5. The stultifying sameness of the year’s comic book movies.
Can we talk about Guardians of the Galaxy for a minute? This 2014 movie was hailed by many as the best and most original Marvel movie to date. And it was, in many ways, completely unique among other films in the genre: set in space, featuring no superheroes, with a talking raccoon and an anthropomorphic tree as major named characters. And yet, this blazingly “original” film was, in many ways, a simple retread of 2012’s Avengers: otherworldly villains (Loki/Ronan) seeking a MacGuffin of cosmic significance (The Tesseract/Infinity Stone), while a ragtag band of heroes (The Avengers/Starlord and company) must overcome their differences to save the planet (Earth/Xandar) in a climactic battle over a city as faceless civilians run around screaming below.
Is this really the best we can do? Look, I thought Guardians was fun as hell and I’m really trying not to sound like a declinist crank—but when you’ve got merely good movies being called great, and when the most superficial differences are seized on as proof of originality in otherwise derivative work…well, then you’re looking at a genre in creative crisis. After Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and a few years into Whedon’s Marvel reign, comic book movies have been granted a measure of cultural respect—and justly so. But even as the genre has gained respectability, the individual titles have started to feel more and more like versions of the same basic movie with slightly different dress. This goes not just for Guardians, but other objectively good comic book movies that also felt like variations on the same old thing: Captain America and X-Men.
We can do better. And with Marvel and DC set to dominate the movie industry for the forseeable future, we need to do better.
4. Daniel Handler’s racist joke at the National Book Awards.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming was one of the best books of the year, in any category or genre. This memoir in verse is exactly the kind of book that should be published more often—and in November, it was the just recipient of a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
It should have been a wonderful moment. But after Woodson accepted her award, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket, and the emcee for the evening) took the mic and made a racist joke. Handler has since apologized, but we forget the episode at our peril, because it demonstrates something important: how insidious privilege can be, and how creative industries can still be hostile environments for women and people of color.
3. A.O. Scott’s screed against the death of adulthood in popular culture.
In September, film critic A.O. Scott published a long, winding essay called “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” It was by turns brilliant, maddening, lucid, and confused—and months later, I still don’t quite know what to make of it. At the time, it certainly felt like there was something there, that Scott was putting his finger on something real, and important. But in hindsight, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that his mad grab at a real cultural phenomenon, Scott came away with a handful of other stuff as well: patriarchy, and feminism, and American history that only made a muddle of his argument. Hard, too, not to notice the essay’s aggrieved tone, the suggestion of an aging boomer pissed off at the upstart millennials killing off the kind of authority he represents.
Scott was onto something—but to the extent that he takes a side, he’s on the wrong side. Something is dying, and something else is being born in its place. Viva la revolucion, I say.
2. Game of Thrones’ consent confusion.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but (spoilers): the fact that Game of Thrones portrayed Jaime Lannister raping his sister Cersei is not actually the worst thing the show did this season. It was bad, even for Game of Thrones, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what director Alex Graves said about the episode in an interview with Alan Sepinwall: he claimed that the rape was not actually rape, but that the sex “becomes consensual by the end because anything for them ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle.”
Um, no. I’ve seen the scene, and it’s pretty clear: Cersei says “no” multiple times. And Graves is trading in some dangerous myths, besides: the notion that rape could “become consensual,” suggesting that women don’t know what they want; the merest suggestion that anything about non-consensual sex could be a “turn on.” Game of Thrones deals with some rough material—murder, sadism, torture, and yes, rape. These are all valid topics for portrayal on a TV series. But the consent confusion on the part of those responsible for creating the show is the strongest evidence yet that they may be incapable of giving this difficult subject matter the responsible treatment it so desperately deserves.
1. The Amazon vs. Hachette feud.
The public war between two publishing industry giants was way more than a moment—it seemed to drag on, and on, and on. And to those outside the industry, the whole thing must have seemed very boring indeed. But make no mistake, the Amazon and Hachette feud matters—and not just to those who care about books, but to those who care about content and creators, period.
A publisher trying to protect its piece of the revenue pie, a seller using outsize market power to push back with unethical tactics, creators and consumers getting caught in the middle—and meanwhile, seemingly no one minding the store and thinking about the bigger, more important question of how to grow the pie. How to make content creation into a profitable business, how to make it support more creators doing better work for more and more diverse audiences. These same forces could be applied to any content business. What happens in books today could easily happen in movies or TV tomorrow.
The important question for anyone who loves pop culture is: what does the business of creativity look like? How is good work rewarded financially? How are the creators who tell the stories we love compensated for their work? These aren’t sexy questions, but they’re the kind of questions that will make our popular culture what it is behind the scenes in 2015 and beyond, like it or not.
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