Upstream - S3E15.5: To The Bone [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

If we're having fun on one feed, it frees us up to get REAL on the other one. So Let's talk about Marti Noxon's 2017 movie To The Bone, a film about a young woman struggling with anorexia nervosa. Content warning: Obviously, discussion of eating disorders start to finish. ------ FREE PALESTINE palestineaction.org/donate https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ *WEB DESIGN ALERT*  Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/   Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

NKBKBNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN I'm November Kelley, I'm joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello! How you doing? And I hope you're ready for a searing, rending, potentially very triggering, emotionally affecting episode of Comedy Podcast. That's right. Yes, yes. Listeners consider this your content warning for the episode. We watched the 2017 Netflix film To the Bone, written and directed by Marty Noxon. It is about people with eating disorders. It is entirely about that. It's about that all the way through. It's extremely graphic and extremely detailed. If you have

an eating disorder, even if you think you maybe do, or like maybe don't want to hear about it, please do skip this one. But continue giving us your money, but just don't listen to it. It turns out that you can be emotionally affected by these things, even if you don't think you will be. Yes. Yes. Which I found out in the course of recording this. It's fine though, because I'll do some jokes to ease us through it, you know?

Yeah, we've got some drops. Check this shit out, like, eating disorder, more like eating disorder of pizza that I got. Huh? Thank you, thank you. I have two jokes about this, so I'll just bust out the second any time it gets too, like, emotional. Um, yeah, no, I...

What they did was they cured my eating disorder and replaced it with a tweeting disorder. Alright, it's a joke 1.5 there. The movie does tell you upfront this may be challenging for some viewers, and yeah, I should say also, I am some viewers. For this one. I'm some viewers. Mmhmm. Abi, this was your bonus pick as well, and you being some viewers decided to talk about

this, why? Why do this to us? Absolutely no reason at all. Gotcha. Cool. Perfect. We can cut all of that. Nope, that's fine, leave it in!

No, I chose to... I watched this film at a particular time in my life. I watched most films at a particular time in my life. ALICE I watched most films at a particular time in my life. NICOLAS Yup. I watched this film at a time in my life when I was going through some shit. It did not help with the shit, but it did help me understand the shit. ALICE Certainly. NICOLAS But, no, other than that I have to say, well

the microphones are on, I picked this for absolutely no reason at all. Completely random, from a list of random films. ALICE Beautiful. ALICE The Wheel of Fortune delivered us this. Zorano picked this for absolutely no reason at all, completely at random, from a list of random films. Mhmm. Beautiful. The Wheel of Fortune delivered us this. And so the Wheel of Fortune takes us to Ellen, 20 year old girl, who is in, we meet her in group therapy, at an eating disorder unit, and the first thing that you need to know about Ellen is that she is too epic for group therapy.

Mhmm. I also have this problem. Yes. Because in order to like, get you onside and to be like, this isn't your dad's eating disorder movie, question mark, one of the things the movie does to try and take you into its confidence is some girl at her group therapy is whining about how society makes impossible beauty standards for women, and Ellen is like, fuck that, suck my skinny balls, cuz I'm epic. Stop complaining, stop blaming yourself.

RIght, you wanna not riff at the group therapy meeting, that's one of the main things they try to get you to not do, just out of the gate. Yeah, they tend to call that, if you riff too much, they do tend to categorize that as like, oppositional defiant disorder. Which. Which is known as being cool disease! Yeah, fuck it all. traditional defiant disorder. ALICE And it's also known as being cool disease! ALICE Yeah, fuck it all.

ALICE Yeah, it turns out that calling it that also is a manifestation of... ALICE Yeah, yeah. Difficult patient... ALICE They kind of get you coming and going, y'know? I have a lot of thoughts about the medicalization in this movie, and generally. ALICE They would put difficult patient next to you, and normally they would just reserve that for, like, trans people who ask ask questions and just anybody who's black. Yeah. So she gets out of this group therapy, and she goes back home, where she is kind of shitty to her family's maid, one of a small handful of POC characters in this movie.

Also, amazing little bit of detail, as they are driving past her house, they drive past a bunch of restaurants and takeaways, the movie shows us, she is noticing all of them. She sees all, she can't walk past it without seeing it. Everything on the radio is about food as well. There are a few more subtle things in this movie that I want to pull out, and that's definitely one of them. Thank you for reminding me, because I missed it in my notes. Also, Ellen is played by Lily Collins, who you may know as the star of Emily in Paris.

She's really good in this. She's really fucking good in this. Like, if you've seen Emily in Paris, you might be like, oh, Lily Collins, she's really happy, throwing a fashion ball all the time, and then this is just like, death! She does an incredible job in this. She's so job in this. She's so good at this! And we get a kind of quick tour of Ellen's home life, and also some basic manifestations of disordered eating, right? Because we get to see her compulsively exercising, we get to see her calorie counting, it's great

that they put calories on every menu in the UK now, that's cool to me. It's so good, it's really helpful. It probably has no repercussions. That's never been upsetting for me at all. No, no, never. She also makes fun of the housekeeper's plastic surgery. She's very judgmental.

And accent. And Mexican accent, yes. She's very judgmental. And she kind of bonds with her sister, well, half-sister, because she lives with an absent father who the movie can't figure out a better way of depicting an absent father than that he is literally absent from the Snarl Show. That is pretty good. Yeah.

And her stepmother, who has a kind of comedy southern accent. And I dunno, how we wanna describe this woman, or do we want to sort of save that until we get into like, family therapy and the real sort of character work there? I think we can describe her. So she lives with her stepmother, we hear that her mother has moved away to Arizona with her lesbian partner, and that's why the parents' marriage broke down. So I would say her stepmother, like, is supportive, but she doesn't get it. Yeah, she's almost comically bad at this.

She's like a parody of a parody of a bad parental figure. Yeah, so there's a moment where she, on the orders of the hospital, has to weigh Ellen. Yes, I have a drop from this, even, because it reminded me. There's a movie that I really don't want to talk about or ever watch or think about again, called A Fantastic Woman. It's a Chilean movie about, and it's essentially for cis people, it's like, this is what being a trans woman is like, here's what it sucks. Right? And there's like a, there's a medical exam scene in that. And for me, it hits a lot of the same notes of, kind of, being medically humiliated.

And when her stepmother weighs her, she takes a photo of her, and she says, well this is the dialogue. "- Do you see that? Do you see what you look like? Do you think that's beautiful?" And, okay, obviously we're getting into themes here first of all, but it's coercive, and it's humiliating and distressing. And this is a theme that the movie flirts with from time to time, is like, to be pathologized

is an extremely intrusive, humiliating demeaning... it puts you in quite a submissive position as well. That's crazy, can't relate. Absolutely. I've never been pathologized by a medical authority about anything. Yeah, I mean the thing is, I cut the drop off slightly too early because after this Ellen says like, no. Yeah, she replies, no.

Yeah. In the most kind of... Exasperated? Vitiated, consent, exasperated, familiar with this kind of humiliation tone, yes. Yeah, just being like, yeah, I'm not trying to do this. Yeah, like, her stepmom thinks it's about trying to look beautiful, which it's not. So Ellen, something we should mention, is like, dangerously anorexic, like, she takes her clothes off to be white and is like, skeletal, she's very very thin, dangerously anorexic, like she takes her clothes off to be white and it's like, skeletal, she's very, very thin, dangerously so.

So, they have dinner, and this is another subtle thing that I wanted to pick up, which is every sound of chewing in this movie, outside of a couple of contexts, is really, it's mixed up to make it sound disgusting. And I think that's, either that's something that I have brought to this because I'm insane, or it's something that's just flat out in the movie, and if it is, then I think that's really beautifully done, because so much of this is like, misophonic, you know? It's like, really unpleasant to hear two other people eating vegetables. It's really really good. Also, we see Ellen, we never see her put anything in her mouth until much later in the film,

and she cuts up her food and moves it around the plate, and just plays with it. Which is something that people with eating disorders do really do, like it's a very closely observed detail. And later on her and her half-sister go and they look down on the city and they drink. ALICE Yeah, I like this scene, because they're like, toxic-like teenage girls really can be. With the apologies for the slur, just to include it, she's like, her half-sister has gotten a butterfly tattoo, and she makes fun of her for it and she calls it a retarded butterfly. And they both kind of riff on that for a bit, and I'm like, oh, this is exactly like, this

is like, well observed teenage girls being dicks. ALICE Kids are like this. SONIA Yeah, yeah it is. And Alan says, well, her half-sister is concerned, and she says like, I don't know why you do this, and she says, I've got it under control, and her half-sister's just like, how many people do you think are about to fucking die in this world, who just said those same words? ALICE Thousands of passengers on Boeing airplanes,

right now. GARETH I know the risks, again. Very few doors fall off. Oh, hold on, hold on. We can't be talking about this on the free feed. We're talking about fun stuff on the free feed. We need to put the real shit behind a paywall. And that paywall?

£5 a month, patreon.com slash killjamesbond. I'll see you there.