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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest long shoots of Goldenrod edition.

On today's show, the new and remarkable documentary about having and having not the Queen of Versailles, plus the new NBC hour-long series revolution, and finally, you're watching it wrong, has irony destroyed our capacity to appreciate the art of the past properly. Joining me today, our Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner, hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. And of course, our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Stephen. Steve, before we start the show, can I make an announcement?

Well, of course you can. So I want to let our listeners know that they have a rare and delightful opportunity to hear our colleagues at the fantastic hang-up and listen sports podcast, do a live show in Washington, D.C. It's their hometown, and it's their first ever live show in that area. It's going to be Monday, October 1st at 7 p.m. at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, which is at 641 D.Street Northwest. Tickets are 12 bucks, and you can get them at sleep.com slash hangup, D.C. So go snap some up before they sell out. Excellent. All right, well, Dan, now let me dig in with you, film critic.

Queen of Versailles is a new documentary by a woman named Lauren Greenfield.

It's about David Siegel, a timeshare magnate and his wife, Jackie, and their attempt to build what would have been the largest private residence in the United States, a 90,000

square foot plus Leviathan that would have included 30 bathrooms, 10 kitchens, two tennis courts, a bowling alley, a skating rick, a sushi bar, and $5 million dollars worth of marbled, and they called it without irony Versailles. Along the way, Mr. Siegel's business empire begins to falter. Their lives falter along with it. And in the wake of the credit crisis,

they do the unthinkable, they lay off staff, they clean up after themselves, and they fly

commercial. Dana, I can't imagine someone not having a pretty intense reaction to this

documentary. What was your reaction? Well, first of all, I would definitely recommend it highly,

if only because the subject matter is so bizarre and fascinating. And it's one of those rare documentaries, a great break for the documentarian, where Lauren Greenfield, who was originally a photographer and then conceived of this project, I think after having photographed the couple of Seagulls, had this happenstance changed the story of her film. She started off in 2007 making a

movie about the largest house in America that they were having built in Florida. And sure enough,

in 2008, when the credit crisis came along, she found her story to be about something entirely

different. It also, in a very fascinating way, is this story of nested credit crises, right? Because

David Siegel's money all comes from selling timeshares, essentially, which are sort of subprime mortgage time shares for people who can't really afford them. So he is being exploited by the banks in the same way that he is exploiting his own consumers. And it all just becomes this kind of dizzying mirror of capitalism. It's a fascinating movie. Julia, a dizzying mirror of capitalism. What did you make of the cameras being let into these extraordinary lives?

I mean, if nothing else, right, aren't you amazed at, you walk away from this documentary,

amazed at the absolute ubiquity of the reality TV mindset by which anybody opens their

front door to let a camera in and examine them. Remarkable, right?

Yeah, I still can't really figure out what the motives were of Jackie Siegel and her husband

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