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The CW series Jane the Virgin keeps going strong.

Jane is a pretty complex character (some of the others need more complexity, and they may get it) played by an actress, Gina Rodriguez, who keeps proving just how able she is.

To no one’s surprise, the Village Voice reports that the show began with a “seeming social conservatism” but is now displaying “a rather nuanced, if not strictly progressive, sexual politics.”  Are you sure it’s not a seeming sexual politics?  To my mind, all the show wants to do is entertain.  It cares about its characters, but has nothing to say.  (Note to myself:  There are plenty of more episodes to come, though.)

There is a lot of acquisitiveness in the Flannery O’Connor short story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”:  Old woman Crater longs to acquire a husband for her simpleminded daughter, Mr. Shiftlet aims to acquire the old woman’s car without paying for it.  Mrs. Crater lets Mr. Shiftlet stay and earn his bread on her property, intending to play matchmaker for the moneyless man and Lucynell, the daughter; and, indeed, there is a marriage.  But the marriage means nothing to Mr. Shiftlet.  He wishes to abandon the daughter (who has a child’s mind).

Though a miscreant, Mr. Shiftlet is not below feeling regret or even remorse.  The “tramp” who shan’t be starting a family begins to sentimentalize family (motherhood, anyway) to assuage a bitterness he experiences.  But bitterness all too easily gives way to despair.  After a hitchhiking boy—Mr. Shiftlet gives him a ride in the car he stole—insults the man’s mother, he feels “the rottenness of the world . . . about to engulf him.”  It is a rottenness with which Mr. Shiftlet knows he is united, and it triggers in him a thought about the indignation of God.  It is worth asking whether Mr. Shiftlet is on his way to salvation in this Christian story.  Perhaps so, but what is conveyed beyond a doubt is that, as Hebrews 10 tells us, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

English: Portrait of American writer Flannery-O’Connor from 1947. Picture is cropped and edited from bigger picture: Robie with Flannery 1947.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I picked up a nonfiction book from 2011 called Sex, Mom & God by Frank Schaeffer, a liberal Christian or . . . something; I don’t know what he is.

Compelled to comment on Sarah Palin’s role as defender of traditional values such as marriage and the family, Schaeffer has written that “Palin was the least ‘submissive’ female imaginable [submissive to her husband, that is].  She misused her children as stage props and reduced her husband to the role of ‘helpmeet’; indeed, he became the perfect example of a good biblical wife.”  (This during the 2008 presidential campaign.)

I am prompted to wonder why a goodly number of my fellow Christians—or whoever—feel they have to write books.  We’d be better off if they didn’t.  That Sarah Palin has failed at submissiveness is probably something God alone should determine, is it not?  The idea that she “misused her children as stage props” (“used” and not misused is the proper word here) is simply absurd, and who would believe there was any such “reduction” of Tod Palin?

For a man to criticize Palin as late as 2011 was sadly ungallant.

Capriciousness can become cruelty.  It does with Carmen in Charles Vidor’s The Loves of Carmen (1948) based, like the opera, on the Prosper Merimee story.

The gypsies in the film, of whom beautiful Carmen is one, are truly thieves.  Carmen’s Spanish lover, who finds out too late that Carmen is married, becomes one too, after the husband’s death.  Will Carmen stay with the man?

This pretty-looking but often cornball and obvious period piece is rescued by the charisma and fire and gorgeousness of Rita Hayworth (Carmen).  Glenn Ford is miscast as the Spanish lover, Don Jose, but Hayworth makes doggone sure she isn’t miscast.  She’s even good in a fight scene with another woman, and her general energy complements the suitably staged physical conflicts between men.  Artificial as it is, the movie confirms what it means for an actress to be a star in a way Jane Fonda or Debra Winger or Michelle Pfeiffer never was.

Carmen itself is flawed if rather entertaining.  In any case, it offers something better than the fake spirituality of another Hayworth film, Salome.

Cover of The Loves of Carmen

The second episode of Jane the Virgin (on Monday, Oct. 20) was as well-written as the first.  This CW series is the new Desperate Housewives—i.e. the new plebeian, seriocomic soap—but so far it’s better than Housewives.  It’s livelier and more amusing and, well, somehow a little less plebeian.  Too, it’s moving (in the second episode), notwithstanding the gimmicky tear falling in slow-mo from the eye of Yael Grobglas’s Petra.

Gina Rodriguez is appealingly fine as Jane, resourceful and not as conventional as she could be.  Yara Martinez also impresses as a doctor named Luisa, strikingly subdued in pain and fear.  Among the men, Jaime Camil never overdoes his comic vigor as a telenovela star.

The ratings for Jane have been decent.  Let’s hope the show remains decent.