G.I. Jane with Rhiannon Hamam

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
On the Bechdel Cast.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
The questions asked if movies have women in them, are
all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they
have individualism? It's the patriarchy. Zephy and Beast start changing
with the Bechdel Cast.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hey, Caitlyn, Hey Jamie.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Have you ever wanted to watch a movie that's sort
of like Mulan but without literally anything that made it fun?

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I can't say that I have wanted that too bad?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Do I have the movie for you? Is it g
I Jane? It's with deepest regrets, it's g I Jane. Wow,
there's what I mean there? What is this movie if
not the be a Man thing over and over and over,
but with a soundtrack that is completely dissonant with what

(00:49):
is happening on screen. This, I mean, this is a
small nitpick to start with, but the soundtrack to this movie.
I have a theory as to why it is the
way it is, but it's it's fun weird. Ridley Scott
is so all over the place. He really is what
goes through this man's head? But the why is why
is the pretenders in G I Jane? Like? Can we

(01:10):
leave them out of it? I don't like that the
pretender that Chrissy Hind got like G I Jane Dollar Anyways, anyways, there.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
The feel like making love.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Honestly, why is that there? That's why Vigo morton'sage accent,
Vigo Morton's in shorts. Why are so? And this this
is the this is the petty complaint Runk. There's also
I mean, but like, okay, Chrissy Hind, Randy Newman, Mozart,
even Mozart's catching a stray by appearing in G. I.

(01:42):
Jane Like, it's just you just hate to see you
hate to see it. Welcome to the Bechdel Cast. I
guess we were gonna have to cover this one eventually,
weren't we.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
We were.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
My name is Jamie, my name is Caitlin. This is
our show where we examine movies through an intern sectional
feminist lens, using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping
off point. That is a media metric, many different versions.
I'm just gonna breeze through this today because there's so
much to talk about.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
I know, it's like, but it is, I mean, it's this,
this movie is slippery in a way that like does
it pass the Bechdel Test? Sure, but at what cost? Exactly?

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Exactly, so many different versions of the test. The one
that we use is do two characters of a marginalized
gender have names? Do they speak to each other? And
is there conversation about something other than a man? And
we ideally like it when it's a narratively meaningful conversation,
which in this case, sure it's narratively meaningful, but is

(02:47):
the narrative at what jingoistic bullshit?

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yes, it's like if you had to email the Pentagon
to get your movie made. Reconsider Yeah all right, yeah,
well buckle in because spoiler alert, it does pass the
Bechtel test. But that is literally what we will not really,
I mean, it is relevant because it passes the Bechdel
test way before the Bechdel test was a culturally relevant marker,

(03:13):
and it does so very intentionally, but to a very
nefarious end, which is to recruit women to the American military.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yes, indeed, at what cost? We have a wonderful guest.
Let's get her in the mix. She is a lawyer
and host of the five to four podcast and popular
Cradle podcast. It's Rhan and Hamam.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
Hi welcome, hello, and you're welcome. You said you know,
we'll just have to you know, we knew we'd have
to get to g I Jane at some point. You're
welcome for being the person that brought it to twenty
twenty five.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
For you guys, thank you came much true, It came true. Yeah,
I guess to start, let's talk about our history with
this movie.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah, Rhannon, what's your relationship with it?

Speaker 3 (04:04):
So this is really interesting because I had a childhood
relationship to this movie. Without seeing the movie as a child,
I had a relationship to it in that the promo
for the movie, Demi Moore and the casts, you know
what is it called their their publicity tour for it.

(04:24):
Let's say the interviews that they gave. The hoopla that
was made about, in particular some of the what people
would call iconic scenes. Demi Moore shaves her head right
in this movie, those kinds of things. Demi Moore screams
at one point, suck my yes. That that sort of
like media really hit me as a kid. I remember

(04:48):
seeing things like this being like discussed on TV. And
you know Demi Moore's workout routine, these kinds of things right,
and I as a child was even though let's go
ahead and get it out there. I'm Palestinian Arab growing
up in the time post Gulf War then post nine

(05:09):
to eleven. Right, So as a child, I was somehow
even with that context about myself out in the open here.
As a child, I was not clocking that the movie
was about US imperialism, right, the violence of like the
US military. I was not clocking this at all. And

(05:30):
again I never saw I never saw the movie. So anyways,
invited onto this podcast, was thinking immediately about, you know,
when when I was a kid, what were the movies
that were like about being a badass lady, you know,

(05:50):
being a powerful, strong lady, being one of the guys,
even though you're a lady. So this this came up,
and then now like as an adult watching it, I
have you know, the full layers, let's say, of like
perspectives and interpretations and analysis where you're just like, oh

(06:14):
my god, this is so so dark, darker than you know,
even maybe like a sort of substanceless feminism, you know, Patina.
Over all of this, it's even darker and more disappointing
and and sort of at root more violent than that.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
It's totally it's very this is a movie with a
dark energy, putting it in that category. Yeah, and I do.
I feel like this movie did. I also hadn't seen
it before, but I felt like I did because it
was so It's so talked about. I mean, I unfortunately

(06:52):
one of the associations that I have with this is
like that g I Jane was name checked in the
slap incident. This is would remember that.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
WHOA, I don't know, I don't remember that.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yes, I blame my fiance for remind I don't know
why men think about this lap so much, but they do.
But when Chris Rock was mocking Jada Pinkett Smith, he
called her GI Jane because she was bald. And all
that to say, for a movie that was not very

(07:26):
successful and pretty widely mocked in its time, it has
real cultural staying power. Yeah, and for like really bizarre reasons.
Because this movie is clearly clearly has an agenda, and
it is to promote US imperialism and to bring the
third wave feminist movement under the umbrella of US imperialism

(07:50):
and sell it back to women. And I think that
that is why we get the weird soundtrack that we do.
We're like, oh, and we've got your music, girl power.
I mean, there's so many things that this movie does
that is very nefarious to that end, but it has
its cultural legacy. I feel like it's a little harder
to pin down. I'm glad it wasn't more successful. It

(08:11):
doesn't seem like it had a top gun effect, but
it still does demonstrable harm because we're still talking about it.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, yeah, you know. I think it's also a little
bit about selling feminism to men too, like because it's like, actually,
they can be badasses and actually if the real goal
is like serving your country and shooting at the bad guys,
then women can do that too. Maybe, you know.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, it's feminism for like sexist men who like the
type of feminism that they could get behind or digest.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Almost yes, I mean it's like so constantly dissonant, where
every other scene it's like it will start to make
a point but then fail to interrogate the system that
that point is being made inside of. So it's it's
totally meaningless all the way down to like the turf
Senator herself, like where you're like, yes, like she's she

(09:12):
is kind of like Nancy pelosiing her way through life.
This is a valid criticism. There are people who do this,
who weaponize identity politics against people like but then fails
to it. But they were like, and and you know
who really has it figured out? The Navy, And You're like,
what do you mean? What do you mean? Her being

(09:33):
the big bad is so weird, Like it's just like
I don't I don't know, I don't know what the
fuck there. I mean, I do know what the fuck
they're on about, and it's very frustrating, very uh.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
I had also never seen this movie, but I remember
it being a big deal when it came out. It
was the same year as Titanic nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
So it never stood a chance.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
So I was busy and with.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Making an impact.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah right, but this movie was marketed to all hell
I remember there was just like yeah, like you mentioned
Rihann in different images or scenes from it. That just
became part of the cultural zeitgeist. But I just I've
never been interested in war or military movies, so I

(10:19):
was like miss me with this, no thank you. So
I just watched it for the first time the other day,
and I don't really know what I was expecting, and
it kind of it sort of like was everything I
was expecting and nothing I was expecting at the same time.
It was a bizarre experience.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
But and I feel like it Also we'll talk about
this later, but like where it's really Scott's filmography is
so fucking weird.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
How can he make Thelma and Louise and this also
like I don't know, he was just like also not
that like film and Louise is a post child for
perfect feminism or anything, but but for.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Its time I mean. But also I mean it's just
like the movie he made immediately after Thoma and Louise
was fourteen ninety two Conquest of Paradise. So this guy
is a girl boss imperialist. Like I don't I which
those exist, but it's just I don't know, yeah, the
But then he also makes Gladiator, which is like anti

(11:18):
imperial he maybe just wants to work. I don't fucking
get it. I was. He also makes black Hawk Down,
which is right, also very like military copaganda. I'm gonna
look up if that one did, because this movie didn't
get the Pentagon Seal of Approval, but mostly for like
perverted reasons, where Ridley Scott was like, no, her superior

(11:40):
does have to look at her in the shower, and
you're like, that's the reason that that's.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
The nipples are hard in uh in A lot of
that have to talk.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
I'll talk about that later.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
But she doesn't care. She's just she's just one of
the boys. She's just one of the boys. I want
to be treated just like everyone else badly. You're like,
what the fuck, it's wild.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back
to recap the.

Speaker 4 (12:06):
Movie, and we're back.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Okay. So here's g I Jane nineteen ninety seven. So
we open on a hearing where this guy named Hayes,
who is vying to become Secretary of the US Navy,
is giving a testimony. But Senator de Haven, who's a
whoa whoa whoa woman.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
She's not afraid to say it.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
This senator interrogates Hayes about the abysmal treatment of women
in the military and how there are all these barriers
women aren't allowed to do, like a quarter of the
jobs in the military, and she wants full integration of
women in the US military, which is something the Department
of Defense will agree to if candidates who are women

(13:07):
are able to prove they measure up to the men
in a series of test cases, but the high ranking
men who want this program to fail select the Navy
Seals as the test case where women would have to
prove themselves because the Navy Seals training is famously, very

(13:31):
very difficult. It has a sixty percent dropout rate, meaning
most men can't even handle it, so there's no way
a woman will be able to.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
How many times do they say this sixty percent dropout
rate in the movie explicitly? So many times that they
just throw out that stat to remind us, you know,
it's really hard.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
It's so hard, it's.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
So hard to do this.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
The stakes are high.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
Then we meet Lieutenant Jordan O'Neill played by Demi Moore.
Her name is not Jane, no shocking, Yeah, it is Jordan.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
I had no idea. Why why not just call it?
I mean, the name Jordan was not sticking for me.
All my notes say Jane. Right.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
So she works at the Naval Intelligence Center doing some
sort of strategist analyst whatever intelligence job, and we see
her mid mission. Seems like she's good at her job,
and of course she's surrounded by men who tell her
to know her place and not step out of line

(14:40):
or whatever. And she's being told this by someone who
It took me a while to figure this out because
all the men in this movie look the same to me, exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Okay, okay, I was waiting for someone to say it.
You'rs like, I don't know who these guys are. I
was like, do we like that one? I don't, don't.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
I don't know, But this man is a don't step
out a line. And it turns out out to be
her boyfriend.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Yeah, they live together.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
They live and not only did they live together, they
take they take baths together like they're twins.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
It's twins. I guess maybe when you're a child.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Zoom for efficiency's sake, I wasn't talking about adult twins.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Meanwhile, Senator de Haven is reviewing candidates to join this
test program, and she thinks this Jordan O'Neill has potential
because she's attractive and feminine.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
Yeah. Yeah, transphobia already entered into the movie in this scene.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, and with photos too, which is absurd. Yeah. The
first the first person who is suggested, she's like, oh,
too strong, people are gonna like she drops chromosomes, Yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Musom test on this person kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
And there's like this heavy indication that I'm like, well,
at least she turns out to be the villain, but
that's just it was like out of pocket. Immediately she
checks that, which this is a weird planted payoff. She
wants to make sure that Debi Moore is straight.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah, she says, I don't want you batting for the
other side.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah, it's like it's such a nineties dork loser like
way to phrase that, but yeah, I feel like she's
trying to say, like, well, are you normal, because we
need a normal person quote unquote to do this, and
then like all of the prejudices that come with what
she considers normal, we're safe to advance her career. I'm

(16:41):
not really sure what she's trying to do it.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
But it's really unclear. I had to watch these scenes
a few times to try to figure it out, and
I'll try to explain it when we get there, but
I'm just like, what is going on here? Yeah, but
after they say a very like transphobe turfey remark, this
senator also sees another picture of a woman who is

(17:06):
tall and thick and muscular. She has kind of more
masculine features, and they mock her and they're like, is
this the face of someone you want on newsweek? She
looks like the wife of a Russian beat farmer, and
you're just like, holy shit, what.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
A specifically hateful joke, Like who wrote that? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (17:27):
So anyway, they're reviewing all these candidates and they select
Jordan as the person they want to recruit into this
program on the condition that Jordan is not gay. And
we'll talk about that. Don't ask, don't tell of at all,
because like the senator is very explicitly asking. But anyway,

(17:49):
like was.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
It that the whole Wasn't that the thing?

Speaker 1 (17:52):
She's like, I know I'm supposed to not ask, but
I'm asking.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
I'm asking, and you'd better tell, he says.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
She says, I just want to. She says something like,
I just want to make sure you have a solvent
heterosexual at home. Yeah, like that you have a male.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
Partner and they're so heterosexual that they take baths together.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah, we're doing foot stuff.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah. Cut we cut to Demi Moore's feet. I believe
a total of three times. One time when they're like,
your foot's all fucked up, and it cuts to the foot,
You're like, I hate to say the foot I didn't
need to see the.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Foot almost like a Tarantino movie in that way.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
Anyway, she does have a heterosexual boyfriend.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
His name is Royce Solvent, heterosexual at home. Yeah, and
don't worry, he hates her.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
He is not supportive of her goals because she's interested
in this opportunity, but she doesn't want to be a
poster child for women's rights. She just wants the operational
experience so that she can advance her military career in
a way that she's not able to now with all
these sexist roadblocks.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
So already we're not on board with the goal, right,
Like the goal is bad, the goal.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Is real bad. And Royce points out that the men
in the training program will make her life a living hell,
and he's not wrong, but he's also like, well, I
don't want to wait for you if you go off
to war. I expect you to wait for me, but
I'm not gonna do that for you. And then I

(19:30):
don't know if they break up or if he just
kind of like leaves in a huff, But that doesn't
really end well. Jordan arrives at a naval base in
Florida to begin her Navy seal training. She meets her
commanding officer, who's like, oh god, a woman.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
I guess his reasons for hating women. He gives later
is very funny. It made me laugh where he's like
guy in a car, Like I was like, he's just
saying shit.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
It's like that has nothing to do with you, and like,
would never inconvenience you, right.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
He's also he says like, I need to hire a
guy in a collegist now to keep track of your
pap smears. And it's like she's only there for three months.
We don't need a bunch of pop smears during that time.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Like how many pap smears was she forced to get
during her time?

Speaker 1 (20:26):
I don't know anyway, so he's not thrilled about her
being there. We also meet some of her fellow trainees,
who of course are all men, and they're talking about
how women can't do what we do. They're too weak
and they have too much body fat.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
And one guy is named Flea, which is my cats,
which I found very distracting.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
I wrote that in my notes, so I was like
Jamie's cat alert flee.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
He flee would never do anything that.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
The other flee does. He would never join the military.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's a man of integrity exactly.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
In addition to Flee, there are guys like McCool Wickwire Cortes,
Jim Cavizl is there playing a guy named Slovnik, and
they hate her immediately. Then she settles into her like
R and R quarters, which is just an empty room
because it's separated by gender and she's the only woman.

(21:25):
Then it's the first day of training. We meet Command
Master Chief Ergale played by Vigo Mortensen.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Short shorts Viego Mortenson shorts.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Are so short the entire film. Yeah, did he ask
for that, leggy Vigo Mortensen.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
We don't see the legs on literally any other character,
including I think maybe Demi Moore a couple times, because
as we'll talk about, there's like, I guess they could
have done worse with hyper fixating on her body, but
they definitely don't miss the opportunity too.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Sure. Well, it seems like all of the whatever like
leaders of this training program are wearing the same short
shorts because there's a few of them and I only
notice one para legs same. Yeah, it seems like it
was all Vego. I was looking at all the legs.
But in any case, he's one tough sombitch. And everyone

(22:24):
starts the very vigorous and brutal training, obviously lots of
physical exercise. They're fighting over food, they're having to eat
it back out of the trash again. They're plunging into
freezing cold water. They have to write an essay about
why they love the United States Navy. The drill sergeants
are screaming and belittling them, and this is all just

(22:48):
in the first day.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
Yeah, there's so many montages in this movie. It's exhausting, truly.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
Gi Jordan is struggling, but she's not the worst at
this and she's very determined, even though a lot of
the men are cruel to her, especially this guy Cortes,
has a vendetta against her. But again she's very determined.
Though for those who are not determined to complete the training,

(23:18):
they have to ring this bell three times and it
signifies their resignation. So that's always kind of like looming
over everyone. Then there's this obstacle course, which they make
to be like a war zone with the officers shooting
at them. Yeah, but there are these like booster steps
for women and women only time advantages. But Jordan doesn't

(23:44):
want those. She wants to go through the course like
everyone else. So she goes to her commanding officer to
be like, your gendered double standards mean that I'm being
treated as an outsider, Like how am I supposed to
fit in and succeed? And then he pitches a fit.
This is where he's talking about pap smears and her perfume.

(24:05):
But then he agrees to hold only one standard for everyone.
Then we get the scene where she buzzes off all
of her hair, becoming the baldest woman. But I would
not say she's in charge, so it does not follow
the baldest woman in charge not.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Which is weird because I feel like it's one of
the movies I based that idea around despite have never
having seen it. But again you have. It is weird
how how similar there's like sequences in Mulan which comes
out the next year, similar hair chop and scene.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
True. Yes, she also moves into the same like bunking
area as the men, and that guy Slavnik is disgusted
that she brought tampons with her.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
I'm like, what would you like if she didn't have any?
Like what do you wonder to.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Just free bleed all over the place.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, he screams multiple times, like as they're like, you know,
clear out, like you know, we gotta we gotta go
or whatever. He's like, you don't care about tampons. You
don't care about tampons, like fixated. Right, there's this is
somebody really really having a meltdown?

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, as melodramatic as a lot of it is, I'm like, yeah,
I do believe that someone would do that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Men are very emotional.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
They're huge drama queens.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
So then Hayes, the Navy secretary guy, gets wind that
a woman doing the Navy seal training program has gone public.
It was supposed to be a secret, private thing, but
it's gone public because there was this like investigative journalist
or someone taking pictures of Jordan during training. And so

(25:46):
the Navy Secretary is furious about this becoming public information,
and he wants her progress monitored and then also for
like background research to be done on her. Basically he
wants to see if they can find anything to discredit
her because this haze guy wants the program to fail.

(26:07):
But she's doing pretty good. She's made it through the
first week of training. She's getting the hang of things.
She's getting into peak physical shape, doing a lot of
you know, pull ups and push ups, but not wearing
a sports bra, which I don't know why you do that.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
She wants to be just like everyone else. They're not
wearing a sports bra. Why should she?

Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, exactly, And she's starting to earn the respect of
some of the men, though others like Cortes and Slavnik
still have this like sexist rivalry, which.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Which is the sort of part of what's at the
core of her very feminist goal is to earn their
respective men.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Exactly. Yes.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Then there's a part where Jordan struggles to pull her
own body weight onto a raft that's speeding by, so
the master Chief questions if she's strong enough to be there.
And this is happening in a scene where she's taking
a shower and he just comes in and she's naked
and they're both just like shrug.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
This is the scene where Israel is mentioned. Yeah, drink
d we have an Israel mentioned.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
That was like in a scene where you're already like
flat on your ass, like what am I watching? And
then he brings up Israel and it cuts to naked
Demi Moore. I'm like, what the fuck is this? What
are we doing?

Speaker 1 (27:33):
He's like, you know, the IOF is awesome actually, and
then he's like, and you're too weak to be here anyway?
Want to be in charge of boat number six?

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Well, and she also manages to get a girl Boston
there too, where she's like is it also talking sort
of in reference to I guess America and Israel, where
she's like, well, how did you get your little thing?
How did you get your little your metal? And it's
like saving a woman is bad, saving a man is good.

(28:06):
It makes you think. I was like this, you're naked.
He's your boss and you're naked. Like yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
So it's at this part of the story that I
really started to worry that they're gonna wedge in some
like love story between the two of them, because it
sort of starts to kind of I think in a
different movie, or maybe there was just another draft of
this script where like there was that Okay, I had.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
A feeling, yeah, we'll talk about it. But there I
went through because I was like, why did this movie
not get Because there's I mean, the whole military entertainment
complex usually comes down to weirdly like one guy, and
it was one guy for like thirty five years, who
would be the one to decide if you are going
to get the full force support of the American military

(28:54):
to make your shitty movie. And this one guy ended
up saying no and not signing off on g Jane.
And one of one of the original reasons that Ridley
Scott did agree to change was that she was originally
dating her superior in the Navy, which I'm assuming would
have been the Vigo Mortenson character. So that might just

(29:14):
be left over from that, I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
But yeah, I'm like, why is this scene here where
he's like, it's not overtly sexualized, but she isn't the shower,
but he is kind of like looking her up and
down and she is naked and he's not, and so
it's very bizarre and.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
They get very close to face to face. Yeah, it
is introducing sexual tension here, and it feels like very
overtly we're supposed to think Demi Moore is hot, Demi
Moore is sexy, you know.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, yeah, so the movie doesn't culminate in any kind
of love story between them, but it feels like it
was like starting to drop some hints anyway. Then there's
this like simulation mission thing. It's I'm like Capture the Flag,
but like military Industrial Complex style, where Jordan leads her team.

(30:08):
She's delegating tasks, but Cortes and Slovnik refuse to take
orders from her because she's a woman, and they get
themselves and everyone else on the team captured. The master
Chief beats the shit out of Jordan. He acts like
he might rape.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Her in front of everybody.

Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, in front of everybody, because by their logic, this
is what she quote unquote wanted for them to not
go easy on her just because she's a woman, But
she doesn't give up any information. Then she fights back
and kicks the shit out of the master Chief and

(30:51):
this is when she.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Goes suck my deck.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
And now he respects her and so her other fellow
trainees enough to invite her out for a drink when
they have some R and R time.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Which also it's so frustrating, where like her sort of
one pal who is always like she's whatever, the feminism
nurse or whatever, but she like this is another sort
of decisive moment for the debianmore character where she's like
she tells the other girls She's like, I can't hang out.

(31:30):
The boys finally invited me. I'm like, god, you suck,
you suck.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, So she goes to hang out and drink with
the guys, but she also goes on the like little
beach picnic outing with the women at the training center,
who I think are mostly medics, and a reporter is
there taking more secret photos of the women, and the

(31:56):
high ranking men see the photos and pull Jordan aside
and say it looks like you were fraternizing with other
women in a gay way, and Jordan is like, no,
this is just women hanging out. But the men want
to pull her out of training and give her a

(32:18):
desk job, basically demote her, I think. And she's enraged
and she rings that bell that signals that you want
to quit the Navy seal training, and she leaves and
goes back home. Her boyfriend Royce is there. They reconcile
and he shows her some reports and letters and stuff,

(32:40):
and it seems like Senator de Haven, the woman who
was originally advocating for Jordan, is the one who hired
the photographer to sabotage Jordan's training.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah, it turns out she's a cowardly bitchous.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
She really is.

Speaker 1 (32:55):
And these are the reasons that I only very vaguely
understand and can barely articulate. But it's something like she
I think she's a senator in Texas and there are
these different military bases in Texas that are in danger
of being shut down. So she kind of like trades,
does some kind of trade with someone to prevent the

(33:18):
basis from being shut down in exchange for kind of
selling out Jordan, I think, is what was happening, right.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, Like she's gonna lose reelection if these bases get
shut down, like the voters right will turn against her
or something. And so with this threat looming, she saves
the bases over saving Jordan, right.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Right, which of course a senator would do, right. But
it's like this is where like the ultimate dissonance comes
in where she's like, no, that I need to be
a Navy seal, and it's like, lady, you don't. You
do not need to be a Navy There is a
funny like there's like a repeated it's just like a
bad writing thing. But the Anne Bancroft character this seed

(34:03):
says a few different times she's like, well if you
think you're going to change my mind, then pull up
a chair, or like go to sleep, or like you're
going to be here for a long time.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Past your time.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yes, I was like, what do you okay?

Speaker 1 (34:18):
Whatever, So Jordan threatens to expose the senator for being
a lying piece of shit. I guess unless de Haven
gets Jordan back into the Navy Seals training program. Cut
to Jordan returns to complete her training and she and
the others are about to do I think this is

(34:40):
sort of like their last thing and operational readiness exercise
in the Mediterranean Sea. But then they get called to
go on a real life military mission in Libya.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Yeah, like, and they're not done with training yet, and
they're being asked like, okay, no, you got to do
Navy Seal mission right now? Yes, And I've seeing how
fucked up these people are, right right, what an amateur
show this is.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
I'm like, I don't think they're ready, and the mission
is also vague, but I think they have to do
some sort of rescue or extraction thing. I'm guessing rescuing
some American soldiers in Libya. And we'll talk about the
way the country and Libyan characters are portrayed. But yeah,
basically there's you know, a big third act battle. The

(35:38):
Master Chief needs to be saved and Jordan kind of
takes charge. She's giving orders, and then she ultimately gets
the Master Chief to safety. They make it out, and
they return to the US, where Jordan officially makes it
into the Navy Seals after successfully completing her training. The

(36:01):
end y we so let's take another quick break and
we'll come back to discuss, and we're back where to begin, Oh,

(36:24):
Ash Rhannon, is anything jumping to you?

Speaker 3 (36:28):
You know, it really is hard to choose. Is it
the racism, the orientalism? Is it? You know that this
really military propaganda. Is it the dissonant and illogical, superficial feminism,
it's it's it's they're so difficult.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
You know.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
I think something that stuck with me throughout every scene
in which Jordan is insulted or even like sabotaged, you
know her, the fellow Navy Sealed trainees, you know, actively
try to sabotage her and make her look bad every time,

(37:06):
even and I think this culminates in the scenes where
they're doing this sear training, the capture of the flag exercise. Right,
It really culminates in this in this part where Vigo
Mortensen physically assault her. I mean, it's a really it's
actually like difficult to watch. It's like she's actually getting

(37:26):
like truly truly violently beat up, and then he acts
like he's about to sexually assault her in front of everybody.
There's blood, like all of this stuff. What is sticking
with me throughout every single one of these horrifically sexist
examples is not that anybody like learns a true lesson

(37:47):
about sexism or that that kind of overt sexism is wrong.
It's that Jordan overcomes it. And actually, you know, master
Chief Vigo Morten said, did it all for the right reason,
so that she could prove herself, so that the team
will get behind her. You know. Afterwards he tells an officer,

(38:07):
another officer who says like, hey, I think you kind
of went too far on that. He tells an officer,
you don't get it. She isn't the problem we are,
and I did right, like, I did it for all
the right reasons. And this is the entire movie. It's
really sick, yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
Right, and it's they don't, like you said, no one
really learns anything. It's just that she has sort of
assimilated into man behavior quote unquote yes, which is the
problem with any sort of girl Boss feminism where it's like,
women can uphold imperial institutions too, women can commit war

(38:47):
crimes too, and that's the logic of the movie.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
I feel like this movie even takes out a step
further where, like I like, in your prescriptive girl Boss narrative,
it's like, oh, yes, women can commit horrific atrocities, women
can be billionaires, women can do you know, A, B
and C. But this one is also predicated to the
fact that like, like, her whole mission is to be

(39:12):
treated like a man likes it's yeah, you know, Sheryl
Sandberg shit where I feel like it's even worse where
I feel in some girl Boss narratives it's like, oh,
and now the guns are pink or whatever the fuck
She's like, she's not even asking for the gun to
be pink, like she's She's like, I want to do

(39:32):
war crimes just like everyone else. I she is so
vested in not questioning the system she's participating in to
a kind of scary degree. She has no question. Yes,
her mission is to be completely swallowed whole by it.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, let me prove it to you. I can do
I can do war crimes. I'm actually really good at it.
If you would just let me, you just beat me
up like everybody else.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, I don't care about feminism. I'm not trying to
be some poster child for women's rights. I just want
to be a bloodthirsty war.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Criminal, right, And that's I do think it's like an
interesting idea, not in the scope of this movie at all.
It is an interesting idea to not want to be
the poster child for something. I think that that is
like an interesting narrative tension. But in the context of
this movie, it makes her an even more confusing character because,

(40:25):
like I get to the extent that she doesn't want
to be a poster child. She doesn't want the media
to hyper fixate on her. That's fair, right, Like she
doesn't want all these things to happen, But like she
doesn't even take issue with the sexism that she does experience,
Like she gets annoyed when like the I mean in
the beginning where the I don't know what the fucking

(40:46):
title is, but the first guy she meets before Vigo Mortensen,
lays out sort of like, Okay, here is what we're
going to do to sort of protect you from what
is almost certain to be a very hostile group of
people towards you. Yeah, and she's like, no, I don't
want to be like, which is just sending what I mean.

(41:08):
This expands so much because like, obviously there is real
life misogyny and homophobia in the military which is shown here,
but it has no interest in questioning those policies. It's
just questioning it in regards to this one character who's like,
I don't care about that. So what is this movie
even trying to accomplish. Yeah, it feels like it's just

(41:30):
trying to not only enlist women into the American imperial project,
it's also saying be quiet about the like about the
gender discrimination you've heard about? Shut up, Like if you
were a real soldier, you wouldn't quote unquote complain about it.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Yeah, and any even minuscule nod to like, oh, there
might be a systemic problem here. For example, when Vigo
Mortensen after almost killing me more like we're supposed to
understand right by physical assault in front of people. After
he does this, and he says the thing about like
she isn't the problem we are and this is why,

(42:08):
this is why I did this, right saying we are
if he's referring to like whatever, the US military or
something like, there's no there's no then like next step,
which is like, okay, if this is if you're saying
this is a systemic problem here, there's no next step
of like, oh, how might we fix that? The solution
is like again, honorably, I beat her up in front

(42:30):
of people, right, Like.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
It's it's not even like there's not even an interest
in like accomplishing a very like what also would have
been a bullshit like centrist propaganda to this movie. Ye, yeah,
it can't even do that because the movie also hates
their Nancy Pelosi character. So it's like, I don't know
what to do with that, Like, I mean, it's a

(42:53):
it's a right wing movie totally.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
I mean, like it seems to be saying, well, there's
sexism everywhere, so of course there's going to be sexism
in the military, but the movie is like otherwise completely
uncritical of any systemic issues within the military and the
military itself, which is a tool to uphold US imperialism.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
And do lots of violence, including sexist violence. All over
the world, you know.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
And it's basically just saying like, yeah, the military is
is awesome and women should want to be a part
of it. And that type of jingoism is still being
used today, obviously not only to recruit for the military,
but to recruit ICE agents. I've seen people likening the

(43:42):
signing bonus and the relatively high salaries for ICE agents,
likening that to incentives the military has historically offered to
encourage people to enlist.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
So and the fact that the Viga Mortensen character, you know,
references the IDF in the scope of by far the
darkest scene in the movie to be there, and it's
a hard contest because he also almost kills her. I
mean that is used in IDF logic all the time,

(44:15):
is that like, we love women and women are a
part of it. When it's conscripting to a genocide. It's
just I don't know. I was so shocked at how
how this movie wouldn't even get to I guess the
very low nineteen nineties girl boss feminism. It doesn't even
like clear that.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
No, it sure doesn't. And then you have the whole
third act of the movie, which is this mission in Libya,
where again unclear exactly what they're doing. It says they're
doing an extraction thing, but I don't think we ever see.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
That, which based on the documents, not to be a spy,
but but based on the documents that I was saying,
that is very, very intentional, and I think that reminds
me of like a lot of when the American military
is involved in a movie. They never want to draw
your attention to exactly what is being done in the movie.

(45:15):
That's why in the most recent I didn't see it,
but in like the Top Gun reboot, they're fighting a
country that doesn't even exist, unnamed.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, so vague. Yeah, I remember that about that.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
So that's very much a part of the playbook where
they're like, Okay, we're willing to name the country that
we are killing civilians in, but we don't want to
say exactly what we're doing or what the goal is
because you don't want to think about that too hard
because it's violent. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
A couple mentions of the word plutonium, right, like satellite cells.
It is like something extraction, right, and it's just supposed
to be like it's it is shoving. It is shoving.
Imperial violence down your throat, but to such a vagueness
that like you are assumed to be on their side anyway, right,
Like you're this is acceptable because surely what's going on
in Libya is bad and those are bad guys doing it, right,

(46:04):
Like that's there's this baseline assumption not criticized or not
like engaged.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
At all to right, like it's just playing on prejudices.
They're assuming the audience already has.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
Right the idea that like, well, we're in an Arab country,
so of course it's full of terrorists and those people's
lives are expendable, and the Navy has carte blanche to
shoot and kill whoever because they are the enemy. And
even before Libya gets mentioned, someone says like, oh, we're

(46:38):
getting called to this mission where Iran Iraq and it's
like no, another one, another enemy country, quote unquote. So
and then just like the way the country of Libya
is portrayed, the score that starts playing once where.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
In Libya stereotypical like arrul, which is like a Arab
Middle Eastern ancient kind of wind is instrument, is the score.
So you're like, oh, they're in Arabia, yep, they're landing
on the beach in Arabia.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Right, Like, truly, at every level this movie is trying
to play on American prejudices.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
Yeah, the way they make Libya look like this dusty barren,
decrepit wasteland, the brown filter they put on those scenes
in post production that makes everything just look dusty and dirty.
The way the people of Libya are presented, they're hostile,
They're needlessly violent, Like forget that the US Navy has

(47:36):
just invaded this country for unclear reasons and are killing
anyone they see and.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Will continue to for decades after.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
Yeah, so just absolutely horrific.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
And I think that like another I honestly do not
know the name of this character because I couldn't keep
track of all the boy names. But there is exactly
one black character who we get to know. This is
a very very very ugly play to make.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
His name is mcool.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
McCool. All the names are so silly, okay, so McCool. Also,
he has to give this speech while actively treading water,
which is like that doesn't seem fair to that actor,
but whatever. So that where, you know, and it's done
in this very nineties way where it's equating the struggle
of black soldiers with the struggle of women's soldiers as

(48:28):
if it's an identical struggle. But the only black soldier
we get to know is mcool apparently, and he references
very real prejudice in the American military against black people,
which is a very you know, it's an important thing
to talk about, like it is a very valid subject,
but it's brought up for all the wrong reasons. It's

(48:50):
brought up to say, like, oh, no, you know, g
I Jane, like, I totally understand your struggle, like because
my grandfather was treated this horrible way by Themerican military,
and then they proceed to push back on that system
not at all, like and especially in a movie that
is racist in general, that it feels like Ridley Scott

(49:12):
is like or the writers of this movie, sorry he
didn't write this, David Twohea and Danielle Alexandra girl Boss
what the fuck? But they you know, they're they're basically
weaponizing this true fact about how racist the American military
is to excuse all the other racism that the movie

(49:36):
is guilty of perpetrating. And also that's the only thing
we ever learned about McCool, we'd ever guess. Yeah, he
speaks in other scenes, like, I think all the guys
sort of with the exception of like the bully guy
and Viga Mortenson, they're all like about the same amount
of active in the scene, but the fact that they
go out of their way to be like, Oh, our

(49:56):
one black character, he and his family have experienced racism
and that's all we're gonna tell you.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
And that's what defines him. Yeah. Yeah, because you have
like the Jim Cavizo character who's obsessed with tampons being
near him.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah, that's the one thing we learn about him.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Yeah, Cortes Cortez is the guy who like sabotages her
and like doesn't help her over the wall. And then
Vigle Mortensen sees that and he's like, well, I better
combat this sexism by threatening to rape a woman in
front of everyone.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Yeah. Yeah, what you're never gonna get in this movie.
And look, I don't expect Hollywood to give this kind
of analysis to us. I'm not saying right in nineteen
ninety seven that Hollywood and Demi Moore we're gonna make
the kind of movie I'm about to describe. But you
never get from this movie that the US military is

(50:52):
inherently by design racist, sexist, transphobic, because it is an
expression of capitalism by imperialism. Right, these things are not
designed to be inclusive or diverse, right like this is,
this is this is a structure and a system that

(51:13):
truly is not reformable, Jamie, you said it earlier, like
this is a right wing movie, right like this is
and and and the military, the US military is like
a right wing conception, you know, a structure, and so yeah,
you're you're never gonna get that. You're gonna get. What
you're gonna get from this movie is a peak inside

(51:35):
quite a glamorized individual experiences of individual discrimination.

Speaker 4 (51:43):
You know.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
But but but not like, oh, you know, the US
military was racist during World War Two. It's still racist.
It's still super sexist, and like wonder, wonder what's going
on there, you know, But.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
At the end of the day, it's the military we've got. Yeah,
and so I guess in a way it's really cool.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
And at the end of the day they're shooting Arabs,
so that's great. You know.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
That is like very much what the third act is
telling yeaheah, yeah, it's this movie is evil. Super Dark
has an evil and there's there's so much so I
wanted to We talked about this in a couple of
different episodes. I know we definitely talked about it in
our Top Gun episode. I believe we also talked about
it way back in the day in our Independence Day

(52:34):
episode and also Transformers because the American government, uh, the
American military was involved in the making of all of
these movies. Now, I mean I I did not finish it,
but I am bravely in the middle of watching a
documentary called Operation Hollywood, how the Pentagon shapes and censors movies.

(52:54):
It's f I've heard of this, Yeah, it's on YouTube
for free. It's from It's a little dated because it's
from I think it's from like the early to mid
two thousands, but it is a sort of breakdown of
exactly how this system works. So for listeners who haven't
heard of those other episodes or haven't heard us talk
about it in a while, Basically, there is a specific
job that is it's a guy named phil Essentially for

(53:19):
a long time at this time, it was a guy
named Philip Strubb who is the DoD's film liaison. Is
the name of the title, and so from nineteen eighty
nine to twenty eighteen. This was a job that basically
this guy would go over scripts that wanted to have

(53:40):
either bases or tanks, weapons, whatever it is, lent out
to them at a lower rate in exchange for reflecting
the American military in a positive way. It's a propaganda unit, right,
And to be clear, obviously there was a ton of
military propaganda in cinema, like going back to its very existence,
but it took them till the eighties to make this unit,

(54:01):
and it is in direct response to Top Gun. Top
Gun came out in eighty six and famously there was
a huge enlistment spike in response to its popularity, and
that was when the DoD I guess realized, well, if
this is going to be a trend in movies, we
want to be directly involved with it. And so that

(54:23):
is why this department was created. And it really does
seem to just be this guy. So every movie from
eighty nine to twenty eighteen is going through him. Now
it goes through this guy named David Evans. Very very
little is known about these guys by design, I am sure,
but there is there were a and again I cannot

(54:44):
vouch for this website, but a website called spy culture
dot com. Pretty cool sounds git they in Spy Culture Nature.
They did leak some documents. This is from a couple
of years ago how the Pentagon rewrote Gi Jane and
there are twenty five pages of documents that they were
able to access that were between the office of Ridley

(55:06):
Scott and Philip Strubb about this movie and with specificity
what exactly the DoD wanted changed about this movie and
what Ridley Scott's response is, what the concessions he did
make and the concessions that he didn't. And so the
long and short of it is that this movie was
not signed off by the DoD explicitly because it showed

(55:30):
that there's sexism in the Navy, and so they were like, sorry,
mister Scott, the premise is flawed. The Navy isn't sexist.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
There's no sexism here.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
But that does not mean that Ridley Scott did not
make significant concessions to this. So I'm just going to
read from this article what were the Pentagon's objections. They
didn't have any issue with the basic plot of a
woman going through special Forces training, but they did have
a problem with almost everything else. One problem was that
they didn't want the training identified as being for the

(56:01):
Navy Seals, but wanted Scott to invent a fictional special
unit that O'Neill was trying to get into. So again
that trend of like, let's not talk about exactly what
we're doing because then people might think about it. They
didn't like O'Neill's boyfriend being her superior, so that was changed.
A scene between the CEO at the training base and
O'Neil was considered too sexist, but Scott didn't want to

(56:23):
change that. O'Neill shaving her head was considered out of line,
and Scott replied can be negotiated, which I don't think
it was. But the scene where the chief confronts O'Neil
while she's naked and having a shower quote presents privacy
policy issues quote unquote, which Scott agreed to change, which
he didn't. A scene where a seal urinates in a

(56:44):
foxhole in front of O'Neil had the DoD conceding that
it addressed quote issues related to the presence of women
in frontline combat roles unquote, but quote carries no benefit
to the US Navy unquote. They also didn't like the
sequence depicting survival, evasion, resistance escape training, which sees the
masters chief imprisoning, waterboarding and beating up trainees, including the protagonist.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
So that's it. That's that's it movie.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
So those are the reasons why the DD did not
ultimately sign off on this movie. Because one of the
heroes waterboards another hero, however, that does not mean that significant.
So I guess the question is what is the agenda
of this movie if not to get the support of
the DoD, because it doesn't and Redley Scott does not

(57:32):
end up like really getting the what I don't know
exactly what the benefits are, but the ostensible benefits you
would get. So what the fuck is this movie trying
to do? Like it's baffling right right.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
If it's not gonna bother to bend over backwards to
get the Seal of approval from the Department of Defense,
then but it's still like, but the military is awesome,
and like, let's make this movie basically as recruitment propaganda
to specifically encourage women question mark to join.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
The military, join the military, and never ask a question like.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
Yeah, yeah, no, the dissonance here the it's really it's
sort of nonsensical in a lot of ways, plot wise, dialogue,
and then the and then the kind of like politics
of it are are are really nonsensical as well. You know,
what what what was released Scott's goal? What are what

(58:34):
were the what are the goals of the writers here?
What's what's Demi Moore's goal in being in being in this?
You know, it's like a lot of I think there's
a lot to unpack there.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
I can I know a little bit about that because
I did not remember. I don't know, I just did
not remember the like cultural conversation around this movie. But
so apparently this was Demi Moore at a time in
her career where like she was sort of waning in popularity.

(59:09):
She had just starred in a huge box office bomb
called Strip.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Tease, which was notorious for being a horrible movie and
people hated her performance, and.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
So she was already I mean, and this is this
is sort of, I guess, unfortunately, a more kind of
classic tale of how actresses are disposable, and then to
me more making the choice to star in a US
imperialist narrative to try to undo that and rescue her career.
I think it seems like what her motivation here was

(59:41):
was to kind of dig herself out of the hole
that she'd been thrown into by strip teas and try
to remarket herself as an action star by doing this.
But by all accounts, it didn't work. And it seems
it seems like, I mean, it's I don't like, this
movie is fucking horrible and evil, and people were very

(01:00:04):
like weirdly sexist to Demi Moore for having been in it,
Like they blamed the movie sucking wholly on her. She
like won a Razzie, which feels like an over correction
because it's like, there's so many issues with this movie.
I wouldn't put her performance in the top ten of
those issues are agree.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
I actually, okay, you know, let's take the script and
the and the movie and and everything for what it is.
Her acting is not.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
It's not the problem.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
It's not the problem. Yeah, it's not the problem that
makes this movie land the way it lands, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Right, And she's and like, so it's just from what
I can tell, I mean that she she was just
pretty like squarely escapegoaded for this movie's unpopularity, even though
I will say at the time there were reviews of
this movie that were like, uh, this movie is too
jiggoistic for me to engage with. So even in the nineties,

(01:00:59):
like people, we're not just taking their slop, which was
I don't know. I guess I was pleasantly surprised that
not everyone was just taking the slap. But then you
get into like, I don't know Ridley Scott. I don't know.
He's made four thousand movies, he's five hundred years old,
so can we get to the bottom of what his
whole deal is? Probably not. He also made huse of Gucci,

(01:01:20):
which I forgot.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Oh my gosh, he directed that.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
That's hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Wow, he made the last dool at a house of Gucci. Savior.
He's just an enigma, an enigma. He's booked and busy.
He'll do anything. But he I mean his other I mean,
you could argue his most famous characters he directed the
first Blade Runner, but he also I mean, his most
famous character you could say is Ellen Ripley.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
Yeah, right, I would, it's probably his I would agree
with him.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
And she is also in the American military, so like
he like.

Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
There's a soft spot in Ridley Scott's heart for us
military story.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Yeah. Yeah, like I don't know, and there has been
a lot made of over the years of like wow,
Ridley Scott for a male o tour has women as
his protagonists pretty often, which is true. I have not
seen all of his movies, but they're you know, examples
obviously Alien Thelma and Louise Prometheus, which I didn't see

(01:02:20):
Gi Jane. I know that the last duel centers around
a woman house of Gucci. Looks they're not all good,
but it does happen with some frequency. But it is always,
i think, without fail, a white woman. And also he
doesn't write the scripts, so he's sort of just a

(01:02:41):
gun for hire. Clearly he has an interest in this,
but it's a very particular kind of woman he has
interest in. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Can I bring up a very short exchange in Gi
Jane which I think almost completely encapsulates the nonsensical politics
of this movie. Please, When Jordan has survived the torture session,

(01:03:09):
training session, Capture the Flag, when she's survived it and
she's at the bar with the guys, she's done it,
She's she's in you know, like this is this is
almost like a scene with a victory lap where she's
finally in.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
The boys, you're gonna say, she goes to the bathroom.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Is this right, Jamie, Yep, she goes to the bathroom.
Oh and and after all of this has happened to her,
she's very physically injured her face, like, she has black eyes,
she has a huge like red mark on the side
of her face. She's obviously been beat up. Right, she
goes to the bathroom. She's in the women's restroom. She's

(01:03:47):
at the sink, and another woman is in there who
walks past her and said, after you know, looking at
her and noticing what her face looks like, she walks
past her and she says, ain't really my business, but
I say, leave the bastard, which is like, so this
woman has assumed that Demi Moore's character is in a

(01:04:07):
situation of like intimate partner violence domestic violence, right, and
that like her partner, a man has beat her up,
and Demi Moore g Jane Jordan O'Neill turns and gives
like a little bit of a smirk, like doesn't doesn't
say anything in response. The woman leaves the bathroom, but
she kind of smirks, and I think, like, what we're

(01:04:28):
supposed to interpret is like, oh, it wasn't that she's
actually succeeded at something really big and accomplished something important,
but like, actually, what did happen was that she was
beat up by a man?

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
Yes, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
Yes, she was physically assaulted by men.

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
She is in an abusive relationship, yes, in which a
lot of people would say she should leave.

Speaker 2 (01:04:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
So it's so it's so wild, it really is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
Well like and that yeah, and that lady is made
to look ridiculous and it's like no, you actually unfortunately
guessed it exactly. But it's like, but this movie cannot
I think it's like what is the stopping point? Because
it's like, well, if what is happening to dem More
is abuse, then what's happening to all of the soldiers
his abuse? And you're like, yeah, yeah, what if it

(01:05:21):
was there? Yes, but again just like going right up
to the line of like, but we cannot interrogate the
system why I don't know. I really don't know. The
other exchange that because and I feel like that that
exchange and this one like really tells you what the
movie is about. For some reason, what is the okay

(01:05:44):
in one of her many like would you say that
to a woman? Which there are times to ask that
question very rarely. When she does though, where it's like
she's talking to her her nurse friend, you know, and
she her nurse is like, why are you doing this?
And it is kind of gendered the way she's asking it.

(01:06:04):
I wish she was asking it more in the Royal
why are we doing this? Can we stop? Right? But
she says why are you doing this? And then to me,
Moore says, would you ask a man the same question?
Blah blah blah? And then like, and what do they
say when you ask them that question? And the nurse replies,
they say, because I get to blow shit up. And
then instead of again, instead of interrogating that, Demi Moore's

(01:06:29):
character says, well, there you go. And then the scene
is over and you're like, well, I guess that's what
the fucking movie is about. Yeah, because I get to
blow shit up? Does feel like sort of the moral
of the story.

Speaker 3 (01:06:40):
Yeah, yeah, and anything being a victim of any kind
of violence is worth it so that you can blow
shit up. Yeah, this is like the moral of the story.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
It's boggling. We touched on this a bit already, but
The one bit of commentary I suppose that the movie
does seem to offer is that this senator woman who
does this like gender integration into the military project, originally

(01:07:15):
kind of under the guise of feminism and championing women,
but she abandons all that to further her political career.
As soon as her own career is being threatened, she
drops any advocacy she was doing. Fuck that, I'm looking
out for me and myself, which happens all the time

(01:07:39):
in American politics. I mean, look at fucking AOC pretending
to be this progressive voice and then voting to keep
sending money to Israel. You know, shit like that. But
that commentary means basically nothing in a movie that's saying, well, yeah,
sure politicians are correct, but the American military is right good.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
Actually, that's I mean the under the underdog. You're like,
what do you mean you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
There's a scene, there's a scene earlier first first half
of the movie for sure, maybe even first quarter of
the movie, in which the guy in the highest command
position at the base or training center where the trainees
are at he's on the phone with the senator. This
is when the photos first go public. You know, there's
some sort of investigative reporter taking pictures with a telephoto lens,

(01:08:35):
and these are getting leaked to the public, and all
of a sudden, the public knows that a woman is
in the training program for the Navy Seals. So the
senator calls the high ranking officer and is like, what
the hell you know, this wasn't supposed to go public.
What's going on? And the officer guy says, like, you know,

(01:08:57):
a Senator, these photographers are using telephoto lenses. Nothing I
can do. They're on a public highway now unless you
want me to violate the Constitution and violate their civil liberties.
I can't do anything about that. And you wouldn't want that,
would you, Senator. And it's like the milly the military
cares about the Constitution. They're they're they're doing ice detentions

(01:09:21):
right now. They're using military basis for for kidnapping migrants.
So yeah, no, that's that's yeah. The the US military
is in no way the good guy in in in
any in any situation, and certainly not legally right, I.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
Mean, and I think it is like a very a
very like calculated thing to present the military as the
good guys but not present the entire government as the
good guys like they It's almost like it's a it's
a like a lot of copaganda narratives. It's like the
there there are bad apples, and Anne Bancroft is a
bad apple. She is too craven and ambitious, certainly not

(01:09:59):
the head of the military, especially if you go back
to the beginning, and like she I think accurately points
out that he was sex like wildly sexist at many
points in his career. But we're just meant to forget
that because the moral of Demi Moore's story is that
embracing masculinity and all of its horrors is good for you,

(01:10:20):
and so it doesn't matter if even I don't know
like the because the Ambrake bankrupt character is like it's
almost frustrating that you're like, yeah, this is these these
are real people that do this, but there is no
one in the military who is presented as they would
actually be, or if they are, it's like, and that's

(01:10:41):
good and that's the job. But when when this other
character is craven and horrible, it's bad.

Speaker 3 (01:10:49):
There's no rules, right exactly exactly. It's I had a
note that that the scenes in this movie. We're moving
at like breakneckt speed. It's the scenes. The scenes in
this movie, I don't know if we want to talk
about this. Y'all are forty five seconds long, especially in
the first half, and we're establishing so much information and

(01:11:13):
we are moving at such an intense wild pace, and yeah,
these are this is editorial choice for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
And it's always this like there are these like hard
cuts to the next scene, and they're usually accompanied by
this like really epic music when it's like nothing epic happened.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
Like why are we like it's either epic music or
like nineties adults contemporary. It's so dissonant we should turn
to the score. Maybe, Yeah, because there are some.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
Choices made about nineties women ballads in very key scenes.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
Some of them I was laughing because they're just like
it heard. Yeah, there is a Chrissy Hind song where
I was like that, and I also hate that, you know,
it's like these people would have had to have agreed
to have their song put in this. I what I
don't know, I guess is do you get to see
the movie before you like decide if your song is

(01:12:17):
able to be used. I'm assuming no, but either way
it's horrible.

Speaker 3 (01:12:21):
That's an interesting question. Yeah, whether whether these whether these
women artists would have approved their song being used in
the movie had they seen it before.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Yeah, I mean, even if you agree to the premise,
it's still it's like either way. Chrissy Hyde put two
of her songs in the Girl Boss Navy Seals movie. Yeah,
so you know that's that's on her.

Speaker 3 (01:12:44):
It was clockable, Yeah, it was clockable beforehand.

Speaker 2 (01:12:47):
You're right, yeah, it does. It does feel like the
songs are weaponized.

Speaker 1 (01:12:51):
Yes, but that was I mean, like not to defend
anything here, but like the feminism, the Girl Boss feminism
of the nineties, this movie is very emblematic of that,
and that was what we were like, Yeah, this is
feminism because we just weren't in ter I mean there
are episodes, early episodes of the show I feel like

(01:13:13):
on the.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Rock, Oh yeah, we were not asking the right questions.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
Yeah, I was not saying good things on that episode,
like being critical enough of the military industrial complex. But yeah,
this was this was very reflective of the times. There
are two things I do like about this movie. One
is the scene where Jordan and her boyfriend are in

(01:13:38):
the bathtub together and then he gets out of the
bathtub and she says, get your dick back in here.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Oh my god, I like, this movie's tried so hard,
so hard. Also that weird fart, what is that fart joke?
That the like, Oh, yeah, the hell was that?

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
That was a brain fart, like a soldier. That was
a brain fart, And I don't accept brain farts in
you said something stupid and brain and I don't accept
that in my office.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
This this script was bad, but also the actor was
not selling it at all or I was like, what
the hell like, yeah, silly.

Speaker 1 (01:14:14):
Ye didn't like that? Did love? Get your dick back
in here? And then there's also a part where the
whatever the officers are screaming at and berating the trainees,
you know, hurling insults at them, and one of the
things they say is worm sperm and that's just that's
that's funny. That's good.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
I'll go ahead and put that in my pocket.

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
Yeah, yeah, I'll say that again.

Speaker 3 (01:14:39):
Yeah, thank you, Daniella.

Speaker 1 (01:14:41):
Actually, but everything else was bad. We also touched on
this a bit, but the way to me Moore's body
is again, this is not the worst offender of over
sexualizing a woman's body and lear her. But there are

(01:15:01):
some weird choices made where, for example, lives that there's
that little montage where she's by herself trying to get
stronger doing push ups and pull ups and stuff, and
it seems like she is not only not wearing a
sports bra, but she's not wearing any bra and like
no shade to not wearing a bra in general, but

(01:15:23):
when you're doing like very hard physical exercise, like that
doesn't make any sense, and it's it's very much seems
like it's a well, we have to make sure we
see her hard nips through this white tank top.

Speaker 3 (01:15:38):
Yes, yeah, she's gotta be she's got to be sweaty,
and we need to see the edges of her body
in every respect because throughout the movie, you know the
naked where she's naked in the shower with Vo Mortensen
in in the space with her. This is another thing
like throughout we have to have these almost like sign posts,
remember that Meanmore is hot, member Demi Moore is sexy,

(01:16:01):
you know, like it's reminding the audience constantly like yeah,
we're kind of saying a girl has a brain and
a girl has a body that can accomplish things physically
just like men. But also girls are hot.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
But we're but we're told at the very very big
I mean it is by I guess who we're supposed
to think it is the villain of the movie, even
though she's tied for top villain with so many characters.
But we're told at the beginning of the movie like
the limits to which because we're shown we're shown literally
pictures of women who are not acceptable, and like Demi

(01:16:34):
Moore is acceptable, and the camera is not fighting with
the villain of the movie on that whatsoever.

Speaker 3 (01:16:40):
Yeah, yeah, the movie isn't taking that up critically. They're like, yeah,
you're right, she is hot.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
You do have to you do have to be hot
to be respected. You're like, oh, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
And the Senator isn't even poised as the villain at first,
and he thinks that she's advocating for women's rights for
up until probably sixty percent of the way through the movie, and.

Speaker 2 (01:17:02):
That's that's the bummer is like again, just like with
the theme of this movie, that at the by the
end of the movie, no one is advocating for women's rights,
even disingenuously, like we've actually lost one person pretending to
fight for women's rights, and then there's no one to
fill that void, right, and.

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
Again, you could read this and I don't think this
was the movie's intention at all, but you know, it
could have been commentary that, yeah, there are women who
you would think would be championing for women's rights, but
they turn out to be upholding the same sexist ideals
of the patriarchy, which is very much a thing. There

(01:17:41):
are many women like that, but the movie it just
seems as like, yeah, she, like the only other woman
in the movie is evil, and.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
Well there's also missus nurse who oh right, missus Medick,
who is weaponized in a way we haven't talked about yet,
right where we didn't talk about the homophobia plot point,
which is get into it seed that is planted and
then and then it comes back. How thrilling. When the

(01:18:12):
senator was outright transphobic and homophobic at the beginning, I was,
unfortunately like it turned on tried to go into my
nineteen ninety seven brain. I'm like, I'm assuming that her
transphobia is completely being played as a joke and audiences
are not supposed to have a problem with it. The homophobia,
I was less sure about of like are we because
she makes such a point of it to be like,

(01:18:34):
I need to make sure you're a straight, normal lady.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
You're getting dicked down right by a man with a penis.

Speaker 2 (01:18:43):
Right, you better be telling someone to get you get
your dick back in here every night. And she's like,
don't you worried?

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
I am.

Speaker 2 (01:18:51):
I'm the most normal woman alive. But that home again
just like this brain dead ass movie where they bring
back the homophobia because she goes to the beach with
women and makes physical contact with the only woman she's
met in the military.

Speaker 1 (01:19:10):
Even like it's so obviously platonic.

Speaker 2 (01:19:14):
I mean, but I do believe in like the nineties
tabloid culture, this could be weaponized against someone successfully. I
definitely do believe that. But again, it's just like the
way that it plays out is like, it's not that
that is something that should be pushed back on. It's

(01:19:34):
that because they also once again go out of their
way to be like we're not asking and you don't
have to tell us, but which I also know did happen.
But then her way of dealing with it, she's like, well,
this sucks because I'm not queer and then she leaves.
It was like, that's not the only thing that sucks.
They're like, it's it's just this character is unable to

(01:19:57):
conceive of anything outside of her personal predicament, and so
any like social commentary that happens is because it is
directly relevant to her. Is why she's always asking would
you ask a man this? Because she's a woman and
she's directly experiencing the prejudice. But when it comes to
literally anyone else, whether it be anyone who's not white,

(01:20:20):
whether it be queer people, she's like, well, that sucks
because I'm straight and white. And then she like stops
home and again and again with the fucking. When she's
like threatening and bankrupt, she's like, I'm gonna go, I'm
gonna say something about this publicly. I'm going to say
this on MSNBC. And it's like, great, do that. But

(01:20:41):
then when she gets what she wants, which is to
like go commit a war crime, she shuts up, yeah
and never says anything. So it's like, yeah, she's awful.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
Yeah, you know, I think this is like a really
I think this is a really big theme of the movie,
which is that like everything is about everything is about
individual experiences and individual interactions to everybody's detriment. Right, So
this is about like her as an individual experiencing you know,

(01:21:16):
discrimination in different ways and how she overcomes it. But
but the system and the rules and and nothing ever changes.
And I think I was really thinking about this in
terms of what I think are a set of really
disappointing ending scenes. So the end of this movie is

(01:21:40):
the ceremony on the beach, where you know, the people
who have made it through the training are entered into Great,
you made it into the Navy Seals. Good job.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
You know, I've just murdered dozens of brown people in Libya.

Speaker 3 (01:21:55):
Yeah, that's right, and so handshakes all around, Congratulations soldier,
here's your here's your ab Seals little metal thing whatever.
And then that cuts to Jordan, like in the locker room,
kind of putting her stuff away. She realizes that Master
Chief Vigo Mortensen has put a book of poems in

(01:22:17):
her locker or in her area and inserted another medal,
like we can only assume is because she saved his
life right right then, and then they make eye contact
and they're alone, they're alone in the in this locker room.
They make eye contact kind of like the honorable nod
at one another. I see you, you see me, and

(01:22:38):
then the movie is over. And so there's a lot
of questions I have, Like number one, the movie proves
to you, tells you multiple times, there's no systemic change here,
even as to some sort of like collective change even
among her team of trainees that she just went through this.
That there's no ceremony around her getting this medal publicly,

(01:23:00):
Like there's no like team at the end of this movie,
the people that she's just been through all of this with.
There's no like celebratory or like, g I Jordan, we
really actually you know, we did it together, you know
kind of thing. There's no there's nothing. It ends with
her in front of a locker like right, yeah, I

(01:23:21):
don't know, does that make sense, Like it's just the lady.
It's just this lady, right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:26):
You would think there would be like and now women
are allowed to do the thing. Yeah, but there's none
of that. Yeah, it's just like it is so hyper
individualistic every step of the way. To go back to
the don't ask, don't tell of it all.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
Yeah, So after these like beach photos have been revealed
and she's like, these accusations are bogus. But she also
says like she's like, are you suggesting that I'm a lesbian?
Well you better drop these malicious accusations. As if she's
also homophobic.

Speaker 2 (01:24:06):
Yeah, well she is, Like I'm like she we have
no reason to believe that she holds anything but firmly
right wing believes based on everything we see her do
and say or this whole movie.

Speaker 3 (01:24:18):
True, Yeah, the homophobia here to the degree and I
don't think it is. But if there is some tiny
interpretation that could be made that, like homophobia in the
military is unjust and wrong, which I don't think the
movie is doing right, it's still you are still supposed
to kind of shrug your shoulders and understand why that

(01:24:42):
would be wielded against her or like wielded against anybody, right,
Like you're still supposed to be like you know, if
maybe you're like, yeah, but being queer isn't wrong, right,
It's still the lesson is still supposed to be. But like,
but but don't you see like you can't be publicly
you know. That's the That's the best that can be

(01:25:04):
said about the homophobia here.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
And what a nineteen ninety seven sentiment is like, hot
white women can join the military, but you better be
straight or you're not welcome here. Like it's just the
line is so clear. Wait, I need to find this.
Oh yes, okay, this is from that same spy culture again.

(01:25:27):
If anyone knows about the legitimacy of the publication, Spy Culture.

Speaker 1 (01:25:30):
Sounds like a scholarly journal to me.

Speaker 2 (01:25:33):
Yeah, their logos very silly. I'm like they got the document.
I don't know. Okay, I have not vetted spy culture,
but they had a behind the scenes fact that I
did not see anywhere else. So, continuing on this back
and forth between Ridley Scott and the DoD, Scott agreed
to almost all the changes requested, but even after he
submitted a heavily altered script, the DOOD still said no.

(01:25:53):
This led to an amusing but not unprecedented incident where
Demi Moore called up the White House and asked to
talk to press it in Clinton to try to get
the decision overturned. The DoD file on Gi Jane includes
several press cuttings about this, all of which makes sexy jokes. Yeah. So, also,
Demi Moore called one of our pedophile presidents to try

(01:26:18):
to get her imperialism movie made as intended.

Speaker 3 (01:26:22):
You're just like and the White House was probably like lady,
you just did strip teas and it sucked. Like, you know,
Demi Moore in ninety seven doesn't have social or political
capital at the White House, I.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
Mean, and unfortunately that is like reflected. I mean it
all because it sucks because like Demi Moore is willingly
participating in this imperialist slop. Yeah, and also she is
kind of treated like shit a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:26:46):
Yeah, you're just getting demeaned left and right.

Speaker 4 (01:26:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:26:49):
Does anyone have anything else they'd like to discuss?

Speaker 3 (01:26:53):
I'm looking at me notes, but don't want to be
batting for the other side. They will eat corn flakes
out of your skull. Oh your boyfriend telling you we
don't have to talk about that. I just I took
notes on like the wildest lines.

Speaker 2 (01:27:09):
You know, there are some lines that are just straight
up weird, like just yeah, the brain fart thing, the
corn flake skull, like get your dick back in here.
Worm sperm or sperm.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
At least we had worm sperm. This movie gave us
worm sperm and nothing else. I'm grateful. Yeah, that's all
I had this movie does pass the Bechdel test, as
we said at the beginning of the episode, but again
at what cost.

Speaker 2 (01:27:38):
Yeah, this is this is a great example of the
reason why it was to this day Alison Bechdel's like,
that was not how I intended it for it to
be used, right.

Speaker 1 (01:27:50):
Yes, as far as our nipple scale though, where we
rate the movie based on a scale of zero to
five nipples examining it through yes, hard visible nipples through
your white tank top, based on examining the movie through
an intersectional feminist lens.

Speaker 4 (01:28:09):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:28:09):
I think maybe if I had watched this movie ten
years ago, I would have given it like two nipples.
Today I'm giving it zero nipples because it really is
just a propaganda tool for American imperialism and American military
industrial complex, and those are the most evil entities imaginable.

(01:28:31):
So I give it zero nipples. If I did have
to give it some, I'll give one foot rot or
whatever Jordan gets diagnosed with on her foot.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
I can why bring foot rot into it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:46):
I'm not trying to cut to the foot rot, like, yeah,
one foot rot to the line worm sperm, but zero nipples.

Speaker 2 (01:28:54):
Yeah, I'm also zero this. I'm like I'm glad that
this movie was not successful in doing what it wanted
to do. I would recommend, I mean, I'm going to
when we got off this callm to keep watching that
documentary because I think that that's like something that should
be talked about a lot off. Like how absolutely complicit

(01:29:15):
so many filmmakers, and now I think even more so
video game creators are in working with the American military.
And how yeah, and how so much of this I mean,
this specific movie is clearly targeting women, but how so
much of this entertainment targets children so that when the

(01:29:36):
recruiters come around, they have already been, you know, fully
encouraged to view fighting for an imperial force as normal
and good and righteous and all this stuff. So yeah, no, no,
no nipples. It sucked.

Speaker 3 (01:29:53):
Yeah, zero nipples for sure from me.

Speaker 1 (01:29:55):
Love it when we're all in agreement, lehann And thank
you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure.

Speaker 3 (01:30:02):
This was really fun. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
Oh my gosh, come back anytime.

Speaker 1 (01:30:06):
Please tell us about your podcasts, tell us where people
can check them out, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:30:12):
Sure, so wherever you get your podcasts, both of these.
My podcast five to four is a podcast about how
much the Supreme Court sucks. We talk about discuss present
basically left critique of the Supreme Court, critique of the
conservative legal movement. You know, there's six fascists up there

(01:30:32):
right now. There's a lot to talk about. So check
out five to four for all the Supreme Court depression news.
And then and then I'm also on a podcast called
Popular Cradle, which is a little bit newer, and Popular
Cradle is a podcast about Palestine from here in the
far diaspora. I am on that podcast with two Palestinian organizers,

(01:30:57):
community organizers, and we're talking about the Palestinian liberation movement,
the history of Palestinian resistance, what's going on right now,
gesturing at everything, and more. So, Yeah, you can check
both of those out wherever you get podcasts. You can
follow me on Blue Sky at Awa Rhiannon AA's a

(01:31:19):
y w a Rhiannon. And you can check out our
Patreon four five to four at patreon dot com Slash
five four pod all spelled.

Speaker 1 (01:31:28):
Out excellent, Thank you again, come back anytime.

Speaker 3 (01:31:32):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:31:33):
Death to g I Jane, Sorry death death, death to
g I Jane. So I was thinking of the Wendy Williams,
the Wendy Volliumes meme.

Speaker 1 (01:31:43):
Oh Yeah, you can follow our our Patreon as well
aka Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash Bectal Cast two
bonus episodes a month, plus the entire back catalog and
with that at.

Speaker 2 (01:32:00):
Ease Soldiers at Ease, Bye Bye.

Speaker 1 (01:32:08):
The Bechdel Cast is a production of iHeartMedia, hosted by
Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis, produced by Sophie Lichtermann, edited
by Mola Board. Our theme song was composed by Mike
Kaplan with vocals by Katherine Voskressensky. Our logo in merch
is designed by Jamie Loftis and a special thanks to
Aristotle Assevedo. For more information about the podcast, please visit

(01:32:30):
linktree slash Bechdel Cast

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