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Sandman with Tade Thompson
223 Plays1 year ago
We're joined today by Tade Thompson, the multi award-winning author of such books as Rosewater, Making Wolf, Far From the Light of Heaven, and the Molly Southbourne novellas. He is also a self-confessed comics junkie, which he proved when he joined us last year to delve into the great WATCHMEN. This year Tade talks with us about Sandman, arguably Neil Gaiman's greatest piece of work, and another example of the comic book medium bursting free from its pulpy roots and demonstrating that it can stand up as art and literature. Sandman's mantelpiece, groaning under the weight of a World Fantasy Award (the only comic to have achieved this), a Bram Stoker Award, and no fewer than 26 Eisner awards, attests to this. The recent and long-awaited Netflix adaptation of Sandman starring Tom Sturridge has also been a worldwide success.
Be warned! This show comes with huge spoilers not just for the first couple of volumes of Sandman, which have been adapted by Netflix, but for the whole comic book series, and we will be discussing the final ending. You have been advised!
We talk about the psychoanalytic and mythological structures that form the foundation of Sandman, and particularly the characters of Dream and his siblings. We discuss our capacity as humans to use our dreams to simulate strategies in the waking world, and why dreams rub up against desires. Tade walks us through the history of the Sandman IP, and we pontificate on whether a piece of work such as this can be fully formed in the mind of the author, or whether it was discovered as Gaiman progressed through the telling.
We also discuss horror more generally, reflecting some recent conversations on the Chrons boards, and how to best define that slippery genre. In particular we talk about Tade's most recent novella Jackdaw, a magnificent exploration into obsession, art, the creative act, and its relationship to science.
Elsewhere The Judge wraps up the topic of plagiarism, with some advice to authors on how we can protect ourselves against copyright infringement, or having your work stolen. Important stuff for all writers, so take note. Our winner from January's 75-word challenge is Ashleyne and, staying with our topic of dreams, we see what happens when Captain Halkmilkcarton from Mars Radio 14 attempts to stay awake for three weeks straight.
Listener Poll
Lastly, please fill out our very short poll, which is going to inform some future content we're bringing to the show.
Next Month
Next month we'll be joined by none other than Bryan Wigmore, author of the Fire Stealers series, including The Goddess Project and The Empyreus Proof, to talk about John Boorman's 1981 cinematic take on the Arthurian myth, Excalibur.
Index
[0:00:00 - 0:51:23] Tade Thompson talk part 1
[0:51:24 - 54:53] Skit 1
[0:54:54 - 1:08:18] - The Judge's Corner
[1:08:19 - 1:09:51] - 75-word challenge winner
[1:09:52 - 1:12:25] - Skit 2
[1:12:25 - 2:01:46] - Tade Thompson talk part 2
[2:01:46 - 2:03:43] - Credits and close
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Cron's Cast and Episode Topic
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Cron's Cast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I am Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean. Today we're talking about Volume 1 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, entitled Preludes and Nocturne. Sandman follows the story of Dream, aka Morpheus, who is the Lord of the Dreaming, the place we inhabit after falling asleep and taking to the simulations, fantasies and horrors of our dreams.
00:00:39
Speaker
Dream, along with his siblings Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium and Destruction, is a personification of metaphysical and philosophical concepts that we use to make sense of our own lives. In many ways, it's a story about the nature of stories. Sandman is frequently cited as one of the greatest comics or graphic novels of all time. The Sandman was amongst the first graphic novels to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, along with Mouse, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.
00:01:03
Speaker
Over the years, it has won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, the Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Narrative, World Fantasy Award for Best Short Narrative, and over 26 Eisner Awards. After many years and several attempts to adapt it for the screen, Netflix finally released an adaptation of Sandman in August 2022 to General Acclaim, which covered volumes 1 and 2
Guest Introduction: Tade Thompson
00:01:23
Speaker
of the series.
00:01:23
Speaker
Joining us to talk about Sandman is one of our previous guests and friends, Tade Thompson, who took apart Watchman last year, and whose comic kung fu is masterfully deep. Tade is the author of numerous novels, including the critically acclaimed sci-fi novel Rosewater, the first in his award-winning
00:01:38
Speaker
downward trilogy, making Wolf far from the light of heaven, as well as the Molly Southbourne series of novellas, and several short stories. His most recent publication, the novella, Jackdaw, is a quasi-autobiographical exploration of Francis Bacon from the perspective of what I hope is an at least partly fictional version of Tadde himself, and we'll definitely be talking about Jackdaw later on. Here's one that Arthur C. Clarke awarded the Nomo, the
00:02:01
Speaker
Gitchy's Golden Tentacle Award, and the Julie of the Land, and has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Philip K Dick Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Shirley Jackpry, among others. Born in London to Yoruba parents, he lives and works on the south coast of England. So welcome
Exploration of Sandman's Metaphysical and Literary Themes
00:02:16
Speaker
today. Welcome back today. Hi, guys. Great to see you. Great to see you. We've just heard that the Jackdaw has just been longlisted for a British Science Fiction Award. So congratulations on that. Thank you. Thank you. It feels good.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think it will go a little bit further than just a long listing, personally. I think it's a fantastic piece of work. We'll come to it later on, a little bit later on in the show. It's something everybody should read, in my opinion. But, yeah, we'll park that, put a pin in it, and we are going to start off with Sandman. Now, yeah, last year you took us through the weeds with Watchman, and what is it about Sandman that drew you back?
00:02:53
Speaker
Um, well, I think that, I think back in 2017, I, I felt moved to, I'm sorry, do we have a spoiler? There should be a spoiler warning in force because, um, we all, we all just, yeah, we're going, I think we're going to probably focus on volume one, maybe volume one and two of.
00:03:10
Speaker
of Sandman. But yeah, that's fine. Spoilers all the time. I think I'm here on false pretenses then, because I had thought that we were going to talk about the death of Sandman, you know, more towards the end and all that to do with... Because if you remember, when we had this conversation, you had read an article of mine that I'd written about Sandman, about that, you know, analysing the character of Sandman and how it led to the end of the series.
00:03:34
Speaker
Well, we can talk about, I think we'll talk about Sandman generally, but it's a very strange thing, Sandman, isn't it? Because it seems to me that, okay, if we're talking about it holistically, it's almost like
00:03:50
Speaker
dreams journey through life and his journey through understanding and the journey to understanding divine love almost like Dante in Dante's Inferno in his sort of weaving through hell and weaving through purgatory and coming to an understanding about life and an acceptance of death.
00:04:07
Speaker
So it's a very strange story. I think having you on in your capacity as a comics guru, but also as a psychiatrist, I think Sandman is a psychoanalytically really interesting story. So I was hoping that we could delve into that. And as we weave towards Sandman's death,
00:04:28
Speaker
And yes, I mean, your article that we talked about last year was really, really psychologically interesting, I thought, and took apart the various strands of Sandman in an interesting way. From a clinical, from a technical perspective, I guess that you were writing at least partially from your
00:04:47
Speaker
uh psychiatry clinical perspective so i think we should look into that but more broadly what is it about sandman as a as a whole series that allows game and to investigate some of these philosophical ideas because on the surface some of the stories are actually very very simple i mean if we if we do look at the story in volume one it's basically just a quest story
00:05:07
Speaker
That is true. It's a quest. I mean, we join him. We join Morpheus or Sandman when he's been vanquished and he's been captured. And essentially, the first volume is him. How does he escape that capture? And how does he find the things that are his and restore himself to his own throne?
00:05:27
Speaker
So if you look at it in a very simple way, it's, okay, I'm captured. Let me escape and let me get my stuff. You know, basically it was mainly dude wears my stuff. But I think that the richness of it, I think one of the things that comes across fairly quickly is the richness of Gaiman's knowledge of literature.
00:05:45
Speaker
and art and different periods of history and myth. The richness of his knowledge is what sets it apart fairly quick. There is some, I think, one of the things, especially in the first volume, one of the things that wobble is when it tries to be integrated into the rest of the DC universe.
00:06:02
Speaker
I think the weakest Sandman stories are the ones that try to integrate. Basically, it had to be integrated into something else. That's where the weakest parts come through. However, there are certain aspects of the DC universe that are good with Sandman, you know, Constantine, for example, or the demon, you know, where you have creatures that can seamlessly weave into that mythos and weave out of it.
00:06:24
Speaker
In particular, it does seem to be a natural fit with the thematic elements of Sandman. Luckily, I think generally some of the DC Universe stuff is worn with a light touch a lot of the time in Sandman. You might see a glimpse of the scarecrow in a couple of panels here and there, and you might get a mention of the Justice League, but it's kind of kept at arm's length, which I agree. I think it's a good
00:06:49
Speaker
thing, because this is a story not about superheroes, this is a story about stories, it's about the stories of our own lives. Yes. But I think one of the things, again, earlier, one of the things that was really great is how he wove in Mr. Miracle in there. You know, Scott free Mr. Miracle, he actually, what he did there was he had Mr. Miracle have a dream of a story that Jack Kirby actually wrote and, you know, wrote and drew, you know, in the original Mr. Miracle series.
00:07:14
Speaker
And it's executed so well that you realize that this, you know, that Gaiman doesn't just have a knowledge of, not just a knowledge of myth and stories and literature like I mentioned before, but also of comics and how to make those weave into his own story. It was very clear that, okay, he's not, he wasn't going
00:07:32
Speaker
you know, this was not going to be a, you know, a superhero night. I mean, you see the name Sandman, you think they're fine. And probably we should say to people who don't know about comics that there was a Sandman before this, this is not the first Sandman. There was, I think, you know, Wesley Dodd, I think his name was, and he basically was a guy who would wear a regular suit jacket, but a gas mask, and he had tranquilizing, he had a tranquilizing gun.
00:07:56
Speaker
and he would go out at night fighting crime. He would shoot the gas at you, which would make you sleep, and then he would leave some sands there and all that. That was his shtick. I seem to remember that he was, he might've been in the Justice Society of America or whatever. Stepping a bit outside the general narrative itself, Gay Men, of course, was part of the British invasion, which basically included Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave McKean and all of that. It was basically the onset of Vertigo, the comments line and everything.
00:08:25
Speaker
People who are not into comics, this is probably too much information for you. But the point is, sometime in the late 80s and the 90s, American editors came to the UK trying to poach talents. And you see that in many industries, if there's stagnation, there needs to be some new life injected into it. It's almost as if you have a species of creature. If it keeps inbreeding, it will weaken. So you have to introduce new strains over time to keep the population healthy.
00:08:55
Speaker
So, I think they realized, okay, you know what, we need a shot of that British, you know, that 2000 AD, that raw thing that didn't grow up in Joe Kubert's school of cartooning. So, of course, out of that came Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. And apparently, Karen Berger, who's, you know, a massive, talented editor over at DC Comics,
00:09:17
Speaker
you know, was told to meet with Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean and they were like, well, what do you want to do? And they pitched a few stories. And they first of all pitched. Well, what came out in the end was what came out of that first meeting was Black Orchid, which again was a character from beyond, you know, from far before. And, you know, I could I mean, she used to hang out with a phantom stranger and all of that. I probably should not go into that because that's that's a cul-de-sac that will drag us off course. But the point is they did a mini miniseries of Black Orchid where
00:09:47
Speaker
They actually killed Black Orchid in the first episode. In fact, they were so self-aware that they said, look, this is not a comic book. I'm not going to tell you my plan. They've captured Black Orchid. And they're like, I'm not going to tell you my plan and then wait for you to escape. I'm just going to kill you. So he shoots her in the face. Well, in the head anyway. He kills her in the first episode.
00:10:03
Speaker
It's great. It's greatly written. It's greatly illustrated by Dave McKean. So, you know, black or kid, go look for it. You know, it's available. You can find it. Anyway, so after that, they're like, well, what do you want to do next? You know, and of course, by this time, you know, Swamp Thing is doing its thing. So with this, and I think that I think, you know, Gayman and
00:10:22
Speaker
No Game Man and Dave McKinn had done their graphic novel Mr. Punch by then. So we knew we were starting to know who they were. And he said, okay, well, let's do this. Here's the Sandman character. Here's what I want to do with it and all that. And I think
00:10:37
Speaker
that in the first, you know, I don't think he had quite worked out what he wanted to do with the character entirely, except that it wasn't going to be Wesley Dodd, it wasn't going to be the previous guy in the gas massacre doing all that, and it wasn't going to be a superhero show, it was going to be about stories and about myth.
00:10:52
Speaker
even though he drew Morpheus, Sandman, from Greek myth, he didn't directly draw Sandman. I think Morpheus is to Greek myth what Thor in a marvel is to the mythological form. They're similar, but they're not the same
Philosophical Depth and Storytelling in Sandman
00:11:07
Speaker
at all. Their parentage, everything is quite different. Let's talk about the Greek mythology, because I find that quite interesting from a psychoanalytic perspective, and I guess coming from your
00:11:20
Speaker
background as well with the psychiatry perspective. It's quite interesting that the Greek gods, well, the Greek mythology, you have a panoply of gods, a pantheon of gods, and they kind of represent individual extremes of personality. Even though they have their own sort of sub-personalities, they represent a facet of personality. And you might say if somebody is possessed by a fit of peak, then he's possessed by the god of war or god of rage.
00:11:48
Speaker
And all of them together, and in Sandman, they're represented as the various siblings that Bean was talking about in the introduction with dream, delirium, desire, et cetera, et cetera. And altogether, they're kind of taken as a whole personality in the same way that an individual human is made up of lots of different facets of personality. Not if you see somebody and they're possessed by rage, it's tempting to think, especially on a first impression, that that's them.
00:12:15
Speaker
That's the rounded picture of the personality, but it's not. It's a facet. In fact, I think in your article about the death of Sandman, in The Kindly Ones, he's talking about that exact thing. He's holding up a jewel and he's looking after the jewel. And so there's that reflection of you look at one thing and you think, well, that's a reflection of the whole, but it's not. It's like a synecdoche. It kind of represents the whole, but it doesn't really.
00:12:42
Speaker
It's still all in Plato's cave, you know? Yeah, exactly. We can't see the whole picture. And so you've got all of the Greek gods or all of the gods in Sandman, and they're reflective of that whole. And even though they're sort of jostling for position and they're jostling for superiority with desire and despair, maybe they're plotting dastardly schemes against dream.
00:13:08
Speaker
they actually are sort of held in a kind of balance that makes the universe functional. So it's quite interesting because, so Morpheus, we'll call him Sandman, but the Greek aspect of him, again, is just a facet as well. Because if you go throughout the series, there's a lot of power shifting. And by power shifting, I mean, sometimes they think gods are powerful. And sometimes they say, well, actually, you're just a god.
00:13:32
Speaker
It's more like they are, to use a phrase in the series, anthropomorphic representation of concepts. Death is actually just death. There are gods of death, there are angels of death, but this is actually the concept death.
00:13:48
Speaker
So this is why death is probably as old as, or probably the oldest, but will also be the last alive in the universe. Because the moment life was created, death had to be created immediately. So whenever the first thing lived, death existed. And what she has said is obviously when the last thing dies, she will be the last thing in the universe as well. She'll be there to turn the lights off.
00:14:10
Speaker
the lights off, yes. So she will be the first and the last of everything. And neither have these concepts been static. So delirium, for example, used to be delight. They weren't always exactly the same. Destruction is not always present.
00:14:25
Speaker
Disrupting is never present in the general timeline, and we see him only a bit. And I think that's one of those things where, so if you listen to Lucifer's conversations in the series, and even in different literature, he's always asking, why the hell do the humans say that I made them do anything, that I don't make them do anything?
00:14:46
Speaker
There are many books that have tackled this, The Sorrows of Satan. There are many different books I've done and Gaiman, his version, pretty much takes the same point of view that Lucifer is not making you do anything. The devil is not making you do anything. You're doing it to yourself. Why?
00:15:02
Speaker
It's that old line about the line between good and evil down the center of the human heart. Exactly. So for destruction, the reason destruction turned his back is like, well, I'm not making them do anything. Why are they destroying themselves? It's like, I do not care about this thing. But destruction's turning his back also is an important thing. It's very important. And we'll get to that when we start talking about the death of Sandman. We'll get to that.
00:15:28
Speaker
what it is this interweaving of different mythologies, different tribal stories, different rumors, urban legends, comics, everything. It's so rich that you can't, you know, like, and in some ways, it defies characterization. And so it's not just one of the best comics ever written, but it's one of the best stories ever told, you know, as well, you know, the fact that you've already said it wears its literature credentials on its sleeve quite heavily. It's
00:15:56
Speaker
We mentioned it won the World Fantasy Award. As far as I'm aware, is it the only comic that's won the World Fantasy Awards? Yes, because they changed the rules immediately afterwards. They had to change the rules immediately afterwards, like, well, a comic can't win it. But they were like, well, this is literature. Well, a comic can't win it. There was so much. It was very interesting to listen to.
00:16:15
Speaker
You know, it's like when, um, it's like, I think now I may get the, um, the actual award wrong, but it's like when Stephen King won either the national book award or the Penn award or something. And there was a, you know, some of the literary authors were upset that, Oh, this is just a genre of, you know, um, he's, he writes penny bread. Why is he here winning this grand award? You know, so there was sort of back, I think that he's a funny one because he, in the, when he was teaching English and literature in the seventies,
00:16:45
Speaker
He said he was accosted and surrounded by students who all of them wanted to write the next great American novel. And he laughed at them really, not laughed in a mean way, but if you write genre stuff as well as he has, and when you amass a body of work that is as impressive as Stephen King's, and he's probably, arguably he's written a couple of stinkers in there as well, but when you amass a body of work like that, then it's hard not to consider it as literature.
00:17:17
Speaker
If you're serious about your art, you will make something that's bad. I completely agree. I mean, Bowie made a couple of terrible records as well. One thing I like is that Michael Jordan said that the reason you know my name is that I failed more than anybody else. He has made more mistakes than other people, but that made him better. You're going to have some stinkers. That's not negotiable.
00:17:43
Speaker
were wandering off the reservation already. So yeah, it won the world. Yeah, we think only a comic book winner of the World Fantasy Award. But it was for the it was for the edition that covered the Midsummer Night's Dream. Yes. And there was another there was also another one when he talked about Baghdad, which was which was mentioned, which was mentioned in the news. But that will lead to another digression. Let's just continue with this.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, well, Midsummer Night's Dream, there's an obvious connection between dream and Midsummer Night's Dream. But the way that Morpheus weaves that story between, well, through the story of literature itself, over the generations, through Chaucer and through Shakespeare, and the scene with Kit Marlow as well, when he's with Hob Gaddling in the inns in the various centuries, he's weaving the story of ourselves. It's
00:18:36
Speaker
It's very self-referential. It's almost meta in that sense, but it's respectful of the great tradition of storytelling. I remember there's a scene where he mentions the production of Lear, which they changed to have a happy ending, and he's talking about it in the 18th century. I can't remember.
00:18:55
Speaker
And he says they change it to a happy ending. And Morpheus says the original stories, the great stories will always revert to their original endings. Yes, you know, and you know, like, it's so basically, it's, it's self-referential in a way that is, like you said, it's respectful, but it gives the skill in this is that it also gives the main character Morpheus
00:19:16
Speaker
authenticity. As he's going along, he's like, here's Shakespeare. You guys refer him. Well, this is the one who inspired Shakespeare. And that's why all of it comes from dreams. Even when we re-encounter him in the Tempest, he's still having that same conversation.
00:19:32
Speaker
He's not just saying that, but the Tempest is one of the few plays that they think Shakespeare actually wrote as an original. Again, that's another cul-de-sac which would be interesting, but the Tempest is one of the stories that may be thought of as original. Because even the rest of his best work, they can think of antecedents to each one of them. All of them can be stretched back to either the history of England or the history of ancient civilizations or ancient mythologies.
00:20:01
Speaker
The Tempest is a very strange one. It's his last completed work, Shakespeare, and I would argue it's his greatest work, and I would argue that it's probably the greatest piece of literature that's ever been created. And it's enabled a whole other body of work to sprout out of just The Tempest.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yes. Because that play itself, a bit like Morpheus and Samhain, it's about the act of creation, it's about the act of dream and what happens when you will prosper over the wizard. He wants to create, but it's been corrupted. Yeah, but in my own opinion, in my own opinion, prosper over Shakespeare.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yes. I believe that was a self-insert. Absolutely. And from the Sandman perspective, Sandman said, well, I asked him for two plays, Midsummer Night Dream and Tempest are those two plays that he asked in terms of payment, in terms of whatever was going on and all that. And it's rich with all that. There is a book, there is the annotated Sandman, which contains all, or purports to contain all of the literary references.
00:21:00
Speaker
i've not read that because i i want to be able to read it myself and then go oh that's what this means i don't want it all written out for me i want to be able to discover them each time i go back and read them because there is so much there is so densely packed that you can't pick them up in one you know
00:21:15
Speaker
on one occasion. So if people want to, and I'm sure that those of us who want that, if people want to understand all the references and know all of the allusions, then there's the annotated assignment to go with. People have obsessively looked through this series for decades now, so it's all there for the taking, if you want.
00:21:34
Speaker
It's, we've said this about various tech, about various books since we've been doing this podcast. And it came up in the very first one, which was Northern Lights. And we got, we wandered off topic and started talking, well, kind of off topic. We talked about Paradise Lost and the ancestry of Northern Lights in that. And with the great pieces of work, there's almost no bottom. When you start digging, you can just dig and dig and dig and you just reveal another, a new network of holes to explore and you can't actually get to the bottom.
00:22:07
Speaker
Modern Lights is one of my favorite books, and almost by extension, I also love Paradise Lost. In fact, I quoted Paradise Lost in my last novel, Far From the Light of Heaven, because it is related to that. But the point is, you're right. The reference to literature is all there. But I think that there is no way of talking about Sandman that you won't go off topic, because the nature of the narrative itself is wandering. It's a bit meandering if you look at the entire series.
00:22:29
Speaker
Well, Northern Lights is one of my favorite books.
00:22:35
Speaker
I think that's to be encouraged. I think the great books make you think about what they force you or they don't force you, but they encourage you and they help the reader to make connections between what's going on in this particular piece of work and other pieces of work that they know, other pieces of work that maybe they've written, maybe they've read. Umberto Eco, the Italian author, he wrote a really, really cool essay on this, and I forget the title, but it was about what he called the intertextuality of texts.
00:23:04
Speaker
He purported that every text that's been written and every text that's been read is simultaneously referencing every other text that's ever been written at the same time. And I loved that because it's filtered through the reader and so the reader can make any connection with any other text.
00:23:23
Speaker
that they've read and make those connections and formulate patterns. And I love that. And it's completely true. I mean, you can dig in the great texts anyway, the great ones, you can really dig down. And I think that's definitely true with Sandman because it's grounded in that mythology of antiquity and brought right up to the present. It's relevant to anybody really.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yes. And I think the good thing about the texts that we love, that endure and that are written in this brilliant way, like Northern Lights that you just mentioned, is that they tend to recontextualize classics. They give new meaning to things that you were forced to read when you were a child, when you were younger. It makes you then go back and look at those things like, hang on, let me read Midsummer Night's Dream again and see where is this coming from and all of that.
00:24:10
Speaker
you can just tell the brilliance of Gaiman is that he knows this stuff. You can tell that he knows this stuff to a really micro extent, almost anatomic level, so that he can tell you stuff about it. And he can also tell you rumors about it, you know, that were around at the time. So when Shakespeare is talking, you know, when they're talking about the November plot, you know, they make up this rhyme so that it won't be forgotten. You know, like, who knows if that happened or not? But it might as well have, based on the timing. It might as well have. And so, you know, it almost reminds me of that movie. It's as real as it needs to be.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yes, it's as real as it needs to be. So it's like that film Anonymous, which was about Shakespeare's. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, it gives you that same feeling of I need to go back and check this thing and was this happening and so on and so because obviously it's a film. So there will be liberties taken. But it's the same thing with Sandman. You know, we know that he's riffing off Aleister Crowley. We know that he's riffing off, you know, the flapper culture, the obsession with your cults that occurred during the, you know, during the 60s and all of that. He's riffing off all of it.
00:25:06
Speaker
At the same time, he's providing a soundtrack of songs about dreams and all of that. And it's populated by all kinds of characters. There's Mad Hetty. John Constantine makes an appearance. There's all kinds of angels. They make references to different kinds of religions and all of that. It's almost never-ending.
00:25:28
Speaker
it and there is almost no there's no limits to how deep you can go if you start looking at it line by line it's okay what does this mean what does this mean what is this so this is just the answer to the first question why do we like Sandman well let's let's um i'm going to take what you said there you said it's almost never ending let's go right to the end and talk about the ending that's what we're here to talk we're going to talk about
00:25:51
Speaker
What's the ultimate spoiler? But actually, if you think about it logically, it's not really a spoiler at all about the death of dream. And if you think about the progression of the story, then the logic reveals itself. I mean, your article about this, and we'll provide the links in the episode literature to the article, because it's a very good piece of writing as usual. Thank you.
00:26:14
Speaker
And shot through with your professional perspective as well, which I thought made it more interesting. But there is a logic that what's got to happen to the dream, to your dream at the end of its life, has to die and dream comes to understand that through his own journey.
00:26:30
Speaker
I was, Chris and I are both gamers. Are you a gamer, Taddie? I was. I had to stop because I got RSI. I had to. I got RSI in my, you know, like the last, okay. So I was really seriously into, and this is going to date me, but I was seriously into Unreal Tournament, the original version, Quake and Countercrack. Oh wow, Quake.
00:26:50
Speaker
I was pretty big into Counter Strike. I was big into that. But you can only do this. I had to stop. It was either do that or not, right? I had to stop. And I am, no, sorry. I'm lying. I did Bioshock Infinite. I played Bioshock Infinite all the way to the end because just when I thought I was out, they bring me back in. I read so many articles about Bioshock Infinite that I said, OK, I'm going to come out of retirement and play Bioshock Infinite.
00:27:19
Speaker
Well, Bioshock is great. I think they're remaking. Anyway, I finished it. It was great because I finished it. Boom. Just like that. So yeah, I am, I am an OG gamer. Let's put it that way. Okay. That's good. Yeah. OG, we're OG gamers as well. Spectrum. Game is on the spectrum. Plus, get set Willy. Yeah.
00:27:38
Speaker
it's going way back yeah yeah almost like leisure leisure suit larry as well there's loads weren't there manic minor paper boy paper boy yeah paper boy i mean honestly the the boredom that you did you would get just from but it was all new then wasn't it
00:27:53
Speaker
When you're gaming, I did have a point to this amazingly. When we're gaming, at some point you're going to die. You get eaten by zombies or you get chomped by the monster or mown down by the Luftwaffe or whatever it is where you fall off a cliff and you die. I think dreams are like computer gaming in a way. You pursue a certain strategy through the world and then you die.
00:28:17
Speaker
And then you, you respawn and you think like that strategy didn't work, but I can let that one die. Literally in the game, you virtually died. So you can let that one die and you pursue a different strategy and make, maybe you make a little bit more progress. And then you come to another obstacle and you die and you respawn and you rethink your strategy. And humans are uniquely evolved to do that with the prefrontal cortex. And you mentioned the, I think you mentioned that actually the frontal lobe in Jack is also nice little nod to Jack again.
00:28:45
Speaker
But the prefrontal cortex allows us to simulate, to effectively dream our strategy, but we can let the dream die so that we don't have to die. Yeah. Yeah. And it helps us. So it is one of those things where, so we know we think anyway that animals dream as well. But one of the things that we have in terms of our language, our ability to plan things is we can imagine something.
Morpheus's Death and Narrative Journey
00:29:08
Speaker
So we can imagine something and calculate the outcome and then do it. Right. You know, those plantings that.
00:29:13
Speaker
Whereas, or not do it, but a bear, for example, has to hibernate because, you know, its DNA tells it, okay, look, when the weather is like this, your body's going to undergo these changes, do this. Doesn't know why it does it, does it because it has, you know, a polar bear comes to a sheet of ice. It knows that, okay, I'm not going to walk upright on this because I'm going to fall. So I'm going to slide on this. It's not thinking that it's doing problems that have already been encoded. Yeah. It's hardwired.
00:29:40
Speaker
And before we get to what that means for letting dream die, for letting Morpheus die, there is an example, we get a taste of what that would be like if we had that ability to filter out the stuff that we can in our brain. We can filter out the stuff that we know actually that's not going to be a good strategy to pursue. In the episode 24 Hours from Volume 1, where John Dee is in the diner. The diner.
00:30:09
Speaker
But he's managed to get hold of Morpheus's ruby through a series of convoluted transactions. And he takes away the people in the, so there are about six or seven people in the diner and he takes away their ability to dream. And that effectively takes away their ability to filter out the stuff that they know they shouldn't be doing. And so that all that's left is that, well, they're basically the bear then, aren't they? They don't have that ability to filter it out and they just act on what's going on in their brain.
00:30:37
Speaker
And should I say something interesting that happened with science since then. So at the time this thing was written, we weren't actually sure what happened, why the brain needs sleep and all of that. We weren't entirely sure why it was needed. But since then, it's been found that it needs to sleep so that impurities can be filtered out through what's called the lymphatic system and drained away.
00:30:58
Speaker
And that's how they found out that if you don't sleep well enough, it makes you prone to dementia later because it's possible that those toxins will build up and form plaques. So sleeping is when the brain actually does that cleaning and moving stuff out of there. So it's interesting as a parallel to what happened in 24 hours. You know, it's very interesting as a parallel.
00:31:16
Speaker
Oh, that's very cool. It's also interesting that the reason that the Ruby that Morpheus couldn't get the Ruby back is that it had initially anyways that it had impurities because it had been altered, you know, because Morpheus would have got the, you know, he would have got the Ruby and it wouldn't have mattered whatever D wanted to do. But as soon as Morpheus touched it, the impurities knocked him out, basically. And that's what allowed, you know, D to take it to the diner and that whole for that for that whole episode to happen.
00:31:40
Speaker
The way it's set out is so clever because on a narrative level, you knock out your superhero, you knock out Morpheus, and that allows John Dee to run riot in the diner and the people to do all these terrible things to one another. And lots of violence, lots of blood. But symbolically, it works as well, because if you knock out your ability to dream and simulate, then all that's left is the sort of amygdalic fury that's left.
00:32:05
Speaker
So before we actually get into the actual narrative of yourself, there's a question that would come up is that, didn't your game plan this thing out from Sandman 1, Sandman Episode 1, Issue 1 or whatever? Did he plan it or did he just pull it all together towards the end?
00:32:20
Speaker
And the answer to this comes from a surprising source. Well, sorry, I don't know if this is the answer, but using what he said about something else. Now, again, we're going a little bit into the weeds, but there's a character called Miracle Man. I do like it when you take us into the weeds, though, it's okay.
00:32:41
Speaker
So it is the most interesting copyright issue in comics and reading that, you know, at least barring Superman, but it also impinges upon the Superman's copyright issues. But don't worry. The point is that one of the people who said who claims to own Miracle Man ended up being Todd McFarlane of, you know, of the image comics and all of that.
00:33:00
Speaker
But one of the things that happened with the image revolution is that they made so much money that they were able to attract top talent to write for them. So they were able to attract them more and they were able to attract Neil Gaiman. So Neil Gaiman came in and wrote a few episodes of Spawn, which is talk McFarland's character that he created and probably has the longest unbroken run of any comic right now because it's still running.
00:33:21
Speaker
Now, when Gaiman wrote his episode, he wrote about Angela. He created Angela and some other characters within the episodes that he did. I think he did two episodes or so. So there then became a dispute about money and a dispute about the ownership of the car. Tom Follin said it was work for hire. Neil Gaiman said, well, he owned the car. So they went to court. Anyway, the point is they went to court and the transcripts of the court case are available online. I have read the transcript.
00:33:48
Speaker
but that's not the point. The point is you and the judge would get on very well in reading court transcripts together.
00:33:55
Speaker
Well, the point is, at some point, when they're talking about the creation of the character, they're like, well, did you create these characters with the intention of them existing and being used and exploited and all of that? And again, I said, well, look, Spawn was nice and it looked nice and all of that, but it didn't have many supporting characters around him. So one of the things you do as a writer of serial fiction is to scatter a few things here and there that might become important later, even if you don't know what you're going to do with
00:34:22
Speaker
So you create this character, that character to enrich the environment and you can use those things later when you're wrapping things up or when you need a particular storyline. So for me, that was like, ah, is that what happened with Sandman as well? Because, I mean, it all works very well. It's very neat with Dovetail at the end, but he may not have known at the beginning what he was going to do with each of these characters and each of these plot lines. He may just have been throwing his bread upon the water, so to speak.
00:34:49
Speaker
So I think it's important to bring that in a little bit before we go into the actual storyline itself. We appreciate the history lesson, as always. It's good to have context on these things. It would be, ideally, we'd get the answer from Mr. Gaiman himself. So maybe we'll mess him up on Twitter and see, did you plan this out from the beginning? Because logically it works. But I think a great storyteller can make that sort of thing work, even if they're a discovery writer.
00:35:14
Speaker
And the initial narrative that we said that volume one is just a quest narrative. It's the simplest narrative you could have. Like you said, dude, where's my stuff? He goes to get his helmet, he goes to get his ruby, he goes to get his bag of sand and after he's feeling a little bit despondent. And that's pretty much it. I mean, obviously, you know, set pieces and that, but it's very, very simple. So who knows who knows where.
00:35:36
Speaker
Well, exactly. And he was also fighting his feet in American comics. He was also trying to like, okay, what is this character? What is this character? And I think it really solidified in the sound of her wings. But there are a few things that we should note in terms of how it all ended. First of all, from the sound of her wings, the fact that the closest family member, the closest person he is to his death,
00:36:02
Speaker
should tell you something from the beginning it means you are close to death like a lot of what is visual there is also telling you well look this guy's gonna die because he's close to death you know this is the person to whom he is closest in the entire unit is death so person is close to death is going to die you know there's all of that um there is the quest
00:36:20
Speaker
And I think I mentioned this in the article, there's the quest that he and Delirium go on to find destruction. They are literally seeking destruction, right? Literally, they're going to find their own destruction. And it is in the quest to find destruction that he commits the act that will lead to his death specific. When the kindly ones are saying, well, you know, because they're like, okay, what did you do to the kindly one? Well, the kindly one said that his son, we didn't like his son.
00:36:43
Speaker
his son made us cry because when his son went to get his wife, he sang a song that made them cry and they hated that. But the fact that he was made to kill his son when he didn't want to is what made him vulnerable to them. And he had a number of enemies. So we know that there's Loki. The people who were most instrumental in his death were the kindly ones which we've mentioned and which featured pretty much throughout the whole series.
00:37:06
Speaker
Loki, which basically that was a matter of the scorpion and it's that tale of, look, don't do a favour to a scorpion because they're going to sting you because that's the nature of the scorpion. He did a favour to Loki and Loki hated owing him that favour. And you mentioned a Midsummer Night's Dream, he offended Puck and Puck says he wasn't going to forget it. Puck and Loki decide together how they're going to get into this whole problem.
00:37:28
Speaker
litter Hall, you know, he offends her because, you know, her husband, basically he uncreates her husband because her husband was already kind of dead and grieving Dreamland. And he says, I'm going to take your child as well. You know, he is kind of thoughtless in making enemies, you know, and that kind of comes back to haunt him. And there's the problem of desire. So of the endless desire, desire and dream don't get along together.
00:37:51
Speaker
Now, this is not in the text hall, but here's what I've come to think. The reason they hate each other is over the title of who's the Lord of Stories. So in the entire series of Sandman, Morpheus is supposed to be the Lord of Stories. And we say, yes, the whole thing is actually about stories.
00:38:07
Speaker
Well, the problem of stories is that stories always start with a desire. Someone wants something and either they get it or they don't get it, but there is usually a want and then there's an obstruction to that want. The obstruction to the want is conflict, right? Desire is literally the source of all stories.
Symbolism and Impact of Sandman
00:38:22
Speaker
So does, and this is completely speculation, but is this the reason why desire hates dream? Is it because, well, actually I should read a lot of stories, you know?
00:38:29
Speaker
Either way, either way, they hate each other. And I think the key, excuse me, the earliest key to his death is in Season of Mists. It is the place where destiny encounters the three fates and they start the whole, they say he just knows from his book that they have to meet. So the endless me. And that serves a narrative function of introducing us to all of the endless, but it also tells us
00:38:55
Speaker
It also tells us several things. The thing that leads Morpheus to hell, to him offending Lucifer, is the fact that he's done wrong by his former lover. And the desire for that desire literally put that in his heart to desire that woman, who we shouldn't have been doing anything with at all. And then death tells him, well, yeah, you shouldn't have, you know, you treated her wrong. So he decides to go to hell.
00:39:17
Speaker
When he goes to hell, expecting that he'll have to fight Lucifer, hell is empty. And Lucifer is locking things up. Now, there are two things that kind of foreshadow the problem in seasons of mist. One is the fact that destruction just turned his back and left his office. Something that Morpheus himself could never do. But the fact that he did that
00:39:39
Speaker
was something, and that kind of put a, you know, Morpheus, Morpheus is like, look, my duties, my duties, my duties. And he's like, destruction left his duty. And then Lucifer himself was saying, you know what, I'm not doing hell anymore. And he's like, I'm just, you know, I'm just not going to do it. So he decides, okay, you know what, I'm locking up hell, I'm cutting off my wings, or rather he gets Morpheus to cut off his wings. And he said he's leaving something that Morpheus could not even imagine. Like, but this is how can you do that and all of that? He said, well, I'm doing it because I'm just going away. And that is the thing that Morpheus could not do.
00:40:04
Speaker
But it is in the disposal of hell that Morpheus offends Loki. It is in disposing of hell. Because once everybody realizes that Morpheus has the keys to hell, all the supernatural beings in every plane of reality, they all come and say, well, you know what? We should give me the keys to hell. I want to have hell and all of that.
00:40:21
Speaker
And one of, you know, a delegation, one of the delegation is, you know, is Odin and Thor and Loki, right? And Thor, Loki escapes basically. And Morpheus knows that he's escaped and says he can't let him put a dreamer in the place where Loki used to be. But he said he'll put a dream there so that nobody will notice that Loki is gone. And that's how Loki kind of escapes. But that's the offense that he creates to Loki. That's, that's what offends Loki. Like I don't, I will owe an obligation to nobody, you know?
00:40:49
Speaker
But also, also in that same situation, in order to get, when the fairies, because it's good that you mentioned the Midsummer Night's Dream, when the fairies wanted hell, they brought a gift to Morpheus, right? And the gift is basically noila, right? They brought a fairy saying, well, here's a gift to sweeten the deal of you giving us hell, right? And obviously, it's a gift, so you can't take it back. It's not a transaction. It's not a payment. It's a gift. So noila had to stay there. And of course, there's a mention all the way through that, look, don't accept gifts from fairies, because the gifts always come with consequences.
00:41:19
Speaker
consequences. And the consequence of that gift of Noela is death because if Morpheus did not, because Noela was okay. She was in love with Morpheus, but Morpheus didn't even know she existed. So when she was leaving, Morpheus gave her a gift saying, okay, if you ever need me, call me. There's a, there's a jewel. And he says, call me. I make a promise this day that if you call me, I will come. All right.
00:41:41
Speaker
when Morpheus is being attacked by the Candy Ones, he's not afraid because like, well, they can't kill me here in the middle of the Dreaming, unless he leaves. And at that moment, Nualakol, and that's what made him vulnerable. And that's what made them able to kill him, basically. So all of this was going on all at the same time, you know, and it all of it led to it. And, you know, I really found his death quite sad. You know, I found it really, I just found it really sad when I read it, you know, up to that point, because
00:42:05
Speaker
I don't know. I started reading it from the wake and in the wake he's already dead, but I didn't have that feeling. I just said, well, this is really good. I better go back to, I better get all the, is that the, is that the, the volume that you picked up in the library when you, yes, I was seeing something else. Yeah. So I read the wake and I'm like, wow, this is good. And the art was fantastic. It's like, Oh, I got to, I have to go to the beginning of this. And I sat down there and I started reading and I borrowed, you know, all the volumes and I kind of read all of them. That's how I started reading, you know, Sandman.
00:42:31
Speaker
I think the conflict between desire and dream and desire is deliberately set up as ambiguous in almost every way. Desire is presented as sort of androgynous, which I thought was done really well in the TV show as well actually, and ambiguous in every way. And I think that's because desire ain't necessarily a very good thing. It can be, but it can also lead you down the wrong path, whereas
00:42:54
Speaker
A dream is more like a call to action. It's almost like alerting you to the fact that there's something that you need to deal with and you can't deal with it in the sleeping world, in the dreaming, you have to deal with it in the waking world. But it's telling you what you need to do. So dream has to die so that the world may act.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But of course we also have to look at the whole idea of facets. Like he's like, look, he was telling us that, look, I am but a facet of this, you know, of this jewel called that is dreaming. I am part of it. And then the next thing he does is he has it to Daniel, who is going to be the next manifestation of that. Um, and of course we knew that when Loki and Puck killed Daniel, he's got a Phoenix feather. So we know he's going to come back. You know, we already know that. Okay, look, yes, they're burning this child, but he's got a Phoenix feather.
00:43:39
Speaker
So we know that, okay, the child is going to resurrect one way or the other no matter what. And I just thought, you know, and look, you know how comics are. People, characters die in comics all the time and they come back and they die and they come back and everything, but the elegance of giving him a feather. And I tried to put myself in the mind of a person who was reading this episode by episode because
00:43:59
Speaker
I had the trades, I read them in all the trades, so the story was already complete by the time I started. But imagine if you were just reading each episode, you know, so you could, here's this child, they put him in a fire and he's got a Phoenix Fed. So like, if you don't think that, okay, look, it's a Phoenix Fed, the Phoenix always, you know, regenerated.
00:44:15
Speaker
Yeah, you won't. It's the symbol of the same thing that we were talking about. You regenerate, you let the old version die so that you regenerate. Yes. Exactly. And you act anew. Yeah. So it's rich like that. It just seems like even one of the things, and his offense to Lucifer, because there is still a dangling thread in Sandman, because Lucifer said he would destroy him, but didn't. But again, that's rich with symbolism.
00:44:45
Speaker
Yeah, because the devil can destroy anybody but doesn't necessarily. Well, exactly. And it didn't really, you know, it didn't really have, you know, and the thing is, but also, it's also symbolic because Lucifer was trying to explain that these things that you think you have to do, you don't, you can let anything go. And he's like, look, okay, fine. You know what, I said I was going to destroy him, but nah, I don't care. I'm going to play jazz instead.
00:45:08
Speaker
Right. He just, he was, you know, like, so the whole thing is just really layered in, in such a brilliant way. And sometimes you have to actually, the beauty of it is that you may not pick it up in the first reading when you read it again. It's like, ah, that's why he's saying this particular thing. And that's why this is, you know, it's, it's. Well, I think with, with comics here.
00:45:27
Speaker
particularly more than a lot of other media, because it's so economical with the real estate that you have, you have to pack a lot. If you're doing something as profound as Sandman, something with as much depth as Sandman, you got to pack a lot into every line and you got to make sure that every line is worth something and means something. And it does, more often than not, every single panel can be picked apart in Sandman and explored.
00:45:51
Speaker
In Sandman, yes. And that's why it was something that was very rich. It was a boon to comics as a form. It was a boon. You can use comics to tell really intricate stories and all of that, and layered literature, which wasn't... People have tried to do this before. There were comics about literature. There were comic adaptations of classical stories because, look, I'm a complete
Netflix Adaptation of Sandman
00:46:13
Speaker
comic junkie. I will read anything. In fact, people don't remember this, but in the 70s, there were psychiatry comics.
00:46:20
Speaker
that used to run serially at the back of a forgotten which newspaper, right? And I would read those and who knows if that's what influenced my career. They were doing all kinds of things like dream analysis, all of that in comic form, you know, regularly in the back of newspapers back. And so comics have been doing lots and lots of things for a very long time. There were comics about Bible stories, there were Shakespeare comics that
00:46:44
Speaker
everything. But this is where it became woven into mainstream superhero comics, DC Comics doing that. It is a magnificent piece of work. We're going to call time on the first half of the show in a few minutes, but before we do, what did you think of the Netflix adaptation?
00:47:03
Speaker
I loved it. I could not understand. I saw some people criticizing parts of it and everything, but I have to say I loved it from the beginning all the way to the end. Now, I don't know if that's because I've read the source material and I know what's coming. I don't know if that's why I loved it, but the performances were great. The choices that they made to streamline the stories were great. The writing was great as usual, which goes without saying.
00:47:30
Speaker
And I can't wait for the second season. I can't imagine what was making Netflix delay announcing the second season. When they announced the first season, I was really excited. I was excited not just because they were, because adaptations of salmon have been in the works for decades as well. Yeah, well, that was the one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which is in production, I think, for a while, but then it fell over.
00:47:51
Speaker
But there was a terrible, and I read this script, it was a terrible Sandman script that was going around in the late 90s and early 2000s. So someone actually wrote a feature of it. The worst thing that I have, they had Sandman throwing punches at someone. Like that's how bad it was bad. You know, it's as if someone, right, had never read the comics. I was told, go write this script. And the character is called Sandman. Well, maybe they were reading the old Sandman.
00:48:16
Speaker
But the old Sam, I didn't punch people either. The old Sam had used some gas gun. Okay. Well, I thought the TV show was great as well. There's almost a temptation to think, oh, it's just going to be reliant on CGI. And I suppose to tell a story like that, you do need a huge gamut of CGI to be able to convey the scenes that are in the book because the artwork is just fantastic and it conveys a real sense of the fantastical and the impossible.
00:48:44
Speaker
But I thought the series actually hung on the simple interactions between the characters. So the bits where you had dialogue between the characters were great because the dialogue is so good anyway. I thought any scene that had David Thewlis in was just great because he's magnificent.
00:48:59
Speaker
And as John Dee, he had a great part to get his teeth into. But generally, yeah, I really enjoyed Greg. I think they chose the absolute best person to play Sandman. I was amazed at how physically accurate they managed to get somebody. Tom Sturridge, as Morpheus, he looks the part, doesn't he? I missed seeing the flames coming up the trench coat. I thought they might have a go at that.
00:49:26
Speaker
We may yet see that. And I will be honest, I prefer dark eyed Morpheus. I would have preferred him to have those pits so that when he's angry, you'll get that flash. Like it's dark most of the time, but then when he's angry or someone is vexing him, it will flash white. And then when someone really vexes him, it will flash red.
00:49:48
Speaker
I would have liked to have seen that, is what I'm saying. It could be coming, could be coming. He's not been made really angry yet, let's be honest. No, he hasn't quite got to that point yet. I think the angriest that we saw him was when Thessaly protected Lita Hall in a circle, in a magic circle. Because obviously he was, well he used to be, when he broke up with Thessaly he became depressed.
00:50:13
Speaker
know we kind of know that and we know that it was Thessaly's choice to break up with him not the other way around and Thessaly did this because he offended her but you still get the sense that Thessaly loved him because Thessaly has her own oh god I wish we could talk about Thessaly. Thessaly had her own has her own code of behavior all right and she takes she takes shit from no one can I say shit can I yeah you can say shit it's fine
00:50:34
Speaker
Right. That's how they take shit from no one. And she is like this uber witch. All right. And she did all this stuff that led to Morpheus's death just on a pointer principle with him that he offended her and all that. But after he, after he died, she told Litter Hall, who was a pawn in this whole thing that Litter, the thing she told Litter was you better start running because a lot of people are going to want to kill you after what you've just done. All right. And then there's a pause. And then she says, including me, you know,
00:50:59
Speaker
You're so, like, it's, I love that something. She looks like a librarian, all right? She has circular glasses, she reads, she looks unassuming and everything, but she is one of the most powerful people in that whole series. We are going to have to leave it there, unfortunately.
Understanding Plagiarism in Writing
00:51:17
Speaker
We've just gone past the hour mark, so we'll call time on part one of the show, but we'll be back with Tade a little bit later on.
00:51:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Mars Radio 14, the third best radio station in the National Space Force Broadcasting Spectrum. My name is Captain Half Milk Carton and I'm joined by Lieutenant Bungalow and this week we're going to see how long you can listen without falling asleep because we're going to be bringing you live coverage of Bondurant Habab's visit to Pluto.
00:51:53
Speaker
which will be the first Martian mission to the ice planet. It won't take that long. Alright, okay, Bungalow. And tell me this. How long will that take? Oh, two and a half minutes. Ah, for obbligong's sake, Bungalow. You spent 20 diples on planet Earth and you went native.
00:52:11
Speaker
It's a wonder you didn't pick up a human accent while you were there. Will you just use Martian time so our listeners might have half a clone of how long this is going to take? Well, if you were a competent space captain, you know that two and a half minutes is the same as Scrumtolian 5 divided by Scrumtolian 4 and a quarter.
00:52:30
Speaker
No time at all, really. So folks, we're going to be broadcasting for Scrumtalian 1 and Infinite Scrumtalian Dipples, which is some time. Everything takes time half milk carton, except Jupiterian, some of what would you expect from that frickin' planet. Anyway, won't take much time because Hababo is dead. What?
00:52:54
Speaker
Just before Scrumptolium 5. How? He froze to death in his tent bungalow. What do you mean, froze to death? Pluto, as you probably don't know, is very cold. His core onptolium flams dropped below 67 degrees, which meant his gantorian artery could no longer sustain a blood flow to his vestibule. It stopped runculating. And he died. No, I mean, how did he get so cold that he froze to death? He used a cheap tent.
00:53:24
Speaker
I must have let it in the cold. How would he offer that and can you know that? I gave it to him. Got it on earth. In a thrift shop. It's not something I forget because I was on my way out of the shop when a small, fat, middle-aged human woman, well I can't say for definite if she was middle-aged, but she had the look of someone who neither knows nor cares what age she was, she was wearing a UB40 t-shirt. She's drinking cider.
00:53:52
Speaker
Anyway, she grabbed my elbow and screamed, YOU'RE GONNA GET ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah, I did. What about it? Ah, well, bungalow. What about it is that means Bungalow had been forewarned. So it's not really your fault. As all of our listeners will know, and as you should have known, if you were any good displaced lieutenant, which, with all due respect, you are not, but if you were, you would have known that when a small fat, crusty woman in a UB40 T-shirt grabs you by the arm and dementedly yells in your face,
00:54:47
Speaker
then you have been given a poor tent of doom. Hello and welcome to The Judge's Corner with me, Damaris Brown. Over the last couple of months, I've looked at some cases where authors have claimed their work has been plagiarised.
00:55:10
Speaker
both non-fiction research and characters and scenes in novels. This month, I thought I'd wrap up the topic with a few ideas as to how we can shield ourselves from plagiarism claims. But I'll be referring back to the cases and legal points I mentioned in the earlier talks. So if you've not yet listened to them, now's the time to do so. As ever, this is just a general guide. And if you are accused of copyright infringement, or indeed if you think someone has stolen your work,
00:55:38
Speaker
It's important you speak to a lawyer practicing in your own locality, so you can get specific advice on your individual circumstances. The first and most obvious way to try to protect yourself from a possible plagiarism claim is, pause for drumroll, don't deliberately copy somebody else's work. Writing fanfiction and keeping it strictly between you and your computer screen is obviously not a problem.
00:56:03
Speaker
But if you're wedded to the idea of publishing it for the edification and delight of other fans, first find out what the author of the original thinks about it. Some authors hate their work being copied. Some love it. Some tolerate it. Some set conditions on what can or can't be done to their characters. Honour their decisions. And even if an author is usually happy for his or her work to be plagiarised,
00:56:29
Speaker
is another matter entirely if you try to make money from it, especially if that has a potential effect on the copyright holders' earnings. This was where two women ran into problems with their creation, the unofficial Bridgerton musical. Netflix had applauded their derivative work when it was confined to TikTok, but sued them when the pair turned it into a stage show together with the sale of Bridgerton-themed merchandise. This, Netflix said,
00:56:59
Speaker
stretches fan fiction well past its breaking point. It is blatant infringement of intellectual property rights. The legal claim was settled, though on what terms isn't known, but I'd be very surprised if Netflix didn't demand financial compensation as well as a ban on the women pursuing future commercial projects about Bridgerton, its setting and characters.
00:57:23
Speaker
If you're wedded to writing fanfiction, but you want to earn money from it, one way forward is to get the consent of the copyright holder, though that will likely come at a cost. Otherwise, make your work as different as possible from the original, giving it new settings, new characters, changing names, ethnicities, jobs, anything that helps differentiate your work from the original and make it something new.
00:57:49
Speaker
transformative is the word used relating to the fair use defence in the US. Of course, in a sense, that's self-defeating, since the further you go along that road, the less you're actually writing fanfiction, but it will keep you safer. And after all, it worked out well enough for E.L. James, who turned her Twilight fanfiction into Fifty Shades of Grey. As I've previously discussed, if a work is already in the public domain, then you're free to use it.
00:58:18
Speaker
but be careful not to infringe embellishments on the original which have been created by others and which remain under copyright. For example, Frankenstein's monster as created by Mary Shelley is no longer protected, but the Universal Cinematic version probably is.
00:58:35
Speaker
Also, don't forget the point I made last month about US copyright law, where some works by an author may be out of copyright, while others in the same series, which might incorporate changes to the characters, remain protected. Always err on the side of caution. And all of that holds good even if you don't write fanfiction as such, but something you've come across tickles your fancy and you want to use it in your own work.
00:59:03
Speaker
If it's a fact, historical, scientific, whatever, that's no problem. There's no copyright in facts.
00:59:10
Speaker
Otherwise, as I've discussed before, ideas aren't protectable, only the expression of those ideas. Which means that if you're simply taking a broad concept, you should be fine. But the more detail you incorporate from the original work, the more likely you are to fall foul of copyright, since when assessing if there has been infringement, the courts look to see how much has been copied from the original. In the UK,
00:59:37
Speaker
The question is whether what's been copied is substantial, but don't be misled into thinking that's purely a matter of quantity.
00:59:45
Speaker
since it's also a qualitative measure. A relatively small but very important issue may be enough to put you on the wrong side of the line. So again, change whatever you can, varying the plot, the characters, everything, and make your work as unlike the original as possible. Since as well as looking at what is similar, the courts take a broad brush approach as to style and general ethos of the works.
01:00:13
Speaker
But what if you've not knowingly copied anything, but there are resemblances between your work and someone else's? Similarities arising from coincidence or the use of common sources are not actionable as infringements of copyright in the UK, and I suspect it's the same elsewhere. But obviously they raise the suspicion of copying. It's not possible to guard against this completely, but there are steps you can take to help protect yourself.
01:00:39
Speaker
One of the first issues a court looks at is whether the alleged copycat had access to the original work. If the original is published and easily available, there's likely to be a presumption of access. And proving you've never even seen the work might well come down to how truthful you appear when giving evidence, though if you keep a meticulous record of what you do read, that may well bolster your case.
01:01:05
Speaker
This issue of access arose in the UK case I mentioned in January concerning Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. JK Rowling said she hadn't seen Willy the Wizard before the litigation started, and on the paperwork alone the judge found her evidence very powerful, with the claimant having
01:01:24
Speaker
no direct evidence with which to challenge it. However, the claimant alleged Rowling's agent had received copies Willy the Wizard some years before, thereby establishing a link between them. And in the then absence of documentary evidence supporting the defence, the judge wasn't prepared to dismiss the claim outright at that stage. If the matter had proceeded to trial, the judge would have been able to assess Rowling as a witness after cross-examination on this point.
01:01:54
Speaker
As importantly though, she would by then have produced evidence as to exactly what she had written and when, in particular showing whether, as she maintained, she had not only completed the first Harry Potter book, but had also mapped out all the others, including Goblet of Fire, long before she contacted her agent the first time. By proving that, and that the agent had made no suggested changes to the plot,
01:02:22
Speaker
then regardless of whatever he might have known about the other book, since it hadn't affected what she had actually written, the claim would have failed. Similarly, in the Pasternak case I discussed in December, by producing copies of the many drafts of her novel, the defendant was able to prove she had written the all-important first draft before receiving a copy of Pasternak's book, Lara, and also that subsequent drafts written after she'd read it
01:02:50
Speaker
didn't show any major alterations resulting from information that could be found only there. So being able to prove what you wrote and when is an important step in helping to protect yourself from a plagiarism claim. So as I've recommended before, keep all your drafts safe and duly dated, and if the other work is published only after your first drafts are written and no big changes occur afterwards, you should be home and dry.
01:03:18
Speaker
In the Pasternak case, the defendant was further able to prove that similarities between the two books arose because she and Pasternak had both drawn on the same sources in their research, and she produced copies of the book she had used, which she had marked up, with the text of Lara showing far fewer annotations than the others.
01:03:41
Speaker
as the judge specifically noted. As with the defendant's previous drafts and notes, examinations of these markings provided a useful means of assessing what use the defendant had made of these sources. I hesitate to suggest to fellow bibliophiles that you go around defacing books like this because of the very remote risk you might need to produce them in court, not least as I fail to see how it proves when the markings were made so as evidence they fall rather short,
01:04:10
Speaker
But if you undertake any kind of research for your novels, keep proper notes about what you find, where it came from and when you found it. Always date everything. And keep those records as safe as your drafts since they're a second line of defence.
01:04:26
Speaker
Staying with the Pasternak case, I can't help thinking that to an extent the defendant brought the action on herself. Since both women had written about the same historic love affair, some bright spark had the idea of them collaborating in publicity.
01:04:42
Speaker
with the aim of promoting both books at the same time. Perhaps as a result, when the defendant first met Pasternak she was effusive in her praise for Lara, calling it an invaluable resource and saying she had based the love story aspects of her novel on it. An understandable exaggeration perhaps.
01:05:01
Speaker
But if it didn't actually create Pasternak's conviction that her beloved book had been ripped off by some upstart, it must certainly have reinforced her sense of betrayal and a determination to seek redress. That insult was added to injury when she saw that though her non-fiction book was mentioned in the Acknowledgments page of the defendant's novel, it wasn't given its full, correct title.
01:05:26
Speaker
and, in her view, it was lacking the fulsome thanks it deserved and which other works had received. I suspect, too, that matters weren't helped when the defendant's publishers or legal team apparently shrugged off Pasternak's claim by asserting that as she had herself copied parts of it from other sources, Lara was not an original work.
01:05:49
Speaker
and therefore was not entitled to copyright protection. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Pasternak's claim, a perception of this being an arrogant, contemptuous dismissal of her legitimate concerns would have undoubtedly raised her hackles even further.
01:06:05
Speaker
Incidentally, this argument was one the defense maintained in court, but the judge found against them. These incidents neatly demonstrate that so very often it's not the infringement or breach of law which pushes people into court action, but rather it comes from a sense of injustice, of a fence having been given, of not being taken seriously.
01:06:27
Speaker
It may be that if matters had been handled differently in this case, Pasternak might have accepted the advice she received about the risks of litigation and the legal proceedings might never have been started. So, if you do use someone else's work in your novel, don't deny it or try to underplay it as if to disguise what you've done. But on the other hand, don't try and ingratiate yourself with the author by suggesting their work was more valuable to you than it actually was.
01:06:57
Speaker
Be polite, but honest. Also, be scrupulous in listing all your sources in your acknowledgements, give correct citations, and avoid making it appear you're belittling any one source. And if you do receive what you consider to be a spurious copyright claim, don't respond with contempt no matter how angry it makes you. Set out the facts, but be courteous about it.
01:07:22
Speaker
And always, always remember that you really don't want to end up in court.
Writing Challenge and Fictional Skit
01:07:27
Speaker
In the Pasternak trial, with six days for the final hearing, plus other court appearances for preliminary matters, involving two KC's, junior council, supporting solicitors, and goodness knows how much documentation accumulated over some three years,
01:07:43
Speaker
The total costs involved for both sides must be horrendous, and the bulk of those costs, perhaps as much as two million all told, will have to be paid by Pasternak since she lost. But though the defendant won the case, she won't have emerged from it scot-free. Not only did she suffer all the stress and anxiety of the legal proceedings,
01:08:05
Speaker
But though most of her costs will be paid, undoubtedly she will still have been left out of pocket, a fate so very common to so many litigants. Don't be one of them if you can possibly avoid it.
01:08:25
Speaker
The January 75 word writing challenge had the topic of the last one and the genre chosen was science fiction and fantasy. The winner was Ashleen Watts with her entry, The Last Dance. If you want to enter the challenges and improve your writing chops, visit sffchronicles.com and sign up for free. Save the Last Dance by Ashleen.
01:08:52
Speaker
They dance amidst cascading disco lights. Loved ones spectate, wistfully engrossed. His wife's auburn curls sway. She moves like an angel despite the oxygen tube up her nose. To tear full applause, they finish with a flourishing bow.
01:09:21
Speaker
He removes his VR suits helmet. Ur calls his sweaty head. She smiles from her wall mounted photograph, the light bulb casting her a halo. As long as he can revisit their final dance, he'll always smile back.
01:09:51
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to Mars Radio 14, which, by the way, is the third best radio station broadcasting on the Martian Space Force radio spectrum. Yeah. My name is Lieutenant Bungalow, and in this episode, we are looking at the phenomenon known as sleep. Yeah. I'm joined on the phone by Captain Half Milk Carton, who is hoping to be the first Martian never
01:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't, that wasn't a misspoke. Never to sleep. Okay, there I have milk carton. Where? On the phone. Yes? And, uh, how long have you been awake for? Three weeks. You mean you've been awake since Cretolium 5? Oh, for god's sake, man, we used to stop using human durations. You're not a human! Jeez. I'm not? Who is it?
01:10:45
Speaker
Nobody. Nobody on Mars, I mean. I mean, nobody on Mars is human. They've only made it as far as the frickin' moon. Oh, shit. Awesome. No, no. Just 24 hours. Anyway, how are you feeling? Why? Because you haven't slept since Scrumtolian 5. I'm fine.
01:11:04
Speaker
Hey, there's a door in front of me. Should I go through it? How in nine Trangugas do I know? It depends on where you are and now have milk cotton. I'm in sixth century Rome on planet Earth, talking to Pope Gregory. Well, at least I was talking to Pope Gregory. Why were you talking to him? I wanted to know if I was hallucinating. Well, what did he say? I don't know. When I asked him, he just vanished. Yeah, what about the paranoia? I didn't ask him about paranoia, bungalow. What about us?
01:11:34
Speaker
Well, I mean, paranoia can be a symptom of sleep deprivation. Why would someone tell you that? It's not important I'll have milk carton. Well, look, what's important is you're going to be the first Martian to never to sleep. This is fantastic. Have you any words of advice to other Martians looking to follow in their wakeful footsteps? I have milk carton. Can you hear me? I have milk carton. Who's that? Lieutenant Bungalow of the Martian Space Force.
01:12:02
Speaker
Oh, okay, right, bungalow. I must've dozed off. What do you want? For all but the gun's sake, half milk, I was asking what it's like... to never sleep. So Mars Radio 14 listeners can know, you know? Oh, right,
Defining Horror and Its Elements
01:12:16
Speaker
I see. I better start again, so...
01:12:21
Speaker
Welcome back. We are with Tade Thompson. The second part of the show, we're going to be discussing more general things, particularly though, his recent novel, Jackdaw, which we won't be able to say enough about. But before we get into that, I wanted to talk about the concept of horror and genre and where it sits within literature.
01:12:42
Speaker
Certainly, as part of the family of Crohn's, there is, I think, a large misunderstanding about where horror sits within genre and the fact that it gets crowbarred in with fantasy and science fiction, whereas, to my mind, it sits better with comedy, for example. And certainly,
01:12:59
Speaker
There's different aims and I think horror is about the individual rather than the society. It can be about the society. I was talking to Dan recently mentioning Shirley Jackson's lottery as a folk horror and the fact that it's about the individual. It's not about the society who throws stones. It's about the individual being out of their element and going, you know, that's where the horror comes from.
01:13:19
Speaker
Whereas I suspect a fantasy or science fiction person would see the society in that story as what interests them, perhaps. But I find it frustrating as one of the few horror writers there. I mean, there are people that say they write horror, but, you know, I think it informs their writing rather than they write horror. And I do find myself, especially if we're talking about Crit putting something up and it being missed, the beats of horror being, well, not necessarily the beats, really, but the fact that there's a slow build up and this need for
01:13:48
Speaker
bang, bang, bang, shit's going down, bang, bang, bang. It's no, that's not, I want normality and then it grades up. That's for my certain thing. But because of your, so I'm talking to Tade now, in terms of your science fiction, but there's also Molly Southbourne and the concept of
01:14:07
Speaker
the body railing against itself and that sort of existential horror, that nihilism even. And I just wanted to take your take on horror, on the genre, where it sits, what you feel as not just as an author, but in terms of the psychology side of it as well.
01:14:26
Speaker
Well, okay. I don't think I can, for example, define horror. I don't think I can do that. But I will say that horror, from my perspective, it has to generate dread. It has to generate dread. And dread may generate into fear, but there has to be at least dread in the narrative. Fear is good if it can make a person actually afraid. But I think that one of the things that happens is people mistake the cinematic manifestation of certain narratives that are classified as horror, but
01:14:56
Speaker
have more sight to be on. Suspense. Yeah, jump scares and suspense. Rollercoaster. Jump scares is a temporary activation of your fear or flight system, which is undercut immediately by being something that is not scary. You know, it's obviously, it's mainly a cinematic tech. But I think what has happened is that it's bled into narrative as well, so that people think that suspense and excitement is what horror is, because films are doing it, then it must.
01:15:23
Speaker
It's not. I don't like to be prescriptive about what is or what is not a particular category because you then become some kind of cultural gatekeeper, which I'm not interested in being at all. And of course, narratives also have hybrid. For example, my favorite horror film is actually Alien. You know, the first Alien movie is actually a horror film. We were just talking about this, actually. Yeah, Alien came up, didn't it, on the boards not so long ago. So it's a good example. So carry on.
01:15:48
Speaker
And it, you know, it is, it's body horror. It is also, you know, it also has complete existential threat. Like, okay, look, the entire outside, all of it outside is deadly to you. Okay. It is, you know, so like, it's not just the threat from within, but it's also the threat that's out. Like even in escaping one threat, you may land, land, you may end up dying from the other. So it, you know, space, if you obviously, you must remember because we're, we're, we're aged, we're in the same age brackets.
01:16:14
Speaker
So like in space, no one can hear you scream. It's such a great line, such a great tagline for a film, but it's also quite accurate. You're not gonna be able to read out there, so you're not gonna be able to scream, all right? Absolutely terrified when I saw this the first time. I still get terrified when I watch it. Yeah, it's one of those few films when I watch it these days. Because it is a suspense film, the first hour is just building the suspense because you know something bad is gonna happen. Excuse me. But it's one of those few films
01:16:40
Speaker
As a horror fan, there's a sense of chasing the dragon, I feel. You see or read something that elicits a real primal response, a real sense of dread, fear, or even terror, or being disturbed. But being genre fans, you like that. And then you want to chase the dragon, and you want to find something else that can meet that and equal it or surpass it. Aliens, one of those very, very few films,
01:17:03
Speaker
that when I rewatch it, I get that same sense that I did when I watched it. Maybe not the first time, because I watched it the first time when I was 11. And I thought, no, not for me, too much. But when I watched it properly in a few years later, I can still get that same sense, which is just great storytelling. But yeah, we were thinking that horror is, as you said, you don't want to really cut and dry and make it a silo. It sort of cuts across all the different other genres that you can have. So crime, historical, fantasy, science fiction, literary.
01:17:31
Speaker
I think one of the things that has to happen or that has to be in a what I would class a good horror narrative is the things that you depend upon to keep you safe must no longer be safe. So you have an intruder coming into your house of some kind. You must be able to depend upon calling the police or using a weapon to defend you.
01:17:49
Speaker
hide it. Someone comes into your dwelling and this must go down to the first communication, the first stories we told around that there is something, a bear. This thing comes around, it will kill you, just for the fun of it. You can't hide from it because everything we have by warehouses in those days, a bear would destroy. You can't fight it because it's faster than you, it's stronger than you, there's not a lot you can do
01:18:13
Speaker
You can throw things at it from a distance, but you'll just annoy it. You can't run faster than it, so you better not annoy it too much, right? The best you can do is hope that it's going to lose interest. I bet you they told stories of bears around the counter. They told stories of lions, told stories of things creeping into the cage. You know, snakes. You know, things that you can't defend against.
01:18:29
Speaker
And then when they ran out of real creatures, they started to imagine other creatures. But there's that element of something that you can trust to help you. There is fear of a thing and the things that you can trust to help you. For example, I'm possessed by a demon. Okay, the Catholic Church is going to come and exercise you. Well, no, it can't. The things you trust to normally help you. Oh, there's an intruder in my house. I'm going to shoot it.
01:18:51
Speaker
up, the gun doesn't work, this thing is immune to bullets, all right? Or, you know, those things you depend on cannot help, they can't help, it must be that they can't help, and you must then find other resources. And that element of it, although you don't get it in every horror film, but you have to have the catharsis. The catharsis is, here's this dangerous thing that you can't fit, somehow it gets big or not, but towards there's some kind of resolution towards the end of it, so that you emerge back out of the dream of the book, or the dream of the movie, and you're calm, like, okay, I can face the world now.
01:19:21
Speaker
Horror has a specific purpose, in my opinion. It's funny you mentioned that, Catholicism, because I agree. I've always... There is the element to horror, whether it's a film or literature, but it does make me think about a film and maybe the two sort of points of horror. One, which is horror being a moment, and then one where horror is... Films where it sustains. So, for example, there was no catharsis for me when I came out from seeing Midsommar.
01:19:48
Speaker
I just I said to my sister, I never want to see that film again. It was exceptionally good, but I but I never want to see it. That's the thing. It feels as a horror film. Well, does it because I see that as a drama. OK, so they're in Sweden, they're out of their element. It's a folk horror in that respect.
01:20:03
Speaker
It's not a folk horror in the same way, say, that Adam Neville's ritual is. Yeah. Because it's it's there also seem to be playing on the stupid American trope, you know, like out of water. It seems like thematic in that sense. But then there's also the idea of, OK, is this is this a hallucinogenic trip because they've had mushrooms and but it's got the supernatural element with the movement of the trees and the flowers and stuff. There are elements of horror, which is the equivalent of a visceral jump scare where the people jumping off the cliff and committing suicide and stuff.
01:20:33
Speaker
then there's the horror of eating pubic hairs for inner pie. There's so many different elements of horror in there. To me, it was much more about how miserable it is to be alive without sounding too depressing. Rather than here is Nosferatu or some kind of supernatural entity, it was more about the shot, for example, at the beginning of the parents being gassed by the mentally disturbed audience. That was a horrible saying.
01:21:03
Speaker
Exactly. You don't care about anyone. You care about the parents. In literature, you would have had to have developed a relationship to care about those parents. Visually, it's there, and you see that, and it's completely different. I think that's where horror trips up is, or definitions of horror trip up, because people expect it to make them feel the way it does in the cinema, because that's most people's exposure to horror. I do have horror, yes.
01:21:24
Speaker
And coming back to Midsummer, it also has cosmic horror elements because not only are they defamiliarized, the people are in an unfamiliar environment, although that again is somewhat mitigated or undercut by the fact that they're like anthropologists, they're studying something that is unfamiliar. To me, that pulls away from the horror element because they expect it to be unfamiliar.
01:21:46
Speaker
because they were studying them. They were going there to study the rituals, right? Some guy says, come along with us. And I'm like, okay, I have my thesis. And of course, the fact that they're trying to write a thesis is what makes them stay when any idiot would have got up and left, right? But it makes them stay because they want to do things. They have their own particular agendas that make them stay and lead them to become victims.
01:22:05
Speaker
And the point at which the whole thing turns, in other words, the point at which people are committing suicide, that's the point at which they should have made. So I have this theory about at least film horror, where people are punished for particular action. And of course, in the 70s, you were punished for sex. So anybody who has sex in a horror film in the 70s, they will kill you. You know that that's going to be... So the first one is a diary with a black person. Have you seen It Follows, where they play with that trope quite nicely?
01:22:30
Speaker
Well, Scream was the one that did that. Scream was the one that brought that into everybody's consciousness. Even if you weren't a horror fan, if you'd watched Scream, you knew what to expect in any horror film after that. And to some extent, a film like Cabin Fever, which is the first post-Scream self-aware horror film, as far as I
01:22:47
Speaker
As far as I can tell, Scream was self-aware. In the woods was, to my knowledge, the first post-Scream film. Because again, it purported this explanation for the whole thing, which worked on several levels of
01:23:03
Speaker
Yes, you the audience are asking. It was almost directly telling us that we're doing these things, we're making these people suffer because you demand it. And we, the audience, are the elder gods who are watching the whole thing happen. And literally, that was the whole thing. That's kind of what it was. And I like what they said in the end when even the presence of Sigourney Weaver in the film was like, the original Final Girl is,
01:23:29
Speaker
demonstrating what the final girl is. It was so metatextual, so if you look at it that way. There's a part where they said, oh, the sacrifice requires a virgin work. And she was like, we work with whatever we get. Now, for me, what that signifies is more like, well, look, tropes and echoes of tropes. And we're like, it doesn't have to be the actual trope itself. It just has to have the appearance of the trope.
01:23:55
Speaker
I really like Cabin in the Woods. I really like it. I know that it's not fashionable to like Joss Whedon's work, but Joss Whedon wasn't the only person who worked on that film.
Cosmic Horror and Societal Influences
01:24:04
Speaker
There were lots of other people who had other performances, so we shouldn't throw that film away just because of Joss Whedon. It was a watershed moment in horror. I mean, that film was a massive big deal.
01:24:14
Speaker
And it was written by people who understand horror. But linking it to Midsummer, in Midsummer, I felt like there was the whole cosmic horror thing as well. There are forces beyond them that were controlling what was happening or that demanded of them certain tribute that they could not control, that they would have to give in. And that's why, in my opinion, it had that Lovecraftian ending where, you know what, you're not getting out of this.
01:24:40
Speaker
It's that whole thing where in the end, you're not going to beat the cosmic gods. You're not going to beat this stuff is bigger than you. This stuff is bigger than you. And that's where it comes to what you said. It's about life. Life ends in a very predictable way for all of us. We are all going to die. Everything we accumulate is going to go somewhere else.
01:24:58
Speaker
Wait, bits are going to start falling off us or stop work. This is what is going to happen. You can fight it. You can struggle against it, but you will still die. And in my head, I think that every human being thinks that they're going to be the one to be immortal. I think everybody thinks they're going to be hobgaddling. Yeah, I'll be all right. I'll be all right. You know, but yeah.
01:25:17
Speaker
But who would want that? I mean, that's a horror in itself, eternity, immortality. I mean, you know, to value life, it has to end. And I think, you know, with immortality, life loses its value. Everything becomes gray. It's a great metaphor for depression and this numbness and grayness. And I think with something like, and also when you were talking about coming in the woods, I was also thinking about
01:25:45
Speaker
film that came out a similar time, I don't know if it's before or afterwards, Drag Me to Hell, that again was, yeah, that was another very referent, you know, self referential meta, the elements of that, that the whole stuff with the hanky going in the nose was just hilariously. It was fantastic. But it ends in the same way. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the ending is literally in the title of the film.
01:26:07
Speaker
And it's a regular game. There's a force that's beyond the control of the main two characters and they can rail against it as much as they can. Doesn't make any difference in the end. Well, exactly. And that's the thing. So, you know, there has to be, in our best horror narrative, there has to be that sort of thing that
01:26:25
Speaker
Like, like one of my favorite, when you're talking about immortality, there is a, there is a Jorge, Jorge, um, short story called the immortality. And this story is about someone who is seeking, seeking immortality. But when he encounters people who are already immortal, they had been immortal so long that they had evolved because one, they were bored of life. They basically, they devolved into these subhuman creatures that just live in crags on a mountain site.
01:26:50
Speaker
So he thought he was encountering some subhumans that he just has to cross to get to another part of his journey. And then he realised that one of them was actually Homer, you know, and again, of course, it's also commenting on literature and stories and the like, but the point is being immortal, they'd got bored of everything. So they're just like, yeah, I'm just gonna lie in the sun and just not do any and they wouldn't die. You know, you know, if you can find that story, it's very, it's very interesting. But to me, that's the it's almost that's like the antidote to utopian think, isn't it?
01:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, because utopian thinking is always undermined by that quote that Dostoyevsky said, that as soon as you had everything you wanted, somebody would throw a brick through a window just so that something would happen and you'd have something to do. But I'm glad you mentioned that because they literally had this beautiful city they built and they left it to live in the mountainside.
01:27:40
Speaker
So when the guy comes away, he goes to the city and the city is empty. There's nobody in the city. It's empty. It's grand. And this was in the Asian times, right? But it's all grand and all of that. It's beautiful and everything. But no one's living there. And everybody who was supposed to be living there was living on the mountainside in Burroughs carved out of the mountain.
01:27:59
Speaker
So horror is presenting you, on the one hand, it's presenting you with forces that you're not going to be able to escape from. So the drag me to hell one is a good one. And cabin in the woods is another example. There are other forces out there. You can't escape them. They're going to get you the end.
01:28:14
Speaker
But on the other side of horror, that is encapsulated within the corporeal. So it has a body, it manifests itself, and you can overcome it by acting and by taking the appropriate course of action to live your life. And that's the cathartic moment. So it sort of exists in both hands at the same time.
01:28:32
Speaker
Well, to me, in horror, there still has to be a violation of safety. We're talking about Sandman earlier, okay? One of the precursors of Sandman is Freddy Krueger, right? But one of the further precursors is some... I mean, Freddy Krueger in terms of something that is in your dreams and possibly controlling your dreams and using that to affect your real life. But one of the other ones is Pennywise.
01:28:54
Speaker
Now, it is probably one of my favorite horror novels. One, two is the only novel that I've read that has made me have a night, right? And I remember exactly where I was. I was on Piccadilly Line and I was reading this book and I fell asleep and I dreamt of Pennywise and it frightened the hell out, right? I remember exactly where I was when this happened. And I never had the experience with a book before, but I had so absorbed the dread of this thing affecting my imagination and my dreams that when I fell asleep, I saw Pennywise and I was running from Pennywise.
01:29:24
Speaker
And I hadn't seen the film. Even I hadn't seen the Curry film. I hadn't seen it by then. All I had done is read the book. And that's why it forms part of my definition of horror that safety has got to be violated, like the safety of your dream or the safety of your home.
01:29:42
Speaker
Yeah, your independence, your body, it's everything. Like, or the fact that, okay, look, your safety from other people, it's like that film, again, I'm looking at the film scanners, for example, you usually feel like if someone is not touching you, they can't harm you. But that safety of, well, actually, I can kill you with my brain, you know, like, they don't have to touch you to kill you. They don't have to use weapons. You don't even know how to defend against her, right? That's a very, so to me, that safety violation is very important in horror, you know, whichever kind of horror it is.
01:30:08
Speaker
And even more pertinent nowadays, bearing in mind what happened from January the 6th, and the, you know, they live, for example, the science fiction, don't come to science fiction, this is where we live. This is our system that we live in, the institution we live in. But behind the mask is these aliens controlling everything. I'm surprised that hasn't been in a post Trump world, I'm surprised that hasn't been sort of revisited that kind of horror in terms
01:30:34
Speaker
It will in about 10 years. There's usually a delay before, it's like the horror of the 9-11 attacks could not be addressed immediately. It needed about a decade before you started getting nuanced depictions of the Twin Towers coming down.
01:30:49
Speaker
It needs to be processed, society needs to process those kinds of things. So I think that by the time, in about five years, we'll start getting control narrative, we'll start getting all of that. And maybe fictional adaptations and interpretations of those events as well.
01:31:05
Speaker
Well, yes, because, you know, like the drama, I mean, you know, they're still trying to process it. They're still trying to process it. It takes a while, you know, think about when things like All the President's Men came out, you know, before they before they were adapted, which All the President's Men is one of my favorite films, but like, we will never know the completely batshit stuff that happened in those days, but so much happened that even after they declassified
01:31:26
Speaker
It was completely insane. In fact, reading the classified CIA documents is what led me to writing Rosewater because it was also fantastic. A lot of the stuff that's in Rosewater, people on the side was extrapolated from real life, from things that people were actually doing back in the 60s and 70s.
01:31:43
Speaker
It's so strange because when I was writing Manowar, one of the things that I took as the source material, if you like, was some of the documents relating to the Al Yamamah arms deal that the UK did with Saudi Arabia in the 70s and 80s. Because it's such a huge thing that sits behind the side of what we expect from diplomatic reality, let's call it.
01:32:10
Speaker
And there's this whole sort of web of corruption and strange goings on that sit underneath it. And I thought, wow, this is such good stuff. And you can extrapolate a whole line of fiction about that. It's not even just the fact that they're doing it. It's also the fact that these people are stupid. You cannot imagine how stupid they are in hindsight. Look at that. Who would believe this? Why are they believing this? And you can't believe that elected officials would approve this kind of thing.
01:32:32
Speaker
it's all completely insane. And there's a particular kind of horror that should come out of that, you know, about, you know, like, this is who you give power to. I mean, that is kind of an existential horror as well, isn't it? Because it's not in the individual sense. So when, when Bean was talking about the sense of the individual being either violated or threatened or degraded in some way, but at the societal level, there's this existential threat.
01:32:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so that kind of, that's actually where something like cosmic horror comes from. Now you can argue, for example, that Lovecraft, you know, his intense xenophobia and the inability to find a solution to it is what led to this kind of cosmic horror of look at them, they're coming at us and there's nothing we can do to stop them. And they're breeding with us, you know? And they're breeding with us and they're violating us in some way and all of that. Yeah.
01:33:19
Speaker
And maybe the character looks at his bloodline and finds that it's part of his bloodline. Yeah, it's already there. Already in his history, yeah. And he can't escape. And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do about it and all of that. So, you know, it's that helpless. It's like, okay, you know what, they're coming, the foreigners are coming, there's nothing we can do about it. So I may as well just end the narrative there.
01:33:41
Speaker
and we assume that the person died. It's cosmic. The horror of governmental control, of unmitigated corporate power, all of that, it's cosmic horror. Because these people have the power of life and death, and what else is a god? What else is a god? What else is a demon? They can control what you think. They can penalize you for thinking certain things. You can be penalized for particular kinds of thought.
01:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, what else is 1984 if it's not a horror? Yeah. I mean, you mentioned It, and I think It is a great horror novel. I think 1984 is probably the most terrifying novel you could read. So my terror at 1984 is because people see it as an instruction. It's like it's rare.
01:34:27
Speaker
Like, for example, I can watch any horror film, I can watch any kind of special effects, anything at all, no matter how horrifying it might look or how cheesy it might look, but I can't stand to watch real life. I can't stand to watch documentaries about suffering. I can't stand to watch anything that means somebody actual suffered.
01:34:43
Speaker
There's a lot of pornography to that as well, which has become more nuanced nowadays, but there was that period of revenge porn and just torture porn. And I don't mean to be snooty about that because everything has its place. And although I'm not particularly into that, there's films like Man By Its Dog and Hostel, which are phenomenal, but they leave a knot.
01:35:05
Speaker
I didn't like hostel. I should probably give it some layers. I can see it as a cinematic achievement. I can see that it's a film that was well-written, well-performed. I can see the technical elements of cinema being very good in hostel. I just don't like the subject matter. I don't like what it means. I don't like what it says.
01:35:24
Speaker
And I think that's a good example of a post 9-11 film that is trying to make sense in a sort of, in a very, that has a very blackly bleak nihilistic view about the state and about the state of humanity. It's like you said, it falls within that 10 year timeframe after something as traumatic as 9-11 and it's not yet been processed and then something as ugly as Hostel comes out of that.
01:35:49
Speaker
Yeah. I think the horror for me came from in the same sense of Midsommar. When I left Midsommar, I felt dirty and there wasn't a light at the end of that tunnel. There was just, wow, isn't light shit. And at the end, yeah, exactly. And to be honest, I love that side of things, but only when they're done with a supernatural flare, because then obviously it's fantasy. Well, it can be seen as fantasy, but when it is
01:36:14
Speaker
Yeah, when it's The Last House on the Left or, you know, Spit on Your Grave or whatever the horrors from the 80s and their interpretation of Reaganism and, you know, if you take drugs, you're going to get killed. If you have sex, you're going to get killed, whatever. And we've moved on to that into a more nihilistic event horizon kind of movie where shit just happens and there is no escape.
01:36:36
Speaker
I mean, there is no escape and there's no explanation. You know, there is just shit waiting for you. And you can look at that as sometimes, look, you can, young people these days, they don't have the future. They don't have the future that we had, but it's not just that. So, okay, we had, when we were kids, and we were kids, we were kids together, you know, so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna say this. It was still the Cold War. We didn't know if the world was gonna get wiped out in Nuclei Margem. Like, we didn't know that. So we were living with the idea that Reagan, who was, you know, was playing brinksmanship with
01:37:05
Speaker
You know, like, you had Reagan who was like playing chicken with, you know, with Gorbachev, right? Or, or, whoever it is who was there. Yeah, yeah. Before Gorbachev. Yeah, before Gorbachev. You know, he was the one with sense. But like, the point is, you're playing chicken with people who can destroy the planet, you know, with,
Generational Fears and Existential Themes in Horror
01:37:22
Speaker
right? So I'm telling you, some days I would go to school and I would look up and there would be a unique cloud formation. And I would think, has someone pressed the button somewhere?
01:37:30
Speaker
Like, is that a nuclear, is that the drifting of a nuclear cloud? Like, this was reality to us back then. We thought, yeah, we could die the next day. I remember watching Threads, just this hideous horror film.
01:37:45
Speaker
But that's how we live, you know? And, you know, there are all kinds of post-apocalyptic scenarios that, OK, everybody would be like a mutant, sauras on their bodies and so on, whatever. But the people these days, the kids these days, they don't even have the kind of employment future that we would drink with, that we had when we were. So they're looking at a situation where they maybe they can't even move away from home.
01:38:04
Speaker
maybe they're not even going to get a job that's going to last longer than three years. So maybe they're not going to have, or maybe like they don't have the picket fence fantasy. They don't have, there's no, like you start out life and you want to have the fantasy that if you work hard, you will somehow get by. Maybe we're not all going to be rich, but we're going to get by in some way. But that future does not exist right now. We know that pension funds are depleted. So some of us are going to get there and say, oops, sorry, there's nothing in there. Even though you worked all your life.
01:38:31
Speaker
Some of us are going to get there and that's going to happen. The NHS is being destroyed and health in America isn't much better. So we're talking about, we're calling ourselves the two most developed nations in the world and healthcare is really shit in both of us. So they're looking at a place where the rich will have health and the poor, maybe not so much. And the middle class is dwindling, so you don't even have, there's no interregnum. You can either be filthy rich, poor. This is the future that the imaginations that create the story are contemplating. They can't see it. They can't see it.
01:38:59
Speaker
Well, there's no context for them, is there, with age? There's nothing. So if they can't see a future, then it is not surprising that narratives like Midsummer, narratives that continue that have no discernible ending, well, that's what's going to come out of it. Because they're like, well, yeah, where else is life going? We don't know where life is. And it's nothing we did. We didn't do anything. We were just born. And this is the life that was left for us.
01:39:23
Speaker
And it informs your creative process, not your process, but informs your creative output in ways you would never have anticipated. And I mean, I remember Stephen King talking about From a Be Your Kate was that the stimulus for that was the Twin Towers and the Firemen, and then being the sort of the spine of America, these genuine, genuine heroes that we'd not had since the 50s or 60s, you know, from those superhero stuff.
01:39:48
Speaker
And for me, as well as the Cold War, because it was that mushroom cloud and those those duck and cover kind of leaflet things you would get, you know, I know that was American documentaries. Yeah, but, um, yeah, well, exactly, I was gonna say about
01:40:04
Speaker
Thatcher's handling of AIDS and how I knew I was gay when I was very young. And I saw those adverts. They were more scary than Night of the Demon or any amicus anthology I walk. It was at one point demonizing gay people and drug addicts, mostly gay people at those points.
01:40:22
Speaker
with this cold mountain, this immovable, you know, mountain, which has been carved, I think, into a gravestone, which then, I mean, the symbolism and the imagery was just so horrible. And it had such a massive effect on that generational, on that cohort, that, you know, sex became even more entrenched in guilt. And, you know, it set back the queer agenda and all those kind of
01:40:49
Speaker
those kind of things now, working themselves out. So to get onto perhaps a bit of a crowbar of a segue, but to bring in Jackdaw, the element with the anal sex and the whole thing about Elise saying later on, let's go to the gun clinic. I'm immediately taken back to the 80s and not as a nine-year-old, I wasn't going to gun clinic.
01:41:15
Speaker
But the fear of the touch, the fear of pairing my kind of sexuality with something that was going to kill me, that is horror. I have to be careful how I say this because I don't want to breach confidentiality, but I did do some work with people who had been young at the time of the death sentence, AIDS as a death sentence kind of thing.
01:41:36
Speaker
who were positive at the time before AZT, before subsequent medication. And because of all that death sentence rhetoric, they had lived their lives in a particular way. But what happens when you get a death sentence but you don't die? And I was dealing with
01:41:53
Speaker
their existential crisis of having, oops, so I'm not dead, and I'm not going to die because the drugs are so good. I'm like, you know, my CD4 count rate, my viral load is zero. So I can pretty much live a normal life. But I have lived with the idea that I wasn't going to be this old. And all of a sudden, here I am. You've still been living with the sword of Damocles hanging over you for many, many years, I suppose.
01:42:13
Speaker
And it creates a crisis. I think that's as much as I can say. It creates a crisis. How do you plan? How do you plan if you're expecting today? You know, if a cancer patient is told, oh, we don't know how long you've got, but it's incurable. Well, do I bother? Do I go on holiday, spend the rest of my life traveling? Is that responsible? If I then turn out, I've got another 40 years.
01:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about Jack Doll properly, because it's a fantastic...
Introduction and Praise of 'Jackdaw'
01:42:40
Speaker
It sort of sits between novella and full novel length. It is quite a snappy read. It's about 150 pages, but it is absolutely magnificent. We don't tend... We've had authors on a few times on Cron's cast, and plenty of those authors have had a book they want to talk about.
01:42:56
Speaker
And we, by the buyer, we tend to be quite professional about it and we haven't gushed about any of the books. We take it quite objectively, but we're going to have to gush about Jackdoll because it's simply magnificent. It's, everybody should read this book. I don't think it will be to everybody's tastes, but tough. You're going to have to read it anyway. It's about a sort of quasi fictional version of Armand Tade himself, who's been commissioned to write a piece of fiction about the artist, Francis Bacon. So yeah.
01:43:23
Speaker
The Screaming Pope's Guy, not the 13th century philosopher guy. And, well, fictional Tadde. Let's call him Book Tadde. He gets a little bit overly obsessed with the research into trying to get into the mind of Francis Bacon.
01:43:38
Speaker
who was a troubled soul, to put it mildly, and the obsessions start to manifest themselves in strange forms, hallucinations, strange behaviours, physical manifestations. And so it is, when you consider it objectively like that, it is very much a horror story. It's about
01:44:01
Speaker
A man, it's essentially about a man who's in trouble. It's essentially what it's about, and he's threatened by his own obsessions. They seem to be coming out him to get him. It's also, and I've read a couple of the reviews about it, and they said it's very dark and it is pitch black, but it's also, and I found it to be extremely funny.
01:44:18
Speaker
Not just a little bit humorous, but laugh out loud. I was weeping with tears, with hilarity at some points because it's so absurd and so strange at various points in the book that sometimes you just have to laugh at these things. And then Bean and I talked about it and he said, well, that's funny because you found it utterly, where I found it hilarious, you found it utterly terrifying.
01:44:41
Speaker
But that's good because it actually harkens back to something we've already said about horror, that it should be classified with comedy. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's what that's what prompted the discussion, actually. And I think also because the email I'd sent you earlier today saying I felt like this was personally written for me, just because there were just layers and layers of things happening in the story, whether it was a name check, whether it's the fact you mentioned Pennywise or whether it was my reference, you know, like there's a style of dance called Buto, which is a Japanese
01:45:10
Speaker
experiential dance where it comes from this this inside authenticity and, and, and the obsession I have as a neurodivergent with certain things and, and this obsession that Book Tade has, and then the absolute my experience work, because I work a lot with Afro-Caribbean students in challenging behavior and stuff in Tottenham and West London and the homophobia, and then the complete or the complete openness of the character being
01:45:34
Speaker
Yoruba, and none of that homophobia coming, and this willingness for the character to explore just to get this Francis Bacon itch inspiration. And the malaria as well, you know, like when I got malaria, I was tripping off my tits, you know, on the delirium. And there were these, I was imagining people around my bed in the village, and these like that were not sangorma. What was it?
01:46:02
Speaker
Babalawa, the sort of shaman sort of figure, these massive lizards with smiling faces smiling down at me the last day of my infection, you know, the last day of my delirium. And there was just so much in it. And even the mention of e-readers, there's been a topic recently on Crohn's about e-readers versus, you know, hard copy books.
01:46:23
Speaker
It's so dense with references. I mean, the things that sort of triggered me in a good way. The Mention of 2666 by Roberto Ballagno. It's only a fleeting moment, but one of my favorite books. I love that book. I live for that book. It's an insane piece of work.
01:46:44
Speaker
the reference to Hunter S. Thompson and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the fact that you've mentioned that, and then you go on a little riff about Thompson and you think, oh, okay, there's actually a lot of Thompson in this book as well. Yeah. As well as the Yoruba cosmology and the West African
01:47:03
Speaker
aspect and POV that's in there. There's also a lot of British humour. I mean, you're paying a great deal of homage to a great cornerstone of the British civilization that's gone from Chaucer, as far back as Chaucer, maybe even beyond that, the knob gag.
01:47:18
Speaker
And, well, we'll leave it there. People should. Well, no, let's not leave it there about the knob gag because I want to say my perspective on this is from my friends and students who, as black males, are sexually objectified. That whole scene took a different color.
01:47:33
Speaker
In my mind, in terms of these are white people, which is probably rubbish because a lot of the NHS is not white people, but the people making this complaint about Booktade and his tent. Are they white people? Is this some sexual, the fear of the black man?
01:47:49
Speaker
But then, well, they never, they never described the skin color of the occupation. And I think it's probably wise not to do that. But the fact that then that is undermined by the fact that you're laying down the law to the occupational health. Then you get a little stiffy.
01:48:06
Speaker
Fantastic. It's so good. Yeah. I mean, you know, but how long it was, I mean, like, it was actually twice that size. And I deliberately cut it down. I wanted it to be really intense, but short. Like, I wanted it to be the kind of thing that you read and then it unravels in your mind. Like, the extra pages will unfold in your mind after you've read it. You know, you will ruminate over it. But there were parts of it where you see like, look, almost every line is something you could think about.
01:48:36
Speaker
I don't. This, this, this, this, this. Well, it's a bit like what we said about Sandman, like almost every line is packed with something that you could pick on that thread. Yeah. You could pick on that thread and you could find it's so densely packed stuff. You know, the thing that it reminds, the things that came to mind when I was reading it, and I dare say you probably haven't had these comparisons. It reminded me of Breaking Bad. Okay. I haven't read that, but tell me.
01:49:01
Speaker
And well, I will start with Breaking Bad in as much as it starts with a man who is doing something for ostensibly a good reason, and he gets drawn deeper and deeper into this obsession. And you start to think, well, the obsession that's driving him is actually part of the person, it's a part of his personality that's actually always been there. And it's not as a result of him undertaking this new set of action in Breaking Bad. You find out towards the end, he's always been bad.
01:49:30
Speaker
It's always been Heisenberg. It's always there. And occasionally you see that, you know, the mask slips. And I think in Jackdaw, there's that as well. It also plays out like a fever dream in the same way that Breaking Bad does. You know, it's surreal with heads on tortoises and bodies falling through floorboards, turning into sludge. There's that surreal absurdity. It's funny.
01:49:50
Speaker
Well, it's interesting you say that because the hematoma is like a cat's paw for justifying the behavior and he feels better at the end because he's become to sense of peace and so has Elise and his relationship is repaired with his son that he feels personally that he's neglected. But
01:50:12
Speaker
But he only, sorry, interrupting, he only feels peace once he's excavated the bacon from his life. Yeah, but I'm talking about, like you were talking about the fact that it's always been in him. And I'm saying yes, but there's the argument that the hematoma, which is pressuring the brain on the frontal is what's causing this. And it made me as somebody, you know, GAD, PTSD, pressure and the things I have gone through wishing I had a hematoma.
01:50:38
Speaker
Well, let me just say one thing because one of, okay, so one of the things we call those symptoms when they occur in people is release phenomena. So in other words, the purpose, your humanity is in your frontal lobe. A lot of the purpose of it is to keep back the dark desire, but the dark desires are there. So the things that come out, we say they've been released, you know? So it's like when you're drunk, okay? Yeah.
01:50:58
Speaker
Yeah, don't the alcohol didn't really create whatever it is you do when you're drunk. The alcohol removed the control of your frontal lobe and allowed those desires to come out. That's what you know, like John Dee with the Ruby. Yeah, you know, he wanted to do it. You know, look, so there's so many things that we want to do what we don't do, because we're human beings. And we have, you know, we've got our
01:51:19
Speaker
superego telling us, you know, if we have a healthy superego telling us actually know this is what, this is not what you should do, you should do this instead. And that's parenting essentially is training your superego. If parenting is done right, the person will come out of it at least a decent human being who doesn't want to have to cause harm to others while seeking their own desire. You know, if we're lucky, that's what happens. If you don't have good enough parenting, then things may go awry. There are many things that can cause it to go awry. Some of it might be smaller problems with the frontal lobe, for example. There's so many things that could cause that.
01:51:47
Speaker
But what I do want to point out is that part of the key to the ending of Jaktor is in the beginning. And part of that is in the name Francis Bacon itself, because it's either the artist or the scientific method. And in actual fact, both of them, because you go through all the mystical stuff, and then you come back to the scientific
01:52:06
Speaker
There's a specific structure. There's a reason I structured it. And of course, like I mentioned before, I always, I believe in the catharsis model of horror, where you should go through it, but be able to breathe that. I just personally, that's my preferred method of it. That's my preferred horror way. I feel like it is useful when you can visit the horror, but come out as well and think life is bearable.
01:52:29
Speaker
Yeah, I will now go about my day. You know, I feel that's what I think the best horror does. In terms of if you want to think of horror as something that has an actual function, you know, we tell these stories and then it resolves, we can sleep it. And then we can face today knowing that the imaginary dangers, which are greater than the real danger, can be vanquished. Therefore, possibly the real life dangers can be vanquished as well. You know, it's part of why we have so much detective. It's to reassure us that if someone tries to kill you or anything, that the police will get them. Now, reality is
01:52:58
Speaker
be different because the likelihood is that you will get away with murder. If you think about it enough, you'll get away with murder. If it's not a crime of passion and it's not completely idiotic, you will get away with murder if you can because a lot of them don't get solved. It's not like TV where every murder will get solved at some point, even if it's really late, it will get solved. That's not what real life, go and check the cold case file. I chose that particular kind of horror.
01:53:23
Speaker
I found the ending quite sad, actually. Actually, it was a bit before the ending. So when the book Tadde reveals that he has the brain tumor, and that's been fueling his erratic behavior for the course of the book, it undercut all of the... So whether you find it terrifying or whether you find it hilarious, it undercuts it with a real sadness, I think. You're in this world of the fantastical.
01:53:50
Speaker
even if it's just fantastical in the mind of a narrator who, you know, if anybody's, if you want to know how to write the unreliable narrator, then this is the book. And then it's all brought back to reality. So you snap out to that fever dream and all of a sudden it's extremely real. And it grounds the novel in a way that you think, well, actually, even though this is completely wild, it's also the story of an everyman, because it could happen to anyone.
01:54:15
Speaker
one of us, yes. One thing I say about part of the origin of it is that one of my professors in medical school, it actually happened. They had a car accident, they thought they were fine. And then six months later, all of a sudden, this guy was all the female, all the female students was pinching their bottom. And this never happened. He was pinching their bottoms. He was
01:54:33
Speaker
staring in a really weird way at people and all of that. And then one day he collapsed and they found this gigantic hematoma in his brain, took it out of his normal self again. He was horrified. He was horrified that he had been behaving that way. He was horrified because obviously, you know, like there weren't any complaints, but obviously, you know, everybody knows to avoid a pervy professor. They will know that this person pervy. The stories I've got back to his wife, it was just, it was just, you know, it was really a nightmare for him. But, you know, as soon as they evacuated the hematoma, he was fine.
01:55:03
Speaker
So that had always kind of been in my head. But another reason for this is for how the story is struck has to do with West African storytelling. Because the traditions of storytelling are not really about leaving the status quo and then becoming changed before you come back to it. West African storytelling, in actual fact, the middle of the story is the most important part.
01:55:23
Speaker
It is there to reinforce ways of life. It's not there to say this person went and got a change, so that you have to return to the place you left in the way you left, because it's supposed to reinforce tradition. And to say that, okay, traditions are good. That's why you have to come back to it, even if you go off and have all your adventures and all that. So there's a reason it came back to that in particular, in that particular way. And some of it, people are not going to understand that, I don't think, but all of it makes sense, even though it doesn't seem
01:55:51
Speaker
that way. But I think it makes perfect sense, actually, even though it's completely wild and out there and strange and feverish, I think it makes complete sense. And there's one other thing I wanted to say about it, which I didn't mention in the book, but like I said, I shrunk it down. But Francis Bacon is the reason we have the Xenomorph creature in Alien, because H. Geiger was inspired by Francis Bacon, was inspired by Francis Bacon's three figures study something, was that a crucifixion? The triptych, yeah.
01:56:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's what inspired H. Geiger to design that creature. That was one of my favorite elements in terms of, you know, when you come out from seeing a film or you read a book, you're like, I love that bit was this sort of side story about, I mean, we should have really asked you if it was okay to do spoilers because it's still a relatively new book. So it's fine. You know, it's fine. I'm not I'm not an author who's come here to say, and this is my book.
01:56:45
Speaker
I know, but I think, you know, the point in the end and saying, oh, yeah, it was a hematoma, we might might have, you know, we'll have to say something at the beginning of the episode is like, please. As far as I'm concerned, we're here discussing horror and the, and we should probably tell, you know, tell viewers, look, this was not planned. The part where we're discussing Jackdaw wasn't actually planned. It was in the process of doing due diligence that you actually read the book. It wasn't that we, this was all about
01:57:13
Speaker
You did it. It wasn't one of your requirements. I'd finished reading The Fisherman, John Langen's The Fisherman. Oh, I love that book. Well, you know what we're going to get you on next time. I finished that a week ago and I wasn't reading anything else. I thought, I'm not going to read anything before we talk Tada. And then I just had the inkling of, oh, Jackdaw, it's only a novella.
01:57:36
Speaker
I could probably read that in a week. So I thought, okay, I'll read it. I have not got enough time to say all the things I want to say about it. It's a wonderful piece of work. It is a wonderful piece of work. And I read it because you enjoyed it so much. You said, you've got to pick this up. And I needed a break from what I was reading. And thank God it was, you know, that was exactly what I needed.
01:57:55
Speaker
I mean, I've read Rosewater, I haven't read the second or the third part of Wormwood, so I will get round to that at some point, but I've read Rosewater, read Making Wolf, and I enjoyed them a lot, but Jackdaw is just, it's sores, it is sores, like a bird, like a Jackdaw.
01:58:11
Speaker
thank you about everything you know it's wonderful i wanted to um sorry going back to the francis bacon thing the the thing i really enjoyed was this this this this this construction in the attic this it reminded me of so many things that i love this again if there was that element of lovecraft because it's so intangible but the this like tulpa or um
01:58:33
Speaker
this ectoplasmic ejection from from this guy and and there's a fantastic 80s film it's just actually come out on shadow with Sam Neill and Isob Abjani called Obsession. I know not Obsession, Possession. Possession that is that is probably it's one of my top five films ever like it's phenomenal do not get me started about Possession I love that film because
01:58:55
Speaker
When there's this sort of ectoplasmic pork in the acting, I'm thinking of this like possession Lovecraft fuck monster kind of thing that's, you know, from that film. Like I said, there was so much, you know, this obsession, this possession. It was
01:59:12
Speaker
And who's to say, like I said, it's one of my favourite films. Who's to say that subconsciously I wasn't channelling it, you know? Yeah. Like the echo quote, everything references everything else. Channeled through the conduit of the reader. So you don't know the writer, you don't know. Also, warning to people, possession is not for everybody.
01:59:30
Speaker
No, no, no. And as a dance teacher, I've shown the element when she has the miscarriage in the, or whatever it is, in the tunnel. And then the later scene where her and Sam Neill are arguing in the flat, they're just picking things up and moving them. They're having this weird argument, but there's this physical theatre element to it, which is choreographed. And it's just phenomenal as a piece of theatre, of film.
01:59:56
Speaker
And you see the border guards. There's so much weirdness to this. And they don't even address the border guards directly. You're just seeing... Let's not because there should be a very cold attack. Yeah, we've got to wrap up the episode. So I'll tell you what, it's been wonderful having you. We'll just ask one more question. What are you reading at the moment?
02:00:16
Speaker
Oh, when am I reading a moment? I'm rereading the narrative of Michael Sisko. Michael Sisko is probably one of my favorite writers. It's definitely not for everybody. And what he writes is not your plot-based formulae stuff.
02:00:31
Speaker
I would say that when you use the term a writer's writer, Michael Sisko is a writer's writer. His books are full of ideas. They're full of really beautiful terms of language. You will never get bored because things are just happening and you can't, you know, you may not necessarily know, why is this happening? Doesn't matter. Go along for the ride. You know, like it's just like that. So it's just really, it's really beautiful. So I, you know, that's what I'm reading right now.
02:00:54
Speaker
Perfect. Well, thanks for joining us. It's been so, so cool. Every, every minute of this two hours, two hours we've been talking and it's just flown by. I've really enjoyed it. Absolutely flown by. And properly as well.
02:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, you know, which is good. I really enjoy it. And we can always get, you know, like we could, you get the sense that we could have talked even more. No doubt, no doubt. But what would, well, that just gives us an excuse to come and tap you on the head again and say, come on, Teddy, come and have a chat. Yeah, sure. Give me, give me as much notice as possible. I will, I will come over. We will.
02:01:28
Speaker
Okay. Lovely. Right. Great to see you again. Thanks so much. I know Jack Dorb's been out a little while now, but best of luck with it. Best of luck with the awards and the long listings. It deserves every success. So yeah, best of luck. Bye-bye.
02:01:57
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean, and our special guest Tadde Thompson. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton, Jay Starloper and Ashleen Watts.
02:02:12
Speaker
If you enjoyed the episode please like and subscribe and please take 10 seconds to complete our listener poll for this episode. Special thanks to Brian Turner and the staff at Crumbs and thanks to you for listening. Join us next month when our guest will be the author Brian Wigmore, who's chosen to talk about John Borman's cinematic take on the myth of King Arthur, the 1981 film Excalibur.