Welcome back to New Think Green. My name is David Barr. With me as always is my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg?
I'm doing great David. How are you? I'm well and Alex. How are you?
I'm doing all right, man. How are you doing? Good. So I wanted to bring up something slightly personal, but a story that two of us, Alex, were involved in.
And I think the statute of limitations has passed. Do you mind if I share it? I know you don't know what I'm about to bring up. That time at an apple store, we knocked over those stores.
No, we'll say that for another episode. That was great. We smashed up a bunch of stuff. The night we had to say goodbye to one another at the graduate school.
And let me just because this is a good, my favorite part of this is when we realized we had smashed something that's very loud. We both ran in opposite directions and that was it and it's just like we, I was like, see you later. So I was volunteering at a soup kitchen that night in Washington, DC. Oh, but that's this day.
That's what you get your meals. So let me introduce the episode very quickly and then I'll circle back to the story, but I wanted to tell tonight we're discussing Hitchcock's film, Rope. And I was based off of a real life incident that happened. The murder of a young man, 14 year old named Bobby Franks, by two University of Chicago philosophy students in Gileopold and Lo, they murdered him.
And so Rope famously is about a, it's essentially it's the same story to philosophy students murder. Murder or third. And it's the un-rope for the folks at home, Lo would go on to translate basically the entire Greek corpus in English and facing pages. Greg, you play sports, right?
You should know you should not take every shot, right? Sorry, is that low? I'm not as fast as the ball. I like to even do a second.
Sorry, sorry. Sorry, David. The story I wanted to relate, this happened a few years ago. I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, Greg was a graduate student.
And I went on to St. John's where I met Alex. So Alex would come to sit in every now and again on classes with Charles Butterworth. This is where he met Greg.
Now Alex and I immediately clicked, but Greg has kind of all this stuff and we see and we hope our listeners do too soon. You know, where he eats at Cracker Barrel and everybody knows his first name on Apple. Anyway, so Alex and I decided one day that we were going to murder Greg and except for the horse at Cracker Barrel, not too many folks would miss him. And so we had this great plan, how we're going to murder Greg and then we were going to stick him in a big old dresser and then we're going to throw a party and it was hilarious.
And then Charles Butterworth, we were going to have a party and he wanted to come. But since we had seen Rope, we knew that if we invited a really smart philosophy professor, we'd be undone. So that is the day Charles saved Greg's life. And I think you've never heard that story, Greg.
Oh, wow. Thanks, Chuck. Can I read something from what Leopold and Loeb did? This is what David and I were planning to.
This is a real story, by the way, Leopold and Loeb were on this. So they picked up. So they put their plan in motion on the afternoon of May 21st, 1924, using an automobile that Leopold rented under the name of the name, born and be ballad. They offered Frank's a ride as he walked home from school.
The boy refused initially because his destination was less than two blocks away. The Loeb persuaded him to enter the car to discuss the tennis racket that he had been using. The precise sequence of events that followed remains in dispute, but a preponderance of opinion placed Leopold behind the wheel of the car while Loeb sat in the backseat with the chisel. Loeb struck Frank's who was sitting up in the passenger several times in the head with the chisel and dragged him into the backseat and gagged him where he died.
With the body on the floorboard out of you, the men drove to their predetermined dumping spot, your wolf, Lake, and Hammond in Vienna. After nightfall, they removed and discarded Frank's clothes and concealed the body in a culvert along the Pennsylvania railroad tracks north of the lake. To obscure the body's identity, they poured hydrochloric acid on his face and his genitals to describe the back God that he had been circumcised. So Greg, you dodged a wheel bullet.
Yeah, so a little bit more backgrounds and Greg and glad we become extremely close now and we can share things like this. Right. Yeah. Me too.
Leopold and Loeb were very, they were very wealthy. They grew up just to be clear here. You guys are Leopold and Loeb in this story and I'm the victim of the murder. Is that what I'm?
Yeah, that's what I explicitly said. Okay. All right. Okay.
That was not subtext. Okay. No being around Bush here, Greg. So they were, they were very, very wealthy kids, both proposed.
One of them graduated from or entered university at 15 or something. Yeah, really smart. Really smart kids. They became, if actually, with Nietzsche, I know some analytic listeners, you know, maybe the hosts of the partial exam, like we'll say, oh, they were Strauss.
No, no, this is years before Strauss, they learned from somebody else, but they became infatuated with this concept of the U Grimage. And they thought that superior being should, being should murder inferior ones. And I'm ashamed to say Alex and I once held those views with respect to your murder to Greg. Wait a minute.
You guys think I'm inferior? No, no, no, no. So, so give us the plot, Greg, of the Hitchcock's film. It was first a play which Hitchcock adapted, but again, all based on Leopold and Loeb story.
Right. So it was based on some British play apparently, but Rope is a 1948 film. It stars a bunch of, look, we're not, none of us are film professors, anything about cinematography or lighting or grips. I don't even know what that is actually.
So we're just talking about what this play is about, what it reveals about the human condition or whatnot. But yeah, it was based, it was a 1948 movie. The only actor I was familiar with was Jimmy Stewart. He plays the professor, Rupert Cattle, as I was saying, Coddle.
And basically the story is two young men, it's, they were dafferly dressed, by the way, just immaculate, perfect suits, Brandon and Philip. It's not clear to me what they do for a living. That's not clear at all in the film, but they must be very successful because they have a penthouse suite in Manhattan. I think they, they're both recent Harvard graduates.
So I think they, no, no, because they make fun of another kid who's a Harvard graduate. So they're not Harvard graduates. So I don't know where they are, but they made fun of it. They went to a prep school.
They went to prep school. That's clear. I assumed Columbia just on the joke they made about the other guy that had gone. I guess they're one of the victim, the victim may be found Harvard in any event.
In any event, this is a movie. It's all filmed so as to seem like it's a single take. It wasn't a single take because of the limited technology at the time, but the whole movie is filmed in a way so that it looks like it's a single take, which means the whole movie isn't real time or meant to seem like it's in real time. And the movie opens with two young men, Leopold and Lobe figures, who fancy themselves super humans or the upper class, not just upper class, like the sort of the impressive types of the cultural and intellectual superiors who are good and evil.
I'll be above you. Yeah. And they've decided to prove their superiority by murdering their mutual friends, whose name is David. The movie opens, well, the movie opens with the sort of scene of the street outside of their apartment complex.
But the first scene inside the apartment is them strangling David and then putting him inside a chest in their apartment. Everyone's immaculately dressed are two, to say protagonists is a weird word, but the two main actors are the two main characters Brandon and Philip. The rest of the play is the rest of the movie, excuse me, is basically these two characters trying to host a dinner party for their, I would say friends, but they actually despise these other guests. They're the people who are invited.
And they have this party, they've moved the dinner table to the chest where their friend David is sort of entombed, and the whole party is like they're gonna have their friends out there dining over the dead body of their mutual friend. They've Brandon unbeknownst to Philip has invited their old prep school teacher played by Jimmy Stewart, Rupert, to the dinner party. And basically the idea is we're gonna, the perfect murder, we're gonna execute it and the cherry on top of this Sunday of murdering is we're gonna hold this party where everyone's around and no one's gonna realize that we killed this guy. And that's it.
And then that night after the party's over, they're gonna go upstate to some farm in Connecticut, and I guess dispose of the body in some way. The plot is sure, so real quick, a couple of points is David invited David's relatives to the party, his mother and father, as well as his seemingly betrothed. The David's mother, the victim's mother is sick. And so the father brings the aunt instead.
So it's David, excuse me, it's Brandon and Philip who are present David, David who's been killed, David's girlfriend, Janet, Janet's ex-boyfriend, Ken, and then the victim's father, Henry, and his sister, Mrs. Atwater. The other character who's present is Mrs. Wilson.
And the plot of the play, the plot of the movie keeps saying play because it looks like a play. It very much looks like a play and is based on a play. The drama of the plot is that the professor or the teacher Rupert, I think he's actually suspicious almost immediately, but he gradually becomes more and more suspicious until he realizes something very bad has happened. And then basically the plot is Rupert discovering that Brandon and Philip have murdered their friend David by strangulation, hence the title with a rope, hence the title.
The one thing to clarify, Mrs. Wilson, who you mentioned, is kind of like runs their errands and takes care of the house, cleans up and everything. And seems to be a long term, right? It goes and gets cakes and whatever.
And so two quick things. One small point, David is invited to the party. So his father, etc., the guests are waiting for him to arrive. Oh, sorry.
I'm expecting the second point. And this by way of introduction is we mentioned at the start that they were fascinated with this idea of superior beings ruling or doing whatever they wish with inferior beings. Where might they have gotten that idea, Greg? I think that that may be helpful to bring out.
Yeah, sure. I mean, maybe Alex is a professor from Rupert. Yes, from Rupert. So Alex, maybe can speak about this a little more at length.
But there are apparently two sources. One is somebody who I don't know the name of the thinker who talks about art as a kind of murder. But the more important one for our listeners and for our purposes and for my interest would be Nietzsche, who's mentioned explicitly actually by Henry Kentley, the father of the victim. And the main dude, Brandon and Philip see themselves as sort of Superman in Nietzsche's sense of the term.
And what they think is, as Alex already said, that they're beyond good and evil. And they get this sort of moral, what, amoralism, moralism, moral relativism from their teacher, Rupert White-outs. Yeah. And there's also a passing illusion to dusty.
They mentioned crime and punishment, not specifically as a work, but it's Philip. That's a Rupert, right? Enough of this crime and punishment, Derek. Yeah.
And obviously, the illusion is clear with small, non-gauvinic character kills an old woman. Which by the way, one of my favorite novels, and I've always thought was a kind of response to Nietzsche. But apparently that's somewhat antagonistic. Those who are writing crime and punishment before a lot of Nietzsche's major works.
We need your read, Dostoyevsky. I thought he was a great psychologist. But I mean, I think there's, you can read his response to Nietzsche. You could also read it as a kind of cautionary tale about people who try to be uber mentioned.
Right. Shouldn't. Hey guys, I bet you could tell. The voice is pretty coarse.
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Dave Nant Hall. Yeah. And now back to the show. Back to the show.
When I first watched this, the first impression you got to watch this is this guy Brandon is the real sort of motivator. Right. But my daughter was sick. And I was like, there's something wrong.
I mean, he's a motivator. He's coming up with the plot. He's pushing it in that direction. Right.
But a couple of things. I thought the actor was terrible at first. But then you realize no, he's playing a smug note at all who thinks nobody can detect him. It's supposed to be obvious.
Like you're supposed to be easily detected. Second of all, the thing I didn't notice the first time I watched it, he doesn't kill David. It's Philip who's strangling him with the rope. Right.
He's holding his body. And he's like, I got such a thrill out of it. I'm like, different from what you didn't kill the guy. You just held him.
You held with the guy who murdered him. Right. It's Philip, ultimately. So there's the impression you come with is away with a Brandon is smug, no, at all, obvious to detect it.
Not even the one who's actually doing the killing. Right. And yet acts as though he's this great person. Right.
But has no self-awareness, no awareness of how strange he's acting and all this odd texts. Right. Absolutely not a superior human being. I go a step further.
I mean, the purported motivation for the murder is to prove to themselves ostensibly that they are these morally superior types who are beyond a good and evil and who can murder with impunity, the inferior types. Right. I mean, that's what they're saying. So this is an exhilaration supposedly comes from.
They've proven to themselves that they are this. And maybe we'll talk about this a little later, but it becomes less clear to me that that was the actual motivation. I, in fact, I mean, I don't know what you guys think, but so the whole idea is like I'm a superior type. I'm above these things.
But actually, I suspected that David's, excuse me, Brandon's real motivation to kill David was jealousy in fact. That it had nothing to do with this. This was all pretense trying to persuade himself that it was his superiority when it was a fact the most common motive of all for murder, which is murder, revenge, excuse me. He was interested, especially in the fact that David and Janet were going together and it's alluded to at some point that Brandon and Janet might have had a passing thing.
He did. He's all right. And so, and then he's weirdly trying to arrange Janet to get together now with David with this other guy Kenneth. And he's mistaken.
He thinks that he thinks that she broke up with him, but he in fact broke up with her. And so I actually think it's this weird sort of love triangle that's motivating him and why he really wants to kill David is jealousy. It's not just me, Chan. I'm a Superman thing that he thinks that it is for us.
It's worth it. I'd be possible, but then why, but why to allow that it could potentially be both because if it is just the sort of love triangle, there's still the impulse to push the excitement as far into danger as the drama of the murder as far as it'll go. We simply to bump off David, you wouldn't invite the professor who they've made at the beginning. This is the one guy who should not be here because if anybody discovers us, you know, play with fire from the start, it actually forgive me.
Only one of the characters does. The other one's, you're crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
Philip is not on board with this. I think that he's trying to persuade himself that it's for these new chain reasons, but that he's not fully convinced of it. Yeah. I mean, I mean, you can go even further and just say his motive is unknown to himself, right?
Right. Right. When looking for somebody and this comes up early on, why do we kill him? Right?
It's a question, right? I mean, it's strange. Usually if you want to get away with murder, with somebody who's completely disconnected, right? Like Leopold and Loeb did, actually.
Well, they knew that he's actually related. Oh, okay. Francis was related to Loeb, I believe. It was strange.
Loebold was not to be, but it was the interview name. It was like, oh, yeah. I mean, well, that's the perfect kid to murder. He's annoying.
Before that, anyways, he, but yeah, I mean, you tell yourself, I'm a superior human being. I can murder someone who should I murder? I'm a murder this guy. I really hate him, right?
And you don't really maybe know all your motivation. So it might be that he doesn't even think about it in those terms. He just thinks about it as a sort of superiority. Can I say one small one, one small digression here, David, I'm not going to name names, but I had one of the very first times I was ever at teaching assistant back in graduate school.
I was a teaching assistant for a professor, obviously at the University of Maryland, and he was in class with me with my small section. He only taught movies. This was how he taught political philosophy. Maybe I should disparage that because we're doing rope, but he literally was like, has anyone here ever killed anyone?
And I was just like, what are you doing, man? What a weird sort of question to ask 18-year-old kids. I mean, if any of them actually has killed anybody, like involuntary manslaughter in the car, in other words, my only point is that here was this professor who was lecherous and old. I sort of inferred that he was just trying to be shocking and just came off his very silly, like not very serious.
Lecherous? Yeah, yeah, sorry. I did it in the background for that. But in addition to being weirdly interested in death and these things, he was also weirdly interested in sex.
I can also, I can not disconnect it probably. A more, a story that might be closer to home, this was related to me by a professor of mine at NIU Gary Glenn. There was six students were shot by a gun, there was a young student in Northern Illinois, a few years before I got there for PhD stuff. And the student had been taught in Nietzsche, and they found in his effects a lot of book on Nietzsche.
And so Glenn, we were local theory graduate students. He gave us, we lectured on some of the importance of teaching texts seemingly. I mean, this was so fresh in his mind, of course. Sure.
I will say once in Eastern, he said, I will never teach, he said, I will never teach in Nietzsche to undergrad again. I will say once in the semester, I ended the course, I think I said this one to Nietzsche, but once in the semester, I ended with Nietzsche and I decided I would never do that again. I will teach Nietzsche, so I'm not quite as far as Glenn, but I feel like they need something after that to cleanse their palate as a word. All fun games, so somebody gets hydro-core gas record on their tablets.
I'll tell you that much. That's not fun games? All right. Let me, let me go out another way.
So one of the years, I like this movie a lot. For the same reason it's actually Frick's Law and M is it's, the mystery is not who done it. You know who done it from the very beginning. It's how did they figure it out?
How did they find that it's happened or who has done it, right, specifically? And so the reason I like those kind of plots is because the whole thing is centered, therefore, around a thought process. So it's a very philosophic movie as a result, because you're watching somebody try to piece together somebody's psychology, their motivations and all that sort of stuff. This is even more philosophical, because it is tied to ideas and sort of.
One question that keeps coming up as they discuss these ideas, because the plot of the movie is they've killed this guy because they think he's inferior, but throughout the movie, these ideas are discussed, right, like it's proposed. The teacher has put it in their heads since they were young, and then the guy's coming, so they start talking about his ideas. He comes, they talk about it together, and then when he's figuring it out, they then discuss it again towards the very end, right? A few times it comes up.
And one issue that keeps coming up is, okay, let's concede the point. There are superior individuals beyond the evil, and they're capable of murdering others. How do you know who that person is, right? What if the father says it, the father says it, Rupert says it at the end.
I think even Janet says it, so it's a common question that comes up again and again. And it's an interesting question, because Brandon, I think, never asked himself, am I a superior person? There's all this talk about him being giddy and fawning all over his prep school teacher, right, Rupert? Brandon or Philip?
Brandon. Brandon, yeah. And there's all this, these stutters. Yeah, he has all these tells.
And he never stops and says, maybe I'm not that great, right? And the funny thing is, he's caught because he leaves too many clues, right? He has too many tells. There's too many things that are strange.
And he's before somebody that he acknowledges to be his intellectual superior, right? His pride. You let them come back up at the end. Like, he's gone, just say, you know, at the end, the end, I don't want to plot whatever.
So Jimmy Stewart leaves, Rupert leaves. But he's suspicious that he comes back later, and it would have been so easy to say, just not answer the phone or we've already gone or sorry, no, we'll give it to you tomorrow. I found it, we'll find it. But yeah, his pride says, okay, let's let him come back up.
Yeah, I think he wants Rupert to find out. Right. And I think he's hopeful. This comes up to be impressed.
Yeah, he'll be impressed. He says, I hope you like what you see, right? There's a lot of play in this. But I think he's literally saying, I got no way out of this.
All right, open up. I hope you like what you see. I hope you didn't talk earlier, the the the parents spoke earlier about having debated whether or not to bring their professor into the murder. Right.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Or specifically Brandon had entertained at least privately. Yeah, he wants he wants his approval. And that's a psychological motivation. He doesn't understand about himself, but everybody else seems to get and it's his downfall, right?
So clearly not a superior, at least the very least Rupert is his superior. And then at the end of the movie, when Rupert issues this judgment of him, it says, you don't have a right to this. I think you're wrong. In fact, you've even ashamed of what I said.
And now I have a new realization. And all of a sudden, and after that, Brandon goes quiet, kind of like rubs the sides. He's not he's like, I didn't think that was gonna happen. And he would, I think he realizes at that point, yeah, I guess I wasn't, I wasn't that superior.
I'm not one of these types. And you know, I just hadn't thought it through. There's a small point, but only at the end after he's been discovered, I wanted to go back and rewatch it because I'm not sure about this. So I'd be interested to hear if you saw the same thing, Alex, but during the during the whole movie, the two co-conspirators Brandon and Philip, Philip is clearly much less comfortable with the idea of killing and it clearly gets at his soul much more quickly and makes him uncomfortable.
And he's constantly drinking. Like he's, he gets just hammered. I don't remember seeing Brandon drink until after they've been discovered, he pours himself a drink. You hear the sirens, he looks at it and he's like, no, that's not enough.
He fills it up even more. He pours many drinks earlier in the movie, but I feel like he always sets it down or gives it to someone else. Like part of him staying in control is his sobriety. And and Philip, like has to get hammered to try and deal with it.
Yeah, Philip is Philip again. I mean, I think it troubles him too because he did the Kellyanse. Yeah. And no, that's interesting.
Does he have a step of the champagne? Because after that, that was the only one I didn't go back. That was the only one I was thinking maybe had a step of that champagne. Yeah.
Yeah. But another part, just like him not being a superior human being, like he chose a co-conspirator. Right. So if you read your Machiavelli, you've got to choose your fellow co-conspirators fairly carefully.
And he's clearly chosen a poor person to do work with, right? He clearly, Philip doesn't have the steel that it takes to go through, not that we're sort of advocating if you're going to do this, you gotta, I'm not sort of implying you need to actually give a tough guy to go with it. Like a lot of his mistakes, you've pointed out a lot of the mistakes that Brandon makes himself. But I think a lot of mistakes can be connected to the fact that he's chosen.
Not a very good partner in this crime. I would go almost opposite. I think Philip should have been like, I'm not doing this with Brandon. No, sure, sure, sure.
Yeah. I wonder. I mean, you're right, though. There's a real mistake, I think.
I mean, the arrogance, the presumption. He's very arrogant. It's just, I mean, it's crazy. Yeah.
One thing that this, just to switch gears all excitedly, that this movie made me think a lot about guilt, ultimate guilt, or the crime. Especially, there's this scene where Rupert gets into a, he says it, he's always saying things in a snide or sarcastic, smurky way. So it's difficult to kind of pierce this character. There's a scene where it's already been related kind of that.
It's already where he is starting to grow that David's hardiness is something because he's always punctual. So it's something greater than just having this polite. That's right. And so Rupert gets into this debate with David's father about the, about murder and under what circumstances it's okay.
And Rupert vehemently, vehemently defends the position that a superior being should be able to murder. But with a slight upturn on his lip, like he's like, maybe he's joking. So it's not, and the father says, consistently, I can tell if you're being serious or joking, right? That's right.
So it's all theoretical to loop. It's any good philosophy professor. But his students didn't take that in a theoretical way. They took it seriously.
So you can watch this movie and think, wow, it's those two were killers and in particular, it's Brandon, he seems like the most psychopathic of all of them. But I wonder how much blame should he assign to Rupert? I was just going to save this for the end. But I actually think I find the end of the movie completely unsatisfying.
So reminds me of the end, pops comes into the very end. I mean, not how much of the detail you want to relate, but Rupert snips them out and figures out that they've committed this murder, he discovers the body. And then he sort of, as Alex and Luke two months ago, he sort of dresses Brandon down. Like, you're a monster.
How could you possibly have taken my teachings and perverted them and on and on? There are a couple of moments that speak against what I'm about to say. But I think by and large, Rupert doesn't recognize his role in this. Like, it's his fault.
I mean, he has been teaching irresponsibly morally awful things. And not in any, not with the kind of, I mean, you know, I mean, the three of us joke like this, but I think we sort of recognize our audience and recognize we're joking. But like, he didn't realize the effect he was having on these young people. And he was teaching, even if Rupert's teaching ultimately in the last analysis might be right, maybe there's something in the chain, maybe there's something Socratic in this that maybe the truly good man doesn't have to be bound by the law.
But saying that in front of people who do need the law is perhaps somewhat irresponsible. Right? I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, there's there's a kind of, for somebody who's so psychologically cunning and adept and on top of things, it's quite stupid to not recognize I wonder to what extent he really liked Brandon's fun, right? That it gave him kind of confirmation and he didn't realize now he does say I have a sense of shame at the end, right? He says, yeah, there are a couple of points where yeah, yeah, but there's a link to that. But it's mostly puts on him.
And by the way, earlier in the movie, he's really consistently rude to the aunt in a way that's somewhat common, but it's also kind of mean spirited. He like, she can't remember the name of the movie or the actress. And he's like two or three or four times he keeps making fun of her. And it's quite pointed.
It's not like, it's not good spirited. It doesn't seem to me. That's not good nature ribbing. It's like, he's just even inferior, human.
But she's inferior. One's up to him, a little bit. Weirdly. Yeah, a little bit.
But no, another sort of also tied to the ending. I noticed he has the, so at one point when Rupert's coming back, Brandon is worried he puts a gun in his pocket. He opens it up and he sees that there, you can see it's a fiction, right? It becomes eventually exposed that he has the gun, Philip, he throws it on the piano and says, Oh, we were just bringing it up to the country.
Philip picks it up and he's ready to shoot. He's like, I don't know who I'm gonna shoot Rupert or Brandon. And Rupert struggles with the gun goes off one bullet. Then to notify the police, he opens the window and shoots it three times out the window, leaving two bullets, which I assume he did.
So that he's one for Brandon, one for Philip, things get hairy. Sure. So the way I thought about this is he's gonna watch them till the cops get there. Absolutely.
They're guilty. So I thought that I agree with you. I wonder if he should accept greater responsibility as sort of corrupting the you right? Yeah, he corrupted you.
There seems there's no question in my mind. I think it's the blame lies at his feet. I mean, there's, you know, he talked about the motivation. Why did Brandon want to commit this murder?
One of the things that makes Rupert suspicious earlier on is he notes that Brandon, when he had been back in school, had actually written a story about a young woman who was about to be married, but who hit herself in a chest and died. It wasn't discovered till years later. And so yeah, and so like Brandon has had this preoccupation with dead people and Chesense was a kid, again, speaking to the fact that Brandon may not be aware of his own psychological desires or motivations here. And one of the other guest mentions Freud at one point.
So there is this conception of like, you have these desires, you have these motivations that you're not even aware of. So what does Rupert do? He turns it to a letter in Brandon's soul, right? He's aware of this piece of his fascination.
Yeah, he turns it up. Yeah, there's a question. That's and I think that's the biggest indictment. And there's a kind of, you could say there's a kind of epistemological problem, right?
Okay, they, you know, superior people's let's just say they have this way. I feel myself superior. But if I'm not, I'm screwed, I'm gonna get found out, right? Brandon's arrogance, I think just gets in the way of that.
He doesn't see how many times. So for instance, so when the party's about to start, Brandon suddenly gets the idea, instead of eating in the dining room, where there are places that everybody's gonna sit and eat seems, right? Instead, we'll have like a little buffet on the chest in which the body is basically eating off as great as Rupert says later. And they put the candle sticks there and it looks very kind of like an altar, like a kind of sucking or something like that.
And that's one of the hugest problems. I mean, it just raises so many red flags. He thinks this is the, you know, the the the kudagross of the whole thing, but it's really the number one tell. Because he says at one point, after Brandon really upsets David's father, Rupert Gosman says, you know, Brandon, you're not really thinking of murdering somebody.
He goes, oh, well, I'm a man of maybe, you know, just joking, trying to play it off as joking. The very next conversation Rupert is talking to Mrs. Wilson. And she's complaining about that movie.
And he goes, why did he do that? And she goes, oh, I don't know, maybe a whim. And so all the sudden, there's this connection between he's acting strings on a whim. He just connected whimsicality with murder.
He's being very whimsical, it seems like. I think at that moment, he realizes, oh, there's a kind of there's a possibility. And it's all because he made this stupid last minute, you know, change. Can I ask a question?
Yeah. When you die, don't you evacuate your bells? Yeah, I have that same thought. And so then wouldn't like, dude, I didn't have that thought.
Seriously? And you have to suspend some because that one. Okay, right. So it wouldn't have stunk.
Okay. I just imagined that we'll immediately put off odors. You're right, it's a film. I should, we he's also in a box.
Yeah, older concealing box, natural. I think I mean, yeah, you do wonder about that, right? Yeah. Or even his scream at the very, like to be a little less silly, like his scream at the very beginning.
Yeah. David's screaming when he's being strangled, which I don't know, I saw the logistical issues I thought too, that even had they not been found out, he at the for the end of the film, they ring the chauffeur to bring about bring around the car. And then they're saying about everybody down, right? Right.
You know, when the sachel doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I understand. So there's a another thing that's interesting about the movie is it seems to take place in real time as Greg noted with shot, but it's clearly a story because there's 20 minutes at the end of the movie, which is what after Rupert is left and then he comes back and there's this sort of cat and mouse game. And then there's all those sort of initial parts, it's got to be like a 45 minute party.
So there's this kind of strange pace to it, where pieces are moving very fast. I do recommend people watch this a couple of times because it's easy to miss miss things. But there is this kind of quick pace to it that also feels real that leads to the sort of like they're eating one moment and then the next second they're having dessert next time they're packing up is very rushed. And it's a really ingenious plot device because it feels like real time, but it's obviously truncated and it creates this very suspenseful quickening of the plot.
Yeah. There's another aspect of the plot we haven't discussed and that's the departure of some of the dinner guests. So going back to Alex's statement on this potential love triangle that Brandon has set up, he invites David's girlfriend. I think David is going to propose to him and her ex boyfriend.
Yeah. She sees the ex boyfriend there. He knows what's going on. They both at some point turn on Brandon and say look, this is just for you one of your perversities.
Why did you do this? Time goes on and David Stollison showed up and now they're quite worried. And so there's an exodus from the party. So David's aunt, his father, the girl and her ex boyfriend.
When Rupert returns to flat, he mentions that in the car, they all suspected Brandon and having killed David in something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Well, that's the thing is it's not enough for him to kill David. He invites Kenneth, right? Her ex boyfriend.
And he says, he says that Kenneth, who's the first to arrive. Oh, I think, things are really off, right? We got a way. He tends to Janet.
Oh, I didn't know you guys were having, oh, we're dating you and Kenneth have broken off. And then they eventually talk and they figure it out. I mean, the guy's plots just get caught. And so then automatically there's suspicion on Brandon that he's found a way to distract him so that he doesn't come.
So as to put Janet and Kenneth together, maybe try to get them together. Already, that means that there's suspicion on him for foul play, whether it's murder or something, I was like, not so bad. There is this sort of penance, right? To say nothing.
Now it works. The main plot works for the most part on most of the guests, right? They are kind of worried about David and they're calling around and they're not focusing on all the odd stuff around them. But still they even start to pick up that it looks like Brandon is up to no good.
So nothing of somebody uses intellectual superior like Rupert who picks it up pretty quickly. I was just going to point out there a couple other flaws. It seems to me in his plan. Mrs.
Wilson mentions, so Mrs. Wilson, so in the morning, Philip and Brandon are rushing to get everything taken care of. But then they say, okay, Mrs. Wilson, don't pick up these things we need for the party, but please take your time.
So she's like, well, that was weird. But in addition to that, like when she finally returns and Brandon pretends to be surprised that she's so late, she says, actually, I would have been here half an hour ago, but for traffic, which means like his perfect plan had there not been traffic. She would have showed up right before or as they were actually murdering David. And then it would have been, it would have gone much worse.
They would have had to, you know, I'm guessing maybe Mrs. Offness as well. And so like it just points out that Brandon thinks he's perfectly in control of things the entire time and he's not like had traffic played out differently. She might have arrived there.
A small point and maybe we're texting about this beforehand. I'm not sure the significance of it, but David's mother doesn't show up. She's sick. Does that accelerate things?
Because she's only at home sitting worrying about maybe if she had been at the party, she wouldn't have been distracted or she would have been distracted. She was being worried so much about her son. You know, she's supposed to be there and she's not. That's just interesting.
And then another point is that the victim's father brings his aunt instead. And then she has this conversation about astrology, which seems to set emotions, some of the suspicions or at least the nervous behavior of say Philip, she sort of reads Philip's hands and says, oh, these hands, the great deeds of these hands will make you famous or something like that. And then he looks down at his hands because he's just strangled someone. And I mean, from that point on, he's pretty much inconsolable.
He's lost it. So, I'm going to talk about you going on. Yeah, that's just one of many very bizarre double entangis, right? Janet at once.
Once or he's at PNS, I didn't mention that. But she also says, Janet says to Philip, I hope you don't play some cruel trick and become horribly famous, right? Twice, you know, and then they talk about, I could just strangle you or something. Oh, that one happens.
So, I can strangle you. Yeah, yeah, there's a ton of, oh, I could just die. Allegiance to like, guns, which I was like, Greg was fine. This hilarious.
Yeah, that's highly puns. Yeah. David, you're about to, yeah. So I had a question, Greg, were you detecting a kind of fatalism in Brandon, or is this just stupidity?
I can't get the fatalism to swear with his seemingly genuine belief in his superiority. I think he is suspicious that he's not as superior as he thinks that he is, or as it might not be perfectly in. That's a great question. I don't know.
I think like Alex mentions, I think he recognizes Rupert's superiority to himself. And part of this is an effort to prove that he's on the unequal plane with Rupert. Although to the contrary, I mean, he says repeatedly that they're superior to Rupert, because Rupert only has these intellectual impressive qualities and that what sets him and Philip apart is their intellectual plus moral virtues that he's courageous and Rupert is not. He said, I don't know if you could have planned it, but he kind of done it, which means it acknowledges he can figure it out, but he wouldn't go through it, which is just like, well, then why do you want to bring it into the mix?
He's the worst person. Sorry. And by the way, that just to add, just to point this out again, Rupert's teachings, one suspects it wasn't just a one off class. Right.
And by the way, these are college students. These are prep school students. I think it's even more dangerous to teach the students who aren't even sort of somewhat a little more mature and somewhat a little more formed morally. I agree, because it was Rupert's teaching was obviously seared in their mind.
This is past college now. So this happened within three years, at least half a decade. Yeah. And obviously Brandon's priorities are impress the teacher show off your intellect.
A number of people say this, this was his sort of go to thing. Look how brilliant I am, right? He needs a witness, right? He needs somebody to see it and Philip isn't enough, right?
He thinks he's better than so. I'm not sure he is, but he thinks he's better than Phil. But he needs Rupert to see it. And that's that's where I think it's a fatalism.
I mean, I think he might have been happy getting away with it, but you know, he obviously was playing with fire and bringing Rupert there. And I think if he had pulled the wool over Rupert's eyes, he might not have been altogether happy. I think he wanted he needed outside confirmation that this was brilliant. And I also think it's an electoral vanity.
I agree, Alex, I think it's another science intellectual vanity is that he believes that he can achieve the perfect X or Y or Z, right? Like this, I mean, he repeats her at length, right? This was the perfect murder. We've executed it perfectly.
Everything's perfect. Having on this table, we've been putting on the chest will be perfect. And not realizing that one of the vanities is believing that you're smart enough to count for as I mentioned, all the chance of that, right? Like Mrs.
Wilson could have not gotten stuck in traffic. Like the idea that he's so powerful that he can sort of control chance or something like this, it can be perfect. Nothing's perfect in this world. Right?
I mean, there's like they leave the rope hangs out at one point, right? They've left a hat in the closet. There's so many mistakes that they make. Yeah.
Oh, he says that one point is that who cares about the word being out? It's a perfectly ordinary household object. Well, you put all these together. And that's another thing.
The second he sees that Philip reacts to the rope with such fear, he should have been like, let me burn this thing. I can't have Philip seeing it. It's nothing to do with how, right? He wants Philip to just, but you should know that Philip is having more difficult time, right?
And he needs to sort of make sure that not only does it seem ordinary for him, but that Philip acts ordinary, but he doesn't take those necessary precautions. I mean, psychological, for somebody who advances himself superior, he doesn't at all adapt his plan to sort of the psychological circumstances, who hurts presents it. I mean, he just kind of, he thinks he can get away with almost anything as he does it. Yeah, I found it interesting also that he doesn't attempt to overpower Rupert, even though Rupert has the gun or flee.
That's very obvious. I would have tried at least overpower him. I would have ever let him come back up to the department. Oh, there's that too.
Like he's left. He's gone. I think the height of he was. I think the reason he doesn't go after him is I think that Rupert's speech and the coming of the cops really makes him think.
I think he's he realized it's something about himself. I'm more persuaded. I'm just, I'm more persuaded by David's father's speech than by Rupert's. I think Rupert's speech falls.
It was completely unimpressed to me. If you've been teaching that there's no morals and there's no, that there's there's the inferior and the superior, where do you start talking about rights and justice and humanity and taking what there's no grut like where did that come from? Where is you? This is Rupert in a sense, an abstract way, Greg.
This is how Rupert's getting away with murder. It's this kind of fake me a Koopa. Yeah. That's how I got it.
But for example, by contrast, I still think he has the moment of realization, because he venerates Rupert. Right? Oh, I'm sorry. Yes.
Yeah. He venerates Rupert and Rupert saying, actually, I disagree. Here's my argument. It's a very simple argument.
Each person is their own individual and therefore whatever. He just kind of falls your right. It's not an adequate argument. But for Brandon, it's like, not only did he figure me out, he also just shifted his position.
But even then I don't think the, that's exactly right. I don't think it's the argument that persuades him. I think it's that Rupert wasn't persuaded that he's like, Oh my God, I couldn't get this guy. Whereas I think David's father's Henry's argument was much better.
Like when they have the argument about killing, there's no difference. This is what civilization is about. And this is no different than the Nazis. And there's some implication.
I sense this anyway that Henry was that there was some sympathy with the Jewish situation, of course, naturally. And I thought that his father's Henry's argument was so much better. And I think I thought that Brandon's deference to Rupert at the end was not a recognition that his arguments were better, just a disappointment that he hasn't impressed his mentor. Yeah.
And then he disagrees with him. You're right. And another thing the father says, David's father says, this is just contempt for humanity. Right.
He's exactly right. I mean, the only thing that like the basic passion there is a feeling for a superiority and a kind of contempt for what's beneath him, right? You guys noticed that in that interesting conversation, David's father wins, in my opinion. I think that's the argument that he appears to lose is because he shouted down by right acting by both Brandon and Rupert.
And I think that's right. And he's Brandon essentially shouts him down by talking over him in Rupert. Rupert finds recourse, which is cynical and nine remarks. I think Henry is the more impressive character and he's more impressive than Rupert.
Yeah. To me, he's the most hateful person in this. I'm with you. But also that the father, right, he has his massive library.
It's joke that he spends more time like looking at books and cowlonging them than reading them. So any interested in these first editions. So there's a kind of traditionalism about it. He's a decent guy, right?