Have a nice night, I’m not going to go through all your posts to try to document it or anything like that. You’re not that important.
I sincerely apologize to the rest of the forum for the derail, something about the earlier posts struck me as really funny. I’ll drop it.
Feel free to log off and never come back.
First episode of The Good Lord Bird was free on Amazon Prime. Watched it. It’s really good. Probably going to pay for a month subscription to finish the series out
Audition
What the fuck. What the fucking fuck.
Reminder that as of today Netflix and HBO Max now stream all episodes of Chapelle’s Show
Isn’t most or all of Chapelle Show available on YouTube? Its 15 years old now.
Lol
Why do you hate joy
I don’t! I just didn’t realize their were a bunch of people waiting for Chappelle’s Show to become available on platforms.
I’d also add that although I find the show generally funny, it is packed with circa 2003 cultural references. So it’ll feel a little stale in 2020 IMO.
Hah okay so for me, the quality of the stream and the ease of access in a familiar platform makes a huge difference. No one waiting for the show itself, but these other things are A+. Plus I must shamefully confess I have never seen Season 3: the Lost Episodes.
I guess this has an additional interest for me too because in his recent interview with Letterman, Chapelle revealed new details about what went down in s3 (and which skit) that convinced him to run as far away from showbusiness as he could get for almost a decade.
1, 2, 3, 4, fif
McQueen is the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind 12 Years a Slave , as well as Hunger , Shame and Widows. Now we have our first real look at his new project Small Axe, an anthology of five original films that will begin rolling out on Amazon Prime Video this November.
My body could not be more ready. Steve McQueen is one of the finest modern filmmakers.
I just finished this. Overall it was worth the watch, but its pretty depressing overall. At some level it feels to me like the presentation sensationalized and dramatized the suffering of all these women. I dont think thats what the filmmakers were going for, but its there.
My main takeaway was a feeling of great sadness that there are so many broken, fragile people in America with absolutely no concept of what a healthy relationship looks like or how to build one. In my mind the story of the destructive force of the psychopath is kind of boring - its like noting that bad weather is bad. The stories of the women are more interesting to me, but not the terror of their encounter with the scanner. Rather, IMO the real story is the tragedy of their lives of quiet desperation that made them susceptible in the first place. There’s got to be millions of women like them.
This is incredible news! Maybe my all time favorite comedy (the original)
Sorry you found it depressing. I can’t remember if I warned about that but I probably should have. It didn’t get me down personally but it’s objectively depressing content. I’ve got spoilery stuff in this here essay so…
I don’t agree that it sensationalized the suffering of the women, but fair enough. The production/direction team was female fwiw.
There was a bunch that interested me about the show, the way it wove together the problems in the justice system, the difficulty of dating as a middle-aged woman and the way they sort of modelled what a relationship should look like from TV and movies and were susceptible to the frankly corny and sleazy approach of Scott, from what we saw of it.
But also the figure of Richard Scott Smith and how he was presented was interesting to me. For most of the show he’s presented as this sort of slick con artist, smooth and calculating, shot from a distance. Then you meet him and he’s just this sad, incredibly broken human being. I definitely think it’s wrong to view him as a calculating psychopath, if he were he wouldn’t have done the on-camera interview at all, let alone just to stammer incoherently in response to the damning facts about him being laid out. He’s a narcissist and I think he’s sort of dissociated from the things that he does - like when he said he’d forgotten that he was married to two women at once, I kind of believe him. I have met people a bit like that before - able to compartmentalize inconvenient facts about their own behaviour away from their conception of their own identity.
He’s ruined a lot of lives but I had some sympathy for him after the interview. I also believed him when he said that he really wanted to have a family and have somewhere to belong, but he’s totally incapable of doing it. As he said in the interview, he’s forever petrified that the women he sees are going to find someone better and leave him. He’s a Sisyphus figure, getting up every day and donning his fake identity to go out and seduce women, hoping that this time he will feel wanted and loved, but because the person he’s selling is a fake, it will never ever happen. Because of what happened in his childhood, he feels that he could never genuinely be loved, and being abandoned is such a fait accompli that he burns it down and moves on, as a probably unconscious psychological defence against the trauma of being abandoned again. It’s apparent quite early in the show that it’s not just about the money to him, because he tries to win women back in spots where it doesn’t make sense to do it for the con. Like all narcissists, other people aren’t really real to him, they’re things to be manipulated to try to get what he wants, but you can’t con people into genuine human connection. He tries, finds it empty, and tries again, and again, and again. It will never work and never end.
I thought it was interesting because the bounty hunter lady just before that was like “oh yea he enjoys this shit, he gets off on conning them” and I think that’s wildly off the mark. He’s an absolutely miserable person with a hole inside him that can’t ever be filled. What was interesting to me was the way the show invites you to view him as this almost Bond-like cunning psychopath and the collision of that with the reality of him as trauma begetting trauma.
I generally agree with all of your observations. Except possibly one - I think his speech in prison about wanting to feel like he belongs is based in truth, but is more of a practiced manipulation technique than a real insight into his state of mind. Compare it to the various voicemails he left women, for example, to illicit sympathy. I also don’t think there’s an inherent conflict between his being a “cunning psychopathy” and his actual personality. He is a cunning psychopath - he has the organization skills to obtain numerous social security numbers and juggle multiple relationships with women simultaneously. The fact that his awkwardness is surprising says more about our cultural portrayals of psychopaths as supervillains - in fact, like most evil, they are actually banal. This is why my perspectives is that the real insight in the documentary is that America, with it’s broken failed culture, has created millions of absolutely miserable people (in this case women) that have no idea what happiness even looks like. It’s incredibly sad.
One of the really key traits of psychopaths though is that they don’t care what other people think of them. That’s like their defining characteristic, and the major distinction from narcissists, who are obsessed with the question. The fact that Scott spoke on camera at all and the fact that he talked about the psychological stress the website inflicted on him suggested to me that he does care what people think of him. And not care in the sense of trying to protect his reputation, but care in some emotional way. I know that seems incongruous with the disregard he showed to his victims, but I feel like in his mind there’s some way that circle is squared.
I agree about the women. Like just in general in the show there is a real vibe of a hollowed out culture. It really feels to me like the women got their ideas on what romance looks like from TV and movies and when a guy showed up and just parroted those lines they were like “omg real romance”. I know that sounds victim-blamey so want to clarify that I’m not saying it’s their fault. I’m not saying anything about them as individuals, it just feels like it says something about the culture.
Yes, totally. We more or less agree, perhaps a takeaway is that when someone is as broken as Richard Scott Smith they will exhibit numerous antisocial behavioral traits, straddling various categorizations.
is this whole thread spoilers now?
Yes