Amelie with Hana Michels

Bonjour! After a trip to the discotheque, Jamie and Caitlin examine Amelie with special guest Hana Michels!

(This episode contains spoilers)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On the dol Cast, the questions asked if movies have
women and are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands
or do they happen individualism, the patriarchy, zef in best
start changing it with the Beck dol Cast. Hello there
but Bush, Welcome to Nope? No, well good? Can you start? Hi,

(00:31):
Welcome to the Beck dol Cas. My name is Caitlin O.
Caitlin Jimmy. I'm like, there's too many hard continents. I'm
not gonna do it. There's one hard count. This is
the best cost there's we gotta stop. We have to stop.

(00:56):
I think that it's good that we got it out
at the top because out of our system we don't
know how to do it. This is the Battel Cast.
We talk about the portrayal of women in movies. Let
me talk about the portrayal of French people, and maybe
specifically we all talk about Beauty and the Beast and
today's starring al. We use the Betel test as a

(01:19):
jumping off point to start a larger conversation about how
women are represented and treated and portrayed in cinema. The
cinema take there's that really good flight of the Conquered song.
And anyway, the reason we're talking about French people in

(01:42):
France so much is that we're talking about the movie Amily.
But before we get into it, let's introduce our guest,
who has been very patiently waiting, so sorry. She is
the co creator and co writer of Mom Presents. I
think these guys are hot stuff. Hanna Michaels, Hey here,
thanks for having me. I was having fun listening to that.

(02:05):
That's the name of the sign. Why does that come
up in that? There's there must be someone I forget
what happens that makes that song happen? Oh you know what,
I bet it is? I bet in New Zealand they
take French like we take Spanish like it's just obligatory.
So then there's those phrases that you just know and

(02:27):
nothing else, right, Yeah, that's why they keep saying BiblioTech
and disc atteche. Yeah. Well, anyway, so we're talking about Emily. Hannah,
when did you first see this movie? What is your
relationship to it? Tell us everything? What I realized when
I watched it again is I don't actually hate Emily.
I hate dudes who suggest I would like Amily. Okay,

(02:48):
I agree with that I did enjoy rewatching this movie.
I was kind of because sometimes when we revisit movies
that I've been attached to in my past, it's, I mean,
as it is for us all we have to take
a long, hard look at a movie we love and say, oh, no,
like this is shaped who I am in a way
that has had negative effects. I was ready for that

(03:09):
to happen for Emily, and I was not as disappointed
as I thought I would be. Yeah, yeah, same, same.
I My reaction to it the first time was really angry,
and then looking back, it's just like, oh, this is
my relationship with a dude who suggested that I watch it,
Like this is right? So you were projecting some maybe
negative feelings towards a specific man to the movie. I mean,

(03:30):
Emily is like, I guess, an anxious pixie dream girl
kind of. She's not like a yeah, she's not manic,
but she's romanticized for social anxiety in a lot of ways.
This movie does a lot of weird stuff with mental
illness where she's like, but okay, that was a choice. Yeah,
A lot of choices are made. Yeah yeah, yeah. There's

(03:52):
a lot of stalking in this movie. So a lot
of stalking, a lot of orchestrating of like very like
Rube old Berg, almost crazy things where you have to
go to this place and then to follow these arrows
to do this thing and then look through this thing
and did it. Was one of those things where there's
a few scenes especially and where I'm getting way ahead,
but like the you know, last third of this movie

(04:13):
is I'm only basically setting up this really demented obstacle
course to make some guy fell in love with her.
And the twist is it works. But but if you
score that movie a little bit differently, it's straight up
a murder film because she's like at pay phones wearing sunglasses,
and if there's like a little like no no no, no, no, no,
no no no, I was like, Oh, she's dangerous. She's
a scary lady. Okay. I do agree that there is

(04:35):
a specific kind of guy who will recommend this movie
to you, And I don't know exactly what it is
about them that bothers me, but I know that all
the music from my least favorite student film of all
time is ripped directly from Emily. Are you talking about
love Boccardi Boston? Of course I'm talking about Love Boccardi Boston.

(04:56):
It's online to all our listeners. You gotta watch Love
but already, Bosson. If you've dated me for over I
would say three weeks you've seen lave Paccardi Bosson. If
you haven't, it's available to you online. Uh, it's And
Caitlin because we've been dating for what a year and
a half now, Yeah, Caitlin has seen Lumbaccardi boss And
I think what twice one and a half one and

(05:17):
a half, Well, that can be resolved. But yeah, it's
like it's it's in a shitty student film that like
uses Emily's music in a very egregious, transparent, earnest way
that will make you just want to die. That's the
other thing I realized. It's not the movie, it's the
offshoots from Like, if there's no Emily, there's no Garden State.

(05:40):
If there's no Emily, there's no Travelocity gnome Um. Yeah, yeah,
that that tracks. It just created like a cultural moment
where it's like there's a lot of cool romantic ship,
but also there's a lot of romanticizing people who aren't people.
They're just idea, is right. I first saw the movie

(06:03):
I Want to say I was in college. This movie
also came out in two thousand and one, another two
thousand one joint. I saw it in college. I had
a friend recommended to me a woman as a matter
of fact, so not there was no man who was saying, well,
I watched this, like this movie, you should watch it,
um I had is how they all talked. Yeah, when

(06:27):
I went skiing, when did you? When I went to
Late Runner with me? I saw it probably around like
two thousand four five, a few years after it came out.
This is interesting because there's one of the few foreign films.
Is the first foreign movie we've done on the podcast.
It's one of the few foreign films that have crossed

(06:48):
over into mainstream American cinema in a pretty big way,
a big way. I meant to do more research on
sort of film cinema history. I'll go into this a
little bit later. I didn't do enough research, but I'll
just say what I know from the film classes I
took in college, where I did get one of two
degrees that I do have in film, the second one

(07:09):
being a master's degree in screenwriting from Boston. I don't
like to bring it up. I can't believe you made
me bring it up, but I did do that. So
I just it's out there now and now you know.
But I'm interested in exploring French cinema a bit and
why maybe this movie, unlike many other French films, was

(07:29):
able to sort of crossover into American mainstream cinema. Anyway. Yeah,
I saw it in college. I remember liking it enough
that I bought it on DVD and I was like, Oh,
what a fun, whimsical movie. And then I don't think
I watched it again, even though I did have it
very accessible to me on DVD because also brag, I

(07:51):
have a DVD player. Uh, there's no way around it.
But I did. I like it, just went on the shelf,
and then I haven't watched it again until yesterday. So
it shows you how much I cared about rewatching it.
I came to this movie, and I'm curious that how
many young women have this experience. I first became aware

(08:11):
of this movie on basically Tumbler and Tumbler adjacent websites.
I was like eight or nine when the movie came out,
so I wasn't I wasn't aware of it of French
cinema at that time. But fast forward a couple of
years when I was in high school. I do remember
seeing it. It It would pop up a lot. There's a
lot of screen caps I can remember clearly, specifically the

(08:34):
one where she says that I'm nobody's little weasel. Saw
that a million times on the primitive internet in my
old life journal where I wrote poetry. That's probably where, yeah,
like websites like that, because I'm like, this would have
been a little bit before Tumbler was big, because Tumbler
was really big when I was like in late high
school college. But stuff like that, where I had seen
so much of this movie, I'm like, this looks cute.

(08:55):
What's this? What's this? And then as finally I saw
it on TV and was like, oh my god, like
I really really really liked this movie in high school,
kind of forgot about it, and then rewatched it, I
would say, for the first time in at least five
years today, and it I was pleasantly surprised that there's
one specific plot point in this movie that I had

(09:18):
totally forgotten that I find very upsetting. But for the
most part, I'm like, oh, this is misguided in a
lot of ways, But given the fact that it's two
thousand and one. I was pleasantly surprised at how well
it held up for me. Yeah, it's cute. It's it's
a lot more cute than I'm giving it credit for
because of the dudes who are like, hey, your socially

(09:38):
anxious watch this. But yes, yes, but other than that, like,
it's a cute film with some ideas about love that
are not the greatest, but that's fine because we all
didn't have those. How did you first come across That's
part of why is I dated some dude in college
and I was older than you guys when I saw it,
which is probably another reason, um that I didn't as

(10:00):
much if I know what you mean, but you like
for the first time, right, I just want everyone to
know that I'm thirty one. My god. She's like Kyl's
like compulsively spouting information. She's like, I went to college,
this is my age. Please don't say her PIN number.

(10:21):
I'm having a stroke anyway, that's what you do catchphrase. Um.
I definitely think that if I had seen this movie
in college for the first time, I probably still would
have liked it. I don't think I would have been
as extremely attached to it as I was in high school,

(10:43):
because it's so easy to plug yourself into Emily and
be like, oh there is some sort of as well.
As long as you make an incredibly complicated and scary
plan to force someone to fall in love with you,
you can still be a little bit shy, which at
that time I was very responsive to that message. Sure,

(11:03):
as a fourteen year old girl with the back bace,
I was like, oh, hell yeah, we can pull this off. Yes,
he has a twenty three year old girl. I was like, No,
that doesn't work. I've tried it. I'll do the recap
of the story. We focus on a character named Amalie.
She is a French gal living in France. Ever heard

(11:24):
of it? Isn't she in Paris? I'm not sure, but
I would guess so. French listeners, those who have not
abandoned us, let us know where Emily takes place, if
it's in Paris or not also missed opportunity. No one
draws her like one of their French girls. Anyway, I
just had to shoehorn that Titanic reference in there, and

(11:46):
I am not sorry. God Almighty Emily is about a
young woman. We meet her as a child so part
of the story is that her dad doesn't hug her enough,
so she and he's a doctor, so whenever he gives
her a monthly check up, her heart beats so fast

(12:06):
that the excitement of him touching her that it makes
him think that she has a heart condition, and then
it affects her entire rest of her life because which
first of all means probably her dad's not a very
good doctor, or he's like, maybe I should get a
second opinion, like it's nuts, so he is. So they're like, well,

(12:27):
she has a heart condition, she can't go to school,
so she's homeschooled then, and like doesn't ever get to
be socialized out in the world really, so she's she
ends up being this kind of like isolated adult who's
very shy. She's socially awkward. She doesn't necessarily feel complete
as a person, and a three year old person would

(12:47):
feel this way, yes, but the way that they resolve
it for Emily is just like come on, right, because
so she's also like sort of take a night class,
Emily figure out. So this in his first to adulthood
where she's still but she has a job. Now, she's
out in the world. She's a waitress at a cafe,
but she's still kind of a loner. She doesn't relate

(13:08):
well with other people, and she's also sort of prone
to flights of fancies. She's a very whimsical Oh yeah,
her thing is She's like, I don't like sex, but
what I love is contaminating food with my hands. There's
all these tie shots of Omily just dip in her
paws into open bag, like that's someone's food. You can't

(13:30):
do that. They're the sexual politics of this movie, and well,
we can get into this later as well. The sexual
politics of this movie are very all over the place,
where it's for better or worse. It's usually pretty clear
where a movie falls on sex, of like whether it's
being demonized or whether it's being like very pro sex,
but this movie is kind of all over the place

(13:51):
where it's not it's not critical of Emily for not
being interested in sex, but there is something about the
way that sex is portrayed in this movie that does
feel a little bit I don't think prudish is the word,
but something adjacent to that. Well, we can like dig
into that, but yeah, the way that sex is treated
in this movie is weird and also I think is

(14:11):
something that I was very responsive to as a fourteen
year old in the back brace of like I don't
need to have sex. I can just you know, put
my hand in some of food and come that way
have orgasms from skipping rap, right, I mean, we we've
got the We've got This is like one of the
Hallmark like not like the other girls. Um yeah, sorry, continue.

(14:32):
So she's this, you know, kind of socially awkward, like
you sort of said, maybe not manic, but but the
HIXI dream girl in a sense. But don't worry, she's hot.
She's very cute. The story starts with her finding a
little box in her bathroom that a little boy had
left forty years earlier. It is like a period piece

(14:52):
to an extent, not a lot, not only a few
years removed from when it came out. But there is
this through line of the movie where it takes place
just as Princess Die passes away. You can't say die dies.
That's just makes it seem like you're making a joke,
which we would never Uh, it's not so Princess Night

(15:12):
passes away during this movie, And that was another I
was like, that was definitely a choice that I'm not
quite sure why that was the choice, but interesting, well,
it's a catalyst of her she finds out about this.
She drops like the lid to her perfume or something
like that. It rolls across the floor and un wedges
this like hiding spot basically where this little box was,

(15:35):
and she's she digs it out and she's like, oh,
it's this. This little boy left all of this little
like toys and tokens and treasures behind. So she's like,
I'm gonna find out who this belonged to. I'm going
to return it to him, and if he's moved by it,
I'm actually going to be a do gooder from now on.
So she sort of like takes on this project and
she starts to figure out who this person might be,

(15:55):
and in so doing, she runs into this man named Nino,
who also is a bit of a manage tricks tricksie man.
I would like half of the cast of this movie
is just like, yeah, this is a vague, cartoony wow,

(16:15):
Like I mean, it almost reads is a fairy tale.
This movie, to me, does there's that guy with hollow bones.
I did forget about all hollow bones anyway, So she
comes across this guy who's like rummaging around under this
photo booth in a subway station, and they kind of
make eyes at each other and they're like, Oh, this

(16:36):
guy comes back later because as she starts like doing
her do goodie, she comes in contact with him again
in this scene where he's trying to return something to
someone else, and then he loses a book and she
picks up this book, so she's like, I have to
return this book to him, and it's full of all
of these discarded photographs from the people have taken at
these photo booths. So he has this like hobby I

(16:58):
guess of like finding the he's thrown away ripped up photos,
putting him in a like a photo album. And then
he it makes him come. I don't know why he does,
so we have to they're hand in the basket of food,
the texture of the page. You're like, this book is

(17:18):
being come on all the time. Fine, right, So then
she sort of orchestrates this whole thing to get the
book back to him, but because she's so shy, she
can't actually meet him in real life. Meanwhile, he like
there's like hints that she's falling in love with him,
even though she doesn't know who he is or they've
never spoken. And then also he loves her back. You

(17:40):
see her like throbbing heart the second she sees him.
It's like I love it first sight, which automatically when
I was fourteen and I was like, but now I'm
just like like I'm gonna launch myself through a pane
of glass. Especially with that thing with her dad in
her heart earlier, that's just kind of like, oh, yeah,
I was like, that's a call back to your dad. Touched.

(18:02):
That's not good. That didn't even register for me, but yeah,
that's not good. Her her relationship with and that is
like another that's like something that is kind of I
feel like dropped in the movie where at the beginning
there's a lot of like I think if you saw
the first ten minutes of this movie, you would think
that this would be This movie would have a lot
to do with Emily's relationship to her father, because you

(18:24):
learned about Emily's father before you even learn about her.
You hear his whole life story. Then you hear a
little bit about her mom, not as much because it's
a movie. We can't be talking about women too much. Uh,
And then you hit the plot point where it's like
daddy never touched and again, the translation might be funky,
we don't know, but there was like a line that
was basically like like every six year old girl Emily

(18:46):
wanted to be hugged by her daddy more than anything
in the world. And that is like such a strongly
worded statement that you feel like it would come back more.
But the dad is kind of dropped in the movie
event like where she sees him a lot, it's clear
that he is socially weird and doesn't quite know how
to connect with her when she's an adult as well,

(19:07):
but it's it's not really like I was surprised that
they put so much emphasis on that, and at the
very beginning of the movie, and then he kind of
disappears from the narrative and is replaced with a different
older guy who's the artist, older guy m R. Which
which kind of reminded me of Shape of Water was

(19:28):
kind of I don't know, that was a similar relationship
of like, yeah, genue and artist who failing but has
lots of exposition to say. But anyways, Yeah, also, she
she has a dead mom, so she is like a
Disney princess this is a fairy tale. Mom dies in
a crazy way. I did laugh if I forgot that.
I forgot that her mom died like that because someone

(19:48):
is trying to commit suicide by jumping off a building
and lands on her mom, killing her mom. I think
she was successful in the suicide, but I don't think
she firs the suicidal fish. And now this it's there's
a lot of suicide in the first like ten minutes
of this movie, which again sort of we don't come
back to it. It's weird. It's a weird tonal start.

(20:09):
There's I mean, I think the film like I can't.
I just said film, Well, no, thank you, I have retired.
I just called it the film. But the visual consistency
in this movie is pretty much across the board, like
it's a very this whole movie was dipped in some
very ornate piss like it's a very yellowy movie. It's
a very Cepia romantic looking movie. But totally the story

(20:33):
is weird. You think it could be a movie about parents? Yeah,
because I mean there's this voiceover throughout the whole thing,
and it's like focusing on a lot of different things
that really don't have anything to do with the story,
all these subplots get introduced, where so the main plot,
which also doesn't even come up in the story until
maybe forty or forty five minutes in, where she needs

(20:55):
to return this photo album to this guy, so that
becomes the main plot where she's orchestrating ways to get
them to meet up again so that she can return it,
but she doesn't actually want to meet him because she
like returns it from Afar. And then like she's also
kind of chickening out because she's so shy that she
can't meet this person. And then she also orchestrates this

(21:15):
thing where she's gonna help him solve the mystery of
who this one particular person is in the photo album,
this bald guy who keeps popping up over and over
and it's like, who's this guy? And she helps him
figures out. So while all this is happening, she's also
helping some of her colleagues falling but helping people know.

(21:36):
She's interfering with people's lives, and she's breaking her friend
up with a scary criminal like that that's the thing
that okay, but you know what keep going. She also
like breaks and enters into this guy's house. Granted this
guy is very mean, but like she's like making key

(21:58):
copies so that she can go and his house and
funk with all of his ship and like I like that. Yeah,
And then she's like encouraging her dad via this garden
gnome to travel by like sending him she steals his
gnome and then sends him photos in other countries. So
she's yeah, she's basically just like trying to inspire people

(22:20):
to be like better people. But actually the twist is
she's not a complete person herself. Like she's fixing other
people's messes, but her own life is still a mess.
And don't worry. There's a heavy handed painting metaphor into that.
Maybe she's just here as some here are some things
that we say at the painting. Maybe she's just different.

(22:41):
She can't relate with other people. I just lost French.
She has an absolute right to mess up her life.
And then there's one point where All bird Bones is
like enough, It's like we have to stop talking at
this painting right now. There. Yeah, it's almost like an
Emma Ish austiny, like she's interfering a lot and not

(23:03):
dealing with her own problems. Is what it becomes, but
it takes a while for us to get there. For
I sort of forgot. I'm like, I forget exactly how
far into the movie she actually it takes her to
get the box to the guy, and it was sooner
than I thought. And then the objective of the movie
switches again to general meddling, and then at the end
it switches again to trapping me in a relationship with her.

(23:28):
So they're like, her objectives are always I mean, it's
always sort of too fill the void is I guess
the overarching thing. But yeah, like the specific objectives changes
a couple of different times. There's not a ton of consistency.
I will say that the scene I forgot that because
it used to make me cry in high school. But
it made me cry this sound too of when he

(23:49):
actually gets the box back, and like like that that
gets me every time. With the scene with the marbles,
well to launch us into the discussion, so the movie
with finally she's able to have a face to face
with this guy Nino, who she's been trying to connect with.
She catches him in a net. She pulls him into

(24:11):
her apartment and they start kissing, even though they've never
really spoken to each other, and then the next scene
is them like holding each other's naked bodies. So it
all worked out. They got together because she traps him
in her Venus fly trap and their in love. This
had a negative effect on how I my entire life.

(24:32):
So that's the end of the story and every and
they're happy now. They're so happy to launch us into
the discussion all of her objectives starting from like finding
whose box this belongs to helping her debt, like they're
all either to help a man or to help a
female friend of hers get at a man. Hard agree

(24:55):
with that there. I at one point I wrote, Emily
is a guys gal, and I think that that is
to an extent true. And it's not that she's ever
hostile or mean to the women in her life. She isn't.
But every character that we see her create a sustaining
bond with in this movie is a man, and that

(25:17):
you know, you can go to a character based She
was raised by her dad basically, but she seems to
connect easier with men. Where she hangs up with bird Bones,
she becomes very attached to Nino Nino. Nino Nino keep
saying exactly but like everyone we see her connect with

(25:39):
in a meaningful way is a man. Also Lucien. Lucien.
Lucien was my fucking favorite. I so adorable. So he's
the character who worked. He and this other guy or whatever,
the guy that she puts foot cream in his toothcaste, right, Yeah,
they worked. They worked together at a market it and

(26:00):
this older guy is very very mean to Lucien and
insults him and brates him and all this stuff. So
she Jame's rubbing up on your live so helps Lucien
by like basically publicly humiliating his boss, who's just like

(26:21):
really awful, who spirals into this like manic state and
becomes it seems like borderline suicidal. In one scene, Yeah,
I can tell you with certainty I have put foot
cream on my teeth and I'm not I don't need
help with that. He loses his ship. That's like he's
like someone's been in my home. And then he like

(26:42):
can't put his shoes on anymore, and he's vibrating and
he's calling the psychiatric Association, and it's just like, well,
that only happens because she plugs that number into his phone.
He doesn't deliberately call that number. Okay, she makes him
think that she's basically gaslighting him because she's making him
think that the most whimsical guest lighting really beautifully scored

(27:04):
according to music to this. But that is how she
approaches a lot of these situations where she goes. So
there's this guy, a regular at her cafe, who is
there to see one of her colleagues, Gina, because they
used to date. His character's name is Joseph, Joseph, and
he's got his eye on Gina. Meanwhile, Georgette, she works

(27:24):
at the tobacco counter. So Umily's like, what if I
set these two up instead? So she goes to Joseph
and she's like, can't you see how much Georgette is
like doing all this stuff to get She's not She's
just got like nasal spray. And then she goes to
Georgette and it is like, don't you see how much
Joseph is like always sitting so close to you? And

(27:46):
then they have sex in a public space in the
bathroom that's very loud, knocks all the glasses over and
the cadet sex and this movie is very loud. So yeah,
she's basically like manipulating everybody but it's it's okay because
she's helping them. That character Joseph is to me, and

(28:07):
I vaguely remember that, I didn't remember the specifics of
exactly how that story unfold. That part really that really
bugged me. Of like, he is actively stalking his ex
girlfriend every day. No one ever thinks to call someone
say hey, seems like this guy might be dangerous. He's
literally Uni bomber, carrying around a tape recorder and staring

(28:28):
at his ex girlfriend all day and people are kind
of mean to Gina about it, and they're like, well,
it just just tell him to go away. I'm like,
this is not on her. He's the one who has
seemingly left his job full time stalk her, and every
time she does anything, he's like, what are you doing?
What are you doing? Are you You're fucking him? Like
there's you know, which I'm just like, oh, jeez, I've

(28:50):
dated that guy. I mean, I've used to date a
guy who would show up in my work for my
whole shift and just be like just keeping an eye
on you. And it's like, no, uh, we're married now,
Uh you know, he's stalking her. And then Emily goes
over to him, and I'm like, oh, does she tell
him to funk off? Like that would be cool? But
she doesn't. She's like, oh, let me just hook you

(29:11):
up with my friend, this very stable guy who's always
harassing my coworker. Let me just hook him up with
my other coworker like that. I'm just like, then he
starts harassing her too, like they have sex, but then
they're like relationship goes sour, and then he's like doing
the same thing over again, which I'm glad at least
that Georgette gets the funk out of there, because I
was so worried that that would be like, yeah, the take,

(29:32):
because I forgot how that subplot ended. But it was like, oh, yeah,
she does. She does tell him to sunk off, and
then there's that interesting and I thought this was an
interesting um exchange between whoever that failed writer is who's
always at the cafe, Miss Susanne, who is the like
brassy bartender lady and Joseph. Georgette is like, I'm done,

(29:55):
funck off, goodbye, I've got to go, you know, raw
daga bottle of nasals, right or whatever. She does, But
there's Suzanne. She says women need air and then Joseph says,
you give women air, they blow you off, which is
like he's a feminist. But it was interesting to see,
Like I feel like that was the point where the

(30:18):
movie finally passed some decisive judgment on that character, because
before it was like, Oh, this guy's like quirky and
weird and we know he shouldn't be here, but maybe
he's just misguided and needs love. And it's like, no,
this guy needs help, like he needs to not training
orders filed against him to not be in this cafe,

(30:39):
but the movie seemed like weirdly tolerant of his pres
and so finally, by the end with that line, I
was like, Okay, good, now we can write him off
as like the movie thinks this guy sucks. I don't
know why it took so long to reach that conclusion,
because it seems pretty obvious from moment one. But I
don't think that that would have been obvious to me
the first time I saw this movie, because that's like
kind of just like an exaggerated cartooning version of like

(31:02):
the Chase narrative, like just hang out, Yeah, just hang out,
She's yours. This whole movie is a like on the
Chase narrative. There's a there's a scene with Nino in
the porn shop where he works, where he's talking about
how he loves Emilie because of the mystery, and there's
supposed to be that big contrast with the porn shop,
and it's just like, if you watch that as a team,

(31:24):
you're like, Yeah, the mystery is fucking great, And if
you watch that now, it's just like, no, fucking buy
me a vibrator. It's right. His colleague is actively like
putting price tags on her name. Her name is Eva,
and she is She basically only provides exposition. But I'm like,

(31:44):
I wanted what does she do? Like, yeah, can we
stop watching amily and watch whatever she's doing. She seems
to be enjoying her life. There are a lot of
female characters in this movie. There are, um the way
they were treated is all over the board. But the
characters that I found, and perhaps I've missed him, Emily,
Emily's mom, Georgette Madeleine, the land neighbor lady, who I

(32:09):
have some things to say, well, Gina, my dame, Suzanne,
the newsstand lady who does she have a name? I
never caught it, Okay, maybe because French. We didn't catch it,
but I couldn't find a name for her, but she
she's in a bunch of different scenes, the video girl Eva.
There's at one point a stripper named Samantha that Nino

(32:30):
tries to talk to, but she's busy dancing in a box.
It's the whole thing, and those are the ones that
I There's one more that I call Philmine, who is
the flight attendant who helps Yes Emily take pictures with
her dad's gnome in other parts of the world. Amazing, Yes,
but she is basically like she's a tertiary character, hardly

(32:53):
has anything to do with the story. Most of these
female characters exist in relay shintoman or their primary objective
or plot line has to do with getting a man,
which sucks a lot. Emily's plotline is all over the place,
but it eventually settles on getting a man. Georgette, she's

(33:16):
basically coerced into having a man and then leaves them,
which is like okay. Gina, who I really liked to
that and another character I felt was like under serviced.
Gina doesn't do anything wrong this entire movie. She's very nice,
she's very tolerant of Emily being a weirdo. But everyone
is kind of always like Gina is loose, and I'm like, no,

(33:37):
it's just because that guy Joseph's always saying are you
sleeping with him? Like she's not, she's and even if
she has leave her alone, Oh yeah, Okay, Madeleine Madeleine
the neighbor weird subplot, so she's I think one of
the first scenes in this movie that passes the Bactele
test is the scene between Emily. Spoiler alert it does test,

(33:58):
but the scene between Emily and Madeleine the neighbor. She's
always trying to figure out who this box belongs to,
and Malone's like, Hi, I'm Madeleine. My husband died forty
years ago and it ruined my life and I was
just like, whoa coming in hot. Yeah, she's still like
devastated by it and it concerns all of her energy.

(34:18):
But that's literally all we know about her, and we
don't see her for a while, or we see her
for like two seconds or whatever, and then at the
end we get like she she receives, you know, the
letter from the letter from her husband saying like I
love you and blah blah blah, and her the end
beat to her character, she like makes out with a
framed portrait of her dead husband, and I was like, like,

(34:41):
I don't know. That storyline confused me because didn't she
already have letters from him, which we learned early on.
She's like, yeah, but I don't think that they like
said as explicitly like I love you. I thought that
was what I thought. It's all about his day or what. No,
I see, Okay, yeah, it's it's supposed to be Emily

(35:03):
providing closure, but what it ends up is Emily keeping
the myth of this forty year dead guy alive for
this poor woe fueling the fire, yeah, like extended, especially
if fast forward like six months and Madeline finds out
the letter was fake. Oh yeah, that's going to result
in some serious psychological consequences. So that was That was

(35:28):
like one of the female characters that I felt was
like most disservice and just felt like not even underwritten,
but just like that was a choice that I don't
know without but that was a choice because there are
so many subplots that you think one of them might be, Oh,
Emily's helping this person reconnect with a friend or Emily's

(35:49):
helping she does kind of Again, do they not have
night classes in France? Do they not have paint nine
in France? There's plenty of things you can do with
your time that aren't actively sad lives of others in
a very tweet way. With banks, yeah, and helping people
and interfering with people's lives always as it relates to men.

(36:10):
So like I feel like she if she did want
to be this do good or who's helping people? Great,
So maybe volunteer at a food bank. Maybe like go
to an animal shelter and pet some dogs. Don't grab
the nearest blind person and starts shouting at them, and
she didn't even know where he was going. She just
leads him, like leave you here, and then he was

(36:31):
like where I am blind? I do want to point
out though, that speaking I mean animals, she does have
a cat, and that cat most likely has eight nipples.
This has been additor, subtracted, you know, only so full
of whimsy that she might have just an extra nipple.

(36:54):
She may have just amputated because she just made a
necklace of cat nipple and sold it on. Yeah, she
you know, I'm only it's just like if someone breathed
life into Etsy dot com. There she is. She is
et dot com. So I think he might be able
to write off the fact that so much of her

(37:15):
motivation and her decisions and actions are based around like
romantic pursuits, either for herself or helping other people, because again,
like this is sort of a fairy tale, so it's
going to be this like, oh, a romantic narrative with
all of these romantic subplots and stuff like that, but like,
I don't know, there's just it's also it doesn't have

(37:38):
to be exclusively that, because there's so many other characters
and so many other either like fully fledged subplots or
just sort of like story beats that relate to whatever character.
It could be her helping a fellow woman take her
driver's license tests, Like why is it always like, oh,
I have to help set you up with a man

(38:00):
in or I have to do It's always just it's
so focused on either helping men or helping women get men.
And if you can conceive of a suicidal fish, you
can probably come up with problems that are development. Yeah, exactly.
She has a great yardstick. She has a vivid imagination,
Like you would think that she'd be able to like
transcend just helping people find a boyfriend, right. Can we

(38:24):
talk about how especially with this story where she is
trying to get Nino and her to cross paths, but
not really because she keeps chickening out, but all the
measures that she goes through to orchestrate this is so
she like gets him to come to this park thing.
She calls a pay phone. He gets on the phone

(38:47):
and she's like, follow the blue arrows, and then he
runs and follows the arrows. I swear to God score
the scene differently, and it's fucking score crazy. It's like hate.
She's gonna kill him. She's wearing sunglasses. She's gonna kill him.
It's not good. Like it's just it's bad. Put that

(39:08):
on top. So he follows the arrows and then he
comes up to this man who is dressed as a
statue pointing at something. So she apparently paid a person
like a street performer to wait there waits in this economy,
I guess maybe there's a little bit postling boom. It

(39:29):
was a child too, Like a child is less terrifying
to you to talk to than this guy. Then she
also pays a kid to be like hey, make sure
you look at what the guy's pointing at. So she
pays someone to dress up as a statue and then
point at some binoculars, and then she apparently also pays
a kid to tell him where to look in case
she's an idiot, which she is, so then he runs

(39:49):
up and he looks through the binoculars, and then he
sees her returning his book. Then she figures out who
this mystery person is who keeps appearing in his photo album.
Turns out he's a repairman for these photo booths. So
she also want rather than just like meeting Nino and
saying like, hey, um, let's go for a drink, and
then on their day they say, hey, you know that

(40:10):
person that was like in all of your photos, that
bald guy. I actually figured out who he was. Um,
it's just the repairman. Instead of doing that, which would
have been so much easier, she orchestrates a whole other
thing where she deliberately breaks a photo booth and then
tells him where to go so that he can so
that a lot I will say, I just made some

(40:35):
connections to something that I recently did in my personal
life that could be perhaps trades back to no, because
you already know and it's really embarrassing. Okay, But like
all I had to say, if we are to look
at Emily as a movie that is directed at primarily
young women women, which I don't think it's unreasonable to say,

(40:56):
I think that that's the probably assumed who the movie
stuck with the most for sure, especially if it's like
shy young women. This is not a responsible blueprint to
present young women with. Uh, in terms of just like
you gotta do like it looks, you know, it's visually interesting,

(41:17):
shout out to the accordions, but the yeah, like saying like,
if you're a young woman who's uncomfortable approaching romantic partners,
that you should instead of gaslight them half to death,
destroying your own personal life in the process, and that
will achieve you a free ride on a moped like
that patently untrue, And and watching it unfold was it's

(41:41):
it's interesting because it is you know, that romantic subplot
is not subtle, but the way it unfolds is so
like there's so many red flags that we just blaze
past them. And because we love Emily and we love
Bangs uh, and so yeah, there are moments where I'm like,
we should the movie, you should be passing a little
bit of judgment on her right now, but it's ned's

(42:03):
never gonna happen. And again, I think you can chalk
this up to it being so whimsical and fairytale like
that you can't really take it that seriously. It's you know,
I think you're supposed to just walk away from this
being like, oh, what a fun fairytale like story. But
for young women who are watching this, who might not
make that connection because they're fourteen year old brains haven't

(42:24):
fully developed. They're gonna be like, wow, look how oh
my god love, and you're just supposed to like do
all these grand gestures and then a boy will like me.
And one, it's extremely heteronormative. Every relationship in this movie
is is always so extremely white movie. There's one okay,
there's one point where a lesbian hits on Emily and
she is terrified. Oh yeah yeah, And it's not even

(42:49):
that like she's being friendly. It's not like I feel like, yeah,
I feel like that. The way that that scene is
like filmed and like continually cutting back to a horrified
Audrey tend to like, yeah, because that is a pretty
innocuous interaction that could be interpreted as friendliness. But the way, yeah,

(43:10):
the way it's filmed is like, yeah, she's a gay
person in France and like, yeah, obviously idiot. Well then
so like, but I feel like this movie depicts Paris
the way that a lot of movies depict in New
York City, and it's like, oh, only white people here,
even though Paris is a very diverse city. Yes, so
it's craze. Like I just remember that scene in the

(43:31):
beginning where the voiceover the narration is like Emily likes
to amuse herself with silly questions like oh, I wonder
how many people are having orgasms right now? And then
it's like all these quick cuts of all the people
couples having sex. Yeah, I love a lot of ages
and body types, but all straight white couples, yes, And
I was just like, wow, so much diversity and Emily.

(43:54):
But the the use of narration in this movie quick,
because it's a lot of it bothers me. I think
that a very simple choice that could have been made.
Give us a female narrator. Why did the narrator of
this movie who talk about lazy writing, but like, why

(44:15):
why was it a man? Like, why is there a
man talking over half of this movie that is a
woman's story, because that makes it seem like it's coming
from a male perspective, even though the main character of
the story is a woman. That really bothered me on
this view because I forgot how much of it there
is is And again it's like a weird thing that
I'm like, did this At what point did this movie

(44:36):
change hands in terms of who wrote it? Because the
top half of this movie is so heavy in voiceover narration,
especially like the first half hour where there's not even
a lot of dialogue. There's like a set up through
the voiceover and then like two lines of dialogue to
punctuate the scene, and then we're onto the next thing,
but then it sort of goes away. I don't think

(44:58):
that's that unusual though, for any movie to have in
the beginning of the movie, when they're all the exposition
is basically happening, for there to be a lot of narration,
and then for that too, I agree, I agree, But
the thing that it was, I felt like it was
too much, especially because a lot of the exposition were
given at the beginning of the movie. Doesn't really have

(45:18):
a lot of bearing on the rest of the movie, like, yeah,
the first time minutes about her dad's touching of her
or the lack thereof which they really drill into you.
And then but why you know, but yeah, really simple
choice that could have been made. Give us a female
narrator would have made more sense. Yeah, the first thirty
minutes of this movie is kind of like a series

(45:40):
of Okay Cupid profiles. It's just like you're just like,
what questions were you asking it? Okay does ask those questions?
They never fu with okay Cupid. It was a big
okay Cupid head. There is a question on okay Cupid
that is is would you be okay with making dolphin

(46:02):
noises for your partner? Which, like, IM get any more specifics? Yeah,
I mean the person who wrote that question has a
dolphin noise thing, and that's fine, but that's very specifically.
That's just way too specific. I would do it in public,
but I wouldn't do it in a well, no one
asked me, But no one's ever asked me that question.

(46:25):
But if that were to come up, like I'll make
a dolphin noise and if we're at a Walmart, Well
back to a point I was trying to make it
never got there a while ago. I'm sorry, it's quite
all right. Oh my god, I probably distracted myself. Um,
you're all under arrest now, my god. But I was saying, like,

(46:46):
you can chalk this up to this movie being a
fairy tale, so like the depiction of romantic love isn't
going to be very realistic. But the fact that, like
you see these two characters fall in love without even
ever knowing each other's actually like very reminiscent of snow
White our recent episode on that movie where snow White
decides she likes Prince Charming even though their only interaction

(47:09):
had been him scaring her and her running away and
then singing right and then well like song I have
but one song, and then but then he also mysteriously

(47:31):
loves her, even though again they've never interacted hot. So
I just think it's irresponsible to keep making romantic stories
that are reminiscent of these fairy tales that depict romantic
love so horribly and like so unrealistically. It's like, why
do we keep doing this? Granted this was seventeen years

(47:51):
ago that this movie came out, but yeah, um, and ultimately.
I mean, something that does bug me about this movie
is that after all this where On only does grow
as a character outside of her romantic self, where she
does like learn to connect with people in a way
she hadn't before. She gets a little bit more confident

(48:12):
in herself, she's a little bit less shy, she you know,
has more like she does come into her own to
an extent. But then it just becomes like and because
she did all that, she has a boyfriend now and
making that seem like the end game of like working
on yourself is like fuck, like right where the truth

(48:37):
is the reward is you have to just keep doing
that forever. You have to work on yourself, and then
one day there's no more work to be done because
you've passed away. I think you can look at it
like that, and you can also look at it like
her pursuit of a man is what fixed her, Like
she she didn't bother to do any of this stuff
until she decided, oh, I have to try to meet

(49:00):
this man, and that's what is making me a whole
complete person exactly exactly. And then she's trying to do
that for other people to to various results, even though
they did not ask for her and did not want
to end it ends up fucking with them, like poor,
Who knows when Georgette is going to be able to
trust again. Honestly, I bet she's not on okay Cupid

(49:21):
right now. She deleted her profile. She's already a hypochondry.
Like he threw a very nervous person into a toxic situation,
knowingly not smart, not good. Uh. There's that exchange between
Georgette and the news stand lady where the news stand
lady says a woman without love whil it's like a

(49:42):
flower without sun. I was like, oh god, I'm I
feel ill feminist icon newstand lady. I just nodded so
vigorously my head. That was just I don't And that
was like like a number of topics in this movie.
I'm like, where does the movie actually fall on that?
It is unclear because for some characters it seems like,

(50:05):
oh fuck that. But then with Emily, you know, her
improvement is love, and so dudes in Emily's life seemed
to imply that at some point it will be quote
unquote too late for her. Chill. She's twenty three. Yeah,
Once they said, through some sort of expedition that she's
twenty three. I was like, oh, where are we wearing?

(50:25):
What's what's wrong? Bitch? On thirty one? There Caitlin's do
catchphrase bit. I wanted to explore I hinted at this earlier,
but why this movie might have been able to cross
over into American audiences whereas most foreign films don't. I

(50:48):
was like trying to remember what I learned about French cinema,
and I don't remember a lot, so apologies, and I
should have researched this more. What I do remember is
the main difference between a lot of American cinema and
a lot of foreign cinema in general, is that American
cinema is like very structured and formulaic, whereas a lot

(51:09):
of French and then just other cinema from other countries
that are not the US, those narratives, I think tend
to be not quite so structured and not quite so
like rigidly formulaic. So I think one of the reasons
that this movie was able to cross over. And then
it does resemble sort of like the love story fairy

(51:30):
tales and like the whimsical romance that American audiences love.
But again, I wish I had remembered more or read
more about it. So if you are a condosseur of
French cinema, feel free to tweet at us and let
me know what I'm sucking up about it. But yeah,
I just thought that was interesting that this is one
of the few non English speaking movies that crossed over. Yeah,

(51:55):
and it was a big hit. It had a ten
million dollar budget, grossed hundreds seven me four point two,
big old hit. So it wasn't a hit when it
came out. I think that perhaps uh and and I
truly know very little about international cinema. I'm not even
go in a hazard, I guess. But it was associated
with a company called Mila Max that I'm sure was

(52:20):
a feminist icon Mirramax femtassa on Harvey Weinstein and fantasy
on Bob Weinstein, you know, the whole bit. But I
think that that association and that this was like peak Mirramax,
like Chicago too. Thou two is about to come out,
baby that ship, so uh so I think that there
was probably some sort of push. But in terms of narrative, yeah,

(52:41):
I mean American people respond to unrealistic love stories all
the time, all the time, and also I think that
there is like, uh Francophile thing that factors into like
it's a it's a weird love hate relationship where people
my dad says Starbucks is French. But also I was
obsessed with Emily when I was a teenager personally because France,

(53:04):
because France. There's a there's a really great comedian in
New York named Ruby mccollist who has this great bit
about how obsessed teenage girls are with France because of
the romance that it implies, and like you know, like
the looping lid and the whole bit where I know
girls who dropped out of Spanish class and took French
because of this movie. Yeah like this, I mean, I

(53:29):
feel like French culture plus American teenage girls equals wet moisture.
That's what it boils down. Aristotle is gonna Killby's upset.
Can I just say that I wish that the insiding
incident instead of Princess Dies Death. I wish it had
been Emily seeing on the television a trailer for Titanic,

(53:55):
because that was that's what made her drop the thing,
and that's how she found the box. I think Princess
Dies Death was one of the first memories I ever
like clearly remember my mom weeping, yeah when that happened,
and my brother being there and a very tiny baby,

(54:16):
and he was probably weeping too because he was a baby,
not because he was a big fan of Princess. But
I'm interested in and I have truly no context. I
tried to do some research on what the motivation was
because this movie came out No. One. But it's set
in like the two weeks, and they give you the dates,
even like they repeating that they're repeating dates, and I

(54:39):
am not sure, like the way they talk about Princess Die.
There's one point where bird Bones gets piste off at
Lucienne and goes Princess d Princess Deep, and I'm just like,
why is he piste off about Princess Die? And like
does it have to do with like the death of
an icon? The death of a beautiful woman? I feel
like is referenced at one point where the news standlady

(55:01):
says something about like, oh, isn't it so sad she
was so beautiful and beautiful and then normally is like, oh,
what it would have been okay if she was old
and ugly? And then the new Standlady turns out it's
not a feminist icon because she's like, yeah, yeah, look
at mother Teresa, Like, is if like it? She looks
because she was old, right, she old, and she looks
like there is what she's saying. Yeah, I say, Mother

(55:24):
Teresa hot. Anyways, Yeah, that was That was something that
I totally forgot was a part of the narrative. But
it does. It comes up over and over. It is
the inciting incident of the movie to an extent, and
I couldn't exactly put my finger on why. I'd be
curious to know what the answer that is. Impair that

(55:44):
with like this artificial like clock that some people are
putting on Emily Like, yeah, it's I wonder if it's
something to do with that, And I don't know where.
It's like, oh, if you don't do something now with
your life, you might die in a car crash when
you're young. Yeah is that? Like I don't know. I
just like what they do. But also it's like, well
you better find a guy now when and that worked

(56:07):
out well for Princess Die. I don't know, it's it's
kind of all over the place. Now I have to
go home and watch a twelve hour documentary about Princess
Die Again done before I'll do it again. She's an
icon whatever great beanie baby loved the memorial Iconic Beanie Baby.

(56:29):
If only all of our lives could be boiled down
into one iconic beanie baby. I'm going to start designing
my memorial beanie baby. Now. Mine would be Paddington to
the Beanie Baby bear perfect. I don't even know. Mine
is just going to be a bean bag with a
little sad face and sharpiet. They remember those stuffed animals

(56:53):
that like, um, they're so big in the nineties. You
you open them up and there's a bunch of little
ones inside, So you're like performing a c section on
these stuffed animals? Am I making this up? I swear
to god? I remember, I don't remember expand the smell Crow.
What kind of animals was it? Like different dogs and

(57:14):
like unicorns, and you'd open them up and they're a
bunch of little ones inside. I said they were giving bird.
I guess, I don't know. I can really into a
couple of years ago, there were these these free app
games that I found just because I was like trolling
the app store, and they were like all these offbrand
app games where you can give a C section to,
like the characters in Frozen. There's some of the wild

(57:38):
I wonder if they're still online, because they were straight
up you were giving like what appeared to be a
pretty realistic C section where you would sedate Princess Elsa.
She's extremely pregnant. It's crazy. You can give a C
section to the snow man and a human white baby
boy comes out no matter what you do. Every you

(58:01):
give this no man a C section. He's pregnant with
a Caucasian man. It's the man the way we I'm sorry,
that's my memorial stuffed animal, though for sure, I want
my memorials to be an app where you could give
me but it looks very realist. If it turns out

(58:24):
this isn't not a memory and just something psychologically terrible
about me, no, I believe you. I swear everyone. If
anyone's still playing the Frozen C Section games at me
on Twitter. I forget the name of it. I'm afraid
of what will happen if I search Frozen C Section online,

(58:44):
so I'm not going to do that. But if you
remember the name of the game, I'm pretty sure it
was free I'm pretty sure that it was like one
of those apps where you could tell they had like
photoshopped a lot of like it looked too real. It
looked too and the baby comes out, baby covered in goop.
And then and then you gotta put a crown on
it because it's royalty. Because I checked out as soon

(59:05):
as you said frozen c section because that just sounds
like the aisle at the grocery store, where like the
frozen seafood is. This is gonna derail my fucking day.
I have I have things I have to do, and
now I just started playing the frozen c section game again.
All right, Well, let's get back on track and Emily,

(59:25):
is there any final thoughts anyone has about the movie?
As far as Emily as a character and her character development,
I think it's better than a lot of movies we
see because we at least have a very clear understanding
of what her personality is like. We know a lot
of her corks, we know a lot of her backstory.

(59:45):
We see her and her personality having an effect on
this story and having an effect on the decisions she
makes and how she approaches things. Um, A lot of
movies don't bother to develop their female characters enough for
we would see stuff like that. So I actually I
think her character development is better than a lot of

(01:00:06):
movies we've seen. But because the bar is so low,
that doesn't necessarily mean that the character development is superb, right,
But I think and it's and maybe this is like
it has to do with it not being cut and dry,
kind of boring American movie, that it is like what
we that we do see changes in Emily. We don't

(01:00:27):
see her go from flawed to unflawed, which for a
story about twenty three year old woman, makes sense. Like
at the end, she's not gonna be like I've figured
it out, I'm good. So in that way, it's like, okay, cool.
But but yeah, the way that the story, the place
they leave us with self improvement equals boyfriend, eventually it

(01:00:48):
just is like not good. Uh. We hinted that the
movie does pass the backdult test. She does have a
lot of conversations with the other female characters like Susan
and Jit and Gina. The first the first time I
noticed it passing was with her mom. Oh yes, because

(01:01:10):
she's teaching her some grammar lessons and stuff like that. Yes,
a lot of the conversations are about men or men
get mentioned in them. But because of our version of
the test where just has to be a two line
exchange between two women and a man is not mentioned,
there are several of those. Tons of the conversations in
this movie between women, Oh man will get mentioned, or

(01:01:33):
the whole conversation is about a man. So it does
not necessarily pass super handily if you're comparing conversations about
men to not. It was more isolated incident than I
would have thought. Yes, especially the movie with so many
women in it. At one point that Gina and Georgiette
leaning to have a conversation and Joseph speaks into his

(01:01:54):
tape recorder blatant female conspiracy, that was just like the
perfect en cap is right, Joseph. I mean, the Joseph
plotline for me is by far the worst part of
this movie. Yeah. God, I just hate especially when movies
are directed at teenage girls. I just feel like uber
sensitive to like, oh, you're just telling them all the

(01:02:14):
wrong things here, and it takes too long for the movie.
The past judgment on it bugs me. Yeah, I think
also the reason one of the reasons the movie doesn't
pass the test better is that we already touched on this,
but like she has female acquaintances and colleagues, but no
real female friendships that we see. All of her kind

(01:02:35):
of close friendships are either with the guy with brittle bones,
her pal Lucien at the market, her dad, Like all
of the more meaningful relationships she has are all with men.
So she's a guy gal. She's a guys gale. So
when she is talking to women, it's usually because she's
tricking them into thinking a random creep at the coffee

(01:02:57):
shop that they work at likes her. So that's frustrating.
So Emily holds up better than I would have thought.
I definitely think she could have benefited from a female friend.
I don't know exactly why we had to kill her
mom other than that's a funny, like the jokey way
that they kill her off. But it's like, Okay, that's

(01:03:20):
such huge consequences on the story that it's like that
can't just be like a random decision that's made and
it never really comes up again. Yeah, that doesn't pay,
Like that's never referenced after it just it just becomes like, well,
that's why there's no mom, and that's and her dad
is probably more introverted than he was before. Um shall

(01:03:41):
we rank, let's rank. Let's right. Um, we've got our
nipple scales your to five nipples. Based on its portrayal
of women, I'm gonna land somewhere around a two or
two and a half. Because it's a fairy tale. I
think that you could use that to excuse a lot
of the things that happen and a lot of the
choices that are made, such as the super unrealistic portrayal

(01:04:05):
of romantic relationships. But I'm tired of using that as
an excuse because it turns out fairy tales don't treat
women well, and fairy tales do not like prepare you
for a healthy life. Right. Remember that Disney Princess roast
we did where we realized both of our characters are
just horrible things happen to them, and they have no
We have no personality to build up. There's nothing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:04:27):
Because well because you were so and I was Cinderella,
and we were both at an extreme disadvantage we had
we had the oldest movies, so we had no personality. No,
we looked great though, Oh of course, that's what's important.
I'm sorry, it's it's all these fairy tales I took
in as a trial, right, So there's that. But she
does have she has agency, although she goes to very

(01:04:51):
extreme lengths to get what she wants. We didn't touch
on this that much, but I do want to just
acknowledge that I feel like mental illness is treated in
a very weird way in this movie, to the to
the point where I don't I wouldn't even know how
to approach that discussion because it's not spoken about at all.
But there's some like indications we see of it that
are sort of either dismissed as quirky or I don't

(01:05:14):
know there it was just like a very uncanny it
didn't I think that's why I had such a bad
reaction to it. Actually, know that you're saying that, like
people are simultaneously fetishizing and chastising Emily's mental illness. Yea,
And fucking dudes who would suggest you watch Emily will
probably do that like to you. Yeah, Yeah, that's I
think that's exactly why it's not really Emily that I

(01:05:36):
have a problem with. It's same way like a manic
pixie dream girl character. Fine, but that reflects on so
much exactly. Yeah, the people who are like drawn to
and exploit Like, yeah, it's not. That's why it becomes
the responsibility of filmmakers and storytellers that if you do
want to tell a story about a character like that,
you have to frame them in a way that like,

(01:05:59):
then you don't have these fucking idiots who are watching
this being like, oh I think you would look watching
because you like, is there responsibility to like responsibly frame
characters and frame mental illness and things like that so
that the viewer gets the right message right. And it
is like when I got when a guy does say,

(01:06:19):
oh you'd love Emily, they're making a specific comment about
how they view you, and it is not actually very complimented.
So as someone who has received a similar like oh
you probably would love that, I was like, um, fuck off,
my favorite movie is Doubt You Can. So, yeah, I

(01:06:41):
think I'm gonna I'm gonna go with a two nipple
rating because even though she her character development is decent,
all of her motivations and all of her friendships and
pretty much her entire world is centered around male characters,
and she is like interest it in self improvement or
maybe it's not even sure if she is or not.

(01:07:03):
That's what ends up happening, but it's hard to say
if that's an actual goal of hers. But that happens
because a man helps her get there, and then the
reward of her like fixing herself a little bit, is
a man. So I think not watching it through the
Bechtel cast lens, I think the movie does hold up
for a movie that came out in two thousand one

(01:07:24):
better than we expected, but when we are looking at
it through this lens, it's not great. So that's why
it's a two nipples from me. I'm going to give
my nipples. One goes to the cat, whose name we
never find out, so if she bigs to the cat,
it cannot pass the Bechtel test uh. And then the
other nipple, I'm gonna give it to Gina, Emily's colleague

(01:07:47):
in the cafe, because I think she was robbed a
bit by the narrative. More could have happened with her
she had. There's potential for that to be a better situation,
better character, better storyline, what have you. I guess I'll
go to as well, but we always go at the
same But it's but two does sound right for this,
which is always on the same page, which is so

(01:08:09):
in love, which is the reward we got for working
on our side. But yeah, I I'd give it to
as well because it's like with Emily, we do like
you're saying, she does make progress as a person. That
is nice to see. The progress is a result of
her own choices. For the most party, she does have

(01:08:30):
a lot of agency. I just think that this movie
is kind of harmful in that it can be used
as a blueprint. First, I'm not so healthy interpersonal behaviors
for young people. As a young person who did like
ape this behavior, Yeah, I don't like it. I don't
like the way that it treats mental illness. I don't
like the way it treats Gina. I'm going to give

(01:08:52):
one of my nippies to Lucien because I really love him,
and I'm going to give my other nippy to Prison's
die friends in Paradise. Two nipples great, I'm gonna bisect
a nipple right in half and give it two and
a half nipples. Yeah, I'm giving a one nipple too.

(01:09:12):
I think Gina to she she deserves better. She does.
People are endorsing her being stalked, which is just someone
in the comedy community not fun to watch. And then
there's that and then Eva cool definitely giving her a nipple,
and half nipple goes to Emily. Well, there you go, Gang,

(01:09:34):
we did it. We did France, the backt Cost Conquerors France. Hannah,
thank you so much for being here, Thank you for
having me. Where can people follow you online? What would
you like to plug? I would like to plug a
book I wrote with Alex Fere who loves Emily X.
But it's called mom Presents. I think these guys are

(01:09:56):
hot stuff and it's like kind of a cross between
um like a Christmas letter from a mom to her
daughter and Maxim magazine, or like a playgirl. It's so funny.
It was really fun to write. The reason we wrote
is because we were walking from a target and we
saw a guy who was just buying tissues and energy drinks,

(01:10:18):
and so we write about this guy and then it
just became a series of profiles of weird dudes. And
you can follow me on Twitter at Hannah Michael's which
is spelled h A n A m I c h
E l S. I'm on Google Herble. But good luck. Well,
we'll help people find you. Don't we'll help people find you,

(01:10:40):
and then they can show up at the cafe every
single day with their tape or corner. Hey. Hey. You
can follow the Batchel Cast on social media platforms such
as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You can go to our
website back toelcast dot com. You can tweet at us,
you can email us. You can buy our mer ur.

(01:11:00):
You can subscribe to our Patreon, which is five dollars
a month and it gets you two extra bonus episodes
that no one else can get unless you're a matron.
And you can ignore the harmful messages that movies like
Emily send out that you're just going to fall in
love with someone who you've never actually met or spoken with,
but because you're both a little whimsical, you're actually destined

(01:11:23):
to be together. Instead, I say you should become a
woman in STEMP by downloading the c section out and
you're basically assert and you're halfway there. Uh well, thanks
for being here, Hannah. I have a few surgery instinct's
o'clock and tonight, but thanks for listening. Gang