She-Devil (1989)

Matt (00:00:21):

Hello and welcome to the 1-Week Rental Podcast, a movie podcast where we spend the week with a movie and we take you along on our journey. My name is Matt Stokes. I am a film snob, trying to be a reformed film snob, not so obnoxious about the film snobbery.

Laci (00:00:35):

And I’m Laci Roth. I am his wife and a nostalgia-holic trying to broaden my horizons and be more smart.

Matt (00:00:45):

Yeah, more smarter.

Laci (00:00:46):

More smart when movies.

Matt (00:00:47):

Each week we dive deep into a different movie, watching it multiple times, researching it, reading interviews with the people who made it. We really put in the time with the movie.

Laci (00:00:55):

We discuss what works, what doesn’t work. We come up with some theories of our own and we do some irresponsible psychoanalysis about the people who made the movie and some of the characters in it.

Matt (00:01:05):

If you’re listening to the podcast or watching it on YouTube, we assume you don’t mind the movie being spoiled. We spoil every movie that we talk about, including She Devil. And just as a reminder, we’re grateful for every single movie we cover. We could never make a movie, even if we have some critiques of a movie or if we’re not in love with a movie that you love, we’re just doing it because we love talking about movies. I really like She Devil. I’m not in love with She Devil, but She Devil was a lot of fun and I’m sure for a lot of people it’s a huge movie including for Laci. So She Devil, Laci, I mean, how many times had you seen it before spending the week with it this time?

Laci (00:01:39):

There’s very few movies I’ve seen more than 10 times. So this is on the high end for me, probably seven or eight.

Matt (00:01:44):

Wow, okay. I don’t think I had ever even heard of it.

Laci (00:01:47):

Right. I know you haven’t. I’ve brought it up several times and you’re like in out. You’re like, that’s not a deleted.

Matt (00:01:54):

So yeah, until it’s spinning this week with She Devil, I had never seen a second of Roseanne Barr on screen except for her very brief cameo alongside Tom Arnold in Freddie’s Dead, The Final Nightmare that would be Nightmare on Elm Street six. That was not enough for me to judge her prowess as an actress. After watching She Devil, still not totally sure. I do like her and I like this movie and she has a very appealing energy, but we’re going to get into, when we discuss the movie itself, how well we think she works, especially when she’s acting against Meryl Streep and Ed Begley Jr. And Linda Hunt.That’s an impossible task, but how well does she handle it? We’re going to talk all about that. And so now we’re going to get into the history of She Devil in our history so much.

Laci (00:02:37):

Oh, sorry. I thought she’d like some Dylan.

Matt (00:03:04):

She Devil is this movie starring Roseanne Barr. Americans probably are like, “Yeah, it’s the Roseanne movie.” And Meryl Streep’s in it too, and that’s crazy. In researching the movie to spin, remember, we’re one week expert, so we really put in the time we cram for the final exam over the course of six days. Not

Laci (00:03:21):

Trying to make you feel inadequate listeners.

Matt (00:03:24):

So I then find out this movie, this silly movie is based on a very important feminist novel, satirical Black comedy novel by a British author named Fay Weldon, who herself is a very important feminist scholar, writer, philosopher, screenwriter, playwright, just a very important figure in what was called second wave feminism. And she wrote more than 30 novels. She often featured protagonists who were overweight and plain. In 1983, she publishes the novel, The Life and Loves of a She Devil. Now I wish I had had time to read this novel. It sounds really interesting. These are the differences I charted just from reading summaries. So in the novel, the character, the she devil character, Ruth, sends her kids to live with Mary, the Meryl Streep character and Bob, the Ed Bigley character after Bob leaves her for Mary. And then Ruth herself begins a string of unfulfilling sexual relationships, then orchestrates the financial crimes that get her ex- husband sent to prison.

(00:04:28):

But in a significant difference, she ends up with the money herself and she uses this to further reinvent her life and further cause the ruination of her enemies. So apparently she keeps changing her name and her appearance. She keeps getting plastic surgery to look more and more like Ruth the-

Laci (00:04:46):

No, to get more and more like Mary Fisher.

Matt (00:04:49):

To look more and more like Mary Fisher. Why these names? I’m struggling with these names.

Laci (00:04:53):

Right. She focuses her hatred more on Mary it seems.

Matt (00:04:57):

Yes. And then another significant difference is Mary, while Bob, who in the novel is called Bobo, while Bobo goes to prison, Mary stands by his side, continues to love him, spends her fortune on his defense and then develops severe depression and cancer and dies while he is in prison. Meanwhile, Ruth becomes to look more and more like Mary, buys her old house, hires her old household staff and just assumes her old life. And that sounds like a lot of fun, the movie.

Laci (00:05:25):

And that makes sense why she’s called a She Devil, that is a bit more deranged than what the actual movie ends up being.

Matt (00:05:32):

Yeah. The movie seems to forget like, “Oh wait, she devil shit.” Yes.

Laci (00:05:36):

Go back to the devil part.

Matt (00:05:37):

Throw up some flames over her eyes. Oh,

Laci (00:05:39):

There we go. The devil in this guy.

Matt (00:05:41):

Because the whole conceit is like, I call a woman, it’s like calling a woman a bitch and she’s like, “I’ll show you a bitch.” And then I’m really going to embody the stereotypes you have about me.

Laci (00:05:50):

You know I reject the idea of good and evil. So you’re going to have to really fucking convince me if you’re going to call yourself a she devil. I think it’s just a fun … It’s fun. Yeah,

Matt (00:06:01):

She’s just having fun. She’s mixing things up.

Laci (00:06:04):

It’s a very 80s title. The fonts all, it works for me.

Matt (00:06:07):

The book seems like it’s really embracing that she’s actually evil.

Laci (00:06:12):

Right. They’re like psychotically wrong where everything that Roseanne’s character does in the movie seems almost reasonable. I mean, you could defend most of it.

Matt (00:06:22):

Oh, and part of it is the performance is Meryl Strape, who is delightful and hilarious, but some actual sympathy you develop for her as the movie goes along.

Laci (00:06:31):

Yes. I like that she has an arc.

Matt (00:06:33):

And if I have a critique of the movie, I think it maybe doesn’t follow that through enough or doesn’t explore that enough. I’d like to see a little more with her and the kids. Yes,

Laci (00:06:41):

Because she actually does … I mean, it affects her life so much that she puts a book out about it. You don’t have a really good sense of how much time has gone by either, so that would help as well. But she almost seems to start to care about the kids, not in any kind of heartwarming way, but there is a connection, a relationship. She doesn’t want the young teenage girl grinding on the man. I mean, I don’t know. I always thought she kind of developed something with the kids and that doesn’t really get-

Matt (00:07:14):

You can see it a little bit there. It’s the hinter of there and I’d like to see that explored. There’s a source of conflict. It’s not like I want to be a mother, but I do starting to feel like an attachment to these demented little devil children who are totally rotten and I hate them. That’s kind of interesting. I’m saying she hates them.

Laci (00:07:31):

Got

Matt (00:07:32):

It. Faye Weldon writes this novel in the 80s responding to currents in life, responds to misogyny she was experiencing in the professional world and misogyny she grew up with and the mother staying at home all of that. Full disclosure, I’m not a scholar of a feminism. What? I don’t totally understand the differences between all the different waves. I know second wave and third wave are quite different and what often happens is second wave feminism feminists came to resent. Third wave feminists.

Laci (00:08:02):

And that’s how you get a turf.

Matt (00:08:03):

Sometimes that’s how you get a turf.

Laci (00:08:05):

I was thinking that you might.

Matt (00:08:06):

Pin in that, folks. In 2017, Fay Weldon said in an interview with the garden, she said, “You could see the terrible doom and depression in the early 80s when women were supposed to be happy with what they had but they weren’t. The she devil was noticing all this and was a size and a shape that was unfashionable. One became very aware that everything was about the prettiest women and still is. In fact, it’s more so now because there are cameras everywhere. Feminism was a successful revolution, but after a revolution, you lose a generation. We’re having an upheaval with women going out of work and with women going out to work and children going to nurseries. Mothers try to be friends and not parents, but children need boundaries. But children need boundaries. So it’s kind of a free fall. Child rearing has changed and is producing another kind of person.” Yeah.

(00:08:52):

I mean, this is a thing you see happening with aging scholars, philosophers resenting the next generation for maybe believing things a different way or-

Laci (00:09:02):

You could even say aging comedians who

Matt (00:09:04):

Comedians,

Laci (00:09:06):

Comedy rosens who might also be feeling tossed out and sped up. No left behind. I’ve sped up. I’m the next generation, Roseanne.

Matt (00:09:20):

When you are working toward equality in the workplace and when the vanguard of the movement is people in professional class settings, like I want the board of my company to be more gender equitable, you’re kind of only talking to a specific kind of woman and-

Laci (00:09:39):

The most palatable of women or the most impressive. You leaving out regular women.

Matt (00:09:45):

Yeah,

(00:09:45):

You’re leaving out most women. Most women. And you are talking about a thing that you can watch other 80s movies and movies that we’ve discussed on the show like Baby Boom that conclude success in this world is empty. It doesn’t make you actually feel better. It might be equitable that women and men can achieve success in the professional class, but it’s not like it makes either of them better off or better people. And I think that is definitely a tension you see within generations of feminism. We were trying to achieve equality in the workplace and then the next generation says, “Who cares about the workplace?” Or, “I reject the idea that the workplace is the place where I need to define my identity.”

Laci (00:10:21):

And you can see how easily that could happen with a mother so focused on earning her place in a workplace that she kills herself does twice as much as her male counterparts comes home unfulfilled and cranky and tired. And so to you, you’re like, “Well, you’re a crap mom because of this or you’re achieving there and leaving me out here.” And so it just makes sense the ebbs and flows of what’s popular.

Matt (00:10:49):

As the economic situation for most people in the world just deteriorates and it requires if you have the two parent home, it requires both parents to be working and working more and more and more for less and less. Of course, that’s going to affect children and that’s not feminism’s fault. You’re misdiagnosing the thing that is causing all of this.

Laci (00:11:07):

Right. I can give you a hinted rhymes with smapitalism.

Matt (00:11:12):

1986, the BBC produced a miniseries adaptation of the life and loves of a she devil, which was very acclaimed and apparently reading interviews with Fay Weldon from the past 10 years. By British authors, there was of course the classic miniseries and then the less said about the Roseanne movie, the better. But in 2017, she published a sequel to Life and Loves of a She Devil called Death of a She Devil, which dealt with transgender women.

Laci (00:11:39):

Oh, great. Was she nice? Okay.

Matt (00:11:44):

Okay. Again- A they

Laci (00:11:46):

Devil.

Matt (00:11:47):

Don’t know enough about feminism to know what constitutes a turf, a trans exclusive radical feminist, but she did say a lot of garbage stuff. Here’s some stuff she said. In 2016, she said to the Sunday Times, “Well, she said women now lived easier lives than men and the only way men have a fighting back against the natural superiority of women is by becoming women themselves.” She said, “Women today act like victims.” Feminism was necessary in the 1970s because men were so awful. By the end of the 1980s, they had realized what was going on and to their credit changed, but women didn’t change and went on being victims. She claimed men worked harder than women. “Men invent things. If this was an all women society, we wouldn’t have television. We’d have a lot of nice cushions.

Laci (00:12:34):

“Wow. You’re the best of us, Fay. So glad you have our backs.

Matt (00:12:39):

She said to the BC in 2017, “There are a lot of sort of transgender people for whom this is a really serious business, but there’s also a sort of undertow of frivolous people who for the sake of fashion or the clothes or whatever, want to be the other gender.” You’re seeing this more and more. Oh, I’m always seeing these people who are like, “I’ll just change my gender so that I can wear a dress.” That’d be nice. Just

Laci (00:12:59):

A complete misunderstanding of the reality of being the thing that she’s talking about and the reasons for doing it.

Matt (00:13:08):

But don’t worry, Laci, she went on to say, “I’m not offending transgender people. ” Oh, good. “Or thinking there’s anything wrong with that. The women who want to be men have a really hard time for them, I think. ” Now she was very old at the time. I’ve not read her work. I know that she was subversive and transgressive.

Laci (00:13:24):

So she’s just continuing in that?

Matt (00:13:26):

I don’t know. None of this looks good. There seems to be a thing with the aging British feminists like Ms. Rolling where they seem to reject the trans people or resent the trans people. I guess to her credit, unlike JK Rowling, she was not marshaling her forces to literally be an activist to make the world worse for trans people, but it is just interesting to know all of this and then to go back and look at, well, the movie that was based on her work, but a movie that was so rooted in the gender politics of the ’80s. Yes. Dude, direct the movie, they hired Susan Seidlman. Susan Seidlman, director, best known movie was Desperately Seeking Susan in 1985, co-starring. Well, Rosanna Arquett’s the lead of that movie, co-starring Madonna in her first on- screen role. Had you ever seen Desperately Seeking Susan Laci?

Laci (00:14:16):

Yes, and I very much loved Madonna. This wasn’t one of my movies though. It probably felt too cool, a little bit too older. It’s just a little bit out of my range, but I just always love Madonna’s music and of course, league of their own.

Matt (00:14:30):

And I think I had always heard, that’s the good Madonna performance because they always … Madonna’s a terrible actress.

Laci (00:14:34):

Madonna is fun and captivating and alluring and always has phases. There’s so many phases. She’s like Cher.

Matt (00:14:39):

I watched the movie last night. I’d never seen it. Very good movie. A great movie, honestly. It’s very good. And Madonna is good. It’s interesting. There’s tons of through lines between she devil and desperately seeking Susan, about a woman being unhappy and sort of finding reinvention and kind of embracing a fantasy life. But it’s interesting that she’s working in both movies with a kind of non-actor with Roseanne and She Devil, Madonna in Susan. And in I think Desperately Seeking Susan, they put Madonna in a position to succeed with the kind of character she’s playing. Yeah,

Laci (00:15:15):

Look cool. Done.

Matt (00:15:17):

And just kind of be cool. Just exude I am a cool sort of otherworldly presence.

Laci (00:15:22):

Right, right, right.

Matt (00:15:24):

And I don’t know that Roseanne is as successful in her assignment. But yeah, check out that movie. I kind of would like to cover that movie.

Laci (00:15:35):

Yeah. But the handicap that you have here is not seeing where … The levels Roseanne turns it up to. She’s almost always at an 11. So what’s really good about her performance and she double is that she was able to do such a subdued performance and like be just the butt of the joke and become like this kind of classic sort of soft spoke. She’s so anti-Rosanne while still being about Roseanne’s principles. It was important to her that she do projects that had the same politics that she did and always her projects had to do with making a statement about classism.

Matt (00:16:13):

I didn’t grow up with Roseanne the show, but I knew it was a show about the working class when television in the ’80s and ’90s that was disappearing and it is gone. It is invisible today. It doesn’t exist. We do not show working class people anymore and she’s super right-winger now and I don’t agree with her there, but I think it is super important, the idea that we need to show working class people.

Laci (00:16:38):

And regular looking people and have weird people in movies, man. Hooper would not be … If this were recast, who knows who would have the Hooper role? It’s

Matt (00:16:47):

Just- It’d be Zach Efron.

Laci (00:16:51):

As

Matt (00:16:51):

A woman? I’m a male nurse. Isn’t that crazy? That’s weird, right? The nurse. Did that just

Laci (00:16:56):

Happen? The nurse is right behind me, isn’t she?

Matt (00:16:58):

Yeah, exactly. Susan Seilman hired to direct the movie. She’s coming off the success of Desperately Seeking Susan. She will go on to direct the pilot of Sex inThis City and is very important director with that show.

Laci (00:17:10):

Is it also important that she have only S’s in the titles of the things that she does?

Matt (00:17:14):

Just

Laci (00:17:14):

Wondering. I

Matt (00:17:15):

Think she’s always looking for that. She writes a general S. And her

Laci (00:17:16):

Name is S.S.

Matt (00:17:19):

At the top of her projects. Desperately Seeking Susan directed by a Susan. That’s interesting. She didn’t write any of these movies though, but what I notice in the two movies is a great eye for production design, a great eye for putting you, situating you in a time and a place, the way that brands and images intrude into your life. Susan, desperate seeking Susan is very much like a, let’s look at sort of the arty bohemian scene in Manhattan. And she devil’s like, “Let’s look at hoity-toity Hamptons mansions and sort of cookie cutter suburban homes, and I think she

Laci (00:17:55):

Does a great job with them.” Not just cookie cutter, but shittily made the false facade promise of just the all American life and even the grocery store scene is so, it’s so small and shit. You feel like you’re in a piggly wiggly here.You’re like, “Yep, that’s how a grocery store feels.” Yeah,

Matt (00:18:13):

I could smell it. I know what that place smells like, but just like the mansion in the Hamptons is just as flimsy. It’s just as much a facade and just as tacky.

Laci (00:18:21):

Yes. The grand rooms that I remember being in this place, there’s only like one and outside is big and well manicured, but there’s nothing. There’s a lawn. I kept noticing in this last viewing how much is done by drapery and literally the job of drapes is to cover something up and it’s like this pink chiffon is everywhere, but that’s the cheapest thing you could put up somewhere. Everything’s meant to look romantic and it’s like, yeah, but cheap and it can’t last.

Matt (00:18:57):

Here’s what Seidelman said about that. Here’s a memoir called Desperately Seeking Something, a memoir about movies, Mothers and Material Girls. “As in desperately seeking Susan, we wanted to create two visually distinct worlds, one for each main character. Ruth’s suburban home was messy, chaotic, filled with children and pets and decorated in a hodgepodge of patterns, stripes, plaids, prints, wood grain paneling, brown orange and mustard yellow earth tones. Mary Fisher’s world was pink, lipstick pink, ballet slipper pink, Barbie dreamhouse pink, the color most associated with femininity. “Just one of the nice touches you get from a woman director is thinking about things like this. The

Laci (00:19:34):

Patterned wall in Roseanne’s house I’m obsessed with. It almost doesn’t make sense. It looks expensive for how textured it is. It looks like it’s padded. If you watch the movie again, it’s insane. It looks so lived in the house on the inside where the house on the outside and all the houses around it looked like they were just popped up a year or two before, but the inside’s so rich. They almost felt like they were recreating the interior of Roseanne the sitcom show, which also has the best kitchen table, the best living room, the best Afghans.

Matt (00:20:09):

Maybe she knows where people go mess just accumulates and you can see it’s starting to happen in the big pick mansion. It’s just there’s so much space to spread it out, but wherever those kids are, they are littering and just creating garbage.

Laci (00:20:21):

Wherever responsibility is, is mess is things you can’t get around to. Anyone can look glamorous and have an amazing life when they have two servants but they live alone all their time can go into their writing projects and looking the way that they do.

Matt (00:20:38):

Right. Having money usually defeats having a messy house, but what she doesn’t understand is, ” I just need to hire more people. “She never does that.

Laci (00:20:46):

Or the right people, because they’re right. She hired a person to attend to her sexual needs and a maid that could handle one- One person and one job. Grown up woman. She laughed, so now you hire someone anticipating the workload.

Matt (00:20:59):

In Siloman’s memoir, she says that it’s not a very dishy memoir. She doesn’t talk about how any difficulties or anything. She said that it was a good experience. Meryl Streep was the height of professionalism, but she didn’t spend much time interacting with everybody when filming had stopped. She went off into her trailer to spend time with Roy, her hair and makeup artist who has been with her for 50 years, her Garcia in other words. But Roseanne, she said, liked to hang out on set. “She enjoyed a live audience and had little hesitation sharing the intimate details of her personal life with everyone, whether it was about her morning bathroom habits or sexual excapades of the night before with her new bow, Tom Arnold, a then unknown comedian she would marry the following year in divorce four years later.

Laci (00:21:43):

Something else I’ve just always … She’s so accessible. You can just tell her standup routine was about her life and it all made sense. It all sounded true. The stuff that they talk about in Roseanne is like, ” Yep. “It’s just also not glamorous. She just seemed unbothered and untouched by her fame until she wasn’t.

Matt (00:22:03):

Contrast her with popular comedians at the time like Jerry Seinfeld, whose whole thing is like, you don’t know a thing about him. It is all artifice up on stage.

Laci (00:22:13):

Right. Rosanne is just raw and almost like an inability to filter. She is the raw goods.

Matt (00:22:21):

Seidelman says,” It was clear that Roseanne operated without a filter. Over the years, her outspokenness would be both a blessing, the source of her best comedy material, and also a curse resulting in her abrupt fall from grace after a racist late night tweet in 2018 about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett.

Laci (00:22:36):

“Also in my history section. So stay in your lane,

Matt (00:22:39):

Matt. Goes on to say,” It was a different experience working with each actress. Roseanne thought like a comedian in terms of jokes and punchlines, but she was now playing a dramatic role. Ruth Patchett was a victim of emotional abuse. Her character was not funny. Over the course of the story, she would need to evolve from a powerless underdog to a powerful manipulator. My job was to make sure there was a believable emotional arc and that Roseanne’s performance felt honest and I believe it did.

Laci (00:23:02):

Yeah. Putting her … I mean, because it does a lot of work just for Ed Bagley’s character to proclaim, “You’re a bad mother,” but that’s just in a string of insults he’s hurling at her, but that one hurts because she’s in a bad marriage, so she’s detached from these two kids. These two kids are obviously going through something too. They’re at an interesting age. Their dad is clearly up to some shit. So it’s blamed on her, but it’s really, I mean, it’s both of their faults, but when you just say it and then for such an odd thing for a movie to do is a mom lovingly drop off her kids at the dad’s house and say goodbye and know she needs to have her growth alone. It’s like you immediately go, “She is a bad mom,” but she’s not. But they never try to prove that she isn’t.

(00:23:50):

She just is a normal mom and you just never see that in movies of like, “The mom left the kids.

Matt (00:23:56):

What?” One of the best things about the movie is I think it’s very fleet afoot and so it can have her, it is a little detached. The directorial voice is kind of detached. So you see her dropping off her kids like, “Nope, I don’t live with my … You take them, I’m gone. Goodbye. See you I don’t know when.” And the movie’s always almost kind of like, “Well, don’t worry about it. ” But will then come back and show this actually did affect her having to leave

Laci (00:24:23):

Her kids. Well, and the only thing she takes with her when she goes to blow up the house is the picture of her and her kids and she still has affection for Bob as well. But what really sells her arc is that she then she goes to an old folk’s home and of course she could be like, “Oh, this is some sinister fucking shit. What kind of horrors is she going to do as a caregiver of the elderly?” And she changes their lives. You don’t have to do too many scenes to understand what she’s doing, but she gets to go be a caregiver on her own terms and do something that’s really rewarding. And it was all just a means to an end, but she ends up, that’s where you see that she’s like a good person. I mean, you feel sorry for her and then through that phase of the movie, you’re like, “Okay, she’s good.

(00:25:15):

She’s good.” In my head, I remember her being not good here. I don’t know why.

Matt (00:25:19):

And the through line with the nursing home is so good because Ed Begley’s off living his cool life in Manhattan being a cool accountant and going to glamorous parties and like my marriage, my home, I don’t want to even think about that. I’ll come home when I have to and these people in the old folks home at the Golden Twilight are all the parents of like rich, like 40 year olds who are like, “I don’t want to think about my parents anymore. Just drug them up and keep them tranquilized all day and we’ll never have to think about them again.” But as we see, because Roseanne just switches out their meds, there’s nothing wrong with any of them. If you don’t tranquilize them, they will all go have fun and play soccer together.

Laci (00:25:56):

Which is a nice position of the way that housewives were treated in the 50s or how they treated themselves. What did doctors do? They just gave them things to tranquilize themselves because like you’re not going to get out of your reality. You’re in a power situation where you don’t have any and if you want to be taken care of at all and have a roof over your head, you’re going to accept the one that you got.

Matt (00:26:13):

Even the lady, Mrs. Trumper, who runs the nursing home acknowledges, oh, they’d rather be in a living sleep than have to live with the reality that their kids don’t want them anymore.

Laci (00:26:22):

Right. And it goes to show you what kind of level of elderly … Is it barely elderly? And now that I’m closer to that age, I’m like, really how old are these people? They’re like 61. This doesn’t make any sense. Right. Because her biggest rule and there’s no second chances is they can’t wet the bed. I’m sorry. That is the majority of what happens once you’re old enough to go into a home.

Matt (00:26:43):

These are people in their 50s. You’re right.

Laci (00:26:45):

Right. This is not computing. These are people going to live that fucking Matthew … Damn it, the two people from Pretty In Pink. They’re trying to go be yuppies. From the time you’re 30 till you’re 45, you really got to be grinding on Wall Street. That’s when you send the parents away, I guess. Who are you thinking of? Matthew McCarthy. Andrew

Matt (00:27:09):

McCarthy. Andrew

Laci (00:27:10):

McCaid.

Matt (00:27:10):

Okay. There we go. Sideman in her memoir talks about how Streep could have played either of these roles, but it’s interesting. She had not played in a comedy yet. I don’t know if that’s true, but she was not … She’s the most acclaimed dramatic actor of her generation.

Laci (00:27:24):

And then Death Becomes Her, is that 94?

Matt (00:27:27):

That’s

Laci (00:27:28):

92. Okay. So not long after.

Matt (00:27:30):

Yeah. And so many through lines between this and-

Laci (00:27:33):

Oh, yes.

Matt (00:27:34):

But she was basically taking these two actresses and they’re playing roles that were uncomfortable for each of them, Streep doing the comedy role, Barr doing the drama role.

Laci (00:27:44):

God, and Meryl Streep is amazing. There are so many things that I quote that I didn’t even realize were from this. Well, and just whole line reads that just they live in my brain. And she’s a good physical comedian. Good physical comedian,

Matt (00:27:59):

Yes.

Laci (00:27:59):

You don’t expect her to be dainty and a light touch because she’s got that very affected voice, but she can fucking breeze through a room when she needs to.

Matt (00:28:10):

Seidleman says, “You don’t really direct Meryl Streep. She knows exactly where her performance needs to go in every scene. So I found myself directing around Meryl, making sure all the other characters and elements needed to support her performance were working.” I’d make suggestions to dial her performance up a notch or tune it back down, but mostly I focused on the blocking and kept track of the storyline in its various twists and turns since, as is often the case, we were shooting the film totally out of sequence. “Interesting. Very refreshing to hear a director say that about an actor is like, ” Yeah, my job’s to get out of the way.

Laci (00:28:39):

“And can you imagine this movie done with a male director? It wouldn’t have gotten the gold. You wouldn’t have the trust.

Matt (00:28:48):

Yeah. I mean, she might know that … I mean, yeah, a woman director might be more predisposed to know sometimes the job is to just let them just set them up to succeed and work around the edges. But yeah, certainly there’s a billion stories of male directors with massive egos who control every element of the performance. But yeah, Meryl Streep at this point, the line on her … So I mean, she’d already won two Oscars for Sophie’s Choice and Kramer versus Kramer, but there’s kind of a critical backlash building up around her. She’s synonymous with just prestige Oscar baity stuff out of Africa. She has the evil angel of the move, The Dengue Aite My Bibby movie. That’s

Laci (00:29:26):

What that is?

Matt (00:29:26):

Yeah. And she had never done comedy. Also was never a big box office star.

Laci (00:29:32):

Right. These are all high brow, artsy, boring, long movies.

Matt (00:29:36):

I think Out of Africa was a big hit, but this was back when the best picture winner always becomes a big hit. Out of Africa might be the most … If you want to say, what is the most Oscar movie of all time? It’s out of Africa. Movie no one likes, does not have a single lingering cultural element and won 15 Oscars because it’s like, ” Well, it’s a nice pretty movie starring a lady who goes to Africa and learns that there are African people there. “

Laci (00:30:00):

Black and white.

Matt (00:30:00):

In the years ahead … Well, so she does She Devil, which is not a hit, but she gets a Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a musical or comedy. And in the years ahead, she do comedies like Postcards From the Edge Defending Your Life and Death Becomes Her. And then in the 2000s, this is when she actually becomes a movie star with movies like Devil Wears Prada and Mama Mia. And suddenly it’s not unusual to see her in a comedy that people

Laci (00:30:24):

Like to see. Well, the old ones that I love, all of them. It’s complicated.

Matt (00:30:28):

Yep. What else?

Laci (00:30:30):

As good as it gets.

Matt (00:30:31):

Nope. That’s Helen Hunt, my- You got

Laci (00:30:33):

To be kidding me. That’s what

Matt (00:30:36):

She said. Something’s got to get. That’s it. That’s not her either.

Laci (00:30:39):

Jamie, that’s fucking Diane Keaton.

Matt (00:30:41):

Yeah.

Laci (00:30:42):

Is she in more than one?

Matt (00:30:43):

She’s only in one Nancy movie. I know it feels like she should be in a lot. It is.

Laci (00:30:46):

It does. But then you don’t get all my other ladies and I need all those in my Nancy movies too. Diane Keaton being my homegirl for life.

Matt (00:30:54):

Laci’s going to tell me about Roseanne now. I

Laci (00:30:56):

Got to tell you.

Matt (00:30:57):

About Roseanne Barr, the person.

Laci (00:30:59):

So she’s interesting, but this is just a high level quick … Read her. She’s got three fucking books. I’ll bet they’re all good. Okay. So he parents are Jewish, but it’s the kind of situation where parents are hiding their Jewishness from the neighbors. She grew up in Utah, so Mormonism is the thing. So they went to the church of Latter-day Saints as well. What? But yes, but because of her mom’s mom whose mother was killed in the Holocaust, she very much is important to her that the Jewish tradition goes on. So because her mom feels the pressure from her own mother, Roseanne’s grandmother, they still do practice Judaism as well. And so what she says in her autobiography, Roseanne My Life as a woman, she said that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning, I was a Jew. Sunday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon, we were Mormon.

Matt (00:32:00):

I mean, whoa, that classic combo.

Laci (00:32:03):

This is just an aside. She says that she’s on the spectrum.

Matt (00:32:06):

The autism spectrum.

Laci (00:32:07):

That one, that’s the one. So the low filter, that’s where that shit comes in handy. When she was 16, she was hit by a car and the hood ornament actually went into her pierced her head giving her a traumatic brain injury and it so radically changed her behavior that she was institutionalized for eight months. Jesus Christ. At the Utah State Hospital. Shortly after that, she moved out at the age of 18 and told her parents that she was going to be away for two weeks in Colorado with a friend and she just never came home. About a year after that, she had a baby and put her up for adoption, but 17 years later, they reunited amicably.

Matt (00:32:47):

It’s interesting that in the movie and she devil Meryl Streep’s character had a baby who was put up for adoption.

Laci (00:32:52):

While in Colorado, that’s where she started her standup, but that’s not like a hotbed for a standup and she was getting good reactions. So she goes to the comedy store in Los Angeles. From there, she’s able to do the Tonight Show in 1985, which led to a comedy special with Rodney Dangerfield and then a Letterman appearance in 1986, which then got her enough credit to get an HBO special called The Roseanne Barr Show, which she won an American Comedy Award for Funniest Female

Matt (00:33:23):

And TV

Laci (00:33:23):

Special. She has a darling just shoot up. Well,

Matt (00:33:28):

This is the golden age where that can happen. You get on one of these late night shows and get on one of the others and that’s that. And TV is such a big business that the network’s so like- Easy

Laci (00:33:36):

To fuck it up. Keep getting good. She was just so different from everyone else. But

Matt (00:33:43):

So much money going around the like, how can we build a sitcom around you?

Laci (00:33:47):

Oh yeah, right. It was like before reality TV. So everything was, how can we make a sitcom out of this instead of a reality show out of this? Which is crazy. She’s offered the role for Peggy Bundy for Married with Children, which I cannot even imagine that show that way, but she turned that down and she just kind of honed in on her comedy routine and kept doing comedy, standup comedy. And that’s where she came up with this domestic goddess phrase, just picking on how low glamour it is to be a stay at home mom or mom at all. And from the success of her act, that’s how she got her ABC show Roseanne. And so they hired Matt Williams to be the writer and he was the writer for the Cosby Show. So this was meant to be a no frills depiction of an American family and it had a huge premier, 21.4 million people households tuned in.

(00:34:48):

People love the show. But when the credits rolled and she saw Williams as the created by credit, she was fucking pissed because she’s like, “What this whole thing is around my life. It’s based on my three kids.” She didn’t understand that there’s like contracts and

Matt (00:35:04):

It’s

Laci (00:35:04):

Not determined by him. It’s determined by the writer’s guild.

Matt (00:35:07):

Well, that’s all. You got to set all that up ahead of time, but the created by credit, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Laci (00:35:14):

Well,

Matt (00:35:14):

She didn’t

Laci (00:35:15):

Get

Matt (00:35:15):

It. The Simpsons credits are very specific, created by Matt Graining and then another card comes up saying developed by Matt Grating, James L. Brooks and Sam Simon. And plenty of people behind the scenes are like, there are so many people more responsible for the Simpsons than just Matt Graining. But it’s like smart business people are like, “No, my name is the created by.”

Laci (00:35:35):

Thank you, Matt. No, no actual thank you. So the first season’s going amazing, but she wants more creative control. She does not like necessarily the writing that Williams is producing for her and she refuses to say some of the lines that he writes for her and one of them she refused and was so pissed she walked off the set and so she tells them it’s him or me and after episode 13 they do let him go and she hires Amy Sherman Palladino, who is the Gilmore Girls writer and then Joss Whedon, Buffy Angel Firefly for both of their first writing jobs.

Matt (00:36:16):

So we have heard to blame. Great.

Laci (00:36:18):

We what?

Matt (00:36:19):

We have heard blame for Josh Whedon for ruining the culture. Gilmore Girls, I hear nothing but good things.

Laci (00:36:25):

Oh, okay. All right People like whatever, Buffy, hello.

Matt (00:36:28):

Can I ask you a question about the show?

Laci (00:36:30):

Yeah.

Matt (00:36:31):

So I again, never saw the show. Is it a case like with the show Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld is not an actor so they surround him with real professional talented actors. Is that the case with Roseanne? Because I see John Goodman is like one of the greatest actors of all time. He’s her co-star. When you watch the show, can you tell that she’s like not a-

Laci (00:36:50):

There are moments. There are moments, but she saves it with like her big laugh, her big personality, her big voice. I mean, she’s the glue, but he’s the ground. And then of course Jackie, the sister, paid back Carrie Metcalf.

Matt (00:37:03):

Lori Meckman.

Laci (00:37:04):

Lori Mecca.

Matt (00:37:05):

Who’s in desperately seeking Susan.

Laci (00:37:06):

She’s amazing. Her and John Goodman do the crying. When there’s like really dramatic moments in my memory, it’s them that end up doing them. I don’t remember her ever having a crying scene, but there’s definitely a lot of fights, but they’re kind of funny. She’s just got a lot of … She’s a ball of energy and she’s very raw and real.

Matt (00:37:29):

But maybe a case like with Zeinfeld where it’s you’re playing yourself.

Laci (00:37:32):

And that’s why I think it’s so natural. I don’t ever remember her crying, but I mean, this is the ’90s when the show … I guess I watched it rewinds too, but anyway, but there were definitely moments where you’re just like, oh, that kind of … And I was a kid and I didn’t even really know her as a standup comedian. I knew her for the show. So I wouldn’t have had any reason to think that she wasn’t just an actress coming in to act. But even me as a kid was like, “You might have missed the mark on that one.” But I love the show anyway. It was the only show that made me not feel bad about myself. It made me feel like my life is normal. Having regular stuff is normal, but you could tell it was the low brow show, so it still didn’t make me feel all that normal because it was like to really like the show Roseanne meant something about you.

Matt (00:38:26):

And she’s overweight and he’s overweight and most Americans are overweight. So they look like real Americans, but TV never wants to acknowledge that. And to whatever extent there’s a feedback loop with people in their real lives and then the images they see on TV, to whatever extent that creates a negative feedback loop. You only get so few things like Rosanta counteract that.

Laci (00:38:45):

And Roseanne in real life has a gay sister and a gay brother. And so it was her idea to introduce gay characters into the show, which there are two or three. There might be four. There’s several. For a small cast, there’s a lot. The show runs for eight seasons. She won a ton of awards, all the prestigious ones that you can get for a sitcom. And she told New York Magazine after the show was over that it was important for a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim to patriarchal consumerism. I just highlighted that because this is the through line with her. She just wants to push back, which is my only guess as to why she would be drawn to Trump, even though he’s all patriarchal consumerism. He at least is like the outsider and I think she always saw herself as the outsider, this I’m armchair psychologizing over here.

(00:39:40):

But it’s kind of hard to keep your

(00:39:45):

Completely true to your roots when in the final two seasons she makes $40 million making her the second highest paid woman in show business second only to Oprah. She had a lot of power. I mean, she was a powerhouse. That show stayed good. It got really fucking weird at the end because they win the lottery and they become millionaires, but they stay in the house. It’s fucking bizarre. Okay. So in 1989, the show ends I think in 97 and it starts in 87 fucking- 88. 88. So it’s only 89 that she writes her first book, Roseanne Life is a woman or something like that and does She Devil. She did both. And Roger Diebert actually praised Roseanne a lot and liked the movie and just basically said that she could have picked anything and could have gone really hacky comedy with it, but she chose to pick something where she had to dial it back.

Matt (00:40:45):

Ebert says, “Bar could have made an easy, predictable and dumb comedy at any point in the last couple of years. Instead, she took her chances with an ambitious project, a real movie. It pays off and that Barr demonstrates that there is a core of reality inside her TV persona, a core of identifiable human feelings like jealousy and pride and they provide a sound foundation for her comic acting.”

Laci (00:41:07):

Yeah. Through portraying how hard life can be for a plain woman, those moments of levity and just picking on somebody or really giving it to somebody. It’s earned. It’s not just fucking making a joke in a fart joke and picking on someone just to do it. It’s like, “Oh, you know what? You laugh that laugh, Roseanne, you earned that. ” Okay. So the show ends in 1997 and I don’t know why it ends. It’s probably just she realized it was smart to … Honestly, the show had gone insane, so that’s probably why. She does a ton of little things. She has a daytime TV show for two years. She does two different reality shows. She’s a judge on a few comedy things. She’s all over the place. But in 2011, she’s trying to get this show called Dowardly Mobile off the Ground. She’s working with 20th century Fox television to do this and then NBC picks it up.

(00:42:11):

They do a pilot and then they put it on the shelves and it just sits there and it never happens. And she said that she feels her progressive politics were the sole reason behind the pilot’s rejection and she was told by network executives that it would be too polarizing. I just think it sounds like such an interesting show. In 2011, it would’ve been unlike anything on.

Matt (00:42:37):

And she’s self-identifying as having progressive politics.

Laci (00:42:41):

It’s interesting. And she’s very active in not very active, but she would attend gay pride parades and stuff. I always asumed she was left-leaning person and she wouldn’t let them use the term blue collar to describe Roseanne because she thought that calling things white collar and blue collar disguised the role of … I can’t

Matt (00:43:09):

Share- Classism?

Laci (00:43:10):

Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t totally know what she means, but I guess you call someone a blue collar collar person, you’re basically saying, “Oh, that’s just because they are a blue collar person.” Why would they get more money? They’re not white collar.

Matt (00:43:25):

With any of these labels, yes. If you don’t think about it too much, you can be like, “Oh, it’s just a description of reality.” But then you think, well, no, what comes along with designating somebody that way? And as I’ve become, I’ve tried to educate myself more in class politics the last few years, tried to understand things like the idea that just because you work a blue collar job doesn’t mean you belong necessarily to the working class and vice versa.

Laci (00:43:51):

Also, why should the role of a plumber be any less valuable than the role of an accountant? They’re both services you cannot live without. I feel like a plumber should get paid more, but one’s blue collar, one’s white collar.

Matt (00:44:05):

Plus there’s also the difference between the plumber who owns the plumbing company and the guy- Who knows

Laci (00:44:09):

That’s right.

Matt (00:44:09):

… who makes $12 an hour and works for him and they belong in an entirely different socioeconomics.

Laci (00:44:14):

So the line seems arbitrary and all it really means is how much money do you make and then your color changes color. So in 2018, it was really exciting because the 10th season of Roseanne was, they were coming back the whole cast and it goes really well and they pick it up for an 11th season and that’s when she fires off the infamous tweet about Valerie Jarrett

Matt (00:44:38):

The … Valerie Jarrett is a black woman who is an advisor to President Obama, definitely a racist tweet that she said.

Laci (00:44:44):

Yeah, you can’t compare a black person to an ape, you just can’t do it. And she does apologize. At first she was defensive, but it doesn’t take her long to … She wishes it had been funnier. It’s supposed to be a joke and if she’d written it more carefully, it would be clear it was a joke. And then she says she’s on sleeping pills now as someone who has stayed up too long after sleeping pills, okay, but the word ape-

Matt (00:45:07):

But I think this had been following years of everybody understanding she posts things on social media that are offensive, that are racist, that are, I don’t know about homophobic, but everybody’s like, “This falls in line with what we understand about Roseanne.” It’s crazy now to think back to this though. The show was so huge in 2018 that it is a huge show on ABC. They didn’t send it to a streaming network. That’s what would happen today. This show was making so much money and Disney fired her and that is crazy. It’s even crazier. They kept the show going. They just called it the Connors. No,

Laci (00:45:39):

They didn’t. Right. But that took a lot of negotiating and they had to rename it and retool it.

Matt (00:45:44):

All of that is crazy. I do not think she would get fired today. They would just be like, “Whatever and keep going. “

Laci (00:45:49):

I mean, I think she should be. I feel like she got what she should have, you shouldn’t just get to say whatever you want on such a giant platform like Twitter without … I don’t know

Matt (00:46:02):

Where she can call herself a progressive in 2011 and then be so into Trump.

Laci (00:46:07):

But then what happens between 2011 and 2018, well, fucking Barack Obama. So it’s like that’s not looking great that you turn from here to there during that period is like, well, it could be because your age is perfect for that transition to have happen or because you’re kind of racist.

Matt (00:46:24):

Even in 2011 to say, “I’m making a show to speak for the working class,” you haven’t been working class in 30 years. Remember that quote from Stephanie Meyer about why people shouldn’t listen to what she has to say about politics. I loved it because it was acknowledging I am so rich that anything I say you shouldn’t believe because my reality has nothing to do with the reality of the person asking the question. So yeah, she doesn’t speak for the working class anymore, but if she does understand it, I think that a comfortable person could say, “How could you go from liking Obama to liking Trump or what could happen under Obama to make you turn rightward?” And you could say the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street and didn’t fulfill any of its promises to rebuild the working class. And it was a betrayal that is still deeply felt.

(00:47:14):

I remember hearing that in the Roseanne revival season, they work Trump into storylines and she’s arguing, I guess with Lori Metcalf about him and she’s like, “How could you vote for that man?” And she says, “That man was the only one talking about jobs.” And to a liberal, you’d say like, “Are you crazy?” Hillary was also talking about jobs, but she does have the understanding that to a certain kind of person, the Democrats talk down to you and Trump for all of his

(00:47:44):

Fakeness seems authentic, seems like he actually comes from your world.

Laci (00:47:48):

Well, and other people are applying the Democratic or Republican label when she’s always been about class and that goes through both parties. When you see what she’s actually supported in the past is like the Green Party and it’s never been not till Trump and that was just I could see her doing that because she thinks it’s like sticking it to-

Matt (00:48:13):

Yeah. So they try every year they’re trying the Republicans are the working class party. The truth is neither is the working class party, but Republicans will embrace cultural things that signal working class. They’re never going to enact any policies that will benefit working class people, but Democrats won’t either.

Laci (00:48:31):

It’s like the only bright spot of anything I’ve heard about her in the last five years or seven is like the story about her being told by RFK the story about the fucking bear and the footage is of him telling her at Mar-a-Lago.

Matt (00:48:51):

Oh, I remember this.

Laci (00:48:52):

And just the whole time she’s looking at him like a normal person would look at a person talking about that fucking story like, “What?” So in my head I’m like, “Oh, so they haven’t stolen all of your soul.” You know that this inbred fricking decades and I mean-

Matt (00:49:13):

Yeah, this aristocratic-

Laci (00:49:15):

Right, right. This fucking so out of touch alien, his story’s weird to you. Good as it should be.

Matt (00:49:22):

Yeah, because she didn’t come up through the prep school world and the hearing like, “Oh yes

Laci (00:49:28):

.” She went from being an outsider to being in a world where she felt like an outsider. I’m sure she’s always felt not exactly fitting in. Who knows? I don’t know. She didn’t tell me that. Okay. So then the next time she pops up in TV is, well, I mean, for realties, is in 2022, 2022 on Fox Nation with her comedy special cancel this and it’s fucking atrocious. I’ve seen two or three commentaries on it and there’s five jokes. They have five jokes leaning comedy isn’t funny because there’s so much you can’t talk about so they just all fucking make jokes about the same goddamn thing.

Matt (00:50:09):

Right leaning comedy can be funny. This ecosystem sets it up to, it could never be funny because it’s all about the fact that you can’t cancel me and I will say the most offensive shit problem. My

Laci (00:50:18):

Pronouns are fuck off neat. Okay.

Matt (00:50:22):

Yeah. None of that is funny.

Laci (00:50:23):

It’s not funny. And then in 2023, The Daily Wire makes their failed animated adult TV show, Mr. Burcham, based on like an Adam Corolla character and starring Adam Corolla, and she’s a voice in that I don’t think it even makes it into one full season.

Matt (00:50:38):

It was canceled after one

Laci (00:50:39):

Season is atrocious.

Matt (00:50:41):

They turned off their entire program of …

Laci (00:50:44):

And just as a slide, she was married three times, five children.

Matt (00:50:48):

Very interesting person. It’s hard to pin her down. It would be easy to say she’s always been a right wing crank or everything she said was good until she sent out a bad tweet. It’s more complicated than that. Is she successful in she devil? It’s very interesting. It’s a very interesting challenge she has and I think there are moments where she really shines and she really embodies the put upon working class mother, but there are other times where I feel like she’s not up to the challenge of what the movie is asking her, but we’ll talk way more about that when we go through the movie, a movie that we both really, really enjoyed.

Laci (00:51:27):

You’re the devil in this

Matt (00:51:33):

Guy. So coming up next, we’re going to go through she devil. All right Like so many movies Laci has us watch, this one starts with a cartoon opening. No complaints here. I love it. It’s a little cartoon negative angel babies. I knew you’d

Laci (00:52:22):

Like it.

Matt (00:52:23):

It’s like, oh, what’s a nice movie about love and flowers and cakes and then a devil, fucking devil, a she devil.

Laci (00:52:31):

I didn’t mean to have so many movies with cartoon openings. They find me.

Matt (00:52:35):

It’s a nice thing about our journey because this podcast is a journey people that’s- If you

Laci (00:52:40):

Didn’t know, pack a snack.

Matt (00:52:43):

We are on a journey with us and we are discovering it’s eat, pray, love, and we’re Julia Roberts. Oh, I like movies where kids ride bicycles. Oh, I like movies with cartoon openings. What’s something I like? Oh, I like Walter Masto.

Laci (00:52:55):

Yo like angry men.

Matt (00:52:57):

Here’s I do Dennis. You

Laci (00:52:58):

Like men that are feeling prossed up by society.

Matt (00:53:02):

To Marvel then I even get anything.

Laci (00:53:05):

It’s a Marvel.

Matt (00:53:07):

So we go into a department store and all these women, ladies do be putting on their perfume and their makeup, don’t they?

Laci (00:53:15):

You can’t stop them.

Matt (00:53:17):

Look

Laci (00:53:18):

Out.

Matt (00:53:18):

And Roseanne, this cow, she doesn’t hold up to the beauty standards of all these other. Yeah.

Laci (00:53:24):

I don’t know that we use … Can you not call her a cow?

Matt (00:53:26):

You can call her a cow because she played one at home on the range and she’s racist. Rosianne, I think she’s attractive. I

Laci (00:53:36):

Think she is too. And I think lots of people, I think that’s a very normal size that she is. Of

Matt (00:53:40):

Course. Sorry, it’s

Laci (00:53:41):

Not about herbs.

Matt (00:53:42):

I’m saying the movie is making you … Yes. Is like presenting her like, look at this. Look at this steer.

Laci (00:53:49):

The mole they give her really does a lot of fricking work because I think she’s, like you said, I think she’s pretty. She’s just normal, pretty.

Matt (00:53:56):

She’s normal, exactly. But the ladies like their makeup and she explains to us, ladies like makeup because we like to look pretty for our men.

Laci (00:54:06):

Is that your Rosanne impression?

Matt (00:54:08):

I don’t know.

Laci (00:54:08):

It’s my dad’s Dan.

Matt (00:54:11):

Some women are born beautiful.

Laci (00:54:13):

I wasn’t challenging you. You go ahead and just do something normal.

Matt (00:54:17):

They make it look easy, but most women have to put a little time and effort into their appearance and then there are those of us who need all the help we can get. Tonight, my husband is taking me to a very fancy affair, so I’m pulling out all the stops to look great.

Laci (00:54:28):

That’s so sad.

Matt (00:54:29):

I did write in my notes, Jesus. Because she calls up her husband. She calls up her husband on a payphone just to say, “Hey, honey, I just called to say I’m so excited about our ignite tonight.”

Laci (00:54:38):

Right. Just so he can try and talk her out of it once again, you can just tell he doesn’t want her to come along, but the only thing that saves him and makes him seem like he’s into this relationship is that he has a nickname for her and it is Hun. I think it’s Hun, but at the end after he says something kind of dismissive, “Okay, Hun,” and I’m like, “Oh, okay, he’s nice.”

Matt (00:55:01):

Hung? That’s all it takes,

Laci (00:55:02):

Huh? I’m just something. Just don’t just call her Ruth the whole time. There’s a balance. He doesn’t seem completely checked out yet.

Matt (00:55:12):

Well, there’s a way in which … He’s a fucking asshole and Ed Begley’s a great asshole in lots of different things. The way he’s a good asshole here is he’s so condescending toward her, but he’s good at making it seem like he’s not.

Laci (00:55:26):

Right. Like he’s taking care of her. His patronizing is actually him treating her like a princess, not like a baby, which the two are the same.

Matt (00:55:33):

You want to come to the party tonight? It’s going to be so boring, huh? You don’t

Laci (00:55:37):

Even want to- Coach intellectuals. That’ll be boring for you idiot.

Matt (00:55:42):

But okay, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, we’ll do it tonight then. Okay, great. Giving her what she wants and that’s so nice of him, isn’t it? I

Laci (00:55:49):

Didn’t know accountants needed to climb the ladder, but I guess everyone does. I guess they all

Matt (00:55:54):

Do. Yeah. It’s a little weird under examined thing. I mean, there’s hints of it. He’s like, “Well, I’m actually moving into artist management and stuff.” So he’s trying to be a social climber. I don’t think your typical tax preparer. I mean, he works in a downtown Manhattan skyscraper, so he probably does have ambitions. Plus his parents, he’s like, “Don’t embarrass me in front of my parents.”s probably because his parents

Laci (00:56:16):

Are important

Matt (00:56:17):

People.

Laci (00:56:17):

He does act like he owes them a debt. It could just be that they funded his business getting off the ground and that maybe he embarrassed himself by getting pregnant earlier than earlier than they would’ve liked their son to. So he married her to be respectful, keep the appearances that seem to be important to the dad.

Matt (00:56:40):

Yeah. If he comes from a very important social family that-

Laci (00:56:42):

I don’t think they’re important. I think they want to be. His desperation, it’s like Donald Trump, right? His dad’s desperation. Although Donald Trump’s dad was more fine with being right where he was, but my parents just barely made it out of lower middle class. So I have to build on this and maybe even they don’t realize how desperate it is for me to do this.

Matt (00:57:10):

So then she’s at the beauty salon. Another thing ladies do be doing is going to the beauty salon, doing that thing with their feet and the faces.

Laci (00:57:18):

A pedicure?

Matt (00:57:19):

Yeah, that’s it. Okay. That’s the one. And on the TV it’s like a … I wrote down commercial, but I realized, no, it’s like a TV movie adaptation of one of Mary Fisher’s novels and it instantly segues into Robin Leach, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Mrs. Barry Fisher, passion, excitement. Wow, she lives in a palace.

Laci (00:57:37):

Mary Fisher lives in a palace by the sea. I sound like her.

Matt (00:57:41):

That’s good. Wow.

Laci (00:57:43):

Thank you.

Matt (00:57:44):

Yeah. Dan. And you also do a really good Meryl Streep, which we’ll find out. We will. So Rosanne is watching this and she’s like, “Oh, I got to pay attention to this, my favorite novelist, living a life that I envy so much.” And the movie has like a, it’s a hunky guy on a beach with a horse and a woman comes up to him and hugs him and then that’s the end. Never

Laci (00:58:05):

Have I wanted that.

Matt (00:58:06):

So Meryl Streep, as Mary Fisher, she starts to explain to Robin Leach, she says passion, excitement. I think it’s important in a long-term relationship and I think that’s what women find in my novels. They find ways to make the men feel important and comfortable.

Laci (00:58:20):

Stop with the voice.

Matt (00:58:22):

To let him know that he is the man.

Laci (00:58:24):

Right. Whoa. Okay.

Matt (00:58:25):

Trad life

Laci (00:58:26):

Coming out.

Matt (00:58:27):

Excuse me. I like this that she falls it up with, so there’s no confusion.

Laci (00:58:30):

Right. It’s some early red pill going on here. Neat.

Matt (00:58:35):

Among other things that Ms. Mary Fisher does is funds her super mother’s lifestyle. So she can convalescence style and we see her walking her mother around a retired home. Well, you’re

Laci (00:58:47):

Super far away shot of them waving from the hill so

Matt (00:58:50):

You

Laci (00:58:50):

Don’t see how drowsy she is.

Matt (00:58:52):

It’s like Citizen Kane. We tell the story via newsreel, but we’re going to get the real truth later. All right, this is the big social function, big social engagement in the city where Mary Fisher also happens to be. And Ed Begley as Bob is trying to hobknob around, but his wife is kind of embarrassing him, kind of like Jack and Wendy Torrent sort of situation. And she runs into Mary Fisher, spills some wine on her and then she’s like, “Oh my God, I’m such a big fan, Mary Fisher, but Mary Fisher is disgusted, but is still trying to be polite about it. ” And then-

Laci (00:59:28):

Just the tiniest politeness. “Bob, Bob, come see who I spilled my wine on. Oh, Ruth, you fucking ox. Go get some seltzer, water and salt.” Seltz water and salt him. I do love a man who knows of the woman’s thing or whatever she

Matt (00:59:44):

Says. She’s very impressed that he knows how to get a stain out.

Laci (00:59:48):

Which is it? Do you want a man that’s a man or a man that’s a woman? I’m now confusion.

Matt (00:59:53):

You want a man that’s so comfortable and is masculine. Here’s what she wants. She wants a man who’s so comfortable and I was asking Lenny that he can say. I I know that seltzer and whatever can get a stain out.

Laci (01:00:03):

Well, she would need a man comfortable in his masculinity because she’s going to be the breadwinner. So you’re already confusing him.

Matt (01:00:09):

And she’s like, “That’s your wife? That’s too bad.” And he’s like, “It’s too late.” Instantly, just whoever he’s talking to, “Yeah, I fucking hate my wife.” What

Laci (01:00:18):

A stain. It’s too late for the stain.

Matt (01:00:21):

Yes, but it’s a double. He is responding to her saying, “That’s your wife. It’s too bad.”

Laci (01:00:26):

All right, fine.

Matt (01:00:27):

So they’re walking around. While Roseanne goes off to fetch the seltzer water and salt, Mal Street and Ed Begley are walking around just getting to know each other and he’s like, “Yes, I’m an accountant.” And she’s like, “Oh, really? I can’t even balance my own checkbook.” And he says, “Doesn’t your accountant do that for you? ” And she says, “I don’t know. Should he? ” And he says, “The good ones do. ” So they’re doing like a romance novel Flirt. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of this, of people just saying the dumbest things, but with this really funny Howard Shore parody of a romance score going on in the background, like, “Please call me Bob only if you promise to call me

Laci (01:01:04):

Mary.” That seems important.

Matt (01:01:06):

And then Roseanne sees them from down below and she clocks. Something’s going on. She’s not a dummy. So they’re just driving for some reason they’re driving Meryl Streep home. She’s sitting in the front of their car.

Laci (01:01:16):

She lives 70 miles away in the Hamptons.

Matt (01:01:18):

Yeah. They live in New Jersey or something. And he’s like, “Yeah, they’re going to drop Roseanne Ruth off first.” And she’s like, “Can’t you even drive me up to the driveway?” He’s like, “Oh, well, doesn’t have to make the U-turn.” She

Laci (01:01:30):

Doesn’t say that. Oh, no. Mary said she’s so used to being treated like this. She doesn’t even ask for it.

Matt (01:01:35):

That’s true.

Laci (01:01:36):

Yeah. It’s Meryl Streep that’s like, “Shouldn’t you drop her out the door?” “Oh, then there’s a U-turn. “And Roseanne’s like, ” Yeah, it’s a U-turn.

Matt (01:01:43):

“And just sadly reaches in her hand through the window and shakes. It was a pleasure meeting you. Meryl Streep’s like, ” Hey, sure, I’m not putting you out. “He’s like, ” No, 75 miles is nothing. “And this neighborhood that they live in is very cookie cutter neighborhood like a poltergeist soundbite. But very

Laci (01:01:59):

Flimsy, right? It looks super cheap.

Matt (01:02:02):

Which all of these suburbs that we’re just springing up are like sim cities, just copy, paste, copy, paste.

Laci (01:02:08):

Some of them look a little bit more, maybe it’s because I’m used to the hurricane standards you have to have here because whenever you go to Houston and you see neighborhoods like this, they do seem flimsy. So I probably am just biased our buildings have to stay put.

Matt (01:02:23):

Mary Fisher is pretty and rich and thin and writes bestselling books about love. Fortunately, I can trust my husband. As she says this in the voiceover, we see her husband going into the beautiful pink mansion, a real mansion that they located in Long Island. It looks like a long one. I’m like a Danish heiress and she has this sexy Latino butler, Garcia, played by A. Martinez. He’s like a character from the cover of a romance novel and Meryl Streep just sees him. He’s like, ” Garcia, you go to bed now. “And then he eyes them suspiciously. So they sit down on the sofa, they drink cognac and then they start kissing. And this is cut with Ruth back in her bed at home eating Dunkin Donuts in bed and reading Mary Fisher’s novels.

Laci (01:03:09):

Being super nervous and looking at the clock and it’s fucking 4:30.

Matt (01:03:14):

Yeah. And then the next morning he’s not home and the kids are totally detached and they’re debating,” You think he’s dead? No, I think he got in a whatever. I think he fucked a lady. I don’t know. I think that the director Susan Seidelman does a good job of creating a sort of serial mom-esque.

Laci (01:03:35):

Yeah, it’s serial mom.

Matt (01:03:37):

A tone where nobody is that seems that invested in their lives. They’re just kind of observing it all. The kids are not that upset by anything that’s happening to them, but they’re still little shits about it.

Laci (01:03:50):

They’re little shits because there’s a certain level of dysfunction they’re always experiencing with a dad who’s a social climber, who has a wife that will be an anchor around his neck if that’s what he really wants to do, especially if he married her for the children. It’s not like they can’t feel that. They’re not stupid. They’re just an underlying film around the whole relationship.

Matt (01:04:11):

He walks in, he’s like, “Hey family, what’s up? Nothing to see here. Oh yeah, I blew out a tire. I had to get a motel and why didn’t you call me? ” I was like, “Well, you wanted me to call at 4:30 and wake up the whole house and dumb and hit you.

Laci (01:04:23):

” Got to be a fucking dick, Bob. Couldn’t you just be like, “Oh my God, I should have. I just didn’t want to wake you. ” There’s a way to be nice, not go, “You stupid slob. You want me to wake up our precious angels?” Mean Bob.

Matt (01:04:37):

Did she ask him if he’s having an affair? Because he says, I wrote down in my notes, he denies it. He says, “Mary, I’m…” Mary.

Laci (01:04:43):

Yeah, this is-

Matt (01:04:44):

Ruth, I’m always honest with you. You’re my best friend.

Laci (01:04:47):

Yeah. Yes. She’s like, “You’re sure there’s nothing going on or she ain’t nuindows or just directly says it. I mean, she knows right away.”

Matt (01:04:55):

Yeah. In the voiceover, she says, “My husband’s having an affair with Mary Fisher, but you know what? He’s just going through a phase and when it’s over, I’ll be here and waiting for him. Mary Fisher, you’re just a fling, a novelty, an infatuation. Bob doesn’t love you. ” And the second after she says this, we see Bob and Mary at a restaurant and he’s like, “I love you. ” So we’re just toggling between these heightened romance scenes and just the shittiest home life imaginable. But she knows she can get them back. The way to make a man back is with a nice home cooked meal as they buy shit at this terrible grocery store.

Laci (01:05:26):

It’s not a terrible grocery store.

Matt (01:05:27):

It’s just a

Laci (01:05:27):

Regular grocery store. I thought they did a good job of making it just looks like a regular piggly wiggly or something.

Matt (01:05:33):

It’s kind of cranky. Yeah. All piggly wigglies in the 80s looked shitty. All grocery stores in the 80s look shitty.

Laci (01:05:37):

This is a high pressure dinner situation. You can tell she always is put out by the parents. The parents are always early. Bob gets all in his head about it and everything needs to be perfect and Ruth started off not being perfect. You just imagine this scenario has never gone well even when it goes well. It’s not something Ruth looks forward to. And a lesser movie would have the dad and the mom being mean to Ruth, but it’s always stood out to me that the mom is compassionate and this one soft … Who knows how sincere it is, but she definitely feels bad for Ruth just in general. Every single thing’s going wrong with the dinner, just the timing. She goes upstairs to weigh herself and she’s in a nightgown and he’s getting out the shower and he’s like, “Don’t start, Ruth. My parents are here.” And she’s like, “Fuck Jesus, Bob.”

Matt (01:06:34):

And she asked him to be home at a certain time so he could help. Instead, he was busy stopping Mary Fisher.

Laci (01:06:39):

Right. So it’s his fucking fault that he’s rushed and she had no help and now she’s trying to get dressed too and he takes it as her coming on to him and don’t start Ruth. Oh, K, I feel so good in my nightgown with you right there, you fucking asshole.

Matt (01:06:56):

Please don’t embarrass me in front of my parents. He’s so concerned. She’s going to embarrass me. He’s just a big giant baby.

Laci (01:07:02):

So nothing’s ready. The things get burnt. Ruth trips on her way to carry stuff. He magically catches it. It’s a terrible night for Ruth. She looks frumpy. She’s clumsy. She’s distracted. She’s not talking at all. And the only thing that she’s apparently good for in this scenario is the food and every single thing is fucked up.

Matt (01:07:24):

Including a gerbil being in the stew.

Laci (01:07:27):

They do find the gerbil.

Matt (01:07:28):

Dead gerbil.

Laci (01:07:29):

And for some reason that’s Ruth’s fault.

Matt (01:07:32):

That’s why it’s funny. Ruth. Really, Ruth.

Laci (01:07:35):

Real funny.

Matt (01:07:36):

I told you never better.

Laci (01:07:38):

In the chowder

Matt (01:07:39):

Trick. But she’s so checked out. She’s like, “I’ll get a strainer. I’ll get a strainer.”

Laci (01:07:43):

Right, right.

Matt (01:07:44):

But you said the mom is sort of compassionate to her. The dad talks about her like she’s not there. He’s like, “Whoa, what’s the matter with this lady?”

Laci (01:07:49):

Yeah, right. The mom seems to have to be the nice presence in the room whenever she’s in that room with the dad. The dad is rubbed off on the sun and you can just tell he’s an un … Look at him. He’s red as fuck. He’s just sitting there about to burst with just ungratefulness. I can’t even explain what the dad … It looks like a cherry that could pop.

Matt (01:08:12):

Since Ruth has pulled the old gerbil in the stew trick, Bob is like, “Oh, I knew I should have never married you. You mom and dad made me marry her because she was pregnant.” And then Ruth’s like, “Why don’t you have your mistress marry fish or cook you dinner? Oh really, Ruth? Come on. ” So we cut to later and now he’s packing his stuff.

Laci (01:08:32):

I was going to see this through Ruth. I really was, but it just took us having this one fight and now I’ve completely changed the way that I feel about matrimony and morals and everything I was going to do. Okay. She was just one fight away from you flipping your asshole and he’s like so pumped. You can tell he’s in that infatuation stage. We’ve all been there and he’s about to flee to this fucking paradise where he feels like he can just go there because he’s the husband. He gets to leave and he’s going to go have at least a handful of nights where that’s the only thing he’s thinking about, not worried about going home. It’s out in the open. He’s about to have all the most awesome gildless sex.

Matt (01:09:14):

Lists his assets to Ruth very helpfully. Here’s what I have, Ruth. A house, a family, a career, and lots of freedom to enjoy the fruits of my labor. My only liability is you, Ruth. You’re a bad mother, a lousy wife and a terrible cook. In fact, have you looked in a mirror lately? I don’t even think you’re a woman. You know what you are? You’re a she devil.

Laci (01:09:35):

Great. Now we know why they named it this. Yeah, that really ties it all together. But just classic fucking male point of view from this time, not at all giving any credit to the fact that because she’s a stay at home mom is what allows him to have all that he has. Fucking shit doesn’t just fall into place. You don’t get to just spend really late nights building your career and the kids get taken care of. You get to be a bachelor if that’s the life you want. You don’t get to be the perfect dad as well.

Matt (01:10:06):

Yeah. And how much agency did she have in the like, “Hey, you got me pregnant.” And he’s like, “Oh, well then I guess we have to get married.” Can

Laci (01:10:13):

She get an abortion? Yeah. Can we do that? Now she’s stuck with you.

Matt (01:10:17):

Ruth is now determined, “Well, I’m going to take some control back. I’m going to ruin Bob and Mary’s life.” She writes down the list of assets that Bob just listed out for her, writes it down on a notepad that says, “Things to remember, number one, his house.”

Laci (01:10:32):

It’s great that how quickly she gives up this, because this house is not her fantasy. It’s his. She’s been living in his this whole time and just the same way he feels like she’s an anchor to him. The anchor to her is this fucking house. As soon as it existed, she was responsible for taking care of it. As soon as the kids existed, now you have to stay in this house and take care of them too. Well, if I don’t have a shelter for them, who am I? What kind of mother would I be? Bouncing around from house to house, hotel to hotel. It’s just better if they have a nice stable mansion. Bob, with you and Mary, you fucking idiot. You didn’t think I’d burn it all to the ground. You were wrong.

Matt (01:11:12):

It’s such a fun idea. I mean, I know it’s simple, but just like, “Hey, what if the wife was like, actually you take him?” Yeah, because I burnt the house down, so you can’t go back then.

Laci (01:11:24):

She has to get rid of the house for society to even accept that she’s doing this. It’s just so smart and it’s probably a fantasy of tons of homemakers who never got any satisfaction out of constantly making sure that the house is clean, the kids are not pieces of shit and the food is cooked. What if I could just blow it up?

Matt (01:11:45):

Yeah. And of course, it is totally possible to live in a house, take care of it. Your husband works or vice versa. Your the wife and the husband stays at home or a same-sex couple or whatever. In fact, it might be the ideal division of it in a better society. We wouldn’t require everyone to have to work all the time. If you know you supported each other and we’re a team and when you got the one who comes home from work, you have a lot of quality time together and you’re also lifting the burden of things. But if you don’t feel that at all, yeah, then the house is just this alpatross, this thing that’s pulling me into the earth.

Laci (01:12:22):

And it’s the only thing that is the reflection of her value. And he just said that it’s his and that he doesn’t value it. In fact, he cares so little about his house, he’s leaving it. So it’s like, well then now I don’t need it. I never wanted it. This is not a representation of my value. So she blows that bitch up.

Matt (01:12:41):

By putting an iron in the dryer, a hairdryer under a pillow, drops lit cigarettes into garbage can. Go to Getty Images and search how to burn down house and just download all this.

Laci (01:12:52):

Spray paint in the microwave, which the microwave just serves as a countdown for when it’s going to blow up. It doesn’t actually make any sense. The microwave not being on anymore actually would make it not as much want to blow up. But yeah,

Matt (01:13:04):

Just

Laci (01:13:05):

Puts a bunch of shit in the washing machine, shuts it, just all kinds of shit you’d want to do to your

Matt (01:13:10):

House. All these symbols of domesticity. And she walks out of the house as it blows up like it’s an action movie. I think it’s pretty charming how kind of

Laci (01:13:20):

Shitty this looks. How green screen. Yeah. But pointedly, she grabs the picture of her family and in that one move plus the way the picture looks, it tells you she is not a bad mom. She’s a selfless person because, well, one, she wants to keep that with her. Number two, the picture is of her blinking and everyone else looking their best. So because the other people looked good or probably because Bob picked that photo because he looked so good, she was like, “Sure.” I mean, our family portrait can have me looking like an idiot. So anyway, they get a lot. It’s like her having a cat. We know a lot with that one moment.

Matt (01:13:55):

I love the detail that now that the house is burning down, the entire neighborhood has shown up and a lot of them are on lounge chairs and drinking beers and stuff watching the house burn and the kids-

Laci (01:14:05):

What a shot. Okay, you and your stills.

Matt (01:14:09):

Stale of Ed Bakeley’s

Laci (01:14:10):

Butt. Crooked ass. But his position

Matt (01:14:13):

Is flying. Get out of here. Your crooked ass.

Laci (01:14:15):

He looks like he’s about to be put into a human cinnaped situation.

Matt (01:14:21):

Roseanne gets into a cab with her kids and they’re like, “Really? Our house is gone. Yeah. You mean all my toys are gone?” Yeah.

Laci (01:14:31):

But that’s such a good thing I didn’t even notice. She’s completely stranded. Bob, you took the only fucking car. Well, I fixed your ass. I know how to take a goddamn cab. You think I’m not mobile? Watch

Matt (01:14:42):

This. You don’t even have a car. Well,

Laci (01:14:43):

Just leave the family. He doesn’t say goodbye to the kids. He doesn’t feel bad. He feels like it’s Ruth’s fault. Figure out how to get to school and the doctor.

Matt (01:14:54):

Well then now that we’re talking about it, I realize the Ed Begley performance has even more dimension because he has to think of himself as a nice guy to accept any of this, even though he’s a piece of shit to be like, “Well, my kids are here. I can’t turn them away now.” Versus the actual guy would be like, “Fuck that. Take them with you. I don’t care. They can go sleep in a hotel. I’m busy.” Right.

Laci (01:15:18):

He had the cover of they’re with their mother in their home. It’s for the best. Me and Ruth, we can’t get along, but you don’t want to take the kids out of the place where you’re most comfortable with their mother and it’s like, “Ha ha, bitch, those things don’t exist anymore. Now what are you going to say? What better than to live in a beautiful mansion with their loving father?” You

Matt (01:15:38):

Have to do this. I has no choice, but yeah, I’m a good guy, so okay, fine. They can come live with me. Right. Yeah. And the kids’ ties to the house are just like, “But that’s where my tapes were.” All it is just accumulation of shit that we’ve collected over the years. They arrive at the mansion, Garcia the Butler lets them in Mary and Bobo are having a fuck fest in a part of the pool that’s covered in suds and surrounded by candles.

Laci (01:16:11):

It is the hot tub.

Matt (01:16:11):

It’s not part of

Laci (01:16:12):

The pool. It’s just next to it.

Matt (01:16:14):

I thought it was like a corner of the pool that was roped off with a shower curtain.

Laci (01:16:19):

Everything is flowy and shitty and a facade, so I can understand why. But no. And also, I don’t think you’re allowed to put bubbles like this in a hot tub. You would ruin the pH, but whatever. Mary, do what you

Matt (01:16:31):

Want. That’s Garcia’s problem. No. He just

Laci (01:16:34):

Likes to float in. I don’t think he’s the pool boy. He’s just the fuck boy. I don’t think he has any actual skills.

Matt (01:16:40):

And he resents this new man moving in here, so he’s always like- Yeah, I’ll lead you over to the fuck palace. Right. So Roseanne’s like, “Andy, Nicolette, this is your new home.” And Meryl Streep’s like, “Oh, someone get this strange woman out of here.” But no, she kisses her kids goodbye, starts to walk out. The kids, they’re only like, “Oh, this place is awesome. Is there satellite here? Is there a home box office that I can watch the fights on?

Laci (01:17:05):

” I

Matt (01:17:05):

Love

Laci (01:17:06):

The home box office.

Matt (01:17:07):

And Ed Bagley chases her out into the front yard with a towel and she says like, “The house is gone, Bo. So they live with you now. All right, bye. Okay, bye.” It’s like the end of our podcast. Okay, I love you goodbye.

Laci (01:17:19):

It’s just like that.

Matt (01:17:21):

So now Ruth is going to create a new identity.

Laci (01:17:25):

I feel like she doesn’t have much of a plan, but she has this one idea and luckily it just leads to a bunch of other things falling into place. She knows that she needs to further fuck up the household over there at Mary’s. And I guess she has an inkling that they’re grown children. So even if it’s an inconvenience, they could figure their way around that and that might make them closer. So fuck that. We need to go get the dirt on Mary and we need to get her mom back in the picture because there’s a reason why she’s had her mom sedated for 10 years so that she wouldn’t talk to the press. I mean, I’m sure her rise happened in that 10 years because you see as soon as her mom opens her mouth and starts just talking, she

Matt (01:18:06):

Just says- They have to silence

Laci (01:18:07):

Her. Okay. Yeah. Right. She says what’s real about Mary and that’s not the vision of her life that Mary’s trying to sell. I think it’s okay to be a slut, but that’s not what Mary’s going for.

Matt (01:18:16):

See, yes. Everybody’s just playing a role. This is all just artifice. Fuck. What was I just watching where I thought is it breaking bad? We’re going through breaking bad. I mean, Breaking Bad starts with Walter White getting the cancer diagnosis and that leads him to this is the end. I can totally burn down what I thought I was and become something new. It’s not like I planned this, but you said Ruth doesn’t have a plan, but she burns her life down and then suddenly has this total freedom. I can do anything I want now. I can be whoever I want to be. But I was just watching something where there is a … I think everybody has the fantasy of like, even if I love my life, if I suddenly got to live somebody else’s life-

Laci (01:18:55):

No,

Matt (01:18:56):

I never want to

Laci (01:18:56):

Live someone else’s, but to live a different … I wouldn’t want to inhabit someone else’s life.

Matt (01:19:01):

Not a specific person, but if I just woke up tomorrow and suddenly it was like, “Oh, I work on an oil rig.” I don’t know, kind of fun.

Laci (01:19:09):

Okay.

Matt (01:19:10):

She’s going to forge a new identity. She knows from Bob’s records that Ruth’s mother, because Bob started managing Ruth’s finances, that Ruth’s- No, Mary’s finances. God damn it. Okay. I’m just going to say actresses.

Laci (01:19:22):

Man, this is the one time I’m good at the names.

Matt (01:19:25):

Roseanne knows that because her husband is managing Meryl Streep’s finances, that Meryl Streep keeps her mother at a very bougie, expensive retirement community for personal home. She also knows it

Laci (01:19:35):

From the lifestyle styles of Rich and Famous that she was just watching.

Matt (01:19:38):

So okay, that’s where I’m going to go. I’m going to get a new identity and just start working at this home. So she starts working for a woman who runs this home. Her name is Ms. Trumper and Ms. Trumper is like this home … Okay, first rule, no bedwetting. Any bedwetters, you have to report them to me. Bedwetters have no place in the golden Twilight home.

Laci (01:20:00):

Well, you see, it’s not a senior living community. It is a rest home. It is literally a place where people who can control their bladder and bowels have enough money to come here and be sedated for whatever fucking reason. I don’t know that a place like this exists. I mean, I feel like this is something that- It has to exist. I feel like this is something that’s more likely for people who have mental illness and their families don’t want to deal with it, but it shows the con. By having the rule, you cannot pee your bed even one time busted. Busted, you’re not actually a place for the elderly. This doesn’t make sense.

Matt (01:20:40):

She explains, we keep them sedated and tranquilized all day, but they actually like that. They actually like that. They don’t want to think about how sad it is that their kids don’t want to visit them. We meet Nurse Hooper played by Oscar winner, Linda Hunt, a very stern and serious woman, but me thinks Roseanne might melt her shell a litle bit.

Laci (01:20:58):

Shell melt.

Matt (01:21:00):

We see them give all the pills to all the old people. These old people, they’re no longer productive economic engines, so they need to be stowed away where we don’t have to hear from them anymore. But Roseanne takes care to see Ms. Fisher, Meryl Streep’s mom. It’s like, “Hi, Mrs. Fisher. You look very pretty today.” And we see Mary Fisher’s, Mrs. Fisher’s eyes kind of dark toward her like, “Huh? Okay. Someone said something to me. ” And so Ruth gets up in the middle of the night and just swaps all the tranquilizer pills for vitamins and instantly it cuts to a fucking … It’s like a beer commercial. All the old folks are playing soccer.

Laci (01:21:34):

And they’re having fun. All I can think about is how many hips are going to get broken as a lawsuit waiting to happen. But yeah, you think that Ruth’s going to be up to mischief and just be like a big thorn in the side of this whole thing and doesn’t have the older people’s best interest. She’s just trying to cause chaos. But it turns out, I mean, she’s actually here much longer than you realize. They don’t do a great job of showing you how much time has gone by, but she ends up being a real gift to these elderly people. The movie kind of tries to make it like, “Ah, I’m chaos. I’m going to sew chaos wherever I go. Look how Mad Hooper is. ” But they instantly let you like, “No, no, no. This is not malice. These people were thrown away. I was thrown away.

(01:22:17):

Women of a certain age, look, they’re all women that we all get tossed aside way earlier than we should. We still have a lot of life to live. Why do you get to say that I deserve it or don’t deserve it? “

Matt (01:22:27):

And the screenshot, it’s all women. There are men there too. I think that-

Laci (01:22:31):

But percentage wise, elderly places are full of three to one women to men.

Matt (01:22:37):

They’re the ones who survive. Men be dying. But I kind of almost wish the rest of the movie were her in the nursing home. I feel like there’s more juice there when it becomes like, “I’m going to help women succeed in business.” Then I think the movie loses a little steam. It reminded me of the First Wives Club where they’re like, “We’re going to start the first wives club dedicated to helping first wives anywhere.” And the movie didn’t actually have any ideas of what to do with that. Whereas I think there’s some real pathos you can get here out of seeing my life before was like the lives that all these old people have to live because no one values them, sees them as real people worthy of attention and love and care. But as we see, if you just don’t tranquilize them, they have energy and stuff.

(01:23:25):

They’re not infirm at all. And I think we joked earlier, they’re probably like 52 years old. So yeah, they could just go resume their normal lives.

Laci (01:23:34):

Well, and Roseanne though, she’s trying to catch women before their hair is gray. I mean, even just women who are stuck behind a beauty standard that makes it harder for them to get jobs, easier for them to get ignored in general. I like her idea. I like that what she has is an idea to help people because the movie wants to paint her as not nurturing at first and then immediately it’s like, no, I’m just kidding. She’s very nurturing, very cares about things exterior and is very aware of the societal issues that are making all this happen. I don’t know that the movie does a great job of explaining how it is Roseanne gets connected to the business world so quickly and has all these jobs and is a very trusted source of temps and whatever.

Matt (01:24:28):

Yeah. I think that that’s the sort of 80s idea of like, you got to go succeed in business to be a real person. Even as they say, here at the temp agency, we know that you are not your job, but it also seems like that is what they’re saying. Is you got to get a job. You need

Laci (01:24:42):

Money

Matt (01:24:43):

To

Laci (01:24:43):

Do anything else.

Matt (01:24:44):

But I also think the reason I like the nursing home sections is because it’s when Roseanne is best as a performer in the movie because when she’s just doing her voiceovers, it’s just her in a voiceover booth just talking. She’s interacting with other people. She’s laughing a lot. When she’s with Linda Hunt, it’s very charming, especially when she’s conniving with Meryl Streep’s mom. It’s a lot of fun. I guess I wish a lot more of the movie were like, “How can I play some sick pranks on Meryl Streep via her mother?”

Laci (01:25:09):

Yeah. Or just pranks on people who are doing this to their children.

Matt (01:25:13):

Yeah. Let’s go see some more shitty people, rich people in the Hamptons who sent their parents away. We’re

Laci (01:25:19):

Already going the 75 miles.

Matt (01:25:21):

So Nurse Hooper’s like, “Oh, you can’t do this. I’m going to tell Mrs. Trumper and you’ll be sorry.” And Roseanne’s like, “Oh no, I’ve spent my life being sorry, but not anymore. So turn me in if you want, but listen, I thought women like us should stick together.” And so Nurse Hooper decides I shan’t be turning you in. And we get a look at Meryl Streep’s house, the pretty pink mansion, but suddenly starting to get filled up with a lot of trash, a lot of soda cans and boomboxes.

Laci (01:25:50):

A lot of noise. And she’s used to having complete silence and type on her little typewriter and she just can’t seem to concentrate. It’s easy to be a thing when you can focus all your energy on that thing and she’s learning. It doesn’t take a … I mean, it’s still a good bit of … All of a sudden she’s got two kids, but these are grown ass kids. It’s just anyone can look perfect when that’s all you have to focus on, Mary.

Matt (01:26:18):

Yeah. And she has this beautiful poodle who’s to be looked at and admired, but then they just have a big dog called Fuzzy that also lives there now. She’s not happy about all these new developments about the girl, the daughter, Nicolette. How old is Nicolette supposed to be? They don’t say. She’s like lying down in a bikini. You’re allowed to

Laci (01:26:39):

Wear a bikini

Matt (01:26:39):

As 16 year old. I thought she was much younger, but yeah.

Laci (01:26:42):

They don’t say it. I’m just guessing. I mean, the brother looks 12, so she’s like 14, 15.

Matt (01:26:47):

So she calls up Bob and she’s like, “Your kid’s kind of annoying me. ” And he’s like, “Listen, Mary, you’re their stepmom. You need to do a good job of connecting to them. Also, your publisher’s very mad because your book was due two months ago. What the hell?” And he’s saying all this as he oggles a babe in a nearby car. So it’s just immediately slipped into the rule. Yes. Yo

Laci (01:27:05):

Add kids to the situation and all of a sudden he’s trying to get out again and whatever woman is at home, if she has the nerve to complain, then she’s a bitch and it’s time to escape again, even if it’s a mansion.

Matt (01:27:18):

And if you’re having a problem with them, it’s because you’ve just been deficient in being a good stepmom to them. So really take some time, connect with them.

Laci (01:27:26):

Yeah. Guilt the woman.That is his whole move is, how can I turn whatever it is you’re saying into something that makes you feel bad for saying it and then you’ll shut up?

Matt (01:27:34):

Andrew, the boy, like tosses a stick and it just makes Meryl Streep Poodle jumped after the stick, but to its deaf because it’s like off a clip or something. It’s very funny. Yeah. We just cut dramatically to her tombstone.

Laci (01:27:46):

Because then she faints. This is like the last straw for her. This is after the very funny hugging her own ass thing that she … And she wraps her arms around her legs and has her butt in the eye. It’s just brilliant.

Matt (01:28:00):

Yeah. Very good physical comedy from her in this movie. Her mom at the nursing home is just like back to life now and complaining about how bored she is and Roseanne’s like, “Is there anything I can do for you, Mrs. Fisher?” “You think you could bring me a bee? “Sylvia Miles plays the mother and she’s- So

Laci (01:28:18):

Where do I know her from? She’s not mama from mama’s family, but she reminds me of her. Well, she doesn’t remind me of mama, but she reminds me … Oh, you know what? She reminds me of the funny old lady and Golden Girls. That’s the hair, that’s the crotchiness.

Matt (01:28:32):

Estelle Warren?

Laci (01:28:33):

Yeah. I mean, I know they’re not the same person, but this is just a very old lady look. You got to have the glasses. You got to have your hair just like that. You need to be in a robe. Check, you’re an old lady, even though she’s probably 60 something. Let

Matt (01:28:49):

See. I mean, she was in Midnight Cowboy. She’s been in a lot of stuf. I’m looking for the … What does Laci know this? I

Laci (01:28:55):

Probably don’t. It’s just probably this.

Matt (01:28:56):

Okay. She’s reading her daughter’s book. She’s like, ” Oh, Mary Fisher. Are you in your relation? “”Yeah, that’s my daughter.” “Oh, that’s so cool. She’s a slut. “”My daughter’s a slut.” And Roseanne’s like, “Well, why don’t you go visit your daughter?” See

Laci (01:29:11):

If she’s still slutty.

Matt (01:29:13):

“You should … “He’s like, ” Oh, I can’t. I’m too old. No, you are a mature vibrant woman. Okay, maybe I will.

Laci (01:29:21):

“Ring her up, pay her a little visit.

Matt (01:29:24):

Every time we check in on Mary’s house, it’s becoming more and more of a pigsty. There are no clean clothes because no one will do the laundry. The maid Utah is revolting. She’s like, ” I was only paid to take care of one person and one dog. “And Garcia is becoming more and more depressed because he’s not allowed to perform Conolingus. He’s just got all these dang kids around so he just floats in the pool. And he says,” I haven’t been able to perform my usual services, so I don’t know. “And she’s like, ” But you’re still the butler, so go buddle. “But he doesn’t know how to buttle. So Mary’s like, ” Fine, I’ll have to do the buttling. I’ll do some laundry. “She’s becoming more domestic. And I love her New Really crying as she tries to figure out how to do the laundry, breaks her nail on the washing machine and then the doorbell rings.

(01:30:09):

Will somebody get the door? So to get the goddamn door. And their giant dog is barking at the door. She goes by and she’s like, “It’s guzzy. It’s fuzzy. Get away. Ew. Just ew,

Laci (01:30:27):

Ew.”

Matt (01:30:28):

Which I say to our dog all the time. And it’s her mom at the door. Mother.

Laci (01:30:36):

I don’t remember what she says, but yeah.

Matt (01:30:38):

LL, your royal highness, you got to pay the campfire. And back at the nursing home, Roseanne is going to ensure that Mrs. Fisher gets kicked out of the nursing home because she just pours piss all over her bed. So they’re having a big old-

Laci (01:30:52):

This is long term leakage. Sorry.

Matt (01:30:54):

They’re having a big old dinner with Mrs. Fisher. This is a parallel to Ed Begley’s dinner with his own parents.

Laci (01:31:01):

And now we see how comfortable he is when he doesn’t need to be putting on airs. In fact, he is more comfortable being more low brow than Mary is comfortable. They’re both fake in their very different ways, but she’s shooting for something higher and now he’s letting his blue collar show. But with laughing at the potty humor from the discussion. I mean, the mom is fucked up. I mean, I want the grandma, like, oh, I’d hang out with her. But she’s giving beer to Andrew and letting Nicolette sexually dance right next to her with the looks like. So the mom is not the best mother, but she’s funny.

Matt (01:31:39):

Yeah. And the kids like her. And it’s an interesting little dynamic now of everybody’s teaming up against Meryl Strape. The mother, Mrs. Fisher, the Sylvia Miles reveals her daughter, Meryl Streep, she’s 41. She says she’s 35. She’s full of shit. Now she’s 41 and Bo is like, what?

Laci (01:31:59):

What?

Matt (01:31:59):

What?

Laci (01:32:00):

What?

Matt (01:32:00):

Oh my God.

Laci (01:32:01):

It is quite the difference being the 41 year old that I am. When I was 35, I felt like hot shit.

Matt (01:32:09):

You were still hot shit.

Laci (01:32:10):

That’s nice of you to say, but it does feel very different. I cannot only imagine trying to pretend to be 35. I’d feel like just such a fraud. With a back like I’ve got.

Matt (01:32:20):

That’s the only thing I feel- My

Laci (01:32:22):

Body.

Matt (01:32:23):

Your body’s hotter than it was that you were … I

Laci (01:32:26):

Mean, it’s functionality. I

Matt (01:32:27):

Can’t

Laci (01:32:29):

Be physical as much like you

Matt (01:32:30):

Said. I am glad to … I know it’s different from men and women. I am glad to not have any hangups about aging for either of us. I think we’re both in the prime. Okay. But that means that the prime is going to end, of course. So fuck. I don’t know when that’s going to be though. Let’s say 64.

Laci (01:32:47):

44. Oh, all right.

Matt (01:32:50):

No, because when you turned 40, I was like, 40, hello. And now you’re going to turn 50 one day. Stop. 50.

Laci (01:33:04):

Fucking slut.

Matt (01:33:05):

So Ruth is hanging out with Nurse Hooper making her cut loose. Try some pastries. They’ll make you have more fun. Fulfilled.

Laci (01:33:15):

Right.

Matt (01:33:16):

And Nurse Hooper, Linda Hunt, reveals she has $55,000 in savings because this was the 1980s and nobody had any debts and you just had tons of money.

Laci (01:33:23):

I’m sorry. And she’s piling into a shoe bus. For 20 years. She has room and board here. What the fuck is that amount of money? You telling me she doesn’t make more than like 10,000 a year at this place? She’d make 3,000 a year for that to even make sense. I mean, what is she spending money on? Nothing.

Matt (01:33:43):

No. What I’m saying is today-

Laci (01:33:44):

Fucking crazy.

Matt (01:33:45):

Yes. I know. Today you’d have to pay your fucking iPhone bill so you wouldn’t be able to save up anything.

Laci (01:33:49):

Yeah, fine. I’m just saying the amount of money makes no sense for her being there for 20 years, room and board paid. That doesn’t make sense. It should be at least 100,000, at least 150,000. It should be way fucking more.

Matt (01:34:01):

Ruth gets fired because of the piss or something. You piss plot. You’re fired. Fine. I’m fired. I’m going. So Roseanne gets in a bus and she’s starting to leave and then what’s this? Nurse Hooper’s running alongside the bus beside her. Oh, get on the bus. Ran says

Laci (01:34:18):

Nothing to stop the bus driver, by the way.

Matt (01:34:21):

Speed up.

Laci (01:34:21):

Let her run.

Matt (01:34:22):

But yeah, they get on the bus. They’re in it together. They’re in cahoots. They’re going to start the first wives club. At the same time, People Magazine is doing a feature on Mary, but this new situation, it’s causing some ripples, some cracks in the facade of what we all know and love about Mary Fisher. Do we love? The world is very invested in the public image of this novelist. How much do we know about Colleen Hoover and her life or whatever? I don’t know.

Laci (01:34:49):

Don’t even get me started.

Matt (01:34:51):

But things are starting to make her look bad. For example, Garcia the Butler brings them a tray of yohoos for some reason.

Laci (01:34:57):

And squirt cheese.

Matt (01:34:58):

Yeah, cheese whiz.

Laci (01:34:59):

Yes. Just revealing her low class, how all of this could fall apart, this Potemkin village could just fall down all around you and you’d see it for what it were.

Matt (01:35:08):

And the mother then talks to the People Magazine journalist and says like, “Yeah, she was a slut. She was one of your teenage sluts that you’ll get sometimes. She was pregnant. She gave up that baby for adoption.” And the writer’s like, “Are you saying there’s an heir to the Royal Fisher fortune?” Royal, my ass, her father was a butcher from Hoboken. Meanwhile, Ruth and Hooper leave the golden twilight and move on to the next stage of their plan. They buy a rundown building in lower Manhattan just blocks away from the towers and they dress up like the little rascals to beautify it. They

Laci (01:35:45):

Look so cute.

Matt (01:35:46):

Yeah.

Laci (01:35:46):

I love their little montage. And then they do something illegal, which is just flood the fucking Times Square for some reason with pamphlets for their new temp agency or employment agency.

Matt (01:35:59):

I would start an employment agency for the unloved and unwanted women like Hooper who the world had thrown away and I knew just where to find them. Times Square. Times

Laci (01:36:09):

Square for the

Matt (01:36:12):

Tourists on. Comedy show. They would become my own personal army, ready for action when I needed them.

Laci (01:36:19):

Okay. See, now you’ve gotten a little bit to the dark side, Yashi devil. What about their needs?

Matt (01:36:25):

On the wall are these of the … What is their place called? Vesta

Laci (01:36:30):

Rose.

Matt (01:36:31):

The Vesta Rose Employment Agency. As Lazy mentioned, how does she get these jobs? It’s on the

Laci (01:36:36):

Screen.

Matt (01:36:36):

How does she get these jobs for these women? I don’t

Laci (01:36:38):

Know. I don’t fucking know.

Matt (01:36:39):

But again, it was the 80s, you just showed up places. That’s why all our parents are so mad at us. They’re like, “What do you mean?” Why

Laci (01:36:45):

Don’t they just go to the doors and open them?

Matt (01:36:47):

I flipped burgers in college and I paid my way through Stanford. $50 a month. Just show up. They’ll give you a job. Save

Laci (01:36:53):

Up $5 a month and that equals $3 million after you invest it.

Matt (01:36:59):

They’re starting a girl boss temp agency on the walls, framed photos of Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, and Gloria Steinem.

Laci (01:37:06):

Well, it would be like another six years, but little did Roseanne know she’d be the second highest paid woman in the entertainment industry.

Matt (01:37:15):

Behind Mother Teresa?

Laci (01:37:16):

Exactly.

Matt (01:37:17):

Yeah. Mother Teresa, opponent of birth control, Oprah Winfrey, billionaire oligarch, Gloria Steinem, CIA asset. There’s the woman- They’re

Laci (01:37:25):

Perfect.

Matt (01:37:26):

There’s the woman whose husband left her because she has no work experience.

Laci (01:37:29):

You know why they’re framed though, because they’re homely and yet important.

Matt (01:37:34):

Oh.

Laci (01:37:34):

It’s because they’re not who you would expect. Mother Teresa, I don’t know that you’re looking for a hot nun, but the other two, oh, she wears glasses. Sick.

Matt (01:37:42):

Wait a minute. Oprah in the 80s was-

Laci (01:37:45):

Yes. Oprah always, even when she was at her thinnest, even when she was down to a size fucking six, she was always monitored and thought of as fat and homely. She was never thought of as good looking.That’s crazy. It’s crazy. She’s obviously

Matt (01:37:59):

Looking. 80s. Again, hopefully in the 80s.

Laci (01:38:03):

Yes. Fucking hourglass figure, fucking beautiful, smart. Anyway, but that is what she’s known for. Matt, she has never had an opportunity to be in the spotlight without being completely ridiculed for being normal looking. That is why those three people are framed. And then the Stein? Stein?

Matt (01:38:25):

Gloria Steinem.

Laci (01:38:26):

Yeah. She’s not the most homely, but she’s wearing glasses, she’s playing, and she’s got opinions about women.

Matt (01:38:33):

Yeah, but I see those glasses and I’m like, “Hello.” Blackback me anytime. Gloria Stein was in the CIA, as we learned last year with Hal and Craig from … Check out our American Psycho episode people. Anyway, check that out. There is a woman whose husband left her and now she has nowhere to go because she has no work experience. She’s been raising kids her whole life.

Laci (01:38:55):

Yeah, that’s a real fucking thing. We learned that in it. Yeah, but even your husband can go off to war and not come back and you’re still thought of as a fucking bum woman who didn’t bother to learn a trade. When would she have done that?

Matt (01:39:10):

Yeah. And so she’s like, “Well, I don’t have any job experience.” And what Roseanne is doing is like, but I mean one, you took care of your kids. That is work, which of course it is. It is a fucking very, very difficult job. But aside from that, there are skills that you even in there that can translate to you going to get a job. For example, like, “Oh yeah, I did keep our household expenses.” And she’s like, “Okay, yeah. I mean, go look into a bookkeeping job. I’ll use my connections.”

Laci (01:39:37):

Especially someone who’s showing up here, someone who’s been put in this predicament, you’re not just getting divorced. You’re getting divorced from a guy who was mentally abusive, wore you down to a nub and had you convinced you had no value, otherwise how could he leave you and still be a nice gang. So you don’t realize that you taking really good care of the finances of the house, that’s hard. Both of you and me at one point or another have attempted, I mean mine, I don’t know, 14 years ago I tried and-

Matt (01:40:07):

Impossible.

Laci (01:40:08):

Impossible.

Matt (01:40:10):

So the business is now flourishing, but she’s still … I guess my major critique of this movie is, one, I feel like Ruth and Roseanne just kind of get lost in the movie. She’ll kind of come back and be like, “Oh yeah, right.” And where she is and what she wants, I’m never totally clear on because all of this- She’s got the litle list. I know she has the list and she’s like, “Time to go back to ruining Bob’s life now.” Okay. Spying on Bob because he is now moving on to new affairs. Meryl Streep’s no longer good enough for him. New sexy babes who work for him and so Ruth’s temp agency.

Laci (01:40:45):

She planted a sexy babe.

Matt (01:40:47):

He has already hired Sexy Babes. He needs a new sexy babe. He calls her and isn’t aware that he’s speaking with his wife and she’s like- She designs the flyer

Laci (01:40:55):

For him. It looks like a sex worker flyer and someone’s in a low cut. They’re very hot and it’s just like, need a bookkeeper and yeah. And

Matt (01:41:06):

So he calls her up and she’s like, “Now my name isn’t Ruth. It’s tooth.” Yeah, we’ll send you a bookkeeper, a sexy bookkeeper, Olivia.

Laci (01:41:15):

Olivia Honey.

Matt (01:41:17):

Meanwhile, Mary, I love this. She’s finally finished her new draft of her book. She’s calling it Love in the Rinse Cycle. She meets with her publisher who’s very unhappy about love in the rinse cycle. She says, “The love scenes are wonderful, but your heroine has two children and a husband named Bob. And this is this whole chapter on laundry.

Laci (01:41:38):

It’s a metaphor and I love it. This whole time is under the assumption that she has agency, that she is an upwardly mobile person, that she can go any direction she wants. She is in charge of her artistic life. She is respected. It’s like, no, no. You are a very, very specific kind of person who has one value, at least one very commercial, successful value that we can see. And therefore you will be under our thumb and you do what we say. You’re no different from Ruth.

Matt (01:42:10):

You’re a cog. And if you stop making your sprockets, we have a hundred other authors who will come in and make exactly what you make.

Laci (01:42:18):

But I love her slow transition into accepting. She doesn’t fight back against … She really is in love with Bob. And so she does not fight back against this like, I now have kids in my house. She’s not ever … Unless her movie would have her applauding to get rid of the kids as soon as they’re there. But that never happens, that she doesn’t even consider it. She’s just frustrated and it is frustrating. She’s overwhelmed and you know that because when she finds the gummy bear in her hair, she’s kind of like just got to …

Matt (01:42:45):

A gummy bear.

Laci (01:42:45):

And then

Matt (01:42:45):

Eats it. And then eats it. Yes, my favorite detail in the whole

Laci (01:42:48):

Movie. I love it. It’s so unlike her, but that’s because she is changing. She is not a stagnant thing.

Matt (01:42:54):

But it is an interesting middle ground in this movie between … It’s not like she’s like, “I’ve embraced my role as a mother.”

Laci (01:42:59):

No, she just loves Bob. She’s not plotting. He seems to want the kids there for some fucking reason. So she’s all in. She’s not loving it, but she’s not fighting it. She’s just aggravated. She’s just becoming more normal.

Matt (01:43:15):

So the publisher declines to publish it so she gets to take it to arrival.

Laci (01:43:19):

Oh, right. No, she exercises her right to market it with arrival and her publisher caves and does it. That’s why her publisher that you see here is sitting with her at the book signing where no one shows up and then she goes, “I hate to say I told you so. ” No, they stayed with her.

Matt (01:43:36):

Okay.

Laci (01:43:37):

But then that was her last straw though.

Matt (01:43:39):

At the same time, this People Magazine cover is out with all of her unsavory secrets that I’m sorry, would’ve made her even more popular. People would’ve liked all this stuff about her. Ruth reads the magazine, sees the photo of Mary with Ruth’s two kids and it makes Ruth cry. Ruth is Roseanne Mary as Meryl Streep. She’s like, “Oh, my husband’s new wife or whatever has taken over my old role in the family.” And even though we know this is not a happy family, she’s suddenly like, “Oh shit, I’ve been replaced.” It’s very sad. She takes out her family photo. She’s tried to become a new person, but her kids are still a part of her. She misses them.

Laci (01:44:18):

Sorry. Okay. Now it’s like the big fight bedroom scene. Now is when I think is when Mary gets left in her bedroom till 4:30, exactly what happened to Ruth. And Bo finally shows up. He doesn’t even bother to wipe the giant kiss off of his neck. And he’s just reprimanding her for straying from the formula, not being his money cow. And she’s no match for him, even though she puts up a better fight. Oh God, I love everything she does in this scene. She’s so fucking funny. I am an artist bop.

Matt (01:44:54):

Because well, Roseanne says in the narration, Mary Fisher lives in a palace by the seat, but her life is no longer a fairytale now that Prince Charming works late every night. And she is, like Laci said, now she’s left it home alone while Bob is just out till 4:30, missing no word. So Mary’s just wandering around. She goes to visit Garcia and Garcia just turns her away and she’s like … So even he, even her employee won’t give her the attention that she’s craving. Plus she has some goop on her face and she looks at herself in the mirror. And now Meryl Streep, one of the most gorgeous people ever is just focusing on all the flaws in her face and popping pills. So it’s like she has economic independence, but Laci just had that great point of like, yeah, if you do the one thing we will let you do.

(01:45:41):

Yeah,

Laci (01:45:42):

You

Matt (01:45:42):

Don’t get to grow up. You have independence. And it’s not actually independence because you don’t have the freedom to do otherwise. In the same way that like having a job, making a lot of money and having a nice house, it’s not freedom if you have to keep working the job to keep the house. You

Laci (01:45:57):

Pay for it outright. If you have been striving to look a certain way and to constantly keep up with the imaginary Joneses or have the appearance of having wealth and you spend it as soon as you get it. And so you’re just as broke. You just have stuff you could try to sell.

Matt (01:46:14):

So in the same way that like Ruth’s a housewife’s value to her husband goes once her looks go or when she’s not a good cook or a good mother, Meryl Streep’s value is going along with her economic independence. If that leaves, well, my looks are going away too. My new book won’t be a hit. People know I’m a teenage slut. Everyone’s turning against me. And Ed Begley comes home. He’s like, “Oh, come on. Watch your name, Mary. We don’t have to have this fight now.” And he’s like, “No, everyone’s turning against me. Paula refuses to publish the book and you hate my book because he’s like, Mary, why are you straying from the formula? Why are you writing this laundry book? Just go back to the formula that you keep that you’ve always done.” And she says, “No, I’m an artist. And ever since you came into the house with the children I’ve changed and I must reflect that in my writing.” And he says, “Well, we’re not talking about art here.

(01:47:09):

We’re talking about a product. What would you know about art? You’re an accountant.” Bob. And he’s like, “Accountants could be very creative.

Laci (01:47:19):

Don’t you talk about my beautiful friends. You’re so crude. You’re so crude, Bo.

Matt (01:47:26):

Sad Mary Fisher. She’s learning that men who burn for a mistress don’t burn so hot when the mistress starts acting like a wife. So Ruth has sent Olivia into Bob’s office. Olivia doesn’t know this though. Olivia doesn’t know she’s in there as a spy, doesn’t know that Ruth was married to Bob, I’m saying. And Olivia is gushing to Ruth about the affair she’s having with Bob.

Laci (01:47:50):

Bobby.

Matt (01:47:51):

Ruth is like, oh, it sounds really serious. You should tell him you love him because that way he’ll know you’re not just some other fling.

Laci (01:47:56):

Well, and Olivia knows that this is not the right move, but she trusts Ruth and I feel bad for her. And then Ruth takes no responsibility for her being completely wrong when she gets broken up with. Instead, she weaponizes the fact that Olivia’s sad and heartbroken. Now it’s time to use Olivia.

Matt (01:48:11):

So

Laci (01:48:11):

It is the shittiest thing she probably does is the way she manipulates Olivia.

Matt (01:48:16):

Manipulates Olivia right after they’ve had sex on the photocopier, made photocopies of her butt.

Laci (01:48:21):

With his ring.

Matt (01:48:22):

With his ring that Meryl Streep gave him with his initials on it. But

Laci (01:48:26):

He keeps the copies for some fucking reason. In the Olivia’s

Matt (01:48:30):

Hot. They’re hot. I would do. Okay. You and I should do this. Let’s get a photocopier.

Laci (01:48:36):

I’m impressed she doesn’t go straight through it. You want glass in my ass? I do not.

Matt (01:48:41):

Olivia tells him … Yeah, yeah. She tells him, “I love you. ” And he’s like, “Uh.” So we cut to Olivia telling Ru, like, “I told him I loved him and he fired me. He accused me of trying to sleep my way to the top.” And then she reveals things to Ruth that Ruth didn’t know. He cheats his clients. He’s not an honest accountant. He skims the interest off their accounts and wires it to his own bank account in Switzerland. Motherfucker. And so at a certain point, Roseanne has had the mole removed and she’s now just looking good, looking cool and hot and impressive.That’s all it takes. Just succeed in business, get the mole removed and you got it.

Laci (01:49:20):

Shave your mustache. Have the time to put time into your appearance is what everyone expects you to do. But when you’re a mom and a housekeeper, you don’t have that time.

Matt (01:49:28):

Yeah. I mean, every time we record video for our podcast, it’s a whole ordeal for Laci. I have to put on makeup too, but yeah, it’s a thing. You have to make yourself camera ready.

Laci (01:49:39):

I’m sorry. It’s a whole fucking deal. And I hate wasting it. I got dressed today just because it was too many days in a row where I hadn’t … It gets you down about yourself.

Matt (01:49:49):

Poor Olivia. She had learned something about life and love, but more importantly, she had learned Bob’s secret access codes. They sneak into Bob’s office at night, secretly wire hundreds of thousands of dollars from his client’s accounts into his own accounts. Just very obvious and brazen corporate theft.

Laci (01:50:06):

To get him in trouble, not

Matt (01:50:08):

To

Laci (01:50:08):

Get away with anything.

Matt (01:50:09):

And then Roseanne also finds the photocopies of the butt that he kept like, “Oh, better hold onto these.” So she sends the but photos to Meryl Streep and Mel Shape’s like, “Oh, you passed it, ” and runs away from him. So he’s like, “I promise I’m going to be better now.” But inside the house, there’s just this back and all orgy going on where the teenage daughter is dancing sexily with Garcia. The old lady is chugging vodka and the boy is- Drinking a

Laci (01:50:34):

Beer.

Matt (01:50:35):

Yeah. And Mary’s like, “I’m fucking going to lay down the law. You sons of bitches.” Things are going to be different from now on. And I kind of wish we got to see this for a little while longer of her being the serious kickass person in charge of the house.

Laci (01:50:51):

Allah overboard, which she’s about to be joined up with Goldie Hawn, so it’s perfect.

Matt (01:50:56):

Yeah, like Overboard. Yes. Good movie, Overboard.

Laci (01:51:00):

It really is.

Matt (01:51:01):

Check out our episode on Overboard.

Laci (01:51:02):

Do it.

Matt (01:51:04):

And she has a new party. She has a party with this new regime with all my friends, all her artsy friends and Bob and the Rotten Kids are on their best behavior. But what they don’t know is that Bob’s ex- wife, Roseanne, has dropped a dime to the IRS and the IRS storms into the party. They’re like, “Ed Bigley Jr., You’re under arrest for wire fraud.” Everyone’s like, “Oh, water fraud. No.” And they escort him out and this would never happen. They’d just be like, “Hey, could you come meet with our lawyer please? Okay. We’re so long.”

Laci (01:51:34):

They don’t care so much about the white collar crime.

Matt (01:51:36):

So Mary and Bob, they meet with a lawyer who’s like, “Good news. I think you’re going to be totally fine because the judge assigned to this case, my dad’s his best friend and golfing buddy.” Also, he’s very lenient on white collar crime. And they’re like, great. But the lawyer accidentally reveals that Ed Begley has also been stealing from Meryl Strap all this time. And so she breaks up with him and fires himself. The computer

Laci (01:51:57):

Virus, Mary,

Matt (01:51:58):

That’s

Laci (01:51:58):

A lie. We came up with a lie together.

Matt (01:52:04):

I love the way he talks about the computer virus. What I’m going to say is that a virus has somehow crept into your computer. I was like, “Ooh, yes, yes. Okay. Sounds right. Virus in a computer. Wow. Yeah. She kicks him out of her life, including professionally.

Laci (01:52:19):

Does she completely kick him out here?

Matt (01:52:21):

I mean, she yells at him at the revolving door. I want you out of my life, but now I see you for who you really are. Also, you’re fired. Ruth is still pulling the strings, has her friend who got … Somebody who worked, got a job through her agency, got a job at the clerk of court. She’s like, “Hey, could you switch my husband’s case, switch him to a different judge?” Yeah, no problem. So Ed Bigley’s in the courtroom, he’s like, “Can’t wait to … Hey, you think I can take the judge out for dinner after all this after he exonerates me? Oh, I think that’s a great idea. Let’s go to Peter Lugers.” But then into the courtroom walks a black woman. Uh-oh. Oh,

Laci (01:52:55):

Worst nightmare.

Matt (01:52:56):

And they sentence him to 18 months in prison and still pretty lenient. I mean, he stole millions of dollars.

Laci (01:53:02):

I’m sure you had to give it back.

Matt (01:53:04):

Yeah, I know. But if you steal from a Walmart, if you give it back, you’re still like … Anyway, I like the judge says he has violated the public’s trust and shaken people’s faith in accountants everywhere. Everywhere.

Laci (01:53:16):

I guess there was a time.

Matt (01:53:18):

He is great. Ed Bigley hears he’s crying suddenly the totality, the reality washing over him. And then he looks into the courtroom audience and sees Roseanne. He’s like, “Ruth, Ruth, Ruth, who he hasn’t thought about in a year, I guess.” That’s my wife. Ruth, help me. Where have you been, Ruth? Ruth.

Laci (01:53:42):

Yeah. I mean, you cannot underestimate or under state the importance of a cell phone. You really could just go off the grid. She’s just been gone. I mean, as far as they’re concerned, no mention of her in their lives for what you can assume has been like a year.

Matt (01:54:00):

Yeah. And what a mistake. Everything was going great until I left Ruth. I really bungled things up. Ruth, come on, take me back. And then on screen, some flames come on because she’s evil.

Laci (01:54:13):

Such a she devil, you might have heard.

Matt (01:54:16):

But then it’s later now. It’s a year later. She’s the

Laci (01:54:20):

Shortest fucking children. They’re so tiny. I mean,

Matt (01:54:24):

He’s very tall.

Laci (01:54:24):

Okay.

Matt (01:54:26):

Mary Fisher no longer wants her palace by the sea. She doesn’t love my husband anymore either. And these days, Bob has grown accustomed to a very different lifestyle. We see Ed Begley working in the kitchen of the prison.

Laci (01:54:37):

And he’s really fucking it up and the other people are like, “Come on, Bo, you fucking lousy in the kitchen piece of shit. How do you like it? “

Matt (01:54:46):

Not so easy. He’s even burning cookies and yet prison seems to be doing good for him. He’s focusing. He can really be present with himself and focus on the rewarding work of being a prison kitchen employee.

Laci (01:54:58):

The best job in a fucking prison anyone could tell you.

Matt (01:55:03):

Ruth brings the kids to visit him. Now she’s now running the ship and they’re all dressed very nicely and they’re very well behaved too and they look pretty happy. He’s optimistic about the future. In fact, everybody’s things are going good. The system works, the movie is saying. It’s good to go to prison. And he looks at Ruth and he’s like, “Ruth.” New York can come to dinner. Hey, I get out of prison in a couple months. You want to get together? And she’s like, “I’d like that. “

Laci (01:55:30):

She’s like, “That would be nice.” Or maybe she’s not like that, but she’s being real cool.

Matt (01:55:35):

That would be nice.

Laci (01:55:36):

She’s just being real cool and calm. She’s learned … See, she used to be shrill and loud and Mary was cool and calm and then they switched voices because all you have to do is be in charge of a lot of stuff and be a mom and all of a sudden now you’re yelling. And I can talk like this all I want.

Matt (01:55:54):

People can change, she says. That’s why you can’t give up on them. Even Mary Fisher because Mary, she’s on TV now dressed like Meryl Streep’s character from Manhattan. She’s like a cool intellectual. She’s got the giant glasses.

Laci (01:56:08):

I think she’s supposed to look like a feminist.

Matt (01:56:10):

She’s written a book about love, money, and skepticism and it’s getting great reviews. But this is just another skin she’s putting on. Yes,

Laci (01:56:21):

Of course.

Matt (01:56:21):

The market also has room for the cool lady intellectual to write feminist books like this.

Laci (01:56:26):

Smart lady stuff for other smart ladies.

Matt (01:56:28):

Just

Laci (01:56:29):

Don’t give it to any of the men. Then they’ll turn into pussies.

Matt (01:56:32):

Because she’s at a book signing and then Ruth comes up to her. Sign it to Ruth AKA she devil and optical flames go in Roseanne’s eyes and Mary looks up at her and was like … And then the final thing in the movie is like a dude comes in to get his books signed and she’s like, Meryl Streep is like, “Well, hello.” And in the narration, Roseanne’s like, “I mean, not all things change.”

Laci (01:56:54):

Because she’s still a romantic. She still wants to be swept off her feet.

Matt (01:56:58):

What’s wrong with that?

Laci (01:57:00):

Nothing. I don’t think Roseanne is saying something shitty about it. I think it’s just people are people. We still need love. We don’t just start wearing black and clothes down our vaginas.

Matt (01:57:11):

And then she’s walking down the street in Manhattan. It’s like, “You’re a devil lady.” It’s like a-

Laci (01:57:16):

No, she’s the devil, Linda. I can’t even believe you just shit on Delvis that way. She’s the devil Linda’s cast. I hear you going to say something shitty about

Matt (01:57:27):

Elvis. And my memory was like a Motley Cruce.

Laci (01:57:29):

She’s a she devil.

Matt (01:57:32):

It’s ice. That’s not Modley crew. Devil in a blue

Laci (01:57:34):

Dress, blue, dress blue.

Matt (01:57:36):

So yeah, look at her. She’s wash she devil. Well,

Laci (01:57:39):

And she’s surrounded by women who she’s helped. That’s why all of a sudden it’s a sea of red. All the women on the streets are wearing red.

Matt (01:57:48):

No, I didn’t notice that. That’s

Laci (01:57:48):

Because most women are just normal and that’s the point and we overlook them, but maybe if we’re wearing red, you’ll see us.

Matt (01:57:56):

That’s what Steven Spielberg did in Schindler’s List. Laci gets mad when she has to explain something to me. You should be happy. Final thoughts on She Devil. Unfortunately, this is a case where watching a movie a second time and taking notes and stuff made me like it a little less. I like it. I give it three stars out of five. Meryl Streep is so much fun. She is great. That Golden Globe Nam well deserved. Begley’s very funny too. Roseanne, I do like her, but I don’t think she works. I think she’s miscasted. They don’t

Laci (01:58:41):

Give her much to do. Yeah.

Matt (01:58:43):

And it would’ve been interesting to see a seasoned actress in this role. I also think- Like

Laci (01:58:49):

A frumpy Goldie Hawn, honestly, because that is what happens, right? Mary Fisher gets to … Or she gets to be this very glamorous person who steals Goldie Hawn’s husband and Goldie Hawn is frumpy and ugly and then she has a glow up. I’m talking about death becomes her, but it’s like we do get to see that. We

Matt (01:59:10):

Do

Laci (01:59:10):

Get to see the more seasoned person.

Matt (01:59:12):

And both movies, it’s like human beings are like water. They’ll just fill in the size of the container that’s given to them and you’ll become a frump if you have to. All you do is take care of your shitty kids all day and have to take care of this massive giant house that you don’t need. But I think that I like the sort of black comedy of the first half of the movie, but I think it kind of gets confused. Goes too

Laci (01:59:36):

White for you.

Matt (01:59:37):

I don’t know what … I think the message is a little bit muddled.

Laci (01:59:42):

Yeah. I can’t tell if she’s actually … I mean, she’s just normal, I guess. She’s got a little bit of selfishness in her and she’s a caregiver too. She’s complicated, aren’t we all?

Matt (01:59:53):

Right. And Ed Begley is like an especially evil husband and maybe it’d be interesting to see just It’s kind of like a normal husband who doesn’t intend to be evil. I don’t know.

Laci (02:00:05):

Bruce Willis in fucking-

Matt (02:00:06):

Bruce Willis and Death Becomes Art.

Laci (02:00:09):

So I mean, look at this poster. Can’t you tell that this is when they figured out her head would look great on backwards? Look at it.

Matt (02:00:15):

It looks

Laci (02:00:15):

On backwards.

Matt (02:00:17):

We should revisit Death Becomes her.

Laci (02:00:18):

We should. You did not like it.

Matt (02:00:20):

No, I have revisited, it was our sixth episode, I think. Oh. 2017. I did not like it back then. I’ve watched it since and I did like it more. What

Laci (02:00:30):

The fuck?

Matt (02:00:30):

But I still don’t … I think some people say it’s like one of Robert Zemeckis’ best movies. I don’t think that. But we’ll see.

Laci (02:00:37):

Whoa. Fuck. Yes.

Matt (02:00:38):

How many stars do you give she devil?

Laci (02:00:40):

3.5.

Matt (02:00:41):

Okay. What’s coming up next? We don’t know. It’s either-

Laci (02:00:44):

True lies.

Matt (02:00:45):

When Harry Met Sally, high fidelity- Oh,

Laci (02:00:46):

Right. I don’t

Matt (02:00:47):

Know. True lies or she doesn’t. In your

Laci (02:00:49):

Timeline. In our timeline, we’re doing true lies.

Matt (02:00:52):

Yeah. And that’s the truth. Everybody, check out Laci’s coloring videos on YouTube. The handle is 1WR- Movie character Morse.

Laci (02:01:03):

Thinking. I don’t know what I was thinking. One week riddle slash … Fuck me.

Matt (02:01:07):

Link in the description. Laci’s doing these color videos, coloring videos, turn one character into another. People really love them. She’s kicking ass. Again, check out the link in the description and subscribe and support her. She also publishes these to our TikTok. Don’t know how much longer we’re going to be on TikTok, but TikTok, Facebook, Twitter. What else? Blue Sky, Instagram. We’re on all the places and we are on YouTube. 1-Week Rental. I’m on Letterboxd at Matt Stokes nine. Laci is load bearing Laci. My band is rural Route nine. We do the music for the show. Check out our sister podcasts, the sign post up ahead of Twilight Zone podcast and Pod Job, a James Bond podcast. Both of those come out every month. Got a lot of shit to check out. It is your

Laci (02:01:51):

Job to know. Check out all of it. Fucking library or a movie store, you might think. All right. Okay. I love you. Goodbye.