotions Tess’s face reveals in this scene) admits that she has never worked for anyone younger before, nor for anyone female. “Is that going to be a problem?” Katherine asks as she only half suppresses a grin. Tess’s answer is no, but it winds up being a huge problem.

Why? Because youth in a woman often equals desirability which in turn equals power.

Note how ogrish she looks in this shot: rings under her eyes, hulking shoulders (due to the coat) and a threatening metal claw.

It’s kind of terrifying to consider the fact that there are probably many women in business today who grew up inspired by Working Girl. It’s the All About Eve of the business world. However, All About Eve delivers a far more unflinching look at the issues that women face when pursuing power. It’s clear at the end of All About Eve that Eve Harrington is going to be overthrown by Daphne and that the rest of the cast of characters finally sees Eve’s machinations for what they are. The ending of Working Girl is far more confusing. Do Jack and Trask see Tess as someone who is just as conniving as Katherine (or any man in the industry)? Is Katherine supposed to get any kind of sympathy from the audience? Is Tess even aware that she’s setting herself up to be ruined by her assistant?

When we first meet Tess’s assistant, she has brazenly taken over Tess’s office, using it for her own personal phone calls. There’s also a bit of attitude when she asks, “What do you expect from me?” Tess tries to finally be the better person—or boss, in this case. She says they are equals (which they most certainly are not in the professional sense of the word) and that Tess pretty much won’t be expecting much from her new assistant. Tess is essentially setting herself up to be pushed aside by her own assistant, the same way Katherine was by her. The cycle is going to continue.

In Working Girl, women are pitted against other women, but that’s not the biggest tragedy. The tragedy is that the men are still exploiting the women mentally, emotionally and sexually without recourse. Katherine, Tess and the other female characters (including an HR director played by Olympia Dukakis) seem to accept that they can never change the fact that men can do anything in the world of Working Girl and get away with it, because for men there are no rules. As Katherine smoothly tells Tess, “Never burn bridges. Today’s junior prick, tomorrow’s senior partner!” The reason that the men can get away with all of their misdeeds is because the men never blow the whistle on each other. The only people who get in trouble are women. The reason for that is unlike men, the women don’t support each other. Working Girl not only illustrates this practice, but presents it as a success story.

What makes Working Girl such a compelling piece of anti-feminist propaganda is its witty writing, brilliant performances and unflinching realism. It’s not farcical like the earlier feminist revenge comedy, Nine to Five, nor is it fantastical like later feminist empowerment flick Legally Blonde. Tess seems more like a real woman because she is more realistic than Dolly Parton’s Doralee Rhodes or Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods. She wears sneakers on the street and sweats when she has to push around dim sum. I’m not going to lie: it is a good movie. I liked it. Which is the problem. Women shouldn’t watch a film about how they can’t ever beat the system and think it was “fun”. It should be terrifying.

Ultimately, the message of Working Girl isn’t that with hard work you can beat the odds. The message of Working Girl is that women can advance in a man’s world if they throw other women under the bus.

[What say you, Overthinkers? Does Working Girl's cat-eat-cat message ruin the fun? Or can you still enjoy a movie even if it's a little bit regressive? Sound off in the comments!]

Meghan O’Keefe is a stand-up comic and writer living in New York. When she’s not guesting for Overthinking It, she writes for HelloGiggles, The Hairpin, Splitsider and The Apiary.

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Have you seen my god-king's perfectly symmetrical floating city? Sweet, right?

The setting fascinated me: a weird blend of Byzantine decadence, Oriental religion and unique mythology. While plenty of games reveal their world through in-game text (see Deus Ex; see the journal entries in SSI’s “Gold Box” AD&D games), Morrowind‘s books and scrolls were unique. They weren’t just one-radian knockoffs of medieval Western Europe, Tolkien with the serial number scratched out. It was esoteric and challenging. I loved it.

For instance, here’s half of the first Sermon of the Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec:

He was born in the ash among the Velothi, anon Chimer, before the war with the northern men. Ayem came first to the village of the netchimen, and her shadow was that of Boethiah, who was the Prince of Plots, and things unknown and known would fold themselves around her until they were like stars or the messages of stars. Ayem took a netchiman’s wife and said:

‘I am the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three in One. In you is an image and a seven-syllable spell, AYEM AE SEHTI AE VEHK, which you will repeat to it until mystery comes.’

Then Ayem threw the netchiman’s wife into the ocean water where dreughs took her into castles of glass and coral. They gifted the netchiman’s wife with gills and milk fingers, changing her sex so that she might give birth to the image as an egg. There she stayed for seven or eight months.

Then Seht came to the netchiman’s wife and said:

‘I am the Clockwork King of the Three in One. In you is an egg of my brother-sister, who possesses invisible knowledge of words and swords, which you shall nurture until the Hortator comes.’

And Seht then extended his hands and multitudes of homunculi came forth, each like a glimmering rope through the water, and they raised the netchiman’s wife back to the surface world and set her down on the shoals of Azura’s coast. There she lay for seven or eight more months, caring for the egg-knowledge by whispering to it the Codes of Mephala and the prophecies of Veloth and even the forbidden teachings of Trinimac.

…

And so forth. Folks familiar with Judeo-Christian theosophy might recognize the diction of the Old Testament or Torah. Taking Biblical sentence structure and filling it with unfamiliar words helps expose just how weird the Bible is. The netchiman’s wife whispered the Codes of Mephala to the egg-knowledge gifted to her by Ayem, who changed her sex in a coral palace beneath the sea. Got it.

But that’s not the weirdest part!

Sup.

In the course of playing the main quest of Morrowind, you’ll come face to face with Lord Vivec, locked away in the city that bears his name. When you meet him, he will confirm that you are the Nerevarine, the reincarnation of Nerevar, and the only one who can undo the curse that afflicts the continent of Vvardenfell. But he also confirms something that you’ve probably begun to suspect if you’ve been following the in-game text: that Nerevar was once a companion of Vivec as well as the other gods of Morrowind, Almalexia and Sotha Sil. In fact, Vivec and the rest only became gods after uncovering the Heart of Lorkhan, the artifact that Morrowind‘s final villain, Dagoth Ur, is using to escape from Red Mountain. Prior to that, Vivec, Almalexia and Sotha Sil were councilors to Lord Nerevar, who ruled the island of Vvardenfell as a king.

That in itself is a bit of a twist: that the gods of Vvardenfell, the supreme rulers of Morrowind, were once just ordinary people. They only became gods because of a magical relic that they found in the heart of the earth. It makes the ritual and superstition surrounding Vivec seem a little silly: rather than the mysteries of faith needed to comprehend an immortal creator, it’s just the weird trappings of one guy.

The obvious follow-up question is: if Vivec, Almalexia and Sotha Sil got magical god-powers from this relic, what happened to their buddy Nerevar? Here opinions differ. If you ask Vivec or read what he told his priests, Nerevar suffered a fatal wound in the initial fight against Dagoth Ur. However, a sect of dissident priests within Vivec’s ecclesiarchy believe something different: that the tribunal killed Nerevar because he wouldn’t let them use the Heart of Lorkhan to become gods.

I've been doing push-ups and listening to Slipknot for a THOUSAND YEARS.

Two very different responses. You learn both of them in the course of the main quest. Neither of them changes the outcome, or even the nature of the world. Learning that Vivec was an ordinary guy who might have killed his liege does not smash the priesthood of Vivec in one humiliating blow. But it makes you, the player, regard everything different. Vivec is no longer the sage dispenser of wisdom, giving you the guidance you need to complete your quest and save the world. He’s now a canny manipulator, sending the reincarnation of his onetime king (whom he might have slain) to dispatch his enemy.

Those of you who follow Internet arguments between entrenched political camps will recognize this as historical revisionism. For those of you who lead happier lives: historical revisionism is the act of reinterpreting conventional wisdom surrounding some historical event or figure. Pundits and historians engage in it because people rely on history as a guide for what to do next. Changing the lessons available from history – changing the moral of the fable – can disarm one’s ideological opponents or add more weapons to one’s own arsenal.

To use recent examples from American politics: conservatives have spent years attacking the idea that President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped get the country out of the Great Depression. Some economists, like Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, have argued that the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression, by diverting capital and labor through inefficient central planners (the CCC, the PWA, the WPA, etc) rather than letting it accrue to where it would be useful. Other historians have argued that the New Deal was a net harm to America because it legitimized near-fascist levels of government control over business.

On the left side of the aisle, historians like Howard Zinn sought to repaint America’s historical record as well. In A People’s History of the United States, Zinn made the case that the story of America was a story of common people, not elite leaders. It’s from Howard Zinn and historians of his school that we get the image of the Founding Fathers as white, male plantation owners. In defending his book from several critical reviews, Zinn wrote:

My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism. I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.

I meant 'Bully' as an encouragement, not an imperative.

Note that neither side is making up facts here. Teddy Roosevelt did indeed congratulate Maj. General Leon Wood after the Moro Crater massacre, just as the PWA was an unprecedented level of federal intervention in the American economy. But not every history textbook emphasizes the same facts or draws the same conclusions from them. Historical revisionism is meant to challenge that.

The Elder Scrolls series is rife with this sort of historical revisionism. But let’s focus more on the most recent entry: the exceedingly popular Skyrim.

Skyrim sets the clock farther ahead than any of the previous four games. Four hundred years after the events of Oblivion, the Empire is no longer what it once was. The Imperial Legion and a band of rebels, the Stormcloaks, have thrown the province of Skyrim into civil war. Players who’ve been part of the Elder Scrolls series for a while might be intrigued to discover that they’re now a part of history.

It's a fixer-upper.

The civil war itself can be viewed as a debate between rival factions over the historical record. The Stormcloaks consider themselves faithful to Talos – the oath that you swear to the Stormcloaks calls on Talos by name. But “Talos” is the divine name for the first Emperor, Tiber Septim, in whose name the Imperial Legion fights. The war between the two is a feud over the legacy of Talos – what would the god-hero of mankind wish if he were alive today?

Other examples abound. In the first four games, Stendarr was the Imperial god of righteous strength and mercy. In Skyrim, however, the Vigilant of Stendarr wander the countryside and hunt down Daedric cults. The Mythic Dawn were a secretive cult that slew the Emperor in Oblivion; in Skyrim, they’re a quaint historical memory, preserved in a museum in Dawnstar.

Even the stories of the creation of the world differ, with humans and elves having different takes, according to in-game text. This is something of a rarity in the fantasy genre. Even if the characters in The Belgariad don’t know how the world was created, the author does. Ever since Tolkien and The Silmarillion, consumers of the fantasy genre have come to expect a certain knowability in their fiction. There’s no alternate narrative that says no, Melkor was really trying to liberate the Elves from Valar tyranny by destroying the Two Trees of Valinor.

History will validate me!

This isn’t to say that plot twists revealing deeper truths are foreign to fantasy video games. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a prominent example, with a mid-game plot twist that throws all of the backstory into a different light. But that’s a very personal plot twist that tells you (the player) something different about yourself (the character). Elder Scrolls plot twists, such as they are, tend to tell you something different about the world a thousand years ago.

The Elder Scrolls series is also distinct in how much of its backstory is revealed through supplementary texts. You can make it through the entire game without reading any of the historical texts you find tucked on various bookshelves. Elder Scrolls is far from the only RPG to build out its universe this way, but I personally find the in-game text in Skyrim far more compelling than that of Dragon Age.

(In fact, the only series I’ve played that matches it for literary quality is Deus Ex, the latest incarnation of which I have on my shelf at home. I haven’t opened it yet, as I’m still busy with Skyrim)

I’ve written before about the next evolution in storytelling through videogames and I think the Elder Scrolls series is a forerunner in that direction. After games where none of your choices matter (platform games) and games where only your choices matter (sandbox games), we now have games where only your beliefs matter (interpretive games). You can play through the infamous “No Russian” level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by either shooting civilians or not. The level ends the same either way: your character gets shot in the head. The only variable is you: whether the slaughter of civilians shocks you, thrills you or leaves you a desensitized lump.

Similarly, your choice to play Stormcloak or Imperial – or to even take sides in that fight at all – says more about your interest as a player than your choices as a character. Both sides have similar missions: rescuing fellow faction members, capturing forts, laying and breaking sieges. Both sides have opportunities for warriors, rogues or magic-users to cause havoc. While completing either quest produces different outcomes, the game world will still be largely similar. All that changes is you, the player.

Watch the throne.

There is no definitive text that says which side is right: whether the Stormcloaks truly have the right to rule Skyrim, or whether the Imperials are the only hope for peace and prosperity. You have to make that call on your own as a player. In doing so, you’re engaging in historical revisionism of your own. In the hundreds of years prior to the start of Skyrim, were the armies of the Septim Empire a force for good or oppression? Are the Nordic traditions a source of pride or a dishonorable throwback? Your answer to that question – and you can find texts in game to convince you of either – determines the side you choose.

The opportunity to reinterpret history, though not rewrite it, puts Skyrim (and the rest of the Elder Scrolls series) in a rare place among games. It calls into question the role of you, the person holding the controller. Are you a player in a game or the author of a narrative? Skyrim has enough sandbox elements that it challenges the historical definitions of a “game.” There is no stopping point: there’s a main quest that you can complete, but the action keeps trucking after you finish. The “game,” if we can still call it that, continues until you set down the controller, just like a manuscript remains stable until you pick the pen back up. And when your actions shape the course of empires – empires that are documented either in the words of people you talk to or in books you find lying around – there’s a strong drive to leave that manuscript on a solid ending.

(Anyone else play through Morrowind, then pick up Oblivion, hear a rumor that the Nerevarine had headed to Akavir, and say to themselves, “I did? Er, I mean, he did?”)

Of course, in a game that’s rife with such historical revisionism, your enthusiasm to direct the path of history might be dampened. Who’s to say how future generations will remember you? After all, everyone you meet in Skyrim mentions how the Third Era ended with the death of Martin Septim, the last of the Dragonblood Emperors. No one mentions how your Redguard clad in enchanted daedric armor took on an army of dremora and even got in a few good licks on Mehrunes &$#@ing Dagon. Perhaps the Elder Scrolls are meant to encourage cynicism, not optimism.

Either way, by presenting a world with such rich history and giving players extensive option to make their own path in it, Skyrim forces us to reconsider our roles as game players and storytellers.

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