Episode Report Card Jacob: A | 4 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Laika Was An Astronaut
By Jacob | Season 1 | Episode 10 | Aired on 2007.09.27
Joan's out on the floor, wearing the Joan version of the Mamma Mia dress, meaning that she still looks hotter than a campfire on the sun, and Roger drags her across the room to his office, offering tantalizing snippets of sexual harassment as he goes: "I really need to get to the bottom of that, yes..." and "I would like to get a look at those..." Inside the office, he's all overjoyed, like a boy, about how daughter Margaret and wife Mona are "off to Black Island" for Labor Day, like every other set of wife and kids in the city, so they have the whole town to themselves. Red suggests a movie, perhaps The Apartment. The titular apartment, if you haven't seen it, is an executive suite where all the sleazebag guys in this office go to get their rocks off with fun-time girls. Specifically one fun-time girl that the main guy secretly loves but can't stop treating like trash, who in a rare flair of art-imitating-gross, was played by Shirley Maclaine, the Hollywood fun-time girl of all time, after Marilyn Monroe was passed over. Roger says he saw it last week with his wife: "A white elevator operator? And a girl, at that? I wanna work there!" Joan's unsurprised at this: "They passed that girl around like a tray of canapés, and she tried to commit suicide." Roger's like, "So...you've seen it." Seen it? It's a How Not To, in Joan's world. Joan's world is so specific; it has so many rules for survival. What's Joan's Dick Whitman like?
He tries to...Roger, come on...he tries to sweet-talk her about how it's just Hollywood blowing things out of proportion: "That ridiculous Psycho!" He says these days the cinema folks just aren't happy unless everything's that extreme. Joan points out that, sexist-wise and grossness-wise, The Apartment is less sci-fi and more vérité, from where she's standing. He doesn't get it, and then builds an extra floor over his not-getting-it so that he can not get it on a whole new level, comparing Joan's take on the very topical and creepy movie to this time his wife dreamt that he ran over their dog with the car. He laughs because it's so crazy, because she was mad at him all day, and they don't even have a dog. Joan bounces with a quickness, because don't talk to me about your wife, don't talk to me about your fucking imaginary dog, and don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. And knowing Roger, that's literal.