47: Welcome to Me (with Karen Geier) (Patreon)

Toronto-based writer and content strategist Karen Geier (The Guardian, Vice, The Cut) joins the podcast to discuss Shira Piven’s 2015 comedy-drama Welcome To Me, about a mentally ill woman obsessed with television and Oprah (Kristen Wiig); she wins a staggering amount of money in the California lottery, goes off her meds and bankrolls an expensive and strange syndicated daytime talk show about herself, where she re-enacts traumatic events in her life using actors for an increasingly attentive television audience.

Karen I discuss the delicate balance required to respectfully depict Borderline Personality Disorder in a comedy, and how this film was in its own way a premonition of a current social ill in the post-Trump era: unstable people who become “celebrities” on media platforms like Twitter or cable news, and how this fans the online flames of personality cults and political extremism.

Follow Karen Geier on Twitter.

Check out Karen’s podcast about cults, On Belief and support her Patreon  

Trailer for Welcome To Me (Piven, 2015)