Kill James Bond! - S4E17.5: Shiva Baby

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode! Check it our on our reasonably-priced patreon! ----- This week behind the paywall, journalist and friend of the show Sasha Baker drops by to show us Shiva Baby, a movie about a young jewish woman having a series of extremely awkward social interactions. Check out Sasha's recent investigation with the BIJ about a shadowy transphobic parent network here!  ----- We've been nominated for Podcast of the Year at the ITV bCreator Awards! It’s public vote, so vote for us here under “creator shortlist”. should take about a minute, you don’t have to live in Britain to vote! www.bcreator.co.uk/awards/ ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- 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 , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app accounts

KillJamesBond fans, your podcast needs you. We have been nominated for an award for the ITV Be Creator Awards Podcast Creator of the Year. I know. And we need you to help us win this. It's a public vote. You don't even have to live in the UK. You can go to becreator.co.uk slash awards, which will of course be in the description,

and vote for us. Do you like the podcast Kill James Bond? Do you think it would be funny for us to say award-winning podcast Kill James Bond every time we say the name of the show from here on out? Hello and welcome to award-winning podcast Kill James Bond. Do you think that it would be exciting for us all to walk directly into a room full of industry professionals, go straight onto the stage, cunt it up to the nines, get handed an award and tell them all to fuck off and free Palestine? I certainly do, and you have the opportunity in your hands to make it happen. BeCreated.co.uk slash awards, it will take less than a minute. I leave this in your capable hands.

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November NKBKBNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN working with an E. I said you were making it fucking work. D&J- Thank you, thank you, I was, I was, I was. I was in fact on dome leave, I have now returned. ALICE Which is a statutory provision that we have for all of us, that we can all take advantage of. D&J- Unlimited. ALICE Welcome back, and we have a guest. We're joined by investigative journalist, Sasha Baker. Sasha, thanks so much for coming. SASHA Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. ALICE It's our pleasure. D&J- much for coming. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. It's our pleasure.

So excited to have you. Hello. You've brought us a movie for religion season, and the movie that you've brought us is Shiver Baby, which is Emma Seligman's first movie. And, let me tell you, this was a stressful watch. I'm excited to talk about it, and I'm excited to just kind of like, raise my heart rate and blood pressure for the next hour or so. This movie's fucking hilarious though, I really enjoyed it. It's very like a stage play.

Mm. Yeah. Yeah, I really really love this. I think being so low budget sort of means that the movie has to be like a stage play, like, I think this was made for about 200k? Jesus. Whoa! That is less than Dracula's ex-girlfriend.

It's also, it's very short, because it was a short originally, and so the full movie is 78 minutes, right, but with Emma Seligman you feel the time pass, right, like I was checking every so often to be like, there's 49 minutes left of this, I'm going to perish. Yeah, like it feels longer than it is brackets complementary. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And one other thing I will say, noting as we kind of start the movie, is it has a European number of production company logos in front of it. Yes it does.

Which is something that suggests, and I was sort of gratified to have guessed this from the logos and then found this out later, a kind of difficult path to production, right? It took a lot of going around different people to get this movie made, and I'm so glad that they did. But it's just, you can kind of, you know, like, touch the ground and be like, a great battle happened here. Yeah. It's like $200,000, but like, a trillion dollars to the nation of Italy, from the producers of Diabolic, who are like, getting some kind of massive tax rebate off the back of their fists. Yeah, this was partially funded by the EU Central Fund for Anxious Bisexuality.

Which, y'know, obviously this is one of the things, when we Brexited it I was so mad to lose access to that. Yeah, that would've been so useful for me. You know, obviously this is one of the things when we Brexited it I was so mad to lose access to that. Yeah, that would have been so useful for me. Yeah, the only thing we have now is the is the Council of Europe fund for confident bisexuality, which I'm very happy to still be getting checks from them. Discriminatory. Oh no, I lost mine.

I've lost all of those checks and now going to Rachel Senna because she is killing this game so severely. For real. I do want to say about Rachel Senna, and this is also funny because she is, in this movie, playing a Jewish woman is not Jewish herself. Some controversy about this when it came out. Is she at least Italian? Is she at least of Italian descent?

I don't believe it's in accordance with the Jewish-Italian movie agreement. I'm not sure. She's of Italian descent. We don't believe it's in accordance with the uh like Jewish Italian movie agreement. I'm not sure but she's of Italian descent we're okay we're okay. I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah yeah yeah it's 100 percent it's been hashed out at the UN. Valeria who is Italian my reporting partner um on some of the investigations I've done uh we've talked about this a lot. She said in Italy, they just made the nanny Italian when they dubbed it, because Jewish references weren't as legible as that. So Fran Drescher is just Italian in Italy. Amazing.

So I do want to also, if we're talking about Rachel Senet, get this out of the way. Because there's this thing, and I'm always slightly ambivalent about it, which is, Kill James Bond is always caught in a kind of dialectical tension between feminism and lesbianism, where we're like, we love women, but also we love women. So, we just tick off the big Rachel Senet hello box, and we just move on from that now, ideally. So, we just take off the big, like, Rachel Senet hello box, and we just move on from that now, ideally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sure. Okay, fine. Okay, good. So...

Passed unanimously. And of course there's another character in this movie, the only non-Jewish character who is played by, like, very Jewish, Dyada Ygron, who never gets to play Jews, cause she's blonde. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. They put in some dialogue about her character having a Jewish dad, and I think Fran Drescher is like, ah, it doesn't count, it doesn't count. But so, we start in present day New York, where Rachel Sennett's character is... she's on DomeLe is, um, she's fucking a guy. She's on Dome Leave. Yeah, she is.

Yeah. She's not on leave, she's at work. Dome Leave is time off work, yeah. Right, right, right. Bussman's holiday, I guess, yeah, for her. But she's at work, she's having sex with a guy, uh, she calls him daddy during the sex. She does. Important for the plot.

And it sort of becomes apparent over the course of the scene that she is a sex worker and this is a client, right? Which, hell yeah, let's fucking go. But the way in which it becomes apparent that he is a client and she is a sex worker is he is behaving in deeply uncomfortable ways towards her. ALICE Yes. This guy thinks that he's her boyfriend, and he's not. ALICE He thinks he's in love in a kind of possessive way, he thinks that she is going to law school

and she's doing this to just kind of like, fund her law school career and she's gonna like, change the world, and he's a good feminist ally by funding that. That detail is so fucking funny, he's like, I wanna support female entrepreneurs! Yeah, yeah, yeah. So fucking good for us. It's altruistic paying for sex. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I also want to sort of, if we're busy setting things out here as sort

of preceptual, my position on sex work and feminism is of course that sex workers work and sex workers are workers who deserve sort of like rights and dignity and decriminalization and freedom from like sort of paternalistic interventions whatever form they might take. And then there's an addendum to that in the sort of annex to the November report that says kill all clients now. Right. Reasonable. Yes. Not exclusive to sex work. If you work in customer service, it says customers now. Yeah. You've basically taken like both ends of the Nordic model and just like... just like... Turn them way, way up. Yeah, if there was a way to criminalize clients ruthlessly that didn't affect sex workers,

pushing that button day one, because this guy is sort of like, realistically I would submit, the worst. Yes. For sure. And as part of this very, very possessive thing, he has gotten her a very, very expensive bracelet, which he just kind of snaps onto her wrist like a fucking handcuff. Yeah. Very sloppily, as we will see in the rest of the movie.

The sex is interrupted by a phone call from her mum, who says, are you coming to the funeral today, Danielle? Which I think is such great- Well, of course, because Jews have funerals almost immediately after a person dies, so she hasn't really presumably had the time to cancel her plans and block out her calendar for the funeral. The person died yesterday, the funeral is going on as we speak, probably. And then she's going to the shiva, or as Maya refers to within the movie, funeral after party. ALICE AND ZOE LAUGH

ALICE And, yeah, her mum calls, leaves a voicemail, because she's kind of like screening her calls, and her mom kind of like, rants for a bit about her dad, and about the kind of inconvenience of the funeral, and it's just like... and finishes by saying like, call me, do not text me. Which is... Yeah. Implies so much history. Yeah. Yeah, we're establishing a real generational divide here, you know? But so, she goes to get picked up by her parents,

including her dad, Fred Melamed. He's back! Welcome back for sure. Welcome back, brother! Guy we'd love to see! Consecutive episodes. I think, since you're doing Judaism season, he's gonna be in a lot of them. I hope so, because I really like him in this. I really like him in the series, man. Very different character, right? Speaks to range, right? Because Cy Ableman, the kind of home

wrecker, very, very different to Joel, Danielle's dad, who is this kind of like affable, slightly befuddled, kind of embarrassing man. He's the most dad motherfucker. Yeah. They arrive at- This is every Jewish dad. They arrive at the shiva in Joel's minivan, which is full of what he only describes as product. Right?

Stacked so haphazardly as well, we're all in cardboard boxes which have just been kind of put into the back, over our throne. Stacked so haphazardly as well, they're all in cardboard boxes, so it's just been put into the back, like over our throne. Inexplicable, we don't know why he has them, is he collecting them, is he buying them, is he selling them, we don't know, but he has them and they're occupying the whole trunk of this minivan. This is a classic case of Boomer Perrin to his neurodivergent, but it is way too late to get a diagnosis.

Yeah, yeah, I remember my dad telling me. Every Jewish dad. Yeah, this is my dad also. The plans have changed, huh? Yeah. My dad told me that his brother, my uncle, just had this weird sort of habit where he just bought a lot of things, not just one one of a thing, like, y'know, like twenty of a thing, of the same thing, and I'm like, that is autism, Dad. That's neurodivergence. Like, um, not well understood.

There was no neurodivergence in your dad's day, when your dad was growing up. He would just get very angry if the plans changed and then go nonverbal for a bit. That's just what he was like. Oh, don't even joke. Must've been. Yeah. So, so. Whoop.

You know the drill. If you're hearing me at this point doing this kind of a voice, that means that it's time must have been. Yeah. So. So. So. You know the drill. If you're hearing me at this point doing this kind of a voice, that means that it's time for you to pay up or fuck off. I don't believe that. I don't. But if you do want to listen to the rest of this episode, you are going to have to go to patreon.com slash killjamesbond, all one one word and sign up today for as little as five pounds a month

and that gives you access to not just this episode but our entire backlog of bonus episodes and at least two per month and I won't tell you to fuck off again I might, I might, I might, I might