About a month ago, I was in the midst of writing my last article on the politics of Battlestar Galactica when I stumbled on this site. What had happened was that I had Googled something like, “Battlestar Galactica liberal TV shows,” so I could see whether or not the masses thought the Cylons were supposed to be commies or terrorists or neocons or what. Anyway, I read the article and perused the TV-show political spectrum graph, which looks like this:
Via Gawker.
And I said, “30 Rock is the most liberal show on TV? What the what?” Bear in mind that, at this time in my life, I wasn’t a huge fan of 30 Rock. It was one of those shows that I watched when I had nothing better to do, not appointment television, in other words. Up to this point, I had probably seen around twenty episodes of the show. So I said to myself (in the accent of 30 Rock’s Kenneth Parcell), “Wait a goshdarn minute there, Ms. Mlawski! Just because your first inclination was to disagree with this nice blogger’s TV-politics spectrum, maybe you should withhold judgment until you’ve actually watched all of 30 Rock.”
And so I did. Over the last month, I have watched all of the remaining episodes of that lovely little sitcom and have come to the following conclusion:
“30 Rock is the most liberal show on TV? What the what?!”
As I’ve mentioned several times before, I like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series—but I don’t love it. Yes, yes, I know. I’m wrong. BSG is the best TV show ever. I fracked up.
This week on Overthinking BSG (a.k.a. Mlawski’s fortnightly attempt to discover why she doesn’t like the show as much as she theoretically should), I’m going to talk politics. My theory for this week: I’d like the show better if I were a neo-con living in 2004. Which I’m not.
Warning: politics within.
Watchmen is the kind of work that invites interpretation. It has resonance with real-world political events and a tone of high moral seriousness, but no overt moral or political message. The formalist conceits are dazzling in their coquemplexity, but lack the clear symbolic significance of, say, the gimmick from Memento. So what does it all mean?
Probably every geek-in-good-standing has a theory, and your humble blogger is no exception. However, it’s entirely impossible that this isn’t the right question to be asking. As noted in a recent post, Watchmen has a reputation as a serious literary work. Words like “complex” and “difficult” get tossed around a lot, and not without cause. But if it is worthwhile for its “complexity,” then doesn’t it follow that providing the book with a moral is in a sense robbing it of the very thing that makes it special? In any case, crappy novels may have laudable messages, while many a masterpiece is appalling at it’s core. So when it comes to judging or explaining the value of Watchmen as a work of narrative art, its message is irrelevant at best.
And yet… and yet… the text is so mysterious on so many levels that it seems to cry out for exegesis. You have to be willing to entertain this sort of speculation if you’re going to engage with it at all: refusing to speculate about Watchmen is like refusing to laugh at a comedy.
So what does Watchmen mean? Beyond the jump, I’ll take up that question, but although I’ve thought hard about this, and I really do believe in the answers I’ve come up with, they remain as personal (and ultimately meaningless) as laughter. I’m sure that many of you reading this have interpretations of your own, and I hope you’ll laugh along with me by sharing them in the comments… that act of speculation, I think, is all that “really getting” the work entails.
One last thing: this is really only for people who’ve read it already. I will SPOIL the major Watchmen plot twist; what’s more I’m going to assume that everyone already knows the characters and plot. (Also it should be noted that this is about the Watchmen book. As of this writing, I haven’t seen the movie.)
Barack Obama.
We’ve seen him as a young co-ed. We’ve seen him without his shirt on. And, as of yesterday, we’ve seen him as the President of the United States of America.
But the same question is on everyone’s lips: where does Obama rank on a list of hot U.S. presidents?
Don’t worry. I have the answer.
Last year during Presidents’ Week, I started the tradition of ranking presidents and their first ladies in order of hotness. Before I reveal the top and bottom five of my list of hot presidents, let me first talk about my methodology. I wouldn’t want you–or, indeed, these lovely presidents–to think I’m not academically rigorous.
My rules:
- Judging is based off the hottest picture I can easily find of each president.
- The judge should make all attempts to be objective when measuring hotness, but will also be aware that complete objectivity is impossible.
- The judge will make all attempts not to be “time-ist.” In other words, just because almost everyone in the 50’s and 60’s had awful crewcuts and wore disgusting glasses does not mean all politicians from that era are necessarily unattractive. Conversely, just because a president from the late 1800s sports hot sideburns, it does not necessarily make him hot as a whole.
Presidents were rated based on the following scale, from most to least hot: Hot; Hot?; Okay; Ehh; and Not.
A final disclaimer: Yes, this post is written by the same person who wrote that article about feminism and how we should never judge female TV and film characters primarily by their appearances.
And now, the list…
[We are proud (and more than a little astonished) that our quirky little blog has been finding an audience, and that so many of you seem to share our obsessive and idiosyncratic take on popular culture. It is particularly flattering that we have received a few requests to write on the blog. Today we welcome the first of what will eventually be several guest bloggers, some of whom may become regular bloggers. (Let us know what you think in the comments!) Enjoy this post by Diana Barnes-Brown, and if you're interested in writing for the site, contact us at webmaster at overthinkingit dot com. --Ed.]
Some Brooklyn women who happen to support some guy named “Barack Obama” for President have created an advocacy poster that’s been getting a lot of recent media attention. Inspired by an anti-Vietnam poster that showed Joan Baez and her sisters making a similar promise to boys who protested the draft, the new poster proclaims that GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY OBAMA.
In both versions, a row of women sits on a couch in their mini-skirted, mod-ish finest, looking into the eyes of potential candidates (so to speak), and apparently prepared to either spread ‘em or cross ‘em depending on voting choice.
What does this mean to fans of sex, feminism, applied linguistics, mod fashion, and, to a lesser extent, electoral politics?
Matthew Wrather and Mark Lee welcome political operative Josh McNeil to Overthink™:
- Viral Video and the Election
- SNL: Funny or Not Funny
- 100% of Statistics are Made Up
- The City of Las Vegas
- Favorite Fictional Presidents
Overthink This
- McNeil: Sons of Anarchy (http://www.hulu.com/sons-of-anarchy)
- Lee: FiveThirtyEight (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com)
- Wrather: The Final Episodes of The Shield (http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/the_shield)
As always, leave a voicemail at (203) 285-6401 (that’s 20-EAT-LOG-01) or email at podcast at overthinkingit dot com.
Download Episode 18 (MP3)
