Podcast / The Time of Monsters / Apr 10, 2024

Hollywood’s New Lesbian Plot

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Moira Donegan on Drive-Away Dolls and Love Lies Bleeding.

Love Lies Bleeding

(A24)

In the last few weeks, Hollywood has given us Drive-Away Dolls (directed by Ethan Coen, who also co-wrote it in collaboration with Tricia Cooke) and Live Lies Bleeding (directed by Rose Glass who co-wrote it with Weronika Tofilska). Although very different in tone, the two movies have some striking commonalities. Both are set in the late 20th century and take familiar genres (the buddy road comedy, the erotic thriller) while featuring lesbian lead characters.

To talk about this trend, I spoke to Moira Donegan, a frequent guest of the The Time of Monsters, who sees the movies as evidence of “the lesbian plot” becoming Hollywood fare. She locates both films as exercises in nostalgia for a period when actual lesbian culture is rapidly changing.

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Fighting Monopoly Power w/ Zephyr Teachout / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

Donald Trump is practicing crony capitalism on an unprecedented scale, with the government greenlighting major mergers that benefit the president’s friends (most notably the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger). I spoke to Zephyr Teachout, who teaches constitutional law at Fordham, about this worrying development. We take up the long history of anti-monopoly politics going back to the American revolution and the trust battles of the late 19th century as well as the possibility state governments can fight the new wave of consolidation. Zephyr has often written on his subject for The Nation, notably in two recent articles

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Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

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