Slate Money: Movies: Glengarry Glen Ross

Summary

Slate Money: Movies – Glengarry Glen Ross

Release date: August 3, 2021
Host: Felix Salmon (A)
Guests: Mary Childs (C, co-host at Planet Money), Emily Peck (B)

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Overview

In this episode of Slate Money: Movies, Felix Salmon and co-hosts Mary Childs and Emily Peck dissect David Mamet’s classic film Glengarry Glen Ross. The trio explores the film’s enduring impact on business culture, its critique of toxic masculinity, the mythology of high-pressure salesmanship, and how the movie’s themes resonate (or not) in today’s world. They also touch on issues of gender, changing workplace norms, and why Alec Baldwin’s brief appearance has overshadowed the film’s actual narrative core.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Film’s Reputation and Takeaway

• Alec Baldwin’s Oversized Legacy
  • The hosts observe how Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” monologue (00:39) eclipses the film’s Jack Lemmon-driven tragedy.
    • “You thought this was an Alec Baldwin movie. In fact, it's a Jack Lemmon movie, which no one wants to talk about because Jack Lemmon is not your typical hard-charging, sweary, David Mamet kind of guy.” — Felix Salmon (02:53)
  • Baldwin as folk hero mirrors "Liars' Poker" and Wall Street myth-making.
• Misreading of the Film
  • Many fans see the film as glamorizing cutthroat sales tactics when it’s truly a bleak portrayal of desperate men.
    • “We tend to maybe intentionally misunderstand movies like this, where we latch onto the Alec Baldwin swagger... and forget that the entire point... is the Jack Lemmon character.” — Mary Childs (03:09)

2. Toxic Masculinity and Hyper-Masculine Workplaces

• On-screen Gender Dynamics
  • The crew discusses the all-male cast and the resulting oppressive gender dynamic.
    • “This movie is a critique of... toxic masculinity. This movie is all about the horror of being a man in the United States...” — Emily Peck (05:44)
    • “It’s a movie about men, masculinity, and man stuff. Men being men, proving that they’re men for other men.” — Emily Peck (24:08)
  • Off-screen women are either obstacles or absent. The only credited woman is “Coat Check Girl.” (23:26)
• Has Society Progressed?
  • The hosts ponder if workplace masculinity has softened:
    • “Do we think we've done a better job of maybe making workforce masculinity a little bit less toxic? That you don't have workplaces where men just tell each other to fuck off all over the place every day...” — Felix Salmon (17:36)
    • “I think there’s a growing awareness that it’s not chill to do.” — Mary Childs (17:52)

3. Sales as Exploitative Game Versus Relationship Building

• Shift from Personal to Automated Sales
  • The analog days of leads on index cards are contrasted with the impersonal, automated world of email funnels and digital marketing. (09:48)
• Gender and Sales Stereotypes
  • While sales is seen as male-dominated, the group notes prominent female sales figures in finance and retail:
    • “If you're a woman selling something... you have to sell your masculinity or your femininity. That's part of it.” — Emily Peck (09:47)
• Ethics of Selling
  • The cast debates if true salesmanship is about providing value or just extracting cash:
    • “The salesmen in this movie have utter contempt for the people to whom they are selling... All the best salesmen and women... would recoil at that.” — Felix Salmon (12:05)
  • Ed Harris’s character references old-school, relationship-driven sales vs. pump-and-dump schemes (13:47).

4. The Precarity of Work and Evolution of Labor Models

• Comparing Precarity: Then and Now
  • Mary Childs notes that even with the film’s cutthroat workplace, “This is so much better, even still better than a contractor model...” (15:28)
  • Emily Peck counters: “But this is like the bleakest workplace ever. Everyone is out for themselves. There’s almost no camaraderie...” (16:03)
• Modern Parallels
  • The discussion references MLMs, gig-economy insecurity, and how structural underpinnings have deteriorated (17:30).

5. Timeless Themes: Short-Termism and Human Nature

• Short-Term Gain vs. Long-Term Value
  • The characters’ and society’s obsession with immediate payoff at the cost of future well-being is examined:
    • “It’s the human animal. We want the short term hit. This idea of delayed gratification is kind of unnatural.” — Felix Salmon (36:21)
    • Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma as the embodiment of the short con, not the long game.
  • References pop-culture and economic parallels, from Donald Trump to Robinhood trading. (34:19–36:21)

6. Acting, Structure, and Longevity

• Masterclass in Acting
  • Across the board, the panel praises the cast: Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, Jonathan Pryce (“bazonkers” cast — Felix Salmon, 41:19).
  • Discussion about Pacino’s performance before his chewier roles (“He was genuinely playing a character. He wasn't just playing a caricature of Al Pacino.” — Felix Salmon, 40:03)
• Dated but Effective
  • The noirish aesthetic/80s rain-soaked vibe is divisive; timelessness vs. datedness debated.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the film’s legacy:
  • “This is a modern death of a salesman. The salesman dies and you’re sad and somehow that gets lost in the cultural interpretation...” — Mary Childs (05:12)
• The infamous Baldwin speech:
  • “First place is a car, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place is you’re fired.” — Paraphrased by Felix, Emily, and Mary (18:19–18:41)
• Sharp gender critique:
  • “Women are just blocking the great deals and the closings.” — Mary Childs (23:34)
• Sales process, then and now:
  • “These guys have the cards, those cards, you know, with the leads on them. Those cards don't exist. Anymore. Those cards are email addresses and they're harvested by companies...” — Emily Peck (09:50)
• On being sucked in by salespeople:
  • “If you have, you would know... You do not walk out of there without a full face and a full, full bag.” — Mary Childs on makeup sales (09:20)
• The film’s emotional toll:
  • “I couldn't sleep last night after I watched this. I had terrible nightmares... Jack Lemmon fucked me up.” — Mary Childs (42:00)
• Insight into journalism and salesmanship:
  • “This is what all journalists are taught to do, which is shut the fuck up and stop asking questions and just wait for people to reveal their deeper secrets because they're trying to fill an uncomfortable silence.” — Felix Salmon (28:22)
• Cultural resonance:
  • “It was a power game even if it wasn’t in his own long-term best interest... you see that quite a lot in the news these days.” — Felix Salmon on short-termism (34:19)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:28 — “What's my name? Fuck you. That's my name.” (Opening quote reference)
• 03:09 — Cultural misunderstandings of the film and idolization of Alec Baldwin’s character
• 05:44 — “This movie is a critique of... toxic masculinity.”
• 09:50 — Evolution from index card leads to automated digital sales
• 12:05 — Ethics and customer contempt in the sales world
• 13:47 — Relationship-building old school sales vs. modern model (Ed Harris/Alan Arkin discussion)
• 15:28 — Comparing job precarity then (with benefits) and now (gig economy)
• 17:52 — Workplace toxicity and whether things have changed
• 18:19 — Iconic “first prize, second prize...” speech
• 20:11–20:47 — Al Pacino’s seduction-based sales technique
• 23:26–24:08 — Lack of women, gender erasure in the film
• 28:20 — Journalistic silence and letting sales fill the void
• 36:21 — Short-termism, Robinhood, Gamestop, and the “hit” of sales
• 41:19 — Discussion of the film’s acting as a masterclass
• 42:00 — Mary on nightmares and emotional response to the film
• 47:13–49:50 — Ratings, final thoughts, impact, and whether the movie could be made today

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Panel’s Final Verdicts

• Mary Childs:
  • Gave the film an “A” for acting, structure, emotional impact, but called it "gutting and heart wrenching." (47:13)
• Felix Salmon:
  • Gave it a “B” — “Although it does definitely have a lot to say about toxic masculinity... there's a little bit of, like, not very camouflaged misogynism in the way that [Mamet]... wrote it.” (48:06)
• Emily Peck:
  • “A minus” for strengths in acting and composition, with deductions for outdated elements. (48:41)

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Tone and Language

The conversation is sharp, witty, and candid, mixing humor and cultural criticism with personal anecdotes and industry insight. The hosts riff on each other, challenge perspectives, and freely use language reflective of both the film’s and Mamet’s style.

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Closing Thoughts

The group concludes that Glengarry Glen Ross is a brilliantly acted, deeply uncomfortable American tragedy whose real message is often obscured by its own machismo and pop culture quotes. Despite—or because of—its toxic sheen, it remains a cultural touchstone for the dark side of capitalism and workplace ambition.

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Next episode preview: Sense and Sensibility

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome to the Glengarry Glen Ross episode of Slate. Money Goes to the Movies. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios and I'm pointing to my long term co host here and I'm going to say, what's your name?

[B]

What's my name? Fuck you. That's my name.

[C]

I drive an $80,000 BMW. That's my name. Or whatever.

[A]

Right, but your name is not I drive an $80,000 BMW. Your name is actually Mary Childs.

[C]

That's accurate. I stand correctly. My name is Mary Childs. Yeah. Not quite the same punch.

[A]

Not quite the same punch, but it is a fabulous name and you're a fabulous person and you have all manner of awesome stories on the radio, right?

[C]

Yes, I try to deliver awesome stories. I am a co host at Planet Money and we do fun narratives that are about like, business, economics, finance, things. They're usually capers, yet educational.

[A]

This here movie, I'm not sure if it counts as being either educational or a caper, although it could probably make claims to both if you really twisted. But we are gonna talk about Glengarry Glenross, written by David Mamet, directed by someone entirely forgettable, and acted by all stars, everyone you've ever heard of.

[C]

White men.

[A]

Lots of white men doing lots of David Mamet acting. It's a movie that has really resonated for decades. People love to quote it. And we're gonna unpack why. Coming up on Slate, Money Goes to the Movies.

[B]

I'm not trying to be a diva, but should we actually say what my name is? Maybe it's Emily Peck. Emily Peck of Funrise. That is who I am. My name is not Fuck you.

[A]

Okay, Mary Gary Glen Ross. Which for some reason I find incredibly hard to pronounce. Where were you when was it that you first saw this movie?

[C]

Last night, in preparation for today.

[A]

But you picked it?

[C]

Yes. I felt like this was an opportunity to do some of my, like, finance Wall street homework. As a journalist covering the space, I've long felt that I need to watch movies like American Psycho, the Big Short, Glengarry Glen Ross and others that constantly get referenced. But it does have the effect of like, you know how when you see Borat after everyone's been quoting it to you for 10 years. Yes, yes, yes. It sort of takes the air out of it a bit.

[A]

So now you're watching it and you see Alec Baldwin say, always be closing. And you're like, oh, okay, yeah, now I know what everyone's been talking about this whole time.

[C]

And then he leaves the movie and we never hear from him again. This is wildly misleading.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You thought this was an Alec Baldwin movie. In fact, it's a Jack Lemmon movie, which no one wants to talk about because Jack Lemmon is not your typical hard charging, sweary, David Mamet kind of guy. So even though it's actually a Jack Lemmon movie, people think of it as.

[C]

An Alec Baldwin movie, which I feel like is kind of the takeaway of, like, we tend to maybe intentionally misunderstand movies like this, where we, like, latch onto the Alec Baldwin swagger, successful $80,000 BMW character, and forget that the entire point of the movie is the Jack Lemmon character.

[B]

It's the classic thing with these movies. Just like Wall street, where this movie is like a tragedy about Jack Lemmon and the other guys too, but everyone is like, I want to be Alec Baldwin for some reason.

[C]

Exactly. Right.

[B]

Because he sounds cool and looks cool, makes a lot of money.

[C]

He's a closer. So are we.

[D]

You can't close the leads you're given. You can't close.

[C]

You are.

[D]

Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it, cuz you are going out.

[E]

The leads are weak.

[F]

The leads are weak.

[D]

The leads are weak.

[F]

You're weak.

[D]

I've been in this business 15 years.

[B]

What's your name?

[A]

You.

[D]

That's my name. You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. That's my name.

[A]

You know, this is the. The Paradox of Liars Poker, the Michael Lewis book that he wrote it as this sort of cautionary tale about the excesses of Wall Street. And everyone was like, oh, my God, that sounds amazing. I want to go work on Wall Street.

[C]

And to this day, people come up to him and say, you inspired me. And he's like, did you read it? Just wondering. Did you read it?

[B]

What's that about?

[A]

Okay, so this is an interesting question. This is a known trope when it comes to Gordon Gekko, right? Gordon Gekko is precisely the cautionary tale who becomes some kind of folk hero because people don't understand what the author of the movie was trying to do. In this case, I think it's very fair to say that the author of the movie is not the forgettable director who did forgettable directions. The author of the movie is David Mamet. Was he trying to write a sort of cautionary tale about the excesses of rampant hard selling and capitalism? And conversely, like, did people misunderstand it and take it as a celebration of something?

[C]

I think. I mean, I can't speak to David's intentions here. We haven't spoken about this particular film, but I will say that it does seem like this is a modern death of a salesman. That the salesman dies and you're sad and somehow that got lost. That gets lost in the cultural interpretation or at least the kind of things that like imprinted on all the ducks that watched it.

[B]

I can't speak to what he was doing either as a playwright or a screenwriter. Should we call him maybe? Why didn't we get him on Felix?

[A]

We never have principles on this show. Emily. With the single exception of J. Smith.

[B]

Cameron, I think this movie is a critique of. Wait for it. Toxic masculinity. This movie is all about the horror of being a man in the United States.

[C]

And being trapped in that.

[B]

Yeah, and being trapped in it. And you have to prove that you are a real man with your brass balls by always closing, which is really a metaphor for sex. And I mean, Alec Baldwin literally says over and over that it's fucking or whatever. But yeah, this is toxic masculinity. And for a large portion of men who idolize the movie, I'm. Maybe that's exciting to them or like appealing. You want to be like a man? I don't know. I'm not a man.

[C]

And why so desperately they have to appeal or kind of have to identify with the Alec Baldwin character? Because the alternative is horrifying.

[B]

Jack Lemmon.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I will definitely say that in terms of gendered occupations, salesman has to be way up at the top of the list. The hard, smooth talking sales professional, as exemplified by pretty much everyone in this movie, with the exception of Kevin Spacey, is incredibly gendered role. You see it also in some of the titans of business in the real world. People like Tim Armstrong, say, very famous as being a very successful salesman when he was at Google or who was the chairman of cbs who was just like legendary for selling ads like Les Moonves. Les Moonves, Yeah. Les Moonves was really at heart, salesman. And people celebrate that. And it's hard at least for me to think of anyone with the possible exception of like Elizabeth Holmes, who was like a great sort of female salesman.

[C]

I don't know, man. I think there are a lot. I feel like, okay, first of all, like all of hedge fund sales is not all much of hedge fund sales. And like that a lot of hedge.

[A]

Fund sales is women. That's true.

[C]

Is women. And also, like you have that spate of girl bosses that did an incredible job with marketing and like, finger on the pulse of whatever worldview we espouse at the time. Granted, we've all moved on somewhat violently from that worldview and punished them as a result. But I feel like the Audrey Gelmans and the same Steph Curry's, et cetera.

[A]

Okay, so, people, I want to just come back very quickly and say there's a big important difference between sales and marketing, and it's important not to conflate the two. And I remember talking to Ken Fisher about this, who is really the guy who explained it best to me. He obviously has these funds that he sells financial investments to rich individuals. And he's like, marketing is important. And then what you need is like, a salesperson at the end of the marketing funnel who will close the deal, who will close the sale. And I'm seeing this in Masterworks right now. You know, this company, which seems to be inescapable, which is trying to sell, like, fractional ownership of paintings. They have a huge marketing operation. They have this massive marketing operation. They're like buying ads in every, like, financial newsletter and podcast and everything and Twitter. But what that marketing operation does is basically just gets you to type your email into a box and then the leads, the sale, then that's the lead. And then the hard sell comes, and it's the salespeople who really drive that company.

[B]

I have many thoughts and try to distill them. First, women do sales. Felix, you've never bought makeup in a department store, but if you have, you would know, like, those do not walk.

[C]

Out of there without a full face and a full, full bag.

[B]

$200 poor every time. Or $50, whatever. I'm always sucked in. Real estate. My God, likes, don't let a real estate person near your house. You will sell it. You will buy one. It'll be a disaster. I might know something about that. So I feel like if you're a woman selling something or a man selling something, you have to sell your masculinity or your femininity. So that's part of it.

[A]

Interesting.

[C]

That's completely right.

[A]

I like that. Take.

[B]

Al Pacino is, like, basically seducing that guy in the Chinese restaura, which I love the Chinese restaurant. So that's one thought we could play with. And the other thought, before I lose it from my brain, is that the kind of sales they're doing in this movie? This is from, like, such a different time. Before the world of click for the lead, before the world of input your email. Like, these guys have the cards, those cards, you know, with the leads on them. Those cards don't exist. Anymore. Those cards are email addresses and they're harvested by companies like Masterworks and these big pushes that are converted, they're ad auctions now. The marketing and sales is very automated in this new world. Like you wouldn't get a phone call anymore. You would get a hundred emails and there'd be like a 2% response and those people would buy. And you don't need, you don't even really need those salesmen anymore.

[C]

It's more of a volume game. I think that's right.

[A]

I think depending on what you're selling, there's certain things, including houses most of the time, although maybe not in the current bubble where like. And financial investments in general are often very much sold like big dollar amounts or something like a software as a service contract. You know, if I'm slack and I want to sell IBM on installing slack across their entire business or something like that, then that's going to be a very long and involved sales process with a very senior salesperson talking to a bunch of very senior executives over many like weeks and months and persuas feeding them a great effort and expense to sign a multimillion dollar contract that does still exist. And that salesperson, I guess in my head the stereotype would be a man. But I do not know what the gender breakdown is in those kind of sales teams.

[C]

I do think it cuts both ways. I just am remembering, like, there's this whole world of rhetoric around why hedge fund sales and like relationship managers at banks are women. And they're like, well, the clients need the hand holding and they need to be cajoled and women are just more persuasive. So like, you hear this argum, but it's in like a little weird box over on the side, you know what I mean? Like, the rhetorical points are trotted out when they're useful and then to Emily's point, gendered where useful and then they're not transferable somehow. So like the stereotypes and the cliches hold but are not true.

[A]

One of the cliches that definitely comes through in this movie and Mamet totally leans into, is the way in which the salesmen in this movie have utter contempt for the people to whom they are selling completely. And they want to just like extract the maximum amount of money from those people and then they've made their money and then they move on and they don't care what happens to those people after that. And all the best salesmen and women I think in the world would like recoil at that and they're like, the way that you are a successful salesman is by selling something that the client actually likes and wants and wants to come back for more of and more and more and more. And it's not one of those like I'm just going to you over once and then move on to the next mark.

[B]

Well, they actually have a conversation about.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, go ahead. What is that Moss and George. Sorry for. Not Alan Ark.

[B]

I don't know their name.

[C]

Ed Harris.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And Ed Harris. Yeah. Ed Harris makes this point. He's like, when I was coming up, we learned that you want to sell five cars over 15 years to the same person, not one car and get out. And that we've messed it up ever since the. Was it the Glen Ross sales that messed everything up? I can't remember. And I really wanted to unpack that more with Ed Harris, but it's a fast moving time and we didn't get more.

[A]

So he drops that in there and then it's dropped and.

[C]

Yeah. Is it time for kind of a prequel?

[G]

When we were selling Glen Ross farms, didn't we sell a bunch of that?

[A]

Yeah.

[G]

They came in, you know, they it up.

[A]

They did.

[G]

They killed a goose.

[A]

They did.

[G]

And now stuck with this.

[A]

This, this. It's too. It is.

[G]

You get a bad month, all of you run this. They put you on his board.

[A]

I.

[G]

Some contest board.

[C]

I.

[G]

It's not right.

[A]

It's not right to the customers.

[G]

I know. It's what. Hey, what did I learn as a kid on Western? You don't sell a guy one car. You sell him five cars over 15 years.

[A]

That's right.

[G]

You're goddamn right it's right. Guys come in. Oh, blah, blah, blah. I know what I'll do. I'll go out and rob everybody blind and go to Argentina because nobody ever thought of this before, you know, so they killed a goose. And a man's worked all his life got a cower in his boots.

[B]

Boots.

[A]

Yes. So this is really the. It's clearly the seedy underbelly of the sales world. Right. This is the pump and dump stock brokerage. This is the door to door vacuum salesman who throws dirt onto your carpet. This is the. Can I interest you in the set of encyclopedias? I remember because I'm old from these memes and tropes when I was growing up. I feel like none of that exists anymore.

[B]

Door to door.

[C]

I think it's all just different. It's all mlm like, try this essential oil. Try this. Please buy this important costume jewelry that took $3 to make and I'm charging you 35 in my living room.

[B]

Yeah, it's evolved.

[A]

I mean, herbalife is an interesting. Herbalife. It became this religious campaign on the part of bill ackman, who's like, look at this terrible sales organization. It is my God given duty to bring it down. And of course, he failed miserably. But that would seem to be like the modern day equivalent for sure. And the thing about herbalife and its ilk Is that it doesn't even really have professional sales teams like we see in this movie. It's all this kind of self employed pyramid scheme nightmare. Which is in many ways worse completely.

[C]

I was watching this movie and I was like, oh, no. These dudes are so afraid of getting fired. My heart goes out to them. They have health care right now. This is not the gig economy. For once, I'm watching a movie where these people have some degree of, yes, they're precarious. They're fired and hired back Based on their sales of that week. Like, oh, no, that's so stressful. But this is so much better, even still better than a contractor model where they're bearing the cost of their insurance and they're. I don't know, it just seemed like a precarious and stressful thing. But so much more safe and provided so much more security for the people actually working there. Emily's face disagrees. So hard.

[B]

No, I'm interested that you came away thinking that. I came away thinking, like. Cause these days there's so many workplace comedies and dramas and movies. And the workplace is like, we're a family here. Like, even if the environment is terrible, like on the office or something. All the characters are a family. But this is like the bleakest workplace ever. Everyone is out for themselves. There's almost no camaraderie. Except between, I guess, jack lemmon character and al pacino's character a little bit. But, like, it's so, so bleak. And the picture of the workplace it offers is like your identity only matters in terms of the work you do. And you can be fired at any minute. Thus you can be killed at any minute, basically. If that's your identity.

[C]

Yes, and I think that's so true. And I'm not saying I would want to work in this environment.

[B]

God forbid you'd be good at it, Mary. I would buy premier property from you. Yeah.

[C]

I just feel like the backdrop of, like, the structure behind them, the unseen structure. That they're like, oh, this is such a terrifying work environment. Everyone feels so stressed. This is like, so Toxic, et cetera. The underlying structure has deteriorated so much in the intervening decades that it seems to me that it's even worse. Not that we've improved the culture, not that we've made such strides in any sense, and not that that was, like, in any way admirable, but just the kind of. That underpinning feels almost luxurious now just to make a bleak thing a little bit bleaker.

[B]

Yeah, it's bleak now, but it's hidden by cheerfulness in places.

[C]

I think, yeah, maybe we've done a better job at rebranding that.

[A]

Do we think we've done a better job of maybe making workforce masculinity a little bit less toxic? That you don't have workplaces where men just tell each other to fuck off all over the place every day as a kind of, like, normal thing that they do?

[C]

I think there's a growing awareness that it's not chill to do. I think there still are workplaces like this. I, thankfully, generally have not worked in them. But I do think we've made some strides on, like, hey, maybe it's not chill to use all of this homophobic, sexist, racist language. I mean, I don't know that necessarily. We've improved so much as a society, but at least we've learned that there's sometimes legal repercussions if you say things like that in the workplace.

[B]

I mean, no one's hiring someone like Alec Baldwin to come in and scream fuck you to all the salesmen and tell them, first place is a car, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place is you're fired. So that's.

[A]

But it's such a great line.

[C]

Don't listen to steak knives.

[A]

A timeless, timeless line.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Third place is you're fired. Wow.

[C]

So good.

[B]

It is a really good speech. And Mamet apparently wrote it for the movie. It didn't exist in the play before that. It was specifically for the movie, I guess, to kind of like, set it up, set up the stakes. And also so entertaining.

[A]

I don't even understand how it works without that scene. Because the whole. There's this huge sort of dramatic irony which runs through the last three quarters of the film, basically, which is that Al Pacino missed that speech. And he's therefore unaware of the whole way that the stakes have been raised and he doesn't know something that everyone else knows. And no one really ever gets around to telling him about it. And in fact, it wouldn't matter anyway. Cause he's safe anyway.

[C]

Still going to be protected.

[A]

Yeah, he's still gonna get his Cadillac even though he thinks that because Jonathan Price pulls out, he won't get the Cadillac. Yeah, he's still gonna get the Cadillac because no one else is left.

[B]

Yeah. Actually when I was doing my. As the ringer would call it, half assed Internet research, I learned that someone wrote a piece and they basically. Full ass. Full ass. Someone wrote a piece and they said, like Al Pacino's character Ricky Roma couldn't have been in the room during the speech because it would have changed everything. Because he doesn't need to hear the speech. As you just pointed out. Like he's miles ahead of everyone else.

[C]

Like the speech is the hair. He has the same hair as Alec Baldwin. Yeah. I feel like it would have been like a peacock or like a rooster battle. I think there's a word for that, a rooster battle.

[A]

When we first see Al Pacino, which is a long. It's a long way into the movie. It's in like extreme close up, I want to say in the. The Chinese restaurant when he's like seducing this hapless guy who was sitting at the bar and he launches into this spiel that has absolutely nothing to do with investments or real estate. And we see all of the other salesmen pick up the phone and start saying like you sent in a card expressing interest. Or like. Whereas he's like, have you ever really remembered what it's like to have sex?

[C]

He talks about three times.

[B]

As a sales. As a sales strategy. That's his sales strategy. Pooping.

[C]

I mean, getting people outside their comfort zone. It works, it's effective.

[B]

The alcohol probably helped too.

[F]

The great fox you may have had. What do you remember about him? What do I remember? I don't know. For me, I'm saying what it is. It's probably not the author. Orgasm. Some broads, forearm on your neck. Something her eyes did. There was this sound she made. Or it's me in the. I'm telling you, I'm in bed the next day. She brought me Cafe Olay, gives me a cigarette. My balls feel like concrete. Hey, what I'm saying, what is our life? Our life is looking forward or it's looking back. That's it.

[C]

I did have a question sort of on the economics of this. If you did buy an 8 unit something or other in Mountain View.

[B]

I'm just wondering how bad of an investment.

[C]

I feel like these are not con men. I feel like they were great investments. Yeah, I thought about that too.

[B]

Mountain View, like in Silicon Valley, where cost a million Dollars.

[C]

Is there another mountain?

[A]

These units are now worth $3.5 million apiece. And you're like, this is. I am so happy. I am so grateful to my Chicago salesman. But the Nightborgs.

[C]

Did Harriet Nyborg actually get to buy it?

[A]

No, that's not the case.

[C]

What kind of financing was available at the time? You don't know that.

[A]

She didn't have any money. She didn't have any money.

[C]

My magical thinking after the movie ended because I needed Jack Lemmon to be ok, was that that deal goes through. Okay. They dismissed that couple, but the check was good this time. Okay. And he was able to pay for his wife's care. And then that couple profited.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

And they were able to get the help that they needed.

[B]

Also, it was his daughter because.

[A]

Because they made so much money on Silicon Valley real estate.

[C]

Mm, that's right. That's right. The Internet seems to think that Jack Lemmon's wife was sick. I thought it was the daughter also.

[A]

I thought it was his daughter. I think it was daughter.

[B]

I think it was his daughter.

[C]

Well, there are a lot of corrections coming on the Internet.

[A]

Don't believe what you read on the Internet, Mary child.

[C]

Oh, no. Okay, I'm gonna have to go back to half ass Googling then and not full ass then. I'm sorry, I stand corrected.

[A]

I mean, talking about the women in this movie who are all off screen except for.

[C]

Yeah, I was about to.

[A]

There is exactly one actress who is credited in the final credits who is Coat Check Girl.

[B]

Oh, right, right.

[C]

Wow. Didn't even see her.

[A]

That is literally the extent of women in this movie is an unnamed Coat Check Girl.

[B]

Yeah. Women are just.

[C]

They're nags and everybody is white. Yeah, yeah. All the women are just blocking the great deals and the closings.

[A]

There's like an invisible. There's a bunch of wives out there. Everyone seems to be married and has, like, a problematic relationship with their spouse doing unauthorized things.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So let me ask you guys, like, did that make you as uncomfortable as it made me? This feeling of, like, just oppressive. Men everywhere with no sign of any women anywhere.

[B]

I just thought it was like the table. This is a movie about men, masculinity and man stuff. Men being men, proving that they're men for other men. And I just accepted it. Like, I know I'm usually the voice of the angry woman on this podcast because all the movies about money are typically about. About men. And if you see a woman, usually she's topless or something, and I feel like I get angry about it. But in this case, I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna roll with this. I'm not gonna complain about it.

[C]

It's easier when we record.

[B]

But, I mean, it's intentional.

[C]

Yeah. It reminded me. I recently realized that I had a couple month period where I had how do youo Like Me Now? The Toby Keith song stuck in my head. Just that song on repeat for months, I think. Cause I'm on the radio and there's a line that's like, living in your. It was terrible. It was a really dark period. And I realized that when that song first came out, I identified with the protagonist, who's a man talking very rudely and sexistly about this woman who wouldn't date him in high school because he clearly sucked. But I, like, despite the overt misogyny in the song, identified with the dude who is singing. And I was like, yeah, like, she sucks. Like, beep. Anyway.

[A]

And you're allowed to swear on this.

[C]

Oh, okay.

[B]

I just.

[C]

I'm trying really hard to.

[A]

You're not on NPR anymore, Mary Giles.

[B]

But I like what she said. Rooster battle. Like, that was almost better than the alternative.

[C]

Thank you. I really didn't remember. But I like it better also. Just a touch of creativity.

[A]

Meanwhile, I've had, like, Olivia Rodrigo's Good for your stuck in my head. And I'm totally aligning myself with her. And I cannot stand her ex boyfriend. Fuck that guy.

[C]

I mean, part of it is just that you identify with whoever the protagonist is, and to some extent, you just don't notice. Right. Like, if they're presenting this world, that's all men. Like, I almost wouldn't have noticed except for how oppressively toxic masculinity it was. That was the world that we were presented. And we all just like, kind of jumped right in. Or I jumped right in and didn't really think that hard about all the wives that were harshing the vibes and blocking deals and were totally off screen and unseen.

[A]

In a way, the kind of unsung hero of this movie. The only person who seems to be normal and sensible is Jonathan Pryce's unnamed wife.

[B]

Yeah, she's the smartest person in the movie.

[C]

Yeah. She called the attorney General. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

She won't let the deal go through. I'm like, listen to your wife, man.

[C]

Yeah, you apologize.

[B]

Apologizes.

[C]

Good job.

[B]

The Al Pacino character. Like, I'm sorry. She's making me do this. Like, come on, man.

[C]

I really wanted more in that scene where he's like, I have no power. He says to Al Pacino, I have no power in negotiating this. I can't negotiate. And he's like, there, I said it.

[B]

I have no power.

[C]

And it's like, what do you mean, man? Like, what's going. Let's talk to it. I mean, yeah, it felt like there was a whole reservoir there.

[B]

I enjoyed just, like, watching them sell. Like, later in the movie when the guy comes back and Al Pacino's desperately trying to hang on to him. And him and Jack Lemmon start, like, riffing and just coming up with, like, a story. Like, as they're talking, it unfolds. Like, he's the vice president at amex, and, like, we gotta get out.

[C]

He's his family. I gotta go to his wife's birthday party.

[B]

Yeah, I love that so much. It was, like the best improvisation. It was like.

[C]

I don't know.

[B]

They're actors. That's what they do anyway. But now they're doing it in service of a sale, and I thought that was great and they enjoyed it.

[C]

Did you get the sense that they'd done it before? It's, like, a bit.

[B]

Yeah. It seemed like they really were enjoying themselves. Like, this was two, like, master salesmen, like, practicing their art. Like, that was the only time in the movie I felt like these people enjoy the sale beyond, like, closing it. Like, it's just fun to, like, fuck around and see how you can manipulate others.

[A]

But also, like, that bit where, like, Shelley Levine, the Jack Lemmon character who comes back from making his sale to the Nyborgs, and he has to rehearse what happened. He has to tell people, like, it's not real until he's told someone. And then he gets to tell the story to Al Pacino, and he's like. And then I. I just put the piece of paper in front of them with a pen, and I stopped talking. And then it took 22 minutes, and no one said a word for 22 minutes. And eventually they just exhaled, and then they signed and they wilted. And it's like that kind of craftsmanship, just knowing when to shut up and let the uncomfortable silence.

[C]

The Joan Didion method.

[A]

This is what all journalists are taught to do, which is shut the fuck up and stop asking questions and just wait for people to reveal their deeper secrets because they're trying to fill an uncomfortable silence. I've never really managed to do that, but, yeah, apparently it works. Apparently it works as a sales technique as well.

[B]

It works in a lot of ways. You should try it in relationships.

[C]

It does.

[B]

It was really hard. It took me a while to learn in reporting, and I can't say that I'm really good at it, but, like, sometimes I'm like, nope. Stop talking. Nope.

[C]

An older journalist literally told me that I want to say 10 years ago. He was like, you could talk less. And I was like, wait, what? Like, excuse me? And I was momentarily offended. But then I realized I do interrupt so much, and I hate it. But also, I spent a lot of time, like, asserting to sources, trying to prove to sources that I knew what they were talking about in the interest of expediting past the boring, dumb conversation part, you know what I mean? Where they're, like, explaining what credit is, and, like, here's how a bond works. And I'm like, okay, we can skip ahead. Like, what's chapter five? So I was wasting a lot of time doing that and, like, trying to, like, flex around and be like, I know what you're talking about. I can bro down. And, like, a lot of that was.

[B]

Unnecessary, but you can bro down.

[C]

Thank you so much. Thank you.

[A]

I'm with you. I just don't have patience to let people explain to me what a credit spread is, because I'm like, can we just get to what I want to find out? Plus, often they're like, I have 30 minutes now. Let me explain to you what a credit spread is. I'm like, you have 30 minutes. I'm gonna try and get that piece of information. Anyway, this is all irrelevant to Glengarry Glen Ross.

[C]

No, it's very relevant because it's about controlling the conversation. Right. And being able to direct someone in the direction that you want instead of letting them kind of meander off or letting the Jack Lemmon character have the reign because he's just gonna go where he wants to go. And if you're not kind of strong in the conversation, you're like, okay, oops, I just bought eight units in Mountain View. Good for me.

[B]

Salesmanship is so interesting, too, because when it's done poorly, like when Jack Lemmon goes to that guy's house, Shelley Levine rather goes to that guy's house, and he's just, like, laying it on thick, and he's like, can I call you by your first name? I just. It's so much better. And you're just like. It just makes you cringe. Like, if you've ever bought a car from a bad car salesman, it's just, like, make it end. Stop talking.

[C]

Well. And, like, we just used to let people in the house like that. We just let them in they would show up. How did people. Were there more murders then? I just don't understand.

[B]

I think there were.

[A]

I'm with Emily on this one. I went through a terrible experience of buying a car a few years ago. There was this one salesman who was just. He had the car that we wanted to buy, and we just couldn't bring ourselves to buy it from him because the sales pitch was just so. You felt like you were covered in oil upon meeting this guy for about three seconds, and he wouldn't answer questions. He would just, like, give you the sales pitch and you're like, no. Like, stop doing that. How is this effective? But it does seem to live on even today. And this is presumably why all of these online places, Carvana and whatnot, are so successful. It's just like, people will pay a premium to avoid having to deal with a salesperson.

[B]

So sales then, is what the movie is not really about, or is it not at all.

[A]

You don't think it's about sales? I think it totally is. I mean, I feel like the sales thing is at the heart of the movie. It's not just a MacGuffin. Right? Like, it's this combination of sales and then the zero sum. Like, for every winner, there's a loser thing that Alec Baldwin introduces. In any normal sales organization, the people at the top of the organization want all of the salesmen to be selling lots. And then suddenly you get this situation where they're like, we don't care how much you sell. If you're in third place, you're fired. Which is kind of weird, right?

[B]

I thought it was a way to juice up Sal before, like, inevitable firings. Like, they were probably just needed to fire a lot of people. But they figure, okay, on their way out, if they could just make us a bunch more money, that'd be chill.

[C]

Right? Right. I was wrestling with this last night. Like, if they knew that the Nyborgs were insane and weren't actually able to purchase anything, why would they give that lead to Jack Lemmon? Why would they even give that lead in the mail?

[A]

Because I hate you, he says, because.

[C]

I never liked you. But, like, logistically, if you are actually trying to juice sales and make sales, you would never do that. But what they're actually doing is trying to get people fired, which, like, okay, that's a different paradigm.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But you know what is also a movie about sales is Margin Call. And that whole, like, final act of Margin Call where you get this huge sales team together and you're like, you're all going to be out of a job tomorrow. So just sell the fuck out of your positions and sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. And pick up anyone and just sell as much as you can. And if you manage to sell more than this amount, you'll all get a $2 million bonus. That kind of culture of short term, really high pressure. Just what we want to do is juice immediate short term sales as much as possible. Like we have actually. I mean obviously Margin Call was made much later than Glengarry Glen Ross. But like that trope in movies hasn't gone away completely.

[C]

Maybe it's an eternal conversation of like short term gain for long term cost. And like when that cost benefit tips. We just did an episode on Planet Money about the Citigroup mistaken transfer, mistaken payment, which I know you are very familiar with. And a lot of the conversation centered Bankworks.

[A]

Is it Nabisco or Revlon Worms? Revlon name Bonque Worme.

[C]

Yeah, Bonque Worm.

[A]

Bonq Worm. We love Banque Worm.

[C]

I know it's very fun to say correctly, which I will note, no one does.

[A]

It's a French bank in Germany. Right. Which just confuses things even more. So you don't know. Do you pronounce it the French way or the German way?

[C]

Yes, it's a very international operation clearly and, and a lot of it was about if you should torch your long term relationships in service of a short term gain. And I just, I don't know, I don't feel like I know the kind of philosophical history over the decades of like, is this a thing that we've been grappling with in the past 40 years? I know Larry Fink talks a lot about it with BlackRock and ESG investing and all that, but like short termism and so forth. But I'm just curious if we're always fixated on this as a species or if it's particularly acute now.

[A]

I feel like we just went off four years of having a president who was famously short termist and would screw over people in the short term very happily, even if it was not in his own long term best interest. And so that kind of thinking came more to the forefront. He famously was a longtime client of Roy Cohn, who is a central character in Angels in America, who also like would just fuck people over just because he could. And it was a power game even if it wasn't in his long term best interest. You know, you see that quite a lot in the news these days. Maybe not necessarily in the sales context, but you know, if someone like Tom Barak, you know, the Trump confidant is now in jail or at least arrested for taking a bunch of money from the Middle east without registering as a lobbyist. And he was like, I'm just going to take it like short term gain. And then I, you know, not even worrying about like, is it going to be something that lands me in jail in five years time. This is something which you see among people like Barack, who's like worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. Like the guy is really rich and he's still like grasping at these short term gains.

[B]

And you see it now bigger picture, like with investing, the way to make money is you're supposed to be long term. Your retirement savings are supposed to just grow and grow and you sit back and do nothing. But then we had this pandemic and everyone started trading on Robinhood all the time. And, and I think part of it is just for the adrenaline, right? The short term big hit feels amazing. And I kept thinking about when I watched Jack Lemmon, like celebrating the Nyborgs and stuff and like getting all excited about it. I thought about that guy, did you see that video, the Olympics coach who got really excited when someone else was the Australian guy. The Australian guy, he makes this like crotch thrusting motion. And I was like, it's all the same thing. It's all the same kind of vibe. Just like that hit off the short term, like sale or the hit off Gamestop trading or the hit off watching a swimmer win a medal.

[A]

It's the human animal. Like we want the short term hit. This idea of delayed gratification is kind of unnatural, you know, if you're selling right. This is actually what we're seeing in this movie. What you're selling is delayed gratification. It's like, pay me $80,000 today and you will get all manner of like value at some unspecified point in the future when the value of the land goes up. But the salesman himself is entirely motivated by like short term greed, right? It's like, I need to make the sale today because I make my like $8,000 commission today. You have this incredible misalignment of interests between the salesman and the customer. Right? And they're both kind of pretending that there isn't one. This is why it's such a Mametian film, right? Is that the job of the salesman is to lie on some level?

[B]

Yeah. Gotta lie about yourself and who you are and about the Nyborgs and who they are. So they take a chance with their bonds. They're invested in the bonds.

[A]

And they had treasury bonds. They said they had treasury bonds and they moved it all into Mountain View real estate.

[C]

Which again, are they. I don't think they sound insane. They sound perfectly.

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

That was very prescient. But I do feel like with the Tom Barrick stuff and the short termism and thinking about, I don't know, investing in like, climate change stuff. I remember in like the 90s when everyone was like, oh, no, climate change, like, this is gonna be a real problem. I was like, how are we still driving cars? Like, seems bad. Should we stop doing that then? Like, where is everyone on this? And, you know, eventually I just was like, all right, we're just gonna keep driving cars. I'm just gonna get in my car and, like, not think about it. And there's such an element of like, just waiting for the bill to come. And you're like, I can get away with it. I can get, you know, Al Pacino's just like, I just need till Monday. This check will be cashed and I can move on from this and the bill will never come due for me. Like, I don't ever. I can outrun the consequences of my actions. And for a long time that works.

[B]

And I think part of that there's like some behavioral science that shows, like, you just, you think of yourself in the future as an entirely different person, completely. You like, making your decisions. Because the idea of like 70 year old Emily, just like, I cannot conceive of it. And there's like research that shows if you see a picture of yourself aged, then you'll make like more prudent decisions about, like, your money and stuff like that.

[C]

I'm gonna put an old picture of myself on my desk now and everyone's gonna be like, oh, my God, is that a relative? No, it's the consequences of my actions.

[A]

It's future me I need to just look after future me. I should probably not spend quite so much money on or book so many.

[C]

Meetings for next Wednesday. Like, I just don't even believe that I'll make it to next Wednesday, you.

[B]

Know, or agree to any deadline ever, right?

[C]

And like, that Mary's gonna get some sleep.

[A]

Especially not a book deadline. Cause those things are so far in the future that they never arrive. Isn't that right, Mary?

[C]

And yet, Constant, my parents, my family, my husband, everyone's always like, why are you doing another book down? I'm like, no, this is the real one, y'. All. Like, I really gotta meet this deadline. Can you just help me out, like, I need you. You just do the dishes. I gotta do this deadline. And they're like, okay, today it's the end notes, tomorrow it's what I read.

[B]

In my half assed or full asked, however you wanna define it. Research. Someone said Al Pacino, this was his last good role because this, the same year this came out, was Scent of a Woman, which he has a lot of famous.

[C]

I'm pretty sure I'm just looking him up on IMDb.

[A]

That's kind of amazing because. Wow, right?

[B]

It's like a whole different actor. It took a while to make this movie.

[A]

This was before Heat, right. I feel like Heat was a good movie.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, maybe. But he was like kind of subdued. Al Pacino, I loved every, like just the way he was in the Chinese restaurant, like the way he placed his hands and picked up his glass. It was just so great. It was like such a character, so precise.

[A]

And he was genuinely playing a character. He wasn't just playing a caricature of Al Pacino.

[B]

Yeah, he was so good.

[A]

From like Scent of a Woman onwards, he just becomes like, Al Pacino plays Al Pacino playing Al Pacino. But this is him actually acting crazy.

[C]

It was nice. Very nice.

[A]

Just like Kevin Spacey is playing a role and he's not chewing the scenery like he does later on in his career. He's like, my job is I am a professional actor and I'm going to act a role. And that I'm playing is kind of schlubby and not kind of a beta male. And that's what I'm going to play. And he does.

[B]

And the acting is so good in this movie. We did Hudsucker Proxy a while back. Mary and I complained about the acting in that film. It's bad. This film, the character. I mean, it's just a. Everyone is bringing their a acting game. They're acting with a capital A.

[A]

It's an amazing masterclass in acting. And I think one of the reasons that it remains this sort of touchstone of American cinema when people refer back to it, it's just that, you know, this cast is bazonkers, I believe is the technical term. You know, you've got Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Jonathan Price. All of them are Alec Baldwin. A list. Alec Baldwin, right.

[B]

Yeah, all of them. A list. And Al Pacino apparently took a pay cut.

[C]

I'll tell you that.

[B]

He cut his movie rate from 6 million to 1.5 million.

[C]

Worth it.

[B]

Yes. And Alec Baldwin got a Quarter million for his.

[A]

It's a super low budget movie, right? I mean, there's like.

[C]

Because we're all a family here, you can see that.

[A]

Even if they took a pay cut, 90% of the budget of this movie went on paying the actors because there's nothing on screen. So we'll just build a set of the inside of a schlubby office and.

[B]

An amazing Chinese restaurant.

[C]

Could this movie get made today?

[A]

Ugh.

[B]

Would this movie be like a limited series on Amazon prime or something?

[C]

Definitely, yeah. It would be like an HBO prestige miniseries. That's true.

[B]

It would be so depressing. I would not watch that.

[C]

No. I have to tell you, I couldn't sleep last night after I watched this. I had terrible nightmares. I just was so agitated, I couldn't fall asleep. Jack Lemmon fucked me up. Excuse me?

[B]

Oh, yeah, and it's interesting because Jack Lemmon, if you're talking about, like, workplace movies, Jack Lemmon kind of is in the quintessential workplace movie in the Apartment, which is from, I think, the 1950s. And he plays, like, a young guy, like, climbing the corporate ladder. And then he's got this, like, old boss who is having affairs, and it's just like, the beginning and this is, like the end. You know what I mean? It's been quite a journey for Jack Lemmon through corporate America. Yikes. Company guy Jack Lemmon, he's delightful in the Apartment. And the ending is definitely more uplifting. Not to spoil it, but it's been like, 60 years.

[C]

Yeah, I think technically the statute of spoiler limitations has expired, but I have not seen it, so.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[C]

Maybe I'll go watch that tonight.

[A]

Does Jack Lemmon dropping a lot of F bombs feel weird? You know, it's a bit like. What was that movie where, like, Julie Andrews got naked? You're like, no, Jack Lemmon is.

[C]

That's wrong. You can't do that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[C]

I mean, everyone's acting here. You know, they're all, like, really in their characters. So, like, I think this exists outside of our conception of Jack Lemmon.

[B]

Well, this was in the Grumpy Old men era too, right? Wasn't he? I think it was around this time. I probably should have googled that he.

[A]

Wasn'T dropping grumpy F bombs. When he's, like, swearing at Kevin's Spacey. He's like, he's trying to do his own detriment.

[C]

It turned out that's true.

[B]

It's a different kind of grump.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

You should just shut the Fuck up, man. If you're gonna. If you're gonna. Spoiler alert.

[C]

You gotta know where the shot is.

[A]

Break into a office and steal the leads. Then you shouldn't be talking too much.

[E]

Oh, you. You do not know your job. Do you know that? A man is his job. You are at yours. You hear what I'm saying to you? You're in end of the month, boy. You do not know how to run this office. You haven't got the sense. You haven't got the balls. Have you ever been on a sit? Is this. Ever been on a sit. Did you ever see them down? Oh, what, you would.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[E]

What are you gonna do, fire me?

[A]

Oh, oh, Rick.

[D]

Oh, it's not impossible.

[C]

Oh, really?

[E]

On an eighty thousand dollar day of what? It's not even known yet.

[F]

You closed them today.

[E]

Oh, I got up early this morning, I tracked them down and I closed it. What I'm saying to you is that things change and that's where you fuck up. Because you don't know. You can't look back. You don't see who's coming.

[C]

I appreciated that everyone told each other that they had a big mouth. It's like, babe, all of you have big mouths.

[B]

You all need to show them.

[A]

Well, you're all David Mamet characters, right? Like David Mamet characters, by their nature, have big mouths.

[B]

Do we need to talk about the ending? I was surprised. I had seen this movie before, but I didn't remember anything about it except, like, coffee is for closers. So I was actually. When the twist comes, I was like, what? No, Jack left.

[C]

Shelley.

[B]

I know you didn't. I couldn't believe it.

[A]

The Machine Levine.

[C]

I can't believe, for all his smooth talking and his improv and his ability to maneuver his way out of every verbal situation throughout the movie, basically he kind of ruins his own. Like that one slip up to Kevin Spacey unravels the whole thing. That was just. And then he couldn't tap dance out of it. Like, I was like, come on, man. Like, you've got this as your job. You always tap, like, come up with something. Like, I could have got. It was upsetting.

[B]

He lost his touch. The Nyborgs temporarily gave it back.

[C]

Listen, the deal came through, okay? The deal came through.

[A]

There was this part of me, even though I have seen the movie many times and I kind of knew what was gonna happen. But, like, when he comes in waiving the check from the Nyborgs.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm like, he's lying.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

This isn't real. And then he talks about how they had like, a celebratory drink after the deal was signed.

[C]

And Al Pacino's like, when did you come in?

[A]

And then he's like, when did you sign this? He's like, I signed it on the way into the office this morning. It's like you're having a celebratory drink at like 9:30 in the morning. Like, what the hell?

[C]

There is that exchange with Al Pacino where it's just like. It's so hollow. And Al Pacino's like, er, oh.

[A]

And yet that doesn't turn out to be a lie after all. That turns out to actually have been the truth.

[B]

Yeah, I guess it had to be him.

[C]

What do you mean?

[B]

It had to be him that stole the leads? Like, it had to be the twist that makes the movie Shelly. Without that, it had to be Shelley.

[A]

Okay, so Mary, like this movie that keeps you up at night.

[C]

This speaks to a particular Agata.

[A]

Is it a good movie?

[C]

Oh, wow. Oh, God, yes, it's a good movie. I will probably be arguing with it in my mind for a long time. I appreciated the pacing. There's like an indulgently slow pacing to movies that are more than 20 years old and you get to learn more about the characters. And it just feels indulgent at this point because we're so fast. And cut. Happy. But I liked it, even as it broke my whole heart and I was unable emotionally to accept the ending. I thought it was embarrassing for people who have embraced it. And I thought it was overall, like Emily's saying, a commentary on the oppressive, toxic masculinity structures that we have built and that we can opt out of at any time and yet find them. So, you know, there are so many different structures that all of these people could have opted out of, but they were so trapped in them. Yeah, it was a good movie. I hated it.

[A]

If you had to give it a grade of some description, what would you give it?

[C]

I want to give it a C for closing, but obviously that's unfair. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to give it an A. Like, it felt like a play in a way that was at times a little annoying, but also very refreshing, if that makes sense. Like, I felt. I was like, all right, all right. Yeah, you're back and forth. You're back. Like, all right, where's Aaron Sorkin? But I also appreciated the banter. And it just felt lovely and artistic and just gutting and heart wrenching in a very particular, like, I Don't know. I feel like the tragedy of a person fighting for their spot as they age in the workforce. To me, there's nothing more like fundamentally upsetting. Like, that just really gets me and like, the desperation. And then they went and added the wife and the daughter and now I'm all messed up. But yeah, it was very well crafted.

[A]

I think I'm gonna give it a B. It's definitely a great acting. The acting is amazing. It's an actor's vehicle.

[C]

That's what Roger Ebert said.

[A]

But what I'm gonna say is that although it does definitely have a lot to say about toxic masculinity, at the same time, I think on some level, David Mamet is a bit of a toxic male himself. And there is a little bit of, like, not very camouflaged misogynism in the way that the movie is structured and written. And I found that quite hard to swallow that he, you know, he's a little bit too close to his characters for me. Emily, how would you rate this movie?

[B]

I would give it an A minus. I think the minus comes from all the outdated stuff. And I guess, Felix, you took the misogyny harder than I did for this one. I think I just, like, let it go. I just thought it was really good. Like, the acting was so good and the scenes were so, like, composed. It was fun to just look at it. The coffee shop. I'm obsessed with the Chinese restaurant. The half the name is darked out. I kind of like that stuff.

[A]

Yeah. But all of the sort of cliched 80s, you know, neon colors and rain swept streets and I felt like that didn't age well.

[B]

Maybe I just missed the 80s.

[A]

Could it stop raining just once? I mean, honestly, people, it doesn't need to rain throughout the entire movie.

[B]

I liked it.

[C]

Yeah. There was no depression and just so.

[B]

Damp and like, just having to like go out in the rain to do a sit. I don't want to do that. That looked bad.

[C]

Nothing about that was appealing. Yeah, no, it definitely underscored the inescapability of the whole everything. But, yeah, I feel like. Felix, I love that you're taking the misogyny so much harder than we are. That's really interesting.

[B]

I appreciate it.

[C]

Emily, do we hate ourselves? Yeah. Thank you.

[B]

I definitely do.

[C]

Being an ally. Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Thanks, Felix.

[A]

You're welcome.

[C]

Yeah, I just, I wonder about, like, the script today. Like, what would happen if you'd made this movie today. Like, so much of it, you couldn't make this movie.

[A]

Yeah. You can't have the Closest thing to a hero of this movie being, like, Al Pacino with his, like, sleazy sales and his, like, overt racism.

[C]

Right, right, right. The whole. Yeah, the racist stuff was really.

[B]

They didn't leave anyone out with the racism. Really. We don't need to list. But it was bad.

[C]

No, it was just a smorgasbord of offensive. So, I mean equal opportunity offensive, which is refreshing. Nope, not refreshing.

[B]

It's a good movie.

[C]

I liked it better than this season.

[B]

If I had to rank this.

[C]

Really? Yeah. Where would it fall at? Top decile?

[A]

I mean, it's certainly not as good as Parasite, right?

[B]

No, it's definitely not as good as Parasite. It's definitely under Parasite. It's, like, tied with Sense and Sensibility in a way.

[C]

Oh, it's like.

[B]

It's more fun.

[A]

They're what, three years apart, these two movies? Something like that. They're relatively close together. And we get to talk about Sense and Sensibility next week, which is going to be great. But the thing about. No, the thing about Sense and Sensibility, without giving anything away about it at all, it doesn't look like the 80s mid-90s movie or whatever it was. It's timeless, a period piece set in 1795. And they go to quite great lengths to try and make it look like 1795. Whereas Glengarry Glen Ross. I'm not sure when it's set, but whenever it was set was quite close to when it was filmed. And then you have the whopping great big cell phones and all of that kind of stuff, and you're like, this. Just a lot of this is dated. And so you're looking at it now. If you watch it now, 25 years later or more, I feel like it makes it harder to take it as a sort of commentary on contemporary anything, because it's clearly not contemporary.

[B]

I mean, if you showed someone from 1795 Sense and Sensibility, they probably have some quibbles too.

[C]

Is your guest gonna be unfrozen? Is that. Or the occasion you're bringing them back isn't a Ouija board.

[A]

Next week we have that famous 18th century Dowager Countess Taffy Brodessa Agne coming back from the dead to talk about Sense and Sens.

[C]

Extremely well preserved.

[A]

That's something to look forward to. But in the meantime, Mary Childs, thank you very much for coming on this show. It was awesome to have you here.

[C]

Thank you. It's been so fun.

[A]

And we will have you on the main Slate Money show when your book comes out.

[C]

I look forward to that exciting. Fun. Yes.

[A]

We will talk about a large west coast bond shop.

[C]

I have to say, this is deeply embarrassing, but last night, watching, there's a shot of Jonathan Pryce kind of leaning on the bar. And it was Bill Gross. And I was like, why is this? I asked my husband. I was like, do you see it, too? He's like, yes, definitely. Like, you're not losing it.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Long hair everywhere.

[A]

Totally. Yeah.

[C]

Thank you. Thanks for agreeing with me on that, Mary.

[A]

Thank you very much for being here next week. You've been waiting for her. Taffy Brodessa. Akner is coming back, and she's gonna talk about Sense and Sensibility ability.