The Bechdel Cast - Fried Green Tomatoes with Francesca Fiorentini

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

This week, Jamie and Caitlin invite special guest Francesca Fiorentini over for some non-cannibal BBQ and a discussion about Fried Green Tomatoes.Check out this article about the film: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kateaurthur/fried-green-tomatoes-lesbian-classic(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow @franifio 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.

In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nickname Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer,

this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus, only on Apple Podcasts. where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. And this season, we're taking in a bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba,

and the piña colada from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited

about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels,

into something everyone in the South loves, the biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean? It's right here in black and white in print. It's bigger than a flag or mascot. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Bechdel cast, the questions ask if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they have individualism?

The patriarchy's effing vast. Start changing it with the Bechdel cast. Hey, Jamie. Yes, Caitlin. I made some barbecue. Hmm. And also, a man might be missing, but the two things have nothing to do with each other. Do you want some of my barbecue that I made? I'm going vegan. Is it vegan? It's well,

is there a reason it wouldn't be vegan? Well, barbecue tends to have animal byproducts. Okay, okay. You know what? You sold me. I'll try it. Okay, it's good. You going to love it. It's the tastiest barbecue you've ever had. Wow. It's a little tough. This has been a fun role play. We could have just kept going.

And why don't we? What an episode we have for you today. This is the Bechdel Test. No, no. Oh, my God. I sound like people who are reviewing us who haven't actually listened to the show. They're like, it's the Bechdel Test?

It's the Bechdel Test podcast, right? That's what it's called? I'm a huge fan. It's the Bechdel Test? You're just like, oh, you're a liar. Okay. How polite. Southern politeness.

This is our show where we use the Bechdel test as a jumping off point for discussion to have an intersectional conversation about some of your favorite movies in the entire world. Truly. Yes. Well, what on earth is the Bechdel test, though? Well, if you don't know what the Bechdel test is, does that ever happen to you, Caitlin? Like, I feel like that has happened to me many times.

Where people don't know and I have to explain it? No, that they're pretending to know, but they're calling it the Bechdel test over and over and over, and it's very clear that they haven't listened to the show, which is fine. Just say that. For the name of the podcast? Yeah.

Yeah, all the time. We've, like, done... I'm a huge fan we've been guests on other people's podcasts where they're like she's the host of the bechdel podcast yes i mean they're like not wrong but it's not right the best one is when we did a show in london brag remember going places uh and they put out a marquee that said the women in film podcast and we're like well this is all this is again it's not incorrect but it's weird to list a theme instead of a title in any case uh the bechdel test is a media metric invented by queer cartoonist alison bechdel

sometimes called the bechdel-Wallace test. That requires the following. For our purposes, there's many permutations of this, but for us, we need two non-male characters to speak to each other. They also have to have names. I'd like to go back. They speak to each other about something

other than a male character for two lines of dialogue. Does it usually happen in movies? No. Not a lot. Today? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's my other favorite mistake that people make when they explain my podcast to me is that they say, oh, yeah, you and Caitlin talk about whether a movie passes the Bechdel test for two hours. I'm like what would that conversation be like I don't know we go through every single minute of the movie and be like well does that did that scene did that exchange pass yes no okay let's move on to the next line anyone have any observations on this no okay let's move on what if we just did that for all of Indiana Jones and we're just like okay minute 75 uh no women no women let's move on. What if we just did that for all of Indiana Jones and we're just like, OK, minute 75.

No women. No women. Let's move on. No women in that. Only men. Only men. What about just like a taboo buzzer? Just like, you know, I thought it was mostly buzzer.

That's what I thought the podcast was. Just dings and buzzers. Oh, yeah. We should have been implementing that from day one. I don't know why we didn't think of that. But we're talking about fried green tomatoes today. And the voice you just heard is that of comedian, journalist, host of Newsbroke on AJ+, host of the Bituation Room podcast. It's Francesca Fiorentini.

Hey. Hi. Welcome. Man, I'm so excited to talk about this film. Thanks for being here. We're psyched. Thank you for having me. It's a treat. And thank you for bringing this movie too. This has been a fairly popular request. It's been requested to us many times over the years. And it's the day. So we're talking about Fried Green Tomatoes. What is your history with this movie? Okay, so I watched this when it came out. So in 91 and I was like 11, 10 around then,

but kind of like, yes, I miss some of the jokes around like women examining their own vaginas and like marriage, marital stuff, you know, it was me just like looking at my teddy bear, like totally, you know, like what am I? I don't, didn't really get get that but i definitely understood how moving how important this film was what it meant about female friendship how men are trash um have you read the book has anyone read the book i we have not read the book i have not read the book but i have read a lot

about the book there is there read a lot about the book there is there is a lot of really really uh interesting complicated context between the book and the film and i love a good adaptation discussion that said i have not read the book shit i wish i had cool we're all in the same boat um but yes we have a fair amount of context about the book that we do know about my document is horrifying this week we're so southern polite you're so polite no after you oh thank you

I saw it for the first time it was one of those movies that as a young film student in college I was like this is an important movie I need to see it I need to have seen it in my life I watched it once as a young film student in college. I was like, this is an important movie. I need to see it. I need to have seen it in my life. I watched it once as a freshman in college, I want to say.

It was one of those ones that I saw, but don't know how much I was actually paying attention to it. I only remembered the cannibalism at the end. Yes. Yes. I suffered the same only remembering that this movie yes i remember enjoying it um a lot of times i will remember my response my emotional response to a movie more

than i remember the movie itself or the story or anything like that um i remember enjoying it i but i just didn't i had no recollection of what the story was about. And I had only seen it that once. All you had for years was just secrets in the south. Right. In your head. I feel like, and I'm curious to hear back from our listeners, I feel like this is actually something that is pretty common in terms of just how, I don't know, sometimes with movies, no matter how well done they are, and this movie does a lot of things very well, that there is just one completely unrelated

thing taken away from the movie that people are like, yeah, that's what I remember. And I also only remembered the cannibalism. I saw this movie. I have like a very lovely memory associated with this movie, in spite of the fact that I don't really remember what happened, obviously. But my grandma showed me this movie. She was the best. She loved showing us movies that she liked and talking loudly throughout them, which is probably why i don't know anything that happened in the movie uh but this was like a movie that i watched at her house in maine when i was like maybe i don't know like maybe maybe around the same age like 10-ish when you're like allowed to start watching these movies uh but like with your relative so i

watched it with my mom and my grandma and they didn't get along but they got along for the duration of this movie and it was a really nice memory and I miss my grandma and I didn't remember anything that happened in the movie except for the cannibalism maybe that just has to do with being very young when you see this movie we're so i mean for sure a great deal of it was over my head and also my grandma was most likely just talking at volume screaming yeah about how cannibalism was going to happen that's well i love how you're like these movies when you are allowed to watch them and by these i mean movies about cannibals right you remember that time when your grandma and grandfather just sat you down and like you're like, okay, honey, it's time.

There is like there was like a time. I think it was around the time I was like between nine and eleven where like my mom because my mom was very in control of like my media diet. And she would be like, okay, we're going to start introducing mature themes. You know, like this was like one of those movies. Light petting. Light petting. Light petting. Cannibalism.

Cannibal. Maybe just the idea of cannibalism. Kind of a lighthearted cannibalism by a very villainous character. So you're like, oh, who cares? Right. Which is a feeling I uphold to this day about the cannibalism. But in any case, let's talk about what happens in the movie yeah let's do it so we start in rural alabama in the i believe it's set in the 80s yeah i think it's set and when the book was written, so like 87-ish. 87, yeah.

Movie comes out in 91, but yeah, I think it's sort of a period piece by like four years. Weird. And we meet Evelyn Couch, a.k.a. Kathy Bates, our queen. Woohoo! And her husband, Ed. They go to a nursing home to visit his aunt who hates Evelyn. So she starts to wander around the nursing home and runs into a woman named Mrs. Threadgood, but she goes by Ninny. And Ninny starts to tell a story about a murder that took place many years ago. Moida.

And you're like, oh, it's a little Julie and Julia. It's a bit of a story within a story, which I also fully did not remember. Me either. I did not remember that. But I thought Kathy Bates was right there with everyone else. I was wrong. I feel like the parallels between Fried Green Tomatoes and Titanic are many there. And you also mentioned you also mentioned The the notebook as a movie with parallels.

I saw some parallels with portrait of a lady on fire. Also the poster for this movie kind of leads you to believe that all four of the female leads are together in the movie because they're all on the poster and it's kind of Photoshop to make it seem like they're together. Looking at the poster you would believe that it is four women and a freight train that star in the movie i just see a green tomato in this poster but it does make me think that a tomato is a main character so i would get i get the confusion i will send it to the chat one of the main posters for this

movie is for women in a freight train and you do have to hand it to them for not putting a single man on the poster but also being like we have to include the train the murderous train perhaps the that train keeps it's killing keeps on teenagers it's ripping limbs off of kids this train hates men it's totally feminist icon this train train yeah this train listens to the bechdel cast we don't endorse killing beloved brothers and and sons i i think that the actions of the train were rather ruthless. Especially because the men and boys who get killed or injured in the story seem to be perfectly nice and respectful. She doesn't choose her targets very well. That I'll say about this train. She needs to, like, there are men in this community who deserve to be hit by a train.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there are many members of the kkk who should have been there's the clan and there's cops and there's racists yeah but they're just hitting people in fact this train seems to have a very specific vendetta against people named buddy true that's true this train i'm quickly not on board for the train anymore. What was she thinking? Bad train. Bad train. Bad.

Okay. Also, I was like, is it progressive for the sudden death of a teenage boy to change everyone's life? Because in every movie, it's we have to kill Shailene Woodley. Or how is this guy going to learn a lesson? And we have to kill Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember or how is this guy gonna learn a lesson in this one we kill Chris O'Donnell with a train right away and then she learns the lesson of I'm a lesbian I don't know if Chris O'Donnell getting hit by the train teaches her that but it does move things in that you know it keeps these characters together okay so what's happening in the story um ninny ninny starts to tell a story

from her past to uh evelyn aka kathy bates and we cut to a flashback as she's beginning to tell the story we are now in post-world war one era. We meet Idgy Threadgood. She's a little girl. She's a tomboy. And then we also meet her beloved older brother, Buddy. Buddy is in love with Ruth Jameson, who is played by... Change from the book. What?

Change from the book. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is not the case in the book. But in the movie, they are little lovebirds. Ruth is played by Mary Louise Parker. And one day they're all very quick shot of him finally pulling his foot out of his boot. And you think he's going to survive, but then he's still killed. And I was very confused on the physics of that. It was a strange editing choice to include him getting out of the boot.

I don't know if that was a part of the book. The way it was edited, I thought that he had survived and maybe would be like injured, but okay. But they were like, nope, he didn't. He's dead. Rip. Yes. And he's on the train tracks

because he's trying to get Ruth's hat. Yes. It's starting to blow away and you're like immediately like, this is bad. This is bad. What if the train and the hat are working together and it's like collusion

and they're trying to kill all the buddies of the world yeah crime green tomatoes this is this is most things named buddy i feel like our dogs let's just be real. Yeah. Air Bud. Yeah, exactly. Air Bud. Because we just roasted the editing on this movie, I just did a very the quickest Google of my life brag. And so there is a female editor on this movie, Deborah Neal Fisher. Her resume is so extensive. She edited Sonic the Hedgehog this year. Whoa. She edited two-thirds of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise.

She edited every Hangover movie. She edited Baby Mama. She edited all of the Austin Powers. She's just, she's edited Yumi and Dupree. She's edited all sorts of movies. So just if you were worried that she lost work because she showed Buddy getting out of his boot and confusing

us. She did not. She's fine. She's fine. In every single one of those films someone is hit by a train. I think if the common thread. That's her signature thing. Even if it has nothing to do with the movie, she edits it into the movie. She writes...

Yeah, well, editors are often, you know, the real authors. It's weird. I don't remember Sonic the Hedgehog ever getting hit by a train, but in this movie, he does. I think of all the movies, that's the one I would definitely assume it happened.

Dupree for sure gets hit by a train. Oh, yeah. You, me, and... What? Name a Fifty Shades movie assume it happened dupree for sure gets hit by a train oh yeah you me and what name a 50 shades movie where to go to johnson doesn't get hit by a train it's it's her trademark so okay so back to the movie um he is he's killed by the train and edgy is heartbroken over this um it's also around this point in the story where we formally meet big george yes um as well as less formally meet his mother sipsy cicely tyson yep they are two black people who work for the thread good family because they're like a rich wealthy white family who has help and big george does a lot to look after edgy specifically um okay so the story is unfolding but just then kathy bates's husband comes in and interrupts a typical man and we see

them go back home a little bit evelyn couch has been going to these marriage counseling classes. I think she's kind of trying to connect with Ed better, but he's not into it. He does not appreciate her. This whole plot point, we'll come back to it. And only counseling women altogether, not couples. Yes, the husbands are not present. Yeah, no.

No, Ed is asked nothing, which I appreciate that commentary, they I feel like the movie kind of goes out of its way to make women trying to get in touch with their sexuality better to seem ridiculous and perhaps hysterical. I didn't like how those were framed. Oh, sure. Anyways. Yeah. We'll talk about it. Yeah. sure anyways yeah we'll talk about it yeah um so then sometime later evelyn goes back to the nursing home and here's more of the story from ninny so we flash back to idgy who is all grown up now and she is mary stewart masterson and she has not really recovered from the loss of her

brother buddy and ruth who again was buddy's young love, comes around and befriends her. We see them getting into all kinds of hijinks. They're giving out food to poor people. There's a scene with honey and bees. They play poker. They get drunk together. Things like that. I love the bee scene so much. It truly, i was brimming with anxiety oh i loved it and though the movie never makes this explicit it's pretty clear that uh edgy is a lesbian who is falling in love with ruth and ruth also loves her yes well and we'll talk about all of this later but um ruth gets married to a man named Frank Bennett. And we already know from the beginning of the story, based on what Ninny said, this is a murder mystery about Iggy being accused of murdering Frank Bennett.

But we don't yet know how or why or when or anything like that. And then we meet Frank Bennett and we're like, thank God he got murdered. Yeah. He's terrible. He is a truly, truly a piece of shit. Yes. So she goes off, newly married. They move to Georgia. And after a few years, Idgy drives to Georgia to pay Ruth a visit and discovers that Ruth's husband is physically abusive. So Idgy gets Ruth out of there with the help of big george and says to frank if you ever touch her again i'll kill you ruth who was pregnant when she left her husband i'm sorry has the baby oh i'm i'm sorry ruth who was gregnant that's right sorry i don't mean i don't mean to like tone police but you did say that word wrong.

I said the word incorrectly. She was Greg with a Greg named Buddy. Right. That's just his nickname, though. His name is Greg. And then Edgy and Ruth open a restaurant, the Whistle Stop Cafe, where they served fried green tomatoes. That's the name of the movie. And barbecue that Big George makes. This becomes important. Frank shows up a couple of times, trying to get

his baby. His baby. And one night we see him being knocked out by a shovel, I think, which he then presumably dies from. Because, yeah, he's trying to kidnap a baby. Yeah, he's got baby basket in the hand. He's about to make away with the baby.

He's also a member of the KKK, we find out. So we are not sad that he dies. Oh, yeah. so we are not sad that he dies oh yeah uh later some police from georgia show up to the cafe to see if edgy or ruth know anything about frank's disappearance and they're like no and he's like well i don't trust you but i do love your barbecue nom nom nom nom nom and then edgy tells ruth like you don't have to worry about frank coming around anymore. And Ruth is like, well, did you kill him? And she's like, no, I didn't. No, but I know he's for sure dead.

Yeah, but I definitely know he's dead, but I won't tell you why. I felt for Ruth in that moment because she's just like, okay, I don't think you're a murderer, but you're sounding awful like a murderer. And Mary Stewart Masterson is like like just be cool please stop asking yep then several years pass and one day frank's pickup truck is found in a river so edgy and big george are arrested for his murder and she is tried but the judge throws out the case because he's like well you know frank just probably got drunk and drove into the river by accident and got eaten by river creatures which it seems like edgy is such a beloved person in this community that the judge kind of just didn't

want anything bad to happen yeah like that was my read it was the role of the priest remember yeah right because the priest kind of lie and then the judge kind of did a bad job but it like worked out the way it should have right it works out well for the characters who we are rooting for but i'm also just like is this how the justice system worked in 1933 no not at all definitely if there was a black man accused of killing a white man he probably wouldn't have gotten off and especially if there was a white woman who everyone knew was gay that's not what would have happened but look this is hollywood all right this is fantasy yes this is Hollywood, all right? This is fantasy, yes. This is amazing. That's why this movie rules. Things turn out the way they should.

Except Ruth dies. Yeah, and like human flesh breaks down into a great sauce somehow that no one can taste. Well, we don't know. We don't know. We, you know. We don't know. Have we ever tried it?

Ask the train. We don't, it might. But yes, justice was served to the characters who we like yes meanwhile back in the present evelyn has begun this journey of kind of self-liberation she's knocking down walls in her house she's crashing her car into other people's cars she goes back to see ninny who continues the story about a gene ruth uh ruth has gotten sick and dies of cancer which is so sad so sad heartbreaking i was bawling it was yeah rough story of the ducks yeah the duck story i'm like this story is so boring and i don't get it but i'm crying and then back in the present

evelyn thinks that ninny has died but it turns out that it was just ninny's roommate at the nursing home who died so evelyn goes to find ninny who tells evelyn the final bit of the story which is that it turns out it was sipsy who killed Frank Bennett and Iggy and big George. But do they barbecue his body or do they turn his body into the sauce? I was not super clear about that. There is a long night of like Robert Durst style dismemberment that takes place that we don't see.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they go full Durst that night and we just don't have to watch it. And I'm fine with that. Sure. Totally.

In any case, they feed his remains to the cop who had been investigating his disappearance. So that's like the big reveal at the end of the movie. Hence the cannibalism that Jamie and I remembered. Yeah, that's the story. 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 unhurts 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. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you.

I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project All you need to do is record everything like you always do One session 24 hours BPM 110

120 She's terrified Should we wake her up? Absolutely not What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare.

This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean? The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the Biscuits. It's right here in black and white in print. They lying.

An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch is a leader. You choose hills that you want to die on. Why would we want to be the losing team? I just take all the other stuff out of it. Segregation academies, when civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that. Bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

That sounded like, hey, what's that movie? They're back. We're back. A dinosaur story. Oh, that's Poltergeist? We're here? No. I They're back. We're back. A dinosaur story. Oh, that's Poltergeist. We're here. No, no, no. We're so young.

So we just don't know. We forget. Yeah, I think it's Poltergeist sounds right. But she says something like, they're here. I think a good place to start talking about this movie is the way it was adapted because I feel like that leads into a lot of the discussion that kind of needs to be had about this movie so there's there's so much context for this movie and a lot of it is very interesting and some of it is kind of frustrating so we have the very rare example here of the author of an original work co-authoring a

screenplay that is amazing. Fanny Flagg, who I wasn't familiar with her, but now that I learned more about her, she's awesome. She is a queer writer and comedian who got started in the 60s, went on to become a really popular game show personality on Match Game. If you grew up watching Game Show Network with your grandparents, that was a thrill. And later in her career was openly an out lesbian who had, I mean, just a murderer's row of girlfriends. She dated Rita Mae Brown, another really famous queer writer, and a really famous soap opera star named Susan Flannery.

If you want to look up the relationship between the three of them, it's very interesting, not necessarily relevant to the podcast, but I was hooked. In any case, she wrote this novel in 1987 and then uh was approached by the director of this movie john avnet to write the movie herself she had never written for the screen i feel like this is very rare for uh any marginalized writer to get an opportunity to go from zero to writing their own screenplay of their own work. So that's incredible.

She enlists her friend, Carol Sobieski, who also wrote the script for Annie. They work on it together. Carol unfortunately passes away before the movie comes out, but they are both honored with an Academy Award nomination. So it's a beautiful story in that way. What I do think is interesting is, and again, we haven't read the book, so if you have read the book and you have a more detailed, nuanced take,

I'm just going off of the academic pieces I was able to find about the adaptation of this. And although Fanny Flagg is an openly queer writer, there seems to be a lot of debate on, I mean, for sure in the movie, it is coding, coding, coding till the end of time coding. In the book, there does seem to be a little bit of debate. It is definitely less coded, but it is also never explicitly stated. There are some fans of this book who say it is not coded. It is very clear.

But the wording that Fanny Flagg uses is a little obscure. So there are some people that argue that it's still coded. I don't know. I haven't in the book, but other pretty specific indicators that explicitly say that they are a couple who are in love and romantically involved are very present in the book. So there's again, the debate gets kind of really nuanced because people who are fans of this book are like go super hard and I was like oh damn in some forums and yes so from just what I read it seems to me like it is not coded in the book but they also like people were like well they never like kiss there's not a lot of physical interaction or affection shown in the book. And so some people are like, it's not

it's not explicit enough, because they are not like, you know, they're a married couple that aren't kissing. Hello, you know, so there, there's all that. But there are these very, like, to me, like very romantic passages that I was like, Oh, I should read this book. There, here's a quote from the book. Oh, and also the the word like wife girlfriend partner that never comes up uh they are pretty exclusively called friends and business partners in the book so you know if you're a fan of the book let us know so okay when idgy this is from a scene when idgy um is upset that ruth is leaving to go marry Frank Bennett towards the beginning of the book. And she says, oh, no, you don't love him.

You love me. You know you do. So it is way more explicit of like, don't marry him. Stay here. Be my girlfriend. But so, yeah. Wow. That's very different than the movie.

Yes. Yes. So I think it's really interesting, like an interesting case study that Fanny Flagg wrote both that passage and this movie where the relationship is presented very differently. 1991. a GLAAD award for portraying a lesbian relationship. So I, it was, I think clear to queer audiences what this movie was, but it isn't explicitly stated even less so in, in the movie than in the book. But it also, it's, I don't know, it's kind of, it's, it was an interesting watch because like watching it, you're just like, oh, yeah, they're obviously in love. And they're like, you know, this is like this long standing, you know, marriage.

They have a child together. Like it's. They raise a child together. They run a business together. It's very. Yeah. But but I mean, it's coded. I couldn't remember looking back.

And when I rewatched it, I couldn't remember whether they ever kissed. And the time when they would have kissed, I think, is when they were like drunk and lying by the riverbank and talking about how she's going to probably have to get married soon. And they, you know, it's her birthday. I wanted that scene. Yeah. I mean, I mean, she kisses her on the cheek and then Ruth does and then jumps into the water and it's all very oh my god it's it's lovely but but the relationship is so deep even though there is I mean it's physical they're like they have a food fight and that food fight was the director makes director John Avnet saying I think on the DVD commentary that he wasn't he intended for that food fight to be seen as symbolic of love making yeah

which which i do think is first of all it's like um sir how are we supposed to know that it is it is like a really sweet scene and i love mary stewart masterson and mary louise parker play so well off of each other i like fully buy that they are in love and they're like it's so sweet but it's like if you're a viewer in 1991 you're like they were in a food fight yeah yeah that was not it wasn't they weren't like uh you know like it wasn't that was him being like that's sex you're like sir have you heard of sex before? In any case, if you view, if you know that that is how he was thinking of that scene, it is kind of interesting to watch because right after they are like caught having a food fight, the cop friend comes over who is pursuing Iji and says like, this isn't

right. Women shouldn't be doing stuff like this and if you're reading the scene as a food fight it's a very strange comment to make but right but if you're reading it as uh they have a relationship with each other I do believe that that's how he viewed that scene I just think that it's weird that he thinks that that is an extremely clear read for a viewer. Because I don't think it was. But I love that scene. It's very sweet.

I love them. I just think all the language in the film that refers to Iggy is both. It's like 1991 and then very Jim Crow South, like 40s, 50s language around like, she's different. She's a little weird. She's not like other girls. You know, she wears pants. Like there's just a lot of like hilariously,

you know, skirting around the fact that she's gay. And pretty much everyone knows it. It is funny. There was a lot of elements of edgy's character uh that reminded me of katherine hepburn characters um where like so many katherine hepburn characters were just thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly queer coded and it was through like the tomboy aesthetic it was through like all these coded phrases that, yeah, that are just frequently used to just avoid letting a queer character be a queer character. I also found an interesting Mary Stewart Masterson apparently is the realest one of all time because I was able to find an interview that she did in 2017 with queer writer Kate Arthur, who also wrote a really great piece about this movie and

just breaking down what it meant for its time. But she does a great interview with Mary Stewart Masterson. And it straight up asks, like, you know, she says, because she loves this movie, Kate Arthur is like, this is a like a movie for lesbians. Like, don't you agree, essentially? And Mary Stewart masterson responds with like some kind of like righteous frustration and says that uh okay so i'm just reading from kate arthur's piece here the movie is as masterson once told me quote unquote redacted so mary stewart masterson says quote it wasn't a love scene but they were like clearly a love relationship type of fight or jealousy

there was some more sensual kind of stuff in there we were clearly playing that so there are deleted scenes from this movie that make the relationship more explicitly clear even though it seems like much like in the book the language of you are my wife this is our marriage that was certainly not going to be in the movie but like relationship scenes were in this movie and then later cut uh she goes on to say at that time it was just about friendship i think at the time when it was released if it had been labeled frankly that way i think the fear was maybe that it would have alienated all the people older southern women who had those kinds of permanent lifelong friendships the aunts who lived together but never it would have alienated all the people, older Southern women who had those kinds of permanent lifelong friendships. The aunts who lived together,

but never married would have been alienated from watching it and allowing themselves to love the characters. I think, I think that they might've been afraid. So that was Mary Stewart Masterson's take. And she is just generally frustrated that they weren't allowed to be in a relationship because she says Mary Stewart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker were like, yeah, we were, the characters were in a relationship and we played it that way. Right. So I don't know though, that response from Mary Stewart

Masterson, like I appreciate her frustration, but her thinking it's going to alienate like old Southern aunts who live together romantically, threw me a little bit like I don't think that's who it's going to alienate like if anything they would be the people who would potentially connect most to this movie like if it's going to alienate anyone it would be homophobes which in 91 was a large portion of the population so So like, to me, it's clear that the movie was trying to play it safe and appeal to a larger audience by making the relationship between Iggy and Ruth way more like subtextual and implicit. The movie is very feathered edges. I mean, it sounds the story is is cool i bet the book is way better

because the movie version is super hollywoodified like you know cue music and yay we're not gonna get too deep we don't know the relationship like it's just it's not edgy it's probably not what would have even though it's edgy but not edgy um good one not what 2020 might have done to the story so going even deeper on what so I was like okay well how does Fanny Flagg feel about this because she wrote a queer novel that does you know goes all the way up to the line of saying these are

this is the relationship this is a marriage that takes place how does she feel about the changes that were made to the movie we know movies get written all the time and shit gets cut out and so it's not like this is you know her complete script that was shot right but she again kind of surprises you with what her answer is she she has said kind of throughout that she was basing Ruth and Iggy partially on relatives in her own life she's from the south She said it was

based, at least the idea for them having a business and running a business came from her family and not a queer relationship. But she's a queer writer writing about a queer relationship. So, in any case, someone asked her this question in 1992 of, like,

how do you feel about the relationship being far less explicit and she says to entertainment weekly uh quote it's a mainstream movie people are taking children they're taking old people it speaks to everybody that's why it's wonderful they can make up their own minds which is very much the vibe of the reviews of this movie because i was curious about like well how did an audience receive it was your average you know film bro journalist just kind of like not picking up on it like what was the vibe almost every review I read were well aware they're like oh this is a queer relationship but they kind of

toe the line in the same way that Fanny Flagg does and says well you can see this as a relationship or not either way i liked the movie but it's very like wishy-washy in the way that it's approached um you would think that would have just dropped after they didn't win an oscar and she'd be like you know what fuck you it was gay the whole time yeah there's like this review from ty burr that says uh it's also in entertainment weekly he says like in the novel tomatoes uses female friendship as a metaphor for something taboo but the story is in no way diminished if you choose not to buy into it there are hints of earthly desires nevertheless i'm like okay the most virginal thing i've ever read in my whole life but but but like that is kind of the tone of how this

movie was received by critics of like I really liked it seems like there's a queer relationship I didn't think about it too hard night night like that was just the vibe I have a couple additional quotes from Fanny Flagg about

the movie saying that quote it's not a political film at all it's about the possibilities of people being sweet and loving each other another quote it's a story about love and friendship the sexuality is unimportant so but even outside of the queer relationship it's very explicitly a political film like and a book right so yes on a number of levels yeah exactly i'm the most interested in what the this queer relationship meant and means for evelyn in the 80s like would evelyn if ninny told her like yeah so then we slept together you know would she be like ew you know would she be like, ew? You know, would she freak out? Like, I'm curious in the book how they play it for Evelyn. You know, is Nini sort of dampening down that part for Evelyn?

Does it say anything about Evelyn's sexuality and her relationship with Ed? I have to be honest. I kind of, like, don't care that much about Evelyn or her life. I do. I'm, like like a fan of that character. And we can we can talk about her in a bit. But like, yeah, that is that is something I hadn't fully considered because like, Evelyn does go through this sort of like liberation and like, is that due in part to kind of learning about this queer relationship? And because a lot of what Iggy does, in addition to having a woman as her lover, she's challenging the status quo in many other ways as well.

Like, you know, how she presents herself, how she dresses. She doesn't go to church. She drinks. She gambles. She plays baseball. She fishes. she does a lot of things that would have been considered unladylike cool by like polite society and especially in this era and especially in this region but yeah she's like she's like fuck all

that i'm gonna do whatever the hell i want i'm cool that is an aspect of her character that i really appreciated i love her i love she reminds me of a Katharine Hepburn character, but the twist is she doesn't have to marry any old guy at the end. Like, it's cool. She doesn't have to marry Cary Grant. Yeah, I mean, even down to the, and this is like a trope that I'm kind of less fond of, but it does kind of line up

with that Katharine Hepburn parallel I'm trying to draw here of like, she is like the wealthy daughter of a white family that understands like the working man. And that, that is like another hallmark of that kind of character archetype that Iggy kind of plays to a T here where she does come from a lot of privilege.

But she's, she's not like the other girls it's very it is yes well what i also what i think is particularly interesting about this whole situation and adaptation and what gets omitted and not is that like if this movie was like almost made like 20 years from now and it was the exact same thing we almost, I think we could like look at it like, wow, look how normalized their lesbian relationship is. Like,

look, they're just, they're beloved members of the community. Everyone loves them. Right. Like, and like by not identifying, like not being like,

and they're definitely lesbians together kind of normalizes it, but it's not what's happening in the movie because in the context of when this came out in 91 audiences were so conditioned to expect hetero relationships between a cishet man and cishet woman in mainstream hollywood movies like audiences were not at all conditioned to expect queer relationships. We were so starved for queer visibility on screen that media needed to then and still needs to actually identify characters as queer so that we have that clear visibility and we can, we as audience members,

know that about those characters. Again, hopefully we will move to a place at some point on the road where there is more normalization. But that's a really interesting thing that you, that's a really interesting point right there. Because here you have this queer woman writing this story that she, she's like, I want this to be universal. And we're talking about it on a podcast about the Bechdel test, which never gets passed in movies.

And now it's like, well, can it only be passed if two women are in a romantic relationship with one another? Like, is that the minus, you know, in the mathematic equation? It's like, unless they're fucking, it doesn't count. You know what I mean? Well, the context of the Bechdel test, which first appeared in Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out for 1985, her characters were talking about how they saw so little visibility of lesbians on screen and movies that they had to imagine that two women talking to each other about something other than a man. If that happened in the movie, they'd be like be like well now we can ship them together as lovers yeah and that's what spawned the Bechdel test which is so what yeah it like is maybe one of our only movies we've ever covered that connects it pretty exactly of like this is what the Bechdel test was actually supposed to be about this is also like a kind of a big cultural moment for movies

of this nature and this exact framing of like friendship friendship friendship it's just friends because Thelma and Louise comes out just I think a few months before fried green tomatoes so 91 is huge for movies that have a huge cult following today and a pretty significant queer following that at the time were very framed of like friends friends which well it is interesting because I think that the framing device is truly just two women becoming friends in a way that I found to be like really effective and like lovely and sweet of like oh these are it's an intergenerational friendship they're able to help each other through different phases of life and struggling with aging and all this stuff and like that was so beautiful but it is like frustrating to see what is pretty

clearly a queer relationship kind of not not that like friendship is a reduct but like when you're in a relationship with someone you don't want someone to be like, that's your friend. That's your business partner. Like, no, this is my, I'm raising a child. All you do is fry tomatoes together. We're doing, we're rearing a child. We're not just frying tomatoes here.

Like, yeah. Well, I kind of wanted to bring up the Hays production code. It's not the most applicable thing to this movie, but I think we see remnants of it in movies long after the code was lifted. So just a little background from someone who has not one but two degrees in film. Thank you very much. I hate to bring it up. I feel 18 again.

I was like, oh, the Hays Code. So the production code was a set of censorship rules, more or less, that films had to abide by in order to get any kind of wide theatrical release. This was enforced from 1934 to, I believe, 1968. And the rules were such things as like there could be no graphic violence. There could be no swearing. There could be no overt sexuality. When it was lifted in 1968, it was replaced by the MPA rating system, which is like the rated G, rated PG, rated R, PG-13 came later, etc. This is according to, again, our favorite scholarly website, Wikipedia.

It says, in terms of homosexuality, while the code did not explicitly state that depictions of homosexuality were against the code, the code barred the depiction of any kind of sexual perversion or deviance which homosexuality fell under at the time. Gay characters on screen also came to be represented as villains or victims who commit crimes due to their homosexuality. Most filmmakers who have historically been cishet white men either had no interest in including queer characters or felt like a queer relationship can't be in a movie for everyone because it is something that is othered. Right. I don't want to dig into her personal life. It does seem because she dated another really famous lesbian writer who did not code anything.

It seemed like this was kind of a tendency in her work of wanting to write in a universal way, but the definition of universal kind of ended up othering her own experiences, which isn't fair. Yeah, I mean, it could have been her also caving to societal pressures to conform to heteronormative standards. Or maybe she did try to push back more and just wasn't able to get results. Yeah, I mean, and in that same really good BuzzFeed essay

that I'll refer you to again, it's called Why Fried Green Tomatoes is a Lesbian Classic. Yes, lesbian. That's the title. I read that too. But Kate Arthur is also putting this in, and Francesca, you also kind of reference this because it applies in a number of ways in this movie but like this was a

movie that came out like at the height of the AIDS epidemic and when you know the the first Bush administration was completely completely ignoring an epidemic that was ravaging queer communities and this was a queer story however coded that essentially outside of the whole cancer death ended well and ended beautifully and they were accepted by their community and on i mean and we haven't even started to talk about the the race plot line of this movie but you know a black man is brought to court and he is successful and in beloved by the community and like just it's societally speaking kind of like a fairy tale especially for when this total fairy tale like where and when this takes place you have to imagine none of this would go the way it goes

yeah but but i wasn't framing it in like oh yeah 1991 is especially for like in a movie market where there is not certainly no like lesbian relationships being released in on a massive scale and to like this movie was so successful it like made its budget back 13 times or something like that and it kind of like frames everything in this like and it all basically ended well and everyone had a beautiful relationship and except for ruth went on to live lovely lives and they met kathy bates maybe because jessica tandyandy is Mary Stewart Masterson. That is definitely not in the book. And that is confusing. That twist ending, I thought was excellent.

I mean, there's just like that layer of the plot of Ninny being itchy, itchy being Ninny is so good. And I just want a sequel where we find out what happened to itchy in between all that time after Ruth dies. But before we meet her in the retirement home yeah right yeah that's definitely it's made it's there's a clear distinction in the book that edgy is not in any the fact that it's suggested at in the movie is something that i think a lot of the fans of the book absolutely hate yes but not all but readers aren't better than watchers everybody just want the titanic reference

i thought the second i saw that like reveal of like it was like the woman in the picture is me that is so what happens it's the woman in the picture was her okay fine she has a picture of mary louise parker on her whatever. Like it didn't bother me, but I also, if I had read that book and was a big fan of that book, I would have been really bothered by that change for sure. I don't know. My main take,

like there's my takeaway from this movie is I still have a crush on Mary Louise Parker after all these years. She is so beautiful and so funny. And I am in love with her. We got to 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 unhurts 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. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel,

available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours.

BPM 110. 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it.

That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.

Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha Libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha Libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. It's tradition. It's culture.

This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Santos! Santos! Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We'll learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha libre behind the mask listen to lucha libre behind the mask as part of my cultura podcast network on the iheart radio app

apple podcasts or wherever you stream podcasts and we're back uh one quick thing and then we'll move on the the one other movie change that they very explicitly made for the adaptation that i'm like are you serious was that they changed the introduction of Ruth is she's introduced as a love interest of doomed brother buddy who gets hit by the train in the book I think in a way that takes a layer of coding away she is not introduced as like you know a girl who's interested in a guy. She's introduced as like, here's a girl who's staying with us for the summer. And that's just it. But the movie kind of goes out of its way to say that she is interested in men the first time we see her. So, yeah, I guess according to the movie, she is bisexual, but also straight, but but also question mark because it's for everyone

it's annoying i read too that in the book we have a clear understanding of why she marries frank bennett which is that she and her mother needed his financial support or else they would have probably had to experience homelessness because this part of the story takes place during the depression so a lot of people had fallen on very hard financial times so Ruth in the book marries Frank because she needed a financial support system yeah another titanic parallel yes yeah they could have given I think Ruth a little bit more backstory Iggy had so much backstory and Ruth was just kind of appeared in the movie. But then she's perfect. And that would have been a nice detail. I love when Iggy is fishing and Ruth is like, come on, spend time with me.

It'll be fun. And Iggy's like, fine. And then they fall in love. And she's like, fine, get on a train with me. We're going to be socialists redistributing the wealth. And then Mary Louise Parker gets all wet and it's just a good movie um yeah okay so uh this will sort of bring us into the next area of discussion is another thing that is done in the book that is very hollywood whitewashed in the movie is in the book

and again i was not able to find a ton of hyper specific details. Caitlin, let me know if you have more than I do. But in the book, the black characters in this community and in the lives of Ruth and Iji have actual stories. And they're, I mean, they just are more characters than they are in this movie. Because there are so many scenes in this movie

where black characters are actively involved and present where they do not have dialogue where you are not really given a look into what they're thinking how they're thinking there is at least one character from the book that doesn't even end up in the movie at all and yeah i was just i mean especially when it's like you cast cicely tyson and you're not gonna you're not gonna give her anything to do when she can do anything it was yeah so this this movie is like heavily white yeah the one thing she does ends up happening off screen for the most part. I know, and it's the best. Yeah. This is kind of a classic case of a story that is about white people in which there are a few black characters who are kind of there to serve as scenery or to help and serve the white characters.

We never learn anything about their lives in the movie. I don't think we even learn sipsy's name until like an hour into the movie way late yeah you don't it's not i don't think it's established that sipsy is big george's mother until the very end like so we don't even know what their relationship is exactly she's his adopted mother and then there's also a sister-in-law who doesn't appear in the movie there there's like a whole family they have a whole family dynamic in the movie and sorry in the book that is just kind of done away with yeah in the movie entirely yes it is annoying that it's not actually more present but like they are pivotal in the actual like what happens the killing the

sauce eating the cannibalism. It's pretty cool. Which makes it like even more frustrating to me that they are in spite of the fact that like it's clear that the material being adapted. Big George and Sipsy are really active characters. But in the movie, you don't actually get to see them doing much. It's a plot point that you don't see what what Sipsy does right it's a really weird storytelling choice to make an extremely pivotal moment in the story of of like Sipsy killing Frank Bennett so have her be have her character be very important in that

regard but prior to that barely I mean she will be in the background she'll be she's present but she's not she's in ever given the focus they're putting cicely tyson in the background too many so much too much there is one scene in particular where i feel like these problems are especially on display and again we want to hear from our black listeners of what you made of every choice this movie made as well. But there is this sequence where basically we find out that Frank, Ruth's ex-husband, is in the KKK and that the KKK is inciting violence against Big George.

Also right outside the store, but it takes Mary Stewart Masterson a very long time to hear it for some reason. It is happening literally right outside the window, but whatever. So it's just this whole scene that is pivoting around KKK violence that somehow ends up becoming about

the relationship of the white women in the story. Our takeaway from a KKK violence scene is that we are very concerned with the personal lives of these white women. I love those characters, but that just felt so... It's the Hollywoodization erasure also. I mean, I just think like in the same ways that this film sort of appeals to people's homophobia and like sort of dances around it and coddles it. It sort of coddles people's racism, too.

Like we're not going to have these characters say or do much more. In fact, all they're doing really is being like super ride or die for Iggy and Ruth for no reason other than they're employed by them. I mean, it seems right. But it's like, but we still will put our lives on the line. You know, Big George is beaten and whipped by the KKK. And you kind of assume, it's like, well, I guess he loves Iggy and Ruth. Right. We are told constantly this great relationship that Iggy has with Big George,

but we are not shown it. No real estate was, was dedicated in the story, in the movie version. We never see them have a conversation. That's just the two of them. Barely. Yeah. Or if it is,

it's just like a very in passing, like, you know, how's the barbecue today? You know? Yeah. It's just, it's not,

it's very inconsequential. I thought Big George got her out of trouble once. Like he goes to meet with her. Am I misremembering? Oh, well, here's a troubling scene to me where after Iggy has discovered that Ruth's husband is abusive and she basically goes to rescue her. She brings Big George and her brother Julian. And they show up and, you know, Frank is being an abusive asshole. And Julian, the brother, says, you know, I wouldn't do that if I were you.

You might upset Big George and he's crazy. And then it cuts to Big George pulling out a knife. And that to me was like because there's been so much propaganda perpetuated by white people throughout the centuries, painting black men as brutes and as violent, like perpetrators of violence. And for them, for him to like use that and be like, he's gonna kill you. Look how, you know, big and scary he is, is basically what's being implied in the scene. I was like, oh, no. Right. Again, this, this book and movie take place in this kind of willful fantasy version of the Depression era South. But this is the Jim Crow era.

Like there are so many. And it's lightly referenced by characters we're supposed to like. There's who is that guy? That guy, Grady. Oh, are we supposed to like him? I'd love to talk about Grady uh oh are we supposed to like him I'd love to talk about I think we are I think we are supposed to like him which is wild because he is homophobic and racist uh and a cop there's a he's a cop and then there's also a reference to like and you and your boys when you put on your

yeah you know your sheets and you walk around she's like you're in the kkk and he's like shrug like oh grady's also in the kkk he's 100 in the kkk yes but but it's like uh edgy hangs out with them a lot they do a talent show together so i don't think that we're supposed to hate him because no no we're supposed to like him yeah i think we're supposed to like him and so that is a a thing. So, I mean, I guess maybe that is one of the more realistic characters. But it's frustrating. I mean, and again, the author of this book and both of the writers of this movie, everyone, I mean, there are not many black people behind the camera for a movie that is trying to make a statement on race. Fanny Flagg is a white writer. Carol Sobieski is a white writer.

And I was not able to find a ton of writing to how race is handled in this movie, but it is deeply Hollywood. It ignores the historical context in the same way that the queer storyline ignores the historical context, which is kind of seems like it's very intentionally done to give you a story bookish ending to, I mean, Alabama in the 1930s,

not a place known for its tolerance. Yeah. If it didn't gloss over those two things, it would be a completely different story. Yeah. It would not have, I mean, it doesn't have a happy ending,

but it would have even less of one. And the catharsis of, I mean, it doesn't have a happy ending, but it would have even less of one. And the catharsis of, I mean, it is movie wise, the catharsis of an evil KKK abusive husband. Like name one thing that Frank isn't. He's every bad thing packaged into one character. It is very satisfying to see him get turned into sauce and eaten right so which so and or not see him but imagine right so in every way it's satisfying to see him like really defeated there's no doubt that this movie wants him dead but in order to get there there is so much context that is just ignored skimmed over and it happens kind of at the expense of us getting to know uh the black characters in this movie i feel like it

is like a problem that starts foundationally with the book even though the book you know we know more about them we know more about their character journey but it's you know everyone involved in the telling of this story for the most part is a white person so they do seem it's very much like a backdrop hey backdrop characters and even though they're pivotal in what happens in the story and kind of a comfortable second class citizenship you know not they're not comfortable but like the story is comfortable with the second class citizenship. Yeah. Which is, I would say, probably historically accurate for that moment.

The idea that a white woman like Iggy would be both friends with a cop who also sometimes moonlights in the KKK, but he's not that much of a dipshit like Frank is. But he has a crush on her, right? Right, and is homies with, like, you know, the help, quote unquote, right? Like, that feels real for some. Like, I feel like there might have been many, many idgies who are like, well, I'm not going to treat the person who works in my house as inhuman,

but I also have to, like like get along in a small town with this cop who does something i don't agree with you know i mean yeah i think i mean people contain multitudes and sometimes those multitudes are extremely contradictory i'm not interested in the multitudes of like a racist cop like uh uh i mean i wasn't alive in the 1930s brag but i have to imagine that that wouldn't have been uncommon where it's weird because like among her things that like show her kind of challenging the status quo in addition to you know she dresses in like kind of masculine clothing and stuff like that she employs black people in her cafe and has a like black section in her restaurant and you know grady comments on that and he's like well some people around here don't like it that you serve black people at your restaurant and she's like well those people can go fuck off yeah um so like she's shown as being an ally i guess by 1930s standards but right i mean

those standards were just you know not enough it yeah and i just i mean i know i keep coming back to this point but the fact that they if you haven't had the pleasure of reading about cicely tyson's life first of all she's alive she's 95 years old she is but an award away from an egot she's like a true legend and the fact that she is like she was so well established when this movie came out and it was a big deal that she did the movie and then they gave her nothing to do basically for the whole movie as an injustice that I will not recover from. She's also still working, right?

She's on how to get away with murder. Yeah. Yeah. Well, she was, yeah. I don't think that shows on anymore, but it was,

I mean, it was, she's, she is, she's thriving. She was also in the help. She was in the house, which we,

Oh, let's, we can't cover that movie ever. We probably, we probably will. But I mean, it goes to show that like prolific black actors such as her have to take roles such as the one in this movie, such as the one in The Help, because that's often all that's afforded to black actors is these underwritten or tropey black characters, which is tragic. Even though she had a really small part as Sipsy, she crushed it. Like, yeah, she did. She did a she did a good job.

You're right. She needed way more screen time. Right. I mean, I feel like in the movie, we just truly don't know enough about her where big george what we do know about him is that he has like worked in a service role for iggy's family for a really long time and then he kind of just goes with her through life and is with her because it's like if iggy is at home he's working for that family if iggy is running a restaurant he works at that restaurant like which is also kind of never explained it's like he works where Iji is and and going back to Cicely Tyson I is she had been

nominated for an academy award and just I mean there is so there I'm gonna reference a video that I need to pull it up and remember the name of the YouTuber. But there's a really good YouTube channel that I like that examines best actress Oscar races year to year. That has done a lot of work in examining, especially when women of color are nominated for Academy Awards. Their careers go very differently than a white actress who is nominated and then just gets roles, roles, roles, roles, roles forever. Nominated, not necessarily winning, just nominated. Not even necessarily winning. So Cicely Tyson, she hadn't won an Oscar at this point, but she had been nominated. And the fact that she can, you know, achieve that level of prestige and still be relegated to such a small,

kind of like there's not much for her to do in this movie. I don't like it. It's bad. In conclusion, hump. Yeah. I think we need a reboot once again. She's still around. Write Sipsy back in.

Not a reboot, but a remake. That's what it is. A remake. Yeah. Do Sipsy justice in. Not a reboot, but a remake. That's what it is. A remake. Yeah. Do Sipsy justice this time. Yeah. Okay. We haven't talked about Kathy Bates yet.

No. Yes. That's the other big thing. So with Kathy, I love Kathy Bates. I do like Evelyn's character a lot. I enjoy her evolution over the course of the movie, her character arc, because she basically goes from a like, polite, subservient Southern woman to like, learning to be empowered and learning independence. And this is happening while she is hearing this story from Ninny. So it's like learning about like becoming friends

with ninny and learning about edgy and ruth is like part of what empowers her to enact change in her own life yeah yeah take charge yeah there's just some great scenes you know the scene where she's imagining wearing all cellophane the cellophane just to greet her husband i'm like how did i not remember that oh yeah but i remembered the cannibalism that was incredible i will say by 2020 standards watching a white woman freak out in a grocery store brings up a lot of karen images sure a new context so like i was like is this the origin story of karen like you know they too much to wanda too much kathy bates no but uh she's going off on other you know younger hotter

ladies karen's or becky's i guess yeah just kind of the next generation of karen but she does yeah uh she's going up against but that that like, you know, it's the 80s. Feminism won. And yet I still make my husband dinner every day and he grabs it and sits down in front of the TV and doesn't pay attention to me and there's no love in our relationship anymore. Like, I was feeling that.

You know, she's trying. She's going to these classes. She still thinks it's her. And then she just stops giving a fuck. And that's when everything's wonderful. And she starts to like, yeah, I don't know. She just kind of takes charge, you know. She's just like, this is a part of who I am and I'm going to embrace it.

And yeah, I like that. Like, again, the evolution of what we see where first she's taking these classes to help her with her marriage, which, of course, she as the woman is expected to do all the emotional labor of fixing anything about their marriage. And then he gets to just like sit at home and watch baseball all day. Then her friend Missy is like, screw this. We need to wait. What does she say? She's like, what we really need is an assertive training class for Southern women. But for you, Evelyn, that's a paradox because you're living in the dark ages.

Evelyn's like, oh, no. So then they start to go to these, I guess, these assertiveness training classes for Southern women. And these are kind of cartoony where the woman's like, okay, now take off your underwear, everyone. And look at your vagina. I remember this scene from being a little kid.

I was like, what? That's a thing. But like, I mean, I don't know. Was that a thing? I,

I, I didn't, I think I mentioned this earlier. I thought that the way that the other women in that class were characterized was like kind of cartoony and not super fair it did feel like they were so aggro and then I think Kathy Bates's character is supposed to be the voice of reason of like well I'm all for feminism but this is a bit much like that is kind of I choose to read it as because Kathy Bates's character is so repressed that it's going to feel very cartoony and absurd

to get to know your body and to learn to be empowered at first. But then she does a 180 eventually where she's like, She gets a tiny trampoline. I'm going to shoot some men. Yeah, I'm so glad that Frank died. Fuck all the wife beaters.

Their genitals should be shot off like she's going on this like tirade to ninny and then he's like oh no what have i done he's like oh my god she stresses ninny out i i like that ninny uh in some of it is like a little bit like uh i feel like advice you would get from a grandma uh which makes sense because that is ninny is a grandma but i i love that there is i mean their whole storyline is just like two women at different phases of aging being comfortable with themselves and like ninny offers her wisdom about like oh have you considered like taking hormones if that is going to make your like process of going through menopause easier

try that and kathy bates is like oh you're going through the change process of going through menopause easier try that and kathy bates is like oh you're going through the change she's going through the change and then she said something that sounded so much like my grandma which she was just like oh you're unhappy with your life put on some makeup get a job eat healthier i was like okay grandma but like but but it's very sweet and it's very well intentioned. Dude, my mom would be a different person without hormones. Bless hormones. I am not looking forward to the change.

I'm going to need all the hormones I need. But I like that there's no, the way they talk about it, there's no, even though Kathy Bates' character is like not comfortable having these conversations at first, there's not really any stigma around it. They're just talking about it. If Kathy Bates doesn't know something, she says so, or she's like, oh, what? And then Nini just explains what she means. And then Kathy Bates says, oh. And Nini's never trying to make her feel bad about herself.

She's so comfortable in who she is i love it that's exactly right like it's it's less an exploration i mean it is very gendered but it also is just like oh just being comfortable with who you are and finding yourself and realizing you're you don't have to be the perfect wife and it's not on you to do all that emotional labor super liberating i wish she dumped ed yeah dude i know ed was not gonna and do you think ed was gonna improve no way he's not gonna redeem himself i like when he threw the sushi oh yeah oh my god that that's my favorite scene he he's like what the hell is this and she's like it's a low cholesterol meal happy valentine and he's like are you trying to kill me and then she's like if i was gonna kill

you i'd use my hands and she's like bouncing around on this little exercise trampoline it was perfect i really enjoyed the guy who played her husband i really enjoyed his performance i had never seen him before he's been done a lot of character acting, but I mean, I thought he was a blast. He gave a great performance. He knew exactly who he was playing.

Best line is one of the best lines. How in the hell do you hit a car three times on accident? On accident. I really liked that. I mean, that scene and that scene is like kind of a little cartoony and portrays

younger women as just evil shrews that will just whip their head around and be like, deal with it old lady, which I have never seen happen. But you know, it for, know, for her character growth, the Karen-ness of it all is very present. But it is also kind of satisfying to watch her deliver that weird, like that smug insurance line of like, she's like,

I'm older and I've got more insurance. Now you're being classist, Kathy Bates. But I get what they were going for. I was on board just because of classist Kathy Bates but I I get what they were going for I was on board just because of how like Kathy Bates can just give the line read of a lifetime and then do something fun and like I'm never not gonna love that like when she says um I'm too young to be old and I'm too old to be young it's like I already. I felt that so hard, too. And it's weird, though, because when I first watched this as a 10-year-old, in a way, I mean, God, I mean, yes, the movie does a lot of things poorly. But representing women in their 40s and in their 80s, it did a pretty good job.

And it was like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's a whole stage of life, eh? Oh, marriage, not going to do that. Oops, did it. Then undid it. But there's a lot of that that I think sticks with you from a younger age. As a young woman watching this, I think it's nice. We don't have a lot of that now.

And definitely not in the early 90s. I don't know now. What are solid like women in their 40s films like i didn't see steel magnolias then but i saw beaches we'll look back definitely problematic but 40 year old women centered and i'm like i don't know movies now are like no you're just supposed to be 28 forever right right i mean book club that's but that's women in their 70s it's like there's no in between i i don't think that there's still not a lot of like i mean i feel like it maybe in indie movies it's more but it but a lot of times it's i think that there is i wish i had more like receipts to back this point up but maybe maybe you'll both see what i'm saying i think

that there is a lot that there is like a lot of like we see a lot of actresses over 40 but they're very rarely playing over 40 where they're like wow this is so cool she's over 40 and working but she's playing a 28 year old like so you know women being allowed to play roles their age is still i don't i think we're still there's a lot to be desired to be desired and i mean yeah there are just hardly any roles written for women characters who are 40 and above so the fact yeah the fact that like this movie uh focuses on two of them wow they. They should have focused on Cicely Tyson too, but whatever. Not whatever. I just am hung up.

I just love her. Okay. And again, this is, and I feel like it proves every time we cover a movie featuring, First Wives Club is another example of a movie that features women over 40. And these movies always do super well because people want like older women want to see themselves represented like and it like this movie did incredibly well and and i think the other trend that is connected to getting movies made about older women is that the only way a hollywood studio will green light it is if there are huge stars attached.

Where movies about older guys, you can kind of have been in, like, you could have played a corpse on NCIS twice. And they're like, you're hired. But for these movies, like, and again, First Wives Club is a good example. Like, three really incredibly popular actresses had to sign on to that movie for it to be possible. Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy had both been nominated for Oscars in the last two years when this movie was greenlit. So they were at this time, especially they were like, oh, for sure, people will see a movie like, yeah. Yeah. And and you have to imagine that if they were not kind of at the top of their game critically at this time like it would have been a lot harder to get a movie like this made but yeah there's definitely

not enough like good substantial roles written for older women where they can talk about that you know where aging can be a theme and not something that is like oh it's a huge success if you're able to conceal the fact that you're aging versus discussing it in detail the movie so their relationship is really nice i yeah i wish that uh you know i i mean i don't know how this would have been financially possible maybe that's why she doesn't dump ed but she's no she becomes a very successful mary kate worker like all of my friends moms so where's the problem i she should have kicked ed out and then been like all right ninny you we're roommates we're best friends ed is gonna have to make his own dinner from now on that's the ending we needed that happens i like to imagine that happens

yeah that's my headcanon the final the last thing i want to say is uh well i i think we would be remiss not to mention um ninny's horrible purple hair dye job that she gets from a judgey that was very judgy but she is objectively living to the fullest she likes it and that's what matters yeah um the other thing i did i did cackle when that happened because you just like don't see that coming and then it's not super relevant to the plot so you're just kind of like well i think it's part of it is like showing that evelyn is still abiding by these like this like southern politeness mentality of like oh this is awful but i can't say anything because i'm too polite but also like she's not going to be like your hair looks like shit ninny because it like i don't think anyone would say that i work for mary k now fix your face ninny deal with it

uh this is also high visibility for um makeup products at home like this stretch of years because we have we have edward scissorhands avon lady yeah and then a year later mary k gets throws their hat in the mix and they're like no guess avon who anyways they're both mlms so whoopsies um well as we hinted at a lot the movie definitely does pass the bechdel test it is uh passing between evelyn and ninny tons it passes between ruth and edgy tons. Almost, yeah. Almost every, I mean, I feel like outside of discussing the murder or Ed, men do not come up that much. And so, yeah. Right.

Which is great. I love, I love that for this movie. Unfortunately, though, if we're applying like the Vito Russo test to it, it does not pass because the characters are not identifiably queer. That's one of the contingencies of that test. It certainly does not pass the DuVernay test because black characters are just not allowed to be full characters. Right. They are only there to serve the white characters.

So with that in mind, let's go to the nipple scale. Yes. So zero to five nipples. Examining the movie through an intersectional feminist lens. I would give this movie, I think, three. I would have gotten higher had it not mishandled the representation of the black characters and sidelined them and failed to give them any kind of interiority or deeper characterization i think it would have gotten more had the characters been allowed to be identifiably queer and let us see some actual kissing let's see them embrace let's see them be romantic with each other.

Keep the food fight, but give us a kissing scene. Let the food fight turn into a steamy sex scene. Don't start. Okay. But I do really like the female characters that we get to know. Love Kathy Bates. Love the ninny character. I love Ruth and Igi and their relationship. Would have liked to seen more Sipsy, of course. Also, we didn't talk

about this character, but there's a character named Smokey who seems to be a person experiencing homelessness. He's characterized as like a depression era like drifter type and while he doesn't play an enormous role in this story i appreciated that some work was put into humanizing a person experiencing homelessness because so little media does that yeah um there's a lot to love about this movie but it is very very much of the 1991 Oscar bait frame of mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So. Yeah. And the Oscar bait, I feel like real, I mean, a lot of the choices this movie makes, I feel like directly ties to the Oscar bait element of like, if the Academy is going to think that we have gone, quote unquote, too far, then what's the point of making it? Which is like, it's like that to this day. But it's also like, probably just edgy enough for 91 that it's like, but like, we're doing something. We're making statements here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There are a few lightweight statements being made for sure. Yeah, but we look back on it almost 30 years later and we're like, well, yep, that was 30 years ago. That's where we were yeah um so yeah three nipples um i'll give two to sipsy and i'll give my remaining nipple to kathy bates uh yeah i'll go with three as well for this movie i think you know for its time it's doing a lot of things that a lot of movies aren't doing. I do think it's a huge deal that a queer writer was given authorship over her own work in a film adaptation. And that there were resources put behind it.

I think Norman Lear's production company was involved, which famously very progressive, wonderful person. So that's great. But I do agree i mean i think that it's like pretty clear that uh white people are the creative force behind this movie because of what it gets wrong or what it erases or and and they cicely ties in and then they don't use her and they don't even show her the biggest moment for the character for like suspense that doesn't who cares about the murder mystery really like that's not really why we're here um like you're saying i want i want an actual queer relationship i like it's so frustrating

to know that like the actors playing these characters were like thinking that and were this was informing their character but the finished product is not allowed to show that so that's frustrating uh but i really enjoyed this movie it made me cry a lot you never see women talk about aging on screen you don't usually see a lot of intergenerational friendships i always think that that's really nice and it was done in this like really lovely not condescending way um you also get um there's not much body diversity but with kathy bates you know she's she talks about kind of her insecurities with her size and is it handled the way we would want to see exactly perhaps not but the fact that the language is very 91 yeah she does a bit of fat shaming of herself which is something i've done a lot

throughout my entire life she also has a line at some point where she says something like i just wish i had the courage to get really fat which is another thought I've had quite a bit uh so you know I just I I guess I just found her her attitude toward her body to be very relatable and then part of her evolution is like well I'm not gonna she's like I'm gonna start exercising I have to change the way I look and then she refers to her like former self as a blob from a horror movie so like which I don't love I do I do think that it very least it's framed that she is like doing the exercise stuff for herself and not for her husband which is I don't like the language she uses around it but I did appreciate that they made it pretty clear that she was making these changes for herself and she was like happier for

sure for having made these changes for herself so in that way i was like good for kathy base yes this movie is is lovely and it and i really i mean when ruth died i was i was so invested in that relationship and when ruth dies i just cried so much um so'm going to give three nipples as well. I'm going to give one nipple to Cicely Tyson. I'm going to give one. And then I think I just, I love Mary Louise Parker so much. I'm going to give her the opportunity. I want to know what Mary Louise Parker

has to say about the film. She's the one person I don't think we have heard from. Yeah, I wonder. Let's call her. Yeah, I wonder. Let's call her. Yeah, give her a little ringy poo. Come over. Francesca, what about your nipple rating?

What do you think? I'm going to give it four nipples, but only because I am new to this and it is very much stuck in time. It is stuck in 91 interpreting the 30s and it is Oscar bait and I don't expect all movies to be all things to

all people. It is very problematic in a lot of ways but I think you got four very strong and very different female characters. Evelyn, Ninny, Igi, but maybe they're the three, maybe they're the same and ruth and

they're excellent yeah would have loved more sipsy but you got four strong female characters with backstories with interesting lives with all these things you get four they have a bunch of conversations that don't involve men yeah and make me cry three times four times however many times needed to be more nipples if they had actual nipples you'd get the five if we had seen some steamy sex scenes yes runner really boosted that okay so francesca because you asked i was like has mary louise parker said anything about this uh she did say something about it in 2008 so this was on Ellen uh 12 years before she was handily canceled but anyways Mary Louise Parker goes on Ellen Ellen asked her about this movie Mary Louise Parker says uh you know I love my lesbian fans um and then she talks about

something that is not so she so we know that uh And then she goes on to say later in the interview that, or the after Ellen interviewer, I don't know who was doing interview, whatever. Do you ever wish the storyline on fried green tomatoes was a little bit more Mary Louise Parker says, yes. Well,

in some ways I do. I tried to make it a bit more articulated at the time, but they didn't want to go that way. And in many ways I wish it was then in some ways I think maybe the audience wouldn't have gone there so I don't know I have mixed feelings about it because I really tried to push it at the time and they didn't want to go there with me um and then after Ellen asks who didn't want to go there and Mary Louise Parker says no one uh and then after Ellen says not even your co-star and Mary Louise Parker says oh no Mary Stewart definitely did and Fanny Flagg did but not the director not the producer nobody else but I

was really trying to push it and they were like no so none of the men none of the none of the men who get the final say on this project about women so I we we know that the three main you know women involved in this storyline really wanted it. And they said, no, no, no, no, no. So maybe Fanny Flagg was being diplomatic in those interviews. Maybe we should ask her. Let's let's call her, too. Well, director John Evnett famously said about this movie and his approach to the relationship between those two women.

He says, quote, I had no interest in going into the bedroom. about this movie and his approach to the relationship between those two women he says quote i had no interest in going into the bedroom and it's like then get out of the movie stinky you're gonna have sex in the kitchen as you said yeah um so that's that's the movie thank you so much for being thank you for letting me talk so much about this film. Where can people check out your stuff online, follow your social media, et cetera? At Franny Fio on all the things, Twitter, Instagram, and the Bituation Room podcast.

Yes, listen to that, please. Yeah, listen, find that, and thank you guys. Thank you. Of course, thank you for being here. You can follow us on social media at Bechtel cast on Twitter and Instagram. You can check out our Patreon, AKA Matreon. It's $5 a month.

It gets you two bonus episodes every single month. What a bargain. And you get access to the entire back catalog of our bonus episodes, which is now over 70 of them. You love to hear it. You can get our merch over on tpublic.com slash the Bechtel cast. You can get a mask now. Pretty fun.

Pretty cool. And we love you so much. Yes. Talk to you next week. Tawanda! Tawanda! I'm NK, and this is Basket Case. What is wrong with me?

A show about the ways that mental illness is shaped by not just biology. Swaps of different meds. But by culture and society. By looking closely at the conditions that cause mental distress, I find out why so many of us are struggling to feel sane, what we can do about it, and why we should care. Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady Rebel. Like, what does that even mean? It's right here in black and white in print. It's bigger than a flag or mascot.

Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.