Kill James Bond! - S3E29.5: The People's Joker [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Check out the full episode on our patreon!  ----- 2:12 AM going back for more cool transgender art This week, we're watching Vera Drew's seminal The People's Joker, a coming-of-age autobiographical movie about a closeted trans woman who moves to the big city (gotham) to try to make it as an SNL cast member (clown). Check out the official website to find screenings or just plain buy the film! https://www.alteredinnocence.net/thepeoplesjoker ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. They deserve to survive. 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

Hi listeners, this is Abbey. Today we're going to be watching a film called The People's Joker which is very indie. It was kind of made with a lot of love. It's a little bit scrappy in places and it kind of relates to something that I was listening to this morning. I was listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Never Post, and they were doing a roundtable discussion with a lot of people in the podcasting industry, which I was surprised to hear is having a massive crisis. Is it? Apparently, yeah, apparently, like all the money is leaving.

Oh, fuck. Nobody can get sponsorships anymore. There's no ad money anymore. There was some big podcaster they were discussing who said that in order to make a sustainable living podcasting, you need 200,000 downloads per episode. And I was like, what the fuck? This seems so weird because over here here at Kill James Bond Towers, we're all doing pretty

good, making a decent living doing this. Home of independent podcasting. Yeah, we're completely independent. True. We've never done ads. Never run a single ad, as far as I'm aware. We've never been asked, even. No one's ever even asked us to do an ad.

We've never even had to turn somebody down. I did have to download NordVPN to watch this movie, so if you wanna hit me up about that. Yeah, nobody's approached us to run it out, no big podcasting production company has ever reached out to us or asked to acquire us or anything, and we do live shows occasionally and they're like, the audience is fucking great. So it's weird that, like, we're doing, like, really well. ALICE Every listener of Kill James Bond counts as a hundred normal podcast listeners.

RILEY Yeah, you do! RILEY They're just that much stronger, more loyal, handsomer, I would say. ALICE Absolutely. RILEY The other weird thing is that, like, the podcasting industry just doesn't have any fucking clue who we are. We've never been nominated for any kind of award. As I say, we've never been approached by any sort of production, anybody. We were asked to do a podcasting industry show one time and I went along and then I

refused to go on stage because the other panelists had a history of transphobic comments and I said, I'm not doing it. And like, that's it. It was for like no one in the podcasting industry. This is why they don't talk to us though. Has any fucking clue what James Bond is. And it's like, everyone else is fucking melting down and working like five jobs to keep their podcast going. Like they're like big, big people like NPR and shit. They're just like, what are we doing?

There's no money in podcasting anymore. And we're just like three trans idiots doing the best film criticism of the last 40 years. Just like fucking bossing it. So I wanted to say to the listeners, in the spirit of independent media and stuff that is made scrappily and with love, hey, thanks for fucking being here. Cause you dudes you're doing so good. I didn't even know our industry was in crisis. Like just found out about the crisis. Yeah. To our fellow podcasters, hey, stay strong, have you considered getting good? Sorry that that happened to you.

I'm looking at our email here just in case we've missed all of these emails or something. Doesn't look like it. It really just seems that people really relate to, I mean, what we're doing. You could say that we've invented a style of anti-podcasting. You might even call it. Chaos podcasting. Fuck's sake. INTRO Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond.

I am November Kelly, I am joined, as always, by my Chaos podcasting colleagues Abigail Thorne and Devin. Hey, how's it going? What's up? The first all-Penguin, all-trans podcast. Now, we watched The People's Joker, and I gotta be honest, I'm in a kind of emotionally vulnerable state with this one, because I often find that how much you relate to a movie doesn't make for very good movie criticism, but in this case I can't help it.

This is a movie that I feel has been laser targeted on my position, and all of the ways in which I kind of bounced off something like I saw the, and all of the ways in which I kind of bounced off something like I saw the TV glow, are all ways in which I deeply connected with The People's Joker. And this has very rapidly become one of my favorite movies. And so I'm just like... LLOYD Hell, fucking yeah. NICOLAS Whereas I'm the complete opposite, like, I... This movie's about...

LLOYD I hated it. It was shit. NICOLAS No, no, I loved it! I had a great time watching this, let me be clear. LLOYD It was good, it was good. But I can do, like, film criticism and analysis of it, because it's a film about being a trans person, being a closeted trans person, because there's, like, similar themes to I Saw the TV Glow and that it's also a love letter to a particular kind of media.

But I don't relate to this particular kind of trans story at all. Because I'm a freak and there's something wrong with me and I'm AGP. There's two kinds of trans- That's right, we've's two kinds of trans person. That's right. We've seen two kinds of trans film and of the two trans women on the podcast, one of us is related to a different one each, which means scientifically there are two kinds of trans women and I'm this kind. There's the people's Joker kind and then there's the I saw the TV glow kind.

Yeah. You now as the audience can like, arrange yourselves by faction here, really easily. You can be a secret third thing, which is to be of the Prince kind of transversal. But yeah, I just kind of, this is just a little glimpse into my twisted mind that these are the things that I consider to be normal. Yeah. It's almost as if she considers Transition funny. To the Joker, this is a normal film. Yeah, I mean, where do we want to start with this?

We gotta start with a disclaimer. Which the film starts with. Yeah. This is legal. This is a legal film to make. It's legal to do this. It's a parody, alright? Yeah.

It's legal to do this? They can't stop you from using the intellectual property of Warner Bros. and like, Saturday Night Live and... They can't stop you making a 3D Lorne Michaels in your movie. They can't make you not do that. So we open with a disclaimer which says that everything we're about to see is fair use, like all copyrights to Warner Bros. Discovery and DC Comics, who may I, Abigail Thorne, just admit great comic books and great movies. Yeah, yeah.

And also the film tells us that it was made during COVID. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Can tell. And we, we open on a TV that shows us a world falling apart. Uh, there's, there's war on the news. There's been something called the cyber wars, which we never really find out what they are, but, and this animated Alex Jones style conspiracy theorist broadcaster is ranting and raving about everything's going wrong, like the woke, the DEI, the transgenders,

they're taking over, when will Batman save us? And meanwhile, our lead character, Joker the Harlequin, is watching the news and on my notes they're smoking transsexualy. ALICE Yes. Yeah. NICOLAS Yes. This is our lead, Vera Drew, who I believe wrote and directed? ALICE I think so, yeah. NICOLAS Yeah.

Wrote, directed and starred playing the Joker, brackets trans femme. ALICE And she's really fucking good, right? And sets out the stool of this movie immediately, which is, this is your, like, trans-femme coming of age comic book movie, right? This is a lot more like my trans experience, I think it's a lot more confident in some ways. She starts with childhood, right, with her childhood, and the only... and like, growing up through TV as well, so like, a point in common here.

But we get through the TV-ness of this very quickly, right, of like, the only trans women that I ever saw, like, growing up on TV, were dead sex workers, or jokes on like, Jerry Springer. Yeah, yeah. Well, so, just to kind of pump the brakes a little bit, we'll go kind of beat by beat it. Sure. Because she tells us, the audience, she said, ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a joker.

She grew up in the Midwest, lovely little touch, she grew up in Smallville, and her favourite show was UCB, the United Clown Bureau, which is like Saturday Night Live, but everyone on it is the Joker! Yeah, the little digger Upright Citizens for going there as well too, but yeah. There's so much in this that I didn't pick up, like, I picked up a lot of the comic book references, cause there's so many DC comics references and Batman references, which I loved. There's a nice touch, which is that, so we see her as a child, and I believe that actor is a boy. And there's a nice touch, which is that her dead name is bleeped out.

Yes. So when her mom comes in and says like, oh, what are you doing? And we don't hear it. It's nice. Yeah, I really like that. For the first couple, I did think that she was calling him faggot the So when her mom comes in and says like, oh what are you doing? Boop! And like, we don't hear it. It's nice. Yeah. I really like that. For the first couple I did think that she was calling him faggot the whole time, but like, it took me, I'm gonna say an embarrassingly long time to realize that that's not what was happening there.

That would be an incredible dead name. It would be? Yeah, if your dead name was just faggot. They've named my ostensibly cisgender son the Fsler. You're talking about the references, that is one place that I think our analysis as Brits is gonna suffer somewhat, is that none of us grew up watching Saturday Night Live. Like, we don't... There's gonna be a shitload of references in this that I'm just not gonna really understand.

Because I don't know what the fuck's going on. I hear you people find that shit funny. I don't know, I've looked at it myself. We'll try and engage our baked bean brains and fucking like get some of it. Anyway, so there's a nice moment where, so she's bouncing on the bed and she's, you know, excited pretending to be in UCB and her mom is worried. And then we get this moment where Joker as an adult tells us, well, you know, me wanting to be a Joker should have been the least of her concerns because you know, I'm trans and and why not say, she said the word?

ALICE & TROY Yes. Not a metaphor. At all. ALICE This is the thing, there was discourse about I Saw the TV Glow that I thought was very unfair on both sides, I thought it was symptomatic of a very wounded and tense community, right, where someone said about- TROY It sucked, but it was great, they kicked it off right before we dropped the episode.

Really good of a- ALICE But somebody said about... Yeah, it sucked, but it was great, they kicked it off right before we dropped the episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really good of a... But somebody said about I Saw the TV Glow as a point of criticism that it doesn't even say the word trans, right, and in our sort of current circumstances they saw this as being a cowardly thing to do, right. And I don't think it was accurate as film criticism in the sense that that's a movie about not being able to have the word to say the thing, but like... Yeah, like it's sort of the point that they don't know. movie about not being able to have the word to say the thing. But like...

Yeah, like sort of the point that they don't know. I take the broader point, and I think it was well expressed in a more general sense, which is that there are not a lot of movies that are willing to say the word transgender with their chest, right? No, not at all. And this movie absolutely does. And also says the word cisgender. Yes.

Which I love, because, I mean, listeners, spoilers, that not really spoilers for the film, but like, spoilers for the trans agenda? The word cis is the woke mind virus, that's why the BBC never say it. Because it implies that we are two sides of the same coin, and that we are equal, and that there's nothing wrong with being trans. It's enough to make you become the fucking Joker. That's enough of that. Judging by how we tend to do these, uh, these intros to the bonus episodes, most of what you're

gonna have just heard is Abby talking about how cool it is for you to support independent podcasting, and what better time to do that than right now, if you wanna listen to the rest of the episode about the People's Joker. You're gonna have to support independent podcasting baby. You're gonna have to go to patreon.com slash kill James Bond and sign up today for like five pounds a month. Come on, you got five pounds. You've got a fiver. You've literally got a fiver on you right now.