Culture Gabfest “Will Elon Musk Ruin Twitter?” Edition

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Stephen Metcalf: I’m Stephen Metcalf and this is the Slate culture Gabfest Will Elon Musk Ruin Twitter Edition? It’s Wednesday, November 2nd, 2002. On today’s show, Elon Musk, the Tesla baron and world’s richest man, now owns Twitter. How will it change? What’s he going to do? What is radical free speech been? Precisely? And if it means what we think it does, should you quit or stay and fight the fight?

Stephen Metcalf: We’re going to run through it and then Aftersun all one word as UN is the new movie starring Paul Mescal, the very un manic jockey dream hunk from the Hulu Normal People adaptation. Here he plays a loving but ultimately very dark young man, a father to an 11 year old daughter on the verge of adolescence. It’s the first feature film from Charlotte Wells. And finally, Brangelina is the subject of a smashing piece of cultural reporting and criticism from Angelica Jade Bastién. She joins us to talk about it. But first, of course, I’m joined by Julia Turner, deputy managing editor of the L.A. Times. Hey, Julia.

Julia Turner: Hello. Hello, How are you?

Stephen Metcalf: Good. And, of course, Dana Stevens, who’s the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana.

Julia Turner: Hey.

Stephen Metcalf: All right, before we go any further, Julia, let me throw it to you for a couple of sentiments about the show.

Julia Turner: Yeah, I have sentiments about the show. We love doing the show. We love talking to you guys every week. We’ve been doing it now for nearly 15 years. It’ll be.

Dana Stevens: 15 years.

Julia Turner: In April, I think, which is wild. And we’re coming to you, as we periodically do, to ask you if you enjoyed this show. Please rate and review it in whatever platform you are using to listen to it. They all have different mechanisms. I think Apple is one of the biggest. Spotify is on the rise, but when you engage with and publicly profess your fandom of our show in that way, it helps more people discover the show. So please take a moment like us, professor love and listenership, and we will be eternally grateful.

Stephen Metcalf: All right. Thanks, Julia.

Stephen Metcalf: Let’s, uh, let’s make a show.

Julia Turner: Let’s do it.

Stephen Metcalf: All right, Well, one crazy saga has ended, and another begins the story of American life in general, but very much the story of Twitter. This past April, Elon Musk offered to buy the social media platform for roughly 52 bucks a share. Twitter accepted the deal by July. Musk wanted to build or ensued a you know, legal wrangling and a game of chicken that culminated in Musk buying it for 44 billion. He now owns it. Are many people believe default public square and he’s brought to it the promise of radical free speech. We’ll find out what that means.

Stephen Metcalf: But immediately he began making substantive changes, some quiet, some loud change to the homepage. I think it’s a fairly quiet one. But he fired top execs with hints of mass firings to come. There was an immediate surge in hate speech on the site, as I understand it, anti-Semitic in particular. And now Musk promises to shift to a subscription revenue stream, at least partially charging 20 bucks a month for verified status raises so many questions. Dana, I’m going to start with you, because you’re the most Twitter adept and prolific of the three of us. If nobody minds me saying you got to quit.

Dana Stevens: You know, this is such a live question to me. It’s been a while since we talked about something on the podcast that is as directly impacting my thoughts at that moment as the question of what’s going on with Twitter, what’s going to happen to it, whether to quit. In fact, yesterday my brother, who is who was only on Twitter basically to follow me, I think he has a profile that he barely uses, wrote me a long text entreating me to quit and just saying I just don’t see conscionable how anybody stays on this site. And you know that Elon Musk’s tweet about Paul Pelosi, you know, the kind of now deleted piece of it misinformation that he tweeted about that over the weekend, basically announcing, you know, here’s what I’m going to be doing with my new toy is lying on it. Right. That that alone was reason to quit the site. And anyway, he made he made a good case.

Dana Stevens: And I think that like a lot of journalists and critics I know who use the site as kind of a work space watercooler, I am hanging back and waiting to see what happens. I think the counterargument that one could make and that I sort of made to my brother while saying, you know, I’m just sort of in a holding pattern, seeing what’s going on is that desert, the site is is just to hand it over, you know, to the trolls. It’s it’s the closest thing we have to some sort of digital public square at the moment, for better and worse.

Dana Stevens: Right. And a part of me feels just personally resentful at the idea that what is essentially my my break room, you know, just gets to be taken over by Nazis and dipshits like what? They can just walk in and say this is ours now. I mean, also as far as what sort of an ethical relationship we should have to the billionaires who own, you know, everything now in the in the public sphere, that’s a pretty broad open question.

Dana Stevens: I mean, I and many other people stayed on Twitter throughout Trump’s entire administration when he was arguably doing way more to spread misinformation and lies than Elon would be capable of doing right as the president of the United States. And, you know, whatever we give money to Jeff Bezos, even though we may disagree with his handling of his wealth, we are all feudal subjects of Mark Zuckerberg, whether we’re on Facebook or not, because of all the harvesting that they’re doing of everyone’s data. So there’s a lot of ethical questions bound up in that. And while I see the satisfaction of storming off Twitter in a huff to make a point, I would also lose a following that I’ve spent over a decade building up, and that is the place I share, work and read other people’s work and generally participate in public life.

Stephen Metcalf: Yeah, I mean, Julia pivoting to you. I mean, Nazis and dipshits have a long history of appropriating the total cultural space. They’re totalitarians. It’s their announced and unannounced goal. It’s an interesting question that the theorist, Alberto Hirschman, said that in the face of such incursions, people have three choices exit voice and loyalty, rights of voices. You stay and you talk and you counter and you argue back and you don’t occupy the public space that people like Dana have kind of semi heroically carved out for themselves. You exert your like I mean, the only the only dignified use of my agency is to leave. And of course, loyalty is out of the question. These are lowlife thugs. You don’t give in to them.

Stephen Metcalf: Julia, where in that spectrum do you think you might fall?

Julia Turner: Oh, I’m so interested in how we all feel about this because. Elon Musk is particularly identifiably detestable. But what I am not yet sure of is whether his particular management of this social media platform, which is because it is the one that is most about words and most for journalists, is the one that I have the most personal relationship with. Whether his particular to testability is going to materially affect the platform and even this thing about like, oh, you’re going to get charged $20 to keep your verified blue checkmark, I will say it right here. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Like, maybe it’ll happen. But the the whole story of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter has been I’m going to acquire it. No, I don’t want to acquire it. Okay. I guess I have to. Fine. I’ll do it. Okay. I’m going to fire everybody.

Julia Turner: Oh, I’m not firing everybody. Never mind. Like, I’ll believe it when I see it. If if, if he does any of the things he professes to do and if the platform becomes materially worse or different or doesn’t change at all. So I don’t feel a particular moral compunction to quit in a huff. I will quit, you know, And I’ve already I’m already much less engaged with tweeting than I was two or four or six years ago, probably because the platform itself seems to be flagging a little bit as a centerpiece of a place for human conversation. And that’s part of the reason that it was in the trouble that led it to be bought by Musk in the first place. If it gets much worse, maybe I will desist. If not, I will stick around. But I don’t feel a need to make a decision based on my moral evaluation of Musk the man.

Stephen Metcalf: Okay, well, let me make a case for exit then. So a number of years ago, I quit Twitter. It was appealing to the very worst part of me. That part of me that’s addictive, you know, procrastinate. Sorry. And, you know, sort of envious, you know, of other people’s ability to publicly sell fashion and monetize it. And it was just a self belittling act to go back to it over and over and over again. And I quit and never looked back.

Stephen Metcalf: Within about 48 hours, the addiction had cured itself, and I never gave it a second thought. I very, very quietly, I mean, really all but totally and anonymously rejoined it in the immediate days after the Putin invasion, because I felt as though that was obviously the place to get a way. More boots on the ground and hour by hour account of what was happening in Ukraine. And I expanded only to 45 followers. And I never had any intention of tweeting and didn’t. I even tweeted or liked or asserted my presence in any way.

Stephen Metcalf: As soon as the purchase was completed, I quietly quit. And I’ll tell you why. I agree that exit and voice are both viable options and a powerful case can be made for both. That said, you know, yes, there’s this horrible ubiquity of of the tech barons, these hyper libertarian, invariably white, middle aged men who control what effectively is the mental economy of the globe.

Stephen Metcalf: Now, there are all kinds of options to exit. I am not on I quit WhatsApp, I’m off of Facebook. I’ve never been on Instagram. I’m now off of Twitter and I try very hard not to accede to the conveniences of Amazon. And by and large I choose not to give them my money as to staying and not letting the dipshits and the Nazis rule the public space.

Stephen Metcalf: The flip side of that is these people thrive on one thing rhetorically. It’s central to their grift, it’s central to their narcissistic personality disorder, and it’s central to the toxic creep of their politics. They need us, They need the leotard. They are nothing without the Lib tard and.

Stephen Metcalf: I think actually Exit has a special power in this situation. And you’re saying actually watch what happens to this as our default, quote unquote, public space when we’re no longer here. It does both things. Not only does it inflame them in the short run and then defang them eventually, I mean, not in any large way, in any large sense. They can be fought other ways, though. But it what it will also do is demonstrate for the millionth time that one of these sites comprised entirely of right wing trolls and racist and anti-Semitic monsters, is not a public space in any meaningful sense of the word, and is a dead end is a business model and a dead end for their business model. They are trying to enact a public.

Stephen Metcalf: Burlesque. Right? Daily of at the urging and burning the Lib tard and then having the Lib tard react and then doing it again and again and again. Lather, rinse, repeat. And I’m out. I mean, I can’t withstand it for a lot of reasons that may be more linked to my fragility, you know, psychic fragility. But I and I see the dignity of staying. But I just wonder, Dana, do you accord me a similar dignity in my choice, the exit?

Dana Stevens: Oh, yeah, completely. I mean, in a way, I think the probably the more ethically rigorous thing to do is just say, I want nothing to do with this company. And, you know, there’s plenty of other companies that one could say that about with with equal righteousness. And I mean, one thing I do know this week happens to be the week that the last changes are due for my book before the paperback comes out next February. So I’m submitting those changes today. And one thing I’m doing is that I’m taking my Twitter handle off my bio. I’m just taking off the sentence that says you can follow her on Twitter at the hi sign. And by doing that, I may be casting myself some future followers, but I don’t know. In February of 2023, when my book comes out, what Twitter will be and whether that’s a sentence that I want to say about myself.

Stephen Metcalf: I’m perfectly fair. All of that.

Stephen Metcalf: Julia, let’s wrap with you. Maybe if that’s all right. I really want to hear you speak to Twitter’s unique status as a kind of public square. And it does that make it irreplaceable in some sense? I mean, is democracy net net just further crippled if we flee the Nazis? And the dipshits I mean.

Julia Turner: Nazis and dipshits have been a feature of American life from the very beginning. And the thing that is. Difficult to pass, I think, is how our changing media environment elevates and amplifies those tendencies in the American psyche versus how much they just render them visible in a way that they weren’t necessarily visible when they weren’t appearing on primetime news shows. And three main networks controlled the major flow of information and your conspiracy theories and white supremacy were confined to, you know, weird alternative late night radio and strange pamphlets circulated through the male. Right. And I think it is not accurate to say that these platforms merely render these forces visible. They do seem to encourage and amplify them. But.

Julia Turner: A thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the degree to which Twitter was ever a public square, or whether it was merely the illusion of a public square for a certain set of people who are extremely invested in it. Elon Musk among them, right. I mean, Matt Levine is the always essential financial newsletter writer at Bloomberg, has been an absolute poet and bard of this whole godforsaken transaction. And if you’re not reading Matt Levine, you should change your life right now. But, you know, his main theory is that Elon just loves using Twitter. That’s how he got into this mess and started wanting to buy it at all.

Julia Turner: And so for the types of people who are not famous because they’re movie stars like and Dylan and Jolie, but who have some public profile and desire to discuss and debate, it did and does create a forum for that discussion. But there are just millions and millions of people who’ve been tuning it out all along. And I think I’ve been wondering is whether the illusion of a public square is maybe more dangerous than not having one at all.

Julia Turner: And one thing that’s really interesting, I think, about TikTok and its rise as a kind of catchment for American Idol time attention is the tick tock is famously extremely different person to person. Of course, that was true of Twitter too, that your experience of Twitter is totally determined by who you follow. But somehow Tick Tock seems to more clearly represent and signal the media environment that we’re in now in, which is that everybody’s in their own ecosystem, in universe and there is no common space. Twitter somehow more gave the illusion of there being a common space when in fact it was just as fractured.

Julia Turner: So. And, you know, so I’m not sure that we are losing a beautiful town square. I think the times when Twitter felt most like the town square actually were when Trump was president and was on there and was using it as a major vector of official communication for the US government. And I think it’s good that that’s no longer true. And we’ll see whether both of those things remain true, that he’s not president and he’s not on Twitter. They could both change. God help us. All right. Well, that’s that’s my thoughts on Twitter as a public square for journalists and others.

Dana Stevens: I mean, the one thing I would say as a as a button is that I think one line in the sand for me is if Trump gets back on if Trump gets back on, Ellen lets him on, and all of that madness starts again. That was happening during the Trump administration. I mean, at the time it sort of, especially during the pandemic and during lockdown, felt necessary to be there just to police what was going on. But I can’t take that level of stress anymore. And I would almost definitely be out if that voice is allowed back on again.

Stephen Metcalf: Oh, my gosh. A binding public promise to quit if Trump is admitted. Back on Twitter Dana Stevens. I’m here to hold your feet to that fire. Let me say before we go, I there’s a sort of bard of Twitter and musk that I want to shout out as well, at the Verge, Nyla Nilay Patel. Nilay Patel. I don’t know how to pronounce his first name. Welcome to hell, Elon. He’s one of the founders of The Verge. Just he is so tremendously good. You fucked up real good, kiddo. Is line one of his piece? Welcome to hell, Elon. I really recommend it. I thought that is.

Dana Stevens: A good one.

Stephen Metcalf: That’s a fabulous piece. All right, guys, this is one of those things listeners. I mean, we mean it when we say it, like shoot us an email we want to hear, but you know you’re going to quit. You’re going to stay where? Where are your lines? In the sand drawer and shoot us an email. Okay, Moving on. All right, Now is the moment on a podcast we discuss business Dana what we have.

Dana Stevens: Stephen Our only item of business this week is to tell you about today’s Slate Plus segment. This week, we’re answering a question from a listener. We’ve been on a good roll of getting listener questions lately.

Dana Stevens: This week, a listener named Shepard writes in to ask What is a film that would be improved if two actors in it switched roles? And he says, for example, as much as I love The Devil Wears Prada, I contend that it would be an even better film if Anne Hathaway played the snobbish veteran assistant and Emily Blunt played the out of her depth newcomer. Hathaway is always delicious as a villain or villain ish, and Blunt’s charm and range would, I’d argue, make us root even harder for the Andy character? He winds up by saying, I would love to hear the panel’s thoughts on other hypothetical casting swaps and why they didn’t prove the film. This is a great question. Once I saw The Devil Wears Prada, that way, I couldn’t unsee it. And so if you’re a Slate Plus listener, you can hear Julia, Steve and I riff on our own thoughts about casting switches we would make in movies that already exist. If you’re a Slate Plus member, you can hear that at the end of today’s show. And if you’re not a Slate Plus member, you can sign up today at Slate.com slash culture Plus.

Dana Stevens: Okay, Steve, back to the show.

Stephen Metcalf: Aftersun is the first feature film from Charlotte Welles. It stars Paul Mescal as Cullum, a 30 ish young man I think is turning 31 in the course of the movie. Who’s dreamy, semi absent and we come to believe, very troubled for reasons mostly, if not entirely unspecified. But he’s also a warm and often very present and attentive father to Sophie. He takes his 11 year old daughter to a beach vacation in Turkey. This is a memory film. It comes out of that vacation. We have a framing device. Sophie is a young woman with a baby of her own, clearly reminiscing. I mean, it’s very impressionistic, almost pointillist, reminiscing intently about her father. The vacation is pregnant with significance, both dark and light.

Stephen Metcalf: In addition to mescal, the movie stars the remarkable Frankie Corio as young Sophie. In the clip are about to hear. It’s this is part of the framing device. It’s actually artfully done. It’s it’s Sophie at 11, filming her dad column with a video camera. And the viewer sees and hears everything in the camera is capturing it gets toyed with later in the movie in interesting ways. But anyway, let’s let’s have a listen.

Speaker 4: I want you going to stop. These are my moves. Those are so embarrassing.

Stephen Metcalf: So embarrassing.

Speaker 4: Hey, let’s get out of here. You.

Stephen Metcalf: Yeah. Where were you? What were you going to interview me about?

Julia Turner: I don’t know.

Stephen Metcalf: Well.

Speaker 4: Well, I just turned 11, and you’re are 130 turning 131 and two days, so. When you roll over, what did you think you’d be doing now? Hello? What did you think you’d be doing now?

Stephen Metcalf: China also. Okay.

Stephen Metcalf: Dana, let me start with you. I mean, that’s this is a movie that’s deep and very highly personal movie, even though it’s not autobiographical. Charlotte Well, as you said, it’s just saturated with the real feelings and real life of these two people and the slice of life that we see of their life that we see. That clip is so perfect because it not only gives us that remarkable young actress who’s at the center of it just how candid and fresh she is, but it gives you the light and dark of Paul and shows you how. Deftly and subtly it’s gesture to. I mean, that tone change right there. What do you make of this movie?

Dana Stevens: I mean, okay, this movie, first of all, let me start off with the good things. I absolutely agree. The connection between the father and the daughter, between Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as actors and between those two characters is completely what drives the movie. It’s really intimate. There’s essentially no characters right outside of them. You briefly hear them talking on the phone to her mother, who he’s estranged from, but you don’t hear the mother’s voice or see her learn anything about why they’re estranged or really learn anything about anyone else at the at the resort. They’re just backdrop for this relationship of those two characters. So all of that wonderful, the subtlety, the specificity, etc..

Dana Stevens: But I have to say that overall, I went to this movie wanting so much to love it and loving so many moments in it and at the end came out pretty frustrated. And I think that if I were writing a review of this movie, it would probably get the dreaded green asterisk on Rotten Tomatoes. In spite of all the things that I would genuinely praise about it. Because, I mean, here’s and here’s an adjective that applies to the movie in both good and bad sense is it’s diaphanous.

Dana Stevens: You know, it’s this very delicate, fragile, you know, elusive, opaque kind of movie in ways that can be wonderful, but it can also be so ambiguous that quite literally at the end, when we cut back to the adult Sophie and she’s having this somewhat dreamlike encounter with her father, right? There’s this recurring image of the two of them dancing together in a nightclub with strobe lights where he is. That’s still the age that he was, you know, 31 or whatever, at the at the Turkish resort where most of the movie takes place. But she is an adult. So clearly, this is a kind of fantasy space where she’s dancing with this vision or memory of who her dad was.

Dana Stevens: And I kept on waiting in those scenes to sort of understand like, what is she coming to terms with? What was her dad depressed about? What happened after the vacation such that it’s implied that they never saw each other again? Right. There’s a moment when they’re dancing and it’s a beautiful moment. They’re dancing to. David Bowie’s under pressure at the resort on their last night at the resort, and we’re led to believe that this is going to be the last time that they will see each other. But why? I guess a part of me wanted to cut through that ambiguity and just say, can we please have this script? Charlotte will, as his actual script, understand a little bit more about these characters than the 11 year old understands about her father, because otherwise it’s a densely detailed character portrait of a character, Paul Michael’s character that we don’t really understand.

Stephen Metcalf: A Julia Dana’s point is well taken. I mean, this movie is subtle, and if you feel one way about it, that’s its triumph. If you feel another way, you’re going to think it’s subtle to a fault. Julia I’m curious what you made of that and the reticence of the movie, its reluctance to just sort of tell you exposition. Lee What brought Paul to what appears to be his depression and its reluctance to give you any specific outcome to Paul after this vacation, even though I think most viewers will be led to suspect the worst. What do you think of this movie?

Julia Turner: I’m so interested that Dana didn’t go for the diaphanous city of it. I mean, I went for it and I here’s my defense of why it is true that the movie is frustratingly. An explanatory about what the heck was going on with her dad and what happened to him afterwards. And the reason that worked for me is that the film doesn’t quite seem to be about Paul Michael’s character column. It’s about.

Julia Turner: The problem slash act of understanding that in addition to being your parents, your parents were people, too. And I think the fact that the fantasy space is this club, right, is the sort of moment, this environment of being young and free and feeling full of kind of possibility and and bodily abandon and, you know, it your what your parents did in the nightclub.

Julia Turner: Right. Is about as far from from how you comprehended them as kids, no matter what kind of childhood you had. It’s like the thing in kindergarten where you realize your teacher doesn’t just like sleep on a cot at the school and they go home and have another life. Like, I think it’s not an accident, that it’s this moment of adult abandon and possibility and potential and that that is the place where she is trying to find and imagine her lost father. And and he’s lost in some fashion. It’s true that we don’t know what or why. And the fact that she can’t quite get the answer, it feels to me, is the point of the film.

Julia Turner: Now, of course, she does presumably know what the fuck happened. Like he wasn’t like, you know, raptured up to heaven, presumably like something happened to him that he’s no longer in her life. We don’t know why or what, and she knows more about why or what than we do, which is maybe part of what feels frustrating. Like you could imagine a film that explained what happened to him and still used really interesting filmmaking techniques to capture the texture of trying to re-examine your childhood memories for hints of the actual person that was buried in the father figure that you are remembering. But the withholding of the film, I think, heightens that sense of wondering and re-examining. And I don’t know, it just totally worked for me.

Stephen Metcalf: MM Yeah, this I agree with you, Julia. This movie, it’s elusiveness as Diane and it’s, it’s all of that is wonderful. And I think for the record, Colin does ascend to heaven. But because he’s played by Paul Mescal, he captures it. But that was a joke. But anyway, he. I could spend 2 hours watching Paul Mescal read the phone book. He’s so dreamy. He’s so fabulous. And he’s as in normal people, he’s so good at holding what feels like an immense depression within him as he acts something that is not explicitly about despair or feeling of being lost. And without overplaying it, it just seems almost intrinsic to his capacity as a performer to do that.

Stephen Metcalf: And what I loved about the movie as a. Chronically depressed person who. Has loved being a father and kind of. I’ve lived this stance from the inside in some sense, and it was kind of amazing to see it where. If you were holding yourself totally in reserve because out of fear that what’s really going on inside you will alienate or frighten your children, then you’re just simply a performer and you’re all mask.

Stephen Metcalf: And of course, you know, no parent who can be that for real is doing that, I hope. Nor even if you’re the most well-adjusted affirmative personality type. Does it make sense to introduce your kids to your entire adult self so you live that dance moment to moment, and that’s what that character’s living? He. Wants to show himself to his daughter as a way of being emotionally real and present to her, especially as he may have. Some kind of intimation that this is their last meaningful time together. Any time together. And I just I thought that was just beautifully depicted. Dana, I understand what the movie is missing. I don’t think it would have worked better if it had been there.

Dana Stevens: Well, Steve, I mean, hearing that you were so emotionally moved and engaged and identified with the Paul Mescal character, I’m kind of you know, my my criticism is taken out of my mouth because if this movie works emotionally on you, then you should see it. It’s, you know, as I say, what is wrong with it has nothing to do with the two wonderful performances from these two actors and their relationship, which I think both on and off screen seems to have been something real. Right. I mean, there’s scenes of playfulness that remind me exactly of the way my daughter plays with her dad. Right. Just teasing each other, riffing weirdly, on, you know, the thing about whose head is bigger between the two of them is just exactly the way perfect girls and dads, right, would goof around with each other.

Dana Stevens: And so to me, everything that doesn’t quite come together has to do with with the script just needing a little bit more, tightening a little bit more clarification. It is not that I want some sort of leaden explanation of exactly what it all means, but for example, I would take out all of the present day scenes. I don’t think we need to see the grown up Sophie. She’s on screen for probably less than 5 minutes of the movie as a grown up, and I never made the connection of what we’re supposed to know about her grown up self. That wouldn’t have been better just from the point of view of the kid. If you’re going to make a movie about what a kid can’t know about their parent, which I agree is a large part of what this movie is trying to do, why go forward into the future?

Julia Turner: Yeah, and it’s an interesting note about the adult Sophie. I think she’s turning 31, right? Like she’s she’s found herself moving beyond the past where she, we think, lost her dad in some fashion or other. I think it’s different to be a child trying to understand your dad and being an adult, remembering yourself as a child, trying to understand your dad in the face of of some unspoken, enormous loss. So. I liked the glimpses of adult self and I liked that they were only glimpses because the heart of the film is this relationship.

Julia Turner: I will say also, Frankie Corio, what a astonishing performance. I mean, it’s always hard to know with a kid actor, you know, what will become of them. But damn, that seems like a performer to watch. Just so compelling and naturalistic and then wise and everything you want in a face on screen. And I will also say I will watch anything that Charlotte Wells does. I was so impressed with the subtlety of the storytelling here, and I’m excited to see what it is that she does next.

Dana Stevens: I completely agree. Even though even though I didn’t love everything about this movie as much as you two did, Charlotte Wells is an exciting new presence. It’s a great debut movie to burst onto the scene with and her way of working with actors alone. Her touch with the with those two and their relationship is is a reason to keep her. Keep your eye on her.

Stephen Metcalf: Here. Here. Okay. Once again, we’d love to hear from our listeners. Shoot us an email. Let’s move on.

Stephen Metcalf: Okay, Well, what was Brangelina is a remarkable piece of cultural reporting and criticism in Vulture. It’s by Angelica Jade Bastian, who joins us now to talk about it. She writes, As a couple, Pitt and Jolie offered what all great stars do, a fantasy as out of reach as it is alluring. In their decade long union, they transformed from a lascivious, adulterous, sexed up power couple to a more gently constructed philanthropic team defined as much by their capacity for good as their astounding beauty and talent until the fantasy cracked in 2006. We are gratefully joined by Angelica Jade Bastian. Angelica. Welcome to the podcast.

Julia Turner: Oh, thank you for having me.

Stephen Metcalf: You’ve achieved the Valhalla of cultural journalism here. It’s juicy and low and it’s beautifully constructed and important and high at the same time. It has consistency and juice. It’s a terrific piece. Where to start? I love. I love that you set up that stardom was different back then, that the heyday of their stardom was the last, you could argue, gasp of a sort of golden age of Hollywood, where stars were remote and huge sort of pre-social media. And their breakup has been post social media. Talk a little bit about them as a couple and how it got publicly constructed and now is being publicly deconstructed.

Julia Turner: Well, I’ll say this about them as a couple. They were a couple I followed very obsessively, which is why there is so much historical research in this piece that just came from off the top of my dome and from magazines I already owned. So it was a really interesting case study, so to speak, on both stardom and misogyny and the ways that we project onto stars in a multitude of ways. Because for me, I operate under the belief that a great star functions in the same way that the gods of Greek mythology do. They’re supposed to represent sort of an outsized version of very human desires and needs.

Julia Turner: And so that really propelled me when it came to writing this admittedly very long, very taxing piece. And it means a lot to hear that it really resonates with people. And people felt that it has a very sustaining, powerful, engrossing narrative because that’s what I was aiming for.

Stephen Metcalf: So we’re now in the sort of dreary public undoing, the kind of recrimination phase of their relationship, which echoes in a general way. I mean, I don’t want to overemphasize this, but it’s ugly in the direction of Depp and heard in ways that just blow up what they once were and maybe talk just a little bit about the kind of newsy aspect of that, what we what we now know courtesy of lawsuits and counter lawsuits.

Julia Turner: Yeah, it’s funny you mention Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, because one thing I thought for in the piece was not to mention those two at all, because I was like, that brings a level of baggage that the Brangelina relationship and its aftermath already has. And I don’t need to bring in all of that extra junk that comes with the mention of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Yeah.

Julia Turner: For a Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, what’s been interesting with the aftermath of their relationship is just watching how despite the severity of what Brad has been accused of and despite the severity of certain lawsuits he’s going through. He’s like Teflon. Nothing sticks to him versus Angelina, who I think now is in a very weird place in both career and star image where she has not been able to sever herself from that image of them as a couple as successfully as he has. And I think it’s really bringing up people’s. Issues with her that have existed since the beginning, which to me comes back to a very misogynistic belief that she’s this, you know, devious other woman who, you know, wrecked his life. And he’s just the man that just got caught in the middle of it.

Julia Turner: How did this happen? I’m a man with no autonomy. Somehow, all of a sudden. So it’s been very tricky having to think through how to discuss that, because the lawsuits and the back and forth is very vicious and very tangled and requires a level of care and research. And honestly, I think as a journalist, but also you can’t tell the audience what to feel. I can only present you with this information and hope you take from it the lesson that I was taking from it, which is, wow, misogyny older than ever and still here.

Julia Turner: I respect your decision to try to keep Johnny Depp and Amber heard out of the story, but I did. The thing I found most revelatory about your piece is that it forced me to confront my own misogynistic response to this couple, which I also followed them avidly in the arts. And I don’t know, just been rooting for Brad and loved Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Julia Turner: What a great performance. Wow. Finally got his Oscar. Good for him, man. He’s aging well and haven’t thought that much about Angelina other than, oh, God. Everything she’s accusing is really problematic for how much I’m enjoying the Brad’s late acting and producing career, which is not really a reasonable response to what she has alleged.

Julia Turner: And I think you do a wonderful job in the piece, kind of putting a putting a point on that. And and it made me think, too, about what kinds of careers we allow women in Hollywood as they get older to have and the sort of, you know, do gooding philanthropist who also makes the movies sometimes is a role that we do accept. But if the philanthropy, the philanthropic front of their union falls apart, where does that leave us with her? I don’t know. It really left me, considering my own response and and the pervasiveness of misogyny underlying it. That was the point that worked.

Julia Turner: I guess my question to you is, did you come at it as you’ve been watching the last few years? Were you on to him all along or like were you, like, watching all of us get swept off by the golden glow of middle age? Brad And think, Goddammit, I got to write about this someday. Or were you also swept off your feet a little bit? And only upon digging back in, did you start to reexamine?

Julia Turner: Well, I think for me, I have always been really good at taking a nuanced view of stars and understanding, Oh, this is an image they’re crafting. This is not a human being that I’m actually interacting with and know and and joking with. But that intimacy is what has led Brad to be so successful in ways that Angelina is struggling with somewhat.

Julia Turner: For me, it was more so, Oh, I really enjoy this man’s work. But why is no one talking about some of his issues? For example, my family is from New Orleans, so I’ve heard for eons about how bad the Make it Right homes were and the problems with them. And for those who don’t know, Make It Right was an organization Brad Pitt began and really promoted to help New Orleans, specifically the Lower Ninth Ward, which is a predominantly black neighborhood in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, building homes and helping people out.

Julia Turner: And it became very apparent to people on the ground in New Orleans that there was lots of issues with the homes, with mold and rotting and just improperly made and really caused a lot of material harm for the black citizens in New Orleans in their neighborhood. And I found it rather stunning that, like no one talks about those issues even though a lawsuit was settled because of them.

Julia Turner: And so as things just kept adding up and more information kept coming out, especially in the last few months, it’s really this year that there’s been more clarity on what happened in 2016 on the plane incident. It just became undeniable for me that, oh, when you look at it through the lens of these are images these people are creating, you start to become more aware of just how manipulative a great star can be with their audience.

Dana Stevens: Angelica Because you just mentioned image making and image manipulation. I wanted you to go back to that. The photo shoot that came out in 2005 in W magazine, and maybe talk about the image making you see at work in that photos. Brad Maybe describe the photos a bit compared to what you see Angelina and Brad doing in their own separate lives now with media where they are also having carefully managed and groomed photo shoots to project different kind of images of themselves on their own.

Julia Turner: Yeah. What is interesting about that photo shoot is it really leans into the sort of transgressive thrill that really captured people’s interest with their relationship as it was allegedly borne of adultery, which I’m going to be honest. Like I do not care about cheating. Like y’all want to cheat, cheat, I don’t give a damn is not my relationship. Why should I care?

Julia Turner: I think America’s obsession with adultery is sad, to be honest, but I see why people were really interested in that photoshoot in particular because they look. Gorgeous. And as you know, this image of like white, suburban, rich Malays and their debt to the nines and their drinking and and they have all these little blond children around them.

Julia Turner: And it’s it’s a it’s a really interesting photoshoot to look at now, because it’s not exalting this like necessarily wholesome image of an imaginary couple that they’re playing out so much as showing the cracks in a beautiful couple, which is now defines their aftermath in a lot of ways. And what’s interesting with Brad is he’s become very, very good in the last few years post their divorce announcement with slightly adjusting his image. So he seems more tactile and slightly more approachable, even though he really is not.

Julia Turner: Versus Angelina, who I think has not been able to craft a strong new image for herself, in part because she’s still associated with a philanthropy that people really associated with them as a couple. And to her, images aren’t as strong and speaking to anything with any depth, in part because her star image on screen is in a very liminal space right now because none of her movies recently have really popped off for people. And that is the first way a star gets into people’s imagination by what they’re doing on screen.

Julia Turner: And for Angelina, I wrote about it in the piece She’s a star who always was a was rooted in making her private life public in a way that really fascinated people. And when she’s no longer living her private life in public, who is she? And I don’t think audiences have an answer quite yet, beyond she’s a very dedicated mother and philanthropist, But that’s not enough to sustain a star and our interest in them.

Julia Turner: I think one thing that seems so hard about the position she’s in, I mean, we haven’t quite said what the accusations are that came out in, I think, 2016 and that have been further fleshed out in the course of some of these recent lawsuits and which perhaps will get even further fleshed out in some countersuits that Pitt is now filing. But the the core accusation is that while drunk on a plane, Brad Pitt was violent with Angelina Jolie and she alleges with their children, some of their children. He, of course, denies those allegations. But that’s a pretty shocking thing for the American moviegoing public to stomach. And it’s also an experience that feels at odds in some ways with the image she’s projected.

Julia Turner: Right. She’s seemed all along very in control of her image as the sort of wild child and the the transgressive vampire s that who became the globetrotting, you know, do gooder. And and it’s he is assembling a midlife public image in which that never happened. And she’s a crazy lady who keeps saying this thing happened that he claims did not.

Julia Turner: And she, I think, has had trouble assimilating this accusation into. Her own public image, right? Like she seems caught in the swamp of it in a way that is completely reasonable. If if what she’s alleging is true, she should be fighting this hard for custody of her kids. And she has every right to be adopting the posture that she’s in. But all of those decisions which are reasonable as a human. Maybe make her seem stuck in this thing that as a star. The fan kind of wants her to move beyond. And that’s what feels so tragic to me about where she now is.

Julia Turner: Oh, totally. I don’t think women can move on from abuse publicly in the ways men who are accused of it can. Which I think says a lot about how we discuss, view and treat domestic abuse and domestic violence, that women become marked by this as a problem that carries on and then defines the entirety of their image in how we view them, whether we believe them or not, versus Brad, who is dealing with a lot of lawsuits and is dealing with a lot of problems and yet is just the most carefree, golden, tactile, wonderful star that everyone loves and wants to root for and seems comfortable with ignoring the fact that there are very serious abuse allegations.

Julia Turner: It sort of breaks my heart in a lot of ways because it’s like, you know, for as much as people think that feminism or the image of feminism has reshaped how we interact with stars, I don’t think it has that much because people love to stick to these very old, tired scripts about women and power and misogyny that makes them comfortable and feel safe rather than facing the fact that this beloved star is accused of something very heavy.

Stephen Metcalf: Hmm. All right. Well, Anjelica, congratulations on genuinely a triumph of a piece. It’s in Vulture. It’s called What Was Brangelina by Angelica. Jade Bastion. Really? Thanks a lot for coming on the show, and I hope this happens again very soon.

Julia Turner: Oh, thank you. I love that.

Stephen Metcalf: Our right now is a moment in our podcast when we endorse Dana. What? What do you have?

Dana Stevens: Well, we are recording on November 1st, All Saints Day, and since we are getting in on the ground floor of a month, I thought I would endorse something that is starting this month and stretching over the month of November, which is a series on the Criterion Channel. I know I’m constantly endorsing things on the Criterion Channel, but seriously, if you love this podcast and you’re not subscribed to that channel, you’re missing so many great movies and so much great curation of movies.

Dana Stevens: So one of the things that they are presenting in November, one of their programs for the month is called Fox Noir. I don’t know why exactly that November has become the month associated with noir in the public imagination. I know there’s always sort of like noir festivals and, you know, noir initiatives and people doing little noir watching jags during this month. Maybe it goes with the the shortening days and the gloomy shadows of November. But Fox Noir looks really great. It’s just a bunch of 20th Century Fox movies from important directors of that genre or who work at times in that genre, including Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan. Samuel Fuller has some movies in it. And just to give you a few of the titles in the Fox noir lineup over the course of November, and that means that it’s streaming, of course, all month long, anytime you want on that channel.

Dana Stevens: I wake up screaming from 1941. The title alone sells that movie. Fantastic. Laura, one of the great noir love stories, Nightmare Alley, the original version of that movie that was remade with Bradley Cooper last year because we recently talked about Marilyn Monroe and the new movie Blonde. Her film Niagara, one of her great kind of noir thrillers, is showing in the series as well. And maybe my favorite is a pickup on South Street, a similar movie from 1953 that is just one of the nastiest, dirtiest noir crime thrillers you could imagine. There’s plenty of others, But yes, everything about Fox Noir, including the introduction by the great critic Imogen Sara Smith, who which she recorded for the channel, is something that I plan to dig into during the month of November.

Stephen Metcalf: That is awesome. Julia, what do you have?

Julia Turner: I have a slightly odd endorsement today, but it’s just so good. I have to share it. If you are a denizen of the internet, you will find that the internet is constantly trying to sell you underwear. I think we on this show may have at various points read ads trying to sell you underwear, but people really seem to think they can disrupt underwear. And I don’t really know why. And I’ve been kind of an Internet underwear skeptic until now when I have discovered a brand called Knickey. It’s spelled like knickers, but e.y k and i c k e y and they just make the perfect underpants, the high waisted briefs, or whatever it is. They also make a bunch of other stuff that I haven’t tried, but it’s just like, finally the platonic underpants has been designed, the disrupters have been disrupted. It’s gotten it’s stretchy, it’s high waisted, it holds its shape, it’s not too tight, comes great colors. It’s excellent. The Knickey high waisted underpants. That’s my recommendation.

Stephen Metcalf: But, Julia, you have struck me speechless once again.

Julia Turner: I It’s just too good. I don’t usually talk about undergarments on this show, but I feel a duty every week to share the thing that has given me the most joy and truly the discovery of this underwear. Uh, it’s. It’s a Joyce Barker, so give it a whirl.

Stephen Metcalf: Oh, dear. Fair enough. Okay. The thing that’s given me most joy, second only to my underwear, is the Richard Wilbur poem Castles and Distances from 1950. I love this poem. I was just in the mood for Wilbur. I hadn’t read his poetry in so long and I found one I’d never read before. It’s so cool. Oh, it is. Hunters alone regret the beastly pain. It is they who love the foe. The quarries out there force. And every arrow is feathered soft with wishes to atone.

Stephen Metcalf: And I think one of the reasons I stayed with this poem and reread it over and over again for a week is Castles and Distances is in addition to the heart of hunters and and their relationship with the prey. Is it lords and their relationship to the hunt and thereby their relationship to the world outside their castles, which is just so sadly apposite to modern experience lords and their castles, right? Like, especially with like Elon Musk in the news and the tech barons. And I just love this quote they built.

Stephen Metcalf: Well, who made those palaces of hunting lords? The grounds plan does ruled beaches always with a view down tapered isles of trees that last to fade in the world’s mass. The Lords so knew of land beyond their land, i.e. they didn’t. So it’s just the it’s just the classicist Wilbur at his absolute best. Classical in theme and preoccupation, but also the perfect. Delicate equipoise of of his work.

Dana Stevens: Say the poem title one more time.

Stephen Metcalf: It’s called Castles and Distances. You have to dig a little to find it on the internet, but we’ll link to it. You can find it on the Poetry Foundation website, but it takes a few somewhat obscure clicks, so we’ll will provide it for you. Dana, thank you so much.

Dana Stevens: Thank you, Steve.

Stephen Metcalf: Thanks, Julia.

Julia Turner: Thank you.

Stephen Metcalf: You will find links to some of the things we talked about today on our show page that Slate.com slash culture first. And you can email us a culture at Slate.com. We’d love to hear from you. Our introductory music is by the composer Nicholas Britell. Our production assistant is Yesica Balderrama. Our producer is Cameron Drews. For Dana Stevens and Julia Turner, I’m Stephen Metcalf. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you soon.

Julia Turner: Hello and welcome to the Slate Blues segment of the Slate Culture Gabfest. Today we take a question from listener Shepard, who writes, What’s a film that would be improved if two actors switched roles? For example, as much as.

Dana Stevens: I love The Devil Wears Prada.

Julia Turner: I contend that it would be an even better film if Anne Hathaway played the snobbish veteran assistant and Emily Blunt played the out of her depth newcomer. Hathaway is always delicious, has a villain or villain ish, and Blunt’s charm and range would, I’d argue, make us root even harder for the indie character? We’d love to hear the panel’s thoughts on other hypothetical casting swaps and why they’d improve the film. All right. So interesting to play casting director here. Such a strange art, Steve. Give it a whirl.

Stephen Metcalf: Well, let me begin by saying there are all these alternate casting universes that are so enticing to the imagination. And so it’s a fun question to think through. So the most, I think, interesting and famous example is that originally Ronald Reagan was cast as the lead in Casablanca, which is just so horrific to contemplate.

Stephen Metcalf: So it can be kind of fun. I mean, I mean, you know, you could switch Bergman and Bogart in that movie, right? And that would be fascinating. She’s this, like, soulful, propriétaires tress. And and he’s the kind of American innocent, you know, she’s the European woman, quintessential European woman of experience. And and Bogart is this kind of naif who discovers his inner cosmopolitan and his hatred of fascism in this quintessentially cosmopolitan space of, you know, Elsa’s cafe.

Stephen Metcalf: But, you know, the other one. And I have to admit, I kind of cheated a little bit on this one. Someone on the Internet suggested that the fugitive would be a better movie if Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford switched because you’d suddenly have someone who is far more believable as a possible killer, maybe a person whose, you know, deviousness of an aspect, if not actual character, had maybe gotten in the way a little bit. He was just too easy a mug shot in some sense, and the person chasing him was the sort of implacable dragnet type in some sense.

Stephen Metcalf: Dana, I’m curious, is there a do you think there are any screamingly obvious ones or are they all sort of mildly perverse?

Dana Stevens: I mean, when my mind goes to this, I think more about recasting roles that didn’t have the right actor in them then, that there was some other actor in that same movie who could have done the role. That’s a rare circumstance to come across. But since the listener who wrote in came came up with one that I think really is interesting The Devil Wears Prada switcheroo, which would have really changed up the movie.

Dana Stevens: Here’s another case where there’s two, you know, actors roughly of the same generation playing sort of a villain and a hero. I guess both the characters are somewhat morally ambiguous. Ambiguous. But what about in The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed? If Leo and and Matt Damon had switched roles, you know, I’m not sure if that would have made it a better movie. I’m not that crazy about The Departed, but not for the reason that those roles seem miscast.

Dana Stevens: But when you think about how how great Matt Damon was in The Talented Mr. Ripley as this this sneaky, underhanded psychopath, it might have been interesting to see him in the Leo role, which is the more the less idealistic, I guess, at least at the beginning of those two characters. And to see in turn what Leo DiCaprio would do if he wasn’t in his standard kind of role of of the player. You know, it’s been a while since I saw The Departed and probably people are going to tell me I’m getting those two characters completely wrong. But as I remember, it was sort of the moral valence was slightly in Matt Damon’s direction. And to switch that back might have made it a little bit of a more unexpected casting choice.

Julia Turner: Yeah, I’m with you, Dana. That recasting seems like an easier place for your mind to go than finding a movie where actually the roles should be literally swapped. It reminded me of that Broadway production of True West from the early aughts where Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C Reilly alternated roles throughout the run. Just sort of like the whole stunt of it was that each person knew the work so deeply they could do the other person’s role. But one thing I do think about here is the role of the sidekick in the romantic comedy, which as we’ve discussed, romantic comedies are are dying. And although we had differing opinions about reboot and I’m like still like Elon Musk coming to Twitter, I am still. Processing Dana’s assertion that reboot is great and and or sucks and and reckoning with a world in which she believes that to be true.

Dana Stevens: I never said or sucked. I thought it was a little overhyped.

Julia Turner: Fine, fine. But I think we all agree that the Judy Greer portions of reboot were pretty fucking great. So I found myself searching for films in which Judy Greer played a second or third or fourth fiddle and thinking about whether perhaps she could have been our main focus. But Dana, tell us a little bit more about how you think about casting as a movie critic, because to me, it feels like the most important, most ineffable, most hard to predict kind of creative decision making in how a project goes from a script to a fully realized creative work that we have an emotional response to.

Julia Turner: And, you know, my husband sometimes has to review audition tapes, you know, on his laptop, and I’ll walk by in the background and, you know, you just see these different potential versions of the character and the project like and and it always strikes me as impossible to figure out, like, who’s going to be good and how are they going to grow in the role and how is the role going to grow around them. I mean, it’s just it’s such a mysterious part of this craft.

Julia Turner: And I’m curious what prompts you in thinking about a project that you’re reviewing to think? I wonder if this would have been better with someone else?

Dana Stevens: Yeah, it’s definitely a monday morning quarterback kind of thing to do because once the project is cast, it is what it is, right? But you can always reconstruct that dream movie that could have been. And just this week in talking about Aftersun, right, there’s a movie that completely rides on the strength of its casting, you know, and whatever critiques I have of the movie have nothing to do with that. And it’s one thing that I think Charlotte Will’s got 100% right, casting those two people and working with them in the way that she did.

Dana Stevens: I think something that grieves me as a critic, looking at how different projects are cast is just how beholden most projects of any size have to be to having some name actor in the cast. You know, and I think of this as well as the parent of an aspiring actor, you know, who has tried out for things before and come this close to getting them and then not gotten them because she’s an unknown, you know, essentially. I mean, who knows who knows what decisions go into various casting choices.

Dana Stevens: But, you know, it’s it seems very common that producers, creators have to say, look, we need to go with this person who has more experience and more of a profile so that other people will sign on so that we can create this critical mass to this project and get it moving forward. And I just bet, Julia, that, you know, when you’re when those those casting tapes are rolling in the background, that you’re hearing people who, you know, could have just kind of turned the industry upside down with their amazing talent, but they’re not getting cast because they’re not there yet. They’re not to the place where their name is is going to provide visibility for the project. So it’s one of the many ways that I wish that money and power and, you know, everything being a juggernaut at the box office did not have to rule movies so that there could be more unknown voices coming out of the woodwork.

Stephen Metcalf: Yeah. Let me jump in and just say, you know, fully, prejudicially, I think every movie since Risky Business would have been better had Tom Cruise not been cast in it.

Julia Turner: But even Top Gun Maverick.

Stephen Metcalf: You’re crazy.

Julia Turner: You’re a lunatic. This is worse than being like, a reboot.

Stephen Metcalf: I know I do. I would get that reaction if I did. I’m so pleased. But I, I but I mean, the grossest act of Tom Cruise miscasting was when he was cast as Jack Reacher. And, you know, these books are beautifully executed by a very literarily suave writer. Adolescent male fantasies like Jack Reacher. The defining thing about Jack Reacher, you know it right from the beginning of virtually every one of those books. He is six foot six. He is tall, he’s physically large.

Dana Stevens: And that’s why he can reach things.

Stephen Metcalf: Exactly.

Speaker 5: Top shelf.

Dana Stevens: Jack in my cereal. Jack.

Stephen Metcalf: Jack. I can’t reach the Rice Krispies. Additionally, he can kick absolutely anybody’s ass. And. And I mean Cruise. Listen, I’m sure I’m not much taller than Tom Cruise. I mean, no disrespect to bed who are under six feet tall, like. More power to him. He’s the biggest has been the biggest movie star in the world for 30 plus years more. At whatever height he is and it’s been fine but he just is not a man of stature. And of course, it’s just that kind of. I’ll take that one, please.

Stephen Metcalf: Egomania where Cruise Inc steps in and plucks the role of Jack Reacher for himself in this movie’s more or less bombed. And the TV show has been pitched as a you know frank rectification of that. I mean they they got a, you know, physically large imposing man to play Reacher. But how about this one? Let me beat you one more time, Julia. How about Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise? Which roles in the original Top Gun, making it a marginally less stupid film?

Julia Turner: Hmm. Hmm. I’ll allow it. I’ll allow it. I’ll go for that.

Stephen Metcalf: The your. You’re resisting my bait. That was really good.

Dana Stevens: I mean, as long as we’re talking about self casting as a vanity project.

Dana Stevens: What about Ben Affleck not playing so many lead roles in movies? I mean, the movie Argo, which is annoying because it won an Oscar but is a pretty good movie overall, was lots of fun. And I remember liking it at the time. And the weakest point in that movie is Ben Affleck, the director playing the main character. He’s much better as a director of that movie than he is as an actor in it and is really kind of inert and ultimately takes away from the total value of the movie. You know, so I think there’s there are lots of moments like that, too, where somebody with a big name, it’s the obverse of what I was saying a moment ago. Right. Somebody with a big name who gets themselves cast in a role can be both the weak link in a movie artistically and the thing that makes it financially possible for it to be made.

Julia Turner: Yeah, I think fame and the ability to get things made probably are interesting and important factors. Although in observing my husband’s work, they’re they’re far from the only factors. And that’s, I think what, what I find most fascinating is not the not the casting of the anchor for the project, but all the different supplemental roles where the fame level is the same across the board. And it’s just a question of like which version of the role do you want to embody? It just feels like the moment where Frankenstein, like, lurches up off the table and comes into reality and it’s just such a fascinating and unusual art. Well, a great question. I would submit to our listeners to send in their swap answers. I’m not sure we came up with one that’s better than Emily Blunt and Annie Hathaway for Devil Wears Prada. Contact us at Culture Fest at Slate.com. And thank you so much. Say plus members for supporting our show and the journalism slate does. We’ll see you next week.