EricRauchway

Great episode. I'm no Dr. Nicholson so I can't tell you what a real Rhoda might suffer from—but in the 1950s,(apologies if you already know this) all this selfish, spoiling, bad mother (or in the case of Monica, maternal figure) stuff, especially put next to "feeble-mindedness" and easily manipulated men, has a lot to do with the ideas about psychology and parenting in Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers, a book whose analysis has a lot to do also with Rebel Without a Cause, Psycho, and probably every other example of pop-abnormal-psych cinema from the 1950s. (Wylie also maybe had something to do with inspiring Superman, so, you know, his fingerprints could be in a lot of places.)

Would've loved, or felt deep pain at, a versus episode with this and HELP.

I'm voting for Boogie Nights partly on the grounds that it is the Paul Thomas Anderson-ier of the two (though I am with Amy in thinking Magnolia deserves consideration here) and partly, for all the genius of what TWBB does to and with Daniel Plainview, I think I would rather watch Citizen Kane again to see similar themes…

Just a note: as much as anything else, this is a story about how we can be paralyzed by history. There's a reason Babe is a historian, named after a famous historian (Thomas Babington [hence "Babe"] Macaulay). And Babe is only able to act when he decides he can use history to make a judgment that he should kill Szell (which, as Amy notes, he doesn't quite do in the movie).