The Bechdel Cast - Misery with Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Super fans Jamie and Caitlin discuss Misery with special guest Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins, host of the podcast Trials To Triumphs! (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @AshleyBlaine on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante, and @jamieloftusHELPSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I've listened to every episode of the Bechdel cast. Whoa. I've read your writing. Thanks for your support. I've seen your stand-up. Do you do the Matreon, too? I have access to the Matreon. Yeah, and I've listened to all those episodes.

Wow, it's only $5 a month with over 100 episodes of Backlog. Yeah, so either I'm your number one fan and I'm scary, or I'm just a really supportive friend. I don't know. Or my co-host and you're scary. I contain multitudes. It could be so many combinations of things. Break my ankles. I dare you. I want a week off. How long does it take? Welcome to the Bechdel cast. That was a fun one. Okay. Welcome to the Bechdel cast. My name is Jamie Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante

and this is our show where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point, just a way to initiate a larger conversation about representation in media. But Jamie, what is the Bechdel test? Oh, well, I'm glad you asked after all these years. The Bechdel Test is a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace Test. It was originally created as just sort of a one-off joke examination in a comic she made in the 80s but now it is sort of used as a broad media metric to see how people of marginalized genders are treated in movies so the version of the test that we use requires that two characters of a marginalized gender with names speak to each other about something other than a

man for more than two lines of dialogue and it should be you know a narratively impactful exchange do you think when kathy bates talks to her female pig i wrote that down i was like when kathy bates talks to misery and they're oink oinking at each other it's not my favorite pass but there's an argument for it uh i also think that when kathy bates breaks someone's ankles it spiritually passes that passes in spirit um but we have an incredible guest to help tease apart the intricacies of what we would consider passing the bechdel test today so uh, yes, we do. So let's get them in the room. She's an actress and host of Trials to Triumphs podcast. It's Ashley Blaine

Featherson Jenkins. Hi. Hello and welcome. Thank you. So you brought us the movie Misery. I did. Yeah. Welcome to our cabin, by the way. Thank you. I hope you feel safe. I hope you feel secure. I do. Thank you very much. Actually, I really do. Excellent. What is your relationship with this movie, maybe the book, anything related to this property? It's definitely the movie. I was born in 87 so you know Mystery came out I believe in 1990 um so you know I it was a movie that my my family my parents talked about and then once I got old enough to watch it well I probably watched it before I should have been watching it that's all you should put that on the record um but you know I mean i fell in love with it it's it's such a it's a well done

film it's a well acted film it is an emotional film that somehow kathy bates still gives us moments of odd levity i don't even know if levity is the word but she still kind of makes you laugh uh you know we're solving a mystery well we know the answer to the mystery but like you know this town is solving a mystery you know it's it's got everything you could want in a film yeah but yeah i i love it i've always like and it's one of my husband's favorite movies he watches it anytime he's on tv okay nice he's that guy love it yeah babe get in the room misery's on and you're like wow I feel so safe I'm like this again do we need to see the part where she's taking off his feet I don't want to

see I don't want to see the sledgehammer I don't want to see it I saw that clip before I watched the movie so I guess so my relationship and you know history with this movie i've never read the book but i knew about the movie and the story just through kind of cultural osmosis i had seen the clip of the ankle just like with the sledgehammer the sound it's just like the sound haunts me the most it's stressing me out so i i i had seen that clip and then i watched the full movie in college this would have been like probably 15 years ago now and i hadn't watched it since so i didn't fully remember like what a good movie this is you're right it's like very well like very well acted structurally like from a screenwriting

point of view oh good job mr william goldman famous screenwriter it's almost like that guy knows what he's doing it's almost like he's an expert in his craft but um yeah i enjoy this movie i'm excited to talk about it i think it'll be an interesting discussion through our Bechtel cast lens. I'm still kind of processing. Yeah, I have a lot of questions for the room. Yes. Okay. Jamie, what's your relationship with it?

I also did take in a lot of this movie kind of through cultural osmosis. I watched this movie with a friend last night. And we both very strongly remembered seeing this movie parodied in an episode of the Animaniacs in the 90s. And I think that that was my operating knowledge. And like those clip shows of like, I love the 90s. Like, I totally knew about this movie via that. And I knew I loved Kathy Bates because she's in Titanic. Oh, my gosh. The unsinkable Molly Brown herself. Yeah.

Annie Wilkes, you know, more sinkable, let's say. Perhaps sinkable. But I hadn't seen this movie before. I watched it in the early pandemic lockdown where I was just, it was, you know, chaos mode. I was like, who's got it? Who's got it worse right now? And I think it was actually coming up a lot because they're like, oh, it's we all feel like James Caan in misery. And you're like, oh, no.

Anyways, I watched it for the first time then. And I really enjoyed it. But I wasn't watching it through a Bechdel cast lens I was just watching it for a thriller and to cathartically also see someone inside trapped inside yes so revisiting it a couple years later was really really interesting and I also think this movie rocks I didn't realize it was directed by Rob Reiner question mark it's like doesn't feel like but it's so good that you're like all right Rob Reiner I guess that you can direct something terrifying that's not how I associate him he's eclectic look he's got range everyone in this

movie has range and I'm very excited to talk about it and I was also really excited to read what Stephen King had to say about it. We've covered a couple. I want to say, have we just covered Carrie for a Stephen King? No, we've covered The Shining. We've covered a few. Stephen King, I want to defend my fellow New Englanders, but he's kind of all over the map when it comes to writing female characters.

I'm interested uh to unpack it because i feel like annie wilkes spoiler alert i think she's a really good character anyways yes she rocks yeah dare i say i'm rooting for her but that's not how you're supposed to feel i mean on one hand i i resent any movie that makes me that wants me to root against Kathy Bates on the other hand I support any character who is trying to stop male artists from making art well yeah there's so many fun ways to come at this movie that I didn't like I just at first was watching it for like whatever's happening I'm I'm in full support this is great but like yeah there's a way to watch it that is like a parasocial relationship cautionary tale and then my my favorite read of this movie

which is from Stephen King that I wasn't aware of before I was just doing background for this episode was that when he was writing the novel which I also have not read the novel but I looked up the differences it's not too many except oh here's a fun one so in the movie she kills the sheriff with just like a gun in the book she like runs him over with a tractor. She like super kills him. Yeah. She like, she really, I know. But Stephen King had substance abuse issues. He had a cocaine problem for a really long time.

And when he was writing Misery, he was thinking of Annie Wilkes as his cocaine addiction and himself as the writer. And so like there was a whole other read of this movie where Annie is like, there's this representation of addiction, like keeping this like writer who writes all these famous books trapped. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. That's deep. Right. I was like, I was like, all right. All right, Stephen King, you got me. Hmm. Yeah, I can't wait to dive into it more. Shall I do the recap? Let's do it. First and foremost. Yes. Okay. So we meet Paul Sheldon, played by James Caan. He is an author who finishes the novel he's been working on in a remote cabin in Silver Creek, which is probably in Maine because Stephen King sets all of his stories in Maine. It's in Colorado.

This is in Colorado. Okay. Just kidding. I don't know why, but it is. I guess The Shining is also set in Colorado. So you've got Colorado and Maine, and those are the only two states Stephen King cares about. He loves the cold. He's a winter. I know. He loves snow as a backdrop. He really does. I do too, actually. I'm into it. Yeah, snow-related danger.

Seems harder to get out of. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's treacherous. So Paul celebrates finishing his novel by smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of champagne. Then he gets in his car with the manuscript, drives off, but it's snowing heavily because he's in the Rocky Mountains. The roads are slippery and he slides off the road and rolls down an embankment. We then flashback to Paul talking to his literary agent, played by Lauren Bacall. Love that. Yes. What a treat.

Right? What a legend. Sorry, really quick. I just wanted to make note of any movie of this era, when there's a car crash, you get to see the whole car crash. They just wreck a whole car crash they just like they just wreck a whole car i feel like that doesn't happen anymore so this is early 90s so practical effects are pretty much the only option they did like car crashes these days in movies are like all cgi

yeah but yeah they're like well we have to do a car wreck a dominic teretto car crash this is just like a car rolling down the hill in colorado it was right. I don't know. It's cathartic just to see an old school practical car crash. Yep. Okay, so in this flashback, Paul is talking to Lauren Bacall. And he's explaining to her why he killed off a beloved character in his famous book series entitled the Misery series named for the main character whose name is Misery. Basically he wants to get away from this series and work on other projects. We cut back to him in his car. He's bloody and unconscious. Someone pries his car door open pulls him out and carries him off paul then wakes up in a bed in the home of annie wilkes played by kathy bates quick question would the minions have worked for annie wilkes if they existed at the time thoughts well since the minions famously work for the most evil person

they can find right i guess she didn't cut the mustard in terms of evil. There must have been someone more evil active at that time. Who was the most evil person in 1990? Oh, I mean, we have options. Yeah. Well, okay. That's Jamie's Minions Corner for the week. Just some food for thought. Okay. So Annie Wilkes, Paul is in her home. She tells Paul that she is his number one fan. She loves all of his books.

She's read them all. She's also a nurse, and she's going to take care of him while he recovers from this car accident in which he has been badly injured both of paul's legs are broken as well as one of his arms she gives him pain pills she has like put splints on his legs he's like well why didn't you take me to a hospital and she says the blizzard was too strong but once the roads are clear i'll take you to the hospital he also wants to call his agent and his daughter and annie says oh but the phone lines are down because of the blizzard so you can't i do love that he does do like in terms of i don't know how you i would you call is this a horror movie is this a thriller movie i don't really know what the exact genre is

i think it's a it's thriller suspense i would say it's in that right with some horrific imagery yeah there's sure there's some overlap because I just appreciate that James Corden's character so Paul Paul I like that he does do everything that a person would do in this situation he doesn't like do the horror movie thing where he's like all right and you know just like he does challenge her at every turn in a way that like made sense well and maybe there's a discussion about this as far as gender goes but the way men are written in horror movies is very different from the way women are written in horror movies when it's like a female protagonist when they're written by men they are written in such a way where they don't use logic right yeah so yeah perhaps we'll talk about that um perhaps a little foreshadowing um okay so meanwhile um lauren bacall calls

the local sheriff of Silver Creek. She Lauren Bacall. She Lauren Bacall. She Lauren makes a Bacall and she calls Buster, the sheriff. And she's like, hey, no one has heard from Paul. And I know that he was there in your town. So any thoughts? And he's like, don't worry, I'll investigate.

We cut back to Annie and Paul. Annie reiterates that she's his biggest fan and that she's been following him. And we're like, oh, she asks about his new manuscript and he lets her read it. But then she complains to him about all the swearing in the book. And she kind of snaps. She starts yelling. She spills soup all over him. But then she's like, him about all the swearing in the book. And she kind of snaps. She starts yelling. She spills soup all over him. But then she's like, oh, I'm so sorry. And also, I love you, Paul.

And then we're like, double uh-oh. And we also know that Paul has killed off her favorite character. Right. I think that that is my favorite bit of tension in this movie is like waiting for Kathy Bates to get to the end of the book. And then she goes nuclear. Yeah. But prior to that,

she has this little episode and Paul is starting to realize, Oh, she might not be entirely stable. Meanwhile, Buster, the sheriff is looking into Paul's possible disappearance. He is near Paul's car, which is now completely covered in snow. So the sheriff misses it. He doesn't see it. Also, the sheriff's his wife, Virginia. I just want to give her a quick shout

out because she is an iconic character. Amazing. She's the best. I i okay i don't like that this movie is also making me root for a cop and his deputy but i i found their on-screen relationship very fun to watch so sweet yeah i love how she was like was she about to jerk him off in the car or something and then he's like we're at work i was like all right this is this is good horny representation good for them because at first you don't know they're married and she's like putting her hand on his leg and we're like oh no what is about what is this inappropriate yeah and then she's like and then he and then buster's like babe when you're in the car you're not my wife you're my deputy and it's like okay they're married still inappropriate when you're in the car, you're not my wife, you're my deputy. And it's like, okay, they're married. Still inappropriate when they're on the job. I actually don't know whether

that comes from like Stephen King or William Goldman or both. But I just like those moments of levity are so fun. I just, I love Virginia. I wish we got more of Virginia, you know, after Buster is no longer with us. Where's the Virginia spinoff series? This movie has gotten a lot of spinoffs, but all of them have to do with Annie Wilkes, which I guess makes sense. Lizzie Kaplan played her on a TV show that I did not watch. I did not even know that. Yeah.

She plays like the young Annieie wilkes who getting into murdering babies yeah yeah so um i don't know i didn't watch it uh but and then it was also a broadway show starring uh laurie metcalf and she won a tony for it which also sounds pretty good oh wow i had no idea there was so much Misery content out there. The Misery expanded universe. Like, don't rule out the Virginia story. Oh, you mean the MCU? The Misery? The Misery cinematic universe.

Exactly. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So Annie continues to be very creepy. She fawns over Paul's new book. So here's something that was confusing to me. The newest Misery book in his like Misery series has just been released and is being sold at bookstores. So Annie gets a copy of that. So she's reading that and his manuscript. So when she's talking about like

what she's reading, I was never quite clear if it was his published book or his unpublished manuscript. She's reading both concurrently it seems so that's happening and then annie finishes the new book the published one and learns that paul has killed off the misery character which absolutely devastates annie she lashes out she says she can't be around him she needs to leave and she also reveals to him no one knows that he's there she never called his agent or daughter like she said she did and he's like even more isolated yeah now so annie drives off and paul is trapped in her house with two broken legs and he can't walk so he crawls out of bed but oh no he is locked in his room

so the next day annie comes back and she's like i know how we'll solve this god showed me the way you're going to burn this manuscript and she knows this is the only copy and she also starts dumping lighter fluid on him so he has no choice but to burn his manuscript. Yeah. Her like just being the super fan and knowing all this information that like, she's like, no, because like,

Oh, it's just so scary. It's so scary. It's just like a number of times in the movie, she uses her like super fandom knowledge of him against him. Cause he's like, he tries to be like, well, there's a bunch of copies floating around publishers. because he's like he he tries to be like well there's a bunch of copies floating around publishers and she's like you said on an interview 11 years ago that you

only you don't make copies because you're superstitious so i know that this is the only copy and i'm making you burn it and he's like busted it's like meeting the person who edits your wikipedia or your you're like no no, not your your your wiki feed page. And and they want to kill you. It's so good in the book. I guess that and I was like, this is like an interesting I guess I don't know what I prefer. I think I prefer the movie in the book.

There is more than it's like a copy of the book does survive. And he when he escapes at the end he publishes the original copy he wrote and it becomes a big hit he doesn't rewrite it i think i like it better when he rewrites it and it's about ptsd sure yeah i don't know okay so paul has burnt his manuscript and then annie sets him up in a wheelchair with a desk, a typewriter, and expensive paper so that he can write a new manuscript, one where Misery isn't actually dead, and one where he's paying tribute to Annie for saving his life and nursing him back to health. And he's like, okay, but I can't write on this paper. It smudges, which is just an excuse to get her to leave

and which upsets Annie and it makes her feel like he doesn't appreciate her. So she storms off to go get this other type of paper. While she's gone, Paul picks up a bobby pin that has been left on the floor and uses it to unlock the door to his bedroom. But like he does in his books i love i love that sequence he's like well it does work yeah it's one of my favorite

sequences in the movie for sure it's great yeah um but i guess the front door to the house is locked from the outside so he can't get out right so he's going around the house trying to find a way to escape the telephone like she has disabled the telephone so he can't even like make a call he hears her coming back so he scrambles back to his room relocks the door with the bobby pin just in the nick of time meanwhile paul's car is finally found the like area law enforcement thinks paul is dead in the woods somewhere but Buster the sheriff doesn't think so so he keeps searching and then you get that amazing scene with him in Virginia where Virginia's on the phone being like I don't know where he is he's probably out cheating on me

she's like the least professional person in the world I love Virginia Virginia. Yeah. Okay, so then at Annie's insistence, Paul starts writing a new manuscript. Annie doesn't approve at first, so she makes him start over. He begins a new version, which Annie loves. And then Paul is like, Oh, will you have dinner with me tonight, Annie? He's clearly, you know, like cooking up another scheme, which is that he puts the pain meds that he has been stockpiling in her glass of wine to drug her. But oh crumbs, she spills her glass of wine

and his plan doesn't work. Oh, it's so good. It's, ah, I love this movie. So then Paul keeps writing this book. Annie is reading each new chapter as he finishes it. She's loving it. Some time passes. I don't really know how much.

I'm thinking like a couple weeks or so, enough to like get him a little bit more healed up. And she's getting sad because, oh, she loves him. And she knows that he doesn't love her back and his book is almost done and his legs are getting better so soon he will have no reason to be there anymore and then annie pulls out a gun and says something about how she thinks about using it sometimes and we're like oh the stakes are getting higher don't do that oh that monologue is like so we'll talk about it but it's like it's it's just great yeah then paul finds a bunch of newspaper

clippings that suggest annie has killed a lot of people including her husband other nurses a bunch of babies at the maternity ward of the hospital yeah she doesn't really discriminate who she'll kill really anyone it seems yeah uh so paul is really like i need to get the fuck out of here but then she drugs paul and when he wakes up she has strapped him to the bed and she basically intends to keep him trapped there forever then we get the moment that i believe the movie is best known for which is when she takes a sledgehammer to both of his ankles so that he can never get away a scene you can that monologue too oh it's so good. I mean, she won. This is the only fun fact from the IMDb page.

This is the only. So Kathy Bates won an Oscar for playing Annie Wilkes. And it's the only Stephen King movie nominated that's ever actually won an Oscar. No kidding. Yeah. I mean, well deserved. He also wrote. I mean, he wrote.

You would think Shawshank Redemption would have won something that's what i say they i guess that they got snubbed across the board i forget that shawshank redemption is a stephen king thing yeah yeah yeah wait jamie did you say a scene that you can feel similar to oh nicole kidman saying sound that you can feel yes the best thing best thing ever made, the AMC commercial. You know, I would say when it comes to Annie Wilkes Cabin, heartbreak does not feel good in a place like that. Somehow heartbreak feels bad in a place like Annie Wilkes Cabin. Yeah, because not only is your heart breaking, so are your ankles. That's true.

Yikes. Your ankles and your will to live wow yes uh okay so he his ankles are badly broken um then annie goes back into town and sheriff buster sees her and he's like hmm hang on a. There's something peculiar about this Annie person. Meanwhile, Paul is back at the cabin and he's like, well, I guess this is my life now. Annie comes back home and puts Paul in her basement. And then Sheriff Buster comes over to Annie's house and wants to look around. He discovers Paul in the basement. But just then Annie murders him with a murder's buster, the sheriff with a shotgun. And she's about to kill both Paul and herself. But to save himself, Paul is like, No, no, no, Annie, I do love you. And I want you to help me finish this book. So there's a sequence where

he's finishing the book, she's all happy, and they're gonna celebrate and he needs his champagne and his cigarette and a match to light the cigarette. But he has when he was in the basement, he had procured a canister of lighter fluid. And so when she goes to get the champagne, he dumps the lighter fluid all over his manuscript and burns it and she's like oh my god what the hell and then there's a big scuffle they're you know violently fighting with each other and it's a it's brutal i mean that i always i'm surprised again by how and she comes back to life at one point oh it's just brutal yeah and it finally culminates in Paul killing Annie and then we cut to sometime later he has obviously been found and rescued he's made a Lauren Bacall he made a Lauren

Bacall and got to safety and his ankles have healed he's able to walk again and he meets with Lauren Bacall and he has a new book and also he talks about he basically you know he describes his PTSD where he while he knows that Annie is dead he still like sees her on and he's kind of tormented by the thought of of her in general the concept of a brunette and then at the end a server comes up to him and she's like, hi Paul, I'm your biggest fan.

And we're like, oh. And that's the end of the movie so let's take a quick break and we will 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.

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And don't worry, we promise to avoid any black holes. Most of the time. And we're back. Wow. Where shall we start the discussion? Ashley, what jumps out to you? I first want to start with just, I did some research too, and I thought it was just, this is kind of an aside,

but I thought it was crazy how many people that this film was offered to that wasn't James Caan or Kathy Bates. Yeah. Ooh, wait, who? So the part of Paul Sheldon, who ended up being played by James Caan, was offered to, literally, the names are endless. Ahem.

William Hurt, twice. They offered it to him twice. Okay. And he declined both, but they came back and were like, are you sure? William, I guess he was like, no. Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, and Robert Redford.

All of these people said no. Wow. And I guess, oh, and Warren Beatty was interested in it. Okay. But wanted to like change some stuff with the character. And I guess they were like, Warren, we don't have time for all this. Do you want to do the movie or not? And was like no actually i don't and so i was like i'll just keep doing dick tracy yeah yeah and and then and then he eventually had to literally drop out

officially i guess he used the dick tracy as kind of you know the reasoning for that but jay i don't know how it got to james conn but i don't know if they were like, listen, James, we've reached out to 400 people. Are you down to do it? All more famous than you? Yeah. And James was like, yeah, at the time. Like, I imagine it was like super simple. He was like, yeah.

Like, how are you shooting for a month? I can do that. Like, and then it became this amazing movie. And then Annie Wilkes was offered to angelica houston which is like amazing and bet midler both turned it down and bet midler is uh she said publicly that she's deeply regretted the decision to turn down the character well she was busy prepping for hocus pocus yeah yeah but i i just like that as like a just a an entry point or like i said an aside i guess just because it's such an iconic film and so many people turned it down i love hearing those stories yeah where it's like it was obviously

exactly who it was supposed to be it was supposed to be James Cahn and and Kathy Bates but it could have been so many other people wild to think about and I just think it's like wild that um I just can't get over the fact that this is a Rob Reiner movie on on top of everything else and then this is like rob reiner and william goldman collaborate i think back to back doing this and they had just done the princess bride adaptation together three years before and then they're like okay change of pace what if we did misery and both of those movies are so iconic it's like it's wild yeah incredible so my as i said i'm still kind of like processing this movie because i do think there are a number of ways to look at it um yes

i was kind of initially struck by the thrillers of this era of which there are several where women are the scary person the captor the abuser you know like the the villain of the movie who are often targeting men not always you've got like single white female um where it's two women but if you're thinking about like fatal attraction yeah there's another one we've covered on the show and though and the woman is always killed at the end yes yeah so she she's punished and so i'm trying to think of it where i'm like is this sort of just like a, like a screenwriting, like creative choice where writers are thinking of ways to subvert situations and expectations? Because statistically, in real life, it's men who are more often abducting people and abusing them and, and being scary and creepy so is this just like a writer's way of saying oh what if we you know what if it's a twist what if it's a woman this time or is it like male writers villainizing women because of sexist reasons is it something else Is it all of the above? I am very curious about creative choices

like this is what I'm saying. And like, what is the what are the implications of that? What are the motivations behind making choices like that? You know, I think that media has and entertainment has kind of brainwashed society into being really into and intrigued by you know the unhinged quote-unquote woman you know there's something I think it's because you know societal norms tell us that women are hinged we're're not unhinged. We are supposed to have it together and take care of the family and be the wives and the mothers and whatever. The homemakers, you know, obviously, this is a very antiquated view. But I'm just, you know, it's like a blanket statement as far as like the way society sees women. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, those are the expectations society has for women and annie wilkes

like understands that too and like leverages it against people which i kind of for sure but i think that this movie definitely played to that it played to the interest that society and and consumers of entertainment are really that are really into the like you said the shock of like oh this is something different this lady is unhinged she's she's you know she doesn't have it together and she's scary and creepy and also there's a thing about women being obsessive there's a thing about that i think that's that's a major theme in this film and in the book is it's obsession. And I think when we tend to see obsession in media and entertainment, it's typically the woman is obsessed with the man.

Like specifically obsession, I don't think you see as often the other way. You see it very often with a woman being obsessed with a man or a man situation. Or if there's a man who's obsessed with a woman, we've talked like the stalker, like how men, especially in movies of this era are like, are often stalking the person that they want to be with. But it's not framed as a bad thing. It's a framed as like, he's going for it. He's gonna win her over yes yes that's what i mean it's it's cloaked in a different way yeah yeah for sure yeah i was thinking about this as well i um i think a good uh kind of like if i mean i'm sure that there's some crossover between

our listeners and her listeners as well but friend of the cast karina longworth did a wonderful series on uh the erotic 80s this is technically a 90s movie but it feels like an 80s movie came out in 1990 it's a cusp right but that sort of examines a lot of these issues and a lot of the cultural stuff because because yeah this is like the fatal attraction episode a couple years ago, how Glenn Close's character is like, you can't have it all. And like, they're like, and anxiety is around women aging, which I think is also present in Annie's character and just any woman who is othered by society, whether it's by how she looks or how old she is, or like the fact that she doesn't have kids, whatever it is. It feels like people are always, especially in this era,

which I think is interesting, always looking to make that the most evil thing that's ever happened and have it happen to such a nice guy, which is, and I love love i kept writing down in my notes paul as definitely not stephen king is on a little trip but i but culturally it makes me think about just when i was working on the kathy podcast just reading about women's media in the 80s in general skewed so far in this direction it seems like partially in response to um you know the 70s were a pretty progressive time with exceptions but like a more progressive time for women and women's rights than really any other time up till that point and then the 80s and early 90s were just a period of regression and fucking reaganomics and just like completely trying to repackage the collective progress people had made and turn it

into a consumer product and it feels like these characters and these women are are a big part of that of are a big part of like oh you think you wanted to like live on your own you think you wanted to like not live in this you know what is considered like this normal nuclear thing well guess what annie wilkes is like that and she's a murderer or like right this is what happens to a liberated woman who right you know lives on her own and doesn't have children she'll become a murderer which i don't know if that like wholesale applies to this story but it's like they're they're there's definitely annie wilkes is like a part of uh trend but that's part of why i like this movie it's like that reading is right

there and then or also if you you know happen to come across this interview that stephen king did in 2006 you can view the character in a completely different way because she's, you know, the addiction monster come to life. But also, why do you make the creative choice to make the addiction monster? You know, a woman who is over 40? Like, there's so many questions, right? There's certainly implications there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. This is just like something that I find endlessly fascinating in terms of like, we have certain societal and cultural expectations of women to, yeah, to be the ones to like hold things together and, you know, be domesticated domesticated and stuff like that. So to subvert that, and in this version of the subversion, what? Caitlin. Swish.

You have completely, quote unquote, unhinged women who are obsessive and stalkers and you know abductors and and murderers and not to say this never happens in real life but it's also far less likely that it would be a woman than a man doing these things so yeah i just like i still don't know quite how to process it i don't know i guess what i will because i also am actively having like and which i feel like does speak to how good the movie and ostensibly the book is that like it's not a very easily answered question where I guess that like Stephen King did pull from a real person to build out this character a nurse who it sounds sort of adjacent to um Munchausen's by proxy like she's she would make children sick and then quote-unquote cure them but couldn't always cure them and um was responsible for a

number of children dying on her watch and so like he he's pulling from something it's like not happening in a vacuum which i feel like is helpful but i don't know like yeah there are just like so many so many reads of it and well i wanted okay so if we're talking about annie i feel like it is there are a lot of tropes that we're talking about at play where i feel like her her body is not like directly commented on but it feels like the camera comments on her body a lot it feels like the use of the pig is a bizarre roundabout like joke at her expense. And I was struggling with it because it's like this isn't something that the movie is like outright telling you in a way that you might expect a movie of this era to do of just like absolutely making a joke of a woman's body that isn't like rigidly thin. Right. making a joke of a woman's body that isn't like rigidly thin.

Which did happen in the original reviews of this movie. Like Kathy Bates's body was commented on extensively and extremely rudely. And I don't even want to quote it here. Yeah. I was going to say not surprising. Right. Oh, like people had an issue with her body type.

No, they just were like, you know, the way that the character was described it was like leading with like a middle-aged overweight woman like that oh wow i think a good comparison here is have you both seen 10 cloverfield lane yes yeah yeah it's like such a similar premise but the it's a gender swapped premise and from like 30 years later or whatever. But John Goodman is trapping Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the basement and she can't escape.

And the twist is different, but it's like kind of a similar premise in that it's like a middle-aged person who's not rigidly thin is trapping someone in their house. But the reviews for 10 Cloverfield Lane and the way that John Goodman's character is talked about is, is different than annie wilkes i mean granted that the plot goes in a different direction but i i it i don't know i i was thinking a lot about 10 cloverfield lane when i was doing this watch right but that's all that's just very indicative of the way society views women's bodies versus men's bodies where like yeah if a woman is a villain in a story consumers of that story will be like yes she's a villain because she's like

not traditionally beautiful or like or you know just any any number of awful comments like that. But I think it's not a coincidence that an actor like Kathy Bates was cast to play Annie. And considering the other actors who were considered, Angelica Houston and Bette Midler, amazing actors, extremely talented. But these are three women who are not considered classically beautiful by Western beauty standards so i think it's very deliberate that again like someone like kathy bates is cast to play annie because yes she

she's an older woman um her body type is not a victoria's secret model type you know it's the way that like most famous like a-list actresses, you know, female actors look a very certain way. Yeah, it feels like that's what they were trying to say. Like, this is what unhinged looks like. Right. Like, this is what it looks like to us. Does it look like that to you, audience? Like, it almost is like, subconsciously, they're trying to convince us us that like this is the way it would look in reality.

This is what this type of captor would look like. This is what and again, it's not really in your face. You know, it's kind of like it's subtle in a way. But I agree. I think it was it was still very intentional right yeah and we have to decide what is it saying and is that okay that that's what it's saying you know it feels like the subtext is like how could this woman possibly be happy normal and well adjusted just like of course she has you know of course she has this. And at first, you know, her backstory, I thought just about the children at the hospital and her being the nurse, you know, kind of her past life.

At first I looked at it as like, oh, that's really good, like character development backstory. That's really helpful and useful. But then when you think about it, it's like what is that saying too like it's like her backstory is kind of like did children have is she someone who children had to die on her watch and she had to have this horrific backstory in order to be this person who's now doing this you know yeah it's uh it just like introduces so many questions i do i appreciate i just happened to watch fatal attraction the other night at a hotel um brag having a normal one okay um yeah i was at a lakinta uh yeah yeah it was a continental breakfast with the wet sausage that they serve at continental breakfasts yeah yeah yeah um but i was taking in fatal

attraction so it's fresh in my mind as well and i do feel like you'd get more background about annie wilkes than i expected and i feel like you do get more background on annie wilkes than you do for your average quote-unquote unhinged woman yes which is good and I would argue you get more background on Annie than you do on Paul really in terms of like what her history is and her history is uh you know horrific uh but we know about it and um and that does help in a way and I also a big thing unless I missed it so correct me if I'm wrong they do not attribute a specific mental illness to Annie within the movie is that right not that I noticed no yeah that also I know we've talked about this a billion times but that also I was relieved because I feel like often I

mean you could argue the opposite and say like oh you know we're implying that women are you know like fundamentally fucked up but we have you know we have Virginia we have Lauren Bacall we know that that's not the ethos of this world it's Annie specifically right um but I just always I feel like thrillers are so as a genre are so guilty of perpetuating stereotypes about specific mental illnesses. And it's always like, you know, the beginning of Midsommar,

they're like bipolar disease killed the family and shit like that. I just always appreciate when there is a, you know, diabolical character when a text does not attribute that to to a mental illness because they're just like i always does so much but i mean people have certainly speculated around annie wilkes's character but i don't think it's ever mentioned in the book or the movie it's just like well this is just what she's like this is just who she is yeah because that always ends up that always ends up villainizing specific mental illnesses and i would argue just mental illness in general for sure yeah

and then yeah like again the way that she is presented visually is the way that like queer coding a villain demonizes queerness. I think that the way that she's not even coded, just like the way that she is presented visually ends up villainizing a number of attributes a person can have as far as like age and body type and things like that. And then there's, there are parts where she's like,

Oh Paul, I love you. And you're perfect. And you're so brilliant. But you would never love someone like me. Yeah, she says something like, Well, I'm, you know, I'm an I'm a nobody. You know, I'm not this like famous writer like you. But I think that there's also subtext there where it's like, well, you know, I'm not this young, beautiful, you know know traditionally beautiful woman oh for sure yeah she's very insecure she's very insecure as it pertains to a lot of areas in her life i think especially to her her looks and how she comes off and you know she's very in her head about all of it and that and that is ultimately what paul sheldon is able to kind of use in order to get his way and try to escape

the situation he plays on that he's like okay she's insecure so I'm gonna play into no you are beautiful no I do love you no this this paper is great of course I'm grateful for everything you've done for me like he plays into boosting her self-esteem and her self-confidence in order to get what he wants. Which also feels like kind of a gendered thing to me. Yeah. Yeah. The way that like, I don't know, like a lot of women are characterized in movies where they just like need a lot of like emotional reassurance. And because women are so emotional and you know i don't know

i i don't know if i'm articulating that well but no i see what you mean i mean it's like again it's i think the this movie's strength and what makes it like a little challenging to have a discussion about is like there's so many different ways to read it where i think like for sure he's playing on her insecurities and and like you're just kind of getting at of like how how it like Annie is a very smart character she like catches him at every turn and my penguin always faces due south first of all a woman knowing her cardinal directions that's feminism wild that's final wave feminism which way is the penguin facing so like but she she catches him in all this shit she's very observant like there he should not survive this ordeal right but except for when he is manipulating her insecurities about

herself and manipulating her crush on him and her like obsessive nature around him right and then all of a sudden it's like logic goes out the window and she is not this hyper observant character that we know she is and that does feel a little pointed um but and you can come at that from the super fan perspective where I kept trying to like flip it in my mind where I'm like I guess like there is a a fun I don't know like when I was watching it I was like oh what if this happened to like someone writing an MCU movie and they were just kidnapped by one of those guys on Twitter oh you mean a misery cinematic universe yeah yeah in the misery cinematic universe? Yeah. Yeah. In the misery cinematic universe though.

But like, what if Jeff Loveness was, was kidnapped by, by someone on Twitter and like, how would that play out? And, but, but which,

and that mental exercise confirmed to me that it is kind of a gendered dynamic between the two of them that like, you know, when she, because we are conditioned to believe that this character is not going to be loved in the way she wants when she receives that kind of attention everything we know about her goes out the window right because she is receiving affection there's also like there are certain aspects of her character that and let me know if i'm way

off here but there there are things that like you know she lives on a farm she's surrounded by farm animals she drives like i want to say like a jeep cherokee like the and like the way she dresses is like all this sort of masculine there are certain things about her character that are more kind of markers of traditional masculinity. There are implications there where it's like, oh, any any woman who kind of presents in a more masculine way. Something's wrong with her. That also ends up getting demonized by this movie. But then also she is kind of like beloved in her community. So that's like the other

side of it is like she plays on this is something i really like is like she plays on people's expectations about her constantly in order to be like i don't know i just uh have been in the middle of reading a book about female serial killers and uh just having a normal week everyone yeah I was like that sounds interesting staying in a La Quinta fatal attraction look I have no plans to do anything I'm not plotting but but a common like thing that specifically women who kill do is like play on people's expectations of them of like oh i'm you know me i'm i'm just uh you know i'm a middle-aged lady i i raise pigs on a farm what do you mean i'm not a killer right which her community buys completely even though she's a well-documented murderer everyone has a scrapbook full of her murders um so it isn't until buster's like wait a second

isn't that the murder lady like that that that it comes up like so she does she like plays this whole community based on society's like go-to of underestimating what she could possibly be capable of positive or negative and she even like she even gets paul at the beginning where she like is she's got him in a bed she says you know i'm a nurse and he he believes i mean and she i guess she is technically a nurse she's a bad one but but like he but that is her job but he buys it he buys that like oh she's just like this nice lady she's going to take care of me because that is like what's just like this nice lady she's going to take care of me because that is like what you would be conditioned to believe she's going to take care of me

um there's no reason to mistrust her right right i have to look up this okay so the the female not to give a female serial killer a shout out but it reminded me a lot of the same kind of the book calls her the giggling grandma, Nanny Doss. But the deal with Nanny Doss, she was in the she was kind of like the first like the first woman serial killer to be like on TV in the 1950s. But she was a middle aged to slightly over middle aged woman who had killed four or five of her husbands in a row. But she presented as like, I'm just a sweet lady. What do you mean? And like,

she was received in the press. Like, she's not really very well remembered. I didn't know she existed, but like, she's just presented as kind of like a joke, even on TV, she's committed five murders and everyone's like,

look at this grandma who can't stop poisoning her husband and you're like this is horrible yeah right but it's like but she built this whole media image of herself based on people's you know assumptions to underestimate her and even when she was like outed as a outed as a murderer i don't know if that's the right thing but even when she was like you know found to be a murderer of a ton of people, people were still kind of like, ha ha, isn't this like weird and gross that this older woman is doing this? And you're like, it's kind of gross that anyone's doing it. I mean, murder is maybe not good. Murder bad. tends to desexualize mothers like a you know a woman who is like who is like raising a family

and and like raising children and and again like aging women it feels to me like those sort of like stereotypes of what we expect like a mother to look like are given to annie and that makes her less threatening at first that makes her seem like a not formidable opponent you know that's why james connell you know paul at the beginning is like oh i am in good hands like she's a nurse she's this like middle-aged woman who seems like she's taking care of me she put splints on my also the like prosthetics that they put on his legs to make his legs look like broken and bruised and everything like that are so icky um yeah but yeah like he has no reason not to trust her at first based solely on just kind of like societal expectations of women in kind of caregiver roles that we perceive to be as like very unthreatening because of like gender

norms and these societal expectations so i still don't know what to make of that from a like narrative point of view and from like a feminist point of view but it's interesting i feel like there's a lot of ways to come at it because it's like they're also i was like i you know i was like i had to admit to myself obviously you know anti-murder but brave brave of you thank you so much uh but in the world of this movie like it is a little bit cathartic to just like as an idea to have this woman who is like i that's why i really liked the speech where she's like i know you don't love me like don't bullshit me i know that you're like lying to me i know that you go for these you know like hollywood type girls or whatever it is she says and then to see someone clearly

articulate that of like you're full of shit and then uh break their ankles that's uh you know feminism I was like is that a hashtag feminist win I don't know but like seeing that as because you can look at that interaction as like oh she is she is the unhinged woman. And like it's implied that a woman who looks like her and is her age could not possibly be loved. Or you can look at it as like here's a woman who has been told her whole life because of how she looks that she is not going to have the life that she wants because of her gender and because of how she looks and as she ages because of her age and like just taking out that frustration on someone who's full of shit and like that's also really fun I don't know yeah I have a quote from Stephen King and he's using I mean we are it's hard especially when you're reading stuff about this movie too. We want to be mindful about language around mental health. So I'm quoting Stephen King here,

but he's, he says that Annie quote may seem psychopathic to us, but it's important to remember that she seems perfectly sane and reasonable to herself. Heroic. In fact, a beleaguered woman trying to suffer in a hostile or trying to survive in a hostile world full of cockadoody-doodie brats,

unquote. Wait, what did he say? Cock-a-doodie? Cock-a-doodie. I think he's just quoting how Annie talks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Of how she uses all these weird...

I don't think Stephen King minds swearing. I did really laugh at the part where uh Annie gives him the typewriter for the first time and she's like fix your book and he just types fuck over and over and over again I was like yeah been there which feels like I was like god yeah Stephen King loves uh every time I worry I'm like oh am I writing myself too much into this and then you're like well so many Stephen like every Stephen King loves uh every time I worry I'm like oh am I writing myself too much into this and then you're like well so many Steve like every Stephen King not every but a lot of them have like I'm a writer and writing is hard and like that's The Shining and Misery well speaking of The Shining

I think we'd be having a different conversation if every single one of Stephen King's books and like movie adaptations followed this formula of like unhinged woman abducts man and is scary and all women are scary and murderers but yeah something like The Shining which we covered again a few years ago is about a writer who is a man he's the one who becomes increasingly more unstable and scary and abusive and murdery. And his wife, his wife is the victim here. And like,

so we are rooting for her and she's, she's the character in that story who, you know, we're like rooting for her survival and to escape this very abusive man so there's enough yeah you know like uh variety in Stephen King's work that this just seems like an example of oh well sometimes there are scary women and this is just a story about one of them and I'll I'll shoehorn another podcast recommendation in here. You're wrong about just did an episode where Sarah Marshall, friend of the cast, is talking about serial killers and how serial killers are sort of characterized by gender or race or by just any attribute they have and how the white male serial killer um

while historically the most incompetent of them all um like even in serial killing um it's still very much like there's a fucking jeffrey dahmer series that just came out like there's it's still the white male serial killer and that is too i feel like i'm sounding very scary i was with sarah and she gave me the book about serial killers. And that is, I feel like I'm sounding very scary. I was with Sarah and she gave me the book about serial killers and we watched Fatal Attraction together. It was all for her work. Okay, Jamie, sure.

Sounds like a coverup. I'm not gonna kill anybody, I swear. We were at the La Quinta together. Definitely not dismembering a body. Also, I left this out of the recap, but there's what I felt was like a very clever thing for Annie to do when when sheriff buster comes over to look around her house she fabricates this story of like oh

yes i i am such a huge fan of paul sheldon and i you know i received this message from god that i should carry on his work now that he is presumed dead. And that's why I have this typewriter and this Paul Sheldon manuscript because I wrote it. You know, like she's like diabolical. But like the way she covers her tracks is like, I don't know. I just thought that was very clever. And so she is a very like we said, she's a very smart character. She's not incompetent. She just does does get and she had a good strategy like the strategy was

actually pretty solid yeah she and and she kept him there how long was he there i would guess at least a month like it's yeah like do we know the exact time for like how long he's i don't think so it seems like a while because they had to do, like, how long he's? I don't think so. It seems like a while, because they had to do some, like, montages of, like, time. He writes a whole book. I don't know. Yeah, I think it's more than a month. I don't know how, I don't think it's, like, six months, but I think it's a little bit more. It could be a couple months, three months, yeah, because his legs also, like, heal, and, yeah, he has time to write yeah a full manuscript she's so i mean it's like she's

so good that i it's just like wild that in the world it doesn't feel unrealistic somehow that like buster enters the house knowing she's a murderer and she still is able to charm him hard enough that he's about to leave the house like if if if james khan hadn't made noise from the basement he would have left it's just like if she's yeah she's good at what she does she's smart i also wanted to i i agree with what you say what you're saying caitlin about stephen king's um you know just like writing kind of just like a wide variety of killers and crime doers he certainly has stuff that it is not relevant to this discussion sure talk about another time but also i mean this the production of this

movie it's white guys up and down uh yeah however however it is like at least you know you like you're saying stephen king um does write a wide variety of women and a wide variety of villains. And I feel like Rob Reiner and William Goldman also have a pretty good track record with, you know, not being shy about like centering women in their work and not being like known as like hyper masculine um writer directors it feels like you know if if it's gotta be the three straight white guys and according to Hollywood it did always does especially when it's 1990. Yeah and I think it's good to note too that like you know I see Misery as being a film with a female lead a strong female lead and even misery is is a woman and yeah she's the hero of that series yeah so to me it's like it's it's strong female leads in the book and in the film that's right exploring the book that paul shon wrote. But also this is based on a book that Stephen King. It's all very confusing,

but it's female leads for sure. I would read those books. Yeah. I was like, I wish someone, I wonder if that ever happened. You know, sometimes they're like,

Oh, this fake book. And then someone actually writes it. Oh yeah. Right. I read the misery books. She sounds like a badass. She does.

I think that's great. That's the misery, like cinematic universe that a badass. She does. I think that's great. That's the misery, like cinematic universe that we need. Yeah. And controversially, I liked Annie's punch up of the misery story. Not saying it was all worth it, but I'm saying I liked her.

I liked her version. She had some good thoughts. She had some good notes. She did. She had some ideas. She was, I loved, oh,

the Kathy Bates delivery of like i knew misery was a member of nobility and you're just like yeah she's the best also the way that you know audiences remember horror movies for their villains way more than their protagonists who are like right of the victims of the villains for sure and and while you know like paul is like just as resourceful as annie and you know he's got the bobby pin he like stockpiles the drug the medicine he you know is able to procure a knife at some point he's also smart and resourceful but we remember misery for the kathy bates character we remember it for annie and her taking a sledgehammer to his ankles uh far more i i think at least than anyone remembers like james conn's character definitely

so yeah it's her movie oh and just another shout out to kathy bates kathy bates she's amazing an icon she's amazing and you know they talk about her being basically you know quote-unquote undiscovered at that time like she was you know she wasn't a name per se which is so wild all you need is the chance you know that's all you need and i think this is a great example of that and she delivered oh yeah holy shit did she uh and and then she won an Oscar for her first like big Hollywood role. It's yeah. It's she's awesome. Wonderful. Yeah. Is there anything else anyone wants to talk about? I don't think so. I mean, as far as the other women in the movie, you know, I like that there are women in roles. This is like a super, super white movie, which it does not have to be. For other female characters, we have Lauren Bacall, who is great.

I feel like her character, you know, like was properly motivated to like save her clients. And also, I just love agent characters because it's always like the subtext is like i need to save my my my money pile not my person i care about um always a fun character um and then you have virginia who's an icon a legend and i am bummed that they did not like she how does she how does she react when she finds out buster has been shot and or run over with a tractor in the book? And or. Oh, God. Yeah. Poor Virginia.

Also, a horny icon. She's trying to jerk her husband off at work. Good for her. Pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I love. I think the women in the movie all have what i do like about i guess

it's three right it's yeah yeah yeah is that they're all in my opinion very strong characters still they're women with a mission obviously you know any played, played by Kathy Bates' mission, is not a good one. Not a good mission. Not a mission we are rooting for, but a mission nonetheless. You know what I mean? Very active character. She's motivated. And they're all smart.

They all have things figured out. They all, you know, are kind of a step ahead of whatever you know for so i like that i can say that all of them are strong and motivated in their own rights i i really like that for sure nobody felt like a vapid unnecessary character or character used for to be like a sex symbol or to you know to lure lure the guys to the theater like i i i like right i like that they the all the characters felt very strong but also very and i like the casting of them too i think that they they give that as well they're they're giving we care about the character not so much what they look like and and as an actor I I always those are roles that I'm drawn to but also it's it's roles that I appreciate seeing on screen where I can say yes this woman is beautiful or strong whatever but what matters is not just what she

looks like she's saying something she's doing something she has real motivations and I like that I can say that about all three all three of the women yeah has real motivations and i like that i can say that about all three all three of the women yeah for sure yeah and just like the fact that it's like like you're saying actually like there are three women who are over 40 and we know what their jobs are and their jobs are important to what they're doing at all times very important and important to the story like it's important it's important that his agent is like no like he's missing what's going on it's important that virginia is like buster something's going on here i don't know i'm gonna you know it's important that kathy bates uh you know annie has this mission of

getting paul sheldon to do what she wants him to do whether again it's there's murder you know we don't agree with her but she's you know sledgehammering off ankles you know there's a lot of bad stuff happening but everyone's motivation is very clear yeah and i right i bang with that yeah yeah for sure and it's like there are three female characters but there's also not a lot of men it's just a pretty small cast in general like yeah yeah yeah because like there's like what six people in this movie yeah yeah I mean look I don't know what our listeners were expecting but this movie does rock uh it is it rocks and it rolls and it rules I that I will give uh credit to Jamie for that

because I heard you say that one time and I was like that's a good oh my mom used to say that uh when I did my homework oh I love it rocks and rolls and rules that rocks rolls and rules oh Jill I also misery is also just a movie I don't know anyone who's seen it and doesn't like it like I've never heard one person be like I hate misery never want to see that again like I've never heard someone say that all right is there uh any any other anything we haven't touched on i think that's all i have same oh i wrote oh i wrote um okay here's some of my worst thoughts i had please okay uh the original parasocial relationship cautionary tale okay we talked about that yeah okay here's my other thing feminist icon the piss jug question mark a hundred percent feminist icon the piss jug i can't believe we've been talking for an hour and a half and we haven't brought up the piss jug in a in a really

funny scene where she's just like kind of flinging it around i think it has a lid on it. So there's no danger of the piss flying out. But there's the, like the cinematography in that scene is so focused on the piss jug and Paul, James Caan watching the piss jug thinking that it's going to spill all over him. Please don't spill my piss on me. Also cinematographer,

Barry Sonnenfeld. Yes. Wild. You know, a lot of talent in this movie. Yeah. Yeah. I liked, I mean, as someone who has done some piss jug caretaking in my day, I appreciated

piss jug representation. Yeah. Because it's a part of the gig. Incredible. Well, this movie, I do not believe actually passes the bechdel test unless you do count the conversation that annie and her pig named misery so we know the pig's name they do kind of snort and oink around each other i would say it it it like doesn't pass but also that this is we've talked about this for years even though some people never want to hear it but like the just like the fact

that like this this metric was created as like a bit and it doesn't you know it's not the end all be all yeah it doesn't decide if something is you know overtly feminist or not right um but what does is decide that is our nipple scale on which we rate the movie zero to five nipples examining the movie through an intersectional feminist lens now this one is another very tricky one, because of the different ways that you can examine this movie. Could you argue that Annie Wilkes is a like reclaimable, you know, female villain, because she's so smart, and because she's always one step ahead? And, you know, for any number of other reasons? I think, yes. Sure, I can see that argument. Could you make the argument that it's another example of, you know,

villainizing an older woman, an unmarried woman with no children, a woman whose appearance and body size doesn't conform to rigid Western beauty standards, and that those attributes being kind of used to demonize her yes sure uh there there's lots of things and then when you think back to stephen king's original intention which he revealed some years later was that this is you know the anti-character is a metaphor for his addiction that there's a whole other lens by which you can um watch the story but then those implications still exist as far as like her character goes in the way that she is characterized so right right i don't know there's i can't really come to a conclusive thought because i i really like this movie i don't think it's saying something like all women are scary and unhinged because we see

other characters in the movie who are very much not that so it's just i think some people are very scary and murderers and sometimes those people are women and here is a story about one such woman and in a way that's feminism and that's actually feminism um you know there are some as we've discussed some like kind of gendered things and you know like kind of stereotypical tropes at play but this is not the worst example we've seen especially in this era in horror movies thriller movies in this era across the kind of you know genre spectrum even. Yeah. And so I'm going to do what I normally do when I don't know how to rate a movie. And that's just do a split down the middle of 2.5 nipples.

I will give one to Kathy Bates and her incredible performance. I will give another one to Kathy Bates and her incredible performance in Titanic as the unsinkable Molly Brown. And I'll give my half nipple to Misery the Pig. Oh, I'm tempted to go in my I was like, if I was really going buck wild, I would go three and a half. I think I'm going to go three. OK, because I do think that there are like we've discussed, there are a lot of tropes about women who are not traditionally, you know, Hollywood hot and young that are being leveraged as like a shorthand to explain why Annie Wilkes is the way she is. However, I think we also get a lot of explanation as to why Annie Wilkes is the way she is. That would also work if you cast a traditional hot Hollywood actress like she's just like implicitly evil and so

there's so many ways to look at this movie I feel like the fact that you know over 30 years later we're able to still have such a rich discussion about like what she could mean and all the different ways to look at this character speaks very well of it. And especially of like Kathy Bates, his performance, but obviously there are tropes at play that, you know, you could watch the movie and think the movie is commenting on,

or you could watch the movie and think that the movie is completely playing into. And it's just a, it's a tricky one. But of the Stephen King adaptations, I think that this is like, I mean, definitely Up There is one of my favorites. I don't know what my favorite Stephen King adaptation is. I know that I get very horny for Bill Skarsgård.

So that's just... Oh, in It? As Mr. It? Not in It specifically, but just in general. But that kind of has nothing to do with the quality of the movie. So it's complicated. Wait, have you seen Barbarian yet? Just as a quick little side note. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh. Is it good? It's really good. I rather liked it. Yeah. Okay. I enjoyed it.

It's a fun. It's like, I think it's my Halloween movie of the year so far. But yeah, I mean, I think that this movie is still so ripe for discussion in a way that a lot of movies from this era aren't so i'm gonna give it three and i still am like do i think three and a half i don't know but ultimately it is like it's a movie that you know it's you know straight white guys all the way all the way down there's no real diversity of talent behind the camera which always sucks to see or in front of the camera or in front of the camera um i meant gender wise as well like there's yeah but it's shout out to the um i think one person of color in the movie who is a reporter

who is a black woman saying that pauleldon is presumed dead. Yes. I believe is the only, where's her spin off? Where is her spin off? But yeah, I think I'll, I'll go three nipples and I'll get, I'll give one to Annie,

one to misery, the pig and one to misery, the character, or alternatively, I give all of them to Virginia and she can use the spare like a tire. Yes. Good, good, good. Ashley, how about you?

I love both of the arguments. And I actually agree very much so with you both. I think I'm giving it three nipples. I'm giving it to the three female leads in the movie. Hell yeah. I think that's why it gets three. The agent, you know, Virginia, Buster's wife, and, you know, Lauren Bacall

obviously is the agent, and to Kathy Bates. I think that, you know, they're all very important, useful, like I said, strong characters in the movie, and I think that because of that, I'm giving it three to represent

all all three of them nice for sure wonderful ashley thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me thank you for bringing us this movie yeah talking about misery on a monday what better time and come back anytime to talk about any other film. Yes. Thank you so much. You guys are just incredibly brilliant and cool. Oh, stop it. Are you our number one fan? Yes. No, I'm obsessed. I mean, talking about anything, films and women, I mean, it's right up my alley.

So this is great. Come back anytime. We'd love to have you back. Thank you. Where can people follow you online and have a healthy parasocial relationship? You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Ashley Blaine. And then my podcast at Trials to Triumphs Pod on both. Yeah. Awesome.

Yes. Please check Ashley out. um on both yeah awesome yes please check ashley out you can follow us on social media at bechtel cast on twitter and instagram you can subscribe to our patreon aka matreon yes patreon.com slash bechtel cast where you get two bonus episodes every single month this month we are doing spooky movies uh so of course we are doing final destination three we have not covered one or two nor will we bed tanning bed um and as well as uh malignant the james wan masterpiece yes feminist masterpiece by mr james wan uh and that's five dollars a month and you also get access to the back catalog and sorry there's a siren because that's buster and virginia coming to save me i've been trapped this whole time copaganda copaganda got us again didn't it uh okay uh you can also

get our merch over at tpublic.com slash the bechdel cast if you're so inclined to get merch. And with that, let's go publish a bestseller, but be haunted by the ghost of Annie Wilkes for the rest of our lives. Let's do it. I do not sign up for that. I don't want that. Count me out. Fair, fair, fair, fair.

Okay, bye-bye. Bye. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unnerves 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. 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. I'm NK, and this is Basket Case.

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

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