Transcript
Speaker: Welcome, welcome, welcome back to Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. i am Chase here with Sam, and we're today talking about something that kind of probably sits in the Gen X season, but we're doing it now as we by way of closing because i rewatched it.
Speaker: And I said to Sam, we have to do this. It so thoroughly incarnates so many of the themes that we've thought about through this season in the American context. And that movie is American Movie, a documentary about a megalomaniacal, kind of like relatively skilled, actually, filmmaker trying to make it big in mid-early 90s America, specifically the Midwest. His name is Marc Bouchard.
Speaker: And his sort of cast of characters and friends around him, most notably Mike Shank, who talks in a way that I have to imagine you, Sam, found like particularly interesting since he's just like a very middle American guy way to talk.
Speaker: He kind of talks to a sort of sustained wine, sort of found. Yeah. yeah Oh, well, you know, I just think like it's it's kind of interesting.
Speaker: That was pretty good, actually. That was pretty good. Yeah, this is ah this is Germanic America. where We are in the Holy Roman Empire. This is truly, like, this is this is the Krautreich so far as America is concerned.
Speaker: Everyone's got names like Borchardt, Shank, I think the the the director's mother is Swedish, is he? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. ah And everything is like blanketed in snow. Like 80% of the time they go out to shoot. There's a point, uh, where probably, don't know, midway through the movie, they're picking up on a film. They'd started six years earlier. And he's like, well, the last time we shot it, it was, you know, it was the dead of summer and now it's winter. But, uh,
Speaker: We're going to have to make it work. So it's like they're reshooting in the same place, but there's snow banks four feet high, and the previous footage is like, there's no snow at all. Well, it's a great callback to While We're Young, isn't it? Where he's filming.
Speaker: but He's got like a Mugugoti, and then he's filming 10 years later. Yeah, yeah, exactly. the yeah you know The movie, the reason I wanted to bring it wasn't so much because of the content, so to speak, although I do strongly recommend folks see it, and I actually do just want to hear Sam's impression in a second.
Speaker: But I brought it up because there are these little hints of sort of like where American life is going, threaded through the movie, that the characters are living. like There's a horrifying part early on where he Mark basically says, well,
Speaker: you know In my early 20s, it was kind of just all about drinking. you know There's no manufacturing. There's no jobs really around here anymore. It was just kind of like, let's drink and make movies. you know and it's like You could describe that as you know living living in America in 2026, really, if you just turn like movies into YouTube videos or posting short-form content or something like this.
Speaker: what's the Twitter meme that's been going around? It's like, oh, I can't get a job anyway, so I might as well follow my dreams. yeah Yeah, and that's that's actually what's so amazing about it. is like You could read this movie as, oh, the delusions of the 1990s when independent film was strong and you know ah you actually had a shot.
Speaker: But it it doesn't really seem like Mark ever really has a shot. He's just doing it because there's literally nothing else to do except for be the guy who literally vacuums the carpet in the mausoleum where they keep all the above-ground coffins and urns. you know um He does have that hint of sort of mid-later-century, like...
Speaker: rebellion you know There's a point where he gets drunk during, I think it's Christmas, if I remember correctly, maybe Thanksgiving, and he starts like yelling at his mom about how he's not going to end up like her, just sitting in the kitchen all day. He's going to make something of himself. Yeah. um But most of the movie is sort of just shot through at this sense that like...
Speaker: there's really nothing to do in America. The only thing to do in America is like try to make a movie. And of course it has to be like a genre movie because that's like the ultimate kind of American film, like ah a horror movie about ah the woods. Oh yeah. So yeah, it truly is an American movie in like 10 different senses. Yeah.
Speaker: I find it incredibly touching. I watched it with my, well, I sort of like half watched it with my girlfriend. and She was like half paying attention while doing work. And I don't I do think it's got a particularly male it's got like a particularly kind of like male nervous and energy to it. It does.
Speaker: i don't think I don't think she appreciated it massively. ah Which i I do understand. um I think if I had to spend more than ah a day with Mark Borchardt, I'd probably like go insane. But having said all of that,
Speaker: I think it was incredibly touching on just like a number of levels. i you know Mark kind of reminds me of many a man I have known.
Speaker: won't name names, but there are there are several men in my life who have elements Mark Beauchamp to them who I worry about. you know so Sit up at night, kind of go, Jesus Christ. um I'm not elevating myself. think we've all been Mark Borchardt at some point.
Speaker: we we I am Mark Borchardt. Yeah, we all have. I think all all straight men have this in us. and i yeah yeah like as a third I think he's 30 in the film, isn't he? so Just about, yeah. yeah he' just I think he turns 30 in the film. As a 30-year-old man, he's been at a loose end this year, shall we say. uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's a bit of a gut punch.
Speaker: I like, also, I think this like kind of could have been me. This could have been my friends. If we had been born, you know, 10, 20 years earlier and maybe slightly less middle-class, slightly less privileged, you know, I think a lot of these characteristics are rewarded. If you're in the right place, the right social class, you have the right connections, you you become a sort of passionate artist, you know, you know,
Speaker: people reward you for these kind of characteristics. Whereas, yeah, if you're sort of born working class in Milwaukee, well, not even Milwaukee, even further out, right? I think Menemone Falls, Wisconsin.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. ah it's It's less rewarded, right? And um it's, yeah, I think for all of Mark's delusion and for all of his sort of exploitation of his family and friends and for all of his...
Speaker: yeah sort of self delusion he's actually like not a bad filmmaker and I'd actually quite like to see Coven not Coven but Coven it looks good I mean like it's fairly artfully shot like again I kind of like when I was watching this was thinking if Mark had been born somewhere else or had been a bit more connected or a little bit less prone to drink he could have become like Charles Pinion who did Twisted Issues right there's the same kind of DIY scrappiness to them Yeah, and like talent.
Speaker: Yeah, and talent. There is a sort of unpolished talent there. And I think, you know, if if Mark had sort of gone to college or had been in a ah university town and, you know, but perhaps had been slightly more middle class, you know, and had been born in California or Florida or something, or New York, yeah, he could have had a career probably. So it's quite heartbreaking in that sense. um Because he's not untalented in a lot ways.
Speaker: No, and he's not like... I think one of the reasons I love this movie, putting aside even our like Gen X slash generational slash end of history lens for a second, is that Mark is a genuinely complicated character in the sense that he You go to his house...
Speaker: and He's got like books on filmmaking that he seems to have actually read. He has like actual thoughts about shot composition. you know He's not just like i don't know one of these like early twenty ten s YouTube movie reviewers who's like, it doesn't make sense to blow up the Death Star with all these people inside or you know whatever. Sorry, was doing my nostalgia critic and in impersonation there. um like he's He's actually kind of like artful in his thinking.
Speaker: He has almost this... what's ah Sam, what are those... um What is it? the The Angry Young Men or whatever those sort of mid-20th century British... John Osborne, Don't Look Back in Anger would be the big one. ah She lagged Delaney as well, Taste of Honey. Well, she's an angry young woman, I suppose, but yeah.
Speaker: But, you know, this sort of like, yeah, this kind of more working class oriented sort of art style that emerges from the outskirts and kind of finds its way towards the center in the earlier part of the 20th century, in the post-war 20th century.
Speaker: But that by the 1990s, that promise, like, kind of exists a little bit. like You can see Kevin Smith as kind of a Mark Borchardt who like went to film school and succeeded, right? Because we watched um some Clerks and some Kevin Smith earlier in the in this series. But in Mark's case, because he's not successful, we're also forced to see all of his limits, right?
Speaker: He never stops drinking. He's a constantly drinking beer, which is a very, Sam, you may not know this, Wisconsin-coded thing. Wisconsin is like always, by all metrics, yes drunkest state in the United States. like Drunk driving arrests, number of bars, like everything you can imagine. It's always Wisconsin.
Speaker: But here's the other thing, pivoting away from Mark. The cast of characters around him are also bizarrely representative of a kind of dying middle America.
Speaker: And I'm specifically thinking of Uncle Bill. Yeah. Who is this like... in some previous life seems to have been some sort of like cultured, perhaps even almost like feat, you know, sort of working class man. Cause there a point where Mark's dad, who's Bill's brother is like, well, he would always, you know, if didn't know spell a word, he would always spell it, you know, just these like very like normal guy ways of evaluating intelligence. And, um, now Bill is like,
Speaker: First of all, but like his speech is like nearly indecipherable half the time. Although now I cannot stop saying, what does he say? It's okay. It's all right. There's something to live for. Jesus told me so, which is a line that Mark yeah makes him repeat like 70 times. Yeah.
Speaker: and he yeah he He, like, inexplicably has, like, quite a lot of money, but lives in a trailer. So, see, I think he has 28,000? it's 200,000. Yeah, 200,000. Which, obviously, 1990 money is what, now? Probably, like, 800,000? 900,000? I mean, a lot of...
Speaker: which obviously say a nineteen ninety money is what now probably like a eight hundred thousand nine hundred thousand i mean it's a lot of Well, and the funny part is I definitely knew some people like this growing up too, where like they lived very, you know they were born in like the nineteen thirty s They lived very like quiet, sort of normal lives with normal jobs.
Speaker: And um they were able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars just because that's how functional the American economy was in the middle 20th century. And by the 90s, we're seeing that precipice fall.
Speaker: And there's a beautiful moment, not to skip too far ahead, because Bill is really like fighting Mark. you know There's a great moment because Mark is a real wheeler-dealer kind of guy. like He's constantly like talking people into things. Yeah. He's like, oh, Bill, you're going to get your money back. like And and pi goes Bill goes, yeah, when? yeah He's just... He's sort of like cynically the only one who sees right through Mark at all times. But then he's also, Bill dies at the very end of the movie and leaves Mark $20,000 to finish his movie. It's $50,000. So heartwarming. It's so... Yeah, that's like $100,000 in 2026 money. That's a deposit on a house.
Speaker: Yeah. like's And Mark uses it to continue making a Northwestern, I believe, his um his feature length. Which is a great name for film. i love that name.
Speaker: Yes. ah And Sam kind of indicated this earlier, but he's he's making a short film that he started six years earlier that he calls Coven, and everyone around him pronounces Coven.
Speaker: But then there's one like very kind of like gay Orson Welles-style actor who apparently lives in the middle of nowhere for some reason, who's like, it's Coven.
Speaker: And then, you know, it they sort of do a sequence where it interviews like all of the different like neighborhood children. he's And they all say Coven. And Mark's like, well, Coven sounds stupid. No, it's Coven, man. It's just like this wonderful moment where you're forced to um to just accept it. Like it's this it's this beautiful thing where like he knows something so well and he's he's talented, but he just does not know.
Speaker: how to pronounce the word coven. He just doesn't, and that is what it is. Yeah, he is that but it's nice. It's the mark of an autodidact, you know? Yes. it is. it's ah It ah reminds me, I was listening to a podcast recently, and the guy who's doing it, I love him, think he's great, but he kept pronouncing finale as finale. And I was like, oh, you know?
Speaker: But in any case, so we should probably just explain very briefly. The movie is just a documentary that follows Mark as he makes coven, in an attempt to make enough money to finish shooting Northwestern, which is the feature film he wants to put out.
Speaker: And it more or less just follows him as he attempts to finance it, edit it, pick up his friends from prison who are constantly getting arrested for various things. You know, there's a just just It's just down home. There's a great scene where him and Uncle Bill are together on Thanksgiving and they get drunk and he gives Uncle Bill a bath.
Speaker: And it's just like, it's just very human and beautiful, but also tinged by the this sort of, i don't know, the emerging like Mammon Reich that is like 1980s, 1990s America that landed us where we are today.
Speaker: there's still that like liquidity floating around, but the dream is obviously receding. And Mark keeps talking about this as his mode to the American dream. And no one today would describe becoming a filmmaker as a way to achieve the American dream.
Speaker: yeah Maybe being like a content creator, but not a filmmaker, you know? Yeah, and I'm just like looking at the Wikipedia for Mike Schack, who is Mike Borchardt's close friend. who yeah is He's dressed in a freaks and geeks style, like green, sort of post-Vietnam style military jacket the entire time. It's like the mid-90s, late 90s, but he's still got like a kind of hair metal, late 1970s, like Led Zepp style visual aesthetic going on. um And he's just like so sweetly earnest and like unassuming.
Speaker: And i just I was just looking at the Wikipedia, and apparently when they released the DVD of American Movie, ah the director of American Movie, Mike Smith, ah somehow, accidentally, or purposely, put Mike Shank's home phone number on the website.
Speaker: And then bunch of people started obsessively like calling him for like years on end. And apparently some of the big main people who called him were Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the famous British filmmakers. LAUGHTER Steve Vai, the like absurd prog rock guitarist, and ah Angus Young from ACDC. Wow. So there you go. um That is amazing. And I, you know, but this is, all i'm so I'm also looked at, I also looked at some of this and he released a lot of like, you know, bedroom ninety s CD music. And one of them is called Dreams I Know-Yesternight.
Speaker: and It's like there's something so crazy about like if you watch this movie and see this guy who's this very sweet kind of bumbling but also maybe the most like practical and sort of like head squarely on his shoulders of anyone in the movie a guy who by the way used to have like a horrific drug and alcohol addiction like several moments in this in this movie are just him regaling the viewer with these like just terrible stories where he could die at any second um you know of his drug use. And he's kind of just going, hey, hey, hey. He has this little sort of like cackling laugh he does as he tells the stories. And then you just imagine he goes home and he records you know dreams of everything I knew yesterday night. puts it out on a CD, presses himself. And it was just like a quiet American sort of artistic beauty to all of these characters that um feels like both a product of and at the same time, a disappearing force in the times they live.
Speaker: And that's, yeah, it's something that I find very like spiritually empowering in in some way. I don't know. it it It feeds me. It spiritually feeds me to watch this movie in a way a few others do. Yeah.
Speaker: And it's like the last kind of period where perhaps it is you know still possible sort of do what Mark wants to do. I think if Mark had been a different person or maybe slightly less attached to his family, like he yeah he probably could have gone and found like a cheap apartment in New York or Chicago and you know worked a bar, liked four shift two free four shifts at a bar and made movies in Brooklyn or whatever or the south side of Chicago. And that that would have been possible for him in the 90s if he'd chosen to do that.
Speaker: So yeah, it's it's a weird film in the sense that a lot of the way he struggles feels more like the way someone would struggle now. Yeah. And a lot of the actual opportunities that were still there for kind of people like him in the nineties, he doesn't seem to take or doesn't seem to know. I guess that's that, it's that old thing. He he doesn't take them because he doesn't know they're there.
Speaker: Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, yeah have a funny I I was, I spent the entire film until he reveals his age, trying to figure out how old he was, because he's this kind of childlike.
Speaker: A lot of the characters in the film are actually quite childlike, but Mark, I thought he was, he looks like a 20 year old, right? Yeah. And then you sort of slowly find out that he's he's got three children. Yes. And this is, I think, actually very important, is that he is experiencing kinds of debt that are kind of new to the moment the movie takes place. So obviously one of them is child support. That's not new. Yes. But he also has a lot of credit card debt.
Speaker: which is you know the classic 1990s trap kind of debt. you know that where Really, like that became something you could do, was like go into thousands of dollars of credit card debt and just be like, oh yeah, it turns out I have to pay this off. like I know, personally, like people of...
Speaker: kind of like my parents slash in-laws generation who had to pay off like tens of thousands in credit card debt just because they genuinely did not seem to understand how credit cards worked in the 1990s because they were such a new technology. Yeah. um And I think there are still people for whom it confuses them, right? If they don't, haven't experienced it before.
Speaker: And so Mark is like, there are scenes of him just going through bills at the table and he'll be like, oh yeah, i got 500 on this for oh visa for this. And, 200 on the telephone and 300 to MasterCard for this and, you know, 3,700 in child support. and It's just like, you realize that this is a man who from like a, from like a legal perspective or like a de sort of a sociological perspective, he is like,
Speaker: an outlaw. like He's a drain on the system. like He needs to be brought to order, like forced to work at McDonald's, and like his wages are supposed to be garnished like until his you know his children are are receiving their aid and Visa has gotten its money back or whatever. But he's just pouring all of that money, which he gets from Again, having a paper route at 30 years old, which is amazing.
Speaker: And being the knight custodian at some kind of graveyard, but it's all above ground, which all the characters are very obsessed with, this idea of like burial above ground rather than beneath. like There's some kind of modernity to this idea to them.
Speaker: And he just takes that money and pours it directly into the movie and buying Miller like High Life. And there are several scenes where Mike Shank wins money on scratch-offs and is hiding that. He's telling the filmmakers, but hiding that information from Mark so that Mark won't try and take his money.
Speaker: Because there's a scene where Mike comes over and he's like smiling big. And Mark's like, what are you so fucking happy about, man? And Mike's like, nothing, nothing. And then it cuts and it's like him in the basement alone with the filmmakers. And he's like, yeah, I went 50 on a scratch-off, but I don't want to let Mark know because he's going to and take my money. Yeah. It's just like, you know, and it's, um it's this celebration. It's a celebration and also this kind of analysis of a um a certain mode of living that feels very contemporary, but also elusive at the same time. You know, it's like on the borderland of the possible at this point.
Speaker: Yes. It does feel like that kind of like he's living with his parents at 30. He's like desperately trying to like bail himself out constantly. Yes, that feels very contemporary.
Speaker: ah Our scratch-offs a thing in the U.K. In the U.S., s okay, there was a a period, I'll just you know'll confess this, i've I've smoked cigarettes in my life, okay?
Speaker: I've used Zins in my life, and while I am currently not doing these things, I spent a lot of time in 7-Elevens and quick checks and things like that, ah buying those things, buying energy drinks, buying hot dogs. And the worst thing, when you walk into like a convenience store in the United States,
Speaker: is if the lottery people are in front of you. Because, you you know, not all the time, but a huge portion of the time, they're there, especially if you're there like in the middle of the day, they are going to be purchasing like 10,000 tickets and you are now going to be waiting five minutes when you should be waiting like 10 seconds.
Speaker: Is that also true in the UK? Is that also like a thing? Yes. Scratch cards, we call them. I, yeah, again, like, yeah, I've never never bought one personally. The first time I ever had ever did one was when I was living in Birmingham and this very like black country guy I knew from the black country was like, I can't know go do the black country accent.
Speaker: hey I was having like drinks of mine, and there's like ah sort of like a hospitality, like a housewarming gift. like Thank you for inviting me because I didn't know... He was like a friend of a friend. He brought me like 10 scratch cars.
Speaker: ah Oh, wait. deta Have I not told you this? That... This is my family. We got, that's what we got for holidays in my family is you would open your, you know, your Christmas stocking would have a series of scratch offs in it. And then you're my dad.
Speaker: We would sit at the table with quarters and we would scratch them off together. It's like, I know this culture very well. yeah I know this culture very, very well. Yeah. I think like growing up in a sort of secularized, puritanical, upper-middle-class family, like a Cromwellian family. is any yeah like ah We've had this conversation. Any form of gambling is verboten.
Speaker: So yeah, no. But that's funny because Mike is not wrong in saying in the movie, like, because the director, I think, kind of asked him or whoever's behind the camera asked him like, well, don't you feel like you're kind of addicted to the to the lotto? And he says like, well, maybe, but like, it's better than when I was like getting blackout drunk and doing acid all the time.
Speaker: it's like, he's not wrong. If has addicted to something, it's probably better that than the stories he's telling about dying in the snow and having to be dragged to the hospital. feel like you would receive more judgment from my family for bringing home a stack of scratch cards than you would like bringing back a packet of acid.
Speaker: well that's I think if if if um Mike were just sort of recreationally occasionally using acid, you know that's it but he was clearly like yeah kit like, you wonder if he was like that before all of the psychedelics because his brain does have a certain kind of like a guy who's been a burning man a few too many times sort of feeling to it.
Speaker: Yes. Yes. I've met this guy. i actually met like an equivalent of Mike in Austin. I stayed an Airbnb. I stayed in like the 1950s trailer in the front yard of a guy's house in Austin.
Speaker: When he came to meet me, he just gave me this like really limp handshake and was like, Hey a man, how you doing? And then like, I was just sort of chatting him. Is that you from England? I was like, yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, do you guys have Burning Man there?
Speaker: was like, no. But obviously not. It's not like rat it's not like a it's like a franchise, you idiot. Do you mean you mean Glastonbury? Like, you know, what are you what are you talking about? Yeah, it's a different type of person who goes to Glastonbury. Glastonbury is like a a lawyer on their day off, you know. It's so different to Burning Man. Oh, I see. I feel like Burning Man, i as as annoying as they are, they are committed.
Speaker: there's i just need to to kind of get back into this male relationship, into the male bonding at the heart of this movie. so There's an amazing sequence where Mike is talking about how they met.
Speaker: And he's like, yeah, you know, I just really liked to drink vodka when I was a kid. And like, you know, Mark came along and he was like, oh, I'd like to drink vodka too. And he's like, so we kind of just like got together. we would drink a bunch of vodka, you know, talk about stuff, play some music, watch some movies. And it's like,
Speaker: it's there's like a purity with which he's talking about. like There's just a matter-of-factness of, factness of like well, yes, I enjoyed drinking vodka. Mark, as a teenager, also enjoyed drinking vodka.
Speaker: And so as a result, we were able to come together over that shared love of vodka, which has made like even more ironic now because, of course, Mike doesn't drink and he's still best friends with Mark. So obviously, their relationship is more than that, but that is still like the way the story is told and probably in ah in a way that is ultimately true.
Speaker: yeah ah hey Who's the third friend? The one with the absolutely awful ponytail with bald spot going down the back the way? Oh, yes. Because there's no like cast list. when they The one they pick up from prison. Yes, I know who, but I can't remember his name. Yeah, he's um he's sort of like the the mom. Mark's mom is consistently like, that guy is bad for my son. like he is the you know As parents like to do, parents like to be like that.
Speaker: bad kid is the reason my kid is bad. And I suspect it's more complicated than that, but he is clearly the most sort of like degenerate of the group, you know, gets arrested in the movie.
Speaker: But also importantly, when it comes time to cut the damn movie is there with Mike and Mark and the mom and others and is literally like cutting the film with scissors, like doing, doing the job. So they do come together. It's kind of beautiful.
Speaker: There's this beautiful coda at the end of the film during the credits where there's a bit of black and white photography of them as maybe like late teens, early twenties. Yeah. yeah Right at the end where you see the three, the three friends, uh, Mark, uh, uh, Mike and whoever the third blonde boy is.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. ah Nondescript blonde boarding man. Um, it's just really touching. I think is, Yeah, like as as someone who tried to make zombie films when I was like 16 with friends, you know, some of them have flourished and some of them, you know, really struggled and, you know, some of them are not here with us anymore. um Yeah.
Speaker: I got his name. It's Ken Keen. Sorry, it's Ken Keen. Yes, yes, because I almost heard it as Ken Keezy for a moment. i I found that quite fun there quite funny. But yeah, no, it's it's it's it's very heartwarming and it has touches of like boyhood to it, I think.
Speaker: Even thinking of Middlemarch, George Eliot's Middlemarch, weirdly, in the sense of it being a book a book about, i obviously a completely different register, but being a piece of text about like failure and ambition and sort of provincial you know life in the provinces and you know stretching for something beyond yourself and sort of failing. right And I think I'll always find any piece of media that is sort of revolves around that to be incredibly touching.
Speaker: As someone who is you know somewhat of a provincial and yeah is always constantly reaching beyond himself. I think what this movie does for me, and I think Middlemarch is a great pick, actually, bizarrely enough, even though on the surface that's sort of an insane thing to say. That's what you guys come to this podcast for, is the American movie Middlemarch crossover. Well, it is. The subtitle of Middlemarch, isn't it? Isn't the subtitle of Middlemarch like Life in the Provinces or something?
Speaker: No, no, and i I'm not mocking. Like, I actually think it is a good comparison. I have no idea if that's the subtitle, but... A a Study of Provincial Life. Which could be the American movie subtitle. Yeah. Like, truly. right It really could be. Middlemarch is set in, like, Nuneaton, which, if for American listeners, really is the middle of nowhere in some ways. So, yeah.
Speaker: Hmm. I was just going to say that I think what does it for me about this movie, like yes to everything you just said, Sam, but I think the great conflict of my life in terms of, I don't know, my kind of self-actualization and my relationship to the world around me really comes down to my fundamental belief at a young age in two things.
Speaker: One, and this is a very like middle this is a very like American middle-class belief of the 20th century, so I recognize that this will sound insane now. Anyone could effectively do anything. I would say I grew up with that belief, like very fundamentally, that with enough will and luck and sort of like...
Speaker: grit and willingness to be evil. If that's what it took, you could basically accomplish anything. yeah And two, that people are fundamentally complicated and surprise you.
Speaker: And I grew up with both of these beliefs in a way that occasionally actually like disadvantaged me. like I have a memory of being in middle school and being with my history teacher and trying to explain something to another kid, like with the teacher.
Speaker: And the teacher kind of said to me something like, you know, not everyone is as good at his social studies or history as you. And I sort of indignantly looked at her and I was like, kind of like was insulted for the kid and was like, no, like this kid, like, no, any, anyone can do this. And, but here's the catch. Here's the catch.
Speaker: I would say that my lived experience has eroded both of those beliefs substantially over the course of the last 20 years. And so the conflict of my life is always those fundamental beliefs that like I want to have and that sort of like make me happy to believe versus the everyday realities where people...
Speaker: fall into kind of stereotypical categories very often in terms of their interests or moods of expression and the very obvious ways in which we are like materially delimited. And so a movie like this does a lot for me because Mark Borchardt like should not exist. Yeah. Mike Shank should not exist if these sort of like easy categories are true and we can reduce people to these kind of caricatures. Like you should not be able to be like a drunk deadbeat dad who's actually quite knowledgeable about film, who uses like big words. Like he might not be able to say them, but because he is an autodidact, he actually knows. Like his vocabulary is substantially larger than even a college student's today, right?
Speaker: Because they're using like grammar language. And so he's this real like testament to the human spirit in like a really beautiful way that sort of breaks out of the various categories you might want to put him into. And Mike is similar in this way. like Mike's guitar like music he does for the soundtrack is actually kind of beautiful and fits the movie very well, even though it's just kind of him noodling around on a guitar.
Speaker: And so that is why a movie like this will always have a special place in my heart. It allows me to believe yeah the sort of potential fiction I need to go on. it's It's in a vein of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, right? By Werner Herzog, actually.
Speaker: I thought a lot of... them Who is Grizzly Man? It's Terence... Timothy Treadwell. Yeah, like, I saw a lot of Timothy Treadwell in and in a Mark, and and and kind of Fitzcarraldo as well. This kind of, you know, reaching beyond oneself, you know, struggling with one's limitations. Yeah.
Speaker: Obviously, in some ways, Timothy and Fitzcarraldo are more ah successful in their way. I mean, obviously, Timothy gets eaten by a bear, which is i and in an interesting definition of success. But in some senses, he he he's better at manifesting or concretizing his dreams. And Fitzcarraldo, for all of the things he fails at, you does drag drag a bloody steamship across a mountain in the jungle, right? So, but, yeah...
Speaker: on a grander scale, they're dealing with the same thematics, right? Of is is kind of the ambition of the sort of petty bourgeois man or the the middling man, you know, to to to to to to become something great. ah And yeah, I mean, I agree with you on, I think I was also sort of raised with both of those beliefs. One that,
Speaker: Everyone's an individual and everyone is sort of nuanced and complicated and can surprise you. And two, you can sort of achieve what you put your mind to. And those are comforting mythologies. And, you know, I think you need them to it's just sort of paraphrase Joan Didion, right? Like ah what she says.
Speaker: Yeah, we kind of need to tell ourselves these myths to live. But yes, I think as yeah the economy gets tighter and things get scarcer and the sort of Tron, the long echo of the Tron glorias, the sort of social democratic compact of Europe and the New Deal or whatever fades into the twilight.
Speaker: you i think yeah you have to sort of confront. I think, yeah, two things. One is that actually people surprise you less than you'd like and But that there is still that potential for people to surprise you, but it's it's rare, I think. It's it's it's fleeting. and then But in the way, that that means you should treasure it more all the more. And then, yeah, secondly, the...
Speaker: there are hard material political economic constraints on, you know, what can be achieved. And yeah, you know, you sort of think about someone like Mark, if he was born, not even elite, but just like, if his dad was like a local community college professor or something, you know, still middle class, not rich by any means, but just had a bit more cultural capital. know, if he'd been born in Ann Arbor or something, or even Greenpoint, then the route might have been just that much more more clear for him.
Speaker: Not without struggle, right? But like you look at someone like ah David Foster Wallace, I think, was his dad, his parents were professors? I mean, i don't remember. Yeah, but I do remember that, I mean, I've never finished Infinite Jest, so you know you can take away my sort of like toxic male white card or whatever, but I have read substantial portions of it.
Speaker: And, um you know, so much of it is set in kind of the world of... um the the The boarding school, right? Yeah. And yeah, I'm just looking. His mother was an English professor at Parkland College, a community college.
Speaker: And ah the dad was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. So yeah, like, yeah you know, community college professor and public like state college professor. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, but like that, if you think about someone David Foster Wallace, who i actually, again, is someone I saw a lot of in Mark in some ways. yeah He struggled, he did drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental health issues. I think a lot yeah would would win literary prizes, national literary prizes, and then four years later to be working at swimming pool or whatever, doing legal labour.
Speaker: So it's not like he didn't struggle, but he just had that like higher baseline and that like level of access that someone like um Mark had. was never going to have. you know Despite them both being kind of troubled human beings. um So yeah, it's it's a tragic film in that sense. I mean, like a lot of people I think at the time sort as exploitative on behalf of ah the director, um Chris Smith. I said Mike Smith earlier, I meant Chris Smith.
Speaker: And I don't know, I think it's like a kind of weird game in a sense that Chris is kind of exploiting Mark, but I feel like Mark is also exploiting everyone else. So it's...
Speaker: Well, ah so there is a view of this movie where it's sort of like a freak show, you know, where it' sort of like, look at these, look at these fucking assholes who live in middle America and think they're worth shit. And I think that that, I mean, I think our discussion so far should indicate that that is, I think a patently ridiculous read of the movie, both because yes, mar is of course Mark is explaining people around him. And because like, it's actually an extremely humanizing film ah in just about every conceivable way. But yeah,
Speaker: I do think there is something interesting about the fact that Chris Smith and Sarah Price were behind the movie. We should be clear. Mark Borchardt and Mike Shank did come out of this, if not with like material success, with probably a greater degree of fame than they otherwise would have had. right so I don't want to say that they got like nothing out of this.
Speaker: um but Yes, and so Mark's always is talking about selling if you can sell 3,000 copies of ko Coven, he'll be in profit. And I think he eventually sells 5,000 with the help of this film. So there you So yeah, it works. and and But I will say that the one thing though is that Chris Smith was actually able to go on to have like a career. right so One thing I think that is worth noting here, if you do want to think of this as exploitation in any way, which I don't really, but there is something interesting to me and very like actually now coded, very sort of like YouTube commentary community coded about Chris Smith coming in making this set of documentaries about these sort of like, you know, provincial freaks for lack of a better way of putting it. And then he's able to kind of worm his way into the, um,
Speaker: The kind of like Netflix documentary industrial process. Like he did the the the documentary about the Fyre Festival that like failed um music festival from several years ago. He took part in and i think directed... He did Tiger King as well. He did that. He did Mr. McMahon, the six-part Netflix series about um Vince McMahon, the now disgraced head of the World Wrestling Federation and then entertainment.
Speaker: And he also, like, he did he did um this recent modeling documentary for HBO, I think, that my wife and I watched. Like, he actually attained the sort of, like, journeyman level of success that one is seeking as, like, a working documentary filmmaker in the kind of 2020s landscape, right? Yeah.
Speaker: in a way that would never actually be the case for Mark and Mike, who would kind of always remain somewhere out there in Wisconsin, kind of just living their lives.
Speaker: And now Mike Shank actually passed away in his 50s, I think, from cancer a couple years ago. Mark is still alive and hanging out. and like I think he goes to conventions and meets fans and stuff. But he's become more, I think, at this point of a, um what's the way to put it? Kind of a...
Speaker: a figure of interest and and kind of fascination, like a lol cow on YouTube, more than an independent worker in his own right, which is not the case for Chris Smith.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think if you look at his, I mean, he's he's done ah a sort of respectable stint as a kind of character actor slash bit part actor and stuff. Yeah. he's I mean, he's continued to work, but it's but it's largely independent films. You know, that's what's interesting is like... Yeah. He kind of remains in the world of a certain kind of like outsider art. And for all I know, maybe he just wants to be there. i don't know. I'm no Marc Borchard expert.
Speaker: um But I think he's a talented guy. i think he's a smarter guy than he probably gets credit for for most people. And... um Yeah, I don't have like an easy answer. i don't think the movie is exploitative in a meaningful sense.
Speaker: like you Well, beyond how all film is... a but Beyond the way in which all documentary is exploitative, I guess. But I do you think there's something interesting about... Something feels very contemporary to me about making a documentary about someone who's trying to be famous and that generating your fame. Yeah.
Speaker: that That is kind of a move that exists very often now where you sort of cover the striver who is interesting and that then allows you to fire your way into the kind of corporate system of filmmaking. But the person you made the movie about like probably doesn't go anywhere because they... And it's it's a more sophisticated way of striving, right? It's striving at one degree of separation, I think, which is...
Speaker: you know yeah, you have you avoid the humiliation of being seen to be a striver in a way. Yeah, and it's the classic, during the gold rush, you don't go to mine for gold, you go to sell shovels, right? Like, it's the recognizing that the the true path to to success is not the glitz and glam of, of you know, being the the the artist. It's actually being the guy behind the scenes.
Speaker: Yeah, it's the editor, not the the reporter, I Precisely. um i do want to say, you know, we're kind of like between seasons at this point. This is kind of Gen X coded. I mean, Mark and Mike are both Gen X guys. So there is a sense in which we are reporting on Gen X through this episode. And, but,
Speaker: I really just wanted to talk about this because I rewatched it and I wanted to encourage our listeners to check it out. I mean, i think it is it's a well-known movie. It's a beloved movie, but I think it's a very generational film. like If you look at the guys who are considered like big fans of it, it's like Patton Oswalt, Edgar Wright. It's guys of a very specific age bracket, like very elder millennials slash Gen X guys. And I want to rescue it from that and say, no, you too, listener, regardless of age,
Speaker: If you have ever felt the kinds of feelings Sam and I discussed earlier, I think it's worth checking out. I can't speak to the the gender divide. I kind of want to show this movie to my students who are girls. So hopefully it will cross over for them, but we will see. i don't know. I wonder if showing it to younger women might be slightly. I think there's maybe like a little bit of like a bad boyfriend resonance coming from Mark. That is fair. That is fair's fair.
Speaker: i I would be i would be ah sympathetic to anyone who'd gone, I kind of like dated a guy like that. And that's why I i find this film annoying. and a bit far Fair enough. like I feel like being an in a romantic relationship with Mark.
Speaker: At this point in time, i don't know what he's like now. would have been difficult. um Yes. Being close to Mark in any way during the making of this movie obviously would have been... like There's a scene where he needs to shoot a bunch of guys in black robes standing in a field, and he's already shot a version of this scene. it's a It's a continuation of a scene from, again, six years earlier when he was previously shooting Coven, or Coven, excuse me.
Speaker: And his extras cancel because he's just like on the phone trying to get guys to come down. Because it doesn't matter, right? They're just wearing like scream robes. So no one knows who they are. And he can't get anyone. So he's like, mom, mom, i need I need you to come stand in a field in a black robe for a couple hours. And she's like, And you know she's just like this like Swedish immigrant woman who's constantly fighting with Mark's dad. like They obviously have a very toxic relationship. And um the mom the the mom's like, oh, I have so much to do today. I got to do the shopping. you know Just like classic like mom stuff. like very like Reminds me of you know my grandmother or my mother.
Speaker: And he eventually convinces her to come stand out in a field instead of doing the like shopping that kind of structures her life. and like He's just constantly like like just destroying the people around him with these needat with this need to make movies, you know?
Speaker: And yet, at the same time, he has this kind of loyal entourage of actors who seem like that there there are these like very mean, yeah probably the the bits that I feel the worst at are the bits where they the Chris takes off his two brothers and his mother for private interviews. And yeah know they're quite frank about Mark. They're kind of like, one of them sort of goes, I think he's like an a he has autism. I kind of thought always like he'd be like a serial serial killer or something. And ah another one of them is like... That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, the ah the other brother's like, you know, I don't really think he's he's up for much more than working in a factory. and I think his mom kind of goes, yeah, I think he'll finish Coven, but I don't think he's going to make anything else.
Speaker: Which is brutal. Well, yeah, they ask her point blank, do you think he will ever like succeed? And she thinks about it for like 15 seconds and goes, no. It's really like, it's rough, man. It's really rough. And yeah, he has this entourage of friends around him. And not just friends, but also these actors who ah yeah I think have become friends, but aren't initially friends, who really believe in him.
Speaker: Yes, who and some of whom do seem to be relatively talented. I mean, you know it's not as if everyone in the movie is you know Philip Seymour Hoffman or something like that. But there there do seem to be...
Speaker: For the level of B movie we're talking about, relatively talented people. like There's that kind of horrific scene where it's one of these actors who's just like a very normal looking guy. like he looks like he could be someone's dad.
Speaker: like if you know If you played on the soccer team as a child, like this guy is your friend's dad, basically. And he has to come back for reshoots a year later for this Coven thing. Yeah. And he's like, i just was praying it wasn't the scene where I had my head get put through the cabinet. And and that is exactly the scene it is. And these like incompetent, you know like these guys, I think it's Ken Keen actually, is like trying to weaken this cabinet so that when Mark slams this guy's head through it,
Speaker: it will you know break so that it doesn't like break his neck, right? so the wood gives way. and they have to shoot this like 10 times because the wood is not weak enough. So the guy's head just keeps getting rammed into this cabinet.
Speaker: And this guy is, on the one hand, it's obviously awful. But on the other hand, like this man must to some degree actually believe in Mark because he is putting up with just unbelievable stuff on this set. you know it's It's strange.
Speaker: Yeah. Yes. yeah And he's very like, sort of takes it into good faith. Yeah. Yeah. Like he's not even that mad about it. Like obviously he doesn't like that he has to do this again, but he's not like, at no point is he mad at Mark for um making him reshoot it.
Speaker: It's just the human reaction of like, I don't want my head to be put through that thing. And they're just these beautiful, there's at moments where they're recording basically like, like screams, like Foley of screams for these, um,
Speaker: for different moments in the film. And different people get up and they do it. And then Mike Shank gets up and gives like the most high-pitched, blood-curdling scream of all. Like just this perfect horror movie scream. Like Hollywood could not do it better.
Speaker: And it's just those moments where you're like... I believe in the beauty of the human spirit. Mike Shank came in here, guy the world would dismiss, and he just screamed like a perfect Hollywood scream queen somehow directly into this microphone a crisp way. It just those moments where you're like, oh man, there's hope for human beings somehow. I don't know how or why, but there is. So let there be hope for you as well, dear listeners. I think, do you have any other thoughts or shall we? know, I go out, go out, go out and, you know, make art, I guess.
Speaker: um i maybe try and do it in a more sustainable way than Mark does. Go and get a job as a bank teller or, I don't know, a manager of restaurant. and and Go and do it on the weekends. Don't and don't burn your life down making it. but Don't destroy everyone around you trying to. yeah um Don't be an egomaniac.
Speaker: Yeah, but having said all of that, um you know I'd like there to be some more independent art. I will echo what Sam said. I think we, in the age of of AI slop, in the age of um you know the crushing social realities that make it impossible to believe in anything, in the age of of the internet, I think in which the reduction of people to caricatures is really easier than ever because we're playing caricatures of ourselves online and only getting snippets of...
Speaker: even those caricatures online, it is very important to allow yourself to be surprised by people. And movies like this are the the sort of well of souls from which we can we can draw um that possibility. So with that, I'll just say that go out, watch it if you haven't.
Speaker: And more is to come. I think we'll be doing the Gen X wrap-up soon, some reports on the paid tiers, all that kind of good stuff. So just ah bear with us. We've been on break for a bit and um we're happy to be back. So...
Speaker: Hopefully hear from you all soon. Follow us, Patreon, patreon.com slash deathphotopod, Spotify, you know where to find us. yeah See you soon, man.
