Culture Gabfest “Aristocrats at Sea” Edition

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S2: I’m Stephen Metcalf and this is these slate culture Gabfest Aristocrats at Sea Edition. It’s Wednesday, May 11th, 2022. And today’s show, the French movie happening, could not be more urgently timely. It’s what everyone says about it and should say about it. It’s a harrowing portrait of a young woman in France in the early sixties trying to secure an abortion. It’s based on the autobiographical novel by any heir know. We’ll be joined by Slate’s Owen Susan Matthews, host of the upcoming season of Slow Burn. And then our flag means death is a wild queering of the pirate genre. The HBO comedy is suffused throughout with the sensibility of producer, director and co-star Taika Waititi. And finally, the age old question. Here it is again Kim Kardashian apotheosis or travesty? The question finds itself refreshed by Kim wearing an iconic dress of Marilyn Monroe’s to the Met gala. We’ll be joined by the Gabfest sartorial conscience herself Julia Turner. But in the meantime, joining me today is Heather Schwedel, Slate staff writer. Hey, Heather.

S3: Hi, Steve.

S2: And of course, Dan Kois is a writer at Slate. He’s just released the first episode of the Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis with Jason Zinoman and Parul Segal. Dan, welcome back.

S1: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

S2: Yeah, I I’m not going to be constrained by the copy you sent me about your bio. Good as it is. You’re also writing a novel.

S1: That’s true. Comes out in January. It’s called Vintage Contemporaries. Apparently, all I think about now are the literary figures and trends of the eighties and nineties.

S2: I am incredibly eager to read and talk about that book. In the meantime, I sound different. I may have COVID, but I’m isolated in at home. And why not? Let’s make a show we get.

S1: Let’s turn that negative into a positive.

S2: Frown upside down is my middle name. All right, let’s go. All right. Well, in the new French movie happening and is a young woman from a working class family, she shows immense literary and intellectual promise at school. She’s also, I think it’s fair to say, depicted as sexually free relative to her culture. It’s 1963 in a very Catholic France, a very sexually unfree society as depicted in the film in which unwed pregnancy is treated as a fatal moral lapse and abortion is still criminalized. And understands her fate to have the child suffer internal exile anyway and relinquish her promise. And she rejects her fate and is played by Anna maria Vato LeMay. She’s a quiet, ravishing, insulin, slightly insolent girl who must make a journey through a kind of underworld to reclaim her autonomy and her own existence. The movie is a horror show. It depicts what a society without this right looks like for women. It’s a totalitarian nightmare in which everyone is afraid and everyone potentially is forced to live as a hypocrite and or a snitch. The movie is adapted by Audrey Diwan. All right. Let’s listen to a clip now. The movie is a French film. It’s entirely in French, I assume. I’m not francophone like we don’t assume you are. We’d like to just convey something of the tone of the film. Why don’t we listen to a short clip that features the film’s score? It’s a scene in which ends at the library, flipping through books about pregnancy. All right. Well, we’re joined by Susan Matthews. She’s Slate’s news director. She’s also host of the upcoming season of the Slow Burn podcast. Susan, welcome to the show.

S3: Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me.

S2: This season’s forthcoming Slow Burn could not be more apposite. It’s about the run up to the Roe v Wade court decision in 1973. Let’s let’s start with the movie and then broaden out maybe to that many movies, as Dana Stevens pointed out in her review, are about having an abortion. And as she says, usually in their varying ways, their buddy movies of one kind or another. This is very different. This is a portrait of almost total isolation. What do you make of it?

S3: I mean, it was a very intense experience to watch this movie after what happened last week. Even for me as a person who has been living in this topic for I can’t even tell you how many months now. And I agreed a lot with what Dana said about the way that it conveyed that feeling of isolation and responsibility and self-determination. I thought was was quite moving and I wasn’t exactly expecting how intense it got at the end. But I also think that that was something that kind of dramatically separates it from from a lot of movies that take on this topic.

S2: Hmm. Dan, if there’s a shot, a single shot in this movie that doesn’t feature and I don’t really remember it, it’s, it’s tightly, intimately filmed. It’s very hush as many French films are. They seem to be about the human face and the what’s said when people are silent or being implied when people are silent. In another sense, it’s a it’s a horror film. I mean, I do not mean that glibly. It is, as Susan says, extremely hard to watch. What did you take away from the experience?

S1: Yeah, there are definitely scenes, you know, where I felt I had to cover my eyes and then where I reprimanded myself, recovering my eyes, because at this exact moment in time, that seems like the wrong response. But boy, did I want to cover my eyes nonetheless. And and that’s part of the argument that the film is making to, you know, the one particular scene, a scene in which she does attempt to get an abortion with a local abortionist in her town she lives in Angouleme is shot in like one, basically long four and a half minute take the entire thing. And that’s an argument by a director that if a person cannot remove themself from the situation the way and cannot, we as viewers owe it to her to watch the whole time. And that’s a difficult thing to do. At the same time, I was really taken with the way that this movie. Complicated her situation. I mean, it very rigorously isolates her. As Dana said, you know, she has her best friends who are, you know, also for their time somewhat open about sexuality, even if they’re even if, you know, one of them is a self-professed virgin flirt. You know, when she tells them, when she finally reveals to them that she’s pregnant, they abandoned her for the most part. Every time she asks for help from anyone, she’s rebuffed. A male classmate who she tells about it immediately puts the moves on her, tells her, Oh, well, we should have sex now because now it’s safe because you’re pregnant. But I was also, you know, fascinated by the way the movie complicates it a little bit and does things with this story that I think no American version of the story would do. You talked about the harshness of it being particularly French, the stuff that seemed particularly French about it to me, for example, were, you know, the the moment that it gives her to actually enjoy sex with the hunky local fireman in the midst of this crisis or the the firm belief that the movie holds that even a young person’s vague sense that maybe they want to be a writer someday is a future that’s totally worth protecting. That seemed like the parts, the versions of the story that you wouldn’t necessarily see in an American version of this that that this life of the mind that she is so desperate to claim and that that she loses during the period that she’s pregnant, is in particular, a life worth protecting.

S2: Heather, this movie presents a curious challenge. It’s it’s built around a message that is meant to hit the viewer like a kind of a fist. And it does. And and I think we should be grateful for the movie smacking us out of whatever complacency we could possibly have left about this subject.

S4: That makes it hard to.

S2: Judge as a movie, doesn’t it?

S3: Yes, I think it does. There are parts that are very hard to watch. So I was thinking about whether I like this movie, and I have to say I don’t think I want to watch it again or I wouldn’t want to. It was just to the body horror, even when you’re not seeing things specifically, just the look of anguish on this person’s face as she’s trying to end her own pregnancy. That scene was just so hard to watch. So it does make it hard to judge. I think it made me think about my relationship with movies in general. Do I? What is it about a movie being hard to watch, even if valuable? That makes me think I’m not sure what to do with this. So that has made me think of something that I’ve been experiencing in this past week so extremely, which is there’s this feeling that you get as somebody who is trying to make something that is creative or that that means something that taps into the human experience in some way where you don’t just want people to say, Oh, this is important, like this is urgent, this is timely, this is on the nose. And when I’ve been living with the characters in my show and trying to think of them as complete humans who who brush up against this subject and interact with it. And I think that that’s one of the reasons why the way that Dan was explaining the specific Frenchness of the film, that was something that I appreciated here so much, is that Anne was not a woman who had to get an abortion and was a woman with goals. And I felt that that was the dominant thing that like her grit and determination and the reason why she was doing it felt so clear to me and I think helped transcend that issue.

S5: Of.

S3: This is a film that we all have to suffer through because we have to prove that this is important.

S5: Like it.

S3: Conveyed the Y a bit for.

S2: Me. Yeah. And I would add to that very quickly. I mean, it’s also it’s also in its way of buildings, Roman Rite, the old novel that tells the story of typically young man of literary promise who has to mature in some, you know, sort of internally self developing way in order to become the person who could write the book that you’ve just read. Right. And she’s a young woman of that kind of literary promise who in order to retain her promising future as her own, which her own talents have made a kind of expectation and right for her, she has to go through a different struggle and external struggle against a, you know, pervasively sexually hypocritical and patriarchal society in order to come out the person who can write the book. This is based on a memoir is in some sense of buildings. ROMAN But about a, you know, it transcended whatever status it may or may not have as an issue movie by a lot. I thought it was really about what it’s like to not already be in all of the preexisting privileged categories, i.e. white, male, ostensibly heterosexual, middle class or whatever, so that your struggle is purely an internal, spiritual or aesthetic one. It says no. Actually, other people want that feat to they want the right to tell their own story in in a literary format. But their struggle is against, you know, highly, highly external forces of of denial and suppression. I thought that made it both things at once. And that’s why I think it’s a beautiful, beautifully realized film. In addition to a necessary kick in the teeth.

S3: One moment in the film that really surprised me the most. I kind of, you know, going into it, kind of what what you’re going to see. And the thing that surprised me there is that the the film starts not with the sex that leads to the pregnancy, but you kind of get the sense that it might because like, I think in the very beginning, they’re all getting ready to go out. And it’s only later when she, you know, pulls down her underwear and writes in her journal, like, still nothing, exclamation mark. I actually thought that that was kind of one of the absolutely most profound moments of of the whole movie. And the reason why is because it illustrates something that I think every single woman has experienced in their life that hasn’t necessarily had the the. Extreme trauma. The end goes through later in that movie. And the reason for that is because one of the things that I’ve been doing when I’ve been interviewing women who, you know, were alive and sexually active in many cases.

S5: Before.

S3: Roe is, I’ve asked them all if they’ve had an experience with abortion, with illegal abortion, with legal abortion. And so many of them have said, no, I haven’t. I haven’t had to have an abortion. But every single person has said every single woman has said. But there was a moment where I thought that I might need to think about it. And so it was that moment where, well, you’re not sure what has happened to her yet that I thought was just so profoundly relatable.

S2: All right, Susan, before we go, give us just a little a little teaser, a little preview of the upcoming season of Slow Burn.

S3: Sure. The episode I’m working on today is about Shirley Wheeler. And I just want to note for listeners, if you look at the slow burn art, the woman in the photo now, that is Shirley Wheeler. And there’s something very defiant about that photograph that I love. She is the first woman to ever be convicted of manslaughter for getting an abortion. And we are telling her story in the first episode. I think it has a lot of resonance with what we’re worried about, what might happen, you know, after this gin.

S2: All right. Well, Susan Matthews, as Slate’s news director, she’s the host of the upcoming season of Slow Burn, which clearly we should all listen to. We’ll have you back when that drops on June 1st.

S3: Thanks so much and feel better, Steve.

S2: Thank you. Take care. All right. Before we go any further, this is typically where we talk business. We don’t have Dana, but we do have Dan. Dan, what do you got?

S1: Thank you, Steve. Our only item of business today is to tell you about our Slate Plus segment. This week, we’re going to answer a question from a listener named Hannah. Hannah writes, Hey, Slate Culture Gabfest. My question is what movies, TV shows, books are. Culture helped you imagine or shape your idea of people in their forties or fifties? When I was young, I fantasized about living lives like the people in reality bites, walking and talking or TV shows like Friends. I feel like I do not have the same cultural models for being an adult in my forties or fifties. That’s a great question. We have a lot of great answers for Hanna about culture. That does teach us a little bit about how it doesn’t necessarily suck to be over the age of 40. If you’re a Slate Plus member, you can look forward to hearing those answers later in the show. If you’re not a Slate Plus member. You can sign up today at Slate.com, slash culture plus members, get ad free podcasts and lots of bonus content, like, for example, the Slate Plus segment I just mentioned. You’ll also get to hear member’s only programming on other slate shows like Slow Burn and the Political Gabfest. Plus, members get unlimited access to all the great writing at Slate.com. You’ll never hit a paywall if you’re a Slate Plus member. I should also mention, of course, you’ll be supporting our work and the work of our brilliant colleagues, like, for example, Susan Matthews, who you already heard from on the show. These memberships are really important for Slate. So please sign up today at Slate.com, slash culture. Plus one more time that Slate.com slash culture plus. Okay. Back to you, Steve.

S2: All right. The new comedy on HBO, Our Flag means Death stars Rhys Darby as Steed Bonnet, a pampered 18th century English aristocrat who decides to chuck his cushy life and head to the high seas. There he heads up a merry band of misfits, and that sets up early and often a running joke of Captain Barnett’s attempt to cure himself of foppish ness. He’s trying to learn to be ruthless, violent, nomadic. As counter posed with his attempt to soften and civilize his crew by encouraging them to share their feelings and reading them bedtime stories. The show is just filled with all kinds of strange and kind of wonderful whimsy. It also stars Taika Waititi, his black beard. In this he produces and directs and amply on display. Here is his method, as we saw in Jojo Rabbit and what we do in the shadows to totally turn traditional masculinity on its head. Let’s let’s listen to a clip. And we’re about to hear Captain Barnet as he tries to prove that he’s a tough, a manly leader.

S4: Now listen up. I gather some of you feel as though we’re not real pirates. Well, here’s the deal, Buchholz. We have our eyes on a ship. A big one. That’s right. A whopper. And we’re going to catch up with it forthwith. And kick it toss. So any questions? Is it really a big ship this time? Yes, I just said. I’m not asking you. I’m asking him. She was quite impressive. I can relate it on fire. I’d be disappointed if we didn’t. Yes. You have a right to do that. We go to certain that we go. Our one hope being that a certain that been slow swords and sharp turn up our knives and head full sail work the ending of our lives. Well, I think that worked well. All right. They do seem less inclined to model than captain.

S2: The singing that you hear is the actor Joel Fry plays one of the pirates and he’s got some kind of a, you know, late renaissance musical instrument. And he sings these hilariously inapt songs to the crew. Dan, this is this is a.

S4: Strong.

S2: Mix of and maybe unusual mix of flavors. How did it how did it strike you?

S1: Well, it starts in a very familiar mode to people who have, you know, followed Taika Waititi’s career. It’s basically what we do in the shadows. But with pirates, right. It’s a very familiar, familiar cultural trope, something we’ve seen in a million. Like, you know, boys stories and and wire novels. But as performed by incompetents, right. The vampires. And what we do in the shadows are actually quite bad at being vampires. These pirates are they are totally incompetent at being pirates. That is the charm. That is the whimsy. And the whimsy is nearly on overload in the first episode or two of the show. But as you say, there’s a real mix of things happening in here because the show evolves over the course of its ten episodes into something totally different, into not to spoil too much, into a kind of romance that I found quite surprising and delightful. And that, I think, is where the show ascends to a point a little more interesting than a lot of taker’s recent work, its willingness to transform itself on the fly, which seems less due to Waititi and more due to the creator David Jenkins, whose brainchild this series is and who wrote most of the episodes the make up this first season. I really liked it a lot and I liked it despite feeling that the very first episode felt just a tiny bit like, Oh, I’ve seen this from Taika about a hundred times before because it really veers right in a way I didn’t expect at all.

S2: Hmm. Heather, I’m curious. There’s a lot to get through before you get to this turning point that most critics have identified. I think it’s episode four, if I’m not mistaken, where Blackbeard appears as played by Waititi. What what do you make of it?

S3: I had a really hard time getting into this. I was excited for it. I’ve I’ve started what we do in the shadows and found it funny. And but I just thought this was kind of like, okay, like amusing. But, you know, I the first episode I was not excited about and really the next few either I really think I would not have kept watching had I not read, you know, it gets good. So I thought it would be great if it could have gotten good right away. But hey, you know, I, I having watched four or five episodes, I’m sure the last half of the season is as great as I’ve read. But I kind of felt like I, you know, I’ve kind of seen this before. I don’t think this is the best version of it. This this sort of gang of incompetence, you know, and the the historical setting. I don’t know. I just wasn’t into it. So and I feel bad about that because it’s such a sensation and everything.

S4: Yet then I what here’s what.

S2: Surprises me is, first of all, how how huge hit it’s been, how by and large, critically acclaimed it’s been. And then on First Encounter with the show, I had almost a skin reaction to it. I said, this is just brutally unfunny. And it I kind of found myself slogging through it and I stuck I stuck it out through three episodes and didn’t make it to the turning point because I think that that’s a huge ask. Is that common to have 40% of the show go by before you get to the defining, you know, I mean, not just sort of reveal or a plot point or, you know, whatever.

S1: Not a twist. You know, it’s like the whole it’s what the show is.

S4: It’s the show. And it does feel as.

S2: Though two very large creative talents maybe wrestled with one another, amicably or otherwise, about what the nature of the show is or should be. And one kind of got his way for the tone and the set up and the other got his way for the, you know, heart and meat of it in some sense. I think that’s a huge ask in the age of streaming of ten episodes. But you’re going to have to get four to get to the the beating heart of it. I couldn’t I have to confess, I found it so aggressively overplayed and unfunny, I couldn’t get there.

S3: I just think that the streaming. Question is interesting because if we think about some, you know, really acclaimed shows from the past, you know, 20 years, you look at season one of the office was not that great and we gave it time to to get good. So this show, you know, it if it only takes a few episodes to get good that’s great but we are metabolisms are so different now that that it it seems like well I have to watch three episodes for for it to get good or it seems like maybe it will be better if, if the show has hasn’t been renewed for a second season yet. But if it goes on to have this great second season, then maybe people want to will want to watch other people like us who aren’t that into it and and go back and, and like appreciate it more. But it’s it’s just an interesting question of today’s TV model.

S2: Yeah. Now, Dan is the person who really stuck with it, I presume, all the way or most of the way through. I’d love to talk to you about how many people watched this, not knowing whether the show would have the courage of its apparent convictions that it was going to. You know, I read one description is possibly kind of queer bait the reader, with this idea that a fully realized gay relationship might be at the heart of it, but might not be. And they might pull that away. They might hint at it. They might have their cake and eat it, too. But and that actually created it sounds like an enormous amount of suspense. What what precisely is this relationship? Is it going to remain only subtly hinted at sort of beneath the surface subtextual, or are they going to really have the courage to to go there? And it sounds as though, eh, that that worked as a as a suspenseful device. So maybe the choice actually to front load with whimsy and back load with heart or feeling wasn’t such a bad one. And B, it does sound as though it has the courage of its convictions not to give anything away.

S1: It really does. And and I would say that basically the turning point is it’s actually really episode five, honestly, where you finally begin to see, oh, this is a show about a potential love affair between these two guys, these two main characters. I mean, I don’t feel like I feel like in this case, quasi spoiling it is in fact, not a disservice to the listener because this is what the show is leading up to. And if you go into it knowing that this is what it’s leading up to, I think you’re more likely to make it this far. But the show is a romance between Steve Bonnet and Blackbeard. It’s about their burgeoning relationship versus their friendship, and then a romantic connection. And in episode five, they have their first sort of romantic comedy moment of real connection in front of a beautiful full moon of, you know, on the sea. That happens after a big cosmic conflagration that has to do with their differing social statuses, with Blackbeard’s roughness but desire to become an aristocrat and Steve Bonnet’s knowledge of the aristocracy and his wish to actually give it all up in favor of being a pirate. And it does have the courage of its convictions. And I think people have really connected to it for a couple of reasons. And one is simply that the show reminded me, as I was watching it, of two recurrent complaints that I often see on social media from people who are fans of particular genres of literature, TV, movies, etc.. One is people begging creators of queer stories to make a story that isn’t just teen boys finding their first love. Like, those are great, but that’s like 80% of of queer media at this point is adorable stories of teen boys finding their first love. And then the other, which is made most recently just a couple of days ago by beloved former first aid kit. Host Nichole Perkins is for love stories, romances featuring people over 35, featuring people who are not like young and beautiful, but who are who have some miles on them. And as it happens, our flag means death hits both of those spots. It fills both of those very unfilled niches at once in a way that is surprising and satisfying. And and often, I think because I have a higher tolerance for Waititi and whimsy than you guys, often also quite funny.

S2: Heather I have to say, listening to Dan Kois on this podcast, I’m going to return to this the show and watch it till the final episode. What about you? You convinced?

S3: Hmm. I’m really not sure. I do think I want to watch it. I tend to be a completist.

S1: And I mean, you are Slate’s romantic comedy guru, so I really want to know what you think of it.

S3: Yeah, well, I think one point you made, and this was also sort of spoken about in some of the reading we did for this show is now when you watch a romantic comedy between, you know, a man and a woman, it’s so telegraphed like, you know, if you see a certain glance, you know, oh, it’s on. So it it’s interesting. In a queer love story after so many years of of queer baiting or sort of these shows and movies not being willing to go there, that it becomes that a different sort of suspense of, you know, is this actually going to happen? And that that does add an interesting element to it that that I would like to see more. And, you know, there are also other relationships, queer relationships. So obviously, as as a romance romcom person, you know, there are other stories. I don’t know what happens with two. So, yeah, maybe I do need to watch the rest.

S2: All right. Well, the show is Our Flag Means Death. It’s on HBO. Heather and I wobbled on it. Dan convinced me. Why don’t you check it out and shoot us an email? All right, moving on. All right. Well, in 1962, Marilyn Monroe sang a breathless happy birthday to John F Kennedy, her paramour and our president. The dress she was wearing has been preserved. It was worn recently to the Met gala by none other than Kim Kardashian. This outraged some people, preservationists and various others. Before we get to that, though, why don’t we listen to Kim herself describe what it was like to get into the dress?

S6: I had this idea to put it on and try it on and then. They came with, like armed guards and gloves, and I tried it on. It didn’t fit me. And so I looked at them and I said, give me like three weeks. And I had to lose £16 down today to to be able to fit this. But I it was such a challenge. It was like a role, right? I was getting hurt, man. Yeah. I was determined to win it. Put your mind to something. There’s no. You were like eating tomatoes. I don’t think they believe me. I don’t think they believe that I was going to do it.

S2: Mm. Okay. Well, we’re joined by Julia. I hope you’re okay with this. I described you up top as as our sartorial conscience here on the Slate culture.

S5: Gabfest love it. Going to make business cards awesome.

S2: You’re willing to wear it? I love it. Well, welcome to the show. How you doing?

S5: I’m doing well. Thanks for holding down the fort this week and having me on for breaking culture, fashion, new.

S2: Fun all around.

S5: Old, old culture, fashion news that we are excited to still talk about because we are so passionate about it. And by we, I mean me.

S2: Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, let your take your passion and and make it happen. Tell me about why this is interesting to us.

S5: Well, I mean, what seems most interesting off of that clip I will have to acknowledge is just like the demented culture in which we, like, award women for their hustle and hard work for attempting to drop £16 in three weeks through a diet of tomatoes. Like just heads up that that is bullshit and probably more fundamental bullshit that fucks up more women and people in this world than anything that Kim did to the dress. So just stipulated. But when I heard this news, I was incredulous because my I spent a year in college interning at a costume and textile department at the Christie Museum, which was an incredible job, such a privilege, so cool to be in this like beautiful, temperature controlled, underground lair that was basically like a massive closet with these rolling library shelves where they had everything from swaths of linen from the Valley of the Kings to like weird little pointy curly shoes from the 1600s to like fabulous dresses from the forties. And I definitely was not allowed to even fucking touch a thread the whole summer. And even the two women who ran it, the curators like, you know, tried to touch the garments as little as possible, did so with gloves on, like brought them out once to assess what the show would be, put them away, did all their preparation, brought them back out to install like nobody’s, you know, it wasn’t like every afternoon at four for the coffee break, we were like, Let’s try on the stuff from the 1870s. Today, it’s just like, not what you do. This gala, this met gala is to raise money for the Costume Institute, which is an institution like devoted to the preservation of historic garments. Right. So the whole thing seemed insane. And two wonderful reporters on our team at the L.A. Times, Nadine Saade and Deb Vink, and, you know, had considered one of their editors, had considered assigning something in the morning and decided who else is interested in this crazy dress thing? And then I was like, what’s going on with this crazy dress thing? And they were like, You know what? If we’re all interested, let’s let’s go check it out and see what happened. And they reported a really interesting throw story that revealed what had happened, which is that this dress is not owned by a museum. It is owned by Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which is sort of a Madame Tussaud’s type non curatorial entertainment company that, you know, seemingly does not abide by the curatorial practices of costume historians, which their reporting taught me revealed that like it’s actually only since the 1980s or nineties that curators have widely agreed that allowing people to wear important, historic dress is to be avoided because it can damage the curtains, the garments, and it’s just like not something people do. And so, you know, I was horrified. They were horrified. What I’m interested, you know, I also, like admire Kim’s hustle. Like the task of dressing for the Met gala, I think is all about like having the most ambitious, crazy idea and like, points, right? Like, this is a good idea separate from that for how to, like, make a splash and have a good story at the Met gala about what your look is. But so am I alone? Does my question was my brain broken by my summer with the curators? And should there in fact be a prohibition on historic garments? Or is it like, why not? Museum didn’t buy it. Fair market totally allowed. Go for it. Kim. Drop those pounds like use that binder clip where I stole to hide the part where it doesn’t zip damaged some some sequins and souffle. Go for it. Like, am I crazy? This is my question to you.

S3: I think not having spent a summer working with historic garments, my initial reaction was not, That’s insane, how dare she? But when I saw the reporting about fashion archivists and historians not being happy with this, I wasn’t surprised. At first I was like, Oh, of course. I mean, they hate everything.

S1: Killjoys.

S3: Kim does, right? They’re going to find a way to criticize her. And I think having read about it more, no, she had should not have been allowed to wear this, but also who could have stopped her? I think that’s sort of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not aspect of it is really interesting. So they bought this dress for $4.8 million a few years ago, and they have it in one of their, quote unquote, museums that are not actually museums. And, you know, it it does make sense. You know, they bought it to get attention. So it does make sense that they would lend it out to her. I, I guess there’s some someone along the way I guess should have stopped this. But it’s interesting to me to know that actually there are no real rules to stop this. One other thing, though, is I’m going to sound dumb saying this, but is this that famous the dress? Did you guys know about this dress?

S2: Oh, I am seconding you on that. So.

S4: Okay. Holy shit. I mean, it’s. It’s like, how how weirdly.

S2: Self-Serious we’ve gotten around the history of kind of. I don’t know, like, I don’t know, pop culture. I mean, I’m went to talk, I host this fucking podcast, but still it’s it’s like historic. Is this really that historic, this kind of peculiar moment that I mean.

S4: Yeah, I guess the way I put it.

S2: Then is are these are we dealing with a travesty or a total continuity. Right. That Monroe hyper sexualizing herself to a man who virtually did nothing but I mean abuse might be strong, but he did not treat her with much respect. I mean, treated her as sexually instrumental. Right. And singing that song, it’s like, why is that a historical moment? I mean, I think there’s a reason why, like, this thing is not in the Smithsonian but in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, you know? And so I, I just I think if there’s some kind of a continuity between that moment and the kind of, you know, attention economy that’s elevated of all people, Kim Kardashian to, you know, the pinnacle.

S1: Oh, absolutely. There’s more continuity. This is the tackiest of artifacts, one of the tackiest moments in American history. And it absolutely deserves to be worn again at a modern day celebration of the ghost. Right. That is the the ideal use for this garment is to be worn again at the Met Gala in the year 2022, far better. That’s for it to serve that purpose than for it to be in a museum or, you know, be it. Certainly the Smithsonian wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole for the exact reasons you say, I love this and I love that she wore it. I mean, yes, as you as stipulated, Julia, the actual demented convolution she claims to have gone through to do it represented everything wrong with American society. But the fact that she wore it represents everything right? With the downfall and decline of American society and the way it provides incredible, complicated eye candy for the rest of us to enjoy as society goes to the shit.

S4: Oh, my God.

S2: Nero at this fucking fiddle.

S4: Oh. Oh, shit.

S2: How did we get there?

S5: Oh, man, what a nihilistic. I mean, I guess, like, yes, I align myself with the Killjoys in this, if not in all things, but what part of what it is made me think about and part of why I thought it was worth talking about a week later is like it was interesting to work in a costume and like to think about costume and textile history. And I think probably a related set of curatorial work is like the furniture rooms, you know, when you go to a museum and it’s like fancy little chairs with gold on the edges, right? Like those are not my favorite rooms as a kid. They like are my favorite rooms as a grown up probably, but. You know, this this type of work that is about preserving artifacts that are decorative, fundamentally decorative objects, right? Not intended as like capital a art. And like, what is that kind of academic work about and how important is it? I mean, I hear you about the tackiness as well, but the writer, I’m Emma Forrest, posted an observation on Instagram that I thought was really astute, which is that part of what seems so jarring about the moment is that what was interesting about Marilyn Monroe and tragic about her at that moment was just that she was this American avatar of vulnerability. Like, she was so raw. She was so tender. She, you know, she wore this at a very dark time in her life before she was.

S1: Totally without agency at that.

S5: Met a dark and and like Kim Kardashian, God bless her, is like the absolute opposite of vulnerable. Like, in fact, they are incredibly different avatars of femininity, incredibly different women. And, you know, like, it is hard to tell how much the like power and potency and seeming and invulnerability of Kim Kardashian is in fact like a hard carapace constructed to preserve selfhood in a world where her mother has been like farming her out and building her career her whole life. And perhaps there is some marshmallow vulnerable core at the center of it, desperately serving tomatoes. But like. The supposed consonance between these two women is actually really discordant. And I thought just that point about vulnerability was really interesting. But I don’t know. I mean, I guess just the bigger question I have for you guys, like I think it’s fascinating to preserve these kind of decorative objects that are not capital art, that don’t have the machismo of like the male ego pronouncing on the world. For the most part, yes, there is some art made by women in museums, but it’s a little scanty. And the kind of ways in which the beauty of the world and the craft and technique of human history is applied towards objects for home and body is a place where art for women and often art by women exists. And so there’s a part of me that feels like, fuck that about sneering at the idea that preserving that art in artistry is lame.

S1: I am curious. First of all, I hope that future generations will argue about someone wearing the constructed hard carapace of Kim Kardashian to a met gala.

S5: That’s what I’ll wear if I ever go. Yeah.

S1: But also, I don’t think that what I. What I sneer at is the idea of recognizing these objects. But, you know, you mentioned the rooms of decorative arts and various museums, which has, as many parents now, are often the the least favorite rooms of their kids. And maybe I’ll describe to my kids the process of becoming an adult, the process of learning to enjoy those rooms. But those items aren’t merely decorative in this dress isn’t merely decorative, those chairs and chaise longues and whatever. And this dress were also functional in a way that visual art is not explicitly functional. And so what I always view as the real tragedy of those rooms would that are filled with furniture and stuff is that you fucking can’t sit on it. I think you should sit on it. And they’re extremely repairable. They’re extremely you can put sequins back on this dress. You can you can set up a seam that splits on a chaise longue.

S5: What about the delicate soufflé fabric, Dan? But continue.

S4: But, I.

S1: Mean, if the way to recognize these objects is not to merely observe them under glass, but to utilize them in some way, that is similar but but inevitably different because we live in a different era than the way they were utilized at the time. And so that is what is frustrating to me about this, the idea that this artifact, which is also not only an artifact, but an object that was used for specific purposes, should no longer ever be used for those purposes whatsoever. That seems like a bummer to me, and I recognize that there’s a conflict between the need that you have on a historical basis for this thing to be available, for people to see for as long as humanly possible until the heat death of the universe or until Orlando Burns. But I also think how much more worthwhile would it be for the experience of interacting with these kinds of objects to be more in the you see Kim Kardashian wearing it at the Met gala mold than in the it’s in Iraq in a basement where only the curators can see it and no one’s allowed to touch.

S2: Mm hmm. All right. You’re going to draw that line somewhere, though. You’re not going to have, like, the top hat Lincoln was wearing at the Booth Theater, you know, Parade.

S1: I want to fucking wear that from.

S4: Above, but. Yeah, all right. I can’t give the Kois.

S2: The last word here. Heather, you wrote the article about this. Where do you come out?

S3: I think I’m with Julia in that as we meet, these garments need to be protected. I mean, there was so much written in these pieces about how just like a bead of sweat could could damage the integrity of the dress. So I think I sort of like the argument that they should be worn, we should be sitting on those couches, but it’s just not realistic. Yeah. And I hope Ripley’s is, you know, walking a fine line in that they want to protect this dress enough for it to still be valuable and for them to be able to display it. So they’re not going to lend it out to just anyone. And I think you have to be a Kim Kardashian. So I think even they realize that, okay, this this was worth doing for us for this one stunt, but we can’t be lending this dress out all the time.

S2: Mm. Okay. Well, Julia, up top, I didn’t say you’re the deputy managing editor of the L.A. Times. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day. This was really fun. This was cool.

S5: Thank you, guys, for indulging my interest in this topic and my interest in whether I’m completely fucking wrong about this topic. Always a pleasure.

S2: Right now is the moment in our podcast and we endorse Dan. What do you have?

S1: I am endorsing a novel that came out in January that I think got somewhat overlooked, though it got a lot of good reviews. It’s called Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein. It is a contemporary novel about a wannabe writer, in fact, a wannabe novelist who stumbles on the story of a lifetime. Turns it into the season’s hot novel and then is confronted with the results of the story that he took. It’s a very funny, very inside baseball, very contemporary novel about a very bad art friend. I found it as totally entertaining as the big novel of last year on similar themes, which was the plot by Jean and relates. But the difference is that this one is actually believable. And I absolutely loved it. It’s a total delight. I hit it up.

S2: Oh, very cool. Heather, what about you?

S3: I want to endorse a refrigerated dessert called Hershey’s Colliders. So I know refrigerated dessert sounds vague, and it is kind of hard to describe these. I guess the thing they’re most like is a pudding, and you can find them near the pudding in a grocery store, but they’re not quite pudding. So a collider consists of two parts. One part is this like pudding. Like part. But it’s better than putting, in my opinion, that the vanilla is sort of like a custard or soft serve ice cream. And then the other part is the topping, which can be something like Reese’s or Kit-Kat. Beth So if you’re familiar with Chobani Flip, a collider is sort of like that, but not yogurt. They come in a bunch of varieties, but I would say the s’mores one is my favorite and I wanted to endorse these because I’ve never heard anyone else talk about them. So it’s this uncanny thing where I’m curious, you know, am I the only one who loves the who loves these? And I’m slightly worried. Does that mean they’re unpopular and are going to be discontinued? So I wanted to get the word out, but I also think they’re just really good. And I’m yearning to find the community of fellow Hershey’s Colliders lovers out there if it exists. So please go buy a Hershey’s collider and tell me what you think.

S1: I’m absolutely going to buy one. I’m looking at it now. I love Chobani flips, but often worry that they seem too healthy. So this seems like a great option for a person like me.

S3: You’ve got it. Exactly.

S2: Yeah, I love it. All right. Well, I’m whole, whole heartedly pound the table endorsing the 2000 to Brazilian film City of God. I meant to see it when it came out or near the time that it came out. And for some reason, it sort of disappeared from consciousness until I was flying over and I couldn’t sleep. And it happened to be one of the movies they had on unedited the entire thing. I finally saw it. It is a masterpiece. Oh, my God. It’s it’s a crime epic crime story in one of the Rio de Janeiro taking place in one of the Rio slums. It arcs over several decades. It has a highly original storytelling style. It’s visually arresting, incredible acting. It is just anyone seen it? City of God.

S1: Yeah, that movie is fucking great.

S2: Yeah, it’s just an unreal achievement. I hope people, if you have seen it, please email me and tell me I’m right. If you haven’t, please watch it and, you know, affirm for me that it’s just a revelation. It’s a it’s a tremendous movie. All right. Well, Heather, thank you so much for joining us.

S3: Thank you for having me.

S2: Yeah, really, really good show, Dan. Always a pleasure. And I’m sure you’ll come back soon.

S1: I’ll see you soon, I’m sure.

S2: Excellent. You’ll find links to some of the things we talked about today on our show page. That’s Slate.com slash Culturefest. And you can email us at Culturefest at Slate.com. We do love getting emails. I really mean it. We try to respond. Our intro music is by the composer Nicholas Patel. Our production assistant is Nadira Goffe. Our producer is Cameron Drews for Heather Schwedel and Dan Kois on Stephen Metcalf. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you soon.

S1: Hello and welcome to the Slate Plus segment of the Culture Gabfest or as it’s known on the Culture Gabfest slot. Plus, today, we’re going to answer a listener question e-mailed in to the Slate Culture Gabfest email address, which is Steve.

S2: That’s Culturefest at Slate.com. Dan.

S1: We love getting questions here. We love addressing them, especially in our plus segments today. A listener writes in Hey Slate Culture Gabfest. My question is what movies, TV shows, books or culture helped you imagine or shape your idea of people in their forties or fifties? When I was young, I grew up in a fly over place where most people married high school sweethearts, started families in their twenties, took over their parents farms. I fantasized about an alternate way of being in my twenties and thirties through movies like Reality Bites, Walking and Talking and TV shows like Friends. I feel I do not have the same cultural models for being an adult in my forties or fifties unless I want my identity to solely be as the parent, coach or teacher. Great question. It made me think a lot and made me think how rare such cultural artifacts are in contemporary culture. So I’m curious what you guys have to say. Heather, let’s start with you.

S3: This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’m in my thirties and I don’t know, it’s it’s really scary thinking about your forties and fifties for me as a single person who I don’t know if I will stay single, I don’t know if I will have children, but particularly imagining what might look like to be an unmarried woman without children in my forties and fifties, I’m just really not sure and I that I wish that weren’t such a scary thing. But it is. So I’m curious to hear both of your answers. For me, what I came up with is I really like reading the writer Sarah Miller. She’s an essayist and she writes all over the place, but I guess you can often find her on her. Substack at the real Sarah Miller dot substack dot com. And she recently wrote a piece called Own Your Age or Just Rent, which is about being a 52 year old woman and just sort of the reaction that inspires in people. And I think she’s written a lot of interesting things specifically about womanhood at these ages and how people react to you, but also being a writer and just what it’s like to get old, it it makes it slightly less scary to me, but I’m always looking for more.

S1: She wrote a really great piece about having a younger boyfriend, right?

S3: Yes, I think so.

S1: Darkness on the edge of Cougar Town. That was a really.

S3: Terrific.

S1: Piece and very apropos to this question for sure. Steve, what about you?

S2: Okay. Well, I’m going to give you two answers. The the answer the question, while also sort of coyly skirting it. The first is I’m you know, I burned through my forties already and I’m a frighteningly large proportion of my fifties have been burned through, too. So for me, I’m look only looking forward now. I saw a movie, I think now almost ten years ago that floored me, if only for how much it flattered the male egos ability to think of itself as persisting through every conceivable decade of one’s life, mostly intact or mostly uninjured. And that was the Italian film The Great Beauty. You guys remember this one?

S1: Yeah. Sorrentino Right.

S2: Yeah, exactly. And it follows this journalist in his mid sixties who’s approaching retirement and just has filled with so much sensuality and life and, and, and also has a, you know, af attitude to the help. One immediately has to act out, of course, that this this is as I construct my answer and then as the film does it’s this is totally about how a certain kind of, you know, whatever, I mean, quasi patriarchal or white male privilege just can keep men going in their bad habits, you know, decade after decade. Nonetheless, it was narcotic for suggesting that well into one sixties, one is still a creature of of life and all of its, you know, weird ambiguities.

S1: And and Steve, something must keep us going in our advanced years. But thank God we’ve got that right.

S2: Delusive Italian movies. Right. And then and and then the other one is kind of any Gene Hackman movie he made starting in roughly 1980 when he entered this age cohort. I mean.

S4: Every every one.

S2: Of them, you’re like, I just I.

S4: I. I want to be that.

S2: Guy, whether he’s like planning a heist or a super villain or the president of the United States or whatever, I get you know, I do have a specific one in mind, but I mean, just sort of the range of characters. You’re like, got Gene Hackman made. Being a middle aged man appear like the absolute freaking apotheosis of life. Right? There’s no decline about it at all. It’s just the fullness of yourself, of it, you know, only begins to hit you as you hit 42 or something, and then it stays until you’re like mid seventies or something if you’re Gene Hackman. But the one I remember, I just wonder if anyone remembers he has a I don’t know that it’s quite a cameo. He’s there for a few key scenes. And the Meryl Streep picture Postcards from the Edge where yeah yeah he just is. So he’s he’s he also made you think that you could become a mature, fully ripened, human, self-reflective, human being in Hollywood, you know.

S1: And he also by staying as far away from Hollywood as possible, except for when they called him to do a movie.

S2: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And he’s just.

S4: The.

S2: Terrific voice of like centeredness and wisdom, which this character based on, you know, famously based on Carrie Fisher, just desperately needs at this moment in her life. And I just thought, oh, my God, I can’t. It’s like I might as well go, you know, hope I was, you know, Iron Man or Derek Jeter, but I can’t help it. It works. I’m like, that’s oh, that’s so captivating.

S1: Heather, have you seen Postcards from the Edge?

S3: No, I haven’t.

S1: The movie was grown in a lab for you to love it. I’m here to tell you right now.

S4: And an underrated a.

S2: Really underrated Mike Nichols joint. It’s a yeah. That’s a that’s a good movie.

S1: Yeah. I’ve got two. And the first one came from the the email was mention of walking and talking, which is later Nicole Holofcener movie Enough Said, which came out maybe seven or eight years ago, is James Gandolfini his final film? In fact, he died before it was released. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini, as are people basically my age now at crossroads in their lives. They are parents, they are partners. They in fact, the movie is about their flirtation and romance. But but they’re also and they have jobs. And we hear about those jobs. But they were they’re really just people trying to figure out what it means to be this age and have a what seems like a sort of foreshortened set of options, but then have a bunch of other options present themselves to you unexpectedly. And then, you know, the the answer that immediately came to mind, which is a little bit of a cheat for for people. Exactly. My age is Linklater’s before trilogy because those characters for me at least have the benefit of being essentially the exact same age as me in whatever a movie or really actually maybe two years older than me. And so whenever a movie comes out, those characters are exactly where I can maybe expect to find myself two years from now, although I probably won’t be on an island in Greece. But so both of these examples aren’t exactly aspirational, you know, in the way that the the the letter writer suggests, you know, I’m not watching these movies thinking, oh, I want to live these people’s lives because the characters are recognizably dissatisfied and fucked up in ways that make sense to me. But I find them both very heartening as I get older, and that the characters do exist not only as parents or partners or workers, but as full human beings who are wrestling with a lot of the same things I am wrestling with, but also look beautiful while doing it as I aspire to eventually do so. I really love both that that trilogy and the whole scene or movie there. I think great works of art and also I think a truly rare thing, something that a piece of, especially a Hollywood entertainment that is about people this age, that is not about the fear and horror of being this age, but it’s just about living and trying to get by.

S3: I love enough said. That’s that’s such a great one.

S2: All right. Well, is the Ancient Mariner on the panel? Here’s here’s the thing that I’ll say, which is that, you know, it could be that wisdom is this like, you know, highly compensatory delusion that we tell ourselves we suddenly have in abundance as we get older, when all it represents is loss of fill in the blank vitality of some kind. But I would I would put it slightly differently. I would say that every life is characterized by its own special set of delusions, right and coping mechanisms. And as delusions and coping mechanisms go, being settled into yourself and no longer existing on the horizon. But, you know, being where you are is actually a remarkable abundance, you know, and it is kind of great in a way. And I think a youth centered culture, which we’ve had since arguably the fifties, certainly the sixties, too often doesn’t allow itself to find, you know, beauty or interest in that. So I thought this was a great topic and it was grateful to hear what you guys had to say.

S1: Every time anyone says something like, Oh, I never thought that, you know, that life began at 55. But then when I hit it, I understood, Oh, it really does. I’ve always assumed, Oh, that’s just someone who’s sad that they’re 55 spent on it. Yeah. But then every time I hit a new age, I’m like, Oh, this. There are actually compensations to the increasing decrepitude of my body. Like other things, happy things happening in my life and other things that my age and experience allow me to attempt and accomplish. That has been a pleasure to find out and is reflected, I think, in these.

S2: Absolutely. And also, there’s a reason we’re incredulous at the things we said and did when we were younger. I mean, it’s just.

S4: You know, we were like.

S2: Fuck with, you know, in some sense. And I mean, you know, you have to embrace that callow person with love and understanding, you know, or else you know, all you’re drawing from the treasure of your past is bitterness, right? Which is just a terrible thing to do. At the same.

S4: Time, I think if you aren’t cringing at your.

S2: Former selves that, you know, we’re talking decades or at least a decade in the past, something that you just really didn’t know and couldn’t see about life. I mean.

S4: It just there is.

S2: Progress there, right? There’s delusion. Yes. There’s there’s there’s solace of a maybe slightly chintzy kind, but it’s not it’s not unreal. I think that that’s part of the substance of having. The entire living, the entirety of the arc of a life.

S1: Heather, we convince you yet that it won’t entirely suck to get old.

S3: I’m not sure. I don’t know. It’s a scary question. The thing this is reminding me of. You guys are going to think I’m nuts. Is. But I have this horoscope app and it sort of tells me semi regularly. Like when you were young, you were sort of like an old person. But as you get older, you’re going to be increasingly young and. And happy and satisfied and. Oh. Sounds like a riddle to me. But I do try to keep that in mind that because I’m a Gemini moon or whatever, that I will have some sense of spirit and youth as I get older or. I don’t know, I’m. Yeah.

S1: Do you think of you as a predator? Naturally. Wise, 30 somethings. So I think you’ve got hopes. Yeah.

S3: Okay. Well, see. Thank you.

S1: All right. Well, that wraps up this week’s Slate Plus segment. Thank you to the listener who sent in that. Great question. Thank you. Dear Slate plus member for supporting Slate’s journalism. And we will talk to you next week.