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14. Phoenix (and Vertigo)
60 Plays1 year ago
We discuss Christian Petzold’s 2014 film, Phoenix, in all of its preposterously implausible and emotionally poignant glory. We also explore the film’s explicit connections to Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary 1958 film, Vertigo.
Intro and outro music: Candy Jail, by Silver Jews
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Transcript
Introduction to Candy Jail Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
I want to live in the city where if you are not schooled in Hitchcock or you can get beaten up on the street.
00:00:12
Speaker
True love doesn't come around. So hello, everyone. Welcome to Candy Jail, the podcast that once you enter, you can't get out from. We're happy to have you here for the duration. There is no paywall, but there is a wall and you can't break through it anymore. So there is a there's a paywall, but we're stuck on the wrong side of it, too. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.
Overview of Phoenix by Christian Petzold
00:00:37
Speaker
We're happy to have you here as co-captors.
00:00:40
Speaker
And today we're going to be discussing a unique film that clearly has antecedents but nonetheless does stand on its own in many regards as a unique cinematic experience. This is Christian Petzold's 2014 film called Phoenix. And
00:01:05
Speaker
Let me read actually Bremden the blurb from their criterion collection that explains this film before we jump into it, since we surely will have some listeners that are coming to us because they want to hear other people talk about this film that they've seen, but there might be some that haven't seen it.
00:01:26
Speaker
This is from Criterion, quote, this evocative and haunting drama set in Rubble Strune Berlin in 1945 is like no other film about post-World War II Jewish-German identity.
00:01:42
Speaker
After surviving Auschwitz, a former cabaret singer, Nina Haas, in a dazzling multi-layered performance, has her disfigured face reconstructed and returns to her war-ravaged hometown to seek out her gentile husband, and who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis.
00:02:04
Speaker
Without recognizing her, he enlists her to play his wife in a bizarre hall of shattered mirror story that is as richly metaphorical as it is preposterously engrossing. Revenge film or tale of romantic reconciliation, one doesn't know until the superb closing scene of this marvel from Christian Petzold, one of the most important figures in contemporary German cinema.
00:02:31
Speaker
So I thought just to make this as simple as possible, why don't we just discuss general takeaways, general impressions of the film?
Conflicted Feelings Towards Phoenix
00:02:43
Speaker
What was your feeling upon finishing the movie, Brendan? Conflicted feelings, I think.
00:02:57
Speaker
I struggled a little bit at times with the improbability of the pot. And I am not right now leveling that as a criticism of the movie. I'm saying it was something that I found myself struggling with in a way that I don't know is fair or not. This movie is in some ways a noir, visually and in terms of some of the pot devices.
00:03:26
Speaker
it is a noirish film and in noir we're not looking for realistic plots. I don't even like that word really when it's applied to storytelling. But there is at the heart of Phoenix, there is this idea that she, the main character Nellie,
00:03:50
Speaker
She had facial reconstructive surgery, which left her looking different than she had before, but not necessarily radically different than she had before. There are times in the movie when people recognize her for who she is, and there are times in the movie that people do not recognize her.
00:04:13
Speaker
I found that I was sometimes, I think, I felt like the movie was sometimes asking me to suspend my disbelief about that in order to reach the emotional truth of the scene, and I was struggling with doing that. But I don't know, I'm not ready to say that that's a flaw in the movie. And if there was a flaw in the movie, that would be it. I would say that and nothing else, because it's
00:04:37
Speaker
superbly well acted and beautifully photographed. And it is completely unpredictable from beginning to end. The opening scene where Nellie's friend is driving her pre-surgery, her face is covered in bandages, a bullet has plowed through her cheekbone. They are harassed by presumably bored US servicemen at a border checkpoint.
00:05:05
Speaker
And you just have no idea where the film is going from that moment until what is rightly regarded from what I've read as a absolutely classic ending. What about you, man? You brought this to me. I think you were pretty excited to share this one. Yeah.
00:05:23
Speaker
Well, just to respond in brief to one of your comments, I do think that the film demands that the viewer suspend their disbelief with the rules of the game that it's created.
00:05:35
Speaker
And if, for whatever reason, I think you were nice in how you framed it, which is it's not automatically the director's fault, per se, but certainly if you find yourself in a position such that you can't suspend disbelief based on the rules that the film has established, you're going to have a rough go of it.
00:06:00
Speaker
It makes sense why you struggled with the film. I did not struggle with it. I was able to accommodate the conceit in a way that did not impede upon just getting lost in the film.
00:06:16
Speaker
So I think anytime you have a situation where you're aware of the fact that you're watching a movie, unless it's an avant-garde, breaking the fourth wall, experimental film, which I might argue those films also suck in their own ways. Yeah, it's just going to be hard. It's going to be hard to like anything that you can't lose yourself. If you can't lose yourself in the film, in a work of art,
00:06:44
Speaker
and you're constantly aware of the fact that you're watching a movie, it's gonna diminish your enjoyment.
Recommendations and Emotional Depth
00:06:53
Speaker
So, okay. The film was brought to my attention from our possibly non-existent referenced person, Zachariah Phillips, big time cinephile,
00:07:10
Speaker
I would argue he's generally got very good taste in movies, and he certainly has developed and honed an ability to look at films critically. So when Zachariah makes a suggestion, especially one that's emphatic,
00:07:29
Speaker
I'm inclined to pay attention and this was one that he emphatically demanded I watch again and again and again until finally he visited. So unless I am Tyler Durden and Zach is my schizophrenic hallucination, we sat and watched the film together.
00:07:49
Speaker
And then I watched it a second time with you a couple of weeks ago. So I was primed to like the film because I hold my friend's taste in high regard. But that doesn't mean there haven't been films that he's recommended that I understand why they're good, but I can't get with them the way that he can. For instance, I hope I don't get myself in trouble here. There was like a three hour film called Hard to Be a God. I know if you've heard about this movie.
00:08:18
Speaker
The filmmaker took more or less his entire career to make it. He died before it was finished. It's an incredible like world building film. I understand why it's an achievement. I don't want to watch it again. He wants to watch it again. So okay, with that being said, I was immediately drawn into the
00:08:40
Speaker
story, I was immediately emotionally connected to Nelly. And I found the psychology and maybe the psychological truths that the film was trying to reveal to be consistently
00:09:05
Speaker
on point and at certain moments genuinely profound and cathartic to boot.
Balancing Emotion and Logic in Phoenix
00:09:12
Speaker
I found it never sort of got sidetracked into a it could have gotten sidetracked into a kind of Hitchcockian
00:09:23
Speaker
hyper-logical analytical mode at the expense of feeling, I think it always struck a pretty wonderful balance and maybe more often than not leaned more in the direction of feeling than logic back to your conceit issue. And maybe I was primed for that. Maybe my person, I don't know, it's hard to say, right, why we respond to certain things and other people don't, but
00:09:53
Speaker
If you agree with my general thesis here that Petzold was willing to explore feeling and lean into that more than some of the sort of psychological, thrillery contours of like a Hitchcock film with Vertigo being an obvious, inspirational film that he's riffing off of, I think it was the right choice for the subject matter of this film.
00:10:24
Speaker
Well, in a nutshell, that's what I liked about this movie. Let me ask you this. This is just occurring to me right now.
Hypothetical Changes to Phoenix
00:10:32
Speaker
Suppose that there is a version of this movie where everything is exactly the same, but she doesn't have surgery. Because the surgery on some level is, I think, meant as a metaphor for how she's changed because of the unspeakable things she's endured. So suppose she comes back from the camps
00:10:51
Speaker
And she has not had, her face has not changed. And some people recognize her and some people don't recognize her, but it becomes then entirely psychological because like in Johnny's mind,
00:11:05
Speaker
His wife is dead, but also he did not betray his wife, but she's dead. He's moved on. He's created his own sort of fictional version of what happened in the past. So when he sees his dead wife living and breathing in front of her, his brain can't take him any further than, you know, you kind of look like my dead wife. Do you want to be part of this scheme with me? Do you think the movie would still work without the surgery?
00:11:36
Speaker
That's an interesting question. I think that it could, um, maybe that was if the conceit is already impossible, like we have to on in many regards, even with the facial reconstruction, um, be charitable to the director with what he's asking us to do.
00:11:59
Speaker
in terms of plausibility with the situations that unfold with Lenny, in spite of, Nelly, excuse me, in spite of the reconstructive surgery. Because remember, when she's given options from the German doctor, the surgeon says, you know, do you want to look like, you know, fill in the blank famous German actress? And she says, no, I want to look like how I looked. And he said, are you sure? Yada, yada. I think that that's all there to
00:12:27
Speaker
In Petzold's mind, I don't know. It'd be interesting to actually see if he went on record about his thinking with this, but.
00:12:34
Speaker
It sounds like the surgeon did a pretty good job as evidenced by different interactions later in the film, certainly with the hotel groundskeeper that recognizes Nellie immediately. So we know that however she looked prior to the surgery,
00:12:58
Speaker
Um, she looks pretty close to how she looked from a non Johnny observer, but she looks different enough.
00:13:07
Speaker
that there's a certain amount of plausible deniability on the side of any character that might play confused regarding who they're bearing witness to. And in this case, obviously the most important character in that regard is her ex-husband, Johnny. So I would say, yes, it could still work, but I think it makes sense to just offset it enough
00:13:32
Speaker
that we then are given a little bit more realism injected into the surrealism of this implausible
Fictional Storytelling and Holocaust Truths
00:13:40
Speaker
scenario, if that makes sense. It does. I think I may see it a little bit differently though. And again, I'm literally just thinking about this for the first time. But
00:13:51
Speaker
You already brought up Vertigo, that is the obvious, probably first comparison point for this movie because it is, as you said, obviously that was a, there are many, many, many deliberate nods to Vertigo. When was the last time you watched Vertigo?
00:14:07
Speaker
two nights ago. I watched it in preparation for this. Awesome. Okay, so it's pretty familiar to me, but if I get this wrong, it's fresher in your mind, so correct me. But early in the film, as the mystery is unraveling, Scotty, the Jimmy Stewart character, is following this woman that he's been told to follow. She goes into a hotel, a little bed and breakfast style hotel. He sees her at an upper window.
00:14:36
Speaker
And then he goes inside and she's gone and the woman at the front desk says, no, nobody came in here, nobody's upstairs and there's no back door to this house, right? Is that a fair outline of how that plays out? Yeah, yes. Okay, so then the mystery has been heightened and then the movie plays out and it's sort of like one revelation after another.
00:15:01
Speaker
you get to the end of the movie and it all clicks into place except for that part. You realize there's no explanation for that part at all. And yet somehow, at least to me, it doesn't matter because it's as though the movie just said, hey, we're going to ask you to accept a little bit of magic here and you're just going to go with it.
00:15:28
Speaker
Whereas Phoenix, I feel like had the surgery not been a part of it at all, I would have been completely on board with what was happening. And had the surgery been used as a literal plot device more rigorously, I would have gone completely along with what's happening. It's almost like the Petzold needed to take the Hitchcock step and just be like magic.
00:15:56
Speaker
And because it didn't quite embrace the magic all the way, maybe it didn't work quite as strongly for me, even though it makes more sense on some level than Hitchcock's impossible scene.
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think I have thoughts on the Hitchcock comparison and I think there's more to be mined with that, right? But let's just pause for a second there and return to what's happening with the surgery and I'll double down and try to defend why I think it was a smart move. The themes being explored in this film
00:16:38
Speaker
And I wrote to you about this in our, we have to listeners an informal writing exchange that we do to prepare ourselves and just to hear each other's thoughts or to read each other's thoughts. So in my response to you, man, I wrote
00:16:56
Speaker
I think I do have a very high bar for fictional films dealing with the Nazi Holocaust because of the fact there is a veritable mountain of actual primary source material to draw from should one decide to educate themselves about this topic. And for that reason,
00:17:20
Speaker
There's a part of me that's, you know, I've heard science fiction, anti-sci-fi people make this statement. Or anti-fantasy fiction people make this statement. I think it's unfair, but I kind of get it, where they're like,
00:17:35
Speaker
Like real life and things that have happened to real people are crazy enough. And there's so many stories out there that have yet to be told. Why do you need to make something up out of thin air in order to tell a story when there's a billion incredible stories that are truly so crazy, they're hard to believe, but they actually happened.
00:17:57
Speaker
And I think that there's a logic to that argument that I can follow up into a certain point. But here's back to why I say high bar, but not I'm resistant completely to fictional renditions of Nazi Holocaust related films. There's some things that you can't get at.
00:18:18
Speaker
through non-fiction. And you wind up in these paradoxes that I think some of our most beloved authors have explicitly referenced in their own work. Fiction writers, right, that say almost as a imperative or as a North Star by which to make sense of what they're doing to themselves that
00:18:39
Speaker
You sometimes need to enter into the realm of fiction in order to arrive at deep truths. And you sometimes need to engage in certain forms of, we could say, exaggeration, certain forms of distortion, in order to highlight or illustrate something that can't quite be gotten at as paradoxical as it sounds by playing it straight.
00:19:01
Speaker
And I think this is an example of, that would be my bar, right? That's my measuring rod. What is your justification for engaging in fiction with a topic that has so much documentary material? You better have a good fucking answer. And it better be one that is not pretentious but coherent.
00:19:22
Speaker
And I think that the takeaway I had from this film and and why I'm I'm still doubling down with both the conceit and the surgery piece is it's dealing with the same themes that the documentary material is, of course, it's dealing with.
00:19:37
Speaker
grief, it's dealing with ego, death, it's dealing with psychic and bodily disfiguration, it's dealing with just a general displacement and disorientation from loss of identity on nearly every level, betrayal, all this stuff, courage, cowardice, and piecing yourself back together. Once the dust settles and you've survived a catastrophe,
00:20:06
Speaker
And I think what this film has accomplished or what this film did for me that that no number of documentaries have pulled off in my mind, which, again, it's like it's not about knocking a film like Claude Lonsman Showa.
Standards for Fictional Holocaust Stories
00:20:21
Speaker
That exists for good reason. And it's incredible for what it does. And it and it touches on everything I just mentioned. But it doesn't show you what it's like for a person to piece themselves back together after
00:20:35
Speaker
catastrophe of this magnitude. And for that reason, I could hear testimony until the end of time, and I don't mean that to diminish or to discredit the bravery and the historical importance of people going on the record to share that stuff.
00:20:56
Speaker
But it's different than actually being able to watch a character work through this in real time. And that's where the fiction comes in. And that's where I'm like, OK, he is showing me something that I've heard about. People have told me about. But now I'm watching it as if someone's really trying to work through it. And there's something about that that I found profound.
00:21:20
Speaker
and unique and novel to this film. And therefore, it met my standard of, what's your fucking justification? Okay, this is a good justification. I think you have a coherent defense as to why you've made this film. I think that's a persuasive argument. I'm not going to withdraw my potential criticism, but I'm not going to double down on it either because I think you make a really good point.
00:21:49
Speaker
And I think that the, I mean, everything in this movie, as in any well done story, I think comes down to the end, right?
Analyzing the Ambiguous Ending of Phoenix
00:21:59
Speaker
So let's just walk through that ending a second. So Nellie is Nellie, but she's pretending to be a woman named Esther in the presence of her husband. And her husband believes
00:22:16
Speaker
or is pretending to believe that she is not Nellie, she is Esther. She is Esther who looks enough like Nellie that she can pretend to be Nellie in front of their old non-Jewish friends that they used to hang out with in the artsy circles in Berlin before Nellie was taken away to a camp. And Nellie was a singer, Johnny was her accompanist. They sit down in front of these friends who believe they have just seen Nellie
00:22:46
Speaker
get off a train fresh, I guess, from being repatriated from ACAMP. And they go to this hotel they all used to hang out in, and Johnny professes his undying love for Nellie. He sits down, begins to play at her instigation the song, Speak Low.
00:23:09
Speaker
And as she sings, it becomes increasingly obvious to Johnny that she is really his wife, Nellie, whom he betrayed to the Nazis. And that revelation is culminated in the moment when she pulls her sleeve up to reveal the concentration camp tattoo, right? She finishes the song to dead silence. Johnny has stopped playing the piano. Nellie walks out of the building and presumably into the rest of her life.
00:23:39
Speaker
There's a lot there, but first of all, I think from what you've said before that you regard that as a fundamentally, I guess, hopeful ending in keeping with the Phoenix, the title of the movie. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. I think yes.
00:24:00
Speaker
Okay, so I agree that it can be read that way. I also think you can read it as completely the opposite and that it still works either way. And that might be the strongest argument I can make in favor of the movie is that what I read is the ambiguity of the ending is a perfectly true note with which to end any kind of examination of the Holocaust.
Themes of Identity and Passing
00:24:31
Speaker
So the other way that I think you can read the ending is that Nellie has spent the whole movie passing, passing for a non-Jew, passing for someone who is not discriminated against. She even protests to her friend at one point, I'm not Jewish, presumably because she didn't know that about herself or she'd been in denial for a long time. There's a throwaway, well, not a throwaway, but there's a passing line in the movie where it sounds like,
00:24:59
Speaker
She was in London and then she came back to Germany in 1938, which would be a very, very strange thing, a very, very strange time for a Jew to return to Germany, right?
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah, just to jump in just quickly, though, because I've read enough on this topic that I want to I want to show off a little note, but I want to actually contextualize this and give it some historical foundation. So, you know, Theodore Adorno, one of the most famous continental philosophers of the Frankfurt School who did escape to New York with other colleagues. And most famously, he was on very intimate friendship terms with the great
00:25:40
Speaker
Walter Benjamin who never made it out all these guys were jewish right adorno marcuzi is another big one who wind up being on many levels the most prominent leftist activist of the bunch she was the only one that i think
00:25:58
Speaker
maybe not the only one, but one of the most notable figures to put his feet both in academia and in activism in ways that Adorno and others were sometimes criticized for not being willing to, right? That aside, you'd be shocked, Brendan, at what I read regarding the resistance of people like Adorno in leaving Germany.
00:26:21
Speaker
Like they literally had to be dragged out of Germany late in the game when it was obvious. Like it's not just the writings on the wall. Like the blood is on in the streets, man. Like you're going to get fucking killed. Like, and they're all scream and not, they're all saying because they're fully assimilated. And from what I've read with Jewish, um, history as it's tied to Germany, um, this was a 19th century phenomenon. They received, they were in a golden era.
00:26:51
Speaker
From around eighteen i think was eighteen seventy to about maybe you could say nineteen by mar essentially, where you could be a doctor you could be just about anything aside from maybe holding high political office or certain aristocratic positions right but,
00:27:09
Speaker
Generally, every field was open to Jews, and many of them gladly assimilated themselves, changed their names, were baptized, completely had shorn themselves of any vestiges of Jewish identity, as most would understand it.
00:27:28
Speaker
And so to realize when you read about this, even Hannah Arendt was in a similar boat. She didn't identify as Jewish until she was identified as Jewish. And I think even once they were exiled in the United States, Arendt was a little different because she made that sort of a central facet of much of her subsequent philosophy. I think Adorno probably went to his grave being like,
00:27:56
Speaker
these fucking morons you know like on some level i'm not jewish i'm german before i'm jewish well in comes the nazi regime and in that particular moment they're going to remind all the jews who think they're german's what their primary identity is and so it's not that unrealistic when you look at like the actual historical examples of people who
00:28:19
Speaker
did make it out, but had to literally be dragged out. They were in such denial about the danger they were in. Yeah, no, I don't think it's unrealistic at all. I think that denial there is the key word, that that suggests that she was in denial about some aspect of her Jewishness before. In the same way that Adorno was and remained in some regards.
00:28:44
Speaker
And so then she survives, and then she's continually in her quest to find Johnny, her husband, her refusal to believe that Johnny betrayed her and her family to the Gestapo. I mean, at one point, she's trying to find Johnny.
00:29:07
Speaker
She tracks down a guy named Johnny and she then basically witnesses this other Johnny rape a woman in an alley. And then she just waits until the rape is over and then when the guy comes out she's like Johnny like she's she's even in denial about what is right in front of her like.
00:29:26
Speaker
She just saw a man that she thinks is her husband rape a woman and she's like, yeah, let me just wait until the rape is done and then I'll reintroduce myself to him and we'll ride off happily into the sunset. So she's basically in a state of denial up until the very end of the movie. And what she's trying to do is pass, you could argue, right?
00:29:47
Speaker
And in the final scene, who is she in front of? She's in front of these non-Jewish artistic types who presumably have survived everything unscathed, right? And welcome her back into the fold as though none of that ever happened. Just forget about the last five years, you know? And then her non-Jewish husband, who betrayed her to the Nazis,
00:30:15
Speaker
And what do they finally realize about her? They see the concentration camp number on her arm. Her identity as a Jew is reasserted, and that results in her voluntary segregation from the group that had just accepted her.
00:30:35
Speaker
If you read it that way, it's an incredibly bleak ending and I think equally as well earned as the argument that you can also make that it is a more hopeful ending.
Confronting Truth and Isolation
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah. And I feel like in a way, right? What you've helped me land on too is, and this isn't to knock your dichotomy. Like, is it hopeful or is it as gloomy? Maybe those are the wrong questions. Um, because I think of like, um, let's go over to the matrix, which I think borrowed this. I don't remember which Western philosopher, ancient Greek philosopher likely, uh, made some version of this statement, right?
00:31:16
Speaker
Maybe actually no this is this is play those allegory of the cave which is very i mean the matrix in many ways is a riff off play those allegory. The guy that gets out is confronted by reality.
00:31:29
Speaker
and it's extremely disturbing on many levels. Like, yeah, there's sunlight and that feels good, but from what I remember, it was actually fairly rough to acclimate to what was actually going on. And then he goes down and no one believes him, and obviously that must have brought psychic agony for the messenger, the one who got out. But if we then relate that to the notion of truth,
00:31:55
Speaker
and denial, and basically saying like, if you're in denial, if you're telling yourself a lie, whether it be a lie that you're completely unaware of, or a lie that you're dimly aware you're telling yourself, but unwilling psychologically to accept, I'm lying to myself, right? You're not confronting the truth. So then you get into these, these platitudes, like the truth shall set you free.
00:32:21
Speaker
There's obviously immense freedom that comes from the truth because how is any freedom ever possible if you're locked into a denialism? But nothing about that says happy. Nothing about that says you're gonna be okay. Nothing about that says your life is gonna be wonderful. And I think you're right to at least pause and go, what does Nellie's life look like after she's walked out of that door?
00:32:49
Speaker
I don't feel any sense of certainty that she's gonna be okay right in in the grand scheme i don't know if she's gonna recover or find a new life for have a new chapter that. That works for her but i do know that she has.
00:33:05
Speaker
disenchanted herself in the positive sense in a way that those other characters have failed to do. And in that regard, she's free in a way that they're not. It doesn't mean she's happy. It means she's worked her way out of something that they've failed to. Yeah, I think that's an important distinction. But it also makes me wonder about just the
00:33:32
Speaker
continuing impossibility of her situation, which is something that I think many survivors have written about.
Contrasting Characters: Lena and Nellie
00:33:41
Speaker
Certainly Jean Emery wrote about it. I think Primo Levy wrote about it. Both of which committed suicide, which I think is notable. Yes, yes. And Emery was another one of those guys who did not in any way identify as Jewish until the German government and the German people forced him to identify as Jewish. And
00:34:05
Speaker
It's an impossible thing to reconcile yourself to, that such a thing happened, right? Nellie may be walking out of that room, I guess, with the blinders off, having seen the truth that no one else was courageous enough to see, but that doesn't mean that
00:34:26
Speaker
it will allow her to move forward into a better life. I mean, it might. It's not to say that everyone who survived the Holocaust lived in confusion and existential despair and killed themselves. That would be far from the truth. But I don't know that the movie necessarily provides us enough information to be confident that Nellie won't go that path.
00:34:50
Speaker
And it's interesting, isn't it? I hope I'm not doing this film a disservice by tying it back to The Matrix again, but think of, I think it was Cypher who winds up betraying Morpheus with Agent Smith. And he's in The Matrix eating that steak that's clearly not real, but he's like, I think it's real because this is some convincing shit.
00:35:13
Speaker
reality is so unpleasant throw me back in here and just wipe my memory clean so I don't know the difference and I'll take it give it to me there's no doubt right that there's There's there are pros you could put it in quotes. There are things to be gained from maintaining from lying to oneself from living an illusion from maintaining one's ignorance and there are things to be lost by
00:35:43
Speaker
working your way out of that. And so I'm with you that like, it has nothing to do with positive life outcome in some sense, but I think I have to side with tell me the truth.
00:35:59
Speaker
I want to know. I don't want to be lied to. And if the situation is irreconcilable, I guess we're in another paradox where a character like Nelly or real people that go through all number of unfathomable suffering and survive have to live with reconciling with the irreconcilable. Like somehow you have to wear the irreconcilable
00:36:27
Speaker
around your waist, on your shoulders, and not let it hopefully eat you alive, but also not enter into yet another lie thinking you can smooth it out. There must be, I don't know, right? Because I don't know what it's like to grapple with experiences of this traumas of this magnitude. But I'm attracted to that idea of, I'm not going to think my way or feel my way or therapies my way through this trauma.
00:36:57
Speaker
But that doesn't mean I'm lost forever. But it does mean that this is something that just has to coexist with me. I think Amérie was, excuse me, that was like a weird, that was like my fucked up version of trying to do a French accent and it came out sounding Spanish. So Amérie.
00:37:17
Speaker
I think speaks to this fairly explicitly, that there is no smoothing this out. And in fact, honoring the experience in many ways demands not smoothing it out. But what that means for other people that aren't literary
00:37:37
Speaker
Talents like amiri who turned this jaggedness into the thing he needs to write about I don't know I don't know how that's dealt with When you're not trying to do something artistic or creative with it if that makes sense Yeah, it does And I think you're absolutely right. I I wonder too about the title so
00:38:03
Speaker
Phoenix obviously can be read as referring to Nellie, who rises almost literally from ashes and presumably is reborn at the end of the film. But it's also the name of the nightclub in the film where Nellie finds Johnny working. Is there any significance to that? Is there a double meaning to that name here because of its association with the nightclub?
00:38:31
Speaker
Or is it simply a nice poetic echo? I'd have to sit with that for a little bit longer. I think there probably is more going on there than just a poetic echo. I'm starting to think of the very thing you need to get away from is also the thing that saves you. And in this case, you needed to get away from the literal club Phoenix in order to actually be the Phoenix that gets out.
00:38:57
Speaker
But I also, you know, you can tackle this from other angles. Like, let's think of it this way. If the Third Reich had never seized hold of Germany, right? And we'd had no Holocaust, there would have been no reason for Johnny to hide Nelly. There would have been no inciting incident such as this, right? Where his, what would you call it?
00:39:27
Speaker
loyalty or his betrayal would have been tested in quite this way. But it did happen. And he did do what he did. He betrayed her.
00:39:37
Speaker
That reveals almost all we need to know about him. It cuts right to the core of his character. Had this not occurred, and it's like, who the hell would ever wish this
Human Nature in Extreme Situations
00:39:47
Speaker
to occur? But this is the case for us right now, right? With our partners and friends today. Very rarely are we confronted with scenarios that are so extreme that you're gonna wind up making decisions that reveal something extremely, extremely hard to access, either good or bad.
00:40:07
Speaker
And so another paradox that I'm thinking as we're teasing this out is if this was the experience necessary to expose who Johnny really was, she could have gone her whole life not really knowing who she was in bed next to. And this nightmare for all of its nightmarishness did give her that.
00:40:33
Speaker
This is what this is. And there's another element of that too, which is, would it have mattered? That is, had it not, had all that stuff not happened, she might never have known who she was in bed with because no extreme circumstance ever would have brought out that side of his character. And then would it have mattered in any way? In other words,
00:40:58
Speaker
I guess, how many of us are Johnny or how many of us are in bed with Johnny. We just don't know it because that set of circumstances hasn't happened. Definitely. I think even if we pull back and say, without a cataclysmic situation that we're confronted with,
00:41:19
Speaker
We do kind of catch little glimpses of this in other people and in ourselves at times that can be very uncomfortable and very disquieting. I mean, I think it's an unfortunate truth, although I don't want to make a blanket statement for all of humanity, but I do think there is a kind of truth in
00:41:43
Speaker
all of us having the experience of being betrayed paradoxically by those that we are closest to. And I don't think that means the closer you get to someone, the more likely you are to betray them. Not that kind of chain of logic, but more like humans are humans. And yeah, they do do things to preserve themselves.
00:42:09
Speaker
at varying levels, whether it's their status, their reputation, or in the extreme cases, their very existences, their bodily existence. And what we'll do to preserve that is not always flattering. So we've talked about the idea of everyone in this movie being in denial, but there is one person who is never in denial, and that's Nellie's friend, Lena, who is the one who
00:42:39
Speaker
is there with her from the beginning of the movie, drives her across the border, takes her to the doctor, gets her, you know, nurses her back to health. And she is the one who always and completely tells Nelly the truth. Your family is dead. You are Jewish. You survived because they shot you in the head and they thought you were dead, but you weren't.
00:43:04
Speaker
your husband betrayed you and they're setting up a new state for Jews in Palestine and my plan is to go live there, right? She seems to see this situation clearly at all times and yet she kills herself. And I guess that if nothing else, highlights the degree to which denial so often is a literal survival mechanism.
00:43:32
Speaker
And what does it say about those who are doomed to actually see things the way they are? Well, and let's get a little further here, scratch that a little more. So why does she kill herself in your mind? I think that she kills herself, and if I'm failing to remember something in the notes, she leaves a note behind for Nellie.
00:43:56
Speaker
If I'm failing to remember an important detail in that, I apologize, but I think she kills herself because she simply cannot reconcile herself to trying to live with an expectation of hope in a world that has proven itself to be the kind of world that she now knows it to be.
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's a piece of it. I would add to that, that her denial is that her vision for a new life in Palestine involves Nellie. And she was in denial over the power of love, however fucked up in its details.
00:44:45
Speaker
will magnetize people to their oppressors. In the case of Nellie, it's Johnny or those who betray them. And so when she realizes she will not be going to Palestine with Nellie, I read it as a denial that
00:45:08
Speaker
that it was possible without her. Or even maybe that it was possible, period. Maybe she was lying to herself about actually being able to renounce her German identity completely. There's that earlier scene when she says, I can't stand to listen to this German music. Maybe one day I will be able to again. And that's why they're listening to Speak Low, because it's in English. She's so disgusted with everything German.
00:45:35
Speaker
And in spite of that, I read the suicide in part as like, even though she is rightly, and I think you're right, soberly assessing reality, she discovered the painful truth that the irreconcilability of
00:45:59
Speaker
ever living in Germany again, or even being able to relate to oneself as having German identity is so existentially painful that she couldn't, she couldn't actually, uh, bridge that gap and physically bring herself to move to Palestine. So I think there actually is a denial going on there, but it's subtler and you have to, you have to fill in some blanks a little bit more, uh, than with Nelly and Johnny.
Character Obsessions in Vertigo and Phoenix
00:46:30
Speaker
That's fair. I don't know. You know, that's just me giving you my take on... Is it Lena? Does I pronounce it? I would have said Lena, but I... Lena, no. You're the pronounce... You're the pronounce guy. You need to help me. I sound like I haven't seen the movie. I watched the movie... I'm an American, one of the roughs, a cosmos, I contain multitudes. We just spent a week in Mexico and I think we firmly established that your Spanish is better than mine, so...
00:46:59
Speaker
I'm just saying like, I'm, I'm less, uh, I'd be less willing to die on the Hill of my interpretation of Lena's hang ups. Right. Then Nellie's and Johnny's and their friends.
00:47:17
Speaker
So you had brought up towards the beginning of our discussion the obvious debt that this film owes to Hitchcock's Vertigo, and in many regards riffs off of, even though it winds up being quite a different film. They're very, very different. But there are obvious commonalities, the biggest one being, what was the name of the
00:47:44
Speaker
Not the actress, I know the actress was Kim Novak, but the name of the character in Madeleine. Madeleine, okay. Madeleine, okay. So in Vertigo,
00:47:57
Speaker
Okay, Scotty, before realizing that he's the one that's been duped, goes through this whole process of remaking who he thinks to be just an unbelievably surreal doppelganger of sorts of Madeline, who in fact did not exist in that she was made up by the, what was the iron, the husband of the iron magnate in order to cash in on the death of his wife
00:48:28
Speaker
So Scotty doesn't know any of that. So in the latter half of the film, once he gets over his catatonic grief over his perceived loss of this woman who we wound up falling in love with, he attempts to then make her over in the image of Madeleine as he remembers her without knowing that it is in fact the same person. So there's obviously the biggest
00:48:56
Speaker
inter-film crossover, right? But let's, before we get into that, if we even want to, let's get into your earlier point regarding the scene that at the beginning, or in the first half of the film, Scotty has been given the assignment by, what was the, I don't know any of these people's names. His buddy who, it doesn't matter what his name is. That's setting him up.
00:49:24
Speaker
And he follows Madeline at this point, who he believes to be Madeline to that hotel, the bed and breakfast. He sees her, but then as you pointed out, when he goes in, she's nowhere. And you're going, this really is a supernatural element in the film.
00:49:44
Speaker
where other elements are ultimately explained by a very intricate but nonetheless grounded in reality plot twist. So what did you make of Hitchcock's decision to include that? What is even the point in your mind of letting that coexist with
00:50:05
Speaker
the other stuff i think it has at least two points. I suppose i should clarify you can explain away the. The situation i think by postulating. That the woman at the front desk of the hotel is in the employee of. Scotty's friend and she's been paid off so the whole thing has been staged for her to lie so i don't.
00:50:31
Speaker
I don't remember there being anything in the film that specifically precludes that as being a possible answer, but I think it serves two purposes. One is it's misdirection for us because at that point in the movie, we're invested in this whole story of Carlotta and the woman in the painting and the idea that this woman Madeline may believe herself to be like the reincarnation of Carlotta.
00:50:58
Speaker
right?
Influence of Vertigo on Phoenix
00:50:59
Speaker
She does her hair the same way. She sits in the museum and stares at the painting. And so Hitchcock is misdirecting us into believing that this is going to be a certain kind of movie so that we are blindsided by what comes next. But I think it serves that purpose in the film for the character of Scotty as well because Scotty needs to
00:51:21
Speaker
His defenses need to be down in order to walk into the trap that he's about to walk into. And what better way to get somebody's defenses down than to have them experience something that they cannot explain, right? I think that's why it's in there.
00:51:37
Speaker
I should really verify this before I repeat it on a podcast, so let me be very careful about that. I have seen all three of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, but not in a long time. I'm sorry, bro. So am I. I've not rewatched any of them in a long time, but I'm told by the internet that there's a scene in, I think it's the Dark Knight, where there's a car chase and they go into a tunnel.
00:52:03
Speaker
And it's broad daylight when they go into the tunnel and they race through the tunnel for 17 seconds or something and they come out the other side and it's nighttime. And it's often presented as like Christopher Nolan is such a great film magician that you don't even notice. And I will accept that if that is true, that I did not notice. But
00:52:24
Speaker
It's the kind of thing where after the fact I find out about it, and I'm like, yes, this is one of the many cards that I can remove from this house of cards to get the whole thing to come collapsing down. With Vertigo, I don't see that impossible scene the same way.
00:52:42
Speaker
If that makes sense. It does. I think the only counter argument I would make, and this is from a newbie because it's obvious from, I mean, I have seen the film before. I had seen it before going to film school, but, and, and so, and I know the cult surrounding both Hitchcock, but really this movie, uh, being one of the big ones that is just so, such a classic that people are obsessed with.
00:53:08
Speaker
In the logic of the film, so I, so I just, I don't want to get like beaten up in the street for not being as schooled in Hitchcock lore as some
00:53:19
Speaker
In the movie, right, we do get the scene of, I can't remember the actual name of Madeline, the woman that's playing at the wife. When she runs into the Spanish church and presumably kills herself from Scotty's perspective, we do get the reveal later on that she's manhandled by the husband.
00:53:46
Speaker
and then he throws the body of his actual wife down the bell tower onto the roof. That reveal, right? It would make more sense than to provide a reveal for the hotel. And the fact that Hitchcock doesn't make your theory untenable. I actually once you floated it out, I was like, okay, yeah, that could work. She could just duck out, hide in the attic of the hotel and it's part of
00:54:16
Speaker
the husband's ploy to make Scotty feel like he's going crazy or to buy into the supernatural elements of the situation. But the fact that that we do get the reveal in the church tower and we don't with the hotel, I think does does. I could see an argument being made that there's a there's a inconsistency then in how Hitchcock was dealing with the magic tricks of the film. If that makes sense.
00:54:45
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm second guessing myself now because I feel like there is something in the film that prohibits my explanation from being actually tenable, but I could be misremembering.
00:54:57
Speaker
But I don't know that it affects either of our arguments either way, really. Well, and I might have got us off into the weeds here with asking these granular questions about a film that's really not on the agenda today. And so let me try to link it back up with a more solid connection to Phoenix. My question is,
00:55:21
Speaker
There's obviously a connection between the character of Madeleine in Vertigo and what's happening there with Scotty and the character of Nelly and what's happening there with Johnny and their relationship. And this is an obvious overt and explicit nod to Vertigo. But that could still be superficial, right? You could still say, OK, but beyond that, beyond that general sort of character dynamic,
00:55:50
Speaker
that's playing out here where one is remaking another with certain variables change, but fundamentally you have the same situation playing out in many regards. That could still be more or less a superficial connection if that's where it starts and stops. Do you see any argument to be made that there's more happening between those two films than just the simple game that's being played here between characters?
00:56:19
Speaker
Well, I don't know if this is more, but the obsessiveness. It's not simply a matter of each film dealing with someone playing with identity or having their identity played with. It's that it's obsessive in both cases. After Scotty finds Kim Novak again, he obsessively tries to remake her into Madeline more and more extremely. So first, she
00:56:47
Speaker
is willing to go along with a little bit of it and then he just pushes and pushes and pushes until finally the hair has to be exactly right, the dress, the makeup, the dinner table culminating in the trip to the mission. And it's absolutely obsessive on his part. He's monomaniacal by the end of the film.
00:57:09
Speaker
And in Phoenix, it's Nellie who is obsessive. It is Johnny who originally comes up with the scheme, but then he pretty quickly decides it's impractical and he wants to back out, and she begs with him, like, please let me pretend. Let me pretend to be myself, right? And she is obsessive about it.
00:57:32
Speaker
I feel like that is where the parallel really becomes obvious is in that obsessive fixation on assuming an identity that is simultaneously the actual identity you already had.
00:57:48
Speaker
This is good. So let's, I think you've actually helped me solidify that there is more than a superficial connection. So let me take us back to Vertigo. I don't know if you remember the final scene, literally the final scene. He's back up at the mission and he's confronting her because she reveals inadvertently that she was in on the job by keeping that necklace that Madeline owned that was given to her by the husband.
00:58:15
Speaker
So he attacks her and is like, you piece of shit. You know, you think I was too dumb to understand this. You got too greedy by keeping the necklace and you know what you fucking put me through yada yada. She's crying. She's despondent. And then in her panic despondency, she actually does confess, which we learn earlier on as she's writing a note, uh, deciding whether or not to meet Scotty for the first time as her actual self saying, I actually fell in love with you.
00:58:43
Speaker
So it's like this delicious mess where she's not who she purported to be, who she played herself off as, but she nonetheless fell in love with this man, even though it was her job to deceive him. Now he has been disillusioned and realizes the deception. She then confesses, I actually fell in love with you. And they have a final embrace and kiss that's passionate as real,
00:59:13
Speaker
the real not Madeline and Scotty being Scotty. Then the nun emerges and I actually don't know what the psychology was there. And it's okay. It's not like it's a, what would you call it? A flaw in the film. It's just, it's, it's left ambiguous why she throws herself from the tower. I think she thinks it's the ghost of the murdered wife. Wow. Okay.
00:59:42
Speaker
I thought it could have been like a Christian guilt thing. She saw a nun and jumped out of the tower. As a recovered, guilty Christian, I can vouch for the fact that literally anything could be a Christian guilt thing also.
Theme of Reality vs. Simulation in Phoenix
00:59:58
Speaker
That would be a good bin, and by the way, the guilty Christians.
01:00:02
Speaker
Anyway, so that aside, why she throws herself out, there is a moment of genuine reconciliation and he then realizes he is in fact still in love with whoever this woman is. That's how I read it. And before they could then consummate that love for the first time completely unadorned of bullshit and deception, she throws herself off the tower and it's over.
01:00:29
Speaker
with Nellie when Johnny realizes, finally, there's no more room to be in denial. This is his wife. Here's my counterfactual that I want to ask you, the what if of both films. What if there had actually been then a conversation where Johnny was like, I fucking betrayed you. And even the scheme is
01:00:56
Speaker
is undoubtedly revealing to both you and myself how big of a piece of shit I am. And I'm ready to own that and all of its shittiness and do whatever it is I need to do to earn your not trust, because that's probably permanently damaged. But if you still do love me,
01:01:16
Speaker
however fucked up this is, I'm here and I'm not after your money. You keep your money. But if you want me around, I don't know what the situation would have been, but both films end with the impossibility of the connection surviving. In Vertigo, it's done with a physical like this person just killed themselves. So that's a natural terminus point.
01:01:44
Speaker
With Nellie, it's just psychological. They could have, I suppose, however twisted it might have been, tried to make that work once all the deception was on the table and exposed. Could that have played out? Would that have been interesting? Why do both films end with separation?
01:02:13
Speaker
Well, I have two answers to that question for Phoenix. My first answer is that the movie does flirt with that because when they're riding around on the bicycle one day, Nellie proposes to Johnny a hypothetical situation in which his betrayal was more or less accidental. And he does not even respond, right? And he could have seized on that.
01:02:41
Speaker
And because she's basically saying, hey, look, I'm offering you a way out of this. And he could have seized on it. And then they could have moved forward with that narrative that on in both of their hearts, they would have known that that narrative was false. But it might have been enough for them to build up some kind of life going forward on right? My second answer is this gets into forgiveness of
01:03:13
Speaker
oppressors, forgiveness of people who commit genocide, forgiveness of Nazis, which is a deeply personal choice as far as I can see. I need to silence my notifications here. I don't think, I don't know how audible they are. And that's a different movie, right? And there's a scene in, this is a random reference, but it just popped into my head.
01:03:41
Speaker
The HBO miniseries Band of Brothers about Easy Company and the European theater and the Second World War, each episode opens with an interview, an excerpt of an interview with one of the actual veterans who's being portrayed by an actor in the movie. And one of them is Dick Winters.
01:04:02
Speaker
who is asked the question basically when you're about to jump out of the plane to go into battle for the first time, how do you prepare yourself? And he says, he just shakes his head dismissively. He said, he obviously has no interest in answering the question. He says, each man must do that for himself. And that's all he has to say about that huge, huge question. And that's kind of when I imagine like putting myself in the role of a Holocaust survivor,
01:04:30
Speaker
and then asking the question to forgive or not to forgive, I just imagine an old man shaking his head and saying, each man must do that for himself. And it would be, I think, that's a conversation that the movie is
01:04:47
Speaker
not interested in having because it's a conversation that comes after the conversation the movie is interested in having, which has to do with acknowledging the truth of what happened. Once you've acknowledged the truth of what happened, then you can move on to, do I forgive? Do I refuse to forgive? Et cetera, et cetera. Does that make sense?
01:05:07
Speaker
It does, but it also, I feel, is complicated in both films, but certainly more so in Vertigo, where someone actually dies as a result of the truth being revealed. Now granted, maybe she was afraid and thought she'd seen a ghost, and it was a heightened emotional state. But you could read it as, actually, it's the truth that killed the person. So it had this double effect that really pulled Scotty in two directions.
01:05:36
Speaker
in one direction it actually pulled him towards loving the actual person who was in front of him, but it also pulled her in the direction of a panicked actual suicide that destroyed any possibility for the survival or a future with those two characters. And I think at that second point, it's the same with Phoenix, which is
01:06:05
Speaker
wherever Nellie got to in that final scene for herself, it destroyed the possibility of that relationship surviving permanently. And maybe for him too, but I'm more interested in her psychology than his at that point. But there's something interesting there, right? What the truth is both the thing that helps you move on, as you said, and maybe get into, now I get to decide whether I forgive or not.
01:06:32
Speaker
But it also has a destructive element, even if that destruction is maybe ultimately the ashes from which you emerge whole from again, if that makes sense. I don't know how Scotty emerges from the destruction of Kim Nolak, but... Yeah, the very final scene of the movie would seem to suggest that he does not
01:06:59
Speaker
I mean, I don't know that the separations in the movie are analogous. Scotty's final separation from Madeline at the end of Vertigo is self-imposed. If he had not been obsessed with making this a woman into what he thought the other woman was, if he had been able to actually see what was in front of him,
01:07:31
Speaker
He would have found a woman who was real and who loved him that he would have been able to build a relationship with. Yes, she goes along with this scheme. She's a single woman living in the city and she does this for money. She does it because she's pressured by a man.
01:07:53
Speaker
Those to me are very understandable sins. And then she apologizes. And that, OK, that's it. She is not an evil person. She got caught up in something bigger than her. She made some bad decisions for understandable reasons. And she apologized. She has done her part to get herself out of this trap that the two of them have created for themselves.
01:08:19
Speaker
And then what kills her is ultimately a deus ex machina because the movie, I think for various emotional psychological reasons, needs to end on an incredibly bleak note. But it's ultimately all Scotty's doing. He has created this trap for himself.
01:08:39
Speaker
Whereas the separation at the end of Phoenix, I think, happens actually because they were not willing to trap themselves. Nellie eventually figured out the truth, and Johnny, not that this is to his credit, but Johnny refuses tacitly Nellie's offer to live in the lie. I mean, he chooses a different lie, but
01:09:05
Speaker
is like so maybe the question that i'm getting to is what's going on with johnny when they're on the bicycle and she gives him a get out of jail free card and he doesn't refuse it but he doesn't pick it up yeah i think that the for me again like where i was willing to suspend disbelief with petzold's film with phoenix
01:09:26
Speaker
I also was, I thought he did a good job of continuously inviting the viewer to guess at how much Johnny really knows just by reading his facial expressions at different points. Like the first time he actually sets eyes on Nellie, you kind of do wonder like, wait, this is almost a look of recognition. There's a scene when he comes down the stairs after he's given
01:09:52
Speaker
uh, who he's pretending not to be Nelly. I'm going to argue that there's an unconscious awareness that, that he knows, um, when he comes, opens the door and she's wearing that dress with the makeup and she's dyed her hair and really gotten pretty damn close to what she looked like before everything.
01:10:10
Speaker
And his look is one of clear recognition. I read it as he knows he's looking at actual Nelly, and then he immediately follows it up with, it's all wrong. Your makeup's fucked up, your dress is fucked up, and that to me is his way of protecting himself from the pain of actually having to be face-to-face with real Nelly. And yet, I just wanna go back to your vertical point.
01:10:37
Speaker
Obviously, Scotty did not survive a extermination camp, right? But if you remember, this destroyed him. He lost a fellow police officer. Actually, it's a little ambiguous. It seems like the guy slipped. And then he turned it into my vertigo, caused him to die. But it becomes a real psychological hang up. When the love of his life dies, he winds up essentially in a mental asylum for a year in movie time.
01:11:05
Speaker
like an adamant object practically. He's catatonic. So this destroyed him. This destroys Scotty psychologically.
01:11:15
Speaker
And so I wouldn't be so quick to let Madeline off the hook, even though she was the one that was approached, not the mastermind, right? Just in terms of how much damage this wrought on the person of Scotty, the characters of Scotty. But here's another piece, man, that I think ties them together. Both are interested in the real versus the simulated. So Scotty,
01:11:42
Speaker
is so obsessed, as you put it, with his image of Madeline that he fails to realize Madeline is, in fact, in front of him. And then you're confronted with the, again, delicious and agonizing reality that he's somehow more attracted to, pathologically committed to a simulation than the real thing.
01:12:06
Speaker
I wonder if there's an equivalent or a sort of analogous exploration of wanting the simulation over the real thing playing out in Phoenix. Yes.
01:12:24
Speaker
Well, and I think that this goes again back to the ambiguity of the ending because Nellie does spend much of the film wanting the simulation. Of Johnny. Of Johnny, right. And she's totally willing to enter into this grotesque simulation where she's living with him, but they're not man and wife and she's going by another name, even though she desperately wants to be recognized as herself and so on and so forth. Then in the end,
01:12:55
Speaker
She leans into the simulation, right? She embraces the role that everyone in that room wants her to play. And in so doing, it isolates her. She isolates herself. This is where I come back to the idea that this may be a very bleak ending, but a very truthful one because
01:13:24
Speaker
this simulation should break her, right?
Concluding Thoughts on Phoenix
01:13:27
Speaker
Or it should isolate her. Like she shouldn't, she can't be back with these people, right? Like there was a point, I guess, if you were a German, a non-Jewish, non-discriminated against German in Germany during World War II, there was a point at which there really wasn't anything you could do, right? Like there was a point at which if you started resisting
01:13:52
Speaker
you are just going to end up in the ovens with everybody else. So it may be that not everyone in that room is, and this is a big maybe, but it is a possibility that not everyone in that room is morally culpable for her victimization. But all of them
01:14:14
Speaker
welcome her back with the expectation that life will simply somehow resume as before. Nobody seems particularly interested in what she endured. Nobody seems to wonder if maybe she wouldn't want this life back. They're all clearly in denial, and they are all morally beneath her at that point. She should not want to be a part of that group anymore, so the simulation
01:14:43
Speaker
shouldn't work for her, and it doesn't, if that makes sense. It does, and that's why I think there are still inflections of hope in the gloominess of the isolation that you're describing, from snapping to the fact that living within the simulation is untenable.
01:15:05
Speaker
smashing yourself back into the box of old Nellie. Even if you look more or less how you looked and you've regained your ability to sing is untenable within this context. You know that there's no survival in the simulation. There's the possibility of survival beyond it.
01:15:26
Speaker
And so that's where I feel some hope still in spite of in that moment, the profound isolation she must have felt. There's no surviving if you don't get out of it. And there's at least the sliver of a chance of landing on your feet if you can extricate yourself from it. I may be coming around to your way of looking at this. I still have my reservations, but
01:15:54
Speaker
I am certainly at the very least impressed by the deftness with which so much complexity is conveyed through such simple moments of filmmaking.
01:16:07
Speaker
And Zizek does a wonderful, like, I mean, I don't, I'm not a Lacan expert, nor am I a Freud expert, but he does a wonderful, as he would call it, Lacanian analysis of Hitchcock's films in general. And he definitely has very different ideas about what's going on between Scotty and Madeline. I think for reasons that we would also get without Lacan training, which is the situation is just so very different from the one presented to us in Phoenix.
01:16:36
Speaker
even if these other commonalities are there between the two films. He gets that, I think in so many words, the impossibility of actually getting what you most desire and therefore needing it to cease to exist in order to remain in the realm of fantasy, which sounds like a brilliant
01:16:58
Speaker
a Zizekian way of discussing maybe in hyper-academic terms like the pitfalls of pornography in the modern day and potentially or arguably the damage that's wrought on humans' inability to connect with flesh and blood human beings because of the way that we
01:17:27
Speaker
have given ourselves over to these virtual fantasies. Anyway, that's its own can of worms. I just wanted to make clear that for all that is worth comparing and contrasting between these two films, there is a point at which you have to sort of treat them as their own works of art that are getting at different things.
01:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, and ultimately Vertigo is not about, I mean it's, volumes of ink have been spilled about that movie and the male gaze and the sexual power dynamics and everything. Ultimately it's a movie about two people, right, one of whom is deeply fucked up, whereas ultimately Phoenix is about something much, much larger than that.
01:18:18
Speaker
And I think I do, after only having been introduced to Phoenix by you recently and having known Vertigo for a long time, I think I do find Vertigo the more haunting of the two films, even though its themes are arguably insignificant beside the themes of Phoenix.
01:18:36
Speaker
Phoenix is a fascinating movie. It's definitely one I would be willing to revisit at some point. And if anybody out there somehow is still listening to us at the 90 minute mark and has not seen this movie, you should go see it.
01:18:49
Speaker
Also, just a tip to Scotty, if we could go back in time and shake him a little bit. Hey man, whether she threw herself in the San Francisco Bay because she's being paid to do it, or because she's actually disturbed and thinks that she's possessed by a ghost,
01:19:08
Speaker
don't date this person. That's a red flag. Well, that makes me think of maybe I'll close with this. I want to tell this story on the podcast. You and I were in San Francisco together one time. We were walking down the street in a neighborhood that has a lot of signs. I think it's North Beach, but it has a lot of signs identifying it as Chinatown because the historical Chinatown was there.
01:19:36
Speaker
We were on a crowded street and your phone rang. It was your friend calling you and you answered your phone and listened for a moment. You said, no, man, we're in San Fran, in Chinatown. Yeah, all right, I'll call you later. And then you hung up your phone. And this woman was walking beside us and she sped up so she could pass us. And as she passed us, she spat out at you.
01:20:01
Speaker
We don't say Chinatown and we don't say San Fran. And then she speed walked around the corner and disappeared from sight. And this was God, six or seven years ago now. And I've been absolutely fascinated by that woman ever since. And I think the moral of Vertigo, maybe just don't date people who live in San Francisco.
01:20:20
Speaker
Well it's funny you say that because I actually have been haunted by that woman and her sonorous voice ever since and if she's listening now I just want you to know I love you.