The following is a human-made transcript of Episode 303 of the podcast Modern Technology Watches, the subject of which was the film Citizen Ruth. The discussion has been lightly edited for readability without substantially altering the content; if you need a verbatim quote for reference purposes, please confirm it from the original audio if possible.
The transcriber of this episode was Betty Sulwe.
GILA:
Hi, this is Gila. This episode was recorded on Monday, June 20th, 2022 and, for reasons that will soon become apparent to you, was released on Friday, June 24th, 2022. It’s not particularly funny, and it’s pretty raw. We’re sharing our hearts and our politics in a way that we don’t often do on this show. Because of that we won’t be doing music or credits like we normally do, so I’m going to tell you now that episode 303 of Modern Technology Watches is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license and is a production of Joyful Firefly, LLC. Content from wikipedia.org is used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. You can email us at watches at modern dot technology.
Take care of yourself. Take care of your loved ones. Keep breathing. Drink water. Act. Use your voice.
And now, on with the show.
ROB:
Hello Gila.
GILA:
Hello Rob.
(Pause as neither know what to say next)
ROB:
…And that’s our show today.
GILA:
Okay, it’s been great. Thank you so much.
ROB:
(laughs) Hello Gila.
GILA:
Hello Rob.
ROB:
How are you?
I’m well, how are you?
ROB:
I am also well, and I’m happy to be here for Episode 303 of Modern Technology Watches.
GILA:
I’m going to say, I do love a palindrome.
ROB:
It is. This is Modern Technology Watches, the podcast in which I, Rob Vincent,
GILA:
And I, Gila Drazen,
ROB:
Show one another movies, usually, from our combined collection. Today we’re doing something a little different.
GILA:
Today we are doing something a little different. We are going to watch a movie- I seem to do this a lot. We’re going to be streaming it from Amazon Prime, we’re going to be renting it from Amazon, and we’re going to be watching a movie which has alternately been known as Meet Ruth Stoops. Would you say that three times fast?
ROB:
Meet Ruth Stoops.
GILA:
Meet Ruth Stoops, but is more frequently known by the much easier to pronounce title of Citizen Ruth.
ROB:
Citizen Ruth.
GILA:
Citizen Ruth. Alexander Payne’s first feature film. Also set in Omaha, so you know I’ve got some feelings about that. Alexander Payne’s first film, and you heard me talk at length on our Election episode about how I feel about Alexander Payne.
ROB:
Yes, indeed.
GILA:
I did. Yes. So I’m going to hand you a copy of the image of the back of the LaserDisc edition for purposes of back-copy-reading.
ROB:
Okay. And this is not a movie we have in our collection, but you had a very special reason you wanted to show this one.
GILA:
I did. So if you read the description, I think it will become clear.
ROB:
Okay. If I can make this big enough to read here… okay, and this is the back cover image of the LaserDisc to Citizen Ruth from just some site that’s selling the LaserDisc.
“’Outrageous!’ says Us Magazine. This hilarious comedy stars Laura Dern (Jurassic Park) as a loopy, down-on-her-luck drifter at the center of a topsy-turvy media circus! Ruth Stoops (Dern) is pregnant, confused and in trouble with the law for the umpteenth time! But it doesn’t stop there! She soon becomes the unwitting object of a wacky tug-of-war that erupts when Burt Reynolds (Striptease…)”
Really? Everything in Burt Reynolds’ career and they’re going to cite Striptease?
“When Burt Reynolds (Striptease) squares off with Kelly Preston (Jerry Maguire) and Swoosie Kurtz (Liar, Liar)…”
GILA:
That’s when this came out, ’96, ’97.
ROB:
Okay. I feel like even back then Burt Reynolds was known for more and better things than Striptease.
“…And everyone goes to ridiculous extremes trying to claim her as a national symbol for their cause. Highly provocative and utterly outrageous, Citizen Ruth is a critically acclaimed comedy you don’t want to miss.”
And there’s a chapter listing, as LaserDiscs had, and some photos and things. Now, how is this episode different from other episodes we’ve done? What is the thinking behind what we’re doing here?
GILA:
Oh, yes. The thinking behind what we’re doing is that it’s a scary time to be a potentially pregnant person in the United States. We are currently waiting for the Supreme Court ruling that was, an early draft was leaked in April of this year, and at this point we’re still waiting to find out what the future of reproductive rights is in this country. You and I are fortunate to live in a state where that’s not a question, but when this came down, I said, “Now you’re going to be okay, like, you’ll sign off on my birth control needs should that become necessary?”
ROB:
Yeah, and that shouldn’t become necessary, but all sorts of things we should be able to take for granted are not.
GILA:
Exactly. So we are stepping out of our normal apolitical-ish sense, and while this movie is funny, we’re not addressing it for a funny reason right now. And we’re doing this because we’re scared, and we’re doing this because we’re unsure, and we’re doing this because this movie more than any other that I can think of that touches on reproductive rights and abortion – obviously we’ll talk a lot more about this after – but the fact of the matter is this movie really touches upon what happens when people stop thinking about pregnant people and just begin thinking about bigger issues, political points, God points, whatever it may be. You can’t forget about the people, and the person-by-person issues that are a part of this. And that’s why we’re watching this movie.
ROB:
Okay. You have seen this movie before.
GILA:
It’s been a long time.
ROB:
Yeah, I’ve not seen it, but I don’t think we’re counting this as part of our pattern.
GILA:
No, this is a bonus episode.
ROB:
We’ll do a normal episode in our little experiment after this, and it will still be your turn.
GILA:
Thank you, dear. But no, this is an important discussion to have, and this is how we are going to have it.
ROB:
Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense, and I look forward to seeing what this movie has to show us. And I do like Laura Dern, I like Burt Reynolds, I like Swoosie Kurtz.
GILA:
I like Swoosie Kurtz as well.
ROB:
So as a film, this seems promising. We’ll see where this takes us.
GILA:
Yes. So we will be back after we have checked out 1996’s Citizen Ruth, also known as Meet Ruth Stoops. Try saying that, it’s fun.
ROB:
Meet Ruth Stoops.
GILA:
It’s hard to do.
ROB:
It doesn’t flow like Citizen Ruth.
GILA:
No, it really doesn’t.
ROB:
I can see why they changed it.
GILA:
Me too.
ROB:
All right, let’s do this.
GILA:
Let’s do this.
(Silent pause where, in other episodes of this podcast, there would normally be a musical break.)
GILA:
Hey Rob.
ROB:
Hey Gila.
GILA:
Are we back?
ROB:
We are back.
GILA:
We are back. We have just finished watching Citizen Ruth.
ROB:
We have just finished. We have not taken much of a break between that and starting to record this.
GILA:
That is correct, which normally means we have a lot to say.
ROB:
It’s kind of a big traffic jam in my head, and I don’t know quite what to blurt out first.
GILA:
Okay.
ROB:
There is one word that I kept saying to you during this movie that had come up in that back-of-the-LaserDisc copy that you gave me to read before. That word is “comedy,” and on quite a few occasions during this movie I looked to you and asked, “comedy?”
GILA:
(sighs) Yeahhh.
ROB:
You’ve got the mouse, so if you could click back over to the image here, because I’ve opened it back up on our screen, of the back of this LaserDisc.
GILA:
And the first three words of the blurb are “this hilarious comedy,” and this movie is many things, but I don’t know if I’d say it’s a hilarious comedy.
ROB:
Yeah. “This hilarious comedy,” it talks about “a wacky tug-of-war,” a “critically acclaimed comedy.”
GILA:
“Highly provocative and utterly outrageous,” “ridiculous extremes.”
ROB:
Gila.
GILA:
Yes Rob.
ROB:
This is not a comedy. There was one joke, one laugh that I got, and I’m sure we’ll get into this, but it was not even like a comedic beat. I don’t know that I expected a “ha-ha funny” movie given the subject matter, but I would not label this a comedy.
GILA:
So I think what you can say they were going for, I suppose, is it’s best described as very dark comedy. Nay, black comedy. The Wikipedia article refers to it as “a black comedy” and “satire.”
ROB:
This is not a funny movie. It shouldn’t be a funny movie given what it is, but it is packaged like a funny movie because I also brought up the front image of the LaserDisc that I guess is the film poster. And even that is going for the lulz in a situation in a movie that does not have lulz to go for.
GILA:
Well, here’s a question, and I ask this in all sincerity. This movie came out 1996, 1997, 26 years ago when what happens in this movie was not necessarily as much a day-to-day reality possibility. Could it have been funny at one time when we weren’t literally a breath away from Roe v. Wade being overturned?
ROB:
(deep breath) …I guess it could have been funnier.
GILA:
Okay.
ROB:
I guess it could have been seen as funnier. It could have been seen as a dark comedy, like, “tee-hee, how ridiculous all these people are being.” Yeah, I can’t honestly tell you whether, if I saw this back then ,the laughs would’ve been there for me. But especially being where we are now, this was not funny. This was kind of a horrific picture of where things actually are. I guess that says a lot more about the reality we’re living in than it does about this film.
GILA:
I think that’s very true. And, like I said, this is Alexander Payne’s first, the first movie he directed. And, you know, it’s set in Omaha, and there’s places I recognize, and, like, the whole business. And the thing about it, I think, is that, what it was like being there in the mid-’90s.
ROB:
Where you were?
GILA:
Where I was. Where I was and where I was growing up. There’s a brief scene in it where you see one of the characters is just pulled up outside the Adult Emporium. And I said to you, “oh, I bet that’s the one in Council Bluffs, because we didn’t even have one of those in Omaha when I was growing up, but we had one in Council Bluffs. There was an organization called Omahans For Decency, which they abbreviated to “O4D,” who were convinced that Dr. John’s Adult Emporium in Council Bluffs was the end of the Universe, and that Jesus was going to punish Omaha because porn shop. In Council Bluffs. If you’re with me on that.
I often joke that I have one joke in my stand-up set, and the way it begins is “I grew up in Nebraska. That’s not the joke, that’s just true.”
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
But then I say “we had abstinence-only sex education before it was popular,” and it’s true. The realities of what was going on in the Midwest, at a time where you could take for granted that abortion was going to remain legal in the entire United States, gives you the kind of background and the kind of moment where this sort of thing can flourish. But the other thing that really struck home to me, and the reason that I figured this would be a good choice for us to see and to talk about, is – tiny spoiler for the ending – they don’t notice! No one sees her go, because she’s not the important thing. She’s no longer important. She was, for the briefest of moments, something they were concentrating on and then she, this person they’re all purporting to be concerned about, was no longer important. And when you forget that there are real people in real situations and real stories, and that nothing about reproductive health or reproductive rights or reproductive justice is one size fits all, when you lose the humanity of people, when you lose the humanity of pregnant people or potentially-pregnant people, what are we doing?
And for a Supreme Court justice to be able to say, “well, there’s no issue in having a baby now because there’s safe harbor laws in every state, and you just have a baby and drop it off and be done…” No! There is so much more involved, and so much more at stake, and when you’re sitting in a country where people are talking about criminalizing ectopic pregnancy, which first of all is not something you have any control over and not something that can be re-implanted where it’s supposed to go, it doesn’t work that way. And when the black and white overtakes the grey, because no matter what you want to think, there’s a hell of a lot of grey involved in fertility, reproduction, reproductive rights and reproductive justice. And when you lose sight of the people, you lose sight of the point. That’s why I picked this movie.
ROB:
That has been effectively communicated here by you. I don’t know how effectively the film communicated it, but I could see what it was trying to do. It is terrifying where we are, and I say this as someone who can’t become pregnant but certainly my life could be touched by a pregnancy happening. I am not the owner of a uterus, and I have no say over what should be done with one of those and I wouldn’t try to claim that. But I have strong feelings about the rights of people who do find themselves with the ability to get pregnant and the potential to get pregnant and have to make this kind of decision.
I still kind of have a problem with what this movie did in terms of how they presented this. I don’t know that they were trying to be the ambassadors from pro-choice or pro-life land, I don’t think this movie was trying to do that, it was using the debate as sort of a backdrop for the story of this character. I didn’t feel good about what they did with this character, because there’s a whole other slew of issues where the character is a homeless drug addict who finds herself going through all this and finds herself being used as a pawn by both sides. Yet her condition is something that I think the movie is kind of punching down on. Even on the poster image of the movie, she’s dressed as the Statue of Liberty and holding up a can of spray instead of the torch, with this big smile on her face. And I’ve known people who’ve dealt with various kinds of addiction, and that sort of thing has touched my life in ways that it’s not my story to tell. But I think what this film was doing with her character was I think a lot of punching down on people dealing with that. Above and beyond the abortion issue, I think this movie was kind of shitting on addiction and homelessness. I found that very difficult.
GILA:
I totally get that. And the other thing that really struck me coming at this as a female person is I felt in a lot of ways like the main movers of the story were the men.
ROB:
Yeah, definitely.
GILA:
Kurtwood Smith, Burt Reynolds, M. C. Gainey, they were the ones who were making things happen, and the women were there.
ROB:
When the women characters were doing things to make stuff happen they were the stereotype lesbians, and that’s a whole other can of worms, I think.
GILA:
Absolutely, and I think Ruth is probably one of the least well-drawn characters in the whole thing.
ROB:
Yeah, she’s a cipher. She’s basically a joke. Everything that happens is at her expense, which is the story they’re trying to tell. I don’t think this is so much of an abortion-rights message as it is just everyone’s crapping on this poor girl with no agency.
GILA:
Interesting that you should say that because I’m looking over here and in the themes section of the Wikipedia article for Citizen Ruth, and I’m just going to quote from the segment here.
“While the film’s overt subject matter is abortion, Director Alexander Payne has insisted that the film is more prominently about the human side of fanaticism. Elaborating on this, Payne said, ‘People become fanatics for highly personal reasons. I mean, it’s more about them and their own psychosis than about that cause.’ This point has been noted by critics who reaffirm the common loss in sight made by extremists of the people and issues involved in such debates.”
When you lose sight of the micro in service of the macro… I remember the first time I heard about abortion at all, I think I was seven, maybe I was six. I was little. And there was a TV show called TV 101. Have we spoken about TV 101?
ROB:
I don’t recall off the top of my head.
GILA:
Okay. TV 101 was a show, and it was about kids in a TV-making class in, I don’t remember if it was high school or college. Matt LeBlanc was in it. It ran for 13 episodes, it didn’t even run the full season. In one episode, I think it was Matt LeBlanc, his character knocked up his girlfriend, who had an abortion. And we went with her to the doctor, we were there in the operating room, and my babysitter with whom I was watching this, who was the youngest child of a devout Catholic family, “This is the worst thing that could ever happen. I can’t believe she’s doing this, I can’t believe she’s making this choice.” And I remember the next morning saying to my mother very tearfully, “I think I’m pro-life.”
And one of the things that angers me a lot about the debate, and I’m far from the first person to have said this, is that it’s framed as “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” No!
ROB:
Right. I think even I just used those terms in this conversation, and I try not to for the reasons that I think you’re going to…
GILA:
Exactly. Why do people get to define what “life “is? And if you’re not willing to support people after they have children, what are you doing? If you’re going to cut aid to families and you’re going to cut free school lunches and you’re going to cut public education and all these things, then why are you forcing people to have children? Why are you forcing people to have children that are not wanted or who are not going to survive past birth? Why does that side of the argument get to claim that they are “pro-life” and they get to dictate what that means? It’s very frustrating. It’s sad. It makes me mad.
ROB:
It’s frustrating, it’s sad, and yet it’s so ingrained in, like, “that’s just what you call them.”
GILA:
“Anti-choice,” that has not caught on.
ROB:
“Anti-choice” has not caught on, “pro-forced-birth” or the “forced-birth” side I think it hasn’t caught on as much as it should.
GILA:
It’s interesting. The other thing is that that side will refer to people who believe that abortion should be safe and legal as pro-abortion. I don’t hate babies. If people want to have babies, great. Now, I’m not a person who wants to have a baby, but if people want to have babies, great. Let them have babies. I’m not going to stop anybody. But when people who don’t want to have babies have to have babies, because of some…
Okay, there are things that my religion says that I can’t do, and I don’t do them. But I’m not going to stop anybody else from doing them just because I don’t do them. I don’t eat pork. I don’t eat pork because my religion says “don’t eat pork,” but I’m not going to stop anybody else from eating pork. So if your religion says don’t have an abortion, great, don’t have an abortion. It’s none of your fucking business what anybody else does.
ROB:
No, absolutely. I was in a thread, on reddit I think, some time ago and the subject of observing the Sabbath, observing Shabbat, came up and how some Jews won’t use electricity on Shabbat and some will. And there are people who follow certain types of Judaism where they can get somebody who isn’t Jewish to come in and, like, turn the oven on for them or something. This is not your particular sect of anything. But somebody was raising the point where, like, “well, if they’re not allowed to do it, how come they’re allowed to get someone else to do it?” And of course, I’m not going to debate Shabbat, I am not Jewish. I’m not going to debate how anyone chooses to observe Shabbat. But I chimed in on this thread with what I know about this, which is that in the Jewish faith, those particular rules like keeping the Sabbath, keeping kosher, things like that are acknowledged as rules for the Jewish people, they’re rules for your crowd. They’re not deciding that everyone has to keep the Sabbath or everyone has to keep kosher or everyone has to get bar mitzvahed or whatever, they’ve acknowledged that “this is a thing that we do, but also there are other people in the world who aren’t Jewish and they have a place too.” So many religious-type debates are couched in this “nobody should be allowed to do this thing because my religion says so.”
GILA:
Yeah. That’s one way people look at the “chosen people,” like, we’ve chosen to do a lot of this stuff. That’s our choice.
ROB:
Yeah. There’s an old joke about, like, the Pope gets up in front of the crowd and says, “you must not use the Pill,” and someone in the crowd shouts back, “you’re not playing the game, you’re not making the rules.”
GILA:
Legit.
ROB:
It’s that sort of thing where, you know, I have my spiritual beliefs, I don’t make them apply to other people, I don’t try and force my beliefs on people because that goes directly against my own beliefs, but also it’s just not my goddamn place. And yet we are in a reality right now in which people with these fundamentalists, and I think it’s safe to say largely if not totally Christian, fundamentalist beliefs are successfully getting laws put in place for everyone. And that sort of thing is a victory for them, I think it’s a horror.
GILA:
It definitely is.
ROB:
We talk up separation of church and state in this country so much, and that’s not the reality. The church has its fingers very firmly in what we all end up allowed to do, and that’s a horror. Each one of us, not only in this room, but I think pretty much everyone listening to this at some point in our day-to-day lives does something that somewhere else in the world would be considered illegal, immoral.
GILA:
I mean, hell, I’m wearing pants right now.
ROB:
Yeah, you’re you’re wearing pants, you have a driver’s license. I can say things like “fuck the president,” “fuck the Pope.” I write with my left hand, (laughs) and some people would say that’s wrong. I’m wearing clothes of two different fabrics right now. In our society that we happen to occupy, we do things that other people would consider wrong, and it’s just part of our day-to-day reality. And they range from inconsequential things to big-deal things, and…
(sighs)
Where am I even going with this?
GILA:
I’m not sure, but is the traffic jam unjammed a little bit?
ROB:
A little. But yes, I am terrified that religious fundamentalists of any stripe, of any sect, of any belief system are able to get what they perceive as right and wrong embedded in the law even when it infringes on the basic fundamental rights and agency people should have over themselves.
GILA:
I don’t know if you saw but as we’re recording last week, a synagogue in Miami filed suit about the Florida abortion law on a First-Amendment challenge saying that our faith doesn’t view it the same way as you seem to think everybody does, and that in fact, you are preventing the free exercise of our religion by creating this law. And I know that that’s what they were trying to do the whole time, I know that. But it’s going to be interesting to see where we go from here.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
The other thing I’m going to say before we go anywhere else, realizing that this is an unconventional episode for us, so I’m going to say this now and I’ll probably say it again later: We urge you to do what you can to help make change. Are you marching? Are you donating? Are you donating to your state abortion-access funds? Are you donating to the people who do the work on the ground? Are you making your voice heard? We cannot urge you strongly enough to take part and to be part of the process, part of the change. Be part of it. Do what you can.
GILA & ROB:
(heavily sighing)
ROB:
…So. Motion pictures.
GILA:
So, motion pictures! Should we do the cast?
ROB:
We could maybe do a few of them. Let’s just do the main ones.
GILA:
Okay. Could we talk about Burt Reynolds for a second?
ROB:
I think we have to talk about Burt Reynolds.
GILA:
Okay. Burt Reynolds, Burt Reynolds playing Blaine Gibbons, the national head of Baby Savers, who came flying in, in a plane that said, “Baby Savers, Stop Abortion.”
ROB:
Yeah. He’s basically sort of your generic, rich, well groomed, media-savvy, megachurch dude.
GILA:
Who has with him a young boy, who’s, like, his valet.
ROB:
And who’s giving him massages.
GILA:
Who’s giving him oil massages while he’s taking meetings, and apparently he was the child who had been born after Blaine had talked a woman out of having an abortion. So then he kidnapped the kid, and I don’t know what the deal was. But it was weird, it was creepy. The other thing, speaking of weird and creepy, is that I just finished reading Judy Carne’s memoir.
ROB:
Yeah. Judy Carne, known best for Laugh-In, who was always getting it socked to her, and her memoir, among other things, involves her relationship with Burt Reynolds.
GILA:
Her marriage to Burt Reynolds. And he attempted to block the publication of said memoir because apparently he hit her. Kind of a lot.
ROB:
Yeah, and this memoir came out in 1985. It didn’t ruin his career. He didn’t get any kind of, I think, particular backlash over it.
GILA:
No. No, not at all.
ROB:
He was kind of at the height of his powers in the ‘80s.
GILA:
Was he though?
ROB:
Maybe late ‘70s, early ‘80s was his whole…
GILA:
Yeah, because I mean his fallow period depending on what you thought about Evening Shade. I enjoyed Evening Shade as a kid, but I don’t know, would we say that was the height of his powers? No. And then in 1997 when Boogie- ’97 was Boogie Nights?
ROB:
Maybe.
GILA:
Yeah. In the late ‘90s when Boogie Nights happened, it was, “oh, the Burt Reynolds renaissance. The Burt Reynolds-sance.”
ROB:
Before this, and I was riffing on this when reading the back of the LaserDisc because they cited “Burt Reynolds from Striptease,” which was ’95, ’96, and in that one, it was weird that they got Burt Reynolds to play that part. I don’t know if you’ve seen Striptease.
GILA:
Oh, no.
ROB:
He plays a dodgy politician who has this very active sort of fetishy life that he keeps on the down low, and he gets obsessed with the main character of the film who’s a stripper played by Demi Moore. And it’s full of scenes with him being coated in Vaseline and dressed in leather and stuff like that, and it’s all played for the lulz because he’s so weird because he has kinks.
GILA:
No, I don’t want any of that.
ROB:
Yeah, no. But I think to go from that to this and I can see how it was plotting a course back to his crest.
GILA:
Yeah. Hm. Yeah.
ROB:
Also, he was wearing an awful wig in this.
GILA:
He certainly was.
ROB:
It was worse than I think the one he wore in real life at the time.
GILA:
Yes. Diane Ladd is Ruth’s mother. Uncredited, but Diane Ladd is Laura Dern’s mother. It’s a fun little Easter egg there.
Okay, Tippi Hedren?
ROB:
Yeah, her cameo was welcome.
GILA:
I saw her and I said, “oh my God, I didn’t realize how much she and her daughter looked alike.”
ROB:
Yeah. She and Melanie Griffith look like they could… if you take pictures of them at the same age, they could look like the same person.
GILA:
Yes, and we know a thing or two in this house about people looking like their mothers.
ROB:
Yes. You, you won’t be familiar with this, most of you listening, but if you’ve seen pictures of Gila’s mom at Gila’s present age, it’s the same face.
GILA:
Yeah. In her house my mom has a framed photo of her father, herself, and me, pictures of each of us taken the same age. We were a year old or less. We look identical. The only difference is one is sepia, one is black and white, and one is color.
ROB:
We joke around because I’ve had the surprises spoiled for me, I know what my wife is going to look like at all those ages.
GILA:
Unfortunately, we know what we’re going to look like until age 99, because grandma kind of spoiled the surprise by living that long.
ROB:
They’re all very lovely people.
GILA:
Indeed, indeed. I have a lot to say about that character, but we’ll get there in the plot.
Okay, skipping that one, skipping that one, Kenneth Mars as Dr. Charles Rollins.
ROB:
Now, he’s a That Guy.
GILA:
He’s a That Guy!
ROB:
Kenneth Mars is a That Guy.
GILA:
Kenneth Mars is a That Guy. He was in some Mel Brooks movies. He was in The Producers and Young Frankenstein. He was a voice actor. He played King Triton in The Little Mermaid. So seeing him as a Midwestern guy and not really weird Nazi…
ROB:
Super-evangelical Christian. Yeah, that was a kick.
GILA:
M. C. Gainey as Harlan. Now, I don’t know why I know him.
ROB:
Me either, let’s click over.
GILA:
See what we can find out here.
ROB:
There’s a picture of him at WonderCon looking basically exactly like he did in the movie except 14 years later.
GILA:
Okay. This is a fun fact. He worked as a mortician’s apprentice before he decided to study acting. Okay.
ROB:
All right. So he was in a bunch of stuff. Most of this I didn’t see, but Terminator 3, which I saw and remember absolutely nothing about apart from disappointment.
GILA:
He is a working actor who has not been in a single episode of any of the Law & Order franchises.
ROB:
No, but he was in CSI which is basically like the off-brand one, right?
GILA:
It’s gory. It’s gory, Law & Order.
ROB:
It’s Law & Order with like calculating velocities of things. Django Unchained.
GILA:
Con Air, Pennies from Heaven, ooh, Caddie Woodlawn, Leap of Faith, he was in Leap of Faith. Okay. He was in Happy Texas.
ROB:
Con Air, which I saw a hundred years ago,
GILA:
Meet the Deedles. So the short answer is he’s been in a lot of stuff.
ROB:
He’s a jobbing character actor.
GILA:
He’s a jobbing character actor.
ROB:
Whiz Kids, he was in Whiz Kids!
GILA:
He Was in Whiz Kids? Holy buckets!
ROB:
Whiz Kids was a really obscure ‘80s drama about a bunch of teenage hackers. And it was kind of hot garbage, but charming. It was basically, I think, War Games had been a success and so some TV person was like, “yeah, we got to knock that off and have our own little version of it.”
GILA:
Of course.
ROB:
It was basically the Bloodhound Gang from 3-2-1 Contact but with a bunch of computer geeks.
GILA:
He did a little bit of everything.
ROB:
He was in M.A.N.T.I.S! (laughs) It was a truly dreadful superhero show that I liked a lot. X-Files, of course he was.
GILA:
ER, Glee.
ROB:
Bunch of soaps.
GILA:
So yes, basically he’s been everywhere.
ROB:
And he’s still doing it
GILA:
And he’s still doing it.
ROB:
Okay.
GILA:
Okay.
Next Kelly Preston as Rachel.
ROB:
I don’t know a lot about Kelly Preston.
GILA:
She’s dead.
ROB:
I mean, I know that about her. I know she’s dead. I know who she used to be married to. She was married to Travolta. I don’t know that I could have picked out anything that she was in before. I knew she was an actor, but I don’t know that I could have named any of her roles.
GILA:
She’s in Jerry Maguire.
ROB:
Haven’t seen it.
GILA:
I know. She’s in Jerry Maguire with her boobs out.
ROB:
Well, if you’re trying to sell Jerry Maguire to me based on that, I mean… She was decent in this with what little the role gave her, but it didn’t give her much.
GILA:
It certainly did not.
ROB:
She was a stereotype, angry, activist, lesbian.
GILA:
Up next, Mary Kay Place as Gail Stoney.
ROB:
Which one was…
GILA:
The Christian mom at the house married to Kurtwood Smith, the very blonde one,
ROB:
Oh, yes!
GILA:
Whom also has been literally everywhere.
ROB:
Yeah. She’s the one that looked like the, when I first saw her, I wondered is she the mom from Edward Scissorhands, but that wasn’t her. What’s her name?
GILA:
Someone else. So I love the fact that Mary Kay Place was a writer also. She wrote for M*A*S*H, and she wrote with Linda Bloodworth-Thomason who made Designing Women, fun fact.
ROB:
She was on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
GILA:
She was on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and she hosted Saturday Night Live, and she’s been around in a bunch of stuff, and I feel like there was a movie where she was someone’s mother and she was leaving voicemail.
ROB:
Oh, she was in Being John Malkovich.
GILA:
She was in Being John Malkovich. Right, she played Julie Powell’s mom in Julie and Julia, and that consisted of her leaving voicemails.
ROB:
Okay. So I think it would be safe to call her That Guy as well.
GILA:
Give me one second, I’m pretty confident she’s in the book.
ROB:
All right. Tell us again the title and writer of this book.
GILA:
This book is called Hey! It’s that Guy! The Fametracker.com Guide to Character Actors written by Tara Ariano and Adam Sternbergh.
ROB:
We talk about this book all the time on this program.
GILA:
Well, it’s very helpful.
ROB:
I think we’ve obliquely referred to it without giving out the info.
GILA:
We’ve mentioned it a few times. I do believe that it’s out of print. Why is there no alphabetical…
ROB:
But whether or not she’s in the book, I think it’s safe to call her a That Guy.
GILA:
She’s a hundred percent That Guy, but how is she not in this book? She should be in this book. She’s not, I was convinced that she was though.
ROB:
Oh, she was on AJ and the Queen. Couldn’t tell you who she was because we didn’t…
GILA:
We watched one episode and it was a lot.
ROB:
Did we watch two?
GILA:
Nope, we watched one. We didn’t even let it go to the next episode.
ROB:
Yeah, no, anyway.
GILA:
Anyway, Kurtwood Smith is Norm Stoney.
ROB:
Yeah, he’s another That Guy.
GILA:
I think he actually is in the book. Now I have to look, hold on. Again with the book, I’m sorry.
ROB:
Maybe this is why we don’t podcast with the book to hand because half the show would be just us flipping through.
GILA:
He’s not in here either.
ROB:
Good heavens.
GILA:
You’re failing us here, Fametracker.com.
ROB:
Maybe he’s on the site, if that’s still a site. But no, he’s another one who was good at the “I’m a super fundamentalist Christian dad” thing.
GILA:
I mean, he kind of has a line on Dads. He was the dad in That ’70s Show.
ROB:
Oh, was he?
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
I know I never watched that.
GILA:
He was Robert Sean Leonard’s dad in Dead Poets Society. He’s a dad.
ROB:
He’s a dad. I wasn’t sure with his character where they were going in the very beginning, like, is he going to start actively perving on the vulnerable girl that’s staying with him? There’s that scene where they’re laying together on the bed. I’m sure we’ll talk about this. But yeah, I thought he was going to be worse, but it turns out he’s just a fundamentalist dope.
GILA:
Or maybe he’s just sublimating.
ROB:
Maybe.
GILA:
But again, we’ll get there.
Okay, Swoosie Kurtz as Diane Siegler.
ROB:
I like Swoosie Kurtz so much. I will watch her in anything. I don’t know why, as there doesn’t seem to be like any sort of the standard, “hey, this is a celebrity that you should particularly be a fan of stuff,” but just all my life when I’ve seen her in stuff, it’s always been like, “oh yeah, Swoosie Kurtz, she’s great!” She is eminently watchable, she makes anything she plays charming. She was on a dreadful drama that a bunch of my family watched when it went out called Sisters.
GILA:
Hey!
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
Heyy!
ROB:
It’s one of those shows and we all have those shows when we’re kids that our family watches, and so we have to sit through, even though we’re not enjoying it. And I did not like Sisters, but I would watch for the bits where she was on because I just found her watchable.
GILA:
So I really liked Sisters.
ROB:
I got that sense just now.
GILA:
And there is actually a moment in the movie where she says, “sisters? You don’t know what it means to be a sister,” and I thought that was very funny.
ROB:
Oh yeah, I guess this would’ve been around…
GILA:
Couple years after it ended, yeah.
ROB:
Okay. I don’t remember much about the show, I just remember it bored me to tears, but I would watch her bits and just go, “yeah, she’s okay. I can watch Swoosie Kurtz.”
GILA:
It was a family drama about four sisters who all had boy names because their dad really wanted sons.
ROB:
And there was some weird conceit where the camera would keep panning back and forth between, it was supposed to be the past and the present? Am I remembering some other show, or was that Sisters?
GILA:
They were flashbacks. One of the things it’s best remembered for is giving an early role to a young actor named Paul Rudd, who played Alex who’s Swoosie Kurtz’s daughter’s boyfriend. Swoosie Kurtz’s daughter, by the way, was played by Ashley Judd.
ROB:
I think I saw that clip of Paul Rudd in the show Sisters. Yeah, it involves this kid in a wheelchair and he falls down off a cliff into the water, and then this alien pops up.
GILA:
Hundred percent, yeah.
ROB:
Yeah. (laughs)
GILA:
Yeah. (laughs) Well done, you.
And we finish our cast list with Laura Dern as Ruth Stoops.
ROB:
Oh, my, fucking, God.
Laura Dern, I like Laura Dern a lot. You know, of course, Jurassic Park, and this was pretty soon after Jurassic Park, couple years. She wasn’t good in this!
This is Laura Dern trying to say lines like, “I don’t got anything,” with conviction. The effective part of her performance is when they show her actually doing all the things that you need to do to huff stuff out of a bag, and that all seemed kind of medically accurate, but I think her performance kind of crossed the line from genuine to pastiche. I think it’s part of the problem I have with this movie was she was playing a parody of a homeless drug addict basically, and I don’t think she was doing a good job at it. I don’t know if she was miscast or misdirected or what, but I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I did not like her in this movie.
GILA:
I mean, there wasn’t much to like.
ROB:
I think it was not an effective performance, but I don’t know if the material was there to give her any kind of effective performance. But again, her character’s not the point.
GILA:
Exactly. Her character’s the title character, but not the point.
ROB:
So most of what she’s doing, and I think this is encapsulated in the poster image for the movie, is she’s doing kind of the stereotypical “poor me, I’m a drug addict making bad decisions” stuff and kind of playing it for, I guess, dark comedy lulz, but it’s coming off like a lot of punching down.
GILA:
I don’t disagree. I don’t at all disagree.
ROB:
I like Laura Dern so much I’ve watched her in so many things and enjoyed it. I don’t think what she did in this movie was a good thing.
GILA:
Marilyn Tipp. Marilyn Tipp, who played one of the Baby Savers. We talked about her in the Election episode. Marilyn Tipp, who is a member of Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska, and got her SAG card at this movie and has been in every movie Alexander Payne did, and she’s awesome. I just like mentioning Marilyn when we do these things.
Okay. The other thing, by the way, that I will say is that this is a Miramax movie.
ROB:
It’s a mid-’90s Miramax movie.
GILA:
It’s a mid-’90s Miramax movie.
ROB:
Back when the label meant a little something, I guess.
GILA:
But also… (sigh) I know that he’s not involved with it anymore, but just the fact that Harvey Weinstein was involved with this.
ROB:
Oh boy.
GILA:
Yeah. So.
The simultaneous good and bad news here is that we have a very fairly well written, detailed plot summary.
“Ruth Stoops is an inebriated addict in Nebraska who is capable of doing nearly anything to get money or drugs. She has four children, all of whom have been taken from her custody by the state because of her inability to care for them. One morning, Ruth and her boyfriend have intercourse on a bed in a flophouse, after which he disrespectfully throws her out of the apartment. After, she visits the home of her brother and sister-in-law to sneak a look at two of her children and to beg her brother for money.”
ROB:
Okay, and just to talk about that opening for a minute,
GILA:
Sure.
ROB:
It starts and some song is playing and it’s this very matter-of-fact scene of dispassionate sex between her and this guy in this cruddy flophouse, after which he throws her out, and she wants her TV back, and he throws the TV into the hall smashing it. And so she goes out in the parking lot, finds his car, smashes the windows up, takes a bunch of stuff out of the glovebox. And yeah, then the movie just kind of immediately goes there where she’s huffing stuff out of a bag.
GILA:
She went to her brother’s house, to ask for money or ask to stay there, and he says, “you can’t stay here. You can’t mess with these kids.” She starts crying, “I have nowhere to go.” He goes back in the house, she immediately turns it off. He gives her $15. She said, “couldn’t it be 20?” And immediately goes to the hardware store and winds up huffing patio sealant.
ROB:
Like you do.
GILA:
Like you do.
ROB:
And so it was kind of checking off the boxes of, like, portrayal of an addict; manipulative, uneducated, uncaring mostly, and then goes right into getting high. I don’t know, it was what the movie was trying to do. I don’t know how I feel about it.
GILA:
So she huffs the sealant, goes into a full nod in the parking lot, gets arrested. The cops know her because she’s a frequent flyer.
“After Ruth is arrested for her continuing drug use, she discovers that she is pregnant again.”
And the way that that’s handled, I also thought was fascinating. Because she’s in the hospital and the doctor’s like, “you know you’re pregnant again, right?” She’s like, “what?” She didn’t know.
ROB:
Yeah, I noticed that.
GILA:
It’s kind of a throwaway thing, and there’s never a moment where she’s allowed to come to terms with this, it’s just the fact of the matter.
“At her arraignment, she learns to her horror that she is facing felony charges for endangering a fetus. Her many earlier arrests had all been on misdemeanors.”
ROB:
And the judge is played by, what’s his name? Who plays Tackleberry in Police Academy.
GILA:
David Graf.
ROB:
David Graf.
GILA:
Oh, I didn’t know he was dead.
ROB:
Yeah, no, he died 2001. He died young. He died very young.
GILA:
Oh no. Oh, that’s so sad.
ROB:
But yeah, his character in those movies was the trigger happy, ultra butch, shoot everything guy. He was lulzy in those movies. But as a judge in this movie – and again, I know this is what the story was trying to do – but the fact that a judge randomly says “okay, we’re going to prosecute you for endangering your fetus as though it’s a person,” and then immediately talking to her and going, “oh, but if you go and get it aborted…”
GILA:
Well, we haven’t gotten there yet. So speaking of which,
“The judge, who knows of the situation with Ruth’s other children, informs her after the hearing that he will lessen her sentence if she has an abortion.”
Which is not entirely accurate, he tells her in veiled language that if she wants to, “go to the doctor” while she’s in jail, “that’s okay.”
ROB:
Yeah, and he says, like, “if you want to get this problem taken care of…”
GILA:
“And if you do, I can talk to the city attorney.” Not necessarily his choice that this is happening, the extra charges I mean, the city attorney brought the extra charges. But he’s kind of offering her an out, basically, which also is weird.
ROB:
It’s very weird.
GILA:
There’s a lot of weird here.
While she’s in the holding cell – and this is not in the Wikipedia entry, I’m filling this in – a group of women come in and they begin singing a hymn. Because it turns out that they were anti-abortion protesters who had all got arrested. But we don’t know that yet.
ROB:
We don’t know that yet, but we saw her get thrown into the holding cell, and she’s crying in a heap on the floor and saying, “God, please help me,” while punching herself in the abdomen. It’s very upsetting. And it is just the beginning of this movie kind of reveling in being upsetting,
GILA:
Accurate.
ROB:
The camera really lingers on her ugly-crying in a heap on the floor of this jail cell, and that’s not the last time this movie does something like that.
GILA:
No, not at all.
“Ruth is bailed out of jail by Norm and Gail Stoney, a middle aged radical evangelical couple who have become aware of Ruth’s story through the local news.”
No, that’s wrong.
ROB:
Yeah, no, they become aware of it because one of them is in jail with her.
GILA:
Yeah. There is a moment where he’s trying to pay the bail, bond, whatever in cash and he’s $3 short. So he starts fishing crumpled bills and change out of his pockets.
ROB:
Yeah, and get some change from his wife.
GILA:
I’m sorry, my eye just fell on the box-office for this movie.
ROB:
(laughs) Okay. Budget, $3 million estimated, Box-office?
GILA:
$285,112.
ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
(whispering) Wow.
ROB:
Wow. You can add to that the, uhh, what did we pay to rent this from Amazon?
GILA:
$3?
ROB:
Okay.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
“The couple take her into their home and attempt to persuade her to keep her child.”
She also meets their son, Matthew. He’s “a miracle.” We don’t ever get the explanation of that.
ROB:
No.
GILA:
I mean briefly, but no.
ROB:
It’s hinted that there’s more of a story there because the daughter starts cracking up laughing when… But that comes in a minute.
GILA:
“On the first night, Ruth impervious to their convictions, sneaks out of the house with the couple’s reckless teenage daughter, Cheryl. And again, huffs paint and smokes marijuana.”
ROB:
Not in that order.
GILA:
Not in that order.
ROB:
They’re being accurate in their portrayal of a complete drug addict because that is addiction. At every point possible, you see her when she’s meeting the son and he’s showing her model airplanes that he makes and her eyes go right to the tube of airplane glue. She somehow found some touch-up paint while hanging out with these kids at this party. That is a thing that throughout this film you see her, whatever her situation was or however many people were around her to supposedly help her, at every moment possible, she’s going into purses, she’s getting money for more crud or she’s looking for stuff to get high on, and that’s addiction for you. But again, this movie, it goes there? But it also kind of stays there and leers.
GILA:
Yeah. I think that’s a fair assessment.
“At the Stoneys’ urging, Ruth visits a crisis pregnancy center, where she is further persuaded to go forward with her pregnancy despite her resistance given her limited opportunities and drug problem.”
So that’s a thing that really rings true to today.
ROB:
Yeah, this is a thing that exists, and would you be so kind just to explain for those unfamiliar?
GILA:
Those lucky few who may be unfamiliar. Crisis pregnancy centers are real and they dress up as abortion clinics or services that provide abortion care.
ROB:
Or family planning-type places.
GILA:
Or what have you. And they’re like, “No.” They’ll give you an ultrasound, but they’re not often licensed to have the ultrasound, and basically what they want to do is talk you into having the baby. So the nurse says, “why don’t you want to have the baby?” Ruth explains all these reasons. The nurse goes, “’I, I, I, I, I,’ isn’t there someone else at stake here? Someone who can’t even speak?” And then she calls in the doctor who hands her a little model of the fetus. And they encourage her to name the baby, like, “what would you name the baby if the baby were born?” And she says, “Tanya,” and they seize that and they run with it.
ROB:
Yeah, they social-engineer her into it. “Would you have a boy baby or a girl baby if you were going to have the baby?” And she’s like, (mumbling) “I don’t know, maybe a girl.” They seize on that, and it’s very obvious sort of railroading, social-engineering her into the conclusion that they want.
GILA:
And the doctor and the nurse are also both members of Baby Savers, which we don’t know at the very beginning. But the next morning we find out because the next morning Baby Savers are all standing in the room, and they’re all singing Jesus Loves the Little Children, which apparently is only two lines long, which I didn’t know. Also, for the record, Marilyn Tipp is not in that scene, which I found interesting.
But yeah, the doctor and the nurse are both in the room with the Baby Savers singing Jesus Loves the Little Children. Oh, also the dad, Norm, almost gets fired from his job at the hardware store for leaving anti-abortion literature.
ROB:
And his boss is kind of over it, he’s gotten in trouble for this before. He gets punished by being sent out to do the shopping carts. And this is very obviously their thing, but also the crisis pregnancy center shows her the propaganda movie about how “abortion is murder” and all that.
GILA:
So it’s invoking concentration camps.
ROB:
Yeah, invoking concentration camps.
GILA:
I think they actually mentioned one by name.
ROB:
Yeah, they mentioned Auschwitz and Dachau and you see her face as she’s watching this, and she just takes it on and is like, “okay.” And from that moment she decides she wants to keep the baby.
GILA:
Right. Because whoever she’s listening to at the time is who she’s listening to.
ROB:
Yeah. So the next morning…
GILA:
The next morning the Baby Savers are all standing in the Stoneys’ living room singing Jesus Loves the Little Children, which apparently again is two lines long. They just keep singing the same two lines over and over and over again. There’s a really effective fade shot where you go from Mary Kay Place singing Jesus Loves the Little Children looking beatific and at peace, and then it fades into her screaming “murderer, baby killer.”
ROB:
Yeah, at the other people trying to use the clinic.
GILA:
So Ruth begs off the protest. So she’s not feeling well.
ROB:
But another thing that the Wiki article doesn’t mention is that it shows that Ruth’s story is catching on. It’s in the news, counterprotesters had come around the house where she was staying, and then reporters were approaching her.
GILA:
Showing up at the protest, yeah.
ROB:
Yeah, reporters were showing up at the protest and trying to get some words from her. And the mom and dad block her from the reporters and say, “she’s not speaking to reporters,” and she’s getting upset. She’s getting pissed. So she wants to leave the protest and they let her go off and sit in the car.
GILA:
So she goes and she sits in the car. She tries to listen to music, her Walkman eats her tape. She finds another tape in the tape player in the car. She puts it in her Walkman, and it turns out to be this sort of MLM-y making money…
ROB:
Yeah, this self-help tape about investing your money, and I think it went into flipping houses or…?
GILA:
It was about to, yeah.
ROB:
So she’s listening to that, and again, just taking it on.
GILA:
Money, I need money. So she grabs Gail’s purse, which is in the car, gets some money out of it. Goes to the gas station, gets a drink and a scratcher. Doesn’t win the lotto ticket. And then she has the model glue from Matthew’s bedroom.
ROB:
Yeah, so she takes the paper bag from her drink and she huffs the glue in it.
GILA:
And the Stoneys find her, Matthew finds her first and says, “here, she’s over here. Why are you huffing my airplane glue?”
ROB:
Well, not in those words, he’s like, “you’re not supposed to smell it like that. Why are you smelling my glue?”
GILA:
So she hit him. She pops him one good. Then the Stoneys show up and they begin screaming about “you’re on drugs, you’re on drugs, you’re on drugs,” and they tell her she has to leave their house.
ROB:
Yeah. This is also I think, an accurate picture of things that happen when people who are supposedly coming to help aid these people who are in these worse situations than themselves, but first of all, they’re crappy at helping her because they’re not keeping an eye on her. If you have someone who is fighting addiction problems, you don’t leave them alone. You don’t leave them with access to money, or valuables,
GILA:
Or model glue.
ROB:
Or model glue. They’re very obviously unqualified to be doing what they’re trying to do, which is from their point of view, help out this addiction case.
GILA:
Because they weren’t thinking about the addiction case. They were thinking about the pregnancy.
ROB:
They were thinking about the pregnancy.
GILA:
And they were thinking about themselves.
ROB:
Also thinking about themselves. So when it blows up, they start yelling at her like, “this is how you repay us!”
I personally have not fought a drug addiction, I’ve been fortunate, but I have been in situations where aspects of bad things I was going through at that point in my life were kind of weaponized against me and my failure to go along with what others thought was best was thrown back in my face as a personal failing. And… it was unhelpful, I will say that.
And the whole scene is very upsetting, and she’s on the ground crying. The father starts getting the glue away from her. She’s like, “Don’t hit me. Don’t hit me.” There is trauma all over the place here, and it is very viscerally portrayed. But I think this is also an occasion in which the movie is kind of leering at all this.
GILA:
And again, it’s one of those things that just gets sort of dropped.
ROB:
Yeah, it goes nowhere from there.
GILA:
So Diane, who is a friend of Gail’s.
ROB:
Yeah, one of the other women who was in that prison cell or in the holding cell, with her.
GILA:
Who says “let me take her to my house.”
ROB:
And that’s Swoosie Kurtz.
GILA:
That’s Swoosie Kurtz.
“Upon arriving at Diane’s farmhouse, Diane discloses that she is in fact a lesbian, abortion rights activist, and spy, who attempts to help women she feels the Stoneys and others prey upon.”
So they pull up to the house, she stops the car and says “Ruth, I’m not who you think I am.” She takes off her blonde, bangsy, church-lady wig and her big glasses. Drops her accent.
ROB:
Yeah, and she’s red-haired Swoosie Kurtz.
GILA:
Red-haired Swoosie Kurtz.
ROB:
That was so bizarre because, I mean, I saw Swoosie Kurtz in the movie and I’m like, “okay, they gave her a blonde wig to wear in this one for some reason.” But the fact that they had her be wearing a wig in the movie, if someone were spying and infiltrating a society like that, but using their real name apparently, why would they wrap her in a disguise? Why would they put a wig on her? Is she some kind of famous activist outside of that? But she was using her name? It’s all very strange.
GILA:
I mean, honestly, I would say that it’s probably she just wanted to blend in.
ROB:
Maybe.
GILA:
If you’re going to fly under the radar, fly under the radar.
ROB:
So I guess flying under the radar means don’t be ginger? (laughs)
GILA:
Yes. Don’t be ginger with a choppy haircut.
ROB:
Yeah. But then she could take off the wig and be this central-casting ’90s lesbian.
GILA:
She says, “there’s a war, and I’m a spy.”
ROB:
Yeah, and Ruth panics.
GILA:
And then Kelly Preston shows up, and she says, “this is Rachel. She lives here.” Then she runs and she screams. They’re able to eventually get her in the house.
“The witless Ruth soon finds comfort in Diane and her partner, Rachel, as well as Harlan, a gruff disabled veteran and friend of the women who provides security detail for the women.”
So they’re at the house and the news comes on, Action News 4, which spoiler, there’s no Channel 4 in Omaha, just for the record. And I think I very annoyedly said that to you. I’m like, “There’s 3, 6, 7, and 42, but there’s no 4!”
ROB:
(laughs) It might be different now, you don’t know.
GILA:
Well, in 1996 there wasn’t a 4.
ROB:
That’s true. Okay, it’s the ’90s.
GILA:
And there’s a talking head with Norm, with the reporter who had attempted to talk to Ruth earlier. And Norm said, “oh, she’s going to keep the baby, and it’s going to be wonderful.” I don’t even remember what all. “We’re all proud of her. It’s going to be great.”
ROB:
I think that’s when they start using “she’s sending a message,” and Ruth sees this and she gets pissed off. Not only that he’s putting all these words in her mouth, but…
GILA:
She doesn’t want anybody to know who she is. She doesn’t want to be the focal point of anything.
ROB:
She was saying through the whole thing, like, “I don’t want anyone in my business.”
GILA:
So the phone rings and it’s Gail calling to see if they’ve seen it. And Diane attempts to lie and say that Ruth is in the shower. She’s like, “no, I’m not!” So she gets on the phone, and is angry, and then proceeds to blow Diane’s cover.
ROB:
She takes the phone and let’s Gail have it. She’s like, “and you know what, there’s a war on and Diane’s a spy! What do you think about that?” Then she hangs up and she’s like to Diane, “how did I do?” And that was the one time this “comedy” actually made me laugh.
GILA:
I heard those air quotes.
ROB:
Yeah. I got a laugh there. But even that, the joke was “ha-ha, the uneducated, panicking drug addict screwed something up.”
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
This movie punches down!
GILA:
It does.
“After the Stoneys discover Diane was working against them, they stake out in front of Diane’s home with numerous other anti-abortion activists and engage in religious song and mass prayer.”
The other thing this doesn’t really mention is that apparently Baby Savers decide to mount a national alert. They take over a hotel in town, and there’s a press conference, and there’s a bunch of stuff going on. And I said “oh, that’s the New Tower Inn, that’s the same place where they play basketball in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.”
And at this press conference, Norm announces that they have collected $15,000 to give to Ruth if she goes through with the pregnancy. So she’s like, “hell yeah, I’m going to do it. That’s a lot of money. I’m rich! I’m gonna be rich!” And it’s also entertaining because in that precise moment there’s a news reporter standing outside the house saying “we haven’t heard from Ruth.” In the live shot, she comes running out the front door whooping and hollering, and then Harlan grabs her and pulls her back in. She’s like, “No, I have to go. I have to call them. That’s $15,000 for me!” And Harlan says, “if this is the issue, I’ll match it.” She says, “so I can have $30,000?” And he said “no, $15,000 from them if you have the baby, $15,000 from me if you don’t.” Basically saying, “we don’t want the money to be the reason you make your decision whatever it happens to be.”
ROB:
Right. So he’s trying to just level the playing field. He mentions that it’s his Agent Orange settlement from the government. This also kind of pisses off the activists, because they’re like, “we’re paying her off to get an abortion, and that looks terrible.” And he’s like, “this’ll be between me and her.”
GILA:
So this young guy called Peter, who’s one of the activists at the house, says to her, “yeah, it’ll really send an important message if you turn down their money,” and she just loses it again.
ROB:
Yeah, because she’s basically getting fed up with the fact that everyone seems to be using her to “send a message,” and it’s not about what she wants and she starts screaming. “Why isn’t it about what I want?” Just starts jumping up and down going, “want! Want! Want!”
GILA:
Screaming. Then the next morning it turns out that Blaine Gibbons is coming to town. Back to Wikipedia here.
“The scene becomes a spectacle documented by news stations, which is exacerbated when Blaine Gibbons, a charismatic and famous evangelist,” – ehhh – “arrives to participate.”
The issue is less that he’s a charismatic and famous evangelist and more that he’s the national director,
ROB:
Of this organization, yeah.
GILA:
Of Baby Savers. And he arrives in the Baby Savers plane with this young serving child he has, which is fucking weird and gross.
ROB:
In an expensive suit, with immaculately groomed toupee.
GILA:
So he starts giving Norm stick about the money, and Norm’s like, “look, we did the best we could. We’re not even having the picnic this year. A lot of us did all we could to raise this money.” And he said, “well, shouldn’t we make it at least $30,000? I mean, if it looks like we’re buying her off, shouldn’t it be more?” Basically is what he says. So he joins the protest in front of the farm and speaks to Ruth through the news team and says, “we’ve got an additional $15,000 for you.”
ROB:
It wasn’t quite an additional 15, he’s like, “we are now up to $27,000!”
GILA:
27,000-something, but basically.
ROB:
So of course she freaks out again.
GILA:
She’s been drinking all day, and at one point she’s gone through a drawer in, I don’t even know whose bedroom, and she finds a gun, she finds a vibrator. She keeps the gun. She’s been drinking a bottle of Hennessy almost it looks like, some sort of brandy, which she doesn’t like but it’s doing the job, and they all discover that she’s been drinking.
ROB:
Yeah. She kind of drunkenly tumbles down the stairs trying to find Harlan to shout at him about he’s got to match this new number. She’s like, “I gotta talk to Harlan. I gotta talk to Harlan. My body is my own. I get to make my choice.” They’re all holding her back and trying to stop her, and she’s stumbling around drunkenly.
GILA:
And then they’re like, “if you have this baby, are you going to be able to stay off drugs and alcohol the whole time? Is that something you’re going to be able to do?” She’s like, “I don’t know,” because she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. She’s a cipher as we have discussed.
So Diane yells at her, tells her to sleep it off, and she does. The next morning comes the story’s big cop out.
“On the morning Ruth is to have her abortion, she suffers a miscarriage and becomes disillusioned with Diane, whom she realizes is using her as a pawn to promote her message, similar to the Stoneys. Ruth conceals the miscarriage from Diane and Rachel.”
They’re going to find out eventually, she was sleeping in their guest bed, there’s a lot of blood in it.
ROB:
Oh, maybe she cleaned it up because Ruth comes into the room later and sits on the bed and stuff and doesn’t notice anything.
GILA:
Right, and Ruth is all wrapped up in a bathrobe and she’s about to tell her and then she doesn’t.
ROB:
Yeah. She starts telling her, but she gets interrupted by some call over Diane’s radio about planning the whole…
GILA:
Oh, says she’s here, she’s early, but she’s here. We don’t know who she is.
ROB:
Right. So she decides to just keep it to herself, but she does ask, “where’s the money going to be? Where’s Harlan’s money going to be?” And she looks at the crowd out the window and is getting this sense of everything that’s going on, and she knows now that she can’t accept the-
GILA:
“Have the baby” money.
ROB:
“Have the baby” money, because she’s not going to have the baby, so she’s got to figure out her next move.
GILA:
And they’re standing outside, they’re chanting, “save baby Tanya.” They’re singing something about “save baby Tanya” to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And then a helicopter shows up and there’s some sort of national figure in the abortion-rights movement who has shown up, in a helicopter, to fly her, in a helicopter, to get there. It’s Tippi Hedren.
ROB:
It’s Tippi Hedren. Nice to see Tippi Hedren!
GILA:
But as they’re about to get on the helicopter, you hear a voice saying, “Ruthie don’t do it. Ruthie don’t do it.” Also, there had been a car show up the previous day driven by Delaney Driscoll, who was the woman with big teeth who was in Election, who says, “I’m Ruth’s sister.”
ROB:
Yeah. “Get her this note, it’ll prove that it’s me.” She gives a note to Harlan and leaves to go park, and he unfolds the note and it just says something like, “you’re going to hell you bitch,” or some where to that. Then there’s another car that shows up and someone calls over, “hey, someone over here says she’s Ruth’s mother.”
GILA:
So the next day they’re getting on the helicopter, and you hear women’s voice say, “Ruthie, don’t do this. Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.” And she goes, “Mommy?” It’s actually her mother.
ROB:
Played by,
GILA:
Played by Diane Ladd, Laura Dern’s actual mother. Pretty cool.
So, they’re on opposite sides of a field and her mother says, “you don’t have to do this,”
ROB:
Over a PA system.
GILA:
“What if I had aborted you?”
ROB:
Yeah, to which she grabs a megaphone that Harlan happened to be carrying and says, “at least I wouldn’t have had to suck your boyfriend’s cock!” Which-
GILA:
Yeah. Okay.
ROB:
Yeah. And again, the movie went there… and then didn’t go anywhere else. But it used it for a comic beat, and the mother kind of gets all flustered for a second and goes, “that was in the past! I’m saved now.”
GILA:
So Ruth shouts, “I wouldn’t have had to suck your boyfriend’s cock,” and everyone who’s there protesting is just so shocked by that language they just kind of shut down for a second. And then her mother says, “no, but I’m saved now! It’s better now! That’s in the past!”
ROB:
Yeah, and they all get on the helicopter.
GILA:
They get on the helicopter and they go. They get there, they get to the clinic, and the staff at the clinic seems to be much more excited to meet Jessica Weiss, which can we also… (sigh) Does the queen of the abortion activists have to have a Jewish name? Really? Really? Sorry.
ROB:
(chuckling) The other bit that is skipped over there is that from the helicopter they land at the airport where there is a limo waiting for them. And Jessica Weiss says like, “we can’t go in a limo, that sends entirely the wrong message.” And Harlan says, “it’s the only bulletproof vehicle in the state.” Completely ignoring all this is Ruth who runs into the limo and she’s like, “wow!” and she’s dancing to the stereo and there’s stuff in there. She’s like, “come on everyone!”
GILA:
So they get to the clinic. And again, everyone at the clinic is much more invested in seeing Jessica Weiss than they are in Ruth.
ROB:
She’s almost an afterthought there.
GILA:
So she goes up to the counter, says, “do you have a bag for me?”
ROB:
She gets the bag that Harlan left for her.
GILA:
She goes into the bathroom, she packs up a bag and she’s like, “I can’t do any of this.”
ROB:
She also goes in the bathroom and opens the bag with the money in it and just the Hallelujah Chorus plays while she opens it, and she’s rubbing the money on herself and just amazed by the fact of it.
GILA:
And then there’s a knock and asking if, “are you going to come out in a minute?” She decides to leave.
ROB:
Yeah. There’s a little hinged window in the bathroom, and it doesn’t open enough but she somehow has the can of brake fluid in her bag that she stole from her boyfriend’s glove compartment at the beginning of the movie,
GILA:
Chekhov’s brake fluid
ROB:
Yeah, Chekhov’s brake fluid. (laughs) And so she uses that to lubricate the hinges so the window will open all the way. And then she attempts murder on a guy, because there’s one of the guys from the abortion rights crowd in a high-vis vest who’s just standing on the pavement outside the bathroom window keeping watch. And she drops the lid of the toilet tank on his head so she can sneak past him.
GILA:
His credit is “Guy Who Gets Hit by Toilet Seat.”
ROB:
Yeah. In real life that would murder someone. But instead it just clunks him on the head comically, and she jumps out the window with the money, and then pulls the gun on him so he doesn’t follow her. She’s got this gym bag full of money and her stuff, she’s put it all in one bag. She hops out the window, she gets past him and sneaks her way around the building, tries to sneak over a fence, but there’s somebody’s dog on the other side,
GILA:
So she just walks.
ROB:
So she just walks.
GILA:
“Though the clinic is surrounded by anti-abortion and abortion rights picketers alike, they fail to notice Ruth as she walks through the crowd before ultimately running down the street with her backpack of money.”
And that’s the end of the movie.
ROB:
Yeah, that’s totally the end of the movie is just her walking off calmly through the crowd.
GILA & ROB:
(in unison) No one notices her.
ROB:
From either side. She walks past both sides, and she just takes the turn and leaves down the block, and that’s the end of the movie
GILA:
Now, I’m sorry. Did she have a pad? Was she still bleeding? It’s what happens when you have a movie like this written by men.
ROB:
Yeah. The physical effects of what she was doing throughout the movie were really glossed over. I mean, this is somebody who was pregnant, and also huffing, and also drinking, and also doing all this stuff, and takes a tumble down the stairs, and all of this and it’s just “it happens, let’s never mention this again.” I’ve known people who have been pregnant and are basically considered made of glass during all that. People in the house didn’t leave them alone, and that wasn’t even with the addiction aspect of, like, “you can’t actually leave this person alone,” it’s like, “take care of the pregnant person.” And none of that was happening. It was just kind of “whatever.” She has her miscarriage, she seems a bit upset while she’s learning this. She goes into the bathroom, leaves a bloody hand print on the door.
GILA:
Which no one notices.
ROB:
Which no one notices, but I think she cleaned it off later, but it happened and let’s not speak of this anymore. And it doesn’t seem to have an effect on her because she is not a person, she is a very thinly drawn character, or caricature.
GILA:
Caricature really.
ROB:
And so, yeah. And at the end of this, the credits start rolling and I just turned to you and went, “really?” And that was that.
GILA:
There was a little callback in the middle of the credits.
ROB:
Oh yes, during the credits.
GILA:
The music that had been playing stops.
ROB:
You hear the clatter of a cassette and then it’s Tape Two.
GILA:
She’d been listening to this financial whatever tape.
ROB:
Yeah. And at one point during the movie, she’s listening to it on headphones and hears, “and this is the end of Tape One, please continue on Tape Two.” And she realizes she doesn’t have Tape Two, and so she’s just like, “oh, shit.”
GILA:
So in the middle of the credits we hear the beginning of Tape Two Side one, and it’s about renting out a house or something. It’s like all the passive-income shit you hear about now.
ROB:
Yeah, and there’s some bizarre calculation, he’s like, “say you’re buying a house worth this, but this is how much money you have, and divide that into this and you get 9%.” and I was like, “no, you fucking don’t.”
GILA:
And then the tape died.
ROB:
And then the tape distorts and gets eaten, and you hear Ruth go, “shit!” And that’s the end of the credits.
GILA:
And that’s the end of the movie.
ROB:
That’s the end of the movie.
GILA:
No answers.
ROB:
No answers. Again, I think if this movie was funny, it will not again be as funny as it once was. But given what we’re going through now, as a country, even if it were somehow all fixed tomorrow, like someone’s fingers got snapped and just magically abortion was recodified in the law and not about to be challenged and people could have safe and legal abortions again, this would still not be funny again because we would all have in our recent memory that time that shit got this fucked up again.
GILA:
Mm-hm. It is very fucked up.
ROB:
It’s kind of like how there was a humor to the movie Independence Day when it showed the aliens blowing up landmarks like the White House and the Empire State Building, and that was in the ’90s and it was novel and it was a spectacle and people were like, “wow, I can’t believe they blew up the White House and the Empire State and all this stuff.” And then the terrorist attacks of 2001 happened, and the idea of a landmark getting idly blown up will never again be as “LOL, spectacle” in a movie as it once was, especially for those of us who have memories of that happening in real life.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
It’s a trauma. It’s a trauma that we’re all experiencing right now, those of us who care about this issue, those of us who are affected by this issue, are going through right now. Those of us who all we can do is have feelings and care and provide what support we can are going through it to a degree, but those of us like you who are personally, biologically in a position to be directly affected by this, I can’t even say I’m going through a significant fraction of what people whose body this concerns must be going through. (sigh) And in this fight I can be an ally as best I can, I can offer what support I can to those in my life who are more directly affected by this than me, I can try and use my privileged fucking cis male voice to try and elevate and boost the voices of people who are affected by this… but it is still a trauma.
GILA:
A hundred percent, I’m nodding, like you can see me.
ROB:
Yeah, and I’m not trying to go, “oh, poor me, look at what I’m going through because we’re going to make this issue about me,” no the fuck we’re not.
This is something that everybody with any kind of voice needs to speak up on. This is something that everybody with any kind of time, energy, anything to direct toward making this better, even if it’s as simple as voting for the right idiot on election day, you have to do something. You have to do what you can. You have to find out what you can do and you have to do it, and you have to do it while taking on the voices of people who this directly affects have to say about it. Something must be done. The situation right now is, as I said, horrifying, and every one of us with the ability to do something about it needs to.
GILA:
Absolutely. And as I had said before, I think the fact that at the end of this… the end of this movie, Ruth leaves. Walked in front of a lot of people, and no one notices, because they’ve forgotten about her.
ROB:
The movie portrays that, and it portrays these groups as both sides have their nutcases, which is true. But still I think there was a degree of, like, the fact that they were using this issue, and the fact that this issue is in the place it is in real life right now, I think came together in a way where this really soured what the movie was trying to do with it. Because it came out at the end like the ex-president going, “oh yeah, very fine people on both sides.” It totally “both-sides” the whole thing when, in real life, there is a side that is the oppressor and there is a side that is fighting for a basic human freedom. For the record, the forced-birth side of it is the oppressor,
GILA:
Thank you for clarifying.
ROB:
And I don’t care if that loses us a podcast listener or two, that is the fact of it.
GILA:
Yeah. If that is the thing that’s going to make you stop listening to this podcast, don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you, honestly.
ROB:
I mean… (sighs)
GILA:
I know it’s a lot and there’s nothing easy about any of this. I think that’s the other thing, because there’s a lot of anti-abortion propaganda that comes out. And when we were talking about potentially doing an episode about an abortion movie, I could think of two.
Two!
Two.
And that in and of itself is frustrating. Because if we’re saying, “oh, there’s a liberal bias in Hollywood, where’s the pro-choice propaganda?”
ROB:
Stephen Colbert in his famous White House Correspondents Dinner speech, where he was in character as a Republican pundit, said to President George W. Bush, “And we all know that reality has a well known liberal bias!”
GILA:
Yeah, not wrong. But how it’s okay that we’re about to take a giant step backward, that rights that had existed are going to be taken away.. and if anybody tries to say, “oh, it’s up to the states, blah.” No, fuck that. Actually, fuck that. First of all, the states shouldn’t be in charge of anything individually, something that is this significant and this important. People are going to die if we don’t do this correctly.
ROB:
And it’s on the record. People did die from back alley abortions and things like that. People had their lives ruined, people suffered, humanity suffered by not having this choice enshrined in law. And it was, and taking a step back from a gain of personal freedoms like that is terrifying, and we’ve seen that happen time and again, where personal freedoms were whittled away and there was no coming back from that. And what’s next after this? The same evangelicals who are trying so hard to get abortion banned, they don’t like same-gender marriage, they don’t like trans rights, they don’t like LGBTQIA+ rights.
GILA:
And what they’re trying to do, by the way – this is terrifying – because if all these babies who must be born, and their answer is always, “oh, give the baby up for adoption.” “Uhhhh, okay.” But if adoption agencies are allowed to discriminate against potential adoptive parents because of their faith or their marital status or their sexual orientation, that means that only white cis hetero Christian parents are going to be allowed to adopt these babies. So, in no small part, this is to help create some sort of evangelical army. It’s going past the Quiverfull movement, which is its own brand of messed up.
Again, as we were saying at the beginning of the episode, my religion doesn’t get to dictate choices for anybody else, and I think that’s really important to keep in mind. No one’s should! (sighs)
ROB:
And this is the situation in which we find ourselves at the time of recording. This is a situation that caused us to take this sidestep from what we normally do on this program, and it’s important enough to us, I think, to record this, use the movie as a jumping-off point to talk about what’s going on in real life.
GILA:
We know this episode isn’t fun, and not very funny, but we thank you for hanging with us.
ROB:
Yes. This episode was also not a comedy, (laughs) but we we’re not going to try and sell it as one.
GILA:
We’re certainly not, but we are going to again encourage you to use your voice, use your resources, use your power to do something. Anything. But make your voice heard.
ROB:
Yes. And we know that not all of you listening to this are in the United States, but none of this stops at the national borders, I don’t think. So do what you can where you are, wherever you are. Make sure you keep this up as a talking point, discuss it with people, because this is not something that you can kind of back off and go, “well, I don’t want to get political, it doesn’t affect me, I don’t want to have an opinion on it.” No, you need to. I was taught, in school coming up, I was taught about the fight for abortion rights in the past, as a thing that happened, and so now we got these rights that we now have. And it was just something that you took for granted.
GILA:
I don’t remember learning about it at all, honestly.
ROB:
We did. My Global Studies class in, I think, middle school, there were pictures on the bulletin board of the various times in history that we were talking about. And one of them was a protest sign saying “my body, my baby, my business.” And this was in New York, so maybe it was different in Omaha; no, I’m sure it was different in Omaha.
GILA:
I mean, were people in your school district allowed to say “condom?” ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
Because they weren’t in mine.
ROB:
Yeah, we weren’t yet at the stage where those were given out in school, but we were told of their existence in a non-terrifying way.
GILA:
Oh yeah, no, we were told that sex led to babies, STDs, or both and the only way to avoid babies or STDs was remaining abstinent. And we know how well that works.
ROB:
Yeah. Just this situation right now feels a lot like other things. I remember the celebrations when marriage equality was enshrined in law, and I’ve known many people who’ve benefited from that and gotten to marry their partners, even just have the option to marry a partner of whatever gender, and that is such a fundamental win, and the fact that that will be under threat…
GILA:
The fact that there are states that are trying to outlaw specific methods of birth control.
ROB:
It seems so outlandish to say something like, “we used to have slavery in this country, maybe that’ll come back some day,” but it feels less outrageous right now, doesn’t it?
GILA:
Well, the other thing is that’s in the Constitution now. There’s an amendment to the Constitution about that. And none of this is in the Constitution. Roe v. Wade, the right to personal autonomy and privacy is not in the constitution. The right to marry whomever you like is not in the constitution. And the precedents that we have become accustomed to, the precedents that have existed, the fact that they could all go away really quickly because of Clarence fucking Thomas and Amy Coney fucking Barrett, are you kidding me? Oh, and Brett Kavanaugh, please don’t even get me started on Brett Kavanaugh.
ROB:
We are at a scary point right now, and I think that’s why we had to say what we’ve said here.
GILA:
And I, again, appreciate your willingness to do this one with me. I appreciate you, our listeners, for hanging in with us, I know this one wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for us, I’m sure it’s not been easy for you either.
ROB:
I mean, for the record, I didn’t like this movie very much. (laughing) Just to pull it back a little toward our usual path, and say I probably won’t go back and watch this movie again.
GILA:
I don’t really see it landing in my rewatch pile that much either, honestly.
ROB:
But the thoughts and the feelings surrounding what it was dealing with and what’s going on are vital to keep an eye on and pursue and use and pursue in the name of justice and protecting the rights of…
GILA:
Everyone.
ROB:
Everyone.
GILA & ROB:
(heavily sighing)
GILA:
I don’t really feel right during the normal end-of-episode stuff.
ROB:
Yeah. I think we’re going to leave this one, kind of, where it is.
I’m Rob Vincent.
GILA:
I’m Gila Drazen.
ROB:
Thanks for listening.