When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog.
So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded.
Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance.
Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience.
It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth.
Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.
Matthew Rankin makes great movies, but I’m not yet fully sure what makes a Matthew Rankin movie specific to Matthew Rankin. His first film The Twentieth Century is one of the best debut features of this decade, and yet the most accurate way to recommend it to the uninitiated is as the best Guy Maddin movie not directed by Guy Maddin. I found myself reaching for similar hypotheticals while watching Rankin’s latest picture, the low-key absurdist comedy Universal Language. What if Wes Anderson directed My Winnipeg? What if Roy Andersson directed True Stories? What if Quentin Dupieux directed Where is the Friend’s House? Thankfully, Matthew Rankin is quickly becoming a distinct enough directorial voice that I won’t have to come up with these lazy rhetorical scenarios for much longer, but there just isn’t enough material out there to fully pinpoint what makes his work unique, at least not yet. For now, its greatness is still familiar to its most glaring reference points.
Set in a parallel-universe version of Winnipeg that’s just as influenced by Iranian culture as Canadian, Universal Language casually slips between Persian & French dialogue & text as a mirror reflection of its characters’ liminal cultural identities. We start at a French immersion school, with Persian students anxious to break away from their eccentric teacher’s disciplinary shouting so they can have wholesome adventures in the Canadian snow. Outside, their small-scale schemes intertwine with the daily toils of a Winnipeg tour guide and a stranger (Matthew Rankin, essentially playing himself) who’s returning to town to visit his ill mother after years of estrangement. In stage-comedy tradition, their stories converge in a single apartment at the story’s climax, but much of the film leaves them traveling & plotting in isolated vignettes. The tour guide is the most solid narrative anchor in that respect, providing the audience a sense of place as he shows off the many uninspiring wonders of Winnipeg’s cultural monuments: an endless tangle of grey interstate highways, a Beige District of nondescript brick buildings, a briefcase that was abandoned on a park bench in the 1970s and left undisturbed due to general Canadian politeness, etc.
Universal Language lounges in a calm, unrushed mood, warming its frozen hands with a hot glass of tea in avoidance of the harsh winter outside. It’s quietly hilarious, though, with an excess of absurdist gags about turkey beauty pageants, sentient Christmas trees, local TV-commercial celebrities, and schoolboy Groucho Marx impersonators that each land with a warm chuckle rather than a full-bellied laugh. Its visual trickery is similarly subdued, especially in comparison with the German Expressionist fantasia of The Twentieth Century. There are two scenes in which a shot-reverse-shot sequence triggers a harshly mundane psychedelia: one that maps out the cubicle-walled limbo of a government bureaucrat’s office and one that swaps two characters’ personae mid-film, recalling Lynch’s Lost Highway. Another isolated sequence of low-key surrealism makes the audience dizzy with double-exposure images of a figure skater dressed in silver like a spinning disco ball. It’s all purposefully underplayed deadpan, so its merits as Great Cinema are much less obvious than they were in Rankin’s previous picture. It’s also much sweeter & more communal, though, suggesting that Rankin is investing more heart into his characters than his production design as he hones his directorial voice. Although many immediate comparisons come to mind while describing what he’s achieved so far, I still can’t fully predict where his mind is going next. He’s an exciting Artist To Watch as a result, even as someone who’s not yet making fully distinct art.
Making art is hard work, even when you’re just goofing off with your friends. No matter how silly a collaborative art project is on a conceptual level—a novelty punk band, an amateur movie blog, a Mardi Gras costuming krewe (to name the few I have personal experience with)—the practicalities of seeing it through gets mired down in the general bullshit drudgery of modern life. Between everyone’s duties to work, to family, and to personal health and well-being, real-life circumstances are always stacked against your success, which can make you question why you’re working so hard for something so silly as, say, organizing a meet-up for a small group of friends to dress as Divine on Mardi Gras day. It does feel great when everything clicks in to place, though. There are few victories sweeter than defying the odds or our modern capitalist hellscape by making something sublimely stupid with your friends.
Even by my personal standards, the communal art project documented in Grand Theft Hamlet is exceedingly inane. “Filmed” entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto Online during the early lockdown years of COVID-19 (in the style of We Met in Virtual Reality), Grand Theft Hamlet documents the efforts of two goofball British blokes to organize a staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the gaming platform. It’s an absurdly specific novelty project that quickly leads to a broader story about how hard it is to complete any piece of collaborative art. All the usual roadblocks of squeezing in rehearsals around work schedules, balancing personal obsession with familial obligation, and navigating contributors’ differing excitement levels to distribute labor according to enthusiasm all apply to meeting online to recite Shakespeare while digitally represented as archetypal sex workers & thugs. Only, the video game platform literalizes those obstacles in the form of outside players firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to goof off with your friends.
The tradition of adapting Shakespeare in a novelty setting is long & storied. Even the modern specificity of Grand Theft Auto can’t make this staging a total anomaly, since a digital office-building setting will instantly recall Hamlet (2000) or a burst of neon-lit gunfire will recall Romeo+Juliet (1996). I’m sure there have also been unpermitted guerilla productions of Shakespeare plays periodically shut down by the cops, even if those cops are usually not algorithmically generated NPCs. It’s the effort that Sam Crane & Mark Oosterveen (along with central documentarian Pinny Grylls) put into working around the intended purpose of GTA Online that affords the project its true uniqueness. The triumphant perseverance of a player shouting their lines over machine gunfire during rehearsal while fellow collaborators play defense against disruptive trolls & “griefers” adds a new obstacle to the usual “Let’s put on a show!” artistic sprit. The defiance of carrying on in those chaotic circumstances is energizing, inspiring an actor to shout “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” into the digital void.
Hamlet proves to be an apt play to stage for this ludicrous project, not least of all because its tragic Shakespearean violence fits right in with the basic control functions of GTA. The actual themes of the play are genuinely felt in the final edit, especially in scenes where Crane & Oosterveen slip into suicidal ideation thanks to the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns or when GTA‘s in-universe superhero franchise Impotent Rage is advertised in block letters on billboards & slot machines. The most critical Shakespeare quote repeated in this particular staging, however, isn’t from Hamlet at all. It’s the Macbeth line about how life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That pretty much sums up the whole project, from the proudly idiotic premise to the meaningless displays of violence to the general, persistent emptiness of being alive. It’s also a succinct explanation of why it’s so important to make dumb art projects with your friends despite the effort required to pull it off. Nothing matters anyway; you might as well have a little fun while you’re here.
Hollywood studios are struggling to get back on their feet after years of being knocked to the ground by blows like the COVID-19 pandemic, labor union strikes, and the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Industrial Complex. That’s bad news for shareholders & below-the-line workers alike, but it has cleared a lot of space on local marquees for microbudget indie cinema that would otherwise be elbowed out of the frame by superhero flicks, nostalgic remakes, and other Disney products of that cursed ilk. It’s easy to doomsay about the future of theatrical moviegoing in our current blockbuster lull, but I can’t get too dispirited by a trend that’s left room for independently-funded filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun, Vera Drew, Kyle Edward Ball, Robbie Banfitch, Matt Farley, Kansas Bowling, Dylan Greenberg, Mike Cheslik and Ryland Tews to land major headlines & showtimes when just a decade ago their work would’ve been stuck in straight-to-Vimeo purgatory. Maybe it’s a bad time to own a movie studio, but things are looking up for outsider artists with attention-grabbing filmmaking styles, an active After Effects subscription, and a dream.
I’m excited to add Maxwell Nalevansky & Carl Fry to that growing list of microbudget freaks who’ve landed major impact with minor resources in this new era of outsider cinema. Their debut feature Rats! calls back to an older tradition of Texan slacker art sparked by a previous independent cinema boom, but I don’t know that any of those post-Linklater buttscratchers were ever as exceedingly gross or as truly anarchic. A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk, Rats! is a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens. Set in small-town Texas in the mid-aughts, it follows the daily follies of a permanently stoned graffiti artist who earns himself a night in jail when he’s caught tagging the town’s beloved public phone booth. The especially deranged cop on his case offers him amnesty for this crime if he rats on his small-time drug dealer cousin, whom she suspects of selling nukes to Osama Bin Laden but does not have the evidence to prove it. Meanwhile, a local serial killer is systematically removing the hands of unsuspecting victims around town, which also gets unfairly pinned on the cousins despite their collective ambitions mostly amounting to ripping bongs & chilling out. There isn’t much else going on in terms of plot, but much violence, romance, pop-punk whining, and lazing about ensues.
Rats! estimates what it might be like if the singing-butthole sequence of Pink Flamingos were staged in the live-action cartoon playhouse of Cool as Ice. The audience is afforded no time to adjust to its cavity-boring sugar rush, as the film frequently cuts to one-off Looney Tunes gags & nauseating Farrelly Brothers gross-outs without warning. It’s an unrelenting editing rhythm that’s sure to trigger a fight-or-flight response in unsuspecting viewers, but it’s also one with promising cult-classic potential for those who stick with it, given the density & intensity of its jokes. Like with other recent outsider-art triumphs like The People’s Joker & Hundreds of Beavers, it only gets funnier the more time you spend with it, as it builds its own inside-jokes with repeated gags like its persistent, nonsensical mispronunciation of the word “hands.” There might be some subversive political commentary in its lampooning of fascist suburban paranoia and its declaration that “The only good cop is a dead cop,” but for the most part its only goal from minute to minute is to make the audience laugh, and it consistently succeeds. Everything else is just a loving effort to make every frame as cartoonishly 2007 as possible, collecting as many totems from the era as it can in 85 breakneck minutes: an Alkaline Trio poster, a Converge t-shirt, a McCain/Palin billboard, Game Stop & Hot Topic shoplifting sprees, Xanax tablets, a panini press, etc.
Yellow Veil is giving Rats! a proper theatrical run before it hits VOD, including a local screening at The Broad on 3/28. Regardless of its immediate response from a wide audience, that level of distribution is an immediate victory for a film this cheap, this gross, and this prankishly abrasive. Not that long ago, it likely would have stalled on the regional festival circuit before trickling into self-published online platforms. That’s cause to celebrate, preferably over 40ozs and Black & Milds with your closest knucklehead friends for the full effect.
This year’s Oscar race for Best Actress has narrowed down to two fierce combatants: Demi Moore for her career-reviving role as an aged-out aerobics TV show host in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance vs. Mikey Madison for her career-making role as a wronged erotic dancer in Sean Baker’s Anora. Thankfully, they’re both great performances in great movies, but since this is Awards Season, they share a combined running time of 280 minutes, which is a lot of homework to squeeze in before this Sunday’s ceremony if you’ve fallen behind on the syllabus. So, at this point it’s probably best recommended to watch the one title that combines those two flavors in one easy-to-swallow, two-hour treat. 1996’s Striptease stars Demi Moore in a career-pinnacle role as a wronged erotic dancer, lacing up her stripper boots and spinning the poles years before Mikey Madison was born. It’s got none of The Substance‘s gross-out humor nor any of Anora‘s violent despair, but it does find the exact Venn-Diagram overlap where Moore & Madison’s awards-season spotlights currently intersect. It’s also, on its own terms, a total hoot.
Released just one year after Paul Verhoeven’s vicious camp classic Showgirls, Striptease is mostly remembered as a hollow echo of one of the great erotic thrillers of its era. Despite their shared strip club setting, the two movies are wildly different in tone & intent, which makes Striptease‘s lighter, fluffier approach hugely beneficial in retrospect. It’s shockingly cute & playful for its scummy setting—populated with perverted Congressmen & gropey strip club patrons—ultimately playing more like a precursor for Miss Congeniality than an echo of Showgirls. Like Madison in Anora, Moore stars as an erotic dancer who has to chase down her fuckboy ex to get what’s owed to her (in this case, custody of her young daughter) while suffering a series of screwball hijinks that are tonally incongruent with the violence threatened by the crime-world goons circling around her. Moore was no young upstart ingénue at the time of filming, though. Her performance was the highest paid actress gig in Hollywood history at the point of paycheck, and she deserved every penny. Unfortunately and unfairly, it was also the start of her professional decline that hadn’t fully recovered until this year’s Oscar campaign, three decades later.
On a technical level, Striptease excels foremost as a feat of mainstream screenwriting. In an opening scene that lasts less than a minute, we’re introduced to Demi Moore in a Floridian divorce court, pleading to a good-old-boy judge not to grant custody of her daughter to her pill-head ex (Robert Patrick), whose flagrant criminality caused her to lose her job as a secretary for the FBI. That’s some incredible efficiency. From there, we immediately jump eight weeks into her new career as the rising-star dancer at The Eager Beaver, a humble strip club that struggles to match the class-standard set by its better-funded rival, The Flesh Farm. In that club, Moore exclusively strips to Annie Lennox tunes in absurdly athletic, MTV-style strip routines that recall Adrian Lynne’s girl-on-the-go 80s classic Flashdance . . . with a lot more nudity. She also makes fast friends with a cast of adorable fellow dancers and their living-cartoon bodyguard, played by Ving Rhames in what might be his career-funniest performance. Every exchange between Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff is genuinely, warmly funny and hints to a screenplay that was refined trough several joke punch-ups by screenwriter-turned-director Andrew Bergman. That affable tone then goes a long way to soften the thriller elements that threaten to sour the good mood but never can, not in a movie where Ving Rhames trades quips with a pet monkey in perfect deadpan.
Burt Reynolds anchors the serious end of the plot in a deeply unserious role as a drunken lush Congressman with a panty fetish, who is so obsessed with Moore’s rising-star dancer that he at one point douses himself in Vaseline and huffs her dryer lint just to feel close to her. The role perfectly completes the comedic pervert trifecta established by his more celebrated parts in Boogie Nights & The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, balancing out the thriller requirements of his character with some vintage kinky kitsch. Because the Congressman is so obviously, publicly horny for Moore, his staff has to clean up the trail of witnesses to his depravity with murderous violence, which escalates the stakes of Moore’s custody struggles. To the Right-Wing Christian voter base, he’s a God-fearing soldier of Christ who uses his office to uphold Family Values in the Deep South. To anyone who’s ever been alone with him, he’s a dangerously horny freak with no functional sense of interpersonal decorum, a total menace. Meanwhile, Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff are portrayed as adorable women struggling to make do with “honest work.” Sure, a couple of them have the largest breast implants you’ll ever see outside of a Russ Meyer film, but they’re truly a wholesome bunch who love & support each other. It’s really very sweet, especially in comparison with the sleazy lawyers, politicians, and fixers in their orbit.
Demi Moore is more widely beloved for earlier 90s classics like Indecent Proposal & Ghost, but Striptease might be the best total-package encapsulation of what makes her great. She’s funny, she’s relatable, and she’s an exquisitely sculpted physical specimen that defies the usual limitations of the human body. A lot of the subtext of her role in The Substance relies on the audience’s understanding that she is a perfectly calibrated Hollywood actress who is still made to feel like she’s not living up to the impossible, illusionary standard set by her industry; Striptease puts her body on display in the same way, which had to have been a vulnerable act even at the height of her star power. The main struggle of Mikey Madison’s Oscar campaign this year is that she doesn’t have that built-in rapport with her audience, since she’s really just getting started. Her body is also being ogled in her star-making role, though, so it would be great to see her compare notes with Moore in a dual interview discussing what it’s like to work a stripper pole on a 50-foot movie screen with nowhere to hide from strangers’ eyes. You’d think that, because of the time of its release, Striptease would’ve been a lot more dismissive or gross about Moore’s fictional dancer than Anora was about Madison’s, but that’s really not the case. The two women were both given a chance to play these vulnerable, wronged sex workers with full heart, humor, and humanity, sidestepping the nastier, scuzzier tropes typically associated with the archetype. And they were both great at it.
Rock Hudson was an enormous presence in Old Hollywood, and I don’t just mean as the personification of movie star handsomeness or as an archetype of “open secret” closeted gay celebrity. He was physically enormous, towering over his co-stars at 6’5″ with a burly lumberjack build to match his cartoonishly square jaw. Somehow, that imposing figure never really stood out to me in the romantic dramas of Hudson’s prime, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Giant or Jayne Wyman in All that Heaven Allows. Where he becomes most glaringly imposing is in his career-pivot to comedy in 1959’s Pillow Talk, which features several gags about his gigantic build. Pillow Talk gawks at Hudson’s enormous body as he struggles to squeeze it into bathtubs and sportscars that were designed to house mere mortals, then concludes on a gag where he carries co-star Doris Day’s pajama-clad body through New York City streets like a firefighter rescuing a small child while she kicks her feet in petulant protest. Tony Randall looks even mousier in comparison with that towering wall of beef as his ill-equipped romantic rival, posing next to him like a civilian fan taking photos with their favorite professional wrestler – physically mismatched to great comedic effect.
Hudson plays a jolly fuckboy giant in Pillow Talk, a skyscraper cad. His meet-cute with Day involves a shared partyline between the two mismatched lovers’ NYC apartments, which Day is never able to use because Hudson is constantly tying up the line wooing a bevy of short-term lovers. That partyline etiquette premise is just as relatable to kids today as their absurd romcom-trope professions: Broadway songwriter & interior decorator, respectively. Day is understandably annoyed by Hudson’s playboy antics, describing him as a “sex maniac” in her request to the phone company to break up their partyline. Meanwhile, Hudson is frustrated by Day’s immunity to his fuckboy charms, diagnosing her with “bedroom problems” during one of their shared-line squabbles. According to romcom law, the pair are obviously destined to couple up by the end credits, but it takes some Three’s Company-style sitcom hijinks on Hudson’s behalf to make that happen. He invents a flimsy naïve-Texan-in-the-big-city persona so that he can date her in person, which mostly amounts to Hudson doing a half-assed John Wayne impersonation while “aw, shucks”ing his way through several low-stakes dates. Meanwhile, Day experiments with being overtly sexy onscreen for the first time in her career while maintaining a sense of cocktail-hour class, which is mirrored in her character’s struggles to loosen up enough to finally solve her “bedroom problems” once & for all. Tony Randall also hangs around as their ineffectual third wheel, landing none of the successful smooches but most of the successful punchlines.
Pillow Talk precariously teeters between a more buttoned-up, euphemistic era of Hollywood screenwriting where characters are described as “bothered” instead of “horny” and the looser-morals Hollywood to follow where characters brag about bedding & marrying “strippers” in free-wheeling locker room talk. If it were directed by Frank Tashlin in the mode ofRock Hunter or The Girl Can’t Help It, it might’ve been a perfectly anarchic, amoral comedy, but workman director Michael Gordon keeps it all at an even keel (likely just happy to be working again after being blacklisted for Communist ties). In our collective memory, it’s lingered as cutesier and tamer than what Gordon delivered in reality, as evidenced by its ironic, post-modern homage in Peyton Reed’s 90s send-up Down with Love. Like most comedies, a lot of Pillow Talk‘s individual punchlines have not aged well politically, especially when punching down at date-rape victims, racist stereotypes, and fat-bodied uggos. Still, its willingness to offend leads to one of its more metatextually interesting gags, when Rock Hudson briefly indicates that he is a closeted homosexual so that Doris Day will up the stakes of their sexual contact to test his orientation. In that moment, he’s a known-to-be-closeted actor playing a hyper-straight himbo slut who’s only pretending to be closeted so he can bed even more women. The open discussion of that perceived queerness feels wildly out of sync with the Hays Code-era Hollywood glamor of the film’s Cinemascope extravagance, which twinkles in every one of Doris Day’s gowns & jewels, as spotlighted in the opening credits.
The segmented comic book framing of Pillow Talk‘s 1st-act phone calls conveys a modern, chic playfulness, while every one of its punchlines are underscored by stale, goofball sound-effects. During a dual bathtub scene, its two near-nude stars play footsy at the barrier between their respective frames, so that you get a full view of their muscular gams, and yet they’re not allowed to consummate that mutual desire until they agree to marry at the end. It’s a 1960s sex comedy made within the bounds of a 1950s romcom that’s not allowed to openly joke about sex. None of this truly matters, though, since the main selling point is the spectacle of its two main stars. Doris Day’s uncomfortable transformation into a Hollywood sex symbol makes for great comedic tension against Hudson’s rock-hard leading man physique. Meanwhile, Hudson’s massive body is a spectacle unto itself, one that every woman onscreen instantly swoons over . . . Except, of course, for the one he loves. It’s a dynamic so charming that it led to two more romcom pairings of those stars in Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back, both of which brought Tony Randall along for the ride to ensure no chemistry was lost.
There is something grotesque about the way cultural institutions are preemptively leaning further right-wing in anticipation of the second Trump administration. Trump’s second term has not started yet, but companies like Disney & Meta are already self-censoring in anticipation of a hard-right shift towards moral censorship, which likely makes business sense given Trump’s public alignment with “anti-woke” shitposter Elon Musk. Usually, being designated The Richest Man in the World encourages billionaires to hide from the public in shame while executing their political influence in private, but Musk has instead elected to purchase himself a prominent role in Executive Branch politics, demanding to be liked in addition to being feared. He’s openly rigging the system to be more favorable to his regressive worldview, which is something the wealthy are supposed to do behind closed doors. There’s nothing new to the cultural strong-arming through obscene wealth that Trump & Musk are indulging in right now, except in the extent of their shamelessness to do so in full public view. If nothing else, you can already see their personality & tactics viciously satirized as far back as the 1940s comedy The Devil and Miss Jones, which itself preemptively apologizes & kowtows to “The Richest Men in the World” . . . before mocking them mercilessly.
As early as its opening credits, The Devil and Miss Jones is clear about the moral stance it’s going to take in the eternal Class War. Charles Coburn is introduced as The Richest Man in the World by a title card that dresses him in a devil costume, with the flames of Hell roaring behind him. His comedic foil—Jean Arthur as a humble department store clerk—is then introduced dressed as a heavenly angel, complete with wings & halo. Then, a written letter from the producers apologize to The Richest Men in the World for that satirization, begging to not be sued for defamation since it’s not meant to target any one Wealthy Ghoul in particular (a tactical move that Orson Welles would have been wise to borrow for his satirization of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane that same year). Part of the reason they can get away with the transgression is that the ultra wealthy of the time mostly had the good sense to hide from the public. Or, that’s at least Coburn’s approach as a millionaire businessman who’s so obscenely rich he’s no longer sure what actual businesses he owns. In the opening scene, he’s horrified to discover that an effigy of his likeness was hung & burned outside a department store by its unhappy workers, which made the front page of the daily papers. Only, those workers have no idea what he actually looks like; they just know (and curse) his name.
Coburn weaponizes his anonymity by posing as a regular worker at the department store, so that he can single out the dissidents on his payroll for mass firing. His attempts to unionbust from the inside quickly go awry when he discovers that the ground-level workers are wonderful people, and that middle-management are the true social pariahs. Jean Arthur is especially adorable as the titular Miss Jones, who adopts the Undercover Boss out of pity because he is absolutely abysmal as a salesman. Coburn is dragged to an underground union-organizing meeting after his very first day, so that he can be paraded as an example of how pathetic elderly workers can become in old age once they outlive their usefulness to their corporate employers. Without all of his wealth strong-arming his Yes Men into doing his bidding, Coburn proves to be a low-skill, low-intelligence loser, which is a characterization the movie doesn’t back down from even as his fellow department store workers help him stay on his feet so he can make a living. When his true identity as the company’s owner is revealed to those kind souls, he’s met with the same reaction that greets Monstro Elisasue at the end of The Substance; they recoil in horror at his monstrosity, disgusted with themselves from socializing with someone as grotesquely inhuman as the 1%.
Directed by Marx Brothers collaborator Sam Wood, The Devil and Miss Jones is a hilarious class-differences comedy about how labor unions are pure good, the wealthy are pure evil, and everyone loves a day at the beach. It may indulge in a little “We’re not so different after all” apologia in depicting its cross-class culture clash, but its politics remain sharply observed throughout. Even Miss Jones’s romantic infatuation with the department store’s most ardent labor-union rabble-rouser has its nuances, as the movie criticizes the unchecked machismo of Leftist men by having him blab pigheaded phrases like, “A woman’s place in the world is to tend to the male” while she scoffs. The main target of its political satire is, of course, Coburn’s obliviousness as a wealthy ghoul, repeatedly humbling his sense of superiority among the unwashed “idiots” and “morons” in his employ. It feels especially pointed that even when those workers attempt to sweeten the fine wine he brings along to their Coney Island beach day with a splash of Coca-Cola, it’s not quite enough to overpower the bitterness. Its class & labor commentary has aged incredibly well, so it’s somewhat a shame that its cultural reputation as mostly persisted as a footnote to the porn-parody title The Devil in Miss Jones, directed decades later by Gerard Damiano.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the stop-motion animated comedy Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2025).
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