“War is coming, and who’s gonna lead us? You?? If I’m not in charge, our entire way of life is decimated! So, you want me off this ship? You better kill me.”

—Admiral Marcus, Star Trek Into Darkness

“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. . . my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”

—Colonel Nathan Jessup, A Few Good Men

In the most recent addition to the Star Trek franchise, we find out at about the movie’s half-way mark that Admiral Marcus, head of Star Fleet, has sent the Enterprise on a suicide mission, aimed at triggering a war with the Klingon empire. Arguing that war with the Klingons is inevitable, he has been building a fleet of warships in secret. He’s willing to sacrifice Kirk and his entire crew in order to make that war happen.

We find out further that Admiral Marcus has been using a genius/super-soldier war-criminal from Earth’s history to develop these weapons. Both his use of Khan and his sacrifice of the Enterprise are motivated by a single idea: civilization can only be saved by uncivilized men and uncivilized means. The Federation, without economic need or martial strife, will be helpless to stop the war-like Klingons, without men who live “grotesque and incomprehensible lives.” Luckily, Kirk and Company arrive just in time to show that the right amount of technology, pluck and derring-do can solve any problem.

Who’s going to do it?

Who is going to defend civilization against the forces that seek to destroy it? And what kind of people do they need to be in order to accomplish that mission? Moves like Star Trek, Iron Man and The Dark Knight wrestle with the same question that has plagued the entire War on Terror: Must a civilized society use uncivilized means to protect itself? The debates on torture, wiretapping and targeted killing all have this question at their root. Of course, the debate is even older than the War on Terror: A Few Good Men came out in 1992 and asked the same question—can we defend ourselves without resorting to barbarism and lawlessness? Like Admiral Marcus, Colonel Jessup is willing to break the rules of his society because he believes doing so is how to “defend a country.” You’re goddamned right that Colonel Jessup ordered the Code Red, and he’d do it again.

From a purely political stance, Hollywood has a long history of discomfort with military power and the use of military force. In Into Darkness, Scotty protests that Starfleet Officers are “explorers, not soldiers.” Throughout the Iron Man franchise, Tony Stark’s villains have been an assortment of military weapons builders, and he takes every opportunity to condemn the manufacture of more advanced weaponry. He even takes Nick Fury to task for building the “Phase II” weapons based on Tesseract technology. At least overtly, the message is clear—weapons are bad, and the people who build them should be condemned.

Unfortunately, Hollywood Blockbusters like Into Darkness have a problem when dealing with these issues. As Matt Wrather, the WORLD’S FOREMOST EXPERT on François Truffaut likes to remind us, “There is no thing such as an anti-war movie.” Explosions, violence and mayhem put butts into seats—the line between condemnation of violence and glorification of violence is razor thin. There’s an inherent tension in movies that that have an explicit message of “War is bad”, and an implicit message that “War is RAD: Buy our toys!”

So when Scotty protests that Star Fleet isn’t a military organization, it’s hard not to notice that Into Darkness takes a TV show about explorers and turns it into a two-hour movie about soldiers. Tony Stark condemns Nick Fury, despite spending all of his available time building weapons of his own. In multiple movies, Tony Stark protests that someone else is building dangerous weapons that could fall into the wrong hands—right before strapping on a suit of armor and shooting people in the face with it (usually with alcohol on his breath).

Blockbusters try their best to wrestle with these complicated issues of security v. dignity, the needs of the many versus the needs of the few. But in the end, they also need to sell some movie tickets. So how does the Hollywood Blockbuster resolve these issues? In Into Darkness, Spock blows it up with some torpedoes (and then punching it in the face). In Iron Man 3, Tony Stark uses a few dozen suits of Iron Man armor to beat down the bad guys. In The Avengers, we don’t need the Phase II weapons because we have well, The Avengers.

Who is going to defend civilization? Ultimately, the answer is an unsatisfying one. Hollywood rejects that idea that only moral monsters can save the world, and replaces it with the idea that only angels can save it. We don’t need to sacrifice our morals—we have superheroes! The solution to a bad guy with a gun is a just really smart, strong, good looking moral paragon with a gun. As long as your motives are pure, having a gun is just fine—problem solved!

Because only our hero is moral enough and responsible enough to use power effectively, anyone else (villain or no) must be wrong. Unfortunately, this insistence on absolutely purity leads to movies that “throw the baby out with the bath water.” While the threat in Into Darkness is almost entirely created by Admiral Marcus’ bungling and militaristic over-reach, it’s not that the Klingon threat isn’t out there. Clearly sending your own ship on a suicide mission to start an interstellar war is wrong—but that’s not to say that having a few warships around to defend the Federation is a bad idea.

In The Avengers those Phase II weapons would have been really handy if, you know, an alien army decided to invade New York City one day. Come to think of it, a platoon of soldiers in Iron Man suits would have come in really handy fighting said alien army. In Iron Man 3, Pepper Potts rejects research into the Extremis project—solely because it COULD have military applications. Just to be clear, she refuses to do research into a serum that regrows missing limbs and probably has all sorts of other amazing medical uses, just out of a puritanical fear of anything that could be misused.

You know what would have been better here than one drunken billionaire in a suit? SEAL Team 6 in 20 suits.

Instead, the solution is institutions that work. There’s nothing wrong with a Starfleet with an increased military capacity—the problem is when you put it in the hands of a megalomaniac without any civilian oversight. Checks and balances, civilian oversight and the democratic process are ultimately the only effective way of ensuring that neither the monsters at our door or nor the monsters in our midst destroy our society. We can’t count on finding the perfect specimens of humanity and getting them to save society for us—entertaining as their stories may be.

Peter Fenzel, Shana Mlawski, and Matthew Wrather recap Mad Men Season 6 Episode 8, “The Crash.”

For more videos from Overthinking It, including all our TV Recaps, follow our Google+ page and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Peter Fenzel, Shana Mlawski, and Matthew Wrather recap Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 8, “Second Sons.”

For more videos from Overthinking It, including all our TV Recaps, follow our Google+ page and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

→ Download Episode 255 (MP3)

Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically? Subscribe in iTunes! (Or grab the podcast RSS feed directly.)

Spoiler Alert for Into Darkness and the whole Star Trek Universe.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call (203) 285-6401 to leave a voicemail.

Further Reading

• Felicity on IMDb
• The Philosophy of Batman: Literary Theory Edition by Jordan Stokes
• I Boldly Went Where Every Star Trek Movie and TV Show Has Gone Before by Matthew Yglesias

OTI Classics

• The Eels Have Eyes by John Perich

To conclude our Eurovision 2013 coverage (though residents of the greater New York area can still come to the party!), Matthew Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather try to convince actual bona-fide European and sometime Overthinking It contributor Timothy Swann that he should cast his vote for their favorite song in Eurovision.

And San Marino:

Want to see the original videos? Here’s Andrius Pojavis with Something (Lithuania) and Valentina Monetta singing Crisalide (San Marino).

For more videos from Overthinking It, including whatever we do after Eurovision, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Today (or whenever you’re reading this…although I guess that would also be “today” for you even if you are reading this IN THE FUTURE!) let’s look at some other stuff!

So there are these two sitcoms. One is network television’s most popular comedy, and the other is a cult favourite rife with network drama and constantly on the edge of cancellation. And they both feature, as their most beloved character, young men who are portrayed as being…not quite right. I refer, of course, to Family Matters and ALF.

No, just kidding. Obviously I mean The Big Bang Theory and Community. Dr. Sheldon Cooper of Big Bang is a scientific genius, vastly socially inept, asexual, and a major science fiction and fantasy nerd. Community’s Abed Nadir is utterly obsessed with pop-culture to the exclusion of almost everything else, displays very low affect and difficulty recognizing social cues, but is fun-loving and often displays a childlike sweetness. The thing about both Sheldon and Abed is that they are characterized—though never explicitly described—as having Asperger Syndrome, or at least being somewhere along what’s known as the autism spectrum.

The fact that it’s never actually stated that these two characters have any clinically specific disorders is somewhat important. In contrast with Legion, say, who had been variously described as suffering from Schizophrenia, Autism, and most recently Multiple Personality Disorder, having no official diagnosis frees the shows’ creators a bit from any criticism from those in the mental health profession or those who actually live with these conditions. If anyone objects, “people with Asperger’s don’t act like that!” the writers can respond, “We never said he had Asperger’s.”  As far as I can recall, the closest that Abed has ever got to being identified is in an episode of the controversial and Dan Harmon-less fourth season where his email buddy from Europe comes to visit and refers to “neurotypicals,” a colloquial term for people who are not on the autism spectrum. Abed looks at the guy rather askance both times that he uses the word, but doesn’t take it on directly. The implication is clear that the other guy identifies as being somewhere on the spectrum, and (much like many viewers do) assumes that Abed is as well, but Abed never describes himself this way. Similarly in the case of Sheldon, the closest we get to a diagnosis is whenever someone accuses him of being “crazy.” His standard response is, “I’m not crazy; my mom had me tested.” The show’s writers have taken on the autism questions by explaining that since in the show’s reality Sheldon never received a solid diagnosis of any condition, the writers don’t have one either. In the case of both Abed and Sheldon, while they behave in ways that certainly can easily be seen as largely consistent with autism in general or Asperger’s in particular, Sheldon is written as Sheldon and Abed is written as Abed, not as any specific mental health condition.

Now, while that affords the shows a certain degree of protection against accusations of making light of mental illness, it’s in a fairly major sense nit-picking. Audiences wouldn’t so consistently and easily leap to the assumption that these characters were on the spectrum if they didn’t display some pretty typical (or stereotypical) symptoms. So I’d say it’s not unreasonable to treat Abed and Sheldon as if the characters are on the spectrum, and examine what autism/Asperger’s symbolizes in these two characters. Which is: the inability to deal with the unstructured and emotionally messy realities of, uh, reality.

Both Abed and Sheldon are addicted to patterns. In Sheldon’s case this manifests in his self-admittedly Spock-like devotion to logic over emotion, and his obsessively scientific mindset that sorts and ranks every element of life into distinctive categories—including collecting and organizing physical objects such as comic books, but also specifying things like the number of times he must knock on someone’s door to gain entrance, his dinner order on Thursday night, or his place on the couch, and if any of Sheldon’s preferences are violated he becomes extremely agitated and uncomfortable (this is played for laughs). These kinds of repetitive activities and inflexible habits are some characteristic symptoms of Asperger’s. In Abed’s case, his primary frame of reference for interacting with the world is through the tropes of media (mostly television and movies). Because of Abed’s tendency to view everything through the lens of media, Community often functions as a kind of meta-sitcom; Abed’s genre awareness, where he acts as if he and his friends from community college are characters in a sitcom about a group of friends at a community college, lets Community comment on sitcom tropes and clichés while at the same time subverting them. It also lets the show play with structure and parody with genre homages and movie references woven right into various episodes’ plots.

As a matter of fact, at one point in an episode from the second season, the study group’s unofficial leader, Jeff Winger, mockingly accuses Abed of living by a “cutesy ‘I-can’t-tell-life-from-TV gimmick.” Abed responds with a very self-aware and forthright, “I can tell life from TV, Jeff. TV makes sense, it has structure, logic, rules and likeable leading men. In life we have this. We have you.” For both Abed and Sheldon, their extremely sensitive natures (which the shows attribute culturally to nerds) privileges the familiar and well-understood tropes of popular culture to the overwhelming uncertainty of real life, and a constellation of symptoms typically associated with Asperger’s serves as the engine of that metaphor.

The videogame Psychonauts, from game studio Double Fine Productions, takes a much more classically Freudian attitude toward mental illness and psychology in general. The player character, Raz, is an especially talented psychic who goes to a summer camp for children with unusual mental abilities, where they learn to control their powers and also go canoeing and stuff. Raz can travel into the minds of many of the various characters he meets, and by navigating through their internalized traumas and caricatured memories, he not only learns about what makes them tick, but can actually fix their psychological problems by completing quests, defeating their inner demons, cleaning up literalized mental cobwebs and anthropomorphized emotional baggage.

Interestingly, even though Psychonauts appears to adopt an outdated idea of the motivations for people’s behavior and the constitution of the psyche, wherein a single event from a person’s troubled childhood can be the one factor that informs their entire personality from that moment forward, to the point that, for instance, winning a chess game is all that’s required to heal someone who’s convinced that he’s Napoleon, Psychonauts also complicates this by showing us that even the most seemingly well-adjusted characters in the game have deep-seated traumas locked away that continue to haunt them. Psychonauts doesn’t operate from a scientific style of diagnosis-based description of mental illness at all, but treats the mental world as a literal, albeit metaphysical, realm that can be lived in, manipulated, and broken or repaired on its own metaphorical terms. A character’s emotional baggage here can be an actual suitcase except it’s got googly eyes and is weeping uncontrollably, and if you reunite it with its missing luggage tag they both rejoice and you’ve solved that particular psychological problem.

This sort of treatment would not work on Sheldon Cooper.

In Part One, in discussing pop cultural depictions of Multiple Personality Disorder, what I didn’t mention is that there are a great many professionals who doubt that MPD is even a real thing. It’s certainly a very rare condition, and there is often a contention that the few patients who have been diagnosed with it are actually just faking it to get attention, and/or their doctors are inventing it in order to get famous. That’s either crass and insulting to the actual people suffering from the condition and the professionals trying to help them—if it’s real—or else it’s dismissive of them as posers trying to capitalize on the sympathy they perceive that people with mental health issues receive in our society, or at least the sympathy to which they feel entitled.

Does using mental illness as a metaphor do something similar? Does it objectify the real people who actually have these conditions as part of their identity? Or is it legitimate to take an illness as symbolic for a wider cultural or existential investigation—certainly tuberculosis was a popular trope for this very thing not unreasonably long ago. Should we be wary about portraying a real mental illness in art if we’re not doing it in order to actually understand the condition itself and the actual people who live with it? Or is it inherently impossible to divorce an artistic subject from its broader figurative consequences, so that worrying about it too much is rendered senseless?

This is Frasier Crane saying goodbye, and good mental health.

This singer didn’t even want to enter Eurovision. AND YET, here he is. This song is highly unlikely to make it to the finals, so watch our 2 minutes of snark and hope that Hungary fields a more credible competitor for next year.

For more videos from Overthinking It, including our coverage of Eurovision 2013, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Italy’s song is not bad at all; I don’t think it has a great chance of winning, but since Italy is one of the countries that automatically makes the finals, it’ll definitely be in the running. All that being said, this review is mostly a vehicle for giving Italy grief for its recent 14 year absence from the competition. It is not a vehicle for pointing out the allegorical nature of the singer being under water, like many European economies, because A) Greece did a much better job of that and B) it’s a little too on the nose.

Check out the original music video for “L’essenziale” by Marco Mengoni here. For more videos from Overthinking It, including our coverage of Eurovision 2013, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

As we count down to the Eurovision Semi-Finals, we’re bringing you a video jam-packed with four (four!) countries: Estonia (“It’s the 70s!”), Belgium (“Downer Bieber”), Moldova (“The Maya were not so wrong.”), and Slovenia (“DROP THE BASS!”).

Original Videos

• Estonia: Et Uus Saaks Alguse (New Beginning)
• Belgium: Love Kills
• Moldova: O Mie (A Thousand)
• Slovenia: Straight into Love

For more videos from Overthinking It, including our coverage of Eurovision 2013, subscribe to our YouTube channel.