The Bechdel Cast - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) with Jasmine Johnson

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Oh this episode, Caitlin, Jamie, and special vampire slayer guest Jasmine Johnson kill vampires and discuss the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow @jazzfacekilla on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, this is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right? Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Las Culturistas. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture.

Don't miss Katherine Hahn on Las Culturistas. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour.

If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Caitlin. Hey, Jamie. So we're about to graduate from high school, right? And I'm trying to plan the next phase. Can I just pitch you what my idea is and then let me know what your plans are? Please. can I just like pitch you what my idea is and then let me know what your plans are please okay

my plans are to graduate from high school move to Europe marry Alfred Molina and then die what are your plans oh um I was thinking I would just like accept my fate as a vampire slayer and kill a bunch of vampires because Wow, you're not like other girls. I know. Or are you? I am. I am exactly like other girls. Isn't that wild that that's that becomes the central question of the movie? Welcome to the Bechdelcast. My name is Jamie Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante. And this is our show in which we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point. Now, Jamie. Yes.

Whatever is the Bechdel test? Well, I'll tell you. And we told Alfred Molina this. so it's good that we're all like my future husband alfred melina who famously hates men's rights activists as he said on our show absolutely he's gotta come back okay uh the vectal test we're and we're okay so that's an example of something that does not pass the battle test because the version that we use, it's a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test. Lots of different versions of it. The version that we use requires that two people of a marginalized gender with names speak to each other about something other than a man

for more than two lines of dialogue. And the dialogue exchange should have some sort of meaning and not just an offhand, like, would you like spaghetti? No. Although, unless it's very, it plots spaghetti and it's very important. Sometimes there's plot spaghetti. What's an example of plot spaghetti?

Huh. Oh, actually, maybe in another vampire movie, which the name of it is escaping me right now, but it's the one that Kiefer Sutherland is in, not Donald Sutherland. What the hell movie am I thinking of? The Lost Boys. The Lost Boys. Are you talking about The Lost Boys? Yes. Sorry to jump in already. no no please i was like the lost boys there's plot spaghetti in that movie i've never seen it well i wouldn't call it plot spaghetti necessarily or it might not even be spaghetti but there's a scene where there's like some noodle dish and then they they're like feeding it to humans and then they're like just kidding it's worms or something iconic and then they're like

they use their vampire powers to turn the spaghetti into worms i might be completely you remember that but you didn't remember the name of the movie i have like no recollection of that look it's been a minute though my brain works in mysterious ways move over mom's spaghetti plot spaghetti has entered the chat. Well, I'm glad that we got that. I think that that was a perfect way to introduce our guest. Absolutely. Yes.

Let's get her in the mix. She is the Senior Vice President of Development at Crypt TV. She is a co-executive producer on Peacock's The Girl in the Woods. It's Jasmine Johnson. It's me. Hello. Welcome. Thank you guys for having me. Oh, thanks for being here. I'm always psyched to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie. Yes. In particular. Yes. So what is your relationship and history with the movie, the franchise in general? Tell us everything. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because in my line of work, my line of work being

like being a producer and a development executive where I have to meet with a lot of writers and a lot of directors, specifically those who like genre because that's what I produce, I would say like a third of the time, I always have people who will cite Buffy as such a big inspiration to them. And when they cite it, they're talking about the TV show, always, always, always talking about the TV show. And I think I might be maybe the rare person who when I say I was obsessed with Buffy as a kid I'm talking about the movie not the show I've seen like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer the TV show but the movie was what I watched on repeat as a kid over and over and over so much so that I was convinced do not laugh at me because it still may be true but I was convinced that I was in line to be the Slayer.

Because I have a similar birthmark to the one that Merrick tells Buffy that she has. And I just knew, I just knew that I was supposed to be one of the Slayers of the Vampires. I hate to tell you guys, it didn't happen. But I just was so sure. You know, yet, maybe. Maybe yet. I feel like my heyday is sort of behind me at this point, as far as being able to fight and kill and, I don't know,

take down vampires. You never know. You never know. Right. It's very, very like 16th birthday like I remember the pilot episode of Sabrina the teenage witch I think she like woke up on her 16th birthday levitating above the bed and that was the thing that I was like absolutely that's gonna happen the morning of my 16th birthday I will be floating I just really want the show or movie that's about like you turn 40 and then realize you have

magical monster slaying powers I guess I could maybe that's the next thing that I want to be responsible for making oh that is such a good idea that would actually be amazing yeah because everything is like 16 17 18 but like what happens when you're like me and I'm 33 and I have no powers to look forward to coming into? It kind of kind of sucks a little bit. It's pretty ageist. The fact that, yeah, like so much media, I mean, in general revolves around young people like 30 and younger. And it's like, what about the people? I feel like I come of age every five years

like i have another coming of age like every few years and i'm like what it what coming of age thing am i gonna have when i'm 50 like that should be a story for sure that i mean that's so true i mean i i always use the term i say that i love coming of age content and people always equate that with like ya meaning you're in your teens, or like you're young adults. And I always have to correct them and say, when I see coming of age, I'm not necessarily talking about like teenagers, obviously, you do come of age at that age. But you never like truly stop coming of age. And I think, you know, having more things that explore what that looks like when you're past whatever the

ages that media has deemed as the one that is the most important, I think should be done more, you know, like, it's just as important. Totally. Yeah. I think we just got a pitch together in the space. Yeah. And I heard that you're a development executive. I am. I am. Anyway, that's all to say. I was convinced I was going to be the next Slayer. It didn't happen, but maybe in the real world, you can be 40 and be a Slayer. Or maybe the Slayer before me killed all the vampires. One of those. That could be possible. Hard to say. Jamie, what's your relationship with the Buffy franchise? Extremely limited. I think I've said this, this might have been on a Matreon episode, but I had like a very bizarre experience with the Buffy series where like my first day of college,

there was a girl who like locked me in her dorm room and made me watch 10 episodes in a row and it was like I think well-intentioned but felt like a hostage situation and I just the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth towards Buffy culture so because it was just like I was like god what a stressful thing to happen on your first day of anyways so I have very limited experience with it I knew I thought it was interesting going into preparing for this episode only knowing like the impression I had was that fans of Buffy the tv series hate this movie and I was curious I was like I wonder why like I've definitely seen 10 episodes of buffy under duress so i i get that the tone of the show um but i i you know it's it's dated in a lot of aspects but i really thought the movie was

perfectly fine and uh everyone was being a baby about it like it's very different from the show but if there's anything that that caitlin and i were texting about this before we started recording uh if there's anything that we've learned on this show in the past month, because we also covered Alien Resurrection, another Whedon script. It's that Joss Whedon loves to have a tantrum when he doesn't have complete creative control over something. And he'll like shit talk anything that he didn't have a million which is like whatever that bears out in his personal behavior too but like anytime he doesn't have complete creative control he's like that was the worst thing that ever happened and pee pee poo poo and it's like dude the movie is like pretty good i really enjoyed it so it's fun it's fun uh c Caitlin, what's your history with Buffy?

So I am admittedly a fan of the show, although I have not engaged with it in many years. I binged all, is it seven seasons? Oh, wow. Somewhere around like 2012, I want to say. I watched it with my best friend JT, who was always a big fan of the show. Then I watched a little bit of the spinoff show Angel. I read some of the comics. At some point, I think after I saw the series, I went and watched the movie. I don't remember if I watched the movie before or after. I think it was after the series, which probably explains why I didn't like it as much as the series because I was like, this is different and blah blah blah right and then

going back and re-watching the movie for this episode I was like oh I was hard on the movie back then it's not as bad as I thought or it's not even like bad at all although I would say the third act gets a little it's kind of messy at the end yeah it gets a little flimsy i could have stood to have maybe like a more epic less weirdly sexually charged thing i was just like dude peewee is a vampire who like jumps on the hood of a car i was yeah, how can people dislike this movie? That's it's fun. I want that. Yeah. So, yeah, I was I was too hard on the movie the first time I saw it.

I generally enjoyed it. Watching it back this time to prep for the episode. And that's my general history with Buffy. Oh, yeah. Should we dive into the recap of the movie let's do it and jasmine feel free to jump in whatever yes okay okay so we open on a quick scene in the dark ages we see a young woman fighting some vampires and we get some voiceover about vampires and vampire slayers. Then we cut to 1990s Southern California, the light ages. Very funny. We meet Buffy,

played by Christy Swanson, who is doing a cheer routine with her fellow cheerleaders then she goes to the mall with three of her friends who i do not know what those characters names are because we i know one's name is jenny i remember that because i think but i don't know which i i think it was the one with the curly hair because i remember jenny and not to spoil the end but she's at the dance showing up at the dance yeah um but outside of that i'm not sure did they even give those characters names barely i think so hillary swank is one of the friends and she i think is kimberly uh yes okay yes yes yes but then there's a third one who in fact like the one black friend what's friend, what's her name? What's her name?

We don't know. We don't know anything about her. Okay, because I kept like waiting for, waiting to find out what her name is. I kept waiting for those characters in general to become important, relevant to the story. And they never like, that was one of the things where I'm like buffy needs like and i know that that's a huge part of this show is like buffy's like connection with her like friends who are other women and yeah yeah movie buffy no dice in that department yeah it's kind of a bummer um it's one of the things that i also i didn't realize like in watching it as a kid, but it had been maybe like 15 years since I saw the movie and then rewatched.

And I sort of hate the idea that like Buffy has to be such a, a lone fighter. Like I, I think that that messaging that, you know, your friends are not going to support you and you have to sort of give up everything in order to save the world is not quite right uh and i understand that the show didn't go that route and if i was going to remake this movie in this day and age i wouldn't do that like i wouldn't her friends can like they can all start that way and you can have some who maybe uh don't believe in vampires or don't support buffy but i don't think that every single person in her friends group needed to be so terrible all the way through the end yeah it almost felt like another way of like because

it's like kind of goofy and funny to me but it's you know definitely a thing where it becomes a big part of the movie as it goes on to telegraph that Buffy's not like other girls. And it seems like that's how they demonstrate it, by making other girls mean and vapid and awful, which is like, that's not the move. Yeah. Right. Yeah, we can talk about that more, because there's a lot to cover there.

Yeah. Okay, so Buffy has friends, and they go shopping, and they do cheerleading together. And at the mall, they have a brief encounter with Donald Sutherland, who is giving off some weird vibes. Very weird. He's wearing a trench coat, like a trench coat and a fedora. He's just staring at them, not saying anything.

So they briefly encounter him, but then they go about their day and head to the movies a couple of their classmates are there pike played by luke perry and benny played by david arquette are there at the movie theater and they're like these like burnout quote-unquote loser types and then that night buffy links up with her basketball star boyfriend jeffrey meanwhile one of jeffrey's friends is walking through a park and crosses paths with paul rubens who is looking very creepy and it seems like he is probably a vampire i love he's having so much fun in this movie. I love him in this movie.

He's great. I think that this would have like overlapped with Pee Wee too. Like, I don't know, not to whatever. This is a feminist podcast, so I'm not going to just like hand it to Paul Reubens for an hour. But it is like, I feel like he's like underrated in like how versatile he is because he's so associated with Pee Wee he's got range he's certainly um a scene stealer in this movie I can't wait till we get to his death scene oh my goodness top five best deaths in cinema history. It's so good.

Oh, gosh. Then we cut to a news report about a bunch of people having been attacked and dying from severe neck wounds. Then Buffy has a dream about the vampire slayer who we saw briefly at the beginning of the movie, who I think is also played christy swanson yeah it's like her in a wig yeah yeah that was a confusing part of the lore to me it was like the lore is kind of messy when i thought about it where i was like okay so there's always been slayers but they all seem to be christy swanson reincarnated over and over question mark see that i've gotten in debates about this as a child um because okay hit it you know it's kind of it kind of sucks a little bit because as a kid you want to play like as your favorite characters like we want to play power rangers you want to play whatever and so playing buffy is not a game but if I wanted to play Buffy I wanted to be Buffy but it's the early 90s and kids would tell me like

you can't be Buffy because you don't look like Buffy or even if I was playing Power Rangers you can't be the pink ranger you have to be the yellow one because the yellow one is black and I'm like shut up I will be who I want to be but in diving the lore, as I was watching this movie, I had flashbacks to being a kid and being told I couldn't be Buffy because this is how Buffy looks. And I was listening to what Buffy was saying. And this comes a little bit later when Merrick says like, have you been having these dreams? And she's like, yeah, you know, I was a handmaiden or maiden or something. And she's also like i was a slave in virginia and i picked up on that like so quickly and again this may just be my own personal

history with buffy and uh just growing up in a society that wanted to marginalize me and tell me i could only be but a certain character right but i was like there's no way that like buffy that's if she looked like buffy would have been a slave girl in virginia so i believe and i'm sorry to go on such a deep tangent no no no please great point but this is important to me only me maybe but it's important i believe that buffy was just when was dreaming, she was putting herself in the situations of these girls. I don't think it was actually the Slayer looked exactly like Buffy every single time. I just think that she was dreaming and putting herself in the shoes of all of these. I'm not even sure if it was only women.

Who knows? Anyone could be a Slayer. So I think any one of us could have been a slayer including me hell yeah no that's a very good point though yeah and that makes sense that like she would just insert herself into her own dreams but yeah no that's a really good point I hadn't thought about that sequence in context of because the other the only other one you see is her in a wig that totally makes sense yeah yeah because in the show you see like slayers of bygone days and i if i'm remembering correctly there's one who is like a slayer in the 1970s who is a black woman in the show who like

pops up now and then throughout the series so cool the slayer is not just christy swanson or sarah michelle geller um okay so during this dream though we see this vampire lothos played by rutger hauer and he seems to be like the big bad vampire in charge. Then we cut back to the present where Paul Rubin's vampire tells his master, presumably Lothos, that he is building an army. Then the next night, Buffy and her friends go out to plan their upcoming senior dance. A drunk pike and benny are there they all give each other a hard time then the guys leave and then benny gets bitten by paul rubens pike doesn't notice because he's passed out from being so drunk and then donald sutherland shows up and takes pike with him then donald sutherland aka merrick it takes him a while for us to know what his name is his name i know this is then donald sutherland aka merrick it takes him a while for us to

know what his name is to find out his name i know this is like donald sutherland they're not great with names they're not great with names donald sutherland in a trench coat three donald sutherland's in a trench coat so he is merrick he pays a visit to Buffy and tells her that her birthright, her destiny, is to be a vampire slayer and that he is her watcher. And she's like, what are you even talking about? So then he takes her to a graveyard to show her and prove to her that she is, in fact, the slayer. A couple couple vampires come out of the graves and buffy is able to kill them with relative ease she seems to be a natural at this then we cut back to pike and benny benny shows up and he is a vampire now he wants pike to invite him in. He's floating. Pike is like, what the hell, dude?

Get away from me. I don't want any part of whatever you're doing. Meanwhile, Lothos, the big bad vampire, is getting more and more powerful. Buffy, on the other hand, is not too sure about this whole being a vampire slayer thing. She just wants to be a normal teenager and go to cheerleading practice. But Merrick shows up again and he proves that she is the true slayer by throwing a knife at her head. Big swing. Really, really a risk.

But she catches it. What would he have done if that went straight through her forehead like congratulations you just killed a child i wonder how many like teen girls he has accidentally killed because he's like you're probably the slayer. Let me just test this out. And then a knife through her skull. You know, I never thought about that. That's pretty dark. I actually don't feel like Merrick is a great trainer. We can talk about that more maybe later. So I do, now that you say that,

I feel like he probably went through, like, at least three or four girls before he finally got to the right one with Buffy. Dark. Well, because his gauge also isn't that great because he sees Buffy doing some gymnastics and he's like, wow, you're a gymnast. You must be the slayer. And it's like pretty basic gymnastics, too. I mean, I can't do any gymnastics. So none of it is like super basic.

But she's doing a couple cartwheels and like a backhand spring or something. It's not like she's doing Olympic levels of gymnastics. But still, she's right. That makes her qualified to be the best slayer. Right? I'm like, dude, your criteria seems to be a bit off um but he was right she is the slayer because she catches the knife and he's like only the true slayer could have done that and she's like okay i guess i am the slayer so then she starts training so that she can be fully prepared to take on vampires and then we get a fun training montage we see buff Buffy slay her first vampire, or I guess not her first because she slayed some in the graveyard, but like her first one is like the official

slayer. Meanwhile, other vampires, including Paul Reuben's vampire, attack Pike in his van, but Buffy and Merrick show up and save him and then buffy and pike have a conversation about like oh wow he's so surprised that she kills vampires he thought that she was like just like the other girls or whatever um and there's also some romantic tension in the air between them buffy again wants to continue to keep up her normal life with her friends and cheerleading. So one night when she's cheering at a basketball game, one of the players, Gruler, is now a vampire.

So she chases him out of the game and fights him. Pike shows up to help. And then Lothos shows up up and there's a weird interaction between him and buffy where he's like i'm waiting for you to ripen yeah and so we'll talk all about that yeah the last thing you want to hear someone say to a young woman is exactly that. So gross. Or a young person at all. Yes.

It's just like, get away, get away. And then Lothos kills Merrick. Very easily, by the way. Barely tries. It is. barely tries it is every time lothos is on screen i'm just like what is happening what is he doing how why is anyone reacting the way they're reacting i find it all very confusing but he so he kills merrick and then just leaves so buffy is safe. She's sad over the death of Merrick. She also just feels in way over her head. And then she and Pike have an argument because she's like, I can't handle

this. I just want to go to the senior dance. And he's like, oh, well, I thought you wanted to do important things like kill vampires. And then he drives off on his motorcycle um so then buffy goes to the senior dance her boyfriend jeffrey dumps her there which is like who cares fuck that right we're like buffy barely cares because she's like oh yeah here's the other guy that i was sort of already dating yes because pike shows up after all, and then he and Buffy kiss. But then a bunch of vampires invade the dance, and Buffy fights them. Then she heads off to face Lothos. She gets there.

She kills Paul Reubens, where, again, his death scene is just, I would say, tonally inconsistent with the other things that are happening in this moment in the movie. What? Very long and drawn out. Extremely campy. But I wouldn't want it any other way. Can't have it any other way. Yeah.

So then Lothos is about to bite Buffy. But then she fights back. She gets away. She returns to the dance where her classmates have killed a bunch of vampires. And then Lothos bursts in again, and Buffy finally kills him. And then she and Pike ride off on his motorcycle. That's the end of the movie. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, this is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right? Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful.

Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. I feel some Sandra Bernhardt in you. Oh, my God, I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know, I'm so behind. Katherine

Honkin's thing. Oh, I'm really good at karaoke. And on camera, yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love a ballad. I felt Bjork's music and I just was like, who is this person? I gotta hawk this slalom, Luigy.

Not hawk the slalom. I absolutely love it. It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my slok, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions.

Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Sanner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote.

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Jasmine, is there anywhere in particular that like, was there anything that stood out to you on this rewatch that you want to talk about in particular? Maybe too much for me to be able to like center my brain where to start. So why don't you guys pick something? And I'm sure I will have a lot to say on the topic. I just wanted to start with a little bit of like context on the movie and get through kind of the Joss Whedon of it all. Because I'm always trying to get like in and out there because I feel like we've been talking

about him too much on the show recently and I'm sick of it. Okay. So this movie was written by Joss Whedon. The characters are his creation, and then he goes on to do the TV show later. It's also directed, I feel like it's not discussed enough, this movie is directed by a woman. By a woman, yeah.

Fran Rubel Cousy, and she's, I don't know, she's been a director of various romps over the course of her career. I think that it's interesting, like, the main takeaway, I don't know, like, listeners of the show will know, Joss Whedon bothers me. I don't like him. And I think it is so interesting how he has kind of managed to shape the entire narrative around this movie and in the process whatever a writer who was really tooting his own horn for being mr feminist for a while like repeatedly dumped on the woman who directed this movie and kind of blamed her and donald sutherland for the

reason that it didn't turn out the exact way that he wanted it as if it's like whatever he's like screenwriting nepotism he should know that when you write a script it's not going to appear word for word on the fucking screen you baby anyways uh so but but he's such a feminist yeah google google that um whatever okay so uh so i'm like having a hot flash now um it's upsetting i mean it's really upsetting because uh for a long time like you said he was sort of like the voice of i don't know but you're right women like kind of like women in genre like uh badass women i don't it just is kind of uh a bit uh it's so rough when you think about it it just it makes you there's so many things that we did wrong in the past um but allowing that to sort of be the voice of of badass women is maybe one of them but right yeah the shows did inspire a lot of writers but now we do have to

sort of contend with what does that mean to have someone like that have shaped such a influential female character yeah it's a it's a messy topic um for sure and it seems like you guys are sick of talking about it so oh no no no it's just in the context of him specifically he's just been coming up a bunch. But yeah, I mean, I guess the long and short of it there is that he, in multiple interviews, has said that Donald Sutherland was very difficult on the set. He was rewriting his own lines, which I do fully believe.

There's like so many stories about Donald Sutherland being a pain in the ass to work with. Fine, I'll concede that point but he also was like oh and this director was so like weak-willed and she would let Donald Sutherland kind of walk all over her and I'm just like do you hear yourself um in any case uh I think it is interesting that you know in retrospect Joss Whedon kind of actively turned his own fan base against this movie. And I think that's why people don't really critically engage with it. But there's, there's quite a bit going on.

Yeah, yeah. Starting with I mean, just the kind of basic idea of this being a movie that centers a woman is like the hero, like the ass kicking, like action star of the movie which like a lot of movies of this genre or this type don't do this is a pretty male heavy thing as is the idea of like kind of the hero's journey chosen one narrative right that is something that women and girls like usually don't get to be the chosen one in most stories this is like a pretty male centric idea and so it's just like very cool to have this movie that as simple as it might seem and like like you mentioned jasmine was like a very empowering thing for you to watch like to be able to like see this woman and for sure watch her kicking ass and have this like chosen one

narrative be about a teen girl like that's an empowering thing for you know the target audience of this movie being like teens and you know young people generally i imagine so yeah i mean i think that's just like a a cool thing in general yeah the movie has things to discuss yeah but the but the i mean like the action scenes are fucking cool and like funny and dynamic and she's in control. Like I was really worried about at the end. I was like, oh no, please don't say that. You know, I feel like it's so we very often see in this like kind of this specific era of when women are fighting or even when they're the hero.

They're kind of like tossed out of the climactic scene and it's like no now you will be saved and this happens in another vampire movie with twilight where bella swan is the protagonist of that franchise and yet in the first movie she's just like rendered unconscious almost immediately during the climax and then like doesn't get to do anything yeah and then like the other example i always go to is like kristin kirsten sorry it was getting like the oh the kristins the kirsten movie stars kirsten dunst like caught in a just like held on the side of the scene in a spider web for the entire climax of spider-man 2. Right. You're just like, okay, so you're not invited to participate. But Buffy remains in control of basically all of the action.

And it's really, I thought Christy Swanson did a really good job. She's good. I thought so, too. I also really loved, like, at the very end, you have Pike. And I appreciated that Pike was the damsel here. You know, Pike always fainted. There was even one time I think where I heard him say like,

at least I didn't faint this time. And you get to the very end and Buffy has saved the day. I mean, Pike didn't really do much. I don't really know what he did, but he looks up and he's like, Oh, did I do all this?

And she's like, no, no, you absolutely did not. and he's like oh did i do all this and she's like no no you absolutely did not and he's like yeah yeah you did all this and it's it is totally fine with that i don't i never felt like he felt like his masculinity was threatened in any way not that it should have been but this is the early 90s we're talking about right um and i just really think that like as a young girl watching this i didn't't realize this, obviously, at the time, but I internalized a lot of the good there's, there's some rough stuff. We'll talk about that. But a lot of the good things, the main thing being watching this woman, like really, like you said, take over, take ownership, kick butt, and like come out and on top and she is she's the one no one else does this but her she saves the world basically um i think was really informative especially now as i'm getting into making you know being able to like help make my own content the kind of things that i value and the kinds of uh stuff that i want to make i really do think that if I think about it, I can trace it back to a very early on like watching and loving Buffy as a kid, you just never know like what someone's

going to watch and how it's going to influence them, which is why I think that it's really important like what we put out there what we put on on our screens. Yeah, because you just you just don't know. Yeah, absolutely. That's so cool. I love that. And with that romantic subplot with Pike, as you said, there's like, I mean, it starts out. It's like one of those like enemies to lovers dynamics, which is like, right. Which I kind of I do. I'm a sucker for that. But like we mentioned, like their dynamic is mostly this like almost like gender flipped because we're so used to seeing it the other way where you know we're used to seeing a man be

the fighter the protector the action hero and his love interest a woman because everything is hetero in movies um that she's the damsel. She's the one who has to be saved. She's the one who's not really participating in any of the action. In this movie, though, it's like completely flipped where he does help out sometimes. And almost he assumes this role is almost like her sidekick, I would say. I feel like he kind of gets in the way a little bit more. Which is funny.

And, like, yeah, I don't know. I just appreciated that where there's, yeah, various scenes where he, like, he doesn't fight at all. And then he instead faints. Or he does, like, help out a little bit. But it's still Buffy, like, taking the like getting shit mostly done and then like you said like at the end like he acknowledges that he hasn't contributed much this is not a blow to his ego he's just like wow you're and I also think that there's something to be said for him kind of encouraging her to like continue to be the slayer because there's like a moment where she's like i'm in over my head like i just want to be a normal teenager like this was sprung on me and i

never asked for this and blah blah blah and he was just like well like you have this opportunity now don't you want to like make something of it and like do this important stuff and you know the the way he handles it is like maybe a little i don't feel like he could have handled that better. But the fact that he's like cheering her on, he's her cheerleader. Wow. Wow. Right. I also love that he even though he felt like it was beneath Buffy and definitely beneath himself, he still showed up at the dance.

He still came to the dance and he came prepared. He brought a bunch of spikes. A bunch of wood. And it came in handy. Yeah, I was, I'm glad we're having this, this talk because I was back and forth it on like, okay, what function does this love story serve? like as i was watching it to to prepare i do think that like there is i don't know we're we're always arguing that it's like is this hetero

love story necessary to the story and right well and i you know we'll get to this we've sort of already started talking about this but um how i do wish that one of just like the glaring things about this movie is that there are no women in buffy's life that provide any support or like real narrative importance for her and so i wish that she also had like a friendship but i did feel like yeah the the dynamic with her and pike especially as the movie goes on does serve a function like you're describing jasmine of like you know it's still extremely heteronormative and and stuff that it's like movies from 1992 tend to be but it's he's not threatened by her because i feel like even when you do have these like

very active female action stars the guy that they'll partner with, even if they're very in love, sometimes it's like, he's not totally okay with the dynamic or like, yeah, he's like threatened by it. It almost feels like a competition. Yeah. Yeah. And this doesn't feel that way at all. And it's like, it sounds like it that that does have like a real positive application of Pike is still this traditionally cool outsider motorcycle. Luke Perry, he's cool. Right. But also is very secure in himself and is okay with his girlfriend being the one who saves the world. Yeah.

And was rooting for them by the end i just wish that she had uh some friendships um some friends she can have that in friends right like her best friend ended up being donald sutherland in a trench coat i needed a i needed a little more than that yeah uh the one thing about the romantic subplot that was all for me was like really uh this again where at the dance he's like puffy you're not like other girls but she's like yes i am i like that i like that i was glad because when i heard that i like groaned. Why? What was your what problem did you have with it? I mean, mostly just that like the idea of like hetero men especially will use the you're not like other girls as a compliment when it's really just like that's just a way to

tear down other women or to like paint femininity or just like womanhood or girlhood in these broad strokes and and like negative classify that as like bad right but like oh but if you're not like the other girls you're different in like xyz ways like that's awesome so it just like is a way to kind of demonize femininity and like girlhood and womanhood and things like that so it's like always like it always pings for us when we hear like oh you're not like the other girls but then she's just like so what i liked about it is that she immediately challenges him and is just like yes i am because there's nothing wrong with other girls who doesn't say

that but like that's the implication right i just wish that the script also followed through on that and gave us some likable women in the script that weren't buffy right which which we know that like joss whedon is capable of doing so i'm assuming that that had to do with studio stuff because it like we do know that he you know for all his faults does write women who are friends with each other and important to each other but yeah that i don't know i'd like i and i also another like little moment that i appreciated from buffy was also at the end where i think pike says something like he asked her to dance after she's killed every vampire ever and he's like i'm assuming you want to lead and she's like yeah no i don't and i liked that i was like

that's no i didn't even until she like said that i was like oh yeah like action girl protagonist i feel like we're so like painted with a broad stroke of like and she's in charge of fucking everything and she's the boss and blah blah blah blah where it's like people are complicated and and right she's like nope i don't want to be you can do this it's all good and it's fine like i thought that was a very sweet exchange yeah it's it's kind of like you guys said i guess a little bit unfortunate that in the whole if you look at the way that they paint that they paint particularly teenage girls but i guess you could say um women in general since there are no like adult figures in her life because her mom is awful as well uh yeah it's

a very very negative view of them and even like take like buffy herself i don't know if you guys tracked this but i happen to i love love love like outfits and fashion and i particularly love the stuff in this movie um but buffy goes from wearing the sun dresses and like her hair down and all that to wearing cut off shorts with like a flannel and boots like the implication sort of being that if you are into this stuff, you're into show even at the end when she's going to look for like a dress and she's shopping. She's not like super into it anymore. Because now she's evolved. She's better than that. She's like the next level of woman, which I have a huge problem with. I think like you said, Jamie,

people are multifaceted. And I don't love this idea that doesn't only come up in Buffy that comes up quite a bit that if you happen to be quote unquote, girly or into fashion or whatever it is, that is deemed to be, like I said, feminine activity that it's less than and it makes you less than and in order to ascend, you have to put that behind you and realize that that is not something that you need to care about and once you do that you will become the person that you should be and I think the two things can completely and totally exist together which is why I wish that at least one of her friends had like stood by her in addition to Pike and didn't have to I mean they were pretty awful in the

beginning but I don't think that like some of the stuff that they loved needed to have changed to still support their friend and take down vampires together right yeah I totally agree yeah where it's like and again it's like I don't even know who would have been the perpetrator of that stuff because Joss Whedon has distanced himself so much from this script. So who knows? But yeah, it does seem to, in a way that feels very 90s, but I feel like does still happen sometimes in media, demonize whatever, a more traditional form of femininity and make it seem like oh this is an inherently weak and vapid way to live and feel where it's like that is so like there's no gray area there and there needs

to be gray area especially because i don't know even like stylized i was like i want buffy's costumes from the beginning not the end um or like some modification because I know it's like you know I want her to be able to fight comfortably but I'm like you could modify your style at the beginning to make it like vampire killing friendly sure I liked all of the outfits I like Buffy in the beginning and the end then all of her outfits for the training montage too i really liked that training montage me too right but the movie does like subscribe to this idea that like buffy is the one good female character in this story and all the other women because they like quote unquote

like feminine things that the movie deems to be like vapid like shopping and like wearing dresses and caring about going to a dance and like all that stuff all the other women in the movie equals bad to the point where like to bring up the costuming thing again when buffy goes leaves the dance to go fight this like horde of vampires she's wearing a dress but Luke Perry throws her his leather jacket yeah as if to say like you'll need this to fight vampires I said that exact thing when I was watching it I was like what's the point what is that gonna do in fact I feel like it's gonna to encumber her arms. It's going to make it harder for her to fight. But cool. I got a leather jacket. Great. odd strokes of just like portrayed as being too hyper feminine equals vapid equals bad kind of logic um it means that all of buffy's most significant relationships in the movie are with

men and you know we talked about her and the love interest pike already but then there's also like buffy and her mentor merrick buffy Buffy and the villain, Lothos. So like we can have separate discussions about that. But yeah, the movie does subscribe to this idea that like Buffy is kind of not like the other girls. And that's a good thing. Yeah. Right. And it's like, that's not the message that we should be putting out into the world. Which is wild.

Yeah. Because it's like she she the character pushes against that but then the movie doesn't quite follow through on effectively commenting on it it's a little bit messy yeah let's take another quick break and then we will come right back Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Should we talk about Buffy and Merrick? Sure. Why not? I mean, he also starts out being like wow I've never met such a like vacuous and vapid slayer I can't believe I'm stuck with you right now and but then she's constantly challenging him and it gets to a point where they actually develop a bond and mutual trust and at one point

she's like what do you even do sir like i'm out here putting my neck on the line what are you doing he's like oh i'm kind of like a trainer kind of guy a very bad one because it's been centuries and he has not defeated the vampires i'm like how do you still have this job in any other line of work if you consistently do not deliver the results you are replaced yet here you are to lead another girl to the slaughter men get a million chances don't they they get a million chances to do one thing he also like he admits he's like oh i should have found you so like so many years ago we should have started your training a long time ago but i don't know i just he's like well what do you what were you doing like isn't it your job to find her and then

right like early on and train her so it's also such a like a blasé sort of thing to say considering this is buffy's life her life she's putting her life on the line and merrick's just like oh sorry you probably should have years of training under your belt but you're still gonna have to sort of condense everything into a four-week timeline i think at one point buffy says it's been like three weeks or four weeks or something years of training condensed to four weeks merrick is awful trash he's bad at his job like i felt like and i felt like buffy buffy did so much of the like emotional lifting in that like she like whatever she's like oh you made a joke like she kind of like brings out a lighter side of him but it's like yeah he put her in an impossible situation that was like for sure and she pulls it off like she's i don't know i thought that that that montage cracked me up because she's wearing the same outfit at the

beginning and end of the montage so i guess that she just happened to be wearing the same outfit exactly three weeks later which is like true to like clothes but was confusing movie-wise like what it seems like no time has passed because he's always wearing the same trench coat so you're like what day is it whatever gosh yeah but yeah I mean I guess I don't totally know how to feel about this relationship because he also like dies. Like, and then there's like 40 more minutes of the movie. But I guess I appreciate that that dynamic grows and that they come to respect each other. And then he's even like, wow, you're you were the right person for the job after all. And then I think as he's dying, she's like, sorry, I keep doing this wrong.

And he's like, no, don't do it wrong. Do that. Do that. Be you. Yeah. Do what you're doing. Don't play our game. Don't play by our rules.

Because clearly it never works because there's still vampires around. So do it your way, Buffy. And so he respects her and admires her and yeah so I don't know I guess I was like fine with all of that yeah I think their relationship you know it ended up being kind of sweet my issues specifically come with Merrick as the trainer of the Slayers and I've said my piece about that right right he Right. He's awful. Like, story-wise, like, I didn't hate Merrick. I just felt like their connection, like, again, I just feel like there were stronger options for a character for Buffy to connect with because they truly had nothing in common.

He wasn't doing a good job. And then when he died, like, she was sad, but it was also like, I don't know. I feel like the movie wanted you to, like, really feel his death. And death and i was like oh wow donald sutherland died pretty early in the movie that's that's interesting right i was like well that was kind of easy that was simple i thought he would have lasted the whole time all right like there was like no fight like suddenly he was just stabbed there was like no fighting leading up to that i was like what how who what all of that oh well um also okay so merrick is like hey how about those menstrual cramps you're feeling oh Oh my God, yes. Okay. Joss, is that a thing on the TV show?

Please say it's not. No, I do not think so. I was like, what are you doing? So what is happening here is that basically when vampires are nearby, Buffy feels menstrual cramps. It's like a warning sign to let her know that vampires are afoot. And she's like, what is this all about? And Merrick explains it's a natural reaction to their unnaturalness, to vampires' unnaturalness. So basically, I know that Joss Whedon does not consider this movie to be canon canon but if you're looking at like this movie and the show the lore seems to be that the vampire slayer is always a cis woman

right so at least with this movie with this like world building thing of menstrual cramps equals vampires are nearby the logic is that like if you're a slayer you're a woman and being a woman means you have a womb and that you're a menstruating person and that's natural so it's like this very cis normative idea and i think it's also supposed to be kind of like a joke to like I don't know what it was it was so random yeah that didn't work for me at all it was like and it doesn't really come back either where yeah it's like very night 1992 and it's like cis normativity and also just in it's like oh well I'm writing a character that menstruates I better bring that up like that up you don't need to bring that up like chill out i don't know if like if the slayer was written to be a cis man i feel like there

would not be anything like that attributed to his character it wouldn't be like oh your scrotum's gonna hurt when vampires are around like does that happen in the last boys caitlin remembers the movie better than both of us Like, does that happen in The Lost Boys? Caitlin remembers the movie better than both of us. That is, yeah. I don't believe. Yeah, like, what are you, what? It was so weird. Yeah, I found that to be very, very bizarre.

Yeah. It was. 1992 really was, what, 1992-ing in there it was really having a 1992 um okay so the other like major relationship or like whatever dynamic there is between buffy and another character in this movie is with her and lothos and i i'm gonna need some help understanding what I don't know if we can help you there I don't know if there's any help that that was uh I have no words yeah I have here's my spiel about it so what appears to be happening is what feels like a very sexually charged hero slash villain dynamic that feels extremely gendered because, again, I don't think it would be written that

way if the hero was a man. But because it's a teen girl, this weird, like, heterosexual dynamic gets introduced, which is especially creepy because she's a teenager and Lothos is played by a much older actor and also the character is like 500 years old hundreds of years old right yeah I feel like this happens in other movies where the protagonist is a girl or a woman and the villain is a man I thought immediately of Labyrinth with like Jenniferennifer connelly and david bowie and like that weird like dance they have together um yeah but there are all these scenes where like buffy has a dream where she gets into bed with lothos and he embraces her there's that scene

where like the first time they come in in face-to-face contact lothos is like oh i'm right i'm ready for you to ripen because like it seems like he doesn't want to fight her so much as like have this weird like seduction sex like he's like fetishizing the idea that she's a slayer yeah which feels very like vampire culture as well of like right this old creepy guy trying to like engage with a teenage girl and that's kind of like canon to this genre in a way that i was kind of hoping that the movie was going to comment on because this movie does a lot of things that vampire movies don't usually do but that was something that felt kind of bizarrely very much in place yeah yeah i just and i didn't understand like logistically what the heck was going on like

the first time that buffy has an actual showdown with lothos and she sees him and is mesmerized ice is that is that what's happening right i don't know i'm like stab him and she can't she's not really moving she's looking at him she's coming closer and like you said there's this weird sexually charged energy i didn't quite understand what was happening all i kept shouting was what are you doing stab him with your wooden stake thingy and some he kept saying like we're drawn to each other and it was just like all very weird and the movie could very much so exist and should have existed without that and i don't know even from a story perspective uh i actually think it undermines the logic of what was going on because

i have no clue like why that was happening yeah exactly and if like they insist on that happening in the movie because like vampires i mean like vampire lore is very much that like they're seducers they like draw people in with they you know they glamour right people so like if that's a thing that needs to be established as part of like right the world building and it just isn't so it gets really confusing to the point where we're wondering yeah buffy why aren't you killing him like why aren't you trying to fight him because it seems like it in in her character because she is so like one of the things i like about her is she's so self-assured against people that you know whatever against yeah people who are giving her shit like she rejects donald sutherland in a

trench coat several times is like fuck off like she's she's like very confidently rejecting the call to adventure she's like fuck you like i maybe you don't like that i want to like graduate high school move to europe marry christian slater and die iconic line uh she's like but that's what i want so like leave me like alone and then there's that amazing uh thing where her like shitty boyfriend's friend slaps her butt and then she like slams him to the ground it's like this is a girl who like is not afraid to fight back when someone's fucking with her and so it does feel like out of like i don't know yeah that didn't feel fully realized because it's like we've seen her give so many people shit yeah it's not consistent yeah so i was just so confused by that but then like based on some weird thing that merrick

had said where he's like listen to the music and when the music stops and then he like blah dies but then like the music has stopped in that scene with her and Lothos. And she's like, Oh my God, it was, I knew it all along music. And we're like, what are you?

I'm like, did you forget to have a scene here? I never quite understood like what she realized. I never got it. I was like, okay. As long as she understood what it was, that was her next move. Cause I certainly didn, okay. As long as she understood what it was that was her next move, because I certainly didn't understand.

I mean, I think it is important for the audience to make it clear to the audience what that's all about. But whatever it is, she then kind of like snaps out of it. And then she finally starts to fight back and then you know lands the killing blow in in the next scene and you know defeats him finally but there's so much of like that dynamic where he's like being uber creepy and like uber predatory which again this is what vampires do but there's nothing to establish why, what is exactly happening,

what Lothos wants, why he wants to seduce the slayer rather than kill her since she is an immediate threat to him. Yeah. Or why she's responding to it in the way that she is, that it's just like, Right.

Just feels like very weirdly like gendered and sexualized in a way that like just made no sense to me absolutely none yeah okay i'm glad we're all in agreement yeah does anyone have any any other stuff they wanted to uh to talk about for this one just a couple quick things one this is another teen movie that ends with a big dance. I don't think it matters here. That's a staple. Yeah, it is a staple. I'm just pointing it out. I'm not saying I hate that detail. You know, I love a dance. You hate that detail. You said? I just more notice it as a as a very

consistent trope. I love it. Sometimes I'm annoyed by it depending on kind of what happens or what the implications of the dance because sometimes it's like, well, a movie starring a teen girl has to end in some big romantic thing because girls like romance and love stories and glamorous balls

where she hetero kisses her one true love and then other times i'm like uh you know the high schools have dances so it makes sense that like you'd have a the big third act at like a significant social event kind of thing it didn't bother me because i felt like that like brought together buffy's two worlds so cleanly whereas like she was on the dance planning committee yeah those are where her previous friends were I felt like in this like this movie kind of uniquely because sometimes you're just truly at a dance because it just feels like well this is where teen movies end but in this movie I did feel like it was

justified in like bringing her worlds together that is fair right it was also like like you said uh Jamie weaved throughout um you start the beginning it was also like like you said uh jamie weaved throughout um you start the beginning where she's like fully you know they're one of the second or third scenes we see with buffy and her friends they're planning they're trying to figure out what the theme should be and they settle on oh yeah environmentalism and uh oh that was kind of funny bugs or something i don't know yeah they're like we hate bugs so that's our platform let's get rid of the ozone layer um so it was like weaved in and like jamie said it was a i felt like it was a nice little having the two worlds come together and maybe i just uh i don't know maybe i'm a sheep that just

likes everything that everybody else likes. But I loved that in dance with her and Pike. I thought it was very sweet. And I was all for their romance. I was okay with it in this instance. I will say I did not mind the hetero teen romantic subplot in this movie. Which is saying something. Which is saying some of them are vile.

Right. But I think like, yeah, the way that, you know, we already talked about it, but it's the way it was handled, I appreciated. Yeah. a lot of movies with a woman as the action hero doing fighting often has like very gendered and sexualized fight choreography we talk about that vagina slam the pussy slam yeah i wasn't getting any of that really in this movie it was just like what you'd expect as far as just like non-gendered combat and i also really liked the fight choreography like wove in what buffy was already really good at like she's a very gymnastic fighter like it's yeah cool i don't know yeah like her being a cheerleader is part of why she's a good fighter which i feel like that's that on top of it like I mean I guess we don't really talk about this very much because we probably talked about this in the bring it on episode but like cheerleaders

are so athletic and strong and it is like so physically taxing to do and so to see that like applied to combat was really cool yeah yeah Buffy was already starting out um uh like at a high I in the beginning of the training montage this isn't uh fighting but I remember watching her climb do the rope climb and she just like sails up that rope and I don't know if you guys have tried to climb a rope oh but that is not easy tried Tried. That's been so much strength. Tried is the operative word. So she was already tried and not succeeded. So she was already starting like at a high. And I do love that they incorporated the gymnastics. In the show that I have coming out this month, we also have a main character, much like Queen

Buffy, who is a monster fighter. And we had a lot of conversations about like, what does it look like? What do those fight scenes look like? Because you mentioned this being non-gendered fighting style. But I do think that when we were talking about our own character, there are differences between the ways that people fight, especially depending on who your opponent is going to be.

And you want to make sure that you're utilizing what you would actually, as the person, how you would actually fight. And so a lot of times you'll see that people don't take that into consideration, especially when it comes to female characters. Like what are the ways that they are going to approach a fight versus like a male character? And one of the things that I love about Buffy, like you said, is they were using what she would already have considered as her strength, which is her gymnastics.

So it's nice that they took the time to think about that and really incorporate that into the style. And it's cool to watch, you know, I love watching her flip around and stuff. Yeah, I guess the better way to frame it is that her fight choreography didn't seem sexualized in a way that a lot of like sure women's fight choreography tends to be right so yeah um this is also a very white movie yeah the cast is very white any people of color which i think is hardly there's her one friend her one friend right

who we might not even know the name of i think she has two lines right hardly says anything yeah so any people of color are relegated to like secondary or tertiary like background characters who we learn nothing about you know every major character is white yeah yeah which is um uh you know i already went on a whole spiel about you know growing up like wanting to play certain characters and not having any of that. There certainly were black characters, but like you said, they oftentimes had no lines or just were very much in the background. And this wasn't just the early nineties. Like I want to say, like even still, still now, but especially in my formative years as a child and a teenager even watching some of the shows that i love to watch like uh i was a huge smallville fan for a while um and that show

uh i love love love but like they had a a character who was superman's uh best friend who was black and over the course of like literally i want to say the first season was pushed to the background and was very much just showed up to exposit some stuff and then uh leave and that's kind of what i felt like most how most black characters were treated um and still are sometimes where they they never have their own storylines. They never have their own agency. They are just there to either be like the voice of wisdom or come in and relay just enough information so that the producers and the network executives can say, oh, but we have a character of color, but they're never given like the meat and potatoes, which is unfortunate because people want to see themselves on screen, which is why I would get

into fights about how I want to be Buffy even though I don't look like Buffy and it's just you know I'm glad that we're sort of talking about these things and and changing it I think the changes are coming slowly but it really is important that people are able to see themselves absolutely and like yeah like you're saying not just in a surface way in like an impactful fully realized character way and also it's a it's a very straight movie as well which is always like i don't understand why vampire well i i understand but it's like i understand because society but also i'm just like vampires being repeatedly coded as strictly hetero. I'm like, it just doesn't track for me.

It doesn't. Never has, never will. Vampires, I feel like are queer canon. Like what? Very hetero movie. Vampires are pansexual. All of them. For sure.

I think that's true for sure right for sure there's no way that you can live hundreds of lives i couldn't even live this life that i'm in without exploring my sexuality and figuring out that being straight for a hundred lifetimes? So you're trying to tell me that hundreds of years, like, no one explored outside of just, you know, I don't buy it. I don't buy it at all. Not a chance. And again, tell me if I'm misremembering, Caitlin, but the TV show isn't quite as heteronormative, right?

There are queer, there is at least a queer character, correct? There are several queer characters. there are queer there is at least a queer character correct there are several queer characters or there are queer relationships like you actually see in fact that might i think that was one of the first shows on network television or not i guess cable television that had um or what network i don't it was on like the WB for a while, wasn't it? And like UPN, if you remember that. Maybe I'm aging myself. Like what's UPN? But it was on one of those.

I don't know if that counted as like cable or what it was. In any case, it featured one of the first lesbian kisses on screen, on television. Yeah. So that's awesome. Yeah, there was not quite so much heteronormativity as there is in this movie and most movies. Feels worth mentioning that, especially toward the beginning of the movie, Buffy and her friends make different jokes that are like at the expense of the unhoused population or they don't um there's some like xenophobic remarks that are made and things like that but i think that's done to show who buffy used to be or like who like who what her friend group is like these again kind of like self-centered sort of like rich elitist types um right but you know there's there's still like jokes made at the expense of unhoused people and stuff so you know feels pretty 90s yeah those feel very 90s also ben affleck is in this movie i know for like five seconds like two seconds and I I actually read somewhere just in casual googling

of this movie which one does I read that his line the one line he had was actually dubbed because the director hated his delivery like to be to have one line in a movie and that line be completely dubbed over couldn't even get He couldn't even get that right. Couldn't even get that right. But yes, Ben Affleck is in this movie. So is Thomas Jane, who is not as big a name as Ben Affleck. I did not catch him. I did not catch that either.

But I was watching this with my girlfriend over the weekend and she was like, that's Thomas Jane. And I was like, no no only ben affleck that's the only one with that the only star that just like briefly appeared uh thomas jane plays someone named zeph oh i didn't even know that character had a name they are horrible with the names in this yeah when pike goes to get i guess his van yeah service because he's trying to leave because he knows vampires are out and about and he's like I want no part of this the mechanic and I have no idea

how my girlfriend was able to spot that this was Thomas Jane I don't like even still like I wouldn't be able to pick that up um but yeah Thomas Jane appearance him and Ben Affleck have ran random appearances and uh wow this movie also steven root who is one of my favorite character actors plays like the school principal in this movie yes yes yes there's a lot of people this movie is apparently kind of stacked with uh with the cast here yeah and then i kind of assumed i was like oh like whatever happened to christy swanson i've never seen her in anything else she has been consistently working this entire time but she's she's in a lot of like tv movies and yeah stuff that i tend not to watch but yeah she's she's

still around working shout out to her i thought she was awesome as buffy i thought she was great like just uh just a quality quality superheroine yeah yeah and then Paul Reuben's giving the performance of a lifetime stealing every scene he's so wonderful yeah it's a fun movie like if you if you have been on the fence about giving this movie a chance just because of kind of the bizarro cultural reputation it has watch the movie it's fun you'll have a good time yeah but does it pass the bechdel test i feel like it does it does even though the buffy's friends barely have names and we barely learn them and they mostly talk about a yellow leather jacket and um they but they talk about

like planning the upcoming dance and stuff like that so yeah and they have that whole scene that's about like that i mean they do talk about men for a part of the scene but about the conflict of like buffy you've changed like right why do you think what we like is not cool anymore like that was a meaningful like yeah I'll always be bummed out that there were not stronger friendships but I feel like that's a lot of that scene pretty firmly passed and then I think maybe a few exchanges with Buffy and her mom as well like when she's like what time is it and then Buffy lies and she's like my watch is so slow I'm like yeah I guess that that can pass oh buffy's mom where's that spinoff um yeah so it does pass the bechdel test as far as our nipple scale

in which we assign zero to five nipples to the movie based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens i feel like i would give it like a three maybe even like a three and a half oh so we can get half a nipple yeah oh we give quarter nipples sometimes yeah decimal to your heart's content i think we've given pie nipples before 3.14 i see we've given negative nipples before inverted yeah yeah the the nipple score spectrum is fluid um i think i'll give it three and a half maybe that's too generous but especially for like an early 90s movie because oh my gosh comparing this to other early 90s movies in any genre really like things were not great so kind of maybe in like adjusted for time inflation almost but just for inflation the

fact that you have the fact that you have this female-centered story about a woman, a chosen one narrative about a woman who like kicks ass and doesn't really need help from men because Merrick, as she points out, is not really doing anything. Pike is her sidekick who barely does anything, who gets like damseled and that she has to save several times like she never really has to be saved she's doing all of the work she has all of the agency in the movie although i guess you could argue like being a chosen one kind of like inherently takes agency away from you because she's just sort of like you're foisted i don't think in like a gendered way though right right right exactly yeah um so as far as far as like the circumstances go like she's got agency she's doing things she's a very active character i didn't hate the heteroromantic subplot i did hate the weird dynamic between her and lothos that did feel

oddly gendered knocked off a nipple. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's happening there. The weird menstrual cramps thing should have just been absolutely deleted from the movie. The fact that there's no racial diversity, there's no like body type diversity. It's all very heteronormative but uh yeah i think there's enough like cool stuff going on i think i'll land on a three three and a quarter nipple and i'll give one to buffy i will give one to paul rubin's death scene i'll give one to buffy's black friend who we who the movie doesn't even care to give her a name oh and i'll give a quarter nipple to the little baby kitty that lothos is about to go snack on in that one scene because i feel really bad for the cat yeah uh I'll meet you there I'll

go three and a half as well I think that the issues this movie has with a glaring lack of diversity across the board is both very obvious and extremely of its time yeah I i mean i i'm kind of just co-signing our discussion in what you just said caitlin um because i like buffy a lot i like how much she subverts i wish that the villain subverted more about this genre yeah i wasn't actively rooting against the central relationship but i do wish that she had women in her life to talk to and it was like extra like they were right there give her a connection with her mom of some sort even if it's not positive like give us something like give us some friendship give you know there there are opportunities or like why are all the vampire villains men like what you know there's like so many opportunities for her to not just

have the pivotal figures in her life be a bunch of white guys and but that's not how it went however i love buffy i really loved the performances in this movie and i'm gonna give it three and a half so i'm gonna give one to christy swanson i'm going to give one to the director of the movie fran rubel kuzui i will give one to the motorcycle and i'll give my half to paul rubens nice jasmine what about you um i will give this three and three quarter nipples. So slightly higher than you guys. 3.75 nipples. Three quarters of those nipples goes exclusively to the scene where the friend grabs Buffy's

butt and she flips him over and slams him against the locker because that is the proper response to when that happens. So good. I mean, you guys have already touched on the things here. I agree with everything that you said. I will focus mostly on the positive here because, like I said, this had such a positive influence on me and seeing a character like Buffy especially growing up as a child of the 90s and a teen of the early 1000s you just never saw I shouldn't say never but mostly did not see women portrayed in this way so I already gave my three quarters

of a nipple to that one scene obviously one goes to Buffy I gotta give one to my man Pike I'm a big Pike fan I appreciated what they did with that romance and with that character and I guess what do I have one more one more nipple I will give one more nipple to just the influence that that movie had on me and how it continues to have influence on me and the stuff that I want to champion developing now that I am an adult over 30 woman who gets to help put content out into the world. Yes, which speaking of, tell us about your show. Yes, yes, I would love to. So the show is called the girl in the woods and it premieres october 21st which i believe is a thursday very soon on peacock um and the show

much like buffy the show revolves around our main character whose name is car Ecker. And she is a monster slayer. She lives in this colony on the outskirts in the woods of this mining town. And this colony's sole job is to protect a door, a very mysterious door that stands in the woods. The door is a door to a monster dimension. And it is the number one priority that that door does not open and the monsters do not come out. But this is a TV show, so you can guess what is going to happen. If you can't guess, the door is going to open and monsters are going to come out. And so Carrie is going to eventually find herself in this mining town. And she's going to come across

two new friends whose name names are Tasha and Nolan. And together they are going to have to fight the monsters that have been released and try and save this town. It is a very fun show. It has a lot of great themes that I think are very relevant today. It is a very queer show. I say that with so much pride being a queer woman myself. And I just think much like Buffy, it is very fun. It is very fun. And we have three main characters. And I think they all sort of, you get to see the three mains play characters that you don't really see very much even today. And I'm just really excited for everyone to check it out. At the very least, if you love watching teens fight monsters, check out the show. But if you also like character development, you like scary content that has social and very human themes at the heart of it,

and you love teen romance, especially with the little dash of queer inserted into it uh all of the things that i love um you'll love the show hell yeah everyone check out the girl in the woods on peacock is there anything else you want to plug social media stuff if you want to find me on Instagram or Twitter, have the same handle. It's Jazz Face Killa. That's Jazz with two Z's, Killa with two L's. Jazz Face Killa. And please hit me up. Let me know what you think about the show.

Let me know what you think about Buffy the movie. Spread the word about Buffy the movie. So many people talk about the show and that's fine. But like, let's bring up, you know, the movie's profile. Because I think you're right, Jamie, in that Joss Whedon did some damage out there. And it's not fair, because this movie is very fun. Yeah, it is. It is.

Let the Buffy movie live. Totally. Well, Jasmine, thank you so much. Jasmine, it's so awesome for having you you this is so much fun this was a lot of fun thanks for uh inviting me to be on the show i loved uh talking about all this stuff with you guys our pleasure come back anytime thank you yes and then you can follow us on twitter and instagram at bechtel cast we've got got our Patreon, aka Matreon, that gives you two bonus episodes every single month, plus access to the back catalog. It's $5 a month at patreon.com

slash Bechtelcast. You can also get our merch at tpublic.com slash the Bechtel cast. It'll be there if you need it. If you don't need it, that's okay too. And with that, do you both want to like get on my motorcycle and let's get out of here? Oh my gosh. Yeah, let's blow this joint. Can I wear a leather jacket? Oh yeah, you can borrow my yellow leather jacket, Jasmine.

Yes. So five minutes ago, yeah. You can borrow my yellow leather jacket, Jasmine. So five minutes ago, Caitlin. No, it's retro. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. Hey, everybody. This is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right?

Well, this week we're taking it to you next time. This is Catherine Hahn on Las Culturistas. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks everywhere

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in.

Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.