Episode 4 - Maigret in Maigret (2022)
Bonjour, détectives! This week on Be Gay Solve Crimes, we bring in Commissaire Jules Maigret for some much needed gender questioning. Specifically, the Georges Simenon novella Maigret and the Dead Girl, for which the best on-screen adaptation unfortunately stars the most Brought-In-For-Questioning actor we've yet encountered.
Oui, nous regrettons tout.
We've watched it so you don't have to.
Join us as investigate the Saddest Detective In The World. A man with the lungs of a twelve year old. A man who isn't sure what a pipe is, let alone how to get rid of his own. A man who, if the subtitles that we very legally downloaded are to be believed, sure knows how to choke every last drop of gravy out of the head of his duck (???)
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Next week, we're cracking open an old case with the girls to ask whether they really got the right culprit in the classic two-part Simpsons episode Who Shot Mr Burns.
Comments (32)
The French, one must remember, are obsessed with Melusine & like one can read this progenitrix of the house of Anjou as trans femme coded.
My dad had all of the same neuro divergences I do and hated going out and being around strangers too, and also spent his entire life in the exact same polo shirts and with the same short back and sides haircut. "Dad might have had unrealised bonus gender" is definitely a thought Ive had
I hope it's cool for me to say this— I'm cis and I'm finding it very lovely and sort of healing to hear the hosts talk about femininity in this film. It feels like a holiday from the male gaze where, instead of femininity being something I have to exhaustingly upkeep and surveil and feel I'm always failing at, and which is never complete until it's witnessed by a man, it's inalienably precious and present in small, unthinking details. To think of it as something that Maigret could yearn to understand, rather than just appraise, is very touching.
it’s very very cool of you to say this, that means so much to us 🥰
"We will talk about that at length when we do Spiral" Oui...hon hon hon... Oui! (Pervers)
On the dadrepper theory, I know a Norwegian trans woman whose father was a longtime crossdresser. She also tried to join ISIS before she transitioned but that wasn't related
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE MENTIONED
"Ok so our main character is a man who is unusually empathetic to women, who should we have play him? The local rapist"
Loved the subtitle mayhem! (also, great main episode.)
Theory vis a vis the relative transness of detectives: proximity to the francophone world, when you are a detective, increases your general trans aura - tboy Poirot, Maigret, Harrier DuBois, and dare I suggest… Tintin? Edit: I might also suggest that Arsène Lupin, over the course of the books, transitions from crook to detective
it’s on the list 🫡🫡🫡
inflated duck is traditionally how peking duck is made! you inflate it to separate the skin from the meat so the fat renders out
Tragic "fermé ta gueule vendredi" joke not made about the lawyer.
In the straight/cis reading of these types of stories I realized something really messed up: in this model of masculinity usually the only way to empathize deeply with a woman is if she's dead (an object). This one gets around that by making the woman a stand in for a dead daughter (also in a patriarchal sense, an object). It's just so fucked. But there is a sense also that the dead woman is a cipher and a puzzle, a mystery, unknowable. I think this is why all detectives are transgender, because of the longing to know the unknowable (except it is knowable, because you could transition and/or allow women interiority and listen to them). But the corpse in a detective story is unknown in a sense of being unable to fully understand another person's experience or in the sense of being a stand in for death itself. A deeply interesting figure (Apologies if I got intense, I just spent 873 years as a disappointing banh mi being delivered at speed by moped to a French police station and came out of the experience feeling a bit existentially pessimistic, but with a much greater appreciation for terror management theory)
This episode got me pondering how much do the circumstances that spawned so much detective fiction shape it. Because everything is logistics. For example there's a continuous conversation within the work of Raymond Chandler where he's clearly grappling with his desire to create what he considers to be meaningful literature with an agent/publisher who wants hard boiled slop. The result is the finest prose ever written wrapped around plots that feel like they may have used a noir-themed Wandering Monster table to perk up the quiet bits.
Sayers' 'Gady Night' features a crime-solving detective-fiction-writer protagonist struggling with writing deep, emotionally-engaging characters when she's accustomed to putting out light, emotionally-undemanding 'tec stories that keep readers happy and don't force her to look too closely at her own trauma. Sayers was almost certainly writing about her own experiences here, as Gaudy is her longest and most emotionally-heavygoing novel.
As a cis man, I also hate the feeling of being seen as a potential threat, so I do the stuff like crossing the road and circling back and so forth. I don't think it's a gender thing, I think it's just polite to not make people fear for their lives.
true, but the distinction here would be whether hating that feeling is rooted primarily in the thought "i'm sad that i have to do this because i don't belong in the category of Threat" or in the thought "i'm sad that i have to do this because i don't really belong in the category of Man" similar architecture of discomfort, but aimed at categories which overlap so subtly that it can take a trans woman a lifetime to recognise there's a difference 💛
Wonderful podcast. Great work, everyone. Re: Who Shot Mr Burns: Simpsons YouTuber TheRealJims pointed out that someone who appears to be Homer dressed as Krusty is hanging around when Mr Burns is shot, which is never explained, and makes it look a hell of a lot like Homer actually shot him in disguise and got away with it.
As someone who has been to France several times, I'd say the language thing depends on the area. If you're in Alsace, German is fine but if you are in Paris and say you only speak German and English, they will make a face and offer to speak English (understandable). If you try to speak French, the friendlier areas will accept it but other areas will ask you to stop if your pronunciation is not to their liking. It seems to hurt them physically.
Happy Birthday Lucy, being a bit dusty the next morning is a sign of a good night out I hope! Edit: Came back to say, I just remembered what your conversation reminded me of. Here in Aus there is a new TV series called "Homebodies" about a trans man who returns to his home town and finds his mum living with (or haunted by) the ghost of his pre-transition teen self.
For Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, will y'all be doing the book or one of the film adaptations?
If they do the movie I hope they use the original(s)
My experience in Paris was the exact opposite of what Lucy, November and Mia describe. The thing is I do speak french reasonably well, but I'm from Quebec, and everyone in Paris I spoke to insisted on switching to English when they heard my accent. I spent the week prior in London, and no one in London thought I didn't speak English when they heard my Canadian accent there. so...
The French thing with the Quebeocois/e accent is crazy eh? The stories about like French tourists going to Quebec on holiday and making their kids all speak English so they don't pick up the accent etc are nuts
Happy birthday Lucy!
thank you! 🥰
The intuitive detective is always a more interesting character to me than the purely logically one. No matter if it's the jolly Columbo or the much darker Rust Cohle.
So my divorced parents lived in two different states; one where salvia was legal and one wasn't. So I'd just get it shipped to me and then sell it to folks in the other state for weed money. One of my trips was just 500 years getting chased by an Indiana Jones style rolling boulder
I have only watched the Rowan Atkinson versions so I keep seeing him do everything you mentioned.
what the fuck is salvia divinorum
i am not a drugs person why is this substance ive never heard of like brought up in conversation and talked about as if its entirely obvious and known about enough that you can do bits by coming up with off the top of your head tbe skrt of stuff it makes you see