Transcript
Speaker: You don't have to.
Speaker: Welcome back to Death is a Photograph. This is Chase. Sam, is he's been wounded on a field fighting the IRA, so unfortunately he couldn't join us today, but I'm sure he'll be out of hospital soon.
Speaker: I'm also wearing a suit, which, contrary to what you might think, is not typical. But I am here with ah another man who's not wearing a suit, in fact, which is my old friend, Andrew Young, who is an associate faculty member at the Member School.
Speaker: How are you, Andrew? Doing well, thank you. How are you, Chase? I look like a ah man on the street reporter, a two-bit... For the listeners, my mic stand is ah not functional, as so I have to hold the microphone in front of my mouth while I'm doing these, which should show how much I care about you. Please subscribe.
Speaker: But if you add a suit to that, I really sort of look like Tony Wilson from 24-Hour Party People when he hosts Wheel of Fortune. so you know, could be better, could be worse, but... Andrew, what did you bring to Death as a Photograph, to Death Photo Pod this week?
Speaker: So I brought a movie called I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell. And I brought this because I'm not 100% sure ah that I knew or when I knew Heart Huckabees and Three Kings were by the same director.
Speaker: But you guys, you and Sam mentioned Three Kings on a previous episode. And i then you said, oh yeah, David O. Russell, he's like the most Gen X guy. was like, really? is that a thing? like Because it just, you know, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees were just movies that kind of you know were in pop culture at the time, to me, in the way that they did. And I didn't think much more of that other than the fact that I enjoyed both of them. I don't even remember associating the two. It just seemed like the kind of movies that were around at the time.
Speaker: Yes. that That is something I was going to mention, that watching this was sort of like going into a time machine of a certain kind for both good and ill. I mean, I actually really enjoyed the movie, but still.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, it was, I mean, they're very, you know, David O. Russell films are very much of their time. And you you asked after after I mentioned this if I had seen Spanking the Monkey, which I had not.
Speaker: Oh, geez, I'm sorry. No, actually, it's funny because I will go book shopping or I will go movie shopping or the movie rental store. We have a wonderful one, Bay Street Video, so it feels like being a kid going to Blockbuster still. I i actually got the DVD. Oh my God, i I'm envious. you know Speaking of generational memories, we've got a really wonderful ah movie rental place.
Speaker: And when I buy books or I get movies for my partner, Manny, I'll often get compliments on my taste when I'm buying for her, but never for myself. Right? But this is the first time where I was picking up a movie and and he looks at me and goes, oh, Spanking Monkey, that's really funny. That's very good that's a really good one.
Speaker: i like I get a compliment for myself for once. What we're saying here is that if you're a parent out there, perhaps you know have a significant other, you're interested in enculturating in some way, this is the podcast to come to for the picks so that you know maybe they can even build it and say that Amazon will sort of say back to you, like excellent choice. Exactly. i It's very validator. But yeah, I checked out that and I'm flirting with disaster.
Speaker: And it was a weird experience because like I said, I've seen, I've seen three things dozens of times. I saw for a long time, I Heart Huckabees was really like ah a comfort movie for me. could see that.
Speaker: Like one of those ones where you just kind of want the, do do dude it you just kind of want that really comforting move music to keep playing. Yes. One of those movies where you could just finish watching it and start watching it again.
Speaker: So I think that is, and I agree with, like, I had not seen this, but I very much enjoyed it. I was afraid it was just going to be, like, footage of Mike Huckabee talking about Gog and Magog or something for a period of time.
Speaker: But once I turned it on, I also, I found it kind of calming or warming because it is fundamentally, like, All David O. Russell movies are quirky in one way or another, and that is, I think, something we associate strongly with millennials, though, as we constantly contend on this show, the culture of one generation tends to be the sort of backwash of the late version of the prior generation. Yeah. And this movie in particular...
Speaker: It came out before Juno, but it it had that... And Juno is a movie of like my youth, right? Yeah. it It had some of that light touch quirk, kind of high stakes in an existential sense, but sort of cinematically low stakes. So if you're if you think of yourself as someone who's a thinker of some kind, but you also want something that sort of is like being in a warm bath...
Speaker: then this is going to do that. And I think that's a kind of person who was, at least in this mode, more common at that time. And that's why you had so many of those movies. It was desirable in some way.
Speaker: oh Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. and And you guys brought up Three Kings in the context of like Fight Club, but because I think Three Kings is 1999. And there's this 1999 moment with Fight Club and Office Space, which are other ones with this kind of like very much end of history. What are we doing? bored. I'm bored.
Speaker: And it was interesting with going back to my heart, because it's post 9-11, so history is kind of coming back. And they mentioned 9-11, right? At one point, it's like, he's having a hard time after the September thing, which is just such a good line, because he's a firefighter. We'll get to that. No, you're so right. I'm reminded of Gilbert Godfrey's Too Soon, where he was speaking at the Friars Club like a week later. he came in and he said, I'm sorry, my flight was delayed. Like it hit the towers or something. And he got like booed off the stage, you know, the sort of not being ready for it. And here...
Speaker: A few years later, we've settled into the ability to sort of whisper it, yeah but leave it leave it sort of implied like, oh, we all know the firefighters are having a rough time. And that kind of softness is very indicative, I feel, of what the movie, kind of how it works. And I have to say, you mentioned the end of history.
Speaker: One thing I identify with this movie sort of strongly, it does have something of a of ah of an awakening last man quality. What mean? Like, Because it's really a movie about you're like reasonably comfortable in some kind of economic sense, right? You're working.
Speaker: You have a job that somehow allows you to survive that is being an environmental activist who reads poetry. Like that's a job you can have. i like How does he get his money? Exactly. But then, and like his issue is not...
Speaker: I've surrendered my life to this good cause, but I'm not making anything and it's terrible. His problem is that he has experienced a set of coincidences, which means he be he becomes sort of like existentially interested, which is so distant. Like I was thinking about this while watching the movie. i was like, if I showed this, it's like my students were like 18 years old.
Speaker: they would probably be like, what is he talking? You saw the same guy three times. like you know what What is this? but Who cares? yeah He's in this moment of all there really is to do is plumb the depths because the externals are like reasonably well-situated. There's even a character, and the movie doesn't really remark on this. It's kind of a comedic beat, but there's a character who's adopted into like an evangelical Christian family. And it's just sort of like, this is what happens. We are good end of history people.
Speaker: we We believe in the gospel. We adopt children from Sudan and they become doormen and it's fine. And it's not, there's no racial component to it in any like stated way.
Speaker: Or are like are like very, very briefly, yeah right? Yes, yes. Because Mark Wahlberg starts going on the rant where like he's starting. what It was so great about this scene. So for a little bit of context, the the what African guy, kind of trying to figure out the coincidence of this African guy who Jason Schwartzman sees three times, ends up at his house and he's been adopted from Sudan and into this white evangelical family.
Speaker: And the dad is a urban planner, electrical engineer or something. Like he wires mini malls or designs them in some capacity. And you can see Mark Wahlberg, it's kind of building in him how much he hates petroleum. and It almost feels like he hasn't said, like, I hate petroleum yet. When the evangelical dad is already defending petroleum, like, God gave it to us.
Speaker: If we're not supposed to use it, why did God give it to us? Right? He's like, I hate petroleum. Why? And Mark Wahlberg starts going like, the war for oil is what causes the problems in Sudan. And...
Speaker: yeah you know And so it's you're displacing him. You're not helping him. We've caused those problems over there. And there's just this brief moment where it it like just like geopolitics flares up. Yeah. And then it's gone. Yeah. And that's like the whole Three Kings movie, right? Just the whole background of the, like, don't do Iraq War two Don't do the second Gulf War. that's That's David O. Russell's previous film starring Mark Wahlberg.
Speaker: It's just sort of contained in this this brief moment where it just kind of, and then it all goes back to like riding on bikes. And the scene after that is scene after that, when they leave the evangelicals' house, is one of my favorite. Because just watching the two of them ride bikes quickly and like stand up, and like it's just two little boys riding on their bikes.
Speaker: like Just the most idyllic, like and it's so charming in this scene. disarming, slight, twee way that we're we're supposed to be too cynical to enjoy. But I i can't help it. I just really... know it it it is kind of a beautiful movie. So to give the context, because I think this will allow us to then kind of intro our characters to return to this scene. Jason Schwartzman is the environmental activist who is trying to, quote, protect the wetlands, to save the wetlands. And he's doing this
Speaker: In a way that the movie does tarry with a little bit, but that I think in our current moment is a little confusing in that he's working with a large company called Huckabees, specifically with a guy named, a guy played by Jude Law, doing his amazing American accent where he just sort of deepens his voice. I've noticed British actors do this to sort of take on the American accent. They just kind of go down a little bit.
Speaker: And they're working together for reasons that are kind of It almost seems like maybe in the world of the movie, they're intended to be too obvious to need exploration. like it's sort of Huckabees needs the good PR, so they want to work with this group. But me, the sort of cynical man of 2026, is sort of like, well, but you can't trust... like ah like like What you... They have every economic incentive to not want to to not work with you in a meeting. But you know this is this is Bush. This is you know right after Clinton. So I guess they still are like the public, not even public, but the nonprofit, private, for-profit company fellowship relationship is somehow actually going to work together to save the world. And they're working on this. This is when Schwartzman sees this
Speaker: This tall African man three times, once at a ah very bizarre, very of-the-moment place where you go and you get cataloged photos of people to get signed, I think is the main reason. Yeah, like the the archive, I think they call it. Yeah, like this is ok this needs to be said now. We've both been through PhD programs at this point, Andrew.
Speaker: And i this movie is so interesting to me because it like contains the backwash of like academic theory in 70 different ways. Yeah. But it is not like a it is not like a highbrow movie particularly. It is so weird.
Speaker: like you can't think The philosophy in it is completely unidentifiable, right? Yeah. Watching it this time, Isabelle Husspeyre's character is the kind of Nietzschean, right? Yeah. Like, darkness, kind of Deridian deconstruction, you know, dark French theory coming She's literally French, right? Like, yeah the actress is, but I'm just saying, like, the character, too. The character as well. but But she has American advisors, which is why why is that happening? why is Because she was their graduate student. doesn't make any sense. But but she's she's talking about force. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah And you're like, how does that play in French? Like, there's no, like, you're talking about the force. like no Yeah, there's no, like, translation happening. there's no Yeah, there's no reason not to translate it. It sounds like Star Wars just in French. And it's not like, it's not like Gewalt or Gemacht or something like Will to Power or or Critique of Violence or one of these things where we need to keep the German language. Yes. The mystical meanings contain, you know, we're not doing like Heideggerian etymology here where we have to leave technē untranslated or dasein untranslated. yeah Exactly. And so, and and the most academic joke I and would allow myself to to tell is that if you had given me like six more months to prepare, i would have read Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. I have it upstairs. Let's just turn this into a no reading group. Right? Because the answer of the movie is dialectical, right? Yes.
Speaker: You need both. You need both. Exactly. You need both. You need a synthesis of the two. But they're doing existentialism, right? is that and They're existential detectors. So aren't we not supposed to be dialectical? Well, that's and that's where Sart comes in. This is true. So he has the coincidences and he finds, and this is another coincidence, it a card for existential detective work, which is an amazing moment for me because it's very, it's just noir, sort of touches in for a few scenes, you know, just kind of tags in.
Speaker: And he finds it in a jacket that he borrows because he forgets to wear his jacket, right? So he has to get one to eat at this restaurant, contains the card. And it turns out that these existential detectives, played by Dustin Hoffman as the male one, and who is his wife?
Speaker: Lily Tomlin. Lily Tomlin, yeah. Yes. And... What it basically amounts to, and this is another amazing thing about this movie, he just is agreeing to be surveilled twenty four seven like he just It's like you signed up with Palantir to be like, I need you to just watch me and do my biometrics. That's how they're going to learn who he is and what his problems are. it no There's no therapy. Well, there is a little bit of therapy, but there is it's mostly just, I'm going to watch you and you're going to know I'm watching you. And that's how we're going to find out what's wrong with you. But in both cases, because Jude Law shortly thereafter signs up, in both cases, they don't know how much they've signed up for. So it's like, yeah, yeah, I'm i'm in, sure, surveil me, but don't come to my work. it's like, no, this is a comprehensive contract. No, don't come to my house. No, this is a comprehensive contract. Yes, there's the amazing scene later where Jason Schwartzman is making breakfast, and Lily Tomlin's just on his balcony, furiously writing notes in her notepad, and he's like, what am i supposed to do? And she just, just do what you normally do, and then he just starts like...
Speaker: moving around his Cheerios or whatever it is, and she's just furiously scribbling in this note. it's This is what I mean about the back... was Sorry, go ahead. ki no i was No, no, please. but the I was just going to say, her physicality in this movie is a lot. it like really carries it. Just yeah just like how intense she is. like There's a point where she's running across a lawn and there's ah there's sprinklers she's trying to jump over and fails to jump over the stream every time. It's like, shit!
Speaker: Yeah, it's Sideshow Bob and the Rakes, basically. And actually, Sideshow Bob is a similar kind of character to some of what's going on here in a way. um yeah But this brings me to the academic backwash thing. Because, okay, first of all, they're essentially doing some kind of strange, probably closest to something like a Jungian psychoanalysis of him that is not being carried out in a typical way. It's being carried out by like the post-9-11 surveillance state.
Speaker: But then they assign him his other, which is Mark Wahlberg, who is basically another guy in their program who we meet when his wife is leaving him because she can't take anymore. This is the petroleum guy who was talked about earlier who just...
Speaker: And again, it's so bushy. And not that this is not true, not that petroleum is not bad, but the sort of peak oil moment of the aughts where the left had sort of fractured in the post-Soviet context into what was essentially a series of interest groups, right? Animal rights, environmental activism, so on and so forth.
Speaker: And he's so obsessed by this that everyone finds him... basically impossible to be around. And of course, Mark Wahlberg is very good at being an annoying kind of aggressive white guy.
Speaker: So he's perfectly cast. But here again, we have the whole idea of the other. I was doing Lacan in class today. We're doing the bell jar. i was having the students fill out a graph of desire, and i'm pointing at the board, and saying, this is what the S means, with the bar through it. This is what the A with no circle is. The big A with the circle is this, blah, blah, blah. And we're mapping it onto Esther Greenwood from the bell jar.
Speaker: And obviously, like... Is it legal to teach La Carta high school students? It is now. i'm making I'm passing the law. It's happening right now. but And they they did great at it. By the way, here's my theory on this.
Speaker: The kids, they love they they can learn so well. We just need to give it to them. We need to give them the sustenance. But in any case, you know, all of those A's stand for other, right? um So as a result...
Speaker: I'm watching this movie around the same time that I'm doing this exercise. and I'm like, of course, you know, we have to have the other in here. How could we not? And the other also operates as a kind of like union shadow situation. that There's all these kind of like, they're not put in your face, but the language, you know, Lacan talks about the unconscious relation to God. You know, you say Jesus Christ or, oh my God.
Speaker: it The movie feels kind of like that for how theory had found its way through. It's like watching movie from the 60s where everyone has a psychoanalyst or something. And it's just like an accepted part of how business is done. And here, it's these weird existential quasi-psychoanalytic kind of theories.
Speaker: And then you get the bifurcation where we find out okay, these two have a former graduate student, Isabelle Hubert, who's French, and who has taken on this like nihilistic version where it is all about sort of like eliminating your opponents and your traumas. And you're just like, what is happening in this movie? Yeah, it's...
Speaker: Well, and and she's there there. They have this incredible moment where Mark Wahlberg and Jason Schwartzman are hitting one another with ah with a balloon yeah to get them to, sort could you just kind of space out and like disconnect from from reality? And they're talking about how great this is because now they've fallen under her spell and, you know, getting to the nihilism. And they're talking her and they're like, you know, this ball thing. And she's like, don't call it the ball thing. Call it pure being. And they're like, this pure being ball thing. right and And he's like, I'm just going to do this all the time. i'm just going to like you know exist. And there is this moment where it's this kind of Heideggerian, I'm just thrown. Galassianite, letting be. Yeah, exactly. or Or even just like the Stoic, like not letting anything, you know so not not assenting to any dispositions or whatever the Stoic language is.
Speaker: Apatheia. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. and And she's like, no, that won't work because human conflict will always come back. And and he's like, no, I think I could just keep hitting myself in the face with a ball.
Speaker: And she's like, okay, well, this isn't going to work. So she seduces Jason Schwartzman quite deliberately so that she can leave Mark Wahlberg to be alone and sad.
Speaker: Which is, ah it's it's so funny. And then Mark Wahlberg comes and confronts them after they've they've been sleeping together for the second or third time But first they dunk, I just have to say that first scene where they're just dunking each other. Because, okay, and this is, again, it's very like French theory. She's seduced to him. She puts her foot like her on his crotch basically to signal this is going to happen. They go into the woods and okay, they're going to have sex.
Speaker: But then they just start dunking each other in mud and you start thinking and like smearing and you're like, okay, some kind of sublimation is happening here. I guess this is actually what they wanted. You know, sex was was a substitution for the the actual pleasure. And then no, they just actually have sex. And you're like, okay. so What was this? But yeah, sorry, when he confronts them later. Yeah, later. No, but that is that is an incredible moment because there is this this sort of there's something that is supposed to represent authenticity.
Speaker: Yeah. Right? And this is, you know, to go back to your point about psychoanalysis, right? You're never supposed to be able to have real sex in psychoanalysis. Right? The point of sex is to try and have sex, and you'll just fail and you We didn't cover that in class. I mean, to be clear, we didn't take it there. I'm sorry, what are you teaching these teenagers?
Speaker: but So this idea that there's something about you know the the kind of primitive or the wild that's supposed to bring you closer you to the authentic. like It's clear that they're riffing off of that, yeah and then they just go to having like normal sex. A couple of sins later, they're in a hotel Like having a hotel affair.
Speaker: Yeah. ah So then Wahlberg confronts them. Because Wahlberg confronts them. And it's it is it is like a point of contention. It's like, did you two sleep together just to make me feel pain? And you can see like the pain on Jason Schwartzman's face. It's like, are we having sex for that? Oh my... it's always a substitution. This is what I mean about the movie. Like he is, you know, yes, he is being taught a lesson, Jason Schwartzman, right? That ultimately you can't just, it sounds absurd. Hit yourself in the face with the balloon constantly to experience pure being. Conflict will always return. Okay. Okay.
Speaker: But he does realize in that moment that also what it means for Mark Wahlberg is a lesson, that it was never simply about his lesson about the sex he gets to have. There's always another. yeah And you know to to make this, I suppose how I was thinking about it in terms of the podcast and how we handle these questions and in broad strokes, I couldn't help but think about...
Speaker: The moment of Gen X, I'm really talking about the post-French Theory Comes to America moment. Gen X is the first, and you know maybe I'm spitballing a little here. you know As far as I know, David L. Russell has never been spotted in a beret or you know attending a conference at Johns Hopkins or something. But...
Speaker: They're the first generation who really define academic university theory as a discipline influenced so strongly by all of these continental thinkers. It's obviously the boomers and the silence who formulate the theory, who bring it over, who lived through World War II, or who are the immediate students of those people. But it's not until the 70s, by which point Gen X is already like their children or their teenagers, basically.
Speaker: Well, it's kind of by definition that that it's a post-Boomer thing, right? Because it's post-May 68. Yes. Right? and And this fracturing of, you know, the kind of grand revolutionary, we're going to fix everything of May 68, it's like, no, we're going to each, we're going to kind of yeah each ah become our own little thing and the struggles are going come separate. Just like you introduced the the movie, you know, he's trying to save the wetlands. It's these micro-struggles, Yes. And so that that may be the most, like,
Speaker: accurate part of the movie is is the kind of post-May 68 fracturing to the micro struggles. you're You're completely right. And if I think about that in terms of how the university sort of relates to pop culture, because again, this movie made a lot of, well, it didn't make a lot of money, but it didn't make money. yeah And it was reasonably successful, right? um It's not as if this was I don't know, a foreign film that only got played at indie cinemas for the purposes of, you know you show it in Toronto, you show it in Princeton, you show it in Cambridge, because that way the grad students can go see it and say, oh, wasn't it so wonderful the way that that, I don't know, referenced this Godard film or something. It's not that, right? It is an American pop cultural film made by successful American, the guy who directed Silver Linings Playbook, right? Right? Yeah. Made this movie. Again, I had no idea that this guy had a career that was anything. And so he did Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. So he yeah this is this is right before he becomes really successful.
Speaker: Yeah. And, you know, he he has worked all over. He did a sports drama called The Fighter that I haven't really seen. But the point is that if I think about, okay, how did all of that theoretical stuff kind of shake out over when Gen X is growing up, right? We're talking about the 90s really here when these people are getting old enough to really make their way into academia and culture.
Speaker: And I mean, i I do think a lot about the revival of many of these kind of micro left movements. Not that the left doesn't exist in the 80s or something, but the environmental movement, the animal rights movement, um to some extent, reassertions of sort of black or other identity um movements.
Speaker: A lot of these things are products of that end of history moment and are effects i mean, I'm not saying they're created by like Derrida coming to Johns Hopkins University or something, but that the intellectual soup created by all of that does play a role in how these people start talking about themselves. And it's at that time that a lot of, you know, boomer era thinkers from the new left from 68 and before are kind of rediscovered and reapplied now in terms of these other theories. And so it in a way,
Speaker: The movie felt like, to me, the last gasp of those 60s movies where the psychoanalyst is always in the movie. And often they're evil. like If I think about a movie like um Invasion of the Body Snatchers with other noted Canadian Donald Sutherland, the bad guy in that movie is the psychotherapist. like They're always evil in 70s movies because in the 60s movies, everyone has to go to one. And I think by the 70s, they're tired of as they turn them always into a villain.
Speaker: And then it kind of, it's dribbling and it's drabbling and it becomes more abstract. And by this moment, you can kind of freely play with the ideas without any kind of attribution. And I'll give you an example of this.
Speaker: We were talking about Lacan, as I mentioned in my class. And so I mentioned, of course, Sigmund Freud. And many of my students did not know who Freud was, but they knew what a Freudian slip was. And to me, that was sort of great what the movie, we all Freud would really appreciate that. Yeah.
Speaker: But there's an extent to which that's kind of where we are with the movie at ah at a more macro-cultural level, think. Yeah, I mean, you know, to riff off what you're saying there, if we think of Spanking the Monkey, right, one of the big problems for our main character, protagonist of Spanking the Monkey, is that to his father's going to stop paying for his medical school. Yes. Right? And a lot of him and the...
Speaker: quasi-girlfriend character, a lot of their flirting is like learning school and like the ability to do well at school. And and like when he's hanging out with his friends, all they want to do is is do math equations. And there's a way in which his his father preventing him from going to school is kind of like an eating the young moment where he's sacrificing his son's medical career to his his shitty sales guy career.
Speaker: But there's like strongly emancipatory potential with education yeah in that movie. And if we can't oppose it here, it's it's completely, like you said, a product, right? It's it's like a self-help type of thing. And Jude Law is like, what is this, like a self-help? I can always improve myself. I'm a little bit. Right?
Speaker: But... There's a way in which it's like fractured and domesticated. and so the the the, you know, the emancipatory potential of education, or it's going to like free these kids from suburban hell and is prevented by the evil boomers. Right.
Speaker: Sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah right Well, i mean that's that's a really I mean, that's a really interesting part of these is that David Russell's early movies are about Gen Xers. The bad guys are very boomer-coded. Yes.
Speaker: Right? Yes. Like Spang and the Monkey, he has very young parents, so they can be boomers, right? Yes. And that's important for the movie, not that we will spoil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just say a little psychoanalysis happening in that movie as well.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. That's one way to, there you go. But yeah, yeah so the bad guys are all kind of very boomer coded, even as they're supposed to be the parents of Gen Xers. It brings me actually to something we very briefly mentioned earlier, but does seem kind of key to the movie, which is we said, okay, he's trying to protect the wetlands, but he's trying to do it with poetry.
Speaker: And everyone around him is very clear that this is not a good, they're like, this is to to the point that the people working at this nonprofit with him prefer Jude Law, who again, in every way,
Speaker: is just a corporate American psycho-style monster, right? there's not There's even a scene, again, we're talking repetition compulsion, later in the movie, where the existential detectives are kind of trying, because again, they're trying to get everyone to recognize their series of traumas and what's defining them, and let's call it the object cause of desire, insofar as you could ever locate that.
Speaker: And they play this record this series of recordings because, again, they're surveilling you constantly. Presumably, it's got your phones tapped. They're coming to your meetings and pretending to be people to listen in, right? And he constantly tells this story over and over again about ordering chicken salad for, is it Shania Twain, I think? Shania Twain, not a good idea. Yes.
Speaker: Over and over and over again. and he And we've heard the story several times at this point. like We, as the audience, have been informed that he's this sort of conceited guy who has this story that he always tells that everyone loves because they're vapid business people or whatever. And they finally play it back and he's confronted with that repetition. But it's this man who they all love because the idea of art as a means to activism is just a non-starter for them. And I found that very interesting because what do I identify more with this period of sort of emerging millennial kind of late Gen X, again, in this way that the besides the the backwash of one kind of influences and defines the other, right?
Speaker: It's that in this movie, the Jude Law character's repetition and he's not doing poetry. The other guy is. Okay. Well, art is activism is Banksy, right? It's Jeff Koons to a certain degree. I think it was the last episode we recorded with 24-Hour Party People where Sam was talking about, i think it was, it might've been someone else, but an artist of the kind of early two thousand who put together a bunch of SS zombies in automated wheelchairs and just sent them around a room, like flying, hitting walls and stuff, which is, you know, I don't know, some grand play-based statement about Nazism. But the point is, the movie is poking fun at this idea, but also...
Speaker: it's our main character who we sort of sympathize with and desire the best for. So to me, that was also a moment of the the sort of the fundament, the um the the superstructure, if you will, poking its head through of sort of what do we have left as a means to ourselves?
Speaker: We have this sort of like debased situationist understanding of the relationship between the society and art, and it's no longer... you know i don't know, trying to wake people up with yippee-esque moments of, I don't know, leading a class in the Pledge of Allegiance, but doing the hit Hitler salute. And now instead it is reading a poem that's like, The Rock, it simply sits. Does it not The Rock?
Speaker: It does not move. you know and just You rock, rock. Exactly. Exactly. Nobody sits like you sit. You sit and are. And, you know, and then it but there it is. It's pure being. You are, you know, like it's a movie that feels so of that moment.
Speaker: A lot of what we've spoken about on this show is sentimentality and irony in their relationship in Gen X. And that is exactly what I'm talking about. It's funny to us, but also the movie does believe in pure being and the desire for it in a sincere way, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, if you really wanted to riff on the on that sincerity, kind of hopefulness thing that you've seen with these cynical movies, right? If we're moving from kind of the Fight Club office space moment where they have deep disaffection with being in the corporate culture and then they find something else, right? Whether it's blowing up banks or just working a construction job and working with your hands.
Speaker: And After I Heart Huckabees, you know, as we get into closer to the now, you don't get this kind of happy resolution anymore. It's quite sort of, right? And so I Heart Huckabees is kind of between the sentimentality of the earlier movies where there is an outside, there is a way out. And here it's kind of like yes the way out is the process. The way out is, you know, the working through of the trauma and the thinking through and the being together in some way God, it reminds me, you putting it that way reminds me so much of, like, I grew up at this time, and I was reasonably young when this movie came out, but the kind of ideas it's playing with definitely soaked into the culture for a little while longer. And I have a memory of being a teenager and sort of thinking about these intractable problems and thinking, like, is the solution not just thinking about them?
Speaker: is Is not the awareness of the problem itself the solution to the problem? And... it I mean, that's not exactly where the movie comes down, but it's pretty darn close. you know yeah Yeah, exactly. No, one absolutely. Absolutely. You raise it up to the status of an issue and that's what allows you to... That you've done it, basically. like We don't know where it's going. It remains totally intractable, but you you do kind of massage it. And I think...
Speaker: we you know um A moment ago, you were talking about the sincerity irony you know between Office Space or Fight Club and and ah another movie, Falling Down, I think, of a movie oh yeah where we have that same kind of issue where there's sympathy for the main character, but also a recognition that he's sort of a buffoon at the same time, but it's based in these real economic problems that you can't just make go away.
Speaker: In a movie like this, It's not just that there's no outside. It's that, in fact, when you go outside, it is only to be brought back inside. There's no part of this movie where he's like...
Speaker: And it was resolved when I realized it wasn't worth protecting the wetlands in this way. And what I should do was actually become a high-powered environmental lawyer who sued Exxon at the national scale, right?
Speaker: It's sort of like, not to make this almost like a feudal analogy, ah but you know it's sort of like, I am a serf. That is where I have found myself. My job is not to emancipate myself from that serfdom. It is to sort of like interrogate the the symptoms of being a serf as fully as I possibly can in order to achieve something like peace with that station in society. and and Except it's being an environmental activist who does poetry, right? hes yeah He's like, I've succeeded. I've become what I want. At no point are they like, this is the amount of money you make. I mean, even when they fight with...
Speaker: you know, sort of Mike Huckabee dad, the evangelical dad who's adopted the son from Sudan, which by the way, Jonah Hill shows up in that scene, just a little shout out. He there. He's a very young man and sounds and looks and acts just like Jonah Hill will in Superbad when he comes to prominence. We don't have to think about that stuff, do we, mom? Exactly. That's Gene Smart, too. It's a star-studded table.
Speaker: Yeah, no. But okay, so the dad, right? It's not like, you could imagine a version of that conversation. That instead of it being about whether or not God's having given us petroleum necessitates our use of it, which is essentially the conversation they're having, right?
Speaker: Whether or not grace requires the cooperation of of ah the individual human subject or not, ah in all cases. Instead, you could imagine a version of this movie where that conversation is actually, at most, if it stayed the same, a sublimated conversation about their different statuses in society, right? The dad is a professional yeah who is making a lot of money, can afford to have several kids, can adopt an additional kid, has a nice house, and he's at a table with a man who, again, is a sort of hokey environmental activist. And then Mark Wahlberg is, yeah, a fireman.
Speaker: Oh, a hero. I'm not a hero. Yeah.
Speaker: People who don't use petroleum are heroes. yeah Well, that's another great scene when he's biking alongside the fire engine and he gets to the fire first, but he can't actually do anything because he has none of his gear. So he just runs it. That's that's amazing too. yeah um But that conversation is never actually about...
Speaker: The fact that, like, it turns out his coincidence was that he met, in a certain sense, again, seen from a certain perspective, a very lucky person, someone who has escaped this war-torn world, managed to be raised in an upper-middle-class family in a country in you know North America, who basically is able to engage his hobby of getting things autographed, you know.
Speaker: That's not his hobby. It's his family's hobby. this is like This is a hobby I have picked up from the family and I hope to pass on. then That's even better because it's like it's like a leave-it-to-peaver family. It's like if you had Ward Cleaver adopt, like I don't know, ah a child who was orphaned in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1951 or something. right like and Instead, it's it's just okay.
Speaker: We're all adults here having a philosophy. We're in a salon, essentially, right now, rather than any sort of, how dare this be? that Because you can imagine, right, a version of this movie where it's like, I've had these coincidences. What did learn at the end?
Speaker: That, oh, I met this guy who seemed really other to me, but in fact, he has been sort of interpolated into being a good American middle-class citizen in a way that even I have not. Right? Like you could, that's one version of the movie. Yeah. um But that's not what happens. Instead, there's an equal-footed sort of philosophical discussion that takes place that involves Mark Wahlberg becoming very angry, indeed, because he always does.
Speaker: But it it reminds you of the dorm room or something. It's, yeah, the universalism, the world is a dorm room to riff on the song, you know? Yeah, that's, That's what makes it kind of concerning because, you know, the power imbalances is not what's going on. The economic imbalance is not what's going on. Right. Especially because, I mean, this is 2004. Right. So it's Gulf War II is gearing up at this point. And so instead of like the, you know, the point is to change it type of conversation where we're doing real activism, it is, like you say, more of a dorm room conversation.
Speaker: Well, but you know that feels very true to the most... There's a show I think about a lot that I think probably had about four episodes, and it's one of the things Mike Judge did after King of the Hill. Okay. And he decided he was going to, instead of kind of lightly lambasting conservative suburbanites, which is what King of the Hill is, right? Sort of valorizing them while also making fun of their foibles.
Speaker: He decided he was going to do this in a slightly like more cartoonish way, literally in terms of the design, but also in terms of the size of the stereotypes and sort of the tone, ah with kind of liberal Californian type people. And it was called the Good Family. oh wow. right Because their last name is Good and because they think they're good.
Speaker: And i I think about that show a lot because if we're imagining what that would look like now, if um Ben Shapiro's production company were to be like, we need a show about a liberal family that we as conservatives get to fantasize about what they're like, it would be nothing like The Good Family in that they're kind of just like...
Speaker: harmless environmentalists. Like the dad, I think, is always wearing his like skin tight bike suit and just loves getting around on his bicycle. They've got sort of like the pot smoking hippie daughter, right? It's very much kind of this like, again, micro activist, but also dorm room kind of intellectual coded, but it's not like, they're not Marxist. They're not even cultural Marxist. They're not, they're not, um you know, transing the kids or something or whatever conservative thing is happening now.
Speaker: Instead, it's just sort of like this is a kind of normal middle-class family who has kooky values. They have the kid that when you go to lunch, they're not allowed to eat the Doritos that you brought with you. know that's That is who they are.
Speaker: And that is reflected in the movie. There's a kind of ultimate harmlessness to all of the – even the Nietzschean Isabel Huber, this sort of like French – this stand-in for George Bataille, if you want to think of her that way, right? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Even she is sort of maybe more like a chaotic neutral than a chaotic evil, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, absolutely. Because I mean, that moment where Mark Warburg confronts them and says, are you only sleeping with him to hurt me?
Speaker: And Jason Schwartzman looks at her like very hurt, like preparing to be hurt. i was That would have been a very good opportunity for her to like crush him. Yeah. Right. And even having seen the movie before more than once, it kind of feels like that's what she's about to do and doesn't. Right. It feels like that's the beat and that's not where it goes. Well, and they have to solve this narratively late in the movie where they need to set up this binary. Right. I mean, we know that she was the graduate student. We know that they have differing philosophies. We know that sort of what makes them different is that the Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin pair,
Speaker: believes in a kind of new age connectedness of everything, right? We've all come from stardust, you know, whatever this kind of idea. And we know that Isabel Huppert believes in ah kind of like creative destruction, i guess, destruction, right? like To go back to Heidegger here.
Speaker: and But they haven't, made them kind of poles. They haven't actually diametrically opposed them. They've just given them a kind of contested relationship. And the way that the movie, because the the movie, in order to have its resolution, which is, you're both extremists, we need kind of our Aristotelian golden mean here.
Speaker: The way that they get there... is by having her advise Jason Schwartzman to burn ah the vehicles in Jude Law's garage. And there's this scene of him- His jet His jet skis, that's what it is. Thank you. I couldn't remember. um Which are a great symbol of like unnecessary wealth. of sort of like I have enough to go out upon the lake and and ride around and be free, right? And you know there's this scene of him sort of like,
Speaker: ghoulishly lighting it on fire and enjoying it, and they're laying in the bushes outside, you know? And he, of course, realizes, oh, that didn't actually bring me. I just hurt somebody that I kind of care about.
Speaker: But they need to give her that kind of actually evil moment of harming someone and not just being an instructor. Not just being the, you know, what's the... the i This is probably not real because I think I heard it on an American reality TV show ah called Love is Blind, which probably means this is not a real thing. It's got to be true. Couldn't put it on TV otherwise. No, of course. I mean, well, and that's that's what Gen X believes, which is why it's perfect for the ah for the podcast.
Speaker: But... There's a ah story, I think one of them told one time, about the the Zen master who gets asked sort of a question about what is the meaning of life, and they're standing next to a river at a monastery or like a pond, and the Zen master just shoves the student in and walks away, right? Like, you know, this sort of like aggression as instructor, you know, the thing that allowed like so many of the boomer gurus to be sex pests and violent and make cults, right? Like the belief in that. Speaking of David O. Russell. Yes, which is, we should probably say this, you know, do sort of our our equivalent of the, ah
Speaker: I don't know, the land acknowledgement. i don't know what you call it when it comes to the director being a sex pest, but David O. Russell, a very bad man, yeah um notably ah groped his trans niece, is notoriously kind of like Isabel Huppert-like to the people on set on his movies, kind of screams at them, which is kind of interesting in itself because a lot of the Gen X figures from theory have had situations like this. Like, um...
Speaker: Avital Ronell, is that her name, the woman from NYU, like 10 years ago? Yeah, yeah, It was like a similar thing, like anger, sleeping with students, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they rallied around her, all of the other theorists, so that sort of went away. i mean, it was it was a thing for a moment, but...
Speaker: I recall that, yes. I mean, now ah to the audience, so of course, Andrew and I actually originally met. I mean, you know, why not? Sam's not here when the might when the cat's away, the mice will play. Yeah. um and So he and I originally met a theory program.
Speaker: Summer camp for nerds. Yeah, like like space camp for guys who like this movie, um basically. And it probably was around the time, because this is sort of 2017, I want to say it was. Sounds right. Yeah. Yeah, so almost 10 years ago at this point, and taking some wonderful classes and just exploring. and i Actually, Ithaca is a good... Sorry, so it was in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell.
Speaker: And Ithaca is kind of a good fit for this movie in a way, I'm thinking. Yeah, very college town, right? Yes, college town, but hippie-esque, crunchy. right like Not all college towns are like that. And that is kind of the air this movie has. like Theory touched, but we have a kava bar.
Speaker: We have a co-op. like the The co-op is of this moment. um the My wife always talks about this. the um she didn't She didn't have Whole Foods up, but they had like Sprouts or something, something with a similar name. And she she always laments the loss of the big tubs of like nuts and things that you would just scoop out of and buy by weight. And you know she's so like, that was the moment of liberation. you know it so There's no packaging. I'm just putting it into my sack. you know This was the actual environmental moment. And that is Jason Schwartzman's character. and this That's where he shops.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's where he goes. Brings his own reusable jar. Yes, no, he's got mason jars as far as the eye can see, and we are not yet in the moment of like Brooklyn semi-ironized farmhouse. We're drinking out of the mason jar with the exposed piping. This is a kind of authentic belief in, i might not be able to destroy the system or even question the system past a certain level, right? There's no moment in this where, there's it and this is what makes it to me a very end of history movie, attempt to imagine beyond the limits of the economic system capitalism that we're existing in, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But what you do is you find the things that you believe in or passionate about, and you can change at least through your own effort to not participate, right? There's a kind of de-participatory element here. You kind of opt out And Mark Wahlberg is doing that with petroleum products. Although, hate to tell him this, but in the scene where his wife's throwing him out, I do see some some shampoos and things that do seem to be made of plastics. So I don't know how successful he's been.
Speaker: he said he says, I can't stop using it. didn't remember this. Yeah, there's a point where he's like, you know i I refuse to use petroleum, but I can't stop its use in my lifetime. Exactly. But that's exactly it. it's It's this, and I think this might be the word, it's a moment of paralysis. If we want to think about this as a symptom of something broader, right? And something that we see in a lot of Gen X movies and that millennial movies will, or I'll put it in these terms, ah we're planning and hopeful to interview Anton Yeager at Cambridge who wrote a book called Hyperpolitics that came out pretty recently.
Speaker: And the contention of that book is essentially that you get these three waves of kind of political consciousness that happened after World War II. And there's the moment of high sort of post-war you know success or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker: The moment of the 90s that he calls... um ah post-politics, which is what we think of as the end of history, right? Everything's technocrats. We've got it figured out.
Speaker: There's going to, I don't know, Russia is going to join NATO or something, and we're just going to figure it out, right? And then he talks about the millennial moment of anti-politics, which is the sort of post-2008, post-occupy. And now he says we have hyper-politics. And I'll save for that interview what all these things exactly mean.
Speaker: But the point is, we are still, I think this movie is excellent about showing us the cusp of what he's calling post and then anti-politics. There's a consciousness of the need for certain kinds of change. It's not a full handover to the technocrats in every conceivable way.
Speaker: Mark Wahlberg still believes we should stop bombing foreign countries such that we don't have to displace people so that they don't have to be adopted into evangelical families and like do some kind of weird reverse missionary thing. And I don't mean that in a spanking the monkey way. I mean that in a this movie way.
Speaker: And yet, there are kind of hard limits to what that means. And it it sort of takes the personalist political and turns that into this strange tautological function rather than its initial attempt at a kind of emancipatory, like it's part of the changing of the system is living the change of the system, right? Instead, it becomes, um well, there is no actual political at this grand scale, really. So what I can do is live out my own personal version of opposition to that that is still circumscribed. I still have to use the plastics. Right? I still need to work with Jude Law, who, by the way, surprise, why was he helping?
Speaker: Because they were they they clear the forest next to the wetlands. So he's like, I saved the wetlands. I did it and like by cutting down the forest. Yeah. Like, of course, of course that's going to happen. yeah exactly. But in the movie, you can still sort of believe in it, I suppose. And Andrew, I have one last thing I want to talk about before I run off to my besuited arrangement I have after this.
Speaker: And that is what I think of as like being quirked up, more or less. um Something that's identified strong with like millennial movies, again, the Junos of the world, kind of Diablo Cody written movies of the of the world after that.
Speaker: um I'm thinking Coraline as well. there's a There's a kind of moment for twee quirkiness, the Zooey Deschanel flick, all of this kind of thing. And this movie does have or anticipates some of that. Like something we haven't really talked about that gives it that warm tone is its embrace of a kind of just like play.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, as long as you vibe with the wavelength that's operating it, if you can accept that existential detectives exist and that um guys go into shops where they have photos and they go to put in their own headshots,
Speaker: you know, and it's cool. We're enjoying it. Yeah. Well, that's, that's part of the the charm of the movie is that the there's a lot of people doing ridiculous things, but there, there's a lot of conviction behind it.
Speaker: Right. And it's like, we're going to go do this. And they're like, okay. And they just start running off to go do it. yeah Right. It's like, it has that kind of like a child playing kind of, you know, single mindedness of it.
Speaker: Purposiveness without purpose. Right. Well, Well, that's the bike scene you were talking about earlier, where they just gleefully escape on their bikes and ride around like boys in the summertime. you know that's That's what it is. And i I find that interesting because for me, if I can... So to me, it anticipates like a major millennial mode that does exist earlier, but really comes to a kind of apogee around the late aughts into the early 2010s. That I remember very well because that's when I was a teenager and was really taking these things in.
Speaker: But the degree of warmth and the kind of seriousness with which it takes that quirkiness is what saves this movie from being too up its own ass. Like, yeah no disrespect intended to Richard Linklater.
Speaker: I loved the Before trilogy when I first watched it as like 19-year-old. I tried rewatching those movies, and it's at least the first one I tried to rewatch. And it's so dorm room, like the conversations between them. It's so like two precocious young people meeting each other and realizing in that moment that they both have some, and that's beautiful. Like, I'm not here to rag on that.
Speaker: But as an adult man, not inserting a certain kind of ironized comedic beat into that makes it very hard to stomach. it's it's It becomes saccharine, right? And so the movie works so well for me because it's a kind of early adopter of this ironic quirky mode that allows it its pretensions, but with just enough distance to let you laugh at them while also appreciating them. And that... um That captures that balance we spoke. I'm trying to, I guess, sketch that balance from earlier in ah in a more contoured way.
Speaker: And that for me is it. it's not It's not two people who really love English literature meeting in Paris and having a conversation about how much they both love English literature. like I tried to watch Richard Linklater's new movie, Blue Moon.
Speaker: Shout out my friend Micah, if you're listening, fellow Canadian. ah We're talking the Great Plains here. We're talking Winnipeg. And he was like, you should watch it. And I did. and he liked it. And it was just so like, I looked it up. It was written by an English teacher. And that was the least surprising thing I encountered this year so far. It's incredible.
Speaker: It just because it has this kind of self-serious pretension to it, right? Right. And this doesn't have that. You don't feel that at all. mean, i think I think there's something about that time, though, as well, right, where everything seems to demobilized, in the United States, at least. um with that Certainly not in Iraq. Yeah, right. The lead up to, yeah, exactly. But the lead up to the Iraq war, right, it was very much like a one-party state. You have to agree Right. That kind of that kind of way of talking about it. And so the little bit of theory that I was getting in that era. Right. Because I started my undergrad in 2004. Fun fact, Chase and I are exactly eight years apart. We have the same birthday.
Speaker: So he is a young millennial and I am an older millennial. So I was starting undergrad in 2004, and a little bit of theory I was getting, it was all ideology critique. yeah um and And that is specifically like playing with the ideas about how it's put together, but not in a way where you're like, and there's kind of a backlash against ideology critique over the last 15, 20 years. kind of think it's ready to come back because... I think it is coming back. There's so much ideology now. Just Zizek hands shaking. No, don't do it now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, the the backlash against ideology is it's ideology critique is it doesn't do anything.
Speaker: right And so like just thinking about the moment where you can't do anything. yeah And I think in that era too, the capitalism as freedom people had won. yeah So the only thing you could do is vote with your dollars.
Speaker: Yes. But it was before the right wing decided that they didn't like it when the left voted with their dollars and like the backlash against like boycotts and this type of thing. I'm not buying Goya beans or whatever was there a couple years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like now, they you know, they're trying to make it illegal to boycott certain things. I thought this is the only way you wanted us to express ourselves. Yeah. But now that's going to be illegal too. Yeah. No, that's that's actually perfectly put. I have one thing I will say before I um run here, because i that was wonderful. And I really do recommend, if you haven't seen this, watch it. Because if you're anywhere in our age range, if you're a millennial, maybe a younger Xer, think that the hints of twee and sentimentality, but also with just enough irony, the sort of absurdism of the movie and its willingness to take that absurdity. to It has a little Wes Anderson about it, really, if I had insert it into another filmmaker's kind of oeuvre.
Speaker: um Check it out. but And this is purely really for you, Andrew, but when you were saying a minute ago that one party had won and I was thinking about, okay, you know it doesn't really matter who you're voting for, you're getting the same thing. Andrew, you're ah a Haiti person and what it brought to mind for me was, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that Papadoc Duvalier would have you know a vote and you would, I think, hand in one card or another. it's like two different colors or something like this. And you're handing it to a guy with a gun who works for the regime. And it's sort of like, should Papadoc still be president? you know Yes or no. And it's like, well, I really only have one. I'm not going to hand the no card to the guy with the gun who works for the dictator. You know what I mean?
Speaker: And so that, I mean, we obviously didn't have it like that. I mean, that's what happens when you're in a post-colonial regime being punished for its attempt at liberation. But the idea that you get a choice, but you don't really get a choice is in a way the the dominant the dominant framework of that moment um in a less severe way, as is usually the case with, you know, the sort of metropole. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, first of all, ah thank you, Andrew. Did you want to plug anything aside from your upcoming defense of your academic work? i No, I don't want to plug that. It is a closed defense. Please do not come. Kamala Harris, do not come. Do not come. Hopefully by the time this comes out, I will be a doctor.
Speaker: I trust, I believe. Fingers crossed. No, other than that, I'm an associate faculty at the member school. ah Check us out. Next summer, I will be teaching a course on the political writings of the 19th century by Haitian intellectuals, starting with Toussaint L'Avarture.
Speaker: i I got to say, I mean, Andrew and I keep up about his work pretty frequently, and he has found some amazing things, including what it is that Hegel was actually reading about Haiti. And in any case, it was wonderful to have you, Andrew. Thank you for coming.
Speaker: I invite everyone to like, subscribe, rate. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Patreon. It's all free at the moment. We're not going to go paid until we start the millennial season. And even then, not everything will be paid. But we want to give you guys an opportunity to get to know us before we start monetizing.
Speaker: ah Because ultimately, we're not in this for the money We're in it for the fun. But one needs to justify one's existence under capitalism one way or another. So we we do what we can. Suits aren't free. No. all right. Thank you, Andrew.
Speaker: Bye-bye, everybody. was a pleasure, my friend. Thank you.
