Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back. Death is a photograph, culture at the end of history. i'm your co-host, Chase Biduzniak, here with my co-host, noted orange man, Sam McGilliga. How's it going, Sam?
Speaker: I just feel ethnically attacked at this point. And we're here today with the Eddie Averill of the Extended Clip Podcast. What's going on, Eddie? Not much. Did you say you felt ethically attacked or ethnically attacked there?
Speaker: I was going to like leave that strategically ambiguous. Okay, okay, okay. Well, thank you for having me on. ah No problem. It's our pleasure. We're having you on today to talk about Magnolia because i was you know listening in to Extended Clip, as all of our as-yet-nonexistent listeners should do. Thank you. And you talked about having a certain kind of relationship with it over the last, you know, whatever couple decades, and thought you came to a kind of realization about it. So maybe tell us a little bit about that, then we'll talk Magnolia.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. So on a recent rewatch of Magnolia, I kind of had a bit of self-effacing moment, I guess, where i was um you know I was prompted to take another look at this film because...
Speaker: I had looked at like um something on Letterboxd and just like looking at my diary entries for the film. And looking back, I was like, oh my god. From 2015 2016, re-watched this movie eight times or something like that. you know And on Letterboxd, you see, you know, five stars, five stars, five stars, five stars.
Speaker: And then you go a little further, and it's like 2020, I rewatched it again, or 2019 or something, and it was like three and a half. And I remember that experience, and I was like, huh. It's kind of a funny arc there, and I wonder how I would feel about it these days now. And, you know, it's a film that meant a lot to me at a crucial age, coming into cinephilia, right?
Speaker: and coming into adulthood simultaneously. um you know i wasn't like one of those kids, like fucking Spielberg running around the backyard with an eight millimeter camera trying to remake you know Flash Gordon serials when I was eight years old.
Speaker: I liked baseball and comedy, you know and I only took movies seriously as an art form once I got into college. And So it was at that time that i became obsessed with Paul Thomas Anderson as any 18-year-old new cinephile should, particularly because i was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley where most of his filmography takes place. So Magnolia is a film that for so many younger cinephiles and cinephiles in general, like really wows people with its
Speaker: sense of bravura and the very active camera and the accomplishment of weaving this grand tapestry of characters together. And it's, you know, veer into near surrealism or at least biblical implications at the end. And it's a film that also...
Speaker: a lot of people have cooled on over the years, particularly from an auteurist standpoint. Um, it doesn't help that Paul Thomas Anderson in a now rare interview, because he rarely does like long form ones at least, uh,
Speaker: You know, it's wrong to say that because his last couple projects, he's been a little more forthright. But through the middle period of his career, at least, he was quite elusive as far long-form interviews go. And so on that classic Marin episode, he talks about how Magnolia was too long and he regret certain things about it. And he wished he could have cut a couple of the plot lines out or whatever. And I feel like that kind of just like within the auteurist circles set the wheels in motion for the, what what would be the opposite of a reclamation project, a dethroning project, I guess. And,
Speaker: Also, just like these end of history, we are all connected, mind equals blown ah subgenre of films started really getting the short end of the stick because, yeah, all of the auteurs behind them had either matured or burnt out, you know? And i think that also it's just like...
Speaker: we are so ideologically and just in terms of our material reality so far from that end of history, late ninety s American milieu that people have a hard time taking those movies at face value these days. You know, like...
Speaker: movies like this and movies like Fight Club. You know, these are the ones that throughout the 2000s and throughout most of the 2010s, when people talked about 1999 as this like watershed year for cinema, they often led with Fight Club and Magnolia, you know, and Three Kings also. And so, you know, um what's his name? I almost called him fucking David Foster Wallace. The other three name hack, David O. Russell. Not that David Foster Wallace is a hack. I'm joking around here. Let's be fucking clear. Well, you don't like Spank the Monkey?
Speaker: i like... You know what? I actually do like Spanking the Monkey. I think he has become a hack. I think David O. Russell has like three good movies or so. But Three Kings is not particularly one of them in my opinion. Yeah.
Speaker: But regardless... He's one who burnt out. And then the other people from that period, like Tarantino, Fincher, ah the Coens, all kind of had a perceived bit of maturation. And that perception is correct, I would say.
Speaker: So it's like people are easier to look down upon films like Magnolia now, especially like... pairing it with Boogie Nights through the lens of pastiche where people are more attuned to Robert Altman's 70s films and the Scorsese and Robert Downey Sr. films that Paul Thomas Anderson was so heavily influenced by that they can almost see those pastiches like ah That level of pastiche is like a shortcut the way that people criticized Tarantino in the moment, you know? Yeah. And...
Speaker: Also, it's like... It's a luxury problem because the dudes just like made masterpieces nonstop to the point where now Magnolia is not seen as one. And I understand that too, but like...
Speaker: I think it's really just by virtue of his mature period being so fruitful, as well as cinephile tastes and in general pop cultural tastes being so far from where they were 25 years ago, that Magnolia is not held up the same way it was maybe even 10, 15 years ago No, I think you're right. It it probably, yeah I would say at least 10 years.
Speaker: You mentioned Fight Club. We had Matthew Spector on a while ago, who was producer on that and founder of the LA Review of Books. And one of the things we talked with him a lot about was, I guess, what what felt like the timely the timeliness of that movie or the way that if you grew up when I presume everybody here grew up, it had a kind of mystique or a power, both in terms of the form and the content, that made it feel like very urgent.
Speaker: like I can remember you know watching Fight Club at the same time as I was looking up Camus or Kierkegaard quotes or something online in high school and being like, oh, this is the fucking shit. And i I guess what we came to in that interview...
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, the sense that the moment has passed, that a lot of the problems actually persist, but the sort of solutions that seem to be proposed by a movie like Fight Club are just totally you know mean nothing to us. But I guess what's weird about Magnolia is the solution, insofar as the movie imagines a solution, is totally different. I mean, I mentioned this in the notes, but it's like a very weirdly moral movie in a certain sense. It's it's a movie that...
Speaker: you know I don't know if it's going to church exactly, but you've got all the Exodus A2 things everywhere. Obviously, that plays a large part in the frog scene at the end. But it's also just a movie where characters' motivations feel strangely pure. like Characters who now, I feel, would never be given the chance to regret are given the chance to regret very strongly. So I think about Julianne Moore's character, who is you know married to this dying producer, has not loved him the entire time.
Speaker: i don't know how necessary it to give backgrounds. This movie's been out for so long, but I'll do it anyway. And she goes to the lawyer while stealing his medication that he's on in hospice and is like, I have learned to love him through the process of taking care of him and therefore don't want to take all of his money when he dies.
Speaker: And so it's this strange, almost like faith in humanity or the ability of the human spirit to go somewhere good in times of trial, which is definitely not Fight Club's approach to the end of history whatsoever. but also like not necessarily one I even fully associate with Paul Thomas Anderson. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Chase, that it's there's an odd clash in this film that I sort of identified on second watching. I think i I first watched this film at about 13, so probably, God, 2010, 11, something like that.
Speaker: And this is my second watching in like 10 years. And it definitely didn't hold up for me in the way that it did on first watching. But I think the interesting thing found was that it's this film that's framed from ah you know the first opening clip as being a film that's about non-linearity, post-modernity, coincidence, chance.
Speaker: so fragment fragment tree sort of sort of, you know, chaos. And yet at the same time, almost all of the characters are sort of like classic tragic archetypes out of like A.C. Bradley or something. like shake They're like classic Shakespearean tragic figures who follow these very like neat and defined light curves from like initial wrongdoing to like revelation to catharsis.
Speaker: like It seems to be a film that's like deeply concerned with catharsis, which to me doesn't particularly like follow or echo or mirror the postmodern structure. I think it's a very 90s film in that way. like it's so It's very confessional.
Speaker: It is a definitely very confessional film. And I think that what you identify with this whole coincidence and chance thing being at odds with those tragic archetypes is that I think really what the film is getting at is this perfect storm of catharsis is that all of these tragic archetypes can intersect at one time. you know Because like...
Speaker: You're completely on the money there. And if I were to generically define the film, it would be that of a melodrama first and a city symphony second. And so, and first of all, obviously that is an incredibly postmodern genre clash. Oh yeah. So,
Speaker: In his probably most postmodern film, despite the fact that Boogie Nights is quite literally a pastiche machine, he is like playing with yeah classic archetypes going all the way back to biblical storytelling, basically.
Speaker: And I think the flaws in it are really only that he's biting off more than he can chew. I think it's a maybe one of the more ambitious, dramatic films in Hollywood history. And it only comes up short because it's written by like a 28-year-old and someone who doesn't understand a full experience of a life lived the way that he would be able to write the movie now, for example, I think.
Speaker: But yeah, I think that's really like what quote unquote doesn't hold up for me about this movie is that like when you watch it at 19, you think that this guy or 13, you think that this guy has figured out the universe. And then once you maybe have approached the age that he was when he made it or have passed that age, you realized that it's a short-sighted but incredibly ambitious film.
Speaker: It's youth imagining age too, right? Which is what makes it kind of weird. Like... This is a guy who's already made it, not even 30 years old, who's deciding he's going to make a movie about what life looks like at the end of that industry. Something we haven't mentioned is that virtually every character, I think in fact every character, is connected either by a romantic relationship, a family relationship,
Speaker: or employment to some kind of entertainment industry space, right? And it's it's noteworthy that the suburb within the San Fernando Valley that most of the action takes place in is quite literally called Studio City.
Speaker: But it's also, it's it's notable that like... the the sort of media industry that all these characters are connected to, it's very sort of like middle-of-the-road media, right? It's like in this hierarchy of sort of relevance and glamour, like Koi Sherbos is kind of like lower middle in that hierarchy, I would imagine. And then like the other character that's very prominently sort of about media is Frank TJ Mackey, who's a kind of, don't know, sort of peddles like seminars and like pick up artistry in like conference rooms off motorways, I imagine. So it's it's it's a kind of like seedy underside of Hollywood almost.
Speaker: ah He's a great example of the the ways in which, even if we've moved beyond the movie in certain parts, there are parts of it that feel almost like prophetic. i mean Not that those guys didn't exist already in the 90s.
Speaker: You can't watch that Tom Cruise performance and not you know feel like you're watching something that gets clipped to be put on Twitter to like make fun of some guy yeah who does like shitty talk in conference rooms.
Speaker: It's like deeply pressing in two ways for me. One is that it's a film that feels obsessed with trauma yeah and self-actualization. And it's a film that is sort of pairing or or contrasting the director's concern of self-actualization with a sort of more base concern for self-optimization.
Speaker: I think that's like really generational, right? Like Paul Jobs-Anderson, despite being Gen X, kind of has a kind of proto-millennial obsession with like trauma and like foundational trauma and catharsis and confession in a way that very much like the boomers did as well.
Speaker: And the Gen X characters in the film, especially Frank T.J. Mackey, played by Tom Cruise, is obsessed with self-optimization. I think it's an interesting contrast. So one thing we've ended up talking a lot about on this podcast is that Gen X, you know, has this, there's this notion that Gen X is all about apathy.
Speaker: It's about sort of like standoffishness. It's about unplugging from the system, right? And it's not that that's totally untrue. But if you watch, for example, Almost Famous, one of my least favorite movies of all time, or if you watch like any other Cameron Crowe movie, for that matter, Singles, whatever,
Speaker: they're very often highly moralistic films where, you know, in the simplest version of this, like what's the one with um Ben Stiller play is like the bad, ah meet you know, he works for like a TV station or something and is going to, uh, bites. Yes, Reality Bites, which is like a movie about a guy. like the first time I watched that as an adult, Ben Stiller is supposed to be evil because he's an industry guy. like That's it. You know what I mean? Whereas watching it myself, I'm like, you got to choose him.
Speaker: you know I forget who the other lead is, but I mean, he's just like is like a shithead who plays guitar. There's no stability there, which of course reflects, I guess, you know how deep the abyss had gotten in the 90s as opposed to now.
Speaker: It's a bit like you know like that that old phrase, which is that like only 5% of the population actually experienced the 60s as we retrospectively understand them. right like But for most people, the 60s was not like Carnaby Street or you know The Beatles or any of these things. like It was like very much still like the 1950s. And in that sense, what bubbles to the top in terms of generational discourse or even depictions of generational sort of tendencies is the kind of slacker stuff. It's the sort of anti-systemic, anti-corporate stuff.
Speaker: But like I was just thinking in terms of like the Frank T.J. Mackey character, he really reminded me of Tony Robbins, the guy with the huge... Do you know Tony Robbins? This self-help guy. and He's an absolutely ginormous head, I have to say. But like his his book started coming out in 1986. His first book came out in 1986. And he sort of like hit his stride in like the mid-90s. So like there's this whole other slipstream in the generation that's going on. And it and those people we don't really hear about so much because they're kind of like...
Speaker: They don't have like control of the media. They don't make they don't make things so much. It's interesting that Magnolia shows up this element of Gen X that like we don't see that much, which is says yeah it's very much more like frustrated, self-optimized, very neoliberal of the generation.
Speaker: Well, the other part of that is the secret, which takes off in the 90s, right? This idea that you can just... I mean, I remember, I'll bring her up again, my wife, whose parents got into the secret in the 90s, and they were like very young boomers slash very old Gen Xs. And I don't know if that's like a response to where the American economy is going in the 90s, if it's the feeling that maybe the dream is slipping a little bit, but you get this thrust towards this individualized yeah self-actualization, essentially, that you're talking about, Sam. And what's interesting about Magnolia is that it takes a cross-section of that, right? Where a Frank T.J. Mackey character is seeking that self-actualization by repudiating where he comes from, but literally telling his father to go fuck himself, I mean, at the end of the movie.
Speaker: But in other characters, the trauma results in something totally different. And self-actualization looks like being able to go on a date. But I feel like Frank T.J. Mackey character isn't doing self-actualization, right? He's doing self-optimization. Okay. like and I would be keen to like define the two as being quite different in the sense that self-actualization is something that rises out of the you know Freudian movement and you know rises out psychotherapy and finds its sort of apogee in like the 1960s with therapy culture and new age stuff.
Speaker: It's is' much more holistic and you know it's about sort of like emotional expression and kind of like... yeah it's It's much more sort of like holistic in that sense. So self-optimization is much narrower and utilitarian. And it seems like interesting that he's he's kind of... The other characters are searching for something that's much more like self-actualization, right? It's like Claudia searching for stability or some kind of i love.
Speaker: Other people are searching for forgiveness or understanding before they die. That, for me, seems like self-actualization, whereas what the Mackie character is searching for is something much narrower.
Speaker: yeah Before he's thrust into... He's like unwillingly thrusted into this kind of self-actualized reckoning. But it's very reluctant right in the way that it is with the other characters. Which is maybe the, I mean, that's that character, Donnie, is played by William H. Macy.
Speaker: And this movie is full of this era sort of movie gods when it comes to actors, right? So Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise in there, William H. Macy's in there, John C. Reilly kind of on the come up, not quite at his you know Dewey Cox period yet.
Speaker: ah it Somehow that makes the movie feel... even more essential to me or even more representative. Like the idea that you can take what amounts to like an all-star building, you're like a team, which is something that, you know, PTA has liked to do at various times in his career, but especially in Boogie Nights and in Magnolia.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, here he is bringing back basically the entire ensemble of Boogie Nights minus the two male movie stars in Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds and, you know, I guess combining them into Tom Cruise and Jason Robards, if you will, But yeah, I think for it gets at something with how essential this movie is because he established and then disbanded a repertory company within two movies, which is something that not very many filmmakers do, but is something that like
Speaker: I don't know, just kind of stamps the era in a really unique way where it's really the the signifier of maybe guys can define the difference of Paul Thomas Anderson self-actualizing or optimizing by shedding his pastiche ah and going for something more original with the less ensemble-driven films that come in his more mature period.
Speaker: And it did, work because next he's going to go right to to Sandler, right? Punch Drunk Love is next. Punch Drunk Love is like the transition. Punch Drunk Love, he kind of even defines as like, after the glut of Magnolia, like he challenged himself to make a 90 minute movie. um And that was the way to do it, was do a Sandler rom-com. And then I think like the mature period kind of starts with There Will Be Blood after that.
Speaker: I just love the idea of selling Punch Drunk Love to a studio as an Adam Sandler rom-com because, of course, technically it is, but anyone who's seen that movie you know knows that ah it's ah definitely a slightly different film.
Speaker: Yeah. But I mean, yeah, it was the it was the first of its kind. It sets the trend. you know That's one of the other ways ways that Anderson impacted the industry also is like on a very micro level is... um the cottage industry of the Adam Sandler auteur vehicle that was then taken up by James L. Brooks, Noah Baumbach. Safdie brothers.
Speaker: The Safdie brothers, of course. So just on what you were saying there, Sam, about self-optimization and self-actualization, i think part of what maybe makes the movie feel so strange, if I can return to this like moral core idea,
Speaker: is that in a lot of the movies that we've watched for this podcast or that we associate with the 90s and Gen X, self-actualization is demonstrated usually just through like a standoffishness with the parental generation. like you You're getting away from them. I know you're you're calling the Tom Cruise thing self-optimization. I think that's totally fair.
Speaker: But like in another movie, it would be the ability to reject the boomer parent generation or maybe the silent parent generation that defines your ability to like fully come to terms with who you are.
Speaker: And we see that with slacker archetypes, but you also just see it with like, don't know, the whole idea of grunge and basically doing like, no, we're going to do our own Woodstock in 99 with new metal or something like we're, we're breaking with you.
Speaker: This movie is strange because there's a desire for reconciliation that just pervades the vast majority of the characters, right? I mean, certainly the older characters experience it, right? So the Philip Baker Hall character who probably abused his daughter Claudia who he brought up earlier. He's the quiz show host.
Speaker: We should come back to that question of whether he did or didn't molest his daughter because I think that's an interesting segue into the discussions around recovered memory I mean, yeah, what does his wife say at that moment? You should know better. Because he says, i don't know.
Speaker: Well, it's um oh it it's it reminded me a little bit. I'd i'd watched Bo is Afraid semi-recently, right? And there's that great moment at the beginning of that movie where he's on the phone with his mom and his plane tickets have disappeared along with his keys. And he's like, what should I do? And she just, there's a beat. And she just goes, I'm sure you'll do the right thing. Yeah. It's this similar model of, like the pert in this case, the wife's authority as opposed to the parental authority. But like this person you want to be able to speak to who's going to solve the problem or somehow absolve you, who actually just turns it right back on you yeah you know in a very Freudian model way. i'll just I'll wrap up the reconciliation thing with this, and maybe we can move on. But...
Speaker: if you view this as this like magnum opus of the 90s, this thing that is foreclosing the decade, is trying to kind of subsume into itself all these themes, ideas, actors, all that stuff, it makes this weird move to almost like want to make everything work right before the millennium or to sort of have it be the case that, like yes, we're going to have Y2K, but Y2K is actually going to be this like cleansing situation as opposed to you know He could choose from the biblical plagues he wanted to go with. He doesn't go with the firstborn son getting killed in every case or you know the pharaoh's magicians being defeated or something. right Although I guess you could maybe read the the TV you know execs kind of getting their own as maybe pharaoh's magicians getting defeated or something. But what it really is is he picks this, like, gory, disgusting, because, like, the sound work there is crazy. Like, you hear that frog flesh slamming into the city of L.A. There's blood all over the windshield of the car at the end with John C. Reilly William H. Macy.
Speaker: It's very visceral, but it's not like a rainstorm in which um you know a frog falls out of the sky, bashes John C. Reilly in the head and kills him. It's this like weird moment of almost like rebirth, where like the slate is going to be wiped clean in some way, you know even if it's a very dirty wiping clean, if you want to think of it that way. Yeah, and and that frog scene ends with the cop, Jim C. Reilly character, forgiving the Donnie character for stealing like a a load of money from his bosses.
Speaker: As you said, it's not a full cleanse. It's a dirty windshield wipe because of that phrase that's repeated through the whole movie that we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us, which is very therapy-speak thing and a very Alcoholics Anonymous kind of thing as well. But you can read it in two ways, right? My initial reading was the same as yours, which is that it was incredibly self-indulgent, thoroughly speak. And yet at the same time, it's a kind of repost or rebuttal to the kind of end of history thinking, which is that history is over, that we have escaped the kind of dynamics, the slipstream of the 20th century, that post 1989, the past is done, we've done with the past, that is over. So there is this kind of weird rebuttal in that line that like, is it really about these kind of individual traumatic pasts or is it really more about history? don't
Speaker: Well, also, it's like, yeah, the idea of history being over, it's like, then what else do we have than to look back at history now that the story is complete? And so everyone's just kind of taking that on the micro level by going through, yeah, their family trauma, and in this case, even like Philip Seymour Hoffman doing it on the behalf of the dying Jason Robards character.
Speaker: I like that reading, Sam, and what you say, Eddie, because it it does give the film... I've been talking about it moral film, and I still think it is, but it's also, i guess, if you read it that way, a movie about...
Speaker: imbuing a certain kind of hopefulness into a situation that otherwise feels hopeless. Like, if you think about what pastiche does as a form, right, it's a replaying because we, the the only form left is to replay the other forms in a certain kind of relationship to each other, right? It's almost like Eisensteining form itself or or something like that, right? Which is, in a way, a very pessimistic mode.
Speaker: It's the Jameson book, right, postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Like, well, We're just going to redo the Marvel movies because, i mean, not that Jameson was thinking that when he wrote the book. but But in this movie, the idea that family reconciliation could exist even to such a point that people's lives could continue is itself kind of a message about like, all right, let's get it wrapped up.
Speaker: We're not going to fry. We're not going to go into the suicide booth and have to wake up a thousand years in the future to have a chance. We're going to tie off these loose ends. It's going to be bloody. It's going to be disgusting. A lot of amphibians are going to die.
Speaker: But there is a chance that what we move into next has at least a certain bittersweetness with an emphasis on the sweetness there, right? That there is something thing there.
Speaker: There's that cut scene where the flo of frogs are falling from the sky where Stanley, who is the younger sort of quiz savant, that you see, so you have a pairing between Donnie, who's a kind of grown-up quiz savant, and Stanley, who's this younger quiz savant.
Speaker: What's his line again? It's like, this is something that happens. Yeah. what the frogs are for He's sitting in the library and he says says, this is something that happens. And it's interesting, just going back to your Jameson point, Chase, like I mean, you can also think about Mark Fisher and the kind of like foreclosing of the future, foreclosing of modernity in the 90s to maybe the 2010s.
Speaker: I struggle to understand the function of the frogs as a sort of deus ex machina. Like, is it a kind of, we're at the end of the millennium, there's nothing new, and Paul Tassel Anderson kind of going, here's something that's new, right? This is something that happens.
Speaker: Frogs falling from sky is completely new. thought it was very old, of course. And yet, of course, it's just a recycling of a biblical trope at the same time. It's a Deus Ex machine, but it's not an escape valve from the sense of things being foreclosed. in the sense that I really think it's the only way it works in that plot function is in terms of John C. Reilly rescuing William H. Macy, but like...
Speaker: I think its function is much more symbolic than ex machina. Like, in my opinion, it is saying that, yes, this is something that happens. And, but also it's just that like, i don't know, it's, it's the start of a new day after. And as the, the song that's,
Speaker: you know, saying by the cast at one point goes, it's not going to stop. And as the voiceover that comes back at the end ah from the beginning that was talking about coincidences says, and so it goes, and so it goes, and so on and so forth.
Speaker: So I think that this movie is actually saying that everything like this is just going to keep happening even if there is a rain of frogs. And that like the only way forward is trying to personally reconcile with what you can't.
Speaker: Now, there have been accusations levied against Paul Thomas Anderson from more ideological film critics, that his films do not have any sort of political conscience to them, that they're not ideologically founded. And you know part of it comes from the fact that like he's this wunderkind, as you call it, a who like has never had to worry about money in his life and has you know been rich since he was 25 and has never had to work a real job. Yeah. And I get that, but I think that he kind of indulges in something myopic here in saying that, like, not in saying this forthrightly, but implying that there's more to the end of history, as it were, than the ideological struggle between fucking communism and capitalism. It's more that we're in a place in life where at this moment, people need to like look back at the past and see what they need to reconcile with, even if like a rain of frogs might be the craziest thing that could potentially happen in the future.
Speaker: it's It's funny to imagine it as like a truth and reconciliation commission for the 20th century America or something. But just to build on that, it is interesting to think of it as an ironic device, right? Because I'll put on my English teacher hat, you know, what is a deus ex machina? I mean, it's a thing that the Greeks invent that you can take a situation in a play that seems unsolvable and solvent, right?
Speaker: But that needs to have a happy ending because it falls into the form of comedy. And so you use this device out of nowhere, the surprise, to resolve things such that there's a happy ending, right?
Speaker: The irony here is that if this is another thing that happens, if the deus ex machina is just another part of life and things are just going to go on after the rain of frogs, that you both get that catharsis that you were talking about earlier, Sam.
Speaker: But in addition, we know that it's simply going to go on as it is. So even if this there's been this emotional release, unlike in a typical comedy with a deus ex machina, where it cuts off, right? And that's it. It's over. you know um Think about the ending of The Tempest or something where Prospero turns to the audience and is like, give me a round of applause. We solved it, everybody. We did it. Isn't everybody very happy?
Speaker: you know Instead, this is like... the magic is here, it happened, but, you know, good luck. um Maybe the new millennium brings better, but this stuff's still going to keep going on. So it's it feels almost perfect in that way because it captures both the apathy and sort of sadness that I associate with the end of history, but also maybe some of this hope or moral conviction that I've been hinting at that I feel not just latent in the movie, but kind of baked into its DNA at the same time. It kind of undercuts itself and lifts itself up at the same time.
Speaker: English teacher hat off. In any case, I did want to touch on the l la aspect. I have never been to the city myself. PTA is obviously a big L.A. filmmaker. you said you're from the Valley, which I do mean to ask you what that even means.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, as an L.A. film, as ah as an entertainment industry film, i mean, what strikes you? Or like is it just a backdrop because that's what PTA does with his early movies is films L.A.?
Speaker: Well, I think it's both at once. I think that he was smart to keep it in his backyard for Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Obviously, Hard 8 is not set there. It's set around a casino. um But there's a lot to that question. um First of all, defining it.
Speaker: If you look at a big map of Los Angeles, you're not going to want to look at geographical features, despite the fact that that could make it easier if you were here. But it's hard to look at it on the map. You got to look at the freeways because if you've seen Los Angeles plays itself, the freeway system was developed ah basically so that we would never have good public transit. Mm-hmm. and defines the borders of every part of Los Angeles. So the valley is a not hexagonical shape, but something like that, bordered by the 101 Topanga Canyon, the and the if you're looking at Google Maps right now. And so it is the suburban sprawl north of Los Angeles that was first primarily orange groves and some Western sets as well. And then eventually developed into...
Speaker: the suburban overflow for Los Angeles and has just even in my lifetime really seen a lot of kind of upscaling and urbanization in certain parts of it, but still retain a certain suburban feel in other parts of it. Because like Los Angeles as a whole, the San Fernando Valley is extremely segregated by its neighborhoods.
Speaker: Due to gerrymandering and you know district control, local politics we're talking about here, the ethnic makeup of every single neighborhood is pretty radically different.
Speaker: And so when people talk about the San Fernando Valley, they could mean like 30 different things. Right. Paul Thomas Anderson, for the most part, shoots Studio City, which is a primarily white and middle class, I would say, place. you know There are houses, aka south of the Boulevard, and apartments, aka north of the Boulevard, being Ventura Boulevard. And it's a city that, it's a neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley Studio City, that is, that exists in the shadow of Hollywood. The bordering neighborhood that also has some shots in this movie is literally called North Hollywood, ah built, ah you know, established as an extension of the industry town. And so
Speaker: was the suburban area where people who worked the studios would go to sleep at night and feed their families. And then it became more of a city into itself. And I think that's what you see in this movie when you go to, let's say, Claudia's apartment and John C. Reilly's driving around. It looks like really a mix between yeah suburban and the urban, you know?
Speaker: And then you can only imagine that Jimmy Gator's house in the hills is protected by quite a lot of suburban blocks and parks and whatnot. And i don't know. I find that that's really interesting, um the specificity of it, because Boogie Nights, in comparison, was largely shot Lucida, which was much more like... ethnically mixed, much more of a Latino neighborhood, and also back in the day, much more of a sleazy neighborhood.
Speaker: And so just like as a Los Angeles resident, as a San Fernando Valley resident, it's just very interesting to see like this as a point in time, as well as Boogie Nights, because it's recreating a time 20 years before, and that flattens that timeline for me. Like, I don't know the difference between Reseda in 1978 and because I wasn't born until the 90s. But Boogie Nights kind of like melds that all into one piece for me. So I find him to be one of the most essential San Fernando Valley filmmakers. And you know that goes without saying, Licorice Pizza, he returns to the realm. And Unstrunk Love, also in this realm.
Speaker: So it's interesting because what you've basically done is told the story of 20th century America. I mean, by 1999, when this movie is made, I assume that that project of turning LA into this kind of perfect post-war city where you have a car to go everywhere, where you um everything is sort of cut off, you even said, by highways, which is really interesting because in New Jersey, that's not true, right? Like, we have a very robust highway system, lots of tolls, so we don't call them freeways, but...
Speaker: What you identify with is actually your exit, right? So where you get off the highway, but that changes kind of in slow gradients or sometimes very rapidly across a couple of exits. But the highway itself is just an artery that goes north to south that sort of deposits you in the different sectors.
Speaker: I'm not a native, but having driven the New Jersey Turnpike, it's also embedded within the topography much better. Oh, that's interesting because i i mean I've driven, obviously, a turnpike a ton and the parkway a ton. and you know They are built in... Certainly, the turnpike might be older, but the parkway is the 50s. My dad predates the Garden State Parkway, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. and it It is weird to watch movies that take place in California. I'd actually be interested to hear what you have to say about this, Sam, since you've been there and also aren't from the US. But when I watch a movie about LA, and it's not like there are a bunch of highway shots in this movie or anything like that, but you know you see it in a lot of places...
Speaker: There's this weird way in which it's embedded not within nature, but within the neighborhoods themselves quite often. So, you know, if you like pull up a little bit from the highway, a little kind of bird's eye view shot, you're seeing like the Claudia style apartment sometimes just right off the highway, right?
Speaker: And she does definitely live right off the 101 and 170. That's where this film would geographically place her. Which is really interesting because i you know i mean I don't think I'm blowing anyone's brain by saying that the way that a city is constructed affects you know this the the psychologies of the people who live there. And if you think about this as a movie, essentially about the TV industry, right and and I've made that point in my notes...
Speaker: the way these neighborhoods are broken up, the way that the highway system works there, it it maybe it reflects to a certain degree the kind of shatteredness or disconnection that the characters themselves endure. I mean, when Claudia moves a few neighborhoods over, presumably, again, I don't know it that well, she's moving out of this like fully you know tile or stone-floored home where you can have four dogs who run around and like make a mess of everything into something that's like a bog-standard garden-style apartment that you know, is um basically where the neighbor and the main guy live in um office space.
Speaker: That seems to be where Claudia lives, right? How do we meet her? We meet her, well, aside from when her dad accosts her when she's having sex with a random sort of middle-aged gentleman. We meet her when her neighbors complain about a noise complaint because like that's the she lives in this boxed-in world of the apartment complex. There's no fucking way that John C. Reilly is going to get a noise complaint when the dogs go nuts because he bought a bunch of you know Hustlers and Bananas ah midway through the movie.
Speaker: So it I guess it feels like a really LA movie to me in that way, that like the industry they're involved with, all of them, and within the hierarchy of that industry is then pushed onto the way the characters actually interact. but Oh, I was just going to say, all also related to that, I think, in terms of character psychology and how these circumstances bring people together in this movie and how they wouldn't have come across each other otherwise is the biggest factor of l a culture that leads to isolation that we've only hinted at here, which is car culture and the bubble of the car. And during the true moment of emotional catharsis, the sing-along to the Amy Mann song, i believe two or three of the characters are singing it in their cars. you know And people's cars have always defined them in Los Angeles cinema. And I think that this film, you know just subtly enough, which is a funny thing to say about this movie, hints at that car-based separation of people.
Speaker: I mean, how are we how are we introduced to William H. Macy but the shitty pop that he listens to in his shitty boxcar that he drives through the window of 7-Eleven, you know?
Speaker: Which I have to say, my wife kept commenting, like, he's been listening to the same CD the whole time. Like, yeah you know what Like, you know he pops that CD in and just lets it play from beginning. You know, whenever he stops, it turns off. and then he gets in and he turns it right back on. just that That one song is on the soundtrack too, which I like. When that song comes up on the soundtrack, it's an immediate skip, but it's very funny it's a very funny, ironic needle drop.
Speaker: Yeah, and i I will just add that Amy Mann consummate Gen X pick. I just put that my notes because I couldn't deny myself Paul Thomas Anderson also married to Fiona Apple, or dating Fiona Apple. I'm a big Fiona Apple fan, so that makes this a tough conversation for me. What can I say? Although she does tell a great story about him and Tarantino doing cocaine with her in the room and being very annoying. Yes, I've heard this story. Being very boring, sort of like Gen X-Men. Just be like...
Speaker: directors ever. But I mean, no, even to the point around the car culture thing, like Linda, who is Elle Partridge, she's a senior executive who's dying of cancer, like, she tries to OD. Where did she try to OD? In her car, right? And she's... The reason that she doesn't die is because this... I think the character's name is Dixon, this young African-American child who is ignored by the cop character when he tries to tell the cop how this previous murder he'd investigated has happened.
Speaker: It's kind of like another deus ex machiner in a way, right? Like, he appears... He's kind of like... You don't know if there's this racist trope that's going to happen of this a young black child who's trying to rob the Linda character.
Speaker: it eventually does rob her of money, but he also saves her life. He gets to the car and it ends up phoning the police and the ambulance and saves her life. And yeah, that kind of like weird intersection of this kind of like racist trope versus like the car culture versus like the kind of consumerism or some materialism of the robbery. And yeah, that somehow saves this woman's life. The robbery effectively saves this woman's life. I think it's very L.A.
Speaker: I think I'll use that as kind of an opportunity to talk TV because it's something that, you know, obviously the TV industry, huge in LA. um Also, Paul Thomas Anderson from a TV family, right? His production company named after, i think, Goularty, his sort of Edward Vampira-style father who had a, I guess it wasn't public access. I don't really know what they had at the time, but. Yeah. Ernie Anderson, had he was a horror host ah in the Midwest. And so like Vampira or something like that, yeah, he he was just like on the channels there introducing horror films and then later would become the ah voice of ABC. So he was the guy doing, you know, next week on the Brady Bunch or whatever. Oh, that's crazy. I didn't know the second part. I just knew about the Midwest vampire to sort of like coastal success story, broadly speaking. but So it's a movie where that relationship to TV is everywhere.
Speaker: TV and the TV industry kind of mediate all of the relationships, right? So like you talked about William H. Macy as Donnie... Donnie Brasco, the quiz kid or whatever his name is, who like has this success in the 60s, has everything stolen by his you know grubby sort of Judy Garland parents-esque paternal figure.
Speaker: We then get the younger child whose name I'm forgetting. Stanley. Stanley. Thank you. um Who is undergoing that right now. And there are these sort of like, what for me, honestly, are the hardest scenes in the movie, which is when he just needs to pee and they won't let him go. Like a lot of the movie is supposed to be really sad, but the only ones this time that like really played for me is like, this is painful to watch are the scenes where it's like, they're on the commercial break. Like he could go right then. yeah but for whatever reason, they're like, no, sorry, it's been 10 seconds. It's we're too far into the break. You got to stay there. And the fact that the other two kids on the panel show are just idiots. Yeah.
Speaker: They're like, they are they are just like, have never answered a question in their lives. One of them is a very like proto-Rizzler type. Oh, I love the little fat kid. he He's like, it's he rocks. Him beefing with Louis Guzman in between segments is like the funniest shit.
Speaker: That is, it's so good. Another ah PTA regular yeah um of the sort of sleazy club-owning variety and in Boogie Nights. But Yeah. And of the co-proprieting of toilet plungers in Punch from Love. Yeah, yeah. He's great.
Speaker: um Anyway, those characters are obvious. With the other ones, it's, you know, they're the kid of a TV exec who, like, obviously has done all sorts of crappy shit. or they're you know a host, as is the case with the Philip Baker Hall character, who some great moments for him too, where he's like trying to hold it together on set because there's you know it's all taking place at the same time, and the quiz show is one of these times. and He does the thing where he gives away that the answer is like Chopin or whatever it is, and he's like, it's a really great song, and I'm not trying to give away the answer. just you know And he just gives it away. He's busted. Philip Baker Hall is like, one of the greatest character actors ever. I mean, the two, three named Phillips that are in the two movies back to back him and Philip Seymour Hoffman are like both on my Mount Rushmore of acting. Um, they're, they're the gods. And, uh, yeah, Philip Baker Hall falling apart.
Speaker: Because he's both drunk and sick and dying and realizing that, you know, he can't reconcile with his daughter who he may or may not have molested if he can ever remember it.
Speaker: ah Like, that clashing with Stanley having to go pee-pee... is just like cosmic fates of tragedy intertwining. And I really love putting them in the room together. And also Ricky Jay as his right hand man is such a good touch. I mean, Ricky Jay is wonderful.
Speaker: mean, yeah, that shit is so like Fassbender to me. I'm a, I'm like, I'm going to say the internet's number one Fassbender fan. yeah And like, nothing more than like a tragic, the melodramatic moment that kind of overflows its own boundaries into the point of comedy. yeah i mean, that's that's what that moment is. but So you you've got that, right? And then obviously Claudia has been screwed up by the fact that her father is in TV. it's and And we haven't talked about the William H. Macy character a lot, but I mean, most of his scenes are just him ogling like a hunk in a bar, yeah who has like a great...
Speaker: You know, Simpson style. If you remember when Marge has the fantasy about like the Fabio guy on the ship and she goes like, does that earring mean you're a pirate? And he's like, kind of, you know, like that but that kind of guy.
Speaker: and and, you know, he's got, he wants to get braces because the guy has braces. And then of course, in the end, the happy coincidence is now he needs the braces because the frogs have, he's fucked up his face by falling during the storm.
Speaker: But it's a movie where like TV is kind of the center of the rot of whatever disease is running through. And you could argue on the one hand, yeah, it's LA. It's probably going to be TV or movies or maybe porn production if it's Boogie Nights. But on the other hand, like it's so personal to PTA as a filmmaker. And the ninety s is like...
Speaker: not the golden age of prestige TV, but the golden age of like crap TV. Like trash TV. Yeah. was going to say, do you think it's too on the nose that like, just going back to your previous metaphor about this kind of sickness that comes from media, the sickness that comes from ah Hollywood, that the two main characters who are involved in TV, which is Jimmy Cater, who's the the cu show host, and Earl Partridge, who I think it's alluded to as his kind of senior. He's the, he's the producer. He's the guy who produces that show. He, you see his logo in the credits. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like they're both dying of cancer.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Like the two main sort of patriarchs of, I suppose all they're probably silent generation Hollywood people, they're both dying of cancer. Like is that, I mean, obviously like the film is playing with coincidence, but it's also quite on the nose that that's how, I mean, there's this kind of both literal and metaphorical cancer, I don't know.
Speaker: Well, you could make the case that television is the cancer upon the city of Los Angeles. Which is very, very Gen X, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It is. And that's like, but the thing is, i think that that's not the actual thesis of the movie. i think that that's an idea that the movie takes into consideration, struggles with, and spits back out at the viewer, kind of. Because...
Speaker: It's all about reconciliation, as we say. And this is a deeply Freudian movie, and I'm not the person to analyze that. I don't know this guy on a personal level, but Paul Thomas Anderson is, ah you know, his movies have some interesting ah father figures in them, to say the least. ah And, you know, his father being this television guy who then passes away around this time, like...
Speaker: it's it's all very much like a young man reckoning with his father's mortality and then in in ah in those terms, his own mortality. And like much like these characters, like this this inherent like angsty backlash that people have, even if they had good relationships with their parents, you know because it's just the angst of youth.
Speaker: And um yeah, I don't know. I think that... like Like so many other parts of this film, Jimmy Gator and Earl Partridge both dying of cancer is not just a symbol, but an idea like to be contradicted by the other ideas. like These characters might be very standard dramatic archetypes, tragic ones at that.
Speaker: But I think that it's like the intersection of what they really mean as far as contemporary culture goes ah that makes it so interesting.
Speaker: Well, this seems like the time to bring up the fact that Claudia's father, Jimmy Gator, and the John C. Reilly cop character, whose name is Jim, yeah they they have the same name. And of course, John C. Reilly comes in as, we haven't really talked about what they do with each other, but a lot of it is just like her being coked up. out it like The kind of woman, like you have to think about how broken John C. Reilly is that he meets this woman and is like, Yes. Like this, what I need in my life is a woman who disappears every 15 minutes and comes back sort of like looking in every direction, speaking in sentence fragments. And when they have dinner at the end of the movie, or I guess to the middle later part of the movie,
Speaker: It's, you know, them basically saying this thesis about reconciliation, or at least about putting aside some of this this trauma they've experienced. Because she says to him, like, you know, have you ever just said something to someone basically because it's what they want to hear? You know, and he responds and says, yes, of course. And they have this, I think, actually very sweet back and forth about, like, being honest with each other, like not hiding who they are in some way.
Speaker: And of course, she's tried to be honest with her father, and also Jimmy, Jimmy Gator, and the honesty doesn't go anywhere because he can't remember. as we And I do want to return to that question, as Sam mentioned earlier.
Speaker: Yeah, we came to discuss the idea of recovered memory, but carry on. That just seems to me like the most... paging Dr. Freud moment. Like, obviously, it's a movie about family relations and fathers and repression and all these things. But the moment where a cop, an authority figure who has the same name as your father, who's like, I don't know, the the cop of TV or something, you know, as a quiz show host, that he comes in and attempts to transplant.
Speaker: It's sweet, but it also seems to suggest that, like, one of the ways that this is going to be dealt with, that the reconciliation is going to be affected, is through this, like, attachment to another figure in her case that like whatever brokenness she's experiencing is only going to be repaired in that way. And I'm not like, I don't know, making some kind of argument about Paul Thomas Anderson being like the nuclear family man or so. He's not, you know, Steven Spielberg, but I do think that that's one of the theses for moving on that's put forward in the movie. du It's is incredibly interesting how linear the kind of traumas and the sort of after effect of the traumas are in Magnolia, right? Like the fact that Claudia is also like fucking 50 year old man, she's probably what?
Speaker: 30. Let's say she's 30. Like, you could read a really, really clear, like, epedial, like, narrative back in, like, if she has been molested by her father, there's a very clear, like, cause and effect there that can be read. Like, even with a Frank T.J. Mackey character, right, the fact that Earl Partridge, who's dying of cancer, his father, that in the film, the central kind of betrayal that happens there is that he leaves his, Frank's mother, while she's dying of cancer, to, presumably, for the Linda character, or someone else we don't quite know. And Frank is left to care for his dying mother, along with a female caretaker, right?
Speaker: And his kind of reaction to that situation is to sort of cycle between desperate, pursual, and also misogynistic rejection of women. It felt like almost too neat that all these kind of foundational traumas in the past just p play out in very, very predictable ways in Magnolia.
Speaker: Anti-Frodi and Sam, you know, logging onto the podcast and putting his CBT nonsense out here. and i I'm joking, but... No, I i i i think you're right. i do think one one of the things that makes this feel like melodrama, I made the kind of Fassbender point earlier, isn't just that the characters are archetypes. It isn't just that it relies on catharsis. It isn't even the fact that it relies on Deus Ex Machina at the end.
Speaker: It's that all of the characters are set up to have sort of their resolution fit almost like Dante's Inferno style into like, you know, what does the William H. Macy character do? Donnie the Quiz Kid, he wants to rob Solomon and Solomon, the store he works at or was recently fired from,
Speaker: In the end, because what does he need? He needs money. That's what was taken from him by his father figures and the substitute Solomons. I couldn't really tell if the guy is Solomon Solomon or if the two guys in the room are Solomon and Solomon or what exactly is going on there, but he tries to get the money, thinks better of it, and then being the klutz that he is, breaks the key off in the door and is only saved by the male authority figure kind of father sub in in in John C. Reilly, and then earns forgiveness, which I think is what he's kind of looking for because he's very neurotic. So it becomes so melodramatic in part, yeah, because of how the things actually play out in the way that you say. It's soap opera-esque. And I say, again, you're not going to find a man who has watched In A Year of 13 Moons more times than me. It's it's not possible. But melodrama's not bad, but it is the way it's operating. And I'm interested in, I guess, why he chooses to go there, but maybe that's a different conversation.
Speaker: Let me ask this clue style. Okay, we're here, we're in the bedroom. Was it Jimmy Gator with the booze bottle and his hands you know in the bedroom? Or is that not the case?
Speaker: Sam? No? Okay. no you ok i so I suppose like I'm interested in the kind of background, obviously this is the period where recovered memory therapy peaks around the sort of early nineties. You get books like Spectral Evidence come out.
Speaker: Yeah. And there's all these accusations, unprompted accusations of molestation generally aimed at either mothers or father figures from younger, from Gen X generally, presumably Gen X patients. And then obviously this is the later disputed um that all of this is like imparted memory.
Speaker: You obviously have the satanic panic, richly obese scandals going on at the same time. And there's like a general anxiety throughout media in the 90s, right? That's, I think, kind of rearing its head again now around sort of AI and the iPhones and stuff, which is, it's not like entirely unfounded, but like in the 90s, it's sort of like around violence in movies, it's around sexuality in movies. It manifests both on the left and the right, both among like feminists and kind progressives, but also among like Christian evangelicals.
Speaker: And there's a deep sort of connotation between Hollywood and sort of abuse, sin, sort malevolence, which obviously, again, raises his head in the to turnss book Well, I also think it's probably important to distinguish those two periods of the late 90s, how people viewed Hollywood as a dent of sin and abuse versus ah the 2010s, which is like the Me Too movement and based on actual reportage of rape and abuse, where it's like... Oh, yeah. The satanic panic and like fucking violent movies and, you know, hoes and music videos or whatever, Marilyn Manson. It's like, that's all just people.
Speaker: That's some real end of history shit of people being so bored because there's nothing real going on that they have to look to Marilyn Manson, you know, when there is some pretty real stuff going on that they are then blaming on Marilyn Manson.
Speaker: Anyway, sorry, not to cut you off. Continue, please. No, no, I think you're entirely right. Like, there's, and I wonder what Paul Thomas Anderson's position is on this. We're at the end of a decade of kind of like moral panic and, yeah, i can't tell whether he's like subverting that with that the sort of ambivalent molestation accusation or whether it's he's endorsing it.
Speaker: Because like, right, in one way you can read um the Jimmy Gator's kind of, I don't remember, it's just like a a fucking cope, like a kind of, yeah, it's just a cowardly way out of like admitting it. Like, if he really hadn't done it, he'd just deny it. um And yet, in another way, like, it sort of plays on the trope of recovered memory. Like, normally it's the patient the or the the victim who kind of, like, doesn't remember and then remembers.
Speaker: And this case, it's kind of, like, playing with that trope, but with ah the supposed sort of perpetrator being so traumatised that he can't remember. You can read it both ways, right? It's either Cavadish or it's some kind of deeper reflection of this phenomenon.
Speaker: Well, also, just like in terms of auteur studies and his arc as a filmmaker that I talked about earlier with his like more mature period, Recovered Memory is something he goes back to in a major way with The Master, where it's pretty unambiguous that he sees it as hucksterism and equates it with like fucking Scientology, basically. like that's what you know When The Master was coming out, this is like 13 years ago now, that's all people talked about was like, oh, it's the Scientology movie, when it's a lot more than that. yeah It's about human relationships and needs being fulfilled. But um back to what we're talking about here, um i think that like if he is continuing to pull at that thread of recovered memory, I think that it's only exposing darkness and hucksterism if you're continuing that thread for 13 years to the master in 2012.
Speaker: And that's not to say everyone's bullshitting. Obviously, there are real like fucking accusations made validly that you know someone only realized later in life due to trauma. But I think what you were talking about earlier with therapy culture so heavily dominating the late 90s and recovered memory being such a big part of that that yeah I think that like he leaves it open for interpretation but later sours on it well it so a couple things I mean first of all 100% second of all
Speaker: you know You can also read the Jimmy Gator denial as you know maybe he's been an alcoholic the whole time. you know Maybe he legitimately doesn't know. yeah yeah like it's it's there It could be that he hit the bottle because he did this and it's fucked up his memory. It could be that the whole time his life as a TV guy you know kind of sucked and so he was just drinking and you know whatever, he did this awful thing.
Speaker: i think what makes it interesting for me in the world of the movie is that his inability to remember... kind of, yeah, it's the reversal you're talking about, Sam, where like the child here seems very sure. I mean, she never says it on camera, I don't think, but he brings up later, she thinks that I molested her, right?
Speaker: So in the world of the movie, you know, she's certain, so she wouldn't be the repressed memory candidate. He, you know, ends up being. It's also, I would be remiss as a sort of a parapolitics guy to not bring up that the Recovered Memory Foundation, which was sort of founded by a bunch of these parents who had been accused,
Speaker: was it itself rife with hucksterism? Meaning like several people who were found to be subscribed to Dutch pedophile magazines and things like this. Oh, God. Yeah, no. And and I mean, it's really like ah ah a real den of thieves in a lot of ways.
Speaker: So, you know, almost at a meta level there, Sam, by even invoking that, no matter which way you push the relationship, It's invoking this idea that like you know the 90s is full of the Tim Robbins hucksters, repressed memory hucksters in one way or another. It's a moment of like deep confusion for an attempt at self-actualization for whatever traumatic reason, right?
Speaker: I do you think it's a good question. Is there anything else you wanted to cover? I feel like, Eddie, we've kept you for a very very long time. That is okay. I keep my guests very long very often. That is that is quite okay. And um you know i'm I'm always happy to to talk Magnolia at length. It's funny, there's so much that we could talk about. But I you know i feel like from the approach you guys are taking on the film...
Speaker: this pretty much covers it and leaves me enough to not repeat myself too much on a further extended clip episode on Magnolia because I haven't talked about Composition. i haven't talked about editing. i haven't talked about form at all.
Speaker: And, um you know, that's okay. that that's That's my wheelhouse on the other show. You know, it's such a dense film that like, you can just explode a conversation out of so many approaches um and not even touch other approaches that you would maybe think to right away. um Like, there's there's a three-hour discussion to be had just on Tom Cruise and the place that this holds in his career, you know?
Speaker: um But that's another ah discussion for another podcast. I will say worth mentioning on the TV thing that we've come back to that, of course, all this comes out while he's in an interview with presumably a TV reporter, which is sort of amazing because a lot of the shots we want to bring composition in are sort of, from what you imagine is the camera that's filming him for the TV special and Yeah, I was going to say, i found that the motive the mode of interview was just like fascinating in the sense that it furged on therapy. I guess there's always that kind of clunky metaphor or analogy to be drawn between the journalist and the their source and the therapist and the patient. like You could draw that.
Speaker: I'm sure many people have drawn that analogy. But it did verge on journalistic mode as emotional catharsis, which I suppose was like fairly predominant among lower-level entertainment news at the time.
Speaker: But it felt deep, like, as as someone works in that world, it felt, like, deeply odd to me. Well, think Oprah. You know what I mean? Like, this is the golden age of the talk show. I mean, granted, Springer takes things in a different direction. Yeah.
Speaker: Sure. And, i obviously, you have, like, Jeremy Kyle and Judge Judy and all these kind of, like, confessional mode reality TV at the time. But there's also mainstream TV journalism that people took really seriously, but the general tone of TV and culture at the time was very salacious and tabloid-ish. you know That's another thing we didn't really talk about too much is the like relationship between the melodramatic approach and the ah sensationalism and like tabloid-esque approach of...
Speaker: everything in America in the late 90s, particularly the the sanctimony after the Bill Clinton sex scandal. you know Last time I talked about Magnolia on my podcast, I was talking about it in relation to The Human Stain by Philip Roth, which in its opening pages sets the scene by describing America with the president's penis on its mind. Yeah.
Speaker: was just trying to think if there's anything else to say about the film on this sort of topics we we had drawn out. I mean, I am interested, but it might get too much into the form of the film, which is that obviously Chaos by James Gleek came out in the late 80s.
Speaker: And obviously, late 80s into the 90s, you have like a real obsession of like fractals and the rhizome, like non-linearity. And you have all these like, yeah, obviously there are other films that come out that are very non-linear at the same time and thinking...
Speaker: I don't like later films like City of God or like previous films like... Like Go or Run, Lola, Run. Yeah, yeah on later Run, Lola, Run. You obviously have like yeah this like huge explosion of like interest in that chaos theory.
Speaker: And yeah, like obviously the Magnolia at a certain level is playing with this. Obviously the framing device at the start... which has a young boy trying to commit suicide. His suicide is going to be foiled because there are building nets at the bottom of his apartment complex.
Speaker: And yeah, as he's about to realise that his suicide is foiled, his parents are having an argument in the apartment, which he's jumped off. His mother fires a shot. Oh, the shotgun accidentally goes off. Mrs. Zala goes through the window and kills him as he's fallen. Right. So like there's a very sort of a foreground of the film in like chaos theory and coincidence and chance and contingency.
Speaker: And yeah, I feel at least the main sort chunk of the film in between the framing device, it sets you up to expect something that's much more interesting that than it actually is. Like there's some non-linearity in the film. There's obviously like you see the film from like multiple perspectives, but it's not like that formally interested in innovation in my opinion.
Speaker: Well, I have to say that that made me think about the fact that it, this is very me to see it this way, but if you see the concern with chaos and with what I've been calling like providence or like the moral, you know, I think in my notes is something like the arc of the universe bends towards television or something like that or, you know, whatever. Like it's bizarre thing. it's a weird mix, right? Both this idea of coincidence that seems profoundly sort of Gen X, irreligious, sort of like whatever things happen, it is what it is, and then the moral content to the movie. And you could, if one were interested, maybe read...
Speaker: both the use of that formal device and the sort of semi-abandonment of it, and even the the mode that the movie takes along with its content as like, kind of like post-religious end of history theology, you know, where it's like, this is the sense we're going to make out of coincidences. I'm not going to pretend they're divine. I'm not going to put like an unmoved mover behind them, but we're going to find the significance we do in them.
Speaker: And the best way to present that is to kind of jam alongside both this like moral universe and this kind of chaotic actual mode of production for the film itself. You know, what mode of presentation put better?
Speaker: Yeah, I do find that odd that there is not like an unmoved, there is no unmoved mover, there's no first mover even in in this universe. It's like, There's a deep tension between, i think, Paul Thomas Anderson's desire to find meaning in chaos or find meaning in coincidence, like the bit where Donnie falls off the telephone pole that he's climbing to get back into the business get the money back because a frog hits him in the head and he breaks his teeth, which obviously allows him to get the braces that he so much desires to mirror mirror his love interests. right There's deep meaning there, and yet yet there's never any sense of a ah kind of moral mechanism in the universe that's producing that.
Speaker: But it's interesting because the universe is still kind of like active. You know what I'm saying? like in In the sense that obviously this isn't a movie where like the Abrahamic God comes out and like is like, I'm going to do the plagues.
Speaker: But it's it's also not really a movie where human beings just simply decide to discover the meaning in the events that happen to them either, which would be like the other... kind of end of that poll, right? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't feel like retrospective reinterpretation, honest. No, it feels as if there's some, like, essential meaning to the acts that are happening in the moment, like with the thing you said with the braces. Or, for example, with the fact that Tom Cruise makes it before his dad dies, even though his dad is zonked out on liquid morphine. Right. Like that's the perfect way for it to happen because what does Tom Cruise need?
Speaker: i mean, Tom Cruise in real life probably needs a lot of things, but in this case, what he needs is to yell at his father and and express his disappointment and tell him he will not help him. Right. Like that's what he needs in that moment. So.
Speaker: Before I go, first of all, I want to say thank you again for having me on. This was very fun discussion. And um you should... I also wrote a blog about Magnolia that you guys should read on my blog. I write a substack twice a week.
Speaker: um It's vintageviolence.substack.com. And I mainly write about film, but I also write about music and books and television and life and photography once in a while. And, um yeah, you should you should check that out as well as my podcast extended clip that I do with my co-hosts, Malcolm Baum and J.T. White, two the best guys in the world at talking about movies.
Speaker: i I will just second the recommendation. I think... ah Eddie and the boys are doing some wonderful work on Extended Clip, covering a little bit of everything. The choices sort of change up since it's ah curated by those on the show, so you really do get like a nice spread.
Speaker: But yeah, Eddie, thank you so much. This was a pleasure. And um oh yeah, I got to plug our own podcast, patreon.com slash deathphotopod. You can email us at deathphotopod at gmail.com. And we're on Twitter at deathphotopod. So...
Speaker: ah Go to any of those, see a big picture of Francis Fukuyama turned upside down with some various colors done to his face with, you know, my graphic design is my passion style art. Have you guys done like a watch along of Francis Fukuyama on Charlie Rose? No. ah It's great. Charlie Rose is like, so Francis, your book says that history is over. What do you mean by that? um With that, thanks everybody.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
