WUH: Der Fan (1982)

Wake Up Heavy is a weirding Way media podcast, not. The very much Rockets for Me Dog. Welcome to Wake Up Heavy, the world's greatest horror movie podcast. In this episode, my weird dad will be talking. About Hello and welcome to Wake Up Heavy.

This is Mark Begley, your host, and I am finally getting around to the third course of my Cannibal movie trilogy that was started oh just about a year ago when I did a why Didn't I Rent This? On Motel Hell, and then Christashu joined me for an episode on parents, and amongst all that, I mentioned probably a number of times that I was going to round it out with der Fan or the Fan from nineteen eighty two, and I'm finally getting to it, So here we go. There are a couple of reasons it took me this long to get back to this, and some of them I've mentioned on the show in the past, just life stuff, work stuff. But the other reason was that, actually, I every time I thought about rewatching this film, I paused and thought, do I really want to right now?

And the reason for that is at that time and for the last oh gosh, four or five years or even longer, I've had this thing about watching movies with unlikable protagonists, and I'm kind of tired of it. And I had it in my head that the lead in this, that the main character was a lot more unlikable than is actually true. I just kept thinking that, I think, oh, I need to do the Derfan episode. Let's sit down and watch it. I know I like the movie.

I talked about it a little bit on an episode like four years ago, sometime during the pandemic when I actually bought the Blu ray, and then it just kept coming back to me that this girl is so unlikable and she treats everybody so horribly, and she's so selfish and entitled and blah blah blah, And there is that in the character, but it's not nearly as bad as I had been making it out in my own head. So anyway, I saw a couple people post about this over the last few months on Twitter and having watched it and kind of hyping it up, and I thought, Okay, time to get back to this. So I had a date to myself here recently and thought, okay, let's throw it on, take some notes, think about it, and see if we really want to do this, and I did, and enjoyed it a lot again and was happy to see, Okay, she's not that awful.

She's a teenager and has issues with her parents and authority and blah blah blah. So enjoyed it immensely again and am ready to get talking about it. So, yes, this is about The Fan from nineteen eighty two kind of commonly goes by its American title in most things that I see online, not to be confused with The Fan from nineteen eighty one, starring Michael Bean and Lauren Bacall. And I'm pretty sure I've mentioned watching that in the past. It is a sleazy little number and it has this very eighties homophobic subtext running throughout.

It is an interesting film, though, and I believe it's going to be on TCM this month this October on the Creepy Cinema that Mario Cantone does with Ben Maka Wits every year. I want to say. On the promos there is an image of Lauren Baccall in distress, and I'm thinking, did she do another early eighties movie where she's in distress? I don't know, so I think it'll be plain if you want to catch it. Also, not to be confused with the nineteen ninety six film The Fan directed by Tony Scott starring Robert Tanniro and Wesley Snipes, and most certainly not to be confused with The Fanatic starring John Travolta.

House. Ouse, Watch Out, Watch Out, Here's Moozy and directed by Limp Biscuit. Of course, all four of these movies, amongst others, deal with an obsessive fan, a fan who writes letters or somehow else contacts this famous person that they're obsessed with or in love with in this case, or think they're in love with and stalks them and then finally meets them, and so on and so on. They all have that same very similar theme and plot, and it's a thing that, of course, since the early to mid eighties has been a real problem for people and has become much more exposed and talked about. And we've had numerous celebrities killed by their stalkers and so on.

So it's one of those things that's been around forever. I'm going to talk about fandom in this because it is and can be a very strange world, and in our day with the Internet and Twitter and Instagram, it's even uglier than in the past. The film was directed by Eckhart Schmidt, and I am not familiar with any other films of his. It stars a very young Desiree Nosebush, probably mispronouncing her name, and Bodo Steiger, also probably mispronouncing his name, as the a Fan and the Fans' Obsession, respectively. I cannot, for the life of me think about where I first heard about this film.

I know it wasn't back in the eighties when I was buying all these movie books and reading them and noting movies on little lists to try and look for, because as far as I know or what I've read, this wasn't even released in the States at any point up until the Mondo Macabre Blu Ray. I could be wrong. There may have been a version or a different title obviously edited. It was released in the UK as Trance, heavily edited, but like I said, everything I've read has stated it was never released her. But when I saw it online, I'm assuming sometime within the last ten years, it rang familiar to me.

And I don't know if it's just because that idea of an obsessed fan stalking their obsession and doing horrible things to them is a pretty common trope, or if I don't know, the images of her on the posters looked familiar, so I don't know how if it came across my radar way back when or not, or it's just one of those zeitgeist type things where this is a familiar tale. Whenever I did first read about it, it intrigued me enough to continue reading about it looking for it, of course on streaming, which I don't believe it ever has streamed anywhere here, probably won't and we'll get to the controversy of the film later on in the episode. And the only option was this Mondo Micabro Blu Ray. And you' all know me, if you know me in person, and if you listen to any episode of the show, you know that I am a cheap skate.

I don't have a lot of Blu rays and DVDs and VHS tapes from my past. But I went out on a limb on this one and got that Blu Ray. And I probably got it on Amazon because I had Amazon gift card money. I don't believe I ordered it directly from Mondo. I'm pretty sure I didn't order it from them, and so it was probably cheaper than buying it from them, and possibly free if I have gift card money.

Anyway, got it, watched it, really enjoyed it. Like I said, talked about it. I think early on in the pandemic is when I watched it, maybe slightly before the pandemic started, and thought, Okay, well that was a I'm going to be watching this again. That was an Oak purchase. It's not a one and done thing, like I I sit on my shelf and never be watched again.

And I believe even back then I probably consider doing an episode on it. And back to that unlikable character thing. A lot of the movies that I watched in my teens and early twenties had unlikable characters. A lot of Scorsese films, who I was a big fan of his big films, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, even Goodfellas. They're unlikable people.

They are not good people. And this is particularly true of Raging Bull. And I just can't watch that. It's such an amazing movie. It is an impeccably made film, but I can't put myself through two and a half hours of Jake Lamatta on screen, and I just can't do it.

I can't. He's such an awful person. He's an abuser. He beats everyone in his life literally and figuratively and emotionally and every other way you can. And I can't do it.

I just can't put myself through that stuff anymore. I think about Ferris Bueller and how I watched that movie so much as a teenager, and it was on cable constantly. I remember my dad would walk in and be like, oh, he wouldn't say this exactly, but this fucking movie's on again. And I loved it back then, and these days, I'm like, this guy is such a prick. Why doesn't anybody knock him down a few pigs?

Yes, it's fun ditching school, going out, having a great day, but he is an asshole to everybody in his life. And I am like team Jennifer Gray in that film anymore. A recent example Scott Pilgrim from Scott Pilgrim Saves the World. Guy's a dick. It's not fun for me to watch unless there's a redemption aspect or arc to the story.

I kind of can't do it. So that's why, like I said, I put this off for so long, and I was sort of a mistake. On my part, because she's not that awful. I mean, she's pretty awful, but it's not hard to watch. It's not hard for me to get through.

She's mainly just a selfish, self absorbed teen she being Simone, a German teen in um who is obsessed with R or Or, a new wave singer. And Bodo Steiger, who plays R in the film, was the lead singer and guitarist of Rain Gold, a band, and this is one of the aspects of the film that I know I talked about on this past episode where I had a feeling that this electronic music throughout the film was going to drive me nuts, and it did exactly the opposite. I love it, and you'll hear little bits and pieces of it throughout this episode, but it is so hypnotic and it's not played so much that it's annoying in the movie, thankfully, but you do hear snippets of the same songs over and over again. But it adds to this repetitive life that we see Simone go through on a daily basis, where we get mirrored shots throughout the film.

She goes through her daily actions at home and at school, and so there is a repetition to it, and the music definitely adds to that. I have to say that this is a beautiful transfer. I have nothing to compare it to since I haven't seen the film in any other way before, but just in general, as far as movies blu rays transfers go, it is crisp and clear. The film opens with a wonderful title sequence of contrasting blacks and reds black titles on a red card and vice versa, and we hear this zooming of cars, and the opening shot is a close up of Simone's eyes, and then we start to get her voiceover, which is pretty consistent and constant throughout the movie, and it's mainly her reading letters, the letters that she's writing to R.

During this close up shot, we see what she's staring at, and it is a mailman walking down the street, and once the mailman catches her eye, his face just drops. So this is an ongoing thing, we realize, and we'll continue through the film. This is one of those repetitious motifs throughout her confronting the mailman asking if she's gotten anything back from R, and of course she never does, and in her voiceover we get an idea of her mind. It must be that our's secretary is throwing her letters away because she's jealous. And if R were to get her letters, you would realize, you know, she's the one.

And again that's consistent throughout a lot of her imaginings, her fantasies. If he only got my letters, or if he could only see me, or if he knew this, or if he knew that about me, he would love me too. The idea of these songs, Your songs are for me. It's like you know me. Stuff like that.

This stuff with the mailman continues for a while. We see I think at least three confrontations, and the last one gets violent and she finds his bag on the street. He's left it down there, and he comes out in an apartment complex, and on this viewing I noticed that he has lipstick smeared all over his mouth. So he's been up prancing around with one of his customers during his workday, and she effectively beats him and then throws all the mail out of his bag. Prior to that, she steals a letter from her school that he is going to deliver to her parents.

This becomes another aspect of her routine where she's constantly ditching school and we see multiple shots of her in class, and I love the This is another good example of the mirroring in the film, where the shots of her in class are set up the same, The composition is the same, the movements are the same. There's, you know, the droning teacher in the background, which she is totally disinterested in. She's usually thinking thoughts that we hear about are There's always a boy sitting behind her that wears a scarf around or a bandana around his neck, and we'll see him later on on one of her ventures around town. This city, um that she lives in is just gorgeous. That adds another aspect to this film.

Quaint, little medieval German town with a big cathedral and this tower that she goes up on and of course fantasizes. You know, if I were to just throw myself off and have a last letter to R in my pocket, then he would have to know who I am and he would have to love me. So the shots of her roaming around wonderful lot of steady camwork. Her outfits. I have to say, I don't pay much attention to that kind of stuff.

In movies, but early eighties new wave European and her choice of clothes throughout the film is just incredible. Photos fashion leaves a little bit to be desired, since he likes to wear Nazi stuff. During the opening of the film, when we get to Simone's house and there is a close up of photos and paintings and pictures of our photo Steiger's character, and then there's a big picture of a German crowd doing the sighile and you hear Hyle's over the soundtrack. This idea of this fandom is fascism, which I find really intriguing, plays a big part in this. That's what I was referring to earlier.

Where I mean, growing up up in the eighties with a lot of new music coming out, and I knew a lot of people who Oh well, I was into him. Then I was into him before anybody else knew about him. Somebody, some small band gets their big break and now they're very popular. Oh well, I had their first. You know that kind of crap, And it is so much worse these days with the online culture, and you know, you can't be a true fan of Taylor Swift if this this and this the director gets into this a bit in the interview that's included on the disc, and the idea of this history of fascism in Germany, and did Hitler somehow fill a need for the German people or did he bring about the fascism fans?

Do they create these superstars or do the superstars come in and fill that void. Ours logo is two lightning bolts side by side, which very closely resemble the SS symbol. So you get those bits and pieces throughout and I like that. The director in this same interview says, you can look at it with that lens or completely ignored. It doesn't matter to the rest of the film, really.

And so between her skipping school and bothering the mailman, she's aware that Our is going to be on TV. So in one of the letters she writes, she's like, well, wink your right eye and I'll know that that's a signal to me. And so she gets all dressed up in a fancy outfit to watch this, and her parents, of course are disinterested in her, It seems disinterested in each other. When they put the program on that Aura is on, he stares dead eyed into the camera, so he doesn't even blink let alone wink, which I just think is absolutely hysterical. And of course you know that means that the secretary through the letter away, etc.

Etc. When Dad changes the channel, she attacks him, much like she's attacked the mailman previously. So we get this idea that there is some violence in her, some physical violence. We get shots of all the mail that our gets going through the post office there. At some point she decides to circumvent the mailman and gets basically a po box.

So now instead of meeting him on the street, she's going there every day and asking the clerks if she's gotten anything. And we get these great interstitials of day one all the way down to I don't know at least day six, and nothing comes, and by that point they're laughing at her. On one of her ventures around town, the boy that sits behind her in class with the bandana is following her. When he finally catches up to her, he gives her a mixtape, and there's some dialogue there where it implies that they were dating. At some point.

He says something like you never come around, or you don't take my calls anymore, or something to that effect. I like that it's subtle like that, and we don't really know what their relationship is. It just seems like maybe he's pestering her. But then it feels more like she's gone so heavy into this obsession that a normal relationship with just a guy in her class is beneath her and she's not interested. She has fantasies throughout, and they're always shot with a filtered lens, and it's usually of ours secretary getting rid of her letters or chasing her off at one point, and at some point it appears that she has run away from home.

She's still wandering around the city, but she breaks into a car to sleep. The next morning, an old man finds her in there. We get an indication of some pervinus there, which will creep back up in a little bit. She does eventually take to the road to go to Munich, where are is going to appear on Top Pop a music show, So she catches a ride with an older man, who, of course, at one point tries to rape her. She escapes and wanders through the woods and finally ends up at this TV station where other quote unquote celebrities keep showing up and there's fans milling around and getting people's autographs, and she's not interested in any of them because they're not are.

Once she's in Munich, she has another fantasy. I believe, there's this raging storm and she's sitting in the car and the car is rocking, very striking. And then she wakes up the next day and he has finally shown up, and she freezes, they make eye contact, he walks over, and she passes out. So there's this point. There's a couple of points in the film where you could make the argument that we are in one of her fantasies.

The filmmaker has established a look for her fantasies and these don't have that look. But I don't think you have to adhere to that necessarily or it would be too obvious. And again you can make the argument both ways. No, this is not a fantasy, and I think the strongest indication of that is why would you fantasize this? And I'll explain that when we get to the finale.

But there are points where you wonder, since she has an active imagination, since she has had fantasies before that aren't always positive, and her whole life is built around this imaginary relationship. So at this point, when she wakes up, she is in the studio and he is looming above her in silhouette, and you could very easily say, okay, well, this isn't real. From this point on, we're in Wizard of Oz territory. Nothing that comes after is actually happening to her. He is very nice to her.

He's very friendly, not creepy at this point, but seems to be legitimately concerned, and I guess that's sort of where my mind is thinking, Yeah, this isn't real. He gets her backstage. He basically keeps her there and is constantly going back to her like a caring boyfriend. Of course, he's got this show to do for top pop. It's very eighties.

There is a set with all these mannequins that are bald. He wears a bald cap and a strange brown shirt, kind of more of this national socialism gear. She's in the audience, loving all of it, clapping after everybody else to stop clapping. He seems to be pushing everybody away from him and focusing solely on her. Again makes me think this is her fantasy.

He takes her out to eat. There's some talk about the secretary, like she's getting jealous and she's left, and he agrees that she has most likely thrown her letters away because he's never seen them. Blah blah blah. So we're starting to get this turn of where instead of it feeling genuine, it feels more like he is manipulating this young fan because she is extremely attractive, very into him, and he's going to be able to do whatever he feels like with her. And that's my own argument against that this is a fantasy, because the rest of this plays out not well for her, and since she saw him get out of the car earlier on, she has been very, very shy, which to me is a stark contrast to how she has acted throughout the film, being abusive to people, showing a lot of force and strength.

And it made me think as I was watching it, what's that thing that's going around the very demure, very demure, very mindful. She seems almost overwhelmed. She's a young girl. She is a teenager. We don't know.

I don't think it's ever explained what her exact age is in the movie, but she is a teen girl. She is in high school or whatever the German equivalent is, secondary school, that's British, and she's not the cool character that she has come across as uptil now ours entourage is ticked off at him because he's kind of shrinking his responsibilities. He's got these places to be, these things to do, and he's all about Simone at this moment. He takes her after this top pop performance to a friend's house nearby that no one else knows about. She's very willing to go, but she's still in that kind of shy, guarded mode, and so you don't know how this is going to play out.

There's a great shot before they get into the house of Simone in the car and the camera slowly tracking into her mouth as it opens, which again brings to mind for me, at least, we're entering another world. This is a fantasy world from this point on. You could say fantasy before they enter the house, or it's just simply a little foreshadowing of what's to come. They have shared a kiss already at this point at the studio, but when they get to the house, it's still that awkward. What's going to happen?

They separate. She's exploring the house looking at the artwork, a statue that's in the hallway some of the other things in the house. She goes to the bathroom, smashes her face up against the mirror, and then finds him in a room that is draped in like curtains hanging all very again, very very very eighties. At this point they proceed to have sex, and as you would expect, the second it's over, he cannot wait to get the fuck out of there. So he makes some excuse about having to do this business, these things that his secretary and all his other entourage, his hangers on were talking about earlier.

Oh, now he's concerned about it. Hey, you stay here, stay as long as you want. Just lead the key under the mat. No big deal, and thanks for the fuck I'm out of here. Goodbye, little girl.

I got what I wanted. I really don't care about you. She tells him that she loves him, and his response is me too. Not quite as bad as Han Solo, but it's up there. I love you.

He says something like you made me very happy. She starts crying, and I was kind of struck this time. It looked like her tears were milky, and I was thinking, what the hell is this all about? But I believe it's just running into her makeup. But I thought, for a second, Oh god, we're going into sci fi territory or something like that.

Excuse me. There's an interesting break here where we have her screaming and then another shot, not an exact shot of her screaming again, and it's like they took two different takes and put them together. And again my mind goes to this is a break in reality. Is what happens next not real? So maybe up to this point it's been real, because why would she fantasize about him leaving immediately instead of a fantasy where they're together.

Now they're an actual couple. He expresses his love back to her. I mean, we could have had that as a fantasy, and then cut to him leaving and saying, you know, I got shit to do. We don't, though, so is this point after her scream now fantasy. She takes the statue that she was admiring earlier, which is a figure with an outstretched hand in a fist, and nails him in the back of the head.

There's this really cool shot of him where he's just standing there after this happens. He doesn't fall to the ground immediately. And then of course she clubs him again and he does go down. And it's interesting for a film that is filled with in particular the music of Rhein Gold, throughout this whole stretch is musicless, and it really puts a point on what's happening here. So she drags his lifeless body into the kitchen area.

She notices a standalone freezer in there, and she slowly begins to undress him. She finds an electric knife and proceeds to dismember his body. It's not graphic. There's one shot of her putting the saw up against his shoulder and you can see it go into blood. Isn't spraying everywhere.

They take a very clever route with the quote unquote special effects here during the dismemberment scene where she is picking up individual limbs or parts of his body, and it is just him or maybe a stunt double or a body double, where she picks up an arm and the arm and the whole rest of his body is lifted up, but the shot is cut off where his arm is. So they didn't create fake limbs for any of this. They just used somebody's real body and she stores them in the freezer at some point, she's sitting at the table and has the wonderful idea to cook him up. We proceed to get shots of her making a stew, making things. She goes so far as to grind his bones in what looks to be a coffee grinder, and she heats all of this up in the oven and basically turns him into dust.

And she takes that dust when she leaves the house. So at some point we've got to cut in here to the next morning. She has finally gotten dressed. She's wearing the brown the brown shirt from earlier that he wore at the Top Pop performance, and the camera stays below her neck or a while here. She gets her stuff together, she cleans up, she goes to his car, his rolls that he had taken her therein, puts the keys in there, gets something out of the trunk, and then takes off and ends up back home.

Well, eventually we see she has shaved her head during this time to look like what he looked like during that Top Pop performance and is wearing his shirt. When she gets home, her parents are like, oh, thank god you're home. You know, we didn't bother to call the cops because we didn't want to cause a fuss, and I'm thinking, ah, yeah, you just don't give a shit, And then we immediately go back into voiceover. She is still writing letters. We find out that she is pregnant.

We also see on the news that are is missing. They haven't found anything, any idea of what's happened to him, it's just that he's missing. She's still writing her letters. She hasn't been caught up to this point. And then at the very end of the film, the doorbell rings and we cut to credits.

So who knows is that the cops have they discovered something in this house? Did anybody even know really where this house was? Are they going to find any trace of him? Since she basically devoured and or burned his body up and she ends up tossing his dust on the street. At some point, I've made the point of the fantasy aspect.

I just kept thinking that as I was watching the movie, Okay, well, at this point, maybe it's fantasy. Maybe it's this point, maybe it's now. Maybe she didn't really kill him, this is her fantasy of revenge. And in that director interview, eckhart Schmidt mentions that the censors made them tack on a dream ending where she wakes up and it was all a dream, and I kind of thought, oh, yeah, that makes sense, you could get away with that. Now, I don't think I would be happy with that.

And then what they ended up doing they pulled a Kubrick and they went after all the prints had been released to theaters, they went and cut that ending off, so they got it to pass censorship, went around cut those out. He had edited in so much as a way that it wouldn't interfere with the rest of the film. And there you go. So I think it's warranted to think at any certain point in the film we're dealing with her fantasies. I mentioned Taxi Driver, and there are definite similarities here.

The constant voiceover narration in Taxi Driver, it's Travis's journals that we're hearing in this, it's her letters. Mainly. The shaved head at the end is very reminiscent of the mohawk that Travis Pickle sports before he goes on his rampage. And then you have the aspect of the Jodi Foster character, the twelve year old prostitute, which she played at twelve years old. That was controversial at the time.

There were a lot of protections surrounding her during that filming. Her sister doubled fur her in any of the more overtly sexual scenes. She also doubled for her in The Little Girl who Lives Down the Lane for that nude scene in that and that blurring of that line brings up issues. And there is a definite issue with this film. The controversy of this movie, which I mentioned at the beginning, that I would get into, isn't the subject matter, although I'm assuming for some people a movie about cannibalism would be controversial to begin with.

It's the fact that Desiree Noseboosh was a young girl. She was sixteen going on seventeen. The film came out in June of eighty two. She turned seventeen in January. Now, unless they had a super fast turnaround, I'm assuming that some of this was filmed, some of it at least was filmed while she was still sixteen.

I'm going to track a little bit. Desiree Noseboush was actually pretty well known already at this time, at least in her home country of Luxembourg, where she had hosted a radio show At twelve and a TV show by the time she was fourteen. And I guess if you read the trivia about her, one of her more famous bits of trivia is that she got kicked off of hosting this TV show because she insulted a politician. So to me, that raises this point of this precocious team. The idea that a lot of people use as an excuse to get in relationships with a very young person, or in this case, have them star in a movie that requires full nudity, that they are mature for their age.

We've all heard this, mainly in reference to young girls. Of course, it goes against all we know about the brain. Being precocious does not mean your mature. Our brains do not mature until early to mid twenties. And so the controversy really revolves around the fact that between the making of the film and the release of the film, some stills, nude stills of her sex scene with Bodo Steiger were published in a magazine, and so I think she had maybe a moment of self consciousness and tried to keep the picture from being released, and there was a whole court case.

Now everything I've read before, it's the top IMDb trivia note when you look up the movie and it's in the Wikipedia page and everything else. She lost the court case because she had signed a contract after having seen the storyboards for this whole last act of the film, which comprises of a good twenty or so minutes where she is going to be this character Simone is going to be naked for most of this time. So I've read that a number of times and thought, okay, well, great, she signed a contract during that interview that is on the Blu ray. Towards the end of that, Schmidt says, well, once we got to court, we realized she hadn't signed the contract. Her manager, who was her boyfriend at the time and much older than her.

Here we go again, hadn't signed a contract because he couldn't sign the contract, and her parents hadn't signed the contract. So actually there was no signed contract. I'm not sure how they ended up winning the court case. I guess it eventually came down to the producer saying, offer her some money and get rid of the problem, which they did. So there is this aspect of the film that's uncomfortable for me.

I mentioned this however, long ago. I did that episode a watch List episode where I talked about having seen this and if that's an issue for people, you know, don't watch it. You have to track this thing down to watch it in the first place, or buy the Blu ray to begin with. So if you have an issue with underage nudity, don't watch it. Is this the first time it's happened.

No, there are numerous instances I can think of off the top of my head. Melanie Griffith was in two movies I believe before she was eighteen where she is nude. Jenny Agater in walk About was sixteen when she did a full nude scene nis Jostic. Okay, here we go with I'm gonna screw up her name. Nastoshya Kinski, good god Mark is trying to say.

Nostasia Kinski was fourteen when she filmed the nude scene in to the Devil a Daughter. So it does happen from time to time, and I don't know the particulars of each situation and who signed off on what. Those movies are out there to be watched by people, And I think for me that was one of the reasons I halted doing this episode. And I'm thinking, are you being hypocritical. Can you criticize this and watch it do an episode on it knowing that there is this issue now?

Supposedly, according to Schmidt, they made up years later. They were both living in LA and they met for lunch and it was all water under the bridge. I've never heard her side of it or read her side of it. It's all been from him or these bits of trivia that are probably mostly garnered from these interviews of Schmidt. Is it just one of those things where you get over it and move on.

I've been seeing this post the last couple of days or this past week on Twitter about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Is it problematic? Is it problematic and trans misogynistic? And the original poster was like, you know, yes, but does that mean you can't watch it? No, you can enjoy problematic art.

You can enjoy art from problematic people. That kind of stuff I always think of as an individual choice. You guys decide what you're going to do. I'm going to decide what I'm going to do. The other part of me, as a dad of a daughter who just turned seventeen last week, can say, without a doubt there is absolutely no way I would sign off on this.

My daughter's not an actress or anything like that, but it wouldn't happen. Nude scenes. Sex scenes don't bother me. I'm not a prude. I don't really enforce that on her so much.

Except for extremely We're not watching Blue Velvet anytime soon. That's a very adult movie. That is a whole other discourse where this current generation seems to think that all sex scenes are unnecessary. Yeah, that is not where I stand. The sex scene in this is not explicit or super graphic.

It's almost impressionistic in a way, not so much like my own Private Idaho, where it's actually meant to look like stills during the sex scenes. But it has a weird, stilted quality to it. But she is completely naked. Could they have done it with a body double? Of course?

Could they have done this with an older actress? My wife watched Euphoria a couple of years back, like went through the whole She didn't start watching it from the beginning, but watched it and kind of binged it for a few months. And it's extremely graphic. Obviously, even though they're playing teenagers, all the actors and actresses in that are over age. They're in their twenties.

Could you do that in Derfan? Of course you could. Could you, like I said, use a body double. Yes, you could do all kinds of things to where this young girl who's sixteen or seventeen is not appearing completely naked in the film. What does that mean for you as the audience member, whether you have this information already or not.

Some people may watch this and have no idea that the lead actress was at the very most seventeen years old when it was filmed. So that's the individual question each person has to ask. I think it's an interesting aspect of the movie of its history. I really enjoy this movie, and I think she in particular does an amazing job. Does the controversy taint the film?

Yeah, a little bit in my head. I'm obviously going to watch it and have watched it. Whatever that says about me, I don't know. The wonderful thing is you all can decide what you would do, whether you would watch it or not. With that knowledge in mind.

I'm certainly not going to tell you not to watch it, and I'm not going to tell you to watch it. I think it's a fascinating film. It's a beautiful film has some great performances and an interesting conceit. That idea of cannibalism, ingesting the thing that you obsessed over, that you quote unquote loved. It's a powerful theme in movies, and it I think goes back to the whole idea of fandom.

Isn't that what we do to the people, the artists, the musicians, the actors that we love, try to consume them. Okay, well, thank you so much for tuning in. Hey, two episodes in as many months. I guess the juices are flowing again. Not a fan of that phrase.

And I actually have an idea for something completely different to do. I've thought about. I've changed up the way I'm recording right now, and I've thought, I don't know if anybody would be interested in doing kind of a tech talk episode where I explain how I put together the show, how I create an episode of Wake Up Heavy or Cambridge and with Sean or whatever else it might be that I'm working on. So I might do that. I don't know, We'll see.

I don't know if that would be of interest to have an audio guide for that, but maybe would be helpful for anybody out there. That's got their own podcast and has questions. I don't know, we'll see. I'm tossing that idea around and who knows, it might be four or five months before that ever happens or anything else comes out. You don't know anymore with this show.

But again, thank you all for being here, Thanks for listening. Go watch der Fan if you're of a mind too, or completely ignore it and never watch it in your life. That is totally up to you. Have a great day, a great month. It's October, it's spooky season, watch good horror films, and don't forget anything can happen when you wake up Heavy.

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Wow, this has just been such a pleasure. I'm such a lucky boy. I can't wait to go home.