In defense of PASSENGERS

Every now and then I see a film get a reaction that makes me wonder if I saw the same movie as the rest of the audience. When OBLIVION came out, it was so aggressively panned that I waited until DVD to view it, upon which I discovered a very entertaining, well-made sci-fi film. Slightly more recently, I felt that the aggressive hate for TOMORROWLAND felt quite out of proportion to the mildly disappointing but still interesting film.

And then there's PASSENGERS. Last weekend, it felt like you couldn't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting someone ready to tell you that the premise was creepy, or that the film was sexist, or that the ethics of the film were appalling.

In a nutshell, here's the premise of the script by Jon Spaihts: Jim is one of 5000 passengers in cryo-sleep for a 120-year voyage to a new colony planet. Due to a completely unprecedented malfunction, his chamber wakes him after 30 years, making him the only person set to be awake for 90 years. He can't go back to sleep and though the ship is programmed to tend to his needs, his only companion is a robot bartender. In other words, he's facing the prospect of never having human contact for the rest of his life.

This is tantamount to solitary confinement, a practice that many psychologists consider inhumane. This article from Gizmodo calls it "the worst kind of psychological torture" and in fact, "solitary confinement beyond 15 days leads directly to severe and irreversible psychological harm. But for some, it can manifest in even less time." We need to take this into consideration and then note that Jim spends an entire YEAR alone on the ship before he comes very close to attempting suicide.

Human beings are social creatures and without that interaction, Jim is trapped in hell. However, he's tech-savvy enough that he knows how to wake up someone else. Company would go a long way to relieving his pain, but there are other ethical concerns. Jim discusses this with his bartender, likening it to being trapped forever on an island, but having the power to transport one person there, knowing that you were ruining their life.

This one interaction alone shows that the film is aware of the ethics behind Jim's predicament. By questioning it in such a way, I don't understand how anyone could come away from the film thinking the movie sees what Jim does as pure. It's largely about the question of if you could make your personal Hell more bearable by condemning someone else to join you. He ultimately awakens the beautiful Aurora, leading her to believe another malfunction is to blame for her state.

Where many of the critics seem to miss the mark is where they equate Jim's actions with a violation of sexual consent. I think it's offensive to actual rape victims to equate anything in this film with sexual assault. To me, what Jim does is not about sex so much as it's about human contact. He needs a companion ship that isn't necessarily sexual. Sure, the water is muddied because the two DO fall for each other and there's no lack of sex appeal on the part of Aurora's portrayer, Jennifer Lawrence.

If Jim had woken up a man, someone who he felt would be his Number One Bro, would we still be having this debate? PASSENGERS seems most interested in the morality behind alleviating your pain by sharing it with someone else. I don't even know if I'd necessarily argue that the film comes down on the side of it being right, but it DOES depict how a desperate person might come to believe this is the only course of action available to them.

Seriously, could YOU face the prospect of 90 years alone on a ship? How far would you have to be pushed before you convinced yourself you HAD to have human contact? And once you arranged that, would you really be forthright with the fact that you caused the malfunction? Jim certainly makes selfish choices, but they're selfish choices in the midst of an incredibly painful experience. I also don't believe you have to choose between being sympathetic to Jim and sympathetic to Aurora.

Aurora rightly is furious when she learns Jim engineered her awakening. "You MURDERED me!" she screams, more than once. The blossoming romance is immediately dead, and she begins a period of shutting him out. At this point, I thought the film might explore her isolation as a way of depicting what her loneliness might drive her to. This path could lead her to understanding Jim's horrible decision, even as it isn't necessary for her to condone it.

Instead, the third act brings Jim and Aurora together to resolve the increasing malfunctions of ship's systems. It turns out that an asteroid impact is to blame for the damage that shut down Jim's pod and that the other damage it caused has built up into a reactor malfunction that will destroy the ship. To save everyone, Jim has to go outside the ship and open a door manually so Aurora can vent the reactor while he's stuck in the path of the radiation. It means certain death, and indeed, he takes the direct blast with only a small shield to deflect it. Though Jim told her not to come for him, Aurora dons a spacesuit of her own and risks her life to bring him back, where he is resuscitated.

There's some criticism that the third-act crisis is a convenient way to let Jim off the hook. If he hadn't woken her, then there would have been no one else to help him save the ship and the entire crew. Aurora is presented with a situation where she can say, "If he hadn't woken me, I'd be dead."

This would be a more fair criticism if the film embraced it. I believe it does not. A couple points to recall:

- As the crisis reaches its peak, Aurora suggests waking some of the crew. There's no hesitation on her part, even though this means they would share her fate on the 90-year voyage. In the context of this moment, doing so would directly save 5000 people as well as herself, so yes, there is a "needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few" scenario. But she's not without self-interest here either. Remember too, that Jim would have died had he not acted to preserve his own sanity.

- Aurora goes against Jim's wishes when she risks herself to save him. Jim is content to die saving everyone else. Is her motivation romantic? I don't think it necessarily has to be, and the film allows for the interpretation that it's not. Aurora surely knows all the details of Jim's horrible year alone and what being that alone did to him. If Jim dies, this is the fate she's facing - the total abyss of loneliness for the rest of her life. Is risking herself for him a purely selfless act? Or is it one she willingly takes because it would be better to die quickly than in the lingering slow torture Jim endured?

Taking those together, I don't think we can discount that Aurora comes to understand what pushed Jim to awaken her. She's stared that same fate in the eye and it gives her what she needs to accept his choice. The ending is not about letting Jim off the hook so much as it's about pushing Aurora to her limits. In the end, she needs companionship just as much as Jim did. This is why I feel that even if there had not been an immediate crisis, Aurora would have eventually thawed things with Jim. Whether that came as a result of madness, Stockholm Syndrome or genuine empathy is a matter of debate.

Moreover, this is easier to see if you're not determined to equate Jim with being a "stalker." He's not a calculating and manipulative predator. The film more accurately diagnoses him as a drowning man grabbing for any life preserver. You can decry his actions, but the point of the film is to make you ask, "What if you were the one who was drowning?"

It disturbs me that we see art being attacked for merely exploring complex scenarios like this. Back when Indecent Proposal was made, did people think that just by making the film, the creators were advocating that a married woman sleep with a billionaire for one million dollars? If we discourage art that asks uncomfortable questions or explores moral grey areas, what will be left with? You can be uncomfortable with Jim does and still acknowledge that the film doesn't endorse it by building drama around it.

Passengers is the story of a man pushed to his moral limits. The more I examine it, the more I suspect the film is rejected out of hand by viewers uncomfortable contemplating what they would truly do in Jim's shoes.

Bonus: I wrote an article for Film School Rejects in which I worked out how Jim and Aurora could have used the functioning medical pod at the end of the film to take turns sleeping long enough for both of them to make it to the colony within their lifespans. You can find it here.

A tribute to Carrie Fisher: actor, author, and Princess Leia

"If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable." - Carrie Fisher.

It's ten years ago, almost to the day, and thanks to one of my closest friends, I'm sitting in the Geffen Playhouse for the first public performance of WISHFUL DRINKING, Carrie Fisher's one woman show. With the above quote, our evening begins, taking us on a hysterical and candid tour of the life of the woman best known as Princess Leia. Before the evening is out, she has become much more than that for many audience members, she's become Hollywood royalty, a bipolar sufferer, an addict, a mother, a writer with a keen sense of self-deprecation, and (perhaps most remarkably for anyone who came just because of her connection to a galactic freedom fighter) a human being.

For someone who achieved iconic status at 19, that is no easy task. The show touches on this, in some semblance, as she quips that "I'm not famous. Princess Leia is famous and I look like her."

Carrie, with all due respect, your mother was Debbie Reynolds and her union with your father was so famous that announcement of your impending arrival made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. I'm gonna call bullshit on that "I'm not famous" line.

Today we mourn, for Carrie Fisher has left us at the too-young age of sixty.

Like many of my generation, Princess Leia was my introduction to Carrie Fisher. Also in line with most men of my generation, Carrie Fisher was my first crush. I think. There's a chance it was Vanna White and right now I'm not writing Vanna's obituary. (Though with the kind of year 2016 has been, who knows what the next week will bring.) Leia was bold, brassy and she didn't take shit from anyone. Think of how many young men grew up seeing this "damsel in distress" snark back to her captors and then take charge of her own rescue. That had to have an impact. Over the last several days, I've seen women of all ages pay tribute to how much of a feminist icon Leia was to them. I have to believe that many a young boy grew up more enlightened because of seeing kickass women like Leia.

And there's no doubt that Leia is one of the most iconic, perhaps MOST iconic badass women in popular culture. She's on that particular feminist Mount Rushmore, probably with Ripley and Sarah Connor as companions. (I'd love to recognize a non-genre female as the fourth one, but let's face it, it's Lois Lane.)

I've gone to San Diego Comic Con every year for over a decade and soon after I started attending, there was an explosion of cosplayers wearing the iconic golden bikini Leia wore in RETURN OF THE JEDI. Now, like most men of my generation I had a certain affection for that outfit, but it surprised me to see such passion from the opposite gender. As I observed a gathering of some 40 such fans for a photoshoot, overheard snatches of conversation left little doubt they were TRUE fans. (They invoked the Star Wars Expanded Universe, mentioning things like "Thrawn," "Mara Jade," and "Jania.) I had a few instances to make conversation with these ladies (and BELIEVE me in that situation you are trying hard to make eye contact, so engaging them in substantive topics is suggested) so I asked, "Why this outfit?" The answer usually was some version of "Because she's a badass in it!"

I think of that whenever I see a thinkpiece attacking the "sexism" of Slave Leia. And then I think of Carrie's perfect reply to a father wanting to know what to tell his daughter about the merchandising of Slave Leia: "Tell them that a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn’t like it. And then I took it off. Backstage."

(And I think most of the male appeal for the outfit is a mix of this and how attractive the performer appeared in it. For most of them I don't think it promotes slavery any more than a Dark Side Anakin cosplay advocates child murder.)

I saw some tweets today chiding people for honoring her "only" as Princess Leia. There was a weird sort of shaming going on, an implication that not genuflecting on her writing career was some kind of disrespect. Poppycock, I say! Mourn how you choose to mourn. That doesn't take away from the fact she was an accomplished and witty writer of several books and an accomplished script doctor. During the 90s, she worked on HOOK, SISTER ACT, and THE WEDDING SINGER.

You might not realize that because she never sought credit for her rewrites. Today on Twitter, Robert Hewitt Wolfe relayed the following anecdote:

I had one professional interaction w/ Carrie Fisher. We were on an arbitration panel together, got on a conference call to determine credit.

— Robert Hewitt Wolfe (@writergeekrhw) December 27, 2016

These calls are anonymous, but I recognized her voice immediately. Carrie Fisher was a top notch script doctor... but spent the call...

— Robert Hewitt Wolfe (@writergeekrhw) December 27, 2016

Passionately defending the credit of the original writer over the parade of rewriters and script doctors. Fisher saved Writer A's credit.

— Robert Hewitt Wolfe (@writergeekrhw) December 27, 2016

It would have been understandable if Carrie Fisher had sided with rewriters like herself, but instead she protected the little guy.

— Robert Hewitt Wolfe (@writergeekrhw) December 27, 2016

It's noteworthy... praiseworthy, in fact, that Carrie Fisher never sought or accepted credit on the scripts she rewrote. She was all class.

— Robert Hewitt Wolfe (@writergeekrhw) December 27, 2016

"I had one professional interaction w/ Carrie Fisher. We were on an arbitration panel together, got on a conference call to determine credit. These calls are anonymous, but I recognized her voice immediately. Carrie Fisher was a top notch script doctor... but spent the call passionately defending the credit of the original writer over the parade of rewriters and script doctors. Fisher saved Writer A's [WGA-speak for "the original writer"] credit. It would have been understandable if Carrie Fisher had sided with rewriters like herself, but instead she protected the little guy. It's noteworthy... praiseworthy, in fact, that Carrie Fisher never sought or accepted credit on the scripts she rewrote. She was all class."

For those not in the business, screen credit means royalties, and that's a huge loss of income for a writer who get's arbitrated off the credits. Some rewriters try to secure their place by changing as many details as possible just in a bid to grab credit. A rewriter who fights on behalf of the writer who originated the project is a true class act.

I'm traveling this week, so I'm tabbing this obituary out on my iPhone from my hotel room. As it happens, the same hotel room where I rewatched THE FORCE AWAKENS the night before. I think it was a great gift to us that Carrie was around to resurrect Princess Leia one more time to see her continuing to persevere in the fight against evil. It may have been a great gift for Carrie herself too. There are too few roles for strong women of a certain age in Hollywood and it makes me happy she got to experience that once more.

There is still one more outing for General Leia, as Carrie had completed next year's EPISODE VIII. Inevitably, talk will turn to how her loss will impact the conclusion of the trilogy. I like to think that some of this is about people hoping that an icon like Leia is allowed to retire with dignity, to honor Carrie. There are bigger concerns than a film, but I get that Leia meant a lot to many men and women and it's hard to picture her fading away, suddenly gone from the narrative mid-story. So I will strive to take the "What this means for EPISODES VIII and IX" talk in that spirit. No one can bear seeing Leia die after losing Carrie Fisher. Hopefully the character is retired with grace.

I only met Carrie Fisher once, during a time when I worked on a small film in which she appeared. We were on location when I glanced down the street and saw a diminutive woman approaching from about a half-block away. She had a trenchcoat and dark glasses on, so I didn't yet recognize her but even at that distance, she walked with such authority that I found myself involuntary standing straighter, almost at attention.

Some people in power carry themselves with such authority that you can feel it before they speak. And here was five feet and one inch of pure "Don't mess with me" headed my way. My gut reaction was that this was either a studio exec or a producer headed to set. It wasn't until she was almost upon me that my brain went, "Wait, isn't that.."

I tell this so that you can understand the strength and charisma she carried herself with, and how in those moments I first saw her, none of that was mortgaged from identification with Princess Leia. That was pure Carrie.

My only regret is I never had a conversation of significance with her, though I do hope whoever is showing her around Heaven is stocked with a great deal of the vice she indulged in on set and that it was mandatory we had plenty of on that production: Diet Coke. Farewell Carrie Fisher.

My ROGUE ONE reflections over at Film School Rejects

I haven't written a full review of ROGUE ONE, and at this point I'm not likely to. For the most part, I enjoyed it, but my immediate reaction was that it didn't work for me the way THE FORCE AWAKENS did. Since last year, I've watched THE FORCE AWAKENS at least seven times and the film still works just as well for me as it did after my first viewing. In some ways I might find it more re-watchable than parts of the original trilogy, but beyond that, I can't think of too many films in the recent past that have made me WANT to rewatch it that many times without getting weary of it.

(And I can only blame one of those rewatches on the writing process of THE MAKING OF STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII. By the way, if you still haven't checked out that script that I wrote with Brian Michael Scully, you can find it here.)

I bring that up by way of mentioning that "not as good as THE FORCE AWAKENS" is far from a condemnation from me. I thought ROGUE ONE was solid entertainment, particularly once it got going. The early segments of the film drag as all the pieces come into place. What matters is that it finishes strong. From the point where the team assembles against orders to get the Death Star plans, everything seems to click into place, and we get another JEDI-esque finale with several battles advancing on different fronts.

Outside of Jyn, I felt disconnected from most of the characters, and that's where THE FORCE AWAKENS gains a lot of its edge over this film. Donnie Yen's Chirrut has some clever moments, and the novelty of a blind devotee of the Force taking down superior forces never gets old. Okay, and K-2SO was pretty awesome. The movie managed enough base hits and triples that I came away satisfied.

Of course, the Darth Vader scenes were the sort of moments fans have been hungering for for 30 years, particularly the hallway scene. But that also speaks to one of my bigger issues with the film in general. This is the first Star Wars feature film to venture outside the Saga Episodes, and the first place we go ends up being a very direct prequel to the original film. I have some concerns about these "Star Wars Stories" only going to the most obvious places in Star Wars history, and for further discussion of that, check out my piece "The Known Unknowns of Star Wars" at Film School Rejects.

While you're over there, click on over to my second ROGUE ONE story, "7 Films That Could Be Headlined by Creepy Dead CGI Actors." As you might infer, I felt that the use of VFX to resurrect Peter Cushing as Tarkin yielded somewhat mixed results. But if we get past the ethical issues, think of all the new performances we could enjoy!

Have a good holiday everyone, and if you get a chance, please buy my book, "MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films." It's a great last-minute stocking stuffer for the film geek in your life!

I'm a guest on the Law & Order podcast "These Are Their Stories!"

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a MASSIVE fan of Law & Order. My essay declaring Jack McCoy one of TV's greatest characters will attest to that, and I've been known to berate you to track down some of the best episodes of the series.

Thus, when I recently learned that there was a new podcast devoted to Law & Order called "These are Their Stories," my first thought was "How can I become a guest on this?" Fortunately, the creators of the podcast, true crime writers Rebecca Lavoie and Kevin Flynn were kind enough to oblige and booked me an episode from Season 18, the period of the show where Jack McCoy was the District Attorney of New York, and had to deal with an Executive Assistant DA named Michael Cutter who was even more of a maverick than Jack used to be. It's an under-appreciated era of the show, and while this episode in particular, "Tango" is not representative of that era at its best, I think we got a great conversation out of it.

If nothing else,  you can learn my favorite detective team in all the franchise, as well as my favorite legal team. I got the sense that at least one of those answers surprised the hosts.

Go here to listen to the episode. You can also download the episode here.

You can find the homepage for These Are Their Stories here.

Film School Rejects: The Flash and Supergirl as my wife's gateway drug to geekdom. Plus MORE articles!

I know my posting has been sporadic the last few months. There are reasons for that and I'm hoping to redress that as we head into 2017. If time permits I'll do a couple belated reviews for some recent films, and with luck, I'll have seen enough of the major 2016 releases to do a Top 10 or Top 20 post. One factor in my absence here is that I've been writing a bit more for Film School Rejects. This has been going on for a few months, and I've neglected to cross-post those over here.

Yesterday, FSR published my most recent essay: How The Flash and Supergirl became my wife's gateway drug to superhero fandom. It's a reflection on how the Greg Berlanti shows are making an incredibly complex mythology accessible to people who never would have considered reading a comic book. You can also learn how the most intense fight of my marriage was over the time travel logic of The Flash.

My other recent articles are:

Gilmore Girls "Final Four Words" Leave the Most Important Conversation Unsaid - An exploration of the abrupt conclusion of the recent series revival by contrasting it with one of the best-received series finales: Angel.

Reclaiming the Fun Side of Batman - I take a look at the recent animated film Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, to push back against the idea that Batman always has to be serious and gritty.

An Appreciation of That Thing You Do on its 20th Anniversary - A loving tribute to one of my favorite films, and a deep-dive into how the Extended Cut of the movie can show how critical the right edits can be in taking an okay film to the next level. The longer cut of the film has so many unnecessary moments that were (rightly) removed for pace and repetition. It's a wonderful opportunity to extrapolate how Tom Hanks learned from and corrected his mistakes.

6 Films That Are Still Waiting for Their Legacy Sequels - In a film culture that's brought us the re-quels like Creed and The Force Awakens, what other library titles might be ripe for a reboot with new protagonists treading familiar paths while being mentored by their predecessors?

A Look Ahead to What the Next 15 Years Holds for the Lights Out Franchise - Using other horror franchises as a template, how much the other slots in the inevitable Lights Out box set be filled?


As FSR publishes through Medium, you can follow me on Medium here.  I'm going to try to be better about flagging these over here, but that's a good way to see articles as soon as they post.

Also, with the holiday season approaching, I'd like to again remind everyone that my book Michael F-ing Bay: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films is a great stocking stuffer for the film geek in your life. It's only $5 on Kindle!

I always feel like a self-promoting whore when I do this, but any time I plug the book on Twitter, I get replies from people who say they had no idea it existed. The extra cash would definitely come in handy this holiday season, so if you've enjoyed my posts and would like to leave me a tip for the holidays, please consider buying the book.

You can find all my Michael F-ing Bay posts here. This one in particular is a good all-purpose primer on it.

Be the lightning bolt - Some thoughts on the last week

I haven't posted much lately. A lot of that has been work commitments, but for the past week, my silence has been because I've been trying to process the aftermath of this election. My candidate lost, which is something I've lived through before. People I know voted for the other guy, which is ALSO something I've lived through before. This time is different.

I don't want to re-litigate Trump vs. Hillary because I've got a lot to say about this aftermath, but I think we were handed about as clear a contrast as possible. Hillary was a flawed, albeit extremely qualified candidate with a long record of public service working towards the betterment of people. Was she unblemished? No, but I feel like we have to get over the "purity myth" of politicians. You go to war with the army you have, not the one you want. In Trump, we had a man with no history of public service, a lot of very questionable ties to Russia. His entry to the campaign came with a lot of ugly racist statements about Mexicans and illegal immigrants. And then, after a detour to attack captured POWs, he called for a total Muslim ban. At that point, even Paul Ryan rebuked him.

I'll admit that even at that point, as shocking as his comments were, I felt secure that they were disqualifying to such a degree that we'd never have to worry about this man facing a general election. But he kept going and going, like the Energizer Bunny. In any logical world, it was inevitable that the preponderance of these gaffes would catch up to him. But they didn't.

There's a metaphor I've been using a lot this year: "Luke Skywalker under the stairs." It's referencing a moment in RETURN OF THE JEDI. Luke, after having been goaded into a fight with Darth Vader, has retreated into a hiding spot. He's determined not to fight, but Vader keeps taunting until he finds the one nerve to hit. At that point, Luke leaps out from under the throne room stairs, lightsaber blazing and unleashes hell upon Vader. Lightsaber strike after lightsaber strike. By the end of it, Vader's on his back, disarmed and beaten.

That's how I felt as we got within 12 months of the election. I know I have friends back home who had... shall we say... strong opinions about Obama. I'd hoped that eight years of vast improvement and prosperity would turn them around, but primary season made it clear they somehow perceived Obama as the worst thing to happen to the Presidency. I behaved during the first few Trump months, figuring that some of them were just sharing Trump stuff to gawk at the car crash.

And then I hit my red line. It was the infamous "Sheriff's Star" dog whistle that was a clear anti-Semitic meme. I was proud of the bravery shown by a New York Observer columnist named Dana Schwartz, who wrote an open letter to Trump's son-in-law and campaign manager Jared Kushner, expressing her concerns that this was being seen as support for the anti-Semetic alt-right. Kushner also happens to be Schwartz's BOSS. Which... look, I like to think I have balls, but to openly suggest to your boss that he's encouraging Neo-Nazis takes BALLS. It's worth noting that Schwartz had already taken days of really ugly abuse from alt-right trolls when she did this, so she knew when she wrote this, it was only gonna draw more.

But it was the right thing to do. She appealed to him to have Trump denounce it. For his part, Kushner gave a response that started with "My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite" and basically proceeded from there. It didn't really address the core issue - that Trump's campaign seemed to be courting the anti-Semite vote - and it was in line with the rest of the campaign rhetoric, wherein his surrogates tried to convince us that it was not a Star of David in the meme, but rather a sheriff's star.

Bullshit.

I'm of Jewish descent, but not EXACTLY Jewish. I never attended Hebrew School, never had a bar mitzvah and my mother's not Jewish, so in the strictest sense, I am not. However, half of my family is and my wife and her family are. I've read that children of mixed-religion families are more likely to consider themselves Jewish because of the cultural history attached, and that's generally where I fall.

We all grew up with the Holocaust as part of our past. I don't discount that non-Jews are equally capable of understanding that horror, but when you're growing up, that history is one thing that reminds you that no matter how much you look white, there is a LARGE segment of the population that is capable of seeing you as The Other.

I never faced anti-Semitism growing up in the suburbs of the midwest. I don't even think I knew the word "kike" until high school and THAT only came from controversy over lyrics in a Michael Jackson song. You can't even blame this on me going to a lily-white school. My high school had a higher percentage of black students than white and even there, I never felt anything you'd perceive as racial tensions. The most racist remarks you'd encounter might be something like someone observing all the black kids walk around with their pants sagging.

Bottom line: I grew up in a world where it felt like we were all educated enough that the Holocaust could never happen again and that my generation was bridging all the racial divides we'd read so much about in our history books. It's not that racism was gone, but it felt like strides forward were being made. The few bad apples were the minority and people were basically good at their hearts.

The Holocaust seemed like the red line we could all agree would never be crossed. It's why Holocaust deniers are so vile. The people responding to Ms. Schwartz weren't denying the Holocaust, but they were celebrating it. There was a lot of "We're warming the ovens up for you, kike" and when I checked the mentions of several other Jewish journalists, it was clear this was NOT an isolated block of support for Trump. It was also equally clear they had interpreted the meme the way Schwartz had.

Kushner didn't address any of the rising anti-Semitism the campaign was contributing to. There was no apology to the Jewish people for causing any pain. There was just denial, "Oh it doesn't mean that. Oh, you're being hyper-sensitive."

Their earlier attempts to incite hate against Mexicans and Muslims had been undisguised. Even if they had offered an apology, it would ring hollow. This was unique. This was an anti-Jew dog whistle. If it was unintentional, the easiest solution would be to offer apology. The denial, "Donald Trump is not an anti-Semite," infuriated me because that's not really the issue. He doesn't have to BE an anti-Semite for his actions to empower anti-Semites. All this did was provide cover for people whose own bigotry drew them to Trump, but didn't want to admit it.

I'm sure that my friends who voted Trump convinced themselves, "Well, I'm not an anti-Semite, racist or homophobe," and are offended at the suggestion that supporting Trump makes them one. Empowering homophobia IS an act of homophobia. Empowering anti-Semitism is an act of anti-Semitism. And as I said, this was not a difficult dilemma. The Trump Campaign was made up of values that every decent person should be able to reject without much introspection.

My generation grew up without really being tested with regard to bigotry, at least not in the way our parents were. Our failing might be the belief that our work stops with "I am not a bigot." We confer our own moral purity and because we're not faced with daily opportunities to affirm it outwardly, we believe that's enough. It breeds complacency and we start to think that "it can't happen here."

I've seen more anti-Semitism in the last year than in the 35 years I lived before it. It was drawn to the Trump agenda like moths to a flame and with Steve Bannon of Breitbart News acting as campaign manager, it's clear the alt-right had a mouthpiece. They saw it and anyone paying attention would have seen what a Trump victory would embolden.

THIS was my Luke Skywalker under the stairs moment. You were either with the crowd that thinks Hitler didn't go far enough, or you're with her. I'd say "it's that simple" but it's even simpler than it would have been with almost any other candidate. Trump had no coherent policy, nothing that should pose a moral dilemma in terms of rejecting the rest of his slate. For the sake of argument, if he had an economic plan that made sense, would boost the economy, help the middle class and reduce the deficit, I could see someone being mildly torn - at least up until the anti-gay stuff and the sexual assault confession and allegations.

There was no such policy, though. Where there were shreds of a policy, experts almost unanimously agreed they'd bring ruin to foreign relations, the economy and the environment. I'm saying this so it's clear - his agenda had plenty of reasons to reject it even if you discount every racial and sexual issue he barreled into. We're not dealing with a case of "Damn, he has great ideas, but he believes some horrible things."

Easy to reject, right?

And yet I saw the Hillary bashing memes still surfacing via the Facebook pages of old high school friends. Some were subtle about their Trump support, others flagrantly "liked" his page and passed forward his words from time to time. I admit, I deliberately provoked a few of them, drawing a firm line about a month out saying that I could not be friends with anyone who supported this man.

That was part threat, part truth. I was cutting off less as a matter of principle and more because seeing that kind of moral failure in a person forever changed how I felt about them. I have old friendships that are forever tainted by the knowledge that these people were so easily capable of performing mental judo to excuse someone who saw me as less of a person, who were indifferent to the numerous ways my gay friends would be caused pain under this agenda, who were not disturbed by disrespect shown to veterans, to Mexicans, to women.

These people, these Trump voters, sat in the same history classes as me. I watched their faces go pale alongside mine as Holocaust survivors would tell stories that MUST not be lost to time. When we learned about the Asian internment camps of WWII, I remember how hyperaware we were of our Japanese classmates, and how WRONG what was done to them seemed. But now, when you replace "Asian" with "Muslim," that same repulsion didn't exist.

It's easy to hate some faceless bigots in a small town in Podunk Red State. To see your old friends fail the "What would I have done in Nazi Germany" test is... it's soul-crushing.

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." Do you recognize that quote? It's from Anne Frank's diary, written while she was hiding in an attic from the Nazis who would eventually kill her. I want to agree with her, but the hardest lesson of this past week might be that... I don't.

I figured Trump's victory would empower some ugliness. I didn't expect to actually WAKE UP to reports of violence and harassment. It took less than a day for people of color to start being harassed by groups of white men. The less fortunate ones were physically assaulted, while some were merely intimidated and told to "get out of the country." The KKK was openly celebrating in North Carolina.

When you see that happen so quickly, you realize it's not as simple as just blaming Trump. These people were already here. They were hiding, walking among us, like some sort of xenophobic sleeper agents. And a lot of them are YOUNG. My generation was supposed to be the enlightened ones. We were supposed to be learning from the past. Sure, there were some bad apples. You can't help that, but as a collective, we were post-racial, right?

Observing a switch flip THAT quickly is like watching reality break before your eyes. Evil rose because we all convinced ourselves it was impossible something that ugly could happen without us knowing about it. If we were less certain of the virtue of our fellow man, maybe we'd have seen it before it boiled over. There's not inherent good in this world. We have to make it.

It's hard not to feel broken after these election results. The Republicans targeted minority voters in several key states and worked to depress turnout (and again, made no effort to disguise what they were doing). The FBI Director released a letter designed to inflict maximum damage on the Clinton campaign soon before the election, a letter that turned out to contain no new information. The media couldn't be bothered to talk about ANYTHING but Hillary's emails. Yet, despite all of that sandbagging, Hillary Clinton still not only got more votes than Trump, but one of the highest popular vote counts of this century.

And she still lost. We played their rigged game, we got the votes and she STILL lost to a guy who offered nothing and rode in on a bandwagon of hate and misogyny. Even just as an abstract concept, that feels hopeless. When you have friends who you know will suffer a lot of pain because of this, it's... look, I'm out of synonyms, it's bad.

I don't have the rousing "let's go fight" speech that undoubtedly would come out of the mouth of Captain Picard, or Kirk, or Buffy, or Superman or... you get the picture. I've spent a week trying to conjure the words, but they all sound hollow in the face of this past year. What I can offer you is this...

There's a movie I watched a lot as a kid called Short Circuit. It's about a military robot who's struck by lighting and develops a cuddly personality. His fellow robots remain instruments of destruction, but "Number 5" becomes a decent person. Right now, that's my metaphor for humanity. We're not basically good, but some people get struck by lighting and evolve beyond expectations.

Be that lightning bolt. Make it possible for someone to evolve. 

I think again of Luke Skywalker in a fighting frenzy until he has the Dark Lord of the Sith at his mercy. In that moment, he's beaten him, but that's not what saves the soul of the man who once was Anakin Skywalker. That table is turned when an unbowed Luke faces the Emperor head-on and becomes the target of all his evil power. It's that act of bravery that provokes Vader to finally turn on his dark master. He throws off years of lies and hurls him to his death.

Should the next few years become a fight for the very soul of our nation, don't be afraid to take the impact of that dark lightning. Take that stand and maybe, just maybe, those who have been blinded by the dark can save themselves and us all.

SUPERGIRL premiere reaches new heights with Superman

I've been away for a while working on other projects, but I couldn't let the opportunity go by to comment on the SUPERGIRL season premiere.

Back when SUPERGIRL was announced, I wondered how they'd handle the Superman issue. It's tricky doing a show about an offshoot character when the main franchise character is controlled by the movie division. I thought a cool way to get around this would be to start the show after some version of "The Death of Superman." It explains why Superman is off-screen and would have given Kara an interesting arc about her struggle to fill the shoes of a beloved hero. Then, at some point many seasons down the line, Superman could have always been resurrected and spun off into his own show.

Instead, the creators opted to just keep Superman an off-screen presence. While I know some people complained about the Super-cousins conversing only in IMs, I think that was the smart play. It implies communications between them, even while it kept Clark off-screen. Not bringing in Superman until Supergirl had time to establish herself and stand on her own legs.

Introducing Superman to this universe was bound to be a challenge. Even though Supergirl is the junior partner, it's still her show. She can't play second fiddle, but at the same time... it's SUPERMAN. He's supposed to be the greatest and purest hero. If Kara showed him up at every turn, it undermines Superman's reputation and the way he's been built up on the show. The challenge: how do you make Superman everything he's been hyped up to be and not turn Kara into a supporting character on her own show?

That's a tough needle to thread and they pulled it off. The first smart move was to put them up against a challenge that needed both of them to fight. Of course, the Venture crisis is the latest in a long line of aerial disasters throughout the Superman mythos. (Hey, when your main character flies, you want to structure an action sequence that takes advantage of that.) It gives Clark and Kara an easy win and a good opportunity for teamwork.

A lot of shows decide that when a new character comes in, they should have a strong conflict with one of the main characters. Sometimes it works, but just as often it can prompt a reaction of, "Who's this asshole who got here five minutes ago and is giving shit to the characters I love?" ER did this constantly, and in most cases, all it did was make the new guys harder to like. I'm glad the show fought the urge to play up the tension between Superman and Supergirl.

Melissa Benoist again proved she's the show's MVP when she was completely endearing as Supergirl gushed over how awesome it was to finally do a rescue with Superman. After so many years of grim heroes taking their job seriously, it's refreshing to have a hero who does good and is all "That was SO cool!" On top of that, she was so happy that Superman saw how competent she was, like a proud child showing off for her parents. It takes some skill to have a character as strong as her somehow be the everyman audience surrogate, but that moment underlined why the show works -despite her powers, Supergirl still feels very much like one of us.

Of course, Benoist also benefited from a strong scene partner in Tyler Hoechlin. In all my fancasting for the part, I don't think he ever would have been on my radar. Part of this is because within the show, Superman would probably have to be in his mid-thirties and Hoechlin is barely older than Benoist. (The premiere lampshaded this with a fun throwaway.) It would have been great if the stars aligned to give one-time Superman Brandon Routh a shot at the part, but I get that once he entered the Berlanti-verse as Ray Palmer, he was never gonna be Clark Kent again.

Hoechlin might be our best small-screen Superman yet. His introductory scene showed he had a good grip on a Clark that was earnest and nerdy without being an over-the-top geek and he radiated the same calm and confidence as Superman that Christopher Reeve did. Reeve is always going to be the gold standard, and right now I'm putting Hoechlin in the same class as Routh and Cavill, who are just below Reeve.

Hoechlin's other big moment to shine was against Calista Flockhart's Cat Grant. Despite a pretty significant age difference in real life, the two played off each other so well that Cat's crush felt kind of sweet and not at all like a "cougar" joke that other shows would have gone for. Flockhart has consistently been one of the stronger cast members and it's gonna hurt to lose her as a regular. Hopefully she'll make frequent visits because she and Benoist bring out the best in each other, and Cat's the sort of defined and dominating female character that we have too little of on TV these days.

The later part of the show also found the balance between the two Super-cousins. Two action scenes required them to split up, but in both instances, the writers were careful to let Kara "kill the bull." She's the one who saves Lena Luthor's helicopter and she's also the one to reinforce the building's collapsed foundation. Each time, Superman was given a challenge worthy of his powers while the big emotional wins were delegated to Kara. Superman wasn't undermined to build up Kara and the integrity of both characters was respected. It seems effortless on-screen, but I'll bet many hours, if not days of discussion went into servicing both heroes properly. It's nice work all around.

Shorter takes:

- I hope we eventually get to meet this universe's Lois Lane. For the Berlanti connection, I'd love to see former EVERWOOD co-star Emily VanCamp land the part, though I'm sure her Marvel contract prevents that. But after some thought, I think I landed on an even better possibility: Autumn Reeser.

- I was surprised they broke up James and Kara that fast, but I'm okay with them putting the breaks on things. James reads as so much older than her that it makes for an odd pairing. They're like a big brother/younger sister type of dynamic more than anything else. He and Lucy didn't seem like a great couple but they at least felt more on each other's level. A Kara/James match-up might work better in later years after she's matured a bit.

- Wynn working at the DEO is an abrupt move for the character and feels more like an effort to get Jeremy Jordan closer to the main action of the plots.  Back when SMALLVILLE decided that "the Lana problem" could be solved by tying her into the mythos more closely, we got that dreadful witch plot. Hopefully this works out better.

- With Wynn no longer at CatCo and Cat herself on the way out, does James have anyone to interact with at work? I guess he and Kara will be partnered there, but pulling Wynn out of that world takes away a pretty important scene partner for Olsen.

- I'm sure that eventually Lena Luthor is gonna end up on the dark side, but rather that try to outguess her agenda or when she'll show her hand, I think I'll just sit back and enjoy the ride.

- In a sad coincidence, the debut of a new Superman came on the 12th anniversary of Christopher Reeve's passing. I wrote a tribute to Reeve six years ago on this date.