Speaker 1: Oh folks, it show die.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater, they want clothed sodas,
Speaker 3: pop popcorn in no monsters in the protection booth.
Speaker 4: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 2: Got it off.
Speaker 5: By the time I was sixteen years old, I was
Speaker 5: notorious as a kid with a terrific knack for theft.
Speaker 5: Foster homes would no longer take me, and I was
Speaker 5: sent to the Boys Reformatory of Batans. There, in the
Speaker 5: counterfeit world of men among men, I found my true family.
Speaker 6: At Batten.
Speaker 5: I was astounded by the discovery that each male had
Speaker 5: a male of his own, and that the world of
Speaker 5: force and manly beauty loved in that way within itself
Speaker 5: from link to link. It was from then on, when
Speaker 5: they merged in shadow, that each group offered me a puzzle.
Speaker 5: The stiff, silent males possessed the violence of love, and
Speaker 5: my life's study would be to find. Sixteen years had
Speaker 5: passed when the maximum security prison of Fontana brought me
Speaker 5: face to face.
Speaker 7: With my deliverance.
Speaker 5: Jack bowman age twenty eight, one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 5: pounds seventy five inches, formerly a captive of Batan.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the Projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Speaker 6: Joined me once again is Ms Rain Alexander.
Speaker 4: Hi, everybody happy to be here.
Speaker 6: Also back in the booth is mister Kyler Faye.
Speaker 8: Hi, everybody.
Speaker 6: We are kicking off twenty twenty five and kicking off
Speaker 6: a month of Patreon request with one from Kyler Fay himself. Poison,
Speaker 6: this first feature film from director Todd Haynes nineteen ninety
Speaker 6: one's Poison is I'm prized to have a trio of stories, Hero,
Speaker 6: Horror and Homo and we'll be talking about these three
Speaker 6: diverse interweave tales and ruining them as we go along.
Speaker 6: So if you don't want anything, run please just turn
Speaker 6: off the podcast and come back after you've seen Poison.
Speaker 6: We will still be here. So, Kyler, I'm very curious
Speaker 6: why did you choose Poison as your Patreon pick and
Speaker 6: when did you first see it?
Speaker 9: It really brings back some memories and I hadn't watched
Speaker 9: the film again. It's been several years since I had
Speaker 9: gone back to it. I saw it when it was
Speaker 9: brand new and I was a young kid abroad in
Speaker 9: England as a student. Still a teenager, and it was
Speaker 9: released in the UK in October of ninety one.
Speaker 8: I saw two movies almost back to back.
Speaker 9: One was Derek Jarman's Edward, the second which was dazzling
Speaker 9: and wonderful, and then the second one I saw was Poison,
Speaker 9: which just really punched me in the face in like
Speaker 9: a good way. I could hardly believe it. I had
Speaker 9: never seen anything like it. Granted I was a very
Speaker 9: unsophisticated film watcher at that time.
Speaker 8: I was just a kid. I hadn't seen a lot
Speaker 8: of stuff.
Speaker 9: But I had not seen anything put together like that,
Speaker 9: anything that looked like it, and I had seen nothing.
Speaker 9: Really was such a frank depiction of gay intimacy and
Speaker 9: it like ever honestly, I hadn't even seen any porn
Speaker 9: yet really at that point, because the Internet was not
Speaker 9: then what it is now, so it wasn't accessible. You
Speaker 9: used to have to spend one hundred bucks on a
Speaker 9: tape or something back in nineteen nineties dollars. But it
Speaker 9: just absolutely amazed me and just stuck with me all
Speaker 9: those years, and then periodically over the years when I
Speaker 9: would try to show it to somebody else and it
Speaker 9: wasn't always that successful. I couldn't really get anybody else
Speaker 9: to quite share my enthusiasm. So it's fun to talk
Speaker 9: to a couple of people who actually want to discuss
Speaker 9: it and rain how about yourself?
Speaker 4: So this came out just as I was leaving college. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I graduated nineteen ninety one, and I had just really
Speaker 4: come into myself as like this really angry, radical, queer,
Speaker 4: feminist person. This wasn't the first time I rewatched it recently.
Speaker 4: I rewatched this every so often. But it really strikes
Speaker 4: me how it seems so impossible to explain what it
Speaker 4: was like before this film, the world before this film.
Speaker 4: And it's not just that this film changed the world,
Speaker 4: because it did, but also it didn't, as we're as
Speaker 4: going to talk about, I think, but there was just
Speaker 4: nothing at all like this before. We were still living
Speaker 4: in a world where it was very fraught to even
Speaker 4: show two people of the same sex kissing on television
Speaker 4: or even in movies, like it was still so difficult
Speaker 4: to even show something like that. I was coming out
Speaker 4: in the early nineties, and I was not just coming
Speaker 4: out as queer, I was coming out as trans, which
Speaker 4: was not even an easy thing to do within the
Speaker 4: queer community. So to see this when it hit was
Speaker 4: just such a blow. Was like it showed me so
Speaker 4: much possibility. When I had knewn a little bit more
Speaker 4: about Todd Haynes through reputation by the time this came out,
Speaker 4: this was a time when I still couldn't really easily
Speaker 4: see Superstar. So when this came out, I still had
Speaker 4: not seen Superstar right that had not been made accessible
Speaker 4: to me. This big My first Todd Haynes was really
Speaker 4: just you know, it opened my world and knew in
Speaker 4: ways that like I'm still enjoying now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this was probably my first thought Haines as well.
Speaker 6: I eventually caught up with Superstar The Karen Carpent dis Story.
Speaker 6: I think I ordered it from video search in Miami,
Speaker 6: maybe ninety five, ninety six, something like that, and this
Speaker 6: one I do remember picking up at the video store.
Speaker 6: Surprisingly enough, it was actually stocked at Blockbuster. And I
Speaker 6: saw this probably ninety three, ninety four something like that,
Speaker 6: probably watched it while I was in college, and it
Speaker 6: just blew me away. Just absolutely loved it. The way
Speaker 6: that the stories are told, the way that their inner
Speaker 6: cut was something very radical for me. I had never
Speaker 6: seen anything like that before. The mixed mediums I thought
Speaker 6: was fantastic. The way that you know the Jennet section,
Speaker 6: I believe that's the homo section. Just how gorgeous that looks,
Speaker 6: the wonderfulness of the horror section, and just the playing
Speaker 6: up of the cheese factor with that, the science fiction
Speaker 6: culty cheapness of it was wonderful. And then the use
Speaker 6: of the documentary style footage for the hero section where
Speaker 6: you don't know exactly what's going on, and I love
Speaker 6: that this whole movie is just set up in such
Speaker 6: a way that you don't know what's going to happen
Speaker 6: to any of these stories. And they are really teasing
Speaker 6: you with the editing because you might start to get
Speaker 6: invested in one story and that moves on to the
Speaker 6: next story, and then it will come back to that story.
Speaker 6: And I love that the editing style is not just
Speaker 6: one story, two story, three story. We vary that because
Speaker 6: otherwise it would start to feel like a waltz with
Speaker 6: that one two three one two three one two three rhythm.
Speaker 6: And I'm just like, I love that we go back
Speaker 6: and forth between the stories as needed, and we might
Speaker 6: get hero and horror going back and forth, and then
Speaker 6: we might slip into Homo in there, and then we
Speaker 6: might go Homo to Hero for a few and then
Speaker 6: go back into the horror section. I'm just like, this
Speaker 6: is fantastic. But I do before we even start to
Speaker 6: talk about the movie, I do want to talk about
Speaker 6: the era that this was made in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 6: You know, Rain, You're talking about how you're just coming
Speaker 6: out as queer and as trans at the time. To
Speaker 6: set this in the proper historical context, I mean, this
Speaker 6: is pre Ellen coming out. It's still a horrible mark
Speaker 6: on your career. You might end your career if you
Speaker 6: come out as gay or if people like catch you
Speaker 6: being gay all. And it's just like this is right
Speaker 6: around the time of independent film really starting to make
Speaker 6: a mark. Like we're one year before Reservoir Dogs. This
Speaker 6: is like sex liize and video tape time. So this
Speaker 6: is like the perfect time for this movie to come out,
Speaker 6: and this is the time when we're starting to actually
Speaker 6: see of course, there have been gay filmmakers since film
Speaker 6: has been made, but very open challenging the status quo
Speaker 6: gay filmmakers. It's starting to happen right now. I mean,
Speaker 6: of course, yes we have John Waters and things, but
Speaker 6: like this with this movie, with Swoon, with Gregor Rakis films.
Speaker 6: I mean, this feels like a real golden age of
Speaker 6: queer cinema is starting right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think a real repudiation of the way
Speaker 4: stories had been told. I mean, this is put out
Speaker 4: as a foundational film for new queer cinema, and that's
Speaker 4: a great label. This is a queer film. I hate
Speaker 4: to fall back on what feels like an academic kind
Speaker 4: of jargon at this point in history, but it really
Speaker 4: did shift the way storytelling was done. There's an interview
Speaker 4: that I saw with Todd Haynes. Wrory says, you look
Speaker 4: at these other films that are arguably gay stories that
Speaker 4: are in the history of cinema, but they're told through
Speaker 4: a straight lens. They're straight stories. Cruising is a straight story,
Speaker 4: he says, This is not this is queer. This is explicit,
Speaker 4: and that's why it was so challenging politically.
Speaker 9: It relates to the point when a lot of people
Speaker 9: had it with the failure of society to deal with
Speaker 9: as also, right, you said, so the still enrages me
Speaker 9: when I think about horrible like the Reagan government was
Speaker 9: during that period, and then you had groups like act
Speaker 9: Up formed outrage in the UK, and a lot of
Speaker 9: people were like, fuck this, We're not going to disappear
Speaker 9: and we're not going to just be defined by this,
Speaker 9: and we're going to do something. And these kinds of
Speaker 9: films were I think these filmmakers saying, yeah, we're not
Speaker 9: going to just clean or act up and be real
Speaker 9: acceptable to you because you're associating us with this disease.
Speaker 8: And it really did. It really changed some things.
Speaker 9: A lot of people now don't I don't know if
Speaker 9: everybody really appreciates just how wildly vicious homophobia was in
Speaker 9: those days too, because this was that the like that
Speaker 9: nineteen ninety ninety one ninety two, you're right at the
Speaker 9: worst part of the AIDS epidemic when that we did
Speaker 9: not have very good drugs yet the treatments were not
Speaker 9: very good yet a lot of people were still dying,
Speaker 9: and the attitude of a lot of society was like, yeah,
Speaker 9: you probably deserve.
Speaker 8: It, you have it coming.
Speaker 9: It was so awful and a lot of younger queer
Speaker 9: people now, I think of particularly young like gen Z
Speaker 9: gay men now in particular, have no concept a lot
Speaker 9: of times of what that was. And I'm glad they don't.
Speaker 9: I'm not one of these old people who are like,
Speaker 9: you have no idea how bad it was. You got
Speaker 9: it so good now. I'm glad that they are not
Speaker 9: living through that. But at the same time, I get
Speaker 9: pissed off when they do stupid shit like vote for
Speaker 9: Trump or something. We didn't go through all this hell,
Speaker 9: so you can help us like regress into fascism at
Speaker 9: this point.
Speaker 4: And that's the interesting thing to me about this is
Speaker 4: that in some ways this feels like it's absolutely coming
Speaker 4: out of this Reaganist era, and specifically about the Reagan's
Speaker 4: non response to AIDS and HIV, and in a way
Speaker 4: we can be like, Okay, I'm glad we're not in
Speaker 4: that space any longer. But I'm seeing the same tactics,
Speaker 4: the same material conditions being deployed against trans people now,
Speaker 4: and ultimately as a transperson who has been in this
Speaker 4: fight for this entire time, especially when I hear gay
Speaker 4: people say, oh, this is a new thing, the trans
Speaker 4: thing is a new thing, I'm like, no, We've been
Speaker 4: here all along. I fought that fucking battle in the
Speaker 4: eighties and in the early nineties, and fighting that same
Speaker 4: fucking battle with the same fucking tactics now where this
Speaker 4: social pressure is to define us as pariah's anathema, as
Speaker 4: to be eradicated, to be quarantined, the we're spreading disease.
Speaker 4: All of these tropes are still functioning, they've just been shifted.
Speaker 4: And it's interesting to me that we're in a place
Speaker 4: historically now where we're seeing AIDS and HIV being arguably cured.
Speaker 4: Right we're seeing these news stories what was the fifth
Speaker 4: person where maybe it's actually been completely eradicated from their system,
Speaker 4: And this is a beautiful moment we should all be celebrating,
Speaker 4: because what a beautiful moment for humanity, for science, for
Speaker 4: everybody who's been marginalized by that disease historically. And now
Speaker 4: we're onto a new thing. But all those same actors,
Speaker 4: all those same right wing religious paranoiacs, are still driving
Speaker 4: the same bus.
Speaker 9: Even recently, what's her name in Congress, Marjorie Green, when
Speaker 9: the monkey pox outbreak was going on a couple of
Speaker 9: years ago, she was like posting on social media all
Speaker 9: the time. She somehow got hold of pictures of mostly
Speaker 9: gay men at a clinic or something lining up to
Speaker 9: get vaccinated and yeah, and repeatedly posting this trope that
Speaker 9: these queers are spreading this disease again, and I'm like,
Speaker 9: we're not gonna if this spreads out of control. We're
Speaker 9: not taking the blame for this one, you know. And
Speaker 9: I was glad to see a lot of people got
Speaker 9: vaccinated because it was also at the height too of
Speaker 9: anti vacs all of a sudden becoming socially acceptable as well,
Speaker 9: which is still lows me away HIV doesn't actually cause anything.
Speaker 9: That's what he'll say. If that mad man actually gets
Speaker 9: to do anything, it's gonna be bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 6: I'm waiting for RFK Junior to announce that he's going
Speaker 6: to you know, take prep off of the market. Going
Speaker 6: back to some of the stuff that you guys were saying,
Speaker 6: I mean even right now, like the election this year
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four, the year that we're recording this, so
Speaker 6: many because Michigan was a battleground state and we just
Speaker 6: had so many literally anti trans ads, and it was
Speaker 6: all of this horseshit about well Kamala is paying for
Speaker 6: so for prisoners to get sex changes, and oh, you
Speaker 6: go to your kid might go to school a boy
Speaker 6: and then come home a girl, and all of this
Speaker 6: kind of malarkey, and I'm just like, what the fuck
Speaker 6: are you guys doing with this? Like this is And
Speaker 6: I remember it was like, you know, Trump is for you,
Speaker 6: Kamala is for they them, And I'm like, oh my
Speaker 6: fucking Christ, I can't believe it. Even the liberal media
Speaker 6: was shocked. Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners
Speaker 6: and illegal aliens.
Speaker 8: Every transgender inmate would have access.
Speaker 6: Kamala is for they them. President Trump is for you.
Speaker 8: I'm Donald J.
Speaker 6: Trump, and I approve this message. We are still dealing
Speaker 6: with the age crisis here in nineteen ninety one. We
Speaker 6: are still we're in the Bush era, which might as
Speaker 6: well have been the Ragan era, because it was just
Speaker 6: same shit, different days, different dude, different dim witted dude
Speaker 6: who's out there just like, yeah, I'm clueless, I have
Speaker 6: no idea what to do with these weirdo's and they're
Speaker 6: weird disease, you know, it's like, oh my god. I mean,
Speaker 6: and we don't necessarily get exposed to what this world
Speaker 6: was like other than through now like television and movies
Speaker 6: and things like pose and stuff, where it's just like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 6: this is what the world was like. But I think
Speaker 6: they even kind of gloss over that it's way worse
Speaker 6: than what we're seeing.
Speaker 4: And it doesn't provide the full picture of the various
Speaker 4: kinds of ways of being queer, the ways of being
Speaker 4: trans and there's no one thing that's ever going to
Speaker 4: capture all that, nor shouldn't it attempt to. That's not
Speaker 4: what we're doing here. But what I think is really
Speaker 4: interesting about this historical moment that we're in is that
Speaker 4: this is a beautiful opportunity for people. If they're using
Speaker 4: the same tactics to find it against us, we can
Speaker 4: use the same tactics to respond, which means that the
Speaker 4: people that are making the poisons of this era, whether
Speaker 4: it's like Vera dru making the people's joker, etc. Etc.
Speaker 4: These are the ways that we're able to respond, so
Speaker 4: we can respond in kind.
Speaker 6: Before we move on to the movie too, I just
Speaker 6: want to talk a little bit about how this was
Speaker 6: actively attacked. You know, how people again tend to forget
Speaker 6: the whole idea of the national adoment of the arts
Speaker 6: or any sort of arts grants, and how those are
Speaker 6: a thing of the past a lot of times because
Speaker 6: of what happened during this era where Oh my god,
Speaker 6: they're using money for queer art and they wouldn't call
Speaker 6: it art even, they would just call it pornography. And
Speaker 6: they're just like, look at all this stuff, Look at
Speaker 6: piss Christ, look at these photos from Robert Mapplethorpe. How
Speaker 6: awful is this? And this was one of the things
Speaker 6: Poison was one of those hot you know, the firebrand
Speaker 6: issues where what's the guy's name, Donald Wildman.
Speaker 9: From Wildman and Jesse Helms. May they both rest in
Speaker 9: piss forever. Oh my god, this has brought all of
Speaker 9: that back to it. There was at my college a
Speaker 9: small Maplethorpe exhibit a little bit during this period. Just
Speaker 9: remembering all of this again as something else.
Speaker 6: At the time, after this movie came out to right
Speaker 6: to I think every was it, every congress person or yeah,
Speaker 6: and just say do you know that your that federal
Speaker 6: money is funding this pornography? And just yeah, of course
Speaker 6: I'm sure they're looking at the Jane stuff because the
Speaker 6: other stuff is there, but they probably too stupid to
Speaker 6: notice it type of thing. But it's just like, oh
Speaker 6: my god, this is yeah, just outright attacking. How dare
Speaker 6: these people try to make art?
Speaker 10: You know?
Speaker 6: This is wrong because we're using federal money for this.
Speaker 6: It was probably like, you know, a dollar twenty five.
Speaker 6: But yet it's like, good lord, any any money coming
Speaker 6: from the government going towards this basically deviant art. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's the same kind of stuff that Hitler didn't want
Speaker 6: to fund back in Germany in the forties.
Speaker 4: Around this time, three of the NEA four came to
Speaker 4: my college to perform. All of them except Karen Finley
Speaker 4: came and they did a performance for me. I was
Speaker 4: really ready for Poison to be there for me. It
Speaker 4: was a really catalyzing film and a really catalyzing historical moment.
Speaker 4: The thing is they wouldn't look at it. There's clips
Speaker 4: of Pat Robertson talking about like how pornographic Poison is
Speaker 4: and I haven't seen it, and I'm like, I understand.
Speaker 4: You in habit a world. There's definitely things I don't
Speaker 4: want to see and I can be aware of there's
Speaker 4: a thing that I don't want to see, But Poison
Speaker 4: is not part of that. This movie is not that
Speaker 4: part of that category. I don't want to watch a
Speaker 4: snuff film. I don't want to see that, right. I'm
Speaker 4: channeling Valerie Cherish from the comeback, I didn't need to
Speaker 4: see that, right, If I want to intellectually engage with something,
Speaker 4: even if I find it antithetical to my political position,
Speaker 4: I really think it's important to look at it and
Speaker 4: engage it on its own terms so I can at
Speaker 4: least argue against it. And Pat Robertson refused. He wouldn't
Speaker 4: look at it, which means he's getting it filtered. He's
Speaker 4: getting the interpretation filtered through what, through who, we don't know.
Speaker 4: And he would never admit to it. He would just
Speaker 4: be like, oh, it's pornography. There's not really pornography. Maybe
Speaker 4: a little bit, but yeah, I arguably it's even in
Speaker 4: that the one of the most intense scenes, the one
Speaker 4: in the Jena section, it's all Jenei section, in the
Speaker 4: Holms section where there's a rape scene. Effectively, right, we're
Speaker 4: not seeing genitals, we're not seeing it's all we're seeing
Speaker 4: in that is faces. But we know what's happening there,
Speaker 4: and it's incredibly effective. And it goes back to that
Speaker 4: old oh what's his name? I forge the definition of pornography.
Speaker 4: I know when I see it that when you see it.
Speaker 4: But you can't buy those other definitions of what pornography
Speaker 4: is where you see genitals, fluid, where you see these things.
Speaker 4: It's not defined by that, it's more defined by what
Speaker 4: you don't see.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's like the brief glimpse of a man's penis,
Speaker 6: which I think is just a prosthetic penis. I don't
Speaker 6: even think it's the real deal. But oh my god,
Speaker 6: you know we have to cut that out. And then
Speaker 6: what was it? I think it was during the rape
Speaker 6: scene they're like, you have to make this shorter, and
Speaker 6: it's like, well, do you object to any particular shot? No, no,
Speaker 6: it just needs to be shorter, like you can't go
Speaker 6: on this log.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was like just the It wasn't a specific
Speaker 9: part of it, it was just the I guess the
Speaker 9: total effect of it was just too much to get
Speaker 9: the because they were trying to get Was it a
Speaker 9: cut to try to get an R rating so they
Speaker 9: could be in theaters?
Speaker 8: Was NC seventeen a thing yet at this point? Did
Speaker 8: it get it?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Right around this point, Yeah, that's.
Speaker 9: Not really any better than an X really, because at
Speaker 9: as soon as NC seventeen started, the theater chains and
Speaker 9: Blockbuster and stuff wouldn't carry those films anyway, So you
Speaker 9: needed an r get to get out there.
Speaker 4: But it gets to this question like how long should
Speaker 4: a rape be? How long? How long?
Speaker 6: Just let me know, rape should go on as long
Speaker 6: as they have to.
Speaker 4: Thank you MPAA for clearly defining that for us, because
Speaker 4: I prefer it at a zero A zero. This is
Speaker 4: what I would like.
Speaker 6: I love the structure, like I said, of this movie
Speaker 6: and just the way that it's put together, and I
Speaker 6: love that. If you were to go through and if
Speaker 6: you're some sort of maniac and do a fan edit
Speaker 6: of this movie and take all of these chapters and
Speaker 6: put them into chapters, like make three short films out
Speaker 6: of this, I don't know why you would do that,
Speaker 6: but you would find that they are missing major portions,
Speaker 6: like it is necessary to watch these films in the
Speaker 6: way that is presented by Haynes and by his editor
Speaker 6: is to see these things, and because you're missing little
Speaker 6: pieces as you go along, like we are skipping time,
Speaker 6: we're going past events, We're you know, even doing like
Speaker 6: flashback type of stuff at times. We're not telling the
Speaker 6: story completely linearly, even though it seems very linear with
Speaker 6: the way that it's going. And a lot of that
Speaker 6: is because it takes the other two stories to give
Speaker 6: you context for the main story, and which is brilliant
Speaker 6: because these things couldn't be more different. You know, this
Speaker 6: absolutely beautiful color footage of this you know, prison scenario
Speaker 6: that they have, plus you've got the flashback to the
Speaker 6: earlier prison stuff in there, which is shot in a
Speaker 6: different film stock looks even more gorgeous. And then, like
Speaker 6: I said, the cheapy look of the horror section, the
Speaker 6: almost shot on video nests of the documentary you know
Speaker 6: investigation footage that they have. I just love that they
Speaker 6: just keep moving along and the way that one will
Speaker 6: talk talk to the other. We'll talk to the other,
Speaker 6: and yeah, it's it's brilliant that they move along this way.
Speaker 9: A lot of these cuts are very like short too.
Speaker 9: It'll be as I was going through it, we would
Speaker 9: be with your drop into the hero segment for forty
Speaker 9: five seconds or something, and then they don't move on.
Speaker 9: But it just flows so perfectly from one thing to
Speaker 9: the next, and it doesn't in the whole film as
Speaker 9: a totality.
Speaker 8: It just rolls along.
Speaker 9: It just it feels like it passes in no time.
Speaker 9: It's not a long film anyway, So the eighty five
Speaker 9: minutes or so. It's not a very long movie, but
Speaker 9: it just it just blows by, just relentlessly, and it's amazing.
Speaker 6: And of course there are things that tie these chapters
Speaker 6: together directly, things like people going out onto ledges or
Speaker 6: bodily fluids. I mean, there's a lot of spit in
Speaker 6: this movie. You know, there's also other secretions that are
Speaker 6: going on, and it's like, yeah, this is great. The
Speaker 6: way that these tied togethers is loose, but you see
Speaker 6: those connections, especially the more you watch this. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's funny because my memory of this film was so
Speaker 6: completely different than going back and rewatching it. I had
Speaker 6: pictured that it was three chapters, just here's this one,
Speaker 6: here's this one, here's this one. I forgot about the
Speaker 6: editing style. And to revisit this and to be like, oh,
Speaker 6: oh yeah, that's right. It is all intercut. It was
Speaker 6: so nice to see that, and so nice to see
Speaker 6: the way that they, like I said, speak to one another.
Speaker 6: And I think though, we should probably focus on each
Speaker 6: of the chapters as we go along, just because it
Speaker 6: would be a little too confusing to jump back and
Speaker 6: forth in time. Because this is not a visual medium.
Speaker 6: I would love to talk maybe about the horror section first,
Speaker 6: just because I love horror and it just plays with
Speaker 6: those conventions so much. Oh, I love how cheap this looks,
Speaker 6: and just how arch the acting is. I mean he's
Speaker 6: hitting it. He's hitting it perfectly.
Speaker 9: With the tone of this he's not doing He's hitting
Speaker 9: that tone perfectly, but he's not doing like a broad charity.
Speaker 9: It's like he understands the genre that he's getting at here,
Speaker 9: is doing this with kind of respect to the material
Speaker 9: that's inspiring it, and he just hits all these like
Speaker 9: just awesome details like the little montage of the guy
Speaker 9: with all his test tubes and Bunsen burners and that's
Speaker 9: how you do science with all these like liquids.
Speaker 8: And then the very dramatic and music and it's so cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like James Whale filtered through Fastbender, which brings
Speaker 4: such seriousness to it. Rewatching it for the podcast again,
Speaker 4: Like one of the things that struck me for the
Speaker 4: film as a whole, but especially the horror set, was
Speaker 4: it reminded me a lot of my own childhood experience
Speaker 4: just watching the daytime television, because I would watch an
Speaker 4: old monster movie and then i'd watch like a weird
Speaker 4: documentary and then maybe I'd watched something that I didn't
Speaker 4: quite understand, maybe it was foreign or something like that,
Speaker 4: because TV used to be like that, especially in the
Speaker 4: weird upper echelons of the UHF. You can click over
Speaker 4: there and just see some things and you didn't understand
Speaker 4: what was going on, but maybe you could explore a
Speaker 4: little bit. So it had a little bit of that vibe.
Speaker 4: But of course the accessibility of that horror section, which
Speaker 4: is that Edwood, James Whale, that texture, that film texture,
Speaker 4: that visual language, of course spoke to me. It was
Speaker 4: like this like budding cinophile in the early nineties and
Speaker 4: this queer who's like trying to figure out where I'm
Speaker 4: fitting in the world. So many of those other horror
Speaker 4: films I don't think that I really had. I certainly
Speaker 4: didn't know them. James Wayale was this big queer filmmaker.
Speaker 4: I had no real sense, but I had that lack
Speaker 4: of language that drew me to those films, so that
Speaker 4: I understood what was going on underneath all of those
Speaker 4: films right and here it was being made explicit again
Speaker 4: here in Todd hands.
Speaker 9: It gives outer limits like a lot too. Remember, like
Speaker 9: original outer limits, especially with the way in the narrator
Speaker 9: voice drops in and make some kind of pronouncement on
Speaker 9: the lesson of what you're seeing here. I thought that
Speaker 9: was really cool too, because I love that stuff when
Speaker 9: I was a kid, and that'd be something that would
Speaker 9: appear on TV, like late at night in some weird channel.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I love things like when we have our main scientist,
Speaker 6: doctor Graves, and he's got his new I want to say,
Speaker 6: she's the assistant that's coming in, or another scientist, Nancy Olsen,
Speaker 6: coming in there, and just the string of gobbledegook science
Speaker 6: nonsense that they spew at each other. It's so great.
Speaker 10: Ever since evaluations the molecular suspension of hormonal conductivity appeared
Speaker 10: in the Science journal at MIT, your discovery of the
Speaker 10: white cellular clotting predominance in your senior completely altered my
Speaker 10: understanding of conditional bioflavnor in your pathology.
Speaker 9: It makes no sense also that when she appears, when Nancy,
Speaker 9: doctor Nancy Olsen, when she shows up and he's I
Speaker 9: wasn't expecting a woman that is so common in the
Speaker 9: films of that era that he's referencing. There's always that
Speaker 9: the main female protagonist in all of those movies is
Speaker 9: like the woman that's not expected to show up, and
Speaker 9: it's that's just great too that she ends up being there,
Speaker 9: really the protagonist of that segment.
Speaker 6: And just this whole thing how he's trying to capture
Speaker 6: the spear of sexuality inside of a liquid form and
Speaker 6: then he just accidentally drinks it and then you've got
Speaker 6: that whole like the pinwheel effects going on, and he's
Speaker 6: got those you know, he's just like, oh my god,
Speaker 6: what am I doing? Like it's like that Spider Man
Speaker 6: Italian Spider Man reaction type of thing where he's just like, ah,
Speaker 6: I don't know what's happening. She's the only one that
Speaker 6: understands him because and she's the only one that accepts him,
Speaker 6: because after he takes this dose of sexuality, he ends
Speaker 6: up breaking out into these big, massive sores. Kind of
Speaker 6: reminded me of Rusty Nails is acne because of the
Speaker 6: cheapness and the black and white and everything, and especially
Speaker 6: all the goo. I mean, he's there's parts where like
Speaker 6: his head is seeping and he's got all these nasty,
Speaker 6: you know, sores all over them. But at the same time,
Speaker 6: I'm just like, Okay, this is AIDS. You know, this
Speaker 6: is what I saw with AIDS patients and the big
Speaker 6: open sores that would open up on their faces, and
Speaker 6: it's just it broke your heart every single time saw
Speaker 6: that on television. I did not experience that in real life,
Speaker 6: but I was so far removed in my little suburban world.
Speaker 6: But I can't even imagine what it was like for
Speaker 6: people who had friends that were dying of AIDS and
Speaker 6: to see just the deterioration, and you're watching this guy
Speaker 6: deteriorate through this entire horror chapter.
Speaker 4: But even apart from that, I think this is one
Speaker 4: of the things that gets that what I wanted to
Speaker 4: talk about in terms of people not understanding what it
Speaker 4: was like before because you didn't have to see Koposi
Speaker 4: sarcoma in the late eighties. Personally, all you knew was
Speaker 4: like there was this disease that was there and it
Speaker 4: was invisible, that anybody could have it, anybody could be gay,
Speaker 4: anybody could be There was that old joke, what's the
Speaker 4: hardest thing about having HIV? Telling people that you're Haitian?
Speaker 4: There was that joke that was like there and these
Speaker 4: were insidious moments that created so much paranoia and so
Speaker 4: we didn't have to see these things just to be
Speaker 4: like constantly on alert about them and worried that anything
Speaker 4: was going to happen, happen at any moment, and it
Speaker 4: ultimately it was not only going to kill you, but
Speaker 4: it was going to mark you in a way that
Speaker 4: would what make you lose your friends, lose your family,
Speaker 4: disown you. And if people like Donald Wiwman had it
Speaker 4: away be quarantined on an island where you would never
Speaker 4: be seen again, that was the fucking culture.
Speaker 6: Well they call this guy the leper killer, you know,
Speaker 6: and that's basically what it was, was modern day leprosy,
Speaker 6: where it's just like, yeah, get these people out of here,
Speaker 6: we don't want to see this, we don't want to
Speaker 6: deal with these people, Just get them out. And I
Speaker 6: just I remember being so ashamed by just to hear
Speaker 6: people just flip it like you know, you're talking about
Speaker 6: like the jokes and stuff, and to even like punk rockers,
Speaker 6: like I remember Mod had that anally inflicted death sentence song,
Speaker 6: and I'm just like, you guys are fucking punk rockers,
Speaker 6: What the fuck are you doing being so insensitive to people?
Speaker 6: It makes me ashamed? And I was filled with so
Speaker 6: much shame, with so many people that just didn't understand
Speaker 6: and who just had these knee jerk reactions and just
Speaker 6: thought it was all a big joke, and who just thought, oh, well,
Speaker 6: it's just affecting the gaze. It doesn't affect anybody who
Speaker 6: I really care about, and it's just like fuck off. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and this you know, guy going around the city. It again,
Speaker 6: it feels that the cinema style of it is it
Speaker 6: almost feels like a like a Kids in the Hall
Speaker 6: skit at times, you know, like the one where the
Speaker 6: where Bruce McCully lost his pen. You know, like some
Speaker 6: of those things. It just is so out there. But
Speaker 6: to your point, Kyler, it isn't. It isn't played strictly
Speaker 6: for laughs. There is a real underlying you know. It's
Speaker 6: kind of like watching the old fifties horror films sci
Speaker 6: fi films where you're like, oh, this may look really
Speaker 6: shitty and might have some very arch acting, but it's
Speaker 6: actually telling a pretty important story, you know, like to
Speaker 6: see what's happening here. It's like, oh, there is a
Speaker 6: metaphor for this. They are really telling something larger than
Speaker 6: the story of a guy who's running around murdering people
Speaker 6: quote unquote with this rampant sexual disease that he has.
Speaker 4: So at the time the films that we're dealing with
Speaker 4: HIV when they were made, when they were being seen,
Speaker 4: they were of that long time companion variety where there
Speaker 4: was like a pathos to the whole thing, and like
Speaker 4: this even maybe even a purity aspect to it. So
Speaker 4: we've got this more or less innocent victim who's living
Speaker 4: a more or less wholesome life, who just maybe just
Speaker 4: happens to be gay. But we've got this other We've
Speaker 4: got this character here in poison who is not obviously gay,
Speaker 4: might even actually just be a straight person so far
Speaker 4: as we know, but really through complete happenstance, through accident,
Speaker 4: infects himself and it becomes this becomes known as I
Speaker 4: don't think we had really seen somebody like depicted as
Speaker 4: like a killer by virtue of happenstance in the way
Speaker 4: that we were being accused of at the time.
Speaker 6: That was a lot later, actually, right, I mean this
Speaker 6: was how many years I mean, this was right around
Speaker 6: the time of Matthew Shepherd, right.
Speaker 8: That was some years after. But yeah, was.
Speaker 6: That later that whole thing of like oh, he's not gay.
Speaker 12: Mike has confused the names Matthew Shepherd with Ryan White.
Speaker 12: He'll ramble on a bit more apologies.
Speaker 6: I remember the whole thing where it was like, oh, no,
Speaker 6: they have aids, but it's not from gay sex. It's
Speaker 6: you know, it was a transfusion or even heroin. It
Speaker 6: was like heroin was seen being a heroin addict was
Speaker 6: being seen as being better than being gay.
Speaker 4: There were plenty of other gay people being killed at
Speaker 4: the time. There were plenty of other cases that we
Speaker 4: could point to around a time, and plenty of other legislation.
Speaker 4: Colorado right around this time was putting legislation through to
Speaker 4: eliminate gay people from public life.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: That was happening then. But yeah, Matthew Shepherd was like
Speaker 4: ninety eight ninety nine somewhere in that time print, so
Speaker 4: we've still got like a full almost a full decade
Speaker 4: before that murder happened.
Speaker 6: The thing that kills me about the horror section is
Speaker 6: when they're walking down the street and those two little
Speaker 6: girls are there and they spit right in his face,
Speaker 6: and it is the most spit that I've ever seen
Speaker 6: anybody spit until later in the film. And we'll talk
Speaker 6: about that, but just that flowing down his face. And
Speaker 6: then so shortly thereafter they're having the hot dog scene
Speaker 6: and all of this stuff is seeping out of his
Speaker 6: face and he's just you can tell how embarrassed he
Speaker 6: is and just how awful he feels about this, you know,
Speaker 6: and he's like trying to hide behind the dark glasses
Speaker 6: and everything, and it's just not working. People are stopping
Speaker 6: and staring and pointing.
Speaker 9: It's so sad that, yeah, there's that group of people
Speaker 9: that are staying off the side, just literally just staring
Speaker 9: at them while they're trying to eat.
Speaker 8: It's just horrible.
Speaker 4: Now, the dripping hot dog scene, you know, it's super
Speaker 4: disgusting for many reasons. All the spitting scenes throughout the
Speaker 4: entire film are you know whatever, They really get at you.
Speaker 4: But it really does bring to mind what the question is, like,
Speaker 4: why are we so disgusted by this?
Speaker 8: Like?
Speaker 4: What is it about it? Just to jump to the
Speaker 4: almost section for a minute, the spitting scene and there
Speaker 4: the very notorious spitting scene there in the commentary track
Speaker 4: for the film, Todd Haynes. People kiss all the time,
Speaker 4: they're swapping, spit all the time. What is it about this?
Speaker 4: That makes people so disgusted. We're shedding skin and hair
Speaker 4: and fluid all the time, Like I'm doing it right now.
Speaker 4: Things are falling off of my body in my own
Speaker 4: house right now. But I'm not thinking about that. I'm
Speaker 4: not attempting to be discussed about it. But I could
Speaker 4: spend a lot of time being disgusted and repelled by
Speaker 4: what I'm just doing normally. All this other stuff is
Speaker 4: really just an extension about ideally we're not dripping. Since
Speaker 4: somebrity sores into our own hot talks. This is one
Speaker 4: of the things we're trying to hope to do as
Speaker 4: a human species. Maybe, but at the same time, it's
Speaker 4: a human thing ultimately. I think what really mortifies people
Speaker 4: about seeing a film like this is their own humanity.
Speaker 6: Yeah. You get that scene towards the end of the
Speaker 6: horror sequence where he is out on a ledge ready
Speaker 6: to jump and basically giving his I'm not an animal,
Speaker 6: I'm a human being type of speech, and all of
Speaker 6: those people looking up at him, looking up at him,
Speaker 6: and it's it's it's that it's elephant man. It's also
Speaker 6: a hunchback of Notre Dame a little bit, where you're just.
Speaker 4: Like it's the Substance.
Speaker 6: It's this Okay, I haven't seen The Substance either.
Speaker 8: I hear good things though.
Speaker 4: I just watched it last night before I watch Poison again,
Speaker 4: and there's a real strong dialogue happening between those two films.
Speaker 4: For sure, double feature The Substance and then Poison. If
Speaker 4: you can handle it.
Speaker 6: Almost couldn't handle Poison when I rewatched it because of
Speaker 6: that homot scene. But well, we'll talk about that as
Speaker 6: we go along. Before that, I really want to kind
Speaker 6: of jump into the hero section because that, to me,
Speaker 6: is the most opaque of the sections as far as
Speaker 6: he's handing us something, but he's not telling us everything.
Speaker 6: He's definitely not being very open about stuff. And the
Speaker 6: whole thing is that the whole section is about secrets
Speaker 6: to me and just what really happened to this little
Speaker 6: boy who apparently flew away. And I love too that
Speaker 6: at the beginning of the movie, it's you know, the
Speaker 6: first shot I think we see after the title card
Speaker 6: is the cops at the keyhole, and you get that
Speaker 6: great fish eye lens effect of them, so like he's
Speaker 6: playing with time with us because he's not showing us.
Speaker 6: The end of the sequence right here, but he's showing
Speaker 6: us stuff that's happening in the later part of that sequence,
Speaker 6: and eventually, I mean, I think it's all POV. From
Speaker 6: the doctor's point of view, and the way he goes
Speaker 6: out to that ledge, it almost looks like what happens
Speaker 6: to what's the character's name, Richie the kid that flies away,
Speaker 6: And it's like marrying those two things together. It's like
Speaker 6: the person going to the window all POV. The screen
Speaker 6: goes completely white, and then we move on to the
Speaker 6: next area and I'm like, oh, well, that could be
Speaker 6: the doctor or it really could be Richie as well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's almost we never see the kid.
Speaker 9: We don't really know what did this literally happen the
Speaker 9: way it's being presented to us, because we don't really
Speaker 9: see what's going on at that At the end of that,
Speaker 9: it's almost like he takes a camera away with him too.
Speaker 9: It's and it just leaves the whole world behind. It's Yeah,
Speaker 9: that section is very the least readily comprehensible as far
Speaker 9: as what we're supposed to take away from it is
Speaker 9: did the kid I want to believe that, Yeah, he
Speaker 9: really did go to the legend he flew away like
Speaker 9: a bird, or but did he though? Or is his
Speaker 9: mother nuts?
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 9: There's all kinds of different ways you can look at this,
Speaker 9: and is this a horrendous child a story?
Speaker 6: That's what it feels like. It feels like this whole
Speaker 6: thing is all about child abuse. It feels like the
Speaker 6: father is fucking the son.
Speaker 13: Yeah, she calls it like a and it feels like
Speaker 13: the son is acting out because of that and trying
Speaker 13: to get the other kids in the neighborhood to basically
Speaker 13: reenact the dynamic that is at home, and he wants
Speaker 13: his one friend to spank him.
Speaker 6: Do you see later on there's a spanking scene, and
Speaker 6: we'll definitely talk about spanking as we go along here,
Speaker 6: But there's the spanking scene, and there's the part where
Speaker 6: the mother is talking about the look that's on his
Speaker 6: face when he's being spanked, and it's the same look
Speaker 6: that he had on his face when he walked in
Speaker 6: and caught his mother with the Spanish gardener.
Speaker 9: You had it in your notes, an oath in another language,
Speaker 9: and it's just it's very unsettling, and I'm just, yeah,
Speaker 9: there's just.
Speaker 4: So much going on, and I know that we want
Speaker 4: to talk a little bit about Dottie gets spanked, and
Speaker 4: some of these other things that Todd Haynes has done
Speaker 4: outside of this, But this is one of the things
Speaker 4: that really attracted me as this theory nerd watching this film,
Speaker 4: as this queer theory nerd at this point in history,
Speaker 4: we're talking nineteen ninety one, nineteen ninety two, when I
Speaker 4: first got to see this was a way that you
Speaker 4: could put theory into practice. Right, as they might say
Speaker 4: now on Twitter or a Blue Sky, this is praxis right.
Speaker 4: This is the way that you're making theory accessible and
Speaker 4: legible to the masses that's not just buried in psychoanalysis
Speaker 4: or whatever that theoretical language is. So this is a
Speaker 4: way to look at what Jane is writing, what Freud
Speaker 4: is writing in a Child is being beaten and operationalizing
Speaker 4: that and finding ways of having hope in it. For me,
Speaker 4: looking at the end of hero In, that moment was
Speaker 4: like an act of pure queer liberation, right, because I'm like,
Speaker 4: is the child jumping out of the window Superman or
Speaker 4: is that geekboard falling to his death? Is it one
Speaker 4: of the two. Maybe it's Icarus, right, maybe it's both,
Speaker 4: Maybe it's both. Of those things at the same time. Well,
Speaker 4: interestingly enough for me the viewer at that moment, it's
Speaker 4: coming at the same time as Thelma and Louise. This
Speaker 4: movie and Thelma and Louise, they have the same ending
Speaker 4: for me.
Speaker 6: It's almost supernatural too, the way that these other kids
Speaker 6: will talk about Richie, like there was something about him
Speaker 6: that made us want to beat him up. And it's
Speaker 6: like they could see or sense the difference of Richie
Speaker 6: and they couldn't really put their finger on it, but
Speaker 6: they just knew something was wrong with this kid, something's different,
Speaker 6: and I think that difference was the queerness. But they
Speaker 6: didn't have a word for it, and so they just
Speaker 6: were like, whatever this is, we need to destroy it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they couldn't stand it. And the one kid that
Speaker 9: I guess gets induced to spank him like he describes,
Speaker 9: I just couldn't stand it. I just I just did
Speaker 9: it because he was driving me nuts over the top
Speaker 9: of reaction that he has because he can't explain what
Speaker 9: it is that made him feel this way about this kid,
Speaker 9: and it's yeah, it's just it's really intense.
Speaker 4: Well that's what I think is going on about gayness
Speaker 4: at the time, and transis now. A lot of people
Speaker 4: are really disturbed at this moment now in history about
Speaker 4: what trans means, even though it doesn't really materially affect
Speaker 4: them at any way. But like all these fears are
Speaker 4: being activated and they're being exploited by all these terrible
Speaker 4: actors who are achieving political power through it.
Speaker 6: I mean, we didn't even mention the whole bathroom controversy
Speaker 6: that just happened with the one transsenator and the other senators.
Speaker 6: Just like the picture of her pointing to like the
Speaker 6: men women sign on the bathroom. It's just like, oh,
Speaker 6: fuck off, yeah, because we're so concerned about what's going
Speaker 6: on inside of other people's pants that we can't even
Speaker 6: pay attention to everything else that's going on in the world.
Speaker 14: Well, Number one, I want to see this in the
Speaker 14: House rules package. I want to make sure that no
Speaker 14: men are in women's private spaces. And it's not going
Speaker 14: to end here. This shouldn't be going on on any
Speaker 14: federal property. If you're a school or an institution that
Speaker 14: gets government funding, this kind of thing should be banned.
Speaker 14: I think it's sick, it's twisted. I have fought like
Speaker 14: hell for women's rights. I mean twenty five years ago.
Speaker 15: This year, I became the first woman to break the
Speaker 15: glass ceiling and graduate from a military college that was
Speaker 15: formerly all male. And to see the way that I've
Speaker 15: been attacked today and last night for fighting to protect
Speaker 15: women and girls, it's ridiculous. So if that being a
Speaker 15: feminist makes me an extremist, I'm totally here for.
Speaker 4: Is this teffort in response to congresswoman that drives coming
Speaker 4: to Congress?
Speaker 15: Yes, and absolutely, and then some that.
Speaker 9: One Republican congresswoman spent days doing nothing but.
Speaker 8: Tweeting about that.
Speaker 9: It was like hundreds of posts on nothing but that topic.
Speaker 9: Is what the fuck is wrong with you people? I
Speaker 9: don't I do not understand.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's like, what's that line from me and girls?
Speaker 6: Why are you obsessed with?
Speaker 4: I am trans? I don't think about being trans that much,
Speaker 4: not as much as that person does.
Speaker 6: To go back to the hero section again, the way
Speaker 6: that it's structured, and that's where you know, I was
Speaker 6: really noticing this idea of us missing little pieces of things.
Speaker 6: But at the same time, it's perfect for the way
Speaker 6: that it's set up because these are little vignettes. There
Speaker 6: are just quick snippets of interviews quote unquote with these
Speaker 6: actors that are inside of this and just to see,
Speaker 6: like the way that the neighbors reacted, the way that
Speaker 6: the school reacted, the way that the teacher reacted, and
Speaker 6: just that this is all being told from a point
Speaker 6: of view in the future, and that they're all looking
Speaker 6: back on the past. And that's we have the flashback
Speaker 6: inside of the Janet section, inside of the Homo section,
Speaker 6: and I'm sorry, I just been calling it the jene
Speaker 6: section because that's the most obviously Jenee of everything. But
Speaker 6: we even have inside of the horror section. There's little
Speaker 6: tiny flashbacks, like when he is about to drink the formula,
Speaker 6: he is imagining her. You know, she's already left the room,
Speaker 6: but he's imagining her, like fixing her hair and being
Speaker 6: right next to him, and he's distracted by her when
Speaker 6: he drinks the formula instead of the coffee. And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 6: each one of these has, like whether it's a few
Speaker 6: seconds of flashback or a few minutes, or the entire section,
Speaker 6: because the entire section of Hero is all looking back
Speaker 6: at this incident and the incidents that led up to it.
Speaker 6: I mean, the one woman where she talks about how
Speaker 6: he made a BM in front of her and she's
Speaker 6: just completely you know, horrified, and I'm like that, I
Speaker 6: don't know why, but that just makes me laugh every
Speaker 6: single time.
Speaker 9: All the little accounts in that section, there's some great
Speaker 9: little character bits in there, like those ladies sitting on
Speaker 9: the couch talking about.
Speaker 8: They're like I heard every shot.
Speaker 9: You just don't know what people are like, and that
Speaker 9: was fantastic.
Speaker 6: This is a genre that he's sending up. I mean
Speaker 6: true crime. Obviously we know in twenty twenty five, we
Speaker 6: know true crime. I mean it basically took over the
Speaker 6: entire podcasting industry for a while, and it took over
Speaker 6: television for a long time too. I mean I have
Speaker 6: coworkers that will go to sleep to true crime stuff
Speaker 6: and I'm like, I don't know how you can do that.
Speaker 6: It's very disturbing to me. But whatever, I'm not going
Speaker 6: to yuck your yum kind of thing. But it is everywhere.
Speaker 6: I mean Netflix basically became the true crime channel for
Speaker 6: a while. I mean you've got True TV and some
Speaker 6: of these others where it's just like, Okay, what's the
Speaker 6: latest case we're going to look at. It's just wild
Speaker 6: and this is exactly. This is the template.
Speaker 9: I love horror fiction and horror movies and stuff like that.
Speaker 9: I can't get enough of it. In the most extreme
Speaker 9: of that, I'm fine with. But the dwelling on the
Speaker 9: true crime story is just that I can't. I just
Speaker 9: can't quite do it. It's it's because, I guess, because
Speaker 9: it's too real. But yeah, a lot of people just
Speaker 9: can't get enough of that.
Speaker 4: It just feels so prescient in this film that I
Speaker 4: forget exactly how long it had been since I There's
Speaker 4: a long gap between when I'd seen it in the
Speaker 4: nineties and when I started rewatching it again in the
Speaker 4: last few years. I mean, now I'm watching it even
Speaker 4: without the podcast side. I'm probably watching it every couple
Speaker 4: of years. Anyway. I've started to do this just in
Speaker 4: his decide. This Queer Horror class just a lecture for
Speaker 4: a friend of mine who teaches a class and film
Speaker 4: for a little arts high school, and so this is
Speaker 4: part of my curriculum. Like I'm talking about poison, Which
Speaker 4: is amazing that I get to talk about this to
Speaker 4: like high school students who are really invested in this,
Speaker 4: but they're already up on it because I ask these
Speaker 4: questions like, okay, so in twenty twenty five, let's talk
Speaker 4: about what it means. What does the word queer mean,
Speaker 4: what does the weird horror mean? Because Poison arguably isn't
Speaker 4: just a queer film. It's not just a horror film.
Speaker 4: So maybe it's neither of those things, but it is
Speaker 4: very much about those things because it's talking is engaged
Speaker 4: with those dialogues, and it's really actually very heartening to
Speaker 4: talk with these students because they're like they are in it.
Speaker 4: They understand, they've got clarity about what these things mean,
Speaker 4: and so I'm learning from them when I talk about it.
Speaker 4: So I do watch this pretty regularly now, and I
Speaker 4: get to see it with these constantly new eyes as
Speaker 4: well as my own nostalgia for what its me at
Speaker 4: such a a visceral in pivotal time.
Speaker 6: And the one thing that Hero doesn't do is reenactments.
Speaker 6: And I like that they don't do the reenactments, but
Speaker 6: instead it's it's a flashback again inside of the story.
Speaker 6: But then the flashbacks are so stylized. I love this
Speaker 6: whole thing about it. Sounds like they basically hung up
Speaker 6: a sheet and we're rear projecting super eight onto the
Speaker 6: back of the sheet, and then they had a little kid.
Speaker 6: What was it like he couldn't see anything without his glasses,
Speaker 6: so like they have him standing there in front of
Speaker 6: a door, and then they have like the primal scene
Speaker 6: basically going on on the sheet where he walks in
Speaker 6: on his mom and the gardener. And then you also
Speaker 6: get that same thing repeated when it's like the dad
Speaker 6: beating on the mom, and these aren't you know, it's
Speaker 6: not the actors. You know, it's not We're going to
Speaker 6: do a reenactment of the beating scene or the sex scene.
Speaker 6: It's the people that were doing it in the first place.
Speaker 6: Of course, it's all actors. I understand this is not
Speaker 6: reality that we're watching, but I love that it's the
Speaker 6: people themselves. And I love that it's so super stylized
Speaker 6: and just how odd it looks and feels because you
Speaker 6: can see the movement inside of that, you know, the
Speaker 6: way that it's being projected, or they'll like cut to
Speaker 6: a close up so it almost looks like the you know,
Speaker 6: the mom is suddenly closer to the little boy, and
Speaker 6: I'm just like, this is really wild and.
Speaker 8: It looks so cool.
Speaker 6: Oh it's so great, man. Oh, It is like the
Speaker 6: best cheap process shot I've seen in forever, because yeah,
Speaker 6: we also get that same thing with it, and it's
Speaker 6: almost like the next shot, like I think we cut
Speaker 6: back to the mom and then we go back to
Speaker 6: when the sun is being when Richie's being spanked, and
Speaker 6: obviously not a real hand that's spanking him either, which
Speaker 6: adds again to the oddness of that scene. It just
Speaker 6: feels like it's, you know, a mannequin arm almost a smack,
Speaker 6: and I'm on the underwear butt and then the mom
Speaker 6: in the background again being projected onto that sheet. It
Speaker 6: looks so good.
Speaker 4: I think it speaks to what memory does I think
Speaker 4: about the violence that I experienced as a child. It
Speaker 4: is cartoonized in my own memory because sizes are different.
Speaker 4: I'm a larger person now, but what things seemed larger
Speaker 4: to me. Of course, maybe a thing is going to
Speaker 4: feel like a giant cartoon hand at this point in
Speaker 4: my own life, right like it almost has to be,
Speaker 4: and that distance that comes from it, or like even
Speaker 4: that thing where one of the great parts about cartoon
Speaker 4: violence is that you survive it. So if you survive it,
Speaker 4: like maybe your own violence becomes a cartoon doesn't excuse
Speaker 4: it at all.
Speaker 6: I've never gone through and timed these sections, but it
Speaker 6: always feels like the prison section, the Homo section is
Speaker 6: the longest the three, and I don't know if that's
Speaker 6: just because it's shot so different from the other two.
Speaker 6: It's such a just a lyrical narrative. You know, we
Speaker 6: talked a little bit before we started recording about the music.
Speaker 6: The music is perfect for all three of these chapters.
Speaker 6: I really love the overdone music for the horror section again,
Speaker 6: but it is so gorgeous. The Homo section, the music
Speaker 6: for that is just beautiful, especially when you get to
Speaker 6: the flashbacks within there and just the use of the
Speaker 6: flute and everything. Oh, it is so good. And just
Speaker 6: that whole section, it's like, Okay, which Todd Haynes do
Speaker 6: you want? Do you want the Todd Haynes that does horror,
Speaker 6: that does hero or that does Homo, because this guy
Speaker 6: can do everything that feels like and it just it's
Speaker 6: so nice. And again, that's it's probably the most straightforward,
Speaker 6: straight ahead narrative that we have, even though there are
Speaker 6: those flashbacks in there, but it really tells a very
Speaker 6: complete story with these prisoners, and you know, following this guy,
Speaker 6: and this is the only one. Like we do have
Speaker 6: voiceover to your point from earlier, Kyler, we have voiceover
Speaker 6: in certain parts of these, but this is you know,
Speaker 6: our main character having a voiceover, giving him that privilege
Speaker 6: that none of these other characters have had.
Speaker 9: Some of the sections of the Homo story do run
Speaker 9: a bit longer on average, and some of the scenes
Speaker 9: in the other two stories, but I didn't time a
Speaker 9: lot of the stuff, but I did check time on
Speaker 9: a couple of them, and the scene in the prison
Speaker 9: at night where they're sleeping and the erotic scene I'm
Speaker 9: talking about, were and that goes on quite long compared
Speaker 9: to to like really a lot of the other.
Speaker 8: Scenes in the whole film.
Speaker 9: If it's good, I feel like it's a good three
Speaker 9: four minutes or so of the of that, which is
Speaker 9: a pretty long take in this cause a lot of these,
Speaker 9: a lot of these sections are very short, some of
Speaker 9: them cut off at a minute or less sometimes throughout it,
Speaker 9: So you're lingering with that for what feels like a while.
Speaker 9: It's real sexy if that's your thing.
Speaker 6: Too, prison sex. Is there any better sex than prison sex?
Speaker 6: Come on?
Speaker 4: I did think it was interesting that in some of
Speaker 4: the commentary that I read from Todd, he was like,
Speaker 4: I don't find Homo to be like a real sexy scene,
Speaker 4: but other people do just the storytelling of it, and
Speaker 4: I guess I can see, well, I can understand that
Speaker 4: it is a languorous it's slow paced, but it seems
Speaker 4: like jail would be like everything stretches out longer. In jail,
Speaker 4: you're not going anywhere, You're just stuck there, and so
Speaker 4: time would extend. We think about the ways that we
Speaker 4: all inhabited quarantine during the pandemic pandemic time, we just
Speaker 4: stretched in these really bizarre ways, and I think we're
Speaker 4: still dealing with that. But I think that kind of
Speaker 4: thing is going on in that section as well. But
Speaker 4: rewatching it for the podcast again, this time, I was
Speaker 4: really thinking about the ways that what is it that
Speaker 4: makes a Pat Robertson or a Donald Wildman uncomfortable about it?
Speaker 4: Film like this, and some of it is just this
Speaker 4: lingering on male beauty, right, so you're just looking at
Speaker 4: it and they're not really moving the way that the
Speaker 4: movie industry would cut, especially in the eighties. Let's think
Speaker 4: about what the eighties was in terms of what film
Speaker 4: was intended to deliver commercially. The eighties was the apex
Speaker 4: of the boob shot, right, all of that. So there's
Speaker 4: really we're not seeing naked women in this. We're not
Speaker 4: seeing boob we're not seeing we're not even seeing like
Speaker 4: hints of that. We're not seeing bush, we're not seeing
Speaker 4: anything remotely like that. We're just seeing these long, languorous
Speaker 4: shots of men who were both masculinized and feminized. But
Speaker 4: there's still men, right, They're in that space. And this
Speaker 4: thing was not done. Yes, Fastbender movies existed, other movies
Speaker 4: like that existed, but they were not being seen in
Speaker 4: the same way that this was. And this was getting
Speaker 4: this was getting the Sun Dance Award, and this is
Speaker 4: getting Robert Redford speaking out on their behalf and so
Speaker 4: this was breaking containment at the time.
Speaker 9: And like the pat Robertson's of the World and whatever,
Speaker 9: they wouldn't have known anything about any European art house
Speaker 9: stuff from But before that, when this comes along, it's, Yeah,
Speaker 9: I guess it's just really rattled them. And I guess
Speaker 9: it gets to the kind of the Jennet of it
Speaker 9: all actually, the being very forthright about it. Yeah, we're
Speaker 9: I don't mind that I am offending you with us
Speaker 9: with this presentation, which is very much the attitude in
Speaker 9: his work, which Haines is obviously working with here too.
Speaker 4: Absolutely here look at this. Why do you deal with
Speaker 4: your feelings about this?
Speaker 6: I can't say that this was making me uncomfortable, nor
Speaker 6: can I really say it was turning me on too much,
Speaker 6: because there's the threat of violence that hangs over all
Speaker 6: three of these sections, but especially for me the Homo section,
Speaker 6: just because it really starts pretty violently. I mean, we
Speaker 6: do get to see the interview at the prison before
Speaker 6: he goes into general population, but once he does, then
Speaker 6: it is just bullying, and you know, for sodomy and
Speaker 6: all of these things. I'm just like, wow, this is
Speaker 6: pretty scary, and you don't know how he's going to react,
Speaker 6: Like during that scene where the one prisoner is basically
Speaker 6: fondling the other prisoner and he's like is he awake?
Speaker 6: Is he not awake? And I just keep wondering if
Speaker 6: he wakes up, what will he think? Will there be violence?
Speaker 6: And I'm just afraid of the violence, and of course
Speaker 6: rape is violence. Then we do have the rape scene
Speaker 6: later on. Up until that point in Homo, there's not
Speaker 6: a lot of bodily fluids, and we don't see the
Speaker 6: bodily fluids at that point, but he does talk about
Speaker 6: that and it's just like you know your mine now,
Speaker 6: like I have ejaculated into you, like you're you're my
Speaker 6: bitch basically, and it's like, okay, you know, Like it's
Speaker 6: a very very powerful, powerful moment. But I have to say,
Speaker 6: the most powerful moment of this whole movie. And I
Speaker 6: actually had to fast forward at the last time because
Speaker 6: I couldn't watch it again because it was burned into
Speaker 6: my brain from the very first time I saw it
Speaker 6: was the spitting scene, and my god, it is so
Speaker 6: disgusting but so beautiful all at the same time. It's amazing.
Speaker 8: It is incredible.
Speaker 9: That was the thing when I first saw it when
Speaker 9: I was a kid, seen it in England when it
Speaker 9: was a new movie. That was probably more than anything else.
Speaker 9: She's like, I cannot believe that I'm seeing this on film.
Speaker 8: Because it's yet.
Speaker 9: It's terrifying and disgusting, but it's just it's also the
Speaker 9: way it shot is gorgeous and ecstatic, and I think
Speaker 9: maybe I discovered a kink I didn't know I had
Speaker 9: or something at the time, but yes, but also just
Speaker 9: really scary too. And and the way that it just
Speaker 9: proceeds when he goes to his knees and is looking
Speaker 9: up and reaching up and it's just absolutely just battered.
Speaker 9: It's amazing. But yet it's not easy though, to not
Speaker 9: easy to take.
Speaker 4: No, it's not. I mean it's because basically it is
Speaker 4: so this is this film is pressed in so many ways.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the way that this is shot kind of reminds
Speaker 6: me of Careful. Just the use of the color. It's
Speaker 6: not that same too stripped technicolor that guy Madden used,
Speaker 6: but just the theatricalness of it, I suppose, And especially
Speaker 6: there's the spitting going on, and you're cutting back from
Speaker 6: the guy who's being spit upon versus the prisoners, and
Speaker 6: you get that great shot basically of the sky with
Speaker 6: just them popping into the frame, which is wonderful. And
Speaker 6: then you start to get the flower petals coming down.
Speaker 6: But it's the guy who's over to the side looking
Speaker 6: at all of this stuff. That's what reminds me of
Speaker 6: Careful the most. For whatever reason, the way that the
Speaker 6: spit and the flower petals all mixed together. Oh my god,
Speaker 6: it is so breathic. And like I said, that was
Speaker 6: the moment I remember the most from watching this film,
Speaker 6: and that I was like, Okay, I don't know if
Speaker 6: I am ready to do this, you know, thirty thirty
Speaker 6: five years later or whatever. I'm like, I don't know
Speaker 6: if I can handle that.
Speaker 4: But it's a moment that collapses objection and transcendence simultaneously.
Speaker 16: Right.
Speaker 4: It's the same thing as jumping out the window and
Speaker 4: flying or falling, Right, it's both and neither at the
Speaker 4: same time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And it's interesting that with Homo, there's just the
Speaker 6: I think there's just the one scene after that where
Speaker 6: you just hear about what happened to the other prisoners,
Speaker 6: and it stays with the main guy. So the guy
Speaker 6: who he was I think is Jack Bolton. I think
Speaker 6: it is the character that our main character was in
Speaker 6: love with. Basically, he escapes, but then he gets shot
Speaker 6: on his escape attempt and that's it, you know, and
Speaker 6: then we cut back to the hero section and kind
Speaker 6: of wrap that up. I mean, it's interesting where we
Speaker 6: start and where we stop with all of these stories, and
Speaker 6: that you've got the Jena quotes throughout the entire thing.
Speaker 6: I mean, just you know, the last one a man
Speaker 6: must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur,
Speaker 6: and dreaming his nursed in darkness. And that's over, Like
Speaker 6: Richie's Flight Away, and the whole thing starting with what's
Speaker 6: the beginning one about the whole world is dying of
Speaker 6: panicky fright, which takes us all the way back to
Speaker 6: the beginning of our conversation where we were just talking
Speaker 6: about how the world was at this moment. The whole
Speaker 6: world was dying of a panicky write.
Speaker 9: The Jena quotes in the director's commentary. I was kind
Speaker 9: of surprised that they had a Apparently it was a
Speaker 9: big deal to get approval to use this Jena content
Speaker 9: from the estate, which I just I don't know. For
Speaker 9: some reason, I didn't think that would be like so difficult.
Speaker 9: I felt like almost that Jenay is a recent enough
Speaker 9: figure that I guess there would be there would be
Speaker 9: that to some extent, he almost seems like a figure
Speaker 9: that you could just it's just part of history and
Speaker 9: literature or whatever that you could draw from. But apparently
Speaker 9: this state they found very difficult to work with for
Speaker 9: whatever reason. And then finally they found somebody that they
Speaker 9: guess they showed the film and then got approval to
Speaker 9: use these quotations directly rather than have to try to
Speaker 9: paraphrase or camouflage it somehow.
Speaker 4: I think they said that they needed to translate it
Speaker 4: to English and then back to French again to actually
Speaker 4: use it, which I think is just such an interesting thing,
Speaker 4: and it's definitely worth delving into that commentary track for
Speaker 4: that history alone, because I think they talk about like
Speaker 4: how difficult it is to even see jene on film.
Speaker 4: Now this is a place where the estate is really kept,
Speaker 4: Janet's legacy from for better or worse, being filmed and
Speaker 4: being delivered to a mass audience. Yes, this gets talked
Speaker 4: about in their early part of this like kernel of
Speaker 4: what Janey is about, which is me going to prison,
Speaker 4: is me rejecting the world that is rejecting me, So
Speaker 4: it's taking agency. It becomes this very broad understanding of
Speaker 4: what it means to go to jail. Ultimately, but how
Speaker 4: is it possible that I'm finding freedom in prison? And
Speaker 4: yet this is what this is specifically, what this transfer
Speaker 4: is I am rejecting the world that is rejecting me.
Speaker 4: What a powerful message.
Speaker 9: Have you seen Janey's film? That is I'm blanking on
Speaker 9: the title now because makes want to think of the
Speaker 9: prison section obviously in Poison a lot, and it's I
Speaker 9: think it most particularly that if you remember that that
Speaker 9: kind of remarkable part in it with the cigarette smoke
Speaker 9: where the where the prisoner on the one side of
Speaker 9: the wall blows the smoke through a straw to the
Speaker 9: other and it's yeah, super super cool.
Speaker 6: But all right, let's go ahead and take a break
Speaker 6: and we'll be right back after these brief messages.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, this is Malcolm McDowell. I just want to
Speaker 1: say that this is a request to listeners of the
Speaker 1: Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Speaker 1: Patreon dot com, p A t R e o N
Speaker 1: dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 7: That's pretty simple. I think you can do that.
Speaker 1: It's a great show and Mike he provides hours of
Speaker 1: great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
Speaker 1: little drovies. Settle down, take a listen, and have a
Speaker 1: sip of the old molocco and then you'll be ready
Speaker 1: for a little of the.
Speaker 8: Old in Out, in out real horror show.
Speaker 7: Bye bye.
Speaker 6: All right, we're back when we were talking about Poison,
Speaker 6: and I imagine that everybody has seen Superstar. I'm pretty right.
Speaker 9: I haven't super recently, but I have seen it. It's
Speaker 9: a yeah, they have a decent memory of it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's funny to me, And this is just a
Speaker 6: little pot shot, but it's funny to me that the
Speaker 6: titles in Poison are as tough to read as the
Speaker 6: titles in Super Black. On the use of the black
Speaker 6: over dark colors or the scripty font for Poison is
Speaker 6: really tough to read, especially on like you know, bad
Speaker 6: copies of the film. But yeah, my god, Superstar, Oh,
Speaker 6: I just love that movie so much. And again just
Speaker 6: to take that other style, to take the movie of
Speaker 6: the week type of style and transform it, and to
Speaker 6: transform it and I don't want to say Barbie dolls,
Speaker 6: because they were not officially Barbie dolls. I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 6: They were like, I don't know, Stacy or something, some
Speaker 6: other type of dolls. But to transform the movie of
Speaker 6: the week with those dolls, and to make you feel
Speaker 6: so much for these fucking dolls, and to present the
Speaker 6: best version of the Karen Carpenter story that I've ever
Speaker 6: seen in my life, and to also inject it with
Speaker 6: you know, the whole idea of Downey and I love
Speaker 6: how often he uses white as his character's names. You know,
Speaker 6: there's whites in this one. There's Carol White in Safe
Speaker 6: as well. But like to have the use of Downie
Speaker 6: and what's under the surface of Downey because it's like
Speaker 6: those idyllic, you know, houses that were going by at
Speaker 6: the beginning, and you get that same thing here in
Speaker 6: Pois and with the hero section of here's these beautiful houses,
Speaker 6: what kind of horrible shit is going on behind the facades?
Speaker 6: And you get I want to say that there's more
Speaker 6: spanking inside of Superstar. There's I've always felt, and please
Speaker 6: correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always gotten the
Speaker 6: message from Superstar that Richard Carpenter was gay. There's like
Speaker 6: a whole thing where she's talking, Karen's talking to him
Speaker 6: and like, I know what you do, Richard, And I
Speaker 6: think it's probably drug use. But I always got this
Speaker 6: whole feeling that she was accusing him of being gay,
Speaker 6: and I'm just like.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I've wondered that too, because I know that I
Speaker 9: know that he had a bad drug problem for a
Speaker 9: long time. Quayludes, classic seventies drug addiction.
Speaker 8: I wonder if that's ever going to come back.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Trying, man, let me call me up.
Speaker 8: I need some I know, really.
Speaker 6: Can value make a return as well.
Speaker 4: It doesn't really matter whether it was gay or drugs
Speaker 4: or like whatever. It was a secretcy I mean it
Speaker 4: was in secrecy. That was the issue. Of course, Karen's
Speaker 4: dealing with her own anorexia, which is secrecy. I mean
Speaker 4: everything is secrecy. What's southern California but a bunch of
Speaker 4: fucking secrets, right, secret, secret, secret secrets. What's America? But
Speaker 4: all these secrets that are like suppressed and hidden. That's
Speaker 4: what that whole thing is about. And I don't, I
Speaker 4: honestly don't think you can make superstar with people.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 6: I mean I've seen the movie of the Week that
Speaker 6: was very similar, but it was nowhere near as powerful.
Speaker 6: I mean, to see the way that he carved away
Speaker 6: at her arms and made those arms skinnier and skinnier.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't need to see the vomiting. I
Speaker 6: don't need to see that kind of stuff, But you
Speaker 6: get the implication of everything. And again, that movie starts,
Speaker 6: now that I'm thinking about it starts with like I
Speaker 6: want to say, it's like a POV shot of them
Speaker 6: finding Karen's body and you hear the mother like Karen, Karen,
Speaker 6: what's going on? You'll call the ambulance or whatever, and
Speaker 6: then it's like flashback to what brought her here. It's
Speaker 6: very much that hero type of thing where it's like,
Speaker 6: all right, we're now, we're adopting this storytelling method and
Speaker 6: going through all this, and I want to say, there's
Speaker 6: again talking about how tough it is to read, but
Speaker 6: the title cards that they use and superstar and everything,
Speaker 6: and I just love that he was playing around with
Speaker 6: this stuff. I mean, even going back to one of
Speaker 6: his first student films with the film Suicide, he's playing
Speaker 6: with the form so much. I want to say that
Speaker 6: that shot in at least three different film stocks. There's
Speaker 6: at least two color versions, and then there's the black
Speaker 6: and white and the way that we're moving from one
Speaker 6: to another. I will admit I haven't really kept up
Speaker 6: with Todd Haynes like post Safe. I don't think I've
Speaker 6: seen very many, if any of his works, which makes
Speaker 6: me feel very bad. I just have never said down
Speaker 6: to watch any of like the Melodramas or even Vil
Speaker 6: the Goldmine, have been wanting to watch that seen it.
Speaker 6: I just have never said treat yourself. I still haven't
Speaker 6: said that. It's great, I have it. It's it's it's
Speaker 6: sitting upstairs and I'm like, I just need to sit down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, treat yourself. Just take a fucking weekend and go
Speaker 4: to town. There's so much.
Speaker 6: Does he do the same thing with the mixing of formats,
Speaker 6: because I love that what he's doing in these first
Speaker 6: then these early films not.
Speaker 4: As much really, I mean it hops from film to film,
Speaker 4: but like for the most part, once he's in a thing,
Speaker 4: he stays in a thing. Now, but it's always so lush,
Speaker 4: and so even when it's a film, I'm a little
Speaker 4: less like a wonderland like his relatively recent excess. It
Speaker 4: like a really accessible thing which I went in. I'm like,
Speaker 4: it's it's fine, it's not it's not in my top
Speaker 4: ten or whatever. But we I mean, I guess I'm
Speaker 4: not there. Really does that one hops around? You know?
Speaker 4: That one hops that? That's probably the hoppiest. I am
Speaker 4: drinking a beer. It is the hoppiest of the more recent,
Speaker 4: more recent I'm talking about it. I'm not there as
Speaker 4: if it's a recent film of Toddyes, like.
Speaker 6: Even far from Heaven is not a recent film, but
Speaker 6: it's one I haven't seen, so I'm like, yeah, it
Speaker 6: feels like it just came.
Speaker 4: You're you're just you're just in for treats, Galore, Mike,
Speaker 4: you really.
Speaker 6: Are the thing that I did do know about. Far
Speaker 6: from Heaven is again our main character opening up a
Speaker 6: door and then catching somebody, catching her husband with another man,
Speaker 6: and it just feels like there's so many door swings
Speaker 6: that happen in all of these movies where something is
Speaker 6: being revealed to us, and even suicide starting with the
Speaker 6: door being closed, you know, having this whole thing, the
Speaker 6: door repeatedly being closed. More stories of bullying and you know,
Speaker 6: and the outsideer, the game outsider, and the way that
Speaker 6: he's trying to basically vivisect himself with these scissors. I mean,
Speaker 6: it gets real bad, real fast, very very disturbing film,
Speaker 6: but wonderful.
Speaker 4: I'm going to make you a deal Mic right now,
Speaker 4: because I did just watch Substance last night and then
Speaker 4: Poison I also again last night. Dennis Quaid is on
Speaker 4: my mind. Who did play the husband in Far From Heaven,
Speaker 4: so who is like harboring a secret? Dennis Quaid appears
Speaker 4: as the agent in the Substance, and he also recently
Speaker 4: played fucking wrong O Reagan. So I will put you
Speaker 4: to the challenge on the Projection with podcast if you
Speaker 4: want to do a three movie Dennis Quaid, like, hold
Speaker 4: that man's feet to the fire, look at the Substance,
Speaker 4: look at Far from Heaven, and look at Reagan and
Speaker 4: make him accountable for his actions.
Speaker 7: Do I have to.
Speaker 2: Do?
Speaker 6: I have to watch Reagan because he knows it's going
Speaker 6: to be so fucking whitewashed and not talk about Iran
Speaker 6: Contrast's not going to talk about, you know, the AIDS crisis.
Speaker 6: It's not going to talk about the trickle down economics.
Speaker 6: I'm sure, I mean the way he gutted healthcare.
Speaker 4: I don't want to do it either, but I will
Speaker 4: have you have you have you ever been challenged on
Speaker 4: your finals?
Speaker 6: I don't think. I mean I might have been challenged
Speaker 6: to a fight once or twice, but that was mostly
Speaker 6: over Last Action Hero.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: That's a lot to ask to sit through that you
Speaker 9: can honorably decline.
Speaker 6: It's kind of like when people tag me for those
Speaker 6: music challenges and I'm just like, yeah, no, I don't
Speaker 6: do that.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, that's that's that's an advanced level.
Speaker 4: That's that's a final boss level kind of ship right there.
Speaker 6: Me with the first two, I mean, can can we
Speaker 6: switch it up to do Dreamscape instead?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 6: Okay, well there you go. All right, that that challenge
Speaker 6: I accept right there, because I've been wanting to rewatch
Speaker 6: Dreamscape for a while.
Speaker 4: But you know, one thing I want to say about
Speaker 4: super Star, and I really wanted to, like I want
Speaker 4: to skirt like the kids these days kind of thing.
Speaker 4: But like another piece, like another like emotionally absent piece
Speaker 4: here is like that pursuit of something you can't get
Speaker 4: too easily. And now, like it's very easy to find
Speaker 4: Superstar on YouTube, you know, and it probably will be
Speaker 4: for a little while. It'll be a while before these
Speaker 4: things become inaccessible. But you know that, I mean, we know,
Speaker 4: we know what it was like. All three of us
Speaker 4: know what it was like to like have to wait
Speaker 4: and to really like do some digging to find a
Speaker 4: thing like that that we know is out there, that
Speaker 4: we know is going to challenge us. And I'm sure
Speaker 4: there are plenty of things that are like that now
Speaker 4: in various in various ways. But you know, just like
Speaker 4: that that transcendence, right, that comes from like finding that
Speaker 4: thing and finally being able to access it and be
Speaker 4: informed by it. In some ways, I hope that never
Speaker 4: comes back, and at the same time, like, I really
Speaker 4: would love to make sure that people understand how important
Speaker 4: that moment of finding that thing is going to fulfill
Speaker 4: you is.
Speaker 6: Right kind of along those lines. When it came to
Speaker 6: Dottie Gets Spanked, I knew that it was out there.
Speaker 6: I knew that I had played on PBS. I couldn't
Speaker 6: find it forever, and so I actually wrote to like
Speaker 6: our local PBS affiliate, or it might have been like
Speaker 6: the Washington DC PBS. They actually sent me a VHS
Speaker 6: copy of that one. So I was fortunate to be
Speaker 6: able to experience that. And just man, oh man, I
Speaker 6: love Dotty Get Spanked. It's so simple but so powerful.
Speaker 6: And I mean I still quote from that movie, you know,
Speaker 6: I think about that line my sister says, You're a feminino.
Speaker 8: That was a new one to me.
Speaker 9: I just I watched it last night that I thought
Speaker 9: for the first time, get getting ready to talk about
Speaker 9: it now?
Speaker 8: Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 6: And just to explore a kid of that age and
Speaker 6: the confusion and the taking of all of these different
Speaker 6: things and putting them all together, and it's just like,
Speaker 6: this is how fetishes are made, you know, but we
Speaker 6: don't want to talk about that stuff. But this is
Speaker 6: so great to have this little kid who's what like
Speaker 6: seven years.
Speaker 8: Old, six and three quarters?
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you, Yes, I forgot that. That's what
Speaker 6: he tells Dottie when he meets there again. The layers
Speaker 6: of reality where it's like, this is the actress that
Speaker 6: plays Dottie and then here she is behind the camera
Speaker 6: looking in there being super like not as aggressive, assertive
Speaker 6: and just like okay, yeah, we need a wedge here,
Speaker 6: we're going to do this, and like so she's super
Speaker 6: in charge of all this stuff, and then the way
Speaker 6: she puts on the wig and then starts getting spanked
Speaker 6: by Adam Arkin. Yeah, and then the way that we have,
Speaker 6: you know, the little kid than doing the pictures and everything,
Speaker 6: and the way that he's like showing her the picture
Speaker 6: book and everything, and he's just like so expressive that way,
Speaker 6: and I love that. This is Todd Haynes. He did
Speaker 6: a commentary track for this one too, if you guys
Speaker 6: check out that MKV. He talks about how a lot
Speaker 6: of these drawings were his drawings, and he talked about
Speaker 6: how he just had like Lucy, who was a Lucy.
Speaker 6: It was Julie Andrews who he mentions in this, and
Speaker 6: there's one other person. I'm trying to remember who it was,
Speaker 6: but it was like almost all like queer icon type
Speaker 6: of stuff. Not surprisingly, it wasn't Judy Garland. I know
Speaker 6: about you, Gays. I know how much you liked you.
Speaker 4: I was in a dean mode.
Speaker 10: And Frank Sinatraus Sandwich and Frank Sinatru's penis was so
Speaker 10: bid when I was doing a line of proke off
Speaker 10: of it, I had to stop halfway through to catch
Speaker 10: my read.
Speaker 4: He liked the comedians, and that's the that's the interesting
Speaker 4: part about this, like that queer comedy connection. I mean,
Speaker 4: I know I talked a little bit earlier about Vera
Speaker 4: Drew's People's Joker, and I think there's very much some
Speaker 4: dialogue that's happening here, both of them, both People's Joker
Speaker 4: and Dottie Get Spanked being very personal films. Even before
Speaker 4: listening to the director's commentary on Dottie Gets Spanked, that
Speaker 4: felt like probably Todd Haynes's most autobiographical and personal film,
Speaker 4: and then you listen to that track and you find
Speaker 4: out they're like, oh, he actually did visit the set
Speaker 4: of the Lucy Show. He did get to meet Lucille
Speaker 4: Ball when he was a child.
Speaker 8: Oh, that's it. I had not heard.
Speaker 9: I didn't hear the commentary track, So he actually did that.
Speaker 8: That's cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we really met Lucille Ball when he was a child.
Speaker 9: I really identified quite a bit with with this kid
Speaker 9: in this movie because I was kind of I was
Speaker 9: I was kind of like that, like, uh, old TV
Speaker 9: shows like that.
Speaker 8: Like like I've watched I Love.
Speaker 9: Lucy when it was not when I was a kid.
Speaker 9: It started all those shows that are getting rerun all
Speaker 9: the time on like when we first got cable TV,
Speaker 9: and you know, they'd be chanting like TBS and whatever
Speaker 9: to have or those channels like that would have those
Speaker 9: things on all the time. And then my grandmother, I
Speaker 9: spent a lot of times with my a lot of
Speaker 9: time with my grandparents and just and it was fun
Speaker 9: for her too, because all the TV she remembered from
Speaker 9: back in the day was back again. And I always
Speaker 9: had these interests and enthusiasms that were not masculine enough
Speaker 9: for some people. Probably, so I totally, I totally get
Speaker 9: where that six and three quarter year old little kid
Speaker 9: is coming from there.
Speaker 6: Just how uncomfortable his dad is.
Speaker 8: Uh huh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: I did like that Haynes was saying how supportive his
Speaker 6: parents were, though. I was very glad about that. I'm
Speaker 6: trying to remember the name of the artists we talked
Speaker 6: about him recently. I can't remember if it was Unknown
Speaker 6: Man of Shangador or what it was. But Haines is
Speaker 6: mixing formats in here, and we get the color stuff.
Speaker 6: We also get some you know, shots of television, you know,
Speaker 6: so it gives it kind of a video effect, but
Speaker 6: it's really all film. He does that in color, and
Speaker 6: then he does these fantasy sequences in black and white,
Speaker 6: and this whole thing it almost looks like pair Ubu
Speaker 6: with the way that he's got that huge crown and everything,
Speaker 6: and sitting above, you know, it's very expressionistic, sitting above
Speaker 6: Dottie and the way she's pleading with him. But then
Speaker 6: you've got the other thing that's going on where you
Speaker 6: see a man and I want to say, it's the
Speaker 6: father banking him. And that's what I'm talking about, Like
Speaker 6: the painting painterly quality of it, where you see like
Speaker 6: the portico is going out into infinity and there's the
Speaker 6: closer one near us. I'm like, this is very much
Speaker 6: a reference to an artist, and I can't remember their
Speaker 6: name right now.
Speaker 12: Mike is trying to think of the artist Giorgio de Chirico.
Speaker 12: He recently made a reference to this artist on the
Speaker 12: five Thousand Fingers of Doctor t episode.
Speaker 6: But my god, what a beautiful, beautiful shot. And especially
Speaker 6: when he comes back and the man is laying there,
Speaker 6: I guess dead and he's got one arm up and
Speaker 6: you get the harsh shadows. Looks so beautiful. And to
Speaker 6: see this, like, because I only saw it as a
Speaker 6: VHS tape, looked really darn good to me there. But
Speaker 6: to see it now like in a more modern blu
Speaker 6: rayish dvdish type format, I'm like, this looks just beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker 9: I was really glad to have seen that because I
Speaker 9: had not seen that one before and I really liked it.
Speaker 6: So I guess I know which Haynes I'll be starting with.
Speaker 6: It sounds like I'll be taking you up on your
Speaker 6: challenge here, Rain, and I'll be watching Far from Heaven first.
Speaker 4: I'm here for you.
Speaker 6: Though, I don't know, I kind of do want to
Speaker 6: watch Velvet gold Mine first though.
Speaker 4: Fun, it's all fun. Yeah, you've got a velve a
Speaker 4: gold mine ahead.
Speaker 6: Oh very nice. Yeah, Actually, I take it back. The
Speaker 6: last one I saw of his was The Velvet Underground.
Speaker 6: I did watch his documentary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was good.
Speaker 6: I thought it looked wonderful.
Speaker 4: Of course, of course.
Speaker 6: All right, we're going to take another break and play
Speaker 6: a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
Speaker 16: Hi, I'm Tony Wilson. This is the trail off for
Speaker 16: twenty four hour Potty People. It's the incredible but true
Speaker 16: story of a man behind the scene that defined the decade.
Speaker 16: This is not about sex drugs in rock and roll,
Speaker 16: although they are and it looks. Look, it's not about me.
Speaker 7: Plus four.
Speaker 2: It's about music. This is the moment when even the
Speaker 2: White Man starts dancing. It's about people with impossible dreams.
Speaker 2: It's like Scooby doing it because they like they had
Speaker 2: a buster. It is a little bit like Scooby do.
Speaker 2: This is Manchester and there are guns. Really ought to
Speaker 2: be careful for that show. You can do text on Zions, the.
Speaker 16: Name of the film company director's credit the glocal plays
Speaker 16: me typle graphic twenty four hour Party People release dates,
Speaker 16: silly bit at the end, the pity you didn't sign
Speaker 16: the smith's but you're right about me football, His music's
Speaker 16: rubbish and his a gens fucking plays website and credit
Speaker 16: block that nobody ever reads.
Speaker 2: We're finished?
Speaker 6: Can I keep this suit? That's right. We'll be back
Speaker 6: next week with another Patreon request. It is twenty four
Speaker 6: hour Party People. Until then, they want to think by
Speaker 6: co host Kyler and Rain. So, Rain, what is the
Speaker 6: latest with you?
Speaker 4: You know, I am taking We're recording this around the
Speaker 4: holiday time. I'm taking a little bit of a chill pill.
Speaker 4: I've got some travel ahead of me, but I'm coming
Speaker 4: back in twenty twenty five with some big and exciting things.
Speaker 4: So check out my website Rain dot com, r Ahne
Speaker 4: dot com and see what I'm up to.
Speaker 6: When you hear this, cool and Kyler, what's going on
Speaker 6: in your world?
Speaker 8: A couple of months ago, my.
Speaker 9: Newest novel, The Vampire Circus, was released. I haven't done
Speaker 9: a bunch of fan fair about it yet because I've
Speaker 9: just been too busy with the day job. That was
Speaker 9: a lot of fun to write. So that's out there.
Speaker 9: I got some other books out there. I'm easy to
Speaker 9: find on the Amazon is easy. You can look me
Speaker 9: up there, and I got a couple. I got a
Speaker 9: couple other writing projects coming. There's one that's kind of
Speaker 9: cool that I can't really talk about out too much yet,
Speaker 9: but a little bit interesting in that has kind of
Speaker 9: made me have to try my hand at writing a screenplay,
Speaker 9: which I had not really done before. The format kind
Speaker 9: of intimidated me, so I went at that. So yeah,
Speaker 9: that's what That's what's going on. So just working and
Speaker 9: living and yeah, working in some writing when I can
Speaker 9: and if anybody wants to catch up with me. I
Speaker 9: have a website that I never do anything with at
Speaker 9: Kylerfay dot com. I swear that twenty twenty five is
Speaker 9: the year that I will use my website for something,
Speaker 9: but I swear this will be the year otherwise. On
Speaker 9: social media, I'm a blue Sky person. Now I'm leaving Twitter.
Speaker 6: Yay, what I would you leave Twitter? Come on?
Speaker 8: And it is always Twitter. It will never be x.
Speaker 8: X is not a thing. Stop trying to make X
Speaker 8: a thing.
Speaker 9: But with that now being owned by an actual member
Speaker 9: of the Trump administration. I'm gonna leave my account sitting
Speaker 9: on there so my name doesn't I don't know, yes
Speaker 9: gets stolen by a Nazi or something, but blue Sky
Speaker 9: I've started to find some of my people there again,
Speaker 9: so that's been fun.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you so much folks for being on the show.
Speaker 6: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 6: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 6: of the other shows that I work on. They are
Speaker 6: all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Speaker 6: Patreon community, of which Kyler is a proud member. If
Speaker 6: you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com
Speaker 6: slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection
Speaker 6: Booth take over the world.
Speaker 7: All luck my town.
Speaker 3: With a little drop of toys and nobody no, they're
Speaker 3: line enough to go and sing I'm all alone. I
Speaker 3: smoke my friends down to the field too, but I
Speaker 3: feel much cleaner after real.
Speaker 7: And she left in the fall. That's a picture of
Speaker 7: the garden. She always had.
Speaker 3: That little drop of toysm did the devil.
Speaker 7: Make the world her God was seeking?
Speaker 3: You'll never get a wish from the bone.
Speaker 7: Another ron, good pie.
Speaker 11: And a hurry said.
Speaker 7: That deep blue sky is smile, and she left in
Speaker 7: the fall.
Speaker 11: That's a picture.
Speaker 7: On the wall. She always said that can talk of coils.
Speaker 11: And rat always noise.
Speaker 7: When he's in with whe's rooms.
Speaker 8: Here you lose a little every day.
Speaker 11: Well, I remember boom.
Speaker 7: And a million mons, a million they all have raised
Speaker 7: to make you pink. And she left in the phone.
Speaker 7: That's a picture on the wall. Always said that lit
Speaker 7: the top of poring, And she left in the phone.
Speaker 7: That's a picture on the wall.
Speaker 3: I always said that it's a drop of torhing