Particularly in the post-9/11 world of “gritty” superhero movies, this is not unique to the X-Men franchise – Spiderman, The Dark Knight franchise and even last weekend’s Man of Steel have visited the idea that what we fear what we don’t understand. The trend has gotten to the point where even a supposed paragon of moral virtue like Superman is scared that the world is going to hate and fear him. Other “superpower” shows like Heroes and the vastly under-rated The 4400 have gone to this well as well. The “Normals” fear the new powered people. The government responds to the fear and cracks down – in no time at all you’ve got registration, segregation, round-ups and concentration camps.

These stories all make a basic argument about cause of effect: The unknown leads to fear; fear leads to hate; hate leads to violence. Consider these quotes from the various X-Men movies:

You see, I think what you really fear is me. Me and my kind. The Brotherhood of Mutants. Oh, it’s not so surprising really. Mankind has always feared what it doesn’t understand. (X-Men)

Tomorrow, mankind will know mutants exist. They will fear us, and that fear will turn to hatred (X-Men: First Class)

Since the discovery of their existence they have been regarded with fear, suspicion, often hatred. (X-2)

The quotes above highlight this theme – discovery = hate. And the implicit message is that the solution is understanding: If only we could understand that mutants are just people like us, then we’d be fine. Instead, we build giant robots to round up all of the new super powered people that walk among us (or just send Special Forces to go do it, depending on the budget of the movie involved.)

But take another look at the list in the last quote above – fear, suspicion and hatred. This misses the other way in which people react to the unknown: Greed. Opportunity. When European explorers “discovered” new lands, there were competing feelings – fear and greed. When Columbus came to America, there was certainly no shortage of fear and hatred for the people they found there – but even more, enterprising merchants were falling over the opportunity to earn a buck off of it, and kings clashed over who would control the new lands. Fear is powerful – but never underestimate the power of an opportunity to turn a profit to motivate the human spirit.

There’s a strong case to be made that the first instinct on encountering the unknown isn’t to kill or destroy it – it’s to exploit it. Humans aren’t known for their restraint in this regard. In the words of Ian Malcolm, we’re generally more interested in figuring out if we could than stopping to ask if we should.

Why would the government expend billions of dollars fighting the new powers on the planet – instead of recruiting them? The government would love to have some super powered folks fighting our wars, spying on our enemies and policing our streets. I’m fairly certain the “Mandatory Mutant Military Service” Bill would have a lot more support in Congress than the “Let’s round up and kill all the mutants” bill.

Pictured: A budgetary nightmare

Perhaps more importantly, how would corporations and private actors respond to the existence of super powers? The government is notoriously slow at responding to new “technologies” and opportunities. As Matthew Yglesias over at Slate points out, crime fighting is generally a poor use of superpower resources. Other than your generic “Super strong/Super fast” superhero, punching villains in the face really isn’t the best use of your average superhero’s time.

A quick look at the X-Men’s roster proves as much. Wolverine – welcome to Big Pharma. Storm – Monsanto would like to make a deal. Magneto – take your pick between ConEd and CERN. Charles Xavier could rewrite pretty much every psychology textbook, while he’s not serving as the world’s greatest lobbyist and/or jury consultant. Etc. etc. The X-Men franchise focuses so single-minded on the idea that humans are a fearful and xenophobic group without remembering that we’re also greedy and opportunistic. (Hooray!)

Which brings us back to the civil rights movement. X-Men was quite deliberately meant to parallel the civil rights movement. And fear of the other, fear of the unknown was certainly part of the desire for segregation and racial hatred. But it wasn’t the only motivation. Go back even further, to the first causes of the racial divide in America and greed is front and center. Segregation in 1955 was the end result of a bunch of European explorers looking at Africa in the 1600s and deciding it was just the perfect place to get a bunch of free labor. Slaves were brought to the United States because they were viewed as a resource.

In that sense, racism was a feature not a bug. Slave-holding society didn’t harbor racism against lack slaves because they “feared” them or because they “didn’t understand” them – racism was a strategy of justifying abhorrent moral decisions that happened to make a lot of money. And this strategy didn’t go away when slavery went away. Segregation wasn’t just some social accident because White society “feared the unknown” – it was an economic strategy aimed at ensuring that blacks would remain economically disadvantaged (and thus forced to work for reduced wages).

So why is that important? It’s important because it means that the story of X-Men is too simplistic. X-Men would largely have us believe that the problem of racism is insufficient understanding. It ignores the very real role that self-interest and greed plays in the perpetuation of racial animus – civil rights laws have gone a long way towards curtailing it, but there are still  people today that profit from propping up racial and other cultural biases. And it’s important because it ignores what would really happen if all of a sudden people started popping up with super powers. Sure, there would be fear – but even more powerful would the desire for greed; the desire for power.

Of course, this doesn’t meant that mutants wouldn’t have anything to worry about. The fact that mutants just became the most important resource for governments and corporations seeking an advantage also means that the other guy’s mutants just became target #1. And some of the mutants might not WANT to be taken advantage of – which is where the fear comes in. If there’s a politician whipping up fear of the mutant population, you can bet that he tried to recruit them first – the fear is a weapon to force the mutants to comply, force them to get in line and be exploited. So the extent that there would be demagogues whipping up fear of the “mutant threat”, you can bet there’s someone trying to turn a buck off of the situation.

That said, the mutant population, at least as portrayed in X-Men have two substantial advantages. First, they can interbreed. All of the talk about mutants being another “species” is a much harder case to make when there’s no real biological difference. As far as I’m aware, the “mutant” gene is just one or two changes to DNA, and can be passed on either between two mutants, a mutant and a “human” and two “humans” – which means the distinction between mutants and “normal” is as arbitrary and meaningless as the difference between blond and brown hair.

Now, of course, I know the response – the fact that black and white people are scientifically the same species has not stopped racialist idiots from talking about the “White Man” as distinct from the “Black Man” for the last 500 years or so. But that’s where Mutant Rights activists second advantage comes in.

Because mutants can come from anywhere. Two “normal” parents can have a “mutant” child. Your co-worker can be a mutant and you might not ever know it. Your brother could be a mutant. Your husband could be a mutant, and except for the rare cases where the mutation is impossible to hide, you wouldn’t know it until they told you.

And in that sense, the mutant struggle really is more like the recent struggle for gay rights in the 00’s than for the struggle for racial equality in the 60’s. Look at the change in position from politicians like Rob Portman. People can have their opinions changed in an instant because someone they know is gay. That difference is important – no one ever woke up and found out their friend of the last 10 years was black the whole time, and you never even knew it. And that has a snowball effect – as coming out has become more socially acceptable, the chances of a given person knowing a gay person personally goes up; as their opinions change in response, it makes it easier for people to come out.

The issues is by no means settled and gays still suffer from prejudice in many parts of society, but the trend is clear. In just 10 years, gay rights has gone from a wedge issue used to assure the GOP’s continued stay in the White House to a major policy liability for conservative politicians. Anyone reading demographic data knows that in 10 or 20 years more the issue will be as uncontroversial as the idea of interracial marriage or racial equality.

And in that sense, the struggle of the super powered for equality in society will be much more successful than I think it’s portrayed in franchises like X-Men. The X-Men franchise has a somewhat simplistic view of prejudice and animus – what we don’t understand, we fear. There are two reasons why I think that’s wrong – one cynical, one hopeful. On the one hand, our desire for opportunity often outweighs our fear. On the other, the ability for mutants to dispel the idea that they are truly the “other” will mean that the unknown won’t stay that way for long.

Peter Fenzel, Shana Mlawski, and Matthew Wrather recap Mad Men Season 6 Episode 12, “The Quality of Mercy.”

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*SPOILER ALERT* for Game of Thrones Season 3. (We also discuss some adaptation choices from the books, but don’t discuss future developments.)

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As the United States was engaged in a global strategy that had become known as the War on Terror, with its two most visible fronts being the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. government had more problems than the ones on the battlefield; they were simultaneously engaged in a marketing campaign rivalling even that of John Carter of Mars or whatever that movie ended up being called. America’s own citizens as well as the governments of most of the United States’ traditional allies were less and less convinced about these wars. Even many of those who supported the invasions as reasonable pre-emptive actions were growing ever more critical of the U.S.’s effectiveness in completing their stated goals as the destruction of the Taliban and the Ba’ath party degenerated into seemingly uncontrollable sectarian violence and terrorism against American troops on the ground.

Into this scenario emerged two major Hollywood blockbusters set against the backdrop of World War II, not only America’s last most consummate victory, but also its most convincingly moral military engagement. Captain America: The First Avenger and Inglourious Basterds both pit American superheroes (or antiheroes) against the closest thing the real world has ever had to actual supervillains: the Nazis. Of course there have been more movies made about World War II than probably about any other subject, except maybe Dracula, and if there hasn’t ever been a movie that included both Dracula and World War II, then I am officially calling dibs. So there was nothing unusual about these movies happening when they did, and the fact that the U.S. was fighting a war at the time could easily have been a coincidence – however, both these movies also had as major thematic components the concept of war marketing, specifically propaganda films. And the way that Captain America and Inglourious Basterds dealt with the production, reception, and consequences of using the mass media to promote the righteousness of nationalist military causes provides insight into not only the filmmakers’ thoughts on the subject while anticipating and pre-emptively refuting their critics’ inevitable accusations of propagandizing (remember the reviews castigating earlier thematically similar films 300 and The Dark Knight as little more than crypto-fascist American apologetics?), but also commenting on the uses of propaganda films in practice and the relationship between propaganda and the moral certitude necessary for military victory in the first place.

When the young American soldier Steve Rogers is injected with an experimental “super-soldier serum” that gives him astonishing strength, stamina, and agility, he’s intended to be but the prototype for a new kind of army that can easily defeat the U.S.’s enemies. However, when the inventor of the serum is assassinated, rendering the super-soldier process irreproducible, Rogers is relegated to a somewhat less glorious assignment: pitch-man for war bonds. As “Captain America,” he is dressed up in a flashy costume and sent around the country to hype up crowds and record newsreels as the personification of the war effort, to stir up patriotism and encourage Americans to make their contributions on the homefront.

He starts out awkwardly, but develops into quite the enthusiastic and effective mascot; once Rogers overcomes his natural modesty and shyness, it is his genuine patriotism and love of his countrymen that shines through and makes the citizenry want to rally behind him – and behind America. Now, Rogers is undoubtedly doing good for the American cause by inspiring support for the troops; remember that despite the fact that we tend to recall the Allies’ cause as just (disputes over the necessity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki notwithstanding), there was strong opposition to U.S. involvement in the war, from isolationist groups who didn’t feel that America was particularly threatened by the Nazis, by German-Americans who had personal stake in not destroying the country where many of their relatives still lived, as well as from straight-up personal friends of Hitler like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, the latter of whom asserted that the pressure on the U.S. to enter the war against its own interests was a Jewish plot and that the “greatest  danger to this country lies in their [the Jews’] large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” The “Jew-controlled media” canard is something that crops up much more explicitly in Inglourious Basterds; but in Captain America, which is after all set after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American support for involvement in the war was galvanized and although opposition remained in certain spheres (mainly among American Communists, anarchists, and political pacifists, whose British counterparts George Orwell himself brutally castigated as “objectively pro-fascist”), voicing these sorts of objections in public became unpopular once the United States itself had actually been attacked and Americans killed. The propaganda war, though, was still extremely important – war is exhausting not only for those on the front lines, but also for those at home who must now ration their coffee and gasoline, and pray that their loved ones abroad would return home alive. Civilian morale is incredibly important, as Captain America well understood.

That said, Rogers was not satisfied to stand in the literal spotlight of the media rather than the symbolic one of the battlefield. While overseas performing for the troops, he insists on undertaking a very dangerous mission to rescue American soldiers who have been captured by a splinter group of the Nazi party called HYDRA, and the movie follows this adventure as the resolution of its main plotline. What’s interesting is the conclusion that seems to be drawn here: this American war movie seems to be implying that while the media’s support of military engagements when they are seen to be just is important, it pales in comparison with the actual soldiers doing the actual fighting. That sounds so obvious as to be trivial, but it’s more complicated than it seems on the surface. Because we must remember that while Marvel Studios / Paramount Pictures is an American company, it is still a private company and not an arm of the U.S. government (unless you’re particularly conspiracy-minded). Its motive is not nationalistic but capitalistic. And in 2011, when Captain America was released, not only had support for America’s wars significantly dropped and opposition greatly increased, lip-service had arguably largely replaced actual support – “Support the Troops” bumper stickers that benefited nobody but the sticker manufacturers (and were probably printed in China) certainly dwarfed the number of Americans enlisted in the armed forces or providing material assistance to the war effort (you can still buy U.S. Treasury securities, if you want to – especially if you’re more interested in financially aiding the country than assuring return on your investment).

So there’s no reason for Marvel Studios to denigrate the role of the media in war unless they, as an entity, either genuinely feel that way or believe that it will help them make more money to behave as if they feel that way. And yet that’s exactly what Captain America does – its hero essentially realizes that talk is cheap, and decides that he must take action in order to really support the cause he believes in. Before taking the super-soldier serum, Rogers was desperate to enlist but was turned down numerous times for his physical shortcomings. Once he was granted the gifts by the U.S. military that nature saw fit to deny him, he was not satisfied to play the clown even though he grew to be eminently good at it. Captain America’s message appears to be that when it comes to war, those who can do and those who can’t make movies.

On the other hand we have Inglourious Basterds, which makes the propaganda war absolutely front and center for the WWII military theater. The climax of that film has Hitler and the entire German High Command locked inside a Paris movie theater for the premiere of a highly anticipated Nazi propaganda film. The premiere been infiltrated by a number of Allied soldiers (posing as Italian cameramen), accompanying a German film actress working as a double-agent for the Allies, who plan to plant explosives in the theatre and end the war by killing the entire Nazi leadership in one strike. In addition, the theatre itself happens to be owned by a Jewish woman who fled to Paris when her family was murdered by the Nazis, and who plans to burn down the theatre and everyone in it by igniting a pile of highly flammable old-style nitrate film. So not only does the Americans’ plan to win the war depend on military personnel masquerading as filmmakers, but the tool used to actually bring down the Nazis is turning their own propaganda against them (blowing up the premiere) by literally weaponizing film.

Much has already been made of what some people have seen as an attempt at portraying moral equivalence between the Nazis and the heroes of Basterds, but Tarantino very deliberately complicates this reading with his attitude toward film and propaganda throughout the movie. One scene in the theater shows Germans laughing uproariously as the “hero” of the film mows down hundreds of American soldiers onscreen. The effect this has on the audience of Basterds (that is, us) is to be at first disgusted by their attitude, and then uncomfortable as we recall that we ourselves were laughing at the deaths of Nazis onscreen not so long ago. Shortly thereafter, a couple of Jewish-American soldiers fire their machine guns at the theater attendees as the Germans riot, having realized that the theater is aflame and all the doors are sealed. We’re intended to feel complicated about this, but Tarantino primes us earlier to prove that he is not drawing a moral equivalence. He does this in two main ways.

The first, and more obvious, is that we’re explicitly told that the premiere is very exclusive and only the German High Command and their guests will be in attendance. While this doesn’t, perhaps, make the theater deaths less of a massacre, it certainly does make it a military operation and decidedly not, say, a terrorist attack; there are no innocent civilians inside that theater.

The other is subtler. The reason the Basterds’ plan ends up the way it does is because of one fatal miscalculation earlier in the movie by a British soldier who accidentally blows his cover as a German. This soldier, Lieutenant Hicox, speaks fluent German and was, before the war, a film critic, and author of several books on German cinema. When asked to describe the German film industry under Propaganda Minister Goebbels, Hicox says, “Goebbels considers the films he’s making to be the beginning of a new era in German cinema. An alternative to what he considers the Jewish-German intellectual cinema of the ’20s, and the Jewish-controlled dogma of Hollywood.”

At this point, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, also in the room, interrupts to ask, “You say he wants to take on the Jews at their own game. Well, compared to, say, Louis B. Mayer, how’s he doing?”

While this is, on the one hand, a fair characterization of the sort of thing Churchill might actually have said in such a situation, it is also a very important point being made by Tarantino. The Nazis are obsessed not only with physically/militarily destroying the Jews, but also eradicating the cultural influence that they perceive the Jews to have on civilization. The propaganda war, then, is at least as important to the Nazis as the actual military objectives. Tarantino shows Hicox being momentarily nonplussed by Churchill’s basically admitting he agrees with Goebbels on this point, but doesn’t put forward any particular narrative argument against it either. Tarantino is not actually himself promoting the “Jews control Hollywood” conspiracy theory (note that, having drawn the equivalence between propagandists and soldiers, the leader of the Basterds, Aldo Raine, is a white Southern American through and through, who recruited Jewish soldiers to undertake clandestine missions inside Nazi-controlled territory; they report to him, not vice versa), but he is making a connection between the idea of Jewishness and the film’s force of moral narrativity, in particular the Hollywood studio system of which he, Tarantino, is a part. This moral-narrative sense comes out in the contrast between Lieutenant Raine and Hans Landa, the “Jew Hunter” who is the film’s main antagonist. The banality and opportinism of Landa’s malevolence (early in the film he openly admits that the common German’s dislike of Jews isn’t particularly based on anything, and toward the end he is almost delighted to betray Germany and hand victory to the Allies in exchange for his life and an official pardon) is the direct antithesis of Raine’s ethical system, who seems to have no specific stake in seeing that Jews personally defeat Hitler and yet is absolutely dedicated to making that happen, and who we have no doubt would gladly die rather than be disloyal to America. Everything that Landa and the Nazis do seems to be just a series of amoral performances (even the rank-and-file Nazi soldiers we meet at the bar at one point act like a bunch of punks who aren’t operating out of any particular devotion to the cause), whereas everything Raine and the Basterds do are motivated by genuine certainty in the absolute righteousness of their mission.

This is why there is no moral equivalence between the good guys and the bad guys in Inglourious Basterds (despite some intentionally superficial similarities), why Tarantino portrays media and military as equally important factors in war (as opposed to Marvel’s downplaying its own significance in the global fight against terrorism, fascism, or what have you), and what gives Inglourious Basterds the narrative authority to rewrite history in a more poetically just way than how things actually turned out, with Hitler and his confederates decisively and publicly eliminated by a couple of plebian Jews. Tarantino unapologetically allies himself with “the Jewish-controlled dogma of Hollywood,” with America/the West and its moral ideology (if not necessarily its specific tactics or strategies) precisely because, as he shows us in Inglourious Basterds, the alternative is the disturbingly luxuriant nihilism imputed to those identified as enemies of the West.

Both these war movies communicate a message about their own unavoidable role as a sort of crypto-propaganda; saying that while history is indeed written by the victors, and perhaps even rightfully so, victory itself is a condition achieved only by genuine dedication to the moral narrative of the cause, a burden from which the media can never fully be exempt.

Spoiler alert: one of these characters dies in the first season. Spoiler alert: you won’t care much.

As the first season of NBC’s post-apocalyptic drama Revolution came to an end, I really wanted to write a post about how the show reflects Hobbesian social theory and demonstrates the fragility of our modern, technology-dependent society.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to write that post. After a few promising moments early in its run, the show abandoned the exploration of big ideas and became a messy collection of bad plot devices and even worse acting. I’ll spare you from the details; read the AV Club episode reviews if you want a blow-by-blow recount of the inane pendant-chasing, gunfighting, and Charlie-whining that came to define the second half of the season. All this is to say, there’s just not much “there” there when it comes to analyzing Revolution.

And yet. I stuck with the show to the bitter end, partly to see if the show could possibly redeem itself, partly out of curiosity as to how the flimsy plot would play out, but mostly because I started to enjoy mocking the show’s flaws.

In other words, I was full-on hate-watching Revolution.

In case you haven’t heard of “hate-watching” TV, here’s a brief primer: to “hate-watch” a TV show is to watch a TV show in spite of (or perhaps, because of) one’s hatred of it. It seems to have been coined in the context of another NBC drama, Smash (about a Broadway musical, not the Incredible Hulk, sadly), though it’s been applied to other shows across a broad range of critical derision: everything from Newsroom to Two and Half Men.

It seems strange that such a phenomenon would exist, given the embarrassment of TV riches we have access to and the vanishing amounts of free time we have to watch TV. Fortunately for us, we have a framework for analyzing and evaluating this seemingly irrational decision-making: economics. Specifically, we’ll ask and answer the following questions: what are the costs associated with hate-watching Revolution? What are the benefits? And perhaps most importantly, what’s the opportunity cost? What else could I have done with the time I’d spent watching this crappy show, and how much utility would that have given me compared to watching Revolution?

Costs

Cost.

Oh, the heavy price I’ve paid across these 20 episodes. Some of these are more straightforward than others, but let’s run through them all for the sake of thorough accounting:

Time. Including commercials, I spent a little less than 20 hours watching all of the first season of Revolution. I watched it on Hulu, so I can’t be certain how long the ads were, but let’s just assume it took one hour to get through each episode.

Anger. As the show’s problems mounted, I found ourselves yelling at the TV with increasing frequency:

“CAN CHARLIE POSSIBLY WHINE ANY MORE? OH, YES SHE CAN.”

“WHY ARE THERE SO MANY GUNFIGHTS? WHAT HAPPEND TO THE BIG DEAL THEY MADE ABOUT BULLETS BEING SO SCARCE? AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SWORDS?”

“SERIOUSLY? NANO BOTS?”

Disappointment. I had high hopes for this show and its potential to explore the big ideas I mentioned above, so when those high expectations gave way to weekly “escape from gunfight and capture” adventures and mind-numbingly stupid pseudo-science, the loss was far worse than if I were watching a less ambitious show with weekly “escape from gunfight and capture” adventures and mind-numbingly stupid pseudo-science.

Money? There’s actually very little monetary cost associated with watching a season of TV. Granted, I pay for a Hulu+ subscription, but I’d still pay for it even if I weren’t watching Revolution. If I weren’t paying for Hulu+, I could still watch it on Hulu or NBC.com for free. So let’s assume that the monetary cost of watching Revolution is de minimis.

Benefits

Yes, there are real benefits to hate-watching a TV show. These are the reasons why I kept watching, in spite of the costs listed above:

Benefit.

Reinforcement of superiority complex. I think most instances of hate-watching can be traced to this perceived benefit of watching a bad TV show. Being aware of a show’s badness while watching it reinforces one’s status as discerning consumer of pop culture. Simply put, knowing what’s good requires also knowing what’s bad.

Having a shared experience. In this case, my girlfriend and I hate-watched Revolution together. Like cooking, walking in the park, and zip-lining, this shared experience helps reinforce a couple’s bond, but even if I weren’t going for the domestic benefits of a shared experience, I’d still be connecting with others who were similarly hate-watching this show–and similarly reinforcing their pop culture superiority complexes–in communities of like-minded individuals.

Giancarlo Esposito. His masterful performance as the ruthless, cunning, and charismatic Tom Neville is perhaps the show’s saving grace. Although even this comes at a cost–he’s so good that whenever he’s on screen, he reminds you of the shortcoming of pretty much every other actor in the show.

A sense of accomplishment for sticking it through to the end. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “You’re just falling for the sunk cost fallacy! You’re just telling yourself that to justify the unrecoverable 20 hours that you sank into this endeavor.” You may be at least partly right, but bear with me on this. I’m really bad at sticking with TV shows, particularly hour-long dramas. I’m That Guy who’s started Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and a host of other Critically Acclaimed TV Shows but never finished them because there are too damn many episodes and I’m way behind and…OK, I know these are bad excuses. Just trust me when I say that I feel a small sense of accomplishment for making it to the end of this season of Revolution.

This article. This wasn’t the article I wanted to get out of watching Revolution, but now that I’m writing it, I’m glad I have this excuse to explore the decision making behind watching a TV show. It’s a decision that’s played out millions of times every day, and one that’s actually deserving of this level of scrutiny.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Did the benefits outweigh the costs? Since so many of these costs and benefits are highly subjective and unquantifiable, it’s impossible to say this definitively, but let’s line them up in a pseudo-ledger to help with this determination:

Actually, now that I think about this, it’s a fairly easy determination: the strength of Giancarlo Esposito’s performance alone makes this calculation a net positive. He’s that good in this show.

But “net positive” is damning with faint praise. It’s not a lot to ask of a TV show to provide you with at least some entertainment in exchange for your time and attention. So to get at a truer sense of the value of hate-watching this TV show, we really need to compare it to the other ways I could have spent 20 hours of TV watching time:

Opportunity Cost Analysis

Would I have been better off watching one of those Critically Acclaimed TV Shows with my 20 hours instead of Revolution? Perhaps a show with my beloved Giancarlo Esposito, like…Breaking Bad?

I’d make a clever reference here, but I’ve only seen two or three episodes of “Breaking Bad.”

It’s tough to say, given that I haven’t actually seen much of this show, but let’s assume the following costs and benefits:

Let’s dig a little deeper on some of these costs. In terms of time, I realize that watching 20 hours of Breaking Bad from the beginning actually may include little to no Giancarlo Esposito, but let’s assume that I start at a point where I can listen to his dulcet tones on a regular basis. As for the girlfriend: she would not watch this show with me–the violence was too extreme for her–so not only would I not gain the domestic benefits of watching Revolution, I would actually incur a domestic cost by having this show on when she’s around.

As for the benefits, from the OTI content perspective, I would actually argue that my contribution of this article will, in the end, be worth more than the marginal benefit I would provide to future discussions of Breaking Bad, especially when you consider that I wouldn’t be able to catch up with the whole series in just 20 hours. But the most important–and unknowable–benefit is the amount of utility I’d gain from the Actual Enjoyment of a Great Show. As I mentioned before, I haven’t really participated in this Golden Age of Television. I tell myself that I prefer the succinct storytelling and big special effects that define modern movies, but I can’t say that I prefer that to 20 hours of Golden Age TV when I haven’t progressed that far with a given show.

But even if we assume that I enjoy the heck out of 20 hours of Esposito-infused Breaking Bad and it’s as good as people say it is, I still think that Breaking Bad vs. Revolution comes out to a wash when considering all of these factors. OK, maybe a slight edge to Breaking Bad, but not so much of an edge that I’d deeply regret my hate-watch of Revolution. 

And I don’t say that just because I’m trying to justify a questionable and irreversible decision. I say it only partly because I’m trying to justify a questionable and irreversible  decision. One that I won’t be repeating for the next season of Revolution.

LIGHTS OUT (See what I did there?)

Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather recap Mad Men Season 6 Episode 11, “Favors.”

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather recap Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 10, “Mhysa,” and offer some preliminary thoughts as to the larger significance of Season 3.

Check back here later in the week for downloadable audio of this recap!

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Spoilers for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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Further Reading

• Big Brother is Hugging You
• Hedley Lamarr from Blazing Saddles vs. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr](Hedy Lamarr)
• The Purge

Alternative Titltes for This Episode

• It’s Watchmen All The Way Down
• TCP/IP Werewolf Communications
• The Surveillance State that Makes Us Buy Cereal
• Big Wrather is Watching
• In The 24th Century, Nobody Hates Each Other Because Everybody Hates Each Other
• I Just Purged All Over Myself

This week writer S.E. Sinkhorn wrote a thought-provoking post contending that love triangles are empowering and those who roll their eyes at these stories are doing so for sexist reasons. Too often that second point is true. Certain readers say things like, “Ugh, Protagonist is such an annoying whore! Why doesn’t she just pick one already? Bitches be fickle.” Other readers hate not only love triangles but all love stories, because romance is unimportant girl stuff, as opposed to important boy stuff like football and punching.

So yeah, some readers have sexist points of view about literary romances and love triangles. But I also think it’s wishful thinking to suggest love triangles are inherently feminist or empowering. Just because a heroine gets to make a choice in a story, it doesn’t mean the story is pro-choice and therefore feminist.

You Must Choose!

I think the issue is that we expect all stories about a young female character to end with the heroine in a stable heterosexual monogamous relationship, and in many stories female leads have no choice in whom they end up with. They end up with the male lead, because that’s the way these things go. In comparison, a love triangle seems exceptionally feminist. Now the heroine has some power over the conclusion of her story. She can end up with Edward or Jacob, Peeta or Gale, Stefan or Damon. She is a sexually-empowered woman in control of her romantic destiny.

Doesn’t it follow, then, that she would be even more empowered if she had even more choices? How about instead of a love triangle we start writing harem stories? I’m referring to the anime subgenre of harem anime, in which a young everyguy somehow has three or more beautiful women wanting to become his girlfriend. The story ends when he finally chooses his girl: the hothead, the domestic, the shy one, the robotic one, the ditz, the “slut”…

Diversity in literature.

I always thought this genre was silly wish fulfillment, but maybe if we switched the genders it would somehow become empowering. Like how The Bachelorette is empowering. I know every time I watch The Bachelorette I feel more empowered. Equal pay? Control over my reproduction? Nah. Give me a choice of 20 pieces of man meat and I am good.

In all seriousness, there is a realistic way to give heroines choice when it comes to men: have them date several people over the course of their trilogies. That’s how things sometimes work in the real world. It’s not always, “Meet a guy; marry him” or “Meet two guys; marry one of them.” Sometimes it’s, “Meet a bunch of guys, date one, break up with him, have a friends-with-benefits situation with another guy, meet a third guy, have an open relationship with him, find out it doesn’t work for you, go on okcupid and date five more guys, and then maybe get married.” Maybe that’s not as romantic as finding your one true love on page 2 of your life story… or maybe it is.

Obvious problem with this solution: If you give the heroine five choices, there will be at least five different kinds of shippers in your audience, and if she ends the series with Guy A, the fans of Guys B, C, D, and E will freak out, which means they might not buy your next book. I have no solution to this problem, unfortunately.

There’s another kind of romantic choice a heroine can have: she can decide to own the fact that she doesn’t want a guy at all; she wants the girl. Consider Malinda Lo’s Ash, where her version of Cinderella (quite wonderfully) passes up any princes for a huntress. Or what about a heroine who exercises her choice by dumping both guys in the triangle and going home to masturbate? (Sorry, I’ve been watching too much Adventure Time.) Fans might revolt, but this does happen in real life sometimes. Just because two guys come after you, it doesn’t mean you want to date either of them. The love triangle model all but forces women in this situation to choose one of the two no matter what, which in my opinion is a terrible lesson to give to teenagers.

Nice Guy vs. Bad Boy

I’m sure I’d like the “choice between two guys = empowering” construction better if YA fiction had more variety in the kinds of guys the heroines get to choose between. Unfortunately many love triangles are paint-by-numbers, pitting a stereotypical bad boy against a stereotypical “nice guy.” That gives me pause. Any love story that seems like an example in a book for pick up artists might be problematic from a feminist perspective.

Consider the Bad Boy of YA lit. He’s mysterious. He’s ripped. He’s humorless—no, strike that. Emotionless. He has few ties—no real friends, likely no family. He’s violent. He might have even been sent to kill our heroine. But once he’s met her in person, he knows she is meant for him. It is insta-love and nothing, no one, will get in its way.  And anything that does will be dealt with.

Yeah, to me, this guy sounds like an abuser. Oh, sure, he’s not hitting the heroine yet, but look at that list. Emotionally-stunted, violent, possessive. Oh, boy, do I ever want to date him!

Luckily we have another option: the Nice Guy. He has emotions. One emotion. He’s compassionate. To the heroine. He listens to her. He sacrifices himself for her, because she is the only thing that matters. Like the Bad Boy, he probably has no real friends. Nice Guy understands the heroine without her having to say anything. She doesn’t need to. He knows her. How does he know her? As I mentioned in this post, he’s probably stalked her once or twice, but he swears! It was only so he could protect her! He deserves the heroine because he idolizes her. And at least he’s not abusive like that other guy. Well, not until our heroine falls off her pedestal. But that won’t happen until after the book is over, so readers won’t have to see the fallout.

These are our choices. In this love triangle the heroine gets to choose between the guy who’s throwing up red flags for abuse and the other guy who’s throwing up different red flags for abuse.

Empowering.

I’m over-exaggerating, I admit, but I’m not far off from reality. This story isn’t fair to guys, either. If you’ve read my book and futzed around with my female character flowchart, you’ll notice I’m not a huge fan of treating entire genders as symbols. In my mind, it’s just as unfair to split the entire male gender into Nice Guy/Bad Boy (or idealism/cynicism) as it is to split all women into Madonna/Whore (which is another way of saying Nice Gal/Bad Girl).

So what is to be done?

My hope is that instead of deriding love triangles as annoying or praising love triangles as empowering, we continue criticizing books with problematic love stories and praising those that do romance right. There are many YA love interests out there with actual personalities who are neither abusers nor stalkers. They communicate. They are not emotionless assassins. They have flaws, but not scary flaws like “might murder you.” I’m talking about flaws like “sometimes awkward” or “sometimes too proud.” They have lives outside of the heroine. They love her, but not so much you’d fear they’d kill someone or themselves if they broke up. A few even have a sense of humor and friends, like humans do!

And let us praise the great female protagonists of YA who do take control over their love lives. That doesn’t only mean making one simple choice between two guys (one of whom is usually presented as the lesser option) but by looking at a whole range of people, as well as herself.

[What do you think about love triangles? Sound off below in the comments!]