The Bechdel Cast - Inception

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Caitlin and Jamie go into an episode within an episode within an episode to analyze Inception.(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. 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. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.

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And this season, we're taking an even 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 iHeartTrue Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. Hello, listeners. It's Caitlin and from the future the future and we're just popping in with a note about this episode which is that we recorded and released it before elliot page came out as a trans man so if you listen to the episode in the present day it may sound like we are misgendering elliot and dead naming them so that might seem kind of jarring and careless but again it's just that we were not

to know at the time of this episode's recording um yeah that is just something we want to make you aware of we don't want to jump scare you uh it. So yeah, because of when this episode was recorded, we are unfortunately using a dead name because we did not yet know. And with that, here's the episode. On the Bechdel cast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands

or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effing vast. Hey, Caitlin. Yes, Jamie. Do you ever think, well, that we might not be podcasting at all? Are we in a dream? And then we like look and then you look over like your shoulder all sexy and you're like, it's a dream. And then I go, no. And that's basically the movie, folks. That's it.

The whole. more or less welcome to the Bechtel cast all due respect to Hans Zimmer this like you have to imagine Christopher Nolan was like I just want the soundtrack to sound like a large electronic fart because it's so like it's just it's overwhelming welcome to the Bechdel cast yes this is the Bechdel cast in which uh well hello I'm I'm Caitlin I'm Jamie and we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens. With as little sound effects as possible. We pull from, we use the Bechdel test as a jumping off point for discussion, pulling from a media metric invented by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes referred to as the Bechdel-Wallace test, that requires, for our purposes, that two people of a marginalized gender talk about something with each other.

They also have to have names. And they talk about something that is other than a cis man for more than two lines of dialogue. I have to be honest. Okay, we're also covering Inception today. I was so, I was like, it's probably a no for this one but I was surprised but we'll yeah we'll yeah I guess it's it's to all of our to all of our listeners who aren't actually listeners who think we just talk about whether it passes the Bechdel test or not that's incorrect but I was pleasantly surprised i'm like does ellen page talk to marion cotillard at any time the answer but then i also have i have that answer but then i also have a

counter argument that's a whole thing oh sure uh yeah same we're talking about inception today we are okay okay i'm wondering if we hit on the same thing. I'm just like getting a big Jumanji energy from all of this. But yeah, Jumanji the new one. Wait, in what way? What do you mean? In the way that we had that discussion about Jack Black in Jumanji, I have sort of a similar feeling about Marion Cotillard in Inception. Got it. Right. Because her character is actually, oh, it's a projection of a man. Yeah. It's like, I don't know if that counts as a female character because he says to her, like, you're not you. You're me. So I'm like, OK. It seems like it's been confirmed in text.

Very. I mean, this is this is like I was really I don't know. I had to go on a walk. Well, also, I mean, and we'll talk about this but like how little does he think of his wife his wife if his projections of her behave the way that she does because she's like the villain of the movie anyway we'll talk about it she is yeah she's a whore and then at the end he kind of like retcons the whole thing. He's like, yeah, I'm kind of really remembering you falsely and exclusively at your worst. So.

Right. That's kind of on me. And you're like, yeah, I would say that that is definitely on you. But don't worry. Ellen Page is there to just constantly be like, you're great. And that's her character. The Redeemer and the Projection. This is what we have to work with with Inception, people.

This is what we have to work with. Yes. So what is your experience with Inception, Caitlin? I saw it in theaters in 2010. I think like many people quite enjoyed it. It was hailed as being, you know, one of the smartest and most profound movies of the decade for a while. And I was admittedly fully on board that ship for quite some time. And then I don't remember exactly when this happened, but I felt like there was some kind of cultural shift where a lot of people were like, you know

what, maybe Inception isn't as awesome and as smart as we thought it was. Maybe it's actually kind of silly. And then I also... Midway through the decade, I feel like there was kind of this mass. I wonder if it was like when it hit streaming or something, but there was kind of this mass. I wonder if it was like when it hit streaming or something. But there was kind of, yeah, like a mass like, hold on. I just rewatched Inception for the first time since 2010. And it's silly. Right. And I also, you know, boarded that ship for a while.

Yeah. But I have then jumped on. These are deliberate Titanic references. I have jumped off of that i was gonna say hong kong i have jumped off of that door and climbed back onto the sinking titanic of inception being a good movie and i am firmly in that camp again and I and when I say that I'm it is extremely pretentious it is so far up its own ass but it's like at some point in Chris like I feel like not to movie blame but at this point if you're going to a Christopher Nolan movie and leaving like that was so pretentious it's like at this at this point, he's made 11 movies. You gotta, if you're showing up, you gotta be ready for a pretentious thing to happen.

It's true. There's no, I would argue there's really no excuse at this point to not know that Christopher Nolan makes some of the most pretentious stuff in the game. I feel like we've been on kind of a similar-ish journey with it where I saw it. This movie came out, I think, I don't know. Either like the year, yeah, I guess it would be like shortly before I went to college.

Because imagine going to film school right after this movie came out. Like just droves of 18-year-old boys that are just like i'm gonna make my inception and like just i mean students of all genders but you know i would i would argue a male heavy group that were just like oh my god like just just really very into inception i definitely liked it i thought it was really smart i saw it in 3d and I got a headache the first time so then I had to see it a second time in 2d and I really liked it that second time the first time I was like I have a migraine but I really liked it and then similar to you I saw it kind of midway through the decade after and then I think I had soured to it because I was in film school when all the 18 year

old boys were really frothing at the mouth regarding Christopher Nolan sure and I didn't love that so I think I soured towards it kind of early but then every and and then I realized and then I think midway through the decade I'm like this movie is such a waste of Marion Cotillard because I saw La Vie en Rose which she won her Oscar for and I was like oh my god she is so talented how did Christopher Nolan like hire her after she like did a performance like that and then gave her this role but in any case re-watching it I I watched it a month ago before we decided we were doing this just for fun and it's i guess it's it's a variation on a romp it's a pretentious romp yes i think it's like a very heady romp yes

i would agree with that it's extremely watchable it is too long for sure it's two and a half hours and that's just offensive but oh my gosh i i do really appreciate the world building as far as like a script goes it's a pretty you know it's potentially confusing the whole dream within a dream million layers of dreams thing you know i i don't know like you can enjoy this i can say from like, you can enjoy this, I can say from personal experience, you can enjoy this movie without fully understanding exactly what's going on. Yes.

And still just be like, okay, that could have been a plot hole. I could have missed something. But, like, well, I guess they're all wearing white now. Like, I don't know why that reveal has always made me laugh when they cut to like everyone's in the snow and everyone's wearing white and it just like watching it this time I'm like I feel like Kanye West's like property in Wyoming is like this where everyone's just like wearing the same outfit and it's huge and kind of scary yeah but but it's just like

I don't know it's so over the top I appreciate I really like the practical effects in this movie. Great practical effects. I love the cast, except for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Oh, no, I like him. I think I see. I think that what is aged the worst about this movie are it's it's treatment of gender and casting Joseph Gordonph gordon levitt in a large role i'm just kind of done with him i don't know what what it was that like turned me on joseph gordon levitt but i'm like he was in everything for five years and then he kind of was like where'd he go but

then i was like i guess i just haven't been i haven't asked myself that question but he was in everything he was in every genre and he was so chatty and I was just like I need a break I understand that um yeah I mean to me there's there's a lot to like about this movie in terms of pure entertainment value I'm not watching it because I'm like i want to see strong representation of women because you certainly won't find that no here but but i do i love that do you remember what a big deal it was that ellen page was in this movie this was like kind of ellen page's like cinematic glow up like she'd never been in like a gigantic movie like this before i remember being really excited about that.

Right, because this was post Juno, right? Yeah, Juno's 07. But Juno wasn't like a huge blockbuster hit kind of thing. Right. She was kind of an indie darling for a long time. And then this was kind of her big, and I guess kind of for Marion Cotillard too, in terms of like big American movies. This was her like huge spotlight, too.

So that's at least good. Yeah. I don't I'm I'm reaching. But I still enjoy watching it. Yeah. Even when I had kind of soured on it, I still enjoyed watching it. I have to admit. So and I honestly i like okay just to quickly address right at the top

all of the icky news items being bandied about about christopher nolan just about the way he treats his workers sounds absolutely atrocious did you see that news item that was like christopher nolan tells his employees they're not allowed to sit down for 13 hours and you're like well that's certainly unethical like he has a and I feel like this kind of even before we talk about the movie this is such a problem with I would say largely male auteur directors where while it is genuinely cool and amazing like we were just saying to kind of see a person with a vision that has carte blanche in terms of money like that very rarely happens but it when it does it always happens to white men but like yep in any case but the fact that on top of that it's just

like every with little exception like all the stories you hear about these types of directors they're just ego tripping uh you know over their own ego dick or whatever like it's it's just it's it is really frustrating to hear and also the fact that he was so he was like we have to release Tenet in the middle of a pandemic I don't care I have no regard for human life which you already made clear by the fact that his employees aren't allowed to sit down which is unethical which is ableist which is on and on and on right big systemic issues with the film industry so we're not I think we've made this clear in our Dark Knight episode as well we are not vouching for Christopher Nolan he sounds like a complete asshole right oh I just and and and it and I'm just like god damn it why are the movies fun you know it's very frustrating his movies are very and I'm excited to see Tenet so am I I want to see it I'm pissed off I'm so annoyed I'm

like oh I love John David Washington and I want to see Kenneth Branagh play a Russian villain like oh my oh yeah yeah it sounds fun I'll see it I just it pisses me off yeah it's like you hate to see it but then also in your heart of hearts you kind of love to see it and i really hope that uh warner brothers starts to force him to treat his employees ethically you know yes i have infinite trust of a large corporation like warner brothers i'm sure they'll do the right thing oh of course 100 when haven't they don yeah, don't check the receipts on that one. In any case, fuck Christopher Nolan. But unfortunately, we enjoy watching his movies. Yeah, his sensibilities are like extremely in my wheelhouse because he's usually doing, I mean, this movie is a like action sci-fi heist movie, which is like extremely like

up my alley. I was reading about and I was just like, oh I mean I feel like he gets criticized pretty frequently for like how sometimes people think his movie the themes of his movies are like a bit too similar and I think that the way he treats gender in his movies there's a lot of overlapping problems uh just a real fixation on advancing the plot by killing off cis white women yes but in any case i i don't even remember what point i was arriving at i just got mad at him again i i feel like i i want i feel like a lot of people we're not alone in having a complicated relationship with the works of Christopher Nolan. Sure.

And I wonder if it's generational. I wouldn't be surprised if the generation after us is sort of not, in the way that we're like, oh, fuck Stanley Kubrick. We have no sentimental attachment to him. Where I feel like it's possible that some of our attachment to Christopher Nolan is sentimental. I don't know. That could be. Nostalgia is a real emotion, as it turns out. Yeah.

God damn it. Well, should I try to recap this movie? Yeah, have fun. I'll just, yeah, I'll. Yeah, please do the sound effects. I'll be, yeah, I'll. Yeah, please do the sound effects. I'll be the top. Did you used to have, okay, I, this is really embarrassing, but I, I don't know, especially right after I watch a movie, I'm really easily like taken in by it.

Sure. Because it turns out media is influential to your life. But I did like for like a week, just a week. But I did like carry around a little totem with me for like a week after I saw this movie. I'm like, I had. Is that horrible? That's really embarrassing. Only because I would never expect you to do something like that, especially for a movie like Inception.

I carried around dice for a week. I carried around. Was it Ellen Page that had the dice? I had dice. I'm like, yeah, I should carry around dice. It was Joseph Gordon-Levitt has the dice. Even worse. Well, that makes sense because when this movie came out, I was so I was like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, genius, sexy, sensitive.

Do you remember he used to have that website called Hit Record Joe? Yes. Yeah, I had like the DVDs of that. Me too. I was just I don't know. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, I think is probably a wonderful person, but like he's just so corny. I don't know. Anyways, I carried around the dice and that's on me. That's incredible. I didn't do that.

But as you recall, I used to, well, I still have the ring from Lord of the Rings on a necklace. Yes. That I only ever wore when I was cosplaying as Frodo, which I did do multiple times. One of the most iconic pictures of you of all time because you're selling it and you're so happy. I'm fully in character. Yes. Thank you so much.

Okay. So the recap of Inception. Okay. This is a two and a half hour movie and the plot is very complicated. So I did my best to simplify it as much as possible. There's parts that I kind of gloss over a lot. So if you really want to know what the movie's about, just watch it. But here we go. Yeah, it's on Amazon Prime. If you're, you know, also in Jeff Bezos's pocket because no ethical consumption it's there indeed

okay so we open on Leonardo DiCaprio in the water and we're like what is this the end of Titanic I have okay this is a really early point to interrupt but I I had a thought and then I consulted the one other person I've seen in the past six months, Isaac. I was like, I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio in his career is very often on the beach or in a body of water fully clothed. It happens a lot. A lot. Well, he's literally in a movie called The Beach. But I feel like I don't know. He wears clothes for a lot of the movie he's literally in a movie called the beach but i feel like i don't i don't know

he wears clothes for a lot of the movie yeah yeah i feel like he's fully clothed in the water in titanic he is in a body of water at some point during shutter island clothed clothed in the water in inception what is it with this guy and being clothed in the water just a fun movie trend wow i'll keep my eye on that yeah everyone in the comments uh shout out your favorite leonardo dicaprio clothed in a body of water i guess in the revenant he's clothed in the snow and also great gatsby dies in the pool fully clothed he's clothed in water all the time okay it's a trope it's it's a trope specific to one actor that has no implications of anything unlike most tropes this trope is meaningless and i don't know why it is so or does it have meaning jamie where you just have to discover

the meaning is he in the water in Gilbert Grape? I'm just like, maybe it's every movie. Yes, he is. Well, he's not clothed. But there's that scene where he gets left in the tub overnight. And he's really cold. But he's naked. Okay.

Well, I guess that's an outlier. So does it count? Well, maybe someone saw that movie and they're like but what if he was fully clothed and then that it's just the rest of his career i don't know i don't know what maybe it's in his contract he's like in every movie i'm in you are contractually obligated to write a scene in which I am. Because there's another scene where he gets dunked in the tub in Inception and he is fully clothed. Fully clothed. In the beginning, remember?

And it's not just like, oh, a t-shirt and shorts. It's like he has like layers on. Yeah. In all of these movies. He's like fully dolled up, fully clothed underwater. Happens to him constantly. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Okay, that's all I had to say.

Does he go into a body of water in Wolf of Wall Street? I have to imagine. Well, he's on a yacht at one point. Oh, that's true. There's probably swimming pools. I'm going to try to make a gallery for our Instagram of Leonardo DiCaprio underwater in clothes. It's just so bizarre. Is he in water in like Gangs of New York?

Oh, I still haven't seen that. I know people love it. It's a slog. I'll tell you what. Really? Oh, I thought it was a romp. I was wrong. Oh, no, I'm thinking of Catch Me If You Can.

People love Catch Me If You Can. Oh, yeah, I do. Like Catch Me If You Can was a romp. I was wrong. Oh, no, I'm thinking of Catch Me If You Can. People love Catch Me If You Can. Oh, yeah, I do. Like Catch Me If You Can is a romp. Does he go underwater in that one? You know what? I would not be surprised at all. I don't remember if he does or not, but it seems very possible in that movie. This is mind blowing to me.

This is I don't know. I'll source some images, post it to our instagram be like any any film critics have something to weigh in with here it's i feel like the other underwater trope is like a white girl in a teen movie going underwater in a pool to reflect on her changing life which is a more gendered trope with implications whereas this is just chaos i don't know why it happens well i think we should start a new podcast about it okay i agree a spinoff okay um so okay lee leo his character's name is Cobb. He is in the business of extracting information from people's minds by way of infiltrating their dreams. So he and Arthur, that's Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are trying to extract something from Mr. Saito,

whose name is also pronounced Mr. Saito sometimes. So I don't know which one it is because the characters say it differently. There's no continuity. The character never corrects. We just don't know. It's annoying. Yes.

And he's played by Ken Watanabe. An iconic character actor. Love him. Yes. Same. So they're trying to extract something from him and they are inside of his dream in the beginning of the movie also in this dream is mall played by marion cotillard which did you did you learn that that okay this is like peak christopher nolan but mall is french

for bad or evil uh if you want to just finish. How simplistically Christopher Nolan views gender. He's like, okay, woman, woman, woman. Okay, bad. I'm getting bad. I'm getting bad. Okay, we can't just name her bad. I guess we'll have to make it French.

Yikes. Yes. yikes yes so maul is cobb's his wife and she has a habit of popping up in dreams throughout the movie and we will later find out why exactly so it turns out that mr saito knows that he's asleep and that they're all in his dream but wait a minute they're still in a dream they're in a dream within a dream and now he's impressed and they all wake up from the various levels of this opening dream and seto is like okay i want you to do an inception rather than extracting something from someone's mind he wants an idea to be planted in someone else's mind and And Arthur's like, that's not possible. But Cobb is like, um, actually it is.

Um, actually. But it's really hard. Fortunately, Mr. DiCaprio, Mr. Cloth Underwater himself, has the goods. Yes. So he's like, it's possible. It's really hard. You just have to go really deep into a person's mind and he's reluctant to do it but saito is like if you do this for me i will make it so you can return

to the u.s because cob has two young children who he can't go home to but we also don't know why yet exactly so the idea that saito once planted is in the mind of the son of saito's main competitor he owns some kind of energy conglomerate it's all vaguely evil yeah yeah saito wants the son to walk away from his inheritance to break up the empire and i don't know if that's because he's basically trying to avoid his competitor from establishing a monopoly. And I'm like, okay, well, that's good. Like monopoly shouldn't exist. But I feel like it's because he wants to have the monopoly instead. I think that's kind of my question is, as I was at first, I'm like, oh, this is there's a really fun, like, leftist way to look at this. But then the more I thought about it, I'm like, oh, this is there's a really fun, like leftist way to look at this. But then the more I thought about it, I'm like, actually, I don't think that that is true.

It seems like the reason they want the monopoly broken up are also capitalistic and pretty selfish. Uh huh. So zero out of 10 on that end. Yeah. Because I was like, oh, I forgot this kind of angle of how do you is it Cillian Murphy? I think it's Killian. Killian Murphy. But I'm not sure.

Who has beautiful eyes. I think every time I see this movie, I'm like, wow. And then also his his whole thing is ultimately movies are about fathers and sons, which is just like, all right, I guess we're doing this again. Right. In any case. Yeah, I was thinking about that and I don't think it's actually I mean it's kind of like they're sort of doing the right thing but it's not for the right reasons so right confusing not enough information but yeah what seems to be

there is not good okay so now Cobb and Arthur have to find a new architect, basically someone who creates the worlds of the dreams that they go into. So they recruit Ariadne, which is Ellen Page's character, and they show her the ropes, and we learn that time in the dream world moves more quickly or more slowly. I don't know. Basically five minutes in the real world gets you one hour in dream world. And then we also learn about totems, which are the little objects that help these people

distinguish dreams from reality. They recruit Eames, aka Tom Hardy, to be a forger, basically someone who impersonates other people within dreams. And then they also recruit a chemist named Yusuf to create sedatives to keep people asleep and let them go deep enough. Who's the scientist from Avatar? Is he? I don't remember. Yes. Okay. Yes. I went deep down the rabbit hole because I'm like, I like this character actor. Where have I seen him before? And I'm like, Avatar. And then it was like, what has he done since Inception?

Literally, avatars. Oh. I think he's just been like trapped in New Zealand for 10 years. Yeah. Because Avatar. Well, James Cameron will do that. Yeah. So his participation in the story is necessary because they need these powerful sedatives.

Because for Inception, you need to go down. Like Cobb is like, we have to go down three levels. A dream within a dream within a dream. We also learn that Maul is actually dead. And we're like, well, it's a Christopher Nolan movie, I guess. That stands to reason. That tracks. So whenever we see her in any dreams, she is just Cobb's projection of her. And we find out the reason that he can't go home and see his kids is that people think that Cobb killed her.

So they start planning the infiltration. There's the kick that they have to synchronize. Something, something, the kick. Right. the kick that they have to synchronize something something the kick right and they figure out if they get stuck in the third level of the dream it might be like 10 or more years that they're trapped so they have to like make sure that that doesn't happen and the time comes to sneak into killing murphy's dream his name is mr fisher they're on a long flight from Sydney to L.A. That's when they go in. They hack into his brain. But there's not a Matthew Lillard to be found.

Where is Matthew Lillard in Hackers? Where? In this movie. Missed opportunity. So they get into the first level of the dream. They have a rough start. Cobb's subconscious projections keep interfering. Saito gets shot. You know, they're trying to get a combination from Fisher. All this stuff I'm going to kind of gloss over. They get into the next level, the dream within a dream. Cobb tells Fisher that he's like, by the way, you're in a dream. Spoiler. And he convinces him that Fisher's like he's like by the way you're in a dream spoiler and he convinces him that

fisher's uncle peter is conspiring against him and convinces fisher to go into the next level of the dream with them which ends up being this kind of remote fortress in the snowy mountains right this is like the everyone is wearing matching outfits and has a machine gun question mark. Right. Yeah. You're just like, all right, I guess we're here. Sure. Chaos is happening all around them and in the other levels of the dream. In the third level, just as Fisher is about to open a safe, which will effectively be the moment of inception.

Maul comes in and shoots Fisher, which means that Cobb and Ariadne have to, is that how you say her name? No idea. Again, I think different characters say it differently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because like at one point, Michael Caine's like Ariadne, except in a British accent. Right.

And you're like, is it just because he's British? I don't know. Not sure. I'm like, stop choosing these names if you're not going to tell your actors how to pronounce them. Right? Christopher Nolan, it's like literally, you've made 500 movies. Tell your cast how to pronounce the name. Yep.

Oh, well. Shouldn't be that hard. And yet. Nope. Yep. Oh, well, shouldn't be that hard. And yet. OK, so she and Cobb have to go down to yet another layer of the dream, I think, so that they can keep going and get the job done. So now they're in like the fourth layer of dream world. And when they're down there, Cobb reveals that it was him who incepted Maul with the idea that maybe reality isn't reality and that's why she killed herself because that's something we learn happened but now he's he's finally able to let go of the guilt and he stays behind to find Saito, who has died in Dreamworld and will be stuck in limbo.

So Cobb finds him, which is the scene that the movie opens on. And then everyone, you know, wakes up from the various levels of the dream. We get back to reality on the plane. Fisher has been successfully incepted and then everyone gives each other a meaningful look. It really, oh my god and the Hans Zimmer is blasting that everyone's just like we did it we did it we did it we did it we did it Ellen Page is like I forgive you and you're like why right then Cobb returns home to see his children but the ending is left ambiguous because of the spinning top.

We don't know if he's in a dream or the real world. And it's like, Christopher Nolan, just let us see the top fall over, you coward. No, I think that that's like, I was like, that's pretty cool. That is never not a cool choice to me. I'm like, oh, you got. No, I hate it because your team rose went to sleep and it's like you know i like that they don't tell you and it's a little wobbly and you're like oh oh oh like oh my god it's fun you can argue about it with your friends on the way home. It's movie fun. Whatever. I'm like, what am I saying?

I think. Yeah. Why are you trying to die on this hill? No idea. I retract dying on this hill. Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come right back to discuss. 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.

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Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours. EPM 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. intergenerational conversation between Latinas from Gen X to Gen Z. We're covering everything from body image to representation in film and television. We even interview iconic Latinas like Puerto Rican actress Ana Ortiz. I felt in control of my own physical body and my own self. I was on birth control. I had sort of had my first sexual experience. If you're in your señora era or know someone who is, then this is the show for you. We're your hosts, Diosa and Mala, and you might recognize us from our flagship podcast, Locatora Radio. We're so excited for you to hear our brand new podcast, Señora Sex Ed. Listen to Señora Sex Ed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple push record, right? Okay.

And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba, and the piña colada from Puerto Rico. So all of these... We have, we think, Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the 9th century B.C.

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ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And... We're back. Oh, Christopher Nolan. Where do we, I mean, okay, I have a really quick rundown.

I'm trying to, I'm struggling to remember exactly how much of this talk we have sort of had to an extent in our Dark Knight episode. But I just wanted to give a quick rundown of, I feel like it is semi-common knowledge among movie lovers, aficionados, if you will, that Christopher Nolan tends to kill off female characters,

fridging, we call it, killing off a female character, usually the significant other of the main male protagonist, in order to advance the plot in a rather lazy, sexist way. I think Christopher Nolan is one of the foremost offenders of this trope in modern movies. I will at very least say that it appears that he has at least, I mean, it took him a long time, but it seems like someone has brought this to his attention at some point because we have at this,

as of this recording, we have not seen Tenet, but it seems like at least in his past two movies, he has not fridged female characters in interstellar i don't believe it happens and then there's like a dead there's a dead wife but her death isn't integral to the plot and then what dunkirk aka boy island has zero women so i think he kind of gets off on a technicality by not including women at all. But just a quick rundown of how this very, and I think it ties into a lot of how much Christopher

Nolan pulls from film noir, and especially in this movie, the femme fatale tropes that he is referencing without building on at all. But how a dead, hot, cis, white, hetero woman factors into his plots, it's remarkable. Okay, so apparently his first feature, which I've never seen, called Following, has a beautiful dead girl is the twist at the end. There's a twist at the end, spoiler, and it's a dead white girl.

Okay, Memento. girl is the twist at the end there's a twist at the end spoiler and it's a dead white girl okay memento okay so i'm pulling here from a blog post from overthinkingit.com where they very succinctly put this so uh memento a man with amnesia is obsessed with finding the killer of his beautiful wife yes insomnia a detective plays a cat and mouse game with the killer of a beautiful Yes. the beautiful woman they both love is killed inception a dream thief struggles with the crushing guilt of his wife taking her own life and that gets us up to so at this point like this is the like sixth or seventh time that christopher nolan has done this exact thing yes i am all for a director i like i don't really have an issue with like i appreciate that christopher nolan seems to be really interested in the concept of time and time manipulation that's his thing not a problem but he dismisses female characters the same way yes every time

it's like not just insensitive it's also stunningly lazy it's like get some new material bro like write a new premise seriously if i was chris i know christopher nolan's um his wife emma thomas is a producer on i think maybe every single one of his movies if i were her i would just be so nervous i'm just like my husband seems really like fixated on a wife being dead in order to move on with their life like yeah what is he trying to tell me also this is his brother writes some of the movies too so jonathan nolan is also at fault here sure yes for being obsessed with dead white ladies i just think it's it's just so strange and this movie i think is this and memento for me are tied with them for the most egregious examples of this and the prestige and the prestige yeah and we did talk quite a bit about

fridging in the dark knight episode because the character whose name escapes me. Oh, no. Rachel Dawes. She gets fridged or. Maggie Gyllenhaal at death. But Katie Holmes at other points in her life. Right. She gets.

Violence is, you know, people are violent toward her three different times in that movie if i'm remembering correctly the final time being when she dies yeah absolutely so yeah there's there's constant fridging all to advance the plot of christian bale and famously i frankenstein i mean go to the matrion to hear everything the whole teapot was spilled on iFrankenstein I'm not

seeing the thread how does iFrankenstein connect? Aaron Eckhart oh right because he plays Harvey Dent in okay I get it now but then he later plays mr i mr adam frankenstein it sounds so ridiculous to say out loud adam frankenstein but that's the character's name uh but that's the only ridiculous thing about the movie otherwise it's everything else

makes total sense uh but yeah i i uh and i mean a lot of these christopher nolan movies i enjoy in a macro sense but it is kind of stunning how this same thing happens over and over and over and i think that especially how maul maul's character i'll just call her bad uh how how bad's character is treated in this movie is very almost beat for beat pretty similar to how the oh i'm not remembering the character's name but the the his wife in the prestige is treated where it's like she loses touch she doesn't know what's real what isn't and ends up taking her own life and then men argue for an hour and you're just like why is this a thing wait what i remember from that i need to re-watch the prestige but the main thing i remember from that movie is a woman dying in the

very beginning and that's sort of like initiating that rivalry does another woman die no i'm referring to that woman but then she comes back through flashbacks and stuff like that. Sorry, that's what I meant. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, I think it's, I believe it's Piper Perabo, who is the, his wife. Okay, got it. In that movie. Bottom line, yes, Christopher Nolan has a terrible track record when it comes to including women in his movie he has a real fixation on a woman has to be fridged and more specifically die in a movie to characterize my male protagonist violently yeah die violently especially like memento and insomnia the whole point of the movie doesn't happen unless a woman is killed violently.

Like it's really frustrating. I came across this very helpful paper by, I believe, a Swedish writer whose name I'm going to butcher. And I apologize. It's Sverre Sigfusen. I'll link it. I apologize. I almost certainly got that wrong. But they wrote a paper called Noir Guilt Complex, The Death of Women as a Catalyst

for Character Development and Plot in the Films of Christopher Nolan. And basically, I mean, a lot of it is stuff we're going to be discussing anyways. But I did think it was interesting and I had never quite made this connection very explicitly before of how dependent Christopher Nolan is on film noir tropes in order

for his movies to work and how I think like it's been regarded as like oh you know Christopher Nolan is updating film noir when it's like, you know, maybe he is aesthetically and effects wise, but in its treatment of women, I would argue it's like even more regressive than your average film noir where you have obviously you have your femme fatale, who I think Maul falls into that very cleanly, down to her haircut for some reason. She looks like it's a film noir movie, even though it's 2010, and everyone else looks like it's 2010,

but whatever. But she falls very cleanly into that. But at least in most film noirs, which we have yet to cover on the show, but just, I mean, I've seen some of them. I'm not a huge fan, but at least part of what distinguished a femme fatale is she is always, you know, connected to the mystery

and she's often manipulative. There's definitely a lot of negative tropes in there, but at very least part of what makes a femme fatale interesting is that they have agency that at that time it was unusual for a female character to have. Right. And I feel like Christopher Nolan presents you with the aesthetics and some of the hallmarks of a femme fatale, but then generally strips her of agency entirely.

So in some ways it's like even worse. I don't know. Right. Oh, yeah. Well, let me tell you a little something that Christopher Nolan himself said in an interview with Wired in 2010, shortly after the movie came out, because he was asked about his like noir references in his movies and particularly in Inception. quote the key noir reference is the character mall it was very important to me that she come across as a classic femme fatale so he is literally identifying her as such that was extremely deliberate on his part okay back to the quote the rest of the quote is the character in her relationship to cobb's psyche is the literal manifestation of what the femme fatale always meant in film noir. The neuroses of the protagonist, his fear of how little he knows about the woman he's fallen in love with, that kind of thing, end quote.

See, I feel like, I mean, you know, everyone is free to interpret anything any way they like, but that seems like a pretty unsophisticated interpretation of what a femme fatale is supposed to, like, I feel like he's kind of telling on himself there a little bit, because to me, that's never been to me what a femme fatale is, as a manifestation of the male protagonist's insecurities. Like, I think that's how Christopher Nolan's femme fatales present. But I don't think that that's so I mean for me I I always viewed the femme fatale in terms of like the negative stereotypes associated with them of being like the threat of a woman who is sexually empowered and has agency and that this presents a danger to the protagonist and like it, it falls into the, you know, stereotype that women are always trying to deceive you.

And you can't trust women when they say yes, they mean no. When they say no, they mean yes. And to me, that was where those tropes lie. So the fact that he interprets femme fatales that way is also like kind of, I don't know,

telling to me, I guess. Yeah. And maybe that's just like the way he thinks he's updating. But no, he says like this is a very classic femme fatale. So yeah, I don't know exactly what to make of this. Aside from he extremely intentionally wrote Maul as a femme fatale, which in itself is sort of confusing to me because as we already hinted at, the character that we see on screen as Maul is in some cases in flashback, she is a real person and alive in the context of that flashback but most of the time we see her she is a projection of cobb's subconscious right so she's not even real she's just his guilt-ridden

version of her buried deep in his subconscious which is also in text explicit too like they say that by the end which brings me to i mean like we've we're sort of referencing this at the beginning but i even though there is an exchange in this movie that on its surface may appear to pass the bechdel test i feel like with the exception of a few flashback lines most of the time we hear maul speak she's speaking through cobb's subconscious and so i don't think that really qualifies as a female protagonist because it's made explicitly clear in text that she is a manifestation of his which is like I mean could you have less agency no right you're being repeatedly murdered but

you're also just a projection of your husband. But we get to see her die violently several times. Don't worry. Yep. Yes, we do. Does it pass the Bechdel test when Ariadne kills her in the end? And does it pass the Bechdel test when she stabs Ariadne toward the beginning of the movie? Women are killing each other more than you'd expect at least her being a manifestation of like emo cob like at least justifies how overwrought marion cotillard's dialogue is and

she's like a fabulous actor and she i mean i really liked her in the movie when it first came out i was like wow she's so cool she's so like compelling in the way that femme fatale characters can be and she's really talented but like on paper my god where she's like circling Ellen Page like a hawk and it's just like have you ever been a lover and you're like oh my god and if you think that that's actually like if you think about it and you're like that's actually Leonardo DiCaprio subconsciously asking her that. Ew, like, leave Ellen Page alone. Right, and on top of that, those lines that are being delivered by his subconscious's version of Maul,

she's just quoting stuff he has said, like, earlier in their life to Ariadne. So she's, like, not even saying her own words. She's just like quoting Cobb's character. So like, yeah. And even like the physical implications. And I know that the story is not intended to be read this one-to-one, but it's for the sake of argument.

I just, I really, it didn't sit well with me on this viewing that it is like a victory every time Leonardo DiCaprio shoots his wife and kills her like in this movie brutalizing a woman means a really good thing and progress for our protagonist that he is able to shoot his wife with a machine gun that's good that's progress we like that like it's like that. Like, it's just, I don't know. It's just kind of, I know that it's not that one-to-one and, you know, if you're watching the movie, you understand, but it is just on the surface is kind of ugly. I don't like it. Well, weird, because one of my big things with this movie is that a lot of the complications that arise in the story could have been eliminated

if Cobb just like went to therapy because so many of the obstacles are Maul showing up and like trying to interfere or sabotage their mission and it's because he has so much guilt about the circumstances surrounding her death and he's like buried all of this guilt in his subconscious so these projections of her based on all this guilt he is feeling keep popping up and and ruining everything and like messing with their whole operation and it's just like if you just go to therapy go to therapy and work this shit out therapy if ellen page will just do it for free oh that yeah i have a whole i have a whole spiel about that but before we get to ellen page i also wanted to just quickly like the way that and i, like I don't have a direct fix for this given how rooted this sexist in the way that it's presented to the viewer where

you know you were told by Leonardo DiCaprio like well I implanted this sick thought in her brain and that blossomed into and on and on and you're you know it's like he's towing a line there okay let's see where this goes and and the way that it manifests I just I didn't really care for it all where you know it did lead to her becoming deeply paranoid about what is you know what is real and what isn't that's inherent to the story but when it comes down to we see her take her own life without knowing you know that her husband is the one who has you know basically forced this circumstance on her and on top of that that she did i think this is like a combination of handling mental illness very poorly badly interpreting what a femme fatale

is and just good old-fashioned sexism where he had like Christopher Nolan has Marion Cotillard's character say, well, I've basically framed you for being a horrible person. And so you also have to take your own life with me. And I've kind of like it just makes her seem so devious. And the the specific mention of I've had myself quote-unquote declared sane by three different doctors and the vagueness of that I thought was very troubling and I don't know I mean it's like I feel like you know if Christopher Nolan is going to root a movie in the brain and in the dark recesses of the brain and what are the consequences of exploring that you have to do your homework and like deal with that responsibly like that's literally what the movie

is but then when you actually get down to the specifics and this you know this criticism exists on many levels of this movie of you're like huh but this but this is think, like a genuinely harmful one of just kind of casually being like, I don't know, defining reality, implying that women are more susceptible. I mean, it's just, I don't know. I just didn't like it. I thought it was handled very unresponsibly. Irresponsibly. My God. irresponsibly my god i i have a whole thing about this where sure we've talked about the idea of a woman being a bitchy obstacle for a male character to deal with quite a bit i think there's a

variation on this trope and i think it ties somewhat into the femme fatale conversation but i think there's a slightly there's a different version of it because if you do look at some like really well written film noir you do see femme fatale characters who are nuanced and interesting yeah fully characterized like have and not in every case but there are definitely case studies you can do of certain femme fatale characters who are like really interesting, compelling characters. If you take like the husk of that, you get what I'm about to talk about, which is, again, this variation on the bitchy obstacle. I don't know exactly what to call it because as we've talked about recently, we're doing our best to really eliminate words from our vocabulary that have any disparaging or negative connotations surrounding mental illness. So I was inclined originally to call it like a crazy obstacle, but I don't want to use that word anymore. So I'm trying to figure

out exactly how to best characterize this. But basically the idea group effort we got this right the idea is a woman will be depicted as having behavior that is erratic or unstable or irrational or obsessive and that behavior becomes a major obstacle for other characters particularly the male protagonist. Yeah. We see this in movies such as Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction. This is a huge one. Yes. We see it in Kathy Bates' character in Misery. Even like Wayne's ex-girlfriend in Wayne's World. You see it in Andrew Garfield's character's girlfriend in The Social Network.

This is the whole plot of my super ex-girlfriend this is uh isla fisher's character in wedding crashers so it is so i mean so pervasive that and i think that i mean this goes to a lot of tropes that god i mean even hearing that list like sends me kind of back to like research i did on mensa in just terms of like how it's a generally accepted thing for for a very long time and still by many people now that the brain of of a woman or just a not a cis male is weaker and more fragile and more which is stigmatizing to everybody. Yeah. Because I feel like it also reinforces this hyper masculinity of like, I'm a boy, my brain is stronger. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't possibly need therapy. I couldn't possibly need to seek out help because I have

a strong brain. And just, I mean, the implications of this go on and on and on. But right. Yeah. There is like this very common perception that you know women are not i don't know that yeah like they're i think that it's been often labeled as women are inclined towards hysteria it's stated explicitly in many cases and i think that it's stated not quite as explicitly in this movie, but it's heavily implied. And right. Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly frustrating. And it's still, you know, in movies to this day. This was 10 years ago. And it's weird because like so this is kind of a different circumstance than a lot of those other movies I listed, because in this case, Maul being this obsessive unstable person is well okay part of it is what she becomes after having been incepted and effectively gaslit because what is inception besides being like

gaslighting someone gaslighting on a like you know a chemical level right so after after he incepts her and makes her question her own reality to the point that she dies by suicide so there's that factor but then also a lot of what we see of her on screen again is his projections of her. And she is again, very meddlesome. She's showing up to sabotage their mission all the time. And in that way, she becomes this obstacle who is again, characterized as being irrational,

unstable, et cetera. But like, that's his version of her. So like, which we learned at the very end but i feel like at that point the damage has kind of already been done and it's well it is an interesting twist i guess like i remember when i first saw the movie when you find out what what the real circumstance of like her death was you're like oh this okay but but it's just not handled it's handled so

I think strangely and I think it is a lot of what it is is she's treated so poorly and kind of so inconsistently because it's just like that's not who the writer's concern is the writer is concerned with basically absolving Leonardo DiCaprio from as much guilt as they possibly can before the movie is over and that is I think a huge reason why Ellen Page is involved so heavily there's elements of her character that I like but her you know huge task here I think is to take on you know Cobb's emotional baggage and absolve him of guilt. Yeah. That is basically her plot function. And it's just, I don't know. It seems like the plot is designed to examine his guilt,

explain why he's feeling that guilt, and then say, actually, we forgive him. It's fine. Right. Because, like, there should be more stories about men dealing with their feelings and acknowledging that they have feelings and coping with them in healthy ways. Like there are not stories about that very much. Not that this is a story about that either, because he does not deal with his feelings in a healthy way.

No, he just waits for someone to tell him to not deal with it. And then he doesn't. Like, well, I mean, I guess I don't know. I guess in that last scene, I will say this is embarrassing also. But like that last scene with him and Ma, it still gets me a little bit when she's, you know, they did grow old together. That's very sweet. That part, you're like, okay, fine. You got me for a second there. But it's like it's just so it, you know, even that moment is designed to absolve him of the consequences of his actions. The fact that he did a bunch of sweet, nice things in the dream world before gaslighting his wife and and causing this personal catastrophe and taking her life from her. The fact that they grew old together in the dream world is supposed to make that okay. And the movie just kind of runs with that. Because he should feel guilty. He should feel so guilty.

I don't know why everyone's like, don't feel guilty. It's like, yeah, go to therapy. Feel guilty. Probably go into a different line of work like that these are these are the things i see like be a father to your children get a different job like just come on become a real like an architect who just designs buildings in the real world like stop it yeah be like joseph gordon levitt in 500 days of summer god because okay i honestly i kept getting confused because i know that everyone in the i couldn't tell you who's doing what in the

in the t the dream team and they're like i'm the architect i'm i'm the pa i do the lights or like whatever the fuck they're doing the inception squad they're all they all each have their little job the eye squad but i kept thinking that joseph gordon levitt was the architect because he's an architect in 500 days of summer i guess i'm like wait no but he's not he he's like the gaffer of dreams or whatever i don't know what he does his job is never given a name because you have ariadne is the she's the architect right eames aka tom hardy is the forger um you've got the chemist and yusuf but uh we don't know what joseph gordon levitt's characters what his job title is just supposed to be like cute and around he i i don't know i don't i like need to get past my joseph gordon levitt like i just find him

bothersome but it's fine he's not a bad person and that doesn't happen enough so that we know of gosh that we know i have to be so careful before you drag me check the date that this was released you know right god but i guess where i land land on Mal's character is that like the way she behaves is not her fault because Cobbs gaslit her into this warped version of reality. And then the rest of the time we see her is his perception of her. And again, he apparently thinks very little of her if he just and then at the end he kind of like self-owns himself by being like yeah obviously you're nothing like this and you know i guess i'm just a little bitter but but then he it sounds like he's like calling he's insulting her it just sucks like every like it's a personal victory when

he's cruel to her and it's a personal victory when he murders her because she is his guilt right find a better metaphor for that like oh don't keep killing marion cotillard she's she's so talented yeah i i found that whole thing really this is just a plot issue why wouldn't he just tell her he incepted her when she's on the ledge i feel like that might do it right there are many plot holes in this movie and i don't even know what they all are because it's so complicated i'm not paying close enough attention but i know that they're there i just don't know what they are but like right what is why wouldn't he just because she's not real?

What are the what would be the consequences if he told her that sooner? Because him at worst, a divorce like him at work, right. In dream world even or in the real world. Like, why doesn't he just tell her at any point in the movie prior to the end? Like, there's no i don't understand what the disadvantage of revealing this sooner would have been and i understand storytelling like guilt or shame and whatever but yeah so like it's like right so like in storytelling the character arc doesn't happen until the like the full arc doesn't come all the way around he won't change or grow until the end but like what just

oh it goes back to like find a better way to do and like again a man dealing with grief like that's an interesting story like men are so conditioned to be emotionally closed off and to like not acknowledge or feel their feelings and like so a story that explores that is worthwhile but even like in this he just doesn't he doesn't deal with his grief in a healthy way at all he's just he's so he's just keeps well i mean if coming if his characters grow too much then christopher nolan might have to do that and that's clearly like not something that is on the table so i don't know and again it's like when we talk when we talk about christopher nolan i guess i'm also including i mean not in inception jonathan nolan didn't write inception christopher did but he but jonathan nolan is very present in the

perpetuation of this in the the nolan expanded universe sure So like, I guess my point or like kind of what I'm trying to figure out here is Maul, the way we see her behaving in the movie is really not her fault because the gaslighting and her being a projection of his subconscious when we do see her. But even so the movie frames her as the villain who we are not supposed to identify with or we are like she's just there to further characterize cob so we as the audience are meant to see her as an obstacle as a complication i think there's part of it where

like we are supposed to be like oh no we especially at the end when she's like when she finally learns because he finally tells her that it was him who gave her the idea isn't that him isn't he just telling himself like he's right the truth to himself it's like she's dead you're like you're making amends with your your subconscious you're not even making amends with your wife because you you it was your fault that she died which is an important part of like growth of like admitting something to yourself and acknowledging that you have a problem that is literally step one of the process but i feel like it's framed like he's making amends with which is so weird because in the previous moment he's like i know that you're not you i know that you're a part of me but then it sort of evolves into my read and maybe i'm just like an unsophisticated viewer but like when i

was first watching this movie i thought the movie was very clearly saying like oh and isn't this nice he made amends with his wife and he apologized to her. But it's like if you think about that for even 0.01 seconds, he's not like she's dead. It's done. I just messy, messy, messy. Chris, in the real world, after they have woken up from that, like 50 years long dream where they grow old together and build a whole world together. He knows that there's something the matter because one because he incepted her and two because he's downright says

like yeah she wasn't the same i could tell something was wrong then like make sure she gets help like go to couples counseling together i don't like do something but his but i but i feel like they dodged that by being like well we can't tell people about the whole dream thing or or or which is like okay but also i thought this is like the most minor character to the point where you don't even see her but they made grandma seem also like a very cruel bad character that was like you can't i don't want you to talk to later and i'm like uh look at what she has to work with here like she thinks that you murdered her daughter

which basically you did so stop being such a baby of course she doesn't like you there's there's no i wouldn't if i was the grandma in that situation i would be like these kids are being raised by me bye-bye like leonardo dicaprio doesn't get within i also don't fully understand why he gets to be with his kids at the end but i think that that was because i always stop listening by the end of this movie i'm sure it's justified but this okay so this kind of do you have anything else on maul i guess my the last thing i wanted to say, and it's it's a little bit of repetition of what we've already said, but this is coming at it more from like a screenwriting point of view. Not that I have a master's degree or anything, because I would hate to bring that up. Oh, also, I thought Ellen Page in this.

I was like, wow, grad school visibility. Caitlin's going to be thrilled. Yeah, I did. I did appreciate that. Anyways. So the like, OK, so a movie generally has an external struggle and an internal struggle. Here's just a mini screenwriting lesson for all of our listeners out there. The external struggle is more or less the outward plot of the movie.

So Inception, the external struggle is the Inception squad trying to incept Cillian Murphy. The internal struggle of a movie is whatever emotional struggle that the protagonist is dealing with, which exists alongside the external struggle. So in this movie, the internal struggle is Cobb dealing with the guilt and regret and memories and all that stuff surrounding his wife, Maul, which I feel like is such a, and we've talked about this a lot in different episodes, of a female character whose only function in the story is to be a male character's internal struggle as a way to like further characterize the male protagonist like she doesn't have any of her own agency or interiority or anything like that and

this was like such a prime example it was i mean this is egregious like an egregious example of like very i mean you couldn't more intentionally take agency away from a female character than to make her a projection of the male protagonist like that's just above and beyond it's comical almost it's like it's funny how ridiculous it is um but yeah, that was the last thing really that I had on Mal. Justice for Marion Cotillard. She's wonderful. Why would you do this to her? I know. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.

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 iHeartTrue Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life.

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available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I felt too seen. Um, dragged. I'm N.K., and this is Basket Case. So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown. I was crying and I was inconsolable. It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me?

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Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts. And we're back. Let's talk Ariadne. Woo. So, I mean, first of all, it goes without saying, Ellen Page, queer icon, love her. Oh, yes. Big fan.

Another egregiously named Christopher Nolan character. I learned that Ariadne is a mythical reference. Yes. But it basically translates to it's a redeemer, literally the redeemer, Ariadne the Redeemer. And boy, does he have some follow through on that one. That is pretty explicitly her purpose in the plot, as we referenced multiple times. Yes, there are. I think. OK, so in that same paper I was referencing earlier about film noir guilt complex. Yeah.

I sort of agree with the writer in saying that Ariadne is kind of an outlier in the Christopher Nolan film canon in that at least on the surface, there's a lot of things that Ariadne like has that Christopheropher nolan would usually only afford to a male character such as she doesn't die such as we know what her job is and she is not defined by being someone's romantic partner or by being a mother um it truly is like the most bare minimum shit possible but right it's worth saying that this character and then i guess i haven't seen Insomnia in so long. But I guess that there is a character in Insomnia who has a similar position of just like extended the basic courtesy of not being a murdered wife. Imagine that. I would still. I mean. And we'll talk about like. I don't think Ariadne is in any way.

A developed character. And she doesn't have as much agency. As she should. And her storyline is so. Chained to Leonardo DiCaprio's. Progress as a character. And I think that she is. Very much.

I think it is somewhat some I mean I think it's pretty gendered that she is brought in as kind of the person to take on his emotional baggage and absolve him of this guilt right that's all very true but but we know what her job is we know what her interest is she isn't brutally murdered I hate that we have to like grasp for these straws, but there it is. was that she is a character who is new to this world of infiltrating people's dreams. And one of the functions of her character within just the context of the movie is that she is a conduit by which the audience receives information and exposition about the world. She's your avatar? She's perhaps the avatar.

She's your avatar. and this is obviously not an uncommon function for a character but i feel like the optics of one of only two female characters in the movie and the only female character on the inception squad not knowing anything and having to be taught Everything like having to have men tell her all the stuff that I have mixed feelings about it because on one hand I hate it. You do get to see You do get to see how smart she is How quickly she's able to learn and piece things together and like create mazes and complex architecture, right? But it also means that you do have to see a lot of men explaining everything to her.

And it means that all of the men on the team are way more seasoned and experienced than her. Even like, even Killian Murphy, who's not even, who's being gaslighted knows more than she does. Right. He knows more about inception and like extraction than she does.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even removing gender from the discussion, I just always find this to be very obnoxious to have to sit through that, you know, because it's literally just like, what is the first rule of writing? Show don't tell. But this is just like, yeah, I mean i i have the same issue with harry potter where it's like the whole first movie is just like harry potter's like what's this

and then an adult is like well it's that and he's like oh interesting and like that is the whole movie i just and i don't know it happens in, but also it's the title. So whatever. He's like, what's this? Well, in a lot of movies with like heavy world building, you do need to be explained the rule. The audience needs to understand the rules of the world. So, you know, you usually have to have a character act as like the proxy, the avatar by which that information gets explained to us so i don't necessarily even have a problem i don't have a problem so that is just a general concept but for it to be like the one woman on the team yeah is the one who doesn't know anything and has to be told it because like why couldn't there have just been another woman in the squad maybe she's the

chemist or why couldn't and we'd have a woman in stem yeah why couldn't like joseph gordon levitt have been the newbie like why did it have to be a female right character especially with and again it's like like you were kind of just saying like if we had more women in the story this would be less of a problem because there would be more women in the story there is only like really one and a half women in the story because mal is only mal sometimes so right so it's like yeah the fact that i got really frustrated i kept like pausing the movie and like stomping around and being like i'm ellen page what's this what's this what's this what's this i forgive you what's this because that's just like she forgives him for stuff that she doesn't need to and then she's like what's this and it's frustrating because we are given

like I don't know I feel like this is a weird phase of Christopher Nolan slowly realizing that he keeps doing this and so I mean I'm this isjecture, but maybe this is like the point in Christopher Nolan's career where he's like, OK, OK, OK. So I keep killing wives. What if I did that? And there was a second woman. Like, I think he's just kind of messing around with the formula and being like, maybe they won't see this if I put this over here. You know, he's like the prestige. But it doesn't work. And it's really i like that at least

i mean it's just i always find it really frustrating when you're given the infrastructure speaking as an architect speaking as the guy from 500 days of summer um you have that you're being given the like the the bones of a character that could be really interesting we know at least some things about her we know that she is good at what she does we know that she's a fast learner we know that she's interested in and all this stuff but then it just kind of like goes nowhere they only characterize her as far as they need to in order for her to engage with Leonardo DiCaprio on his terms. And most of her agency, I do think she has, I mean, she certainly has more agency than Maul, who has nothing, where like she does, you know, choose to kind of, she wants to

know what is Cobb's deal. She is like actively pursuing answers there. But it's about, but it's just about him. Like all of her agency is directly connected to learning more about him. The one time that it deviates from that, as far as I could tell, maybe there were other small moments, but if there were, I didn't even notice. Where toward the very end, it seems like they have failed because Maul came in and killed Killian Murphy. So it's like, well, that was it then. I don't know why I always feel so bad for Killian Murphy in that moment where I'm like, he does not know what's going on.

He's like, where am I? And then he just gets like really suddenly murdered by Marion Cotillard. And it's kind of funny. Because Ellen Page is like, don't let her kill killian murphy he's so confused and leonardo dicaprio is like i don't know maybe i'll let her do it and then he she does it i don't know i always laugh in any guy in any case um it is ariadne's idea yes to go into the next level, go into a deeper level so that they can keep going and succeed in incepting Fisher. That's true.

That's true. I had, I hadn't. Yeah. We'll give her credit for that. That's smart. And that's, and it's only because she had that outsider's perspective too.

Right. That's fair. I appreciate that. But that was kind of the only moment where she's really given any agency that impacts the narrative in a way that is not directly tied to Cobb and his like guilt. Also, I didn't like the moment where it's kind of I mean, this is nitpicky, but there's a moment where kind of like DiCaprio implies that she's a real one for not assuming that he killed his wife like he's like you're not like the other girls you didn't assume that I murdered my wife like I just thought that was a really annoying like dialogue edition where he's like yeah everyone thinks I killed my wife what the hell and then she doesn't really say anything for a second he's like yeah thanks

for not assuming I killed my wife that's a first and you're like she's just like you did kill your wife she's like go to therapy bro what are you talking about dicaprio's whole thing is i didn't kill my wife but like he absolutely did kill his wife 100 indirect though it may have been he is he's 1 million percent responsible for her death. In a court of law, culpable. Yes. Culpable. He did it. I would not let him have his children back. Sorry.

I just wouldn't. They are not safe with him. Those kids. OK, those kids. Imagine being older and then like finding that out. I would have been like, I wish they had left me with grandma. Like, what the hell? This is bullshit. Seriously. Also, oh, wait. Okay. Sorry. One more annoying aside. Can you imagine?

I wonder, okay, what's your opinion on this? Because not all of the effects in this movie have aged super well. It's been 10 years. Some moments you're just like, oh, that's a computer. But the, okay, the kids running away, are they like photoshopped in running away? Or did they like shuttle these kids all around Burbank for weeks to just run away? I would imagine that they green screened that. So they just put the kids in front of a green screen, showed them running away, and then just like imposed that image of them. Because you see them like basically every scene in the movie, except for like the snow, like the blizzard fucking world. If it's not green screen, that is so much work for those poor kids that aren't even allowed to show their faces until the end of the

movie as a plot point i also couldn't see like what his he was like i can't look at my children's face i'm like just go to therapy my god but yeah no i wouldn't give him his kids back i don't think he should have gotten his kids back sorry Sorry. No. Career change, honey. A couple other things I wanted to say about Ellen Page's character. This is an action movie. There's a lot of action. There's a lot of fighting. There's a lot of chase sequences.

But she does not get to participate in any of that. And it's like, well, you could argue, okay, well, she's not a trained fighter. She doesn't have any of that training. But even so, again, the optics of having your one female character not be able to participate in any of the fighting except for that except for the scene at the very end when she does pick up the gun and shoot maul but other than that like she's which does pass the bechdel test yeah yes it does um when a woman shoots another woman it it passes the Bechdel test. No, but, well, bullets are men. So I think maybe not, actually.

Phallic. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the fact that, like, and this is like, I mean, we're really, like, getting into it here, but I feel like that's what Christopher Nolan does, so it's fine, we can, too. But the fact that, like like the only woman in the movie who's allowed to do combat is a projection of a man is my god my god like because it's not like regular like Maul when she's herself and she is

like prior to her death she doesn't fight it's only when she is in the dream world as leonardo dicaprio's hyper mask projection that she is a skilled killer you know like it's just like i'm so i'm so annoyed by by all of them i think i mean yeah i mean ellen page also deserves better than this part also there is like okay genuinely i can never get a read on like, are they trying to like push some sort of like subtle love story with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page in this? Because if so, I don't like I've never been less compelled by anything in my entire life. But they keep putting them together and like saying cute things to each other. I'm am i supposed to like want more of this because i just like i just don't i never thought that the only thing to me that would indicate that a little bit is that scene where they're i think they're in like the second level of the dream cob has just told killing murphy

and they're in like the lobby of a hotel or something i think and killian murphy has just told Killian Murphy they're in like the lobby of a hotel or something I think and Killian Murphy has just learned that he is currently in a dream so like now his projections of his subconscious are like basically trying to figure out who who's the dreamer or like who are the

outsiders so they all look at Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And he's like, Oh, no, here, maybe it'll distract them. If we kiss each other, give me a kiss. I feel like that is like, I don't know, I thought that. And the only reason that I'm kind of willing to go with like, I think that we were supposed to like, want that is because Christopher Nolan is so profoundly unskilled at writing anything like romantic that isn't traumatic like he can't just write people that have a crush on each other it's just not what he does um I think we were supposed to be into that it's either way

it's like if so that's even more insulting to Ariadne to think that you need to like try to like force a love interest on top of all the, you know, disservice issues that are being done. But it barely reads because she and Joseph Gordon-Levitt just like couldn't have less chemistry. It's given like two seconds of attention. Sure. Yeah, I could maybe see that. But it also it never occurred to me that they were trying to like push a little like romance between them. If anything, I thought that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy were like flirting. They were like negging each other a lot, but I'm like, you guys are flirting and you should just fucking kiss already.

Like just make out. I agree. And I like want that. And I feel like that was all performance. Like that was like the way they performed it was like, you're like, okay, I like want that. And I feel like that was all performance. Like that was like the way they performed it was like you're like, OK, I like this more. I like this way more. This is good. subtle plug i guess but like um i have been watching maggie may fish's friend of the cast her youtube series on the works of zach snyder and how zach snyder and i think christopher nolan falls into this exact same thing and i've seen this criticism of him coincidentally they also have done batman's whatever but like christopher nolan is a profoundly sexless director. Like his work features couples, but only at the worst moment of their entire lives.

And it's just like for all of the heteronormative couples you see in his movies over and over and over. It's profoundly, there's no intimacy in it, really, that isn't rooted in trauma. And Zack Snyder's film canon is really similar to the point where, it's definitely not in this movie, but I think that each of them have each done one sex scene. I know Zack Snyder's was Watchmen, and it's so hard to watch, but like,

just, it's very bizarre like these and they both did sexless batman movies that are rooted in you know mommy girlfriend trauma it's like just let a woman direct something please for the love of god it's just so strange that's just more of an observation i it's i don't know just the most traumatic moments of a relationship are all that gets the worst which is why it's like if they if he was trying to write in a cute moment that sort of hit the cutting room floor for two other characters it falls completely flat and it's confusing because you're like christopher nolan can't do something that's just like kind of cute.

Right, but he does not have the skills. Well, kind of going back to Ariadne, where in my list of like very bare minimum things this movie does that are like, I guess not negative in its like representation of women, but like, again, bare minimum or like neutral. I wrote down in my notes well at least ellen page's character isn't poised as the romantic interest for any of the men because again i did not interpret like the movie attempting to push her and joseph gordon

levitt together at all i'm curious about what our listeners think because yeah i i've heard differing opinions on that where i don't know I texted I texted people about it because I'm like am I totally misreading this or and then some people were like no I thought I was supposed to think that and then other people were like never picked up on it I wonder I would be curious if there is like if previous drafts of this movie were kind of pushing it because it seems like what we have might possibly be remnants of something else that's my theory i downloaded this script brag um and while i did not read it because it is 8 000 pages long no thank you um i did do like control f to find if the word kiss appears in the script, because I wanted to see if that scene where he where like Joseph Gordon-Levitt's like, give me a kiss quick, it'll distract them or whatever, if that is in the script, and either just got thrown in on that day of shooting or something

or you know like the mystery yeah so i think i think maybe it's just that like that got wedged in at the last moment it's like christopher put in something put in something flirty like this is the least flirty movie i've ever seen christopher and then he's like um make someone kiss I don't know as a joke it's like women won't want to see this movie unless there's a kiss in it so throw in a kiss god damn it

Chris your movies aren't flirty enough and he's like oh rats like it's just I mean no one's coming to Christopher Nolan for like even a compelling love story. It's just not why we show up for him. We keep showing up because of Hans Zimmer, possibly. The other bare minimum thing I wrote down as it pertains to Ellen Page's character,

which is more syllables than Ariadne, but I don't, I can't, I keep not being able to say that name. Ariadne, I mean, it's an unusual name. And it's also, it is so, like, Maul and Ariadne are so freshman year in film school name choices. It kills me. yeah um but anyway the the other like bare minimum

thing is at least the male characters around her notice and acknowledge that she does a good job yes um there's a few different lines of dialogue that i wrote down where Cobb says to Arthur, he says, I've never seen someone pick it up so fast about Ellen Page. At one point, Cobb says kind of apropos of nothing. He's just like, Ariadne, terrific work, by the way. Yeah, that is nice. And then right before she gets recruited, Michael Caine, Cobb says, like, I need someone who's as good as Cobbbb says like i need someone who's as good as cobb is like i need someone who's as good as i was and michael cain's like i have someone even better i have someone even better

quick recommendation if you haven't ever seen michael cain's acting lesson tape from the 80s on YouTube. Oh, the blink. The don't blink, never blink. Do not blink. It is like very funny and also like low-key kind of helpful. Now every time I'm on camera, I'm like, blink with intention, Jamie.

You heard the man. Blink with intention. And so whenever Michael Caine blinks, it's at a moment where his character is feeling vulnerable. Always. I always notice that. Imagine that. He's in this movie for 14 seconds. Yes.

And too bad he loves Brexit. Yes, he does. So whoopsies. He loves Brexit. He hates blinking. And that's just the unfortunate truth. But yeah. No, I agree. the unfortunate truth but yeah no i i agree i was a little leery on the um i've never seen someone

pick it up so fast because i that like it didn't cross the line fortunately but sometimes i worry about like kind of like when a woman joins the squad and they're like wait a second she can do something i'm shocked but it did but it kind of stayed on the other side of the line of like they were genuinely impressed that anyone could pick this up so quickly they appreciated her work and then when she made the suggestion to go down deeper they take that suggestion seriously and they take it on and no one else takes credit for it and just like yeah yeah like she christopher nolan is such a strange writer where i'm like did he just treat like he's just like oh just treat this character with the way you would treat a male character but then no because she

has to do the emotional baggage stuff i don't know i don't know um i have a couple other things that are not at all gender specific but that i thought were very funny um go for it the mood this movie only works under the assumption that the idea that you have during a dream if you have a dream and you come up with an idea of an idea happens in your dream that that idea will stick with you under any circumstance and it might change everything about who you are as a person because like watching this movie I was like this would be like if I woke up from a dream where in the dream I started a podcast about the movie Inception and and then I wake up and I'm like oh my gosh I have to start a podcast about the movie Inception. I, you know, I had a dream about that. So I guess I have to do it.

Like, yeah. Oh, yeah. You are just beholden to every lark that your subconscious like imagine the most bizarre dreams you've ever had. And then being like, well, I guess that I guess I have to do it. Like, I used to have this really scary recurring dream about Bob Saget on a trampoline where he would be like, get on the trampoline, get on the trampoline. It was just a recurring dream I had when I was a kid when they used to be re-airing a lot of reruns of Full House on ABC Family. It would just be Bob Saget on a trampoline in my backyard.

We didn't even have a trampoline, but he was like, get on the trampoline, get on the trampoline. And I would always be like, if something if I get on this trampoline, something horrible is going to happen. It's like if I woke up and I was like, I have to get a trampoline and I need to get Bob Saget to his chat and investigate this. I mean, now is as good a time as any to announce that i am going to start a podcast about the movie inception i had a dream about i have to do it the rules i am literally i i bob saget is on a spirit airlines flight here right now to to find out what was going on there and that i mean it's like i know i know that dreams can be very profound, but the assumption that all dreams are profound is ridiculous and very funny. That's also OK.

A quick thing I had was that like the Cillian Murphy thing, the whole the the corny levels of him holding his his like evil dad's hand and he's the evil son and the dad is like i wish you just were a different evil than me and he's like he's just like rich boy crying you're just like i i felt it the first time i watched the movie i feel it now i'm like i could not care less about whatever is happening here with the billionaires and they're like how do we approach an oil fortune you're like i don't care who is this character like oh my god could we just like let ellen page do something else like yeah well one of my other things fathers and sons exactly it's in every movie as it turns out well one of the other things. Fathers and sons. Exactly. It's in every movie as it turns out. Well, one of the other things I wrote down was Inception is what like uber rich people do with their money to get richer.

Because like Saito buys an airline so that they can incept Cillian Murphy. Like why not just use. And it's a joke. Yeah. He's like, haha, it would be. I just thought it would be cleaner if I just bought the whole airline which by the way i hope that flight attendant they said that they bought her first of all they said we had to buy a flight attendant as if that was just like something people do it's like i hope they paid her well i like why wouldn't

why would they like now she has dirt on you guys like why wouldn't you just have one of the other she sold that story to variety right also they live in la i don't know why i found that detail to be obnoxious but at the end they're like you're about to land in la baby like i'm like leonardo de cabrera's just like landing at his house like what are you what and then he's like got off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan welcome to the land of fame excess

is he gonna fit in we don't know something something about stilettos oh my god that's like every school dance i ever went to that song would just play it like volume deafening at some point the butterflies fly away that's like leonardo dicaprio reunited with his children nodding his head like yeah moving his hips like yeah oh why is this so funny I'm sweating so much okay um so

Saito he buys the airline and it's like why not just use that money to like bribe Fisher or buy him out of the company or buy some stock in his company. Do something. Like, why are you going through all the lengths of doing something that does not sound like it would work at all?

Inception does not sound like a thing that would work even a little bit. But the movie is so hellbent on convincing you that it is like the most effective. Like there's like an idea is the most effective parasite ever like it's you can't kill an idea i have to admit that's just like christopher nolan fully jerking himself off like being like ideas are i mean i see what he's saying and i understand the the reality under it of like a an idea can be very pervasive but i feel like he's being like the dark knight changed your life right like i just i don't know i it's it's all it's all annoying i really enjoy watching this movie but it's also so annoying

it's such a weird that's such a christopher n thing where you're like, I'm having a great time. I'm deeply annoyed. I'm like, how dare you make me enjoy this movie? I also think that at the end when after Cillian Murphy has been incepted and he decides to like break up this multi-billion dollar empire, I like to think that he just like starts an etsy store selling his like cross stitches or something like that oh i know like what happens to these people afterwards like i don't i mean if i were ellen page i would just i'm like i have no allegiance to these people i'm gonna just write a tell-all sell it to random house for a million billion dollars like see you. This guy killed his wife. Everyone's saying he killed his wife.

And guess what? It's true. He did. He fully did. This movie is weird, but it's fun. I also appreciate, I mean, again, it's like, I think that with white male auteur culture, the negatives outweigh the positives. But to give Christopher Nolan the

smallest bit of credit I appreciate that uh there was not a sequel to this movie because I know people wanted it and I can't imagine something more exhausting than a sequel to Inception I'm like I don't want a single I don't want another detail about this. Let's just bury it. We're done. I am curious about Tenet. I want to see John David Washington and Robert Pattinson together. I know. I hate that I want that, but I do want that. I do. I do too.

We fully recognize the at what cost of this movie as such an all-time high. The fact that Christopherolan was pushing and seemed like imagine taking a global pandemic this personally like it's just absurd um yeah that said i really hope and the whole time i'm like i just like would love to see this movie at a drive-in like this would be a great drive-in movie i would happily see this movie at a drive-in can't we just do that i don't know yeah like how deeply selfish and like just uncaring do you have to be to be like yeah someone might die to see tenet like what are you doing with your life i don't see tenet in theaters see it safe please and let us know what you think because

it's been getting pretty good reviews uh i mean he makes good movies unfortunately he's like it's a tenant it's a palindrome i'm like i get it i get it he's so he's a genius he really i mean is not but like he he wants you to think right no it's like he's really just like some of his movies feel like he's screaming that he's a genius like into your mouth like i'm a genius i will i mean props to han zimber on score. It is an iconic score. It's a very good score. We culturally have not escaped this farting noise in movies to this day. Ever since Inception came out, the fart noise is now canon. And we can't get rid of it. It's as ubiquitous as Leonardo DiCaprio being clothed in bodies of water.

What is going on? I just, men need to stop. They need to stop. I will, I will again, just give a shout out to Emma Thomas, who is Christopher Nolan's spouse, but also has produced all of his movies. And I would say, well, actually, I wouldn't say, wow, I have to give credit to a man right now. It's ruining my life. But I recently listened to friend of the cast,

Karina Longworth's season of You Must Remember This about Polly Platt, which I highly recommend to our listeners. It is all about Polly Platt is like this iconic producer who her skills were repeatedly discredited and buried because she was always working for men. And so it is kind of this incredible investigation of her life that just reveals exactly how much she did. And she was married for a while to Peter Bogdanovich

and how much credit he took from her. And all of his good movies were with her. So what does that tell you? Et cetera. Yeah. And Isaac brought up as we were watching this, he's like, oh, I wonder if like Emma Thomas is potentially a similar Polly Platt story. Because she's pretty exclusively produced Christopher Nolan movies. But we don't really hear her spoken about much.

It's not a name that is like brought up. I mean, given how much she's done and how many billions of dollars movies she's produced have generated. I'd like to know more about her. I'm curious. And also being married to Christopher Nolan sounds terrible. Like I don't,

but maybe it isn't, I don't know. He seems to want you to die. he seems to want to kill you let's hear more about no but I I am very curious I want to like give her her due she has I mean yeah she's produced quite literally all of it and a few non-Christopher Nolan movies but for the most part they seem to um work together yeah in any case shout out to her there this is i wouldn't say it's a diverse cast i think that like there there are non-white important cast members but for the most part they are relegated to the sidelines yes with i guess the exception of ken wantanabe who i i think he does such an iconic oh i just love how he delivers a line where

i forget what line it is but there's like one line where he has so like he's on the floor and he has to turn over his shoulder and he's like this is a dream isn't it or it's like it's just so because he's on the rug and he's like my face is in polyester right now, not wool. It's a whole monologue about a rug. And it's so goofy, but he is great. And the extended Nolan universe is a very, very heteronormative white universe. And this is certainly no exception to that. And this is something that we have an ongoing conversation about on on this show is that auteur culture in general is so white dominated and so male dominated and

Christopher Nolan has perpetuated that in or and is complicit in that in many ways down to I don't know I mean I would I would recommend that people check out that Polly Platt miniseries because they're really, I mean, we all know that women and people of color are constantly erased from the narratives of, I mean, of quite literally everything, but pertaining to our show, to movies, and just like hearing the details of that, and just like the psychological trauma that comes with that from being repeatedly erased and discredited. It's a wonderful series and we're going to see Tenet, but we don't have to like it. We don't have to like it.

I don't know. I'm really struggling with how much I want to see Tenet. It makes me feel bad. Same. Well, well, tenant it makes me feel bad same well well we've had a discussion already a bit about whether or not this movie passes the bechdel test i think if you were i'm gonna say no if you were just looking at it on on paper i you could argue that it technically passes because there is that small

interaction between maul and ariadne where like Maul's like what are you doing here my name is I know who you are what are you doing here I'm just trying to understand blah blah blah and that goes on for a little while but it is like you said but it's projection Maul it's projection Maul so she's not even real for the rest of that scene she's like quoting stuff that Cobb had told her I would say considering the context of this in exchange I would give it a no I think again it's like a technical pass but yeah factoring in the context not a pass anymore I'm hard no I think this is a galaxy this is like Christopher Nolan not that I think he knows what the Bechdel test is I would be shocked but I mean prove me wrong I guess but um yeah no I I think that he I mean no I'm he does not deserve to get away on a

technicality here it's a no for me um and how okay let's go let's go to the nipples nipple scale wow wow wow um yeah so zero to five nipple scale. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah, so zero to five nipples based on how it represents women slash how does it fare from an intersectional feminist point of view. I'll give this, I guess, one, maybe a half even. I was going to go half, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a few very bare minimum things to like about the way Ariadne is characterized in that she's smart and capable and we know what her job is

and her team members appreciate her and never call into question her skills or abilities or anything like that. But again, that's extremely bare minimum stuff. And most of the time she is doing Cobb's emotional labor for him and she's being like you need to and just absolving him for things at random for things he doesn't deserve to be absolved for because plot I mean the fact that she picks up on what he's going through I think is also an extremely gendered thing it's not necessarily a negative trope but like right but it's rooted in something right because like the one woman on the team is the one who's able to see that like hey baby that Cobb is being tormented by guilt and it's like I was like come on dude like you

there are other people around you like don't you notice that your friend is like going through something like you know that his wife his wife died like it's just baffling to me that it's like well but of course the woman is the one to figure it out anyway right like it is and i think that's that's negative for everybody too because it also just implies that the people that cob is with every day seem to have no idea that he's under this intense psychological torture. Yusuf is like administering the sedatives and stuff to enable him to go under on his own time. Right. To like be with his wife in dream world.

Like how does he not know what's going on? Logically, he should be the one to know i think right like logically he would be the person to pick up on this he has the closest access to leo dicaprio's actual brain chemistry but he's busy he's an avatar so i don't know um so yeah there there's some positives and negatives about Ariadne. And then when it comes to Maul, like, woof. But again, it's like I think like the worst of the worst in terms of Christopher Nolan's gender problems. For sure. And it's like, again, if you think about it for two seconds, you realize that all of her behavior,

which is being framed by the movie as as like villainous and and sabotaging and bad but mall it's mall a bit mall yeah moi mall um if you think about it for two seconds you realize like well none of what she's doing is her fault she was gaslit and then everything else is a projection so like we we can't blame her for what she's doing but the movie very very very much wants you to blame her for what she's doing so it's not good one half nipple i guess i'll give it to maul because she deserves i'll give it to to marion cotillard because she deserves better yeah she does she's i i just i can't recommend her work enough i really like her um same with alan page god damn it i love alan page so yeah i'll give it a half as well for

at least the outlined sketch of a good female character that was not followed through on and also for not murdering her i really you couldn't ask for less I will say that this is I mean again it's like you don't want to hand it to but in the context of Christopher Nolan's career the fact that Ariadne is not brutally murdered is somehow progress for him and oh what I feel so great but like and this does seem to put him on some track to treating his female characters in ensuing movies, starting with The Dark Knight, where he's kind of trying to have Catwoman be empowered, and it doesn't work, but it's an attempt. I feel like Inception is kind of an inflection point for him in terms of making an effort,

or at least recognizing that he cannot continue to treat his female characters like this maybe tenant will blow up this theory but it seems like at least around this time he starts to realize that like people are not going to stop giving you shit for this you have to find a more compelling you need to just like simply take women seriously imagine your wife has produced every single movie like right how it's it's absurd so this is i i like you know white male auteur culture is very frustrating and i want to see tenant so in conclusion we're going to see tenant in conclusion we're going to see tenant and honestly probably will like it seems Seems like people like it.

Yeah. So. I'm prepared to like it. God damn it. In conclusion, God damn it all to hell to quote Titanic. I'll be God damned. I think that's all I have to say. I don't know.

I'm so frustrated with myself. I'm like, I want to see Tenet. Like, stop. Don't. Look, we contain multitudes. We are multidimensional female characters in our own movies, in our own dreams. What if this whole episode was a dream the whole time and we wake up and we're like, fuck, we didn't even actually record anything so you know god damn it all to

hell and we love you this has been the episode we also you'll notice there wasn't a guest on this episode it's just just the two of us because I'm still trapped in wisconsin and we both felt guilty that we liked inception so uh in conclusion you can uh follow us on all the social media platforms you can follow us on twitter at bexelcast instagram at bexelcast uh subscribe to our patreon aka matreon where we will uh be doing yet another exciting month of I think we're going to be doing another Ellen Page classic this month, yes? Oh yeah, so yeah, I pitched Sport Timber, which we're going to cover Whip It and Stick It. Because all movies about... It. I'm calling it It Timber.

It Timber. Because all movies about women's sports have to have it in the title. It's another baffling. It's a trope that's neither here nor there. Much like Leonardo DiCaprio underwater in clothes. It's neither here nor there. But it's a thing for some reason. Yeah. True.

So anyways, you know, head over to the Matreon for that. You can go to tpublic.com slash the Bechtel cast for our merch. And, you know, give us a little rate and review. Why don't you on, you know, Apple podcast or wherever you find your podcast. And otherwise, just be really careful that you don't get incepted because obviously it's going to change your entire life. Because the ideas that you have in dreams will change you forever. I was like, to conclude. Like, you know, I hope you're doing well.

Take care of yourself. Help other people. Yes. And, you know, at least feel a little bit bad when you watch Tenet. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. 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. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? 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. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearths the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. There's so much beauty in Mexican culture, like mariachis, delicious cuisine, and even Lucha Libre. Join us for the new podcast, 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, Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts.