The Bechdel Cast - Mulholland Drive with Dawn Borchardt

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Jamie, Caitlin, and special guest Dawn Borchardt have a very surreal and metaphorical dream (???) about discussing Mulholland Drive.(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow @fauxreal222 on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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, They're just dreams. swaps of different meds, but by culture and society. By looking closely at the conditions that cause mental distress, I find out why so many of us are struggling to feel sane, what we can do about it, and why we should care. Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Bechdelcast, 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 effin' vast, start changing it with the Bechdelcast. Um, hi, I just wandered into this house, and I'm in the shower. Who am I? Oh my gosh, let me help house and I'm in the shower. Who am I? Oh my gosh.

Let me help you. I'm so nice. I just moved here and I'm going to be a big star. Cool. Just kidding. And that's the summary of Mulholland John. Yeah. You're not going to hire a hitman to murder me, are you?

No. Okay. I would never do that. I'm so nice i would never do that i'm so nice look at me i'm so nice i just got off a bus and everyone believes in me and i'm an amazing actor cool let's kiss i did have this thought okay does this whole movie pass because okay spoiler alert no we haven't even told you what the movie or the podcast or who we are yet. But I'm going to spoil the whole movie right now. Yeah. In Mulholland Drive, does the whole movie pass the Bechdel test?

Because it all takes place inside of one woman's head. And so in a way, they're all extensions of one woman's brain. And therefore, every exchange in the entire movie is just a woman talking to herself and rationalizing the events that have for the first two hours i think you could make that argument yeah oh and then right right yeah because this movie is two and a half hours long but i think yeah for for the majority of the movie it's it's a woman talking to herself through different conduits but it's all in the same person's mind i don't know if you if you take that interpretation of the movie because famously david lynch is like i'm not telling you what my movie is about he's like

and that he like look i'm taking the most basic one and yeah i feel fine with that yes in that read though i think that it's it's a good hack and yet we have so much to talk about welcome to the Bechdel cast my name is Jamie Loftus my name is Caitlin Durante and this is our podcast where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test as a jumping off point but oh no I have amnesia oh no I don't remember what the Bechdel test is Jamie tell me well uh this is all my dreams so I have allnesia. Oh, no. And I don't remember what the Bechdel test is. Jamie, tell me. Well, this is all my dream. So I have all the information.

Okay, great. The Bechdel test is a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test. A lot of permutations of the test. The one we use is this. We require that there be two characters with names of a marginalized gender talking to each other about something other than a man for more than two lines of dialogue and it should be some sort of narratively impactful exchange not really a problem for this movie so i'm not going to get much more into it than that yeah and today's movie as we said and as the title of the episode would indicate

is Mulholland Drive and it's interesting because it's we have this has happened I guess a couple times over the years but we have prepared for this episode previously for a show we were going to do in Philadelphia and then we I forget what happened but then we're like we're not doing that and I think we we found a guest that we were like you can do whatever movie you want we were going to do Mulholland Drive but you don't have to do that if you don't want to and she was like yeah let's do something else so that's why we changed it okay i think i don't i mean this is an amazing story no matter what and our listeners are probably really engaged in this story of scheduling from three years ago i don't really remember i just remember that we ended up

it this is so boring anyways we're covering the movie now and we've got an amazing guest so let's get them in here we certainly do she is the host of faux real podcast she's a contributor to cinema femme magazine it's dawn borchardt welcome hello hi thank you so much for having me oh we're so stoked to have you and thank you for uh bringing us i think this is this has definitely been a request for the entire time this show has existed and we've been putting it off i'll tell you what reluctant i'm happy to be talking about it today i'm the guest for you well let's get started there then what is your um history and connection with the movie mulholland Drive well I've seen it a few times over the years probably first in college would be my guess um and then I watched it again in

preparation for this podcast and I think mainly I just love David Lynch and was a big fan of Twin Peaks um and so I was excited to choose this film and you guys sent me a couple options I was like oh yeah I want to do this one and a couple years ago I went to the Twin Peaks town and so that just kind of like furthered my like nerddom I don't know what I can't remember what the town is actually called but where you can see like the waterfalls and the diner and all that and like the area where the sign is. So that's not Mulholland Drive. But yeah, I'm excited to talk about this one today. Cool. Hell yeah. We have Okay, this is one of my favorite episode dynamics we have coming up because I feel like this is I'm trying to think of another example this has happened where we've had a guest who is very into the director. We've had a Caitlin who is very not into the director. And then we have Jamie scrambling around

the centrist of the operation, not in life, hard left in life. But sometimes on the podcast, I take a center stance because Caitlin, what is your history with Mulholland Drive? Oh, gosh, yes, I have seen it a number of times also the for the first time in college so it would have been like mid-2000s that I saw it the first time once again sometime after that maybe like you know your early 2010s and then uh probably like three times I watched this movie so many times to prep for this recording because again, the movie is famously difficult to interpret. So I was like, what is this about again? And I kept rewatching it, hoping that I would come to a better understanding at any point.

And that didn't happen. So generally, okay, here's a little, it's story time. Hit it. Yesterday, I think I tweeted something, which is mistake number one. Never a good start to a story. I tweeted, I resent all the years I felt pressure to pretend that David Lynch is any good. Now, I do wish I had reworded that. I feel like you fired a take into the internet. I did. Which is a risk. It is a risk. But I wish I had said, I resent all the years I felt pressure to pretend that I like David Lynch's work. Sure.

Because there's a big difference between I like something or i don't like something and something is good or something is bad so i recognize that i agree however i will say uh twitter is a website for adults that should know that and and perhaps um not attack you based on a very simple easy to understand way of like you know i agree i agree okay okay i was like i was like don't be too hard on yourself in this situation because people know that but that's not what twitter that's just not how people act on twitter sure so basically what happened after that is dozens and dozens of people uh got into my mentions and uh insulted me in various ways because i forgot something that i should have remembered which is that and i i wouldn't even this doesn't just

apply to david lynch fans i feel like this applies to a lot of things that have a like cult following status. Yeah. Where some of the fans sometimes take it personally when you don't like the thing that they like. So a lot of David Lynch fans did not like what I had to say and they started bullying me online. Not online bullying. So that's what I've been dealing with. So I've been, you know, just trying to ignore all of my Twitter notifications for the past several hours. So this is all to say that my, and I don't even, I don't even dislike all of David Lynch's work.

I find Twin Peaks to be generally enjoyable. I like the elephant man. Other of his films, not so much. I do deeply, deeply, deeply hate Eraserhead. And I also am not a fan of Mulholland Drive. But I do think it'll generate some interesting conversations that we will have soon on this podcast um but yeah i generally i have a tumultuous relationship with david lynch's work drama the end jamie what about you uh no real saga or lore to go with it uh i i think like my my whole ethos towards david lyn Lynch I don't love Mulholland Drive I've seen it a couple times before

It's not my favorite I find David Lynch to be a very I'm glad he exists Because I do feel like there is A dearth of Ochoers Who are just fucking weirdos And I think that slowly

This is happening more and more that there was more diversity in that category of filmmaker of just like carte blanche weirdos. He's not a weirdo that lines up exactly with my interests. And I do think that there's a lot of interesting discussion around his work and whiteness and his work as it pertains to women because he's just like i'm just i'm interested in him as a cultural figure he seems like a lovely man every every interview i've seen with him he seems like a sweet old man

right true yeah and i also have done some of his meditation stuff and it's pretty fucking good uh but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about the movie i i think that it is like interesting to kind of look at especially how it's it's most male auteurs that we talk about you know the issue is that they underdevelop female characters they never you know feel like centering them they never feel like really exploring their motivations their ideas where they're coming from that isn't david lynch's problem at all but he's still weird with women where it like it's just like he seems to in his work that i've seen and i have not seen all of it so take everything i'm saying with a grain of salt and i'm sure everyone's gonna be so

fucking mad uh is is that i i think it's interesting that there's a male auteur who seems uniquely interested in psychologically torturing female protagonists. Because he has women as protagonists all the time, but they are always under this extreme mental distress. And this movie is not an exception to that interest no like Lars von Trier like oh my god yeah and I have to say I haven't seen all of his films so I'm not like as intense of a diehard but I do love him and I agree with what you're saying Jamie like his him as a person just seems so likable and goofy like I want him to be like my grandpa

the documentary that I saw what was what was it on there's a documentary about him because he has this whole and we'll get into this too I mean and like he has this whole ethos of like art life and that's his whole like the way he lives his life he has his home life he has his art life and art life is very important to him and it sounds like a lot of his previous spouses have been shirked and perhaps mistreated in the interest of art life right but there was a whole movie made about his view on art and how it's like very all-encompassing for, but also I guess we'll get there. I just am like, you know, men, you know, but truly here we are. And that's okay.

That is okay. Should I do the recap and we'll go from there? Yeah. Good luck. Well, you'll do the recap and then we'll run it back and then recap it in order you know i guess what i'll say before you start the recap is i don't know the exact quote but i read some quote from david lynch that just said like i don't understand like what the problem is it's a totally cohesive story i yeah i saw that too i think he trolls though i do think that he is like somewhat of a something of a something of a troll what the fuck am i talking about i think he trolls in inter like in interviews it seems

like he has fun being like what do you mean this movie makes total sense like he knows yeah hard hard to say um okay so the movie opens on a bunch of people swing dancing and then we see a car driving a windy street it's Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles ever heard of it I've been my I will say this is this is not a flattering portrayal of David Lynch fans my first and worst roommate in LA drove me up to Mulholland Drive on my birthday two weeks after I moved to LA and in spite of the fact that I told her I've seen Mulholland Drive before she essentially held me hostage on Mulholland Drive and recapped the entire movie to me didn't love her moved out three months later yikes I had a comedian friend or like someone who i was friendly with

reply when i told him i wasn't an enormous fan of david lynch he called me stupid and said i just didn't get it because i wasn't smart enough oh so he's not your friend not after that good riddance right okay so in the back seat of this car that's driving on moholland drive is a woman played by laura herring the two men in the front seat stop the car they point a gun at her we don't really know what's going on and before we can find out two cars full of wild youths it's the best way I can describe them, come racing down the street and crash into the car that Laura Herring is in.

Everyone presumably is killed in this accident except for this woman who stumbles away from Mulholland Drive to Sunset Boulevard, which is like roughly two and a half to three miles, by the way. So she stumbles there on foot. I've stumbled down further lengths of Sunset Boulevard, which is like roughly two and a half to three miles, by the way. So she stumbles there on foot. I've stumbled, I've stumbled down further lengths of Sunset Boulevard. And it was

not as sexy as it is in the movie. Pretty ugly. That's how I get from your place to my place. But you're not stumbling. No, I look so beautiful when I do it. It reminded me of when I asked directions from this really buff guy one time uh to go to Runyon Canyon and he pointed me in the direction of the very wrong very hard path and I was trying to be like a cute girl with like an outfit on walking on Runyon and ended up like with just like leaves and sticks in my hair and was like sweating profusely and hated every second of it i love hiking now but that time i was like no honestly brave of you to hike at all

okay so she stumbles to sunset boulevard and sneaks into an apartment uh the woman who lives there she sees leaving town so she starts squatting in her apartment. Then we get a scene where a man at a diner is telling another guy about a nightmare that he had about a man with a scary face. And then we see a scary swamp monster. Yes. And you're like, I know this is a metaphor, but I guess I just have to wait two and a half hours to find out what it is for and i still don't get it i think it's failure i think it's failure and guilt and shame i see i see anyways uh then we get a quick scene with a guy whose name is mr roke i think he's like the girl

is still missing and this is presumably about the woman from the car crash then we meet Betty played by Naomi Watts Naomi Watts is I view her performance in Mulholland Drive as her preparing for her best role which is the next year in The Ring oh right I have not seen that movie in such a long time we should do it at some point only because it's i i don't even know if it's good i just know that i it's the thing that has scared me most in my entire life it is very frightening so naomi watts has a special place in my heart for scaring the shit out of me that movie came out when the lord of the rings movies were coming out and i was just like the one ring is the only ring i care about wow well i guess well i mean i guess that the lord of the one ring is the only ring I care about wow well I guess well I mean I guess

that the Lord of the Rings ring is a little better because it's like yeah absolute power corrupts absolutely but you at least get to live longer than seven days once you have it true money that's not enough time Gollum lived for 500 years hanging on to the damn thing it's true anyway okay so betty has betty has just arrived in la to try to be an actor she's very starry-eyed she's very sweet and bubbly she heads to her aunt ruth's place where she will be staying which is the same apartment that the woman from the beginning went into so betty finds the woman in the shower and assumes that she's a friend of her Aunt Ruth. The woman tells Betty that her name is Rita after she sees a poster for a Rita Hayworth movie.

And it becomes clear that this woman has amnesia after being in this car crash and doesn't remember her actual name. Meanwhile, Adam Kesher, played by Justin Theroux, is a film director who... His hair is so spiky. It's so spiky, so pointy. I like it. You can tell that you're like, oh, this this guy, this is a bad sort of guy. Look how spiky his hair is. So fun little anecdote. So David Lynch always has actors like meet with him for like a kind of interview rather than audition him so anyone he's seriously considering he'll just sort of

meet with and like get to know a little bit so when he met with justin thoreau justin thoreau had just gotten off of an airplane it was a long flight He didn't get any sleep. He was dressed in all black. He had untidy hair. And then Lynch was like, oh, wow, this is such a cool look for you. And then he basically mimicked the clothes and the hairstyle. He saw him in that day in real life and put that in the movie. By contrast, Naomi watts arrived for her interview wearing jeans and little to no makeup also direct off of an airplane like a long flight from new york city and david lynch asked her to return the next day quote more glammed up look there is there's a whole i got a whole little section on how david lynch treats women that he works with because that is so oh my god i'm just like naomi watts that's uh

jesus christ right meanwhile justin thoreau's plain clothes he's like king wow love what you're doing changing the narrative around clothes and looking like oh my god he's like put it in the movie cut print that's a wrap and we're like sure okay so adam kesher is a film director who some like producers or some industry people are demanding that he cast a specific actress in his movie someone by the name of camilla rhodes then we see a scene where a hitman shoots a few people then steals someone's famous black book that's full of phone numbers if you're wondering if that will ever come into play at any point in the movie it does not um it's a metaphor for hollywood ever heard of it for hollywood gatekeeping right yeah there's anytime i don't know what's happening i'm like metaphor for hollywood i just

am not famous enough to understand right then betty talks to her Aunt Ruth and realizes that Rita is not a friend of her aunt's. And then Rita confides to Betty that she doesn't know who she is. She doesn't remember anything. So then they go through Rita's purse to try to figure out who she is. But all they find is several stacks of money and a peculiar looking kind of triangular blue key. And we're like, it's a metaphor. But for what? For what? Guess I have five more hours of the movie to find out.

And this doesn't really jog Rita's memory, except that she does remember Mulholland Drive. Meanwhile, Adam, the director director goes home after production has been shut down on his movie and finds his wife his wife in bed with another man so who is played by come on wait who is that what billy ray cyrus are you for real oh my god the pool boy Billy Ray Cyrus I just guess I don't know what Billy Ray Cyrus looks like well clearly like that Caitlin I do think this is like another micro generational thing where it's like I've seen so much Billy Ray Cyrus because if you you had to watch Hannah Montana it was the law oh he was on hannah montana yeah because he's miley cyrus's father right i've actually never seen that show well i i saw i saw so much of that show and he

plays miley cyrus's father pulling from his own experience as miley cyrus's father right right and he's he's not a good actor he's the worst actor on the show. It's like actually funny how bad he is. Like it's kind of a perfect role in a way for him because it's so ridiculous. But he's terrible. He's the kind of bad actor where he like, maybe I'm just giving him too much credit because I have a nostalgic attachment. But I'm like, when Billy Ray Cyrus acts terribly worse than I've ever seen someone perform, it's a choice.

He's making a choice. And he could be doing a great job. But he's like, but what if I did a horrible job? What if I sounded like I was reading? I love that theory. Yeah. Anyway, Adam, the director, has found his wife in bed with Billy Ray Cyrus, apparently. So unbelievable. He ruins his wife's jewelry and

then leaves meanwhile betty calls the police to see if there was an accident the night before on mulholland drive which she's able to confirm there was and then she and rita go to a diner the same diner where we saw the scary face earlier, where their server is named Diane, which activates something in Rita's memory, Diane Selwyn, and she thinks maybe that's her name. So they look up Diane Selwyn in the phone book and find her address. Back in Justin Theroux land, some dudes are after Adam, the director, and he is instructed to meet with a guy named the cowboy who tells him he needs to cast this specific actress, Camila Rhodes, in the movie he's making. So then Rita helps Betty prep for an audition. Then we see Betty do the audition. Then she is brought to the set of the movie Adam is directing,

where they make eyes at each other. And it seems like, you know, sparks are flying. Spikes are gelling. Right. You can tell that he likes her because the spikes go boing okay his hair gets even pointier i also regret saying that um then adam concedes and casts the woman who he has been pressured to cast then betty leaves the set and she and rita go to the address of diane selwyn to investigate

they break into her apartment and find the dead body of a woman presumably diane selwyn rita freaks out they get out of there and then that night betty and rita sleep in the same bed and start kissing. Rita then wakes up in the middle of the night and takes Betty to this place called Club Silencio. They watch a performance and then suddenly Betty takes a small blue box out of her purse. It looks like it matches the blue key they found in Rita's purse. It looks like a metaphor. It's another metaphor. So they go home to unlock it. But then Betty seems to disappear. So Rita just opens the box and then we kind of like sink into darkness. We see a few images. We see the woman's dead body again we see the cowboy again then we see Betty waking up in a bed the bed of Diane Selwyn because she seems to be Diane Selwyn she has a blue key but it looks more like a regular house key now we also see Rita is there except now Rita is Camilla Rhodes,

who again is the actress that those people made Adam cast in his movie. Betty, a.k.a. Diane. This is going to be fun. Rita, a.k.a. Camilla, are in a romantic relationship or recently have been they seem to be kind of on the outs and it seems to be because adam the director is directing the movie that they are both starring in that both camilla and diane are in but now camilla has left diane to be with. We get a scene where Diane is crying and masturbating. Yep. Then we're like,

okay, I guess this needs to be in the movie. Then Diane gets a call from Camilla saying that a car is waiting for her and she needs to go to an address on Mulholland drive. And it's basically the same car ride as the beginning, but now Naomi Watts is in the back seat instead. But there is no crash like there was in the beginning. This time, Diane meets up with Camilla and they go to a party at Adam's house. On Mulholland Drive.

On Mulholland Drive. Ever heard of it? Diane seems to be having a bit of a breakdown throughout this party, which continues on for the rest of the movie. We smash cut to Diane at the diner that we've seen before. She's talking to the hit man and she's paying him to kill Camilla. The guy with the nightmare about the scary face is also there. We see the blue house key again. The scary face person is outside with the little blue box now.

It's so funny. Caitlin, I just took a step outside of knowing what you were talking about and being like, she does, she, what? Sorry. You're doing a great job. I'm right there with you. It's a very confusing movie to explain. Right.

I know. I'm like, I don't know. Am I leaving things out that are like super important because they're super metaphorical. Cause I'm like focusing, I'm trying to like make sense of the narrative stuff, but it's all very like symbolic and cerebral.

We can get in, we can get into that sure and also we're not here to break down the extremely specific david lynch symbols we're here to talk about right the intersectional aspects of it so true true true then we cut to diane at her home she's like having a full breakdown and she pulls out a gun and kills herself and then she becomes the dead body that rita and betty found and that's where the movie ends more or less let's take a quick break and we will come back to discuss 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 unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I felt too seen. Dragged. I'm NK, 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? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions

in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a basket case. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. on his life in less than three weeks. President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman.

The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current, available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. David Lynch fans that there's a lot of different ways to view the sequence of events in this movie and that that is it seems like part of why this movie is so sticky for people because it's like it it defies interpretation in many ways I think it's probably easiest for the discussion we're

having to go with I think the most popular interpretation which is Diane has called out a hit on a woman she's in love with named Camilla, who she had a relationship with out of jealousy. And the majority of the movie with Betty and with Rita is this kind of fantasy she's having, making sense of, you know, rearranging events to make her the hero or at least innocent in a story where her lover lived out of guilt that she's experiencing in her actual life i'm absolutely fine with that interpretation especially because david lynch his tagline for this movie is a love story in the city of dreams yeah i was just gonna say i would just go as far as just that and that the fantasies are happening in some sort of dream state because there's a sort of consistent laying down sleeping

theme throughout the film and so i feel like these i didn't watch it with like the intention of like pinpointing like scenes and their relation to like sleeping or laying down. But I feel like if you did, maybe maybe that would provide some insight at like sections. But for sure. Sure. I was I mean, I'll say I'll start by saying something nice about the movie, which is like it's I do think that it's it is like a really interesting setup for a movie where it's like, if you don't know how it ends going in, everyone in the first two hours or hour 45 of the movie are like a stock character of some type where it's like, Betty is like, just got off a plane

and has these big dreams and is kind of nepotism but we don't talk about that and like you know she's like this aspiring young actress we have the femme fatale character in the form of rita we have like kind of these like eccentric older women that appear in david lynch's work elsewhere not in a dream state but just you know flat out but in this um i think it's interesting, because because we talk about, you know, stock characters and trope characters so much on this show. But in the context of this is the dream of a failed Hollywood actress, it made a lot of sense to me. And I thought was like in terms of the first you know significant

chunk of the movie I thought that stock characters were used in a more interesting way that doesn't mean that there aren't problems with it obviously but like in a more interesting way and then when we flash to the reality I think that stock characters are used really not very well. And in a way that there is no excusing because David Lynch is like, and this is what Hollywood is really like, and I'm going to kill every queer character. Right, especially because it creates this kind of weird paradox for me, where again, the first two hours of the of the movie are these very like kind of one-dimensional characters these like archetypes that again are being used to a certain effect based on what we can only imagine is david lynch's intention we don't know because he won't tell us

but which is fine i mean whatever right i mean and it's i think it's like interesting that he's like oh here's my views on hollywood while also still you know very much participating in that system right anyways continue sorry um right so yeah he's using like you said jamie these um kind of stock characters approaching them differently and and having a specific intent for them, which like makes sense within the context of the story. But then the last like 30 minutes, when you see the real versions of these characters, not like a dream projection, or like a, you know, fantasy version,

like an unconscious or subconscious fantasy version of these people. Since you spend so little time with them, what little you do see, like you said, Jamie's like, oh, don't really like that. And then again, it's just so little development there that it kind of reminds me of the conversation we had about Inception, where one of the women in the movie, Mal, is a projection of Leonardo DiCaprio's subconscious or whatever. So it's like, how can you even? You know what? If this movie was made 10 years later, you know, Marion Cotillard would have been punished in this movie. Poor Marion Cotillard. I mean, say what you will about her, such as she doesn't believe in the moon landing, which I just think is an interesting fact about her. But they are killing her off in movies and treating her as like this ghost dead wife to this day. To this day. Y yikes she was killed off in annette just last year oh still haven't seen it look it's i i i can't stop thinking about it i don't know if it's good

or if it's bad but poor yeah marion cotillard she she has an oscar and yet we're still dead wifing her it's not nice but yeah i i yeah the the use of tropes in some parts of the movie i think makes narrative sense and then um towards the end doesn't i don't know yeah yeah so character development wise it's a really tricky movie to analyze right because of that which is like by design right because it's like i mean in in the in the betty rita dynamic you have very much this kind of like this femme fatale and this ingenue like you could you could paint that as a madonna whore to some extent and then feel like oh okay i know what how i feel about this but then when you see the reveal it's like oh no this is just you know i don't think that it's even really reductive or unrealistic to think that this is how

an actor who is not in a good mental state would try to interpret the world of any gender of just like because even i mean i think people of all genders in the first part of the movie are stock characters including like the incompetent hitman and like the detective and totally the psychic woman and just all of this stuff that is very david lynchie and but but contextualizes it in a way that some david lynch projects maybe don't but okay so so in that way it's it is hard to to analyze because in some ways i mean it's so interesting because like laura elena herring harring harring harring not sure we don't get to know her character really at all because we we get to see two different perspectives of her like we don't really see anyone in this movie even when we flash forward, my interpretation of it was like, even when we flash forward to Diane's quote unquote reality, we're still seeing things through her perspective.

And so people are still acting in this very bizarre way that I find it hard to believe people would actually be acting like in like in that reveal towards the end of the movie. That's like Adam, you know, Justin throws hair gel and and Camilla are going to get married. And the way that they reveal that information is like they're like mocking her, which is probably not how that would have happened. But that's how she perceives it. Right. And like everything is through Diane slash Betty's perspective throughout the entire movie to the point where it's like kind of hard to attribute like, oh, well, Camilla was doing this because I think that a lot of and this gets into a lot of the issues or criticism, at least around how queerness is interpreted in this movie of like how Camilla behaves at the end of the movie is made to seem very antagonistic and to like rub Diane's face in this new relationship she has with a man but as a viewer

I'm like I'm not even necessarily sure that that's what the character was doing that is how Diane interpreted that behavior because she was hurt that she was left but it's like but you can also if you interpret that behavior straightforward then there's a lot of tropey problems right it's and we've talked about this caitlin so like it keeps coming up because we keep like for some reason recently, Don, we've been covering a lot of movies that have like femme fatale adjacent energy to it. And this is another like more modern example of that. bisexual tropes that come into the mix as a result which is i think very much what is being put on to camilla's character right towards the end of the movie yeah do we want to get into that now let's let's get into it well i heard you guys talk about it on i think it was your a simple

favor episode so i was when you were talking about that i instantly started thinking how you guys were talking about the it was like dangerous bisexual character which isn't something that i had ever thought about before but it does apply here and then i guess i just wanted to add thinking back to like thinking about things from diane or betty perspective, taking it even a little bit of a step further, I guess. I feel like that scene is almost through like the lens of when you're really high emotions and remembering something, even the way like people are sitting around the table sort of like and looking at her the way that you would just remember something when you're really hurt and like maybe it doesn't even totally make sense you're just like reading off of everyone's emotions instead of like their actual words or announcement you're thinking about how someone you like was like cuddling and kissing and giggling with someone

else instead of like their actual what they're actually saying yeah right and just like yeah that was kind of my read of that whole elevated emotion scene it's like everything happening in that scene is happening at diane which is not how the world works but because like you're saying don she's at that elevated emotional state she's really hurt she feels betrayed she's taken off guard because she goes to that party it's clear off guard because she goes to that party it's clear from her perspective she goes to that party as still very much a viable romantic prospect for camilla only to find out that camilla is engaged and she had no idea like that betrayal obviously feels very personal to her and i feel like that i didn't even dislike how that was played out in like the

way that scene plays out it's just I mean honestly it's just like hard to talk about David Lynch movies on this show specifically because you can never be sure what's happening but I did want to speak a little bit to I think what is kind of clear in the way that and what's being telegraphed in that storyline i read a piece on a website called global queer cinema that does not credit its authors for some reason so this is from global queer cinema but really i thought broke down the way that bisexuality is portrayed through Camilla's character and how I believe we are to think that Diane is a lesbian that she's only interested in women and or at least that's what this piece is using sure so I just wanted to read from that really quick quote this is troubling in that the second half of the story relies on the viewer's preconceptions of the tragic lesbian in order to

function we see Diane as bereft, incapable of dealing with Camilla's defection to a man. This kind of quote-unquote straightening behavior fulfills the viewer's expectations that the woman who is solely lesbian is someone to be pitied and ignored, while the bisexual woman is to be congratulated for quote-unquote returning to heterosexuality. where we see the violent suicide of diane and her rotting corpse in the last image we have of camilla she is laughing radiant and apparently sexually fulfilled she is not presented as a figure to provoke our disgust or scorn unquote which i feel like kind of breaks down how and again this is speaking solely to the back half of the movie where I feel like the more insidious queer tropes are really poking out.

But yeah, especially I mean, as it pertains to Camilla, she's a bisexual character and she's very much portrayed in that way. We were talking about on the A Simple Favor episode of she's portrayed like bisexuality is conflated with being quote-unquote like loose and like i love everybody and i'm not i can't be faithful to anyone and ultimately i probably belong with the opposite sex with a man and yeah the fact that we never i mean we barely have bisexual men on screen it's almost always the more camilla storyline that is addressed because women being intimate with other women is so eroticized by straight men on screen so it's just like there's just a lot going on well also the female relationship it seems to play more on like temptation and they do talk about um well betty doesn't but they talk about like

it being wrong and like we should stop doing this and like yes it's because she's with adam the director but i also feel like it's because she's a woman it's like taboo that was yeah i totally agree with you and this is something that again this is i this has just been coming up for us so much recently we discussed this in our basic instinct episode was the idea of and and again it was discussed and i just we'll link to this um article in the description because i found it very illuminating and helpful from global queer cinema that kind of unpacks the idea of in these lesbian relationships in movies of like this era this 15 year stretch you very often see like the single white female trope coming out of like i'm in love with you and being in love with you if we are both the same gender means that i want to wear your skin and it's scary and also murder you eventually and and kill you

like it's it's so intense that it's dangerous and abnormal and to be avoided you know and it's like oh sure it's eroticized but it's never gonna end well and this movie plays on those same tropes and I never had like language for like because we were talking about that in basic instinct of like what is this this this comes up a lot what the fuck is this um this piece kind of attempts to unpack what the fuck that is so i just wanted to share this as well they they use it as a concept called sameness okay so the author says sameness in the sense which sarah ahmed uses in her study refers to a kind of homophobic preconception in which, quote, the very idea of women desiring women because of sameness relies on a fantasy that women are all the same. This portrays a kind of social and sexual arrogance as though women who choose each other are not capable of the kind of challenging diversity to be experienced in a heterosexual relationship it also assumes that

there are more differences between men and women than there are between two women or two men this association between homosexuality and sameness is crucial to the pathologizing someone's got a master's degree to the pathologizing of homosexuality as a perversion that leads the body astray so i i'm curious as to like what you both think about that and what our listeners think but that made sense to me as like something that a straight male oversimplification would be is like well women are attracted to women because they're both women and all women are the same to me because they're both women and all women are the same to me so they're probably the same to each other too like yeah I mean I definitely

got the sense that David Lynch doesn't really know what he's talking about in terms of representing oh well yeah queer women on screen and a queer relationship i mean definitely yeah yeah i i'd have to this is kind of the first time i'm i've gotten acquainted with this kind of idea of like sameness as same here sameness here same sameness um so yeah i i'd be interested to examine that more closely but i mean just as far as like the general tropes being put forth and i don't even know if some of the choices that david lynch is making as far as the queer characters in this movie are tropes maybe they are but either way it's definitely just like choices that are harmful well i mean for a marginalized group because like ultimately both of our queer female protagonists are brutally killed yes by

the end of the movie like again because like if if you're portrayed it's not unheard of in storytelling for like a scorned lover to get jealous and vengeful and then murder someone right you probably see that a lot in hetero relationships um which but it's in the news it's in the news but when you're portraying a particularly underrepresented group in media you have to be very careful about the decisions you make with regard to those characters so when you have a character who is a queer woman at the end of the movie vengefully hiring a hitman to kill her ex partner for reason like for what we don't totally understand and i also think there's a conversation to be had about the way mental health is represented in the movie sure so you know just to suggest oh

this queer woman is gonna freaking like have a breakdown and kill is there ever i don't think that there's ever a specific mental illness attributed to what no is happening right because that was that's always like my main like cardinal sin sure of mental illness trips but i do agree with you like there yeah i mean and just like conflating obsessive behavior with i mean specifically and again like this comes up in a lot of movies in relationships with lesbians and bisexual women and conflating obsessive and jealous behavior with a lesbian character and promiscuous and unfaithful behavior with a bisexual character is something you see in movies all the time for sure and this movie it like takes it to an 11 essentially well my thoughts like when you're talking about sameness my first thought is

literally and like everyone listening you just have to imagine i'm just showing boob hands there's like all these shots are just like boobs boobs and it's like comparing like these are two women and like that's what they're into and that's like what i read from those more like sexual scenes there's two of them like one the bed and one the couch oh yeah in both realities and it was just like very simplified to just like lesbians boobs totally i i agree with that like i think david lynch sex scenes i don't love them um but when i was talking about sameness sorry what i was more referring to was the wig and the like yeah oh yeah i was gonna talk

that stuff to mention that too so i i i don't want to like mischaracterize the piece that's specifically what that piece is talking about in that moment is like the single white female sequence i guess in that movie which you can very much attribute to like dreamlike behavior and i know in the dream analysis of this movie that that choice can be viewed very differently but I do think that it's very valid in in this interpretation as well of like you are the same as me and now I am attracted to you because it's not until Rita is wearing the wig and some and doesn't even want to take the wig off that they're able to have a sexual connection so I do think so sorry that that is like what the context in which that was coming up in got it

yeah yeah totally I mean that it seems so like I guess simplified in a way that you're saying like I had never heard that theory before but it in that moment where she's like wearing that wig, I guess that like intention to me seemed so obvious that it was like. Yeah. That age old sort of, I guess, sameness. Yeah, because this didn't come up in the recap, but there's, I guess, maybe like halfway through the movie. But after they go into Diane Selwyn's apartment, they find her dead body there. Rita kind of has a breakdown. And then we see her starting to like cut her own hair off.

And then we see her now wearing a short blonde wig, which is pretty close to the same hairstyle that Betty has. Yeah, I think that they're supposed to be kind of doppelgangers in that moment which didn't understand why that was happening but okay i'm glad you didn't because i also god david lynch gives himself such a huge like margin of error for most of the movie because you can just be like well dreams you know sometimes they just have dreams There's truth but no logic. And see, I guess that's why I like him because I'm okay to go with the flow. Right, right. Just be like, I don't know what's happening.

Because most of the movie can just be like, well, dreams are wild sometimes. But in that moment, yeah, I just thought that that was interesting because that is something that is presented as not dream logic in a lot of movies of like my first relationship with someone of the same gender was it was very you know obsessive to the point where it was dangerous that's a plot point in basic instinct that's a plot point in single white female like that it's just conflated with deviance, like horror movie behavior. Right. When it's a relationship that didn't work out, which is statistically all of them, basically. So like, you know.

Right. Yeah. So that was not handled well. Let's take another break and we will come right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. percent ad free subscribe to the iHeartTrue Crime Plus channel available exclusively on Apple Podcasts

I felt too seen um dragged uh I'm NK 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? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the

conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a Basket Case. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago, when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks.

President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore.

The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current. Available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. The next thing I wanted to discuss is, so there are two sex scenes. The first one, as far as I'm concerned, presents these two women in a very male gaze way in a scene that feels like it was plagiarized directly from a 13 year old boy's erotic fanfic where like

Betty is like, Oh Rita, you don't have to sleep on that uncomfortable couch. Crawl into bed with me and get a good night's sleep with me where you'll be so comfortable. And then Rita, very soft core. Yeah. And then Rita's like, crawl into bed with me and get a good night's sleep with me where you'll be so comfortable and then Rita very soft core yeah and then Rita's like okay and then she like comes over and approaches the bed she takes off her towel she's fully nude she gets into the bed Rita like leans in to kiss Betty's forehead Betty then kisses her on the lips she takes off her top they start having like a pretty steamy

makeout and I'm just like who okay first of all let's look I've had this dream I the first time I saw this movie it activated something in me where I was like this is one of the hottest sex scenes i've ever seen let's yeah i mean it can be it can it can be you know many different things the male gaze misses a lot of the times and then sometimes you're like oh i've had this dream but yeah i speaking to that there was a i mean there's been so much written about this movie we couldn't possibly read it all sorry we're not readers but there was a reflection quote from laura elena harring or herring years later talking about the direction of that scene where she says uh when david lynch was directing the scene she said it was kind of cute because she

said quote one time he went don't be afraid to touch each other's breasts now like like even the description of how he was just like whatever like her truth is her truth it doesn't sound kind of cute to me but like just to give you an idea of like how male gaze that scene was was like a midwestern guy being like don't be afraid to touch each other's breasts now like action no thank you but but yeah so that's a i don't know i guess like curling away from my microphone i know don you visibly recoiled when i said and i'll say it one more time just so the listeners can feel ill. Imagine the next time, okay, for those of us with breasts, I mean, or just nipples in general, the next time you're having something done to your nipple, just think of David Lynch standing inches away from you saying,

don't be afraid to touch each other's breasts now. Yikes. inches away from you saying don't be afraid to touch each other's breasts now i yikes i have a similar tidbit that i found after watching an interview with naomi watts and david lynch are recounting their experience shooting moholland drive and this was like a video from it was at least published in 2020 but I'm not sure if that's exactly when it was from but it was like definitely there was a lot that came out from this movie last year because it was like the 20th anniversary wave of clickbait etc totally so I think it's a pretty recent thing where Naomi Watts in the interview is talking about the masturbation scene. Cause there's that scene where she's crying and masturbating at the same time. She's boinking it,

baby. She's, she's, she's jerking and she's crying and you're like, wow, visibility. She's talking about how that scene made her very uncomfortable to shoot, how she had a stomach ache that day and went,

had to, as she puts it, make several trips to the bathroom because she was so nervous about shooting this scene, how it was generally like an unpleasant experience for her. But the way she's framing it is interesting where she's describing how like while the cameras were rolling she was like david i can't do this i can't do this and and then she's like oh but the thing with david is

he just keeps pushing you and she's talking as if she's describing like oh what a good quality for a director to have to you know push me to give my best performance but my read of that is he's not respecting boundaries and insisting that his artistic vision be carried out even if it makes his performers uncomfortable and physically ill for a scene that can easily be cut from the movie and the movie would doesn't need to be there right i and this is like behavior that is attributed to auteur is very often and like yep whatever i mean the the carte blanche of it all means that sometimes you get a very interesting movie but it also means that you're you know kind of everyone who's in this movie is has to act you know and bow to the ego of one person and hope it works

out like it's dictator logic and right david lynch doesn't sound like the worst dictator of them all but that is like a fucked up thing to like i'm glad that naomi watts looks back on it and isn't upset like whatever her truth is is totally. But that sounds extremely unpleasant and like not a good, not a good yardstick to be using for how. It's also possible that she was just framing it that way because David Lynch was literally sitting right next to her. I was going to ask. I was like, did you say they did this interview together? Together, yes. You talked about?

I mean, that's. And they still work together too. Right. So I know that there is like some sort of like, if you're still working with someone, you probably don't want to talk shit about them while you're sitting right next to them. Right. Especially if you're a woman and you could be called difficult. It's that Hollywood power that they're talking about in the film.

That is, okay. So that's, let's get into that because I do think that. Bring it back around. Right. I do think that like the Hollywood commentary being made here is not invalid you know there's like a whole you know lens of this movie where you can look at it as like look how willing hollywood is to you know take very talented and determined and motivated women and pit them against each other put them in a couple movies and then dispose of them like they never existed

which is something i totally agree with and i think of them like they never existed which is something i totally agree with and i think it's like i mean there's obviously a very very traceable history with how that works but contrasted with stories about how david lynch treats his own actors who are women you're just like well it just becomes like I always think of what is like that onion headline that it's like the worst person you know just made a great point where it's like it seems like he he has actively done this in his career but also is making a valid point but it's like well but you're not the person to hear it from there's a there in 2018 there was a piece written on vice which is not how i want to begin a sentence ever

to be clear but it's about um it's kind of a review of a book written about david lynch that he participated in that also spoke to a number of people who were in his life I think that this would have been the same thing that the documentary offshoot that I saw was about okay sure but this piece specifically focuses on how he related to the women in his life professionally and personally the writer of this piece is named Hannah Ewins oh my god Ewins McGregor Ewins McGregor that's how you call Ewan McGregor and his clones Ewins McGregor I can't say that man's name wow okay so David Lynch and again it's like personal life stuff is complicated but David Lynch is a filmmaker who is known for he certainly has a lot of women who are protagonists in his work but usually if the woman is a lead character in a david lynch piece she is under some sort of

extreme psychic distress she is often assaulted or brutalized in some way. She often dies. And so it is like we were talking about at the beginning of the episode. Women are very central to his work, but also how are they being treated and how are they being treated off screen? But there's a lot of stuff, you know, in terms of like women who have been married to David Lynch, where it just sounds like they've been very neglected and you know emotionally not treated very well being told you know basically by David Lynch up front like my life is my work and if you're not okay with that then this marriage isn't going

to work out he's been married like five times so it seems like statistically it doesn't work out whatever I don't that's not a value judgment. What I'm saying is the separation of art life and work life. While it sounds good in the book sense, what that meant very often for David Lynch was that his art life involved becoming infatuated with his female stars. I knew where that was going. And having affairs with his female stars i knew where that was going and having affairs with his female stars and so i think it is almost a galaxy brand take on cheating on your wife to say well that's art life so it doesn't count and home life i'm your husband and this seems to be a repeating pattern for him it's not something that he's been especially taken to task with it seems like with most of

his ex-wives even though this seems like it was a pattern for him most of his ex-wives were like that's just what he was like and so I divorced him but I just do uh it just is it feels relevant to what we're talking about sure and I I can exactly, I mean, maybe that's an overstep, but I don't really think so. Because when someone, when a man who really goes out of his way to include women in his work, you know, does that, I do think it's valid to ask, well, how does this man treat the women in his own life? And I mean, that's a conversation that's going on very much right now with Joss Whedon. Yes. Obviously, very, very different situations.

But, you know, men who are known for centering women in their work and then being praised for it, you always get to ask a follow up question there. You definitely have to examine. Yeah, there's lots to examine. And David Lynch, I mean, has said multiple times that like women in psychic distress are of interest to him. Like he says in 2018, it's hard to say exactly what it is about Marilyn Monroe, but the woman in trouble thing is a part of it. It's not just a woman in trouble thing that pulls you in though.

It's more that some women are really mysterious, which I think is like how he writes his movies. Like he writes his movies. Like he doesn't completely understand women because I don't think that he does you know like and it's like well then just like co-write a movie with a woman I don't understand and there's also a very vile anecdote about Isabella Rossellini who uh was in Blue Velvet there's a very famous scene in Blue Velvet in which the Isabella Rossellini character is raped and Isabella Rossellini and David Lynch were also in a relationship for five years uh off of that

movie so make of that what you will but in in that scene where um she's being assaulted in Blue Velvet Isabella Rossellini later told someone in an interview that david lynch was laughing throughout the entirety of shooting that scene oh my god and she said quote i said david what is there to laugh at are we doing something ridiculous i still to this day don't know why david was laughing and so there's just like no this is is not the kind of be writing queer relationships between women, I think is what I'm saying. Absolutely. And then to bring it back to his tendency to brutalize women in his movies. There are a number of examples in this movie, aside from the two main characters being brutally killed by the end of the movie.

Although we don't, I mean, at least we don't have to see by the end of the movie. Although we don't, I mean, at least we don't have to see the brutal death of Camilla. It's just implied that she was killed by the hitman. But we... But I do think it's like, I think that that's like, we see the lesbian character die over and over. Right. And see images of her dead body a number of times. There are other examples, such as the hitman who really fumbles the first hit that we see him do. There's a woman who he accidentally shoots in her butt, I think. And then he drags her around while she's screaming. And eventually he shoots her again and kills her they they drag out that poor character's death and then there was a part where i was like i'm glad that she's the one that like almost gets out it almost feels like mean that she doesn't well because like so this scene

is very tonally inconsistent with all the other scenes i would say because it's weird because it's comedic yeah in a way that none of the rest of the movie is um and i think that part of where this movie is trying to derive comedy from is the treatment of her body yeah because she is a fat woman and the movie is as far as my read is saying like look at this guy dragging around this fat woman as she screams and you know pleads for help and stuff like that i thought that too and then we get the justin thoreau's characters his wife who that character the adam the director character shoves and roughs up after he finds out that she's been cheating on him and i think she's also presented as being very shrewy and irrational where the second he walks in on her cheating on

him she immediately blames him she's like always yelling and lashing out at other people and again it's like hard because it's like this is for some reason a dream that Diane is having. Right. We don't know why. So it's like, this isn't even a person that we're watching, but like the person presented to us, I thought was like really leaning into some shrew tropes. Absolutely. And then that character, they're like these like big bad guys who are after Adam and they show up at

her house after Adam has left this woman jumps on this guy and is kind of telling him to leave and then he pushes her and then punches her in the face yeah so there are a number of pretty tertiary characters who are women who you're not even sure why they're in the movie to begin with because they're not really serving much of a narrative purpose. And then there, it seems like they're really only there to be like assaulted and, and brutalized. It's almost like early,

like 1900s ideas of like quote unquote mania and women and them being like uncontrollable. Right. Right. Like they're so they, yeah. and them being like uncontrollable right right like they're so they yeah a woman at a heightened emotional state is inherently irrational and like there's nothing that could have prompted this that would have been reasonable i like a lot of minor characters in that first large chunk of the movie who were supposed to in this read the popular read sorry is diane's

imagination which i mean we could really get into that i'd kind of rather not but but i do think it's interesting that if we're looking at the hollywood criticism perspective of like this is the dream of an actor who either was very talented or certainly believed that she was very talented because that whole scene of her audition, you know, reveals her to be like a very intuitively talented actress. Even in a room full of producers that are creepy and predatory and like an acting partner who is actively hitting on her. She still manages to give this incredible performance. Again, we're seeing this through her perspective, but I thought it was interesting and more effective than other sections of the movie

how that stuff was portrayed because we're looking at this from Diane's perspective in retrospect, kind of rationalizing what's happened to her and it's clear that like she was a talented actor who wasn't getting the parts that she wanted and because of various Hollywood bullshit I think that a lot of that she blamed on Camilla and in another way that it's like oh this bisexual woman is using her universal wiles to get what she wants like she can't have a real emotional connection because she's just using sex to get

what she wants which is another like you know bullshit construction that revolves around bisexual characters right i think it's more effective in other characters where especially in that audition scene that at first i was like wow this scene is so long but but there is a lot going on there where the man who is much older than her in that scene is taking advantage of her character and it's clearly like you know unwelcome touching kissing where it isn't written or warranted and it's on betty slash diane because she is new to this industry to pretend that isn't happening and give the best performance she can anyways which which is a thing that happens and is like fucked up and not okay but it but it was interesting to

see that kind of like cogently seen on screen where you know that Betty is not comfortable and that she's trying to navigate around all of these aggressions being put towards her and the fact that through her character's mind there are other women in the room with her and like women who our attention is drawn to them because in that scene Betty's brought into the audition and immediately the first person you meet is like here's this amazing casting agent she's great you know she's gonna work with you and here's her assistant who's a woman as well and at least for me like in situations like that when you see two other women in the room you're sort of like okay this is a safe situation for me because there are other you know there's's quote unquote, there's allies present.

Right. Right. You don't want to be in a room full of old guys at any time. Never. Ever. Right. But in that scene, those women don't say anything when she's being. And it's also implied that this happened to who we later learn is camilla and and that this is something that

you know possibly is something that they related with each other on is like being taken advantage of and being mistreated by executives of all genders where it's like the straight guys who are going to try to grope you in the room and no one's going to say anything and then kind of like the more girl boss archetypes that we see through that manager character who is like yeah i know this isn't right but we want money and success don't we so we're not gonna say anything and so that stuff i thought was like a little more effective yeah although there's a similar scene where the Justin Theroux character, this is toward the end when Rita is now Camilla and Betty is now Diane. And they're on set in the movie that they're both in together. And Justin Theroux is like directing one of his actors to be like, no, this is how this kiss is going to go.

And then he like gets in the car with camilla and is like yeah do it like this that is not how directing a movie you should you don't like get into the scene with the actor and be like and this is how you kiss the woman in the scene and then because that that kind of blew my mind though because it's like david lynch who at the time of this movie had a reputation for courting and falling in love with the stars of his own movies for a decade and a half put this commentary in where it's like the two spider-mans pointing at each other i'm like what's your fucking point it seems like this is something that you actively try to do and have maybe even been successful with but you're presenting it as a criticism and also i feel like implying that

camilla is an active participant in that right and she's like enjoying it there's no coercion implied yeah i read that like while the audition scene definitely is very creepy especially in the way that the actor acting opposite Betty and the way that the director is like yeah do whatever you want whatever yeah uh-huh that worked a little more effectively as as commentary or at least I felt the like creepiness and coercion of it all but it was self-aware at least but then to turn around and have a very similar thing happen later in the movie in a way that doesn't seem to provide any commentary and that is again reflective of david lynch's own behavior yeah i'm like well then that kind of nullifies the other thing it's like well

don't bring a bisexual woman into the into the picture because then all of a sudden it's bad and somehow she's complicit in this evil plan like yeah that's a great point and i don't know the fact that it reflects his own behavior i'm just like yeah so what is the point what are you saying david it's a metaphor so one thing that's interesting about all that is i guess like when they released the DVD it came with a card of like 10 unlocking clues to the film to figure it out okay and one of them number eight is did talent alone help Camilla and I feel like that's like oh revealing to all of this like intentionally interesting or not like is that almost Davidid lynch like so how do you interpret that yeah like accidentally revealing like oh i don't actually just cast my actresses based on

their talent alone well because that's another scene that you see that i assumed was commentary and i think was to an extent towards the beginning of the movie where they're doing the casting for adam's movie and they don't watch any videos they just look at pictures they don't like and you know that these these actresses on the other end because we see Betty and Rita and again this is through Diane's perspective but like you know Betty is really preparing for this audition and gives a great audition but the only discussion that's had is pictures so it's I thought like again like that's more effective for me but then when you take into account like you're saying Don like that seems to be what David Lynch had done in the past like it's just so it's I mean like I guess I don't I mean

there's no like hard evidence that he's you know doing that exact thing but to see like i don't know the self-awareness of it all of like yeah actresses work obviously really hard to get the parts that they get and the reality that this movie is presenting is like these women can work so hard and it doesn't even matter because it's just a room full of guys doing some sort of unrelated dick measuring contest and there's a bunch of pictures and the choice has already kind of been made before you're even in the room and so like it doesn't matter if you're talented which is clearly how diane feels at the end of the movie and i think that those messages like the fact that it's like the reality presented at the end of the movie is that

she is both professional rivals with camilla and is in love with her gets kind of messy with the commentary the movie is making because sometimes i feel like it's trying to make some hollywood commentary that ends up being homophobic because they're attributing both of those things at the same like i don't know messy messy well and i don't at the same, like, I don't know, messy. Messy. Well, and I don't even think that, like, I mean, I don't know for sure, but I don't even feel like that's what he was even talking about or whoever wrote that question on their, like, clue card. I feel like they were just talking about, like, the cowboy said to cast her. I don't even know that they, like, were intending for the answer to be all the things that we just discussed. But I feel like that's the real answer. Right. But yeah, with a movie

like this, where there's so much ambiguity and so much symbolism that's open to so many different interpretations and all these metaphors that depending on who you are and how your brain works and what you notice you're gonna interpret things differently so with this type of movie it's so hard to know what if anything was the intent as far as like social commentary and because uh david lynch refuses to fill in the gaps it's like okay i don't think that that's an artistic failure on his part it's just it makes our job harder right yeah so either way i'm confused by everything in this movie um fun fact the movie was originally developed and shot as a pilot for ABC, but ABC watched it and didn't end up wanting to pick up the pilot. So David Lynch basically just like wrote and shot and added a few more scenes

and turned it into the feature film that we now know. And for me, not love, but, uh, have seen it, have seen multiple times and been dragged across the internet. I feel like that's where all those random scenes come in.

Or I just have to assume they do. Right. Maybe they were supposed to pay off in some way later. Yes. I think that was part of what David Lynch was going for. He's like, yeah, I'm setting up all these arcs that are going to come back later. Similar to what happens in Twin Peaks but they they just never really do I mean that gives me the smallest bit of peace I mean ultimately I just like this makes me want to

go back and re-watch because I hadn't watched it since it came out re-watch that documentary about David Lynch because this book seems to reveal that like basically just like the cost of what he you know says is his art centric lifestyle took on the women in his life where it sounds like many of his wives and children were like deceived and mistreated in the service of his art and then on the other end of it the women who were involved in his art were also mistreated in the interest of the art and so it comes up as i i don't know i i just like i know that this conversation has been had around his work but he is such a beloved person that it's like and you see him in interviews and he's so sweet and blah blah blah but it's like but this is you know this is on paper as having happened

and it almost feels like a little as someone trying to like participate in understanding who this person is it feels a little gaslighting media wise because it's like Naomi Watts is like yeah he made me perform under duress haha and Elizabeth Rossellini is like yeah he was laughing during the most traumatic scene in the movie isn't that interesting because he's such i feel like there is like that eccentric guy personality that lets you get away with a lot of things that it's like that does actually doesn't sound like an adorable or appealing quality at all like no so i mean again speaking to his personal life i don't want to like bring it two two two into this discussion but for someone who focuses on the psychological effects that life takes on women it seems like his life has taken a lot of psychological effects on the women in his life

and that's not and and so that's um i'm on a journey it It's hard. Back to the movie originally being, no, that's fine. Um, but it was originally shot as a pilot and some reasons that, you know, the people at ABC said that they didn't want it after all. They saw it. They're like, um,

I hate it. Sorry. They didn't like it because of the nonlinear storyline. They didn't like it because Ann Miller's character smokes cigarettes. And I guess they didn't like it because ann miller's character smokes cigarettes and i guess they didn't want that on tv um dare okay they didn't like it because the ages of naomi watts and laura harring who they considered to be too old oh my god yep they're like 30 and finally abc opposed to the close frame shot of dog feces in one scene okay so that's just now that's prudish put poo poo on screen i don't even remember that poo poo erasure in movies more poop poop poop is a part of life

there needs to be more movies where someone's like i'm so sorry i have to poop and i leave the scene like the next time if you're a writer and you are like i've had this problem many times where it's like oh my gosh i need someone to leave this scene but i can't figure out how to get them out of here. There's your answer. They have to poop. And people will see themselves in that character in that moment to be like, oh my God, guys, I have to poop so bad. I have to leave.

And then boom, the character's gone. That does happen in Bridesmaids. Oh, that is true. Okay, so it happens. It's happened once in cinematic history. And happened recently on the show for the She's Gotta Have It episode where I was like, I have to poop. We have to end this episode. Caitlin was literally like slouched in her chair and then finally revealed that it was because she had to poop.

Amazing. Just, man, our lives are a movie. They're a podcast. Right? Does anyone have anything else they'd like to discuss? I'm good. I don't think so. Same.

All right. Well, in that case, this movie very much passes the Bechdel test. That's not a problem that this movie has. Even without your theory of like, well, they're all projections of the same woman's mind and they're all talking to each other therefore even if not that yeah women are talking for a good portion of the movie and it's not even like i feel like sometimes there's a hack of like well women are talking they're still talking about romantic relationships but it's with other women but but there's so much discussed in this movie between women where sometimes it is about a relationship.

Sometimes it is about, who am I? Sometimes it's about, you know, it happens between so many characters. We haven't even really talked that much about Louise, the psychic character who comes in very distressed. We don't talk about the conversations between Betty and her aunt. There is a conversation between Betty and this metaphorical character that we

didn't have time to get to that. I don't want to talk about named Irene. Oh, sure. At the beginning of the movie, there's a ton of conversations between Betty and Rita and also Diane and Camilla and Betty and Coco have conversations. Coco is another character that I didn't have time to bring up.

Appears in both timelines and passes the Bechdel test in both timelines. Like women are talking plenty. Yeah. That's not the issue. And that's why we say, you know, it's a, it's a starting point for discussion.

Exactly. Yeah. But an amazing metric by which to analyze movies is of course our nipple scale. Yes. metric by which to analyze movies is of course our nipple scale yes where we rate the movie on a scale of zero to five nipples based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens just between the toxic and harmful tropes that are perpetuated as far as the queer characters go the violence against women that seems to be played for laughs several times in the movie the weird way in which mental health is represented where the movie is suggesting

if you get dumped you're gonna have a complete breakdown that will lead you to murder yeah usually it'll just lead you to sleeping a lot yes uh based on that i will give the movie um what do you even give a movie that makes so little narrative sense again he got you again he got you again i'm gonna give it like one i guess yeah i was leaning toward like one nipple just for like i guess good job centering women in your movie when you're a male auteur but also you have the responsibility to do it well and as far as i'm concerned he didn't right so one nipple and i will wait what's the part that i liked i'll give it to the untouched plate of breakfast food that the guy who has a nightmare about the person with the scary face leaves at, what was it called? Twinkies Diner or Winkies?

Winkies. Winkies. Winkies Diner on Sunset Boulevard, which I don't know if that's a real thing or not, but. Maybe it was at the time. Could have been. Because they go to other real LA food places. Right. Like Pink's Hot Dogs and stuff.

Don't even get me started. Don't even get me started. Hot Dogs. I started hot dogs i know but at what cost fuck pinks anyways sorry finish your thought oh no so feminist icon plate of breakfast food that's who gets my one nipple amazing um i'm between a one and a 1.5 whoever whichever of you of you brave, uh, missionaries updates our Wikipedia page. I guess I'll leave that to you. Uh, I'm between a one and a 1.5. I can't really decide.

Maybe I'll just say a 1.25. Love that. Again, it is like a very complicated thing where I do feel like there is a necessary given. I mean, just even given the conversation we've had today, I do think that there is a necessary given. I mean, just even given the conversation we've had today, I do think that there is a necessary there is a need to reassess behavior versus intent in David Lynch's work because it feels like we've had. And again, it's like every conversation is very individual. But there's been a lot of male auteurs who have been seen to be very pro women simply for including women with motivations in their work. And then you look at their personal behavior and think, oh, wait a second, maybe this was actually

not the feminist king that I ascribed to him. I'm not saying that that's exactly what's going on here because I just don't know enough information. But just based on this discussion, it seems like this should be kind of something that is worth discussing more right for sure yeah i think that this movie is hard because i do it like dedicating an entire movie to a woman processing the events of her own life and processing her own mistakes which on its surface is technically what this movie is and taking into account that, you know, there is a lot of commentary about show business that I thought was pretty valid.

And I think that it's supposed to be implied in the movie that the way that her industry treated her influenced her own behavior and drove her towards horrific behavior. Like there are things, this movie think i think that this movie has its heart in the right place with and then there's things that it very clearly doesn't like the most generous interpretation is that david lynch is way out of his depth and shouldn't be writing about this kind of stuff without consulting with other people or including other people as co-writers and i mean that's an auteur

problem we come up against all the time it's like if if you have the ego that it just has to be you then write something that you know you're what you're talking about right or if you want to expand outside of yourself which i think you know all writers should i'm not faulting him for wanting to have women as his protagonist but it's like well then talk to women like that's just how that works otherwise you're gonna come up with some weird shit and it's gonna influence people and then 20 years are gonna pass and then we're gonna have to record a podcast about it like no one wants to be doing this so just do it right um yeah a lot of bisexual tropes that we've talked about a lot recently that i

think just hold true and are still just as shitty here a lot of tropes about lesbians that are very much the same and it's a very white movie i mean it's like an extra like the whole world the whole expanded universe of david lynch is very white and not in a way that implies any commentary. It just implies that this is these are the stories he's interested in telling. So there it's just it's 1.25. I'm gonna I wanted to give it to the hot dog. But I can't because it's from pinks. And and listeners of the Bechtel cast. Oh, just wait till my hot dog book is on presale you're not going to hear the end of it it's not yet it comes out next year but there's a whole section on pinks because guess what they love the los angeles police department they love it so much

they love cops and they hate street vendors even though they were once a street vendor themselves does it make sense no it doesn't the story of hot dogs is a story of class oppression and colonialism and animal abuse. So I can't give it to the hot dog. So I'm going to give them all to Louise because she was right. Who is Louise again? She's the psychic who comes to the door.

I mean, I don't even know what the purpose of that character was, even in the universe of fantasy. What was the purpose of most of of like the characters sorry she shows up at the door she's like something's not right and it's like well yeah obviously but that never comes back so um i'm gonna give it to her good for her she was right something wasn't right in that house she is correct uh don what about you um well i have to say that this conversation has been very enlightening for me and if you would have asked me this question at the beginning I would have had

a different answer than I'll have now however my number of nipples is still higher than yours That's fine I have learned through this conversation more about the female interest trope and the perception on queer women specifically. And that has really tainted my number of nipples. I do still appreciate the amount of female characters and the amount that they talk to each other.

And that the film is shown through a female perspective. So not just that there's female characters that men interact with. Sure. So I not confidently would say three nipples. Hell yeah. Who are you going to give them to? So I live in Salt Lake City, Utah and I've been a really big fan of big hats since

I've lived here so I just have to give it to the cowboy character. He's weird and mysterious and like my kind of guy. And he's wearing a big hat. He's a metaphor baby. For what? I don't know. And I don't care.

I kind of want to give my nipples to the to the metaphorical swamp lady uh i kind of because i i'm pretty i was like she's a metaphor for like whatever the side of you you don't want to confront failure past mistakes She's just all this shit. And then she's behind a diner like, I'm like, I know that lady in a way, you know, the part of you, you don't want to confront that other men have nightmares about for some,

which, you know, probably is true. Yeah. Fair. Well, there you have it, everybody.

Mulholland drive. PP and poop. Dawn, thank you so much for joining us and for being here. Thank you. What would you like to plug and where can people follow you on

social media? Tell us about your podcast. Yeah. I have a podcast interviewing filmmakers. I'm especially interested in talking with female filmmakers that are making films that really are inspiring broader conversations and topics. So I'll be doing some interviews for Sundance and Slamdance coming up. So you can check out Faux Real Podcast on all whatever

podcast platform you're listening to right now. And then I'm on Instagram at FauxRealPod. And then I'll also be doing some writing with Sundance Filmmakers for CinemaFem Magazine. Nice. You can find that online as well. And that's FauxReal, F-A-U-X-R-E-E-L. Correct. Because there could be multiple spellings. Yeah.

I just want the people to be able to find you, you know. Thank you. The people have to know. The people must know. Thank you, people. And you can follow us at Bechtelcast on Twitter and Instagram. You can subscribe to our

Patreon at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast where you get two bonus episodes every month, plus access to the nearly 100 or maybe even over 100 episodes on the Patreon exclusively. And that is $5 a month. And then if you want some merch, you can always go over to tpublic.com slash the bechtel cast for all of your merchandising needs and with that um let's not wake up gang because if we do the elderly couple is going to attack us and we will have to die so murder each other so let's just let's just stay asleep dreaming is better you know. You know? Sounds great.

Night night. Night night. Good night. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.

She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeartTrue Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. 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. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church.

Voila! You got straight away. They try to save everybody. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.