Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. I'm Chase Biduzniak here with my co-host, whose name I'm going to get correct this time. That's Sam McElhaga. Oh my God, that was 99.9% correct.
Speaker: Well, technically correct is the best kind of correct. And our guest today is ah one of my favorite podcasters, if that ignominious title can be applied to him.
Speaker: Dr. John Dolan, how you doing? Oh, I'm fine. I'm pleased to be here. And it can definitely be applied to me because podcasting lifted me and my wife out of poverty. So I'm all for it.
Speaker: Well, a yeah a success story. It's the spinning journey of the twenty twenty s It kind of is Yeah. Except I wouldn't have the coordination to work a spinning Jenny. Yeah. In any case, John, we invited you on to talk about a specific movie, Army of Darkness, um which I don't know if it lifted anybody out of poverty, but maybe it was sort of a last-minute Reaganomics thing, you know, rising tide lifting all boats or something.
Speaker: But I'd like to ask you about one thing first, and that is I understand that you were recently living in the aisle that Sam calls home. Where were you living, John?
Speaker: I was living actually on Canary Wharf. Why? Let me tell you who else was living there. A bunch of what they call in the UK midges and what I would call black flies. And they, first of all, this hotel lied to us. They said there was an AC. And when we got to the room,
Speaker: Really, you just had to open the window. And once you did, the the hordes flew in. And they're they're quite invisible. And i unfortunately have bunch of weird allergies, a bunch of weird health reactions. And i had gotten bitten quite enough.
Speaker: i was half expecting you to say a Sodom Seekers. No, London looked to me contrary to all the whinging that gets onto the international media. looked very prosperous and running very well as far as I could see.
Speaker: I think Londoners like to whinge. I mean, i I'm currently in the UK's second city, which is not doing so well. but Manchester? No, yeah exactly. That's hilarious. Like Birmingham.
Speaker: I don't know which is supposed to be worse, Birmingham or Manchester. Well, my professional career sort of depends on me saying Manchester, so I'm going to Manchester. ok Okay, okay.
Speaker: I don't know if you all saw it because, we're you know, Europe and the air conditioner. I saw a thing recently online where ah apparently European scientists are looking to revive an air cooling system used in Al Andalus, where you sort of build these trenches at the base of buildings that are filled with cool flowing water or something. and's See, I think the black fly lobby is behind that. Perfect. Every building is surrounded by standing water.
Speaker: Before we move on to the topic of the podcast, I have to ask, John, considering I read some of your book that Chase sent me about five or six months Is it Erdogan Pizza? Erdogan Pizza, yeah.
Speaker: Yes, I read that and enjoyed mean, actually, viscerally, I enjoyed it, but also it sent visceral shows as disgust down by his spine of sort of recognition. Yeah. In the sense of being like a poor freelance journalist and just stringing together a living. Yeah. I thought i thoroughly enjoyed that in a sort of sadomasochistic way, but...
Speaker: So, John, and unlike with a lot of ah episodes, usually we send the guest a short list and sort of say, hey, um what are you looking at here? But I knew I had to ask you to do one of the Evil Dead trilogy because i i know it it played a part in your life. And we went with Army of Darkness originally to be called, I think, the better Medieval Dead. Right. I think that, you know, as a medievalist, I would thought that'd be better.
Speaker: So, I mean, do you have any memory of seeing it for the first time or sort of oh yeah what roles Sam Raimi would have played for you the 80s, 90s? Yeah. I was told that it was a masterpiece by Mark Ames. I mean, Mark and I go way back to Berkeley, but At this point, I had just moved to New Zealand.
Speaker: I was living alone in Dunedin, New Zealand, and it was ah quite a jolt for me because I'd been in Berkeley for a long time. And I didn't like it because I had...
Speaker: some weird quibbles that I don't know if I'll have to explain with with the earlier Evil Dead movies, but I took it on Mark's advice and I went to see it. I was one of the very few people in the theater and I was ah doing a middle-aged chortle before the movie was 20 minutes old. And I chortled until I was...
Speaker: almost in tears at the end. And ah it was the ending that that you describe as as one of two. But to me, it's the only ending. It's the one. Sure, I could have stayed in the past.
Speaker: Could have even been king.
Speaker: But in my own way, I am king.
Speaker: Hail to the king, baby. I mean, that's that's a great last scene. I much prefer it, actually, to the ah alternative, which I gather was released in Europe, the sort of H.G. Wells time machine ending of ruins. ah But there's there's something that is very important about that ending. Like, the the tension of of the movie is partly...
Speaker: that Ash is a buffoon and at the same time a real hero. and And he's a real hero in part because he shows fear. He's terrified yeah a lot of the time.
Speaker: That makes him a lot easier to believe in. And even when he's a blowhard, he's, well, he's, first of all, he uses hundreds of years of English idioms because they're all fresh.
Speaker: He's back the 600 years in time. And these people don't know any of those expressions like, hey, you know, your shoes untied to a knight who's wearing, you know, iron foot sheaths.
Speaker: And there ain't no way to tie them. And then Lord Arthur finally looks down And exactly as it's meant to work on the playground, Ash uppercuts him and lays him out. And, you know, that for me, ah there there was probably an added appeal in in that because, well, the way i tell it, I i was a...
Speaker: victim and a very trusting, ah easily foolable kind of kid. And I would have been on the receiving end of that joke. Other people say, that's not really true. You're just always whining. So I don't know.
Speaker: i I do feel the need to make a confession here, which is that I had not seen any of these movies until a few years ago when we decided, my wife and i to consider going through the trilogy, you know understanding it as a kind of trilogy, right?
Speaker: And we got through Evil Dead 1 and we were like, oh, this is you know this is fun, whatever. And then Evil Dead 2 starts and it's the same movie. right So it was it was a deeply confounding experience. I don't know. I assume you've seen them, John. I don't know. if Have you seen any of them, Sam?
Speaker: The name had crossed my path as this kind of like weird relic from like being a four or five-year-old and hearing it sort of in the background. um But I i'd never actually ventured into the trilogy. So this is my first dip.
Speaker: Well, I think Army of Darkness was probably my favorite of the three, in part because it provided relief from the weird duo that was you know this kind of replay of the first and the second, but also because it I mean, i i'm I'm a medievalist. That's what I'm trained to do. And so the idea of, you know, not just tying this kind of sci-fi idea to the Middle Ages, but putting Dolph Lundgren, who's also a a geek who works at Kmart, you know, into that environment, inverting the whole trope of the protagonist as they would normally exist in this kind of movie, was much more satisfying for me.
Speaker: when When you proposed this... this discussion to me, I was really worried in that I have trouble remembering what was in ah Evil Dead 1 and what was in Evil Dead 2. There's one scene, and this is kind of Raimi thing, and and it does bother me a little,
Speaker: And I also feel ashamed of talking this way because I sound like a PC person or something. But there's a bit of ultraviolence like when she gets raped by the tree root. And that kind of bothered me a little.
Speaker: And I don't know which it's in but Army of Darkness is relatively free of that. Well, maybe this is kind of a good place to start in talking about it, and maybe we're um starting a bit big here, but part of the reason I was interested in doing this for this particular show is that Army of Darkness represents what seems like the apogee of a certain kind of like 80s attitude, at least in American cinema, which is this, on the one hand, machismo, right? the The hero who saves the day in one way or another,
Speaker: And the simultaneous undermining of that with the fact that comic books show up in the movie, the fact that he's very obviously intended to not actually inhabit, you know, he's the little kid who imagines himself in the 50s pulp story, but as himself, but who still manages to succeed.
Speaker: And I guess I'm curious how that felt in the moment. It seems like such a defining feature of so many of these, especially like horror comedy B movies of the 80s and early 90s in this case.
Speaker: yeah Well, I think I'm ah much more credulous or or willing to believe than than most people. But i for the duration of the movie, I believed in Army of Darkness. And that applied even to the twenty late 20th century smart-ass comments that are a feature of Ash's verbal repertoire in the movie. Because... One thing that you would enjoy if you actually traveled back ah six or seven hundred years in time is that all these cracks are new.
Speaker: Nobody's used them yet. and And you can tell this Baron who's in line about to get killed with you. um and got news for you, pal. You ain't leading but two things right now.
Speaker: Jack and shit. And Jack left town.
Speaker: It's a little verbal repertoire vobal rougherire of of joe Joe Biden on this, isn't it? Yeah, but he looks better doing it. And, you know, Joe Biden doesn't have a chainsaw on his amputated hand.
Speaker: Can we get an AI version of this with Joe Biden in as the Ash character? Yeah. You ain't leading nothing but two things right now. Jack and shit. It lasts about two seconds. I mean, one thing about ah Ash or or Campbell is that he was doing a lot of stunts in that movie. I mean, he was pretty agile at that point. I think one thing Campbell does very well is...
Speaker: undercutting his own machismo. Sometimes it can get a little excessive, but he did it in ah that series. What was it called? Ash vs. Army of Darkness or something? Yeah, it's Ash vs. Army Darkness. ye Right. And he openly displays his modest, but spreading belly and then buckles it into a corset of some kind and goes out to do battle with whatever creature he's dealing with in that episode.
Speaker: But there's something faintly ridiculous. But just as in the narrative curve of Army of Darkness, He starts as ah terrified.
Speaker: How the hell do you stop it? A terrified hero who's out of his league fighting something that never quite embodies itself or speaks, but is malign and omnipotent as far as we know.
Speaker: And he ends having... defeated that, at least temporarily. And then there's that strange, and I always found rather moving, Koda in Esmart when he's back to his his ordinary life in the 20th century, because this was the 20th century. This was late 20th century.
Speaker: Well, he yeah, he manages to be beat off the ghoul who reappears in yeah the you know in the real world. I don't know what to call it, the future, the present. Yeah.
Speaker: But he also does it with some nice, smart-ass line, ma'am, I think I'm going to have to ask you to leave.
Speaker: and And of course, the usual shop smart, shop S-mart. That's maybe my favorite of the ah of the catchphrases. And yeah what's interesting is that the the machismo that he has, it does occasionally override his own fear to produce a kind of excessive self-confidence. I think about what was one of my favorite scenes the first time I saw the movie when, so maybe this is a good time for a quick plot you know ah summary.
Speaker: He's sent into the past due to the events at the end of Evil Dead 2. There's this book called The Necronomicon that does it. He's in the year 1300. He needs to get the Necronomicon to go back and is sent to retrieve it. It will also help the kind of castle where he's staying with Lord Arthur.
Speaker: And when he goes to get the Necronomicon, the sort of, you know, the wizard, the sage character, the person i always like to imagine I'd be playing because of my physical inability to fight deadites. Which he calls spinach chin for the big beard.
Speaker: Yes, that the guy who's who's um rolling with wisdom and intelligence in our Dungeons and Dragons game here, and certainly not charisma or strength, says to him, you have to remember these words exactly. And you you know from the second you hear that,
Speaker: that First of all, it tells the viewer, I'm going to repeat these words over and over in my head to, I don't know, prove that I'm smart and can remember these things, or maybe that's just me and my sort of hang-ups. But you also know he's not going to remember it, and the guy says to him, you know, curtu vaerra tuto or whatever, he says, You yeah you should don't say the words of power on the podcast. It might, I don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker: Apparently that's from the Day the Earth system. Yeah, the Day the Earth system still. I always figured Nikto is just Russian. It's nobody. Nikto. Oh, this is a a sly, perhaps, nod to Limonov somehow. That's what I just call But in any case, he's like, repeat the words, and he says them one time, and then he's like, you know you come on, you need to make sure you have them. He's like, got it, I got it, I got it, whatever.
Speaker: And then you know when he gets to this altar where there of course, three Necronomicon's, because there have to be three, and one bites him on the hand, the other sucks him in and gives him sort of Looney Tunes space jam face, and looks like Because he's he's famous for the chin. like you know His ah autobiography is called if Chins Could Kill, and then this extends his chin to cartoon proportions.
Speaker: Which is hardly necessary, which I guess is important. I was going to say, think he's an interesting case study of this. It's something we've been talking about on the podcast, irony to earnestness spectrum.
Speaker: where like Gen X kind of sits at the the sort of weird sort of crossover bell curve of being both incredibly earnest and incredibly so ironic. Yeah, Bruce Campbell as an actor, I can't think of any analogs contemporary analogues for him in the sense of this kind of fusion of... Well, I can't... I always feared that he would...
Speaker: you know, like Bill Murray with that god-awful Somerset Maugham plot, ah try to do straight drama because he's not meant for that. But that that is an asset, and he's been intelligent enough to see that as an asset. Like, even in his commercial work, he he does... ah old Spice.
Speaker: Yeah, Old Spice. He does a fake imitation of a classy guy tinkling on a piano in a tuxedo, but you're not meant to really believe it.
Speaker: I guess maybe this is a way of tying what I was saying into what you just said, Sam, which is that, of course, he doesn't remember the words, and that's what sets off the events of the rest of the plot, right? So it's this odd moment of he he sort of believes his own bullshit for a moment, or at least in the world of the movie, we're meant to believe that despite his fears and his kind of hangups and his...
Speaker: inadequacy as it might be presented in a normal, I don't know, Jean-Claude Van Damme or, you know, God forbid, Steven Seagal style action film. He has this balance, right, between the believability of the action hero and this kind of ironic thing.
Speaker: And I think... and maybe this is to your point, Sam, it allows for an interesting kind of buy-in, right, in that moment where you kind of believe the sincerity of the overconfidence, but it's also played for laughs and it's very funny, or at least I think it's very funny.
Speaker: Yeah. I will say there is a potential equivalent, Sam, that I could lay on you here. Go for it. Which is Henry Cavill. you You might right. i mean, even the Warhammer link, the kind of semi-ironic enthusiasm for Warhammer might...
Speaker: And also Vin Diesel was kind of... Vin Diesel didn't necessarily do it in his actual work, but he's like a big D&D World of Warcraft guy, ah despite always playing, you know, sort of... Well, I was going to ask both... It's a film I'm less familiar with in the background, let probably less familiar with than you, Chase, and certainly you, John. um me but What is the sort of counter-cultural background to this film? i think I think it's a curious film in the sense that really compared to sort of 2010s and 2020s fantasy programming, both sort of high prestige television, but also film, it really doesn't concern itself with world building.
Speaker: Oh, no no, no, no, no. You're sort of slotted into this world and absolutely nothing is, or very minimal amount of stuff is explained. And what is foregrounded is a kind of kinetic, you know, slapstick comedy that could yeah could be a sort of out of a Charlie Chaplin film.
Speaker: Well, this is ah this is i mean this is filmed in Southern California from in some Southern California papier-mâché castle, I guess.
Speaker: And it has the feeling of an eternal world of movie ah Middle Ages. I thought it was odd to say 1300. I mean, first of all, how does he know? He just got got landed back there. ah And also, you don't want anything too particular because ah it is the Middle Ages.
Speaker: and I don't mean this in a critical way or a negative way at all. The characters are not meant to be three-dimensional individuals. In fact, three-dimensional individuals are, to my mind, vastly overrated.
Speaker: And it's it's a plot that it concerns a lot of people who are typical, and they're typical of... a sort of g agreed world between the makers of the movie and the audience of the movie, which is, this is the Middle Ages. You know, this is castles, this is battles, and maybe a little supernatural thrown in.
Speaker: Well, and they're there're yeah i think an interesting kind of outgrowth of that is the way that the two armies interact, right? You've got Duke Eric, or Duke... Henry, think. The Red... Yes, the The Red, who I watched a little documentary about this where, let me say, he seems like he had a great time on set. like It was yeah a long filming experience. They were, I think, out there for some absurd number of days with like no breaks. And Sam Raimi is just cracking jokes like the whole time. from my yeah it sounds like he tried to kind of create a set that mirrored what was going on in the movie.
Speaker: But the the way that the armies interact, right, it opens with the capture of this one army by Arthur's army. And of course, Bruce Campbell's character, Ash, is caught up in this, right? They're like, oh, he's one of the soldiers, which is hilarious, of course. He's not wearing a tabard. He's not wearing any armor. He's, you know, like, he's But he arrives in in the Buick or whatever, and and they say, somebody says, you know, in the distance, what a piece of armor this is. Yeah. One of my favorite things about the movie, if I can jump ahead, is later on when they turn that into sort of like a like a tank of a certain kind, when they're battling inside the castle.
Speaker: And then the only reason that that doesn't completely destroy the skeleton army that the Necronomicon has summoned is is because he's distracted by the, I think, wonderfully named Sheila, which might be the most unmedieval name you could give a female character. Yeah, and and the thing is, M. Beth Davids really is beautiful in that scene, and ah very, very deathly. she She has one of the great lines. There aren't a lot of great lines for women in the movie, but...
Speaker: Well, she has a couple of great lines. First, you found me beautiful once. And then that leads to his line, honey, you got real ugly. But they ah the the other line is, i may be bad after she's transformed by the forces of evil. I may be bad, but I feel good.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, she stops that in about five seconds. And the whole big weapon, the secret weapon they've developed in in the shed with their, ah somehow they've got a welding kit. But anyway. The blacksmith who's like a grease monkey, basically. Yeah, yeah. And...
Speaker: They have this weapon, but what I loved about it, and this connects, in my mind anyway, to the early 1980s, and particularly the sudden and very shocking appearance of Devo videos, because I used to go watch Eraserhead every Sunday ah at 20th and Mission in San Francisco. i went alone, came home alone, and I had a horrible experience watching it, but, you know, I watched it to the end because, yeah it was scripture, really. And before that showed, they showed the same short film of Devo and
Speaker: I think, doing either Mongoloid. And it was a beautiful, beautiful video. And it was it was partly ironic, but it was also about believing in science. And Devo did feel like people who believed in science. Little Mr. Science, Mr. DNA. And one of Ash's most beautiful lines that I've always remembered in the movie, and there are a lot of lines you remember, but ah it's...
Speaker: We can take these deadites. We can take them.
Speaker: With science. And, you know, that's that's only about 30% funny. That's, for me, and I'm very much a nerd. I'm not kidding around about that. That's 70% real.
Speaker: It's actually interesting you mention that because we we spoke about the blacksmith thing, but the equivalent of that with the sages is that in the back, in the trunk of the Buick is a chemistry 101 textbook that is quite literally just emblazoned with chemistry 101. Right. And they're actually able to make these sort of small gunpowder explosives that they put on their arrows and basically turn into small bombs to destroy the skeletons with.
Speaker: And I think it it does betray something... interesting about the intellectual world of the movie, which is that even in the Middle Ages, if these guys were given access to a chemistry textbook, they would sort of have the ability to make sense of And i'm i you know obviously it's a joke, but at the same time, there is a certain kind of faith in humanity there, as bizarre as it may sound in a movie that's about you know the dead and they're coming to get us, a faith that humans can overcome.
Speaker: There's also something interesting about that generational moment where the protagonist goes, but and there's that meme, isn't there? It's like a guy of glass. I think it's supposed to be like a millennial. He's like talking to the Pharisees or the gathered sort of like 500 in biblical the a Israel. And um they're kind of going, and how does this electricity work? Exactly. Exactly. I was thinking of that same meme. Yeah. I don't know. i don't know. Yeah. And yet this character from me from the 80s and ninety s Ash, kind of has... He's not like ah a mechanical engineer or anything, he's a shop clerk, but like he has this kind of foundational understanding of how like things work.
Speaker: Yeah. in a way that I think a contemporary protagonist wouldn't, which I find quite specific to that period. I think in America it's also ah somewhat of a class thing. I mean, Ash is ah sort of, you know, he he works at s S-Mart and he works somewhere very inland because he can go to this, you know, ah Appalachian cabin. ah on a weekend trip. And the kids I knew like that, they they had a better sense of like, if the car stopped, ah what you could do. i didn't even know how how I could replace the water in a car, but they could at least do that. And the more middle-class kids who went nearsighted early and were aiming at at university, they they never had that.
Speaker: You know, it's funny. I think you're right about the class angle, John, but there is also and something of ah of a generation a generational intensification of that phenomenon, at least for me. Right? So my father was born in 1948, and his stories are very much those of like...
Speaker: his dad sending him onto a golf course to gather golf balls, to have cleaned in the basement with some contraption he'd rigged together so that he could resell them to the golf course. or the time that my father was sent onto the same golf course to cut down a Christmas tree during the Christmas party. And my father was chased off as he dragged the tree and hurled it over the fence, right? And you know as a result, his attitude for me was very much, you know, because he had been slightly more socially mobile than that. Not that he like went and got a BA or anything like that, but it was mid-century America and a lot of people were able to make it work.
Speaker: yeah um and And so he sort of thought, okay, I need to keep him away from these things. I want him to have to cut down as few Christmas trees during Christmas parties as possible. I want him i don't want him to have to rig up any kind of contraption to sell anything to anybody.
Speaker: and And I do think that Gen X, which, you know, John, I think you're ah sort of ah a leader boomer, as I understand it, or maybe sort of mid-boomer in terms of... I was born in 1955, not that long after your father.
Speaker: Yeah, so but that's right in the middle, right? I mean, in other words, like if 45 is, you know, when the boom starts, and I think they usually take it to about 64, you're kind of dead center, yeah you know?
Speaker: And I think for... My father is relatively old for the age that I am. I'm just 31, right? So he had me later in life. um A lot of kids born around my time, with the exception of, yes, I think very, very working class kids who maybe their dad's a mechanic or something like this, it tried to kind of keep us away. There was a sense in which civilizationally, it was important that we became very effete.
Speaker: Even if that effete-ness was sort of repugnant to our parents in a certain way, how effete we could get. But they wanted a certain amount of that. And it is interesting that in the world of the movie, this kind of nerdy character who today would probably be portrayed as someone who, I don't know, plays video games in between shifts at GameStop or something like that, still has that kind of mechanical knowledge, or at least enough of it to...
Speaker: you know, be able to pass it on combined with but the faith in humanity you get with these guys, even understanding how it could work in the past, right? The Sadducees who actually are able to figure out electricity because they, you know, I don't know, find Tesla's notebooks or whatever.
Speaker: was going say, it to me, Ash was a kind of a a subversion, but like importantly, not a rejection of that kind of like nineteen fifty s American male archetype of like John Wayne or someone, or Marlon Brando.
Speaker: like it's it's that It's playing with that archetype, but it's not rejecting it wholesale. Oh, not at all. I mean, the playground ethics, that is, you bully whoever you can, ah they are...
Speaker: endorsed throughout the movie. It's just that Ash has this opportunity to bully more people than he is normally able to do because people don't know the punchlines that he is about to literally punch them with.
Speaker: And in fact, they they don't know firearms either. That's That's a very bullying scene in a in a kind of cool way. I find it really admirable when Lord Arthur actually, after being uppercut in the face, says,
Speaker: drawing his sword, I'm going to kill you. And Ash pulls out his shotgun and blows the the latter half of of the sword away and then stands up and says, this is my boomstick.
Speaker: You see this? This little baby retails for about $119. got chestnut stock and blah, blah, blah. it's got a chestnut stock and blah blah blah and I love that scene. i yeah I just love that he knows all the details. You know he's sold these before and in Homegolds. I think that's really beautiful. and I think for a lot of people, and certainly for me, the chance to be the witty bully who always has the right line.
Speaker: to spring on people and the right male fist, literally, to spring on people is a great... Yeah. There's an interesting sort of arc for Ash in the film, right, John? Like, he starts off...
Speaker: falling through that the sort of ah evil dead hole from wherever he is in Appalachia. The old evil dead hole. Into early 14th century England, which weirdly looks like Spain, but whatever. um And he's kind of this cripple. He's he's lacking a hand.
Speaker: He's a slave. And obviously, as he progresses through the film, he gains... he Obviously, he has this very cool chainsaw at the start, but like he loses that, and then he's kind of a cripple, then he gains this chainmail fist.
Speaker: And then he suddenly, he's in these these fine linens and he gains armour. Then halfway through the film, sort of these like peasants start going, Hello, sire! Hello, sire! What can we talk about, sire? He's suddenly gaining and middle all this like social status. um I just think it's an interesting, like I don't know, parable of social mobility there in the film.
Speaker: Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but i thought it was funny. I would love to, I think I can yeah try and and tie some of these threads together with sort of ah ah a point or a question, which is you just mentioned the scene where you know he's a slave at the beginning, right? Like that's how we meet him at the very opening. And he opens with that, you know, what is now a kind of highly overdone, you know, i bet you're wondering how I ended up here kind of thing.
Speaker: Well, I'm a slave in 1300 AD, you know, and I'm being dragged to my death. um That's exactly it, John, is that I think what's really interesting about watching a movie like Army of Darkness is kind of eighty s into early 90s.
Speaker: I think of it as almost like a D&D culture movie or something, is that today, a lot of those tropes or ideas have sort of become so highly ironized that they've lost any ability to connect to them. So in other words, you've talked about the wonderful way in which within the movie, he's able to you know drop some playground wisdom on these on what you know what are basically children on the playground, precisely because they don't know them.
Speaker: At the beginning of the movie, he's able to give us this, I bet you're wondering how I ended up here, but it's done in such a way that Of course, most of the audience, I'm sure, is at least passingly familiar with the other movies. So there's a way in which it both allows a new viewer to come in end kind of subverts or plays on this existing expectation.
Speaker: Now, and I don't know, John, how many you know superhero movies of the last 15 years you've watched or things like this. But at at this point, they've somehow disconnected those ideas and tropes, the kind of smart aleck dialogue, the framing device that we just talked about, things like this.
Speaker: Yeah, i' so I've seen a few of them when I when i fly. god you cross the Pacific and you've got time for a lot of movies. um And a lot of those movies seem to show up.
Speaker: I can imagine no worse punishment maybe than being dropped in the bottomless pit. Yeah. from Than watching a superhero movie on like a nine-hour flight. Yeah. I haven't done it very recently, but...
Speaker: But the one thing that that i was really struck by when I tried to remember for the purposes of this interview, the the scenes I like best in in the movie, one of them is the very ending scene that I've talked about before, Hail to the King, baby. And that really wouldn't be very possible now. yeah I mean, America has squeezed out a lot of people who are in the situation of Ash.
Speaker: Ash was not a big achiever. That was very clear. he was Even though he had ah Bridget Fonda as a girlfriend, and has some have he was only working in an S-Mart. And I don't know if you can retain any dream of yourself as a hero when you're only working in that kind of job.
Speaker: That's a ah very a very good point because you know we're always thinking in terms of generations on this on this podcast, at least for this particular season we are. And now I think if you made this movie, he would have to like invest in crypto. or so like The way that you could tell this story would not be... yeah you know he like for instance, just just materially, right like ah what' he supposed to be in this film? A now would not have a car or a girlfriend.
Speaker: and there's no yeah There's no future there. I mean, like you couldn't even go to the past to Jerry Riga future, which actually reminds me, I hadn't thought about this till this exact moment, but this movie has a little bit in common with another great sort of American novel, which is a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. Oh, yeah. Which is, I mean, that's a little different, but it is this kind of similar tale of a guy who's able to go back in time and use that to you know basically totally change the way that this past And he sets up an electrical grid which fries all the goddamn nights. So they're in iron clothing and ha ha. ha
Speaker: I like this, ah yeah I don't know, this this thought about where that person would be now. Because if I imagine, not only would they not have a girlfriend or any kind of you know future car to speak of, but also like what would they actually even do?
Speaker: You know, they would, would they just become a slave and then the rest of the movie would be like a really sad version of Spartacus? Like, you know, the the only truthful version you can tell would be, you know, I don't know, working in the obsidian mines until at the end they're killed by, you know, the plague or something like, well, I guess 1300, no plague yet, but what we'll just, or just, ah you know, getting a ah sharp piece of something and figuring I'll take somebody out with me. And I'll hope it's fast.
Speaker: yeah' I'll kill the orc overseer who exists in this version of the universe. Yeah. Yeah. it's ah it's It's very strange. i I wanted to go back and think about this. We've talked about the 80s and you know how these things play now versus then.
Speaker: But I guess I'm particularly curious about it in the world of of of Reagan. I mean, at this point, George Herbert Walker, you know, Poppy Bush himself is the president of the U.S. when this comes out. But I've always been kind of fascinated by the idea that the 80s, this decade of I don't know, would-be moral uprightness that's also tinged with Gordon Gekko.
Speaker: is also the golden age of kind of exploitation and geek cinema. Yeah. When somehow the underdog tries to make and does for a period make a series of very successful films about, you know, being a kind of fantasy underdog who overcomes in various ways. and Yeah.
Speaker: I guess I'm just curious. I don't know if the question is where you think that came from or how it was able to come to success, but as someone who you know lived through it in a certain way, you just talked about the early version of that with David Lynch, which is, you know I don't know, maybe a bit higher brow, but I think comes out of the same place.
Speaker: Well, I mean, yeah, that's that's someone who is... To say that the the protagonist of Eraserhead is a loser is to put it very, very mildly. But ah I think the first Evil Dead movie came out in 82, was it?
Speaker: Early 80s. Yeah, and and the second one, I don't know, 87. To me, there's a big difference between... those years. And I can't help put it personal terms because in 1982, I wasn't sick and I had a real future as a grad student. In 1987, I was what seemed like permanently ill and I had no future.
Speaker: And ah in the 1982 era, my first thought, and I think this is something that was very common among people who haunted the video stores was, I could have thought of that. Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I? um And that I was bitterly envious of anyone who had made it.
Speaker: Like, I thought these guys had made it once and for all. Because the big distinction then was either you've made it or you haven't, you know, either you're cops or you're little people. yeah And I...
Speaker: i hadn't made it. I mean, Mark and I were playing around with screenplays. We wrote a lot of screenplays. None of them went anywhere. And I was slowly dealing with the fact that I'd made the wrong career choice and i nobody was going to hire me.
Speaker: Fellow PhD here, John. i ah i you know I also have a podcast. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Yeah, we died a few times, but here we are. Boing! We're still going.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and in the, the later eighties version, i don't, I don't know if I even saw that I was, ah just increasingly embittered. So I, I don't know for me, the personal ups and downs, uh, control a lot of what I felt about, about the movie. Uh, I,
Speaker: I mean, I don't know. It did have
Speaker: a deep pathos for me. And I think Army of Darkness does have a deep pathos, which is unusual for Raimi films. That's not yeah something he specializes in.
Speaker: But it's it's something, i mean, maybe he is just a dumb clerk in that last scene, and you're ah you're aware of that. yeah But just as in other movies of of that era, from Chinatown to Blade Runner, ah there there's a sense that everything is deeply sad and doomed.
Speaker: But there is something you can salvage out of that. I think that's a ah great point. I guess if I can i ask the question in kind of ah an addendum to the question.
Speaker: You mentioned you know early 80s, late 80s feeling you know quite different for you personally, but also for America. I mean, things were trending in a different direction by 88 from you know the Carter presidency or um you know early Reagan.
Speaker: I guess Sam kind of touched on this earlier. One of the themes that's really come out as we've gone through these movies is Gen X. And we're thinking of this as a Gen X movie in a certain way.
Speaker: They have this rap for being apathetic. You know, like there's a so the Simpsons episode where Lisa gets married, right? And Maggie is grown up. And Maggie is portrayed as being this kind of like classic mid-90s teenager.
Speaker: She doesn't say anything, not because she's still a baby, but because she's, you know, a checked out teenager who doesn't really care about anything. Yeah. Or who gets interrupted when she's going to sing at the wedding. ah This is the archetype, right? Yeah.
Speaker: On the other hand, a lot of the movies that we've watched come with what feel like actually very strong moral universes, the kinds of things that would come out, I think, in the anti-apartheid campaign that I know Mark has talked about as being you know a part of his kind of formation when he was coming through college, or um you know the the animal rights movement that becomes very important in the late 80s, early 90s, the growth of PETA, things like this.
Speaker: This movie is kind of interesting because it forsakes that it's not a didactic movie, right? It's not intended to tell you how to live or to tell you what's right or wrong about the world.
Speaker: It seems to be intended as a a personal story, something for you to slot yourself into, which is yeah kind of what you're describing. And I guess the question is, you mentioned watching Eraserhead and it being, I guess, about hearing the sadness reflected back to you, right? Kind of like going to church to hear you're a good person, but in this case, going to church to hear you're a bad person or something like that. right. right Army of Darkness, I guess I'm curious when you watched it on Mark Ames' kind of suggestion, this later sort of you know ripe Kiwi stage of your existence, did do you think when you watched it, you were watching it
Speaker: ah you know, for the purposes of empowerment, would you have thought of it that way? I guess I'm trying, because on the show, talk about these films both as what they meant to people in the moment, what they meant socially or culturally, and maybe what they tell us now about, I don't know, folks for whom they were important at the time. Yeah, no, i think I did. i very much did. um For one thing, i was ah I was terrified because I had to teach hundreds of med students who hated my guts. And this was like being able to touch on a cultural core that made me very proud of America. the
Speaker: The smart ass who actually has a good heart and is a coward most of the time until it really counts. And then he's not. I'm reminded Last night, my wife and I watched Beau Travai, the Claire Denis film from the late 90s. I don't know if either is familiar with it.
Speaker: It's about the French Foreign Legion. And I said to my wife, you can't imagine how much as a child I imagined that I could be in the French Foreign Legion. which you know And you know it's funny to think of the past. It's like, well, really, you only end up in the French Foreign Legion because you you know killed a guy in Somaliland and need someone to be lawless, but with you know with state sanctioned. So you know me growing up in suburban New Jersey, the odds were always going to be pretty low. But you know you you had this imagination.
Speaker: And it sounds kind of like army of, but Beau Travai does not give you that fantasy, by the way. It is not kind to the French foreign legion. Right. Right. um But imagining a version of it where, you know, it is just Arnold, you know, going in and I don't know, executing Algerian terrorists for the Algerian state or, you know, jihad, like did that, that would have meant a lot to me at that time in my life to imagine that I could have been in the French foreign legion yeah at a younger point.
Speaker: So I guess it, it It sounds like it is fulfilling some version of that can put masculine fantasy, which is, you know, fine. I don't mean that in a moralistic way. because Well, no, no. I mean, I once deployed this movie, as it were, to show to three female colleagues from from the Australasian academic world, a one of whom was an art history ah teacher, one of whom who I was going out with at the time was was a women's studies professor.
Speaker: the The art history professor said about halfway through, this is nothing but a male fantasy. And I just sort of collapsed on the on the sofa to laughing for five minutes.
Speaker: that's That's sort of a, my first date movie with my wife was Eyes Wide Shut. So, you know, i not quite the same, but maybe a a similar decision with respect to the Yeah, let's go get some robes.
Speaker: Yeah. Sorry, Sam, go ahead. If we're thinking of these films as kind of choose-your-own-adventure-style flipbooks, I think I would pick Eyes Wide Shut over.
Speaker: you could be You could be Jeffrey Epstein you can be you know Special Forces Commando in the 1300. Your choice. yeah um Yeah. My point I was just quickly going to make is that so many of the Gen X films that we've watched have protagonists who sort of rail against the corrosive effects of sort of blind and sort of like visceral pure entertainment, rail against consumerism, rail against the kind of distracting nature of being entertained, right?
Speaker: And yet... the object of their kind of antipathy is never really presented to us. It's always this kind of like vague other thing that they're railing against. And I kind of feel Army of Darkness is that object. like army of Army of Darkness is the kind of film that, you know, like, gosh, ah I don't Ethan Hawke's character in like,
Speaker: before sunrise or whatever would like spend 10 minutes like slagging off. Like it is, it's just like a piece of like pure entertainment in ah in in an odd way. He'd mentioned Camus and, you know, talk about, i don't know why army of darkness proves Camus right or something like that.
Speaker: Like, it's just, i'm I think the first thing I, said the first message I sent to you is just, this is silly. It's got a deep like, like Monty Python-esque silliness to it. Yeah. That's okay. That's, that's where I have to bow out. Uh, And I know this makes me seem rather stupid, but um it did not seem silly to me.
Speaker: and No, but I think that's important because I'm a, listen, I love slapstick. So I'm a big fan of Jerry Lewis. I don't know if you've seen any of his movies. No. ah Well, you know, he's he's all about the the big slapstick or his, you know, former guest on the pod, Eileen Jones. And I think a friend of yours, John yeah is a big Jacques Tati fan. Who's, you know, all about ah the physical comedy and physical expression, let's say.
Speaker: So I think. And I don't know, you mentioned Monty Python, Sam, but there are parts of Army of Darkness for me that are full-on Looney Tunes. You know what I mean? Like, silly in the sense that they're playing on something quite literally cartoonishly silly. Yeah, I mean, the bit where he has the fight with his own body, and he's like crawling around like a spider on all fours. Yes, or when, you know, sort of Twilight Zone style, he fractures a mirror into a bunch of tiny versions of himself who then torture him.
Speaker: That's kind of scary, though, if you're in the mood. It's very scary. When he the the little guy jumps down his throat and he pours this boiling hot tea down his throat saying, How'd you like that, little fella? Ah!
Speaker: And of course it doesn't work. that's I think the key there, you know he's he should be torturing himself, but somehow seems totally fine with it. you know Very like Bugs Bunny style. um Well, and that if I can bring it then to what Sam was saying, this is, I think, made by a generation raised on Looney Tunes, raised on Jerry Lewis, raised on you know this traditional kind of American art of slapstick and the cartoonish.
Speaker: Now, that's that's something that I, yeah, I realize you're right there, because for me, the link is the Coen brothers, who were actually working on...
Speaker: um Evil Dead movies, or at least the first one. were Ramey early on, right, if I'm not mistaken. And the bits of early establishing scenes, like when the creaking rocker on the porch stops moving, that's a very Cohn scene.
Speaker: And ah there's a scene from the other end of their career Ballad of Buster Scruggs, where great movie oh and one of the best movies I have ever seen. And ah Buster walks into this saloon with his bucktooth grin and he dusts himself off and he moves out of this ray of sunlight that's inside the room.
Speaker: And There, I swear to God, as a silhouette in smoke or dust is the the silhouette of Bugs Bunny you know after he's gone. Which makes perfect sense because I think, Sam, it's interesting to think of like how both the Coens and Ramey were received by the critical establishment of the moment.
Speaker: in A critical establishment that was older then I think the influence of some of these ideas. like I think about... Ebert, for example, you know, the, I don't know what to call him, the old fat man, you know, I don't know, whatever, your the Orson Welles of mid-late century criticism, um and who, you know, is very important for me as I get into movies. I'm not going to totally badmouth the man, but I think he gave Army of Darkness something like two and a half stars. And while think he was relatively early to the Coens, you know, a lot of critics weren't.
Speaker: So there is this, I don't know, sort of Gen X resurrection. I mean, a lot of these filmmakers are very, very late boomers or or you know early Gen Xers born in the mid-late 60s or what have you, who bring this particular...
Speaker: I don't know, ethos to filmmaking that the Coens will take in a prestige sort of serious direction. Although they they still get attacked for not being serious enough. And yeah i don't I don't understand that at all. but that's just That's just stupid.
Speaker: You think about something like The Big Lebowski, which, you know... is it Sam, I'm sure you you have to have seen The Big Lebowski. Of course, yeah. you know i don't I don't know what they're doing in the UK. Maybe you just watched David Lean movies all day and that sort of... Probably I did, but yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we are both big Lawrence of Arabia fans, which is another male fantasy ah that I you know personally enjoy participating in. i Yeah. I think it's like a sickly aristocratic, like, clustered bisexual fantasy. Well, that's the British male fantasy. You know, that's the difference.
Speaker: is yeah you know to be the sort of the colonial administrator who remembers a trick or two from boarding school, but you know sort of dies in the desert or something. now for For me, what's ruined that is actually going to teach in Saudi Arabia. It's like, ah you know what it's like to actually be out in a sandstorm? It's it's not sand even, it's dust, it's grit that gets in your teeth. yeah Well, and and this is why the David Lynch version of Dune will always be better because, you know, the French with their Orientalist fantasies can't capture the ah the true kind of comedic horror that is being in a desert, you know, no disrespect to... a
Speaker: Villeneuve intended, but yeah you know like I guess it is a little disrespect. What can I say? you know ah Sam, as a product of the English boarding school system, i mean perhaps your schoolyard bullying tactics could be combined with the schoolyard bullying tactics of ah John's generation to produce some sort of next-level Jeff Goldblum and the Flies-style schoolyard bully. It's really like mid-Atlantic-style bullying. Yeah. i have so I have to admit, I wasn't i wasn't but i was i was sort of Bullying didn't come come into my nature, but i was also about six foot three, four at age 16. I was i was sort of like Switzerland, effectively. I was neither bullied nor able...
Speaker: ah I wonder, one your questions, Chase, that you wrote down this kind of jock jock nerd dichotomy that plays out in something, I think it's slightly earlier, like The War of the Nerds or is Revenge of the Nerds? Revenge of the, oh, I was thinking about Revenge of the Nerds the whole time I watched this movie, which, John, you must be familiar with that movie.
Speaker: Oh, yes, yes. I mean, it was, it's, well, what I thought about that movie is, um I'm sure these people are not versed in Nietzschean philosophy, but Revenge of the Nerds covers an awful lot of ground. And it's not just a joke.
Speaker: No, no. but no that's the The reason I was thinking of it the whole time, Sam, just to kind of add to your question... Because, well, first of all, my father, not a big movie guy, he watched two movies with me growing up over and over again, Bloodsport and Revenge of the Nerds, which should tell you something about the cultural world of my household.
Speaker: um And Revenge of the Nerds is a really nasty movie. yeah Especially if you watch it now, it is a movie about getting the girl by deception of kind of finding a way to... I mean, it's it's Elon Musk.
Speaker: I mean, essentially. um It really is. And this movie, I found... ah Interesting because despite what the art history professor said when you, you know, ah sat her down and and tried to give her a course in masculine studies or what have you, John, that the movie is quite far removed from that. In fact, it might be a male fantasy.
Speaker: But it's not a male fantasy of revenge on women or even really revenge on the world. It's a fantasy of success and heroism yeah ah in spite of and informed by one's kind of foibles and desire to play Vampire the Masquerade, Bloodlines, and other such tabletop RPGs. like It lacks that cruelty that is so often characteristic of these kind of 80s nerd fantasy films. And I say that to its credit.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. It's weird how that that echoes down the down the decades, like when Homer Simpson in ah and a much later episode of The Simpsons gets to college because he's almost...
Speaker: fried everybody in Springfield with the nuclear power. He leans out of the window and and says, nerds! Yeah, and that there's this geeky, harmless guy just going past saying, huh, what?
Speaker: This is a, actually, this fits into the kind of Gen X arc that we've been talking about because it is true. If you watch a 70s, 80s into kind of at least part of the 90s college movie, and and there's a certain amount of this in the 2000s, there is this like,
Speaker: you know, sort of post-colonial subcontinental belief in the caste system. You know, where it's like, it's when Homer goes and he says, Marge, it is my duty as a jock to make fun of nerds. That is how the ecosystem works. And of course, the episode is so funny because no one else thinks that in the 90s. But also, I have to point out in that clip where he leans out the car and screams, nerd!
Speaker: the The character he's screaming at is like dressed in nerd clothing, but is like six foot five and jacked. i like That's that the innate joke at the heart of this, right? Is that like the kind of the the the binary has collapsed by the time that this instance is is making a joke. I found the binary collapsed This summer, I graduated from Pleasant Hill High School and ah went to UC Berkeley. that That did not operate at UC Berkeley.
Speaker: i I didn't make a big social hit at UC Berkeley, but there were other reasons for that. But um there were there was no bullying of that sort.
Speaker: In fact, i there was just a massive indifference, massive, massive indifference. Which I think is is an interesting kind of transformation, right? So like, when I think about, Sam, you're 100% right about the breakdown of the binary.
Speaker: And of course, I need to add here the scene in The Simpsons where they make fun of a grad student with his little ponytail and Marge says, you know, come on, his life is bad enough. Like, don't, you know, you don't need to add insult to injury or he's a grad student. He knows. The bot guy's like, hey, mom, look, I'm a grad student. I made $28,000 last year. You know, and um which, you know, in the 90s, he was basically a king. I mean, come on, those rates have not gone made like two k off that. this is So the the the point I'm making, I guess, is that you see that binary breakdown over time until...
Speaker: you know I would say, certainly by our moment, and I would say a bit earlier, you know we we live in the Revenge of the Nerds. We live in you know Mecca Hitler, Grok. That is what the news is about, where Grok calls itself Mecca Hitler, and you know Mark Zuckerberg comes out with a perm and wearing a big chain and a big t-shirt and Well, yeah, that is interesting. i say Mark Zuckerberg is kind of like trying to do the Ash Williams. Ash Campbell or Ash Williams?
Speaker: Ash Campbell. No, it's Bruce Campbell Ash Williams. Mixing my Welsh and Scottish. But Zuckerberg is attempting this kind of fusion that you see in the Army of the Dead, right? Which is probably a film he would have seen, actually, as a teenager. But... um Well, that's kind of the point, though, is that like we got the Revenge of the Nerds version of this fantasy, right? like The way I think it has actually turned out in our kind of Silicon Valley hellhole, I mean, I know, John, you know, yat Yasha Levine's book, Surveillance Valley, which is kind of about like the original nerds who no one liked who did this and then became kind of sex pest hippie guys, which is an earlier version of what we have now. It's just more dominant.
Speaker: That As that binary breaks down, what you get in its stead is a kind of ah an even colder indifference, almost like the universalization of the Berkeley aesthetic that you're talking about, John. Yeah, yeah. where you know now you know ah If I can put it in terms I've heard you put it before, you know everybody, I guess, is is treated kind of like the silent George Wallace voter, where you kind of just pretend it's not going on if you don't matter. Right.
Speaker: Right. but um you don't need the full on fantasy of revenge or in the more sort of as you put it earlier pc version john you get the friend group that is somehow like contains the entire high school. Yeah. That, you know, like the coder guy is friends with the jock, who's friends with the popular girl who's dating the jock, who's dating like the hot goth girl.
Speaker: And, you know, all of them somehow are- I was going to say, yeah, like Gen Z, the kind of like- I suppose, well, this is the kind of millennial casting battle, this kind of like millennial projection of high just Gen Z high school life, because i presume all the writers of current high school dramas on Netflix or whatever are probably Gen X or millennial.
Speaker: But these kind of like, I'm trying to think of an example, sex education on Netflix... God, I saw the poster for that and it made me want to commit seppuku, I'm going to be honest with you. Yeah, I mean, I did actually halfway through watching series with my parents, but it does, it has this very egalitarian...
Speaker: And I don't know if it's true or not because I'm 29 and haven't been in a high school for a long time. But ah ah I don't know if this is sort of fantasy of egalitarianism that is projected onto Gen Z high school and college films is true. But like very much as you're saying, like if you look at a series like etc Sex Education, there is a hierarchy of virtue in these programs. There's not really a hierarchy of like caste or subculture.
Speaker: And it does feel like... the kind of early 90s to maybe the early 2000s was the last time that this was really a thing. ah do wonder how much like the incel, as a kind of weird, arbitrary, casual category has replaced the nerd.
Speaker: I think it's it's quite big because when you think about the equivalent of an Ash-type character now, right you're talking about someone who probably spends most of their time online.
Speaker: Ray, you're talking about someone whose community, insofar as it exists, is is going to be forums, is going to be you know, basically the younger person version of what I know you're fond of reading, John, the Yahoo.com comments, right? Right, yeah. These places where a certain kind of alienated person can congregate. And I think you're right, Sam, that like, this is almost like a a happier fantasy, a fantasy where the teenager, instead of going postal, could, you know, um get a chainsaw arm and cut up some some some skeletons and defeat a lich.
Speaker: Also played by Bruce Campbell, it's worth saying, I should add, under all that. Oh, yeah. it's His alter ego is a wonderful character. um A badass!
Speaker: Yeah, but anyway... Which I love that they just call it that. It is very medieval to just do these allegories. I do wonder how much... My inability to like, how do I put Because I kind of came of age during the sort of epoch of like grand sort of really like swords and sandals film, right? So like my earliest filmic memories are like Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, Lord the Rings. And it's kind of very self-serious, very sort of like Wagnerian and it's kind of like attempt at some kind of like total world building.
Speaker: like that That is very much how fantasy is has coded for me over the years, because that that was my first exposure to it. And kind of like reaching back beyond that bridge to a sort of earlier period, which I wasn't you know didn't grow up with, but has just similar tropes.
Speaker: The siege at the end of the film feels very much like the kind of Minas Tirith siege or the Battle of Helm's Deep. um And yeah, obviously completely slapstick and kind of ridiculous. and It's just an interesting exercise to like reach back beyond that kind of epoch, a very serious fantasy in the early 2000s to something that's much more light-hearted.
Speaker: Your point, I think, is even more telling than you may know, because if we can go back to the land of the, you know, Kiwi and the Koala for a second, Peter Jackson in 1992, of course, makes Braindead. Right. Which is one of the great sort of gore-fest exploitation, you know, sort of Ramey-adjacent horror comedy movies. Yeah. So even within his own arc, Sam, the sort of arc of this, the filmmaker of that generation,
Speaker: you see a movement from the kind of tone we're talking about to something very different. I mean, what you just spoke about a moment ago. I did want to, because we've we've held John for, you know, let's just say we've we've held him in the bottomless pit for a very slow series of spike walls coming towards him, but coming nonetheless.
Speaker: I wanted to ask about punk because, you know, the movie is not by any, you know, there are no Mohawks, Sid Vicious, to my knowledge, makes no appearance. But,
Speaker: Obviously, we've talked about punk on this podcast because even though most Xers were too young to you know live through that first generation of punk, except as relatively young children and teen you know young teens, the sort of popular imagination of the punk is very important. It's where I think some of that kind of standoffish, apathetic thing that reaches an apogee and grunge and nirvana and that stuff really comes from.
Speaker: And there's a ah kind of a sub-genre of punk that that overlapped with the kind of geek thing that we've been talking about insofar as maybe geek can be more readily applied to the... Well, that yeah, that would be Devo. I mean, yes Devo, possibly the only band in history which did not take itself seriously enough.
Speaker: Which is, I mean, itself a kind of punk. Yeah, I mean, and that's a punk ethos, right, to apply it to. um Or, for example, ah you'll know, John, they he just passed away, the lead singer for the ah the band, the kind of post-punk group. um Oh, Perubu.
Speaker: Yes, which is like an early punkish group, late seventy s early 80s, as I recall. Yeah, but they they sort of evolved very impressively outside of punk, but they were part of this...
Speaker: c click of bands that Devo was also part of in ah the industrial east of Ohio. There's Cleveland, right, I think. Yeah.
Speaker: They never looked like punks and they never even tried to. the The main singer dressed in whatever would fit him. And, you know, that wasn't easy. He had that song, Mom Threw Me Out Till I Find Some Pants That Fit. And... Punk sentiment, if I've ever heard one, you know? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But I do think that later on you get this blending of a certain kind of quasi-geek culture into this kind of punk ethos. If not, obviously, punk is a musical movement, right? So I think about bands who will come up like The Cramps or a certain sort of like post-Goth, you know, sort of board gaming culture, things like this.
Speaker: How do you feel that that played into the coming to age of Gen X or even yourself as somebody a bit older, but who it sounds like kind of came into adulthood through that paradigm. Yeah, I came into adulthood through that paradigm because there wasn't any for me before that. I'm not a very flexible person.
Speaker: And ah I didn't recognize anything familiar in popular culture until... Until Eraserhead.
Speaker: And and then then it came in a flood. Or ah I found access to it somehow. There were there were things that had gone before, ah like the Stooges. um But I didn't know about them. Everybody mentions them. Or MC5.
Speaker: MC5 was not on AM radio that miserable losers like me had access to. MC5 was an elite taste and i never, never knew anything about it. But punk kind of hit popular culture head on and suddenly what were a lot of depressive symptoms in my case, like that I wore the same clothes day after day, um that could be ah construed as a uniform.
Speaker: i I'm reminded of your boots in Pleasant Hill. I'm sorry to bring up details from the memoir, but yeah it is it is a a book I really enjoyed. And yeah, I remember your boots, you're trudging in everywhere in the in the same, you know, to the point of bleeding, as I recall.
Speaker: Oh yeah, I blood in those boots many times. Yeah. Very punk. Very punk. Yeah. but But you couldn't show it off. It's like, here, I'm bleeding, you know. But that's kind of interesting because it's almost as if, if I can take,
Speaker: you know ah Army of Darkness a kind of metonymy. It's almost like it takes until a certain point in the for popular culture to be ready for that, whatever that is. I'm not able to put a label on it, but I appreciate hearing that because We don't always have guests on who, I think, interacted with the social currents that we're talking about. you know Sometimes we do. Eileen Jones talked about indie filmmaking in the 90s, and um we had one of the producers of Fight Club, Matthew Spector, on. So you know we have talked to people who lived through the experiences. But I think a ah real defining point for Gen X that we've been able to kind of come upon is that
Speaker: Something about the afterlife of punk, not the first thing, not you know the actual music, but just what it created. There's this kind of shift from punk as a subculture to punk as an idiom, right?
Speaker: Like, Ash Williams, the ah the protagonist, he's kind of like... wry, cynical... i mean that There is like a sort of genealogy that you can trace back to Johnny Rotten or to like Lou Reed even earlier as a kind of proto-punk.
Speaker: And yet by the time you get to The Army of Darkness, it's kind of like a pose. as it's it's It's like a rhetoric that can be picked up and dropped rather than something substantial. But I don't think that's necessarily like a bad thing. It's just...
Speaker: Well, I think there are, in every pop culture movement, there are people who believe, and I was like those people. I wanted punk to have an army, and I wasn't kidding.
Speaker: The army of darkness, if you will. Yeah. But then, for me, it it I don't know, we'd given a lot of family to the clergy, and punk also felt...
Speaker: oddly Catholic, which is strange and I can't justify it. Oh, no, i can I can tell you that that um that overlap is ah as an idea, i mean, I'm not crediting it or not crediting it, but is alive and well. I mean, in the mid-2010s, you had like you know Instagram accounts called like The Punk Catholic. or Oh, okay. All right. Well, they never told me about it. does it What is it that you find a Catholic about it? Is it the kind of like focus on iconography? and No, but I was raised on stories of doomed Irish rebellions and doomed was a big part of that.
Speaker: ah And I don't know, punk seemed pre-doomed. So it it fit right in there. Well, maybe we leave it there because honestly, like I can go on and on as probably has been detected at this point. So first, I want to say thank you very much, John, for coming on.
Speaker: And second all, I want to give you an opportunity to plug you know anything that you're up to. So what is going on? Well, there's always Radio War Nerd. If people want to look that up, you can find you can find the program on Patreon, Radio War Nerd. ah And I also have a book of essays coming out, which is going to be called To the Crows.
Speaker: Cheerful. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's it's from this Greek saying, Eis Korakis, and imagined a pseudonym of Eis Korakis a private eye or something. So um it just came about that way. But yeah, that should be out soon. And I also have, well, yeah, the novel plus now, the ah travel memoir, Erdogan Pizza,
Speaker: And, uh, yeah, if you like academic books, I have a poetic occasion from Milton to Wordsworth. It's a real page turner.
Speaker: So this has been death is a photograph culture at the end of history. um write us at death photo pod at gmail.com or of course, subscribe at patrion.com slash death photo pod.
Speaker: Hit that button. Uh, listen, wherever podcasts are found. And thanks everybody. Thanks so much guys. Thanks.
