Another in our series of election year chats about movies about presidents. Originally published 18th October, exclusive for Patreon subscribers of Daniel or Jack, now released for all. By patron request, we watched and discussed 1999's delightful neo-screwball teensploitation 70s-nostalgiafest Dick, in which two teenage girls - Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams - accidentally find themselves befriending Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya) and becoming entangled in Watergate. It's terribly fun. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Be prepared for difficult application process and stressful work environment.
Challenges?
Many.
Rewards?
Numerous.
Failure?
Possible.
Your employer?
The American people.
The few chosen have been the presidents.
Welcome back to another edition of IDSG bonus episodes.
The presidential movies run up to the election edition, and the election is racing towards us.
Daniel, how's everything doing out there in nearly the election time, America?
It's getting there.
We've got about three weeks to go at this point, and boy, the yard signs are multiplying.
You live in a swing state, it's just delightful.
I'm sure, yeah.
I love how just impossible it is to find anything like any kind of consistency in the polls.
I just think that's wonderful.
I mean, this really is a toss-up.
It should not in any sense be a toss-up.
This should be a very obvious decision for people.
But, apparently, it is still a toss-up.
Yeah.
Well, it always is, isn't it?
American elections are always decided by fractional differences.
They're always decided by percentage points within the margin of statistical error.
And...
Ultimately, I suspect they're generally very little to do with the personalities of candidates.
I really do.
Which is why, you know, an election, it seems to anybody rational, looking at it like, whatever you think, Kamala Harris, you have, on the other hand, literally an insane, senile fascist.
But, yeah, it's still going to be...
I was going to say, actually, on that subject, you know, if I run out of things to say about this movie, which is a possibility...
I'm just going to start playing songs, and I'm just going to stand here swaying for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, however long it takes.
Because apparently that'll do now.
Yeah, no, that's all it takes.
I don't know how well that's going to play in an audio medium, but we can certainly go a little avant-garde with these.
These are the fun ones.
These are the bonus episodes.
While watching Donald Trump bop to Sinead O'Connor in Guns N' Roses and Ave Maria, I wish that had been just an audio medium.
Yes, yes, yes.
I'll be honest, even though I live in a swing state, previous cycles have been much, much worse than 2024 for me, because I don't watch TV anymore, and what I do watch is streaming.
And it's like pay streaming, so I don't see ads.
I don't listen to the radio.
I listen to podcasts or I listen to whatever.
And I pay for YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads on YouTube.
So I don't see political ads.
I just don't see them.
They just don't play for me, unless I see them in other people's coverage of them.
But I remember, I think it was 2012. It was just like every 30 seconds they were just playing, even like the local ads, you know?
Some of those are still burned into my memory because they just get played over and over and over and over and over again.
But, you know, now I've set up my life in a way that I just don't, you know, other than the yard signs and, you know, just people talking about it, I am not inundated by the fact that an election is coming in three weeks.
So, you know, it's a good life.
It's a good life, is what I'm saying.
It's a better way of doing things, yeah.
I confess that I am unhealthily addicted to a couple of the YouTube channels that make gargantuan amounts of money just from basically reciting the latest stupid thing that Trump has done or said, you know, and showing some footage of it.
So I get my Trump news mainly via cynical, centrist, liberal YouTubers.
You're moving right in your old age, Jack.
That's what's happening.
Pretty soon you're going to be wishing Biden was still around.
Why didn't we have the sense to vote for Romney?
He was a reasonable socialist.
It's just, it's as with any addiction, you know, you just have to have your fix and you don't care how you get it.
No, no, I get it.
You know, you don't have to like your dealer.
Let me put it that way.
Yeah, that's fair.
That's fair.
Yeah.
No, I hear you.
So, yeah, what we're actually here to talk about is the, in line with the series that we're doing, which is a very, very loose series of bonus episodes about movies about or increasingly just featuring presidents, you know, in line with this being president season.
We're talking about, and this is by listener request, isn't it?
We're talking about 1999's Dick.
One of my Patreon subscribers.
One of my long-term Patreon subscribers.
Because we talked about maybe doing this one, like you were just joking around, because we both had an obsession with Richard Nixon.
And he was like, no, no, yes, please, do it.
So, you know...
Yes, the same person actually is also a Patreon subsidizer of mine and got in touch with me as well.
So, you know, clearly this is something that's very important to them that we should talk about.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think...
I don't know how you feel about this.
I guess we'll talk about that here in a minute, but I'm expecting some people are going to expect that you're going to loathe this, and I think that might be.
I think there's a fanbase for us just completely shitting all over this, which I don't think I'm going to...
I don't feel that way about this, but we can get into that.
Well, just spoilers straight away.
I love this movie.
Okay, awesome.
Awesome.
So my history with this basically is I watched it at the time, which was 1999, as I say.
So I would have seen it in 99 or 2000. Do you think you saw this theatrically?
Do you think you saw this theatrically?
I didn't see it theatrically.
No, it would have been a VHS rental.
And the reason that I watched it was, well, I mean, partly even at the time I was interested in Nixon, you know, because even when I was 23, 24, I was a weird politics nerd.
But the main reason that I watched it at the time is that it features two cast members from the kids in the hall, which...
I absolutely loved.
It features both Bruce McCulloch and David Foley, who are Kids in the Hall members.
And I got into Kids in the Hall from the showings of that that were on Late Night Channel 4 here in Britain while I was at university, which is roundabout just before this came out.
So that's why I watched it at the time.
And I remember really liking it at the time.
And of course, being 23...
The two leads appealed to me very much.
That's more defensible at age 23 than it is for me now to be thinking that way.
They're both working actresses in their 40s now.
They did have staying power.
There's no question about that.
They're both really good.
It's just that, you know, one of the things that is slightly uncomfortable about this movie now is that an awful lot of emphasis from the poster and right the way through the film, particularly the very end, is placed upon their physical attractiveness.
And both these actresses at the time of filming were under 20 years old.
So, you know, it's slightly now, but there you go.
Yeah, I mean, I believe Kirsten Dunst was actually under the age of 18. I think she's like 17 or maybe 16 when they filmed this, depending on when the filming dates were.
Michelle Williams was 19 when it was released, so probably 18 when it was filmed.
So, you know, but, you know, that's, you know, a real easy way to make yourself feel creepy in your mid-40s, you know?
It is slightly, yeah.
The characters, they're playing like 15, I suppose maybe 16 by the end of the film.
And they're very convincing.
It does some weird things with time, which I think we might mention, but yeah, no, yeah, go on.
Yeah, so...
Yeah, they're supposed to be 15, and I think, narratively, this is all supposed to take place over the course of a few weeks, maybe a couple of months.
There's just not enough tissue here for us to think this is a multi-year saga in these people's lives or anything.
Anyway, they're 15 or 16, yeah.
As you say, the actual sort of Watergate saga took years to unfold.
Watergate was grumbling along as a political issue before the 72 election, and it didn't do him any damage.
I think he won one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history in 72. For a long time, everybody thought, well, it's just this thing that's going.
It's not going to cause any problems, really.
But it's, yeah, it's a few years.
It takes a few years to bring him down.
So if we are to, I mean, as you say, this movie telescopes time downwards.
But it also, I think, I mean, we should probably go back a bit in a minute and sort of explain the plot a little bit.
But it also functions, I think, as a kind of a growing up story.
You know, for the two lead characters, they start, and they're very, the two actors playing Betsy and Arlene, the central characters, who are 15 at the start of the film, they do, Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, they do a really good job.
They're incredibly convincing as young girls at the start.
They really, you know, you start questioning it.
Are they actually 15?
Because they're so, they're so good at putting across that 15-year-old girl thing.
They're not that much older than 15. I was like, oh, they surely...
It's like the 90210 trope is like, oh, we're college freshmen and everybody looks like they're 25. These two still have a little bit of that baby fat on them.
They're young.
Particularly Michelle Williams, although she's older than Kirsten Dunst.
She particularly looks like...
I think it's the way she carries herself and it's the way she does her makeup and the way it's like...
She looks 15. She looks very young.
That's it.
It's the performances, because there is a difference between 15 and 17 and 18. And of course, we're talking about girls who are quite worldly at this point.
They're both experienced film actresses at this point.
But at the start of the film, they do a really good job of making themselves convincingly seem like unworldly 15-year-old kids.
And by the end of the movie, the idea is very much that they've grown up, both physically and sexually, and also politically and in terms of their view of the world.
Yeah.
Well, although, you know, there's one line almost at the very end of the movie that is very much like, oh, they've become very good liberals.
And I think we might discuss that towards the end.
So yeah, I mean, I guess we should talk a little bit about what this movie is for those who haven't seen it.
It's a sort of...
I was sitting watching this yesterday and I thought like, you know, this is sort of like...
Bill and Ted, but for girls, right?
There was this string of movies in the late 80s to mid-2000s, which were kind of low-budget.
I don't have to think of those stoner movies without the weed, right?
Where it's not Cheech and Chong.
This has plenty of weed in it.
Well, it has plenty of weed in it, but interestingly, it's the older brother character.
Who, you know, is like the purveyor of the weed.
And he's like a, you know, but he's not in the gang.
He's kind of antagonistic towards his sister and her friend, you know?
But I'm thinking in terms of like, you know, Cheech and Chong, you know, they're just openly doing weed jokes.
And then like, you get to like Bill and Ted or like Wayne and Garth and, you know, and it's a lot more like, well, we're just kind of dim-witted, you know, like we act like stoners, but we're not, we can't be stoners in the movie because, you know, that's a little bit more risque.
And so there's this PG-13-ness of a lot of these movies that I grew up on.
I grew up on Bill and Ted.
I grew up on Wayne's World.
I grew up on Encino Man, all those Pauly Shore movies.
There's just a ton of that stuff, right?
And towards the late 90s, you started to see, well, the girls get to do it too.
And this is kind of in that vein.
Yeah, this is reminiscent of another roughly contemporaneous movie that I really like, Romeo and Michelle's High School Reunion.
I was thinking of that one as well, although I haven't seen that one in so long, so I didn't want to reference it.
But you're right, that's another one in this The Girls Get to Do It 2 genre, yeah.
Again, just to sort of nip back to what I started to say was that I watched this at the time when it came out, and I've just watched it for this podcast.
As we said before we started recording, I finished watching it about a couple of minutes before we started recording, and it's the first time I've seen it since.
So there is literally a 24-year gap between my two viewings.
A 24 and a half minute.
Yeah, no, no, it's fine.
Yeah, I didn't talk about my history with it.
I did not see it theatrically.
I don't remember ever sitting down to watch it.
I don't remember it being something like, I am actively going to seek out dick.
So much as, yeah, we're going to keep...
The movie does this all the time.
I think we get to...
I am really going to seek out dick today.
I really need some dick in my life.
Stay normal then.
I think the dick just came to me as it sometimes does.
Sometimes the dick just pops up.
Probably through Pay Cable, you know, or something like that.
I probably watched it on HBO Late Night or something like that.
Sometime in the, you know, between 2000 and 2005. It didn't make a huge impression on me.
I remember really liking Dan Hedaya.
I wasn't a fan of the silliness at the time.
I was thinking it was going to be a little bit meatier.
And the fact that it's like...
I don't know.
In the 90s, when this movie was made...
It's definitely hearkening back to the 70s.
There's a lot of the aesthetics of the 70s are a big part of it.
And that's another thing that's going on in film at this time, particularly mainstream pop culture film.
The Brady Bunch remakes were in the cycle, and there was a lot of nostalgia for the 70s going on.
Well, now, this style of movie, the SNL... Kids in the Hall ensemble movie.
This thing now, it harkens back to that for me.
I have nostalgia for these kind of flabby comedies now, having rewatched this and going like, oh, they really don't make these anymore.
Will Ferrell, I think he was still on SNL at this time.
And a lot of these actors, and a guest stars in this, and she was, I believe, on SNL at the time this movie was made.
And so the idea that these guys are going to become, that Will Ferrell is going to be a huge movie star in five years, this is way earlier than that for him.
And so there is this kind of like, we're team players.
We're just coming up, we're just doing the bit for the movie today.
And there is something really delightful about that to me.
I have a strong nostalgia, even when most of those movies were actually quite bad.
But it was an era in film comedy that I look back on with some fondness.
So, it is basically a retelling of the last year or so, last couple of years of the Nixon administration, the Watergate crisis, and through to the resignation, but told, obviously, it's an outright comedy, and it's deeply counterfactual.
I mean, first thing to say is that it's from a point in time before we knew who Deep Throat was.
Deep Throat is the name that was given to the source of Who was feeding information to Bob Woodward.
Bob Woodward, who's in the news at the moment, because he's got another one of his new Trump cash-in books out, in which he reveals information about the fact that Donald Trump has been in more or less constant contact after the presidency with Vladimir Putin.
He's just been keeping that to himself in order to sell books.
Thanks for that, Bob.
And then one of the things I love about this movie is the way it punctures the myth of Woodward and Bernstein.
Because I think there are a few...
I mean, yes, okay, there's some decent reporting that they did back at the time.
Nobody can take that away from them.
But the myth that has grown up around Woodward and Bernstein and the glamour and the idea of, you know, every American hack journalist wants to be Woodward and Bernstein and wants to sort of perform...
being Woodward and or Bernstein.
And it's pretty pernicious in my opinion.
So I love the way that the movie, because Woodward is played by Will Ferrell and Bernstein is played by Bruce McCullough.
And they are presented as outright just comedy fools in this film, which is great.
I just love that.
And the movie, as I say, is from a period before we knew who Deep Throat was.
And I'm so uninterested in that that I can't even think of the name.
I looked it up.
His name was Mark Felt.
His name was Mark Felt.
He was an FBI agent at the time.
And the movie posits, basically, that Deep Throat was a pair of teenage girls who sort of accidentally stumbled into having...
a Watergate cover-up.
And the idea is that this has never been revealed by anybody subsequently because everybody just finds it too embarrassing to admit that they got the story basically handed to them by these two teenage girls.
Which I think is, I think that's an interesting commentary, isn't it?
The idea that just anything that comes from a girl that age is just kind of inherently embarrassing, that men can't admit that they got any kind of information from a young woman, basically.
I love that they're, like, sworn to secrecy, because we haven't talked about the plot, but, I mean, basically, these two, you know, one of the young girls, Arlene, played by Michelle Williams, lives in the Watergate Hotel with her mother, or the Watergate building, so she's, I guess they're, like, there's a hotel in their apartment.
People don't realize the Watergate complex is huge, and it's got hotels in it, it's got apartments, it's residential, office buildings, yeah.
Yeah.
So, and, like, you're right that it's, you know, it takes, it doesn't play loosely with the facts.
It does, like, the Forrest Gump approach to the facts.
It's that, like, oh, the tape that they discovered on the inside that was keeping the door open at the Watergate, well, that was actually done by Arlene so she could escape and then get back into her house.
Her home after sneaking out to send in this fan letter to join this contest, the Loving Bobby Sherman contest or something.
And it does a lot with those kind of facts.
It does a lot with the peace accords between Brezhnev and the Brezhnev peace accords were, really, they just gave him some really good pot brownies.
And he just chilled the fuck out.
That's the...
Um, there's a lot of that.
I mean, it's very, it's very, very self-aware of that kind of stuff, you know?
And I mean, it really does.
I think, I mean, this movie did not do well theatrically.
I think partly because like the target audience for the, for the advertising was, you know, like young girls who want to, you know, see, you know, Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst.
And a 15-year-old girl in 1999 probably has no idea who Lynette Brezhnev is.
It's just not a thing.
Do not have the sophisticated understanding of the details of the Watergate break-in and why Deep Throat is funny.
It's a very...
A lot of the jokes do rely on contextual knowledge.
You need to know a lot about Watergate in order to get a lot of the jokes, like as you say, the tape left on the door and stuff like that.
Yeah, so it is difficult to know exactly who this was aimed at.
I mean, it is basically a teen comedy, but it's also about Watergate.
Right.
I didn't manage to rewatch the trailer, although I meant to.
My memory was that a huge part of the marketing of this movie and the posters was all about Arlene falls in love with Nixon.
That's a huge, huge part of the movie.
And in my memory...
That was a big part of the movie.
I remembered it being a good 30-minute subplot, but really, it's like 8 to 10 minutes.
I didn't go back and time it, but it's a very brief blip, and you spend a little time with that, and a lot more time, a lot more time on funny jokes you can tell about Watergate.
So again, I feel like it started being one thing on the script.
I mean, I would love to read the different scripts.
I would love to see what process this took.
Because the co-writer and director had previously made The Craft, which was kind of this big indie hit a few years earlier.
And then it seems like maybe this is meant to be another attempt at that, to have teenage girls in this weird world again.
But it turns out that Watergate is not nearly as sexy and interesting as witchcraft.
So, you know...
I think it's a funny flex because Arlene is established at the start of the movie as being like the crush-prone one.
Right.
And the idea that she kind of falls...
Well, she does.
She develops a great big crush on Richard Nixon, which is an interesting idea because, I mean, one of the things that does get lost in movies like movies we've talked about in the past, Oliver Stone's Nixon and the Frost Nixon that we talked about last time, one of the things that gets lost is Is the fact that Nixon, you know, as inexplicable as it might seem, he was able to be charming.
I mean, as I said, in 72, he won a massive election victory.
He was incredibly popular for all that, you know, our image of the era is of young people protesting and calling him a Nazi and stuff like that.
Huge numbers of Americans thought he was great.
They voted for him twice.
And he could be charming.
He could be winning.
And he's depicted as being quite nice to the two main characters when they sort of bumble into the White House and end up accidentally in the middle of...
Cabinet meetings and things like this.
Everybody else around him is kind of, what is this?
Who are these people?
What are they doing here?
Let's get them out.
And he is portrayed as the one who's being kind of nice to them, kind of kind to them.
And that was, you know, he could do that.
And so I think the interesting...
I'm going to give him the old Nixon charm.
It's quite an interesting flex in the movie to show his charming side and to show Arlene kind of falling for it.
And then falling out of love with him when she learns...
Specifically when they're through a complicated sort of series of plot shenanigans.
They're listening to White House tapes, Oval Office tapes.
Because they're just in and out of the White House very, very easily, these girls.
Because they get themselves appointed like...
The White House Dog Walker.
Official White House Dog Walkers, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
And on one occasion, they left alone in Rose, whatever her name was, his office, just outside the Oval Office, ostensibly because they're going to take checkers for a walk.
Was it still checkers at this point?
I thought it was a different dog.
At least in the film, it's checkers all the way through.
I don't know how that matches reality, but in the movie, it's always checkers.
Checkers was called checkers because he was black and white like a checkers board.
The dog in this is pure brown, so it doesn't work at all, but it doesn't matter.
The famous dog that Nixon had is checkers, so it's checkers.
If that's going to be your point of fact, sir, this film cannot be...
If that's where you're going to stand in this, that must be period accurate.
I don't know what to tell you.
The dog had the wrong name.
That's my main factual issue with this movie.
But yeah, they're ostensibly there to walk the dog and they're left alone in the office and they find the famous tape recorder, you know, and they start playing the tapes.
And in the middle of this funny movie, there's a bit of sort of authentic Nixon where he's shouting about Jews and things like this and kicking the dog on the tape and stuff.
And what the movie is saying is, yes, this man could be plausible.
Yes, this man could be charming.
People did fall for it.
People did fall in love with him.
And then, like, the country learned the truth.
You know, the tapes showed the country the truth.
And she falls out of love with him.
The country fell out of love with him.
I suppose that's the deep and complex metaphor that the film is going for.
I, uh...
I laughed at quite a bit of this movie.
I did laugh out loud several times in this movie.
I did not expect to actually get an actual guffaw out of me.
The thing I laughed at the hardest was the bit where after they've listened to the tapes and they go in, they're going to confront Nixon.
And, you know, it's like, how could you do this?
How could you say those things?
We listened to some of those tapes, and he's like, well, girls, the Watergate break-in is not my doing.
And he goes on his spiel about this, and they go, no, we don't care about that.
You said you don't like checkers, and you kicked him, and that's why we don't like you anymore.
Yeah.
And it's so no perfect for the characters.
Everything in this works perfectly.
Because isn't that the whole thing?
I mean, I guess we're going to have to make the comparison to Trump.
The entire mainstream media, the thing that's bad about Trump is that he's rude.
Is that he's unkind.
And not all the fascist shit he gets up to.
It's just like...
It's such an encapsulation for me of just how politics really works.
If only he hadn't said naughty things about the dog, if only he had actually legitimately liked the dog, then everything would have been A-OK for these girls.
I don't know.
It's such a perfect moment for me.
It is funny.
The bit...
I laughed out loud several times with this movie as well, which is unusual for me.
And one of the bits that really, really tickled me...
I mean, I think my favourite performance in this is probably Dave Foley as Bob Holderman, because he plays him as such an unpleasant, twitchy weirdo.
And it's so...
It's so...
It's not an imitation, but it's so authentic as a representation of that horrible, horrible guy.
And there's a bit where, I think it's in the first scene where they actually sort of bumble their way into to see Nixon.
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
Go ahead, go ahead.
Yeah.
They start talking about the war, because these 15-year-old naive girls, but they've kind of half imbibed some of the anti-war talk that they've heard.
And there they are, faced with Nixon, and they're actually hearing conversations about the war.
Henry Kissinger, played by Saul Rubinick, bumbles in and starts talking about the Salt Peace Treaty or whatever.
And one of them, I think it's Arlene, starts saying...
Isn't war bad, though?
Isn't war bad for the environment?
And the guys around, because Nixon is, as I say, Nixon, played by Dan Hedaya, is portrayed as being able to seem charming and kind.
He's nice to them in that scene.
And he's surrounded by, of course, his people, his flax and sycophants and so on and so forth, including Haldeman.
And they're all reacting far more negatively to this, what they perceive as like peacenetic hippie talk than he is.
He's kind of just, well, girls.
But there's this bit that makes me laugh out loud is where, as he's being pushed out of the room, Haldeman, played by Dave Foley, sort of leans around and aggressively points at them and says, if you don't like Watergate, then take it up with Johnson.
It's so funny.
He's so, he can't turn it off, you know, just one slight word of, isn't more bad from a teenage girl, he goes straight into immediate sort of political flack mode.
Yeah, no, it's a delightful, it's a delightful moment, you know.
What did you think of Hedea?
I thought he was really good.
He's probably the most...
Of the Nixon, of the sort of performed fake Nixons that I've seen, Nixon representations that I've seen on film, he's probably the best representation.
Because as I say, he's less...
As I've said before, I love Oliver Stone's Nixon, I love Hopkins' performance in that, but it's big and huge and weird and over-the-top, and it's an impression.
He creates his own character, sort of loosely based on Nixon, as indeed does the film.
And Langella's in Frost-Nixon is more restrained, but it's still quite a big, grotesque performance.
Hedaya, firstly, it's overtly common.
A lot of the time.
Whereas those other two performances are trying to be serious.
So I think the elements of impersonation seem less congruous because it's in a funny movie where people are giving slightly over the top in congruous comedic performances.
And I think he's also able...
He brings out something of Nixon's sort of slimy bully qualities, I think, in a way.
And also, as I say, that ability to seem charming that other performances haven't done.
I'd completely forgotten that he'd played Nixon in this, and I was talking online about it because I'd seen him in something else.
I was talking online a few years ago, and I said, Dan Hedaya should really have played Nixon.
And somebody reminded me of this movie.
Yeah, he's such obvious, perfect casting for Nixon, and it really works.
Yeah, no.
He also was in Oliver Stone's Nixon.
I don't know if you remember that.
I think he's one of the Cubans who was trying to convince Nixon to run in 64. Yeah, he's one of the scary, weird conspirators who are in Texas, isn't he?
Yep, yep.
That's exactly the scene, yeah.
I really like him here.
I mean, he is playing the funny version of Dixon, but I think you're right.
He does get at that, that some of the elements of Dixon, because he's allowed to, because the script lets him get into these elements that other scripts don't allow, the more charming side, the more You know, human side to Nixon.
I also think he just looks a lot like Nixon, like where, you know, he doesn't look exactly like Nixon, but he has that kind of Nixon physique.
And I think he disappears into the role.
He does the thing that I want every great Nixon on film to do, is to disappear into the role.
I want to forget I'm watching Dan Hedaya.
And this definitely makes me think I'm watching Nixon at times.
So he succeeds on that level for me.
And I think, you know, I do love Dave Foley.
I've loved Dave Foley in a lot of things, but I think Hedaya is my favorite performance here.
Yeah, I love, as I say, I think Dave Foley's Haldeman is probably my favorite performance, apart from the two central performances, which are, they're both really good.
They're both tremendously good.
Absolutely.
But you have a real, it's a great ensemble cast.
You have the great Terry Garr popping up, only in a couple of scenes, but she's really good in it.
And you have Sol Rubinek, as I say, doing a really good Kissinger, wonderfully sort of portraying him as creepy around the girls, which rings very true indeed.
Yep.
And you've got an embryo Ryan Reynolds, I think, pops up.
Oh my god, yeah.
I did not remember that, and then suddenly he pops up, and I'm like, oh my god, this must have been very early in his career.
He was young here, you know?
Yeah, but...
Yeah, as the teenage boy.
I don't know who the guy playing Liddy is, but this is the best screen Liddy, because it really captures what a fucking fruitcake Gordon Liddy is.
Yeah.
That is Harry Shearer.
Harry Shearer.
Yeah.
And he is best known for- He's really good.
Yeah, he's very good.
He is also in, he does a lot of the voices for The Simpsons.
He does Mr. Burns, he does Smithers, he does Flanders.
So that's kind of been most of his career is that.
But he's done a ton of, like he did a bunch of stand-up, but he did, I mean, he's been in a ton of stuff.
I think he, yeah, he was in, he co-wrote Spinal Tap, so he was in that.
Oh, right.
Yeah, no, he's got, you know.
A ton of.
Yeah, he was on Saturday Night Live for a while, so he was one of those guys.
But he is under quite a bit of makeup here.
It was really a moment where I'm like, I know I know that guy.
I cannot place him until I looked up in the cast list and I was like, oh, duh, it's that guy.
But yeah, no, he's very, very good, obviously.
And that's a really good litty.
It made me want to go back and re-listen to the two-part Behind the Bastards on G. Gordon Litty, which is a great listen if you haven't heard it.
It's a really fun listen.
Yeah, that is a good series, the Behind the Bastard series.
It really does put across just what a nutcase Liddy was.
A very sinister nutcase, but a nutcase nonetheless.
And I think this movie puts that across, just the sheer ridiculousness of Gordon Liddy in a way that other versions I've seen haven't managed to do, which I appreciate.
I like the irreverence of this.
I like the way it punctures, you know, because these are...
Liddy was, I don't know if he's still alive, but he was an incredibly pompous, self-important, delusional guy with, as I say, delusions of grandeur.
It's part of why this all went the way it did.
You know, Gemstone, Operation Gemstone and all that shit.
And yeah, I love that he's just portrayed as just this twitchy nutcase.
And again, as with Haldeman, you know, just this horrible, twitchy, bug-eyed, nasty little guy and stuff like that.
It's great.
Liddy did die in 2021. I just looked it up.
I thought he had, but he did die in 2021. I'm glad he's dead.
Yes.
I think the interesting thing, I mean, I agree with everything you say there about the performances.
I think the performances are allowed to be more grounded and more down-to-earth because It's a broad comedy, and so it doesn't have to swing.
Again, as much as we love some of these other movies, this isn't an opera.
This isn't swinging for the fences.
This is playing people as humans because it's a low-budget comedy with a couple of teenage girls as its leads.
That's what this movie is.
They're allowed to play it smaller.
Nobody's winning an Oscar for this.
It can be more interesting on that level.
I think you're absolutely right.
I noticed that.
You know, that the production value affects the way that the performances are allowed to inhabit the space.
Man, I wish we could get our friend Elliot on here to kind of talk about the acting here and about how, like, the sets and the production might affect, you know, how you approach a role.
I mean, I think, you know, neither of us are actors.
I am far, far, far from an actor, as everyone who's listened to this podcast knows, but...
I'm a frustrated actor, so...
Right, but...
No, I think there's something really interesting there.
Because it's a smaller production, it's allowed to be a little bit more interesting and intimate.
And because it's a comedy, they're allowed to...
They're reaching for the funny, both on the script and in the performance.
They're reaching for the funny.
And reaching for the funny means finding the absurdities.
It means finding the little things.
It means finding the little personality ticks, as opposed to going for the dramatic opera.
Yeah, and there's ways in which it can, there's some strangely profound little moments in there.
Like, I mean, the thing with Nixon making the double V sign thing has always been weird, you know, and it's always been a weird sort of inversion of the two-fingered peace sign.
And this movie just goes straight for that.
It actually shows him getting, I mean, it's counterfactual because he was doing it long before this, but it shows him Getting the idea of the two-handed, two-fingered V-sign salute thing that he did, you know, where he sticks his arms up in the air and makes two Churchillian V-signs.
It shows him getting that from the girls, because one of them does the peace sign.
So it just goes straight for that weird juxtaposition and highlights it.
And he even does the bit of like, what is that?
What is that symbol you're making?
Oh, it means peace.
And then, you know, he's standing up to the Air Force One to helicopter and he like does the double and does the double thing.
And it's like, it's, you know, like the classic move again.
Again, it's the very Forrest Gump moment in this, you know, where, you know, it's a, you know, they just happen to be standing around there and create all these iconic meeks and things, you know?
Some of it's very clever.
The counterfactual way the Deep Throat nickname is arrived at, because as they're talking to Woodward and Bernstein on the phone, the girls are also in the midst of a family argument where Betsy's older brother has just been found by their dad at a porno cinema.
And you have a scene before there where the girls are talking about it.
I don't understand what The movie's name means, and you get Betsy whispers in Arlene's ears and explains it to her, and you get this great bit where they both sort of...
Arlene has to think about it for a hilariously long amount of time, and then Michelle Williams just immediately screams, and they both scream out of the window.
I mean, these are...
You don't hear it until the phrase comes up as they're speaking down the phone to Woodburn and Bernstein.
And that's how the source ends up being called Deep Throat.
It's clever.
It's very clever stuff.
I always love in movies like this when they do 20% more effort than they had to do.
And that's the kind of thing that's definitely like...
It could have been...
It's actually like I get a little complicated...
Rube Goldberg machine as to how, you know, because first you have to have the older brother who's a little bit of a narrow-to-well who's, like, smoking all the weed, and who's, you know, he would believably be caught at a porno theater watching Deep Throat, you know?
And then you have to set that up, and then you have to set up the, you know, that the parents are kind of in...
I mean, there's just a lot of moving parts to kind of make that moment work, but that's why it works.
It's because it's actually been, like, set up.
It's not, like, one of those things where...
You know, they just happen to be watching a news reporter to open up a newspaper and go deep throat, you know, which would be sort of the easy way to write this.
So, I mean, there's more going on here than meets the eye.
There's a screwball element to it, I think, that is definitely underplayed, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, when we talked about Dave, how very Capra-esque it is.
And this is similar, not quite in the sense of being Capra-esque, because it's less idealistic, although there is an element of political idealism about it.
As you say, the girls sort of mature to become good idealistic liberals towards the end.
You get the...
I mean, it's obviously a very...
It's meant to be an ironic laugh line where they're watching Nixon resign on the TV and Betsy says to Arlene, now they'll never lie to us again.
You know, in 1999, that would have gotten laughs in the cinema.
Said in the midst of the Lewinsky trial.
Like, yeah, in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal.
Yes, exactly.
Absolutely.
But...
It is less idealistic than Dave.
You know, Dave does have that very sort of idealistic, starry-eyed, Capra-esque thing about it.
But it does hark back to...
I mean, you used the word screwball.
That's the perfect word.
It harks back to comedies like His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, stuff like that.
I think...
Yeah.
Which is lovely.
I love that stuff.
And it's...
Yeah, it's...
You know, I keep saying it, but they don't make stuff like this anymore.
Yeah, no.
I mean, they barely made it then.
I mean, this feels very...
I'm surprised that it hasn't had more of a longevity in terms of...
I'm surprised there's not a cult classic or a fandom around this, and I don't think people...
Well, it's about girls!
It's about girls, isn't it?
That's the problem.
Well, but the craft has an ongoing genre.
Well, that's true, yeah.
I can imagine one of those 20-year-olds later sequels called Trump, with these same two characters coming back, like, bring back Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams to have a goofball adventure in the Trump White House, you know?
Yeah.
One of the things that makes it, because it's inherently an incredibly implausible storyline, and they get away with it by leaning into that, by making the implausibility of these girls sort of stumbling into this White House meeting and then being invited back, and they keep on bumping into aspects.
The idea is that John Dean flips and goes and testifies to Congress because at one point Because Nixon shouts at them, and as they're leaving, John Dean says, oh, I'm sorry, he's been under a lot of pressure, and they say to him, why are you letting him get away with it?
If you stick with him, you're just as bad as he is.
And that's why John Dean ends up testifying to Congress.
The inherent implausibility of this is they lean into it.
They make it part of the joke.
But they also justify it dramatically.
And one of the really clever things they do is to make the edibles part of the plot.
Because it could have been just a throwaway joke.
Like, they take the president some cookies and unknowingly they've used some of Betsy's brother's stash and it's ended up in the cookies.
So the president gets high.
You know, it could have just been...
And they do that joke.
Nixon's scoffing the cookies at the Resolute desk and he starts giggling and stuff like that.
They do it.
But they also make it part of the plot.
They make it part of why they're able to get in to the White House over and over again.
Because every time they go there with cookies, the guards on the gate take some and other people in the White House take some.
So they let them in because it means they get the cookies.
And then another really clever thing that I love is that later on, when you start getting the conspiracy movie stuff, and the house is burgled by spooks, who hilariously are going around in a van that has Washington, D.C. plumbers on the side, the house is burgled by spooks, and nothing is stolen apart from the big recipe for the cookies that's on the wall.
So they've obviously had instructions from the president, get me that recipe!
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, no, that's great.
No, I love the sort of implied, the subtle joke that all these people are eating pot brownies because they have no idea what marijuana smells or tastes like, you know?
Yeah.
It's like, oh, these are really good, oh, you know?
It's like, you know, a bunch of squares in the Nixon White House just have no fucking clue, you know?
I love that implied joke, that even the guards are in on it.
They're like, oh yeah, give me some of those cookies.
It's like, oh yeah, these are the Hello Dollies.
Hello Dollies, my god.
That is the most 70s thing, you know?
We have the homemade cookie recipe, they're called Hello Dollies.
It's like, you know?
It's so 70s.
It's so 70s.
It's kind of a hackney joke.
You know, there'd be no wars if everybody was on a part all the time.
Right, yeah.
But the movie leans into that because, as you say, it has the scene where they stumble into the White House in the middle of the Brezhnev visit and they hand out the cookies and Brezhnev's being difficult and then a few cookies later everybody's singing together and Nixon says to them, girls, I think you just saved the world from nuclear catastrophe.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's delightful.
It's delightful.
We, I don't know, I've been trying to approach all these with like, what does this say about the American presidency?
And, I mean, to answer my, I mean, to sort of, I mean, A, I don't think this is saying much about the American presidency.
I don't think it's, I don't think it's It's, at least not explicitly, it's not making a point.
It's sort of like doing the thing of like, it's a teenage girl comedy.
It's the light stoner movie, you know, set around the Dixon White House.
It's just sort of that high concept thing.
But I think implied is this sort of like thing of like, you know, there is this sort of like loss of innocence, you know, thing that's sort of like, that's very kind of, you know, I mean, that's exactly, I mean, Arlene goes on this journey of like, first falling in love with Dixon and then like realizing what a bastard he is.
There was this sense that Watergate is this, again, certainly in the liberal imagination, was this betrayal of the American people's ideals and all of that sort of thing.
It's definitely implicit in the text that there is this loss of innocence, at least In the eyes of people who could see Nixon clearly, which, you know, for all of their ignorant teenage girls, you know, not that all teenage girls are ignorant, but, you know, that's what the characters are.
And the fact that they are ignorant of these more worldly things, that to see Nixon clearly, and they do much more so than, say, Betsy's parents, who seem to have, you know, more of a reverence for, like, the American ideals and, you know, all that sort of thing, and then see Nixon as a, you know, well, this is the president.
And to see him more clearly is to see the flaws in the system more.
And I think there's definitely something going on with that, that they are disenchanted with Nixon because they've seen it up close.
And then, of course, one of the last lines in the movie is like, none of them will ever lie to us again.
It's like, you know, yeah, you missed the point there.
But again, the movie is pointing that out.
The movie is pointing out that this is a silly lesson to take from this.
So, I mean, there is a sophistication here.
There is something going on, you know, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, one of the last scenes in the movie is the Nixon resignation, and they're watching it on the TV. And, you know, the emphasis on TV, that's what a television phenomenon.
It was like a soap opera.
And you get the scene at the end where Betsy's parents, who have been like this chorus all the way through, just lightly responding to news events...
I mean, there's a very good early bit where, and this is very true to the history, I think, where Betsy's mother, and this is long before the big revelations, she says, you know, I'm just sick of this Watergate thing.
I just wish they'd stopped going on about it.
These guys, Woodward and Bernstein, and the TV news, you know, it's...
You know, it's just boring.
It's been going on too long.
And by the end of the movie, you have the scene where she says, I can't believe it went up that high.
And Betsy, of course, now is wiser.
It is a maturation story.
It is a loss of innocence story and a maturation story, you know, growing up tale.
And she says in response to that, almost to herself, really, more than to her parents, you have no idea.
And...
Yeah, I mean, that's it, isn't it?
The people sitting at home watching TV, they don't really have any idea.
And Betsy and Arlene have kind of been emblematic of that, and yet they have had a glimpse of how it, quote-unquote, really works.
And I think...
This was made and released when the X-Files was still a big thing.
And the X-Files, for all that I have very fond memories of it, it has an occult view of government and an occult view of conspiracy, and it makes government conspiracies into this huge, vast, omnipresent, almost existential, tragic, gigantic dimension of life and stuff like that.
And this movie has a much more clear, I think, and realistic depiction of them, which is that they're just very silly, very selfish, very unpleasant people who have power, and they do stupid and shambolic and selfish and rotten things when nobody's watching and nobody's listening.
And that is how it works when these people do stuff like that.
That's what's going on.
And yeah, it's a story about people who aren't really paying attention, who sort of stumble into a situation where they get a glimpse of what power actually is, and how just bloody rotten and shabby it is, I think.
Yeah, no, no, I absolutely agree.
I mean, I was thinking about this earlier when we were talking, but I guess I'll bring it up here.
I mean, Ed Bermilla, a friend of the pod, and I don't have the text in front of me here, so forgive me, forgive me, Ed, if you're listening, but I recently wrote on his Patreon in a behind-the-paywall kind of thing, and he was writing about how people see the election, how people see politics, how most people see politics.
And you ask somebody, like, you know, you and I are, like, About as deeply invested in, like, American politics as, like, you know, more deeply invested than 99.9% of people.
Like, even on a casual, I didn't follow the news today day.
I know more about the state of American politics than, like, any of a thousand people I would meet on a given week, you know?
And that's not me being, I mean, that's just, I follow politics.
I know more about this.
You know, it's just the truth.
Sure, yeah.
But you talk to, you know, like you talk to normal, like, you know, journalists will go out and ask questions of like, well, how do you feel about such and such?
And people get this, like, they feel like they want to have a response.
They want to have an intelligent response.
So they say things like, well, I really like Trump, but I also really like AOC because they just, they tell it like it is.
And it's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
You know, like these people.
The opposite of each other, you know, what's going on here?
And that's, you know, you ask them about like tax policy, you ask them about, you know, and they want, they don't want to sound like, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.
You know, you asked me, like, I know there are like sports fans that I work with, you know, there are people who follow football and people who follow baseball and, you know, I am not, like, socially required to have an opinion about, like, whatever team, you know, about the Detroit Tigers this year.
I am not, like, I do not look like an idiot if I don't have an opinion.
But if you ask to me, like, if I had to know, like, a handful of people on the Tigers lineup this year, and I had to know, it was like, well, I guess he's going to swing and a miss this year.
You know what I mean?
Like, that would be the answer.
You know, it would be that level.
It's that level of thought given to politics.
And those are the people who are kind of in the middle.
Those are the people that these campaigns are reaching out to.
In these final days, that's kind of what's going on.
And I think that this movie, in some sense, reflects that sort of, not ambivalence and not even ignorance, but just this sort of, this isn't really my place to have knowledge about this, and the way that people just kind of respond to whatever the last thing they saw in the news is.
In that sense, as you say, I think it is more sophisticated about the way that people honestly engage with politics than a lot of the other movies we've talked about in this series, and just in general.
There's a really good bit at the end when they're...
I mean, the ending is glorious.
Like, as I say, I just finished watching it a couple of minutes before we started recording, and I was cheering for the ending.
It's just beautiful.
And there's a really great bit because they're making their...
You, the good communists, really love to see American flags desecrated.
Like, that's...
That's what I'm talking about, because they're cutting up American flags in order to make their Stars and Stripes outfits that they're going to wear as they get onto the roof.
Because they're in Washington, obviously.
The plot wouldn't work if they're not living in Washington, D.C. Obviously, as you realize, as it goes on, what they're doing is they're going to go up onto the roof of the building.
And they're going to put on special Stars and Stripes costumes and they're going to unfurl a big banner that's going to be visible from the air as Nixon, because they do the whole thing where he gets on the plane and he does the hand gesture and he flies off, you know, having resigned, all that whole thing.
And he's leaving the White House, having resigned, and he's flying over Washington, D.C. And very conveniently, Betsy's house is on the flight path.
So the plan is they're going to go up onto the roof, and they're going to, in these special uniforms, they're going to unfil this big banner that says, You Suck, Dick.
It's another one of the movies.
Many, many plays on the name Dick.
Because if you hadn't realized, listeners...
Dick, which is a diminutive of the name Richard, is also another word for penis.
And that's what they're playing on in this.
So they're going to fill this big banner that says, you suck dick.
And it says at the bottom, you know, yours truly deep throat.
So it's like the very end is this fuck you where they reveal that it was them that did him in.
Which is great.
I love that.
It is great.
I mean, it's weird.
This movie affected me more with that scene.
I do love Oliver Stone's Nixon, but it's too sympathetic to the guy all the way through, and it's particularly too sympathetic towards him at the end.
Right.
It's really strange.
And in this movie, there's no sympathy for Nixon at all.
And it affected me more.
I really, I was watching it.
I was watching Dan Hedaya's face sort of in the window of the helicopter, you know, his pissed off, brooding face.
And I was sitting there and I was thinking, yeah, yeah, I hope it fucking burned you.
I hope as you flew away in that fucking hell, I really hope it burned.
I really do.
I was into it.
I was really into it, watching him leave, you know.
I was enjoying the idea of that character getting it, having to resign and fly away in disgrace.
And then you get the wonderful scene where they unfold the banner and he realizes who did him in.
And it's these two girls and it's great.
It's just glorious.
But the moment that I really liked is that as they're making their costumes, Betsy is cutting.
They're cutting the flag to make their costumes.
And Betsy says, hang on a minute, isn't it illegal to cut up the flag?
And Arlene thinks for a moment and then she says, not if you sew it back together again.
And I thought that was great, because it's the idea of, like, you just make up the rules as you go along.
Like, you know, you want to cut up the flag, so you find a reason why it's okay.
And that's what people do with politics.
Yeah.
There's a lot of faux, urban legends about the American flag and U.S. consciousness as well.
It's like, why are you allowed to do this?
Because, again, reverence for the flag is just big into our culture and certainly was in the early 70s.
There is something powerful to the image of they're cutting it up to make these costumes that they're going to use to give Nixon the bird, literally.
Yeah.
Even if they do sew them back together later.
And of course, that is exactly that imagery.
Those costumes are on the DVD cover and probably in the theatrical poster.
Yeah, it's in the theatrical release poster that the Stars and Stripes outfits.
So this was a marketing thing as much as it was a rhetorical thing.
There's no story reason why they have to be in those costumes except like It is a cool little moment, and it does make for a good image.
But the fact that they, again, as we kind of mentioned before, these are both technically, and they're not 20 yet.
These are probably technically of age, of consenting adult status at this point.
But they are very young women.
And the film definitely plays on their sex appeal.
Like, you know, it is not as overt as it might be otherwise.
If they had been like 23, I'm certain this would have been much more, you know, much more aggressive about this.
But here they are ostensibly, you know, high school-aged girls.
Yeah, I don't think you could get away with it now.
Probably just, you know, Rightly so.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I don't like this quite as much as you do.
I think it drags a bit at times, and I wish it was a little bit tighter and a little bit more thoughtful about some of the things it does.
But I have fond memories of this era of comedy, and I will definitely revisit this in the future.
So, yeah, I do enjoy this.
Oh, and Ted McGinley has a bit right as one of the plumbers who seduces Arlene's mom.
Which is just delightful.
Oh yeah.
That's probably a bit you could cut, actually, if you wanted to tighten it up a bit.
It's a fairly brisk 90 minutes, but yeah, if you wanted to tighten it up, you could probably cut that subplot and some of the stuff with Ryan Reynolds.
Yeah, I think you could cut basically the entire Ryan Reynolds character who's really just there to be You know, he's there to make out with Kirsten Dunst.
I mean, there's this weird, like, thing where, like, she goes to the bathroom and she, like, does up her hair, like, she wants to make out with this kid.
And then she comes back and he's just, like, doing a beer bong, you know?
Like, oh man, he's supposed to be, like, a teenage.
I think he's supposed to be the same age as the girls are at this point, or else that gets real creepy.
So he's just doing a beer bong in his friend's room.
And then they sit on the edge of the bed and they start to make out.
It's this very weird teenage makeout awkwardness.
It comes from out of another movie.
It feels like it was written.
They just really liked Ryan Reynolds and wanted to write him into the movie or something.
It is very bizarre how long that takes.
How small of a point it is and how it's just, it's not, it's not even particularly funny.
You know, I mean, it's funny, but it's not like, you know, American Pie comes out the same year and that is like much more.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
The exact same year.
I think this was released.
Sorry.
Oh yeah.
I got it here.
This was released in August of 99 and I can check American Pie.
I think American Pie was like a month before or something.
That's surprising.
I thought American Pie was kind of later than this.
No, American Pie.
Not that I've ever seen American Pie, but I know what it's about.
I was 19 in 1989, and so this was like...
1989 is a classically brilliant year for movies.
If you were a budding movie geek in 1989, your plate was overflowing with riches the entire year.
This is the year of being John Malkovich.
This is the year of American Beauty.
This is the year of Magnolia.
This is the year of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
This is the year of...
I mean, I'm forgetting so many.
I'm forgetting dozens.
But there are so many soon-to-be kind of instantly held as classics movies that were released this year.
And that most of them have held up with time.
And I think that one of the things with Dick is that it doesn't hold up to that standard.
It never found an audience at the time, you know?
And, you know, it does kind of come across as a little bit more of a, you know, a little, even like a throwback at this point.
Even in 99, I think that, you know, I mean, after American Pie, this must have looked like really, really, you know, resolved, like a demure almost compared to, you know, kind of the antics that you get about in American Pie.
And they're obviously going for at least some of the same audience.
So yeah, I think that's an element here to why it didn't make a bigger splash.
Because I think if it had come out before American Pie, I think maybe this would have been seen as more of a popular comedy.
Yeah, you're probably right.
And there is also the sort of built-in conceptual problem we mentioned earlier of who precisely this is aimed at.
Is it aimed at older people who understand about Watergate, in which case there's probably a bit too much Teenage Girl in it?
Or is it aimed at teenagers, in which case there's probably a bit too much Watergate in it?
It's an odd one.
But I really like it.
I think it's a lot of fun.
I think it's quite clever.
And I think the ending is delightful.
Absolutely delightful.
Just the idea of Nixon being brought down by teenage girls who are in the process of becoming politicized.
And they just have this clarity about it.
They think, well, you know, we thought he was nice.
And then we learned that he wasn't.
And he's mean to his dog, and he says nasty things about Jews.
And yes, actually, now we come to think about it, he is involved in this cover-up.
So yeah, let's bring him down.
And they do it.
And then they do a great big thumbs, you know, middle finger up at him at the end.
It's just something so pure about it.
And it's Nixon as well.
So yeah, I really like it.
It speaks to the rebellious teenage girl in all of us, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think, I don't know that I have anything else to say about it, really.
No, this is, I mean, you know, we've spoken, the movie is 90 minutes long.
It is, and I will say, again, I do enjoy the movie.
It felt, it felt longer than 90 minutes at times.
I think because of some of that, like, kind of lacedaical pacing, you know?
But it is only 90 minutes long, and we've spent about 70 minutes talking about it, so we have gone nearly the entire runtime of the film chatting about it, although it'll be cut down a bit.
But yeah, I am completely done talking about Dick, at least the film.
I mean, Dick is a concept, so that's everlasting.
We can always talk about that, but...
There's plenty more to say about Dick as an existential concept.
Absolutely.
Dick the film, I feel like we're done.
I feel like I've had enough Dick for tonight.
I've filled up all my holes with Dick.
The movie makes this joke.
If you haven't seen the movie, if you've gotten this far, the movie does this like 10 times, by the way.
It's pretty delightful.
Oh, the other, I will say, my other, like, my favorite little minor gag in the movie is how the teenage girls, like, once Nixon says, you can call me Dick, and then, like, the gag is, well, he said to call him Dick, so we just call him Dick.
They never call him Mr. President, they never call him Nixon, they never, they just call him Dick.
Well...
What was the phrase for Woodward and Bernstein that Betsy's mother says at the beginning?
It's like, the muckworking bastards is another adjective in there.
Muckworking bastards is the last two words of it.
And then, you know...
They're talking about, like, who should we prank call?
And I was like, oh, we could prank call the Buckwrecking Bastards, you know?
And then later on, we need to tell the Buckwrecking Bastards, like, they just decided, like, this is the proper name for Woodward or Bernstein.
And so they just keep, and it's always that same three-word phrase.
And that's just, I don't know, that sort of thing is like, it's such a mannered choice in the writing and the direction and the performance to play it that way.
And I think it's just, I mean, it made me laugh.
That was one of the things that made me laugh, is continually coming back and just calling them like the muckraking bastards over and over and over again.
That is good as well.
I think that's also kind of true to how teenagers talk.
I mean, I had stuff like that with my friends when I was around that age.
In your little group of friends, you do develop a kind of an internal system of reference.
You would have like Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Another bit I like is when they're trying, Woodward and Bernstein are trying to interrogate the girls in the parking lot about who said what and who did what and so on and so forth, and they don't know any of the names, and they're coming up with stuff like Herlichman and stuff like that, and they go, no, no, there's nobody called Herlichman.
And they show them a photograph, and they say, which one of these guys was it?
And they just look, and they say, they all look the same!
Yeah, it was a creepy guy with glasses, and then you see the photo, and it's like literally every single one of them is a creepy guy with glasses.
Yeah, no, there's a lot of fun stuff there.
There's a lot of fun stuff.
But yeah, I think we're done.
I think we're done.
So watch this.
It's worth a watch.
It's worth a watch, for sure.
It's fun.
So thank you to our listener who demanded of both of us that we do this one, because I would not have rewatched this had it not been for that.
And I'm glad that I did.
I am very, very glad that I did.
Yeah, this is going to be a lot more fun to watch than Hillbilly Elegy, which I think is our next one.
Is our next one, yeah.
I think we've got to get that one in before the election.
I think the goal is to get that in before the election.
I think so, yeah.
Before J.D. Vance becomes either irrelevant or effectively Peter Thiel's dictator by proxy.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Thanks for listening to that, everybody.
And thanks for giving us a dollar a month, or one of us a dollar a month, at any rate, to listen to it.
It is very much appreciated.
And thank you for tuning into the show, and just thank you for being you.
Absolutely.
So, we'll be back soon.
But in the meantime, I don't know, do what you do.
