Game of Thrones is back, baby! Everything you’ve missed about the show has made an appearance in the trailer for House of the Dragon, the prequel series coming to HBO: bad wigs, sexism, and actors you remember from Doctor Who.

Given how badly burned Game of Thrones fans feel about the final season of the show, it would be easy to dismiss House of the Dragon as an expensive mistake. Set in a time period well before Game of Thrones—and based on excruciatingly boring fake histories written by George R.R. Martin and, puzzlingly, originally packaged with author-approved fan fiction—this series will track the succession crisis of the Targaryens, a family of colonial occupiers committed to keeping power, promulgating doctrines of racial supremacy, and keeping its bloodlines pure and uncorrupted through incest. So much of the art direction and writing in the teaser trailer feels so similar to Thrones—the ominous but quotable narration intones that life is about the pursuit of legacy—that this feels a little more like a surprise ninth season than a new show in its own right. They even make sure to introduce some characters with familiar last names, like Stark and Baratheon, and the score transitions into the classic Game of Thrones theme song briefly.

A slightly closer look reveals a more basic truth about this show: HBO has really figured out that what people liked about Game of Thrones was the dragons and the fight for the Iron Throne. That’s why it commissioned more than one show about succession crises that premiered shortly after Thrones ended. One of them was Righteous Gemstones, about a family of evangelicals fighting for control of their megachurch. The other was literally called Succession, and it became HBO’s biggest show after the end of Thrones.

Given the broad variety of types of King Lear on offer at HBO, the way in which House of the Dragon hews so closely to the previous Thrones show feels like a misstep. Worst of all is a return to the extremely bad wigs from the first season of Thrones, which here will be unavoidable as the Targaryeans canonically have pale, silvery-gold hair. No matter how good of an actor Matt Smith is, he still looks like he’s wearing a bumpit.

Despite my misgivings, I know that I will watch at least one episode of this, because the baseline assumption is right—I do want to get invested in the various factions maneuvering for the throne. I just don’t feel like it’s truly possible to make lightning strike twice, in the same setting, with the same basic plot. You can watch multiple shows about the same kind of scheming and plotting on HBO right now that won’t also remind you of how Thrones was ultimately unable to deliver on its promises.

While Tatiana Maslaney lights up every frame she appears in, I can’t help but be apprehensive about She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. There just aren’t a lot of ways to be a woman in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

There’s a lot to like about the She-Hulk trailer. It’s got a breeziness about it, and it leans into the zaniness of its premise (which is literally just, “girl-hulk is an attorney, hilarity ensues”). But it’s a little hard to get excited for a story about a woman in the MCU. The franchise doesn’t have an awesome track record for writing women, and I am wary of setting myself up to be disappointed again.

Take Wanda Maximoff, also known as the Scarlet Witch, played by Elizabeth Olsen. Though Olsen imparts a lot of humor to the character, and once she turns villainous (again), chews the scenery with zeal, there’s just not a lot to the character once she’s been run through the gamut of both Marvel movies and her own Disney+ TV show. When you meet Wanda, she’s a refugee with misplaced anger, lashing out at the de facto heroes until they convince her to switch sides. After she joins the Avengers, she is put through so much trauma it’s like the character’s ability to hold complex concepts shrinks. Wanda just becomes an avatar of pain, one that is mostly centered around her ability to have and raise a family. 

If it was just the one character, that would be one thing. But Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansen, also has a major aspect of her character revolve around her inability to have children. In Age of Ultron, she tells her fellow Avenger the Hulk that she feels like a monster because she was forced to undergo a hysterectomy as part of her spy training in Russia. It doesn’t feel any better to see the scene in context. What’s just as worrying about both Scarlet Witch and Black Widow is that at the end of their character arcs they die, though Olsen says that she hasn’t discounted the possibility of appearing in future MCU films.

Parent-child relationships define a lot of other MCU women. Thor’s sister Hela is motivated by her father having imprisoned her in hell. Nebula and Gamora are defined by the torment they suffered at the hands of their evil adopted father Thanos. The Wasp acts largely as an instrument of her father’s will. Above all else, they’re men’s daughters.

When not defined by their roles as daughters or as people who can’t bear daughters, MCU women are often not women at all, but children. In Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the titular doctor is joined by America Chavez, a plucky teenage girl. In Hawkeye, the titular Hawkeye is joined by Kate Bishop, a plucky teenage girl. Black Panther has a sister, Shuri, who is written exactly like a plucky teenage girl despite not being a teenager. Prior to the Captain Marvel film, most of the female characters in MCU movies were love interests, leaving Captain Marvel herself as one of the few female characters who doesn’t have a plot line or character arc revolving around wanting to be a mother or otherwise settle down. (There are at this point several Captain Marvels, one of whom is another’s daughter; their associate Ms. Marvel is a plucky teenage girl.) Even the ones who do have more going on in their lives than being a parent or child tend not to get a lot of focus. Jessica Jones, the titular hero of the Netflix TV show Jessica Jones, was a three-dimensional person, but although the character was well received, Marvel’s partnership with Netflix ended and there’s no telling if we’ll ever see that character again.

Not all women in the MCU are written in the same way, and characters like Valkyrie have potential, but it is telling when you struggle to think of women in the Marvel Cinematic Universe who aren’t primarily focused on having children or being someone’s child or aren’t basically children themselves. She-Hulk, as a lawyer who has starred in some very good and deliberately goofy comics, from which the show seems to be taking its cues, will hopefully represent a change, but as much as I am excited to see her literally lift up her date and carry him to the bedroom, it also makes me wary. Sure, professional women in their thirties do date and want to have children, but I hope that She-Hulk has enough room in it for this character to be defined by other things.

When I was in college in 2008, my friend Matt and I organized a “film series” in which we screened the 1998 Michael Bay movie Armageddon once a week for a month. We posted cheeky flyers around campus announcing “ONCE A WEEK THE WORLD WILL END.” Our motives were partly inspired by our dismal future prospects: we were about to graduate from art school into the wreckage of a global recession, and cataclysmic events did seem to be happening on roughly a weekly basis. What better catharsis for all that uncertainty and gloom than to repeatedly watch Bruce Willis die for the planet’s sins and bask in misguided nostalgia for pre-9/11 imperialist propaganda? 

All this is to say: Armageddon is a really good crystallization of a particular zeitgeist. Movies where giant rocks from space end up on a crash-course with Earth tend to be. It’s easy to project a lot of present-tense existential anxieties onto space rocks, and stories about planetary-scale problems tend to involve other planetary-scale systems, like empire and capitalism. 

Asteroid movies, like most science fiction, are primarily vehicles for blunt ideological statements. They’re about as much about actual astronomy as zombie movies are about epidemiology or time travel movies are about quantum physics. While the release of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up has produced a surfeit of (she writes, choking back bile) discourse, most analyses haven’t actually situated the film in the long political history of asteroid movies. There are probably two reasons for this: for better or worse McKay has explicitly sought to frame Don’t Look Up as a climate change allegory rather than an asteroid movie, and asteroid movies are as a general rule pretty bad movies so people don’t take them seriously. Don’t Look Up has an Important Message that merits Serious Discussion, Armageddon had animal cracker foreplay and Steve Buscemi as a pervy geologist who gets space dementia. 

But while McKay’s climate change allegory and his extremely online defensiveness have produced a lot of sturm und drang, it’s probably the least interesting thing about the movie. And the fact that asteroid movies are largely perceived as (and, well, often are) spectacle and explosion-driven films with almost no self-awareness doesn’t make them any less political; if anything, it renders their politics all the more explicit. There isn’t a lot of room for nuanced messaging in narratives about big dumb rocks killing everything on Earth. Looking back at some of the high-profile asteroid movies of history, it’s clear that the genre of a scorched earth has always been fertile ground for arguments over capitalism and the state. 

A caveat: one thing that becomes abundantly clear when trying to construct an intellectual history of the asteroid movie is that there are a lot of asteroid movies. Most of them were made for television, many of them look terrible, and at least one of them is also about don’t ask, don’t tell. The following chronology is far from comprehensive, but focuses on some of the higher-profile entries into the genre. 

I’m now going to completely disregard that caveat by telling you about a 1916 movie about an asteroid hitting the planet that was, in part, about capitalist greed weaponizing the media and environmental disaster for profit. The silent Danish film, Verdens Undergang (The End of the World, also released as The Flaming Sword), features a villainous mine owner who takes advantage of the inevitable stock market crash brought by news of a planet-killing comet. After buying up stocks for pennies on the dollar, he conspires to spread what we would today call a “misinformation campaign” to convince people that the comet’s a hoax, thus bringing the market back up and making himself the richest man in the world. He then invites all his rich friends to go hide out in an underground bunker. Meanwhile, a disgruntled miner who loses his sweetheart to the charms of the aforementioned capitalist seeks his revenge through leading a proletariat revolution. 

Made in the wake of Halley’s comet passing by Earth in 1910 and amidst the wreckage of World War I, it’s unsurprising that Verdens Undergang offered such a blatant critique of capitalism and case for seizing the means (there’s also a lot of Christian moralizing—which also kind of makes sense for the time, as it’s literally an apocalypse movie). The comet isn’t exactly the war, but the wreckage the comet leaves probably would have been eerily familiar to many moviegoers. 

Verduns Undergang may not be the most famous asteroid movie but it does have the distinction of being one of the first, and it almost certainly influenced another film first: renowned French silent filmmaker Abel Gance’s first foray into talkies. 1931’s Fin du Monde shares much of the same plot as Verduns (both films drew on an 1893 novel by French astronomer Camille Flammarion);  it even goes to somewhat greater cartoonish lengths, featuring a capitalist orgy interrupted by rioting monks. But Fin du Monde also gestures toward idealist interwar-period politics toward the end of the film, with the creation of a (Christian, of course) world government supporting the people of Earth rebuilding from the comet’s wreckage. 

It should be noted that at no point does anyone really try to stop the big rocks in either Verdens Undergang or Fin du Monde. It’s really after World War II that the asteroid movie takes on its familiar narrative arc of government(s) doing Big Science to prevent planetary destruction. Two politically contentious technological developments shaped this narrative shift: nuclear weapons and the Space Race. Asteroid movies offer a pretty nice redemption arc for nuclear weapons and their Cold War proliferation: while they were created for the purposes of mass murder and pose an existential threat to life on this planet, they’re also conveniently the only method of protecting or saving the planet. A later Cold War film, 1979’s Meteor manages to critique the shenanigans of Cold War politics and simultaneously redeem nukes. Its protagonist, played by Sean Connery (no for real), is a scientist who leaves NASA after the military turns his asteroid defense technology into a weapon. When the asteroid threat emerges, Connery is brought back to NASA to convince stodgy politicians to get past their Cold War posturing and work with his Soviet counterpart (because of course the Soviets built an identical system of space missiles) to take out the meteor. The film features an extraordinarily long sequence of American and Soviet missiles gently cruising through space side-by-side (get it?). 

For most readers, this is all prehistory—the asteroid genre as it’s known today really begins in 1998 with Armageddon and Deep Impact. Of the two, Armageddon was the more financially successful and more aligned with the more conservative side of Cold War politics, somehow both deeply patriotic and vehemently anti-government. Like Meteor, Armageddon doesn’t bother to give its President of the United States a name; like Meteor, Armageddon shows capable scientists at odds with the military and bureaucrats. (Also, both Meteor and Armageddon feature imagery of New York’s World Trade Center in flames that hasn’t aged well; this may be more of an unfortunate coincidence than political message). 

Armageddon also takes the Cold War “thing that could kill the world will save the world” message to the next level by making people who work on oil drilling rigs—as in, people enabling and profiting from climate change—as the only team capable of effectively stopping the asteroid. The audience is apparently supposed to like the fact they work in the extractive industry (we meet Bruce Willis’ character on an oil rig, pitching golf balls at a boat of Greenpeace protestors). As Sarah Gailey has observed, Armageddon is also a film about masculinity and fatherhood: it’s not nukes and oil extraction that save the planet, it’s essentially Bruce Willis’ dad-ness.  

By contrast, Deep Impact’s president not only has a name, but is played by ultimate gentleman Morgan Freeman. If Armageddon was the asteroid movie of conservative, toxic-masculinity-laden imperialism, Deep Impact was the liberal centrist’s asteroid movie—competent engineers take center stage, not swaggering oilmen, and during the press conference announcing the comet to the world Freeman insists that in the year’s time before the comet’s arrival that life will continue as normal. (Watching a fictional president tell the world about a looming extinction event and then say, with a gentle smile, “you will keep paying your bills” strikes an unfortunately prescient nerve in 2022.)

For the most part, I’ve focused here on the category of asteroid movie where people try to stop a big rock from hitting the planet. But there is another angle, one that unsurprisingly hit its strides in the past decade: stories where people figure out how to live either in anticipation or the aftermath of a big rock hitting the planet. I say “unsurprisingly” because the 2010s were a big moment for millennial malaise. This is where we might put ponderous entries like 2011’s Melancholia or inexplicable romantic comedies like 2012’s Seeking A Friend For The End of the World (side note, remember when people kept putting Steve Carrell in romantic comedies?). Subverting the action movie form—focusing usually more on everyday people and their feelings instead of heroism and explosions—lays bare the real conflict at the heart of all asteroid movies, which is the question of how people choose to live while facing the inevitability of death. This is a worthy question, but it’s often rendered into an apolitical individual journey rather than a matter of collective experience or discussion of power. Characters in these movies sleep around, fall in love, and find themselves. They don’t choose organizing or community-building, they choose the nuclear family and heteronormative romance.  

As any connoisseur of disaster movies understands, simultaneous apocalypse is a great way to flatten politics and power dynamics in the name of an overarching story of “humanity.” It's never how disaster unfolds in real life, where the already suffering face disproportionate harm and capitalists find some angle through which to profit. (Also, even in most asteroid movies there’s some unevenly distributed suffering, since there’s almost always some preamble destruction where deadly medium-sized detritus takes out New York City or Hong Kong.) Movies with survival arks and bunker lotteries (1951’s When Worlds Collide, Deep Impact) gesture at this reality, but typically end on the positive note of another tomorrow rather than unpacking the fucked-up process that saved the lucky few. 

This brings us to Don’t Look Up and how (as previously mentioned) it really isn’t that interesting as a climate change movie, but as an asteroid movie has a lot to offer. McKay comes closest to doing for asteroid movies what George Romero did with zombie movies: he lays their latent symbolism bare and acknowledges its real underlying existential horror, not to mention the implications of the fucked-up ways most modern asteroid movies face that horror with gee-whiz technological salvation or toxic fuck-you nationalism (sometimes both). While the more self-aware subgenre previously mentioned does something similar, Don’t Look Up manages to avoid going fully interior to the detriment of a political message. It’s laser-focused on the systemic fuckups and abuses of power manipulating the planetary disaster. The main characters ultimately fail and they mourn, but they do also organize. 

I still have a real soft spot for Armageddon—admittedly, more for the experience of watching it in 2008 than any of its cinematic merits. But I do think that disaster movies, especially the big loud ones that make people roll their eyes, are worth taking seriously in a time increasingly defined by disaster capitalism. In most movies where our heroes avert the asteroids, the ending tends to feature a celebratory return to some status quo—think of Armageddon’s end credits featuring faux-grainy footage of Liv Tyler’s white wedding. In movies where the earth sustains damage or everyone dies, the narrative tends to either be about the promise for a world reborn or some kind of closure via a reaffirming of the status quo. I don’t know if Don’t Look Up is an especially great movie. It’s a disaster movie without catharsis—which maybe explains why it’s so polarizing. But there is something very of this particular zeitgeist in an ending that insists that there’s really no going back to the way things used to be and that there are no guarantees for redemption. 

Last night, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, on stage, at the Oscars, for telling a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. The whole world was watching—and now everyone wants to tell you what this moment means.

Rock told a joke about Pinkett Smith which referenced her hairstyle. (She shaved her head because of her alopecia.) Smith then got up, walked onto the stage, and slapped Rock. After he returned to his seat, he shouted at Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth!”

Moments after the slap, Smith became the fifth Black man to win the award for best actor, and the first since Forest Whitaker won for The Last King of Scotland in 2006. CODA, a film about a child of deaf parents, received the award for best picture in a historic win. Other things happened as well. The day after the ceremony, no one really seems to care about any of that. They want to talk about what Smith slapping Rock says not just about these two men but about society, comedy, and anything else you could possibly think of.

To be fair, this was the Oscars, Hollywood’s so-called biggest night, and anything that occurs during the ceremony has the potential to be take fodder. Even without the slap, Rock’s joke about Pinkett Smith was always going to hit a sore spot for both people who have alopecia—an autoimmune disorder—and specifically Black women, for whom hair is a particularly sensitive topic. It’s unlikely that Rock even wrote the joke—one of the lingering mysteries of the evening is why anyone thought that a joke about a justly-forgotten Ridley Scott movie from 25 years ago would land—and whoever did write it is probably now very aware of why you should double-check whether someone is making a fashion choice when you make jokes about their appearance. But Smith did slap Rock, so now the moment has far eclipsed its origins.

To comedians, including people like Judd Apatow, this event became emblematic of the apparent risk that stand-up comedians face in their workplace. In a since-deleted tweet, Apatow said that Smith “could have killed” Rock, which seems unlikely. (A burst eardrum seems like the most apocalyptic possibility here.) Other comedians, like Jim Gaffigan and vaccine skeptic Jimmy Dore, echoed the concerns Apatow expressed. (Apatow was at the ceremony and up for multiple awards, so one might think he had better things to do than tweet with the hand he wasn’t using to clutch his pearls; evidently he did not.)

Professional critics have, meanwhile, treated the idea of someone getting slapped at the Oscars roughly like someone peeing on the Vatican, with the Telegraph declaring this the “most shameful–and unforgivable—Oscar moment ever.” Acting as if the Oscars are hallowed ground for cinema is an easy mistake to make, but personally, Crypto.com using the tragedy of the war in Ukraine as an opportunity for advertisement ranks a little bit higher in terms of shame. 

Almost immediately, viewers at home started saying that Smith “assaulted” Rock, and should be arrested. For what it’s worth, the Los Angeles Police Department told Variety that Rock is not pressing charges. Still, for a segment of people, this event has immediately become a story about a dangerous man (Smith) attacking a harmless bystander (Rock), and the way the Hollywood elite has celebrated itself by defending Will Smith. This has then extended out to general opinions on how black men should comport themselves in public, often with racist subtext.

In contrast, many black people see this as a positive example of a black man standing up for his wife, specifically because Rock has previously told jokes about Pinkett Smith at the Oscars before. In this context, Smith is the hero and Rock is the villain, and the slap becomes a fulcrum on which the topics of race, masculinity, and heterosexual romance balance.

The further you get from the actual event, the more bizarre the takes get. To some political analysts, this is a story about how to use violence. They have compared Smith’s slap to the war on Ukraine, turning this story into a parable about how responding to an insult by escalating violence is inappropriate. How this is related to a single open-palmed slap between two rich men in their 50s is not immediately clear.

How you respond to this ends up saying more about you than it does Smith, Pinkett Smith, or Rock. It’s a Rorschach test, revealing the specific ways in which the take-havers imagine themselves as the protagonists of reality. Although there does seem to be a clear cause-and-effect in terms of why this went down, there’s also a distinct lack of context granted by the fact that celebrities and their lives are so distant from everyone else and theirs. Smith and Rock are both black men in Hollywood; it’s very possible that they know each other and that this beef extends beyond what we saw last night. It’s equally possible this was all a farcical misunderstanding brought about by Smith assuming everyone is up to date on his family’s various health problems and some writer not thinking to take 10 seconds to use Google. In any case, they seem perfectly capable of resolving it on their own, and neither Rock nor Smith seem to have left the night worse for wear.

Since we as a culture invented the idea of celebrity, we have used the lives of strangers to explain our own. They become like Greek gods or royalty; these are people who experience things for us, about whom we tell stories in order to understand ourselves. The internet has only made this process faster, so that the free association between what happened and what it reminds you of happens more quickly than one’s ability for critical thinking. Cultural events like this are made of clay. They have so little structure, they’re pliable enough to take any form that you need them to.