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Speaker 2: Oh gee is folks, it's showtime. People say good money
Speaker 2: to see this movie When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 3: They want closed sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 1: In the projection booth.
Speaker 2: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring, Put it off? Who is it?
Speaker 2: Fisa the shoot show it a momentally do tiu posers.
Speaker 4: Then themselves here the mutilation Barchette to Cortoon.
Speaker 5: Would be there. Would you sold.
Speaker 6: Me you like.
Speaker 1: Coe could use confer.
Speaker 4: She brought you the really good can't can't be kept them?
Speaker 4: Then in expectation, I mean the Pipsis.
Speaker 7: She probably she used a purple porch.
Speaker 2: Officer.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the projection both, I'm your host, Mike White,
Speaker 1: join me once again. Is mister axel Cohagen.
Speaker 7: Stopping in for a nibble.
Speaker 1: Also back in the Buddhist mister Ben Buckingham Salutations. We
Speaker 1: continue October with a look at In My Skin, released
Speaker 1: in two thousand and two. The film was written, directed by,
Speaker 1: and stars Marina Devon as Esther, a marketing exec who
Speaker 1: injures her leg while wandering off from a party. She
Speaker 1: becomes fast by the wound, and this begins the story
Speaker 1: of how Esther forms a new relationship with her own body.
Speaker 1: We will be spoiling all the gory details as we
Speaker 1: go along, so if you don't mind anything ruined, please
Speaker 1: track down the movie and watch it before continuing. Just
Speaker 1: it pause and we'll just be waiting, trapped like flies
Speaker 1: and Amber act sol When was the first time you
Speaker 1: saw in My Skin?
Speaker 2: And what did you think?
Speaker 7: This is the first time I've seen it. I went
Speaker 7: through a huge New French extremity kick when I as
Speaker 7: soon as I watched my first film, which probably would
Speaker 7: have been Martyrs or High Tension, I needed to see
Speaker 7: everything within the genre. It really struck me. It's a singular,
Speaker 7: amazing film style like the Jay horror films or you
Speaker 7: know American cult movies from the seventies and eighties. It's
Speaker 7: it's just this perfect time period. But I I don't
Speaker 7: think I came across In My Skin until preparing for this,
Speaker 7: and my first response is that even though it has
Speaker 7: so many hallmarks and is definitely indicative of the new
Speaker 7: French extremity in a lot of ways, it's also a
Speaker 7: very straightforward film, does not pull a lot of punches,
Speaker 7: and I think directors has kind of downplayed heavy symbolism,
Speaker 7: and I actually agree with her that this is a
Speaker 7: straightforward film about a woman's discovery of her body.
Speaker 1: And Ben, how about yourself.
Speaker 2: It was twenty seventeen that I first and the only
Speaker 2: time I've seen it until recently. I haven't kind a
Speaker 2: funny relationship with this film. I laughed when you contacted
Speaker 2: me and said, hey, Ben, I want you to do
Speaker 2: In My Skin because you're the second person to stick
Speaker 2: this film in front of me. When I ran a
Speaker 2: barroom film night way back, when one of my co
Speaker 2: hosts Along the Way picked In my Skin to play.
Speaker 2: I was a film I'd come across in reading bits
Speaker 2: and pieces but hadn't actually seen, and it was a
Speaker 2: curious pick for our night. We definitely played some pretty intense, heavy,
Speaker 2: messed up film, so we definitely we weren't playing it
Speaker 2: safe a lot of the time, but not exactly the
Speaker 2: kind of film you go and have a couple of
Speaker 2: beers and then sit down in the bandroom in ancient
Speaker 2: couches and soak up with a group of people. At
Speaker 2: the end of it, even I was a bit like, hey, Liam,
Speaker 2: interesting choice. He's like, I thought you'd appreciate it that.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, yeah, I did. But also so once
Speaker 2: again I was like, ah, yeah, okay, Mike, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: appreciated that.
Speaker 1: You're my cannibal go to guy.
Speaker 2: I am the go to cannibal guy, which is why
Speaker 2: this film has been put in front of me twice now.
Speaker 2: It is a film that I think I went yep
Speaker 2: okay at passort of the way and knew that one
Speaker 2: day it would return, and hadn't thought much about it
Speaker 2: until now when it suddenly seems to be exploding back
Speaker 2: into attention, getting a couple of Blu Ray releases around
Speaker 2: the world, and I'm very happy to return to re
Speaker 2: examine it, and I definitely am much more impressed by it.
Speaker 2: I thought that I wasn't impressed by it when I
Speaker 2: first saw it. I don't think it is an easy
Speaker 2: film to absorb on a single viewing, and I think
Speaker 2: that watched it quietly in the dark on your own
Speaker 2: at least once, not all the time, but at least
Speaker 2: once is definitely the way to really follow the experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying to remember the first time that I
Speaker 1: saw this film because I am not a big fan
Speaker 1: of the French extremity films. I walked out of high
Speaker 1: tension before their big twist was revealed. I talked about
Speaker 1: that on our Martyrs episode. We did an episode on murders,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that that went overwhelm with at
Speaker 1: least one of my co hosts on that one. But
Speaker 1: I do remember liking this film, and I do remember
Speaker 1: enjoying that this was such a look at a woman
Speaker 1: in her relationship with her own body. And by the way,
Speaker 1: how great is it that we have three dudes on
Speaker 1: this episode here to explain to women exactly what this
Speaker 1: film is about and to really mansplain all of the
Speaker 1: things that they experience and go through. I mean, we
Speaker 1: can talk about all kinds of bodily trauma and rape
Speaker 1: and menstrual anxiety and all those things and just really
Speaker 1: give the girls heads up on what it means to
Speaker 1: be a woman.
Speaker 2: So yay us.
Speaker 7: I think I had watched it twice in preparation for this,
Speaker 7: and I had notes, and I kind of had had
Speaker 7: some ideas of what I was going to say, and
Speaker 7: then I listened to Faculty of Horror's excellent podcasts on
Speaker 7: this film and thought, well, shit, this is covering a
Speaker 7: lot of the stuff from a feminine perspective. I'm gonna
Speaker 7: have to to push it a little bit harder, you know.
Speaker 7: I see this as a challenge for us to rise
Speaker 7: to well acknowledging, you know, our identities and possible limitations.
Speaker 1: And next week when we talk about raw, will have
Speaker 1: two female co hosts and then me to explain to
Speaker 1: them what things are going on. So it's easier here
Speaker 1: when we have three guys.
Speaker 2: That's that's called balance, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, fair and balanced.
Speaker 2: Also we can see who has the worst French pronunciation
Speaker 2: as well. The Australian accent is not one that mixes
Speaker 2: with friends very easily, and I did not get a
Speaker 2: chance to look up any pronunciations, So I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: apologize right now.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do my best to avoid French at all.
Speaker 1: That's why I didn't say this is called dance mapeau.
Speaker 2: Or however, that's the easy one. You've got to say
Speaker 2: that as many as times as possible, because that's the
Speaker 2: easy one to get the points up. It dance Mapu, well,
Speaker 2: it looks.
Speaker 1: Like dance mapeu, which I know is definitely not it
Speaker 1: as in Pepe the Pew.
Speaker 7: It was only in preparing for this podcast that I
Speaker 7: learned his name is pronounced Gaspar no Way and not
Speaker 7: Gaspar Noir. It kind of changed everything for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was looking up Rabelists or no, I've already
Speaker 2: gotten it. That's the one that I looked up. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I know it's not Rabelists. That's so as where I was,
Speaker 2: I was disappearing into some strange places. I had to
Speaker 2: listen to the facult of your Horror episode as well,
Speaker 2: and I was it was good because my brain wasn't
Speaker 2: particularly going in those directions. I had other weird things
Speaker 2: to look up, and I got distracted by all of
Speaker 2: the piles of books that I have and didn't get
Speaker 2: around looking up the pronunciations. But yeah, there is a
Speaker 2: lot of way is to approach this film in our defense, Well,
Speaker 2: obviously this is a film dealing with a lot of
Speaker 2: feminist issues. It's a lot of just general societal mental health,
Speaker 2: community connections, modernity, all sorts of things that I think
Speaker 2: are much more widespread. It's just that we don't tend
Speaker 2: to get a film that so specifically hones in on
Speaker 2: a woman's experience, and especially a woman who isn't afraid
Speaker 2: of being a and I mean is extremely positively a
Speaker 2: weird little goblin freak.
Speaker 1: Yeah. As I was watching this, I was making a
Speaker 1: list of all the oppositions that happen in this film,
Speaker 1: the idea of inside outside, negative, positive, And I'm going
Speaker 1: to be focusing on these opening credits quite a bit,
Speaker 1: just a warning work in personal woman, man, public, private beauty,
Speaker 1: ugliness and then person body And even in the credit,
Speaker 1: Don's MAPO is split between that M and the A
Speaker 1: and these opening credits. Like, I don't focus on the
Speaker 1: credits nearly as much, but with this film, the whole
Speaker 1: idea of these negative and positive images, and that sometimes
Speaker 1: it looks like it's the same image on the left,
Speaker 1: which is positive, versus the image on the right, which
Speaker 1: is negative. Sometimes they are the same, very similar, and
Speaker 1: sometimes they are complete opposites. And you even get the
Speaker 1: split of the image when it comes to first times
Speaker 1: that we see our main character when we get that
Speaker 1: amazing shot of her leg, and her leg is such
Speaker 1: the focus of so much of this film, and you
Speaker 1: have the chair on the left hand side, the leg
Speaker 1: on the right, and it almost looks like an architectural
Speaker 1: sculpture rather than a person, and that kind of disassociation,
Speaker 1: which we'll also be talking quite a bit about, and
Speaker 1: then you get the split screen comes back a few times,
Speaker 1: especially in what I would consider the opening to the
Speaker 1: third act, because this movie goes along pretty normal, well
Speaker 1: normal a narrative path through the first and second act
Speaker 1: quite a bit, and then when it comes to the
Speaker 1: third act, it's still of a piece, but it goes
Speaker 1: off in a different direction, and it's handled and is
Speaker 1: shot in a little bit of a different way. And
Speaker 1: I did find it fascinating to find out that the
Speaker 1: cinematographer of this film also has a very successful business
Speaker 1: shooting food, and the food in this film is so unappetizing,
Speaker 1: especially when you get a shift. I think that's more
Speaker 1: of the second act shift of the restaurant scene. Because
Speaker 1: so much of this I talked about how it's work
Speaker 1: and personal, and it's this whole idea of the societal
Speaker 1: expectations this idea of our main character being this it
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter what her job is, but she is
Speaker 1: in advertising, which I guess actually does matter because advertising
Speaker 1: is all about presentation. It's all about the gloss. It's
Speaker 1: all about you know, you don't sell the steak, you
Speaker 1: sell the sizzle kind of thing, you know. And this
Speaker 1: idea of her working at this marketing company and having
Speaker 1: all of these expectations thrust upon her as far as
Speaker 1: it's not just the nine to five, it's the party afterwards,
Speaker 1: it's the dinner with clients. It's these things that you
Speaker 1: have to perform at as well as the job, and
Speaker 1: those things are not necessarily I mean, you can be
Speaker 1: a fucking fantastic writer, have a great mind for ad
Speaker 1: copy or imagery, but then having to perform at a
Speaker 1: social function when you are definitely not comfortable doing that,
Speaker 1: it is such a pain in the ass. And that
Speaker 1: doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, but
Speaker 1: when you are a woman you have extra stuff put
Speaker 1: upon you as far as well. You have to be pretty,
Speaker 1: and you have to be pleasant, and you have to
Speaker 1: know how much you can talk versus not talk, because
Speaker 1: Lord knows, if you are there with a male client.
Speaker 1: You have to defer to them, and you just have
Speaker 1: to be basically arm candy or eye candy for this person,
Speaker 1: just be seen and not necessarily heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I knew the order of my notes was going
Speaker 2: to drive me insane. But you just zigzagged through like
Speaker 2: three quarters of the film there, Mike.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah. No, we are going to be
Speaker 1: all over the place. We are not taking the narrative
Speaker 1: way at all. We're definitely going to be all over.
Speaker 2: This film needs like hyperlinks on hyperlinks to go through everything.
Speaker 2: There's just to like duck back to the opening credit.
Speaker 2: I would just gribe it as a dynamic dichotomy that
Speaker 2: it isn't entirely as you said, reflections splits divisions. I
Speaker 2: did get a chance to check out a little bit
Speaker 2: of her commentary, and she said that she described that
Speaker 2: you wanted to start it like a normal film. I
Speaker 2: love the idea, like, oh yeah, we'll just start it
Speaker 2: normal and then go from there. Have it dragged you
Speaker 2: into something not but what she meant by that when
Speaker 2: she wanted to do it in the American style of
Speaker 2: having the starting with the city and then moving in
Speaker 2: closer to the buildings than the people and the person,
Speaker 2: but to do it in a way that was different,
Speaker 2: that was a bit more abstract and changing it up.
Speaker 2: The split screen does return later, and there, she said,
Speaker 2: when it returns later, that is meant to represent the
Speaker 2: wound itself rather than showing it, which does make that
Speaker 2: opening title sequence extra interesting, that the city itself as
Speaker 2: a possible wound. I don't necessarily think that the split
Speaker 2: always means that in the film, but you can certainly
Speaker 2: read it as such, and it is deeply meaningful. She
Speaker 2: wanted it to start with the city because you actually
Speaker 2: don't get much contextualizing geography or background throughout the film.
Speaker 2: It really stays owned it and close to her, and
Speaker 2: so gets out of the way that opening sequence. But
Speaker 2: it also it's not just the city. It's the office space,
Speaker 2: it's the office materials, it's objects, It's so many you know, yes,
Speaker 2: did you get a bit of her leg mixed in
Speaker 2: with these objects. It's quite a fascinating hypnotic experience that
Speaker 2: is also feels like real sense. Memory of the Naughty
Speaker 2: is the way it's kind of like the vibe of
Speaker 2: the film stock and the color choices and the like.
Speaker 2: There was a gentle piano I think to kind of ease,
Speaker 2: U see it like everything is just yeah, it almost
Speaker 2: feels normal, except there's that destabilization with the split, and
Speaker 2: then the image is not necessarily being matched or unmatched
Speaker 2: in a easily classifiable way that the opening.
Speaker 7: To me, I see it as establishing the monotony and
Speaker 7: boredom of her world. It's it's giving us this it's
Speaker 7: a split world, but it's yeah, I found it purposefully
Speaker 7: bound compelling in terms of showing us what she's going
Speaker 7: to have to break free. And then there's the shot
Speaker 7: of her leg, which you know, as I remembered it
Speaker 7: and as I noted down, it's kind of a you know,
Speaker 7: a Laura Mulvey gaze kind of thing, because I think
Speaker 7: that first shot it kind of starts down near her
Speaker 7: foot or ankle and goes up to her thigh in
Speaker 7: a way that I see it as kind of that
Speaker 7: that male gaze, and I see that as establishing in
Speaker 7: the beginning, this is not her body. It is there,
Speaker 7: and people are gazing upon her, and she is an
Speaker 7: object to be looked at, and I think that happens.
Speaker 7: To contrast, shots later on of her and the leg
Speaker 7: are more static, not that zoom in not that like
Speaker 7: lawyer is. It's just this has become her body and
Speaker 7: she has reclaimed it. And also I may be reading
Speaker 7: too much into this, but I think it goes from
Speaker 7: moving over her leg. I think it cuts to a
Speaker 7: container of pens with scissors in it, and I thought
Speaker 7: that was a nice little touch.
Speaker 2: Definitely inclined to agree that the things we're seeing are
Speaker 2: boring world, because I mean, well, three of us don't
Speaker 2: look like the type of guys who would be especially
Speaker 2: thrilled to be in an office space all the time.
Speaker 1: That's my life is working in this office.
Speaker 2: Yes, And the commentary Marina Devan says that she really
Speaker 2: wanted to establish that she had this professional life, that
Speaker 2: she had things that where she places, where she had
Speaker 2: a kind of meaning, the connection, that she wasn't somebody necessarily.
Speaker 2: You know, she's not Jack in fight Club already fractioned
Speaker 2: and splintering loosekin with It's like things could be just fine,
Speaker 2: they could just continue on. She is on a track
Speaker 2: at the track is very familiar and unexciting and not
Speaker 2: prone to flipping.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you mentioned fight Club because the line.
Speaker 2: Self improvement is masturbation. A self destruction.
Speaker 1: I mean, this whole movie feels like self destruction, but
Speaker 1: really coming to grips with yourself as far as feeling
Speaker 1: your body and knowing your body, because so much of
Speaker 1: this too it feels like this disassociation between her and
Speaker 1: her body. I mean, we get the scene at the
Speaker 1: dinner and again jumping all over, but at that dinner
Speaker 1: scene where her arm is completely disconnected, it's not even
Speaker 1: her arm anymore. And when she is shown later suckling
Speaker 1: on it, biting on it, sucking the blood. She says
Speaker 1: in that kind of terry fucking fantastic commentary, and it's
Speaker 1: so nice to have for me a visual commentary, you know,
Speaker 1: like hearing her seeing the subtitles watching the movie at
Speaker 1: the same time was really really great. And to have
Speaker 1: her talking about how she shot it as to show
Speaker 1: that this arm isn't even hers, you know, that it
Speaker 1: is so disconnected, and those scenes where she will, god,
Speaker 1: I wish I was this flexible still where she'll take
Speaker 1: her foot and rub her foot over her face, and
Speaker 1: it's like, this is so unnatural to see the way
Speaker 1: that she is framing her own body, the way that
Speaker 1: she talks later on when she lays back and her
Speaker 1: leg is in front of her, and she's like, I
Speaker 1: shot this as if my leg were a lover coming
Speaker 1: to me. I'm like, wow, that's great that you are
Speaker 1: so conscious of this disassociation of your own body. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that arm on the table and then to I guess,
Speaker 1: almost like relieve stress at this dinner, the way she
Speaker 1: takes her arm later on as part of her but
Speaker 1: again we don't see it connected necessarily, and just as
Speaker 1: stabbing her arm with the fork and with the knife
Speaker 1: and well, it could be that plastic arm that you saw,
Speaker 1: but it's this whole idea of like she's almost become
Speaker 1: a mannequin at that point, with that arm and the
Speaker 1: watch on there. It almost seems like an object that
Speaker 1: she would have in a commercial or inside of a
Speaker 1: marketing copy, a print app.
Speaker 2: I did briefly pick up my copy of The Sexual
Speaker 2: Politics of Meat by Carol Adams and have a quick
Speaker 2: flick through, but it was just like a little too
Speaker 2: specific in its approach to the material that's definitely exists
Speaker 2: in the DNA of this film, the objectification of bodies,
Speaker 2: the parallel associations of animal butchered meat and women's bodies
Speaker 2: in language, imagery marketing. In a lot of ways, this
Speaker 2: film feels quite singular, which is partly to do with
Speaker 2: that France doesn't have a huge history of horror cinema.
Speaker 2: It sort of does, but it kind of doesn't. The
Speaker 2: orthodoxy of French critical film theory does not, or at
Speaker 2: least has not recognized horror cinema until very recently. I
Speaker 2: can't I was trying to find the reference, but I
Speaker 2: couldn't find anywhere but that there was some massive like
Speaker 2: Encyclopedia of French Cinema published in France, was very well recognized,
Speaker 2: and when it got to talking about George Fanzou just
Speaker 2: left Eyes without a Face out completely, which is his
Speaker 2: most significant film now was still a pretty goddamn significant
Speaker 2: film at the time, but it was just like, oh no,
Speaker 2: we don't this is not proper to talk about that.
Speaker 2: They would talk about the fantastic, you know, things like
Speaker 2: Labet Labette and George the Ear and all those kinds
Speaker 2: of things, but it had to be this more poetic
Speaker 2: fantasy rather than horror. And going back and looking at it,
Speaker 2: there's like that scene that you talk about, the dinner scene.
Speaker 2: There's quite a few parts in this that do feel
Speaker 2: quite like Louis Bounuel films. That one is that one
Speaker 2: is the one that definitely has the strongest connections with
Speaker 2: the Seven Hand to like when she on andlou and
Speaker 2: to Exterminating Angel. But also I'm struck this the Franzos
Speaker 2: connection feels really significant. And it's not just eyes without
Speaker 2: a face, because obviously that film is a woman in
Speaker 2: pieces has lost her face and who's been experimented on
Speaker 2: by doctors to make her whole again, which is the first,
Speaker 2: you know, the first interaction she has with the doctor.
Speaker 2: The doctor offers to make her hold of have use
Speaker 2: plastic surgery to smooth over the wound, and she says, no, thanks,
Speaker 2: I'm good.
Speaker 1: I thought you were talking about I just thought the
Speaker 1: face because I almost said not just the doctor but
Speaker 1: her father. But yeah, the doctor in this he's cool.
Speaker 1: He's one of those first encounters where it's just like, oh,
Speaker 1: don't you want to be pretty? You know, the expectation
Speaker 1: is that your leg is a sex object.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and ironically played by her brother in the film.
Speaker 2: But also to frans use Blood of the Beasts, which
Speaker 2: is a documentary he made about the Paris abattoirs and
Speaker 2: is an absolutely horrific and grueling experience, and so like that.
Speaker 2: It feels like Blood of the Beasts is very much
Speaker 2: part of the DNA of this film, of contrasting two
Speaker 2: sides of Parisian life. This sort of like the everyday
Speaker 2: normal world and then this absolute horrific blood bath that
Speaker 2: is occurring in a private sphere.
Speaker 7: I would like to lodge a complaint that the Australian
Speaker 7: guy is doing very well at pronouncing things in French
Speaker 7: and as the guy with the mid Western accent, I
Speaker 7: don't like that because it does not set me up
Speaker 7: for success.
Speaker 2: Okay, sorry, sorry, Axel, I'll try to be worse. These
Speaker 2: are the only ones that I can do properly, which
Speaker 2: is why I said them instead of the I could do, Hey,
Speaker 2: the you San's visage. I should have done that, because
Speaker 2: I can say that, and that's it.
Speaker 7: I am a devout horror fan, and I would say that,
Speaker 7: you know, I am probably you know, if I had
Speaker 7: to swear allegiances, I would swear my allegiance to horror
Speaker 7: before I saw it to film itself. And with that said,
Speaker 7: and I've thought about this, and I've watched this movie
Speaker 7: a couple of times, I do not think this is
Speaker 7: a horror film. I see this as a work of art,
Speaker 7: visual art, and I see it as a testimony to
Speaker 7: the triumph of her body and to take something out
Speaker 7: of context. If you were to take the slogan long
Speaker 7: Live the New Flesh away from Cronenberg repurpose it for
Speaker 7: this film, I think it would suit it really well,
Speaker 7: because this is a movie about her triumphantly reclaiming her
Speaker 7: flesh and frankly, her ecstasy as she does.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 7: I do feel compelled to say that self harming and
Speaker 7: behaviors are definitely something to talk about with a professional
Speaker 7: and to be concerned about without shaming anyone. But to me,
Speaker 7: this is a film that is demonstrating her thrills and
Speaker 7: a sensual joy, which gives me some thoughts about the
Speaker 7: ending that I'll hold off on. But I was not
Speaker 7: horrified by this film. I found myself watching The Transformation.
Speaker 2: One of my first notes was doesn't feel like a
Speaker 2: horror film to me. It feels pretty normal, and I
Speaker 2: will throw myself under that bus. I do think it
Speaker 2: is a horror film, though I just don't think it's
Speaker 2: necessarily a body horror film, because I think that it's
Speaker 2: the while there is some dichotomy is presented. I think
Speaker 2: it's collapses a lot of those, and I think that
Speaker 2: the reason why it is a horror film for me
Speaker 2: and I don't find a joy in what's going on
Speaker 2: with her is because of the collapsing of those elements
Speaker 2: that if it was just a body horror film to me,
Speaker 2: I could probably be more in that position of like
Speaker 2: seeing what she's going through as a kind of revelatory
Speaker 2: positive but because of how much of it is collapsed
Speaker 2: together with a social failure out and be mind, body
Speaker 2: split is a really sick delusion that we've been suffering
Speaker 2: under for censories now that is what causes a lot
Speaker 2: of what's going on from her that we have were
Speaker 2: so that it's so ingrained in us to have an
Speaker 2: experience of the two parts being separate and that that
Speaker 2: doesn't really fucked up things to us. And I do
Speaker 2: find it to be a horror film because it is
Speaker 2: about destabilization and because there is a lot of failure
Speaker 2: around her that it isn't threatening, but it's really not great.
Speaker 2: But it is very, very very different to almost all
Speaker 2: the other horror films of its kind, to all the
Speaker 2: French new extremism, to the new French extremity, I exact,
Speaker 2: probably and especially to feminist cannibal films, because she's not
Speaker 2: reacting to any thing in particular. There's not a person
Speaker 2: or an entity or anything that symbolizes any kind of
Speaker 2: patriarchal law. Precisely, it's a real you know, in so
Speaker 2: many films that the cannibalistic act is devouring something else
Speaker 2: to like take its power and make it your own,
Speaker 2: to like gain this kind of you know, independence or
Speaker 2: you know, to erase that which has been dominating you.
Speaker 2: But here it's just it feels very real that it
Speaker 2: does feel much more like even at the same time
Speaker 2: as dealing with that horror stuff, it's dealing with it
Speaker 2: a way that feels like a social realism because it's
Speaker 2: just like, oh no, there isn't one thing that you
Speaker 2: can react against. There isn't a way to just devour
Speaker 2: it and be on with. There's no catharsis. It's just
Speaker 2: kind of a flailing around. And yeah, I think that
Speaker 2: she is. I'll have to find the quote. There was
Speaker 2: a quote about like in the commentary about that that
Speaker 2: of that this is a compulsion and there isn't necessarily
Speaker 2: joy in it, but it isn't necessarily bad either, And
Speaker 2: it's so complicated in the way that she collapses those
Speaker 2: together that it isn't necessarily negative, but it isn't necessarily positive.
Speaker 2: But after watching all of her short films, I had
Speaker 2: a much more negative experience of In My Skin because
Speaker 2: it feels like the culmination of a shit ton of pain.
Speaker 2: I highly recommend the shorts, but dear God, yeah, she
Speaker 2: had some shit to work out. But then the positive
Speaker 2: of that is it seems I feel like she did
Speaker 2: work it out, Like In My Skin does feel like
Speaker 2: she exercises demons, and she has said any interviews that
Speaker 2: she never self mutilated again after making the film, that
Speaker 2: she was able to release that and move on. So
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, that's also really positive. But also, ah, yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of.
Speaker 7: What we're saying that there's a real strong overlap. I
Speaker 7: think what it comes down to is, you know it
Speaker 7: there's an attempt at transformation, and what we're disagreeing on
Speaker 7: is is whether or not she gets there, Because if
Speaker 7: she's always fractured and she doesn't achieve any kind of
Speaker 7: like a sublimement, you know, then I think it's a
Speaker 7: horror film. But if you believe that in this she
Speaker 7: finds something holy, and I believe that for her subjective narrative,
Speaker 7: she finds something of that meaning. And to me, that's
Speaker 7: what keeps it from being a horror film, is that
Speaker 7: it's about that trajectory. Now, in terms of her own biography,
Speaker 7: in terms of how you would like clinically if you
Speaker 7: were working with this person, there are all sorts of
Speaker 7: issues that would come up. But looking at it from
Speaker 7: her narrative, I find it interesting and again I see
Speaker 7: it as her finding something in this. But like I said,
Speaker 7: I think it's going to depend interpretively on whether or
Speaker 7: not people think she has beyond that fracture into something
Speaker 7: whole and new, or if she is never able to
Speaker 7: fully leave it behind, which thing the film open to
Speaker 7: That kind of interpretation, I think makes it richer and
Speaker 7: it gives you something to talk about after the movie's done.
Speaker 1: The patriarchy for me, is ever present, you know, and
Speaker 1: I think that there is not necessarily one person that
Speaker 1: represents it in here. I think there's more like three
Speaker 1: her boyfriend, her boss, and then her girlfriend her girlfriend.
Speaker 1: The pressures that happen between women at work is so awful,
Speaker 1: and the idea of you cannot get ahead, and we've
Speaker 1: seen this in a thousand movies, a thousand TV shows.
Speaker 1: You can't get ahead unless you push other people down.
Speaker 1: I can't break through that glass ceiling unless I'm stepping.
Speaker 2: On your head.
Speaker 1: Like those are awful, awful things. And the moment I
Speaker 1: mean talk about threes, the three men that attack our
Speaker 1: main character at the pool and her friend is just
Speaker 1: sitting there. Everyone is just standing around, and meanwhile, I
Speaker 1: will consider this a rape is happening right in front
Speaker 1: of them, with these three assholes that come out of
Speaker 1: the pool and want to throw her into the pool
Speaker 1: and try to start stripping her before they throw her
Speaker 1: in there, and they stop when they see the blood.
Speaker 1: And of course, to me, that is the whole women
Speaker 1: on their periods don't go swim kind of thing. And
Speaker 1: it's like this horror of I know it's not meant
Speaker 1: forru blood, but for me, these guys react as if
Speaker 1: it was and just like, oh, we can't do this.
Speaker 1: And her POV shots after that happens where she's looking
Speaker 1: around and it's like she's losing herself. And I love
Speaker 1: that it is a POV that we are getting inside
Speaker 1: of her head and we're going to get a lot
Speaker 1: more of that later on in the film. But it's
Speaker 1: it's not just one person holding her down. It's society.
Speaker 1: It's every single person she runs into. Even when she's
Speaker 1: at that party at the beginning, after she cuts her leg,
Speaker 1: there's that guy who's trying to dance way too closely
Speaker 1: to her. I mean, it's just a little moment, but
Speaker 1: you're like, Okay, this is the same kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that she probably has to put up with every single
Speaker 1: day of her life being a woman, and she, you know,
Speaker 1: has to put her hand on I'm just like, nope,
Speaker 1: not today, and you move away from this guy, but
Speaker 1: he is such I'll latch. And at that point her
Speaker 1: friend kind of helps her out, kind of moves her
Speaker 1: out of the way, which is nice, but her friend's
Speaker 1: not going to help her out too much more after that.
Speaker 1: Throughout the rest of this film.
Speaker 2: It is one hundred percent there in so many different ways.
Speaker 2: But it's like, I mean, if she turned around and
Speaker 2: ate her boyfriend in this, it wouldn't feel the same
Speaker 2: as if, like in Tumble every Day or something like that.
Speaker 1: Oh God, I keep forgetting that I saw Trouble every Day.
Speaker 1: That's another French extremity film that I just could not stand.
Speaker 2: I did not like it the first time. I wish
Speaker 2: I could find the essay I wrote on it years ago,
Speaker 2: because I did come around to loving it. I really
Speaker 2: do appreciate clear did a lot more now. But I
Speaker 2: think I wrote an essay on that and Baisee Moir together,
Speaker 2: both films I didn't care for until I wrote that
Speaker 2: essay and then came around them to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, I actually love these. That scene in the
Speaker 2: pool is intense. That is filmed in such a way
Speaker 2: that it comes off a lot more intensely than the
Speaker 2: cinema genuinely treat It's an actual rape scene, and a
Speaker 2: big part of that is not even so much the
Speaker 2: action of the guys. It is the reaction of her
Speaker 2: friend and that failure of the bond, and the way
Speaker 2: her friend just kind of lets her get bulled away
Speaker 2: and then kind of excuses like, oh, I just froze,
Speaker 2: and it's like, no, we could. We could see you thinking.
Speaker 2: You were thinking about what was happening, and you felt
Speaker 2: weird about your friend, and so you let it happen
Speaker 2: instead of just getting in there and helping shut it down.
Speaker 2: And it feels like such a betrayal, and it's a
Speaker 2: betrayal that really cuts wide and deep if you feel
Speaker 2: it on the personal level and also on that societal,
Speaker 2: bigger picture level as well. That kind of is one
Speaker 2: of the many things that helps set as to kind
Speaker 2: of even more adrift, that she starts to lose those
Speaker 2: connections more and more. And that's that is that the
Speaker 2: failure to like have recognition, I think is also part
Speaker 2: of the horror of this film. She doesn't necessarily need
Speaker 2: somebody else, but the lack of anything that there isn't yeah,
Speaker 2: that it's it's just that that isolation and that loneliness.
Speaker 2: I don't know. In the in the commentary that de
Speaker 2: Van talks about that a bit and how especially at
Speaker 2: the beginning, she wanted she didn't want to shoot her
Speaker 2: like she was isolated because she didn't I didn't feel
Speaker 2: like she was. That there's a lot of the shots
Speaker 2: she's paired with somebody else, that there's is in groups,
Speaker 2: and that when she goes off on her own, it's
Speaker 2: not caused you alone, it's her own curiosity. That she's
Speaker 2: just someone who explores and moves around, and it's that
Speaker 2: sort of going off and curiosity. That is part of
Speaker 2: what helps set her adrift, because it breaks her loose
Speaker 2: of these people who don't want to explore, that aren't curious,
Speaker 2: that don't have actual empathy, that their empathy is built
Speaker 2: on pre established structures of status quo and feeling at ideas,
Speaker 2: and that anything different or unusual is too much and
Speaker 2: too alien. And maybe they might be able to come around,
Speaker 2: but the reaction is so immediate and there isn't really
Speaker 2: any coming back for esther once they react in a
Speaker 2: negative fashion. Yeah, I was going down some weird rabbit holes,
Speaker 2: like thinking about ideas of relation to this kind of thing,
Speaker 2: of trying to pin it down. I found some fun
Speaker 2: stuff from like talking about Hobes and Locke and what
Speaker 2: brings individuals together and how like that essentially the like
Speaker 2: I've got a great quote here from Maggie Kilgore from
Speaker 2: a book on communion to cannibalism. It's called ideas of incorporation.
Speaker 2: And so the old image of the body politic created
Speaker 2: the sense of a world of essentially related members who
Speaker 2: identities were determined and controlled by their social roles. With
Speaker 2: the rise of individualism, that body is also broken. It's
Speaker 2: members scattered, as atom like individuals, so that society has
Speaker 2: to be remembered in a new way, with a new
Speaker 2: basis and foundation for relationship. According to Homees and Locke,
Speaker 2: what brings equal individuals together is the desire to preserve
Speaker 2: the most essential human right property. So you end up, yeah,
Speaker 2: with this fracturing and modernity where we all get split
Speaker 2: apart from our communities and we start to get isolated
Speaker 2: and become individuals, and how important that is, and how
Speaker 2: that's held up as the absolute be all and end all,
Speaker 2: and the thing that holds together is property. But women
Speaker 2: are made into property, and then it's all starts. And
Speaker 2: this whole film just feels like a whole trajectory of
Speaker 2: the last four or five hundred years just colliding into
Speaker 2: one individual person's just crash again, a crash that isn't
Speaker 2: entirely bad. We haven't even mentioned like that big a
Speaker 2: word yet, abject, But so much of this film is
Speaker 2: using these kind of abjections of like the boundaries the transgression,
Speaker 2: to melt the status quo, to melt the expectations. And
Speaker 2: I think I'm real curious to see what people think
Speaker 2: of this film when it sort of re appears now
Speaker 2: with these new Blu ray releases, because I think back
Speaker 2: in two thousand and seven, what year did this come out? Again?
Speaker 2: Two thousand and two, So even earlier, back in two
Speaker 2: thousand and two, even with things like the French New
Speaker 2: for a New French Extremity, so much of that was
Speaker 2: saying that it was dealing with things like misogyny and racism,
Speaker 2: but really just like riding them real exploitation. This film
Speaker 2: just feels like a kind of film that I was
Speaker 2: just like popping up on tube now made by people
Speaker 2: in their backyards at home, like the strange YouTube phenomena
Speaker 2: of like weird women getting their weird vibes and experiences
Speaker 2: out there. And again I mean that positively. It's like
Speaker 2: I really wanted to try and watch Cannibal Muckbang before
Speaker 2: watching this, because I felt like, I feel like Cannibal
Speaker 2: Mugbang must have some in my skin DNA somewhere in
Speaker 2: it for like a transgressive pushback against all that is
Speaker 2: proper and ordered.
Speaker 7: You can put a cultural Marxist reading on this, you can.
Speaker 7: You know, however, this is where I'm going to maybe
Speaker 7: have people disagree with me. I don't think that is
Speaker 7: the most useful reading because I really do think this
Speaker 7: is a work of what was it term auto cinema
Speaker 7: or auto fiction auto fiction. This is to me, putting
Speaker 7: the focus on patriarchy and culture and capitalism. You can
Speaker 7: get agent results, you can have definitely an informed discussion
Speaker 7: about them. But to me, once you start putting your
Speaker 7: energy into those discussions, I really think it loses the
Speaker 7: focus and the power of one individual's story. And in
Speaker 7: this case, I think, and I'm going to go back
Speaker 7: to what I said, this is a story of a transformation,
Speaker 7: and I think the feelings we have on that are
Speaker 7: how we judge that kind of a transformation. Now it
Speaker 7: informs the transformation that she has to have a patriarchy
Speaker 7: to rebel against to claim her body. We have to
Speaker 7: understand that first to be able to understand why she's
Speaker 7: doing this. But from there, to me, it becomes so
Speaker 7: very very personal, you know, body writing. There's a whole
Speaker 7: history of feminist literature and filmmaking based on this, where
Speaker 7: there are players of experiencing more than just the narrative.
Speaker 7: And I found this as a film mostly an experience
Speaker 7: that I enjoyed it when I was feeling her journey,
Speaker 7: and I enjoyed it least when I had that critical
Speaker 7: lens to say, well, her boyfriend is showing this and
Speaker 7: her her best friend demonstrates this. I felt like as
Speaker 7: soon as that critical lens came up, it gave me
Speaker 7: a distance. It made me too comfortable, because it's like, oh,
Speaker 7: I get this. This is a movie with symbols and metaphors,
Speaker 7: and I can't understand it that way, and I'm safe
Speaker 7: in my ivory academic tower.
Speaker 2: I think if you.
Speaker 7: Push those aside, you know, your face to face with
Speaker 7: this woman telling you a story about who she is,
Speaker 7: and your reactions to it become a part of the story.
Speaker 7: But as long as I have the talking stick for
Speaker 7: a little bit, I don't want to go too much
Speaker 7: further in the episode without talking about the party scene,
Speaker 7: which it might be my favorite part of the movie.
Speaker 7: I'm going to give a little background as to why
Speaker 7: she goes to the party with her friend. It does
Speaker 7: not look like a particularly awful party, but it looks
Speaker 7: incredibly boring. She goes out to walk, stumbles, falls and
Speaker 7: cuts her leg, and it is completely anticlimactic. If you
Speaker 7: knew anything about this movie, you knew she was going
Speaker 7: to wound herself. The movie does not make that an event,
Speaker 7: does not highlight it. There's no close ups, there's no
Speaker 7: shocking music. It just happens and it passes. The real
Speaker 7: magic for me is when she discovers the wound, she
Speaker 7: goes to the bathroom, she sees that she's tracked in blood.
Speaker 7: She looks at her leg and sees the wound, and
Speaker 7: then there's a close up of her face, which I
Speaker 7: believe I'm paraphraise saying John Cassavetti's you know, her face
Speaker 7: is the best special effect in the movie. There's a
Speaker 7: look of fear, maybe some disgust, and then, in my opinion,
Speaker 7: and this is you know, central kind of my thesis,
Speaker 7: there's this trans awe of this is me, this is
Speaker 7: something that is happening. I have found something new within
Speaker 7: my own body. And here's where you can see some
Speaker 7: of the connections to the movie and book Crash, although
Speaker 7: they're not one to one equations, But the look on
Speaker 7: her face where she discovers through wound, to me, that
Speaker 7: facial expression explains more than any dialogue could.
Speaker 1: If this was a different kind of movie, she would
Speaker 1: meet a tall, dark stranger at this party and begin
Speaker 1: an affair with that tall dark stranger and that would
Speaker 1: change the relationship with her best friend, with her boyfriend,
Speaker 1: with her work. But instead, the tall, dark stranger is her.
Speaker 1: It's like her meeting herself and her understanding or beginning
Speaker 1: to cope with this idea of the wound in her leg.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I can definitely see that Cronenbergian Crash Ballard
Speaker 1: type of thing, especially the Roseanna Arquette character with that
Speaker 1: big wound in her leg, which was just so freaking vaginal.
Speaker 1: And I mean doesn't It's been a long time. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen Crash since I saw it originally at the theater.
Speaker 1: I mean, basically, isn't the sex with the wound rather
Speaker 1: than her vagina?
Speaker 2: Yeah? That does happen in that film, okay, And I
Speaker 2: know that. In the commentary, Marina says that she very
Speaker 2: much didn't want to make it about sexuality, but when
Speaker 2: she talks about that, she does mean more that her
Speaker 2: compulsion isn't caused by sexual issues. You know that it's
Speaker 2: the boyfriend Andrew's hung up on, Oh can you feel me?
Speaker 2: Versus her? She's not. I do love that scene where
Speaker 2: she finds the wound initially, the way that we discover
Speaker 2: that she only becomes aware of it the blood that
Speaker 2: she trails behind.
Speaker 1: Well, the blood becomes like a tattle tale through the
Speaker 1: whole movie, like when she's at the restaurant later on
Speaker 1: and the waitress sees the blood and at one point
Speaker 1: there was the guy next to her and I can't
Speaker 1: remember who that if that's like one of her I
Speaker 1: think that's her boss. When he looks down and I'm thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: there's going to be a whole bunch of blood there,
Speaker 1: but no, it's like a bag. I'm like, all right,
Speaker 1: because I thought for sure she would be trailing blood everywhere.
Speaker 2: Well, the blood trail also makes you feel like we
Speaker 2: think of the like, you know, if you've had some
Speaker 2: situation in the social circle where there's been a lot
Speaker 2: of emotional fallout and you don't necessarily notice that something
Speaker 2: bad has happened until you see the trail of destruction behind,
Speaker 2: which is something that happens in the film. Later on,
Speaker 2: her friend of when she comes to confide in her,
Speaker 2: but she doesn't realize that this is a strange thing
Speaker 2: to be confiding and that her friend reacting just like
Speaker 2: the blood is the thing that tells her that, oh,
Speaker 2: hang on, there's something something not I didn't expect he
Speaker 2: hang on.
Speaker 7: I love that scene where she was to her friend
Speaker 7: and says, I guess what I did. I remember, I
Speaker 7: went to the back room and I cut myself with
Speaker 7: something metal. And again there's that transformative joy she is experiencing,
Speaker 7: and in that moment, she is trying to recruit another
Speaker 7: woman into this experience, saying, this is something that you
Speaker 7: can experience too.
Speaker 2: And so there's a.
Speaker 7: Moment there where she's attempting to create a community based
Speaker 7: on the body. And again I'm not saying that self
Speaker 7: harm could be a transformative experience, although I believe my
Speaker 7: kid said we're going to talk a little bit about performance,
Speaker 7: are it so that that'll muddy the waters. But she
Speaker 7: tries to create the shared experience based on the body
Speaker 7: and you know, ties to the abject and the things
Speaker 7: that patriarchy isn't interested in, and she revolts and frightens
Speaker 7: her friend, who in a later scene can't even look
Speaker 7: at her.
Speaker 2: I talked a bit before about how this film was
Speaker 2: received when it came out, and being curious about how
Speaker 2: she received now is I love? In the Severn release,
Speaker 2: there's an interview recent interview with Marina Devann and she
Speaker 2: basically opens with her saying, look, I used to say
Speaker 2: it was all fictional, but now I'm tired and old
Speaker 2: and lazy and I can't be asked. So yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's actually really heavily automed biographic and talks about the
Speaker 2: self mutilation and how much of that. There's like very
Speaker 2: truth full that the piece of tanned skin we see
Speaker 2: in the film is of her real skin that she
Speaker 2: had tanned previous to the film, that there was that
Speaker 2: she had eaten herself. But in a very different context
Speaker 2: it says like she had it with champagne and you know,
Speaker 2: on a plate and like a civilized dinner. That it
Speaker 2: wasn't such a chaotic kind of thing like in the film.
Speaker 2: But at the time, I think what you were saying
Speaker 2: before about interpreting it like I do, I am writing
Speaker 2: both rails of personal experience interpretation and more critical academic
Speaker 2: kind of experience. I have a lot of connection to
Speaker 2: this film. I have my own share of scars. I
Speaker 2: have very antagonistic relationship with my body, which transformed quite
Speaker 2: significantly when I got my first tattoos. I remember sitting
Speaker 2: in the tattooed chair and looking at them doing this
Speaker 2: huge piece on my arm and having theation that where
Speaker 2: previously I would not have cared if I was in
Speaker 2: some kind of accident and lost the arm, I was
Speaker 2: suddenly very attached to this arm. The tattoo itself made
Speaker 2: me connected to it. And that is something that this
Speaker 2: film is about that Brinda Devan talks about this in
Speaker 2: I can't remember possibly in the same interview of saying
Speaker 2: that like working on the body and creating the scars
Speaker 2: is a way of like shaping it into a way
Speaker 2: that is more you.
Speaker 7: Sometimes in the faculty a Horror podcast on as well,
Speaker 7: Andrea Superstudy said she is heavily tattooed, and in that
Speaker 7: process there was a lot of self reflection about what
Speaker 7: that meant for her and for her body. Alexandra West,
Speaker 7: at least at the time of that recording, no tattoos,
Speaker 7: no piercings, and so all of a sudden, I'm listening
Speaker 7: to that, and I'm thinking about myself, and I'm forty seven,
Speaker 7: no tattoos, no piers sayings, and I'm tenuinely thinking about
Speaker 7: getting a tattoo, but I never do it because of
Speaker 7: that permanent mark and that feeling of what's going to
Speaker 7: be meaningful enough and then I feel like, on the
Speaker 7: other hand, well, but I'm missing out on this opportunity
Speaker 7: for you know, reading a narrative. So I don't know,
Speaker 7: maybe thinking about this movie in this conversation, maybe that'll
Speaker 7: push me one way or another. Mike, where are you
Speaker 7: at on tattoos and piercings.
Speaker 1: Well, I can't get a tattoo because I want to
Speaker 1: be buried in a Jewish cemetery, just like Lenny Bruce,
Speaker 1: even though I'm not Jewish, but I just want to
Speaker 1: be buried there.
Speaker 2: I am very much an anti fiacing vest not if
Speaker 2: I the vapor, just myself like that. It kind of
Speaker 2: freaks me out. Heavy holes bunched in me, but like
Speaker 2: that didn't want me, just a lot of punched. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's different. They don't. It's it's it's superficial. But the
Speaker 2: two tattoos I have on each arm both have significant
Speaker 2: meaning to me and came about through the experience I
Speaker 2: went through with my father dying of cancer and then
Speaker 2: the way that I found a path through that through
Speaker 2: Jeff and Deer Me a Southern Reach trilogy. And so
Speaker 2: I have all three tattoos, all threeople covers tattooed on
Speaker 2: my arms, with words annihilation on one and acceptance on
Speaker 2: the other. So it's a They're very connected to trauma
Speaker 2: and to damage and loss, and it was a way
Speaker 2: of rebuilding myself and reconnecting. It was an odd side
Speaker 2: effect that I discovered a stronger connection to my own
Speaker 2: body than I previously had. I'm definitely very understanding of
Speaker 2: her experience in this film and very very non judgmental,
Speaker 2: even though it's like chill out a bit.
Speaker 1: I used to do a little bit of self harm.
Speaker 1: Not a lie, but yeah, we had. When we did
Speaker 1: the episode on Secretary, I remember we interviewed someone about
Speaker 1: cutting and just the idea of control and not having
Speaker 1: control in your own life, but having control over your
Speaker 1: own body. I mean, I see cutting being related to
Speaker 1: you know, eating disorders and this whole idea of just
Speaker 1: not having that control. And to me, the cutting that
Speaker 1: Marina Devan does in this movie feels very similar to
Speaker 1: that as far as the idea of you know, I'm
Speaker 1: being I'm under all of this pressure from all of
Speaker 1: these other things. Especially I would say the job definitely
Speaker 1: seems to play into that. And this is the way
Speaker 1: that I can control things. This is the only thing
Speaker 1: that I have control over is the skin I live in.
Speaker 1: Not to drop another film title.
Speaker 2: Looping back again to the reception of it, but what
Speaker 2: I remember the people who I watched it with back
Speaker 2: in when I first saw it, A lot of people
Speaker 2: were made on c comfortable by not knowing where to
Speaker 2: sit with the film as to whether it was autobiographical
Speaker 2: or symbolic, and that the lack of stability in their
Speaker 2: position at that time in history, with the way that
Speaker 2: we interpreted these kinds of feminist films which were mostly
Speaker 2: only existing in the underground, if they did exist, it
Speaker 2: made it a lot harder people to just comfortably sit
Speaker 2: with it. That it was that they needed to know,
Speaker 2: they needed the position, they needed the judgment or something.
Speaker 2: Obviously it's quite different now that you've come out and said, oh,
Speaker 2: it's very autobiographical. Obviously the film still works hugely, brilliantly
Speaker 2: on a symbolic level as well, But it is I
Speaker 2: think that was part of the problem of how to
Speaker 2: approach it, like it felt like only getting half of
Speaker 2: the conversation. And I think that's why it hasn't necessarily
Speaker 2: come into awareness as much. There's films from ten years
Speaker 2: after they can't this film's are ten years something like
Speaker 2: Trouble every Day. Trouble every Day is definitely much more
Speaker 2: in acceptance and understanding and general dialogue in relation to
Speaker 2: this kind of extreme feminist cinema than this film, and
Speaker 2: that comes out what the year before Basic. At the
Speaker 2: same time, I'm glad that she's able to come out
Speaker 2: and say that and to talk about her experiences, because
Speaker 2: I think it really does empower the film sort of
Speaker 2: land more firmly, and don't you know, certainly doesn't make
Speaker 2: it any more black and white. This will never be
Speaker 2: a black and white film. But to know, to be
Speaker 2: able to hold those two in your hands without having
Speaker 2: to like, you know, do any kind of gymnastics or
Speaker 2: anything to figure it out how you feel about it,
Speaker 2: to just be like, Okay, this is happening and that
Speaker 2: is what it is. I think it will allow a
Speaker 2: lot more people to approach it more openly, and I
Speaker 2: think it is like a very positive experience, though I
Speaker 2: don't think it ends positively excellent. I found that ending
Speaker 2: to be well. I felt tired.
Speaker 7: It's almost a true crime confessional, but replace crime with
Speaker 7: like social mores. You know, this is a movie that
Speaker 7: it's telling you this is what happened. There's not a
Speaker 7: lot of ambiguity. There are no tricks, and that, by
Speaker 7: the way, I think makes it stand out from most
Speaker 7: of the New French extremes. It doesn't feel like it's tricky.
Speaker 7: It doesn't feel like there are odd things happening here
Speaker 7: and there to spice it up to get your attention.
Speaker 7: It's very, very focused and direct, and it's presenting this
Speaker 7: narrative and challenging. You like to implicate yourself, you know,
Speaker 7: how you respond to this movie is also going to
Speaker 7: be a reflection on who you are and how you
Speaker 7: got to that position. And it's hard to watch this
Speaker 7: movie in my mind and talk about it without exposing yourself.
Speaker 7: It's very challenging in that way. And yeah, it's to
Speaker 7: me the hardest parts of it watch it was less
Speaker 7: specific scenes. There are gross and gory scenes in this movie.
Speaker 7: You know, she shuts herself, it's painful. But the toughest
Speaker 7: parts for me were just the stretches of the monotony
Speaker 7: where I felt like her life was just thing and
Speaker 7: dragging on some Geen dummon in here, the dinner scene.
Speaker 7: And I worked the second time specifically on this. I
Speaker 7: tried to pay attention to what the other people at
Speaker 7: the table were talking about, and I.
Speaker 2: Not do it.
Speaker 7: Her real world is so just draining and bland.
Speaker 2: I was climbing out the walls in that Tennessee like
Speaker 2: it was I wanted to stab my arm. Oh, it
Speaker 2: had nothing to do with what was going on with
Speaker 2: her and just everything else. It was just like it
Speaker 2: was so uncomfortable and painful. Yeah, that's say is is rough.
Speaker 7: Here's what I noticed about the ending, and I'm probably
Speaker 7: stating something that's obvious, but she is either in her
Speaker 7: underwear or naked. I think she's in her underwear. She's
Speaker 7: got the wound on her face, blood all over, and
Speaker 7: she's calling work to say that she'll be in tomorrow
Speaker 7: but not today, and then is calling her boyfriend side
Speaker 7: comment I could not stand him.
Speaker 2: I think he did a good job. Then there were some.
Speaker 7: High flying moments, but it was a realistic performance that
Speaker 7: made me want to slap him. But the last shot
Speaker 7: after she calls in and she's covered in blood is
Speaker 7: she's cleaned up. She is wearing her uniform, which is
Speaker 7: what I refer to as the black pantsuit that she
Speaker 7: wears throughout much of the film. She's laying on her side,
Speaker 7: staring straight forward and me, it's like she tried to
Speaker 7: get out of all of these things, and the last
Speaker 7: shot she is still trapped in this boring, draining, soul
Speaker 7: crushing world, even though she hasn't left the hotel room yet.
Speaker 7: And I took it as that she isn't free in
Speaker 7: the very end, that she had a chance at it
Speaker 7: throughout this transgressive problematic practice, but she didn't may yet.
Speaker 7: And I'm curious what you two got out of that.
Speaker 2: There was Where was it? I think it was in
Speaker 2: the interview on the disc, the Marina talks about that
Speaker 2: that wasn't originally planned as the final shot, that the
Speaker 2: final shot was meant to be her leaving the hotel
Speaker 2: and that it was meant to be more opimistic kind
Speaker 2: of ending of her leaving that space and moving on,
Speaker 2: but it just didn't work. They didn't It didn't feel right,
Speaker 2: and so it ended up being that final shot, which
Speaker 2: she says, she describes it as exactly as you did,
Speaker 2: that she's trapped, that she's stuck there, that she hasn't
Speaker 2: found a way out, that this isn't there is no
Speaker 2: solution here, and that's definitely how it felt to me
Speaker 2: that it's it feels like a dead end that she's
Speaker 2: been backed into and nowhere else to turn to Psycho.
Speaker 1: And the way we pull out from her in this
Speaker 1: spiral pattern, like the water going down the drain, and
Speaker 1: you get that repeated three times as you're looking at
Speaker 1: her and her just staring at the camera, And that
Speaker 1: whole third act is so fourth wall breaking, which I
Speaker 1: guess would be twelve walls. I think if it's a
Speaker 1: third act and there's a fourth wall break, fourth wall
Speaker 1: break inside a fourth wall break, that's like sixteen walls.
Speaker 1: It's just wild to see how often she's looking at
Speaker 1: the camera and how vivial she looks. That's when we're
Speaker 1: talking earlier about whether this is a horror film or not.
Speaker 1: There are horrific moments in that last bit. When her
Speaker 1: hand comes around and grabs the bedpost and comes out,
Speaker 1: she comes out from behind it. She looks like a
Speaker 1: cannibal coming to eat you. And the way she's staring
Speaker 1: right at us, the audience, and she's got those great teeth.
Speaker 1: I mean, Marina Devn has a fantastic smile with those
Speaker 1: big teeth and that gap in between and just looks
Speaker 1: like she's going to open up that mouth and just
Speaker 1: devour us. And that whole last part, I mean I
Speaker 1: said earlier, we're going to talk about it the way
Speaker 1: that we go from a regular normal, no not quite,
Speaker 1: but a narrative film into her having that breakdown where
Speaker 1: the world starts to get blurry for her, and we
Speaker 1: again we're seeing all of these POV shots and then
Speaker 1: we go back to the split screen and that whole
Speaker 1: thing of her being at a store. And it's wild
Speaker 1: to me because I was trying to really pay attention
Speaker 1: to the things that are at the store and the
Speaker 1: things that are being bought, because we could see the
Speaker 1: whole idea of what's being scanned to pay for again,
Speaker 1: whole consumerism and consuming things and like this is again
Speaker 1: her job is selling things to people going back to
Speaker 1: fight club to buy shit you don't need, right, And
Speaker 1: I love that we get the multiple versions of these things,
Speaker 1: the camera, the diet coke or something, her with their
Speaker 1: credit card in her hand, and again we start to
Speaker 1: go back to we are starting to see the same
Speaker 1: images on both left and right side of the screen,
Speaker 1: but they're being shot from different angles, They're being fragmented
Speaker 1: in different ways, and again, this whole fragmentation, Like we've
Speaker 1: seen her body literally fragmented, and then we start to
Speaker 1: see her being fragmented by the way that she's being shot.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you know, going back to one of
Speaker 1: my favorite professors talking about the way that women are
Speaker 1: objectified on screen, you know, she was a big Mulve fan,
Speaker 1: turned me on to Malvey Modleski, these folks, and just
Speaker 1: the idea of showing different pieces and parts of a
Speaker 1: woman in order to take away their power and decentralize them,
Speaker 1: to destabilize them. I mean recently that to jump too
Speaker 1: far over to the side, but I recently finally saw
Speaker 1: The Substance and it was the strangest movie for me
Speaker 1: as far as a movie about the objectification of women
Speaker 1: that objectifies women to no end in sight. I mean,
Speaker 1: to just take poor Margaret Quality and Demi Moore and
Speaker 1: just turn them into absolute sex objects throughout the entire
Speaker 1: film until maybe the third act. But it's just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this feels very counterintuitive. Whereas with this having Marina Devon
Speaker 1: be in control and have her be the writer, the director,
Speaker 1: or the actress, I feel like this is all very
Speaker 1: purposeful and all very look at what the cinema is doing,
Speaker 1: and her staring at us, and that break of that
Speaker 1: wall showing us.
Speaker 2: Like, I know what the fuck I'm doing.
Speaker 1: I really felt so like she was being confrontational and
Speaker 1: I was there for it.
Speaker 2: We generally don't see her words when somebody else is
Speaker 2: looking at them. We do it when the doctor does.
Speaker 2: But generally in the film, when like the boyfriend or
Speaker 2: friend or people are like crying to see them or
Speaker 2: witnessing them, she holds to a regular kind of dramatic
Speaker 2: two shot backwards and forwards. There's no cut away, there's
Speaker 2: no making the leg a spectacle of it. So it's
Speaker 2: only when she's alone with it that it becomes that,
Speaker 2: that it becomes something that she is in a relationship
Speaker 2: connected to experiencing witnessing, and we are shared in that experience,
Speaker 2: and it does keep it to the personal. And I
Speaker 2: think again again, like that what you were saying about
Speaker 2: it being her, she being the actress, she being the writer,
Speaker 2: the director. That that's part of that the strength of
Speaker 2: if I think back in back in two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: that is a part of the destabilizing experience. It's just
Speaker 2: like people make it, Oh well, it's it's I can
Speaker 2: I can kind of react to this a bit more
Speaker 2: easily because it's her and it's not somebody else doing
Speaker 2: it to her. And then learning that it's autobiographical puts
Speaker 2: off like spins that even deeper and further, and that
Speaker 2: ending is so personal, you know, he watches the second type.
Speaker 2: It doesn't come out of nowhere, but it takes over
Speaker 2: the film like she has that it's a freak out
Speaker 2: like she has. I could I've had a note written
Speaker 2: down somewhere from when she was talking about that, but
Speaker 2: I can't find it. But the way she describes it,
Speaker 2: it sounds like a when you bear autistic people describing
Speaker 2: becoming overwhelmed and overloaded that it's just everything is too much,
Speaker 2: too much, noise, too much, objects, too much, people sound
Speaker 2: every like the look, the lights, the colors, and she
Speaker 2: just needs to retreat. She just needs to be essentially
Speaker 2: like self stemming, do the thing that brings herself back
Speaker 2: into focus. It's just that that final stage she doesn't
Speaker 2: find a way back from it. That it's I think
Speaker 2: there is a degree that the phone call with the
Speaker 2: work and such as there's something really hollow in that
Speaker 2: because it's the connection to the outside world that she
Speaker 2: knows she can't really go back to, like the way
Speaker 2: that she looks now, the way that she's damaged her face,
Speaker 2: she can't hide it and there will be repercussions. So
Speaker 2: it's not that she feels shame, but there's an awareness
Speaker 2: that she's trapped herself here with the way that she
Speaker 2: has been coping, with her inability to cope.
Speaker 7: And again, it puts it all on display of you know,
Speaker 7: how do you react to someone who is objectively attroactive
Speaker 7: and has a good job and has a jerk boyfriend,
Speaker 7: but he checks off a lot of the boxes, her
Speaker 7: essentially erasing and rewriting that narrative for this other narrative.
Speaker 7: And you know when she's not only is it a
Speaker 7: split screen, but if I remember right, the screen is
Speaker 7: split shing pictures she has taken of her wounds, so
Speaker 7: it's like a copy of a copy. Now she is
Speaker 7: essentially editing herself like a film. She's cutting herself up
Speaker 7: literally and metaphorically and rearranging herself into this new narrative.
Speaker 7: And this is it's the new French extremity. It's designed
Speaker 7: to push boundaries and make you react and make you
Speaker 7: implicate yourself. You could also take this into like you
Speaker 7: were saying, you know, if she had, you could do
Speaker 7: this film with someone getting tattoos, and the further into
Speaker 7: the process they get, the more visible the tattoos become,
Speaker 7: until at some point they have a facial tattoo and
Speaker 7: it's changed their narrative and society. And I'm not equating
Speaker 7: tattoos and self harm, but I am saying they're both
Speaker 7: ways of rewriting the body. I remember reading a long
Speaker 7: time ago a book called Sadomasochism and Everyday Life about
Speaker 7: the things that we do that harm ourselves that are
Speaker 7: not considered self harm. Now, and what about what if
Speaker 7: she had been an ultra long distance runner, you know,
Speaker 7: that mark her body with that mark her identity and
Speaker 7: make it so she was not fitting into the narrative
Speaker 7: of what she was supposed to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very much about the like the paradigms that
Speaker 2: are required of us and how we get forced into
Speaker 2: those and what is deemed acceptable and what isn't. It
Speaker 2: makes me think of a film I've been wanting to
Speaker 2: rewatch for so long, but I don't know why it
Speaker 2: hasn't got to re release, Sick the Life and death
Speaker 2: of Bob Flannagan Super Massacrest. The documentary Fro nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: seven was about a guy who used satomasochistic practices in
Speaker 2: his performance art to help overcome his cistic fibrosis. And
Speaker 2: it's like that's something where it's just like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: he would be dead if he didn't do these things
Speaker 2: that everybody otherwise would find super disturbing. It's that the
Speaker 2: unified idea of what a person is and what a
Speaker 2: life is and how that crashes into the actual personal
Speaker 2: experience of how you survive is a narrative that is
Speaker 2: very complicated. That again we come back to that the
Speaker 2: tension of how we live in a society of individuals
Speaker 2: and yet we still have to make sure that we
Speaker 2: don't stick out in weird ways. Yeah, it's it's what
Speaker 2: I found. One of the quotes I was looking for before,
Speaker 2: and this was from the interview on the DV at
Speaker 2: the Blu Ray that she said, I think I mutilate
Speaker 2: myself to recover something that was not really mine and
Speaker 2: that became mine. And also when you mutilate heavily yourself,
Speaker 2: you have a lot of scars. It's as if you
Speaker 2: had drawn your own body and created that as a
Speaker 2: piece of art because there is so many lines, figures
Speaker 2: all that, and I did want to, like, I mentioned
Speaker 2: her short films before, I do want to like come
Speaker 2: back around to them, because there's another quote shortly before
Speaker 2: that quote in the interview where talking about her childhood
Speaker 2: relationship with her parents, which was apparently very not good,
Speaker 2: she said, I didn't feel that my body belonged to me,
Speaker 2: and the boundaries were constantly blurred. And I have felt
Speaker 2: that my parents allowed themselves to judge my body or
Speaker 2: speak of my body in a way that was transgressive
Speaker 2: and invasive and incestual. I think that is why I
Speaker 2: mutilate myself and her first short film, Bien Susu reports
Speaker 2: didn't get a chance to write down what the English
Speaker 2: translation was. Sorry, is a very chattel Ackerman like, very
Speaker 2: kind of cold, straightforward drama about She plays a young
Speaker 2: woman who brings a boyfriend home to her family. The
Speaker 2: brother's mother and parents are all there, and she takes
Speaker 2: the boyfriend off and starts going down on him, and
Speaker 2: then the family comes in and hit the boyfriend, freaks
Speaker 2: out and leaves, and then they turns out they have
Speaker 2: been recording it from the other room to show her
Speaker 2: how she's doing it wrong. And they go into the
Speaker 2: other room together and play back the video this graphic
Speaker 2: real sex of her going down on this guy, and
Speaker 2: watch it together, commentating on it and saying how badly
Speaker 2: she is doing it. It's a lot, the father says
Speaker 2: in this short, every social practice needs to be educated.
Speaker 2: You must follow rules, especially for violent pleasures, or else
Speaker 2: you would have a nice looking girl who all of
Speaker 2: a sudden wallows like a cow and does things without precision,
Speaker 2: without beauty. Needless to say, this means a lot of work.
Speaker 2: That was from nineteen ninety six. You made that the
Speaker 2: first short film. I highly recommend if you get chance
Speaker 2: to watch the fore shorts thats you made before this.
Speaker 2: The next one, Retention and then Size Show and Alias
Speaker 2: at such a continuity of ideas and an evolution of
Speaker 2: second film. Retention is very much more traditional transgressive piece
Speaker 2: with shit and you know, sitting on the toilet, going
Speaker 2: to little toilet, holding rosaries and eating shit and you know,
Speaker 2: living in filth and all this kind of thing. Very
Speaker 2: bit more weirdly traditional. Siso was like people talk about
Speaker 2: SI show. A lot of people like this was really
Speaker 2: funny and I'm like I normally the he's laughing at
Speaker 2: the things everyone finds fucked. But slide shows this guy
Speaker 2: goes to the therapist and he's like sitting there, lying
Speaker 2: on the couch, and the therapists like moves his chair
Speaker 2: slightly over and the guy rolls over. He's like you move,
Speaker 2: He's like, no, I did, and he keeps doing that,
Speaker 2: and the guy's trying to talk about how he was
Speaker 2: just fired from his job because he didn't fit in,
Speaker 2: and he's talking about lack of like connection with the
Speaker 2: people around him and how the way the work was
Speaker 2: more important than human connection, and this therapist keeps moving
Speaker 2: the chair more and more and saying, no, no, I
Speaker 2: don't know what you're talking about. It's such a head fuck.
Speaker 2: It's like this doesn't feel good. And then Alias is
Speaker 2: a young girl who's her birthday and she's sad and
Speaker 2: disconnected from her family, and her family are having this party,
Speaker 2: like getting ready to show slides from her life, and
Speaker 2: she's crying and she's smoking and drinking, and then she
Speaker 2: gets up and leaves them looking at the slides, and
Speaker 2: she swaps clothes with their house cleaner, and the house
Speaker 2: cleaner goes and sits down and party just continues and
Speaker 2: they give her the gifts as if she's the daughter.
Speaker 2: And I was like, all four of these together, it
Speaker 2: is just like this horror of alignment, like either not
Speaker 2: enough alignment or too much alignment of these roles that
Speaker 2: you have to play, of the boundaries and borders that
Speaker 2: should be there melting, and just like the whole thing.
Speaker 2: It was like they were all about like ten to
Speaker 2: sixteen minutes each, So it's like all four together is
Speaker 2: like almost a whole film. And watching all four of
Speaker 2: those and then watching In My Skin is just an
Speaker 2: incredible emotional head trip. I only got a chance to
Speaker 2: watch one of other films. I watched the Irish film
Speaker 2: that she made recently, Dark Touch, and I wish that
Speaker 2: I had a chance to watch that again after watching
Speaker 2: her shorts, because that is a really intense film about
Speaker 2: childhood abuse but done in with a narrative that's like
Speaker 2: carry And I watched that like earlier in this week
Speaker 2: before i'd come back around and watching My Skin again,
Speaker 2: and it was a lot. I was very impressed by it.
Speaker 2: It was very definitely had the same kind of feeling
Speaker 2: that In My Skin has of just telling a personal
Speaker 2: story that feels like it comes from the source, that
Speaker 2: it's not secondary. And I'm definitely going to go back
Speaker 2: and revise The Dark Touch after watching the shorts and
Speaker 2: Near the Skin again because I think I think she's
Speaker 2: a really, really tremendous filmmaker. I think there's she has
Speaker 2: a way of just like hitting these notes that a
Speaker 2: lot of people else either just feels like they're telling
Speaker 2: a story what feels like exploitation and instead it just
Speaker 2: like I felt like I was putting my hand in
Speaker 2: the fire. And it's a lot in a great way,
Speaker 2: But oh man, you get watch those shorts, like when
Speaker 2: you go back and look at the stuff that like
Speaker 2: Vissi talks about her family and that that lack of
Speaker 2: bound and borders, the way she felt transgressed on, and
Speaker 2: then you look at In My Skin and the way
Speaker 2: she talks about how this was the way of taking
Speaker 2: her body back, in her life back, and then ultimately
Speaker 2: the film ends up being a positive experience because it's
Speaker 2: her way of restoring that something that the self ulation
Speaker 2: like I really wasn't giving her like it was a
Speaker 2: coping mechanism, but it wasn't giving her the step to
Speaker 2: get out. And then making the film. She got that
Speaker 2: and it's yeah, they're beautiful, incredible films, but not a
Speaker 2: sunny day.
Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting that the family is not part of
Speaker 1: this film, that there is no family when it comes
Speaker 1: to this other than her literal brother who's playing the
Speaker 1: doctor character. We've actually talked about her a little bit
Speaker 1: before when we were doing We did an episode on
Speaker 1: Visitor Q and we talked about what's the name of that?
Speaker 1: The Pasilini film is a tinterera where the Terence stampm
Speaker 1: theorem thank you when he is in r I p
Speaker 1: Terrence Stamp. And we also talked about sitcom on that,
Speaker 1: which is the Francois Ozone. I believe it's how you
Speaker 1: say it? And she worked with him a lot as
Speaker 1: both an actress as well as a collaborator. She has
Speaker 1: credits for what is it? The Eight Women, and there's
Speaker 1: another one that he worked on that she gets some
Speaker 1: screenwriting credit on as well. I don't know what their
Speaker 1: relationship is, if it's more a mentor student or collaborator,
Speaker 1: but just to have those two together very similar sensibilities,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I definitely saw a lot of interesting things,
Speaker 1: especially I mean sitcom. Really when I did sit down
Speaker 1: and watch bien rapport, which I think translates to good
Speaker 1: in all things or good in all respects.
Speaker 2: That just felt so.
Speaker 1: So Sitcom to me, and I think it was before Sitcom,
Speaker 1: so it was pretty wild to see that stuff. To
Speaker 1: go back to the idea of your body not being
Speaker 1: your own. It's funny because there was just a story
Speaker 1: on NPR maybe two days ago talking about a study
Speaker 1: around limbs that are missing and the whole idea of
Speaker 1: when the brain knows or doesn't know that your limb
Speaker 1: is missing, and there was an interview with a woman
Speaker 1: where she had lost her arm three years ago and
Speaker 1: the brain still thinks that it's there. And then you
Speaker 1: compare that to something like there's a really amazing documentary
Speaker 1: called Whole Wholi from two thousand and four by Melody Gilbert,
Speaker 1: which is all about body integrity identity disorder, which is
Speaker 1: when you feel this limb does not belong to me,
Speaker 1: you know, this whole dichotomy of my limbs still here
Speaker 1: versus this limb isn't mine, and people who go to
Speaker 1: these extra to remove their own limbs. I think we
Speaker 1: talked about that a little bit when we discussed boxing Helena,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that was really wild to talk about. And
Speaker 1: then you're talking about the Bob Flanagan documentary. There's also
Speaker 1: I know, I don't think it's just called suspension, but
Speaker 1: there's a great documentary about people who are into suspension
Speaker 1: and how that discomfort is so freeing. And I know
Speaker 1: that things like shabari is usually treated like a very
Speaker 1: therapeutic thing, where even by being tied up in these
Speaker 1: different positions, you feel like you're more free than you
Speaker 1: are normally, that you feel like you are in you know,
Speaker 1: in a different headspace, you know, again head space rather
Speaker 1: than body space. But the body affects the brain, and
Speaker 1: I so agree with you Ben as far as this
Speaker 1: whole dichotomy of brain body just should not be a
Speaker 1: dichotomy at all. It really should be all one whole thing,
Speaker 1: but we treat it like that. And even Marina Devon
Speaker 1: talking about how you know, as a person, you don't
Speaker 1: see yourself unless you're looking in a mirror or being
Speaker 1: on film. You don't see your face, you don't see
Speaker 1: certain parts of your body. You are not looking at
Speaker 1: yourself at all times. And we were talking about the fragmentation,
Speaker 1: or I was talking about the fragmentation of the body,
Speaker 1: and there's a moment in that third act where you
Speaker 1: go from all of these fragments of her and her,
Speaker 1: you know, sucking on herself, biting herself, feasting on herself,
Speaker 1: and then boom, you cut to a shot where it
Speaker 1: is her whole body, from head to toe, And it
Speaker 1: feels like that's the moment for me that Catharsis that
Speaker 1: this film brings to her. I know there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of disagreement between the three of us if there
Speaker 1: is a Catharsis, but for me, it's like when you
Speaker 1: see her all back together, then it's like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: think she's in a better place. But yeah, to your point,
Speaker 1: as far as does she ever leave the hotel room,
Speaker 1: I don't know if she does. And I love that
Speaker 1: it's a hotel room because I was talking about how
Speaker 1: this whole thing feels like she's met the tall, dark
Speaker 1: stranger that is herself that she rents this hotel room
Speaker 1: or it seems like many hotel rooms to have this
Speaker 1: illicit affair with herself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also the scene where she fakes a car
Speaker 2: accident feels like she's been out on a date and
Speaker 2: needs to make up like an excuse for the time
Speaker 2: and the wounds. It's a great scene her trying to
Speaker 2: explain is that the most animated she is in the
Speaker 2: entire film. I think like she's talking, sort of babbling
Speaker 2: away with the reasons and excuses, and it feels so
Speaker 2: unnatural to how we've experienced her.
Speaker 7: So this came out in two thousand and two. That
Speaker 7: puts it before a lot of the emphasis on trauma
Speaker 7: and how trauma affects the body and things like the
Speaker 7: polyvagal nerve and a different and more thorough look at PTSD.
Speaker 7: So in a way, this film really anticipates where we're
Speaker 7: at now, and you could almost argue that this movie
Speaker 7: might find a more receptive audience now than when it
Speaker 7: was released, that it's saying things that now were more
Speaker 7: prepared to talk about. Another element of, you know, self
Speaker 7: harm is that it marks the outside of your body
Speaker 7: things the inside of your body might be feeling. So
Speaker 7: if you come from a dysfunctional family where you are
Speaker 7: being traumatized, you may not look traumatized from the outside.
Speaker 7: Put you in a row of kids the same age,
Speaker 7: and you look exactly the same, but you feel all
Speaker 7: of these feelings. You don't feel like the other kids.
Speaker 7: So I think sometimes part of that self harm is
Speaker 7: marking I am hurting, this is my experience. I am different.
Speaker 7: And I can definitely see that applying to Esther in
Speaker 7: this movie of she is suffering these invisible wounds with
Speaker 7: her boyfriend, her job, the lack of a connection with
Speaker 7: her friend, and as she is marking herself, she is
Speaker 7: setting herself up as different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they certainly especially experience. You know, we're hearing so
Speaker 2: much now of testimonies from women about their experiences with
Speaker 2: the medical industry, with doctors disbelieving the pain that they're in,
Speaker 2: they're disbelieving their personal testimonies. And yeah, the self harming
Speaker 2: is a way of making that menifest, of taking it
Speaker 2: away from being just in your head, to oh, look, no,
Speaker 2: this is a real thing, and I don't think medical efision,
Speaker 2: see it, listen to it like that way. But that
Speaker 2: can be soothing. Definitely, this is.
Speaker 7: Very definitely a movie about a woman, definitely a feminist
Speaker 7: lens to be able to fully appreciate the nuances in
Speaker 7: what's going on. That said, you know, there are men
Speaker 7: self harm. It would be a different movie to take
Speaker 7: this from a masculine perspective, and not to take anything
Speaker 7: away from this movie. I would be curious what that
Speaker 7: movie would look like and how that would be different,
Speaker 7: because I don't think it's apples to apples. It would
Speaker 7: be a very different film. And yeah, it just was
Speaker 7: something that made me curious and I was watching those.
Speaker 1: Well, some men self harm by picking fights and getting
Speaker 1: other people to harm them or being injured in fights.
Speaker 1: You know, one real quick scene that I want to
Speaker 1: talk about as we start to wrap up this discussion
Speaker 1: is the moment when she wakes up and her arm
Speaker 1: is asleep, and she's just kind of flopping her arm
Speaker 1: around and just you know, kind of exploring this. And
Speaker 1: it's the same arm, of course, that is going to
Speaker 1: be disembodied later on during the dinner scene and her
Speaker 1: boyfriend comes up, you know, he's behind her and she's
Speaker 1: and I think she's enjoying this sensation of what is
Speaker 1: this arm that I have? You know, it feels again
Speaker 1: very disassociated, and of course he has to solve a problem.
Speaker 1: You know, so many men just see a problem. They
Speaker 1: want to solve a problem, you know, just don't bother
Speaker 1: me kind of thing. And he just takes her hand
Speaker 1: and starts to massage her arm and tries to get
Speaker 1: the blood flowing again, and he's just like, yeah, there
Speaker 1: you go, easy peasy, and it's like, no, she actually
Speaker 1: didn't want help at the moment, dude, like you really
Speaker 1: need to back off. And his whole thing is it
Speaker 1: feels like she is a problem to solve. And I
Speaker 1: did really appreciate what Alexander Heller Nicholas said in her
Speaker 1: video essay about this on the I can't remember which
Speaker 1: release that was, but great, great essay. She really again
Speaker 1: talks about those opening credits and then they the video
Speaker 1: editor of that does a great job too, will pull
Speaker 1: in other moments of the film where there are split
Speaker 1: screens that aren't split screens, but the way that things
Speaker 1: are filmed, Like there's shots of those office buildings where
Speaker 1: in that business district where Esther works at, our main
Speaker 1: character works at, and the spleen screen will be split
Speaker 1: down the middle with a building on one side and
Speaker 1: then make more of a scenic few on the other side,
Speaker 1: and I think then you count Countradrick that with another
Speaker 1: one where the building's on the other side, and then
Speaker 1: you have more of a vision on the opposite side
Speaker 1: of the screen, and she talks about in that how
Speaker 1: I think the boyfriend reacts so violently against esther's self
Speaker 1: harming because of his own anxiety, his castration anxiety, and
Speaker 1: just like, how can you hurt yourself? How dare you
Speaker 1: defile that temple?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Like so many men, I mean, men will fucking freak
Speaker 1: out if a woman gets a fucking haircut. I mean
Speaker 1: it's wild that they are so. And I say they
Speaker 1: because I don't count myself in with this at all,
Speaker 1: but some men really freak out if a woman has
Speaker 1: that autonomy over herself to make her own choice when
Speaker 1: it comes to how she wears her hair. Good lord,
Speaker 1: let's all just have a panic attack, everybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very clear that the only way that he
Speaker 2: has into understanding her experience is how it affects him,
Speaker 2: that everything he talks and he talks about it, that
Speaker 2: it's all in relation to him in some way, either
Speaker 2: in like a high key or low key way, that
Speaker 2: he doesn't he isn't able to like grasp the independence
Speaker 2: of her experience. Part of that is definitely because of
Speaker 2: the association with self harm being connected to suicide, and
Speaker 2: so there is like that is a big death is
Speaker 2: a big chasm like that makes people leap backwards suddenly.
Speaker 2: And in two thousand and two, and I'm saying, we've
Speaker 2: got a better understanding of these kind of tendencies now,
Speaker 2: but there's a lot more, not as an arrow of
Speaker 2: an experience people have had with these kind of self
Speaker 2: harming and such. So I think it's that it's to
Speaker 2: a degree there people's reactions and this is understandable if
Speaker 2: you do keep that in mind. We aren't looking at
Speaker 2: it with a more modern lens, with better understandings of
Speaker 2: psychology and mental health and diverse experiences. These people are
Speaker 2: reacting to someone who they are seeing as suicidal, like
Speaker 2: that's most likely the way that they are interpreting it
Speaker 2: that they're saying, like, well, if she's not suicidal now,
Speaker 2: it's only a few steps till because that's when people
Speaker 2: hurt themselves, is when they want to die. And you know,
Speaker 2: in some ways that ties it back around to the
Speaker 2: abject and how you know, the ultimate abject object is
Speaker 2: a corpse, and so they are almost imagining her as
Speaker 2: a corpse in their mind walking around, and that's you know,
Speaker 2: is entirely on them. There is a different experience of
Speaker 2: human connection. This film that we haven't talked about, and
Speaker 2: that's the pharmacist, which is a great seed where there's
Speaker 2: no get is a banana's conversation where it's so much
Speaker 2: like did you feel like the pharmacist should be maybe
Speaker 2: asking a couple of extra questions. She comes to him
Speaker 2: to ask how to preserve a piece of her own skin,
Speaker 2: and her answers aren't quite stacking up, and he's not
Speaker 2: quite putting it together. But also it's great that he
Speaker 2: doesn't put it together to be concerned, because it's these
Speaker 2: two people who are curious meeting in their curiosity, and
Speaker 2: there's a beautiful little scene of these strange little like
Speaker 2: bonding between these two as they discuss the hows of
Speaker 2: like how to preserve something and this shared interest, and
Speaker 2: it's like it is actually like probably like the bost
Speaker 2: kind of like that's the scene that made me happiest.
Speaker 2: I enjoy those two little weidos having their weird conversation.
Speaker 7: It's very childlike, and there's there is a childlikeness to
Speaker 7: a lot of these very serious bub things, and at
Speaker 7: that moment when she's talking to the pharmacist, his first
Speaker 7: reaction is also a childlike wonder of yeah, how would
Speaker 7: you do that? And oh, it would be like this,
Speaker 7: and it's it is, it's this playful moment. And then
Speaker 7: as the scene progresses, he starts to catch that this
Speaker 7: is going further than just an idea, and you can
Speaker 7: see him retreat from being playful. But I think one
Speaker 7: of the ways that we experience the abject and we
Speaker 7: experience things outside of norm you know, is that kids
Speaker 7: will play with that, and they will they will find
Speaker 7: ways of interacting with that, get to know it better.
Speaker 7: And you know, then as we're socialized, we're taught that
Speaker 7: certain things are taboo, especially your body blood. And for
Speaker 7: her to go back and almost regress is it's a transgression.
Speaker 7: I wanted to add in talking about Vincenn the boyfriend,
Speaker 7: I think one of the most telling scenes for him
Speaker 7: is he is furious she is crying on the street
Speaker 7: because he worries people might judge job as a boyfriend.
Speaker 7: So her crying the problem is it makes him look bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a typical emotional mail. To come full circle,
Speaker 2: I think we already do have this film as about
Speaker 2: a man and it is fight club.
Speaker 1: I can see that. I mean, we've made several references.
Speaker 2: It's just him on his own in his personal with
Speaker 2: his tall dark stranger having he's exploring his body.
Speaker 1: And I believe that Marla even makes a reference to
Speaker 1: a tall dark stranger in that.
Speaker 8: Film Asper of our Generation, you slip well, when you
Speaker 8: need a stranger, you dance all night, then you throw
Speaker 8: it away.
Speaker 7: Connor, I would add to Fight Club, the early works
Speaker 7: aren't written than filmic, but some of the Brett Easton
Speaker 7: Ellis's stuff like Less than Zero American Psycho have that
Speaker 7: same transaggressive I kind of want to be an object
Speaker 7: and let things happen to me vibe to them. They're
Speaker 7: not they're not the same, but I felt like they
Speaker 7: would be interesting to compare to one another.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's a lot more of transgressive art in
Speaker 2: this than there is a horror art DNA. It's definitely
Speaker 2: owes more to that art transgressive background, the literature and
Speaker 2: films and the films of the underground, And I said, like,
Speaker 2: you know, the short films definitely connect those dots a
Speaker 2: lot more as well. Chantell Ackaman, we mentioned a couple
Speaker 2: of times.
Speaker 1: For actually you climbed onto the idea of the performance
Speaker 1: art and Yeah, I wanted to touch on that very quickly.
Speaker 1: So much performance art falls into this whole idea of
Speaker 1: the body and how do we treat our own bodies,
Speaker 1: how do we use our bodies as this canvas sometimes
Speaker 1: a literal canvas. And I know we'll talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more next week when we discuss raw as far
Speaker 1: as the painting of the body. But even thinking about that,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about like Karen Finley and how she would
Speaker 1: cover herself in chocolate pudding and just basically it would
Speaker 1: mimic shit, and just the way that she would be
Speaker 1: almost naked up on stage but just covered with chocolate pudding.
Speaker 1: And I'm trying to remember there was a performance artist
Speaker 1: that we had at Noir Khan years and years ago,
Speaker 1: and Bluboxer's got an interesting range when it comes to
Speaker 1: what he considers noir art. And this performance artist she
Speaker 1: did this amazing stuff where she had a whole lot
Speaker 1: of pig skin and took all of this pig skin
Speaker 1: and stabled it to a house and had this shack.
Speaker 1: This almost reminds me of those pictures that you see
Speaker 1: of Ted Kaczynski's shack, like where they have it at
Speaker 1: like FBI headquarters or whatever, and they're still studying a
Speaker 1: shack or whatever, but it was like shack like that
Speaker 1: covered in pig skin, and she would invite people to
Speaker 1: come inside the shack and smell what it smells like,
Speaker 1: feel what it feels like, touch that skin, which, if
Speaker 1: you don't know, pig skin feels so much like human flesh.
Speaker 1: And to touch that, I mean when they talk about
Speaker 1: cannibal cannibals and I'm sure you can attest to this
Speaker 1: one bend the whole idea of long pig, right, like
Speaker 1: humans are just longer pigs, and yeah, people going in
Speaker 1: there and touching these things. She also made these beautiful,
Speaker 1: beautiful flowers live in front of us on stage, and
Speaker 1: she used duck tongues and those kind of crawl over,
Speaker 1: very different than a duck's cock, which is more like
Speaker 1: a corkscrew, but duck tongue kind of crawls over and
Speaker 1: it becomes the paddles of these flowers. As she was
Speaker 1: making really fucked up but really fascinating at the same time.
Speaker 2: The artist's name is Hyder Hatri Hi d e h
Speaker 2: A t R. Y spent some time working in fetish
Speaker 2: golf clubs and got my fair share.
Speaker 1: When didn't we all do that?
Speaker 2: Definitely seen some things shoved through human al Janatalia in
Speaker 2: my time. A lot of this this film, you know,
Speaker 2: it's there's definitely I don't find it particularly shocking. It
Speaker 2: was the main scene that had me climbing up the
Speaker 2: wall was the dinner party scene. That was more the
Speaker 2: social aspect, but it was also the adhd intrusive thought
Speaker 2: part that it really tickled memories for me of those
Speaker 2: moments where you're like, wait, am I doing this? Is
Speaker 2: this happening? Wait? No, I'm just thinking this. No I
Speaker 2: didn't just say that, did I did? I think it?
Speaker 2: That film that section captures that so well, and it does.
Speaker 2: It feels like performance art in that it does feel
Speaker 2: like an embodied projection of an experience that I don't
Speaker 2: feel like I'm sitting there watching a narrative or another person,
Speaker 2: like you're really feeling the experience, which is you know,
Speaker 2: performance art aims for a lot of the time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I really hope Marina Devan gets a chance to do
Speaker 2: more films.
Speaker 7: With the dinner scene. I might be reading too much
Speaker 7: into this, but I found it interesting that when she
Speaker 7: goes down into the wine cellar to continue cutting her
Speaker 7: arm and she drops the knife. It's another woman that
Speaker 7: finds it and has this reaction to it, and it
Speaker 7: becomes concerned. When I saw that, part of me thought
Speaker 7: maybe there's something to that, is that it takes another
Speaker 7: woman to be able to really I see her as
Speaker 7: opposed to the people at the table understand that she's off,
Speaker 7: but don't really see where she's at. I thought that
Speaker 7: was an interesting little moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also the flip side of interpretation, that is
Speaker 2: that it's a very ordered space, and a knife is
Speaker 2: a very threatening object, and in a such an object
Speaker 2: in an ordered space is a red flag. But yes,
Speaker 2: I definitely think that a woman is probably having worked
Speaker 2: in customer service in places where there are knives, a
Speaker 2: woman is more likely to notice that than a guy. Yes,
Speaker 2: how many cannibal books do I have within reaching me
Speaker 2: right now? We didn't. We barely even talked about cannibalism
Speaker 2: ad bitterly though, Like the cannibal stuff was kind of
Speaker 2: hard to come at and I had to like jump
Speaker 2: through a lot of hoops. But it's sort of the
Speaker 2: cannibal thing was more that it was thinking about rituals
Speaker 2: and thinking about cinemas ritual and how the Marina the
Speaker 2: Arnes films do like they really feel like she's harnessing,
Speaker 2: harnessing the language of cinema and communicating to us, and
Speaker 2: we are coming to perform the ritual of experiencing it
Speaker 2: and incorporating her experience into ourselves, like an act of
Speaker 2: cannibalism like that that definitely feels like an appropriate way
Speaker 2: to describe the experience of her films, Like they're meaty
Speaker 2: and chewing on them, and you feel like the transgression
Speaker 2: of it, but also like the power of it that
Speaker 2: you feel like you're restoring something in yourself, that you're
Speaker 2: gaining energy from it, and meaning that they don't feel
Speaker 2: like hollow, capitalistic experiences, they don't feel like a big
Speaker 2: mac that they're they're really tangible and that they exist
Speaker 2: to give you some kind of restorative meaning, balance function whatever,
Speaker 2: to like bridge a divide that nobody else is necessarily
Speaker 2: trying to bridge, which is you know, the cannibalism even
Speaker 2: with you know, shouldn't it's not a film we can
Speaker 2: use it should really use the word cannibal because that
Speaker 2: does time more into colonialism and defining an other in
Speaker 2: order to lessen them, where this is really like anthropophagy,
Speaker 2: which is the like just the act, the ritual act
Speaker 2: of taking in the flesh of a human, which in
Speaker 2: most ritual tribal societies is restorative, it is positive. The
Speaker 2: connection to long pig and such that, you know, there
Speaker 2: were societies that stopped sacrificing humans and started sacrificing pigs
Speaker 2: as well, which is also there's all sorts of coss
Speaker 2: mix up things. And yeah, this this film, in a way,
Speaker 2: it does feel like a bit of a sacrifice, that
Speaker 2: she's kind of sacrificing part of herself to give to
Speaker 2: the world. And that's it's and I think that is
Speaker 2: part of why it ultimately ends up feeling like a
Speaker 2: beautiful experience, as difficult and confronting as it is.
Speaker 1: I agree with you that I can't remember who said
Speaker 1: it earlier. As far as what would happen if she
Speaker 1: ate her boyfriend, and there's the moment I think it's
Speaker 1: about seventeen minutes in when they have sex and they're
Speaker 1: kissing and she is definitely doing some play biting at
Speaker 1: him when it comes to that, And what a different
Speaker 1: movie it would be if she were to eat her
Speaker 1: boyfriend as opposed to this self cannibalism, this idea of
Speaker 1: her being so in touch with herself, because it just
Speaker 1: wouldn't make sense at all if she were to eat
Speaker 1: somebody else, because this is so much about her getting
Speaker 1: in touch with her body and experiencing her body, and
Speaker 1: just fuck everybody else. I mean, everybody else in this
Speaker 1: movie doesn't support her nearly as much as she needs,
Speaker 1: and really can't. I don't think I think she has
Speaker 1: to go on this journey herself with no one else
Speaker 1: along as this kind of guidepost. And like you guys mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, she tries to bring it up to other people,
Speaker 1: they are either horrified or don't care. And other than
Speaker 1: maybe that pharmacist, who, yeah, kind of a little creep,
Speaker 1: who I really appreciate.
Speaker 7: You're imagining it with that change of her eating the boyfriend,
Speaker 7: and that kind of brings me back to the substance,
Speaker 7: which is not that scenario to me. The substance is
Speaker 7: taking ideas like this movie has, and then tasting meaning
Speaker 7: in a really obvious way that it hands to you
Speaker 7: so you can watch it and you can say to yourself, hey,
Speaker 7: I watched a movie with subtext, but it's it's really
Speaker 7: not subtext. It's pretty clear that makes this more than
Speaker 7: a horror movie, so we can go ahead and applaud
Speaker 7: it because someone already told us what it means.
Speaker 1: I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.
Speaker 7: This is a movie that exists and asks you interact
Speaker 7: with it. It requires more from the audience, less passivity,
Speaker 7: and that's their strutine between art and a movie that
Speaker 7: I didn't find very remarkable.
Speaker 1: Literally put big words across the screen to tell you
Speaker 1: sometimes what's happening.
Speaker 2: I quite enjoyed the Substance that I also saw it
Speaker 2: on a big screen in a ratty old cinema with
Speaker 2: a middle aged woman about the back who kept having
Speaker 2: coughing fits. She was laughing so much, so it was
Speaker 2: kind of the perfect way to see it. And I
Speaker 2: think think the big difference for me between the Substance
Speaker 2: and In My Skin is the Substance is an aggressive film.
Speaker 2: A substance wants to assault the audience, which you definitely
Speaker 2: get if you see on the big screen, because it's
Speaker 2: so loud and so just like it's just Window Liquor
Speaker 2: the Gore film, it's Window Liquor and come to Daddy,
Speaker 2: cramped together into like a feminist French film, whereas the
Speaker 2: most skin is not that. And then most skin doesn't
Speaker 2: want to attack its audience. It's actually really holding back
Speaker 2: from freaking you out as much as possible. I think
Speaker 2: I am coming around water saying that In My Skin
Speaker 2: isn't a horror film. I think I'm coming around to
Speaker 2: your side there, Axel. I also think that the term
Speaker 2: the new French extremity is a completely useless term. I
Speaker 2: saw in one of the readings this cinema de corpse
Speaker 2: or cinema of the body is suggested by Tim Palmer,
Speaker 2: which connects back to the cinema de luxe of the
Speaker 2: eighties and nineties and thinking out how the substance is
Speaker 2: basically fusing a cinema of the body in a cinema
Speaker 2: the look together. And someone really needs to come up
Speaker 2: with a better term, because I do think that there
Speaker 2: is I don't think. I think that In My Skin
Speaker 2: is part of an extreme movement in French cinema that
Speaker 2: is about reclaiming a lot of different things that are
Speaker 2: connected to horror, that are connected to transgressiveness that brings
Speaker 2: in you know, we haven't even mentioned Katherine Briard at all.
Speaker 2: I'm of all the things in the French New extremities.
Speaker 2: She's probably the one that this film has the most
Speaker 2: in common with with like Fat Girl and such. There
Speaker 2: definitely was something interesting going on, but as I said,
Speaker 2: like the French cinema is so disrespectful to horror and
Speaker 2: so disregarding of it that simply like slap it all
Speaker 2: together was one hole. It really undermines something like this film,
Speaker 2: which is a lot more than what was this board?
Speaker 2: What was that one with like the French Nazis torturing peoples.
Speaker 1: CONTI borders frontiers close enough I mean borders Barnes and Noble, close.
Speaker 2: Enough to have like an umbrella term that includes that film,
Speaker 2: and his film really illustrates that. It's not a helpful term.
Speaker 7: I think it works better if you think about it
Speaker 7: almost like Old Testament New Testament, because from what I read,
Speaker 7: there's the first part. You know, the beginning stages of
Speaker 7: the New French extremity were extreme art house films, but
Speaker 7: were at their heart art house and an independent but transgressive.
Speaker 7: And then next sort of level of that is when
Speaker 7: horror minded people realized, hey, we can make explicit horror
Speaker 7: films with a splash of art house and that would work,
Speaker 7: and we can get them into you know, we can
Speaker 7: get them playing in different theaters than we could otherwise.
Speaker 7: There's a Yin Yang thing going on there. This is
Speaker 7: definitely an art house film with horror elements, whereas I
Speaker 7: only saw Frontiers once a long time ago. To me
Speaker 7: it was, you know, someone added arty elements to The
Speaker 7: Texas Chainsaw Massacre and put it in France, although the
Speaker 7: original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has enough arty elements of
Speaker 7: its own that don't get enough credit.
Speaker 2: Sometimes there's something interesting, really something interesting there, because I
Speaker 2: haven't seen Martyrs since it came out either, But that
Speaker 2: feels like a kind of lynchpin between the two somewhat.
Speaker 2: But then, you know, we mentioned Gaspa Noah, and it's
Speaker 2: like Climax feels like it has more in common within
Speaker 2: my skin than any of these earlier films. I think
Speaker 2: Climax is the best, is far better than his earlier
Speaker 2: works because it has a bit more of the personal
Speaker 2: and the empathetic and understanding that something in my skin has.
Speaker 2: It feels like a film made by a small group
Speaker 2: of people in a short amount of time who, instead
Speaker 2: of thinking about it, presented themselves.
Speaker 7: Into the void. I would maybe put there too, as
Speaker 7: one that does have a little bit more empathy and
Speaker 7: more range of motion than like I stand Alone or
Speaker 7: Irreversible is just a mean angry critter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought of Inversible when I was coming back
Speaker 2: around and watching this again the second time this week,
Speaker 2: because both films involve women going off into like dark,
Speaker 2: isolated places and having a bodily crappy experience, and they
Speaker 2: outcomes from each of them are very different. Which don't
Speaker 2: feel that. There wasn't a line I thought that really
Speaker 2: went anywhere, but it was. It says a lot about
Speaker 2: how different this film is to that film that that
Speaker 2: spirals out into guys freaking out and destroying everything, and
Speaker 2: I was having to sit through a woman having a
Speaker 2: hoof experience, whereas this one is not much more complicated
Speaker 2: than that.
Speaker 1: All right, We're going to take another break and play
Speaker 1: a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
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Speaker 2: TI.
Speaker 1: That's right, we'll be back next week where they look
Speaker 1: at raw a great companion piece to in my skin.
Speaker 1: Until then, I want to think my co hosts axelent Ben,
Speaker 1: so Ben, what is the latedst with you?
Speaker 2: Sir? Not a huge amount these days, you'll just plug
Speaker 2: it away in the TV post production world. You can
Speaker 2: find me on Letterbox Do's Dissolved Pet, where I have
Speaker 2: an absolutely huge list of all the cannibal related films
Speaker 2: that I've ever been able to find. And you can
Speaker 2: also find me on Blue Sky at Dissolve Pet where
Speaker 2: I really should talk about cannibalism more.
Speaker 1: And Axel, how about yourself?
Speaker 7: Still threatening to do my own podcast? I keep coming
Speaker 7: up with ideas. I even started writing a script, so
Speaker 7: it's taking about as long as it took Guns n'
Speaker 7: Roses to put out Chinese Democracy. But there's always the
Speaker 7: threat that I will create a podcast at some point,
Speaker 7: and then working on starting up some writing. In November.
Speaker 7: I've got kind of a nonfiction mental health book I've
Speaker 7: been tooling around with so I might go and do
Speaker 7: another wash at that and then just hanging out and
Speaker 7: slowly finding age appropriate horror movies for my daughter, who
Speaker 7: you'll be happy to know, picked a book about the
Speaker 7: Donner Party to read the other day.
Speaker 2: Gotta get more keys into cannibalism, young.
Speaker 1: I keep so going to watch Cannibal the Musical after
Speaker 1: she's done with that.
Speaker 7: I don't remember if that one's because I always have
Speaker 7: to think two questions. Is there gonna be something sexually
Speaker 7: explicit I don't want to explain, And is there gonna
Speaker 7: be a moment where she will wake up in the
Speaker 7: middle of the night and wake my wife up because
Speaker 7: she's scared, Because then that comes back to me.
Speaker 2: I mean, there is the bit with the ogre guy
Speaker 2: and he has the eye poking out. That's probably the
Speaker 2: gnolliest bit. And because he's like, ah, and he's big
Speaker 2: and scary. I don't think. I think all the sexual
Speaker 2: stuff is like very Mormon sexual, so it's all like it's.
Speaker 1: More about the love between a man and his horse.
Speaker 2: If memory serves, Yeah, there's a lot of that, but
Speaker 2: that's you know, that'll just go. I'm just in either
Speaker 2: and like I always watched that when I was what
Speaker 2: thirteen pen so, but that doesn't that you shouldn't take
Speaker 2: that into account because that was he way more fucked
Speaker 2: up stuff than that at that age.
Speaker 1: Thank you again, guys, thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks to everybody for listening. Do you want to support
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Speaker 5: Just don't easy do the talking for Mattens Tigna for
Speaker 5: see you the Faldaddy and all to do settle it
Speaker 5: not too to the sea coming blue a ving so
Speaker 5: to fay, please talk a hole, not anything on the door.
Speaker 3: Nor least before sit that ramon.
Speaker 2: No, what don't do?
Speaker 6: Just play the toil and lovely.
Speaker 5: Song Maddon tiga fo.
Speaker 6: Just stick at an aside, can't you fool?
Speaker 2: You have to want to see me. Stop fool, stop,
Speaker 2: says coming you after says you do? Steps come any
Speaker 2: bet that ho.
Speaker 5: St a time of blue shott.
Speaker 6: Come man, if we go down the door, down a hole,
Speaker 6: sing the way down, now that the window, now, hey.
Speaker 2: Ho this
Speaker 5: Non snubh