This Time We Actually Review Phantom Thread w/ Gio Pennacchietti: The J. Burden Show Ep. 382

We had the idea of of like the right wing has to read like Leninism, We have to read lenin Okay, that's how you win a sort of like cultural revolution and and the sort of and then and then Carl is bad. I think I don't know if he's around.

Apparently he's still kicking around an alerker all but my good friend Carl's uh he also talked about this, and so I think like some wires got crossed where James Lindsay now believes that the woke right is like Maoism and Leninism, and I think this is all due to Thermoor magazine.

all I say. I'm not entirely sure how that's gonna go, because the more I dug into it. And that's sort of why I wanted to do a review of one of his pieces, because I was like, all right, like I make fun of this guy enough, and I know what he says in short form, but like, let's let's give him the benefit of the doubt, Like let's dig into you know, something that should have taken him a long time to come up with write a long This should be him at his best. I was not impressed.

But enough about Lindsay, because look, man, if you want to get me distracted, that is a way to get me distracted.

twenty seventeen film by Paul Thomas Anderson Phantom Thread. So I'll be honest, I was not super excited initially, Like I did not think this is a movie that I would like because it's look, it's a movie about a fashion designer, like that sounds pretty dumb if I'm to be brutally honest, but is really fascinating so effectively, just in broad Strokes, this movie is sort of a drama concerning the relationship between fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock Cyreal, his sister,

and then Alma sort of the main character, a woman who he ends up falling in love with. Broad Strokes, this movie has a very fascinating discussion about the relationship between genius and a muse, and then also the kind of different ways in which femininity encounters and sort of breaks down masculine genius. I think there are multiple ways to look at it, none of which I think were exactly what the director was necessarily desiring to come to express.

And then maybe we can get into this later Geoe. But I think there's a fascinating sort of like alternate reading as well, which is definitely not what the or the movie is trying to talk about, but is worth discussing. Maybe later, Well, I.

the film. So spoiler alerts, we're gonna get into a lot of spoiler alerts. But uh oh yeah, I didn't think that adds jail before I do my bit, so.

as a muse than as a romantic partner. Yeah, their relationship kind of you know Burgeons, there's you know, ultimately their relationship falls apart. But what's interesting is that their relationship is sort of saved by his sickness. He gets very very ill, and to sort of continue this process, we find out that she is she's poisoning him. This is much basically, yeah, it's Munchausen by proxy, so that he can sort of reduce him to an infantile level.

They can bond. Because there's also a very bizarre relationship between our main character and his mother. We'll get into that later. And then apparently as the movie ends they have a happy domestic life and his creative work suffers. So big picture, I think that they're sort of fascinating. Three motifs, three distinct female motifs. There is Alma, right, who is a romantic relationship with Reynolds, obviously a very dysfunctional one. There's Cyril, his sister, who has sort of

a business yet still feminine relationship. And then also his mother, who both teaches him how to so teach him how to create, and then after she dies sort of recurrently appears in his dreams talking to him. So those are the three primary female archetypes. But I'll throw it to you, Geo.

archetypal mother maiden crone iteration of Chloe Savini's character. If you've ever watched The Brown Bunny, it's very similar here. There is a maiden mother crone distinction that the feminine serves as the unconscious shadow self, the anima of Reynolds.

So this isn't the I believe the nineteen fifties this is when fashion was starting to change and where you had, like still you have like a lot of very high key designers that were doing a lot of private commissions for very rich and famous people, very rich and powerful women such as this one. I think the one he designs a wedding dress for is the Princess of Belgium or something like that.

and famous to have a personal designer nowadays. Right, So this is still where fashion, this area of making serviceable dresses for special events. It wasn't exactly the runway fashion that's very highly adjacent to the art world. And so you have this designer who's sort of a dinosaur, and he's on his way out, and it's implied that a lot of his clients are going to more of these affordable, mainstream fashion designer houses or that are rather factories, like Champaul Gautier for example.

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dress of the Woodcock House. And as it progresses through the film, he's at his wits end with his one muse. Then he discovers the what's her name in the film the Crimps woman?

her phone number in address saying for the hungry boy. Right, so you know what this is going to be about, even though he's way older than her. So then as the film goes on, she works in the house. I believe she has some connection to the to being a seamstress and all that. And you have to realize that when you are someone who is an artist. Those like little moments of creativity. They can come few and far

between and when ordinary life disrupts them. This is what I found so fascinating about the film is that Daniel de Lewis played a very good creative in the sense that he's very petty and cantankerous, and he needs a silence and he needs that sort of on the one end of very reassuring and structured home life, but not one that can disrupt his flow. And so this translates to him being very like crotchety and insulting and petty, and and it's it reminds me of something I heard

from a documentary on the famous comic artist Mobius. You know Mobius, right Jay? Uh? He yeah, yeah he Also this is uh he got famous because I believe was it Marvel that brought him on to do a Batman or a Superman Sorry, a Spider Man was a Marvel or DC that does Spider Man? I forget, which I thought was very interesting. But Mobius is very famous in his own right for his own series and it grew one of the best avant garde comic book artists ever. Right,

his penmanship is incredible. There's this documentary that was made a few years before he died, talking about his relationship to his wife in one section where he said that, you know, it's very funny because a lot of comic artists, a lot of artists in general, it's almost like the wife becomes this mother figure where they're doing the taxes, they're organizing the meetings because the artists can like have time to play with his little colors and his pens.

It's very much like a sort of consuming mother type of relationship.

of implications of sex or anything like that. It very much is a standoffish muse type of relationship where to lower it to the level of being fleshy and visceral and vulgar that would have a profound impact on the relationship as a whole. So Woodcock wants to keep her at a distance. But when it comes to sort of like the more masculinized version of the feminine in the film, it's obviously his sister. His sister is his business partner.

She's the one organizing all of these very high end commissions with like royalty and famous people and so on and so forth. She's the one that he confides in as an old I believe she's the older sister, and so she took the role of her mother in nurturing his talent, but doing it in a very strictly strict and regimental way, whereas Olmah's character is sort of the you know, the chaotic feminine. She's the agent of disorder because she has a lot of other needs that are not there as

a sister. Right, So they have kind of like I wouldn't want to say that would the two like Woodcock siblings. I don'tudn't see that there's an incestuous relationship there. It's more of like she is the manager. She takes on a masculine role, whereas he's dwelling in something that is very feminine, which is the act of creativity in a

very which has historically been a very feminine pursuit. Although a lot of the greatest fashion designers of history have been met and not necessarily gay men either, I mean a lot of them were straight, right, I know, like there is there is this one very famous model who wrote about actually the relationship between homosexual men and women in the fashion world that's in the fifties is very

red pilly. But anyways, so you know, a lot of the great designers are men and so, but they're taking on the embodiment of what has been pigeonholed as a characteristically feminine form of art, right, although it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be. So he's he's going into this relationship

with his own creativity. He's meeting this new woman and then all of a sudden there is this disequilibrium he finds with her in the house with the old man in the house, and there's this one scene where he's confiding in his sister after he's trying to create a dress for this very rich but very old woman. He's having a hard time, you know, of all the different scenes and everything, and he confides to his sister, I can't have her in house. I can't work, I can't

do anything. She's ruining my life, you know, like typical like he's an old man, but it's like a teen angst type of thing, right like, And of course, what happens, the stereotypical movie thing. She walks in the room mid mid rant, and now she knows what he really feels about her, and so what does she do? She goes in scavengers for mushrooms in the forest, finds the poisonous ones and then feeds it to him, and he's like

terribly sick. And now she goes from the intoxicating, chaotic maiden to the feminine motherly figure nursing him to health. Because what happens. He's trying to model for this, this wedding dress for this princess, and wedding dresses are very important this film. We'll get to that Jake. So he's trying to model for that. He's trying to construct this wedding dress. He only has a day left to send

it off to Belgium. What happens. He collapses right on it ruins the dress, and so his seamstresses and his sister and his now girlfriend has to work the whole night to repair this dress. And well, sorry, they work the whole night. And well, Uma is nursing him like a mother nursing a sick child, very very similar to an Edward Monk painting. That's the first thing that came

to mind, nursing him back to health. Uh. And and he's terribly still like he's delusional and crotchety and cantankerous, and he wore he tells the doctor to go f himself. And it's just in a weird way. It's it's very crazy and insane, but it's also beautiful. It's it's a very like I wouldn't want to say like it's it's like a fem clled fantasy or whatever, but there very

much is like a very strong feminine fantasy. If I can fix this genius who is a creative genius, but he's he's like a lion, he's like a blonde beast. He plays by his own rules, and he's this almost like a Heathcliff character. He's a force of nature, right, But I'm going to tame him, and I'm going to break him down and nurse him back up. And so there's this very powerful feminine fantasy of engaging with a male artist of any stripe. And so in a lot of ways, it's a very beautiful film, but it's a

very destructive film. And then eventually he gets better and that's when he's that's when she's talling. I believe she's a saying all of this in the film. There's it's interspliced with her her monologuing to a therapist or another guy or whatever, and it's a very beautiful thing where she's like, he's his most calm, he's his most loving, he's his most serene when he's on this like basically

the cusp of death. And so the relationship between the feminine and death is very powerful in this film, because

of course his mother died when he's young. His mother that he had, she had this beautiful wedding dress, and there's this one piece of dialogue between them where he's saying that, you know, it's very hard to do wedding dresses because a lot of models have a lot of superstitions around wearing wedding dresses where they say that if a model wears a wedding dress on a runway that they're never going to get married, or they're going to marry the wrong guy, or it's going to characterize their

life and the romantic relationship in some way. And so he goes a it's very like a notoriously difficult to do a good wedding dress, right, but he's obsessed with the same design of his mother's wedding dress that then gets lost through time or moving or whatever. And now in the film he models this wedding dress off of UMA's character. He has this very rare I think it was Italian lace that survived through the war. You know, this is the nineteen fifties, so used to World War Two,

and he like throws it on her carelessly. He's putting needles and pins everywhere, and he's sort of like trying to.

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he's fine with it. He takes the mushroom. He knows he's getting poisoned, but he does it anyways. And it's a very it's a very like weird relationship, but within the confines of that very creative lifestyle, you can understand in a weird way. And so I thought it was a very beautiful film, and it really has that the interplay between the masculine and feminine within a creative endeavor.

And she then has this vision of having a child with him, and it's it is implied that they eventually do have sex and he she like totally just like breaks him down and builds him back up. And it's it's a way in which the feminine can impose upon this feral, chaotic force of nature that is male creativity

in the artist. And if you look throughout a lot of human history, a lot of artists had this relationship and even when there wasn't, like if you have artists such as I mentioned Edward monk Ortulli's the track where they have a very like chaotic and destructive relationship to women, and they're like, you know, frequenting ladies of the night and all this stuff there still is. Ah, there was something that Robert Hughes, the great art critics, said a monk.

He said to Edward Monk's sex is ominous and hateful. As a man, you either live in the humiliation of celibacy, being an insul or you subject yourself to the castration of the feminine. And it was like this very the polarity of the masculine energy being subsumed by the feminine. And of course Edvardmunk was into the early Scaninavian vitalist movement where it's like a bunch of men, you know, bathing naked and the sun, very sole broad ish type

of stuff. But that they were doing where they were like the male if you look at the male bather painters, sorry, if you look at the male bathing paintings of Edvard Munk, you know what I mean. Where they had this like Germanic and Scandinavian health movement where a lot of men would prance naked on the beach and these like nudist beaches, and they do their exercises in the nude, and it was about this like solar vitality type of stuff, you know,

very very like not feminine. But at the same time, Edward Munk had this incredible relationship to the feminine that yeah, was very I guess the modern you know, twenty ten's lingo would be toxic and chaotic and whatnot. But here you see with Woodcock in the film an equally destructive and toxic but yet beautiful and in some ways endearing relationship to the feminine. And so uh yeah, that's that's that's my little rantom the film.

She ends up going to this like horrible like gaudy, uh you know, New Year's celebration, and he comes to get her sort of rebukes her, which I think is an interesting element there. Multiple things. One obviously, you know, the reaction of the kind of the aesthetic or the artist to kind of like mass market celebration.

you remember those classic Patrisa o' neil interviews. Right, yeah, you know, Now, not that I endorse, you know, I'm you know, I'm not about the whole like anti women stuff, but like there is a lot obviously like a lot of truth there. There's obviously a lot of truth there, like she's goading him and testing him, and it's just a simple fact of human nature, you know what I mean,

between men and women. And there's this sort of like and it's very funny how there's a little subtle hints of the changing times because this is in Europe, but there's like this very like American esque and gaudy Years party, and so there's sort of like a commentary on the vulgarity of the culture that is coming down the pipe in this time after the war, and he's sort of trying to find a way in this new culture, this new mass produced culture, as a niche boutique fashion designer.

And so yeah, then it's also with noting by the way that for years he resisted, I believe Daniel day Lewis is like he's supposed to be in his fifties in this film. For years he resisted actually getting married because he assumed that if he was going to be married, then he would view every wedding dress he made filtered

through his own relationship to his wife. And so the fact that he was broken down to submit to bourgeois domesticated marriage is a very you know, that's a very important plot point that they would get married and that he you know, he essentially he does pass the test because he grabs her and wrestles her away from this this terrible New Year's party of gallantry and drunken festivity. And so well, what did you think of that part burn you mentioned about the shit testing, What did you think?

very wealthy, but very very classless. Yes, and he has made I think, like an absurd number of wedding dresses for her over and over and over again. Yeah, because he can sort of summon the magic to make her young and beautiful again.

see her embarrassing herself in his dress. Yeah, and there's this moment at the wedding, and I think that there's there is a tension between the two party. So I guess three technically party scenes between the beginning and the end, because in this one, they together, he and Alma are unified in going to retrieve his dress. This woman has a.

at the relationship. He's not happy, he feels as if he's been sort of, you know, tricked into something.

playing i think backgammon or something. So basically it's a round robin, you know, you move from one to the other, and so we have back to back, you know, a conversation between him and his wife, which is very icy, and then him and this other woman, one of his clients, and it seems as if she is sort of this other woman trying to muscle to steal him away from her. Maybe who knows, but very clearly there is this class dynamic where she views Alma as being lower or under class.

And that comes back around when we talk about, you know, this sort of wild bacchan alien celebration, because we see the doctor who she's not quite it's never implied they're having a fair but she is flirting with and.

like no, I won't let you do this. But on another level, I think as well, it is like no I will like you, you are not allowed to. You will you are a representation of me, and you will conduct yourself as such, which I think is interesting because that is another dynamic as well, the degree to which the product of their work as both of them. You know,

it is her wearing his art. And I think that that's an interesting development as well, that they it goes from being this kind of revolving cast of him and whichever muse to his one muse right, the person he is linked to. And I think that that's an interesting development as well, because before they're both going to retrieve his art, yeah, whereas here he's basically saying like, no, you are a part of me and you are not allowed to do that. I don't know, you see on getting at their geo.

guy and I might interview him one day. But there was this magazine once that wrote about my artwork in relation to my friends Fenn and Matthew Stout and he

said something. It was like it wasn't meant as like maybe it was meant as a job, but he said that like a lot of my landscapes are sort of like in the British context, there's sort of like a seaside seasider art, you know what these like seaside resorts in the UK, and like they have landscape painters Plannar painters there right, And you know, I don't really take any offense to it because I do quite a bit of Plannier landscape painting, and you know, I mean if

they're pleasant or whatever. But I remember my girlfri read this and she freaked. She like, absolutely, this is terrible. I can't believe that he would say something thing about you. And I'm like, oh my god, Like I wasn't even that offended, you know what I mean.

the Nearest Festival is this like American theme. I believe they even had the Confederate flag in Abraham Lincoln in this unstilts type of deal, you know, which to the British ruling class at the time was very like vulgar and New World and not very couth, right, But when it comes to the enclosing of that social system, the sort of like British higher class. I mean, obviously, you know they won the war against the Germans, but did they really win the war against America? You know what

I mean? Like, you know, the America Kin's basically ruled the world after that point, you know, because of well we all know what happened, right, So I thought, like Paul Thomas Anderson, in a very slight, minuscule way, was nodding to I would say, a more mature aspect of that greater sociocultural commentary than this recent abomination that he did with the Thomas Pinkton short story what's it called? One soy after another, one battle after another, one battle

after another, the recent Paul Thomas Anderson film. But in that film, it's a very good commentary on the situation in a weird way, right, Like these people they still maintain their class distinction, their class consciousness, but that class consciousness has suffered a great deal of you know, a great blow to their sort of global legitimacy. Right, And so it comes off as kind of pernicious to make

that comment that, well, you know, she's not British. I don't know what they do in her with her people in Belgium or Germany wherever Uma is from. And it's a very like, you know, these people are kind of on the losing end of things, the way that Woodcock himself is on the losing end of a larger, more mass produced, more American driven fashion industry that now is coming from New York rather than coming from London or Paris.

So it's sort of like the art world in general, that huge change after the war from Paris and you know, from Paris, Italy, the UK, especially from Paris to New York City. It's it's the same trend over and over

again at this time. And but that's like, you know that that was like a side of the film when it comes to the ratio between them, Like as you pointed out, there is always she's trying to wrestle him away from what did make him a great in it's not necessarily that she wants to destroy his creativity, she

wants to domesticate him. It's just like that that is an element of nature that in a lot of ways is necessary because it is true what people say, Like you know a lot of people men and women that are sort of bachelors or whatever later on in life, they they're sort of cement I know a lot of older men like this, by the way, you never got married or whatever. They're cemented in their ways, and they can become quite quite ornery in their disposition towards anything

that smacks of like bourgeois domesticity. And so it's a very interesting tension there, right and throughout the film the fact that a lot of those tender moments comes at the behest of a great physical illness, and it's very cathartic in a way. And so but anyways, I've rambled for I've rambled for her to yeah.

gaze in a weird way the film. But what did you think of that though, Like, what would your interpretation be?

version where her actions are redeemed after the fact. So for instance, like the scene where he voluntarily takes the un poison or the poison again, where it's like, Okay, well did that really happen? Or is that her romanticizing this sort of munchhaus in by proxy right, saying that oh, you know, he really wants this, which, again that sort

of infantilization from the very beginning throughout the end. I don't think that's a necessary reading, but I think that that's an interesting element to it.

So but then again, I think that you can't really pull a sort of how shall I say it, Sometimes it's necessary to suspend a sort of real world moralism when it comes to a lot of these films, when

it comes to any work of art. So I wouldn't be too critical or to judge, but given the real world context of the things like this happens every single day, then yes, it is very like destructive and you know, abusive, but it's a very feminine style of abuse though right it's it's it's mothering to the point of destruction, and that is I think something that isn't you know, there's a lot of famous cases of course in the real world, like there's the whole Gypsy Rose thing, right, But it's

something that a lot of a lot of people talk about. And I think Paul Don Sanderson he's very uh for as much as like his recent work is terrible, he is willing to go to places that are very like unp politically uncorrect, but portraying them a sympathetic way, like specifically a Magnolia with Tom Cruise's character. Right. So I think even though like nowadays we we view it as well, it's hall would And this recent film that came out is like Bryy Stellis is I have a green line

about liberal mustiness. I think if you suspend any moral judgment, that does make sense within the film.

from you know, woke quote unquote Hollywood. But yeah, no, he's sort of it's not entirely negative, right, their relationship is an entirely negative. But I do think it is interesting that he is very comfortable painting her in a in a negative light. And I think it's interesting that there are multiple negative versions of femininity, right. You see, the the kind of you know, vanity of you know, an aging an aging woman in his you know, in

his clients, this sort of like backbiting cattiness. Uh, you know, in the woman that he you know, speaks at at the kind of like backgame end game. Yeah, but there were there's sort of a number. Uh and honestly, there are very few male characters in this book other than Reynolds.

feminine forces, either through nurses or through his mother. And so I think that the film is very honest when it comes to sort of female power struggles and intersexual competition and and the modolo was thing of It was Coco Chanel who wrote this like very telling, uh screed about gay men in the fashion in history and how they like you know, make women look ridiculous. And there was always this like tension between you know, gay gay

men and women. And I remember one time on Da Me and Prude, we had Catherine Dion and Katherine she was recently in the New York Times. I don't know if you saw that, Jay, but we were reviewing these three films and one of them was this film called Pig Hag about this this rather large woman and her only friends, these gay men, and at the very end of the film, she says, you know, my gaze have ruined me. My gaze have ruined me. But anyways, that's that's off topic. It was very well kind of on topic.

But it's on topic in the sense that when it comes to Woodcock in the film, just by necessity, he is surrounded by the world of the feminine. His seamstresses are all women, his sister, his mother who died Umma. The clients that he has are women. They're very powerful. Women employ him. So he has to assert himself as a man.

find a motherly maternal replacement. But he's also repulsed by it because he has to differentiate himself as a man in the world of women, which is, I hate to say it, a very unhealthy type of thing, right, especially if you're a heterosexual man.

so fair enough, but would recommend it. You can find it, rent it for three bucks or sale the high seas. But there's an interesting, uh, an interesting commentary there on both the nature of what it is to be a creative you know, what it is to produce art that indexes with the real world and becomes commercialized, and also with the feminine, you know, in both positive and negative, in kind of multiple different forms.

dollars a month, although there's different tiers of Patreon. But I'm also starting to get more into art videos and where I talk and I paint. I call a painting Discourse every Monday, and in the near near future I'm going to probably start releasing Patreon exclusive art videos as well. So but yeah, I have literally hours upon hours of content, and of course you know I have da with with Prude Credentialist Digital Archipelago every Tuesday night. And so yeah,

that's just go to my link tree. That's probably the best bat.