Let’s get this complaint out of the way directly: the use of female characters in J. J. Abrams’ second offering in the rebooted Star Trek franchise is sigh-worthy at best, probably more like eye-rolling and groan-worthy, and possibly even merits serious hair pulling. Zoe Saldana is still awesome as Uhura in Star Trek Into Darkness but her interesting updates, including linguistic genius and unwavering confidence, are undercut in this movie by her damsel-in-distress situations. Speaking of “damsels-in-distress,” Alice Eve’s Dr. Carol Marcus (presented on IMDB as simply “Carol”) represents yet another female character who’s good on paper and easy on the eyes but doesn’t offer much but a way to nix any *ahem* suggestions of sexual tension between Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto). Point, match, feminists.

That said, for all those who have been complaining that Abrams’ Star Trek isn’t “Star Trek” enough: you’re nuts! In this flick, perhaps even more than the first, Star Trek returns to its philosophical roots of exploring what it means to be human and how we strive to be the best iteration of that humanness. And yet, obviously, this is not your father’s Star Trek. It’s so filled with Easter eggs its villain is the biggest one of all (also: worst kept secret ever) while its loving nods to the preceding mythology temper any sense of snark or unending, frivolous “play.” Indeed, the film’s self-awareness of its changed universe is so meta, and yet so well-conceived in its own right, that it transcends post-modernism and becomes, what? Something that gets beyond that circling anxiety, frivolity, and/or simulacra of traditional post-modernism and into something that mingles our contemporary fears for the future (aka, obsessions with apocalypse), loves for nostalgia and technology, and twinging hopes that extraordinary individuals—particularly if they work in tandem—may be able to improve the world.

*Here There Be Spoilers*

The film opens with the Enterprise crew trying to keep a volcano from erupting and decimating the planet’s pre-modern civilization. However, when things go awry and Kirk must choose between saving Spock and violating the “Prime Directive” (which dictates that Starfleet shall do nothing to meddle in the development of other cultures), Kirk of course chooses to rescue his friend. This leads to him being demoted to first officer under Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who vouches for him so that he avoids court martial, and leads to Spock being reassigned to another ship. Meanwhile, a terrorist named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) blows up an archive and then uses the subsequent gathering of Starfleet top brass to attempt a massive assassination. Among the victims is Admiral Pike.

From the get-go, the film establishes male emotion as a key theme. We first see Harrison manipulate a father into blowing up the archive in order to save his dying daughter. Then we are treated to several touching scenes between Kirk and Pike, who has become the surrogate father that Kirk needs. Moreover, much like Kirk’s real father, he dies violently, a casualty of a vengeful enemy. Even our villain, John Harrison, who turns out to actual be a super-man from the late twentieth century (KHAAAN!!!!!), speaks with eloquence, his eyes full of tears, of his crew—his family—imprisoned in torpedoes by the ruthless Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller). There are lots of other examples but the core relationship of this film, of course, is that between Kirk and Spock, who were bitter antagonists in the first movie and who now find that, as original Spock claimed, they are in a friendship that will define them both. Acknowledging legitimate complaints about the weak female characterizations in the film, the male emotion on display goes deeper than in most action movies, combining the bromance with action cliches and then adding a healthy dash of real heart. The result is, again, that vaguely “post-post”: self-aware yet deconstructive yet strangely heartfelt simultaneously.

In response to Pike’s murder and the attacks on Starfleet, Kirk feels justifiably enraged. He receives permission from Admiral Marcus to retake command of the Enterprise and go after “Harrison,” who is hiding in an uninhabited area of one of the Klingon planets. Marcus expresses his belief that war with the Klingons is inevitable and authorizes Kirk to blast “Harrison” to smithereens using brand new, top secret, high tech, whizbang torpedoes. Kirk enthusiastically agrees but finds contention from his best friend and first officer; Spock argues that preemptively executing anyone, even someone as heinous as Harrison, goes against core Starfleet beliefs and basic ethics. En route, the Enterprise runs into technical difficulties that leave them unable to warp and Spock convinces Kirk to try to take Harrison alive. What they discover is an uber-mensch: brilliant, with super human strength and potent emotions.

I must stop here to note that Cumberbatch is mesmerizing in the role of Khan. He’s the kind of actor who elevates the entire franchise (not unlike Christopher Plummer [The Undiscovered Country], Alice Krige [First Contact], and William Cromwell [First Contact] before him), making his fellow actors look better and work harder, all while creating a supervillain both chilling and strangely sympathetic.

Which leads to the other “post-post” of Star Trek Into Darkness. Since the terrorist attacks of 9-11, our popular films have treated us to various apologies for American culture and actions, resulting in a whole lot of very interesting, very conflicted artifacts. Perhaps the best example is Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight/Batman franchise, which switches schizophrenically between political allegiances and yet ultimately apologizes for Bruce Wayne’s unethical behavior because he’s a “hero” who keeps Gotham “safe.” (Confession: I do like those movies.)

But Star Trek Into Darkness suggests we may have come to a new point in our cultural dialogue, one that lets fictional characters in an imagined future wrestle with the emotions that terrorism brings—anger, fear, vengeance, grief—while ultimately choosing to listen to their better angels. The film upholds American ideals that have gone out of fashion since we began our “War on Terror,” ideals such as due process, trust, dialogue, and sympathy for the enemy. In the end, we’re made to empathize with Khan’s loss while condemning his actions. And Marcus proves almost a caricature of an evil American military officer (I almost expected him to berate Private Pyle), signaling the film’s willingness to criticize those who seek vengeance and cultural supremacy above decency.  I won’t give away the ultimate conclusion but let’s just say I hope we get to see Khan (marry me, Cumberbatch!) contribute to this story again.

On that note, what did ya’ll make of the post-film’s note of appreciation for 9-11 responders and US military personnel? Was that Abrams’ clarification or something the studio insisted on? I’ll admit, to me it felt safe, perfunctory, possibly even trite. Not that we shouldn’t appreciate most of these people but it felt like a chicken’s apology for the surprising arguments on display in Star Trek Into Darkness. Thoughts?

And for any consummate Trekkies, here’s a fun article on how the new film re-enacts a core battle between Rodenberry’s vision of an idealized humanity and Nicholas Meyer’s attempt to represent a more militarized, complicated universe.

Two Star Trek “virgins” go see the new film; wackiness ensues.

This exists.

Favorite geek-out moments: The red shirts change into costumes—and survive the away team. More Scotty (Simon Pegg). Hikaru Sulu (John Cho) owning the captain’s chair like a boss (an Easter egg that I have not yet heard mentioned that nods to Sulu’s ultimate command of his own starship).  Bones asking Kirk: “Are you out of your corn-fed mind? The Tribble.

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Sarah S: I thought the movie was pretty interesting on both class and gender, albeit perhaps subtly enough that the average viewer might miss it. I also found any notion that it idealized that world sans critique completely stupid. I have more detailed thoughts but I’ll add them based on what you  think. What say you, Sarah T?

Sarah T: Yes I agree with you on both counts! On the gender front: People tend to hate Daisy because they think she’s just a blonde, glamorous, blank projection of men’s dreams. And she is a projection, but not just a projection. The problem isn’t that she has no personality, it’s that nobody sees Daisy–not Gatsby, not Tom, not even Nick, who prides himself on being observant. They’re all too busy being dazzled by that voice that sounds like money. (Good voice choice by Mulligan, by the way—low, musical, lilting, balmy as a summer day in Louisville.)

But as both Fitzgerald and this movie make clear, Daisy’s actually pretty complex. For one thing, she’s got this sly wit that she gets no credit for at all. (“Tom is getting very profound,” she says dryly after Tom goes on a ridiculous, racist rant. “He reads deep books with long words in them.”) And I loved that scene in the sweltering hotel room where we see how Daisy’s being ripped apart by two men who are each trying to control her, though Tom far more brutishly than Gatsby. I also like the image of the three-strand pearl necklaces that Tom gives to both Daisy and, later, to Myrtle–a handy symbol of the wealth and power that he uses to lure and trap women. That’s why Daisy tears them off when she tries to break off their engagement. Though it turns out that Gatsby is just as determined to use money to get to the girl of his dreams, too.

I also loved Jordan in this movie–so skeptical and breezy but with a new undercurrent of kindness that the book doesn’t give her. She came across as loyal to Daisy, compassionate toward Gatsby. And it’s clear how frustrated she is by Nick’s passivity, which is his greatest flaw, so good lookin’ out, Jordan.

Sarah S: There were a couple lovely scenes with Daisy when she realizes that Gatsby sees her as something to possess, a status symbol, just as Tom does. Gatsby might be nicer but that doesn’t change the essential fact. We see this when Daisy asks to go away and Gatsby insists they live out this public display of a fairytale. And then, as you mention, the room in the hotel when Daisy is literally repeating Gatsby’s words at his command (until she stops). (This scene is performed almost exactly as written in the novel.) The audience has this impression confirmed, too, when Gatsby watches Daisy prancing up his grand staircase and comments to Nick how glamorous she makes his house look. It’s almost as if she’s The Dude’s rug in that she “really ties the room together.” I found this a perfectly plausible way to represent Daisy based on the book and a nice way to push past Nick’s dismissal of her as vain and shallow. We still don’t have much access to Daisy but this twist, combined with Mulligan’s performance, gives us tantalizing glimpses, as if glimpsed through billowing curtains.

As to class, I felt that Luhrmann did an excellent job showing the crassness of Gatsby’s display of wealth, a poor boy’s excessive fantasy of how the wealthy live. When Tom taunts him that he’ll never belong, it’s true, and we know it’s true. When Nick tells Gatsby that “they’re a rotten crowd,” he’s right and, again, Gatsby will never belong with them. Depending on how you think about it, it’s a rather pathetic consolation prize, their rottenness. I also thought the film nailed the “valley of ashes” and the desperate, awful lives of Myrtle and George. No wonder Myrtle embraces an exciting affair with a rich brute (rich being the only part she’s not used to); no wonder George wants to sell that coupé and head west.

One other small thing that struck me was how often intimate conversations went on with servants still in the room–and how uncomfortable this made me, the grossness of ignoring the other humans in the room. In Downton Abbey and the like the family don’t have serious conversations in front of “the help.” So this detail seemed like a really subtle way to drive home the class distinction.

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Sarah S: Melissa made a thorough defense of the contemporary, hybrid soundtrack. How did you think the music worked in the actual film? How about the CG? The general style?

For my part, I was fine with the music and feel that Lurhman has “trained” his audience in how to absorb his frenetic, garish, mish-mash vision. Having said that, I’m not sure he gives 1920s jazz quite enough credit for how it can still make people (at least, make me) feel. I got a bit tired of the swooping CG; it felt too fake. Still, I was overall pleased with the style, particularly the costumes.

Sarah T: The music (and the parties) were my favorite part! I loved Jay Z’s hip-hop/jazz-age mashups, and I think the songs really captured the decadence and seedy glitz of the 1920s. Plus, so danceable. Which brings me to the parties. Luhrmann’s always at his best when he’s going big, which is why Gatsby’s parties soared so high in the film. It’s not just the blitz of glitter and fountains and flappers and fireworks that makes those scenes pulse with life, it’s the way the camera swirls through the crowd and then stops, so you get a sense of both the parties’ wild scope and that intimacy that Jordan loves so much.

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Sarah S: Let’s talk about the actors. Wasn’t DiCaprio magnificent? And so were Mulligan and Edgerton. However, did you find Toby Maguire tiresome as Carraway? The incessant exposition and voiceover,  am I right?!? (That bit’s not entirely Maguire’s fault, of course.) In the book, you can make of Nick what you will: reliable? unreliable? sympathetic? snot-nosed? It’s part of what makes the book so rich. But you don’t need a narrator like that in a movie and, indeed, it’s hard to pull off. So instead, we’re given Nick Carraway as total prat. (FWIW: much of the exposition came directly from the book but much of it didn’t. For example: “Gatsby and Daisy sped away…toward death.” *vomit* At the same time, getting in the closing lines was nice and fitting.)

Sarah T: Big yes to DiCaprio—he was all I’ve ever wanted in a Gatsby, so starry-eyed and desperate and with that crinkly golden aura that makes you understand immediately how he managed to climb so high. He’s wonderful in most scenes, but I particularly loved his conversation with Nick after the party: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can.” The way DiCaprio says it, you understand how much he needs to believe that’s true.

Also, I did not think Nick was a prat! Tell me more about this. Like my blue-eyed girl Jordan I was annoyed and often disappointed by his shiftlessness. But in Maguire’s scenes with DiCaprio I felt a real warmth and sympathy that made their odd friendship work onscreen. (It turns out they’re good friends in real life, too, which may have something to do with it.) Also, I’m into the Nick-is-gay interpretation of Gatsby that got floated back in our grad school seminar, and since Maguire looked most alive in those scenes I guess I wound up reading their relationship on that level.

Sarah S: I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I think DiCaprio is one of the most underrated actors of his generation. This movie needed actors who could convey a lot of depth without explanatory monologues or a very sympathetic plot. It’s one of the reasons the book may be “unfilmable” and why I was so happy to see Luhrmann as director because he was always going to do an interpretation.

Okay, maybe Nick wasn’t a total prat. If it wasn’t for the exposition, I probably would have liked Maguire just fine. It was so often textbook “telling” instead of “showing,” sometimes literally describing images (like Gatsby reaching for the green light before he reaches toward it) that don’t need explaining or telling the audience how to interpret the action, which I found an annoying unwillingness to trust that we could “get” the meaning without having it spelled out.

As to Nick’s potential homosexuality, it’s there for interpretation in the movie (and the book) and Luhrmann took a light hand with it that actually makes the whole thing richer. I think the best evidence for this is the erasure of Nick’s relationship with Jordan and his voyeuristic presence during Gatsby and Daisy’s affair. Nick’s always a been a bit of a voyeur, and the conceit of him as “author” of the book further necessitated his presence at scenes he shouldn’t be witnessing. But then if we extrapolate further to the scenes he’s imagining—the most romantic, the most intimate—well, then, is he identifying with Gatsby in love with Daisy or Daisy loved by Gatsby who Nick so adores?

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Sarah T: I thought Luhrmann actually one-upped the book in one respect: the love story between Gatsby and Daisy, which Fitzgerald acknowledged was the book’s Achilles heel. Luhrmann gets the romantic heavy lifting done in two back-to-back scenes: their jittery, awkward, hilarious first meeting for tea in Nick’s cottage-turned-florist shop, and then the swoony afternoon they spend in Gatsby’s mansion. That shirt scene! Both Gatsby and Daisy lit up with love and relief, and then the sudden sharp turn as Daisy starts thinking about all those years lost. Pitch-perfect. What did you think about the Daisy-Gatsby storyline in this version, Sarah S? Were you feeling it?

Sarah S: I was! And the credit for this goes, I think, all to the actors: DiCaprio’s bursting anxiety waiting for Daisy at Nick’s cottage, played for laughs and then for agony; Mulligan’s whisper to Gatsby, “I wish I’d done everything in the world with you.” And those shirts! That scene’s so odd when you first encounter it but Mulligan nailed it. This was one spot where I was irritated by Nick’s explanation because the scene was so perfect it wasn’t needed. But, as we mentioned before, their love is tainted by Daisy’s need for money and security and Gatsby’s combined emotions of devotion and ownership.

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Sarah T: I was glad Luhrmann preserved the book’s complicated portrait of race and racism, even calling attention to it at times–take the scene where Tom barrels on about that racist book in front of the African-American butlers. What were your thoughts, Sarah?

Sarah S: I agree about the complicated portrayal, including the still racist depiction of Wolfsheim. As to Tom, don’t you think it’s even an easier way to immediately show he’s a villain and a boor than it was when the book came out? (I.e. I’m glad it was in there since it’s Tom but I didn’t find leaving it in to be particularly progressive.) There was additional sympathy when Nick looks at the apartment house across the way from Tom and Myrtle’s love-nest and sees the working class people, many of them African American, living their lives. And presented without comment, the magnificent scene of the black flappers and dandies in the screaming car with the champagne and the white chauffeur. This sight makes Nick very uncomfortable in the book, it’s a sign that the world has become topsy-turvy. In the movie it’s stunningly visual and magnificent.

When I was in college one of my favorite professors researched women’s cookbooks, particularly the ones created by churches, societies, and other clubs (as opposed to famous chefs such as Julia Child or giant publishing houses). This work was classic feminist recovery in the era of cultural studies, moving from highlighting forgotten women authors or figures and into celebratory analyses of women’s lives. If I recall, this professor focused on themes within the recipes (region, culture, etc.) and items such as decoration, fonts, purpose of the cookbook (usually some form of fundraising or cultural record).

Since that time, our cultural relationship to food has changed considerably. From celebrity chefs to locavore activists to foodies such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, we have removed food production from the realm of Betty Draper and into…where exactly? If nothing else, our televisions, bookshelves, magazines, politics, and national conversations.

Another thing came to prominence during this time—the web. One thing it encouraged was a flurry of recipe sharing sites, in many ways not unlike the cookbooks my professor studied, and formal recipe sites such as Epicurious.com, similar to the fancy, all-encompassing cookbooks. But the internet also created something that I’m not sure really existed before, a merging of recipes and life narrative: cooking as autobiography.

These things of course start with blogs, whose journaling origins encourage a chatty, narrative-based genre. They also create a forum for home cooks to share their recipes, and this has often led to hybrids of autobiography and cook”books”. GLG’s own Chelsea has a blog in this vein. There are dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of others but two of my favorites are The Smitten Kitchen and The Sprouted Kitchen, both of which have brought their narrative-based recipes beyond the web and into beautiful books.

The creators of these blogs/books use stories to earn their stripes. They’re not trained chefs or restauranteurs (or writers or photographers) so they frame their recipes in experience: the funny or frustrating failures and missteps; the party for a friend that inspired this cake or that cocktail; the cultural or familial history that surrounds a dish.

But in so doing they also reveal how essential cooking and eating are to culture, and in such a beautiful way. On one hand, we cook because we have to eat (not eating not being a viable option for long). But for something so quotidian and necessary we surround it in an awful lot of creativity and ritual and love. It’s easy to forget that, to forget how essentially we need the production of food to sustain not only biological life but also social, familial, and individual life. By telling the tales of food, alongside sharing the how-tos of the food itself, these unique storytellers remind us.

Melissa Sexton

Note: NPR has taken down the livestream of the Gatsby soundtrack, since the soundtrack was released for purchase today.

I have spent the past two days in an ecstatic swoon, listening to the new soundtrack for The Great Gatsby over and over again. Haven’t heard it yet? NPR is streaming it on First Listen, giving the English majors of the world something to do with their media-time until the film FINALLY comes out this Friday. My love for the soundtrack is not surprising; when the first trailer came out last year, I was elated by its pairing of hip-hop and Prohibition-era glamor. I got that thrill – the one we go to the movies to get – when the trailer opened with shots of fast, glamorous cars careening to Jay-Z and Kanye’s menacing, pounding “No Church in the Wild.”

But not everyone has shared my enthusiasm. And as professional writers and passionate individuals alike began responding to the soundtrack and to early viewings of the film, I picked up on a pattern: to dismiss Luhrmann’s glossy, glittery remake and Jay-Z’s equally sequined soundtrack as somehow “inauthentic” to the original Gatsby – or, more subtly, as missing the novel’s entire point, reproducing the very American Dream that Gatsby was intended to critique (as we all dutifully learned in our high school English classes).

Now. I don’t do this very often. But. As someone with a PhD in American literature, I feel like I have some professional clout behind my own reflections on whether a hip-hop, cinematic orgy of a film can be considered “authentic” or “faithful” to an American modernist novel. And as someone with a developing love of contemporary popular music in general, and 21^st century hip-hop in particular, I think I can talk about Jay-Z’s involvement in the project without the kinds of knee-jerk reactions I was noticing all over the comments sections of The New York Times and NPR – comments that were basically the equivalent of “You kids with your hip hop music! Get off my American literature! Now Maud, turn that NPR jazz hour back on!” But for once, I’m going to flaunt the professional clout. Because if I see one more Facebook post snidely asking if “anyone who liked the soundtrack had actually even read the whole book,” I am going to go all George Wilson on their asses. So. I’m not saying that Baz Luhrmann’s and Jay-Z’s take on Gatsby is THE right one, but I think it is A right one. And I want to explain why a trained literary professional can totally get behind this fusion of hip-hop with The Jazz Age.

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If you haven’t read the NPR article on the soundtrack yet, do it. Ann Powers’s take on the music really nails it. She argues that Jay-Z’s soundtrack production follows in Luhrmann’s footsteps, refusing to go for either a complete contemporary “updating” or a straight-faced “period” piece. We don’t get rewrites of ‘20s hits with an 808 beat. Nor do we get straight-up hip-hop or dubstep songs that adopt the themes of the novel without any musical nods to the period. Rather, what we get is music that blithely smashes together influences from the ‘20s with the dance music and indie rock of today. In Powers’s words, we get music “Distilling the essence of the Jazz Age though never completely reflecting it.” My favorite such moment is when sassy horns replace Beyoncé’s vocalizations in the remake of “Crazy in Love.” The result is music that seems to resonate in some period outside literal history. If you heard Florence Welch’s scorching “Over the Love” on the radio today, you wouldn’t blink. If you heard The Bryan Ferry Orchestra’s “Love is the Drug” at a swing night, it would blend right in. But together, the mix feels somehow outside of time – in a way akin to the soundtrack of one of Luhrmann’s other projects, Moulin Rouge.

Why go for such a weird mix-up? Powers again explains it perfectly, suggesting that the soundtrack along with the film is exploring the question: “How did the music in the original Great Gatsby feel to its characters and audience?” How did jazz music feel to the readers of the 1920s? The simple answer is that it felt sexy, a little dangerous, the prelude to a big party. It dragged you out on the floor to dance and it raised eyebrows. No matter how much we like jazz in this day and age, it doesn’t have that feel for us. Well, not for me or many of my generation. When I think of jazz, I think of coffee shops and poetry readings. You have to appreciate jazz, to cultivate a taste. Even the jazz clubs and dives I’ve been to have had a studied air of dishevelment to them: just wild enough. While I’m sure the wider world of jazz has subtleties that I can’t appreciate, some sexy and dangerous, the wider cultural connotation is one of class. Jazz is the provenance of music departments and bars selling ten dollar cocktails, not the go-to start-up sounds for a rager.

While the parallel may seem facile, hip hop does in many ways seem to be the new jazz – intoxicatingly danceable, pushing the cultural boundaries, and (as Powers again argues) permeating the culture, so that its basslines and rhythmic cues have flooded pop and alternative music too. One way to soundtrack the film would have been to ask: What kind of music was prominent in Fitzgerald’s time? But this soundtrack asks: What kind of effects did the music Fitzgerald features create? For the twenty-first century, if you want to conjure that odd tug in your gut – that longing to dance too late and drink too much, to kiss a stranger and pretend the rest of your life doesn’t exist – you’re going to need something with a little more bass, a little more electronic flair, a little more snarly rapping in the lyrics.

I can understand why many fans of Gatsby still might not love the soundtrack, no matter the explanations. They may simply not like hip-hop. Or dance music. Or Lana del Ray. But what I don’t understand is why reactions against the soundtrack rarely boil down to an admission of aesthetic preference. Rather, the charges against the soundtrack (and, by extension, the film) are often moral in nature. Something precious in Gatsby is being tarnished by a soundtrack that celebrates partying and makes modern audiences want to dance.

For instance, Maureen Dowd’s piece in The New York Times  quotes a number of people who deplore the remake of Gatsby for buying into the very glitz and glamour that Fitzgerald’s novel was trying to mock and expose:

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, understands that we’re drawn back to “Gatsby” because we keep seeing modern buccaneers of banking and hedge funds, swathed in carelessness and opulence. “But what most people don’t understand is that the adjective ‘Great’ in the title was meant laconically,” he said. “There’s nothing genuinely great about Gatsby. He’s a poignant phony. Owing to the money-addled society we live in, people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald’s title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize.”

But the trouble with Wieseltier’s take on the film is its over-earnestness. The assumption seems to be that unless the film pedantically foregrounds the shallowness of the 1920s New York scene, it will lead audiences astray, causing them to adopt all the glamor and ignore all the warnings. A legitimate danger, sure, given the recent Gatsby parties, full of unironic swag. But perhaps the troubling slip between a celebration and a critique of opulence doesn’t stem from film remakes alone but from the novel itself – a novel that paints glamorous and exciting pictures of champagne-fueled parties, drunken orgies, fast cars, and illegal financial gain. Like it or not, the Great Anti-American Dream Novel is as conflicted as a Jay-Z rap song, both celebrating a culture of excess and deploring the emptiness such a culture creates.

Which is why I remain firmly convinced that having Jay-Z produce the soundtrack was an inspired move.  Jay-Z is a present day artist who, like Jay Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, has to comment on the benefits or pitfalls of the good life while he’s living knee deep in it. He too is a celebrity that the nation watches, envying his excess, greedy for more details about what he does with the life so many of us secretly long to have. And like Fitzgerald, though unlike Gatsby, Jay-Z both revels in and questions the good life. What was Watch the Throne other than a dizzying oscillation between political critique and celebratory decadence? The album was self-described as “luxury rap,” an image that carried through to the gilt gold cover. And yet its usual hip-hop celebration of success and profit was frequently tempered by self-reflection – Kanye rapping about the emotional price of his publicity stunt-driven fame; Jay-Z wondering how he can help his children avoid the long road he took to success. Perhaps the album’s opening track, the very song pounding along in the opening of the first Gatsby trailer, best captures the sense of despair that runs through both Gatsby and Watch the Throne. It describes the futility of hope and social climbing: “Human beings in a mob? What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a god? What’s a god to a non-believer that don’t believe in anything?” Meanwhile, the verses describe hung-over partiers, immersed in and indifferent to a life of constant partying and sex. This is what we do, the song seems to say; we ball until we get above the mob, then we throw ourselves into a new partying mob to forget. The album as a whole depicts a world where people murder and steal to get to the top, then find the top to be unsatisfying and have to celebrate like hell to mask that fact. The album, like The Great Gatsby, asks what it means when you’ve succeeded by all standards but still feel unfulfilled. Sometimes you swagger. Sometimes you ponder. Sometimes you party and try to forget.

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That conflicted morality is what I want to preserve in our readings of Gatsby. I don’t want a CliffNotes summary that pegs the novel squarely as a a straight-faced rejection of the American Dream. As a professor of literature, I feel I have the clout to say: when we get sanctimonious about preserving the purity of our literature, we end up worshiping a thing that never existed. When we take the lewdness out of Shakespeare, the eerie menace out of Emily Dickinson, the sarcasm out of Jane Austen, or the debauchery out of Fitzgerald, we end up with a sterile substitute that never existed in its own time – the great and peerless bard, the crazy poet recluse, the dainty English lady, and the noble, tragic narrator of the failed American dream. We get a fantasy in period clothing, When you complain that a new Gatsby film featuring hip-hop and dance music is wasting a good chance to feature jazz, what you’re really lamenting is an opportunity to immerse yourself in a period fantasy, a 1920s-era reenactment. Which is fine. Period pieces are great. And if that’s what you want when you turn to literature, that’s certainly one way to read it. It’s not a wrong way to read it. But it’s also not a more right way to read it than to focus on emotions and reactions, to try and contextualize the way a text would have sounded to the audience who was its original target. Which is what Luhrmann’s films do.

Read this way, Fitzgerald becomes less a Puritanical critic of  wealth and more a conflicted celebrity, the “shimmering American chronicler of corrosive glamour and crushed dreams” Dowd describes. I understand all the commenters hell-bent on defending Gatsby as one of the great works of American literature. I just think it’s great because it’s full of all the sex and drugs and despair and desperation and desire that are also in some present-day hip-hop. Yes, Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream, alright – but it’s a hesitant one. I agree with Leon Wieseltier – the “great” in Gatsby is supposed to be ironic. But it’s an irony spoken by someone lost within the mad, glittering whirl.

Maybe there is nothing truly “great” about Jay Gatsby, but the genius of The Great Gatsby is its recognition of that little piece in all of us that longs for what Gatsby did achieve – for what Jay-Z did achieve: for the glitter and the flash and the effortless coolness, in all our cool shirts. Maybe pairing Fitzgerald with Jay-Z takes away the easy moralizing that we’ve become comfortable assigning to Gatsby, because it challenges the notion that Great Literary Heroes are somehow more morally nutritious than hip-hop mega-stars. But Jay-Z and Fitzgerald alike paint for us morally complicated worlds; and both recognize the seductive power of music, which can let us forget all that complexity by inviting us to dance. I don’t want to reduce The Great Gatsby to a morality tale. And I don’t want a soundtrack that locks conflicted excess into the 1920s, making it a period problem rather than a problem we still ponder and dance around today.

Stories teach us empathy. When we get absorbed in the tale of a teenage vampire slayer or rival street gangs on the Upper West Side, we’re forced to step outside our comfort zones and consider the world from other people’s perspectives. I am absolutely down with that narrative project. I want to understand the different struggles we face, including the ones with our own demons. But lately I’ve found myself impatient with stories that ask audiences to channel their empathy toward violent men–to the exclusion of everyone else.

The character that’s tipped me over the edge is Huck on Scandal, the addictive-as-caramel-popcorn television drama by Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes. The show follows Washington DC power players and the band of brilliant outcasts, headed by Olivia Pope, who fix their problems.

Huck is probably the most fully-realized character in Pope’s hodgepodge troupe: a former soldier turned CIA assassin turned homeless man turned professional fixer. With his soft, stumbling voice, teddy-bear looks, and gentle manner, he’s one of Scandal‘s most easily sympathetic cast members. We understand the loneliness that drives him to set up camp outside a strange family’s house each day and watch them go through the ordinary motions of their lives, pizza dinners and game nights and walking the golden retriever. We cringe for him when he reveals that his old CIA nickname was “Spin,” short for spinster, “because they said I’d never find someone.”

The show loves to contrast Huck’s lost-soul mooniness with his brutal talents. In one excruciating scene last season, Pope asks him to torture a former CIA colleague for information. Huck agrees to give up his “sobriety” (the show frequently uses the language of addiction to discuss torture) for the greater good. Soon he’s leaning over an assassin named Charlie—someone who’s a lot like him, only meaner. Huck tells Charlie that he’s going to relish the high of making him suffer. “We both know what a junkie I can be,” he says.

Huck is our only point of identification in this scene. We don’t know Charlie very well at this point in the series, and what we do know, we don’t like. We’re not meant to care about his pain. The real source of dramatic tension is how Huck will be impacted by the torture. Now that he’s fallen off the wagon for Pope, will he be able to stop himself from spiraling into a new cycle of violence?

I don’t object to a storyline that examines how violence changes the people who perpetrate it, or to narratives that persuade viewers to empathize with people who do horrible things. What bothers me about Scandal’s portrait of Huck is that the show is so bound up in character loyalty that torture only matters insofar as it impacts him. When Huck is water-boarded and, later, beaten and trapped in a trunk, we’re supposed to be horrified on his behalf. We understand the lasting trauma of torture as Huck slips under the tides of post-traumatic stress. But when Huck is on the other side of the power drill, he remains the sole figure of empathy. The people he tortures are as disposable and interchangeable in the show’s eyes as they are in his.

This point was driven home by a recent episode, “Seven Fifty Two,” which fleshes out more of Huck’s back story. We find out that Huck was conscripted into the CIA torture squad, but soon found himself enjoying his work. “There’s no feeling like it in the world,” his co-worker says after Huck’s first kill, “it’s like being a god.” “It was freakin’ amazing,” Huck agrees with a grin. A montage set to jaunty funk music showcases Huck’s salad torture days: blood splattered on the walls, muffled screams, and then deathly-still hands from which Huck removes watches as keepsakes. We catch glimpses of the sadistic speeches Huck makes to his victims. “Are you a screamer?” he asks one man. “Let’s find out.”

On the day his girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant, he goes to work on a man who’s bound and gagged, begging for mercy. Huck’s practically whistling. “I’m in a good mood,” he says, before taunting him about his manicure and going to snip off his toes.

But none of this is supposed to turn us against Huck. Indeed, “Seven Fifty Two” is unabashedly sentimental about his story. When he becomes a father, he can’t bring himself to torture people like he used to. He breaks down, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him—but never for the man who’s shaking his head, pleading with Huck to put down his weapons and leave him alone. Later, Huck gets thrown into solitary confinement, left at the bottom of a dark hole until he agrees to forget his wife and child. At the end of the episode, we find out that he’s only seen them once since then: at a subway station, at precisely 7:52 am—the number Huck can’t stop mumbling as his PTSD sets in.

The episode set off waves of Huck-sympathy across the internet. Danielle Henderson of Vulture—a terrific recapper, I should add—declared it “a sucker punch right to the cry bones.” But the near-sighted morality of Scandal leaves me cold. The show takes torture—one of the most important human rights issues in the post-9/11 U.S.—and reduces it to Huck’s personal tragedy.

In the show’s worldview, violence and suffering only have meaning when they happen to people we know and care about. It’s that kind of attitude that lets governments get away with torturing prisoners and launching drone strikes against civilians. It produces a cultural apathy that makes us shrug when we see someone not like us who’s in pain. If they’re in trouble, we try to tell ourselves, it’s probably their own fault.

Scandal didn’t create this problem. But it is a symptom of it. Which is why I can’t bring myself to muster up too many tears for Huck. I can have sympathy for the devil, sure. But I’m wary of a show so desperate to insist that I put his feelings first.

By now, you’ve probably seen that Dove “social experiment” that’s going around, but just in case you’re as behind as I am, here it is:

The premise here is simple and, if I’m honest, well-meaning: many women, as evidenced by the way they describe themselves, don’t recognize – or are reluctant to acknowledge – their own beauty.  Any flaws they have in appearance are magnified when they view themselves; every crease set by joy and laughter is a “crow’s foot.”  Every tiny, cinnamon-dust dot is a big ugly freckle.  Chins protrude invasively.  Cheeks that don’t have flesh-slicing angular edges are chubby.  These flaws are captured when they describe themselves, all unseen, to a trained forensic artist who draws their portraits to match their descriptions.  And really, this shouldn’t be terrifically surprising.  Women are hard on themselves.  We’ve been taught to be.  Lines, wrinkles, creases – these are harbingers of mortality.  Any freckle, any spot, even the hopefully named “beauty mark” is looked upon as a flaw.

But then the tables are turned: earlier on the day of the experiment, each woman met and chatted with another participant.  Each is asked to describe the other person, and again the sketch artist draws the face that is described.  Results are, as you might expect, startlingly different: faces described by their owners as fat are simply pleasantly oval in shape.  Chins that are claimed to protrude are “nice” and “thin.”  Noses are “short and cute.”  Each woman is then shown the two portraits: one “drawn” by her own eyes, one by the eyes of a stranger.

Most of the women stand in stunned silence.  Some tear up.  Some smile ruefully, and some seem – not ashamed – but a bit bashful at their own perception of themselves.  The one older participant, Florence, who is given a lot of face time, says “I should be more grateful of my natural beauty.  It impacts the choices in the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children, it impacts everything.  It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”  The images of the women standing in an otherwise empty gallery gazing on the sketches send a powerful message, the tagline of the whole campaign: you are more beautiful than you think.

At first viewing, my impulse was that this video rocked.  I got a little teary.  I said some affirming things to myself.

But then I watched it again, and I started asking questions.  Yes, the message is good: women should celebrate their beauty, but what is really being said about beauty in this depiction?

As blogger Jazz has said perhaps more eloquently than I can, there is a disparity in the types of woman being represented here.  Most are white – and not just white, but blonde.  Most are young.  All are thin-to-average in weight and build.  The women of color who are shown are featured less – say less and receive less screen time – than their Caucasian counterparts.  The one Asian woman represented, as Jazz points out, says nothing at all.  Beauty is, then, a young, thin, white woman.

Bitch Magazine has also picked up this issue and paraphrases it perfectly: “The hearts of conventionally beautiful women can grow a little warmer today.”  And really, isn’t that what’s being shown here?  While Florence is a bit older than the other participants, she barely tips the scales at middle aged.  She talks about her wrinkles and crow’s feet, but she’s barely got any to worry about.  All the women featured have feminine hairstyles, all wear make-up, all are dressed in casually stylish but unremarkable ensembles.  Women should consider themselves beautiful, then, but the depiction of beauty we are told should be celebrated fits within a stiff, traditional mold.

Dove, I commend you for selling us a vision of much needed self-affirmation.  I commend you for acknowledging this tendency in women and encouraging a move away from it.  I commend you for resisting the urge to sell us your skin care in a promise to enhance the beauty we already having.  As Bitch notes, there is no product schilling in this ad, and that’s nice.  But this video does sell us something.  It sells us a standard: while telling us to celebrate ourselves – we are more beautiful than we think – it sells us what beauty means, and what we should do with it.

What beauty means here, beyond an image of a thin, fair-skinned, young woman, is a physical appearance.  There is no acknowledgment of personality.  There is no discussion of inner strength or kindness or courage or wisdom.  We see chins and cheeks and eyes and hair.  We see surface.  What is revealed about these women’s thoughts is appearance-based as well: each woman is made to think, and think deeply, but her thoughts are all – every one of them – about how she looks.  Everything is about the surface.

So beauty means what someone looks like on the outside.  And knowing our surfaces meet a standard makes us feel good which, as self-affirming messages go, is bad enough already: the right kind of beauty = happiness!  Let’s look again at Florence’s conclusions: “I should be more grateful of my natural beauty.  It impacts the choices in the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children, it impacts everything.  It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”

Do I really want to live in a world where my physical appearance and how I interpret it impacts what choices I make when I seek friends?  Friends, I can tell you with certainty that neither my looks nor your looks were what drove me to desire your friendship.  Are my own looks really going to impact how I treat my children?  My wrinkles and laugh-lines, as they develop, will somehow influence the way I love?  Beauty as Dove defines it – how I look on the outside – is not, and should not, be what is most critical to my own happiness as a person.

But that’s not all.  In the final scene of the ad, one of the women’s voices tells us “We spend a lot of time, as women, analyzing and trying to fix the things that aren’t quite right, and we should spend more time appreciating the things we do like.” As she speaks, the scene changes from a reflective moment in the gallery of portraits to an outdoor setting.  Against a bright beam of sunlight, she is suddenly enfolded in the arms of – judging from what we can see of him – a young, conventionally attractive, well-dressed man.

So, it’s not just that women should celebrate their own beauty, it’s not just that the women in this video are what beauty looks like, but part of the message is also about heteronormativity.  That’s disappointing, even though it’s not strange.  But what really bothers me here is that even as we are told that women should stop worrying so much about how they perceive themselves and concentrate on more important things, we are told exactly what those more important things are.  The couple depicted here at the end of the video embrace each other, her hand grasps at the bottom of his jean jacket as they walk, and the video closes with this image of her tucked under his arm, almost disappearing against his body – providing a clear interpretation of what it is that we should “spend more time appreciating” and what it is that, at least in her case, “we do like.”

What we get here, then, is suggestive.  Beauty suddenly isn’t an idea in itself; we are shown what appreciating our own beauty does for us.  When we aren’t so worried about our fat cheeks and pokey chins and gross freckles, we can devote our time not to building our self-confidence or learning new things or celebrating our independence, but to hooking, hanging onto, and demurely all but fading into the protection and strength of a man.

Now that’s a message I want to send to my friends and my children…

The books we love tell a lot about us, particularly the ones read multiple times. And not because it shows you’re “old fashioned” or “feminist” but because if you can understand why a book gets to you so deeply that you’ll return to it again and again you’ll understand something about yourself. For example, it’s objectively true that Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is a great book. But I read it for my connection with the titular professor, a character for whom I have empathy and criticism in equal measure. The fact that I read for the professor (and have little emotional interest in Tom Outland) reveals something about me—whether a truth of personality or a whisper of something I strive to understand.

I recently re-read one of my favorite childhood books, a novel that I read so many times its edges are grey and rumpled and the cover finally fell off. This time, however, I found it painfully wanting. Yet it also provided a telescope down the rabbit hole to my childhood self. I see why I liked it then and it has nothing to do with it being objectively good.

The book in question is Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle, easily the least of the four novels about the Murray children (the others being A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet). Many Waters focuses on the “normal” twins between the eldest daughter, Meg, and the youngest son, Charles Wallace. Sandy and Dennys Murray lack the genius as well as the awkwardness of their sibling but they nevertheless get their own adventure. In sum, they accidentally mess with one of their father’s space-time experiments and blast themselves to the time of Noah mere months before the flood that will destroy the known world.

The ancient world L’Engle creates is fascinating. All the people are small with the exception of the mysterious nephilim (fallen angels) and beatific seraphim (angels on earth), each of whom can transform from its beauteous, be-winged humanoid form to a unique animal host. Sandy and Dennys jointly fall in love with Noah’s youngest daughter, a beautiful, virtuous girl named Yalith who falls in love with both of them. Yalith, of course, is not part of the official story, nor is she meant to board the Ark that “El” has ordered Noah to build. What is this odd, religiousy threesome to do?

L’Engle’s solution has Yalith being taken into the “Presence” by one of the seraphim, just as her grandfather Enoch who walked with El and then was no more. Pretty it up with mysticism all one wants, Yalith essentially dies. The twins get home using a combination of seraphim and virtual unicorns and the rains come.

As an adult, I see this as L’Engle’s most conservative novel. In her other Murray books she counters the anti-scientific streak in American Christianity (which has only grown more virulent since she wrote the books) while also insisting on an essential battle between darkness and light, evil and good in the universe. I would call the other three required reading for all Christian children and nearly-required reading for non-Christian children, particularly A Wrinkle in Time. (A claim I cannot make with a fully clear conscious for other series on both sides of the spectrum, on the one hand, Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, on the other, Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy.) Many Waters, however, puts L’Engle into ambiguous territory that she can’t write her way out of easily, particularly in a children’s book. It insists that El is good and highlights the virtue of Noah’s immediate family so it cannot or won’t account for the cruelty of wiping out everyone, including Yalith. It’s her least scientific novel, in part because it wants to vitalize a myth. And for a woman with a host of fantastic female characters under her belt, L’Engle peoples this book with women who are caricatures of virtue or vice.

So why did I love it so much as a child? Despite my current dislike, what insight did it bring me that merits this much thought? As a child I was sentimental, spiritual, and imaginative—always longing for transcendent experience. Yet I was also a mini-intellectual, enjoying to think about things, and somewhat inherently personally conservative, enjoying classic plots about princesses and love and Big Truths. (I’m still this way with my  imagination; it’s why I’m such a lousy fiction writer.) Many Waters brought to life a story I was raised to believe was historically true, it seemed intensely romantic to my child self, and yet it didn’t flinch from the hardness of a Big Truth (Big Truths, like virtual unicorns, tending to exist in various ways at the same time). It’s little wonder that this somewhat ridiculous novel touched a nerve in me and that I read it and read it and read it again.

Sometimes one re-reads a book, from childhood or otherwise, and discovers something even more magnificent than one remembers. Time and experience bring a new way of understanding the work and you find that it has grown richer. (This happened to me in another recent re-read, To Kill a Mockingbird, which I did not really “get” as a child but fell in love with on re-reading.) I think my days of re-reading Many Waters are now officially over. But I’m still glad I went inside its world one more time. Not because I enjoyed spending more time with the (let’s face it) terribly boring Sandy and Dennys but because I got to spend a bit of time with the child that used to be me.

Irrational Games’ latest opus, Bioshock Infinite, was released last week, to universal acclaim. Creative director Ken Levine has been making the kind of upscale promotional rounds usually frequented by novelists or filmmakers—rare air for someone who has just made an ultraviolent first person shooter, the most reviled (and most lucrative) subgenre of the most debased popular art form. Like other games of its type, the new Bioshock features plenty of gunplay and gruesome melee finishers; unlike other games in any genre, Infinite’s storytelling, setting and themes explore the most troubling aspects of American history, providing a fairly scathing commentary on the interplay of American exceptionalism, racism, religion and labor exploitation. What really struck me is the way that the game evokes—in its narrative and mechanics—two very different responses to historical guilt, responses which make the game’s politics both fascinating and contemporary.

WARNING: massive spoilers below, including major plot twists and ending!

The game’s initial scenario is a version of the all-too-common damsel in distress trope. It is 1912. You play Booker DeWitt, a down on his luck former soldier and Pinkerton agent who receives a note stating that his ‘debts’ will be repaid if he can find and rescue a girl, trapped in a tower above the clouds, in the floating city of Columbia. Her name is Elizabeth, and she can create tears in the walls separating the ‘infinite’ parallel universes.

No damsel: Elizabeth hits Booker over the head with Quantum Mechanics

At first glance, the city of Columbia is a wonder: a beautiful, impeccably clean paean to bygone Americana. Strolling through its stately boardwalks and cobbled streets is a lot like walking down Main Street, USA on Dapper Day at Disneyland. We are pleasantly regaled with premakes of classic pop songs, which succeed at being both startling and nostalgia-inducing.

…And then Booker wins a raffle at a carnival game, and discovers that the prize is first chance to throw a baseball at an interracial couple.  This is only the first in a series of uncomfortable revelations in which it becomes clear that Columbia is an attempt to create a white, ultra-nationalist utopia. Its prophet, Father Zachary Comstock, has made an old-testament style religion out of America’s founding ideologies and myths, in which Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson are worshiped as saints or perhaps gods. The police here protect the purity of the white race as well as its property. Lincoln is a kind of devil and there are statues of John Wilkes Booth. Segregated washrooms recall the Jim Crow era. To get hired for work, the city’s laboring class must bid at auction: the least minutes to complete a job (and, therefore, the lowest wage) ‘wins’ that job for the day. Columbia’s museums celebrate the glory of Wounded Knee and the firebombing of Peking—complete with standees painted to look like horribly stereotyped versions of American Indians and Chinese.

The spirit of George Washington defends Columbia from the ‘foreign hordes’

Booker finds Elizabeth relatively early, and most of the game is about their attempt to escape Columbia and the war that they help escalate between Father Comstock’s ‘Founders’ and the revolutionary ‘Vox Populi,’ the city’s racial and economic underclass who live in the basements of their employer’s factories. Early previews of the game led many outside observers to see an allegorized conflict between a hyper-racialist and repressive version of the Tea Party, and an especially bloodthirsty version of Occupy Wall Street. Certainly, some of the rhetoric and propaganda of the Founders and the Vox recall their contemporary counterparts.

Propaganda posters: The Vox Populi (left) and Occupy Wall Street (right)

But the world of Columbia is not exactly bifurcated into the ‘two Americas’ of haves and have nots, and the makers of the game are not trying to enact some tired, dual/simplistic conservative-liberal clash. Actually, Booker embodies a number of America’s historical traumas, and through his hazy or perhaps selective memory, their elision. As his memories slowly return and his backstory is filled in, we become aware of how he—and by extension, we—are implicated in the horrors which underwrite Columbia’s prosperity and undergird its philosophy. Xenophobia: while a soldier, Booker was at Wounded Knee. In a voice recording, we discover that he was one of the most zealous perpetrators of the massacre. Exploitation: Columbia’s greatest industrialist tries to recruit Booker the former Pinkerton as a strikebreaker, cognizant of the agency’s bloody anti-labor history. Extreme violence, racial and class repression: in a genre filled with flawed anti-heroes, Booker’s crimes are especially troubling. Few creators in any narrative form would even contemplate making their protagonist a participant in a genocide, or a man who ostensibly clubbed striking workers.

The big plot reveal—of course, although I didn’t at all see it coming—is that Comstock is actually a parallel-universe Booker. He is the Booker that chose to cleanse his past sins in the baptism that we see our version too full of guilt and self-loathing to go through with. The man we are controlling and accompanying never really recovers from his past actions. He doesn’t take responsibility for them until the very end of the game, but this is far better than the alternative.

The Booker who becomes Zachary Comstock? He creates a floating city on the hill dedicated to American exceptionalism, to an America which not only does not feel guilt about the horrors it has committed—it doubles down on them, praises itself for their commission, and makes plans to burn the “Sodom Below” for daring to criticize God’s newly chosen people. It is an audacious conceit, one that some players will not want to engage with. Many will probably look at the horrible reminders of racial oppression that Columbia evokes and will try to assure themselves that these were things of the past. But the game’s critique is not only of bygone injustice and murder, but also of a curious, contemporary perversity, embodied by Comstock—our inability to take responsibility, and worse—some people’s justification (!) of those actions, with their desperate insistence that America has never, will never, could never have do(ne) anything wrong.

Don’t give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

Sadly, we do not need to travel back to 1912 to find examples of these, not when one of last year’s candidates for president named his book about American greatness No Apologies. Bestselling pundits bend over backwards trying to justify Japanese internment. And, of course, there are still a number of duly elected politicians who believe that American slavery really was beneficial for the enslaved. Just a couple of weeks ago, at CPAC, one member of a (thankfully small) group of actual activists tasked a panelist to explain on what basis Frederick Douglass needed to forgive his former masters: “For giving him shelter? For food?”  Three days later, Infinite was released. In it, you come across an audio log by the fictional Zachary Comstock which is disgustingly similar:

“What exactly was the ‘great emancipator’ emancipating the negro from? From his daily bread. From the nobility of honest work. From wealthy patrons who sponsored them from cradle to grave. From clothing and shelter!”

All actions have consequences, certainly, but every action is only one possibility: we could take a different path, or even no action at all. Booker is almost certainly named after another B. DeWitt, the physicist who popularized the ‘many worlds’ theory of quantum mechanics, the game’s key plot device. Every decision point, for every person, creates two realities—two universes—which thereafter exist side by side. Booker is baptized: he forgives himself and more, becomes comfortable with  his religious, xenophobic totalitarianism and builds a city-sized shrine and cult around it. Booker refuses baptism: he becomes nihilistic, self-hating, and tries to drown his guilt in gambling and liquor instead. That first choice may be a very small one, but all of the choices which follow, for Booker and Comstock, seem to take on the weight of inevitability. While the metaphysics of choice are of course fascinating, I find the game much more interesting ultimately because of how it frames our response to past choices and actions, those we make ourselves, of course, but also the legacies of our forebears.  We can choose an exceptionalism which is, despite its rhetoric, the real apologism. Or we can choose recognition: of mistakes made, harm done and the need to make amends. With all of the soul-searching and difficulties that this entails.

Brian Psiropoulos is a dad and PhD candidate in English literature. He likes stuff, especially gothic Victorian novels, superhero comics, and video games. Also tennis. Read his scribblings on these and other things here.

Note: This post contains adult-themed videos probably in the PG-13 range. Potentially NSFW and watch at your own risk/desire.

On the surface, a show about a sexist, moronic super-spy with zero self-reflection and serious mommy issues might not seem like a candidate for any kind of progressive title. But bear with me. Sure, ISIS agent Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) consistently makes racist, sexist, ageist, and homophobic comments (as do many others among the cast of characters). He’ll also blow his cover faster than you can say “martini” if he thinks being a “spy” will appeal to whichever woman (or women) he’s hitting on. The show is rife with Archer’s horror at any mention of his mother, Mallory Archer and ISIS head (Jessica Walter), having sex. And all the characters consistently grimace at the sexual exploits of overweight Pam (Amber Nash) and the strangulation fetish of Cheryl/Carol (Judy Greer).

Yet I still maintain that Archer may be the most progressive show on television regarding women’s sexuality.

Why?

Because despite the distaste expressed by the characters over their colleagues’ sexual predilections, the women in question ignore this kind of slut shaming and do what they want. Cheryl finds men (or machines) who can strangle her…just…right… Pam sleeps with, well, basically everybody; furthermore, her lovers unequivocally desire her OR only sleep with her when drunk but then keep coming back for more. And Mallory, a former super-spy herself, is still a stone fox who sleeps with everyone from the head of the KGB to Bert Reynolds.

Further, the animation frequently shows its characters in various states of undress or carefully concealed nudity. Mallory and Cheryl are represented as conventionally beautiful—even Mallory with her wrinkles. Archer’s counterpart and former fiancé, Lana (Aisha Taylor), is the most aggressively attractive of the female cast, with her long legs and giant breasts, and yet the show mocks her cartoonishly superhero figure with jokes about her “man hands.”

One’s reaction to nude Pam probably depends on one’s reaction to overweight women in general. Yet while the show gets laughs out of the characters’ comments about Pam’s weight (as well as her drinking, lack of sophistication, and lesbian tendencies), the animators don’t play Pam’s nudity for laughs. It just is, and a fairly accurate presentation as well. The situation might be funny, as well as the characters’ reactions to it (including reactions to Pam’s sexual activity and size), but her figure itself is not part of the joke.

Last, returning to Lana. She is one of the show’s most likable characters, one of the few who can give back Archer a piece of his own and who can actually get under his forever-adolescent emotional skin. They are the fated couple at the heart of the series. It’s also very refreshing to see an African American woman in such a prominent and powerful role. However, out of the female characters, Lana has the most standard role and the most standard sex life—infrequent, paved with jerks and losers, perpetually overshadowed by her ex (equally objectified by the animators, I might add). Thus, Archer further overturns expectations for women’s sexuality by offsetting the stereotypical aspects of Lana’s love-life against the unabashed antics of her lady-peers. Pretty impressive representin’ from a spy series merged with an office comedy.

What say you? Do you agree or disagree? Any other contenders for this title?

All that acclaim couldn’t go to a more deserving book: Code Name Verity is a ferocious, dazzling tale of the friendship between two young women who also happen to be ace British spies, and the courage they summon under terrible circumstances. I stayed up late into the night finishing the book all in one gulp, and the next day, I started reading it over again. After that, I still wasn’t ready to let go of the world Wein had created, so I sat down and emailed Wein herself–who graciously agreed to an email interview with Girls Like Giants. Read on for her thoughts on villains, best friends, facing your fears, and what learning to fly a plane taught her about feminism. –Sarah Todd

‘Verity’ (aka Queenie) and Maddie are such distinctive, vivid characters. Were they inspired by particular people you’ve known or read about?

The things they do were inspired by real people—I read a lot about women of the Special Operations Executive and the Air Transport Auxiliary when I was doing the research for CNV, and I made altered use of some of their experiences. But the characters of Queenie and Maddie are totally original and developed as the book developed. They really aren’t like anyone I know—they are just themselves.

Often books about female friendships seem to focus on the jealousies and tensions between women. But Queenie and Maddie’s love for each other is pure–maybe because they become friends during wartime and establish that baseline level of trust from the get-go. Do you have a best friend? What’s your own perspective on female friendships been?

I have had several best friends at different points in my life, and there has occasionally been some jealousy involved (Queenie and Maddie do actually admit that they are sometimes secretly jealous of each other, and Maddie now and then expresses her irritation out loud to Queenie). But basically I *love* having a best friend—several different people have filled that role at different times in my life. Writing CNV was partly a celebration of that. When my closest friends live far away, as they do now, I really miss that easy and close-knit interaction.

Although I wouldn’t say the friendship in CNV is based on any ONE of my friends, the development of Queenie and Maddie’s friendship was consciously patterned on my friendship with Amanda Banks, who was enrolled in the same PhD program as me (CNV is dedicated to her). At the time we lived about 100 miles apart and only got to see each other every couple of weeks, and we really lived for those brief meetings. Also, we were under a lot of stress studying for our PhD exams and struggling with some academic backstabbing issues in our department—add to the mix a dorm fire at 2 a.m. and the two of us having to usher all the undergraduates out from the fifth floor—it wasn’t wartime, but our friendship developed very quickly sunder stress, a small bit of danger, and in spite of physical distance. So you can maybe see the parallels.

Code Name Verity is so intricately plotted. I’m curious what the process of writing and structuring it was like. Did you plot out all the book’s twists and turns beforehand, and then go back so that events were revealed in a certain order? Or did you write the book chronologically, figuring out what happened as you went along?

The latter. I knew the basic plot and I knew the structure—the dual narrative and the climactic moment—but I had NO IDEA what the twists and turns would be beforehand. The coded manuscript, Queenie’s actual line of work, Engel’s personality, von Linden’s family—even the fact that Queenie’s confession of code sets might not be entirely what it seems—I didn’t realize ANY of that until I got there. I didn’t know what Queenie’s mission in France was. Because the plot *is* so intricate, it looks like I did it purposefully, but I confess that a lot of it just fell conveniently into place (I had a lot of “AHA!” moments while I was writing it).

Your book does an excellent job of portraying the Nazi characters as real people without ever diminishing their sadism and cruelty. As readers, we’re never meant to be sympathetic to von Linden–thank goodness. But seeing him through Verity’s eyes, knowing that he’s a former headmaster with a daughter in Switzerland and a soft spot for the arts, we wonder along with her how he lives with himself. What was your approach to writing von Linden and the other Gestapo characters in the book–to understanding how ordinary people came to commit unforgivable acts? 

As with the plot structure, I knew very little about these characters when I started writing the book. I set them up as traditional baddies in the beginning, and in fleshing them out I started becoming aware of their humanity — von Linden’s family and interest in literature, Etienne Thibaut’s complicated situation as a local boy, Anna Engel’s sullen nature hiding a TON of stuff (apart from Maddie and Verity/Queenie, Engel is my FAVORITE). But honestly, I just can’t produce a straightforward one-dimensional bad guy.

With von Linden, there was a definite influence from two books I’d recently read in French: Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (which Verity mentions) and La Jeune Fille Au Pair (The Young Au Pair) by Joseph Joffo. Both portray German officers as nuanced human beings. In Le Silence de la Mer, a French family forced to accommodate a German occupation army officer tries to freeze him out, but find themselves forced to listen to his nightly stories of his past life and hopes for the future as he does all the talking to mitigate their frosty silence. In La Jeune Fille Au Pair, the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official takes a job as an au pair for a family of Jewish Auschwitz survivors just after the war. She leads a very complex and distressing double life, as she adores her employers and their children, but disappears to Berlin every two weeks to visit her father, now in prison for his role in the mass transportations of Jews to the death camps. This book definitely provided me with a lot of food for thought as well as the inspiration for Isolde von Linden.

Code Name Verity places a lot of emphasis on courage and fear. Both Maddie and Queenie encounter situations in which they have to face their worst fears and summon up the bravery to make incredibly difficult choices. What made you want to write about women and courage? And where do you think their courage comes from?

Well, truthfully, I don’t really write about women and courage—I write about people and courage. My other five books all feature characters who have to endure equally fearful trials—Telemakos, in The Sunbird, is an eleven-year-old boy who suffers just as much as Verity and proves himself just as clever and courageous. So it’s not really a surprise that my girls are brave too!

Actually, I think that fear, and facing fear, is a big theme throughout everything I’ve ever written. My books The Lion Hunter and The Empty Kingdom are all about learning to live with fear. The assurance, Do not be afraid runs through The Empty Kingdom with the same repetitive insistence that Fly the plane, Maddie runs through Code Name Verity—and it means essentially the same thing. Do what you have to do. Don’t let fear stop you.

I think the reason I find this such an important theme is because it is such a theme in our lives—I grew up in the shadow of potential nuclear war, and my children are growing up in the shadow of global terrorism.

The events of September 11, 2001 made me very aware that the opposite of fear isn’t really bravery—it’s love. The last words of the September 11 victims, calling from their cell phones to say goodbye, were “I love you.” Not “I don’t want to die,” but “I love you.”

So, um, yes. I’ll stop now ’cause I’m making myself cry! But yes. That’s what I write about. People living with fear and beating it.

I understand you’re a pilot yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about what flying means to you, and why you wanted to write a book about a woman pilot in particular?

Getting my pilot’s license was the hardest thing I have ever done, for a number of different reasons. One of these was that when I started taking flight lessons I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old in the house. They were in daycare two and a half days a week, and that’s when I fit in my lessons. How I fit in the intense study (there are 8 written exams) I do not know, to this day, but I do remember once becoming so frustrated with the background distractions that I scribbled all over the book I was trying to study and threw it across the room (it was the navigation manual).

I find, living in Scotland, that women are more complacent about fitting into traditional stereotyped roles than I have experienced in other places. It irritated me that as the mother of very young children I was expected to lose interest in anything else. A friend at the time bemoaned the fact that she’d always wanted to play the saxophone and now she never would. It made me so mad! Why the heck should having children stop a free and independent grownup from taking saxophone lessons? And the first time I went to a flying club social evening as a student pilot, someone who hadn’t met me before asked me “whose wife” I was—assuming I couldn’t possibly be there as a pilot myself.  Gah. ARE WE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OR NOT???!

So being a woman and a pilot did cast a new light on feminist issues for me. Like Maddie, I was given tons of encouragement from all my instructors and fellow pilots, but also like Maddie, I was a bit of an anomaly. And I got to explore those issues, which are very much part of my sense of self now, in Code Name Verity.

That’s kind of separate from the joy of being in the air and the sense of accomplishment in knowing how to fly a plane—but the ground work is actually just as important.

Is there any talk of making Code  Name Verity into a movie? And in your dream-casting world, who would you want to play Maddie, Queenie, Anna, Jamie, and other key characters?

The movie rights for CNV have been optioned by Anonymous Content, a management company, who will work on putting together a package (studio, director, actors, etc) around the book. We’ll see what comes of it! I have to stay away from the dream-casting question because I don’t want to jinx it or type-cast anybody’s role. Careless talk costs lives!

Where can fans of your book find more of your work? And do you have any book recommendations that you think people who loved Codename Verity might enjoy?

My books and all my short stories are listed on my website (www.elizabethwein.com), but unfortunately they’re mostly out of print so they’re hard to get hold of. There are usually used copies available on Amazon but I’ve also found that eBay carries a fairly steady supply. My first book, The Winter Prince, is available as an audio book.

Readers of Code Name Verity should check out Sharyn November’s short story anthology, Firebirds Rising—the last story in this collection, “Something Worth Doing,” tells the story of the “vicar’s son” who Maddie mentions a couple of times, as well as Theo Lyons, the ATA pilot who first tells Maddie about the Moon Squadron.

Here’s a great trio of World War II spies-n-pilots books for readers who enjoyed CNV: Amy McAuley has a wonderfully well-researched novel about teen girl Special Operations Executive agents in The Violins of Autumn. Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl tells of a black teen girl pilot who joins the WASP during World War II – this organization was the American equivalent of the ATA. And completing the trio, Tanita S. Davis’s Mare’s War is a moving and evocative novel describing life in the only all-black women’s regiment stationed in Europe during the war.

And of course… Rose Under Fire, my next book, will be available in the UK as of 3 June, and in the US and Canada in September!