0:00 - Introduction
2:06 - Anticlimactic Revelation
4:45 - Mechanics of the Movie
8:40 - Emotional Deadness and Dissociation
9:06 - Reproducing Horror in Others
10:38 - Unappetizing Jigsaw of Horror Cliches
12:34 - Single Mother Alliance with Violence
16:11 - Coercive Charity Analogy
19:14 - Lackluster Ending and Acting Analysis
The speaker, Stefan Molyneux, reviews the movie "Long Legs" in a detailed and critical manner. He describes it as a pastiche of horror movie cliches, including killer clowns, frightening FBI agents, creepy dolls, and more. The speaker expresses displeasure with the excessive use of jump scares, labeling them as an audio assault.
He highlights the lack of coherence in the movie's plot, particularly criticizing the anticlimactic scenes and inconsistent character development. The speaker delves into the mechanics of the movie's world-building, pointing out inconsistencies and illogical elements within the story.
Moreover, the speaker delves into the deeper themes of the movie, focusing on the portrayal of single mothers making deals with the devil to protect their children. He draws parallels between the movie's narrative and the dynamics of single motherhood in society, emphasizing the destructive impact of such alliances.
In addition, the speaker discusses the symbolism of the free dolls delivered by the single mother in the movie, highlighting the themes of false morality and coercive generosity. He connects these themes to larger societal issues, such as the perception of welfare programs and the consequences of unearned assistance.
Furthermore, the speaker critiques the movie's ending as lackluster and discusses the thematic elements that could have been better developed. He touches on the portrayal of female and male characters in the movie, pointing out stereotypical acting tropes and predictable performances.
Overall, the speaker provides a thorough analysis of "Long Legs," offering insights into its plot, themes, character development, and underlying messages. Despite his criticisms, he suggests that viewers pay attention to the single mother theme and invites further discussion on the topic.
[0:00] Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. So I did go and see the movie, I went to a late night showing of the movie Long Legs with Nicolas Cage and Blair Underwood and some woman who apparently was told by the director throughout the entire movie to act as if she was both frightened, frigidly cold and needing to pee. Just this kind of uneasy Jeff Goldblum in a skit kind of tension that didn't really have any characterization to it there's going to be some spoilers in this but there's also going to be a real wallop of insight so i'll keep this relatively brief so basically it was just a pastiche of all the cliches you could possibly come up with with regards to horror movies right you had uh the the killer clown which was nick cage in some pancake makeup nonsense you had um you know the the frightened fbi agent which i guess is a nod to uh silence of the lambs you had.
[0:57] You had uh dolls of course the creepy dolls with the eyes opening and all that kind of stuff you had uh improbable uh lighting where everything's really dark except for the beams of light coming in from outside with no particular source just to make things look cool you had uh christian cross-axe murderers, you had terrifying nuns, you had like every possible cliche. It's like if AI assembled a jigsaw puzzle of horror movie cliches and jammed it into one appetizing hour and a half snooze fest. They had audio assault. Literally, it feels like Trotsky being hunted down with an ice pick by Stalin's goons in Mexico because the jump scares, listen, I don't mind if you earn a good jump scare right i don't mind that at all what i do mind is if you have basically a sonic weapon aimed at my frontal lobes through my eardrums causing them to hurt that's not a a legitimately earned good goose gumpy goose bumpy jump scare that's just basically an audio punch to the nads and it's considered to be some sort of sport so that was pretty pretty terrible.
[2:07] It had one of the most anticlimactic, you know, the cliche is, you know, the serial killer is leaving all these clues and the FBI has to figure out all these clues and rush to save, right, the next family. So the woman finds a picture of the serial killer from her youth, and apparently he hasn't changed his look in 20 years.
[2:31] And so they say hey are you sure you want to put out an APB on just this picture and she says yes and then the next shot is him at a bus stop with some suitcases and the police are all closing in there's no how did they find him this guy who's off the grid uh how did they possibly locate him he doesn't seem to have a cell phone he doesn't post he doesn't use social media doesn't use the internet so how would they find him he kind of lives in a basement in the middle of nowhere where uh but anyway they found him and i thought this is going to be kind of like a joke like.
[3:02] You know that it's just a it's a speeder that they're pulling over in front of him and it's kind of ironic that the police catch the speeder but nope they just catch this guy and and lock him in a cell and then they let a woman go in with this guy who's a serial killer alone uh and uh talk talk to him it's all you know crazy nonsense the other thing too is that unless i missed something it always could happen i remember getting something about joker wrong i could have missed something but what i don't recall is they spend the first quarter of the movie setting up the young fbi agent this woman as a psychic you see she just knows right this the movie starts out they go looking for a guy she just knows where this guy is i don't think he shows up again again unless i miss something but she's she just knows which house he's in although though they're all undifferentiated cookie cutter copy paste uh little box little boxes on the hillside kind of houses so she knows exactly what this guy is she's psychic you see and then they put her through these tests and she gets more than she gets half of the random questions like guess a number between one and 100 inclusive she gets half of the 12 right which would be statistically anomalous and so she's she's psychic right this is all set up and then it.
[4:16] Like it never shows up again the psychic abilities are never brought into play they're never used again and i just don't understand why you'd spend all of this time it's like it's like a very roughed rough i was kind of drunk first draft of a script that they just said yeah that's it let's just let's just go ahead and film it nick cage is on board and he's going to chew up the scenery like a pennywise on cocaine with a bad face job so So, that didn't make any sense to me.
[4:46] The mechanics of the movie don't like if you're going to create a fictional universe and of course i've done it uh in in my novel the future which you should definitely get for free at freedom dot com slash books i set up a whole world 500 years in the future and knew it down to the last detail so you've got to have a world that's believable so what is the mechanics of the world so basically the story is that a woman dressed up as a nun delivers a free doll to a family and then the doll causes the father in the family to go crazy and kill the family, okay we'll get into all of that in a sec what that's an analogy for, but why the devil's all powerful the devil can do crazy things and so why is it that the devil needs to be some smoke in the head of a doll's in the doll's head and why does he need that right is it like you have to be invited in like a vampire but he's not a vampire he's the devil and of course it's very anti-christian as all of these movies tend to be it's explicitly crazy anti-christian in that every time like there's a lot of axe murdering scenes there's always a cross around and they're always hyped up as religious people so christianity and slaughter can go hand Hand in hand.
[6:03] And also the fact that it's nihilistic because the mother of the FBI agent keeps saying, have you said your prayers? Your prayers will keep you safe. And then finally she says, no, I've never said my prayers to her mother. And her mother says, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Prayers don't do a goddamn thing, which is of course highly blasphemous. And so they're basically saying you have no defense against the devil a prayer won't work and the christians are just infiltrated without any free will they don't fight back they don't win so the devil rules and i guess maybe that's true in hollywood i don't know but probably but the anti-christian stuff was uh pretty wild the the um now you could say well she came from a church so she'd have to go to christian households and so on but i don't know man a lot of people would like a free doll i guess for their kids so that didn't really make any sense and she's got this um this i think he's a boss he's not a partner i think he's a boss the blair underwood character and blair underwood's character like every time the doll gets delivered the husband goes crazy and kills the family right.
[7:18] And so eventually it's the woman's mother who's delivering the doll in partnership partnership, sort of forced partnership with the killer clown guy. And her mother then delivers a doll to the Blair Underwood family, himself, his wife, and his daughter. And so Blair Underwood turns vicious and angry. And then he basically says, you know, honey, come into the kitchen so I can kill you with a knife. And the FBI agent who knows exactly how this goes, just stands there, doesn't go in and doesn't prevent her boss who's become possessed from killing his wife. Just stands there.
[8:04] It makes absolutely zero sense. And there were so many things that just didn't add up and didn't make any sense that you just kind of give up and say, okay, I'm wandering into an AI-generated montage, or pastiche or sort of quilt work tapestry of various horror movie cliches and that's all that i i get to do and of course you know the dead-eyed frozen faced kids is always the same, and everybody's emotionally dead.
[8:40] And, you know, frozen faced and there are these interminable pauses between dialogue, which is just supposed to depress you and make you anxious and awkward at the social silences and the dead-eyed interactions and the non-existence of people's personalities. And, of course, this would be dissociation, right? Like you've experienced a lot of horror, you don't experience it yourself, and therefore it manifests in the world around you, right?
[9:06] When you've experienced a lot and people try this in a way and not obviously to the same degree i'm not putting my listeners in in these categories but to a much smaller degree but along the same sort of dimension my listeners will in the call-in shows will tell me the most, terrible terrible stuff like hey steph you should improve your posture and sit up a little and they'd be right about that all right so they they say the most terrible stuff and then they giggle or laugh about it and it's quite a common thing and that's because you're unable to experience your own horror, so you reproduce it in others by laughing at that, which is appalling.
[9:39] So, you know, that sort of dead-faced, dead-eyed, kids with no expression, staring up at terrifying clowns, kids with no sense of self-protection, no sense that this is weird and creepy and dangerous, and so on. That's kind of common. Now, why would a kid have no sense of danger and just stare blank-eyed and hang around this crazy, creepy, singing, laughing, deranged, over-the-top clown head guy? Well, because they've been eviscerated. They've been so tormented and tortured at home that they've lost all sense of self-protection. So this sort of the child abuse radiates out from this. And the other thing too is that we get into the single mother thing, of course, but it's always the fathers who do the attacks because women are wonderful and only men can be possessed and so on, right? Right. So men who are the protectors of the family turn into the destroyers of the family, family annihilators, I think they're called. And again, that's just sort of a predictable thing to have people hate the patriarchy and so on. So.
[10:39] It was a complete mess and needed probably four or five more rewrites with some critical eyes, as opposed to just assembling every jigsaw puzzle piece cliche of every horror movie that's ever made and jamming them all together in one unappetizing meal. It's sort of like going to, I went once with my daughter to, it was sort of a Chinese food buffet that had both Chinese food, they had sushi, they had Western food, and it's just like getting everything, putting it into a blender and trying to drink it you and you know we do this as kids you just get everything from the cupboard and try to make some quote meal and it just turns into this unappetizing ketchup flavored, orgasmic mess of culinary hell so but there was one thing or two two things i think that were important and they were related to each other so again the spoilers blah blah blah but the mother. So what happens is the serial killer comes to kill a family, and the mother says.
[11:37] Save my daughter, don't kill my daughter. And he says, okay, I won't kill your daughter, but you have to help me out in killing more families, right? So I'll let your daughter live, but you have to help me kill more families. So then the woman who used to be a nurse, crazy, who used to be a nurse, unless you're a nurse dealing with me, in which case you're saying I'm wonderful. So the woman who used to be a nurse, she's a single mother, and she saves her own child's life by allying with the devil, or this psycho, this killer clown. He's a hail Satan kind of guy. So the single mother preserves her own life.
[12:25] Her child's life by allying with violence and destroying intact households.
[12:34] Hmm. Interesting. So this to me is a deep analogy for the welfare state, also known as the single mother state. So women make bad decisions. They have children with the wrong men. And then to preserve their children's life, they make an alliance with the state, right? Single mothers vote overwhelmingly for bigger government programs. They don't really care about national and they don't care about raised taxes and so on, in general, lots of exceptions. So, in order to, quote, preserve their child's life, in the belief that they need to preserve their child's life, they make an unholy alliance with this agency of coercion, and then they go around destroying intact families, right? Because there needs to be a father present. so this is of course a hatred of the father that comes out of the single mother culture right single mothers and i was raised around single mothers so i know this with deep and horrifying intimacy uh single mothers have a huge amount of hostility towards men because they blame the men for really making them single mothers they won't take responsibility for the choices they make they will often worship their fathers but hate the fathers of their children it's a weird kind of split. But so the fact that a single mother makes an alliance with a coercive beast, that's indicative of a larger issue is not just an individual, he's like demonic or satanic, or he's a larger sort of agency.
[14:00] And so the single mother, in order to preserve the life of her child, makes a deal with the devil, and then, as a result, she destroys intact families. Well, of course, the redistributive, coercive redistributive nature of the welfare state means that money is taken from functional families and given to single mothers, which swells the ranks of the single mothers and destroys the two-parent household, right? Because they don't have enough money, and single mothers can be quite toxic, and single women keep women single, right? This is sort of an old Kevin Samuels thing. I think it's quite true.
[14:38] So the predatory toxicity of the single mother brigade, again, I'm talking collectively, there's individual exceptions, of course.
[14:45] But what happens is they ally with the government to gain resources through force in order to, as they believe it, preserve the lives of their children or the future success of their children, and they then destroy intact families. And that, as you can see, the sort of two-parent family, the rise of single mothers is coincided with the destruction of the two-parent family. And this is a result of socioeconomic things, of toxicity in the media, of a coerce of redistribution of resources through the welfare state. And so that to me would be the analogy that the this this single mom allies with the state and destroys two parent households in order through her hatred through hatred of the men in order to get resources for own child in this case the resources being her own survival and of course the woman's gone crazy the mother the ex-nurse she's gone crazy and so how does she live well she must live off the welfare state because um she's got a decent-sized house she's obviously a hoarder well she's a hoarder in the movie so how does she live well she lives off the welfare state right so she's got disability or some government pension or uh just welfare as a whole so so the other thing too though the question is why Why?
[16:12] Uh, why is it an analogy or why is the story in the movie that the single mother dresses up as a nun and then offers a free gift that she says, oh, you've won this, this, um, big doll from, from the church, right? You, you, you've won something from the church. And then people say, oh, great, lovely. Uh, come on in and bring this creepy doll with you and so on. Right? So, so why is that the case? Well, I would say that it is the pretense of charity, of generosity, but it is actually coercive and destructive. So this would be, of course, everyone thinking that the welfare state is about helping the poor, it's a kind of charity, it's niceness, it's kindness, and this is a Christian charity and niceness from the church and you get something for free. And people would say of course they would say well i i didn't enter any raffle i didn't like nobody called me like why would i i don't want to take this doll right this this could be so it could be drugs in the doll there could be a bomb in the doll there could be creepy stuff in the doll it just it could be uh recording me it could be any like why would you somebody says hey um, it's a beautifully perfectly made doll probably worth a thousand or two thousand or three thousand dollars and somebody comes and says oh here i want to bring this doll into your house and you You know, you won it in a church raffle. And it's like, well, I didn't enter any church raffle. Like, what the heck is going on, right?
[17:38] So the fact that they just, oh, I'll take something for free without examining it, and I will assume that it is nice and kind and charitable and Christian when it is, in fact, turns out to be coercive and destructive. Well, that's people thinking that the welfare state, which is founded on coercion, is nice and charitable and so on. And so...
[18:02] There's this mirror, right? So the woman makes a deal with the devil to preserve her own child. But other people think that it is Christian charity to take the unearned, right? So they didn't earn these dolls. They don't know where they come from. It doesn't make any sense why they'd just be getting a free doll from a church. And of course, if they don't go to the church, it makes no sense. If they go to the church and they've never heard about this doll raffle, then that wouldn't make any sense either. So they're taking something for free because they're greedy and they don't examine what appears to be for free, which turns out to be coercive, right? So this is false morality. This is people who say, well, the welfare state is, even though it's based on coercion, is in debt, right, the enslavement of the next generation to foreign bankers. They say, oh, no, no, it's nice, it's charitable, it's wonderful, it's kind, and so on, right? It's Christian charity when it's not. It's a desire for the unearned, which is the desire to, quote, help the poor without actually having to interact with the poor which is the mantle of virtue rather than the actual virtue and so the single mother aligned with the state to preserve her own child which results in the destruction of the nuclear family that's very clear in the movie and the fact that people.
[19:14] So thirst for the unearned that they will never question where it comes from or what its nature is or why it's there and so on they just let people come into their house and bring big boxes of creepy dolls uh because why no no particular reason and so and the ending was a real letdown there was no twist there was no reveal there was nothing right i mean the the uh.
[19:36] The movie literally ends on on the repeated click of an empty chamber uh in a gun and um i mean that's really they were out of bullets so again like metaphorical bullets it's right out of impact out of uh and so yeah a couple of jump scares nicholas cage doing his usual coked up scenery chewing uh stuff and everybody else was understated right so all the emotional energy and creepiness and and focus and demonic power is in the bad guy and all the good people are like weird half frightened constantly you go you gotta go this this is how actors act like male actors act by clenching their jaw like once you see that in tom cruise movies you just realize he's basically his whole acting lesson is chew gum jaw clench jaw clench jaw clench and the women do it by being you know cold and and and their neck tendons you know this makes men sympathetic and so on oh let me get you a coat you must be scared right the whole thing was the woman being cold and going like i just need you to be in an icebox and breathing hard that's your whole acting uh audition for this role and um so that's why the women act with the neck tendons The men act with the jaw muscles. It's all very, very sad and predictable. But yeah, the movie ends with this nothing burger of an ending. And then the credits roll backwards. Isn't that weird and eerie?
[20:57] And so, yeah, the world doesn't make much sense. The physics don't make much sense. The logic of the movie doesn't make much sense. The fact that they spend so much time trying to set her up to be psychic, which is never used again. The fact that she doesn't save her superior, even though she knows that he's been possessed and is going to kill his family. She doesn't save the wife. She doesn't save the husband.
[21:16] None of it makes any particular sense. except for there was this deep thematic thing about single mothers and deals with the devil and the destruction of the nuclear family out of the single mother's desire to preserve her child that was something that was like a core that could have been really really worked on and made just perfect but i guess they i mean i edit quite a bit of my own books uh but i guess they were just uh you know well we've we've assembled all the jigsaw puzzle pieces of all the famous horror movie cliches, let's just jam it into a narrative and fire it at the screen. It's like watching somebody paint by throwing buckets at a jet engine against a splatter wall. But, you know, I wouldn't recommend it, except if you do watch it, you know, it's not the end of the world. Just watch it where you can control the volume, because otherwise it is... I have to go to movies with, like, ear protectors, because they've just become so loud, especially the scare stuff. It is an assault. It actually makes me angry. So that's why I put the ear protectors in. I'll give up on some of the dialogue to preserve my hearing from the ear punch jump scare bullshit but i think it's worth watching but when you do uh sorry it's not a great movie but if you do watch it look for that single mother theme and let me know what you think of the comments below i really appreciate your time effort and energy thank you so much free domain.com donate if you'd like to help out the show i'd really appreciate it lots of love bye.
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