Ben Shapiro dissects Everyday Feminism’s absurdity—lesbian Tori Truscheit’s "Nine Ways to Be a Heterosexual Feminist" mockingly dismissed as tone-deaf—before pivoting to Michael Flynn’s resignation, framing it as media hysteria over unenforceable Logan Act claims while accusing Democrats of weaponizing leaks to sabotage Trump. He ties Flynn’s fall to a broader pattern of bureaucratic resistance, citing Jim Webb’s warnings about institutional obstruction, and contrasts Trump’s chaotic presidency with the "deep state’s" entrenched power. The episode spirals into film criticism, slamming I’ll Never Leave You’s anti-Semitic love narrative while praising Casablanca’s moral clarity, arguing modern media prioritizes shallow sensuality over sacrifice—culminating in a call for art that demands spiritual depth over fleeting pleasure. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's Valentine's Day, and that seems like a good time for our monthly visit to our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
Everyday Feminism is a place where straight men can go to experience the true joy of feminism, which is making fun of feminism.
It's also a place where women can go if they're unhappy, angry, confused, and perpetually dissatisfied, and they want to be with other women like themselves.
Today on Everyday Feminism, we find a post entitled, Nine Fantastic Ways to Be a Practicing Feminist with Your Partner.
And you know just how fantastic it's going to be because it's illustrated with a picture of a happy, gay Eurasian man washing dishes.
I'm not sure what that's about, but I know if a happy, gay Eurasian man would come over to my house and wash dishes, that would be fantastic.
And when he's done, maybe he could take out the trash.
The post is written by Tori Truscheit.
No, really, that's her name, I swear.
And Tori Truscheit explains that she's a lesbian who enjoys dating masculine women.
So she knows a lot about being with men because her friends tell her about it, and it sounds very difficult.
I'm not making any of this up.
So Tori Truscheit asks, what does feminism look like in a relationship with a man?
Which of course is a difficult question to answer since it would involve finding a man who is in a relationship with a feminist and is able to stop sobbing long enough to explain what it's like.
But as a lesbian who dates masculine women, Tori Truscheit offers the following nine guidelines to straight men for how to be in a relationship with a feminist.
Number one, continually ask for consent.
Tori Truscheit writes, and this is a direct quote, so help me, I've lived in a tragic bind for the last decade, which is that I'm a lesbian who loves breasts, but I'm attracted to masculine women who don't enjoy their breasts being touched.
Unquote.
So if you're a man in that situation, make sure to continually ask for consent before sneaking out the back door and never going home again.
Number two, actually listen.
Actually, I don't know what this section said because I wasn't paying attention.
Number three, respect your partner's autonomy over their body.
Happily, if your partner can be described by the possessive adjective there, it's possible she has more than one body and you can respect her autonomy over one of them while going to town with the others until the first one is ready to go.
Number four, split housework in a way that works for everyone.
Speculation Becomes Fact00:15:30
This sentence has no rational meaning.
Well, there are five more fantastic ways to be a feminist with your partner in the article Nine Fantastic Ways to Be a Feminist with Your Partner.
But if you followed the fantastic advice in the article so far, you probably no longer have a partner and are now miserable, lonely, bitter, and angry.
So you've come to the right website.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is to give you blue.
Birds are need also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship shit, tipsy-topsy, the world is if it easy.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
I think we should just end the show.
I don't think I can.
All right, well, if you're sitting at home and you're looking at your life and it's miserable and everything is broken and you've made all these mistakes, don't worry, tomorrow is the mailbag.
You can write in your questions about anything you want, and we will answer them, and the answers are guaranteed to change your life occasionally for the better.
But you have to subscribe to thedailywire.com, subscribe, and then you can ask your questions, and your life will be incredible.
I mean, you will just say, oh, my goodness, I'm so glad those $8.
What were they worth to me in my misery when I can ask these questions?
All right, so the left got itself a scalp, and they are happy.
Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor, resigned.
He had, what had he done?
It's kind of a good question.
What had he done?
He had talked to the Russians before he took office, to the Russian ambassador before he took office.
He had mentioned, talked about the sanctions that Obama had put on the Russians for theoretically tampering with the election.
You know, who cares that he did this, but he did.
But then he lied to officials about it, Mike Pence included, and Pence went on TV and defended him and then felt kind of wrong-footed, and now it came to light.
All of this was leaked to the press.
So the story that the press is telling now is that the White House is in complete chaos, right?
This is complete chaos, and everything is just falling apart, and this president will never accomplish anything, just like he never won the nomination, and he would never win the presidency.
So now he's never going to be able to accomplish anything.
Here's the Washington Post.
Upheaval.
Upheaval is now standard operating procedure in the White House.
Once dismissed as growing pains, three weeks ago, once dismissed as growing pains, the chaos that was one of Donald Trump's trademarks in business and campaigning now threatens to plague his presidency, according to interviews with a dozen White House officials and other Republicans.
Just to compare, just for fun, to compare the way they treated Obama when he couldn't get anything done.
He first got into the White House, right?
Here's Terry Moran from ABC News interviewing Obama.
Listen to the difference in tone.
Ms. President, you got no honeymoon.
Not a single Republican vote in the House on your first major piece of legislation.
I'm getting a big honeymoon from the American people.
But what happened coming into the presidency?
Maybe you were too nice.
If I'm a Republican senator or a Republican congressman, I'd think you're a very nice guy, but maybe I don't have enough reason to fear you.
You know, I'm waiting for this interview with the Donald.
You know, President the Donald, you're just too nice.
You know, why didn't you get a honeymoon?
Oh, yeah, because we're attacking you every day.
Now, remember, so the press is happy.
They feel like they—here's a New York Times reporter yesterday.
You know what?
I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now.
I'm feeling like a real man with real cojones.
Okay, maybe that wasn't really a New York Times reporter, but maybe it was.
For all I know, it could well have been.
All right, so, you know, they did give the impression of chaos.
Kellyanne Conway went out and said that Flynn had the complete confidence of the president.
And then within 45 minutes, Sean Spicer was saying not so much.
And within another hour, you know, Flynn was gone.
So Matt Lauer has Kelly Ann, and he's taken her to pieces.
Here's the first cut.
Yesterday afternoon on MSNBC, you said that Michael Flynn enjoyed the full confidence of the president.
Sean Spicer later said the president was evaluating the situation and then Michael Flynn resigns overnight.
Were you out of the loop on this?
No, not at all.
Both were true.
The president is very loyal.
He's a very loyal person.
And by night's end, Mike was best to resign.
He knew he'd become a lightning rod, and he made that decision.
So had he not resigned, the president would continue with him as National Security Advisor, even though he misled the vice president and the administration about the contents of that call?
That fact is what became unsustainable, actually.
I think misleading the vice president really was the key here.
And I spoke with the president this morning.
He asked me to speak on his behalf and to reiterate that Mike Flynn had resigned.
He decided that the situation had become unsustainable for him.
So this happens every time somebody gets the can, basically, in politics.
Every time somebody comes out beforehand and says, the president has 100% confidence in this man, and then the trapdoor opens underneath him and he's gone.
So the big question, the question that the press is asking is why did this take so long?
If the FBI and the intelligence community had warned, the Justice Department had warned the president that he might be blackmailed because he had said things to the Russians and then had not been honest about what he said, although that seems really, really far out there that that would get him blackmailed.
But okay, if he knew about it, why didn't he fire him?
So here is the exchange where Matt Lauer tries to say that this proves that he was acting for Trump.
He was contacting the Russians for Trump, and it was all basically the administration.
I mean, what this is about, let's remember, these sanctions that Obama lowered on them were a political move in the first place.
They were just to show, just to delegitimize the presidency by saying that the Russians had somehow skewed the election, which we now know is untrue.
We now know that people did not vote according to things that the Russians did.
That really didn't happen.
So this whole thing with the sanctions was a political setup to begin with.
So it's not like a real thing.
So he's talking about it.
So what the big conspiracy would be, I don't know.
But Matt Lauer feels that he's on the trail of something.
Here he is.
You're starting to make me think that perhaps General Kelly was not freelancing during that call when he talked about or hinted, I'm sorry, General Flynn, that he wasn't freelancing during that call, that in fact he may have been making that call on behalf of the administration or the incoming administration.
Would that be accurate?
No, it would be a mistake to conclude that.
Remember, in the end, it was misleading the vice president that made the situation unsustainable.
Which the White House knew about last month.
And yet yesterday you went on the air and said that General Flynn had the complete and full confidence of the president.
And General Flynn decided that he should resign last night, and the president accepted that resignation.
The president is very loyal, and he's been carrying forward with his entire team very effectively, frankly.
And at this stage, he accepted the resignation, and he's moving on.
You know, one of the things is, I mean, I don't know what the sequence of events was.
No one else does either, except for Trump and maybe the few people who were around him.
So one of the things I've noticed about commentary is people speculate and then the speculation becomes the fact and people just act as if they're crazy speculations or what actually happened.
I mean, I can imagine, I can imagine Trump's, you know, Trump is a loyal guy.
He does stick with people right down to the end.
I can imagine Trump trying to stick with this guy, becoming impossible for Pence to work with him.
I think that Trump has a lot of investment in Pence because I think that he knows that Pence is his connection to Congress.
He knows he's not going to get anything.
He doesn't know how to deal with the Senate and the House.
And he knows he's not going to get anything done.
He knows that Pence gives him respect he wouldn't otherwise have.
And there was a lot of noise about the kind of hires that Flynn was making.
So maybe Flynn wasn't doing that good a job and he just eventually said, you know, this has got to happen.
I don't know.
I do not know what happened.
But here's the thing.
There's all this talk about the Logan Act.
And this is trash, okay?
Because the Logan Act essentially says that private citizens are not allowed to negotiate with countries that we're at odds with, basically.
And no one's ever been, one person was once indicted on it.
No one's ever been prosecuted on it ever.
No one's ever been prosecuted on it.
And if they were, It would be tossed out on First Amendment grounds.
I mean, you can talk to anybody you want, you know, and what difference does it make?
If I go talk to the Russian ambassador, that's not going to do anything to the country.
I mean, it's a ridiculous thing.
There's no reason why an incoming administration shouldn't be talking to him.
It's absurd.
I mean, this part of it is absurd that he violated, he violated some kind of criminality.
But that is part of what the left is selling.
The best one, this was just before the resignation, was our old friend Keith Olbermann, which I have to play because it's just too hilarious, where he now believes the entire government.
I love this guy.
He's like the entertainer.
He's like the clown, the jester of the court of Donald Trump.
It's like Donald Trump, and then the guy comes out with the little bells on his hat and all this stuff.
Keith Olbermann believes now the entire country has been taken over by the Russians.
I call for the immediate indictment of Michael Thomas Flynn on charges of and his immediate arrest on suspicion of violations of the Logan Act.
I call for his immediate suspension, resignation, or dismissal as the national security advisor to the President of the United States of America.
I call for the immediate investigation of whether his relationship with the Russian government is limited to activities covered by the Logan Act or if he is acting as an agent of the Russian government or as in the past, acting as a paid employee of companies affiliated with the Russian government.
I call for Senators Graham and McCain and any remaining patriotic Americans on the Republican senatorial roster, if any there yet be, to fulfill their promise of weeks ago to immediately conduct a full, open, and limitless investigation into Russian hacking during the election, into Russian coordination with the Republican presidential campaign during the election, and into the contact between the Russians and the transition team between the time of the election and the time of the inauguration.
The Russians have captured the airport.
Listen, you guys, we've just got to get organized.
For God's sake, we've got to get organized.
Just don't panic.
Keith Olbermann starring in the Russians are coming.
The Russians are coming.
So the government is taken over by the Russians.
We violated the Logan Act.
Something terrible.
Oh, and the White House is in chaos.
Listen, Trump has a chaotic style.
You know, the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece today kind of describing what happens is that he likes there to be.
Anytime there's a president, his inner circle divides into power centers.
That just happens with any group.
It's going to happen with any group.
And usually the chief of staff, in this case, Reince Priebus, governs, he kind of guides everybody in.
You can go in now and you can go in then, you know, kind of puts people together so it all makes sense.
And that doesn't seem to be happening yet after three weeks with this guy who was never a politician before.
The Wall Street Journal writes, Vice President Mike Pence ran the transition and has a say in personnel, among other things.
Strategist Stephen Bannon and his policymate Stephen Miller share Mr. Trump's fondness for shocking the Beltway bourgeoisie and wrote the botched executive order on immigration.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner appears to play on any issue he wants.
Kellyanne Conway is a presidential favorite who takes the media spears on the cable shows.
Gary Cohn runs the National Economic Council and is already muscling out competing voices on taxes and finance and block supply siders Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow from senior White House jobs.
Then there's Reinz Priebus, the nominal chief of staff who was supposed to impose order on the joint but hasn't been given the power to do so.
And now they're starting to blame him.
You're starting to hear all this stuff about Reinz Priebus and maybe we're going to get rid of Reince Priebus and all this stuff.
So there's a little bit of disorder at the White House.
And that is part of the Trump style.
Part of the Trump style is like this kind of creative destruction.
Whether this is going to be a huge problem or not is absolutely beyond our ken.
It's impossible to know.
All we do know is that all the same people who are telling us that Trump can't succeed and that Trump can't do anything with the same people telling us he couldn't get elected, same people telling us he couldn't get nominated.
So there's much to say.
I have something really important to say about this, but unfortunately, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
So you've got to come over to thedailywire.com and hear the rest.
You can watch if you subscribe, and if you subscribe, you can be in the mailbag tomorrow.
All your problems solved.
So Charles Krauthammer made a really good point about this.
He was...
He spoke very sanely about the whole thing, that it's a bit of a kerfuffle.
Here is his take.
What strikes me is how bizarre the whole story is.
This is a cover-up without a crime.
The idea that one should be all aghast because the incoming National Security Advisor spoke with the Russian ambassador and spoke about sanctions seems to me to be perfectly reasonable.
The idea that it was illegal is preposterous.
When I hear Nancy Pelosi get all upset about this and how in the grip of the Russians this shows us to be, this is an absurdity.
But then you ask yourself, well, then why did he lie about it, even internally in talking to the vice president?
And that shows a tremendous lapse of judgment and a sort of a lack of trustworthiness.
So, you know, it's entirely possible that Trump is the one who lied to Pence and that became a problem.
You know, we just don't know yet what exactly happened.
But this is the point.
The point is that this is the left has its scalp.
Congratulations, they got their guy and now they're all the bloodlust is up.
You know, you can really hear the way they're talking.
The Washington Post had a headline, he's the first to go.
That was their headline.
They change these things.
You know, if you get them early in the morning, you see the real headline, and then they disappear down the memory hole.
Okay.
But let me get through this idea, and I'll come back to this in a minute.
There obviously is some ruckus in the White House, growing pains, three weeks.
Three weeks is short time.
These are not professional politicians.
Okay, fine.
But the thing is, the left has nothing.
On the left, there is complete chaos.
And the press is working for the left.
So you have, for instance, all these meetings about Obamacare where these paid protesters are showing up and saying, but I'm going to die if you take away my Obamacare.
And those are being reported as real meetings, as real protests, when in fact that's astro turf.
It's just paid stuff.
What's really happening on the left is they are in a terrible, terrible bind.
The Democratic Party's Transformation00:09:34
They have got, they have built their party.
They have nothing.
They have nothing.
They have accomplished, they had eight years, they accomplished nothing.
They have built their party on racism.
You know, yesterday, Grammy-winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles was talking about the lady who wore a pro-Trump dress at the Grammys, right?
Joy Villa, her name is.
And her album went from 500,000 on Amazon to number one.
It became a bestseller overnight because of this.
And yet the Grammys are under fire for being Grammys so white, like the Oscars were, as if, as if, because Beyonce didn't win and instead Adele won.
And now it's like, why should they?
That's the that is a perfect metaphor for the state of the Democratic Party.
They have sold their party as the party of racism, basically, the party of racialism.
We are going to—they call themselves progressive, but that's going backward.
It's an advance to say, e pluribus unum, that we will make one of all of us simply by adhering to our ideas, by acting out the meaning of our creed.
It's going back into this Stone Age to separate us by race, and that is the choice the Democrats made.
So now they have the same thing.
They have people, you know, that woman Boynton, who's running for the head of the DNC, saying, my job will be to shut white people up.
You know, good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
You know, I mean, that's no way to build a party because not only do you alienate all the white people, but you alienate all the same people of color who don't want to live in that world, who just want to be part of America.
You know, that's going to be a sizable group of people who are not going to buy into that vision.
So here is former Senator Jim Webb, who is a Democrat moderate who is being forced out of the party.
And here he is talking about what's happened on the left, the chaos there.
There is a campaign going on on the Hill in the media, in the academia, to personally discredit not only Donald Trump, but the people who are around him.
And, you know, the end result of this really is trying, and to slow down the process, by the way, you and I were talking a minute ago about the confirmation process, is slow it down so that by 18, when the Democrats are very vulnerable, particularly in the Senate, there will not be a record of accomplishment that they can run against.
And at the same time, the Democratic Party over the past five or six years has moved very far to the left.
When you can't have a Jefferson-Jackson dinner, which was the primary celebratory event of the Democratic Party for years because Jefferson and Jackson were slaveholders, they were also great Americans in their day.
Something just different has happened to the Democratic Party.
All right, so here is an ex-senator, a Democrat, Jim Webb, doesn't like Trump.
He says he doesn't like Trump.
But he's saying that there is a campaign on from the Democrats to slow Trump down, to stifle him.
You know, that's part of their job, no question about it, to slow him down to stifle him.
So he doesn't have anything to run on in the midterms when they are vulnerable, because all the states where they have Republican, Democrat senators from Republican states, states that Trump won, are going to be up for grabs, and they're going to lose those seats if they don't find a way to stop him, okay?
So this is their strategy.
And the thing is, this strategy, it's not just the Democrats.
The Democrats include the Democratic Party, the press, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, The Washington Post, that is the Democratic Party.
Those are just Democrats with press cards.
That's all they are.
That is the Democrat, what Andrew Breitpart used to call the Democrat media complex.
And it also includes the bureaucratic state.
And this is the point I want to get to.
When I say the bureaucratic state, I mean this massive, massive government entity that writes laws without passing laws, that gets to come into your business and say, oh, you can't build this business here because there used to be a stream that went through here in the Jurassic Age, and we're hoping it'll come back.
And, you know, so you can't do this unless you pay obeisance to us.
This massive bureaucratic state, which is naturally Democratic, although the Republicans have a hand in it, it's naturally democratic because it defends the power of the state.
And of course, Obama has had eight years to stock it with his guys too, but it's naturally democratic.
It's not just Obama doing it.
It is a natural Democrat entity.
The intelligence services have become, I believe, in part, a vehicle for that entity, that bureaucratic entity.
And I say this because they did the same thing to George W. Bush.
When they didn't like his stuff, the leaks began.
You know, this is not letting Flynn off the hook.
It's not letting any kind of incompetence from Trump off the hook.
Don't think it is.
I'm just saying that somebody in the intelligence community taped Michael Flynn's, bugged Michael Flynn's phone call.
Now, there are systems for doing that.
You have to go through certain courts and certain, you know, you have to get certain permissions to do that.
We don't know whether they had that.
They then took that information and they leaked it to the Washington Post.
Okay, so that's our intelligence services leaking bugged telephone calls to the Washington Post.
When did that become all right with anybody?
When did that become all right with anybody?
So, okay, so we have two stories here.
It's not just one story.
We have the story of Michael Flynn and whatever it is he did and whatever it is, he got fired, and add to that the story of a little bit of growing pains and incompetence in the Trump White House.
Fair enough.
But on the other hand, you have this massive entity fighting for survival, fighting to keep Donald Trump from doing what he seems very intent on doing, which is cutting them back, doing what he said in his inaugural speech.
He said, I'm going to transition power from the government back to the people.
And he's made every indication of meaning to keep that promise.
He really has.
And the bureaucratic entity is fighting back, and the press is helping them.
And of course, the Democratic Party is helping them.
Here's the thing about Donald Trump.
I have been so straightforward about my feelings about Donald Trump.
I wish he were not the guy.
I wish he didn't say the things he said about women.
I wish he didn't insult his opponents the way he did.
I wish he didn't go on Twitter and talk about nonsense.
I wish he were a better man.
I wish Donald Trump were a better man.
But Donald Trump is the very, very imperfect vehicle of a battle between us and the bureaucratic state.
And ultimately, we're going to have to choose sides.
Ultimately, we have to choose sides.
And I would rather stand with Trump knowing who he is and speaking my mind about who he is and catching all the nuances and being honest about it.
But at the same time, this cannot stand.
This press, this lying, corrupt, ideological, ideologically unified press cannot be allowed to go unopposed.
This machinery for leaking information out of the Oval Office cannot be accepted.
You know, he is battling a bureaucratic entity.
And as flawed as he is, and God knows he's a flawed man, we have to choose sides.
You know, I've been traveling for three weeks.
I've been around different places for three weeks, which is really good because I'm in LA, which is a bubble in and of itself, and I've been talking to people.
And one of the things I learned, you know, in my youth, I was a bit of a drifter.
I drifted all around the country.
I was in every state, but I think North Dakota.
And I slept in hobo camps, and I really lived quite an interesting existence for several years out on the road.
And it shocked me because I grew up basically in New York.
I grew up 20 minutes outside of New York.
And I had a New York sensibility.
And when I met all these Southerners who I only knew from movies about Rod Steiger beating up black people, that's what I thought about Southerners.
When I met all these Midwesterners who were always being portrayed as fools and bozos and yobs, I suddenly realized, you know, that's not, it's not true.
I mean, people are smart.
You know, what the guy says in Men in Black are true.
A person is smart.
You meet people all the time who are much, much smarter than the guys at the colleges and the guys on TV, but they are not sure of themselves because they don't have the education, they don't have the class, they don't have the manners, they just know what they know.
And a lot of times, I've said this to guys from the State Department, I've said to them, you know, when you guys were saying that we've seen, when you guys were looking at the Soviet Union, intellectuals were looking at the Soviet Union and saying, I saw the future and it works.
Guys without a college education were going like, that's evil.
And they were right.
And the people with the educations were wrong.
And when I go out now and talk to ordinary people, for lack of, and there is no such thing as an ordinary person, but for lack of a better term, people outside the bubble of LA, outside the bubble of Washington and New York, they all say the same thing.
They're worried about Trump.
They're worried about his temperament, but he's doing a good job.
You know, that seems to me, that seems to me just the evidence of your eyes.
And all the smart people who are parsing each little thing and blowing everything out of proportion, he's doing a fairly decent job so far.
And yes, am I worried about his temperament?
Yes, I am.
But if it's a battle between Trump and the bureaucratic state, I'm with Trump.
And I say that knowing his flaws, knowing who he is, having talked about him.
But ultimately, if this is the battle, if we are going to have a battle between Trump and the bureaucratic state, you got to choose sides, and I'll be with Trump.
All right.
That's what I wanted to say about this.
All right.
Valentine's stuff I like.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I got to talk about that.
This I really want to talk about.
So I was talking about, I want to talk about some movies, and I want to talk about the effect of the movies.
Valentine's Day Imagery00:10:14
For the last, let's call it 50 years, basically the movies and television have been the major American form of art.
And this means that one of the things that Alfred Hitchcock discovered about the movies is that they're a visual art form.
They're not a verbal art form.
In the old days, the movies were written by playwrights.
Playwrights would come out to Hollywood, novelists would come out to Hollywood, and they would write rich screenplays.
And a two-hour movie had a 250-page screenplay.
Okay, a screenplay today is half that long.
It's 110 to 120 pages.
And that's the same thing, two hours.
But there's no language in it.
There's no dialogue.
Everything is done through imagery.
And I have frequently pointed out that a society that lives in pictures is going to be a shallow society.
I mean, this was true in the Middle Ages.
In the Middle Ages, the pictures were the gospel.
You saw the gospel and the pictures you saw in church.
And it makes people shallow because images, there's a natural tendency to idolatry in the human heart that turns the image into the thing itself, okay?
So in a movie, when they show two people having sex, they are trying to show you an image of love.
They're trying to show you an image of tenderness, of people coming together, of two becoming one, all the things that sex is supposed to represent in life.
But all you really get is hot sex.
All you really get is the imagery.
And this is why Alfred Hitchcock told Truffaut, he said, the two things I try never to show are people praying and people having sex.
And I infer from that that the reason he didn't do that is because the internal experience is so different from the external experience.
And I think that one of the things that I have seen in the movies is that more and more they have sold sex as a replacement for love, simply because that's all the movies can do.
They can't show you love.
They can only show you sex.
You know, the worst love story movie I've ever seen, one the Oscar, was The English Patient.
And a lot of people love this movie.
And I went and saw this movie and it has all the scenes it's supposed to have, all the love scenes it's supposed to have.
It's about a cartographer who gets caught in World War II and he and his lover get caught in World War II and all this drama happens.
I won't give it away.
It's Ray Fienz and Juliet Banoche.
And they ultimately realize that what happens to them, that what happens to the soldiers, the armies, doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
All that matters is their love, okay?
So here's this scene that's supposed to be very romantic, where she's been injured and he's going to go heroically and try and save her life.
And this is the scene between them.
Listen to me, Catherine.
You've broken your ankle, and I'm going to have to try and bind it.
I think you've also broken your wrist and maybe some ribs, which is why it's hurting you to breathe.
I'm going to have to walk to El Taj.
Although given all the traffic in the desert these days, I am bound to bump into one army or another.
And then I'll come back and you will be fine.
You promise.
I wouldn't want to die here.
I don't want to die in the desert.
I've always had rather an elaborate funeral in mind.
Particular hymns.
And I know exactly where I want to be buried.
In our garden where I grew up.
The view of the sea.
Promise me you'll come back for me.
I promise I'll come back for you.
I promise I'll never leave you.
So it's got all the words of a great love story.
I walked out of this movie thinking, why am I so cold?
Why did I not feel anything for it?
And the clue in there was the line where he says, I'm bound to run into one army or another.
And the idea of the film is it really doesn't matter who wins this war.
What matters is their love.
Their love is bigger than anything.
And there's even a scene which I read as deeply anti-Semitic, in which a Nazi reluctantly tortures a Jew who's a thief.
And the message to me of that was: these Nazis didn't want to hurt Jews, but the Jews were thieves, you know?
That's basically the idea.
And so everybody is bad except the people who love.
Compare that.
I've always called this film the anti-Casablanca.
Compare that to probably the most famous scene in all of movies, the scene where Humphrey Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman and sends her off to do her heroic work with her husband.
Casablanca.
There.
Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor.
You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going.
If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
But what about us?
We'll always have Paris.
We didn't have, we lost it until you came to Casablanca.
We got it back last night.
And I said I would never leave you.
And you never will.
I've got a job to do, too.
Where I'm going, you can't follow.
What I've got to do, you can't be any part of.
I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Someday you'll understand that.
See, this is the greatest movie ever made, I think.
There's no better movie than this.
But compared the I'll never leave you in this to the I'll Never Leave You in the English page, and he means it literally, I'll never leave you.
Bogart is saying, You'll never leave me, you'll always be in my heart.
But the problems of three little people don't amount to much.
They don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
The war effort is more important than even the love between these two people.
And obviously, they've spent the entire movie showing us how much they do love each other.
So, what's the problem?
You know, there's a famous poem, or at least it has a famous line in it, by Richard Lovelace, written in the 17th century.
It's called Tula Casta, Going to the Wars, meaning I am going to the wars and this is to my lover.
I'll read you the whole, it's very short.
It says, Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, that from the nunnery of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, to war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase the first foe in the field, and with a stronger faith embrace a sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such as thou too shalt adore.
I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved thy not honor more.
That's a very famous line: I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.
The point is, to be worthy of love, to be capable of love, you have to put something above yourself.
So, the question is: are you what the movies show you you are, a body having sex, you know, a slave basically to your pleasures and to physical sensations and to your impulses?
Or are you a spirit who loves something higher, who can then reach the kind of love that is actual real love, the kind of love you saw in Casablanca?
And I think the movies have sold to us an image of love that is simply false, and an image, and I think that image has become pervasive, especially in the minds of people of a certain generation, the people of the generation coming up.
They no longer know.
They no longer know that they have to sacrifice themselves to something bigger than their own pleasure in order to be able to love, in order to be capable of love.
You know, I always hear feminists saying that, oh, Cinderella, terrible movie because terrible story because it tells us that, you know, we have to.
It tells us that love is everything, that the handsome prince is going to come along and save us.
That's what they always complain about, that the handsome prince is going to come along and save us.
But that's not what Cinderella says.
Cinderella says that the handsome prince will come along if you're Cinderella, if you're worthwhile.
You know, I mean, whenever I hear a woman say, you know, I can't find Mr. Wright, I think, well, are you Miss Wright?
You know, I mean, you have to be Miss Wright before you find Mr. Wright, and vice versa.
So I'm just saying that the movies, like every form of art except maybe music, the movies have limitations.
And one of their limitations is they cannot convey the spirit through visual images unless they go around it, unless they go around it, which is why the movies were actually better when they were censored.
That's why they were better when they were censored.
They have to find another way to tell the story of love besides just showing people banging each other.
And that actually moved them to tell stories that did show love in a different way.
One of those stories, great comedy, Roman Holiday by William Wyler, one of the great directors, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.
She is a runaway princess, and he is a reporter who doesn't tell her he's a reporter because he wants to get the story of what she does on the day she runs away.
And two of the best-looking human beings were ever created showing real on-screen chemistry, Roman Holiday.
Why don't you take a little time for yourself?
Maybe another hour.
Live dangerously.
Take the whole day.
I could do some of the things I've always wanted to.
Like what?
Oh, you can't imagine.
I'd like to do just whatever I like the whole day long.
Things like having your hair cut, eating delight.
Yes, and I'd like to sit aside what cafe.
Look in shop windows.
Walk in the rain.
Have fun and maybe some excitement.
Doesn't leave much to you, does it?
It's great.
Tell you what.
Why don't we do all those things together?
But don't you have to work?
Work now.
Today is going to be a holiday.
But you don't want to do a lot of silly things.
Don't I?
That's a great story about love and responsibility and what you have to be, what kind of person you have to be in order to find true love.
Really terrific story.
Have a happy Valentine's Day.
Be nice to your significant other if you can possibly find it within yourself.
We will be back tomorrow with the mailbag, and we will change your life, maybe even for the better.