Ep. 15’s chaotic rant mocks Playboy’s legacy—from normalizing objectification to its "bunnies" absurdity—while skewering Biden, Clinton, and Ryan with absurdist political jabs. The host dismisses modern superhero films as escapist but concedes Star Wars’ mythic pull, despite his indifference, before pivoting to Poe’s gothic Annabelle Lee, framing it as a Halloween antidote to Hollywood’s hollow spectacle. [Automatically generated summary]
We mustn't let another day go by without discussing the truly big cultural news of recent days.
Playboy magazine will no longer feature the pictures of naked women that used to be its trademark.
Scott Flanders, Playboy's chief executive, announced the decision to the New York Times, a former newspaper, which had recently made a similar decision to no longer feature the naked truth that used to be its trademark.
Flanders told the Times Playboy would stop publishing nudes because, quote, and this is a real quote, the battle has been won.
You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free.
Wow.
Thanks, Playboy.
You know, folks, in the same way it's easy to forget that our forefathers once sacrificed and died so that we can enjoy our constitutional freedoms, it sometimes also slips our minds that the editors of Playboy magazine once had to fight the good fight so that we could one day come to treat women like soulless objects with no other reason for existing than to take off their clothes on camera in order to provide us an empty moment of solitary physical pleasure.
You young people out there may not realize this, but there was a time when a man had to look a shopkeeper in the eye in order to buy his pornography.
In those unenlightened days, you were made to feel guilty and ashamed just because you were debasing yourself and providing a market for another human being's sexual degradation.
Back then, you couldn't just take a photo of your girlfriend in an intimate moment and then publish it online for revenge after you broke up.
You had to slink into a store and shell out your hard-earned money, and even then, you only got a picture of a perfect stranger being cheapened and disrespected and humiliated.
See, before Playboy, women were culturally conditioned to feel ashamed of reducing themselves to meaningless eye candy.
They were oppressed into believing sex should be connected to affection and responsibility.
So you had to be nice to them.
And then, if they decided you weren't going to throw your whole life away taking care of them and, you know, talking to them and stuff, they might not do anything for you.
And you couldn't just go off and lock yourself in a bedroom with your computer.
If it weren't for Playboy, you'd have had to reconsider your entire demeaning attitude toward the opposite sex.
And consider it from the poor women's perspective, too.
In those pre-Playboy days, a girl might go to bed with a guy one time and wake up to find herself trapped in a lifelong relationship of mutual care and goodwill.
Soon they'd be stuck at home with the meaningless drudgery of turning helpless infants into loved and joyful and responsible adults instead of picking up easy cash by flaunting their bodies for a nameless drooling multitude.
So thank you, Playboy.
You're right.
The battle is won.
Your efforts have helped to free us just a little bit from the irritating burden of treating one another like human beings.
We salute you and say, trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clayman, and this is the Andrew Clayman Show.
You know, I actually went to the Playboy Club once.
Am I the only person in this room who's actually been inside a Playboy Club?
Yeah, I don't want to make it sound like I went there once.
It was like I was degrading myself.
It was actually a step up from the usual sleazy joints I was hanging out in.
But this friend of mine came to town.
I was living in San Francisco and he belonged to the Playboy Club and he took me there.
Pulling You Into the Fabric00:15:04
And, you know, it was like that faux elegance, that kind of sleazy elegance that people who don't really know what elegance is like.
And the waitresses were called bunnies, which I guess was a wee bit sexist.
I think we can all agree that that was just a little bit sexist.
And they wore these bunny outfits with, they would have little bunny ears in their hair, and then they wore, I don't know, what are they called?
Those things like majorettes wear that just kind of cover your torso, basically.
Like a leotard, you know, yeah, with just, and the top of these things was engineered to push these girls' breasts up so high to emphasize their cleavage that it really looked like Victoria's Secret design dream of the Spanish Inquisition.
It was like Torquemata's secret.
It was like, you know, yes, we will make you wear this and you will confess the true faith, you know.
And I can honestly say, I must have been 19.
I'm pretty sure I lied about my age to get in.
I was 19 years old.
I can honestly say it was the only time as a young man I ever looked at a beautiful woman's cleavage and thought, man, that looks uncomfortable.
I mean, that just looks painful to me.
You're 19 years old and you're thinking, I want to take that girl's clothes off just to save her from the pain.
Don't worry, Nell, I'll be there.
Anyway, that's my experience.
The play was truly one of the least sexy places I had ever been to in my life.
So lots of political things happening that we don't really care about.
Joe Biden's not running, so that's exciting.
And that means that Hillary Clinton will probably be exonerated.
And the slow leak of the email scandal coming out of the White House is probably now over, I guess.
And Paul Ryan says he'll be Speaker of the House if they're very nice to him.
And Justin Bieber is now Prime Minister of Canada, I think.
You see this guy?
This guy's going to form.
He's going to form like a coalition government with Ludacris.
You know, Ludacris will do the rap portion of the government because I don't know.
It's like we're bringing the country down.
We're not going to talk about anything.
We're going to talk about the movies.
My problem with politics.
I've been really good.
I know this is a political site.
I know people come here to talk about politics and hear about politics.
And I've been really good.
I mean, Monday we talked about the debates a little bit and we talked about Israel and all this stuff.
My problem with politics after a while, and Lindsay and I were talking about this in makeup, it's the opposite of Christianity.
It's the opposite of everything that gives you joy.
In Christianity, you're supposed to love your enemies.
In politics, it's like hunt them down and destroy them.
Christianity, forgive your neighbors.
In politics, it's like hold a grudge for maybe a decade and then spring your revenge on the guy.
And when he says that's not fair, you say, yes, but in 1967, you did this.
And in Christianity, the whole thing is rejoice.
You're commanded to rejoice.
Rejoice always.
Rejoice evermore.
And in politics, it's like despair every time you lose anything.
Anytime you lose a vote, the country's finished.
It's all over.
So I have to heal myself by going back to the culture and the arts from time to time, which is where the soul goes to play.
Now, I haven't seen, I think I've talked about every movie that I've seen.
We talked about Crimson Peak the other day.
And the only other thing I've seen was San Andreas, which I watched with The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, Saving Everybody from the Earthquake in San Andreas.
I watched that on pay-per-view because I think I mentioned my wife is out of town and I'm just reverting to my feral state.
It starts with watching Dwayne Johnson movies and then it ends up with me running through the woods bringing down deer.
I am the king of the forest.
I am the rock.
So anyway, but it was actually a really good picture, Dwayne Johnson and Alexandria Didario.
I'm making fun of Playboy Magazine.
And I think when I mentioned Alexandria Didario, every guy's, you know, the words true detective appear in every guy's eyes because she did a nude scene in that movie.
It was like, for guys, it was like a world historical event.
It was like, where were you at D-Day?
You know, where were you when Alexandria Didario took her top off, you know?
And you guys were making fun of me a couple of days ago because I said that women are nicer than men.
There was a movie, maybe five years ago, it was called Solaris.
Do you remember this movie with George Clooney?
An absolute stinker, right?
I mean, this movie came out and they knew, and the studio knew, they were testing it and they knew it was a stinker.
And so to save it at the box office, they started leaking these kind of giggly little articles about how George Clooney took his pants off.
And you got to see George Clooney's backside.
And it would come out a little, you know, you'd hear it here and there and they talk about it on.
Movie comes out and it dies the death.
It just absolutely tanks without a trace, disappears.
Nobody sees it.
And one of my brothers, I have three brothers, three of the funniest people I've ever met, and one of them said they didn't understand that women will go see George Clooney's backside if the picture is good.
But when a famous actress does her first nude scene, men cancel their vacations and stay at home.
So when you tell me like women aren't nice to them, men are barely human, you know?
They're just this close.
It's like little peeking over the bar of being human beings.
Anyway, I thought this was a really good picture of San Andreas.
No kidding.
It was so much fun.
The special effects were insanely great.
It ends with the flag being unfurled and people saying the Our Father.
It's like, I couldn't believe it.
It was just a very, very fun picture throughout.
It got such bad reviews and has such a low, it's got like a 50% on, yeah, 50%, 56%, 50% on the critic side on Rotten Tomatoes.
And I just love this.
They say this is the critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes.
San Andreas has a great cast and outstanding special effects, but amidst all the sense-shattering destruction, the movie's character and plot prove less than structurally sound.
It's like, who writes that?
Who gives a rat?
You know, it's like this big, big, beautiful, beautiful action picture.
Just so much fun.
And I cannot believe that anybody took the time to criticize it.
It's dumb.
It's dumb, but it was really fun.
Anyway, the big movie news, as you will know if you listen to Ben Shapiro.
In fact, you'll know everything, is this Star Wars trailer that came out.
And I'm not going to play the Star Wars trailer because you can't see it if you're just listening.
You know, all trailers are pretty much the same.
A psychiatrist once explained to me, bona fide MD psychiatrist once explained to me that trailers are constructed for the infant mind.
What infants like to see is faces.
First of all, they're trained to look at faces.
You look at babies.
They just stare at your face.
Big noises, loud music, and very, very intense, easy to understand messages.
And that's the Star Wars trailer.
It's like, bomb, bomb, bomb bum, face, face looking at faces, looking at something, you know, bomb bomb, bomb, you know, crash explosion, boom, boom, bum, bum, bum, bum, face, another face, awestruck face.
And then the messengers are all like, evil is real, you know.
It's all true.
Harrison Ford, you know, yes, it all, so now you have the trailer, or you can watch it on YouTube.
So I have to tell you that I like Star Wars.
I'm not an anti-Star Wars guy.
I never got Star Wars.
I mean, this is just being flat out honest.
I enjoyed it.
I went, saw it, thought good movie, left, forgot about it.
When you come into this office, there are guys having arguments about Star Wars that sound like parents discussing a major decision they have to make about their children.
Should the Ewoks really come back?
I can't even remember who any of these characters are.
And that's how intense they are.
So a few weeks ago, I walk in.
Jeremy, come on over.
This is Jeremy Boring.
He runs the place.
And if it sounds like we're having fun, we are.
And it's mostly because of Jeremy.
He's also a film director, made a terrific movie called Arroyo about the Dreamers.
It's about the Dreamers of our border.
The true story is that I had the opportunity to meet Donald Trump about a month ago.
And of course, it was a wild tornado experience.
And his campaign director actually came over and said, you made the Arroyo.
Really?
This is the movie that informed Donald Trump's understanding of our border.
So, I don't know, a month, six weeks ago, I walk into Jeremy's office, and there's a look on his face that I expect to see one more time, which is when Jesus comes back.
A look of awe struck.
If you ever saw 2001, it was the look the cavemen had when they saw the big Earthstone.
You know, it's like just this look of awe.
And he said, you have to look at something.
You have to see this.
And he takes out YouTube.
So I figure, you know, it's a dog teaching a baby to jump or something.
Well, that one's good, too.
I love those because the mom is always going, look, he's teaching the baby to jump.
And the dog is thinking, like, is there a biscuit in this for me?
But he had just seen the Star Wars trailer, okay?
And it's true.
Your eyes were misty.
No, it's absolutely true.
Jeremy Wept.
Jeremy Wept.
So it's, like I said, it's not that I don't like it.
I just, I don't get it.
So this picture came out in 77.
The first one came out 97.
I came out in 79.
Okay, so you weren't even born.
No.
So when did you first encounter it?
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, my first conscious memory probably is of my sister being born in 83, and the third film in the trilogy was already out.
So Star Wars was ubiquitous before I knew anything about the world.
So I have no memory of seeing it for the first time.
Oh, really?
No.
Okay.
So let's talk, before we talk about the movie, let's talk about the trailer.
What is it about this trailer that just blows you away like this?
Well, J.J. Abrams understands nostalgia probably better than any other filmmaker.
He's a filmmaker from the generation in which all the great sort of art of the 60s, 70s, 80s was culminating.
And he, if you, anything he's made from his Star Trek films that he's produced to 8mm, which was just an exercise in nostalgia.
Even his first film, which was a Mission Impossible sequel.
And it was.
He's bringing all that stuff back.
Yeah, he's bringing all the stuff.
That's really never occurred to me.
So of course, the reason these trailers are terrific is because they present you with a nostalgic view of what you loved about the original Star Wars.
In fact, one of the problems I have with the new trailer, we were talking about it with Jonathan yesterday, is that the new trailer actually presents the new characters and something about the plot of the film.
And I went, oh, it looks kind of good.
But the first two teaser trailers, we didn't know who any of these people were.
And then there's the Millennium Falcon and there's Han Solo and Chewbacca.
So it was just, you know, pulling you into the...
All right.
And this is in the context of the fact that the last three Star Wars movies, which were the second, kind of confusing, they're the sequels, but they're the prequels, I guess.
Right.
The sequel prequels.
The sequel prequels.
And they sucked, basically.
Well, they don't exist to me.
He's dead to.
They're dead.
They're dead.
And those were by the original guy, right, George Lucas.
Right.
Well, no, they were by the hollowed-out husk of a man that was once short sleeves.
In fact, only George Lucas could have made those films as horrible as they actually were.
In fact, I really believe this.
I mean, I'm scarcely a film, barely a filmmaker at all.
I would have made a better, I'm not boasting here.
I'm telling you that even someone with my limited abilities would have made a better original prequel sequel to Star Wars.
There's not a person, you could go, there are homeless guys on the street in L.A. who made student films when they were in UCLA.
But literally any other human being on earth, because George Lucas is the only person for whom there was no sense of nostalgia or for whom there was no reverence for the source material.
He can't be reverent toward the source material because he made it up.
I got it.
And I would actually take that one step further and say that I think one of the reasons that the sort of great filmmakers of the blockbuster age can't recapture the old glory.
Because, you know, Spielberg and Lucas also made that horrible Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sequel to Indiana Jones.
Why is that film terrible?
I think part of it is because they can't understand what it was that allowed them to be so successful in the first place.
What allowed them to be successful in the first place is what Abram still has, which is a sense of wonder about storytelling.
And I think that probably these guys who've made so many great movies and made so many films over such a long period of time, the things that interest them now are the things that they haven't gotten to do before, which is the emerging technologies.
And that's why the films start looking like cartoons.
The story really becomes subordinate to what it is that still gets them excited, which is something new and something which doesn't really dust.
But now go back.
You're born into a Star Wars world.
It's just the atmosphere you breathe.
And you seriously don't remember the first time you saw it.
So what, I mean, where do you remember engaging with it in the sense of it's becoming your inner mythology?
Well, I was a Star Trek kid.
My best friend in childhood introduced me to both Star Trek and, I'm sure, Star Wars, although I don't remember that day.
So our elementary school days were really the Star Trek mythology.
And we weren't allowed to watch Star Wars because we grew up in the South and all of our parents had decided that Star Wars was about magic and evolution and alien races.
And I'm sure James Dobson had put out some sort of treatise on this, so we weren't allowed to watch it.
That's really funny.
But we had all seen it by then.
Somehow it was already part of it before they took it away.
I remember my dad's best friend, or one of his best friends, a guy named Billy Pickens, who was my favorite kind of adult because he was the kind of adult who lies to children, which I think is a virtue.
I guess it depends why you're lying.
But he would argue constantly that there was a fourth, a mysterious fourth Star Wars film called Yoda.
And you talked about this earlier in the week, how in the pre-internet days you didn't have access to any information.
I had no way of knowing if this was real.
And I would go on these quests to try to find the fourth Star Wars movie in my little hometown.
This guy's now in prison, right?
So I don't have that memory of the first time, but it was always there.
It's part of the backdrop, part of the fabric of.
So everybody would play.
Like, when I grew up, it was still time to play with, you know, we were World War II soldiers.
We were cowboys, which has vanished from the cultural lens.
No, we would sat in the, and we were knights.
We were knights.
We would duel, and, you know, my mother would come out and say, you'll put out somebody's eye, and she didn't realize that was the idea.
I'm going for the eye.
Imagining a Better Future00:05:08
You're like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to say.
So you just grew up playing with the lightsabers.
Yeah, so we, of course, I grew up in Texas, so we still played cowboys.
But we never played knights.
If you were going to swing a sword, it was a lightsaber.
We'd buy Dow rods down at the hardware store and paint them green and red and turn them into lightsabers because there were no toys back then of that sort of thing.
So that's what we were trying to put each other's eyes out with.
When you think, I mean, you know, as you get older, especially if you're a storyteller, as you get older, the stories that you imbibed in youth become all the more meaningful to you because they shaped your narrative mind.
And one of the things that really changed, you know, is that when I was growing up, movies came to the theater and then vanished.
Right.
So you actually grew up watching your parents' movies because they were on TV.
So I grew up watching John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart in movies that were made before I was born, I mean, decades before I was born.
And then the movies that came to the theater, you know, you might see them, you might be playing baseball that day, and then you'd miss it and you'd never see it again.
So I was much more shaped by like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart.
And that's why I was more shaped by Star Trek, right?
Because the original series was on in syndication.
Okay, okay.
But when I look back, when I look back on those things, I think, well, the West, you know, was that time when men can be men and they can stand, you know, they can commit acts of violence for the good, you know, which is, of course, what men want to do.
They want to commit, A, commit acts of violence.
And it's a very important thing.
And if all of the movies are good.
Exactly.
You can get away with it.
And you know, obviously my father was in World War II, so that was a very important, you know, heroic moment for me and all this.
What is this with this space opera, basically?
Well, you know, Star Wars, I think, is we've talked about this before.
It's the classic story.
It's the hero's journey.
It's built.
I think Lucas sat down like a math problem and tried to decide how do I tell a story that touches these deep threads that run through Western mythology.
And Star Wars does that so perfectly.
I think that almost every generation has its incarnation of that story.
Star Wars and then Lord of the Rings and then Harry Potter and they're all in modern time.
They're all grabbing on this ancient story, which Star Wars does so well.
And it presents you with the opportunity.
This is the other thing George Lucas doesn't understand in the prequels, right?
He thought you have to put little kids in the movie because we want little kids to watch the movie.
No, that is dumb.
That's foolish.
What little kids want is to be adults.
So we wanted to be, you know, you say you wanted to be in a time when you could do violence for the good, and that was for us too.
We grew up in post-Vietnam America, and the country didn't have that same sense of optimism maybe.
And this presented us with a world where there was optimism for overthrowing the big totalitarian state.
And I would actually say my conservatism was deeply probably informed.
You know, it is a conservative movie.
There's simply no question about it.
Deeply.
So one more question before we run out of time.
A lot of people think, they think, oh, the Western is over and World War II stories are over, and that's a bad thing.
And, you know, obviously everything that you lose, you pay a price, it costs you something.
But I do think it's a good, science fiction is now the heroic story.
The heroic story is now a science fiction story.
And that does turn your mind to what's ahead.
It is essentially optimistic, or am I wrong?
I agree.
I mean, I think science fiction is, by its very nature, optimistic.
And I think it's good that we look toward a future.
One of the things that Star Wars, and even more so Star Trek, gave you, was the sort of ability to imagine something better than what we have, something that you would strive for, you could turn your imagination toward.
And I think part of the power of today, something you didn't mention, a great moment in cultural history is that today is back to the future.
It's back to the future day.
Oh, I forgot.
I forgot about that.
Today's today, Marty McFly.
And the Cubs are losing, so maybe it all never happened.
I hate to think that.
But that sort of idea that we can build the future, part of the reason those things are successful is because actual engineers working at NASA today decided they wanted to get into science watching Star Trek.
They wanted to invent the future.
And I think that that, in a strange way, is something that's being replaced right now because you say that it's sci-fi, but it's really now the superhero story.
Yes.
Which is a, it has science fiction elements, but it ultimately requires the supernatural.
And I think that that's actually problematic because it almost says the future isn't actually available to you.
The future is something that only exists in fiction.
And I think that when I was a kid, the future was possible.
Yeah, that's what we really...
I mean, my problem with superhero stories is that you don't have to have recognizable enemies.
So basically, Hollywood never has to make a movie saying, it's Islam.
We have a problem with Islam.
And they're blowing things up.
It's always like some octopus guy, you know.
And interestingly, Star Wars, of course, does, I mean, it's, you say a space opera, and that's right, but it's really not sci-fi.
It's science fantasy.
Annabelle Lee's Supernatural Future00:04:21
Right.
But it, nevertheless, part of why it is so conservative is it has such a clearly defined enemy.
The enemy literally is the big government.
Right.
And the heroes are the rebellion.
I mean, it's like an American Revolutionary War.
There's no question about stories.
That's great.
See, this is why I love working here.
People actually have something to say.
I appreciate it.
We'll have you back.
It'll talk to you again.
Well, I appreciate it.
Give me 10 minutes.
I'm going to go stand right over there.
I can continue to read.
That was great.
Give him a hand.
Come on.
Come on.
All right.
Thank you.
That was actually great.
I actually now know something I didn't know before.
We got to do stuff I like, Halloween stuff I like.
This is a radical experiment.
I'm actually going to read a poem in a conservative broadcast.
Now, you know, I'm warning you because if your brain gets big and your ears fall off or something like that, I don't want anybody suing us saying, you know, my mind expanded, my face broke.
So this is, we can't talk about spooky stuff.
I've been talking about spooky stuff all month, all through October.
And we can't talk about spooky stuff without one of the first truly great American writers who was Edgar Allan Poe.
And he was discovered by the French for some reason, but he was still a fantastic American writer.
He invented the detective story.
And we were talking about the Gothic yesterday, and he was an absolute, you know, there are three great openings in American literature, three great opening paragraphs in American literature.
One of them is the opening to Farewell to Arms, just a beautifully written description of war.
One is the famous opening to Huckleberry Finn.
And the other is the opening to Edgar Allan's Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, which is almost gothicness personified.
I let you read it yourself.
It's this incredible Gothic opening just describing a landscape like an opium dream and all this.
It's fabulous.
This is the last poem, I believe, that Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote.
It's called Annabelle Lee, Annabelle Lee.
It's very short, or I wouldn't read it.
I read this when I was a little kid.
Talk about things that shape your mind.
I thought this was the spookiest, creepiest story I ever read, I ever heard.
I just this little poem.
And I went through it just looking to make sure that, because Poe used a lot of classical references.
And I don't think there's anything that uses the word seraph, which is like an angel, right?
We all know that.
And sepulchre, which is a tomb.
But that's it.
It's a very simple poem.
All right, here we go.
Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allan Poe.
It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea that a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabelle Lee.
And this maiden, she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea.
But we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabelle Lee, with a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that long ago in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out of a cloud, chilling my beautiful Annabelle Lee, so that her high-born kinsmen came and bore her away from me to shut her up in a sepulcher in this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me.
Yes, that was the reason, as all men know, in this kingdom by the sea, that the wind came out of the cloud by night, chilling and killing my Annabelle Lee.
But our love, it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we, of many far wiser than we.
And neither the angels in heaven above nor the demons down under the sea can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabelle Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabelle Lee, and the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes of the beautiful Annabelle Lee.
And so, all the night tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in her sepulchre, there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.
So we end with a little necrophilia, and that's one of the spookiest poems ever.
That'll keep you up at night, and as it does, I hope you'll be thinking about coming back tomorrow.