Aug. 28, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:36
5610 Longlegs: The Freedomain Movie Review
In this episode, I delve into a detailed and critical review of the movie "Long Legs." I critique it as a collection of horror movie cliches, from killer clowns to creepy dolls, expressing disappointment in the excessive use of jump scares. I highlight the lack of coherence in the plot, pointing out inconsistencies in character development and world-building. Additionally, I explore the deeper themes of single mothers making deals with the devil, drawing parallels to societal issues. I discuss the symbolism of the free dolls and the movie's ending, offering a comprehensive analysis of its thematic elements and character portrayals.Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!NOW AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING' - AND THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI AND AUDIOBOOK!Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, the interactive multi-lingual philosophy AI trained on thousands of hours of my material, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
I went to a late night showing of the movie Long Legs with Nicolas Cage and Blair Underwood and some woman who apparently was told by the director throughout the entire movie to act as if she was both
Frightened, frigidly cold, and needing to pee.
Just this kind of uneasy Jeff Goldblum in a skit kind of tension that didn't really have any characterization to it.
There's going to be some spoilers in this, but there's also going to be a real wallop of insight, so I'll keep this relatively brief.
Basically, it was just a pastiche of all the cliches you could possibly come up with with regards to horror movies, right?
You had the killer clown, which was Nick Cage in some pancake makeup nonsense.
You had, you know, the frightened FBI agent, which I guess is a nod to Silence of the Lambs.
You had
You had dolls, of course, the creepy dolls with the eyes opening and all that kind of stuff.
You had improbable lighting where everything's really dark except for the beams of light coming in from outside with no particular source just to make things look
Cool, you had Christian cross-axe murderers, you had terrifying nuns, you had like every possible cliche.
It's like if AI assembled a jigsaw puzzle of horror movie cliches and jammed it into one appetizing hour-and-a-half snoozefest.
They had audio assault.
Literally, it feels like Trotsky being hunted down with an ice pick by Stalin's goons in Mexico because the jump scares.
Listen,
I don't mind if you earn a good jump scare, right?
I don't mind that at all.
What I do mind is if you have basically a sonic weapon aimed at my frontal lobes through my eardrums causing them to hurt.
That's not a legitimately earned good goose bumpy jump scare.
That's just basically an audio punch to the nads and it's considered to be some sort of sport.
So that was pretty terrible.
It had one of the most anticlimactic, you know, the cliche is, you know, the serial killer is leaving all these clues and the FBI has to figure out all these clues and rush to save, right, the next family.
So, the woman finds a picture of the serial killer from her youth, and apparently he hasn't changed his look in 20 years.
And so they say, Hey, are you sure you want to put out an APB on just this picture?
And she says, yes.
And then the next shot is him at a bus stop with some suitcases and the police are all closing in.
There's no, how did they find him?
This guy who's off the grid?
Uh, how did they possibly locate him?
He doesn't seem to have a cell phone.
He doesn't post, he doesn't use social media, doesn't use the internet.
So how would they find him?
He kind of lives in a basement in the middle of nowhere.
But anyway, they found him, and I thought this was going to be kind of like a joke, like, you know, it's just a speeder that they're pulling over in front of him, and it's kind of ironic that the police catch the speeder, but nope, they just catch this guy and lock him in a cell, and then they let a woman go in with this guy who's a serial killer, alone, and talk to him.
It's all, you know, it creates an answer.
The other thing too is that, unless I missed something, it always could happen.
I remember getting something about Joker wrong.
I could have missed something, but what I don't recall is they spend the first quarter of the movie setting up the young FBI agent, this woman, as a psychic.
You see, she just knows, right?
The movie starts out, they go looking for a guy, she just knows where this guy is.
I don't think he shows up again, again, unless I missed something.
But she just knows which house he's in, although they're all undifferentiated cookie cutter, copy paste, little boxes on the hillside kind of houses.
So she knows exactly where this guy is.
She's psychic, you see, and then they put her through these tests and she gets more than, she gets half of the random questions, like guess a number between 1 and 100 inclusive.
She gets half of the 12 right, which would be statistically anomalous.
And so she's psychic, right?
This is all set up and then it
Like it never shows up again.
The psychic abilities are never brought into play.
They're never used again.
And I just don't understand why you'd spend all of this time.
It's like a very rough, rough, I was kind of drunk first draft of a script that they just said, yeah, that's it.
Let's just, let's just go ahead and film it.
Nick Cage is on board and he's going to chew up the scenery like a Pennywise on cocaine with a bad face job.
So that didn't make any sense to me.
The mechanics of the movie don't.
Like, if you're going to create a fictional universe, and of course I've done it in my novel, The Future, which you should definitely get for free at freedomain.com slash books.
I set up a whole world 500 years in the future and knew it down to the last detail.
So you've got to have a world that's believable.
So what is
The mechanics of the world.
So, basically the story is that a woman dressed up as a nun delivers a free doll to a family, and then the doll causes the father in the family to go crazy and kill the family.
Okay, we'll get into all of that in a sec, what that's an analogy for.
But why?
The devil's all-powerful, the devil can do crazy things, and so why is it that the devil needs to be some smoke in the head of a doll's
In the doll's head.
And why does he need that?
Right?
Is it like you have to be invited in like a vampire?
But he's not a vampire.
He's the devil.
And of course, it's very anti-christian as all of these movies tend to be.
It's explicitly crazy anti-christian in that every time like there's a lot of axe murdering scenes, there's always a cross around and they're always hyped up as religious people.
So Christianity and slaughter can go hand in hand.
And
Also, the fact that it's nihilistic because the mother of the FBI agent keeps saying, have you said your prayers?
Your prayers will keep you safe.
And then finally she says, no, I've never said my prayers to her mother.
And her mother says, yeah, yeah, that's fine.
Prayers don't do.
A goddamn thing, which is of course highly blasphemous.
And so they're basically saying you have no defense against the devil.
A prayer won't work and the Christians are just infiltrated without any free will, they don't fight back, they don't win, so the devil rules.
And I guess maybe that's true in Hollywood, I don't know, but probably.
But the anti-Christian stuff was pretty wild.
Now, you could say, well, she came from a church, so she'd have to go to Christian households and so on, but... I don't know, man, a lot of people would like a free doll, I guess, for their kids.
So that didn't really make any sense, and she's got this... I think he's a boss, he's not a partner, I think he's a boss, the Blair Underwood character, and Blair Underwood's character, like, every time the doll gets delivered, the husband goes crazy and kills the family, right?
And so, eventually, it's the woman's mother who's delivering the doll in partnership, sort of forced partnership with the killer clown guy.
And her mother then delivers the doll to the Blair Underwood family, himself, his wife, and his daughter.
And so Blair Underwood turns vicious and angry, and then he basically says, you know, honey, come into the kitchen so I can kill you with a knife.
And the FBI agent, who knows exactly how this goes, just stands there.
Doesn't go in, and doesn't prevent her boss who's become possessed from killing his wife.
Just stands there.
It makes absolutely zero sense.
And there were so many things that just didn't add up and didn't make any sense that you just kind of give up and say, okay, I'm wandering into an AI-generated montage or pastiche or sort of quiltwork tapestry of various horror movie cliches.
And that's all that I get to do.
And of course, you know, the dead-eyed, frozen-faced kids is always the same.
And everybody's emotionally dead.
And frozen-faced, and there are these interminable pauses between dialogue which is just supposed to depress you and make you anxious and awkward at the social silences and the dead-eyed interactions and the non-existence of people's personalities.
And of course, this would be
Dissociation, right?
Like you've experienced a lot of horror, you don't experience it yourself, and therefore it manifests in the world around you, right?
When you've experienced a lot, and people try this in a way, and not obviously to the same degree, I'm not putting my listeners in these categories, but to a much smaller degree, but along the same sort of dimension, my listeners in the call-in shows will tell me the most terrible, terrible stuff,
Like, hey, Steph, you should improve your posture and sit up a little.
And they'd be right about that.
All right.
So they say the most terrible stuff and then they giggle or laugh about it.
And it's quite a common thing.
And that's because you're unable to experience your own horror, so you reproduce it in others by laughing at that, which is appalling.
So, you know, that sort of dead face, dead-eyed, kids with no expression, staring up at terrifying clowns, kids with no sense of self-protection, no sense that this is weird and creepy and dangerous, and so on.
That's kind of common.
Now, why would a kid have no sense of danger and just stare blank-eyed and hang around this crazy, creepy, singing, laughing, deranged, over-the-top clown head guy?
Well, because they've been eviscerated.
They've been so tormented and tortured at home that they've lost all sense of self-protection.
So, this sort of child abuse radiates out from this.
And the other thing, too, is that
We'll get into the single mother thing, of course, but it's always the fathers who do the attacks because women are wonderful and only men can be possessed and so on, right?
So men who are the protectors of the family turn into the destroyers of the family, family annihilators, I think they're called.
And again, that's just sort of a predictable thing to have people hate the patriarchy and so on.
It was a complete mess and needed probably four or five more rewrites with some critical eyes as opposed to just assembling every jigsaw puzzle piece cliche of every horror movie that's ever made and jamming them all together in one unappetizing meal.
It's sort of like going to, I went once with my daughter to
It was sort of a Chinese food buffet that had both Chinese food, they had sushi, they had Western food, and it's just like getting everything, putting it into a blender, and trying to drink it.
And, you know, we do this as kids, you just get everything from the cupboard and try to make some, quote, meal, and it just turns into this unappetizing, ketchup-flavored, orgasmic mess of culinary hell.
So, but there was one thing, or two things, I think, that were important, and they were related to each other.
So again, spoilers, blah blah blah, but the mother.
So what happens is the serial killer comes to kill a family, and the mother says, save my daughter, don't kill my daughter, and he says, okay, I won't kill your daughter, but you have to help me out in killing more families, right?
So I'll let your daughter live, but you have to
Help me kill more families.
So then the woman who used to be a nurse, crazy, who used to be a nurse, unless you're a nurse dealing with me in case you're sane, in which case you're sane and wonderful.
But so the woman who used to be a nurse, she's a single mother and she saves her own child's life by allying with the devil or this psycho, this killer clown.
He's a hail Satan kind of guy.
So, the single mother preserves her child's life by allying with violence and destroying intact households.
Hmm.
Interesting.
So, this to me is a deep analogy for the welfare state, also known as the single mother state.
So, women make bad decisions, they have children with the wrong men, and then to, quote, preserve their children's life, they make an alliance with the state, right?
Single mothers vote overwhelmingly for bigger government programs, they don't really care about national debts, and they don't care about raised taxes, and so on.
In general, lots of exceptions, but... So, in order to, quote, preserve
Their child's life, in the belief that they need to preserve their child's life, they make an unholy alliance with this agency of coercion and then they go around destroying
Intact families, right?
Because there needs to be a father present.
So this is, of course, a hatred of the father that comes out of the single mother culture, right?
Single mothers, and I was raised around single mothers, so I know this with deep and horrifying intimacy.
Single mothers have a huge amount of hostility towards men because they blame the men for making them single mothers.
They won't take responsibility for the choices they make.
They will often worship their fathers but hate the fathers of their children.
It's a weird kind of split.
So the fact that a single mother makes an alliance with a coercive beast that's indicative of a larger issue, he's not just an individual, he's like demonic or satanic or he's a larger sort of agency.
And so the single mother, in order to preserve the life of her child, makes a deal with the devil and then, as a result, she destroys intact families.
Well, of course, the redistributive coercive redistributive nature of the welfare state means that money is taken from functional families and given to single mothers, which swells the ranks of the single mothers and destroys the
The two-parent household, right?
Because they don't have enough money, and single mothers can be quite toxic, and single women keep women single, right?
It's sort of an old Kevin Samuels thing.
Well, I think it's quite true.
So, the predatory toxicity of the single mother brigade, again, I'm talking collectively, there's individual exceptions, of course, but
What happens is they ally with the government to gain resources through force in order to, as they believe it, preserve the lives of their children, or the future success of their children, and they then destroy intact families.
And that, as you can see, the sort of two-parent family, the rise of single mothers is coincided with the destruction of the
To parent family, and this is a result of socioeconomic things, of toxicity in the media, of coercive redistribution of resources through the welfare state.
And so that to me would be the analogy that this single mom allies with the state and destroys
Two-parent households through hatred of the men in order to get resources for her own child.
In this case, the resources being her own survival.
And of course, the woman's gone crazy, the mother of the ex-nurse, she's gone crazy.
And so how does she live?
Well, she must live off the welfare state because she's got a decent-sized house.
She's obviously a hoarder, or she's a hoarder in the movie.
So, how does she live?
Well, she lives off the welfare state, right?
So, she's got disability, some government pension, or just welfare as a whole.
So, the other thing, too, though, the question is why
Why is it an analogy or why is the story in the movie that the single mother dresses up as a nun and then offers a free gift that she says, oh, you've won this big doll from the church, right?
You've won something from the church.
And then people say, oh, great, lovely, come on in and bring this creepy doll with you and so on, right?
So why is that the case?
I would say that it is the pretense of charity, of generosity, but it is actually coercive and destructive.
So this would be, of course, everyone thinking that the welfare state is about helping the poor, it's a kind of charity, it's niceness, it's kindness, and this is a Christian charity and niceness from the church and you get something for free.
And people would say, of course they would say, well I didn't enter any raffle, I didn't, like nobody called me, like why would I, I don't want to take this
A doll, right?
This could be drugs in the doll.
It could be a bomb in the doll.
It could be creepy stuff in the doll.
It could be recording me.
It could be anything.
Why would you, if somebody says, hey, it's a beautifully, perfectly made doll, probably worth a thousand or two thousand or three thousand dollars.
And somebody comes and says, oh, here, I want to bring this doll into your house, and you know, you won it in a church raffle, and it's like, well, I didn't enter any church raffle, like, what the heck is going on, right?
So, the fact that they just, oh, I'll take something for free without examining it, and I will assume that it is nice and kind and charitable and Christian, when it is in fact turns out to be coercive and destructive, well, that's people thinking that the
Welfare state, which is founded on coercion, is nice and charitable and so on.
And so there's this mirror, right?
So the woman makes a deal with the devil to preserve her own child, but other people think that it is Christian charity to take the unearned, right?
So they didn't earn these dolls, they don't know where they come from, it doesn't make any sense why they'd just be getting a free doll.
Um, from a church.
And of course, if they don't go to the church, it makes no sense.
If they go to the church and they've never heard about this doll raffled, then that wouldn't make any sense either.
So, they're taking something for free because they're greedy and they don't examine what appears to be for free, which turns out to be
Coercive, right?
So this is false morality.
This is people who say, well, the welfare state is, even though it's based on coercion, is in debt, right?
The enslavement of the next generation to foreign bankers.
They say, oh, no, no, it's nice.
It's charitable.
It's wonderful.
It's kind.
It's and so on, right?
It's Christian charity when it's not.
It's a desire for the unearned, which is the desire to, quote, help the poor without actually having to interact with the poor, which is the mantle of virtue rather than the actual virtue.
And so
The single mother allying with the state to preserve her own child, which results in the destruction of the nuclear family.
That's very clear in the movie.
And the fact that people
So thirst for the unearned that they will never question where it comes from or what its nature is or why it's there and so on.
They just let people come into their house and bring big boxes of creepy dolls because why?
No particular reason.
And the ending was a real letdown.
There was no twist.
There was no reveal.
There was nothing, right?
The movie literally ends on the repeated click of an empty chamber in a gun, and I mean that's really... they were out of bullets.
So again, like metaphorical bullets, right?
Out of impact, out of... and so yeah, a couple of jump scares.
Nicolas Cage doing his usual coked up scenery chewing stuff and everybody else was understated.
Right, so all the emotional energy and creepiness and focus and demonic power is in the bad guy and all the good people are like weird half-frightened constantly.
This is how actors act like male actors act by clenching their jaw like once you see that in Tom Cruise movies you just realize he's basically his whole acting lesson is chew gum!
Jaw clench, jaw clench, jaw clench.
And the women do it by being, you know, cold and their neck tendons, you know, this makes men sympathetic and so on.
Oh, let me get you a coat, you must be scared, right?
The whole thing was the woman being cold and going, like, I just need you to be in an icebox and breathing hard.
That's your whole acting audition for this role.
And so that's why the women act with the neck tendons and men act with the jaw muscles.
It's all very, very sad and predictable.
But yeah, the movie ends with this nothing burger of an ending and then the credits roll backwards.
Isn't that weird and eerie?
And so yeah, the world doesn't make much sense, the physics don't make much sense, the logic of the movie doesn't make much sense, the fact that they spend so much time trying to set her up to, well, they set her up to be psychic which is never used again, the fact that she doesn't save her superior even though she knows that he's been possessed and is going to kill his family, she doesn't save the wife, she doesn't save the husband, none of it makes any particular sense.
Except for there was this deep thematic thing about single mothers and deals with the devil and the destruction of the nuclear family
I think so.
Yeah, well, we've assembled all the jigsaw puzzle pieces of all the famous horror movie cliches.
Let's just jam it into a narrative and fire it at the screen.
It's like watching somebody paint by throwing buckets at a jet engine against a splatter wall.
But, you know, I wouldn't recommend it, except if you do watch it, you know, it's not the end of the world.
Just watch it where you can control the volume, because otherwise it is
I have to go to movies with like ear protectors because they've just become so loud, especially the scare stuff.
It's, it's, um, it is an assault.
It actually makes me angry.
Like, so that's why I put the ear protectors in.
I'll give up on some of the dialogue to preserve my hearing from the ear punch jump scare bullshit.
But I think it's worth watching.
But when you do, sorry, it's not a great movie.
But if you do watch it, look for that single mother theme and let me know what you think of the comments below.
I really appreciate your time, effort and energy.
Thank you so much.
freedomain.com slash donate if you'd like to help out the show.
