Weirdhouse Cinema: Deerskin

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Joe and guest host J.J. discuss Quentin Dupieux's 2019 film "Deerskin," starring Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hello, and welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is
Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert Lamb is out
today and so sitting in the guest co host chair
we have and I'm so excited to welcome him onto
the side of the mic for the first time. Our
longtime audio producer JJ Posway. Jj. How you doing? Man?

(00:34):
Hey doing pretty well? How are you, Joe? I'm doing great.
To be honest, actually I'm incredibly tired, but I'm not
but I think we're gonna have a great time today.
I'm truly, genuinely so excited for you to come on
the show. We've been talking about doing this for a
while and I'm glad we're doing it with a weird

(00:56):
House pick. So today on Weird House Cinema, we're going
to be talking about a movie that you selected, and
that is the twenty nineteen French black comedy Deer Skin,
directed by about to say a French name, Quentin Depew.
How's that yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:14):
I think that's probably about how I'm going to say
it too. It's okay, Quantin Depew, Quanton dep I'll probably
say Quentin Depew.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, in English, it looks like Quintin, so Quentin might
say Quentin Depew. So I had never seen a movie
by this filmmaker before. Obviously this is more recent than
a lot of the films we cover, but nothing wrong
with that. So what got you excited about Deer Skin?
What's your relationship with this movie?

Speaker 3 (01:40):
To be completely honest, it's when I only watched a
couple of weeks ago. I have a couple of friends
named Ian and Terrence who have watched most of Depew's movies,
and they started introducing me to his work, and at
this point of watched like five or six of them.
They're absurd and surreal. There are a lot of on coincidentally,

(02:02):
last week watching the movie incredible but true. I thought
one of his movies would make a good Weird House
Cinema episode, and I definitely recommend that one, but Deer
Skin kind of felt like the best fit for an
episode of Weird House.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, I'm glad you picked this one because I loved it.
I thought it was really weird and funny, just fantastic.
I liked the pathetic, understated sense of humor in it,
and yeah, kind of. It's the kind of absurd groove
that it gets into. I think you probably know what
I mean by this. The pacing of the increase in

(02:36):
absurdity is really exquisite here.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
It's slow but steady, and I think groove is the
right word. There is like a strange musicality to it.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah, not to It actually has good music in it. Oh,
It's not like a musical movie that's like dominated by
musical motifs, but it has like a few recurring things
like these ominous horns that come in, these little bleats
every now and then that are just kind of sound
like something's wrong. But sometimes it's just when it's a
guy looking in a mirror. Yeah, yeah, now, incredible but true.

(03:12):
That's another depew movie. That's the one with the robot penis.
We're not talking about that one.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, that one didn't seem right for the show, but
I do highly recommend that one. That one has a
little more of a like a sci fi thing going on,
if you could call it that. I think it's a
really good primer. But every movie I've seen of his
has been really great and pretty. He's got a consistent tone.

(03:38):
I read this letterboxed review of Incredible but True, and
it was actually a disparaging review. But the way they
started off I thought was pretty apt in calling Depew
a premise generator. Yeah, and I think he's really great
at these just absurd premises, setting them up and letting

(03:59):
them play out for usually like an hour and fifteen
minutes or so. They're not often long movies.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
So I guess we could go ahead and say what
the absurd premise of Deer Skin is? How would I
put it? I'd say it's about a kind of pathetic
middle aged man who goes through some sort of personal
crisis and becomes enamored of a new deer skin motorcycle
jacket that he paid too much money for. And as

(04:28):
his love affair with this jacket and how he looks
in it deepens, it goes to increasingly bizarre places, and
he eventually becomes a co conspirator with the jacket, and
they together decide that they must eliminate all other jacket
wearing phenomena from planet Earth, and this will be the
only jacket human duo that should be allowed to exist.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
I think that's a great summary.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Okay, now, having only seen this, depu film. I can
see how somebody might describe his style as premise generator,
because while the I think you could call this the
style of filmmaking like absurdist or absurd comedy, it's actually,

(05:13):
I think quite logical. It's just a very B follows,
a C follows, be kind of logical progression pursuing this
absurd premise where if you take the absurd premise on,
everything just kind of flows and it makes sense totally.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
There's a quote I want to share later that I
think Get said that same sentiment, and Yeah, what is
so fun about it is the just the slow ratcheting
up of that absurdity.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Another thing I want to establish here at the top.
It is hard not to see the main characters increasingly
bizarre and toxic relationship with his leather jacket as having
something to do with the way lonely people become obsessed
with things. And I feel like this is something I've

(06:07):
seen in my life has happened with people I know.
In fact, I can feel little threads of it in
myself at different times in my life, the way that
when you feel kind of alienated or you are lacking
in a rich, well entangled, you know, sense of human
connections and human networks. When you're lacking in friendship and

(06:30):
family life and stuff like that, it seems like maybe
you are more prone to find a new thing and
then make that thing your entire personality. This is like
all you know, I've discovered that. Now I'm into a
new hobby or a new artist that I like or
something like that, and that's literally all I can think

(06:53):
and talk about, and all subject matter is now I
now relate back to this thing.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah. I agree with that completely, and I think Depew
from what I've read, has a similar view.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Oh okay, well, maybe we'll get into that as we
go along. Elevator pitch. I guess I've already given the
straightforward description of what happens in the movie thematic Elevator pitches.
I'd say it's a film about loneliness, falsity, and authenticity, obsession,
and of course killer style, both in the earnest and

(07:27):
the ironic sense.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Absolutely. Yeah, all right, we're going to play a little
bit of the trailer audio.

Speaker 4 (07:51):
Well, now, j J.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
We we kind of had to put this episode together fast,
so I ended up streaming the movie. But you were
able to get ahold of a disc.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, I rented from Video Drome here in Atlanta. It's
also available on Apple and Amazon Prime.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Though now, as usual on a Weird House Cinema episode,
we're gonna end up discussing the plot in a lot
of detail. So if you haven't seen the movie and
you want to see Deer Skin without knowing everything in advance,
there are some fun surprises in it. Here is your
warning pause the episode. Here, go watch the movie first.
But if you think you'll never see it, or you

(09:18):
just don't care, if we describe the whole story in advance,
let's plow right on ahead. All right, Well, let's move
on and talk about the connections and discuss some of
the key people involved. I think you had some stuff
on Quinton Depew, the director writer also, I think yes, he's.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
The director, writer, cinematographer and editor. Depew's a French filmmaker
a musician. He makes music under the name mister Waso
and put out his first EP in nineteen ninety seven
via the label f Communications. A few years later, in
nineteen ninety nine, he'd released a single called flat Beat,
which was a hit in Europe. The music video for

(10:07):
Flatbeat was directed by De Pew himself and featured a
puppet named flat Eric. De Pew created Flat Eric with
Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and the puppet, as well as
the song flat Beat, were used in a series of
Levi's commercials that he directed.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
What kind of animal is he? He's like a yellow
dog but without ears, but with the like little beaty
bits of coal for eyes.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah, I'd say that's an app description. But also a
little guy.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, yeah, he's cutee. I mean is he cute or
is he cruel? And does he wish me harm?

Speaker 3 (10:48):
I feel like that exact intersection is where his music,
as mister Waso, at least the stuff I've listened to
seems to.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Live so I haven't listened to any mister Waso. What's
the what's the style of music? Like? How would you
describe it?

Speaker 3 (11:02):
It falls broadly under the umbrellas of like electro and house.
He makes electronic music, And I mean, I think you
put it best just in describing Flat Eric. There's like
a very playful sinisterness. There's like always a layer of humor.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Is it like in Deer Skin when there are those
scenes of George sharpening the fan blade to turn it
into a machete, but he's like playing with it. He's
playing with the with the watermelon and just having a
good time. It's like it's like a like a cute
having fun montage, but he's making a Jason Vorhees implement.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, yeah, kind of. I linked one of these Levi's
commercials that has a I think paints a pretty good
picture of flat Eric that features the song flat Beat.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
I'm gonna pull this up right now. Hold on, I
gotta order some jeans. No, it's good. It's like, I mean,
it's got that Oh, here's where I don't have the
correct terminology. It's got a kind of fuzzy, malfunctioning electronics
sound to the to the tones in there, there's something

(12:13):
that sounds like a like an incomplete connection in the wiring.
But also it's a little bit jaunty, you know. It's
it's like something you can nod your head to. It's
not like, you know, industrial downbeat kind of stuff. It's fun,
but but something sounds a little wrong.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a little distorted, and ultimately it's fun,
but there's just like a tinge of menace to it,
the most playful kind of menace.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Though, but also in this levice commercial, it's like a
guy driving with flat Eric the puppet. They get pulled
over by a cop and flat Eric quickly tries to
make his car look less threatening, so he like turns
around like a pin up picture, and just on the
other side, it's a picture of a horse in a meadow.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
So he's still active as mister Waso, and some of
his movies have featured his music under that name, and
he is always credited as mister Waso when he makes
music for his movies. His first movie, titled non Film,
was released in two thousand and one, but his breakthrough
movie was twenty ten's Rubber, a movie about assentient killer

(13:23):
tire with psychokinetic powers.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
So I've never seen Rubber. I had entirely the wrong
idea about what it was, though I'd seen the cover,
not the movie itself, and I assumed it was a
like self conscious ironic schlock comedy horror movie, something more
like Sharknado in like irony zone stuff. And now I

(13:48):
assume that's not really what it's like. It is probably
something a little bit closer to Deer Skin, but more
firmly in the absurd horror Vein.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
Yeah, I think it's somewhere in between. I definitely don't
think it's a full sort of Shark Nato situation. I
actually watched it last night just to get a good
sense of what that was, and it is closer to
Deer Skin than something like Shark Nato, though I do
feel like I kind of prefer where he goes after Rubber.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Okay, so that's not his peak. It's not all downhill
from there.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
At least, you know, in my opinion, But I think
that that's one that he's pretty well known for, and
it was the first of four films he'd make in America,
followed by twenty twelve's Wrong, twenty thirteen's Wrong Cops, and
twenty fourteen's Reality. He returned to France after the release
of Reality and put out his first film produced there
in twenty eighteen. He's been pretty prolific since, sometimes releasing

(14:50):
multiple movies a year, with his most recent at the
time of recording being The Piano Accident, which was just
released in France a couple weeks ago. The writer Savina
Petkova has a piece on Deer Skin from twenty twenty
one on the publication The Quietest that I think aptly
describes to Pew's appeal when she writes his films are

(15:10):
laden with characters, situations, and spoofs that produce a hypnogogic effect,
but the reality status is never questioned. Deer Skin represents
the opposite of skepticism in relation to the uncanny, a
film that gladly jumps on the bandwagon of unforeseen ideas
with an ease that resembles a dream.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah. I could agree with that there is something dream
like about it, but not in every way. One of
the we sort of got into this earlier. But one
of the ways I would say it is not like
a dream is that dreams often feel more random, like
just random new introduction of new elements, Whereas it seems

(15:52):
to me that once Deer Skin gets going, sort of
like I was saying earlier, everything just kind of follows logically.
If you buy into the initial dream, it's like a
real world that operates fully on the logic of physics
and cause and effect, and people behave in some ways normally,

(16:14):
except this real world was created by an absurdist demi
urge who is, like, you know, a man in a
jacket will decide that they must be the only man
in jacket that can be together.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Moving on to our protagonist.
Jean Dujardins plays George born nineteen seventy two, French actor
and comedian. Worked as a stand up comedian in France
and has been in many films as an actor. Some
of the most well known include The Artist from twenty eleven,

(16:46):
the comedic reboot of the French spy series OSS one
hundred and seventeen, and The Wolf of Wall Street. As George,
he portrays a bit of an idiot, but he's a
confident idiot, and that confidence mostly successfully carries him as
he reinvents himself around a new jacket on the fly.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yes, yeah, I like you flagging the confidence there and
how much it how much it works like. He's a
pathetic character, but a different kind of movie I think
would have more of everybody around him just treating him
as a fool and treating him with scorn and actually
he you know, he gets some pushback in skepticism, but

(17:25):
he also gets pretty far just on being a foolish, overconfident,
pathetic person.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah, he gets remarkably far. He gets remarkably little pushback
there's like one exception that isn't even really overt pushback
in that sort of sends him over the edge.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah, So I thought Douchardon was good in this role,
and I knew I recognized him from somewhere, but I
couldn't place it at first. I actually have not seen
the Artist I think he was. Did he win like
a Best Actor Oscar for that?

Speaker 3 (17:57):
Oh man, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, sorry, we just had to look this up. He
did win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his
role in The Artist from twenty eleven. Again, I have
not seen that one, but I realized what I knew
him from was that he is the corrupt Swiss banker
in Wolf of Wall Street. He's the guy who's like
trying to telepathically make make slimy deals with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
It's been a while since I've seen that one, so
I don't remember that. But he's great in this.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, he is. There is a there's a soft spoken,
matter of factus to the way that he resists anything
that challenges his delusions that is so good. One of
my favorite moments of the movie is when he's been
like doing stuff that's impossible to explain without getting more

(18:50):
into the plot first, but doing weird stuff that he's
like paying these actors to be in these bizarre scenes.
And one of the actors is like, this movie you're
making it's a bit weird. No, he says, it's not weird,
it's amazing. It's really good delivery on that line. It's
in French, but yeah, it comes through.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Yeah, agree completely. I love his delivery. I love his
whole demeanor in this movie. It really sells it.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yes, similar things I would say about the next actor
we're going to talk about, is this Adele nel Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Annelle born nineteen eighty nine is our second lead. She
made her film debut at the age of twelve in
the two thousand and two movie Le Diaba. In twenty fourteen,
she won the CESAR Award for Best Supporting Actress for
her role in the twenty thirteen movie Suzanne, and in
twenty nineteen she appeared in three movies, Deer Skin being

(19:46):
one of them and the other two being Heroes Don't
Die and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is
where I knew her from. She retired from the film
industry in twenty twenty three. Citing that the industry defended
a capital, patriarchal, racist, sexist world of structural inequality. She's
since been active in theater and as a political activist.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
Well respect her critique of the industry, both from within
and without, but I also I think she's so great here, Like,
I love the way that our empathy for this character
evolves as we come to understand her better. So like
the evolution goes something like when we first meet her.

(20:32):
In classic comedy terms, this character, Denise is what do
you call, like the feed or the straight character, the
comedic foil of the act's main buffoon, which is George. Here,
this kind of character is the stand in for the audience,
the normal person who is there to react skeptically to
the funny man's antics. And that is what she feels

(20:52):
like in the first few scenes with her. But then
as our main weirdo evolves to become more criminal, basically
more sinister, the drama shifts and she becomes the victim
of his lies and scams, and we feel a totally
different way about her. We start to feel pity for
her while he's like, you know, lying to her and

(21:14):
draining her bank account. And then she reveals that she
was actually always aware of the fact that he was
a fraud, and then she becomes part of the antics
and scams. In essence, she becomes the weirdo, and in fact,
maybe even weirder than the weirdo that came before. She
starts kind of trying to give orders, and so I
love that evolution. You feel like three totally different ways

(21:37):
about her as the movie goes on, and it's a
very seamless kind of transition. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
I love this too. I was reading an interview on
the publication Dazed that Depew did in support of Deer Skin,
and to quote that interview, Originally, Depew planned for Denise
to be down to earth every woman to counteract George's quirkiness. However,
Nnel insisted that Denise should adore blood and slaughter without

(22:05):
changing a line in the script. We decided that she's crazy,
the director says, and because she's an amazing actress, you
see it in her eyes. Suddenly every scene looks different,
and Jean looks stupid in front of her. She's evil
and he's just a kid.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
That's brilliant. Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
So, yeah, totally agree. The composer is Yanko Niovich. I
think that's how you pronounce it. As far as I
can tell. He was born in nineteen forty one. He
did the score. He's a prolific Paris based musician who
has released over thirty albums since the early nineteen sixties,
mostly library music, essentially work for higher albums made to

(22:47):
be easily licensed for productions. He's made music under a
variety of pseudonyms, one of which was Mad Unity. Under
the mad Unity name, he released one of his most
well regarded albums, Funky Tramway. I checked out the title
track of this one, and it definitely sounds like a
funky tramway. Flattering, it's frenetic, and then there's a bunch

(23:12):
of like wah guitar. You gotta check it. It's a
funky tramway for sure.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
His music has been sampled by artists like Jay Z,
Doctor Dre the Alchemist, and Freddie Gibbs and Schoolboy Q
to name a few. He seems to be sampled quite
a bit actually, and as of twenty twenty two, he's
still making new music. And I found news from twenty
twenty three of a documentary called The Sample Return of
Yanko Niovich. That's currently in production, I guess. According to

(23:45):
an interview Depew did with Dazed during Deerskin's post production,
he scrap plans to record an electronic soundtrack himself, saying
that quote to me, it's a dead serious movie. It's funny,
but not what we call it comedy. And actually I
never used funny comedy music or whatever. I decided to
only use music from the seventies to match the jacket.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Oh that's interesting, because yeah, the music in this movie, well,
first of all, there are some there's some great like
needle drops in it. In the closing credits, it uses
the song by Della Humphrey that I don't know if
I'd ever heard before, when Good Girls Go Bad. That
one's fantastic excellence.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
It's a great closing song. Yeah, I loved it.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
But also the original score for it, Yeah, it doesn't
sound like goofy dump de dump comedy music. It sounds
like something that could be in like a dark Michael
Chimino movie from the seventies or something.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
And finally, I wasn't able to find a ton of
info on her. But Jean le Barux, the production designer,
this is Depew's wife and the production designer on seemingly
all of his movies from twenty Twelve's Wrong onward and
according to an interview, I ran and she's the only
person he will run edits the movie by before finalizing them.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
All Right, you ready to talk about the plot? Ja, ja, Yeah,
let's do it cool. So I think we're going to
talk about a lot of like direct in scene texture
in this one, because that's a lot of where the
pleasure of the movie lies. So it starts off with
the cold open in like a big empty room that
looks like it could be a warehouse or parking garage.
And there are several young men and women. They stand

(25:38):
lined up behind a car with the car trunk hanging open,
and they're all holding piles of clothing in their arms.
And the first guy, sort of a guy with red
hair and a mustache, he looks straight into the camera
and he says, I swear never to wear a jacket
as long as I live. And then he's got this
stack of clothes in his arms. You realize they're all jackets.

(25:59):
He dumps the jackets into the car's trunk gets out
of the way. The next man in line steps up
to the car. He looks into the camera with a
kind of smirk, and he says the same thing, I
swear never to wear a jacket as long as I live. Dump.
A woman steps up from behind. She seems a little
less good humored than the first two guys. She dumps
in her pile of jackets and says the same thing,

(26:21):
though she has to be prompted by somebody off screen
to get the words right. And then a voice behind
the camera tells them to close the trunk. She slams
it and we cut to black. There's a good WTF opening.
Don't see that every day? And then the action reopens
on our protagonist, George. This is again is Jean dou
Chartin and he is a quiet, bearded man in his forties.

(26:45):
He's dressed in a corduroy blazer and a button up
shirt tucked into his pants. He's driving a sedan along
the highway in France by himself, somewhere in rural France,
and he passes toll stations. He stops for gas, and
at the service station where he's putting gas in the car,
he stares at his reflection in the window of his

(27:06):
car and it seems like he doesn't like the way
he looks. He's kind of pulling and adjusting at his
jacket to try to look better, but just doesn't seem happy.
So he goes to the bathroom at the service station,
where he takes off his blazer, wads it up, crams
it into the toilet, and then tries to flush it down.
Now this doesn't work. The toilet begins to overflow, and

(27:29):
he starts like stomping on it and the toilet bowl,
trying to jam it down the hole. But how's that
going to work. You're not even supposed to flush paper towels,
you know, Are you gonna get a blazer down there?
So it doesn't work. Everything's just flooding in the bathroom,
and he flees the scene in his car. So George
is on a journey. We see him sleeping in his
car overnight beside the highway, and then later he is

(27:52):
following a map, winding his way up these narrow, twisting
country roads, and eventually George comes to an old farmhouse
on a hillside. At the door, he rings the buzzer
and he announces that he's following up about an advertisement,
and an older man lets him inside inside this house,
it's rustic, a lot of simple varnished wood, and George

(28:16):
is here about a product that this guy has advertised
for sale. George says, he's very anxious to see the item.
So the old man goes and gets it out from
a chest, this big treasure chest looking thing in the
other room. And then the old man comes into the
room with George holding up this object like a highrafant

(28:37):
showing off the sacred relics. It is a leather jacket,
tawny brown. I'm not sure what you call this cut,
but his kind of motorcycle style with a wide collar
and a zipper in front. But it's the zipper's not
straight down the middle. It's a little offset to the side,
with big stripes of leather fringe in a V shape
across the chest, and then the fringe wrapping all the

(29:00):
way around the back. That I miss any important details, JJ,
I feel like we've got to describe the jacket.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
Right right, Yeah, No, I think that's a pretty good description.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Okay. The old man says, meet the beast, one hundred
percent deer skin, and George is obviously impressed. It's love
at first sight. The old man says that he wore
it for about a year, but then it went out
of style, so he put it away. He also says
that it made him itch a little bit. So George
takes the jacket, he looks at himself in the mirror,

(29:31):
He tries it on, looks in the mirror, and he
loves it. He makes an offer to the old man
and pays him in cash, and the old man is
very pleased. He's counting the money while George is admiring
himself in the mirror, and George is saying, look at yourself,
how elegant. And here I've got a question. I think

(29:53):
this is a serious question about the craft of the film.
Is the jacket actually supposed to look good on George?
As in, obviously he likes it, But is it supposed
to look good to us the audience. On one hand,
it's it's I think you could say it's a cool
looking jacket, but it is also ostentatious, like it has

(30:16):
all this fringe and stuff, and you know, the deerskin
element is obviously I don't know, maybe some people are
really into that or not, but it also looks kind
of short to me, like you can see a gap
between the jacket and the top of his pants, where
his button up shirt is just kind of sticking out
in a way that looks silly. Maybe that's just the

(30:36):
style of how you wear this, but I genuinely couldn't
tell whether the jacket is supposed to look cool on
George or not. It's sort of somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yeah. No, I agree, it looks a little goofy. He
loves the jacket, though he stands up, his mouth is
a gape in its presence and has to sit down
with his hand over his mouth, just overcome by its
beauty when he sees the fringe on the back and
speaking to whether or not the jacket looks good, I
guess to Pew tried like ten or twelve jackets on

(31:08):
John saying that quote. We loved that the jacket was
good looking, but too short. Something's wrong. Oh okay, Yeah,
I think it looks a little goofy. As I said,
I feel like he hasn't fully crossed into goofball territory yet,
which I'm excited for. I also want to point out
that he pays seventy five hundred euros for this jacket,

(31:29):
which today converts to roughly eight thousand, six hundred and
ninety one dollars, which is a steal, of course, exactly. Yes,
And we get a shot of a deer looking directly
into the camera before he puts on the jacket.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Okay, I think here's the way I would put it.
George is he doesn't look clownish in the jacket, but
he is not quite pulling it off. I think it's
the kind of jacket that like would look really cool
on somebody who usually looks really cool. You know. That's
it's kind of an unfair thing about fashion, right, Like

(32:05):
there are a lot of clothing items that look really
cool only on people for whom everything they wear looks cool.
And this jacket might be in that zone on George.
It is. It is definitely somewhere near the border of ridiculousness.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
Yeah, and I think it's funnier for that, Like if
it was over the top, it wouldn't have the same
sort of effect.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
Anyway. The old man is so happy with this deal
that George is. You know, George is like, here's seventy
five hundred euros for this old thing you're getting rid of.
He decides to give George an extra gift. It is
a digital video camera, and as he says, digital is
the best.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
You can't top digital.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Yeah, which is very confusing because admittedly I haven't used
a lot of digital video cameras, but I assume a
digital video camera means that you're like recording to a
memory card or chip or something. But then later in
the movie there's like a significant plot point about needing
cassettes for the video camera. So I don't know, I

(33:04):
didn't know what to make of any of that.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
We're gonna get into this. Oh, and he pulls the
camera out. I have a whole tangent to bring us
down perfect.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
I can't wait. I love it. Love a technology run
down in movie props. So George leaves and he checks
in at a nearby hotel, telling the clerk that he
plans to be there for a month. He has no money.
I think he spent all his money on the jacket,
and he says there is a problem with his credit card,
so he's going to get that sorted out the next day,

(33:35):
but in order to stay the first night, he takes
a gold ring off of his finger. I'm pretty sure
this is a wedding ring, and he leaves it with
the clerk as collateral, promising to pay the bill the
following day. And then George goes up to his room
and he oogles himself in the mirror, offering these quiet
little statements of commentary, sort of complimenting himself. He says

(33:59):
things like stoking killer style, it's it's really tender, you know,
he's it's I like these little, these little moments, especially
how quietly he says these things. And then after checking
into his room, we also see him leaning out of
his window playing around with the video camera he got,
like he's I think he starts focusing it up on

(34:20):
the mountain across the way from the hotel.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, and this movie is heavy on the beige in
the tan, and this hotel room is like maybe the
beigest thing of all, and it sort of mirrors the jacket.
I also want to point out that the wallpaper extends
into the shower. I'm not sure how normal that is.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Does this hotel room have a bathroom? There is the
showers in the corner of the room.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
That's a good question. It might just all be in
one room, Okay, Because you're right, the shower is just
in the corner.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
It's like a ned Flanders house that love built situation
where the toilet is in the kitchen. Maybe this I
don't I mean to make fun. Actually, I wonder if
this is something that's actually common in like some French
hotel rooms or something, maybe maybe in older buildings or
something like that.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. And this is
where George removes the almost new digital camquarder from its bag.
And I spent too long trying to find the exact
model camquarder this was, so I'm gonna go on that
brief tangent I was mentioning earlier for some reason I

(35:28):
needed to know, and I think it's a Sony DCR
PC one handycam. It's a mini DV camquarder and according
to the camquorder pedia wiki, sorry, it was introduced in
two thousand and one.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Oh so it's almost new.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
Is almost new perfect.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Most things are almost new if you think about it.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
And we talked off Mike earlier too about why this
digital camcorder uses little tapes. This came up when I
was watching with my friends Terrence and Ian as well.
So I'm going to offer a brief, very basic explanation
of the DV format because I went down a whole

(36:15):
rabbit hole to be able to talk about this camera
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Absolutely, fill me in, man, make it make sense.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
I'm going to try, Okay, I did some cursory research.
DV was a format developed by Sony and Panasonic that
was introduced in nineteen ninety five. DV tapes came in
a variety of sizes, the smallest of which many DV
being very popular. That's what we see in this movie.

(36:43):
DV tape store compressed video in glorious for ADP so
DVD quality, and uncompressed audio at sixteen bit forty eight
K when recorded in stereo, so that's higher than CD quality.
While it was mostly a consumer grade format, it was
also used professionally sometimes, and a notable example is that

(37:05):
David Lynch actually shot Inland Empire on the DV format
using a Sony DSR PD one F.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
I've actually never seen that Lynch movie. I've heard some
people who have seen it describe it as one of
his least accessible films.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
I'd agree with that, but I really love it. I
could not recommend it more.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Well, of course, I love David Lynch, So on your recommendation.
I'm gonna reprioritize Inland Empire. I'm gonna move it up
my list and try to see it sooner. But yeah,
i'd heard people say it's one of his less accessible movies,
and I think maybe i'd heard different things about the
way it looked. I know some people didn't love the
way that it looked or found it kind of murky

(37:48):
or something. And I not that I would really think
David Lynch would be a part of this wave. I
don't know, maybe, but I do remember there was sort
of a thing, wasn't there In like the early to
mid two thousands were more mainstream feature film directors were
experimenting with using digital formats. I remember associating this with

(38:11):
twenty eight Days Later, had a kind of digital look.
I don't know how that was actually shot.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
You know what, that one's also shot on DV.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Oh okay, cool? Well, yeah, I remember associating it with
that look and some other films of that time getting
into that thing. And I wonder how film like that
is sort of being evaluated in retrospect. I haven't read
that much about it, but I do know it can
have its own aesthetic virtues like there's another film actually

(38:40):
that I don't know what it was shot on, but
it has that digital look and I think it contributes
to the aesthetic effect of the film. And that is
one of the weirdest cop movies I've ever seen, The
Michael Man Miami Vice movie from what is it like
two thousand and six or something. Do you know what
I'm talking about?

Speaker 3 (38:59):
I do. I know that it has a lot of
a lot of people really love that movie.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
I saw it a few years back and was mesmerized
by it. I would call it the cop movie at
the End of the World. So in content, it is
a you know, it has a kind of dark romantic subplot,
but overall it's like a you know, drug busts and
raids and you know, cops and criminals kind of movie.

(39:26):
But there is something about it that feels so doomed
and uh and bleak, and like it takes place in
a world where where all happiness and meaning has been
lost and now all that there is left is is
cop and crime and and maybe and maybe there's there's

(39:46):
the illusion that there could be love, but but that's
really also doomed.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
It's it's a unique film. I would say it's not
what you think of when you think Miami Vice. At
least it's not what I imagined Miami Vice would be.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, I mean from watching Inland Empire, I can totally
see that, because I think the way Inland Empire looks
gives it that same sort of quality. I definitely think
it is augmented by looking like that, and I think
it was something David Lynch went into very deliberately.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Okay, well, I'm going to watch in lond Empire. But wait,
so we were getting into the technical details here. So
what's the deal with the tape? So it's digital, but
there are still tapes.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Yeah, sorry for the tangent to address the tapes. Tangent
to address the tapes. The video in the audio info
is store digitally. Put very very simply, the video and
audio information are converted to digital information, so a sequence
of ones and zeros, and that digital info is encoded

(40:50):
onto magnetic tape. When you play the tape back on
the camcorder or on a DV deck like we'll see
later in the film, that digital and is converted back
to video and audio.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
Okay, So maybe I just had the wrong idea of
what digital means. A recording in storage context totally.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
This was new to me too, though I think maybe
if you like live in camera world and you're more
involved in film, this might be a little less novel.
But I also thought this was pretty cool and I
started researching how exactly it works. But I got in
over my head pretty quickly, and while I have a
loose grasp of it involves magnets, I definitely don't understand

(41:32):
it well enough to explain it. So if you're a
listener who wants to elaborate on this or roast me
on my short explanation, I would love to hear about it,
and you can write in at contact at stuff to
blowermind dot com. But anyways, Yeah, it's a mini dvcamcorder,
so it is digital video, but it's stored on little
cassette tapes.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
Okay, so we're coming back to the plot. So, like
George has been playing with his dvcam quorder and then
he goes out walking in the evening and we hear
voiceover of a phone conversation between George and a woman.
The woman says, why are you calling? What's the point?
George says, to tell you, I'm far away. I left
it's done. Want to know where? And the woman says, no,

(42:20):
you're nowhere, George, you no longer exist. And then George
finishes the conversation standing outside a bar in the rain.
When it's over, he throws his cell phone into the
garbage can and goes inside. So he's done with the
cell phone. No more cell phone. And I think we
it seems pretty clear to me this is to imply

(42:40):
that George is at some kind of breaking point in
a relationship. I think this is his wife he's talking to,
and it's the end of their relationship for some reason
that it's not exactly explained. So at the bar we
meet a new character, Denise, the bartender, played by Adele
and l And this scene gets funny and so like
a lot of the humor in the movie, it's it's

(43:02):
understated humor, but so I'll describe it. Denise is speaking
with a patron at the other end of the bar
while George is having a whiskey by himself, and they're
talking about somebody they know. They're just kind of like saying, oh,
you know, can you believe he said that? No, what's
she going to do? You know? Standard kind of social

(43:22):
gossip and then George suddenly confronts them and says, you're
talking about my jacket, aren't you. I loved this, and
they act confused. They're like, no, we were not talking
about your jacket. And he's like, oh, sorry, people always
talk about it sometimes they stop me in the street.
I'm just used to getting it noticed. Sorry. And Denise

(43:45):
is kind of skeptical and she says, really, what do
they stop you to say about it? And he doesn't
really answer. He's just like, as you can see, it
is no ordinary jacket.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
He has like a slight pause where he looks a
little lost for a second before saying that.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, it's really good. So George, Denise and the other
lady start chatting. They ask him what he does for
a living. He thinks back to his video camera and
he says, oh, actually, I'm a filmmaker and I might
be working on a film while I'm here in this
little town. Yeah, that's the ticket, that's what it is.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah. They ask if he's shooting now and he says yeah, possibly,
totally possibly.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
And then in the next scene, George is walking home.
He's going back to the hotel and the bar, not Denise,
but the bar patron she was talking to pulls up
beside him in her car and she's like, you know, hey,
you know what, I used to act in porn twenty
years ago. She assumes he's a porn director, and he's like,
why would you assume that I don't make porn? And

(44:48):
she's like, well, you don't look like you work in
real film, and he says, I do work in real film,
don't you see my killer style? And she calls him
a loser and drives away. But back in his hotel room,
George is about to start working in real film. So
he's lying in bed, playing with the video camera, and

(45:08):
across the room from him, hanging on the back of
the chair where it will often be in these little scenes,
is the jacket, and he frames it with his camera
and he starts talking, and as he talks, there are
these little modulations of his voice, as if in different
sentences it might actually be different people talking, if you

(45:32):
know what I mean. His mouth is always moving, but
he's like doing little different voices. So he says, hey, you,
where are you from? I come from Italy. I come
from Italy. The jacket is Italian, by the way, it
comes from Italy. And then he says, that's good from Italy.
You're so classy. You look great on camera, and who

(45:53):
are you. I'm your new owner. I think we'll make
a nice team. I'm fine with being teammates, but I'm
the one in charge. Okay.

Speaker 4 (46:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
He takes a minute here to kind of figure out
what the Jacket's voice is. It starts off a little
higher and it slowly falls to a calmer place.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Oh, that's right. I didn't think about it that way,
but you're right. He's like experimenting. He's like, what does
the jacket sound like? And the jacket actually has a
different voice than George, though he's again his mouth is
always moving, so he's the one talking, but the voice
he does for the jacket is lower and more authoritative
and confident, self assured and decisive. Totally. So anyway, he

(46:36):
closes the camera and he says good night to the jacket,
goes to sleep, and then later that night there's a
little moment where there's like a loud crashing sound. George
comes out into the hall to investigate what was that,
but there's no answer, So we'll get follow up on
that later. So the next day we see George go
to the atm wearing his jacket, of course, and he
tries to get money out, but no money is forthcoming,

(46:57):
and he's very mad. He digs some food out of
a trash can and starts eating it while this boy
stands watching him from across the alley, and he yells
at the boy to get lost.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
Yeah. The boy's just looking at him completely blankly.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Doesn't say anything, just stands there, stonefaced. Yeah. And then
after this, George stops at a book shop. He checks
out a book about filmmaking, and then he shoplifts it
by stuffing it into his jacket. The jacket's just coming
through on all levels. And then next he goes to
the bank and he speaks to a worker there. He

(47:35):
finds out that he can't withdraw money from his bank
account because his wife has placed a security hold on
the account. This morning. This was I think, after he
withdrew seventy five hundred euros the day before to buy
the jacket, and George does not take this well. Back
at the hotel, he showers while talking to the jacket,
and the jacket is kind of watching him while he's

(47:56):
rinsing his body with the detachable shower head. And he's like,
don't worry, I'll find us some money. I'm going to
take care of us. And then later back at the
same bar as he was at the night before, George
talks with Denise the bartender. She is interested in what
kind of film work he's doing, because she herself is
an amateur film editor. She talks about how she enjoys

(48:19):
re editing other people's finished movies just for fun. For example,
she says she took pulp fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino
and put all the scenes in chronological order to discover
that it sucked. And there are plenty of things that
should be read flags about George in this conversation, like

(48:39):
he asks her if she has a special machine that
allows her to put the scenes of a film in order,
and she says no, she uses a computer like everyone else.
But she says that film editing is her passion and
she would love to do it for a living. So
here she is meeting an actual filmmaker, and she clearly

(49:00):
he sees an opportunity. I think she's so excited about
what this could mean for her that she's maybe just
looking past the red flags.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
I love the exchange of her saying I'd love to
do it as my real job, in George's response being
something along the lines of they really are amazing jobs.
For sure.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
There are a number of moments that are of really
good comedy where what happens is you would expect in
another script that George would come up with some kind
of funny bluff or lie, but what he actually does
is fail to come up with anything to say, so
he just says like, they are amazing jobs. So later
we see George walking home and arguing with himself or

(49:45):
maybe arguing with the jacket about whether he should should
have claimed to be a movie director or not. You
see him having some kind of you know, moral dissent
within himself. He's like, maybe I shouldn't be lying about this.
But then he he also defends himself to himself, saying,
a guy who films is like a guy who makes
a film. You could say here a filmmaker. Yeah. So,

(50:07):
back at his hotel room, George is trying to read
the book about filmmaking that he stole from the store,
but the Jacket hanging on the chair across the room
just keeps calling out to him. And again we can
see that whenever the jacket is speaking. George is the
one talking. He moves his own mouth, but he's giving
this different voice to the jacket, the deeper, more confident,

(50:28):
less emotional than his own voice is kind of more monotone,
and the jacket interrupts his reading to ask him, do
you want to know my greatest dream? Here we get
into the here the stews really cooking now. The Jacket's
greatest dream is to be the only jacket in the world.
I want us to be able to walk the streets

(50:49):
without seeing other jackets. Well, George confesses this is perfect
because his greatest dream is to be the only person
in the world who can wear a jacket, and the
Jacket asks, kind of ominously, how are we going to
realize this stream?

Speaker 3 (51:05):
George, Yeah, an ominous cut to a deer after, how
do you intend to realize this dream? I wish I
could convey His conversations with the jacket in words over
a podcast. They're just so goofy. He's trying to tell
the Jacket that they can talk later while he's reading,
but the jacket successfully gets him to talk right now,

(51:30):
and he like closes the book and tosses it aside.
In exasperation, like as if he has to stop reading
and listen to this jacket. Yes, as if he's not
completely in control of the entire situation.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Yeah, it's really good. Okay. So next thing is there's
a scene with George discussing his payment problems with the
hotel manager, and George finds out that the first clerk
he talked to, the guy the day before, the one
to whom he gave his gold wedding ring, has died.
He died by suicide two nights before. Bizarrely, the new

(52:04):
guy at the hotel desk tells George that the clerk's
body is being stored in one of the hotel rooms
until the undertaker arrives, and that the room is open
if George would like to go say goodbye. So George
goes to the room and the guy is laying there
with a giant bullet hole in his face. But George

(52:26):
gets fixated on something. He's not looking really at the
dead guy. He's looking at in the clerk's hands. There
is a hat. It's clasped over his midsection. It is
a wide brimmed Fedora style hat made of some kind
of leather swayed material and George pries the hat out
of the dead man's hands and investigates the tag on

(52:48):
the inside and it says one hundred percent deer skin,
and George goes ah bingo, and then he's trying it
on in the mirror. It's killer style, so he steals it.
He also takes his ring back. He has to like
use his mouth to get it off the dead guy's hand,
and then leaves the ring with the new hotel clerk

(53:08):
as collateral.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Once again, the scene with him putting on the hat
in the mirror just gets me every time. This is
where he crosses into total goofball territory. He looks like
a like a store brand Indiana Jones, and he just
looks so psyched about it.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Yeah. Killer style. So after getting the hat, he has
another meeting with Denise the bartender. He spins out some
lies to make it sound like he's in the middle
of a big, expensive production. He's like, oh, yeah, my producers,
they're stuck in Siberia filming the big fight scene and
I can't get they can't get cell reception. But he

(53:45):
tells her great news, I do not yet have an
editor for my film. Though he accidentally says creditor, and
I don't have a creditor. I don't know if there's
supposed to be some kind of double meaning there, But
she's like, do you mean editor? And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah,
you can have the job. She's very excited and agrees,
but doesn't he want to see her work first? No,

(54:06):
no need. He trusts her, but she does need to
take off her jacket, and she's immediately suspicious. She's like,
wait a minute, are you trying to get me to
strip or something? He promises or no, no, no, nothing
like that, nothing sexual. It's just very important to him
that he be the only person who gets to wear
a jacket.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
Yeah, it's as important to me as editing is to you, Bravo.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
And so she's suspicious, but she really wants this job,
so she agrees, and once the jacket is off, you
can see George relaxes. He kind of like settles down,
like okay, and he gives her something. It is a
cassette from his video camera. He tells her that it
is stuff for her to edit, and she's like, okay,
I need to copy the script though, and he's like, yeah,

(54:53):
we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that later. So
somebody stole my credit card, and next thing, they're in
an ATM and she's getting money out to loan him.
Of course, the producers will reimburse her once they get
cell phone reception again after they get off of the
glacier in Siberia. And then we see Denise at home
getting out some old video equipment, cassette reader and maybe

(55:14):
a digitizer of some kind.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
Yeah, I think that's right. She has to diget out
of a drawer. And I'm a little less sure on
this than the camera, but I think it's a Sony
gv HD seven hundred hdv video walk man. Yeah, it
seems to be like a VCR with a built in
screen that allows for some basic editing. I was going

(55:37):
to look a little more into this thing, but I
got totally sidetracked by the camera rabbit hole.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
So yeah, she starts reviewing his footage. She's seeing like
scenery of the mountain beside the village, shots of the
fringe on the deerskin jacket, George posing in the mirror
with the jacket, and Denise seems amused. George meanwhile, it's
time to go shopping shopping spree and what is he
going to get? Is he going to get some more

(56:02):
cassette tapes? No, he gets some deer skin boots, Killer style,
and it's time for an incredible montage. So with the
deerskin jacket, the deer skin hat, and the boots, George
starts filming scenes. He hires, He puts out ads, and
he hires local non actors to be in his movie.

(56:24):
He tells them to bring all the jackets they own,
and then he films them putting the jackets into the
trunk of his car and vowing never to wear a
jacket again as long as they live. This is what
we saw in the cold opening of the film, and
this is where we get that amazing exchange where one guy,
after doing this says, sorry, but isn't your movie weird?
And he says, it's ut weird, it's amazing.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Yeah, you can't make sense of it now, but it.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Rocks, But it rocks. And then once the scene is
over and the actors have been paid, George steals the jackets.
He just drives away with them while people are like, wait,
I need my need that back. So after one of
these shoots, George notices a kid watching him it's the
same kid who was staring at him while he was
eating out of the garbage can earlier, and George yells

(57:11):
at him to go away, but the kid just stands there,
stone faced, looking at him, and then getting really annoyed,
George picks up a rock and throws it at the kid,
hitting him in the face. Oh, and then also says
to the actor the jacket doner, who's just standing there,
He says, you saw nothing, and then George drives away.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
Yeah, this is kind of what I was referring to
before about there being one notable exception to people buying
his whole persona this kid that does not even really
seem to be questioning him as much as he's staring blankly,
and George is projecting something onto this kid.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
I feel like all of the other characters either they
buy into George enough and like they either kind of
play along with him, or they ignore him and move on.
His kid is the only person who doesn't do one
of those two things. This kid is continuing to engage
with George, but not by like playing along with him,

(58:15):
instead just by staring at him and making him feel weird.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
Yeah, I think that's a better way of putting it.
I agree.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Oh, but also the actor as George is driving away,
he's like, wait, what about my jackets? There in new
trunk and George says, you swore never to wear a
jacket again. I have filmed proof their mind now. I
think he says, your f to their mind now. And
then there's a there's a creepy scene outside a movie
theater I like this where he like pulls up alongside

(58:43):
a guy walking in the snow. He's filming the guy.
The guy's wearing a jacket. He's confused about what George
is doing, and then we cut away before we see
how it resolves. We'll see more of this scene later.
But then George meets back up with Denise at the bar,
and she has been editing film the stuff he already
gave her. I don't think this includes the new stuff,

(59:04):
all of the jacket theft and the pledges of never again.
It's the earlier tape. And she says she likes his movie.
She says it's like a mockumentary. So we get the
sense that maybe she's going along with it because she
thinks it's supposed to be funny, or she's interpreting it
in a different spirit than he is. But she does
say it's hard to figure out what to do with

(59:25):
the footage without a script, but she put it together
in a way that made sense to her, and she says,
this is just my interpretation, but the real subject of
the film is the jacket, or the fact that we
all hide behind a shell to protect ourselves from the world.
And he seems intrigued. He asks her, should that be
what it's about? Good question? Should that be what it's about?

(59:49):
And then next thing, they're like back at the ATM
and she's trying to withdraw more funds to give him,
but I think she's maxed out at this point. She
can't get more than like eighty euros. And he gets
angry and starts freaking out and eventually just says chow
and storms off into the night. So here's where things

(01:00:14):
are about to start getting darker. George later reviews the
footage he took of the man in the street by
the movie theater, and we see more of the conversation.
George starts badgering the man to take off his jacket,
the man refuses. They become increasingly hostile to each other
before the guy eventually says George will have to kill
him to make him do it, and then the filming
stops and in the room, the Jacket speaks to George.

(01:00:38):
The Jacket says, the plan is not working at this rate.
It's going to take a thousand years for us to
have the only jacket in the world. And George tries
to argue, He's like, our dream is not reasonable. There
are so many jackets it will take a lot of
time to accomplish. But the Jacket, after a long pause, says,
I know what we'll do, and George then began taking

(01:01:00):
apart the appliances. He disassembles the ceiling fan in his
hotel room and removes one of its blades, and then
goes out driving in the night, leaning out of the
door of his car, dragging the fan blade along the
road as he drives, and you can hear it grinding
and see it like shooting up sparks in the dark.
And I was like, wait, is he sharpening it? And yes,

(01:01:22):
in fact, that is exactly what he's doing. Next there
is like a there's a watermelon chopping scene where we
learned he has turned this fan blade into a deadly
machete and he drives around some more, eating the watermelon.
Eventually he finds a couple of guys standing outside talking
in the snow. He drives up to them, gets out,

(01:01:42):
approaches with his fan blade, and asks if they would
like to help him realize his dream. Then we cut away.
So here's where things sort of take a twist, because
next thing we see is Denise. She receives a letter
in her mailbox, along with a drawing of George in
the jacket, presumably by George.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
Yeah. They show this just sort of briefly, and I
love this drawing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Yeah, the letter goes Denise. Despite not having money, I
shot a scene tonight. By the sweat of my brow.
Enjoyed these images for they may be the last. I
think something awful must have happened in Siberia for the
producers to leave me with no news. I doubt I
can finish this film without the financing it deserves, unless,
of course, you can find a way to help. And

(01:02:26):
then he includes another cassette tape of himself. On this tape,
he has filmed himself going on a murder spree, whacking
people with his fan sword and then stealing the jackets
of the people He kills. Denise watches this footage and
she is thrilled. She's watching it there. Her eyes are big,
and she says to herself. Yes. So she comes to

(01:02:49):
his hotel room and she's like, you know, George, I
saw the new footage. It's wild. She says, I'm into it.
And before they discuss any further, he does make her
take off her jacket.

Speaker 3 (01:02:59):
Yeah, there's the room, he says, you know why.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
But she is now, She's now all in on his
film project. She's got an advance from her boss at
the bar, so she has more money now. She also
has brought a present for George, wrapped in newspaper. It
is a pair of one hundred percent deer skin pants
with fringes running down the leg. And George, he says,

(01:03:25):
damn classy. I love my life. Thanks.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
It sounds like a Facebook post somebody would make.

Speaker 3 (01:03:35):
I love that. She gives him the pants as an
apology for my card maxing out yesterday.

Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
Yeah. Yeah. So they go on to discuss the project,
and you know, for a while in the middle of
the movie here we've been thinking like, oh no, poor Denise,
like George is scamming her. Exploiting her, but the tables
are kind of turning. Denise is like, Okay, I think
I can get a lot more money soon, enough to
finance it's the whole movie. But she's like, George, I

(01:04:03):
need you to shoot more footage so that I can
edit a teaser. And then she starts giving him notes
on style. She's like, you got a position, the camera
closer to the subject, needs more action, more blood. Is
she giving the orders now? Yes, she is, and she
hands him some money and it seems like she may
be the boss of this film suddenly. So at this point,

(01:04:24):
George is Jason Vorhees. He goes out into the night
following random people, filming them, killing them with the fan blade,
chopping the heads in half, like stabbing them through the
guts and everything, and of course always stealing their jackets.
And he's like wearing a rain slicker, of course to
avoid getting blood on his deer skin. And there were
some funny music choices, I mean throughout the film, but

(01:04:45):
especially here. There's groovy lounge music in this montage where
he's whacking people with the machete, and eventually the jacket
starts talking at George while he's asleep. It's like saying
his name over and over as if it's impatient. He's
not moving fast enough.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Yeah, my friend Ian pointed this part out to me
is maybe secretly the funniest part of the movie, and
just the fact that George is either not waking up
or pretending to not wake up while he like voices
the Jacket trying to rouse him from his sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Oh yeah, it's earlier. It's like when he was doing
the voice of the Jacket trying to get his attention
to make him stop reading and he has to put
the book away. Yeah, so George, he's out with his camera.
There's another scene where he like directs a man who
operates an excavator and he makes this guy dig a

(01:05:36):
big hole in the ground. And I was thinking, what
is he going to bury a bunch of bodies in there? Nope,
he's gonna bury the jackets. He's gonna get rid of
all the jackets. His car is full of them. The
bodies he just leaves wherever. So oh, and also he
sort of beats and abuses the jackets before he covers
them with earth, Like he's beating one of the jackets
with a pipe, and then he covers them up with

(01:05:56):
earth and then he but there's kind of an interesting
moment after this where he leans over a rushing mountain
stream and drinks from the water like a wild animal,
like a deer. Yeah. So George meets with Denise yet again.
Now she's got a ton of cash. She says, her
father sold his butcher shop and now she's loaded. She

(01:06:17):
has fifty thousand euros and she announces that she is
officially taking over production. She's the producer. Now what can
he do about it? She's bringing the money. How can
he argue? She says he needs guidance in his work.
It's a mess, and she's going to have to instruct
him on the art of filmmaking. He's frustrated. He kind
of tries to resist, but he also just wants the money,

(01:06:40):
and she explains, look, the money is not for you,
it is for the film. This is business here, and
she says that in fact, she knows he's been lying
about being a filmmaker, lying about the producers in Siberia.
And there's a great cover here where he's like, I'm
not lying. They sent a fax this morning telling me
they had died in an avalanche. That's why I couldn't

(01:07:00):
reach them and I don't know. Something's not lighting up there.
They died, but they sent a fax and he says
we But she's known since the beginning that it was
all a fraud. And she says, you're nothing, no one,
no producers, just a guy alone. He points out that
she is in fact alone too, and then she says

(01:07:21):
everyone is alone. Oh good, come back. But she does
want to make a film, and that's what they're gonna do.
She says, we can be alone together and we can
make a great movie. Now. He tentatively agrees, but first
he needs to do something. He needs deer skin gloves,
so she's got to buy them for him. So the
next thing, they're like at a clothing shop and he's

(01:07:43):
trying on deer skin gloves in the mirror, getting all
hyped up, and Denise is encouraging him. She's like, yeah, yeah,
and the shop worker asks if he's interested maybe in
trying on some synthetic leather gloves. He says, do I
look like the synthetic type? Denise says, don't you see
his killers style? So next George and Denise, he's like
fully suited now head to toe deer skin, and they

(01:08:07):
go out driving on the mountain roads and George he
stops at one point along the highway and gives the
camera to Denise and tells her to film him. So
he climbs up on a hill beside the highway and
dances around, showing off his glorious head to toe deer
skin outfit and saying over and over again for Denise

(01:08:28):
to film him. And then suddenly, from out of nowhere,
a shot rings out and George falls over dead. He's
been hitting the head by a bullet. And we see
from far away a man holding a rifle who shot George.
It was the father of the boy who George hit
with the rock the other day. The boy is in
the car with like a bandage on his head.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
And he's sitting there eating a sandwich.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
I didn't notice the sandwich. I should go back and
look for that. Yeah, eating a sandwich at the execution. Yeah,
But anyway, so George gets hit with the bullet. He
falls down and Denise keeps filming. She approaches George's body
and begins to take off his deer skin. She takes
off the gloves and the jacket, filming the whole time

(01:09:13):
then she puts the jacket on herself and looks into
the camera and it's, you know, there's a transformation. It's
like I am deer skin now. And that's the end
of the main actions. She dons the deer skin, we
get the credits. There is a post credits scene where
we see video footage playing on a TV screen and
it shows a herd of deer wandering on a ridge

(01:09:34):
in the woods, and then the camera turns back and
we see George is holding it. But after this we
go to the closing credits music, which is a great
needle drop of I can't remember if we mentioned this
already on Mike, but it's a wonderful song that I
was not familiar with before, called Don't Make the Good
Girls Go Bad by Della Humphrey. It's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
I really enjoyed this too, And I wasn't sure how
to exactly how to take that post credit scene. He's
also sort of like either pointing or reaching back towards
the deer.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know exactly what to make of
it either. I mean, if it's like he was so
he's putting on these deer skinned products, so in one sense,
he's putting on a deer suit, but you could also
it's always like he's becoming a deer, but you could
also think that he's consuming deer. I mean, like deer
have to be killed to make these products, and so

(01:10:27):
he is. You know, he could be looking at them
in a predatory way, like he wants to harvest all
of their skin and wear it all. Or if I
don't know, I don't know what the sense of identification
there is it a predatory gaze and a gaze of
identification and becoming like I wouldn't be you. I'm not
quite sure what is it George wants is? It seems

(01:10:51):
to me what he wants. You know, you could imagine
versions of this story that have a more mature and
meaningful and identifiable sense of longing, you know, people who
want kind of freedom, or people in middle age who
are unhappy with their choices and want another chance at
life and things like that. So maybe you can see

(01:11:13):
little flashes of that here and there in George. But
it seems like the main thing he wants is killer style.
He wants to be He wants to look cool and
be seen as cool, and there is a fundamental kind
of childishness and like boyish immaturity to him.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
Yeah, he makes a lot of Jacket first decisions. Was
the way I kept thinking about it, Like, I agree
with you that, and I feel like I started off
maybe even the first or second time I watched this movie.
I watched it a couple times just to prepare for this,
But on my initial viewing of it, I think I
read a little more into it, and I saw it

(01:11:54):
as something more akin to this person obsessed with like
the identity of being a filmmaker or an artist over
the substance of actually doing that art or that filmmaking.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
Oh yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 (01:12:13):
And when he does start to do some of the work,
he likes to do the stuff that will reinforce his
identity as Jacket where exactly all jacket first decisions.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
I can see what you're saying there, Yeah, there are.
I mean, people have vocational or artistic dreams for themselves
or is like I want to be a filmmaker, I
want to be an artist or a writer or you know,
a musician or something like that. And I think a
lot of those desires really can be decomposed into very

(01:12:47):
different kinds of desires. Like somebody who wants to be
a musician. Could be somebody who loves the act of
like playing and writing music. They like being in the process.
It's like the doing that they're excited about. Or somebody
could be like, I want to be a musician because
I want to be up on stage and look cool

(01:13:08):
and have people think I'm cool. And you know, I
want to have my identity associated with the things that
I associate with being a musician. And those are like
different desires. And I'm sure that in you know, many people,
they can sort of intermingle in different ad mixtures, like
very different amounts. But I think you're exactly right that

(01:13:28):
there's something in here about that that like he he
does get very hung up on this idea of being
a filmmaker. But like like Denise points out, like he
doesn't he doesn't seem to be paying any attention to style.
Like he's not paying attention to the art of filmmaking
and doesn't seem to care much about it. It's more
about being able to say he's a filmmaker in service

(01:13:52):
of being the coolest looking guy in the world, the
only guy in the world who can wear this jacket.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Right, I mean, the whole reason he even says he's
as a filmmakers. It's the first thing he thinks of
when he's put in a situation where he has to
justify why he's wearing the jacket.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
Yes, yeah, you know. By contrast, it seems like Denise
really does love the doing of the filmmaking, Like when
she's talking about enjoying being an editor, it sounds like
she likes being in the process, even if it is
not necessarily a great end product, like she talks about
how much she liked re editing pulp fiction when she
says the final product sucked, right, yeah, yeah, And one

(01:14:31):
more thing before we wrap up, I wanted to come
back to it. Does seem also like something here is
about an interaction between these these pursuits and loneliness. Right.
I think we talked about this at the beginning, that
Denise and George both seem like characters who aren't not
having fulfilling, functional relationships. They're both they both seem like

(01:14:53):
loners or lonely people in a way, and not necessarily
by choice. And it does seem like that is contributing
to or manifesting in some way as these bizarre obsessions
that end up kind of blossoming into aberrant behavior.

Speaker 3 (01:15:10):
Yeah, totally. And to Pew himself said that we're all
a little bit George. Any of us can have that
moment where something snaps and everything collapses into obsession.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Okay, does that do it for deer Skin?

Speaker 3 (01:15:24):
I think so.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
Jj. I really hope you have enjoyed your first turn
on Mike on Weird House Cinema, and I hope you'll
do it again in the future.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
Yeah, for sure. Is fun talking about this movie with you.

Speaker 2 (01:15:34):
Absolutely, I'm glad you picked it. I don't know if
I would have seen it otherwise, but it's a hit.
All right. Well, I guess that does it. So Hey,
if you are new to the show, let me explain
a little bit about what we do here. So our
main show is Stuff to Blow your mind. That is
our core science and culture show, where most episodes have

(01:15:55):
something to do with science, but we also have a
kind of interdisciplinary approach. We like to talk about history, mythology,
and religion, literature and things like that, and those are
our Tuesday Thursday episodes. Every week on Fridays we do
this show Weird House Cinema. We're usually my co host
Rob Lamb and I just talk about a weird movie,

(01:16:15):
and they can. These movies can be old or new,
good or bad, well known or obscure. The only real
criterion is that it has to be weird. So we
do these every Fridays. On Wednesdays, we do a short
form episode on Saturdays, and Mondays we feature older episodes
of the show. So yeah, if you're new, stick around,
listen to some more, and of course subscribe wherever you

(01:16:38):
get your podcasts. You can also if you would like
to get just the Weird House Cinema episodes by themselves,
without everything else, you can look up Weird House Cinema
and I think you can subscribe to that as its
own playlist or feed. Though of course I encourage you
to check out all of our offerings. If you want
to follow us on social media, we're on some of
those I think we're on I think I think we've

(01:17:01):
been building up a new Instagram page after we got
somehow locked out of our old one a while back.
We're on some of the other socials you can find
us on Letterboxed. Letterboxed is a sort of community film
sharing site. You can find us there under Weird House
and Let's see I guess that's it for now, so

(01:17:22):
JJ thanks once again, thanks as always for being our
excellent audio producer, but double thanks today for joining me
on Mike. I really really appreciate it and I had
a great time talking to you and let's see. Oh
last thing, of course, if you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact

(01:17:44):
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:17:53):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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