Latest / The Bechdel Cast / Addams Family Values with Ali Nahdee
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: On the Bechdelcast. The questions asked if movies have.
- 0:04Speaker 2: Women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands,
- 0:08Speaker 2: or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, zeph and
- 0:12Speaker 2: best start changing it with the Bechdel Cast.
- 0:16Speaker 3: No no, no, no, no no no no no no
- 0:20Speaker 3: no no, no no, it's the Bechdel Cast. Oh you're
- 0:26Speaker 3: gonna keep Oh I will? It failed immediately?
- 0:29Speaker 4: Okay, Well, what is what is the beel Cast introduction?
- 0:33Speaker 4: If not a shocking lack of commitment on both of
- 0:36Speaker 4: our parts. I think that that.
- 0:38Speaker 3: Is what a true all about.
- 0:40Speaker 4: It's being like, okay, you get the concept, but we're
- 0:43Speaker 4: not gonna sing. Okay, the podcast is free to listen to. Yeah,
- 0:49Speaker 4: welcome to the Bechdel Cast. My name is Shamie Loftus,
- 0:52Speaker 4: and I'm not gonna sing.
- 0:53Speaker 3: Oh yeah. My name's Caitlin Dernte. I really wish I
- 0:56Speaker 3: had the foresight to like write out a Like's family
- 1:00Speaker 3: style Bechdel Cast theme song, but and it turns out
- 1:04Speaker 3: I'm not an improviser, so it didn't work out.
- 1:07Speaker 4: Well, here we are, and we are doing this our
- 1:10Speaker 4: second Adams Family episode with I feel the superior Adams
- 1:14Speaker 4: Family movie. But before we get into it, what the
- 1:18Speaker 4: hell is this show? This show is a podcast where
- 1:21Speaker 4: we take a look at your favorite movies using an
- 1:23Speaker 4: intersectional feminist lens, using the Bechdel Test as a jumping
- 1:27Speaker 4: off point for discussion. But Caitlin, what.
- 1:29Speaker 3: The hell is that? Well, it is just a little
- 1:33Speaker 3: media metric that first appeared in our best friend Alison
- 1:36Speaker 3: Bechdel's comic dis to Watch out For. It has many versions.
- 1:41Speaker 3: The one that we use is do two characters of
- 1:44Speaker 3: a marginalized gender have names? And do they speak to
- 1:48Speaker 3: each other about something other than a man? And ideally
- 1:51Speaker 3: we like it when it's a narratively substantial, meaty conversation.
- 1:58Speaker 3: Not a problem for this.
- 2:01Speaker 4: Yeah, let's get let's get into it.
- 2:02Speaker 3: We have an amazing returning guest, Yea, and I want
- 2:06Speaker 3: to get her in here. Indeed, she is the creator
- 2:08Speaker 3: of the Ali Naughty Test. She is a content creator
- 2:12Speaker 3: with a terrific YouTube channel. You remember her from episodes
- 2:17Speaker 3: on movies like Frozen, Two Avatar, Aquaman. It's Ali Nanny.
- 2:24Speaker 1: I'm here. I rolled up because I heard you guys
- 2:28Speaker 1: need a nanny.
- 2:29Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes I might kill you.
- 2:31Speaker 1: Guys and take your money.
- 2:32Speaker 3: I don't know.
- 2:33Speaker 4: Yeah, I've got this like weird brother who's single, which
- 2:37Speaker 4: is a statement that's half true.
- 2:38Speaker 3: I have a weird brother.
- 2:40Speaker 4: He's daying someone.
- 2:44Speaker 1: It's so good to be back. I was so excited
- 2:46Speaker 1: when you guys asked me back, especially for this video.
- 2:49Speaker 4: Welcome back, yes, because we I mean, you have made
- 2:52Speaker 4: a video on this very movie.
- 2:54Speaker 1: Yep, what was it? It was Sada the fat culture
- 2:57Speaker 1: critic on YouTube. She these prompts for YouTube videos, and
- 3:02Speaker 1: it's usually like for a positive emotion, like one scene
- 3:06Speaker 1: for joy, one scene for forgiveness, one scene for hope,
- 3:12Speaker 1: and this one was one scene for resistance because a
- 3:16Speaker 1: lot of people ask me about my opinion about this movie,
- 3:20Speaker 1: and I was like, what better way to just dive
- 3:23Speaker 1: in because it was my one scene for resistance.
- 3:27Speaker 4: Because it's perfect, it's a great video. We're gonna link
- 3:31Speaker 4: it in the description as well. I mean, just congrassle
- 3:33Speaker 4: your channel.
- 3:34Speaker 3: It fucking rocks, Thank you so much.
- 3:36Speaker 1: I work so hard on it, and I'm not monetized
- 3:40Speaker 1: because as soon as I turn it into a job,
- 3:41Speaker 1: I'll hate.
- 3:42Speaker 3: It, sure of course.
- 3:44Speaker 1: So it's just I need an outlet for this sort
- 3:47Speaker 1: of thing, and it's something I've always wanted to do
- 3:50Speaker 1: and it's it's really great and I'm just very bad
- 3:54Speaker 1: at deadlines.
- 3:55Speaker 4: So the but it doesn't matter if it's not your job.
- 4:00Speaker 1: It's true, it's a hobby.
- 4:03Speaker 3: That rocks.
- 4:04Speaker 4: Well, thank you, thank you for coming back. Yeah, we
- 4:06Speaker 4: have so much to talk about today, but let's get
- 4:10Speaker 4: started in the way we always get started. What is
- 4:12Speaker 4: your personal history with this movie, which I guess we
- 4:15Speaker 4: haven't said the title Adam's Family Values in nineteen ninety three.
- 4:18Speaker 1: Yes, and you're corrected as the superior movie. And I
- 4:21Speaker 1: don't know, maybe it's because I'm biased, because I explain
- 4:24Speaker 1: in my video for it that, you know, I grew
- 4:28Speaker 1: up in a biracial family. You know, my dad is
- 4:32Speaker 1: a Nishnabe and my mother's white, and me and my
- 4:36Speaker 1: sisters we grew up, you know, not on a reservation,
- 4:41Speaker 1: not on an unseated territory without like a big native
- 4:45Speaker 1: community like at all. So because my dad was assimilated,
- 4:52Speaker 1: because his mother and his anti were residential school survivors,
- 4:57Speaker 1: they didn't have a cultural connection either, you know, so
- 5:02Speaker 1: when they raised us, it was you know, we were
- 5:05Speaker 1: native and we understood that dad wasn't white, you know,
- 5:09Speaker 1: at least visibly, and they would show us like we
- 5:14Speaker 1: still wanted that connection, you know, to the culture and
- 5:18Speaker 1: didn't really know how to go about doing that since
- 5:21Speaker 1: we lived so far away, and a lot of stuff
- 5:25Speaker 1: that my parents would do was, oh, there's a movie
- 5:27Speaker 1: that has Indians in it. Let's show it to them,
- 5:29Speaker 1: and they'll think that's cool because it's you know, like
- 5:33Speaker 1: their dad, like us. You know. So sometimes it was
- 5:38Speaker 1: good and sometimes a lot of times it was not.
- 5:41Speaker 1: But you know, with problematic representation isn't a new thing
- 5:46Speaker 1: for natives, but this was one of them, and I
- 5:50Speaker 1: didn't realize until we get to that specific part why
- 5:55Speaker 1: my parents chose to show us this movie. And it's
- 5:58Speaker 1: been a favorite sense and I love the hell out
- 6:01Speaker 1: of it.
- 6:02Speaker 3: Hell yeah.
- 6:03Speaker 1: It also helps that when I put my hair in braids,
- 6:06Speaker 1: especially if I try to go to like, you know,
- 6:09Speaker 1: rallies or pow wows and stuff, because I'm very pigment challenged.
- 6:15Speaker 1: I look more like Wednesday than I do like any
- 6:20Speaker 1: of my native relatives.
- 6:22Speaker 3: Like Okay, Jamie, what about you, what's your relationship with
- 6:28Speaker 3: this movie?
- 6:30Speaker 4: I was a late comer to it. I think I
- 6:32Speaker 4: saw it when I was a kid, but I it wasn't.
- 6:35Speaker 3: I don't know.
- 6:36Speaker 4: I think my mom was just she's like the Adams Family,
- 6:40Speaker 4: no goths in this house, which is why I got
- 6:43Speaker 4: so into goth stuff because my mom said no goths. Anyways, Yeah,
- 6:49Speaker 4: so I got really into the Adam's family as like
- 6:52Speaker 4: a teen. I love this movie. It's my favorite of
- 6:58Speaker 4: I mean, there's only the two, but this is the
- 7:00Speaker 4: better one. I feel like this movie really is like
- 7:03Speaker 4: the best use of the Adams Family that I've ever seen,
- 7:06Speaker 4: in putting them in fish out of water situations to
- 7:08Speaker 4: criticize American culture, which is the point of them. And
- 7:12Speaker 4: I don't know. My niece watches that this is unrelated.
- 7:15Speaker 4: My niece really enjoys the like animated reboot, and they
- 7:18Speaker 4: just don't use any of the cool parts of the
- 7:20Speaker 4: Adams Family. It's a waste. I haven't seen Wednesday, can't
- 7:25Speaker 4: speak to it. But yes, I love the Adams Family.
- 7:28Speaker 4: I think that this movie is doing so much in
- 7:34Speaker 4: something that I feel like it's hard to find family
- 7:36Speaker 4: films doing now, which is really exkewering and criticizing American
- 7:41Speaker 4: culture and not sacrificing any funny to like, you know,
- 7:46Speaker 4: be super didactic, which is just you just don't see
- 7:49Speaker 4: it a lot. So it's I think one of my
- 7:53Speaker 4: favorite comedies. I think, I mean, I think. I also
- 7:56Speaker 4: think it's wild that any like has it happened and
- 8:00Speaker 4: other things where like Joan Cusack and Christine Baranski two
- 8:07Speaker 4: women I love so much, very confusing when they're in
- 8:10Speaker 4: the same movie. Their vibes are similar. Sure, yes, and
- 8:14Speaker 4: then I did, Caitlin. I didn't run this by you before,
- 8:17Speaker 4: but I feel like it's just time to say something
- 8:22Speaker 4: that it's been five years. It's been five whole years,
- 8:25Speaker 4: eighty four years. So another reason that this is an
- 8:29Speaker 4: especially interesting movie for us to cover on the show
- 8:32Speaker 4: is because we have previously interviewed the director of this
- 8:36Speaker 4: movie in one of the very few lost episodes of
- 8:42Speaker 4: the Buxtell Cast. You'll never hear it. We are Barry
- 8:46Speaker 4: Son and felt heads on the show. But he was
- 8:49Speaker 4: definitely not brief done what our show is about.
- 8:52Speaker 3: Or he was and he did not pay attention.
- 8:56Speaker 4: We're not sure. I mean, it's like he's busy. I
- 8:59Speaker 4: get it, pod has prep. It could be a lot
- 9:01Speaker 4: of work and uh, but anyways, it's just a fun
- 9:05Speaker 4: fact that something that happened five years ago, and we
- 9:08Speaker 4: were like, someday we'll say it.
- 9:10Speaker 3: It happened. It did happen.
- 9:13Speaker 4: We we covered Wild Wow West, and you'll never.
- 9:16Speaker 3: Know what happened in that conversation.
- 9:18Speaker 4: You can imagine it, you can wonder, but we'll never tell.
- 9:23Speaker 4: But I I feel like it's okay, I don't know.
- 9:26Speaker 4: We talked to our point of contact and she was like, yeah,
- 9:28Speaker 4: tell everyone it happened.
- 9:30Speaker 3: Well, it happened, history, history happened.
- 9:34Speaker 1: Well.
- 9:34Speaker 3: Also, at the time, before the interview went the way
- 9:39Speaker 3: that it did, we had posted like a screen grab
- 9:42Speaker 3: of our zoom call on Twitter, I think, and then
- 9:45Speaker 3: people were like, wow, that's cool. And then we just
- 9:48Speaker 3: never released that episode and people are like, what wasn't
- 9:51Speaker 3: that supposed to be something that came out, and we're like, really, don't,
- 9:54Speaker 3: don't talk about it.
- 9:55Speaker 4: I really know we were talking about.
- 9:57Speaker 1: Have you guys deleted your Twitter?
- 9:59Speaker 3: No?
- 9:59Speaker 4: No, it's sitting dormant. It's just like a fucking.
- 10:03Speaker 3: Graveyard and is gone. I was like, good for you,
- 10:08Speaker 3: but yeah, I know this happened. And he's in the
- 10:09Speaker 3: movie as a cameo. He plays He plays a character's father.
- 10:14Speaker 4: Yes, and we are we are we are fans, we
- 10:17Speaker 4: are Barry Heads.
- 10:18Speaker 1: Yeah, but it was wild which character's.
- 10:21Speaker 3: Father Joel Joel's father a ka David Crumholtz his father.
- 10:26Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it was.
- 10:28Speaker 1: Like if it was the Sarah Miller's father. I was
- 10:30Speaker 1: going to be like, oh no.
- 10:34Speaker 4: So Also, this was the first I don't I haven't
- 10:37Speaker 4: seen this movie in well, it's not even true. I
- 10:39Speaker 4: saw it a couple of years ago. They did a
- 10:40Speaker 4: double feature with Casper and Adam's Family. Value is great
- 10:45Speaker 4: double double. So I saw that a couple of years ago,
- 10:48Speaker 4: and that was the last time I saw this. But
- 10:50Speaker 4: this is the first time I registered that that's baby
- 10:52Speaker 4: David Crumbholts. Oh nokay, I just I didn't know that
- 10:56Speaker 4: Bernard was in this film.
- 10:58Speaker 3: Bernard the Elf. Yeah, what can you do?
- 11:01Speaker 4: Anyways, Yes, I love this movie and that episode exists. Yes,
- 11:06Speaker 4: that's all I have to say at this time.
- 11:09Speaker 3: Thank you for sharing. I have a pretty limited history
- 11:14Speaker 3: with this movie. I probably saw both of the early
- 11:19Speaker 3: nineties Adam's families when I was a kid, but I
- 11:23Speaker 3: don't know something about my household. We were more of
- 11:25Speaker 3: a no goths. We know, it was more that we were.
- 11:28Speaker 3: We were a Tim Burton household.
- 11:32Speaker 1: Have ten anime betrayals right there.
- 11:35Speaker 4: It's funny.
- 11:37Speaker 1: There was a time.
- 11:38Speaker 3: I won't vouch for the man now, but we Yeah,
- 11:41Speaker 3: for some reason, when it came to like nineties Gothy
- 11:46Speaker 3: type movies that were mainstream. I mean, my mom fucked up.
- 11:51Speaker 3: She should have we should have had these on BHS,
- 11:53Speaker 3: but we didn't, and I resent her to this day.
- 11:56Speaker 4: We weren't allowed to have Tim Burton I there.
- 12:02Speaker 3: Anyway. So all this to say, I didn't really grow
- 12:05Speaker 3: up with these movies. I think I probably saw them
- 12:07Speaker 3: at some point, but I didn't really immerse myself in
- 12:11Speaker 3: them until we covered the first movie, which was what
- 12:14Speaker 3: like five six years ago at this point.
- 12:16Speaker 4: Yeah, with the Iffy and Danny, I.
- 12:18Speaker 3: Think, yeah. And while prepping for that episode, I also
- 12:22Speaker 3: watched Adam's Family Values. And these movies are very funny.
- 12:28Speaker 3: I love the jokes in them. I wish I had
- 12:32Speaker 3: kind of gotten to them sooner. Also side note, there
- 12:34Speaker 3: is there is a third movie that I guess is
- 12:37Speaker 3: canonically part of the trilogy, although almost the entire cast
- 12:41Speaker 3: is different except for Oh the actor who plays Lurch.
- 12:45Speaker 3: But there's a movie called Adam's Family Reunion. Yes, from
- 12:49Speaker 3: nineteen ninety eight Tim Curry, Tim Curry and Darryl Hannah
- 12:53Speaker 3: as Gomez and Mortitia.
- 12:54Speaker 4: Wow, I have seen that. I guess that's like, I
- 12:57Speaker 4: feel like it's its own thing. Wednesday, it changes, it's
- 13:01Speaker 4: a different iteration.
- 13:02Speaker 3: I mean once all day. Once you know Angelica Houston
- 13:05Speaker 3: isn't there, Christopher.
- 13:07Speaker 4: Lloyd or Flintstone's Viva Rock Vegas in that way? Right,
- 13:12Speaker 4: You're like, where what's Jane Krakowski doing here?
- 13:16Speaker 3: Yes, So anyway, I don't have much of a history
- 13:20Speaker 3: with these movies, but I do enjoy them very much,
- 13:23Speaker 3: and there's a lot to discuss today. Let's take a
- 13:27Speaker 3: quick break and we'll come back for the recap, and
- 13:40Speaker 3: we're bad. We're back.
- 13:42Speaker 4: Hailey duff is in Adam's Family Reunion. Sorry, I'm looking
- 13:45Speaker 4: at this list like as Wednesday or no, as Gina Adams.
- 13:50Speaker 4: I'm assuming these are who I don't know. I'm assuming
- 13:53Speaker 4: she went to the reunion. Gina Adams Harve.
- 13:57Speaker 3: The reunion right right right right? Yeah?
- 13:59Speaker 4: This guy straight to video. That would be a good
- 14:01Speaker 4: Matreon theme, just like Curse Straight to Video.
- 14:06Speaker 3: Sequels. There's so many bad ones with an entirely different
- 14:09Speaker 3: cast I always think of like George of the Jungle.
- 14:12Speaker 1: And Mortal Kombat Annihilation.
- 14:16Speaker 4: Just some really gnarly stuff. A lot of actors in debt,
- 14:21Speaker 4: right Yeah. Anyways, Adams family values, which does not suffer
- 14:25Speaker 4: from this problem.
- 14:27Speaker 3: Not at all. So we see the Adams family that
- 14:30Speaker 3: we know and love. We've got Fester screaming at the moon.
- 14:35Speaker 3: Wednesday and her brother, Pugsley and their granny are burying
- 14:40Speaker 3: a cat alive.
- 14:42Speaker 1: What cats.
- 14:45Speaker 3: Hid Your cats? Lurch is playing the organ Gomez and
- 14:50Speaker 3: thing our arm wrestling. Mortitia announces that she's going to
- 14:55Speaker 3: have a baby right now, so the family rushes to
- 15:00Speaker 3: the hospital and Mortitia gives birth. They bring the baby
- 15:05Speaker 3: home and it looks like a miniature Gomez with a
- 15:08Speaker 3: little mustache in the suit and everything. Wednesday and Pugsley
- 15:13Speaker 3: resent the new baby and keep trying to kill it,
- 15:18Speaker 3: but their plans are thwarted each time.
- 15:20Speaker 4: Their love language.
- 15:22Speaker 1: Movie perfectly like encapsulates my dark humor that I've developed
- 15:28Speaker 1: over the years, because every single thing that happens in
- 15:32Speaker 1: it is so bad and hilarious, Like they're dropping the
- 15:37Speaker 1: baby and gor didn't hit with bowling.
- 15:40Speaker 3: Balls and it's comedy, it's hilarious, it's amazing. Yeah. So
- 15:46Speaker 3: Mortitia and Gomez are trying to be romantic because they're
- 15:51Speaker 3: still so horny for each other, but their hands are
- 15:55Speaker 3: full with three children. They try to hire a nanny.
- 16:00Speaker 3: Cynthia Nixon plays.
- 16:02Speaker 4: Like Maranda, what are you doing here?
- 16:05Speaker 3: Marianda? Yeah, she's one of the people who is interviewed.
- 16:09Speaker 3: Another is Debbie Jelinski played by Joan Cusack, who they
- 16:14Speaker 3: eventually hire, and they introduce her to their baby, who
- 16:19Speaker 3: they've named Pubert. Hilarious, awesome, saying how did.
- 16:25Speaker 4: They get away with it?
- 16:26Speaker 3: We don't know, we don't know, it doesn't matter.
- 16:29Speaker 4: And then did you know that David Hyde Pierce is
- 16:32Speaker 4: in the delivery rooms?
- 16:33Speaker 3: He plays a doctor Blitz second.
- 16:35Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of good cameos in this too.
- 16:38Speaker 3: So Debbie also meets the rest of the family, and
- 16:42Speaker 3: when she meets Fester, he's like hubba, hubba, who's that
- 16:46Speaker 3: at And then Debbie moves in that night, and then
- 16:51Speaker 3: she watches a news report about an unknown serial killer
- 16:55Speaker 3: who the media has dubbed the black Widow because she
- 16:59Speaker 3: seeks out rich and marries them and kills them on
- 17:02Speaker 3: their wedding night so she can collect their money.
- 17:05Speaker 1: I don't remember that happening in the Avengers movies, right,
- 17:10Speaker 1: would have made things better.
- 17:11Speaker 4: It would have been much more interesting.
- 17:14Speaker 1: So that's why she showed up an Iron Man two.
- 17:18Speaker 4: I do like that they take the trouble to show
- 17:21Speaker 4: like four different pictures of Joan Cusack and various wigs.
- 17:24Speaker 4: I think the disguises were pretty good. Like so, I mean,
- 17:28Speaker 4: while Wednesday's right to say that she was sloppy, I
- 17:31Speaker 4: still think she was doing She was running a pretty
- 17:33Speaker 4: good grift.
- 17:34Speaker 3: It's not until she met the Adams family and she
- 17:37Speaker 3: was no match for them.
- 17:39Speaker 1: No, if she just would have been so upfront, it
- 17:41Speaker 1: would have been like, oh, honey, you want to.
- 17:45Speaker 3: That's awesome.
- 17:46Speaker 4: She and Martitia really could.
- 17:48Speaker 1: Have bonded, I think joined a polycule man and then
- 17:53Speaker 1: even Odder exactly.
- 17:56Speaker 3: Yeah, because that's the whole thing that this you know,
- 17:58Speaker 3: Black Widow serial Killer is bi Jelenski, and she starts
- 18:02Speaker 3: to go through Fester's things and finds all of his assets.
- 18:05Speaker 3: There's stocks, there's bonds, there's deeds to houses, all that stuff,
- 18:11Speaker 3: and it looks like he will be her next target.
- 18:15Speaker 3: But Wednesday is on too Debbie. So Debbie gets rid
- 18:19Speaker 3: of Wednesday by lying and telling Mortitia and Gomez that
- 18:22Speaker 3: the kids really really want to go to summer camp.
- 18:26Speaker 3: So the family arrives at Camp Chippewa.
- 18:30Speaker 4: Ah, yeah, it begins.
- 18:34Speaker 3: We'll talk about it does not mean orphan, No, it
- 18:40Speaker 3: does not. They drop off Wednesday and Pugsley. At the camp,
- 18:45Speaker 3: the kids meet a spoiled rich girl named Amanda, as
- 18:51Speaker 3: well as the camp directors, Becky and Gary played by
- 18:55Speaker 3: Christine Branski and Peter McNichol, who I recognized from Ghostbusters two.
- 19:02Speaker 3: Oh okay, yes. They also meet another camper, Joel. This
- 19:07Speaker 3: is the David Crumholtz character, and he and Wednesday make
- 19:12Speaker 3: eyes at each other. Meanwhile, back at the Adams family home,
- 19:18Speaker 3: Debbie is there with Fester and she's working on getting
- 19:22Speaker 3: him to fall in love with her, and she is succeeding.
- 19:26Speaker 3: A double date is arranged Mortitia and Gomez and Fester
- 19:30Speaker 3: and Debbie. They go out to dinner. There's this whole
- 19:33Speaker 3: scene where Morticia and Gomez do like a tango dance number.
- 19:38Speaker 4: That's a great number.
- 19:39Speaker 1: It's great that inspired an entire generation of bisexuals. They
- 19:45Speaker 1: know it because it was the nineties, and.
- 19:49Speaker 4: It was yeah, everyone in that scene is cooking. I
- 19:54Speaker 4: love that they're like getting off on making the other jealous,
- 19:58Speaker 4: Like it's just oh, it's so good, it's so good. Yeah,
- 20:01Speaker 4: and then cutting back to Uncle.
- 20:03Speaker 3: Fester doing that. What does he do?
- 20:05Speaker 1: He's like showing he's like sticking dreadsticks up.
- 20:09Speaker 4: Oh, yes, it's just just no, no, it's perfect hilarious.
- 20:17Speaker 3: And then later that night, Fester and Debbie are alone
- 20:20Speaker 3: and she tells him that she's a virgin. Obviously she's lying,
- 20:26Speaker 3: but he very sincerely is like me too, and she
- 20:33Speaker 3: professes her like you know, love for him, aka she's
- 20:37Speaker 3: manipulating him, and they get engaged. Meanwhile, at camp, Wednesday
- 20:44Speaker 3: is having a terrible time among all of the rich
- 20:47Speaker 3: blonde children, especially that girl Amanda. The camp directors put
- 20:53Speaker 3: Wednesday and Pugsley in this like time out cabin or
- 20:57Speaker 3: it's called like army house hardy House. Little David Crumholtz
- 21:03Speaker 3: is sent there as well. He and Wednesday continued to
- 21:08Speaker 3: vibe with each other and the three of them try
- 21:12Speaker 3: to escape the camp because Wednesday has learned that her
- 21:16Speaker 3: uncle Fester is engaged and she wants to try to
- 21:18Speaker 3: put an end to it, but the campers and camp
- 21:21Speaker 3: directors catch them and stop them from leaving. They like
- 21:25Speaker 3: sing Kumbaya at them.
- 21:27Speaker 4: They just can't stop appropriating. I can't, I can't, they can't.
- 21:31Speaker 1: Act of positivity is a weapon.
- 21:33Speaker 3: And yeah, oh yeah, oh my god, absolutely so at
- 21:39Speaker 3: the house, Fester and Debbie have an engagement party slash
- 21:44Speaker 3: like joint bachelor slash bachelorette parties. Fester is still oblivious
- 21:50Speaker 3: that Debbie is conning him. Then they have their wedding.
- 21:54Speaker 3: The whole Adam's family is there, including the kids plus Joel.
- 22:00Speaker 3: He got invited to the wedding and they managed to
- 22:03Speaker 3: leave the camp. Then we cut to Fester and Debbie's
- 22:06Speaker 3: honeymoon in Hawaii, where she tries to kill him by
- 22:11Speaker 3: throwing a stereo in the bathtub while he's in it,
- 22:15Speaker 3: but just turns him on.
- 22:19Speaker 1: He's like, this is so awesome.
- 22:22Speaker 3: So now Debbie is pissed that he's still alive and
- 22:25Speaker 3: grossed out because now he wants to consummate their marriage
- 22:30Speaker 3: and have sex ever heard of it? And she's like, okay,
- 22:35Speaker 3: but after we make love, you can never see your
- 22:38Speaker 3: family again, and he's reluctant, but anyone else. Yeah, honestly
- 22:48Speaker 3: a pretty pretty cool move.
- 22:50Speaker 1: He got tries so upset that he's alive. It's so mad,
- 22:57Speaker 1: and then it's like, oh my god, Christopher Lloyd's fucking face. See.
- 23:04Speaker 4: I was surprised at like how in detail that seed
- 23:09Speaker 4: goes into, because I feel like with the kids movies,
- 23:11Speaker 4: you usually get like an implication, but they're just they're
- 23:14Speaker 4: just having a frank discussion about fucking.
- 23:17Speaker 3: Well while he's inside her question mark.
- 23:21Speaker 4: It's unclear. I watched it. I'm glad it's not clearer,
- 23:25Speaker 4: but the fact that it's a possibility is wild.
- 23:28Speaker 1: I think the only reason that it could do that
- 23:31Speaker 1: was because Gomes and Morticia or clearly fucking like the
- 23:36Speaker 1: entire time through both movies, it's true. And the movie
- 23:39Speaker 1: even begins with Wednesday. You know that girl's like the
- 23:43Speaker 1: diamond under the cabbage patch turned into a baby and
- 23:45Speaker 1: Wednesday's like our sand sucks.
- 23:48Speaker 3: That's hilarious joke anyway, So he Fester doesn't want to
- 23:53Speaker 3: cut ties with his family. He's very reluctant, but he
- 23:56Speaker 3: agrees because he's so freaking horny. Many such cases, the
- 24:03Speaker 3: leaps in logic that we all do because of horniness,
- 24:06Speaker 3: you know, yeah, Okay, So then they return from their honeymoon.
- 24:11Speaker 3: Debbie is still furious that Fester is alive, but she's
- 24:14Speaker 3: kind of accepted that he's going to be sticking around,
- 24:17Speaker 3: so she gives him a makeover with like a bowl cut.
- 24:22Speaker 4: He seems to be into it.
- 24:25Speaker 3: She is a dom, he is a sub. And then
- 24:29Speaker 3: they move into a mansion while the rest of the
- 24:32Speaker 3: family receives word that Fester can never see them again,
- 24:36Speaker 3: and they're like, what the fuck. So Morticia and Gomez
- 24:40Speaker 3: go to Debbie and Fester's new house to be like, Debbie,
- 24:43Speaker 3: U succubis, let us see Fester.
- 24:46Speaker 4: And then the iconic but Debbie Pastels moment is so good.
- 24:52Speaker 1: Yeah, and I love that Mortitia respects the hell out
- 24:57Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, it's like you, you've put him under
- 25:01Speaker 1: some sexual seductive spell. I respect that.
- 25:06Speaker 4: But Debbie, it's so and I love the like the
- 25:13Speaker 4: Angelica Houston lighting. She's just so movie star, her little
- 25:17Speaker 4: eye line light that just irrationally follows her throughout everything,
- 25:22Speaker 4: and I just love it.
- 25:23Speaker 3: It's so good. So, yeah, they they confront Debbie, but
- 25:27Speaker 3: she refuses to let them see Fester, who is cowering
- 25:32Speaker 3: in the corner, too afraid of Debbie to defy her,
- 25:37Speaker 3: so the family goes to the police and tries to
- 25:41Speaker 3: report Debbie parentheses ACAB include Nathan Lane playing a cop.
- 25:47Speaker 4: That was that was.
- 25:48Speaker 3: That was a hard one. That's a hard one. But nonetheless,
- 25:53Speaker 3: because the police are useless, they do nothing to help
- 25:57Speaker 3: the family.
- 25:58Speaker 1: Wow, that's a that's a shock, right, They never do that.
- 26:02Speaker 1: They're usually so competent.
- 26:04Speaker 3: And oh yeah, meanwhile, the kids are back at the
- 26:10Speaker 3: summer camp and the camp directors are organizing a play
- 26:16Speaker 3: about the First Thanksgiving.
- 26:18Speaker 4: And you know that they're obsessed with this racist story
- 26:21Speaker 4: because they're doing it in the summer for some reason. Ye,
- 26:25Speaker 4: Like yeah, fuck, And.
- 26:28Speaker 1: Like it makes even less sense because that's not even
- 26:31Speaker 1: the tribe. I mean, like, it's not gonna make sense
- 26:33Speaker 1: for car.
- 26:34Speaker 3: It's not the tribe. Pocahontas was not at the First Thanksgiving.
- 26:38Speaker 3: Because Wednesday gets cast as Pocahontas. They start rehearsing the play.
- 26:43Speaker 3: It is horrendous for many reasons. Obviously we'll talk a
- 26:47Speaker 3: lot about this more, but Wednesday, Pugsley and Joel are like, Okay,
- 26:53Speaker 3: this sucks. We don't want to participate in your awful play.
- 26:58Speaker 3: So they are sent back to the Harmon House and
- 27:00Speaker 3: made to watch a bunch of like uplifting family friendly media,
- 27:06Speaker 3: Disney movies, Sound of Music, Brady Bunch Annie, all that
- 27:10Speaker 3: kind of stuff to fix their bad attitude. Meanwhile, Pubert
- 27:15Speaker 3: the baby seems to be sick or possessed because he
- 27:20Speaker 3: suddenly looks like a more traditional cute baby with like
- 27:25Speaker 3: rosy cheeks and blonde curls.
- 27:29Speaker 4: He likes Doctor Seuss books, he wants the cat in
- 27:32Speaker 4: the Hat so good.
- 27:33Speaker 1: Yeah, Hubert looks like me when I was a baby,
- 27:36Speaker 1: because exactly what my hair used to look like?
- 27:40Speaker 3: Oh wow, Okay, I don't know.
- 27:41Speaker 1: And then I guess I decolonize because now it's uh
- 27:44Speaker 1: this color and gray.
- 27:47Speaker 3: Yeah. Anyway, so they think Pubert is possessed maybe because
- 27:52Speaker 3: of this like troubled family life ordeal that they're going through.
- 27:56Speaker 3: Fester abandoning them, and so they work on trying to
- 28:00Speaker 3: fix this. Cut back to the camp, it is time
- 28:04Speaker 3: for the Thanksgiving play. Obviously, it's very whitewashed revisionist history
- 28:10Speaker 3: version of the Thanksgiving narrative. So Wednesday goes off script
- 28:16Speaker 3: gives a monologue about colonialism, stolen land modern day injustices
- 28:22Speaker 3: that native people face, and then she and the other
- 28:27Speaker 3: native characters in the play literally burn the set of
- 28:32Speaker 3: the play and tie up that snobby rich girl Amanda,
- 28:36Speaker 3: who had been cast as like the lead pilgrim woman.
- 28:40Speaker 3: The whole thing is chaos. It's very cathartic, so good,
- 28:46Speaker 3: and then Wednesday and Pugsley escape. After Wednesday and Joel
- 28:51Speaker 3: share a heartfelt goodbye. Back at Fester and Debbie's house,
- 28:58Speaker 3: she wraps up a b as a birthday present for Fester,
- 29:02Speaker 3: once again trying to kill him, but he's like, oh
- 29:05Speaker 3: my god, is this a bomb? Thank you so much.
- 29:09Speaker 3: But she leaves the house and goes to a bar
- 29:12Speaker 3: where Tony Shaloub is singing Macho Man.
- 29:16Speaker 1: As you do.
- 29:17Speaker 4: Just then you think it couldn't get any better. There's
- 29:20Speaker 4: Tony Shaloub at a bar singing Macho Man.
- 29:24Speaker 3: And then I guess the idea is like Debbie leaves
- 29:28Speaker 3: so that the house can explode and then she'll come
- 29:31Speaker 3: back to be like, oh no, my poor husband. But
- 29:35Speaker 3: Fester survives the explosion, so Debbie pulls a gun on
- 29:40Speaker 3: him and admits that she doesn't love him, that she
- 29:42Speaker 3: wants to kill him, and take his money. But before
- 29:45Speaker 3: she can do any of that, Thing the Adams family
- 29:49Speaker 3: disembodied hand runs Debbie over with a car and rescues
- 29:54Speaker 3: Fester and they drive off.
- 29:56Speaker 1: Upon this most recent viewing, there's a piece of dialogue
- 30:01Speaker 1: earlier on in the movie where Fester was talking about
- 30:05Speaker 1: how he's been jealous of Gomez and Mortitia's relationship, and
- 30:11Speaker 1: Gomez says something like, well, you have Thing, And I
- 30:15Speaker 1: was like, has Thing.
- 30:16Speaker 3: Been jerking off Fester this whole time?
- 30:20Speaker 1: And then Thing comes and saves him from the woman
- 30:23Speaker 1: who stole him away from him.
- 30:25Speaker 4: So, look, everything in this family is fluid, and don't
- 30:31Speaker 4: worry about it. What happens in Adam's manner stays in
- 30:37Speaker 4: Adam's manner. I also love cousin it and his wife.
- 30:42Speaker 4: That was a really fun, touchy but he's got a
- 30:46Speaker 4: he's got a normy wife and they seem very happy.
- 30:48Speaker 3: And then then they have a baby, and what a
- 30:51Speaker 3: cute kid.
- 30:53Speaker 1: I gotta tell you guys something. Yeah, it was me.
- 30:56Speaker 1: I was cousin it.
- 31:00Speaker 3: A celeb unkenny. I'm Kenny resemblance of Okay. So back
- 31:07Speaker 3: at the Adams family home, Mortitia is trying to care
- 31:12Speaker 3: for this new version of her baby, and Gomez is
- 31:17Speaker 3: like bedridden and dying. I'm not really sure what's going
- 31:21Speaker 3: on there no extra But then Fester returns home, as
- 31:26Speaker 3: do the children, so the family reunites. But oh no,
- 31:29Speaker 3: Debbie shows up with a rifle and puts the whole
- 31:33Speaker 3: family in a bunch of electric chairs, shows them a
- 31:36Speaker 3: slide show of all the people she has murdered, her
- 31:40Speaker 3: past husbands and her parents when she was ten years
- 31:44Speaker 3: old because they gave her Malibu Barbie instead of Ballerina Barbie.
- 31:47Speaker 1: Incredible, incredible because then her parents might have taken it
- 31:51Speaker 1: too far. But who else does Debbie kill? She kills
- 31:54Speaker 1: a doctor because he's snipped dinner because the pope had
- 31:57Speaker 1: a cold, not a girl. And she kills a senator
- 32:01Speaker 1: and there's nothing wrong with that.
- 32:03Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, some of some of Debbie's crimes.
- 32:07Speaker 3: You're like, I support it.
- 32:08Speaker 4: Yeah, wait, you know whatever, it's valid.
- 32:11Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 32:12Speaker 3: So, meanwhile, the only family member who Debbie didn't tie
- 32:15Speaker 3: up is baby Pubert. He's on the loose, looking like
- 32:19Speaker 3: a mini Gomez again, you know, zipping around the house
- 32:24Speaker 3: and setting in motion a final destination style Rube Goldberg
- 32:30Speaker 3: thing that electrocutes Debbie and turns her to dust. We
- 32:36Speaker 3: cut to sometime later, the Adams family is safe and
- 32:40Speaker 3: together and back to their normal cousin It and It's wife,
- 32:48Speaker 3: Margaret and their baby come over for baby Pubert's first
- 32:54Speaker 3: birthday party and bring along their nanny, Dementia, who seems
- 33:00Speaker 3: like a very good match for Fester because they look identical.
- 33:06Speaker 3: And Joel also comes to see Wednesday, and the movie
- 33:10Speaker 3: ends with Joel being like, oh, Wednesday, I hope we
- 33:15Speaker 3: can get married one day, and she's like, ooh, gross,
- 33:18Speaker 3: cool it. And then she's like, I'd rather be like
- 33:23Speaker 3: Debbie and kill my husband, except she was sloppy and
- 33:26Speaker 3: I would get away with it. And then she plays
- 33:28Speaker 3: a little graveyard prank on Joel the end. Oh, and
- 33:35Speaker 3: then the credit song is I forget when episode We
- 33:38Speaker 3: were just talking about this on Jamie, but when you
- 33:41Speaker 3: were like, Oh, I miss the days when the credit
- 33:44Speaker 3: song was a rap recap.
- 33:48Speaker 4: Oh my god, this is such a good one. This
- 33:51Speaker 4: one it like it makes no sense and therefore it's perfect. Yeah,
- 33:56Speaker 4: I love it. What did they call it a fish?
- 34:00Speaker 4: It has such a funny title.
- 34:02Speaker 3: Oh, I don't even know.
- 34:04Speaker 1: Yeah, the last movie I saw they did that recently
- 34:06Speaker 1: was PG Psycho gore Man, where they had like some
- 34:12Speaker 1: nineties not nineties, like eighties white rapper. I guess summarize
- 34:17Speaker 1: the video.
- 34:18Speaker 4: Okay, it's called Adam's Family.
- 34:20Speaker 3: Woomp. That's okay. Oh yeah, they're sort of like that.
- 34:24Speaker 1: Woomp. There.
- 34:25Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it couldn't be more nineteen ninety three if
- 34:29Speaker 4: it wanted to be. It's Adams Family.
- 34:31Speaker 3: Woomp.
- 34:32Speaker 4: You are seeing you are valued?
- 34:35Speaker 3: Yes, okay, so let's take a quick break and we'll
- 34:37Speaker 3: come back to discuss.
- 34:48Speaker 4: And we're back, Ali, We're going to kick it to you.
- 34:51Speaker 4: Where would you like to start?
- 34:53Speaker 1: Oh? Okay, Well, first of all, perfect casting all around.
- 34:58Speaker 1: Everybody in this movie is perfectly cast. I would love, like,
- 35:03Speaker 1: I know you haven't seen Wednesday, and I've only seen
- 35:05Speaker 1: like a couple episodes on the Netflix. The Netflix Wednesday. Yeah,
- 35:09Speaker 1: but Sabrina Carpenter had Jenna Ortega and her music video
- 35:14Speaker 1: for Taste, and it was a very death becomes Her,
- 35:18Speaker 1: very morbid, but very funny and very toxic lesbian. You know,
- 35:23Speaker 1: it's great, And Sabrina Carpenter could totally be Debbie on Wednesday,
- 35:29Speaker 1: and I just think that would make things perfect.
- 35:32Speaker 4: That would rock young Debbie.
- 35:34Speaker 1: They do it right this time, or it was like
- 35:38Speaker 1: Debbie's niece or something like right sure, Sabrina Jelenski.
- 35:44Speaker 3: Oh, I'm waiting.
- 35:46Speaker 1: That would be perfect.
- 35:47Speaker 3: And then.
- 35:49Speaker 1: Wow, where else do I begin? Like I'm going through
- 35:52Speaker 1: my moods right now? What else?
- 35:54Speaker 4: Here's seventy seventy places to stay?
- 35:56Speaker 2: Oh.
- 35:56Speaker 1: Someone said on Tumblr or something about how beheading all
- 36:00Speaker 1: the billionaires would include Gomes Adams because he's got all
- 36:04Speaker 1: that money, and I was like, you know, he would
- 36:05Speaker 1: just be so honored.
- 36:08Speaker 4: Yeah, I say, I think he'd be like, you know what,
- 36:11Speaker 4: you got me, I deserve it.
- 36:12Speaker 3: You got me guys guillotine me.
- 36:14Speaker 1: So Pupert has a little baby guilloty on top of
- 36:18Speaker 1: his birthday cake and I want one.
- 36:20Speaker 3: Amazing.
- 36:21Speaker 4: I love usually a movie where the premise is and
- 36:25Speaker 4: now there's a baby, it's so hit or miss premise wise,
- 36:29Speaker 4: but like Pupert Ooh, I love that baby. He's he's
- 36:34Speaker 4: a great addition. He just makes sense. He's just as evil.
- 36:37Speaker 3: I love his little mustache.
- 36:39Speaker 4: And the story doesn't get lost in like I don't know,
- 36:42Speaker 4: like what now there's a baby, which I just like.
- 36:46Speaker 4: It is a very tired plot point like, yeah, there's
- 36:48Speaker 4: a baby, the kids are trying to kill.
- 36:50Speaker 3: Him, classic narrative.
- 36:52Speaker 4: Yeah, and he's kind of loving it.
- 36:55Speaker 1: Yeah, right, and all that. Wednesday plays with a gea
- 37:00Speaker 1: with the baby dressed up as Marie Antoinette, and I
- 37:03Speaker 1: was children paying attention to comrade Wednesday.
- 37:08Speaker 3: Fun fact, Hubert the baby is played by twin babies,
- 37:15Speaker 3: as like children and babies often are in movies because
- 37:18Speaker 3: it's like they need a break, We'll swap out this
- 37:21Speaker 3: one for the other one. Yeah, but the babies are
- 37:24Speaker 3: twin girls named Kristen and Caitlyn Hooper. But Caitlyn spelled
- 37:30Speaker 3: the wrong way, so I can't forgive that.
- 37:34Speaker 1: So the baby with the little mustaches, that's adorable.
- 37:40Speaker 4: Something that stood out to me. I mean, this movie
- 37:42Speaker 4: is doing so much cultural commentary. Obviously we're going to
- 37:45Speaker 4: spend a lot of time on the Thanksgiving play, but
- 37:48Speaker 4: I just wanted to shout out a few other things
- 37:49Speaker 4: that popped out that I had to like put on
- 37:52Speaker 4: nineteen ninety three goggles to understand. There's a few contemporary references.
- 37:58Speaker 4: There's obviously the Michael Jackson reference, which I had to do.
- 38:03Speaker 4: I mean, like I had a feeling why it was included,
- 38:07Speaker 4: but I was like, well, like, where was that cultural
- 38:11Speaker 4: discourse at at the time, And it ended up being
- 38:15Speaker 4: actually quite personal to the movie, specifically because Michael Jackson
- 38:20Speaker 4: was originally going to appear in this movie. Yeah I
- 38:22Speaker 4: read that, and so yes, I'm pulling from scholarly journal
- 38:26Speaker 4: Wikipedia here. He was supposed to have a song in
- 38:29Speaker 4: the movie called family Thing. The song is rumored to
- 38:32Speaker 4: have been removed due to the child's sexual abuse allegations
- 38:36Speaker 4: against Jackson, but the truth is it was a contractual difference,
- 38:40Speaker 4: so we don't know if they would have included it.
- 38:42Speaker 4: If they could have, it seems like they probably wouldn't
- 38:44Speaker 4: have because of the way he's referenced that Yeah, he's
- 38:48Speaker 4: referenced like visually and Joel is terrified of him, which
- 38:52Speaker 4: I'm sure got a big laugh in nineteen ninety three.
- 38:56Speaker 4: I personally don't like when they use his accurance to
- 39:01Speaker 4: like seem like that's the source of horror when it's
- 39:05Speaker 4: the act. Maybe just don't reference him at all. It
- 39:08Speaker 4: is my fat And then I felt the same way
- 39:10Speaker 4: about the Amy Fisher reference, which is also so nineties
- 39:15Speaker 4: in a way that like in a movie that generally
- 39:18Speaker 4: is pushing back on popular narratives. I don't know. Listen
- 39:23Speaker 4: to the year wrang About episode about Amy Fisher. It's
- 39:26Speaker 4: like a classic mischaracterization of a teenager who is being groomed.
- 39:33Speaker 4: So there was that. I also didn't know that the
- 39:36Speaker 4: title is a reference to a dan Quail speech question
- 39:40Speaker 4: mark yeah, okay, also pulling from scholarly journal Wikipedia here.
- 39:46Speaker 4: Of course, the family values in the film's title is
- 39:49Speaker 4: a tongue in cheek reference by the writer to a
- 39:51Speaker 4: nineteen ninety two speech called Reflections on Urban America made
- 39:56Speaker 4: by then Vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle. In the speech,
- 40:00Speaker 4: Quail controversially blamed the nineteen ninety two Los Angeles riots
- 40:04Speaker 4: on a breakdown of quote unquote family values, which is,
- 40:08Speaker 4: you know, we don't need to tell you that's unbelievably racist.
- 40:12Speaker 4: But I just didn't realize that the title was pulling
- 40:15Speaker 4: from something. Yeah, both like very recent and very specific,
- 40:20Speaker 4: and that is a culture reference that I'm like, yeah,
- 40:22Speaker 4: that's a fun fuck you uh to Dan Quayle.
- 40:26Speaker 3: Similarly, I would say that there are a couple jokes
- 40:29Speaker 3: in the movie that just feel quite reductive. Most of
- 40:35Speaker 3: the jokes in the movie are hilarious, and great, and
- 40:37Speaker 3: I have a list of my favorites, but there's for.
- 40:39Speaker 4: Nineteen ninety three is an accomplishment truly that more of
- 40:43Speaker 4: it agees well than doesn't.
- 40:45Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. There's a joke where like that implies that
- 40:50Speaker 3: Gomez infest jerk off to a pin up style nude
- 40:54Speaker 3: image of their mom and we're like, okay, insects and
- 40:59Speaker 3: miss art. Dang, yeah that's there. There's an there's a
- 41:05Speaker 3: joke that's judgy toward anyone who has had cosmetic surgery
- 41:11Speaker 3: that Wednesday makes the where it's like, oh, all the
- 41:13Speaker 3: girls woke up with their original noses and they're like, so,
- 41:20Speaker 3: she's like shamy of that. Christopher Lloyd is in a
- 41:24Speaker 3: fat suit to play Fester. So you know, there are
- 41:28Speaker 3: some things that don't age very well.
- 41:32Speaker 1: But as a person with an overbite, let me tell
- 41:36Speaker 1: you when oh, yeah that one your bathing suit, is
- 41:40Speaker 1: that your overboy brutal?
- 41:44Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess with the with the joke about nose jobs,
- 41:47Speaker 4: I felt like that was, Yeah, that's cruel of Wednesday,
- 41:50Speaker 4: But I felt that they were trying to get at
- 41:52Speaker 4: the waspiness of the girl she was talking to. It
- 41:57Speaker 4: could have been a different joke.
- 41:59Speaker 3: That's thing, like she could have commented on her whatever
- 42:02Speaker 3: class privilege or something, didn't need to make a dig
- 42:05Speaker 3: at anyone's appearance. But she does that a couple of times.
- 42:09Speaker 4: She also tries to kill a baby. I mean problematic, problematically, yeah,
- 42:17Speaker 4: and then I mean, yeah, the big, the big discussion
- 42:19Speaker 4: to have here is the I mean the summer camp
- 42:23Speaker 4: it itself and then the specific play that they put on.
- 42:28Speaker 3: But yeah, so overall, it's I think a pretty effective
- 42:36Speaker 3: satire of like American summer camp culture, where it's this
- 42:41Speaker 3: camp for like privileged children who you know are just
- 42:46Speaker 3: children with rich parents. Almost every child there is white.
- 42:51Speaker 3: Almost all of them are blonde. Like you see shot
- 42:54Speaker 3: like wide shots of like forty kids, and they're all
- 42:57Speaker 3: just these blonde children. There's commentary on class and white
- 43:03Speaker 3: supremacy and how non native people and especially white people,
- 43:09Speaker 3: appropriate indigenous cultures, treat Native people as a monolith, act
- 43:15Speaker 3: as though Native people don't exist anymore, that they're a
- 43:18Speaker 3: thing of the.
- 43:19Speaker 1: Past, completely make up the name, like say that the
- 43:23Speaker 1: name of it, yes, scribe is because it's not orphan.
- 43:27Speaker 1: What happened was is that Chippewa is what the colonizers
- 43:32Speaker 1: heard when they said, oh, jibwa, and they thought, because
- 43:35Speaker 1: how you spell it? And I'm sure how you say it?
- 43:38Speaker 1: Before there was like a written language for these words.
- 43:41Speaker 1: They were like, oh, chippewa instead of ojibwa or ojibwa.
- 43:47Speaker 1: That's what it is. It doesn't mean orphan. I forget
- 43:49Speaker 1: what it means. It means something. It means something very weird,
- 43:54Speaker 1: like if I recall correctly, but I forgot what it was.
- 43:57Speaker 1: I can look it up somewhere.
- 43:59Speaker 4: But racist brain cell to be shared among these colonizers.
- 44:03Speaker 4: It's just like sough. I was curious. I guess I
- 44:08Speaker 4: was curious if either of you. I hadn't thought about
- 44:12Speaker 4: this in a long time, but I was talking about
- 44:14Speaker 4: this movie with my brother, and we grew up in Massachusetts,
- 44:18Speaker 4: where misrepresentation of Native history, I feel like, is particularly egregious,
- 44:24Speaker 4: and we were talking about it wasn't a camp quite
- 44:27Speaker 4: like this, but it's one of the or at least
- 44:30Speaker 4: at the time in the late nineties early two thousands,
- 44:32Speaker 4: was a default field trip that you would take in
- 44:36Speaker 4: public schools to a place called Camp Squanto in Massachusetts.
- 44:42Speaker 4: And so I did a little bit of research into it,
- 44:43Speaker 4: because again, this seems like, it's a very like the
- 44:47Speaker 4: camp that the Atoms are going to is a rich
- 44:50Speaker 4: kid camp. This is a publicly owned camp that I
- 44:52Speaker 4: think mostly boy Scouts use, but it has this very
- 44:58Speaker 4: racist history that it doesn't seem like unlike you know,
- 45:03Speaker 4: at very least there has been push back on the
- 45:05Speaker 4: way Plymouth Plantation, another field trip I had to go on,
- 45:09Speaker 4: is portrayed.
- 45:09Speaker 3: There hasn't really been any.
- 45:11Speaker 4: Motion on camps like this, but I just wanted to
- 45:14Speaker 4: talk about it a little bit because I do like
- 45:17Speaker 4: once my brother brought it up, I was like, oh,
- 45:19Speaker 4: I clearly remember going to Camp Squanto as a kid,
- 45:24Speaker 4: which is you know, Squanto is yet another like misrepresented name.
- 45:30Speaker 4: I looked into how the website portrays and I want
- 45:34Speaker 4: to make sure I'm saying his actual name correctly. It's
- 45:38Speaker 4: to Squantum, and he's He's a popular, falsely portrayed cultural
- 45:44Speaker 4: figure in Massachusetts.
- 45:45Speaker 3: I've learned about him all the time.
- 45:46Speaker 4: Growing up, and the narrative that is attributed to him
- 45:50Speaker 4: is that he was an indigenous person who helped the
- 45:55Speaker 4: pilgrims and who like you know, helped them understand how
- 46:00Speaker 4: the land worked. And he was presented as like helpful
- 46:04Speaker 4: to colonizers and that that was a good thing. And
- 46:07Speaker 4: that's why they named this weird camp after him, the Camp,
- 46:11Speaker 4: And it seems like a lot of similar camps like
- 46:14Speaker 4: it in New England. There's also a Camp Squanto in
- 46:17Speaker 4: New Hampshire that's even worse because it's an explicitly Christian camp,
- 46:21Speaker 4: which makes is what do you even say this that
- 46:31Speaker 4: I was like, I was like, I don't want to
- 46:34Speaker 4: bring these, but yeah, it's Camp Squanto invites campers to
- 46:38Speaker 4: experience the love of Christ outside of four walls in
- 46:41Speaker 4: a unique transforming environment. This is what wasn't the place
- 46:44Speaker 4: I went. It was a federally owned piece of land,
- 46:47Speaker 4: but nonetheless it is a piece of land that is
- 46:50Speaker 4: dedicated to teaching kids, most of whom are not native,
- 46:53Speaker 4: this false version of to Squantum. It opened in July
- 46:58Speaker 4: nineteen twenty five, so it wasn't even originally integrated. Obviously
- 47:03Speaker 4: by the time I went, it was. But it was
- 47:06Speaker 4: a camp for white kids all over Massachusetts to learn
- 47:09Speaker 4: a false version of history. And to this day it
- 47:12Speaker 4: is very popular. It is still where boy Scouts will
- 47:17Speaker 4: go and camp year round. And I guess I just
- 47:22Speaker 4: I don't know I hadn't really connected that. Even though
- 47:26Speaker 4: it's not the exact same kind of camp, it has
- 47:28Speaker 4: a similar mission, which is just mis education and misrepresentation
- 47:33Speaker 4: of history to serve the American project. So that's unfortunately,
- 47:41Speaker 4: Camp Squanto in this.
- 47:43Speaker 3: Movie seems very aware of all these types of camps
- 47:46Speaker 3: that are all over Turtle Island and is satirizing them
- 47:52Speaker 3: by way of this play that goes a little differently
- 47:59Speaker 3: than the camp directors are expecting. So yeah, Ali, we're
- 48:03Speaker 3: curious on your take on this.
- 48:07Speaker 1: Well, Okay, first of all, I remember that ojiboy, the
- 48:12Speaker 1: word is like kind of in reference to this is
- 48:16Speaker 1: so silly, Like puckered up is more or less because
- 48:20Speaker 1: the way we wear they would wear our moccasins is like,
- 48:25Speaker 1: I don't know, the moccasins have like puckered scenes or
- 48:27Speaker 1: something like that. So it's like, oh, puckered up or something.
- 48:30Speaker 1: So that's kind of what ojibwe means. But obviously Ani
- 48:33Speaker 1: schnabe would be more correct, you know. Anyways, it doesn't
- 48:39Speaker 1: mean orphan, it means puckered up. God, I wish it
- 48:43Speaker 1: didn't sound so dirty the Thanksgiving scene. So I, like
- 48:49Speaker 1: I said, I did a video about this on YouTube.
- 48:53Speaker 1: And the thing that I really loved the most about
- 48:56Speaker 1: this scene was, you know, first of all, came out
- 49:00Speaker 1: like I don't know, a year or so before Disney's
- 49:03Speaker 1: Pocahontas came out, so before you know, like obviously, the
- 49:09Speaker 1: story of Pocahontas has been told for you know, since
- 49:13Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. People have like a vague, very whitewashed
- 49:18Speaker 1: understanding of that story anyways, so it's familiar, and then
- 49:23Speaker 1: Disney just made it worse. But it's just so interesting
- 49:28Speaker 1: that this movie is so honest about the lie of
- 49:33Speaker 1: not just not just Pocahontas. You know, they don't really
- 49:37Speaker 1: dive into that story. It's just, oh, this is a
- 49:41Speaker 1: play about Indians, and Pocahontas is an Indian, so let's
- 49:44Speaker 1: just you know, throw her in there to make what
- 49:47Speaker 1: stay uncomfortable. But just how honest it is about the
- 49:50Speaker 1: lie of thanksgiving, and not only the lie of Thanksgiving
- 49:56Speaker 1: that we tell our you know, the nation to children,
- 50:01Speaker 1: but how the other parents in the audience very clearly
- 50:06Speaker 1: are racist against Native people. And that's something that really
- 50:09Speaker 1: stood out to me when I was little, you know,
- 50:12Speaker 1: I saw this movie probably when I was like four.
- 50:14Speaker 1: I want to say, three or four. And I understood,
- 50:18Speaker 1: you know, at a very young age, just from like
- 50:21Speaker 1: what my parents taught me, and then later when I
- 50:23Speaker 1: would like go to school and stuff and interact with
- 50:27Speaker 1: people who had never seen a Native person, like until
- 50:31Speaker 1: my dad. My dad was probably the first, if not
- 50:35Speaker 1: the only Native person that a lot of the white
- 50:38Speaker 1: kids in my schools ever saw, you know, so probably
- 50:42Speaker 1: one of the very very few that the teachers had
- 50:45Speaker 1: to like interact with. Also. So it's like I understood
- 50:50Speaker 1: at a very young age that there are adults and
- 50:54Speaker 1: parents and teachers that are lying about what happened to
- 50:59Speaker 1: the Native Americans, not just at Thanksgiving or even with pokehonnas,
- 51:04Speaker 1: but throughout history. I realized that teachers will lie about this,
- 51:09Speaker 1: like they'll even probably even know the story and still
- 51:12Speaker 1: lie about it just because you know, it's a prettier version,
- 51:16Speaker 1: it's a more flattering version.
- 51:18Speaker 3: It's more quote unquote appropriate for children, and it's who's children.
- 51:24Speaker 4: I've I got into an argument about this with one
- 51:26Speaker 4: of my mom's co workers years ago, who teaches at
- 51:30Speaker 4: an elementary school, and it was like this looping thing
- 51:36Speaker 4: of I was like, well, but you know that's not true.
- 51:40Speaker 4: And you know, she was like, well, but that's how
- 51:42Speaker 4: are you supposed to explain that to children? I was like,
- 51:45Speaker 4: figure it out.
- 51:46Speaker 3: I don't know, it's not true your job as an educator.
- 51:49Speaker 4: But it was this idea of like, well, it's a
- 51:51Speaker 4: tradition to tell this lie, and like she really felt that,
- 51:55Speaker 4: and it's it's I think that there are a lot
- 51:58Speaker 4: of people out there who still really don't want to
- 52:01Speaker 4: face their own discomfort of having to explain this.
- 52:03Speaker 1: No, not at all. But yeah, it's just like how
- 52:06Speaker 1: the movie really just called that out, especially like in
- 52:10Speaker 1: the early nineties, Like people have difficulty calling it out now,
- 52:15Speaker 1: let alone, you know, back when I was three years old,
- 52:18Speaker 1: so Wednesday not giving them an inch. It's like I
- 52:23Speaker 1: like to think that she just sat in that cabin
- 52:27Speaker 1: and watched all those movies and just was like, oh,
- 52:30Speaker 1: I'm plotting how to get back at all of you
- 52:34Speaker 1: just orchestrated all of this. I will say though, that
- 52:39Speaker 1: the scene, as amazing as it is, it's still pretty problematic.
- 52:43Speaker 1: Y like context matters, but racial stereotypes are still racial stereotypes.
- 52:49Speaker 1: If you look at the Native the kids that are
- 52:52Speaker 1: dressed up like natives, A lot of them have really
- 52:56Speaker 1: darkened skin. I point that out in the video. I
- 53:00Speaker 1: was like, Wow, they really just like dark in this
- 53:03Speaker 1: kid's skin for the play. And it's racist. I mean,
- 53:07Speaker 1: the whole play is racist.
- 53:09Speaker 3: But right, it's tricky because yeah, the like, of course,
- 53:13Speaker 3: these racist camp directors would put these children in brown face.
- 53:19Speaker 3: They would like cast and it's not even predominantly white people.
- 53:23Speaker 3: Because another thing with that is that the campers who
- 53:26Speaker 3: are cast to play native characters are like the quote
- 53:30Speaker 3: unquote outcasts in the camp. Like there's a disabled child
- 53:36Speaker 3: who's Jewish, there's a kid who is fat, there's an
- 53:39Speaker 3: Asian kid, there's a Latina kid, there's a black kid,
- 53:42Speaker 3: a nerdy kid, like all the quote unquote outcasts who
- 53:46Speaker 3: are not these like blonde children.
- 53:49Speaker 4: Like descendants are pilgrims.
- 53:51Speaker 3: Yeah, right, and that's that is like a commentary of like,
- 53:55Speaker 3: of course, these horrible camp directors would put children who
- 54:00Speaker 3: who have been othered by society, you know, cast them
- 54:03Speaker 3: in the role as the native characters in the play.
- 54:06Speaker 3: But the movie also others those children and again it's like, yes,
- 54:11Speaker 3: of course, these horrible camp directors would put those children
- 54:15Speaker 3: in brown face.
- 54:17Speaker 4: But like the viv isn't doing a ton to push
- 54:20Speaker 4: push back to be like, let's get to know these kids.
- 54:23Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we get more time with how terrible the
- 54:26Speaker 1: white kids are than we are with you know, how
- 54:28Speaker 1: cool these kids are. Actually, like Wednesday should have been
- 54:32Speaker 1: with them more.
- 54:33Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, why doesn't she befriend like Jamal and Consuela
- 54:37Speaker 3: and the other children who she has been outcast with,
- 54:42Speaker 3: right like and find community with them anyway.
- 54:45Speaker 4: So it's not really her thing, Wednesday.
- 54:47Speaker 3: That is true. That's true.
- 54:48Speaker 4: But even Pugsly, I mean Pugsly, who I do kind
- 54:51Speaker 4: of like that. It's cannon to the Adams family universe,
- 54:54Speaker 4: that Pugsy. You know, we can kind of take or
- 54:56Speaker 4: leave him. Yeah, you know, he's in a couple of scenes,
- 54:59Speaker 4: but but he's not putting butts in seats. You know,
- 55:02Speaker 4: he seems like a sweet kid. I like his his
- 55:07Speaker 4: performance as the turkey was very funny me. I mean,
- 55:12Speaker 4: even down to the like lyrics that they're writing. I
- 55:17Speaker 4: mean it is like it is really really sharp commentary
- 55:20Speaker 4: writing display from this like horrendous couple's perspective.
- 55:26Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of Native people who like
- 55:29Speaker 1: the scene, and there's a lot of Native people who don't,
- 55:31Speaker 1: and that's I think that's valid. Like I would never
- 55:35Speaker 1: argue with a Native person about not liking this scene because,
- 55:40Speaker 1: you know, like I said, it's you still have kids
- 55:42Speaker 1: in brown face and culturally appropriating costumes. The dialogue is
- 55:50Speaker 1: very racist too, you know, like it's you know, like
- 55:54Speaker 1: racial stereotypes are stereotypes and they're harmful, so you know,
- 55:58Speaker 1: like ironic racism can still racism. That being said, if
- 56:04Speaker 1: I have to choose between two false accounts of the
- 56:06Speaker 1: Pocahonta story, I'm going with this one because it was
- 56:10Speaker 1: very very cathartic for me, you know, at that time
- 56:15Speaker 1: in my life, and still kind of I mean, Donald
- 56:18Speaker 1: Trump is using Pocahontas as a slur to this day,
- 56:22Speaker 1: and with recent hate crimes committed against Indigenous actors like
- 56:28Speaker 1: Jonathan Joss, I would see that. Yeah, it still holds
- 56:34Speaker 1: up in some places, even if it doesn't in others, right,
- 56:38Speaker 1: I mean.
- 56:38Speaker 3: This is one of the few pieces of mainstream Hollywood
- 56:41Speaker 3: media from this era that even acknowledged European settler colonialism
- 56:48Speaker 3: and stolen land and modern Native people living in poverty
- 56:54Speaker 3: on reservations as a result of colonialism and displacement and
- 56:59Speaker 3: so like, I'll give the movie that, but like you said,
- 57:03Speaker 3: there are things that ways in which the movie doesn't
- 57:06Speaker 3: handle this perfectly. For example, I mean, the whole thing
- 57:09Speaker 3: still centers whiteness. There are no Native characters present on
- 57:14Speaker 3: screen to offer their perspectives or experiences. I feel like
- 57:19Speaker 3: there are things that the play gets wrong that the
- 57:23Speaker 3: movie could have easily acknowledged if it's something that like
- 57:26Speaker 3: Wednesday includes in her monologue, or again, if the movie
- 57:31Speaker 3: included one or more Native characters who could set the
- 57:36Speaker 3: record straight.
- 57:37Speaker 4: But again, one of the many things that I like,
- 57:40Speaker 4: something that would have fit pretty seamlessly into Wednesday's monologue
- 57:43Speaker 4: is acknowledging how racist their costuming is. Like that would
- 57:48Speaker 4: have been at least a step toward not seeming as
- 57:54Speaker 4: if the movie is just endorsing like any facet of that.
- 58:00Speaker 3: But that doesn't.
- 58:01Speaker 4: I mean, it's I feel like it's almost kind of
- 58:02Speaker 4: like leaned into versus resisted, which isn't true of a
- 58:08Speaker 4: lot of elements in that speech.
- 58:10Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, she could have acknowledged the costuming, the brown face,
- 58:14Speaker 3: the fact that Pocahontas was not a quote unquote Chippewa maiden,
- 58:20Speaker 3: as she says in her dialogue.
- 58:23Speaker 4: Yeah, as you say in your video, very funny and repeatedly, Ali,
- 58:28Speaker 4: she's nine.
- 58:29Speaker 3: She is nine, Yes, yeah, she's a small child. Pocahontas
- 58:34Speaker 3: was not involved in the first Thanksgiving, neither was the
- 58:39Speaker 3: Ojibwe nation. It's just all these like again, the movie
- 58:43Speaker 3: is commenting on how these racist white camp directors have
- 58:47Speaker 3: created this and are perpetuating this very false version of
- 58:51Speaker 3: the narrative. But for the people in the nineties watching this,
- 58:56Speaker 3: and even people today watching this, many of them don't
- 58:59Speaker 3: know any better. They don't know that the quote unquote
- 59:03Speaker 3: facts presented by this play are completely incorrect, and the
- 59:08Speaker 3: movie doesn't say, hey, all these details that you see
- 59:12Speaker 3: here in the play are wrong. Again, it would have
- 59:13Speaker 3: been easy for Wednesday to be like and by the way,
- 59:17Speaker 3: this this and this, or it would have been easy
- 59:18Speaker 3: for a native character to be written into the movie
- 59:21Speaker 3: to say here's the actual thing. But the movie again
- 59:26Speaker 3: just glosses all over that. But but it is very
- 59:30Speaker 3: cathartic to watch this set burned down and for Sarah Miller,
- 59:35Speaker 3: the pilgrim girl, to be tied up and burned at
- 59:38Speaker 3: the stake question mark.
- 59:40Speaker 4: That's great.
- 59:40Speaker 1: So I think something that like in the hands of
- 59:44Speaker 1: a responsible writer. Something that could have helped the scene
- 59:51Speaker 1: would be if there was an actual Native person at
- 59:54Speaker 1: the camp. Obviously you walk on thin ice with that one,
- 59:59Speaker 1: like isn't a person attending the camp, And if it's
- 1:00:03Speaker 1: a rich like city Indian, you know, or you run
- 1:00:06Speaker 1: the risk of like you know, stereotypes anyways, but how
- 1:00:10Speaker 1: they treat a rich Indian is still very racist, you know,
- 1:00:16Speaker 1: when you're surrounded by rich white children or like maybe
- 1:00:21Speaker 1: there's a camp director or something like that that's like, oh,
- 1:00:25Speaker 1: we're gonna teach you, you know, take you on a
- 1:00:27Speaker 1: trail or take you horseback riding, and the kids are like,
- 1:00:31Speaker 1: you know, because the other thing is, you know, you
- 1:00:33Speaker 1: don't really want an excuse, like you don't want a
- 1:00:36Speaker 1: Native person there specifically so people can be racist to them, right,
- 1:00:41Speaker 1: But like if someone was there, like I don't know,
- 1:00:45Speaker 1: the image in my head when I imagine how the scene
- 1:00:48Speaker 1: probably could have been a little bit better, would be
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: like a Native person watching this all unfold and just
- 1:00:56Speaker 1: like nodding and smiling and just watching it like, oh, okay,
- 1:01:01Speaker 1: you know about it all. I don't remember this version
- 1:01:04Speaker 1: of the Thanksgiving story, but it's a lot better than
- 1:01:06Speaker 1: the ones they've been telling for the past like three
- 1:01:10Speaker 1: hundred years.
- 1:01:13Speaker 4: The other thing that I know we've like touched on it,
- 1:01:16Speaker 4: but again, one of the things that I don't think
- 1:01:19Speaker 4: I would have seen in other movies is the acknowledgment
- 1:01:23Speaker 4: that Native people still exist. Like, I think that was
- 1:01:27Speaker 4: something that I was I feel like, I mean, I
- 1:01:30Speaker 4: didn't grow up around any Native kids. I grew up
- 1:01:33Speaker 4: in a very diversity, but we didn't have a large
- 1:01:36Speaker 4: Native population at all. And I feel like, even if
- 1:01:39Speaker 4: it wasn't explicitly said to me that you're sort of
- 1:01:43Speaker 4: taught that Native people don't exist anymore. And so that Wednesday,
- 1:01:48Speaker 4: even in like it could have been a more detailed
- 1:01:50Speaker 4: line of dialogue, but acknowledged that of course Native people
- 1:01:54Speaker 4: still exist and they're extremely oppressed to this day, Like
- 1:01:59Speaker 4: is really impactful for it, you know, kids in the
- 1:02:03Speaker 4: audience who just have not been taught that whatsoever. Yeah.
- 1:02:07Speaker 4: I had a long talk with my brother about this
- 1:02:09Speaker 4: because I was like, we didn't like, I just to
- 1:02:11Speaker 4: verify how miseducated we really were. And yeah, I mean
- 1:02:15Speaker 4: it's just again it's like a couple lines of dialogue,
- 1:02:18Speaker 4: but it's I'm very glad it's there.
- 1:02:21Speaker 1: One of my nieces. And this was back I want
- 1:02:24Speaker 1: to say, like two thousand. Let's see, I graduated high
- 1:02:28Speaker 1: school in two thousand and eight, so it must have
- 1:02:30Speaker 1: been two thousand and five era, I want to say.
- 1:02:35Speaker 1: But the kids in her classroom, so she was probably
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: like in sixth or seventh grade. The kids in her
- 1:02:44Speaker 1: classroom didn't think Native people were real. My god, They're like,
- 1:02:48Speaker 1: why are we learning about this? This didn't even happen.
- 1:02:51Speaker 1: I was like, what are you talking about? They're like,
- 1:02:53Speaker 1: Indians aren't real. And I'm like, excuse.
- 1:02:56Speaker 3: Me, Hi, nice to meet you.
- 1:02:58Speaker 1: Like what the fuck is going on at our public schools?
- 1:03:02Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, oh my gosh. And it's only gotten
- 1:03:06Speaker 1: gotten somewhat better and gotten somewhat worse because just recently,
- 1:03:10Speaker 1: actually I was helping my nephew with his homework and uh,
- 1:03:14Speaker 1: Sitting Bull was addressed Chief Sitting Bull, and they talked
- 1:03:18Speaker 1: a little bit about the battle a little big horn,
- 1:03:22Speaker 1: just what it was, and you know that Sitting Bull
- 1:03:25Speaker 1: was there. Then they followed it up like the next
- 1:03:28Speaker 1: page was about Golden Mirror. I think it's how you
- 1:03:31Speaker 1: say it. Who was the fourth prime Minister of Israel
- 1:03:34Speaker 1: oh and asked how was Goldenmeir and Sitting Bull alike?
- 1:03:41Speaker 1: And I was like, excuse me, oh my god. Yeah,
- 1:03:45Speaker 1: I was like, first of all, we never even learned
- 1:03:47Speaker 1: about Israel like at all through my K through twelve education,
- 1:03:52Speaker 1: like saying, none of it, not at all. I don't
- 1:03:55Speaker 1: even think we learned about Sitting Bull in my K
- 1:03:58Speaker 1: through twelve. You know, I think I learned about that
- 1:04:01Speaker 1: like on my own, just because of who my family is.
- 1:04:04Speaker 1: And it's like, so the one time you're bringing up
- 1:04:07Speaker 1: Israel and Sitting Bull is to compare those two. And
- 1:04:13Speaker 1: I wrote a very very angry email to my nephew's principle,
- 1:04:17Speaker 1: So yeah, it.
- 1:04:19Speaker 4: Shouldn't fault you. But I'm oh glad that people are
- 1:04:24Speaker 4: keeping their eyes piled for it, because that's that's absurd.
- 1:04:27Speaker 3: Like it goes without saying that Israel is the pilgrims,
- 1:04:32Speaker 3: is the colonizers decimating an entire indigenous population.
- 1:04:38Speaker 1: And I was very much like, listen, if this woman
- 1:04:42Speaker 1: was anything like Sitting Bull, the United States would not
- 1:04:45Speaker 1: be backing Israel, just so you.
- 1:04:47Speaker 4: Know, like, yeah, they are the colonizers, it's their whole
- 1:04:52Speaker 4: fucking thing. I mean it is it yeah again, And
- 1:04:56Speaker 4: it's like it's tricky because I think we've had this
- 1:04:58Speaker 4: conversation on the show before. It's it is like one
- 1:05:02Speaker 4: movie is not going to be able to make up
- 1:05:05Speaker 4: for years of miseducation, but it can help. And this
- 1:05:11Speaker 4: is a scene that I think is an example of that. Yeah,
- 1:05:16Speaker 4: I have for I have a whole section. I need to,
- 1:05:20Speaker 4: I think, process this whole Camp Squanta thing because I'm
- 1:05:23Speaker 4: still thinking so much about that, Like I double checked
- 1:05:27Speaker 4: current stuff hanging at the camp just to see him,
- 1:05:30Speaker 4: Like has the messaging changed at all? It hasn't, and
- 1:05:34Speaker 4: you know it instead of being presented as oh, the
- 1:05:36Speaker 4: translator for the pilgrims in Plymouth, where the truth, of
- 1:05:43Speaker 4: course is far more complicated and horrific, is that he
- 1:05:47Speaker 4: was overseas and returned to North America and his entire
- 1:05:51Speaker 4: village was gone and it'd been replaced with Plymouth Plantation.
- 1:05:56Speaker 4: And that is certainly not acknowledged within the walls of
- 1:06:00Speaker 4: Campsquanto because that doesn't feel good to hear. And I
- 1:06:04Speaker 4: feel like that is a lot of what is satirized
- 1:06:07Speaker 4: in this Christine Baranski and other guy Gary Couple here
- 1:06:12Speaker 4: is like they are in a way that like I
- 1:06:15Speaker 4: think is like written pretty well of like they are
- 1:06:17Speaker 4: so determined to appropriate the hell and misrepresent the hell
- 1:06:22Speaker 4: out of any aspect of Native culture that they can
- 1:06:25Speaker 4: accept the parts that don't feel good to hear. And
- 1:06:28Speaker 4: that is there's that great line that I think they
- 1:06:32Speaker 4: kind of split about privilege. What is it privileged young
- 1:06:38Speaker 4: adults and we're all here to learn, to grow and
- 1:06:40Speaker 4: to just have plain fun because that's what being privileged
- 1:06:43Speaker 4: is all about. And like doing that in the context
- 1:06:47Speaker 4: of misrepresenting and stealing Native culture for their own purposes
- 1:06:52Speaker 4: unfortunately completely tracks. And I do appreciate that the movie,
- 1:06:56Speaker 4: for its faults, does seem to know that. I also like,
- 1:07:00Speaker 4: did they know that Pocahontas was in production when this
- 1:07:04Speaker 4: was made? Because they have they have it out for
- 1:07:07Speaker 4: Disney in this one.
- 1:07:08Speaker 5: It's very satisfying, maybe because I remember, I guess around
- 1:07:14Speaker 5: that time, like because Pocahontas and The Lion King were
- 1:07:19Speaker 5: both being animated at the.
- 1:07:20Speaker 1: Same time, and Disney wanted that Oscar Gold and thought that, oh,
- 1:07:25Speaker 1: we'll get it with Pocahontas this time and make it
- 1:07:27Speaker 1: edgy an adult, you know.
- 1:07:30Speaker 3: Make her sexy.
- 1:07:31Speaker 1: The gross, so gross nine nine, she was nine.
- 1:07:39Speaker 3: I did.
- 1:07:40Speaker 4: I did. Like the the other aspect of the like
- 1:07:43Speaker 4: the camp being that if you disagree with them, they
- 1:07:46Speaker 4: will try to basically clockwork orange you by making you
- 1:07:50Speaker 4: watch The Little Mermaid a trillion times, and that Wednesday,
- 1:07:55Speaker 4: Wednesday is stronger.
- 1:07:57Speaker 3: Yeah, like you said, Ellie, she's you can imagine, she's
- 1:08:01Speaker 3: just like sitting there as like Ariels singing part of
- 1:08:06Speaker 3: this world or whatever, just like plotting. Like yes, I
- 1:08:09Speaker 3: will pretend to agree to be in the play so
- 1:08:11Speaker 3: that I can, you know, derail the play and give
- 1:08:16Speaker 3: this monologue. I read a couple pieces by Native writers,
- 1:08:22Speaker 3: one by Sasha la Point in huff Post in twenty
- 1:08:27Speaker 3: twenty entitled as an Indigenous woman, I always hate Thanksgiving
- 1:08:32Speaker 3: This year, I'm terrified of it in reference to people
- 1:08:36Speaker 3: gathering a few months after COVID broke out, and then
- 1:08:40Speaker 3: the other piece I read is by author Alyssa Washuota
- 1:08:44Speaker 3: in twenty seventeen in a publication called Electric Lit, entitled Wednesday,
- 1:08:50Speaker 3: Adams is just another Settler. In both pieces, the writers
- 1:08:54Speaker 3: discuss their relationship to Thanksgiving and their relationship to this
- 1:08:59Speaker 3: scene in Adam's family values, how they celebrated and or
- 1:09:05Speaker 3: connected to the scene in their youth, but both say
- 1:09:09Speaker 3: that like it's not enough. Though of course, white people
- 1:09:13Speaker 3: like Wednesday Adams are still sellers on stolen Land. Liberation
- 1:09:18Speaker 3: isn't going to happen via sharing this clip from the
- 1:09:21Speaker 3: movie on social media on Thanksgiving, solidarity and allyship from
- 1:09:25Speaker 3: white people has to be a lot more meaningful and impactful,
- 1:09:29Speaker 3: and both pieces are definitely worth reading. We'll provide the
- 1:09:33Speaker 3: links to those.
- 1:09:34Speaker 1: But that makes me happy to hear though I know
- 1:09:37Speaker 1: that you know, both of those were released, you know,
- 1:09:39Speaker 1: a couple of years ago, but especially how relevant it is,
- 1:09:44Speaker 1: Like again, going back to Jonathan Joss, it's you know,
- 1:09:48Speaker 1: his husband has been very vocal saying, you know, like
- 1:09:52Speaker 1: please keep putting pressure on the fact that this was
- 1:09:56Speaker 1: a hate crime against gay indigenous man, you know, put
- 1:10:01Speaker 1: pressure on the police. And surprisingly every new piece of
- 1:10:07Speaker 1: information about Jonathan Joss is worse than the last, and
- 1:10:10Speaker 1: it's been very traumatizing, like just this past week, you
- 1:10:14Speaker 1: know alone. But I really appreciate how much this man
- 1:10:22Speaker 1: was loved by so many people, because it sounds like
- 1:10:26Speaker 1: the police, the San Antonio Police Department was severely underestimated
- 1:10:31Speaker 1: how much people would have cared about this, like oh
- 1:10:35Speaker 1: it's another gay guy. Oh it's another dead Indian and
- 1:10:38Speaker 1: everyone's like, oh no, actually absolutely not. We're not just
- 1:10:43Speaker 1: gonna gloss over this murder that happened, you know, And
- 1:10:50Speaker 1: again like that's another example of using your solidarity, not
- 1:10:53Speaker 1: just sharing, you know, a very cathartic, awesome clip from
- 1:10:57Speaker 1: your favorite movie, but being like this is their phone number,
- 1:11:01Speaker 1: this is who you can call, this is you know,
- 1:11:03Speaker 1: post on social media, send money to the GoFundMe. I
- 1:11:07Speaker 1: heard that the husband doesn't want any more GoFundMe donations,
- 1:11:10Speaker 1: but you know, using your platform, which I hope that
- 1:11:13Speaker 1: the Parks and Rec and King of the Hill people
- 1:11:17Speaker 1: will step up and put a little bit more pressure
- 1:11:20Speaker 1: on it with their platforms. But we'll see, because I
- 1:11:24Speaker 1: saw how they treated them at that panel, so hopefully
- 1:11:27Speaker 1: Park Rec does better.
- 1:11:29Speaker 4: I've been so disappointed to see how I mean, not
- 1:11:32Speaker 4: that we expect anything from Chris Pratt, but Chris Pratt,
- 1:11:35Speaker 4: I think, is the only person who is like acknowledged
- 1:11:38Speaker 4: it in a public way, in a half assed, useless way,
- 1:11:41Speaker 4: and all of the acknowledgments that he isn't here don't
- 1:11:45Speaker 4: acknowledge the fact that he was murdered. It's just very
- 1:11:49Speaker 4: like I read I was reading through just public statements
- 1:11:52Speaker 4: made for the most part, it's like you would think
- 1:11:55Speaker 4: he died in his sleep, you.
- 1:11:57Speaker 3: Know, like you just it's disgusting.
- 1:12:00Speaker 4: Especially I'm like Amy Poehlard couldn't have a huger platform, why,
- 1:12:05Speaker 4: you know.
- 1:12:06Speaker 3: I hope she steps up. I hope they all do.
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: So if you love this scene and Adam's family values,
- 1:12:12Speaker 1: do something awesome this year for Pride and step up
- 1:12:15Speaker 1: for Jonathan Jass. So yeah, anyways.
- 1:12:18Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, I don't have that much else to
- 1:12:20Speaker 3: talk about with this movie, especially stuff that we didn't
- 1:12:25Speaker 3: also cover on our first episode. Yes, about the first movie,
- 1:12:29Speaker 3: Corny Parents Rock.
- 1:12:30Speaker 4: You know, we talked you could go back to our
- 1:12:32Speaker 4: first episode to talk about the ways that the Added
- 1:12:34Speaker 4: Family subverts all of these you know, Hollywood tropes in
- 1:12:38Speaker 4: this really delightful way. I did want to talk a
- 1:12:40Speaker 4: little bit about Debbie, because this is our first rodio
- 1:12:44Speaker 4: with Debbie and unfortunately our last. I would love to
- 1:12:47Speaker 4: see word Debbie. I think she's a pretty cool, like
- 1:12:51Speaker 4: satirical character as well, where she is this like extremely entitled,
- 1:12:57Speaker 4: you know, wasp by murderer. It's an interesting idea for
- 1:13:01Speaker 4: a character. Yeah, and she's just she's killing guys. She's
- 1:13:05Speaker 4: just she's just walking around killing killing rich guys, and.
- 1:13:09Speaker 3: She's manipulating them, she's doming them, she's making them get makeovers,
- 1:13:14Speaker 3: stealing from them, murdering them. It's honestly iconic.
- 1:13:19Speaker 1: I like that she's very feminine and very pretty and
- 1:13:23Speaker 1: where's you know, like white Sellstels, but is also very
- 1:13:30Speaker 1: dark and very like unhinged and very angry. It's a
- 1:13:35Speaker 1: great character. It's like girl you and more should have
- 1:13:39Speaker 1: just hooked up and Orkard Gomez lovingly because he would
- 1:13:44Speaker 1: have loved it.
- 1:13:45Speaker 3: And yes, the thing could be there, you know whatever.
- 1:13:48Speaker 4: I like that they don't try to like I don't know, well,
- 1:13:51Speaker 4: they do justify her actions quote unquote where they give
- 1:13:54Speaker 4: her like villain origin story, but it's so silly. It's
- 1:13:57Speaker 4: the ballet bou barbie thing where Yeah, I think a
- 1:14:00Speaker 4: lot of times we get I mean I think I
- 1:14:02Speaker 4: complain about this all the time, and especially more recent
- 1:14:04Speaker 4: Disney movies, where the villainous behavior is contextualized through like
- 1:14:10Speaker 4: you know, something that almost feels like it's excusing the behavior.
- 1:14:14Speaker 3: Itself.
- 1:14:14Speaker 4: They're like, well, yeah, as tough childhood. So that's why
- 1:14:18Speaker 4: he killed all those people, you know, like.
- 1:14:20Speaker 3: And that's why they deserve a redemption.
- 1:14:23Speaker 4: Right, right, And Debbie Jelinsky couldn't get less of a
- 1:14:28Speaker 4: redemption arc if she tried. She dies like several times,
- 1:14:34Speaker 4: and that, you know, her villain origin story is ridiculous.
- 1:14:37Speaker 4: It's like she's just like, I think whatever, this representation
- 1:14:41Speaker 4: of someone who is just like absolutely a selfish consumer
- 1:14:45Speaker 4: to her bones, literally her bones, because she's crevated.
- 1:14:51Speaker 1: I also love that Debbie's evilness isn't tied to oh
- 1:14:57Speaker 1: I hate this other woman for being pretty or something,
- 1:15:01Speaker 1: you know, like she doesn't really like. She and Mortitia
- 1:15:05Speaker 1: are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I wouldn't
- 1:15:08Speaker 1: say that, you know, they're at odds as far as
- 1:15:12Speaker 1: you know, oh she's prettier and oh she's got more money,
- 1:15:15Speaker 1: you know, which would have been super boring.
- 1:15:18Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 1:15:19Speaker 1: I love Martitia also is in you know, like I'm
- 1:15:22Speaker 1: not like other girls like and response to it. It's
- 1:15:24Speaker 1: just fucking beneath her and for her killing all of
- 1:15:28Speaker 1: these dudes. I never got like this faux feminist vibe
- 1:15:32Speaker 1: from it, you know, like, especially in the nineties where
- 1:15:34Speaker 1: it's like feminism is man hating and blah blah blah.
- 1:15:37Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, she.
- 1:15:39Speaker 1: Just wants money, which valid don't get married, just get cash.
- 1:15:46Speaker 4: Yeah, she's doing a series of neutral acts. I think
- 1:15:49Speaker 4: she I Yeah, I like jumping off that point. I
- 1:15:53Speaker 4: think if Debbie was the only woman we met in
- 1:15:58Speaker 4: this movie, I would have some issue with it because
- 1:16:00Speaker 4: it's like, if you only get to know one woman
- 1:16:02Speaker 4: and she's extremely selfish and horrible and evil, you know,
- 1:16:07Speaker 4: that's something to talk about. But we get such a
- 1:16:10Speaker 4: range of types of women, especially in the Adams family,
- 1:16:14Speaker 4: like Martitia. Yeah, I love that. Martitia's like, I respect
- 1:16:18Speaker 4: what you're doing, but you look tacky doing it. Wednesday. Uh,
- 1:16:23Speaker 4: I mean you have you even have a range of
- 1:16:27Speaker 4: types of horrible waspy white lady. Debbie Jolinsky and Christine
- 1:16:30Speaker 4: Baranski's character are different flavors of terrible person and I
- 1:16:35Speaker 4: think Christine Baranski's far worse.
- 1:16:38Speaker 3: Yes, and then you've got the Amanda the little rich
- 1:16:41Speaker 3: girl character. Yes, another brand of that.
- 1:16:46Speaker 4: Yeah, there's I guess maybe it's because we were recovering
- 1:16:48Speaker 4: camp Rock too, but I was like, the it's such
- 1:16:51Speaker 4: a it's such a stock character, like the bitchy blonde
- 1:16:55Speaker 4: girl at camp.
- 1:16:57Speaker 1: And she probably wouldn't have been the bad if it
- 1:17:01Speaker 1: wasn't an Adam's Family movie. But what was interesting to
- 1:17:06Speaker 1: me about Amanda's character was like, this is very clearly
- 1:17:10Speaker 1: a child repeating the things that her parents and her
- 1:17:15Speaker 1: teachers were telling her. You know. She like, if you
- 1:17:20Speaker 1: don't know, you don't know, and you only know what
- 1:17:22Speaker 1: the adults around you are telling you or not telling you.
- 1:17:27Speaker 1: And adults weaponize this all the time, you know, because
- 1:17:31Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well, you can't get mad and you
- 1:17:34Speaker 1: can't say anything because it's a child, you know, Like,
- 1:17:37Speaker 1: what are you going to do? Bully a kid for
- 1:17:39Speaker 1: being racist? They don't know any better, and uh have.
- 1:17:43Speaker 4: To fucking talk to them.
- 1:17:45Speaker 1: You have to do better. And they'll run into someone
- 1:17:48Speaker 1: like Wednesday, who will you know, scalp them and burn
- 1:17:51Speaker 1: their village to the ground. We'll walk around and find.
- 1:17:54Speaker 4: Out, Yeah, she will not forget that anytime soon. I
- 1:17:59Speaker 4: do think it's tricky with a character like Wednesday specifically,
- 1:18:02Speaker 4: I it seems like this is this dynamic is adjusted
- 1:18:06Speaker 4: somewhat in the Netflix series so that Wednesday can have
- 1:18:09Speaker 4: a friend I'm pretty sure, not sure, but this iteration
- 1:18:14Speaker 4: of Wednesday, like she's not going to be building a coalition.
- 1:18:19Speaker 4: That's just not what she's gonna do. So, you know,
- 1:18:23Speaker 4: I think the result of that is like you can't there.
- 1:18:25Speaker 4: You probably could have squeezed a little more. And it's
- 1:18:27Speaker 4: not that I wanted to admit a character on screen more,
- 1:18:30Speaker 4: but I feel like you could have gotten a little
- 1:18:33Speaker 4: more nuanced, like you were just describing Ali of like
- 1:18:35Speaker 4: we see that her parents are racist, but there's not
- 1:18:38Speaker 4: an explicit connection of she is parroting what her parents
- 1:18:42Speaker 4: are saying, because she does say like, you know, she's
- 1:18:45Speaker 4: not just racist, she's also very classist. She you know,
- 1:18:49Speaker 4: when they talk about, you know, uncle Fester is marrying
- 1:18:52Speaker 4: the help and I don't know, this movie will choose
- 1:18:57Speaker 4: a one liner over almost anything, so it's not like
- 1:19:00Speaker 4: we're going to get a deep insight into this very
- 1:19:02Speaker 4: toxic dynamic in Adam's family values. And not being said,
- 1:19:07Speaker 4: I do love that exchange between her and Wednesday where
- 1:19:11Speaker 4: Amanda's like, I'll be the victim and Wednesday is like
- 1:19:14Speaker 4: all your life. It's so good.
- 1:19:18Speaker 1: I also love Okay, as soon as Fester comes back,
- 1:19:24Speaker 1: you know, and Gomez is on his deathbed, you know,
- 1:19:27Speaker 1: his heart is broken because he lost his brother, and
- 1:19:30Speaker 1: as soon as Fester comes back, it's just immediate love
- 1:19:33Speaker 1: and support, like we know, you know, it's not. Wednesday
- 1:19:37Speaker 1: has a moment where she's like, you know, you sent
- 1:19:40Speaker 1: us a camp and they made us sing, you know,
- 1:19:43Speaker 1: but she gets over it because that's their their unit,
- 1:19:48Speaker 1: that's their family, and it's just such a nice example
- 1:19:52Speaker 1: of how to care for your family when they come
- 1:19:57Speaker 1: back from a very abusive, toxic relationship up which you
- 1:20:01Speaker 1: know of all families do. To see Adam's family.
- 1:20:05Speaker 3: I love the part right after Fester returns and Gomez
- 1:20:09Speaker 3: is kind of in disbelief about it, and he's just
- 1:20:12Speaker 3: like you are, mister Debbie, and I'm like, mister Debbie. Hilarious.
- 1:20:20Speaker 4: They kind of they match each other's freaking a kind
- 1:20:22Speaker 4: of interesting way. I wasn't not rooting for.
- 1:20:25Speaker 3: Them back to Wednesday really quick, though I would have.
- 1:20:30Speaker 3: I mean to me, it feels like they kind of
- 1:20:32Speaker 3: wedge in an unnecessary hetero love story.
- 1:20:36Speaker 4: There very studio notes.
- 1:20:40Speaker 3: And look I Joel as a character I enjoy very much.
- 1:20:44Speaker 3: And you know, a camp crush that's familiar people can.
- 1:20:48Speaker 4: But it's beneath Wednesday Adams.
- 1:20:51Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I do like that he comes over at
- 1:20:56Speaker 3: the very end of the movie and is now like
- 1:20:58Speaker 3: dressing like and Adams, and he basically gives up his
- 1:21:03Speaker 3: identity for a girl, and I think more men should
- 1:21:06Speaker 3: do that.
- 1:21:07Speaker 1: So and I love how how it ends where she's like,
- 1:21:11Speaker 1: I would scare him to death, you know, I assume
- 1:21:15Speaker 1: he does so does kill him. And I feel like
- 1:21:19Speaker 1: Wednesday is just like Debbie, that's how it's done. You
- 1:21:23Speaker 1: were slappy because they're over her grave as they do.
- 1:21:26Speaker 1: It's good.
- 1:21:28Speaker 4: I also liked with with Joel. It's again it's it's
- 1:21:31Speaker 4: a very like not a harped upon point. But Joel
- 1:21:36Speaker 4: is from a Jewish family, and his family is very
- 1:21:40Speaker 4: racist toward natives, and he clearly, like I think the Joel,
- 1:21:45Speaker 4: we get a little closer to like what you would
- 1:21:47Speaker 4: hope for in a character like Amanda, where his parents
- 1:21:50Speaker 4: are just as racist as hers are, but he is
- 1:21:54Speaker 4: resisting it and you know, actually trying to learn because
- 1:21:58Speaker 4: he reads, because he reads.
- 1:21:59Speaker 3: He's he reads books.
- 1:22:01Speaker 4: Right right, which I mean even you know, hopefully he's
- 1:22:04Speaker 4: just choosing authors and sources carefully.
- 1:22:07Speaker 3: Jul.
- 1:22:09Speaker 4: But but yeah, like I do like that you have
- 1:22:12Speaker 4: an example of this kid who is unquestionably from privilege,
- 1:22:17Speaker 4: but is not just wholesale buying into the bullshit that
- 1:22:21Speaker 4: his parents believe. I think it's a good good character
- 1:22:24Speaker 4: for kids to see.
- 1:22:26Speaker 1: And I like that his explicit jewishness is at the wedding.
- 1:22:32Speaker 1: So it's not, you know, a joke. It's not you know, like,
- 1:22:35Speaker 1: oh the Jewish kid, you know what I mean, Like,
- 1:22:37Speaker 1: it's not offensive, it's like, oh, he just happens to
- 1:22:40Speaker 1: be Jewish. And when he goes to the wedding, he's
- 1:22:42Speaker 1: wearing I think it's called Yamaica. I'm not sure.
- 1:22:45Speaker 3: I'm not kidding he's wearing a Yamica, right, Because a
- 1:22:47Speaker 3: lot of characters will be coded Jewish in movies but
- 1:22:52Speaker 3: not explicitly defined that way. But I think it's safe
- 1:22:55Speaker 3: to say that his Yamaica explicitly identifies him as being
- 1:23:00Speaker 3: a Jewish kid.
- 1:23:02Speaker 4: Which which makes sense with Barry sound and fault. I
- 1:23:05Speaker 4: think that's been a very consistent part of like, you know,
- 1:23:08Speaker 4: he wants to have good representation of young Jewish characters.
- 1:23:12Speaker 3: Right. Shout out to a couple of my favorite lines
- 1:23:16Speaker 3: slash jokes mortitious, saying, I'm just like any modern woman
- 1:23:21Speaker 3: trying to have it all, a loving husband, a family.
- 1:23:24Speaker 3: It's just I wish I had more time to seek
- 1:23:26Speaker 3: out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.
- 1:23:29Speaker 4: That's my one thing with this movie that there's so
- 1:23:34Speaker 4: much amazing, there's so many great storylines. I just I'm like,
- 1:23:37Speaker 4: not enough more Titia for me.
- 1:23:40Speaker 3: I need.
- 1:23:40Speaker 4: That's like the one thing that we're One of the
- 1:23:43Speaker 4: only things that the first movie has the edge over
- 1:23:45Speaker 4: the second movie, and is Gomez and Martitia are art
- 1:23:49Speaker 4: around for the majority of the action, and which I
- 1:23:53Speaker 4: don't know if that was like an availability thing or
- 1:23:56Speaker 4: whatever it may be, But I mean, I just always
- 1:23:59Speaker 4: want to see Raul.
- 1:24:00Speaker 3: Julia's health was failing during the shooting of this movie.
- 1:24:06Speaker 4: Oh wait, this is his last film, right, the.
- 1:24:08Speaker 3: Last one that he shot. And then something else came
- 1:24:10Speaker 3: out after he had passed Street Fighter.
- 1:24:13Speaker 4: Yes, wow, Karen, but very nineties, Yes, Okay, that that
- 1:24:19Speaker 4: does make sense.
- 1:24:20Speaker 3: It could have been that, and maybe they needed to
- 1:24:22Speaker 3: make changes to the script to accommodate his health. We're
- 1:24:25Speaker 3: not totally sure, but he was missed.
- 1:24:28Speaker 4: I also didn't realize that because the grandmother character is
- 1:24:31Speaker 4: under so much makeup that it's Carol Kane in this one.
- 1:24:36Speaker 4: I didn't didn't know that was her in there. Always
- 1:24:39Speaker 4: happy to see Carol Kane.
- 1:24:42Speaker 3: Indeed, one of my other favorite jokes is Gomez saying
- 1:24:47Speaker 3: to Fester. After Fester is saying how oh he would
- 1:24:50Speaker 3: like to one day get married and have children, Gomez says,
- 1:24:54Speaker 3: I hope you someday know the indescribable joy of having
- 1:24:57Speaker 3: children and paying someone else to raise them. Hilarious, incredible.
- 1:25:03Speaker 1: Do you know? Like this movie was so ahead of
- 1:25:05Speaker 1: its time anyways, But the fact that Pubert, you know,
- 1:25:09Speaker 1: when he is possessed in his blonde and looks like
- 1:25:15Speaker 1: the grandma, is like, he could become a lawyer and
- 1:25:19Speaker 1: he's not in this house. He could be the president.
- 1:25:23Speaker 1: I was like, you know what, that is legitimately terrifying
- 1:25:26Speaker 1: now because there are lawyers who voted for Trump and
- 1:25:30Speaker 1: Trump became president, and I would definitely be concerned as
- 1:25:34Speaker 1: well for my child.
- 1:25:36Speaker 3: Oh yes, I do.
- 1:25:37Speaker 4: I love that.
- 1:25:38Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:25:38Speaker 4: Their whole thing, like I feel like it hasn't really
- 1:25:41Speaker 4: been done effectively since, but does the ideas of like
- 1:25:45Speaker 4: them being the least American family in terms of like
- 1:25:50Speaker 4: ascribing to these like white supremacist American values and yet
- 1:25:55Speaker 4: really thriving all at all times. It's very cool.
- 1:25:59Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like, when you think about it, it's
- 1:26:01Speaker 1: like gom as a Morticia. Not only do they just
- 1:26:05Speaker 1: love each other like fiercely, like they are very romantic,
- 1:26:10Speaker 1: very sexual, very you know, like on each other's level,
- 1:26:14Speaker 1: but they also respect each other. They co parent together.
- 1:26:17Speaker 1: It's not like, you know, oh, I'm cleaning up after
- 1:26:20Speaker 1: my useless husband while he you know, weaponizes his incompetence.
- 1:26:26Speaker 1: You know. It's, uh, it's very interesting, it's very wholesome.
- 1:26:30Speaker 1: I also love how they're just so secure in their
- 1:26:34Speaker 1: sexuality so much, like they know they're the hottest people
- 1:26:38Speaker 1: in the room and the hottest people to each other.
- 1:26:41Speaker 3: It's awesome.
- 1:26:42Speaker 1: It's it's great goals.
- 1:26:44Speaker 3: Yeah, I was just gonna say, hashtag relationship goals. And yeah,
- 1:26:48Speaker 3: I think we talk about that in quite a bit
- 1:26:51Speaker 3: of depth in our first episode, so if listeners want
- 1:26:54Speaker 3: to go back and check that out, we wax poetic
- 1:26:59Speaker 3: about it. The last thing I wanted to say was
- 1:27:05Speaker 3: Wednesday talking about Gary's play, right after she's initially been
- 1:27:10Speaker 3: cast in it, and she's like, I don't want to
- 1:27:12Speaker 3: be in this and she says, your work is puerile
- 1:27:15Speaker 3: and under dramatized. You lack any sense of structure, character
- 1:27:19Speaker 3: or the Aristotelian unities. And it's like us describing most
- 1:27:24Speaker 3: movies they cover on the.
- 1:27:26Speaker 4: Podcast Wednesday Adams come on the show, Christina, please, Yeah,
- 1:27:35Speaker 4: I think that that's all I had. But that was
- 1:27:37Speaker 4: a lot. I mean this, this movie gives a lot
- 1:27:40Speaker 4: to chew on or however you say that correctly, a
- 1:27:43Speaker 4: lot of gristle to.
- 1:27:45Speaker 3: That was the word I was chew on. It's another
- 1:27:47Speaker 3: weird word.
- 1:27:49Speaker 1: Some one did say that Fester and Debbie is like
- 1:27:51Speaker 1: Trump and Millennia, but I disagree completely, because Fester adores
- 1:27:55Speaker 1: Debbie and Trump doesn't adore anybody except himself and his money.
- 1:28:00Speaker 3: That's true.
- 1:28:02Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like, guys, why you got a drag Fester? Yeah, no,
- 1:28:05Speaker 1: it doesn't deserve that Festers.
- 1:28:08Speaker 3: He's had it hard enough. It feels almost subversive to
- 1:28:10Speaker 3: me that he's this like love sick, like longing for companionship,
- 1:28:16Speaker 3: and he wants to be married so much, and he's
- 1:28:20Speaker 3: like he submits to the first woman that shows any
- 1:28:23Speaker 3: interest in him. He's you know, he's like a very
- 1:28:28Speaker 3: just love sick man.
- 1:28:29Speaker 4: I mean, it.
- 1:28:30Speaker 3: Feels like to see more of that.
- 1:28:31Speaker 4: It feels like they're they like he or Debbie keeps
- 1:28:34Speaker 4: waiting for him to feel emasculated, right, and he just doesn't.
- 1:28:38Speaker 1: He just doesn't.
- 1:28:40Speaker 3: It's not a.
- 1:28:41Speaker 4: Part of his makeup. And I'm like, great, I don't know.
- 1:28:44Speaker 4: It's he was looking for a woman to throw a
- 1:28:48Speaker 4: toaster in his bats up and she found him. Yeah,
- 1:28:52Speaker 4: rip Debbie.
- 1:28:55Speaker 1: Oh daddy. My mom took personal offense that her name
- 1:29:00Speaker 1: was Debbie, just because of how Fester would be like,
- 1:29:03Speaker 1: oh Debbie. She's like, stop.
- 1:29:06Speaker 3: It wait, is that your mom's name?
- 1:29:09Speaker 1: My mom's name was Debbie. I take personal but her
- 1:29:13Speaker 1: name is Debbie, just because how dare oh poor mama.
- 1:29:20Speaker 3: Does anyone have anything else they'd like to talk about?
- 1:29:23Speaker 3: I don't know.
- 1:29:24Speaker 1: I like how this movie was as good as it
- 1:29:27Speaker 1: was for the run time that it had. It doesn't
- 1:29:30Speaker 1: feel like it dragged on for too long, except for
- 1:29:33Speaker 1: you know, Fester's O face that dragged on a bit
- 1:29:36Speaker 1: too long. But I just watched it this morning with
- 1:29:40Speaker 1: my family and we laughed our asses off.
- 1:29:42Speaker 3: So it's like a cool ninety four minutes or something
- 1:29:46Speaker 3: like that. I love it. We should go back to
- 1:29:48Speaker 3: those I know, so I'm always saying the movie does
- 1:29:53Speaker 3: pass the Bechdel test where Wednesday and Amanda insult each other,
- 1:30:04Speaker 3: Wednesday and Debbie.
- 1:30:06Speaker 4: All of the Debbie confrontation that Mortitia and Debbie. There's
- 1:30:10Speaker 4: at least one exchange in there that.
- 1:30:12Speaker 3: Yeah, Martitia and her mom. I think either mostly talk
- 1:30:16Speaker 3: about the baby who's a boy or Gomez, but maybe
- 1:30:21Speaker 3: there's a couple quick exchanges. Either way, the movie passes.
- 1:30:24Speaker 1: She curses Debbie.
- 1:30:26Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that passes. A woman curses, another one cursing Debbie.
- 1:30:33Speaker 3: So yeah, lots of passes. Lots of combinations are nipple scale, though,
- 1:30:38Speaker 3: where we rate the movie zero to five nipples based
- 1:30:42Speaker 3: on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens, I'll give it.
- 1:30:49Speaker 3: I think like a three, maybe even as much as
- 1:30:53Speaker 3: a three and a half. And maybe that's too generous,
- 1:30:57Speaker 3: but considering this is a mainst stream studio movie in
- 1:31:03Speaker 3: the early nineties that has a full monologue where a
- 1:31:09Speaker 3: character acknowledges land theft and displacement and poverty and class
- 1:31:17Speaker 3: disparity between white colonizers and Native people, and that is
- 1:31:23Speaker 3: followed by a scene of said colonizers burning like their
- 1:31:32Speaker 3: village burning to the ground, and you know, the main
- 1:31:36Speaker 3: pilgrim lady being tied up at the stake about to
- 1:31:41Speaker 3: be burned. All that like, it's very cathartic. As we've discussed,
- 1:31:45Speaker 3: It's not handled perfectly. There are you know, things that
- 1:31:50Speaker 3: could have been done a little bit differently, but again
- 1:31:53Speaker 3: for the early nineties, it feels pretty groundbreaking for a
- 1:31:58Speaker 3: movie to have done that. So and I just you know,
- 1:32:02Speaker 3: I love this family. I love the characters who are
- 1:32:04Speaker 3: girls and women in this family. They get most of
- 1:32:08Speaker 3: the best jokes and laugh lines. I love it when
- 1:32:12Speaker 3: women are allowed to be funny and allowed to have
- 1:32:15Speaker 3: jokes because so few movies and so a few comedy
- 1:32:18Speaker 3: movies let women say the funny things. But most of
- 1:32:23Speaker 3: the best jokes are either Mortitia or Wednesday. Mabby is
- 1:32:28Speaker 3: pretty funny too, and Debbie's funny too. Yeah, it's great
- 1:32:35Speaker 3: every performance. No one does a bad job.
- 1:32:38Speaker 4: No one does a bad job in this movie.
- 1:32:39Speaker 3: So yeah, three, I'm gonna three and a half and
- 1:32:43Speaker 3: I'll give one to Wednesday, one to more Titia, one
- 1:32:46Speaker 3: to Debbie. She did nothing wrong, right, maybe Ibbie, And
- 1:32:51Speaker 3: I'll give my half nipple to all to the kitten
- 1:32:56Speaker 3: maybe got buried alive at the beginning rip. I know,
- 1:32:59Speaker 3: I think it escaped. That's my head canon.
- 1:33:02Speaker 4: I think I'll make sure at three point five. With
- 1:33:04Speaker 4: the understanding that we've talked about a bit, and as
- 1:33:07Speaker 4: you talk about in your video, ALLI like that my
- 1:33:11Speaker 4: enjoyment of the movie.
- 1:33:12Speaker 3: Does you know.
- 1:33:13Speaker 4: I would never argue against a Native viewer who was like, no,
- 1:33:17Speaker 4: fuck it, it's still doing a lot of the same
- 1:33:19Speaker 4: reductive tropes that we see in movies over and over.
- 1:33:22Speaker 4: But I agree with the Caitlin that this movie is
- 1:33:25Speaker 4: doing this, particularly for its time, something that not only
- 1:33:29Speaker 4: were other family directed media not attempting, but in short
- 1:33:34Speaker 4: order would be doing the exact opposite with Pocahontas. And
- 1:33:39Speaker 4: so the fact that this came out a year and
- 1:33:41Speaker 4: a half before Pocahontas, I think is actually it is
- 1:33:45Speaker 4: really really worth remembering how these movies are in conversation
- 1:33:49Speaker 4: with one another, even though there are shortcomings that this
- 1:33:53Speaker 4: movie has and that it is still ultimately centered on whiteness. Yeah,
- 1:33:59Speaker 4: I mean, we've talked about most of it. But I
- 1:34:01Speaker 4: think that this this movie and this like series in general,
- 1:34:03Speaker 4: it just is like an endless amount of opportunities to
- 1:34:07Speaker 4: push back on popular white supremacist American narratives, and I
- 1:34:11Speaker 4: think this movie is the best example of them really
- 1:34:14Speaker 4: swinging for the fences with it. So I'm gonna go
- 1:34:17Speaker 4: three and a half nipples, and I'm giving them all
- 1:34:19Speaker 4: to the very son Enfeld episode.
- 1:34:24Speaker 3: Well, speaking of rip RIP.
- 1:34:29Speaker 1: I am giving it four because I loved it. I
- 1:34:34Speaker 1: really loved it, just because of how cathartic it was,
- 1:34:37Speaker 1: you know, and how it still like holds up now,
- 1:34:41Speaker 1: and especially because like it could be made today, but
- 1:34:45Speaker 1: then it would be canceled for being woke or something
- 1:34:47Speaker 1: equally ridiculous and be like God that was so forced,
- 1:34:51Speaker 1: or Wednesday gave that speech you know today, right, but
- 1:34:56Speaker 1: still they would be wrong today anyway. So I would
- 1:35:01Speaker 1: give my nipples to Mortitia and to Debbie that who
- 1:35:07Speaker 1: else can have them? Who else? A thing?
- 1:35:12Speaker 3: Why not?
- 1:35:13Speaker 1: But he has to watch his name first after got No.
- 1:35:21Speaker 4: Really, the of this movie is just doing so much,
- 1:35:27Speaker 4: like so much? Why why all the incest implications with
- 1:35:32Speaker 4: with the mom right?
- 1:35:33Speaker 3: Is thing related to them?
- 1:35:35Speaker 1: I hope not?
- 1:35:36Speaker 3: I hope not.
- 1:35:37Speaker 4: I guess I was talking about the mom thing? Why
- 1:35:39Speaker 4: the mom thing? But why is that there? Why is
- 1:35:43Speaker 4: that there? I don't know. Also shout out okay, I
- 1:35:46Speaker 4: I couldn't tell if the movie. I think the movie
- 1:35:49Speaker 4: was poking fun at him a little bit, But I
- 1:35:53Speaker 4: liked that Fester was not ashamed or embarrassed or felt
- 1:35:58Speaker 4: any which way about saying that he hadn't had sex before.
- 1:36:02Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:36:02Speaker 4: I liked that. I thought that was a cool moment,
- 1:36:06Speaker 4: and especially because the contrasted, like the joke of the
- 1:36:10Speaker 4: scene is that she is lying about being a virgin,
- 1:36:14Speaker 4: because that is something that is valued, especially in white womanhood,
- 1:36:19Speaker 4: is you know, purity, blah blah blah and that. But
- 1:36:21Speaker 4: it's gross. It's like emasculating if men, you know what
- 1:36:25Speaker 4: I'm talking about. But he was like, oh, I'm a
- 1:36:27Speaker 4: virgin too, awesome. I was like, I love you love.
- 1:36:30Speaker 3: I feel like the movie doesn't really cast judgment on
- 1:36:33Speaker 3: him for that. Yeah, but I don't know. I was like,
- 1:36:36Speaker 3: probably the.
- 1:36:37Speaker 4: Nineteen ninety three I'm sure that that is supposed to
- 1:36:39Speaker 4: be a laugh live but it just really endeared me
- 1:36:42Speaker 4: to him. And it just is another way that the
- 1:36:44Speaker 4: Adams family kind of consistently eschewes these gender norms.
- 1:36:51Speaker 3: Well, there you have it. That's our Adams Family Valuees episode. Allie,
- 1:36:56Speaker 3: thank you so much for joining us. Where can people
- 1:37:00Speaker 3: bull check out your work? Tell us what you'd like
- 1:37:04Speaker 3: to plug?
- 1:37:05Speaker 1: Okay, so you can visit me on YouTube. That's where
- 1:37:08Speaker 1: you'll get like my quality stuff. If you want to
- 1:37:11Speaker 1: see my less quality stuff but still entertaining. I guess
- 1:37:14Speaker 1: I'm on TikTok. I still run the Ali Nati Test
- 1:37:20Speaker 1: on Tumblr, but it's the Aila Dash the Dash Aila
- 1:37:24Speaker 1: Dash Test on Tumblr. I also run another blog that's
- 1:37:31Speaker 1: not as fun, but I still try to make it pretty,
- 1:37:34Speaker 1: you know, like relevant or important. It's called the your
- 1:37:37Speaker 1: fave is Anti Native and that one is about It's
- 1:37:42Speaker 1: kind of in the vein of your favorite problematic, except
- 1:37:45Speaker 1: it focuses specifically on public figures, so actors or politicians
- 1:37:52Speaker 1: or world leaders or whoever with like a big public
- 1:37:56Speaker 1: influential presence how they have been anti Indigenous with their racism,
- 1:38:03Speaker 1: either in the past or currently. So it doesn't like
- 1:38:06Speaker 1: just tackle any like rando on the Internet. It's specifically like,
- 1:38:11Speaker 1: this is who this person is, this is how you
- 1:38:13Speaker 1: know who they are, and this is what they've said,
- 1:38:17Speaker 1: you know, And it's less about you know call out
- 1:38:20Speaker 1: culture and more about how normalized anti indigenous racism is
- 1:38:28Speaker 1: like across a scale, you know, like if our politicians
- 1:38:32Speaker 1: and our movie stars and stuff can get away with
- 1:38:35Speaker 1: saying it, I mean, of course the people, the rando's
- 1:38:38Speaker 1: and the comments are going to feel comfortable saying it,
- 1:38:41Speaker 1: you know. So there's a lot of people on there,
- 1:38:44Speaker 1: but more creatively, I mean, like my YouTube is the
- 1:38:48Speaker 1: place to go for some more fun. And I have
- 1:38:53Speaker 1: a project that's coming up soon that should be done
- 1:38:57Speaker 1: sometime this week. It was supposed to be do on
- 1:38:59Speaker 1: Memorial Day, but me and deadlines since it's not my job.
- 1:39:03Speaker 1: So take your time and thank you so much for
- 1:39:06Speaker 1: inviting me. I always love coming on. And this is
- 1:39:09Speaker 1: number four now.
- 1:39:10Speaker 4: Right, yeah, five timer jacket on the way, the jacket
- 1:39:14Speaker 4: we makeup.
- 1:39:15Speaker 1: I'm so happy you guys aren't sake of me.
- 1:39:17Speaker 4: I love you, We love you. Oh my gosh, thank you,
- 1:39:20Speaker 4: thank you for coming back.
- 1:39:21Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you Megwitch. I did want to say though,
- 1:39:26Speaker 1: I wanted to really thank both of you because of
- 1:39:30Speaker 1: the search the landfill hashtag that we talked about in
- 1:39:36Speaker 1: the Avatar episode, because they found them. Like I try
- 1:39:41Speaker 1: to keep you guys in the updated every time new
- 1:39:44Speaker 1: information came up, but they found them, and so I
- 1:39:50Speaker 1: you know, obviously a lot of people did a lot
- 1:39:51Speaker 1: of work, but I think that though talking about it
- 1:39:56Speaker 1: on the Beckel Cast probably put it on people's radar,
- 1:40:00Speaker 1: otherwise wouldn't have. So I think every little bit helps,
- 1:40:04Speaker 1: And I just wanted to thank you guys for doing that, so.
- 1:40:07Speaker 4: Literally the least we could do. Thank you, Thank you
- 1:40:10Speaker 4: so much for consistently bringing important stories here.
- 1:40:13Speaker 1: Let's do the same for Jonathan Johns and give him
- 1:40:15Speaker 1: some justice.
- 1:40:16Speaker 4: Justice for Jonathan. I still yeah, I literally just checked
- 1:40:20Speaker 4: to be like, has anyone else from Parks and Rex
- 1:40:23Speaker 4: said anything not at the time of this recording.
- 1:40:26Speaker 1: Yeah, so fix that.
- 1:40:29Speaker 4: Fucking fix it. Yeah, And with that, let's go, yell,
- 1:40:34Speaker 4: let's go shake our fist at Debbie's grave.
- 1:40:39Speaker 3: By bye bye. The Bechdel Cast is a production of iHeartMedia,
- 1:40:47Speaker 3: hosted by Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftus, produced by Sophie Lichterman,
- 1:40:51Speaker 3: edited by Mola Board. Our theme song was composed by
- 1:40:54Speaker 3: Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Voss Krasinski. Our logo
- 1:40:58Speaker 3: and merch is designed by Jamie Loftus and a special
- 1:41:02Speaker 3: thanks to Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about the podcast,
- 1:41:06Speaker 3: please visit link Tree Slash Bechtelcast