Red Scare - Size 8 1/2

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

The ladies talk about Martin Scorsese's latest for Harper's, the jokerfied Cruella trailer, and Kendall Jenner's Skims shoot body fallout.

Okay, hello. We're back. Can you hear me? We're back. Yeah. Coming in loud and clear. No more Avion, huh? No. I'm on Ascension now. The hot girl water. That's what I call it. I just cycle through luxury waters. Maybe I'll try Fiji next. Fiji's like mid market. Yeah, it's like the Bloomingdale's of water. Exactly. And I like it's the vaporwave water brand. Square bottle. Exactly. And the little like, what are the most infuriating bottles, Fiji and Vox probably. Voss. Voss. Yeah. Well, Voss is like glass and really heavy and Voss is the Vox of water. Yeah. And Voss is just it's kind of bullshit. Yeah, I've never had it. We used to sell it when I worked at like a luxury frozen yogurt retailer in Las Vegas in high school. We also had like Voss

water. So I was sipping good back then. Yeah. But anyway, anyway, congrats to us on our Adam Curtis episode. Well, we we had a really kind of fulfilling and edifying conversation last episode. So we're going to drag it all down by insulting women and bodyshooting them. By talking about a whole bunch of bullshit we don't even really care about. Great. We did one good thing. So we have to undo it. Now we can do six bad things. It's my birthday tomorrow. Yeah, it's Dasha's birthday. But we'll probably post this episode tomorrow. So yeah. Or maybe the day after. Yeah, we could probably marinate. Yeah. On paywall, something on your birthday, live on the wild side. How do you feel? I'm gonna be 30. I feel pretty good. Does that mean anything to you or not really?

Um, maybe if I wasn't in such a good place in my life, I would feel but I usually get, you know, the birthday blues on the day of but I feel pretty good. I feel ready to part with my with my 20s. I feel like I had a good, I had a good run. And I've, you know, 30s still really young, you guys. You're like so young. Um, when Trump had that video, he was like, he said he was one of the youngest people. He is though. He's, he's what, like 74. His spirit. Yeah. He has a youthful spirit. Definitely. As do I. So he has that the shit poster spirit. Exactly. There's a resence of a shit posting. Don't crack. Bella Russian. Don't crack. Actually all Slavic races really do crack around like the 45 year mark. It goes really downhill. Definitely. That's what I'm dreading

more so than my 30s is my 40s when I'll inexplicably start looking like a pumpkin. Like a trunk full of watermelons. Yeah, they crack, they crack hard with the slabs. My mom went from like 16 to 80 overnight. Like that Chinese lady mean though she does look more Chinese than, than Russian. So maybe the life comes at you fast. Yeah. Yeah. Did you notice how in the, in the Curtis doc, all of the wives of like powerful Chinese politicians looked increasingly kind of masculine as they got older. There's very, it's very like androgynous kind of upper echelons of China. It seemed. Yeah. No, it is. I was like, why is that old man crying? And I was like, Oh, that's his widow. Why is his dad crying?

He's like 80 and that's 120 too. Oh, that's his young wife. And in fact, but in fact, no, they do look like that. I mean, I think like everybody gets more and they get the hair and they, yeah. But yeah, they, well, they wear those military sets, like a pant with a jacket shirt thing, shirt jacket. Yeah. And they also, yeah, cut their hair in a very masculine way and don't wear any makeup. Yeah. It's a very uniform, uniform look. Yeah, I kind of like it. It's very all-purpose and utilitarian. For sure. Seems liberating. Yeah. This is how like certain kind of like intellectual, liberal Russian women start to look. Like Masha Gassin. Yeah. Or like, they kind of start

looking very androgynous while the rest of the women just like put like lipstick on their double chin. They dye their hair that a trademark red color. Yeah. But I will only see Russian ladies. Are you going to do that? Maybe. I mean, it's hard to, you know, you look at older women and you're like, why are you, why do they all get that haircut even in the States? You know, like at a certain point they get the like short in the back kind of cut. Yeah. And I guess it's because your hair like loses volume. Yeah. It just stops growing at a certain point. Ostensibly. So, and you think like, well, I would never, but then, you know, it probably comes around and you just make those choices like everyone else does.

Yeah. But here's my question. Why do they get the crunchy gym teacher cut when you can just get a really cute pixie cut? That like, you can get a short haircut that's cute and Mia Farrow-esque and not like old lesbian who works at the post office. I hope to have long white hair, like a witch. Is what I would hope to achieve, but I'm sure all my hair is going to like fall out. I'll go bald. It would be karmic retribution for body shaming. I know. I weirdly feel like, not to jinx it, but like, I have pretty good karma randomly. Yeah. But I had a rough. Yeah. Like, I feel like the first half of my life was kind of rough. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Painful. And so now it's paying dividends and

yeah, the second part of my life, middle part, I guess. I guess I'm middle aged. I don't think you're middle aged yet, but you know, you know, our parents abused and neglected us so that Adam Curtis and Steve Bannon could be our new dad. Exactly. Basically, we just interview our father figures. There is a lot of edible stuff going on with some of our more high profile guests. Yeah. We need to get some more women on the show. I mean, we have some ideas. Susan Sarandon. Yeah. She's got those nice mommy milkers. Yeah. I tried to get speaking of milk. I wanted to get something called an exotic milk ritual for my birthday at this tell that we're going to. But it was all all booked up. So I have to get I wanted to be kind

of cocooned in in linens, like a 29 year old like worm. Yeah. And then emerge like a 30 year old butterfly. But they didn't have the, I guess they're fresh out of out of milk. It's going to take like a regular milk bath. Instead of like organic Ronnie Burke milk, you get like the bodega milk that they squirt into your dollar coffee. I don't even know what what the milk is, but yeah, where do they go? I'm interested. Who are they milking? Maybe maybe you could could spare some milk. I'm so hungry. Sorry. Shall I well last year on my birthday, you got me silk pillow cases and some highlighter, which I still use. Oh, what highlighter did I get you? I don't even know. It was like in a little tin. It was like, not like pixie brand, but something like that.

It's nice. I'll, I'll, I'll remember. Shall I do an unboxing unboxing? You can't see the wrapping, but it's Olga Bobkina themed Olga Bobkina is a woman that we both follow and Instagram who owns a lot of cold weather exotic pets. And if she owns something, I think she rescues them. I think she would argue that they own her and they have a spirit of their own. She claims to be rescuing them, but they are clearly purchased in bondage. No, I don't think they're purchased. I think they're like, they're forced to live. They're foraged. She's just like, she's one of these kind of like a remote Warner Herzog people. You did a great job with, with the wrapping. Thank you. That's one of my feminine domestic

skills is lining up corners. Cause my mom used to beat me if I got it wrong. Bloomingdale. No, that's just the box. Oh, well, great box. Sorry. No, it's okay. I'm just going to run down all of my, all of my skills while I, while I watch you unbox my gift. Oh my God, Anna, no way. Oh, I love it. Thank you. Anna got me an I Yankee, I Yankee puffer. Wait, is that how you say it? I don't know how you say it. It's the, it's the puff, the puffer brand that all the celebs are spotted wearing, but they make these, these hoods. Yeah. Oh my God. How did you know? I don't know. You mentioned it once. I did mention it like months ago. Wow. I love it. Thank you. It's a lovely army green.

Yeah. This is a khaki drop, which I love. It's extremely Soviet and I love it. Thank you. Wow. Thanks, Anna. I'll model it for you, for you later. That's very sweet. I thought this was a Scandinavian brand and then I was like, disappointed. Ukrainian. It was Ukrainian, but it like came from Ukraine. So that's like also. Grimes has one. Amrat rocks a lot of the coats I've seen. Yeah, the belted. The belted coats. Oh, I thank you, Anna. This is very nice. I love it. You're welcome. My pleasure. I feel like a 30 is a big milestone. So, uh, yeah, kind of is, I guess it's a good age though. It's if you're in a good place in your life, if you're in a bad place in your life, it's a really shit. It's probably

devastating. Yeah. But I have a lot to look forward to my film and stuff. And I weirdly feel like 30 somehow feels older than like 31. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, because 31 is like the start of a new decade. Yeah. 30 is like the end of a previous decade. Exactly. 31 is like, oh my god, she's so young. She's 31. She's so far away from 40. Yeah. But 30 is really like, oh, wow, you've lived your whole 20s. Wow. I mean, when I turned 30, I was living in a shoebox and I was also fat. So it wasn't the best of times, but you know, I, I don't, you really turned it around. You had to go up for the ages. Yeah. Like, what are you going to do? That's the thing. Like, what are you going to do? You're going to get old and fat eventually. It's unavoidable. You'll never be,

and you'll never be younger than you currently are. So you should just, we might as well just enjoy it. Well, you should focus on the two variables that you can control, which is becoming richer and thinner. Because if you can't, you know, really, there's no way to turn back time. Exactly. Yeah. People have like a lot of aging anxiety in the West, especially in America, which is sad. And I used to think it was like a product of the obsession with like youth culture. But I think the, I think Wellbeck is right in youth culture itself as a product of the contempt for aging, which is a kind of grounded, I think, in a fear of mortality. But I think like once you acknowledge yourself, like intellectually acknowledge, and then

from there, it's a short step to emotionally acknowledging that you're going to die anyway, and you're just a meat suit. Yeah. Like, what are you going to do? Everything gets easier. Yeah. Lots of people describe turning 30 as a sort of a point where a lot of anxieties, alleviate like things that have sort of haunted them through their 20s kind of dissipate and don't seem as significant or important. So I hope, I hope to have that experience, but I feel relatively well balanced actually, well, well adjusted. Well, yeah, but the scary thing is like you're going to feel like my feeling, even though I have no ideas, like you're going to feel young into your mid 40s, and then something physically bad is going to happen, like sick, which, you know,

you'll have to confront your mortality, like in a very real way. My bones will get increasingly brittle. Yeah, osteoporosis and like dementia. Not if I keep drinking that milk. I mean, also, like I watched like, you know, like all the women in my family came up in the Soviet Union, so they didn't take any care of themselves. And they like, you know, age themselves very rapidly. My parents are still incredibly young. Well, yeah, because they have to be by their profession or had to be in the like, like habit that they kept up, which is positive and good.

So they look great, but they're also like, my mom's 51. Yeah. So she's like, she's on the young end for parents. Definitely. Yeah. Good for her. Truly, they look great. Shout out to my, my mom's and dad. Yeah. Speaking of, of old people, Martin Scorsese, penned an essay for Harper's, which he has received kind of moderate backlash to sort of off the wave of the previous backlash she received for criticizing like Marvel movies

or whatever it was. And now he's sort of doubled down on the bleak state of cinema. And he wrote this essay about Fellini for Harper's where he kind of, he laments the streaming platforms and tech companies that are ruining cinema as he puts it. Yeah. I mean, I mean this, like not at all in an insulting or pejorative way, but Harper's is sort of like the boomer Bible. And it's valuable for that reason, because a lot of, you know, the ideas conceits that it publishes are very important to keep in mind, but are fading and like going back to the youth thing, like everybody thinks like young people, of course, suffer from the crushing myopia of the fact that they don't, it doesn't occur to them that they're

going to be old and in pain and miserable one day. And it doesn't occur to them that one day they're going to look at the people who are younger than them and be like, you know, outraged and frustrated. And so like, I think like Harper's is, is doing like a very good service by being like this kind of like a singular institution. I'm a mouthpiece for, for boomer culture or older people. And, you know, I think probably like every time I go log on to Twitter and there Harper's is in the middle of like some a cultural flame war. It's a bunch of young people talking at how, how like cringe it is, but it's like, good, you should experience and internalize that because you will one day,

like younger people one day think you are cringe. It's a very important lesson to internalize. That's very wise. But what was interesting about this article is how the media build it, which was they immediately, you know, just made it look like it was a takedown of like the Disney and Marvel content industrial complex. And really, it was like a very earnest and touching homage to Fellini. Yeah, it was primarily about about Felini. It's sort of bookended by this nostalgia really. Yeah. But even the response to it is exemplary of the problem, like it illustrates the problem that Scorsese is trying to like identify. Like that everything becomes like a kind of like gossip item, right, you know, fodder for like the content turd cutter or whatever.

And I was, I was surprised because Felini Scorsese is actually a very good writer. He is. Yeah, he has his mo he's like very functional and then he's very lucid. He's a little he's a bit sentimental. Yeah. But yeah, I thought it was well written. Are you a fan of Felini? Um, I, I am and I'm not, I'm not as my present self, because he is like really much like a stylist and a fabulous as Scorsese calls him. But Felini was my favorite director. And when I discovered cinema as a young person, Scorsese, so I'm very kind of nostalgic about him. So you relate to it's like a person thing who now also seems, you know, a little cringy, corny, fantastic, theatrical, but it was very meaningful when your brain was less developed

than 14, 15, 16, whatever. Are you? Not especially. Yeah. I like also when I went through when in a younger phase when I was like really hitting the criterion collection hard, but also probably smoking so much weed, I retained very little of the like information I was attempting to absorb. I, I like eight and a half. I like the Lestrada and stuff and the clown. I just, I, it has nothing to even do with Felini. It's a purely like I carnival-esque is not my, my favorite aesthetic or genre, which probably has to do with my, my parents being in the circus. It all just feels a little like loaded and repulsive to me, but that has nothing really to do with Felini as a filmmaker who's that's funny. I like that loaded and repulsive. Well, okay. Like Russians love

Felini A because he was permitted in the USSR and B because it's like theatrical and melodramatic. They love anything Italian or Iberian. Totally. Like they love to tuck a rose behind their ear and do some like tango dancing. Totally. Yeah. They love masks. They love puppets. Not for me. I reject, I reject this like pan Russian aesthetic because it's like it is, it is loaded and there's something like, it's like kind of like a Louis Bourgeois sculpture. There's something like sticky and Freudian about it that I don't like. It's like consuming and stuffy. Exactly. Yeah. Stuffy is a good descriptor. And it's supposed, well, it's supposed to be romantic and glamorous, but it's somehow not. I think maybe it was then. Yeah. You know,

I was just talking to someone about that, that Czech new wave movie, Daisy's. Yeah. Is it good? Should I watch that? I want to watch that. It's good. I really liked it when I was a teen, but it has become sort of like retroactively tumbler-ified. Yeah. Or it's a victim of its audience. And the, it feels extremely twee, but at the time it was in the 60s in Czechoslovakia, it was like extremely transgressive to be twee and it felt completely differently. And so I think the same goes for anything, but Fellini especially, it's like, it's very hard to, no one's ever going to watch eight and a half the way that Scorsese experienced it. Yeah. Which is a beautiful thing, but that's like a moment lost to time. Exactly. And I think that

that's what he's trying to like convey. I like the early Fellinis that are kind of like, I like Knights of Kiberia. Have not seen. Do you should watch it? And I like actually, and I like some of the later ones, like Juliet of the Spirits, I like the ones that starred Julieta Mazina, who's is like long suffering, somewhat unattractive wife. He always cast in unflattering roles like as a prostitute or like as a clown or as a bourgeois housewife who's being cheated on. Yeah. And meanwhile he had like, you know, like Claudia Cardinale and like Anuka May and these beautiful women cycling around that like this woman was like, they were married forever. And I think he really loved her. Sure. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Fellini is not my

favorite, but I understand like I totally get why Scorsese would be enamored of him and drawn to him. Which is nice and cute. I mean, I guess he talks about, I guess we can tackle, do like a deep read of this essay that nobody asked for. Well, my issue with it, though I am, though I am very sympathetic to Marty, is that, or like the sort of the nostalgia is a disease as we learned in our previous episode. One that I think he's highly afflicted with, so much so that he can even sort of see his own kind of complacency in the streaming economy. I mean, he just made this completely enjoyable, but totally superfluous from Fran Leewood's documentary that we watched and talked about.

That completely was like content. It was by no stretch of the imagination, like a great documentary that had like cinematic merit. It was like a puff piece streaming content. It was probably the best of the best when it comes to throwaway content. Yeah. It's like it was a fun and enjoyable little amuse-bouche or whatever. Exactly. And he's just also just pretty blind, I think. And I get that it's an essay he's making. He's setting up a thesis and making arguments for it. But I mean, Almodovar's Pain and Glory came out in 2019, and that was sort of like Almodovar's like eight and a half, and was like a really compelling and beautiful movie that

dealt with a lot of the same themes. So the kind of the lamentation of there being cinema being sort of like streamed and then locked away, as he says by the platforms, fell a little bit flat to me because I'm younger and because I don't think that we're kind of like an impasse with cinema. I think cinema is going to continue. Not to mention like, I mean, New York is still one of the best places to see rep, not currently because of COVID, but prior to March 2020, the Lower East Side, whereas also in the Friendly Bow at Stock, Scorsese says that he hasn't gone below like 50th Street in like decades. So him kind of positing this boyish nostalgia for going to see Art House film programming on the Lower East Side when he was like a teenager

is like, you could still you can go to Metrograph, Marty. It's if it ever opens up again, you know, like there is still really good film programming in New York. It's not. But I mean, the fact of the matter is that he's old and rich, and therefore he does not ever leave uptown. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because there's no reason for him to. And being old and rich, his mobility is decreased, but his resources are increased. So there's no point for like a a creaky old man to like go to the quad. And no, but I mean, I find I find his whole approach like I think he means well, and his heart is in the right place. And he is trying to have like a very kind of humane and edifying conversation with people. I think just like, inevitably,

like every generation thinks the next generation sucks ass, and its culture is an embarrassment and is like in decline. But I think these things are cyclical. And we are in a in a valley like we're a trough right now for culture, but I think that inevitably we'll have to revive itself. It can't just go downhill forever. I agree. And there are like tremors of that already happening. Because I think people are taking matters into their own hands. Yeah. And I think that the you know, the studio model of these like tentpole releases isn't sustainable in the long run because people do tire of like formulaic content, I hope. I think nobody really watches it. Yeah. I think like, I mean, first of all, now it's all streaming truly because nobody goes to movie theaters.

But like again, I don't know a single person who watched Wonder Woman. No, I'm sure they're out there. Yeah. DM me. Yeah, but he opens up this like very cinematic vignette of like a young man surveying the offerings, the movie offerings in the West Village, and then he like cuts to the present day. What's this? Godard? Bicycle thief? With a copy of the Village Voice tucked under his arm. But and then he kind of says like flash forward to the present day and the art of cinemas being systematically devalued sideline demeaned and reduced to its lowest common denominator content. He talks about content being like a catchall business term from for any moving image from like a feature length film to a cat video, which is true. I mean, and he attributes this of course,

yet to the fact that streaming has overtaken a movie going much like E calm has overtaken brick and mortar, etc. etc. But he says that like on the surface, this appears to level the playing field and make it more democratic. But in fact, when you have like algorithms running the show and feeding you content based on kind of predictive modeling, like on what you previously viewed, it's actually anything. But democratically, these arguments are like, not wrong. They're just kind of like, old at this point. And they're a little he has like, tunnel vision of some sort in that regard as well. Because yeah, it's like, I guess you are being algorithmically recommended things to watch. Every time I go in prime, it's really cute. If you like Dasha, you'll enjoy.

No, but it's, there also are like, I mean, not just criterion, but like canopy and stuff. There are streaming platforms that have, but even if there's like algorithms built into them, like, it's not as if people are completely sort of siphoned into these things where they can't find out about feline. Yeah, there's a will there's way. And also, this has never been a democratic process. But I think the bigger problem is not so much with movies or movie going or movie making itself as it is like this, the the way that the kind of social component of like, communal activities has changed like before you went to a movie theater restaurant and we're among people now that's increasingly hard to do, especially because of COVID. And it's going to

rebound in some way. And it's unclear exactly how, but it probably will. I mean, but he says, he goes on to say curating isn't undemocratic or elitist a term that's now often used so often that it's that's now used so often that it's become meaningless. It's an act of generosity, you're sharing what you love and what inspires you the best streaming platforms such as criterion channel and movie and traditional outlets such as TCM are based on curating, they're actually curated algorithms by definition are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else. And like, he's not wrong. I agree with him completely in spirit. Yeah. Yeah, but he's like missing the point a little I think like, you know, I love Marty again,

I think his heart's in the right place. But like, undemocratic is not a dirty word in the context of art. And I think it weakens his point, it undermines his argument to argue that like, you know, actually, this was not undemocratic, he should say like, yes, it's undemocratic. And that's a good thing. Right. Like you should take a cue from his good friend Fran, who famously said there's too much democracy and art and not enough in society. Right. Like that's the real problem. Everybody knows that like, our culture is overly democratic. There are no gatekeepers. The quality has suffered because of it. Everybody knows this, they may argue that it's not true, but everybody knows. And like, you know, he shouldn't shy away from making that point.

But I think that that's why Adam Curtis is so beloved, because he's one of like, a handful of figures. And like, I really mean you can count them on your hand. I think who provides people with like an aesthetically novel, and intellectually challenging, but very accessible, right, and democratized like access point, I sound like really gay and actually does. No, absolutely. People that. And like as Adam Curtis sort of said on our show, like the problem is that everybody feels entitled to express themselves now, which like, you know, good, you should feel entitled, but in the privacy of your own home, and don't, you know, you don't have to inflict it on everybody else publicly, you know.

Yeah, you don't into telling your story and whatnot. Yeah. And everybody's like kind of jealously guarding their right to self expression and telling their story as if it's like the one human value that matters more than all the other ones, which it's not. Right. And this is, yeah, reflected, I think also in a lot of contemporary filmmaking. Unfortunately, there's very little imagination. Oftentimes people tell these and you see it in like auto fiction and stuff too. There's these sort of hyper myopic kind of stories that the director novelist or whoever has like just the most immediate access to being their own. Yeah. That are like completely unself-aware. Like that's honestly the beauty of girls,

which a lot of people hated, was that it was mocking itself every step of the way. Right. It had a lot of like self awareness, you know, and a few weeks ago, you know, people got kind of mad. Not wasn't so bad, but people, a lot of people kind of pushed back on on our remarks on a promising young woman. And some people even went as far as to say that it was a watchable and even good movie. I think it's debatable that it's even a movie. I wouldn't even class it's not even a movie. It's a it's it's like the meat product of movies. It's a movie product. Right. It's not like a real it's the most charitable thing you can say about a promising young woman is that it's kind of like possibly an exploration of a new cinematic format, but it's not

like a movie in the old sense of the word. I think yeah, it's a Scorsese's nostalgia is a little bit ironic because I think that our contemporary cinematic forms are also infected with this nostalgia, which we see in just this kind of like recycling of tropes and characters and concepts as we see in like with Cruella, which we'll get to, you know, it's all like being kind of remasticated and redigested and then regurgitated and like vomited back for us to consume and nothing it does definitely feel like cinema isn't advancing into more kind of experimental forms. And I don't yeah, I agree with you that a promising young woman does feel more like a product more like content than like a film or a movie. It's like a

weird hybrid of like a ad and a music video or something. Right. But also like we we're never going to have the answer is not sort of to like aspire to Fulini ask forms of expression like we're not going to have another eight and a half. We have to do something new that Marty would probably hate. Yeah, like, I mean, you can't this is this is like my big objection to people on the left and like liberals who complain about or who accuse other people of being trad there's no trad you can't go back to being trad all this stuff that like, you know, like having a white picket fence nuclear family and having kids and getting married for for coastal elites, at least, maybe not for everybody else, but it's getting there. It's just a lark, you know,

like you can't go back. It's like the whole again, it's like that Wellbeckian concept of the over analyzed woman who is incapable of love in the kind of old sense of it, because she's too self aware, like we're too self conscious to ever be trad, right? There's no going back. It has to be a new thing that hopefully retains the, you know, you can't like purge the past entirely, it will retain some of the positive features of the past, ideally not so far our culture retains most mostly the negative nostalgia. But yeah, and also I like, I don't agree that democratization of a medium is exclusively bad, but that you have to be honest and upfront and say that it does in some sense yield many unforeseen bad results. Of course, kind of like the same thing with like the

liberation of women, nobody's arguing that that was all bad. You can't make that except for me. But it did yield some very unpleasant and negative results for women and you're a liar and in denial if you reject that, right? But I think I was thinking about this like concept of hauntology and why we're haunted by the past. And it's like, well, because we haven't reckoned with it on its own terms and in all of its complexity. Totally. So even like, I think Marty's vision is, it's hard to say what Marty wants, you know, he wants in a way just to be young again, and to have the experience that he had of coming up in a time when cinema was very exciting. He talks about, yeah, we discussed every second of Lestrada or wherever we poured into

coffee shops to discuss this stuff. And he's that will never be regained inevitably. Yeah, because we've acclimated to the medium. It's a novel medium. Now we all we do is discuss tweets, like TikToks or whatever. But again, and then he goes into Fellini, he says at the center of it all there was one director whom everybody knew one artist whose name was synonymous with the cinema. And what it could do is a name that instantly evoked a certain style a certain attitude toward the world. In fact, it became an adjective, let's say you wanted to describe these surreal atmosphere of a dinner party or wedding or funeral, or political convention for that matter, the madness of the entire planet, all you had to do was say the word Fellini-esque

people knew exactly what you meant. I thought in that initial part of beginning part of the paragraph, I thought he was going to talk about Bresson. Yeah. And Bressonian. But then yeah, it took a took a real twist. Yeah. What? Bergman? But I yeah, I get why yeah, Fellini would be his his choice because he's an Italian supremacist. Exactly. Bresson and Bergman are like foreign for him. But yeah, he's getting at this idea. But what he's getting at really is that Fellini, like all great artists is an aesthetic autocrat. Like you have to be there's no democracy. Like he took a personal idiom and he turned it into a film canon. Yeah. Like when we think of Italy through cinema, that's 80% Fellini. Just like the the busty women in polka dot sheaths. And

like the vintage cars and the kind of Dikirco-esque landscape that's all, you know, it's Fellini's personal experience of growing up in Rimini under fascism. Like you can look he has diaries and notebooks where he sketches all this out. Yeah. Like these big like the woman in Amar court who's like suck don't blow when she's trying to get like the 14 year old to like lick her breasts. And that's like some fantasy image of a woman that he had a Freudian fixation on when he was like a teen. And it's like beautiful. But like that that's I mean, I think like that's the mark of an effective artist, like a good artist is how well you can take your kind of personal private view of the world, impose it on the world and then transform the world. Right. Like

that's all it is or reflect the world at least. Yeah. But I don't that's increasingly less possible now because there's so much information. So yeah, well, that's the whole argument about like a tour shipping dad. Yeah. In general, like that there's very few people who are able to sort of synthesize like cohesive aesthetic vision. There's very few like directors who are really working that way or even interested in working that way. Yeah. And who can inflict themselves on everybody else in that way. Yeah, exactly. But again, like Adam Curtis living proof that you can still do it. Yeah. Well, he's in a Curtis is in a very fortunate position. Yeah, the BCC, you know, yeah, the BBC. Sorry. But yeah, he has access to that to that archive. Because of that,

his films are relatively inexpensive, which gives him an incredible freedom. Yeah, but they would be insanely expensive if you had to pay for all of that stuff. Yeah. But then on the on the by that same token, I feel like a lot of people if they had his advantages and his access, it wouldn't occur to them though, like, no, definitely not. Of course not. That's not that's not to take away from his talent or anything at all. It's just but the question that you have to ask yourself then is, do you want that? Do you want a Tership, which again, is aesthetic autocracy? Like, I don't know. I mean, I want that because I'm like an elder millennial and I'm like the last generation to witness that. But I can't argue with people younger than me and be like, no,

you're wrong. Actually, my way of doing it is better. It's hard to say because I don't think people really know what they want. Well, yeah, that's another thing. Let's talk about democracy. We're all women now, you know, um, like I just, does anyone want the Cruella Joker movie? Nope. I can't imagine that anybody does. I can't. I don't think zoomers do. I don't, they don't know. Um, I think, um, like maybe some a certain sect of kind of the most like the millennials leading the least examined lives, perhaps are interested in something like that. I think like the Jessica Valenti's and the Noah Brilatsky's of the world, like Twitter blue checks, who confuse sexual pathology and

and they're maybe not interested in aesthetic autocracy because films and art are just a way for them to sort of narcissistically consume something that either affirms or inflames their own sensibilities and worldviews, you know, it's just, it's like a very reactive, reactionary way of, of engaging with, with culture. No, but they're the progressives. I like Dan Allegretto's tweet that was like, I'm mad that Disney didn't make a movie that was exactly like tailored to my personality or whatever. He worded it better, but should we talk about Cruella or do we have more comments than Marty? Um, let me look at my notes. I will say being off of Twitter. Yeah, Marty, come on the pod. Um,

no, I guess that's, oh, um, I did also kind of think it was funny that he says, um, nowadays people are dazzled by the latest technological tools and what they can do, but lighter digital cameras and post production techniques such as digital stitching and morphing don't make the movie for you. It's about the choices you make in the creation of the whole picture. I thought that was funny because in the Irishman, he literally puts like De Niro into that de-aging machine, which I think sort of speaks to Marty's larger preoccupation with the past. I just realized the Irishman is his eight and a half. Yeah, I guess it's weird, like reckoning with, like, yeah, the Irishman is like, did you like the Irishman? Um, the Irish, the Irishman,

Jewishman. Um, I didn't, I didn't hate it, which is weird because I hate, okay, people are gonna be very mad at me and I know everybody thinks I have a horrible taste in music and movies and that may be true, but I have a very idiosyncratic, personally canonical taste. And I think, like, if you, um, you know, I even liked it when Azalea Banks said Goodfellas sucked because I don't think that movie sucks. I really liked that movie, but I was like, I appreciate that she has a personal opinion on this movie that everybody agrees is like this great masterpiece. But, uh, I think the departed and the wolf of Wall Street are such abominations of films. I'm sorry, please don't kill me. Compared to Casino, that like it's shameful that he made those movies,

and I think the Irishman is not so much a better movie than those films, but it's a more confusing and, uh, it's more interesting, interesting movie. And it reminds you of like Goya, Goya's late career paintings where it was just, it would just be like a crazy face or a weird dog and like an empty landscape or like Saturn eating his children. There was something like more of it and perverse about the Irishman and like very emotional that doesn't exist. Like my objection to the departed and, um, the wolf of Wall Street is that they're totally just like schlock Hollywood movies and they are like a touchstone on the way to the degradation of cinema as he describes it. Yeah, well silence I actually liked. Which one is that? I haven't seen that. Um, that was the one about the

Portuguese missionaries with Andrew Garfield. I haven't seen that one. Like it was also kind of quiet. Adam Driver was in it too. But it's not, it's like not one of his like big blockbuster movies. It was, yeah. I don't, I don't know how it fared and it got like Academy Award Noms and stuff. It was like 2016, I think. Well, he also made, um, the adaptation of that Edith Wharton book. What was it called with Michelle Pfeiffer and like Daniel Day Lewis? Age of Innocence. Age of Innocence. Yeah. So actually Marty's way more. Age of Innocence is great. It's a good movie. Yeah. He's, but he's a much more like, um, well rounded, fully fleshed filmmaker than people think he is. Cause I think most people associate him with like, no, totally. I mean,

last temptation of Christ. Yeah. He's a weird guy. He's made some really cool movies. Yeah. And he's, he's a weird guy, especially because he has a reputation as kind of like a normie director, but he's not. No, he's not. And I fuck with them as a, as a Catholic living in sin. Yeah. And he made, I mean, he made that like three hour long, um, documentary about Bob Dylan. Yeah. Oh yeah. He talks about Bob Dylan in this essay too, which I kind of glossed over because I'm not really a Dylan fan. I'm a Dylan fan and I hate myself for it. And I've spent countless hours of therapy. I was, I've always like, I should hate this disgusting, effeminate, fake, shitty man. He's a hobo. And then I like, can't, um, you can't fight it. But, um, and he

made like an eight hour long documentary about the grateful dead. Like he's too weird. No. Yeah. I meant nothing but respect for, for Scorsese. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I really would, well, I'm going to try to manifest this. I would really love if he came on the pod, not that he would, but it would be like great to like pick his brain a little. He probably doesn't even know what a podcast is because it's not a fullenie movie. He probably thinks we're a subjugating culture or two are streaming a content platform. Yeah. What's like the movie that was your eight and a half that really touched you as a person and like changed your life. Do you have one? That's a hard one.

Changed my life. Or like, you know, that was like kind of like a milestone in the way that you saw the craft. Um, I mean, the, the early Polanskis, well, really, I guess, yes. Kubrick. Yeah. Like maybe clockwork orange or I mean, I'm a massive eyes wide shot, but obviously, but I wouldn't say it changed my life. Kubrick-esque. 2001. Like, I don't know. There's a lot. Yeah. I'm like trying to think of like the one movie that like did it for me. I can't even think of one. Shrader. I think Shrader is the one who I would really love to have on the, on the pod, honestly. Listen, Paul, we couldn't get Marty. So we were wondering if you would come on.

He were around. Bernard Herman. Who noticed you in posting on Facebook a lot lately. Maybe you could. Yeah. I love Paul Schrader too. And I love that he's like, not a Jew. Yeah. He's like really not a Jew. The one who got away. Yeah. Yeah. But he's kind of like, he's from the Midwest, right? He's, yeah. Well, he grew up a Calvinist. He didn't see a movie till he was 17 years old. Oh, okay. So that's why when he did it, like blew his fucking mind. That's cool. I think that that's how you should raise your child, just to keep them in like a

sensory deprivation tank until they're 17. Yeah. Let them out and then they'll either go mental breakdown or they become a great auteur. Paul Schrader. I don't know if he's a, he's definitely a great auteur. He's, he's sort of underrated is what I'm saying. I love him. He's one of my favorites, but he's not a guy who's, he's not like on the level of like, he's underrated, but it's, I think precisely kind of what makes him great. It's because he's very inconsistent. Yeah. And he really takes risks and like, he's always like trying something new. That's kind of his whole transcendental cinema thesis, which is like movies should be surprising. They shouldn't be like, formulating. Yeah. He's, what's that word? He's like,

he has a, he has certain hits and certain misses. I mean, like, yeah, which is cool. That's how it should be. Definitely. Everything has to be like a polished three hour production. Totally. I might like fuck around and rewatch the Irish. I'm just kidding. That's probably not a movie that I'll, I'll ever watch. Cruella. Cruella trailer dropped. Yeah. Are we going to watch Cruella as the big question? I have had the same thought. I don't think I can bring myself to it. It looks so bad. Yeah. It's, yeah. It's, they tried, they made the Joker like girl boss edition, but about Cruella Deville with Emma Stone. I feel a tremendous amount of goodwill actually for Emma Stone, and I really like her. And this was disappointing to see. I think Emma Stone is very pretty,

a very funny, very smart. Her eyes are so blue. Yeah. She's like a fierce and feisty Irish lass. She seems like a girl you get drunk with. Yeah. She seems like she'd be good in bed. She has a lot of qualities that are attractive in a woman. She's absolutely wrong for this part, like beyond wrong. She's too young and too pretty to play the part of Cruella Deville. I understand it's supposed to be like an origin story, but like it's, it's her joker vacation. I know, but it's just like, it's so weird and wrong. Like the Cruella character is not a fiery and feisty Irish pub wench. No, she's Glenn. Well, Glenn Close portrayed her in the live action. Yeah. She's, she's like a shy and mousy girl who becomes Joan Rivers. That's what Cruella Deville is. Like a Joan

Rivers style character. Right. And I mean, Glenn Close, I think was pretty decently cast, I guess. Totally. I'm Glenn Close being like a leading lady to me, like defies all the odds. It really speaks to an era that I, it's hard for me to fathom that Glenn Close was ever like a femme fatale or that she was ever young, that she had a prominent film career. She's a great actress, but oh God, she's a, I mean, she's weird yet. I mean, she's like this kind of like also last gasp of like Hollywood actresses who looked really weird. She's not like a beautiful, a conventionally beautiful woman, but she was took up a lot of space was very sexy, like fatal attraction, all the outfits she wears, and she plays that unhinged BPD thing like really well. And

you know, you can, you contrast her against Ann Archer, who plays Michael Douglas, it's Michael Douglas, right? She plays his wife and she's also like very sexy and, and I mean, that was like the last era when the Hollywood actresses were like more womanly, I guess, and girlish, which I think is also like people lament that, but I think it's also like a cyclical thing and things are going to go back and yeah, in and out of style. Yeah. Like, you know, one generation, it's tits next generation, it's ass. Yeah. Waves coming background any day now. Yeah, let's hope I'm tired of the era of the Pog. I know. It's I'm okay with that. I'm fine with Pog. It doesn't. It's all yeah, I don't care. It's just that there's fine line between Pog and

anyway. Yes. But um, yeah, crew, I don't know. But setting aside the weird casting of Emma Stone. Well, yeah, because I guess it's, it's not a really about Emma Stone versus like a Glenn Close type. It's more more us to do with like the fact that it shouldn't exist. This film should have never been made. It's just complete. When did they even cook this one up? Was this a COVID production? It's like a Margot Robbie's production pulled out of their ass. Why wasn't Margot Robbie Cruella? She'd be good. Well, because she's already probably Harley Quinn. It's a little close to home. Oh, she probably doesn't want to get get typecast because she's done so much with the Harley Quinn franchise. Yeah. Yeah. Um, she's really inspired girls in Bushwick to wear striped

knee highs. Good for Emma Stone for securing the bag. That's all I have to say, I guess. Well, yeah, she probably made a lot of money off of this defunct and deleterious production. I just can't even look at it. It's a drag. I know. I know. It looks like watching like Harry Potter when you're drunk or something like that. That kind of whatever that filter is that color grading. Yeah. Like it's like the league of extraordinary gentlemen color grading. It's like that kind of high contrast and blue. Yeah. Cyan. Yeah. I hate that shit. The thought of watching that movie in its entirety though. Honestly, I would probably watch almost anything if I had if I got to go to a theater.

Well, we did watch a promising young woman. I know. I was drunk. I made $20 to watch that and I was drunk. So that was my bad. But we also went and saw the Lady Captain Marvel, which was pretty atrocious. Oh yeah, we did. I forgot. We saw that at the Alamo. You know what, if they, if the Alamo opens up, I think it comes out in May. If we can go sit in those like big, deep chairs and drink like Long Island ice teas and I'll go see, I'll go see Cruella for the listeners. But the Joker was a real letdown. Yeah. But everything like now there's like this whole Joker-fied genre for women that's like,

yeah, what is it? Harley Quinn already the female Joker? Yeah, she's a Joker's girlfriend. Oh, she is. Okay. Like literally. I don't know anything about this. Yeah. I think that's her origin story is she's like the girl Joker. What's their age gap? He seems significantly older. He seems like he's grooming her. I'm not very well versed in the Marvel universe. Or is this even, yeah, I guess because Disney and Marvel are the same thing. Are they fused? I think so. I think Disney owns like everything now basically. Yeah. And does age gap and grooming stuff count in the case of like diabolical villains? Hmm. They should make a Harley Quinn or Cruella movie where they come out as victims of abusive relationships with the Joker. Yeah, it's actually

Cruella had a bad boyfriend that actually drove her to the edge and made her evil. So he called her names. She even gained 10 pounds or lost 10 pounds because she was so upset. Uh, my ribs were like popping out. What else happened in the Cruella trailer, they should just like leave, they shouldn't even make the movie, they just release trailers. That's all people have the attention span for anyways. Yeah, they can just watch. Feels just as good. What I want to know, okay, this is what I want to know because this is like the one thing that I wrote in the notes is like, who is this for? Because it's not for children. It's for adults. It's for adult women. Okay. It's for like millennial women

who probably are also like into Harry Potter. Yeah. And they're living in a kind of state of arrested development where this sort of thing appeals to them. Childless unmarried hat women work in politics. Yes. Like who would why would you want to watch this movie? It's just I mean, it is like what Marty says about the lowest common denominator though, it's just like, I don't I think unfortunately he's right and that a lot of people yeah, they're not interested in seeing something new. Yeah. Or innovative. They just actually want to see something familiar. Yeah. In which case this is like 101 Dalmatians meets the Joker. And those two things are just kind of like mashed together into this like gruel that people can

consume. Yeah, the feeding trough. Yeah, they're like focused group to the feeding trough. It just like that's all that's why so much like there's so much emphasis now on like intellectual property in production companies like that's for the most part I had a meeting actually with Margot Robbie's production company like two years ago now but and it was when I was taking lots of like I went to LA to like take a bunch of generals and they were all very uniform and that everyone wants like IP they just want to like get the rights to something that already exists so that they can kind of repackage it or remix it and regurgitate it. As I said, it's like, yeah, it's a real vomitorium out there. And it's very hard to sell people on something new

like original on original content. Exactly. Okay. No one wants to finance something that doesn't already exist, which is why we're stuck in this sort of loop. Okay, well, yes, of course, as he's right about that, that like the certain kind of production middlemen who brought problematic European cinnamon to the States were really taking a risk. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot more like ebbs and flows, but I guess you can't like you don't lose but you don't you don't win rather but you don't also lose when you make like a Wonder Woman or Cruella or Harley Quinn movie, right? It's dependable. Well, that's the whole idea of risk is that it can potentially reap fast rewards, fast rewards, but it is a risk when everything is sort of algorithmically

generated and formulaically produced. It's low risk, but it keeps a kind of like cultural stasis. Yeah, because I guess they have to keep making movies for some reason. Yeah, they could just like not make movies. I left that Adam Curtis episode feeling very optimistic and now I feel like I'm still optimistic. No, I think it's I don't I don't think it's sustainable. I think that we will reach a kind of fatigue point, but while you know, cut to three years from now when Cruella 2 is coming out and we're still doing this podcast and like 45. We're somehow aging even more rapidly than we are now. But I am optimistic. I mean, well, I'm optimistic to the degree that I think like, I'm sorry to use this phrase, but like independent creators have a lot of room now

to come to come up with like interesting weird films that like strike a chord. It's just the money that's, yeah, that's the problem. It's hard to, but there's independent financiers here and there who will give you some money if you have a little bit of buzz or something like that. It's not impossible. It's far. I mean, I made a movie. Yeah. And if I defunct retard like me can do it, then yeah, it can't be that hard. It's very hard, but you know, it's possible and there's certain there's there have to be people like smarter and more talented than me out there. More Jewish than you basically. Well, that's where the money comes from, baby. And I not to to my own fucking horn, but my movie while it has kind of derivative elements, I think is pretty original.

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not like the story of a 30 year old podcastress who lives in New York who suffers a head injury. Exactly. It's like it's at least about something. Yeah. Just like kicks down a mailbox and a skater knocks me over and I'm getting a vegan Caesar. Some Mexican guys who stole skateboards from crack you over the head in the middle of one of their brawls. Anyway, should we touch on Kendall Jenner's body? Yeah, I'm just trying to like spit ball brainstorm movie ideas like I'm really into like remaking show a street cast actors. And I think that euphoria meets show. You show are you. But there you show. Show for you. Sephora. Sephora. Perfect. Yeah. It's a movie. It's about it's a movie about sex

workers, but they're intellectually disabled. They know everything about eyeshadow palettes and blender brushes. I got to go to Sephora to get my my birthday gift actually. Oh, yeah, shit. I think I can get it all month. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. I had a very good birthday gift once which was like those Smashbox pencils. I still have them. I got them like 10 years ago. It's probably unhygienic to use 10 year old makeup. Nice. Sephora does deliver with a gift. Okay, good to know. But I'm, you know, as a boomer, I like the brick and mortar experience. Yeah, me too. I like to go to the shop and yeah, just like touch the testers even though I'm not supposed to. I know me too. Like living on the wild side. Trying to stop me. I feel like a gay guy in a

bath house in 1985. Oh my God, a dusting myself with like powders. Anyway, Kendall Jenner, Spanx, skim skim skim. For similar though, you're right to Spanx, which is the Kardashians were big proponents of Spanx. I feel like prior to the skims launch. Yeah, they must have been. Here's the the pic. Here's the pic I'm showing it to Anna. I mean, it's photoshopped. Yeah, that was people's kind of like this doctored image of Kendall Jenner's impossibly thin body, which it kind of isn't. And it's pretty normal. This was my, the screenshot I just showed you is from HRH collection, and she captioned it. It doesn't bother me at all. I'm obsessed. We all know she's model skinny. If you want to be thin, stop eating and put the fucking work in. So what if she smoothed

her skin to look plasticky? I have a pic where I swear, like almost as good. It's all about flexing and angles. I wish I could share. Wait, what is same HRH collection? I don't know what this is. You don't know who? No, I've been scared to confess this because I'm afraid that like Paul Kupo and Dana Ligretto will never speak to me. We'll have them on to give you a primer. She's like a vlogger, I guess is how she came to prominence, but she's known and beloved for really speaking her mind. Okay, cool. And she hawks like jewelry and stuff too. She's built a small empire. What's her primary platform? She was on YouTube and now probably still is, but I kind of interface with her via Instagram stories primarily. Should I follow? But I was

a pretty late adopter at HRH collection, honestly. But yeah, you should definitely, she's a good follow for sure. Okay, cool. I'll do that. But she's right. I don't think there's anything really that triggering about this image of Kendall Jenner. She looks like a fairly normal model. She's definitely like photoshopped her pussy area and made her skin look more glossy and stuff. But you know, I basically look like this when I like wake up before I have breakfast. Because it's definitely not like an unattainable physique. I've seen people speculating that she has like hip injections, which is probably true because they all do from that Armenian doctor who like will really like tweak your proportions to hip ratio. Yeah. Yeah, they all have those

kind of soluble whatever injections in their hip areas that will lead to a great autoimmune arc when they're in their 60s and need to have a reality show. But first of all, she's not okay, I don't mean this in a mean way, but she looks like she's not that skinny. She's like actually good skinny. She looks like a model like athletic. Exactly. She's got like strong legs. Yeah, she looks hot. I don't know. It's fine. She doesn't even seem like she'd have a thigh gap if her legs were closer together. You know, she's definitely not like emaciated. Yeah, she looks fine. I think like when you're that tall, you can pretty much eat whatever you want because your metabolism requires a lot more calories. Right. And I think she's naturally thin,

naturally kind of lanky. So if the issue, I don't really see what the issue is with. What is the issue? What's the complaint that she photoshopped her? That she photoshopped her, that it was triggering people's body dysmorphia, that she was sort of propagating unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I don't know about unhealthy. It's unrealistic because she's like very tall and thin, which is like most people don't have that body composition. No offense. Right. Like no offense. It's not a democracy. It's like our beauty is not a democracy. Well, it's, yeah. I mean, it's really not. I'm sorry. And I think I wonder if she hadn't have had the sort of augmentations done to her hips, if people if she just looked kind of

normally thin and less like Barbie ask. Yeah. I bet people would be less mad if she looked less good. Like if she just looked kind of straight up and down. Yeah. The issue I think is that she just looks impossibly good. But she's a top scion of like an elite mercantile family who's also a model. Yeah. It's like literally her job to be hot. I mean, I think what's what people aren't talking about, which Patrick Samberg brought up to me is that she's in the face looking more and more uncannily like Emily Radikowski. Oh, I want to talk about her face. I actually don't care about Kendall's body, but I have my own take on her face. Yeah. Yeah. I think she's the prettiest of the Kardashian clan easily, but her those termite queens.

I'm so racist against Armenian. That's okay. You're allowed. I'm allowed. I have the hood pass. I look at Kim Kardashian and she's obviously a beautiful girl, beautiful gorgeous 40 year old girl, strong upper body, but I look at her and I see all the flaws that all Armenians have that I have to that are short torso, wide ribcage, chubby armpits, like all that kind of stuff that you can't augment with plastic surgery. And I'm just like chubby armpits. We all have some real we all have chubby armpits, but it's like, um, it's, it's a body. I mean, you, you grow after many years to respect what you have, what God gave you because it's a body that's built to clean chicken coops and carry and carry jars of like olive oil up a mountain. Right. Like literally it's just a

functional body, you know, mercantile as you like to say it's, it's, it's a body that is good for like beating a rug, you know, for body strength. And there's this myth that like Armenian women have, um, wide hips. Thanks to Kim Kardashian. We don't, we have very narrow square hips and skinny legs. She just has hip injection. Right. Termite. I think the Kardashians are all pretty, and they're pretty together as an ensemble. Yes, they're kind of a set that you get, but you got to collect them all like Pokemons. Um, but what do you, what are your thoughts on Kendall's face? I just want to say that like, I think Kendall's face is a remarkable feat of plastic surgery technology because she's somehow retained most of her old face, but it's been really subtly and

beautifully tweaked. Like her work is very good. Her work is quite, you don't, but you don't feel like she's uncannily morphing into Emra. Um, no, no, I think they have a similar coloring, but they're a very different type. I think naturally, yes. But I think Kendall's looking increasingly more like Emily. I just think that that's like the kind of type right now, which is like, I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know if I have the stamina to look at the side by sides. I didn't present my, my PowerPoint presentation. Kendall has, she's trying to achieve sort of what Emily kind of has naturally is what I think. I don't think they're resembling one another. I think Kendall specifically is looking more and more like Emily.

Okay. Well, you know, Emily has a Semitic look. She has a very Jewish look, which is nice. I think Jewish women are really beautiful gorgeous, but Kendall has a very Germanic or well, she has like a very English look. The thing that sets her apart, she has dark hair, which most English Germanic women have blonde hair, but like, um, she got her, Kendall, I think got her eyelids lifted and her nasal bridge narrowed, which looks really good. And she got her upper lip done. Yes. I mean, her work is just like impeccable. It's up there with like Bella Hadid for me, honestly. I would love to like, I think like if I wasn't a podcaster, I would love to have a career as like a cosmetic plastic surgeon. Yeah. Like a surgeon or something. Cause I'm like so obsessed

with like my new proportions and aesthetics, but like, I found an article from the good people at the sun, actually that if you want to just scroll, you'll see some pretty compelling side by side. It's this, this article makes the case that it has more to do with sort of her poses in general aesthetic, which is, is I think does have something to do sort of, yeah, with the conventions of Instagram more than Instagram. And I have, I have a kind of darker theory on this. I have like some race. I have a little race theory. No, I think just like, um, you know, like a couple of years ago when I did that spiked interview and people were really mad at me. Um, and I said that we don't live in a white supremacist country. The part that was

cut, there was a part that was cut. I have the receipts, by the way, was, um, I was talking about how we don't live in a culturally white supremacist country. We live in a multicultural country. Our rap music is exported across the globe. Like kids in Russia and, um, Belgium imitate black rappers. Right. I know that's a very boomer point, but it stands. And the beauty standard right now is not white. It's ethnically, um, ambiguous. It's, it's moving toward brown. That's all it is. Yeah. Like, I would agree with that. So like now you have like, that's the reason behind the popularity of the Kardashian. They look ethnically ambiguous. Right. Mocha. Yeah. They're like caramel colored. Um, and their proportions have been augmented to look more

non-white. Right. Like I think that that's just all it is. And the, the Kardashians really like capitalized on that moment. They were very smart to not go with, because like, you know, it was the nineties. It was like the era of the Pam Anderson blonde bimbo or like Anna Colesmith. By the way, I love both of those women. They're beautiful, but like that era is over. Those beauty standards are over. Yeah, definitely. So I think like, um, yeah, blondness has not been a beauty norm for a long time. I feel like in the nineties, it was Sharon Stone, like Nicole Kidman. Yeah. I definitely don't feel like we're coveting blondness as a culture. Yeah. And I think as much as we used to come back, but it'll be very problematic. I just think this is, um, whatever you think

about it personally, in terms of whatever representation or justice, this is ostensibly a good sign because it means that we are truly multicultural as a society, at least on the cultural level, you know? Yeah. Well, I would say my whole, the problem, I guess, with Instagram face and those contemporary sort of beauty standards aren't that they're augmented necessarily, but that they're kind of expensive to maintain. Yeah. Or to even achieve. Yeah. That our beauty standards are kind of, um, very interwoven, sort of with class and capital and status in that way. Yeah. Like with aspirational kind of like nouveau riche stuff. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Because like no one even, there isn't even really a pretense

anymore of like natural beauty being coveted. It's like, I think completely socially acceptable and even preferable to look like you've had procedures done, you know? Um, yeah. No, that's true. That's something that I personally just like doesn't sit well with me as, as like an old foggy. Yeah. I'm very, I'm like very big on like kind of like the natural look, which I'm not against like minor tweaks and interventions. But when you start like having obvious plastic surgery face is sort of like, you know, wearing labels or whatever, like you're broadcasting to the world, that you have the disposable income to what's really scary for me is when this again, um, a, it's going to turn into like a whole autoimmune medicalized industry. B, people are going to

start genetically engineering their kids, which is going to be really scary. That's going to be scary. That's going to suck. Yeah. Right. Everyone's going to have biracial babies, even if the parents are both white, you know? Yeah. Everyone's going to have caramel babies. With green or blue on. They're all going to have Afghan girl eyes. And perfect freckle placement. I don't know. I mean that, I, yeah, I think we're in, in this like kind of like, uh, we're at this like border point where like all the hot, ultra famous influencers are still white, but they're looking physically less white in minute ways. And it's like kind of like, well, the tanness to me has less to do with kind of

ethnic ambiguity and more, I guess with the concept of maybe leisure, you know, that you are, you have the time to sort of acquire a tan, which also speaks to my point about it being beauty, being very interwoven with like class, classed signifiers. Yeah. Being like purchasable. Yeah. Which like, I, you know, about to pivot back to Martin Scorsese and Fran Lee Woods. I really liked the point that she made, I don't know, in like episode three or something of that documentary that was like, um, Fran Lee Woods, most beautiful woman. I like that point that she made that was like, you know, talent is one of those things that you can't learn, you can't buy, you can't inherit genetically. Um, therefore it completely levels

any kind of like economic, like socioeconomic considerations. Of course, some people never get the opportunity to capitalize on their talent because they come from like a lower socioeconomic background and she makes this caveat. But beauty is the same thing. Like, you know, it's a thing that like you can't buy or inherit or learn except now you can buy it. And I think that that, but it's not beauty standards are disconnected, I think, from what we're talking about, which is like a natural kind of ephemeral beauty. Yeah. I mean, look at Kate Moss, she was found in the, in the dirt. Yeah, we're what she found in a pub. You know, yeah, she was literally some like farm girl. Like a bassinet and she was like a dirt

farmer in the English countryside or something. And she just happened to be the most beautiful woman. And she's weird. She's weird looking. She's like, she looks like an alien. Like she had something incredibly special. Yeah. Are her and Liz Hurley the two hottest British women? Maybe. Because I think British women are not really known for. There's some nice British models like Gemma Ward, who also looks quite weird. Oh yeah, that one. I wonder what has this Gucci model named Delphi, who I really like. I've been following on Instagram for a while. Also kind of fetal alcohol vibe, which I find to be very cute. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the other thing that like people are always like getting butt hurt at me because they're like,

Anna only likes women who look like better versions of her. It's like, you know, shit. Everybody should like people that look like better versions. Yeah, that's why I like. It's like a model with a wonky eye. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. You shouldn't like, you know, expect other people to like that, but it's understandable. It's like when people couple up, they date very often people who look like them, not always, but very often it's like, I think Alice Gregory said this, I said this before on the podcast like a million times, but like, you know, like your beauty idols are literally superior versions of yourself. Right. Why wouldn't they be like, if I was out here trying to look like a kind of Scandinavian

blonde or an African black girl, it'd be weird and pathological. Definitely. Yeah. I'm not like in the self-hatred business. Well, I am, but no. That's actually how we make our money. What else is there to say about I think candle, Jen, Jen, I mean, I will say being off of Twitter has been, has been nice because I'm not, I haven't been as privy to these, these conversations, which has been refreshing. And I missed the whole arc of the attempted canceling of David Letterman. Oh yeah. I didn't even know. I, I, there is some arc about Australia being banned from Facebook or something. Okay. I reversed my free speech anti-censorship stance is like, good, ban those mutants. Yeah, I have no idea, but there's some kind of like Facebook Australia thing that I was

going to like propose that we tackle as a subject today. And then I was like, no, I was looked into it. Yeah, like really wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you feel, do you feel that you, do you feel more lucid and collected now that you're off of Twitter? I just feel more relaxed, I think. Yeah. I feel less kind of agitated. I think had I been on Twitter, it would have, for like the sort of David Letterman discourse, it would have triggered a lot of my like, edible transference I have with, with Letterman. And I would have felt compelled to sort of engage and defend him, which is really, truly not my job. You would have acted out. I would have acted out. And I didn't have to. And that's, I feel just kind of more, more mellow. Definitely. Maybe I'll tweet David Letterman

did nothing wrong tomorrow in honor of your birthday. Thank you. And then when people get mad at me, I'll just be like, I actually, I don't have a dog. I like Letterman, but not as much as Charlie Rose who truly did nothing wrong. So I'm just kidding. I actually don't know what he did or didn't do. He showed his dick to an intern. I have no idea. And even if he did, we love him anyway. Yeah. See you in hell. See you in hell.