Episode Details

The SFFaudio Podcast #829 – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, read by Jenn Broda for (LibriVox). This is a complete and unabridged audiobook (3 hours 31 minutes), followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
Jonathan got to go first, 1925 book, epistolary novel, letters, a diary, The Illuminating Diary Of A Professional Lady, great narrator, great book, Jonathan will love this book, how can I count the ways, a movie adaptation, second to last musical sequence, Marilyn Monroe sings about diamonds, got lazy, cut the opening to it, make the case, the book is pretty great, the movie is very dangerous and has caused a lot of problems, how meanspirited the book is, a scathing social satire, very mean, mean to the reader too, ridicules these values, the movie is extoling those values, what the target of the book’s satire is, a speech at the end of the movie, daddy in law, being rich is just like being pretty, super evil, very compellingly put together, Howard Hawks, his most evil creation, a really good propagandist, the cult of Marilyn Monroe in L.A. today, their model is her in this movie, make you watch this movie, understand and miss, pretending to be dumb to get ahead, in the film, she’s pretending to be lazy to get ahead too, that’s what women like, they don’t have to do anything to get ahead, be sexpots, become lazy to emulate Marilyn Monroe, to sing like that, to talk like that, the product of hard work and dedication to her craft, effortlessly, a very dangerous film, luckily not a girl, problems it engenders, Jane Russell is good too, blown off the screen, Dorothy is a fun character, her diary, she’s the one who gets it, quite different, set 20 (or more) years apart, given even billing, in the book everything revolves around the plans of Lorelei, she’s a murderer, fucking genius, really smart, reading subversively, she has another layer on, if you look at the way she constructs sentences, baby sentences written by a baby: “A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book.”, he’s tired of her, or she’s so smart, this almost made me smile, a wole row of encyclopediacs, the spelling throuought, she’s a “Christian Science”, how stupid is she?, money, language, geograohy, she gets everything she wants all the time, she always comes out on top, stupidly uneducated, the books stacked up around her apartment, a woman intelligence about how men work, a very strange phenomenon, not a blonde, a screenwriter, a movie actress, men lose their fucking minds over women, all the men are married in the book, a little bored, an opporutnity to cheat on their wives, she knows what’s going on, how smart she is is very well hidden, underestimate how stupid she is, looking at the results, what’s so great about this character, seeing the world, we like her, a curse on Marilyn Monroe, the character is a parody of a real kind of person, lady looking for sugardaddies, before she takes her trip, Helen Of Troy, of Greek extraction, Mr. Popadopolis, a shopper, and he even speaks Greek to waiters, very hard to tell, intuition, doesn’t think things ahead very well, she makes plans, they always fail, the way the society she wins is constructed, shot him through the lungs, they want her to do well, they are invested in her, except for Dorothy and Lulu, the Jewish one who is educating her, hard to understand, movie Emmanuelle (1974), books by Joseph Conrad, every part of this book is spectacular, the layers of sickness/awesomeness, as a book it is a very good thing, the film takes it at face value and does that twist at the end, a limited perspective, her vision of the world is very small a