Kill James Bond! - S3E31.5: Air Doll

Episode Date: November 9, 2024

On this week's Bonus, it's Girls Night as Nova and Abi watch Air Doll, a movie about a blow-up doll that comes to life. I'll tell you this for free: it ain't about 9/11. Joining us is Lily Alexandre, video essayist and fellow Nebula creator, who's videos introduced Abi to this movie! Check out Lily's videos here! -----   FREE PALESTINE   Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. They deserve to survive.   https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip   https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate   -----   Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond   ------   WEB DESIGN ALERT   Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/   Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com  

Girls night. Girls night. Let's go. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I'm November Kelly. I'm joined as always by Abigail Thorne. Sadly, no Devon this week. But we have a guest.

Guest, please introduce yourself. Absolutely. Hello. I am Lily Alexander. I make video essays. I'm trying to steal your gig, Abigail, basically, is the deal. Already stolen, I think. Lily makes some of the best video essays out there.

Lily's also a nebula family, so... And you recommended this film in your most recent video, so I was just like, oh, yeah, that looks good. Let's give you one. Yeah, yeah, I love this movie. I have been talking around it for the past year in my videos, because it's almost impossible to make into a video of its own, I think just because of the sheer amount of nudity in this thing.

So just touching on it sort of at the end was... I think I've done it two or three times, this specific movie, just because I can't get enough of it. And I had never heard of anyone who had seen it before. So I'm so glad that the word has gotten out now and that you two have seen it. I mean, I'm really glad. I really enjoyed this.

The film is Air Doll by Hirokazu Kureeda. And I had never seen any of his work before. I know the actress who's leading this, Bay Duna, from a couple of things that she's done with the Wachowskis. But like, I, first time seeing any work by this director, and I really, really enjoyed it. Reminded me of Poor Things quite a bit. Also got an edge of stuff like Consequences of Love a bit. And a few others. So it's very much like, it's in my wheelhouse. I'm very

glad. My notes say trans women really good at basketball call that air dog. You've stolen the set up to a joke I was going to do and then pay off at the end of the thing of being like, yeah, I don't know where it says in the rules that, you know, trans women could play basketball. They changed it recently. It does in fact say that very explicitly now. Take 20 point font, bold page one.

Trans women cannot play basketball. Damn it. Well, at least I have an excuse now. Yeah. Air doll also implies the existence of an earth doll and a water doll and a fire doll. Everything changed when the fire doll attacked. She could do whatever to me. I don't care. This is a very TS movie, if I may say so.

I imagine we'll get into that. So we have a thing on the podcast, yeah, that all movies are either about 9-11 or being transgender. And let me tell you, this movie ain't about 9-11. No, no, it is not. No, not really at all. But so we we begin in like some regional Japanese city. Like this movie is entirely set in a sort of like ordinary sort of working class Japanese neighborhood, like urban area. And it suffers a bit for me from the context of now, you know, in twenty

twenty four, when we live in hell and as someone who like, you know, in 2024, when we live in hell, and as someone who like, you know, is able to appreciate a lot of this stuff, you're doing this film that is largely about alienation and how miserable this is, and experiencing an extremely high quality of life. You know, like you see our opening show is like a guy coming home from work, and you know, looking miserable is why I mentioned the consequences of love is like he's on the bus alone. He's in the supermarket alone. And I'm just thinking to myself I have watched too much YouTube. I know how good the sandwiches in that supermarket are.

I don't know what you're complaining about. It's like when you watch the Matrix now and it's just like damn he gets his own cubicle. Yeah, yeah. Just like eating eating like the best egg sandwich ever made by human hands at the like apex of like, sort of like quality of life for maybe ever. And being like, you know, fuck my stupid alienated life. This is bullshit. Why don't I have a girlfriend?

Which is, which is an interesting thing to say about, about the movie. Because he gets home, back to his apartment and and does the whole honey I'm home thing, sits down for dinner, and we get what would be the reverse shot of a conversation, of the back of a woman's head and shoulders, as he's talking. And he's talking about his day. And you realize in the course of holding this shot that this is a doll that he's talking to. Like a blow up sex doll.

It's sort of like, and this is kind of a point in the movie, we're not at the... The sex doll tech tree hadn't advanced to the point of real dolls or anything yet. So it's like an inflatable sex doll. Yeah, yeah. With, you know, clothes and hair and everything that he is like, sort of like, sat in front of him while he eats his dinner and complains about work. About his day. He only talks about his day. He even pretends that it's giving him little responses. Well, it, her? Hard to know what pronoun to use at this stage. It's, it makes a pretty strong thing that like men like to hear themselves talk

and do not really need anyone else to be involved in that conversation. What's also interesting about this is, um, Yeah, interesting. Compare me to a man. Um, so Interesting. Compare ourselves to men. Um, no, it's, it's, it's the like self-hatred part of the, the transgender experience. No, um, the other thing that I wanted to note about this is he's talking about, um, this incident that he had at work where he, he like humiliated a junior colleague, uh, because he was like, oh, he doesn't know his job and the way he smiles is really repulsive to me.

And what are you going to do with these people? And he's kind of like, he's like flexing a little bit. You know? I didn't even pick up on what his conversation was actually about. I was too busy digesting the setup to it. So I'm glad you picked that up. Yeah, the what the fuck of it all.

I think it's reasonable to spoil this bit, but to say that like later on in a montage, we see that what he's actually doing here is inverting a conversation that he's had at work where he is the one being humiliated and he has placed himself in his boss's position to explain this to his sex doll. He's trying to impress his sex doll. I hadn't put that together before. You know, like, at the start of this movie, I tend to think like, oh, this is like a sad, lonely man

who needs company. Mm-hmm. But yeah, you're right, that he's much more interested in just like he's doing things at a person. He does not want a mutual connection at all. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so he has like this sad, everyone in this movie has a bit of a sad little life, huh?

Mm-hmm. He's like a waiter at a buffet where he's berated by everyone. He's just like a total... Like, Cuck is not strictly accurate, but he would be in a different world. He's like obliged to perform this kind of like very polite, very servile demeanor. And it's interesting, as a character, this guy, he has some like, you know, some depth to him. We see that he's very interested in astronomy, for instance.

He has like a telescope and like inflatable models of the planets and like a star machine, like you see under viral tweets. And this is just like, this is a part of his life. He's not necessarily like an obsessive exactly. But this is, he is, she is a possession that he has bought for himself to like, you know, fulfill like emotional and sexual need, as we shall see, because... He does fuck that inflatable doll. He fucks that doll.

He fucks that doll. He fucks that doll. Oh yeah, vigorously. Like, Napoleon Solo with the clown, I mean... Yeah, yeah. And he calls her, he calls her Beautiful. The name that he gives her is Nozomi. He fucks the doll and then we get like, what a stock cut to him in the bathroom, cleaning out the kind of like, the disposable flesh like pussy.

Yeah. And just kind of like business like, like washing out her, her like flesh like pussy. Yeah. It totally takes away the glamour and the romance because at times he's really affectionate with her, you know, and like it's almost endearing. But then this shot is just like vile. Yeah. Yeah.

I have a lot of thoughts about this. My notes say the epidemic of male loneliness. Also her resting expression, which is the only expression we see her have at this point, is kind of horrified. It's like very wide-eyed and kind of like, if you saw this on a person, you would read that they were scared, right? They were concerned at the very least. Yeah, totally. Yeah, you're right. She's kind of very wide-eyed and like, of course, staring because she doesn't

blink. But yeah, then the next morning... Except she doesn't blink. She fucking does though. That's the first show of life that we get from her. Ah, but it's not. Is it not? Because, no. Because before we see it, we hear it. We get some shots of the sun rising over this rain dampened neighborhood.

And we hear breathing in the mix. We hear a woman very slowly breathing. And as Hideo, this guy, leaves the house, Nozomi blinks. Mm-hmm. He doesn't notice, of course. And he does also, he puts a blanket over her. Like not- He talks her into bed. Not completely over her, like you would a person,

because she's, you know, he says, it's cold. So he puts a blanket over her. It's like a kind gesture, ostensibly, right? Man has a parasocial relationship with his sex doll. Yeah, I guess. He kisses her goodbye, and tucks her into bed, and leaves, and she gets up. Walks. And they're still not using a human act for this one.

It's still a plastic doll, and so she kind of walks like she's in the Thunderbird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's puppety. It's a bit muppety. It's a little... I can see how, like, some... The initial response to this movie was not as, as, like, strong praise as this guy's movies usually get. It was like, oh, this is so schlocky and cheesy. And I think partially because people weren't sold

on the whole, like, human to doll conversion thing. But to me, it's like really beautiful how they do it. Yeah, it is like walk up to the window and it is like super stiff and stilted because, you know, she's moving for the first time in her life. And then it sort of, you know, pans away outside and then back in. And now she's the human woman. This was such a powerful moment for me. of, you know, pans away outside and then back in. And now she's the human woman. This was such a powerful moment for me.

She gets she gets like raindrops down her arm. And and she like she remarks that they're beautiful, which is the same word. Yes, she is. Echo Lailia, right? Like she's she's repeating what she so she goes through the clothes that he has bought for her, which are all, of course, like fetish clothes of various kinds. She's got like schoolgirl uniform, I think like sexy mermaid. And the one she settles on is like femboy-ling.

A nun outfit. We've all seen these outfits on the timeline. Of course. Like, would you date a trans girl? Oh, God. Things of this kind, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But real Finster's wardrobe ass scene.

The one she settles on is your, like, French-made outfit. I say you ought to mean ones. I'm not implying you have a French-made outfit. And she goes for a walk in the neighborhood. And my note here just says, man, the adult age bracket edition of Old Enough is a weird watch. Because she's like experiencing the world for the first time with like very childlike, very consciously childlike wonder.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Her physical acting. Beidouna's physical acting. Yeah. Especially when she like walks and goes up and down stairs. It's like so, it's so good. Mm-hmm. I think the first thing she sees, an example of Chekhov's garbage truck, is... Oh, the bin man. Exactly. The bin man going through the trash and being like, this is burnable, this is burnable, this isn't burnable, this is burnable, and separating them out for like,

you know, like what's recyclable versus what has to go in the incinerator. And- She sees an older woman saluting the bin man, which you always should always salute the bin man, but salute brackets Japanese, so she bows to the bin man. She follows that woman as she goes around thanking things. And copies her.

Mm-hmm. She copies her. Ecopraxia. I don't know if this is depending on some sort of cultural context that I just don't have, but the woman who's just going around thanking everyone, do we know? Is that, is she, is it some sort of religious thing? I did wonder about that, but I'm not sure either, you know? Quirked up queen.

Mm-hmm. Because we see her later on in the korban, the police box, trying to confess to crime she's seen in the newspaper. So I think this is as much as anything, it's an expression of loneliness, right? As almost every behavior in the movie is. Mm. Maybe she's getting a little old and a little confused. Reminds me a bit of a poem, actually, by W.S. Merwin called Thanks, which is one of my favorites,

despite the fact that I had to look up the title. And but, yeah, no, I think it is a kind of like loneliness thing. It's an odd thing to do. She plays in the park. She like follows some little kids to the park and like plays. She's very childlike. Although one of the kids doesn't want to like touch her because her hands are cold. This is a recurring thing because she's, you know, she's a doll, right?

Also, it's interesting, people pay her no mind, despite the fact that she's dressed in a sexy French maid outfit. Nobody like thinks it's weird. The parents don't want the kids playing with her, but that's about the extent of it. People are mostly like, oh, this is some naive, weird, but mostly harmless person. I think it's an essential thing to the kind of alienation theme of this movie, that people generally either don't notice her, or if they do react with kind of suspicion, right? But in general, people are like, just do not see her.

And this is the things that like, this is a portrait of a society which is fatally atomized and separated from from from itself. So she she's like wanders the town until she comes across this video rental store. It's a DVD rental store. And I immediately start plotting out the rest of the movie in my head wrongly by going, oh, OK, this is Dole Tooth. She's going to like emancipate herself through the power of cinema because movie guys love movies unsurprisingly and love making movies about how good movies are.

She's going to, you're a ghost land theme, she's going to watch Jaws and Rocky and then kill for this guy. I want to be sure you want to be sure we all want to be sure, we all want to be sure. Yeah, me who has seen Dogtooth being like, getting a lot of Dogtooth vibes from this. Yeah. And she briefly meets the young man who works at the video store named Junichi, who will come back later. Yeah. I actually wonder, because, you know, she does not become a movie star, I don't know what happens in Dogtooth, Bite the Movies or whatever it is. I wonder what this movie has to say about movies. Like, it seems like just something the director knows a lot about.

And it's like, it's a fun, comforting place to stay. But is it saying that Alienation is like, like movie-like in some way? I'm not totally clear on it. All I know is like, it's very cozy. It does make a theme of this in particular that the video rental store and the existence of that is like home media is killing cinema. In the cinema used to be a communal activity. Oh interesting. That's a way in which the film hasn't really aged well then

because if it's trying to say like, this is an atomizing force, video rental store brackets bad. Now I look at it and I'm like, oh, I'm nostalgia for like the video rental store. You had to go to a store and talk to a person about a movie. Yeah, that was so nice and like communal. As we will see, there's a nice scene later on where people come in and like ask for movies. Yeah. It's true. You know, people recommend stuff.

It's not recommended by an algorithm. Or a podcast. Again, this is the watching the Matrix being like, damn, he gets a cubicle. Yeah, my favorite little detail for that is the cop, the like neighborhood cop who just has like a sort of perfectly ordinary like office job and spends most of his time watering the plants outside the police box, coming in in his like off-duty leather jacket and being like, do you have any movies about like a really bad cop? Like doing like drug deals, he's like bad to the bone, he gets recommended bad lieutenant. It's really funny.

So that night, she's pretending again to be a doll for Hideo. She like holds her breath and doesn't move. It's a beautiful physical acting and she like leans away from him trying to kiss her in the way that a doll might plausibly fall. It's like deniably like and like something that I personally and I think a lot of women have experienced of someone who is trying to kiss you that you don't want them to and you just kind of like your first reaction to like feign kind of like moving away from them, you know?

Yeah. And not definitely not fight back. I mean, of course, for like very diegetic in universe reasons here. Yeah, this guy had gender on the brain. That's for sure. I really like how honestly, the actual doll's face did not read as panicked to me necessarily, but seeing the same expression on a human woman, it was immediately like recontextualized as like, oh fuck, she's having a panic attack right now.

Almost like dissociating, yeah. Yeah, completely. And she says in voiceover to us, she says, I found myself with a heart I was not supposed to have. Yeah, this movie is about 9-11 beautiful clear awesome day in September 2001 the Japanese word is kokoro which I think can mean like heart soul mind animus it has like a multitude of meanings sure I mean the translation

heart is interesting in English too, because it implies a kind of femininity, right? Your heart is a matter of concern to you if you're a woman in a Jane Austen novel, right? Men don't necessarily talk about what their heart is doing as much in English, and I wonder if that carries over into the Japanese as well. I suspect so from the way this movie is sort of like portraying it. I wonder. Also, the heart as like obviously a tangible thing that we attach meaning to versus like,

I think a soul might have been the more strictly accurate translation, you know, because she like a soul is an intangible thing and sort of associated with like breath and air. Interesting that she would say that she has a heart or that, I mean, we would, we would translate it that way. I don't know if I would prefer if it were soul, but that the gendered thing is interesting. Yeah, certainly. And she gets a job somehow. Remember when, you remember those?

He like leaves, he leaves her alone during the days to go out to work and so she can just like go out during the day in her maid outfit. And she goes to this video rental store again and gets a job. No CV, no ID, she's never seen a movie, doesn't know what movies are. She doesn't know what movies are. And they're just like, huh. I mean, some of this is also playing into a kind of cultural thing for female innocence as well.

Yeah. It's the same thing that audition is playing on, right? Of the kind of conservative idea of what a Japanese woman should be is like, oh, I don't know anything. I need someone to explain this to me. It's hard to understand. I'm afraid she uses a lot. And so she gets this job from the boss at the video rental store, an older guy who, ostensibly, at this time is quite a nice guy, not least because he gives her the job, but he has this

kind of affable boomer grumbling about how, oh you've never seen a movie in a theatre, kids these days, I'm sort of my first date with my wife was going to see Love Story together, which is a really good pick for dating it. And yeah, it's just like for the moment, when I'm thinking this is dog tues and this is going to be about how watching the movies can give you the models to emancipate yourself I'm like, this guy's cool, I know an indie film festival hates to see him coming. We also meet some of the people in the neighborhood. One is a woman with stockings that have lines up the back. And Nozomi mistakes her for a fellow doll. She wrongly clocks at this one.

Yeah, she clocks at this one. Because she has lines up the back of her legs, Nozomi, because they're her seams, because she's made of plastic. So she sees this lady with stockings and thinks that she's a doll. And she gives her advice on how to cover them up, right? Like with makeup. She gives her concealer later on, like you could cover the lines. Do not do this. Do not clock me in public and then give me passing advice. Yeah. The line she says to that lady later on is you can cover up the lines with these.

And she thinks she meets the lines on her face. Like as we see, this woman is very insecure about her age. But there's also a pervy guy who tries to look up her skirt in the store and she doesn't understand what he's doing. She does also lie for the first time. And she says this because I found a heart. I told a lie because this boss asks her in what is maybe the first hint that there is something over familiar about him, whether or not she has a boyfriend.

And she's like, no, I don't. Despite the fact that, well, she doesn't, but she lives with a guy who owns her and is fucking her. Right? And she denies his existence. Someone else we meet who's a very sort of interesting character, who never interacts with any of the other characters, but we just kind of cut to her. Because as she's walking home that night, she finds an apple in the street, like a whole bushel of apples, which is first of all like a sort of Eve Forbidden Knowledge reference. But then we cut inside the house.

Where did they get this footage of me in my apartment? Please remove this from the movie. Is this lady a hoarder or a binge eater? Or she's like eating and drinking a huge amount? This is a girl who rocks, I think, and is doing nothing wrong. This is a very unhappy, obviously unhappy young woman in a trashed apartment that's full of garbage and full of apples, as well as a big palette of apples. She's girl rotting. She is. She absolutely well. She's got a big like palette of apples. She's girl rotting. She is. She absolutely. She's eating fast food. She's like drinking beer

and like getting so drunk that she throws up in the toilet. I know where DJ sets go crazy. Yeah. I want to hang with this girl. I think she would be cool. Absolutely. It's funny how like non-plot relevant she is until like the very, very end, you know? Tops will literally be like, I know a place and take you to an apartment full of apples. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could fix her. So she goes home and sort of like waits for Hideo to come back, which he does.

He takes a bath with her, he washes her hair. Yeah, and we see that when he was in the convenience store at the beginning, he pauses to smell a bottle of shampoo. And he explains that he got this, it was like a hundred yen more. So I paid like 50p more for this bottle of shampoo, but it smells way nicer. It's both ostensibly caring, but it's also like, oh, everything here is like an aid to like sexual release for him. Yeah, he does. He fucks her again. She has this line in the voiceover that like, I am an air doll, a substitute for what is it?

Handling sexual desire. Yeah. Often a role of the trans woman just to make that explicit for people who may not know. Yes, indeed. Like, I do wonder how differently this movie would hit if I dated more men, especially more cis men. But even still, I've still managed to feel like this sometimes. People talk about sex workers in this way. People are like, oh, like men should just use sex workers as if sex workers should just absorb the violence and pent up frustration of men who don't fix

themselves. Totally. And then sort of like being dependent on to be the inanimate fucking object with respect to a bruge, you know, to just kind of absorb this stuff. But like Arnold Schwarzenegger, we must also talk about the pump. Because he has a pump when she when she goes flat a little bit, he has a pump that connects to her belly button and he like it's a little hand pump and he inflates her, he inflates it. This becomes Chekhov's pump.

This will come back later on. And she you know what? It must be hard to mimic like being inflated, but I think Bayduna does a pretty good job of this. Yeah. Yeah. What a difficult role this must have been. Oh yeah.

She's like totally singular. And even like, she even makes the sounds of like being inflated as well. Like if listeners, if you want to know more, you can Google Sonic inflation. I'm gonna stop. She goes to the next day, she goes to a store, she gets her makeup done. She goes shopping for her own clothes and tries them on. My notes say, why am I crying? She's able to find out that she can use foundation

to cover the seams that she has from manufacturing. Your manufacturing marks that you can just erase them to be happier and more authentic. That's crazy. So again, 19 hijackers infiltrates a series of airports. By the way, when she's clothes shopping, there's a bit where she pauses and she looks at and taps the mannequin, which I really like, because it's relating to a sort of inanimate feminine, you know, as something that exists as an act of service. And she chats with Junichi, who she's sort of developing some fond feelings for, and they go on a little,

not quite a date, I suppose, but she says, I've never seen the ocean. And so he takes her, and she really likes it, and he explains things like death and aging and the sea, as if she's never heard of it. Yeah. And he's just completely open to this. This doesn't stymie him at all. I mean, this is a coworker thing as well, which is really funny to be like,

yeah, I had to explain the concept of death to my friend from work today. I mean, I guess that is just Kim Katsuragi, you know? Yeah. Oh my God. But yeah, so she's very childlike throughout. She's like, you know, like, what's that? What's that?

And she does another very childlike thing, which is she collects, you know, Ramune, the soda that has like a little like glass marble as an opening that rattles around in the neck of the bottle. Well, she like finds an empty Ramune bottle and is like entranced. Yeah, she's delighted by how the little like glass marble jingles around. Ten hours of jingling Ramune bottle on YouTube. And so I have something on that, which is that like, just generally something we see about her is that because she was just like brought into existence surreptitiously one day, she is always looking around for things that are like her.

You know? So I think her connection to the bottle is that she realizes her shadow is transparent at some point. And then she holds up the glass and the sun and she sees that it is as well. So she becomes like really drawn to it or connected to it. There's so many lovely... There's an animal with an inside and an outside. Sorry.

Oh, I. Mmm. Oh, I like that. It's from Vives Savi, another movie about women feeling sort of hollowed out internally. They go to dinner and she sees a little girl pretending to eat carrots and flicking them away. And of course, because she doesn't eat, she throws a carrot away in the same way. And wigs to this girl. A fantastic acting thing of being like, okay, now wink like someone who has just

found out what the concept of winking is and is doing it for the first time. She kind of does like Rowan Atkinson, Johnny, and was like, fucks it up. She tries to wink and fails. And as she's coming home from the stage, she's coming home on the bus on her own, and there's a... Sorry, there's one crucial thing that happens in the restaurant, which is that it's the little girl's birthday. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And the lights go out and everyone sings happy birthday and she gets a cake.

And Nozomi asks Junichi, does everyone have a birthday? And Junichi's like, yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah, that's how that works. Again, like having to explain the concept of birthdays to your coworker. So maybe maybe she's a Jehovah's Witness. I don't know. I don't know how we're going to explain the concept of the ocean to Devon when I get back. But I'm going to have to also tell them about aging too.

Yeah, that's going to be a rough conversation. Yeah. So as she's going home from this date on her own, she's on the bus and there's a salary man type guy who's asleep on the seat next to her. And she does some more echo lately because she answers a question that Genichi had asked her earlier. He's like, is there anything else you want to know about? And she just says to herself, I want to know more about you. And this wakes the guy up.

And she instinctively moves closer on the seat so he can lean on her. Just sort of like making yourself like a surface, you know? Yeah. Oh, this feels complicated. Because everyone here is so lonely and she's interested in connection. And so on my first watch, I think I was just really touched by that.

Just like she wants to bridge this gap because, you know, she doesn't understand why people are so alienated. But of course, it's also that as we see, she sort of understands her role in the world as like being the the physical woman there for the men to like satisfy their needs through. Yeah, it's in perfect languages, right? If you want to connect, but your only language of connection is submission and service, then to do that is, you know, I think that's basically her kind of journey through the movie is,

is that worth doing? Yeah. When she gets home, she hides her clothes and treasures in the back of the wardrobe. I really, really like this. It's just a little touch of, like, you know, having to hide this stuff and square it away. But this bit is heartbreaking.

And in so doing, she finds her box... Yes. ...which has a name, Candy, and a price. 5,980 yen. And Candy is such a great choice of name, Candy, and a price, 5,980 yen. And Candy is such a great choice of name, because it's sweet and disposable. It's also heartbreaking as well, that because she has been out in the world

and she has been working and she has been spending and earning money, she knows the context of this to know that she is cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Like to know that you have a value is bad enough, but then like know what that value is. Yeah. And that it's not much. Yeah. Yeah. Like to know that you have a value is bad enough, but then like know what that value is.

Yeah. And that it's not much. Yeah. God. Yeah. What an existential nightmare. I think we get a sort of, she engages with this sort of like thing of her as a product in a way later that she has like a little more control over that I think is really sweet.

I think one of my favorite scenes. We will, we will of course get to that in due time. So next there's one more person that we have to meet. And that's an old man in the park who's very, very sick and dying. And she sits next to him. He's got the like oxygen canister. And he tells her about mayflies, which only live for a day after they're born. They're a type of insect. And so they're completely empty inside. They have no organs. They don't eat.

They're just full of eggs. And she says, oh, like me, I'm completely empty inside. And he says, these days, everybody is. And then we get her remarks and her inner monologue, she sort of tries to suss out what being alive is. And she says that it seems like life is such that nobody can really fill it on their own, and we need other people. But at the same time, we forget that and then sometimes find the presence of other people displeasing or irritating. And we see a little montage of all the sporting players that we've met so far. Everyone just kind of going about their life in a very lonely way, including Hideo getting berated at work. It's interesting, particularly, I think it's particularly Japanese, that one of the things

that she says is like finding others displeasing, right? Is this idea that like, the alienation that you have is not just cold, it is a like forced politeness and civility. Where I think if you tried to make this for like, you, say, a British audience or an American audience, you might have that for like Hideo's customer service job, certainly. But in general, the kind of day-to-day interactions with people, you're not having that kind of facade as much, right? And it's interesting as well that, you know, she says like, why is it that the world is constructed so loosely, right?

That we know so little about each other. But now it's time for her secret to be exposed because she's working... I do want to go before we go to that, I want to go back a bit. So there's a couple of things we skipped over. Aside from this, there's also like, we have a couple of scenes of her like working in the rental thing There is a great bit by the way where the the little girl from the restaurants dad comes in Trying to find out what movie she's been watching because she's been combing her dolls hair with a fork Like Ariel and the Little Mermaid and he doesn't know what it is and she can't like she doesn't know either

It's like the the brick joke and control about the Shawshank Redemption, right? Like not being able to remember a movie is like something that's very evocative to me. Also very obvious parallels between this movie and The Little Mermaid. But the other thing is that in the course of this, because she's not able to help people and because she's still doing the like, Echol thing, she learns to say, excuse me, and I'm sorry. And she like, feels, she like learns to apologize, she has another like faux pas where she like, tries to like, interact with a child in a push chair in the street and the mother comes over and is like, quite suspicious of her.

And she says that she feels useless, which is something that she's picked up. And she has learned this sense of shame. She's not only gotten the beautiful stuff, but also some of civilization's discontents as well. Yeah. Well, like the apple earlier on. She has knowledge, but she also now knows that she's naked, as it were. And now her secret is exposed because she falls off a ladder

in the video store and tears her wrist open. And like, I was, I like gasped when I saw this because I was, you know, I'm looking at an actor and I'm seeing a human person. So when her wrist is torn open and it's like plastic and she starts like, and like air comes out and she's deflating. I was like, oh, oh, it's like horrible. It's horrible to see.

It's like a little two minute scene of body horror, basically, because you forget that she's a plastic doll. Mm. Christ. And she starts deflating and Junichi sees, and this is heartbreaking, though, but she says, don't look. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. She says, don't look. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. She says don't look. Again, this film was about 9-11 because of 9-11's habit of, you know, it's like if you

get hurt or if you're in pain or in some kind of a compromising situation, you might not necessarily want to like out yourself to people, especially people that you, you know, know in a certain sense and want to be friendly with, but you don't want them to, you don't trust them to know that about you. You don't want them to know that you're a doll? Yeah, exactly. You're one of the dolls? That's it.

So, but Genichi, I have to say, takes this in his stride, and he patches her up with sellotape, and then he goes, you need to be reinflated, and he reinflates her with his mouth, like on her belly button valve. On her her belly button valve. It's a little bit sexual. It's sexual in a way that is shown as being like enjoyable for her and intimate for her

as well. Life giving I mean. Yes. Yeah, yeah it is. The obvious parallel to like rescue breaths and CPR which we'll come back to later on. But like also like oral sex right and it's sort of like interesting because on the one hand you have this kind of like pleasure giving, life giving thing, but it's also that like functionally as well, he has like seen that she is a doll and immediately gone to like sexual pleasure, right?

It's not one that's solely his and therefore it reads differently to her, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's one of those things where it reminds me of poor things. Different ways you can be exploited, you know? Just like, breath and air are just so poetically loaded in so many different cultures that I think this also works as, just like, in the sense of breathing life into her, it also kind of works if you look at it as like pregnancy.

There is a sort of life recognition of life in her for the rest of the movie that has not been here to this point because she understands now sort of what life is, that it is temporary, that it can be given or taken away. If you want to use the etymology connection here, it inspires her. Yeah, yeah, inspiration. Oh, yeah. And so having gone through this experience, she throws away. We saw her in an earlier scene, like pumping herself up like Jarvis Cocker and,

and like experiencing pleasure from this and a bit of like, kind of self control. But like, she, in like a sort of positive way, she throws it out, right? Which you embrace like, love and mortality at the same time, the two things are like, inextricable. And she says to the old guy in the park the next time she meets him, I'm gonna get old! Like really excited. Which, transgender moment! Being excited to get old, being happy to get old. Like, really excited. Which, transgender moment. Being excited to get old, being happy to get old.

Get hit to age, yeah. It's really nice. She floats around the house, because she's lighter than air, so she like, dances and kicks her heels and floats up to the ceiling and she goes out, she smells the flowers and takes a boat ride and waves to people. Oh, the bit where she waves to people on the bridge fully got me in tears. Isn't it beautiful? I thought this movie was going to be that, like, for the first hour or so it is just

like, doll learns the beauty of being alive. And I was just totally ignoring all the things of like, you know, woman, apple apartment. Like I wasn't worried about it. But then, from this point, after the wrist tears, it kind of just breaks your heart in a million pieces. Or at least it does for me. Oh, certainly. She's got the tape on her wrist the whole rest of the movie.

By the way, when the old guy in the park described feeling empty, he used the phrase, what a marvelous coincidence. And that's a phrase that she uses when she sees Genichi again, is, you know, the feeling in love with him is like, it's a marvelous coincidence, a recognition of like a sort of a con specificity. You see yourself or something like yourself in someone else. Yes, and there's this interesting line, because Genichi hasn't told anyone that she's a plastic doll,

and he doesn't seem to behave any differently towards her. But he says, like, I think you're like me, maybe we're not so different. And I initially took that literally as like, oh, is he also a doll come to life? But now I think I realize that, no, he's recognizing a kind of like, I too have felt empty inside like an empty doll. Who am I to judge? The way that they cement this, and I'm gonna reference fucking V of Sylvie again, but I feel like all my life I have been watching a woman find herself in a cinema, is they go to the cinema together, they watch a film.

Yes. It's a kind of like, as you know, the manager did with his wife seeing love story together, it's a sort of like communal moment of like, you don't just see yourself in the films, but in the film, but you see someone else too, someone who's like you. They go and see Venom, Thor, Venom. That's right. That's fucking right. But he's, she's still keeping something from him because she points out the stars in the sky, she knows this because Hideo has told him to. And without meaning to, she copies his accent.

And so he says, how come you have an Osaka accent when you talk about the stars? And she's like, oh, I must have seen it in a movie. But sadly, she then discovers at Genichi's place some pictures of him with a girl. In particular, a girl, a human girl, wearing the same moped helmet that he gave her to drive her around in. And so she's still just a substitute for someone else. Uh-huh, yes. Which is, yeah.

And this is where we get the second montage of everybody in this town is miserable and alienated in different ways. There's a beautiful shot of a rose being cut, right? Because she's one of the metaphors that she uses to describe, you know, life being sort of like woven quite loosely is people people need each other like the parts of a flower. Right. Yes. You fulfill each other.

And if you're if you're separated and then we get this shot of a rose being cut from its stem as this kind of like active alienating violence Against the self and against against the other along with you know Like eating too many apples and jerking off over an anime doll, which is a guy's actually doing the like Guys like jerking off over a anime doll, which the guy is actually doing. The like hentai guy is like jerking off over a doll, like drinking too much. There's a really beautiful, just like a sort of a short film and one shot bit of

a guy like he's like sort of whisking an egg into his rice and he he finds like a hair in it and he's like can't get it out with the chopsticks. He has to like pull it out with his thumb. And then he finds he doesn't have any like napkins to like, to wipe it off on and he just like, that's the kind of one final straw of his psyche and just slams the entire bowl across the room, like egg everywhere and it's like, that's just beautifully evocative. Another person who I don't know how much more we see of that guy.

We get a little bit inside his house and it's, I don't know that he's like a character outside of these little montages, but he has like a house full of trophies and it seems like he either has a family or had a family who is gone. This movie is just like really interested in people. I find that as the common thread between all of the movies that I get really into. And I don't know, like going into it, I really thought this was a movie about like, oh, being human is beautiful. And then it just pummels you. It's like, it sucks, it sucks, it sucks. But it still seems to think whether or not like being a person is worth it, despite all the pain, it seems to still

at least be interested in being a person or value that. Like, it is what it is, basically seems like the message by the end, like, yeah, suffering is inevitable. Good luck. ALICE It all sort of tied this together in the last act, but so we get a kind of a jump scare where she's working in the video store and Hideo comes home early and is like renting porn DVDs from the store. And we get a really funny little scene where because she's renting porn and because the society is so like atomized anyway, he doesn't notice that it's her because neither of them are making eye contact with the other.

Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. It's nicely done. The manager though, the manager sees this happen. And it's like, do you know that guy? And she's like, no. And he's like, you're lying.

That's your boyfriend. Does Junichi know about this? Because you're dating. Does he know you've got someone? And also, I saw you out on a date in a park earlier on in a scene we didn't mention, where you were with Pidea and she might get in trouble. So he blackmails her into sex. Yeah, it's a sexual assault.

And we see her having to like, wash her own pussy out afterwards. Yeah, this scene is hard,, she's just totally dissociated, just tells herself in the voice of like, I'm an adult, I'm a substitute for handling sexual desire. And it's like, oh, wow. Let the woman who has never had to dissociate in order to like, you know, deal with the trauma as it's happening, cast the first stone, you know?

Yeah, God, yeah. This is the reason that I ever hesitate to recommend this movie, because that is just like, it's fucking brutal. And it feels very honest. I really appreciate how it is shot just sort of through the doorway, totally not lending any sort of power to the boss. Just sort of presenting it as this like very pathetic,

passionless thing that he's doing. It reminds me a lot of, not to keep doing Yorgos here, of presenting it as this like very pathetic, passionless thing that he's doing. It reminds me a lot of um not to keep doing Yorgos here but it reminds me a lot of a sex scene in Alps which is also a movie about being a a substitute um and one one which I think might I think that might be my next pick to be honest. Okay also the fact that the manager like either doesn't notice or doesn't care that her pussy is made of plastic. This movie hates men for good reason, right? Like, when I say that to be clear, it is a compliment. But yeah, it's absolutely like a sort of a feminist text in this sense of being like,

oh, even this like nice affable guy is like, sort of like instantaneously capable of switching on the like big sexual violence switch and happy to do that the moment he thinks he can get away with it. And speaking of being a substitute, that night she finds that Hideo has replaced her. Yes. She has like, you know, a fucking cross-stitch thing of like sometimes you have to like wash the cum out of your pussy and face the day, right? She's done that, gone home, and he's still replaced her. Yeah.

With like the newer model. Who hears, oh God, this gets me. He calls her Nozomi. The same thing that he calls Nozomi. Like it is literally just, the Nozomi we know is just nothing. She's just exited his mind entirely. She's not worth her own name. She's a figment, yeah.

Yeah. It's a sort of creation of, like, a pathetic, horny man. Yeah. And he has prepared this new doll a birthday cake to celebrate her coming home and, like, sings happy birthday to it, which, again, is how she discovers this. And our Nozomi fucking talks to him. Yes. Yeah. And she's like, did you bring me a birthday cake when I came here?

Where's my birthday cake? And he absolutely fucking shits himself. He's like, what the fuck? Really, really good. Yeah. And she says, hello, I'm alive. Like I found a soul, a heart, Kokoro. And he also, she asked him, what do you like about me? And he can't think of anything.

It's this like brutal line, which I think is really the crux of the movie, which is him not even like conscious of the fact that he's saying something that is going to hurt her feelings. It's not malicious. It's like ignorant. It's the way you would treat an object, right? Mm. That he says like, all this stuff that stuff that you know that you're doing now

It's can't you just switch back because it's it's really annoying like This stuff annoys me. That's why I chose you in the first place, right? And like real women are too much trouble I'm something like that specifically like MGTOW shit annoying as as like the the thing that you land on here. It's not like, you know, not even like difficult, not troubling, not frightening even, you know, it's not someone who like hates women and she's definitely misogynist, but like it's not hatred, it's not spite, it's not fear. It's not that he's trying to connect with women and fails, it's that he's not even interested.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's not like, oh, I'm afraid of intimacy or I'm scared of it. He's like, no, he just finds them annoying. Yes. And it's like, ah, that's so pathetic. We also get this incredible... You know what that is as well?

That is a lack of interiority. It's fucking Barry Lyndon shit again. I think you, sir, are the dog. Yes. Yes. That's legitimately true. Like, that's the thing. It is someone who is both in the narrative and I think like beyond it to talk about this kind of man. Someone who is like purely reactive, right? Like you might call him an NPC. Like he's, there's a kind of like, it's... Your hollow inside. call him an NPC. Like he's, uh, there's a kind of like, it's interested in, in like convenience and like, uh, smoothness and lack of annoyance. Right.

We also get this incredible line that passes by where she says, Nuzomi, it wasn't even my name. That's your old girlfriend's name. And like, he doesn't deny this, but yeah, it's fucking incredible scene. At the end of which she runs away. Yes. And then she falls asleep on a park bench and has a dream. She dreams that she's in the ocean and then wakes up and like again, amazing fucking acting from Bae Doona that we understand when she wakes up that she has never had a dream before. Yeah. And she's like, what happened? So she goes to the old man's house where she looks through his stuff.

He's like bedridden at this point. And it's like, here's like photos of his dogs. And he's like, I don't get a dog because they die too quickly and you just get lonely. Well, he specifically says, I hate dogs. And she's like, are you allergic or something? He says, no, they get old so quickly and they die, so you lose them. And it's like, oh, this is like, like Hideo found connection annoying. This guy has like suffered loss because of love and has, is now expressing that as hatred.

He's like, I hate dogs because I loved a dog and lost it. It's sad. She finds out that he was a substitute teacher and they have this little bonding of being a substitute. And he asks her to touch him. And of course, like imperfect languages, right? Miscommunication. She like tries to

like jerk him off and like, I think you, the viewer, are meant to intuit that like that's not what he meant. Right. And he stops her and he's like, no, no, no, like, can you like touch my forehead? You know, like, he just wants to... He just wants actual touch and like... Yeah.

Man. He says, people with cold hands have warm hearts. Because they're both cold. Because he's dying. Yeah. And then she goes to the factory where she was made. It's a little bit like meeting God, right? It's incredible.

Yeah. This scene is like, there's all these headless, big titty anime dolls. And then this, the guy in the apron walks through. Totally normal type guy. Like... Yeah. He just says, welcome home. This guy...

He knows that she's doll instantly. Like, yeah, takes it in stride. Like he remembers her even. Yeah. And he says that this is just like something that happens sometimes and he doesn't know why. As he says, you know, the, the, the gods don't probably don't know why human beings have, have hearts or have souls, you know? Yeah.

And, and he asks her, you know, um, what you know, what it's like, right? And he shows her the sort of like mountain of like, sort of abused, returned, sort of like dismembered dolls. Yeah. One of which has her face. Yeah. And sort of like theorizes that they all have souls because you can tell from looking at them whether or not they've been loved as she's like touching them. It's an interesting line. Yeah, absolutely. Wasn't quite sure what to make of that one.

Well, this is the thing, right? I think this is, it's, I'll get to this in the end, right? But I think this is a movie about like imperfect languages, right? Or imperfect systems, right? Or imperfect systems, right? And sort of like a failure to connect exactly as you might wish to. Interestingly, there's a bit when they're both working in the movie rental store with Genichi and Nizomiya like cleaning each side of a glass pane that's in between them in the middle of the shot. And so she has been loved imperfectly, selfishly, transactionally by Hideo. We see him cover her up with a blanket or take her

out in the park in a wheelchair so he can push her around. They're both wearing love heart scarves. And it's compromised, fatally compromised to the extent that it would be like horrible for her to stay with her. But this is how she is made, right? She's constrained by the material conditions of having been made to service men. And he has been constrained by the material conditions of being a very lonely, pathetic man who is being emasculated at work and who wants to fuck a sex doll instead of a woman. But so that's my theory anyway. As she's leaving, her maker asks her, what do you think of the world?

Did you see anything beautiful? And she goes, yes. And she thanks him for making her. Yes, yeah, because what he asks her specifically is, was everything sad? Or did you see like something beautiful? Even one. Yeah. And he's glad for it, right? This is, I talked about the motherhood statement, right? This is a motherhood statement, or in this case, a fatherhood statement for humanity,

for women, for anyone, right? Is it worthwhile to, just because there is beauty in the world amongst, you know, all this ugliness? And, you know, I think the movie takes the position that, here at least, that it is, and then goes on to complicate it in the next bit. Yeah, because she goes to Junichi, and we could interpret this scene as her declaring her love for him, I guess, but the words that she uses, again, in perfect languages, is she says, I will do anything for you. I will do anything you want.

You can do anything you want to me. And it's like, oh, that is like how a woman who had previously been in an anime sex doll would declare love, but it's like sweet, but also like, ah. And to be like, this is literally what I was made for because I know, because I spoke to the guy who did it. Yes, just now I met God and he said I'm a whore. Yes.

So, how are you doing? This is what doing Getterman is like, I understand. And he has this request. Maybe you can tell me, I'm not entirely sure what he means by this or why he wants this, but he says, can I let your air out and reinflate you? There's a few things this can be, right? The fact that he's looking away, he won't look at her when he says this, but is looking out of the window, suggests that this is, again, another man who has found himself in

front of the big disposable woman switch and is just like, yeah, okay, sexual violence, right? He says, it's not something I could do with someone else, right? And God knows there have been plenty of trans women, and still are, and maybe always will be, who will be receptacles for stuff that is unacceptable to do to a real woman in some man's eyes. And there's also, there is a quality of difference about her that fascinates him both in itself and because he can use it to control her. It's like, in this analogy, it's like, well, I mean, my, my note that I wrote down is of course he wants to kill her or at least like, I guess in this analogy, choke

her. Right. Like I wrote that and then cross it out because of the way that the following sequences shot. But it's interesting that you also have that thought. So my, my read on this is essentially that I think this guy lost a partner. I don't know where you guys landed on this, but the woman in the old photos, I gathered that she had died and he is like now fascinated with death, fixated on death. And that sort of the bedroom is a place that he wants to explore that. It's certainly, yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good reading. I don't think the the movie absolves him for that and says, like, oh, well, you know, they're both good consenting adults, so let's not even think about it further. It's definitely like a textually a fucked up thing to do to a person. You could read this as a like a radical feminist critique of King, certainly. I don't think it's intended as one, but you can certainly read one into it. Yeah. But the following, well, I guess sex scene, is shot in a way that is quite, I want to say, tender. Yes.

That he deflates her and like, re-inflates her with his breath again and again. And she seems to be enjoying this? He did. This is, as a bit of a setup, he had said had said to her as we mentioned in the video rental store He was like her right again Yeah, perfect languages childlike understanding and also this bit this last bit's a little bit of a like a fable or like a fairy tale or Romeo and Juliet kind of because She having having sort of like been Deflated and reinflated by him while he sleeps, goes and decides to do the same to him.

Yeah, this really... This fucking threw me, you know what I'm gonna say? Like, eleventh hour, like, what the fuck? Because she stabs him. Mm-hmm. And like, cuts his belly open. And then like, tries to sellotape it. Tries to reinflate him.

Yeah. And like like fails. And he just, he just, she like tries to kiss him and blow into his mouth. She doesn't understand that she's hurt him or where his plug is. And he bleeds out and fucking dies. Doesn't say anything to her. And one of the things that her maker said to her

when looking at this big sort of pile of discarded dolls is, you know, because she asked what do you do with them. He says, well, once a year I take them out and I, you know, I put them in the, uh, in the like non-burnable garbage because it's recyclable. Um, and she's like horrified by this and he's, and he says, well, it's not so different from humans. The only difference is, you know, burnable versus non-burnable garbage. Right. And so we see that she puts him out in the garbage bag. Just on the curb. As burnable garbage.

He's covered in blood. It's a really visceral image. He's just like sort of fetal positioned. It's one of those things that you're not meant to think about too deeply. Like, you know, how did he get down the stairs and like why? Yeah. But it's just really strong image. But you can't put human remains out on the curb like that.

No, foxes will get them. You can't be doing that, Erdahl. Not after 7 p.m. Foxes have tipped over my wheelie bin and my boyfriend has like spilled out into the street and it's horrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My fucking, my street at the moment has this pain in the ass thing

where you can't put the bins out except after 9 p.m 7pm and I'm just like fuck off, like no one cares. I've got the corpses here to get rid of. But then she tries to throw herself away. Yeah, what she does is she goes in into the garbage, we've seen her go through it before looking for more Ramine bottles, and she arranges herself in this sort of like staged scene of like bottles and apples because it's outside the Apple Girls apartment. And she lets out her own air and slowly deflates while collapsing in front of a dandelion,

which is about to kind of like, you know. Yeah. And as she does, she has this fantasy sequence of being in a restaurant eating, like a real person. And all the characters we've seen so far appear and bring her a cake and sing happy birthday to her. Junichi is there. The manager is there, interestingly.

The cop is there. And it's like, in the course of your life, you have been surrounded by all of this imperfect and terrible love with all of its horrible consequences. And you know this is something that could never be real because these people are all constrained from expressing it. But this is the kind of closeness that you want, right? And it's like unattainable. It's something that can only exist in your kind of like dying fantasy. That's true. With her last breath, she blows out the candles in her fantasy and blows the dandelion clocks off the dandelion.

And I guess dies. Yep. And then the dandelion clocks drift around the neighborhood and we see the dad taking care of his daughter. We see the old lady confessing to crimes she didn't commit and being told that was already solved. The cop waters his plants, the old man goes for a walk, stalking ladies doing some beauty treatments. There is a bit, right before she dies, the little girl finds her and you know, she's garbage. She like trades her, she takes a ring off of her and gives her her doll. So

even she in the end ends up using like a substitute for love, you know. Mm. Mr. Hentai gets hired to work at the video store by the manager. Yep. So it all worked out happily enough for Mr. Hentai. Yeah. The real protagonist. The doll maker continues his work. Hideo has his new doll.

An Apple girl in the final moment wakes up and she... First of all, she puts something in the garbage. So like, good for you, girl. Don't leave a line on the floor. And she opens the window, the curtains, and she sees Nizomi lying in the street, dead, her dead-ass corpse. And she says, beautiful. And that's the fucking movie. And that's the movie. It's really, really good.

Ooh, fair enough. That last ten minutes fucking took me out. I was just like, oh, yeah, beauty of humankind, love, yeah, whatever. And then it's like, she stabs him to death and he dies. The end. It's quite a like, Shakespearean thing. Like, some of the like, I'm reminded a bit of the revenge trilogy. To be like, yeah, to engage in love is to like, open yourself up to this like, terrible, doomed love as well.

You know, that has like like very immediate and bloody consequences yeah I think of this movie is like anti-transcendence in some way it is sort of saying there is there's sort of nothing that you can reach for as a person on earth that is going to help you escape from all this in a way that is healthy for you you know everyone is like retreated into this in a way that is healthy for you. You know? Everyone is like retreated into their little fantasies. She is looking for love and she finds it and it doesn't, it doesn't free her from suffering at all. It just brings more suffering. It's, it's just the question of like, is that a suffering with meaning? Right? And I think

that's, that's the distinction that the film makes, I guess, is... It is an attempt to connect that is doomed to fail still worth making, you know? Totally. It seems to come down on the side, yes. And it's still a beautiful thing to try. Yeah. Because it's all we have available to us, you know? Like, what else are you going to do with your day?

Sit around, eat apples. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Get all rot. It's all we have available to us, you know, like what else are you going to do with your day? Yeah, yeah basically all right I thank you so much for introducing it to me both of you really. Yeah, it's all one really. Thank you Yeah, I could talk about this thing till the cows come home. I mean I have already talked about it quite a lot in that That one video I did Yeah, but I'm always turning it around in my head. I think you should both watch some more Coreda movies because this actually, I don't think it's my favorite of his. I think he has like four more on this level, to be honest with you.

He won the Pomodoro a few years back. I mean, he's one of the greats by my estimation. Hell yeah. Absolutely. Was he the writer too? I believe so, but I'm not sure. Everything has like a similar sort of floaty sort of sad tone to it. Yeah. His latest one from last year, Monster, is like a phenomenal movie and has sort of,

I don't want to spoil it, but the opposite trajectory is this where it begins and it's the darkest place and then just like fills up with love throughout. Wow. It's every bit as good. I really, really recommend it. Oh yeah. Thank you so much. Do we have any closing thoughts to end Erdogan with?

Well, it's not about 9-11, is it? Is it not? No, I think it's about being transgender. Well, that's my analysis in the trash next to the sex dolls. Yeah. And your boyfriend. Is it about 7-Eleven? Can we make that work? What's that?

Is it about 7-Eleven? It is. No, what it's about is about it's about the like chicken sandwich and the Japanese convenience store that is like incredibly favorably reviewed. Wrapped in disposable plastic. Yeah. It's weird that it's aged in such a way that now a lot of this, like, alienated, horrible lifestyle seems good.

Like, I'm like, oh damn, a video store? Hell yeah. Bring those back. What? Yeah. But yeah, yeah, it's nice. I liked it a lot. And like, just as an actor, like, game recognized game,

there's some astonishing fucking performances in this, especially from Bay Duna. Like, I'm putting everyone involved in this on my list of people I'd like to work with. It reminds me of Death Stranding as well, quite a bit. Again, need for connection and stuff. Hell yeah. Finally a Strand-type movie. But yes, thank you so much, Lily, for joining us and talking us through this.

Oh, thank you so much. This was a total treat. Thank you to the listeners for subscribing to Patreon. Where can the people find you, Lily? So you can find me by looking up Lily Alexander on YouTube. I also have a podcast coming out soon, maybe already out by the time this goes out, it is called TSTV Transsexual Television and it is a Twin Peaks discussion show. Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah. And I would also love to have maybe either of both of you on one of these days. I would love to watch Twin Peaks. I've never seen any Twin Peaks. Oh, damn. Yeah. That's my experience too. So this is my friend who is like the super knowledgeable

David Lynch head sort of guiding me through the show. It's been a blast. Yeah, you know, check that out. Check that out. Thank you so much to the listeners for subscribing to the Patreon. Our next mainline episode, we're gonna commence robbery season with heat.

Yes. Yes. Our next bonus episode, I believe it comes back to me and I want to do Alps. So check that out as well. Back, going back at 3am for more Yorgoslan Themas. That's right. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time. Bye everyone. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond. This jazz outro will go at the end of both the Diabolic 3 episode and the following bonus

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