#5 // I don't understand the question, and I won't respond to it.
#5 // I Don’t Understand the Question, and I Won’t Respond to It
Perhaps unsurprisingly, last week at the HBO panel for the Television Critic’s Association (TCA), the question of gender and violence came up. Several heroic critics asked the network’s new president of programming Casey Bloys about some specific acts of sexual violence against women in the forthcoming fall series Westworld. Bloys seemed to miss the point:
The violence is pretty extreme on all fronts. I take your point — so far there aren’t any male rapes. But the violence is spread equally. I would hope the violence is not intentionally against women.
I mean, listen, when some writers come up with an imaginary idea for a show, and then we greenlight that project based on their ideas, and then we hire writers to make up characters out of thin air, and then they make up things for those characters to do, and then we hire actors to stand in front of cameras and pretend they’re doing those things, and then we edit the film that got shot so it creates a coherent sense of spatial and temporal continuity for viewers at home, I mean, there’s no telling what’s going to happen, there’s just absolutely no way we can possibly control what happens in our television series. So if some women are assaulted, it’s certainly not intentional. We’ll try to assault some men in the second season.
In other words, I’m not sure he “take[s] your point.”
Earlier this year, some writers from Game of Thrones engaged in a similar feat of Olympic-level point-missing (they’re perennial favorites at the World Championships as well). In season five, the series was roundly criticized for turning a woman’s rape into a character beat for a man. Bryan Cogman, the episode’s writer, riffing in the DVD commentary this year, responded thusly:
Another argument — and I get why this criticism was leveled at us — is the idea that we took Sansa’s story away from her and made it all about Theon [by cutting to his face at the end]. I personally don’t believe that’s the case … Certainly Theon’s redemption journey is an element of the subplot. But if you really watch this scene it’s played from Sansa’s viewpoint, for the most part. The main reason we cut away at the end, frankly, is that this was Sophie’s first scene of this nature, and we didn’t want to show the attack. And so we cut to Theon to hear the attack. I understand why many people reacted to that, [thinking] we were making this scene about Theon and not Sansa. I’m sorry it was viewed that way. All I can say is it’s certainly not my intention when I wrote it or when we were producing it … We could have stayed on her face of the entirety of the attack, that would have been a perfectly valid choice. To me it was about being respectful to Sophie.
Respectfully, it doesn’t really seem like he does “get why this criticism was leveled at us.” In fact, “I’m sorry it was viewed that way” is kind of a baffling, passive-voice non-apology coming from this guy. There is such a thing as film language. There is a grammar by which we understand everything from a character’s motivations (scary ominous music, etc) to the passage of time (montage, etc). This isn’t lofty interpretation, it's not apparatus theory, it’s just how it works. When an editor cuts from one person’s point-of-view to another person’s point-of-view, we change the point-of-view. I understand a filmmaker objecting to a misreading of a carefully composed scene, but, unless this cut was an accident, the critique of this scene isn’t based on a misreading. It’s based on a perfectly valid, even unavoidable, parsing of the visual language. People “viewed it that way” because that’s the way it was shown to them. Either Bryan Cogman seriously doesn’t understand how his medium communicates information—which is a big problem—or he’s gaslighting his critics.
There’s more! Lili Loofbourow wrote a beautifully scathing article last week about Danny McBride’s failure and/or refusal to understand how point-of-view operates in his own Vice Principals. It seems unimaginable to him that the spectacle of two white guys torching the home of a black woman might be racially offensive. And as UnREAL has used the police shooting of a black man as a character beat for its white protagonist, Angelica Jade Bastién has been keeping what has basically turned into a live-blog on the limitations of Sarah Gertrude Shapiro’s racial consciousness.
This is just a handful of recent examples, but the performative denial of how filmmaking works is an alarmingly common trend in interviews with film and television writers and creators. The examples above are all tied to very contentious and important issues in television about the representation of gender, race, and violence. But these kinds of comments—in which writers and directors and producers dodge criticism by asking us not to overthink, by explaining representational problems by way of you-had-to-be-there logistics, by saying it wasn’t intentional and that they’re sorry we saw it that way—happen much more casually all the time. Just let the art happen to you, people, don’t worry about it. It’s just TV!
But that’s the thing. It isn’t just TV. Films and TV shows ask us to see things through the eyes of people who are not us. That’s what empathy is. And TV shows play with and manipulate that function over long periods of time for good and ill. It’s bad enough, then, that these shows are demonstrating a failure of empathy onscreen, but, in defending themselves from that criticism in this way, they’re denying their work’s ability to create empathy at all. It’s self-defeating, it’s anti-intellectual, and it’s disappointing to know that so many of the people responsible for creating art in a golden period of this art-form are so invested in denying the thing that makes it art in the first place.
Why treat interpretation as an annoyance rather than an opportunity? It’s, unfortunately, not just a question plaguing creators of television series. It is a constant refrain amongst critics of the Republican nominee for president. Do a twitter search for the phrase “words have meaning,” and it will not surprise you to find that this exasperated, ultimately ethical plea will bring up tweet after tweet of shock and dismay at yet another moment when Donald Trump has said something awful with a wink and a nudge and then denied the clear meaning and effect of his remarks.
If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.
Then, later:
SEAN HANNITY: Obviously you're saying that there's a strong political movement within the Second Amendment, and if people mobilize and vote, they can stop Hillary from having this impact on the court. But that's not how the media is spinning it. What's your reaction to it?
DONALD TRUMP: ...Nobody in that room thought anything other than what you just said… There can be no other interpretation!
There can be no other interpretation. As much as each comment is an attack on Muslims or women or people who don’t want to be shot to death, it is also an attack on interpretation. And interpretation is neither a luxury nor a tactic of the "dishonest media." It is a foundational element of what it means to be a person in the world. Every image has a meaning that we understand through an act of interpretation, however small. Every word has a meaning that interacts with the meanings of the words surrounding it. But, by all means, Casey Bloys and Bryan Cogman, let’s not overthink it. This is the signature, and very possibly a lasting curse, of the Trump Era. We traffick in subtext, and then we claim that subtext doesn't exist.
Finally Started // Stranger Things (Netflix)
Finally Finished // Stranger Things (Netflix)
We’ve been binging at a suspiciously high rate since I wrote in this space about lurch-watching. Oops! Anyway, it’s not hard when Stranger Things is so stinking good. I’m a little wary of the way this show is so frequently reduced to its nostalgia value, but whatever.
Flagging // Bachelorette (ABC)
I’m just kidding! A few observations:
JoJo, you made a horrible mistake. Jordan Rodgers is a Chrome extension that replaces all answers to direct questions with Red Flags.
Chase might be the only contestant in this franchise’s history who actually reaped a psychological benefit from his participation.
Robby’s hair is fake. I don’t know how, but it is.
Recommendations //
Elizabeth Minkel’s defense of fandom is a nice, useful read.
Danielle Dutton’s short historical novel Margaret the First feels so contemporary and conversational without resorting to shticky anachronism. It’s fast and sad and funny and fluent. Bump it up on your list of buzzy historical fiction to read this year.
It’s a little hot takey as a pitch—Beck in the Age of Trump!—but it’s not wrong. Zoe Camp gets what’s so weird and funny and transgressive about Beck’s Odelay twenty years later.
Jesmyn Ward is really fascinating on race and Twitter and James Baldwin and mythology here, and it's making me excited to read her important new anthology, The Fire This Time.
I'm a little late to the party on this, but the Baby Geniuses podcast with Lisa Hanawalt—the comic artist and designer of Bojack Horseman—and Emily Heller is hilarious.
Hallie Bateman, who is a cartoonist and humor writer for The New Yorker, and also the designer of the Dear Television logo(!), has an illustrated pen review newsletter called "Pen Parade." Trust me, just subscribe to it.
Lauren Berlant is very very good on Trump and emotions here.
And, for this week's recipe, don't make a boring pancake, make a DUTCH BABY.
Never built a building or a golf course in his entire life,
Phil.