In the formative decades of cinema, the national film industries of the world were veritable cauldrons of experimentation: laboratories in which the limits of the cinematic form in terms of composition, mise-en-scène, and editing were still being sketched and thus still being continually shattered and redefined. In this cinematic frontier era, communities of filmmakers were refining the grammar of the art, arguably bootstrapping in years what had taken other visual and literary arts decades or centuries. At this level of cinematic development, cohesion existed at a national level, and while there were always outliers, it was possible to detect distinct elements of technique that drove the thrust of a nation’s cinema. Especially in Europe with the concepts of montage, expressionism, and the avant-garde, these elements of formal technique were often given the weight of ideology as well.

But through the years and thanks to certain historical events (the cataclysms of Europe driving much of the best talent to Hollywood, and America’s relative economic advantages during and after World War II, among other things), an aesthetic mainly defined by mainstream Hollywood cinema emerged as the clear dominant form across the world. Distinctive national cinemas still exist, of course, but their distinctiveness can be read in their deviation from the Hollywood norm. Even though a Chinese or Nigerian (or American) filmmaker can create a film in opposition to the technique and assumptions underpinning Star Wars (1977), the fact remains that Star Wars and many mainstream Hollywood films like it probably comprised a great deal of those artists’ initial cinematic experiences.

But what about those “old” formal styles of film developed in Europe in the early decades of cinema? They’re still around; one of the distinctive qualities of American cinema is its quality of assimilation—it’s quite prone to taking influences outside itself and absorbing them. It took those European ideas and stripped them of their ideology (Hollywood’s appearance of a lack of ideology can be said to be an ideology of its own), deploying them because they can perform certain functions admirably. Where are you most likely to see collision montage, expressionism, and avant-garde elements in the supposedly-realistic sphere of mainstream Hollywood? Curiously enough, you see it in dreams.

When discussing early European cinema through the lens of history and theory, the three central divisions are usually Soviet montage, German expressionism, and the French avant-garde. The distinctive marker of much of Soviet cinema was in its heavy use of editing and the juxtaposition of shots to locate and create meaning. While montage in general can refer to a wide variety of editing styles and techniques, the most explosive and iconic idea when speaking of Soviet montage is Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of “montage as a collision… the collision of two factors gives rise to an idea… montage is conflict.” In this collision montage, Eisenstein believed that film editing was an encapsulation of the Marxist dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and thus films like his own Strike (1925) were charged with revolutionary energy in both form and content.

In a Germany suffering from the aftermath of a cataclysmic World War and defined by the mélange of decadence, financial misery, and confusion of the Weimar Republic, a filmic aesthetic concentrating on mise-en-scène rather than editing developed. German Expressionism fixated on a distorted, corrupted world within the film frame, often using unsettling and grotesque artificial forms to convey the sense of a fallen, paranoid reality. Meanwhile, in France, the cauldron of avant-garde artistic movements informed a great deal of cinematic thinking and technique, coalescing against more realistic formations of cinema’s purpose. The avant-garde film artists, allied with European Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, and a plethora of other –isms, subverted what appeared to be the default or traditional cinematic mode by arguing through the forms of their films that cinematic reality should not be shackled by the rules of representation. This included destroying the expectations of unified time and space, psychologically predictable narrative, and even cause and effect.

Mainstream Hollywood cinema, as in those films produced and distributed by the major American studios, has dominated the discussion of filmic technique for the majority of film’s history. It has appropriated those techniques of expressionism, montage, and the avant-garde, but in appropriating those techniques, Hollywood had to deal with the issue of the ideologies attached to those techniques. That is, these techniques were used because they have obvious power to shape the audience’s experience—a major tenet of Hollywood’s philosophy—but embedded in the skeletons of those forms were potential challenges to the dominant paradigm presented by mainstream Hollywood cinema. This paradigm was, and is, so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible: the primacy of logical narrative and the resolution of the narrative bringing psychological resolution in the viewer.

Mainstream Hollywood cinema has accomplished the disarming of these techniques’ ideological qualities through a process of colonization. By circumscribing the spaces in which these techniques are allowed to be used, they are brought into a clear subordinate position. The most common way these techniques are used in the mainstream is to demonstrate a contrast with whatever “reality” is established by the rules of the film. They’re used to represent the unreal spaces of dreams and false realities.

Salvador Dali had collaborated with Luis Buñuel to create the avant-garde standard Un chien andalou (1929), a film entirely dominated by formalist tendencies; Dali’s surrealist work was appropriated for the Hollywood thrilled Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Most of the film conforms to the realistic style of classical Hollywood, but Hitchcock needed to display the fractured and troubled dream world of his protagonist, Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck). This segment was created by Dali following in the style of his previous work, even making references to Un chien andalou with such images as a slashed eyeball—the segment stands in stark contrast to the style of the rest of the film. However, Hitchcock trimmed it down from Dali’s original attempts to burst out of the confined space allowed for it; the sequence was corralled to fit what Hitchcock needed for his narrative—as he stated:

I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of his work. Chirico has the same quality; you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance, and the converging lines of perspective. But Dali had some strange ideas; he wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it, and underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by ants! It just wasn’t possible.

The message created by the relationship of this segment to the rest of the film is that the dream world, the “false reality” where this avant-garde style is deployed, is a troubled and broken one as opposed to the stable reality established by the techniques of mainstream Hollywood cinema.

Jean-Louis Baudry wrote about cinema as an apparatus that mimicked dreamspace on a very primal level, as in something paradoxical that takes on the mantle of reality without obeying its rules. He describes this connection as

The simulation apparatus therefore consists in transforming a perception into a quasi-hallucination endowed with a reality effect which cannot be compared to that which results from ordinary perception. The cinematographic apparatus reproduces the psychical apparatus during sleep: separation from the outside world, inhibition of motoricity…

However, the dreamscape is potentially troubling to Hollywood cinema because it does not conform to the orderly and consistent space that the audience finds pleasurable, and therefore may compromise the fundamental Hollywood principles of narrative and psychological resolution. The dream must be constrained and managed; but as long as this dreamspace is cordoned off, formalist techniques are free to be deployed in this colonized space.

A more recent example of formalism existing in the colonized space of the dream is Inception (2010) directed by Christopher Nolan. Literally about the construction and management of dreamspace, Nolan uses formalist techniques to define the foundation of how he represents the world of the dream. The dreams of Inception are, at first blush, not entirely fantastical or phantasmagoric—there might not be such a strong separation between reality and the dream. For the first scenes and sequences of the movie, we cannot grasp whether we are watching reality or a dream because a hierarchy has not yet been established. But for the film to work, Nolan must make the constructed nature of the dream explicitly evident, and this comes by making a formalist intervention into the narrative. The fragile and broken nature of dream space is made clear by the distortion and destruction of the world; there is an extended sequence where the protagonist, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explains to Ariadne (Ellen Page) the falsity of the world that they’re creating, which they accomplish by flattening and distorting cityscapes and playing with reflections and impossible geometry. To drive home the fragility and constructed nature of this space, a common refrain in the film is “the dream is collapsing.”

In Inception, as in many other films about dreams, one can see the influence of Un chien andalou in disconnecting time and space from psychological perception and cause and effect. One dream sequence represents a character’s consciousness as a building with an elevator, and there is a scene (that recalls a similar one from Un chien andalou) in which one character looks out from inside a building out towards another character on a beach—the characters do not necessarily exist in the same physical realm but are only connected by the filmic conceit of a matching eyeline. The difference is that in Un chien andalou, the impossibility stands on its own in the foreground of the work. Inception must make it clear that this sort of disjunctive connection is only plausible because it takes place in a false subordinate reality, one that exists under a reality in which all the usual rules apply. Inception creates a world defined by formal intervention, but it must be contained within a realist superstructure. The formalist world of the dream only has meaning when defined by the “real world” created by realist technique.

Much like the physical and social process of colonization, the stylistic colonization of Hollywood cinema operates by appropriating the material nature of a technique while discarding or suppressing the challenges of a foreign identity or ideology. In mainstream Hollywood, a realistic style is taken for granted as the norm, and the role of formalist intervention—to define what is “not real” in approved subordinate film spaces—takes on such a natural aspect that it is similarly unquestioned. When placed in the right context (and with “right” defined by Hollywood) these techniques are not Marxist or oppositional or avant-garde. They are simply tools in a toolbox.

A number of his fellow first responders are too sick to work and are fighting with insurance companies for the funds to pay for their medical care. A bill named after Zadroga, intended to give financial aid and medical support to these people who have been lauded as heroes, passed the House but was blocked by a Senate Republican caucus that is fighting for the passage of tax cuts.

As Media Matters for America has pointed out, ABC, NBC, and CBS news programs have ignored this story entirely, which should have been newsworthy for a number of reasons: Republican obstructionism, the blocking of 9/11 legislation, and the juxtaposition with the tax cuts. It’s been left to The Daily Show and Al Jazeera to actually cover this story with any seriousness.

The propaganda model of media, developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman and laid out in Manufacturing Consent, points out how newsgathering and reporting are distorted by a series of filters that controls what information reaches the public. One of these filters is the desire for a standardized national narrative, whether that is anti-Communism or anti-terrorism. In this case, the narrative in question is that of 9/11, a tragedy which has been invoked by many politicians to claim the moral high ground, especially in situations of questionable legislation or policy.

When the news media is presented with a story that does not fit the national narrative — here, 9/11 first responders are not faceless heroes invoked as a talisman but are real people with needs that underline the hypocrisy and failings of the American health care and political systems — the media clams up.

Leaving aside partisan politics (the Republicans who used 9/11 as a shield to push their agenda are now suddenly ignoring one of the consequences of 9/11 to fight for tax cuts), consider this: The Daily Show is one of the few reliable political gadflies in the media, which itself is a tragic fact. But in this case, they’ve had to step up and commit to bringing an important issue to light and make it part of the public discourse because no other mainstream news outlet would. If things keep up, The Daily Show is going to have to stop calling itself a “comedy news show”, because it’s the rest of the news that’s the real joke.

The latest episode of NBC’s The Office (Thursdays, 9 PM) entitled “China” uses Michael (Steve Carell) and his newfound fear of China’s economic power as the launching point for its storyline. It’s interesting how this ambivalence towards corporate internationalism seems to be of a piece with another NBC Thursday sitcom, Outsourced. And while that other show appears to be the most egregious example of racial minstrelsy on network television since The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer or perhaps Homeboys in Outer Space, The Office manages to poke fun at American naivety about China while exploring the political and cultural fears permeating the China discussion.

“China” frames its A-story as a debate between Michael and Oscar (Oscar Núñez) the accountant, who is pegged as the office’s know-it-all. After Michael reads an alarmist Newsweek article about the Chinese economy, he tries to get the whole office fired up about the threat to America. Michael focuses on China’s massive population base and its large holdings of American debt, while Oscar points out how much of China remains overwhelmingly agrarian and America’s comparative advantage in the higher-potential information sector. But the substance of the arguments are largely irrelevant, because it’s a sitcom and not The Situation Room, so the debate is more of a pretext for the denizens of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton to score a point against the haughty Oscar. However, there are interesting analogues in Ellie Kemper’s portrayal of Erin the receptionist as the dumb naïf who passively accepts whatever Michael says about China, and how Michael loses the debate on substance but triumphs by papering over the argument with meaningless platitudes and an unswerving faith in American exceptionalism.

This is the same debate that’s played out for years, with Michael taking on the role of the “blue team,” a faction of American foreign policy analysts who believe that China is America’s preëminent potential threat on a number of levels. They reached their peak in the 1990s when the triple whammy of China’s economic boom, its spotty human rights record, and political friction with Taiwan put a spotlight on the region. After being cast into the wilderness when the War on Terror took precedence, the blue team and their ideas have had a resurgence since the economic crisis brought China’s complicated relationship with America and American corporations into stark relief.

But for a sitcom episode using the situation as a pretext for character comedy, there are quite a few incisive points to find here, especially in the show’s seemingly-unrelated B-story. Dwight (Rainn Wilson), an employee at Dunder-Mifflin that also happens to be the office building’s landlord, begins instituting annoying cost-cutting measures such as installing motion sensors for the lights and reducing the toilet paper in the restrooms to half-ply. Pam (Jenna Fischer), in her new role as office administrator, engages in a battle of wits with Dwight to thwart his plans.

The battle for creature comforts placed against the A-story’s China debate generates an entirely different context, bringing it home to Pam’s role as a worker. As consumers, our standards of living are dependent on cheap goods provided by a cheap workforce; but as workers, we’re disturbed by that same workforce who, if not “taking” jobs outright through overseas capital flight, pose a bogeyman threat to worker rights by encouraging a race to the bottom. This is internalized in Pam, a character who has repeatedly changed career paths and is crippled by the fear that she’s not good at any of them, and thus has no economic power of her own. With the ending that this episode gives her (in which Dwight “lets Pam win” to boost her confidence), the message seems to be that the only security we can find in this situation is an illusion.

It’s all about illusions. As Michael displays in this episode, the average American’s engagement with China is through its products and through heavily filtered and spotty reportage. China exists not as a people but as a collection of objects and financial obligations, a vague entity from which it’s easy to construct a looming threat. Even Oscar’s sober rationalism rests on some degree of belief in American long-term triumphalism from the limited information he has access to. A Beijinger columnist once argued that there is no such thing as a “China expert.” There are only people who have lived and breathed China for years and yet only have a narrow specialized base of information that is dangerous to generalize from. The real gap isn’t economics; it’s information, and that’s why much of the political discourse on China approaches the level of a series of sitcom gags.

When I was living in China this past summer, a frequent topic of conversation would be television. And when speaking to a native Chinese person about it, their response would be, without fail, something along the lines of: “Oh, I love American television! Do you like The Big Bang Theory? I love The Big Bang Theory! My favorite character is Sheldon. Who’s your favorite character?”

Within my small sample size of Chinese television viewers, there were several near-unanimous favorites. Gossip Girl was one of them; the appeal of a show about the dramatic escapades of hip and sexy American rich kids seems obvious, but my other work for the Hypermodern examines the levels of political and social critique embedded in that CW soap. Prison Break was another, and while there is a certain interest in speculating about how the Chinese live vicariously through a show about the wrongfully-imprisoned fighting against a shadowy government cabal, my curiosity ended there.

The Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, was a conundrum. The CBS sitcom about nerds (Thursdays, 8 PM) is in the middle of its fourth season and is a hit in the States as well. The show comes from television sitcom super-producer Chuck Lorre, whose legacy stretches back to working on Roseanne but more recently includes Two and a Half Men (the title greatly overstates the maturity level of the show) and Dharma & Greg (the television equivalent of punching a small child in the face). The show was co-created by former computer programmer Bill Prady, who previously worked with Lorre on Dharma & Greg; together with physicist and technical consultant David Saltzberg, he’s responsible for the show’s “nerd accuracy.” However, as any nerd can tell you, there is a difference between accuracy and precision.

BBT’s central characters are a group of young scientists and engineers who work at Caltech. Sheldon (Jim Parsons) is the quasi-Asperger’s genius of the group, an eccentric who finds it difficult to understand social situations except scientifically. His roommate Leonard (Johnny Galecki) is the well-adjusted one; his pining for—and eventually, relationship with—attractive girl next door and aspiring actress Penny (Kaley Cuoco) was a main focus of earlier seasons but was eventually downplayed for more of Sheldon’s antics. The cast is rounded out by Raj (Kunal Nayyar), an Indian physicist who can’t speak to women unless he’s drinking, and Howard (Simon Helberg), a self-proclaimed ladies’ man who lives with his perpetually-offscreen mother.

The comedic template of BBT is usually “The nerds try to do something that normal people do but things get wacky Because They Are Nerds.” It’s also often more specifically “The nerds try to interact with women but things get wacky Because They Are Nerds.” This is not an entirely awful premise for a show, and in fact is the basic template for many sitcoms; for example, if you crossed out “nerd” and replaced it with “snobbish cultural elitist”, you’d have the logline to Frasier. The difference is that Frasier was funny.

The problem here isn’t in the performances; they’re mostly serviceable, and the cast does have some level of natural charisma that threatens to cut through the material. It’s admirable in a way, like soldiers sent to the battlefield without adequate supplies and equipment and yet they fight anyway because it’s their duty. If the live studio audience howls at “[Social situation] is like [scientific concept]” or “[Sci-fi, video game, or comic book reference awkwardly shoehorned into conversation]”, the two things that make up the majority of the show’s “jokes”, it must be from these actors’ sheer physicality, from their goofy mannerisms and their wide-open body language. It’s certainly not from anything like plot or dialogue.

Earlier this year, porn distributor New Sensations released Big Bang Theory: A XXX Parody, whose title is self-explanatory. Pop quiz: try to identify whether the following quotes are from A) The Big Bang Theory or B) Big Bang Theory: A XXX Parody.

1. “Cultural perceptions are subjective. Penny, to your mind, are you a slut?”
2. “You let her drive around in the NASA Mars rover?” “Yeah, and everything went great until she ran that bus full of nuns off the road!”
3. “Oh God, that feels so good…oh, oh, oh, that’s the spot. Oh baby.”
4. “I don’t want to speak to the FBI!” “Why not?” “I’m brown and I talk funny!”

At times, the parody seems funnier than the show, although part of that is from the contemplation that a porno might be better written than, you know, an actual television show. And it’s difficult to say which is more misogynistic; although Two and a Half Men is your Lorre go-to for a vile parade of women-as-sex-objects, BBT has its troubling moments, not only in the clichéd characterization of Penny but in the way Sara Gilbert’s “girl nerd” character, Leslie, was demoted in the third season and then written off because the writers couldn’t find “quality material” for her. (By the way, quote number 2 is from the parody. The rest are from the show.)

In conversations with and about Chinese viewers of BBT, we considered the possibility they watch the show differently than American audiences do. The character traits on display (working in scientific and technical fields, social awkwardness, an adult professional living with his mother) are perhaps more relatable to Chinese young adults than the vast majority of other American shows. And maybe because of the language gap, the dialogue recedes into the background in favor of the broader and more physical aspects of the comedy. Another element is that it’s a rather inviting caricature of American culture; one English teacher in China I spoke to called it “to them what Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is to us”. But Chinese viewers perceive that they are laughing with these characters, as opposed to American audiences, whom Chinese viewers picture as laughing at the characters instead. It’s not really fair to paint either the Chinese or American audiences with one brush; a show with an enormous audience like BBT has many different groups of viewers with their own reasons for liking the show, scavenging what humor and quality they can. But the show’s template, the pattern on which its episodes are constructed, will guide those audiences one way or another.

The more episodic a show is—that is, the more it tries to have each unit of story be self-contained—the more the show’s template takes on the aspect of law. The draw of the episodic show is the way that its template creates a comfortable rhythm and imposes order; it makes assumptions and places constraints on the world. For example, the specific details of the weekly medical mystery on House are irrelevant; they’re an excuse to watch the characters on that show play some slight Goldberg-like variation on the show’s core themes: that physical frailty is the expression of moral frailty, and that we create illusory realities to hide from the pain of the world.

So if there is something fundamentally wrong with an episodic show, it’s because there’s something fundamentally wrong with the show’s template. In BBT’s case, it’s because the show operates from a foundation of broken caricature. It’s never overtly or actively malicious, and critical accusations of the series being a “nerd minstrel show” are a bit overblown, but the series is less a story about nerd characters than it is a story that uses its characters as vehicles for nerd jokes. When caricature is wielded properly, it achieves through its distortion and abstraction an acknowledgement of our common humanity by pulling performers and audience towards the same comic level. It’s possible to laugh both at and with someone at the same time. It’s the way the animated sci-fi comedy Futurama can take nerdy topics and make them the foundation of great comedy; that writing staff is able to take something as potentially dry as mathematical pairing theory and use it as the premise for brisk, madcap farce. Futurama works because no matter how outlandish or wonky their plots get, their characters feel like people (even if they’re aliens or robots).

BBT pretends to live in that space; the fact that there is any humanism embedded in the writing at all must be attributed to co-creator Bill Prady, who also worked on shows such as Gilmore Girls that tried to tell stories about actual thinking, feeling people. Lorre sitcoms are aggressively unfunny because they operate from a narrow vision of humanity where the pettiness and brokenness of people are on display; but rather than locate some semblance of story or humor there, they cruelly use them as vehicles for a disconnected series of stale jokes. These shows try to sugarcoat their misanthropy with the slick, colorful stylings of the traditional sitcom setup and try to wipe your memory with rapid sound-and-color transitions between their short scenes, but these things can’t mask the utter detachment the stories have from the characters in them.

It’s telling that there is a clearer voice and real humor to be found on Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of each episode which have various thoughts, stories and rants written on them. When Lorre personally writes about himself or his actors or real people he knows, as opposed to pushing bundles of cliché through the sausage grinder of his writers’ rooms, there are some actual sparks. One card this season was a list of “new rules” for his actors following Kaley Cuoco’s horseback riding accident:

1. No friggin’ horses. This includes those found on merry-go-rounds and in front of supermarkets.

2. The only motorcycle you can get on is the one you’re accidentally crushing in your big-ass, air-bagged SUV.

3. All cast member motor vehicles must adhere to U.S. Army guidelines for attacking Kandahar. (Galecki’s Tesla is a terrifically fuel efficient vehicle but is essentially a hundred thousand dollar go-cart. From now on it is only to be used for backing down his driveway and retrieving mail.)

The whole list flashes by so fast you need to pause the video to read them, which means the funniest parts of a Lorre show last for literally half a second.

It’s almost tragic how you can see the cast of BBT try to fight against the hegemony of the Lorre sitcom mold. When you have a strong actor that can rise above the material (like Cybill Shepherd in her eponymous sitcom, also created by Lorre), the tension generates something that’s at least watchable. On Two and a Half Men, you can see the leads being complicit in their own dehumanization. And when you have weak actors utterly dominated by the material, the purest form of Lorre’s vision is realized in a grotesque stillbirth like Dharma & Greg. The actors on BBT are somewhere in the middle, and you can see in the show’s few moments of actual warmth and humor their active resistance against being treated like soulless joke-delivering automatons. Perhaps it’s a bit Brechtian after all.

In The City (La ciudad), a 1999 drama film directed by David Riker, we get an unvarnished, unsentimental look at the plight of Hispanic immigrants in New York: language barriers, alienation and isolation, and abusive labor practices and lack of access to social services. Riker attempts to accurately reflect these experiences as they would happen in the real world, and uses non-actors and location photography to enhance this element. The City comes off as an utterly realistic film—and yet it is filmed in black-and-white.

This notion of the black-and-white aesthetic as being part of the realist tradition is an intriguing paradox. If we consider a crude working definition of realistic aesthetics as those that more closely replicate our own natural observation of the world, then black-and-white photography seems to be a poor fit. After all, most people perceive the world as a world of color; even those who are colorblind do not look out at the world and see it as a black-and-white film represents it. And yet regardless of the arguments for or against its realism, its usage is practically cemented as a standard cinematic trope. The Wizard of Oz represented the dreary “real world” of Kansas in stark black-and-white while reserving the palette of color for the fantastical dream world of Oz. Alfred Hitchcock filmed the 1954 crime thriller Dial M for Murder in color (and in 3D, which is yet another technological conceit that should more accurately represent the reality we perceive but instead results in a less realistic final product), but Dial M for Murder is actually one of Hitchcock’s more stylized and self-conscious works. Two years later, he directed The Wrong Man, a much more down-to-earth drama about a man wrongfully accused of murder; it meticulously recreates actual police procedure at the time and is in fact based on based on a true story—and the film is in black-and-white. Schindler’s List, one of Steven Spielberg’s first serious historical dramas that hewed closely to actual people and events, is almost entirely in black-and-white.

Consider that all these examples are films where color photography and black-and-white photography were both viable choices, and the palette was chosen almost purely for aesthetic reasons. A reliable color photography process was not available during the infancy of cinema, and it’s this historical conceit that seems to have informed the way the “realistic black-and-white” aesthetic is perceived. To wit, the technological and economic necessities that constrained the usage of color photography in films became conflated with the aesthetic and societal impact of both black-and-white and color films. Even though the necessities of the past are no longer as prominent, the conflation persists.

Especially in the early days of reliable, replicable color photography, the cost barrier was a significant factor. When choosing color, changes must be made all along the production process, from using more reliable lighting instruments during photography to additional steps in film processing during post-production. The result is an appreciable cost difference between color and black-and-white film, which in previous decades put a large number of lower-budget films out of the realm of considering color. This may have factored into the photography of The City, as even in recent decades the cost differential persists. A film such as The City that was made on a shoestring budget would have received significant savings by shooting on black-and-white. But having been produced well after the maturation of color photography, aesthetics must also have played a great role.

The significance of the black-and-white aesthetic was undoubtedly affected by the types of films that were historically predominantly in color and the films that were predominantly in black-and-white. When the cost of color photography was exceedingly expensive, the only films that would have access to color were the films with the largest budgets—the centerpiece films of the Hollywood studios. Color was thus a novelty where the added expense was justified by increased audience interest; these films with the largest budgets also happened to be in crowd-pleasing genres including historical epics such as Gone with the Wind, musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, or animated fantasies from Disney—genres which also tended to reject aspects of realist aesthetics.

On the other hand, the films on the lower end of the budget scale could not even consider color photography for economic reasons—this included almost all newsreels, because at first the rugged and portable cameras needed for newsgathering could not be as easily adapted for color use as bulky studio-bound cameras of the era could. Lower-budgeted films that were also likely to remain black-and-white included socially conscious dramas and most of the national cinemas outside Hollywood; the lower profitability was reflected in lower budgets, and was in turn reflected in lower usage of color photography.

So for the decades in which a significant number of black-and-white and color films shared space in the cinema, there was an appreciable divide: the glitzy, big-budget Hollywood films were predominantly in color, while foreign and “conscious” films were predominantly in black-and-white, and a huge swath of genres which could use either lay in the middle. This could be said to create an association, perhaps not entirely conscious, of color with the fantastical and black-and-white with the realistic. This notion as an unconscious one is important, because the conscious desire of most mainstream cinema to reflect our everyday perception in its aesthetics has led to the near-total dominance of color photography in film. However, even after the advancement of color photography technology lowered the cost of entry, the legacy of this genre divide still seems to remain and govern the impulse to film in black-and-white when “the reflection of reality” is a concern.

A similar phenomenon can be seen with the development of 3D in contemporary cinema. As mentioned before, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder was filmed in 3D; after a short period of experimentation with 3D in the 1950s to combat the increasing popularity of television, the prohibitive cost of 3D photography and projection coupled with the immersion-breaking necessity of wearing stereoscopic glasses relegated 3D to a gimmick for theme parks and other non-cinematic venues. However, there has been a revival of interest in 3D cinema in recent years, and once again there is the possibility of 3D as an aesthetic element of mainstream cinema.

It is quite early to speculate on the true impact of 3D on mainstream cinema, as 2009’s Avatar is perhaps the first and currently only film to seriously consider 3D as a holistic aesthetic tool and not merely a specialized gimmick. As such, the implications of a true three-dimensional cinema for the consideration of realism as an aesthetic and cinematic practice are outside the scope of this article. However, some tentative guesses can be made by way of comparison with color photography, its development, and eventual dominance.

The same question that was asked of early color cinema can be asked of 3D cinema: “What does this add to the experience?” Merely being more like reality is not enough, especially as the crude usage of 3D in many films (consisting of elements “poking out” from the screen towards the audience) is in fact more immersion-breaking and self-conscious than anything else. The relatively unsophisticated ways that 3D has been used in the past shape the way most filmmakers and audiences currently view 3D, and once again a genre divide has created a paradox where 3D, which is an element that more accurately reflects our everyday experience (most people don’t perceive the world as a flat space) instead contributes to a rejection of realism.

This genre divide has resulted because of the current dominance of computer-generated animation. The production process of this kind of animation already requires the simulation of 3D space; the increase in cost to produce a 3D animated film is far less than the cost of photographing a traditional live-action film using a 3D process. (Avatar, although featuring a large number of live-action elements, makes such heavy use of computer-generated elements that it is practically an animated film itself.) Couple this with the narrowly-circumscribed genre space that animation is allowed in Hollywood cinema: typically science fiction, fantasy, and children’s film. Therefore, the type of film that is currently most likely to make use of 3D technology is also a form that is associated with rejections of reality and realism. Today’s 3D epics and cartoons are a parallel to yesteryear’s color epics and cartoons.

Although it’s too early to tell, perhaps this time around 3D cinema will not end up as a gimmick but actually develop into an aesthetic tool used in much of mainstream cinema. If the technology is continually refined and made cheaper as color was, 3D might perhaps become the standard way to produce films, a basic cinematic assumption of the future as color is of the present. If this is the case, it’s possible that decades from now, films concerning the harrowing experiences of (space?) immigrants will be produced in 2D because “it just feels more real”.

(with apologies to Lawrence Weschler)

Imagine our national media as the population’s mental landscape. What’s playing in the cinemas and on our televisions reflects something about our collective psychology – our hopes, dreams, and fears. We engage with entertainment to experience catharsis and indulge in fantasy. Things in the real world have a presence in this mental reflection, but they are distorted and manipulated through the lenses of our own preconceptions and emotions.

What happened to this mental landscape after September 11, 2001 reflected the actual landscape – for a moment the image of the World Trade Center burned brightly. It was impossible to avoid seeing it, and the sights were indelible and seared into our collective memories. And then suddenly it was gone.

Following the attacks, the images of the World Trade Center were scrubbed clean from the world of film and television. Promotional materials from the film Spider-Man that prominently featured the Twin Towers were pulled. Sidewalks of New York, a comedic drama that premiered at film festivals just days before the attacks, had its wide release date pushed back because of its setting and shots that featured the towers in the background. Meanwhile, those towers were digitally erased from films such as Zoolander and television shows such as Friends.

This response was understandable, because events had changed the way in which we perceived those images. They became invested with meaning where there was none before, and elicited emotional reactions that were raw and counter to the narratives they were in. However, the problem was that deleting the images of the World Trade Center did not necessarily stop those reactions; even if the Twin Towers were gone from our mental landscape, the negative space they occupied still remained.

Either way, their presence could be felt. Reviews of Zoolander pointed out the obvious places where the digital removal occurred, and that created an alienating moment where they were jarred out of the outlandish comedy. On the other hand, the box-office bomb Glitter was released with shots of the World Trade Center intact; they were greeted in some theaters with rounds of applause for a movie that deserved none.

The monumental historical events of September 11 reframed our perspective towards certain narratives and images. This is because unless a story is explicitly historical or bound to a specific time frame, as an audience we tend to engage with it in the context of an indefinite present, our present. Sometimes even historical markers can’t prevent this: M*A*S*H is set during the Korean War, but its themes are pointed towards the Vietnam War instead. This is more visible in a television series, which stretches over a period of time, rather than a film which only occupies a point.

After September 11, the producers of many television shows had three choices. One: accept the reframing caused by these attacks.The political drama The West Wing is set in a world that explicitly does not mirror our own, but showrunner Aaron Sorkin chose to produce an episode outside the series continuity that discusses and reflects on September 11. Plotlines on the show were influenced by concerns about terrorism and security; the show embraced its zeitgeist.

Two: a show could choose to ignore its contemporary context. Friends continued unabated without acknowledging that the World Trade Center was missing from its New York skyline. Even though The West Wing is outside our political reality we expect such a show to engage with it. Friends is a sitcom, so even though it takes place in New York we do not expect it to engage with those events because it is counter to the show’s themes.

The third choice was hardly a choice at all; some narratives simply could not exist after September 11. In 2001, the writers of the Law & Order detective franchise planned to have a multi-episode arc across all its shows about a terrorist plot in New York; those plans were scrapped. Seven Days was a science fiction series with the premise that a government team had the ability to travel back in time to prevent cataclysmic events from happening. After September 11, what was once simple thriller fodder looked more like bitter wish-fulfillment; predictably, the show was not renewed.

II. The Symbol

On the other hand, some narratives could only exist after September 11. As time passed and collective shock faded, shows and films were able to engage with the attacks and the aftermath. At first this was done peripherally: the series Rescue Me and the film Ladder 49 dealt with the heroism of American firefighters, while a bumper crop of stories regarding terrorism and national security flooded the cinema and television. The thriller series 24 was at the vanguard, and many critics saw how the show — sometimes described as “torture porn” — reflected a nation’s anxiety about terrorism and the sacrifices needed to confront it. Meanwhile, films such as 25th Hour portrayed a post-9/11 New York dealing with its trauma and loss.

As even more time passed, stories were able to confront the attacks directly; United 93 and World Trade Center were the most visible dramatizations of the attacks, and a major critical point of contention was whether these films were reverent and cathartic portrayals of a national tragedy or unnecessary cash/award-grabs designed to crassly tug on viewers’ emotions.

Nevertheless, the imagery of the Twin Towers themselves remained as potent as ever. Before September 11, the Twin Towers were a deprecated symbol often accused of being a blight on the New York skyline. They were associated with financial greed and predation, such as in the opening to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street; his beatification of the Twin Towers in World Trade Center is a sign of how much the symbolism has changed.

September 11 created a negative space in our mental landscape where the World Trade Center used to be; as time passed, that negative space was filled with different meanings and symbols by different narratives. Both Munich and Gangs of New York invoked the Twin Towers at the end; the former spoke to a parallel between Israeli anti-terrorism in the 1970s and American anti-terrorism in the 2000s, while the latter used the towers as a reminder of American resilience in the face of tragedy.

III. The Twist

As time continues to pass, we have not necessarily forgotten the importance of what happened on September 11, 2001, but our relationship to those events and our engagement with its imagery has changed. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was an assumption that images of the World Trade Center were aversive to see in our entertainment; they were too painful and too horrific to look at. The mental landscape created by our films and television shows reflected a reluctance to engage with the trauma of reality.

Now those psychic wounds are less sensitive. In time, Ground Zero will be completely built over. Nine years later, we have internalized the non-existence of the World Trade Center as a fact in our collective history. The Twin Towers have become iconic of a very specific moment, and this has led to the use of their imagery in an entirely different way. At first, September 11 reframed the context of narratives by changing the meaning of the Twin Towers. Later, the image of the towers was used in narratives to give meaning in a broader historical and societal context. Now, we are seeing the use of the World Trade Center as a narrative twist.

Simply put, in 2001 the Twin Towers were removed from films and television shows because it was thought they would create an unpleasant shock in the audience; in 2010 the Twin Towers are used in films and television shows precisely because they generate a shock in the audience. Similar to the sight of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, seeing the Twin Towers smashes our assumptions about where and when the story takes place.

In perhaps one of the few moments in which the US remake of the series Life on Mars one-upped the UK original, the protagonist looks out at the World Trade Center, and immediately realizes that he may be dreaming, traveling through time, or insane, but he certainly isn’t in 2008. An episode of the science fiction series Fringe ends on a shot that tracks back out of the Twin Towers, indicating that we and the story have traveled to an alternate universe.

In perhaps the most outrageous use of this imagery, the romantic drama Remember Me, out of left field, puts its lead inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11 in an attempt to give its ending some narrative weight. The movie was savaged by critics, and the twist was labeled by one as “borderline offensive.” Even though time has passed, images of the Twin Towers are still emotionally charged, and there are still limits, however wide they may be, with how they can be used.

Customized Lady Gaga Barbie dolls, designed by a 29-year-old Beijinger

I’ve made no secret of my hatred for Graydon Carter’s society rag Vanity Fair, so guess what happened when I opened its September 2010 issue? I sliced my finger open on a subscription card; not off to a good start. I was only interested in this issue because of the feature story devoted to Lady Gaga, who you may know as an artist of particular interest to me.

Vanity Fair’s profile on Gaga has little to recommend it save some exquisite photography from Nick Knight (which nevertheless fits perfectly into my Vanity Fair Cover Nudity Theorem). The piece comes off as an insubstantial primer on Gaga for the fearful and clueless; I’m sure the cover blurb “Should you worry?” was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but the article seems to take it at face value. To reassure its readers of Gaga’s corporatist credentials, the article starts off with a barrage of pull quotes from top music executives, as if they could be trusted to be the arbiters of anything of importance.

However, the Vanity Fair article manages to bumble into inadvertent insight with the title “Lady Gaga’s Cultural Revolution,” a configuration of words with the right balance of senselessness and pretension. Yet there’s a bit of truth there—it’s a title that wouldn’t fly in the PRC, but by recalling one of the most traumatic and important events that shaped modern China, it makes one think about Gaga’s influence in that country.

The Gaga phenomenon has a worldwide reach, but the response to it is always local. Amid the recent explosion of academic interest in Gaga and her work, there’s been an intriguing exploration into how Gaga’s status as a native New Yorker has shaped her artistic development, and how she’s been influenced by, and in turn influences, the Byzantine cultural sphere of that city. (It’s a point Vanity Fair touches on with thinly veiled condescension when it breathes a sigh of relief that Gaga wasn’t one of those unwashed tourist-bumpkins continually invading their city.)

But let’s talk Gaga area studies: her reception in Beijing is necessarily going to be different from her reception in Manhattan. Mobs of adoring fans may look the same from a distance, but their perceptions as they engage with Gaga will be entirely different. In the West she exists in well-developed, sophisticated and jaded media spaces. Chinese pop culture, on the other hand, is in a period of rapid transformation, and injecting Gaga into the mix has had some interesting results.

While it’s not the whole truth, it’s a useful generalization to say that Chinese media consumers and producers take a great deal of their cues from Western media, gleaning the broad strokes and amplifying them. Modern Chinese pop music builds on the foundations laid in Hong Kong and Taipei, which were heavily influenced by American and British styles. International response to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon led to a decade of domestic and for-export wuxia fantasy epics, and probably made the formerly-realist director Zhang Yimou the man he is today. For now and into the near future, there is a premium in China on what American trendsetters think.

The Gaga phenomenon, which originated in a combative and conflicted American media environment, is entering practically uncontested into China. The result is what I only half-jokingly call Total Gaga Dominance. In my stay in Beijing, her work was ubiquitous; constant play on the radio and at bars and clubs goes without saying, but I’d get a haircut and hear “Bad Romance” over the speakers while someone’s phone rang to the tune of “Paparazzi.” My local supermarket put The Fame and The Fame Monster on loop over their PA system and left it like that for five months. Unscrupulous concert promoters can claim Lady Gaga’s going to be performing and sell out in hours. There’s even a talk show host on Chinese television named “Lady Guagua” whose star is unsurprisingly on the rise.

Elizabeth Lynch of China Law and Policy noted this too, musing that this may come from the accessibility of both Gaga’s music and fashion. She also delightfully points out that

Lady Gaga is so popular right now that her name is barely ever translated into Chinese characters, much to the chagrin of Chinese officials (if it is translated, it is usually translated as 雷帝嘎嘎 ["Lei Di Ga Ga"], meaning “Thunder Emperor Gaga”).

Language has a great deal of power, and the fact that Gaga goes untranslated in Chinese culture puts her above a host of other foreign celebrities. Lynch also notes—and I’ve seen firsthand—that the current Chinese net expression of surprise is not “OMG” but “OMLG”: Oh My Lady Gaga. In the officially atheist People’s Republic of China, Lady Gaga has replaced God.

Pop culture and commercialism serve as social glue; in early 20th century America, Hollywood pictures created an idealized version of the American that the working classes, especially a generation of recent immigrants, could aspire to. This weakened the cultural hold of ethnic enclaves and reduced the isolation of certain social groups by giving them a common language and set of desires. Although there were large swaths of the population excluded from these developments, they still had a noticeable effect.

The same developments are happening in China right now. American writers in China, such as Peter Hessler and Leslie T. Chang, have examined the conflicts generated by the massive social upheaval caused by the past decade of Chinese industrial development. Although the average Chinese citizen has intense loyalty to China as a national idea, there is still a great deal of parochialism and provincialism in play; China’s unity disguises the fact that it is heavily regionalized. Although Mandarin is proclaimed as the official language, it may not necessarily get you far with the locals in southern Guangzhou, or even heavily commercialized and modern Shanghai. (A friend of mine mentioned that on a trip to Shanghai, she received a much better reception speaking her decent-to-good English as opposed to her flawless Mandarin.) And these are urban cores we’re talking about—rural China is fractured into thousands of isolated villages with their own dialects and flavor of culture.

But millions and millions of Chinese are traveling to the cities to work, and they’re experiencing the full force of mass media, pop culture, and commercialism. One of the consequences of pop culture’s attempt to reach the largest audience possible is that it transcends provincialism, and a generation of working-class Chinese is rejecting their parents’ old ways for the perceived values of modernity, glamour, and sophistication offered by urban culture. And if pop culture is social glue, Gaga’s the stickiest of them all. There are more people in China studying English than the entire population of Great Britain, and for them Gaga’s lyrics are surprisingly easy to sing along to. She carries foreign glamour and no cultural baggage; her beautiful alien aesthetic seems divorced from anything else her fans have ever known, and thus a place to build a new culture and identity.

In the new Karate Kid film, Chinese actress Han Wenwen performs an energetic dance to Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The funny thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like a forced needle-drop—it’s emblematic of something real in China. Han’s standing in for millions of Chinese girls doing the same dance.  In a sense, Gaga’s values are the values of a new Chinese pop culture. At the moment, Gaga is irrepressibly cool in the PRC, and this moment is very, very important in a lot of ways. When she finally deigns to perform there, the reaction will be intriguing, to say the least.

An article in the Wall Street Journal profiled the women writers behind the hit AMC drama Mad Men, where they make up the majority of the staff. Such a writers’ room is a rarity; more often seen is a writers’ room composed entirely of men. But the world of television is a utopia of diversity in comparison to the feature world. Try this little test: think of all the contemporary Hollywood directors you can name. Now think of all the women on that list. I like to think I’m well versed in these things, and I barely need more than one hand to count the number in the second category.

There are two questions that revolve around this issue: Why is there such a lack of representation of women in Hollywood, and why is television slightly more diverse than features? It’s especially interesting in this historical moment where the Sotomayor nomination revealed quite a bit of rhetoric with the unspoken assumption that the white male was the standard of unbiased neutrality. There has been a mountain of writing on this very topic, but let’s try to sketch some points out.

It goes without question that the majority of what comes out of Hollywood is saddled with some sort of inequality of representation. My favorite of these tests: think of the last dozen films you’ve seen, and think of the most prominent woman in each one. Now how many of those women are more than a wife/girlfriend/sex object/love interest? (The only genre in which women are strongly represented is romance, for obvious reasons. Pursue that line of inquiry and you just get into wheels within wheels, so I’m just going to recommend that you watch The Celluloid Closet for that.)

Some of this lack of representation in front of the camera stems from a lack of representation behind the camera, and both shortcomings come from an inherent bias somewhere in the chain of production. This bias is largely inadvertent, because most filmmakers aren’t going around saying, “We can’t put a black/Latino/Asian/female person in this role.” But I have to say “largely” because in some cases, that’s exactly what they’re saying:

“There’s sort of an accepted myth that if you have two black actors, a male and a female, in the lead of a romantic comedy, that people around the world don’t want to see it,” [Will] Smith told the British paper, the Birmingham Postwhile promoting the flick [Hitch] overseas. “We spend $50-something million making this movie and the studio would think that was tough on their investment. So the idea of a black actor and a white actress comes up—that’ll work around the world, but it’s a problem in the U.S.”

So in Hollywood logic, a black woman won’t do well overseas and a white woman won’t do well in America. So let’s split the difference and cast a Latina! Not exactly cinema’s finest hour, but it shows that most of the skewed representation isn’t because of some malicious atmosphere but because of a drive to chase the bottom line—movies are a business after all, and so the studios pander to the biases of their audiences. Another way this is seen is in the conventional wisdom that women will watch films centered around men and male themes but it doesn’t work the other way around.  So in Hollywood’s Barnumesque logic, catering to the shallowest and most narrow-minded among us will lead to maximum profit.

That explains part of it. But shouldn’t women be able to direct all kinds of films? Kathryn Bigelow tells us yes, but look at the rest of the films out there and the evidence is scant.  Just as how a number of U.S. Senators thought that white males are free of the racial and gender bias that Latina women apparently carry with them, the Hollywood assumption is that men can do your standard chick flick rom com as well as women can, plus everything else to boot.

Again, this is (largely) absent of any active malice. Few people would say that men are inherently better scientists than women (except for Lawrence Summers and look where that got him) and few people would say that men are inherently better musicians than women (except for the Vienna Philharmonic). And yet when orchestras started hiring via blind audition in which the performer was hidden behind a screen, there was a corresponding increase in the number of women hired.  Some biases are just too subtle, too ingrained, and too subconscious; and the smallest things can tip the balance in hiring.

Few people would say that men are inherently better writers and directors than women. But you can’t hire directors and writers behind a blind screen. There are no objective criteria in this industry; it’s all about personality and reputation. Once again, the focus is the bottom line: on a feature, one director and one script hold everything together. The studios want proven performers to fill those roles, known quantities from a select list that can turn out a good product.  Right now, most of the names on that very short list are men; those demographics may shift in the future, but it looks to be a long and slow process.

What about television? The Journal article notes that 23% of television writers last year were women, a clear minority. However it’s far better than the 12% of feature writers that were women. What makes the difference?

A theory I heard once was that feature directing and scriptwriting was about self-aggrandizement, competition, and dominance. Television directing and writing, on the other hand, was about consensus-building, collaboration, and long-term planning. Features were full of “daddies” and television shows were full of “mommies.” While this was quite possibly one of the stupidest things I had ever heard, it sounds like the type of conventional wisdom that some executive somewhere would believe.

A more plausible take on the situation is that features are generally larger in scope, more visual, and more action-oriented. Television on the other hand tends to be more intimate, more dialogue-driven, and more focused on character and relationships. Along with this, feature audiences are male-driven and television audiences are female-driven. Combine those two bits of wisdom and view them through the lens of subtle gender bias, and it seems like those in charge might think that women are better-equipped to handle television (but not enough to bring them toward any sort of equality).

But to me the strongest element seems to be one of risk. Hollywood is a business, and everyone wants to maximize profit while minimizing risk. The sad fact is that the conventional wisdom says that hiring a woman anytime and anywhere is a risk compared to hiring a man. The difference is that in a feature, hiring that woman as the sole director or the sole writer puts everything at risk. The episodic nature of television means that you only put a small part of the larger whole at risk when you hire a woman. And that makes the risk acceptable enough to do it.

Of course, the fact that one of the best shows on television is written mostly by women means that all your conventional wisdom is bullshit.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, better known to the world as Lady Gaga, has had a meteoric rise in the world of pop music with the release of her debut album The Fame. With her catchy lyrical hooks and slick electronic beats, Lady Gaga may not necessarily break any significant musical ground; she beats her critics to the punch and says that “My music isn’t me jerking my dick off all over a piano trying to feel something. I make soulless electronic pop.” But that electronic pop is an excellent springboard for a rich output of visual media, including not only music videos but also short films as well. Throughout it all, one can detect a singular vision that expresses a consistent visual style and explores a tightly-knit set of questions and themes. By examining her videos and films, one can see that Lady Gaga is trying to be a different kind of pop star. She’s an auteur in the truest sense of the word, claiming ownership of her visual output as a slice of a larger mode of artistic expression.

It is often difficult to locate a sense of authorship in the popular music world, much of which is manufactured by committee and corporate dictum and bears more than a little resemblance to the Hollywood studio system. Not every pop musician can claim authorship over his or her work; in fact, few can. Before one can examine Lady Gaga’s body of work for an authorial voice, one must justify that the body of work belongs to her in the first place. What separates Gaga from most other pop singers and musicians that we can even begin to ask the question, “What is Lady Gaga’s authorial signature?”

Continue reading at The House Next Door.

The central plotline of the episode is dominated by Serena: the stresses placed upon her love affair with Trip, its dissolution, and her car accident. Apparently Gossip Girl was not content with the Kennedy parallels by the fake Chappaquiddick earlier in the season that they had to have a real one: Trip crashes his car after being accosted by three wolves (really?) in the middle of the road, and he and his wife try to cover up the incident by making it look like Serena was driving the car or something similar. Ignoring the fact that this was a plotline used in the comedy Arrested Development, and that there is a huge bloody indentation in the passenger-side windshield, the problem is that this is putting Serena into the utterly cliche “girl in peril” role. The answer to all the dramatic conflicts in this episode is “Serena is hurt, let’s all rush to the hospital!” The Jenny-Eric conflict fizzles out with a rather weak justification about family, considering all the horrible things they’ve done to each other this season — they seem to be setting Jenny up for the even-more-insipid plotline of “Jenny is a drug dealer!”

The events turn the rather bland character of Trip into a scumbag rather quickly, but he seems schizophrenic (as a politician usually ends up seeing, true), another hodge-podge of plot necessities that only exists to create artificial conflicts. It also places Nate conveniently in the role of protector, voice of reason, and hero, finally punching out his own cousin. (The quality of a season of a Josh Schwartz show can be judged by how frequently someone gets punched out. Season One: a punch in the pilot and in almost every other episode. This season: it took twelve episodes for the first K.O.)

The problem revealed by this storyline is that it shows that at this point, in order for Serena to be a sympathetic figure, she has to be a pitiable one. She has to be wronged; she has to be weak; she has to be placed in grave danger. In other words, she has to be Marissa Cooper. The Marissa Cooper Problem was seen in The O.C., where Mischa Barton’s character was a loathsome, vile creature: self-centered, over-dramatic, codependent. She always made incredibly stupid decisions, tried to make herself the center of attention with transparent cries for help, and generally ruined every plotline she was remotely involved in. Contrast this to the Serena of Gossip Girl’s first season, who was intelligent and reasonable; even though she wrestled with her past and with inner demons, she was possessed with a self-awareness and confidence that Marissa Cooper lacked. Unfortunately, it seems as the seasons wore on, Serena trended downwards toward that broken characterization like it was some kind of baseline equilibrium. I’ve mentioned similar problems with the character of Jenny Humphrey; it’s interesting that the most well-adjusted and sympathetic female main character on the show is Blair Waldorf, who also happens to be the character who hews the closest to traditional gender roles.

In fact, the only character really served by the episode and treated with a measure of dignity and thoughtfulness is Chuck Bass; it’s the anniversary of his father’s death, and the weight of that lays heavily upon him. His internal monologue is externalized as a dialogue with a ghostly vision of Bart Bass, and in those scenes the show actually takes time away from the relentless pushing of plot points to breathe in and realize one of their characters as something more than the conjunction of conflicts. Chuck continually compares himself to his father, and part of what drives his character is the indelible fact that his father died knowing him only as a wastrel and a dissipated lush. Bart Bass will never see his son be a man, and this invests Chuck with a measure of guilt, compounded by the fact he couldn’t even muster up the courage to see his father on his deathbed. It’s a powerful internal struggle, as we see Chuck deciding between whether to wall himself away from others and retreat into the exacting security of work — in other words, to honor his father by being the same man as he was — or to connect to others, to reach out and admit his own inner humanity — to honor his father by being a better man than he was.

Friday Night Lights also recently dealt with a plot arc about one of its main protagonists, Matt Saracen, dealing with the death of his father. Although the shows are diametric opposites — rural Texas versus Upper East Side Manhattan, raw and subtle versus stylized and soapy — it’s interesting to see the commonalities between the two arcs. Both seem to manifest the loss of the father as a spiritual wound; for Matt it is fresh and deep, while for Chuck, it is a dull ache, scarred over and yet impossible to ignore. Both are confronted with images of their fathers, unsure of how to reconcile the man they see with the man they knew and will never see again. Both shows meditate on how grief is a personal and supremely unique torment, impossible to share with others; and yet we do it anyway because we don’t know anything else. Without indulging in normative claims about what a family should be, both shows dramatize that we live in a society that is bereft of fathers and yet that same society will always live in their shadow. And finally, both Friday Night Lights and Gossip Girl tell us in order to heal the wounds and pain caused by the loss of their fathers, the characters must confront their own fears and misgivings about who they are as individuals. Chuck and Matt are men, not their father’s sons.

Of course, Gossip Girl is a soap opera, and it can’t escape that; it has to plant and pay off another over-the-top storyline about “Chuck’s mother didn’t die in childbirth and has been living in secret for decades, isn’t that crazy?” But let’s ignore that for now. Of all the characters’ obsessions and conflicts with their parents, Chuck’s is the most potent and the most thoughtful. And of all of Gossip Girl‘s reversals and inversions over the years, the supreme one is that the most villainous and corrupt character has matured into the most nuanced and truly understandable one.