Salon.com > Andrew O'Hehir http://www.salon.com Fri, 03 May 2013 03:47:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Pick of the week: I was a teenage anarchist! http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13288181 “Something in the Air” tells the story of a French teenager caught up in the half-crazy early-‘70s climate of political radicalism and artistic experimentation, an era that can seem so far from our own as to be a science-fiction alternate reality. It’s a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal. Writer-director Olivier Assayas (of “Summer Hours” and the terrific terrorist miniseries “Carlos”), one of the leading figures in French cinema, has described this movie as generally autobiographical. While Assayas’ young protagonist and his anarchist pals never come to the point of blowing up civilians, they get pretty close, and indeed avoid committing murder mostly through luck. Is this a true story? I obviously have no idea, but it’s a convincing and disturbing one.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/feed/ 9 “Iron Man 3″: A playboy grows up http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 17:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287839 As far as bored and cynical, playing-out-the-string comic-book action sequels go – hey, “Iron Man 3” is a pretty good one! The third and purportedly last of Robert Downey Jr.’s adventures as the armor-clad but increasingly vulnerable Tony Stark features one of Downey’s most nuanced performances, arguably a lot better than the movie around him, and keeps him separated from the physical and emotional protection of the Iron Man suit for extended periods. There are several good supporting performances, not even including Gwyneth Paltrow’s abdominal muscles, which is really all I can remember about Pepper Potts: Guy Pearce, as a nerd genius spurned by Tony Stark years earlier who comes back for revenge; Ben Kingsley, most delicious of all, as a shadowy techno-Osama known as the Mandarin.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/feed/ 4 “Post Tenebras Lux”: A perverse, dreamlike masterpiece http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13286687 A mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” casts a strange and powerful spell. While this is certainly a challenging film on many levels, and one rooted in observation of the natural world, it isn’t one of those drifty contemplative Terrence Malick spectacles where nothing much happens. It’s just that many of the events are puzzling and disconnected, and you have to work out for yourself the allusive or subterranean relationship between them. There’s a neon-red animated demon who invades a family’s home at night, a shooting, a hilarious and heartbreaking rural A.A. meeting, a visit to a perverted sex club and a guilt-ridden killer who commits suicide in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. It’s as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/feed/ 6 “Love Is All You Need”: Pierce Brosnan’s lovely, lightweight rom-com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285820 Danish director Susanne Bier has spent her career stuck in the mushy European middle, halfway between Ingmar Bergman and Hollywood. She has a tremendous gift for character and storytelling, coupled with a penchant for preachy, melodramatic message delivery in the Paul Haggis vein, especially as her films have attracted a global audience. She won the foreign-language Oscar for the Euro-guilt odyssey “In a Better World” in 2010 – a picture that was conspicuously trying to be meaningful – and has made one semi-unsuccessful American venture, the 2007 “Things We Lost in the Fire,” with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/feed/ 4 The Boston backlash is rooted in America’s paranoid past http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/the_boston_backlash_is_rooted_in_americas_paranoid_past/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/the_boston_backlash_is_rooted_in_americas_paranoid_past/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283619 A terrorist attack, small in scale but brutal in effect, shocks the nation. The leading perpetrator is an American with foreign connections, apparently linked – at least in his own mind – to a worldwide movement of violent extremists. Furthermore, this young man in his late 20s with the unpronounceable name had attracted suspicion in the past and struck some observers as unstable, although even members of his own family did not suspect he was planning such a spectacular crime.

In the aftermath of the attack, some people assume it was the work of a sinister global conspiracy against America, despite little evidence. Others see an unemployed and alienated loner, unable to connect to the promise of the American dream, who turned to extremism out of personal despair or mental illness. Many political commentators call for a crackdown on immigration, the restriction of civil liberties and an aggressive military-style counterattack against anti-American radicalism, both at home and abroad. As the nation’s energetic young president puts it, counteracting this tide of violence is the most significant question facing the United States, and one that could even endanger the nation’s future.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/the_boston_backlash_is_rooted_in_americas_paranoid_past/feed/ 84 Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282238 With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/feed/ 27 “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”: Is the Princeton grad a jihadi? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/the_reluctant_fundamentalist_is_the_princeton_grad_a_jihadi/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/the_reluctant_fundamentalist_is_the_princeton_grad_a_jihadi/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:50:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13281194 People who show up for “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” expecting an exotic and morally murky thriller about terrorism, somewhat in the “Homeland” and “Zero Dark Thirty” vein, will get it – at least for a while. No doubt it would be good for business if I told you that Mira Nair’s film, adapted from a novel by Mohsin Hamid, was about an American-educated young man who turns to violent radicalism. But this story only seems to be about that, and not for long. “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” begins with a classic opening sequence of misdirection and disorientation, in which we see an American academic kidnapped off the streets of Lahore, Pakistan, while a handsome young Pakistani receives text messages and photos that seem to link him to the crime. All this bewildering night action is set to a hypnotic traditional Pakistani folk tune, performed live in the street around a bonfire.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/the_reluctant_fundamentalist_is_the_princeton_grad_a_jihadi/feed/ 4 “At Any Price”: Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid’s Corn Belt thriller http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280336 Movies about so-called ordinary people in the American heartland, even when they’re pretty good, tend to be driven by a reflexive and almost guilty sentimentality. Even the hardened, cynical coastal types who make films don’t want to challenge the national myth that life in rural America possesses a realness absent in more metropolitan surroundings. There’s some genuine history behind that myth, in the sense that over the course of the 20th century the nation’s population and economy permanently shifted away from the agrarian republic imagined by the founders, but a great many of us have rural roots in the not-too-distant past. One of my grandfathers was an Irish immigrant, but the other was born in a prairie town I’ve never even visited, to a father who sold Case tractors.

One of the best things about Ramin Bahrani’s bracing farmland thriller “At Any Price” is its refusal to condescend to the Iowa farm family at its center by depicting them as nobler, more innocent and less sophisticated than other people. Many people who see this movie will be understandably focused on Zac Efron’s intense performance as Dean Whipple, the family’s handsome but embittered youngest son who yearns to be a stock-car driver. But for me the breakthrough in “At Any Price” comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/feed/ 5 How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_911_bargain/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_911_bargain/#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:20:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13276983 To put it mildly, this has been a bad week for democracy and a worse one for public discourse. In the minutes and hours after the bombs went off in Boston last Monday, marathon runners, first responders and many ordinary citizens responded to a chaotic situation with great courage and generosity, not knowing whether they might be putting their own lives at risk. Since then, though, it’s mostly been a massive and disheartening national freakout, with pundits, politicians, major news outlets and the self-appointed sleuths of the Internet – in fact, nearly everyone besides those directly affected by the attack – heaping disgrace upon themselves.

We’ve seen the most famous TV network in the news business repeatedly botch basic facts, while one of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers misreported the number of people killed, launched a wave of hysteria over a “Saudi national” who turned out to have nothing to do with the crime, and then published a cover photo suggesting that two other guys (also innocent) might be the bombers. We’ve seen the vaunted crowd-sourcing capability of Reddit degenerate into self-reinforcing mass delusion, in which a bunch of people whose law-enforcement expertise consisted of massive doses of “CSI” convinced themselves that a missing college student was one of the bombing suspects. (He wasn’t – and with that young man’s fate still unknown, how does his family feel today?)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_911_bargain/feed/ 241 Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13275381 Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/feed/ 20 Tribeca Film Festival: The 10 hottest movies http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13274179 Born a dozen years ago in the wake of a major tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival finds its opening week this year tinged with trauma as well. Yes, the show will go on, with the glitz and the headlines more than a little subdued by the painful news from Boston – but what kind of show is it? Tribeca is now established as a cornerstone event of New York’s spring cultural season, but still lacks a clear role in the movie world’s ecology. It’s not a major market festival where films are bought and sold, in the vein of Cannes or Sundance, it’s not a Hollywood/Indiewood showcase, like Toronto, and it’s not a celebration of DIY or low-budget ingenuity, like South by Southwest. In part, Tribeca has always been a hometown festival for the Manhattan-centric indie film world, but that’s no longer the same hot concept it was in 2001, when Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff announced a new film festival aimed at getting downtown Manhattan back on its feet in the wake of 9/11.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/feed/ 1 Discovered: Crackerjack Danish political drama “Borgen” http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/discovered_crackerjack_danish_political_drama_borgen/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/discovered_crackerjack_danish_political_drama_borgen/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13272834 Each episode of the Danish TV series “Borgen” begins with a quotation from Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” and as the show proceeds, Denmark’s first female prime minister, an attractive and immensely likable moderate named Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), gets a systematic education in that collection of cynical wisdom. One could almost say that “Borgen” is a lesson built on the old saw about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely – but Birgitte is the head of a shaky coalition government in a European social democracy, not a tyrant, and what keeps us watching is the knowledge that she always has good intentions.

No doubt Americans by the thousands have found ways to watch “Borgen,” whether strictly legal or not, since Stephen King declared it his favorite TV show of 2012. Now the first season of this intimate and addictive political drama is finally available on Region 1 DVD, so no mastery of streams and torrents, or ownership of an all-region player, is necessary. I for one am grateful: This is an immensely more satisfying and realistic show than the American version of “House of Cards,” not least because it depicts retail politics in a small European country with its own distinctive traditions, where left-right tensions often wear a deceptive veil of civility.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/discovered_crackerjack_danish_political_drama_borgen/feed/ 9 Waiting for the gay Jackie Robinson http://www.salon.com/2013/04/13/waiting_for_the_gay_jackie_robinson/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/13/waiting_for_the_gay_jackie_robinson/#comments Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13269809 Whoever the gay equivalent of Jackie Robinson will be – and according to some sources, we may get several of them at the same time – he (or they) is almost certainly already playing professional sports, and may well be an established star. Robinson’s history-making Major League Baseball debut in 1947 was enormously dramatic, of course, but lacked that level of shadowy intrigue: No one wondered whether Stan Musial or Ted Williams might abruptly announce that he’d been black the whole time, like the tormented hero of a Faulkner novel. (Although, given the bizarre history of race in America, who really knows? There were a handful of earlier cases when baseball teams tried to “pass” light-skinned African-American players as Native Americans – and that’s a terrific movie idea if I’ve ever heard one.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/13/waiting_for_the_gay_jackie_robinson/feed/ 36 Pick of the week: Terrence Malick’s rapturous, religious love story http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/pick_of_the_week_terrence_malicks_rapturous_religious_love_story/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/pick_of_the_week_terrence_malicks_rapturous_religious_love_story/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13268331 Terrence Malick has followed the six-year creative struggle of his universe-spanning, would-be masterpiece “The Tree of Life” with a period of unprecedented, unexpected and indeed unexplained productivity. For whatever set of reasons, the famously reclusive director who had made five feature films in the previous 38 years has apparently completed four more since 2011. The first of these to reach the public is an abstract and perhaps allegorical story of love and heartbreak called “To the Wonder,” and even in beginning to speak about it I run the risk of leading you down the wrong path. Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko are in the movie, as a man and woman who meet in Paris, fall in love and move to America, and then drift apart, for reasons we (and they) only partly understand.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/pick_of_the_week_terrence_malicks_rapturous_religious_love_story/feed/ 25 “Fists of Legend”: Ludicrous (and delicious) action extravaganza http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13267281 Not to indulge in cultural stereotypes about how Asian movies involve several different genres at once, along with a lot of ass-kicking – but that’s exactly what the overloaded and outrageous Korean martial-arts saga “Fists of Legend” is like. One of the mini-stories of global movie distribution in the last year has been the sudden emergence of Korean pop cinema in the American market, which is partly about the fact that the Asian-American audience is now spread across the continent and partly about the fact that Korean movies tend to draw so heavily on a blend of familiar Western and Eastern references, and aren’t likely to strike anyone as incomprehensible. Like the recent gangland thriller “New World,” “Fists of Legend” will open in numerous cities before moving rapidly to home video.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/feed/ 1 “Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13266018 With its clinical, anonymous interiors, its icily sardonic manner and its vision of a profoundly disordered human future in which celebrity worship merges with cutting-edge biotechnology, the Canadian horror-thriller “Antiviral” would remind viewers of David Cronenberg’s early films no matter who had directed it. But since it’s the debut feature from writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, the comparison immediately gets complicated. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s ingenious or foolhardy of the younger Cronenberg to go right at his dad’s legacy this way – quite likely it’s both. At any rate, he’s created an interesting decoding problem for viewers, along with an intriguing low-budget chiller that deserves to be seen on its own terms.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/feed/ 4 Colonial Williamsburg: Where the Tea Party gets schooled http://www.salon.com/2013/04/07/colonial_williamsburg_where_the_tea_party_gets_schooled/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/07/colonial_williamsburg_where_the_tea_party_gets_schooled/#comments Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13264044 So I just got back from a family vacation at Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia granddaddy of all American “living history” museums. (They hate the term “theme park,” and those people in 18th-century costume are “actor-interpreters,” not characters.) The first thing to say is that we all had a great time: My kids studied up on Revolutionary War spycraft, watched several terrific programs of 18th-century theater, and delivered orations from the Declaration of Independence late at night in our hotel room. We learned how bricks and barrels were made in that pre-industrial age, and my nine-year-old daughter signed up in the Virginia militia to fight the British. (Historical accuracy be damned: One of her drill sergeants was female too.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/07/colonial_williamsburg_where_the_tea_party_gets_schooled/feed/ 52 RIP Roger Ebert: Movie criticism’s Great Communicator http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/rip_roger_ebert_movie_criticisms_great_communicator/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/rip_roger_ebert_movie_criticisms_great_communicator/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:10:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13262246 Roger Ebert, who died on Thursday at age 70 after a long and debilitating struggle with cancer that never sapped his spirit, was the Great Communicator of movie criticism, a genuine and generous man who became the greatest popular advocate the form has ever had. He reached millions of readers with his straightforward prose, and a vastly larger universe of TV viewers in the ‘80s and ‘90s with his gruff but avuncular presence. Even if you’re too young to have grown up watching Ebert spar on the small screen with his late friend and rival Gene Siskel, you still know who he is. Virtually alone among his generation of journalists, Ebert saw the substantive potential of social media early on and translated his fame in print and on TV to the Internet, becoming a Twitter trailblazer and a mentor who showed the rest of us in this imploding profession not just how to survive but how to prosper in the digital age.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/rip_roger_ebert_movie_criticisms_great_communicator/feed/ 31 Pick of the week: The year’s most divisive wannabe cult hit http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13261835 It’s definitely possible that Shane Carruth’s slo-mo science fiction allegory “Upstream Color” is total hokum, and there’s no doubt that many viewers will experience it that way. My own feeling after one viewing of this disorienting and fragmented fable of thwarted love and obscure interconnection, which caused a sensation at the Sundance and Berlin festivals, is divided and perhaps paradoxical. I was immediately drawn in by the mysterious, meticulous world of vision, sound and sensation Carruth creates, with its blown-out digital color scheme and intimate focus, which simultaneously seems to be contemporary America and also an alien zone of disconnection and isolation. Yet I emerged from that hypnotic dream state, 90 or so minutes later, feeling as if the story Carruth tells in that magical space doesn’t quite carry the transcendent resonance he intends.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/feed/ 7 Did TV change America’s mind on gay marriage? http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/did_tv_change_americas_mind_on_gay_marriage/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/did_tv_change_americas_mind_on_gay_marriage/#comments Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13256469 Did gay and lesbian characters on TV (and to a lesser extent in the movies) help pave the way toward acceptance of gay marriage and this spring’s potential Supreme Court landmark? So Vice President Joe Biden said last year in his possibly strategic endorsement of same-sex marriage on “Meet the Press”: “When things really began to change is when the social culture changes. I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anybody’s ever done so far. People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.”

I’m a fan of Biden’s, more or less. (Here’s my unsolicited advice on 2016, Joe: Don’t do it!) But that may have been the only time anyone ever described “Will & Grace” as educational, and Biden is engaging in a classic Democratic Party, pro-Hollywood fence-straddle here on the effects of culture. A popular and vaguely liberal sitcom gets credit for driving social change in a positive direction, but violent media bears no responsibility for real-life violent crime. (Conservatives are at least more consistent, if also more consistently wrongheaded: Pop culture has pernicious effects all the way around, and is turning us all into slutty divorced gay mass murderers.) No, the two things are not parallel, and the general point the veep was struggling to make is valid. But “Will & Grace” marks only one minor milestone in TV’s 30-odd-year struggle with representations of sexual identity, during which the box has served both as an agent and a mirror of social change.

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