Red Scare - Jewties

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

The ladies review Netflix's latest film offerings, Maimouna Doucoure's Cuties and Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

🎵 🎵 And we're back. We're back. Hey, Anna. Hi, Dasha. It's that nice, that fall weather out. Yeah, that leather weather.

Leather weather. Leather weather. Leather weather. Um, back to school season. Yeah. How did your, you had a good yard sale? I had a yard sale. It was really fun.

Did any psychos show up? No psychos. Well, they probably did show up, but they were lurking in the, in the distance. Yeah. But no creeps or weirdos or freaks approached me personally. There was a couple of people who were kind of sticky and annoying, but that's the worst of it. Everybody was really nice.

And I meant what I said. Everyone was hot. I mean, back when we used to do live shows, it was always like a good looking audience for the most part. Yeah. Some fucking bitch tried to like come for me because of my fat phobia. Excuse me? Because I made that tweet about how all of our fans have a great waist to hip ratios and

a girlfriend material. And I was like, wait, fat chicks can have a great waist to hip ratios. Waste to hip ratios. So proportions. Yeah. It's not about weight. It's literally not about weight. You could literally be like a fat bitch with a great waist to hip ratio.

I'm sorry. You can be. It's true. Of course. It's the, it's that's why they call it a ratio. Yeah. It's about keeping one small in proportion to the other. Yeah.

No, this is, I think this is what I have to call my book, the ratio. The ratio. It's about getting ratioed on Twitter and the waist to hip ratio. Yeah. And like liberal proportionalism in race relations. There's so many meanings. There's so many good ratios. Yeah.

No, it was really nice. We might do it again. It was a great vibe. Cool. Everyone was like really shy and sweet. Reminded me of being like really nervous and shy to like talk to people when I was young. Have you ever met any of your idols, Anna? Yeah.

They say you, they say you shouldn't. Yeah. They say you shouldn't, but I've, I've actually had really good experiences. Every time I've met one of my idols, except for, I'm going to see Nicholas Taleb. Not that he's my idol, but he blocked you. He blocked me many years later in a mass block. I think he like, when like 10 years ago when I was like, I don't know, like 24 or 25 or something, I was sitting at like an Armenian Lebanese restaurant in the Flatiron with like

two girls from the Gulf and my like Iraqi friend, my sister. And we were like a table of like eager Middle Eastern young people. And we sent some baklava to this table. He was like holding court with a bunch of like boring waspy academics. And he sent it back claiming that there was allergies, that somebody had allergies. I mean, maybe that's true. That's true. But he's such a like, he's such a like, I love Taleb because like, you know, like his

whole thing is like anti-fragile because he's a profoundly insecure and fragile person. He like weight lifts publicly. Right. Because he's like, just like brittle and defensive, which is cute. That's why you have such a big personality because you're so small. But I also like him because he's like a classic Middle Eastern man who combines feminine vanity with masculine authoritarianism, which is like the grossest combo ever. Totally.

It's like your boyfriend backhanding you with a perfectly manicured hand. With his dainty glove. He has his chest waxed, but demands that you wear a burqa at all times. When I was really drunk in Paris, I thought I saw Claire Denis and I like ran up to this older French lady at a restaurant and but she apparently I was like, are you and she turned around and was like, yes, I'm an actress. It was like another like older French actor who I didn't recognize. But then I was like, oh yeah, I totally know who you are.

But when I did see Claire Denis at the high life screening, like a year and a half ago, I did auto say out out loud the second I saw her went, there she is. There she is. Oh my God. Did she hear you? Yeah, I think so. I was a little, I mean, we never met, but she did hear me say there she is. She was mortifying.

Yeah. Yeah. That's like embarrassing and sucks. I met Camille Polya. I have to remember to pronounce it with the soft G at a book signing years ago with my sister. And she was really nice and cool. She like wanted to talk to everybody and was like very down to earth. And, you know, her publicist or whoever was the one like calling the shots was like giving

everybody like five seconds. It was like the Apollo theater really drag you offstage. But yeah, it just, yeah, I remember like the kind of like nervousness and shyness I experienced as like a young person that has all but fallen away. So it was like a very nice and wholesome experience. It sounds nice. If you guys do another one, I had all some of my wares. Yeah, you should.

Yeah. Some of my Ambien Farfetch purchases that I don't want. I also accidentally brought a bag of my dirty underwear because I dumped some clothing on top of it. And I was like, oh yeah, I should just like sell this. That's where you were really making a killing in the panty game. Disgusting airy panty. They're not even nice.

Victoria's Secret Pink. Is Victoria's Secret closed everywhere in the city? It seems to be. I haven't seen a, seen an open one for a second. It's funny that it took COVID because, you know, in all of my years going into Victoria's Secret and getting migraines from the house sent, there have been like so many instances where I picked up a pair of underwear and it had skid marks or like snail tracks on it already because somebody had tried it on in the fitting room and they got dropped back into the pile.

Oh my God. Yeah. And it's all like schmatas made out of plastic. What else is going on? Jack shit. I don't know. Not much. We're talking about cuties today.

Minions. Minions. What does minions mean? Cuties? Small ones? I think it means like cuties. And if we get to it, the new Charlie Kaufman film also on Netflix, what did you think of cuties?

Pedophile. Yeah. This is so deeply offensive and objectifying. Yeah. I thought it was a fine, normal, somewhat woke, libtard film. Yes. I was surprised by the Republican backlash actually. First of all, I thought it was a documentary.

I thought it was a miniseries, kind of like dance moms. Yeah. And then I realized it was a French film. It's not even an American film. No, of course. French people get a little bit of extra latitude because they have a different concept of sexuality than Americans. They don't believe in age of consent.

Yeah. They're all pedophiles and they love making movies about girls getting their periods. Yeah. And getting their cherries pop. That's like most, that's like half of French movies anyway. So. Yeah. It's like she's ripe, like a fine, soft cheese.

But it also, I thought had kind of, I thought the Republicans would almost like it because of all the kind of Muslim stuff. And the social commentary. Yeah. It was like, it was a movie that was simultaneously, gently critical of Islamic traditionalism and also of the objectification and over sexualization of children in the West. It was basically a critical film. It was about, yeah, a girl trapped between the decadent West and the brutal oppressive

Muslim upbringing. Yeah. It was like submission for Zoom or like TikTok girls. The girl was really beautiful and a really good actress. She was a terrific actress. She was incredible. The way she cried on cue. I think she really like made that movie like watchable for me.

A lot of the, and her parents, you know, the actress who played her mother and her aunt. Yeah. Their immigrant rage was very triggering for me and so it was like emotionally resonant. Did you find the depictions of sexualized preteens to be gratuitous? No. Really? I did a little. Maybe a little during the dance scenes.

It's just, yeah. They were a little edgy, but like. Well, because the movie's supposed to kind of be, yeah, it's a critique of the over sexualization of children. It has to make you feel uncomfortable. It's a critique which you can't make without depicting it essentially. Right. You have to like exemplify and depict it, but it's not an endorsement by any means.

Like, you know, in the final scene, right, Amy, the protagonist, Amy Therese, the protagonist. With her big 11 year old naturals, jumps off of the stage and abandons the routine and runs home, but doesn't agree to participate in her father's wedding. I'll explain the plot in a moment. But goes outside and engages in an age-appropriate activity of jumping rope with the local girls. It's a perfect like boilerplate centrist moral lesson, like instead of seriously interrogating the duality of extremes, you compromise by accepting liberalism. Right.

Exactly. She doesn't don her traditional, uh, Sangoese gown and instead wears like a Henley, like a nice. Skin jeans. Yeah. Like a nice neoliberal subject and does something age-appropriate. Yeah. I think sisters on the mic.

So this is, so this is a coming of age comedy drama that was written and directed by this French Senegalese woman, Maimouna Ducourt, and this is her featured directorial debut. And the girl is, Amy is played by Fatia Youssef. She's a Senegalese immigrant in France who finds out her dad is taking a second wife. He's in Senegal there in France and she falls into a group of like neighborhood bad girls who it turns out are actually training for a twerking competition, um, and they live in the kind of like projects or whatever. Public housing, um, I feel like a lot of the people who were mad about the kind of over

sexualization and objectification of children probably didn't get much farther than the poster. Well, that's, yeah, so the Netflix promotional materials were very different from the, like is the Sundance and promotional materials in France. Yeah. That did make it look kind of like a dance mom's style, salacious. Yeah. They were wearing like, you know, purple lipstick and like teal crop tops.

Which they wear in the film, yeah. And so a lot of like right-wingers kind of lost their shit. Usually it's the left losing their shit in recent history. So this is refreshing that the right-wingers. Yeah. They were like culture awardees. Exactly. Can't hashtag cancel Netflix, got trending Tulsi, tweeted about it.

Yeah. What did Tulsi say? She said that it, um, she said something kind of crazy, a little crazy. Yeah. She said, child porn cuties will certainly wet the appetite of pedophiles and help fuel the child sex trafficking trade. One in four victims of trafficking are children. It happened to my friend's 13 year old daughter, Netflix, you're now complicit, hashtag cancel

Netflix. Hi. I mean, cancel Netflix. I'm on board. Whatever it takes. Yeah. Cancel Netflix for their predatory pricing and streaming services, not for this movie. I think yet it's all a marketing sigh up by Netflix, as you said.

Yeah. To generate outrage over a totally inoffensive, uncontroversial French, like French people love, uh, like social commentary, totally. That's what all the movies are about. And they hate Muslims. And they hate Muslims. Yeah. So it's a great French film and people, well, people were so but her over the marketing

and promotional materials, they forgot to watch the film and they totally missed the part where the food preparation ritual is supposed to be, um, evocative of FGM. Like when the girl walks into the room and there's like, uh, like scissors and calipers and all sorts of weird tools and they are just like, oh, um, today you will become a woman and you're sitting there like, Oh my God, no, no, and she's like, you will prepare food for your father's second wedding and you're going to peel all of these 50 onions and one sitting and you're just like, Oh, and then she goes to the closet and looks, there's like this weird kind of like, I thought the weakest part of the film where she has this

like kind of symbolic fantasy disassociation with that Senegalese traditional dress and the dress starts like bleeding. Yeah. You think she cut herself or something initially, but it's like a total FGM reference. I didn't pick up on that, but that's us too. Yeah. I think that's that's like my reading of it, but nobody got offended. I mean, the Republicans should be spinning their wheels at that though.

I guess it's like pro it's anti Islamic. Exactly. That's why I think it would have resonated with Republicans. Yeah. It's, it's about kind of the oppression of yeah, polygamists. This movie is like that comic that people share on Twitter of on one hand on the left, it's like a woman in a Birken on the right. There's a woman in a bikini.

It's like, this is the same kind of oppression. Yeah. Yeah. But it takes 90 minutes to get to that same pieces though I did. Well, it's clearly also, it's like QAnon trickle down of like, this is, this all goes back to Epstein, honestly, it's like, the right wing has this like vigilante pedophile justice thing, which is weirdly mirrored on the left with like, age gap discourse. And typically by like, women who are obsessed with like true crime stuff and like sex crimes

who think everything is like, who have to live under like constant fabricated psychological threat of sexual violence to justify their perpetual victimhood. So there's just a ton of like, pedophilic hysteria that's very hard to critique because people will inevitably call you a pedophile or say that you're quote telling on yourself. You got called a pedophile for saying that it was fine for Johnny Depp to date Winona Ryder when he was 26 and she was 17. Yeah. I said that that was normal to me and lots of like, I don't know, woke zoomer virgins

or like doing vomiting emojis at me and stuff, but which I get sex is super scary. If you haven't, I got called a pedophile for saying that Baron had like a stately and statuesque profile. I don't want to fuck Baron Trump. He has an upside down ear and I'm not horny for large adult blonde males. Yeah. I got in trouble for calling him big family of pogs. They're like, oh, you're objectifying a child.

It's like, what do you think like, immigrant aunties do at parties? They're like, look at him. He's a real lady killer Casanova, please. But all of it to me seems symptomatic of just a general kind of like powerlessness. Yeah. You know, Yeah. I'm here to tell you vigilantism is for losers.

It takes a lot of energy and burns a lot of calories and these people aren't interested in burning calories and it just, it sucks because it's, it's like, yeah, okay. The world is shitty. The system is rigged against you. You have to pay kind of a built in bribe everywhere you go, but just like accept that and move along. You don't have to like weed out instances of evil and corruption everywhere because they exist and we all know they exist.

Right. And it's like gay and pathetic to like dwell on them. Pedophilia is just, it's a very like kind of black and white issue for people to become really intensely invested in. Like black people can't be pedophiles. Only white people. Only white men can be, women and black people cannot be pedophiles. And of course, human trafficking is a problem.

There are like, there are elite superstructures that oppress great swaths of people, but what I, the Republican kind of argument anxiety about cuties seems to be that like pedophiles will be, as Tulsi said, it'll like wet their appetite and help fuel child sex trafficking. And like, they're scared pedophiles will jack off to this movie. It's like, they're already jacking off to everything, they'll find something else to jack off to. I mean, it's, we can't censor things on the ground that a pedophile might find it. Pedophiles, yeah.

Are very industrious. Do you want to ban children in general? Yeah. We have to put burqas on children. We have to put burqas on the kids because. But that's, no, that's the thing. It's like, have the right-wingers heard of YouTube or TikTok, which are breeding grounds. They're like clearing houses for pedophiles.

Like there was that story that the cut published a couple of weeks ago that I was reading in a moment of weakness, because it got like targeted to me as like in an ad about this family of vlogger influencers who had a bunch of children and they adopted a Chinese child. Who it turned out like from China, because it's one of the easiest countries to adopt from, I guess it's harder to adopt in the United States allegedly. And plus they wanted like an exotic flavor child. And of course it turned out that this child had a lot more developmental and behavioral problems than, of course, had been apparent at the time.

And they slowly and quietly kind of gave him away. So he disappeared from their vlogging content. And of course their fans and followers who are even bigger losers than they are picked up on this and tried to cancel them. But the story is like gross all around these people, you know, it's like follow our adoption journey to mainland China. But the sickening kind of tangential, like off topic stuff that like emerged from reading this article is that there's a lot of these families who like pimp out their kids on social

media and make tons of money and get like products and endorsements and stuff like that. And they'll publish things like preteen daughter shaves her legs for the first time or preteen daughter goes bra shopping for the first time. And recently, I guess Google deleted a bunch of this sort of content from YouTube because it was like literally like pedophiles or congregating and time stamping, time stamping it. And it's like, what do you expect? Yeah. I mean, again, cancel Netflix, I'm on board.

But if we're canceling stuff, why not cancel Pornhub or X videos or like actually very visibly expeditive industries in which like actual child pornography is routinely disseminated. Yeah. That warps people's ideas about sexuality to begin with. Yeah, or like, I mean, I don't know, pedophiles are a tale as old as time. They've always been around. They'll always be around. It's kind of an uphill battle to root them out.

It sucks. It's like one of the worst things that, you know, well, the problem with pedophiles to me isn't necessarily their pedophilic. I'm just like too old for them is that they don't like me. It isn't necessarily that the desire isn't the problem, it's the abuse of power. That's what's so heinous about Epstein more so than the fact that he had an appetite for 15-year-olds. Yeah, I agree.

It's that there was like an elaborate kind of trafficking system that perpetuated. That was like farming out girls to other shadowy figures who we'll never hear about. And that comes from power. The problem isn't like some lone pedophile jacking off to TikTok videos. And the other thing is I guarantee you pedophiles have a black market and like their own social network where they disseminate gruesome, gory, explicit videos of children being like trafficked and raped. They don't need to jerk off to cuties.

Oh, they probably would. They definitely will now that all this marketing brought them to the water. And once they find out about the rest of Verite style of French cinema, they'll be really stoked. Hey guys, have you heard of Serge Gainsburg? I don't know. I don't think any art should be censored. It's an age-old conversation about pornography too where it's like you have to kind of intend,

does matter. But I did, from a filmmaking perspective, I did find the cinematography to be gratuitous. If you can make a major criticism about the film, I agree it has to be depicted. But there is a kind of stylistic choices and kind of lingering shots that did feel that made me uncomfortable. Like the wet-ass posse video a little bit was like that sort of thing. I think the worst critique that you can make of this movie is that it's a little boring, a little literal, a little on the nose and a little undeveloped.

There's no continuity between the overall pace of the film, which is boring and uneventful, and then these periodic, very gratuitous scenes. But it's not like dogtooth or something, you know, or like... Well, remember when 13 came out? I haven't seen that, but it was suggested to me because I watched it. Right. Well, there was all a bunch of controversy when 13 came out as well. That was also a controversial movie because it depicted young girls engaging in over-sexualized

behavior and cuties deals with 11-year-olds, which is more kind of shocking. But Little Miss Sunshine also came to mind. And I don't remember there being much of an uproar about that. But yeah, I think this movie also... It was pandering a little too much, like American values and sensibilities, hence the kind of gratuity. It was like a very French interpretation of American media culture and social media, which has now gone global or whatever.

But for being kind of like a critique of the market, it was rather market-friendly. Yeah. But it wasn't a very salient critique of the internet to me. Yeah. I guess French people have a different relationship to the internet. And child sexuality. Yeah. But that also has to do with, I think, kind of like in America, there is kind of an excessive

preoccupation with child sexual abuse and pedophilia because it's total shadow-self stuff. People or Americans are so repressed. And so Republicans, I think, haunted by their own confusing pedophilic impulses that they have to double down on hashtag cancel Netflix and stuff. Because I think if you don't have pedophilic impulses, like I don't, when you watch cuties, you're not like... It's kind of gross and maybe a little gratuitous, but you're not like struggling with any of these depictions, really.

Because watching kind of the more gratuitous scenes and cuties and thinking like, wow, this is very kind of pitiful and pathetic and sad. And if you get horned up by this, I don't know what to tell you because it's just depressing. These are children on no uncertain terms. My impulse watching these actresses is to protect them, not to dittle them. So to give them constructive activities, like a sketch pad, some watercolors, or a little drum set or whatever. Taking a nice ballet class.

Yeah, I'm just like, girls, do you like bar? Pole dancing? But yeah, I don't know, also, the kind of irony of all of this is that Americans are so busy protecting their kids from the world that they fail to protect them from the market. Everything is a safe space, but the safe space has been totally infiltrated by commercial interests who are selling you parcels of real estate within that space. And parents literally thrust their children into the market. I mean, they have to because everyone's busy making ends meet or whatever.

And also, I was thinking, keep in mind, this is a movie about immigrant girls, especially from global south backgrounds, mature faster. They go through puberty earlier, they have sex earlier on average, statistically. In America, this is the case with Middle Eastern, Latina girls, African girls, also African American girls. And that's also like, I remember reading, for example, I don't know if this kind of information is even disseminated in health classes now. I can't imagine what health classes in the United States are in the year 2020, but I

remember literally my health teacher saying, well, you know, some girls, especially from immigrant backgrounds, get their periods as early as 10 and other girls get them as late as 16 or whatever. But it's, I don't know how the underlying mechanics, but I think this has a statistical basis in reality. That girls from the global south mature. Yeah, I mean, in America, definitely black and Latino girls mature earlier than white girls.

I don't know. In America, although he's like milk drinking chicks, I feel like there's, I don't know, all the genetically modified foods in America also probably contribute to overdevelopment. Well, America does have a problem with precocious puberty, it does, the girls are maturing earlier and earlier probably because of the seed oils and the hormones and the food in the air. I'm sure of it. That would be my, yeah.

But early puberty also statistically means early sexualization, like if you go through puberty earlier, you have sex earlier, sure sort of thing. And I thought the film kind of did successfully, did depict them as children, like when they're flirting with like older boys who are kind of rejecting them. I kind of lost the thread when Amy posts the picture of her vulva on Instagram. I didn't get that. I just got a little confused. I think the point was like that she's a naive and a nerd and not an initiate into like the

way they do things around there and just kind of like over plays her hand. But even her group of girlfriends has like a weird, they're like, dude, like you made us look bad. Yeah. Cause she's kind of a spur loser. She's very timid and traumatized by her upbringing. Yeah. And I think like the other thing is like, you know, I don't think it was like that overtly

objectifying or grotesque or gratuitous. It's pretty like much what you'd expect of girls to act like in a culture where they're constantly besieged and attacked by sexual imagery. Like if you go on social media, you can see like women's pussies. You can see whole. If you watch rap music videos, you might see, you might see some lascivious dancing, which is where these girls, girls learned about twerking and whatnot. And kids are very impressionable.

The one thing that the movie did do well and that reminded me of very strongly was how intensely children feel their feelings like you think it's the end of the world when like your friendship with somebody breaks up or you get into a disagreement. You get bullied for being a whore. But it feels like the end of the world and not like a blip on the radar. And then, you know, the other thing, the other thing that kind of I have a bone to pick with is how the family is depicted, like her immigrant family, like they're not, they're not strict enough.

Her mother is, she's supposedly from this oppressive, oppressive culture, but her mother is actually very non evaluative and indiscriminate and tolerant and non judgmental. And finally she breaks down and slaps her around. Like, well, I sort of thought that my read on that was kind of that her mother was so kind of preoccupied in her own suffering. And kind of her husband taking a second wife and all of that, like, yeah, that sucks. Yeah. That the her aunt or whatever seemed to be the more kind of like authoritarian figure

in her life. Yeah. They were supposedly both authoritarian, but it's weird because she's an immigrant girl from a Muslim background at that. And she faces no consequences in the film. Like, you know, at some point she locks her little brother in the bathroom and he floods, he turns on the tub and floods the apartment. At some point she throws the phone out of the window and her dad calls as an act of rebellion.

You know, if I did either of those things, my mom would take out the bell immediately. There would be no discussion. Sure. And her mom is like, yeah, like long suffering and eternally tolerant in a way that didn't exactly add up because I think it was more of a like convenience, like a stylistic convenience, you know, to move the movie along. Well, they do that kind of ceremony with her where they're like splashing her with. Oh, it's like an exorcism ceremony.

Yeah. She's like twerking. Yeah. Which seemed to make some kind of, I don't know, case for like repressed female sexuality within the cultural framework of being from Senegal or whatever. And then when she, when her father arrives with his new bride and she glimpses her in her like scary white ghostly burka, that's the kind of stuff, you know, you think we'd like over here in the decadent West.

Yeah. But of course, yeah, I was reading that it was like an Axios article or maybe it was the Daily Caller one, one of the ones that you sent me. And it's like, you know, the other thing is like this, all this hysteria about the over sexualization and objectification of children is like preemptive and self-protecting because you also can't pump the brakes forever. Like this is the age 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, when girls start to get initiated into sex and become interested in sex.

And boys too. It's just like inevitable. Right. It's just really like the liminal phase. That's why like the dial, even like the dialogue around pedophilia is so kind of one dimensional and true American form because there's a huge distinction between pre-puberty and post-puberty. Right. That's like the major.

Exactly. And just the willing full kind of blindness to contacts, the kind of the thread that went pretty viral that pointed out that Johnny Depp dated, problematically dated Winona Ryder when she was 17 is all about kind of celebs. Yeah. Like Winona Ryder was a child actress. She wasn't a naive high school girl. They've both been working in the film industry for a long time.

It makes sense that she would date, it would be weirder for, there would be more of a power imbalance if she dated a boy her own age who wasn't famous. I know. I know. She'd be like the Epstein in the relationship. She's the one with the access to the private jet and the private island. There's just a total kind of misunderstanding of power and desire both. Yeah.

Wait, can you unpack that for a minute? Well, I actually think about like, I mean, even Seinfeld and I agree, like, yeah, 35 year olds shouldn't date 17 year olds. There are, you know, it is pathetic. But it's hardly pedophilic, like Shoshana, whatever her last name is, Shoshana Launstein had the tits of a 35 year old woman. She looks like a full grown mommy to me. She doesn't, I'm getting hungry just looking at those milkers, you know?

It's to like insinuate that there's some slippery slope or that Seinfeld was acting on some like pedophilic desire. Yeah. It's very confused. Yeah. I think he like, I mean. And Jessica Crispin actually wrote, just wrote a piece about the age gap discourse. Was it good?

I haven't read it. It is good. And it points out something that I thought was very astute that right men accrue power as they get older and women have more kind of power in the sexual romantic marketplace when they're younger. And so there's just a dissonance in saying that these younger women in these age disparity relationships are being exploited. Yeah.

Are agency less and powerless. Right. I like Jessica Crispin. She doesn't like us for some reason, but I don't remember why. We have a lot of overlap, but yeah, it's like this is literally an exchange. Yeah. It's just not an exchange that that's available on the market yet. It's not a purely transactional exchange, which by the way, the liberals want it to

be. But why would rich powerful men day poor powerless women, if not for some kind of kind of power that they wielded over them to exactly like these aren't, you know, I think it's like completely infantilizing and harmful to run with this narrative that women are helpless and hapless victims of circumstance. And I think a big part of it is kind of elder millennials now aging out of their most sexually desirable years wanting to stigmatize attraction to women who are younger than them. Yeah.

No, definitely. Well, I think, okay. I think it's girls again. We, I mean, we've talked about this a million times, girls, women, it's women who are also butt chugging the feminist Kool-Aid and want to believe that they can't be successful in romance and dating with men because they're too strong or too intelligent when really they have unpleasant chiseling personalities. That's all it is.

So preoccupied with true crime, sex crimes, one order special victims unit, they like have this conception of themselves as the most special victim in that manner, like universally these kind of exploitative oppressors. Yeah, which they're not. I mean, we've said this a million times too. In different cooks who will take what they can get. Someone made this like infograph of the ages of all of Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends and this sort of line of him getting older and them staying below 25, like, I mean, why

would Leonardo DiCaprio date a woman over 25? He doesn't, he's a movie star. Yeah. And he has a screw loose. He's like a weird perennial bachelor. Exactly. He's like, there's something admirable about it. Like, it's like, you know, again, the problem with being an older man who dates drastically

radically younger women, isn't that you're abusing or exploiting them. It's that you're a loser. Yeah. Like that extended loser who can't sustain normal intimate relationships with people your age. And the ultimate referendum on your only Leonardo DiCaprio's character will be one that he'll reckon with. There's no need to, you know, demand that he date an age-appropriate person.

Yeah. And this man has never been married. He's never had children. He's a weird kind of well-Becky man, like perennial, like vagabond world traveler. Like that's just his personality. Who cares? It's not criminal. He's not harming anyone.

I'm sure these chicks are more than happy to date Leo DiCaprio and go to Ibiza on his credit card. Yeah. They stand to gain a lot. Yeah. It's not the worst. From being his younger paramour. Yeah.

It's literally insane. And also, I think it's just like a lot of this kind of grouching is coming from women who realistically have nothing to offer a man. They don't cook. They don't clean. They're incapable of like reciprocal emotional exchanges. Everything is transactional for them. They have no ambitions or plans for the future.

They have no desire to have children or if they do, they've repressed it under layers of ideology. And I'm not saying, I know a lot of people are like, well, Anna wants is 35 and childless and wants women to go back into the home and be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. And I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying you have to be honest with yourself about what you want, which feminism is like congenitally incapable of doing. They're all constantly lying to themselves.

And like, I think for me personally, the best sort of reciprocal relationship is when the man handles the hard labor. And like the financial paperwork. Balances the child. What not? Yeah, and I do like the domestic duties. It just works out and it's mutually fulfilling, but emotional labor. But if you flip the script and switch the gender roles around and the woman's doing that

and the man is doing this, it's all the same. Whatever, whatever floats your boat. Division of labor. Yeah. I mean, I will say within the kind of the confluence of left and right pedophilic hysteria is at least the right wing is consistent in their like old, it's like they have old school moralizing and the kind of the new wave of like Q and on vigilantism, but it's all, it's a pretty unified perspective.

Whereas on the left, there's this massive point of cognitive dissonance where an 18-year-old in a consensual relationship with say a 35-year-old is like a powerless grooming victim, but a sex worker in the same age dynamic is making some kind of empowered choice. Yeah. That's the most psychotic element of it that it's okay if they, if there's a literal exchange of power and capital happening, yes, because we would never stigmatize sex work, people's personal private consensual relationships are up for being stigmatized left and right. I know the thing is like the left is really talented at stigmatizing the wrong things

and de stigmatizing the wrong things, pathologizing normalcy and normalizing pathology. Yes, like sex work should be stigmatized. There should be an element of shame around it. Not maybe for the sex workers, but for the clients for sure. It shouldn't be like an above board regular, I mean, it should be regulated, but it shouldn't be like a totally like a, you know, garden variety industry, like being a real estate agent or like a barista or something. Exactly.

It's a weird fundamentally black market field and I'm all for like protecting sex workers and making sure that they're not trafficked and prosecuted. But again, this is like one of those facts of life. We're never going to eradicate all of the harm and shame from sex work. It's impossible. And you're not ultimately protecting sex workers by de stigmatizing and normalizing sex work. Yeah.

Because we've, I mean, we've had this conversation a thousand times, but yeah, it's the normalization of sex work typically protects a very small already privileged segment of like visible escorts. Yeah. The best prostitutes. Women with no skin in the game. I think Palliah says this is like the best prostitutes are invisible. Yeah.

That's true. They would never be like advocating for themselves on, on Twitter or. Yeah. That's beautiful. The prostitutes and the morally exemplary are both invisible classes within society. Unfortunately, therefore, prostitutes are morally exemplary, the ones that can stay invisible. I admire those broads a lot.

Yeah. I admire that's why they get, that's what they get paid for. Yeah. Like I, you know, I have, I have a healthy dose of respect for real hookers and real strippers, but do I have a, a ton of like respect and admiration for middle class girls who show hole on only fans? No. No.

Like you, you know, have to earn it and you haven't thus far. It's always like, you know, you don't, you don't get respect. I mean, on a baseline as a human being sure, but you don't get respect for your profession merely because you think you should and you feel entitled to it. Right. It's like this whole dog dick. Because you're stealing marginalized valor. But yeah, but I wonder, I mean, both you and Greenwald made this point that like, yeah,

like the only relationships that liberalism permits are the purely transactional ones. Or bureaucratized. Yeah. Which is true. I mean, this goes also to Lash's very good point in his critical essay on Hillary Clinton about how Hillary's child care and education initiatives were supposedly in service of empowering the individual, but were actually designed to make the individual award of the expanded bureaucratic administrative state, which is absolutely what liberalism is and

like leftism to the same extent. And a friend of mine made the very kind of like meaningful, I think distinction that I've never heard before that leftist, for example, especially confuse the working class and the welfare class, like they're one in the same in their mind and they're not. And increasingly the middle class wants welfare concessions. That's what the left is really fighting for at the end of the day, which is fine. And we don't have to like evaluate it or discuss it. But yeah, you guys make this point that like transactional relationships, Trump, actual

relationships on some level, especially in the realm of something like pet discussions around pedophilia. But I'm wondering why I like still can't wrap my head around why pedophilia is such a obsessive topic of focus for both the left and the right today. Like there's got to be some psychoanalytic explanation is what I'm saying. Because, well, I think in America, there's two parts, there's a kind of like a shadow self projection formation happening because our culture is profoundly pedophilic. And rather than having a referendum on our decadent Western values, we'd rather kind

of isolate the problem on to, you know, these kind of shadowy sinister pedophiles. I think Epstein redpilled a lot of people into understanding that there was kind of a ruling class, which quickly gave way to kind of conspiratorial thinking again out of powerlessness, like not being able to actually address real structural problems. So QAnon is then becomes preoccupied with like policing individual problematic desires yeah that the left also sort of runs with and scapegoating individuals, many of whom happen to be like legitimately bad and deserve to be punished but who are nonetheless like they perform a scapegoat function right right as Epstein clearly does on some level.

And because it's such a categorically rigid issue, you know, no one, no one's add no one can advocate for pedophiles, because they're like deeply morally problematic. Except for Poggs, she she's she's a little and there's an essay somebody wrote like cataloging every instance of her defending gamble and she has a very, you know, kind of consistent and coherent argument as to why yeah but generally like pedophiles are beyond the pale. Exactly. So people have a instinctual understanding, right, the children ought not be abused.

Yes. Yeah. But then when in America as we extend the category of adolescence childhood to 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds, that becomes really problematic. Well that's I mean, okay, yeah, but that's I think what it is too. It's like the age of adulthood keeps getting pushed forward in perpetuity. So you have like a bunch of like 40 year old teenagers walking around, which is what millennials are for all intents and purposes.

And yeah, I think a lot of people have like are constantly harping about the grooming and age to age gap discourses are people who feel themselves to be perennial adolescents like they never grew up but are coming up against the limitations of their age that are finally starting to reveal themselves because you really start to feel your age. I think probably around, you know, 38, 40, as you enter into like official middle age or what used to be official middle age, right, which is where you start now 50, 60. That's so like the eldest millennials are 38 to 40. Yeah.

Now. Yeah. So that makes sense to me. Yeah. And women start feeling their age probably even sooner. Earlier. Yeah. Because this is when you start to confront your reproductive limits, which is scary.

I saw a good tweet from Lee Fang that I retweeted. He says, what motivates the ruling class is a routine desire for maintaining power and self-interest, but political storytellers need laureate emotionally driven narratives. So the far left and then so white supremacist elite in charge of the country just as the far right imagines a pedo cabal. And that's like, yeah, they serve similar functions and like, you know, black trans lives are untouchable in the positive sense and then pedophiles are untouchable in the negative sense.

Right. They're the two like extremes of the kind of like good and evil access in America. Right. The morality access. Yeah. So there's that and then I think also, I mean, the other thing that I was thinking of is basically that I think like pedophiles, yeah, provide kind of yeah, like a symbolic, a concrete scapegoat.

Yeah. That I think ultimately is about a correct feeling about the ruling class that they are evil, exploitative, kind of pulling the strings to meet their needs, which are exploitative and sick. And so pedophilia becomes like a perfect kind of illustrative talking point of this if like, that they exploit people in sinister ways that aren't necessarily sex trafficking. Yeah. That then get talked about way less.

Yeah. Because they're less exciting. Right. And not salacious. Yeah. But yeah, the other thing, yeah, so pedophilia is kind of a scapegoat or like a placeholder, I think, for general moral decay and decrepitude. And I think real feelings of class resentment.

Yeah, probably. And then I think it also could be channeled in more productive ways. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And then, but I also think like it, they, the kind of pedophile discourse reveals people's paranoia about the motives of others in this like war of all against all world, like everybody is suspect and everybody is projecting onto everybody else, right? Anyone can be a pedophile except for women.

I mean, not even women aren't safe. Yeah. I guess not. Yeah. Can women be pedophiles? That's a good question. Well, sure. I mean, go on Maxwell.

Yeah. That's true. But, but women are usually accessories to pedophilia. They're like accomplices and that they're like fixers and, and madams. Right. I mean, I'm sure there's female pedophiles. There's all sorts of degeneracy. Like diddling and fiddling.

Yeah. Um, anyway, any other thoughts on? No, can't really, wouldn't recommend cuties. Yeah. I wouldn't recommend it. I wouldn't not recommend it either. It's like literally a movie that I watched and forgot about. Yeah.

Other than the actress, the main actress, I hope she goes far. For sure. And, um, you know, I hope that when puberty hits, she stays as beautiful as she is now. It becomes the next Lupita Nyong'o. Um, is that Leia? That is roommate Leia. Yeah. Yeah.

We should also. Filmmaker said that she, I read the kind of the production tab on the wiki for cuties and she said that she worked with, um, that the casting process was extensive, that she kind of worked with the girls, her actors, about their own kind of experiences and that there was like a child psychologist present on set. Which I guess is, I mean, admirable, her due diligence or whatever, but it also kind of makes me think that she can't be that surprised that her film is controversial if she had to make it with a child psychologist on set, you know, like, if you need to hire a child

psychologist to make your movie, then you have to have an implicit understanding that your movie is dealing with experiences and subject matter that are going to make people feel troubled and uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, I was reading this, like, um, I don't know if I mentioned this already, um, but I was reading, um, like a quote from, from one of the articles of this Indiana congressman Jim Banks, who talks about, oh, the lessons taught in this film are not ones I want my

daughter's learning. The DOJ should be readying charges against Netflix for distribution of child pornography. Um, and I was thinking like, really, because the lessons of this movie are pretty like, also again, boilerplate and garden variety, but they're not bad. They're literally like, don't embrace extremes and until the very end, basically, and with the instances of kind of bullying that Amy experiences, at least when she first joins the twerking dance crew, um, she is having a pretty good time. Yeah.

It does seem like kind of a positive thing in her life initially. The funniest part of the, the movie though, I have to say is when, um, they mock her for being like flat as a board and like flat up and down or whatever, cause like these young ladies aspire to kind of like a video girl, Pog body, but I was thinking about how all the girls in dime square aspire to look like white Amy, like waves. And it's funny also how they kick the fat girl out of the click. I was like, this is like fat phobic. Totally.

There's a lot of problems with cuties. Looks must be canceled. Yeah. I would have liked it to be a better movie, but it's not the worst movie for a directorial debut. Sure. By a strong, beautiful woman of color. It's, yeah, it had some very sophisticated moments, but it's, yeah, I mean, it's certainly

not child pornography. No. Because it's intent isn't to titillate. Yeah. And if it does titillate some American Netflix pedophiles, then that's kind of a different comment. That's a different conversation. Yeah.

That's the one that censorship doesn't need to, you know, enter into. It's like, we should have a referendum on our pedophilic pornographic culture. Yeah, that incentivizes people to obsess over lurid, sensationalist topics like pedophilia while indefinitely postponing their own childbearing. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I also want to know how many of the women who are obsessed with age gaps in pedophilia have kids?

I mean, none. Like, none. Like 0.8%. 0.08%. Yeah. Anyway, shall we move on to Charlie Kaufman? I'm thinking of ending things. Me too.

It's the name of Charlie Kaufman's new film. Real drag. Yeah. Bummer. Wasted what? Like two and a half hours? Yeah. That thing was long.

Too much too long. The audacity to make a film that long and that boring. That bad. What was your interpretation of, there will be spoilers, I guess, obviously, but what was your kind of, I saw lots of, you know, if you type in, I'm thinking of ending things, explained is like the next thing that comes up. People really love to have movies digested and explained to them, but I saw many different kind of like interpretations of the meta narrative of the movie.

Yeah. For me, I thought, sorry, I thought it was about, it was like a horror movie basically about dementia or like Alzheimer's and the woman in it, she's like, she references this paper, she's writing about rabies in the first portion and like the virality of rabies and then she goes to her, she's having kind of ambivalent feelings about her relationship as she's enroute to visit his parents and then they have this kind of like psychedelic time at his parents house that sort of jumbled and haunting in a very Kauffman-esque way. And the parents like shape shift in age.

Yeah. And then, and meanwhile, it cuts to the kind of like footage of this janitor wandering around a high school where kids are rehearsing for Oklahoma and then the themes from those disjointed parts of the film are then echoed in the couple's kind of conversations. And so my take was like the whole movie is kind of the demented fever dream of this janitor who is the younger man. It's Jake. Yeah.

It's the kind of janitor who's having kind of demented hallucinations as he's reflecting on his life and relationships. Yes. Yeah. I would, I would agree with that. And I think, yeah, it's, it's also a movie about the kind of internal interior monologue of a guy who's been broken up with by his girlfriend. It seems to be from her perspective, but then becomes evidently sort of about his interior

space. Yeah. I think like the senility and dementia part is on point. It's sort of like, I mean, Charlie Kauffman is basically like David Lynch for ugly people. It's like his, his kind of aesthetic, but he's, he's into like the subconscious and like psychoanalysis, dreams, like this kind of thing and, and interior. The nature of memories. It reminded me of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and that it also dealt thematically

with a breakup through kind of the fragmented subconscious space of memory and brain damage and stuff. But eternal sunshine is a much better film that has a lot more kind of joy and whimsy nuance and whimsy in it because it was directed by Michelle Gondry. Yes. And every time Kauffman directs, I mean, people make this critique of him that I, it's hard to disagree with. It's like, it becomes this very, um, modeling kind of navel gazing.

Yeah. Um, thing that ought to be maybe tempered a little bit. Yeah. He, he has no restraint or discipline as a director. He's really like very much the kind of liberal Jewish child who no one said no to growing up. So he thinks he expresses every single thought that pops into his mind without a sense for like a hierarchy of importance.

And no one's there to tell him like, Hey, this is like a minutia and trivia and probably should not be fleshed out. Right. It's interesting because the woman's narration actually fell flat for me because it is, it's a masculine internal monologue and he really is a filmmaker for people who are, uh, uh, with overactive internal monologues who are obsessed or besotted with them. Right. Are you Jewish?

Right. Well, I thought that's why I kind of came away with the, the, um, the thought that it was all sort of his internal monologue and projections onto her. Yeah. I mean, right, my initial kind of problem with it was I was like, everyone in this movie is like talking in Charlie Kaufman's voice, which was an intentional choice on his part. Yeah. And it, that wouldn't be the worst thing if the movie was edited for interest and if

his inner voice was interesting, but it's not. Right. It's very, um, preoccupied, yeah, with its own kind of neuroses and suffering. Yeah. And here, this is my problem with Charlie Kaufman in general and with Jewish humor in general, as exemplified by people like Larry David and Woody Allen, who are by the way much better kind of, uh, directors, writers, but they have a touch of this. Um, he thinks he's that because he suffers more than most people that he's special, never

mind that he can't prove that he suffers more than most people, but because he's a kind of able to express his suffering more than most or willing. It's not even that he's able. He's just willing. Most people keep their shit under wraps, um, but, and I think like not only as a suffering in neurosis, but also his self-awareness of his suffering and neurosis and his like ability to make light of it kind of informs his feeling of like intellectual and moral superiority. You know what I mean?

I think Larry David and Woody Allen have this too. And the problem with it is that this is like a fundamentally delusional and self-flattering narrative. Right. Um, like he, he thinks that he's basically, um, a sage and an ironist and he's really a dupe. He's very easy to, uh, take advantage of or men like this are in general. It's like, remember that, um, New York MAG interview with Sunyi about Woody Allen and

she's like, well, he's so gullible and naive. Yeah. I mean, anyone can take advantage of him as Mia Farrow did. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, I am a fan of Kaufman's. I think he is like a, uh, a good, tremendous screenwriter.

Yeah. Um, I thought he did this very well and say adaptation where his character played by Nick Cage has like a twin brother who's the kind of less neurotic foil who's taking like a screenwriting seminar and trying to write like a very, um, uh, sort of banal kind of populist film that the Charlie Kaufman character feels. It's like exactly what you were describing. Yeah. He feels this kind of like moral intellectual superiority to his brother, um, but in their

dynamic again, not directed by Charlie Kaufman, um, there's more of like an irony, more of like a, a critique of the like myopic Jewish psyche. Yeah. Um, and when he's left to his own devices, he really like revels in it much more. Yeah. No, I, you know, I was just telling you, I watched being John, John Melk, which was like a palette cleanser afterward. And that movie is much better because again, he wrote it, but he didn't direct it.

Yeah. He needs to be curved. A little bit. Yeah. I would also say this, by the way, as like a person, I don't know anything about Charlie Kaufman. I've watched his movies like periodically, sporadically, but I'm like, I don't hate him as an artist.

I find him frustrating as an artist because he could be really good. I think that filmmaking is directing rather is not a good kind of medium for him. I thought. Yeah. Well, I've, um, I'm thinking of any of the things I guess is based on a novel by somebody else, someone else. And he wrote a novel recently that I've heard good things about, but he's, his impulses seem to me to work better kind of in a novel format where he can, he has more room for

like interiority and more readers have more patience kind of like I thought, um, I bet if we watched, I'm thinking of ending things twice, you would pick up on all these kind of clever things that he had sort of woven through the whole movie, but the audacity of expecting people to watch this movie in full at all. I know that he forecloses on that possibility by making a fucking two and a half hour long masturbatory like fever dream where nobody wants to, I mean, I feel like I've wasted two and a half hours. I mean, there's a part where, um, well, when she goes into his childhood bedroom, there's

kind of this lingering shot on his, um, his books, which has like, uh, has the David Foster Wallace essay collection and like a Pauline and then they're in the car and they start having this, um, this conversation about like Cassavetes that you realize is just like a Pauline Kale essay and then they start talking about David Foster Wallace and then also just verbatim kind of repeating portions of, and that's meant to convey, I guess, the experience of, uh, a person maybe afflicted with Alzheimer's whose mind is like jumbled with influence and information that isn't theirs. Yeah.

And that's interesting enough, but to expect people to watch two boring people sit in a car and recite DFW essays for such an extended portion of the movie is unbearable. It really made me think of ending things. I could just end it now. I could take poor Eli out with me. Um, yeah. The, I'm the girl in the movies, the guy. Um, yeah.

And it's like, literally, I thought, and thank God it didn't end up being, I thought it was going to be a two and a half hour movie about two charmless, unattractive people taking a charmless, unattractive road trip. And I was like, no, not today, say, and the other thing is usually, uh, he often usually uses like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener. And for various reasons, they were not available. Uh, so these people are like the DSA version of those actors, the male, what's the male actor's name?

I don't know. I actually like him. He's, he's very talented. He's a good actor in the Irishman. Yes. Yeah. He's a good actor. He's married.

He just had a baby with Kirsten Dunn's actually. Oh really? That's so cute. Um, that's really cute. Yeah. But the girl didn't really do it for me. It seems one of my friends made this point that, uh, Kaufman made this movie with the mentality that what people like about his films is women with frizzy hair, like talking

about their relationships and not the kind of like high concepts, um, unconscious like psychedelic elements of his films that people actually do like. And so he just write charmless car ride with charmless people. Yeah. And I think, yeah, he's like kind of like, um, not a faithful, uh, kind of interpreter of his own artistic vision. He's like not to be trusted on some level. Yeah.

Um, and it's like, you know, the best parts for me were like all that weird animal stuff when they get to the farmhouse initially and there's like the kind of weird like depression in the ground for, from when these pigs that they were raising on the farm were being eaten alive by maggots. Yeah. It was like this really bizarre morbid thing that almost reminded me like Ari Aster movies. Well, you haven't seen hereditary Tony Collette, who does a great job. I'm a big fan of Tony Collette.

She plays the mom. Yeah. She plays the mom in hereditary, which the movie was reminded me of, especially with the casting of Tony Collette, who I'm like, Oh, she's going to be really typecast now as this like, mom, horror, scary mommy. Um, but yeah, it was very reminiscent of, of hereditary. But it like, you know, that it had a winding scary house. Yeah.

But you keep waiting for something truly morbid and horrific to happen and it never does. Just the horrific mundanity of aging. Yeah. It's like a movie about blue balls just forever waiting to come, but you can't. I know at one point I was like, I realized that there was like 40 minutes left and I was like, there's not going to be a fucking payoff is that it's going to have one of those fucking stupid endings that's like, the ending was viewed. You decide.

What do I don't know? What do you think it was about kind of ending that's like going to be so unsatisfying? I knew this movie was going to be a wash for me when, um, the, the kind of tiny font and the twee score at the beginning, I was like, this is already a twee and whimsical movie. You don't really have to like insist on it. But if you insist, but if you insist, I mean, was there a producer to no one, can no one stop him? This is the real movie that Netflix should be canceled for not cuties.

Right. I bet they, they probably developed it and paid for it and so they don't need to, that's the problem with a lot of these streaming platforms, Netflix included is that they pour all this money into development rather than acquisition. And so then these movies end up being made that really no one likes or wants to see. And can we just talk about also how it looks like shit? It reminds you of like when we saw Joker with Maddie and she was like, this movie looks like shit.

And I was like, Oh yeah, I didn't even think of that. But it just like the format, the color grading, it all looked like shit. And then you watch like Eternal Sunshine or being John Malkovich and they look great. Like even if you don't like the movies, they look visually very good. Well, yeah. I mean, I snagged to New York, I think is his best direct, directorial venture, Animalisa, the puppet one he made also very bleak. It's just it's very, I would love to see him, I don't know, like actually reckon with himself

more and try like how so like to engage with the themes that he's preoccupied with in a way that is kind of more spirited and generous. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, okay, the problem with Charlie Kaufman is that he has a very obscure, arcane, hyper specific, idiosyncratic view of the world, which is great as an artist. The problem is that you have to then part of the work of being a good artist, a good alter is turning that, that kind of appetite for arcana or whatever into an idiomatic vision. Like I forgot who said this about Fellini, but Fellini, everything we think of Italian

cinema comes from Fellini, like the busty whores, the kind of philandering cats, the vintage cars, whatever, that's all his personal canon that he, you know, there's diaries from when Fellini was like a 16 year old boy that he made little sketches of all these types to Pajoo, whatever that then made it into his films. And they appear again and again, you know, David Lynch is like the, the auteur of a, of Americana, dark side, like, I'm not even a fan of David Lynch, but when you think of like a certain kind of like hopper-esque, yeah, CD underbelly of like all American life, that's David Lynch.

Well, Lynch has a sense also for entertainment, which is a big part of filmmaking, like he's not a neurotic. That's the thing. Yeah. He's a goi. Yeah. And like, and he's an, an athlete, you know, which Kaufman is, is not, he has these kind of aesthetic preferences for frizzy-haired women and like layers wearing sweaters and

stuff, but. He should direct a Pantene Probe commercial, like in reverse, but it's like, yeah, he, you can't be mad at people. He's not interested in like beauty. Yeah. Or like, or even the dark side of beauty or anything. Well, he's interested in a very kind of hyper specific, arcane definition of beauty that only he's aware of that people like don't get.

It's like when I try to explain to people why Steve Bannon's hair and tan are appealing or whatever. Right. But exactly. People don't get it. They don't get it. And then he feels vindicated as a kind of misunderstood genius, struggling artist, perennial underdog, because people don't enjoy watching his films.

Yeah. You can't be mad and but her that people don't get you. And by the way, I actually, Eli's been reading this, a clunker of a book. I know the book comes highly recommended, but it's like, it's a novel about kind of like, it's a critique of wokeness to its credit. But the thing is also, it's like one of his movies, it's like, you know, 3000, it's like the Bible. It's like 10,000 pages long, you have to really slog through.

And I opened it up and he makes some funny points, but I like listed through a couple of pages and it's more of the same like hyper quirky, idiosyncratic, like look how clever I am, like self satisfied stuff. And I just hate being confronted with an artist's inner process like that. I don't ever want to be subject to somebody's interior monologue ever. I mean, it's audacious to expect people to enjoy something like that or to be patient with it or to engage with it. Yeah.

It's, it's, he needs to really check his privilege. I think he does, like male Jewish privilege because I think few people would be able to take, he's really carved out like a niche for himself where he's able to get away with a show like this. And I mean, to his credit, he's been incredibly remarkably successful being an annoying, needling neurologic. So good for him. Mausoleum.

And I say this, by the way, with utmost respect and admiration for Charlie Kaufman because I do enjoy him as an artist and I'm rooting for him. He's just clearly very depressed. Is he? He'd be depressed if you had his money and reputation. Does he have children? That's a good question. He has a wife.

He has like a Jewish yoga wife. I believe that he's legitimately depressed or at least attached to his depression in a self-sabotaging way, which is still a kind of depression, a kind of pitfall. He should go on a well-beautran. Yeah, he should. I'd love to see a Kaufman movie on well-beautran. God. I mean, he's incredibly productive for a depressed person.

I will give him that. Yeah, that's true. Most people in that state of mind would probably wallow rather than make a two and a half hour long film. I mean, look, if you can, he has one child. Okay. Well, he's not doomed. And an Irish wife.

I lied. You lied. Irish yoga wife. Yeah. But good for him. I mean, he has at least one kid. His life is complete. And he's made a ton of movies.

Yeah. He's not, he's no loser this guy, even though he likes pretending that he's one. To be a, to be an underdog, yes. Yeah. Anyway. I'm looking at my notes. How are we doing? We're at hour 20.

We could wrap it up. I didn't think that I could talk so long about, I'm thinking of an absolute sonora of a film. I will never be watching this film again. And in fact, I regret having seen it. And I would rather watch, why did we watch this to, uh, because I think people were talking about it and there was even a thread on the sub where people were like, this, here's my problem with Charlie Kaufman as an artist and I was like, yes, somebody gets it. Yeah.

Mostly we just didn't want to talk about Biden anymore. Oh yeah. Talk about dementia. Yeah. Speaking of, yeah. I mean, what else is going on like, uh, was that, sounds like a ship, it's like a schooner. Um, I don't know, nothing's going on. I'm offered to debate Biden on Rogan, which I think is really sick and should happen.

Yeah. Cool idea. Like J.K. Rowling's writing a book about a man who wears women, women's clothing to kill women. Yeah. Yeah. Which is incredible. History goes on.

More of the same. More of the same. I can't believe somebody is writing a book about Charlotte Clymer, good for her. About Samantha Pritchard. Anyway, that's all I really got. That's all for us. That's all folks. See.

We'll see you in hell. We'll see you in hell. We're not pedophiles by the way. But what? We're not. We're not pedophiles by the way.