Speaker 1: On the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 2: The questions asked if movies have.
Speaker 1: Women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and
Speaker 1: husbands or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy. Zeph
Speaker 1: and bast start changing with the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 3: Hello, Jamie, would you like to come eat some sandwiches
Speaker 3: with me in my room full of taxidermy birds?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 4: I felt personally attacked by that scene as someone who
Speaker 4: recently asked you to take care of the taxidermy bird
Speaker 4: that I taxidermied this year.
Speaker 1: I was like, that is I.
Speaker 4: Mean, there are a lot of communities that are poorly
Speaker 4: represented in this movie, but true, I have yet to
Speaker 4: see the essay on taxidermists.
Speaker 3: Respond, well, maybe that's your responsibility.
Speaker 4: Exidermists are regular people, just like you and me, And
Speaker 4: I think that the one thing that Norman Babs does
Speaker 4: correctly say is that it's actually a very affordable hobby.
Speaker 4: People think it's going to be expensive. The only real
Speaker 4: expense is your time and your ability to wish to
Speaker 4: dissect things. Yeah, but I think that as long as
Speaker 4: you're doing it legally and good. So sorry to start
Speaker 4: with my stumping for fellow taxidermists.
Speaker 3: No no, no, please, I.
Speaker 1: Used to a symbol in a Hitchcock movie.
Speaker 4: I mean it's good, but taxidermists didn't recover for years
Speaker 4: after this movie.
Speaker 3: Maybe yes, it protected class of people taxidermists.
Speaker 4: The wild thing is there's like all these laws around taxidermy,
Speaker 4: which is good, but essentially you cannot and should not
Speaker 4: taxidermy an animal that is in any way endangered or protected.
Speaker 4: There's all these laws around it. But you can taxidermy
Speaker 4: any animal that is technically an invasive species as long
Speaker 4: as they are already dead.
Speaker 1: So there's all.
Speaker 4: These complicated rules. But when it was explained to me
Speaker 4: by my gorgeous, amazing taxidermy instructor, I.
Speaker 1: Was like, wow, it all does make sense.
Speaker 4: But she sources the birds that we taxidermied in her
Speaker 4: class like they were like ethically, I don't know. I
Speaker 4: mean they were invasive species and on a farm and
Speaker 4: killing animals, and so I guess then you're allowed to.
Speaker 1: Kill the birds.
Speaker 4: But she bought the birds from this guy who like
Speaker 4: owned a farm in Wisconsin, and she's been buying European
Speaker 4: starling bird corpses from this man for a decade and
Speaker 4: he has never asked her what she's using the birds for.
Speaker 1: Isn't that so scary? He's like that, I don't want
Speaker 1: to know?
Speaker 2: Is why?
Speaker 1: Just if the check clears, it's all good.
Speaker 3: Also, it all comes full circle because someone who had
Speaker 3: a farm in Wisconsin, ed Gean, aka the person who
Speaker 3: the book of this movie was loosely based on.
Speaker 1: So no, well not mister ed that's a different guy.
Speaker 1: That's a horse.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it all comes full circle.
Speaker 1: It's true.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Hello, and welcome to the Bechdel Cast. I think
Speaker 3: that was a good trip, perfect, flawless, no notes. My
Speaker 3: name is Caitlin Derante, my name is Jamie Loftus, and
Speaker 3: this is the podcast where we discuss either taxidermy or
Speaker 3: looking at your favorite movies from an intersectional feminist lens.
Speaker 3: That long conversation about taxidermy mostly past the Bechdel test,
Speaker 3: I believe, until we got to the pharm owner.
Speaker 1: I think it did. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And also on the record, our friend Bryant is watching
Speaker 4: my bird.
Speaker 1: I checked in on him a couple of times. He's
Speaker 1: doing good. Glad to hear it. But that didn't pass
Speaker 1: the Bechtel test. But why is that?
Speaker 4: It's a media metric that we use as a jumping
Speaker 4: off point for discussion. Certainly not the be all and
Speaker 4: all of discussion at all, but Kitlin.
Speaker 1: What the hell is it?
Speaker 3: Well, it's a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel,
Speaker 3: sometimes called the Bechdel Wallace Test, first appearing in Alison
Speaker 3: bechtel comic Dex To Watch Out For in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 3: Intended originally as just like a one off goof a
Speaker 3: bit a joke that has since been kind of co
Speaker 3: opted into this pretty widespread media metric. There are many
Speaker 3: versions of it. The one that we use is this,
Speaker 3: two characters of a marginalized gender have to have names,
Speaker 3: they have to speak to each other, and their conversation
Speaker 3: has to be about something other than a man, and
Speaker 3: ideally for us, it's a big meaty conversation. Yeah, okay, sure,
Speaker 3: sorry to say meaty.
Speaker 4: Now, as a member of the tax star of his community,
Speaker 4: I know a thing or two about meat.
Speaker 3: Sure. So that's our show, today's episode. It's it's a big.
Speaker 1: One, A long time coming, I think, yeah, because at
Speaker 1: this point this show has been running long enough that
Speaker 1: we've covered it lee.
Speaker 4: One or so of the whatever considered the big director Ouvra.
Speaker 1: Which is mostly white guys. It includes this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we've never covered this guy. And here we are.
Speaker 1: The day has come.
Speaker 4: We are covering nineteen sixty Alfred Hitchcock Psycho. It's true
Speaker 4: and we have an amazing guest. I'm so excited for
Speaker 4: our guests.
Speaker 3: Yes, she is a film critic, podcaster, and columnist for
Speaker 3: Total Film Magazine. It's Leila Latif.
Speaker 5: Hi, Welcome, I'm so excited. Longtime listener, first time cooler, welcome.
Speaker 1: Never stop calling.
Speaker 2: But yeah, like this is not a soft landing.
Speaker 3: This is heavy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm excited. This is a challenging movie in many
Speaker 5: many regards, so it seems to be a different movie
Speaker 5: every time I watch it.
Speaker 4: It really is, I mean, and this is I think
Speaker 4: part of the reason we haven't been acting avoiding Hitchcock.
Speaker 4: But part of the reason that I've avoided it is
Speaker 4: just logistically, there is so much written about this movie
Speaker 4: and this director that you're like, how do you even
Speaker 4: prepare for this episode?
Speaker 1: And we're about to find out.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, Jamie, you and I were both talking off
Speaker 3: Mike about how we did a lot to prepare, like
Speaker 3: the normal amount, but because there's just so much with
Speaker 3: this movie. We feel like we've barely scratched the surface.
Speaker 3: I kind of took approach where I was like, well,
Speaker 3: there's just too much, so I'm going to do almost nothing.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: Except I read like Anthony perkins entire Wikipedia page. I
Speaker 3: read a bunch of stuff about ed Gean. I listened
Speaker 3: to part one of the Behind the Bastards episode on
Speaker 3: Alfred Hitchcock. I obviously watched the movie several times.
Speaker 1: I would say, that's not almost nothing. Why are you
Speaker 1: being down with yourself? I was like, quite a bit.
Speaker 2: You're right, it's like a working week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been a lot. Yeah, but I still feel
Speaker 3: very unprepared.
Speaker 4: I think it's kind of hard not to. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think between the three of us, you know, we've
Speaker 4: I think it's interesting with this movie. There's so many
Speaker 4: ways into talking about it, and it just seems sort
Speaker 4: of like what stands out to you personally that you're
Speaker 4: kind of drawn to. I was really drawn to how
Speaker 4: serial killers and like mental illness are portrayed in this
Speaker 4: movie and how it influenced other movies.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should just get into our personal histories.
Speaker 4: Because when I was rewatching it I haven't seen this
Speaker 4: movie in probably close to ten years, and I kind
Speaker 4: of forgot how well we get to know Marian before
Speaker 4: she dies, right, which there's a lot to talk about
Speaker 4: with Marion for sure, which I feel like you wouldn't
Speaker 4: know by the scenes from this movie that are the
Speaker 4: most famous.
Speaker 1: But we'll get to.
Speaker 3: That, yeah, because it's just like she's getting stabbed.
Speaker 4: But first let's get through what our personal history is
Speaker 4: with I guess this movie and also just Alfred Hitchcock
Speaker 4: in general.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Leila, what's your experience with the overall?
Speaker 5: Psycho just feels like something that I'd like never not
Speaker 5: seen in a weird way, like I think is like
Speaker 5: by the time I came to it, I just like
Speaker 5: I'd seen so many parodies and references, and I knew
Speaker 5: exactly what was going to happen with like the chest
Speaker 5: spinning around, and I knew that there was this whole
Speaker 5: thing where you know, she kind of dies at this
Speaker 5: like midway point and stuff. So like I had so
Speaker 5: much knowledge coming into it, and I watched every horror
Speaker 5: movie like way too young.
Speaker 2: It is probably like seven when I watched this for
Speaker 2: the first time.
Speaker 5: Like it just feels like omnipresent in my life in
Speaker 5: a weird way, but like as a result like coming
Speaker 5: back to it, and I'm kind of like you, Jamie,
Speaker 5: Like it probably been about ten years since I've seen
Speaker 5: it last, but it feels like the parodies could kind
Speaker 5: of like gotten away from it, And it was really
Speaker 5: nice to come back to because I reimagined Marian because
Speaker 5: it's kind of like what she'd been in the culture
Speaker 5: is like Drew Barron more from The Scream basically of
Speaker 5: like the big star who like shot gets killed off,
Speaker 5: rather than like she's in it till like the midway point.
Speaker 3: I would say, yeah, the first forty five minutes or so, and.
Speaker 4: She has like in a whole arc. It's like, it's
Speaker 4: why I totally I didn't remember.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it didn't feel like the rug pull that i'd
Speaker 5: like remembered. Like I've still left this feeling like she
Speaker 5: was the star of this movie. She was still the
Speaker 5: protagonist rather than just some kind of plot twist device.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, Jamie, how about you?
Speaker 4: My history with this movie, same thing. I mean, I
Speaker 4: found myself as I was watching it this time. It
Speaker 4: surprised me in a lot of ways. And it also
Speaker 4: I don't know This feels like one of the few
Speaker 4: movies where it's impossible to have a clean reading of
Speaker 4: it because everyone knows what happens at the midpoint of
Speaker 4: the movie. I would love to be able to see
Speaker 4: this movie and not know that happens, but it's impossible.
Speaker 4: By the time I saw it for the first time
Speaker 4: in probably high school, everyone knows what happens, and I
Speaker 4: think I remembered it as happening earlier in the movie.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I mean, it's like you, it's so cultural
Speaker 4: osmosisy that everyone knows the chair turning, everyone knows the
Speaker 4: shower scene, and so it's it's an interesting watch because
Speaker 4: you can't not know that kind of against your will.
Speaker 4: And I think my relationship with Hitchcock I was in
Speaker 4: fifth grade. For I had this amazing teacher who for
Speaker 4: some reason decided he was going to show a bunch
Speaker 4: of nine year olds The Birds, and there were two
Speaker 4: kids that peeded themselves during the movie. It's just it
Speaker 4: was an iconic fifth grade experience. Every kid in that
Speaker 4: class remember seeing The Birds. Parents were upset. My mom
Speaker 4: was like, huh, and then I didn't sleep for like
Speaker 4: a week. And so that's I think my most vivid
Speaker 4: Hitchcock related movie, and then learned more about him as
Speaker 4: a person as an adult. It's like a wild ride
Speaker 4: with his work, which we can get into later. And also,
Speaker 4: I mean I listened to the Hitchcock episodes of Behind
Speaker 4: the Bastards when they first came out, and.
Speaker 1: I mean, holy shit, I mean.
Speaker 4: This literally said quote women are a nuisance. So there's
Speaker 4: a lot to get into. But this movie, I think
Speaker 4: I came away from it surprised and with way more
Speaker 4: to talk about than I originally thought. I went so
Speaker 4: excited to talk about it, Caitlin, was your history with
Speaker 4: Psycho the Hitchcock expanded Universe.
Speaker 3: I saw it for the first time in college. I
Speaker 3: think when I was watching a bunch of Hitchcock for
Speaker 3: the first time, and like you, Jamie, I already knew
Speaker 3: the iconic means the twist at the end, you know,
Speaker 3: just through cultural osmosis. And then I think I didn't
Speaker 3: watch it since, but I will think about the movie
Speaker 3: basically anytime, because in the past few years, the conversation
Speaker 3: about trans representation in media is more present in the zeitgeist,
Speaker 3: and part of that conversation is the representation of like
Speaker 3: trans and or gender non conforming people as murderers in media,
Speaker 3: and I'd be like, oh, Psycho, Like Psycho is such
Speaker 3: an early example of that, so like it just like
Speaker 3: comes to mind every time that particular topic gets brought up.
Speaker 3: And then rewatching the movie, I was like, oh, yes, confirmed,
Speaker 3: So that will be I imagine a huge part of
Speaker 3: our discussion later on. But yeah, it's it's just weird
Speaker 3: to me that such a huge like piece of cinema,
Speaker 3: like an iconic piece of cinema, like such an influential
Speaker 3: thing in American cinema that's so celebrated is also so
Speaker 3: damaging and harmful to so many communities. So that's those
Speaker 3: those are my initial thoughts on it. But yeah, I
Speaker 3: haven't seen this movie. I think since I've watched it
Speaker 3: that first time, probably like well over fifteen years ago.
Speaker 3: But I generally like Hitchcock movies. It's weird, like I
Speaker 3: like Strangers on a Train. I like Rear Window, I
Speaker 3: like north By Northwest. I haven't seen Rope and a
Speaker 3: few of his other like pretty major ones.
Speaker 2: I'm with you, there are some like really tiny gems.
Speaker 5: I mean, I about every decade I'll do like a
Speaker 5: big Hitchcock rewatch and like the minor ones are so good,
Speaker 5: like Lifeboat is amazing, rope Rocks, there's like.
Speaker 2: Less problematic than Psycho in many regards.
Speaker 5: But I think, like with that same nasty spirit, really
Speaker 5: recommend Frenzy, which is basically his last good one. I mean,
Speaker 5: and just like and I don't know, maybe it's like
Speaker 5: my Britishness, but like I think he's like I love
Speaker 5: his humor, Like There's a Lady Vanishes is so funny.
Speaker 1: I never seen it.
Speaker 2: It's really really funny.
Speaker 5: And I always feel like humidates more than any other
Speaker 5: genre of film, and like it's still like laugh at
Speaker 5: loud funny and just stupid and like the best ways interesting.
Speaker 4: I think we're having a conversation like this recently where
Speaker 4: it's like, for all of this movie's difficult and often
Speaker 4: just outright prejudiced ways of viewing the world.
Speaker 1: It's a good movie.
Speaker 4: And that's kind of why it has the cultural influence
Speaker 4: that it does and why we're talking about it and
Speaker 4: why it's like, I don't know, if you can make
Speaker 4: a good movie and project those values, it's.
Speaker 1: Kind of a scary amount of power to have.
Speaker 4: I haven't done Hitchcock B Sides viewing before. I did
Speaker 4: recently go back and watch the birds to see if
Speaker 4: it was as scary as I remembered, and it was not.
Speaker 1: It's pretty funny, though, it's a very fun It's terrible.
Speaker 2: It's so bad.
Speaker 1: Not good.
Speaker 3: It's bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, try being nine god yeah.
Speaker 5: Fair, But like it all kind of like brings the
Speaker 5: question of like the kind of autistic male genius were
Speaker 5: in a way like I'll do mental gymnastics to like
Speaker 5: make Psycho okay, and like try and like justify it
Speaker 5: to myself. I can in no way justify that, like
Speaker 5: Tippy Hedron was like tortured to make the buds.
Speaker 4: It's so popular, absolutely, yeah, yeah, And it's so interesting
Speaker 4: that there was only a care about it in any
Speaker 4: cultural way in like five years years ago, because as
Speaker 4: far as I know, she had spoken about it before
Speaker 4: and no one cared. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: when the Me Too movement started getting some momentum, all
Speaker 4: of a sudden, people cared and we're like, I can't
Speaker 4: believe I didn't know this, And.
Speaker 3: It's like, well you could have a long time ago. Yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 3: shall we take a quick break and then come back
Speaker 3: to recap the movie. Let's do it all right, We'll
Speaker 3: be right back, and we're back. Here is the recap
Speaker 3: of Psycho. We are in Phoenix, Arizona. Ever heard of it?
Speaker 3: And we meet Marion Crane that's Janet Lee, of course.
Speaker 3: She is in a hotel room SMO coaching her boyfriend
Speaker 3: Sam played by John Gavin. They are talking about getting married,
Speaker 3: but they can't because he is in debt and he's
Speaker 3: paying his ex his ex wife's alimony, and he can't
Speaker 3: support her, and so they can't get married. Then we
Speaker 3: see Marion at work at a real estate office where
Speaker 3: a rich guy named mister Cassidy is there to buy
Speaker 3: a house with a load of cash.
Speaker 4: This fucking guy, this guy, he's so horrible. And then
Speaker 4: he crossed into like campy territory for me when he
Speaker 4: said I need a drinker, Rooney.
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, what are we gonna do with
Speaker 1: this guy?
Speaker 2: He's just and it's just like tax evasion.
Speaker 4: He's like, my daughter is my baby and my property.
Speaker 4: I don't pay my taxes and I I want to
Speaker 4: drink at work right now.
Speaker 5: And I am such a terrible father that I assume
Speaker 5: you can be an eighteen year old girl and never
Speaker 5: had a sad day, And.
Speaker 4: We learn all of this while he is sexually harassing
Speaker 4: our protagonist.
Speaker 1: It really is kind of an all timer.
Speaker 4: And to be fair, the movie is aware that he's horrible,
Speaker 4: but it was just like I didn't remember that character,
Speaker 4: and I watched that scene three times because I was
Speaker 4: just like, I don't know if I'm catching everything.
Speaker 1: He's moving so fast he's Among.
Speaker 3: The things is the fact that he has a lot
Speaker 3: of cash of forty thousand dollars that he's just carrying around.
Speaker 4: On him in nineteen sixty money, it's ninety six money
Speaker 4: fucking juggled it.
Speaker 5: You can just add a zero, which is very helpful mathwise,
Speaker 5: So it's it's about four hundred, one.
Speaker 3: Hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Okay, so houses were expensive back then, too.
Speaker 1: Well that's like I'm probably a huge state.
Speaker 3: Big ass house.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So point is he's got cash.
Speaker 4: One thing I loved about Marian right from the jump
Speaker 4: was that she is giving it about two percent at
Speaker 4: her job. I feel like that is rare to see
Speaker 4: in any movie in a way that the movie is
Speaker 4: sort of ambivalent about, Like she comes back really late
Speaker 4: to work because she was having sex and then she
Speaker 4: leaves twenty minutes later.
Speaker 1: She's like, oh, my head, and then like I gotta go.
Speaker 4: Like I just that's how I acted at my jobs
Speaker 4: in my early twenties, and I kind of was like,
Speaker 4: maybe I should bring it back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, one seems bothered.
Speaker 3: She's quietly quitting, no doubt about it.
Speaker 5: She's given capitalism about the level of respect that it deserves.
Speaker 4: Exactly, she does not give a shit, but she's worked
Speaker 4: there for ten years. Like, you're just like, good for Marian, honestly,
Speaker 4: like we should try less hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true read wealth, go for it, Marian.
Speaker 3: That was her plan.
Speaker 4: Also, yeah, what she does a victimless crime. I think
Speaker 4: you're just like, yeah, steal forty thousand dollars for someone
Speaker 4: who's actually her as to you. You know, he's already rich,
Speaker 4: he's the worst.
Speaker 3: Do it, yeah, for sure, steal, eat the rich, steal
Speaker 3: from the rich, et cetera. So he comes in with
Speaker 3: this forty thousand dollars. Marian's boss, mister Lowry, tells her
Speaker 3: to take it directly to the bank. So Marian leaves
Speaker 3: with the cash, but she doesn't go to the bank. Instead,
Speaker 3: she packs the suitcase and heads out of town with
Speaker 3: the money. On her way out, her boss sees Marion
Speaker 3: in her car and he's like, hmm, that's weird, and
Speaker 3: she's like, oh no, and then the string instruments are
Speaker 3: playing loudly and it's an anxious moment. Then for a
Speaker 3: while a cop is tailing her. He follows her to California,
Speaker 3: where she trades in her car for another car in
Speaker 3: a transaction that takes like five minutes because it's the sixties,
Speaker 3: and then she takes off again in a hurry. She's driving,
Speaker 3: it's dark, it's pouring rain, so she pulls over at
Speaker 3: the Bates Motel, which big mistake.
Speaker 1: Big mistake, babe.
Speaker 4: I really appreciated in that whole sequence because even when
Speaker 4: the scenes are like kind of weirdly long, it feels
Speaker 4: very intentional and like, you just I didn't really remember
Speaker 4: the last time I saw this movie how intentional.
Speaker 1: This movie is about setting up.
Speaker 4: How Marian has to navigate her way through the world
Speaker 4: like as a woman and as like an attractive woman,
Speaker 4: very very intentionally, and it's like it's I don't know,
Speaker 4: I feel a time.
Speaker 1: Where you could easily get away with showing.
Speaker 4: Woman or any character really just kind of moving through
Speaker 4: the world like ah hahi.
Speaker 1: Whatever, and just like half assing it.
Speaker 4: There is like a menacing undertone to how every man
Speaker 4: in the story treats her right up to her arriving
Speaker 4: at base motel, and then by Norman as well, and
Speaker 4: that whole sequence where she's driving towards the motel and
Speaker 4: you hear kind of her fantasizing about how people will
Speaker 4: react to her disappearance and all this stuff. It's just
Speaker 4: it's more than I remembered getting in terms of context
Speaker 4: for who she is and why she's running.
Speaker 3: And I thought it was cool, and it's something that
Speaker 3: a lot of contemporary horror movies fail to do in
Speaker 3: terms of like showing the unease in which a woman
Speaker 3: moves about the world. People and particularly men around her
Speaker 3: will be menacing and creepy, and in a lot of
Speaker 3: like female protagonists in more modern horror movies, they're just like, what,
Speaker 3: I don't even notice anything. Everything seems fine, no danger here,
Speaker 3: nothing to worry about. In a way that always bugs
Speaker 3: me because I'm like, that is not how women move
Speaker 3: about the world. We're like very cognizant of the dangers
Speaker 3: around And I feel like this movie successfully does that
Speaker 3: in a way that a lot of other horror movies
Speaker 3: do not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's something that was really articulated pretty
Speaker 5: beautifully in like the recent Barbie movie. Very different movie,
Speaker 5: but like like that with women, like attention often just
Speaker 5: has this like undertone of violence, and like obviously Marin
Speaker 5: is a like ludicrously beautiful and glamorous woman. And there's
Speaker 5: the what I found interesting about like because she's kind
Speaker 5: of always moving with this undertone of violence, that there
Speaker 5: is always this attention which has this like sinis to
Speaker 5: like you said, menace edge to it, like that hyper
Speaker 5: vigilance can of get her so far. So actually she
Speaker 5: drops her guard whilst where with Norman in a way
Speaker 5: that kind of makes sense if you've seen like her
Speaker 5: journey so far, because of course he is being unsettling
Speaker 5: and disturbing in a way that we can identify. But
Speaker 5: that is simply every interaction she has with a.
Speaker 2: Man to a certain degree up till that point.
Speaker 4: Mm hmmm, and we see her like advocate for I
Speaker 4: don't know, I like that it's like also clear that
Speaker 4: she understands what's happening. She's kind of choosing her battles
Speaker 4: as this sort of continues to happen. She chooses them
Speaker 4: very intentionally, like with the cop where the cop is
Speaker 4: arassing her. He wants to know what she's doing. Why
Speaker 4: is she sleeping on the side of the road, And
Speaker 4: she's just like, what have I done? Why do I
Speaker 4: need to show you my license and registration?
Speaker 1: What is necessary? Like why are you doing this?
Speaker 4: And I really appreciate how it's such a hard balance
Speaker 4: to strike, and I feel like it's really I don't know,
Speaker 4: I was thinking about the Barbie movie as well.
Speaker 1: I just said for the second time the very night.
Speaker 4: But yeah, like striking the fact that she is, like
Speaker 4: she's hyper competent, she's very aware of what's happening. But
Speaker 4: being aware of what's happening is not necessarily enough to
Speaker 4: protect you. And it felt like this movie did a
Speaker 4: better job than I remembered at like making that clear
Speaker 4: and striking that balance.
Speaker 3: M hm for sure. Okay, So she is now at
Speaker 3: the Bates Motel, which is run by Norman Bates played
Speaker 3: by Anthony Perkins, who lives in the house just up
Speaker 3: the hill overlooking the motel. He checks her into room one.
Speaker 3: She gives him a fake name like in the registry,
Speaker 3: and she's also the only guest staying there, because the
Speaker 3: whole thing with this motel is that it used to
Speaker 3: be along a main highway, but they made a new highway,
Speaker 3: so there's basically no traffic going past this place, and
Speaker 3: no one stays there anymore, so it's very secluded. Then
Speaker 3: he invites her to his house for dinner, but as
Speaker 3: she's getting settled and hiding the cash by rolling it
Speaker 3: up in a newspaper and sitting it on the bedside table,
Speaker 3: amazing hiding spot.
Speaker 1: To be fair with her first time stealing forty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 1: True, True.
Speaker 5: It also seems like getting away with crime was pretty
Speaker 5: easy back then, like a cop could watch you as
Speaker 5: you switch costs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he's just like, well, I don't know, I know,
Speaker 1: And he's like, Wow, this lady knows the law. She knows.
Speaker 1: I guess what she's doing isn't technically against the law.
Speaker 5: I mean, of all the things about Hitchcock that have
Speaker 5: like aged really badly, how much in basically every movie
Speaker 5: he hates the police.
Speaker 2: True, And it's just or is the delightful to me?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're like portrayed as bumbling, incompetent getting in the way,
Speaker 3: never helping that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's like the whole third act of this
Speaker 4: movie relies on like it's barely discussed. It's just like
Speaker 4: assumed by Sam and by oh my gosh, what's her name,
Speaker 4: her sister, Lila, Lilah, that the cops are not competent
Speaker 4: enough or don't care enough to solve this crime, and
Speaker 4: they have to take it into their own hands, which
Speaker 4: is like, it's great.
Speaker 3: For sure, Okay. So as she's getting settled into her room,
Speaker 3: she overhears Norman Bates arguing with his mother about inviting
Speaker 3: a strange woman over for dinner, and the mother is
Speaker 3: like shaming him and shaming Marian. And then he shows
Speaker 3: back up with some food and she's like, oh, your
Speaker 3: mom sounds awesome. And then they dine together, but in
Speaker 3: the parlor area behind his office, which is that room
Speaker 3: full of taxidermy birds. He tells her she eats like
Speaker 3: a bird. Then he's like a boy's best friend is
Speaker 3: his mother, and he talks about how his mother is
Speaker 3: mentally unwell and how he feels trapped there having to
Speaker 3: take care of her. She's very controlling all of this stuff,
Speaker 3: and Marian's like, well, why don't you put her in
Speaker 3: a facility And he's like, no, those places are horrible,
Speaker 3: and he gets pretty scary for a moment, and she's like, yikes, bro,
Speaker 3: But things kind of return to normal ish and she
Speaker 3: goes back to her room, where he then peeps on
Speaker 3: her via a hole in the wall while she's undressing.
Speaker 3: Then she gets in the shower, we get the iconic
Speaker 3: shower scene where Norman bay his mother comes in and
Speaker 3: stabs Marian in the shower multiple times. The violins are screeching.
Speaker 3: It's iconic.
Speaker 1: It's like that music cue in the Jaws music cue.
Speaker 4: Mmm, Like that's those are the two they just maybe
Speaker 4: there's others, maybe Star Wars, whatever doesn't.
Speaker 3: As far as like horror movies go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I want to say.
Speaker 5: That it's a Jurassic Park one, but yeah, nothing's quite
Speaker 5: as evogetive as.
Speaker 1: It's so good.
Speaker 4: Yeah that I'm excited to come back to that scene
Speaker 4: between the two of them right before the death scene too,
Speaker 4: because that scene is just like full of things to.
Speaker 1: Talk about for sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Marian has been stabbed to death, and moments later
Speaker 3: Norman discovers what his mother has done. He rushes to
Speaker 3: help Marian, but it's too late. She's dead, so he
Speaker 3: cleans up the crime scene, packs up her body and
Speaker 3: her belongings, including the money that's tucked in the newspaper
Speaker 3: that he doesn't realize is there, into her car, and
Speaker 3: then pushes her car into this like swamp tarpit kind
Speaker 3: of place. Cut to Marian's sister Lilah played by Vera Miles,
Speaker 3: approaching Marian's boyfriend Sam to try to find out where
Speaker 3: Marian is because it's been several days and no one
Speaker 3: has heard from her.
Speaker 4: Then this guy Arbagast, great name, truly sounds like a
Speaker 4: guy in a horror movie to me.
Speaker 3: He's played by Martin Balsom. Arbagast is a private investigator
Speaker 3: who I think was hired by mister Cassidy, the guy
Speaker 3: who's forty thousand dollars is missing. And Arbagas starts going
Speaker 3: around to different motels in the area to try to
Speaker 3: find Marion, including the Bates Motel, and he's able to
Speaker 3: match Marian's handwriting in the registry book with a sample
Speaker 3: that he has, so he starts asking Norman a bunch
Speaker 3: of questions about did Marion stay there and blah blah blah,
Speaker 3: and mister norm is being pretty suspicious, and then Arbagast
Speaker 3: sees Norman's mother sitting in the window of the house
Speaker 3: and Arbagast wants to question her, but Norman is like no, thanks,
Speaker 3: now go away please. Obviously, Arbagast is very suspicious, and
Speaker 3: he comes back a little later and goes to the
Speaker 3: house to question missus Bates because he thinks that she
Speaker 3: has information about Marion's whereabouts. But missus Bates promptly stabs
Speaker 3: Arbagast to death in another pretty iconic scene where he's
Speaker 3: falling backwards down the stairs. Meanwhile, Lila and Sam are like,
Speaker 3: where's our friend, mister Arbagast. He was supposed to call
Speaker 3: us back several hours ago. So Sam goes off to
Speaker 3: find the Baits motel to see what's going on.
Speaker 2: Quick stop off with some useless police.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, yeah, I guess that the best you could
Speaker 4: say of the police in this movie is that at
Speaker 4: one point they were kind of doing their best.
Speaker 3: And that's not saying much. So Sam finds the motel,
Speaker 3: he can't find Arbagast, so he comes back to Lila.
Speaker 3: Then they go to this like deputy sheriff guy who
Speaker 3: is like, well, sounds like your private investigator doesn't even
Speaker 3: have his facts straight because Norman Bates's mother died ten
Speaker 3: years ago, and Sam is like, well, I saw an
Speaker 3: old woman sitting in the window, and so there's like
Speaker 3: a lot of confusion about who she is and what's
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 4: God, there's so many moments in this movie that it's
Speaker 4: like it really kept hitting for me how iconic the
Speaker 4: big beats of this movie are. Because there are multiple
Speaker 4: times when I was rewatching it last night when I
Speaker 4: was just like, how.
Speaker 1: Could he not know that? Like it's psycho, Like you
Speaker 1: should know that. But then if it were possible to
Speaker 1: have a clean reading of this movie, would I have
Speaker 1: picked up on it? Maybe not. I don't know, We'll
Speaker 1: never know.
Speaker 3: It's triaky.
Speaker 5: It does seem a bit weird though that apparently like
Speaker 5: Hitchcock emphasis like so so dedicated to preserving these twists,
Speaker 5: and like was buying up every copy of like the
Speaker 5: book that it was based on to like make sure
Speaker 5: people wouldn't know, and like that before it happens, this
Speaker 5: that like small shadowing of just like oh no, she's dead,
Speaker 5: why would you put right?
Speaker 4: That kind of gives a lot away, and like those
Speaker 4: characters have no incentive to lie about it, like, but
Speaker 4: it is kind of just like passed over as the
Speaker 4: movie goes forward, and they're like, no, no, there's an
Speaker 4: old lady up there. We know it.
Speaker 3: Maybe they try to cover their tracks because the sheriff
Speaker 3: guy is like, well, if missus Bates is still alive,
Speaker 3: then who's that woman buried in the cemetery? And it's like,
Speaker 3: well that doesn't do quite enough.
Speaker 5: Sorry, you've still planted the idea, right, Yeah, but I mean,
Speaker 5: I guess it's very different because like it's not like
Speaker 5: we saw Psycho fresh. We saw it like knowing that
Speaker 5: that was going to happen, But that does seem in
Speaker 5: retrospect like a little taking the wind out of the sails. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, so Lila and Sam, realizing that the police are useless,
Speaker 3: go to the motel to investigate on their own. They
Speaker 3: check in pretending to be a married couple and sneak
Speaker 3: into room one. So their suspicion is that Norman Bates
Speaker 3: stole the forty thousand dollars from Marion, but they don't
Speaker 3: find any conclusive evidence in room one. So Lila wants
Speaker 3: to talk to the mother while Sam distracts Norman and
Speaker 3: Lila goes into the house. She snoops around the mother's bedroom.
Speaker 3: She snoops around Norman's bedroom, which is very like childlike
Speaker 3: and creepy. Meanwhile, Norman Bates does not like the things
Speaker 3: that Sam is insinuating, so he knocks Sam out and
Speaker 3: rushes up to the house. Lilah meanwhile heads down to
Speaker 3: the fruit cellar, where she sees Missus Bates from behind,
Speaker 3: sitting in a chair. But then Missus Bates spins around
Speaker 3: and twist She's a skeleton.
Speaker 1: Who would have know.
Speaker 2: How you spin an old lady around when you yeah,
Speaker 2: look at me.
Speaker 4: I do appreciate in this whole sequence, like Sam, I guess,
Speaker 4: I don't know like how intentional the movie is making this,
Speaker 4: but it felt clear to me where it's like Sam
Speaker 4: is I guess well intentioned, but he is just like
Speaker 4: not good at doing any any of the things he's
Speaker 4: supposed to be doing. Lyla takes control from him multiple times,
Speaker 4: and he's always like, I don't know, but then always
Speaker 4: ends up going with your plan, and then he executes
Speaker 4: his portion of the plan poorly without like I was like,
Speaker 4: why would you say I'm going to go distract Norman Bath?
Speaker 1: And then immediately get into an argument with him. What
Speaker 1: are you doing?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's not being subtle at all. He should be like, hey,
Speaker 3: let's talk about taxidermy.
Speaker 1: Or something like, right, distract him.
Speaker 3: Instead he's just like you stole money, didn't you?
Speaker 2: And yeah, I mean, if we know anything about Norman
Speaker 2: of this point is that he can be let on
Speaker 2: a tangent.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, it's like he hasn't talked to anybody in years,
Speaker 4: Like he's down to chat, just like, don't talk to
Speaker 4: him about his mom or crimes two topics to avoid
Speaker 4: and what.
Speaker 3: Does Sam do? But talks about both of those? Yep, okay,
Speaker 3: so missus Bates is a Skelington. And just then Norman Bates,
Speaker 3: dressed as his mother in a wig and a dress
Speaker 3: and he's holding a knife, pops in about to stab Lila,
Speaker 3: but then Sam comes in behind Norman and stops him
Speaker 3: and saves Lila. Then we cut to a courthouse where
Speaker 3: a psychiatrist who has just spoken to Norman Bates off
Speaker 3: screen explains a whole bunch of stuff that will unpack,
Speaker 3: but basically that Norman Bates has a dual personality where
Speaker 3: sometimes he's Norman, sometimes he's his mother and how Norman
Speaker 3: had murdered his mother and her lover ten years prior
Speaker 3: and then stole her body and preserved it and becomes
Speaker 3: his mother. And then the movie ends with a shot
Speaker 3: of Norman Bates, but with voiceover from his mother saying,
Speaker 3: my son is a bad boy. He's the one who
Speaker 3: murdered those people. I wouldn't even harm a fly.
Speaker 1: And then he has that shot that looks just like
Speaker 1: Janetly when she's in the car. They're both like like
Speaker 1: narrow eyes.
Speaker 4: Almost like stealing forty thousand dollars from a rich guy
Speaker 4: is the same as being a serial killer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not the same. So that's the movie. Let's take
Speaker 3: another quick break and we'll come.
Speaker 4: Right back, and we're back. We're back, okay, Leila. We
Speaker 4: always defer to our guests. What would you like to
Speaker 4: discuss first? What jumped out at you?
Speaker 5: I mean, I've seen it so many times, but I
Speaker 5: think this time I kind of ended up going down
Speaker 5: like a little bit of a.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like a different perspective on it.
Speaker 5: And I was reminded in like the early days of YouTube,
Speaker 5: you know, when people were doing like these things where
Speaker 5: they'd re edit movie trailers to make them look like
Speaker 5: they were a different genres when Mary Poppins was like
Speaker 5: a horror movie and somebody did like Psycho as being
Speaker 5: like a romantic comedy, and like, weirdly I found myself
Speaker 5: watching this as.
Speaker 2: Being like this is like kind of a Hallmark Christmas
Speaker 2: movie ooh, and like hit me out.
Speaker 5: It's they specify it starts on December eleventh, and she's
Speaker 5: got like two days in Phoenix, Arizona, and then she
Speaker 5: has an overnight drive and then they specify that it's
Speaker 5: a week till people start looking for her.
Speaker 2: That's say two three days of the investigation.
Speaker 5: In the end, I swear to god, I think Norman
Speaker 5: Baits that final scene happens on Christmas.
Speaker 2: Whoa, And then the whole thing just.
Speaker 5: Like I kind of work backwards from that where I
Speaker 5: was like, is this like the most searing satire on
Speaker 5: like bullshit romantic comedy Christmas movies? Wow?
Speaker 2: Because we have our like Gal from the city, this kind.
Speaker 5: Of career gal who kind of is like ambitious in
Speaker 5: all of these ways and kind of cutthroat, and then
Speaker 5: she's kind of got the boyfriend who won't really commit,
Speaker 5: but she's really very interested in him. And then this
Speaker 5: like folksy guy who loves his mom and has hobbies
Speaker 5: takes her in and it kind of fell at like
Speaker 5: the forty seven minute mark, I was like, there is
Speaker 5: a version of this where he is about to he's
Speaker 5: going to spend forty k investing in this motel and
Speaker 5: he's about to teach her the meaning of Christmas. And yeah,
Speaker 5: it's it's not what I expected to think coming into
Speaker 5: this podcast. Part of me and I think the Anthony
Speaker 5: Perkins being like such an insane dream boat was just
Speaker 5: like I'm actually watching what promising young woman wishes. It
Speaker 5: was where we are having like this like Syrian critique
Speaker 5: of like the nice guy in like the cultural imagination.
Speaker 1: That's so yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 4: I didn't know very much about Anthony Perkins as a person.
Speaker 4: I I mean, he has a fascinating and in many
Speaker 4: ways I think tragic life in the way that I
Speaker 4: mean he was like a dream boat. He was like
Speaker 4: a an icon long before this movie came out, but
Speaker 4: was also a very talented actor. He was closeted, I
Speaker 4: think for his entire life, and at different points in
Speaker 4: his life underwent abusive kind of conversion therapy to try
Speaker 4: to not be gay. Anymore, which is very of the
Speaker 4: time that's well documented, and ultimately died of AIDS, but
Speaker 4: also just had this incredible life and this incredible career
Speaker 4: and was an activist his entire career. And it was like,
Speaker 4: I really loved learning about him, and I was curious
Speaker 4: why he was thought of for this part, because he's
Speaker 4: in his late twenties when he did this, and he
Speaker 4: was advocated for by Hitchcock, even though I don't know.
Speaker 4: I was curious about because it's an adaptation from the
Speaker 4: book you were referencing Leila, and Hitchcock got wind of
Speaker 4: it and basically bought it out of a stock so
Speaker 4: no one could find out about all the Dune kinds
Speaker 4: of moments. But originally I was pleasantly surprised at the
Speaker 4: changes that Hitchcock and the screenwriter, whose name is Joseph Stefano,
Speaker 4: chose to make from the book. I have not read
Speaker 4: the book, probably never won. Yeah, But originally I think
Speaker 4: it was written in sort of far more broad stereotype strokes,
Speaker 4: where the character of Norman is written to be I
Speaker 4: think an alcoholic who quote unquote SWAP's personalities when he
Speaker 4: drinks too much. He's written to be middle aged, he's
Speaker 4: written to be not stereotypically handsome, and it was sort
Speaker 4: of suggested, like, what if we cast a young, kind
Speaker 4: of iconically hot guy to do.
Speaker 1: This, and how will that affect it? And I think
Speaker 1: it was a really.
Speaker 4: Interesting switch that definitely affected my read of the movie
Speaker 4: and sort of challenges what you expect from people who
Speaker 4: look a certain way when you see them on screen.
Speaker 4: Other changes I saw was in the book Marian and
Speaker 4: Sam do not have a hotel tryst in the book
Speaker 4: that was added for the movie. But something that they
Speaker 4: took out that I couldn't really remember if it happened
Speaker 4: or not, and it was pleasantly surprised, was that because
Speaker 4: Lila and Sam were spending so much time together, I'm
Speaker 4: like two hot people in nineteen sixty, They're probably were
Speaker 4: probably going to force them together arbitrarily, but they don't.
Speaker 1: And I guess in the book that did happen, where
Speaker 1: like Lila and Sam fell in love over the recent
Speaker 1: death of someone they both loved.
Speaker 4: So I mostly thought that the changes that they made
Speaker 4: for the movie were pretty cool and like serve the story.
Speaker 3: I agree. And then also, as we mentioned, the book,
Speaker 3: which was written by Robert block was loosely based on
Speaker 3: real life murderer slash grave robber ed Gan, which I
Speaker 3: guess might kind of inform like the really bizarre psychoanalysis
Speaker 3: that the psychiatrist gives of Norman Bates at the end
Speaker 3: of the movie, which again we'll talk about.
Speaker 2: But give him a break. It's Christmas.
Speaker 3: He's like, Merry Christmas.
Speaker 4: By the way, It's true he has to close one
Speaker 4: of the most famous movies of all time on Christmas.
Speaker 1: No less, he's having a hard time that scene.
Speaker 4: I also kind of forgot of like I think that
Speaker 4: happens in a lot of Hitchcock movies and maybe just
Speaker 4: older movies in general, where at the end everything has
Speaker 4: to be wrapped up and you're like, wait, there's only
Speaker 4: two minutes left, and then a guy gives a speech
Speaker 4: and then you're like, oh, okay, I guess that.
Speaker 1: I guess that's how it ends. It's just so abrupt.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so did you, Caitlin, did you go sort
Speaker 4: of down the rabbit hole on Edge? I didn't learn
Speaker 4: a lot about him personally.
Speaker 1: I just knew that the.
Speaker 4: Author of the book like lived locally, and so it
Speaker 4: was something that was like local lore that existed in
Speaker 4: his mind.
Speaker 3: I read a large chunk of ed Dean's Wikipedia page
Speaker 3: on Scholarly Journal of course Wikipedia. Basically it so I
Speaker 3: know everything now, so I don't have a whole lot
Speaker 3: of insight here, although I was curious because like the
Speaker 3: wikiped again, I should, you know, do more research than
Speaker 3: just scholarly Journal Wikipedia. But the Wikipedia page for the
Speaker 3: movie Psycho says like, oh, here are the similarities between
Speaker 3: Norman Bates and ed Gean. They both like live in
Speaker 3: these secluded areas. They both had domineering mothers where they
Speaker 3: like had a shrine to them in their house. They
Speaker 3: both wore women's clothing. And then I looked into ed
Speaker 3: Gean more and I was like, wait a minute, that
Speaker 3: may or may not be true. I couldn't. What I
Speaker 3: did find is that ed Green made a suit or
Speaker 3: started to and this is gonna be graphic and gory,
Speaker 3: but he started to make like a woman suit literally
Speaker 3: a like skin suit from his victims and or like
Speaker 3: bodies that he had grave robbed.
Speaker 4: The list of things found at his house, if you're beware,
Speaker 4: you're in for his care, it is are al, steign, scary, scary, bad, horrible,
Speaker 4: and yeah, because I also read that very scary Wikipedia page.
Speaker 1: It felt like.
Speaker 4: Because it seems basically impossible and maybe for the best
Speaker 4: that that was not shown on screen and like fully
Speaker 4: adapted into Norman Bates's character.
Speaker 1: The sub in was a.
Speaker 4: Very transphobic and just generally queer phobic narrative around gender
Speaker 4: nonconforming clothing. They're like, well, it's basically the same thing,
Speaker 4: and you're like, well, wait, hold.
Speaker 1: On, no, it's not. It's not.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I guess that leads into so I want
Speaker 3: to kind of unpack what the psychiatrist says about Norman
Speaker 3: Baits and then what the implications of that are. So
Speaker 3: the psychiatrist is describing Norman Bates as having some sort
Speaker 3: of like quote unquote split personality disorder, and I know
Speaker 3: that's like not the real name of anything, but also
Speaker 3: the disorder that's being depicted in the movie is like
Speaker 3: not a real thing. It's some you know, like Hollywood
Speaker 3: version of a disorder. But the point is the psychiatrist
Speaker 3: is saying that sometimes he's Norman Baits, sometimes he's inhabiting
Speaker 3: the personality and likeness of his mother. He describes Norman
Speaker 3: as having been quote unquote disturbed ever since his father died.
Speaker 3: That his mother was clingy, demanding, and it seems like
Speaker 3: she and Norman had a very codependent relationship until missus
Speaker 3: Bates met a man. She took a lover, and Norman
Speaker 3: became very jealous. So he murdered his mother and her lover.
Speaker 3: But he knew that murdering his mother was bad, that
Speaker 3: he was a bad boy, and so he had to
Speaker 3: erase this crime in his mind by becoming his mother.
Speaker 3: So he stole her corpse and preserved it. And he
Speaker 3: was also again he was jealous of his mother and
Speaker 3: assumed that she was just as jealous of him as
Speaker 3: he was of her. And so if he ever felt
Speaker 3: an attraction to woman, you know, the mother side of
Speaker 3: him would take control. Again, this is the psychiatrist describing this.
Speaker 3: The mother side of Norman would take control. And so
Speaker 3: like when he met Marion and he was attracted to her,
Speaker 3: that set off the mother, and then he as his mother,
Speaker 3: like inhabiting the personality and mindset of his mother. That's
Speaker 3: who killed Marion. And then as far as why he
Speaker 3: was wearing a dress and a wig, another person in
Speaker 3: the courtroom speculates that Norman was a and then he
Speaker 3: uses like a very dated term to refer to people
Speaker 3: who wear clothes that quote unquote don't match the gender
Speaker 3: that they're assigned at birth. But the psychiatrist is like, no, no,
Speaker 3: that's not true. Norman Bates wore those clothes to become
Speaker 3: his mother and to maintain the illusion that his mother
Speaker 3: is alive. So we have this just like really like
Speaker 3: quack science, quack medicine explanation of what is going on
Speaker 3: in the psychology of Norman Bates. And the movie does
Speaker 3: not come right out and say like, this person is
Speaker 3: trans and or gender non conforming and therefore they are
Speaker 3: a murderer. But this is one of many movies that
Speaker 3: equates gender non conformity kind of to use that as
Speaker 3: an umbrella term here with mental illness, which, like at
Speaker 3: the time, you know, in the sixties and before and beyond,
Speaker 3: this was a very popularly held belief.
Speaker 4: Which I think you can trace in Anthony Perkins's own life.
Speaker 4: Kind of ironically, it's like this was very much the
Speaker 4: normalized opinion to have at the time, to the point
Speaker 4: where the lead actor in the movie, whose character is
Speaker 4: being subscribed to all this bullshit like was experiencing obviously
Speaker 4: not the exact same thing, but was also being treated
Speaker 4: as if being queer was a fundamental failure in a
Speaker 4: medical condition. I mean, and that was for a decade
Speaker 4: after this movie came out, and like what, I think,
Speaker 4: it's like these different I don't know, there's so many
Speaker 4: different issues and discussions inside of that like minute long
Speaker 4: monologue where it's conflating gender non conformity and transness and
Speaker 4: queerness with mental illness, and this is like a very
Speaker 4: typical problem for horror movies to have. Still is like
Speaker 4: completely mis understanding the mental illness that they think that
Speaker 4: they're describing, that they are needlessly conflating with gender non conformity.
Speaker 1: So it's just like all of this stuff all at once.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 4: We've talked about how in movies, and often in horror movies,
Speaker 4: there will be a specific mental illness that is prescribed
Speaker 4: as like this is why this character is violent, you know,
Speaker 4: needs to be put away, needs to be killed, whatever
Speaker 4: the movie sort of prescribes to, and it is like
Speaker 4: almost always the better choice to just not attach a
Speaker 4: specific diagnosis to something like that. Like no one's asking
Speaker 4: that horror movie villains don't exist, but it is still,
Speaker 4: I mean, the one that always comes up for me
Speaker 4: because I think it just like upset me personally. Was
Speaker 4: in the opening sequence of Midsomar, where it's implied that
Speaker 4: Florence Pugh's sister murders the entire family because she is bipolar,
Speaker 4: which is just like such a huge false swing. Then
Speaker 4: that was a couple of years ago, and so it's like,
Speaker 4: you know, very normalized within this genre to do that.
Speaker 4: But I just wanted to share it quick because I'm
Speaker 4: not a mental health professional, Like I was, like, it's
Speaker 4: safe to say, like I'm assuming that they're getting this
Speaker 4: diagnosis wrong, but I wonder if anyone's written about it.
Speaker 4: So I have just a quick passage from the American
Speaker 4: Journal of Psychiatry from twenty twenty from Riley manscene Bs,
Speaker 4: writing about horror movies and mental conditions throughout the ages.
Speaker 4: They write quote. One of horror's most iconic portrayals of
Speaker 4: a psychiatric condition was in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The protagonist
Speaker 4: Norman Bates, who commit several murders, demonstrates many features of
Speaker 4: dissociative identity disorder. Because the ID was not well explored
Speaker 4: in media at the time, many interpreted the delusions and
Speaker 4: disorganized thought of Norman Bates as schizophrenia. As a result,
Speaker 4: audiences generalized the two disorders as one. Psycho portrayed a
Speaker 4: psychiatric condition coupled with a new heightened level of violence
Speaker 4: on the silver screen, which perpetuated negative stereotypes of violence
Speaker 4: by psychiatric patients unquote. And so it's not psycho that
Speaker 4: invented this, but it's definitely one of the most popular examples.
Speaker 3: Right, And so to go back to conflating gender nonconformity
Speaker 3: with mental illness, which this movie very much does among
Speaker 3: many others, And again that was and still is until
Speaker 3: pretty recently, was a belief held by medical science and psychiatry.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until twenty thirteen when the DSM five was
Speaker 3: published that quote gender identity disorder was eliminated and replaced
Speaker 3: with gender dysphoria, pulling that from psychiatry dot org.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're all waiting for the DSM six to drop
Speaker 1: because yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so medical science was historically very much in the
Speaker 3: mindset of conflating gender non conformity with mental illness, but
Speaker 3: not just mental illness, specifically with violence, because there are
Speaker 3: many many mental illnesses and I have several of them
Speaker 3: that are nonviolent, you know, but like this and many
Speaker 3: many movies say like, if you have any characteristics of
Speaker 3: gender non conformity, you are mentally ill and therefore violent.
Speaker 3: You're an abuser, you're a murderer, you're a psychopath, basically,
Speaker 3: And this was basically the only way that trans people
Speaker 3: and any gender non conforming people were represented in media
Speaker 3: for the longest time, which has obviously had like an
Speaker 3: incredibly damaging effect on that community, to the point where
Speaker 3: there's still constant legislation trying to bar trans people from
Speaker 3: using the appropriate bathrooms because they think that trans people
Speaker 3: are going to prey on people in bathroom things like that, and.
Speaker 4: Just legislating trans people out of existence altogether. Which we've
Speaker 4: talked about this on the show before. But the doc
Speaker 4: that came out a couple of years ago, Disclosure, it like, yes,
Speaker 4: illustrates this point very clearly.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I even pulled a quote from it because I as
Speaker 3: part of my prep, I also watched a chunk of
Speaker 3: that movie and Laverne Cox points out that quote, Alfred
Speaker 3: Hitchcock seems to be obsessed with people who traverse gender
Speaker 3: stereotypes as murderers. And then there are clips of Psycho.
Speaker 3: There's a clip of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour from nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty five. There's also a clip from a movie called
Speaker 3: Murder exclamation Point from nineteen thirty, so Hitchcock had a
Speaker 3: habit of doing this quite a lot.
Speaker 4: Me.
Speaker 5: One of the things that I find also like kind
Speaker 5: of on a next level kind of upsessing about the
Speaker 5: narrative that this starts is that also kind of gender
Speaker 5: nonconformity comes from like a nugget of abuse that like,
Speaker 5: there has to be kind of like an inciting incident,
Speaker 5: there has to be something that horribly wrong with your
Speaker 5: childhood that kind of like sent you off on this spiral.
Speaker 2: But also like in a broader context, like I hate
Speaker 2: these sort of stories.
Speaker 5: About abuse victims necessarily themselves evolving into.
Speaker 2: What it is that damaged them in the first place.
Speaker 5: And I mean, I'm not a scientist, but like I
Speaker 5: believe the numbers do not actually manifest in that way.
Speaker 5: Like if you are someone who has been through a
Speaker 5: horrifically abusive childhood, the idea that you are necessarily doomed
Speaker 5: to reenact that. I think it's very very difficult for
Speaker 5: survivors of abuse to feel that you are necessarily trapped
Speaker 5: in that cycle, but also just like not helpful, and
Speaker 5: you know, in any degree, and you know that faces
Speaker 5: like the people that most likely to suffer from that
Speaker 5: sort of abuse are people from marginalized genders. So it
Speaker 5: just all feels like it's buying something very insidious.
Speaker 3: To me, especially because this movie blames normans, like the
Speaker 3: thing that makes him become quote unquote disturbed is the
Speaker 3: death of his father, almost as if to say, like,
Speaker 3: without the presence of another male figure in his life,
Speaker 3: like setting him on the right path, he becomes this murderer.
Speaker 3: And it also blames his mother for like all of
Speaker 3: his bad behavior. And that's not to say that like
Speaker 3: there aren't abusive dynamics between parents and children, and that
Speaker 3: an abusive parent can't like, you know, affect a person's
Speaker 3: behavior and kind of the way their life pans out.
Speaker 3: But like the this movie is very much like this mother,
Speaker 3: she it's all her fault, and mothers are to be blamed.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess I was a little confused about that
Speaker 4: by the end, because I feel like, I mean, and
Speaker 4: I don't know how intentionally this was done, but by
Speaker 4: the end of the movie, just because obviously from Norman,
Speaker 4: we get an inaccurate depiction of his relationship with his
Speaker 4: mother because he's acting as if she is still alive,
Speaker 4: and then at the end we get kind of a
Speaker 4: glazed over version of their relationship where it was not
Speaker 4: clear to me by the end of the movie the
Speaker 4: mother and son were deeply codependent, sure, but outside of that,
Speaker 4: it was unclear to me what degree of abuse had occurred.
Speaker 4: Or it seems like in some ways that you read
Speaker 4: it as like Norman was presented as this bad seed,
Speaker 4: or that a close relationship with his mother manifested a
Speaker 4: mental illness, which is just like I was just confused
Speaker 4: by the end.
Speaker 1: I was like, what sequence of events is it? Is
Speaker 1: it trying to push.
Speaker 5: Well, because fundamentally we are presented that Norman is like
Speaker 5: completely like sexually shut down, like he mean, I think,
Speaker 5: kind of give the impression that he's never had any
Speaker 5: sort of intimacy with women, whilst his mother, by all accounts,
Speaker 5: has had too committed relationships. She was married and then
Speaker 5: she had like this fiance as well. So it does
Speaker 5: kind of beg the question of like how much of
Speaker 5: this is sort of his psychosexual obsession with her rather
Speaker 5: than necessarily how it really was right, right.
Speaker 1: Because it isn't.
Speaker 4: I mean, in the movie, it is implied that like
Speaker 4: Norman is attracted to women and is attracted to Janet
Speaker 4: Lee's character to Marian, and that like that is something
Speaker 4: to be resisted and pushed away, and that's I don't know,
Speaker 4: maybe that is like a way in of talking about
Speaker 4: a little bit, because I think just Marian was a
Speaker 4: character who I think was better covered and more thoughtfully
Speaker 4: covered than I remembered. Because I think a big turn
Speaker 4: in Norman's narrative is that he is doing what a
Speaker 4: lot of men are doing to Marian in this movie.
Speaker 4: He is trying to, you know, lure her and get
Speaker 4: her alone and spend time with her and have her attention.
Speaker 4: But he's doing it in a gentler way than we've
Speaker 4: seen men in this movie do it.
Speaker 1: So far. It doesn't make her less on guard, but
Speaker 1: it's a different approach.
Speaker 4: And at this point in the movie where like we're
Speaker 4: not really sure who Norman is or what he's like,
Speaker 4: and that conversation between them takes a turn where he
Speaker 4: gets very prickly and defensive and frustrated when his mother
Speaker 4: comes up and the decisions around his family come up
Speaker 4: and then when she leaves, he immediately begins spying on
Speaker 4: her and watching her take off her clothes, which is
Speaker 4: not the first time that even happens in the movie,
Speaker 4: because that's like how the movie starts, is by us
Speaker 4: looking at a window at like Marian topless with Sam
Speaker 4: So it's I don't know. I thought they were like
Speaker 4: interesting choices of how she's framed where you're always I mean,
Speaker 4: there are moments where your the camera's very intentionally like
Speaker 4: leering at her, and with Norman it's a character driven leering,
Speaker 4: but that's not even the first time that you're staring
Speaker 4: at Marian through a window with her clothes off, Like
Speaker 4: it's just I don't know, the way that she's framed
Speaker 4: seems intentional in that way.
Speaker 3: Well, it made me wonder because this is like one
Speaker 3: of the first, if not the first, slasher movies, and
Speaker 3: such a big trope about slasher movies, as we've discussed,
Speaker 3: is the punishment of sexuality, specifically women's sexuality, with violence.
Speaker 3: So if you see teenagers and teen girls having sex,
Speaker 3: they are bound to get murdered violently in a way
Speaker 3: that's often framed extremely sexually, like the murder itself and
Speaker 3: this is the case for this movie, because she gets
Speaker 3: murdered while she's naked in the shower in a way
Speaker 3: that you could argue is sexualized. Where it made me wonder,
Speaker 3: is Marian being punished for kind of having The movie
Speaker 3: frames what she's doing as having this like secret torrid affair.
Speaker 3: It's not quite that. But it took me on my
Speaker 3: second watch to realize the dynamic of the relationship because
Speaker 3: they're talking about like, oh, or should we get married,
Speaker 3: or who has been married.
Speaker 1: Before or not?
Speaker 3: And I was confused by a lot of it, and
Speaker 3: I thought maybe at least one of them, between Marian
Speaker 3: and Sam, was already married and they were cheating and
Speaker 3: having this you know, secret affair where they have to
Speaker 3: meet up in a hotel room and all this stuff.
Speaker 3: And then it turns out that no, it's just that
Speaker 3: he can't marry her because he is in debt and
Speaker 3: can't support her or something. But I feel like the
Speaker 3: movie is still framing it as like this is a
Speaker 3: secret torrid affair out of wedlock, and they're having sex
Speaker 3: out of wedlock, and therefore Marian has to be punished,
Speaker 3: and you know, punished violently and in a very sexually
Speaker 3: charged way. I don't have like necessarily even conclusive thoughts
Speaker 3: or totally fully formed thoughts on it, but it was
Speaker 3: just like a lot of different things I was picking
Speaker 3: up on.
Speaker 5: I think that's how I kind of previously felt, and
Speaker 5: like this viewing change that a little bit for me.
Speaker 5: I kind of saw the Dynamicus being a bit like
Speaker 5: Sex and the City, Mister Big kind of like Sam
Speaker 5: is kind of making excuses and she is like wanting
Speaker 5: to commit and settled down, and then when she's in
Speaker 5: the car, she kind of fantasizes about what he'll say
Speaker 5: when he sees her, and she's going to be so
Speaker 5: like happy to see him in all of you know,
Speaker 5: and all of those things. And I didn't feel that
Speaker 5: like the movie was necessarily judging her for those desires.
Speaker 5: And then like the shower scene is just so kind
Speaker 5: of overplayed in my head. But what struck me this
Speaker 5: type watching it is that she kind of lies out
Speaker 5: of the bath, you know, out of the shower, and
Speaker 5: you know, he has this really long shot that's just
Speaker 5: on her eye, and the water from the shower is
Speaker 5: like dripping, and it kind of does appear to be
Speaker 5: almost like tears and forst moment you think she's dead,
Speaker 5: and then you kind of see that she's It's like
Speaker 5: the last flickers of life kind of coming out of her.
Speaker 5: And the thing she's looking at is the money. It's
Speaker 5: a pot of me that it's just like that was
Speaker 5: the sin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know where to fall on.
Speaker 4: I guess I was surprised at the amount of grace
Speaker 4: the movie shows to Marian. I mean, and maybe that's
Speaker 4: me putting too much of a modern view on it,
Speaker 4: but it felt to me like the movie was, you know,
Speaker 4: not judgmental of Marion's actions.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, I know that there's gendered stuff in this too,
Speaker 4: where you know, in movies where male protagonists, you know,
Speaker 4: steals or robs someone, it's the pressure to justify it
Speaker 4: is not as great. But I felt like the movie
Speaker 4: did a good job of making it clear what Marian
Speaker 4: was trying to do and how frustrating her life was,
Speaker 4: and that she wanted out and she didn't want I mean,
Speaker 4: I think that there's a way to see it both ways,
Speaker 4: but it felt like it was a frustration of feeling
Speaker 4: like she had to hide a relationship and a frustration
Speaker 4: of feeling like having this relationship would result in her
Speaker 4: and her partner being judged on top of being treated
Speaker 4: like shit at work, on top of being harassed by
Speaker 4: every man she comes into contact with.
Speaker 1: Not that stealing this money would change that, but it was.
Speaker 1: It's a very.
Speaker 4: Active decision by her. I mean, I think a lesser
Speaker 4: movie would have someone suggest it to her. But it's like,
Speaker 4: she gets access to this money, this is her chance,
Speaker 4: and she decides to do it.
Speaker 1: I like that part.
Speaker 4: I don't really feel was done judgmentally. I think the
Speaker 4: way that she dies and when she dies was how
Speaker 4: I I don't know. I mean, I didn't come down
Speaker 4: hard in one way. But I think it is really
Speaker 4: interesting that it's like the moment that she decides to
Speaker 4: come clean is when she's killed, And I don't know
Speaker 4: how that sort of affects the way that the movie
Speaker 4: seems to be viewing her. I think the way the
Speaker 4: movie frames her versus the way she's written are often
Speaker 4: kind of in conflict, which we've talked about in a
Speaker 4: pajillion movies. I don't really understand why we're leering at
Speaker 4: her at the beginning of the movie. I guess I
Speaker 4: do understand it more when it's done from the character
Speaker 4: perspective of Norman, but there is other times it happens
Speaker 4: that I don't understand. But there was a quote from
Speaker 4: that Hitchcock and True Faux book, which is just extended
Speaker 4: interviews with Hitchcock discussing how the shower scene was filmed
Speaker 4: and what was supposed to be motivating it, And this
Speaker 4: is a quote from Janet Lee within that book, Marian
Speaker 4: had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and
Speaker 4: take the consequence. So when she stepped into the bathtub,
Speaker 4: it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters.
Speaker 4: The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption
Speaker 4: from her mind, purging the evil from her soul. She
Speaker 4: was like a virgin again, tranquil at peace, unquote. And
Speaker 4: so choosing to kill her at that moment, I don't
Speaker 4: know what trying to do there, because it doesn't feel
Speaker 4: like a punished I mean, I feel like you can
Speaker 4: argue that she's killed as a punishment for considering the
Speaker 4: sin of stealing or the sin of a relationship that
Speaker 4: was not acceptable at the time. But we've just seen
Speaker 4: her decide that she's not going to do that, and
Speaker 4: she's going to return to her virtuous life. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: that's when she's killed. And I don't I mean, I
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 5: It's such a fascinating scene that one with you know,
Speaker 5: when they're having the sandwiches in the living room. Given that,
Speaker 5: like I think what Hitchcock managers to like do so
Speaker 5: skillfully is like you can, I mean the music and
Speaker 5: the birds and like the lighting and everything, you know
Speaker 5: that this woman is in like grave danger and it's
Speaker 5: under threat. But because Giantly's performance is just so good
Speaker 5: that you can kind of see why she's in like
Speaker 5: the mode of like this is just like a harmless
Speaker 5: meet you in this is kind of like some eccentric
Speaker 5: guy and he's kind of dreamy, and it's like her
Speaker 5: why her God is down still comes across in that scene.
Speaker 5: But I had completely forgotten that there's something about that
Speaker 5: conversation that she has with Norman that makes her change
Speaker 5: her mind and like decide that she's going to like
Speaker 5: go back and make it all okay again and like
Speaker 5: give back the money and like change it. And I
Speaker 5: and I've rewatched it like two or three times and
Speaker 5: I couldn't quite pick up on it. What Hitchcock thinks
Speaker 5: Norman is doing to Marian because she seems of like
Speaker 5: such a kind of stronger constitution than he is. And like,
Speaker 5: as much as you know Anthony Perkins's dreamy.
Speaker 2: Like that persuasion never felt quite right to me. Beyond
Speaker 2: that maybe she has like a moment to pause and reflect, but.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, I couldn't identify anything specific that he says,
Speaker 3: unless maybe it's just like him talking about like being
Speaker 3: trapped and you know, under the control of his mother basically,
Speaker 3: and like she worries that by running away, and like
Speaker 3: because she'll eventually have to deal with the consequences of
Speaker 3: like stealing this money, if she will feel trapped just
Speaker 3: by like that stress and the burden or not even
Speaker 3: the guilt, the stress of getting potentially caught, right, maybe
Speaker 3: she decides it won't be worth it. But whatever it is,
Speaker 3: I agree that it's not clear.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I mean, but that's why this is a
Speaker 5: you know, Christmas romcom movie, like kind of deep, incredibly compelling,
Speaker 5: intelligent woman gets like persuaded by this like.
Speaker 4: Lame right, the purpose of that scene because I agree,
Speaker 4: like I didn't feel like that that conversation resulting in
Speaker 4: her deciding to undo what she just started doing like
Speaker 4: their predicaments are not similar.
Speaker 1: It was confusing why it was switched. I read and like, this.
Speaker 4: Makes sense to me, but maybe the execution just like
Speaker 4: doesn't work for a modern audience, or maybe it just
Speaker 4: doesn't work at all.
Speaker 1: Was that that scene was put there?
Speaker 4: That scene doesn't appear in the book, and it was
Speaker 4: put there so that it's like almost this moment of
Speaker 4: like transference, so that you know enough about Norman that
Speaker 4: when when Janetly's character dies in a couple of minutes,
Speaker 4: your sort of sympathies have been transferred from Marian to Norman.
Speaker 4: Which that makes sense that you have to do that,
Speaker 4: But maybe but I think that like I honestly don't
Speaker 4: even know that that had to happen, Like why did
Speaker 4: she need to change her mind in order to leave
Speaker 4: that room and take a shower?
Speaker 1: Like her plan could have been the same. I guess
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't like object to it, but I
Speaker 4: don't really understand why that switch happened.
Speaker 2: But do you think that's just.
Speaker 5: Kind of like male gaze in that like Hitchcock felt
Speaker 5: that we needed to have like additional reasons to find
Speaker 5: her death to be a bad thing. Yeah, because I
Speaker 5: ONMI kind of really needed that interaction with the guy
Speaker 5: who's doing the tax evasion and the eighteen year old
Speaker 5: daughter to be just like I am fully.
Speaker 4: On right her and her victimless crimes, like I don't
Speaker 4: give Yeah, maybe that is like, oh, we need to
Speaker 4: show that she has made the upright, morally pure choice.
Speaker 1: And so then when she dies, it's sadder because she
Speaker 1: was going to do the right thing. She just didn't
Speaker 1: get the chance. She was tempted. Oh that sucks. I wouldn't.
Speaker 4: I would rather die stealing forty thousand dollars than die
Speaker 4: about and steal forty thousand dollars exactly.
Speaker 3: I also wish that Lilah had been poised more front
Speaker 3: and center as like the new protagonist after Marion dies.
Speaker 3: Then she is because as we were discussing earlier, like
Speaker 3: she's better at like going about this whole thing as
Speaker 3: far as like investigating her sister's disappearance. She has better ideas,
Speaker 3: she's got better execution, Like I just I wish that
Speaker 3: she had been allowed to be a bit more important
Speaker 3: to the story because instead it becomes about like it's
Speaker 3: her and it's Sam and it's Arbagaust and then Norman
Speaker 3: Bates is the person that we're like, Actually, I don't
Speaker 3: even know what the movie who. The movie is like
Speaker 3: trying to get you to identify with as like the
Speaker 3: character you're rooting for post Marian's death, because a protagonist
Speaker 3: dying forty five minutes into the movie is a really
Speaker 3: weird narrative choice, and like, I don't know what to
Speaker 3: I think it rocks. It's interesting, but like audiences aren't
Speaker 3: trained how to like redirect their empathy to like who now,
Speaker 3: and like it's now spread over a bunch of different characters,
Speaker 3: and I guess I just wish like that Lila would
Speaker 3: have been POI there's like the new main person that
Speaker 3: we were supposed to direct our empathy toward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean I do love that.
Speaker 5: Like I said, I love horror movies, but like you know,
Speaker 5: sometimes in the beginning of them, you can just kind
Speaker 5: of quickly identify who's like cannon fodder that this is
Speaker 5: kind of the opposite of that. But I know, I
Speaker 5: don't want to kind of bring new bad news. But
Speaker 5: like I mean, Hitchcock treats Vera Miles, who played Lilah
Speaker 5: Crane like that because he was really angry at her for.
Speaker 2: Getting pregnant, so she gives her not much to do,
Speaker 2: and he kind.
Speaker 5: Of dresses her to be like really like Dowdy, and
Speaker 5: she doesn't kind of get like the heroic moment, and
Speaker 5: he like really downplays her to me.
Speaker 2: He kind of positions her as big, like the the
Speaker 2: lesser sister, and.
Speaker 3: She's damseled at the end where she has to be
Speaker 3: saved by Sam who comes in and saves her from Norman. Wow,
Speaker 3: Hitchcock is a monster.
Speaker 4: I was really frustrated, like how difficult that information was
Speaker 4: to find as well, Like that is not presented as
Speaker 4: even in the like sort of reappraisal of Alfred Hitchcock
Speaker 4: and female actors and women characters and all this stuff
Speaker 4: that doesn't come up a lot, which I guess maybe
Speaker 4: is because it's kind of a blip comparatively, but like logistically,
Speaker 4: even if you're trying to streamline this movie, Sam is
Speaker 4: very much in the way in the back half of
Speaker 4: that movie. It would have been very simple to give
Speaker 4: Lila kind of an elevated role, and you know, maybe
Speaker 4: it is more realistic that she'd have to bump up
Speaker 4: against this guy that thinks he knows what he's doing
Speaker 4: or thinks that he knows her sister better than cheetahs
Speaker 4: or whatever. Different kind of blips come up between them,
Speaker 4: but it's like he's mostly in the way, And like
Speaker 4: Lilah's character, we also just don't really know anything about
Speaker 4: her outside of the fact that she's Mary and sister.
Speaker 4: We don't know like, is she also a single girl?
Speaker 4: Are they super close? It seems like they are, but
Speaker 4: we don't really.
Speaker 3: Know what are her hobbies.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's just that throwaway line at the beginning where
Speaker 5: I mean, they do you kind of like off handby
Speaker 5: kind of suggests that she's like a bit pathetic or
Speaker 5: it's just like, well, you know when Sam talks about her,
Speaker 5: like we'll send her off to the movies and turn
Speaker 5: the picture of your mother around and kind of get busy.
Speaker 1: It's frustrating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think like we could have I don't know
Speaker 4: if the way she would have been written in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 4: I also don't really have a clear idea of how
Speaker 4: she's presented in the book and how much that was changed.
Speaker 4: But it just felt like I was happy she was there,
Speaker 4: and I was happy that she was I guess, yeah,
Speaker 4: more active than I would have expected, especially because Sam
Speaker 4: is in all of those scenes and you sort of
Speaker 4: half expect that he's going to be like, we have
Speaker 4: to do this, this, and this, where most of the
Speaker 4: actions they take are orchestrated by her. But ultimately I
Speaker 4: feel like we're kind of short changed. The opportunity to
Speaker 4: see kind of who she is, and the fact that
Speaker 4: that's connected to Hitchcock's malicious treatment of women he worked
Speaker 4: with just sort of puts a bow in it. I mean,
Speaker 4: I guess that this is worth going through in brief
Speaker 4: will include links to more thorough sources on this, but
Speaker 4: because this is the first time we've talked about a
Speaker 4: Hitchcock movie on this show, if you have not encountered
Speaker 4: not really a feminist hero that Alfred Hitchcock was famously
Speaker 4: abusive and coercive to a number of women that he
Speaker 4: worked with, I think most famously and the women that
Speaker 4: he worked with who has spoken out about it most extensively.
Speaker 1: Lele.
Speaker 4: You referenced earlier Tippy Hedron in the movie That Made
Speaker 4: My Classmates and definitely not me p The Birds, where
Speaker 4: not only was she treated brutally on the set of
Speaker 4: that shoot, he was also relentlessly sexually harassing her behind
Speaker 4: the scenes, controlling her behavior, controlling her food intake, and
Speaker 4: just generally making her entire early career a living hell.
Speaker 4: She spoke out on this in a number of times
Speaker 4: starting in the nineteen eighties, but was mostly brushed to
Speaker 4: the side until she released mmoir in I think it
Speaker 4: was twenty sixteen or seventeen and spoke about it in
Speaker 4: more detail. Similar stories exist for the actor Brigitte o'bert,
Speaker 4: who played a part in To Catch a Thief, who
Speaker 4: was sort.
Speaker 1: Of taken on as a you know, mentee by Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaker 4: She was thrilled about it, she is a young actor,
Speaker 4: and then he you know, sexually assaulted her in a car,
Speaker 4: lunged at her, tried to kiss her, et cetera. That's
Speaker 4: well documented different women who worked.
Speaker 1: In his offices.
Speaker 4: It was just like a very clear pattern of behavior
Speaker 4: that was I think in the way that these stories
Speaker 4: very often are just like an open secret internally, but
Speaker 4: it's almost tacitly expected that no one should know or
Speaker 4: should care because of the looming shadow of like what
Speaker 4: this director means to culture and you know, bloody fucking black.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I I'm feeling like very protective of like
Speaker 5: my kind of twelve year old film found self, who's
Speaker 5: just like, oh my god.
Speaker 2: A Hitchcock box set and a Kubrick box set.
Speaker 4: What could the role?
Speaker 3: It's not there.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think the interesting thing about Hitchcock is
Speaker 5: I'm not in any way trying to like excuse like
Speaker 5: the rank misogyny, and I think you can see it
Speaker 5: on the screen, and like, you know, he's a wonderfully
Speaker 5: talented director in many regards, Like that doesn't make any
Speaker 5: of that suck less. But I think there's a weird
Speaker 5: kind of cyclical thing happens that because he's so convinced
Speaker 5: of like the kind of passivity of men and like
Speaker 5: connected to like essentially blaming women for their actions where
Speaker 5: they weakly end up being like the most compelling character
Speaker 5: in each one of his films is like the men
Speaker 5: are kind of like useless babies a lot of the
Speaker 5: time because like the original sin must go back to
Speaker 5: the woman, so she ends up being like inadversently the
Speaker 5: most like the.
Speaker 2: Core of it all.
Speaker 4: I think Married is like a good example of that too,
Speaker 4: where it's like the compelling parts of Marian's character, I
Speaker 4: genuinely don't know at every turn whether I am supposed
Speaker 4: to be fascinated by her and excited by like who
Speaker 4: she is and the choices she's making, but I am
Speaker 4: If it's an accident, I guess I don't really give
Speaker 4: a shit, Like it's good that you can find that
Speaker 4: inside of her and yeah, like you're saying, Leila, it
Speaker 4: doesn't make Hitchcock less of a monster in the way
Speaker 4: that he both treated women and viewed them.
Speaker 1: This was in the Hitchcock Trufau interviews as well.
Speaker 4: He was asked why do you hate women, and he answered,
Speaker 4: I don't exactly hate them, but I certainly don't think
Speaker 4: they're as good actors as men, and then goes on
Speaker 4: to explain at length why women suck at acting and
Speaker 4: that's why he has to be mean to them and
Speaker 4: be harder on them and dress them suggestively to distract
Speaker 4: from the fact that they are worse actors than men.
Speaker 1: So it's so weird.
Speaker 4: It's like he I mean, not weird, it's I guess normal,
Speaker 4: But I think he engaged in a mask off discussion
Speaker 4: of it that is pretty wild, where he was pretty
Speaker 4: open about his misogynist views on women's skills and ability
Speaker 4: and valuing them for looks over talent, but also was
Speaker 4: sort of really determined that how that manifested in his
Speaker 4: behavior was never public till well after he died.
Speaker 5: Like, gee, Alfred, is there anything else that maybe be
Speaker 5: dealing with on the set that the man.
Speaker 2: Might be making that job's hot?
Speaker 1: Ah, it didn't occur to him.
Speaker 3: God And speaking of like blaming women and women are
Speaker 3: sinners who must be punted, like the speech that the
Speaker 3: psychiatrist is giving at the end, where like poor Lilah,
Speaker 3: she just keeps being like, is my sister dead or what?
Speaker 3: Like she still doesn't even know what happened to her sister,
Speaker 3: and the psychiatrist, yeah, just said, well, she was really
Speaker 3: sexy and that's why she's dead because she was so
Speaker 3: attractive and Norman Bates was so attracted to her and
Speaker 3: so aroused by her that he had to kill her. Okay,
Speaker 3: she dude, read the room frame this a little bit.
Speaker 4: Seriously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, her sister literally died.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean that needs to I mean I did
Speaker 5: kind of think that the Bobby movie doesn't need a sequel,
Speaker 5: but maybe it's ken watching.
Speaker 1: Psycho truly they showed in the Godfather, but there's a
Speaker 1: whole world out there.
Speaker 3: There's other movies. I don't even know what to make
Speaker 3: of this line exactly, but there's a part where when
Speaker 3: Arbagast goes to question Norman Bates and he's just like,
Speaker 3: was it like this woman was here? I know she was,
Speaker 3: and you know, maybe she tricked you, or like maybe
Speaker 3: she's trying to scheme you, And Norman Bates says something like,
Speaker 3: I'm not a fool and I'm not capable of being fooled,
Speaker 3: not even by a woman I.
Speaker 5: Know, and then like, just to kind of make it
Speaker 5: all the more twisted, it was just like, but even
Speaker 5: if I was fulled, my mother wouldn't be pulled.
Speaker 2: She's okay. Way to make it all the women's fault again.
Speaker 1: They're like, what it did? Seem like?
Speaker 4: That seems was making an effort to blame every woman
Speaker 4: we have seen in the entire movie before or heard of,
Speaker 4: because we don't ever see them on What a Treat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is just my favorite thing of fiction though,
Speaker 5: Like these like unassuming man babies, I mean, like the
Speaker 5: true evil in the world.
Speaker 2: I really like it when they're identified.
Speaker 3: Yeah that is Norman Baits to a tea. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean the point where he still has like stuffed animals
Speaker 3: in his bedroom and like, okay, a little tiny baby bed.
Speaker 2: Okay, I feel like this is going to be pitch.
Speaker 5: This is my next piece, the kind of Norman Baits
Speaker 5: to five hundred Days of Summer Pipeline.
Speaker 3: Yes, I would read that one percent on it. Does
Speaker 3: anyone else have anything they'd like to discuss?
Speaker 4: I have one more quick thing just about going kind
Speaker 4: of back to the discussion of Norman Baits as an
Speaker 4: iconic movie serial killer and how serial killers are this
Speaker 4: fixation of and to some extent, invention of the media
Speaker 4: and media narratives, and just watching it again. It's not
Speaker 4: a movie that's discussed in this piece, but it's one
Speaker 4: of my favorites and by friend of the cast and
Speaker 4: a dear pal, Sarah Marshall wrote a great piece in
Speaker 4: The Believer last year called Violent Delights, sort of about
Speaker 4: the specifically American media fixation on serial killers and sort
Speaker 4: of examining true crime fandom as it exists today. The
Speaker 4: passage I was thinking of while we're looking at Norman
Speaker 4: Bates and the fact that he was inspired by a
Speaker 4: real life serial killer.
Speaker 1: Although, as you.
Speaker 4: Explained, Caitlin, the gender non conforming elements were way mis
Speaker 4: translated onto Norman Bates. But just how the serial killers
Speaker 4: that media narratives and movies tend to focus on are
Speaker 4: serial killers who are other in some kind of way
Speaker 4: and ignore the most common type of serial murder, which
Speaker 4: is a straight man. And so the example that she
Speaker 4: uses in the piece is someone who had never heard
Speaker 4: of before I met Sarah and she told me about
Speaker 4: all these serial killers is Ronald Gene Simmons, who is
Speaker 4: not a well known American serial killer, but committed at
Speaker 4: the time one of the most horrific mass murders, including
Speaker 4: his entire family, over the course of two days. And
Speaker 4: she speculates the reason that he has not fixated on
Speaker 4: is because there is nothing that's other about him. He
Speaker 4: is a regular guy who committed a horrible atrocity. And
Speaker 4: how that is framed as kind of the way of
Speaker 4: the world, even though it is like far more criminal
Speaker 4: act of murder than we see when women kill people
Speaker 4: and when queer people kill other people, it's presented in
Speaker 4: a different way where it's like fundamentally evil, this is
Speaker 4: at the core of their being, versus when we hear
Speaker 4: about straight men killing people and usually white straight men
Speaker 4: killing people that it's presented as well they were reacting
Speaker 4: to the world, not that they are evil to their core.
Speaker 4: And so just in the way that Norman Bates is
Speaker 4: othered and made to seem effeminate and dresses, you know,
Speaker 4: like we were saying gender nonconforming, it feels like those
Speaker 4: are the characters that really get fixated on and made
Speaker 4: examples of in this completely disingenuous way. And I'd recommend
Speaker 4: reading the piece. It's really interesting.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's fascinating to me that like ed Gean
Speaker 5: has generally got like problematic elements aside eight great movies,
Speaker 5: and like nobody else I didn't think comes like close
Speaker 5: to that.
Speaker 1: It's wild. I didn't realize we've got.
Speaker 5: This, We've got Texas Chainsaw, we got Silence of the
Speaker 5: like that, Like ed Gean, it's really interesting how he
Speaker 5: in particular captured like the cultural imagination, the way that
Speaker 5: they are yet to make a decent Ted Bundy movie,
Speaker 5: and like I mean that, you know, for a million
Speaker 5: gross reasons. And I don't even want to like get
Speaker 5: into like the way that Ted Bundy has been freed
Speaker 5: by the media because it just will meersen it is.
Speaker 5: But like it is very interesting that like this one
Speaker 5: guy and just these couple of details where it's like
Speaker 5: we've got it's essentially the grave robbing. It's the kind
Speaker 5: of taxi and we maybe doing leather work something with
Speaker 5: like people's skin, and it's like just the hint of quickness,
Speaker 5: and like that was enough to inspire, Like it was
Speaker 5: like Helen Detroita, he'd like launched a thousand ships in
Speaker 5: terms of like cultural imagination.
Speaker 3: Similarly, the movie Psycho, where the last thing I want
Speaker 3: to talk about is and I'm not an expert in
Speaker 3: film history, but this movie was made in nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: when the production code, which we've talked about on the
Speaker 3: show before in various episodes, just very quick refresher if
Speaker 3: any listeners are not familiar. It was this code that
Speaker 3: Hollywood movies had to follow from nineteen thirty four to
Speaker 3: I believe nineteen sixty eight, I think was when it
Speaker 3: was replaced by the MPAA rating system. But basically it
Speaker 3: was this like set of guidelines that was overseen by
Speaker 3: the Catholic Church, where like there could be no nudity
Speaker 3: or overt sexuality on screen. A lot of things had
Speaker 3: to be implied rather than shown there could be no
Speaker 3: graphic violence, all these different things just as a way
Speaker 3: to censor movies.
Speaker 5: No interracial relationships where they work to treat it as equals,
Speaker 5: and that was a fun one.
Speaker 3: All kinds of like really disgusting stuff that was scene
Speaker 3: as a way to like, you know, promote good American
Speaker 3: religious values, when it was really just censoring art and
Speaker 3: being nasty. But anyway, by the sixties, the code, the
Speaker 3: restrictions of the Code were becoming a bit more lax.
Speaker 3: They're still being enforced, but filmmakers were like finding ways
Speaker 3: to like try to circumvent the restrictions and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: and a lot of the things that were in the
Speaker 3: original cut of Psycho, you know, the board were like,
Speaker 3: you can't have this scene where they're in a hotel
Speaker 3: room where she's half naked, like you know, she's topless
Speaker 3: with just a bra on and they're kissing and they're
Speaker 3: not marry, Like, you can't have stuff like that, the
Speaker 3: shower scene that you know, they obviously had a lot
Speaker 3: of problems with the shower scene, but eventually, like Hitchcock
Speaker 3: wormed his way out of it, and a lot of
Speaker 3: the stuff that he originally wanted stayed in the film,
Speaker 3: and because this was such a huge, like box office hit.
Speaker 3: This movie was made on a tight budget even for
Speaker 3: the time. It was made for less than a million
Speaker 3: dollars and it grossed fifty million dollars at the box office.
Speaker 3: Like it was just a huge smash hit, to the
Speaker 3: point where the original critical reception of this movie was
Speaker 3: like pretty mixed, where people were like, this is so controversial,
Speaker 3: I don't know about this, it's scandalous. But because like
Speaker 3: audiences loved it, critics were like, maybe it is awesome.
Speaker 3: And then it was like nominated for various Academy Awards
Speaker 3: all this stuff not Anthony Perkins, which is a crime ridiculous.
Speaker 3: But anyway, this movie basically set a new level of
Speaker 3: like acceptability in terms of what you could show on
Speaker 3: screen with violence and sexuality and quote unquote deviant behavior,
Speaker 3: which is a very low noted idea, but this movie
Speaker 3: kind of like set a new standard. And again, this
Speaker 3: isn't the first movie that showed, you know, like a
Speaker 3: gender nonconforming person as a violent murderer. The documentary that
Speaker 3: we referenced earlier, Disclosure dives into that a lot more deeply.
Speaker 3: I'd recommend everyone watching that film. There's also another docuseries
Speaker 3: on Shutter called Queer for Fear, which is all about
Speaker 3: representation of queerness in horror movies. I haven't watched it,
Speaker 3: so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it seems interesting
Speaker 3: and I'm going to watch it anyway. All this to
Speaker 3: say that this movie was so influential in sort of
Speaker 3: like shaping the way certain things were represented on screen.
Speaker 3: And I think so much of the way mental illness
Speaker 3: is like widely misunderstood by Hollywood and gender nonconformity is
Speaker 3: widely misunderstood by Holiday can be attributed to this movie.
Speaker 3: So it has a lasting impact in many ways, and
Speaker 3: not all of them are good. In fact, many of
Speaker 3: them are very bad. Anyway, the end of my tirade.
Speaker 2: About that it's a tough one. Like I have to
Speaker 2: just like resist the mental gymnastics where I try to
Speaker 2: be like it's okay actually.
Speaker 5: Because you know, I appreciate a great edit, but no,
Speaker 5: I mean, like you have to kind of reconcile even
Speaker 5: things that you appreciate, art that you think is great
Speaker 5: with its like negative impact on the world, and like
Speaker 5: that needs to.
Speaker 2: Be I think the priority.
Speaker 3: I agree anything else before we do Bechdel tests.
Speaker 1: I like this movie. Unfortunately, I think.
Speaker 4: In spite of everything we've talked about and it's complete validity,
Speaker 4: this movie rips and so that's challenging.
Speaker 3: It is tricky, it is I call it.
Speaker 2: I kind of created a name for it based on
Speaker 2: like Jered Carbichael has a.
Speaker 5: Really great episode of The Carmichael Show where he talks
Speaker 5: about how like fundamentally we all have to kind of
Speaker 5: make a decision based on like how talented and because
Speaker 5: something is versus how like damaging it is. It's an
Speaker 5: episode where they're discussing Bill Cosby. But I have like
Speaker 5: taken that on mentally, and I call it the Elia
Speaker 5: Kazan index. He sucked, but he was really good at movies.
Speaker 5: But so I consider that an index. And it's like you, I,
Speaker 5: this is how talented you need. I need you to
Speaker 5: be in order for me to recover from it that
Speaker 5: you are a force foot.
Speaker 1: And everyone's smile ish varies with that, right.
Speaker 5: I mean, I trust myself to watch Hitchcock and like
Speaker 5: not become like an agent of the patriot right, right.
Speaker 3: I know there's certain things that I struggle to let
Speaker 3: go of because they were made by someone very problematic,
Speaker 3: but they are such a terrific piece of media that
Speaker 3: it's a constant battle that I fight every day.
Speaker 1: And you're braver than the troops. For that, I we
Speaker 1: have to say it again. We run the front lines
Speaker 1: of watching movies, all three of us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, damn.
Speaker 2: The only thing that I would add because it's in
Speaker 2: all caps, so I.
Speaker 1: Feel like I have to mention simply perfect.
Speaker 2: This is the best eyebrow movie I've ever seen in
Speaker 2: my entire life.
Speaker 1: Oh, you're right.
Speaker 5: Yes, every single character, like the Sheriff has like these
Speaker 5: tough Yeah, Anthony Papkins, Janet Lye strong brow coming.
Speaker 2: On from Sam.
Speaker 1: It's true again, Like I.
Speaker 2: Don't want to be like reductive, but like what an
Speaker 2: eraror for the eyebrow.
Speaker 3: I'll allow it. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 5: I came out of like you know, I'm a millennial.
Speaker 5: Like we had a rough time and then we had
Speaker 5: to try and grow them.
Speaker 1: Back with varying degrees of success. It takes years and
Speaker 1: beforward your backward. It's challenging, truly.
Speaker 5: So lucky that I was too lazy and too poor
Speaker 5: to get regular facing. But it's so nice to see
Speaker 5: such a full set of brows across the.
Speaker 1: Cast is nice.
Speaker 3: I'm glad it's back. I'm glad of thick brow is
Speaker 3: back in vogue.
Speaker 2: My preference, when does that ever happen?
Speaker 5: That like the thing that's like really in fashion and
Speaker 5: like really esthetically peasing to everyone. It's a thing that
Speaker 5: requires you should do nothing, just leave them.
Speaker 3: Can we have more of that?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: As for the basel tiest, I do believe that this
Speaker 1: movie passes.
Speaker 3: Is it between Marian and her colleague in the office
Speaker 3: is at the beginning?
Speaker 1: Yes, whose name is Caroline?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Who's Hitchcock's daughter?
Speaker 3: Oh, that's Hitchcock's daughter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 5: Which is a brutal role for your dad to write
Speaker 5: you because like there is like a really like damning
Speaker 5: line at the end where she's just like, oh, he
Speaker 5: would have flootered at me, but he must have spotted
Speaker 5: my wedding ring. And that's like a punchline, like of
Speaker 5: course he didn't rude Alfred.
Speaker 1: I don't think they say her name out loud, but
Speaker 1: she does have like her name is like on her desk,
Speaker 1: so I considered her to be a named character. She's
Speaker 1: credited as Caroline.
Speaker 6: They talk about I was actually I was watching this
Speaker 6: movie with my boyfriend, and we were like, I don't
Speaker 6: know if I have enough like knowledge of nineteen sixty
Speaker 6: to understand what the joke is with the sedatives. If
Speaker 6: it's a mother's little helper joke, if it's a more
Speaker 6: insidious joke than that, I was not clear.
Speaker 4: But she was like, don't take astrain. Take this like
Speaker 4: tranquil my mom doctor gave me or something. And I
Speaker 4: was like, this seems like a joke that probably made
Speaker 4: sense at the time. It doesn't seem awesome, but I
Speaker 4: don't fucking understand it same anyways, that passed.
Speaker 3: That does pass.
Speaker 5: Everyone's mother's just coming in and messing up, truly. Yeah,
Speaker 5: my assumption with that joke is that like she took
Speaker 5: it and then passed out and was able to like
Speaker 5: consummate the marriage.
Speaker 2: But like maybe that's just oh god.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean that that was one of the theories floated,
Speaker 1: But there just was.
Speaker 2: She was like so nervous.
Speaker 1: That joke was so dated that I found it actively confusing.
Speaker 1: But it did technically pass the vecyl tense did there
Speaker 1: you go?
Speaker 5: There you go?
Speaker 3: But onto our perfect metric the nipple.
Speaker 1: Scale wofully titled metric.
Speaker 3: Not to be confused with. Uh no, never mind. I
Speaker 3: was going to make a reference to something that ed
Speaker 3: Geen had made, but I won't even if you want
Speaker 3: to look it up. Ooh you can, I think one
Speaker 3: you're thinking that, yeah, So instead I'll just breeze right
Speaker 3: past it. The nipple scale zero to five nipples where
Speaker 3: we rate the movie based on examining it through an
Speaker 3: intersectional feminist lens. I guess I'll give this like a
Speaker 3: one one nipple for because it does have interesting female
Speaker 3: characters to some degree. Granted, one of them is murdered
Speaker 3: forty five minutes into the movie. The other one doesn't
Speaker 3: get a whole lot of screen time or active participation
Speaker 3: in the narrative. But I like both Marion and Lila
Speaker 3: as characters. They are strong willed, they are active to
Speaker 3: some degree. They are damseled and or killed, so they're
Speaker 3: kind of they befall. Not a great fate befalls them,
Speaker 3: but the time they are on screen there I would
Speaker 3: say more interesting than a lot of the male characters.
Speaker 3: But ultimately, this is a movie that wildly misunderstands mental
Speaker 3: illness and conflates gender nonconformity with violence being violent and
Speaker 3: does a whole lot of extremely reductive and harmful things
Speaker 3: to extremely vulnerable communities and kind of paves the way
Speaker 3: for a lot of movies to do similar things later on.
Speaker 3: So it kind of again doesn't completely lay the groundwork
Speaker 3: for this. Earlier movies had done something similar, but this
Speaker 3: is a one of the most iconic movies in American
Speaker 3: cinema history, and the implications of what happens in the
Speaker 3: movie have had a very lasting impact for worse. So
Speaker 3: I can only give it one nipple, and I'll give
Speaker 3: that nipple to janetly because she is cool. I don't
Speaker 3: know much about her personal life, but she rocked.
Speaker 1: She's famously Jamie Lee Curtis's mom, Mommy, and this movie
Speaker 1: is about Mommy's.
Speaker 2: Went through the nightmare being married to Tony Kasis.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's a survivor, but also not because she died,
Speaker 4: but only because she result Anyways, Well, on that note,
Speaker 4: I guess, and I meant that critical.
Speaker 1: I meant that how dare is she? Technically, if you
Speaker 1: live long enough, no one's a survivor.
Speaker 2: That is the direction that survivors goes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's survivor damas temporary.
Speaker 1: It's a finite di finishing returns on being alive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, Well, I guess I will go one.
Speaker 4: I guess I'm tempded to go one and a half because.
Speaker 1: Of how surprised I was at what was available in
Speaker 1: this movie and what had.
Speaker 4: Changed to scale back the misogyny present in the original text,
Speaker 4: which I feel like usually that is flipped, but I
Speaker 4: don't know. I guess whoever edits the Wikipedia these days
Speaker 4: you can choose.
Speaker 1: One or one and a half depending on how you
Speaker 1: personally feel.
Speaker 4: But I mean, obviously, I think that the biggest issue
Speaker 4: with this movie is, as we've talked about, how the
Speaker 4: character of Norman Bates contains all of these conflicting things
Speaker 4: being presented as evil, with the gender nonconformity being front
Speaker 4: and center for what has this legacy of harm, and
Speaker 4: then also mental illness being mischaracterized as inherently incurable, untreatable, violent,
Speaker 4: murderous bad. So that I think is the part of
Speaker 4: this movie that is just kind of impossible for me
Speaker 4: to reconcile to some extent. Then I think that, you know,
Speaker 4: whether intentionally or not, there's wait, okay, sorry, my cat's here.
Speaker 1: Flee present.
Speaker 4: Flee has entered the chating, So loud, But I think
Speaker 4: as far as how much we get to know Marian,
Speaker 4: how her perspective is prioritized.
Speaker 1: For the first half of the movie, I was pleasantly
Speaker 1: surprised by I was on her side. It felt like
Speaker 1: the movie was on her side.
Speaker 4: I felt like Lilah was underplayed, and then that leads
Speaker 4: to Hitchcock's like see of misogyny and why Lyla's.
Speaker 1: Character was underplayed.
Speaker 4: So for everything we've talked about today, I guess I'm
Speaker 4: gonna go one and a half for some reason arbitrarily,
Speaker 4: and I'm gonna give one to Janet Lee and I'll
Speaker 4: give the other half two Vera miles because she had
Speaker 4: to endure a lot and didn't get to do what
Speaker 4: she should have been able.
Speaker 1: To do on this movie.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think I'm meantually gonna like do a
Speaker 5: reasonably big boost and go with like two and a half.
Speaker 5: But like, I don't credit any of that, particularly to Hitchcark.
Speaker 5: I think it's sort of he inadvertently centered queer stories
Speaker 5: in women's stories, like within this movie in a way
Speaker 5: that like, for all that it's problematic, it is at
Speaker 5: least compelling and like particularly like within the job that
Speaker 5: I do, and like I have to just like review
Speaker 5: like film for a week and stuff. It's like so
Speaker 5: often where I'm just having to see women and anybody
Speaker 5: from mardualized gender like use this kind of like narrative
Speaker 5: tools to kind of help straight suspens character arcs that
Speaker 5: like this still feels like refreshing that I was just
Speaker 5: like I don't think Psycho expects me to give a
Speaker 5: shit about what Sam's up to, and like that's still
Speaker 5: kind of.
Speaker 2: For all of like the problems with it.
Speaker 5: That feels nice to like actually be like ganantly was
Speaker 5: given the space to make a character like we are
Speaker 5: kind of going into for all of its issue. All
Speaker 5: of Norman bates his relationship with Muy is the central
Speaker 5: thing in his life. It's not all about him just
Speaker 5: trying to like trying to impress other dudes. Like I
Speaker 5: don't give a crap in those scenes, but like Sam
Speaker 5: and Norman are kind of like having some weird alpha
Speaker 5: beta male kind of like stand off.
Speaker 2: So like, yeah, I don't credit Hitchcock.
Speaker 5: With like doing this on purpose, but like where he
Speaker 5: made the the people in the film that mattered most
Speaker 5: like strangely like suberversive and progressive and exciting to me,
Speaker 5: and I I don't know how much like janetly brought
Speaker 5: to that, how much like you know the story that
Speaker 5: I don't know how much like Anthony Perkins bought of
Speaker 5: his like personal story. But I feel now watching it
Speaker 5: seeing the way that like obviously an actress like Janitely
Speaker 5: would have been objectified her whole life, the way that
Speaker 5: like Anthony Perkins would have to have like suppressed so
Speaker 5: much of his identity, I feel like I'm watching that
Speaker 5: on screen and like that's me is like genuinely exciting
Speaker 5: and cool.
Speaker 1: Oh that's such a cool word about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you have anyone you want to give your
Speaker 3: nipples too?
Speaker 5: I think I feel like I need to give them
Speaker 5: to Jamie Lee Curtis, because like what a burden to
Speaker 5: charry when your career. I like, and I love that,
Speaker 5: like when a NEPO baby is just like so open
Speaker 5: with just like hey got down to me and like
Speaker 5: three other people for Halloween and they were like, well,
Speaker 5: make a couple of headlines if it's like the syrup
Speaker 5: Psycher's daughter and just fully open about it.
Speaker 2: Like I mean, I love Jamie Lee curs I do too.
Speaker 4: I'm like that's I guess the least you could ask
Speaker 4: of someone in that position is just to be honest
Speaker 4: about it, And it seems like she is like uniquely
Speaker 4: able to be honest about it because most people are like,
Speaker 4: I don't know, I guess they just did my best
Speaker 4: and worked harder.
Speaker 1: You're just like okay, But you.
Speaker 5: Know, Jack Quaid is like seems to be like the
Speaker 5: gen Z version of Jamie Leaue curses because he's out
Speaker 5: on those picket lines.
Speaker 2: I saw him pictures of him today, so it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: some of that get.
Speaker 1: Oh is he Dennis Quaid's song Meg Ryan and Dennis.
Speaker 2: Nis Quaid and Meghan right, Meg Ryan?
Speaker 3: I remember they have a kid together.
Speaker 2: I think they have multiple damn.
Speaker 3: Well, well, thank you so much for joining us. Do
Speaker 3: you want to talk at all about the Latif Test.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's like such a great thing that
Speaker 3: you did, and I'd love to like give it credit
Speaker 3: if you liked.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's like the Bechdel Test was my path
Speaker 5: into like this being my job essentially, Like I was
Speaker 5: working in a completely different field. I had a catering
Speaker 5: and events company and then like one night I was
Speaker 5: doing till my parents went stoned, and like I just
Speaker 5: just like texting my.
Speaker 2: Sister and I was just like, ah, there should be
Speaker 2: like a Bechdel test for race.
Speaker 5: And this was like twenty sixteen, I want to say,
Speaker 5: and I promised this wasn't really a thing before I
Speaker 5: poined it.
Speaker 2: But my sister is very much like a movie note
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 5: She's a film director, and we were just texting about
Speaker 5: how like, well, what would a Bechdel test for race be?
Speaker 5: And it's like, you know, similar beats of like you
Speaker 5: got to have two characters that aren't white, they got
Speaker 5: to talk to each other about something aside from what's
Speaker 5: going on with a white character. One of them is
Speaker 5: definitely not magic, kind of just like silly stuff, and
Speaker 5: it like really like took off and it was one
Speaker 5: of those very stre things were like that's the first
Speaker 5: thing I ever wrote. And I remember like meeting with
Speaker 5: this editor and he was, you know, full the Guardian,
Speaker 5: which is like a big paper in the UK, and
Speaker 5: him being just like we're putting it on the cover.
Speaker 5: And I had this like completely false belief about like
Speaker 5: what being a journalist is. It's just like wait a second,
Speaker 5: you have an idea and they're like three thousand words,
Speaker 5: it got two months see you and a bit kid.
Speaker 5: But yeah, like that was that was my intro to
Speaker 5: it all, and it was just also, I mean, from
Speaker 5: my perspective, like such a kind of interesting delve into
Speaker 5: white feminism in like a weird way, because I had
Speaker 5: a huge number of white female journalists within like the
Speaker 5: next couple of weeks just like take my work and
Speaker 5: like fully rip it off. And I didn't really understand
Speaker 5: what was going on at the time, and in retrospect it's.
Speaker 2: Like really messed up.
Speaker 5: I had like actually like the editor of the paper
Speaker 5: that had published my work write or a talk to
Speaker 5: me saying that, like creativity is being wiped out as
Speaker 5: we demand diversity.
Speaker 2: I mean, like it's it really is. Like twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: was like the wild West of intersectionual.
Speaker 1: Feminism for sure.
Speaker 5: And yeah, in a way, I kind of wish I
Speaker 5: knew what I knew now because I would have been
Speaker 5: able to stand up myself a bit better. But like, yeah,
Speaker 5: the sort of Bechdel test was kind of like my
Speaker 5: intro but also like a bit of a curse of
Speaker 5: like I've always been interested in like the way that
Speaker 5: we like framed these things in the way that we
Speaker 5: sort of address representation. But it bit me on the ass,
Speaker 5: like I had every kind of of retort coming back
Speaker 5: to it.
Speaker 2: And sometimes I do think now that, like.
Speaker 5: As much as like that was kind of just like
Speaker 5: something that I tried out, and like now this is
Speaker 5: like my full time job, which is awesome. It's tricky
Speaker 5: because I think some of those retorts, some of that
Speaker 5: ripping off wouldn't happen now, but maybe it would.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like if things got that much better
Speaker 2: since nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: Psycho not a ton.
Speaker 4: It's so absurdly frustrating to me that it's like your
Speaker 4: first of all that you were ripped off is fucking ridiculous.
Speaker 3: Oh I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, check out the dates for the Latif test.
Speaker 5: And then two weeks later the New York Times were
Speaker 5: renaming it the Diverne test.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, like yeah, that's horseshit. And then on top
Speaker 1: of that, I think that there is like a disingenuous
Speaker 1: way of framing tests like the Latif test, like the
Speaker 1: Bechdel test as a demand when it's just a way
Speaker 1: to have a discussion.
Speaker 4: And like I think it even today and by people
Speaker 4: that I'm generally like minded with I get frustrated when
Speaker 4: it's a framework to set a baseline and discuss moving forward.
Speaker 4: It's not like you're trying to I don't know, Like
Speaker 4: I feel like it's presented very disingenuously, very often as
Speaker 4: a way to not have an intersectional discussion.
Speaker 3: It's why I don't even pay attention if a movie
Speaker 3: passes the Bechdel test or not for this podcast, because
Speaker 3: it's so little of what we actually talk about, and
Speaker 3: so it's such again, it's a jumping off point, and
Speaker 3: we have left that jumping off point years ago, at
Speaker 3: least for the sake of this podcast. Like we are
Speaker 3: so far beyond that, and I understand how it still
Speaker 3: can be a useful tool, but like in the context
Speaker 3: of this podcast, I'm just like, yeah, but what about
Speaker 3: the other like one hundred minutes we spend talking about
Speaker 3: everything else about the movie?
Speaker 5: So yeah, I mean Passon's aren't interesting. I mean, like
Speaker 5: they just like and like whether it's kind of even
Speaker 5: looking at something like Psycho. Would we be so worried
Speaker 5: about the transgender on performing representation Psycho if it was
Speaker 5: not part of like something larger and more insidious, it
Speaker 5: would just be like a quirk of the movie, but
Speaker 5: like everything has to be contextualized, and.
Speaker 2: You know it's it's about there.
Speaker 3: Yes, where else can people check out your writing? Follow
Speaker 3: you on social media, et cetera.
Speaker 5: So I'm at Leila Underschool Latif on Twitter before at
Speaker 5: least before Yeah, I've got a host Truth of Movies,
Speaker 5: which is a podcast where we review like the week's
Speaker 5: latest releases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a contributing.
Speaker 5: Editor and Columbus for Total Film right for the White
Speaker 5: Lives Sit and Sound about to be the Indie Wire
Speaker 5: representative on the ground for the Venice.
Speaker 2: Film first should be fun. Yeah, oh my god, no
Speaker 2: celebrities or actors is gonna come. But like I'm hoping
Speaker 2: that they like put that budget into giving us free food.
Speaker 3: That'd be nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm so excited to read your cover.
Speaker 3: And thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: Come back anytime, you so much.
Speaker 2: I'm making this show. I freak love this show.
Speaker 1: Thank you, I love making it. Thanks for being a
Speaker 1: part of it. And yeah, come back anytime, bring back anything.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to think, like what could be like
Speaker 2: a more hardcore thing than this.
Speaker 1: Undiscussable movies guests, I.
Speaker 3: Still feel like we've only just scratched the surface.
Speaker 2: Like I'm like, God, yipes, let's not do that.
Speaker 1: Let's not.
Speaker 3: But hey, you can follow us at Bechdel Cast. You
Speaker 3: can subscribe to our Matreon at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 3: Bechtel Cast, where you get two bonus episodes every mon month,
Speaker 3: plus access to the back catalog, and it's all for
Speaker 3: five dollars a month.
Speaker 4: Yes, you can also get our merchover at teapublic dot
Speaker 4: com slash d Bechtel Cast. And with that, let's get
Speaker 4: pulled out of that scary bog at the end of
Speaker 4: the movie.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah
Speaker 5: Bye.