DPP is back, baby — and this time for an encore. Chase and Sam thought they'd round out the season — find a 'capstone', if you will — for the last year. That pediment takes the form of Chris Smith's fly-on-the-wall documentary American Movie (1999).

What does it mean to aspire towards creative production as a provincial dreamer-cum-slacker? What was left of the American dream as the clock ticked over and a new millennium began?

Find out in today's episode.

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 35 — American Movie (1999)

Summer Break 

Fear the coming of the trilby. Yes, that's right — today, in the last episode of our first season, we're looking at Gen X accelerating towards middle age and a crash encounter with those coming up behind them: millennials.

No one captured this dissonant first encounter better than Noah Baumbach in his 2014 feature While We're Young [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/While_We%27re_Young_(film)] — a spiralling comedy of manners obsessed with subcultures, technology, filmmaking, ethics, and the process of ageing itself.

Were the millennials the horrific spawn of a shallow age? Solopistic, self-involved, far too comfortable with 'selling out?' Or were they a pioneering generation, with enough earnestness and purchasing power to transform cities, fashion, media and art — at least sometimes — for the better?

Find out in today's episode.

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 34 — While We're Young (2014)

Patreon here. [https://www.patreon.com/c/deathphotopod]

It's the early 2000s in Mexico — and everyone is feelin' fine. The PRI's uninterrupted one-party 71-year reign of social-democratic, but also neoliberal, authoritarian incompetence is over. The insanity of the drug war proper, unleashed in 2006, is a distant spot on the horizon. A guy with the last name Fox is in charge — he's like George Bush but with even more charisma...and a strange penchant for coke (a cola).

Yes, that's right — today's episode of DPP is covering the defining, break-out films of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano — Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros and Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mama Tambien. Or as Chase has characterised them — a pairing about female predatory behaviour and animal cruelty.

How was the USA's closest neighbour feeling about the End of History? Dread, joy? The irrepressible need to engage in dog fighting?

Find out in today's episode.

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 33 — Amores Perros (2000) + Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)

Patreon here. [https://www.patreon.com/c/deathphotopod]

This week, DP heads south. South to Chile — a nation which ended its military junta and dictatorship through an advertising-powered referendum just as the Cold War was ending. Could there be material that's more End of History in its politics?

Chilean director Pablo Larraín [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Larra%C3%ADn] seemed to think not — producing his 2012 feature No [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_(2012_film)] — half as a celebration of the 1988 presidential referendum's ousting of General Pinochet, and half as a satirical send-up of the growth of political communications through advertising.

What happens when politics is stripped of its substance and rendered as a performative set of vibes?

Find out in today's episode.

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 31 — No (2012)

Patreon here [https://www.patreon.com/c/deathphotopod]. 

This week DPP delves into Guy Ritchie's feature debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998).

What did the 1990s rebirth of Cockney-cool during the Blair era mean for Gen X? How did London feel just before the turn of the 21st century? And why are British-gangster movie directors so posh?

Find out in today's episode.

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 30 — Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Patreon and full episode here. [https://www.patreon.com/c/deathphotopod]

In the second of DPP's special book episodes, Sam and Chase interview Yale Law and History professor Samuel Moyn on his new book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth – and What to Do About It [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374607647/gerontocracyinamerica/] (2026).

For how much longer will the Boomers and Silent Generation rule America? And how does their dominance differ from historical gerontocracies from Sparta to the Soviet Union?

What levers does the US government and US democracy actually have to prevent gerontocracy from continuing?

Find out in today's episode.

Special Episode – Gerontocracy in America (2026) w/Samuel Moyn

Patreon here. [https://www.patreon.com/c/deathphotopod]

This week, DPP explores the cult film — Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001).

Panned at the time by venerable critics like Roger Ebert — Freddy Got Fingered has only grown in influence in the last two decades, generating a reputation as the ur-Gen X slacker and freak-out comedy.

Is this a piece of Dada genius or a symptom of the Hollywood studio system indulging the worst tendencies of a generation?

Find out in today's episode.

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 29 — Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

Patreon here. [https://www.patreon.com/c/deathphotopod]

This week, the DPP lads head east — to the wild years of Russia in the 1990s after the fall of communism.

That's right — we're talking about 1997's gangster coming-of-age feature Brat by Aleksei Balabanov [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksei_Balabanov], a film that explores Russia at a turning point: between the drunken post-Communist years of Yeltsin and the rising authoritarianism of Putin.

To paraphrase Gramsci — "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that Boris is dying and Vladimir cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Season 1, Gen X — Episode 28 — Brat (1997)

DPP ventures into the North Chicago suburbs as it broaches its first John Hughes film — Sixteen Candles (1984).

What does adolescence look like in the affluent upper middle classes for Gen X? What role does the family play? What did dating look like for those coming of age in the epoch?

Find out in today's episode.

Death is a Photograph