By the aid of these senses, then, some of the things that happen to us appear delightful, fitting, glorious, and honorable to us, while others seem vile and contemptible, and we may discern yet another reflexive sense: a sense of things that are ridiculous or apt to cause laughter, that is, when a thing arouses contrary sensations at one and the same time. In the case of men’s intentions and actions, bad behavior that does not cause grievous sorrow or death gives rise to laughter, because there is some dignity in the very name of man because we have a certain opinion of his prudence and intelligence, whereas bad behavior that leads to serious pain or death rather excites pity. In the case of other things, we are moved to laughter by those which exhibit some splendid spectacle at the same time as a contradictory image of something cheap, lowly, and contemptible. This sense is very beneficial, whether in increasing the pleasure of conversation or in correcting men’s morals.

Much of what he says here about the ridiculous and contradictory is a fairly standard theory of humor that dates back to Aristotle. What I find intriguing is that last sentence.

We can all agree that having a sense of humor is beneficial because it increases the pleasure of conversation. But how exactly does a sense of humor “correct men’s morals”? I suspect he is referring back to his earlier point that we laugh at bad behavior (short of death or “grievous sorrow”), which serves as a corrective to bad behavior. Basically, when we laugh at louts, they are shamed into acting better.

Going beyond the text, this passage got me thinking about the role that a sense of humor has in living a good life. I’ve long thought that a sense of humor (both the ability to laugh when appropriate and to make others laugh) is an important character trait. But it is not a virtue that is developed on its own. As Hutcheson reminds us, our sense of humor influences our other character traits. For instance, being able to laugh at our foibles gives us a healthy distance that can encourage us to improve them.

But I’m still wondering if a sense of humor improves us in other ways. How does being able to laugh and make others laugh improve our other character traits? Is a kind person made more kind by having a sense of humor? Is an intelligent person made more intelligent or better demonstrate that intelligence when they have a sense of humor?

Marge Simpson gets psychoanalyz

Most of the debate about Inception (beyond, “does it work?”) has dealt with Nolan’s views of dreaming and the subconscious. A lot of the criticism of the film has focused on Nolan’s rather chaste view of the subconscious and his failure to capture what dreams are like and their relevance to cinema. First, it’s notable that there’s no sex in anyone’s subconscious here. We have one very modest kiss, a couple slinky dresses, and that’s about it. This isn’t exactly the untamed wilderness of lust and desire that people (especially Freudians) associate with the subconscious. There is some violence, but no passion for violence; just violence that is necessary for the mission. Second, dreams make little sense once you’ve left the dream world, but Inception works so very hard to make sense that it’s clear you are supposed to leave the film thinking that it all works. Third, there are filmmakers who push us toward portraying the unease and bizarreness of dreams filmically (David Lynch being an obvious example), but Nolan simply misses all of this. Fourth, many have theorized that experiencing a film is like experiencing a dream, and that films can play to this aspect of our experience, but Nolan fails to do this. Most film edits are like the leaps our brains make while dreaming, for instance. And films can exploit this, perhaps most directly by drawing attention to themselves by employing dream imagery. Inception, it’s been argued, fails to do any of those things that would make it seem dream-like or draw attention to the film as a dream. (I’ve previously argued that Gone with the Wind used dream imagery in this way.)

I don’t mean to rebut these criticisms directly. What I want to say instead is that these criticisms have missed an important aspect of what Nolan is doing. Nolan is not exploring the subconscious and not exploring dreams per se, he is exploring the tension between control and chaos (a theme that runs through most of his work) and using dreaming and the subconscious to further his interest in how we learn to control the world around us (or in this case in us). Three points to consider: 1. Nolan is a controlling director. 2. Chaos and control is an important theme in Nolan’s films. 3. Inception is far more concerned with control over the subconscious/dreaming than with the subconscious/dreaming per se.

First, it is important to note that Christopher Nolan is a “controlling” director, by which I mean that he is a director who works out ahead of time all or nearly all of what will be filmed (scripting, storyboarding, etc.) and the filming comes last. (I know, I know, postproduction comes last, but that’s still been worked out ahead of time). These directors are interested in each detail of the frame, what goes where, and in every aspect of filmmaking because they want to control as many aspects of the production as possible to as fully realize their vision as possible. Other examples of this kind of director include Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Other directors are more open to filming moments as they occur to them (like Ingmar Bergman’s famous closing shot in The Seventh Seal), or leaving pieces of the film open to interpretation (like the blindfolding of the sheep in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel), or working without a script (like Wim Wenders attempted on Wings of Desire). These directors (at least some of the time or for some of the film) try to capture something that is happening in the moment, something that cannot be planned, something spontaneous. This is why it is so odd to see the spontaneous, captured-in-the-moment shot of the fly walking across the camera lens from Truffaut’s Jules and Jim show up Jeunet’s Amelie, since these two films are polar opposites in terms of the sort of control I am talking about. Of course all directors exert some control; we consider Truffaut an auteur, after all, which would be difficult if he had no control at all over his films! I’m just trying to point to two different tendencies among directors. Nolan is the craftsman control, the planner, the preparer. And that’s an important way in which he is engaged with controlling his films.

Second, the theme of chaos and control runs throughout Nolan’s films. I’ll mention just the two that I have watched most recently (which are also his two most well known and most loved films), Memento and The Dark Knight. Memento not only exhibits the sort of supreme directorial control that I talked about in the last point, it is also the story of a man struggling to gain control over himself and his world while he has the unusual condition that he cannot form new short-term memories. We watch in each scene (especially the black and white “forward” scenes) as he tattoos himself with important things to remember, as he makes notes to himself, and (in one crucial scene) controls his future action by manipulating these physical reminders. We slowly come to realize over the course of the film that the other characters are each trying to control the protagonist in unique ways, exploiting the ways in which he is not able to control himself. Memento is, among many other things, a battle for control.

I don’t see much need to harp on the ways that The Dark Knight continues this theme of control. The film (in some disappointingly direct exposition) states the theme of chaos and control quite clearly. The Joker represents chaos. He destroys and terrorizes for the joy of the chaos. Batman tries to bring order to the chaos, tries to help the police and district attorney’s office gain control over the city, because only with this control can there be peace. Batman, though, is a conflicted figure because he tries to bring control by operating outside the bounds of society. He uses his own sort of chaos to help bring control, and thus cannot be an accepted member of society. (This plays into the trope in Westerns that the gunslinger is necessary but cannot remain in the civilized society, captured most beautifully, I think, in Shane.) The Dark Knight is about the relentless struggle between chaos and control and the extent to which at least some of us must become chaotic in order to keep things in control.

Nolan is a “controlling” director and his films engage in the question of how we control the world and the struggle between control and chaos at an individual and societal level. Let’s turn now to the most important point: Inception is far less concerned with how we dream or what the subconscious is really like than it is with how we can control them. Most reviews I’ve read haven’t dealt with this. (Caryn James is one exception.)

The characters in the film are very interested in how much control they have, and how much they are willing that control over to the others. See, as one example, the exchange capture in this TV teaser, dubbed “Control.”

Being in control versus out of control runs throughout the film. It’s spoken of more frequently, I think, than even the question of whether we are dreaming or awake, partly because the question of whether we are dreaming or a wake only matters (in the film) insofar as it affects how much control we have over what happens and what steps we need to take to gain control. Totems are necessary to keep a (literal and figurative) grip on whether you are dreaming so that you can maintain control. Mal loses control over her life because of the inceived (?) idea that the world she experiences is not the real world. This idea matters because she loses her control over herself. When Ariadne enters the shared dream world for the first time, she realizes that knowing you are in a dream can give you control over that dream (visualized beautifully by the city of Paris folding in on itself).

The story of Inception is largely one of control as well. The son who will control his father’s empire. The competitor who wants to control the world’s energy supply. The competitor’s attempt to control the son. And, since this film is in its heart a heist movie, learning to control one’s opponent through sleight of hand (or sleight of dream, in this case) is central to pulling off the heist. From the second scene, where we see Cobb controlling Saito to break into the vault (which he does by noticing Saito’s uncontrolled reaction of glancing in the direction of the safe). When Saito realizes later that he was in a dream within a dream, he wrests control back from Cobb. We could easily run through the whole film talking about how characters struggle against one another for control, how they must cede control by entering into one another’s dreams (which is, after all, very similar to the way we cede control to a film when we enter that darkened theater), and how they must learn to control their dream states.

It is this concern with control, I think, that makes Inception feel like a film that is all ego and superego, and no id. The film is not about the chaos, not about the uncontrolled, except for where it overwhelms us. Like Leonard in Memento or Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight, Cobb has learned to control himself amidst the chaos of his own mind. Even his own subconscious is ordered: he takes an elevator to visit his memories/fantasies, which is a rather silly but sort of neat technique to define and control what seems uncontrollable. Just as Nolan attempts to exert a masterful level of control over his films, his characters are struggling to control their own minds and their immediate surroundings. And far less than in The Dark Knight, the characters of Inception do control the chaos. The chaos is never gone, but it can be controlled. Leonard will never control his memory condition, only learn to control what he can with it. Bruce Wayne must always become out-of-controlled society Batman to maintain control-within-society. But Cobb can go furthest in actually controlling himself.

One of the great mistakes of the film, I think, is the closing shot, because it leaves people talking about only that last scene, which is really one of the film’s most sophomoric elements. “Am I dreaming?” is not a question that is very well addressed by the film, so to leave the film on that question is disappointing. The characters are too busy running through the machinations of the clever plot to do any real work on answering that question. That’s not the sort of question that can be addressed by a zero-gravity fight scene or an imagining of one’s subconscious as a James Bond film. The question of how much control we have over ourselves is a question that can be addressed by the story, and that may be the only intellectually engaging question the film can handle. (The film is far better as a heist film than as a philosophical meditation on the subconscious or dreams.) It’s a question that is well suited to Nolan as a director, because his style and the themes he has been exploring for a decade have all been pushing toward this question of control. So a finely tuned, enormously complex, carefully explained heist plot is the right sort of film to address the question of control, but not the question of “what are dreams?” or “am I dreaming?”

A shared experience, carefully crafted to be as believable as possible, occasionally drawing attention to itself as a dream, always steeped in the images and formulas of genre that involves a remarkable level of control – yes, it’s both the world of Nolan’s Inception and our experience of it.

I wrote all this for two reasons. One, I wanted to chronicle (for my own benefit) what it is like when I have this problem, so I can deal with it better in the future. Second, I thought it would be helpful to point out the ways in which I experienced technology differently because of a relatively small difference in my physical condition from most of the technology-consuming public. As ever, I am trying to reflect on who I am and how I engage with the world around me, although this time I’m less interested in the content of what I view than the physical conditions in which I view it. So bear with this unusual (and probably boring) post.

Tom Cruise in shades, from Top Gun

There are basically three things I have changed to deal with the problematic eye.

1. I avoid bright lights. This doesn’t just mean not going outdoors when it’s sunny. It also means keeping the lights off at home, even at night (where the glow of the TV is often the only light source).
2. When I am near bright lights, I wear sunglasses. This includes almost situations when I am outside the house.
3. I wear an eyepatch. Yes, an eyepatch. Even in low light settings, it can be a strain on my eye to be near any light (even the backlit glow of a computer screen). Add to this the fact that my problem eye is always out of focus, and suddenly using an eyepatch can be a very helpful way of seeing things more clearly.

These three changes have an impact on how I engage with various technologies that depend heavily on eyesight. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t use my iPod for watching video, so I’ll leave those aside.

1. Movie theaters. I simply refused to stop seeing films at the theater because of my eye. So I typically wear sunglass through the previews, when the house lights are still on, then switch to the eyepatch for some or all of the main show. Being in a dark theater isn’t too bad, depending on the brightness of the film. Since I’m especially sensitive to light, I’m particularly aware of the difference in how films are lit. Big Hollywood studio films like Knight & Day, for instance, are considerably brighter than moody indie flicks like Winter’s Bone. Not only is there a difference in lighting techniques (not least Winter Bone‘s greater reliance on natural light), but these choices result in how much light comes through the film strips themselves and therefore how much light reflects off the large white screen and back toward the viewer. Winter’s Bone is more consistent in its color palette and brightness (from outdoor to indoor and from daytime to nighttime scenes) than Knight & Day is from car chase to warehouse gun fight. Other than noticing this, my unequal eyes don’t make a great deal of difference when watching a movie at a theater. It is a bit harder to focus when not wearing the eyepatch, and I do have less depth perception when wearing the eyepatch. But, surprisingly, if I am sitting from the middle to back of the theater, having zero depth perception hasn’t made much of a difference in how I see the film. The closer I move to the front of the theater, though, the greater an impact it makes. In watching Inception, I sat near the front of a crowded theater, and I was losing too much by wearing the eyepatch. It may be that Inception keeps its background in focus more often, or I was more often drawn to the details of the dreamscapes, and thus I need both eyes to take in what is happening, but I suspect that most of the problem stemmed from sitting closer to the screen, where it is more difficult to take in the whole screen with one good eye.
2. 

   How 3-D glasses work from 3dglassesonline.com

   3-D movies. 3-D is completely lost on me because I can’t focus with one eye. So among the many reasons to be skeptical of this “new” technology is that it is (like many “advances”) going to leave some people unable to participate. Since my eye started acting up, I saw only one 3-D film in theaters, How to Train Your Dragon. Watching with only one eye focusing through the 3-D glasses and one not focusing very well is very comparable to watching without the 3-D glasses (based on my mid-movie experiment). Watching with an eyepatch under the 3-D glasses makes 3-D even flatter than traditional film. (I think this is often true of 3-D even with both eyes working, but it is always true if you’ve got one eye covered.) My wife hates 3-D because it gives her headaches to wear the 3-D glasses over her regular glasses, and I avoid it because it so rarely improves a film. (I gave Avatar a “B” when I saw it in theaters, but I suspect it would be no more than a “C” if viewed on other formats. But that is the exception.) (And, yes, I do believe it is legitimate to grade films differently based on the medium employed.) But trying to watch 3-D with one good eye reminds me of how technologies affect people differently depending on their bodily circumstances.

3. Live theater. Going to watch a play is nearly impossible, since I can’t see the stage from the cheap seats (the only ones I can afford). Distance viewing is very difficult, and it is extremely frustrating to be unable to see what is happening on stage. Even if I can handle the lights, which is already a strain, the frustration over watching blurry shapes move around leads me to avoid traditionally staged plays. There is a small black-box theater that I love, that perhaps I could handle because I would be close enough to the action, but I haven’t tried it.


Daryl Hannah, sporting the eyepatch

4. Computers. I keep my laptop’s brightness as low as it can go while still being brighter than the ambient lighting. And, frankly, my MacBook just doesn’t get dim enough for my comfort. I still usually wear an eyepatch, since looking at a computer screen through dark sunglasses is nearly impossible. That increases the strain on my good eye, so I need to relax it more often (close it or focus on something far away for a short while). The one thing that is really noticeable, though, is how difficult it is to watch embedded videos. Nearly all video websites, from Hulu to Youtube to almost every blog on the planet, has a white (or similarly light-colored) background. Videos, however, are typically dark, or at least darker than their surroundings when viewed on a computer. Watching streaming videos on-line is thus one of the most difficult things for me to do. I can lose a lot of quality by taking (some) videos to full-screen; otherwise, it’s a game of trade-offs between making the video bright enough to see and making the surrounding page too bright.
5. Television. My very accommodating wife lets me keep the lights off in our house when we are watching TV, and (with that adjustment) television is the easiest technology for me to engage in right now (at least for the size of our television and its distance away). Apart from the difficulty I have reading subtitles with my poor distance vision right now, television is the most accessible technology for me, in part because it is the most easily adaptable. I have control over the ambient lighting (unlike a movie theater or the area surrounding an on-line video), I have control over the brightness of the television set (unlike a movie theater), and I have control over starting and stopping it so as to give me eyes a rest.
6. Books. Books are perhaps the most difficult to parse. The eyepatch makes it very possible to read a book, but focusing at a reasonable distance puts a large strain on my one good eye, so it is difficult to read for any length of time. This is especially true as day turns to night, and my eye has been worked hard all day. So while reading is quite easy to do (an advantage over almost every other viewable technology), it is very difficult to read for long periods of time. Speaking of which, back to the dissertation…

The dilated eye

Despite all of these (and in some of these cases, because of them), I dearly love Psych. There’s probably no show I enjoy watching more than Psych, none that makes me laugh more, and none that gets watched as quickly after the DVR records it. And it really comes down to one simple thing: Psych is funny.

Funny makes up for a multitude of sins. I’ll watch and rewatch a funny show far more quickly and more regularly than an otherwise superior drama. So when Psych‘s fourth season gets released tomorrow, it will soon make it into the DVD player for a second viewing, and probably a third viewing within a year.

There are some things to be said in favor of Psych. The supporting cast is stronger than Monk, a show that is viewed more positively by critics and Emmy voters. They’re about equal on the quirk-o-meter, for whatever that is worth, and both can attract some solid guest stars. But for me, the show works for one main reason: Dulé Hill.

Critics (and, I suspect, many fans) claim that the show lives or dies by the James Roday’s performance at the center of the show. Shawn Spencer is the fake psychic, after all, and he gets the most lines and the most story arcs. I can’t disagree that the show rests a lots on his shoulders. But what makes Roday’s mugging and irritation to others watchable is Hill’s Burton “Gus” Guster.

Gus fits into a particular subgenre of the bromance that I think of as the Male Black Best Friend. There are Lenny and Carl on The Simpsons, Phil and Lemm on Better Off Ted, Shawn and Gus on Psych, and (the fullest realization of this subgenre) J.D. and Turk on Scrubs. In each case, there is a pair of male best friends, one Caucasian and one African-American, who view each other as equals and are viewed by outsiders as inseparable. (The second half of Community‘s first season saw them pairing Abed with Troy, interestingly putting a twist on the formula by putting a character of Palestinian-Polish descent in the role of the white friend.)

With Phil and Lemm, the idea was that these are codependent coworkers who need each other to be successful. Lenny and Carl began as background figures, drinking buddies to Homer, but The Simpsons has generated a lot of humor out of their pairing. Scrubs pushed the bromance aspect farther than any show or film has yet done, but what interests me the most about it was that it gave Turk more stories and a greater depth of characterization than any other Male Black Best Friend, Guster included. Turk not only supported J.D. through residency and beyond, but he had an interesting and complicated relationship to Carla and had meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast. Gus has far less of that characterization and almost no relationships that aren’t mediated or interrupted by Shawn, and thus he suffers as a character. But he surpasses the others in the central role of the Male Black Best Friend: alleviating the white best friend’s perceived dorkiness by being equally dorky.

The joy of watching Psych for me is watching Hill’s performance as the Male Black Best Friend to a character that is built out of hamming it up and irritating others (including his father and those who sign his paycheck). Hill finds a nice balance between joining in with Roday’s antics and giving a look of sharp displeasure or an annoyed tone of voice that serves as a helpful counterpoint. Psych never passes up a joke, a reference to an ’80s film, an antic, or a farcical conclusion,(except in a handful of darker episodes near the end of the last two seasons). And there is simply too much silliness in the show for one character to carry without the show self-destructing. Many are annoyed at Tony Shaloub being nominated for his portrayal of Monk yet again, but that show is nothing without his performance. Roday’s take on Shawn is too thin to do the work of carrying the show single-handedly. So we have Burton Guster to carry us through, to take the weight off Shawn, to serve as a bridge to the somewhat more realistic characters on the show, and to ground Shawn.

This ancillary nature of the MBFF is disturbing insofar as it suggests that a television show can’t survive with a black lead or further contributes to racial tokenism. And there is probably something significant in the fact that Hill’s most famous role was on The West Wing, where he was a late addition to the cast, forced by NBC to address complaints about its whitewashed primetime lineup. To their benefit, USA has always promoted Psych as a two-lead comedy, but unfortunately that’s not how the show actually works in terms of stories or characterization. Gus is no more than the MBFF.

But I return to Psych because it is funny and because of Hill’s performance. In one of the show’s few (mostly) serious episodes, Shawn is tracking a serial killer and finds he can’t work under the stress, so he asks Gus to be his surrogate and lighten the mood. Rather than aim for mimicry, Hill delivers a performance as Gus that takes Shawn’s levity into absurdly literal territory and thus makes a joke of the very idea that Gus could be funny. But the real joke is that Gus is the funny one. Shawn is the class clown, the big-joke guy who can’t take anything seriously. Gus is the classic straight man who gets more laughs with an exasperated look than the wildly gesticulating man beside him.

I watched the satisfying Toy Story 3 yesterday, which is not only setting box office records (Pixar’s highest grossing opening weekend) but critical ones (one of the highest rated films on Metacritic, for instance). The story follows the further adventures of the beloved Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the gang, as their owner Andy prepares to leave for college. There are some stunning action sequences (the film’s opening is a highlight) and some emotionally moving moments (a moment when the characters hold hands is especially poignant). But what stands out to me the next day is the rich political messages the film offers.

Firstly, there is throughout the Toy Story franchise an emphasis on the emotional rather than commercial value of toys, most clearly exemplified by the evil collector in Toy Story 2. That gets extended in Toy Story 3 by the film’s final sequence which shows 17-year-old Andy passing on his toys to young Bonnie. In addition to being yet another Pixar paean to imagination it’s a reminder that there is a joy to reusing old toys and passing on those old toys to others when they have more use for them which cuts to the heart of a consumerist aquisition of whatever is newest. Caring for old toys is a recurring theme throughout the Toy Story films, which goes beyond mere nostalgia. In the Toy Story films, imagination plus an old box, a paper plate, and some old toys make a perfectly workable spaceship game that are superior to any video game. (Computer games make a brief appearance in TS3, but the suggestion is that these are best enjoyed as a shared experience rather than a solitary one.) Re-using, sharing, and donating wisely are virtues at the heart of the Toy Story films. Disney may make a billion dollars from TS3 merchandise, but the Pixar folks would rather have you playing with your original Toy Story Buzz Lightyear than replace it with every sequel.

Secondly, and more remarkably, the middle third of TS3 showcases a fascist dystopia from which the toys must escape, The Great Escape-style. The Sunnyside Day Care is run by Lotsa Huggins, who smells like strawberries but rules the toys with an iron fist. In the midst of a Disney-financed blockbuster that will earn hundreds of millions of dollars in theaters, and more than that in merchandising and tie-ins, there is a surprisingly seamless tribute to Animal Farm. Orwell’s novel chronicles how easily totalitarianism can arise within democratic societies and how socialist ideals are easily corrupted. Toy Story 3 runs Animal Farm in reverse, beginning with a totalitarian regime (complete with brainwashing, violence, surveillance, torture) and ends with a benign ruler who encourages everyone to contribute what they can to promote the greater good. Like all Hollywood films, we’re required to have a trauma in Lotsa Huggins’ life that leads him to be such a cold, calloused teddy bear. And it’s not as though Toy Story 3 is running a political allegory of the sort that Orwell offered. My point is simply this: Toy Story 3 is a rich, complex story, and (like all rich, complex stories) it is an imagining of how the world works; such imaginings are inherently political.

It’s become commonplace for film critics to encourage viewers to see a film because it is “apolitical.” This happened a great deal with The Hurt Locker, a film that was praised for being “apolitical.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a truly apolitical film, but it would be awfully dull. Every film is political because every film says, in some limited way, “This is how the world is or could be.” So, sure, The Hurt Locker was not political in some narrow, crude sense of saying you should vote for a particular political party. But it was a highly political film in saying, this is one narrow glimpse of what war is like. In understanding what war is like for a bomb diffuser, we are better able to make political decisions like whether we should go to war. Now, critics say The Hurt Locker was apolitical in part because they wanted people to see a very good film and didn’t want them to avoid it for fear of getting Michael Moore’d by it. And some films suffer for trying a bit too hard to make a political point, such as Paul Greengrass’ The Green Zone. But every film, from romantic comedies to big war spectacles, contains depictions of human beings interacting with one another that can shape the way we understand the world. And your politics grows out of your understanding of people and how the world works.

I’m providing a link to my paper which asks the question “Is Team Loyalty a Virtue?”[PDF]. My goal was to ascertain whether the loyalty of a sports fan to a particular team is justifiable. The paper is still (in my estimation) only about half worked-out. Surprisingly little has been written on the subject, so a lot of what I was trying to do was just lay some groundwork. The paper, as it is now, is really a suggestion for what it would take to show that the loyalty of a fan to a team is virtuous.

Anyways, enjoy, and feel free to leave comments below.

We can appreciate those jokes about television (directed at itself, at other sit-coms, or recently at Glee), and it can lead to us thinking of Community as a smart show, one that it takes attention, background knowledge, and intelligence to watch. But I want to highlight a different way that Community‘s creators express and expect intelligence in their show. Here’s an exchange from last week’s “Modern Warfare,” an extended parody of action films.

The dialogue I want to draw your attention to is not the characters’ awareness of clichés and how they see themselves against those clichés. It’s the following.

Britta: “You’re right, you know. I am a phony. I try to act compassionate because I’m afraid that I’m not.”

Jeff: “Oh, please. I invented phony.You care about people. I accuse you of faking to convince myself that I’m not such a jerk.”

Britta: “Jeff, you help people more than I do and you don’t even want to. You’re not a jerk; you’re fine.”

There is a sophistication to this exchange that I really appreciate. Britta expresses a profound insight about herself: that what looks like compassion is actually rooted in a fear of being uncompassionate rather than a true benevolence. Jeff dismisses her worry because, as a phony, he recognizes what phoniness is and can see it in other people. Those are two really insightful observations for characters to make, and it takes an awareness by the writers of who these characters are and an ability to verbalize it without sounding pompous or distracting from the mood of the show. That is really smart writing.

But then it gets better. Britta recognizes a distinction between a person who has positive character traits (e.g., a compassionate person who wants to do go for others) and a person who produces positive consequences (e.g., a jerk who actually does good for others). Britta recognizes that the character traits, intentions, and desires that make a person a good person are not always correlated with actually doing good. On the other hand, there are people who are able to do a great deal of good that don’t have a great character. For example, Richard Nixon has done more good than most people who lived in the 20th century. It doesn’t follow that he had a morally praiseworthy character; he probably didn’t. It also doesn’t follow that he didn’t do a great deal bad, as well. He certainly did. Jeff, through elements of his personality and his position in the group, is able to do a lot more good for the study group (and the community college) than the person who is dedicating her life to doing good. That doesn’t make Jeff the better person, just the more powerful one.

One thing that Community has done a great job of this season is tracking Jeff’s reluctant immersion into the group. Positioning himself as an outsider who in the pilot claimed that he was a moral relativist who doesn’t care about other people to a group-member willing to make sacrifices (that he doesn’t fully understand) for the sake of others.  This can only be achieved when you create really complex characters, and the writers have a really firm grasp on them and the intelligence to draw out of those characters compelling stories and sensible dialogue. What makes Community the smartest show on television isn’t (just) all the self-referential humor, it’s also the ability to articulate very finely the social interactions of these complex characters while exploiting the backdrop of a community college to draw out interesting ethical and socio-psychological insights.

And it’s funny.

Last night’s Chuck (which is the first of six episodes added after the initial run of 13 episodes in season 3) brought a lot of satisfaction to those who had been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Chuck and Sarah to get together. Finally, an end to all that UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension, to use Mo Ryan’s acronym). Most critics have focused on the myth that a show takes a nose-dive in quality after the leads finally get together (the Moonlighting myth). “Look at Jim and Pam on The Office,” these critics say. “There are still interesting stories to tell about being in a relationship, not just about leading up to a relationship.” And these critics are right (except that The Office example is ill-timed, since the best part of season six has been the budding romance of Andy-Erin and not the established relationship of Jim-Pam). There is no part in dragging out a relationship of two characters who seem like they should be together simply to avoid dealing with the new problem of writing them as a couple.

Andy and Erin, from The Office (photo from fanpop.com)

Unfortunately, though, critics have been forced to deal with a rift among the devoted viewers of Chuck. Some fans’ major interest in the show is in seeing Chuck and Sarah get together. Known as ‘shippers among critics (as in “relationshippers”), these fans primarily care about casting aside any obstacles to Chuck and Sarah and getting them together as quickly and as happily as possible. Critics are then in the position of needing to distance themselves from these fans while also reaffirming that there is no point in keeping the leads apart for arbitrary reasons or because of the Moonlighting myth. I’ve written before about how this season of Chuck is an example of how shows (often in their third season) push the lead character away from their allies/friends to add new levels of drama. This was partly accomplished by the introduction of Agent Shaw (Brandon Routh) and Hannah (Kristin Kreuk) as romantic possibilities for Sarah and Chuck, respectively.

What I want to focus on is Sarah. But to do that, alas, I must write about Chuck. A lot has been written about Chuck, which is appropriate on a show that bears his name. But Sarah’s story is in many ways the more interesting one. To an underappreciated extent, Chuck is a show by, for, and about fanboys. It’s the now-classic tale of geek-gets-girl. From Sam Raimi’s Spiderman to Josh Schwartz’s The O.C. to beer commercials, the last ten years have seen a new popular narrative established in which the Geek (brown, tousled hair, glasses, shirt untucked, comic book obsession) wins the Girl (blonde, svelte, a little tomboy-ish). This is derivative of some of the college nerd comedies of the 1980s, but one important twist is that the Girl must recognize that what makes the Geek geeky is also what makes him lovable. Also, the Geek may have a Rival, but this is more often the cause of undermining the Geek’s self-confidence than forcing the Rival out of the Girl’s gaze. Because deep down, this narrative says, the Girl really does like the Geek better, and they would be perfect together if only the Geek could gather the courage to be with the Girl.

One of the dangers with this narrative is that it reinforces the focus on the man (the Geek, in this case) even as it redefines manliness. If the story of the Geek getting the Girl is about the Geek overcoming his lack of confidence, then the story will have to follow him getting that confidence. It’s still all about the guy.

We’ve seen that problem pushed to the forefront in this season of Chuck. Sarah was shoved aside this season while the Geeek (Chuck) tried to earn her love (by becoming a spy) while fending off the Rival (Agent Shaw, who, like all Rivals, represents what the Geek is not but thinks that he must be to deserve the Girl). This left the viewer with one episode in which the Girl makes her move, followed by twelve episodes in which she sits idly by watching the Geek become unrecognizable. Since in the Geek Gets Girl narrative, it is the Geek’s geekiness that makes him suitable to the Girl, when he loses that geekiness he becomes too much like the Rival. And then the Girl may as well be with the Rival. Watching this unfold, however, it reinforces an underlying problem with the Geek Gets Girl narrative: the Girl is completely passive. She simply reacts. This is less noticeable in films (such as Spiderman) where one small goal (e.g., breaking into acting) is enough to distract away from the Girl’s passivity. But over the course of 50 episodes of a television show, it is difficult to find a way to make the Girl an agent with a life and decisions that are her own. This season of Chuck‘s greatest failing has not been avoiding a Chuck-Sarah romance, or introducing Agent Shaw, or putting the Intersect in Chuck’s head, it has been giving Sarah nothing to do. This is a problem embedded in the Geek Gets Girl narrative, but it came to the forefront this season.

Remember when we got backstory on how Sarah became a spy (2.10)? Remember when Sarah shot a Fulcrum agent to protect Chuck’s identity (2.11)? These provided ways to make Sarah a person, someone who makes decisions with consequences and has a story of her own, within the loose confines of the Geek Gets Girl narrative. This season Sarah has been reduced to a prop, whose job is to watch with Sad Eyes while the Geek tries to become like a Rival. She is a passive spectator, rather than a worthy partner to the eponymous hero.

What I liked about last night’s episode of Chuck was not that Chuck and Sarah finally got together, but that Chuck and Sarah were treated as equals. Both were trying to be good partners to each other, considering the other’s desires as at least as important as their own. That Sarah is once again Chuck’s equal is nicely captured in the smartly choreographed fight scene from the episode.

There is still a fundamental inequality to the show that I don’t think it will ever overcome. As we saw in the pre-credits sequence of “Chuck vs. The Honeymooners,” Sarah is in an expensive, barely-there neglige while Chuck is in a plain t-shirt and lounge pants. Sarah, no matter how realized the character becomes, will always exist also as eye candy in a way that Chuck does not. (Captain Awesome, who was yet again shirtless, is supposed to roughly even things out I suspect, but it doesn’t approach the level to which Scrubs took the equity, requiring that every episode of a woman in underwear also have a man in underwear).

Sarah may begin to be treated, finally, as an equal to Chuck, but she will still be the Girl.

And I’m only a moderately rabid fan. I don’t watch college games just to see who the best prospects are. I don’t do my own mock draft. But I do get awfully excited.

I’m presenting at a conference in a few months where I will discuss the concept of team loyalty, so stay tuned for my thoughts on that. But I thought I would take a couple moments tonight to explain to people who don’t follow sports (or follow other sports) why NFL fans care so much about the NFL draft, one of the biggest sporting events of the year.

1. The Wait It’s been nearly four months since most teams have played a game, and for many teams the last meaningful game was a month or two before that. Football has a shorter season (17 weeks) than other leagues (baseball: ~24, hockey: ~24, basketball: ~32). (None include playoffs.) So there is already less football, and considerably fewer games (16 per team, plus chance at playoffs). That makes the off-season for the biggest sport in the country the longest wait of big four sports.
2. Drama You don’t have to spend time around WWE wrestling fans to see guys who love melodrama. Watching a highly touted player drop through the first round as they squirm on national television or staring at shock at whatever stupid thing the Oakland Raiders do this year makes for really great reality television.
3. Shared Experience Sports fans are used to watching live sporting events. They talk about it immediately. We may live in a Tivo nation, but sports fans love their live shows.
4. Hope With the possible except of opening day, there is no day when a sports fan is filled with more hope than on draft day. No matter how bad your team is, your team will get better on draft day. In fact, the worse your team is, the better your draft picks, so (you hope) the more your team can improve on draft day. Sports fans love to see the interests of their team advanced, and they don’t get more advanced (usually) than on draft day.

Biblical allusions were once standard fare in literature, and film has seen its fair share of epic tales of biblical heroes. But (with one notable exception) it has been at least forty years since Bible stories were winners at the box office. More than this, references to the Bible have never been as important to classical cinema as they have been to classical literature. References happen, but they’re not as central to understanding cinema as references to other films, popular music, or Shakespeare. Cinema (with the exception of the one mostly forgotten genre) is much less interested in the stories of the Bible than it is in many, many other things. So I was a bit surprised to view three films in the past month that draw on the Bible in three different reasons.

Richard Kelly’s The Box takes a sci-fi story that had been worked over a couple times before and adds in Kelly’s unique blend of half-baked ideas to make his most successful film yet (successful artistically, not commercially). Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) get a button in a box from a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) who tells them they have 24 hours to push the button; if they push it, the get $1 million dollars but someone they don’t know dies; if they don’t, life goes on as normal. Kelly’s tale is surprisingly suspenseful, even after it incorporates bizarre elements of the supernatural. The Box, like Southland Tales, overstuffed with references, but to no discernible purpose. What are we supposed to make of the Jean-Paul Sartre references, for instance? More immediate to our purpose, what is the point in connecting Arthur and Norma (and the other button-pushers) to Adam and Eve? In each case, a woman pushes the button. Is there some misogyny lurking in this decision? The mysterious stranger is a Serpent figure (from out of this world), and their consequence has Tree of Knowledge-like implications, but what exactly are these implications? Kelly seems content to make the reference, even if it clouds what’s really going on. But the sneaking suspicion in all three of Kelly’s films is that there is nothing deeper going on. There’s just a story crammed full of references. There are a lot of ideas, but none that are fully pursued, none that make the film stronger, none that are important because none matter to the story. No one needs to know the story of Adam and Eve to understand what is happening in The Box, and the references to that story only muck things up.

On the other hand, A Serious Man from Ethan and Joel Coen can only be understood if one is familiar with the biblical story of Job. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg) watches his life fall apart, and his journey of anguish parallels that of Job’s. Gopnik even visits three rabbis who mirror the advice offered by Job’s three friends. A Serious Man is less effective than other Coen Brothers films at presenting a world in which we sympathize with a protagonist cut adrift in a cold, heartless, amoral world. But it nicely summarizes some of those themes. When the film ends with a tornado, it is hard to make sense of what is happening unless one is familiar with the story of Job. When God finally appears to Job (chapter 38 of the eponymous book), it is after a devastating wind. When the film leaves off this deus ex tornado, we see that the Coens are reinforcing what the film hammers all the way through: either the world is random and nothing matters, or there is a God out there who is just screwing with us. God isn’t going to save the day, because our lives show us that if there is a God, then the universe isn’t just disinterested, it’s a cruel joke. Knowing how Job ends is essential to understanding why A Serious Man ends where it does.

Finally, Days of Heaven, the wonderful 1973 film from Terrence Malick, takes a more traditionally literary approach to biblical allusion. The story of Days of Heaven (which hardly matters in a Malick film, where you just want to soak in the gorgeous images and fascinating edits) centers on a trio of early twentieth-century drifters. When Bill (Richard Gere) meets new people he says that his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) is really his sister. (Why? For Malick, it doesn’t matter. He just does.) This story recalls three different accounts in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah (twice) and Isaac and Rebekah are travelling in a foreign land and the husband introduces the wife as his sister. This ends badly for the local leader, who takes the wife/sister as his own (either wife or harem) and then suffers for it, before the truth is revealed and all is restored. In the film, this suffering happens in the form of a locust plague, which is a smart way of connecting to another Pharaoh story. Malick’s allusion deepens the appreciation of his film without depending on it. It doesn’t matter in Days of Heaven as it does in A Serious Man when and how the film diverges from the story to which it alludes. You don’t have to “catch” the reference to appreciate what he is doing, but your appreciation is deepened when you do. By treating the wife-sister narrative as an archetypal story, there is no need drop clues about what the writer-director is thinking, as Kelly too often does. The story speaks for itself, and if you are familiar with the Bible, history, literature, film, you’ll further appreciate what is happening, but you can enjoy it plenty even if you don’t.

I just happened to watch these films in near succession, but I like how they represent three different approaches to allusion. There’s postmodern name-dropping (Kelly), required background reading (the Coens), and archetype (Malick). Malick’s is simultaneously the most subtle and the most successful, but I’m not convinced that this is essential to the approach; it’s at least as likely that Malick is the most talented of the filmmakers (all of whom I admire a great deal).