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2. Speak No Evil
60 Plays1 year ago
One of us is shaken by, and the other skeptical of, Christian Tafdrup's 2022 film Speak No Evil.
Speak No Evil is available here. Also mentioned: Ikiru, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kafka, Raul Hillberg
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, let's just do a eight part podcast episode on Showa. How do you want to start, man?
00:00:15
Speaker
Well, just a content warning upfront for this one. We are going to be discussing a movie that contains graphic depictions of terrible things happening to both children and parents. And that's just how we start. So if you're not up for that, maybe set this one out. Yeah, so let's just get into it. So I.
Film Overview: 'Speak No Evil'
00:00:34
Speaker
I brought something to you this week, specifically the 2022 Danish film Speak No Evil, which you went into knowing nothing about it other than what you could see in the trailer.
00:00:48
Speaker
We are going to just, fair warning, we are going to spoil the shit out of this movie. This is a film that was released on Shudder, the horror streaming platform, which I think kind of perhaps unfairly got it pigeonholed in the market as a horror film, or as a genre exercise or something. Directed by Christian Taftrup, came out in 2022, and
00:01:12
Speaker
I'm going to advance a thesis about this movie, I think. But before
Personal Reactions & Themes
00:01:18
Speaker
I do that, just give me your you went into this cold, you watched it because I asked you to watch it. Tell me your initial thoughts. I don't like you for making me watch this. I understand why it's definitely thought provoking, although I'm not sure it's as deep as it wants to be.
00:01:42
Speaker
Ah, interesting. Okay, elaborate on that. So the moment I finished, I picked up the politics of memory, the journey of a Holocaust historian by Raoul Hilberg.
00:01:54
Speaker
I picked up Radical Evil, which is a multi-scholar undertaking edited by Joan Kopjek, which is from Verso. I probably mispronounced her name, trying to understand through Kant. Not that I'm an expert on Kant, but just the title Radical Evil seemed fitting for what I just saw, and I needed something that was going to try to explore that. And then I picked up Gershom Scholem's
00:02:20
Speaker
on Jews and Judaism in crisis, and I specifically went to the last two entries in this collection, which consisted of his take on Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, and then his take on Hannah Arendt's take on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and specifically her subtitle, The Banality of Evil, which he had
00:02:42
Speaker
a lot of issues with but essentially what I'm getting at is I really clearly felt that this film was exploring evil and the origins of evil and where it comes from and why it happens and I started feverishly trying to figure that out in about two hours.
00:03:01
Speaker
Okay, let me just run through the plot of the film before we get into it any further. So this
Plot Summary & Tensions
00:03:06
Speaker
is a movie about two couples, Bjorn and Louise on the one hand, and Patrick and Karen on the other. I'm just going to sort of anglicize their names rather than butcher the proper pronunciation.
00:03:18
Speaker
Bjorn and Louise are from Denmark and Patrick and Karen are Dutch and they meet on holiday in Italy and they have a good time together in a sort of group holiday setting. But there are some weird things about Patrick especially that come up in that initial holiday period and then they return to their homes and
00:03:39
Speaker
some undetermined amount of time later, probably months, Bjorn and Louise receive an invitation from Patrick and Karen to go to their country house in the Netherlands and spend a weekend. Bjorn and Louise have a little girl named Agnes. Patrick and Karen have a little boy named Abel who does not speak.
00:03:59
Speaker
They say he was born without a tongue, and Bjorn and Louise and Agnes make the trip. It was an eight-hour drive for them, which is a big deal, and they're going out on a limb because they don't really know these people very well. And they seem like a happy family, although there are some hints that Bjorn may be just generally discontented with life. And things immediately get weird when they're at Patrick and Karen's house. There's a lot of passive-aggressive behavior, a lot of
00:04:29
Speaker
microaggressions that sort of escalate into more major aggressions and things get weirder and weirder and more and more uncomfortable for Bjorn and Louise until finally they decide to leave in the middle of the night. And as they're leaving, Agnes, the little girl, is upset. Her stuffed animal, she left it behind and overcome by a sense of fatherly dutifulness
00:04:55
Speaker
Bjorn decides to turn the car around and go back to the house just to get the bunny. And at that point out that there's a clearly like a recurring sort of symbolic significance to this bunny because in a way that's how they meet in on the Italian vacation prior to that scene, right?
00:05:14
Speaker
Yes, and that in the Italian vacation, Agnes loses the bunny there as well, and Bjorn goes in search of it. But he does so grudgingly. He does so because his wife makes him. This time he himself is making the choice. His wife knows that something is wrong and just wants to leave, and she has correctly understood that the bunny is no longer a priority. Bjorn, however, is so distressed by his daughter's tears that he turns back.
00:05:39
Speaker
And although they had managed to successfully sneak out of the house the first time, they are discovered when they return. And this leads to a huge confrontation between the two couples in which the Bjorn and Louise are persuaded to actually stay for the remainder of the weekend. And Patrick
Suspicion & Confrontation
00:05:58
Speaker
and Karen are so good at manipulation and gaslighting that they basically managed to, rather than acknowledge that they have been
00:06:06
Speaker
terrible, terrible hosts, they managed to make Patrick and Karen feel as though they have been terrible guests and that there's blame on them as well. And so the way it culminates is that Bjorn and Louise leave a second time. And it's because of something that Bjorn found while he was sniffing around the property that suggested that maybe Abel wasn't really
00:06:35
Speaker
Patrick and Karen's kid that maybe Patrick and Karen have a habit of collecting other people's children. And Bjorn leaves his wife and daughter in the car while he looks for help. He comes back to find out that they've been intercepted by Patrick and Karen.
00:06:51
Speaker
And the final sequence of events is absolutely one of the most chilling things I've ever seen in a film. Bjorn has not shared with his wife what he found at the house that prompted them to leave. So he has more information than she does. And when Patrick and Karen get in the car,
00:07:15
Speaker
the babysitter shows up as well as a henchman. Agnes, the little girl, is getting increasingly frightened. And Louise says to her, I always tell you nothing bad can happen to you while mommy is here. And the men are sitting in the front and the women and the girl are sitting in the back. And Louise says to her daughter, I keep telling you nothing bad can happen when mommy's here. And Karen
Shocking Brutality & Reactions
00:07:43
Speaker
says,
00:07:44
Speaker
but that's not really true and at that point they grab Agnes and in front of her parents they cut her tongue out and of course we realize at this point if we
00:07:59
Speaker
hadn't realized already that Abel was not born without a tongue, exactly the same thing was done to him. Agnes is then dragged screaming away, so she's now been mutilated and kidnapped in front of her parents. Patrick and Karen then drive Bjorn and Louise to a quarry or someplace like that where
00:08:19
Speaker
they are made to strip naked and then they are stoned to death. And in the final scene we see Agnes, now mute, living with Patrick and Karen as their daughter. So I did something unusual after I watched this. I've
Critique of Societal Politeness
00:08:37
Speaker
gotten into a habit that I really dislike over the past few years. Very often when I finish a movie, rather than digesting it,
00:08:45
Speaker
on my own for any period of time, I immediately bring up the internet because I want to see what people said about it. I'm not particularly interested in why I do that or where that comes from, although I think it's a bad habit, but I do think an aspect of it is that most of the time when I watch a movie, my reaction to it is tempered in one way or another. That was a good movie, but
00:09:10
Speaker
Or that was a bad movie, but it had some good things in it. With Speak No Evil, I have read, very deliberately, almost nothing. I have read no reviews. I have read no interviews with the director or the writer. Christian Taftrup is the director, and he co-wrote the film with his brother, Mads.
00:09:31
Speaker
And so i very deliberately not engaged in the conversation that's out there about this movie and the reason that i did that was partially just that i was so so so shaken by the audacity and the effectiveness of the ending.
00:09:49
Speaker
that I had no interest in reading anything about it. And the other thing is that I had a reading on the movie that was not something that came to me after a lot of reflection, but that it was the take I had immediately when the movie ended. The take that I want to propose is that what happens to Bjorn and Louise happens because
00:10:11
Speaker
they insist on defaulting to politeness wherever possible. And the logical extreme of their defaulting to politeness is that their child is mutilated and kidnapped in front of them, and then they are physically debased and then murdered. And in the car, right before they are taken to be stoned,
00:10:35
Speaker
Bjorn says to Patrick, why are you doing this? And Patrick says, because you let us, because you let us. And I immediately thought of the modern political climate in which there's a sort of both sides or ism that's happening. And there's also this emphasis on politeness, right? Like be civil, raise your objections to fascism in a civil way. If you are not objecting to fascism in a civil way, you are part of the problem.
00:11:05
Speaker
And of course, the ultimate progression of something like fascism is death camps and genocide, right? And all the way on the way to death camps and genocide, there were lots and lots of people who were saying, yes, but let's make sure we're all being polite about this. So I read it as a sociopolitical commentary about how evil wins in the end
00:11:33
Speaker
because good is more worried about politeness, is more worried about the mechanics of exactly how do we stand up against evil and exactly how are we supposed to be good. And evil just does what it fucking wants to and it wins in the end because people were cowards who were focused on the wrong thing.
00:11:53
Speaker
It's a very difficult movie to rewatch because you know where it's going. And I really don't ever need to see that final scene again as long as I live. But it is extraordinarily well acted and perfectly paced. And there's just this extraordinary scene when after Bjorn and Luis have stripped naked, and we've already seen them naked, we've seen them have sex. And so there's no shock value
00:12:22
Speaker
in the nudity itself within the world of the film, we've already seen the nudity. We understand that they are being completely and utterly dehumanized and humiliated, and they have both ultimately failed utterly as parents because they literally failed to protect their daughter while she was in their arms. So psychologically, emotionally, they've suffered about as much as a parent can.
00:12:48
Speaker
and yet they're still trying to comfort each other. Even as they're standing there naked in this bleak landscape, they're still trying to cling to one another and comfort one another. And then the first rock is thrown. There's a part of me that feels like I'm gonna tear up, just even describing it. It's been a long time since I was so harrowed by something that I saw on screen, and so I would argue that
00:13:18
Speaker
this movie is every bit as good as it is trying to be and I well okay let me let me break off there and give you a moment to interject
00:13:29
Speaker
I mean, I think that you positioned the, if you could call it the moral of the story pretty well in that just, you know, not pretty, you did it well. So I think how you described what in the director's mind he wanted to convey to viewers, he did, which is, you know, again, I think, let me reiterate what you said and just make sure we're on the same page. Essentially the moral was,
00:13:58
Speaker
that if you take politeness and stretch it to the furthest extreme, as in, if you're so concerned with the social... Hang on, my cat. Hey, man.
00:14:12
Speaker
Sorry. I have some furniture left that's not totally destroyed. So anyway, if you stretch social niceties and politeness to the farthest extreme, you get this. And where he seemed to be going with it was that's how atrocities happen. Here we're watching it on a micro scale, but you took it to concentration camps. This is what can happen on a macro.
00:14:43
Speaker
I think that is how he's positioned it, but I think what's potentially dangerous in that formulation is this sort of black and white
00:14:55
Speaker
good with a capital G, evil with a capital E, and that in this instance, although this might be reductive, but in the world of the film, it seems to be saying that of all of the things that can lead to genocide, for instance, on the macro level,
00:15:16
Speaker
It is the result of passivity that is shrouded in polite behavior. And I think where I struggle with this, as I was trying to feverishly make sense of an enormous topic,
00:15:33
Speaker
which is I mean clearly I'm no I feel comfortable saying Patrick and Karen are evil with a capital E these are evil characters and it's complicated further because you're not exactly sure what their motivation is why are they doing what they're doing well they're not rich
00:15:57
Speaker
And so clearly this scheme isn't making them billionaires. Money doesn't actually seem to be the main motivator. And it's not about disagreeing with you just to throw in. I'm not sure the ending was actually Agnes on the swing. I think the ending was them going to another hotel.
00:16:19
Speaker
to do it again, but with Agnes. And it shows a shot of Patrick with his hand out of the car window, and he's wearing Agnes' father's watch. And again, so you have this moment where you're like, okay, he's using this stuff. And you're trying to think, okay, both he and his wife, Karen, must take the cars of their victims, and they have some shady person that they sell it to, and that pays their
00:16:46
Speaker
you know, expenses until the next thing, you know, but they cobble together whatever objects they strip from their victims. And that seems, at least in this filmic world, to hold them over until the next attack. Does that sound fair? It does. I was thinking as you were speaking that you can have, because you said capital G, good, capital E, evil.
00:17:13
Speaker
you can have capital E evil without having capital G good. That is, if you look at something like, you know, death camps, that is just capital E evil. And that is a thing that exists in the world, regardless of the nuance that might exist between, you know, the
00:17:34
Speaker
selfish motivation and selfless motivation and all of us being complicated creatures and not understanding our own motives. None of that is an obstacle to capital E, evil being a thing that exists. As far
Antagonists' Motives & Historical Parallels
00:17:48
Speaker
as motive, I think where we differ is I don't care what their motive is at all because I don't think it matters. And I don't think the film is concerned with what their motive is either because I think the film recognizes that it doesn't matter.
00:18:03
Speaker
Like I'm gonna interject and say like, okay, go ahead and argue that for me. Like why wouldn't it matter what the motive is?
00:18:13
Speaker
So we know we live in a world where things like that happen, right? Like there, even if this particular exact sequence of events has never played out before, we know that there exist in the world people like Patrick and Karen who derive extreme pleasure from inflicting extreme suffering and humiliation on other human beings, right? And
00:18:40
Speaker
the result of their actions is exactly the same whether they're doing it because they're, you know, like you said, there's no money in it, but if there were money in it, the result of their actions would be the same. If they're doing it because they're psychopaths who are just who have a
00:18:56
Speaker
an error in their brain, so their brain doesn't function like other human beings, the result of their actions is the same. If they're doing it because there's some hint in the movie that they are perhaps in search of a perfect child, and every time they kidnap one of these children they're disappointed so they kill the child and start the process over, there's a hint of that. So maybe they are doing it because they are in search of their unobtainable ideal of a perfect child, but the result of their actions is still the same.
00:19:23
Speaker
And what the question the movie is interested in is, in the face of people who use a certain set of tactics to get what they want, how do you behave in a way that does not turn you into a victim of those people? I don't think the motivation matters at all.
00:19:42
Speaker
I'm going to disagree. In the same sense of the more that I've read about the history of the Nazi Holocaust, you actually discover Raoul Hilberg, I think, is still considered certainly one of, if not the almost foundational American writer that made Nazi Holocaust studies a sub-discipline in history. And he wrote a three-volume work that's apparently incredible.
00:20:10
Speaker
geared up to read it yet, but I've read around it because he's written some other shorter works. And he does show up notably in Claude Lonsman's, whatever you want to call it, nine-hour behemoth called Shoah. He plays a, I mean, it's a documentary about the Nazi Holocaust, so it's interviewing
00:20:29
Speaker
victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, and Hilberg is going on the record as a professional historian. But what Hilberg said in the film, or at least in writing, I can't actually speak for the film because I haven't seen it in a while, but I know in writing he brings up that when you actually get down to what the hell was going on when Hitler and the Nazi regime initiated the
00:20:56
Speaker
final solution and really ramped it up into its final fully genocidal total extermination stage. Not only Hilleberg but other historians of this period touch on something that I think is absolutely fascinating. This came from a Marxist historian named Enzo Traverso who landed in the same place. He said, you really can't say that this is a byproduct of
00:21:18
Speaker
industrial capitalism, which, you know, many authors, including some that survived camps themselves, tried to smash into, tried to explain this with a sort of capitalist exploitation thesis. And where Traverso came in alongside with Hillberg, although I guess I should reverse it where, no, that's right, because I just want to make sure that Hillberg is given the primary props here. He said, you know, if there were a capitalist explanation beneath this,
00:21:48
Speaker
you wouldn't engage in mass extermination because you would have a slave population whose labor you could exploit for you know without payment and so once it starts turning into literally factories this is where it gets bizarre as you have these factories that actually mirror industrial factories but then you ask yourself what is the product and in its most psychopathic irrational stages the final product was mass death
00:22:14
Speaker
And so there is no rational process going on here. Or you could say they put rational processes to completely irrational ends. And so I bring this up just to say that I will disagree with there was no motivation here, or they don't have something they want. Because I think what I started to feel as I read this material, and by the way, it's like I've read, let's say,
00:22:39
Speaker
10 books on the Nazi Holocaust. You could fill an enormous, enormous library with books bulging and you couldn't get it all in. So there's so much to read. But you get through all this stuff and I had this feeling where I'm like, there's just something here that you can't fucking explain.
00:22:57
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that there's not a motivation, a motive, a desire that is being carried out. And I think what you wind up landing on, or what I did at least, and it's deeply uncomfortable, is that there's something happening below the politics on a very animal level, where people are enjoying the experience of dominating other human beings to the maximum degree and relishing in that power and sadism.
00:23:25
Speaker
And I think that that is what this film is also showing. So to say it in my mind that Karen and Patrick are motivationless, I think is mistaken because I feel that at bottom, these are two psychopaths that are dead as human beings in any real sense. They're breathing, but they're not human. And they want and clearly are addicted to
00:23:54
Speaker
Engaging in these what do you want to call them playing out of power relations and domination and patrick plays the major role in his fucked up partner plays the supporting role and they do this.
00:24:10
Speaker
in perpetuity. And so I brought up the money thing to say, I think what was fascinating and in a way it's analogous to the Nazi Holocaust thesis, which is that at bottom this isn't motivated by normal things. It's motivated by something animal, but that doesn't mean that it's lacking in motive, if that makes sense.
00:24:30
Speaker
It makes total sense. And I'm not even sure if we're disagreeing because I wasn't arguing that they were motivation less. And in fact, I agree with your take on what their motivation probably is. I just think from a storytelling perspective, it doesn't matter. Like if you're in the cattle car.
00:24:50
Speaker
on your way to the death camp. Figuring out why exactly people are doing this to you is knowledge that is going to come to you at a time when it can no longer help you. And in fact, you could argue that in a period, any period where some form of fascism is on the rise, whether it's
00:25:15
Speaker
America in the last 10 years, where we're not sure how this is all going to turn out, or Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, where we know how that ended up, any period like that. If you are faced with such circumstances and your preoccupation is with the motivation of the fascists, then maybe you're sort of missing the point.
00:25:37
Speaker
Well, okay. And so this is where I think I take issue with it being, it presents itself as being deeper than it really is. Like I would almost have an easier time placing this in just like calling it like a really fucking good horror movie or saying that it's kind of like a fucked up version of Louis Boone Wells, the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie or exterminating angel, where again, you're riffing off one theme and you stretch it to the point of absurdity.
00:26:06
Speaker
And I bring that up just to say what you said, which is you don't have time to talk when you're in these situations because you're going to be just smashed. You have to respond. And if you don't, you're screwed.
00:26:20
Speaker
The more that I've read about, and clearly this is coming to the fore that I'm more steeped in the Nazi Holocaust than any other genocide or Holocaust in human history, but I don't think that this is unique to this horrible event that took place. I bring this up just to say,
00:26:40
Speaker
The more i read the more you like wait a second you know it wasn't all just wasn't all passivity of course there was a lot of get on the train and people got on the train but there were also for instance in the worst i get a resistance movement that decided at the final stages.
00:26:58
Speaker
We're going to die. So we might as well fight, and they did. And you have people in the camps that made decisions like that, too. And so I think when I brought up the capital G Good, and maybe actually it's a little more complicated than that on Bjorn and Louisa's side, because I'm not even sure we could call them capital G Good, because the passivity actually might be a knock against them in terms of ethics.
00:27:22
Speaker
certainly Karen and Patrick are capital E evil, but I bring this up and then tie it to these historical examples to say like in the midst of capital E evil occurring, it's not always pure passivity even in the more recent instances and I think we have a tendency
00:27:42
Speaker
in our mainstream notions of these events to flatten them and say it was just a bunch of sheep going to slaughter when in reality, yeah, it sounds like the majority of folks are in such shock and based on the power asymmetry, don't fight back. But that doesn't mean within that, you know, you could pull out from that demographic, not just individual examples, but even group examples where that was not true at all.
00:28:09
Speaker
and even the complexities of all the stuff with these people who are participating.
00:28:15
Speaker
in the evil doings of their captors in order to survive themselves, but also not always completely being complicit, but riding this very complex and ambiguous line. So I just bring it up to say like, at the very least, I don't want to run the risk of flattening this into sheep being led to slaughter by the few hyper predators that are psychopathic and know how to take advantage of it. Cause I don't think that's how it plays out historically.
00:28:44
Speaker
I agree with you, but I don't think that the movie is suggesting that that is how it plays out historically. And I don't think it's how it plays out in the movie. Bjorn and Louise are not cowards at bottom. This is not a movie about two people learning that they're actually cowards.
00:29:01
Speaker
They, at multiple points, they do stand up to Patrick and Karen. They do correctly realize that they need to get out of that environment and get their child out of that environment and they do get out of it. But what you use the word shock, people are shocked. It is continually, they're shocked at Patrick and Karen's behavior. Continually puts them in a situation where they will accept
00:29:26
Speaker
What should be unacceptable explanations for things because it's a way of resolving the cognitive dissonance that the shock feels because. What they really need to internalize your name louise what they really need to internalize is the fact that patrick and karen. Are fucked up and ordinary rules of human behavior don't apply to them.
00:29:51
Speaker
But rather than face that fact, because that fact would make them uncomfortable on a philosophical existential level, they make themselves vulnerable to certain tactics of exploitation and manipulation that ultimately lead them to become totally helpless.
Central Themes: Misjudgment & Norms
00:30:12
Speaker
And I think that's what the movie is interested in investigating is that dynamic. It's not that they're passive, it's not that they're stupid,
00:30:21
Speaker
and it's not that they in any way deserve to be blamed for what has happened to them. It's what is it that we want to believe that isn't true that leads us to not properly judge what's actually going on around us and then the next thing you know children's tongues are being cut out or people are being cut apart with machetes or whatever it is. Yeah I mean it's interesting you bring this up because
00:30:51
Speaker
I don't know where this came from. It might have been Krishnamurti, the sort of mystical spiritual guide that made a mark in the United States, or Chogyam Trungpa. I can't remember where I came across this man, but I came across it in the past week, and I really liked it because essentially what it said was, in the end, you have to be able to trust your own mind,
00:31:18
Speaker
you have to be able to trust your own gut. And if you can't trust your own mind or your own gut, then how can you trust anything? And I think there's actually something very profound in that. And I think that where I've been grappling with this from a slightly different angle, in some ways a more, I'm going to put it, I guess maybe in bad language, but from a neutered angle in that it doesn't have quite the same stakes, right? As your kid might get killed and you and your wife as well.
00:31:47
Speaker
with academia, you know, and reading all this scholarship and, you know, being a teacher and you go, well, according to this person and according to that person, they say, yada, yada, yada. And this person says, yada, yada, yada. Actually, this person disagrees with that person and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, by the time you're done, you've just built up this never ending list of what other people say about things that you're interested in, but you never potentially get to what you think, where you land. And I actually think that that is,
00:32:17
Speaker
in some ways built into academia like I actually had a professor once that who was you know we've all had that smug professor that we both respect but also feel a little bit uncomfortable around and I remember him saying don't make an I statement which is
00:32:33
Speaker
fairly normal for formal essays. But not only don't make a nice statement, go ahead and quote what other people have written and just cobble that together. And it's probably a lot better than anything you can write because you're not going to have an original thought is essentially what he said or came, you know, was very clear and implying and I must have internalized that I think a lot of people do and maybe our culture actually pushes back against this idea that you can be an authority.
00:33:00
Speaker
And maybe I'm not going to be able to work my way through an astrophysics problem, but I should be able to engage with a person who's in front of me, whether they're rubbing me the right way or the wrong way. And not just a personality thing, like something feels wrong. I should trust that. I don't need to ask someone else, you know?
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mentioned this. I was having a discussion with someone in my life that I'm pretty close to who's working through some things in their own life right now. And I was kind of feeling them out about what kind of things that they're drawn to in terms of music and movies and
00:33:39
Speaker
I mentioned this movie and they said they weren't going to watch it because it was a horror movie. And so I went ahead and described the plot to them. And when I finished describing the movie, their reaction was essentially, what the fuck is wrong with you that you would want to watch that and with the filmmakers that they would want to make it?
00:33:58
Speaker
And I found that really interesting, that reaction, because it made me think of the way that people react to the actual capital E, evil stuff that happens in the world. There's sort of this reaction of, let's not talk about that. Let's not focus on it. Let's not think about it. Let's write it off as an aberration.
00:34:20
Speaker
Let's frame it as something that happened in the past due to a unique set of circumstances that will never be repeated. Let's do anything whatsoever except actually internalize the knowledge that this is the way the world is. And just because
00:34:40
Speaker
The odds are pretty good that you will make it through life without experiencing the capital evil of people like Patrick and Karen doesn't mean that that shit isn't real. Like you peel back layers of reality and what you see staring back at you
00:34:58
Speaker
is a woman cutting a tongue out of a little girl. And the movie, I think, is advancing the thesis insofar as art can advance the thesis that, no, this shit happens and you have to pay attention to it. And the only mistake that Bjorn and Louise make, I mean, they make a lot of mistakes like coming back for the bunny was a really bad decision there, buddy. But the only real mistake that they make,
00:35:25
Speaker
is that they won't face the fact that Patrick and Karen don't fit into the existing categories of people that they have in their brains that they might interact with in the world, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And by the way, I don't like your friend's response to you mentioning this film. I find like, you know, I think sometimes about Franz Kafka, you know, who
00:35:55
Speaker
like him or don't like him, I think it's now clear that this is a serious, serious writer who's gonna be with us for a long, long time. And anyone who's read his work, even if they don't like it, certainly can recognize that there's some very disturbing stories. On some level, all of them are on a spectrum, but some of them are really, really scary. And-
00:36:22
Speaker
I don't know how many times I've read that story, but that story has haunted me ever since the first time I read it. And I will, I will find myself every so often. I will, I, in fact, I think this movie made me think of that story and I don't want to go down, you know, a whole rabbit hole of explaining the plot of that story. But there is a commonality there where you're staring into something incredibly disturbing and you find yourself unable to look away.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yes, and I just brought up this Kafka piece because as a quote unquote professional myself, and I know you've been a quote unquote professional, and we've all probably once we reach a certain age, and I don't say this with any disrespect to folks who say this counts as professional, that doesn't just, if you've had to be in a corporate-ish sort of situation or an office environment,
00:37:15
Speaker
Kafka was a petty bureaucrat. It's hard to imagine him engaging in drudgery all day and then have the energy, but also somehow not either that fed a already overly fertile imagination or it didn't get in its way. But I find it obnoxious because I could imagine Kafka sharing one of his short stories with a colleague at his
00:37:40
Speaker
heady bureaucratic job from one seeming bureaucrat to another and the other bureaucrat going, Jesus, friends, you got to talk to a doctor. I don't know you should write this shit. Actually, I'm a little nervous being around you. And you know what, if that had happened because he was so sensitive, I haven't read about him extensively, but it's obvious from the diaries and his difficulties with love interests, you know, that that's like the kiss of death for some artists. So thank God Max Broad, who actually, the more I read about him, I'm like,
00:38:10
Speaker
I don't know how Kafka tolerated this chump, but at the same time, he clearly supported him and saw that there was immense vision. And so, when people make comments like the one you received, all due respect to your friend, I hope they don't listen to this, or I hope they do, and know that I'm not coming after them, but just this sort of situation where
00:38:31
Speaker
You know, that stuff shuts down creativity and it shuts down conversations and it says more about the other person's discomfort, about going into areas of the human, let's not, we could call it soul, whatever you want to call it, the human experience that if you don't go into, I mean, this is where it gets tricky where it's like,
00:38:54
Speaker
Will we understand evil with a capital E and why people do what they do or why these things happen? I actually don't think we will. And I think even survivors that decided to write about it and so many words get there themselves. But I just bring this up man to say like,
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, I find those statements to be so judgy and unhelpful, not just between person to person, but even on a collective level. That is exactly what not to say, I think.
Horror Films & Societal Biases
00:39:26
Speaker
Okay, so that ties in really nicely to something else I wanted to talk about, which is, so horror movies in general have a bad reputation. And part of that is because
00:39:38
Speaker
Genres always have a bad reputation, right? I'm not reading a novel. I'm reading a sci-fi novel. I'm not reading a novel. I'm reading a romance novel. I'm not watching a movie. I'm watching a horror movie. The genre prefix, the genre modifier diminishes things in general. And I don't really want to have the conversation about why that is or is not fair.
00:40:04
Speaker
But I wonder if there's a level also with horror movies at which people are put off by the mere investigation of these questions, and they mistake the investigation for a kind of pornographic, prurient fetishism.
00:40:26
Speaker
talk to me a little bit maybe about as a student of film, as a lover of film, what your own relationship with horror movies is.
00:40:38
Speaker
I mean, so when I was a kid, I grew up in definitely a conservative household. And maybe this is actually a flavor of familial conservatism that some listeners might relate to. Keeping in mind, there's lots of different colors in that rainbow. But in mine,
00:41:03
Speaker
You know, and this is I think also an interesting feature of American prudishness with sexuality, and I'll speak to this too, like my parents let me watch R-rated films when I was seven years old. So the first R-rated film I saw was True Lies, which if you watch it, I think as a kid I understood this is a movie, but it's a seriously violent action movie.
00:41:29
Speaker
And so you have some parents that conservative or liberal, I suppose, on the political spectrum that would never let their kids watch an R-rated film at that age, no matter what it was. And they're very strict about adhering to that for different reasons. You don't want to expose your child to these scary things. Actually, one of my earliest memories, it's kind of interesting, is of walking into my parents' bedroom
00:41:51
Speaker
They were watching a movie in bed at night and someone gets stabbed and I remember feeling viscerally frightened, you know like deeply deeply frightened and I think the reason why it left such an indelible impression on me at maybe three four years old I can't somewhere in that age range and
00:42:14
Speaker
is at that age, it really, we understand that this is deeply unsettling, but in a way that an adult can't say, oh, but I'm watching the movie Speak No Evil. No, it can really feel like you're encountering something very, very real. And of course, if it's a great film, like I think Speak No Evil is a good film or The Shining, that happens for adults too, but there's still a little bit of separation. And so I bring this up to say,
00:42:42
Speaker
that from probably seven to probably 27. Good 20 years. I did not care. I would watch anything. And I also will say that I watch my parents expose me to the exorcist and the shining. I'm pretty sure in a back to back in one day. If you can imagine when that would do to a child's mind. I saw that at eight years old and I have a pretty active imagination.
00:43:09
Speaker
Who's comparing right and certainly would never grandiosely compare myself to Kafka, but anyone who has an active imagination is going to be deeply deeply
00:43:19
Speaker
impacted by watching films like that at an early age. I remember the blood rushing out of the elevators in the shinings, opening scenes and just being, I mean, that was probably three months of like, this is stuck in my brain. And so, but then you become a teenager, you get desensitized, you also don't want to look like a wuss to your friends. And so I watched everything. And I think that now that I'm older,
00:43:49
Speaker
My dad brought this up at one point, which again, and not to say conservatives are like cookie cutter, one size fits all, you've met one, you've met them all thing, everyone is different and we're complicated. And so I love my dad by the way. So he brought up at one point,
00:44:09
Speaker
It's like if you were to show what you just watched, which is actually ironic because he showed me horror, he didn't show me horror films, but they didn't like get in my way, you know, when I wanted to watch them. But essentially his question was if
00:44:24
Speaker
Showing this to a child X would disturb them don't you think it still might actually disturb you as an adult even though you don't register it in quite the same way it's causing psychological disruption and then just add another folder that like i've gotten more interested in buddhism not as like i wouldn't call myself a buddhist but i would say at this point i'm a humble student of buddhism.
00:44:47
Speaker
And I've read both the more like scholarly sort of classic texts, but also some of the more mainstream ones by folks like Thich Nhat Hanh. And Thich Nhat Hanh says, hey, the same way that you don't necessarily want to eat fast food all the time because it's just bad for your body, you don't really want to be consuming media all the time that's bad for your mind. And he really means it. You know, this idea that there is a kind of
00:45:14
Speaker
infiltration that happens if you oversaturate yourself with this material. And so I don't think that means we all need to become G rated watching vegetable eating, you know, folks that never expose ourselves to stuff that could be quote unquote bad for us. But I do think if I'm going to watch something like what you just subjected me to, I'll take you off the hook. I subjected myself to it. But upon your recommendation,
00:45:43
Speaker
I really want to make sure that that filmmaker is to, I can trust them and that they're taking me there for a reason and that they're being thoughtful because I don't need, there's already enough stuff in the world to be depressed about. I don't need to add insult to injury by watching gratuitously rough stuff.
00:46:01
Speaker
Your friend is wrong to give you shit, but I'm also gonna say, I myself am very careful with this stuff now because I don't want it to enter my psyche unless I really feel convinced that the filmmaker has something important to say. I think you kind of helped to answer something that I've been trying to work out for myself. Because
Love for Horror & Narrative Depth
00:46:24
Speaker
my relation to horror movies is that I love horror movies in theory.
00:46:31
Speaker
In some ways, you could almost say it's my favorite genre of film. If I'm sitting in a movie theater and a trailer comes on for a horror movie, I will probably get more excited about that movie. If the trailer looks interesting, then I will about any other generic type of movie. Having said that,
00:46:49
Speaker
The vast majority of horror movies that I've ever seen are bad, including a lot of the ones that people think are good. Like, I don't like the Halloween movies, including the original one I think is a piece of crap.
00:47:03
Speaker
I don't like the Scream movies, I don't like Nightmare on Elm Street, or Friday the 13th, or The Thing. Most slasher movies are terrible. I've been disappointed so many times. And I've wondered what's going on with me. Is it that I really like being scared because of the adrenaline rush that comes along with that? And that's why I like horror movies.
00:47:26
Speaker
Or is it that I'm constantly, expectantly hoping for someone to come along who's going to make a version of Speak No Evil, or I would argue that The Exorcist is a great film. I think The Shining is a great film. I think probably I'm a Stephen King fan, and there's a lot that's been said and written over the years about why that movie is not a...
00:47:51
Speaker
does not work as an adaptation of that book that I've sort of lost sight of how good it is as a film on its own. But maybe it's not that I like being scared and that I'm judgmental about movies. Maybe it's that I'm looking for exactly what you just described. And I very rarely find it because it very rarely exists.
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you put that well, and just thinking about what are the questions that I'm interested in. I think a lot of the questions I'm interested in are the questions that most people are interested in. And maybe I can't speak for the globe, or maybe I could say everyone on the globe is interested in the questions I'm about to trot out, but from different angles based on the culture that they were weaned
00:48:34
Speaker
So, you know, for instance, in American US culture or Western European culture, I think questions like, is there a God? If there is a God, why does bad shit happen? If bad shit happens and there is a God, does that mean that God created evil or did He let us just have ultimate freedom and we have the capacity for evil and we've gone in those directions? Or is there no God?
00:49:05
Speaker
And I think this film clearly wants to invite the viewer to reflect on those kinds of questions. Why are we here? What the fuck is going on? What is reality? Where do I go after I die?
00:49:22
Speaker
I mean, these are like fundamental human questions. And I think that what's interesting, bringing it back to Buddhism, which was my first exposure to these kinds of answers to those questions. When disciples of the Buddha came to him and said, is there consciousness after death? The Buddha's response was at least the historically situated Buddha in India known as Siddhartha Gautama.
00:49:48
Speaker
Essentially, his response to is there consciousness after death to one disciple was, I don't know, and you're not going to figure that out. And I'm here to bring you to the end of suffering. If you're interested in that, here's what I think I can recommend and then you're going to have to figure out also that shit for yourself. But is there a God? Does consciousness happen, you know, after you're dead?
00:50:08
Speaker
These are speculative questions that have no bottom. Therefore, it's best not to even go there. And that doesn't lead to edification, if edification is being defined as the cessation of suffering. And so I bring that up to say, while I actually love the clarity of that kind of response and just saying, listen, you're not going to get to the bottom of this, any of these questions. We can't help but ask.
00:50:38
Speaker
I think it's just so natural to ask. And so I pivot back to like a David Berman. And so your question of like, why are you watching horror films on some level? Like, why am I listening to Purple Mountains even today? And I went to Marguerite's at the mall. And the refrain on this song is how long can the world go on with such a subtle God? How long can the world go on with no new word from God? How's it go? What's the next one?
00:51:06
Speaker
See the plot of the flawed individual looking for a nod from God, trotting the sod of the visible with no new word from God. We're just drinking margaritas at the mall. So here's a man that, I mean, I know, Brendan, you like him. I'm clearly in awe of him, as many are, although not at the level of a Britney Spears. You'd never become that famous, but of remarkable talent. And
00:51:31
Speaker
At 52, he's dropping lines like that, more or less towards the latter half of the album.
00:51:41
Speaker
He's not getting to the bottom of it. He's asking the same questions. And, you know, I think if we went to Primo Levy, a survivor of, I don't want to mess up which camp he survived, but a wretched concentration camp wrote many, many books, some fiction, some nonfiction. One was called If This Is a Man, which is incredible. And there are scenes in that I will never forget. But I don't think it's like, you know, and then I go into Raoul, Raoul Hilberg or
00:52:07
Speaker
the bible or you know any of these texts and you're trying to answer this question why does the shit happen and in the film it's why does one of these two fucking psychopaths wanna cut the tongue out of children and do this again and again while berman is asking how can this world.
00:52:26
Speaker
contains so much shit and God be around and just having to deal with that or feel depressed over that or feel helpless in the face of that and I think where you land or at least where I'm landing is I'm not gonna get to the bottom of it because they haven't and you wind up sort of coming to that again doesn't mean you don't try
00:52:48
Speaker
It doesn't mean you don't read. It doesn't mean you don't watch Speak No Evil, but it does mean in a way that the asking of the question and the continuous reflecting upon the question is clearly where it's at beyond any kind of mathematically framed answer. I'm glad you brought up Berman because I wanted to ask about art that you find yourself returning to again and again, even though it is fundamentally bleak.
00:53:19
Speaker
Berman would fall into that category for me or say no country for old men, either the Cormac McCarthy novel or the Coen Brothers movie, where, you know, no country basically shagor kills everybody except the sheriff. And and yet it's it. I've I've read the book a million times. I've seen the movie a million times and I plan to read and watch again like
00:53:48
Speaker
Is that because, I guess it's a complicated question because on the one hand we're responding to works of art that are exceptionally well made.
00:53:56
Speaker
Margaritas at the Mall is an astonishing song. It's probably my favorite of all of Berman's songs, and I love a lot of Berman songs. The lyrics are incredible, but also musically it's really good. And so part of what we're responding to is just the fact that it's a good song musically. No Country for Old Men is an extraordinarily well-written book and an extraordinarily well-made film, and so it's fun to watch, it's fun to read on some level.
00:54:24
Speaker
But is there, like, what is the stuff like that that you come back to again and again and what purpose is it serving? Or are you harming yourself in ways you don't recognize by coming back to it over and over? I mean, it's such a hard question. We, I think we are drawn to what we're drawn to for reasons we both understand and don't understand. And I think that we can be compelled to watch and rewatch or listen and re-listen.
00:54:55
Speaker
in a sort of medicine and poison combination. I think they serve dual purposes for us, the same way smoking a cigarette can do that. You know, damn, that feels good. And it is genuinely pleasurable. And yet I know it's hurting me. And so, and it might also create a kind of communion or a sense of like someone's seeing something that I'm seeing, you know, the platitude of, you know, they've said what I've thought, but have been unable to put into words myself, but
00:55:25
Speaker
I think even just the need for narrative and the need to situate our sense of ourselves and the world into some kind of story that makes sense. And when we're unable to do that, it is existentially and just viscerally unsettling. And I think in a way that's also what that movie does, is it doesn't really fit into anything.
00:55:49
Speaker
And you can't answer, why did they do what they did? So maybe that gets out like, OK, I'm with you in that. Yes, there might be like a desire or a pleasure in sadism and domination and power that's on display. But fundamentally, it's just like you can't really answer why they're doing what they're doing. And I'm not sure they could.
00:56:09
Speaker
And so, you know, back to Berman again with Purple Mountains, the penultimate track is Storyline Fever. And I've been listening to that album and I have to say, man, we're gonna have to talk about this as an episode. It'll probably have to be a multi-episode because it's so dense and incredible, but that as I listened to it sequentially and I got to Storyline Fever,
00:56:36
Speaker
And for those who don't know, Berman took his own life after the album was released shortly thereafter and was slated to tour. And I guess ironically, and I say this with respect, he was devastated by a Pitchfork review that was written about his last Silver Jews album, which was the previous band that he assembled.
00:57:00
Speaker
and the title that was used. And then they gave it like a 6.7, which was fucking stupid. And we'll talk about that. I'm not making this into a Berman thing, but just to say that this album got like an 8.4 or an 8.5, which is a high, high rating. And a lot of the album is joking in the opening song says, you know, a setback can be a setup for a comeback if you don't let up. That's a storyline.
00:57:23
Speaker
And so then you get the Pitchfork review and the storyline actually is in keeping with this idea of here comes a real comeback. This was a genuinely fantastic album. And then you have a song called Storyline Fever. And then outside of the album, you have this tragedy where a man takes his own life in the midst of really coming back. And I'm not saying this as Berman trying to make some MFA style meta commentary on our need for narrative.
00:57:52
Speaker
But I do think that his decision to take his life cut through the storylines that we had built around him and the storylines that he was actually laying out in that very album. And so I bring this up to say that when you are asking questions that can't be answered and that in some way pull you out of a linear sense of yourself and reality,
00:58:19
Speaker
It's incredibly unsettling. He has a line in his Silver Juice on that says, in natural bridge, he goes, in space, there is no center. We're always off to the side. There's this tendency to always make ourselves central to the world, to what's happening. And very infrequently, even if, again, it's a platitude, we really reflect on
00:58:41
Speaker
We are on a fucking orb in space amongst other planets in one solar system amongst from what I'm now reading billions of solar systems in a universe that is unfathomably large and we're worried about needing to take a shit when we get into the parking lot at work or what we're going to eat for lunch or even just like
00:59:05
Speaker
you know, should I go and get that degree or not? And when you really just stop all that and go, what the fuck is going on? I think you really are confronted with just the enormity of that sort of disjointedness of this thing we're living in. And that film I think plays with that from a very dark angle.
00:59:28
Speaker
So from time to time I write reviews on Letterboxd. I don't do it too often, but if there's a movie I feel like I need to work out in my head, I might write a Letterboxd review and put it up and I hardly ever do it for a movie I've only seen once.
00:59:44
Speaker
But right after watching Speak No Evil, I was really tempted to write a letterbox review. And the hook that I was very seriously thinking about hanging the review on was making a case. And I'm not saying that I am making this case, but I'm going to tell you how I would have made the case, how I was considering it. Making the case that Speak No Evil is the greatest movie ever made.
01:00:09
Speaker
because it covers the entirety of the possibilities of human experience. That is, we see a couple living together, a mostly happy but mundane life. So we see kind of like the day-to-day realities of child rearing in marriage.
01:00:33
Speaker
We see a couple trying to have time for themselves. We see them having sex and very clearly enjoying it and still feeling passion from one another. So there's romance there and we see
01:00:47
Speaker
basically, you know, good times and bad times and socially awkward times and kind of all the things that you go through in adulthood. And then there are children in the movie as well. And so as we see things through children's eyes and then at the end of it, we are confronted with the absolute atrocity that is committed and the reality of the possibility of those atrocities existing. And then the possibility of, you know, when, when
01:01:15
Speaker
Bjorn and Louise die at the end of the movie. They have literally lost everything and they have lost everything in a way that they cannot be philosophical about. There is no redemption in it for them. They are broken and humiliated and they have failed. And that is a thing that happens to people and it's a part of reality. And it happened to them because other human beings did it to them. And so I kind of saw like,
01:01:45
Speaker
I think it was Mahler who, and I've never spent much time with Mahler's music, but I think he said something along the lines of like, a symphony should contain the entire world. And very grandiose German kind of thing to say, but I understand what he means. And there was a part of me after watching Speak No Evil that I kind of felt like this movie contains the whole world. And I'm not seriously going to sit here and argue that it's the greatest film ever made. It's not.
01:02:14
Speaker
But I did feel that, like I felt that impetus to say something like that, because I really did feel like I'd just seen a movie that encompassed the entire world. And you could probably
Human Experience & Artistic Value
01:02:25
Speaker
say the same of no country for old men, for instance, and hundreds of other things that are also very, very dark. Yeah.
01:02:37
Speaker
It's hard. It's hard. I because this is a movie. I actually it's like I almost texted you after watching it. I hate this. And I can't believe you made me watch this because it is. It's painful. Well, and I dreaded rewatching it. And in fact, I did not rewatch it in its entirety. I rewatched parts of it that I wanted to revisit, but. Hmm.
01:02:58
Speaker
And to me that agree watchability would be it would be a characteristic of a you know. Well maybe I mean I. There are movies by Ingmar Bergman that I. Would hold up as but even OK let's let's think about like cries and whispers right. That's a very rewatchable movie. Within certain limits for me like I.
01:03:21
Speaker
I might make a case that that is one of the greatest films ever made, and yet if I'm going to rewatch it, I have to prepare myself for it. I have to be in the right place. I have to know that I can turn it off and I can carry it with me in a good way rather than a bad way afterwards. It's not fucking Indiana Jones that you just turn on to have a good time.
01:03:45
Speaker
I totally get that reaction, and I speak no evil is not something I was looking forward to spending more time with, which may be a knock against it, or it may just be a sign of how powerful it is. So I have a still frame in my bedroom of one of my favorite films, and that is Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, which I am certainly not fluent in Japanese, but from what I've been told, it means to live.
01:04:14
Speaker
and another one that I would have and it's a scene like sort of the climactic scene when the petty bureaucrat who's been diagnosed with stomach cancer and has been doing the same mundane shit for 25 30 40 years knows he has six months to live and so he wants to do one good thing before he dies after going through all the
01:04:34
Speaker
You know, pains of, well, okay, I have saved all this money, but I won't live to be able to spend it. Let me be a glutton. Let me hang out with pretty women. Let me get drunk. Let me, you know, and once he gets all that out of his system and he's still facing down his death, he decides that these women who began in the opening scene in his bureaucratic
01:04:55
Speaker
environment pleading to keep a highway development from destroying their neighborhood and hoping that maybe a park could go there. Instead, he decides to devote the final, final weeks of his life to getting the park built. And spoiler alert, he gets it built. And so the final climactic scene is of this character on a swing in the park that he helped get built. I'm getting emotional. Just think about it.
01:05:22
Speaker
And I think there's something in that kind of an ending for me, and that's not how I don't know. No, it has other stuff going on after that. They're recollecting the funeral. There's a long funeral scene, but
01:05:39
Speaker
Another scene from a film I would do a still from is when the chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest throws the water fountain through the window and escapes and is running down the hill. And Jack Nietzsche's song comes on as he's escaped. And the inmates who also could escape but clearly are too afraid to follow suit clearly look emboldened by
01:06:03
Speaker
Is his name the chief? I can't remember. Excuse me. That's what they call him. I don't, I don't, I believe that's just a racist appellation. Right. Of course. I just want to make sure that I'm not fucking up the character's name in the film, but there's something uplifting in it. And so that, and the previous moment, he just smothers Jack Nicholson with a pillow and his answer before he leaves is let's go. And then he smothers him because Jack Nicholson's character, uh, what was his name? Mick, Mick.
01:06:30
Speaker
Whatever it was, you know, this this totally vivacious alive, you know, live your life. God damn it. Like Harold and Maude, like that woman in Harold and Maude is given a what do they call those where they operate on your brain? Lobotomy. I gave him a lobotomy. And so he just he's not there anymore. And so it actually was a humane. I don't even call it a murder because that character, that person was gone. But his final response is let's go. And then he throws that
01:07:00
Speaker
fountain through the window and bails out after he smothers Nicholson. Sorry, I might want to edit this or you might want me to edit it. So, Nicholson's character is Randall McMurphy. McMurphy. And then the chief is just known as, his last name is Bromden, but he's just called Chief because he's Native American. Okay.
01:07:21
Speaker
And, you know, those are tough movies. Like, Ikiru is about a man who's got stomach cancer and he's gonna die and he's like grappling with how much of his life he's wasted and that his relationship with his son is sort of like irrevocably irreparable. And what's his name again?
01:07:39
Speaker
randal mcmurphy randal mcmurphy in one for me this is a tragedy you know this is like the most vivacious sort of life affirming character destroyed in a mental institution they should have been in to begin with by a fucked up system and a nurse that is become infamous in movie history and so.
01:07:58
Speaker
You know, they're deeply sad films, but there's hope in them. There's hope somewhere and there's the freedom to do good. And I think that both of them are life affirming and that they do ultimately, I think they left me feeling that life is worth living. And they also left me feeling like even in the midst of this heinousness, there's room to be good and that actually we are fundamentally good at bottom.
01:08:27
Speaker
And I don't think that's what this film does. And so that might just be a worldview thing or some gut reaction. I'm like, I think it's still important to explore.
01:08:37
Speaker
the dark corners that this film is exploring. And yet definitely not a desert island film. And I definitely wouldn't say it's one of the best of all time. I think for these reasons and that I need not to be lied to like a Hallmark movie, but I want someone to help me make sense of how to feel that life is worth it in the midst of all that makes you feel it isn't. And it's hard enough as it is to be a human being.
01:09:05
Speaker
And so I don't need art to add insult to injury and make it easier for me to become misanthropic. Again, that doesn't mean it's not a great film, but I think I wouldn't say it's one of the best of all time because I don't want to say a criteria for best of all time would need to be that it makes me feel good. Because I don't even know if that's exactly what those movies did for me, Ikiru and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but it made me feel like life is worth it.
01:09:32
Speaker
and that being human there is goodness in this you know. Yeah I completely understand that and I think there's a not every movie or work of art I would never make it a standard of mine that everything had to do that and I'm not saying you make it a standard of yours that everything has to do that but simply because that isn't how life works like
01:09:57
Speaker
some people live a pretty lucky life where there aren't a lot of bad things and some people live a lucky life or sorry an unluckier life where there are bad things but they find a way to seize on the good and other people live unlucky lives where everything that can go wrong does go wrong and
01:10:18
Speaker
All of those things are valid parts of the human experience, and art has a responsibility to explore all of those three things. But I do think when there is a movie like Ikiru, or I would argue that cries and whispers in it's as dark as it is and as fucked up as it is, there is something life-affirming and redemptive about it.
01:10:39
Speaker
at the end, you have to do it in a, I don't want to say an honest way, but a truthful way. Like we know, I think you and I both feel like we know when we're being lied to. So all right, I'm curious then after we've spent an hour and a half talking about this movie, like I know you're not going to go sit down and rewatch it tonight. And I'm certainly not going to do that either. But
01:11:07
Speaker
Do you see it any differently than you did when we started? I don't think so. And that doesn't mean that that makes it any less of a film.
01:11:20
Speaker
I think the filmmaker had a vision, I think that the filmmaker had a theme he wanted to explore, and he had a sort of, again, that sort of Luis Bunuel or fill in the blank, let's riff off this one preoccupation but stretch it to the farthest extreme and see what happens. And they referenced, I did read a couple reviews and
01:11:40
Speaker
I certainly thought of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which is a similar film in some ways, in that it totally upends audience expectations that this is somehow gonna work out, which it doesn't in both films. And so, as you said, that happens in life, and I'm with that. But just to loop back around to where we were just a few minutes ago before you asked your final question,
01:12:07
Speaker
Even, and I say this with total acknowledgement that like, you're right. I mean, how can you even fathom what some people go through in this world right now? It is unfathomable. And yet we all are going to die. Our bodies will fall apart. We're going to either die from some random thing or we're going to get sick and we're going to die. And there's going to be pain. We're all in that boat.
01:12:31
Speaker
even the movie stars, even the billionaires, whether they want to stuff themselves full of probiotics and God knows what else to stave that off or not. We're all trending towards that. And so knowing that we're all trending towards that, how do you not find lightness, but just say yes to life while knowing that that is there?
01:12:57
Speaker
And I don't think this film says yes to life. I have to sit with that for a while. I don't feel like this film says yes to life.
01:13:07
Speaker
Interestingly, I don't really feel any differently about the movie either than I did coming in, but I need time to sit with what you just said. That phrasing is really striking. Interesting, you brought up Hanaki. We should probably pick a Hanaki film. He's an interesting filmmaker, man. We should probably pick a Hanaki film at some point and talk about it. Fuck, man. Well, there's no easy answer at the end of that conversation.
01:13:33
Speaker
Well, we got to do something a little lighter next time because Jesus Christ, for both our sakes and our listeners' sakes, we can't do a heavy thing next. Oh, why not? What kind of people do you think we are? What kind of people do you think we are? Let's make it worse. What's worse than that?