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Another solo Aaron & Carlee episode as we dig into an oft-forgotten erotic thriller of the early 90s, Nicholas Kazan's Dream Lover, starring James Spader and a post-Twin Peaks Mädchen Amick. A story of love, lust, and betrayal, the film exhibits a disorienting, fragmented editing style that adds fascinating dimensions to its characters' psyches and indicts the film's ostensible victim, Spader's Ray Reardon, in his own deception as more and more layers of Amick's (playing Spader's wife) carefully guarded true self are revealed.
We discuss the film's script and its thoughtful probing of the male ego; how a woman might take advantage of a man because of his own refusal to know her deeply, and how the slow revelations of truth can feel like deceptions to someone willfully ignorant. Then, we discuss the superlative performances from Spade and Amick, particularly the latter's singular ability to remain an object of desire even as she steadily becomes an antagonizing force within the film. Finally, we discuss the movie's relationship to other films that explore the casually kept secrets within matrimony and the turmoil that erupts when the facade of domestic bliss is shattered, most notably David Fincher's excellent 2014 thriller Gone Girl.
Own the documentary We Kill For Love, courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome or stream the film on the people's streamer, Tubi.
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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
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The thing that I love so much about Gone Girl is that it suggests culpability on both parties while this woman's being a psycho, and actually becomes a murderous psycho, but it shifts perspectives to her at sort of the midpoint of the movie, and refuses to allow Affleck to be a victim of all of this, and there's that very famous cool girl monologue, if you recall, where she's talking about this, where she's like, you know, like men have this idea and this ideal of the cool girl, right, that we are like skinny and fit with perfect tits, and we love blow jobs and anal sex, but we also like drink beer and eat burgers and chicken wings with them on the weekend, and we watch sports and we slap five, and we also like that we do everything all the time for them, and that this thing doesn't really exist, but men tell themselves it does, and then women try to like facilitate and maintain that deception by being all the things that a man expects them to be in their relationship, and it's also, you know, done in voiceover at the same time as there's this very fun like extremely liberated like scene kind of montage of Rosman Pike's character like, you know, like spitting and like wearing like baggy clothes and eating cheeseburgers and like, you know, eating like a twizzler and throwing it out the window just like undoing all of the like tightly coiled facade that she's had to put on in front of this guy, and I felt that in this and I kept getting inklings of that with Machin's character where you're like, oh yeah, this is like not just simple deception, she's doing so much fucking work behind the scenes just to maintain this facade and this impression of herself for this man so that she can take advantage of it ultimately, but that, you know, the labor of that is implied and also something that's like really fun to think about and heavily indicting of the male characters in both films. Yeah, and then there are times when like the work is not at all at play and she's allowing him into her deception many, many times she's on the phone with what we later find out is her lover who she's lying is her friend Kelly or Debbie, Debbie, not Debbie, that he's never met. She doesn't, none of what she even gives as excuses sound real like she's not trying. She's on the phone and she's like, well, you're just gonna have to wait aren't you? Like she's clearly talking to someone she's fucking right and it's like her being like, do you want to, do you want to talk to Debbie? Like it's right there for him and she doesn't fucking care. Yeah, even her lies where she's like, he's like, I don't think I've met her and she's like, oh it's because like her husband's a psycho but also a boar. Yeah, like we don't bring him around. It's just like bullshit, right? It's like stuff that's like so obvious. And at one point she's like on the phone with the guy that she's fucking and she stays on the phone importantly what I love about her character is he walks in several times when she's on the phone with her lover and she doesn't bat a fucking eye. Her demeanor doesn't change, she doesn't do a second glance, she doesn't blink, she just keeps talking. I love it. I fucking love it. It rocks. And one, she's just like, you know, good at doing that. She's good at the lie but she's also good at the like, I'm not actually lying. I'm not not, I'm not pretending to not be on a phone with someone I'm fucking right? Yeah. But there's this scene one of the times he comes in she hangs up and he's like, well, who's that or whatever? And she's like, Tabby, she wants me to go see those male strippers. I'm just like, that's the excuse you came up with. And it's funny too because you can tell that that lie is one that is still intended to kind of rouse suspicion and unsettle spader. Yes, she could have said fucking anything. And what she's doing instead is saying something that she knows that he's like going to feel kind of uncomfortable with. And his response is perfect where he can see him literally like swallowing every urge he has to say something and just tells her sounds fun. Often under spurious, if not completely non-existent claims, a husband could just have his wife locked up. So yes, this is absurd. But like, there is a, there is a real world corollary to this absurdity to this absurdity. Absolutely. And to be clear, the institutionalization is not the absurdity. It's the hearing, the trial portion of it. And I think the thing, as you pointed out, that's so insane about it is, this is far more respect and far more of a procedure than any woman would be granted in the same scenario. This is my fucking point. Like, I think the absurdity of the entire thing is meant to be a point. It is meant to be a commentary on like how absurd these types of proceedings are. And like, it really is just her being like, well, he did this thing. And him being like, no, I didn't. And the judge being like, I don't know, she's got a pretty good case. And like, but that's literally what men did. That is literally, and, and the man being the husband is all they needed for their side to be true. Right? Right? Yep. So the roles reversed. And it immediately becomes like a circus in our eyes, right? But like, this happened all the time to women. Yep. All the time.
