EPISODE 628: TRUTH, JUSTICE AND A BETTER TOMORROW
On having a Human Experience.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
What a week. Ted Lasso ended with a very Empire Strikes Back twist (which I will not spoil). William Shatner went to space—and then literally wept about it.
Dave Chapelle is finally starting to get called out more broadly for some of his humor. Superman (formerly one of the characters known as Superboy) brought out as bisexual. There’s a new Batman trailer, and it’s….pretty similar to the early Christopher Nolan Batman, actually.
Definitely grimier and a teense more emo. I look forward to the think pieces about Batman’s eye shadow. But otherwise, very Nolan adjacent.
(In retrospect Old Man Batfleck was actually a pretty smart turn to make with the character. It’s too bad he was never able to get a flick of his own, so we could see what that really would have looked like.)
The Superman news is interesting on multiple fronts. First, it’s part of a much bigger story around that character, who btw icymi and other acronyms is the son of a Superman and Lois Lane from another dimension who came to ours, then sort of ended up merging with/absorbing ours and then their very young son ended up accidentally spending like eight or ten years with Superman’s temporarily-resurrected-and-crazy dad, but meanwhile only like a month passed in real time, so when they came home Lois and Clark were like, Wait, what do you mean we missed all those years with our only son?
Superboy-man just got his own series, in which he takes on the mantle of Superman as his father prepares to go try and liberate a world. And he’s been very young-person-justice oriented in it, saving refugees from drowning and then bringing them to the United States and demanding America take them. Marvel launched a somewhat similar take on the Avengers a few years back, a book called Champions starring young characters, and it was fantastic. So I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.
The other wild thing about this news is that it’s only been a few months since one of the Robins (of Batman and…) also came out as bisexual. So yeah, an interesting moment in pop culture.
Meanwhile Marvel has tons of X-Men characters who are clearly queer but for the most part the creators don’t seem to be allowed to say so. *Sigh* At least we have Iceman.
Oh and by the way, the guy that Superman is kissing is a young reporter. Gotta love fun new takes on old concepts.
You know, like this…
Comic Dave Chapelle’s special The Closer is the last in a series of specials Chapelle did for Netflix, the most recent couple of which have been kind of weirdly obsessed with attacking transgender people, then claiming they’re trying to cancel him. It’s very Trumpian, actually, and just plain strange. The special ends with one 15 minute tale which really and truly can be summarized as, “I’m not transphobic, I have a transgender friend and she says I’m fine.”
There is a lot in the story of his friend that’s kind of wonderful, actually, most especially an incredible thing she says to Chapelle in front of an audience after he makes fun of her. “I don’t need you to understand me,” she says. “I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience.’” But it seems like he doesn’t understand what she means at all, really.
I’ve got a piece in America coming about it, which hopefully has something to add to the conversation – I write about empathy, which believe it or not is what The Closer is about. But other people are saying interesting things. I particularly appreciate this interview with the trans TV showrunner Jaclyn Moore. If you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t understand what the big deal is, he’s just a comedian saying stuff, that’s what they do, read this interview.
(The tl;dr: Comedy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When people get the chance to talk to 200 million people and say trans people are lying about who they are, it has real impacts on their lives. Seriously, read the story and you’ll see an example of that very thing happen mid-interview.)
Also—since apparently this is queer pop culture day here at Pop Culture Spirit Wow—just putting the WOW in PCSW—Sarah Vincent, one of the post-collegiate fellows working at America, wrote this amazing piece about the queer rapper Lil Nas X. He’s the guy who had a video over the summer in which he pole dances with um, the Devil, which obviously freaked out all the right wing Christians. Sarah works her way through that video and more of Nas’ new album to show how in fact the whole thing is him attempting to deal with the fact that Christianity has basically thrown him and all queer people out. If Heaven won’t have us where can we go? It’s a really smart review.
Also fun has been watching Catholic Twitter go insane over it—and maybe wading in a little bit myself.
It’s funny, I generally try to avoid mixing it up too much online. Who needs that, really? You’re just spreading the radiation.
But at one point early yesterday someone took a story I wrote about William Shatner going to space – by far the most fun I’ve had writing a piece in a while—and used it to drag Greta Thunberg and Colin Kaepernick (neither of whom is referenced in any way in the piece, btw).
Greta has become like a trigger word for me—if you attack her on my feed, I will come for you. Just so done with adult men threated by a young woman being prophetic and assaulting her online.
Anyway, the Lil Nas X piece is great. And we’ve got another from another post-collegiate fellow Keara Hanlon on Reservation Dogs that is also really great.
Keara and I are actually working on an article on Squid Game. Have you seen this, or heard about it? Basically it’s Hunger Games (or for those of a certain age Battle Royale) among desperately poor people in Korea, with children’s games (like Simon Says) as the means of competition. It’s supposedly the most popular show Netflix has ever done. I have to say, I feel like if we dug into the fine print we discover there’s all kinds of provisos to that statement, but sure Netflix, market away.
I’m not quite sure what to say about it yet. At some points I think I liked it and that it was really smart. At others I think it was just 9 episodes of pretty horrendous violence, like a reality show meets a snuff film. I don’t know.
SNL had a fun take on it last night.
Actually the whole Rami Malek episode was really good, the most consistently funny episode I’ve seen from SNL in years.
This too was a must-repeat-watch.
So Ted Lasso… I don’t know if you’re watching this, but it’s a great show, and it had a wild wild ending which should make its final season really interesting.
Most of the year the show was dealing with critics who were like, Okay, we get it, it’s better to be nice, but what is this now? But then it turned out the whole year had secretly been building to this turn…yeah, it was pretty great.
It’s really become a show about children and their parents (and their surrogate parents). I love it. If you don’t have Apple TV it’s only five bucks a month, and I think they give you a couple weeks free. Binge this show, binge it now.
If you have watched it, here’s a great interview with co-creator and one of my TV heroes Bill Lawrence on the finale.
THREE TWEETS
Gotta love Dionne Warwick.
And finally, click here for a thread of babies dressed as pumpkins.
So usually I write this at about 10pm on Sunday night, but today I’m getting my Covid booster—huzzah!—so I’m doing it a lot earlier just in case it ends up crushing me.
It’s been remarkable to see how different the rollout is now. You can literally get a booster shot pretty much anywhere in Manhattan. You do have to sign up, but at this point you can pretty much come in the next day, they have so many openings. Obviously this is New York, given our population density there’s going to be a lot more options than you might find in rural Kansas. But still—it’s a lot different than Los Angeles in February or March.
I wondered a bit about getting the booster already. My age certainly doesn’t require it, and my health is generally pretty good. But living with twenty guys, some of them older and with health issues, and working in an office where more and more people are present, I don’t know, it just seemed like if it was available and allowed in my circumstances I should just do it. So, here we go. Fingers crossed
Have a great week. See you next Sunday!