Getting to Love Hitler and Zooey Deschanel’s TV Show

Slate Takes Its Culture Gabfest to Los Angeles

How true does a good story need to be? And should you bring your toddler to The Hunger Games? These questions and others were the subject of discussion as actress Elizabeth Banks joined editors and critics from Slate in bringing the magazine’s Culture Gabfest Live to Los Angeles at the Petersen Automotive Museum. They talked about the retraction of a story on PRI show This American Life; Zooey Deschanel’s TV show The New Girl; and The Hunger Games, in which Banks plays a starring role.

Truth and Fiction on This American Life

Slate’s critic-at-large Stephen Metcalf opened the conversation by explaining that public radio show This American Life aired its single most downloaded episode in January: a monologue by Mike Daisey based on a theater piece about a factory in China that produces Apple products. But in this past week’s episode, host Ira Glass had to admit that the most powerful parts of the monologue never happened. “Unlike the iPad, it was mostly fabricated in America,” said Metcalf. How, he asked Slate deputy editor Julia Turner, do you balance truth and telling a good story?

Turner said she was at first was surprised by how seriously This American Life took the retraction, since the show is a blend of straight journalism and storytelling. But this story is different: Daisey’s talking about the most valuable company in the world, and he’s “playing fast and loose with the lives of the Chinese people he purports to care about.”

The conventions of the monologue genre are slippery, said Metcalf. You fact-check a piece of journalism, but you don’t fact-check someone who tells a story at a dinner table. Moreover, something that never happened doesn’t make as good an anecdote at the table, because we make more demands on fiction than on true stories.

Zooey Deschanel and Feminism

Zooey Deschanel is the star of the Fox sitcom The New Girl, in which she plays a woman who, after being dumped by her boyfriend, moves into a house occupied by three men. The show’s creator is a woman, and the show’s writers are mostly female, and yet Deschanel has become what Turner called “this incredible feminist flashpoint on the Internet.” For instance, she’s been called out for playing a “manic pixie dream girl”–a female character who exists only as imagined and desired by men–and for being too girly.

But the panelists agreed that Deschanel and the show are none of these things.

“I would actually say that [The New Girl is] kind of feminist,” said Slate film critic Dana Stevens. It passes The Bechdel Test, said Turner. That would be the benchmark created by graphic novelist Alison Bechdel: a measure of whether the show features more than one female character, and whether those characters talk to each other about subjects other than men.

This is a show created and written by a woman, said Metcalf, yet the heart of the show isn’t Deschanel’s character but her male roommates. “It’s an Apatovian bromance as imagined by a woman,” he said. “I walk away from the show disoriented by my affection for it.”

Elizabeth Banks on Playing Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games

In the press materials for The Hunger Games movie, which was adapted from the young adult novel by Suzanne Collins, Elizabeth Banks says she read the book when it was published, dreamed of acting in the film version–and knew that she wanted to play the character Effie Trinket. Metcalf opened the conversation by throwing the quote back at her and asking her to explain how she really discovered the book.

Banks said she read the book after a friend in publishing gave her a copy. It tells the story of a girl living in a future society in which children must fight to their death on reality TV to survive. Banks said she’d enjoyed a similar dystopian young adult novel, The Maze Runner, and this book was even better.

Even if the story of The Hunger Games isn’t unusual, said Metcalf, the execution–the pacing and characters–is unusually compelling. But why would Banks want to play Effie Trinket, who’s one of the bad guys?

“I’m trying to find empathy with her because she’s essentially the villain of the piece,” said Banks. Yes, Effie’s job is to lead young people to their death, but, as Banks pointed out, “They tell you in drama school, even if you play Hitler you’ve really got to love Hitler.” So she had to find inspiration in Effie’s enthusiasm for her work and for her dynamic with the story’s heroine, Katniss.

The Hunger Games is also a violent story. Should young children be watching it? “It’s PG-13, so I have to say 13” is the cutoff age, Banks said. But “there is horrible bad behavior everywhere around us.”

Just look at The Jersey Shore. “We are protecting as much of the brutality that we find necessary to tell this story compellingly,” said Banks. “But we’re also protecting the young fans of this series who want to go see the movie.”

Watch full video here.
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Read cultural observers’ opinions on the trends of 2012 that are no longer hot here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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