National Security (Dennis Dugan, 2003) is an action-comedy starring Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn. Like its predecessors 48 Hours (1982) and Rush Hour (1998), its narrative revolves around an unlikely cop partnership wherein both parties find themselves all mixed up in mayhem, violence, and requisite race jokes.

National Security earned over $50 million worldwide, was the second highest-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend (Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday), and stayed in theaters for several months. But for the year, it was the 78th most-profitable movie domestically. Moreover, compared to Big Daddy (1999) and Grown-Ups (2010), National Security serves as one of its director’s biggest misfires. The same goes for Martin Lawrence as the film stands as one of his worst-performing vehicles.

In 2015, I hadn’t seen National Security. There may have been a point at which I thought about the film. Maybe when I was a 19-year-old screenwriting student in Los Angeles, I saw a billboard for it. Or I noticed it on the marquee when I went to see something else. It’s possible I considered seeing it — I liked most of Martin Lawrence’s movies up to that point — but I didn’t.

It’s inconceivable, then, the last conversation between my father and me, of all possible topics, would be about this mostly forgotten buddy-cop movie.

I haven’t spoken to my father in two years. I haven’t seen him. I haven’t touched him. He is gone, and he is never coming back. Yes, people die every day. But not people you know, not your parents.

I had thousands of conversations with my father. At the time of his death, he was neither medically ill nor ailing from the usual effects of aging. So there was no way to know that, when he called me three days before he died, it would be the last time I would speak with him.

In real life, there are two kinds of deaths: expected, which may follow a long illness and allow those left behind a chance to say goodbye; and sudden, which happen unexpectedly and afford those remaining no opportunity to say their farewells.

Movies often blend the two: expected and sudden. A character has been shot and is bleeding out in the street, but he’s still able to muster a few words. A sidekick jumps in front of the villain’s knife, but she has time before she dies to hear her partner say, “Thank you.”

Scenes like this force the writer to think about what they might say in that kind of moment. But such scenes don’t often play out in the real world, and the hope behind them is misplaced. Few people get to create any final scene. In real life, a sudden death denies you those last few words.

Aneurysms. Heart attacks. Car accidents.

The last day I spoke with my father, he had watched National Security on Netflix, and he wanted to tell me about it. I’m a screenwriter, and the two most recent projects I had been hired to write were, what the industry calls, “urban” films — or the preferred euphemism for films with lead characters who are black.

Knowing the basics of my early professional writing assignments, National Security had sparked an idea in my father’s mind: that I could write something similar because it starred a black actor. At first I didn’t get the connection. But after figuring out what film he was talking about and hearing what he liked about it — along with his insistence I should try to write something similar — I told him I would check it out.

I hung up the phone, disheartened my father didn’t understand anything about my career and what I was trying to do with my life. The thing I pour my energy into, the thing that keeps me going through late nights, the challenge of writing words that both make sense and are important — none of that was in my father’s mind when it came to me and my desire to write movies.

My ambitions had been reduced to a particular niche that could be filled, effectively, if I would only sit down and do it. To my father, my work seemed to be laughable — or at least as laughable as National Security.

My father was born in Denver, but spent all of his childhood in Tustin, a small city in Orange County, California. His California was not Steinbeck’s pastoral lament. Instead, it was the rapidly evolving Southern California landscape of the 1950s and 1960s, which saw Disneyland plow over the orange groves and Surf City USA rise from the newly manicured coastline of Huntington Beach.

His parents, at one point, owned a chicken ranch, but they were not farmers. His youth consisted of cars, motorcycles, Little League, and a father who ate eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning.

When it came time to finish high school, my father had the opportunity to go to college. He enrolled at San Diego State University and moved to San Diego, where he would live for the rest of his life and where I would grow up.

My father was an engineering student. After graduating, he took his first of the many technically oriented jobs that would constitute his career. Although he professed to having very poor abilities in math or memorization, he found tremendous success as a manager and a project leader.

For him, there were the details, and then there was the bigger picture. During most of my childhood, I felt my father wasn’t as concerned with the details. I don’t know if this is necessarily true. Like many things that we think about our parents, that idea may have been based solely in emotion.

From an early age, I felt as though I didn’t have a lot in common with my father. I loved sports, and he didn’t. I was drawn to the arts, and he was not. Even as a boy I wanted to be a writer and work in the movies, but I never asked him what my career might look like because I thought he didn’t understand my ambitions. We didn’t talk about movies. In fact, I don’t recall my father ever taking me to a movie theater (maybe we did as part of a family outing, but I don’t recall going only with my father). Movie theaters would become a sacred place to me, but they were not something I shared with him.

About twenty months before my father died, I moved back to the United States after several years of living overseas. Now in San Diego, I saw modest success as a screenwriter. My writing partner and I had found representation, we were hired to write a script, and we had people willing to talk to us about our work.

As monumental as this success was for me, it was difficult to convey to my father. After all, since graduating college I had spent years working freelance jobs, living on friends’ couches, pursuing a Master’s degree, making films nobody was watching, and working as an assistant on studio films in London. I know my “reckless” path, though not unusual for filmmakers, couldn’t have looked great to my father. It was as insecure and unstable as his own had been calculated and assured. He must have been worried for me, confused as to what I was trying to do with my life.

My father didn’t understand my work, and that is largely because I gave up on trying to help him understand. In my mind, the only way I could show him I was “okay” was in basic terms: my name onscreen (“Written By”), in a movie he’d heard of, accompanied by a serious paycheck.

That was the only success my father would be able to grasp, I thought. He never got to see it. When he died, I wasn’t there yet.

The last day I saw my father was Easter Sunday. We had dinner. There were other people there. He and I laughed secretly at two of them, an inside joke between us. We joked with each other, too. We talked about current events. He told me what was going on with his house and what he hoped to do with it in the near future.

Since moving back to San Diego, I discovered how much I had in common with my father: a common love of exploration and a desire to take on project after project. Just prior to Easter, we rebuilt the fence in his backyard. It was a big project, the kind that he loved, and I enjoyed every minute of working on it with him. When we were finished, he was pleased.

After thirty years, I was happy in my relationship with him and looked forward to making the next few years count in terms of strengthening our bond. I was also more secure in my career and poised to bring him into it in new ways.

I left my father’s house after dinner, and he walked me out alone, as he always did. We said goodbye. Not unique among men, or sons, or fathers, he had a hard time saying “I love you.” I don’t know if, during the last moment I saw him alive, he said it. I don’t know if he did in that last phone conversation that we had. I don’t know. I wish I could remember. But I don’t.

Strangely enough, during that last Easter dinner, my father talked with me about dying. He felt good and was healthy. He had plenty of things he was still planning to do, and there was no reason he wouldn’t be able to do them. He told me that he thought he had twenty years left.

I don’t know if I believed him or if I just wanted to. But he didn’t have twenty years left. He had six days.

No relationship is one-sided. Over the years, maybe I didn’t consider my father as his own person. As I struggled to build my own career, I didn’t stop to think that he could appreciate my work without understanding it. But he had his own way of looking at movies, and his own way of looking at my success.

National Security is not what most people would call “a great movie.” It is not the kind of movie most filmmakers aspire to make. But it is a certain kind of movie and a certain kind of success necessary to advance the career of some filmmakers, especially those who work deep in the studio system.

I try not to think that my father, while watching National Security, felt it contained the kind of dialogue I write or that its clunky plotting is something I’m capable of or that a low-brow comedy is what I have oriented my life towards.

At one point Lawrence’s character, a security guard trying to be a cop, turns to Steve Zahn’s, a cop who has been forced to be a security guard, and says,

“Let me get this straight. Your partner got killed. You lost your job. You got thrown in jail. Your girlfriend walked. And now you’re a security guard making $182 a week. Know what you are, Hank? You’re a black man.”

This is the kind of heavy-handed, overtly racial dialogue that characterizes many movies. It’s a familiar line because it emulates other movies with similar lines. It’s a line an audience expects to hear, especially in a Martin Lawrence movie. It not necessarily a fault of the film; it is part of the film’s essential constitution.

That is what I wish I would have talked to my father about: why National Security works on some levels and doesn’t on others. I could have used the opportunity to explore films with him, illustrate what I love about them, and why I have always wanted to be a part of them.

I could have also explained why I may have to write a few National Securitys before I write The Godfather (although he never watched The Godfather, either). I could have seized the opportunity to start that process of helping him understand, ahead of my own arbitrary schedule for it. But I didn’t. I merely counted this as another example of my father’s not “getting” me.

Only now, after time has passed, can I see that on one afternoon, he sat down to watch a movie and as soon as it was over, the first thing he did was think of me. Good movie, bad movie, forgettable movie — it didn’t matter.

After years of wondering whether my father would watch a film in which he could see my work, he had done just that. Maybe I didn’t have anything to explain to him after all.

My Father and ‘National Security’ was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Survivor Memory about Not Watching Survivor

Today — or yesterday, once I finish writing this — is the ten-year anniversary of the Survivor: Cook Islands finale, which aired on December 17, 2006.

I didn’t need to look this up — it’s a date that has stuck with me, albeit for reasons indirect to Survivor itself. Cook Islands, beyond being one of Survivor’s most memorable seasons, resonates with me because it was the first Survivor finale I didn’t watch live. Survivor finales were a big deal in the McNutt household, and when I woke up that morning I had planned out viewing it with my family, home from college for Christmas.

Those plans changed when I got word that my high school friend Kyle had died following a car accident the night before. It’s the kind of news you don’t really prepare for — I was one of the few among this group of friends who went away for university (albeit an hour away), and so I was less close to Kyle than others, but the idea of him being gone at 20 was nonetheless difficult to fathom.

[I’d include a photo of me and Kyle, or even just Kyle, here, but I don’t think I have any of them handy. There’s some photos kicking around on a hard drive somewhere, but those are in my office.]

Kyle’s death resonates with me in many ways, but two stand out. One was the way it highlighted how our lives are shaped by our different relationships: when I attended Kyle’s funeral, the first I’d attended for a non-family member, I was struck by how much the version of Kyle being presented by his family was not the Kyle I knew.

That shouldn’t have been surprising, maybe: of course he’s going to be different with his family than he is in the halls at school, or hanging out with me and my friend Ryan after they drove down to visit me at university. But when I read his obituary it sounded like a different person, and it wasn’t until the funeral that I realized everyone there saw Kyle differently, and that was just how life works, especially with someone still caught between childhood and adulthood in the eyes of the world.

The second, though, was why I missed that Survivor finale. That night, our group of friends reunited in the parking lot at our high school to throw a football around. It was what we did every day at lunch, Kyle included, and it was a way to help us process what was happening. These were friends I usually tried to see when I was home from school, but it felt particularly important to see them that night. While my instinct is often to process things independently, it was a reminder of the value of community, and the way those communities continue to be a part of our lives after we’ve “left” them (like if, say, you moved to another country as I did).

And so tonight I think about Kyle as I do each December — it was hard to imagine life without him then, but on this anniversary it’s maybe too easy to imagine how life might’ve been different if he was here. That’s the joy and pain of perspective, and I take the lessons learned from that with me now and on each and every future December 17.

December 17, 2006 was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, the Guardian published a piece by film critic Ben Child on the role of women in superhero films. Focusing on the newly released Doctor Strange, Child argues women with superhero girlfriend roles are underdeveloped and do not fit into modern times. This, according to Child, is because superhero girlfriends don’t have superpowers.

I’d like to question and expand on some of Child’s points. While Child’s point that more needs to be done to bring forward women’s representations in mainstream media has merit, we also need to keep an eye on the nuances of current portrayals and how they relate to wider cultural issues.

History and Convention — What’s the Problem?

Child begins by noting the superhero girlfriend character type can be traced to the comics, “which have always imagined their (usually male) costumed titans requiring support of a (usually female) love interest in order to save the world.”

Historical context doubtless plays a role here. After all, comics fans and writers have been talking about “Women in Refrigerators” since at least the late 1990s, when writer Gail Simone coined the term. It refers to a narrative trope, or a repeated series of events in superhero stories, in which superhero girlfriends are killed, maimed, raped — or all of the above — in order to propel the (male) hero’s story and motivate his action.

The villain goes for the superhero’s girlfriend in order to “attack his heart,” as Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osborn puts it in Spider-Man (2002). Thus, the superhero has no choice but to save his girlfriend, an act which moves the narrative from one point to the next.

I refer to “women-in-refrigerator” characters as representing “active passivity,” for while they remain passive objects in need of rescuing within the narrative, their integral role in propelling action not their own is fascinating. Without them, the film would fall apart.

At the risk of devaluing film adaptations just for, you know, being adaptations, Child then argues that some superhero girlfriends have been depowered or made less physically strong than their comic book counterparts. Here, he uses Morena Baccarin’s character in Deadpool (2016) to illustrate the ways in which the adaptation process has “downgraded” her superhero girlfriend character. He says

“If being superpowered is what gets you screen time and a little extra attention from the script polisher, there are plenty of comic book paramours due an upgrade.”

Superpowers, it seems, are the key to successful female empowerment in superhero films.

Thinking about these characters in terms of whether or not they have superpowers and then valuing them accordingly has its drawbacks though. Throughout the history of superheroes, there have always been non-powered civilians of all genders (well, maybe not all genders but that’s a topic for another day). Foggy Nelson seems to get by in Daredevil stories without people saying, “Where are his superpowers?” Then again, you don’t see Foggy Nelson pining after Daredevil and constantly needing saving by him.

I would argue, though, that the problem isn’t that superhero girlfriends don’t have superpowers. The problem is with the way in which these non-powered women are devalued through their positioning in the narrative (as being in need of saving).

Giving them superpowers won’t necessarily fix everything. Look at Rogue in X-Men (2000) or Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). In X-Men, Rogue, who is a superpowered mutant, is just a tool which villain Magneto wants to to use to control humans, thereby placing her in danger and need of saving. Meanwhile, Black Widow’s portrayal in Age of Ultron attracted severe criticism for the ways in which she was victimized in the film and positioned as love interest for Bruce Banner.

Superhero girlfriends don’t underwhelm because they don’t have powers. They underwhelm because they’re placed in a particular position in a narrative which relates to bigger issues about what it means to be a woman. And with more widespread awareness of feminist issues, this becomes a more overt problem than it maybe was a few decades ago.

The Amazing Gwen Stacy

Let’s talk about Gwen Stacy, perhaps the ultimate woman in the refrigerator. Gwen Stacy’s comic book story in which she is brutally thrown off a bridge by the Green Goblin only to have her neck snapped by Spider-Man’s web shooter marked the beginning of a more serious mode of comic book storytelling in the 1970s.

The story had an effect on superhero narratives which we can still feel in “dark and gritty” stories today. Her death, of course, served no purpose other than to fuel Spider-Man’s fury against the Green Goblin (on a related note, the editors were convinced the only options for Gwen were death or marriage to Peter Parker — and Petey just wasn’t ready for that yet! So death it was!).

Gwen appeared in the ill-fated Amazing Spider-Man reboot film series, which only lasted two films before they hit the reset button, played by the ever-loved Emma Stone. As insignificant as the film might seem from here, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) is one of my favorite superhero films, and this is partly to do with its portrayal of Gwen Stacy. The film was referred to in the press as “Twilight in spandex” and “a superhero film for women” because of its central love story, but also perhaps because it brought forward the narrative of the superhero girlfriend.

In The Amazing Spider-Man, Gwen’s role forms the backbone of the narrative. In the Raimi Spider-Man films, Mary Jane’s presence and actions are a constant source of pain, woe, and irritation for Spider-Man. But in The Amazing Spider-Man, Gwen’s relationship to Peter is not detrimental to his life, but enhances it. This is most obvious in the scene in which Peter tells Gwen that he is Spider-Man. Subsequently, he is no longer burdened by the isolation of being a hero.

Although part of Gwen’s role is to help Peter by contributing her resources and scientific skills further along the narrative, this is only one aspect of the character. Gwen’s intelligence is often highlighted in the film, but it does not necessarily function in opposition to her status as superhero girlfriend. And at no point is she kidnapped by the film’s villain, the Lizard, although she is part of action scenes between him and Spider-Man.

Gwen’s ill fate in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) is probably most representative of the struggle for the portrayal of women in superhero films. A central conflict of the film regards Gwen’s choice in partaking of the action.

Choice is an interesting concept when it comes to feminist ideas. Women’s choice to do what they want with their lives and bodies is often referred to when thinking about feminism. But it’s also something that has been incorporated by the mainstream and is used with varying results.

In one scene moments before her death, Gwen screams at Peter that it should be her choice whether or not she should be involved in his heroic life. Framed by the language of choice, then, Gwen is ultimately punished for not knowing her place in the superhero narrative, as her death from the comics is repeated in the film, almost panel by panel.

Reconciling Girlfriendism with Heroism

None of this should be thought of as straightforward though. The superhero girlfriend is a complicated character because of the way in which her very presence serves the interests of the male hero. But the bigger picture here points to more general issues about women’s roles in Western society.

One of these issues, for instance, is the role of heterosexuality in women’s identity. Through the positioning of superhero girlfriend characters as both objects of heterosexual desire and things that need saving, the superhero narrative is ultimately linked to specific ideals about heterosexuality and the ways in which this links to gender roles.

Superhero girlfriends also undoubtedly fall into the reinvigorated traditionalist ideas about gender which are part and parcel of postfeminist culture. But they’re also complex in their relationship to old-timey gender representation. Their sassy, even ball-busting, personas are both modern and reach back to an age in which cinema was dominated by what Maria DiBattista refers to as “fast-talking dames.”

Back in the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, DiBattista argues, women were portrayed as sassy and quick-witted. Their verbal expressions were sharp, snappy and came at one-hundred miles per hour. These factors contributed to their representation as empowered in an age which we might associate with overt gender inequality. Both Pepper Potts and Gwen Stacy are arguably presented along these lines in their respective films, making them both contemporary and old-fashioned (indeed, in Stone’s case this might even spill over into her celebrity persona).

It’s not enough to look at these films and simply trace the history of the comics and say “well, this was better and that was worse.” We need to think about the links to wider cultural issues present in the narratives. What’s at stake? How can we make sense of this?

Part of this involves thinking about the ways in which we value some gendered characteristics over others. Is it just an inherently bad thing for a woman to play a superhero girlfriend or is there more to it than that? Is being physically strong really the key to adequate representation? How do other factors such as race and sexuality factor into this?

When Zendaya, a woman of color, was cast as Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming, the decision was met with backlash regarding the changed race of the traditionally white character. The fact that there was backlash speaks to the general issue of the dearth of representation of women of color in superhero films. The superhero girlfriends we’re used to are white, heterosexual, thin, and middle-class.

Interestingly, most have received “upgrades” in terms of profession and intellect — Pepper Potts is CEO of Stark Industries, Gwen is a science genius, Betty Ross is a scientist, Susan Storm is a scientist, Jane Foster is an astrophysicist. This is perhaps ironic in an age in which women and minorities are still criminally underrepresented in STEM fields.

Criticisms not withstanding, superhero girlfriends have played an important role in superhero narratives whether we like it or not. This in itself should be approached and investigated with some degree of sympathy. If a mainstream culture is really into one particular thing, we should be asking why it is into that thing and what that might mean.

Portrayals of women in superhero films undoubtedly need to go further in terms of presenting female superheroes. But the opportunity for groundbreaking representation shouldn’t end there — it is present in every aspect of the superhero narrative, including superhero girlfriends.

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The Superhero Girlfriend was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The fourth season of Orange Is the New Black (2013 — ) has a lot to say about inter-ethnic hostility within the Latinx community. The episode “Power Suit” (4.2) dives most deeply into these conflicts, treating relations between New York Dominicans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans with a level of nuance and depth uncommon in mainstream media.

In “Power Suit,” we learn via flashbacks that inmate Maria Ruiz (Jessica Pimentel) does not have an easy relationship with the Dominican nationalism her father tried to inculcate in her. We see her reject the ethnocentrism of her father, which is primarily directed at the new waves of Mexican immigrants whom he sees as attempting to take over “Dominican” territory in New York.

Although we’re never told exactly where Ruiz grew up, it’s a safe bet it was in Washington Heights, which began to be defined as a Dominican barrio with increasing migration from the island in the 1960s and ‘70s. Further, if we assume the character is in her mid-20s to early 30s, this means she grew up primarily in the 1990s, which is when Mexican immigrants began to arrive in New York City in large numbers.

As a teen, Ruiz ends up hooking up with a guy of Mexican descent, largely as a direct act of defiance against her father. For this “betrayal,” she is eventually kicked out of the house.

At the same time, Ruiz also pushes back against her father’s factionalism in a more philosophical manner, questioning why these inter-ethnic boundaries are so important to him. She challenges his assertions of Dominican pride, suggesting the real reason for his antagonism towards Mexicans has to do with his drug-dealing operation: they’re the new drug dealers on the block, cutting in on Dominican territory.

Also fascinating in “Power Suit” is the shift in Ruiz’s thinking about her ethnic identity, which happens as the present-day prison scenes progress.

While in flashbacks we see Ruiz’s rejecting Dominican nationalism and exclusive notions of identity, the opposite is taking place in the prison scenes. (In fact, you could say one of the main themes of the season is Ruiz’s shifting identity and status inside the Litchfield prison, as she eventually rises to the top of the Latinx food chain, assuming the position of jefa, boss.)

For example, at the beginning of this episode, Ruiz rejects the attempts by Blanca Flores (Laura Gómez), a fellow Dominican inmate, to unite over their shared ethnic identity. One of the most interesting scenes takes place in the TV room where inmates are watching a World Cup qualifying match between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

One of the new Dominican inmates refers to the Haitian players as cocolos, a historically derogatory term similar in use to the “N” word, used to refer to non-Spanish-speaking blacks in the Dominican Republic. Ruiz retorts that this inmate probably has cousins darker than the cocolos, to which the latter responds, “They ain’t black black; they indigenous.”

Ah yes, the famed Dominican denial of blackness: the island is known for its use of the term indio (indigenous) to refer to people who in another context would be labeled black. Clearly, the show’s writers know their Caribbean history, as they weave in nuggets of the historic and racialized antagonism between the two countries residing on the island colonized as Hispaniola 500+ years ago.

Ruiz asks Flores why she is so invested in the outcome of this match, given how terrible the Dominican soccer team is. After all, like its Spanish Caribbean neighbors Cuba and Puerto Rico, it’s baseball that constitutes the national sport of the Dominican Republic, not soccer. Flores responds that it’s all about the homeland, the same words used by Ruiz’s father in her childhood.

Later in this episode, Ruiz and Flores are part of a conversation involving Daya (Dascha Polanco) and Aleida (Elizabeth Rodriguez). Daya and Aleida are the mother and daughter inmates who, as Puerto Ricans—or “original” New York Latinx who were themselves besieged by huge waves of Dominican immigrants in the 1960s and ‘70s — blame new Dominican inmates for clogging the bathroom drains with their “kinky hair.” This not-so-veiled reference to the high proportion of Dominicans with some degree of African ancestry also assumes that blackness is incompatible with Puerto Rican racial identity (yet another narrative of racial erasure).

While Flores calls out the mother and daughter on their racism, Ruiz says nothing and even defends Daya. At this point, it seems Ruiz feels no visceral connection to her Dominican identity. Nonetheless, after Ruiz witnesses Flores getting a beat-down from two white inmates who lament the huge numbers of Latinx inside Litchfield, her Dominican pride kicks in. She decides to participate in a revenge beat-down of one of the white girls.

Thus, it seems, Maria Ruiz has come full circle. What we are left with at the end of the episode is a feeling not of inter-ethnic solidarity among Latinx, but rather a further splintering of identity politics.

Another example of the series’ complex treatment of relations between Latinx of different nationalities takes place early on in “Power Suit,” when all the inmates are called to gather in the chapel. The most unlikely character is chosen to make one of the most interesting racial commentaries of the episode.

Leanne (Emma Myles), one of the “redneck” inmates, schools her friend Angie (Julie Lake) on the major differences between Latinx (Mexicans vs. Dominicans). She also spouts sophisticated knowledge about the historic racial tensions between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, including the fact that Dominicans overwhelmingly deny their blackness as a result of longstanding anti-Haitian sentiment.

After Angie lists several stereotypes about Cubans (smoking cigars and swimming to Florida) and Colombians (coffee, coke, and “hips don’t lie”), Leanne says about Dominicans, “They talk a lot and play baseball, and are always like ‘I’m super not black’ even though Haiti is on the exact same island.”

I laughed aloud at the sheer absurdity of two characters who clearly stand in for “white trash” and who have regularly expressed racist sentiments, displaying such a sophisticated understanding of inter-ethnic differences and hostilities among Latinx/Caribbeans. Of course, upon hearing Dominicans (and other Latinx) boiled down to three features, Angie responds, “That’s right. Yeah, I hate them.” Genius writing.

Finally, “Power Suit” takes on issues still taboo in some parts of Latin America, namely the place of blackness in national identity. As is evident in comments from both Dominican and Puerto Rican inmates, signifiers of blackness — dark skin, kinky hair — are not something to be proud of in many parts of Latin America. Rather, they are denied or projected onto others.

Because Latin American countries have historically included a mixed-race category in their official population counts, many Latinx draw a hard and fast line between mestizo/mulato (mixed race) and negro (black). This presents a major contrast with racial categorization in the U.S., so shaped by the “one-drop” rule that lumps everyone with African ancestry together as “black.”

Afro-Latinx have only begun to be recognized in recent decades as a distinct population group in many countries, such as Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. Thus, to delve into the racial politics of Latinx identity and give this issue some airplay is not a small feat.

In terms of the bigger picture: like Orange Is the New Black’s prison population, Latinx are the largest population of color in this country (Flores tells Ruiz, “We’re the majority now”). It’s about time their issues, stories, and differences were better represented on TV and in the media.

Orange Is the New Black Dives into Latinx Identity Politics was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In my media studies class, I repeat to my students, “context, context, context!” I do this because they need to see TV shows, films, and music within the media ecosystems in which they are created, distributed, and received. These forms of media are, I want them to know, not created in a vacuum.

Before a recent class, I read an “obituary” for IFC’s Comedy Bang Bang (2012–16). In it, pop culture critic Nathan Rabin explains why this particular “comedy geek” series lasted for 110 episodes while similar niche series of the past, like FOX’s The Ben Stiller Show (1992–93), were cancelled so quickly. Ultimately, Rabin argues,

the comedy hasn’t necessarily changed, but the audiences got smarter and more comedy savvy.

This argument — that today’s audiences are smarter than those of the past — keeps popping up in pop culture analyses. It explains everything from the cancellation of past critically acclaimed TV series to the complexity of more recent shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Tony Goldwyn talks about it. Even Bill Gates talks about it.

However, what we generally find with this claim is either the numbers don’t add up or the authors fail to take into consideration the context in which these shows are airing.

While Rabin takes into account some changes in the media landscape between 1993 and 2012, he does so by way of discussing the explosion of podcasts in which comics pontificate on all manner of craft and the mechanics of comedy. Such podcasts, he argues, have primed audiences to understand and enjoy TV shows like Comedy Bang Bang in ways they may have not pre-podcast boom.

While there may be some truth in this explanation, there have been “comedy nerds” — or what we think of as the modern version of the comedy enthusiast — going back at least to the release of Mort Sahl’s first comedy album in 1958 and the popularization of comedy records that followed.

Moreover, there have been analyses breaking down the craft of humor and comedy since at least Aristotle’s Poetics. The current interest in comedy podcasting and the intricasies of stand-up are just the most current incarnation of our fascination with humor.

I would submit what lead to Comedy Bang Bang’s five-season long run isn’t a change in audience as it is a change in television.

In fact, the “audience argument” doesn’t even bear out if you look at the numbers. Vulture reports that Comedy Bang Bang’s first season averaged 122,000 viewers on IFC. A USA Today article from Spring 1993 shows that while The Ben Stiller Show came in last place for the week with a 3.6 rating, this means it beats Comedy Bang Bang’s average handily with roughly 5 million viewers (it took me longer than it should have to find this number). The reason Comedy Bang Bang has lasted longer than The Ben Stiller Show is not that more people have found their “inner comedy geek” over the past 20 years.

Let’s get back to context, shall we?

The television landscape is remarkably different than it was in 1992. In 2016, a cable network like IFC doesn’t need to find as big of an audience as a broadcast network like FOX to make money. Even more to the point, thanks to an increasing number of available outlets on TV and online, narrowcasting, niche branding, and a change in the types of revenue streams that networks rely on for profit, IFC in 2016 needs to find a much smaller audience than FOX in 1992 in order for a series to be “successful.”

Maybe comedy geeks appear more culturally relevant in 2016 than they were in 1992. But that is, in part, because major changes in technology, production, distribution, and viewer practices have given all manner of geeks and fans leverage as a highly valuable and sought-after audiences.

The claim “today’s audiences are smarter than they used to be” makes invisible industry changes, cultural shifts, and economic realities that go a long way toward explaining why a show that aired 20 years ago might have a different fate than a similar show airing in 2016. Again, The Ben Stiller Show cannot be understood in terms of Comedy Bang Bang because the shows by themselves do not paint a full picture of how they functioned within their own unique contexts.

As benign as one (arguably misleading) article about an IFC show may be, pop culture criticism as a whole would benefit from digging more deeply into industrial and cultural contexts, as professors Kristen Warner and Amanda Ann Klein recently explained. Such consideration to detail would not only provide more nuanced critiques of media, but it would also help develop the media literacy of thousands of readers, my students included.

“Smarter Audiences” Is Not the Reason Niche Comedy Thrives on TV was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For many of The Outtake’s writers and readers, school is back in session. (Sorry.)

Before the student emails, faculty meetings, and lecture prep bog you down, check out the stories you might have missed this summer while you were, you know, living.

Here are our 5 MOST POPULAR STORIES of the last few months:

• TV Professors and the Higher Ed Apocalypse
• In Appreciation of The Good Wife’s Jason Crouse
• Economical Exposition in Michael Clayton
• Mr. Robot Goes Full Hitchcock
• Jacqueline White Nonsense

As always, The Outtake welcomes writing on all aspects of film and television, classical and contemporary.

• Evergreen post from your own blog? Sure.
• Timely piece you wrote 26 minutes ago? Yep.
• Authorized excerpt from your book on Sid Caesar’s variety show or zombie movies? Bring it.
• Film- or TV-related speech or presentation the masses will enjoy? Send it on.

No “think pieces,” standard film reviews, or episode recaps, please — unless they’re super funny and/or shed a new and perhaps personal light on the subject matter. See, for example, “You Hate Musicals Because You Are Dead Inside” or “On Grief and Seinfeld: A Festivus Story.”

Your Back-to-School Reading List was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today’s network television landscape nixes traditional opening credit sequences, introductions, and theme songs for at least two reasons: to make room for commercial breaks and to dissuade viewers from turning the channel.

Think about the 5-second title-flasher of ABC’s Scandal, for example, or the 18-second theme “song” for Two and a Half Men. Both are a far cry from the lengthy and (arguably) much catchier introductions of programs like The Brady Bunch, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Golden Girls.

Frankly, I think eliminating such introductions is a mistake because, in many ways, they help solidify a show’s identity with audiences. In his 1992 study, Jeffrey Alan Hicks writes similarly that TV theme songs function not only as an important area of artifactual research, but also as “miniature representations of a program,” possibly helping to unify social collectiveness and teach societal norms.

So this avid television watcher has been thrilled to see the return of extended opening credits and theme songs (or pop songs as themes) in non-network programming like Grace and Frankie (Netflix), Killjoys (SyFy), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix), and Stranger Things (Netflix).

Still, while opening credits are experiencing somewhat of a resurgence, one programming element remains a rarity: the spoken prologue.

These prologues, while never as ubiquitous as opening credits or theme songs, are integral parts of the series that have them. Their narration can be beneficial to viewers by helping set the premise, tone, and thematic framework of a series.

Interestingly, spoken prologues or opening credits have been most popular with shows based in science fiction and fantasy. Unlike police and legal procedurals, medical shows, or family dramas, which often mimic reality, genre series are set in worlds with fantastical elements. To this end, the use of well-conceived prologues provides tantalizing overviews of the universe and the mythology of the genre series in which audiences are being asked to invest.

Although it’s unlikely we’ll see a grand revival of these, here are eight spoken prologues (in no particular order) from some of the most iconic sci-fi and fantasy series ever put on the small screen.

The Six Million Dollar Man (1973–78)

In The Six Million Dollar Man, astronaut Steve Austin’s (Lee Majors) body is critically injured during an experimental test flight. Using bionics, the U.S. government rebuilds him to serve as a covert intelligence operative. Most of this, we learn from the show’s spoken prologue.

In Hollyweird Science, Kevin R. Grazier and Stephen Cass describe The Six Million Dollar Man’s title sequence — with its “archival NASA launch video, high-tech medical graphics of cyborgian surgeries, and the dulcet tones of Oscar Goldman’s” as a “near-perfect introduction to the concept of the show.”

Yes, via only nine words, the series’ opening credits dramatically underscore Steve Austin’s transformation: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”

Battlestar Galactica (1978–79)

The original Battlestar Galactica premiered in the fall of 1978. This ambitious drama, about a near-extinct race of space-faring humans seeking a fabled sanctuary known as Earth, was the inspiration for the SyFy channel’s 2009 reboot.

A hallmark from the original series (but lacking in the reboot) is a stirring prologue narrated by late British actor Patrick Macnee: “There are those who believe that life here began out there.”

SeaQuest DSV (1993–96)

This futuristic series produced by Steven Spielberg imagines that by the twenty-first century, humanity will have colonized the other final frontier — the depths of the world’s oceans.

Late actor Roy Scheider not only starred in the series, but also lent his voice to narrate the aspirational prologue of the show’s first season: “For beneath the surface lies the future.”

Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001)

This network TV series about a formidable warrior woman seeking redemption became an international hit and a pop culture phenomenon due to its charismatic lead (Lucy Lawless), provocative blend of drama, action, camp, and unapologetic feminism.

Oh, it also features a rousing opening sequence complete with an appropriately epic spoken prologue: “She was Xena, a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle.”

Babylon 5 (1994–98)

Set in the the mid twenty-third century, Babylon 5 is a sweeping science-fiction space opera about a space station populated by humans and members of several alien civilizations.

Though it features different prologues for each season of its five-year run, one theme remains in place — the Babylon 5 station was built to be a place that facilitated peace and diplomacy among the denizens of the galaxy: “It can be a dangerous place, but it’s our last, best hope for peace.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–08)

This award winning Nickelodean animated series is set on an ancient world comprised of four nations demarcated by the four elements: Air, Earth, Water and Fire. Certain people are able to manipulate or “bend” telekinetically the element symbolic of their nation.

The protagonist of the series is a 12-year-old boy named Aang, who is also the Avatar — a special individual reincarnated each generation with the unique ability to control all four of the elements. Aang, along with his friends and allies, must bring unity and peace to his world that is being torn apart by war.

The prologue for Avatar alludes to the grand and majestic scope of this acclaimed animated series: “I believe Aang can save the world.”

Farscape (1999–2003)

Farscape is the story of American astronaut John Crichton (Ben Browder) who gets sucked into a wormhole during a test flight, and is flung far into the cosmos. Desperate to return home, Crichton finds himself aboard a living starship, crewed by alien beings who consider him as strange and unfathomable as he thinks of them.

The show’s intense prologue is narrated by Browder: “I’m lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship full of strange alien lifeforms.”

Star Trek (1966–1969)

The most popular and celebrated science fiction series of all time, Star Trek, remains a powerful and influential force in our cultural zeitgeist fifty years after it debuted on television.

Almost every aspect of Gene Roddenberry’s visionary space western is iconic, including the original prologue narrated by series star William Shatner: “Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.”

A proud blerd, Rod is a sci-fi/fantasy fan — and writes a lot about it. He is also the author of 200 Best Online Sci-Fi Short Films — a behemoth compilation of over 30 hours of terrific SF&F shorts. Explore more of his work by subscribing to his monthly newsletter here.

TV’s Spoken Prologues: An Homage was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mr. Robot’s showrunner, Sam Esmail, isn’t shy about quoting from the film school syllabus. In Mr. Robot, you’ll find riffs on David Fincher (mainly Fight Club), Stanley Kubrick (mainly everything), and many more. But his choices aren’t arbitrary. It’s as if Esmail, who wrote and directed every episode of season two, is living out a fantasy of bringing in cinema’s most well-known auteurs to guest-direct his show.

Gratifyingly (for me), Mr. Robot features several Hitchcockian touches. In fact, the second season’s episode, “Unmask,” is a full-on homage. Here are a few highlights from the show:

Mommy Issues, Creepy Houses, and Vertigo

First, Evil Corp’s general counsel, Susan Jacobs (Sandrine Holt), arrives home to find her house, which she’s pimped out with Internet-of-Things technocrap, gone bonkers. Lights, alarms, and AV systems randomly activate à la George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), and when she steps into her shower, she’s assaulted by scalding hot water. Shot-for-shot, it’s a Psycho reenactment:

Second, after the end of season one, Elliot (Rami Malek), a cybersecurity engineer and hacker, moves back in with “the strictest person [he] knows”: his domineering mother and source of his childhood trauma. This dynamic, as well as the (creepy) characterization of his mother, reeks of Hitchcock’s Psycho.

While Elliot’s mother isn’t an invalid like Psycho’s Mrs. Bates, she tends to spend an awful lot of time in her rocking chair, content to dwell in the dark. And with her hair like that, she bears a certain resemblance to you-know-who.

Third, in Psycho, the Bates mansion is a Victorian model, what Hitchcock referred to as “California gingerbread.”

While Elliot’s mother lives in a Brooklyn brownstone, the down-at-heel neighborhood — with its period charm, desolate streets, and mute windows — recalls the Bates estate in spirit.

The grave interiors of his mother’s home bear witness to the barren architecture of Elliot’s soul. Take a look at these shots from the opening credits.

The floor plan even resembles that of the Bates mansion. Here’s Hitch himself to give you a tour.

The Bates Motel lost its stream of clientele when “they moved the highway” — a reference to the Eisenhower-era superhighway system that destroyed rural communities.

As I’ve written previously, the mansion was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad, which, like Elliot’s neighborhood hangout, the Extreme Junction Diner, one day found itself on the wrong side of the tracks.

Fourth, if there’s one theme that dominates Mr. Robot, it’s that one’s past controls one’s present. This, too, is one of Hitchcock’s most repeated motifs. You see it in Rebecca, Under Capricorn, Psycho, and many others.

This theme’s most poetic expression surfaces in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Trapped in his own neurotic cycle, Scottie (James Stewart) drives in circles around San Francisco’s hills seeking a truth that turns out to be a lie. Only at the end, and at great cost, does he become “free of the past.”

Likewise, in Mr. Robot, Elliot’s father repeats the refrain, “Round and round we go, you not knowing what you did or didn’t do. Our infinite loop of insanity.” Then, he drops the twist of an apple peel on the floor, the camera lingering on it a beat too long so that it resembles the double spiral in Vertigo’s iconic poster.

Come to think of it, Hitchcock’s most famous psychopath committed his crimes at the perpetually vacant Bates Motel. Similarly, Mr. Robot’s F*Society operates out of an abandoned Coney Island attraction. Not only that, but Elliot’s counterpart in China is a drag queen. The connections are endless!

Fifth, the bad guys in Mr. Robot also get the Hitchcock treatment. Alert viewer Christy LaGuardia pointed out that the shooting angles and modern architecture of the C-suite high atop the Evil Corp tower resemble those of the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired mountain aerie in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Finally, as Norman Bates’ long-dead mother would occasionally take over his psyche, spelling an early demise for his female guests, Mr. Robot (Elliot’s father, played by Christian Slater), takes over and terrible things happen.

Even the two men’s backstories line up: Norman kills his mother and, to assuage his guilt, assumes her identity. Elliot betrays his father’s confidence, watches him die and, crippled with guilt, internalizes his identity. Watching him struggle with his split personality and dark urges offers insight into what’s only hinted at in Psycho.

Does our knowledge of Psycho suggest how Mr. Robot ends?

Watching Psycho also offers clues as to how things could turn out for Elliot. Sure, he has an adorable mug, and we want him to succeed. But he is, after all, a cyberterrorist, wreaking more devastation on more people than possibly Evil Corp itself. Will he, like Norman, be remembered as a lovable villain?

The show may be already pointing that direction—from the other side of the conflict. E Corp CEO Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer) seems to be grooming Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday), who is suing his company, to reconsider her notions of what makes a person “good” or “evil.”

It’s easy to conclude Phillip is turning her to the dark side, but maybe he’s just trying to talk sense into her. Like all Hitchcockian villains, his pragmatic view of human nature, crime and punishment, is the most rational. As Angela thrives in her role at E Corp, is she selling out or is she beginning to adopt a more expansive view of humanity?

It could be that the biggest theme guiding this show is an inquiry into the notion of individual Will and whether it even exists. Elliot tries like hell to exorcise Mr. Robot from his mind and the resistance is fierce. Says the latter, “This control you think you have? It’s an illusion.”

Unsurprisingly, this resembles Norman’s dialogue when he invites Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to dine in his parlor: “You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever climb out. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

Mr. Robot’s Elliot would have sympathized. After all, if his doppelganger is named for an automaton, what does that make him?

Originally published at www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com on August 22, 2016.

Mr. Robot Goes Full Hitchcock was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Boys Shoot and Girls Cut, or Who’s Really Responsible for the Movies You Love? — by John Alberti

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Taking Up Space: Busting Ghosts, the Female Experience, and the Unabashed Queerness of Jillian… — by Kate Skow

Mike Birbiglia’s Modern-Day Romances — by Stefano Cagnato

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Women Editors, Modern Romances, and Busting Ghosts was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Exposition is a narrative term for background information about a story’s main plot or characters. Providing exposition can be a challenge without making it look like exposition.

You can always spot bad exposition, when something onscreen pulls you out of the story and makes you think, “No one acts or talks like that in the real world.” Of course, not every story element or piece of dialogue must adhere to reality, but it ought to be realistic within the context of the diegesis, or the universe of the story.

Exposition in Film: Some Examples

Exposition can take place when one character stops whatever she’s doing and explains something to another character, thereby inviting the viewer to do the same.

In The Matrix (1999), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) halts the action for a brief moment to explain to Neo (Keanu Reeves) how the matrix and construct work. After the explanation, we return to the story.

Or exposition can happen when one person tries to convince another of something.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), two government agents visit Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford). While they try to find out what the Nazis are up to in Cairo and recruit Jones for their cause, we also get a short introduction (exposition) to the adventures that lie ahead for Jones.

Last, an exposition technique not used much anymore is the pre-movie exposition, in which onscreen text explains what is happening. We see this, most famously, at the beginining of the Star Wars films and in Blade Runner (1982).

Michael Clayton and the Interview

An arguably more well-crafted exposition comes from a scene in Tony Gilroy’s legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007). Gilroy both wrote and directed this film, which marks this as his directorial debut, but it’s not his first screenplay.

The scene I’m considering is an interview around the start of Act Two. Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is the top legal adviser to U/North, a gigantic chemical fertilizing company.

In the scene, Crowder is about to give an interview for the company’s internal marketing. We start off by seeing her at home rehearsing a speech (we don’t know exactly what yet). Then, Gilroy cuts to a conference room in which she sits in front of a camera crew and the interviewer with a senior partner at her side. Crowder delivers a thoughtful and serious answer to the interviewer’s first question; she seems confident and on top of the situation.

But after the first question is answered, Gilroy crosscuts between the ongoing interview and Crowder’s at-home rehearsals. In the comfort of her own private space, the character is just the opposite: nervous, fumbling with her words while trying to find the right answers to the prepared questions.

Not only do we get a great deal of exposition about Karen Crowder here — she’s a workaholic and a young rising star as the in-house legal adviser — but we also see her as a fragile and somewhat emotionally unstable woman who is working very hard to keep her facade intact.

Now, watch how it played out in the movie:

In only two minutes of screen time, Gilroy introduces Karen, sketches out her background, and reveals her complex personality: both her calm, professional side and her fragile, unstable personal side. All of this prove to be vital clues for later events.

Note how seamlessly we ease out of “exposition mode” when the secretary enters the room and interrupts the interview. Those engrossed in the film likely don’t even notice the exposition has ended.

It’s also worth noting the exposition in this scene was not created in editing; it was apparently written this way from the start.

A scene like this from Michael Clayton could have taken up much more space and time, and could have been much less elegantly told. But Gilroy’s version is economical, to the point — and most significantly perhaps, it never feels like exposition.

In the 1990s, Simon Lund Larsen was a production runner on a couple of movies, a sound engineer on others, and a producer of some. Now he works at a large toy maker in Denmark and writes in his spare time. When he is not polishing his latest post on Medium, he can be found on Twitter as @SimonLundLarsen or at SimonLundLarsen.com

Economical Exposition in Michael Clayton was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.