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7. Indiana Jones and the Denial of Death
54 Plays1 year ago
You may not be able to be neutral on a moving train, but you can certainly punch Nazis on one.
Why don’t franchises know when to die? Why, in spite of our trenchant trash talk, do we keep watching these movies? Is America’s unique denial of death expressing itself through these films? Also, Nazi punching.
Also mentioned: Steven Spielberg, Siegfried Kracauer, James Bond, Black Panther, Norman Rockwell
Note: High Priest would've been a more accurate term than Rabbi.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You know when you're too lazy and unskilled to cook for yourself so you buy microwave pizzas? I want that to be somehow analogous to what we're doing here. Like if you really want to learn something, go somewhere else. But if you want the sort of quick and dirty thing that might give you cancer 10 years from now, you're in the right place.
00:00:28
Speaker
All right. So, hey, everyone. Welcome to Candy Jail. I am here with Brendan. This is Robert speaking. We love you all dearly, fully, completely, irrespective of your flaws. Actually, because of your flaws, we love you. Should we start over? Are you going to accept that as the introduction? I don't know. Maybe. Let me do one more take just in case you can pick
Indiana Jones: Childhood Memories and Cultural Impact
00:00:56
Speaker
later. OK. Hi, everyone.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm Robert, here with Brendan. You're listening to Candy Jail. Today, we're going to be discussing a summer blockbuster, a classic, instant classic, but I'm going to let Brendan take it from there. Brendan, what are we discussing today? Well, we went to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, or as I think you called it in Indiana Jones and the denial of death.
00:01:26
Speaker
So we're gonna, we have some thoughts on that movie and about the character of Indiana Jones in general, I think, and we're gonna try to tie it into a couple other things the way that we sometimes do. Before we get into our thoughts on the new movie, I know you grew up with the Indiana Jones movies, as did I, although I think your experience might've been a little bit different. What did those movies mean to you growing up, man? You know, I think probably like most,
00:01:54
Speaker
kids in the United States that, uh, were 10 years old or somewhere thereabouts in the nineties, you know, you're not a teenager, whatever, fuck it. I don't know. Whatever decade you were in. A lot of us, a lot of us grew up with, uh, VHS tapes of Indiana Jones. I certainly did. And so I watched, uh, the original three quite a bit, probably not as much as Star Wars, but still a healthy.
00:02:21
Speaker
or a pathological amount, but in general, just like a lot of Steven Spielberg, you know, E.T., and then I guess George Lucas, who I probably mixed up as a kid thinking they were making the same movies. So yeah, that was my relationship to Indiana Jones, nothing beyond like the normal watching the same thing probably 50 times as a kid, but not having any kind of like,
00:02:50
Speaker
intense identification with the character per se, I just found it entertaining and fun. How about you, man? Well, I watched, I had the first two, or sorry, the first and the third. Interestingly, I never owned Temple of Doom, which is kind of an outlier in the original trilogy in terms of style. But the first and the third I watched over and over again, just like you did, along with all the other stuff that you, someone of my generation would have been watching. But
00:03:18
Speaker
unlike Luke Skywalker or Han Solo or Wesley from the Princess Bride or any of the other action heroes that I watched at that age, Indiana Jones for whatever reason was the character that stayed with me into adulthood. And they were movies that I
00:03:38
Speaker
felt kind of possessive about for part of my life. Like I remember when the fourth one came out, I think it was about 2008. I was really excited for that movie. And I was disappointed by it, but I was also kind of like I remember getting upset about how negative the reaction to that movie was, because I felt like people were maybe overreacting a bit.
Critiques and Analysis of Indiana Jones
00:03:57
Speaker
And all these years later, I don't know how to disentangle my the fact that I'm an archaeology junkie.
00:04:08
Speaker
from my childhood love of Indiana Jones, because of course he's a terrible, terrible scientist in a lot of ways.
00:04:14
Speaker
half the time he's a grave robber rather than an archeologist. Although, to be fair, for a lot of the history of archeology, it was somewhat indistinguishable from grave robbing. I mean, you go back- I was going to say, he's almost like just part of an ongoing tradition on some level. Yeah. No, I think that's actually a really valid point that you go back and look at the Weatherill brothers discovering Mesa Verde. What they did was just flat out looting.
00:04:40
Speaker
And they did, I think, do it out of a genuine curiosity and a genuine love for history, but they also did it in a destructive and insensitive way. And so it's not like Indiana Jones was teaching me to be a good scientist or to want to be a scientist at all, but there is, I think, in the movies at their best.
00:05:01
Speaker
despite their problems, which we can get into, there is a genuine sense of wonder and curiosity in them. And the character is definitely written as a character who has a passionate concern for history, even if he is a white savior with no respect for other cultures, and even if he runs roughshod over
00:05:23
Speaker
Pretty much every culture he ever seems to set foot in, like basically if you have a culture and Indiana Jones shows up in your culture, you're fucked.
00:05:33
Speaker
I just killed 500 local inhabitants of this region, but I did preserve this sundial, and that's what matters. Well, it belongs in a museum, so I hoped you preserved it. Yeah, yeah. These are still movies, at least the first and the third I come back to. Raiders of the Lost Ark is just an all-time classic.
00:05:57
Speaker
Last Crusade, I don't know what your relationship with that one was. That is to me, to this day, it is one of the most quotable movies ever. It's up there for me almost with the Big Lebowski in terms of endless quotability from how does one get off of this thing to I should have sent it to the Marx Brothers and
00:06:18
Speaker
Dad, what? Dad, what? Dad, what? Head for the fireplace. And it's just like all of the perfect chemistry between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery is burned into my brain. And it's interesting because if you look at the first one, it's about the Ark of the Covenant being a real thing that has supernatural powers.
00:06:41
Speaker
I fell down the Graham Hancock rabbit hole at one point in my life and I did become convinced that the Ark of the Covenant was a real thing that was being hidden in a monastery in Ethiopia. But anyway, so the first one is all about how the Ark of the Covenant is a real thing with magical powers. The third one is all about how the Holy Grail is a real thing with magical powers. And not only that, but you have to believe
00:07:06
Speaker
in order to cross the final obstacle. Spielberg is, of course, smart enough to not indicate exactly what you have to believe in. Is it God? Is it Jesus? Capitalism. You have to believe in capitalism. Well, it could well be capitalism. In fact, we don't know what India is thinking when he holds his hand over his heart there before taking that step into the void. He could be thinking, in fact, of capitalism.
00:07:32
Speaker
As someone who's a kind of a hardcore atheist, a hardcore materialist with very little patience for supernatural superstition, I'm all in on both of those movies. I'm not remotely offended or troubled by the fact that the movies, for the sake of telling their stories, take those things as real. I think they do it beautifully. And I think that's one of the sort of the magical balances that these movies walk at their best.
00:08:01
Speaker
is that they strike this balance between a sort of grittiness and a world weariness and a cynicism and a skepticism, and then this just childlike awe, which of course we're talking about Spielberg here, so childlike awe is his stock and trade. So I was really excited for the fourth one, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which has its strengths and also has some terrible, terrible weaknesses.
00:08:31
Speaker
When this one finally came out, I wasn't cynical about it. I didn't feel jaded about it, but I was cautiously optimistic. I knew this was gonna be James Maingold. It wasn't gonna be Steven Spielberg. And I know Maingold to be a workman like craftsman, but probably nothing more. And so I wondered how that was gonna play with the sort of epic ambitions that an Indiana Jones film should have.
The New Indiana Jones Movie: A Mixed Bag
00:09:00
Speaker
How do you feel about this movie? You know, I think in despite myself, I liked it. I think I wanted to go in with like, I'm going to just rip this thing apart or have some sarcastic things to say to Brendan. And I do think that A,
00:09:17
Speaker
The director, who you just mentioned and I don't know the name of, what's his name? James Mangold. James Mangold did a good job. I think it was on the whole an impressively put together film. As you put it, the craftsmanship is apparent.
00:09:35
Speaker
And it did, what's the word, resurrect certain feelings that I'd had for Indiana Jones as a kid. So there was a nostalgia factor. I actually didn't watch the Crystal Skull one. So I missed that. And if there were any references to the Crystal Skull film in this one, I missed them clearly. And actually, it was funny. There were a couple of details, like the snakes, his fear of snakes.
00:10:02
Speaker
the kissing of the elbow at the end, I hope, spoiler alert, but like I remembered then sort of like even dimly like, oh yeah, that's all in the original films and they're nodding to them by paying homage, by bringing up these details and it's in this most recent one. So I would say like, listen, I think it's stupid when film critics don't understand the sort of film they're watching
00:10:29
Speaker
and sort of treat all films as if they need to be Citizen Kane level serious. And therefore, when those films fail to meet that particular Ingmar Bergman level of depressive brilliance, they lash out. And I think that's just dumb. So I think we have to take Indiana Jones on its own terms. It's not a serious movie. It's a summer action film.
00:10:55
Speaker
And it's a campy film and it's a campy franchise, just like Star Wars is campy. We don't split hairs over whether Luke Skywalker, what's the actor's name that plays Luke Skywalker? Mark Hamill. Mark Hamill. I don't think anyone is really debating whether or not, or go like hotly, intensely fighting over
00:11:16
Speaker
the acting of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. That's not the point of that movie, right? My friend, you have not spent enough time around Star Wars fans. Well, that's, I mean, I want to then tell those Star Wars fans to get their shit together because they're not actually assessing it on its own terms. So I guess I'm just making the point that it's a fun, campy franchise. It always has been for that reason. It needs to be assessed on those terms. And on those terms, I think it did a pretty good job. That's what I have to say.
00:11:46
Speaker
You surprise me. It's not the direction I expected you to take. I mean, I'm not saying that like, I'm ready to go watch it again, or like, I'm gonna buy the Blu-ray and put a poster of it up in my bedroom as soon as I can, but I am saying like, it distracted me.
00:12:04
Speaker
It was escapist candy. It might have lagged in terms of its pacing in a couple points, but overall, I think it did what it's supposed to do, which is entertain, make you feel warm and fuzzy, reconnect you with your childhood, or at least the pleasant parts of your childhood.
00:12:24
Speaker
and touch on a couple of heartstrings and throw in some fun action sequences in the mix. And so I don't know. I don't, I don't give it like an A plus, but I don't give it a D either. You know, I think it was a solid film for what it was, what it's trying to do. It's interesting that you brought up the fact that you never saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the last Spielberg directed Indiana Jones film, because
00:12:51
Speaker
The opening sequence of that is every frame of it is perfectly shot. It opens with a friendly car race in the 1950s Nevada desert that gives way to a brief shootout to take over a military base hauling Indiana Jones.
00:13:10
Speaker
out of the trunk of a car and then the desperate search for an artifact that seems to be hidden in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant is. It's fantastically well done. Every moment of it is kinetic and visceral and funny and it's a vintage Spielberg, even if the movie doesn't really live up to the promise of that opening scene. The opening scene of Dial of Destiny is
00:13:33
Speaker
CGI, mercily shot, it's hard to follow the action. It's trying to be quippy and funny, but it's not quippy and funny. The de-aged Harrison Ford is shown to us immediately at the beginning, so there's no, one of the trademarks of the franchise is there's a little bit of a buildup to showing the character. Famously in Raiders, the first time he's ever on screen, we see him from the back first.
00:13:59
Speaker
We see the silhouette of the fedora and the way his head cocks when he hears the gun being cocked. In Last Crusade, we don't see him as a grown man at all until after the River Phoenix sequence is over. Crystal Skull plays a similar trick here where we're shown Indiana Jones constantly from the beginning of this opening sequence, which I think
00:14:22
Speaker
It was a terrible mistake. I think Spielberg could have shot that sequence probably in half the time, twice the efficiency, with the action being far more intelligible and probably finding a way to not really show us Harrison Ford until we were really ready to see him as an old man. And I thought the film was completely lacking any sense of awe whatsoever.
00:14:45
Speaker
it really made me re-appreciate Spielberg and how good whatever his foibles are and whatever kind of mistakes he may have made kind of in his recent run of films, like, goddamn, that guy is so talented. And we've come to take it for granted. But I think if you were to take literally any five minutes of Dial of Destiny and put it up beside literally any five minutes of the four Spielberg movies, the difference would be immediately obvious to you.
00:15:15
Speaker
I thought Mangle was totally out of his depth. And I was honestly, I struggled to stay awake through the movie. It was not funny. And I don't know, how do you have Phoebe Waller bridge in your cast and you don't give her a chance to do script punch up? Like Fleabag is one of the best written funniest things I've ever written. And so how you end up with a script as boring and unfunny as that one when you've got her sitting there, I have no idea.
00:15:43
Speaker
So overall, I loved the ending for two reasons, and there's kind of two endings, which we can certainly spoil. And I do think that you're right that there was an emotional, like I found myself surprisingly moved at the end, but I don't think that much of the movie up to that point earned that ending. So I think, I guess it's a solid movie in the sense that it all sort of hangs together and there is an element of competency to it and everybody's
00:16:11
Speaker
You know, it's well acted and it's, it's like I said, competent is the word that I keep coming back to, but I thought it fell far short of being a decent Indiana Jones movie. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think your frame of reference and probably the, um,
00:16:29
Speaker
last time you watched the originals, even the diamond skull or whatever it's called, is a little fresher for you than it is for me. So I don't have that conjured up in my head quite as readily as it as it clearly
00:16:44
Speaker
seems like you do but you know one thing I did marvel at in the opening sequence that you mentioned so he you have a CGI'd young Harrison Ford it's Nazi Germany it's the end of the war and he's he's being interrogated he gets captured he gets interrogated by these Nazis if you actually like rewatch it man and again actually this might be
00:17:09
Speaker
I'm not, listen, what are we really arguing over here? We're not arguing over whether the Holocaust happened. That might get, I might care a little bit more about something like that. We're talking about this new summer blockbuster Indiana Jones. So I don't have, I don't think there's much, the stakes are not high here, but here's what I have to say.
00:17:29
Speaker
If you actually watch the opening sequence again from the competency craftsmanship standpoint that you mentioned that you respect with this director, I have to say I marveled at how fucking complicated
00:17:45
Speaker
It must have been to game out how you even render that visually. So let me just give the audience a sense of this. I mean, hopefully they've watched it. But if they haven't, I hope my rendition works. So you can build this up in your head.
00:18:02
Speaker
He winds up getting interrogated. It turns into a torture sequence. They put a noose around his neck. A missile that falls from an allied plane falls through the roof of the building in which he's being interrogated. It doesn't detonate, but it's in the splintered floor of the top of the building.
00:18:23
Speaker
It then collapses the floor, falls multiple floors to the basement essentially, and then detonates. And he still has this noose on his neck. The fucking whole building is blown to smithereens. He is being like a string on a fish pole, but instead of the fish, it's Harrison Ford's neck around a noose. He's swinging around this dilapidated, exploded building.
00:18:50
Speaker
I bet if we counted the number of cuts from that bomb falling through the roof to him getting out of even just the building sequence, I wouldn't be surprised if there were at least 500 mini cuts. It is insane the amount of shit going on. That doesn't make it a great film. But I do want to say on a technical level, there was a part of me that was like, how do these people
00:19:16
Speaker
storyboard this? How do you discuss a scene like this that's so outside of the realm of reality? There's no real analog to point to go, okay, well, here's some photograph or historical examples of when this happened or that. No, you're making this crazy situation up out of thin air.
00:19:36
Speaker
And then halfway convincingly figuring out how to render that into a movie, into a scene with or without the CGI. Obviously, this is heavily CGI. But so I'm almost like I cared less about like, is this a solid contribution to the Indiana Jones franchise? And more like, wow.
00:19:57
Speaker
That just cost 50 million dollars. And I don't even I can't even begin to fathom how you discuss mapping out scenes as crazy as this. So that's where my mind went. Well, that's fair enough. But you're still providing like it sounds like even your in the moment reaction to it was as much analytical as it was visceral. Right. And I will say that the the bomb falling through the floor gag
00:20:24
Speaker
is a gag that is worthy of the Indiana Jones franchise. It's maybe the most Indiana Jones of all the gags that's in that film. In a Spielberg joint, it would be we are leading up to this gag. And when the gag happens, the tension is going to be ratcheted up.
00:20:45
Speaker
The way Main Gold films it, it's one in a series of high jinks that happen one after the other, after the other, after the other in this balls to the wall opening sequence. I didn't feel like I even had time to catch my breath to appreciate that scene because he's trying to do, he's operating on the more is more premise, which is very much not how Spielberg has ever operated as a filmmaker.
00:21:10
Speaker
So I didn't feel any stakes there. I mean, look, that's, that's the thing. Like here you are, you have Indiana Jones. He is so close to death. He literally has a noose around his neck.
00:21:20
Speaker
Like that may be the closest to death that Indiana Jones comes in any of the movies. And it's like four minutes into main gold's film and three minutes later you've forgotten about it because then he's running across the roof of a train with Toby Jones. And that's just contrary to the whole spirit of the thing to me. And the other thing I'll say is what I was thinking when I was watching that scene was it reminded me of the sequence in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
00:21:50
Speaker
Where James Franco is going to be hanged you've seen you've seen that movie, right? I've I watched shamefully watched only the first like third or half of it because I know it's in vignette So I've seen like half of the vignette Okay. Well one of them is an extended vignette involving James Franco is going to be hanged for being a bank robber and just when he's about to be hanged and
00:22:16
Speaker
the men who are about to hang him are killed and he is spared, but he's still sitting on the horse and the horse wanders farther and farther and farther away from the tree branch as it's grazing over the coming days so that he's in this incredibly precarious situation. And when I saw the new sequence in the dial of destiny, I was like, I feel like you're ripping off the Coen brothers. And then almost literally everything in the movie, I felt like was a reference not just to another Indiana Jones movie, but like,
00:22:47
Speaker
There was something in there where I was like, that's from the Princess Bride, man. I felt like they were stealing from so many people. They were just stealing from whatever they'd ever seen that they thought was kind of a good idea. Up until the very end, I thought it had a lack of originality. I will say,
00:23:05
Speaker
So we'll just go ahead and spoil this, right? So at the end, Indy is sucked through a rip in time and he goes back to ancient Greece and the siege of Syracuse and he meets Archimedes. And the scene is set up so Indy's now become a part of history, which is fucking fantastic. Like, how do you...
00:23:26
Speaker
How do you end an Indiana Jones franchise? Well, what if you can find a way to put him in the past? He himself becomes history. So he insists that he's going to stay in the past. And if you're going to go there, like if you want to have time and travel in your Indiana Jones movie, I love the idea of having him stay in the past.
00:23:48
Speaker
they decide eventually not to go with that and they bring him back to 1960s New York and then there's the very good very well done scene where he reunites with Karen Allen and they do an inverse version of the famous where does it hurt scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark and it really is the perfect way to end the movie and I thought there was a degree of originality there but even then they figure out in one of the exposition dumps that happens during the siege of Syracuse they figure out that
00:24:17
Speaker
Archimedes has constructed this machine that will, it doesn't create rips in time, it indicates, I think, where rips in time are, but they figure out that it's a closed system, that is, Archimedes created this device in order to bring people from the future to him.
Nostalgia and its Cultural Significance
00:24:36
Speaker
And you can only use the device to travel back and forth between
00:24:40
Speaker
the 20th century and Ancient Greece, it's a closed loop. And that made me think of Arrival, the science fiction movie Arrival, like I felt like even that was being, was a clever idea that was actually ripped off of a much more intelligent film. So overall, I think I really wanted to enjoy it because it's Indiana Jones, you're right, it's not Inmar Bergman. But I guess I still have enough affection for the heights that this franchise has reached at its best that I was pretty disappointed by this one.
00:25:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, you also, I think missed the sort of like the key, the kernel, the core, the deep insight of this film, which comes out of the mouth of that nostalgic, nostalgia loving Nazi
00:25:26
Speaker
that had the other half of the dial when they were on their way into the time rip. He looks Indiana Jones dead in the eyes and he goes, see, math works. And I went, that's right, that's right. That's just like saying science is real. It made me feel like the slogans we've been trotting out post Trump, we should probably add math works to that lineup.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, no, I actually, I totally agree with you. I'm glad you brought that up because I had exactly the same reaction, not to that line, but when Indy is berating Toby Jones for believing that the Antikythera mechanism has magical powers, he says,
00:26:07
Speaker
But did you prove it? Proving it is what makes it science. And I was sitting in a theater in a part of the world that has more than its share of anti-vaxxers and pseudoscience coups. You can just use shorthand Patriot. That works. You're amongst Patriots. I was amongst Patriots.
00:26:30
Speaker
I did a, when he said that line, I gave a silent little fist pump and I kind of listened to see if anybody in the theater was going to object and no one did, which was good, but I do think you're right. Like, no, it does deserve.
00:26:42
Speaker
credit for, like we talked about how you scratch the surface of the Batman movies and what you get is fascism. I don't think you get fascism if you scratch the surface of the Indiana Jones movies. I think in addition to some problematic stuff, what you also get is a genuine love for truth and science and rationality. And that's one of the things I love about the character. And I also think it's worth talking about, you brought this up a minute ago, the Nazi aspect of this. So
00:27:10
Speaker
the universally agreed upon best two Indiana Jones movies are the first and the third where he's fighting Nazis. The second one he's fighting make believe evil brown skinned people in India. And the third one he's fighting Soviets. Yeah, Soviets basically. And it doesn't work at all. The second one the villains are basically racist caricatures. The fourth one the villains are just
00:27:41
Speaker
dumb and unconvincing and led by a very bizarrely poor performance from the usually excellent Cate Blanchett. The fifth one, sorry, we're back to him fighting Nazis again for the third time. Whatever we think of the movie,
00:27:59
Speaker
isn't there something refreshing and arguably something much needed about watching Harrison Ford punch Nazis all over again in this day and age? I will never tire of any rendition of Nazi punching. So yes, I did enjoy it. And I think, you know, as little as I can, I can't really recall the originals that well, but
00:28:21
Speaker
I remember this being a facet of whichever one or two you mentioned. And yeah, of course, I enjoy it and I get satisfaction out of it. And probably most Americans get satisfaction, North Americans get satisfaction out of watching these. I would add though, like, you know, you could without reaching too much, I think, and without playing the sort of like,
00:28:46
Speaker
What do you want to call it? Self-taught Freudian or Jungian or psychoanalysts. I know that we're not Slavoj Žižek over here. He already has cornered the market for that sort of Lacanian film analysis, but I can't help but say
00:29:03
Speaker
that this pathological need that this Nazi has to go back in time to actually kill Hitler, because in his mind Hitler's was on the right track, but ultimately dumb in certain regards, and he's going to get it right. And he's with these other actual neo-Nazis. They weren't with him, it seems. They're just like fellow travelers that believe in the Kool-Aid that this actual Nazi has failed to regurgitate.
00:29:33
Speaker
Can't you kind of read a sort of make Germany great again? I mean, it's not even below the surface. I feel like it's right there. And the parallel is like, oh, not to conflate Trump with Nazism. That doesn't mean I'm letting Trump off the hook. But I think we need to be precise about how we use terms like Nazi and fascist, even ourselves. I need to hold myself to that a little bit better. But
00:29:58
Speaker
I do think there is a kind of winking analogy being made between this Nazi character pathologically bent on going back in time to make Germany great again. And what we've been dealing with from whatever you want to call it 2016 forward with this new brand of authoritarian right wing nut cases in our country.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really good point, man. And I think it's also worth pointing out in that context that for much of the film, an unidentified or unnamed US government organization is in league with the Nazis. And in fact, we see them murdering people at a university somewhere in New York.
00:30:47
Speaker
And it's not the first time in this franchise that the US government has been portrayed as shady or complicit or downright corrupted, which is another thing that I do respect about the way these movies tend to portray the world. It is interesting, I think, and I don't think I've ever thought about this till this moment, but
00:31:08
Speaker
Indiana Jones is a character created by Steven Spielberg. The first four films are directed by Spielberg. Spielberg is, of course, a Jewish director who is very attuned to issues around Jewish identity in some of his films. The Nazis in Indiana Jones are unmistakably villainous, but there is never once a reference to their anti-Semitism.
00:31:33
Speaker
The closest we may come is in The Last Crusade, when he sneaks into Berlin to retrieve the diary, he goes to a Nazi book burning festival. And Elsa, his love interest from the movie is there, and she's trying to convince him that she doesn't actually believe in the Nazi shit. And he says, you stood up to be counted with the enemies of everything the grail stands for.
00:32:02
Speaker
which is maybe the closest we ever get to what do the Nazis actually believe. And in fact, at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this is something I would love to read more about because I've never read much about it, but it is a rabbi who performs the ceremony of opening the Ark for the Nazis, and he perishes along with the Nazis that he's working for. And I was never sure
00:32:25
Speaker
was the implication that he'd been coerced into doing this by the Nazis. Was this something that that rabbi had volunteered for because it was the Ark of the Covenant, despite the fact that he was working with Nazis? We're never told, but I think it's interesting that that's how Spielberg attempted to handle Nazism, and yet they are, in all three of the movies that they appear in, unmistakably villainous.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's super, super interesting. I want to go back now actually. I thought I would watch the originals in preparation for this, but I'm like, you know what, Robert, you don't need to make like work out of an Indiana Jones movie. You make work out of enough things. Just watch this one and have fun. But I'm glad you reminded me of that scene. I'm now sort of like dimly recollecting it.
00:33:12
Speaker
I also wanted to add one other piece just as a historical tie-in with this current theme we're exploring. There's been plenty of historians at this point that have commented upon
00:33:25
Speaker
utopianism in Europe. You have these people in the 19th century and into the 20th, certainly even I guess earlier with Thomas More, where there's this strain in European philosophy that's fairly focused on utopias
00:33:45
Speaker
What's interesting is you wind up reading more often than not of the leftist, quote unquote, philosophers, economists, social thinkers that are defending this. You know, we, of course, you have
00:34:01
Speaker
For a i'm probably mispronouncing his name the french utopian thinker you have what is it robert owen who did the. Can you sort of like industrial factory models but are actually like communities where people are paid well and there's health care and good education and they open something called new harmony i think in the united states you have all these different iterations and attempts to create.
00:34:26
Speaker
utopian communities, and I think it really starts to heat up in the 19th century. I bring this up to say that one of the strains of utopian thought is a kind of nostalgic strain, as in like, hey, we are in an industrial capitalist environment,
00:34:49
Speaker
it's further degrading us, one argument might go. Therefore, we need to get back to where we were, AKA more of like an agrarian setup, where we work the land, where we keep things local, yada, yada, yada. And you look at the 1960s tune in dropout of the counterculture, fairly large contingency of young people that really tried to do just that.
00:35:18
Speaker
most of them failing for different reasons. But I wanted to add like the new fold in my knowledge in this area that sort of intrigued me were the historians have said that if you actually look at national socialism
00:35:35
Speaker
And you sort of dig into their own self mythologizing, you will often explicitly encounter this sort of, they call it a volkish, you know, like pre capitalist utopian thinking. So the argument goes,
00:35:52
Speaker
Don't kid yourself if you think that this nostalgic, pre-capitalist, Edenic aspiration for a utopian past is firmly in the camp of the left. It can also find expression in the most pathologically, genuinely fascist strains of politics.
Nostalgia vs. Reality
00:36:12
Speaker
And so I guess on some level I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about nostalgia. Because on the one hand, this film is dealing with going back in time. Going back in time obviously has an intrinsic like, you know, I want to get back to what was great, whether that's actually reality or just imagined.
00:36:31
Speaker
But then there's also the nostalgia on a more meta level of us, the viewers. We are nostalgically engaging with this film as it makes us feel warm and fuzzy about our childhoods or about, you know, the best parts of childhood where you get to, as you said, engage in the wonderment of our
00:36:49
Speaker
you know, initial engagements with Indiana Jones. So what's landing for you or not landing for you with my diatribe here? And do you feel like there is something to be extracted from this theme of nostalgia and potentially reactionary or authoritarian elements present within it?
00:37:12
Speaker
That's an interesting question, man. I know that nostalgia can be very hard to let go of on a personal level, even when it comes to something like Indiana Jones. I remember how disappointed I was by the the fourth film in the franchise, although I think it probably people should go back and rewatch that because there's some really good stuff in that movie. But it was this feeling of like, oh, my God, you've ruined the franchise.
00:37:37
Speaker
Which is idiotic? Like, can you no longer go back and watch the old movies? Who cares? Raiders of the Lost Ark will always be there. It will always be exactly the same film. And you deal with it with people getting older. God, remember when my favorite rock band was young and lean and hungry and now they're all rich and bloated and why can't they be the way they used to be? Well, who cares, man? Like, go back and listen to the old albums.
00:38:07
Speaker
Everybody gets old, everybody loses their touch, everybody dies, the world moves on. It's really simple for me to say that, but it took me a surprisingly long time to actually put that into practice in my own life with a lot of things. And that's just nostalgia about things that don't really matter, like Indiana Jones movies. But a lot of the toxic fan culture that we see today that we've talked about on this show before has to do with
00:38:35
Speaker
My nostalgia has fossilized in Amber for me a version of what this franchise is supposed to be.
00:38:43
Speaker
and you sir are trying to do something different with this franchise that I am nostalgic for and you therefore can burn in hell because you've ruined my nostalgia. When it comes, and I don't know if I can quite build a bridge from nostalgia about movies to the kind of nostalgia that makes you long for an imagined utopia that you think you can invent. I remember though one time I was sitting
00:39:13
Speaker
at the bar at the mine shaft tavern in Madrid, New Mexico, one of my favorite bars. And I was usually there in the evening in this particular time. I was there during the day and it was a different clientele and ended up sitting at the bar and I was between a biker and a cowboy. And when I say I was between a biker and a cowboy, I mean, both of these people were from central casting.
00:39:35
Speaker
And they were talking across me and their dialogue was so cartoonish that it was hard for me to keep a straight face. The biker leaned over to the cowboy at one point and said, do you know why you and I are the same? Do you know why you and I are the same?
00:39:51
Speaker
because I ride an iron horse and you ride an actual horse. And I'm just sitting there like, oh my God, this is actually the real world that I'm participating in right now. I hope they just started making passionate love in front of you right there in the middle of the bar. That is a fucking classic line. That would have been the greatest thing ever. Instead, what happened was the cowboy eventually got tired of listening to the biker because the biker is getting a little bit drunk and
00:40:17
Speaker
I guess, boorish even by the probably low standards of the cowboy and cowboy left. So now it's just me and biker asshole who was complaining about liberals and how his sister was a Democrat. He moved out to New Mexico so he could set her straight. And I just kind of let him go and didn't engage until finally he started going off about Norman Rockwell, like how much he missed the world of Norman. And I was surprised this asshole even knew who Norman Rockwell was, but
00:40:44
Speaker
He started going off about how much he missed Norman Rockwell, and I couldn't take it anymore finally. And I turned to him and I said, you know that that was just a totally fictional world, right? Like, nothing like that actually existed. And insofar as it did exist, it only benefited white people. And he looked at me and he was like, so? And then he said, you know what I think? I think they should all just get jobs. And at that point, I got up and left because it was either get up and leave or get my ass kicked by a 300 pound biker. But
00:41:15
Speaker
That is nostalgia being weaponized in exactly the way that you're talking about. And it is, like most nostalgia, nostalgia for a thing that never actually existed.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yet I think there's something about nostalgia, just like there's something about Norman Rockwell, where the idealized thing doesn't actually have to have ever existed. Like it could. We've all had amazing parts of our life that really were great, that we wish our lives could be like that all the time.
00:41:49
Speaker
and there have been parts of the past in certain parts of the world that have been way better than other parts of the past. That's not an illusion, but I don't think you need any connection to reality at all to have nostalgia. You can just look at the muscular lines and the cozy lighting of a Norman Rockwell painting and be so allured and soothed by it that the fact that it is a grossly exaggerated representation of reality
00:42:18
Speaker
is actually what you're responding to because reality is not something you're interested in engaging in whatsoever. You're not interested in engaging the reality of the present you live in, and you're also not interested in engaging with the reality of the past you came from. The Nazis, in order to create their nostalgia, they also had to create a false history, right? They had to create a false history of Germany, they had to create a false history of the First World War, they had to create a false history of the Weimar years.
00:42:44
Speaker
And so disengagement with reality is essential, I think, to nostalgia on some level. So here's where I think, as you were speaking, there's another fold here that I didn't predict would surface, but I can't help myself. I wound up in a, you could call it a book club of sorts where we were reading different classic poems from American literature. So of course we wound up reading Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.
00:43:11
Speaker
And it was fascinating to hear different people's takes on that poem. Obviously, with some of the, I think, deservedly cultural social reckonings that have been underway now for some time, even people that were seemingly as untouchable as Whitman have been reevaluated in different ways. And I think up to a certain point that that's important work.
00:43:38
Speaker
But I will say, and I'll freely admit, I love that poem. For however problematic and complicated it is, I love that poem. And one thing that came up, because I know that he was homies with Emerson, if I'm not mistaken. And Emerson, when he encountered it, said this is a masterpiece and really tried to champion it.
00:44:01
Speaker
But it was clear, I think, I can't remember if it was in Emerson, it probably was Emerson's response to it that we were reading upon, you know, taking down Song of Myself that I realized I thought what Emerson was responding to on some level was Whitman had constructed an arguably beautiful
00:44:21
Speaker
sort of mythology of what it means to be an American, what it means to be a Democrat with this particular flavor, this North American flavor of democracy. And that whether the myth, I think, you know, I don't even want to get into how we define myth, but my sense is we're not dealing in fact, we're dealing in sort of a worldview, if you want to put it that way, that the collective can on the whole get on board with and feel like, all right,
00:44:51
Speaker
I don't necessarily root for the same baseball team as Brendan, and I don't even necessarily vote for the same person as Joe Schmo. But we have a similar kind of worldview that can be constellated in and understood through these central cultural documents like Song of Myself, right? And the flip side of that is if the argument goes something like this, in order for a community to be in a state of relative health,
00:45:19
Speaker
you need to have enough communal buy-in regarding shared myths. If that is true,
00:45:27
Speaker
Then the question becomes for me, what happens when the central myths that we use to guide our sense of self and world and community is compromised? To such a degree that essentially the myth is obliterated. We no longer have that script to go off of. And I do think without wanting to accidentally wind up in some kind of reactionary camp here,
00:45:54
Speaker
That is true. I think that is something that the United States is experiencing right now. And I guess the question then becomes,
00:46:02
Speaker
Is that a problem? Do we need a myth or is it okay? And can we learn to just be with one another without this argument that the glue that binds us together are the values that we hold in common? Can we hold values in common without needing to suck down some grand but nonetheless constructed fictionalized myth?
00:46:27
Speaker
Or is it possible, reserving judgment for a moment on the question of whether we need to have a myth, is it possible to have a set of myths that are not corruptible? Can you have a set of myths that are effectively harmless at worst for people to believe in and not open to being appropriated by the bigots and the reactionaries?
00:46:53
Speaker
There is a part of me that wants to say, no, we don't need myth. And I think that comes from a part of me that wants to say that I don't need myth because I think I've divested myself of so many myths.
00:47:05
Speaker
Here I am talking about how much I love the Indiana Jones movies and what are they if not myths. Minor myths, standalone myths, but myths all the same, whether it's as simple as a myth about somebody who punches Nazis or a myth about someone who manages to succeed by dint of scrappiness and luck as much as access to resources or incredible strength in the face of evil.
00:47:34
Speaker
Clearly, I do myth on some level. I think probably we as people do need myth. And I think it probably isn't possible to construct a myth that cannot be co-opted because it's just human nature. That cannot be co-opted for any ideological purposes. Myths are open to hijacking irrespective of political conviction, right? It could be taken up by anyone, any group.
00:48:03
Speaker
Because anything can be, right? There is nothing that is above being co-opted by people who are in the business of co-opting things because they are not in the business of engaging with reality.
Escapism vs. Depth in Cinema
00:48:15
Speaker
And many, many people are not in the business of engaging with reality. And so that fucking Indiana Jones movie, I don't want to deal on some level though, right? I mean, I, I, I copped to that aspect of it myself. Like we,
00:48:29
Speaker
We like escapism and maybe to a certain degree it's fine. What else is a good novel? I'm not even saying that to knock novels or even genre fiction. I know that we're going to discuss Stephen King soon.
00:48:43
Speaker
that part of this stuff is not just something to believe in, but something to escape into. And I think within certain limits, that's probably not only totally human, but eminently healthy, but beyond certain limits can become quite dangerous.
00:49:02
Speaker
Well, that's an interesting point because our next episode, we are going to be talking about Stephen King's The Shining versus Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. And when we were talking about LaVey's auto-portrait, you made the comment that it took you out of yourself. It put you in somebody else's head. And what that made me think was, well, sure, but any piece of writing that we engage with, I think, does that to us.
00:49:26
Speaker
But when I'm watching an Indiana Jones movie, if I'm identifying with Indiana Jones that he's in a lot of ways an aspirational figure, right? Who doesn't want to be Indiana Jones? Who doesn't want to be
00:49:37
Speaker
having those adventures and cheating death and punching Nazis in the face and being as sexy as Harrison Ford while doing it. Of course, on some level, we would all like to be that. If I'm reading The Shining, I'm in the position of either an alcoholic, abusive, very, very troubled, failing writer, or a deeply troubled child who is watching his father
00:50:03
Speaker
descend into abusive madness. I do not want to be in either one of those positions. And so the experience is not really comparable, and yet I would argue that in addition, as different as, say, The Shining and Indiana Jones are, they are both because I would argue they're good at what they do, at least at their best they are.
00:50:22
Speaker
In addition to getting me out of my own head and putting me in someone else's head, they are teaching me to empathize in a way, or they are making the world temporarily make sense to me in a way that goes beyond merely escapism or getting out of my own head.
00:50:39
Speaker
I think that pure escapism, where there is nothing whatsoever there except enjoying being in a world that is not like the world that you actually live in, may actually be a destructive thing. Yeah, and I'm not always sure the line is as defined as I think it is. And I think not to knock your assessment of Indiana Jones, but I wonder if
00:51:08
Speaker
that's a bit charitable. I'm not sure I'm taking away things from Indiana Jones, maybe. I hear you with, I had the same thought while trying to think about the franchise in general and the character of Jones.
00:51:24
Speaker
He is a kind of Odysseus facing off against the Cyclops, at least in that moment, right? Like he clearly is too small to square up with the Cyclops face to face. So he has to figure out ways of cleverly defeating his opponent with wit and intelligence versus pure physicality, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, prototypical character. And so I'm with you on that. I just don't know if,
00:51:53
Speaker
there's as much substance, even in Indiana Jones as you give it credit for, but maybe you're actually, you know, what you said was fairly tempered anyway, but you want to clarify, like, what exactly are you getting from Indiana Jones that's qualitatively better on some level than, let's say, James Bond, or I don't know, fill in the blank, like, truly like brain crack, you know, I'm there to be visually wowed,
00:52:20
Speaker
and i don't care if i forget this film immediately upon the credits rolling james bond i think is actually the perfect comparison because the only james bond movie. I've ever been able to engage with in a way that i appreciate it was the casino royale remake the first daniel craig james bond movies a legitimately good film.
00:52:40
Speaker
I have tried to sit through some of the older ones, and sometimes I've succeeded. Sometimes I've failed. I think I can make it about seven minutes into Goldfinger before I cannot do it. I cannot engage with it. It is so ridiculous. It has very little to do with the over-the-top gadgetry and the ludicrousness of a spy being the most conspicuous person in the room.
00:53:08
Speaker
It has to do with the fact that, to my eyes, there's an utter lack of any kind of truth in the James Bond movies. Whereas the Indiana Jones movies, he's a well-drawn character. The third movie is a really, really, really well-done portrait of a troubled relationship between a father and a son who are effectively the same person.
00:53:30
Speaker
and their similarities are what keep them apart. And the first movie, Jones is so dark that he's almost an anti-hero. And yet he's drawn into this fight against evil where he ultimately, because if you remember, he ambushes the party with the Ark after the Nazis have captured the Ark back from him. He ambushes them above the canyon with a bazooka and he is
00:53:55
Speaker
in a position to blow up the Ark. And the main villain points out to him, like, you're never gonna do it. You're never gonna actually have the strength in you to blow up the Ark. And furthermore, if you do, your girlfriend's gonna die. And eventually he puts down the bazooka and lets himself be captured by the Nazis so that he doesn't have to kill his girlfriend and he doesn't have to destroy the Ark, which he knows has tremendous historical value. That to me is a, within the confines of the kind of movie it is, is a reasonable examination of a complicated moral choice.
00:54:24
Speaker
I'm with you actually I want to I'm on your side now because I was I don't say drag to because I need a little bit more brain candy in my life I do too much of the serious but I was invited to the new fast and furious which is like this two hour non-stop balls to the wall extravaganza that actually cuts spoiler alert
00:54:46
Speaker
Mid scene for a sequel which is exactly what mission impossible just did i watch that two days ago so there now this is clearly like an industry and a new burgeoning industry trick to get people to go buy another movie ticket maybe a year from the first release but,
00:55:04
Speaker
that movie the fast and furious i mean i know again i know what i'm getting into this isn't citizen kane but holy shit i mean talk about like there's almost nothing there and so if i had to take
00:55:17
Speaker
the, whatever you want to call it, the meaning content. If there could be, if you could find it in Indiana Jones versus a franchise like Fast and Furious, far and away. I mean, Indiana Jones is superior, I think on probably every level, but certainly on the level that we're speaking to right now. So you've won me over. I agree.
00:55:37
Speaker
I do think that Bond may be a good archetype of the kind of mindless escapism I'm talking about that may actually be on some level harmful. The Fast and the Furious, I've seen a couple of those, but I don't keep up with the franchise. Some of the action set pieces look pretty cool, but generally- They're deeply moving films. They're very- It's all about family, right, Robert? You and I are also both all about family, so it's no wonder that we both respond so strongly to the Fast and the Furious movies.
00:56:05
Speaker
Yes. Well, at least you're on the right track. You understand the scripture, so to speak. Whenever I don't want to go to a family function, I just imagine Dominic Toretto sitting on my shoulder and reminding me how important family is, and then I go. As your shoulder quickly breaks under the weight of Vin Diesel's enormous girth,
00:56:29
Speaker
If you're okay with it, I want to actually quote from something you wrote ahead of this episode talking about exactly these issues. You said, if Harrison Ford were placed on an aging movie star spectrum, I'd say he's a low offender in terms of death denial versus
00:56:45
Speaker
others who do not only refuse to die, but who refuse to grow old. I think that's fair. How our need for nostalgia products with the take me back to the good old days glow that they emit fuels the seemingly never ending string of franchises that should have died years ago is something that deserves interrogation.
00:57:04
Speaker
We love to hate franchises that have devolved into piles of shit, but we also keep going to watch them. And I don't think we do this simply because there's nothing else to see or even because we love to hate a shitty movie. I think deep down they're feeding some part of ourselves that also refuses to grow up and therefore grow old and therefore acknowledge that we're all trending in one inevitable direction. My argument is that franchises scratch the itch of having something familiar to hold onto in the midst of profound social and environmental changes.
00:57:35
Speaker
I think that's very well put. Putting it that way, does it make you any more sympathetic to the legions of fans who are clamoring for another Fast and Furious movie or another Star Wars movie? Without getting too far afield or going down a rabbit hole, we'll never get out of the German cultural critic Siegfried Krakauer, who wound up being a friend of Benjamin's.
Films as Mirrors of Society
00:58:02
Speaker
a major influence on, certainly he was an influence on Benjamin, he was a major influence on Theodore Adorno. He wound up essentially playing, you know, the equivalent of Alexander's tutor, you know, the historical Alexander to Adorno. So just massively influential towards a young person who would become arguably one of the most important 20th century continental philosophers. And so his
00:58:32
Speaker
legacy on many levels is, what's the word, is staked on a book that became extremely important amongst film studies circles. The book was called From Caligary to Hitler. Have you heard of this book, Brendan?
00:58:52
Speaker
I have not. So let me just very quickly explain what it is. He winds up, because he was living in Germany at the time, along with Adorno and Benjamin and other Frankfurt School fellows, watching in theaters, certainly the birth of cinema on some level, since it was in the 1920s, that movie theaters really begin to become a mass, you know, their
00:59:18
Speaker
movie theaters cropping up all over the world, certainly in Europe and Berlin, major cities in Germany. So he's watching this phase in post-World War I German cinema referred to as German expressionism. So you have these classic films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, you have The Blue Angel, which was infamously made by Lenny Riefenstahl, who then wound up making many propaganda films for Hitler in the Third Reich. But
00:59:47
Speaker
He basically made a very provocative and somewhat argue controversial and somewhat even argue untenable thesis. This is what he says.
00:59:59
Speaker
that you can actually read the psychological developments of Germany through their films and not necessarily predict Hitler's rise to power, but essentially predict and watch a proto-fascism, proto-authoritarianism
01:00:20
Speaker
make its way from abstraction to concreteness by subjecting specifically German expressionist cinema in post-World War I Germany to intensive interrogation. And many have basically said, listen, from an empirical standpoint, you can't test this. So it's problematic in that regard. You can't really ever get to the bottom of a claim like that. But I think he did
01:00:47
Speaker
wind up allowing future film critics, philosophers, cultural critics to think in new directions. So back to our A.O. Scott discussion with the Walter Benjamin episode, our opening episode of this podcast. A.O. Scott saying in part, I don't want to fucking be a film critic anymore because I'm witnessing a fascistic trend in these Marvel films that I'm tired of.
01:01:12
Speaker
And it's all the same movie on some level. And I'm very disturbed by what I think it's trying to feed its audience and what the audience seems to be getting fed by with these films. You wind up in a funny way with Krakauer in a similar position. We say, well, I don't know if this is a crystal ball.
01:01:32
Speaker
that if Rub the Right Way reveals Hitler 10 years from the point at which these films came out or his rise. But I think it does speak to when we are in a state of turmoil, COVID, pandemics, recessions, political instability, chaos, deep questioning over our foundational myths that are theoretically the glue that binds our society together.
01:01:58
Speaker
When you find yourself in that kind of a conflagration in any country, I think the argument he's making is we will then give ourselves away to the kind of escapism that you are, I think, correctly saying is very problematic.
01:02:16
Speaker
And I'm wondering as I watch Indiana Jones, even though I want to give it more of a pass as you have, or I'm watching Fast and the Furious or The New Mission Impossible, that part of what's happening and part of why these films are coming out in such volume and essentially playing the same dumb tricks,
01:02:37
Speaker
is we want to give ourselves away not to a compelling story, but to out and out escapism. And when you start witnessing collective cultures desiring that particular kind of escapism, then away that's when the alarm bells have to start ringing and you go, this is not only an indicator, but it's clearly showing there's an opening for something very, very troublesome to really fill a power gap is one argument that could be made here.
01:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, I hear that. I think that's a good argument. Just as an aside, the Blue Angel was von Stenberg. I don't think- Oh, the Riefenstahl was the actress. I can't remember what- Marlena Dietrich was the actor. I don't think Riefenstahl was involved in that. I wonder then what the Riefenstahl tie-in was, but there is one, so I can't remember.
01:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, I'll take your word for it that there is a tie in there. But anyway, is that what A.O. Scott was speaking to either indirectly or explicitly? And is that what we're now discussing here? That we're on the face of it discussing Indiana Jones, nostalgia, childhood, how we're relating to franchises. But maybe beneath all of that, we're really trying to grapple with
01:03:54
Speaker
Are there perceivable trends in cultural products as they're disseminated that you can put your finger on and go, this is at least showing you which direction the wind is blowing. It doesn't give you an automatic, this is what's going to happen, but you have a kind of, oh, we're in a particular moment that does have echoes or rhymes with previous moments that are very, very troubling. And if that is true,
01:04:23
Speaker
we need to first establish if it is true but if it is then what do you do and i'm not sure and maybe that's why scott ultimately said fuck this without having without having red crack hours argument i'm inclined to say that yes it is true that makes perfect sense to me and we're we're living in exactly such a time is that and i think.
01:04:43
Speaker
indiana jones in the dial of destiny is a relatively innocuous entry in that cannon and may in its own very small way with its. It's clips i mean there's an anti capitalist clip there's the remarks we already mentioned about math and science being real there's of course the fact that the nazis.
Escapism in Modern Cinema
01:05:02
Speaker
Are the villains again? There's the make Germany great again subtext that you brought up. I guess you could argue that the movie in its small way is trying to fight that from within, as it were. And I think that Harrison Ford is notoriously grumpy about a lot of his roles. He did not want to come back to play Han Solo. He was glad when they killed Han Solo off in Star Wars.
01:05:22
Speaker
Indiana Jones has always been the exception. He has always loved playing that character and he's always been emotional about playing that character. I don't know why that is, except that it's just a really good character. So I think maybe part of the impetus for making Indiana Jones 5 really was Harrison Ford just really likes that character. But I think if we're going to situate it within exactly the trend that you're talking about, it's probably a relatively innocuous offender compared to some of these others that we can see as
01:05:51
Speaker
pure fantasy pure fantasy yeah not just pure fantasy but weather veins that are telling us which direction the wind is blowing in
01:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, and another just sort of question, you know, the question would be, why do people collectively want to give themselves away to this kind of total escapism in the midst of periods of great social upheaval and duress? And obviously, there's probably just self-evident reasons, you know, like if I can find a way to not feel pain, even for half an hour, I'll take it. But
01:06:29
Speaker
I think there's another piece that I want to ask you about, because I wonder if part of it is if I actually square my shoulders with the enormity of the systemic problems that are causing these catastrophes in my community, in my society, in my nation, with the widest lens.
01:06:55
Speaker
And i actually assess the systemic problems soberly then maybe there's the recognition that this road is going to be painful and long to get from the.
01:07:08
Speaker
damage and destruction we are living through to a state of health again. But the only way to get to a state of health is the sober assessment. And my question is, is, is this desire to just turn our brains off a kind of, I just don't want to face how fucking hard this is going to be. It's easier just not to deal. Give me the brain crack. Give me the candy.
01:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I think on top of that, it's give me the brain crack that makes me not have to deal, but also give me the brain crack that will reframe everything so that it doesn't seem as fucked up as I thought it was, or
01:07:52
Speaker
it's not my fault at all. It's actually the fault of the Jews or the gays or the trans people or the liberals or whoever your victim du jour is to turn into a villain. And this goes back to one of my strenuous objections to superhero movies, which is the idea that they're going to save us.
01:08:16
Speaker
And so we don't actually have to do anything about it ourselves because we're excused because we don't have the powers that they have. And one of the few recent superhero movies that I will give an exception to, because I thought it was excellent, is Black Panther, the first one.
01:08:33
Speaker
I haven't seen Wakanda forever, but even the first one it ends with because the premise of the first one is that Wakanda is this prosperous African nation, which is prosperous because of its access to basically supernatural material that it refuses to share with the rest of the world because it doesn't want to get drawn into squabbling and conflict.
01:08:57
Speaker
And at the end of the movie, you see Wakandans going to Oakland to the low income black neighborhoods in the Bay Area and actually sharing this technology with them, which is a fantastic way to end the movie. But it makes it essentially impossible to set up a second entry in the franchise because you would then have to create a world which is now totally divorced from our own.
01:09:20
Speaker
in which inner city impoverished minorities are being given access to world changing technology with the backing of a powerful global government. Well that's obviously total fiction so it's a great way to end the first movie but it doesn't put you in a good position to create a franchise because you now have to create your franchise in a total fantasy land and you're back in the territory of all the other superhero movies.
01:09:44
Speaker
So there's almost by creating a franchise, you're almost putting yourself in a position where you have to begin by postulating the imaginary, but you end up by perpetuating the fantastical in a way that can be quite dangerous.
01:09:59
Speaker
And I do think, right, like it might not be too, it might not be ridiculous then to say beneath all of this is a truly like, I do not want to grow up. And the franchise comes in and says, guess what? We heard your wish and you don't have to. And we'll keep trotting this out. And that beneath the, I don't want to grow up is obviously I don't want to face what it means to be an adult. And part of what I think it means to be an adult on a fundamental level is
01:10:27
Speaker
actually recognizing we are going to die. You are mortal. This shit changes. Your childhood is over. You can't get back to it. You can't get back to yesterday. That doesn't mean we don't appreciate what's great from yesterday. But if you keep trying to get back into yesterday, it's a fool's errand. And actually, whatever happens in that quest is going to be destructive.
01:10:55
Speaker
And in a way, that is perfectly encapsulated without trying to make this any deeper than it is with the Nazi quest to get back to pre-defeated Nazi Germany. It's a primal, I think, wish not to get back to Nazi Germany, but not to have to die, to turn back the clock, to be immortal.
01:11:19
Speaker
and is our unwillingness to face our own death in its own funny way, finding expression in franchises being unwilling to die or franchises always coming back to help us keep that fantasy alive.
01:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, it absolutely is. So we were originally going to try to tie this in actually to David Bowie and his last album Blackstar and specifically the song Lazarus, which is, of course, it was written when he already knew that he was dying of cancer. His fans did not know that, but he did. And that's what the subject matter of the song is.
01:11:55
Speaker
I think we've come far enough with this that I don't think we can really tie that in at that point. But I do feel that I should point out that we were going to talk about that. And if anybody's looking for something to engage with that was made by an artist who was perhaps trying to confront their own death and in a way seek for immortality at the same time without retreating into fantasy or fan service, then David Bowie's last album is probably a great place to find that.
01:12:24
Speaker
Wonderful. Yeah. And maybe just to end with a question, which I think was if the franchise at its worst is keeping us infantilized in a way that's ultimately unhelpful at the individual and the collective level and keeping us ignorant on some level or rewarding our ignorance, are there other art forms that don't need to be Ingmar Bergman level heavy?
01:12:50
Speaker
that nonetheless can make us laugh, make us cry, give us a little escape, but also don't cut us off from what's so important about
01:13:02
Speaker
the fundamental ingredients of being human and doesn't lie to us or disrespect our intelligence or yeah, mangle our psyches by keeping us eight years old in terms of our maturity or our way of relating to the world or ourselves. Franchises as opposed to standalone movies, there have to be, there have to be. I just can't think what any of them are.
01:13:32
Speaker
off the top of my head. Well, I will say this, that the mark on some level of a mature film company maybe, or whatever you want to call it, a distribution company, would be actually knowing when it is time to kill a franchise. So not just the stand-alones, but maybe we can just put a pin in that and say, let's think about a franchise that actually knew when to fucking die.
01:13:58
Speaker
because clearly most of them don't. And it has maybe not, as you put it, marred those original Indiana Jones films. Those films are still great. But it is a bit of a shame when you have Terminator 47 and they all fucking suck after the second one. And you go, you know, guys, you should have killed this at two and you would have been smart to do that. But anyway, for another discussion.
01:14:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. We'll think probably five minutes after we get off of this recording, we'll both think of a perfect example. Also, so we've talked about the fact that we're doing the Shining next episode. We have brought up Ingmar Bergman a lot recently. We definitely need to get into Ingmar Bergman on this podcast at some point. Let's do that. Does he have a franchise? Yeah, all of his movies, what's the Bergman verse, man? They all take place in one continuous universe where
01:14:52
Speaker
Max von Siedau overcomes his despair just so he can despair in a different way.