The Worst Idea Of All Time - 32: The Louise Conspiracy

Episode Date: April 11, 2019

Guy has struggled through a very difficult watch in Melbourne but Tim has stumbled across one of the single most important theories in the history of The Worst Idea of All Time: Louise is not real. She is a figment of Carrie’s imagination, wrought with the guilt of discovering she is a horrible person. It’s Fight Club meets M. Night Shyamalan meets Sex meets a City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We just have a good rhythm together, you know, he sort of feels me out, I feel him out, and we go for it. Welcome to this episode of The Frosty Fellas, an online broadcast where Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt, two comedians originally hailing from Aotearoa, New Zealand, repeatedly punched themselves in the balls through cinema. We have just completed our 30-second watch, if my math is right. I think that's right, of Sex and the City, the movie. Is that right? That's right.

Yeah, yeah, 31 plus 1, 32. Way to go. Good morning, Tim. 9.41 a.m., Melbourne, Victoria time. I woke up after returning home from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that closed at 3 a.m. I woke up at 7 a.m. to deep dive.

Have you played one? Some other comics. Daniel Sloss has organized a game. It's Dungeon Master. That would be cool. I play the elf greg greg the second greg has two g's but you can call me greg greg for short uh having a lot of fun you know and i gotta say the difference between the day and night it's honestly like night and day that was of all the watches we've done one of the most

harrowing experiences i've had with any any media uh really oh just like just you know so there's two different experiences you can have when you're really really tired and one of them is when you know that you're allowed to go to sleep and i would argue that is one of the best feelings that you can have in the world like when you just let your eyelids shut and you know when you're so tired that blinking feels really good and you do a blink and you try to open the blink but your eyes are just shut like no no no this is where we are and you're like oh yes we're allowed to be here the other is when you're that tired and you have to watch sex in the city for the 32nd time yeah those are the two options i'm afraid you're going to get sick in melbourne because it's a lifestyle during the festival

season that does not lend itself to good health and you need to try and get as much recuperative sleep as possible but this is really hampering that, huh? I have had the last two nights off the beers. So I've been out late, but I've been just consuming unholy amounts of water and quite a confused sort of strategy to keep myself healthy. No, that's not confused. That's smart. That's good stuff.

It's smart water. But I think, you you know still at the cost of sleep which does sort of factor in as quite an important part in staying healthy and on top of stuff so it's um it's i've got a pretty confused body i'm pretty cross at us for agreeing to this uh it does not seem sustainable you're about to join join me in melbourne which is um sustainable you're about to join join me in melbourne which is um i mean you know we've often talked about pavlov's dog uh and i do fear like i i am not in any way with due respect i'm looking forward to you being here is that um i was actually going to ask has it happened yet that you don't look forward to seeing me and you've just answered it and i am very hurt to hear that i know i know and understandably too i don't want

to feel that way but i'm just i'm i am being as honest with you as i can i yeah i dread it i'm i've shut my i've shut myself out of the apartment i'm living in, like a dirty little dog, where I'm not allowed inside because I've been naughty. Okay, well, let's talk through this. What are you so worried about with me coming over? I already feel really stretched for time. It's a busy time of year, and now all of the free time I've had for mental health

and physical health recuperation is going to be absorbed by just willfully consuming the worst possible media with you. Obviously in the name of fun and research, but it's just what it is. It shuts down the avenues for any free time, which is sort of the crutch that I've been using to prop up my mental stability at the moment. This is just a simple reframing exercise.

You've got to start considering watching Sex and the City as free time, as a leisure activity. The way that we're going to achieve that... That's the meanest thing you've ever said. The way that we're going to achieve that is by getting some A-class guests to come on. And we don't, I only really want to watch the movie

a couple of times with you while I'm over because we're going to try hard and bang out another season of Overlooked and Undercooked, our limited podcast series where we watch Rob schneider's netflix disaster with different comedian guests um but we don't we don't need to go fucking hog wild on sex in the city we need to watch it once for the live show and maybe we do one other one while i'm there

i'm there for like what 10 days i think that seems all right doesn't't it? Well, no, because even within the model of how many episodes we're watching, that's not enough for while you're here. No, it's not. We're not even keeping pace, you know, with the speed limit, the minimum speed limit. I literally felt sick the whole time you were just talking. I know it is a simple reframing exercise, but it's like, I don't know. I know I've enjoyed it not two watches ago, so anything's possible.

But what I just had was like... You're in a very emotional... Look at you. You are really out of sorts. Yeah. How was it for you? I think, I mean, obviously not good, but I have had a little bit of distance

and a cup of coffee and a Skype call in between, so the itch has been dulled a little bit. Also, of course, I watch a little bit later than you, I think. Wait, does that math on that stick up? yeah you do I got up at 7.30 to watch it though I woke up just before 6am because unfortunately my wife's a bit crook

and it's kind of mean in retrospect but I watched it up in Zosie this is an old riddle what does a what does a what does a doctor do

when they're sick if they call up work they say I can't come in to work I'm sick and then their work says well you better get in here fast judging by what I'm seeing

it's uh watching some David Attenborough in bed on a laptop and mucking around with a dog oh

you know you can watch David Attenborough do bed on a laptop and mucking around with a dog oh you know you can watch David Attenborough on your viewing platform Tim did you know that you can actually do that no you're fucking wrong about that my device is virginal it is kept pristine for one purpose and one purpose

only and that's for carrying the gals to parade around night after night day after day but um i exited the bedroom as quickly as possible because i didn't want to get her germs and there was no air circulation in the room it's kind of mean so you just got up and got to it got to it got work, jumped in the studio, got myself a nice cup of coffee and just fucking tucked in. It's such a bad film, isn't it? Well, let's try and find some redeeming qualities just to lighten the air. Did you enjoy anyone's company this week?

Did anyone out of the blue take you out for a drink and show a side of themselves you'd never seen before weirdly for some reason louise did which i don't think happened before but she was just like um do you know what's so weird i always kind of obviously not in a logical way or in a 100 literal literal way, but in some way, I always kind of forget she's in the movie. Do you know... Because they have this... Yeah, go on. No, you go, and then I'll tell you what I was going to say.

The treatment of the character is so disrespectful, where they kind of bring her on for no particular reason, really. Carrie says, oh, this was something I laughed at today, when Carrie says I couldn't think of a better time to get a personal assistant or was that a fact? That sentence might not be word perfect but she says that and I'm like, I reckon I can think of a

better time, it was when you were trying to plan a wedding and it put a huge strain on you and Big's relationship and if you had a personal assistant to do the admin, maybe you could have's relationship and if you had a personal assistant to do the admin maybe you could have communicated better and none of this would be happening that is so good i uh i just find it funny like i i hadn't really thought about it like this until you brought up louise but i've sort of i think quietly been treating her as an ally of ours since we started like nice i think of her as not like a

mole but certainly she's in there on behalf of us because she's the only character who's given any substantial amount of screen time who exists and or like as you know is independent of the franchise and yeah accordingly she doesn't you know the same thing that happens to all sorts of secondary characters in these movies we watch she doesn't get given enough screen time or backstory or fleshed out enough to to learn how to just thought of something yeah does any other character at any point in the movie see louise uh is carrie the only gal who sees her yes i'm so i'm so confident that you're right what the fuck is she not real do you reckon is she a specter i think it's some sort of projection of white guilt that Carrie was like,

I literally have no friends of colour. I'm going to invent a personal assistant to fill this void. I can't think of any time in the movie where she interacts with another character who isn't Carrie except for her own family and her fiancé. I think you're exactly right. And even then, that's seen through the eyes or the experience of Carrie. So that could all be constructed within her mind as well.

You've stumbled into something absolutely massive here. This is big. And I didn't even think of it during the watch. That's just come to me now it's like there's a um popular theory that ferris bueller's day off is all uh just the imaginings of cameron and that all the other characters don't exist um oh wait i think that's it either that or ferris is imagining cameron but he's not real one or the other i i feel like this really holds water that little saint and she's called saint louise that's kind of like i can't believe it she totally exists in a vacuum from anyone else

so i think carrie's probably she's under quite a lot of emotional strain she's uh she's feeling even amongst her friends we've established in previous episodes that they don't listen when they talk, so she's probably feeling quite emotionally isolated, like there's no real outlet. Professionally, I don't know that we've seen her achieve anything throughout the movie. How dare you? She writes the word love on a computer screen,

as you mentioned last episode, turns the full stop to ellipses back to back again but like this is that's that's after she's she's taken on louise like okay louise represents louise represents a mental breakdown shared by kate shared by carrie and the frosty fellas it is where worlds collide. This makes perfect sense as well for where she comes in in the movie because Carrie has basically gone through a semi-catatonic state.

Not unlike Cameron and Ferris Bueller when they figure out that they can't make the odometer on the car go backwards by chucking it in reverse. Which I just have to say as a comedy premise is dynamite for for something to put in a film so funny that you could just turn back the clock like that by going reverse um so so carrie breaks down she's been jilted this is after honestly years of emotional abuse from her partner big they've been abusing each other they've been

lashing out i think it it was Jen Frigger who said these two just shouldn't be together. And the more I think about it, the more true it is. And it's such a horrible moral to put them being together as the audience expectation in this film. So Carrie's damaged.

She's gone to Mexico, gotten reasonably blotto with her mates. She goes and gets a haircut, which is a real sign of like human grief, that's what people do often when they come out of a big relationship she gets the haircut after St. Louise appears

oh that's true she comes straight back and also I think the filmmaking represents the mental fraying of the edges of Carrie's mind because the transition we see into Carrie deciding she needs to get a personal assistant is the shot of her throwing the cell phone into the water.

We see it on the fringes of the water on the beach. The water laps over the phone. And then the seediest and dodgest of all cinema transitions, I cannot believe that they played this out on the silver screen, the water of the ocean somehow transmorphs into a puddle of rainwater with a wheel in it that drives away and we see carrie at the front of her old apartment going to start her life again really hard at an attempt at a i think it's got a matched shot in film it's at that moment so so then what we see instead of actually seeing

carrie going out and interviewing all these different candidates for a personal assistant job what the what that scene actually is is carrie just having a having a breakdown in a starbucks it's just a woman talking to various different people who exist within their mind in a Starbucks until she finds one she likes and leaves the coffee shop. Holy shit. Okay, let's do a little mental map here because I'm quite bad at the chronology of how the movie comes out. My memory just doesn't work like that.

What happens after we meet Louise? What bits of the film transpire after that? Because all of the stuff that happens during that period is now when carrie has lost her mind after her psychic uh so after after that we've got uh i mean first of all louise immediately comes in and helps carrie organize her life so you know this is the this is the positive side of this breakdown, is that there is actual value in it, and that Carrie uses it as some sort of, you know, mental support to sort of unpack her apartment,

fix her website, start putting the pieces back together. She also becomes a better friend. Oh, my God. This is so Fight Club, because it means she's hiding those emails from herself that get sent to Meg. But, like, she has to pick apart what she picked as her own password to lock emails away from herself.

She's putting a wall between one section of her brain and another. Fucking hell, this movie just got a lot better. It truly did. You've unlocked something special, because we've been watching it for 31 screenings as just an ordinary over-inflated rom-com reviving a beloved television franchise. What we didn't realise is that Mattress Pikelet King is actually Mattress Pikelet Shyamalan. Yes! M. Patrice. No, fuck. How does this work?

He's Trojan Horstus Jennifer Hudson is Bruce Willis Yeah No, Carrie is Bruce Oh wait, no, you're right, yeah Yeah Or Carrie Bradshaw is

Ed Norton in Fight Club Is that kind of an affair? Possibly both. What else happens? How good would it be to see a screening of Sex and the City where Edward Norton plays Carrie Bradshaw and Bruce Willis plays St. Louise? I'd pay substantial money for that.

It's going to be a lot of one of those uh situations when she gets the haircut and people are kind of commenting on it it's like it's almost a red herring so people like oh your hair looks really good it's like yeah cheers i've invented a whole other person who i'm treating as a personal assistant and they don't exist but she's she's oblivious and the reason she's getting away with it is because she's she doesn't introduce i mean i don't know what the the traditional lines of friendship and professionalism are between you know someone and their personal assistant but it seems to me that they're quite buddy buddy like you'd imagine that carrie would be excited to introduce this person to her other friends and yet she doesn't. Like. Yeah. No one.

No one. In her immediate orbit. Sees what is happening. Because she doesn't let them. It's such a closely guarded secret. So. Okay. Okay.

Does that mean. That Carrie. On some level. Knows it's a delusion. No. Because if she. Was fully. In. The grips of it she would attempt to introduce louise to people and no there's no one there carrie do you know i think because

saint louise is uh she has a genuine capacity for empathy and so what what i think is that carrie has found this character and is uh afraid of sharing someone with these qualities with her other friends. So it's a conscious decision she's made to not... I don't even know that she tells any of them that she's hired a personal assistant. She doesn't. This is why... This is what I was talking about when I'm like, I always kind of forget she's

in the movie because the one thread she has is to carry and she's not connected in any way for any amount of time to any other character except for her own um set of people her family and her fiance this is fucked man that's so crazy i can't believeress Pikelett did this to us for such a long time. He's back in the good books. What a play. I know. We should write him an email saying we figured it out. We should.

What other explanation could there be? What is our relationship to St. Louise? Because I do feel like in some way she represents us or she's here to help us. Yeah. So here's what i think has happened carrie bradshaw has gotten to a stage in her life where she's 41 years old and she's taken a look around which has been it's a moment that got forced on her by the fact that she got left at the altar by a man that she's been in an emotionally abusive relationship with for a decade. She finally had to take a look in the mirror.

And she found out she is not a good person. And she is wholly without empathy. She can't hold a conversation with other people for like 30 seconds. Without making it about herself. So what Louise is. Is the embodiment of all of these virtues. That Carrie knows a person should have. That Carrie doesn't actually know how to integrate it with her personality.

So it's this like external make-believe friend that is the embodiment of everything Carrie knows she should be. Helpful, kind, selfless, good at technology, but she doesn't know how to put that into herself oh thoughts yeah i mean it all it all adds up and i think that in creating this person carries also unknowingly created uh some sort of beacon of hope for us that maybe we sort of we offhandedly dismissed or didn't pay you know due mind the first 31 times we met her but right louise there's more gold in the hills well i just think that she she represents you know something for us and what other films have we had you know a spectral character who

who uh i mean when she's not on, she's literally capable of anything because the rules of, you know, reality do not apply to her. Yeah. I mean, who knows? You know, she's been thought into existence or, you know, she's been created from the recesses of Carrie's mind. But so long as she's not engaging with carrie she is entirely you know she's got total autonomy over her decisions so when she's not on screen she's kicking around in the background you know probably causing some mischief probably inspecting the sewers having words with the rats you know literally talking

to anyone and thing this is a very interesting interpretation guy because you are you are unlike dick bot brady the rat king these sorts of um peripheral characters who are getting up to a lot of stuff on the sidelines just outside of the frame of what we see um saint louise is in a slightly different category whereby she doesn't exist but you've sort of interpreted her like she does she's got action outside the screen but she's just an imagining of carry but no because you do you know you know um it's it's the same thing where like it's it's i think it i i you know i fear speaking out of turn here but there's a behavior within schizophrenia whereby it's difficult to hold people accountable

for actions that are performed by someone else who lives within their body. Oh, like a multiple personality sort of a thing? Exactly. And that's what we're dealing with here. So she does exist within the real world okay so less like M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense and more like M. Night Shyamalan's Split

a film I have not seen but presumably yes it's about someone with split personality disorder or not that's the that's yeah yeah premise i mean mattress pikelet's done a delectable delectable job of only leaving you know enough breadcrumbs to for us to have the idea of a meal but you know what we choose to do with them when we eat them is entirely up to us um does this then mean that whatever carrie is by herself and acting out these i'm presuming

she does it out loud acting out the conversations between her and louise she does a louise voice absolutely hasten to add is uh jennifer hudson you better believe that's what she does if a 40 year old rich white woman is being racist and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? Sadly, it doesn't exist entirely within the confines of our own apartment. When they go out for cocktails, that is one of the most uncomfortable nights that the bartender has pulled within that hotel lobby. She's watching Carrie Bradshaw, renowned author and sexual anthropologist about town, performing a dual conversation about booty calls and how she doesn't get to have them anymore. But one of them is 20 years her junior and black.

Oh, man. Good fucking times. It really has put a difference. But do you know what? This almost endears me more to carry bradshaw because it's such a huge flaw yeah it does make it interesting because it's like you know previously we've dismissed all of her problems as not actually existing within reality because it's like yeah but you know it's all it's all sort of wrought upon herself or i i just i've

struggled to find a reason to to sympathize with her but you know knowing just how much strain she's found herself under like it does make her such a more interesting character yeah character caricature do you know you could almost do the same thing with smith garrett were it not for our extensive knowledge of the second film. Oh, and actually, he's in the TV show as well, so everyone's met him and people talk about him. No one even fucking mentions her. No one even mentions Louise.

How could they? You know, I can't mention thoughts you have that I don't hear. Yeah. Fuck. I mean, what to me is the biggest miracle of all is that carrie somehow manages not to refer to or engage with saint louise in front of her friends i guess that comes from the fact she's trying to hide them from her but like that must be so like maybe the reason that she's socially restricted or uh you know slightly off you know selfish around her close friends later in the film,

is because all of her energy and concentration, instead of going to being a good friend, is going to shield St. Louise from her friends. Why do you think she's shielding Louise from her friends? For the reasons I've outlined before. Because she's found a friend who embodies all the traits that she craves in companionship and doesn't want her... would you not oh sorry she doesn't she doesn't she doesn't want her friends to to like take a slice of that pie or chop and change the

personality and sort of you know the more time they spend with each other the worse these women become and so by introducing saint louise to these people uh that will begin the decay of this incredible you know alter ego that carrie's created for herself but almost simultaneously by spending more time with these wretched friends as long as you don't tell them about louise it almost makes louise grow it makes her stronger that's right it drives carrie deeper within herself all right so um why then does louise leave at what point does that happen it's kind of when she's repaired her life so that still holds water uh yeah so i guess louise is still on the scene when car has the breakthrough that she's hidden the emails from herself. Yeah.

I guess Louise is a coping mechanism for her separation from Big because by the time she's back with Big, we know that Louise doesn't reappear in the second film. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is also, there's like such obvious foreshadowing by the fact that louise says that she's going to get married like it just all of a sudden she decides that her and her ex-boyfriend are going to get married and she needs to leave and that's carrie making the call

in her head me and big are going to get back together i don't know how i don't know exactly when but we're going to get back together and we're going to get married it's literally when they go when she goes to the wardrobe so the last thing that Louise says to her is you left those shoes in the wardrobe she goes to the wardrobe who's there? Mr. Bick

I mean of all of the hair brain theories we've concocted for the various different films we've watched various is probably quite generous the four different films we've watched various is probably quite generous the four different films we've watched this one like everything everything fits neatly within the actual framework of the movie that everyone else is watching as well do you know what i like about this is that as a listener to this podcast you heard this happen in real time all the other theories i've usually pinned down

when I've gotten too bored of the film or just needed to protect myself against the film, so I've started hiding into the recesses of my own mind, which is quite analogous to what we're talking about, the phenomenon. But you heard the cogs turn and produce this result, folks. You heard it here live first as it unfolded absolutely i mean that that to me because you heard who i was at the start of this episode

and you can hear who i am now i'm a tired boy but that to me was just like fucking christmas real shot in the arm i like the concept um i i kind of would want this to apply in real life that if you get to a point in your life where you're at your lowest ebb and you don't have the personal resources in you to kind of fix your life but your brain sort of unlocks this this extra resource that you didn't know you had to create a character create an imaginary friend to help you through because there's something less confronting about having like a third party this external person to guide you through it rather than you have to do it yourself well like it would actually be a pretty good feature of the human brain if this was we encourage children to you

know be open to and cultivate friendships with their imaginary friends. But at some point in adulthood, that becomes, you know, unacceptable or unhealthy. But what we've seen is Carrie becomes so vapid and self-centered, she returns in some ways to a childlike state whereby it serves an important mental function. Yeah. Wow. Go us. a childlike state whereby it serves an important mental function yeah wow go ass uh um did you have a shining light this watch buddy absolutely not uh i i hated every second of it i mean i was furious the whole time i was furious and tired like i was literally holding my eyelids open while just fucking fuming uh but i mean all entirely redeemed by this conversation we've just had i don't want to

talk about anything else like if it's okay with you tim i think this is an episode mate excuse me martha clear all my calls we're just discussing this one thing this episode absolutely did you have a shining light? Martha, of course, is Martha Stewart, who I have hired as my personal assistant for stuff like some creative text treatment. Well, I mean, I feel like I've put a lot on the floor. You throw in.

No, I told you. I don't have one. Oh. Well, not even shining light. I thought we'd just cancel it for this episode. I don't really one oh well not even shining light I thought we'd just cancel it for this episode I don't really have one either okay great thanks so much everybody we'll see you next time

is that truly us? yeah yeah fuck it that is us that's us yeah we're done what a great episode yeah bye take the afternoon off everyone I love it we've got a live show coming up in Melbourne

oh it's sold out I forgot but we might have some limited door sales so keep your eyes peeled on the Twitter both Guy and I will retweet it it'll probably come out of the Little Empire Podcast Twitter account as well if you do find yourself in Melbourne Guy's got a live show going on at the It'll probably come out of the Little Empire Podcast Twitter account as well. If you do find yourself in Melbourne, Guy's got a live show going on at the moment

called I Was Part of the Problem. Before we were talking about it. Before we were talking about it. Which you will find at littleempirepodcasts.com slash live. We've both got shows coming up in New Zealand as well that's on that same page. And all the good shows

that you want to go to are on that page I feel so happy a crisp 30-ish minutes. You got anything else you want to leave the audience with Guy? Absolutely not. Oh to be young again. I'm going back to bed Bye everybody

We just have a good rhythm together he sort of feels me out I feel him out and we go for it.