Can This Marriage Be Saved? Try TV Therapy

There used to be a saying that “The family that prays together stays together.” In other words, regular church attendance was thought to be good for stable, happy families.  When religion went out of fashion, social scientists then said families should eat dinner together.

But I’ve got a different idea – families should gather around a TV and watch a favorite show.  There’s nothing as disheartening as a house where the kids are hunched over their laptops in their bedrooms while dad is following football in the living room and mom is watching home improvement shows in the kitchen.  That’s a family where everyone is in his or her own world.

I’m not advocating a return to the Fifties, when each home had a single television and the whole family had to watch the same homogenized programs.  But with the amazing catalog of content available today it doesn’t seem too much to ask that families find at least one TV show per night to experience together.

Admittedly this is easier when you have fewer kids or children that are near in age.  My wife and I only had one child, and until he was six or seven he never sat in front of a working television without one or both of us by his side.  This smells of over-parenting in retrospect, but TV was always something we affirmatively did together – just one of several activities we shared.  It was not a babysitter or a way to pass time.  But if you have a handful of kids instead of just one, it’s not as easy as it was for us.

Watching TV with your kids doesn’t need to be a sacrifice once we’d separated the wheat from the chaff.   In fact, children’s TV can be delightful.  We discovered that “SpongeBob Square Pants” was hilarious, “Arthur” sweet, and “Hey Arnold” touching.  Soon enough we were watching “The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld” and then “The Office.”  On the very last week he left home for good and moved into his own apartment, we binge-watched and finished the final season of “Justified.”

There are many benefits to a family TV hour: you can make sure your kids are watching age-appropriate TV; the kids come to understand that they are important enough to spend time with; everyone in the family learns to compromise; the family develops inside jokes and special catch-phrases; and the content stimulates unforced discussions that you might already want to initiate (or sometimes NOT want to initiate – I remember all too well the day my son asked me what Viagra was, thanks to a commercial during a baseball game.)

Once the kids are out of the house, shared television-watching can also be good couples’ therapy too.  I’m not making this up either – there was an actual academic study published in the mighty Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that said watching television together can strengthen the closeness of a romantic couple, particularly if the couple do not have a lot of common friends.  In effect, television characters become their shared friends.

It is a truism of marriage counselors that married couples should find shared interests to prevent them from drifting apart as they grow older.  I remember reading one article that praised a canny wife for taking up golf so she could play with her husband.  Today it would be offensive to suggest that a wife should take up a husband’s hobby – why doesn’t he get into gardening to make her happy for cripes sake?

Watching television together is not a marital panacea but I know from experience that it’s an easy way to generate a shared experience.   Five years ago my wife and I made a pact that we would watch at least one show per night after dinner.  We’ve recently started to follow “Game of Thrones” from the beginning (better late than never!) and it’s been an intense bonding experience as we’ve tried to figure out the characters, the history and the alliances.  Before that it was “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “The Americans.”

Please note: this video-based couples therapy doesn’t work if all you’re doing is sitting on the couch and passively turning on the TV to see what’s plying.  This needs to be “appointment TV” – a show you affirmatively want to watch and interact with.  It doesn’t have to be high-quality TV, though.  Even just kibitzing and second-guessing the answers in “Family Feud” would work if it’s an interest that a couple shares.  Because in the end, it’s not really the TV show that matters; it’s the commitment to spend time together on an experience that interests everyone in the family or marriage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So Much Comedy, So Few Laughs

Feeling a little down about the state of the world?  Wouldn’t it be great to turn on the TV and spend an hour just laughing?  Well, forget that.  TV has never offered as many comedy options as it does today and yet produced so few actual laughs.

We are constantly congratulating ourselves for living through the Golden Age of Television, but I don’t think anyone can really argue that we are in a Golden Age of TV Comedy.  There’s no contemporary equivalent of “I Love Lucy,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or “Seinfeld.”  The closest we have today to those classics is “Modern Family,” which is heading into its eighth season and feels more than a little long-in-the-tooth.

The problem isn’t confined to network TV.  Basic and premium cable are awash in comedies, as are streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.  Almost every time I turn on Netflix I’m notified of a new sitcom that seems mildly interesting but usually isn’t.  Part of the problem is that many of the new comedies seem to be targeted at niche audiences – black single women, the transgendered, lesbians with mastectomies, older divorcees, teens, Hispanic single moms, African American college students, etc.  It’s hard to find a show with universal appeal.

To be fair, there are a handful of shows that are actually fresh and funny: “Veep,” “Silicon Valley” and “black-ish” are of-the-moment and hilarious, but none are particularly highly rated, and they ask the audience to think too much ever to penetrate the consciousness of Middle America.

An even bigger challenge in comedy is that the most highly respected sitcoms are barely comedies as all.  I’ve written about this before, noting that pain, humiliation, and self-involvement are now considered mainstream sources of humor.   Shows about drunken, self-abasing cartoon horses (“Bo Jack Horseman”) or pathetic education administrators who burn down their boss’s house (“Vice Principals”) might tell us something are human nature when it’s pushed to the extreme, but it’s definitely not going to give us a respite from our daily cares.  (See the “BoJack “trailer below for an example of a very good but very dark “comedy.”)

And it’s not just sitcoms that have ceased to be funny.  Late night TV was once the province of laid-back amusement – a place to mellow out with a few laughs before fading away for the day.  No more.  Now it’s the spearhead for the Trump resistance.  Stephen Colbert used to be a sharp and acerbic political critic, but now he’s so bitter about the Trump presidency that he is no longer funny except to Trump haters.  (I do have to admit, though, that “Saturday Night Live” was the exception to the rule this year, producing hilarious and much-talked about spoofs of the President and, most memorably, Sean Spicer.)

Meanwhile poor Jimmy Fallon, who deliberately tried to avoid political controversy, isn’t funny anymore precisely because he seems out of touch.  It’s a crazy conundrum – you’re not funny if you talk about politics too much, but also not funny if you pull your political punches.  No one seems able to find the happy medium – maybe because the country is too split.

One place from where you should be able to squeeze out a laugh or two is from one of the hundreds of stand-up specials on HBO, Showtime, Netflix or Amazon and yet I find this a generally unsatisfying experience.  There’s a reason that stand-up works best in front of a live audience.  The crowd laughs and you laugh too, even if the joke isn’t that great.  But watching alone in your living room with all the attendant distractions?  It better be riotously funny.  The last stand up special I really enjoyed was Bill Cosby’s 2014 appearance on Netflix (sigh).  I did appreciate the achievement of Dave Chappelle’s two recent specials but they were so risqué that I was embarrassed to be watching them even though I was the only one home at the time.

In the end, I think the problem might actually be that there’s too much comedy content.  How many more comedy shows are there now than in the 1980s, when TV fractured into specialized channels?  Five times more?  Ten times?  But there isn’t five or ten times more comedy talent than there used to be.  Writers who used to be the fourth-funniest person in the writers’ room are now showrunners themselves.  Comedians who would be barely scratching out a living 30 years ago in comedy clubs or improv companies now have major production deals.

Maybe we’d be better off with less comedy and more desperate struggling comedians.  That would be worse for them but better for us.

(By the way, the exception to everything written above is “The Big Bang Theory,” by far the most popular sitcom on TV and a throw-back to 1970s TV with its punchlines, laugh tracks, easy-to-follow plotting and three-camera production values.  The show is not really for me, but audiences seem to like the tried-and-true formula.  It’s shocking to me that no one seems to be able to duplicate it.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those Lazy, Hazy Crazy Days Of Summer

When people look back and romanticize the summers of their youth, they usually rhapsodize about swimming holes, the beach, boardwalks or picnics, but for me, what I most remember about the summer is the many many hours I spent in front of the television set.

It’s a rule of thumb that TV viewing declines in the summer when people start spending more time in outdoor leisure pursuits.  That’s not the way it was in our house.  Freed from the shackles of homework and all those hours of sitting in school, my sister and I plopped ourselves in front of the TV for hours at a time.  It’s a law of physics that all matter will eventually succumb to entropy, but there is nothing quite as entropic as a kid left to his own devices in the summer.

This was back in the day before parents planned every second of their kids’ lives.  And both my parents worked long hours so we didn’t have a lot of supervision.  Eventually at some point during the day, we’d go outside and run around in the back yard, ride our bikes or find some other kids to play whiffle ball with, but first we had to conserve our energy in front of the TV set.

We watched lots of cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Wood Woodpecker, Might Mouse), game shows (“The Price is Right,” “To Tell the Truth” and “The Match Game”) and syndicated sitcoms (“I Love Lucy,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “The Danny Thomas Show.”)  In other words, not the most elevated programming.

And when we’d go to visit my grandparents on Nantucket we’d log even more hours in front of the TV. In fact, it was on Nantucket where I saw my first color TV.  Every Friday night we’d go down to my great-grandfather’s house and watch Mitch Miller’s show in color.

I wince now to think of those Nantucket visits, but there we were in a summer paradise and instead of chasing girls, exploring the island or learning how to catch fish, I’d be hanging out in my grandparents’ living room watching the tube.  How well I remember the summer I insisted we return from the beach by 3:00 pm because I wanted to watch “Dark Shadows.”  The chagrin of it all.

When I became a parent myself, my wife and I made sure our son spent his time more productively.  Even though the cartons he wanted to watch seemed vaguely educational or socially redeeming, we still restricted his TV time and signed him up for plenty of summer activities.

Of course TV today is actually the least menacing screen.  Video games are violent, computers provide easy access to porn, and smartphones are addictive.  My wife and I were lucky that smartphones didn’t become pervasive until our son was in high school.  If I were currently the father of a young child I’d probably WANT him to spend more time watching TV, if that is what it took to keep him away from the other screens.

But when all is said and done, I wonder if all this anxiety about screens really matters.  Left to our own devices my sister and I watched a lot of TV during the summer but we still turned out to be productive members of society.  Eventually I grew out of game shows and cartoons and started reading books.  To namedrop a big one, I even read “War and Peace” a few summers ago, so my powers of concentration were not shattered by a childhood of watching “I Love Lucy” reruns.  (On the other hand, who’s to say, maybe if I’d had the right stimulation I might have WRITTEN my own “War and Peace” instead of simply reading it.)

I still watch a lot of TV in the summer, but now it’s baseball, Netflix, and Shark Week.  Unlike my youthful self, though, I would never watch TV during the day, so that must be a sign of maturity.  Maybe when I’m retired I’ll recline on the couch in late afternoons and reacquaint myself with “The Andy Griffith Show.”  That would be a real second childhood.

 

 

Happy Birthday Henry David Thoreau — A Dozen Great Quotes from “Walden”

July 12, 2017 is the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, the godfather of the Green movement, the original proponent of civil disobedience, a likely virgin and one of the world’s great aphorists.

Like many others, I first real “Walden” in high school, and found it inscrutable.  I reread it in college and was inspired by the themes of independence, simplicity and naturalism.  I thought it might change my life, but alas, it didn’t really. Or at least not too much.

And then as a worldlier adult I read it a third time and found myself vaguely annoyed at the impracticality of it all.  It’s all well and good for Thoreau to live simply because modern capitalistic society has made it possible for someone to easily acquire the basic necessities of life.  Five hundred years ago a person living in the woods alone would have spend all his time growing and hunting food and would have no time for writing books.

(My very dog-eared copy of Walden from high school)

It’s probably not useful today, if indeed, if ever was, to look at “Walden” as a practical guide to living.  However, it is a remarkable self-help book.  His exhortations to simplify your life, to stop chasing material wealth and to get more in tune with the natural world are more important today than ever before.

Walden Pond itself has been a place of pilgrimage over the years and I’ve been there twice myself.  Both times the site of Thoreau’s cabin was represented by some stone markers, although I understand an actual replica cabin has since been constructed.

(This was the site of the cabin in 1980)

(Here’s the cabin today)

Whatever you think about Thoreau’s philosophy, there’s no denying he is a remarkable writer.  Walden is full of beautiful inspiring language.  Almost every page has a sentence worth underlining (and having read the same volume three times, there is plenty of underlining in my copy.)  Here are some of my favorite quotes from Walden.  It would not be hard to assemble twice as many from his other writings.

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

• Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

• I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

• However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

• Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

• Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

• Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

• Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

The Violent World of Prestige TV

With the season finales of “Fargo” and “Better Call Saul” behind us, the prestige TV season is almost over.  There’s really only “Twin Peaks” to keep us going until next spring, when the Emmy-bait shows return.

This also means we have a short respite from highly stylized violence deployed in the pursuit of art.  Unfortunately, it will be a very short respite, because “Game of Thrones” is right on the horizon, and “The Walking Dead” will be back soon after that.

For decades, television violence has been one of the most hotly debated issues among academics, family groups, lawmakers, and critics, with most of the debate revolving around the impact of violence on children.

The rule of thumb is that conservatives are more worried about sex on TV and that liberals are concerned with violence.  And I have to admit that I am among those who think that a teenager is more likely to be influenced by watching their peers having sex than by people shooting each other.

Having said that, I’ll leave the debate about TV’s influence on kids until another time.  I’m more interested now in the impact of violence on adults, specifically the violence that appears on the most highly honored and respected television shows.

Any list of great shows from the Golden Age of Television would include some of the most violent ones — not just the previously cited “Game of Thrones” and “Fargo” but also “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad,” “Homeland,” “The Leftovers,” “Dexter,” “Justified,” “True Detective” and “The Americans.”

A comparison between the original “Twin Peaks” and its sequel illustrates how our tolerance or even craving for violence has grown in the past three decades.  The first “Twin Peaks” was plenty scary and psychologically disturbing through good writing, haunting music, original storytelling, and eerie production values, but there was little in the way of obvious blood and guts.

Even accounting for the fact that the first “Twin Peaks” was shown on broadcast television (ABC) and the new one is on Showtime, the new version is markedly more grisly, with disembodied corpses or gruesome murders in almost every episode.   In one recent episode a dwarf brutally stabbed two women to death with an ice pick, and a drugged-up teenage driver ran over a small child in front of his mother.  These scenes effectively illustrated the depravity of modern life — but boy, they were tough to watch.

Part of the problem with evaluating television violence is that there are qualitative but hard-to-quantify differences between different types of violence.  When I was growing up, the adults used to worry that the face slaps and head bonks of “The Three Stooges” encouraged violence. And there was rarely a Western or crime show that didn’t begin or end without someone being shot dead.  But those violent acts were relatively bloodless and not particularly disturbing.  Even today, there are shows with plenty of gunplay that don’t make you question whether life is worth living.

But one of the features of prestige TV is beautiful and powerful visual direction, with each scene composed like a masterpiece.  When someone on these shows gets killed (or even beaten up), the director’s talent is on full display.  For example, one murder on “Fargo” involved a guy getting stabbed in the neck as he was retrieving a carton of milk from the refrigerator. The resulting image was a stream of bright red blood pooling with the white milk – a beautiful but disturbing contrast between life and death.

On prestige TV, violence is supposed to be disturbing — it’s not to be taken lightly.  If a couple of bad guys are kicking a woman on the ground, each thud makes you feel sick to your stomach, as it should (see following video for proof of that).

Further, the more the show aspires to real art, the more the innocent suffer and the more random life feels.  This is one of the differences between prestige and traditional TV.  Most TV viewers prefer unchallenging shows where emotions are not ripped raw and where evil is punished.  That’s not always the case on the artier shows. Sometimes the good guys end up dead and the bad guys walk free.

Look, I like shows that challenge my assumptions and make me think about the bigger issues as much as the next guy, but the over-reliance on violence as an emotional intensifier seems a bit lazy after a while.

Here’s where shows like “Mad Men,” “Six Feet Under,” and “Friday Night Lights” really differentiated themselves.  Almost all of the drama we experience in our own lives is free of physical violence.  We are subjected to plenty of EMOTIONAL violence, but most of us don’t get shot, stabbed or garroted even once in our lives — never mind with the frequency it happens on TV.

So give us a break, prestige TV artists-of-the-first-rank.  Find a way to get our blood racing without showing someone else’s blood flowing.

Rethinking Twitter

Like a lot of people, I’m beginning to suffer from Twitter-fatigue and wondering whether I should just dump the whole thing.  Oh, for the old days, when the biggest complaint about Twitter was that too many people were tweeting about what they ate for breakfast.  Now it’s worse, with too many people tweeting about what they were THINKING at breakfast.

Twitter hasn’t really reached its full potential as an enhancer and promoter of television either.  There was a time when I thought TV and Twitter would become inextricably linked in a kind of call and response mechanism, with people actively engaged in Twitter conversations about what they were watching on TV.

That’s not to say that Twitter and television are unconnected.  It’s just that Twitter needs TV a lot more than TV needs Twitter.  During primetime, for example, I’d bet that at least half of all tweets concern something that’s on television, whether it’s a TV show, sporting event or news development.  And of course a huge amount of Twitter activity consists of retweets of TV content, including late night skits, sports highlights, snippets from news shows, or memes from reality shows.

Twitter’s got a couple of problems when it comes to establishing TV-related connections.  First, it’s not as popular as you’d think.  Every reporter is on Twitter and seems to think everyone else is too, but less than a third of Americans have Twitter accounts and most of them are not very active.

Then there’s the problem that so much of TV is time-shifted.  You can’t be in community with other fans of a TV show if you’re watching it at a different time.

But the real problem with Twitter is that it’s so hard to find the tweets you want to see or to have your own tweets seen by the people you want to see them.  For all of Twitter’s efforts to manage this, the newsfeed is still a gush of unrelated content that frequently has little to do with your interest at the moment.

Here’s an illustrative story: last November 2 as Game Seven of the Cubs/Indians World Series reached its breathtaking climax, I posted on Facebook “Baseball is the greatest game,” and immediately got 20 “likes.” I was astonished that so many people were still watching the game at 11:00 p.m. and that so many had Facebook open at the same time. I posted something similar on Twitter but the tweet went into a void.  Did anyone see it?  Who knows?  All I know is that if I want a warm and fuzzy feeling, I go to Facebook.

There are four main categories of Twitter users.  First there are the actual newsmakers: the president, the pope, Katy Perry (100 million followers!) and other movie stars, politicians, basketball power forwards, etc.  They have tens of millions of followers but hardly follow anyone back.  For these folks Twitter is a great way to get their message out unfiltered.

A second major category are brands, including TV networks and specific programs, who use Twitter as a trendy form of marketing. Some networks are better at tweeting than others, but I’m not sure how much it really matters. One traditional video promo on a primetime show will have far more reach than any single tweet, no matter how well crafted.  The exception to this – a big one – is when a show tweets out vital content. “Carpool Karaoke,” for example, has been seen by far more people on social media than on “The Late Late Show With James Cordon” itself.

A third category of important Twitter users are the wordsmiths – comedians who make jokes, reporters who tweet all day long about the news, and other professional kibitzers.  Myself, I follow quite a few television critics.  Theoretically they could have an impact on what shows I will watch but their Twitter accounts are so mired in politics that they’ve lost a lot of credibility.

The biggest category of Twitter users is the hoi polloi – the millions of users who have one or two hundred followers and tweet occasionally or rarely – and who are the ultimate target for the other three categories of tweeters.

As a Twitter user firmly in this last category, I worry that I might be wasting a lot of my time.  I get a lot more of my new from NYT and WSJ news alerts than I do from Twitter; I’m annoyed by half the tweets I read; I don’t even know a third of the people who are following me; and among the followers I do know, only a handful seem to be reading my tweets.  And I’m just not learning very much about TV via Twitter.

I don’t want to get rid of Twitter altogether, because it’s still a good way to kill time when I’m standing in a slow-moving line, but maybe I should emulate the advice of those closet organizing gurus and stop following people who don’t give me joy.  Time for a full Twitter audit before I ditch the whole thing.

 

 

Wondering About “Wonder Woman”

In the most recent “Wonder Woman” movie, the main character is never called “Wonder Woman.”  She’s “Diana.”   I hope that’s not a spoiler and if you’re worried about major plot points being spoiled, don’t read on.

• Feminist critics almost ruined this movie.  Why does everything need to be analyzed through the lens of identity politics?  Feminist critics were falling all over themselves about how affirming it was to finally have a female super hero movie.  Some wrote about being emotional when they brought their daughters to a movie where could finally see themselves empowered, etc etc.  This same kind of P.C. nonsense went on with the all-female remake of “Ghostbusters,” which turned out to be pretty mediocre despite the politically correct good reviews.  To be honest, I don’t understand what these women are talking about.  There was a Wonder Woman TV show in the 1970’s that taught an earlier generation of women that they too could have super powers.  And didn’t we previously go through the excitement about female action heroes with Lara Croft?  How many “firsts” do we need to have on the same topic? And yes, the director is a woman but the writers are men and Warner Bros. itself is run by men. In any event, there is nothing particularly feminist about the “Wonder Woman” story except that the main character happens to be a self-assertive female.  So is Sarah Palin.

• Wow Gal Gadot is beautiful.  (Am I being sexist to comment on the physical attractions of said feminist protagonist?)  She’s a former Miss Israel and she has an ever-so-slightly exotic look that makes her stand out from run-of-the-mill movie stars.  Hilariously, the Commentariat is so desperate to claim Wonder Woman as a feminist icon that they’re arguing that “Wonder Woman” does not invite the “male gaze.” One writer went so far as to claim that she is depicted as a real woman because her thighs “jiggled.”  I kid you not.  Read it here.  I didn’t notice if her thighs jiggled but I did notice that every bit of hair below her eyebrows has been removed.  She also completely transformed her body with an extensive exercise regime and crazy diet that no average woman could maintain.  If they were trying to avoid my male gaze they failed.

• As a kid, I always thought the Amazons lived in the Brazilian rain forest; now I find out they live on some Mediterranean island paradise where the women spend all their time training in the arts of war — but the arts of war as they existed in 400 B.C.  For some reason, technology has not advanced on Themyscira over the last 2500 years so the ladies are still training with bows and arrows, javelins, swords and shields.  This leaves them at a bit of a disadvantage when World War I Germans show up with guns.  Eventually all the Germans are massacred, but not before killing a few Amazons, who are apparently not as indestructible as they seem. (Historical note: by 1918 the German Navy was completely decimated so would not have been in position to send a destroyer to search for an escaped spy.  Also by the way, Steve Trevor must be piloting the world’s slowest airplane if it can’t outrun a destroyer.)

• Just how old is Diana?  When we first see her, she’s a little girl, supposedly created by Zeus before he died — for argument’s sake, let’s say that was in 400 B.C.  We then see her grow up and trained by her aunt.  Maybe she was ten years old at the beginning of the movie and then she was about 30 when Steve Trevor shows up?  But somehow during those 20 years the timeline changes from 400 BC to 1918 AD.  Apparently she stops aging at the moment of peak beauty because she looks the same in the movie’s prologue, set in 2017.  So is she really 30 or 2300 years old?  There’s no indication that time is moving in a different dimension.  In fact, when the Germans arrive she has only that very day learned how to use her full powers — by crossing her wrists — so we don’t get the idea that she’s been training for centuries (and how boring would that be — even for a warrior princess?)

• Has there ever been more perfect casting than Robin Wright (aka Claire Underwood) in the role of Diana’s hard-ass, militaristic aunt (see photo below)? I’d like to see her use dress up like General Antiope on “House of Cards” and punch out a few weaselly Congressmen.

• If I were doing PR for the Germans I would scream bloody murder about this movie. They don’t call them Huns, but they might as well.  No one today could get away with depicting an entire race of people (except for perhaps the Germans) as this malevolent.  This is even more over-the-top than the propaganda of World War I.  I fully expected them to twirl their mustaches as they went about killing innocent people and poisoning whole villages.

• By the way, the movie’s runner-up villain, General Ludendorff, was a real general (see photo below and read more about him here). By the end of the real war, he was essentially running the German war effort.  He was kind of a bad guy but not the monster seen in the movie (for example, he never killed a room full of generals who were negotiating the Armistice.)  He died of liver cancer in 1937, not from a sword to the gut in 1918.
• There are no sex scenes in the movie but plenty of funny innuendo.  When Diana comes upon a naked Steve Trevor taking a bath she asks if he is average for a man and he hilariously replies, as would most men, that he is “above average.”  When she then asks “what is THAT?”  he’s nonplussed until he realizes she’s referring to his watch.  When he tells her he uses it to tell time and organize his day she says, “You let that little thing tell you what to do?” Hah.  Later when they’re in a boat headed to London she asks if they will sleep together, which leads to an amusing discussion in which he prudishly says that only married people should sleep together and then fumbles when she asks if he’s never slept with anyone.  And all the time this was going on, the nerd inside me kept wondering who was going to steer the boat if they’re both sleeping.

• Poor doomed Steve Trevor.  It’s not really a spoiler that he dies — the only question was when and how.  After all, the movie begins in in the year 2017, with Diana looking at a photo of him from 1918.  He’s mortal so would not be alive today unless she gave him some god-like DNA, which would defeat the whole point of her falling in love with a mortal.  Speaking of which, Wonder Woman lives in Paris and works for Batman?

• I don’t know if the filmmakers were deliberately trying to introduce Christian themes into the movie but they seemed pretty obvious:  a) Zeus/God creates man, gives him free will and he proceeds to sin; b) Diana, created through a form of immaculate conception, is given to mankind to defeat evil; c) she is tempted by the evil one, who shows her a vision of paradise in which the two of them will reign together; d) there is an explicit discussion of undeserved grace, in which the sinful humans are given an opportunity to redeem themselves; e) love is offered as the only power to defeat evil; f) There’s a measure of forgiveness (when Diana is encouraged to kill the evil chemist she does not); g) at the end of the battle Diana descends with her arms spread wide in an obvious crucifixion pose (see photo below).  There’s too much violence in this movie for it to be a Christian movie, and Jesus obviously never used a sword to kill anyone, but you have to wonder what the writers were up to.  (Here’s a longer discussion of the movie’s call-backs to the New Testament.)

• Having said all this, I think this might be the greatest superhero movie ever made.  It avoids the worst aspects of the genre, which is consequence-free violence.  In too many movies the good and bad guys fight it out in the middle of a city and destroy half of it, killing an untold number of by-standers.  In “Wonder Woman,” the consequences of violence are evident and not fun — the injuries and loss are real.  Plus the story does grapple with the complications of good and evil, including our own complicity as flawed beings.  I also appreciate setting the film in World War I, which is the most consequential event in the last 500 years and the moment at which modern civilization came unhinged in a spasm of completely unnecessary war and violence.  Millions of people killed for nothing after a century of European peace; and then after the war was over the seeds were sown for another even more destructive conflagration.  So there’s a feeling of weightiness and real consequence to the setting.  And finally, the story makes sense, which is not always the case with superhero movies.  (And did I mention that Gal Gadot is gorgeous?)

• Here are my reservations about the movie: the climactic battle scene between Diana and Ares, with explosions and a lot of tossed-about machinery, is too long and too conventional, and it undercuts the care that has been taken to make her seem approachable and semi-human.  Also, what’s the real take-away with Ares, the God of War?  Zeus put him in the Phantom Zone or some other place, from which escaped to start World War I; and then once he dies the war ends.  OK, but what about all the wars before and after World War I.  I think we did just fine in the war department without him.

Bottom line: great movie, great heroine, doesn’t stretch reality too far, a few funky plot points.