Latest news with #Bechdel
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Funniest Part of Alison Bechdel's Work
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel's career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest. Watch out, strip after strip said: Here comes Mo, the main character and author-avatar, spinning her way onto the page like a flustered Tasmanian devil of '90s-lefty anxiety. Look out for Mo, going hoarse over the rise of Pat Buchanan or chiding her circle for not thinking enough about genocide in Bosnia. There's Mo, nose in a newspaper, ignoring her friends' new baby to stress about the latest mainstream co-optation of radical activism. This might sound like a drag, but it's actually one of the funniest running bits in Bechdel's work. For decades, the author has allowed herself—or her stand-in self—to be loudly annoying, and often wrong, on the page. When Mo's a bummer, her friends snap back at her; when she talks or worries her way out of an opportunity to get laid, they poke fun at her. Mo is frequently uptight about other people's choices (to take Prozac, for instance, or to transition), but her diatribes usually end with her being dressed down or hurting someone she cares about. I've always been charmed by how much Bechdel is willing to let Mo be both her double and the butt of her joke. In her new book, Spent, Bechdel blurs the writer-character line even further, Hanna Rosin writes this week, and the result is even more gratifying. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books desk: Return of the shaman Shutting down Salman Rushdie is not going to help America's Johnson & Johnson problem An awkward truth about American work Spent is not a memoir, but neither is it wholly fictional. Instead, it's a graphic novel about a character named Alison Bechdel, who looks just like Alison Bechdel, the book's author—and also an older Mo. Novel-Alison, like real Alison, lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly, and has made a lot of unexpected money off a television adaptation of her memoir. (Bechdel's memoir Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical.) Alison and Holly's closest friends in Vermont are old standbys from DTWOF: Sparrow, Stuart, and their child, J.R.; Ginger; and Lois, who all live in a group house. They're busy with their own various crises and hookups, while Alison finds that more money means more problems. 'There's no avoiding it. She is complicit to the craw with the capitalist crisis,' a box of omniscient narration says in one panel. Alison, sitting at her desk doing her taxes, says aloud: 'Someone should write a book about this.' Spent is that book. Bechdel the author is 'astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable,' Rosin writes. So here, 'she's created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author.' And, thank goodness, it's still funny. Alison keeps putting her foot in her mouth on social issues, especially in front of the radical recent college dropout J.R. and their companion, Badger. The young adults—furious with the world for going about business as usual during a 21st-century 'polycrisis' (the name of a podcast they host)—resemble in many ways a younger Mo. Meanwhile, Alison wonders where her fighting spirit has gone, growing concerned that luxury and age have dulled her into complacency. When Sparrow suggests that the kids cool it, Bechdel isn't mocking their idealism. And she's not suggesting that Alison's become a coldhearted reactionary—just that she has more to manage, and perhaps more to lose, than she did years before. After all, in DTWOF, Mo's all-consuming neuroticism prevented her from living a fulfilling life, driving away friends and lovers. As in previous books, Bechdel seems to hint that a middle path is the only way forward: Giving in to mega-corporations and nihilistically welcoming climate apocalypse, she suggests, is an abdication of our responsibilities to one another. But her characters have to learn, again and again, that sticking to your principles doesn't have to mean ruining every meal shared with your loved ones. What Is Alison Bechdel's Secret? By Hanna Rosin The cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace. Read the full article. , by Elaine Castillo Girlie Delmundo—not her real name; she adopted it for her high-stress job—is a content moderator at a massive tech firm. Her work involves filtering through a carousel of online horrors so crushing that there are typically three or four suicide attempts among her co-workers each year. Girlie, however, is sardonic and no-nonsense by nature: She's an eldest daughter shaped by the 2008 recession, when her immigrant family lost everything. The job can't break her. But her life transforms when she gets a cushy position as an elite moderator for a virtual-reality firm. Suddenly, Girlie is enjoying perks such as regular VR therapy sessions, in which she experiences rare moments of bliss—swimming through cool water, touching the bark of a tree. The new gig is great, at least for a while. (All may not be as it seems there.) Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo's flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie's defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can't be controlled. — Valerie Trapp From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide 📚 Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret 📚 When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas 📚 The South, by Tash Aw The World That 'Wages for Housework' Wanted By Lily Meyer But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. Read the full article. * Lead image: Excerpted from the book Spent, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2025 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Washington Post
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Alison Bechdel makes a welcome return to fiction in ‘Spent'
No artistic border is more poorly defended or muzzily mapped than the wavy line that separates self-consciousness from self-parody. Too many of the greats stumble unintentionally across the divide, and when they do they rarely return. The wisest artists are those who make the journey with eyes open and head held high. How else would we know when they're winking? Witness Alison Bechdel in her charmingly shaggy new graphic novel, 'Spent,' her first proper work of fiction since she ended the 25-year run of her beloved comic strip 'Dykes to Watch Out For' in 2008. Here she is once again her main character, as she was in her graphic memoir 'Fun Home,' but the fictional Alison is the creator of a series called 'Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For.' Like the real Bechdel, this one lives in Vermont and is married to a woman named Holly (based on the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who is responsible for the vibrant colors of 'Spent'), but her friends are almost all fictional characters drawn from the cast of 'Dykes.' They're older now than they were when Bechdel last checked in on them, but they remain recognizably themselves as they aspire to thrive in the interregnum years of the covid-19 pandemic and the Biden presidency. Bechdel's return to fiction — even in an autobiographical key — is welcome, not least of all because graphic memoir yielded increasingly diminishing returns for her. 'Are You My Mother?,' her follow up to 'Fun Home,' was a denser book in every way — intellectually, narratively, formally — than its predecessor. Cluttered with lengthy quotations from British psychoanalytic theory across pages sometimes overcrowded with panels, it resembled an endless footnote appended to an already abstruse tome. 'The Secret to Superhuman Strength,' in which Bechdel retold her life story by discussing the kinds of physical exercise she did in different decades — call it a bildungsmuscleroman — aimed for a lighter tone but still overloaded the bar with plates. Both books are really about Bechdel's attempts to follow up 'Fun Home,' which lends them an exhaustingly self-referential tone. 'Spent' satirizes that impulse from the start. The fictional Alison is the author of 'Death and Taxidermy,' a memoir that reimagines the real Bechdel's schoolteacher father as a rogue taxidermist. (An excerpt from the book within the book demonstrates that it looks an awful lot like 'Fun Home,' though its themes are much sillier.) As 'Spent' begins in 2022, an acclaimed television series adapted from 'Death and Taxidermy' is increasingly going off the rails — its own version of the protagonist has just eaten a burger, to the vegetarian Alison's horror. Seeking to reassert herself, Alison is struggling to write her follow-up, '$um: An Accounting,' a book that will, she modestly hopes, 'put the final nail in the coffin of late-stage capitalism.' One problem: She's not entirely sure what 'late-stage capitalism' actually is. Alison's creative frustrations are less the spine of 'Spent' than one recurring gag spilling out of a horn of plenty. With its cast of familiar, aging lesbians, 'Spent' sometimes reads as if Bechdel had relaunched 'Dykes to Watch Out For' in AARP: The Magazine, its story ambling peripatetically between characters and situations. The results are often wry and sometimes raunchy. In one plot strand, a married, barely heterosexual couple from 'Dykes' cautiously opens their relationship to another woman. As things heat up ('Spent' is refreshingly graphic about postmenopausal sex), they settle on the term 'throuple' to describe their arrangement, on the grounds that 'polycule' sounds 'like a skin disorder.' Alison, meanwhile, has to push down jealousy after Holly, who becomes an internet celebrity when a video of her chopping wood goes viral, starts flirting with the alluring veterinarian who keeps stopping by. As Bechdel knows well, queer enclaves in liberal college towns are all alike in their insistence on difference, and she skewers those routine eccentricities as lovingly as ever. When almost all the characters gather for an 'anti-colonial Thanksgiving,' one is delighted to find that the old electric carving knife still works. 'Is that really necessary for Tofurky?' another asks. Alison and Holly are perpetually preoccupied with their finances, but they still spend on groceries with comedic profligacy, partly because they can't imagine going anywhere other than the organic co-op, where three bags of provisions run them $480. Despite its self-reflexive conceits, 'Spent' largely eschews the smirking pomp of metafiction. Yes, the fictional Alison is friends with the real Bechdel's characters, but no one ever comments on that fact — she seems to have simply slid into the place that Mo, her longtime alter ego, occupied in 'Dykes.' Lois, Ginger, Sparrow and the rest are here instead, one senses, as stand-ins for Bechdel's real friends, and the veneer of fiction gives Bechdel that much more permission to go broad as she takes aim at the proclivities of lefty Vermonters, herself included, who long to reclaim their old activist passions but can't quite escape the comforts of Burlington and its environs. Alison's artist's block, similarly, seems to have less to do with Bechdel's own attempts to repeat the triumph of 'Fun Home' than it does with — to put it both earnestly and hyperbolically — the struggle to do anything worthwhile in a dying world. Despite that, Bechdel's visual style is freer and lighter than it has been in years. Panels flow fluidly into one another and occasional splash pages vividly capture the communal tempo of Vermont life at cookouts and farmers markets. Her characters are crisply rendered, but her linework has a slightly wavy quality that imbues her drawings with the improvisatory tone of life as it is lived rather than plot as it is planned. Not much happens, but you don't need it to: The real pleasure of 'Spent' derives from watching its characters go about their lives, and imagining that Bechdel might continue their stories for the rest of her career. To the extent that there is an organizing story here, it is a book about people who need to get over themselves so that they can better look after one another. Holly slips into egomania as she watches her view counts on social media rise and fall, formerly revolutionary parents grapple with the radicalism of the next generation, Alison tries to respect her MAGA-minded sister. Ultimately, the very thing that threatens to grate in 'Spent' — the self-involvement of its characters, Alison in particular — is what makes the book so rewarding. In teasing herself and her friends, Bechdel finds a new way to have fun with both. That attitude, in turn, opens up forms of sweet-minded sincerity, and 'Spent' shines most in fleeting moments when its characters tenderly push one another, often with simple acts of care, to overcome their obsessive impasses and paralyzing dreads. We may not, Bechdel suggests, be able to help ourselves any more than we can save the world, but we can always look after those we love. Jacob Brogan is an editor with Book World. A Comic Novel By Alison Bechdel Mariner. 257 pp. $32
Atlantic
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Alison Bechdel's Search for Solace
In the opening scene of Spent, billed on its cover as a 'comic novel,' Alison Bechdel's cartoon avatar, also named Alison, has rearranged her sock drawer in an effort to stave off 'the feeling of impending doom.' Ever since she was born on the page four decades ago, Bechdel's fictional self has regularly journeyed between insecure and panicked, conveyed by the artist through subtle downturns in her tiny dash of a mouth. She perseverates about impending nuclear war, environmental disaster, 'patriarchal death culture,' girlfriends cheating on her, the local gay bookstore where she works closing down. From Our June 2025 Issue Subscribe to The Atlantic and support 160 years of independent journalism For fans who have followed Bechdel from underground lesbian cartoonist in the 1980s to best-selling author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and then watched with amazement as her life on the page went 3-D in a multiple–Tony Award–winning musical, the doom-tinged update in Spent will not come as a shock: She can still get pretty freaked out. Bechdel's latest title refers to late-stage capitalism, the semi-facetious frame for the book (which is broken into 'episodes' titled 'The Commodity,' 'The Process of Exchange,' and so on), but like almost everything else in her graphic storytelling, the title is also self-referential: It describes her age and her state of exhaustion, and perhaps hints at a concern that aging lesbians might not command much of an audience. Cartoon Alison now has lines under her eyes and graying hair, though otherwise she looks more or less as she did 40 years ago: butch haircut, eyes wide and worried, hunched shoulders, and, even in her 60s, the air of a teenage boy who does and doesn't want to be picked for the team. So imagine my surprise when, toward the end of Spent, after Alison has suffered through months of writer's block, a public-speaking flop, an awkward trip to Hollywood, an encounter with her Donald Trump–loving sister, and a couple of anxiety dreams, I came to this caption (spoiler alert): 'Alison experiences an unfamiliar sensation. Could it be … happiness?' The last scene, a full double-page drawing, finds Alison sitting on the grass at sunset outside her Vermont house, watching a bird do loops in the sky. If you look closely at the reclining figure, you can see that her mouth is unmistakably upturned. Over the decades, I've come to know the many moods of Bechdel's avatar, and not all are dark. There's also sardonic, horny, intellectually lit up. But relaxed? That brand of happiness feels new, and now ? Signs of real-world doom crop up everywhere in Spent, including in Alison's dreams. Yet as the novel winds down, a palpable calm arrives. Bechdel's gift as an artist is evoking the spirit of the moment through expressions, gestures, the way two bodies lean subtly toward or away from each other. More often than not, her scenes feel too claustrophobic to linger on. But this one is a wide and soothing expanse of tamed nature, and I studied it closely for clues. Up the hill stands a barn, sturdy and welcoming, and nearby, playful goats are happily entertaining themselves. The birds are chirping ('twittertwittertwitter,' 'peent!,' 'twitter'). The reeds in the foreground look like they're dancing. Alison is with her girlfriend, Holly, surrounded by friends. I felt at first confused, then seduced, and ultimately … jealous? What does Alison Bechdel know that we don't? And how, for all these years, in a remote corner of Vermont and mostly stuck in her own head, has she figured out just what to say to the rest of us? Bechdel began publishing her comic series Dykes to Watch Out For in the '80s, the same decade that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Art Spiegelman's Maus appeared. Graphic novel was just emerging as a term (Moore dismissed it as pompous marketing-speak for 'Big Expensive Comics'). The men were writing and drawing about war and murder; Bechdel wanted to focus on her friends. She has given several explanations over the years for why she landed on DTWOF, all of them personal: Comics still had something of an outsider aura that resonated with the lesbian separatist crowd she hung out with. Also, comics did not resonate with her highbrow mother, an English teacher and a talented amateur pianist. But mostly Bechdel talks about being unable to find her own quotidian queerness reflected in any artistic form, so she created one. Bechdel achieved the alchemy of memoir at its best, making her singular experience so specific and vivid that it became generalizable. The strip, which was serialized in more than 50 alternative newspapers for 25 years, could be as soapy as Friends and Sex and the City, but with a lot fewer men and meat products, and almost no shopping. The Alison character, the neurotic hub of the collective, went by 'Mo.' Coming of age in an unnamed midwestern city, she and her activist friends had sex, broke up, ate Szechuan vegetable pulp, and complained about the 'Republican lynch mob.' When Mo would have panic attacks, her friends would suggest that she 'cut back on the Earl Grey.' In ' The Rule,' which ran in 1985 and soon inspired a cultural trope, two women discuss what movie to see, and one lists her three requirements: It has to feature at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. This became known as the Bechdel Test, and no matter how many times Bechdel says that the list was a joke, Reddit still loves it. (In the strip, by the way, the pair can't find such a movie, so they go home.) By the end of Dykes to Watch Out For 's run, in 2008, a gay character was the lead in one of the aughts' most popular network sitcoms, and gay marriage had been legalized in two states. For decades, Bechdel had captured queer life with pitch-perfect mocking-insider's affection, and then she made a career turn that might have seemed a cultural retreat of sorts: She decided to let Mo morph into 'Alison,' the protagonist of a pair of family memoirs. But the more Bechdel turned inward, the more famous she got, and along the way, fame gave her something new to feel ambivalent, even panicked, about. Nothing about the central, bewildering tragedy in Bechdel's 2006 breakout, Fun Home, suggests an obvious mainstream hit: In 1980, months after 19-year-old Alison came out as a lesbian to her parents, her father, who'd been sleeping with men but hiding it, got hit by a truck—or, Bechdel intimates, put himself in the path of a truck. But Bechdel achieved the alchemy of memoir at its best, making her singular experience so specific and vivid that it became generalizable. Although she didn't call it that, her subject was emotional neglect. Early on, we learn that her father was 'monomaniacal' in his dedication to restoring the old Gothic Revival house they lived in. If one of the children couldn't hold up a mirror or a giant Christmas tree long enough to suit their decorator father, he might hit them. 'I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture,' Bechdel wrote. She portrayed a man besieged by his own demons, and then, in Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012), a mother who couldn't be bothered to pay attention. And who among us can't relate to some version of parental dysfunction? A bit later, her sometimes-exhausting internal monologues arrived on Broadway in song form, which aired out the neurosis. The effect was to turn Fun Home into a gentler story of self-discovery. pent is not technically autobiographical, although I've come to think of it loosely as the third in a trio of memoirs: Moving beyond Bechdel's biological family, it revolves around her chosen family, which feels genuinely more fun and more like home. The main character is, again, Alison. Her girlfriend shares the name Holly with Bechdel's real-life partner (Holly Rae Taylor), and the setting is Vermont, where they actually live. But Holly's job has been tweaked, and their friend circle consists of various fictional characters from DTWOF —older now, some saddled with jobs and progeny, all as libidinous as ever—who live together in a group house as part of a 'longitudinal study on communal living' (invented, as far as I know, but perfectly plausible in Vermont). While the group house cycles through comic sexual and domestic dramas, Alison is nearby nursing her most recent anxiety—her growing fame. Bechdel isn't purely making this up: Taylor has remarked in the past that Bechdel craves fame, even as she finds that craving pathetic—and she's astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable. So in this latest version of her avatar, she's created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author. In the novel version, her memoir hasn't been turned into a brilliant Broadway musical but has instead become a schlocky TV series controlled by a showrunner who loves explosions and dragons. Alison's friends at the group house invite her over to watch episodes together ('Hollywood in da house!'), and she sits cross-armed on the couch, looking miserable. In the meantime, Holly (an artist and the owner of a composting-bin company in real life) is getting ever more famous through her viral wood-chopping videos, which both annoys Alison and makes her jealous, particularly as people in their Vermont town start to recognize Holly first. (The caption of Alison's dream one night: 'Must … generate … content …') To escape the pain of having her name linked to commodified junk, Alison decides to write her own television series, and lands on the idea of a reality-TV approach to showing 'people how to free themselves from the grip of consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life!' Out in Hollywood, her pitch to all the major networks initially seems to be a hit, and the grip of the entertainment complex only tightens. Over at the group house, the queers continue to protest and organize, all the while still obsessing over sexual arrangements that we now call bisexual polycules. Which one of these worlds—the capitalist vortex or the polycule-friendly group house—is more real? Life at the house seems more entertaining, but is that just a foolish fantasy designed to trick us into thinking that there is safe harbor somewhere? Or even worse, a dangerous fantasy at a time when funding a longitudinal study on communal living could get your whole university canceled? I started to wonder where Bechdel was leading us. Read too much news and you're in the vortex. Retreat too much and you're lost in a bubble. Or maybe that's just black-and-white thinking, as therapists like to say. Maybe what she has learned over time, which many of us haven't quite, is that although you can never outrun your own anxiety, you'll never be sorry about taking a break from your own head to indulge in some friend drama next door. Four decades ago, Bechdel stumbled into chronicling an outsider niche during the Reagan era, and she has since grown into a lesbian icon on a national stage. She weathered the AIDS crisis, has witnessed the Obergefell v. Hodges watershed and the mainstreaming of RuPaul, and now finds herself in a country where state lawmakers are trying to undo gay marriage. In Spent, she shows Alison alone at her desk trying to work on her next book, but instead obsessively Googling marauding militias, monkeypox, Musk. Meanwhile, at the group house, they take turns weighing in on the train wreck that is modern politics while playing a rollicking game of cards. 'I see your abortion pill ban …' says one player, 'and I raise you armed white supremacists protesting drag queen story hour in Ohio!' Maybe if you and your friends have been worrying and talking about the patriarchal death spiral for decades, you've built up more stamina than the average person. You've probably learned by your 60s that you can't stop the spiral, or stop fretting about it either. You have, though, discovered that solidarity can really help (even if you're not the most sociable person)—and that you can show the rest of us that working the worry into a game of cards with old friends once in a while is more than fine. 'Where had her youthful idealism gone?' Alison asks herself at one point, a question in the air these days. Bechdel's trajectory suggests an answer: Idealism is still simmering, especially in a rich life lived among others, and it's still there partly because it isn't necessarily a drop-everything call to gear up for crisis. Even as Bechdel gets more famous, and the world keeps spinning forward and backward, her real life hasn't changed much. She has remained a semi-loner who sticks to a rigid routine in rural Vermont, which includes making morning coffee for Holly; tirelessly photographing herself in positions she intends to draw; working long hours at her desk, only sometimes productively—and watching her world. From the July/August 2014 issue: Why are all the cartoon mothers dead? A graphic novelist, unlike a regular novelist, has to leave room for the pictures. The neurotic inner monologue can take up only so much of the page. The cartoon Alison is situated in a space outside herself, with Holly, and goats, and neighbors. On that last, restful page of Spent, the caption reads: 'And she knows that whatever happens in those coming days, she will get by with a little help from her annoying, tenderhearted, and utterly luminous friends.' Mind you, these are not Bechdel's real friends. They are creations she's lived with for decades. In that way, though, they are just as concrete as her actual friends, and still standing after all these years, just like the trees, the reeds, and the birds. Still standing.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Yahoo
Former Bellefonte school board member charged in assault case allegedly shoving victim out of a moving vehicle
BELLEFONTE, Pa. (WTAJ) – A former member of the Bellefonte Area School District board is facing criminal charges after allegedly assaulting a woman by shoving her out of a moving vehicle and hitting her in the face, according to a criminal complaint filed by State College police. Jack Bechdel II, 58, of Bellefonte, was charged with simple assault, harassment, and driving with a suspended license following the April 2 incident in College Township. According to the criminal complaint, the woman told officers Bechdel picked her up at her home, drove to a Sheetz on Shiloh Road, and bought her a six-pack of Corona beer. She said the two began arguing about her drinking before the situation turned violent. Bechdel allegedly opened the passenger door while driving and pushed her out of the moving vehicle, causing her left ankle to be run over. The victim said she got back into the car and asked Bechdel to take her home. Once there, she told police that Bechdel struck her in the face with a closed fist before shoving her from the vehicle into her driveway and driving off. Police arrived at the scene and observed visible bruising and swelling under the woman's left eye and blood on her hands. Officers later located Bechdel's silver Mitsubishi Mirage at his place of employment, Lowe's. Inside the store, Bechdel admitted to striking the woman, reportedly telling police she hit him first while he was driving, according to the affidavit. Although Bechdel claimed to have sustained injuries to his face and mouth, police noted no visible trauma. He did show officers a loose tooth but was also observed to have several missing or decaying teeth. Bechdel was additionally charged with driving on a suspended license, which had been revoked for three months beginning Feb. 11. He acknowledged to police that he was aware of the suspension, according to the complaint. Bechdel was arraigned on April 3 before Magisterial District Judge Allen W. Sinclair. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for April 9. Bechdel submitted a resignation from being a member of the Bellefonte Area School District board, April 4, according to Superintendent Dr. Roy Rakszawski. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Los Angeles Times
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Boiling Point: Not a great year for climate change at the Oscars
And the Oscar for best climate change film of 2024 goes to ... 'The Wild Robot,' a beautiful animated movie that takes place in a world irrevocably altered by rising seas. Not that there was much competition. For the second year running, nonprofit consulting firm Good Energy applied its Climate Reality Check to the actual Oscar-nominated films. Intended as a climate version of the Bechdel test, which measures representation of women, the Climate Reality Check tests whether a movie and its characters acknowledge global warming. Compared to last year, the results weren't great. Of last year's 13 Oscar-nominated films that met Good Energy's criteria (feature-length movies set in present-day or near-future Earth) three passed the test. This year, there were 10 eligible films. Only 'The Wild Robot' passed. The climate silence 'does feel a little striking after the harrowing year we've all had,' Good Energy Chief Executive Anna Jane Joyner said, referring to the fossil-fueled wildfires that tore through Altadena and Pacific Palisades. 'I think Hollywood is learning firsthand that it's on the front lines of climate change,' she added. Maybe a few years from now, studios will release a torrent of movies and shows reflecting the realities of a scary-but-still-salvageable world, helmed by producers and writers jolted into renewed awareness by the infernos. But for now, the picture is bleak. A peer-reviewed study slated for publication this month, led by Rice University English and environmental studies professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, analyzes climate change mentions in 250 of the most popular movies of the last decade. The authors found that just 12.8% of the films allude to global warming. Just 3.6% depict or mention the climate crisis in two or more scenes. 'A lot of times, it's really being mentioned in passing,' Schneider-Mayerson said. It's also possible some Hollywood studios could be wary of acknowledging climate change on the silver screen so long as Donald Trump is president, given his history of climate denial and fealty to the oil and gas industry — and his growing propensity to threaten and bully media companies whose content displeases him. Joyner, though, doesn't think studios will shy away from climate. She pointed to another analysis led by Schneider-Mayerson, which found that movies passing the Climate Reality Check and released in theaters earned 10% more at the box office, on average, than films failing the test. Netflix, meanwhile, says on its website that 80% of its customers 'choose to watch at least one story on Netflix that helps them better understand climate issues or highlight hopeful solutions around sustainability.' 'Clearly, audiences are more and more interested in these stories,' Joyner said. Sponsors are interested in selling audiences on climate-friendly products, too. I was sitting in a movie theater last weekend enjoying 'Captain America: Brave New World' — the latest entry in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe — when, to my surprise, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) got out of his SUV and pulled his iconic red-white-and-blue shield out of the front trunk. Yes, a front trunk, where an internal combustion engine would normally be. That meant Captain America was driving an electric vehicle, right? Indeed, he was. I did some research after I got home and learned that Wilson was driving a GMC Hummer EV, the result of a paid partnership between Marvel Studios and GMC parent company General Motors. 'Brave New World' doesn't pass the climate test. Also, SUVs kill more pedestrians and cyclists than smaller cars. But the more movies and TV shows spotlight climate solutions — electric vehicles, solar panels, induction stoves — the more likely people are to support those solutions. For Hollywood, that's a step in the right direction. Moving forward, filmmakers need to understand that stories ignoring climate change don't reflect reality. 'It's going to feel like they're in a fantasy universe,' Joyner said. On that note, here's what's happening around the West: The fossil fuel industry faces a long, steady decline in California. But it's putting up a fight. Oil and gas companies and trade groups spent a record $65.8 million lobbying California legislators and agencies in 2023 and 2024, as Liza Gross reports for Inside Climate News. Those expenditures helped defeat a bill that might have led to PBF Energy facing steep penalties for a recent explosion at its Martinez oil refinery. Environmentalists and some lawmakers, meanwhile, worry the plastics industry may have enlisted Gov. Gavin Newsom in its campaign to delay a groundbreaking law that's supposed to phase out certain single-use plastics. (Plastics, you may recall, are usually made from oil and gas.) Details here from The Times' Susanne Rust. Even if fossil fuel companies don't ultimately block the transition to cleaner products, the road won't be easy. Take gasoline. As demand falls due to growth of electric cars, state officials are weighing many options to stabilize gas supplies — including taking ownership of oil refineries, as my colleague Russ Mitchell reports. Speaking of which, the Wall Street Journal has a good story on Chevron's decision to move its headquarters from California to Texas. One fascinating tidbit: Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth texted Newsom before making the announcement, hoping to get him on the phone first. Newsom wasn't interested in talking. A few other stories dealing with fossil fuels: I'm not sure what's worse: President Trump ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs (which will lead to wasted electricity and higher utility bills for Americans), or Trump not knowing that the Energy Department, not the EPA, writes those rules. I take that back: The underlying policy is definitely worse. Also bad: The Trump administration's funding freeze could interrupt vegetation clearing work in national forests intended to prevent devastating wildfires. Here's the story from my L.A. Times colleague James Rainey. Thousands of layoffs at the U.S. Forest Service, part of a massive round of job cuts affecting agencies including the National Park Service, could have similarly catastrophic consequences for wildfire prevention work. Those aren't the Trump administration's only questionable fire-related choices. My colleague Tony Briscoe reports that federal officials are skimping on soil testing meant to protect families from hazardous chemicals in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires, seemingly to speed up rebuilding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency insists its approach is scientifically sound, even though it's not what FEMA has done after past fires. In other news, Trump barred federal agencies from buying paper straws, The Times' Susanne Rust writes. Associates of Trump advisor Elon Musk, meanwhile, were granted access to the EPA's contracting system, even as Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle company, was fined for violating California rules protecting workers from dangerous heat. My colleague Suhauna Hussain wrote about Tesla's alleged violations at its Fremont plant. How should the Democratic Party respond to Trump's attacks on clean energy and democracy? Fellow L.A. Times columnist Mark Z. Barabak thinks Democrats should pick their battles; he commended Gov. Gavin Newsom for trying to stay on Trump's good side in hopes of securing federal wildfire aid for L.A. County. As you may recall from last Tuesday's Boiling Point, I have a different view. Mark and I engaged in a thoughtful, spirited debate. Lots of other stuff happening this week. Let's do a quick rundown, starting with fire: Moving on to America's public lands and waters: Last but not least, some urban planning. First, let's talk about billionaire developer and former L.A. mayoral hopeful Rick Caruso. He's been railing against Mayor Karen Bass, exaggerating her role in the Palisades fire getting so destructive. He's also a longtime critic of the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, an important law that's sometimes used by bad-faith actors to try to block affordable apartment buildings, solar farms and other worthwhile projects. Well, now Caruso is using CEQA to his advantage. As my colleague David Zahniser reports, one of Caruso's companies, the Grove shopping mall, is suing to block L.A.'s approval of a $1-billion renovation of the former CBS Television City studio nearby. The Grove is contesting the project's environmental review under CEQA — exactly the kind of lawsuit Caruso has described as 'frivolous.' CEQA reform for thee, but not for me. Second: RIP Donald Shoup, brilliant economist and enemy of free street parking. If you haven't heard of him, that's OK; this obituary by The Times' Liam Dillon is a wonderful read. Shoup's work helped spur the elimination of mandatory parking requirements for most developments near mass transit in California, a win for climate. First: On this week's Boiling Point podcast, our guest is climate comedian Esteban Gast. Yes, he tells jokes about global warming. And not only is he funny, he has great insights about how the climate movement might adjust its messaging for America in 2025. (For more, I wrote last year about the burgeoning climate comedy movement.) Second: I'll be at Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City this Saturday, Feb. 22, from 6 to 7 p.m., participating in a panel discussion focused on the current political moment. Conversation topics will include climate, immigration and disinformation. Feel free to join us. This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here. For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @ on Bluesky.
