Transcript – Part 1

[Episode begins with the film trailer for Quid Pro Quo]

Jeff:

You are listening to invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling media representations of disability. This podcast is all about staring into the abyss of pop culture adjacent films that never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. So buckle up folks. The following content is rated I for invalid.

Mvll Crimes (theme song):

I’m arguing with strangers on the internet. Not going out today because I’m feeling too upset. Arguing with strangers on the internet and I’m winning. And I’m winning!

Jeff:

Welcome back to another thrilling episode of Invalid Culture. As always, I am your host, Jeff, and I’m joined once again by co-host sarah. How are you doing, sarah?

sar:

Oh, I can’t wait to talk about this movie. How are you doing?

Jeff:

I am frigging thrilled to talk about this film. This was one of the first movies I’ve wanted to cover on this podcast. It was an insight incident and years later, here we are, we finally get to talk about it. But this is a special episode. This is a special movie, and so we thought we would bring in a special guest. So we are joined today. Sarah and I joined by the one, the only, the legendary Lawrence Carter-Long. How are you doing, Lawrence?

Lawrence:

Oh, I am thrilled to be here with you as part of this very special episode.

Jeff:

Yes, they’re all special, but this one is a little more special. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Lawrence is of course most famously, perhaps for some people, not for me. Most famously curator and founder of this film series that was running in New York in the early 2000s. I was co-hosted three different spotlights on disability and film on Turner Classic Movies. Get that on your cable box. And for me, most famously portrayed a police officer in a very special film about a really fun summer as far as I know.

Lawrence:

The Best Summer Ever. Yeah, The Best Summer Ever.

Jeff:

Can you tell us a little bit about your turn on film?

Lawrence:

Sure. I’d spent so much time talking about film critiquing, film analyzing film, battering people around the ears with film. But what folks probably don’t know is that I started out in my youth as an actor. So in high school and in college, I was on stage doing theta spelled with an RE at the end instead of ER and very, very serious about that and thought it was something that I might pursue, right? So I got out of college early nineties, moved to New York City and found it was similar somewhat in college, but everybody was casting me. Here I am 20, 21 years old full of piss and vinegar, and yet I’m getting cast as the old man or the neighborly grandfather type or that kind of thing. And I was like, nah, that’s not me. So I shifted my energies and my attentions to focus on media and media representation, but film was always near and dear to my heart.

It was the thing that I always went back to. I didn’t walk till I was five. I have cerebral palsy myself, didn’t walk till I was five. So I was weaned in the days before cable in the seventies on old Laurel and Hardy films and chaplain films on the independent PBS station there in Indianapolis where I grew up. So I always seemed to go back to film and had this idea around 2006 when I was the communications coordinator for public policy org in New York City called the Disabilities Network of New York City. And a lot of the older folks, folks who were older than me, I was in my late thirties, early forties at that time, started saying, where are the young people? Why aren’t young folks coming to our meetings? How can we not engage with the younger generations? We want to get some cross-pollination going.

And it was my thought that if you want to appeal to young people, people, then you have to do something that they’re going to be interested in. And so I started thinking, well, how can we get folks in the door? And I had this wackadoodle idea. I thought, well, everybody, most of the films that we see about disability are all sappy, safe, and sentimental. What if we showed films that are kind of edgy and in your face and hard to label or hard to categorize? And so got a space donated, got six month grant to license the films, bring in guest stars. We’re doing this little experiment called this film series, and it was sort of like a middle finger to the establishment. And the way that we talked about it was disability through a whole new lens. And so with that idea in mind, we started this experiment downtown, lower East side Manhattan, to just surprise people, sex, drugs, and rock and roll all with wheelchairs. And it was this six month experiment that lasted four years because they wouldn’t let us stop once people started coming, right?

People could get a beer there. We had a popcorn machine. People could move the chairs around the space. It was a place called the Old Firehouse where they film the TV version of the Democracy Now program, or at least did in those days. So it was just kind of this hip edgy thing. It really wasn’t anything else like it in 2006 in New York City. And what started out as kind of a showcase for some British short films had about 20, 25 people and then it had 40 people, then it had 60 people, then it had 75 people. By the end of the six months, we were right up to around a hundred people a month for these monthly screenings. And we thought, oh, well, we can’t stop now. My initial question was, will people show up if I show this stuff that isn’t sappy safe or sentimental?

Will it just be me sitting there drinking beer and eating popcorn by myself or will other people show? And they did. And so the second question for the second evolution, if you will of this was we learned during the first iteration that it was a really great idea to have a conversation about the film after we screened it. So we would bring in producers, directors, actors, social workers, film critics, whoever it was to talk about the significance of this film. And I thought, ah, that’s where the magic happens. The movie is the vehicle, but it’s that crosspollination sitting across aisle from somebody that you may never wouldn’t be in the same room with otherwise sort of having the same community experience. And so we thought, oh, we’re never going to show a film without a conversation again. And this was after the second screening. And so the question became for the second round, will this spark conversation? And so I would always try to program movies that would get people talking. And we were about two years, just a little bit into two years of that experiment when we started having filmmakers, film producers, film distributors come to us and say, this movie hasn’t been released yet, but they’d written about us in the New York Times and other places by that point. So we were getting up some buzz and we were getting known. And so people was like, would you be kind of our test audience, if you will, our focus group?

sar:

That’s amazing.

Lawrence:

And that’s how the film that we’ll be discussing over the next couple episodes came to my attention and eventually came to be screened as a part of dismiss.

sar:

Did Quid Pro Quo end your film series hosting career?

Lawrence:

I’ll tell you this, it nearly did. We were able to go for a couple of years after that when I got a federal job and had to move to New York City. But it was very interesting, so I’ll give you the backstory. So the producers came to us and said, we’d already had our screening booked for that particular month. And they were like, would you add an extra screening? We’ll rent the room, we’ll pay for whatever the sign language interpreters, whatever it is you need. We would love to get your honest feedback. And I said, well, send me a screener. Let me take a look at the film first, right? Is this us? I’m not sure. It looks like it might be, but who knows? Hadn’t seen it yet. And by this stage, we had a really sophisticated audience. There were people there that were unpacking and really looking at, they knew a bit about disability history.

They were certainly part of disability culture. They were thinking critically about, because we were doing repertory films, we were doing first run films. We were doing films that were shown overseas at that point but didn’t have us distribution. And so people had been, at this point, two years in exposed to a lot of different things, and we had our regulars first Wednesday of the month, every month. They didn’t even care what we were showing. They would show up in order to have that conversation. And so I said, you got to understand this is a sophisticated audience. We’re there to have fun, but people are thinking critically about this stuff and analyzing it. Oh, that’s exactly what we want. Okay, good. So I got the screener, watched it and was flabbergasted because for so many reasons and we’ll get it. I know the second part, we’ll get into all the reasons, but this was 2008, maybe late 2007 or early 2008 when this happened, film hadn’t been released yet. Basically nobody had seen it. And I remember thinking as I was watching, I tried to pay close attention to the moment when it just fell off a cliff when I was just like, and it was this hard right turn up until about the 46 minute mark. I had problems here and there issues, concerns. I was wondering about it, but it just took this hard turn at about the 46 minute mark halfway through the film and it never recovered.

sar:

I think it’s generous to give it 46. Yeah, that’s pretty generous. That’s incredibly generous.

Lawrence:

Well, I think I was, I’m an optimist by me, and so I think it was up until the 46 minute mark, I thought, maybe it’s redeemable. Maybe they can do something and surprise me, pull this out. I think the saddest thing about this film and the most bewildering mind blowing thing about this film is that it actually has potential. There’s a lot that they could have done with it if they had come to us a little bit sooner. If they had talked to folks like yourselves or me or anybody actually,

sar:

Yeah, anyone would’ve qualified.

Lawrence:

…they put the film out. And so I think that most of my kind of antipathy and anger, which is very strong toward this film, and I think it was also very strong from our audience, was really based on the fact that it could have been something, it could have been a contender, it could have been something. And it just, after it took that turn, there was just no redeeming it. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse by God, it did. And so we set up the screening and so I tried to diplomatically talked the distribution company out of it, which was Magnolia Pictures and their PR person, oh, I want to attend, but don’t announce me. I just want to be a fly on the wall in the back of the room. And I was like, we can do that. Are you sure? Well, absolutely. We’ll do that.

And so everybody was there. It was our first time. We’d done two screenings of two different films in one month, and I promoted that the film studio had come to us and it was very excited about getting their honesty actions. And I’d warned the PR person from the distribution company, you’re going to get it. And I knew what was coming. I could see it, the writing on the wall because I’d seen the film and I was just like, okay, well, this will be an interesting experiment. And it literally, Sarah, it literally was in the four years that we did the film series, no film at any point caused the type of blowback and visceral hatred did. People were just so angry and just throwing bombs at this thing. And I remember I would always lead discussions after the screening, and I remember about 15 minutes into it, I had noted at the beginning of the screening that the PR person had introduced herself to me before things began, and I noted where she sat and all of that, and I looked up, gone.

sar:

I was expecting you to say she had burst into tears crying her eyes.

Lawrence:

There might’ve been this little pile of dust or ash there at the bottom of the chair. I don’t recall, but she was just no longer in the room, and I remember trying to email her and talk because I felt kind of bad,

sar:

Deleted, unfollowed.

Lawrence:

She just disappeared off the face of name change.

sar:

Yeah, she actually changed countries. She’s no longer an American citizen. I actually would’ve paid real life money to have been there, preferably beside the Magnolia producer PR person. As soon as that movie ended and the energy in the room kicked off, I would pay concert ticket money to have been there in that moment. As soon as the movie,

Lawrence:

It was so funny, I would do a thing where as the lights went up, the credits start to roll and the lights would go up and I would stand in the front of the room. I had a bar stool. I kind of lean up against it and the first thing I’d always say was, so what did you think? Right? The booze, this chorus, this cacophony

sar:

Having the microphone: okay, guys, we’re going to do this one at a time.

Lawrence:

And I was like, well, yeah, I’m glad we don’t have tomatoes. I was just like, okay. And so I see that you didn’t like it and well, why? And the magic shoes and all of the people were just flabbergasted. But as I think back now, having literally just watched this because I’ve been putting it off, I want to tell you Jeff, I’d seen it in 2008. I was so scarred and traumatized by that experience. I had not watched it again in all these years. So we’re talking well over a decade. I was like, no, man, I don’t want to revisit that thing. But watching it again this morning and having the benefit of hindsight, I think the thing that frustrates me most about this film is that if they’d gone about it differently, they actually could have done something.

sar:

I actually totally agree with that. I think that a bunch of, I think Jeff said it was only one writer, but this guy had clearly encountered some entry level Crip theory and then was like, I think I could do something really subversive with this. And the movie wanted to be so critical, and it was trying to come up with new acronyms and new ways of looking at Crip theory in the moment, but they were also wasted and haha and blatantly offensive that every time it tries to have an inspired moment, it’s something like Welcome to Hell or Paralyze Yourself.

Jeff:

Yeah

Lawrence:

It was all this kind of this fun house mirror of Crip theory where it’s just distorted left and and up and down and where it’s almost recognizable, but not quite,

sar:

But not quite.

Lawrence:

And so you’re left sort of a little literally off balance watching this thing going. This is almost familiar, but this is some alternate universe that I’m not a part of where the streets look the same and they look like human beings, but something’s dangerously desperately off.

Jeff:

I think there’s an apt metaphor here. It almost feels like a movie about someone who is pretending to be disabled, and that is maybe fitting because…

sar:

Holy shit, Jeff,

Jeff:

That’s the film that we are talking about right now is of course the one and only Quid Pro Quo. Now, for those of you who have not seen Quid Pro Quo…

Lawrence:

Wait, congratulations. First off, congrats. Congratulations for not seeing it.

Jeff:

Yes, you have made a phenomenal choice with your life. That’s why we exist. You get to learn about these films without having to subject yourself to them. Okay, so what is quid pro quo? Well, according to the mixers of the film, it is a darkly erotic movie from the box. When a man walks into a hospital and offers a doctor $250,000 to amputate a perfectly healthy leg reporter, Isaac Knot Next all becomes intrigued, not who lost the use of his legs in a childhood car accident, finds his professional interests turn into personal business. Fiona Viga, a mysterious and sexy informant, offers him an odd exclusive, an introduction to the disturbing new subculture.

sar:

I think it’s even generous to call professional disability pretendianism a subculture. I really wouldn’t even reward it, that name.

Jeff:

Yeah. Okay. So if we take a step back, how does this box, does that accurately describe the movie that you were forced to watch here?

sar:

Not really.

Lawrence:

No. No, I don’t think so. And I think that is the problem with the film in general. If I were to narrow down and distill the issues with the film disability, not withstanding, which we’ll get into the nitty gritty about that in a bit, I was like, what does it want to be? It has this identity crisis. So it’s like not only do the characters have these identity crisises, but the film has an identity crisis. It’s sort of marketed as kind of a Cronenberg-esque or a David Lynchian kind of film. But as I was watching it, I’m seeing more Brian de Palma and shades of Michael Powell’s, The Red Shoes, even with the magic shoes and all of that business. And so what I think with the filmmaker is that either knowingly or not knowingly, I’m not sure. I think they directed and wrote it, had all these influences that had either subconsciously seeped into their brain or consciously tried to rip off all these other filmmakers but didn’t commit to any of it. So there’s this kind of half-assed touching on a theme or dropping a hint somewhere, but then never really committing to that theme or to that idea, which leaves you with this unsatisfying hodgepodge of what is going on here, what are we watching, and how did this film get made?

Jeff:

Yeah. Well, I mean, that is a great question. How did this film get made? Well, it was written and directed by a person named Carlos Brooks. Brooks would actually follow up this film with another writer, director, joint/calamity, which was titled Burning Bright. This was a film about a woman and her autistic brother that have to survive being trapped in a house with a tiger during the hurricane. So this is somebody who likes to mash stuff together.

sar:

That’s next week’s film.

Jeff:

Spoiler alert…

Lawrence:

God, just put it in a blender. Wow.

sar:

Okay. Yeah, I love it.

Jeff:

Spoiler alert, we will be doing this film next year.

Lawrence:

Wait, let’s just revisit this minute. We’ve got a hurricane, a tiger, single mother. Is it a single mother?

Jeff:

Sister.

Lawrence:

Sister, okay. And an autistic child.

Jeff:

Correct. Yeah. I think he is a teenager possibly, but yes. Yeah. Anyways, I am anxiously the DVD to arrive at my house, and we will be doing this film next year.

sar:

Life of Pi as visualized in a New York slum.

Jeff:

Yes. Yeah, it’s basically like Rain Man and Life of Pi slammed together with that Hurricane Heist movie. Yeah,

sar:

I like that he seems to think that slamming together two really iconic directorial styles is a film sub genre, and he is not even wrong. And the films that I would’ve used for Quid Pro Quo were kind of Mary Harran, American Psycho with anything by David Lynch, slammed together to try to make Disability Theory as visualized by American Psycho and Memento.

Lawrence:

And it did. It tried so hard at the beginning of the film, really.

sar:

It was a really earnest effort at Memento, American Psycho Crip Theory, and I really like how hard it tried, but it didn’t stick to the Landing.

Lawrence:

You’re five minutes in and he’s talking about ABs and PWDs

sar:

Table bodies.

Jeff:

Oh, man. Okay. So we are going to talk about the acronym nonsense in this film. I pitched to Sarah that we should do this entire episode just in acronyms. Yeah, because there were so many shot down. Now, part of the answer on why this may might not great is that it was produced in part by HD Net Films and Sanford Pillsbury Productions, I’m assuming Sanford Pillsbury Productions, I don’t know this, but I’m guessing is probably Carlos Brooks’s production company in which they produce two films, HD net films, mostly concert videos. So they have concert videos for Bush Newfound Glory sticks, Liza Minnelli. They have put out several dramas, including the architect and several horror movies, one of which is called S Ampersand Man, which apparently is known as Sandman, not S and M Man, which I think would’ve been way better as well as a movie called Bubble.

So I think there wasn’t a lot of production support, let’s say. But despite that, this film did draw two very big actors at the time. Nick Stall is our main character who plays Isaac Knotts. This is not his only disability related role. Nick Stall is also appeared in film’s life, A Man Without a Face, Thin Red Line, Sin City, Disturbing Behavior. While he was a bit of an A-lister at the time of this film, he’s sort of devolved into more of a B or possibly C list actor at this point. He just was in a thing called Knights of the Zodiac, which has nothing to do with the Zodiac Killer. Very disappointing. As well as,

Lawrence:

Or Knighthood maybe at all.

Jeff:

It’s like if you took the Marvel Universe and then you put it in the microwave for about an hour. And then of course Stall is also Beloved in HBO’s Carnival, which is a whole other disability conversation. Exactly. Entirely. Nick is mirrored by Vera Farmiga, who plays Fiona the love interest. Now, Vera is of course a legitimate actor who’s had a remarkable career, included Oscar movies like The Departed, Up in the Air, is in the billions of horror movies associated with the Conjuring-verse as Lorraine.

sar:

I was going to say: how are you naming anything but The Conjuring first?

Jeff:

All of the Conjuring. Yep. She’s also done well in television with Bates Motel.

sar:

Bates Motel. She’s actually playing the same role in this movie.

Jeff:

Pretty much. That’s what she disappeared to at the end.

Lawrence:

That’s kind of her archetype.

sar:

Yeah, she’s reprising her creepy, oddly sexy, but not sexy at all mother.

Jeff:

And so I have never seen both Bates Hotel. How much does ancient Chinese girls come up in that show?

sar:

Oh, absolutely none. Because America doesn’t observe other cultures, but there would definitely be more ancient Chinese women.

Jeff:

And last but certainly not least…that’s right, sports fans! You did see for a brief moment the beloved Amy Mullins as Isaac’s ex-girlfriend Raine. Now, interestingly, by my count, she has one scene in the entire movie. However, there are deleted scenes from this film that you could watch on the DVD, and most of them are scenes involving her character. So yes, this is true. The movie cut out almost all of the scenes that involved the actually disabled actor that was attached to this film.

Lawrence:

Which begs another question, Jeff. Now I have not had the pleasure of seeing these deleted scenes, but, and when director’s cut with these scenes included in context to the rest of the film, would you subject yourself to that?

Jeff:

Okay…we are going to put an enormous pin on that because I did subject myself and I did it for a very specific reason, which we’re going to talk about in about 15 minutes.

sar:

He actually did it to give me a textual blow by blow of every single deleted scene, which was appreciated because I didn’t have to watch.

Jeff:

I narrated it. Now, we obviously have our own opinions about these movies and they’re valid opinions, however, we are not the only ones. So let’s take a look at some of the critical response has been to this film. So I’ve got a couple quotes here from Rotten Tomatoes that we’ve pulled from movie critics. As you can imagine, this movie was not really beloved by the critical class. David Eldine has written. The first half of quid pro quo is amongst the most jaw dropping things I’ve ever seen. Who knew there was a closeted subculture of people pretending to be paraplegics…

sar:

Which to be, I want to be super clear about this. There’s not.

Jeff:

Who knew?

sar:

I feel like the movie that its chief fallacy is perpetuating the subculture of people faking disability, which is what everybody’s getting so mad about. If you haven’t seen the film and the fact that people are coming away, coming away with this saying, wow, I didn’t know so many people were faking disability is the problem with the film.

Jeff:

Every single one, every single person you’ve see in a wheelchair is actually probably a wannabe

sar:

They have been. Try to push them out because they’ll probably get up

Lawrence:

And Yeah, I guess when we’re doing the scene by scene, we can talk about this. There’s several scenes where they do that. They literally do that. They get up and they carry the chair

Jeff:

…the wheelchair away

sar:

This movie put the ADA back 20 years, and it was released in 2006.

Jeff:

Now, Rex Reed has a very interesting, I would love to hear what your thought is on Rex Reed’s comment. Rex Reed writes about this film. It certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of breakfast bitters, but you can’t dismiss it nonchalantly.

sar:

Oh, I can.

Lawrence:

Well, I got to tell you what, he was with me. I was with him completely until that last word. No, I don’t think you can dismiss it nonchalantly. I think you have to dismiss it vehemently. I think you have to dismiss it with all the passion that you can muster. So he had me, I was with him up until the nonchalant, and I’m like, you know what? I guess he’s right. You can’t dismiss it nonchalant because it does provoke such strong reactions.

Jeff:

Yeah. Now, Lawrence, it’s my understanding that you’ve also found some very intriguing references in terms of analysis of this film. What did you dig up for us?

Lawrence:

Yeah. One of the things that strikes me about this film that I did not recall from blanking it out and blocking it out, which for a movie about repressed memories, I guess that would be appropriate, but I was a radio show host and producer in New York City during time, and so part of my sort of mo in preparing for any interview, whether I’m a host or a guest, is to kind of do my research and kind of read the teale, see what people were talking about and what the reviews, basically what we’re doing now ran across this review, sort of this aside in the review in the San Francisco Chronicle, which says this, its biggest mystery is how quid pro quo was financed by Texas Trillionaire and Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban, no less, and selected for distribution.

Jeff:

Yes. This is a hundred percent accurate. He is in the credits.

sar:

Mark Cuban saw some form of this script or movie and was like, seems legit.

Jeff:

I’m in.

Lawrence:

I just want to know the origin story. I want to know how that meeting came to be. I want to know what was said during that meeting and how much he bankrolled. What was his buy literally?

sar:

I want to know if they got Mark Cuban via Vera Farmiga’s crip fantasy theory. I think that’s what would’ve sold him on it.

Jeff:

See, my theory is I think Mark Cuban is the reason we have these big name actors in the film. That’s my suspicion.

sar:

Thank Mark Cuban for Vera Farmiga.

Jeff:

My suspicion, I don’t want to say that you owe us as a community, but I think you owe us as a community, Mark Cuban, if you can bankroll one film, you should be required to bankroll the counterpoint to this film. I think.

sar:

What would the counterpoint to this film incredibly sexy, disabled people who weren’t faking it at all?

Lawrence:

What I’m kind of imagining is I would as a test, as an exercise to myself, a challenge, a challenge to myself. If I were given this film, I would try my best to leave everything as it was up until the 46 minute mark. And then the challenge, what would I change afterwards? And here’s what I think I would change after that 46 minute mark is I would have Mr. Magic shoes here, Nick Stall, suddenly because the only other Crip he knows is the priest, right? His buddy who

sar:

Father Basketbal

Jeff:

Father Basketball, that’s what we call him.

Lawrence:

His basketball buddy who’s in two quick scenes and that’s all. He’s supposed to be this old friend. But the only time we see or hear him or think about him, and you know that he dates Amy Mullins. He dated at least Amy Mullins character, but it doesn’t appear by my viewing of the film that he’s at all interested, invested or connected to disability culture at all. And so what I would like to see is that character, as he starts investigating this story, stumbling across a crew like the folks who used to come to this film series, and because we had disabled folks, trans folks, academics, activists, this whole spectrum of people that had their own reasons for being there that were wild, that they were always drinking. We had dance parties after the screenings. And so I’d like to see through no intention of his own, the guy kind of stumbling, pun intended across Crip culture, and then getting kind of jazzed by it and writing a different story, pursuing a different story. So instead of being fixated and hung up on the magic shoes, he gets turned on to Crip culture. He gets turned on to the people that we know and the people that we talk to, and it takes a turn. And he kind of embraces that

sar:

This is such a wholesome and earnest rewriting of this movie, and I love it, and it makes me really love Lawrence that he’s like, I love how this started and I just want him to meet Crip community and all of us can just love each other. My answer to that question was I wanted to go full mockery in the other direction.

Lawrence:

So like full blown satire

sar:

Walking into a university like, ha, check out my five degrees and all this walking, I can do down 15 building hallways and all of these meta stereotypes to ability, but done really s sardonically.

Jeff:

So Forrest Gump is what you wanted. You wanted this to become Forrest Gump.

sar:

Forrest Gump in a university.

Lawrence:

Well, and I could see a hybrid. So the Crips that he runs across, radicalize him, right? And then he decides he’s going to F with the system. I would love to see this merry band of Crips just running around New York City causing anarchy and just disrupting things left and right. That would be the movie. That’s the movie. This could have been, right?

sar:

You’re pushing the movie Newsies,

Jeff:

Crip Newsies.

sar:

It actually already exists

Lawrence:

Their own nonprofit media group, right? They’re going around. He had no issue getting into the taxi cab, right? There’s a scene. We’ll get into this, right? Yeah. I will say this. Every restaurant, every apartment building, every public space is accessible. Nobody, out of all the wannabe Crips, the real Crips, the who know Crips in the film, they never run across any access accommodations. They never that are not provided, right? They never bump into any obstacles that are the day-to-day realities that we face. And so it would be fun to see a bunch of Crips then take it upon themselves to, with Sledgehammers, create those curb cuts where they do not yet exist.

sar:

It’s true as a New York citizen, that New York City is actually a utopia for are paralyzed people and other Crip identity.

Lawrence:

Again, I think it was an alternate universe because that’s not the New York City that I experienced.

sar:

Am I to believe that New York City is actually a disability utopia?

Jeff:

Well, according to some other people, that might be the case because of course, lots of uppity people go to things like the New York Post and the Washington Post to get their culture. But the real ones know that the best critical analysis comes to us in the comment section, the IMDB and various websites. But I prefer Amazon and IMDB are my two preferred for just the best takes. So I have two that I for us to get into here. Our first one comes from Bernstein 3, 2, 9. He provided this film with a one out of 10 rating, the title being Garbola, which I like that. Zesty. Bernstein 3, 2, 9 says, this was probably the worst movie I have seen since the arrival and one of the worst films I’ve seen in my entire life having been suckered into renting this horrific piece of garbage. I left the movie experience feeling Ill, literally horrible, screenwriting, atrocious acting, contrived bullshit plots and unbelievable characters, magic shoes, ginger. Jake, am I expected to believe that someone who has been in a wheelchair for 20 years could just get up and start walking somehow? I don’t think the human body works that way.

sar:

That’s actually an unfair and incredibly hilarious review because there was actually an entire two minute montage dedicated to how hard it is to get up out of a wheelchair and walk immediately.

Lawrence:

And this guy had no physical therapy. I mean, he does talk a little bit about, well, I swim.

sar:

Yes. Oh, he does 17 sports.

Jeff:

He does 17 sports!

Lawrence:

But none of them which uses legs. And so he’s just able to rise up out of the chair via Jimmy Swaggart or whatever.

sar:

The sheer force of his masculinity allowed him to rise up and above using the magic shoes.

Jeff:

Yes, of course. So anyway, this one cracked me up, particularly because he identifies the reality that there is magic shoes in this universe, but he still refuses to believe that magic would be able to overcome disability, which I thought that was also fairly interesting. Even

sar:

A alternate universe, you’re going to need more than shoes, bud.

Jeff:

You’re trying to tell me that candle can just magic potion his way, and a Frodo is not a little person. Come on.

sar:

Which actually introduces a secondary more interesting conversation about what magic item would’ve been enough for him if he put on a magic suit of armor and able to walk.

Jeff:

A magic watch?

sar:

Is that enough magic to disability ratio that it cancels out?

Jeff:

Yeah. Well, yeah, you would need to go to a doctor to get that prescription. Sarah, obviously,

Lawrence:

Who is the sorcerer, which is duing out these magic clothing items, right? The capes, the coats, the belts.

sar:

He gave him a magic hat. Would he have accomplished the same montage?

Jeff:

And the source of said magic, of course, is a pawn shop where he found the shoes, which of course now, okay

sar:

Which implies that this is part of actually a whole series of people who used to be disabled, use the magic shoes are no longer disabled, and now they’re passing it on to the next poor disabled man who needs to get his girlfriend back. But his girlfriend implied, the one person must always walk in relationship rule

Jeff:

But we’re not going to give it to them. We’re going to put it in a pawn shop and hope they find it.

sar:

They’ll know If you’re looking for this, you’ll know.

Lawrence:

And I got to tell you what, as a viewer, again, with the benefit of hindsight, I was a little disappointed, and maybe it’s in those deleted scenes or those extra scenes, but I wholly expected upon seeing this again, that because he could walk and he had then met the criteria of one person in the relationship should be able to walk, that we would see the Amy Mullen’s character again at the end. But no, he was still obsessed with the gal that caused his injury in the first place. So I was a little disappointed by that. I thought, close this loop here, people.

Jeff:

So it turns out you actually might be an Nostradamus. So as I was going through the reviews, many of the positive reviews for this movie would make the same claim, which was, this movie was infinitely better if you included the deleted scenes. I’m not joking. Multiple comments said, you got to watch the deleted scenes. It makes this movie a million times better. You’ve just got to watch them. So that’s exactly what I did. I pulled up the old DVD and I found that there were in fact 10 minutes of deleted scenes, which largely consisted of Isaac reunited with rain, his ex who had dumped him for not being able to walk, but they reconcile once. He is now not a disabled person. My personal favorite though of the deleted scenes is one in which Isaac does go to a doctor to confirm if the shoes are in fact magic. And the doctor says, and I quote, yes, you could walk. I suspected it the minute you roll through that door, which is exactly how that could work. Exactly. A closed runner up was a scene in which he goes to visit and apologize to wheelchair, priest, basketball enthusiast, priest, Dave, father Dave. And at the end of the scene, he asks Isaac how he feels now that he’s able to walk. And Isaac responds like a bicycle, and then the scene ends. And I have zero idea what that means.

sar:

Father Basketball, you can’t do me like this.

Lawrence:

Yeah, come on. Come on, father.

Jeff:

What? Isaac feels like a bicycle now that he’s able to walk again. I don’t know, maybe that he’s getting ridden all the time now by his new girlfriend.

sar:

Okay. Funny. Okay.

Lawrence:

But that would be Raine, not the

sar:

Not Vera Farmiga, no, she gets canned in either scenario. Can I ask a possibly provocative question based on that?

Jeff:

I would love you to.

sar:

Are you feeling comfortable with me, Lawrence, to ask a possibly provocative question.

Lawrence:

I am seated. I’m strapped in. Let’s go in for the duration. Go for it.

sar:

I wonder if, because you said there were a number of reviews that said if you had included all these scenes where he spoke a little more on the shoes or got back together with the actually disabled character in the movie, it would feel like a better film. And I’m just thinking in the spur of the moment here, I feel like they kind of missed the point of the film because I feel like the point of the film was that all of these pretending are around him, and they’re all psychosomatically disabled, which is another way of saying they’re either doing it to themselves or it’s for some reason all in their heads, or it’s some kind of overcomeable circumstance by way of physical therapy, which this movie thinks is bullshit or regular therapy, which this movie also thinks is bullshit. And then the big reveal at the end of the movie, spoiler alert, is that he was psychosomatically disabled the whole time.

So if you wanted his resolution to be, oh, good, now he can get with the disabled girl, I feel like the reveal was lost on you because he actually belonged with all of these people the entire time. He was not the outlier and Vera, far Miga fantasizes about his psychoso, not the fact that he’s disabled. And she actually goes as far as applying that as far as she can go consciously upon herself. So if you want him to end up with this neat little love story resolution, did they not get the ending? Did they actually think the shoes were magic?

Lawrence:

Well, I think that’s the problem with the film. As we said earlier, it touches upon, it almost goes there. It alludes to, and it plants a seed, but then none of these things sprout. None of these things grow. And so you’re left with this hodgepodge, right? This mashup of things that could have been, that are never really actually realized, or I would say even pursued. So it just sells itself short on every conceivable level. It doesn’t commit to any of these things. And so you’re left being scratching your head and kind of frustrated by what it could have been.

Jeff:

And speaking of not committing, I am not going to commit to talking about this movie anymore this week. It’s time for us to end on a cliffhanger.

sar:

What a transition.

Jeff:

If you want to know more about this film for, I’m going to say sadomasochistic reasons, then you will need to tune in next week where we do a deep dive on Quid Pro quote

[Mvll Crimes theme song interlude]

Jeff:

And thus concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it or not. Either way, please take a second. If you haven’t to subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform you’re using, tell a friend, and better yet, do you want to be a victim on the podcast? Go on to our website, invalid culture.com, submit your name. We would love to terrorize you with a bad movie, have a bad movie of your own that you think that we should watch. Again, jump on our website, invalid culture.com, submit it, and we would love to watch the trash. Be sure to tune in again next week for part two, where we will start to dig into the movie and find out whether or not it wins the coveted Jerry Lewis seal of approval

Mvll Crimes (theme song):

Arguing with strangers on the Internet. Everyone is wrong, I just haven’t told them yet.

Transcript – Part 2

Jeff:

Previously on invalid culture.

Fiona (Vera Farmiga):

People who get off on braces and wheelchairs are called devotees. They’re a joke. They’re the bottom rung. Above them are the pretenders. They wear the braces, they push the wheels, but they don’t belong to their chairs Still. If they want to fantasize, that’s their choice. Then there are the wannabes. You saw how crazy they are.

Isaac (Nick Stahl):

What makes you different than I wannabe or pretending?

Fiona (Vera Farmiga):

I’m a unique case. I don’t want to be paralyzed.

Isaac (Nick Stahl):

You don’t.

Fiona (Vera Farmiga):

I already am paralyzed. I’m just trapped in a walking person’s body.

Jeff:

You are listening to invalid culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling media representations of disability. This podcast is all about staring into the abyss of pop culture adjacent films that never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. So buckle up folks. The following content is rated I for invalid.

Mvll Crimes (theme song):

I’m arguing with strangers on the internet not going out today because I’m feeling too upset with strangers on the, and I’m winning. I’m winning.

Jeff:

Welcome back to another thrilling day Invalid Culture, back with part two of Quid Pro Quo. Once again, we are joined by co-host, sarah, how are you doing this week, sarah?

sar:

I literally can’t wait to finish this conversation. Quid pro quo winning.

Jeff:

Are you a better or worse person a week later?

sar:

Probably better, but only because I had time to explore the darkly erotic depths of quid pro quo.

Jeff:

Yeah, that’s fair. And again, we are joined by our resident expert and quid pro quo enthusiast. Lauren Carter-Long.

Lawrence:

Yeah, it’s flipped me. I’ve, I’ve gone from somebody who was highly traumatized myself by this film to one who is imagining all the possibilities of what could have been, should have been, might’ve been if this had been handled differently. And congratulations, sarah, on exploring those dark recesses of yourself via this film. I’m glad to know it was good for something.

sar:

Thank you.

Jeff:

So what is quid pro quo for those of you who have not watched this film? Well, our dark, gritty and titillated tale that is extremely horny begins with the introduction of radio journalists, wheelchair user Isaac, who is totally not working for NPR. It is some other leftist New York talk radio station. It is not NPR

Introduced as a spicy new story. Apparently a man recently tried to bribe a surgeon to amputate his perfectly fine legs, Isaac getting over being dumped by his PWD girlfriend because he cannot walk, decides to take up the story because geez, it’s really tough being disabled because cops won’t pull over for you. And so why would someone want to do this after tugging on the frayed threads like a good noir Detective Isaac has tipped off on a literal dank basement meeting of a special group of people, the wannabes. It is here that Isaac learns. There is a whole constellation of abs, which apparently means able-bodied people who find the idea of disability, sexy and cool. These folks go around pretending to be disabled, trying to learn the PWDs way of life and and speaking so that they can pass in the culture of the pws. So basically this is a totally normal anthropology department at any coastal university.

sar:

It’s true. There’s some really inclusive commentary there about the type of people who study other people for a living, and I don’t think it was intentional, but it is funny.

Jeff:

Yeah, absolutely. Little jab, but are my anthropologist friends. Okay. So I think we probably need to start our conversation. Okay. I’m not even going to do, I don’t even know where to start. Where do we want to start on the start of

sar:

This film? Can I propose something?

Jeff:

Please save me.

sar:

I was struck in the first, I guess you’re doing thirds, the first third of this film, by how many times Stall has to tell you point blank to the viewership. I have sex. This guy has the ultimate broken masculinity, straight white male syndrome of, I need to tell you on a literally constant basis how much I’m getting it. One of his opening lines in this film, for those of you who hasn’t seen it, is I have sex. I just can’t get cabs, which I think is supposed to be sexy.

Lawrence:

We can go a little deeper with that, sarah, because as I watched it again in preparation for this conversation, the actual quote is, I can HAVE sex.

sar:

Oh my goodness.

Lawrence:

And so is this aspirational? Yes. Is my question.

sar:

I guess we’re asking, he wants to tell me every 20 minutes that he can have sex maybe because he’s telling himself

Lawrence:

Yes. Yes. I think that maybe this is aspirational for him that he can, whether or not he is, he can, but maybe he just is getting in his own way. And

Jeff:

There’s some evidence there. He does actually miss out on an opportunity for population moments later in which one of his absolutely not NPR coworkers sets him up on a date with ABHB and it doesn’t go well. Unfortunately, she does not wish to sleep with him because she, in his words, doesn’t want to be a good person that day. Which yeah, there is some gender politics stuff going on in this film, which is fascinating.

Lawrence:

Well, and the date, right? The date doesn’t even, again, it’s sort of this ends prematurely in that the date doesn’t even happen, right? No. He enters the restaurant strangely accessible. And I believe he asks for the name, says the name out loud to a bartender or a wait staff or something. And you see, I believe you see the person behind him kind of pay attention to that. And next thing you know, she’s at the curb hailing a cab. Right. Same cab that he can’t catch right?

Jeff:

Yeah. The obsession would not being able to catch a cab is throughout this film. And I found it particularly interesting. I mean, okay, full disclosure, I do not live in New York. I live in a small Canadian town, we’ll call it a village, the Village of London, Ontario. And my understanding of the problem with cabs, it’s not so much that they won’t pull over for you as the racial discrimination thing. It’s more that when you call for one, there are none that are accessible. That seems to be the issue.

Lawrence:

That is the issue. And I was the communications coordinator. I don’t think I’d quite been the executive director of the Disabilities Network of New York City by this point, but I was doing advocacy in New York City and it was all public policy work. We were engaging, the whole point of the organization was to engage with the mayor’s office to come up with public policies that would benefit disabled folks in New York City. That’s pretty cool. Taxi cabs was one of the issues that was a priority for us. And so we were doing forums with the Taxi and Limousine Commission. There were car services that theoretically speaking, pick people up if you’re not disabled. And I remember this was the same year, this came out 2008. That was the same year that I did an interview with Penn and Teller’s Bullshit television team. And the whole point in one of the scenes of the episode, I literally hailed down a taxi, had the camera crew hop in the taxi with me, and then talked about how out of millions of people in New York City and tens of thousands of taxis, only 25 were wheelchair accessible at that point. So you’d have a better chance of spotting a unicorn or Elvis at the Burger King than you would in getting an accessible taxi.

Jeff:

Now, another real New York culture question I have this film at the beginning of the film is extremely assertive, that there are specific phrases, specifically acronyms, that all disabled people use, including the assertion that disabled people refer to themselves as pws, that we refer to people that don’t have disabilities as abs as an able bodied. And that at times there are also addendums to this acronym based on the quality of the body. Specifically you are an HB as in a hot body. So you could be P-W-D-H-B, you could be an A-B-H-D, I myself am P-W-D-A-B-PhD.

sar:

Very good, very good.

Lawrence:

I think you win the acronym Olympics there. Yeah.

Jeff:

Is this a New York thing or is this a, I don’t actually know about disability culture thing.

Lawrence:

This is one of those, this is what I imagine disability culture to be without doing the actual homework is what this is.

sar:

This is kind of funny because acronyms are themselves extremely inaccessible. So it’s like the most inaccessible way of going about trying to make accessible, culture accessible, but in trying to be accessible about accessible culture, you’ve actually made it even more inaccessible than had you just said No, she’s able bodied.

Jeff:

Right.

Lawrence:

Well, I think it’s trying really hard to make it the subculture with its own lingo and its own in way of talking, but in a way that’s painful in a way that it’s like, I don’t know, akin to Sally Field saying, you like me, you really, really like me. It’s so awareness that you’re just like, oh, give me a freaking break in ways that it’s so transparent and so obvious that folks never really do. It’s those assumptions one makes about how people talk or what community is like. But having never really spent any time with those giving

sar:

Twitter academic activism, am I right?

Jeff:

It’s true. It’s so true. And the thing that that’s most jarring about the assertion of these phrases as common lingo is that there are actual phrases that are common lingo. It is not uncommon for us to refer to normies or walkies. We have these actual phrases that we actually use and the movie was like, Nope, I’m going to make up my own terms and I’m going to assert with authority that these are the terms they all use.

Lawrence:

And it’s a slightly askew, a warped version of those terms and phrases. So instead of saying, which maybe the generation or two before us would maybe say something about tabs or people who are temporarily able bodied. So it’s a bastardization of what kind of sort of did exist, but without having the context to get it right.

Jeff:

Yeah. Now, speaking of context, to get it right, we have to talk about this meeting in the basement.

sar:

I love the basement

Lawrence:

And I love that there’s this Mexican sit off as he starts to go into the room. We don’t know how he got down there, first off, because we learn later there’s a reveal. I’ll let you give the reveal, but we don’t know how the hell he gets to this room to start with at this stage in the story. But when he goes through the dark shadows and gets to the room and knocks on the door and sees them sort of in the distance in the shadows, they open the door and there’s kind of this a Mexican standoff where they’re kind of sizing up each other. Who’s the real, who are you? And you almost hear the Sergio Leone music playing in the background.

Jeff:

Yeah, absolutely.

sar:

This isn’t CDS gang. This is the handicap mafia.

Jeff:

So my question for all of you is this is apparently as the movie sets it up for us, this is a reg that we’re meeting of people who are wannabes. They want to be disabled, but they are not expecting a PWD as the movie says to a real one, a live one to walk into the room. So my question is, what in the ever living hell happens at this meeting on a regular basis? What do these people do at these meetings?

sar:

I have a theory and it’s a little bit bitter and it’s a little bit mean, but I do have a theory, and I do think it was intentional. I think Lawrence was kind of dead on with the anthropology quip, where if you get a bunch of these people where they really want to understand this culture and they’re really lusting after being accepted by that culture, by that community, and you see this a lot with people who talk about Russiaboos, Weeaboo kind of thing, where they’re not X thing, but they love X thing enough that they really want to be or become X thing. So they’re doing it with Crips. So he comes to the basement, a real live Crip with all of these academics who are studying this and want to be able to be an expert on this and want to be accepted in the community.

Sociology, anthropology, critical disability studies, all of these fields who are totally guilty of this, going and doing conferences about people with disabilities with no sense of irony that that’s not the terminology and hasn’t been for as long as I’ve been alive. And then when they encounter someone who has real claim to the identity, or at least passes better to have claim to the identity because the big reveal was that he also doesn’t, which is relevant, but if you’re in this room with all these people who are willing to revere you and put you on a pedestal as this person, I think that’s how you get cultures of academics who will circle jerk themselves, so to speak, about how much they know about a culture they’re not actually a part of, or observing from a distance or only engaging with parts that they’re comfortable with or only engaging with academics who are Crips kind of thing, instead of actually going out into not basement New York and meeting real scare quotes, disabled people who could teach them so much more. I think that was a really obvious literal, very much they’re hitting you on the head with this analogy for people who are either studying this or want really badly to be accepted by it as an expert.

Lawrence:

And I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, I do think that we’re probably giving this movie more credit than it deserves in that regard. But one of the things that strikes me, Sarah, as I listened to your astute analysis, is that these individuals really don’t care about real disabled people. What they’re interested in is their fantasy. What they’re interested in is the cosplay aspect, their notion of what disability is, and they don’t want to invite anything in that might disrupt that magical thinking that might disrupt that false impression that they have. So I think this is really more about being committed to the fantasy than it is about any real interest or inclination to find out about disability, culture, disability, community, even the issues that disabled people face, whether it’s being able to get into a damn taxi or not, those things can’t even broach the threshold of the topic because they all run the risk of disrupting the fantasy.

sar:

But that cosplay aspect is what so many not naming names and we’re not going to of disability, especially academic critical disability, are guilty of, right? They want to pass just enough to be one or be an expert or especially be loved or beloved as an expert.

Lawrence:

So yeah, you want to be sort of disabled adjacent without any of the headaches. Yeah, I think that’s what…

sar:

Yeah, those people who make tons of money doing UDL lectures, but all their information about UDL is wrong. That didn’t actually matter to them. They just want to be known for it because that’s associated with all of these great things about what your cosplay identity is. Look how much she cares. Look how EDI she is.

Lawrence:

Yes, exactly. And that’s why I think they have that face off when he opened. The door opens, there’s like, right, and he is coming into the room. He’s a threat to All right.

sar:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff:

And the realest part of the movie might be the one guy saying, I don’t feel comfortable doing this in front of him. And he pulls off his trach tube and they all leave. They pick their wheelchairs up and walk up a flight of stairs to meeting, there’s the reveal.

Lawrence:

So it appears right there in this dark musty, not particularly well lit basement, which says to me without overtly saying it, that this is not an official group in the way that a Alcoholics Anonymous group might meet. That they’re what? Sneaking into the church…

Jeff:

Right, they’re breaking in.

Lawrence:

…basement to have their, and the thing is, I’ve been in that building. That building is where back when I did animal protection work in New York City, that’s where group that worked to get animals spayed neutered would have their meetings. None of them were ever in the basement in a badly lit room. And so I’m like, is this an official get together? Is it not on the bulletin board of the church? Why is it that they then fold their wheelchairs up at the top of the stairs or the bottom of the stairs depending on where you are, and then go down and do their meeting? Right.

sar:

No. It’s giving pager location an hour before meetup.

Jeff:

It’s like the police were going to bust in the door and be like, no, you can’t be pretending that here. And they’re like, we’re not pretenders we are wannabes!

sar:

A cosplay. Police have busted this operation.

Jeff:

Now after the seedy underground meeting, Isaac continues to dig into this subculture and he is introduced to quote, I’m not making this up Ancient Chinese girl. It turns out to be neither ancient nor Chinese. It’s Vera.

Lawrence:

And we’re not certain about the girl part either at this point. Yeah, that’s true.

Jeff:

So Fiona is apparently an extremely wealthy restoration person who has a sexy secret. She likes to wear braces and lingerie. Fiona, it turns out, is not a wannabe at all. She is a P-W-D-H-B trapped in the body of an ABHB. And so if you don’t know what that means, well you’re not a part of the community. Isaac realizes that the best way to tell Fiona’s story is to form a sexual relationship with her to gain her trust and accessed her deepest, darkest, sexiest secrets like a good journalist who does not work for NPR.

sar:

We want to be clear about that.

Lawrence:

Yes. We want to be very, very clear about that.

sar:

The basement mafia was not a one-to-one to the MLA accessibility committee either.

Jeff:

So basically Isaac and Fiona formed this relationship, which is rooted in Fiona being attracted to Isaac’s disabledness. There’s a lot to unpack there.

sar:

There’s a weird relationship I couldn’t quite suss out, and maybe you guys can help me with this. I already brought up, I think a lot more people are more culturally familiar with kind of the wibu culture where you’re kind of fetishizing Asian, especially Japanese women and everything you think they do and anime and all this. But you think that these 30-year-old women are watching children’s cartoons on weekends, and that’s just radically incorrect. And I thought they were going to do something with the casual appropriation of ancient Chinese lady, and she has collections of mid-century, obviously Asian architecture. She had Ming Vs. In her house. There’s a deleted scene where she’s speaking Mandarin. She fetishizes this culture

Lawrence:

And she does, in one of the scenes that did make the cut right in the restaurant, she says, let’s go to a restaurant that neither of us have been to before, which happens to be a Chinese restaurant, and she does her order in Chinese.

sar:

It’s wild. I thought they were going to try to connect the kind of fetishization of culture visually explicitly with the fetishization. Vera Formiga has toward disablement more directly than they did. They didn’t go anywhere with that.

Jeff:

That’s the really interesting thing because on the one hand, you could read this as being a very self-aware critique about that this type of cultural appropriation is exactly what the wannabes and the pretenders are doing for disability. That’s the one possibility. The other possibility is that this movie is really leaning into Orientalism and is trying to use interest in Asian culture as another sexy facet of her identity

sar:

That reading…that’s so dark. It didn’t even cross my mind to tell you that.

Jeff:

Was it a darkly erotic reading, would you say?

sar:

Darkly erotic? Yeah. I mean, I’m not going to say it is not.

Jeff:

I don’t know what the answer is,

Lawrence:

But I would say it’s a fetishized attempt to be erotic. So it’s not true eroticism, you’re not totally owning the kink, right? It’s keeping the kink at arms length. So again, you really don’t invest in it in a way that somebody who let’s say is going to go all in for that kind of thing, might actually do. They’re

sar:

Kind of doing multiple layers of fetishization too, kind of simultaneously. And if this was a smarter film, I would give them credit for it. But this was obviously accidental because you’re a Amiga in the lunch scene. She’s looking around and saying, wow, look, they’re all looking at me. And she’s pretending to be annoyed by this, but you can tell she’s really enjoying the attention. And you think because of the juxtaposition of the scene before where she’s very obviously sexualizing her disabled ness that she’s getting off on it, but she could have also bitten on another level. The conversation we were having in the basement, been getting off on being associated with something that she so badly wants to look like she knows shit about. Which brings you back to the academic Crip critique of wanting to get off on your own knowledge and how other people perceive you seeing the world rather than having any actual

Lawrence:

Knowledge. And there’s a foreshadowing of this, if you remember just before they go to lunch, when they’re first meeting in the park, they’re sort of obsessed with the origin story. How did you become disabled? When did you become disabled? Where were you? What was the temperature of the time of day? All of that sense. And in part scene at one point he blurts out the word gimp and she smiles and then she even comments in a self-aware way that she’s smiling when he says the word gimp. And she asks if he’s kind of toying with her in that way. And so it does sort of foreshadow. I think if it was smarter and more committed, it does sort of foreshadow that possibility, but then drops it and doesn’t go any further.

Jeff:

So I have a theory about this and I’m going to agree with your original tape, Sarah, that I think this is really intentional. So several years before this movie came out, there was a fantastic documentary that was released that’s called Whole, so AC company this before, and this is about this disability I guess or something, this diagnosis of BIID, which is body integrity, sorry, body identity, integrity, dysmorphia, which now people would refer to as probably trans ability, which is this notion of people who identify as disabled. And in whole, one of my favorite things about whole is that they have a bunch of people that have BID, that self-disclose as having a BI. Many of them have been successful in amputating the limb that they felt was not a part of them. And what’s really fascinating about the film for me is that pretty much every person in that film, they ask them, they’re like, oh, so why do you want to be disabled?

Where did this come from? And they’re all like, I don’t know. And then several hours later in the film they’re like, yeah. So there was this time when I was a child and I was having this horrible childhood. My parents were abusing me and everything was terrible. And I had this neighbor who just happened to have the exact same amputation that I fetishized for, and he was beloved, and everyone in the community loved him, and they looked at him lovingly and he was a good father and he loved his children. But yeah, I have no idea why I want the exact same amputation as that person. And one of them had all of these sort of interesting stories where they were going through really rough patches in their life and they saw a disabled person and perceived them to be receivers of warmth and charity, that they were beloved, that they were cared for. And it was all of these things, this attention that wanted in their life and that performing the disability gave them access to these feelings of recognition that they wanted.

Lawrence:

They don’t even give themselves permission to be all those wonderful things without the disability. And that the other thing that really strikes me about the documentary, not quid pro quo, is that they are to the centimeter in terms of where that amputation needs to occur, right? Yeah.

sar:

With Vera Farmiga saying, I want to be T 12 disabled.

Lawrence:

Yes, exactly. T 11 won’t do it. T 10, no Uhuh, no got to be T 11. And so it’s this very sort of an obsession or a fixation on these imagined aspects about what disability is supposed to be that then become the compulsion or the motivation for whatever you’re seeing. Waiter, oh my God. It’s almost like, okay, so speculating. It’s almost like I believe that if, I would like to think like to think that if the director had seen that documentary that they would’ve gone a little bit more in depth and they would’ve, for lack of a better phrase, fleshed out the film better than they actually did. What I’m imagining is that they saw a blurb or a trailer for the documentary and they speculated everything else. They imagined everything else based on what the trailer or what the one paragraph blurb about the documentary would’ve said. Yeah,

Jeff:

That’s my theory as well. I think that they had some awareness if not of whole. There was also a series of articles in the press around the time that whole came out. So kind of 2004, 2005, which is probably right around the time he started writing the script. If the movie comes out in ’08, he probably was working on this thing in ’06, right?

sar:

Okay. Working with that theory, because that’s kind of a third level of socioemotional fetishization we’re now working with here. If we’re going from the kind of base sexual, then you move up to the kind of pseudo intellectual community acceptance, and then you move up toward the socio-emotional like, I belong nowhere else. This is the only place I belong. And I think you’re with me on the film’s concept until you cross the border from funny academic parody of intellectual fetish to toward people who have developed emotional fixations and disorders around not being who they say they are, particularly because you can’t talk about this without somebody then bringing up the trans community. Absolutely. But because this whole documentary, and I said this to Jeff yesterday when we were watching the movie, especially Vera Farmiga scenes where she’s quite literally sexually getting off on people looking at her. I’m like, this is kind of a republican fearmongering masterpiece. You can use this film as this definitive text of look at how many people fake disability for all these socioeconomic benefits and to feel better about themselves. This is why we won’t help any of them. And it does a fantastic job at that narrative. And I don’t think it meant to,

Lawrence:

In the incarnation of me after I left New York City, was to go immediately to Washington DC to work for the federal government. And my role there was for an independent federal agency called the National Council on Disability. That’s mandate is basically to recommend federal disability policy to the President Congress and other federal agencies. So I was basically as the comms lead for the agency, I was translating public policy speak and lawyer ease to the mass public, to the general public and turning it into plain language. And what is absolutely fascinating to me about that thesis right there, the assumption is that all someone has do is go on disability, which is what you fill out one piece of paper and then you take it into the Social security office and magically all your needs are met when in reality, 66% of all social security claims, like first social security claims are denied right off the bat. It’s a years long process whether or not you actually achieve the goal. I think your odds in getting, let’s say social security disability from the government in terms of government support go up, increase three times if you get an attorney, but most people can’t afford an attorney. And so they’re left in this limbo for years and years.

sar:

Oh, a hundred percent.

Lawrence:

And so the Republican fantasy is that all you have to do is say you’re disabled and then you get an accessible vehicle and you get somebody to come to your home and wipe your backside and you get an accessible apartment and everything is magically taken care of, quite like the magic shoes feeds into that fantasy ever with, ever without ever giving anybody the option to reality check it or to fact check it, right? It’s just presented as fact. It’s there in the ether and it’s there. That’s the ecosystem in this alternate universe in which this story takes place, and none of it is questioned as phony. It’s all accepted as fact.

sar:

But I think that’s the problem. It’s not marketing itself as an alternative universe. It’s positing itself in hyper reality and saying, look at all these bastards faking it. What are we going to do? And if I were a Republican candidate when this came out, I would be showing screenings of this film. If I were against socioeconomic policy and people getting support for disability, I would show this film every Saturday and try to get people to come see,

Lawrence:

Look these weirdos, look at these weirdos. Why do we have Medicare, Medicaid?

sar:

This is what we’re up against.

Lawrence:

This is what we’re up against. And scaring grandma. And sort of affirming air quotes here, or confirming every fantasy or every false notion about disability, because what is the narrative? The narrative is that people are going to game the system and that people don’t really need the supports and don’t really need the assistance, and that they’re taking advantage in some way of the kindness of society or those benefactors, which is anybody that’s ever had to apply for disability benefits can tell you it’s no walk in the park. And I wouldn’t wish that process on anybody. So it’s again, divorced from the reality that people face. But if you don’t know anything about it and you haven’t seen the sausage being made, you wouldn’t know the difference.

sar:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Your experience with this community is the basement handicap mafia. This is reality.

Lawrence:

Okay. Can I say one more thing too about her sort of fetishization of it, right? Some of the language that she uses and that is used in this portion of the film is very telling to me. I mean, one of the things she says that nervousness when she reveals herself to him goes into the other room. She comes back wearing what’s called a Milwaukee brace, and it’s kind of soft lighting and sexy, and you can imagine candles being burned, and she talks about being nervous to reveal herself to him. And then she says, nervousness is shame that somebody else catches you feeling. And in watching that scene, I was struck one, she’s got the leg braces on, but leg braces are designed anatomically to give weak legs, additional support for strength, for stamina, for balance, right? They’re usually locked at the ankles and they’re locked at the knees. These braces that she’s wearing are neither, she simply just saunters into the room without these braces doing the job that they were intended for

sar:

Kind of the ultimate visual metaphor of taking disability

Lawrence:

For the entire film!

sar:

Quid Pro Quo in general…

Lawrence:

If you haven’t lived it or if you haven’t done your homework, you wouldn’t notice those little details. But it’s those details, those nuances where you can actually spot a fake, right?

sar:

Well, she knows it too, because she’s so ready to share this really out there research on which vertebrae affects which muscles in your body. There’s no way she doesn’t know. No.

Lawrence:

Right? Absolutely. And then she basically jumps him, right? He does. Then she basically jumps him. So maybe, okay, you’re going to, are we going to find out if he can actually have sex at this point? He can sort of pushes back and says, wait, there’s somebody else. And here’s the gotcha, right? She’s actually paraplegic, right? And you see the wannabe kind of recoil in the way that you, I almost like Sunset Boulevard or something and the silent movie over the top. And so there’s this very, they go their whole little banter and start coming onto him again. And then they’re both in their wheelchairs making out and it’s getting the wheel steamy. And I’m like, wow, where are we going here? This is interesting.

sar:

They do the sexy wheelchairs spinning around each other wheel.

Lawrence:

And I remember thinking at this point, okay, maybe this film is redeemable, but before I’d seen the end like, oh, this is interesting. I’m curious to, and what does she do? Right in the middle of the hotness, she stands up and blows the mood

Jeff:

All while attempting to uncover the truth behind BIID. Isaac has been obsessing over a pair of fancy shoes that he sees at the window of a local pawn shop, buying them and trying them on a miracle occurs with the shoes Isaac can walk. Isaac begins to transition out of his PWD era and toward an ab era with his magic shoes, much to the chagrin of Fiona, who just doesn’t find Wiess sexy as their relationship phrase. Fiona steals the magic shoes and gives Isaac an ultimatum. If you want to walk again, you must disable me, Isaac. To investigate Fiona’s history, only to discover is shock and truth. Fiona, it turns out, was the young girl who caused the childhood car crash killing his parents and allegedly paralyzing him. But OMG guys, wait.

Lawrence:

Yes.

Jeff:

Isaac has hysterical paralysis for 20 years and is not actually disabled. No doctor ever told him. Fiona giving him the gift of his lives back then stares, longingly out his window before disappearing. And our 80 something minute episode of Touched by an Angel comes to a merciful end.

sar:

Excellent reference. That show was just heinous hysterical. Okay. I think the most interesting thing about the hysterical paralysis flash, psychosomatic injury arc was that this movie concedes pretty early on. It does not need any actual experts in the conversation. It doesn’t want lived experience experts. It doesn’t want cryp lifers, it doesn’t want anybody who’s in Crip community or academic community. It doesn’t even really want people who actually in big scare quotes are suffering from any of these BIID or et cetera, identity crises. They just want to have their experience in the moment entirely supplanted by anyone else’s approval or evidence. But the entire movie is about all of these people constantly wanting the approval of others. So there’s this kind of ironic injury, bit of, I think physical therapy is bullshit and magic Hughes are the answer, and I refuse to go see a doctor or I refuse to go see a psychiatrist. And all of those things would’ve literally fixed all my problems. But in lieu of that, I found that magic and being insanely selfish cured me all the same. That’s a dangerous message.

Lawrence:

Well, it’s an easy way out if you don’t have to do the homework. You don’t have to actually invest any time, effort, energy, or attention into the reality. You just make this shit up and then roll with it. And I think that’s what the problem with this film that you see over and over and over again, that it would set up these suppositions and then say, ah, logic be damned reality be damned. We’re just going to commit to this thing halfway half commit to it and then let you ascribe to it or attach to it, whatever you will. And there’s this, what you can see, I think that tug of war, that push pull that you’re talking that crisis of identity or conscience in the scene in the museum where she works, she’s a restorer of these artifacts or knickknacks.

And I love this because the knick stall character we’ve already established, he’s gone to work with crutches. He’s now not using the wheelchair. I believe he actually walks into the museum or wherever it is that she works using crutches or some sort of assistance. Is there a wheelchair? So you get to go a wheelchair, what happens, right? Yeah. But then you see him using the hospital issue, not his own wheelchair, but the hospital issue wheelchair, the one you can borrow at the museum if you get fatigued and then goes to visit her in her office and she’s got something she wants to tell him, he’s got something he wants to tell her. And then you literally have this role reversal with this, not ROLE, no, no, ROLL where he is what is getting up out of the wheelchair. And she then sits in it

sar:

Freaky Friday with the worst possible circumstances.

Lawrence:

And as he’s standing up, as he’s standing up and he’s excited, I can walk, it’s a miracle you’ll never walk alone. All this is happening. She’s going, no, no, no, no, no. And she’s kind of doing the here, no evil speak, no evil, see no evil thing. And she’s freaking out. She’s not at all interested in him or him walking or what his desires or needs are. She wants to maintain that fantasy, but

sar:

She wasn’t interested exactly the same way. So it really is the touched by an angel body change moment. Yeah,

Lawrence:

They were both guilty here, right? I mean they’re both doing the inverse of the same thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

sar:

The moral of the story was if you are straight and white, shit will eventually just work out with you no matter how

Jeff:

That, yeah, I got to say the look of revulsion on her face when he gets up, sustains me because that was sort of the face I had watching this movie. Yeah.

Lawrence:

Finally I can identify with someone.

Jeff:

Yeah, I finally, this is my screen projection. I could put myself in her shoes. This is how I feel. So I think that the ultimate back stab of this movie, the ultimate sin of this text is the way that it presents disability in the first half as this cool hip subculture and then immediately betrays it in the second half by giving us another cure narrative. Where next all had to walk in the end. And as far as we know, Fiona does not end up disabling herself or may have jumped out a window. It’s very unclear what happened to her character. She vanishes

Lawrence:

Her neck, she literally throws him, there’s a big sort of face off, another face off right in her apartment and a conflict where she literally grabs him and throws him out of the wheelchair, throws him out of his wheelchair, and then poof, disappears. I can walk never

sar:

To be seen. We were debating whether or not she had died by suicide at the end of that, because I think, and I know the movie itself says, and then she moved away and everything was better. I dunno, I’m not convinced

Jeff:

By that. It does say that she couldn’t find her, that she asked, said he couldn’t find her.

Lawrence:

I never saw her again. That’s the last time, something like that.

Jeff:

Which is why I think she was an angel. So here’s my hot take. Are you ready for my hot take?

sar:

We’re not doing Touch by an Angel. That movie died at the end of the eighties for a reason.

Jeff:

My hot take is she also died in the car accident and she has been growing up as a ghost in this world, and that when she restored his walking ability, she was then allowed to leave this planet and finally transcended the after.

Lawrence:

So the director’s not only ripping off Cronenberg, Lynch, Michael Powell, Brian De Palma, but ripping off M. Night Shyamalan as well.

sar:

Isn’t everyone really ripping off Shyamalan?

Jeff:

Well, if only,

sar:

Okay, my rebuttal to that, A, the film just makes it fucking impossible if you haven’t seen it. She interacts with dozens of strangers and is not Haley, Joel Osmond. But B, I’ve been thinking the past couple minutes based on our conversation about the scene where she goes home with her, it’s a mom ex boyfriend, her mom, and they have that really weird conversation about, okay, mom, you are not the final arbiter on who gets to make great porcelain on Elephant. So that’s the thing she has in her basement for the reversal. And now I’m thinking, and this might also give the film way too much credit. What if that elephant, the only reason it got so much dialogue was to be kind of the central metaphor for that reversal scene. Because the whole thing was kind of an exploration of the ability part of disability and what so many abs abled people get so caught up in when they’re talking about disability.

It has to be about, well, what can you do? Or what are you able to do? Instead of any of the conversations Crips actually want to have about like, okay, well can you not just take that for granted, which is how you get stuff like ability achievement centers and shit that everybody thinks are so offensive. She’s doing that conversation with that stupid fucking porcelain elephant with her mom. And I didn’t connect it until right now where she’s saying, I don’t know who the fuck made you the arbiter of who gets to make great porcelain elephants.

Jeff:

But I think the amazing part of that scene is that the writer director is the Fiona character because somebody, his mother should have told him before making this film, you haven’t done a single drawing class. You cannot make a beautiful elephant.

sar:

There are actually arbiters of this and also ability and they’re called experts. And that’s what all of you need.

Jeff:

And it’s just wild to me that in this film, there’s this conversation of like, you can’t just manifest something. You have to actually work at something and learn about something in order to do it. And clearly the producers of this film didn’t do that work on disability community before making a film about disability community.

Lawrence:

It’s the overcoming narrative, right? You’re overcoming all these obstacles without any thought recognition or realization about the reality of any it, right? You just work hard enough or you will it into being right and it can be. So it’s the inspiration porn on steroids. Yeah,

Jeff:

Absolutely.

sar:

But with the flavor of all of these levels of ability, the sexual ability, the intellectual,

Lawrence:

Yeah,

sar:

Emotional ability,

Lawrence:

Which are hyper able, right?

sar:

Well, Nick Stall going to tell you, he’s hyper able.

Lawrence:

If the studio hadn’t butchered it up and cut out all of these scenes, Allah, magnificent Andersons, what could quid pro quo have been for audiences and the disability community?

Jeff:

Probably still garbage. But we have a way of determining this because here at Inval culture, of course, we have a fully empirical, rigorous scientific methodology which we use to evaluate the quality of the films that we have viewed. So let’s see how quid pro quo does on the invalid culture scale. Our first question, on a scale of one to five, with five being the least accurate, how accurately does this film portray disability?

Lawrence:

5.5.

sar:

You can’t do that. That’s against the rules.

Lawrence:

Five. All right. It’s five because they just got none of the details. None of them from our walking around without the braces locked to the magically appearing ramp. There’s a scene in the museum where she’s there talking to somebody and you see him arrive, show up from behind, he’s in the distance. There are four stairs there, and there’s a ramp. There is a ramp that they’ve added onto the stairs that are magically there, appear out of nowhere, that he’s then able to wheel down and then go over and see them. This is in the third act of the film. There are things like this. Nobody has an issue getting into a taxi cab. He talks about not being able to ride in a taxi, but then you see him in one. There’s so many inconsistencies throughout here that don’t speak true to reality. So I would say on this, I give it a five for those reasons.

sar:

Lawrence, the New York King, you know how I knew this was bullshit because of the cabs? Lemme tell you,

Alright, I’m going to give it, I’m going to give it a three. And I agree with Lawrence that they get just about everything wrong, but I think at least some of the time they’re very intentionally getting it wrong. And that’s when we were talking about kind of the levels of feta that were going on there, but I don’t think it sticks the landing. It wants to get some stuff wrong to try to start some of these actually pretty great conversations about the lengths of ability and how we arbit ability and all of these things. And it just does it so badly that I called it the Republican fearmongering masterpiece because it got a lot more to convince you that disabled people are trying to just pull one over on you at all times.

Jeff:

Yeah, I’m going to split the difference on this. I’ve even a four for basically all of the same reasons. I didn’t give it the full five because as host of this show, I have literally seen worse. And that is a staggering statement to say

sar:

Sobering,

Jeff:

Sobering thoughts with Jeff Preston. On a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, how hard was it for you to get through this film?

Lawrence:

I got to give it a three because I was completely gobsmacked by it. And I remember thinking, how the hell are they going to end this thing? Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. And I was completely fascinated by knowing that it probably wasn’t going to improve the film. It was a car crash of a movie. And I did find myself intellectually interested in just how they’re going to wrap this train wreck up. So I think I give that a three for those reasons.

sar:

I’m going to say a two. And that’s because when I’m doing a film theory for films that aren’t garbage, I’m actually a huge fan of Vera Amiga. I think she’s a really gifted horror film actress in particular, and she’s unstoppable in Bates Motel. So as soon as she came on, I went from casual disinterest in this movie to wrapped attention. I was paying attention to everything, trying to figure out some gem in the screenplay she apparently saw to sign onto this film and I never found it. But if she ever hears this honest to God dying to know,

Jeff:

I suspect that they were given the script one page at a time.

sar:

I’m already in. I’ve deposited the money,

Lawrence:

I signed the contract. I can’t get on now. I’m trapped. They’re going to take my leg braces away.

Jeff:

So I gave this a three. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever watched, but lordy, this movie is so horny and I have never felt less aroused in my entire life. In fact, I think you could show this film to high school students and it might lead to abstinence. So I’m going to give this a three. It’s not the worst, but there are some painful moments. On a scale of one to five, with five being the maximum, how often did you laugh at things that were not supposed to be funny?

Lawrence:

Again, there’s the belly laughter, the guffaw, the I can’t believe how wrong that is. And then there’s kind of that shake my head laugh. Did that really just, did I just see that? Did they just say that kind of curiosity, right? With a raised eyebrow. So I think I was probably at a round a four there because after a certain point where it seemed like it was not, I held out hopes at the beginning that it was going to be redeemed. When it became clear that there was no redeeming this piece of trash, then I just was like, all right, enjoy the ride. See where this thing goes. And so yeah, I’d say that’s about four.

sar:

I think my bias is that whenever Jeff wants to watch a movie with me, the scale is irrevocably screwed because I know we’re not going to be watching a Hollywood blockbuster. So I kind of subdue my expectations as soon as Jeff says, okay, this is the one I want to watch. So I’m looking at between Christmas Evil to at Best Freaky Friday. So within that scale, I actually thought we did pretty well. I’ll give it a four. I was pretty entertained by this film, and I’ll give it the credit of, because I know a lot of my friends and Jeff’s friends are like legit disability theorists. This film does reward you for applying theory where you absolutely shouldn’t. We have two great conversations about where this could have gone.

Lawrence:

Yes, its own bizarro land Easter egg, right? Unintentional Easter egg for those who conceive of such things. Yeah.

Jeff:

Yeah. So I came in on a five on this one. I thought this movie was hilarious. And I don’t think it was trying to be, I think it was trying to be, as it says, it says it’s a darkly erotic tale. They were trying to be so sexy and cool and noir and this is bloody comedy. It is hilarious.

Lawrence:

So this could be sort of the disability equivalent of the room, Jeff, is that what you’re saying?

Jeff:

Oh man, it is dangerously close.

Lawrence:

Imagine. So yeah, imagine what the objects we would be that we’d bring into the screening to throw at the screen.

Jeff:

Oh God. Braces.

sar:

And everyone brings stuffed elephants. And when we went to the elephant scene, everybody stands up shaking it like I’m the elephant. I can arbit my own fate

Jeff:

Oh no…

Lawrence:

Don’t forget the shoes.

Jeff:

Oh yeah. You got to wear, wear your fancy shoes. Oh lord.

sar:

Jeff, we should unironically suggest to The Princess, who holds room viewings like five or six times a year, that we would host disability screenings of this film. Anytime.

Lawrence:

Alright, here is my pledge to you. If you can arrange this feat, this coup d’etat, if you can get the room to screen this film as a midnight movie, I will either by plane, train, boat, or donkey find a way to get there to be part of it.

Jeff:

Yes. Done. The challenge is out. And I think that this is now, I think the third or fourth GoFundMe that we have pitched on this podcast here. So open those wallets folks.

sar:

But that’s what I actually want.

Jeff:

Oh, I want all of them. Come on. You don’t want a sequel to Tiptoes? We need a sequel to Tiptoes.

Lawrence:

Oh SO right. Oh my God. We need to, yeah, we should make this a weekend. There’s so much that can be done here.

Jeff:

Absolutely. Last but not least, scale of one to five, with five being the most, how many steps back did this film put? Disabled people?

Lawrence:

You couldn’t call this the escalator, you couldn’t call this the, is the Mount Everest of films that set back disabled people. One, because none of it’s informed by actual experience of disabled people or disability community. As Sarah so rightly put, it’s all the imagined all the worst things that the worst Republicans bearing in mind that George W. Bush a Republican is who signed the a DA. But since that time, right? All the worst fantasies about disability that we’ve been conditioned to adopt or accept. And so I would say I don’t even, this goes to the moon and back. I don’t know that I can calculate the number of steps that this has set disability back. But I will say that if someone goes into it with sort of a literal mindset, that’s the case. However, if you are an imaginative personality, if you are someone who is somewhat seeped in disability history or disability culture or disability community, and you’re someone who likes to pull back the curtain and pay attention to whatever’s behind there and what’s taking place, I’d say that it’s a zero and that it’s a wealth of opportunity to explore and examine and to dissect.

I think ultimately it depends on the audience, but I would say since most people who have been exposed to this film are not in seeped in any of those wonderful things that I just mentioned, I’m going to give it a five.

sar:

Yeah, I think I said in the first episode that if this movie had come out before the ADA had passed, this would’ve introduced significant difficulty of the ADA becoming law which is impressive for one film to have that kind of power

Lawrence:

…that kind of power, right? Yeah.

sar:

It definitely strikes me as a film that would resonate strongly with people who were already suspicious of disability culture. So for that reason, I’d have to give it a five.

Jeff:

Yeah. I’m going to complete the triad. I gave this a five because watching this movie was the first time that I didn’t want to be disabled because I didn’t want to be a part of any of this. So because it undid my identity.

Lawrence:

So this film would’ve made you renounce.

Jeff:

I’ve renounced it all. If this is disability, I’ve renounce.

sar:

You don’t want to be in CDS gang. You want to be in handicap Mafia.

Jeff:

Yeah, sorry. Yes. Okay. Okay. I can, if there’s an opportunity for me to meet in a dank basement with the wannabes, I’ll hang out there. I guess.

sar:

You would do it. You would do it once.

Jeff:

Oh, you got to try it once.

sar:

Jeff Preston will do anything once. You got to try it once.

Jeff:

You haven’t lived until you’ve hung out in a basement with one of these.

sar:

So Jeff’s review is, this is the first piece of cultural media that made me actually regret being disabled. So is that a five?

Jeff:

That’s a five. That is a pure five.

sar:

Alright. You want to know the total? You want to give me a drum roll?

Jeff:

Yeah. Drum roll.

Lawrence:

[drum roll noises]

sar:

48

Jeff:

With a 48 Quid Pro Quo, unsurprisingly but very deservingly, has won the coveted Jerry Lewis seal of approval. We did it, gang.

sar:

That was it. As soon as this movie ended, I knew this was going to be a really funny episode.

Lawrence:

And to quote Mr. Lewis, right, those half persons imprisoned in their steel chairs,

Jeff:

They should just stay home if they don’t want to be pity.

Lawrence:

Right? If you don’t want to be pity, just stay home. Right. Or in the basement of a dank.

Jeff:

Yeah.

Lawrence:

Certain churches.

Jeff:

Yeah. Well, that concludes our episode. Thank you so much, Lawrence, for joining us. Thank you, Sarah, for being here. I’m really sorry that I’m your friend and thank you to the audience for joining us, and please do not watch this movie

Mvll Crimes (theme song):

Not going out today because I’m feeling too upset. Arguing with strangers on the Internet. Everyone is wrong, I just haven’t told them yet.