Genre Reveal Party!

This week we talk with special guest and feminist horror critic Johanna Isaacson about Ana Lily Amirpour's 2014 Persian-language western Neo-noir vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.

Spoilers: sexy vampires, terrible men, Chester Cheeto, skateboarding, the "Jurassic Park rule," hipster directors, Tony Hawk 380.

Special Guest: Johanna Isaacson, author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (Common Notions 2023). You can follow her @StepfordDotter on Twitter. Read the Blind Field Journal piece of hers we mention in this episode, We Don’t Need Another Zombie-Killing Hero: Political Horror in Dawn of the Dead (1978).

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we talk with special guest Eleanor Russell about that one time when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro tried to make a comedy as their follow-up to Raging Bull. King of Comedy stars De Niro, Jerry Lewis, and the incredible Sandra Bernhard.

Spoilers: we are all Rupert Pupkin, Joker talk, obsessive fandom, Liza Minelli/Martin Scorsese/Mikhail Baryshnikov love triangle, Jerry Lewis wrapped in duct tape, is this a Taxi Driver multiverse?

Special Guest: Eleanor Russell! Eleanor has a PhD in Theater Drama from Northwestern University, and she writes about comedy. You can follow her @eleanoir on Twitter.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we talked about Neil Jordan's 1994 film Interview with the Vampire, adapted from Anne Rice's 1975 novel, as an eerie portrait of '90s sexy leading actors who are actually vampires pretending to be men: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas.

Spoilers: "how avant garde," there will be blood, the existence of Tom Cruise, immortality, the '90s, Claudia's Lolita vibes, brief discussion of Axl Rose.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

A comedy about terrorism? Released in 2010, Four Lions follows the story of four British Muslims who decide to become suicide bombers. It's... funny, tragic, confusing, satirical, and maybe a spoof of The Lion King.

Directed by Sam Morris, and written by Morris, Sam Bain, and Jesse Armstrong, the film stars Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Arsher Ali, and Adeel Akhtar.

Spoilers: weird to be watching this in the context of Palestinian genocide, The Lion King, anti-villains, post-9/11 satire talk, Jesse Armstrong and the Succession family tree, Madeline had a neck injury.

Read the Critical Muslim review we reference a lot in this episode.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

We're launching our second season with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the film that inspired our season's title, "We Don't Need Another Hero." Made in 1985, the film is the third installment in George Miller's Mad Max franchise, and the last (thankfully) to star Mel Gibson. Stealing the show are Tina Turner as Aunty Entity, who rules over Bartertown.

Spoilers: Mel Gibson (go to hell), Tina Turner (RIP), Australia, franchise talk, Furiosa prequel details, Babe and Babe 2: Pig in the City, George Miller's filmography, the actress who played Savannah (Helen Buday) was 23 at the time of filming.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

In this bonus episode we reflect on the season and the films and shows we watched, our awesome guests, and our plans for next season. Thanks for listening!

Spoilers: theme for next season, "lens" crafting, the end of Casablanca, self-critique, uninformed feelings about Bo Burnham, thoughts about stan culture, RIP Pee-wee, RIP Sinead, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

To conclude our first season on "Family Matters," we watched Jerrod Carmichael's 2022 comedy special Rothaniel with special guest Tim Barnes.

Tim helped us unpack this incredible special and Carmichael's discussion of family secrets, Black kinship and family experiences, coming out, and more. We also talk about Carmichael's relationship to other iconic Black comedians, especially Richard Pryor.

Spoilers: Chairs in stand-up comedy, the vibes of Bo Burnham, audience participation, edge-lords, looking directly into the camera.

Tim Barnes is a comedian and television writer whose absurdist humor brings light to social issues from unexpected angles. Tim has written for the Nickelodeon sitcom Warped!, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Nickelodeon's All That revival, Comedy Central, the NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, and even documented his testicles once for Men's Health. Chicago Magazine named Tim one of the 16 Chicago Comics You Should Check Out... and The Chicago Tribune has described him as "a smooth wordsmith who is sharp, polished and confident..."

Please check out Tim's strange and fantastic short film, Inland Empire (a Vimeo Staff Pick!), which he wrote and stars in with his good friend Ian Abramson.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we discussed Cruising, William Friedkin's highly controversial 1980 film starring Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover to catch a serial killer who's targeting gay men in the underground subculture of S&M and leather bars of New York City.

Joining us this week to help us think about this confusing, confused, and fascinating film is writer, editor and translator Max Fox. We talk about attempts to sabotage the production of the film in the summer of '79 by gay protestors, the ways this film has been re-considered more recently, as well as James Franco's weird 2013 "docufilm" re-imagining footage of explicit sex scenes that Friedkin cut in order to acquire an R-rating from the MPAA.

Spoilers: werewolves, sexual paranoia, all method actors are undercover cops, Madeline's Pacino impression, "rich texts."

Max is part of the editorial collective for Pinko Magazine, edited Chris Chitty's posthumous book Sexual Hegemony with Duke University Press, and translated Guy Hocquenghem's The Amphitheater of the Dead for Guillotine Press. He also co-authored a book with Madeline, Fag/Hag, which will be out next year from Rosa Press.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

We are them and we watched Us. Jordan Peele's 2019 movie Us.

Spoilers: Santa Cruz housing crisis, Hands Across America bookkeeping, the Jordan Peele trilogy, Madeline thinks infamous horror villain Jason is a ghost.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we took some time to revisit The Royal Tenenbaums, a film neither of us had seen in about twenty years, but which falls very clearly into this season's theme of films about family with lots and lots of genre troubles. We chatted about Wes Anderson's career, the politics of his aesthetics, and also what we didn't notice about this film in our late teens.

Spoilers: hot pink, hot goss on Gene Hackman, the hipsterdom of hating other hipsters, needle dropping, castration anxiety, Richie's suicide scene should be edited out George Lucas style, CD players with skip protection.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we discussed Caché, the 2005 French film by Austrian director Michael Haneke, starring Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, and Maurice Bénichou, and suggested by our guest Bettina Johnson.

Caché is about a well-off French family terrorized by a series of surveillance videotapes left on their front porch. This terror reverberates from the Paris Massacre of 1961, which had only recently been acknowledged by the French government when the film was made more than four decades later. Through the course of the film, we see how this unspeakable moment in history and the horrors of colonialism haunt generations.

Spoilers: guilt, colonialism, disagreeing about how to pronounce "Haneke," Paul Gilroy doesn't buy it.

Bettina Johnson is a co-founder and current steering committee member of Liberation Library, a prison industrial complex abolitionist books-to-incarcerated youth project. They're also a facilitator and member of other abolitionist campaigns like Defund CPD. Donate to Liberation Library's GoFundMe! And follow Bettina on Instagram @bettinajaywalker and Twitter @lesypersound.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

We learned so much in this episode about the meaning of family, freedom, and driving real fast. While Dave was a fan already, Madeline had never seen a Fast & Furious movie, so we called on two experts to fulfill this mission: Em Gonzalez and Jo Giardini.

Em and Jo help us unpack everything from the geopolitical to the penis allusions of the entire franchise. Most of the discussion is about the eighth installment, Fate of the Furious, and none of the discussion requires any previous knowledge of any of it.

Spoilers: Vin Diesel impressions, no blondes allowed, Paul Walker is no longer alive, cars are impossible, man tears, no fatalities.

Em Gonzalez is an organizer around prison and police abolition, reproductive justice, and anti-sexual and domestic violence. They love chisme, fantastic meals, and long walks on brisk days. From the depths of Shudder to the best of Criterion Channel, Em enjoys various types of media and how they impact the way we look at the world and reflect moments in time. Email them your favorite 80s movie at [email protected] 

Jo Giardini is a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where they teach for the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Their research focuses on twentieth-century poetics, communalist and separatist movements, literary genre, and the intersection of political economy, racial capitalism, and the history of sexuality. They're currently working on a history of Johns Hopkins University's Gender Identity Clinic (1966-1979) and the production of trans narratives in the 1970s, among other projects. Hit them up with your favourite slasher recommendations, Trailer Park Boys hot takes, and used bookstore stories at [email protected].

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we talked to author M.E. O'Brien about the final season of Picard, and her forthcoming book Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communization of Care (Pluto Press 2023). We discussed the political legacy of Star Trek and recent series in the franchise, and the ways that sci-fi can help us better understand what exactly it might mean to "abolish the family."

Spoilers: woke mob borg, the family form, the correct pronunciation of "Data," nostalgia, Troi and her outfits, father stuff.

M.E. O’Brien writes on gender and communist theory. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She previously co-authored the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. 

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we're getting into some cringe-rotic territory with a conversation about THE MICHAEL DOUGLAS TRILOGY: Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Disclosure (1994).

Spanning from the Reagan era into the Clinton years, this trilogy features so many flavors of feminist backlash. These films have different directors, writers, producers, and co-stars, but what they have in common is The Michael Douglas Character and his lady problems.

To help us understand all this, we called on Jasmine Bridges, Madeline's best friend since the 9th grade, to tell us about the erotic thrillers of this time, and much more.

Spoilers: Michael Douglas's butt, career women, family values, #believemen, virtual reality, Dennis Miller, sexy VHS covers, power mullets.

Jasmine Bridges' beige flag is having a background in psychology but forcing everyone she meets to take online personality tests. When it comes to TV, she lives for trash and aliens. Email her 00spaceistheplace00@gmail if you were the other person who watched Foundation or you have important 90 Day Fiancé UK hot takes.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter, and email us at [email protected] with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

Back by popular demand, we're doing an encore discussion of Succession! We've got some emails and social media polls to share as well.

In our first episode of the podcast, Dave and Madeline made some provisional genre reveals (Dave said "American satire accordion," and Madeline said "at worst, cluster-fuck, at best, meta-cluster-fuck").

Now that we've reached the conclusion of Succession, we're going to make our final calls on the genre reveal with guest Kyle Lane-McKinley. Kyle and Madeline know each other pretty well.

Spoilers: the finale, correct opinions about Succession, BattleBots, decline of British television supremacy, rise of slop.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we're talking about A Serious Man, the 2009 Coen Brothers film starring Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor whose family mostly hates him, and whose bad luck just keeps getting worse.

While A Serious Man is certainly Coenesque or Coensy, we wanted to think more about the film's genre and the politics of Jewish humor with our guests, Daniel and Sheera.

Spoilers: Santana Abraxas, F Troop, Richard Kind, threatening goys, more serious men, Sy Ableman, girls just wanna shampoo; ALSO: you might hear Madeline's cat killing a rat in the background at some point.

Daniel Strauss is an LA-based writer and actor. He's an alum of The Second City MainStage in Chicago. You might know him from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Bust Down on Peacock, or the Hulu series There's... Johnny!

Sheera Talpaz is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at Oberlin College, who's taught courses on Jewish comedy along with much else.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we've got our first double-feature on Genre Reveal Party: Juno & Junior. These are two of the weirdest movies about pregnancy, weirdly made by a father and son.

Spoilers: home skillets, moldy peaches, steifens, Emma Thompson stanning, bromancing, pro-life but maybe accidentally, gender abolitionist but maybe accidentally, The Jason Bateman Character.

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

This week we're discussing Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2018 masterpiece Shoplifters. It's a film deeply concerned with the question of what makes a family.

What does it mean to be a family? How is 'family' defined by the state and private property? And how might we describe forms of care and survival in other terms? We talk about how the film grapples with these questions and more.

Spoilers: noodles, child liberation, kidnapping, theft, more noodles, the care commune.

Thanks to Adwoa Agyepong for recommending Shoplifters!

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

To kick off our first season on the theme of "Family Matters," we're talking about HBO's Succession: a show about daddy that's got a lot of mommy issues.

While clearly positioned among HBO's prestige dramas (and currently Emmy campaigning as such), many critics and fans have made the case that Succession is quite clearly a comedy.

So how do we read Succession? And what is it trying to say about the family, capitalism, and genre?

Spoilers: dead daddy, the Shiv of it all, #TeamGerri, Nicholaus Braun seems sketchy, and no more power point presentations from Adam McKay!

Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter.

Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley

Here's the trailer for Genre Reveal Party. Writer/cultural critic Madeline Lane-McKinley and comedian/actor Dave Maher host this podcast exploring tv and movies through the lenses of politics and genre. Season 1 is "Family Matters," focusing on family stories like "Succession," "A Serious Man," "Star Trek: Picard," and "Fast X."

Episodes drop on Fridays! Subscribe now, so you don't miss a single one.