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1. Walter Benjamin and A.O. Scott
100 Plays1 year ago
What makes movies so special? Can art be “political” without being didactic? Are superhero movies fundamentally fascist?
We discuss Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and A.O. Scott's decision to leave film criticism.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Candy Jail' and Cultural Critics
00:00:06
Speaker
My phone is ringing. Do you want me to get it? It's totally up to you. I am so sorry. I'll be right back. Sure. It's not important. Okay.
00:00:23
Speaker
It was a fellow David Bermanite, Silver Jew, Purple Mountains enthusiast, actual air acolyte, Zach, Zachariah Phillips, who you know. Oh, we should get him on here. Yeah, we should actually. That's a good idea. Anyway, go on. I'm Brendan. And I'm Robert. And this is Candy Jail, a podcast that may one day be about David Berman, but today is about Walter Benjamin and AO
Walter Benjamin's Impact on Art and Culture
00:00:49
Speaker
Scott.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, today we're going to discuss a very famous essay by a very famous, at least in some circles, German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the essay that we'll be trying to make sense of and
00:01:04
Speaker
perhaps debate, although that might be the wrong word, is the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. And it is arguably his most famous essay. This was written in the 1930s, and he had a lot to say about
00:01:20
Speaker
cinema in general. He had recently been exposed to the works of Karl Marx and even met some quote-unquote communist revolutionaries, one of which he fell in love with. We won't necessarily get into that. And then we heard an announcement by the decades-long primary film critic at the New York Times, A.O. Scott, announcing that he was leaving his post. He's putting up his
00:01:50
Speaker
hat, hanging up his hat, and essentially just admitting, I guess, or lamenting what he sees as just the ultimate decline of American cinema. And we thought that there might be some nice correspondences to what Benjamin was speaking to and writing about in the 1920s and what A.O. Scott is lamenting in 2023.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I should point out, you brought the Benjamin to me, and you're familiar with him. You've read a lot of Benjamin. You've studied him in a lot of
Critiquing Benjamin's Marxist Analysis of Art
00:02:25
Speaker
depth. You're wrestling, I think, with the arcades project, which is sort of his unfinished masterwork. And I came to it fresh.
00:02:33
Speaker
without knowing exactly what to expect. And and this is kind of a it's kind of a sprawling essay. It's a little bit of a mess, but there is some stuff that I just can't like I don't. There's a lot of stuff that Benjamin says that I that I agree with that I think is useful, that I think is worth talking about, that I think is insightful. But also, I'm just going to read you the margin notes, some of the margin notes that I wrote. Oh, tour theory and film. OK, fair enough. No.
00:03:03
Speaker
No, this is so wrong. Question mark. This is nonsense. Come on. So there's some stuff that I want to get the negative out of the way, first of all. Totally. And yeah, just to chime in very briefly as well, let's do that. And certainly not as a debate. I'm curious to hear what
00:03:26
Speaker
what bones you have to pick with him and honestly just to hear what you have to say from a pair of fresh eyes and a fresh brain because as Brendan brought up and this is certainly not to claim authority or more claim that I'm some sort of you know tenured professor of Benjamin studies although there's plenty of those folks around but I've I have been very intensely engaged with him and sadomasochistically read
00:03:53
Speaker
his entire collected writings, or I guess they call them selected writings, so some Harvard professors, or at the very least, Harvard's publishing company.
00:04:04
Speaker
Put those out over the course of a handful of years They total four volumes volume two is split up into two separate ones because they're so big so, you know, I bring this up not to brag although maybe I am trying to brag who knows but just to say that I've been really Sucking down a lot of this guy and sort of I'm so in it. You know what I mean that I
00:04:27
Speaker
I'm not sure I can gain critical distance in the way that you can. And so this will be really helpful to hear from you because yeah, I've been steeped in it. So I want to, I want to get shaken up in a good way. Well, there's, there's two ways to approach the Benjamin, I think, because he was a Marxist and this essay is essentially a Marxian analysis of modern technology and art.
Art's Origins: Ritual and Purpose?
00:04:55
Speaker
So you can approach it as a political piece or you can also approach it as a piece about art. And there's very little that he says politically that I disagree with. There's a lot that he says about art that I disagree with because I feel like he's misinterpreting something at a very fundamental level.
00:05:12
Speaker
He starts off by talking a little bit about the history of technology and art and the way that the printing press allowed the dissemination of the written word and then lithography allowed the dissemination of visual artwork and then of course photography and film rapidly accelerated that process to a point where there's now nothing that really can't be reproduced and disseminated around the world.
00:05:37
Speaker
And I don't have any problem with any of that. But early on in the essay, he says, as we know, the earliest artworks originated in the service of rituals, first magical, then religious. Well, that's not true. I mean, I suppose it's possible in some cases. But I mean, just last year, earlier this year, there was a team of researchers who were studying some of the
00:06:05
Speaker
symbol-like recurring motifs that are on the walls of some of the European caves whose artwork goes back tens of thousands of years. And what they figured out was that the symbols were being used to leave messages for hunters who might be following game across
00:06:27
Speaker
seasons and across unfamiliar landscapes. So it was a proto-written language. There was nothing symbolic about it whatsoever. It was for the purposes of relaying information to people. But beyond that, there's a basic impulse. We're storytellers, and we're always trying to make sense out of the world, and we use creative endeavors to do that.
00:06:54
Speaker
I think those two things, the desire to communicate, to leave information for people, and the desire to make sense out of the world through creativity, that's where art comes from. His assertion that it's fundamentally connected to ritual, I think, is
00:07:11
Speaker
deeply misguided. So let me like, I have like 1000 different associations. So I'm gonna try to not get too far afield from the text itself, but provide maybe a little bit of biographical background on Benjamin and specifically his relationship to Marxism and more specifically his writings and what he exposed himself to. So I think it'll help answer at least a little bit of your confusion, Brendan.
00:07:40
Speaker
From what I've read, he actually didn't read Marx extensively. His major entry point into Marx's work was somebody else interpreting Marx, who produced two pretty famous, among some circles, primers on Marxian economics and what some might call Marxian philosophy.
00:08:04
Speaker
And that was Karl Korsch. And he met Karl Korsch through Bertolt Brecht, who was a very close friend of Benjamin's, and actually let him stay essentially for free. I think it was in Denmark while he was exiled, since, as we know, or if folks don't know, Benjamin was a German, but he was also a Jew.
Benjamin's Unorthodox Marxist Views
00:08:27
Speaker
He was raised secular, like many of his contemporaries that are also equally famous, Theodora Dorno being one of them.
00:08:34
Speaker
Eric Fromm, people that you would lump into the group called the Frankfurt School, many of whom were actually successful in escaping to the United States, living in Manhattan for a time, and then in Los Angeles. But anyway, I bring this up to say, one, he didn't just sit down and read Capital Volume 1 through 3 in a systematic way. And
00:09:03
Speaker
speaking to what you brought up with your sort of befuddlement with this essay, at least in terms of like, I don't, you know, I sort of heard you saying that you can't really find a logical train of thought and that it's messy. And I would completely agree with you. It is fucking messy and it's confusing. And I think that in part speaks to, if we're looking at this from how did Benjamin try to incorporate Marx into his analysis of art,
00:09:31
Speaker
His own exposure to Marx is pretty unique and one would even say idiosyncratic and that further those that encountered him and engaged him in discussions of Marx that were more steeped in it and actually had done that sort of
00:09:46
Speaker
rigorous, systematic, let's go through as much of Marx's corpus as we can in a logical way, came away from those discussions saying this Benjamin guy at the very best, he is idiosyncratic, but he's far from orthodox in his understanding of Marx and probably its application into economics and certainly art theory, if that's what we're going to call it. So yeah, he is strange. He's a strange bird in that regard.
00:10:16
Speaker
I came of age as a reader and a writer sort of worshipping Nabokov. And Nabokov was famously opposed to any kind of union of art and politics. And I absorbed that idea pretty deeply when I was young.
00:10:34
Speaker
When I got older and a little bit smarter, I realized the degree to which he was misguided and that he tended to oversimplify. His family fled the Russian Revolution and lost everything they had, and then his father was assassinated as part of a political dispute. So he had a lot of really negative associations with
00:10:59
Speaker
politics in general, but also Marxist politics specifically. And it was only a lot later that I understood the degree to which there is a lot of politics in his work that he just doesn't like to use that term to describe.
00:11:16
Speaker
degree to which art is political, because everything is political on some level. But I still have a knee-jerk reaction. My radar pings a little bit when I hear someone writing about art and politics together, because my first question is always whether they're misunderstanding whatever the fuck the purpose of art is.
Art and Politics: Should Art Convey Political Messages?
00:11:43
Speaker
there are certain things that it isn't, like art isn't meant to be didactic and it isn't meant simply to convey political messages. And whenever I see anybody discussing it as though it is, I react with a certain degree of skepticism. I got you. Well, I'm glad that you
00:12:03
Speaker
sort of went where you went because I sort of missed in wanting to provide a little bit of that biographical background to explain at least in part some of the idiosyncratic nature of the writing and even the Marxian analysis itself. I wanted to add because you brought up ritual as your first sort of like red flag or critique and you're just like what the heck
00:12:27
Speaker
is he getting at here? And I think that, again, maybe I am reading too much into it, and I'm also certainly no expert on Marxian economics, but one word that comes up often in Marx's writings, I think definitely in Capital One, is the fetish character of commodities, or commodity fetishism.
00:12:53
Speaker
And I think what Marx was getting at was, in his mind, in an industrial capitalist society like the Germany he was living in or other parts of Europe at that time, there was a tendency already well underway
00:13:10
Speaker
where people would buy things that were produced by human beings but because you only go to the store and you lose the whole story of who was in the factory and under what conditions were they working and what were the what was the nature of the process by which this product was put together put in a car or a truck or a ship to get to a merchant who could then sell it to a consumer.
00:13:37
Speaker
You're basically saying we buy these products and we might actually worship them or see it sort of like they magically are just in the store. And because we're divorced from the whole story about how that product got to us, we have perhaps a tendency to fetishize not only the object itself, like worshipping it, but think that maybe it just fell out of the sky. And so I think what Benjamin's getting at without spelling it out
00:14:06
Speaker
And I could be reading too much into this, but I am keeping in mind that it is a Marxian analysis in the end, that he's attaching ritual to art objects the same way Marx attaches the fetish character to commodities and saying, this is a problem.
00:14:28
Speaker
That's interesting and I think that there are times in the essay when it seems to me like maybe Benjamin is confusing the physical object that is a work of art. For instance, a painting with a broader concept of why that thing exists or what the painter got out of painting it and what we get out of seeing it.
Aura and Authenticity in Art
00:14:52
Speaker
He's very concerned with what he calls the aura of an object, which is the physical object, but then everything associated with it. And he talks about how when photography was invented and you could photograph paintings, you were destroying the authenticity
00:15:11
Speaker
of the painting because you were destroying its aura, you were basically taking it out of its context. And that is true to a certain extent, to a limited extent, for the actual physical painting that is hanging on the wall of a church or a museum or a house or whatever.
00:15:28
Speaker
But I don't know to what extent you can apply that same concept to other forms of artwork. For instance, what is the aura of a novel? Or what is the aura of a poem that is passed down through oral tradition? And for that matter, what is the aura of
00:15:52
Speaker
a movie that was made by hundreds if not thousands of different people doing different jobs, many of whom never had any contact with one another. Under the sort of grand artistic vision of one or two or three or four people kind of at the top of that pyramid. It's a different kind of thing.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, and he definitely does the reader no favors regarding clarity over these terms, or even we could say, and I say this with respect, but nonetheless, trying to give this a deep read and be honest about it, a certain maybe inconsistency with the application of these terms.
00:16:32
Speaker
you know, in the beginning he establishes or, you know, uses the word aura, then we get authenticity and originality sort of bound up in this, you know, holy trinity. And then what else does he give us? What's the other word that I'm—originality is the other one. And so these are all sort of like
00:16:54
Speaker
clearly constellating with one another, bound up in each other. But at the beginning of the essay, I'm like, okay, is Aura something we're trying to get rid of?
00:17:07
Speaker
At other parts of the essay, I'm like, wait, is aura not something we're trying to get rid of, but just something we're acknowledging exists in original works of art that get sort of dissolved in art that is produced through technology that by its nature is geared towards mass reproduction. And so there's that issue of just like,
00:17:27
Speaker
If we actually did a systematic analysis of every instance these words pop up and when Benjamin is using them, I think we actually would find some confusion. Maybe not from him, but at least like, wait a second, there's at the very least intense nuance or paradox present in how he's using these words. And it's unclear where he lands. It doesn't seem to me like it's a black and white aura is good or aura is bad. But then
00:17:56
Speaker
He throws in right nature. He says aura is the shade that when a tree is hit by the sun at a certain hour in the day, casts on the ground and a sunset illuminated behind a mountain range is the aura of those mountains. And I'm going, I don't think he's helped me at all here. In some ways he's made this worse, but it might be on me. I'm willing to accept that it's my confusion, not his.
00:18:22
Speaker
Right. And then so by extension, like if I go to a museum and I stand in front of a painting that was originally commissioned to be hung in a church in Italy.
00:18:34
Speaker
But now it's hanging in a museum in the United States in the 21st century and I sit there and I like experience the painting and I'm overwhelmed by the beauty or the sense of history or whatever. Is that then part of the painting's aura? Like what if I'm looking at a reproduction of a painting on my phone?
00:18:54
Speaker
and having a positive reaction to it like i did the other day like is that part of the ara cuz this is at that point we were into so many different levels of reproduction that that my. Relationship to the original painting is essentially non existent i've never seen a thing i've only seen reproductions of it on electronic devices.
00:19:11
Speaker
So he does say, he does write at a certain point in the essay when he starts transitioning from his reflections on different art forms, theater, like a theatrical production, a live performance, sculpture, painting, et cetera. And I think theater is the key example in where we're headed.
00:19:34
Speaker
He says you know when you're if you go to a theater and you watch a performance of hamlet that the actor on stage actually does have an aura and the aura is tied to his person and you can only encounter that aura if you are physically in an audience watching a physical performance on a stage.
00:19:53
Speaker
He then uses that to transition into a film actor saying something very different is happening. And actually, the film actor is performing not in front of people anymore, but in front of an apparatus, which is, I guess, halfway true. He's performing in front of a director at the very least with a crew, as you pointed out, since there's always at least, I think,
00:20:15
Speaker
and a normal big budget movie dozens of people on set at any given time but i think he's getting out something key about aura. Is attached to an original object be that van gogh starry night or an actual human being.
Film's Editing Power vs. Ancient Art's Perfection
00:20:31
Speaker
And when a human being performs Hamlet, but instead of it being on a stage, it's in front of a camera, the aura, according to Benjamin, is dissolved. But then, and this is where it gets interesting, I don't think he is making that claim as a negative thing or something to grieve. He seems to actually be positioning it, if not neutrally, I might even say positively.
00:20:56
Speaker
I agree with you that it's sometimes hard to tell whether he's being neutral or negative or positive towards something and he makes observations that kind of
00:21:08
Speaker
because I disagree with them so strongly, they make me question some of the other things that I don't entirely understand. But like at one point he says, and he- And actually before you go, let's do this man. Like I wanna take us through your top five or whatever they were that you're just like, this is bullshit or this I vehemently disagree with. I wanna know what those are. Okay, well number one was the thing about ritual. Yeah.
00:21:36
Speaker
I guess the second one would be film is the first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility. The film is therefore the artwork most capable of improvement.
00:21:52
Speaker
I was so confused by that. It's like, I mean, a film is highly editable, and now it's more editable than it ever was because you just go into Avid or Final Cut Pro and change your movie as many times as you want to. But he seems to be at some points laboring under the illusion that there's something fundamentally different about the way that film is produced.
00:22:17
Speaker
He talks about other works of art being created at a single stroke, and there is no art that's created at a single stroke. You might have a burst of inspiration, or you might get lucky and point your camera at exactly the right thing in exactly the right way and not have to do anything to the photograph afterwards, but making art of any kind is usually a long and laborious process.
00:22:41
Speaker
even art that we think of as being the product of a single talent or a single genius often isn't. I mean, it sort of is, but Nabokov showed everything he ever wrote to his wife and got her feedback.
00:22:57
Speaker
Stephen King does that. Writers have editors. Writers share things with people and get feedback. I have a friend who's a painter and he will occasionally send me unfinished paintings just to get my input. So most art involves a degree of collaboration and all of it is highly editable and everything goes through a million revisions before it reaches the point when it's presented to its audience.
00:23:23
Speaker
So the idea that film is the artwork most capable of improvement, I just think is nonsense. Like he's just missing something fundamental there. So let me jump in and just say like, I think you bring up really good points. The only art form that I've ever actually like witnessed as like single stroke artwork is something like Zen calligraphy, you know, where it's actually folded into the process that if you can
00:23:52
Speaker
make this beautiful piece of calligraphy literally in a single stroke, it is the mark of mastery. But with that being said, here's what I came up with for
00:24:04
Speaker
that portion of the essay. And I also want to start by saying he makes a curious statement at the beginning of it, I don't know if you caught it, where he says that socialism as a political project came on the scene was born at the same moment that film was born.
00:24:23
Speaker
And I'd have to look that up and see who he's thinking of and what, in fact, what heralds the quote unquote beginnings or the birth of socialism as a political project. But there's clearly something going on there where you brought up at the beginning of this that, you know, not all art
00:24:44
Speaker
needs to be political, certainly not didactic, but art can be political and powerful. But he's clearly tying these two things together as at least being co-emergent. Here comes socialism, here comes cinema. So here's what I wrote, and it sort of, I think, speaks to your
00:25:08
Speaker
Suspicions that benjamin might be missing the mark here so i wrote that in acknowledging the infinite improve ability and malleability of reproducible work. It's but a small step to acknowledging the infinite malleability and improve ability of social arrangements.
00:25:27
Speaker
So if works of art are not eternal, which he claims the Greeks were pretty obsessed with, trying to create artworks that illustrated or promoted a sense of eternality or perfection. So if works of art are not eternal, like for instance Greek sculpture, neither are the social arrangements we find ourselves currently living in.
00:25:52
Speaker
our society is a living organism subject to change rather than a sculpture which you could argue is fossilized and finished if the end goal is to promote a kind of eternal quality and then i think he uses that to say if that's. The message is if that's the message or the value that is.
00:26:13
Speaker
Pregnant and every work of great ancient greek sculpture how does that then reflect back on the society itself and i think he's making the claim that the ancient greeks thought their society was had reached a stage of. Being finished and being totally perfected.
00:26:34
Speaker
And he's kind of saying, well, the Greeks have got it wrong, and they just had a social arrangement that emerged in a particular time and place, and it was subject to change. And that film, being a contemporary phenomenon of an industrial, what he's calling industrial capitalist society, or at least I am, but I know he's reading it through Marx,
00:26:59
Speaker
that they had the sculpture, we have the film. But the film might actually be more in keeping with reality if we are defining reality as something that is in a constant state of change, which would then mean our societies are open to change, hopefully change for the better. And then he ties that into the malleability of film in that you can edit, re-edit, cut, re-cut, re-shoot, shoot 3,000 yards, as he mentions with Chaplin's film,
00:27:28
Speaker
to only use a small amount of it. But yeah, I mean, you might be right that it's a bit of a stretch that works are completed in a single stroke. But I think he is focused more intently on this idea of on the one hand, you have works of art that claim to be finished and perfect. And I think he is saying, at least implicitly, this is problematic in how that then reflects on
00:27:53
Speaker
people trying to make sense of their societies. And I think he's posing the argument as socialism is that
00:28:00
Speaker
And there could be a danger in historical determinism. You don't want to say, we're on this steady line march of progress, which he actually himself takes issue with as very famously does the Frankfurt School. They really hate this word progress and think that it's grossly misused in both history and philosophy. But with that being said. That's interesting because I also hate that word.
00:28:24
Speaker
but it's something that I've only really come to understand pretty recently and it's so easy in conversations of this kind to slip into that unconscious progress mindset where you because it's just it makes it makes a lot of sense to us on some level.
00:28:42
Speaker
that we as a species are trending in a certain direction or we as a culture trending in a certain direction and that we're moving towards some sort of improvement. Benjamin would be right to distrust that word. If you're taking issue with him maybe saying that film is the most improvable and therefore superior to sculpture, he might inadvertently be falling into a kind of march of progress historical determinism that he's trying to actually wiggle out of, I think.
00:29:12
Speaker
Well, I think there's just like, okay, so my next marginal note is maybe in your world, buddy. In reference to his line, again, it's italicized because he thinks it's so important. The stage actor identifies himself with a role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His performance is by no means a unified whole, but is assembled from many individual performances.
00:29:43
Speaker
I mean, I understand that this is pre-method acting and pre Stanislavski and all that kind of thing, but really, the film actor doesn't identify with the role. That's just factually incorrect. And so whenever he talks about film, he just gets things wrong. And because he gets these things wrong about just basic elements of film and filmmaking, when he then tries to draw broader conclusions about the nature of
00:30:11
Speaker
modern world through film, I don't trust him, even if I'm sympathetic to his aims. So it's funny because like another biographical aside, Gershom Scholem, who wound up being arguably his best friend who did emigrate to Palestine and tried to urge Benjamin to follow, and Benjamin of course never did, but
00:30:31
Speaker
He recollects that when they met in their youth, he, Benjamin had this tendency and everyone seemed to give him a pass to sort of speak authoritatively and write authoritatively. And people just were so impressed by his intelligence, by his erudition that he just did that. So it's funny you bring this up because it's definitely a personality trait where
00:30:58
Speaker
You know, I mean, I say this with respect to Benjamin, but there could be a kind of arrogance where you read these lines and go, okay, so according to what or to whom do you base this claim? Or you're just saying it because as you know, right in education, I could see this essay, if I wrote that and turn that into a professor coming back going, this is what we refer to as a blanket statement. Here's why blanket statements are problematic, yada, yada. And as much as.
00:31:27
Speaker
I have my own issues with academic standards and often the arbitrary nature of what counts as formal writing. He clearly does have a tendency to just like say something and you kind of picture this booming, deep authoritative voice and we're supposed to just, I guess, take that and agree or just based on his own purported authorities think he must be right.
00:31:56
Speaker
Last one, and then we can move on to other stuff in here.
Benjamin's Influence on Social Sciences
00:32:01
Speaker
And again, I've already mentioned the ritual thing, but early in the essay he says, the elk depicted by Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic and is exhibited to others only coincidentally. What matters is that the spirits see it.
00:32:19
Speaker
there's so much arrogance in that conclusion. I mean, first of all, he's doing what you just mentioned. He's asserting that as fact with a lot of confidence when it's not a fact. But even if it were a fact, he doesn't seem to have put any thought into the kind of work that you would have to do to know that that was true. And it's a simplistic reading of
00:32:45
Speaker
why people make art, and it's a simplistic understanding of what people in the Stone Age might have been like. And it does, I think, betray this unconscious bias towards progress.
00:32:58
Speaker
He himself is in the 20th century, he's writing about people in the Stone Age and his implication is that we've come a long way since then in terms of what we do with art. I think that you've put your finger on some really important pieces and all I can say is, because I had the same response to you, I read it, I think it's a funny paradox where it's like every time I reread this thing,
00:33:23
Speaker
I find fresh insights or at the very least statements that I am just fascinated by. And at the same time, the more I read, the more I must admit it does read quite messily. It doesn't seem to be organized in a coherent way. And so I bring this up just to say, at least in the humanities, I think sociology, I don't know about psychology, history, philosophy of history,
00:33:50
Speaker
philosophy itself, he seems to have impacted, similarly to Marx, nearly all the social sciences, linguistics even. But I'm not sure that he's impacted them because his statements have been proven to be categorically correct. I think it's just like his mind was so fertile
00:34:08
Speaker
And it wound up making such unusual connections that it gave plenty of future folks, right? Tons to work with, even if the statements themselves prove to be false. It's just fertile thinking that is rich and ready to be mined. And I think it has been. And so I'm with you. Like, I think it's messy. I think it's at times, even some of the statements just aren't right.
00:34:35
Speaker
But I wonder if that can be made sense of, or that can be sort of put alongside the recognition that maybe the most important thing is just that he started asking these kinds of questions or making these kinds of connections. And that cleared the way for a lot of future thinkers. Yeah, I think that's fair. But he would have had a podcast if he were alive today. He did actually. He did radio broadcasts.
00:35:02
Speaker
Oh, all right, there you go.
Art, Fascism, and Politics in Modern Media
00:35:04
Speaker
Do any of those survive? They did not survive in audio form, but they survived in transcript form. So he either wrote long transcripts himself, I can't remember, but yes, and actually a book has been published called Radio Free Benjamin that collects that whatever they could find of his radio work. Interesting. Yeah.
00:35:25
Speaker
So moving away from well I guess we can I think we can pivot away from from what I take objection to because when he isn't confusing himself about how film is made or what the purpose of art is he has some insightful things to say about
00:35:43
Speaker
the relationship between art and fascism and also between producers of art and their audience. He says later in the essay that the masses have a right to changed property relations. Fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. I think that's extremely well put. I wonder what he would have thought of the current obsession with superhero movies.
00:36:11
Speaker
And I've always objected to those movies very strongly, not because I'm too highbrow to enjoy special effects and explosions or anything like that, but because at the heart of most superhero mythologies is the idea that someone stronger than us is going to protect us.
00:36:34
Speaker
And that in and of itself is a, I mean, it's fine to tell stories about, but it's a dangerous thing to believe and it's a dangerous kind of wish to have. And as a premise for like an artistic investigation of the world, it's pretty flimsy. And what ends up happening, you know, in, I mean, who are the Avengers battling in the Avengers movies? They're battling another imaginary villain.
00:37:04
Speaker
Right. They're not battling the things that are actually going wrong in our world. And so not only are the superhero movies based on the idea that it's not our responsibility to solve our problems, but they're not even honest about what the problems to be solved are. And in some cases, like, you know, Batman is the really obvious example. Batman is a billionaire.
00:37:34
Speaker
who is going to save the world by fighting petty crime with his billions of dollars. That is a fundamentally fascist vision. And so the idea that, to quote Benjamin again, fascism seeks to give people expression in keeping property relations unchanged. That is a description of the Batman movies.
00:38:03
Speaker
And I think more generally, it's a description of most superhero movies in general. I would give Black Panther a pass, for instance, but generally speaking, I think that's true. I don't know how to finish that thought exactly.
00:38:25
Speaker
Well, it gets really, really messy. I mean, the final line, let's see if I can get it right. He says fascism aestheticizes politics, communism politicizes art. And it's a wonderfully elegant, snappy final line that I think both of us responded positively to. Absolutely.
00:38:47
Speaker
With the caveats that this could be misread as a reductive black and white sort of oversimplified description of good versus bad art. But to loop back into what you were speaking to, it's so difficult, man. Cause like I think of, um,
00:39:07
Speaker
Charlie Chaplin, who's mentioned in his essay, in Benjamin's essay. And he'd written about him in previous essays, some that are quite short, but it's obvious he really, really liked him and was a big fan. And Chaplin himself, self-identified as a socialist, actually to such degree that the United States deported him from the country.
00:39:30
Speaker
only to bring him back in the 70s to give him a lifetime achievement Oscar, which is kind of interesting to watch. But I bring this up to say like, he's friends with Brecht. Brecht is a playwright. Some would level the charge against Brecht that he was definitely didactic in his approach to art production. And he had this whole thing about in Brecht's like theory of epic theater where he's like, listen, I am committed wholeheartedly
00:39:58
Speaker
to making the audience, to transforming the audience from passive spectators. So I'm thinking like those of us watching Mickey Mouse for entertainment into active participants. He seemed very sort of
00:40:15
Speaker
What's the word? Ideologically committed as an artist, political artist to produce work that engendered active participation, whatever that means. And so I bring all this up man, just to say like, here's where this gets tricky. Even with that final line that both of us thought was elegant. Again, I'll repeat it because I like it and I want to see if I can get it right again. So fascism, aestheticizes politics, communism politicizes art.
00:40:43
Speaker
Well, if you take Chaplin as the example, who Benjamin obviously holds in high esteem and is an example of the kind of art that he would see as right or correct or good, I've heard arguments from the left.
00:41:01
Speaker
Let's say the chaplain's highly problematic because let's say you're a blue collar worker, you're a wage slave, so to speak. You're being exploited. You're exhausted from day after day of barely making it. And you just want to relax at the end of the day, have a beer and watch a movie.
00:41:21
Speaker
and you go and you watch chaplain and you laugh and maybe you cry and there's a real catharsis that comes from connecting with the tramp which is a beautiful character i love that character some on the left of actually level critiques of chaplain saying. You know he's wrong because it's an opiate of the masses they get their sort of ventilation by going to the movies.
00:41:43
Speaker
And then they go to bed and do it all over again. And in that regard, they actually would label it anti-revolutionary, which I find astounding. I don't agree with that at all. But I think it's problematic this is, you know? Yeah, the left will always come for itself. Like it will always, you know, cannibalize itself and fall out in, you know, internecine disputes. True.
00:42:09
Speaker
there are probably reasons to come for Chaplin for totally non-political reasons, but only the left would come for a man who made a film parodying Hitler while Hitler was still alive, like Jesus Christ, like, you know. Yeah, totally. And I watched that recently, by the way, and it's pretty damn impressive. It's a cool movie.
00:42:32
Speaker
Right. But yeah, I just bring this up to say, like, if he makes this grand statement that fascism aestheticizes politics and communism politicizes art, and then he goes, see, look at Chaplin, I could easily see Brecht turning to Benjamin and snortling in a smug way and saying, you fucking fool. They're just put, this movie's putting them to sleep. I'm trying to wake them up. And then I'm going, oh my gosh, this
00:43:00
Speaker
this is gonna be trouble, you know? Yeah, exactly. The Judean people's front versus the people's front of Judea all over again. Yeah, exactly. The other thing that Benjamin says in here that I thought was insightful, especially given where we are in the world right now and the A.O.
A.O. Scott on Fandom and Authoritarianism
00:43:22
Speaker
Scott thing that we're gonna talk about,
00:43:24
Speaker
He says that the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. And he wasn't anticipating anything like social media, but he was inspired by the rise of things like letters to the editor columns and the increased ability of the average person to get their voice into print in some context.
00:43:48
Speaker
Well, okay, so let me I read that Benjamin quote Let me read then a quote from an interview that AO Scott gave to the New York Times about his decision to leave film criticism. Yeah, perfect He says I'm not a fan of modern fandom this isn't only because I've been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and Top Gun and everything everywhere all at once and
00:44:15
Speaker
It's more that the behavior of the social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mindset that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity, and mob behavior. And its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life. What do you think about that? I mean,
00:44:45
Speaker
I think I agree with pretty much everything he said, although, you know, there's a few things. One is it's like he's just, it's like because he's still, and I say this with respect. I have no disrespect towards AO Scott. I actually have read, I think a lot of his reviews, I couldn't quote them, but I don't have any bones to pick with the guy. But I think it's interesting and granted, we all have to make a living. And there's nothing I think intrinsically wrong with being a journalist or a film critic.
00:45:14
Speaker
But it's like he's leveling a fairly radical critique not just that movies but even that i think american society in general but he's stopping just short of like naming the issues and so i don't think he's done.
00:45:29
Speaker
I think he's clearly done his homework and thought a lot. And so I find it just curious that he's willing to say sort of lament or grieve what he's seeing as the decline of cinema as we know it, but he's not willing to say something like,
00:45:45
Speaker
This is a result of corporate entities that have the bottom line as their obsession and as a result are producing garbage like these Marvel franchises. But then you think of old Hollywood and the cliche of just like the director always being at odds with the production company that wants to ruin his artwork. And so this is nothing new, but at the same time,
00:46:13
Speaker
Maybe it is something new in that there was still room for other people to step up to the plate and I think that's what a Scott was getting at is that yeah of course Hollywood is an industry and it's there to make money and so you're gonna have a lot of garbage.
00:46:30
Speaker
in general, but the garbage to artistic achievement ratio is kind of what I'm hearing and what he's saying there. Maybe 20, 30, 40 years ago was much different than it is today, where maybe the good stuff, there was enough of it to offset the garbage. And now he's saying, there's so much garbage, I'm not even sure I can see any good stuff.
00:46:56
Speaker
Is that how you're reading this? Not exactly. There is a podcast that I listened to with AO Scott where I think he was pretty clear that he thinks there are still a lot of good movies out there. Right. I think there are two things that he's interested in and
00:47:14
Speaker
more than a dearth of good movies. It's the kind of movies that are dominating the culture right now and the relationship that fans of those movies have to the people who make them and then to the people who criticize them. So when I was in high school, my friend gave me this volume of Oscar Wilde and this beautiful old volume that was like 75 years old.
00:47:44
Speaker
the kind of book where the first thing you do is you open it up and you smell the pages right i'm glad i'm not alone and i read that thing from cover to cover i became obsessed with oscar wild for a while in a rather obnoxious way i remember once observing to my grandmother who was a very sweet person
00:48:05
Speaker
In the parking lot of a strip mall Irish pub where we were going for some kind of
Criticism as Art: Oscar Wilde vs. Modern Fan Culture
00:48:10
Speaker
family celebration, I remember telling her that in a sense, a personality was just a collection of faults because I thought it was the kind of pithy incisive thing that Oscar Wilde would have said.
00:48:23
Speaker
But Wilde, who I'm not nearly as much of an admirer of now as I was back then, but he has an essay called The Critic as Artist in which he discusses the idea that the critic who is analyzing art is himself engaging in an artistic endeavor. And so that was kind of like, that was my first exposure to the idea of criticism as
00:48:47
Speaker
a part of a conversation that's ongoing between people who create things and people who enjoy or don't enjoy what they create. And that's arguably an unnecessarily elevated view of criticism, but it's sort of the diametric opposite of the modern culture that we seem to be living in where
00:49:08
Speaker
I mean, being the film critic at the New York Times is basically as ivory tower as it gets in some sense, right? Like you are high, high above in your office in one of the most esteemed publications in the world.
00:49:26
Speaker
You're established. You're established and you're insulated to a certain extent. And in fact, one of the criticisms that's often leveled against publications like the New York Times is that they're too isolated, they're too aloof, they're on an island.
00:49:43
Speaker
If even AO Scott can feel the sting of angry fans and even angry actors, I mean, he cites the fact that Sam Jackson came for him on Twitter because he gave a mediocre review to an Avengers movie.
00:49:59
Speaker
I remember a couple years ago, there was an incident where a music critic, I think wrote a complimentary review of a Lizzo record, but also singled out some criticisms that they had of that record. And then Lizzo got on Twitter and came for that critic. And I don't even want to get into like, I mean, anybody can say whatever they want to whomever they want, however they want to say it.
00:50:22
Speaker
I don't want to get into the propriety or appropriateness of artists clapping back at critics. Nobody should be immune from criticism. But I guess what I'm interested in is, is there a connection? And if so, what is the connection between
00:50:39
Speaker
the current culture of fans coming for critics who try to think and reflectively criticize works that they're a fan of and the nature of those works themselves.
00:50:56
Speaker
Yeah, you bring up, I mean, there's so much that came up for me as you spoke to this, and I can't help but think about, like, you know, on a broader level, just when we reflect on democracy, which I think is one of those words that's bandied about, similar to fascism, actually, where
00:51:16
Speaker
We use it a lot, but I'm not sure we're all in agreement as to what it means. Like I had, um, I think Ian Kershaw, the historian in one of his books wrote, it might've been a different writer, but I'm connecting this to Kershaw. He said something like,
00:51:31
Speaker
Fascism is one of those words that it's like trying to nail jelly to a wall. You know, it's just really hard to pin down. And so keeping in mind, or at least acknowledging like, I know democracy is a contested, and what would you call it? Loosely used word, arguably to the point at present that it's lost a lot of its meaning.
00:51:56
Speaker
But if we call ourselves a representative democracy in the United States or a republic, and that part of what makes us a democracy is our ability to disagree with one another, but not let those disagreements tear us down, destroy us, and further, that actually a certain amount of disagreement is healthy,
00:52:23
Speaker
and is the sure as a sign of the health of a democracy to some degree if we're measuring health as the ability of different people to hold opposing views without those opposing views being shoved down anyone's throat or coerced to do something someone doesn't want to do that we can we can tolerate there's outward a certain degree of of collective disagreement and so. On the one hand I could say maybe the.
00:52:53
Speaker
People coming out al scott and others on twitter is just a sign of a healthy democracy but actually my gut tells me it's not.
00:53:01
Speaker
And that actually there is something worrisome about that. And so maybe what I'm asking you, man, is like, if you're in agreement that one of the signs of a healthy democracy, if we're both in agreement that democracies are sought after in their ideal form, uh, if one of the markers of a healthy democracy is
00:53:23
Speaker
collective toleration of opposing viewpoints that can just coexist even if it's uncomfortable. When does that cross the line into something else that is actually destructive and harmful and is what we're hearing from Scott and what's happened to him and maybe others that you've mentioned, something that's beyond just people disagreeing with each other?
00:53:49
Speaker
I don't know, I'm thinking like, I'm imagining the world as it was 25, 30 years ago, maybe two people are standing in line to go see a movie and one of them says to the other, you know, A.O. Scott gave this a really bad review and the other person responds, well, A.O. Scott can go fuck himself. And then that's the end of the conversation, right? Now, of course, you can pull out your phone
00:54:15
Speaker
and you can tweet at ao scott go fuck yourself and i hate the idea that that's a huge difference but i think that's a huge difference i mean it seems over overly simplistic but i don't i don't think it is but the other part of it is
00:54:34
Speaker
the kind of movie that elicits that go fuck yourself reaction when people criticize it, right? And it does seem to be centered on, I guess, two related things. One is superhero movies and the massive cultural domination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
00:54:55
Speaker
And the other is franchises that just keep rebooting themselves or turning out sequels, you know, Fast and Furious and Star Wars and all that kind of thing. And we've all heard people bemoan the lack of original intellectual property. We've all heard people bemoan the very term intellectual property. I mean, and there was a lot of positive conversation this year around the fact that the Best Picture Oscar went to everything everywhere all at once, which is an original.
00:55:24
Speaker
story, it's not part of a franchise. But it's also, I mean, that movie is basically, you know, it is an original story, but it's also a pastiche of so many other things that those guys love that it's not really that original, I guess. You know, it's adjacent to The Matrix and martial arts movies and a lot of other things. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah.
00:55:48
Speaker
And it sounds like I did not read A.O. Scott's review of that movie, but it sounds like he had some criticisms of it and the fans responded to a much the same way that fans of the Marvel movies might. But the idea that at some level these movies are not dumb in a harmless way, the way that a lot of movies are.
00:56:10
Speaker
that there's something fundamentally, simultaneously vapid, but also dangerous in the way that they approach the world and maybe in the way that they conceive of their audience and the way that they encourage their audiences to conceive of themselves.
Superhero Movies: Condescension and Superficial Themes
00:56:28
Speaker
The whole concept of superheroes to me has something I feel like I'm being condescended to.
00:56:38
Speaker
And not to bring up Nabokov again, but to bring up Nabokov again, when he and his family immigrated to the US around the beginning of World War II was when Superman was first getting popular in the United States. And his son liked Superman and loved reading the Superman comics. And Nabokov wrote a poem which I think was rejected by the New Yorker. I don't remember, they might have published it
00:57:04
Speaker
But he wrote a poem which is about what happens when Superman gets a hard one and then is going to have an orgasm. He can't actually come inside of anybody because his sexual partner would basically just explode, right?
00:57:20
Speaker
And to me- Sounds like a masterpiece, by the way. It's a good poem. It's a good poem. But to me, that's the appropriate way to think about Superman. The little kids who argue with each other, could Superman defeat a Tyrannosaurus Rex? Could Superman defeat Batman? All that kind of thing. They're on the right track. That's the level of attention that that kind of
00:57:43
Speaker
a Superman concept deserves. You argue about whether Superman could defeat Godzilla, and then you make jokes about Superman having orgasms, and then you move on to something else. That's it. And I feel like in being asked to take Superman seriously as a way of interpreting the world or as a way of analyzing the world, not to mention pretty much every other superhero, that I am being condescended to.
00:58:11
Speaker
And we've now, you know, if you want to start like the MCU started, I think with the first Iron Man movie, which was first decade of this millennium, you know, we're now 20 years into movies that I would make the argument that however well made they are, they are condescending to their audiences and the audiences in some cases, I wonder, are responding by allowing themselves to be condescended to.
00:58:41
Speaker
So, okay, a few things. First off, I'm glad you brought up Iron Man because I read, I think this came from the film critic, but also like really film academician, Mike Wayne. He's written a number of interesting texts in film studies, actually cites Iron Man and says, if you really pick this apart, you could make a very, I think compelling argument that this is propaganda.
00:59:09
Speaker
you look at when the first Iron Man came out, it was very close to the invasion of Iraq. You look at the enemies that the Iron Man character is fighting, their Middle Eastern.
'Iron Man': Militarism and Political Messages
00:59:21
Speaker
And he's again a billionaire that is creating this body suit and everything that comes with it to fight the Middle Eastern scourge. And basically Wayne was arguing
00:59:35
Speaker
this at the very least is a fairly explicit promotion and even celebration of the military industrial complex and also just militarism in general. And this is, we need to be paying attention to this. And so, yeah, I think the same way that some young people today could watch a Western and mock it for John Wayne's sort of gendered macho persona,
01:00:04
Speaker
or the chauvinism present, the misogyny, the gender roles in general that are being sort of reinforced through these films. They can put their finger on all that and make fun of it to, you know, the ends of the earth, and then go and watch Iron Man and not catch for a second these kinds of things that are sort of arguably embedded in Marvel movies.
01:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's an extremely astute point. And I've also read at least one piece about the fascism that's inherent in the, you know, the Batman movies that Christopher Nolan directed. And I should clarify that I like
01:00:47
Speaker
I haven't always been this insufferably snobbish about superhero movies. I saw the Christopher Nolan Batman movies in the theater and at the time I enjoyed them. But I do remember even at the time being frustrated by Nolan's tendency as a writer to he wants to explore or he thinks he wants to explore the
01:01:13
Speaker
complicated moral questions. So in The Dark Knight you've got that scene where you have the two fairies and one fairy is filled with criminals and one is filled with regular people and each supposedly has the ability to blow up the other. It's a kind of prisoner's dilemma.
01:01:28
Speaker
And it's an interesting attempt. I was interested when I saw that movie the first time to see where he was going to go with it. And where he goes with it is basically nowhere. He fails to do anything whatsoever interesting with it or reflective with it, which I think basically summarizes Christopher Nolan movies in general. But I wonder if that's also symptomatic of this larger tendency in
01:01:52
Speaker
a lot of these big blockbusters to act like they're dealing with something serious when they're actually not and so my objection to them then isn't the fact that they don't deal with anything serious i don't care about that at all it's that they they act like they do and they talk to their audience like they do and they expect their audience to believe them.
01:02:14
Speaker
So yeah, I mean like I want to just go back to your sort of worry about potentially sounding snobbish because I hear the tension in this where I'm, I think having very similar readings to the Marvel universe films that you are and going like, this is fucked up.
01:02:31
Speaker
And at the same time, I can't help but be haunted by—I think I encountered this in the writer Isaiah Berlin, who was far from a leftist, but said something along the lines of,
01:02:47
Speaker
He had critiques level that russo he really was not a fan of russo and i think i've got my issues with them although i haven't i didn't spend nearly as much time with them as berlin did but essentially his major criticism of russo's philosophy the social contract what he was reading into it was. He felt russo was saying. To the masses you think you like x you think you like that big mac.
01:03:15
Speaker
But I'm here to tell you that actually you don't like that. And if you don't know you don't like that, I'm here to say that I know better than you know what's good for you. Let me put you in the right direction. And Berlin basically says this is, even if that's true, which I think he finds highly questionable, it's so fucking condescending. And so if we take that same example and pivot over to our Marvel discussion,
01:03:43
Speaker
are we not potentially running the same risk of saying like you think you like this let me tell you why you're being condescended to that in itself is condescending you know and so i want to be careful i'm not saying you've done this but i'm trying to be aware of the fact that like it's not up to me to dictate to someone else their taste and if their taste lead them into a marvel movie again and again
01:04:09
Speaker
Who am i to tell them not to and so a final piece final another example this was when. I got in shock bars who wrote a best seller in his eighties by the way which bodes well for us or at least for me called from dawn to decadence also not a leftist but.
01:04:25
Speaker
He basically was leveling the critique at Marx, and he was looking at what he was calling the labor theory of value, which is central to Marxian economics, and basically saying that at the end of the day, the value of a given commodity can be traced back to the workers and the energy and labor that they put into the making of that product. And then in comes Barzun, and he says, well, what about pearls?
01:04:50
Speaker
Do our pearls valuable because divers die for them or do divers die for them because they're valuable? And so again, you know, it's the same idea of, are we putting the cart before, not the carpet for the horse, but are we, are we being assholes to say to, you know, a huge swath of moviegoers, you think you love these and you've got it all wrong. You know,
01:05:15
Speaker
I would rephrase it a little bit maybe and say, are we being assholes by saying you are wrong to love this thing?
Critiquing Popular Art: Condescension or Cultural Insight?
01:05:24
Speaker
Right. OK, there it is.
01:05:26
Speaker
I don't know. I'm thinking about two extremes. One is you're in high school. You go to pick up your friend, your really cool friend that you've always admired because they're cooler than you are. And you've got your music playing in the tape deck and your friend hops in your car and ejects the tape and says, listen to this and puts in a new tape and turns it up. And it's the coolest music that you've ever heard. That's one extreme.
01:05:51
Speaker
the other extreme is jazz guy who can't stop talking about jazz and how much he loves jazz. And I don't think that there's anything in between those two extremes, like those are the two options basically. But at the same time, neither of those scenarios involve
01:06:11
Speaker
any kind of moral consideration, right? Your friend just has cool taste in music and wants to share it with you, and Jazz Guy is just snobbish and unable to communicate properly with people. Those are not moral issues. I mean, I watched that Kenny G.
01:06:30
Speaker
Documentary that came out a couple years ago and I was fascinated by it and I was glad I watched it and Kenny G seems like he's probably a very nice person and I have no problem with the idea that all of his fans are totally wrong for liking his music.
01:06:46
Speaker
But I don't care. It's not my business. I'm just not going to listen to Kenny G. This, I think, is a little bit different. And AO Scott is in a public position, and he is publicly leaving that public position for reasons that he has explicitly linked to concerns about the rise of fascism.
01:07:05
Speaker
And so I think there are probably more and less asshole-ish ways to respond to the rise of fascism, but I think I'd be concerned with them only if I was trying to publicly communicate in a way where I was trying to change somebody's mind.
01:07:22
Speaker
That makes sense. And I hear you and like, I think you've also just like really cleanly articulated why this is such a difficult thing to unpack. And I think in part it's difficult because this is the place where politics and culture meet.
01:07:40
Speaker
And it's similar to it kind of does refract back on benjamin's some of benjamin's points and so. On the one hand i'm going like i started thinking about you know this tendency we're seeing a people to actually protest outside of politicians houses they don't like. You know when there's a part of me depends context specific.
01:08:02
Speaker
But there's a part of me that goes, yeah, well, that's our fundamental right. As long as you're not kicking down someone's door, you have the right to protest in this country. On the other hand, people have been getting death threats. People have had their lives, you know, just like they weren't, they didn't feel like it was just tough talk that.
01:08:20
Speaker
all kinds of things have been happening and so and then you think of like the framers of the constitution and the american revolution and they're saying hey we're fighting for freedom which has all kinds of ironies that we don't need to get into but that by the time they realize that the articles of confederation aren't gonna cut it.
01:08:41
Speaker
Some of the discussion was centered around we don't want mob rule to dictate the direction of this new republic when. The mob are the people and the people are trying presumably to get under and get out from under the boot of the british monarchy and so.
01:09:02
Speaker
I feel this tension of like the one side of me goes we have the right to say whatever the fuck we want in this country and i guess i have to tolerate the idiots and actually.
01:09:13
Speaker
I want to hear from the neo-Nazis, because if you say some crazy shit, you've just announced yourself and now we know who you are. And that's actually, in a way, keeps us safer. But on the other hand, when do you actually have a situation where both, I don't know if it's as prevalent on the left, I'm sure there's been instances, certainly I've been focused more on
01:09:35
Speaker
The right, but, and some of their behavior, but, you know, again, when, and, and, and this is why I'm bringing this up and maybe raising the stakes because the stakes are raised. If we're not just saying, I like that movie, the special effects were great. The action was bad-ass and actually know these films are consciously or unconsciously training people's minds in fascist directions. That's really troublesome to me. And so.
01:10:02
Speaker
A, I definitely feel like we should push back against that in any way, shape, or form, in any way that fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny rears its ugly head. And yes, but poor A.O. Scott getting nailed to the wall.
01:10:22
Speaker
for just writing a film review. And again, the odd, we have the right to protest a film or a politician, but at what point are you actually really getting into a dangerous situation? That's, that's not really in the spirit of democracy. Yeah. I think that's, that's pretty much exactly where we are right now. If Sam Jackson listens to this podcast, I'm going to tell him it was all your idea. Well, I'm going to blame it on Zach.