The Bechdel Cast - The Descent with D'arby Rose

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Jamie and Caitlin and special guest D'arby Rose descend into an uncharted cave to examine The Descent. Check out these articles about the representation of disability in film: "What's so Scary About Disability" by Laura Elliott: https://medium.com/the-establishment/whats-so-scary-about-disability-98b05a5c2dab, "Don't Look to the Movies to Learn About Disability" by Kristen Lopez: https://psmag.com/news/dont-look-to-the-movies-to-learn-about-disability (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast. Follow @darbleezy on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP.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. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project.

All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister? Or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller

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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. Hey, hey Jamie. Hey Caitlin. Do you want to accompany me in this cave and explore it together wait wait i just need to triple check something okay has anyone ever been in this cave um probably not but who can say okay that's fine i have a question i have a second question follow up okay sure um is this cave just like some really long vagina metaphor

if so i mean yes yeah i mean aren't all caves do it all right here we go we are now descending into the cave oh effortless incredible beautiful welcome to the bechdel cast uh my name is Caitlin Durante my name is Jamie Loftus and we're just gonna we're just gonna you know rope on down I'm like I I'm gonna make it very immediately clear that I've never been spelunking uh let's rope on down into the vagina metaphor uh that is one of the scariest movies that I've ever seen I think yeah uh-huh yes this and this is our show the Bechdel cast where we examine film through an intersectional feminist lens we use the Bechdel test as a jumping off point for discussion that being a media metric invented by queer cartoonist

Alison Bechdel sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test. My mouth just went another place. The Bechdel-Wallace test. Yes. And that requires our rendition of the test that two people of a marginalized gender speak to each other about something other than a man for at least two lines of dialogue. Shouldn't be that hard. It really shouldn't be that hard. But some people really, I mean, I don't know if Christopher Nolan has really gotten there yet. So, you know, it's like we're always pushing for growth.

He simply has never seen two women talk to each other. Our thoughts are always with Christopher Nolan and his quest to get two female characters to speak to each other about not Leonardo DiCaprio,rio but you know someday well today's movie should fare a little bit better but not to spoil anything spoil away because today we were talking about the descent and we have a guest with us who we are very excited about. She is a filmmaker, an artist, and a consultant. It's Darby Rose. Hi. Hello.

Welcome. I'm descending with you. Yes, please descend with us into the vagina metaphor. Which character is it that descends really quickly? And you're like, oh, no. But then she's like, I descend all the time. That would be Holly. Hollylly yes and then i mean yeah holly she should maybe descend a little slower as we learn anyways this movie is so

scary thank you for coming on i'm so stoked and thank you for bringing us this movie oh yeah i love this movie i saw it years ago on the interwebs okay and then again at cinefamily and the director actually came oh and did like a q a yeah it was really rad um and you know he said a lot of the stuff that you can read on imdb trivia which is fairly fascinating but i loved it and watching it again i was like this movie's still badass and it scared the shit out of me yeah it's like i'm still scared it's like broad daylight i just got so scared yeah by their own terrors in their own lives and then the tears below ground that they embark with i right that they descend upon That they descend upon. Yeah, they descend upon. Yeah.

Jamie, what's your history with the movie? I had really no history with this movie at all. I knew that it was a horror movie every I feel like I got the 2005 theatrical experience that I was that I would have because it's so I mean like our discussion aside like it it's so scary it is so well paced like there were so many times that I was surprised and then I had to go seek out the UK ending I watched a cut of it that had the US ending oh sure and I'm like I I still don't know which ending I prefer I think I know what ending I prefer but I don't but I'm but I don't know there it was really good it was really good and

really scary and I was I don't know yeah I was very happy I went in kind of not knowing anything about it what about you Caitlin I saw this movie in theaters in 2005. Depending on what month it came out, I was either a freshman or sophomore in college. And I went with my best friend, JT, friend of the show, Twilight. Twilight episode. And we saw it together

because we had a habit of seeing horror movies, especially together in theaters, and then both being so scared about whatever we watched we would then have to like just stayed over at each other's apartments for like a week afterward just to take comfort in knowing that someone else was there to protect us um so that was very much the case for the descent i thought it was one of the most effective horror movies i had ever seen yeah um because a lot of horror movies it's like they're in a haunted house and it's like okay then leave the haunted house or like the reason that they can't leave will be so

like plot devicey or ridiculous but this one it's like they had to keep going forward they yeah they're trapped like there are no i mean well i don't want to say there are no story logic issues because like what about the cave dwellers but i mean for what it is like the world building that it accomplishes you're just like oh my god like oh it's just so scary I feel like it it does enough kind of early on too that I truly wasn't like I don't like there were different moments where I'm like I don't know if this is going to be a last girl situation like maybe more maybe no one will get out maybe multiple people will get out like I just have no and I certainly I was watching this movie by myself and I was just sort of like giving my boyfriend brief summaries every few minutes of what was happening um but I certainly didn't see a truck

full of spears crashing into them at the beginning that was yeah I was like just what kind of truck was that it was a truck full of spears and the spears were on top of the truck and that so it's like gory but then not gory for long stretches and then you don't like i wasn't sure i knew so little about it that i wasn't sure if there were going to be quote-unquote monsters at any point and you get like pretty far into the movie without that happening and so it was like a cool surprise when you're like, oh, there are little vagina monsters inside the vagina. And not in this movie do we call them STDs. They are cave dwellers.

Which now maybe I will refer to any lady problems as I've got a cave dweller dwelling and descending. I love that the movie does have like, it's kind of like two movies in one because it's not until according to IMDb trivia 51 minutes into the film does the the cave dwellers do they come out like the killing doesn't start happening until then and I feel like up until then it's already like so scary but it's not it's just good it's just good. It's just a good time. Every like moment that you get scared or jump feels so like, Oh yeah, they deserve to do that to me. I deserve that.

And it's, and it's also like, yeah, sad. And you're like getting to know these characters. And I think actually by the time they start dying, I was kind of like, that's okay.

I'm okay. I'm okay with this. Even though I've gotten attached to some of them, except for a bitch ass Juno, the time they start dying i was kind of like that's okay i'm okay i'm okay with this even though i've gotten attached to some of them except for bitch ass juno i'm okay with this i have no sympathy for that homewrecker oh well i oh i have a whole thing about her we'll get to it man i feel like i'm weirdly empathetic i mean there are some things where you're like juno like what but there is a loaded character. There's so much going on there.

So much. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. My only issue too, though, with them doing that to Juno was she was like the only woman of color. And I was like, why'd you gotta do that to her? Well, to me, and we'll talk about this, but just to give you a little sneak peek, the movie suggests that women are so petty that they will just kill each other. Because like,

I understand the anger of learning that your best, one of your best friends like was having an affair with your husband, but are you going to be so angry that you kill her or leave her to die? Yeah. That was, that was definitely like her change. And, you know,

and she becomes like a little cave dweller herself, like after Beth dies, you know, I was like trying to believe this change, but I was like, but you just didn't give me that like anger building up. You gave me a lot of anxiety and hallucinations, but you didn't give me this like anger that burst or she just like

snapped you know yeah or maybe they did but i didn't believe it i kind of was i i don't know why like one of the things i was sure of was that i felt so sure i don't know i just was like well i don't think that sarah is going to kill i just didn't think sarah was going to kill juno i thought they were going to both escape and then have like the most terrifying discussion of Juno's entire life. Like that was kind of what I was hoping for is that they would both live and then they would just have to like coexist with every bit of trauma in relation to each other.

Yeah. Yeah. Like it just every single conceivable imaginable trauma. I was kind of, yeah. I mean, honestly in a, in a movie that like I really, really, really enjoyed, that was like one of the choices where I feel like maybe if I saw it in theaters,

I would have been like, fuck, yeah. You know, like that's so cathartic. But like, yeah, being that she is the only woman of color and it kind of like makes Sarah. I don't know. I was like, I feel like Sarah is going to also just logistically. I'm like, Juno is the only person that has been spelunking. Like, obviously, she fucked this day up, about it and I'm so curious why they took that route. Yeah. Wait, what is it? So, spoiler alert, everyone,

for The Descent Part 2. It's the same cast, sort of, where basically it picks up right where the first movie leaves off, where, like, the authorities find Sarah having just escaped

from the cave, but she doesn't remember anything. I guess the trauma has made her unable to remember what just happened. So they're like, well, all of your friends are missing. We have to go back down into the cave to find them. And she's like, I guess. I don't know what happened down there. So she and like some, I don't know if they're park rangers.

I think there's like a few cops, but they all go into the cave. Because they don't believe the woman. Well, that and she doesn't remember, which I think we've talked about how like women having amnesia is like often a plot device in movies when women be having amnesia women's brains are so unreliable um so they go back down into the cave and they basically find all of the dead bodies of her friends they find the cave dwellers again but guess what juno has survived and she wait she like fought everyone off with her broken leg with her broke right with her stabbed leg and yeah so she she's survived and basically the rest of the cast dies except for sarah and juno they are like kind of the two final girls at the end and they sort of reconcile where they're like,

we have to protect each other. And they both, they kind of both like martyr themselves for each other. So the second movie kind of, it ends, it ends in a way that I like better than how this first movie. That sounds like how I wanted the first movie to end was like that they would somehow right

be what i was hoping yeah i mean i'm like maybe this is shooting too high for a movie a man wrote in 2005 right but i i was hoping that they would have some sort of like intense cave discussion they're in the vagina and they're just like wait a second like you, you know, it's fair. I feel like sometimes in these situations, it's like maybe her husband was like an total asshole who like misled both of them and all this stuff. And they're like, OK, well, good thing he got stabbed. Let's get out of here or whatever, whatever, that they have some some sort of like they don't have to like each other but some some kind of thing that doesn't involve just murdering each other but i'm glad that that man that's so innocent horror sequels never correct things that's great yeah yeah yeah did you guys read the imdb trivia because you keep calling it the vagina and one of the trivia pieces was that so

all the caves were obviously not real. They built like 21 different caves and that they called that tight, narrow one, a vagina. So they would always be like, all right, we're going in. Yeah.

So I thought that's what you guys were referring to. I thought everyone read the trivia like me. Wait, that's so funny. No. Yeah. Anytime you drop a female cast into a large cavernous space and there's the movies written by a man i'm like well we know what this is about like yeah i guess he

so he did dog soldiers which i still haven't seen and then they asked him to do this and he was like uh i don't really want to get like known as a like a a horror director. And then something changed and he was like, all right, screw it. Let's do it. But you know, I want to do with an all feel male cast and at CineFamily, he put it better than when,

how it's put on IMDB. He was just like, you know, with women, they are more likely to talk about their feelings about why they're in the situation versus like the men I write don't talk about feelings. I was like, okay, thank, thank you. But at Cine talk about feelings i was like okay thank thank you

but at cinefamily he was like he's like well women have more dynamic and i was like yeah okay i like that he's like i think we need to see more movies with like an all cast of women and he's like so i asked all my female friends i'm like you know what's so funny is what you should have done you should have given the movie to a woman to direct and write. It's cute that you wanted to learn to be a woman, Joss Whedon, but you could just give the project to a woman. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then he did it. And then I guess they like made them all like have different accents

because he had like a primarily UK film. Actually, I get the ending of this movie often confused with the ruins. Oh, I haven't seen that. I don't even remember. She like gets stuck in a pyramid or something it's like a bunch of white people go to like a brown country and they get stuck in a pyramid but then the pyramid like creates some virus or disease and if you leave and then like the the natives they think are like don't leave you're cursed but then eventually she gets away in the ending but is infected so i always get the ending of the descent in this mix up two entirely different movies extremely different but i think the early 2000s horror films where it gave you that hopeless

ending was like kind of a thing yeah for sure except for the american ending i like i like a hopeless ending i do too yeah i love a hopeless ending i don't care about life let's do it i'm like you know like realistically there's rarely a last girl in life you know yeah i kind of when i went back and watched the uk ending to this i mean we'll talk about but like i i mean obviously it's more bleak but but I'm like, this makes more sense. This makes more sense. Yeah. And more likely that that would have happened that way, probably. Yeah, they were all fucked.

Yeah. Well, should I recap the movie and then we can really dive in? We can really descend into the discussion? Let's do it. Okay. to the discussion let's do it okay so we open on a group of three kind of like adrenaline junkie women uh they are sarah beth and juno who we see like whitewater rafting sarah has a husband and her young daughter and they are brutally killed in a car accident on the drive home. I can't emphasize it enough. A truck with spears on top of it and the spears are loose.

Yeah. No. They were like, I think they're just like narrow pipes, which might be foreshadowing the narrow pipiness of it all. Maybe. Wow. I really did appreciate. I kind of like when like a horror movie cuts to the chase of like no this is

gonna be a gory one because the second you see that like whatever it is go through her husband's head right after she's like babe you're distant because he's cheating on her and then he's like um and then it's just instant karma pipe through the head

yeah yes R.I.P so sarah is obviously devastated and then we cut to one year later she's still dealing with the grief but she decides to go cave diving in appalachia with her friends beth and juno as well as some other friends becca becca's sister sam who is a med school student and holly who is the one who's like kind of the most reckless and thrill-seeking of the group she's the parkour one of the group right she descends quickly oh that was good and then they head for borum cave or what they think is borum cave they arrive at the mouth of the cave and begin their descent right away when they're inside some some things happen there's like a bloody handprint

a bunch of bats fly around and startle them there was a dead deer right near the mouth of the cave and we're like hmm i wonder if anything bad is gonna happen they like start poking at it like a dead body like in stand by me or something it's like you guys want to see a dead body they start poking they're like come on we gotta go we have to have a descent okay so they go further into the cave they go down this narrow tunnel, which I guess was the vagina. Yeah. Is what they called it on set. I mean, yeah. I mean. There's a pool full of blood at the center of it.

I mean, it's very, it's a very cis-normative situation they're descending into. So they don't know where they're going. It's very dark and scary. And then Sarah gets stuck in one of these very narrow tunnels. She starts panicking. The tunnel starts to collapse. Oh, that shit was scary. Oh, so scary.

I actually had to walk out of the room at one point. I was like, I can't even walk. That was the scariest part for me. Same, the claustrophobia. Yeah, yeah. I definitely have claustrophobia. And that was my worst nightmare i was like i'd rather deal with the cave dwellers and get yeah yeah same

once you get to the cave dwellers you're like okay this is like this is imagination but that like moment of horror at the beginning because at the beginning of this movie i was like oh i've kind of always wanted to do that and then immediately you're like no i i've had a change of heart yeah yeah so beth helps her get out but one of the bags of ropes gets lost in the rubble and then that way out is now blocked so they send it with the last person though right questions why yeah that is a good question why do we ever find out This is maybe a plot hole, but why doesn't Juno take the book? Like, is it just because she's like, we're so bad? But it's like if she knew.

The book that she has is for Boram Cave, but they don't go into Boram Cave. So that's why she doesn't bring the book. Oh, she's like, why bother? That makes more sense. That's right. She's like, we don't need this shit because we ain't even going not even there but i'm gonna rush everyone because we gotta get to the vagina now there's there's also there's a a female orgasm joke in there it's how do you give a lemon an orgasm you touch it's citrus you touch it's citrus which is supposed to sound like clitoris

it's not an it's not a good punch line i'm like maybe that works better with a scottish accent i'm not sure yeah okay so that one way out is blocked and they're like no big deal there are two other ways out of borum cave right and that's when we learn juno didn't bring them to Boram Cave. She brought them to a different uncharted cave that no one has ever been inside of before, or so they think. Shady. But this means that they have no idea how to navigate it, and no one knows they're down there. So if they do turn up missing, the rescue team will search the wrong place um so then sarah thinks she sees something or someone oh lurking in the distance maybe it's a

a yeast infection that's affecting this i know i was i was just like whoa with the uti lurking in the distance like yeah as utis do they make that sound too yeah yours don't very echoey those utis yeah yeah yeah um so they move onward to find a path out of the cave and they come upon this deep ravine that they have to get across and as they're doing that they notice a hook that's already embedded in the roof of the cave and they realize someone's been down there before but it's equipment that's like several decades old so they're like well if people have been down here before why is this cave still uncharted and they're like they haven't touched this equipment in a hundred years yeah that's my also horrible accent but bear with

it incredible but then they come upon some cave paintings that show that there's another entrance to the cave but then holly who loves scrambling ahead of everyone falls into a hole and breaks her leg and while the rest of the group is dealing with her injury sarah hears something she breaks away from the group and sees what appears to be a man or a kind of humanoid figure she tells everyone she tells juno and juno gaslights the shit out of her yes she does we're like homewrecker of all people to be gaslighting sarah at this time that's what i says are you shady so no one believes her but then they do because they all get attacked by what turns out to be

cave dwelling cannibalistic humanoid creatures wikipedia calls them crawlers it kind of looks like i mean i feel like it looks like a variation on so many horror movie characters that at least i'll give them credit for not making the entire head of a giant mouth which is usually what happens happens but it is still just like a a fleshy mystery i like that they actually built it to kind of make sense i'm saying this because i also just watched a quiet place for the first time and you're just like oh vagina mouth got it yeah but this one i mean i like that they at least like took the time to be like oh it makes sense that this creature would evolve the way it did like it is kind of like a water bat thing like it makes sense enough yeah it's really scary to look at i like the mother and and child pair yeah that come for sarah sorry i'm jumping ahead no no no

but i mean there's a whole they made variety in this yeah i i it's very baffling to me that like the female cave dweller has long hair she has long curly hair but the male ones are bald and it's like that's not how that works we also had some cool like body tats going on like i saw some like chest tattoos happening it was like a chest piece oh i didn't notice that all right that or it was a clothing piece or her skin was very mutilated i thought she has she seems to have like breasts yeah she's got like she did cave dweller titties yeah it was kind of i mean i thought that was interesting because i felt like in that it's like a conversation that i feel like we usually have during animated movies where it's like a I don't know like kind of needless gender coding where

you're like why are you giving this like creature a hairstyle like what are you doing for what because I'm just thinking about her like what what were the decisions like someone looked at her they put their hand on their chin, step back and be like, yeah, that looks, I think this is it, you guys. I think we've got it. We've got the female cave dweller, just the one, and her little baby that she protects. Yeah.

Will women be raising children without the assistance of the monster father? I'm also just like, i guess the filmmakers were like well most women above ground have long hair and most men have short hair so that's how these cave dwellers will also look they evolved like according to western fashion which is how evolution works but they did say that they were from like a hundred years ago which was a more traditional time that's true maybe i don't know i don't really want to oh see i aren't they supposed to be from like no i think it's that there were other like spelunkers who had tried to explore the cave, but they also got murdered by these cave dwellers who had been there for, I'm guessing, millennia.

Right. Yeah, I guess that's not how humans evolved in a hundred years under a cave. Yeah, that's right. Well, would you think it was like, I don't know, this was, I honestly wasn't thinking about it that hard, but would it have been like people who got stuck there in like cave dwelling times

and that's why there's cave paintings. And then it's like those people evolved into the cave dwellers? I don't know. That's, I think, where some of the story logic does get a bit muddied. Because, you know, in human migration, the humans, because they're in Appalachia, right? Humans didn't arrive to the Americas until about, you know, there's debate on exactly when it was. But that was somewhere around, I think, 20,000 years ago is a number that we now think it was. so it might just be that very you know early humans had gone into these caves decided to stay there evolved or maybe they got stuck there and they found a way to survive and then like yeah

generations of i don't know like they they evolved to this space of like it makes total sense that they're blind like all that i don't know yeah and, there's, I have a whole spiel on like how disability is treated in horror movies that we'll get into. But yeah, I don't know exactly how these cave dwellers came to be there. Yeah, I guess we're not meant to think too hard about it. Yeah, we just have to suspend our disbelief. But I just still want to know why they chose for the female to have long curly hair and like chest and arm tattoos. And she did not pass the Bechdel test for sure.

She didn't have a name. She protected a man. We never got time with her. I think she was the one underserved female of the film. Justice for... One of the only things we knew about her was that she was the one underserved female of the film justice one of the only things we knew about her was that she was a mother yes yes a loving heartfelt mother who would die for her own and i think we should take a moment of silence for this lost cave dweller i know because she gets stabbed in the eyeball oh i know so sar. So Sarah has spotted one of the cave dwellers.

No one believes her. Then they get attacked. Holly gets killed by one of the cave people. Juno manages to kill one of them. But then she also accidentally stabs Beth and leaves her there to die. Oops. Oopsies. I have a whole thing about that as well we'll get

there then juno becca and sam they're trying to find their way out sarah has gotten separated from the group and she finds beth who is not all the way dead yet and beth is like don't trust juno she did this to me also she was having an affair with your husband and she's like well shit in my opinion beth is really blowing her last moments on earth like getting into other people's business it's like do you have like a family that you would like a message passed on to or are you just gonna like gossip into an early grave like what's going on beth it's like well i have no choice but to just tell you this because fuck everything and bleeds to death imagine with your dying breath to be like by the way um did you know so bizarre right like this is like literally a matter of life and death. Like that's the thing.

Like this movie was like, women are so petty that in their dying breaths, they're going to gossip and they're going to murder each other. Wow. That's real. Which is interesting because they're all like, you know, thrill seekers and they all like knew what they were.

They knew there'd be like some danger doing this, whether it was charted or uncharted. Right. But the fact that like all of a sudden they all freak out and have no idea what to do like they all just freak out i'm like wait don't y'all like to do this you know like parkour over here is just like jumping around and like splits her bone out of her legs and i'm like what the what are you doing i feel like you should know you should be a little more conscious and then oh i love okay i don't even think you've gotten there i'll let you continue um okay so then sarah manages to kill a few of the cave dwellers then becca and sam get killed and so now it's only sarah and juno wait but sam's death was i feel bad because I laugh every time. Wait, which one was hers?

She's like, fucking, I'm going to, I'm going across. And she like starts hooking up. Oh, right. And then she puts the knife in her mouth when the cave dweller comes at her. And I was like, oh, she's going to use the knife to like stab it.

But then it slits her throat and then she just, just bleeds out. was like wait what was the point of any of that that's the other fun example of instant karma in this movie that i really thought was fun was like she's about to ditch all of her friends and then immediately it just it just blows up in her face in the worst possible way and And she wastes the rope. I'm like selfish. Right.

She done goofed. I think I might've misinterpreted that. I thought she was like trying to kind of martyr herself to like get, but I don't know. And that doesn't make any sense. No, she was bailing. She was leaving.

Wow. Just like freaked out. It was like, I'm over this. I've been over this. I think her vibe was like, I don't really know most of the people on this trip very well like i'm out of here well i think that was like parkour also sorry i can't help but call her parkour but i felt like she was also like fuck this dude just like skirted out we're like where

bro where are you going oh well she she thinks she sees daylight yeah yeah yeah right they're like it's phosphorus in the rocks or something fun fact good now i know that yeah now you know which we're gonna do after this um okay so uh becca and sam get killed and now it's only sarah and juno they join up and sarah is like hey juno i heard you were having an affair with my husband stab kind of stabs her in the leg and leaves her to be eaten by the cave people yeah which was i thought a more colder move than to just kill her she's like bitch i'm not gonna kill you i'm gonna just let you fight in fear for your life also like why would she leave her behind i mean i i understand why she was like draw the

attention to you so i can bounce but it really felt very like sarah's character was so hard to keep up with because i was like what's your what is your intention right going into this trip? Why? To be honest, too, there's like three blonde women in the cave. And it's so dark that sometimes I'm like, I don't know which blonde woman it is. I appreciate that they keep saying everybody's name very frequently because I'm just like, I don't know if this is a protagonist blonde woman or an ancillary blonde woman well like you mentioned darby the director was like yes i gave the women different accents so we could tell them apart and it's like that didn't work at all yeah it's like have some more women of color in the group that will help yeah exactly 2005 black people weren't around yet at that point. Right, yeah. It's like, what happened here?

I was like, really couldn't get like one black British person? Should I get Naomi? What's her face from 20 Days Later? Oh, yeah. And also in like, she's great in 20 Days Later. I gotta rewatch that. That's a good rewatch. I just rewatched.

Very quarantine friendly. Ooh. Yes. Love a quarantine. I mean, there's so few. Naomi Harris, right? Naomi Harris. Yes. Sweet angel. She stopped aging, I think, after 20 Days Later. oh yes love of corn i mean there's so few naomi harris right naomi harris yes sweet angel who she stopped aging i think after 28 days later she looks exactly the same yes oh she's in the new

james bond too fun oh that's right yeah um okay so then they're the then the ending in there uh jamie like you mentioned there are two different two versions of the ending there's the u.s cut in which sarah makes her escape she finds the other exit crawls on top of like a pile of bones to get up out of the cave i also feel like when she like emerges through like the tiny little hole that's going to be like how we all come out of quarantine yeah we're just like we're like popping out of the ground seeing daylight for the first time in a while we're all covered in blood and get like a mile away from our homes then burst into tears like yeah yeah anyway so she she gets out she makes her way to the car, drives away a little bit, pulls over, vomits.

And then she has a hallucination of Juno being in the car with her. And then we smash cut to black. Now that I think same thing happens in the UK version. But then there's a little bit more. We smash cut back to the cave. Back to life. Back to reality. Right. Where she had just hallucinated her escape she wakes up she

sees like another hallucination of her daughter and a birthday cake and then all the the cave dwellers descend upon they descent upon her uh and then she presumably dies i I read that the U.S. ending is the U.S. ending because they did a screening in the U.S. of the U.K., and they were like, oh, hell no. I remember reading, quote, it was uber, uberly hopeless. Uber hopeless, yes. Because American moviegoers, really, they like a happy ending. Yeah.

We're very fragile. Yeah. Yeah. I think I like the UK ending better. Same. I've watched the whole movie through with the American ending, then found out about the UK ending. I like it better.

I like my ending the best. And my ending is Sarah and Juno both live sarah doesn't try to kill her friend she's still mad at her but she's like come on we'll deal with this on the surface let's get out of here they apologize to the cave people for trespassing on their land they're like so sorry we shouldn't have We should have never come. Our bad. Get them like a year's supply of animals. Right. Open a small business.

I want them to open a small business. Yes. Yes, they do. They start like a diner in the middle of the woods. Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break and then we will come right back. And we're back. I want to give this movie props up top for, I mean, in terms of the metric we use, the Bechdel test, this movie really couldn't fare better. It's mostly women talking to women

about surviving the whole cave situation. I think the one, but the one male presence looming over this movie is her husband. Yes. And I think, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's not, certainly not the most egregious example of this and so I wasn't like extremely put off but Caitlin I feel like you already kind of

alluded to this was that whole element of like the jealousy and the suspicion and that kind of translating to basically leaving Juno for dead at the peak of the movie when we don't really know enough about the husband. And I feel like the movie just assumes that the husband was an awesome guy, which is like, well, we don't know that. We see him for two seconds and he's being distant. And he was cheating on her. So it's like I feel like it was like a slight writer telling on themselves situation where it's like, well, he was her husband. So I'm sure that he was it was just, you know, he was tricked. He was, you know, because women, you know, women be tricking men and whatever.

One of the oldest tropes in the book. But I did think it's interesting that I mean, I don't really necessarily want them to burn any time in this movie, like talking about this husband. I don't really care, but it does seem to kind of assume that like he was a great guy and therefore all of the blame for this infidelity is on Juno. Right. Yeah. I didn't really think about that.

He is kind of looming. He is kind of looming over the movie because we think of it. I mean, I really love how they told the moments. Like I felt like it was so to the point like we did not fuck around we didn't get little lovey-dovey moments but that moment where he walks over to juno when they get out the raft i was like oh you are so shady oh no and then beth catches on and i'm like beth is kind of shady too for not saying anything i feel like a good friend should say something personally you know like if someone if my one of my best friends in this trio knew you

were cheating or my husband was cheating on me with other friend yeah bitch you better tell me right you know you gotta tell each other things and you have to believe each other and none not it's an honor system yeah so i'm not like system juno is clearly like i mean it takes two to tango in this situation and the friend betrayal like that's the worst that's a horrible thing to do but i do but i but i i don't think that this movie really recognizes the two to tango situation unless sarah is so like galaxy braining her own grief which we know she isn't uh that she's like well i can't hold my husband accountable at this point so i'm shifting the blame i don't i don't know what's really going on yeah right and again like i understand sarah's anger and feelings of betrayal when she finds out that juno was having this affair sure but to the extent that you're going to let her die and be eaten alive by these like

cannibalistic cave dwellers well darby you were saying and like i i do kind of i'm kind of assuming that this is what neil marshall is going for is that like this experience has like hardened sarah so much that it's like you know you have wronged me and like this is a game of survival and like i don't need you to survive anymore and you've wronged me so you know fuck you i'm leaving to steal your car i guess yeah yeah but yeah i don't know i mean it's i'm kind of i was kind of glad that like that was i mean it is definitely a thing and it also i feel like is compounded by the fact that natalie mendoza is the only woman of color in this entire movie and she is like the villain of the story and she is like this temptress and she is, you know,

I mean, it's a lot of negative stereotypes like all foisted upon this one character. She's also the only American character, but American people are horrible and they'll probably steal your husband. But I mean, just also the fact that she was the one to like trick them and be like, we're

not going to the cave where we're like safe and it's actually been charted. We're discovering this new cave. And her, what she tells Sarah is that, you know, I was doing this for you. We were going to name the cave after you. Like this whole thing is so that you can like help get over your grief or i don't even know what her logic was i will say that line made me laugh a lot because i'm like imagine naming a cave sarah like what welcome to the sarah cave you're just like this name sucks let's let's pick another no but yeah yeah i i i was looking into and we sort of talked about it already, but like the casting process for this movie, because I was curious of like, well, was this a movie that was written for women specifically?

And it wasn't originally, which I think is kind of interesting and like harkens back to stuff we've talked about before where it was supposed to be a cast of men and women but then neil marshall's business partner said hey horror movies never have all women so marketing yeah and neil marshall was like okay and then and then it says and again this is we're about to like give him like a trophy for the bare minimum. But it does. It was said in a lot of press at the time that after deciding, OK, I'm going to cast, you know, all women in this movie. He talked to women he knew. Oh, my God.

I know. Like the thing that male screenwriters never, ever do. He's like, I asked for their advice and I asked, you know, what are things that they things that they say and talk about i'm like what we're like a creature you've never dealt with again also give the damn movie to a woman to direct and to write and to oversee like how many men were behind that camera making that movie that's i want to know yeah i'm seeing for the for the sequel the editor the male editor of the first movie directed the sequel, which is like, come on. What? Come on. Jeez. But but I do. I mean, it's like I mean, as far as I mean, Caitlin, you've talked about this before in terms of like your classes of like if you are a male writer that wants to write about women, the least you can do is do your homework like and talk to women and I don't know I the the interactions with women especially like the hanging out at the beginning and stuff like that like it felt pretty authentic I don't know I I was like yeah

light impressed I was like all right Neil Marshall talked to a woman about this just imagine yeah I like that they were all hung over too it was like yeah i like that they all got like wasted and smoked weed low-key and then all that and i was like there were moments i was like these are women but i i really didn't think deeper on yeah it's like they were gonna make them petty like sarah's character was just so much more of a tool than an actual person like she was just there to like help set shit up and make things happen because i'm like you know what if you are the type of person to just go and kill your friend that your husband cheated on you with you know what bitch maybe you deserve to be cheated on i said it i just don't like i mean, I like that you have a depiction of like these complicated female friendships where like one of them is doing something wrong and like going behind her friend's back and having this affair.

Like people are complex. People make horrible mistakes. People do really bad things but like again the movie like the suggestion that she's like well i know we were best friends up until five minutes ago but now i'm going to kill you um i just the thing for me like the first half or maybe even the first like 60 minutes of this movie i think are like really good for looking at it through our lens of like, women are shown being very capable. We see them having physical strength. We see them being athletic, like all this stuff they're doing.

I like that. It seems like there was care taken that like each woman in the, in the group has some like specialty that is not like Mary Sue that is like established in their character that is able to move the action forward where there's like someone who's a medical student and so she's able to do first aid when someone's like gets busted and like everyone has some knowledge that is able to assist in moving forward which is like good right and and you know women don't always get that for sure and like we see them like have to fight off the cave dwellers in a way that is not sexualized like one

of the like one of the major tropes of horror movies and especially like slasher movies is women being sexualized and then also being shamed for being sexual so you don't get any of that they have like outdoorsy skills we see sarah like she figures out that there's like i think what's kerosene and an old lantern yeah she uses that to light a torch which she has to do like a flint kind of like that was cool i was like oh that's where i would have died i guess like right exactly uh so we see that we see becca is the one who crosses like the ceiling of the ravine and like all that upper body strength that she needs to do that and you can tell how much she's struggling but it's still like you believe that she would be capable of that yeah then it's Beth who like

notices the cave painting and like interprets it because everyone else is just like this is nothing and she's like no wait like let's read this let's like look at these clues the first yeah the first chunk of the movie it's all this really cool stuff that you see these women do and i was like oh i and i and i didn't exactly remember how things ended so i was like really getting all geared up to be like this is like a feminist masterpiece like definitely there's not enough diversity it's five of the six women are white it's very heteronormative in spite of seeming to like suggest i thought something was being suggested between holly and juno but then it's kind of dropped i don't know yeah i did too there was a moment yeah and i was hoping that they would just make it explicit of

like oh these are two either gay or bisexual characters awesome but but then they kind of just drop it and they're like no no, no, no, no, no. And then Holly like even is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to have a lot of hetero babies. And you're just like, okay, Holly. What? She wants to parkour her way to babies.

So I think there's like some really cool subversions of the horror genre that we're seeing in this movie but then a man gets fridged a man yes a man yeah he and the only man we see or at least the only like human man right he gets killed almost instantly so it's it's a lot of like cool subversions but then like by act three yeah the script this writer was like oh wait i forgot that women are really petty i have to write this into the movie they're also in a huge vagina there i'm sorry i just like can't say it enough i like i just feel so just i don't know like i think this is a very inventive subversive horror movie but like men making horror movies they literally cannot help themselves like they can't help themselves there's

a huge vaginal metaphor in every single one down to the i mean the pool full of blood at the heart of the i mean it's just like it's like that's the uterus neil, we get it, honey. Like just call your mom. Like I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you. I also feel like usually when we see women who are hallucinating in films or like, you know, are seeing things that we, the audience, are also seeing with her. Yeah.

That usually it's men that are like, you're just crazy. You're making it up. Or it's like some older woman, mother character who's like, honey, you're just seeing things. But I think seeing everyone doing that with her was also kind of breaking that stereotype of like sometimes people just don't believe people like i think that i kind of like that we were seeing everyone well juno gaslighting her but even beth is like you're just seeing things it's okay but i was like it's, it's weird. They should believe her. I feel like they should also be more sympathetic

because she just lost her child and her husband, which in the griefing process, a year is like a second. Like that's really not a lot of time from like what your life was going to be the rest of it then turns into nothing. Which I was also like, they don't spend a lot of time on the grief.

I was like, yeah, that thing that happened. Right. You get like flashbacks of her having kind of like dreams or visions of like the accident and stuff. But we really don't know. We don't learn anything about her daughter or her husband before they die. So it's like, OK.

I thought that that I don't know. Like that was kind of in terms of how she is gaslighted by her friends. I also thought it was like they were dismissive of her because of her grief and also because they're like, well, you're just you're just being like on edge because a cave just collapsed on your head two seconds ago. And I'm like, well, that's a great reason to be on edge. But like, right. You know, there that was one that was another subversion. There's some I mean, we haven't gotten to the parts of this movie that I don't love so much. But that was a subversion that I thought was fairly effective of.

I don't know. I was thinking at the beginning of this movie where something deeply traumatic robs a woman of her family instantly. I went to Midsommar, a movie that I think couldn't handle that plot point any worse if it wanted to. Like I just fucking movie. The opening sequence of Midsommar is like some of the most irresponsible like treatment of mental illness I've ever seen in movies, period. But I think this movie toes the dealing with grief as plot. I think better than a lot of horror movies tend to. And it's like I'm not a huge horror aficionado there.

I'm sure there's other movies that deal with it well. But I feel like there is maybe a tendency and correct me if I'm wrong but a tendency to treat grief as like a hindrance where like I think that you know what Sarah's going through actually ends up kind of serving her in this situation it motivates her need to survive even though you know she's dealing with it it doesn't prevent her from handling the situation at hand even though her friends seem to think it is we find out almost immediately like no she is not you know like she's not being unreasonable what she's seeing is there she's telling the truth and it works against the friends to disbelieve her because they think that she is just like in

a bad place so I thought that that that plot point was kind of cool of like she's going through this very heavy, horrible thing, but it's not, you know, it doesn't make it impossible for her to survive. It actually kind of helps her survive. Yeah. Everyone else is kind of like, I don't know. We don't really know anyone else's backstory

except part of Juno's only because of the husband. Right. And other than that, like even Sarah's like trying to find out like what everyone else like has kind of back home. They like have very small talk. Like, so what man do you have back home?

Which I was like, are you just assuming everyone has a man back home? What if they have a couple of partners? What if they have a same sex partner? What if, what if, and also why is everyone identifying as this here? Like was like obviously no diversity but i'm sure neil marshall's like dive who what i don't know what that is 2005 i don't know anything yeah i don't

know anything ask me in 15 years and i'll say i've been doing it all wrong like everyone else but yeah i agree i think that it definitely is it's cool like if i were to put aside like my deeper thoughts that we've like discussed about you know how it's kind of weird that she kind of flipped you know at one point it's like wait so now you're now you're a total badass who's like you know covered in blood and you're kind of a cave woman who has no words anymore i'm like i know i guess if i was grieving and this was just where I was, it's like, all right, no time to fucking play anymore. Let's fucking do this. You know, get out of my way. Yeah. I can't make a whole lot of sense of it. I guess my main thing with

that whole scenario is I wish that when Sarah did reveal that she's like, I saw someone I thought I saw before and now I definitely saw it and i'm not making this up i'm not imagining it and they're all like nope the dark plays tricks on you this nothing you didn't see anything and i just i really wish like even if they were incredulous they should have still been like well what did you what did you see or what do you think you saw or what did it look like and like i just i wish that we had seen just them making more of an effort to believe her i mean that is that's almost like a story bump too because it's like at this point aren't they all aware that they are in completely uncharted territory like it's

it's kind of like counterproductive to assume that anything you would see is not there if it's like well what do you know no one's ever been here you know like but they also like no one knows how to deal with anxiety and i hate to bring that piece of shit movie back up again but midsommar was just like that like they you know her boyfriend had no idea how to deal with her anxiety disorder or she bipolar in the film but like in this it's like no one knows how to deal with it which I think spoke to something it's like as someone with anxiety like often people will just assume that I'm being dramatic or I'm being sensitive or I'm just seeing things so I felt like when they were like no no it's fine I'm like that's. So I felt like when they were like, no, no, it's fine. I'm like, that's really real.

I mean, the conversation has changed a lot now, just in time, regardless of that film really have, it could happen in real life. Like I think, you know, as a kid or even up until a few years ago,

people still will like, you know, just assume I'm yeah. Being dramatic or overreacting, but now there's so much more compassion i think in the world or at least in our world and and so i think that now if that movie is written i think there would be more like well wait tell us what's going on but i think it kind of it seemed very real that they were all just like no no you're just seeing things you know regardless that yeah like you said like

they were in uncharted territory so it's like i mean anything goes out here like fucking cave dwellers sasquatch anything you name it yeah which they do make a joke about earlier though like it's probably sasquatch and i'm like girl don't play because cut so like 60 minutes into this film you're gonna be like you're not gonna be laughing about that uh-huh i just yeah i mean like they at this point i think it's before this that they find the cave painting and they had found the old equipment so it's like well things aren't what they see you thought no one's been down here before and you were proven wrong so why don't you listen to your friend yeah why don't you open yourself up to this possibility right open yourself up like you've opened up this vagina of

a cave and just embark within when i was watching this i actually have like a game i play internally and movies with myself that sounds really dirty like i try to guess like the character zodiac sign and so i felt like what you know i was like oh she is a stubborn relentless taurus with a gemini moon because tauruses are historically stubborn as someone who dates a taurus oh i'm a taurus you're a taurus i am a taurus really yeah i gotta know more about your birth chart because you don't are you a stubborn person? I'm pretty stubborn. Really? Yeah.

For some things. Yeah. I can be pretty, I can be chill and I contain multitude. I wonder what your moon is. Yeah. What's your moon? I don't know what that means. Oh, we're going to have to look it up.

I'm going to find your birth chart. We'll do this after. Okay. But then with Sarah, I was trying to figure out what everyone's signs were and then also as i feel like it's the equivalent to like you know when people want to know my race for example it gets like them trying to like box me into like what they know about them so i try i'm very like um discriminating with zodiac signs so i'm like that bitch is for sure a scorpio she's got the loving edge you the loving edge, but same time she will cut you very fast.

But some of them were, you know, a couple of them were definitely Sagittarius. So I just was like, don't let them lead. You know, they want to be adventurous, but they're also going to be really indecisive and just be on their own. I think Sam was definitely a Sag. They want to be out there,

but she was just a scared little shit at the end of the day and was like indecisive and was keeping her feelings or was like letting her feelings overrun everything else without seeing like logic anyways that game can go very deep in my brain and then i'm like what movie am i watching right now i could listen to this for every movie that's ever come out. If we need a spinoff Bechdel cast, Zodiac, I don't even know. Just the full movie character, what's your placement? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back for more discussion. And we're back. So another thing kind of along the similar lines of what we were talking about in terms of kind of like women being pigeonholed as being petty, that ties into a horror movie convention of the horror movie kind of justifying why people die or get killed. Right. So like in a lot of slasher movies, it's like if you're a teenager who's sexually active, you die. The classics. The classics. I feel like a lot of time men having too much hubris or just who won't bring a map people who won't bring a map in general they get they get killed yeah right excessive pride recklessness that will get a man killed um i feel like oftentimes a woman being kind of oblivious or maybe even like too nurturing or too trusting or just a failure to exercise logic

overall will be what gets a woman killed and this rang true especially for beth beth's death scene where juno has just fought off two i think it's like two different cave dwellers she kills one of them by stabbing it several times which is really cool right and then someone sneaks up on her and it's beth but juno doesn't realize this until it's too late and she turns around and stabs beth in the throat to be fair isn't beth like an art student or something I mean she's like she's the one who knows what the cave paintings mean so I was assuming like oh so she's kind of like she's an artsy type she's not a survivalist but she's like she was whitewater rafting she she's true spelunking like all these women are like seem to be very competent at these like

extreme sports that they're doing so for me like Beth what like wouldn't she have just witnessed Juno killing these like cave dwellers and like wouldn't she approach with caution and like exercise some logic and not just sneak up on someone who would be very easily startled. I agree, but I just didn't interpret that as gendered. I mean, I don't think it was like a very informed or thoughtful decision, but it didn't, I don't know. I didn't read, I read that as like thoughtless, but not gendered. Especially because I think it would be one thing if many of the other characters were men and they died in a way that wasn't so, like, they're oblivious. I would have read that as more gendered. But I think it is a gendered trope in other horror movies with mixed casts.

So I was disappointed to see it pop up in this movie. I mean, I guess that to me, like, that kind of, I mean, that certainly serves to further villainize Juno. Even though, like, when I saw that, I'm like, oh, well, that certainly serves to further villainize Juno even though like when I saw that I'm like oh well that's like really unfortunate and of course she's going to lie about it because you don't want people to get mad at you and they're already mad at you yeah for bringing them into an unmarked cave uh but like and so I don't know I feel like that's that ultimately that decision like further villainized Juno so I don't know. I feel like that's that ultimately that decision, like further villainized Juno more.

I don't know. Maybe I just didn't care about Beth. And then when she was dying, she was just got, you know, gossiping to the grave. So yeah. She was hanging in there though. Cause a while past when she came up and she was like, I was like, Oh, you're still around.

Like how did you wow are you still alive literally drowning in your own blood for the last like 20 minutes yeah so this is impressive and that you can still speak enough to gossip with your friend yeah part of me has to admire it but that was a very bizarre choice yeah Yeah. I do agree though, Caitlin, you made a good point about how it's like, yeah, there was a lot of, um, and Darby words.

There was a lot of cool shit that happened with the characters up until the cave dwellers came out. And then the writer was like, Oh shit. Yeah. Women are, let's do all these things. And who knows?

Because I'm sure what, you know, as the writer listens to this episode, he's our biggest fan. They're going to feel very defensive. And no, I didn't think that think that but it's like but there's something to be said in that you know the same conversations happening about white supremacy and the covert and overt behaviors that we all harbor i as a black person harbor and that you know it's like we harbor a lot of sexism and i think the writer may be thinking like well this is you know women can

keep it cool until shit goes down and then they're gonna turn on each other they're gonna gossip to the bloody grave they're gonna stab each other in the leg with a pick but i think that like if the i hope that the writer hears that and that neil marshall hears that and it's like well why why is it that when women are saving and protecting themselves like that they actually just fully abandon all the rules right they were like rule number two don't leave each other yeah and then they all left each other there was no like you know juno couldn't be in leadership anymore for everyone which i thought made sense for her character because she was obviously like going through her own shit she's

like i can do this cave trip with sarah oh my god no i can't i am a horrible person but i just need to like make up for it but everyone else it was just uh it was just weird it was like all the character strengths were abandoned right as soon as the cave dwellers which i think obviously would happen no one's gonna do it perfectly but yeah i guess when i think about it now that was obviously when the movie shifted but the characters greatly shifted and the writer like abandoned yeah and it like it does imply that yeah like women at their like core or whatever like when you're down to that survivalist core that these are like inherent behaviors where which sucks and it's like i don't know i feel like yeah more often when you have like a majority

male cast it's like the hero jumps out when you're like brought to your you know revenant survivalist i haven't seen that movie but like whatever you get inside a bear and you live man because that's what you do is that what happens I don't know but more or less and it does seem like I don't know I would be surprised if Neil Marshall was like explicitly

thinking like you were saying Darby like well women are like this so I'm going to write that but it is just like another weird example of someone kind of telling on themselves right possibly unintentionally men men be telling on themselves man all the time they can't stop get me a hat that says men be telling on themselves the next big thing i wanted to touch on uh and i foreshadowed this a little yes i have a huge section on this as well is the demonization of disability in horror movies we've talked

to some extent in past episodes about how mental illness is demonized in horror movies a lot we've talked about how aging tends to be demonized especially as women age it's often included as like right and and the vivitch um an old woman will be a part of the horror imagery what we haven't talked about really yet is how disability is also demonized in horror movies yes um where because in in this movie the cave dwellers are blind this is a pretty i mean you see it in a few other horror movies the quiet place comes to mind and you know any any number of disabilities will be used and ascribed to the killer or the monster or whatever it is that is causing terror for the protagonist which just goes back to the i mean part of why so many horror movies seem so horrifically dated when you watch them back later is because the villain is very often just what is the example of the other that the writer and the filmmaker is threatened by

which is I think there's a lot of racially motivated villains that we've seen in horror movies over the years because that is what the white writers thinks is going to be scary to people that's where vagina mouth comes from that's like there's there and and yeah i think um mental illness and and disability in general kind of goes into that general like you know it's the writer assuming like well people aren't comfortable with this and i have no interest in normalizing it so let me basically weaponize people's own prejudices and affirm them through creating this monster. Yeah, I have a few quotes from a piece I found on Medium by Laura Elliott. It's entitled What's So Scary About Disability.

Laura discusses how there are recurring tropes in horror movies that basically say disability equals evil and disfigurement equals morally bankrupt and how a lot of these tropes in horror films are rooted in and date back to a lot of old literature, religious texts, folk tales, fairy tales, things like that. She says, quote, perhaps you might think that these stereotypes are no big deal. But the fact is that the horror genre is the only genre in which disabled people are regularly represented at all. In 2015, a report by the Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative found that of the top 100 movies that year, only 2.4% of disabled characters spoke or had names, despite the fact that one in five people around the world are disabled, unquote. So there's so little visibility and representation of people with disabilities

in movies. And it's so rare that you see any kind of respectful or responsible representation because disability is so often, again, ascribed to the villains in horror movies. And that's really the only visibility you get. and then another quote from this same article says quote it's worth remembering that while horror entertainment frequently depicts disabled people negatively there's essentially no other popular media to counteract these depictions while there are countless disabled and disfigured people portrayed as killers and villains we rarely ever get to be the heroes and frequent negative representation breeds ongoing stigma and prejudice end quote so yeah yeah i mean historically in film this has just been unequivocally true in film i mean this

movie came out 15 years ago movies like a quiet place came out two years ago I've been lightly encouraged in recent years of there being more representation of disabled people that are played by disabled actors as well and it isn't just I mean I think there's it's basically a trope of a very famous actor playing a disabled character in order to get an Oscar nomination like Like that's a pretty common trope. But I will say in A Quiet Place, and I literally just watched it for the first time last week. But the daughter in that movie is a deaf preteen played by a deaf actress, Millicent Simmons. And that character, I mean, is like one of the central characters. Her disability isn't played for evil or jokes.

And it ends up actually kind of being something that she is able to, you know, work to her and her family's advantage in the story. So I am other. And this is an example that is in. Let me be clear. Not a very good movie, but one that I have seen before. Did anyone watch Unfriended Dark Web? Yes.

I saw it in theaters. I did not ever see it. So I've seen them both. I really enjoy the Unfriended franchise. It is so silly. But in the second Unfriended franchise. It is so silly. But in the second Unfriended, and it is the worst Unfriended, twist, everyone's a hacker. But there is a lead character that is deaf.

She is a romantic interest. She has a whole arc. The part is played by a deaf actress, and her disability isn't leveraged against her. She is a character that exists in this story. And yeah, I mean, we don't need to get into it too much. Like she and her boyfriend are kind of like there's communication issues. But I thought it was dealt with pretty respectfully.

And so even in bad movies, you know, like there. But but I don't you know, I don't think The Descent really qualifies as a movie that is handling this well at all. And yeah, I think. Well, overall, I'd be interested to hear from our listeners with disabilities on how. Because I think this movie isn't the absolute worst offender of demonizing disability in the horror genre. And yeah, I'd be interested to hear our listeners' perspectives on that. Just kind of in this movie and then as a whole. Friend of the cast, Kristen Lopez, has done some really great writing on this as well. And we'll link some of her articles the best there's definitely not a lot of solid allyship from the other woman with her in this and i think

that's like i mean a big part of what we're seeing in like the blm movement is like how important allyship is because like disabled people in this specific conversation can continue to like advocate and fight for their rights but at the end of the day it's like how is everyone going to show up how are they going to like help make space how are they going to help learn and so on and I think that yeah this movie I think it's like a d and not an f in uh effort for allyship and I think Beth is the only reason why the grade went up in any sort um even if she does get you know chatty kathy at the end and wants to get gossipy

um i wanted to bring up this book that um actually alex jacobs got me once house of psychotic woman and autobiographical topography of female neurosis and horror and exploitation films and it's a really dense and a really interesting formatted book but i really like it because i've also thought more not so much on like the physical disability side of it but more of like the like mental disorder side of things just like as i explored my own anxiety and depression and mood swings through my 20s and seeing in movies I'm like my friends did that to me I would be so mad why are they treating and then they care you know the protagonist still stands with them at the end I'm like uh-uh bitch you should have my back when I'm having a panic attack yeah don't demonize me and like isolate me in this

but the book like dives into yeah different films um mostly horror films and you know like rosemary's baby is a great fucking example of a time where we totally isolate someone who's like experiencing all these like you know legitimate things within her female body but then also you know is being possessed at the same time with the demon baby right um but i think you know i think movies like that and like ginger snaps is a great example too of like talking about like teenage girls coming into their own and everyone's like oh you're just having your period i mean they become a werewolf but also you know having that and so i think that i like when movies do that like you were saying jamie with a quiet

place how that ends up working to the family's benefit um where it actually like works with the story but you know like midsummer you know i know that guy tries to fucking talk about mental health stuff but like god he sucks at it so bad he at and i oh god it's just it's for me it's like it's a lot of like what I've experienced you know I think what I I paid a lot of attention to good intention shitty impact a lot lately and that guy is the epitome of yeah good intention he wants to bring awareness to this but then like horrible fucking impact yeah so I think that when people want to write about disabilities I'm glad you brought that up i think people need to think about like a do you are you really the person to speak about this like is this your place are you really gonna you know not further villainize

this and further isolate this from the conversation of inclusivity and allyship and like be yeah are you just gonna like bring you know the awareness to it that it needs rather than just using it as like a tool because it's exhausting watching it as a tool I hate being seeing people like who are like me or people who have you know physical disabilities and they're just being villainized for that so yeah I don't think we see in nearly enough of you and just intersectionality in general like we'll see you know white people and a disability we'll see you know black people in poverty and then we'll like start to see more and more layers but i feel like the more layered intersectional films come more with like the indie

films they get the lower budgets and like the lower marketing and distribution ceilings so i'm like i would be so curious to see these films you know as we like you know layer up these identities and these oppressions and privileges but like with the bigger budgets and i think people you know can explore that a lot more with the bigger budgets that they get absolutely this guy kind of had an opportunity and he uh he caved in and that and that also will come with allowing black indigenous people of color to make their own movies people with disabilities to make movies about themselves uh queer people to make movies about themselves yeah oh my god please And since we're talking about horror

this month, I mean, it's a genre that is so open to different characters and so it's kind of, I mean, it's frustrating to look back, and this is 15 years ago, but it's frustrating to see a genre that's uniquely

qualified use its power for bad, of by by demonizing people instead of you know representing them and lifting them up and and yeah yeah you get a lot of freedom with horror movies i mean i feel like the marketing for it i i feel like a lot of people make horror movies unless it's gonna be like a quiet place or something like generally they're like we know we're gonna like stay within this pool of money and demographic and audience and yada yada yeah i love horror movies because you get to explore these types of topics i think for me midsummer and hereditary which i've so uh you, you know, words. Um, I'm just like,

they were so disappointing at the end of the day, because I'm like, you had such a fucking opportunity. You had such an opportunity and you blew it. And people won't stop congratulating you regardless. Yeah. Like, yeah.

Tony Collette was fantastic, but Tony Collette's always fantastic. She's an angel. Like, what do you expect? I don't expect anything less from her. Yeah. I hate Ari Aster and I don't like his movies.

And, but people just can't stop requesting them for us to do. They will be fun to cover when the day comes, but like, I, but I'm not in a rush. I do. I'm maybe I'm inventing this I'm pretty sure that this is something that he said where he's like I'm not going to direct a movie for a while I'm just going to fund other people's projects and it's like yes do that um and don't and you I better not see you funding the project of cis hat white guys thank you oh my god also okay the irony of most horror movies being made by and being about cis hat white people and marginalized people being the people who actually

experience most of the horrors in their lives and and like horror movies are usually allegorical right the monster is never really a monster the monster is an allegory for something but i feel like even so like there aren't that many allegorical films about like racism or queer phobia or classism or anything like that. At least not ones that are in the main zeitgeist, in the whatever, what is considered to be the horror canon. Because I'm sure, I mean, we know that these movies exist

and that they're out there. It's just they're not brought to the forefront the way that they should be. Yeah, I'm in a weekly quarantine movie club with a friend and then he, a movie club with some, with a friend. And then he has a bunch of other friends. And so we meet every Sunday at five on zoom.

We watch a movie every week. And I really enjoyed it because it's like the first, you know, Caitlin, I met you in a very white world and, and it felt like talking movies as much as I love those sweet gems. It was always like, I felt like I was always coming with this. Yeah.

Kind of intersectional angle that, you know, if you or Catherine weren't there for the night, then I was like, dude, I'm like out here, like drowning, just trying to talk about, I'm just trying to talk about the movie. Right. It's like, I think all women can relate to like, people want to ask us like, how is it being a female comic? How is it being a female writer? And it's like, I just want to talk about being a writer. I just want to talk us like how is it being a female comic how is it being a female writer and it's like i just want to talk about being a writer i just want to talk about being a filmmaker

and so i feel like when i talk about movies there's so much more of the layer of like having to talk through like the issues of it or like the lack of intersectionality in it um but in this group we're talking about movies yada yada and we i feel bad because i actually missed it so i haven't watched yet but we watched tales from the hood which i have yet to see yeah i haven't seen it either yeah and we're trying to watch like sometimes we dive deep into like yeah the cis white hat like movies whatever but they were also trying to you know we watched like the watermelon woman which was like the first out black lesbian made film. Yeah. But yeah, we're like trying to explore more movies like that. And I, you know, it goes back to like how I see it as though, you know,

like Jamie were just saying, you know, it's like, yeah, how many movies don't really get out there? And it's like, well, it's like anyone who's marginalized, like we might not get the meeting, but if we get the meeting, how much do we get to pitch in the meeting once we're in the room once we like get the movie green lit like how soon do we get to do the movie once we get the movie like you know we're kicking into production is it going to happen on our timeline are we going to get the budget we want are we going to get to hire the people we want how much to produce yada yada yada the ceiling is always there and And I think that, you know, A Quiet Place, my biggest issue with it is like, why?

Why this movie? Now, I love John Krasinski, fine, Emily Blunt, whatever. But like, why did we need this movie? And I think Get Out, to me, I thought Get Out and Us were going to be these like perfect like gateway to like black films. And then I've heard from friends who, you know, are like perfect like gateway to like black films and then i've heard from friends who you know are like pitching movies out they're like oh we already have get out you know they're like they're like we already have like the black horrors they think they

filled and i'm like are you serious like what are all of the movies that we call classics godfather is goodfellas casino like it's all the same shit over and over and we're still letting scorsese you know so i'm like why why do we get the ceiling why do black filmmakers get the ceiling you know i could go deep that could be a whole other episode on its own but i think that that is something to be said we think that there's not as many out there it's like you know people are like there's no female filmmakers we're like excuse you hello no that's i that's like the most frustrating fucking thing in the world to hear that just it's like unfortunately so unsurprising of how it's just assumed that people want to see the same cis het male white stories told over and

over and over and that's why they're made over and over and over and why the bar is so low this is um i was caitlin i feel like maybe i was talking about this with you not too long ago but there is a moment that emily yoshida friend of the cast pulled out of other friend of the cast karina longworth's um we have so many friends we have i mean listen our our show has been on for 500 years um but it's a while it's true uh for for as long as the cave people have been developing their wall climbing abilities in any case um emily pointed out this part of karina's most recent podcast season on you must Remember This, where she mentions that Wes Anderson, when he was developing Bottle Rocket, his first movie, the way he got that movie produced was that he wrote a nonsensical 60 page treatment, didn't even

format it like a script, didn't know how to format it like a script. And then instead of someone saying, this is not a script go learn how to do this they said we love it you seem to have a lot of potential we're gonna buy it we're gonna teach you how to write a script and then they like taught him on the ground because that is i mean privilege firing on so many levels of like yeah i don't know and and just how infuriating that example is and to so many filmmakers that have no i mean truly no choice but to come knowing their shit and are still turned away when wes anderson is like what is what is the script how do i do that what is a movie and

they're like you're hired like it's just such bullshit i mean going back to kind of the horror conversation, like so many horror movies are about like zombies and vampires and werewolves and any number of other creatures that are not real. to scare them whereas again marginalized people live every day in fear because they're so often the victims of discrimination and oppression and violence damn or worse they're they're taking marginalized oppressed people and turning them into monsters into the villains yeah so like yeah yeah does anyone have any other thoughts about the dissent specifically or just kind of talking about the dissent yeah um i think it needed some more black people yeah yeah and by some more yeah i think they could use some more, any? I think they could have used some more black people. That's my, real of my final thought on the dissent. Because, you know, there are some great black actors, you know, one or two out there that, you know,

might have been around at the time. In 2005, though? I don't think so. They didn't come around until 2020, apparently. Yeah, I think that was like something that was sitting with me but also honestly i'm fucking used to it i'm so used to like some of some of my favorite movies are not black led and created films but then also it's like you know the ways in which i allow that to just be okay. And I've tried to boycott like watching white movies. It's fucking hard, dude. It's like, it's super hard, because our ceiling

is just so, so low. And even if there was a black actor on that, they probably would be coming out with a story now about how, you know, other they felt and there was it was an entire white male cast you know and this and that which i'm really curious how many women were involved and that were not in the hair makeup or producing department because that's typically where we are on set or often where we're hired the most and people want us you're organized so you're so together like let me be dirty and be a grip come on now yeah you know but i want to be a best boy yeah yeah i didn't see any i didn't see any women in at least high up behind the scenes roles in this movie yeah yeah i definitely want to watch it with the commentary because when i was reading

all the trivia it was like five minutes into the commentary and then they would say certain things. So I'm really curious about, I want to hear their tone because I feel like you can always, like I can start to, you know, Sherlock Holmes my way through tones and commentary or like, wow, they really hated the process. Like Naomi Watts talking about Mulholland Drive.

Ooh, yeah drive and her audition is just so sleazy and disgusting. Like David Lynch, like told her she came in and then she had no makeup on cause she wanted to seem natural. I think she was new to LA, very similar to the character she ends up portraying. And he said, come back with makeup. And so she's like, and when she talks about it, she sounds sort of brainwashed. Like, so, you know, I left and I put on makeup and I came back and he was like, oh, this is better now, you know? And I was like, yeah. And I was like, man, but it's those things that we allowed to not be, you know, the canceling factor or something that we think is not worthy of bringing up about someone and so we i mean we

all just have to unlearn the like really harmful things that we learned living in this like patriarchal structure right yeah it's like i'm so curious if if the dissent had a bigger turnout and was more like i think it's like a like i think it's got a good following but i think if i had a more mainstream following that it seemed like they were kind of hoping for i'm curious if some of those actresses would be coming out now and saying like you know we could have done more we should have made it more diverse because that's what i'm watching a lot of like high supposedly high up like white women do they're like i should have done more i'm like yeah bitch you should have done more why were you just sitting there oh because your privilege wasn't being tested where were you 15 years ago yeah exactly so i think it's like you know i think

low-key this movie did speak to like the white supremacy that like definitely boils within that and i'm like you know obviously this was a good movie to take a chance with an all-female cast you could have thrown a sister in there or something so absolutely i don't know i mean and it was a commercial success it had like a 3.5 british pound yeah budget uh and made yeah i don't know but um but and then in u.s dollars it made somewhere around i think 55 to 60 million at the box office so it yeah it was a box office success and honestly this is one of our most requested horror films to cover on the podcast yeah we've been getting this request for a long time you're welcome everybody you're happy it's a solid film man for what it was when it was yes you know i think if they made that movie now like even the movies i see coming out now i'm like are you

fucking serious what year is this why is this movie happening right now yeah but i think for 2005 for them to do a bunch of women diving into caves with the budget that it was like i think what like there's not many other films like that like i think you know like 28 days later oh my god naomi harris i don't know there's so many naomi actresses i get them all mixed up. Yeah. Naomi Harris. Like I think she, to me, when I saw 20 days later, I was like, skirt,

excuse me, this black woman with this like kind of short pixie flat iron haircut is just like kicking ass and saving this like sad little white boy. Okay. I am here for this, but I feel like we only get those every so often. And then we got, you know,

not get out uh i didn't like us i thought us was horseshit to be honest but i love lupita i thought lupita like blew me the fuck away so it sucks as a black mixed person like every so often i get someone i'm like yeah but then most of the time you're like no no there's not really anyone oh she has anxiety i have anxiety well i guess there's that you know yeah yes um well does this movie pass the bechdel test oh it sure does almost constantly almost exclusively yeah and it's interesting because i i i didn't like check this to the to the hilt let's say but I feel like even when they are maybe the subtext is about her husband they don't really say his name and they don't really mention him it's all kind of like subtext and it's more they're talking about grief

than they're talking about him except for're talking about him uh except for like that one line where i'm like juno what are you doing where when she says she's not the only one who lost someone in that accident i'm like uh you why are you telling on yourself like this you're like what um but outside of that yeah they men aren't really mentioned at all yeah yeah it's true it's true actually and i only think about like every time a man was mentioned you're like oh a man oh i forgot about them for a second you know like yeah because sarah asks a couple of them like so do you have a man back home and then yeah we do talk more about the grief of the husband and the daughter rather than him that's fine by me it was a nice little break

yeah there were way too many questions like they almost like went around the circle do you have a boyfriend or husband yeah that was ridiculous yeah which was like too much but at least they also talked about like yeah i like spelunking i am in medical school here are some of my interests yeah it did sort of feel like okay what do women talk about when they're not being killed by yeah or and also when they are being killed by yeah all the men in the movie are killed yeah yes yeah and that's fine the the sequel uh also uh kills a lot because there are it is a a cast of men and women and um all the men are also killed spoiler alert i'm curious to see that one now i got damn it it sounds pretty good it's it's not it well it's it's uh the first one is a better crafted and like better structured movie and i think a more effective horror movie uh the second one i think course corrects some of the

issues with and has another uh woman of color as one of the lead characters who um and i won't spoil this but you know you're not unhappy about what happens really with her so okay okay it's a little better um is her storyline like she walks up to the cave and it's like oh hell no i'm not going in there i'm out you're crazy i wish uh but she's like i'm gonna break the stereotype no black person's dying this is she black what kind of uh latinx okay okay great yeah um i'm gonna watch it damn it yeah it looks like horse shit but i guess i'll watch it so as far as our nipple scale um examining the movie from an intersectional feminist lens zero to five nipples um again there's a lot to appreciate about this movie and there's there's a lot to be upset by about this movie yeah um it almost feels

very equal i'm almost inclined to give it like a 2.5 like a split down the middle because you see very capable physically strong outdoorsy athletic women who you almost never see they aren't sexualized it's just a group of friends doing extreme sports yeah until the cannibals until the cave dwellers come and then you have uh i mean the only woman of color gets uh vilified the pettiness uh the petty behavior of some of the women at the end it all sort of cancels out so yeah i guess i would give it like a 2.5 it is very much a movie of its time and this is a rating of of the film through an intersectional lens not as a film as a well i want to say as a cinematic piece but i think we should start evaluating films through an intersection yeah so our our yeah our rating is based on like the the lens the only

reason i'm i'm torn in this is because i feel like i typically rate films through this lens but now there's other people doing it and i'm like am i in the real world right now you guys do this too this is way better okay uh because people will be like oh no i just thought it was a good movie i'm like oh were you not uncomfortable by it like i was oh that's so nice for you and your cute little privilege go over there what a treat yeah i think i would give it i think i would give it three nipples out of five yeah i'll split the diff i'll do 2.75 wow wow jamie very i love to get the decimal zone here um no yeah i think that like given the fact that it was 15 years ago and it is there is a lot that this movie is doing in this genre that no one was doing in this genre unfortunately as as infuriating as i

find it i do feel like there is i don't know how to properly phrase this but like there is kind of a like a tendency maybe in movies of like once a male director proves oh there can be a you know a horror movie starring all women then it unfortunately kind of does get the ball rolling to maybe let a woman direct a horror movie about women but and i guess i feel like there's a lot of moving in the right direction in some ways and then in other ways i think complete like stagnation but there is a lot happening here that isn't happening really anywhere else in this space at that time so i'll give it its due there and it's really cool to see sarah come out of the the period pond and get all pissed off i don't care what anyone

says it is it is a men being afraid of vaginas thing again which is also very cis normative get like anyways yeah two point sure 2.75 I'll give one to Sarah I'm gonna give one to I guess I'll give one to Juno because I I don't know why I was like you know Juno made mistakes but who among us has it who hasn't who among us has read that their friends to certain death on purpose and I'll give the last three quarters to Beth because I did think it was funny that she was gossiping when she's dying, you know? Oh, golly.

Well, Darby, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. What a treat that we just, the fact that we all descended into this conversation together. That was good. And now we're crawling over the bones of people to get out.

Yes. Where can people check out your stuff, follow you online, etc. Yeah. So I'm pretty active on Instagram at Darbleezy. D as in Delta, A as in Alpha, R, B as in Boy, L, E, E, Z, Y. I've been doing a lot of customer service calls lately. I have to spell my name out in letters like that. What else do you do in quarantine but fix problems you don't really have?

And yeah, I'm a filmmaker, artist, consultant. I consult folks in film. I used to run a collective called Color Film where we provided resources and tools and education for the community of marginalized filmmakers. And now I'm doing it on my own. So if you need a consultation to get through a work situation, I do monthly live streams and I have a Patreon, patreon.com slash Darby Rose, D-a-r-b as in boy

y rose um and yeah i do monthly live streams i talk about intersectionality at work how to be productive during this time that we're in and um all the other things and i do want to recommend a couple movies oh yes oh yes anything by k yes. Anything by Karin Kusama. Yes. Jennifer's Body, The Invitation, other horror, thriller films. Yeah. Ginger Snaps,

although co-written by a woman, fully directed by a man. Fantastic. More lady bits and comparisons, all that, and horror. Our friend Alex recommends that we cover that movie on this podcast almost on a daily basis.

Yeah, I'm not surprised. It's a fantastic film, and I feel like I'm forgetting others, but there's a lot of incredible films out there by marginalized filmmakers. So support the work, support anything that we and they need because white america don't care so yes yes and and uh listeners hire darby for her consultation work

and subscribe to her patreon and give me money we in a capitalist society still and and covid took my work away yes thanks for having me this was really fun i feel like i've been waiting to have this conversation and i'm a big fan of what you guys have been doing with beckdelcast so i'm so happy to see it like still where it is and where it's going it's so cool onward and upward baby yes i love it, thank you for being here. Yeah. Hey, everyone. It's future Jamie and future Caitlin. It is us. We wanted to address something that we talked about during the episode and that we got feedback on from a few different listeners

regarding our discussion that we had about the representation of disability in horror movies. And yeah, we basically got the feedback that while that's an important discussion to have, this was not the appropriate movie to do it for. And so we just wanted to acknowledge that. We've spoken with listeners and we just, we want to continue having this discussion, but this wasn't the movie to do it for. And so we apologize. And, you know, as always, our lines of communication are open to you. And yeah, we will continue to

have this discussion in movies that makes more sense for us. So our apologies for misfiring on when to have that discussion. Yeah, it was pointed out that because many like species of animals who dwell in caves are blind it wasn't as though this movie was necessarily demonizing blindness for me i was just like oh this would be maybe a good opportunity to kickstart that conversation but as people pointed out this wasn't the right movie for it it just wasn't the right movie for it. It just wasn't the right match. Right. Yeah. But it's still a very important discussion. For sure.

So yes. Thanks for those of you who gave feedback. Like Jamie said, we encourage that, you know, sometimes we're, you know, we're not always going to get things exactly right every time.

So it's, it's helpful to receive feedback from people and we're always wanting to learn and grow. So thank you for that. We love you. Love you. Future Jamie and future Caitlin out. Signing off. And you can check us out on Twitter and Instagram at Bechtelcast.

You can subscribe to our Patreon, aka Matreon, at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast. You get two bonus episodes every month it's only five dollars and you get access to the entire back catalog and if you're a horror fan we've covered a number of horror movies on that including including jennifer's body including jennifer's body and teeth yes and get out and uh the baba duck who can forget the baba duck who could forget uh yeah among many many others yes and uh you can get our merch tpublic.com slash the bechtel cast we have we recently got masks to the store with all of our classic Birch stuff, so you can get those if you so choose. And yeah, stay safe, help people, and we love you.

And now we have an ascent out of the cave. Oh, brave. Bye-bye. Bye. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption

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