From 'I, Tonya' to 'Cat Person,' Is 'Based On a True Story' Better?

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With awards season upon us, it's hard to shake the feeling that our movies and books and TV shows are trying extra hard to tell us something about our current world, especially when they're based on real events.

From movies like Itanya and the Post to TV series like The Crown and American Crime Story, we are awash in fictional portrayals of what really happened.

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction.

But can fiction help get us to the truth?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

Our co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, is out gallivanting this week, but we

out gallivanting, as always, out on the gallivants.

But you hear the sonorous tones of my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

Hello, Matt Thompson, my esteemed colleague.

Hello to you as well.

And we have a special treat.

Atlantic.

Who?

I'm just going to spoil the news.

Atlantic Staff Writer and also veteran podcaster who you may know from Blank Check with Griffin and David, David Sims.

What, what, what, what?

Hi, guys.

Is also with us in New York.

How are you, David?

I'm very well.

I'm glad to gallivant with you.

A real podcasting pro.

Oh, that's right.

You're like the Mark Maron of our

Atlantic podcasts.

You're a paleocaster.

Who are your guys, Matt?

I'm just going to stick with the Mark Maron thing.

It is a pleasure to have you as today we discuss fiction, the movies, the TV, and what it can tell us about real life.

So the other day, The Atlantic published a piece by our staff writer, Connor Friedersdorf, who we will hear from briefly in the second half of today's episode.

And Connor made this argument that in this moment, when the truth is bitterly contested, that fiction presents an opportunity, allowing us to step into another person's perspective, to imagine someone else's experience.

And I don't know whether I'm imagining this, but it seems like we are actually in something of a golden age of fictional storytelling, whether you're talking about text or cinema or television that is based on reality.

So we've got sumptuous prestige series like The Crown and American Crime Story that are based on true events.

And I think because television has such length to digest these stories, the movies seem to be upping their game.

Movies like Itanya and The Post and The Big Sick.

And so our discussion in two parts.

First, what lessons are contained in our recent spate of based on a true story, films and novels and television shows?

And in the second half, to go specifically specifically to Connor's argument, what possibilities lie in fiction for exploring difficult subjects such as Me Too?

David.

David.

Oh, boy.

You have watched everything on a screen,

basically.

Maybe overstating it.

Sure.

You've watched every movie ever, David.

That's right.

So let's begin there.

And yes.

Am I right?

Do I sense a recent upping in the game of based on a true story stuff?

I mean, Hollywood's always loved a true story since its golden age.

What I think there's been an upping of is the kind of material you're talking about with a movie like Itanya, say, that is

exploring like the fungible space in between fact and fiction, right?

Like rather than the

traditional biopic, you're even like, you know, think back like to Oscar Winner's prior, like a beautiful mind, your inspirational true story.

you're oh i can't believe it you know my left foot he wrote a whole novel with his foot or it's been a while since i saw that one um that's one from the vault uh is these these movies that are like what is truth like can we even uh really uh declare what tanya harding did like you know or with it with any kind of uh surety like or or is it more interesting to wrestle with like how we perceive celebrity or how we perceive heroism in a hollywood context and also in a real context and what's in between all of that, right?

I, yeah, that you make it sound, so that's a really interesting take on

what we're doing here because

you seem to think that it's about the sort of florid inner life of

figures from reality and history.

Some of that.

But I guess maybe because I'm known to be a curmudgeon on this show, that's not true at all.

That's not true.

I assumed that we were seeing what felt like more fact-based plot lines because Hollywood is just wildly unimaginative.

Well,

that's always been true, I guess.

There's an argument for that, that if you're going to make a non-franchise, non-superhero movie,

base it on real events that there better be some kind of a name, right?

Like, yeah, that you can pin it to.

Yeah.

Well, and it's safer, right?

Like, oh, everybody knows who Tanya Harding is, therefore people will go see this movie.

Whereas if we just made a movie about a crazy figure skater, that would be Black Swan.

No, if we just that was about Ballerinas.

That was about Blanche.

They're the same, in my imagination.

But you know what I mean?

Like if someone said, I want the inner, like the inner sort of mental, the machinations of

a queen in the mid-1950s.

You're saying you want that fictionalized?

No, I'm just saying if you pitched it as such, like would someone greenlight it?

But when you say

it's about Queen Elizabeth.

Hang on, but let me tell you something else.

It's all true.

Yeah.

Like, that's part of the pit.

And part of what I'm wondering about is how TV has changed the game on this type of story.

So the biopic, the knock on the biopic, is that to condense, even if you're focusing on a pivotal moment in someone's life, biopics have to take a

very familiar template to a person's life story, right?

And so all the beats tend to be samey-samey.

You know that at some point you're going to have the rise, training montage, moment of adversity, the

fight back

to the peak, and

some one to grow on lesson

at the outcome.

We are very used to biopics, but we're not used to things that take the shape of the crown, where we are diving into

all of these tiny moments in a manner that allows us the space to really kind of unpack this person's fictionally imagined real experience.

The crown is wild when you think about it from that.

Like the queen is still alive.

Yeah.

And we are

that's wild in and of itself.

Yeah, well, sure.

It's been a long time.

That, yes, that we are digging into her emotional life.

Right.

I mean, obviously also the crown takes stock of Britain's political upheaval and the decline of the empire and all that stuff, but that you'll also have main storylines about the Queen's relationship with her husband, who she's still married to.

Yep.

And that that's, you know, being dramatized for our soapy entertainment because we eat our popcorn.

And for her, I mean, entertainment, presumably.

I would love to know if Queen

Elizabeth watches it.

But I would, to your point, Matt, I wonder if there's space carved out to do a show like The Crown.

I mean, when I watched The Crown, my immediate thought was this TV series would not exist without Mad Men, and it wouldn't have existed without The Sopranos.

That the sort of like high-caliber fiction serials that were developed almost opened up space to treat nonfiction in a really stylized, atmospheric, fiction-y kind of way, right?

Absolutely.

Maybe.

And not, you know, I got to throw a shout out to Downton Abbey, too, but also American Crime Story, which is less

prestige, but certainly has that kind of rich, it's a little bit more Chandeland than Madmanland.

Than Matthew Weiner.

Matthew Weinerland.

Yeah.

I don't have to say

that.

Sure.

There's a Romanov series coming out from Matthew Weiner.

There we go.

He's dipping back into fact, and I'm sure it will be done in a way that's the sumptuous fictional treatment.

For sure.

And again, we'll look at a larger state of upheaval, like, you know, in Russian society.

And like like the OJ series, the American crime story, People vs.

O.J.

Simpson, that's certainly a model that the Crown, I'm sure, is glomming onto a little bit because

you have all this rich public drama that everyone remembers, you know, in some form or another.

And then you have this

juicy private drama that no one maybe knows about, or that you can flesh out, or you can dramatize in these fascinating ways.

And that's so

much fun to watch in like you're watching an episode of scandal.

Yeah.

I think what I'm saying.

Can I propose something though?

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

No, no, no.

You propose something, Alex.

I'm going to propose something that is a little bit perhaps controversial, which is I'll invoke the great White House senior advisor, Kellyanne Conway, alternative facts.

When we take heretofore widely accepted factual events, Tanya Harding, the fact that Nancy Kerrigan's kneecaps, well, that Nancy Kerrigan was kneecapped.

She was.

And we revisit that story from a distinctly different perspective.

We offer alternative facts to the storyline that shed main characters in totally different lights.

Does it not create,

I'm really getting into like a Brown senior thesis here, but it's okay because I went to Brown University.

I just call those hot takes.

Does it not serve to undermine like what we all popularly accept as what happened?

Right.

I mean, the American Crime Story, in a way, it didn't suggest that OJ wasn't guilty, but it offers different, I mean, it just

never had a scene of him committing the crime.

Yeah, I would argue that Ezra Edelman's documentary

was much more, I mean, I actually thought it sort of shed light on what happened.

And I think each time we do this, you kind of perhaps open the door.

And I'm not saying more information is necessarily bad information, but it does potentially open the door to revisiting sort of settled ideas about what happened.

And

is that a good thing?

So I've got a counter-argument to it, and it's based somewhat on the crown, which is that

What good fiction does is it allows us to sink into someone's experience and to imagine it really richly, to really think about

what in this person's life and context might cause them to take this set of actions.

And imagining real individuals as fiction means that you are kind of situated in their world in a way that

creates a kind of empathy that we can lack when we're just viewing characters distilled to a kind of reality show paradigm on our screen.

For Queen Elizabeth, who

just exists in this world that's so far apart from the daily life of any average person.

The crown, I think, one of the fascinating things about it, and one of actually the really enjoyable parts of getting to watch the narrative is really imagining what is this life?

What would I do if I had the responsibility of this crown weighing on my head?

It's heavy as the

heavy is the head.

Heavy is the head.

But it really makes that vivid, and you see

the stakes and the trade-offs.

David, do you have stake in this argument?

Do you have a position in this argument?

Yeah, I mean, I think I want to draft off this a little bit with, I mean, what's interesting, you mentioned the OJ documentary, is that there are so many of these parallels,

parallel series, I guess, you know, with the OJ.

We were enjoying the Ezra Edelman's documentary just, what, a couple months after we were enjoying American Crime Story.

Itanya is coming just a couple years after that 30 for 30 about Tanya Harding.

That sort of reopened the case in a nonfiction way.

And the queen,

her whole existence has always, the whole appeal of it, I think, well, part of the appeal of it has been that it's shrouded away and that no one can understand it.

And just, I just watched just the other day that interview she did where she was talking about how she felt on the day that she was crowned, like talking about her emotions in a way that is very unusual for the royal family.

And it feels like there's this openness

there that is being mirrored in our fiction.

And I think what you're saying about that openness, Matt, is the central core of the appeal of all these things, is that peek behind a curtain.

Yeah.

And also, I think the empathy that's in it.

I want to shout out a story written by one of my favorites, Chima Manda Ngozi Adishier, in 2016 during the U.S.

presidential and the run-up to the U.S.

presidential election.

It was called The Arrangements, and it was published in the New York Times book review.

It was a story that was imagining the perspective of Melania Trump during the campaign.

And

DCA, Chimuanda Adishier, brought all of her writerly gifts to actually trying to imagine what her life might be like.

What I really liked about that story is she didn't just treat it as an exercise.

It's not just an effort to score partisan points.

It's really an effort to kind of sink into what in her mind is a character's perspective and to imagine a world.

It's probably not even close to the real world of Melania Trump's life, but it gives you a sense of what that life might encompass.

I want to quote just a passage from that story.

Quote, and this is again from Melania's perspective, but written in the third person.

Quote, Being in the news brought Donald the closest he could be to contentment.

He would never be a truly content person.

She knew this.

Because of that primal restlessness that thrummed in him, the compulsion to prove something to himself that he feared he never would.

It moved her, made her feel protective.

Even the way he nursed his grudges, almost lovingly, unleashing in great deal slights from 20 years ago, made her protective of him.

She often felt, despite the age gap of more than two decades, that she was older than Donald.

You know, that's a very provocative essay to read, Matt, because I think there are some people who would say every human being at some point, there is some amount of empathy we can find in any human story, right?

Whether it's trauma visited upon someone in childhood that lends to terrible decision-making and behavior later or, you know, any number of things that happen.

It's what almost all fiction is looking for.

Right?

Like you can find that in someone.

And I think there are some folks who would say, I'm not necessarily one of them, though.

That's a form of apologism, right?

Here's a way of presenting an otherwise despotic person.

And I'm not saying that, nor am I saying that Donald Trump is despotic, but someone who is highly controversial in a way that humanizes him and makes him more palatable and therefore excuses some of what some people would say are egregious missteps.

Another thing that occurs to me,

you can say that, or you could also say that sometimes it can feel too simple.

It's like, oh, here I've found the thing we haven't realized, which is blah, right?

Like this private thing.

And that helps explain everything and make you feel better about why does this person behave this way in public.

I mean, Itanya is definitely a movie that's trying to do that, where it's, you know, here's the real story, and here's the hidden pain, and

here's some sort of maybe too simple, too neat explanations for why someone maybe was wrapped up in something so horrifying.

A plot to kneecap

America's sweethearts.

Well, I think another thing that fiction like Itanya does, and I would argue that that Shimamana de Duche story did, is to reshape, and you said this before, David, but I want to reinforce it, to reshape how we think about someone who, about whom the narrative of their life is somewhat settled.

Sarah Marshall had written this story for The Believer a few years ago about Tanya Harding, Marsha Clark, Anita Hill, and Monica Lewinsky that was about how the news presented, made a character out of each of these women in the 90s, and how that character was such a reductive presentation of who each of these women really was.

And I think Itanya was very much a reconsideration of that story.

These stories now, a story like Itanya at this moment in the news cycle, it kind of has this question embedded in it.

What else?

And there's a Lewinsky show coming up, right?

Like, isn't there some Lewinsky?

It's high time for the revisitation of the Lewinsky scandal.

Although, you know, or the Clinton scandal, as perhaps it more aptly is should be called.

The Anita Hill story.

I mean,

there was a clear story.

Or the Clarence Thomas.

Sure.

Our colleague Julie Beck actually mentioned the rush to judgment that attached to some of these figures at the time.

Itanya also made me think about Monica Lewinsky.

Their scandals were kind of contemporary, you know, like within a few years of each other, I think.

And it just truly was extremely recently like how willing we were to just absolutely throw these women under the bus and make them the face of a scandal that they were not actually central to.

Like obviously the situations are a little bit different, but

for example, like now, you know, Bill Clinton was focused on at the time, but now he's like a lovable grandpa who plays with balloons at the DNC.

And people are just now starting to question like, hmm, maybe we treated Monica Lewinsky unfairly at the time.

And now, you know, whether they treated Tanya Harding unfairly at the time, because she was really the face of the incident.

I don't know how many people really knew like the name Jeff Galluli, which was her ex-husband who ordered the hit, or the name of the guy who actually did it.

It was all Tanya Harding, Tanya Harding.

And it just makes you think about how these stories kind of get distilled over time and we sort of suck all the nuance and the uncertainties and the unknowns out of them.

As Julie points out, we have a tendency of really quickly embracing a narrative, and that has often been to the detriment of women.

It's interesting that you brought up women, Matt, because inherent in all of this is a kind of gender critique, which is we often box women into these archetypes, and

we rarely look at their interior life, and or

do we see them as multivalent, complicated characters?

And there seems to be like a dawning awareness that, oh, maybe women aren't just, you know, objects of desire and sidekicks, best friends and wives, but are sort of lead characters in their own right.

I mean, that's what's so interesting about The Crown, too.

To that point, I want to shout out Sophie Gilbert's season two review of The Crown.

So, Peter Morgan, who is the showrunner for The Crown.

That's right, David, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

And he really is the grandfather, not grandfather, but he's done a lot.

This is the world he lives in, because he wrote Frost Nixon as well.

He writes a lot of these things that dig into the story behind the story.

Right.

And Sophie, to quote Sophie, she writes, quote, in interviews, he's described his subject, that is Queen Elizabeth, as a, quote, countryside woman of limited intelligence, end quote.

But that's Elizabeth Windsor, he seems to be describing.

Elizabeth Regina, as the show attests, has transcended those human origins to become something greater and something much harder to dismiss.

And at the end of Sophie's quote, but part of the story that Sophie reads into the crown is the way that

Elizabeth, despite her kind of narrow upbringing, her narrow monarchal upbringing,

is

this incredibly intuitively intelligent character in the show.

who

has a different sort of book learning than the prime ministers who come to greet her in Buckingham Palace, but can go toe-to-toe with each of them

on a very different set of terms, that her intelligence might not be one that society has conventionally recognized as intelligence, but it is fierce.

Do you think the truth matters in something like the crown?

There are moments where there are invented characters.

And I think Sophie points this out, or maybe you do.

I think it's Sophie.

Well, I read about the first scene.

I'll give you credit for it because you're sitting in front of me.

But,

you know, there's a scene where Winston Churchill's secretary is killed by an Aaron.

Sure.

But

during the peat fog.

Exactly.

That never actually happened.

And I guess as we think about these series as reframing

factual real-life characters, does it matter if events or aspects of their lives

never happened or are completely fictionalized?

What do you guys think?

No, because this is, again, something that Hollywood has done for 100 years and people have done for longer, where, you know,

there's nothing unusual about taking a narrative shortcut to get to whatever point it is you're trying to make, right?

But it can go too far.

It can get in trouble.

That's happened with Itanya.

We keep coming.

I keep coming.

I keep bringing us back to Itanya, where people will be like, well, hang on a second.

You've omitted something.

I feel like, I guess there's a difference between omitting something crucial that feels crucial to people

and cutting a corner to, you know, get to get the narrative to where it needs to be.

Right.

And

just like the fact that we're talking about fiction that's about Melania Trump, about the queen, I immediately thought of that Curtis Sittenfeld novel, American Wife, which I read whenever I read it as well.

You know, a Laura Bush type.

We are fascinated by these

ceremonial, like, mother-hostess figures, you know, who

are women behind the scenes that, as, especially in the Crown, where it's like, well, these are are political actors too.

And there is much more than

perhaps 100 years of patriarchal

iconography has suggested to these roles.

Perhaps more so than, I mean, the crown really throws that into sharp relief because she is the regent as opposed to the first lady, right?

I mean, how many, how many, you know, there's the king's speech.

We know well the story of Edward's abdication and Wallace Simpson and the, the king's ascension to the throne, but so little about someone who has been on the throne as is she the longest-serving monarch?

She is.

Yeah, she'd be Victoria.

She's the longest-serving monarch.

And I also think, actually, one of the things about this moment is that facts are so contested.

Facts and truth are incredibly contested.

I think part of what

things like the crown and Aitanya derive their power from is that they don't purport to be anything other than fiction.

That in fact, the crown is both

it

goes to some lengths to try to establish what is true about the stories that it tells, but it's kind of unapologetically fictional.

I think Chimamanda and Gozi Adishie's story about Melania Trump has the same character.

It's like these things are precisely because they don't claim to be the real thing.

They are just a thing that gives you a sense of what the real thing might be.

I think there's some power in that in this moment when facts are

very.

So you prefer your alternative facts.

I think you're right.

I think that, I mean, because I think anytime if someone came to Peter Morgan and said, well, wait a second, that's not how that went down.

Or like, well, wait a second, there's no proof that Philip had an affair or anything.

He would be like, oh, no, I know, but, you know, this is drama.

I'm creating drama.

And like, yeah.

I hope in the second half of our conversation, as we turn to the possibilities of fiction for venturing into difficult territory, we talk a little bit about Saturday Night Live, our

recurring weekly series of fiction that touches on real life.

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We are now joined by Atlantic staff writer and Radio Atlantic semi-regular Megan Garber.

Hello.

Hello.

Hi.

Hello.

And I wanted to kick this part of the conversation off.

So, Megan, we've just been talking about fact and fiction, fiction that blurs the lines.

And I wanted to come back to an argument made by our colleague Connor Friedersdorf.

We asked him to tell us how he feels about the role of fiction in a moment when we have a lot of uncomfortable conversations, most notably related to matters like Me Too.

Here's what he said.

The longer that the Me Too moment lasts, the more people are having this understandable impulse to talk not just about egregious cases of sexual assault or workplace harassment,

but these other encounters where the behavior of men to women is maybe insensitive to their dignity,

but all dealing with gray areas.

And there's a belief that things will never change unless we talk about these moments.

But the gray areas of sexual encounters turn out to be really hard to discuss because most people feel as though when they hook up with someone or enter into a sexual relationship, what happens within that sphere is private.

And this is where fiction is really useful and I think underutilized.

In fiction, there's no need for bravery to share an uncomfortable story rooted in your personal experience.

There's no need to protect the privacy of others.

And

a fictional story like Cat Person, which the New Yorker recently published, we hear about this older man hucking up with a younger woman and afterwards we can discuss every nuance of their interactions.

Whereas in a non-fiction account like that anonymous story written about Aziz Ansari, you know, many people never get around to learning from the gray areas of their interaction because the debate is so focussed on whether his date should have come forward, whether she was unfair to a public figure by sharing all these private details.

So I think if the Me Too moment is going to transcend these most unambiguous cases of misconduct and delve into the grayest areas of human relations,

where changing any norm is going to be sharply contested no matter what, maybe naming and shaming famous individuals for real-life encounters is just doomed to fail.

But I think with personal accounts of these ambiguous edge cases that don't breach anyone's anonymity,

you can have fictional characters that are presented in full.

You can have every wrinkle of consent norms that are discussed with a lot less backlash and maybe without any real substantive loss, too.

So I'm curious whether

I'm curious whether you'll accept Connor's premise.

Does fiction allow us to talk about the real life uncomfortable with less worry.

Megan, you've also written about Cat Prison.

I'm particularly curious for your thoughts on that.

No, I think it's such a good point, Connor made.

I think I'm sort of torn on it because, on the one hand, I was nodding my head to everything Connor said there.

And I think it's very true.

We want to try to, you know, decontextualize, I think, these stories to some extent as much as we can to really get at sort of the human truth of it, right?

So, you know, to take it away from individual people and that kind of thing.

But at the same time, I think we have this tendency to sort of think of fiction as a realm separate from our own, you know, where it's fiction, so it doesn't have to really directly and urgently relate to our lives.

You know, fairy tales, they're just fairy tales.

It's fine.

So I think there is something

profoundly important about sort of doing that very intentional blend of fiction and fact when we talk about this.

So we can sort of, you know, have the sort of more theoretical ideas that fiction would call forward, as Connor said.

But I think also we have to sort of have those discussions with a very real sense of, you know,

these are real lives.

These are, you know, these are ultimately going to come back to the human truths.

Yeah.

Megan, you use the word urgent, and that's like what I scribbled down on

my sheet of paper with David.

David Drew a cat person.

Yeah.

David Drew a cat person.

Shows you where our minds are at.

But I do, I mean, I think I really agree that part of the thing with fact and actual stories from reality is that they possess an urgency that demands attention and discussion in a way that fiction, while great and it can go viral and prompt all kinds of amazing conversations and realizations as cat person or cat people

did in The New Yorker, it's just it's not it's not the same.

And when we're talking about modifying behaviors and really re-examining things like gender norms and sexual norms, I feel like you need to have the weight that reality brings with it.

Which isn't to say that it's not a useful tool to talk about things in the abstract and in a fictionalized way, but I think you can't fully or even partially shed the reality piece of it.

I also think there's just this, as this, as Connor mentions, you know, as this, as this continues, every new story, it now becomes about some particular detail that gets picked apart or, you know, zoomed in on to such an extent that you lose sight of, like maybe with the Aziz Ansari story, it was that philosophical question he's talking about where it's like, oh, does his private life, you know, does that outweigh whatever is being, you know, like, should we be ignoring Blah because he's

a public figure?

Yes, right.

And

maybe that's just, that's just a side effect of how many stories have been sort of coming out with such frequency that rather than

take every one as a new thing to examine as its own sort of story, like we just, we're like, oh, well, the detail here is this.

And we now, now there needs to be an entire debate for a week about this kind of behavior.

I also wonder how many of the conversations that were prompted by Cat Prison itself, by that short story, were not just as uncomfortable as some of the conversations about the real life events that kind of touch on that experience.

Saturday Night Live recently aired a kind of instantly viral sketch about the difficulty of talking about the babe.net story about

Aziz.

I'm sorry.

Yes, yes.

I'm sorry.

We can talk about something else.

I was just curious what everyone thought.

No, no, no, of course.

We can

talk about it.

Yeah.

I mean,

I think we should.

We absolutely should.

Well, let's come to this.

I'll go first.

Are you sure you want to do this?

Yes, yes.

I will speak on the topic of Aziz.

I'm sorry.

I think...

Careful.

Yeah,

I think that some

women...

Careful.

Or

rather,

some men have a proclivity.

Careful.

Don't do it.

Stop.

Don't do it.

Honey, honey, honey.

And I think

I can imagine many conversations about Cat Prison that went essentially that exact same way.

Right.

Right.

I mean, I think there's a desire to think that, oh, it's easier to talk.

I mean, I do think it is easier when you're not debating the sort of merits of stars having their personal lives splashed all over the internet and you're really focusing on the transgressions or non-transgressions of the moment.

But like both cat people and the Aziz thing were really awkward, you know, encounters to unpack in part because

there was a gray area surrounding, or they were in the gray area.

I kind of wonder what the possibility.

I feel like satire actually presents a huge amount of possibilities for talking both about real life and talking about fiction.

I want to shout out a college humor sketch.

So college humor, first of all, I'm a total, I stand completely for college humor.

They're great.

And they have this sketch.

It's a few years old at this point, but it's a redo of the song Summer 11 from Greece that is very much

a satire of rape culture.

Tell me more, tell me more.

Did she put up a fight?

What?

Whoa, what?

Come on, Tundra Birds, what do I say?

Is that something that happens to you, Kanicki?

Like, they put up a fight?

That is not cool.

Guys, I was messing with you.

Come on.

So much of the discomfort in these conversations is an unfamiliarity about talking about culture, about norms, about the environment that we're all embedded in, that we don't really have a way or a usual mechanism for questioning.

Those things that are just kind of like casually tossed off references that happen in conversation, that's the stuff.

We can't talk about that stuff very easily, and satire kind of allows us to.

And I feel like too, yeah, when you when you say stuff and norms and all that, I mean, part of it is just we're so bad about talking about sex in this culture.

You know, we just we don't have good language for it.

We sort of, you know, pop culture at the one on the one hand sort of glorifies it as like the ultimate thing about being human, and yet at the same time can only make jokes about it.

You know, so it's these weird sort of

adolescence, you know, that we have at sort of the level of the mass culture, I think.

And that extra complicates things because, you know, it's these are both uncomfortable, but they're also about something that we're just really bad at talking about.

Yeah.

Our most consistent, ongoing fictional series that touches on real life matters is, in fact, Saturday Night Live.

Saturday Night Live is where, when it's in season, every Saturday, we're imagining the inner life of Donald Trump as constructed through the character of Alec Baldwin.

David, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about

thinking about SNL itself and satire more broadly.

What's the role of satire in this conversation?

I think the role of satire is very important.

When you think about the Baldwin Trump character, what struck me about his introduction,

which was back right, you know, I think it was maybe a couple months before the election.

It was right in the thick of 2016.

And you'd had Darrell Hammond playing the character because they couldn't really find a Trump.

They were struggling with a Trump.

And Darrell Hammond played Trump as this sort of like

slightly sly kind of New York slick guy who would sort of give asides to the audience where he's like, huh, I don't know, you know, and was more of like

a huckster, I guess, or more of what maybe the perception of him is this real estate guy.

The 1980s and 1990s, Donald Trump.

Right.

And then when Baldwin emerged, he had such an aggressive energy and he was playing him more monstrous.

Like, and there was something immediately very impactful about it.

I felt like, you know, impactful should never use that word, but something,

you know, kind of frightening about him.

And I think that has now

begun to disintegrate.

I think that now Baldwin plays him more in line with, I guess, what a lot of the, you know, sort of stories of Trump's inner life in the White House is like, which is that I guess, you know, the most recent sketch was him in bed eating an Egg McMuffin, and like he's vain, I guess, or he doesn't know, he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

You know, more of, more of like a sort of a fatuous softie again.

Yeah, more malevolent but bumbling.

And that is

automatically interesting to me, even though I think some of the edge is gone from Baldwin's impression.

It's even that transition is interesting to me, that that's now maybe SNL's perception of Trump.

And

as you say, SNL is the biggest satirical reflection of current events.

And I don't know if that's just a matter of Balton's performance changing or his take on the character changing or our take on the character changing.

Yeah, I feel like it tracks with our national attitude towards, or well, at least liberal America's

attitude towards this president, which was initially, oh, he's a huckster real estate tycoon, and then he's kind of a malevolent

dictator, and now it's like a malevolent bumbler, perhaps.

Sure.

I don't know.

What do you guys think?

Megan, I'm particularly curious about whether you think, to the point about the Batua Softie depiction of Donald Trump, Batua Softi being my new rap name.

Particularly about that depiction of Donald Trump, does satire actually make us,

that is, in one sense, kind of speaking to the choir too, potentially, or alternatively, allowing us to poke fun at ourselves.

Does it make it easier or harder to discuss things about which we disagree, like the president?

Yeah, oh, that's such a good question.

I think it's a little of both, really.

I think easier for all the ways we've been talking about, where you sort of put it into the realm of sort of ideas and you can analyze the joke rather than analyzing the president.

And, you know, in this highly partisan age when, you know, so much is just about bickering, it can be nice to just have things kind of located on a purely ideological or ideas-based, I guess,

plane.

But at the same time, I do think it can lead sometimes to we can only talk about the ideas and we can sort of lose sight of the fact that, you know, this is a president who has a very specific set of policies that are, you know, rendering themselves in very real ways onto the American people.

So I feel like it's a balance of sort of finding the ways to talk about the things that need to be talked about, but also, you know, in a way that's not too theoretical and in a way that, you know, even though we're maybe using the lens of satire, we can sort of get back to the reality of the situation.

And again, back to that word word urgency and not forget the urgency of it all.

I do think that, you know, one of the things, one of the gifts that 2017 gave us was a lightly satirical movie that at the same time allowed a big chunk of America to sink into another big chunk of America's experience in a really rich way.

And I'm talking, of course, about Get Out.

Funny, scary,

and real in a way that little else is.

Yeah.

Agreed?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, and David and I, before this podcast started, we were talking about it as an Oscar nomination, right?

Which is like, I think

I wonder kind of whether get out would be an Oscar contention if Donald Trump wasn't president, right?

I mean, and that gets to, I think, something about fiction is that it can be cathartic in a way.

I mean, I definitely think SNL is a form of liberal catharsis.

Like at the end of the week, after the handwringing and the indignation, and I'm not saying that those aren't necessarily well-founded emotions, but after that's over, here's a chance to laugh at the man that's made you so angry or stressed out during the week.

And with Get Out, it's sort of like, here's a rejoinder to the Make America Great Again

crowd.

This is the sort of like woke movie of 2017, 2016?

Now I can't even remember.

2017.

Well, 2017, that's why it's nominated for an Oscar.

Hello, Alex Wagner.

At any rate, I mean, I just think you can't, there is an emotion, there is the success of those two enterprises, both get out and snl i think cuts to sort of deeper reality that americans find themselves living with and they search something out in fiction to deliver them from that in a way or to to respond to that

so i want to turn us to the way we always end radio atlantic with our keepers what have you heard watched listened to read experienced done recently that you do not want to forget david sims how about we start with you starting with me okay well not to brag but i saw black Panther yesterday.

What?

Speaking of a rejoinder to

like the white patriarchy.

Rude.

What it's very rude of me to go see that movie in my role as film writer for the I.

And it's not going to be a movie that's going to be hard to avoid, obviously.

It's going to be everywhere in a couple of weeks, I think on the 16th.

It's not going to be hard to avoid.

It is going to be hard to avoid.

Well, right.

Yes.

Sorry.

Thank you, Alex.

What I loved about it the the most, without spoiling anything, is its sense of world, which is so often missing from a comic book movie,

is

it gives us a lot of time in Wakanda, in T'Chala's, in Black Panther's kingdom, secret African kingdom, that is not about setting up, you know, a villainous plot point that needs to be resolved later, or, I don't know, like dropping an infinity gem that's going to, Thor's going to have to deal with in the next movie or what that is about giving us a very unique kind of a world that you might not have glimpsed in a big budget movie that I can really think of and I hope that that's what we talk about you know the the the sort of investment in that kind of storytelling when this movie comes out I'm sure we're gonna talk about a lot of things did you did you and in Wonder Woman in in Patty Jenkins version of it there's time spent on the island of like women and are these presented as kind of alternate universes where you know there's like a dominant black culture that runs things, and same with a dominant female culture that runs things.

For sure.

I mean, I think that's one of the reasons Wonder Woman is so successful as well.

Again, because it's not 10 minutes, it's 50 minutes, you know, that there's real time spent there.

But yeah, no, there's a philosophical question at the heart of here's this magical world, right?

That

this African kingdom that's technologically advanced and

very sort of sort of ahead of the rest of the world in a lot of ways.

And just sort of challenging the audience with,

how would you feel if such a place existed?

And would you be able to reconcile it with how the rest of the world works?

Yeah.

Can't wait to see it.

Alex.

Me neither.

Wagner.

What is it?

I want to shrink myself down to a mouse size and be up in David Sims' pocket when he goes to these movie screenings.

Is that creepy?

I didn't mean it to sound creepy.

You could see it.

I'm speaking kind of like a redatatouille sort of situation.

That's a rat.

Great movie.

So great.

Great movie about that.

That's my keeper.

Ratatouille.

It's not my keeper.

My keeper is, I'm reading Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers, which is a great and delicious read about the life and times of Jan Wenner that was an authorized biography until it was decidedly unauthorized.

It was deauthorized.

Deauthorized.

It's just great.

You know, we live in times of turmoil right now, no doubt, but it's great to remember the sort of 70s counterculture moment and sort of how roiling youth culture was in those days.

And think about that in contrast to today.

I can't wait till someone, maybe Peter Morgan, makes a mini-series based on John Winners.

Probably won't happen.

Just throwing it out there to tie up the theme of this podcast.

Awesome.

Great, great, great job.

Megan,

what is your keeper?

So speaking of the 70s, I recently binge-watched the entire second season of One Day at a Time.

Have you guys watched the the show on Netflix?

Yes,

so good.

To where the music's playing.

And yes, and I've just been loving this show.

So the reboot very much has the Norman Lear DNA in it.

It's very sort of issues-oriented.

This time around, it's a Cuban-American family living in LA.

And they're just wonderful.

Just top to bottom, the show is well written, it's well acted.

It has just, I know this is cliché to say, but it has so much heart.

And to tie back to the idea of fiction and fact, one of the things that I just really love about this show is it's such a good presentation of ways to argue in ways that are meaningful and that don't feel gross.

You know, every sitcom will have a conflict in the middle that's resolved by the end.

But this one in particular finds ways to really emphasize that this is a family that loves each other so much and fundamentally respects each other so much that whatever disagreements they may have, and in a lot of cases, these are really big disagreements about how each character lives their lives, but regardless of those, they will find ways to come back together at the end.

And it just feels like a very good metaphor for America.

Aww.

One day at a time.

I like it, Megan.

It's nice.

One day at a time.

So I will close this out.

On Super Bowl Sunday, I joined many people in celebrating Janet Jackson Appreciation Day.

I would like to specifically call out an epic Twitter thread from October 2017 that begins, quote, the youngest in her famous family, Janet Demita Joe Jackson, seemed predestined for stardom.

This thread goes on for another 237 tweets.

We will link to it in the show notes.

It is easy to forget what a tremendous mark Janet made on the landscape of pop music.

How many other living musicians were in the direct orbit of Michael Jackson, Prince, and Tupac Shakur.

What?

Basically, every living pop diva has borrowed elements from Janet's sound and image.

And I want to make the case for making Janet Jackson Appreciation Day an annual event.

Yes.

Every Super Bowl Sunday, I think we can proclaim it Janet Jackson Appreciation Day.

So let it be written.

So let it be done.

My esteemed co-host has said it.

It's a rule now.

I think we're done here.

We're done here.

Thank you so much.

Megan, David.

Thank you.

It is a pleasure.

Thank you.

An honor.

Thanks.

Alex, as always.

Thank you.

Matt, it's my pleasure.

It's my honor to be your esteemed colleague.

I will talk with you next week.

Once again, we've reached the end of Radio Atlantic.

Make sure you tune in next week for a very special episode of the show.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend, with production support from Diana Douglas and Kim Lau.

Thanks, as always, to my co-host Alex Wagner, to David Sims and Megan Garber for joining us in studio, and to Conniff Readersdorf Julie Beck and Lenika Cruz for their contributions.

Our theme song, The Battle Hymn, is by the freaking inimitable John Batiste.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information, your thoughts on the episode, and/or your lesson about fiction from real life at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

Do not miss next week's episode.

It is a doozy.

We'll see you next week.

week.