You’re Wrong About‘s Sarah Marshall on how to reclaim our misremembered history
How Kitty Genovese, Nicole Brown Simpson, and the Stepford Wives can teach us about the way history is written.
Aux Features Sarah Marshall
You know the old joke about how copyediting saves lives? The gist is that the gory suggestion “Let’s eat Grandma!” becomes far less hazardous—“Let’s eat, Grandma!”—when you apply the proper punctuation. That’s how every episode of You’re Wrong About feels: the podcast presents you with the facts and figures of recent American history, but with certain excerpts highlighted and underlined to extract a more meaningful (and often more complex) narrative than the one we internalized at the time. And if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in conversation with You’re Wrong About host Sarah Marshall, you will be treated to enough insight to fill an entire season-long slate of podcasts.
Marshall, whose series has been debunking commonly misremembered historical events and figures since its debut in 2018, has always chosen her episode topics carefully, motivated by a genuine sense of urgency to correct the record rather than aiming to pull the rug out from listeners for the sake of it. Sometimes, correcting the record isn’t strictly the goal; instead, it’s about Marshall and her (sizable) audience working through the murky muck of history together, taking the opportunity to apply a more empathetic lens wherever one can be retrofitted. Y2K, Amy Fisher, “going postal,” crack babies—all of these get the closer inspection you didn’t know they needed.
With the podcast recently reaching its fourth anniversary, Marshall spoke with The A.V. Club about which episodes best represent the spirit of You’re Wrong About. Newcomers, start here.
The Stepford Wives (August 24, 2020)
The A.V. Club: Why do you think this is a representative episode of You’re Wrong About?
Sarah Marshall: That’s the first one that comes to mind when people ask for a personal favorite. To me, it feels like the most coherent theory has happened there—my theory that The Stepford Wives is a true story, because it reflects the fact that we were being drugged into submission in midcentury America, and the horror of the social isolation of becoming a suburban housewife when maybe you were used to living in a city and having friends around.
It’s a horror novel that, when you think about it, doesn’t really seem like an exaggeration at all: It’s space-age technology being used to perfect the housewife. And yeah, it’s based on a horror novel where everyone is murdering their wife and replacing her with a robot, so obviously, it’s grim subject matter. But it’s a relatively light way into some really intense themes that we access in other episodes. So I like it also because it’s a break from telling a life story. We get to talk about the characters in a novel.
AVC: How did you come up with this as an episode topic?
SM: I probably read The Stepford Wives for the first time in grad school, and then came back to it in 2019. I really loved it, and I had already talked quite a bit on the show about my thoughts about Rosemary’s Baby (which is also by Ira Levin) being effectively an allegory for the normal experience of becoming a wife and a mother: suddenly your body is controlled by your husband and the people who, in this story, are standing in for the in-laws.
And then it was when I read the book More Work For Mother, a history of housework in the United States, that it came together. I had started developing this idea [that] women are being overmedicated in this [era], and Valium was invented by the family that would go on to be responsible for Oxycontin, and they kind of related to it with a similarly thoughtful marketing push: Let’s get this into every American home and think about the consequences later. I felt like I was onto something with that. And then it was when I read this book about housekeeping and technology that everything clicked.
AVC: I don’t know that the 2004 movie engaged with the material on the level it could have. Do you think we’re due for another reboot?
SM: I think we’re so due for a Stepford Wives limited series—and there are a lot of ways you could do this—but I would want to see it take place in Silicon Valley. The mechanical wife is just such an obvious way to disrupt wife technology. [Laughs]
But I think that could be amazing. The Stepford Wives is just such a perfect horror novel, and the [1975] movie has some lovely touches, but you can see a lot of compromise happening in it. It’s great; it’s imperfect. And then you have the Stepford Wives movie from [2004], which is just an utter nightmare. We love Nicole Kidman, but there are limits, Nicole. We won’t watch you in just anything! But it’s clearly an idea that’s just as relevant now as it was 50 years ago.
Kitty Genovese and “Bystander Apathy” (June 20, 2019)
AVC: What makes this a compelling episode to you?
SM: Kitty Genovese was a story that my mom first told me when I was 12—which is too young. I don’t know what she thought I was going to do. “Sarah’s going to get on a plane and wander around in Queens at night in the 1960s. I’ve got to stop her!”
I remember absorbing it as one of the fairy tales of the time about why little girls can’t go into the world. Because we’ll die.
It’s funny, too, because we did this episode in a week where I was like, Okay, I’m at a loss. I don’t have any good topics. Let’s just do Kitty Genovese. To me it was an amazing story, and I had learned that the facts were very different from what I learned as a child thanks to an article that was in The New Yorker around a decade ago. I thought, well, if it’s in The New Yorker, then everyone knows by now. But that doesn’t turn out to be true. There can be an amazing article that you read about something that completely changes the way you see the world, and that doesn’t mean that it’s common knowledge, unfortunately. So we recorded that episode.
To me, it was important to contextualize—the core myth of Kitty Genovese, and the thing that makes her life into a kind of tough-on-crime teaching tool, is that 37 witnesses watched her be murdered and nobody did anything. Thirty-seven witnesses, and nobody called the police. This was the inflammatory story that made this legend from the beginning. And the most obvious fact, when you think about it, is that if someone is stabbed to death in the wee hours of the morning, why are all these people casually awake, for one thing? Why are they all just sort of sitting around?
As you learn the truth, what it breaks down into is that some of her neighbors did try to call the police. The police were so incompetent at the time that it didn’t matter. The neighbor with the single best and most complete view of what was happening, and who knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was being assaulted, was gay, and the idea of calling the cops as a gay man at that time in New York City—if you look at the context of how they had been treating gay people, especially around this idea that they needed to “flush out” gay New Yorkers before the [1964] world’s fair, it isn’t surprising at all that you would potentially be too afraid to call the police.
You end up with some witnesses who saw or heard something. The 37 number, or it might have been 38, is just derived from the number of windows. The single best witness, who knew what he was seeing, was too afraid to act.
And then, looking at the fact that [Kitty Genovese] was living her life as a lesbian at this time, what becomes clear is that if your death becomes famous in some way, and is used by people to prove a point, inevitably it’s going to take over the substance of your life. And you might be someone who these people—who use you as a talking point—wouldn’t have even cared about or protected while she was alive.
AVC: The Kitty Genovese story is told by people who think that it demonstrates something they already know to be true about humanity. But your story, as presented, is more hopeful: It’s that people are looking out for each other. There’s an inherent cruelty in the original version. But when you unpack it, it seems to strip that cruelty away.
SM: Right. Because this mythological world where people are just, like, eating popcorn, casually looking out the window watching someone be stabbed? Yeah, if you believe that wholeheartedly, then that can teach you that you need to be hard enough to survive in a world that’s like that. I think in many ways, in America we’re living every day with the results of people becoming individualists because they grew up learning that it was the only way to make it.
The O.J. Simpson Trial: Nicole Brown Simpson Part 1 (October 3, 2019)
[Note: You’re Wrong About has, from 2018 to the present, intermittently released episodes investigating the O.J. Simpson case. The Simpson series, 16 episodes long thus far, is both chronological and ongoing.]
AVC: This is such an opus. As a listener, I put off listening to any of these O.J. episodes for a really long time, because I wanted to eventually listen to them all in a sequence—
SM: Yeah, that would have been nice. It’ll happen someday. [laughs]
AVC: It’s a really interesting listening experience, and it’s so in-depth. What is it about these Nicole episodes within the greater O.J. saga? What makes them great episodes of your show?
SM: I remember first researching Nicole Brown Simpson in 2014. Initially, I wanted to find out what was going on in the O.J. Simpson trial. It was something that I vaguely remembered, but we hadn’t culturally revisited it yet in the way we have now.
The first book I read was Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life, which is real bitchy on the subject of Nicole. It’s very easy to pick up on. I’ve heard women be maligned after their own deaths before, and this is it.
I became really compelled by her story. I also read Raging Heart by Sheila Weller at the time, and a lot of the sources I could find. When The People vs. O.J. Simpson came out [in 2016], I thought, this is exciting, because for one thing, it’s making my argument more viable that people want to consume tabloid stories from the ’90s. So thank you, Ryan Murphy. But I was also like, where is Nicole? I know you only have 10 episodes, FX, but where is she? [Batman voice] Where is she?!
AVC: You’re pop culture Batman!
SM: Yes, ideally. [Laughs] I wait in parking garages and I surprise TV execs.
Initially, I was like, we can do this whole trial story [on the podcast] in 10 installments as well, but mine are going to start off really Nicole-heavy. And then, of course, it’s become one of these fancy restaurant things, where you, like, take a carrot and you atomize it into carrot gel and carrot puff or whatever. You end up with a bit of F. Lee Bailey on the plate, and then some candied Guy Who Did The DeLorean Defense.
It was just a story that I found so heartbreaking. I don’t normally dream about my research at all, but I had dreams about Nicole Brown Simpson. What was hard for me was the repetition of how awful things got, and how violent he became with her. How many people knew, how much people knew. People whose job it was to try and intervene in some way—and just how it never mattered.
I felt like she had been really slandered throughout the trial, and that’s something we can see in our revisitations of that recently. So I thought, you know what? Let’s start with her taking up space as a person, and then let’s see where we can go from there.
AVC: What do you think people get the most wrong about Nicole?
SM: Just to not think about her. One of the reasons we love trial narratives, maybe, is because once it’s a trial story, it’s not a murder story anymore. It can become this long, often somewhat funny daytime drama as opposed to something that happens once very briefly in a way that nobody usually sees—or no one who survives can describe.
The ways that we tried to not take [Nicole’s] trauma seriously were by calling her a “party girl,” like Jeffrey Toobin did. The implication at the time was, well, she wasn’t a very serious person. I don’t know. Does that make it better? No. Unserious people need to live too. You can’t judge that about somebody, but if you could, it wouldn’t matter.
The idea that to be recently divorced, good-looking, and running around town is somehow courting your own murder is a really oppressive idea. It’s disturbing to see on full display. The way to reclaim her is not to say, “No, she was a really good mom!” It’s to say, “She was a really good mom, and she liked to go to the club—and God, did she deserve it!” [Laughs]
AVC: What do you hope to continue doing with You’re Wrong About into the future?
SM: Well, I guess now I want to go write a Stepford Wives TV show.
This is an exciting time to be making the [podcast], because we got to the point where we really knew what we were doing and what it was going to look like each time. And now I’ve been doing it solo for about six months after [former cohost Michael Hobbes] moved on to focus on Maintenance Phase. I know a lot about what I’m trying to do, but it’s a little different each time when I’m with a different person. It’s more guest-oriented now, and that’s showing me what it has the potential to do, and feel like and sound like, in ways I wouldn’t have thought of until you can see it emerging.
I’m looking at ways to expand the brand—oh my god, I can’t believe I just said “expand the brand.” I’m looking for ways to expand the You’re Wrong About experience into things outside of the podcast in the next couple years.
It feels like there will never be an end to the material, and each year that I do it, there are new questions that I find myself learning how to ask and think about. The show and I get to grow together.
AVC: As listeners, we get to expand our own definition of empathy and learn to question the narratives we’re told, but in a way that’s most charitable to the humans in those narratives.
SM: One of the things that makes the show work is that when you’re stretching and using your empathy in new ways, extending yourself empathetically to people who it might be your initial impulse to judge and then push out of your brain—one of the reasons people love that is that it feels good as you’re doing it.
It’s not like taking the recycling bins in or something. It’s not mowing the lawn. It’s not something you do to be a good citizen. If you extend yourself empathetically to someone and feel some kind of connection, even or especially if they’ve behaved in ways that it’s hard for you to imagine behaving in your own life, that feels good. It allows people to expand their definition of what makes them worthy as humans, and maybe to entertain even the idea that humans deserve and require unconditional love.
AVC: That’s the read on history I’ve always wanted.
SM: It’s true!
56 Comments
I think its important to reclaim lost, forgotten or misunderstood history. I spent a long time last year making a Jack the Ripper video for YouTube but it was mainly about the five victims and there story. This was motivated purely by how often writers didn’t care about the people, and because of long standing lies such as they were all prostitutes. This was assumed by the police and just casually repeated for the last 130 years. The bit about Nicole being seen as just a party girl also brings to mind poor Betty Short, the Black Dahlia. Often dismissed as the same thing or worse, when her story is more complicated and tragic.
You may want to read The Five by Hallie Rubenhold if you haven’t already. It’s a great examination into the lives of the victims that goes in depth into the topics you’re mentioning.
Not only did I read it, it was my main source for the video and I even emailed Hallie Rubenhold for additional information. That book is a goddamn masterpiece of social history.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that history is the most important field of study and the one non-historians should pay the most attention to. We all want to make good decisions when it comes to the world we live in, and how do we do that except by studying similar cases from the past? People love to bloviate about topics they know little to nothing about (see: Twitter), but when you start seriously learning about a topic you often start to realize how much you don’t know, and start to feel like you aren’t qualified to opine on it.It’s not even just about those particular instances like the Black Dahlia or Kitty Genovese that have been completely warped, but virtually everything: our understanding of how life worked in earlier ages, what people thought or believed, the existence of entire ethnic groups or even nations most people have never even heard of that were wiped out by war or genocide.
I agree on all points. It truly matters in many ways
Just so long as it wasn’t a contrarian take: “Jack the Ripper was actually a proponent of sex worker rights because by murdering them and being never prosecuted he demonstrated to society at large just how little society valued their lives”
Well no obviously, also three of them weren’t prostitutes, one was actively a high class prostitute that had fallen on hard times, Mary Jane Kelly, and one was a prostitute at one point in her life but might not have been active at the time of her death, Elisabeth Stride. Its also like two hours.
I’m a much bigger fan of history that sticks with presenting factual information and avoids drawing conclusions or opinions. “X worked like so, and here’s how we know that” rather than “X means this”. I realize that understanding the larger historical meaning of things can be important, but I also think we’d do a lot better to focus on the facts first and try to draw conclusions about meaning later, if at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Stepford_WivesSharon Gless. Don Johnson. Julie Kavner and Mrs. Roper (Audra Lindley)The 1980 sequel to the Stepford wives did go the medication route – mommy’s little helper 4 times a day. And a much more violent ending.
The 2004 film ending… had an antifeminist female villain. WTF?
While there were a lot of things that didn’t work in the Oz/Kidman one, I thought there were some new ideas introduced to the material. It’s weird revisiting the movie and seeing that some of the proto-30 Rock reality TV shows aren’t all that different from now, the expectations mostly on women to feel equally on top of domestic and career lives, and having Glenn Close play a Phyllis Schlafly type character does slightly tap into how systems can get people to act against their own interests.I’m still not super clear how the movie holds together if there are no robots though since I seem to remember them heavily implying there were more.
I recall the 2004 film was supposed to be robots and this was changed after several scenes were filmed, but they had already shot the ending (spoilers) when it is revealed the Wife of the “villian” replaced him with a robot whereas the women were now rewritten to be controlled by microchip implantshere’s an insane deleted scene with Bette Midler as a robot
I guess fittingly, considering the podcast in question, I am really torn on how to view Marshall and her approach. I’ve listened to almost all the episodes of the show and have been forced to re-examine my assumptions on several things as well as learned a lot of things about things I thought I knew. I do think the research on the show is pretty reliable, or rather I did when it was done by Mike who was much more thorough in his source analysis. Which brings us the other side of this subject.
For me, Sarah Marshall not only huge blindsides, but because of she seems utterly unwilling to truly examine them. Like when discussing those misunderstood people of history, if she decides they’ve been wrongly framed, it’s almost like she doesn’t want to address any negative parts of their activities. As a result, while they are education, I never really find myself trusting on what Marshall is presenting. It also doesn’t help that she seems to just accept things said if it supports her view while Mike seemed to be willing to entertain the thought that maybe people lie.It leads to the concept of empathy as presented by Marshall where it feels like nobody should be held responsible for anything they do as there’s always an explanation. Except for them to make that thought work, they’ve said some really weird stuff. On her specifically, during the Wellfare Queen episode, which was good overall, in the final banter it legitimately sounded like Marshall didn’t think what Elizabeth Holmes did was really that bad.
I don’t know what we can really learn from just pointing to single individuals and deeming them good or bad. I think with Holmes it really is a weird dualism between what she did was terrible vs how she gained power by aligning herself with misogynist values points more to a really terrible society. So to me Marshall’s abundant empathy always leaves me with a lot of room to ask myself questions after the show is over instead of just turning off my headphones and saying “that person was bad”. I think she’s basically asking us to take some responsibility for the environments we create instead of always putting it on a single individual.
But I didn’t write pointing people to and deeming them good or bad, I noted that Marshall doesn’t feel like anyone should be held responsible. And those are two drastically different things.To stick with the Holmes example here, one of the aspects what makes it a fascinating story is how it reflects on the twisted values of the start-up industry and how she could rise as far as she did there. However, what she did was horrible even within the context of that environment and required her to constantly make choices that others in that very same environment were questioning. That story is just as much about her as about the society, so while the larger context is incredibly valuable, it is still about the actions of that person and how she was able to take advantage of that society.
This is where Marshall’s abundant empathy becomes such an issue with me as there is something almost condescending in it for me as it completely removes agency. And to make it more distracting for me, if there are negative traits or actions her focal point takes that she can’t explain, she tends to ignore them or quickly breeze past them.
I mean we can’t change Holme’s, but we can change ourselves. I really like Marshall’s approach. I can’t change bad people like Holmes, but I can help change the bad society I am in by how I understand and participate in it.I guess I really like that approach from Marshall, I’ve heard enough horrible things about these individuals through other tellings. Now let’s hear how these people sadly became who they are and chose what they chose.
It’s adorable that you think some dude was doing the research & not a team.
You think Mike has a team? They don’t even run ads on their shows– how would he pay a team?
Sure, Team Mike.
adorable that you think a podcast that releases about once a week and is listener funded has enough financial resources to pay an entire staff
it’s adorable you think anyone gets paid.
I was generally referring to the research done for Mike’s subjects compared to Sarah’s subjects, especially since I can’t recall them ever discussing their research as something done by other people for them. Also I’m glad that my comments raised such warm emotions in you.
I do wonder how much of this podcast is affected by the times. I have heard a few of these and they feel very “right now”, which is a time of deep questioning. And if we know anything about revisiting history, it’s that the revision is a product of the current. It took me a LONG time to listen to one, since the phrase “you’re wrong about” is truly the grating and annoying zeigeist.
It absolutely is and that’s not a bad thing. Also to give Marshall credit, she had a big part in this modern revisiting of pop culture history moments with her original work on Tonya Harding. There is a massive value in challenging how we remember the past and I do think that there is a lot of positive things from the podcast and others like it.
Let us not confuse “a time of deep questioning” with “I’m doing my own research” or “just asking questions here”
LOL and that’s pretty much the nice way of saying it, isn’t it? Everyone is cynical and questioning of basically everything. I tend to think that everything is maybe not bullshit, and the moment someone starts in with “you’re wrong about” my eyebrows go way the F up my forehead.
Your second paragraph is a complete mess, and your take on YWA (or at least what I think is your take, it’s hard to tell) misses the whole point.
I tried to like this but didn’t think the research or commentary was that great. In some cases I knew the subject matter really well and found their discussion overly surface level or wrong. Most of the ones I listened to weren’t much better than a Google search and some clickthroughs. They weren’t complex, in-depth discussions. Just the debunking and that was that and in some cases not particularly nuanced debunking.
Holmes made Kissinger look like an idiot, that gives her a lot of points in my book.
Her “Yoko broke up The Beatles” episode came out years before the Peter Jackson documentary. That was a good one.
That episode drove me nuts as I was confronted by the fact that Millennials didn’t seem to know or care that much about the Beatles as well as the revelation that I am old
I’m on the older side of GenX and I still don’t know or care very much about The Beatles. Largely because I associate them with the songs grade school chorus had to sing in the 1970s like “Yellow Submarine” and “Yesterday”, which I both despise to this day. They do not rock. And yet The Beatles were supposedly a rock band?
The Beatles recorded about 275 songs, so sure
you can pick out some non-rock ones. Helter Skelter, Come Together and Get
Back are all classic rock songs. They did classic versions of other people’s rock songs too, like Twist and Shout.
This might be the worst opinion I’ve ever heard in my life.
Is it the Pete Worst?
According to the noted author Ronald Thomas Clontle, The Beatles merely “rock” but do not “rule” because, as Clontle notes, “they wrote a lot of bad songs.”
The contract Epstein got them with their label granted absolute creative freedom (in exchange for a pretty crappy cut of the sales; the only reason the 4 of them got so rich is because their success was abnormally high); when nobody can tell you “no”, a lot of your bad ideas make it into the final product. (See also: The Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Fantastic Beasts movies, et cet.)
Well if that’s your only frame of reference, no they would not seem to “rock”. But how about Helter Skelter, I’m Down, Back In The USSR or the plethora of great covers of older rock songs they did?
:sigh:I’ve been trying to forget Sarah Marshall, thankyouverymuch.
I’ve been listening to YWA for a couple years. Sarah is also very humane toward her subjects and tries to understand why people did the things they did at the time. This and her dry humor put this podcast ahead of others for me.
The Amber Heard episode can’t come soon enough
can’t wait, at least we don’t have to wait 20 years for a lot of people to already recognize how fucked up and misogynist all that was.
How people didn’t realize it in real time is staggering. Like, are you at all concerned that you might be mocking a woman discussing her sexual assault history for the whole world to hear?
no. “They” were not concerned, at all, in the slightest. It helps to smear someone and feel better about yourself if you ignore anything pertinent or factual.EVEN in that case, where both sides may have some guilt, or complicity, especially the victim who was found guilty and has to spend the rest of her life being pilloried for being a “fake victim”. Because when I look at JD, I think: Innocent and Believable guy.
Ira Levin has sort of been forgotten but in the 1960s/1970s he was like Michael Crichton in that he wrote thrillers that were almost always turned into movies, which still have some input into pop culture. Not only The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby, but also The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying. One book of his that I wonder why has never been made into a movie is This Perfect Day (although many movies have borrowed elements from it so making a straight adaptation might seem unfairly derivative). Basically it is one of those future societies that on the surface seems utopian but only because non-conformists are dealt with harshly.
Every few years I hear rumblings that they’re going to make a movie of Veronica‘s Room, a play of his that few people seem to know but I absolutely love.
Yeah, he was a playwright too. One of his plays, Deathtrap, was made into a movie in 1982 starring Michael Caine.
The fact is “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is a terrible movie and I didn’t read this article before commenting.
The only good part about that movie is Paul Rudd. Just about everyone else in it is annoying as shit, and Jason Segel is probably the worst actor I’ve ever seen in everything I’ve seen him in. I’m surprised Adam Sandler isn’t in it, because it seems like it would be one of those movies he only makes so he has an excuse to make a movie studio pay for his vacation.
No way this lady is childless and single.
I miss Podmass. Is there no longer an AV club feature that covers new podcasts in general? Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement if so?
Both the Jessica Simpson and Princess Diana deep dives (several episodes each) were amazing. If you didn’t think John Mayer was already the worst…
This article sucks. The comments suck. You all owe me a burrito. Shit. Fucker! twister.
One episode I was deeply impressed by were the DC Sniper ones. I hate True Crime Entertainment with a passion, so I put this one of until I had listened to All other YWA episodes, and it was just a fascinating story, because they focus on the humans in the story, not the CSI-shit.
As someone who experienced the DC sniper cases in real-time (I was in close proximity to many of the shootings including being in the same shopping center at the Falls Church Home Depot), I really appreciated the deep dive into the life of the two men (well, one man and one boy). It’s actually still bewildering that so many people think it was insanity or terrorism, when in fact, it was simply cover for a planned murder of John Allen Muhammed’s ex-wife so he could get custody of his kids. It shows that, at the heart of it, the choice to kill or endanger others is almost never random. People attribute the fundamentalist Mormon murders in 1984 to religious zealotry, when it really was just revenge. Even Donald Trump’s election fraud conspiracy, where actual people have died as a result, has been couched in fundraising and greed.Humans are really just grotesque but simple creatures.
Thank you for doing a story about “You’re Wrong About.” I’ve been a fan of theirs since 2020. Their research is great, and their sense of humor is contagious. I do miss Michael, though. He was a hoot!
Fabulous podcast in this era of renewed moral panics. Lots of great stuff on copaganda and true crime myths too. Mike is missed but Sarah Marshall is unforgettable.