00:02:52.160who was able to do what she was able to do,
00:02:55.420which is maintain a positive public perception0.98
00:02:58.700and basically uniform affection from an American public
00:03:05.840over a career that was like 50 years long.
00:03:10.080Yeah. I've become really good at identifying the incentives and like unconscious desires that cause people to dislike famous women. And I've become really good at learning how audiences can distort a woman's actual words and actions and qualities in their own minds in order to make her seem more powerful than she really is, more flawed than she really is, more nefarious than she really is.
00:03:37.460And like worthy of punishment. But that's kind of the opposite of what happens with Dolly. Instead of everybody seeing this famous woman and finding something to hate about her, this is a famous woman who everybody sees and finds something to love about her.0.94
00:03:52.880And that is because Dolly Parton did this thing that should be impossible, which is that she pulled off this balancing act where she was always suspended between the contradictions of American womanhood and American celebrity in this very, very particular way.
00:04:09.040And I think as we're going to see, she did that through an extremely careful and deliberate and I think sometimes like militantly careful and deliberate sort of high wire act.
00:04:19.780And that's what we're going to try and look at today.
00:04:22.880So by the time that Dolly Parton died in August, she had taken on this kind of like statesman-like role, right?
00:04:31.480She was beloved across the political spectrum by these red state, like more traditional country audiences, and by the coastal country audiences at a time of really profound and high stakes political division.
00:04:46.520Yeah, she's the kind of inverse of Ed Sheeran.
00:04:49.160He also does bring the country together.
00:05:15.100Very critical of the way society works and of her own place in it in some ways, but always with a smile, always with this kind of Energizer Bunny energy that suggested, hey, like, we can work through this.
00:05:31.580And so all that means that when she died, it was like this pop cultural earthquake.
00:05:37.100We're recording now about like a month after Dolly's death.
00:05:41.860I really took my time on this episode and I really wrote quite a lot.
00:05:45.100But it was this big media deal because suddenly everybody was rushing to claim Dolly, to wield her for their own interests, to, like, make these statements about who she was and what she meant.
00:05:57.520It was like George Washington had died or like we lost the last bald eagle or something like this, like this icon of American kitsch and this great symbol was brought back into our attention at the moment of her dying.
00:06:12.060And now the actual human being who inhabited that iconography is gone, but this sort of like symbolism remains, right?
00:06:21.180So today on In Bed with the Right, we're going to go down a couple of different discursive paths with Dolly.
00:06:27.660We're going to talk about like who was this real actual living human being, Dolly Parton, and what relationship does she bear to this quote unquote Dolly Parton character that emerged as a symbol of America's better angels.
00:06:40.880We're going to try and figure out what did this human being do that created this national mascot?
00:06:49.240And centrally, for our purposes, we're going to ask what Dolly's performance of her signature style of really exaggerated, really campy, hyper real form of femininity did for her as she built her career and as she built her persona.
00:07:05.160How did she deploy gender to try and become this sort of universally beloved figure?
00:07:13.840I love the fact that you're reaching for the word hyperreal to describe a person who, to me, like, also was one of those incredible icons for how the 80s were never ending, right?
00:07:24.060I wonder if Jean Baudrillard ever wrote about Dolly Parton, because it is a kind of a simulacral quality there where, like, it's a self-referential universe and she mostly just stands in for herself.
00:07:34.440But it also makes me realize that as we're saying goodbye to her, it's really hard to say what period she is actually of, right?
00:07:42.540She's a relic of something, but I'm not sure what she's a relic of.
00:07:45.260So, like, while I'm a big Dolly fan, that's what I'm excited about, to sort of get history returned to this icon a little bit and get, like, she is of a time, but which time is that?
00:07:55.300Yeah, in her like outfits, in her look, in her self-mythologizing efforts, in like her theme park.
00:08:04.700We are going to be talking a lot about Dollywood.
00:08:49.940Like the traditional country music markets,0.73
00:08:52.100mostly white, mostly Christian listeners in the South, Midwest, and Mountain West.
00:08:58.160We talk about like Dali as sort of always evoking this kind of imprecisely imagined past.
00:09:02.860And I think one thing that's really interesting about country music as a genre
00:09:05.740is that it really took off commercially when people were leaving the country
00:09:09.760in like the post-war era of the 20th century when a lot of people were moving
00:09:15.000out of those rural areas into the cities when they didn't live in the country anymore.
00:09:19.940Those people really started buying a lot of country records and like listening to country music stations, it totally exploded.
00:09:25.920And Dolly was very much part of that transition for the genre.
00:09:29.500And I don't want to underestimate that in like the first part of her career, when she was a kind of straightforward country star, she was huge.
00:09:38.660She was one of the major country stars throughout the 1970s.
00:09:42.960But by the time that Dolly died, the nature of her celebrity had really expanded, and that was in part because she had also become beloved in what we might call blue America, right?
00:09:55.620Like, she had this whole other market that she got access to of people who, like, you know, love gay abortions, et cetera.
00:13:55.600So this is all by way of saying that, like, the Hannah Montana audience spawned a popular revival of Dolly's career.
00:14:03.140It put her into this new market, and it really extended her career because it recruited a new generation of fans for her, right?
00:14:12.640This is also something Dolly has as, like, a transgenerational appeal.
00:14:15.860And I also think now is probably a good time when we should pause and really make explicit something we've been dancing around a little bit, which is Dolly's performance of gender.
00:14:26.040Adrian, could you just tell our listeners, maybe those who have been living under a rock, what does Dolly Parton look like?
00:16:13.200There was always this really aggressive self-deprecation about it from Dolly.
00:16:19.940She was asked about her look and she said, you know, when I was growing up, I thought the prettiest thing in the world was a town tramp, right?
00:16:24.700So she's referencing, you know, like pretty explicitly sex workers.
00:16:29.900she's referencing an exaggerated sex appeal i think this is interesting because like her actual
00:16:37.260song lyrics are pretty pg there's not a lot of sexually explicit material in her song lyrics
00:16:44.620which is not true of the like bluegrass blues and country genres from which she is taking
00:16:52.300inspiration when she writes songs like those can often be quite dirty not dolly dolly is like very
00:16:58.200PG. But I wanted to like allude to this sort of position where Dolly is not entirely robust or
00:17:09.860sincere in her own taste, right? Like her look is a distinctive look. It is a consistent look.
00:17:16.580She actually changed like kind of shockingly little over the years. It is always nostalgic.
00:17:23.580Like I think, you know, in the 80s, she was wearing wigs that were clearly supposed to look
00:17:27.880sort of like the 60s. And then by the time she died, the wigs were supposed to look like the
00:17:31.60080s, you know. But it's not exactly a vow. There's sort of a like a self-conscious distance to it,
00:17:39.700right? So this reminded me, of course, of Notes on Camp, in which Susan Sontag writes about
00:17:48.520gender's role in this quality she's describing as camp. And she says,
00:17:53.500Allied to the camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn't
00:17:58.680a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms
00:18:03.280for obvious reasons the best examples that can be cited are movie stars the corny flamboyant
00:18:09.120femaleness of jane mansfield gina lolo brigida jane russell virginia mayo the exaggerated he
00:18:15.360manness of steve reeves victor mature camp sees everything in quotation marks it's not a lamp but
00:18:22.180a lamp not a woman but a woman to perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand being as
00:18:29.300playing a role is the farthest extension insensibility of the metaphor of life as theater
00:18:35.060so this is i think where i got to baudrillard right and the concept of hyper reality because
00:18:41.600well this is like you know dolly is always kind of winking right um i think like sontag would say
00:18:51.120that most camp is a little less self-conscious than Dolly is.
00:19:15.300Like, drag artists love doing Dolly Parton impersonations.0.96
00:19:21.120For a reason, right? Because she's already in drag. And this is where I think like the kind of set of reference in Dolly's personal look connects to the sort of incohate set of references in her self mythologization, right?1.00
00:19:37.560There's like woman in quotation marks in the way Dolly like dresses herself and makes herself up.
00:19:43.140And then there's sort of like America in quotation marks in the lyrics she writes, in the sort of world she creates at Dollywood, in the sense of down hominess that she's always trying to evoke for her audience.
00:20:03.440No, I mean, this is why I'm glad that we're involving Monsieur B here, because there is a kind of an element of, right, it's about sex, but not in a straightforward way.
00:20:12.200It's about the unconscious, but in a way that feels extremely flat and like, right, everything's just kind of out on the surface, right?
00:20:19.940Like when you have Johnny Carson just being like, I'd like to see your boobs, it's like, wow, this is not a whole lot of sublimation going on around Dolly Parton, right?
00:20:27.420It's like he's just like va-va-voom, and you're like, okay, I'm watching this on TV now, what the hell.
00:20:32.800The relation to the past, the relationship to class, it's hyper-real, right?
00:20:37.580It's there, but it's a relationship between reference.
00:20:41.620She's not drawing on anything very, very specific, or she's not either expressing something that preexists or repressing or hiding something that preexists.
00:20:53.680And I think that's, for Baudrillard, very important in terms of the simulacrum.
00:20:56.520It is a thing that attains what he calls the precession of simulacra, where basically the simulacrum kind of moves and develops a logic of its own that really doesn't have anything to do with what we would think would be underneath the sign, right?
00:21:12.540Yeah. And I think the sense of like, there's nothing really being concealed, right?
00:21:17.420There's no truth that you're going to pull off like a mask at the end of a Scooby-Doo episode to Dolly Parton.
00:21:23.400I think that brings us maybe pretty nicely to the word that got bandied around a lot during Dolly's 2010s revival era, which is the F word, feminism.
00:21:36.440So a question that a lot of the late Dolly Parton reconsiderations all asked was one that I just honestly kind of want to get out of the way, which is, was Dolly Parton a feminist?0.97
00:21:49.440And Adrian, I fucking hate this question.0.87
00:21:51.060I don't just hate this question about Dolly Parton.0.99
00:22:38.260But it seems like the question, was she or is she a feminist icon, is like, is asking something different.
00:22:44.620Yeah, it's usually a question that serves polemic rather than descriptive ends, right?
00:22:49.640I think it can sometimes get us farther away from understanding something rather than closer to it.0.98
00:22:55.800And I'm somebody with a lot of investment in what the word feminism means, right?
00:23:01.920I'm about to say something that also just kind of contradicts what I just said, though, because like the answer to is Dolly Parton a feminist is no.
00:23:15.140I'm on the record as fighting a very losing battle here because I believe that the word feminism should refer to, you know, the political movement by women to end the oppression that they face because they are women.
00:23:25.880I know that's like a hashtag unpopular opinion.
00:23:29.280But by that measure, it just doesn't make sense to call Dolly Parton a feminist.1.00
00:23:32.180That's simply not what her project is.0.99
00:23:34.060She's doing something else, and that's okay.
00:23:37.820Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you've read Sarah Smarr's book on Dolly from 2020.
00:23:42.620She comes by it naturally, and she sort of, it's been six years, but she sort of says every time, like, well, Dolly has this feminism that is the feminism of the women I grew up with, right?
00:23:53.920And you're like, well, okay, so that feels to me, right, like where it's a project about problematizing how women are being put on display, but also not shrinking away from that, thinking about how class and gender interact in rural America, et cetera, et cetera.
00:24:09.100I think what Smarsh is doing, which is very, very clever, is to sort of say like, well, it's a form of gendered critique that Dolly Parton comes out of.
00:24:19.660And you can call that feminist if you want, but you can also say like, well, it's not explicitly linked to that political project.
00:24:25.680The other reason that I say that Dolly Parton is not a feminist is because Dolly Parton said that Dolly Parton was not a feminist.
00:24:33.640Yeah. Like in this 2019 podcast interview, a radio journalist asked her this question directly and she said no. He in fact said that when he asked her this, she seemed to kind of recoil. Right. And so there's like kind of a tendency to sort of correct women who say that they're not feminist to be like, oh, no, no, no. It just means equality or like to emphasize their own, you know, independence.
00:24:58.540No, no, no. I get that impulse, but I think it's kind of patronizing. Like Dolly knew, I think, what feminism means and she rejected it. I don't think she rejected it out of ignorance. I think she rejected it out of commitment. So if we're going to like take her seriously, as I think we should, as a writer, as a wielder of public attention, as somebody who thought intelligently about gender, I think we have to take her seriously on this point too and say, okay, she's not a feminist.
00:25:23.460What she was instead, I think, was, and I say this with like some admiration, like an auteur of femininity, which is something very different and very fascinating in its own right, aside from being like a quote unquote feminist, right?
00:25:37.780But one thing I think is really fascinating about Dali is she wasn't even a uncomplicatedly enthusiastic practitioner of femininity.
00:25:48.320Clearly she took a lot of joy in her own gender performance
00:25:50.900and she certainly never deviated from it in public.1.00
00:25:54.260Like if you see a picture of Dolly Parton1.00
00:25:56.940that's supposedly like without makeup or without her wigs,1.00
00:28:11.200There's a lot of like frills and bows. And all of this was a hook for attention or maybe like a shield for self-protection. But it was also something that gets lightly resented and something that keeps the full seriousness of sincerity sort of at bay.1.00
00:28:28.000And I think when feminists are doing this kind of analysis of ambivalence, particularly with things like femininity, there's this effort to sort of rush past that ambivalence or to like resolve it, right?1.00
00:28:42.740It's a tendency, like a discursive tendency you notice if you spend a lot of time reading feminist writing, feminist theory, feminist commentary, as I do for my J-O-B.0.89
00:28:51.180Like on the one hand, the pleasures of, say, you know, makeup or shaving or high heels, those pleasures exist alongside like the very real contributions of those like imageries and practices to women's own lower status.
00:29:26.180And like neither one of those are like honest.
00:29:28.160Yeah, it's particularly strange around gender.
00:29:29.800It's like, oh, you're deconstructing the gender performance by overdoing it.
00:29:34.540And I mean, like on some level, sure.0.99
00:29:36.420But on the other hand, the reason Carson and people like that reacted the way they did to Dolly was they understood they were being catered to, which they were by, yeah, her enormous boobs, by the good ass she also claimed to have.0.99
00:29:50.420I must admit I've not paid any attention to that.0.95
00:29:53.140But, yeah, there is an element of like, OK, so the form of subversion is full on catering to something like it's a complicated, it's a vexed place, right?
00:30:02.040Yeah, I kind of, I land sort of more on like the master's tools won't dismantle the master's house with this kind of stuff. But I think like the feminist question is like, okay, well, to what extent do you like judge or condemn this complicity, which like, honestly, I just don't have the fucking energy to do. Like who could fucking be bothered?0.84
00:30:19.020um it's like it's pretty low stakes in terms of all the different kinds of ways that women1.00
00:30:25.040participate in patriarchy i'm just like not that hung up on the false eyelashes but this is
00:30:29.040something i do want us to sit with this like unresolved ambiguity it's a both and quality
00:30:34.800and i would ask our listeners when we're thinking about dolly and maybe when we're thinking about
00:30:39.640like our whole lives to try and not put it into one camp or the other to try and not make a
00:30:44.760conclusion? Like, ask the question and then be willing to not have the answer. Probably good
00:30:51.780advice in general. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so who was this actual woman? What do you know about Dolly
00:30:58.420Parton's early life? Not that much, except she's from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, today dominated by
00:31:05.320her image and her wood, her Dollywood,
00:31:09.940born into genuinely, I think, hardscrabble background.
00:32:28.140seems to have been pretty sickly during Dolly's childhood.
00:32:31.560Could be because of the 12 pregnancies, but I'm no expert.0.91
00:32:35.120Right. I mean, combined with the fact that the family did not have much in the way of access to medical care or doctors in abject poverty in rural nowhere, Tennessee.
00:32:46.100Yeah, the Great Smokies are, as Maura's saying, gorgeous, but they feel remote even today.
00:32:51.660Like, I don't know if I'd want to step onto a nail in Bigeon Forge, Tennessee today.
00:32:55.940Like, it's going to be a while to the hospital.0.89
00:32:58.060Well, Dolly liked to tell a story where she was, in fact, delivered when her mom gave birth to her.
00:33:03.780She was delivered by a local missionary.
00:33:06.240And her father paid the man with a bag of cornmeal.
00:33:10.680But then another story features Dolly as a child cutting her foot on broken glass that was, like, in the backwoods behind their home, which was, by the way, a two-room cabin.
00:33:21.460and her mother disinfected the wound with kerosene
00:33:25.560and then sewed it shut with her like sewing kit.
00:34:50.100And in this one, this is a pretty early song of Dolly's.
00:34:52.960It's sung from Dolly's perspective as a very poor young child who needs a winter coat.
00:34:58.900So her mom takes this bag of donated rags and stitches together a coat made of rags.
00:35:06.240And Dolly is made fun of by the other school children for her coat, for her evident poverty.
00:35:12.960And then there's like a refusal of shame.
00:35:14.840It's like, OK, I am loved so much by my mother that she made me this as opposed to I am so deprived that I need to wear a coat made of literal rags.
00:41:46.060And the suit is a kind of blue—so some of this might be the degradation of the physical image over time, but, like, it's also blue in a way that suits are not really supposed to be blue unless, you know, you're starting in one of the Leisure Suit Larry games, basically.
00:41:59.820This feels, to me, that would be a hard pass if I found that at Bloomingdale's, I've got to be honest.
00:42:05.480And about how old does he look to you?
00:42:07.540I mean, today I would put him at a 60, which probably in the 1970s put him at 40.
00:42:13.300So, Porter Wagoner was a very, very famous country music singer and songwriter.
00:46:36.580I mean, given that you sort of pointed to the function of the invisible husband behind all this in terms of making her both alluring and kind of a little off limits.
00:49:11.160But it also could be that, I mean, it sounds like he was a big promoter of a career, and that's lovely.0.99
00:49:17.140At the same time, stoking rumors or at least not discouraging rumors that someone got to where she is because she's fucking you0.98
00:49:25.780is also a way that men undercut and undermine the women around them as well,0.98
00:49:30.580even if that woman has had zero contact with you and no interest in you whatsoever.
00:49:34.800And this is something I kind of want to talk about that happens a lot in the careers of, like, ambitious young women, because I call it, like, the bad mentor.
00:49:56.120Or, you know, he offered some kind of quid pro quo, whatever.
00:49:59.440They met when Dolly was in her early 20s and Wagoner was in his 40s.
00:50:04.120And at a moment when she was very talented and ambitious, like sort of young entree into an industry, and he was already firmly established in that industry.
00:50:14.460That is something I see basically every workplace, every industry, every sector, every state in the country, and probably every nation in the world.0.89
00:50:22.840When you look at the early careers of these ambitious women, there's often a figure like this at the beginning.
00:50:30.060This older man whose professional mentorship and his sort of like paternalism comes with this kind of like sexual interest and expectation.
00:50:40.040Misogynists call this women sleeping their way to the top.
00:50:42.560I call it making sex a condition of women's professional success because young men do get this kind of mentorship from men, but it usually doesn't come with that price.
00:50:52.840right? Yeah. Men get it by servicing the narcissism of older men, right? Like,
00:50:56.840oh, I recognize myself in you. And you're like, okay, cool. Great. Can you write the letter
00:51:01.280of recommendation now? Or are we not doing this? So I'm talking about exploitation in this
00:51:05.460relationship. And I think that's like the framework that you kind of need to understand them. Like
00:51:10.640there's an asymmetry of age and worldliness and professional power that creates this imbalance.
00:51:18.280It's like genuinely ethically problematic to me.
00:51:20.860I'm not trying to start like hashtag age gap discourse, but I do think this is a real ethical thorniness in these kinds of couplings.
00:51:29.400That doesn't mean that the relationships are not, strictly speaking, consensual.
00:51:33.960It doesn't mean that they never contain sincere affection or genuinely formative like pedagogical interventions, right?
00:51:42.380It's not that it's like sexual exploitation or an actually useful professional opportunity.
00:51:47.280like the injustice is exactly that it's both, right?
00:51:49.880That they're melded together and entangled in such a way
00:51:52.820that no one can actually come to any kind of conclusion
00:53:08.140She's been around the block a little bit.
00:53:10.060And her success as a singer and songwriter
00:53:12.180has been matched with an increasing sense
00:53:14.060of what she's worth, but that wasn't the case when she first met Wagoner back in the 1960s.
00:53:19.320She signed this contract when she met him that gave him these insane rights to her career,
00:53:24.860like well beyond whenever she left the show. So she's like kind of trapped, right? He's got
00:53:29.840rights to manage her. He has rights to profit from all of her solo records.
00:53:35.400She like can't break with him. So what she does is in 1974, she breaks the contract.
00:53:41.500She leaves the show and she says that she told him she was leaving in the scene that like, again, it's so good that it seems kind of not true because it like exactly mirrors the story she tells about how she got the job, which is that she goes into his office with her guitar and plays him a song she wrote about how she needs to leave.
00:54:02.680And Adrian, can you guess what that song was?
00:54:05.040Does it start, if I should stay, I would only be in your way.
00:56:17.600She starts directing her music and writing her music
00:56:21.100more for like a mainstream pop audience.
00:56:23.540And this is like the first part of her crossover status.
00:56:27.540A lot of her songs are getting covered around this time.
00:56:30.540She also starts covering songs from other genres.
00:56:33.760She does like a, I think, a pretty cute version of The Temptations, My Girl.
00:56:36.960And this really starts to pay off in the end of the 1970s when she starts having these top charting singles on the pop charts, like not just the country charts, right?
00:56:46.660So she's like sort of reaching this crossover success.
00:56:50.700And because of the experience with Wagner, she was pretty hard-nosed about making sure that anytime she wrote a song for someone else, she got a lot of the royalties, right?
00:57:00.900This is also the beginning of Dolly Parton, just like extremely rich businesswoman.
00:57:06.640She became a really savvy negotiator, a strategic businesswoman.1.00
00:57:13.500This was a woman who is about her coin.
00:57:15.960You know, she was all about making money and did so very, very successfully.
00:57:20.000I'm going to be really honest, and I'm going to get yelled at again for this.
00:57:22.360I think the Whitney Houston version of I Will Always Love You is better than the Dolly Parton version.
00:58:36.440She released almost 50 albums over the course of her career.
00:58:39.560I saw that in one of the obituaries and I was like, I guess that's a number that makes sense now that I'm hearing it, but it's still staggering.
00:58:46.800And in 1980, she gets this new, different kind of opportunity when she gets a call from Jane Fonda's people.
00:58:56.100Adrian, what do you know about the movie 9 to 5?
01:00:28.820I don't think I knew that either, yeah.
01:00:29.880The movie was conceived of as, and I say this with great affection, propaganda for the union.
01:00:35.240This is a weird sort of like relic of the 1970s and 80s is that for a while, Jane Fonda was operating as a go-between between like the radical left and like the new left movements and Hollywood.
01:00:50.180When Jane Fonda dies, it's going to be for me what Bob Dylan dying is going to be for like straight white men, you know?
01:00:55.960Like it's just going to be my like personal 9-11.
01:01:47.040Like, people love using this song because it is a song about the indignity of the hierarchical workplace that also has this sort of investment, like, cheerful investment in ambition and, like, the dignity of work, right?
01:02:06.180There is a real lean-in quality to that song.
01:02:09.380There's that line, they just use your mind and they never give you credit, which I think is, like, basically, I'm like, whoa, like, it's just Marxism right there.
01:02:17.040But then the next line is, it's enough to drive you crazy if you let it, right?
01:02:21.480The trademark Parton optimism still seeps through, right?
01:02:25.760It's like, oh, like, don't let it drive you under, you know?
01:02:36.920Yeah, the cheerfulness of it and the catchiness of it is a major driver of the film's success.
01:02:44.320And this is a turning point for Dolly.
01:02:46.260It's her entrance into film and acting.0.97
01:02:50.540The movie was, like, more than just a little obliquely feminist.0.99
01:02:53.760Like, Dolly is this, like, cartoon pin-up figure.1.00
01:02:57.600And in the movie, that makes her the target of sexual harassment.
01:03:01.300And she, like, trivializes it as her character, but she also, like, righteously resents it.
01:03:05.960But the film is, like, pretty explicitly pro-worker and pro-union.
01:03:10.140And that is weird for the Dolly that we know in 2026.0.97
01:03:14.540The Dolly we know in 2026 is militantly apolitical, does not talk about politics, does not express her opinion, did not say jack shit about Donald Trump, like, ever.0.95
01:03:27.560And so that's interesting to me, right?0.94
01:03:29.240Because, like, when those politicians, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, like, started using 9 to 5 at their campaigns, apparently, like, the Dolly camp, like, sent cease and desist.
01:03:41.720They're like, we don't accept any requests from political campaigns, right?
01:03:45.420So it's like, where does Dolly stand politically while she very deliberately stands nowhere?
01:03:50.980And that, I think, is something interesting because I'm not totally sure that 9 to 5 was exactly a contradiction.
01:03:58.020Dolly doesn't come out in 1980 with any kind of particular politics after she does this movie.
01:04:03.560In fact, like one of the things that Jane Fonda says is that they recruited her in part because they thought it would help with middle American audiences, right?
01:04:09.420Who might not be, like, as amenable to, like, a union propaganda movie.
01:04:14.880It's just her and Warren Beatty trying to figure out who they can rope into their, like, communist Ajit prop.
01:04:20.500It's not nothing for Dali to be in a movie with Jane Fonda.0.73
01:04:33.620Because of the unique cultural position of workers' rights politics in the U.S.
01:04:38.320It's like you can be for the workers and against the bosses in this kind of like righteously populist way and still be either for the political right or the political left.
01:04:48.560Like you don't actually totally have to take a side.
01:04:50.620I think like this is not a position that I think is correct.
01:04:53.720I don't think it's analytically defensible, but it is something that is true in sort of the American political imagination, right?
01:05:01.400I mean, as you know, in my other life, I'm writing this book on cars, and I did a lot of work on the Trucker film, which is likewise pretty right-wing coded.
01:05:11.660You know, it sort of often stars country stars.
01:05:14.360It's very much from Red America, what we would today call Red America.
01:05:18.120But they're also implicitly, of course, sort of pro-Union pictures, even though the union never shows up.
01:05:24.100It's always like the boss is riding us, and we got to get this beer from Texas, Arcana to Atlanta, and they're giving us no time to do it.
01:05:30.020And, you know, they're going to foreclose my house, et cetera.
01:05:32.060And in that inchoate way that, like, so much of, like, 80s comedy is sort of, like, the bad guys were real estate developers, the owners of, like, large companies that needed things shipped across the United States but didn't want to pay a fair wage for it.
01:05:45.060Like, it has this kind of populist anti-capitalism where you're like, well, obviously this movie wouldn't happen if Burt Reynolds or whoever was in a union, right?
01:05:54.120So, like, it's not just that the contradiction is more attenuated in the United States, it's that it was particularly blunted at that moment in U.S. history, I would say.
01:06:03.780And Dolly very much takes advantage of that, right?
01:06:07.220She can gesture to populism, evoke her own sort of rural poor origins and get the authenticity points from that.0.99
01:06:14.820But she doesn't have to throw her gauntlet down on either side.
01:06:17.800And she never does, not until she dies.
01:06:19.960So after 9 to 5, her first movie, she does a few others.
01:06:24.300To my mind, the best one is still Magnolia's, which she's very good in.
01:10:08.060So they only did this for a couple of years.
01:10:09.720And they did it sort of like at the peak of the anti-gay marriage political movement.
01:10:14.120The park's lawyers threatened to sue them.
01:10:16.620The park cops tried to shoo them out.0.80
01:10:19.020There was a Klan rally outside Dollywood to try and prevent gay fans from congregating there.
01:10:27.140For a long time, even outside of the gay days in particular, it was park policy at Dollywood to make anybody who is wearing like a gay T-shirt or a slogan that said like gay is okay, to take it off and turn it inside out to conceal the message you weren't allowed to be gay at Dollywood, right?
01:11:27.960You know, the park had a mission statement that says that it operates in a manner consistent with Christian values and ethics.
01:11:35.360So, like, after the Klan protested against the gay day at Dollywood, a lot of Dolly Parton's gay fans, of which she has many, hoped that she would say something, and she didn't.0.52
01:11:45.520And, like, this is the other side of Dolly.
01:11:47.500Dolly maintained that universal appeal, that sort of, like, bipartisan affection by not taking any stand, including not standing up for stuff that's right.0.85
01:11:59.920And I think that, like, really does suck, right?0.95
01:12:02.600But I think also it's interesting to think about Dolly as a gay icon.0.99
01:12:06.420Like, because in part, because of her gender performance and all of that, like, self-conscious, deliberate artificiality in it,0.58
01:12:13.840And she was just a huge gay icon for, like, most of her career.0.99
01:12:18.660Also a woman who's taken some shit in her life, who was under the thumb of an older, abusive older man.0.99
01:12:25.260Like, this is just catnip for the gay community.1.00
01:13:02.640And I think that's like Dolly Parton being made fun of for being too girly and sort of making herself the author of that joke, defeating the mockery with humor.0.88
01:13:16.140I think that's like a very gay thing.0.58
01:13:20.140That makes her different from, like, a Jane Mansfield, who's also a kind of gay icon, but, like, you know, just a horrible, horrible story, or Marilyn Monroe, right, where basically the martyrdom is part of the identification.0.64
01:13:35.060Dolly is the person who takes her marginality, takes her liabilities, and turns them into strengths, and gets fucking rich and shows everyone.0.92
01:13:45.840Dolly is a survivor, and she is a winner.
01:13:48.260And something I want to say about her final years is that Dolly's final illness,
01:13:52.280the illness that ended with her death in August, it was not brief.
01:15:00.440And she seems to have tried to really, like, genuinely use that character in the public interest.
01:15:05.300And this is something I do admire her.
01:15:06.720She did tremendous amounts of philanthropy.
01:15:09.580Like, a lot of young people now first heard of Dolly Parton because they got her donated books for her, like, big children's literacy initiative.