For its part, and despite its neutered (spayed?) title, Frozen’s loose adaptation of “The Snow Queen” plays as a consolidation of this bent, with a plotline centred above all on a sororal relationship—one that is furthermore presented as the surprise lynchpin to the film’s climax in a winking subversion of Disney’s hetero-romantic narrative tendencies. Love saves the day again, but this time it is familial, sisterly love. This, in conjunction with the supposed LGBT-friendliness of “Let it Go”—its central, Oscar-winning musical set-piece—has created some renewed popular interest in the role of gender politics in Disney films.

For a while now, Disney has been negotiating a compromise between some of the more regressive social values it has attached to itself, and the need to maintain cultural relevance and dissuade potentially harmful critique. Frozen maintains the princesses, Eurocentrism and cookie-cutter character design (look at those tiny women and huge men), but places less emphasis on idealised heteronormative pairing in order to highlight other modes of female characterisation. In the context of Hollywood, and Disney in particular, this is commendable. At the same time, it shouldn’t be taken in any way as if it is at the vanguard of media representation within these parameters. It is simply indicative of symptomatic shifts within an otherwise largely entrenched ideological core.

The extent of this entrenchedness is most visible when examining how more recent Disney fare treats modes of representation discursively detached from girlhood’s growing importance in Disney’s media profile. In Frozen itself, this may be seen in the construction of ethnic/cultural otherness implicit in the film’s troll characters. Magical, familial, communal, amiable, open and deferential to the film’s human characters, Frozen’s trolls fulfill a checklist of characteristics distinctive of subservient cultural others, particularly of the type that serve narratively to facilitate white people’s ability to love and understand each other better thanks to their intuitive wisdom and connection to the natural world. In the trolls’ case this is both symbolic and literal, with the characters themselves being composed of living rock. In terms of performance, this communal otherness is accentuated by the ways in which the trolls act as a collective unit, scrambling and speaking over each other, often in the evident voices of non-white performers —all supremely interested and supportive of the protagonist’s agenda and eager to play matchmakers for her.

This characterisation is all the more notable for the contrast it presents to the behaviour and attitudes that inform the basis of the film’s main interpersonal conflicts, all of which are centred on intra-familial secrecy and individual self-control and denial. Indeed, the main conflict of Frozen is possibly the whitest to ever happen in a Disney film, based as it is in problems predicated by a conception of whiteness that sees itself in opposition to the raucous, communal earthiness so often attributed to other cultures and ethnicities, particularly those of Black, Hispanic and Mediterranean heritage. Throughout such conflicts, whites overcome the trappings of their over-civilisation by balancing them with the subservient wisdom freely offered by cultural others. In perpetuating these narrative relationships, Disney in particular and Hollywood in general demonstrate how relative discursive progression in some areas (or freedom for interpretation, as in Let it Go’s adoption as a coming out anthem) comes with little regard for entrenched regressive values in others. While Disney’s female characters have begun ever so slightly to shed their role as satellites to male protagonists, other modes of otherness persist in much the same way as they have since Song of the South. It’s almost as if Disney’s perception of cultural otherness is immobile. Petrified or static, if you will.

Netflix’s July 2013 release of Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black is representative of the innovations in content made possible by independent distribution. There is little public information about why Showtime, home to Kohan’s Weeds, passed on Orange, but Kohan has discussed enthusiasm for the freedom working with Netflix gave her:

“the greatest thing about going to Netflix was that I pitched it in the room, and they ordered 13 episodes without a pilot. … That is every showrunner’s dream, to just ‘go to series’ and have that faith put in your work. … They were new, they were streamlined, they were lovely, they were enthusiastic about it. And I love being on the new frontier.”

One of the freedoms Kohan has enjoyed is writing a complex story about women for a diverse female ensemble cast. The complexity of Orange’s three-dimensional characters has been both praised for “exhibit[ing] the sort of real talk about race, gender, and identity usually limited to college seminars” and critiqued for repeating familiar stereotypes of race and class. Although many critics agree that the series is “a showcase for a large group of black and Latino actresses who for the most part have not had regular roles in series before this,” it is Orange’s representations of gender and sexuality diversity that have brought it nearly unanimous praise. The New Yorker, for instance, proclaimed, “There are more lesbians here—butch and femme and of every ethnicity—than in any other series on television.” The show also blurs the lines between lesbian and straight with characters like Piper Chapman, who finds herself caught between her former lover (a woman) and her fiancé (a man), and Lorna Morello, a “temporary lesbian” who has sex with Nicky Nichols until she feels it is a violation of her commitment to her male fiancé. But by far, the most interesting, compelling, and groundbreaking character on Orange is the prison’s hairdresser, Sophia Burset, who, in addition to being an inmate, is African American and transgender.

Laverne Cox, also a transgender woman, plays Sophia, and her presence in Orange marks the first time in history that an African American trans woman has held a substantive role on television. And unlike the two-dimensional and stereotypical transgender characters who came before Sophia—like Dirty Sexy Money’s Carmelita Rainer, a mistress whose life ends tragically, and Nip/Tuck’s Ava Moore, a sexual predator who transitioned to woo a love interest—Sophia’s character is a thoughtful portrayal of transition and transgender identity. Laverne Cox told Time, “There’s a lot of the same trans stories being repeated over and over again. Orange breaks that in a lot of wonderful ways.”

Though she does not have an abundance of screen time in each episode, we learn a lot about Sophia’s life in season one, much of it in an episode-long showcase on her history, her transition (Cox’s real-life twin brother plays Sophia pre-transition), and the credit card fraud that landed her in prison. We also meet her wife and son, which allows the show to explore the complexities of transitioning in midlife. But Sophia’s most compelling storyline involves her struggle to receive her hormone pills in prison after a budget cut takes them away (they are eventually restored). Through it all, Orange portrays Sophia as a transgender woman who made some bad choices, but who refuses to be a victim or a stereotype—she is a loving spouse, parent, friend, confidant, and hairdresser extraordinaire.

With its multifaceted portrayals of women, gender, and sexuality, it is easy to see why Orange is being hailed as Netflix’s best program—even better than Emmy-nominated House of Cards. And when you look at the new fall offerings from the broadcast and cable networks, Orange looks downright avant-garde. In many ways it is disappointing that Orange seems so extraordinary in 2013, but as Bitch Flicks argues, “It is still revolutionary and fresh merely for there to be a show mostly about women, much less one like OitNB that does its best to reflect womanhood as anything but monolithic and directly addresses race, class and sexuality.” While it is not possible to know the number of viewers who have viewed Orange, the buzz the show has generated says something about our culture’s readiness for complex, sexually diverse female characters. Hopefully its success will convince television producers and networks to be ready, too.

Though Beasts features offensive, retrograde race, gender, and class politics, it has elicited deferential online discussions that rarely voice any critique (although bell hooks and some bloggers call out its flaws). Perhaps its poetic sheen, with lots of lens flares and handheld jiggling, has inoculated the film from political analysis, despite the fact that it portrays poor, rural, African American people speaking minstrel-show English, with lines like “they be talkin’ in codes” explaining how the six-year-old protagonist can hear animals speak. Along with a few drunk, dirty, working-class whites, heroine Hushpuppy and her father Wink live in filth and disarray, yet the film proffers them as an idealized utopian community. Beasts trucks in the recirculation of all-too-familiar clichés about people of color and the working class: closer to nature (“we’s who the earth’s for,” Hushpuppy tells us), working roots and shooting gators (Louisiana—exotic!), fiercely loyal, and explosively violent. Wink’s open-handed slap knocks Hushpuppy to the ground, yet because he later expresses his love for her on his deathbed, many viewers forgive his abusiveness.

Hushpuppy narrates in voiceover the tumultuous period in her life when Wink falls ill and a hurricane floods their rural community, The Bathtub, outside the south Louisiana levees. But the post-Katrina context in Beasts is submerged in the miasma of magical realism, which mystifies the extreme weather events in the film. We see many Bathtub denizens evacuating before the storm, but Hushpuppy and drunk Wink hunker down to ride it out. The threat to the Bathtub is ascribed vaguely to climate change, as Hushpuppy’s teacher explains: “the fabric of the universe is coming unraveled” which means “the ice caps gonna melt, water’s gonna rise, and everything south of the levee is going under.” Waters rise, not due to any human causation, but a mystical rupture in the universe. Redeemed father Wink watches approvingly as Hushpuppy faces down prehistoric aurochs, loosed by the melting ice.

Given this mystification of climate change and environmental degradation through noble savage primitivism, the movie is astonishingly popular. The Beasts Facebook page has over 76,000 likes, with posts touting a live performance of the film’s score in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and wishing readers “Happy Earth Day from the Bathtub!” The movie has inspired a Twitter hashtag #BEASTit, mainly used as encouragement in sporting and racing events; its @BeastsTheMovie twitter handle has over 3600 followers. On the official Beasts website, we can read about its four Oscar nominations and see animations of review snippets: A.O. Scott’s “a blast of sheer, improbable joy,” Bryan Alexander’s “spellbinding,” and Manohla Dargis’s “hauntingly beautiful.” Along the sidebar scrolls a procession of tweets, mostly expressing fans’ hyperbolic praise: “this movie has inspired me and changed my life” says jessicamartinez.

Unlike Beasts, nobody sees SharkNado as life-changing. Likewise, it cannot be mistaken for an art film—it positions itself consciously in the tradition of B-movies, in a line of SyFy made-for-basic-cable schlockfests such as SharkTopus and Chupacabra vs. The Alamo. Special effects hearken back to Bride of the Monster’s Bela Lugosi wrestling a plastic octopus, the tornadoes are CGI, with scripting and acting to match—but SharkNado’s genius lies in catering to fans of B-movies (tagline: Enough said.) Such fans (and others, presumably) went online en masse via Twitter during the premiere broadcast, peaking at 5000 #SharkNado tweets per minute, which Twitter ranks among the biggest trend surges in its history. Although video on demand is touted as the wave of the future, the simultaneity of watching a show as it airs along with millions of other viewers remains a strong component of viewer pleasure.

I'm not so sure about the science in this movie you guys. #SharkNado

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) July 12, 2013

Wil Wheaton’s (@wilw) popular tweet, “I’m not so sure about the science in this movie you guys. #SharkNado,”  encapsulates the sarcastic, Mystery Science 3000 tone of the TweetNado. Unlike the storm in Beasts, which hazily alludes to Katrina, the extreme weather event in SharkNado is never credible. Nevertheless, it ably conforms to weather disaster movie conventions such as shots of bending palm trees and driving rain, and the reconstituted family unit at the end: hero-dad Fin gets back together with his ex-wife after rescuing her and their daughter along with lots of other people (although his ex’s husband is conveniently eaten). We even get the added pleasure of seeing the reporter eaten by a wind-propelled shark. Before she dies, we learn that sharks from the Gulf of Mexico have migrated into the unusually warm Pacific, where Hurricane David is now driving them up the California coast and “experts are saying global warming is the reason for this unprecedented event.”

SharkNado’s knowing nods to the pleasures of bad movies, as well as its many allusions to Jaws and other classics, suggest a target audience of savvy, sophisticated viewers, a group that may overlap with Beasts‘s demographic. But the affect SharkNado generates is less serious, less misty-eyed, and dedicated to the fun of hurling ridicule at a B-movie. With its spoofing tone, SharkNado produces a sharper, more critical mode of viewing than the art film, though it doesn’t pretend to Beasts’s intellectual depths. Both fantastical films employ extreme weather as a backdrop for adventure and heroism, including rejuvenating the father as the patriarch of the family; both the derision heaped on SharkNado and the precious sentimentality of Beasts operate to sideline any engagement with extreme weather beyond a staging ground for cliché.

WWE recently debuted a new character named Zeb Colter, a Vietnam veteran with a particularly negative view of the current direction of “his country,” complete with racist undertones and far-right political views. Thrust into the spotlight as the manager of wrestler Jack Swagger, the duo quickly gained infamy and raised the ire of Tea Party conservatives who believed they were being villainized, eventually finding their way into the crosshairs of conservative uber-pundit Glenn Beck. Suddenly, the fighting spilled outside the ring and became a major news story for both sides, covered by The Hollywood Reporter, ABC News, and CNN.

While the issue is ostensibly about the negative portrayal of a certain politically-minded group in this country, Glenn Beck and especially WWE have taken advantage of the situation not for political gains, but for the oldest reason in media: publicity. While WWE is no stranger to complaints for its sometimes controversial, violent, and objectifying content, they rarely provide a direct response. More often, they skirt the issue by touting their various positive outreach outside their television programs, with efforts like the anti-bullying Be A Star Campaign, their WrestleMania Reading Challenge, and Superstar John Cena’s 300 plus Make-A-Wish wishes. But in this particular instance, WWE saw a perfect window to not only respond to this criticism, but gain more attention at the same time. They did so with the following video, released on their official YouTube page:

WWE’s response is, like most of their work, over-the-top, direct, and begging for attention. The video begins with a standard WWE-style ‘promo’ where Zeb and Jack run down illegal immigrants, non-English speakers, and World Heavyweight Champion Alberto Del Rio for his Mexican heritage. About one and a half minutes in, however, the characters break the fourth wall, revealing they are standing in front of a green screen with professional lighting and cameras surrounding them. Even more out of character, literally, both men reveal their true names (Wayne Keown and Jake Hager) while emphasizing their nature as entertainers and their role as antagonists in the current story WWE is telling.

What is phenomenal about this presentation from WWE is a complete break in standard operating procedure for the company. For years, WWE has generally insisted upon its performers staying in character during media appearances, sometimes extending into their personal lives as well, as was the case when Serena Deeb was released in 2010 for (allegedly) drinking in public while the character she was portraying was meant to be living a ‘straight-edge,’ alcohol-free lifestyle. What would make WWE change this policy in such a sharp direction, not only allowing performers to break character but officially having them do so?

The answer is, you guessed it, publicity. As I mentioned before, when Breitbart and Glenn Beck originally reacted to the storyline and characters, WWE suddenly saw more mainstream media attention than usual. It didn’t matter what people were saying about the WWE, it only mattered people were suddenly looking in their direction. And with their flagship show WrestleMania just one month away, the extra eyes could not come at a more opportune time. Even before this fight broke out, WWE had been positioning itself strategically to bring in more casual and unconverted fans, resigning Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and making him the new WWE Champion as well as announcing a partnership with Paramount to help promote two of their upcoming releases, both of which, of course, star The Rock. And just this past Monday, they announced Donald Trump as the newest ‘celebrity member’ of their WWE Hall of Fame.

Clearly, WWE saw the increased attention as another opportunity to build buzz during the most crucial time of their year. This is made clear in the video, as Wayne and Jake (now out of character) take the opportunity to promote WWE’s success and PG nature. Although responding to Glenn Beck, they find a way to slip in nuggets of information that sound meant for an investor’s meeting: 14 million US fans, broadcasting in 145 countries, a desirably audience that’s 20% Hispanic, 22% African-American, 35% female, and covers a variety of age groups, oh, and the #1 show on USA Network. Phew. But that’s not all! After comparing themselves to hit shows like Glee and NCIS, WWE takes a shot at primetime television, touting their PG rating by mentioning they do not depict murder, rape, or gun violence.

In the end, WWE extends a challenge to Glenn Beck, offering him five minutes of unedited time on Monday Night Raw to offer a rebuttal. Beck’s response: “Unfortunately, I am currently booked doing anything else.” While seemingly ending the grudge, WWE wouldn’t let a “no” from Beck stop them from keeping the feud going, mocking Beck on this past Monday’s Raw to yet more media coverage, even posting a video of their own Michael Cole trying to get an interview with Beck at Glenn Beck Studios.

For WWE, the extremely rare moment of ‘truth’ and peek behind the curtain offered in these videos were well worth it. The larger controversy they’ve generated with the Tea Party is exactly what they wished for, and the video gave them a chance to not only fend off attacks from a powerful political segment, but gain more mainstream publicity and an outlet for corporate promotional content. As the title of wrestling promoter and former WWE rival Eric Bischoff’s best-selling autobiography says: controversy creates cash.

I begin with this truth to discuss Django Unchained because it informs my reluctance to discuss this film. I recognize that my ambivalence belongs to me and that many folks are happy to investigate,  interrogate, segment and contextualize the film to determine if the film is harmful or not or plumb interviews given by writer/director Quentin Tarantino to locate his intent in producing such a film. Excellent pieces by wonderful thinkers have emerged and I would do no service to them to repeat what they’ve already written. Instead, I want to offer a few points about how Django actually makes sense in our Post-Race world and why its “good” fit only cements the confusion about how to understand race contemporarily.

1. A friend told me about a girlfriend of hers who shared her confusion around how Black folks are supposed to feel about Django. Based on all the reviews as well as the interviews Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington gave I can see how this confusion emerges. When Foxx and Oprah Winfrey discuss the film as a tribute of sorts to our enslaved ancestors and posit that it offers the opportunity to have conversations about the “evolution of freedom” from slavery to present day, it does make me question if I’ve misjudged the film’s mission. The burden of representation is so great for people of color that any reason to support a film with “strong” Black lead characters should be reason enough. That there is the possibility of a revisionist redemptive slave narrative is all the better. However, while Django centers around a newly freed slave and while the horrors of slavery are on display in graphic detail, I would not say it was a commentary on the evolution of freedom because the story uses slavery—its most culturally specific factor—as a conceit while the story of Django rescuing his lady love is the main story—the one that is universal and familiar. While there is nothing wrong with a story people can connect to, making it is easy for the average moviegoer to relate to Django does align with the goals of Post-Race logic where finding “common ground” supersedes the specific historical differences that actually marginalize groups.

2. One of the patterns in the film that struck me was Django’s sole goal of freeing his wife Broomhilda from the Candie Plantation. It struck me because it was such an individualistic objective. One free former slave rescuing one enslaved woman from the horrors of slavery is a lofty goal to be sure; however, it seems antithetical to the ways that slaves functioned as a community system. The conscious choice, for example, to have Django never look back at his brethren–even after he has killed all their captors–and leave them in cages so they can watch him him ride back to the plantation to free his wife seems off. Why not arm them so they can all get their revenge on the evil slave owners? Perhaps it is because he was trained by his mentor Dr. King (ha) Schultz to treat being a bounty hunter as a solo gig. However, I can neither imagine the process of becoming free nor the  disconnecting of emotional ties to other slaves as occurring overnight. Thus I contend that the emphasis on the individual  achieving his aims rather than on the collective is a product of Post-Race logic that is not necessarily interested in slavery as anything other than an elaborate and terrible backdrop. Besides, a gang of enslaved men taking on slave owners in a raid seems far more menacing for a 21^st century mainstream audience than one man in a velvet suit.

3. My last point of illustrating that Django is a product of the Post-Race lies in the supporting character of Steven. Played by Samuel L. Jackson, is a conflation of types: Uncle Tom, Boondocks-famous Uncle Ruckus, as well as a well-versed code-switcher. For me, Steven’s intraracial hatred in concert with being the smartest character of them all made him the most evil. A brilliant performance to be sure; however, I could not help but think that for many moviegoers in the film, the black-on-black violence diminished the impact of the fact that both men were enslaved psychologically and physically, instead placed the burden of evil on them hating each other with this subtle shift.

In conclusion, I would suggest that this racial moment produced Django. This is the moment where a horrible past is so far removed that it can be redeemed through a fantastical story that if set in modern day would scare its moviegoers. That is indeed the gift of a Post-Race era.

Replacing over half of the original cast, the second season seems to be attempting to reflect a more diverse sampling of the city’s residents. Situated within the discourses of class and excessive wealth, the show’s new cast members claim that Miami is changing. What is not said, but clearly implied, is that Miami’s transition from “Old” to “New” is one not necessarily marked by wealth—new versus old money—as the cast members might suggest, but one that is instead marked by a process of whitening.  The “New” Miami is a white Miami, one that can capitalize on the extracted elements of Cuban culture when it so desires, but one that is ultimately laboring to disassociate itself from the racialized baggage of the “Old” Miami.

I am not denying the association of Cubanness with notions of whiteness that played a critical role in the form and fashion of representational Cuban latinidad—a reality reflected in Mary Beltrán’s analysis of Desi Arnaz as ethnically Latino but racially white (Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes 2009). What I am suggesting, is that even though the usage of racialized or ethnicized signifiers is abundant in RHOM—much in the same way the franchise’s Atlanta cast is racially marked (see Kristen Warner)—it nevertheless uses those signifiers to assert the city’s movement away from its Cuban heritage. Best represented in the image and rhetoric of the show’s most famous new cast member, supermodel Joanna Krupa, the beautiful people of Miami are being replaced not by a new generation of Latina/os, but by those who better adhere to normative white standards of beauty and don’t stand for, what Krupa called in her Bravo blog, any of Miami’s “nonsense.”

I would argue that the articulation of a “New” Miami by the new cast members of RHOM is an effort to normalize and racially separate themselves from the eccentric latinidad of “Old” Miami, one that is epitomized by the show’s breakout figure: Mama Elsa. The mother of one of the show’s three remaining original cast members and one of the most talked about secondary figures from the entire franchise, Mama Elsa is a woman from the “Old” Miami. She is not only disfigured by extensive plastic surgery, but is positioned within the representation of the Latina witch (a figure that might be lesser known than other Latina representations, but one that nonetheless has a long history in U.S.-based mediated constructions of latinidad that often manifests in the “superstitious” abuela, or the Caribbean santera, or the elderly woman in the village who has held onto the old indigenous ways). At the end of the first episode, Mama Elsa, in describing Miami, suggests that people like Miami not because it is a great place, but because it is an odd place. And it would seem that no one knows that more intimately than the psychic, dramatic, and overly expressive Mama Elsa.

Diane Negra’s scholarship on ethnicity and female stardom provides an approach to a concurrent and contradictory distancing and appropriation of Cubanness in RHOM. Negra contends that “In a large part, the ethnic female body serves as a repository for fears of difference that play out across several registers, activating anxieties pertaining to femininity, to ‘foreign’ ethnicities, even to the uncontrollable, lower-class body” (Off-White Hollywood, 2001: 19). What is important here is that ethnic female stars, as both personae and texts, reflect and contribute to the labor of articulating and maintaining the boundaries of American whiteness. The ethnic female star, as one that transgresses many of the normative boundaries of whiteness, threatens to reveal the “fragile construction” of white, American patriarchy and therefore it must be neutralized. Furthermore, Negra contends that intimately tied to such processes are the discourses that construct ethnic femininity as excessive and exaggerated—in a very embodied way. By offering figures seen as clearly binary oppositional (Mama Elsa and Joanna Krupa) and deploying a ubiquitous framework of “New” versus “Old,” RHOM demonstrates the excessive ethnicity of the “Old” Miami and subsequently reinforces boundaries of whiteness.

Latina bodies are explicitly both ethnically/racially and sexually marked in such a way that they can be consumed, commodified, and exploited, and the RHOM is in many ways no different from the litany of media texts that exhibit this practice. Yet this is a shallow assessment of what is actually unfolding in the show’s representation of a transforming Miami identity. When one delves deeper, what is revealed is how ethnicized Latina bodies are participating in the “processes of ethnic retention, invention and resuscitation” that contribute to both the maintenance and assault on normative boundaries of U.S. whiteness (Negra 2001: 24). I am in no way suggesting that the show’s intention is to reflect the hegemonic struggle over constructions of whiteness, however, that seems to be the result of Bravo’s re-casting of the initially abandoned Real Housewives of Miami.

“Parable” responds to some foundational texts of feminist science fiction book fandom, Octavia Butler‘s 1990s dystopian novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Butler’s novels have never been adapted for the screen, but Chaila didn’t let that stop her. In the absence of a media source other than the print and cover art of the books themselves, Chaila pulled together an intertextual archive from the world around her to craft an adaptation of her own.

We talk about transmedia as a way that media producers can distribute story, character, and worldbuilding across multiple platforms. To make her vid, Chaila engaged in a different kind of transmedia storytelling: one that combines fannish appreciation, critical media analysis, and grassroots production. She found the places and platforms in which stories like the Parable novels were being told, and used Butler’s ideas as a lens through which to gather diverse representations from fiction and reality into a story that articulates lived and imagined dystopias together.

In 1993, shortly after the LA riots, Butler wrote about a Los Angeles splintered between walled communities and the desperate poor, with no state services to rely on and scarce food and water. Amid chaos and violence, iconic protagonist Lauren Olamina flees her home, builds a new one, and very carefully and consciously starts a religion––Earthseed––aimed at gathering people together around the goal of sending humans to the stars. Some elements of the story were easier to find than others. Images of urban disintegration and environmental collapse are easy to locate; a black woman’s coming of age at the heart of them, less so. Chaila found her Lauren in Patricia McKenzie’s role as Reena from the 2005 TV show Charlie Jade, one of many easily-forgotten shows set after the collapse of technological society. As Liz Henry remarked at a different WisCon panel, the stories that speculative fiction has been telling this decade have been characterized by the “mid-apocalypse”; the world is always ending, and stories about how people might learn to live in the ruins are thick on the ground.

“Parable” brings together at least three genres of online video: book trailers, vidding, and political remix. Making videos for books is not a new idea; book trailers have been around for a while. But book trailers, whether for original or fan fiction, function as advertisements to encourage readers to seek out the text. “Parable” is best appreciated if you’ve already read the Parables. Though she was inspired by book trailers, in making “Parable” Chaila was vidding. She sets visual material to a song in order to make an interpretation, craft an argument. WisCon gave her an audience who would both recognize the story she was adapting for the screen and have the vidding literacy to appreciate the interpretations she is making.

The kind of interpetation Chaila makes––of Butler’s story in the light of media sources, and of media sources in the light of Butler––brings “Parable” into the territory of political remix video’s activist interventions into media representation and current events. Chaila has remarked that the footage she found hardest to find was that of the multi-ethnic but largely non-white community Lauren builds. Yet imagery of torture––which takes place in the books but is only briefly described––was far easier to come by. Her search underlines at least one of the reasons why the vivid, visual, and painfully current narrative of Butler’s Parables has never been brought to the screen: the overwhelming whiteness of popular media, particularly science fiction, and the limited range of roles available for actors of color.

Yet the vid’s political intervention does not only come from its weaving of TV and film’s post-apocalyptic sci fi tropes with the constructed story of a rare black woman protagonist. Many visuals Chaila uses are not fiction but news, drawing parallels between Butler’s imagined twenty-first century and the real one. In Parable of the Talents, a far-right organization named Christian America comes to power and persecutes the fledgling Earthseed community for its political and alleged sexual deviance. Chaila links this to Rick Perry and Rick Santorum’s fulminations from political pulpits in 2011, suggesting that these are the figures who could make the real 2020s similar to Lauren’s fictional experiences if we do not learn from her example and try to make things change. An audience member at WisCon wondered whether these clip choices were too specific, whether they would date the vid. Yet these are the moments in the vid that pull us out of the spell its seamless production casts, that make us think not only about the impressive adaptation Chaila has crafted but about the disturbing realities that surround us. Perry and Santorum may or may not be recognizable names in a couple of years, but their iconic similarity to fictional dystopia insists that their mode of politics is not a flash in the pan.

For Octavia Butler fans, the tag line for “Parable” neatly condenses how the vid uses the future of the past to talk about the present: In July 2012, Lauren Olamina will turn three. In vidding novels 19 and 15 years old, Chaila turns our gaze on their prescience. Not only in relationship to apocalyptic fictional tropes, but to the real world and real politics as well.

“That’s New Orleans, too,” says Antoine as the cop cars speed past him, likely on their way to the scene of Harley’s murder. He means that the city is more than the drunk St. Patrick’s Day revelers walking past; he and Sonny are both answering the question posed in this episode’s title, “What is New Orleans?” Yet Antoine also echoes many of the show’s critics, who complain that the city is more than just the partying, food, music, and tourist sights that appear so often in its episodes. This episode, signaling the season’s stronger emphasis on crime and corruption, might appeal more to those demanding greater verisimilitude and less televisual tourism, to use Lynnell Thomas’s apt expression.

For many in New Orleans there comes a point when we have to answer a difficult question: is living here worth your life or that of your family? Where do you draw the line? What are you willing to risk, to possibly sacrifice, in order to live in such a magical place? Seeing what is still happening to Ladonna and probably more than one person we know in real life, we ask this question. I answered it back in the early 90s, when most people I knew had had a gun stuck in their face or worse. I was lucky in that I was willing and able to leave and make my life in other places once I chose to leave. But many people stay, believing that there is nowhere else they can live–because of their family ties, work, community, and/or a sense of cultural belonging. Like the Midcity homeowner who says, “When I leave this house, it’s going to be feet first.” In the reverse shot, we see not Hidalgo, who is talking to the gentleman, but his cousin the roofer, transfixed by the conversation. The slow zoom into his closeup emphasizes the emotional power of the man’s ferocious love of his home. A commitment, a conscious choice that this will be where I die, also characterizes Harley, who does indeed die in this episode in the gritty realism we have come to expect from George Pelecanos. If the show had seemed too touristic, this brutal episode offers a possible counter-balance to that.

On the other hand, for those seeking more verisimilitude, I give you the Davis character. So many criticisms of the show focus on what an ass the character of Davis McAlary is. Yet I have to say, Davis is an integral part of the “realism” of the show as well. To paraphrase from a comment thread on an earlier post, I think Davis’s character personifies the enduring and ever-adapting tradition of white supremacy in New Orleans, in this case the music scene. Davis sees his new label, funded by his eccentric Garden District aunt, as a vehicle for his overtly political music that he hopes will speak to the New Orleans public–perhaps the way Creighton Bernette’s YouTube rants gained a local following. A fool’s errand, as Sound of Treme blog points out. New Orleans music has always been “political” but not usually in overt ways; more often it takes the form of “feel good music” to express resistance indirectly.

Herein lies the challenge facing Tremé (and every other media representation of New Orleans): finding a way to balance a celebration of the city’s unique cultural contributions with an acknowledgment of its more conventional, and often more damning, histories, memories, and contemporary realities. In the past weeks, this blog has attempted to meet this challenge with some columns referencing the city’s unique sense of place and coolness factor and others critiquing persistent socioeconomic inequalities and racial divisions. Week 6’s episode “Feels Like Rain” also responds to the challenge, self-consciously, if not always adroitly. Season two’s shift from showcasing New Orleans cultural innovations to documenting the painful process of recovery for the city’s cultural producers is epitomized by Antoine’s (Wendell Pierce) hiring of a straw boss to manage the “regular shit” keeping the band from producing good music.

Ultimately, it is the regular shit that Tremé’s characters – and New Orleans’ community – must contend with in the aftermath of Katrina. Whether it’s Desirée (Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc) pleading for her cousin to be enrolled in a decent, safe school; LaDonna (Khandi Alexander) avoiding a return to her bar where she was brutally attacked; Albert (Clarke Peters) vowing to relocate after mounting frustrations with the insurance company and the Road Home; or Toni’s (Melissa Leo) and Terry’s (David Morse) crusading against the criminal justice system, Tremé forces us to abandon momentarily the exceptional city – exotic, carnivalesque, romantic – in order to better understand the mundane, everyday issues that New Orleanians struggle with. These ongoing struggles attest to the fact that Tremé cannot be only a love letter to New Orleans, but must also, at times, be a “Dear John” letter. Such a letter has been contemplated, if not composed, by countless New Orleans residents (including Louis Armstrong, whom Antoine pays tribute to in this episode) hoping to escape economic, sexual, social, and racial exploitation or exclusion.

Episode 6 is sometimes heavyhanded in its efforts to describe the city’s complexity and the ambivalent relationship some residents have toward it. Nelson, (Jon Seda) the Texas opportunist, compares the city to “a village on an island” where unscrupulous business elites, ethically-challenged politicians, and struggling neighborhood cultural groups are “all connected somehow.” Annie (Lucia Micarelli) reflects on John Hiatt’s “Feels Like Rain” as an allegory for the city: “a little dark sometimes and a little dangerous…like New Orleans.” What they attempt to convey in words, Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, has been crooning to New Orleans audiences for over a decade. Their 1996 hit “Joy and Pain” tells an honest story about relationships by striking a balance between the debilitating and regenerative possibilities of love. Hopefully, Tremé will also continue to strive for such a balance.

Remember when you first found love how you felt so good
Kind that lasts forevermore, so you thought it would
Suddenly the things you see got you hurt so bad
How come the things that make us happy make us sad
Well it seems to me that

Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain
Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain

The creators of Treme sat on a panel at Tulane University in November of last year where they talked about the series, its outlook, its goals, and its differences from The Wire. The focus for Treme was the culture-cality of the city and where the creators aimed their arrow for most of season one. But in this season two, amongst the sadness and pathos, they begin to address the deeply embedded divisions, corruption, and largely racialized visioning of a city wedded to a plantation economy that shapes its educational institutions, housing patterns, job allocation, and routine interactions.

In the rhythm of recent episodes, (and really mainstream jazz), the crosscutting between scenes of Sunday’s episode requires not only an intimacy with the characters but also a colossal feigned empathy with and identification of the similarities between their situations. While New Orleanians seem to love the series and are elated that it has been renewed for a third season, at least the ones that post to the Times Picayune site nola.com, talking to several Black New Orleanians strikes a slightly different note. One ex-pat felt that the story engages the city like a tourist would—centering all of the things that tourist boards foreground in their presentations of cities—food, music, local color, and if possible, exoticism. New Orleans indeed has all of those things and Treme shows them. But the pedestrian, everyday, go-to-work daily New Orleans, the feel of extended family in a place where so many have never known, will never know, any other way of life has been largely absent.

The twin emotions of comfort and resignation feel like they are just beginning to emerge in this series. While a story like Davis’s, for example, is annoying at best, distracting and offensive at worst, Albert Lambreaux Sr. and his frustration/anger with homeowners insurance, Batiste’s reintroduction to the school system and its problems (alongside the lingering dread of Katrina dwelling inside Black children), and the brutality that comes with sustained poverty through LaDonna’s rape, the killing of Benny’s son, and repeated discussions of police brutality get at another New Orleans. It is this New Orleans, the largely Black and poor New Orleans, that is only starting to gain traction in Treme.

This New Orleans is not on the tourist path; it’s beyond Bourbon and besides Mardi Gras. It is this New Orleans that privileges familial traditions and histories. It is one where talks about Indians move beyond costumes and masking. It could be the 7^th Ward New Orleans and the histories of racial mixing, ambiguity, and Creolization as a way of life and division live. This New Orleans must contend with the outcomes of corruption, cronyism, greed, and nepotism.

Living here in New Orleans, one of the most striking conundrums about this series is that while its heartbeat lies with the culture of Black inhabitants, it seems their larger lives cannot be the focus –perhaps due to its audience of largely white and affluent viewers. Regular, non- artistic Black New Orleanians do appear as extras and even capture central roles, as in the case of the awesome, Phyllis Montana-LaBlanc as Desiree. However, a large majority of Black New Orleanians cannot even afford to pay for the network in which this series about their city, their culture, and their lives appear. Like F.E.M.A., Treme has a certain impotence built into its existence. It’s a TV program. But as the series continues, I look forward to viewing the reconciliation or at least further examination of its polls and can only hope that its presentation provides more effect and impact than the Feds (and local government) did at that moment.