The Top 25 Fantastic TV Shows of the 2010s

I don’t consume enough contemporary films, music, or novels to make “best of the decade” lists of those, but I do keep up with TV especially fantastic TV--“fantastic” in the sense of non-realist genres, i.e. science fiction, magical realism, surrealism, etc., broadly conceived. So, here’s my top 25 best fantastic TV shows of the 2010s.

Honorable mentions (These are shows that I watched, appreciated, but honestly still haven’t finished and, frankly, find kind of dreary):

Game of Thrones
Westworld
The Man in the High Castle
American Horror Story
The 100
Orphan Black
Mr. Robot
The Handmaid’s Tale

25. The Mandalorian

Okay, it’s too new to fairly assess, but it earns a spot because it succeeds so well as a proof of concept: the first live action Star Wars story not to feature a single character from the original films (even the Ewok movies had Wicket). Given that “The Skywalker Saga” seems to be ending disappointingly, this show demonstrates that the franchise can focus on what it was always best at, world building, and doesn’t have to be beholden to a particular narrative. Also, it looks amazingly cinematic--gotta love that Disney money.

24. The Netflix Marvel shows

This is another one that earns a spot based on its strengths as a proof of concept. The idea of an interconnected TV universe running parallel to the cinematic universe was a lot cooler in theory than in execution. These shows ended up being a slog. Still, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Matt Murdock are interesting characters who are well-realized; had each series been a single eight-episode season rather than multiple 13-episode seasons, they might have been great.

23. Runaways

This is, in many ways, the show I wish the Netflix Marvel shows had been. It still sometimes took itself too seriously, but it was generally breezier and more willing to embrace its comic book roots.

22. The CW DC shows

Speaking of embracing comic book roots…. I honestly couldn’t keep up with the “Arrowverse” shows, but to have built out a universe as expansive as this one is an amazing feat. By my count, it features five official series and four contemporaenously related series, and it’s roped in characters and material from five older series. This is not counting several spinoff web series and references to various movies. It might be cheesy and have a much smaller budget, but it far exceeds Marvel in terms of storytelling scope.

21. The Amazing World of Gumball

I appreciate this show’s manic energy, and its artful blending of radically different animation styles.

20. Big Mouth

This show could’ve been another Family Guy, and it’s really impressive that it has avoided going that route for three seasons now. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a lot more thoughtful than you’d expect from a show with this many dick jokes.

19. Person of Interest

Okay hear me out: yes it’s a CBS procedural that superficially looks like it could be another NCIS spinoff, and yes its take on cops and the surveillance state is ultimately really disturbingly right wing. But it’s also a really in-depth consideration of the ontology of artificial intelligence, how an artificial intelligence would think differently, and how one might communicate with an artificial intelligence. The moments when it goes full William Gibson are pretty great. And it has Michael Emerson, Amy Acker, and a pre-Empire Taraji P. Henson.

18. Russian Doll

I don’t know what to say about this show except Natasha Lyonne is awesome.

17. Black Mirror

I’ve seen people call this show technophobic or preachy, but I think that misses the mark; it uses technology as a touchstone to explore different kinds of relationships and the functioning of civic institutions. It’s not The Twilight Zone, but it hits the spot.

16. Rick and Morty

Its insufferable fandom aside, it’s just a really witty and well made show.

15. Stranger Things

I’m annoyed that it became more zeitgeisty than the other Netflix shows that are higher on the list, but it’s still a damn fun show and a really impressive pastiche.

14. The Americans

Okay, it’s a stretch to include this on a list of fantastic shows, but it’s a sort-of alternate history spy show, and that’s close enough, and it’s clearly one of the best shows of the decade.

13. The Good Place

Like the Americans, this is another one that doesn’t need me to sell it; it’s just an obviously great show.

12. 3%

Brazillian dystopian show on Netflix. If you haven’t checked it out, do so ASAP. It’s a superb illustration of how the perpetuation of inequality depends on widespread mythologizing of the idea of meritocracy.

11. Bojack Horseman

A good old fashioned Hollywood satire that is also a uniquely modern exploration of the entertainment industry in the Me Too era. It also has some of the best word play in TV history.

10. Agents of SHIELD/Agent Carter

I made a pointed decision to put this in the top ten, because not only do I maintain that these are the best TV shows based on superhero comics to have come out in the past decade, I also argue that they’re the shows that demonstrate that there’s still some value in, for lack of a better term, 90’s-style TV. AoS doesn’t have movie stars in its regular cast, it has a limited budget, it’s largely episodic, and its act structure rigidly adheres to the requirements of commercial breaks. It’s comfortingly familiar and old fashioned in so many ways, but it’s still damn smart and creative, with a lot of genuinely exciting moments.

9. Gravity Falls

Weird fiction par excellence. If you want your kid to get into Buffy and The X-Files and Twin Peaks as a teenager, start them on Gravity Falls. I’ve already introduced Sam to it.

8. Lady Dynamite

Pug-loving bipolar ladies are hilarious and awesome. That’s why I married one.

7. Adventure Time

The best, most fully realized fantasy epic in TV history. Several episodes made me weep (“I Remember You”), several made my jaw drop (“Escape from the Citadel”). The show proves that there is more than one way to package a complex, emotionally weighty piece of myth.

6. The Expanse

This show’s so cool. Each season offers a masterclass in how to really take your time building drama and leading up to a big game changing climax.

5. The Leftovers

Any show on my top 5 you could make a strong argument for being the best show of the decade, and I might not polemically defend The Leftovers the way I would my top four, but that’s also because it doesn’t really need it.

4. Sense8

The best use of a science fiction premise to explore human empathy. And the second-most egregious premature cancelation on this list, after my number one choice.

3. Atlanta

This may seem like a stretch, but Atlanta is absolutely a work of weird fiction. It has an irresistible dreamlike quality that is only rivaled by the #2 choice below.

2. Twin Peaks: The Return

Man, this show. I’ve said before that there are two kinds of “arthouse” films: puzzles and playgrounds. Puzzles are obscure and challenging, but there’s a solution--there’s a “right” interpretation to what you saw. Playgrounds embrace absurdity--you can make an interpretation, but that interpretation is the result of your own play with the material; the material itself is semantically unstable. What I love about David Lynch is, his work lives in the middle ground between these approaches. He gives you reason to hope that there is a unified way of understanding the universe, but also forces you to come to terms with the fact that you cannot fully understand it; you may arrive at fleeting glimpses of a totalizing interpretation, and those moments trigger some profound sense of the aesthetic, but then you have to return to a state of confusion. Lynch sympathizes with us in our desire for the story to end with a green-fisted superhero punching out the bad guy, but he also knows that the story really ends with a primal scream.

1. The OA

Hands down the most touching, complex, artistically ambitious TV show I have ever watched. Knowing that Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij had a five-season story planned, and that thanks to Netflix’s cancelation, we’re only getting two of those seasons, just repeatedly breaks my heart.

The Top Ten Pug Movies

Honorable Mention #1: Lady Dynamite

There’ve been some solid pug performances on the small screen. In an episode of Friends where Phoebe is contemplating serving as a surrogate, her mom gives her a pug puppy so that she will know the pain of giving up a baby. And on The King of Queens, Spence, played by geek icon Patton Oswalt, has an adorable pug named Alan. But I decided to limit this list to movies, because otherwise Lady Dynamite would run away with the top spot. The murderous Blossom, the flirty Blueberry, and especially the teutonically brilliant Bert are possibly the three greatest characters in the history of television.

Honorable Mention #2: Pocahontas and The Nut Job

I also decided to limit this list to live action, because really, how do you evaluate Percy, Governor Radcliffe’s gluttonous pug in Pocahontas, or Precious, the eccentric pug in The Nut Job, alongside the live action options here. Bonus points to Precious, however, for being voiced by Maya Rudolph.

8-10. Breakin’ All the Rules; The Great Race; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen Breakin’ All the Rules or The Great Race, and I didn’t realize The Hobbit had pugs in it when I started making this list. But Google tells me there are pugs in them, so there you go. Google also tells me that the pugs who cameo in The Hobbit are Peter Jackson’s actual dogs, which is pretty cool. They’re probably the most interesting creatures in the movie not portrayed by Andy Serkis.

7. Milo and Otis

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who think Milo and Otis is a cute movie about a couple of animal friends, and those who recognize the truth--that it is the most horrifying film to come out of Japan this side of Takashi Miike’s Audition. Guess what I never need to see a pug do? Watch his mate give birth, then nearly get himself killed trying to fight a bear. No thank you.

6. The Men in Black Trilogy

Here’s a good idea: if you see a pug, make a Men in Black joke to its owner. I guarantee they haven’t already heard it a thousand times before.

5. Kingsman: The Secret Service

Now we’re getting into movies that truly capture the essence of the pug, and of pug ownership. It may seem ridiculous to give a spy-in-training a pug puppy to take care of, but that’s only because pugs are inherently ridiculous. They are the pinnacle of human-directed evolution: pointless, useless lumps that are totally maladapted to life in the “wild,” but perfectly adapted for their ecological niche in human civilization: so friggin’ cute that nobody with a soul wouldn’t want to protect them. That’s why asking Eggsy to shoot the pug is such a perfectly sociopathic test.

4. The Campaign

Does anything capture pure joy like this gif of Zack Galifiniakis?

3. Dune

I have a confession: I actually kind of like David Lynch’s Dune. From Kenneth McMillan’s pulsing face boils to Sting’s knife fight in a speedo, it’s a glorious mess of a movie. It’s actually kind of impressive how much of Frank Herbert’s epic novel, and how much dark Lynchian weirdness, they manage to pack into the 2 hours 15 minutes runtime. It’s an absurd, goofy monstrosity that manages to fail as an adaptation, fail as a sci-fi epic, and fail as an art film. It’s spectacular. And that’s where the pug comes in.

There’s an unwritten rule that if your space opera takes place in a fictional galaxy, no nonhuman earth animals should appear. Ronald D. Moore was known to have regretted letting a reference to “chicken pot pie” slip into Battlestar Galactica, because why would they have chickens on Caprica? And Rian Johnson had to dress Carrie Fisher's dog Gary Fisher up as a space dog for his cameo in The Last Jedi. But when faced with adapting Dune, David Lynch said, “fuck it, the Atreides have a pug.”

I have to believe that Lynch knew this movie was ridiculous, so he put a ridiculous animal in the middle of it. It’s the ultimate wink to the audience, like he’s turning right to us and saying, can you believe this shit? This is a movie in which esteemed Shakespearean actor Sir Patrick Stewart runs screaming into battle with a machine gun in one hand and a pug in the other. It’s glorious.

2. The Room

Hai doggie! This pug is possibly the best actor in the film. It hits its marks, its pacing is natural, you really believe its performance.

1. Mansfield Park

The most famous pug in literature is also my choice for the top spot. Jane Austen repeatedly characterizes Lady Bertram through her love of her pug: “She was a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long piece of needle-work, of little use and no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children…” The 1999 film captures this aspect of her character pretty much perfectly. Lady Bertram represents a person who has OD’ed on her pug, which is a real risk; the zen of the pug is a seductive thing. It is sufficient unto itself, living in an eternal present with a mind unencumbered by thought or ego. It lacks even a name. It is simply pug.

Race, Genre, and the Golden Globes

Universal Pictures raised some eyebrows recently with the news that it had submitted Get Out to compete in the "Musical or Comedy" categories. Certainly the film is a satire, and it has funny moments, and its director, Jordan Peele, came to prominence as a comedian, but no reasonable person would describe the film as a comedy, and it sure as hell isn't a musical.

I think a lot about genre classifications, the cultural forces that inform them, arbitrariness of the distinctions, and the attempts to justify that arbitrariness through definitions based on form or content. Whether, say, a Kazuo Ishiguro novel is shelved in the "Literary Fiction" section or the "Science Fiction and Fantasy" section of the bookstore has more to do with Ishiguro's cultural position than any discrete attribute of the book itself.

As a film that is most readily identifiable as a work of horror, Get Out doesn't neatly fit into either of the genre classifications. The arguments for one classification or the other is grounded not in form or content but in cultural connotations. From a film industry perspective, the "Drama" category privileges the kinds of stories that would be shelved in the "Literary Fiction" section, such as war films and historical biopics, while any popular genre, such as science fiction, fantasy, or horror, will fare better in the "Musical or Comedy" category. This makes a kind of sense--the very name of the category suggests that it is more of a generic grab-bag: this is an award that has been won both by a film featuring naked Ken Jeong jumping out of the trunk of a car and a film whose title literally translates to "The Miserables." And given that the Golden Globes are perceived as a stepping stone to the Oscars, submitting the film in a category where it will be more competitive might be an effective strategy.

On the other hand, many would argue that classifying Get Out as a comedy connotes an unserious approach to its critique of racism. As some have said, being able to laugh at a film like Get Out is itself a manifestation of white privilege. It's also fair to note that "Drama" typically connotes a higher degree of prestige, and that placing a film about racism by a Black director in the "Musical or Comedy" category implies relegating it to a second class status.

But of course, we don't have to simply speculate, since this one submission doesn't exist in a vacuum. What, exactly, do the designations "Drama" and "Musical or Comedy" signify? I was curious, so I decided to dig into the question of what genres these categories encompass.

Methods

I decided to look at all the films nominated in these two categories for the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2016. This gave me a corpus of 101 nominees in the "Musical or Comedy" category and 104 nominees in the "Drama" category. In identifying films' genres, I start with the premise that films don't don't have single genres, and that genres overlap in myriad ways. Therefore, the question is not the genre to which a film belongs, but rather, the genre with which a film is primarily associated. If I had the time, I would have developed a little Python script that read the descriptions of films on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and Wikipedia and count up the genre terms used in those descriptions to determine what genre was most often used in association with each film. But I'm not that good at Python and I don't have that kind of time, so instead I skimmed through the Wikipedia entries listing the nominees and counted genres based on my memories of the movies or the descriptions in Wikipedia. This makes my data set very subjective, but sufficient, I think, for a little back-of-the-envelope exercise like this.

Because this is a quick-and-dirty exercise and I was primarily interested in whether "Drama" films are really dramatic and "Comedy" films are really comedic, I avoided breaking my categories down into genres that heavily overlap with one or both of those designations, such as "Romance" or "Biopic." Instead, romantic comedies were designated as comedies and romantic dramas were designated as dramas, and so on. However, I did break out "fantastic" genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror, in contrast to "realist" genres that are situated in the narrative world of the audience. I did this under the hypothesis that realism would be more often associated with Drama (connoting "serious" and "prestige" fiction) and the fantastic would be more often associated with Comedy (connoting "popular" fiction). I also counted the films that were based on a true story, again with the hypothesis that these would more often be associated with Drama.

As I conducted my counts, I was stricken by the number of comedy-drama hybrids nominated in both categories, but especially in the "Musical or Comedy" category. Films with both serious and humorous elements like The Kids Are Alright, 50/50, and Joy were all nominated for "Musical or Comedy" while The Descendants, Inglourious Basterds, and Philomena were all nominated for "Drama." In approaching these films, my policy was that I would give the submitters the benefit of the doubt and classify it in the category in which it was nominated, except in cases where either a dramatic or comedic tone clearly outstripped the other (as with the 2003 Musical or Comedy winner Lost in Translation, which I classified as a drama).

Results

My counts are represented in the following table:

	Musical or Comedy	Drama
Drama	15	79
Musical	15	0
Comedy	54	5
Action	5	1
Science fiction	4	5
Fantasy	3	5
Children's	5	1
Western	0	6
Horror	0	2
Total	101	104
True story?	14	44

This confirms the general impression that the Musical or Comedy category is slightly generically looser than Drama. 68% of Musical or Comedy nominees are actually musicals or comedies, whereas 76% of Drama nominees are dramas. However, the action films that were nominated, including Spy and Deadpool, were fairly heavily comedic, and the Westerns, including There Will Be Blood and Hell or High Water, were fairly heavily dramatic. Adding those to the totals, then 73% of Musical or Comedy nominees are musicals or comedies, and 82% of Drama nominees are dramas.

This survey also suggest that "Musical or Comedy" is more receptive to films that are predominately dramatic than "Drama" is to films that are primarily comedic. Films that I classified as drama from the Comedy category included Nicolas Nickleby and Mrs. Henderson Presents, as well as the biopics Ray and Walk the Line, which were presumably nominated in this category because they centered on musicians even though they are not typically classified as musicals. Films that I classified as comedy from the Drama category included The Man Who Wasn't There and About Schmidt. As these examples probably suggest, these determinations necessitate a fair amount of subjective decision-making.

Fortunately, I was able to make determinations about the fantastic genres based more objectively on the presence of fantastic motifs or settings. Contrary to my hypothesis, fantastic films did not appear more frequently in the Musical or Comedy category; 12% of Musical or Comedy nominees were classified as science fiction, fantasy, horror, or children's, whereas 12.5% of Drama nominees were classified as the same genres. Most of the children's films in Musical or Comedy were Pixar films, whereas the one children's film in Drama was Hugo. The Lord of the Rings films, Mad Max Fury Road, Avatar, and The Truman Show were all nominated as Drama, whereas the Charlie Kaufman films Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Tim Burton films Big Fish and Alice in Wonderland were all nominated as Musical or Comedy.

Interestingly, the only two films that could be described as horror films nominated in this 20 year period were Mulholland Drive and Black Swan, both nominated as Dramas.

On the other hand, my hypothesis was confirmed that films based on a true story are more highly represented in Drama than Musical or Comedy (42% vs. 14%).

Discussion

Based on these data, I don't see strong evidence to support the argument that, as a horror film, it's more advantageous for Universal to have submitted Get Out to the Musical or Comedy category rather than to the Drama category. While Get Out's use of sci-fi horror differs from the two previous horror nominees, both of which were purely psychological, fantastic genres are equally represented in both categories. The Return of the King and Avatar both won as Dramas, while Toy Story 2 and The Martian both won as Comedies, and the same year that The Martian infamously won as a Comedy, Mad Max Fury Road was nominated as a Drama.

At the same time, while awards are certainly rife with racial bias, these data don't provide evidence to support an argument of racial bias in the choice of genre category. In fact, the Golden Globes show a stronger tendency to recognize filmmakers of color in the Drama category than in the Musical or Comedy category. Out of the forty winners I surveyed in these two categories, the only two with Black directors or a predominately Black cast were Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave and Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, both of which won as Dramas. This may suggest that industry-wide bias works in the other direction, and that Black filmmakers' main avenue for awards success is through making A Very Serious Movie About Race. Additionally, skimming over the Drama nominees from this 20 year period, I saw a number of directors of color, including Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Denzel Washington, Ang Lee, Alphonso Cuarón, Ava DuVernay, and Shekhar Kapur. I was only able to identify one director of color among the Musical or Comedy nominees, Iñárritu, for Birdman. I'm not certain, but it's possible that Get Out will be the first film by a Black director nominated in the Musical or Comedy category.

Conclusion

The Golden Globes' approach to genre is, frankly, an absolute mess that nobody should take seriously.

Get Out, however, is a phenomenal film that everybody should take seriously, regardless of what it's nominated for.

Ghost in the Wood: Some thoughts on Twin Peaks

People often talk about the work of David Lynch in terms of genre. Much of his oeuvre fits the tradition of neo-noir, featuring postmodern remixes of tropes developed by the likes of Otto Preminger, Edward Dmytryk, and of course, Alfred Hitchcock. Noir elements are certainly present in spades in Twin Peaks, as are elements of soap opera. Twin Peaks isn't subtle in its self-aware embrace of soap opera styles, motifs, and plot twists; it signals this embrace through its frequent references to the show-within-the-show, Invitation to Love. Less discussed in analyses of the show (at least analyses that I've read--I don't profess expertise in Lynch scholarship) are its debts to the haunted house genre.

Twin Peaks is the least-ambiguously supernatural work that Lynch has produced. Whereas in films like Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive many of the weird fiction elements are attributable to characters' dreams or hallucinations, in Twin Peaks it's difficult if not impossible to interpret the demons, whatever they are, as anything other than a literal presence. Those demons' home, the Black Lodge, is the first in a tradition of sites of spiritual significance on TV, a tradition that runs through Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Hellmouth and Lost's island.

Significantly, the black lodge is located in the woods. The woods, and indeed, wood itself, is the show's dominant image. The opening credits sequence provides us not with images of the town itself, but images of the surrounding woods, juxtaposed with images of the sawmill that transforms those woods into industry. The first face that you see in the pilot episode is not that of the dead Laura Palmer, but that of Josie Packard, owner of said sawmill. The last time you see Josie's face, it's in the wood--having died of fear after killing her lover, Thomas Eckhardt, Josie's spirit is absorbed by the wood of the Great Northern Hotel, wood that was likely cut in her own mill. Wood is imbued with an animism throughout the series, most notably embodied by the Log Lady's log. How appropriate that the forest is called Ghostwood.

But if wood can carry spirits, the birds that perch on that wood, like the bird in the opening credits' first shot, can carry demons. The owls are not what they seem.

When I point to Twin Peaks' indebtedness to the haunted house genre, I mean haunted house stories in the broadest sense, encompassing stories of homes and people occupied by evil spirits, be those the spirits of the dead or the spirits of demonic others (in Twin Peaks we encounter both). Modern haunted house films, from The Amityville Horror to Paranormal Activity, take the elements of classic gothic fiction and move them out of the castle and into suburbia, transforming the middle class ideal of home ownership into a nightmare. This is why the genre is so amicable to the Lynchian treatment--many of his films, most notably Blue Velvet, are about finding the nightmares hiding behind the veneer of suburban contentment.

One of the best haunted house films ever made is Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982), in which a real estate developer discovers after a series of horrific events that his new home is built atop a cemetery, and that his boss, when building the neighborhood, only moved the headstones, leaving the bodies. Poltergeist begins with an iconic shot of a cathode ray tube television at the end of the broadcast day, turning to static, which is how the ghosts haunting the property communicate with the people in the home. Ten years later, the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) would begin with an image of static on a TV tuned to a dead channel, and that image of static would recur throughout the film.

Looking at the opening of the film alongside the opening of the series, we get a juxtaposition that constitutes the heart of the story: nature vs. modernization, the untouched vs. the developed. People misremember Poltergeist as being a film about a house built on an "old Indian burial ground," but in fact the house is only built on a modern cemetery. In Twin Peaks, however, the area's connection to indigenous populations is unavoidable, represented either through Deputy Hawk's expositional monologues about local beliefs, or through Ben Horne's appropriations of native iconography in the design of the Great Northern (it's telling that Ben's intellectually disabled son always wears a Native American headdress). The Ghostwood National Forest may not be a burial ground, but it's certainly a site of the sacred.

That's why I think it's so interesting that the show's biggest B plot line involved Ben Horne and Catherine Martell fighting over the rights to Ghostwood Estates. I used to think this plot line was pure soap opera, but I've come to see it as essential. Twin Peaks' existing suburbs already boast haunted houses, most notably the Palmer house--what would happen if Ghostwood did become another housing development? What poltergeists would be unleashed?

Perhaps in the past 25 years, Ghostwood Estates actually has been built. If there's one omission from the revival's cast list that has me worried, it's Piper Laurie as Catherine Martell. Without her, I fear that the fate of Ghostwood Estates will be an ignored or underdeveloped component of the show. I hope it won't be. I hope we'll get to see Ghostwood, and Theresa Banks's ring, and Andy and Lucy's now 25-year-old child, who I hope is a daughter named "Judy."

But trying to predict what Lynch will do is probably foolhardy. More than anything else, I just hope to enjoy the ride.

Let’s Talk About Miscarriage, Baby (Guest post by Paula Matzke)

A note from Brian: This is a post from my wife Paula. I don't have much to add, but we both believe in the value of normalizing these challenges. And, as usual, I'm blown away by her eloquence.

A note from Paula: In the course of trying to make uncomfortable topics less uncomfortable, things inevitably get weird and awkward. If you're not in the mood for weird and awkward (especially if you know Brian and me personally) this may not be the post for you. Take what you need, and leave the rest. 

Content warning: miscarriage (obviously)

Miscarriage. I don’t even like typing that word. Even when you type it, it still sounds like something that should be whispered. In like, an old women’s sewing circle. Followed by a bunch of those sad tongue clucking sounds and a few murmured “Oh, what a shame”s.

Miscarriage. I had one (‘Oh, what a shame!’). I initially did not want to talk about it because miscarriage is weirdly….embarrassing? However, I very quickly realized what a huge number of other women have realized: that our collective not talking about it makes it feel worse, and that we probably should talk about it more.

There are some very powerful things written by other women about their miscarriages. Many of them are written by women who have some degree of distance from it and have accrued some wisdom or, in many cases, a subsequent child. I’ve noticed in particular, that we seem to feel more comfortable hearing about women’s miscarriages when they now have a baby. Ali Wong has a great comedy special in which she discusses her miscarriage. In interviews she says that people didn’t start really laughing at it until she was visibly pregnant with another child. We want there to be a happy ending.

My miscarriage happened last week. There is no baby. There is no wisdom. There is no happy ending.

I 100% do not want to discount accounts of miscarriage from women who went on to have a baby and/or learned something really profound. I have read and heard many of these narratives and found them extremely helpful and comforting and I think we need that. I am so grateful to these women who have written about miscarriage with beauty and wisdom and eloquence, but you know what? Maybe sometimes we don’t need wisdom, beauty and eloquence. Maybe sometimes we need some discomfort and vulgarity and rambling.

I am no stranger to writing about difficult and uncomfortable topics. In the past I have written very candidly about psychosis and psychiatric hospitalization because I also have bipolar disorder. My medical file now emits a palpable cloud of awkward pity when opened. However, there is a certain pride in having ‘stigma’ be a keyword in pretty much all the articles about any part of your medical history. I’ve got double stigma now: I have fucking STIGMATA (I’d make the obvious Jesus joke here, but when you have bipolar disorder you’re not allowed to do that, so you know, make it yourself). Not to make light of other medical conditions, but honest to god, I really hope next time something awful happens to me it’s appendicitis, or pernicious anemia, or some other shit that it is socially acceptable to talk honestly about outside of a social worker led support group or blog post that people will call you “brave” for writing.

So what happened? Well, I was having a perfectly normal pregnancy. This may be surprising to some of you that know me and/or Brian, because it was supposed to be a secret. You are not supposed to tell people before you make it to 12 weeks. This is because most miscarriages happen before 12 weeks and it is very sad and awkward to have told people you are pregnant and then have a miscarriage and have to tell them you are not pregnant. It is also very sad and awkward to NOT have told people you are pregnant and then have a miscarriage and have to tell people not only that you are not currently pregnant, but also that you were pregnant. It is sad and awkward either way and if you are pregnant you should tell people whenever the fuck you want to.

Anyway, I was pregnant and it was perfectly normal and uneventful. I didn’t bleed; I was throwing up, my boobs hurt; these were all good signs. I had no particular reason to worry about miscarriage, but I did anyway because I am an anxious fuck. From the minute I got that positive test, hell even before I got that test, I worried about miscarriage. I knew that about 1 in 4 pregnancies ended in miscarriage, so it wasn’t a totally irrational worry, at least in the beginning. But as the weeks went on and the risk of miscarriage theoretically dropped (I say theoretically because this is an event that has already happened and therefore the probability of its having happened is now 100%), I still worried. This was not because I had some kind of special intuition, it was because I am an anxious fuck and I always assume the worst. My husband, bless his heart, did not worry. This was, at the time, the more rational position. He was full of hope and blissful ignorance and was therefore very reassuring.

The morning of my first pre-natal appointment, my husband took his blissfully ignorant (and very cute) ass to work as normal. I woke up in kind of a funk. I had previously been very excited for this appointment, but I was noticeably less excited that morning. Again, I would like to think it was some kind of “mother’s intuition”, but more likely it was that it was the first day after spring break and I was a tired anxious fuck. I went into the appointment eager to finally have some concrete evidence that the little sprout inside of me was there and ok. It was there. It was not ok.

It’s kind of a cliché to say that you can’t possibly understand what it feels like to, at one second think that you will probably be bringing a baby home in seven months, and the next second know that you won’t because your stupid embryo doesn’t have a fucking heartbeat. So I will try.

You know that feeling where you are expecting reassurance? Like when you text your friend to see if they got home safe, or tell your partner that you love them just so you can hear it back, or hear a car pull into your driveway when you’re expecting someone home and they’re late? It’s like when you get a call back from your friend’s number, but it’s someone else’s voice. It’s like hearing that infinite pause instead of “I love you too.” It’s like when you look out the window and it’s a police car.

It’s that feeling when your wife went off to her pre-natal appointment that morning and you hadn’t even thought about it until you looked at your phone after class and saw the missed calls.

My husband is no longer full of hope and blissful ignorance. It has been squashed right out of him like the last dregs of toothpaste and now for any future pregnancies we can be anxious fucks together.

My body failed at pregnancy, but it also failed at miscarriage. I had what is called a “missed miscarriage”, which is when the embryo or fetus dies, but your body doesn’t recognize it, so you don’t miscarry “naturally” (which is the polite way of saying you don’t bleed and cramp and expel the dead embryo or fetus from your body). In this situation you can either 1) wait for above “natural” miscarriage to happen 2) induce bleeding and cramping and associated dead embryo or fetus expulsion with medication, or 3) have surgery to clear out the dead embryo or fetus from your uterus.

Many women like to let things happen without additional intervention or prefer to have the comfort of miscarrying in their own home. That’s perfectly valid. I, however, did not want to let things happen naturally because nature is a goddamned asshole. Additionally, the prospect of copious amounts of blood and pain did not appeal to me, while a minor surgery that would get it all over with quickly and that involved a legal high did not sound so bad.

A week later I got what is technically called a “manual vacuum aspiration”. This is where they basically take a big syringe and suck out the dead embryo or fetus and associated uterine gunk. It is exactly the same procedure they use for many elective abortions. The difference is that when you wanted the pregnancy you get to do it in the hospital instead of having to go to a whole separate clinic and your insurance covers it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It was painful and awkward, but I got to get high so I didn’t really care that much and I don’t remember much either. I threw up on the car ride home. My husband pulled over and I spewed apple juice onto the dirty snow and thought about how this was the last time I would throw up because of this pregnancy.

Physically, I actually feel much better now, which I feel weird about. I’m no longer nauseas and exhausted. I haven’t bled or cramped that much after the surgery. Emotionally, I feel like a woman who just had a miscarriage. I have spent most of my time on the couch watching re-runs and eating take-out (but I’ve still managed to lose 3 pounds, so there’s that). I have not been back to work yet. This is not only because I want to cry and eat pizza in peace, it is particularly because my job this week was supposed to involve 1) making plans for my future that just a few weeks ago were supposed to have to be rearranged to accommodate a baby, and 2) teaching students a unit about kids dying of cancer. I do not want to do either of these things right now even though I probably physically could. I have also previously been on the student side of the TA having an obvious emotional breakdown in the middle of class situation, and it is not comfortable for anyone. My students deserve better.

Luckily (well not really luckily because, as I have been wisely told, there is no good news when there’s a dead baby involved) miscarriage is one of several “trump cards” in life. Similar to how saying you have diarrhea will get you out of pretty much any social obligation, informing people of your miscarriage is SO awkward and uncomfortable for everyone involved that no one is going to ask follow-up questions or challenge you. They just want to get out of that conversation as soon as possible and they don’t want you around crying and being sad. To be frank, this is one of the main reasons that I told people. I needed that instant pity and I wasn’t above getting it.

When you tell people about your miscarriage they now know, not just that you’ve had a miscarriage, but also some shit about your sex life, which is fun. When you are young and recently married and obviously very sad about your miscarriage people will assume that you have been “trying” (which is polite code for ‘having unprotected sex’) and may continue to do so in the future. “Trying” is also not polite conversation, so now there’s just a whole bunch of unspoken knowledge and assumptions about your and your partner’s reproductive organs out there. For those who are curious, yes Brian and I had been “trying”. Yes we will continue to be “trying” in the future. No, we don’t want to talk about it with you unless you’ve also had a miscarriage and want to be sad about it with us.

That’s it. I hope I’ve at least satisfied your morbid curiosity about miscarriage. And for those of you who didn’t have any morbid curiosity because you already know all too well yourself: I am so, so sorry. I hope my words have at least provided some small comfort to you in the same way other women’s stories have comforted me. Like I said before, I don’t have a happy ending. What I do have is pizza, Sex and the City streaming, and a bottle of wine. So let’s talk.

On Impatience with "Problematic" Stories

Because I'm perpetually behind in my pop culture consumption, I only recently finished Louis CK's series Horace and Pete (2016) and Denis Villeneuve's film Sicario (2015), both on Hulu. They're both well made, with solid acting, writing, and directing, and I probably would have enjoyed them both quite a lot if I had watched them when they first came out. But, watching them in 2017, I hated them both. In the wake of the election, my tastes changed--specifically, my patience for "problematic" narratives has diminished substantially.

I've often joked about the way in which the word "problematic" gets thrown around sometimes as a euphemism for "bad," but that's not quite accurate. The way that I teach stories (be they novels or films or TV shows or whatever), and the way that I try to talk about stories outside of the classroom too, I try to lead with the assertion that it's important to acknowledge ambiguity. No story has a single interpretation that is "right" to the exclusion of all other interpretations. That's especially important to acknowledge when engaging in an evaluation of the sociopolitical implications of a story. I doubt that there is any story that is purely progressive or purely reactionary. When someone says that a story is "problematic," often what they are communicating is that they acknowledge the story's ambiguity but feel that its implications lean more towards the reactionary than the progressive. Because people so often adopt a defensive crouch when confronted with the reactionary implications of stories that they enjoy, I've always maintained that it's perfectly okay to enjoy problematic stories--we all like some problematic stories--and it's perfectly okay to draw out more progressive interpretations that exist within the story's ambiguities, so long as you don't try to shut down conversation or deny interpretations that may be less comfortable.

I still believe this, but on a purely personal level, it feels like the balance has shifted, and as I said, I just don't have as much patience for some problematic narratives. Take Sicario, a film about U.S. federal agents trying to take down a Mexican drug cartel. The film not only upholds stereotypes about Mexican criminality, but explicitly uses those stereotypes to justify the horrendous authoritarian tactics of its protagonists, including torture, extrajudicial killings, and partnerships with murderers. It's certainly possible to read the film against the grain. Our viewpoint character, an FBI agent played by Emily Blunt, is horrified by the abuses committed by her CIA counterparts, played by Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro, and in some respects the film can be seen as asking us to share in that horror and condemn these actions. But ultimately, it's hard not to see this film as aligning with Donald Trump's rhetoric, presenting a dystopian view of the Mexican border as a lawless land requiring brutal suppression. It's a stomach-turning worldview.

The problematic worldview of Horace and Pete is much more subtle, but no less troubling. Louis CK and Steve Buscemi play the titular Horace and Pete. Horace is a sad sack divorcee who is estranged from his children, and Pete is a schizophrenic recently released from a mental hospital (the show's offensive depiction of mental illness is a topic for a whole other blog post). The two run an unprofitable dive bar that has been in their family for 100 years, along with their sister Sylvia, who is suffering from cancer, played by Eddie Falco. Much of the series focuses on Sylvia's desire to sell the bar coming into conflict with Horace and Pete's rigid, self-destructive adherence to the traditions established by their physically and emotionally abusive parents and grandparents, the bar's previous owners. Their story is interspersed with conversations from the bar's regulars, mostly about politics. The series was released during the 2016 presidential primaries, so many of these conversations are built around the creation of cynical equivalences between the Republican and Democratic candidates. In a way, the show's depiction of both its title characters and the barflies offers a useful take on the "white working class" whose disaffectedness led to Trump's victory. I can see it serving as a time capsule, providing a glimpse into a very particular moment in the history of white masculinity. The problem is, the show asks us to sympathize with these broken men and their nihilistic, misanthropic patrons as they all refuse to break free from their cycles of self-destruction, taking others down with them.

But I can't offer that sympathy. Not in 2017, when I know where those self-destructive tendencies lead.

What Scares Me

Years ago, when I was still a Ph.D. student, I was teaching a first year writing course. I'd assigned students to write a "position paper," in which students were to take a position on a contemporary issue and argue for that position. Most papers made familiar arguments on topics that 18 year olds are invested in--violent video games don't make people more violent, schools should eliminate standardized tests, etc. But one student's paper--conveniently, the bottom paper of the stack, which I read late into a long evening of grading before returning the papers the following morning--was an argument that opposed covering birth control under the Affordable Care Act. This was during the height of debate over the ACA, and unbeknownst to me before reading this paper, this particular student was a deeply conservative Catholic. His paper was an utter mess--though initially framed as an argument about the need for religious exemptions to birth control coverage, the paper quickly descended into a unfocused rant about the evils of contraception, highly confrontational and lacking any coherent organization. Trying to control my own offense at the paper's tone, I gave the paper a low C (which felt generous), and provided a brief, carefully worded end note about the paper's tonal and organizational issues. A few days later, the student came to my office hours to discuss his grade, though it was unclear whether his intent was to get a better grade, or further litigate his argument. Repeatedly, I would attempt to turn the conversation to the rhetorical and analytical content of the essay, only to get pulled into an argument about contraception itself. I could feel that I was being cast in the role of the stereotypical liberal university teacher; the conversation was an exercise in trolling more than a discussion of academic writing. But the sad thing is, I genuinely sensed that the student didn't realize there was a difference; to this 18-year-old, argument was argument.

I eventually let the student rewrite the paper on a different topic and raised his grade slightly, an outcome motivated by exhaustion rather than a sense of fairness--he had successfully worn me down, and as a grad student it wasn't worth it for me to fight for him to keep his C. This would not be the last time that I would feel like I've failed as an educator to adequately confront a student's ideological entrenchment--the student who, when asked to bring an example reading to class, picked a 10-year-old climate change denying editorial from a right wing magazine; the student who wrote a paper critical of Western medicine whose only sources were anti-vaxxer websites; the student who, in a discussion of violence at Trump rallies, insisted, "to be fair, there's been violence on both sides"--these examples all stick with me for the way they've left me feeling blindsided.

I don't believe teaching can or should be an ideologically neutral act. However, nothing in my training as a teacher of writing and literature has prepared me to handle overt ideological conflict. I've acquired some basic skills on my own, but for the most part, the material that I cover as a humanities teacher presupposes a certain amount of common ground, and I no longer believe we can or should assume that such common ground exists.

Here's what scares me: I know that a year from now, or two years from now, there will be college students citing Milo Yiannopoulos's new book as if it is an academic text, citing statements from the new president as if they are authoritative truths, and many of the people on the front lines in confronting those ideas--the teaching assistants and writing instructors--will be ill equipped to handle it, just as I was and largely still am. We train instructors on how teach evaluating sources, we train instructors on how to teach rhetoric, but we don't train instructors on how to teach ideology. At least not directly--certainly, by training instructors on how to teach sources and rhetoric, we are indirectly training on the teaching of ideology, but I don't believe we can afford to be so indirect in the future. Teachers need the equipment to confront racism, misogyny, homophobia, and science denialism when and where it shows up in their classrooms--to confront it with the compassion, empathy, and respect befitting an educator, but to confront it nonetheless. I have decent improvisational skills, but I need more concrete strategies--we all do.

Of course, resources providing these strategies already exist, but they're more important than ever before. Here are a few questions I've been mulling over, pertaining to specific teaching scenarios that I've encountered in the past that I suspect will become more common in the future:

• How do you grade and comment on a paper when the fundamental problem with its argument isn't the rhetoric or the sources or anything you covered in class, so much as it is the first premises from which the paper is arguing, e.g., an unexamined assumption about biological race?
• How do you diffuse an encounter with a confrontational student in office hours?
• Is there such a thing as a student who is a "lost cause"? That is, how do we identify and deal with students along a spectrum of ideological entrenchment, from those who simply have never examined their problematic beliefs before, to those so steadfast in their bigotry that there is little to nothing productive we can do with them in the course of a semester?
• What role do facts play in an ideological discussion, and how should an instructor handle a situation where they don't have the relevant facts at hand? If one student peddles false or misleading information in a classroom discussion, but the instructor doesn't have the resources to fact check in the moment, how can the instructor effectively debunk the misinformation while maintaining authority?
• How do you manage sensitive discussions in an ideologically diverse classroom? That is, in a hypothetical classroom comprised of 2 or 3 students from vulnerable populations (e.g. queer or POC students), 5 or 6 students who consider themselves allies, a dozen or so indifferent or politically disengaged students, 5 or 6 international students without the same background in American political discourse, and 1 or 2 right wing students who might be inclined to be more confrontational, how does an instructor manage conversation so as to provide an education to everyone at once (this is, in my anecdotal experience, a fairly common demographic breakdown of a ~25 person class at Michigan)?

Obviously, no two scenarios will ever be the same, so none of these questions have easy or universally applicable answers, which makes ongoing teacher training that much more important. I honestly don't even know if I'll still be teaching in a year or two, but I'll still be in academia in some capacity or another, and whatever I end up doing, I hope I'll have a network of colleagues with whom to explore these questions. We'll need each other as resources now more than ever.

We also need institutional backing, since those on the front lines are also those with the greatest professional vulnerability: graduate students and non-tenure track faculty. We shouldn't have to risk our jobs confronting ignorance and bigotry, but if we don't confront the ignorance and bigotry, I don't believe it's a job worth having in the first place.