The Bechdel Cast - Psycho with Leila Latif

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

On this episode, violins screech as Caitlin, Jamie, and special guest Leila Latif discuss Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @lei_lala_letif on Instagram.See 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. Hi, everybody. It's Katie Couric. Have you heard about my newsletter called Body and Soul? It has everything you need to know about health and wellness,

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What is wrong with me? A show about the ways that mental illness is shaped by not just biology. Swaps of different meds, but by culture and society. By looking closely at the conditions that cause mental distress, I find out why so many of us are struggling to feel sane, what we can do about it, and why we should care. Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Hello, Jamie. Would you like to come eat some sandwiches with me in my room full of taxidermy birds? Okay, I felt personally attacked by that scene. As someone who recently asked you to take care of the taxidermied bird that I taxidermied this year,

I was like, that is... I mean, there are a lot of communities that are poorly represented in this movie but true i have yet to see the essay on taxidermists respond well maybe that's your responsibility taxidermists are regular people just like you and me and i think that the one thing that norman bates does correctly say is that it's actually a very affordable hobby. People think it's going to be expensive. The only real expense is your time and your ability to wish to dissect things. Yeah. But I think that as long as you're doing it legally and good. So sorry to start with my

stumping for fellow taxidermists no no no please reduced to a symbol in a hitchcock movie i mean it's good but taxidermists didn't recover for years after this movie maybe yes a protected class of people uh taxidermists the wild thing is there's like all these laws around taxidermy, which is good. But essentially you cannot and should not taxidermy an animal that is in any way endangered or protected. There's all these laws around it. But you can taxidermy any animal that is technically an invasive species as long as they are already dead. So there's all these complicated rules but what it

was explained to me by my gorgeous amazing taxidermy instructor i was like wow it all does make sense but she sources the birds that we taxidermied in her class like they were like ethically i don't know i mean they were invasive species and on a farm and killing animals and so i guess then you're allowed to kill the birds but she bought the birds from this guy who like owned a farm in wisconsin and she's been buying european starling bird corpses from this man for a decade and he has never asked her what she's using the birds for isn't that so scary he's like that i don't want to know is wild just if the check clears it's all good also it all comes full circle because someone who had a farm in wisconsin ed gein aka the person who the book of this movie was loosely based on. No, well, not Mr. Ed. That's a different guy. That's a horse.

So yeah, it all comes full circle. It's true. Anyway, hello and welcome to the Bechdel cast. I think that was a good intro. Perfect, flawless, no notes. My name is Caitlin Durante. My name is Jamie Loftus, and this is the podcast where we discuss either taxidermy or looking at your favorite movies from an intersectional feminist lens. That long conversation about taxidermy mostly passed the Bechdel test, I believe. Until we got to the farm owner, I think it did. Yeah. And also, on the record, our friend Bryant is watching my bird. I checked in on him a couple times.

He's doing good. Glad to hear it. But that didn't pass the Bechdel test. But why is that? It's a media metric that we use as a jumping off point for discussion. Certainly not the be all, end all of discussion at all. But Caitlin, what the hell is it?

Well, it's a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test, first appearing in Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test, first appearing in Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985, intended originally as just like a one-off goof a bit, a joke that has since been kind of co-opted into this pretty widespread media metric. There are many versions of it. The one that we use is this. Two characters of a marginalized gender have to have names, they have to speak to each other,

and their conversation has to be about something other than a man. And ideally for us, it's a big, meaty conversation. Ooh. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Sorry to say meaty. No as a member of the taxidermist community I know a thing or two about meat. Sure. So that's our show. Today's episode it's it's a big one. A long time coming, I think. Because at this point, this show has been running long enough that we've covered at least one or so of the, whatever, considered the big director oeuvre, which is mostly white guys. It includes this one.

Yeah. But we've never covered this guy. And here we are. The day has come. We are covering 1960 Alfred Hitchcock, Psych hitchcock psycho it's true and we have an amazing guest i'm so excited for our guest yes she is a film critic podcaster and columnist for total film magazine it's leila latif hi welcome i'm so excited long time listener first time caller oh welcome never stop calling but yeah like this is not a soft landing

this is heavy yeah i'm excited this is a challenging uh movie in many many regards so it seems to be a different movie every time i watch it it really is i mean and this is i think part of the reason we haven't, and this is I think part of the reason we haven't been actively avoiding Hitchcock. But part of the reason that I've avoided it is just logistically, there is so much written about this movie and this director that you're like, how do you even prepare for this episode? And we're about to find out right yeah jamie you and i were both talking off mic about how we did a lot to prepare like the normal amount but because there's just so much with this movie we feel like we've barely scratched the surface i kind of took approach

where i was like well there's just too, so I'm going to do almost nothing. Except I read Anthony Perkins' entire Wikipedia page. I read a bunch of stuff about Ed Gein. I listened to part one of the Behind the Bastards episode on Alfred Hitchcock. I obviously watched the movie several times. I would say that's not almost nothing. Why are you being down on yourself?

I don't know. Sounds like quite a bit. You're right. Yeah, it's like a working week. Yeah, it's been a lot. Yeah, I but I still feel very unprepared. I think it's kind of hard not to I mean, I think between the three of us, you know, we've, I think it's interesting with this movie, there's so many ways into talking about it. And it just seems sort of like what stands out to you personally that you're kind of drawn to. I was really drawn to how serial killers and mental illness are portrayed in this movie and how it influenced other movies. Maybe we should just get into our personal histories. Because when I was re-watching it, I haven't seen this movie in probably close to 10 years and I kind of forgot how well we get to know Marion before she dies.

Right. Which there's a lot to talk about with Marion. For sure. Which I feel like you wouldn't know by the scenes from this movie that are the most famous. we'll get to that yeah because it's just like she's getting stabbed but first let's get through what our personal history is with I guess this movie and also just Alfred Hitchcock in general yeah Layla what's your experience with the overall Psycho just feels like something that I'd like never not seen in a weird way like I think it's like by the time I came to it, I just like, I'd seen so many parodies and references and I knew exactly what was going to happen with like the chair spinning around.

And I knew that there was this whole thing where, you know, she kind of dies at this like midway point and stuff. So like I had so much knowledge coming into it and I watched every horror movie, like way too young. I was probably like seven when I watched this for the first time like it just feels like omnipresent in my life in a weird way but like as a result like coming back to it I'm kind of like you Jamie like it probably been about 10 years since I'd seen it last but it feels like the parodies could kind of like gotten away from it. And it was really nice to come back to because I reimagined Marion because it's kind of like what she'd been in the culture is like Drew Barrymore from Scream, basically, of like the big star who like shot gets killed off rather than like she's in it to like the midway point, I would say. Yeah, the first 45 minutes or so.

And she has like a whole arc. It's like, it's why I totally, I didn't remember. Yeah, it didn't feel like the rug pull that I'd like remembered. Like I've still left this feeling like she was the star of this movie. She was still the protagonist rather than just some kind of plot twist device. Yeah. Right. Jamie, how about you?

My history with this movie same thing i mean i found myself as i was watching it this time it surprised me in a lot of ways and it also i don't know this feels like one of the few movies where it's impossible to have a clean reading of it because everyone knows what happens at the midpoint of the movie. I would love to be able to see this movie and not know that happens, but it's impossible. By the time I saw it for the first time in probably high school, everyone knows what happens. And I think I remembered it as happening earlier in the movie, but yeah, I mean, it's like like you it's so cultural osmosis-y that everyone knows the chair turning everyone knows the shower scene and so it's it's an interesting watch because you can't not know that kind of against your will and I think my relationship with Hitchcock I was in fifth grade for I had this amazing teacher who for some, decided he was going to show a bunch of nine-year-olds the birds.

And there were two kids that peed themselves during the movie. It was an iconic fifth grade experience. Every kid in that class remembers seeing the birds. Parents were upset. My mom was like, huh huh and then I didn't sleep for like a week and so that's I think my most vivid Hitchcock related movie and then learned more about him as a person as an adult it's like a wild ride with his work which we can get into later and also I mean I listened to the Hitchcock episodes

of Behind the Bastards when they first came out. And I mean, holy shit. I mean, this literally said, quote, women are a nuisance. So there's a lot to get into. But this movie, I think I came away from it surprised and with way more to talk about than I originally thought I would. So excited to talk about it. Caitlin, what's your history with Psycho, the Hitchcock expanded universe?

I saw it for the first time in college, I think, when I was watching a bunch of Hitchcock for the first time. And like you, Jamie, I already knew the iconic scenes, the twist at the end, you know, just through cultural osmosis. And then I think I didn't watch it since, but I will think about the movie basically any time, because in the past few years the conversation about trans representation in media is more present in the zeitgeist and part of that conversation is the representation of like trans and or gender non-conforming people as murderers in media and i'd be like oh psycho like psycho is such an early example of that so like it just like comes to mind every time that particular topic gets brought up and then re-watching the movie I was like oh yes confirmed so that will be I imagine a huge part of our discussion later on. But yeah, it's just so weird to me

that such a huge piece of cinema, like an iconic piece of cinema, like such an influential thing in American cinema that's so celebrated is also so damaging and harmful to so many communities. So that's those are my initial thoughts on it. But yeah, I haven't seen this movie, I think since I watched it that first time, probably like well over 15 years ago. But I generally like Hitchcock movies. It's weird. Like I like Strangers on a Train. I like Rear Window. I like North by Northwest. I haven't seen Rope and a few of

his other like pretty major ones. I'm with you. There are some like really tiny gems. I mean, about every decade, I'll do like a big Hitchcock rewatch. like the minor ones are so good. Like Lifeboat is amazing. Rope rocks. There's like less problematic than Psycho in many regards. But I think like with that same nasty spirit, really recommend Frenzy, which is basically his last good one. I mean,

and just like, and I don't know, maybe it's like my Britishness, but like, I think he's like, I love his humor. A Lady Vanishes is so funny. I've never seen it. It's really, really funny.

And I always feel like humor dates more than any other genre of film. And it's still laugh out loud funny and just stupid in the best ways. Interesting. like laugh out loud funny and just stupid in like the best ways interesting i think we're having a conversation like this recently where it's like for all of this movie's difficult and often just outright prejudiced ways of viewing the world it's a good movie and that's kind of why it has the cultural influence that it does and why we're talking about it and why it's like, I don't know if you can make a good movie and project those values. It's kind of a scary amount of power to, to have. I haven't done a Hitchcock B-sides viewing before.

I did recently go back and watch the birds to see if it was as scary as I remembered. And it was not, it's pretty funny though. It's a very fun movie. No, it's terrible. And it was not. It's pretty funny, though. It's a very fun movie. No, it's terrible. It's so bad. It's not a good movie.

It's straight up bad. Yeah. Okay, try being nine. God. Yeah. Fair. But it all kind of brings the question of the kind of autistic male genius

where in a way I'll do mental gymnastics to make psycho okay of like the kind of artistic male genius where in a way like I'll do mental gymnastics to like make psycho okay and like try and like justify it to myself I can in no way justify that like tippy head run was like tortured to make the birds like it's so bad absolutely yeah yeah and it's so interesting that there was only a care about it in any cultural way and like five years ago, because as far as I know, she had spoken about it before and no one cared. And then all of a sudden, when the Me Too movement started getting some momentum, all of a sudden people cared and were like, I can't believe I didn't know this. And it's like, well, you could have. She said it a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well, shall we take a quick break and then come back

to recap the movie? Let's do it. All right, we'll be right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017

was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I 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 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,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Here is the recap of Psycho. We are in Phoenix,rizona ever heard of it and we meet marion crane that's janet lee of course she is in a hotel room smooching her boyfriend sam played by john gavin they are talking about getting married, but they can't because he is in debt and he's paying his ex-wife's alimony and he can't support

her and so they can't get married. Then we see Marion at work at a real estate office where a rich guy named mr cassidy is there to buy a house with a wad of cash this fucking guy he's this fucking guy he's so horrible and then he crossed into like campy territory for me when he said, I need a drinker Rooney. And I was like, well, what are we going to do with this guy? He's just the worst. And it's just like tax evasion. He's like, my daughter is my baby and my property. I don't pay my taxes and I want to drink at work right now. And I am such a terrible father that I assume you can be an 18 year old girl

and never had a sad day. And we learn all of this while he is sexually harassing our protagonist. It really is kind of an all timer. And to be fair, the movie is aware that he's horrible, but it was just like, I didn't remember that character. And I watched that scene he's horrible but it was just like i didn't remember that character and i watched that scene three times because i was just like i don't know if i'm catching everything he's moving so fast he's among the things is the fact that he has a wad of

cash of forty thousand dollars that he's just carrying around on him in 1960 money it's in 1960 money fucking wild i googled it you could just add a zero which is very helpful math wise so it's like it's about 400 400 000 yeah okay so houses were expensive back then too well that's like a probably a huge estate big ass house yeah anyway so point is he's got cash one thing i loved about marion right from the jump um was that she is giving it about two percent at her job i feel like that is rare to see in any movie in a way that the movie is sort of ambivalent about like she comes back really late to work because she was having sex and then she leaves

20 minutes later she's like ow my head and then like I gotta go like I just that was how I acted at my jobs in my early 20s and I kind of was like maybe I should bring it back yeah no one seems bothered she's quietly quitting no doubt about. She's giving capitalism about the level of respect that it deserves. Exactly. She does not give a shit, but she's worked there for 10 years. Like you're just like good for Marion, honestly.

Like we should try less hard. Yeah. It's true. Redistribute wealth. Go for it, Marion. That was her plan. Also.

Yeah. What she does a victimless crime. I think you Go for it, Marion. That was her plan. Also, yeah, what she does, a victimless crime, I think. You're just like, yeah, steal $40,000 for someone who sexually harassed you. He's already rich. He's the worst. Do it. Yeah, for sure. Steal, eat the rich, steal from the rich, etc. So he comes in with this $40,000. Marion's boss, Mr. Lowry, tells her to take it directly to the bank. So Marion leaves with the cash, but she doesn't go to the bank. Instead,

she packs a suitcase and heads out of town with the money. On her way out, her boss sees Marion in her car, and he's like, hmm, that's weird. And she's like, oh no! And then the string instruments are playing loudly, and it's an anxious moment. Then for a while, a cop is tailing her. He follows her to California where she trades in her car for another car in a transaction that takes like five minutes because it's the 60s. And then she takes off again in a hurry. She's driving. It's dark. It's pouring rain. So she pulls over at the Bates motel which big mistake big mistake babe I really appreciated in that whole sequence because even when the scenes are like kind of weirdly long it feels very intentional and like you just I didn't really remember the last time I saw this movie how intentional this movie is about setting up how Marion has to navigate her way through the world

like as a woman and as like an attractive woman very very intentionally and it's like it's I don't know I feel like a time where you could easily get away with showing a woman or any character really just kind of moving through the world like ah ha ha hi whatever and just like half-assing it there is like a menacing undertone to how every man in the story treats her right up to her arriving at bates motel and then by norman as well and that whole sequence where she's driving towards the motel and you hear kind of her fantasizing about how people will react to her disappearance and all this stuff. It's just it's more than I remembered getting in terms of the context for who she is and why she's running. And I thought it was cool. fail to do in terms of like showing the unease in which a woman moves about the world

people and particularly men around her will be menacing and creepy and uh in a lot of like female protagonists in more modern horror movies they they're just like, what? I don't even notice anything. Everything seems fine. No danger here. Nothing to worry about. In a way that always bugs me because I'm like, that is not how women move about the world. We're like very cognizant of the dangers around. And I feel like this movie successfully does that in a way that a lot of other horror movies do not yeah I think it's something that was really articulated pretty beautifully in like the recent Barbie movie which is a very different movie but like like with with women like attention often just has this like undertone of violence and like obviously marin is a like ludicrously

beautiful and glamorous woman and there's the what i found interesting about like because she's kind of always moving with this undertone of violence there is always this attention which has this like sinister like you said menacing edge to it like that hyper vigilance can only get her so far so actually she drops her guard whilst we're with Norman in a way that kind of makes sense if you've seen like her journey so far because of course he is being unsettling and disturbing in a way that we can identify but that is simply every interaction she has with a man to a certain degree up until that point and we see her like advocate for i don't know i like that it's like also clear that she understands what's happening she's kind of choosing her battles as this sort of continues to happen she chooses them

very intentionally like with the cop where the cop is harassing her. He wants to know what she's doing. Why is she sleeping on the side of the road? And she's just like, what have I done? Why do I need to show you my license and registration? What is necessary? Like, why are you doing this? And I really appreciate how it's such a hard balance to strike. And I feel like it's really, I don't know, I was thinking about the Barbie movie as well. I just saw it for the second time every night. But yeah, like striking the fact that she is, like she's hyper-competent. She's very aware of what's happening.

But being aware of what's happening is not necessarily enough to protect you. And it felt like this movie did a better job than I remembered at like making that clear and striking that balance for sure okay so she is now at the bates motel which is run by norman bates played by anthony perkins who lives in the house just up the hill overlooking the motel. He checks her into room one. She gives him a fake name, like in the registry. And she's also the only guest staying there because the whole thing with this motel is that it used to be along a main highway, but they made a new main highway.

So there's basically no traffic going past this place and no one stays there anymore so it's very secluded then he invites her to his house for dinner but as she's getting settled and hiding the cash by rolling it up in a newspaper and sitting it on the bedside table amazing hiding spot to be, it's her first time stealing $40,000. True. It also seems like getting away with crime was pretty easy back then. Like, a cop could watch you

as you switch cars. Yeah, and he's just like, well, I don't know. And he's like, wow, this lady knows the law. I guess what she's doing, this lady knows the law. She knows. I guess what she's doing isn't technically against the law. Mm-hmm.

I mean, of all the things about Hitchcock that have, like, aged really badly, how much in basically every movie he hates the police. True. It's just always delightful to me. Yeah, they're, like, portrayed as b as bumbling incompetent getting in the way never helping that kind of thing yeah and it's like the whole third act of this movie relies on like it's barely discussed it's just like assumed by sam and by oh my gosh what's her name uh her sister lila lila that the cops are not competent enough or don't care enough to solve this crime and they have to take it into their own hands which is like it's great for sure okay so as she's getting

settled into her room she overhears Norman Bates arguing with his mother about inviting a strange woman over for dinner. And the mother is like shaming him and shaming Marion. And then he shows back up with some food and she's like, Ooh, your mom sounds awesome. And then they dine together, but in the parlor area behind his office, which is that room full of taxidermy birds.

He tells her she eats like a bird. And he's like, a boy's best friend is his mother. And he talks about how his mother is mentally unwell, and how he feels trapped there having to take care of her. She's very controlling, all of this stuff. And Marion's like, well, why don't you put her in a facility? And he's like, no, those places are horrible. And he gets pretty scary for a moment. And she's like, yikes, bro. But things kind of return to normal-ish and she goes back to her room where he then peeps on

her via a hole in the wall while she's undressing then she gets in the shower we get the iconic shower scene where norman bates's mother comes in and stabs Marion in the shower multiple times the violins are screeching it's iconic it's like that music cue in the Jaws music cue like that's those are the two that you just maybe there's others maybe Star Wars whatever doesn't matter as far as like horror movies go yeah yeah I want to say that's a Jurassic Park one but yeah no nothing's quite as evocative as it's so good yeah that I'm excited to come back to that scene between the two of them right before the death scene too because that scene is just like full of things to talk about for sure yeah so marion has been stabbed to death and moments later

norman discovers what his mother has done he rushes to help marion but it's too late she's dead so he cleans up the crime scene packs up her body and her belongings including the money that's tucked in the newspaper that he doesn't realize is there into her car and then pushes her car into this like swamp tar pit kind of place cut to marion's sister, Lila, played by Vera Miles, approaching Marion's boyfriend, Sam, to try to find out where Marion is. Because it's been several days and no one has heard from her. Then this guy, Arbogast. Great name. Truly.

Sounds like a guy in a horror movie to me. He's played by Martin Balsam. Arbogast is a private investigator who I think was hired by Mr. Cassidy, the guy who's $40,000 is missing. And Arbogast starts going around to different motels in the area to try to find Marion, including the Bates Motel. And he's able to match Marion's handwriting in the registry book with a sample that he has.

So he starts asking Norman a bunch of questions about, did Marion stay there and blah, blah, blah. And Mr. Norm is being pretty suspicious. And then Arbogast sees Norman's mother sitting in the window of the house. And Arbogast wants to question her. But Norman is like, no, thanks. Now go away, please. Obviously, Arbogast is very suspicious and he comes back a little later and goes to the house to question mrs bates because he thinks that she has information about marion's whereabouts but mrs bates promptly stabs arbogast to death in another pretty iconic scene where he's falling backwards down the stairs. Meanwhile, Lila and Sam are like, where's our friend, Mr. Arbogast? He was supposed to call us back several

hours ago. So Sam goes off to find the Bates Motel to see what's going on. Yeah, quick stop off with some useless police. Yeah. Right. right yeah I guess that the best you could say of the police in this movie is that at one point they were kind of doing their best and that's not saying much

so Sam finds the motel he can't find Arbogast so he comes back to Lila then they go to this like deputy sheriff guy who is like well it sounds like your private investigator doesn't even have his facts straight because Norman Bates's mother died 10 years ago and Sam is like well I saw an old woman sitting in the window and so there's like a lot of confusion about who she is and

what's going on god there's so many moments in this movie that it's like it really kept hitting for me how iconic the big beats of this movie are because there are multiple times when i was re-watching it last night when i was just like how can he not know that like it's psycho like you should know that but then if it were possible to have a clean reading of this movie would I have picked up on it maybe not I don't know

we'll never know it's tricky it does seem a bit weird though that apparently like Hitchcock infancies like so so dedicated to preserving these twists and like was buying up every copy of like the book that it was based on to like make sure people wouldn't know and like that before it happens there's that like small foreshadowing of just like oh no she's dead so why would you put right that kind of gives a lot away and like those characters have no

incentive to lie about it like but it is kind of just like passed over as the movie goes forward and they're like no no there's an old lady up there we know it maybe they try to cover their tracks because the sheriff guy is like well if mrs Mrs. Bates is still alive, then who's that woman buried in the cemetery? And it's like, well, that doesn't do quite enough. Yeah, you've still planted the idea. Right. Yeah. But I mean, I guess it's very different because like, it's not like we saw Psycho Fresh, we saw it like knowing that that was going to happen.

But that does seem in retrospect like a little taking the wind out of the sails yeah anyway so lila and sam realizing that the police are useless go to the motel to investigate on their own they check in pretending to be a married couple and sneak into room one so their suspicion suspicion is that Norman Bates stole the $40,000 from Marion, but they don't find any conclusive evidence in room one. So Lila wants to talk to the mother while Sam distracts Norman. And Lila goes into the house. She snoops around the mother's bedroom.

She snoops around the mother's bedroom. She snoops around Norman's bedroom, which is very like childlike and creepy. Meanwhile, Norman Bates does not like the things that Sam is insinuating. So he knocks Sam out and rushes up to the house. Lila, meanwhile, heads down to the fruit cellar where she sees Mrs. Bates from behind sitting in a chair. But then Mrs. Bates spins around and twist. She's a skeleton. You know how you spin an old lady around when you walk into a movie. Look at me.

I do appreciate in this whole sequence, like Sam, I guess I don't know like how intentional the movie is making this, but it felt clear to me where it's like, Sam is, I guess, well-intentioned, but he is just like not good at doing any,

any of the things he's supposed to be doing Lila takes control from him multiple times and he's always like I don't know Lila but then always ends up going with her plan and then he executes his portion of the plan poorly without like I was like why would you say I'm gonna go distract Norman Bates and then immediately get into an argument with him what are you doing yeah he's not being subtle at all he should be like hey let's talk about taxidermy or something like yeah right distract him and said he's just like you stole money didn't you and yeah i mean if we know anything about norman at this point is that he can be led on a tangent yeah right it's like he hasn't talked to anybody in years like he's down to chat just like don't talk to him about his mom or crimes two topics to

avoid and what does sam do but talks about both of those yep okay so mrs bates is a skeleton. And just then, Norman Bates, dressed as his mother in a wig and a dress, and he's holding a knife, pops in about to stab Lila. But then Sam comes in behind Norman and stops him and saves Lila. Then we cut to a courthouse where a psychiatrist who has just spoken to Norman Bates offscreen explains a whole bunch of stuff that we'll unpack. But basically that Norman Bates has a dual personality where sometimes he's Norman, sometimes he's his mother, and how Norman had murdered his mother and her lover 10 years prior and then stole her body and preserved it and becomes his mother. And then the movie ends with a shot of Norman Bates, but with voiceover from his mother saying, my son is a bad boy.

He's the one who murdered those people i wouldn't even harm a fly and then he has that shot that looks just like janet lee when she's in the car they're both like like narrow eyes almost like stealing 40 000 from a rich guy is the same as being a serial killer. Yeah, not the same. So that's the movie. Let's take another quick break and we'll come right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now.

The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeartTrue Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I 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 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. about my podcast, Wake and Jake. It's your go-to spot for anything and everything sports. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey, golf, college, whatever's hot in the street, we're talking about it on Wake and Jake. So if you're a diehard fan or looking for the latest buzz,

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You will not regret it. So, new episodes Monday and Wednesday. You can watch along on the Wake and Jake YouTube channel or listen to Wake and Jake on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. Okay. Layla, we always defer to our guests. What would you like to discuss first?

What jumped out at you i mean i've seen it so many times but i think this time i kind of ended up going down like a little bit of a kind of i don't know like a different perspective on it and i was reminded in like the early days of youtube you know when people were doing like those things where they'd re-edit movie trailers to make them look like they were a different genre so like mary poppins was like a horror movie and somebody did like psycho as being like a romantic comedy and like weirdly i found myself watching this as being like this is like kind of a hallmark christmas movie oh and like hear me out it's they specify it starts on december 11th and then she's got like two days in phoenix arizona and then she has an overnight drive and then they specify that

it's a week till people start looking for her about let's say two three days of the investigation in the end i swear to god i think norman bates that final scene happens on christmas whoa and then the whole thing just like i kind of worked backwards from that where i was like is this like the most searing satire on like bullshit romantic comedy christmas movies because we have our like gal from the city this kind of career gal who kind of is like ambitious in all of these ways and kind of cutthroat and then she's kind of got the boyfriend who won't really commit but she's really very interested in him and then this like folksy guy who loves his mom and has hobbies takes her in and it kind of fell at like the 47 minute mark i was like there is a version of this where he is about to she's going

to spend 40k investing in this motel and he's about to teach her the meaning of christmas and yeah it's it's not what I expected to think coming into this podcast. Part of me, and I think the Anthony Perkins being like such an insane dreamboat was just like, I'm actually watching what Promising Young Woman wishes it was, where we are having like this like searing critique

of like the nice guy guy in the cultural imagination. That's fascinating. I didn't know very much about Anthony Perkins as a person. I mean, he has a fascinating and in many ways, I think, tragic life in the way that, I mean, he was like a dreamboat. He was like an icon long before this movie came out but was also a very talented actor he was closeted I think for his entire life and at different points in his life underwent abusive kind of conversion therapy yeah to to

try to not be gay anymore which which is very of the time. It's well documented. And ultimately died of AIDS, but also just had this incredible life and this incredible career and was an activist his entire career. And it was like, I really loved learning about him. And I was curious why he was thought of for this part

because he's in his like late 20s when he did this and he was advocated for by Hitchcock even though I don't know I was curious about because it's an adaptation from the book you were referencing Layla and Hitchcock got wind of it and basically bought it out of stock so no one could find out about all the dun dun kinds of moments but originally I was pleasantly surprised at the changes that Hitchcock and the screenwriter whose name is Joseph Stefano chose to make from the book I have not read the book, probably never will. But originally, I think it was written in sort of far more broad stereotype strokes, where the character of Norman is written to be, I think, an alcoholic who quote unquote, swaps personalities when he drinks too much.

He's written to be middle-aged he's written to be not stereotypically handsome and it was sort of suggested like what if we cast a young kind of iconically hot guy to do this and how will that affect it and I think it was a really interesting switch that definitely affected my read of the movie and sort of challenges what you expect from people who look a certain way when you see them on screen other changes I saw was in the book Marion and Sam do not have a hotel tryst in the book that was added for the movie but something that they took out that I couldn't really remember if it happened or not um and was pleasantly surprised was that because lila and sam were spending so much time

together i'm like hmm two hot people 1960 they're probably we're probably gonna force them together arbitrarily but they don't and i guess in the book that did happen where like lila and sam fell in love over the recent death of someone they both loved so I mostly thought that the changes that they made for the movie were pretty cool and like served the story I agree and then also as we the book, which was written by Robert Block, was loosely based on real life murderer slash grave robber Ed Gein, I guess might kind of inform like the really bizarre psychoanalysis that the psychiatrist gives of Norman Bates at the end of the movie, which again, we'll talk about,

but give him a break. It's Christmas. He's like, Merry Christmas. By the way, it's true. He's, he has to close one of the most famous movies of all time on christmas no

less he's having a hard time uh that scene i also kind of forgot of like i think that happens in a lot of hitchcock movies and maybe just older movies in general where at the end everything has to be wrapped up and you're like wait there's only two minutes left and then a guy gives a speech and then you're like oh okay i guess that i guess that's how it ends it was just so abrupt yeah but yeah so you did you caitlin did you go sort of down the rabbit hole on ed gein i didn't learn a lot about him personally i just knew that the author of the book like lived locally and so it was something that was like local lore that existed in his mind i read a large chunk of ed gein's wikipedia page on scholarly journal of course wikipedia basically

so i i know everything now so i i don't have a whole lot of insight here although i was curious because like the wiki again i should you know do more research than just scholarly journal wikipedia but the wikipedia page for the movie psycho says like oh here are the similarities between norman bates and ed gein They both like live in these secluded areas. They both had domineering mothers, where they like had a shrine to them in their house. They both wore women's clothing. And then I looked into Ed Gein more and I was like, wait a minute. That may or may not be true. I couldn't, what I did find is that Ed Gein made a suit or started to, and this is going to be graphic and gory, but he started to make like a woman suit, literally a like skin suit from his victims and or like bodies that he had

grave robbed. The list of things found at his house viewer beware you're in for a scare it is rl sign scary scary bad horrible and yeah because i also read that very scary wikipedia page it felt like because it seems basically impossible and maybe for the best that that was not shown on screen and like fully adapted into Norman Bates's character. The sub in was a very transphobic and just generally queer phobic narrative around gender nonconforming clothing. They're like,

well, it's basically the same thing. And you're like, well, wait, hold on. No, it's not. it's not so yeah i guess that leads into so i want to kind of unpack what the psychiatrist says about norman bates and then what the implications of that are so the psychiatrist is describing norman bates as having some sort of like, quote unquote, split personality disorder. And I know that's like not the real name of anything, but also the disorder that's being depicted in the movie is like, not a real thing. It's some, you know, like Hollywood version of a disorder. But the point is, the psychiatrist is saying that

sometimes he's Norman Bates, sometimes he's inhabiting the personality and likeness of his mother. He describes Norman as having been quote unquote, disturbed ever since his father died, that his mother was clingy, demanding, and it seems like she and Norman had a very codependent relationship until Mrs. Bates met a man. She took a lover, and Norman became very jealous, so he murdered his mother and her lover, but he knew that murdering his mother was bad, that he was a bad boy. And so he had to erase this crime in his mind by becoming his mother. So he stole her corpse and preserved it. and he was also again he was jealous of his mother and assumed that she was just as jealous of him as he was of her and so if he ever felt an attraction to a woman you know the mother side of him would take control again this is the psychiatrist describing this the mother side

of norman would take control and so like when he met Marion and he was attracted to her that set off the mother and then he as his mother like inhabiting the personality and mindset of his mother that's who killed Marion and then as far as why he was wearing a dress and a wig another person in the courtroom speculates that Norman was a, and then he uses like a very dated term to refer to people who wear clothes that quote unquote don't match the gender that they're assigned at birth. But the psychiatrist is like, no, no, that's not true. Norman bates wore those clothes to become his mother and to maintain the illusion that his mother is alive so we have this just like really like quack science quack

medicine explanation of what is going on in the psychology of Norman Bates. And the movie does not come right out and say, like, this person is trans and or gender nonconforming and therefore they are a murderer. But this is one of many movies that equates gender nonconformity, kind of to use that as an umbrella term here, with mental illness, which like at the time, you know, in the 60s and before and beyond like this was very much the uh normalized opinion to have at the time to the point where the lead actor in the movie whose character is being subscribed to all this bullshit like was experiencing obviously not the exact same

thing but was also being treated as if being queer was a fundamental failure in a medical condition. I mean, and that was for a decade after this movie came out. And like what I think it's like these different I don't know, there's so many different issues and discussions inside of that like minute long monologue where it's conflating gender non-conformity and transness and queerness with mental illness and this is like a very typical problem for horror movies to have still is like completely misunderstanding the mental illness that they think that they're describing that they are needlessly conflating with gender nonconformity. So it's just like all of this stuff all at once. I know we've talked about how in movies and often in horror movies, there will be a specific mental illness that is prescribed as like this is why this character is violent you know needs to be

put away needs to be killed whatever the movie sort of prescribes to and it is like almost always the better choice to just not attach a specific diagnosis to something like that like no one's asking that horror movie villains don't exist but it is still i mean i the one that always comes up for me because i think it just like upset me personally was in the opening sequence of midsommar where it's implied that florence pugh's sister murders the entire family because she is bipolar which is just like such a huge false swing than that was a couple of years ago. And so it's like, you know, very normalized within this genre to do that. But I just wanted to share a quick, cause I'm not a mental health professional. Like I was

like, it's safe to say, like, I'm assuming that they're getting this diagnosis wrong, but I wonder if anyone's written about it. So I have just a quick passage from the American Journal of Psychiatry from 2020 from Riley Mancine, BS, writing about horror movies and mental conditions throughout the ages. They write, quote, one of horror's most iconic portrayals of a psychiatric condition was in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The protagonist, Norman Bates, who commits several murders, demonstrates many features of dissociative identity disorder. Because DID was not well explored in

media at the time, many interpreted the delusions and disorganized thought of Norman Bates as schizophrenia. As a result, audiences generalized the two disorders as one. Psycho portrayed a psychiatric condition coupled with a new heightened level of violence on the silver screen, which perpetuated negative stereotypes of violence by psychiatric patients, unquote. And so it's not Psycho that invented this, but it's definitely one of the most popular examples.

Right. And so to go back to conflating gender nonconformity with mental illness, which this movie very much does, among many others. And again, that was and still is until pretty recently was a belief held by medical science and psychiatry. It wasn't until 2013 when the DSM-5 was published that, quote, gender identity disorder was eliminated and replaced with gender dysphoria, pulling that from psychiatry.org. Yeah, we're all waiting for the dsm-6 to drop because yeah yeah so so medical science was historically very much in the mindset of conflating gender non-conformity with mental illness but not just mental illness specifically with violence because there are many many mental illnesses and i have several of them that are nonviolent, you know, but like, this and many, many movies say, like, if you have any characteristics of

gender nonconformity, you are mentally ill, and therefore violent. You're an abuser. You're a murderer. You're a psychopath, basically. And this was basically the only way that trans people and any gender nonconforming people were represented in media for the longest time, damaging effect on that community to the point where there's still constant legislation trying to bar trans people from using the appropriate bathrooms because they think that trans people are going to prey on people in bathrooms things like that like and just legislating trans people out of existence all together which right we've talked about this on the show before but the doc that came out a couple years ago disclosure is like yes illustrates this point very clearly yeah i even pulled a quote from it because i as part of my prep i also watched a chunk of that movie and laverne cox points out quote, Alfred Hitchcock seems to be obsessed with people who traverse gender stereotypes as murderers.

And then there are clips of Psycho. There's a clip of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour from 1965. There's also a clip from a movie called Murder! from 1930. So Hitchcock had a habit of doing this quite a lot. I mean, one of the things that I find also, like, kind of on a next level kind of upsetting about the narrative that this starts is that also kind of gender nonconformity

comes from, like, a nugget of abuse, that, like, there has to be kind of like an inciting incident there has to be something that went horribly wrong in your childhood that kind of like sent you off on this spiral for sure but also like in a broader context i like i hate these sort of stories about abuse victims necessarily themselves evolving into what it is that damaged them in the first place and I'm I mean I'm not a scientist but like I believe the numbers do not actually manifest in that way like if you are someone who has been through a horrifically abusive childhood the idea that you are necessarily doomed to reenact that I think is very very difficult for survivors

of abuse to like feel that you are necessarily trapped in that cycle, but also just not helpful in any degree. And face it, sadly, the people that most like to suffer from that sort of abuse are people from marginalized genders. So it just all feels like it's buying into something very insidious to me especially because this movie blames norman's like the thing that makes him become quote-unquote disturbed is the death of his father almost as if to say like without the presence of another male figure in his life, like setting him on the right path,

he becomes this murderer. And it also blames his mother for like all of his bad behavior. And that's not to say that like there aren't abusive dynamics between parents and children and that an abusive parent can't like you know affect a person's behavior and kind of the way their life pans out but like this movie is very much like this mother she it's all her fault and mothers are to be blamed well i guess i was a little confused about that by the because I feel like, I mean, and I don't know how intentionally this was done,

but by the end of the movie, just because obviously from Norman, we get an inaccurate depiction of his relationship with his mother because he's acting as if she is still alive. And then at the end, we get kind of a glazed over version of their relationship

where it was not clear to me by the end of the movie the mother and son were deeply codependent for sure but outside of that it was unclear to me what degree of abuse had occurred and or it seems like in some ways that you read it as like norman was presented as this bad seed or that a close relationship with his mother manifested a mental illness which is just like I was just confused by the end I was like what sequence of events is it is it trying to push well because fundamentally we are presented that Norman is like completely like sexually shut down like he I mean I think kind of give the impression that he's never like had any sort of intimacy with women whilst his mother by all

accounts has had two committed relationships she was married and then she had like this fiance as well so it does kind of beg the question of like how much of this is sort of his psychosexual obsession with her rather than necessarily how it really was right right because it is i mean in the movie it is implied that like norman is attracted to women and is attracted to janet lee's character to Marion and that like that is something to be resisted and pushed away and that's I don't know maybe that is like a way in of talking about Marion a little bit because I think just Marion was a character who I think was better covered and and more thoughtfully covered than I remembered because I think a big turn in Norman's narrative is that he is doing what a lot of men are doing to Marion in this movie. He is trying to

lure her and get her alone and spend time with her and have her attention, but he's doing it in a gentler way than we've seen men in this movie do it so far. It doesn't make her less on guard, but it's a different approach. And at this point in the movie, we're like, we're not really sure who Norman is or what he's like. And that conversation between them takes a turn

where he gets very prickly and defensive and frustrated when his mother comes up and the decisions around his family come up. And then when she leaves, he immediately begins spying on her and watching her take off her clothes, which is not the first time that even happens in the movie because that's how the movie starts

is by us looking in a window at like marion topless with sam so it's i don't know i thought there were like interesting choices of how she's framed where you're always i mean there are moments where you're the camera's very intentionally like leering at her and with norman it's a character driven leering but that's not even the first time that you're staring at Marion through a window with her clothes off like it's just I don't know the way that she's framed seems intentional in that way well it made me wonder because this is like one of the first, if not the first slasher movies. And such a big trope about slasher movies, as we've discussed, is the punishment of sexuality, specifically women's sexuality, with violence. So if you see teenagers and teen girls having sex, they are bound to get murdered violently in a way

that's often framed extremely sexually, like the murder itself. And this is the case for this movie because she gets murdered while she's naked in the shower in a way that you could argue is sexualized where it made me wonder is Marion being punished for kind of having the movie frames what she's doing as having this like secret torrid affair it's not quite that but it took me on my second watch to realize the dynamic of the relationship because they're talking about like, Oh, or should we get married or who has been married before or not? And I was confused by a lot of it.

And I thought maybe at least one of them between Marion and Sam was already married and they were cheating and having this, you know, secret affair where they have to meet up in a hotel room and all this stuff. And then it turns out that no it's just that he can't marry her because he is in debt and can't support her or something but i feel like the movie is still framing it as like this is a secret, torrid affair out of wedlock, and they're having sex out of wedlock. And therefore, Marion has to be punished and, you know, punished violently, and in a very sexually charged way. I don't have like, necessarily even conclusive thoughts or totally fully formed

thoughts on it. But it was just like a lot of different things I was picking up on I think that's how I kind of previously felt and like this viewing changed that a little bit for me I kind of saw the dynamic as being a bit like sex in the city Mr. Big kind of like Sam is kind of making excuses and she is like wanting to commit and settle down and then when she's in the car she kind of fantasizes about what he'll say when he sees her and she's going to be so like happy to to see him and all of you know and all of those things and I didn't feel that like the movie was necessarily judging her for those desires and then like the shower scene is just so

kind of overplayed in my head but what struck me this time watching it is that she kind of lies out of the bathtub you know out of the shower and you know he has this really long shot that's just on her eye and the water from the shower is like dripping and it kind of does appear to be almost like tears and first moment you think she's dead and then you kind of see that she's it's like the last flickers of life uh kind of coming out of her and the thing she's looking at is the money there's part of me that's just like that was the sin here yeah yeah i didn't know where to fall on i i guess i was surprised at the amount of grace the movie shows to marion i mean and maybe that's me putting too much of a modern view on it but it felt to me like the movie was you know not judgmental of marion's actions i don't know i

mean i know that there's gendered stuff in this too, where, you know, in movies where male protagonists, you know, steals or rob someone, it's the pressure to justify it is not as great. But I felt like the movie did a good job of making it clear what Marion was trying to do and how frustrating her life was and that she wanted out and she didn't want I mean I think that there's a way to see it both ways but it felt like it was a frustration of feeling like she had to hide a relationship and a frustration of feeling like having this relationship would result in her and her partner being judged on top of being treated like shit at work on top of being harassed by every man she comes into contact with not that stealing this money would change that but it was it's a very active decision by her i mean i think a lesser movie would have someone suggest it to her like but it's like she gets access to this money this is her chance and she

decides to do it I like that part I don't really feel was done judgmentally I think the way that she dies and when she dies was how I I don't know I mean I didn't come down hard in one way but I think it is really interesting that it's like the moment that she decides to come clean is when she's killed. And I don't know how that sort of affects the way that the movie seems to be viewing her. I think the way the movie frames her versus the way she's written are often kind of in conflict, which we've talked about in a bajillion movies. I don't really understand why we're leering at her at the beginning of the movie. I guess I do understand it more when it's done from the character perspective of Norman, but there is other times it happens that I don't understand. But there was a quote

from that Hitchcock and Truffaut book, which is just extended interviews with Hitchcock, discussing how the shower scene was filmed and what was supposed to be motivating it. And this is a quote from Janet Leigh within that book. Marian had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean and take the consequence. So when she stepped into the bathtub, it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters.

The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption from her mind, purging the evil from her soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil at peace, unquote. And so choosing to kill her at that moment, I don't know what they're trying to do there.

Cause it doesn't feel like a pun. I mean, I feel like you can argue that she's killed as a punishment for considering the sin of stealing or the sin of a relationship that was not acceptable at the time. But we've just seen her decide that she's not going to do that and she's going to return to her virtuous life. And that's when she's killed. And I don't I mean, I don't I mean I don't know it's such a fascinating scene that one with you know when they're having the sandwiches in the living room given that like I think what Hitchcock manages to like do so skillfully is like you can I mean the music and the birds and like the lighting and

everything you know that this woman is in like grave danger and it's under threat but because Janet Leigh's performance is just so good that you can kind of see why she's in like the mode of like this is just like a harmless meet you and this is kind of like some eccentric guy and he's kind of dreamy and it's like her why her guard is down still comes across in that scene but I had completely forgotten that there's something about that conversation that she has with Norman that makes her change her mind and like decide that she's gonna like go back and make it all okay again and like give back the money and like change it and I and I re-watched it like two or three times and I couldn't quite pick up on it what Hitchcock thinks Norman is

doing to Marion because she seems of like such a kind of stronger constitution than he is and like as much as you know anthony packard's is dreamy um like that persuasion never felt quite right to me beyond that maybe just she has like a moment to pause and reflect but right yeah i couldn't identify anything specific that he says unless maybe it's just like him talking about like being trapped and you know under the control of his mother basically and like she worries that by running away and like because she'll eventually have to deal with the consequences of like stealing this money if she will feel trapped just by like that stress and burden or not even the guilt but just the stress of getting potentially caught right maybe she decides it won't be worth it but whatever it

is i agree that it's not clear. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but that's why this is a, you know, Christmas rom-com movie. Like, kind of deep, incredibly compelling, intelligent woman gets, like, persuaded by this, like, lame guy. I think it's the purpose of that scene. Because I agree, like, I didn't feel like that that conversation resulting in her deciding to undo what she just started doing. Like their predicaments are not similar. It was confusing why it was switched.

I read and like this makes sense to me, but maybe the execution just like doesn't work for a modern audience or maybe just doesn't work at all. Was that that scene was put there that scene doesn't appear in the book and it was put there so that you it's like almost this moment of like transference so that you know enough about norman that when when janet lee's character dies in a couple of minutes your sort of sympathies have been transferred from Marianne to Norman which that makes sense that that you have to do that but maybe but I think that like I honestly don't even know that that had to happen like why did she need to change her mind in order to leave that room and take a shower like her plan could have been the same I guess I don't know I mean I don't like object to it but I don't really

understand why that switch happened but do you think that's just kind of like male gaze in that like hitchcock felt that we needed to have like additional reasons to find her death to be a bad thing yeah because i only kind of really needed that interaction with the guy who's doing the tax evasion and the 18 year old daughter to be just like, I am fully on. Right. And her and her victimless crimes. Like, I don't give. Yeah, maybe that is like, oh, we need to show that she has made the upright, morally pure choice. And so then when she dies, it's sadder because she was going to do the right thing she just didn't get the chance she was tempted oh that sucks i mean i would rather die stealing forty thousand dollars than die about to unsteal forty thousand dollars exactly i also wish that lila had been poised more front and center as like the new protagonist after mar Marion dies than she is because as we

were discussing earlier like she's better at like going about this whole thing as far as like investigating her sister's disappearance she has better ideas she's got better execution like I just I wish that she had been allowed to be a bit more important to the story because instead it becomes about like, it's her and it's Sam and it's Arbogast. don't even know what the movie who the movie is like trying to get you to identify with as like the character you're rooting for post marion's death because a protagonist dying 45 minutes into the movie is a really weird narrative choice and like i don't know what i think it rocks it's interesting but like audiences aren't trained how to like redirect their empathy to like who now? And like it's now spread over a bunch of different characters. And I guess I just wished like that Lila would have been poised as like the new main person that we were supposed to direct our empathy toward.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I do love that. Like I said, I love horror movies. But like, you know, sometimes in the beginning of them, you can just kind of quickly identify who's like cannon fodder. But this is kind of the opposite of that. But I know I don't want to kind of bring new bad news, but like, I mean, Hitchcock treats Vera Miles, who played Lila Crane like that because he was really angry at her for getting pregnant. So he gives her not much to do and he kind of dresses her to be like really like dowdy and she doesn't kind of get like the

heroic moment and he like really downplays her so he kind of positions her as being like the the lesser sister yeah that and she's damseled at the end where she has to be saved by Sam who comes in and saves her from Norman. Wow. Hitchcock is a monster. I was really frustrated at like how difficult that information was to find as well like that is not presented as even in the like sort of reappraisal of alfred hitchcock and female actors and women characters and all this stuff that doesn't come up a lot which i guess maybe is because it's kind of a blip comparatively but like logistically even if you're trying to streamline this movie sam is very much in the way in the back half of that movie.

It would have been very simple to give Lila kind of an elevated role. And, you know, maybe it is more realistic that she'd have to bump up against this guy that thinks he's knows what he's doing or thinks that he knows her sister better than she does or whatever different kind of blips come up between them but it's like he's mostly in the way and like lila's character we also just don't really know anything about her outside of the fact that she's marion's sister we don't know like is she also a single

girl are they super close it seems like they are but we don't really know what are her hobbies yeah there's just that throwaway line at the beginning where i mean they do kind of like offhand they kind of suggest that she's like a bit pathetic or it's just like well you know when sam talks about her like we'll send her off to the movies and turn the picture of your mother around and kind of get busy it's frustrating yeah i think like we could have i don't know if the way she would have been written in 1960 i also don't really have a clear idea of how she's presented in the book and how much that was changed but it just felt like i was happy she was there and i was happy that she was i guess yeah more active than i would have expected especially because sam is in all of those scenes

and you sort of half expect that he's going to be like we have to do this this and this where most of the actions they take are orchestrated by her but ultimately I feel like we're kind of shortchanged the opportunity to see kind of who she is and the fact that that's connected to Hitchcock's malicious treatment of women he worked with just sort of puts a bow in it I mean we I guess that this is worth going through in brief we'll include links to more thorough sources on this but because this is the first time we've talked about a Hitchcock movie on this show if you have not encountered not really a feminist hero, that Alfred Hitchcock was famously abusive and coercive to a number of women that he worked with. I think most famously in the women that he worked with who has spoken out about it most extensively.

Leila, you referenced earlier Tippi Hedren in the movie that made my classmates and definitely not me pee the birds where not only was she treated brutally on the set of that shoot he was also relentlessly sexually harassing her behind the scenes controlling her behavior controlling her food intake and just generally making her entire early career a living hell. She spoke out on this a number of times, starting in the 1980s, but was mostly brushed to the side until she released a memoir in, I think it was 2016 or 17, and spoke about it in more detail. Similar stories exist for the actor Brigitte Aubert,

who played a part in To Catch a Thief, who was sort of taken on as a mentee by Alfred Hitchcock. She was thrilled about it. She's a young actor. And then he sexually assaulted her in a car, lunged at her, tried to kiss her, etc. That's well documented. Different women who worked in his offices it was just like a very clear pattern of behavior that was i think in the way that these stories very often are just like an open secret internally but it's almost tacitly expected that no one should know or should care because of the looming shadow of like what this director means to culture and you know bloody fucking blah yeah yeah i end up feeling like very protective of like my kind of 12 year old film fan self who's just like oh my god a hitchcock box set and a kubrick box set what could go wrong it's not fair I mean I think the interesting thing about Hitchcock is I'm not in any way trying to like

excuse like the rank misogyny and I think you can see it on the screen and like you know he's a wonderfully talented director in many regards like that doesn't make any of that suck less but I think there's a weird kind of cyclical thing happens that because he's so convinced of like the kind of passivity of men and like connected to like essentially blaming women for their actions where they weirdly end up being like the most compelling character in each one of his films because like the men are kind of like useless babies a lot of the time because like the original sin must go back to the woman so she ends up being like inadvertently the most like the core of it all i think marion is like a good example of too, where it's like the compelling parts of Marion's character.

I genuinely don't know at every turn whether I am supposed to be fascinated by her and excited by like who she is and the choices she's making. But I am, if it's an accident, I guess I don't really give a shit. Like it's good that you can find that inside of her and yeah like you're saying Leila it doesn't make Hitchcock less of a monster in the way that he both treated women and viewed them this was in the Hitchcock Truffaut interviews as well he was he was asked why do you hate women and he answered I don't exactly hate them, but I certainly don't think they're as good actors as men. And then goes on to explain at length why women suck at acting.

And that's why he has to, you know, be mean to them and be harder on them and dress them suggestively to distract from the fact that they are worse actors than men so it's so weird it's like he i mean not weird it's i guess normal but i i think he engaged in a mask off discussion of it that is pretty wild where he was pretty open about his misogynist views on women's skills and ability and valuing them for looks over talent, but also was sort of really determined that how that manifested in his behavior was never public until well after he died. Like, gee, Alfred, is there anything else that maybe they're dealing with on the set that the man might be making their jobs harder?

Oh, it didn't occur to him. God. might be making their jobs harder oh it didn't occur to him god and speaking of like blaming women and women are sinners who must be punished like the speech that the psychiatrist is giving at the end where like poor lila she just keeps being like is my sister dead or what like she still doesn't even know what happened to her sister and the psychiatrist yes and another thing well she was really sexy and that's why she's dead because she was so attractive and norman bates was so attracted to her and so aroused by her that he had to kill her okay jeez dude read the room frame this a little bit seriously yeah her sister literally died yeah no i mean that that needs to i mean i did kind of think

the barbie movie doesn't need a sequel but maybe it's ken watching Psycho. Truly. They showed in The Godfather, but there's a whole world out there. There's other movies. I don't even know what to make of this line exactly, but there's a part where when Arbogast goes to question Norman Bates and he's just like, oh, was this woman was here? I know she was. And, you know, maybe she tricked you or like maybe she's trying to scheme you and norman bates says something like i'm not a fool and i'm not

capable of being fooled not even by a woman i know and then like just to kind of make it all the more twisted it was just like but even if i was fooled my mother wouldn't be fooled jesus okay way to make it all the women's fault again they're like what it did seem like that scene was making an effort to blame every woman we have seen in the entire movie before or heard of because we don't ever see them on what a treat yeah this is just my favorite thing of fiction though like these Like, these, like, unassuming man babies. I mean... Like, the true evil in the world. I really like it when they're identified.

Yeah, that is Norman Bates to a T. Yeah, I mean... To the point where he still has, like, stuffed animals in his bedroom and, like... Okay, watch your mouth. A little tiny baby bed. Okay. I feel like this is going to be pitched.

This is my next piece. The kind of Norman Bates to 500 days of summer pipeline. Oh, yes. I would read that 100%. On it. Does anyone else have anything they'd like to discuss? I have one more quick thing just about going kind of back to the discussion of Norman Bates

as an iconic movie serial killer and how serial killers are this fixation of and to some extent invention of the media and media narratives and just watching it again, it's not a movie that's discussed in this piece, but it's one of my favorites.

And by a friend of the cast and a dear pal, Sarah Marshall wrote a great piece in The Believer last year called Violent Delights, sort of about the specifically American media fixation on serial killers and sort of examining true crime fandom as it exists today. The passage I was thinking of while we're looking at Norman Bates and the fact that he was inspired by a real life serial killer, although as you explained, Caitlin, the gender nonconforming elements were way mistranslated onto Norman Bates.

But just how the serial killers that media narratives and movies tend to focus on are serial killers who are other in some kind of way and ignore the most common type of serial murder, which is a straight man. And so the example that she uses in the piece is someone who I'd never heard of before I met Sarah, and she told me about all these serial killers, is Ronald Gene Simmons, who is not a well-known American serial killer, but committed at the time one of the most horrific mass murders, including his entire family over the course of two days. And she speculates the reason that he is not fixated on is because there is nothing that's other about him.

He is a regular guy who committed a horrible atrocity and how that is framed as kind of the way of the world, even though it is like far more criminal act of murder than we see when women kill people and when queer people kill other people. It's presented in a different way where it's like fundamentally evil. This is at the core of their being versus when we hear about straight men killing people and usually white straight men killing people, that it's presented as, well, they were reacting to the world, not that they are evil to their core.

And so just in the way that Norman Bates is othered and made to seem effeminate and dresses, like we were saying, gender nonconforming. It feels like those are the characters that really get fixated on and made examples of in this completely disingenuous way. And I'd recommend reading the piece. It's really interesting. It is fascinating to me that, like, Ed Gein has generally got, like,

problematic elements aside, eight great movies, and, like, nobody else, I think, comes, like, close to that. It's wild. I didn't realize. Because we got this, we got Texas Chainsaw, we got Silence of the Lambs. Like, Ed Gein, it's really interesting

how he, in particular captured like the cultural imagination yeah the way that they are yet to make a decent ted bundy movie and like i mean that you know from a million gross reasons and i don't even want to like get into like the way that ted bundy has been frayed by the media because it just yeah i will listen to this but like it is very interesting that like this one guy and just these couple of details where it's like we got it's essentially the grave robbing it's the kind of taxidermy maybe doing leather work something with like people's skin and it's like just the hint of queerness and like that was enough to inspire like it was like

helen of choice he like launched a thousand ships in terms of like cultural imagination similarly the movie psycho where the last thing i want to talk about is and i'm not an expert in film history but this movie was made in 1960 when the production code which we've talked about on the show before in various episodes um just very quick refresher if any listeners are not familiar it was this code that hollywood movies had to follow from 1934 to i believe 1968 i think was when it was replaced by the like MPAA rating system. But basically, it was this like, set of guidelines that was overseen by the Catholic Church, where like, there could be no nudity or overt sexuality on screen, a lot of things had to be implied rather than shown, there could be no graphic

violence, all these different things just as a way to censor movies no interracial relationships where they were treated as equals that was a fun one all kinds of like really disgusting stuff that was seen as a way to like you know promote good american religious values when it was really just censoring art and being nasty. But anyway, by the 60s, the code, the restrictions of the code were becoming a bit more lax. They're still being enforced, but filmmakers were like finding ways to like, try to circumvent the restrictions and stuff like that. And a lot of the things that were in the original cut of psycho you know the board were like you can't have this scene where they're in a hotel room where she's half naked

like you know she's topless with just a bra on and they're kissing and they're not married like you can't have stuff like that the shower scene that you know they obviously had a lot of problems with the shower scene but eventually like hitchcock wormed his way out of it. And a lot of the stuff that he originally wanted stayed in the film. And because this was such a huge, like box office hit, this movie was made on a tight budget, even for the time it was made for less than a million dollars and it grossed 50 million dollars at the box office like it was just a huge smash hit to the point where the original critical reception of this movie was like pretty mixed where people were like this is so controversial i don't know about this. It's scandalous. But because like audiences loved it, critics were like, maybe it is awesome. And then it was like nominated for various Academy Awards, all this stuff. basically set a new level of like acceptability in terms of what you could show on screen with violence and sexuality and quote unquote deviant behavior, which is a very loaded

idea. But this movie kind of like set a new standard. And again, this isn't the first movie that showed, you know, like a gender non-conforming person as a violent murderer. The documentary that we referenced earlier, Disclosure, dives into that a lot more deeply. I'd recommend everyone watching that film. There's also another docu-series on Shudder called Queer for Fear, which is all about representation of queerness in horror movies. I haven't watched it, so I couldn't necessarily recommend it, but it seems interesting and I'm going to watch it. Anyway, all this to say that this movie was so influential in sort of like shaping the way certain things were represented on screen. And I think so much of the way mental illness is like widely misunderstood by Hollywood and

gender nonconformity is widely misunderstood by holiday can be attributed to this movie. So it has a lasting impact in many ways, and not all of them are good. In fact, many of them are very bad. Anyway, the end of my tirade about that. It's a tough one. Like I have to just like resist the mental gymnastics where I try to be like, it's okay, actually. Because, you know, appreciate a great edit. But no, I mean, like you have to kind of reconcile even things that you appreciate, art that you think is great with its like negative impact on the world.

And like that needs to be, I think, the priority. I agree. Anything else before we do Bechdel test I like this movie unfortunately I think I think in spite of everything we've talked about and it's complete validity this movie rips and so that's challenging it is tricky yes I call it um I kind of created a name for it based on like Gerard Carmichael has a really great episode of the Carmichael show where he talks about how like fundamentally we all have to kind of make a decision based on like how talented and good something is versus how like damaging it is um it's an episode without discussing Bill Cosby but

I have like taking that on mentally and I call it the elia kazan index he sucked but he was really good at movies but so i consider that an index and it's like you i this is how talented you need i need you to be in order for me to recover from that that you are a force for evil and everyone's mileage varies with that right i mean i trust myself to watch hitchcock and like not become like an agent of the patriarchy right right i know there's certain things that i struggle to let go of because they were made by someone very problematic but they are such a terrific piece of media that it's a constant battle that i fight every day and you're braver than the troops for that i i know we have to say it again we're in the front lines of watching movies all three of us yeah damn okay the only thing that i would add because it's in all caps so i feel like i have to mention you simply perfect this is the best eyebrow movie

i've ever seen in my entire life oh you're right yes every single character like yeah the sheriff has like these toughs yes Anthony Perkins Janet Leigh strong brow coming on from Sam it's true again like I don't want to be like reductive but like what an era for the eyebrow I'll allow it yeah you're absolutely right I came out of like you know i'm a millennial like we had a rough time and then we had to try and grow them back with varying degrees of success it takes years and you forward your backwards it's challenging truly so lucky that i was too lazy and too poor to get regular waxing but um it's so nice to see such a full set of brows across a cast. It is nice. I'm glad it's back.

I'm glad a thick brow is back in vogue. It's my preference. When does that ever happen? Like the thing that's like really in fashion and like really aesthetically pleasing to everyone is the thing that requires you to do nothing. Just leave them. Can we have more of that?

Yeah. As for the Bechdel test test i do believe that this movie passes is it between marion and her colleague in the office at the beginning yes whose name is caroline yeah who's hitchcock's daughter oh that's hitchcock's daughter oh yeah okay which is a brutal role for your dad to write you because like there is like a really like damning line at the end where she's just like oh he would have flirted at me but he must have spotted my wedding ring and that's like a punchline like it's of course he didn't rude alfred i don't think they say her name out loud but she does have like her name is like on her desk so i considered her to be a named character she's credited as caroline they talk about i was actually i was watching this movie with my boyfriend and we were like i don't know if i have enough like knowledge of 1960 to understand what

the joke is with the sedatives um if it's a mother's little helper joke if it's a more insidious joke than that i was not clear but she was like don't take aspirin take this like tranquilizer pill that my mom's doctor gave me or something and i was like this seems like a joke that probably made sense at the time it doesn't seem awesome but i don't fucking understand it same anyways that passed the fact that does pass everyone's mother's just coming in and mess it up truly yeah i my assumption with that joke is that like she took it and then passed out and wasn't able to like consummate the marriage but like maybe that's just oh god my brain goes i mean that that was one of the

theories floated but there just was she was like so nervous i don't know that joke was so dated that i found it actively confusing but it did technically pass the medical test so there you go there you go but on to our perfect metric the n nipple scale. Woefully titled metric. Not to be confused with, no, never mind. I was going to make a reference to something that Ed Gein had made, but I won't even. If you want to look it up. Oh, dark. I think I know the one you're thinking about.

Yeah. So instead, I'll just breeze right past it. The nipple scale, zero to five nipples where we rate the movie based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens. I guess I'll give this like a one, one nipple for because it does have interesting female characters to some degree. Granted, one of them is murdered 45 minutes into the movie. The other one doesn't get a whole lot of screen time or active participation in the narrative. But I like both Marion and Lila as characters.

They are strong-willed. They are active to some degree. They are damseled and or killed. So they're kind of, they befall, not a great fate befalls them. But the time they are on screen they're i would say more interesting than a lot of the male characters but ultimately this is a movie that wildly misunderstands mental illness and conflates gender non-conform with violence, being violent, and does a whole lot of extremely reductive and harmful things to extremely vulnerable communities, and kind of paves

the way for a lot of movies to do similar things later on. So it kind of, again, doesn't completely lay the groundwork for this. Earlier movies had done something similar. But this is, again, one of the most iconic movies in American cinema history. And the implications of what happens in the movie have had a very lasting impact for worse so i can only give it one nipple and i'll give that nipple to janet lee because she is cool i don't know much about her personal life but she rocked she's famously jamie Curtis's mom. Mommy. And this movie is about mommies.

Went through the nightmare of being married to Tony Curtis. Yeah. She's a survivor. But also not because she died. But only because

she was old. Anyways. Well on that note I guess I'll And I meant that critically how dare she technically if you live long enough no one's a survivor that is the direction that survivism goes yeah it's survivordom is temporary it's a finite

diminishing returns on being alive yeah yeah yeah okay well i guess i will go one i guess i'm tempted to go one and a half because of how surprised i was at what was available in this movie and what had changed to scale back the misogyny present in the original text which i feel like usually that is flipped but i don't know i guess whoever edits the wikipedia these days you can choose one or one and a half depending on how you personally feel but i i mean i obviously i think that the biggest issue with this movie is, as we've talked about, how the character of Norman Bates contains all of these conflicting things being presented as evil with the gender nonconformity being front and center for what has this legacy of harm and then also mental illness being mischaracterized as inherently incurable untreatable violent murderous bad so that i think is the part of this movie that is just kind of impossible for me to reconcile to some extent then i think that you know whether intentionally or not there is wait okay sorry my cat's here

present flea has entered the chat being so loud but I think as far as um how much we get to know Marion how her perspective is prioritized for the first half of the movie um I was pleasantly surprised by I was on her side it surprised by. I was on her side. It felt like the movie was on her side. I felt like Lila was underplayed. And then that leads to. Hitchcock's legacy of misogyny. And why Lila's character was underplayed.

So for everything we've talked about today. I guess I'm going to go. One and a half. For some reason arbitrarily. And I'm going to give one to to janet lee and i'll give the other half to vera miles because she had to endure a lot and didn't get to do what she should have been able to do on this movie i mean i think i'm actually gonna like do a reasonably big boost and go with like two and a half but like i don't credit any of that particularly to Hitchcock I think it's sort of he inadvertently centered queer stories and women's stories like within this movie in a way that like for all that

it's problematic it is at least compelling and like particularly like within the job that I do and like I have to just like review like film for a week and stuff it's like so often where I'm just having to see women and anybody from marginalized gender like use this kind of like narrative tools to kind of help straight suspense character arcs that like this still feels like refreshing that i was just like i don't think psycho expects me to give a shit about what sam's up to and like that's still kind of for all of like the problems with it that feels nice to like actually be like Janet Leigh was given the space to make a character like we are kind of going into for all of its issue all of Norman Bates's relationship with Mike is the central thing in his life it's not all about him just trying to like trying to impress other dudes

like I don't give a crap in those scenes where like Sam and Norman are kind of like having some weird alpha beta male kind of like standoff. So like, yeah, I don't credit Hitchcock with like doing this on purpose, but like, maybe he made the, the people in the film that mattered most, like strangely, like subversive and progressive and exciting to me. And I, I don't know how much like Janet Leigh brought to that how much like you know the story that I don't know how much like Anthony Perkins bought of his like personal story but I feel now watching it seeing the way that like obviously an actress like Janet Leigh would have been objectified her whole life the way that like Anthony Perkins would have to have like suppressed so much of his identity I feel like I'm watching that on screen and like that to me is like genuinely

exciting and cool yeah oh that's such a cool way to put it yeah do you have anyone you want to give your nipples to trying to think I feel like I need to give them to Jamie Lee Curtis because like what a burden to carry I like and I love that like when a nepo baby is just like so open with just like hey it got down to me like three other people for halloween and they were like we'll make a couple of headlines if it's like the star of psycho's daughter and just fully open about it like i mean i love jamie lee curses i do too i i'm like that's i guess the least you could ask of someone in that position is just to be honest about it and it seems someone in that position is just to be honest about it. And it seems like she is like uniquely able to be honest about it.

Because most people are like, I don't know, I guess I just did my best and worked harder. You're just like, okay. But, you know, Jack Quaid is like, seems to be like the Gen Z version of Jamie Lee Curtis because he's out on those picket lines. I saw some pictures of him today. So it's like, yeah, some of them are good. Oh, is he Dennis Quaid's son? Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid.

Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, yeah. I never remember they have a kid together. I think they have multiple. Damn. Well, Lila, thank you so much for joining us. Do you want to talk at all about the Latif test? Well, Lila, thank you so much for joining us. Do you want to talk at all about the Latif test? I feel like it's like such a great thing that you did.

And I'd love to like give it credit if you'd like to. Yeah. I mean, it's like the Bechdel test was my path into like this being my job, essentially. Like I was working in a completely different field. I had a catering and events company and then like one night I was um my parents were stoned um and like I just was like texting my sister and I was just like oh there should be like a Bechdel test for race and this was like 2016 I want to say and I promise this wasn't really a thing before I coined it, but my sister is very much like a movie nerd as well. She's a film director and we were just texting about how like, well,

what would a Bechdel test for race be? And it's like, you know, similar beats of like, you've got to have two characters that aren't white. They got to talk to each other about something aside from what's going on with a white character uh one of them is definitely not magic um it's just like silly stuff and it like really like took off and it was one of those very strange things where like that's the first thing I ever wrote and I remember like meeting with this editor and he was you know for the Guardian which is like a big paper in the UK and him being just like, we're putting it on the cover.

And I had this like completely false belief about like what being a journalist is. It's just like, wait a second, you have an idea and they're like 3000 words. You got two months, see you in a bit, kid. But yeah, like that was my intro to it all. And it was just also, I mean, from my perspective, like such a kind of interesting

delve into white feminism in like a weird way because I had a huge number of white female journalists within like the next like couple of weeks just like take my work and like fully rip it off and I didn't really understand what was going on at the time. And in retrospect, it's like really messed up. I had like, actually like the editor of the paper that had published my work, write a retort to me saying that like, creativity is being wiped out as we demand diversity. I mean, like, it's, it really is like 2016 was like the wild west of intersectional feminism. For sure. And yeah, in a way I kind of wish I knew what I knew now because I would have been able to stand up myself a bit better.

But like, yeah, the sort of Bechdel test was kind of like my, my intro, but also like a bit of a curse of um like I've always been interested in like the way that we like framed these things in the way that we sort of address representation but it bit me on the ass like I I had every kind of um of retort coming back to it um and sometimes I do think now that like as much as like that was kind of just like something that I tried out and like now this is like my full-time job which is awesome it's a tricky one because I think some of those retorts some of that ripping off wouldn't happen now but maybe it would I don't know like have things gotten that much better since 1960s psycho not a ton it's so absurdly frustrating to me that it's like you're first of all that you were ripped off is fucking

ridiculous i'm so sorry yeah check out the dates for the latif test and then two weeks later the New York Times were renaming it the DuVernay test. Okay, okay. Like, that's horseshit. And then on top of that, I think that there is, like, a disingenuous way of framing tests like the Lateef test, like the Bechdel test, as a demand when it's just a way to have a discussion. And, like, I think even today, and by people that I'm generally like-minded with, I get frustrated when it's a framework

to set a baseline and discuss moving forward. It's not like you're trying to, I don't know, I feel like it's presented very disingenuously very often as a way to not have an intersectional discussion it's why I don't even pay attention if a movie passes the Bechdel test or not for this podcast because it's so little of what we actually talk about and so it's such again it's it's a jumping off point And we have left that jumping off point years ago, at least for the sake of this podcast.

Like we are so far beyond that. And I understand how it still can be a useful tool. But like in the context of this podcast, I'm just like, yeah, but what about the other like 100 minutes we spend talking about everything else about the movie? So, yeah, I mean, patterns are interesting. I mean, they just are like and like whether it's kind of even looking at something like Psycho, would we be so worried about the transgender non-performing representation in Psycho if it was not part of like something larger and more insidious, it would just be like a quirk of the movie. But like everything has to be contextualized.

And, you know, it's stuff out there. Yes. Where else can people check out your writing, follow you on social media etc so i'm at leila underscore latif on twitter before at least before elon musk formerly known as after the ground um yeah i've got i host truth in movies which is a podcast where we review like the week's latest releases and yeah i'm a contributing editor and columnist for total film regular white lies sight and sound about to be the indie wire representative on the ground for

the venice film festival which should be fun oh my god no celebrities or actors gonna come but like i'm hoping that they like put that budget into giving us free food that'd be nice yeah i'm so excited to read your cover and thank you so much for coming on the show come back anytime thank you so much for making this show i freaking love this show thank you we love making it thanks for being a part of it and yeah come back anytime bring back anything i'm just trying to think like what could be like a more hardcore thing than this? Undiscussable movies. Yeah. I still feel like we've only just scratched the surface.

Like Ace Ventura. I'm like, what are we going to do? Yipes. Let's not do that. Let's not. But Hey, you can follow us at Bechtelcast. You can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast, where you get two bonus

episodes every month, plus access to the back catalog. And it's all for $5 a month. Yes. You can also get our merch over at tpublic.com slash The Bechtel Cast. And with that, let's get pulled out of that scary bog at the end of the

movie. Oh, yeah. Never. Bye! Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16thth 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.

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For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church. Voila! You got straight away. He tried to save everybody. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.