Kill James Bond! - S3E24.5 What Women Want [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Get your live show tickets Here! Listen to the rest of this episode Here! ----- This week on the Kill James Bond Bonus feed, November and Abi are alone again, they've each received a powerful electric shock granting them a sort of sex-based telepathy, and they're finally going to get to the bottom of exactly what it is... that women want. ----- Friend of the show Blake is fundraising for gender affirming surgery It would mean the world if you could help contribute to her fundraiser! https://www.gofundme.com/f/blakes-gender-affirming-surgery-fundraiser?lang=en_GB&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to hit their gofundme for passage out of Rafah whenever the crossing reopens. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. While the crossing might be closed, the situation is changing by the day and being able to afford passage out when a crossing reopens is an immense comfort. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip 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

INTRO MUSIC Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Kill James Bond. It's November and it's Abby and we are sadly Devon-less this episode. ALICE Girls night! ALICE It's girls night again! It's another sleepover episode, we're gonna paint each other's nails. We've picked a girl movie in capital letters, I'm really excited to talk about it. And while Devon is off riding a tractor around, or implementing the Devon Report, or any number

of possible things that they could be doing. You and I are gonna talk about the Mel Gibson movie What Women Want. SONIA Yes. This was my pick for the bonus feed. I remember watching this film as a child, and it did instill in me a love of Frank Sinatra. And as far as I know, hopefully- ALICE Terrible crime. SONIA Hopefully nothing else. Hopefully none of the other values of this movie rubbed off.

ALICE Yeah. I mean, I'm a bit of a kind of, not for the first time, right, I'm a bit of a stranger in a strange land with something traditionally, like, feminine coded, in that, like, I don't know rom-coms very well. I have a bit of a kind of a weakness for a romantic comedy, but I'm not that sort of well read in them. RILEY It's a straight rom-com too. Yeah, this has always been one of my stumbling blocks with them, is that they're very, like,

cis-hat. And also, just in general, my idea of romance is asking a girl how hard she thinks she can punch me in the stomach, but like... Yeah. It took me some time to realize that Mel Gibson is meant to be sexy in this movie. He's pretty old in this. SONIA Yeah, well he's in really good shape, and I didn't notice until he got his shirt off, and then he had his shirt off for like quite some time, I was like, oh right, okay, sorry,

you're meant to be attractive, sorry, yes, please, go on. Yeah, really, you're beautiful, yeah, love the hair you have everywhere. Actually, what's Helen Hunt doing? Can we go back to her? So, I mean, these kind of romantic comedies, right, they used to be unfairly called, like, chick movies, right? Movies for girls. And I think a big part of Kill James Bond as a podcast has been us exploring what it means to like what you might reductively call boy

movies, or as they used to be called, movies. And I think as well there's an aspect of that with this, because this was directed by a woman, Nancy Meyers, which first of all I was surprised by, but second of all, it had kind of the thing where you look up the list of best-selling female authors, absent that one, right, a lot of them are like Barbara Cartland, Jackie Collins, Danielle Steele,, a lot of them are like Barbara Cartland, Jackie Collins, Danielle Steele, this whole world of romance novels that are mostly by and for women and that are completely unheralded into mainstream culture. So if I tell you that this was not only directed by a woman, but it was, at the time it came

out, the most successful film ever directed by a woman. LARISSA Wow! ALICE It's still the tenth highest grossing. It was, like, surpassed by Shrek the next year, and then after that, like, Twilight, The Matrix and stuff. LWX Huh. Yeah, I mean, I guess, like, it feels a little bit the way that the first Fifty Shades movie did, in that, like, okay, yes, the source material is the source material, but with

the right female director and, like, a cast who are pretty game for it, it actually ends up being better than you think it should. And we may as well like tell you the premise going in, Mel Gibson is a misogynist who gains the power to read women's minds. That's the setup, listeners. If you were like, I don't know, am I gonna listen to this one? It's a chick movie, it's a romcom. That's the setup.

Mel Gibson is Professor X, but only for chicks. He's Professor XX. ALICE That's really good. Yeah, and again, Mel Gibson is kind of an odd choice for this casting, right? He's like... SONIA He's meant to be attractive, is he? ALICE Apparently. I don't...

You're asking the wrong person, I think. But I think he's also a little old for the casting as well, but yeah. Yeah, just a little. He's meant to be kind of a man's man, right? And we open the movie with a female narrator explaining what a man's man is, and a man's man, apparently, is the kind of man who just doesn't get what women are about. And we illustrate this with a montage of some dudes, including some good-natured, old-timey New York City sexual harassment.

Which sort of sets the tone, right? Like, men are pigs, and this is just how it is. I think the sort of overriding feminism, such as it is of this movie, is men are from Mars, women are from Venus, right? They want very different things that are sort, barely congruent with each other. And so this narration is being provided by Mel Gibson, his character's name is Nick, his ex-wife Gigi, who's like telling her bridesmaids all about her first husband Nick, right? And we see that they're a little bit distant now, they're divorced, we also see that they have a daughter together, Alexandra, who has like, a little bit of a distant

relationship with him, she says, well he's kind of like my Alexandra, who has, like, a little bit of a distant relationship with him. She says, well, he's kinda like my uncle. Uncle Dad, right? And he also works in advertising, he does a lot of adverts with, like, ladies in bikinis and stuff. ALICE Yeah, he's Don Draper. There's a, sort of, like, barely noticed Sarah Paulson being absolutely wasted as his secretary here, by the way.

SONIA Yeah. Yeah, yeah. My notes here also say, New York City, baby! And then I crossed it out and wrote Chicago, baby! Because it's not New York, it's Chicago! ALICE I also did this! Yeah. JG It's because it's the yellow cabs!

They have the yellow cabs, and I was like, ah, it's New York! And then the old people from Chicago were like, no. ALICE So, Jiji, his ex-wife, explains why her ex-husband got this way. Which is funny to be thinking about him this much as you're about to get married to another dude, but whatever. And she explains, right, he was socialized wrong because his mum's job was a bit too much like sex work.

SONIA Yes. And this is a thing that, a problem that the movie has with a certain kind of women, and it's quite judgmental. We'll see this coming back, like, his mum was a Vegas showgirl. ALICE Yeah, which is not what a Vegas showgirl is or does, right, they're stage entertainers. SONIA Yeah, that's a very demanding, like, performing job, yeah. And he was raised around Vegas showgirls, and they didn't have a father present in his life apart from, y'know, misogynistic promoters.

ALICE Yeah, genuinely, he's like, he had bad male role models, and then you see him learning to slap women on the arse with, like, Joey the Misogynist. SONIA Yeah, yeah. Hey, Joey the Misogynist. ALICE Yeah, yeah. Hey, Joey the Misogynist is here! Oh! ALICE He's gonna teach you how to hate women in an Italian-American inflected way. ALICE Oh!

ALICE This is the thing, right, it's kind of like, okay, well we've figured out why this one guy is a misogynist, what about all the rest of these, like, men's men, you know, wandering around? ALICE Yeah. Yeah, like, men's men, you know, wandering around. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, one thing this movie does do well is it takes all the threat out of the misogyny. Oh, yeah.

100%. Apart from one thing which is about to happen right now, Nick's misogyny never becomes, like, physically threatening? And that is assumed to be, like, a different species of misogynist who is not appearing in this film. ALICE When I mention the kind of sexual harassment over the men's men thing, it's a guy stopping two women in the street and going past them like, whoa, alhamdulillah, these girls are hot. It's kind of PG sexual harassment, right?

It has the kind of like... SONIA Yeah, it's not a man murdering his pregnant wife. ALICE No, exactly. I do find this like, oh, he's like, he was surrounded by beautiful women all the time, it was kind of sex work adjacent which is inappropriate, and so he got bad role models. Kind of repugnant. Like, I don't want to gloss over that. Cards on the table, I enjoyed watching this movie.

More than I thought I would. But this bit I think reveals more than I thought I would. But like, this bit I think reveals more than it means to about the politics of it. Yeah, and it's about to do that again, because Nick wakes up in his fabulous New York Chicago apartment, and he has like a lipstick kiss on one cheek, he has a female housekeeper who wakes him up. A female, kind of mother-like, heavily accessent and Hispanic housekeeper, who's also, like, she's kind of on the heavier side, right?

Which is important, because she's not a sexual object in this movie, except in a joking way. SONIA Well, he does assault her. ALICE Yeah, but in a way that's comedic, which is different. That'll get to that later, because there's another woman immediately following that the movie does this to as well. Yeah. And she finds some skimpy lingerie lying around, and tells him off basically for dating sluts. She's like, when are you gonna date a woman who wears real underwear? And it's like, so it's kind of like his misogyny is being blamed on a certain kind of woman, who

is also not appearing in this film? ALICE Certain kind of woman like his mum, and his mum's co-workers, I guess. SONIA Yeah, yeah. It's like, well, he may be a misogynist, but that's cause, like, some women give it up too easy, and it's like, okay... ALICE There's a very, sort of, like, concise statement of this later on that we'll get to, I think. But yeah, this movie firmly believes that, like, sluts are real and a, like, distinguishable

category of women who are a problem for the rest of women. Yeah. Letting the side down. But we get this kind of comedic scene where his housekeeper wakes him up and says, I don't have time to make you a bagel this morning, please don't call me babe. And then he's not listening at all, he's like, oh babe, could you please make me like a bagel if you've got time for it? And he's like, she's like, okay, I'll make you one. But as long as you stop calling me that word. And he's like, no problem, babe. And like, it's played for less. He doesn't

listen to women. Exactly. Stop. That's right. I was on this episode. I've just been waiting this entire time to tell you that you can't hear the rest of this unless you go to patreon.com slash killjamesbond and sign up today for at least five pounds a month. Please?