Conversations with Friends #1: Sarah Marshall
in which we talk about about eating with our hands, misogyny, & how we live as working writers
Conversations with Friends is a new feature on The Unexpected Shape newsletter in which I have a free-flowing chat with someone who is truly a friend. In today’s conversation, I decided to call up Sarah Marshall, who is a brilliant journalist, Satanic Panic expert, and the host of the critically acclaimed and wildly popular podcast You’re Wrong About, which addresses issues that the public is misinformed about (I recommend starting with the Kitty Genovese episode). She also co-hosts the podcast You Are Good, “a feelings podcast about movies.” I am lucky enough to call her someone I know and love.
This is Part 1 of our conversation with Sarah Marshall. Part 2 will go up tomorrow.
CW: the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial (though we don’t describe any of the relevant violence), misogyny, sexual harassment of a minor through lewd images
EW: Something that I love about you, is that you have a certain number of pop culture libraries that your brain pulls from. And I feel like half the time, I'm not sure which library you're pulling from, but I have a general sense of what the libraries are, which is helpful.
This also reminds me of my Worst Ex, who kept a big binder on top of the TV that was a binder of all the episodes of The Simpsons. Not scripts, but descriptions of each episode, season by season.
SM: Yeah. I really do, unfortunately, understand the impulse to have that in a pre-internet world, because when I was in eighth grade, I would print out scripts from episodes of “Friends.” I would put them in a binder, and I would take them to school, and I would read them.
EW: Privately?
SM: Yeah, quietly. If I’d had friends, I would have made them act out scripts for “Friends.” But as it is, I just read the script and visualized the episode. Because here's the thing: people act like you need a smartphone to be able to watch TV in public, but you don't. You just need to give calories to your brain so that you can read a script and visualize the episode; you make a little play inside your head.
EW: It’s like how I say that there are things that we do now that people think are specifically of our technological age, that are not really.
My example is that women—usually women—are sent unsolicited dick pics on the internet. But when I was 13, I did a zine (I continued to do zines until I was about 19). I once received a large envelope in the mail from a grown man who had decided to send me a bunch of nude photographs of himself.
Let me describe to you these nude photographs. They were all the same image, like when you got your photo taken at school and they’d make all these smaller photos for your wallet and some tiny ones that were stickers, and so forth.
So his photo was a full-frontal shot of himself naked in front of a fake waterfall, and he had sent me a bunch of photographs of wallet size and larger, in addition to a refrigerator magnet of these photographs.
First, I want to say it's a lot easier to harass women with images of your nude self nowadays. But people did it back then, and I'm sure cavemen carved pictures of their dicks onto rocks and wheeled them over to the cave next door.
SM: How... Had he made them himself, or was there this specific kiosk at the mall that did it for him?
EW: This is what confuses me as an adult. First, I want to say it's a lot easier to harass women with images of your nude self nowadays. But people did it back then, and I'm sure cavemen carved pictures of their dicks onto rocks and wheeled them over to the cave next door.
SM: Maybe more men used to expose themselves. Possibly before it was easy to send pictures, so you didn't have to develop them.
EW: Maybe he had darkroom access and developed some pictures, but then how did he get the magnet made?
SM: I think he was good friends with a teenager who worked in a kiosk at the mall.
EW: And he said, "Hey Billy—if I give you five bucks a week for a Cinnabon, will you please develop my gross pictures and maybe throw in a magnet once in a while?".
SM: Yeah. And no matter what, it's incredibly sinister.
EW: Something that you talk about a lot in “You’re Wrong About” is the way that women are seen and treated in society. I specifically remember this from your Amber Heard episode, because we did talk a lot about Amber Heard together. That episode was a bonus episode, and I don't know if you specifically did that because you wanted fewer people to harass you about it.
SM: Yes, I did, Esmé. Yes I did.
EW: I’ve listened to that episode a lot, actually.
Something that really resonates with me about that episode is how, at the beginning of the episode, you talk about how people say things like, Down the road, because of You're Wrong About, people are gonna not treat the future Monica Lewinskys of the world like Monica Lewinsky. But then we are considering our contemporary “problematic female figures,” and it's not very different.
SM: In that case specifically, I was shocked by how it felt like the majority of the people most vocally attacking Amber Heard were other women.
EW: Yes. I was a little bit surprised by how it was mostly other women, and I was also very surprised by how vitriolic they were about it. I do think that part of the reason it invoked so much vitriol was this idea that she's fucking it up for the people who are “really” experiencing abuse.
SM: Which is so frustrating to me, because I don't believe that many people really thought that. I think that they were defending “the nice man from the ride.” And now, when you go on Pirates of the Caribbean, you have to see that fucking Johnny Depp animatronic destroying an otherwise perfect attraction. I really hope you publicize my views on that.
I know that some people sincerely felt [that Amber Heard was fucking it up for the women “truly” experiencing abuse], and that feels like such a symptom of the scarcity mentality we've developed in America about who receives care for their trauma.
[In a situation of] interpersonal abuse, the thing about people who behave abusively is I think that they often, even if they're able to act with what feels like cool rationality, are not acting as part of a well-thought-out plan. This idea that Amber Heard was some kind of criminal mastermind, and had this plan to destroy Johnny Depp's life—well, if you were a criminal mastermind, why would your plan be going so badly?
SM: I feel like something that to me was central about it was people kind of wanting to fit Amber Heard into this archetype— which I don't think really exists in real life.
[In a situation of] interpersonal abuse, the thing about people who behave abusively is I think that they often, even if they're able to act with what feels like cool rationality, are not acting as part of a well-thought-out plan. This idea that Amber Heard was some kind of criminal mastermind, and had this plan to destroy Johnny Depp's life—well, if you were a criminal mastermind, why would your plan be going so badly?
EW: Maybe the way people see it is like, Oh, she had this dastardly plan, but we see right through her plan.
SM: Yeah. She's a genius, but I am even more of a genius, and that's why I'm calling her out on TikTok.
EW: To back up a little bit about why I was so fascinated by the story, I think that there were two things.
One is that, as you and Jamie Loftus said in that bonus episode, it was basically impossible to avoid the trial if you were at all online in any capacity. I felt like it was being forced in my face constantly. I think something in the algorithm made it appear like hotcakes all over everybody's feed. A number that you quoted about the number of times some Justice for Johnny hashtag popped up was in the billions, which really gets me.
And once the algorithm had lured me in and was like, Hey, don't you want to know about this criminal trial where we determined whether or not a woman is a lying bitch, she wants to make this nice man seem bad, I couldn't help but be pulled in because even though I knew it was just gonna make me feel like shit, I would spend hours watching the YouTube live-stream of the trial. I’d not only watch that, but I also would go to social media posts about it and read all the comments, which feels like a certain kind of self-harm.
SM: The word self-harm was coming to mind for me too.
EW: I definitely felt like it was connected to my trauma in some way. I don't know if I'd be able to say clearly in what way, but something that I think about a lot is imagining myself on trial or as a plaintiff.
I imagine how I would be cross-examined and how it would go, and how I would be ripped to shreds because of something I had done that was considered not the action of a perfect victim. There was something that I found so compelling about the whole circus sideshow element of it that made me feel upset constantly. But I also find that a lot of things that I find constantly upsetting are things that I can't stop looking at, that I can't look away from.
Were you watching the live stream of the trial and such?
SM: I was really trying to avoid it. I think I only watched a little bit of it a few times often because I would be scrolling; it would start playing, and I would stick with it. But I really was not able to watch it for very long because it was hitting me in a slightly different way.
It was putting a woman on the stand in the spotlight and having a legal and social imperative to shred her as thoroughly as possible. It was that idea that felt really horrific to watch for me.
Let's say she was on trial for killing someone, and she was guilty. What is the social value of the entire country, and apparently vast portions of the world, watching that play out live every single day? It makes the OJ Simpson trial look neolithic by comparison because people couldn’t watch the trial throughout the day unless they could stay home or be in a place where there was a TV.
Part 2 of this conversation will go up tomorrow.
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