S4E41: Blue Collar

**November Kelly** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, I am joined, as always, by my friend, Abigail Thorn and Devon.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:26)
Hello.

**Devon** (0:27)
Cowabunga, how are we doing, folks?

**November Kelly** (0:29)
We are surging out of the Malaysia's of Fast and Furious.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:35)
We're leaving Dominic Toretto in the fucking review mirror, baby.

**Devon** (0:39)
I don't know if I can do a mainline episode of Kill James Bond without Letty Toretto in it. I don't know what I'll do about my girl.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:45)
I can't even remember what it's like now.

**November Kelly** (0:48)
Yeah, without asking where Paul Walker is in the plot of this movie. Yeah. No, we are going back to heist season. And for our first return heist season movie, we're trying to unify the bonus episodes where we've been doing sort of loosely truck season because one thing we established with Fast and Furious is that the natural enemy of the car is the truck.

**Devon** (1:11)
Absolutely.

**November Kelly** (1:13)
And so we're trying to unify these things with a kind of car heist film by Paul Schrader. His first film, Blue Collar. Yeah.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:24)
A movie about people who make cars in a car factory. Movie about Detroit and about the working class. It's like, see, we're returning to the fuck- no one goes into space.
Nobody, as far as I know, is a paedophile. It's just a movie about the working class.

**Devon** (1:40)
I haven't checked everyone, but as far as I'm aware, this is just a straightforward working class thing. Now, obviously, I know everything there is to know about Paul Schrader, but maybe some people in the audience might not be super familiar with this guy.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:54)
Some people on the podcast aren't super familiar.

**November Kelly** (1:57)
Tell me.

**Devon** (1:57)
Some people on the podcast.

**November Kelly** (2:00)
So, Paul Schrader was the guy who wrote Taxi Driver. He also co-wrote Raging Bull, and he's done a bunch of films himself. We've done one of them before, The Card Counter, which I really loved.

**Devon** (2:18)
Okay. That's very interesting.

**Abigail Thorn** (2:20)
A very different film than this.

**November Kelly** (2:22)
At some point, if we ever go back to religion season, we'll have to do First Reformed, which is also a Paul Schrader movie.

**Devon** (2:29)
I would love to do First Reformed.

**November Kelly** (2:32)
This is his first one, directing, and Blue Collar, it's interesting, because it's Richard Pryor, sort of at the height of his career, trying to turn being a stand-up comedian into being a serious, dramatic actor.

**Abigail Thorn** (2:48)
Yeah, he's trying to do a Robin Williams.

**Devon** (2:50)
It's a tough maneuver. Some people have done it successfully, but we'll get into how successful we feel. We feel Richard Pryor isn't being serious.

**November Kelly** (2:59)
Yeah, but all of Paul Schrader's films, and Paul Schrader now is the type of guy who can write something that has the kind of despair of First Reformed, or Master Gardner, or things like that, but then also be credulous enough to be like, this AI stuff, it's gangbusters.

**Devon** (3:20)
It's the future.

**Abigail Thorn** (3:21)
Yeah, oh dear.

**November Kelly** (3:22)
Yeah, he keeps getting himself- The thing about Paul Schrader is, watch the films, don't read the posts, because he will post on Facebook about, oh, I just gave, you know, Grok or whatever, a bunch of prompts, and it wrote me a screenplay, you know?

**Abigail Thorn** (3:39)
Oh, no, no, it didn't. No, it didn't do that.

**November Kelly** (3:42)
Yeah, he's just, he's a guy who can really sort of, like, talk you out of liking him, right? He's, like, you want to watch a Paul Schrader movie? That's a good idea. You want to read Paul Schrader's thoughts about cancel culture? No, you don't.

**Abigail Thorn** (3:59)
Oh, dear. Well, that's interesting, because this film was recommended to me by a very good friend of mine, Dan, who is very leftist and is, like, working in Hollywood in his, uh, I think he's, like, an anarchist or a communist or something.
But he recommended this to me and was just like, you gotta fucking watch this movie, you'll love it. And because it is, listen, it's, like, quite, I would say didactic, maybe not necessarily, like, Marxist, but definitely it's, like, a didactic leftist movie.

**November Kelly** (4:30)
It's, like, left populist, for sure.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:33)
Yes, absolutely.

**November Kelly** (4:34)
But so, we begin with the car assembly lines of Detroit, Michigan.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:40)
1970s Detroit, we're making cars, where men, manly men, are hitting a big girder with a hammer, they're, like, lighting cigarettes with welding torches, we are making things in America, we're still making things.