Culture Gabfest “Heteronormative Nonsense” Edition
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Speaker 2: You.
Stephen Metcalf: I’m Stephen Metcalf in this vs slate culture. Gabfest Heteronormative Nonsense Edition. It’s Wednesday, October 5th, 2022. On today’s show, Netflix has generated a bit of controversy with Dahmer Monster, the Jeffrey Dahmer story, yet another dramatic retelling of the serial killer spree. This one stars Evan Peters in the title role. It’s created by Ryan Murphy here of Glee fame. And then Brose is the new Billy Eichner vehicle. The star has touted it as a history making breakthrough for being a big Hollywood release to depicts gay relationships. Honestly, Eichner co-wrote the movie with the director, Nicholas Stoller. And finally, we discuss the curious phenomenon known as the Wife Guy. Joining me today is Julia Turner, the deputy managing editor of the L.A. Times. Hey, Julia.
Julia Turner: Hello. Hello.
Stephen Metcalf: And of course, Dana Stevens is the film critic for Slate.com. Hey, Dana.
Julia Turner: Hey. Hey.
Stephen Metcalf: Guys. You want to make a show?
Dana Stevens: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, Dahmer monster, the Jeffrey Dahmer story Stars that really is its title, stars Evan Peters in the title role, The Serial Killer, famous for having dismembered and cannibalized his victims over the course of a 13 year spree. The show devotes much of itself to painstaking recreations of some of his crimes, but it also reaches back to Dahmer’s childhood in an attempt to trace an arc back to the origin of his bloodlust. It also details the years of indifference on the part of law enforcement to the weird goings on in his apartment. The consequences the show demonstrates of police homophobia and racism. The show comes courtesy of Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee and Nip Tuck, among other shows. And it also stars Niecy Nash as a suspicious neighbor In the clip are about to hear Dahmer has been arrested finally for his crimes. And he’s trying to explain to the police why he’s capable of doing such horribly depraved things. Let’s listen to the clip.
Speaker 2: I do think I was born like this. Like, I don’t think there is something that happened that made me like this because this was always just how I was. Because after the hitchhiker, I want to do it again for a while. I, I wanted to. I thought about doing it aloud sometimes, but I was able to push it down. And it didn’t happen again for nine years.
Stephen Metcalf: Julia, let me start with you. The Dahmer story is certainly nothing if not familiar territory. Why do you think creators return to it, and how do you think they did with this new retelling?
Julia Turner: Steve I have never felt more alienated from American pop consumption habits than I have watching this show. This is one of the most successful launches on Netflix in years. And I hated it. I hated it. I think it is like bad, deeply morally wrong, and coats itself in a veneer of righteous, modern recasting of how we are thinking about this story.
Julia Turner: And man, I could not have disliked this more and I do not know. I do not know. I am not interested in this weirdo. And I don’t want to spend time in his company and I don’t want to stare at him for hours at a time as he slowly malevolently like sidles down hallways and turns up and turns down the temperature of his ominous glower like, What is wrong with people to leave him alone? I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to be there. Like, is it that it’s a horror movie and people like horror movies? I don’t like horror movies. Like, is that what’s what what Murphy is trying to do here? But like, it seems so enamored of him and curious about him, and it just made me furious. I don’t think his depravity is worthy of curiosity, and maybe that’s an inhuman response.
Julia Turner: Of course, people are interested in freak shows. I don’t know. I really detested this show. And I, I particularly, you know, I the show is thoughtful about really emphasizing the fact that these crimes were committed largely on queer men of color. And Dahmer’s black female neighbor tried desperately to get someone to take her seriously in her conviction that something deeply wrong was happening, as she literally, in the depiction of the show, watched young men disappear around her after walking into his apartment.
Julia Turner: And, you know, I am not a completist on all previous tellings, but there’s sort of a like righteousness in the portrayal of, you know, how systemic racism is, part of what enabled him to be so evil. And that is no doubt true. But somehow the way that that is done felt so glossy and thin overlaying this, just like let’s just stare at the monster. Fundamental interest of the show. And I did not like it. How about you guys.
Stephen Metcalf: Dana?
Dana Stevens: I mean, now I feel like it makes me a morally depraved individual that I wasn’t outraged at every second while watching it. I mean, I will start by saying I’m not a watcher of true crime. I have no desire to revisit the Jeffrey Dahmer story. So I went into this knowing that it was not going to be my personal thing and I was not going to sort of groove with the series. But because it was such a big hit on Netflix and as you say, Julia Yeah, it’s this this kind of unprecedented drop for them. And apparently also they’ve marketed it hardly at all, in part, I think because of fear about the controversy, which we can get to various controversies it’s ignited. So in spite of this complete lack of publicity, it does incredibly well for them, proving that people cannot get enough true crime. And there’s a giant appetite for it out there.
Dana Stevens: So I think I went in a little bit more with a cold experimental eye of I want to understand how this story is being told and what the appeal of it is in this format, especially given that Netflix is just about in two or three days, I think, to drop a non-scripted, you know, documentary series called The Dahmer Tapes, I think it’s called that’s based on the recordings he made, I think, with his legal team before the trial. So they’re about to bombard us with more Dahmer And and I wanted to understand the appetite for it more than to see whether it was artistically successful for me, if that makes sense. And I’m still not sure I do after watching over half of the show. But I will say that I think I have more respect for what the show is trying to do than Julia. I mean, if you take it as a given that there is this massive, massive appetite for true crime.
Dana Stevens: Right. Which is another whole question which we actually talk about in our plus segment today. Does this show, you know, unfold or complicate or do anything new in that genre? I think it does to a certain extent, and I think that starts to happen in the second half of the series. It’s a ten episode series. And I watched through episode six in part, I watched that far because I had read that it takes a big turn in the second half and stops being as much about Dahmer. And for example, episode six is almost completely from the point of view of one of his victims. And it’s really the best episode so far because it is telling a story. Besides the one Julia is talking about, this very slowly paced, you know, look at this. This very. Sorted. And as he says in that clip, you know, somebody who from childhood was had a serious, serious. Something wrong with them kind of protagonist, which is not necessarily somebody you want to spend 5 hours with before you get to visit with anyone else.
Dana Stevens: But the main character of episode six, who unfortunately by the end of Episode six has been horribly killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, is is a fascinating character, is this black queer man who’s deaf, who’s played by a deaf actor who’s fantastic in the role and who is an aspiring model and who has an actual relationship of sorts with Dahmer who, you know, flirts with him in a bar. And then they they date a few times. And it’s much more of a of an actual something approaching love story than than any other episode so far. So I don’t know. I mean, I’m not saying stick with it for 5 hours and then you’ll like it. That is not what I’m saying. But I’m saying that combined with the framing, you know, the very first shot of the show is of Niecy Nash, of the Neighbor, you know, watching something on TV and being aware that there’s something next door to her that’s wrong. So I think that in a way, this show is trying to skew the way that we look at the white serial killer so that it’s not just, you know, some sort of sick glorified vision of him.
Julia Turner: Know in episode seven, which is all about Niecy Nash, his experience is is incredible and powerful and makes its own resonant points about how frustrating it is to not be listened to. And then in its final shot, without revealing what happens in the episode, suggests that the motives of the people who are finally listening to her are not necessarily that much better and are going to leave her in a whole different heap of trouble.
Julia Turner: And the show is I mean, it’s well-crafted and well shot and sort of beautiful and how it depicts that. I don’t know why its attention to those themes felt insincere to me. Like those are important themes, obviously, to look at in the context of the story. You know, I was, I think, struck and influenced by a piece that Jessica Wynter wrote for The New Yorker about the story that notes that, you know, in its deep exploration of how it is that that became to be the way that he was. The show just makes a bunch of stuff up. So it’s like, Wolf, it’s true crime, but it’s a psychological portrait and we’re staring at the monster. And how did he become a monster? But then it’s just, you know, adding a whole bunch of random filigree on top, like, what are we doing here? I don’t know, Steve. Help us out. Adjudicate.
Stephen Metcalf: Well, I. I can, you know, break the tie by saying Tim Julia. I just. I have never. I mean, I’d be curious to know if either one of you can think of an analogy, but I’ve just never seen something so deliberative, fully paced. I mean, the slow, like, agonizingly slow build up.
Stephen Metcalf: Two in episode one two, The violence, you know, is drawn out, incredibly elongated like taffy. And I already began to lose me there a little bit. But then, oddly enough, in it, I hear you Julia that there’s a didacticism to, you know, Niecy Nash was a, you know, black neighbor who got totally ignored in favor of the white serial killer and the weird, nonsensical alibis offered by the white serial killer. You know, point taken. That’s well depicted, I think, as is the oddity of cops repeatedly showing up at the door and not seeing what was pretty much right under their noses for years.
Stephen Metcalf: That said, and I thought that that was admirable and well done. What offended me about it, in a way, oddly enough, was the idea that you can tell a revealing narrative about the causal factors that go into creating someone who’s evil. It’s just Shakespearean in a way, right? What he says about Jago, it’s just motive, less malignancy. I mean, there’s just a certain kind of wickedness that can’t possibly fit into a, you know, if X then Y like, because by definition they’re a person who doesn’t really exist within the same narrative constraints as virtually the rest of humanity.
Stephen Metcalf: And I could only get to about midway through episode three. I found it just so totally repetitive and off putting. I wasn’t I wasn’t in the end learning anything about why. And now to find out that many of those are fabricated details from his childhood, I began to think it was useless data. I just can’t answer the question why. And I don’t know that watching 5 hours to get to some glimmer of that is a fair ask.
Dana Stevens: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I’m also actually somewhat amazed that there is such a huge thirsty appetite for this kind of programming. It just does not seem like a thing you would want to flop down after a long day and watch on Netflix. But given that that is the case, I guess I was surprised, especially given that it’s Ryan Murphy, who I have never been a fan of and who I find sensationalizes everything. I was surprised that this movie had as much respect and care as it did for the victims, for, you know, the fact that these stories are hard to tell and not there to be sensationalized.
Dana Stevens: The show is not that gory, given the fact that it’s about, you know, someone who did things that it would be very easy to portray in a horror movie sort of garish way. The mood has to do with horror sometimes, but it’s not slasher gore. And I have to hand it that it does not relish the scenes of violence in that way. Also, we haven’t mentioned it yet, and this is kind of a given when when Ryan Murphy is is at issue. But the acting is really good. Evan Peters, as as Jeffrey Dahmer, I mean, talk about a role that is is thankless, incredibly demanding, while, you know, not allowing you to earn any of the audience’s love or charm them at all. I think he brings a lot of pathos to it and underplays it more often than he overplays it.
Julia Turner: Yeah. No, there’s a ton of craft here. That’s good. And and I really want to be clear that I think the part of the project that that is about explaining how structural and and systemic inequity is part of what allowed this terrible thing to happen. It feels really well done. It’s just like I mean, I love your word, Taffy. It’s like dread taffy. Like the whole thing is so slow and oppressive. And there’s a moment in the second episode where, like, the dad is in the Thomas dad’s talking to the cops, and they’re like, How did you get this way? And it’s like, flashback to the school bus. And I’m like, Are you fucking kidding me? We’re going to the school. But like, I don’t this is not it’s just doesn’t seem like the right way to think about this guy.
Julia Turner: And, you know, there have been protests from the families of Dahmer’s victims objecting to the show and objecting to the fact that they were not contacted about the fact that it was being made and objecting to having the stories of their loved ones death and dismemberment exploited once again for the profit of a major corporation and the glory of a bunch of actors and directors.
Julia Turner: And, you know, I have. I have great sympathy for those complaints. You know, as a journalist and like, terrible stories and inequities can can be told. And I don’t think it is up to the victims of the world to determine who gets to tell their stories. I’m sympathetic to their complaints, but I think, you know, journalists have a right to to describe the truth of the world as they discover it. And I think artists have the right to tell whatever stories they want. But I wonder if this show tripped those complaints because even though. It does make some interesting formal experiments with how it thinks about the victims and their stories.
Julia Turner: Fundamentally, what the first batch of episodes seems to do is like almost treat what happened to their loved ones as a thrill ride. Like you’re trapped in the apartment, you’re full of dread. You don’t know if you can get out. Who is this guy? Why is he so weird? Then he turns sort of compelling, like it does feel exploitative and and the quote unquote, curiosity about what made him that way that’s technically driving the plot feels actually incurious if they’re just making up details for dramatic effect. And so I just I just have sympathy for these people. I think there is a there is a Dahmer project that I would defend and I defend the right of artists to try and make projects. And sometimes people make projects and they come out well or poorly. But just the the the fundamental project here seems excited about putting you in the shoes of Dahmer’s victims in a way that felt deeply gross.
Stephen Metcalf: Mm hmm. Yeah, I’m with you on that. I mean, we’ve left a big topic on the table here, and we’ll get to it in the plus. But where does this seemingly bottomless appetite for such material come from? But as I said, we’ll talk about that. And plus, okay, the show is got a stupid name that I can never remember.
Dana Stevens: Just say the name Dahmer a bunch of times and you’ll.
Julia Turner: Do on our Dash Monster call and the Jeffrey Dahmer story.
Dana Stevens: I also heard you say, in addition to using the name twice, which is on its face, absurd. Monster has already been used for a movie about a serial killer that I know. What is this movie, right? I mean, what then is that?
Stephen Metcalf: But it’s not, so. It’s all right. It is Dahmer monster. The Jeffrey Dahmer story on Netflix. I think Julie and I are saying don’t check it out. But Dana disagrees. Let’s move on. All right. Well, before we go any further, this is typically in the podcast where we discuss business. Dana, what what business do we have today?
Dana Stevens: Steve One day we will once again have a busy week, but this week our only item of business is to tell you about our Slate Plus segment. This week we decided to extend our conversation a bit from the Jeffrey Dahmer segment that we’re talking about, the Netflix scripted series on Jeffrey Dahmer to talk about true crime as a genre and our relationship to it. We’ve talked about plenty of true crime shows, movies, podcasts on on the show, but I don’t think we’ve ever talked about the genre itself and our life history with it. And I know I have one. I’m sure Julia and Steve have two, So we will talk about that in our bonus segment today. If you’re not a Slate Plus member and you want to hear that segment and others like it, you can sign up at Slate.com slash culture Plus.
Dana Stevens: All right, Stephen, back to the show.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, in the feature film Bro’s now out in theaters, Billy Eichner plays Bobby, the very vocal, very opinionated host of an LGBTQ podcast at 40. Bobby has never really been in a you know, in his telling real or lasting relationship when he meets Aaron, played by Luke Macfarlane. Aaron is a dreamy hunk out on the dance floor and Bobby improbably falls in love with him, improbably in the movie’s telling. Because Aaron is a bro, a kind of guy guy, gay guy, a more traditionally masculine man. What follows is both a rom com and in a way a meta rom com, a movie about how gay romance might or might not conform to the familiar beats and tropes of the genre. It’s directed by Nicholas Stoller, he of Neighbors and Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Stoller co-wrote it with Eichner. All right. In the clip are about to hear Bobby and his colleagues are brainstorming ideas for a new LGBTQ plus museum, and they are just not seeing eye to eye. Let’s let’s listen.
Speaker 2: We cannot afford to push our opening again. People will think we’re in trouble. Maybe this whole place could fall apart. We need new ideas for what goes in the final wing. And we need them now. Cherry girl, You know the blue well, hanging in the Museum of Natural History. Yes. What about that? But instead of the blue. Well, it’s a lesbian. Oh, no. Yeah. Okay, Well, yeah, we can’t do that.
Julia Turner: What if the final exhibit was a recreation of a queer wedding?
Speaker 2: I like that. That I don’t have tomorrow. That is so sweet. I love that. And people can come and register for wedding gifts here. Oh, my God. No. That is old fashioned heteronormative nonsense. We need to get people to rethink history through a queer prism, not comfort them with another gay wedding. All right. It’s a museum. It’s not Schitt’s Creek. Oh, I love. But I love Schitt’s Creek. That show has.
Stephen Metcalf: Layers. Everyone loves Schitt’s Creek. Great.
Speaker 2: Okay, That’s who you remind me of.
Julia Turner: Eugene Levy.
Stephen Metcalf: All right, Dan, let me start with you. Eichner has been quoted as saying he loved when Harry Met Sally as a kid. And he went on to say, I really wanted to do a movie at that level in style, but that was about a gay couple because we truly had never gotten that. So Eichner stated goal was to honor and queer the genre at the same time. How did he do?
Dana Stevens: Yeah, clearly this this is an attempt to have a historic moment in queer representation history, right? I mean, Eichner is marketing it that way. The movie itself is very conscious of hitting those rom com tropes and I don’t have to cite them all, but just, you know, rest assured that you’re going to get plenty of moments that you would recognize from a a Nora Ephron or, you know, kind of traditional nineties rom com in here.
Dana Stevens: Does it all work hanging together? I mean, put it this way, Judd Apatow is one of the producers of this movie, right? Nicholas Stoller is a familiar director from straight romantic comedies like What The Neighbors Movies and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I love. I think it’s one of the great romantic comedies of the past couple of decades. So it’s definitely bringing together some, you know, conventional, straight leaning representations of, you know, mainstream romance into this very queer world. And I think that it’s strongest at the moments that it is not self-consciously pointing up that fact.
Dana Stevens: The clip that we heard, I think, is is not one of those moments. And the idea that that his character, Bobby, is his is Billy Eichner. His character’s name is a gay podcaster, which is the first thing we see him doing. And with a million listeners, by the way, so a very successful one. And also helping run this new LGBTQ museum in New York. Right. He’s he’s powerfully placed in the gay community, in the elite community, really, in this in this movie. And he also lives in a super nice apartment on the Upper West Side. He vacations in Provincetown like he is definitely a member of the, you know, white, cis, gay male elite. And he kind of pokes fun at himself for that fact. And I don’t know, I feel like the self-congratulatory parts of this movie are a lot less fun than the simply romantic parts of it.
Dana Stevens: I do think that the two stars, Luke Macfarlane and Billy Eichner, have great chemistry. It’s a little bit of an unexpected, you know, an odd couple when one reviewer compared them to Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in the way we were, which I think is a kind of funny comparison because there’s a similar you know, there’s the political firebrand, the Jewish political firebrand who Billy Eichner represents, and then this, you know, much more WASPy square, straight acting dude that he is in love with. And that is a sweet chemistry. It’s fun to watch it spark between them.
Dana Stevens: But in the style of an Apatow comedy, it’s a little all over the place. It’s a little digressive. I’m not sure every subplot belongs in there. The ending feels a little tacked on. I mean, does it cohere as a as a beautifully cohesive unit in itself? Not really. But is it a funny romp with lots of good moments and characters and some good writing? Yeah, I think I thoroughly enjoyed this movie moment to moment, but I don’t love It’s the story that it’s telling about itself because I think it it does a bit a bit of injustice to other stories, including Fire Island, a movie that came earlier this year from Hulu, not quite as big a release, but, you know. May be just as groundbreaking, if not more.
Stephen Metcalf: Hmm. Uh, Julia, what do you think?
Julia Turner: I really love Billy Eichner. You may remember that one of our biggest knockdown, drag out fight on this show after our fights about Taylor Swift is how much you guys hated Billy on the street and how much I love it. And I’m such a fan of him. His comedy, his shtick. I wish he liked this movie more. I mean, I enjoyed it. I cried. I liked it when the guy ran slowly down the street and then picked up speed as he realized how much he needed to be with the other guy.
Julia Turner: Like. But I don’t like. I blame Judd Apatow, but I’ll say I like that Beethoven universe and its comfort with like the shaggy and the under edited like the movie. Just a really good rom com is like a taut, perfect little gem. It’s like a 90 minute gem, and this is a nearly two hour movie and it does not need the 2 hours to tell its story. Like the the falling in love sequences, the odd couple sequences, the sort of ability to blend like frankness, comedy and steamy ness in the like romantic and sex scenes and actually like put them on screen is is revolutionary and great and they they pull all that off really well.
Julia Turner: But then there’s just a lot of scenes of people talking to each other that sound less like snappy, elevated movie versions of falling in love and like, more like real relationship setbacks. Like, there’s a moment where you’ll be shocked to learn that our protagonists, after finding great love with one another, run into an obstacle and must part ways for a while. And then they briefly reconnoiter and figure and try to decide whether they can take each other back. And they hilariously had this conversation near some city bike racks, which is a nice comedic touch. And in the middle of in the middle of like a heart breaking discussion, some woman comes and tries to put her city bike back and which like there’s a lot of like funny little laugh moments like that like, great.
Julia Turner: But that scene feels like it’s 40 minutes long. Like it feels like they did 20 takes and they stitched them loosely together. And like they say the same thing over and over again. Like, it sounds like a real breakup where everybody in articulately says the same thing 40 times instead of a romantic comedy version of a breakup where like three beautiful sentences are like, perfectly articulated while a single tear rolls down the cheek. Like, I want that. Like, I just wanted the movie to be better, I guess. But I did enjoy it.
Stephen Metcalf: Yeah, I, I that’s more or less where I, where I came out. I mean, I, I just admired how unapologetic it was about, you know, depicting, you know, gay relationships as they really are not, you know, a subject that the movie itself, the Eichner character in the movie addresses explicitly is just how hallmarked up in order to make gay life acceptable to a mainstream, broad audience. You know, Hollywood has just completely, you know, misrepresented it in some fundamental way. And and I liked that it posed.
Stephen Metcalf: Itself a interesting question, which is, you know, how much do we want? You know, quote unquote, our story from the point of view of Eichner, you know, to fit into received extremely Heteronormative like defining Heteronormative genres and how much do quote unquote we from Eichner point of view want to tell stories completely in our own way, like like which subsumes to it another question that the movie asks quite explicitly, because it’s one of the obstacles they have to overcome, is like, to what degree do we want a traditional seeming heteronormative relationship based on like a certain kind of monogamy and commitment, possibly marriage, and, you know, towards the end of the movie, possibly children and my gay friends tell me that’s an extraordinarily complex set of questions that don’t come with an obvious answer. And so I thought all of that was kind of wonderful that it was going to produce a kind of internal friction that was, you know, very true to the lead character, Bobby.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. So, Dana, this is a movie that has a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, on an A on Cinemascore and it bombed. And Eichner has said has tweeted, that’s the world we live in, unfortunately, even with glowing reviews, etc., etc., straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for bro’s. Anyone who isn’t all caps, a homophobic weirdo should go see Bro’s tonight. I mean, that’s showing you how close to Bobby Eichner is and vice versa. What do you make of that response?
Dana Stevens: I mean, I just I don’t know. It’s I don’t think it’s the greatest marketing technique, first of all, to go around basically shaming everyone for being a homophobe who didn’t see your movie. We’re at a moment in, you know, in movie history and release strategy history where no one understands what makes a movie bomb or not bomb. And you know why Top Gun Maverick went insane at the box office and why, you know, tons of other great movies have not. Nobody knows whether it’s a good idea to release things day and date, i.e., streaming at the same time is in theaters or streaming only or what is going to work.
Dana Stevens: So I don’t know that you can draw huge lessons from the fact that that Rose didn’t kill at the box office on its very first weekend when it’s only in theaters. Maybe it’ll be one of those movies that finds its place on streaming. People want to watch a movie like that as a date movie at home, so I don’t know. But but I don’t respond well to the idea that, you know, it means something bad about you as an audience if you don’t choose to see a certain movie or not.
Julia Turner: No. I mean, like romantic comedies are dead at the box office. Like they only really exist on streaming right now. Like, there’s been many, many articles about the economics of releasing, which, as you say, everyone’s deeply confused by right now, Dana, particularly post-pandemic, but like also the romantic comedy, the adult romantic comedy that he’s throwing back to it. This film is dead. So, you know, like, yes, it’s great that a major Hollywood studio released one, but the fact that it was not a success released in 2022 is not, I think, really fair to say. It’s a reflection on its themes.
Dana Stevens: I had one more thing to say about the content of the movie, and I think this goes to the question of what should a gay romantic comedy be as opposed to, you know, a romantic comedy that just happens to have gay characters. I mean, something that this movie really prides itself on, I think, and that Eichner as as a creator has prided himself on, is that is that it’s not heteronormative. Right. As we hear in that scene he’s not thrilled at the idea that gay marriage will be the centerpiece of the museum’s opening. He wants there to be something that is specific to the queer community. So there’s lots of polyamory in here. There’s a really funny foursome scene that we haven’t talked about. I won’t spoil what’s so funny about it, but I was cackling throughout the entire foursome and a lot of the sex stuff is is specific to the community is and seems to me as an outsider to be like revelatory, you know, to be to be right on in something that that Eichner trying to make observational humor about his own scene.
Dana Stevens: But there are other really key moments that I think needed to be unpacked a lot more like the dynamic between the two lovers at the center of the movie really has to do with internalized homophobia in some ways, right? That he, Billy, his character, thinks his boyfriend is too straight acting, and the boyfriend thinks that when they go out with his parents who have accepted that he’s gay but don’t necessarily know a lot about gay culture, find Billy Eichner his character to kind of on and to be constantly talking about his community and ask him to tone it down. And so what does that point to between them? Right. Or even the fact that one of them wants kids, one of them doesn’t. You know, these things seem like they seem like something to explore in a romantic comedy between two men that you might not explore in the same way in a straight romantic comedy. And the movie kind of throws them away.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, the movie Brothers is out in theaters. Maybe go check it out. I think we admired it in many, many ways. Not a perfect movie, but it’s very funny. All right. Moving on.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, I think the best explainer I got for this phenomenon of the wife guy came from Rebecca Onion of Slate. Let me quote her. She says, I’m pretty sure the wife guy couldn’t exist without social media. Wife guy. As a person who publicly celebrates both his wife as a person and his couple good wife guy makes his wife’s virtues a constant topic in public and posts movie things about domestic life. Wife Guy is unable to say anything that sounds at all realistic about marriage and relationships. He’s happier than could possibly ever be true, and that’s why a rupture is such a risk for him. Julia, explain to us why we’re talking about this phenomenon now. It’s been around for years.
Julia Turner: All right. This week we’re talking about the wife guy, but we’re talking about the wife guy because of a phenomenon called the Try guys. This is a YouTube comedy troupe that got their start in BuzzFeed in the early teens. And they’ve now built a kind of mid-sized YouTube empire. The concept is it’s for guys. They’re like regular guys and they try stuff in videos. And each of them has sort of developed his own public persona version of himself and their personal lives. And and, you know, the people they are married to are engaged to or whatever are sort of pulled into the universe of their videos.
Julia Turner: And one of them who has been sort of famously exhausting since the beginning of their videos, this man, Ned Fulmer, who apparently is a wife guy because he talked so much about his being married to a person, loving that person, having a great wife, etc., was caught cheating on that wife with a person who was also an employee of this small Internet company.
Julia Turner: And so the try guys announced in a in various formats, including a bleak video that dropped yesterday the re formulation of the try guys as three people and they have jettisoned the former wife guy among them. We will leave aside I think the dissection of the track guys and their brand and their personality. But you know, I think there was rage and confusion at the fact that this purported wife guy would cheat on his wife. And it has caused many folks and now us to think through this trope of the wife guy. It’s origins, it’s evolution, why it has been so fascinating, why we love to hate wife guys, what’s so unctuous and odd about them.
Julia Turner: And in the course of prepping for this segment and kind of looking back on the history of the way of guy in the term, which, you know, I think arguably got its start in 2017 with the guy who posted a picture of his like lovely looking wife on Instagram and and then protested slightly too much. I love my curvy wife. And just because she, you know, is a little thicker than the Cosmo standard basically was like, fuck you, I love my wife. She’s a little bit chubby and I’m so noble for loving her. And she, like, just looks like a normal woman. And it made him seem like a real asshole and the whole internet made fun of him for several days. Like that’s the origin of the trope, basically. And it’s really worth going back to look at the post. It’s amazing.
Julia Turner: But all of this led me to a question. Steve, are you okay?
Stephen Metcalf: Well, I, I meditated on that. I would say no, I don’t feel like I publicly perform Yukari and I if I do a little bit here and there, I hope it’s not unctuous, but I would say that I’m a dad guy. I mean, I in the sense that I don’t know. I mean, the subject for my kids has come up not infrequently over the course of making this podcast. And I don’t know, it probably projects this image of me as a devoted or considerate parent. I’d like to think I’m those things.
Stephen Metcalf: To me, what’s interesting here is a couple of different things. One is that I think Rebecca Onion hits a nail right on the head, which is just a phenomenon. You know, it would have to coincide with social media and the rise of social media. I mean, it’s just an age of performed selfhood. And, you know, we can’t avoid it. We perform selves spontaneously on this podcast that are sort of us and sort of not us.
Stephen Metcalf: And it’s extremely can be very confusing. I mean, I think one of the hardest things for me getting into the rhythm of doing the show, it took me years and it was the single biggest hump to get over is am I me or my performing me? You know, if I’m just me, don’t I just sound like a banal blather or, you know, making casual conversation in front performed me Is it somehow screened and artificial? So I would say, God, I hope I’m not wife. I think publicly performing love of another human being in whatever context you’re allowed to be this way about your dog, Let me put it that way. And if you’re allowed to. Be that way about your dog. Don’t be that way about your fucking spouse. That’s my bottom line.
Stephen Metcalf: Dana, what about you?
Dana Stevens: Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s getting into a different territory of. Just do you mention that person at all? You know, do you have, as Julia does, I know, kind of a strict policy that you don’t post family pictures or kid pictures ever. And that world is completely private? Or do you have some balance like I do, where maybe on a special occasion you post a kid or a pet picture, but you try not to make that your whole persona. That I guess that’s that’s adjacent to the to the wife guy discourse.
Dana Stevens: It seems like the wife guy discourse already applies to people that are extremely online. It’s sort of, you know, a world where there’s no question you’re going to talk about your private life or your spouse. The question is how do you talk about them and is your talking about them really just a way of talking about yourself? And it seems like in this really wonderful round up, it’s a it’s a Slate conversation published late last year, The Curse of the Wife guy that you were quoting from with the Rebecca Onion quote, It just you get the impression that the wife guy persona someone like, you know, this guy who posted his curvy wife that Julia mentioned, that there’s just a narcissism of, you know, performance of one’s own relationship that is setting the person up. It’s almost like, you know, John Mulaney being the excuse for that that conversation in Slate.
Dana Stevens: Right. John Mulaney stand up comedy often referenced his now ex-wife and, you know, spoke of her in this loving and kind of idealizing way. And it’s really just you’re just blowing up a balloon that can then be punctured if something goes wrong in your relationship. So it’s a very risky approach to take for a performer of stand up comedy or just a performer of of oneself on the Internet.
Dana Stevens: I mean, to expand the conversation, I guess the question would be, you know, why don’t we talk about husband guys or pit girls, right? Or kid moms? I mean, there certainly is a phenomenon of performative parenting, right? And people bragging about their children and maybe posting photos that the kid might not later want posted, etc.. There’s also, you know, sometimes a backlash against that. But that hasn’t created a whole type, you know, like a character like the wife guy is. And I just wonder what that has to do with what we expect of husbands in general.
Julia Turner: I have a theory.
Dana Stevens: Please. Let’s hear it.
Julia Turner: Okay. The wife guy. Don’s on the internet as a concept. In 2017, several months after Donald Trump was elected and just before the Harvey Weinstein reporting dropped and a succession of additional reporting about scuzzy men in power followed. And it’s like genuinely, I think, difficult to be a man today. I mean, Steve, you know, you can chime in and disabuse me of this notion, but like.
Julia Turner: The prevailing. Public sentiment for the last five years have been that men are stupid and venal and selfish and they suck and they wear their power lightly and they don’t understand it. And they use it to quash people thoughtlessly or with intent, and that this is a dreadful state of affairs and.
Julia Turner: So all of the Internet’s public men, which the Internet, you know, or at least the corners of the Internet populated by like BuzzFeed and YouTube improv groups have had to figure out different ways to perform masculinity. And I think part of what feels so.
Julia Turner: Challenging about the wife guy is that there’s like an impulse underlying it, which is like, I’m a good one, you know, I’m one of the good men. I’m not like one of those men. Like, I don’t need my wife to look like the cover of Cosmo or I’m a famous, handsome comedian. But like, I just all I want is the approval of my wife at home and. That is fundamentally using your partner as an object to. Profess something about the moral fiber of your being, and that is not the best way to perform being a good person or be a good person because it it sort of instrumentalize someone in your life. And that is what bothers people about this.
Julia Turner: But the underlying impulse of like the it is possible to have other relationships with women besides like sexually harassing them, quashing their careers, like, you know, raping them in dressing rooms, like the impulse of like there are more ways to be a man than the most publicly prominent ones in 2017. 1819 feels like a reasonable one, right? Like, I have sympathy for the impulse and the fact that a bunch of dopes are doing it stupidly. You know, they’ll they’ll learn eventually when things like this happen, I think maybe. And if they don’t, they’ll entertain us by being dufus.
Dana Stevens: Yeah, I guess if you see it on a continuum with, you know, just men being a little more open or vulnerable or, you know, romantic online, that certainly is not a bad thing. And I was thinking when you were speaking, Julie, about how just yesterday a friend I know who are a couple who are both online, it was it was the woman’s birthday and the dude who is not a husband but a boyfriend posted the sweetest little montage of pictures of his girl and wish you a happy birthday and just talked about how she looked beautiful in every setting. And when I think about it, it was kind of a wife guy post, but I hundred percent loved it. It was really sweet and romantic. So I guess what it is is that there’s a you know, there’s a seductive component to the idea of the wife guy, Right. And maybe that’s why his betrayal as the person who presented himself as extra sincere and extra loving is all the more sharp to experience.
Stephen Metcalf: I mean, the other thing I would say also is that is that and I’d be curious to hear you speak to this. I mean, marriage has a performative aspect to it, no matter what taken setting aside social media or traditional media or whatever. I mean, you know, my my feeling is that my experience of other married couples is always, you know, is it easygoing to be around them because of the way they relate or don’t relate to one another? That’s a huge tell at the same time.
Stephen Metcalf: There’s an extra. My experience of both my marriage and other marriages is that there’s a profound difference between the interior and the exterior of a marriage in all cases. And so there’s the reverse situation where you get these little flare ups, these little tells, these little passive aggressive tells sometime sometimes from couples, some couples that I know quite well. And I’m sure that I do it right. And I just you don’t know whether you’re looking at the part of the iceberg above the surface.
Stephen Metcalf: Right. From which you can extrapolate the mass of resentments, accumulated resentments blow, or whether whether the inside isn’t reflected in this public interaction at all. Because I know for a fact that that’s not always the case from from married couples that I’m very, very close to. You know, so it’s it’s like disentangling where performance and actuality begin and end, I think is almost harder for a married couple than it is for an individual.
Dana Stevens: Right. Even think about your story. How did you meet write that story that people get asked as a couple. You know, I never like that moment. I don’t like telling that story because it has to be condensed and, you know, it has to have sort of like points that you hit. You know what I mean? And laugh lines or whatever. And it feels like it doesn’t do justice to the actual private history of what happened. And maybe this is off the subject, but that seems like it’s on the continuum, right, of sort of creating your performance of coupledom. But.
Julia Turner: Right. I mean, but but I don’t think it is that, you know, like that that that is what is so funny about online life and why this is an online term, which is that there are so many people who perform a self in a different way in the era of social media. And each platform cultivates a different type of self performance. I mean, it’s we should like circle back around to tick tock. I think because we we there’s so many more people on it and types of people on it from the, you know, time a few years ago when we first joined it. And it’s I think the way that Selzer performed on Tick Tock has evolved a lot and is interesting and different than Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or some of these other places where people perform selfhood.
Julia Turner: But I will also say, just for sheer entertainment, the wife, the remaining three track guys that published this like hostage video explanation of the future of their enterprise, that if you don’t give a crap about the try guys and I’ve barely ever watch one of their videos except for in prep for the segment is like hilarious. If you just want to like speculate about the interpersonal dynamics of this trio, there’s like two dudes who seem really angry and one dude who seems really sad that he’s not going to get to make videos with his friend anymore. And anyway, it’s a rich text. It would definitely send it to anyone who for whom. That sounds interesting.
Stephen Metcalf: Yep, a rich text as well as the curse of the wife guy. The December 2021 piece in Slate that I quoted Rebecca Onion from. All right, let’s let’s move on.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, now is the moment on our podcast when we endorse technology. What do you have?
Dana Stevens: Steve, I’m going to do a you this week and do a local endorsement, which I know seems exclusionary to people who don’t live near the place that I’m going to endorse. But when you hear about how magical it is, I’m sure that you will forgive me because it’s worth it to help support this place and keep it alive. So a new bookstore has opened in my neighborhood, the first used and new bookstore to open within, you know, close walking distance of me and on a very residential street that has very few businesses on it. And it is absolutely wonderful. And I can’t believe that we’re lucky enough to have this place. So I’m just going to endorse it so that folks who are in Brooklyn, in North Park Slope and wanting to go to a mysterious little nook can visit a bookstore called. Wait for the name Troubled Sleep, which is on Sixth Avenue in Park Slope. And and is everything you would want in a brand new little tiny neighborhood used in new bookstore.
Dana Stevens: I was just there over the weekend with a friend, and it was such a moment. My friend and I both agreed, visiting it a feeling like the world was coming back. You know, in terms of everything that’s disappeared in the last few years and how public space has become so rare to visit with someone and spontaneity has kind of disappeared from social interactions. Right. And just randomly, I just texted a friend on Sunday afternoon, rainy afternoon, said, Hey, you want to go visit that new bookstore? He happened to be free. We met there, got a haul of books, went to a bar, had a drink, and looked at our piles of books we had bought. And it was such a wonderful afternoon that felt like revisiting an ancient, ancient time in history when such simple pleasures were possible.
Dana Stevens: So Troubled Sleep is a small but great bookstore that reminds me of a college town bookstore. In a way, it’s got those kind of surprisingly inexpensive finds. It has a lot of box sets, like a complete box set of Proust, you know, the remembrance of Things, past translation and a complete box set of of who was it of George Eliot’s works for, you know, the kind that come in beautiful sort of boxes with marbled paper around them for reasonably low prices and you know, lots of just trade paperbacks and, you know, dusty tomes and a few new books in the front, including they had a copy of my book, which made me happy. But yeah, the guy who runs it is a real book lover, and he’s excited to be in the neighborhood and I couldn’t want to support him more. So please, any of you, including you and Julia, next time you’re in New York, go to Troubled. Sleep on Sixth Avenue in Park Slope.
Stephen Metcalf: Oh, that sounds amazing.
Dana Stevens: Yes, please. Let’s visit it together next time you’re in town.
Stephen Metcalf: Lovely.
Stephen Metcalf: Julia, what do you have?
Julia Turner: Well, as sometimes happens in here, outperform motherhood and family life. For a moment, I sometimes happens. My son asked a couple weeks ago what military museums exist in L.A. County, so I set to Googling as we were eating breakfast. This was like a heat wave weekend in L.A. It was like 95 degrees where I live near the ocean. And I learned and began to read out loud before I realized what I was doing.
Julia Turner: That in El Monte, California, which is further inland, there is a place called the American Military Museum, comma, also known as Tankland. And it was when I read that outloud that I set my fade. It has 170 odd decommissioned military vehicles, its website read. Whereupon my son was like, We must go there right this second. Whereupon I lied and said it was closed because I was pretty sure it would be about 130 degrees in El Monte, California on this particular hot weekend. But few weeks later we decided on a cooler weekend to make the adventure.
Julia Turner: And yeah, if if this sounds appealing to you, it will be. It is like a packed, jam packed, dusty parking lot in the baking sun full of vehicles that were in World War Two. We’re in Vietnam. We’re in the Gulf War. We just, like, parked in a row, like you’re at an enterprise ready to, like, pick up the keys to your, you know, Kia Sorento or whatever. Like, it’s a very funny little institution. It’s been around for 40 plus years. It’s, you know, used to provide a lot of these vehicles as rentals to various filming productions. As productions have gotten more and more digital, the call for these vehicles is less and less as the budgets for filmmaking has grown less and less. The call for these vehicles is less and less, but it’s an independent mom and pop institution and an absolute joy to young people interested in military history.
Julia Turner: If you happen to know any as I do, and there are legit tanks. And we also got some amazing Johnathan Gold approved tacos at a place called Burritos La Palma nearby. It’s justly famed for its teeny tiny burritos that are actually tacos that are actually burritos. So I guess my recommendation for you is the American Military Museum, a.k.a Tankland in Almonte, California.
Dana Stevens: Tankland and Taco. That’s Southern California afternoon.
Julia Turner: It was pretty perfect.
Stephen Metcalf: I love it.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, last week I endorsed a sort of short YouTube film about the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, this incredible 27 chorus solo that a member of Duke Ellington’s band took. It’s just the most wonderful kind of exhibit, really exhilarating video. So this week, I’m going to endorse a video from the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, which was, Have you guys seen this? The singer songwriter Brandi Carlile coaxed Joni Mitchell back to the stage for the first time since 2015 when she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015.
Dana Stevens: I’ve seen it.
Stephen Metcalf: It is so it’s so fricking inspiring. It’s amazing. She did a full 13 song set. It’s her first full set in more than 20 years. You know, she’s obviously had health issues. She’s getting on a little bit of nerves, but she does case of you, both sides now, some of her other, you know, well-known songs. And it’s just powerfully moving. Her voice is still extraordinary. It’s not and can’t be the same voice, but it’s taken on different tonalities. And I just the awe inspiring dignity to it.
Speaker 5: From both sides now from band. It’s cloud image that I recall.
Speaker 2: I really don’t know, Claire.
Speaker 5: I really don’t know that at all.
Stephen Metcalf: So I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s on YouTube. Just click on it. Check it out. I dare you not to be moved. Julia.
Julia Turner: Thank you. Thank you.
Stephen Metcalf: Dana, thanks so much.
Dana Stevens: Thanks, Steve.
Stephen Metcalf: You’ll 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 at Culture Fest at Slate.com. Our introductory music is from the composer Nicholas Patel. Our production assistant is Nadira Goffe. Our producer is Cameron Drews Ford, 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 this flat produce segment of the Slate Culture Gabfest. Today we tackle a big question What is up with true crime? Why is everyone so obsessed with it? Why do people want to spend hours and hours in this shitty apartment of Jeff Dahmer contemplating his monstrosity with both a dash and a colon in the title? We will resolve this once and for all on today’s Slate Plus segment. Dana, why do we like to reenact depraved humans in their acts and watch it for pleasure? Go.
Dana Stevens: I mean, you’ve got me. This was a big part of what our Dahmer segment was about, I guess, was that even I who I guess was defending the show more than either of you, don’t really get why it’s Netflix’s number one show right now, despite no marketing. Why do people want this stuff so much? You know, why did the serial True Crime podcast start this true crime podcast wave? That’s that’s still going on to the date. I mean, I guess the most obvious simple answer, the Occam’s razor of answers is just, you know, this stuff is aberrant. It’s unusual, weird, bizarre human behavior that is, you know, far outside the norm of most people’s experience. And they’re drawn to it because of the extremity of it, because they want to understand the darkest parts of human nature and, you know, explore their worst fears and nightmares.
Dana Stevens: And on paper, that makes sense to me, right? I mean, obviously it is the extremity that draws people into these stories, but what the actual sensation is that they want to experience as viewers or readers or listeners, I guess is the thing that I don’t feel like I have as much access to because I just don’t want to experience that that often. I guess there was a period in my life when I was read more true crime books than I would write.
Dana Stevens: Now, I don’t think it’s ever been a visual genre, you know, of storytelling that I’m particularly drawn to. But I do remember the book Fatal Vision, the now very controversial book by Joe McGinniss, about a murder that took place in North Carolina on a military base that has never been completely solved or explained. I remember that book kind of entranced my whole family, like my parents read it, my siblings read it. We all talked about it was back in the I guess the mid-eighties that it came out. And I’m sure at the time I was a teenager and was not problematize the genre itself and asking myself why we were all obsessed with this murder and talking about it.
Dana Stevens: But, you know, then it came to be the case decades later that Joe McGinniss is telling is contested, and it’s really not clear what the ethics are of writing a book like that. I believe Janet Malcolm also wrote a book about the same the same crime and possibly the coverage of it. I don’t know. I mean, the older I get, the more small, aberrant stories about horrible human behavior are not something that I want to turn my attention to. You know, it’s sort of like they’re all the same in a way. Like the individual details of the story may be very different, but the idea that you are kind of soaking yourself in depravity, enrolling in the sordid part of life itself just feels kind of wrong and gross to me. And yet there are great works, like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, right? I mean, there are lasting works of literature that are about reported versions of true, awful stories. I don’t know.
Dana Stevens: I don’t think I’m answering your question, Julie, about why people need this so much. I guess I’m just kind of roiling around in the sordid ness myself.
Julia Turner: I mean, I think you’ve articulated a useful framework here, though, Steve. What what’s your theory? Why why are humans drawn to this kind of storytelling?
Stephen Metcalf: Well, I, you know, is Kane the first murderer, according to the Jew Judeo-Christian tradition, the first murderer, you know, who ever existed? I mean, it kind of you know, it’s as elemental as Eve eating the apple somehow to our Western psychological makeup, right? I mean, we’re a people of crime and punishment. And we’re trying to understand we’re trying to understand ourselves as fallen creatures in a way, you know, how is it that we’re the creatures that have to assign ourselves laws and then obey them? Why is the psychic cost of obedience for some people intolerably high? What counts as norm and what counts as transgression?
Stephen Metcalf: And what’s the nature of evil, Right? I mean, how do you account for evil in anything like satisfyingly explanatory terms? And I think one of the interesting things is that because those questions they get asked over and over and over again compulsively throughout all of human history because we don’t have an answer.
Stephen Metcalf: So I understand why you stick a camera in an actor’s face who’s playing Jeffrey Dahmer or I understand the impulse to do it, and the impulse to watch it is you just what’s it like, right? What’s it like to. In the presence of someone who’s missing some component of self-regulation, that they’re capable of doing those things.
Julia Turner: Yeah. You know, it’s so interesting because I think I’m probably the closest thing we have on this show to a crime story fan in that I love procedurals, I love Law and Order and I love detective novels. Like I’ve been on a spree of reading Michael Connelly books.
Julia Turner: Um. But I don’t like the ones that are about the psychology of the monster. I mean, it’s funny even hearing you think about crime and punishment, I’m realizing that the sense of like, claustrophobic oppressiveness that I felt watching Dahmer is, like, similar. This is going to seem like a loaded comparison to how I felt reading Crime and Punishment, the Dostoevsky book, where where my like, fundamental sanity was like, triggered. And as I think I described before in the show, my response to Crime Punishment is like, this is boring. I’m not interested in this guy. Just don’t kill the stupid lady. And then you wouldn’t be in this situation. Like, why do we even have to worry about your situation? And it’s a dumb situation. Like, just don’t think I’m not interested in your problems of, like, an uncontrollable old lady murdering. Like, just.
Dana Stevens: Have you tried? That’s like not killing people. Raskolnikov.
Julia Turner: Like, literally. That’s my major emotional response to Crime and Punishment, which is probably says something about the smallness of my soul rather than the limitations of Dostoyevsky is a great novelist, but I had like a similar feeling of like, I don’t know, man, most people aren’t like this. I, like, don’t want to be around this, like, go away. And that revulsion, I think, is probably the key to why I do enjoy crime stories and law and order and some versions of true crime.
Julia Turner: Because thinking this through, there’s actually very different approaches to true crime. There’s true crime that’s about the hunter and the puzzle and the solution, Right? There’s there’s true crime. That’s about how they catch him. Then there’s true crime that’s about systemic injustice and the failures of our legal system when it’s confronted with evil or accident. You know, like serial serial was good. I’m not going to stand up here and say that serial was like a morally problematic project. There’s plenty to discuss in it. But it was curious about whether our criminal justice system got it right or committed an injustice.
Julia Turner: And so, okay, questions about process, procedure and like putting bad guys away. That’s one thread of true crime, questions about, you know, pain, tragedy, social injustice, the failings of our criminal justice system, who it’s fair to and who it’s not fair to. Those feel interesting, the true crime that’s just like, get a load of this guy and all the crazy shit he did.
Julia Turner: That’s like another genre, another stripe of it that’s like probably closer to horror or, Yeah, staring the monster in the face. And that’s the one that is least compelling to me, but clearly holds deep appeal to some people for all the reasons that Steve describes of like it, you know, or the same the same reason people are compelled by the unusual or the aberrant, the the dark and the scary. You know, people tell horror stories and ghost stories and go to horror movies. And I don’t like doing any of those things because I like a tidy, controllable universe full of sane people who don’t just being old ladies in the head for no reason. So I think like that when we talk about the fascination with true crime, it’s worth thinking about all of the various subgenres thereof.
Dana Stevens: Yeah, you know, it’s funny when you mention horror movies, then I suddenly get it. I mean, not that I like every horror movie by any standard or that, you know, I’m not sometimes a little wimpy about getting scared in them, but I understand the appeal of that genre implicitly. As soon as it’s fiction and it’s either a monster or a supernatural story or something, it feels to me like a fairy tale structure that I can understand, which seems different then kind of plowing through the actual facts of an actual event that happened in your lifetime to a real person. And I’m not sure why that is, that those two things, those two genres seem completely separate to me in their understandable appeal, but they really do. I mean, I guess it has to do with how people process their their horror and their nightmares and the things that they don’t want to think about. But but they know or somewhere at the bottom of their psyche, you know, I don’t think I agree with Julia that I simply prefer a world where people don’t act that way. I just want them to be people in fictional stories. Maybe that’s where I get a sense of control over the narrative.
Julia Turner: All right. Well, Slate Plus listeners, thank you so much for listening to this bonus segment of our show for supporting Slate and all of its work, including the sequel to Gabfest and for being with us this week. We’ll talk to you soon.
