Transcript
Speaker: welcome back to Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History with Chase Biduzniak and my co-host Samuel McAlliga. he He refuses to correct me, so I'm never going to know. um We're here today with Eileen Jones, film critic at Jacobin and co-host of Film Suck, pondering the work of art in the age of crap cinema, if I remember the tagline that's right correctly. ah How are you, Eileen? I'm doing great. It's an honor to be here.
Speaker: that's You'd be the first to feel that way, so thank you very much. i think Sam and I are still figuring out if it's an honor to be here. um But what did you bring today, and why did you think it might be a good fit?
Speaker: Well, I brought an odd one, on The Thin Blue Line, which um of the Gen X films I was thinking of talking about, that was that's our topic, Gen X films, was the one I threw on the list thinking you guys would never go for it. and you It's more interesting than doing, you know, reality bites, God knows. Yeah.
Speaker: but i I will just say on Reality Bites, I saw that for the first time this year. i did too. It made me physically angry. like Me too. I hated it. It was like, this guy's stable, he's treating you well, and he's evil because he cut your movie a little bit badly. i mean, come on.
Speaker: so Have you seen this, Sam? I saw Reality Bites as a sort of impressionable 19-year-old. Oh, okay. Yeah, a lot of the Gen X resonances went over my head um at the time, but I you know i sort of thought that Yeah, God, wouldn't it be cool to be Ethan Hawke's character in...
Speaker: And when when a writer looks so great, it just like you can get lulled in. You were the right age to see it. Obviously, we were dual. I've watched it now, I'd probably cringe slash feel like vague sense of anger.
Speaker: It's very fitting, actually, for of what we're going to discuss today because it's, you know Reality Bites, which apparently we're now also doing, is there a movie that it's just incomprehensible now because now anyone in that position would just be like, I would love to have a job. Thank God have job. Right. And in that movie, for those who haven't seen it, the Ethan Hawke character turns out to be the desirable one. And my wife and I were like jaws on the floor as we realized the movie was was going in that direction.
Speaker: where he's kind of this like mean troubadour, you know the kind of character who he's not really agreeable. He sort of is keeping her at arm's length when in a writer character. And the other love interest, who in my mind is John C. Reilly, but I don't think it is John C. Reilly. I think it's Ben Stiller. Oh, it is Ben Stiller. It's young Ben Stiller. Yeah, very insulting of me to... I forgot to.
Speaker: It's directed by Ben Stiller, written or directed by Ben Stiller, I think as well. Am I wrong about that? ah It is directed by Ben Stiller. who it is i my god you're sellinging ben stiller short in every way and anyway i'm glad you brought it up because i was thinking in those terms i rewatched high fidelity i did a couple of the the usual suspect gen x films and so i was thinking in terms of one of the big preoccupations of reality bites like many of these films is young people trying to find a way to be authentic which usually means expressing their true selves, finding their good inner values. And and usually your your true self is creative in some way. You're trying to avoid.
Speaker: It helps a little to think of it as this is, you know, eighty s Reagan era. Everything went pro-business, yay, free market and capitalism and all jazz. And so that all got tired as that's what we're we're stuck with. So the job represents, oh, he's got a good job in ah in a Reagan-y kind of way. And it made finding the authentic self look better to at least some people. Because now it looks appalling. But yeah. but and this is This is an interesting fulcrum for thinking about Thin Blue Line. Because maybe a very quick and dirty summary is that it is a documentary film that, as I understand it, was rejected as a documentary by the Academy for ah including dramatizations. Yes. It's a documentary film by Errol Morris. I almost just called Moral Eris. Yeah.
Speaker: Errol Morris. It's about a guy named Randall Adams who was convicted of a crime in or around Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas, I think. I thought it was Dallas. Okay. I'm in New Jersey. They're all the same. Not Austin. Austin's the left-wing one. It's definitely the right-wing one. It's just an aglomeration of sub-abs, right?
Speaker: Yes, it does come across in the movie because the dramatizations are all kind of outside hotels, on highways, in these neighborhoods that don't actually seem to contain houses. And the movie is very basically a report about the case, and it uses a kind of juxtaposition of testimony and images to imply very, very, very strongly that another character, whose name is David, who's from a nearby sort of semi-rural community called Viter that he is actually responsible and that he's sort of pinning it on Randall Adams. Now, the reason that this job issue is such an interesting fulcrum from Reality Bites to this is that it starts with Randall Adams saying that he stayed in Dallas because he found a job there. He was coming from Ohio. you know He said, what were the odds that
Speaker: I, you know, nobody has work. It's the late seventies. The oil crisis is happening. Everything is awful, but he gets a job. And so the job is what lands him there. And I guess we can maybe, maybe take it from there. What, what made you think it might be a good fit? Yeah, maybe that's. Well, for me, I was tracking a strand of this naive belief in the authentic self, I guess, especially in the context, which I'm sure we'll get to, of how enthralled the culture got for a while in the eighties and nineties with postmodernism and, you know, you're not going to be able to access the real and everything is mediated in a construct and we'll we'll get into it more, I'm sure. But at any rate, there was this streak running through in high fidelity, et cetera, that you're going to have to do a lot of work and soul searching. It's going to get very complicated. The plot of high fidelity, for example, is a guy's girlfriend breaks up with him. It's belated in a long string. And even though he's living an authentic life, he has a little record store. It's idiosyncratic. He knows music. He's cool.
Speaker: his life keeps going, becoming a wasteland because he always winds up with no one relationship. So he he decides to go, you know, get together with every woman he's ever dated in order to figure out what's wrong with him, why why his relationships fail.
Speaker: So that kind of elaborateness to get at The real of the self seemed like, oh, there's this weird preoccupation in the Thin Blue Line, obviously, with how do we even get at the truth?
Speaker: If you look at the style of the Thin Blue Line, it hits you so hard in the face. It's so montage-y. It's so intense in its neon color scheme. It's got a Philip Glass score that's just this mind-spinning, dread-filled, film noir-esque sound.
Speaker: And the spinning includes the imagery. There's a spinning cop, you know light on a cop car. You're spinning, you're constantly circling through the same... Milkshake cup sort of landing and falling and Right. Yes, the milkshake, the co-cop drops um at the scene. um You return close-ups of maps, intense close-up old-fashioned maps. You see reenactments of the crime over and over and over in keeping with narration from whoever's telling what their version of it is.
Speaker: So all through all that spinning, for many people who came out of the film, and I know this because I saw Errol Morris speak a couple of times. I was in the indie film world. I was going to film festivals, and I kept seeing him. And he told this narrative a couple of times.
Speaker: He said, people keep coming up to me and saying that's such a brilliant postmodern film about how you can't get at the truth. And he was just driven mad by this. and In the end, I've got the confession David Harris on tape.
Speaker: He's basically saying I'm the one who knows and there's, you know, the reason Randall Adams is is doing life is because he didn't have a place to stay for a kid, me, who wanted a place to stay that night. And he didn't let me stay with him and his brother. And that might be where he is. So he gets a confession. This is what makes the Thinboo line the main thing that makes it famous. Makes every top 10 documentary list because of the the drama of this. Randall Adams literally gets exonerated, released because of the film.
Speaker: So he's like, no, the whole film is about you can access the truth. In fact, you have to. You can find out what really happened, but it's going to be so difficult. Why? there's all this human error and human perception that stuff that gets a little into the into the Pomo preoccupation, but more, so many people are lying their fucking heads There's so many people with so many interests in not having the truth known that you are going to have to, you know, Morris had once been a private investigator, as he loved to tell people. You're going to have to claw your way through all of these distractions, all of the lies, all of the fakes, all of the wrong versions to finally get in charge of the truth.
Speaker: a So his whole point was just like, he was just like over and over, I'd be congratulated on and doing exactly the opposite of what I was doing. So for me, and keep in mind too, in the Gen X prime period, when you're coming into adulthood in the 80s and 90s, suddenly documentaries were popular entertainments that were playing in cinemas and making lots of money. And Errol Morris and and Michael Moore were probably the two biggest names for this brief period of time when spectacular documentaries with high style.
Speaker: Yeah. And very arresting imagery and forceful delivery that were the opposite of a kind of PBS dulled down documentary form that had sort of settled out in the eighty s after years of experimentation from the fifty s to the 70s. It had all gotten dull again. So suddenly doing reenactments. This was a complete no-no. You are not allowed to do this in the world of direct cinema and cinema verite and all that. Or or it was very frowned on.
Speaker: He brings it back and that's one of his claims to fame too. But in other words, so that sort of aligned weirdly enough in my head with, wow, yeah, that was a huge part of Gen X film viewing. All of a sudden documentaries were hot, hot, hot.
Speaker: And there's this... preoccupation that I'm seeing in all of these other youth-oriented Gen X films. So that was how we got here. Sorry, long explanation. No, that makes perfect sense. Sam, did you want... you were No, I wondered why the documentary was such a prominent sort of film media at the time.
Speaker: Why did it get so prominent? It's part of the... um Sorry, film history. Hollywood bottoms out in the 70s. Everyone knows this. It's actually a wonderful time artistically. You get the Hollywood renaissance of all these great young directors who are suddenly given jobs.
Speaker: It's because the whole studio system is tanked and the panicked executives are saying, I don't know, you, Coppola, you're just out of school. I bet maybe you could do something. Maybe the kids would watch it. You, Scorsese, you, this person, Hal Ashby, any of you, do you know anything about how to do anything that the kids would come and see?
Speaker: So, okay, that's going on. But they revive a business model that involves blockbuster hits that are tentpole films that can make all your money on two films. That's with things like Star Wars, Jaws, etc.
Speaker: That's exciting for a while, too, the new franchise sequel blockbuster-y thing. But by the time you get to the mid-80s, it's a disgusting commercial system. They've got it down to an absolute, it's just a it's just a rote packaging deal. Tom Cruise, action film, Steven Spielberg, done. Billions were good. It really gets awful. So there's a rise of the independent film that for a while really is independent film. People coming from nowhere and an explosion of interest in film festivals. So that's how you get the Coen brothers and Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino and all of these hot young directors who are literally making movies on credit cards. And with parental money and dentists are coming in. ah Yeah, that's the Coen's, right? There was like a dentist who... it was literally, they went to dentists. I don't know why dentists, but I guess dentists have loose capital that they wanted somewhere. I don't know. think Mark Zuckerberg's dad is a dentist. So, you know, maybe there's something to that.
Speaker: So anyway, it's it out of this, and that's only part of it, because why documentaries? It makes sense for, you know, fiction filmmaking, but... Along comes these breakthrough figures. So Michael Moore, he's he's a little bit of a more of a joke now Both Errol Morris and Michael Moore, the Shines kind of moth them now as filmmakers.
Speaker: But when they first emerged, they were so like, you just hadn't seen documentaries like this. um And I think there was um an awful lot of crossover. There was a lot of just wild experimentation people were really going for alternative filmmaking. So you had all sorts of different styles that were quite Jim Jarmusch. You just had wildly different styles and you had a kind of various ways you could interrogate, again, reality. So suddenly you're playing with genres ostentatiously. Yeah.
Speaker: So you're going to crash together three different genres and have all sorts of sub citations and references. The constructedness of the movie itself gets foregrounded, all of those things that had critics going, it's another postmodern film by blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: So I think it was part of that. I think there there just came up a generation of documentary filmmakers seeing a way to get much wider audiences through these sort of equally upfront um stylistic and kind of genre mixing moves. So Errol Morris, of course, thinks nothing of, again, evoking film noir in The Thin Blue Line, even though once that would have just been like, you've just invalidated your entire project. Yeah.
Speaker: it it is ah it it It occurs to me that, in a way, it the documentary at least professes a kind of authenticity, right? So there's a way in which returning to that approach fits with the concerns that you're talking about, even if Morris is takes a different direction, right, and in terms of making it more sort of obviously fictional.
Speaker: I find that particularly interesting because if you've got this, it's it's a different way of getting at the same problem, which is to say, okay, I need to discern who I am authentically.
Speaker: Obviously, it's not the system. you know I've seen, i don't know, Robert Altman's the player. I know it's it's bad. I don't want to be doing that. I'm not interested in making Chewbacca action figures the rest of my life or you know whatever. At the same time, nobody's saying, like I need to get back into Italian neorealism right now. you know like That's not...
Speaker: That's not people are thinking. You've got this problem where it's like, okay, well, I need authenticity in the documentary format. Is that? But we've exhausted, you're right. We've exhausted those approaches. We've exhausted the approach that allows me to just like, um ah who are the brothers who did Salesman in the 60s? I never know how to say their name. Maisley's? Yeah, I think it's, yeah. to Yes, yes, yes. and yeah, they did several of these. I think Grey Gardens, maybe two. Grey Gardens, yeah.
Speaker: And like those are movies that are very... um they They're just showing you. you know They'll take you to the salesman in his hotel room looking like he's about to kill himself and cut, and he's in a woman's house trying to make her buy a Bible for like 50 times what it would cost at a bookstore. like And it uses the very basic cinematic language of you know the cut is a link. you know These sort of ideas without really being showy. And I think that means someone like Morris has to figure out, okay, well...
Speaker: how do I take something that is supposed to be direct and real and and imbue it with something new? And it seems to me that the dramatization, the reenactment, the um the user of juxtaposition, I mean, one of the things that really sticks with me is there's a sequence in the kind of early middle part of the film, as I recall,
Speaker: where it's the testimony of police officers talking about what supposedly happened with newspaper clippings of the initial report, which is importantly different, right? The movie wants to make this point that presumably the police grabbed, as they keep saying, the lady cop and the lady lawyer because it's the mid-80s. Think about things. The lady cop, she thought she saw this. But you know we we we worked we talked to her and we realized, oh, actually, she'd seen this. Oh, yeah she had a milkshake. Oh, no, that was fake. She actually got out of the car and was doing her job, right? And he uses these very basic but ultimately kind of non-realist strategies of taking, okay, here's a newspaper clipping of what she said at first.
Speaker: And then here's a cop at the same time saying what it is she testified in court. And it's just little things like that that maybe sound so simple now, but I'm sure for a documentary format in the late 80s, mid 80s would have just been like, you know, you can't do that.
Speaker: Absolutely. he was He was deliberately flouting all the all the rules. He's doing America's Most Wanted. like that's what i was I mean, I know that that's later and very different in terms of what it's trying to accomplish, but it's the same strategy, right? It's like America's Most Wanted would be reenactments, doing a a voiceover and being like,
Speaker: you know And then she walked home. It's the same strategy. So it yeah it obviously took off and even got appropriated for right-wing purposes. So it was success. People wanted it. Is this a kind of bridgehead between what you might call like journalism as information journalism as entertainment? I mean, you obviously, like this film is being made, so the rise of 24-hour caves, the rise of a kind of entertainment landscape within journalism. I mean, how does that fit into the...
Speaker: Oh, there's no question that Moore and Morris are both going all-out entertainment and risking having a serious documentary filmmaker a reputation, if they even consider that a risk anymore. I mean, these are guys who don't want to be... Ironically, in retrospect, like as a viewer in 2025, I think we're so used to those elements in documentaries, those kind of narrativizations from the director, those kind of editorial cuts, those structure they're sort of like very meaningful juxtapositions that
Speaker: Oh, it's gone way further. I remember watching Dirty Wars, the Jeremy Scahill thing. And not only is it constructed as an ostentatiously as a film noir, he's playing the film noir antihero. He's doing the voiceover narration about his tortured suffering. My jaw was on the ground. Like, you for one thing, you're a bad actor. You're a terrible actor. What are you doing trying to play a neo-noir indie hero? Oh no, it's gone way, way further. away for And people have no objection now. I'm always ripping my hair out going, you know, I hate to get all pedantic about this, but there's a vast history that was serious about what is the nature of a fact that What do we mean by documentary? how What do we even mean by accessing the truth of representing reality? And they spent 20 fucking years trying to work through experiments in documentary filmmaking to see, is there any way you can approach objectivity? That was the fly on the wall thing.
Speaker: And then coming up to, there is no way. So now you have to foreground what your own participation, you'll have shots of the documentary filmmaker. But they actually took this seriously, went through all this stuff only for to have it now be like, fuck, make it a film more, make it a thriller. Everyone will like it better. Nobody cares.
Speaker: Contemporaneously, it feels like a preemption of the sort of the objection against any attempt at objectivity, right? Like if you think of, don't know, was it Nathan Fielder's recent series? The rehearsal? yeah Yeah. Yeah, like preemption of any critique.
Speaker: It's like built in as a kind of protection mechanism rather than anything else. Yes, now it is. but then it it wasn't, but I think it just worked to their advantage. All the outrage, all the controversy just added to their fame, I think.
Speaker: There is, I think, a point that needs to be made there about um maybe the the Gen X current there. So yeah there is a sense in which protesting too much about who you are authentically is, of course, a way of foreclosing further investigation. You know, yeah the classic, like, you know, ah Mr. Garrison in South Park, the, like, very closeted man who never stops talking about his need to have sex with women, right? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Bit of a strange comparison, but my point is that you can think of this this preemption you're talking about, Sam, as a protectiveness that someone like an Earl Morris seems to be not as concerned with, which in a way strikes me as somewhat out of touch with Gen X, in in a way, because a lot of the Gen X stuff does feel a little bit like you're protesting too much. I mean, we talk about, him okay, Reality Bites, for example, I mean, that's a whole movie to me about like protesting too much about how much you want, you know, to live this romantic life. i I think, frankly, the before trilogy suffers from a similar problem. I'm sorry to ah fans of that. i think that he somehow manages to square the circle here. It doesn't feel like protest against, you know, being found out or something like that. Well, and there's also the tricky thing that that everyone becomes absolutely ill with irony. um yeah At that time. So you've got this, again, this kind of seemingly naive, perhaps protesting too much, seeking authenticity and whatever. And then you've got this, people are just knee-jerk, ironic, sarcastic, all all of the forms of, you know, one might say weak irony, um but it's just everywhere. It permeates. It's like the Simpsons joke saying...
Speaker: You know, one one guy, one disaffected flat voice teenager who says to the other, are you being ironic, man? i don't even know anymore. So we all felt irony poisoned. I was in the academy. mean, you know, going to Berkeley and all this stuff in the 80s and 90s. And it was, of course, had completely overtaken as an intellectual project, um you know, that the university system.
Speaker: you think Morris sort of ties his hands with the irony like, in some sense? I mean, you think about ah a few decades ago, he makes um The Fog of War. Yeah. About Robert S. McNamara. McNamara. He's like one of JFK's sort of ah brain boxes. and yeah In comparison to sort of films made in the late seventy s early 80s, sort of feature fictional films about Vietnam that somehow feel more realistic more comfortable with trying to attack a kind of objectivity than something like yeah and that that McNamara film which is like yeah obviously it's called fucking Fog of War right like it's got ambiguity in the title and right and it is exactly the film that's always the film named when does the shine go off Errol Morris it's Fog of War
Speaker: That's when it just starts being like, for so many people who had loved him, including me, it's just like, okay, you've now lost me. For one thing, I'm sick to death of the Philip Glass score. mean, he's just overused all your, your the Interatron interviews, you know, his whole modus operandi. And well, he's, you know, doing things like making commercials now. And, you know, I hate to get, again, naively authentic, but in doing things for the Oscars and it's just become a rote series of approaches that seems, begins to make one, you know,
Speaker: feel a major ick factor in watching something like the way he handles McNamara. You're just like, this isn't the approach. And from then on, it seems like the whole constellation of things he was keeps working on starts to lose its ability to have its impact on people. Now he makes films in obscurity. Hardly anyone sees most of his recent films that come out every few years regularly. Yeah.
Speaker: So it it was very much of its moment that and I think the set of contradictions was very typical of, again, that time when, you know, I would watch Coen Brothers films and find them intensely, you know, have an intense emotional impact, intensely meaningful. But for many critics who considered them with Tarantino, the ultimate postmodern filmmakers, they were like, they're just playing. It's all playful dissonance.
Speaker: It's all citations and quotes and crashing genres together. um They're merry pranksters with nothing to say. It's all visual stylistic dazzlement and there's not there's no there there. And I'd be like, it's like we're watching two different movies.
Speaker: So they completely the completely different impact of Miller's Crossing. People claiming, you know, Ebert says it's just a pastiche of old gangster films. And I'm like, fuck you, buddy. What game? It ain't a gangster film like it. You're out of your fucking heart.
Speaker: But sorry, I'm swearing a lot, aren't I? No, you're fine. oh But anyway, it's I think there was a lot of that, that a lot went under the blanket of POMO, and i obviously could, it's an expansive term, in a way that really mirrors the whole Gen X experience, I think. You know, we we have to sort of locate Gen X, I think.
Speaker: Who are these people? It's very unsatisfying reading the definitions because you're just like, it's just a hodgepodge of stuff. Really, they're defined by following the boomers. The boomers are the definitive generations.
Speaker: Because there's such a huge generation. It's the post-war generation. There's at least a surge of a lot of mostly white people into the middle class in unprecedented numbers. And they're such a big generation. The whole society gets geared toward them.
Speaker: So there's a boomer boomer set of you know beliefs that seem secure, that seem to for them to mirror reality that by the time you get to the much smaller Gen X, after a thought generation, the kind of turmoil that's going on, and there was plenty of turmoil for the boomers, I think seems more intense because nobody's designing a society around us. In fact, they're starting to close all the schools they built for the boomers.
Speaker: So the certainties start coming unraveled in a way that seems dramatic enough to name them Generation X, which was an old term that had been used to describe earlier generations that were troubled and weird.
Speaker: guess that's a good question, isn't it? Because... We sort of skate on sort of what you might call on the top of the foam of ideology or generational ideology a lot. And we we sometimes like sort of manage to delve into the sort of hard economics or yeah the sort of material basis for YGNX is the way it is. What kind of factors would you identify that sort of lead to this?
Speaker: Especially in the academy right in the 90s, postmodernism is this huge thing. Everyone's fucking talking about Derrida and Foucault and Bourdieu. Macan. Bourdieu didn't happen. Gen X starts in 1965, ends in, what, 79? How do we get to the sort of 1990s Academy and to films like the FinB line, right?
Speaker: Well, one of the obvious things and applying and to the to scholarly work is, that you know, suddenly the collapse of of investment in the so-called grand narratives or meta-narratives.
Speaker: So suddenly, for example, Marx in any study of class is regarded as just distressingly naive and in its very materiality. That becomes a no-go.
Speaker: I was there for that. I had people saying, who can identify as as socialist anymore? I mean, that's just laughable. I mean, really scorned. for that as a grand narrative. and And Freud is only saved by Lacan. So Freud, know, just Freud, he's sort of out, but like the Lacanian elaboration on him is okay. But there's a huge insistence on the constructedness, the arbitrary nature of meaning. It's all that, you know, Derrida, you know, based on language construction. Now we apply that all to the world. It's all arbitrary. It's all constructed. And you have to learn to read the whole world in in those terms.
Speaker: Can I attempt to tie what you said prior into that, which is, so you talked about having this emotional experience of Coen Brothers movies, which I think for people in my generation, don't know how you feel about this, is actually quite typical. Like, A Serious Man was a very important movie for me, for example. One of the things we feel we've kind of excavated in doing these interviews is that, in fact, in a lot of ways, there's deep...
Speaker: and I haven't quite found the right word for this because often I say sentimentality, but I think that can be confusing, but I'll use it because I'm not sure what to say. Sentimentality about Gen X. And you have identified it there. It's this sentimentality, this this sense of authenticity that is inaccessible to someone watching this form of art that is capable of reaching you or other people who are in this milieu, but not capable of reaching this this prior group of people. And in some ways, the irony seems to be almost like a sieve that exists to sort of get rid of those other viewers who are are either need to be kept out or for whatever set of reasons are being kept out. Now, I think there's something there with respect to the kind of theoretical trajectory that you're talking about in the Academy. that
Speaker: i think, frankly, just has to do with the fact that there is something deeply... um I think a lot of Marxists would object to me putting it this way, but sentimental in the sense that I am using it in this conversation about Marx and Marxism. I mean, if you read Capital, vast swaths of that book are essentially, if not a moral critique, strictly speaking, are using moral language to make points about why this is bad.
Speaker: It's essentially an appeal to, you know, um these are the conditions these people are living in. These are bad things. All the theoretical stuff people know about is there. But it's very often couched in this highly literary language about you know capitalism as a vampire, stories of of mothers drugging their babies, image. But the point is, i think in the quasi-boomer-dominated sort of 80s into early 90s academy, there's an extent to which in the failure of the 60s and 70s, that kind of sentimentality is is out. And again, sentimentality in this very peculiar way that I'm using it, which I suppose just means a kind of earnestness about
Speaker: I think that a lot of Gen X is looking at the sellout generation of the 80s, essentially the Reagan generation, the Wolf of Wall Street generation, the subject of so much criticism in Gen X movies. That's always the bad guy, as in Reality Bites. It's interesting the rejection of being a sentimentality or being a self-actualization.
Speaker: doesn't warrant a return to materialism. Gen X don't make that full transition or that full 180 back to free war generation's understanding of the world. like it's They're very much still in the wake of the new age sentimentality. Right. And this is in spite of like a major scholar, Frederick Jameson, trying to find his way back to don't you see what's happening? yeah You've now left yourself no ground on which to stand to take a political action because you no longer believe in history. Right. It's a metanarrative. You believe in his historicity, but you don't believe in history. So and another again, you don't seem to believe things actually happened in the world and then had consequences and all of these things. And so he talks about films in those terms. We've got all these weird, nostalg spurious nostalgia films that aren't located in any, that aren't grounded in any sense of real history.
Speaker: So we're seeing the logic of late capitalism, which is, you know in which we should be embracing. Yeah. i I need to show Jameson was my advisor's advisor. Oh my God. Well, you know all about it. well but i But here's the thing. I also don't because I remember coming in and not knowing a ton about Jameson. I'm a medievalist. There are very few medievalists trained by Jameson. I think I'm in a peculiar position.
Speaker: And I tossed out the word historicity and he was just like, get that shit out of here, baby. I don't want to see that. So, I mean, these these issues, I mean, if they didn't go away, i think there has been, you know, um a certain vindication of the Jamesonian approach, you know, vis-a-vis the other stuff. yeah I will say, thinking about these things in terms of, you were talking about self-actualization, boomer self-actualization, Sam. I think it became passe. Yeah.
Speaker: What I mean is when your hippies turn into like cults or California ideology, kind of like New Earth Magazine, you know computer salesmen, or they go full yuppie and that whole thing. You look back, I mean, a great example of this to me, like ah a very Gen X concert, right, is Woodstock 99 and Woodstock, I think it's 92 or 93. And these are very telling for me because they're concerts staged as Woodstock. Like you can't escape the fact that Woodstock is the concert that you need to think in terms of. It is the concert.
Speaker: But they're very explicitly intended to be like, no, like it's it's our Woodstock now. you know And I think that's very indicative of this ambiguity where the the boomer sentimentality is passe, but kind of nothing totally new has been discovered.
Speaker: like The UK has the the second summer of love and like illegal raves, which are like explicitly harking about the hippies. And the acid house in the late 1980s is doing exactly the same thing. No, I certainly felt just in the 80s and 90s that we were very much running on the fumes of the boomer generation. So there was still enough. And, you know, to be to be fair, you in your exclamation, but he has a job. He has a really good job, I mean, in that it's steady and it's going to pay him and he'll have a pension and everything. And that now seems incredible. is There was still enough in the system. There was enough give, enough fat, whatever, that you could still
Speaker: you know, achieve the arc that had always been taught for for generations, you know, get an education and then you'll get a good job. And enough of it was still true for long enough. Get a PhD, then you can do a podcast. yeah Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I was the generation that was told their jobs are all going to be opening up and then they never did. yeah but yet But also that you could feel it being eaten away. at yeah mean, in other words, you both had a sort of false sense of secure enough and you kind of knew. Yeah. that it was ending and how fast was it going to end? any any The great Iraqi movie is the Doom Generation, right? I mean, i think that title is for a bit. Sorry, Sam, you wanted to say something. I think it's fascinating in that sense that they're living in an interbrenguion between the sort of what yeah was called in like France, the Trond Glorieuse, the three glorious decades of like the 40s, 50s, 60s. And then what you might call like
Speaker: capitalist scarcity post-2008. h And that period between, let's say, 1969 and 2008, it's like a really interesting period in the sense that you have the oil crisis, you have like OPEC, you have a hyperinflation and stagflation in the 70s.
Speaker: They're kids then, right? They really remember that. And then by the time you get to the late ninety s like that's a pretty, ah I'm not sure about the US so much, but in the UK, that's a pretty good time to be alive. And it's a pretty fucking good time to be alive all the way up until about 2008.
Speaker: yeah By which time most Gen X's are firmly established in their careers. I think you're right. And I think you see that in those films that we're talking about, like Reality Bites, singles, all this. There's room for all this. Now they're tortured to watch because there's room for all this. Oh, my God. But how can I live authentically? And you're just like really? Who the hell cares? How can you live? is what we have now Yeah. So, yeah yes, there's that exactly that sense of it was a pretty good life, but people didn't know it. They were already torturing themselves as if because there were difficult. It was good. You were going to have to maneuver to get where you but you still it at least you could believe potentially you still could get there.
Speaker: So, i several things. But first of all, I mean, what you're kind of describing there, Sam, is the end of history that we're talking about, right? In other words, this time period in which communism is obviously or seems to be failing, um that there's not really ah any ability to imagine, right? That's the Fukuyama line. is we and and And actually, the Jameson line, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Mm-hmm. It's all kind of the same thing, which is to say we don't know where we're going. And the way I think about this is that you know even now, dictators are still elected. right like Most dictators are still trotting out the fake election because the horizon of the of the imaginary remains like something like liberal democracy.
Speaker: And what you're talking about there, Sam, is this kind of like epoch before we get to the true like dog shit that we get to live in now. you know This moment where like maybe technology could still be interesting or liberatory in some way. you know Maybe there's space for these creative enterprises. And now it's like...
Speaker: you know if you If you thought you had to commodify yourself in the 90s to achieve success, like I have a friend who's in the music business. i mean He's a producer. He tried to work as an artist. He had a deal. and they Most of his job was making TikToks. i mean you know He was like, Chase, going to kill myself. for this ah friend fine with I with Ireland Records. I would say she she's testified that it's got 90% TikToks. Yeah, because that's what music means now. But if i I want to just briefly try to reground us in the thin blue line, which, yeah. No, no. I mean, I think this is actually very good because what what's happening here, Eileen, is actually sort of like a teasing out of the premise of the show in a way that we maybe have not done a great job of expressing very directly. So I think it's it's quite helpful. But the movie is fundamentally a movie about the innocence of someone on death row. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Which is a very timely issue for this generation, specifically because the death penalty basically goes away and it comes back, right? And it becomes associated in the 80s and 90s. I remember this from growing up in the ninety s It becomes associated with like the backward southern states. you know How many like John Grisham legal dramas of the 90s are basically just about like ah a fast-talking lawyer who you know can get a guy off who's actually innocent? you know like That is ah a stock character. We've seen that also with The Chase. We recently did the Charlie Sheen movie, The Chase.
Speaker: Which is a movie where, in in a different version, you can imagine a noir version of The Chase, which is fundamentally just a movie about a guy who kidnaps a woman with a Butterfinger bar pretending it's a gun, and they end up in a chase with the police. He's on the run from the cops already. He takes the hostage that the cops don't you know take him, right? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: There's a different version of that movie where you don't know if Charlie Sheen's character is innocent or guilty. you know It's just kind of about the relationship between Charlie Sheen and Christy Swanson, who plays the woman in the car. And it's you know just about like who can trust whom, you know who's telling the truth about what.
Speaker: That is not The Chase. The Chase is a movie where you know immediately that he is innocent, that he's being mistreated by an unjust legal system that notably is using technicalities to keep him in prison rather than let him out of prison.
Speaker: It's a preoccupation that keeps coming up. And I i find it very interesting that insofar as we see a political thread that runs through a lot of these movies of the Gen X period, quote-unquote, It's a systemic issue, but it's one that manifests in these very individual and very rare cases, which are, first of all, death penalty cases, and secondarily, death penalty cases in which the person is innocent, right?
Speaker: Which is a totally noble cause. You know, listen, I'm i'm i'm on board. ah You know, abolish the death penalty. But it's interesting that that's what the political concern becomes and that there's such an investment in, like,
Speaker: the innocence of the potential sacrificial victim as a way of talking about it. It's a very like black and white way of thinking about the problem. I think you're completely right. And it's so revealing when you contrast A Thin Blue Line. So when was watching A Thin Blue Line, like a film that immediately came to my mind that i'd watched maybe six months ago was Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, which is from 2011, which also deals with the death penalty in Texas, I think.
Speaker: yeah In Dallas, it's in the exact same place. And it's Instead of having, I presume, the the two main characters in The Thin Blue Line of Boomers, it it deals with two millennials. And it's it's so revealing in the sense that you know absolutely immediately that Jason Burkett, and I think it's Michael Perry, the guilty of this crime, there's none of this kind of like semiotics of entanglement and like mess narratives, confusing narratives. It's like Werner Herzog lays it out incredibly simply. like Why is it?
Speaker: the sort of terrific impulses of these two teenage boys, why the murders have been done, and then gets that out of the way and moves on to sort of the moral object of the death penalty. And most of the film is really about, you know, the lethal injection chamber and sort of horror of that space. And it's yeah just very interesting that like yeah by 2011, I think Americans really aren't having a conversation about the defense in the way they were in the ninety s and early 2000s. And yet, this film that's really about millennials is able to sort of face up to the object of the documentary in a way that Errol Morris' Thin Beauty line just isn't.
Speaker: one i I will say, I mean, and this is you know mildly off topic, but I can't help myself. I love Renner Herzog. I also think he's maybe the evilest filmmaker who's ever existed. He gives D.W. Griffith a run for his money. And I mean that in like a non-moral sense. I know that might sound insane, but like if you compare Bad Lieutenant 1 to Bad Lieutenant 2, Abel Ferrara movie, like that's a man who believes in God, who believes in redemption. Renner Herzog is like, no, no, it's evil all the way down. like there There is nothing but the abyss down there. Can't you hear the grass screaming or whatever? Everything is the opening to Blue Velvet, like over and over again, you know? And, and like, I guess what I'm saying there is Herzog is almost like a man who stands outside time. And that's like, you know, he probably would have made the same movie in 1989 as he would have made. i mean, not, I think it's a very good point, Sam, but he just such a like singular presence in that way.
Speaker: Well, and you and you could go back to like early 60s and look at the film version of In Cold Blood. That's exactly what I was i was thinking of In Cold Blood. And you know they're guilty, and it's an impassioned anti-death penalty film nevertheless, even though you see the horrors of the of the whole thing. So it it does seem like that's waxed and waned. And yes, by the time we get to Thin Blue Line, it's you're right, it's very equivocal. and Because for one thing, I think you pointed this out in one of your comments, Chase, that They look so exactly from central casting. i mean Randall Adams looks like a saint on his way to the crucifixion and a kind of, you know, raw boned Midwestern saint. But nonetheless, and David Harris is this smirking little creep. Yeah. Well, if we're judging by appearances, we know who's ah who's done what.
Speaker: and My wife just kept being like, he keeps smiling. Why is he smiling? He's got a meaningless smile and he's got these verbal tics and what have you after he'll say something horrifying and say, well, he did this and what have you.
Speaker: yeah yeah Yeah, exactly. It's what have you. No, i you're you're right. and it is that is something that I think it is certainly the case now that audiences do not know how to handle ambiguity. I'm not you know saying otherwise. And certainly when we look back at the 90s or something, it's like, oh my God, this was a ah civilization of geniuses. you know they like It's different. But I do think in a lot of what we've seen, and this is tied up in this idea of sentimentality that I was talking about earlier, there is a kind of a desire for trope or allegory in a lot of the movies that we've watched. I mean, I i think about, we did 19, I think it's 84's Mean Time, which is a documentary about street children. And that's a movie that is, you know, very hands-off, very like, presents the kids as what they are. It's not moralizing in that sense. But the choice of subject matter, the decision to kind of show you the kids, does have this real deep desire for like,
Speaker: They're good. like They're ambiguous. Some of them do bad things, but at the end of the day, there's a desire to show you the street children can be good. yeah you know We don't see them like do murder or something like that, which you imagine the Werner Herzog version where that does happen, and we're asked to still, if we can find it in our hearts, empathize with them somehow. Mm-hmm. So it does seem to me that there is a desire in this period for not perfect victims necessarily, although Randall Adams is quite close to a perfect victim. you know like He's like, and then I turned on the Carol Burnett show. and it like shows the like He really is you know truly... doesn't even like the cheerleader movie because, you know, soft porny. Yeah.
Speaker: But, you know, funny story about Randall Adams. Guess what he does after he's saved, basically, by... He sues him for money for taking rights to his life story. Oh, my God. He sues Errol Morris.
Speaker: So he isn't nearly the suffering saint he appears to be. And you know that if Herzog made that, he would have made the next documentary about him being sued. Yeah. Like, that would be the the obvious next move. Yeah. That's amazing. i Yeah.
Speaker: Actually, this is an interesting kind of full circle in a way. so i grew up in a world in which like the documentary was kind of what you wanted to do. like My wife grew up wanting to be a documentary filmmaker. That's what she wanted to do. um and Then she ended up going ah a different route.
Speaker: It was something to aspire to. right If you're growing up in the early 2000s, even into the early twenty ten s There's a sense that you can make a difference using the documentary as a form in a way that is not necessarily clear from fiction films. And part of this is that you know um PBS makes all these wonderful documentaries and HBO kind of gets involved in this more true crime-y world. Basically, there's a true crime renaissance, and that also assists in this.
Speaker: So when I think about a movie like this, it hadn't even occurred to me it sort of testifies to a moment in time in which documentary is recovered and in which you want someone like Randall Adams to be perfect and so and so forth. And especially now where like Netflix just shits out like the worst docu-series like four times a week.
Speaker: So there's something I think special about recognizing Gen X is existing in ah in a cinematic history where the documentary has a special place. Because we hadn't really thought about that yet. I think there's something incredibly notable within Blu-Line, which is that the There is no narrator. There's little omniscient Errol Morissar narrator. Yes.
Speaker: Which makes it so shocking at the end when we hear his voice for the first time, yeah. But there's also no fallible first-person narrator either, right? There's just an absence of of that, basically, at all. It's it's just interviews spliced together, effectively, with like you know bits of sort of reenactment and footage.
Speaker: But there's also an intensification of each individual through theteritron the Interatron, the thing he rigged up a camera so that the person being interviewed seems to be looking directly into your eyes. He actually he actually can see Errol Morris and is looking into his eyes. That's what he can see reflected in his camera lens.
Speaker: So he changes the way documentaries look before people would be looking off to the person questioning them. They'd be looking off camera and now you get this eye to eye. And they brought that back. Like that's a sort of classic move now.
Speaker: It's just that trope, isn't there, and in in contemporary documentaries where you get that kind of unedited five seconds before the interview starts where the the subject sort of sits down. And they look at the camera. That's the camera in the eye. So like adjust their collar, yeah adjust their hair. That's right. That's right. Exactly. Yes. And yeah, it feels like there's there's something of this in that film.
Speaker: It reminds me of the you know the Portrait Doc documentary was a big subset of the resurgent documentary. So they'd find oddball people, famous or not, who would become the subject of intense investigations. So Terry Zweigoff's Crumb about Robert Crumb and his brother Charles, who committed suicide, is one of the more vivid ones I remember. And they're very, very intensive, but it's all about like the precious uniqueness and meaning of this person and this person's life. And I think you get some of that. You get that with Michael Moore presenting himself as the main character of all of his films.
Speaker: I was going to say that that's an interesting point because in a Thinbley line are two protagonists, if you can call them that, Adams. and um Very much. It starts with the two of them, each one alternating narration about how they wound up meeting. Yeah, Morris isn't in ah in a way...
Speaker: He gives some of the backstory to Harris, I think, um later on in in the middle of the film, but not much. And there's no real building up of these two people into, like, still fleshed out human characters.
Speaker: Even though he starts as if he's doing doing exactly that by going, this guy's story, this guy's story. and You think that's exactly how it's going to go, but you're right. You lose that for quite a while, and then in the end you get David's backstory that supposedly explains how he's obviously the murderer. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: You also get in the middle that where Sam is talking about, you get these moments where you can begin to feel this pull away from this kind of co-equal move, which actually is interesting because it means that Adams gets no backstory at all. Like what makes him perfect is precisely that we know nothing about him. And of course it turns out he's not as perfect, but in the middle, right, you get this sort of lineup of like Cletus from Simpsons type guys who live in Viter. And they're just like, well, he he told me he did it on him. Believe me. Yeah. Like, And and it's it's this amazing thing where, of course, what Morris is saying is like, well, if any of these assholes have just asked, you know, any of these guys, this whole thing wouldn't have needed to have happened. that's fast One of the key hints points of the film is where I think it's the lady lawyer who makes the the the actually the most pertinent point in the entire film, which is that there's some momentum to to convict Harris, and then they realize he's too young to be tried on the death penalty.
Speaker: They're like, no, we need the death penalty. Like, this is a cop killer we're talking about. Like, we we need to secure the death penalty. Exactly. He's too young to be tried to the death penalty, so we've got to try Adams. That's right. That was sort of just kind of in passing, in and it doesn't get explained and entirely that much, but it says so much about a justice system that's more interesting in outcomes than that process, right?
Speaker: Yes, and in when featuring people who are clearly for railroading Harris, they're almost always shown to be just ideologically loaded up with some crazy, and yeah almost movie usually movie or TV-based idea of the world. So like the woman who was paid off clearly to... She saw, you know, that it was Adams and she's like, oh, ah detective stories. And then you get the montage and all she, or the cop tears up over the thin blue line. And, you know, so these people are so completely loaded with a meta narrative that they live by that that he really does a nice job of the hope, but he only does it for the people who are on the David Harris side. we We probably should talk about the irony of that, at least briefly, the term that I'm sure predates the movie to some extent, because of course the prosecutor, the DA, who's the one who brings up the thin blue line, says that, or no, the judge, excuse me, says that he hears it from the prosecutor. Right. no nus So it obviously pre-exists the movie, but I have to imagine that this movie plays a major role in what becomes this symbol in the United States for
Speaker: basically the anti-Black Lives Matter police movement, the Blue Lives Matter movement, as it's sometimes called. Yes. Like, that could not be kind of funnier. Like, I mean, like you would think you would pick a different symbol than the one that in the movie is quite literally the thing the judge is like, well, you know, I had my doubts, but then I just thought about how dadgum important those cops are. And I thought, well, you got to be guilty. You know, like, it's just... like literally in the movie is the thing that causes the injustice not causes but sort of like cements the injustice so i just it's insane in a way that's like maybe the final kind of like big gen x cynical joke of the whole thing is that like the title of the movie is now you know a bumper sticker that right yeah they should be and perhaps you can just now count on people not to see the movie they know the title
Speaker: But it at least seeded the idea. I have to imagine, because I know it was quite a big movie. like This movie was big enough. This is what saying earlier about documentaries. This movie was big enough that when I was a kid and I was doing my, like, ooh, I'm a young movie watcher and I need to see High Noon and you know Platoon, this was one of the movies on that sort of list. like That's how big it became, along with Crumb and several of these other documentaries. So at least at a time, it must have played a role in kind of inserting it into the the consciousness of the society. Yeah.
Speaker: I think, yes, these these late 80s films really led to the boom um in documentary. This and Roger and Me were the two biggies, and that was in 89. Which is funny, because Moore, of course, goes on to be something of like a clown. I mean, in a really like social sense. By the mid-2000s, he's being made fun of, he's constantly in the culture, whereas Errol Morris obviously doesn't occupy that same, you know, maybe I'm going out limb here, but is kind of maybe the two sides of some of the Gen X stuff we've talked about, because one of them does seem to be this centering of the self is this authentic expression of who I really am, and I perform myself, and blah, bla blah, blah.
Speaker: And then the other does seem to be this more, um you know, Coen Brothers style, maybe like I'm going to use this arrangement, this kind of idea of fragmentation, but it's in the interest of not protesting too much. The anti-protesting too much side of things. so Yeah.
Speaker: Nice. That's a nice summing up. I'm glad you're on the job there. He gave up a while back. It's Friday, so I guess maybe I'm just so out of out of gas that like whatever comes out could be good, could be bad, but it's it's coming out. so yeah Well, this was great. I feel like, yeah, I really learned a lot. This was a nice interrogation of that film.
Speaker: yeah i I mean, I feel I learned a lot about Gen X, and i think, can't really thank you enough for really just getting at what the thesis of the podcast is supposed to be that we you know continuously fail to bring up properly. It's quite exciting, because when you read about it, you think you're going to find something more illuminating. But to me, it's it's always the question of why don't you go one more step? Like when they keep saying...
Speaker: Gen X is all about latchkey kids because all the women go to work. And you're like, but why did all the women go to work? Well, it was one of the many ways we kept people's incomes going, you know, and then credit card debt under Reagan. And there were all these ways we shored up the decent life that were completely just saving off the worst.
Speaker: At some point, we need to do an entire episode that's just on economics. Yeah, absolutely. Always in these accounts, it's always one more step that doesn't get taken, I swear to God.
Speaker: And maybe that's actually a good point because you know part of our goal here in like foreclosing on the boomers or trying to address that as little as possible, which of course proves impossible, I mean, Errol Morris is a Beamer, right? Yes, that too. But you I think it's an important reminder, of course, that it's always an artificial exercise. that you know We can go back to World War II, which we could go back to World War I. And I think yeah when we talk about the material base for GenX, for example, right?
Speaker: um We're talking about this post-war world that we say it's falling apart. Well, the silent part is the it that's falling apart that we're not talking about that did get to happen. So, you know, that's always going to be sort of in the background. And I just think, you know, Gen X likes to talk about itself as the forgotten generation. This is very, you know, sort of the Korea vets of 20th century history or something. Mm-hmm. And I think we have been able to isolate these certain qualities that do seem characteristic that I think are are often forgotten now just in favor of think of Gen X as like pure cynicism, which is there. There is cynicism, there is irony. But I think they float around these various moral concerns, they float around these concerns with like what access to the truth means, if it's possible.
Speaker: um And they float around, you know, a world that seems dumb to us now, because of course you could still express yourself. But to people of the 90s was like, well, this sucks. This isn't the 60s. you know So, you know, you need to take it on its own terms, you know. um yeah i also think what's interesting is that the 90s currently undergoing a kind of mythologization in a way that the 60s might have in the sort of 80s, late 70s, 80s, right? Like,
Speaker: it It's even gone beyond the... I mean, we my my wife was terribly scandalized recently. So there were these awful shorts that were very popular. that You get an Old Navy when I was a child and she and they were these awful plaid shorts. Yes, I know them. I had a pair. Yeah. And I don't know what anyone was thinking, but they were ubiquitous. Everyone was a golfer suddenly. What the hell? Bizarre. And and like they were just awful, totally awful. Color combinations that had never been seen before or after. The point is, she saw a pair of these on like a teen girl, I forget where we were, and she was just like, it was like cold horror had just perched itself in her heart. Because it was like, how could this, of all things, be coming back? like Of everything. like the We knew this was bad at the time.
Speaker: So in other words, I think one of the things we're contending with, Sam, is the mythologization that's going to happen in history sort of no matter what. i mean When people think about Gen X, they're not thinking about the fact they're growing up during the serial killer epidemic in the 70s.
Speaker: It's, you know, I think about this a lot where we have changes, deindustrialization happened in my town, our factories are turning into luxury apartments. There are all sorts of things that I don't like about, you know, what what has happened to even my town in my lifetime, sure.
Speaker: What confuses me is that you have older residents who are 60, 70, maybe 50, who live through a lot of this stuff. It's what I find very confusing. like My dad will say, oh, they're going to behead you on the subway. And I'm like, you're alive in that 70s.
Speaker: like like What are you talking about? like Yeah, sure, maybe I'll get beheaded on the subway, but like have you seen you know Serpico? guess what I don't... i guess what i don't Something that is very interesting to me, the reason why this late 20th century period is interesting to me is because it it just happened.
Speaker: It's not that long ago. yeah But somehow it also seems to be totally forgotten. Like we only live now. There was there was never white flight however many years ago. There was never a period of, you know, for example, there's a huge immigration boom in the early 90s after NAFTA. I mean, watch American History X or Falling Down or movies like that. Like, these are things that come up.
Speaker: but Right now is an era of of real hysterical fear over the things that are the least concerned. Crime is down dramatically the United States, in cities. But people, especially anyone who's got any affluence,
Speaker: utterly terrified, completely like in their house with weapons. Now people would never have been gun owners, liberals now own guns because they're terrified because they think they're going to have a home invasion any second now. And they just don't seem to get, there's no connection to like, what do we really have to fear now? Or not know, but a weird dislocation when it comes to what we should be scared of and what we are scared of. or If you're in a suburban area, it's it's like even so much worse than that in the sense that it's like half of the local Facebook groups, which I you know i have to be in out of a mixture of duty and morbid curiosity, are all just license plate pictures of like, I saw this person driving 37 in a 35. I'm on one of them and where I am. And it's just like this man and they'll take a picture, walk by my house. Yeah.
Speaker: this This is baffling to me from my perspective. but i yeah i mean You're in the Detroit of the United Kingdom. so oh i mean i mean I'm in a situation where like people drive 180 miles an hour down like a 20-mile-per-hour street like every five minutes. every five minutes like There's like warehouse fryers probably once a week. like but You're living in what they're supposed to be remembering. What they're supposed to be.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very distant for me. um But yeah, it's at the the flip I'm looking at the post-industrial sort of midlands of of England. And um yeah, I think the decline here is pretty real.
Speaker: Okay. No, I'm sure you're right. You would know. i just, to to bring it back to the generational question very briefly, it just drives me bananas because I'm like... You're someone who presumably at some point like lived through the serial killer thing, you've lived through the oil crisis, you've lived through you know of all these things that you don't remember fondly. But you do have this fond memory, and you now see this from Gen X too, with like drinking out of the hose, playing outside.
Speaker: Things that i but I can understand why you'd be nostalgic about those things. Then now, every opportunity for those things is foreclosed as potential danger. So for example, like I see constant posts about kids in malls or at the the boardwalk. And it's like, well, do you want the kids inside or do you want them outside? do you want them playing the video games or do you want them...
Speaker: I was going to say, right, judge Gen X are the parents of Gen Z, right? And Gen Z are the of the the most agoraphobic, the most lonely, the most sort of like under-socialized, under-risked in some ways, like as a wary of risk generation as that has never been produced. and they've been produced by this kind of ostensibly punk rock milieu, right? Yeah.
Speaker: which really makes it sound like when they always claim that the Gen X starts all troubled, but then it becomes very solidly happy and stable. you Have you seen those those those reports? And I'm like, really? Yeah, but then if that's the case, how do we get how do we get Gen Z kids from from those very people who are so stable and happy with their lives?
Speaker: Well, yeah, they don't even do in a lot of cases. And listen, I'm not here to judge whether or not it's a good idea, but I know like sleepovers are very out of fashion right now, for example. and like Sleepovers were like 80% of my youth. like i yeah I don't even know what I would do if I couldn't like...
Speaker: go to my friend's house and, you know, make a kid like eat peanut butter until he threw up or whatever it was that we were doing. like You know, either i do yeah it's, it's, it's, I think it's, it's character. I mean, not to sound like a complete reactionary, but it's, it's character building to wake up with like a tube of toothpaste shoved down the throat. yeah so yeah this has been, ah you know, reactionary, a whining hour. the But Eileen, is there anything you wanted to to promote or plug beyond obviously FilmSug and your work at Jaguar? Yeah, my usual, you know, writing lots of film criticism for Jaguar. I can't even think of what I'm doing. What have I been doing lately? i You know, it's usually a horror show.
Speaker: Mission Impossible. The Final Reckoning! and so Did they bring back De Palma to direct direct to direct the final one? No, no, no. It's that guy who's been doing it for the last four times. De Palma's Ancient History. That was was actually an entertaining one. yeah that's a long That's eight films ago or something. Yeah, I have no idea what they're at now. But okay, Mission Impossible... check out Eileen's review, which will probably be out by the time this releases. Thank you Yeah, it's nothing too exciting. I've been, I, the things I'm more interested in, I've been finding a lot of um films that are really resonant about our tendency now toward censorship, persecution, blacklist, the the way it's heading for leftists and people who are outspoken in any way in America. And there's, there's a, there's a great film noir series on Criterion Channel, Noir on the Blacklist it's called. So there's a better piece that I wrote. It's, it's actually, it's, It's chilling ah what a tutorial it is in what's going on right now. so
Speaker: Thank you so much, Eileen. That's wonderful. thank you you so much. and A pleasure. Delightful. I always feel a little weird when someone likes a tweet of mine or something and I'm sort of deeply confused or repulsed by what I read in their bio.
Speaker: A comment I had made to someone else was liked by someone who is into a fuckton of kinks, Fyndom. Check Linktree for OnlyFans, Tributes, Telegram, and for ownership, devil emoji. so I'm trying to try desperately to try and pivot towards the film here. was fairly fond of the film like as a working reporter and journalist.
Speaker: Sam is now inserting dramatizations into all of his articles. He's saying, imagine if this had to sort of bracket it off. I'm asking my editor for a larger budget to hire character actors.
Speaker: yeah However, we also like your money. That's yeah This is, please sign up to be fin-domed by our podcast at patreon.com slash deathphotopod or join it in normal to your end. Yeah. If you have no money or if you've given it all away to some other fin-dominatrix on some other web website, you can just like, rate, and subscribe the podcast.
Speaker: See you guys later.
