• Memento: A man with amnesia is obsessed with finding the killer of his beautiful wife.
• Insomnia: A detective plays a cat and mouse game with the killer of a beautiful young girl.
• The Prestige: A magician engages in a bitter rivalry with a former friend he blames for the death of his beautiful young wife.
• The Dark Knight: The lives of a masked vigilante and a district attorney are shattered when the woman they both love is killed.
• Inception: A dream thief struggles with the crushing guilt of his wife’s suicide.
• And here’s a bonus: Nolan’s first feature, Following, apparently features a beautiful dead girl as a final twist.

The one movie that doesn’t fit the pattern is Batman Begins. But of course, the love interest dies in the sequel. And there is a dead mom to tide us over.

Shana, our resident feminist/Lostologist, introduced me to a name for this plot device: “fridge stuffing.” The term comes from a notorious issue of Green Lantern from 1994, in which Kyle Rayner came home to find his girlfriend not merely dead, but stuffed into his refrigerator. I can’t help but speculate as to WHY the villain, who is eye-rollingly named “Major Force,” would stuff his victim into a refrigerator. If he intended to eat her, the freezer is the way to go. If he wanted to hide the body somewhere no one would find it, this seems like a poor strategy; Green Lantern gotta eat. My best guess is that he wanted to instill a fear  of refrigerators in his enemy, so that Green Lantern would slowly starve to death. Think about it: if you opened a refrigerator to find your girlfriend’s dead body in there, you would have second thoughts about opening a refrigerator ever again. You’d be living on pasta and soup for a while.

You know what? I have to Google this.

[five minutes elapse]

Okay, from the single page of the comic I found, Major Force leaves a note on the table that says: “Surprise for you in the fridge. Love, A”  “Huh,” says Kyle. “Handwriting looks funny.” This was just silly on Major Force’s part. Was the Major honestly worried that, were it not for this note, Alex’s body would never be discovered? Can we all agree that however great Kyle’s shock, it would be that much greater if he sat around the apartment for two hours, watching ESPN and leafing through his mail, before he finally got up to see if there were anymore Coronas in the OH SWEET MOTHER OF MERCY!!

Hey, I wonder what Major Force did with all the food that was in the fridge?

Wait, what I am supposed to be writing about? Let me check my tattoo… oh right.

Now technically, not all of Nolan’s movies rise to the level of fridge stuffing. It’s my understanding that the cliché require that the female character be a real character in the story, that the audience kind of likes, and who is sacrificed so the male character has something to brood about. In Memento, Insomnia, and Inception, the girl is dead before the movie starts. Her identity is defined by her death… which isn’t exactly feminist, but isn’t quite fridge-stuffing. The death of Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight qualifies, because we’ve had plenty of time to know Rachel before she gets exploded.

But no matter how much we dislike any given cliché in the abstract, you can always find counter-examples in which the cliché works brilliantly. After all, it wouldn’t be a cliché in the first place if it didn’t work. The Dark Knight is a perfect example. The death of Rachel Dawes is surprising, effective storytelling, moving the plot forward on several fronts. Shana was as enamored with this movie as any of us, despite the sad fate of the movie’s one female character. If you grade The Dark Knight as a work of feminism, it may not do very well. If you grade it as a movie, different story.

In fact, I love all of Christopher Nolan’s movies, and I wouldn’t change them one little bit. That’s what makes this article tricky to write: I don’t know what my thesis is. I have an observation, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think it’s clear that Christopher Nolan prefers male characters to female ones, but I don’t think he’s misogynistic. There are great parts for women in Memento, The Prestige, the Batman movies, and even Inception. I suppose there’s a soft misogyny in the way these men are haunted by angelic, sexualized ghosts. It’s kind of Dante. But Christopher Nolan isn’t Michael Bay. Hell, I can’t even recall a sex scene or nudity in any of his work.

So yeah, I don’t think Nolan is sexist. I DO think he has a fascination with dead love interests. Don’t bother searching his Wikipedia page; there’s no dead mother, sister, or girlfriend in his past. Besides, as Wrather noted on this week’s podcast, that kind of psychological determinism is seldom true in real life.

Maybe these dead ladies are an accidental byproduct of the noir world he likes to work in: if you love grim, driven men of action, you need to manufacture something for them to be grim about. The man who actually wrote that Green Lantern story eventually addressed the “woman in the fridge” controversy, saying:

To me the real difference is less male-female than main character-supporting character. In most cases, main characters, “title” characters who support their own books, are male.

There’s some truth to this. The movie is called The Dark Knight, and if taking away the only woman the titular character has ever loved isn’t fair game, what is?

And yet, it’s definitely true that, even when there are stories centered on women, you don’t see a lot of men stuffed in fridges. At the beginning of Kill Bill, Uma’s fiancé is slaughtered in front of her. But you really don’t get the impression that’s what she’s upset about when she wakes up. It’s unclear whether she even cares about the guy. What really drives her is her lost baby… which isn’t particularly feminist, actually. I asked the Overthinkers to suggest situations where a woman is out to avenge her dead lover. McNeil recalled The Brave One, a Jodi Foster revenge flick. Shana mentioned the Sun/Jin story arc on Lost, but with the disclaimer that it petered out pretty quickly.

(To bring it back to comic books for a second, someone made the interesting observation that when male superheroes die, they are often brought back to life with their powers restored. But when female characters die, their deaths are treated as a permanent tragedy.)

So while there’s nothing wrong with a story about a dead woman and the man who avenges her, there is something problematic about how commonplace and effective that trope is, and how seldom we see its gender inversion. There’s a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but there’s no Bros Avenging Bros Unit.

Or maybe there’s nothing problematic about it at all. Maybe we, as a species, are programmed to be more upset by the death of a woman than the death of a man. Remember the end of Dr. Strangelove, when he explained that in the mineshafts, the ideal ratio is ten women for every man? He has a point. When human existence is in jeopardy, protecting the women is smart evolutionary math – they are capable of producing fewer children, and therefore are the limiting factor in propagating the species. I’m sort of kidding, but I’m sort of not: men and women are different. Maybe it’s in our DNA to care more about the death of a woman than a man.

Still, even if my crazy theory is correct, it doesn’t mean fridge stuffing can’t be misogynistic. The writer is basically deciding that there is nothing that character can do that would be more interesting than getting butchered. That any possible plotlines she could be a part of wouldn’t be as effective as her funeral.

But then AGAIN, I’m certainly not arguing that it’s always wrong to kill off a female character.

Ag, I give up and throw it out to you. Is Christopher Nolan guilty of any sort of sexism? When is killing off a supporting female character wrong, and when is it fair game? If you were going to kill your arch-enemy’s lover and hide the body for him/her to find, where would you put it?

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Pillars of The Earth, Ken Follett, 1989.

Heh, look at that font. All literary and elegant. Don't be confused, though: the book still has, like, tons of dirty bits.

Sometime in the late 80s, a successful spy novelist named Ken Follett got tired of thrillers and decided to try his hand at historical novels.  This understandably made his publishers a little nervous.  Follett’s stock in trade was the potboiler, the beach read.   It was by no means clear that his audience, who had eagerly lapped up the cocktail of sex, violence and Nazis that Follett had perfected in The Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, would be as interested in a thousand-odd page love letter to medieval cathedral-building.  But the gamble paid off.  The Pillars of the Earth turned out to be Follett’s most critically and commercially successful book.   So successful was the book that it’s easy to overlook just how peculiar it is.*  There’s a reason why the book is borderline respectable:  Follett explores medieval culture and society with a level of detail that rubs up on the border between the novelistic and the encyclopediac.  (I don’t know if the detail is accurate, necessarily, but it feels accurate, which for historical fiction is really all that matters.)  But there’s also a reason why it’s only borderline respectable:  Follett fans who turned in for the hair-breadth escapes, vivid fight scenes, and well-nigh-pornographic sex scenes that marked his earlier works would not be disappointed.  In fact these elements are if anything ramped up, as if Follett understood on some level that a fifty page in-depth exploration of the medieval textile industry would need to be washed down with a spoonful of sugar vigorous humping.

But that’s the nice thing about novels.  They’re spacious:  there’s more than enough room for the history lessons and the coed naked knife fights.  As a result, Pillars of the Earth earns its page count.  It needs its page count.  Cut out the history, and it collapses into a pile of letters from penthouse.  Cut out the raunch and it becomes a rather substandard history textbook without footnotes.  Keep them both, and it stands as a nearly perfect exemplar of its particular kind.**

Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, 2010, Ridley Scott et. al.

More like Pillars of the Backlighting! Am I right? Amirite?

It’s something of a commonplace these days that we are currently enjoying a golden age of television, and most of the shows people bring up are serialized dramas on premium cable channels.  The Sopranos, The Wire, Treme, and their ilk are often held up as the moving-image equivalent of the novel, offering psychological and social nuance that cannot be achieved in a mere two-hour movie.   As a result, an eight-hour miniseries adaptation of Pillars of the Earth would seem to be something to cheer about.  Would seem to be.

Overthinking It is not a review site, so let me get this over with quickly. The show is fine, but it’s not particularly good, which means either that I’m overestimating the quality of the source material or they really blew an opportunity here.  By relishing in the detailed exploration of various slices of 12th century society (and toning down the sex and violence, or at least leaving it alone), they could have turned Pillers of the Earth into something like a medieval version of The Wire.  Instead, they actually decided to ramp up the sleaze, throwing in an incest subplot that I don’t remember from the book, and cut out a great deal of the subtlety.  Take the character of Ellen.  She is accused of witchcraft early in the book, but no one, even her mortal enemy Waleran Bigod, takes it seriously.  The ecclesiastical court, lead by the virtuous Prior Philip, summarily informs everyone that she is obviously not a witch, but that she has committed fornication and as punishment must stay away from her common-law husband Tom for a full year, after which they have to get married for realz.  As punishments from medieval courts go, this lacks something in the Iron Maiden department, which is why coming across it in the book feels so refreshing.  Ellen’s reaction is also interesting.  Tom breaks the news to her at dinner.

“We have to live apart for a year, and you have to remain chaste—”

“Piss on that!” Ellen shouted. Now everyone was looking. “Piss on you, Tom Builder!” she said. She realized she had an audience.

“Piss on all of you, too,” she said. Most people grinned. It was hard to take offense, perhaps because she looked so lovely with her face flushed red and her golden eyes wide. She stood up. “Piss on Kingsbridge Priory!” She jumped up on to the table, and there was a burst of applause. She walked along the board. The diners snatched their bowls of soup and mugs of ale out of her way and sat back, laughing. “Piss on the prior!” she said. “Piss on the sub-prior, and the sacrist, and the cantor and the treasurer, and all their deeds and charters, and their chests full of silver pennies!” She reached the end of the table. Beyond it was another, smaller table where someone would sit and read aloud during the monks’ dinner. There was an open book on the table. Ellen jumped from the dining table to the reading table.

Suddenly Tom knew what she was going to do. “Ellen!” he called. “Don’t, please—”

“Piss on the Rule of Saint Benedict!” she yelled at the top of her voice. Then she hitched up her skirt, bent her knees, and urinated on the open book. The men roared with laughter, banged on the tables, hooted and whistled and cheered. Tom was not sure whether they shared Ellen’s contempt for the Rule or they just enjoyed seeing a beautiful woman expose herself. There was something erotic about her shameless vulgarity, but it was also exciting to see someone openly abuse the book that the monks were so tediously solemn about. Whatever the reason, they loved it.

This is a pretty weird scene, and not one of my favorites from the book.  Confidential to authors everywhere, and especially Ken Follett because he does this kind of thing more than once:  there is never, ever, any reason to write “there was something erotic about X.”  Either the audience will themselves find X erotic, in which case they don’t need you to point it out to them, or they will not, in which case they will not appreciate the implication.  (The only exception to this rule is when X is something cartoonishly non-erotic.  If there was something erotic about the aluminum siding, for instance, you probably would have to tell us.)  Nevertheless, this scene is far, far preferable to the version that appears in the TV series.  Here the accusation of witchcraft, rather than being laughed off, is played deadly serious.  Waleran instructs his men to start building a pyre so that she can be burned at the stake.  Ellen protests that her weird collections of mushrooms and the like are only medicine.  So she’s not a witch, she’s a doctor, and the primitive medieval Catholics just don’t understand! How original.  (Even the fact that she has a weird collection of mushrooms is a little obnoxious:  in the book, Philip points out that the only reason she’s being accused of witchcraft is that she lives by herself out in the woods.)  Luckily Philip and Tom arrange for her daring escape.  They smuggle in a knife to her, which she uses to cut her bonds in the middle of her trial.  Jumping up onto the table, she advances on the prosecutor – Waleran, in this case – and delivers the following, much shorter, soliloquy with an air of deadly calm:  “Piss on you, Waleran Bigod.”  And then she does.

I guess it’s a creative escape plan.

The Starz version takes Follett’s scatology to new and obnoxious levels; meanwhile, as far as sociological depth goes, it is not far removed from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Also, it makes Ellen less interesting as a character.  While the urination feels unnecessary in both scenes, the book version has the virtue of being a recognizable human impulse carried well past the limits of our suspension of disbelief (i.e. the pee feels gratuitous, but the tantrum feels real). It shows us Ellen as a woman with some self control issues.  The TV version gives us a caricature of bravery and righteous indignation.  To put it another way:  the urination always seems stupid, but in the book we’re supposed to think it’s stupid, while in the show it’s supposed to be badass.  If you already subscribe to Starz, you probably should watch Pillars of the Earth at least once.  It is – to damn with faint praise – just about worth the time it takes to watch it.  The acting is good, if nothing else, and you might get to see Donald Sutherland wielding a claymore.  But the idea that anyone would subscribe to Starz specifically for the purpose of watching this is absurd.

Pictured here is the historical d'Artagnan, who was named Charles de Batz de Castelmore, and was not a schlub.

Now lets get into the overthought portion of your evening’s entertainment.  The most interesting thing about the new series is another element that it gets wrong.  One of the classic structures for historical fiction is the Tale of the Schlubby Bystander.  In this kind of novel, we see important moments in world history through the eyes of a not-particularly-distinguished observer who rubs elbows with the great, and feels the repercussions of their actions, but has little to no active role in the creation of history.  Johnny Tremain is a great example of this, as is The Three Musketeers, as are pretty much all of Sir Walter Scott’s books (Scott having essentially invented the historical novel with Waverley).  The attractions of this structure are obvious.  The readers get to identify with the Schlub:  after all, they too are bystanders.  The author is spared the indignity of having to put too many words in the mouth of (and worse, thoughts in the head of), notable personages such as Paul Revere and Anne of Austria.  It’s really a win-win.  But it does entail a tricky balancing act.  Stories of this kind always require the author to shift back and forth between the main character – i.e. the Schlub – and the more important supporting characters.  Even in the sections focused on the Schlub, the author needs to balance the character’s personal emotional life with his/her involvement with world events.

One of the best examples of this balance can be found in The Three Musketeers.  The first big section of the book is all D’Artagnan all the time.  He traipses around France on his godawful horse, gets in some duels, makes a friend or two or three, becomes a Musketeer (although actually he totally doesn’t, yet).  Then, slooooowly, we zoom out.  Now D’Artagnan is running errands for the Queen.  Now he takes part in the siege of La Rochelle.  At the climax of the book, we witness the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham!  How did we ever get here? (And note that D’Artagnan is not really even peripherally involved.) Then in the falling action we zoom back in, and it becomes all about the personal vendetta between the Musketeers and Milady De Winter.

In the book version, The Pillars of the Earth follows a similar arc.  When it starts out, it’s all about Tom Builder and his family trying like hell not to starve to death after someone steals their pig.  Gradually we zoom out to the point where we see Prior Philip struggling to run his thriving medieval town, and rubbing elbows with Kings and Archbishops in his efforts.  Towards the end, we zoom back in and focus on how all this has derailed the main character’s love life. On its most fundamental level, for all the chase scenes and heavy petting,  The Pillars of the Earth is about how the best-layed plans of mice and men are upset by institutional forces like monarchy and religion (although, unlike The Wire, it does offer the individual a way to struggle back against the system:  if one is lucky and persistant one may get the chance to build a cathedral, which after all will stand long after the current king is dead).

What makes this structure work is that it’s not a bait and switch.  We know going in that we’ll eventually be seeing the big picture – we just don’t know how it will relate to the small scale stuff.  Part of the reason that the small scale, pig-stealing stuff can be compelling is that we know these characters are destined for greater things… but we don’t know anything specific.  If we did, it would wreck it:  the mystery, which must be carefully maintained, is what really makes the story tick.  Said mystery is established in the very first scene of the book, in which an unnamed man is hanged by the neck on the orders of a likewise unnamed monk, knight, and priest.  The dead man’s lover – who turns out to be our old friend Ellen, she of the active bladder – curses them, which apparently was a thing you could do back in the middle ages.  I really dig Follett’s prose here:  “I curse you with sickness and sorrow, with hunger and pain; your house shall be consumed by fire, and your children shall die on the gallows; your enemies shall prosper, and you shall grow old in sadness and regret, and die in foulness and agony.”  Proper.  Next time someone cuts me in line at the grocery store, I’m gonna whip that one out.

Who the dead man is, and why he was killed, is the central mystery of the book.  We find out sloooooowly, even more slowly than we pull back and start to engage with the broader political situation.  Arguably the answer, when it arrives, is something of an anticlimax – but with big narrative mysteries like this, the anticipation is always sweeter than the event itself.  Follett manages to sustain the tension for well nigh 1,000 pages, and that in itself is something to celebrate.  Also cool is the way that Ellen’s curse actually comes true.  One of her antagonists turns out to be the old Prior whose cathedral burns down, giving Tom a chance to design the new one; one is Percy Hamleigh, whose loathsome son William eventually does die on the gallows; and one is Waleran, who at the end of the book we are told is “a sad old man… and knows that [he has] wasted his life.”  If you’re paying close attention throughout the book, you can figure most of this out, but it’s not actually spelled out for you until the very, very end.  Which is how it should be, with a major narrative mystery.  It’s not exactly rocket science – just basic narrative craft.

The TV show bungles this on every conceivable level.  Rather than the slow zoom out from the petty concerns of petty people to the great concerns of the nation, it cuts back and forth between them constantly from the very first episode.  As a result, I found myself hard-pressed to care about either one.  Rather than the lingering mystery of the hanging and the curse, we learn in the first episode that [Spoilers!  Although the writers of the show apparently don't think so!] the man was killed because he knew something about the shipwreck that caused the death of the King’s only heir.  We also learn right away that the old Prior was involved with the coverup, because he makes a deathbed confession to his successor, Philip.  Yes, you read that right:  when adopting the novel for the screen, the writers found it necessary to add a dramatic deathbed confession that basically gives away the plot.  And Ellen’s curse (which does not happen right at the beginning, where it would be cool, but halfway through the second episode), is considerably dumbed down.  I don’t remember it word for word, but rather than telling Waleran that he’ll grow old in sadness and regret she says that he’ll “climb very high, and then fall.” Really?  I mean, really? If this turns out to be setting up a scene in the last episode where Jack Jackson tosses Waleran off the top of the newly finished cathedral, shouting a one-liner like “I’ll take the pillars – give my regards to the earth,” I may well vomit.

But that’s only if I end up seeing the last episode.  And I don’t think I will.  After all, we’re living in a golden age of television.  I have better things to do with my time.

*Granted, the combination of sleaze and scholarship in Pillars of the Earth is not particularly strange for a historical novel.  Once in a library I picked up a book called Raptor that was ostensibly about the reign of Theodoric the Great, and turned out within the first ten pages to feature an extensive episode of what can only be described as “hot hot female-nun-on-intersexed-nun action.”  I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that historical fiction, as a genre, runs to weirdness.

** This isn’t to say the book is actually perfect… there are lots of flaws. Although Follett’s prose usually does a good job of avoiding the Scylla of Ye Olde Englishe and the Charybdis of “Yo yo yo, wassup your Majesty?  Isn’t this, like, bubonic plague thing totally harshing your buzz?” there are rare occasions where a modern-sounding phrase lands on the reader’s consciousness with a deafening leaden CLUNK. A couple of major plot threads are left hanging in a way that’s probably meant to be realistic (because in real life people sometimes do just up and die at narratively inconvenient times), but comes off as a failure of imagination. The book could stand to be a bit less rapey – or if we think that’s an important reality of the time period, it could at least be much, much less prurient about it.  And most damningly, the main character, Jack Jackson, has a bit of a Mary Sue problem.  Nevertheless, I do think that Pillars of the Earth would be pretty much the best possible book to study if you wanted to learn how to write a historical potboiler.  Follett is a tremendously gifted craftsman on both small and large scales, and his balance of geopolitical sweep with the soap opera angst in this book has got to be some kind of minor miracle.

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Magneto is the pseudonym of one Erik Lehnsherr, a man with the ability to create magnetic fields and control metals. It’s one hell of a useful mutation to have, but it presents us with a bit of a problem that must be considered. Namely: what is it about metals that Magneto can control and why can he not control the other elements? We’ll have to look at several properties of metals. It might be useful to have your periodic table close by.

First thing to clarify is what exactly we mean when we say “a metal”. Defining it specifically, a metal is a substance which conducts more than 10,000 Siemens per meter. Metal has the ability to conduct electricity this well because of its structure when “in the bulk” i.e. when lots of the metal’s atoms are grouped together. Unlike non-metals which form strict chemical bonds where the atoms are positioned specifically, a metal features all its nuclei (central part of the atom) arranged in a lattice while the electrons (outer parts of the atom) are free to swim all over the structure.

It’s a bit like a bowl of Rice Krispies where the Krispies are the nuclei and the electrons are the milk. The electrons are free to move everywhere: they’re not fixed to one specific atom, which helps them to conduct electricity better because they can move so well (electricity being the property of moving electrons). At first we might think this is the property Magneto is exploiting, because it’s the only property that all metals have, perhaps he can control these delocalized “electron seas”? But this can’t be true because of one rather inventive scene in X-2 where Magneto escapes his plastic prison by sucking the Iron out of a prison guard’s blood after Mystique has injected him with it.

Apparently, Magneto required a certain amount of metal for him to use. Normal human bodies only contain 4.5g of metal, which we must assume Magneto could manipulate normally but which would not have been enough for him to build his floating platform as well as two bullets. (Although it does suggest that anyone suffering from Beta-Thalassaemia, a condition in which excessive iron uptake leads to an amount closer to 70 grams, shoudln’t be allowed to guard Magneto.) More importantly however, what it tells us is that he doesn’t need the metal to be “in bulk”; he doesn’t need a solid lump of metal for him to manipulate.

Sir Ian needs no help picking up a man.

In the body, iron is stored in four main proteins: Hemoglobin, Myoglobin, Cytochrome-C-Oxidase and Transferrin. All of them contain Iron as an atom. Iron in the blood (mostly Hemoglobin) is held in place via what’s called the Weiss model and involves a single atom of Iron having three of its electrons removed (a process called ionization) and bound in place by nearby Nitrogen atoms.

In other words, Magneto can control single atoms of metals—even metals that have been ionised. He doesn’t require metals to be in the bulk, so it’s apparently not their conductivity he’s exploiting, because iron in the blood doesn’t conduct. So it must be something else.

The first property worth considering is the metal’s magnetic properties. His name is Magneto, after all.

There are five main types of magnetism which elements can display, based on the arrangement of their electrons. Diamagnetism for instance is a property displayed by all solid materials, so it can’t be this or Magneto would be able to control lumps of coal (solid carbon).

The most obvious and familiar type of magnetism is called ferromagnetism (ferrum meaning iron in Latin) and arises from electrons all pointing the same way. But there are only five elements in this category (Iron, Cobalt, Nickel, Gadolinium & Terbium) and Magneto can control bullets which are usually a combination of Lead, Copper, Nickel, Antimony and sometimes Tungsten. So it’s not Ferromagnetism he’s using.

Ferrimagnetism and antiferrogmanetism are two other types, but they can be ruled out as they require atoms to be “in bulk”. Paramagnetism (the fifth kind) is temperature dependent and we have seen that Magneto can easily control metals on a warm day as well as in the coldness of Alkali Lake in winter. So although Magneto has the ability to create what are deemed “magnetic” fields, this must be a simplified explanation of what he can actually do because he’s creating some kind of field that all metals are affected by, irrespective of their magnetic characteristics.

If we rule out magnetic and conductive properties there are only two remaining parameters that generally distinguish metals from non-metals.

The first is ionization (the ability to remove electrons from the atoms). Metals are generally easy to ionize, but if this were the source of his power, Magneto would build up an enormous static charge every time he manipulated metals, and furthermore the metals themselves would become electrically charged. So when Magneto floats up the side of the Statue of Liberty, if he were ionising the metal around him somehow, he should be creating enormous static charges which would cause the metal to interact with other metal objects, not just him. We can thus rule out ionisation, leaving only one other property: the atomic shape.

If you look at a periodic table you can see it’s grouped into four “blocks” named the s, p, d and f blocks. These four blocks denote what type of shape the atom is (more specifically, it tells us what type of orbital the outer-electron is in, and the four different orbitals have different shapes so, it’s essentially the same thing). Most of the metals in the world are in the s, d and f blocks. This leaves the p block, made of all the “non-metals”, the “semi-metals” and 8 metals…which we’ll get to a bit later.

[NB: Hydrogen (the one electron atom) is sometimes placed in the s block, but it really doesn’t belong there as it shares none of the other s block properties. So we’ll assume that Magneto’s power requires there to be more than one electron in the atom he’s controlling (there are certain properties that >1 electron atoms gain which we don’t need to go into, but apparently Magneto’s powers are limited by them).]

Atoms in the s block are spherical, so whatever Magneto’s power is, it can manipulate spherical atoms. The d and f blocks unfortunately have two opposite types of shape however. The d block elements have what are called “gerade” shapes, which means if we turn the atom completely inside out, we have an identical shape. While the f blocks are “ungerade” meaning they cannot be pulled inside out to create the same shape. But nevertheless, if we look at the s, d and f atoms we have got most of the metals covered and we can actually distinguish them from the p block using group theory.

Group theory is a mathematical tool that puts collections of numbers (or physical shapes) into groups based on their collective properties. It’s commonly used in chemistry to classify molecules or atoms in terms of their symmetry (by symmetry, we aren’t just referring to whether they are mirror images of each other—we also need to consider things like rotational symmetry, i.e., can we rotate a shape around to give us an identical shape). If we consider the s, d and f blocks then we can classify them into different symmetry categories and using group theory, predict what geometrical features the p atoms have which the others don’t.

It can get a bit confusing, as the shapes in atoms aren’t always exact because they can distort and mix with each other upon bonding (as indeed iron does when it binds in Hemoglobin) but if we take this as our basis then the various p-orbitals can still be put into the groups that are separate from the s, d and f groups. This gets us as close as possible to accounting for Magneto’s metal controlling ability.

So what about the 8 metals in the p block? There are eight elements in the p block which are metals “in bulk” but in the atomic form have no magical properties. So these are metals, which Magneto should have no control over…so why was his prison not made of these metals? (Surely simpler than building a plastic facility)

Well, seven of them can be accounted for. Thallium, Lead and Bismuth are all highly toxic, so you can’t build a prison out of them; after a few months of touching the walls or breathing the air, he’d build up a high concentration in his blood and would die horribly (fair for a super-villain perhaps, but a breach of his mutant rights). Indium and Tin are both quite soft metals that can be pushed around quite easily, so not really ideal for making a prison. Gallium has the property of melting in the palm of your hand (melting point similar to that of chocolate) and so to escape Magneto could press against the walls and liquefy the cell.

Thanking her lucky stars she's not made of gallium. Though she did melt anyway.

Which leaves one element. It’s cheap, very common, can be made quite strong and is not particularly toxic that is also in the p block. Aluminium. Of course if we assume that there is some other property of Aluminium’s shape that allows him to control it, then we must remember that Boron (not a metal) has an identical shape and very similar chemical and physical properties. So if there’s something we’ve missed, Magneto should be able to control Boron as well. How can we account for this?

Thankfully we do have an escape clause. Nowadays, very little is actually made from pure Aluminium. Usually we use an alloy of Aluminium and another metal. (An alloy is a colloid of one metal suspended in another, like hot chocolate, where the milk is one metal and the chocolate powder is another—apparenlty milk is my go-to analogy in this article.) So when Magneto appears to be controlling aluminium, he must actually be controlling the other metal in the alloy. Even Aluminium foil is at best 99% Aluminium, so he must be controlling the 1% other metal! In fact, this could get us out of a lot of holes, because if he is ever shown controlling Lead pipes (sounds like something we’d see him do) then we can just claim it’s the other metal impurities. Magneto’s powers are demonstrably not magnitude dependent because he can extract one atom at a time from a person’s bloodstream, so a 1% impurity would be all he needs (far less in fact) to control pieces of aluminium.

Other interesting implications of this are that it tells us at least one property of Adamantium (the metal of Wolverine’s body). If we go with the comic canon it’s an alloy of steel and fictional metal Vibranium. The steel is mostly Iron so that’s how he can manipulate it. If we follow the film canon, then Vibranium is a metal found in meteorites and is in fact an element. We know from the foregoing analysis that it can’t be a p block element. Its minimum atomic weight must therefore be 119 (as all the other undiscovered metals are in the p block) making it very heavy and highly radioactive—but of course radioactivity wouldn’t bother Wolverine’s constant re-healing ability.

Another important implication: Magneto should be able to control Biothene, a naturally degrading plastic that contains Cobalt Stearate in a tiny amount. So while the government wants to fight Magneto, they’d better use environmentally unfriendly plastic to mold their guns. Otherwise there could be trouble!

Recall that Magneto cannot control Tin. This man may be our only hope of defeating him.

Whatever magnetic force you’re feeling—attraction or repulsion—sound off in the comments!

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What...the...hell...is...going...on???

While watching Christopher Nolan’s Inception, my mind wast mostly turned to jello from trying to make sense of the movie’s mechanics. Why exactly does the falling van cause weightlessness in the 2nd hotel level, but not the 3rd ice level? Why do they need the fancy dream machines when they’re already inside the dream? What is Christopher Nolan on, and where I can I get myself some of that?

The few solid chunks of brain matter I had remaining, however, asked a far simpler question:

Haven’t any of the characters in this movie seen Total Recall?

Or The Matrix?

I don’t know about you, but if I were an elite dream-hacker who dealt constantly with the possibility that my current state of consciousness was a dream and not reality, I’d be constantly making references to these kinds of movies. Well, part of that’s due to the fact that I’m a pop culture reference kind of guy, but it’s also just how most people--not just Overthinkers--go through our lives and interact with friends: we talk about pop culture together, and we connect events in our lives with related works of pop culture.

Inception is devoid of any such references. For all we know, in the universe of Inception, there are no movies whatsoever, or if there are movies, then these characters have either never seen them or have seen them but never talk about them (on screen). What’s going on? Are they living in some sort of, say, dream world that’s divorced from reality? Well, probably (more on that later). But here’s the interesting thing: movies don’t seem to exist in this world, or at least the characters don’t show any awareness of them, but pop music clearly does, and the characters are aware of this. Hence the prominent use of the Edith Piaf song “Je ne regrette rien.”

So the characters in Inception exhibit zero knowledge of any movies, but they do know at least one pop song that the audience also knows. This got me thinking about how this works in other movies: sometimes, characters make reference to one or two movies; occasionally, they’ll make lots of references, and their actions will be highly influenced by movies they’ve seen.

Likewise, with music, a movie can have zero instances of pop music playing that the characters recognize, a few scattered instances, or multiple instances of characters jamming along to our pop music and being highly influenced by it.

Strangely, though, characters’ knowledge of movies and music function independently in movies. In some movies like Inception, characters can be aware of pop music, but not movies. In higly self-aware movies like Kick-Ass, characters exhibit knowledge of, and are highly influenced by, many movies, while exhibiting no knowledge of in-universe pop music.

Hmm. This calls for a chart. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Overthinking It Pop Culture Awareness in Movies Matrix, or as I like to say, OTIPCAIMM.

I couldn't come up with a "Low Movies, No Music" example. Hit me in the comments if you've got one.

So what does this all mean?

First, it’s eminently clear that having characters show a high level of awareness of both movies and music is by no means indicative of the realism of movies. If that were the case, then Hot Tub Time Machine would be a gripping drama of coming to terms with adulthood and life choices instead of…well, this:

One thing, though, seems to be clear: it’s very difficult to make a serious (i.e., non-comedic) movie in which characters exhibit a high level of awareness of other movies. It calls attention to the audience that they are, in fact, watching a movie, which can help a comedy/action farce get away with a high degree of unrealism, but would obviously hurt a serious sci-fi movie that’s trying to sell you on the idea of, say, “red matter.”

Awareness of music has the opposite effect. A well-placed pop song--”As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, “Tiny Dancer” in Almost Famous--creates a bridge of common understanding between the characters in a movie and the audience without the plot baggage of the common understanding of movies.

Now, let’s come back to Inception. By this logic, the combination of lack of movie references plus one key music reference should be a good combination for selling the realism of the movie to the audience, right? Mostly.

Let’s imagine what Inception would have been like if the characters had shown awareness of movies like Total Recall and The Matrix through their dialogue and actions. Most likely, it would have come in the form of sarcastic remarks from Ellen Page, which would have had brought audiences back to her role in Juno. Chris Nolan, obviously aware of the meta-casting implications of Marion Cotillard (she played Edith Piaf in the biopic La Vie en Rose), clearly would not have wanted to make such a connection with Ellen Page.

Beyond this specific meta-casting issue, there’s the issue of “selling reality” to the audience. After all, Nolan isn’t exactly trying to sell “realism” to the audience in the way that a typical action/drama movie would. He actually wants the audience to question reality, but only on his terms. Making references to Total Recall and The Matrix, even if they were throw-away, would have taken the audience out of Nolan’s carefully constructed universe and its very specific rules. In this universe, there’s no room for Total Recall or Matrix rules to distract the viewer.

Arnold: unfortunately not likely to star in a Chris Nolan movie anytime soon

Plus, “Get your ass to Mars!” is not the kind of catchy one-liner that Christopher Nolan is apt to allow in his movies.

As for the music, well, it’s a little more complicated. As I mentioned before, the song “Je ne regrette rien” is the only work of pop culture that we’re made aware of in the world of Inception. The song functions as a recognizable pop song in a movie should: it highlights the poignancy of Cobb’s regrets and mental anguish through the poignancy of the song and the irony of the lyrics (“I regret nothing” vs “I regret, well, everything). But we have this additional layer of reality-questioning that we must reconcile such an association with. If, by the end of the movie, we’re left questioning whether Cobb’s anguish was “real” or not, then we’re also left questioning the “reality” of the poignancy evoked through the song. But that doesn’t mean it was just a throw-away. At the very least, the presence of this song means that somewhere in this movie, there is in fact a grounded reality that at least has common roots with our own reality. Even if everything we saw in the movie was Cobb’s--or someone else’s--dream, we at least know that the dreamer lives in a universe where Edith Piaf and “Je ne regrette rien” also exist.

But all of this only applies to those in the audience who are actually familiar with this song. Although it’s a fairly famous and popular song throughout the world, it’s still a French song. Plenty of people who saw Inception (a major studio tentpole marketed to a broad American audience) probably don’t know the name Edith Piaf, nor are they consciously aware of the song “Je ne regrette rien.” Yet Nolan was probably counting on those people to have a faint outline or little fragments in their mind of Edith Piaf and her voice. They probably heard it in Saving Private Ryan or in a number of other pop culture works that reference France. Her voice is unique among unique voices to the point where anyone who’s heard it at least a few times would get at least a few hints of recognition from “Je ne regrette rien.”

The people in the audience who fall into this category don’t get the full effect of song recognition, but instead, they get little twinges of recall to something they think they might have heard before but aren’t completely sure. You might event say it’s activating a subconscious memory of the song. Or replicating the effect of trying to remember a dream.

How cool is that? Damn. Christopher Nolan is a genius.

Okay, maybe this reading is a bit of a stretch. Even if it is, I still think that Inception provides us with an interesting opportunity to Overthink the way movies choose to depict pop culture awareness in their characters. So many of our movies purport to exist in our “real world” yet have vastly different ways of reflecting the “real world’s” pop culture, if they choose to at all.

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Compare that to OverthinkingIt.com, where a search for “reality” turns up over 179 articles, including a lot of Lost, Back to the Future and Total Recall commentary.  Meanwhile, searches for “reality TV” and “reality show” turn up fewer results, most of them in the comments section or on an open thread.  A couple of years ago, frequent commenter Gab asked “does anybody watch any reality TV, or is that… below… the Overthinkingit uh, cast?”

Only CSI will survive...

We’re not above reality TV (or much of anything, really), but that side of popular culture can be difficult to Overthink.   While we can examine the characters, the production and the terrors that these shows presage for our society, this site tends to deal with broader themes.

Wikipedia says that there are ten subgenres of reality TV, but I argue that there are only four themes.

1) Competition – which of these dancers, apprentices, singers, travelers, eaters, attention whores, drug addicts, chefs, midgets will win the day?  (America’s Next Top Model, So You Think You Can Dance, America’s Got Talent, Celebrity Apprentice, The Amazing Race, Dance Your Ass Off, American Idol, Fear Factor, Project Runway, Last Comic Standing, Iron Chef, Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, almost everything on the Food Network)

2) Awful people being awful. (Real Housewives, Tool Academy, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Toddlers & Tiaras, Jersey Shore, The Osbornes, Bridezillas, Jon & Kate Plus 8, Girls Next Door, etc.)

3) Saving people from themselves.  (Biggest Loser, Clean House, What Not to Wear, Extreme Makeover: Every Edition, Supernanny, Intervention, Hoarders, OCD Project, Inner Beauty)

4) Doing your job.  (Ice Road Truckers, Ace of Cakes, Cake Boss, Dirty Jobs, Miami Ink, Pawn Stars, Pit Boss)

Guess which theme this one is?

Hard to overthink those few basic themes, but for this Underthought juggernaut of the popular culture, it’s worth a shot.   I plan to spend the next few posts taking a look at reality shows and trying to dig a little deeper.

First, I want to take a look at Food Network and the food shows on Bravo.   Having been subjected to countless hours of these shows in recent weeks, one thing has become clear: the producers of the Food Network are pornographers.

Pornography’s attempts to stimulate its audience are handicapped, seeking to approximate the full-on sexual experience with only two of the five senses.   In order to make up for the fact that you can’t touch, taste or smell the folks getting it on for you, porn has to provide additional stimuli.   Though lots of fun for those involved using all five senses, watching and listening two normally sized Americans have basic Wednesday night missionary sex in a bed just isn’t doing it for us anymore.   First, they started hiring insanely beautiful women.  Then those women started getting surgically altered to look like Jessica Rabbit.  Now there are whole websites dedicated to tying up midgets in public settings—you’ll have to google that yourself. The unusual makes up for the handicaps of the medium.

"They said that if I didn't pose in those pictures, Roger would never work in this town again!"

Food shows are forced to do the same thing.

A television network devoted to food is like an art appreciation class for the blind – the key elements of the discussion just aren’t going to come through.  Imagine the investor meeting for the Food Network.   A journalist from the Providence Journal in Rhode Island goes into the offices of Scripps Networks Interactive (true) and says: “We’re going to do an entire channel about food.”   The Scripps executive says: “But food is all about taste, smell and texture and we haven’t even perfected smell-o-vision.”  The journalist then pulls out his extensive blackmail file on the executive and the rest is history.

If the network primarily hosted shows on HOW to cook, it would make sense.  That sort of information can be transmitted through audiovisual means.  Instead of pornographers, the Food Network producers would be the culinary equivalent of the folks who made the filmstrips you slept through in middle school.

But that’s not what the network does.   Some of their programs focus on interesting food from exotic locations, sort of a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous “you’ll never get to eat this, you plebian” gastronomic tease.   The majority of food shows, however, focus on competition between chefs.  This is where it gets pornographic.

...and this is where it gets kinky.

The basic setup of every food-related competition show is this:

A number of cooks will be given a limited amount of time and a specific theme and/or ingredient.

The cooks run around a lot and cut up lots of things.  This is interspersed by interviews in which each cook gets to gripe about the limitations of the special ingredient, take shots at their competitors, or talk about their boundless confidence/crippling lack thereof.

The food is presented to the judges.  They eat, then critique the meal in front of them using words that sound really impressive to the uninitiated (favorite recent example: “acidity”).  Whenever something bad is said about a dish, on any show, the same ominous bass drum sound effect moves us on to the next contestant.

One of the contestants is eliminated.  Rinse.  Repeat. We’ve just spent an hour watching people make food that we’ll never get to eat.

Like their friends Hugh Hefner, Larry Flint and that douchebag from Girls Gone Wild, the Food Network producers have figured out what they can give us that will make up for the fact that we derive no actual satisfaction from what they have to offer.

"Don't you wish that YOU could taste this delicious pepper?"

In this case, they’ve added two completely extraneous elements:  surprise ingredients and time limits, the twin breast implants of the food show world.

I spent a few months in a restaurant kitchen and have had sex once or twice.  I’ve never witnessed a chef presented with rattlesnake meat or forced to prepare a desert with marshmallows, risotto and bamboo chutes.  I’ve also never had a woman beg me for a facial.  These things do not, and should not, actually happen.

What they do is make up for the fact that neither the enormous fake boobs nor the braised scallops in a reduction of blueberries and pine nuts are actually going in your mouth.

Thanks to my girlfriend, I am fairly familiar with Top Chef, Say Yes to the Dress, Chopped, Clean House, Ace of Cakes and Cupcake Wars.  Thanks to being alive, I am familiar with Big Brother, Real World, Top Model, American Idol, So you Think You Can Dance and the biggest new hit: Wipeout.  Thanks to Belinkie, I knew Iron Chef before it came to the states (and saw God of Cookery ten years ago, before anyone in the US knew who Stephen Chow was).  Beyond that, I’m a novice, so I’m calling on our commenters to suggest new reality shows to Overthink.

Next time: “From Jim Carrey to Snooki: the false promise of the Truman Show.”

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The Younger Edda depicts Baldr, reputed for his untarnished beauty. His mother, Freya Frigg, is so paranoid for his health and looks that she exacts an oath from everything on the planet, living and inanimate, that it will not hurt Baldr. Everything that she talks to promises to back off -- except a sprig of mistletoe that she overlooks. Bitter with jealousy at the glorious Baldr, Loki fashions a dart out of mistletoe. One day, while the gods are playing a game of Throw Things At Baldr And Watch Them Veer Away At The Last Second, Loki hands the dart to the blind god Hodr and suggests he play too. Hodr flings the mistletoe, Loki guides it home, and Baldr is struck down dead. As punishment, Loki is caught and bound beneath the Earth under a snake which drips venom on his face. This torture contributes to Loki siding with the giants, rather than the gods, during Ragnarok.

Also, Loki is the father of, among other things, the World Serpent Jormundgandr. Raised in the land of the giants, Jormundgandr grows so large that it encircles the world. When it lets go of its own tail, on the day of Ragnarok, the world will literally fall apart.

So Loki is the trickster god. He can create pleasing illusions. He strikes at vanities. He triumphs over brawnier foes. Does that sound like anyone else we know?

Old Spice has been known for the direct, ironic earnestness of its ads for some time. Remember the Bruce Campbell ads? The hairy guy in the gym? The LL Cool J ads? Old Spice has been pushing the envelope for some time. But the new ads -- which I’m calling the Isaiah Mustafah ads, after the actor who appears in them -- take it to an even more ridiculous level.

The world Mustafah lives in continually changes. First he’s in a shower. Then he’s on a boat. Then he’s riding a horse. In the most recent commercial, he’s on a beach, then is rolling a log, then is walking through a kitchen into a rocky river, which he dives off of into a hot tub. Mustafah displays power over his own appearance as well. He starts off wearing a towel, then wearing a sweater, then wearing a bathing suit, then jeans. The one constant seems to be that he’s shirtless and grinning. He can even transform objects with a word. “It’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again! The tickets are now diamonds!”

Like Loki’s feud with Baldr, Mustafah attacks masculine vanity. “Sadly, [your man] isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady-scented bodywash and started using Old Spice, he could smell like me.” That’s as unapologetic a slam against the viewer’s appearance as I’ve ever heard. “You’re ugly. Your only hope of looking as good as me is to smell like me.” Baldr couldn’t stand up to an assault like that.

Loki (for which read Mustafah) has also triumphed over Thor (for which read Terry Crews). Old Spice launched a similar series of ridiculous commercials at the same time, featuring actor and bodybuilder Crews flexing and screaming at the camera. These commercials, while also absurd, have not done nearly as well. American audiences prefer the soothing guile of Loki to the berserker might of Thor.

Finally, this Old Spice commercial, like Loki, will bring about the end of the world in a cataclysmic battle.

Ever since reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I’ve been on the lookout for the commercial that will destroy America.

For those who haven’t read his po-mo doorstop, it describes (among other things) an escalating war of outrageousness between TV ad agencies at the end of the 20th century. It culminates in an ad for a hygienic tongue scraper. Foster Wallace describes an ad in which a pedestrian is offered a lick of a sidewalk vendor’s ice cream cone by a cute meter maid. As horrible as it is, he describes it in sentence fragments:

The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise. The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid’s face going slack with disgust as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers. The nightmarish slo-mo with which the mortified pedestrian reels away into street traffic with his whole arm over his mouth, the avuncular vendor’s kindly face now hateful and writhing as he hurls hygienic invectives.

These ads shook viewers to the existential core [...] V&V’s NoCoat campaign was a case study in the eschatology of emotional appeals. It towered, a kind of Uber-ad, casting a shaggy shadow back across a whole century of broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely, given the vulnerable psyche of an increasingly hygiene-conscious U.S.A. in those times.

The fictional NoCoat advertising campaign is the most singly effective ad campaign in the history of television and it destroys the television industry. It creates in its audience a terrifying compulsion to buy the advertised product. At the same time, it repulses the audience so much that no one’s willing to watch TV anymore.

The form of the destructor.

Ever since reading Infinite Jest (which I did only recently), I’ve been watching the growing Sturm und Drang surrounding commercials with fascination. For one thing, they have continued to escalate anxieties much as Foster Wallace predicted. Consider the really creepy Super Bowl commercials in 2010. Or the gloomy Tiger Woods Nike commercial, which (figuratively) flagellated Tiger Woods for his sins. Commercials have always played on fears and desires. But it seems, of late, that their messaging has gone (to paraphrase The Simpsons) from the subliminal to the liminal, and perhaps as far as the superliminal.

But one thing that Foster Wallace never predicted was the notion of viral commercials.

For the first hundred years of spectrum broadcast media, commercials were an unwanted burden. They were accompanied by jingles meant to trap them in your head. They were accompanied by gorgeous models and celebrity spokesmen. As the commercial airspace grew more crowded, they escalated the ridiculousness of their imagery. And no one was immune to their effects. The same cynical hipsters who laugh at Hummer commercials fall for the slick packaging of Apple products. The Midwesterners who snicker at products for feminine needs still order more Budweiser than any other beer. Commercials are like pollution -- the price we pay for the wealth of entertainment. Nobody likes them, but we could not have as many shows and movies as we have without them.

Around the dawn of YouTube, however, the younger and nimbler ad agencies realized something. “Hey,” someone said, “if we make a commercial that’s ironic enough to appeal to the 18-35 demographic, they’ll circulate it for us. And people will watch it voluntarily!” Enter the viral video.

Look at your hand. What’s this? It’s a talk by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, given at TED in June 2010.

Look again. The talk is now a prophecy of doom.

Conventional wisdom has it that “word of mouth is the best form of marketing.” This is kind of like saying water is the best way of hydrating the human body: it’s obvious until someone starts getting paid to make alternatives. You might reverse it and say marketing is a crappy way of imitating word of mouth. And it is. Celebrity spokesmodels, touting buzzwords as virtues, are cheap imitations of the recommendation of a friend.

If Clay Shirky were talking about marketing instead of picking up kids at daycare, he’d say that marketing isn’t as good as word of mouth because marketing slaps a price structure on top of what was once a generous exchange of information. Marketers imitate friendship. But because friendship’s rather precious, they have to pay someone -- a publisher -- for the privilege. The publisher has to, in turn, find a way to get the marketer’s message to as many viewers as possible. This is a slow and inefficient process.

Until commercials go viral.

Suddenly, the multi-billion dollar marketing industry (creative, powerful) is now hitched onto the process of word of mouth (friendly, trustworthy). What’s more, it’s accelerated by the speed of the global fiber-optic communications network (fast, reliable). It’s like the dead are besieging Asgard in Thor’s magic chariot, as opposed to a ship made out of fingernails (ick).

The three most powerful forces in the world -- marketing, community and the Internet -- have joined forces to make sure you know what Isaiah Mustafah smells like.

CHECK OUT THIS HILARIOUS WEDDING DANCE, MORTAL!

Why is this so dire? Because there’s no going back from it. Every producer of consumer packaged goods, the next time they sit down to renew their ad agency contract, is going to say, “We want to make a really cool video. One that’ll go viral. You know, like that Old Spice ad.” And since ad agencies justify their budgets by beating their competitors, they’ll have to come up with something even more eye-catching to top Old Spice.

How do you come up with something more entertaining and shareable than Isaiah Mustafah? I have no clue. I couldn’t have conceived of such a commercial in the first place. But I can’t stop watching it. That weird blend of charisma, absurdity and ironic earnestness have lodged in just the right corner of my brain. And 14 million YouTube users agree with me.

In less than ten years, commercials will be nonsense slurs of random images, non sequitur dialogue and explosions. Marketers will spam the Internet with thousands of ads in a day, hoping that one will go viral and validate their budget for the fiscal year. Trunk lines will groan with the effort of funneling videos of arm-wrestling pandas selling Pringles, plush UFOs with googly eyes touting Old Navy and the inimitable Geico Gecko.

And the World Serpent will uncoil its tail, Fenrir will break free from its subterranean prison, and the Fimbulwinter will begin.

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I think Steinbrenner could have pulled this look off.

To say that George Steinbrenner was the owner of the New York Yankees would be like saying Michael Jackson was a pop singer; it’s technically true, but both men were so much more. Both were driven by the desire to be loved by their fathers (a desire that went unrealized), both reached such a level of omnipresence on the pop-culture landscape that you couldn’t hope to be neutral about them, and both went through money like W.C. Fields in a liquor store. The Boss and the King of Pop were massive in terms of ego, but hidden beneath the bluster were small kids forever yearning for love.

You might think it’s crazy to compare Steinbrenner to Jacko, but both men, separated in death by a year, were contemporaries in terms of when they rose to the public spotlight. When George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1973, promising to be a “hands off” owner, Michael Jackson was still the kid brother of the Jackson 5, taking baby steps towards his own solo career. I won’t belabor the MJ/Steinbrenner comparisons further except to say that both men experienced ecstatic highs and soul-crushing lows, somehow managing to remain in the public eye until the day each died.

George Steinbrenner, the New York institution for so many years, was an outsider; born and bred in the Midwest, a native son of Cleveland, Ohio. His father ran a shipping business, and that’s how George managed to make his money. He came to New York as an unknown entity, certainly a step up from the CBS-led management team that had led the Yankees to nearly a decade of futility, with only an occasional sniff at the postseason. By the time he relinquished control Lear-like to his two sons in 2007, the Yankees were restored as perennial winners or contenders with a domestic worth that made them the envy of sports teams everywhere. George III (he really was “George III”) was not the first team owner to transcend the confines of sports culture and make an imprint on the wider world, but he was most certainly the most colorful.

Steinbrenner, “the Boss,” was a quintessential New Yorker, brash and arrogant and convinced that he was always right (especially when he was frequently wrong). His tyrannical rule squashed the late Seventies renaissance in the Bronx and sent it into a decade-plus of irrelevance and mediocrity. He became the symbol of everything that was wrong with baseball in the free agency era, and he paid a huge price for that. Banned twice from baseball (once for contributing to Nixon’s appropriately named “CREEP” re-election effort, another time for trying to find dirt on Dave Winfield), he managed to come back and serve as the thorn in the side of whoever was the baseball commissioner that week. Even Joe Torre’s late-Nineties run of four championships wasn’t enough; eventually the longest-tenured of the Steinbrenner-era managers jumped ship for Los Angeles.

But more than just symbolizing the Yankees, Steinbrenner came to invade a wider cultural landscape. In the mid-Nineties, he became a recurring character on Seinfeld, hiring eternal schlemiel George Costanza and berating the hapless underling in vintage Steinbrenner-ese. The brash, outspoken and arrogant owner of the Seventies and Eighties became something of a comedic foil for the other George, a demented teddy bear who spouted off crazy lines (courtesy of the pen and voice of series creator Larry David) that didn’t seem out of place in Jerry Seinfeld’s bizarre world. Dorothy had pulled back the curtain on the Wizard, and it turned out that he wasn’t quite as awful as he had been made out to be (Steinbrenner’s former and current employees might have begged to differ).

In Seinfeld, Steinbrenner (reportedly a fan of the show) found a new public image, albeit one that he did little to contribute to. Sure, he had held a revolving door of managers over the years, including his legendary back-and-forth with Billy Martin. But he took ideas from Costanza and kept him on the Yankee payroll, earning laughs as he did so. King George had no clothes, so to speak, and was less hateful to the Yankee faithful as a result. It might be stretching it to say that Seinfeld gave the world a kinder, gentler George Steinbrenner, but it certainly helped make him warm and fuzzy for those yearning for the glory days once again.

When the Yankees returned to the fall classic for the first time in 1996, I found myself rooting for them even though I was a Braves fan. The last championship had occurred a year before I was born, and I grew up only knowing the Bronx Zoo, Mr. October, and the Martin/Steinbrenner soap opera only through hastily-written memoirs from former players. For eighteen years, the Yankees had stunk, and George was at the wheel, steering his own personal Titanic well past the surface of the ocean. Now, finally stepping back to let his executives run the show (though not completely hands-off), he could sit back and enjoy a Yankees victory. The meddling must have begun the day after the final Series-clinching game, considering how many has-beens were signed to the Yanks in the intervening years (Jose Canseco being the most obvious “what the hell were they thinking?” signing of all time). Buster Olney wrote about how Steinbrenner couldn’t leave well enough alone in The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, and it’s true that while the Yankees did win four championships they spent the next decade struggling to get back, all thanks to the return of King George.

Eventually, though, like an aged monarch whose vision was dimmed by the onset of madness or senility, Steinbrenner realized that he was not fit to run the team anymore. Giving his sons (Hal and Hank) the reins, George retired from public life, not quite Howard Hughes but similarly out of the harsh light of public scrutiny. And wouldn’t you know, the Yanks won last year with George nowhere near to screw it up.

But as is often the case with a person thrust into the public eye, the persona that he presented to the public was less than rounded. Steinbrenner may have been the “man you love to hate,” but he quietly donated millions to charity over the years out of his own pocket. For every fading-star role player he overpaid for, he balanced his checkbook by giving generously to those less fortunate than him. It may have been a publicity stunt, except for the fact that you never heard Steinbrenner boast about it. In public, he was blustery and bombastic, but in the days after his death former employees and others who benefited from his largesse helped construct a fuller portrait of a much more complicated man.

Love him or hate him (and as many Yankees fans could tell you, it was possible to experience both emotions within the same sentence), Steinbrenner was the last of a dying breed, the owner as the public face of the franchise. His extremely visible presence in the world of the Yankees and Major League Baseball left little doubt as to who was the biggest, the baddest, the one with the most cake. Unlike other colorful owners of an earlier era (O’Malley with the Dodgers, Finley with the A’s), Steinbrenner never moved his team from its urban confines, nor did he spare the checkbook if he thought he could win. And as he would tell you, he thought he could win every year. Whether he was good for baseball or not, it’s safe to say that the game will never be the same after he’s long gone. George Steinbrenner was the New York Yankees, and that will never change.

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SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals significant plot details for the first third of Knight and Day, details that the trailers and commercials have done a very good job of keeping from you. No major spoilers are involved, but If you haven’t already seen the movie and you don’t want the inciting incident ruined for you, you may want to hold off.

By far one of my favorite articles ever published on Overthinking It is Matthew Belinkie’s explanation of the “Ghost Ship Moment.” This is a great article because it doesn’t just explore one movie in unnecessary detail, it gives readers a tool with which they can explore a number of movies in unnecessary detail. Belinkie doesn’t just give the reader a fish, he teaches them how to fish.

(To review: a Ghost Ship Moment—aka a Moment of Recognition—is when the information of the protagonist catches up to the information that the audience has going into the movie, based on the title, a plot synopsis, trailers and reviews. A classic example is Stranger than Fiction: when Harold Crick starts hearing Karen Eiffel and realizes he is a character in a novel, he finally understands what the rest of us watched the movie to see)

Understanding how this concept is used in movies can be quite entertaining. In Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright plays with how long he can keep his protagonists from reaching the Ghost Ship Moment. We know that there will be zombies in the movie, but the GSM doesn’t arrive until we have already seen zombies, seen Shaun see zombies and then seen Shaun and Ed fight zombies, not really having any awareness of the fact that they are actually in a zombie movie. This is a plot conceit from which a considerable amount of both comedy and social commentary are derived.

So typically, yes, the protagonist reaches a point where they realize what kind of movie they are in; at the very least the genre or the main plot, if not all of the important details. From there on, they know how to act, be it to chase after the girl of their dreams or run away from the man from their nightmares. But what if a character was wrong? What if the protagonist figures out what they have just gotten themselves into only to then be proven completely incorrect in their assumption? You would have the only interesting aspect of Knight and Day, that’s what.

Imagine this plot synopsis for a film: June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is a beautiful woman who rebuilds classic cars for a living. Unfortunately, she always plays her life safe, never doing any of the exciting things she has dreamed of doing, like traveling to exotic lands … or falling in love. At the airport on the way to her sister’s wedding, June accidentally bumps into the dashingly handsome and charming Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) twice, and then finds out that the two are on the same flight. Is this fate bringing them together? And if it is, will June finally take the chance she’s been afraid of taking and throw herself into Roy’s arms?

It’s fairly obvious, from this synopsis, that the film in question is a pretty mediocre looking romantic comedy. It’s about a gorgeous woman with a unique job and an obvious character flaw that is the reason she’s single. She’s on her way to her sister’s wedding—a classic rom-com set-up—and through a series of coincidences she meets the man of her dreams and has to take risks she usually would avoid to snag him. Even the cast fits, as Diaz and Cruise would be perfect for this sort of film. Also, the main character’s name is June and her sister’s name is April, which is bad even by typical rom-com standards.

There’s just one problem: Knight and Day isn’t a romantic comedy. Anybody who’s seen a trailer or a commercial knows that it’s an action comedy. Yes it has romantic undertones, but really the action is the skeleton and the comedy is the flesh. I guess the romance is the blood, if that metaphor makes sense at all. Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that June Havens is not a romantic comedy protagonist. But she doesn’t know that.

June’s misconception about the type of movie she is in leads to the most interesting part of the film, which is the Red Herring Ghost Ship Moment (RH/GSM). June is on a strangely empty plane, sitting near Roy, of whom she is clearly enamored. She starts talking about all of the places she wants to someday visit, making it clear her character flaw of cautiousness (a classic rom-com protagonist flaw). Roy starts telling her that he has been to all of those places and more, and it’s clear that he has the exciting life she dreams of. “Someday means never,” he tells her, criticizing her caution. She realizes that if she doesn’t take what she wants she’ll never get it. And she wants Roy.

Of course, outside of June’s perspective we are given a significant amount of information that confirms that we are watching an action movie. We learn that Roy Miller is on the run from some sort of government organization, and we’re relatively certain they want to kill him. We suspect that his accidental run-ins with June are no accident, but we don’t know exactly how she fits into the story. What we do know is that this movie is no romantic comedy.

Which brings us to the RH/GSM. While chatting with Roy on the plane, June excuses herself to go to the bathroom. The scene that follows features some incredibly clever cross-cutting between two very different scenes. In the bathroom, June is talking to herself, trying to convince herself to go out there and make her move on Roy. She thinks this is her Ghost Ship Moment, and she is in a movie in which two strangers meet through acts of fate and one of them has to take a chance and go after the other. Outside of the bathroom, Roy is involved in a fight with every passenger and crewmember on the plane, stabbing and shooting everyone in his way. By the end of the scene, June has decided to go out there and kiss Roy, and everyone other than the two of them is dead, including both pilots.

When June comes out of the bathroom, she is oblivious to the dead bodies around her, and she does indeed kiss the crap out of Roy. She is so convinced that her story is a romantic comedy that she cannot deal with the action movie reality. When Roy tells her that there is a problem, her first assumption is that Roy is in a relationship, which is a totally reasonable leap to make in a romantic comedy. Two strangers with great chemistry meet via fate, so naturally there has to be conflict. In a rom-com world, one of the protagonists being in a relationship is a disaster.

Of course, this is an action movie, where the stakes are much higher, and the problem to which Roy is referring is the fact that he will have to land the plane himself. Also bad guys are trying to kill him, and they now probably think that June is working with him. Makes the conflict that would arise from Roy being in a relationship pretty slight, right? But June is so entrenched in her rom-com mindset that she starts laughing, unwilling to believe the situation that she is in. This may sound unrealistic, but it’s a perfectly reasonable reaction considering her genre. Imagine if Mathew McConaughey went to tell Jennifer Garner that he was in love with her in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and finds her in the process of defusing an atomic bomb. It would be totally at odds with both the character’s and the audience’s assumptions and not make any sense.

So when Roy lands the plane and drugs June, and she wakes up in her old house in Boston, she tries desperately to return to the romantic comedy in which she thinks she belongs. The next scene takes place at a dress shop where June is trying on her bridesmaid’s dress, which is a classic setup for a rom-com scene. But when government agents swarm around June, abducting her from the shop and telling her that Roy is a rogue agent, she is again violently pulled from rom-com territory into action movie land. The car chase that ensues is the real Ghost Ship Moment of the film, because June finally realizes what we already knew going in: she is involved in a high-stakes espionage thriller involving a rogue agent and lots of explosions.

June has one last moment where her life veers into rom-com territory, and again Roy interrupts it with his guns and shouting. June runs to her ex-boyfriend Rodney for protection. This makes sense because Rodney is a firefighter, a figure we associate with safety. Unfortunately, Rodney has not been through everything that June has, and also thinks that the situation they are in is a romantic comedy. If we assume that in everyone’s life they are the protagonist (a fairly safe assumption, I think), then his movie is about a regular Joe who gets a second chance with the love of his life, whom he let get away because he wanted to get engaged and she didn’t. June is frustrated at Rodney’s inability to process the information she is giving him, even though she was dealing with a similar situation in the exact same way just a few scenes before. Fortunately, Roy comes in and grabs June, proving to Rodney that he is nothing more than a distraction from the real story.

It is always very difficult for a character to come to terms with the fact that the movie they are in is entirely different from the movie they think they should be in. Usually this conflict arises from the interweaving of fiction and “reality” in a movie, such as when Jack Slater realizes that he is a fictional character in Last Action Hero or when Tom Baxter walks out of the screen, absolutely baffling Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But Knight and Day is not a meta film, making this conflict more unique and more intriguing. Unfortunately, once the real Ghost Ship Moment is established, that conflict is dropped, and the film becomes a straightforward action comedy with romantic undertones. Still, the way the film plays with the idea of the Ghost Ship Moment, and the tropes of romantic comedies and action movies, makes for a very entertaining first third of a movie.

P.S. If you only read this article because you were hoping I’d explain why this movie is called Knight and Day, I’ll oblige, although you’ll probably be disappointed. Tom Cruise is a rogue agent because he stole a small battery that never runs out of energy, which he refers to as the most powerful self-generating energy source since the sun, hence “day.” He hides the battery in a small plastic figurine of a medieval knight, hence “knight.” Also, it’s revealed near the end that Cruise faked his death and changed his name to Roy Miller, but his real name is Matthew Knight. In case you hadn’t realized by now, this is a fairly stupid film.

Tom Houseman writes movie reviews and covers the indie film scene for Box Office Prophets. He is compiling his collected writings about film and television at filmdepository.wordpress.com.

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Wrather: In The Beginning

I had started—or been involved in the starting of—a couple of websites before Overthinking It. (One abortive attempt, which we christened “The Singing Bus”, actually had some pretty good articles—including a version of Belinkie’s fabled NES Contra fanfic, Red Pants/Blue Pants—and a logo featuring a pickle driving a sports car. Long story.) All of them had limited appeal (even to the small audience of friends and family I convinced to read them), and all folded inside a month.

But like many of my generation, I was convinced that every thought in my head was worthy of publication, and as I cast about for a suitable topic for a website, one thought kept recurring to me: ”You know what’s fascinating? Us.”

You see, most of my smartest and funniest friends had gone to college with me, where we had been involved in the same extracurricular activity. A unique quirk of this organization was that during fall semester—what other, more athletically inclined classmates might have called “football season”—we were tasked with performing an original comedy show with music every Saturday afternoon. Which meant that every Sunday night, we would gather in someone’s dorm room, watch The Simpsons (back when it was good), and try our damnedest to make each other laugh as we dreamt up material for next week.

You can imagine that the obscure pop culture references came fast an furious—and, over time, the whole thing got pretty inside baseball as we, like the dread pirate Blackbeard, sought the mysterious doubloons of comedy gold. And then Belinkie would rewrite the whole damn thing until it was unrecognizable and much better.

(Dedicated fans will note that we record the Overthinking It Podcast on Sunday nights. It is, as Joe McCarthy would say, no accident.)

It was my goal, when I pitched the initial group of writers on my concept for this site, to recreate the feeling of those Sunday nights—watching Manos, The Hands of Fate or Shaft with your underdressed, overeducated pals, shooting Hot Damn and seeing who could make the most meta of jokes on IMDb—and invite an audience into our passion for obscure (and not-so-obscure) pop culture, our friendly one-upsmanship, and our sometimes rather odd obsessions. There was just one hitch.

I had no idea what to call it.

“Overthinking It” was, as I recall, suggested by Stokes. At the time, it was a positive and not a normative claim. It was a attempt—offhand, probably—to approximate what we did. We had no clue that one day we would shoot down one another’s ideas on our writers’ mailing list as lacking in overthink. But we made it our bed, and by gum, we’re going to lie in it.

You see, over time, “Overthinking It” has become our cri de coeur, the almost defiant exclamation of our relationship to the popular culture we love and yet must destroy with our analysis. The “over” in Overthinking It belies the fact that, to a person, we consider this stance a perfectly normal—healthy, even—way to relate to popular culture. And as the audience has widened, I am gratified to say that many agree.

But I am still mindful of those early, primal experiences of overthinking, and I notice that they were always social. And this is my small, provisional contribution to the definition we are working out in this article. Overthinking is a group activity. It was something I did with my friends. It still is—though I’m now proud to count among their numer the over one million people who have visited this website.

Here’s what they have to say.

Perich: SQUEE!

I’ve never been as comfortable embracing the enthusiasm of geek pursuits as others.  I like video games but I’m not an early adopter.  I read the occasional graphic novel but find most of what passes for drama in comics to be a bit silly.  I’m entertained by the work of nerd icons like Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, but I cringe at their faked cleverness.  The incoherent squealing that passes for criticism on most genre sites—where the only two settings are “SQUEE!” or “how DARE they?”—turns me off.  And the geek world’s continued obsession with tits and swords doesn’t help.

Maybe this makes me a snob.  Check that—my continued interest in a genre whose other adherents I disdain absolutely makes me a snob.  But I think this also explains why a lot of geek passions struggled for years to find mainstream acceptance.  Science-fiction, in the U.S., is as old as professional football.  And the #1 movie in America, for the past 30 years, is more likely to be sci-fi or fantasy than any other genre.  But it’s hard to say the same of #2 through #5.  D&D and the videogames that it inspired have become more mainstream, but you still won’t see a D&D convention game on ESPN2 at one in the morning (as you would with the World Series of Poker).

I think mass culture’s continued (though waning) skepticism toward geek culture comes from geeks’ refusal to translate.  Geeks get excited about obscure things.  That’s what makes them geeks.  But geeks have a hard time translating that excitement into a language that non-geeks can get.  They have a hard time critically evaluating their own passions.  This is why it just now occurred to DC to put some pants on Wonder Woman.

So that’s why I overthink.  I want to give geek culture—video games, RPGs and sci-fi movies—the language of sober analysis.  I want to turn the Coke-bottle lenses back in on themselves.  I want to teach people that mere enthusiasm is not enough to make something Good Art.  I want people to start thinking about their passions.

Stokes: Joseph Campbell/Roger Ebert Slashfic

My answer is exactly the opposite of John’s.

I Overthink because I am, like, an unabsashed, mouth-breathing fanboy.  But I am not a science fiction fanboy.  I am a science fiction fan—there’s a difference.  I am a fanboy for critical discourse. (This, by the way, is just about as socially unacceptable as being any other kind of fanboy.  Oh sure, most people know that someone is doing it somewhere, but tell someone outside of the ivory tower that “hey, I think Julia Kristeva is just the coolest,” and they’ll look at you like you’ve grown an extra head admitted that you spend most weekends dressing up in a fursuit and running around the woods pretending to be a wizard.)

Geeks of all stripes like to find outlets for their geekery, and OverthinkingIt.com is for me a daily Comic-Con, a safe space where I can void my lit-crit bile without censure. Why do I overthink? Because it feels so…damn…good!  Because, against all odds, we have found an audience whose reaction to our Joseph Campbell/Roger Ebert slashfic is, “That sounds totally hawt.”  Because the alternative, for me, is curling up in the corner on my life-size Michel Foucault body-pillow and crying myself to sleep.  If John is trying to bring analysis back to geeky hedonism, my goal is to bring the geeky hedonism back to analysis.

Mlawski: Doin’ it Granger Style

In tenth grade, we read Lord of the Flies, as tenth-graders are wont to do. At some point after we had completed the novel, my English teacher, Ms. Green-Lee, asked us to write a short essay on what we thought the book meant.

This came as a shock to me. Before that moment, I don’t believe I was ever asked to consider my own response to a novel beyond the obvious “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” In elementary school we read Number the Stars, and our teachers told us what Number the Stars was about. In middle school we read The Giver and Tuck Everlasting, and our teachers told us what The Giver and Tuck Everlasting were about. To be fair, when I was Bat Mitzvahed, I was told to write a sermon about the meaning of my assigned Torah portion, as I saw it. Unfortunately my portion was all about the proper way to sacrifice a goat, and I didn’t come up with a particularly nuanced interpretation.

Then, in tenth grade, Ms. Green-Lee sat us down in the computer lab and asked us to write an essay about the meaning of Lord of the Flies. I skimmed through the book, lingering on the pig-rape scene, and had an epiphany. “Yes, what is it, Shana?” Ms. Green-Lee said, seeing my hand rigid in the air.

“I know what the book is about!” I said. I was slightly breathless. “It’s about William Golding’s fear of sex!”

Ms. Green-Lee took a breath and paused. Fear of sex. I see. She appeared, shall we say, bemused. Then, with an awkward laugh she said, “Okay! And… can you, uh, support this claim with passages from the text?”

“Of course!” I said, flinging my book open, Granger-style. “Just look at the pig-hunt scene! It’s not just a pig—it’s a mother sow. Golding seems to believe that, without laws or government, pre-teen boys would immediately start raping their mothers!” I could see Golding in my mind’s eye, sweaty and breathing belaboredly as he wiped his glasses with a handkerchief. (In my mind, William Golding wore glasses and carried a handkerchief.) “Seriously!” I exclaimed, pointing down at my book. “He’s so scared of sex that he didn’t even put one girl in the whole thing!”

Ms. Green-Lee seemed to shake her head a little, but then she laughed again. “Okay!” she said again. I don’t think she agreed with my reading. But then she added, “Now write it down.”

So I did. And that is why I overthink.

Lee: Why do I Overthink? Because chicks dig it. Duh.

Seriously, though, I do it because it’s how I was taught to enjoy pop culture by the rest of the Overthinkers. When I met these guys in college, I was a young, naive product of an environment that lacked an appreciation for irony, subtext, alternative interpretations that deviate from the orthodoxy, amendments to the constitution other than the 2nd and 10th, etc. etc.

So imagine my shock when I discovered this motley crew of pop culture enthusiasts who enjoyed spending hours coming up with alternative porn titles to movies, analyzing the theological implications of Crom worship, and debating the ethical implications of killing thousands of stormtroopers on the Death Star for the greater good of the galactic rebellion. I was way out of my league, and way out of my comfort zone. At first I recoiled in fear. Then I came to embrace this way of thinking, not solely from peer pressure (though there were severe beatings involved at one point when I refused to acknowledge that one can appreciate “Freebird” ironically), but mostly from simply learning to appreciate things on more than one level. Two, most of the time. Three on a good day.

I don’t know if there was a specific moment when I realized I’d finally become one with my postmodern brothers and sisters. Perhaps it was that time we performed Oedipus Rex as a football halftime show. Or perhaps it was that time we organized a screening of the then-rare Mr. T VHS tape, Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool.

No, it was probably that moment when I organized a Terminator marathon and realized there were enough people in my life who shared in both my dedication to Arnold Schwarzenegger and lack of anything better to do for 6 hours than debate time travel paradoxes and Skynet’s tactical mistakes.

I was with friends then, and I’m so grateful that I’m still with them now.

Fenzel: The Rule of Three

I overthink for three reasons. Firstly, I believe we should never apologize for what we love. To shout your love from the rooftops is one of the great redemptive joys. I love the world I live in, I love humanity-of-the-now (as distinct from the Cool Tombs of Sandberg), I love the weird things humanity creates that it loves (I mean, soaps! Really! Shoes for sliding down railings!), and I love that it loves them. Yes, I only know a slice of it, as much as I know, but I feel the dual loves of the eater of birthday cake —I love my slice, and I love that, my slice taken, huge and frosted, there is still so… much… cake…

Sure, I could put aside my given slice and scour the earth, searching for a sliver of the finest cake, high in the Tibetan Himalayas, but nobody would ever dream of demanding better cake at as fine a birthday party as this.

Despite the fortunate worldly condition of many geeks, overthinking is democratizing in two ways—it formally elevates and legitimizes the downcast and illegitimate, and it mocks and deflates formal elevation and legitimization themselves in the process. It is both right and ridiculous at the same time, like most love that demands rooftop-shouting.

Secondly, I get to play the Shakespearean fool, who is able in a special way, to speak the truth. Even in our liberal society, there’s a lot an adult just plain can’t say, because of both internal and external factors. By framing what I’m saying as a little foolish or disposable, I hope to find and express greater honesty.

Thirdly, restrictions breed creativity. I love writing, talking and performing and love when I get to do a lot of it. Having a premise to work from gets me past the terror of the blank page and gets me going. Not the most romantic reason, but, pragmatically speaking, a very important one.

Belinkie: What, me Overthink?

I don’t think what we do here is Overthinking at all. Creating good pop culture is every bit as hard as creating good high culture. When they wanted to make Spider-man 2, they hired Michael Chabon to write the screenplay. This was right after he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Know what happened? They ended up tossing out most of his work. He also pitched movie plots for The Fantastic Four and X-Men, which were rejected. You could argue that this is just proof that movie studios don’t value talent or originality, but I don’t buy it. Movies just require a different kind of talent and originality. William Faulkner was one of the greatest writers in American history, but  he spent ten years trying to hack it in Hollywood and got only a few credits and a lot of writer’s block.

Great blockbusters are actually rarer than great novels, because while you can produce a novel by yourself, a movie takes the work of a thousand people. When something like The Dark Knight comes along, it’s a goddamn miracle. It’s the same thing with a great pop song, TV show, or even a commercial. Take the Old Spice guy who’s currently burning up the internet. You can dismiss it as silly fun and roll your eyes at anyone who takes it seriously. But there’s a world of ad agencies out there who spend all day, every day, trying to create a viral hit like that. “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Pirates of the Caribbean, Gossip Girl… whether you personally dig them or not, home runs like these take skill, hard work, and plain old serendipity. They may be designed for thoughtless consumption, but there’s a tremendous amount of thought that goes into their creation.

Our tag line is cute, but I don’t think any of us feel that we’re subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn’t deserve. We’re taking something many people take for granted and popping open the hood, to reveal just how complicated it is to create the simple pleasures in life.

[So, readers: Have we got it? Or are we, like, totally taking this website too seriously? I mean, c'mon, it's just for entertainment, right? Why do you overthink? Let us know in the comments.]

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Sort of. It’s actually a Whopper Bar, which is like Burger King’s cool younger brother. According to the official website, it’s a “premium dining experience,” and there are only three of them in the United States right now. (The Manhattan location will be the fourth.) When the New York Daily News reported on the Whopper Bar back in January, they made it sound like the whole appeal was the opportunity to buy a beer with your lunch. But in BK’s official press release, they claimed customization was the real attraction:

Sandwiches are built to order by an expert “WHOPPER®-ista” from the WHOPPER® Topper, a visible toppings theater that allows guests to choose from favorites like A.1.® Thick & Hearty steak sauce, smoked bacon, Angry onions and guacamole.

This isn’t your father’s Whopper!

Capitalizing on America’s favorite burger, the WHOPPER™ Bar is a completely new, enhanced spin-off concept of the traditional restaurant with a crisp, modern, bar-like look and feel that utilizes the WHOPPER® sandwich’s flame-broiling as inspiration. Crew uniforms will be transformed, emphasizing the red, black and gray color scheme of the bar setting, and boast a more contemporary cut that matches the look and feel of this bold new approach. Even the product packaging is all new. The sandwich will be served in an upgraded, carton-like box – a necessity when it comes to holding as many additional toppings as guests wish to add.

Okay, on second thought, it is actually your father’s Whopper. It’s just that every other aspect of the restaurant besides the burger has changed. (Also, side note: isn’t there a verb tense agreement error in the second sentence? Future tense (will be transformed) vs. present tense (boast)?)

Anyway, let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on with this Whopper Bar.

Burger King, as it turns out, has been doing meh business for most of our lifetimes. After a particularly rough patch in the mid-80s, it was bought by a British company, Grand Metropolitan. Its new owners drove the company further into the ground, and it was put up for sale in 2000. At this point, Burger King was losing a so much money that the Brits gave it away for $1.5 billion, significantly less than the asking price.

So now it’s 2002, and Burger King’s new owners are looking to beef up sales in an attempt to ketchup to McDonald’s. According to this revealing article in The Wall Street Journal, their strategy was to zero in on the “super fans,” 18-to-35-year-old dudes who made up half of the chain’s business:

Burger King tried to distinguish itself from rivals by addressing young men, in particular, like “the cool uncle who tells you how it is,” says John Schaufelberger, Burger King’s senior vice president of global product marketing and innovation.

I wonder if they gave John the job because his name contains the word “burger”?

Think about all those hipsteriffic commercials with The King, and compare him to Kid Vid. Burger King basically made a decision to sacrifice its appeal to kids and families and build its loyalty with the bros. From the article:

“We had multiple marketing meetings where we bemoaned that our kids’ meal sales had dropped dramatically, and that we didn’t have a dessert program, and the company said, ‘This is the way we’re doing it,’” says Julian Josephson, who owns 40 Burger Kings in the West and Southwest.

And for a while, the strategy worked. BK had 20 consecutive quarters of growth. Even considering how badly they were doing in 2000, that’s still impressive.

Then came the Recession. It was a tough time for everyone, but especially 18-to-35-year-old males. (According to one study, 82% of the jobs lost in 2008 were lost by men.) BK’s core customers just didn’t have Whopper money anymore, and its sales fell 4.6% in the third quarter of 2009 alone. During the same period, McDonald’s increased its sales by 2.5%. In other words, people were turning to McDonald’s as a necessity, but giving up Burger King as a luxury.

Meanwhile, one of the hottest food industry trends over the past decade is “fast casual.” These places fill the gap between Burger King and an actual sit-down tip-your-waitress restaurant. Think Panda Express, Panera, and especially Chipotle. I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

Counter service accompanied by handmade food (often visible via an open kitchen) is typical. Alcohol may be served. Dishes like steak may be offered. The menu is usually limited to an extended over-counter display, and options in the way the food is prepared are emphasized. Health-conscious items have a larger-than-normal portion of the menu. Some restaurants may emphasize high quality ingredients like free-range chicken and freshly made salsas. Overall, the quality of the food is presented as much higher than conventional fast food.

As it turns out, all those young men who forsook Burger King haven’t necessarily been eating in all the time. From the Journal again:

People 18 to 34 cut their consumption of fast-food meals from November 2006 to November 2009 while increasing the number of meals they ate at fast-casual chains, says Bonnie Riggs, restaurant industry analyst at market-research firm NPD Group.

Since fast casual is usually more expensive than fast food, there’s clearly more than the recession going on here. A lot of it is health-related: in this post-Super Size Me world, people are more aware than ever that fast food is a one way ticket to Diabetesville (Population: you and Wilfred Brimley). And even though the burritos at Chipotle are ridiculously unhealthy, people feel like they’re eating smarter, because there’s free range chicken and sexy modern industrial decor.

If you want to see where Burger King’s super fans are defecting to, visit a place called Chop’t next to my office. It’s a funky salad joint with items like heirloom tomatoes, Wild Planet tuna, and goat cheese. The earth-toned walls are covered with sans-serif messages about how environmentally-friendly and healthy their ingredients are. Sticking to the fast casual playbook, your salad is prepared right in front of you, by a guy with a special curved blade that looks vaguely Klingon. This place is always mobbed. At lunchtime, the line stretches around the block. And the line is almost entirely 18-to-35-year-olds, who would probably feel a little ashamed slinking back to the office with a Burger King bag.

The fast casual craze has not gone unnoticed by the old school fast food giants. When I started Googling for this article, I discovered that Wendy’s is launching a premium salad bar this week. CMO Ken Calwell makes no secret about their inspiration:

In New York, there’s a salad restaurant called Chop’t, and you will pay anywhere from $7 to $8 to $9 for a salad there. I went in there to get a salad last week and paid $8.85. I waited in line for 27 minutes at lunch, it was a great salad, but I paid more than $8—almost $9—for it. What I’m trying to do at Wendy’s is give you great salads that have those high integrity and high quality ingredients that you can get for $5.99 at every Wendy’s across the country consistently and you can get it in a minute.

But here’s the problem with that plan: Wendy’s is still Wendy’s. Everyone knows Wendy’s is a fast food place. Everyone remembers kindly old Dave Thomas biting into a strangely square double cheeseburger. Brands do not turn on a dime–even if Wendy’s served the exact same heirloom tomatoes as Chop’t, cut with the exact same Klingon weapon, 18-to-35-year-olds still wouldn’t think of the place as healthy or cool. They’d think of the place as trying to copy Chop’t.

Did you know that for many years, McDonald’s was the majority owner of Chipotle? No you didn’t. They didn’t want you to know.

Here’s another piece of fast casual news this week: two former McDonald’s executives are opening a new eco-friendly chain, with the following overkill features:

Grass covered parking lots

Rooftop herb gardens

Biodegradable cutlery

Electric car powered home delivery

Healthier menu items such as steel cut oats, pita pockets, homemade soups and kebabs.

Meanwhile, poor old McDonald’s is desperately trying to look like a fast casual restaurant:

Building upon their design success in France and the United Kingdom, the new McDonald’s look is sleek and sophisticated, with modern, movable furniture, subdued indirect lighting, outlets for laptop connections, free Wi-Fi and wide-screen plasma televisions.

The new McDonald's, believe it or not.

This is a strange development. One thinks of fast food restaurants competing on the basis of price. Five dollar foot-longs! Dollar menus! A bowl of melted cheese for only 17 cents! (In Demolition Man‘s future L.A., Sandra Bullock explains, “Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”)

But today, fast food places are seeing their business shaved away by slightly more upscale rivals. Being perceived as ridiculously cheap is a liability with this demo. So to compete, restaurants have to add a little class… without actually raising prices. Perfect example: a few years back, Carls Jr. introduced the Six Dollar Burger. The cost? $3.95. It’s all about creating an impression of quality and an atmosphere of sophistication, without actually changing the menu too much.

And that brings us back to the Whopper Bar. Burger King spent years building its business on bros, who are now defecting to fast casual. So instead of serving the burgers here…

… they’re going to try serving them here:

Keep in mind, most of the menu will be the same. There will be a few fancy Whopper variations at the Bar that you won’t find at a regular old BK. But basically, it’s the same stuff.

Yes, you can get a beer there.

And that’s why I think this Whopper Bar thing isn’t gonna fly. You see, Burger King obviously didn’t read Wikipedia, and they missed a core aspect of the fast casual thing: the food has got to at least seem healthy. Natural. Wholesome. The Whopper Bar does not seem wholesome. It’s got “Whopper” right in the name. People know that the Whopper is bad for you, and there’s no way around that. The people in line for their St. Tropez salad at Chop’t are not going to start buying cheeseburgers for lunch just because the restaurant looks cool. (Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the St. Tropez salad has just as many calories as the Whopper. But it’s all locally-grown organic produce! Swoon!) Burger King seems to think that people are going to Chipotle just because it has cool lighting. But they’re actually going, at least in part, because it seems healthier than the Taco Bell across the street. The Whopper Bar is basically a fancy new wrapper for the same old burger… and nobody goes to a restaurant just for the wrapper.

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