Episode 766: In My Skin (2002)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:20):
Oh gee is folks, it's showtime. People say good money
to see this movie When they go out to a theater.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
They want closed sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
In the projection booth.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring, Put it off? Who is it?

(00:56):
Fisa the shoot show it a momentally do tiu posers.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
Then themselves here the mutilation Barchette to Cortoon.

Speaker 5 (01:14):
Would be there. Would you sold.

Speaker 6 (01:18):
Me you like.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Coe could use confer.

Speaker 4 (01:36):
She brought you the really good can't can't be kept them?
Then in expectation, I mean the Pipsis.

Speaker 7 (01:58):
She probably she used a purple porch.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Officer.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Welcome to the projection both, I'm your host, Mike White,
join me once again. Is mister axel Cohagen.

Speaker 7 (02:38):
Stopping in for a nibble.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Also back in the Buddhist mister Ben Buckingham Salutations. We
continue October with a look at In My Skin, released
in two thousand and two. The film was written, directed by,
and stars Marina Devon as Esther, a marketing exec who
injures her leg while wandering off from a party. She
becomes fast by the wound, and this begins the story

(03:02):
of how Esther forms a new relationship with her own body.
We will be spoiling all the gory details as we
go along, so if you don't mind anything ruined, please
track down the movie and watch it before continuing. Just
it pause and we'll just be waiting, trapped like flies
and Amber act sol When was the first time you
saw in My Skin?

Speaker 2 (03:20):
And what did you think?

Speaker 7 (03:22):
This is the first time I've seen it. I went
through a huge New French extremity kick when I as
soon as I watched my first film, which probably would
have been Martyrs or High Tension, I needed to see
everything within the genre. It really struck me. It's a singular,

(03:45):
amazing film style like the Jay horror films or you
know American cult movies from the seventies and eighties. It's
it's just this perfect time period. But I I don't
think I came across In My Skin until preparing for this,
and my first response is that even though it has

(04:09):
so many hallmarks and is definitely indicative of the new
French extremity in a lot of ways, it's also a
very straightforward film, does not pull a lot of punches,
and I think directors has kind of downplayed heavy symbolism,

(04:32):
and I actually agree with her that this is a
straightforward film about a woman's discovery of her body.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
And Ben, how about yourself.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
It was twenty seventeen that I first and the only
time I've seen it until recently. I haven't kind a
funny relationship with this film. I laughed when you contacted
me and said, hey, Ben, I want you to do
In My Skin because you're the second person to stick
this film in front of me. When I ran a

(05:04):
barroom film night way back, when one of my co
hosts Along the Way picked In my Skin to play.
I was a film I'd come across in reading bits
and pieces but hadn't actually seen, and it was a
curious pick for our night. We definitely played some pretty intense, heavy,
messed up film, so we definitely we weren't playing it

(05:26):
safe a lot of the time, but not exactly the
kind of film you go and have a couple of
beers and then sit down in the bandroom in ancient
couches and soak up with a group of people. At
the end of it, even I was a bit like, hey, Liam,
interesting choice. He's like, I thought you'd appreciate it that.
I'm like, yeah, yeah, I did. But also so once

(05:50):
again I was like, ah, yeah, okay, Mike, Yeah, I
appreciated that.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
You're my cannibal go to guy.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
I am the go to cannibal guy, which is why
this film has been put in front of me twice now.
It is a film that I think I went yep
okay at passort of the way and knew that one
day it would return, and hadn't thought much about it
until now when it suddenly seems to be exploding back
into attention, getting a couple of Blu Ray releases around
the world, and I'm very happy to return to re

(06:21):
examine it, and I definitely am much more impressed by it.
I thought that I wasn't impressed by it when I
first saw it. I don't think it is an easy
film to absorb on a single viewing, and I think
that watched it quietly in the dark on your own
at least once, not all the time, but at least
once is definitely the way to really follow the experience.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, I'm trying to remember the first time that I
saw this film because I am not a big fan
of the French extremity films. I walked out of high
tension before their big twist was revealed. I talked about
that on our Martyrs episode. We did an episode on murders,
and I don't think that that went overwhelm with at

(07:06):
least one of my co hosts on that one. But
I do remember liking this film, and I do remember
enjoying that this was such a look at a woman
in her relationship with her own body. And by the way,
how great is it that we have three dudes on
this episode here to explain to women exactly what this
film is about and to really mansplain all of the

(07:29):
things that they experience and go through. I mean, we
can talk about all kinds of bodily trauma and rape
and menstrual anxiety and all those things and just really
give the girls heads up on what it means to
be a woman.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
So yay us.

Speaker 7 (07:46):
I think I had watched it twice in preparation for this,
and I had notes, and I kind of had had
some ideas of what I was going to say, and
then I listened to Faculty of Horror's excellent podcasts on
this film and thought, well, shit, this is covering a

(08:09):
lot of the stuff from a feminine perspective. I'm gonna
have to to push it a little bit harder, you know.
I see this as a challenge for us to rise
to well acknowledging, you know, our identities and possible limitations.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
And next week when we talk about raw, will have
two female co hosts and then me to explain to
them what things are going on. So it's easier here
when we have three guys.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
That's that's called balance, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, fair and balanced.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Also we can see who has the worst French pronunciation
as well. The Australian accent is not one that mixes
with friends very easily, and I did not get a
chance to look up any pronunciations, So I'm just gonna
apologize right now.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
I'm going to do my best to avoid French at all.
That's why I didn't say this is called dance mapeau.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Or however, that's the easy one. You've got to say
that as many as times as possible, because that's the
easy one to get the points up. It dance Mapu, well,
it looks.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Like dance mapeu, which I know is definitely not it
as in Pepe the Pew.

Speaker 7 (09:18):
It was only in preparing for this podcast that I
learned his name is pronounced Gaspar no Way and not
Gaspar Noir. It kind of changed everything for me.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, I was looking up Rabelists or no, I've already
gotten it. That's the one that I looked up. I'm like,
I know it's not Rabelists. That's so as where I was,
I was disappearing into some strange places. I had to
listen to the facult of your Horror episode as well,
and I was it was good because my brain wasn't
particularly going in those directions. I had other weird things
to look up, and I got distracted by all of

(09:51):
the piles of books that I have and didn't get
around looking up the pronunciations. But yeah, there is a
lot of way is to approach this film in our defense, Well,
obviously this is a film dealing with a lot of
feminist issues. It's a lot of just general societal mental health,

(10:13):
community connections, modernity, all sorts of things that I think
are much more widespread. It's just that we don't tend
to get a film that so specifically hones in on
a woman's experience, and especially a woman who isn't afraid
of being a and I mean is extremely positively a

(10:36):
weird little goblin freak.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yeah. As I was watching this, I was making a
list of all the oppositions that happen in this film,
the idea of inside outside, negative, positive, And I'm going
to be focusing on these opening credits quite a bit,
just a warning work in personal woman, man, public, private beauty,
ugliness and then person body And even in the credit,

(11:00):
Don's MAPO is split between that M and the A
and these opening credits. Like, I don't focus on the
credits nearly as much, but with this film, the whole
idea of these negative and positive images, and that sometimes
it looks like it's the same image on the left,
which is positive, versus the image on the right, which

(11:22):
is negative. Sometimes they are the same, very similar, and
sometimes they are complete opposites. And you even get the
split of the image when it comes to first times
that we see our main character when we get that
amazing shot of her leg, and her leg is such
the focus of so much of this film, and you

(11:42):
have the chair on the left hand side, the leg
on the right, and it almost looks like an architectural
sculpture rather than a person, and that kind of disassociation,
which we'll also be talking quite a bit about, and
then you get the split screen comes back a few times,
especially in what I would consider the opening to the
third act, because this movie goes along pretty normal, well

(12:05):
normal a narrative path through the first and second act
quite a bit, and then when it comes to the
third act, it's still of a piece, but it goes
off in a different direction, and it's handled and is
shot in a little bit of a different way. And
I did find it fascinating to find out that the
cinematographer of this film also has a very successful business

(12:27):
shooting food, and the food in this film is so unappetizing,
especially when you get a shift. I think that's more
of the second act shift of the restaurant scene. Because
so much of this I talked about how it's work
and personal, and it's this whole idea of the societal
expectations this idea of our main character being this it

(12:53):
doesn't really matter what her job is, but she is
in advertising, which I guess actually does matter because advertising
is all about presentation. It's all about the gloss. It's
all about you know, you don't sell the steak, you
sell the sizzle kind of thing, you know. And this
idea of her working at this marketing company and having
all of these expectations thrust upon her as far as

(13:15):
it's not just the nine to five, it's the party afterwards,
it's the dinner with clients. It's these things that you
have to perform at as well as the job, and
those things are not necessarily I mean, you can be
a fucking fantastic writer, have a great mind for ad
copy or imagery, but then having to perform at a

(13:38):
social function when you are definitely not comfortable doing that,
it is such a pain in the ass. And that
doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, but
when you are a woman you have extra stuff put
upon you as far as well. You have to be pretty,
and you have to be pleasant, and you have to
know how much you can talk versus not talk, because
Lord knows, if you are there with a male client.

(14:00):
You have to defer to them, and you just have
to be basically arm candy or eye candy for this person,
just be seen and not necessarily heard.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, I knew the order of my notes was going
to drive me insane. But you just zigzagged through like
three quarters of the film there, Mike.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. No, we are going to be
all over the place. We are not taking the narrative
way at all. We're definitely going to be all over.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
This film needs like hyperlinks on hyperlinks to go through everything.
There's just to like duck back to the opening credit.
I would just gribe it as a dynamic dichotomy that
it isn't entirely as you said, reflections splits divisions. I
did get a chance to check out a little bit

(14:49):
of her commentary, and she said that she described that
you wanted to start it like a normal film. I
love the idea, like, oh yeah, we'll just start it
normal and then go from there. Have it dragged you
into something not but what she meant by that when
she wanted to do it in the American style of
having the starting with the city and then moving in
closer to the buildings than the people and the person,

(15:11):
but to do it in a way that was different,
that was a bit more abstract and changing it up.
The split screen does return later, and there, she said,
when it returns later, that is meant to represent the
wound itself rather than showing it, which does make that
opening title sequence extra interesting, that the city itself as

(15:33):
a possible wound. I don't necessarily think that the split
always means that in the film, but you can certainly
read it as such, and it is deeply meaningful. She
wanted it to start with the city because you actually
don't get much contextualizing geography or background throughout the film.
It really stays owned it and close to her, and
so gets out of the way that opening sequence. But

(15:54):
it also it's not just the city. It's the office space,
it's the office materials, it's objects, It's so many you know, yes,
did you get a bit of her leg mixed in
with these objects. It's quite a fascinating hypnotic experience that
is also feels like real sense. Memory of the Naughty
is the way it's kind of like the vibe of

(16:15):
the film stock and the color choices and the like.
There was a gentle piano I think to kind of ease,
U see it like everything is just yeah, it almost
feels normal, except there's that destabilization with the split, and
then the image is not necessarily being matched or unmatched
in a easily classifiable way that the opening.

Speaker 7 (16:39):
To me, I see it as establishing the monotony and
boredom of her world. It's it's giving us this it's
a split world, but it's yeah, I found it purposefully
bound compelling in terms of showing us what she's going

(17:01):
to have to break free. And then there's the shot
of her leg, which you know, as I remembered it
and as I noted down, it's kind of a you know,
a Laura Mulvey gaze kind of thing, because I think
that first shot it kind of starts down near her
foot or ankle and goes up to her thigh in

(17:25):
a way that I see it as kind of that
that male gaze, and I see that as establishing in
the beginning, this is not her body. It is there,
and people are gazing upon her, and she is an
object to be looked at, and I think that happens.

(17:47):
To contrast, shots later on of her and the leg
are more static, not that zoom in not that like
lawyer is. It's just this has become her body and
she has reclaimed it. And also I may be reading

(18:07):
too much into this, but I think it goes from
moving over her leg. I think it cuts to a
container of pens with scissors in it, and I thought
that was a nice little touch.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Definitely inclined to agree that the things we're seeing are
boring world, because I mean, well, three of us don't
look like the type of guys who would be especially
thrilled to be in an office space all the time.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
That's my life is working in this office.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yes, And the commentary Marina Devan says that she really
wanted to establish that she had this professional life, that
she had things that where she places, where she had
a kind of meaning, the connection, that she wasn't somebody necessarily.
You know, she's not Jack in fight Club already fractioned

(18:58):
and splintering loosekin with It's like things could be just fine,
they could just continue on. She is on a track
at the track is very familiar and unexciting and not
prone to flipping.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
I'm so glad you mentioned fight Club because the line.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Self improvement is masturbation. A self destruction.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
I mean, this whole movie feels like self destruction, but
really coming to grips with yourself as far as feeling
your body and knowing your body, because so much of
this too it feels like this disassociation between her and
her body. I mean, we get the scene at the
dinner and again jumping all over, but at that dinner

(19:46):
scene where her arm is completely disconnected, it's not even
her arm anymore. And when she is shown later suckling
on it, biting on it, sucking the blood. She says
in that kind of terry fucking fantastic commentary, and it's
so nice to have for me a visual commentary, you know,
like hearing her seeing the subtitles watching the movie at

(20:08):
the same time was really really great. And to have
her talking about how she shot it as to show
that this arm isn't even hers, you know, that it
is so disconnected, and those scenes where she will, god,
I wish I was this flexible still where she'll take
her foot and rub her foot over her face, and

(20:28):
it's like, this is so unnatural to see the way
that she is framing her own body, the way that
she talks later on when she lays back and her
leg is in front of her, and she's like, I
shot this as if my leg were a lover coming
to me. I'm like, wow, that's great that you are

(20:49):
so conscious of this disassociation of your own body. But yeah,
that arm on the table and then to I guess,
almost like relieve stress at this dinner, the way she
takes her arm later on as part of her but
again we don't see it connected necessarily, and just as

(21:09):
stabbing her arm with the fork and with the knife
and well, it could be that plastic arm that you saw,
but it's this whole idea of like she's almost become
a mannequin at that point, with that arm and the
watch on there. It almost seems like an object that
she would have in a commercial or inside of a
marketing copy, a print app.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
I did briefly pick up my copy of The Sexual
Politics of Meat by Carol Adams and have a quick
flick through, but it was just like a little too
specific in its approach to the material that's definitely exists
in the DNA of this film, the objectification of bodies,

(21:50):
the parallel associations of animal butchered meat and women's bodies
in language, imagery marketing. In a lot of ways, this
film feels quite singular, which is partly to do with
that France doesn't have a huge history of horror cinema.

(22:11):
It sort of does, but it kind of doesn't. The
orthodoxy of French critical film theory does not, or at
least has not recognized horror cinema until very recently. I
can't I was trying to find the reference, but I
couldn't find anywhere but that there was some massive like
Encyclopedia of French Cinema published in France, was very well recognized,

(22:35):
and when it got to talking about George Fanzou just
left Eyes without a Face out completely, which is his
most significant film now was still a pretty goddamn significant
film at the time, but it was just like, oh no,
we don't this is not proper to talk about that.
They would talk about the fantastic, you know, things like

(22:57):
Labet Labette and George the Ear and all those kinds
of things, but it had to be this more poetic
fantasy rather than horror. And going back and looking at it,
there's like that scene that you talk about, the dinner scene.
There's quite a few parts in this that do feel
quite like Louis Bounuel films. That one is that one

(23:20):
is the one that definitely has the strongest connections with
the Seven Hand to like when she on andlou and
to Exterminating Angel. But also I'm struck this the Franzos
connection feels really significant. And it's not just eyes without
a face, because obviously that film is a woman in
pieces has lost her face and who's been experimented on

(23:44):
by doctors to make her whole again, which is the first,
you know, the first interaction she has with the doctor.
The doctor offers to make her hold of have use
plastic surgery to smooth over the wound, and she says, no, thanks,
I'm good.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
I thought you were talking about I just thought the
face because I almost said not just the doctor but
her father. But yeah, the doctor in this he's cool.
He's one of those first encounters where it's just like, oh,
don't you want to be pretty? You know, the expectation
is that your leg is a sex object.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, and ironically played by her brother in the film.
But also to frans use Blood of the Beasts, which
is a documentary he made about the Paris abattoirs and
is an absolutely horrific and grueling experience, and so like that.
It feels like Blood of the Beasts is very much
part of the DNA of this film, of contrasting two

(24:36):
sides of Parisian life. This sort of like the everyday
normal world and then this absolute horrific blood bath that
is occurring in a private sphere.

Speaker 7 (24:49):
I would like to lodge a complaint that the Australian
guy is doing very well at pronouncing things in French
and as the guy with the mid Western accent, I
don't like that because it does not set me up
for success.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
Okay, sorry, sorry, Axel, I'll try to be worse. These
are the only ones that I can do properly, which
is why I said them instead of the I could do, Hey,
the you San's visage. I should have done that, because
I can say that, and that's it.

Speaker 7 (25:20):
I am a devout horror fan, and I would say that,
you know, I am probably you know, if I had
to swear allegiances, I would swear my allegiance to horror
before I saw it to film itself. And with that said,
and I've thought about this, and I've watched this movie

(25:41):
a couple of times, I do not think this is
a horror film. I see this as a work of art,
visual art, and I see it as a testimony to
the triumph of her body and to take something out
of context. If you were to take the slogan long

(26:05):
Live the New Flesh away from Cronenberg repurpose it for
this film, I think it would suit it really well,
because this is a movie about her triumphantly reclaiming her
flesh and frankly, her ecstasy as she does.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
So.

Speaker 7 (26:28):
I do feel compelled to say that self harming and
behaviors are definitely something to talk about with a professional
and to be concerned about without shaming anyone. But to me,
this is a film that is demonstrating her thrills and

(26:50):
a sensual joy, which gives me some thoughts about the
ending that I'll hold off on. But I was not
horrified by this film. I found myself watching The Transformation.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
One of my first notes was doesn't feel like a
horror film to me. It feels pretty normal, and I
will throw myself under that bus. I do think it
is a horror film, though I just don't think it's
necessarily a body horror film, because I think that it's
the while there is some dichotomy is presented. I think
it's collapses a lot of those, and I think that

(27:26):
the reason why it is a horror film for me
and I don't find a joy in what's going on
with her is because of the collapsing of those elements
that if it was just a body horror film to me,
I could probably be more in that position of like
seeing what she's going through as a kind of revelatory

(27:50):
positive but because of how much of it is collapsed
together with a social failure out and be mind, body
split is a really sick delusion that we've been suffering
under for censories now that is what causes a lot

(28:10):
of what's going on from her that we have were
so that it's so ingrained in us to have an
experience of the two parts being separate and that that
doesn't really fucked up things to us. And I do
find it to be a horror film because it is
about destabilization and because there is a lot of failure

(28:35):
around her that it isn't threatening, but it's really not great.
But it is very, very very different to almost all
the other horror films of its kind, to all the
French new extremism, to the new French extremity, I exact,

(28:55):
probably and especially to feminist cannibal films, because she's not
reacting to any thing in particular. There's not a person
or an entity or anything that symbolizes any kind of
patriarchal law. Precisely, it's a real you know, in so
many films that the cannibalistic act is devouring something else

(29:19):
to like take its power and make it your own,
to like gain this kind of you know, independence or
you know, to erase that which has been dominating you.
But here it's just it feels very real that it
does feel much more like even at the same time
as dealing with that horror stuff, it's dealing with it

(29:40):
a way that feels like a social realism because it's
just like, oh no, there isn't one thing that you
can react against. There isn't a way to just devour
it and be on with. There's no catharsis. It's just
kind of a flailing around. And yeah, I think that
she is. I'll have to find the quote. There was
a quote about like in the commentary about that that

(30:02):
of that this is a compulsion and there isn't necessarily
joy in it, but it isn't necessarily bad either, And
it's so complicated in the way that she collapses those
together that it isn't necessarily negative, but it isn't necessarily positive.
But after watching all of her short films, I had
a much more negative experience of In My Skin because

(30:25):
it feels like the culmination of a shit ton of pain.
I highly recommend the shorts, but dear God, yeah, she
had some shit to work out. But then the positive
of that is it seems I feel like she did
work it out, Like In My Skin does feel like
she exercises demons, and she has said any interviews that
she never self mutilated again after making the film, that

(30:47):
she was able to release that and move on. So
it's like, yeah, that's also really positive. But also, ah, yeah,
a lot of.

Speaker 7 (30:56):
What we're saying that there's a real strong overlap. I
think what it comes down to is, you know it
there's an attempt at transformation, and what we're disagreeing on
is is whether or not she gets there, Because if
she's always fractured and she doesn't achieve any kind of

(31:21):
like a sublimement, you know, then I think it's a
horror film. But if you believe that in this she
finds something holy, and I believe that for her subjective narrative,
she finds something of that meaning. And to me, that's

(31:45):
what keeps it from being a horror film, is that
it's about that trajectory. Now, in terms of her own biography,
in terms of how you would like clinically if you
were working with this person, there are all sorts of
issues that would come up. But looking at it from

(32:09):
her narrative, I find it interesting and again I see
it as her finding something in this. But like I said,
I think it's going to depend interpretively on whether or
not people think she has beyond that fracture into something

(32:31):
whole and new, or if she is never able to
fully leave it behind, which thing the film open to
That kind of interpretation, I think makes it richer and
it gives you something to talk about after the movie's done.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
The patriarchy for me, is ever present, you know, and
I think that there is not necessarily one person that
represents it in here. I think there's more like three
her boyfriend, her boss, and then her girlfriend her girlfriend.
The pressures that happen between women at work is so awful,

(33:09):
and the idea of you cannot get ahead, and we've
seen this in a thousand movies, a thousand TV shows.
You can't get ahead unless you push other people down.
I can't break through that glass ceiling unless I'm stepping.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
On your head.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Like those are awful, awful things. And the moment I
mean talk about threes, the three men that attack our
main character at the pool and her friend is just
sitting there. Everyone is just standing around, and meanwhile, I
will consider this a rape is happening right in front

(33:44):
of them, with these three assholes that come out of
the pool and want to throw her into the pool
and try to start stripping her before they throw her
in there, and they stop when they see the blood.
And of course, to me, that is the whole women
on their periods don't go swim kind of thing. And
it's like this horror of I know it's not meant
forru blood, but for me, these guys react as if

(34:06):
it was and just like, oh, we can't do this.
And her POV shots after that happens where she's looking
around and it's like she's losing herself. And I love
that it is a POV that we are getting inside
of her head and we're going to get a lot
more of that later on in the film. But it's
it's not just one person holding her down. It's society.

(34:30):
It's every single person she runs into. Even when she's
at that party at the beginning, after she cuts her leg,
there's that guy who's trying to dance way too closely
to her. I mean, it's just a little moment, but
you're like, Okay, this is the same kind of stuff
that she probably has to put up with every single
day of her life being a woman, and she, you know,

(34:53):
has to put her hand on I'm just like, nope,
not today, and you move away from this guy, but
he is such I'll latch. And at that point her
friend kind of helps her out, kind of moves her
out of the way, which is nice, but her friend's
not going to help her out too much more after that.
Throughout the rest of this film.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
It is one hundred percent there in so many different ways.
But it's like, I mean, if she turned around and
ate her boyfriend in this, it wouldn't feel the same
as if, like in Tumble every Day or something like that.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Oh God, I keep forgetting that I saw Trouble every Day.
That's another French extremity film that I just could not stand.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
I did not like it the first time. I wish
I could find the essay I wrote on it years ago,
because I did come around to loving it. I really
do appreciate clear did a lot more now. But I
think I wrote an essay on that and Baisee Moir together,
both films I didn't care for until I wrote that
essay and then came around them to be like, oh,
you know, I actually love these. That scene in the
pool is intense. That is filmed in such a way

(35:55):
that it comes off a lot more intensely than the
cinema genuinely treat It's an actual rape scene, and a
big part of that is not even so much the
action of the guys. It is the reaction of her
friend and that failure of the bond, and the way
her friend just kind of lets her get bulled away
and then kind of excuses like, oh, I just froze,

(36:16):
and it's like, no, we could. We could see you thinking.
You were thinking about what was happening, and you felt
weird about your friend, and so you let it happen
instead of just getting in there and helping shut it down.
And it feels like such a betrayal, and it's a
betrayal that really cuts wide and deep if you feel
it on the personal level and also on that societal,

(36:37):
bigger picture level as well. That kind of is one
of the many things that helps set as to kind
of even more adrift, that she starts to lose those
connections more and more. And that's that is that the
failure to like have recognition, I think is also part
of the horror of this film. She doesn't necessarily need

(36:58):
somebody else, but the lack of anything that there isn't yeah,
that it's it's just that that isolation and that loneliness.
I don't know. In the in the commentary that de
Van talks about that a bit and how especially at
the beginning, she wanted she didn't want to shoot her
like she was isolated because she didn't I didn't feel

(37:21):
like she was. That there's a lot of the shots
she's paired with somebody else, that there's is in groups,
and that when she goes off on her own, it's
not caused you alone, it's her own curiosity. That she's
just someone who explores and moves around, and it's that
sort of going off and curiosity. That is part of
what helps set her adrift, because it breaks her loose
of these people who don't want to explore, that aren't curious,

(37:44):
that don't have actual empathy, that their empathy is built
on pre established structures of status quo and feeling at ideas,
and that anything different or unusual is too much and
too alien. And maybe they might be able to come around,
but the reaction is so immediate and there isn't really

(38:05):
any coming back for esther once they react in a
negative fashion. Yeah, I was going down some weird rabbit holes,
like thinking about ideas of relation to this kind of thing,
of trying to pin it down. I found some fun
stuff from like talking about Hobes and Locke and what
brings individuals together and how like that essentially the like

(38:29):
I've got a great quote here from Maggie Kilgore from
a book on communion to cannibalism. It's called ideas of incorporation.
And so the old image of the body politic created
the sense of a world of essentially related members who
identities were determined and controlled by their social roles. With
the rise of individualism, that body is also broken. It's

(38:50):
members scattered, as atom like individuals, so that society has
to be remembered in a new way, with a new
basis and foundation for relationship. According to Homees and Locke,
what brings equal individuals together is the desire to preserve
the most essential human right property. So you end up, yeah,
with this fracturing and modernity where we all get split

(39:11):
apart from our communities and we start to get isolated
and become individuals, and how important that is, and how
that's held up as the absolute be all and end all,
and the thing that holds together is property. But women
are made into property, and then it's all starts. And
this whole film just feels like a whole trajectory of
the last four or five hundred years just colliding into
one individual person's just crash again, a crash that isn't

(39:36):
entirely bad. We haven't even mentioned like that big a
word yet, abject, But so much of this film is
using these kind of abjections of like the boundaries the transgression,
to melt the status quo, to melt the expectations. And
I think I'm real curious to see what people think

(39:58):
of this film when it sort of re appears now
with these new Blu ray releases, because I think back
in two thousand and seven, what year did this come out? Again?
Two thousand and two, So even earlier, back in two
thousand and two, even with things like the French New
for a New French Extremity, so much of that was

(40:22):
saying that it was dealing with things like misogyny and racism,
but really just like riding them real exploitation. This film
just feels like a kind of film that I was
just like popping up on tube now made by people
in their backyards at home, like the strange YouTube phenomena
of like weird women getting their weird vibes and experiences

(40:45):
out there. And again I mean that positively. It's like
I really wanted to try and watch Cannibal Muckbang before
watching this, because I felt like, I feel like Cannibal
Mugbang must have some in my skin DNA somewhere in
it for like a transgressive pushback against all that is
proper and ordered.

Speaker 7 (41:01):
You can put a cultural Marxist reading on this, you can.
You know, however, this is where I'm going to maybe
have people disagree with me. I don't think that is
the most useful reading because I really do think this
is a work of what was it term auto cinema

(41:23):
or auto fiction auto fiction. This is to me, putting
the focus on patriarchy and culture and capitalism. You can
get agent results, you can have definitely an informed discussion
about them. But to me, once you start putting your

(41:46):
energy into those discussions, I really think it loses the
focus and the power of one individual's story. And in
this case, I think, and I'm going to go back
to what I said, this is a story of a transformation,
and I think the feelings we have on that are

(42:08):
how we judge that kind of a transformation. Now it
informs the transformation that she has to have a patriarchy
to rebel against to claim her body. We have to
understand that first to be able to understand why she's
doing this. But from there, to me, it becomes so

(42:30):
very very personal, you know, body writing. There's a whole
history of feminist literature and filmmaking based on this, where
there are players of experiencing more than just the narrative.
And I found this as a film mostly an experience

(42:58):
that I enjoyed it when I was feeling her journey,
and I enjoyed it least when I had that critical
lens to say, well, her boyfriend is showing this and
her her best friend demonstrates this. I felt like as
soon as that critical lens came up, it gave me

(43:18):
a distance. It made me too comfortable, because it's like, oh,
I get this. This is a movie with symbols and metaphors,
and I can't understand it that way, and I'm safe
in my ivory academic tower.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
I think if you.

Speaker 7 (43:32):
Push those aside, you know, your face to face with
this woman telling you a story about who she is,
and your reactions to it become a part of the story.
But as long as I have the talking stick for
a little bit, I don't want to go too much
further in the episode without talking about the party scene,

(43:56):
which it might be my favorite part of the movie.
I'm going to give a little background as to why
she goes to the party with her friend. It does
not look like a particularly awful party, but it looks
incredibly boring. She goes out to walk, stumbles, falls and
cuts her leg, and it is completely anticlimactic. If you

(44:21):
knew anything about this movie, you knew she was going
to wound herself. The movie does not make that an event,
does not highlight it. There's no close ups, there's no
shocking music. It just happens and it passes. The real
magic for me is when she discovers the wound, she

(44:45):
goes to the bathroom, she sees that she's tracked in blood.
She looks at her leg and sees the wound, and
then there's a close up of her face, which I
believe I'm paraphraise saying John Cassavetti's you know, her face
is the best special effect in the movie. There's a

(45:07):
look of fear, maybe some disgust, and then, in my opinion,
and this is you know, central kind of my thesis,
there's this trans awe of this is me, this is
something that is happening. I have found something new within

(45:29):
my own body. And here's where you can see some
of the connections to the movie and book Crash, although
they're not one to one equations, But the look on
her face where she discovers through wound, to me, that
facial expression explains more than any dialogue could.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
If this was a different kind of movie, she would
meet a tall, dark stranger at this party and begin
an affair with that tall dark stranger and that would
change the relationship with her best friend, with her boyfriend,
with her work. But instead, the tall, dark stranger is her.
It's like her meeting herself and her understanding or beginning

(46:17):
to cope with this idea of the wound in her leg.
And yeah, I can definitely see that Cronenbergian Crash Ballard
type of thing, especially the Roseanna Arquette character with that
big wound in her leg, which was just so freaking vaginal.
And I mean doesn't It's been a long time. I
haven't seen Crash since I saw it originally at the theater.

(46:38):
I mean, basically, isn't the sex with the wound rather
than her vagina?

Speaker 2 (46:43):
Yeah? That does happen in that film, okay, And I
know that. In the commentary, Marina says that she very
much didn't want to make it about sexuality, but when
she talks about that, she does mean more that her
compulsion isn't caused by sexual issues. You know that it's
the boyfriend Andrew's hung up on, Oh can you feel me?
Versus her? She's not. I do love that scene where

(47:06):
she finds the wound initially, the way that we discover
that she only becomes aware of it the blood that
she trails behind.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
Well, the blood becomes like a tattle tale through the
whole movie, like when she's at the restaurant later on
and the waitress sees the blood and at one point
there was the guy next to her and I can't
remember who that if that's like one of her I
think that's her boss. When he looks down and I'm thinking, oh,
there's going to be a whole bunch of blood there,
but no, it's like a bag. I'm like, all right,

(47:37):
because I thought for sure she would be trailing blood everywhere.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well, the blood trail also makes you feel like we
think of the like, you know, if you've had some
situation in the social circle where there's been a lot
of emotional fallout and you don't necessarily notice that something
bad has happened until you see the trail of destruction behind,
which is something that happens in the film. Later on,
her friend of when she comes to confide in her,

(48:03):
but she doesn't realize that this is a strange thing
to be confiding and that her friend reacting just like
the blood is the thing that tells her that, oh,
hang on, there's something something not I didn't expect he
hang on.

Speaker 7 (48:16):
I love that scene where she was to her friend
and says, I guess what I did. I remember, I
went to the back room and I cut myself with
something metal. And again there's that transformative joy she is experiencing,
and in that moment, she is trying to recruit another

(48:36):
woman into this experience, saying, this is something that you
can experience too.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
And so there's a.

Speaker 7 (48:45):
Moment there where she's attempting to create a community based
on the body. And again I'm not saying that self
harm could be a transformative experience, although I believe my
kid said we're going to talk a little bit about performance,
are it so that that'll muddy the waters. But she

(49:07):
tries to create the shared experience based on the body
and you know, ties to the abject and the things
that patriarchy isn't interested in, and she revolts and frightens
her friend, who in a later scene can't even look
at her.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
I talked a bit before about how this film was
received when it came out, and being curious about how
she received now is I love? In the Severn release,
there's an interview recent interview with Marina Devann and she
basically opens with her saying, look, I used to say
it was all fictional, but now I'm tired and old

(49:49):
and lazy and I can't be asked. So yeah, no,
it's actually really heavily automed biographic and talks about the
self mutilation and how much of that. There's like very
truth full that the piece of tanned skin we see
in the film is of her real skin that she
had tanned previous to the film, that there was that

(50:09):
she had eaten herself. But in a very different context
it says like she had it with champagne and you know,
on a plate and like a civilized dinner. That it
wasn't such a chaotic kind of thing like in the film.
But at the time, I think what you were saying
before about interpreting it like I do, I am writing

(50:32):
both rails of personal experience interpretation and more critical academic
kind of experience. I have a lot of connection to
this film. I have my own share of scars. I
have very antagonistic relationship with my body, which transformed quite
significantly when I got my first tattoos. I remember sitting

(50:54):
in the tattooed chair and looking at them doing this
huge piece on my arm and having theation that where
previously I would not have cared if I was in
some kind of accident and lost the arm, I was
suddenly very attached to this arm. The tattoo itself made
me connected to it. And that is something that this
film is about that Brinda Devan talks about this in

(51:18):
I can't remember possibly in the same interview of saying
that like working on the body and creating the scars
is a way of like shaping it into a way
that is more you.

Speaker 7 (51:28):
Sometimes in the faculty a Horror podcast on as well,
Andrea Superstudy said she is heavily tattooed, and in that
process there was a lot of self reflection about what
that meant for her and for her body. Alexandra West,
at least at the time of that recording, no tattoos,

(51:49):
no piercings, and so all of a sudden, I'm listening
to that, and I'm thinking about myself, and I'm forty seven,
no tattoos, no piers sayings, and I'm tenuinely thinking about
getting a tattoo, but I never do it because of

(52:11):
that permanent mark and that feeling of what's going to
be meaningful enough and then I feel like, on the
other hand, well, but I'm missing out on this opportunity
for you know, reading a narrative. So I don't know,
maybe thinking about this movie in this conversation, maybe that'll

(52:36):
push me one way or another. Mike, where are you
at on tattoos and piercings.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
Well, I can't get a tattoo because I want to
be buried in a Jewish cemetery, just like Lenny Bruce,
even though I'm not Jewish, but I just want to
be buried there.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
I am very much an anti fiacing vest not if
I the vapor, just myself like that. It kind of
freaks me out. Heavy holes bunched in me, but like
that didn't want me, just a lot of punched. Yeah,
it's different. They don't. It's it's it's superficial. But the
two tattoos I have on each arm both have significant

(53:11):
meaning to me and came about through the experience I
went through with my father dying of cancer and then
the way that I found a path through that through
Jeff and Deer Me a Southern Reach trilogy. And so
I have all three tattoos, all threeople covers tattooed on
my arms, with words annihilation on one and acceptance on
the other. So it's a They're very connected to trauma

(53:35):
and to damage and loss, and it was a way
of rebuilding myself and reconnecting. It was an odd side
effect that I discovered a stronger connection to my own
body than I previously had. I'm definitely very understanding of
her experience in this film and very very non judgmental,
even though it's like chill out a bit.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
I used to do a little bit of self harm.
Not a lie, but yeah, we had. When we did
the episode on Secretary, I remember we interviewed someone about
cutting and just the idea of control and not having
control in your own life, but having control over your
own body. I mean, I see cutting being related to

(54:17):
you know, eating disorders and this whole idea of just
not having that control. And to me, the cutting that
Marina Devan does in this movie feels very similar to
that as far as the idea of you know, I'm
being I'm under all of this pressure from all of
these other things. Especially I would say the job definitely
seems to play into that. And this is the way

(54:40):
that I can control things. This is the only thing
that I have control over is the skin I live in.
Not to drop another film title.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Looping back again to the reception of it, but what
I remember the people who I watched it with back
in when I first saw it, A lot of people
were made on c comfortable by not knowing where to
sit with the film as to whether it was autobiographical
or symbolic, and that the lack of stability in their

(55:12):
position at that time in history, with the way that
we interpreted these kinds of feminist films which were mostly
only existing in the underground, if they did exist, it
made it a lot harder people to just comfortably sit
with it. That it was that they needed to know,
they needed the position, they needed the judgment or something.

(55:34):
Obviously it's quite different now that you've come out and said, oh,
it's very autobiographical. Obviously the film still works hugely, brilliantly
on a symbolic level as well, But it is I
think that was part of the problem of how to
approach it, like it felt like only getting half of
the conversation. And I think that's why it hasn't necessarily

(55:56):
come into awareness as much. There's films from ten years
after they can't this film's are ten years something like
Trouble every Day. Trouble every Day is definitely much more
in acceptance and understanding and general dialogue in relation to
this kind of extreme feminist cinema than this film, and
that comes out what the year before Basic. At the

(56:19):
same time, I'm glad that she's able to come out
and say that and to talk about her experiences, because
I think it really does empower the film sort of
land more firmly, and don't you know, certainly doesn't make
it any more black and white. This will never be
a black and white film. But to know, to be

(56:40):
able to hold those two in your hands without having
to like, you know, do any kind of gymnastics or
anything to figure it out how you feel about it,
to just be like, Okay, this is happening and that
is what it is. I think it will allow a
lot more people to approach it more openly, and I
think it is like a very positive experience, though I

(57:02):
don't think it ends positively excellent. I found that ending
to be well. I felt tired.

Speaker 7 (57:09):
It's almost a true crime confessional, but replace crime with
like social mores. You know, this is a movie that
it's telling you this is what happened. There's not a
lot of ambiguity. There are no tricks, and that, by

(57:30):
the way, I think makes it stand out from most
of the New French extremes. It doesn't feel like it's tricky.
It doesn't feel like there are odd things happening here
and there to spice it up to get your attention.
It's very, very focused and direct, and it's presenting this

(57:52):
narrative and challenging. You like to implicate yourself, you know,
how you respond to this movie is also going to
be a reflection on who you are and how you
got to that position. And it's hard to watch this
movie in my mind and talk about it without exposing yourself.

(58:17):
It's very challenging in that way. And yeah, it's to
me the hardest parts of it watch it was less
specific scenes. There are gross and gory scenes in this movie.
You know, she shuts herself, it's painful. But the toughest
parts for me were just the stretches of the monotony

(58:42):
where I felt like her life was just thing and
dragging on some Geen dummon in here, the dinner scene.
And I worked the second time specifically on this. I
tried to pay attention to what the other people at
the table were talking about, and I.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
Not do it.

Speaker 7 (59:07):
Her real world is so just draining and bland.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
I was climbing out the walls in that Tennessee like
it was I wanted to stab my arm. Oh, it
had nothing to do with what was going on with
her and just everything else. It was just like it
was so uncomfortable and painful. Yeah, that's say is is rough.

Speaker 7 (59:31):
Here's what I noticed about the ending, and I'm probably
stating something that's obvious, but she is either in her
underwear or naked. I think she's in her underwear. She's
got the wound on her face, blood all over, and
she's calling work to say that she'll be in tomorrow
but not today, and then is calling her boyfriend side

(59:59):
comment I could not stand him.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
I think he did a good job. Then there were some.

Speaker 7 (01:00:04):
High flying moments, but it was a realistic performance that
made me want to slap him. But the last shot
after she calls in and she's covered in blood is
she's cleaned up. She is wearing her uniform, which is
what I refer to as the black pantsuit that she

(01:00:24):
wears throughout much of the film. She's laying on her side,
staring straight forward and me, it's like she tried to
get out of all of these things, and the last
shot she is still trapped in this boring, draining, soul

(01:00:45):
crushing world, even though she hasn't left the hotel room yet.
And I took it as that she isn't free in
the very end, that she had a chance at it
throughout this transgressive problematic practice, but she didn't may yet.

(01:01:06):
And I'm curious what you two got out of that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
There was Where was it? I think it was in
the interview on the disc, the Marina talks about that
that wasn't originally planned as the final shot, that the
final shot was meant to be her leaving the hotel
and that it was meant to be more opimistic kind
of ending of her leaving that space and moving on,
but it just didn't work. They didn't It didn't feel right,

(01:01:33):
and so it ended up being that final shot, which
she says, she describes it as exactly as you did,
that she's trapped, that she's stuck there, that she hasn't
found a way out, that this isn't there is no
solution here, and that's definitely how it felt to me
that it's it feels like a dead end that she's
been backed into and nowhere else to turn to Psycho.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
And the way we pull out from her in this
spiral pattern, like the water going down the drain, and
you get that repeated three times as you're looking at
her and her just staring at the camera, And that
whole third act is so fourth wall breaking, which I
guess would be twelve walls. I think if it's a

(01:02:19):
third act and there's a fourth wall break, fourth wall
break inside a fourth wall break, that's like sixteen walls.
It's just wild to see how often she's looking at
the camera and how vivial she looks. That's when we're
talking earlier about whether this is a horror film or not.

(01:02:39):
There are horrific moments in that last bit. When her
hand comes around and grabs the bedpost and comes out,
she comes out from behind it. She looks like a
cannibal coming to eat you. And the way she's staring
right at us, the audience, and she's got those great teeth.
I mean, Marina Devn has a fantastic smile with those

(01:03:02):
big teeth and that gap in between and just looks
like she's going to open up that mouth and just
devour us. And that whole last part, I mean I
said earlier, we're going to talk about it the way
that we go from a regular normal, no not quite,
but a narrative film into her having that breakdown where

(01:03:26):
the world starts to get blurry for her, and we
again we're seeing all of these POV shots and then
we go back to the split screen and that whole
thing of her being at a store. And it's wild
to me because I was trying to really pay attention
to the things that are at the store and the
things that are being bought, because we could see the

(01:03:49):
whole idea of what's being scanned to pay for again,
whole consumerism and consuming things and like this is again
her job is selling things to people going back to
fight club to buy shit you don't need, right, And
I love that we get the multiple versions of these things,

(01:04:09):
the camera, the diet coke or something, her with their
credit card in her hand, and again we start to
go back to we are starting to see the same
images on both left and right side of the screen,
but they're being shot from different angles, They're being fragmented
in different ways, and again, this whole fragmentation, Like we've
seen her body literally fragmented, and then we start to

(01:04:31):
see her being fragmented by the way that she's being shot.
I mean, when you know, going back to one of
my favorite professors talking about the way that women are
objectified on screen, you know, she was a big Mulve fan,
turned me on to Malvey Modleski, these folks, and just
the idea of showing different pieces and parts of a
woman in order to take away their power and decentralize them,

(01:04:56):
to destabilize them. I mean recently that to jump too
far over to the side, but I recently finally saw
The Substance and it was the strangest movie for me
as far as a movie about the objectification of women
that objectifies women to no end in sight. I mean,

(01:05:16):
to just take poor Margaret Quality and Demi Moore and
just turn them into absolute sex objects throughout the entire
film until maybe the third act. But it's just like, Okay,
this feels very counterintuitive. Whereas with this having Marina Devon
be in control and have her be the writer, the director,

(01:05:37):
or the actress, I feel like this is all very
purposeful and all very look at what the cinema is doing,
and her staring at us, and that break of that
wall showing us.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
Like, I know what the fuck I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
I really felt so like she was being confrontational and
I was there for it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
We generally don't see her words when somebody else is
looking at them. We do it when the doctor does.
But generally in the film, when like the boyfriend or
friend or people are like crying to see them or
witnessing them, she holds to a regular kind of dramatic
two shot backwards and forwards. There's no cut away, there's

(01:06:17):
no making the leg a spectacle of it. So it's
only when she's alone with it that it becomes that,
that it becomes something that she is in a relationship
connected to experiencing witnessing, and we are shared in that experience,
and it does keep it to the personal. And I
think again again, like that what you were saying about

(01:06:40):
it being her, she being the actress, she being the writer,
the director. That that's part of that the strength of
if I think back in back in two thousand and two,
that is a part of the destabilizing experience. It's just
like people make it, Oh well, it's it's I can

(01:07:03):
I can kind of react to this a bit more
easily because it's her and it's not somebody else doing
it to her. And then learning that it's autobiographical puts
off like spins that even deeper and further, and that
ending is so personal, you know, he watches the second type.
It doesn't come out of nowhere, but it takes over

(01:07:26):
the film like she has that it's a freak out
like she has. I could I've had a note written
down somewhere from when she was talking about that, but
I can't find it. But the way she describes it,
it sounds like a when you bear autistic people describing
becoming overwhelmed and overloaded that it's just everything is too much,
too much, noise, too much, objects, too much, people sound

(01:07:47):
every like the look, the lights, the colors, and she
just needs to retreat. She just needs to be essentially
like self stemming, do the thing that brings herself back
into focus. It's just that that final stage she doesn't
find a way back from it. That it's I think
there is a degree that the phone call with the

(01:08:09):
work and such as there's something really hollow in that
because it's the connection to the outside world that she
knows she can't really go back to, like the way
that she looks now, the way that she's damaged her face,
she can't hide it and there will be repercussions. So
it's not that she feels shame, but there's an awareness

(01:08:30):
that she's trapped herself here with the way that she
has been coping, with her inability to cope.

Speaker 7 (01:08:37):
And again, it puts it all on display of you know,
how do you react to someone who is objectively attroactive
and has a good job and has a jerk boyfriend,
but he checks off a lot of the boxes, her

(01:08:57):
essentially erasing and rewriting that narrative for this other narrative.
And you know when she's not only is it a
split screen, but if I remember right, the screen is
split shing pictures she has taken of her wounds, so
it's like a copy of a copy. Now she is

(01:09:21):
essentially editing herself like a film. She's cutting herself up
literally and metaphorically and rearranging herself into this new narrative.
And this is it's the new French extremity. It's designed
to push boundaries and make you react and make you

(01:09:43):
implicate yourself. You could also take this into like you
were saying, you know, if she had, you could do
this film with someone getting tattoos, and the further into
the process they get, the more visible the tattoos become,

(01:10:04):
until at some point they have a facial tattoo and
it's changed their narrative and society. And I'm not equating
tattoos and self harm, but I am saying they're both
ways of rewriting the body. I remember reading a long
time ago a book called Sadomasochism and Everyday Life about

(01:10:28):
the things that we do that harm ourselves that are
not considered self harm. Now, and what about what if
she had been an ultra long distance runner, you know,
that mark her body with that mark her identity and
make it so she was not fitting into the narrative

(01:10:51):
of what she was supposed to be.

Speaker 2 (01:10:53):
Yeah, it's very much about the like the paradigms that
are required of us and how we get forced into
those and what is deemed acceptable and what isn't. It
makes me think of a film I've been wanting to
rewatch for so long, but I don't know why it
hasn't got to re release, Sick the Life and death
of Bob Flannagan Super Massacrest. The documentary Fro nineteen ninety

(01:11:14):
seven was about a guy who used satomasochistic practices in
his performance art to help overcome his cistic fibrosis. And
it's like that's something where it's just like, oh, well,
he would be dead if he didn't do these things
that everybody otherwise would find super disturbing. It's that the

(01:11:37):
unified idea of what a person is and what a
life is and how that crashes into the actual personal
experience of how you survive is a narrative that is
very complicated. That again we come back to that the
tension of how we live in a society of individuals

(01:11:58):
and yet we still have to make sure that we
don't stick out in weird ways. Yeah, it's it's what
I found. One of the quotes I was looking for before,
and this was from the interview on the DV at
the Blu Ray that she said, I think I mutilate
myself to recover something that was not really mine and

(01:12:19):
that became mine. And also when you mutilate heavily yourself,
you have a lot of scars. It's as if you
had drawn your own body and created that as a
piece of art because there is so many lines, figures
all that, and I did want to, like, I mentioned
her short films before, I do want to like come
back around to them, because there's another quote shortly before

(01:12:40):
that quote in the interview where talking about her childhood
relationship with her parents, which was apparently very not good,
she said, I didn't feel that my body belonged to me,
and the boundaries were constantly blurred. And I have felt
that my parents allowed themselves to judge my body or
speak of my body in a way that was transgressive
and invasive and incestual. I think that is why I

(01:13:03):
mutilate myself and her first short film, Bien Susu reports
didn't get a chance to write down what the English
translation was. Sorry, is a very chattel Ackerman like, very
kind of cold, straightforward drama about She plays a young
woman who brings a boyfriend home to her family. The

(01:13:26):
brother's mother and parents are all there, and she takes
the boyfriend off and starts going down on him, and
then the family comes in and hit the boyfriend, freaks
out and leaves, and then they turns out they have
been recording it from the other room to show her
how she's doing it wrong. And they go into the
other room together and play back the video this graphic

(01:13:47):
real sex of her going down on this guy, and
watch it together, commentating on it and saying how badly
she is doing it. It's a lot, the father says
in this short, every social practice needs to be educated.
You must follow rules, especially for violent pleasures, or else
you would have a nice looking girl who all of

(01:14:09):
a sudden wallows like a cow and does things without precision,
without beauty. Needless to say, this means a lot of work.
That was from nineteen ninety six. You made that the
first short film. I highly recommend if you get chance
to watch the fore shorts thats you made before this.
The next one, Retention and then Size Show and Alias

(01:14:31):
at such a continuity of ideas and an evolution of
second film. Retention is very much more traditional transgressive piece
with shit and you know, sitting on the toilet, going
to little toilet, holding rosaries and eating shit and you know,
living in filth and all this kind of thing. Very
bit more weirdly traditional. Siso was like people talk about

(01:14:54):
SI show. A lot of people like this was really
funny and I'm like I normally the he's laughing at
the things everyone finds fucked. But slide shows this guy
goes to the therapist and he's like sitting there, lying
on the couch, and the therapists like moves his chair
slightly over and the guy rolls over. He's like you move,
He's like, no, I did, and he keeps doing that,

(01:15:15):
and the guy's trying to talk about how he was
just fired from his job because he didn't fit in,
and he's talking about lack of like connection with the
people around him and how the way the work was
more important than human connection, and this therapist keeps moving
the chair more and more and saying, no, no, I
don't know what you're talking about. It's such a head fuck.
It's like this doesn't feel good. And then Alias is

(01:15:39):
a young girl who's her birthday and she's sad and
disconnected from her family, and her family are having this party,
like getting ready to show slides from her life, and
she's crying and she's smoking and drinking, and then she
gets up and leaves them looking at the slides, and
she swaps clothes with their house cleaner, and the house
cleaner goes and sits down and party just continues and

(01:16:01):
they give her the gifts as if she's the daughter.
And I was like, all four of these together, it
is just like this horror of alignment, like either not
enough alignment or too much alignment of these roles that
you have to play, of the boundaries and borders that

(01:16:21):
should be there melting, and just like the whole thing.
It was like they were all about like ten to
sixteen minutes each, So it's like all four together is
like almost a whole film. And watching all four of
those and then watching In My Skin is just an
incredible emotional head trip. I only got a chance to

(01:16:42):
watch one of other films. I watched the Irish film
that she made recently, Dark Touch, and I wish that
I had a chance to watch that again after watching
her shorts, because that is a really intense film about
childhood abuse but done in with a narrative that's like

(01:17:02):
carry And I watched that like earlier in this week
before i'd come back around and watching My Skin again,
and it was a lot. I was very impressed by it.
It was very definitely had the same kind of feeling
that In My Skin has of just telling a personal
story that feels like it comes from the source, that

(01:17:25):
it's not secondary. And I'm definitely going to go back
and revise The Dark Touch after watching the shorts and
Near the Skin again because I think I think she's
a really, really tremendous filmmaker. I think there's she has
a way of just like hitting these notes that a
lot of people else either just feels like they're telling
a story what feels like exploitation and instead it just

(01:17:47):
like I felt like I was putting my hand in
the fire. And it's a lot in a great way,
But oh man, you get watch those shorts, like when
you go back and look at the stuff that like
Vissi talks about her family and that that lack of
bound and borders, the way she felt transgressed on, and
then you look at In My Skin and the way
she talks about how this was the way of taking

(01:18:07):
her body back, in her life back, and then ultimately
the film ends up being a positive experience because it's
her way of restoring that something that the self ulation
like I really wasn't giving her like it was a
coping mechanism, but it wasn't giving her the step to
get out. And then making the film. She got that

(01:18:27):
and it's yeah, they're beautiful, incredible films, but not a
sunny day.

Speaker 1 (01:18:34):
Well, it's interesting that the family is not part of
this film, that there is no family when it comes
to this other than her literal brother who's playing the
doctor character. We've actually talked about her a little bit
before when we were doing We did an episode on
Visitor Q and we talked about what's the name of that?
The Pasilini film is a tinterera where the Terence stampm

(01:18:58):
theorem thank you when he is in r I p
Terrence Stamp. And we also talked about sitcom on that,
which is the Francois Ozone. I believe it's how you
say it? And she worked with him a lot as
both an actress as well as a collaborator. She has
credits for what is it? The Eight Women, and there's
another one that he worked on that she gets some

(01:19:22):
screenwriting credit on as well. I don't know what their
relationship is, if it's more a mentor student or collaborator,
but just to have those two together very similar sensibilities,
and yeah, I definitely saw a lot of interesting things,
especially I mean sitcom. Really when I did sit down

(01:19:47):
and watch bien rapport, which I think translates to good
in all things or good in all respects.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
That just felt so.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
So Sitcom to me, and I think it was before Sitcom,
so it was pretty wild to see that stuff. To
go back to the idea of your body not being
your own. It's funny because there was just a story
on NPR maybe two days ago talking about a study
around limbs that are missing and the whole idea of

(01:20:20):
when the brain knows or doesn't know that your limb
is missing, and there was an interview with a woman
where she had lost her arm three years ago and
the brain still thinks that it's there. And then you
compare that to something like there's a really amazing documentary
called Whole Wholi from two thousand and four by Melody Gilbert,

(01:20:43):
which is all about body integrity identity disorder, which is
when you feel this limb does not belong to me,
you know, this whole dichotomy of my limbs still here
versus this limb isn't mine, and people who go to
these extra to remove their own limbs. I think we
talked about that a little bit when we discussed boxing Helena,

(01:21:06):
and yeah, that was really wild to talk about. And
then you're talking about the Bob Flanagan documentary. There's also
I know, I don't think it's just called suspension, but
there's a great documentary about people who are into suspension
and how that discomfort is so freeing. And I know

(01:21:27):
that things like shabari is usually treated like a very
therapeutic thing, where even by being tied up in these
different positions, you feel like you're more free than you
are normally, that you feel like you are in you know,
in a different headspace, you know, again head space rather

(01:21:48):
than body space. But the body affects the brain, and
I so agree with you Ben as far as this
whole dichotomy of brain body just should not be a
dichotomy at all. It really should be all one whole thing,
but we treat it like that. And even Marina Devon
talking about how you know, as a person, you don't
see yourself unless you're looking in a mirror or being

(01:22:09):
on film. You don't see your face, you don't see
certain parts of your body. You are not looking at
yourself at all times. And we were talking about the fragmentation,
or I was talking about the fragmentation of the body,
and there's a moment in that third act where you
go from all of these fragments of her and her,
you know, sucking on herself, biting herself, feasting on herself,

(01:22:33):
and then boom, you cut to a shot where it
is her whole body, from head to toe, And it
feels like that's the moment for me that Catharsis that
this film brings to her. I know there's a little
bit of disagreement between the three of us if there
is a Catharsis, but for me, it's like when you
see her all back together, then it's like, Okay, I

(01:22:55):
think she's in a better place. But yeah, to your point,
as far as does she ever leave the hotel room,
I don't know if she does. And I love that
it's a hotel room because I was talking about how
this whole thing feels like she's met the tall, dark
stranger that is herself that she rents this hotel room
or it seems like many hotel rooms to have this
illicit affair with herself.

Speaker 2 (01:23:17):
Yeah, and also the scene where she fakes a car
accident feels like she's been out on a date and
needs to make up like an excuse for the time
and the wounds. It's a great scene her trying to
explain is that the most animated she is in the
entire film. I think like she's talking, sort of babbling
away with the reasons and excuses, and it feels so

(01:23:39):
unnatural to how we've experienced her.

Speaker 7 (01:23:42):
So this came out in two thousand and two. That
puts it before a lot of the emphasis on trauma
and how trauma affects the body and things like the
polyvagal nerve and a different and more thorough look at PTSD.

(01:24:04):
So in a way, this film really anticipates where we're
at now, and you could almost argue that this movie
might find a more receptive audience now than when it
was released, that it's saying things that now were more
prepared to talk about. Another element of, you know, self

(01:24:28):
harm is that it marks the outside of your body
things the inside of your body might be feeling. So
if you come from a dysfunctional family where you are
being traumatized, you may not look traumatized from the outside.

(01:24:51):
Put you in a row of kids the same age,
and you look exactly the same, but you feel all
of these feelings. You don't feel like the other kids.
So I think sometimes part of that self harm is
marking I am hurting, this is my experience. I am different.

(01:25:14):
And I can definitely see that applying to Esther in
this movie of she is suffering these invisible wounds with
her boyfriend, her job, the lack of a connection with
her friend, and as she is marking herself, she is
setting herself up as different.

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):
Yeah, they certainly especially experience. You know, we're hearing so
much now of testimonies from women about their experiences with
the medical industry, with doctors disbelieving the pain that they're in,
they're disbelieving their personal testimonies. And yeah, the self harming

(01:25:59):
is a way of making that menifest, of taking it
away from being just in your head, to oh, look, no,
this is a real thing, and I don't think medical efision,
see it, listen to it like that way. But that
can be soothing. Definitely, this is.

Speaker 7 (01:26:16):
Very definitely a movie about a woman, definitely a feminist
lens to be able to fully appreciate the nuances in
what's going on. That said, you know, there are men
self harm. It would be a different movie to take

(01:26:39):
this from a masculine perspective, and not to take anything
away from this movie. I would be curious what that
movie would look like and how that would be different,
because I don't think it's apples to apples. It would
be a very different film. And yeah, it just was

(01:27:02):
something that made me curious and I was watching those.

Speaker 1 (01:27:06):
Well, some men self harm by picking fights and getting
other people to harm them or being injured in fights.
You know, one real quick scene that I want to
talk about as we start to wrap up this discussion
is the moment when she wakes up and her arm
is asleep, and she's just kind of flopping her arm

(01:27:28):
around and just you know, kind of exploring this. And
it's the same arm, of course, that is going to
be disembodied later on during the dinner scene and her
boyfriend comes up, you know, he's behind her and she's
and I think she's enjoying this sensation of what is
this arm that I have? You know, it feels again
very disassociated, and of course he has to solve a problem.

(01:27:51):
You know, so many men just see a problem. They
want to solve a problem, you know, just don't bother
me kind of thing. And he just takes her hand
and starts to massage her arm and tries to get
the blood flowing again, and he's just like, yeah, there
you go, easy peasy, and it's like, no, she actually
didn't want help at the moment, dude, like you really
need to back off. And his whole thing is it

(01:28:12):
feels like she is a problem to solve. And I
did really appreciate what Alexander Heller Nicholas said in her
video essay about this on the I can't remember which
release that was, but great, great essay. She really again
talks about those opening credits and then they the video
editor of that does a great job too, will pull
in other moments of the film where there are split

(01:28:35):
screens that aren't split screens, but the way that things
are filmed, Like there's shots of those office buildings where
in that business district where Esther works at, our main
character works at, and the spleen screen will be split
down the middle with a building on one side and

(01:28:55):
then make more of a scenic few on the other side,
and I think then you count Countradrick that with another
one where the building's on the other side, and then
you have more of a vision on the opposite side
of the screen, and she talks about in that how
I think the boyfriend reacts so violently against esther's self

(01:29:18):
harming because of his own anxiety, his castration anxiety, and
just like, how can you hurt yourself? How dare you
defile that temple?

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
Like so many men, I mean, men will fucking freak
out if a woman gets a fucking haircut. I mean
it's wild that they are so. And I say they
because I don't count myself in with this at all,
but some men really freak out if a woman has
that autonomy over herself to make her own choice when

(01:29:50):
it comes to how she wears her hair. Good lord,
let's all just have a panic attack, everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
Yeah, it's very clear that the only way that he
has into understanding her experience is how it affects him,
that everything he talks and he talks about it, that
it's all in relation to him in some way, either
in like a high key or low key way, that
he doesn't he isn't able to like grasp the independence

(01:30:19):
of her experience. Part of that is definitely because of
the association with self harm being connected to suicide, and
so there is like that is a big death is
a big chasm like that makes people leap backwards suddenly.
And in two thousand and two, and I'm saying, we've

(01:30:41):
got a better understanding of these kind of tendencies now,
but there's a lot more, not as an arrow of
an experience people have had with these kind of self
harming and such. So I think it's that it's to
a degree there people's reactions and this is understandable if
you do keep that in mind. We aren't looking at
it with a more modern lens, with better understandings of

(01:31:04):
psychology and mental health and diverse experiences. These people are
reacting to someone who they are seeing as suicidal, like
that's most likely the way that they are interpreting it
that they're saying, like, well, if she's not suicidal now,
it's only a few steps till because that's when people
hurt themselves, is when they want to die. And you know,
in some ways that ties it back around to the

(01:31:25):
abject and how you know, the ultimate abject object is
a corpse, and so they are almost imagining her as
a corpse in their mind walking around, and that's you know,
is entirely on them. There is a different experience of
human connection. This film that we haven't talked about, and
that's the pharmacist, which is a great seed where there's

(01:31:50):
no get is a banana's conversation where it's so much
like did you feel like the pharmacist should be maybe
asking a couple of extra questions. She comes to him
to ask how to preserve a piece of her own skin,
and her answers aren't quite stacking up, and he's not
quite putting it together. But also it's great that he

(01:32:11):
doesn't put it together to be concerned, because it's these
two people who are curious meeting in their curiosity, and
there's a beautiful little scene of these strange little like
bonding between these two as they discuss the hows of
like how to preserve something and this shared interest, and

(01:32:32):
it's like it is actually like probably like the bost
kind of like that's the scene that made me happiest.
I enjoy those two little weidos having their weird conversation.

Speaker 7 (01:32:44):
It's very childlike, and there's there is a childlikeness to
a lot of these very serious bub things, and at
that moment when she's talking to the pharmacist, his first
reaction is also a childlike wonder of yeah, how would
you do that? And oh, it would be like this,

(01:33:05):
and it's it is, it's this playful moment. And then
as the scene progresses, he starts to catch that this
is going further than just an idea, and you can
see him retreat from being playful. But I think one
of the ways that we experience the abject and we

(01:33:28):
experience things outside of norm you know, is that kids
will play with that, and they will they will find
ways of interacting with that, get to know it better.
And you know, then as we're socialized, we're taught that
certain things are taboo, especially your body blood. And for

(01:33:51):
her to go back and almost regress is it's a transgression.
I wanted to add in talking about Vincenn the boyfriend,
I think one of the most telling scenes for him
is he is furious she is crying on the street

(01:34:12):
because he worries people might judge job as a boyfriend.
So her crying the problem is it makes him look bad.

Speaker 2 (01:34:23):
Yeah, he's a typical emotional mail. To come full circle,
I think we already do have this film as about
a man and it is fight club.

Speaker 1 (01:34:32):
I can see that. I mean, we've made several references.

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
It's just him on his own in his personal with
his tall dark stranger having he's exploring his body.

Speaker 1 (01:34:42):
And I believe that Marla even makes a reference to
a tall dark stranger in that.

Speaker 8 (01:34:46):
Film Asper of our Generation, you slip well, when you
need a stranger, you dance all night, then you throw
it away.

Speaker 7 (01:34:59):
Connor, I would add to Fight Club, the early works
aren't written than filmic, but some of the Brett Easton
Ellis's stuff like Less than Zero American Psycho have that
same transaggressive I kind of want to be an object

(01:35:22):
and let things happen to me vibe to them. They're
not they're not the same, but I felt like they
would be interesting to compare to one another.

Speaker 2 (01:35:33):
Yeah, there's there's a lot more of transgressive art in
this than there is a horror art DNA. It's definitely
owes more to that art transgressive background, the literature and
films and the films of the underground, And I said, like,
you know, the short films definitely connect those dots a
lot more as well. Chantell Ackaman, we mentioned a couple

(01:35:55):
of times.

Speaker 1 (01:35:56):
For actually you climbed onto the idea of the performance
art and Yeah, I wanted to touch on that very quickly.
So much performance art falls into this whole idea of
the body and how do we treat our own bodies,
how do we use our bodies as this canvas sometimes
a literal canvas. And I know we'll talk a little
bit more next week when we discuss raw as far

(01:36:18):
as the painting of the body. But even thinking about that,
I'm thinking about like Karen Finley and how she would
cover herself in chocolate pudding and just basically it would
mimic shit, and just the way that she would be
almost naked up on stage but just covered with chocolate pudding.
And I'm trying to remember there was a performance artist

(01:36:40):
that we had at Noir Khan years and years ago,
and Bluboxer's got an interesting range when it comes to
what he considers noir art. And this performance artist she
did this amazing stuff where she had a whole lot
of pig skin and took all of this pig skin

(01:37:01):
and stabled it to a house and had this shack.
This almost reminds me of those pictures that you see
of Ted Kaczynski's shack, like where they have it at
like FBI headquarters or whatever, and they're still studying a
shack or whatever, but it was like shack like that
covered in pig skin, and she would invite people to

(01:37:24):
come inside the shack and smell what it smells like,
feel what it feels like, touch that skin, which, if
you don't know, pig skin feels so much like human flesh.
And to touch that, I mean when they talk about
cannibal cannibals and I'm sure you can attest to this
one bend the whole idea of long pig, right, like

(01:37:45):
humans are just longer pigs, and yeah, people going in
there and touching these things. She also made these beautiful,
beautiful flowers live in front of us on stage, and
she used duck tongues and those kind of crawl over,
very different than a duck's cock, which is more like
a corkscrew, but duck tongue kind of crawls over and

(01:38:08):
it becomes the paddles of these flowers. As she was
making really fucked up but really fascinating at the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:38:15):
The artist's name is Hyder Hatri Hi d e h
A t R. Y spent some time working in fetish
golf clubs and got my fair share.

Speaker 1 (01:38:26):
When didn't we all do that?

Speaker 2 (01:38:28):
Definitely seen some things shoved through human al Janatalia in
my time. A lot of this this film, you know,
it's there's definitely I don't find it particularly shocking. It
was the main scene that had me climbing up the
wall was the dinner party scene. That was more the
social aspect, but it was also the adhd intrusive thought

(01:38:48):
part that it really tickled memories for me of those
moments where you're like, wait, am I doing this? Is
this happening? Wait? No, I'm just thinking this. No I
didn't just say that, did I did? I think it?
That film that section captures that so well, and it does.
It feels like performance art in that it does feel
like an embodied projection of an experience that I don't

(01:39:13):
feel like I'm sitting there watching a narrative or another person,
like you're really feeling the experience, which is you know,
performance art aims for a lot of the time. Yeah,
I really hope Marina Devan gets a chance to do
more films.

Speaker 7 (01:39:29):
With the dinner scene. I might be reading too much
into this, but I found it interesting that when she
goes down into the wine cellar to continue cutting her
arm and she drops the knife. It's another woman that
finds it and has this reaction to it, and it

(01:39:49):
becomes concerned. When I saw that, part of me thought
maybe there's something to that, is that it takes another
woman to be able to really I see her as
opposed to the people at the table understand that she's off,
but don't really see where she's at. I thought that

(01:40:10):
was an interesting little moment.

Speaker 2 (01:40:12):
Yeah, it's also the flip side of interpretation, that is
that it's a very ordered space, and a knife is
a very threatening object, and in a such an object
in an ordered space is a red flag. But yes,
I definitely think that a woman is probably having worked
in customer service in places where there are knives, a

(01:40:32):
woman is more likely to notice that than a guy. Yes,
how many cannibal books do I have within reaching me
right now? We didn't. We barely even talked about cannibalism
ad bitterly though, Like the cannibal stuff was kind of
hard to come at and I had to like jump
through a lot of hoops. But it's sort of the
cannibal thing was more that it was thinking about rituals

(01:40:54):
and thinking about cinemas ritual and how the Marina the
Arnes films do like they really feel like she's harnessing,
harnessing the language of cinema and communicating to us, and
we are coming to perform the ritual of experiencing it
and incorporating her experience into ourselves, like an act of

(01:41:19):
cannibalism like that that definitely feels like an appropriate way
to describe the experience of her films, Like they're meaty
and chewing on them, and you feel like the transgression
of it, but also like the power of it that
you feel like you're restoring something in yourself, that you're

(01:41:42):
gaining energy from it, and meaning that they don't feel
like hollow, capitalistic experiences, they don't feel like a big
mac that they're they're really tangible and that they exist
to give you some kind of restorative meaning, balance function whatever,

(01:42:04):
to like bridge a divide that nobody else is necessarily
trying to bridge, which is you know, the cannibalism even
with you know, shouldn't it's not a film we can
use it should really use the word cannibal because that
does time more into colonialism and defining an other in
order to lessen them, where this is really like anthropophagy,

(01:42:28):
which is the like just the act, the ritual act
of taking in the flesh of a human, which in
most ritual tribal societies is restorative, it is positive. The
connection to long pig and such that, you know, there
were societies that stopped sacrificing humans and started sacrificing pigs

(01:42:49):
as well, which is also there's all sorts of coss
mix up things. And yeah, this this film, in a way,
it does feel like a bit of a sacrifice, that
she's kind of sacrificing part of herself to give to
the world. And that's it's and I think that is
part of why it ultimately ends up feeling like a

(01:43:10):
beautiful experience, as difficult and confronting as it is.

Speaker 1 (01:43:15):
I agree with you that I can't remember who said
it earlier. As far as what would happen if she
ate her boyfriend, and there's the moment I think it's
about seventeen minutes in when they have sex and they're
kissing and she is definitely doing some play biting at
him when it comes to that, And what a different
movie it would be if she were to eat her

(01:43:36):
boyfriend as opposed to this self cannibalism, this idea of
her being so in touch with herself, because it just
wouldn't make sense at all if she were to eat
somebody else, because this is so much about her getting
in touch with her body and experiencing her body, and
just fuck everybody else. I mean, everybody else in this

(01:43:58):
movie doesn't support her nearly as much as she needs,
and really can't. I don't think I think she has
to go on this journey herself with no one else
along as this kind of guidepost. And like you guys mentioned,
you know, she tries to bring it up to other people,
they are either horrified or don't care. And other than

(01:44:20):
maybe that pharmacist, who, yeah, kind of a little creep,
who I really appreciate.

Speaker 7 (01:44:25):
You're imagining it with that change of her eating the boyfriend,
and that kind of brings me back to the substance,
which is not that scenario to me. The substance is
taking ideas like this movie has, and then tasting meaning

(01:44:46):
in a really obvious way that it hands to you
so you can watch it and you can say to yourself, hey,
I watched a movie with subtext, but it's it's really
not subtext. It's pretty clear that makes this more than
a horror movie, so we can go ahead and applaud

(01:45:08):
it because someone already told us what it means.

Speaker 1 (01:45:12):
I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.

Speaker 7 (01:45:15):
This is a movie that exists and asks you interact
with it. It requires more from the audience, less passivity,
and that's their strutine between art and a movie that
I didn't find very remarkable.

Speaker 1 (01:45:36):
Literally put big words across the screen to tell you
sometimes what's happening.

Speaker 2 (01:45:44):
I quite enjoyed the Substance that I also saw it
on a big screen in a ratty old cinema with
a middle aged woman about the back who kept having
coughing fits. She was laughing so much, so it was
kind of the perfect way to see it. And I
think think the big difference for me between the Substance
and In My Skin is the Substance is an aggressive film.

(01:46:06):
A substance wants to assault the audience, which you definitely
get if you see on the big screen, because it's
so loud and so just like it's just Window Liquor
the Gore film, it's Window Liquor and come to Daddy,
cramped together into like a feminist French film, whereas the
most skin is not that. And then most skin doesn't
want to attack its audience. It's actually really holding back
from freaking you out as much as possible. I think

(01:46:28):
I am coming around water saying that In My Skin
isn't a horror film. I think I'm coming around to
your side there, Axel. I also think that the term
the new French extremity is a completely useless term. I
saw in one of the readings this cinema de corpse
or cinema of the body is suggested by Tim Palmer,

(01:46:50):
which connects back to the cinema de luxe of the
eighties and nineties and thinking out how the substance is
basically fusing a cinema of the body in a cinema
the look together. And someone really needs to come up
with a better term, because I do think that there
is I don't think. I think that In My Skin

(01:47:10):
is part of an extreme movement in French cinema that
is about reclaiming a lot of different things that are
connected to horror, that are connected to transgressiveness that brings
in you know, we haven't even mentioned Katherine Briard at all.
I'm of all the things in the French New extremities.

(01:47:32):
She's probably the one that this film has the most
in common with with like Fat Girl and such. There
definitely was something interesting going on, but as I said,
like the French cinema is so disrespectful to horror and
so disregarding of it that simply like slap it all
together was one hole. It really undermines something like this film,

(01:47:55):
which is a lot more than what was this board?
What was that one with like the French Nazis torturing peoples.

Speaker 1 (01:48:05):
CONTI borders frontiers close enough I mean borders Barnes and Noble, close.

Speaker 2 (01:48:10):
Enough to have like an umbrella term that includes that film,
and his film really illustrates that. It's not a helpful term.

Speaker 7 (01:48:18):
I think it works better if you think about it
almost like Old Testament New Testament, because from what I read,
there's the first part. You know, the beginning stages of
the New French extremity were extreme art house films, but
were at their heart art house and an independent but transgressive.

(01:48:42):
And then next sort of level of that is when
horror minded people realized, hey, we can make explicit horror
films with a splash of art house and that would work,
and we can get them into you know, we can

(01:49:02):
get them playing in different theaters than we could otherwise.
There's a Yin Yang thing going on there. This is
definitely an art house film with horror elements, whereas I
only saw Frontiers once a long time ago. To me
it was, you know, someone added arty elements to The

(01:49:26):
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and put it in France, although the
original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has enough arty elements of
its own that don't get enough credit.

Speaker 2 (01:49:38):
Sometimes there's something interesting, really something interesting there, because I
haven't seen Martyrs since it came out either, But that
feels like a kind of lynchpin between the two somewhat.
But then, you know, we mentioned Gaspa Noah, and it's
like Climax feels like it has more in common within
my skin than any of these earlier films. I think

(01:50:00):
Climax is the best, is far better than his earlier
works because it has a bit more of the personal
and the empathetic and understanding that something in my skin has.
It feels like a film made by a small group
of people in a short amount of time who, instead
of thinking about it, presented themselves.

Speaker 7 (01:50:21):
Into the void. I would maybe put there too, as
one that does have a little bit more empathy and
more range of motion than like I stand Alone or
Irreversible is just a mean angry critter.

Speaker 2 (01:50:38):
Yeah, I thought of Inversible when I was coming back
around and watching this again the second time this week,
because both films involve women going off into like dark,
isolated places and having a bodily crappy experience, and they
outcomes from each of them are very different. Which don't

(01:50:59):
feel that. There wasn't a line I thought that really
went anywhere, but it was. It says a lot about
how different this film is to that film that that
spirals out into guys freaking out and destroying everything, and
I was having to sit through a woman having a
hoof experience, whereas this one is not much more complicated

(01:51:19):
than that.

Speaker 1 (01:51:20):
All right, We're going to take another break and play
a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
Looking for something superior to streaming a place with more
than five times the selection available on all streaming services combined,
check out Scarecrow Videos rent by mail service, select from
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(01:51:41):
and get Blu rays four k's and DVDs delivered directly
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dot com and rediscover the wonders of physical media.

Speaker 2 (01:52:30):
TI.

Speaker 1 (01:53:29):
That's right, we'll be back next week where they look
at raw a great companion piece to in my skin.
Until then, I want to think my co hosts axelent Ben,
so Ben, what is the latedst with you?

Speaker 2 (01:53:39):
Sir? Not a huge amount these days, you'll just plug
it away in the TV post production world. You can
find me on Letterbox Do's Dissolved Pet, where I have
an absolutely huge list of all the cannibal related films
that I've ever been able to find. And you can
also find me on Blue Sky at Dissolve Pet where

(01:53:59):
I really should talk about cannibalism more.

Speaker 1 (01:54:02):
And Axel, how about yourself?

Speaker 7 (01:54:04):
Still threatening to do my own podcast? I keep coming
up with ideas. I even started writing a script, so
it's taking about as long as it took Guns n'
Roses to put out Chinese Democracy. But there's always the
threat that I will create a podcast at some point,
and then working on starting up some writing. In November.

(01:54:31):
I've got kind of a nonfiction mental health book I've
been tooling around with so I might go and do
another wash at that and then just hanging out and
slowly finding age appropriate horror movies for my daughter, who
you'll be happy to know, picked a book about the

(01:54:52):
Donner Party to read the other day.

Speaker 2 (01:54:56):
Gotta get more keys into cannibalism, young.

Speaker 1 (01:54:57):
I keep so going to watch Cannibal the Musical after
she's done with that.

Speaker 7 (01:55:02):
I don't remember if that one's because I always have
to think two questions. Is there gonna be something sexually
explicit I don't want to explain, And is there gonna
be a moment where she will wake up in the
middle of the night and wake my wife up because
she's scared, Because then that comes back to me.

Speaker 2 (01:55:23):
I mean, there is the bit with the ogre guy
and he has the eye poking out. That's probably the
gnolliest bit. And because he's like, ah, and he's big
and scary. I don't think. I think all the sexual
stuff is like very Mormon sexual, so it's all like it's.

Speaker 1 (01:55:41):
More about the love between a man and his horse.

Speaker 2 (01:55:43):
If memory serves, Yeah, there's a lot of that, but
that's you know, that'll just go. I'm just in either
and like I always watched that when I was what
thirteen pen so, but that doesn't that you shouldn't take
that into account because that was he way more fucked
up stuff than that at that age.

Speaker 1 (01:55:59):
Thank you again, guys, thanks for being on the show.
Thanks to everybody for listening. Do you want to support
physical media and get great movies in the mail, head
over to scarecrow dot com and try Scarecrow Videos incredible
rent by mail service, the largest publicly accessible collection in
the world. You'll find films there entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get
what you want, when you want it, without the scrolling.

(01:56:20):
And of course, and my skin is available for rent.
If you want to hear more of me shooting off
my mouth, check out some of the other shows that
I work on. They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to
join the community, visit patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth.
Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over
the world.

Speaker 5 (01:57:00):
Just don't easy do the talking for Mattens Tigna for
see you the Faldaddy and all to do settle it
not too to the sea coming blue a ving so

(01:57:23):
to fay, please talk a hole, not anything on the door.

Speaker 3 (01:57:39):
Nor least before sit that ramon.

Speaker 2 (01:57:47):
No, what don't do?

Speaker 6 (01:57:50):
Just play the toil and lovely.

Speaker 5 (01:57:52):
Song Maddon tiga fo.

Speaker 6 (01:57:57):
Just stick at an aside, can't you fool?

Speaker 2 (01:58:01):
You have to want to see me. Stop fool, stop,
says coming you after says you do? Steps come any

(01:58:25):
bet that ho.

Speaker 5 (01:58:32):
St a time of blue shott.

Speaker 6 (01:58:40):
Come man, if we go down the door, down a hole,
sing the way down, now that the window, now, hey.

Speaker 2 (01:59:22):
Ho this

Speaker 5 (01:59:28):
Non snubh

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Episode 766: In My Skin (2002)

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