132: Why Does Kanye Want Parler? Plus: ‘Catherine, Called Birdy’ reviewed!

Welcome

back to Across the movie, I’ll present it by Bulwark Plus. I am your host, Sunny Bunch, Culture Editor of The Bulwark. I’m joined as always by Liz Rosenberg of The Washington Post, Peter SUnderman. I’ve raised magazine. Alyssa Peter.

How are you today?

I am well.

I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First up in controversies and controversies, Kanye West is buying parlor. At least that’s what he said in a press release and no terms have been made available and partner says the deal probably won’t go through to the fourth quarter. So, you know, who who knows what will actually happen here? But it’s telling that following a series of, well, let’s say, what, anti Semitic incidents, including a tweet stating that he is going to quote, go Deathcon three, end quote, on the Jews that resulted in him being locked out of his Twitter account. Kanye’s first impulse was to buy a social media network instead of, you know, not doing the antisemitism.

Frankly, I am a little surprised he didn’t just wanna buy gab, a venue where rambling’s on the perfidiousness of Jews and their love of charging gentiles for divorces among other things would be less noticeable, but I I digress. This is the latest in a series of moves by let’s say, conservative aligned figures to try to reshapes the the landscape of social media in their image. Donald Trump started the company truth social. Right? And according to the Washington Post, almost immediately started violating SEC rules by pressuring executives to hand their stakes.

In the company over to Melania Trump. Though, you know, let’s be honest, if you’re getting into business with Donald Trump, you kinda deserve whatever happens to you at this point. And then there’s Twitter itself, which is on the precipice of being purchased by Elon Musk, who hopes to turn the social media site back towards its found sensibility that of being, you know, the quote, free speech wing of the free speech party and end quote, Musk understood early on that at least part of his wealth comes from his ability to dominate conversation and grab attention and losing the ability to tweet as Donald Trump lost the ability to tweet when he was banned from the service following the January sixth assault on the capital could be a cataclysmic event for him and his various companies, I am I am more sympathetic to Musk than I am to Kanye West or Donald Trump. For for a lot of reasons. You know, Kanye West, one time, great musician, stretch of albums from two thousand fourteen to two thousand thirteen or so that are very very very notable.

I still listen to them. Good stuff. You know, Donald Trump, whatever, we would talk all about Donald Trump, but, you know, I I’m less sympathetic to him. But Musk has been a success in a lot of different thing ways. Like, he made it cool to buy electric cars, something people were trying to scold us into doing for years and years, but he was like, actually, it’s fun and cool to own an electric car.

Everyone was like, yes, we all wanna own electric cars now. I that’s good. Right? That’s good. He’s he’s helping to revolutionize communication via StarLink.

Right? He’s bringing the Internet’s, you know, distant areas. He’s helping in war zones, whatever. Again, I am generally pro musk. That being said, I am I am a little bit worried about his hope to take over Twitter for for several reasons.

One of them being that I have serious doubts in his commitment to free speech will hold up if they butt up against the financial imperatives of the actual moneymaker for Elon Musk, which is Tesla. Tesla has huge financial interests in China, both in terms of resource extraction and car sales slash manufacturing. If the Chinese Communist Party puts its boot on Musk’s snack and says, hey, We’re gonna kill your business here. If you don’t shut down anti CCP accounts in the West, what’s he actually gonna do? Which way is that commitment going to fall.

I don’t know. I do think it is interesting though that, again, all of these folks are kind of settling on the same answer here, which is, and we’re gonna buy a social media company. That’ll solve all our problems. Peter, why does every rich guy with a big mouth wanna own his own social media platform?

I mean, it’s either that or a ten thousand foot yacht. Right? That’s that’s what you can buy at a certain level is is the is like your choices are. You have every DVD You have you have the whole, like, two of them. Right?

You’ve got one still shrink-wrap and one to one.

One in

DVD, one in Blu ray, one in four k. I don’t

know because people are go crazy about and on social media. So I think there’s a bunch of questions here. One is, is this deal a real thing? It doesn’t seem to be completely pulled out of his mind. Right?

But, like, out of his posterior. Right? But, like, Is Kanye West really gonna buy this thing? Last I heard Kanye West was having pretty serious financial troubles and was in debt and sort of didn’t have his money is well managed? Like, is this even a possibility?

Does the does do the numbers make sense? Does he is he able to sustain the interest in this for long enough to actually push the deal through. There’s a lot of paperwork. This is a whole big legal thing. I think it’s just totally possible that this ends up being a couple of day news cycle, and then we never hear it about it again, or we do hear about it three months from now.

And what we hear is that’s not happening. I think Kanye West has a disturbing relationship with social media. So not just mean, so let’s start with the fact that he is using it to make antisemitic remarks and and I just say totally, like, bigoted, crazy awful stuff that’s incredibly offensive. So that’s that’s bad when you’re doing that. But also even beyond that, the guy just clearly can’t help himself.

He is he is by his own diagnosis or at least by his own he has said he is someone who has bipolar disorder. He goes through manic episodes. That make him paranoid. The there were clips from the Tucker Carlson interview that he did a a week or two ago that were removed from the interview where he talked about There are fake children in his house that are being that are, like, replacing his real children and their actors. And it’s like, just completely insane crazy stuff.

I mean, I don’t know maybe there were stunt doubles for the reality show that he’s on. Who knows? It’s totally insane and he’s clearly just mentally not. Well, And yet, this is a guy who has said quite recently, I believe, that he uses social media as therapy. And I think that is something that a lot of people do, even people who are quite well off, even people who are quite successful in their lives.

And that’s a terrible thing. I don’t think I think social media can be good or can be bad. I think the the form of it itself is is neutral. I’m not like a man, I just think social media is inherently bad type person, but I do think that using it as therapy is always a bad idea. But the other thing is to people who are concerned about this, I guess I would just say, I’m not I’m concerned, I guess, about Kanye West.

Because he seems like he’s in a bad place. And I wish he would just give us more albums and, like, apologize for the anti Semitic stuff. And do the thing that’s he does that’s good, which is he makes great music, and that’s why people like him and listen to him. But buying a service like this doesn’t necessarily guarantee that he will end up with much of anything at all. And I think that’s even true with Elon Musk and Twitter, although it’s obviously a much bigger deal.

It is just totally possible that these services become become not nearly as important or influential after after they change hands and change leadership. And we’ve seen that already with Facebook where, yes, obviously, Facebook hasn’t just sort of become a shell of its former self. It’s not like this tiny little thing. At the same time, user numbers are going way down. The metaverse push like, their big announcement within the last week or two was that they’re adding legs to avatars.

You get legs now, guys. That’s it. That’s that’s the metaphor. It’s that’s the future. And people but like the user numbers on on the metaverse are just are collapsing and they weren’t ever very big to begin with.

We spent the last ten years hearing from members of congress and everybody else that Facebook was a monopoly and the Twitter is the public square and should basically be treated like a public utility, you know, as a result. And it’s just not obvious that that’s gonna be true in five or ten years. So I just think that, like, I’m not that concerned about these things, but the ownership changing hands. I don’t think this necessarily guarantees them a significant amount of control. I am concerned about Kanye West.

I’m, like, it’s it’s just it’s not great when you’re running around saying really anti Semitic stuff on a public platform or anywhere else. And he he, like, seems to be having a lot of personal troubles, and I this is not gonna be the way to solve them. Yeah. I

mean, Alyssa, it was it’s very I mean, funny is the wrong word to to to to use here, but it was kind of funny to to hear Kanye West describe. Twitter is therapy because it’s not therapy. It’s affirmation. Right? I mean, like, therapy is a thing that you go to and, you know, you talk to somebody and they tell you, you know, they they help you work out what you were doing wrong.

And and when you’re Kanye West on Twitter, what you have is fifty thousand people in your mention saying, I love you. You’re the best to keep putting pictures of how terrible Kim is on Instagram, etcetera. I like, It’s just people telling you how great you are or people telling you how terrible you are, and that is, like, not much better, frankly, but at least it’s it’s not quite the same thing. It’s

not good. I mean, I feel like we can all agree on the obvious, not goodness of that. I wanna I wanna focus on sort of two things though because I I feel like an under discussed element of this movement is that it’s gonna be completely hilarious of all of these guys by these social media sites and then the Supreme Court is like social media sites are publishers and you’re liable for everything on your platforms. Right? Like, it is gonna be hilarious if Elon Musk pays forty four billion dollars to be forced to moderate a lot of content.

Right. I mean, that’s just the funniest thing in the world. And the second thing is, like, you know, we’re talking about Peter, you know, Right. Anti Semitism is bad. And as the token Jew on this podcast, I just wanted to take a minute to sort of meditate on what you know, sort of what Kanye is saying and like kind of what the dynamic is here.

And I think part of the reason that this has been such a spectacle is because it taps into a quality that stories about antisemitism have over and over again, which is that like the some of the claims the person I mean, the claims the person is making. The specific conspiracies about, like, what the, you know, Jewish schwalthick controls the world supposedly does are ridiculous. Right? I mean, the idea that, like, you know, the, like, international Jews are making Kim Kardashian and talk about having sex in front of a fireplace with Pete Davidson to honor her grandmother because, like, that’s what we do to Christian women with black children. Right?

It’s like, I mean, That’s like a this is a much weirder version of the Bluff Live All. It’s weird. And it’s kind of funny. Right? I mean, it’s like, yes, that is that exactly the thing that, like, an international Jewish cabal would focus on, of course.

Cadet, that makes a ton of sense. And there’s this strain of ridiculous in a lot of these conversations. Like, Marjorie Taylor Green at one point said that she thought wildfires in California were, like, control were caused by, like, a space laser controlled by the Rothchild. Trion White, who is a city council member here in Washington DC, believes that Jews control the weather. Like, I I like to joke Has he lived here in August?

Yeah. Like, we’re I mean, my my people are from the Stetel. We don’t do well with humidity. It makes our hair freeze. And, like, I sort of joke about this stuff because it’s one of the ways that you deal with this, like, constant, low lying,

like, you

know, calimae on your people. But I think, like, the ridiculousness of it, I think people don’t entirely credit the overarching nature of the worldview. Right? Like, if you, you know, if people sincerely believe that, like, the Roth that, like, the Rothchilds and a bunch of other Jews are sitting around being, like, what weather should Peoria have today? That speaks to the sort of level of infiltration you think this you know, this out group has achieved over society and also just like the level of paranoia that people are bought into.

And you know, as someone who sometimes gets like anti Semitic hate mail and voicemails and, you know, even mail at my house, like, it becomes it’s easy to laugh at these things, but the sort of wide the wildest sort of most random elements of Jewish conspiracy theory also are the reason why, like, individual Jews get targeted. Right? Because if you believe that there is a cabal that has infiltrated every facet of life in every institution than anyone who is visibly Jewish at all who can be sort of assumed to be Jewish because their last name is potentially a target. And so I think like the craziness of it is a coping mechanism, but it’s also an illustration of the danger. Yeah.

I mean, I you know, just looking at some of the reaction of the stuff on Twitter, what what I am seeing over and over again from accounts that you know, are, you know, never Trump sellouts like me to people who are, like, actual, you know, fans of Trump and fan fans of Kanye. All of these folks who I would describe as fairly responsible people in the main are almost to a man, like, kind of freaked out by some of the stuff they’re seeing in their own mentions about the Jews and about, you know, people being like, well, maybe Maybe we should have a talk about why there are so many Jews in banking. Like, no. That’s stop. Stop all of this.

And by by doing all of this in public and in a very public way. Kanye West is normalizing. All of it in a in a very I mean, I like, dangerous is a strong word, but I think that this is not this is not good or safe. Or something that we should be condoning or I I mean, like, allowing, frankly. I don’t know.

At the very least, it’s not something Twitter should be allowing. You only put it that way. I don’t think I don’t think that the government should be swooping in an imprisoning Kanye or anything like that. But

Well, Twitter did I don’t know whether his account was deleted. His account went offline and the tweet was not available for, like, relatively quickly after the I believe there was only one of these tweaks. The DexCom three tweet. The Deathcon three tweet, but then what happened after that was we found out there were a bunch of remarks that were on the Tucker Carlson interview, some of which had been removed that seemed to suggest that the Deathcon three tweet was not just a it would be bad to be clear. If it were a one off, this isn’t that’s not to excuse it.

But that it took but that it was actually owner of he said a bunch of stuff like this. Right? It and he said it to Karl’s and — In the

moment of

the — podcast this weekend. And, you know, what Carlson is doing by editing that interview so selectively so it becomes about, like, the, you know, just about what he wears is just about Kanye wearing, like, a white lives matter, a t shirt at a fashion show, is he, like, whether or not he assumes this, Carlson is providing a permission structure where even if the stuff that he is explicitly legitimating on the air is not the antisemitic stuff. He is creating a broader narrative around Kanye as a silenced figure who’s been unjustly shut down. And lots of people are going to assume that among the things that Kanye is, like, right about or speaking a difficult truth about are the antisemitic things that he’s saying. Well,

that I mean, that was the the point of bringing Kanye on the show. And it’s that’s why the the crazier stuff was cut because Tucker Carlson brought Kanye West on the show to use him as a political prop to say, look, here is a black entertainer who was saying I was silenced for Hollywood pressured me not to be vocal in my support for Trump. And that was the main thing that Tucker Carlson wanted to get across, was that Hollywood is trying to suppressed support for Donald Trump.

But the effect of that is a dog whistle that’s like Kanye broadly is someone who’s being silenced for speaking uncomfortable truths and the uncomfortable truth that Carlson is willing to endorse on air is that, you know, Hollywood’s silence is conservative black men. But By implication, all of the anti Semitic stuff ends up getting legitimated. Let

me let me ask I I wanna ask question here. I’m gonna get both of your guys opinions on this. Do you think it would have been better for Carlson to air the interview as it aired with edit stuff out of it out? Interview the thing in Toto, just have all of Kanye’s craziness and antisemitism out there. Or not interview not aired the interview at all.

Because I can see I can see an argument for essentially all three of these. You know, the the argument being look, he edits out the worst stuff because he doesn’t want people to see that. He he edits out. He doesn’t run the interview at all because the whole thing is so deranged that it that it makes both Tucker and Kanye look crazy, or you enter you run the whole thing and you just be like, look, this is what this is what’s out there. This is what people are dealing with.

I

mean, but the the third thing implies that, like, Tucker Carlson

wants to

expose Kanye West and wants to expose antisemitism. Right? I mean, you know, a world in which Tucker Carlson runs the full Kanye interview himself like says derogatory stuff about Jews and then finally gets fired from Fox News and, like, the network illustrates that it has a limit somewhere. It’s, like, maybe the best world for us to live in. But, like, you know, their Carlson scene is from what I can tell, from what, you know, my husband has reported over the years.

It’s like very smart about you know, sort of stretching Fox’s sense of the permissible a step at a time. And but, you know, he he appears to know where that line is and, you know, I think was neither going to ex you know, use his interview to expose or to expose himself. So that was just never gonna happen. It’s not even really an option to consider. So I think

that the interview should not have aired. And I we, on our episode about Gerard Rehab, the film that was taken out of an awards festival, we talked about source protection being something that is sort of important to journalism and In this context,

Kanye

West is clearly having some sort of non trivial mental health episode. Now, I am not saying that he is only expressing antisemitic ideas because he’s bipolar. Being bipolar doesn’t make you antisemitic. At the same time, being bipolar does make you much more willing to say crazy and outlay stuff when you’re having a manic episode. And so the would you would you look at the the interview and its entirety?

Or the especially with the clips that were taken out. I should say, maybe we I guess, do we know if we’ve seen every sentence? So if you look at the clips that were taken out, you can see pretty clearly somebody who is having something like a mental breakdown in public. And it is the responsibility of the journalist. In this case, Tucker Carlson, who, whatever else we think of him, is at least acting as the journalist, that is the role he’s playing.

To try to be humane. And this is not being humane. This is using him, like I said, using Kanye West as a political prop for to sort of as as one more in a bullet fired in a culture war. And I think it’s it’s It’s kind of gross. And that doesn’t excuse Kanye West.

I wanna be really clear. This is not like, oh, it’s actually like Kanye West isn’t the No. It doesn’t accuse Kanye West in what he said at all. But the thing that to me, like, talk like, don’t air that interview when you see that somebody is is having a breakdown in front of you. When you see that this person thinks that there are child, you know, that there are actors being put in his house to replace his actors when you see him just saying totally crazy stuff.

That doesn’t

make any kind of sense at all, that’s the time when you say nope, we’re not gonna air this, but they edited it to make it useful. And I just I don’t I I I think that that’s where that’s

not the

only problem here, but that’s where it’s darted. If that hadn’t happened, maybe the rest of it wouldn’t have gone the way it did. Or maybe then it would have just been Kanye West’s fault for tweeting whatever it was he was gonna week. Yep. I also just

wanna wrap this up by saying, I really hope that, you know, his that Kim Kardashian and his kids are safe. And it’s worth remembering that West is, like, running a, like, a school now and I don’t think

I knew that. What Yeah.

Donda Academy hit the choir from school has been, like, performing at some of his shows, fashion shows, and stuff. I think, like, everything else that’s going on, like this is just a really dangerous situation. And I hope that people around him are safe. And I hope he’s safe and that, like, someday can actually get, like, the help in medication that he needs, but I really hope everyone in his orbit is safe. Yeah.

Safety, that would be good for everyone. Alright. I’m I’m gonna skip the the actual whether or not we think it’s controversy or an controversy. I feel like that’s pretty well settled. So let’s move on.

Make sure to swing by Bulmer Plus this Friday for a special bonus episode on a movie that will be sure to make many year end top tens as, you know, that one movie that everyone sets aside to fill their, like, foreign movie slot on the on the top ten. You know you know what I’m anyway, that’s Netflix is Athena. Good movie. I think we all liked it a while. We’re gonna talk about it on Friday.

Now on to the main event. Amazon Prime Videos, Katherine called Birdie. Lena Dunham’s adaptation of the YA novel of the same name by writer, Karen Cushman, Imagine House of the Dragon, you know, the Game of Thrones prequel that’s obsessed with blood bonds, marriages, and strategic alliances amongst, you know, more or less medieval houses, except set in England rather than Westeros and involving a girl with modern sensibilities rather than the medieval sensibilities that, you know, you would kind of expect from a book in this setting. That’s kind of what Katherine called Birdie is like. You’ve got Lady Katherine who’s played by Bella Ramsey.

She’s the precocious daughter of Lord Rololo. Played by Andrew Scott and lady lady Aslan Aslan. I can play by Billy Piper. She you know, lady Katherine, she doesn’t believe in things like decor a man. She’s a free spirit.

She just wants to have fun. You know, girls. That’s all they really want, etcetera. I don’t know. That is that’s the movie.

That’s like the whole movie right there. The the tension here is that Katherine has this decidedly modern idea and I and ideals about wanting to marry for love rather money or position. And everyone else kinda has to figure out their way around that given that she has begun menstruating and her father needs to secure a decently sized dowry in order to save the family lands and castle and all that. You will be shocked to learn that modern ideals went out in the end Hurray. You you you can see why this sort of project would appeal to Lena Dunham.

Right? It’s it’s about a rich white girl and She doesn’t think the rules apply to her, and she’s fascinated slash mortified by her own bodily functions. And she has a gay friend who she encourages to find his true self. Right? It’s all again, very modern.

Very, very modern. And really that is the big sticking point for me while I was watching this. I’m sorry. I always find it really annoying when artists decide to take older setting like this, and then there are a bunch of modern ideals into the mix. It’s one of the reasons that I could never really get into the Night’s Tale.

Right? The Heath Ledger movie. Even as a young man. Right? I could just keep your modernity out of ancient times, dad, Navut.

Don’t want it. Don’t like it. Not gonna have it. This happens to route this all the way down to the casting, it it is like almost comically multicultural given the setting, which again medieval England. And look, this isn’t the movie for me.

It’s not this movie wasn’t made for me. I’m a middle aged man with, you know, children of my own who I hope don’t act like the people in this movie act but, you know, whatever. That said, I did find the whole thing weird or at least parts of it at least parts of it weirdly, like, mean spirited. For instance, this is a movie that mines for laughs, the death of a nine year old boy because like a tertiary character was gonna have to marry him. And now she can marry somebody who lady Katherine proves of of all in the name of love.

Again, I just not for me. I I didn’t I didn’t like it, did not care for it. Alyssa, you wanted us to see this this movie because you love the book growing up. And I’m being altogether too mean to it, aren’t I? Yes.

And I I some point, like, in a couple of years when your daughter’s old enough for it, we’ll buy her a copy of Katherine called Birdie before that

the track. Right. Right.

Fire. Bird in that

book. The so the book

that this is based on is a total hoot. It has much the same structure. Katherine is writing diarrhea basically cuts a deal with her mother where she can get out of her spitting if she keeps this book for her brother who is a monk. And I think, Sonny, you I actually grew with you on one point, which is that the movie modernizes it up a little bit too much. You know, in in the novel, you know, Katherine is, you know, sort of, run amok.

She, you know, she’s sort of a wild kid but a lot of her wildness is sort of class based rather than modern. Right? Like she wants to be able to act like a villager. She wants to be able to participate in, like, putting up huts and going to festivals and, you know, she sees that the rules are slightly different if you don’t have the kind of social position that she has. And in the book, you know, she is much more clearly, like, thinking about God and about you know, is like her anxiety about her mother’s repeated pregnancies is a little bit more of a plot line.

Although, I actually think that’s handled pretty nicely here in the

movie.

And in the mood, so the book’s ending, is much less sort of anachronistically modern than the movies. In the movie, her father and she’s like she gets betrothed, this, like, awful, ugly old guy and her father in the last minute, like, challenges him to a duel and she doesn’t have to marry him and everything’s fine. In the book, the guy she’s supposed to marry, gets killed in a tavern brawl. And she ends up like, heading off to marry his son instead. And so, you know, it sticks with the idea that, like, this young teenager is like going off to

get married.

She is lucky. And she’s sort of part of what’s interesting about the book is that she, like, accustomed herself to that fate. Right? She, you know, she makes the same deal where she gives into the marriage so her friend can marry her brother who she loves. But she at the end of the book, she’s like stops railing against her face.

She gives in she’s gonna be a lady. And it is more like, it’s more interesting in having her kind of compromise. Right? Like, it’s a more it takes you more effectively into sort of the the mental space of the era. That said, I think a lot of this is just delightful.

I think Bella Ramsey is great. She was wonderful on Game of Thrones. She’s just like she’s a she’s a a hoot of an actress. You know, her ability to play, like, the total outrage about, you know, the mistaken information she’s been given about like how babies happen is really

funny

and sweet. And I actually and I think the actors who play her parents are really nice together. I’ve like Billy Piper for a long time. I don’t know if either of you watched some of the more modern incarnations of doctor Who, but she played the doctor compassion for a while in there and it’s like wonderful. And, you know, she and Andrew Scott work really nicely together.

You know, I I I think this movie is interesting and it’s sort of rauness about childbirth, you know, for a movie that’s aimed at a YA audience. Right? Like, it’s and, you know, it is one of the only movies I’ve ever seen where someone, like, throws up while they’re in labor, which is actually something that happens a lot for those of you in the audience who have not had babies or been with people while they’re delivering babies. You know, it’s I mean, it’s blunt about these stillbirths and the impact that they have on Katherine. And that’s, you know, that is something that is just realistic.

Right? Like the you know, part of the reason that England has a church of England and is not Catholic is because Catherine of Aragon had, like, had a lot of stillbirths and that was something, you know, obstetric medicine was not good in twelve ninety. And so I think, you know, the movie is the I think the anachronism and heightening that was a mistake in the adaptation. But I think there’s just a lot of winning performances here and a sort of a small movie about, you know, someone rebelling against the faith that’s descending on her in part because she sees what it means in like a really emotionally and physically painful way in terms of her mother’s own experience. It’s just like it’s nicely observed and it’s often very nicely acted.

I do I I will say that I agree on the performances. On a performance level, this is this is all quite good. And Lord Rollow is played by who is he in the James the new James one, who is this? Is he c? I think the the MI the MI agent anyway, it doesn’t matter.

He’s he’s very good here as the British Scoot McNary. That that’s a good description.

Peter Peter, what

a what did you make of? This is also not for you, you know, you’re also a middle aged man of modernity. But you I think liked it a little bit more than me the stick in the mud. A lot more

actually. I I did not think I was going to enjoy this very much. And I really kinda did. It’s cute and it’s fun. It very surprisingly mirrors House of the Dragon.

It’s like with like I watched I watched this on the same day as I watched the ninth episode of House of Dragon. It’s like, wait, here’s two different treatments about a basically good dad who’s kinda out of touch, who’s just like, well, I’ve gotta get my daughter married in the middle ages, yay, one is in Westeros. It’s a fantasy land, but it’s it’s the Middle Ages. Right? It’s I gotta get my daughter married because that’s like how we’re gonna keep going as a family and as a country.

And like, that’s I I don’t actually care what she thinks. I mean, I do care what she thinks. But it’s it’s the same story except not unrelentingly brutal and grim and fewer dragons. Well,

I mean, that’s what Katherine called Birdie needed was more dragons, frankly. If if this had had at least three

more dragons, I think it would have been much more into it. And in some ways, I actually think this movie does a better job of handling questions of female agency, especially adolescent female agency in this sort of pre modern time, but obviously looked at through modern eyes that House of the Dragon does. And so if you if you watch the post show kinda interview that sort of recaps that HBO puts together after the credits of each episode. Of House of The Dragons! You can see the show runners talking about they’re often mostly they mostly they just sort of summarize what happened on the show.

But they do talk a little bit about their process and what they’re thinking in the big themes of the show, and it’s very clear that they view it as a fundamentally a feminist enterprise about the ways in which female agents females women are deprived of agency. Right? And in which they don’t have choices about what to do about their own lives because of patriarchal systems. And that’s also this. That is also exactly what Katherine Culberty is.

But Katherine called Birdie addresses this in a way that is both light. And I think does a better job of kind of giving us a protagonist who we can not just root for, but who who takes action? And her whole, right, like, she is just constantly making in her own little way. Right? Like, and I say little because she has she is constrained in her choice not because she’s a little person.

But but She is

a little person. Right? She have

also that. But, like,

in her right. But in her in her little

Fourteen year old girl

way, she is making choices and changing the outcome of her life by putting off all of these suitors with her ridiculous antics, with which Bella Ramsey just sells marvelously. And you can imagine those scenes, those scenes shouldn’t work actually. Like net like, they’re too cloying and too cute. And Baloramsi sells every single one of them. And there’s something So part of it part of it is Lena Dunham is just like a actually a good director and sort of think

about this particular Yes.

Part of it is that, like, one thing that that this movie does very well that I think could have gone very wrong is that it is ultimately quite empathetic to Andrew Scott’s character, the father, as well as to to Billy Piper’s lady as Island right to the mother and father, but in particular, to the father. The father is you could imagine a version of this in which the father is like actually you’re a really bad guy. Right? And we we see him as the one who is controlling her and like the the me And instead, we see him as somebody who just doesn’t get it, but does kinda love his daughter and cares about her. And in the end is here to start heroic.

And all of that keeps this

it keeps it it

it like kept my attention because it’s just sort of the individual bits are so good and the acting is is so strong. But it also allowed me to just like enjoy this on its own terms. And so this is where I think like I’m normally in your camp, Sunny, about like modern treatments of historical periods. And I just think it totally worked here. And in part, I think it totally worked because if you wanna make this story for younger viewers.

Under fifteen, it’s gonna be very very difficult to do it in a truly authentic way just because pre those pre modern ideas are so different from ours. But also because I don’t think that filmmakers and storytellers should be constrained by this sort of thing. And so what they’ve done is they’ve taken modern sensibility, totally modern. And applied it to to some of the circumstances and trappings of you know, this of the late twelve hundreds. And what they get out of that is this great little comedy that is about a character who you quickly come to care for.

And that’s that’s what made the movie work for me is, like, it cares about its characters. They all seem to be rounded and real. And it’s not mean it’s never mean spirited, like, for it’s just for the sake of being mean spirited.

And as a result, like

it gets at the like, I think it does a better job of handling some of these questions than, you know, sort of gloomier and more serious works do sometimes. And

it also I mean, that has a certain amount in common with turning red, which, you know, I think I also like to us in that. And what I appreciated about it What I appreciate about both of those movies and their treatment of female adolescents is that the characters feel believe believeably young. Right? Like, they’re they’re children on the cusp of transitioning into a different phase. You know, the movies are, like, their characters are, like, kind of, gross and silly.

They present desires like you know, a little bit, like but, you know, Catherine is not, like, drawing her hot uncle George as a Superman, but, like, you know, she when she shows up at her the Abby where her brother is a monk and it’s, like, there are all of these hot monks here and I’m confused. Right? Like, they present the onset of, like, desire and physical maturation. It’s like kind of overwhelming. It looks a little bit weird and gross.

That

scene is also great because the statue of Jesus is notably he’s like super buff and ritz. Right? Are they like, it’s not so it’s not so outlandish that you’re like, wow, they chose both Jesus. At the same time when you see her hanging on him and you’re like, Oh, no. This they they did choose both Jesus.

They just had to, like, the sense not to overemphasize it. Yeah. And then even later when you see in the notebook, this, like, a similar drawing, it’s, like, here’s Jesus on the cross with his awesome abs. It’s like, okay.

Yeah. And there I

mean, you know, rip, like, in the, you know, in the medieval era, like religious ecstasy was sort of one of the permissible outlets for sort of trans you know, transforming sexual feeling for women. Into this, you know, intense sense of worship. And so, yeah, it’s just

and they even do a

really nice job with the little characters. Like, you know, like her uncle George who, you know, not, you know, not a major character, you know, is mostly sort of this objective desire, both you know, for her and for Katherine and her friend. And then you, you know, you keep having these moments where Catherine comes to a level of higher understanding of people who she has formed these ideas about. Right? And so, you know, she ends up having this frank conversation with George about of his marriage and her options and the world.

And, you know, she kind of levels up and begins to see him less as a caricature and more as a person. Right? I mean, that scene where she sees her father intervene in this birth sequence. You know, in the book, you know, it’s this seismic moment because she’s just like she sees him be a hero. Right?

And she sees in a way she’s never been able to see before the relationship between her father and her mother as adults. And so the movie is very good at taking these moments, went, you know, she’s grumpy at her brother, and she’s like, wait, he’s my best friend. Like, she’s she is starting to see people as people instead of as characters in the story that she is telling about herself and the world around her. And

again, like, This just leads us to the

Sunny Bunch reading of this that we should have gotten instead of the grumpy version, which is this is a great movie about how the kind of drunk dad is actually

the hero. Yeah. And in the book, it plays the same way. Like, she you know, and in the book her father is more objectionable. Right?

Like, he is, you know, he is like a he’s a bigger, like, physical type. He is more violent and physically gross. Like, you know, she gets, like, hit a lot. In the book, you know, in a sort of like, there are just slaps as like ordinary discipline. And so seeing her father as the hero is like a it’s like an even more seismic event.

Right? Like, she perceives him as like in in the day new month there is less, you know, like, he gives her mother emotional support. It’s like he, like, bullies the doc and it’s like, I am not gonna let this woman die. And so what she has always understood as his Britishness, like, she sees Applied in a different way. And I think that both readings are actually quite compelling.

Yeah. Like, it

just, like, very funny. Maybe not is quite right, but, like, very interesting the way that mirrors a a pretty similar bit in the the pilot to house the dragon this year. Right? It’s the same thing except not gloomy and horrible. Yeah.

And

it’s, you know, it’s

Yeah. It’s

like I said, I mean, it this is an interesting movie in the way it depicts birth. In that it’s a movie for, like, for young teenage girls. It’s, like, actually, you know, gives

you more

of a sense of what the process is actually like than the standard TV. Like, I’m gonna push for five minutes and then there’s gonna be a baby. Like, birth is a protracted thing. It’s like physically gross. It requires like a lot of strength and and like your the, you know, the hormonal shifts and stuff were really weird.

And, like, I actually like seeing that realism in something for, you know, for teenagers, not because it’s like scare anybody off of, you know, messing around. But because it’s like, it trusts them to handle it. I think it’s nice.

Alright. So what do we

think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Katherine called Birdie Peter. I don’t know

that

I will watch this, you know, a dozen times again, but thumbs up. This is a good movie.

Alyssa. Thumbs up. Thumbs

down. Bad

movie. Alright. That’s it for this week’s show. Make sure to swing by a t m a dot bulworth dot com about this episode on Friday, make sure to tell you our friends, strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences and if we go grow, we will die. If you did not love today’s episode, please complain to me on, put your ads on a bunch.

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