Ben Benidos, I don't know. I'm not going to be a bar. I'm not going to be a bar. Who are I?
I'm me. Alex Priu. How's it going, Alex? I'm really buying, huh?
And are you a stoic on his stupid? Who's to your right? I'll stupid. I'll go to the studio.
I'll go to the studio. I'll go to the studio. Can't be a grando. I'll go to the studio.
No, Greg has a beard like he's in Zapata's army. Sorry you guys doing it. No, I'm here. PGPG.
Good. So Alex, you are back face to face with the children. I'm just going to be like, yeah, screaming through a mask. That's how we teach.
Now, luckily my voice booms. So I can just kind of raise it a bit, but it's weird. It's so much better, even though it's still awful. But yeah, I'm really happy to be back in person now.
Everything's better. Everything's better when you don't have that extra layer between you and the other people, I would just say. I was teaching the nude, Greg. Is that what you're trying to say?
What? Yeah, it's good. It's gracious. No, it's like he got tenure and then it's just whatever goes.
You know, this is a post tenure phenomenon. Do you see? He was on that. I posted his YouTube clip online.
Okay. And it's Greg talking to this nice young lady who there's really no two ways around it. She looks frightened for her life. She doesn't look.
She looks like she looks like the show called the show is called Get Your Eagle on. Like that. Eagle experts. Eagle experts.
Yeah. So they went to talk to Greg about elections. So Alex, I have a question for you. How many, how many names did they have to burn through before Greg?
It's just like all the big guns were out. They're like, it hasn't been over freezing here in Ashland in two weeks. You know, go to the house. How do you think the election is going to go?
Like 45 minutes. I think about Santa Fund. This is not what we asked for. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So today we're doing something like, oh, I guess not that unusual, but it's not usual. Second film.
So our first film was Zulu and I was wonderful. Second film, Alex. We do more of these. So it's good that we're coming back even though it's been a while.
So give us some feedback. Alex selected Woody Allen's love and death, which is funny, but you don't think, at least I don't think of Woody Allen when I think of political philosophy. And then I don't think of Woody Allen when it comes to movies that are have depth to them. That's not to diss Woody Allen, but he's kind of clever as I don't know.
I've always considered him to be clever. Now, there are people that take him, take his thought quite seriously. Like Baylor is Mary Nichols, who I think is retired. She wrote an entire book on Woody Allen and I heard the books really interesting.
So clearly I'm confused. I mean, Alex loves Woody too. So why did we select the film and can you just talk about his style, Alex? As a filmmaker.
So the moves from 1975. It's kind of when Alan's films were moving from just joke machines and kind of silly, like these movies like sleepers, which is funny, but it's a little bit much to when he started getting more serious and it's really just a couple of years before Andy Hall, which I think was 1977. And Andy Hall shows remarkable sensitivity to the different angles for the shots. There's various motifs.
It's all an internal reflection. So it's sort of constructed. It's a guy reflecting on his relationship, a failed relationship and constructing out of that. So it's easy to mistake this movie for just being kind of goofy, like at the earlier films, but I think Alan is really starting to push himself as a filmmaker into new terrain.
I chose this movie. I like this movie because, well, the title says it all in a way. It's about love and death, mortality and our longing for some sort of meaningful relationship in this world. But then also all the conditions that come with it, all the things that make it difficult to find love, all the demands that people make of you, if they're going to love you.
This is a goofy movie though, right? I mean, like this is like a joke in the background. It's like slapstick almost at times. Yes.
Very slapstick. Which if you've seen, for instance, Sleeper, which I think was just maybe a couple of years before, the movie is actually wanted to make it as a silent movie and there's a lot of physical comedy in it. Play it again. Sam also has a lot of physical comedy and sometimes it's just kind of silly, like there's a scene in this movie when they're hitting each other over the head with a model and the film speeds up and all the sounds or the music and everything drops out and it feels very silent.
So we're still working in that sort of with those sort of techniques. It's not clear what to make of these moments, whether you should take them too seriously or not. But yeah, so I think though, as far as substance is concerned, he's raising a lot of issues. And I thought it would be good for us to do because my sort of take on this movie is that it is in large part his version of the ideas you find in Phaedrus' speech and the symposium.
So I thought it would be a good way to revisit some of the things we talked about for that angle. Alex, really? Go on, Greg. One of you can someone, look, two things.
One tell listeners why they ought to watch this movie. I think you're kind of already hitting that. But secondly, I think it's probably a good idea for us usually to give a quick synopsis of the plot is one of you prepared to do that? Kind of just like, what's it about?
I was, by the way, I'll just say that you told me what I all in. I've seen a few Woody Allen films. The setting, as soon as I turn on, I was like, oh, this seems different than the Woody Allen films I've seen. I was impressed with, it's almost entirely, so it's set in Russia in the 19th century, beginning in the 19th century.
And it's pretty, everyone's a set piece. They're all more or less in, they seem to be dressed in the way that one would have dressed with the exception of Woody Allen for it. Yeah. Yeah, it takes place in Sarsia, during the Napoleonic Conventions.
Right. And he's, so it starts Boris, that's Allen's character. They're all dressed in kind of Russian attire. Sometimes it's comically exaggerated versus Woody Allen.
That's like this weird fuzzy hat and fuzzy coat. Now he's always wearing his Woody Allen 60s. Yeah. They never changes those.
Right. So Sars, Boris, it actually takes place. It's a kind of movie that's reflective. So it's similar to the narrative structure of Annie Hall, where at the beginning of the movie, he says, I've been sentenced to death for a crime and a commit.
And he goes through it. So a lot of the goofiness and the patchwork of it is, I think, a function of this character trying to understand how he made his way to this present situation. And then at the end, it picks up now. Basically, you kind of meet Boris when he's a young kid, one of the surfs on the property of the property of the property of the property.
And he gets in touch with his fear of death. And his fear basically makes him a coward on the one hand. On the other hand, he's also a kind of lover. He's deeply wants to fall in love.
And he has a lot of sexual passion, even though he's a shrimp-y kind of anxious guy. He still has this sort of, he's like a sexual dynamo. I thought of him a little bit like Paris. Paris?
Helton? No, no, from the Iliad. Oh, Paris of Troy. Yeah.
A little bit, though. At least I'd rather go off and screw. And he just doesn't want to go into battle. There's a scene where he has two brothers.
And the town here is of Napoleon's invasion. So they all take off to the front lines, excited. And then Woody Allen is trying to dodge it. So I'm like, is that somebody has to pick up a pitch for him?
Yes. He has his butterfly net and his little butterflies that are pinned to the thing. So anyways, he's forced to go into battle by societal pressure, even though he wants to avoid it. Inadvertently, he ends up defeating the French by hiding in a cannon and getting shot at them and taking out the general.
This gives him some medals. He's got tons of medals. It's an interesting moment because he mocked his brothers' love of medals. And then later he's showing them off to this woman because he wants her to sleep with them.
So it goes off. This ends up leading to him being involved in a duel, which, again, doesn't want to kill anybody. And he shoots this thing in the air. And he's involved.
He wants to sleep with another woman. Well, he already slept with her. And then her lover got mad at him and challenges him to a duel. Right?
So that ends up because he survives the duel. His cousin, Sonia, who's played by Dainik, who's is love interesting about agrees that she'll marry her. Second cousin, second cousin. That's right, Alex.
And that's crucial, which makes it legal. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not the first cousin.
Great. You're on your fifth or sixth cousin by this point. But he, they end up getting married. The relationship is fraught.
She eventually, just to speed this up. Hold on. She only marries him because she thinks he's going to die in battle. I'm trying to duel.
You're going to die in the duel tomorrow. He's a very good shot. You're sure? Yes.
Okay. He's a good guy. He might as well marry this guy just to make him feel better. Yeah.
And he does. Yeah. And marriage is unhappy. She learns to love him.
He gets suicidal. He finds a higher purpose trying to be a poet. She eventually thinks that their higher purpose should be killing Napoleon. She convinces him.
He gets involved. But she falls in love with him first though, right? Alex? I mean, eventually they, she learns to love.
Are you sitting at the table on Danes? Yeah. They're just sitting at the table on Danes. Yeah.
They're just alone. I said that. And then she, and then finally they go to kill him. They go to kill him.
He kind of weasels out at the last second, but somebody hiding in a kind of a, a more steps out, shoots this guy turns out, is not Napoleon. It's his like body double. And he gets blamed for this attempted murder with his murder, but not of Napoleon and his sentence to death. Just before being going to death, he has a revelation from an angel and the angel says, Oh, you're going to be saved.
And he's so happy. He's confident he goes to his death all at ease. And then, you know, he doesn't get pardoned by the, I don't know if I would say it's an angel, by the way. It's, but yeah, fine.
Some kind of ghost. Well, the revelation turns out to be false, but you have a, there's a shadow with wings on the wall suggesting it's a kind of angel. So anyways, it ends with him being dead. He's walking away with death and he sees Sonia, his cousin slash wife one more time.
And they have a little dialogue. I think it's really interesting that, and then the movie ends. So it's about a guy who falls in love. He's willing to do stupid things for the one he loves.
And he dies in the process. She finally loves him. And he's just like, well, that wasn't worth it. And then that's it.
So it's again, these nihilistic backdrops you see down. So, but I do think it challenges you denialism, specifically challenges you to ask. Okay. If we have a sense that we're going to die in life seems meaningless and love has these conditions, what is love really?
What kind of demands does it make of us? And can we actually be satisfied with this sort of thing? He's not satisfied with the love, it turns out. Right.
And so there's this sense of human limits and a desire for something more than that and the our inability to find that satisfying or even to fulfill it entirely. And I think that makes it a really philosophically interesting film. If not, you know, as deep of a work of political philosophy as you sometimes find in other movies. What's your connection with the Phaedra's office?
It's with Phaedra's speech in the symposium. I think so we talked about this in our second episode on the symposium and our never ending series on the symposium. But Phaedra's talks about how lovers, because they're ashamed and they're ashamed to do anything that seems less than virtuous before their beloveds will start imitating virtue and striving to have it. And so the question is, I always have those, okay, and that seems like it's great for battle, but in battle you prove your virtue ultimately by sacrificing your life.
Right. That's when you show you've been willing to do this thing. And what good is that to the lover? No longer being able to consummate.
Right. And I think Woody Allen's character Boris here is facing a similar dilemma. Right. Okay.
I'm willing to do and be or at least imitate the sort of person that you want me to be. Okay. But is that if it ends up costing my life, am I happy? And the answer is, I think in Allen's case, at least he says it's not.
David's on the run. Yeah. I don't know where he's going. He's just walking.
He's just walking. He's just going to have to. Okay. It's going to happen.
So you mentioned an nihilism. I just don't really know where we are in the run show right now, but oh, you have some notes here. Good. So Woody's character Boris repeatedly is an atheist.
I mean, repeatedly sort of brings this up. Stony of the woman with whom he's in love is his cousin. She is a believer and in fact she insists that you must believe in God over and over. So I don't know how much you want to clarify on this thing, but there are a few things that struck me.
One was for an atheist, he seems to put a lot of stock in a premonition or a vision. I found that sort of curious. And then as you mentioned at the end, dead Woody Allen or dead Boris has a conversation with his wife after he's passed away. So there's this strange spiritual or metaphysical or whatever aspect of the film, despite I think you're right, the nihilism.
So what are we supposed to do with that? I mean, is somehow Stony superior to him and so far as she's not an atheist? Well, I think he's an atheist by default, it seems like, but she says, well, why don't you kill yourself? He says, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I don't want to do something. I hear that they found something, you know, and he says, just give me something. Give me a cough. God.
He keeps asking for the sign. Even the coffee. And when he finally gets on, he becomes suicidal, actually. So he himself is not so.
So I think one of the things going on in his character is there is this kind of longing for the absolute right or longing for for something eternal, some eternal meaning and he thinks love of another person will give him that, but it doesn't. And so it's interesting that after that, he starts becoming a poet. He wants to have some kind of legacy. And then he ends up being susceptible to even murdering Napoleon, right?
And he's has an ethical dilemma, but again, it's the same issue. Do I want to do something of enduring importance, right? I want to be part of something larger than myself. And I think that's the story.
He's like, look, I was young. I would never have done something like this. I just I wouldn't have ever inclined to this. And then somehow his life brings into a position where he's more susceptible than the peak of this susceptibility to higher sort of sort of transcendent goals is this vision that he buys into completely and even starts speaking in sort of a licious language, very clumsily.
It's one of his last sort of his pious speech that he gives. So if you were a more clear sighted atheist, he wouldn't this is something that I was struck by how much of a letter he is, how deeply erotic he is. And so there's this similar psychological character at play right here, right? There's this deep longing.
Yeah. Okay. He's a hero. And he's a thinker and a lover.
And that interplay is and which one's going to win out in him is the magic. I don't know if this is it. I actually have been struck by I want. So you mentioned that he's sort of the shrimpie kind of guy.
He's kind of cowardly and whatnot. I wonder if there's a connection or those types are those physical types more likely to be inclined to a deeper autism. Does that make sense? I mean, in other words, I think actually he's talked about this in the Republic, right?
The connection between your body and what kind of character your soul has. And I do wonder if there's like being small and fragile, you know, sort of at the mercy of the world inclines one to these stronger longings, right? Some way to escape it. Does that make any sense?
I mean, this is a pretty, not only a handful of films, but the eroticism seems to be a pretty common theme, it seems to me. Yeah. He's always plays these lover types. Yeah.
We're also very anxious and nervous. And often there's that kind of charm that comes out of that, which is sort of interesting, right? There's like a charming sort of self-effacing quality to him that they fall in love with. But there's always this risk that he is that he's going to undermine his own sort of romantic ambitions because he becomes contemptible in some way.
And I think that's related to the cowardice. So I do think there's a relationship between love and the cowardice in the sense that his shrimpiness ends up undermining him. I think that's interesting. The idea that it's also in reverse that the shrimpiness makes him a lover, that he wants something larger than himself, something more beautiful, maybe out of a kind of self-loathing, right?
There is that in this movie. Yeah. Yeah. The flip side of this, we talked about in a couple of episodes, like these great old man or whatever, like these impressive physical men who try to persuade themselves that they don't mean that they're not deeply erotic, but they don't need these kinds of things.
So I just wonder if that was the flip side of this, but a similar phenomenon for us. Yeah. So I'm tapping in like Greg, I know why he doesn't get married into his 40s because I can see him just sitting at home gazing at himself in a mirror and wondering what's that ever future is there. Yeah, that's definitely the hesitation.
Any of you guys find that Neelism in this movie a little bit, not worrisome, but I just wonder how other common viewer, who's not philosophic and refined, would take this all in because it's kind of cynical, it's dark. And in one interpretation, there's nothing redemptive about this movie. You know, it ends with Woody's turn. He dances away in the end.
He's happy. It's death, yeah. All right, fine. No, it's grim.
It's grim. It's grim. Maybe another way to put your point, David, is if you take out the jokes, what is this about? It's about a cat who won over by romance against his better judgment, and he dies for the person he loves and but doesn't even achieve the goal.
He doesn't even seem to care. Right? When he's taken away by death, she just treats that she's having tea with a friend who's complaining about her husband. She knows she does say, you have always been my one true love.
So he does win her over in the end, but she gives this speech at the end that I think. I just mean that she's sitting having tea. It's a she sings about the window goes, I'm pale. I'll see you in like typical woody fashion.
So she gives a short speech when she's talking to her friend, her friend who's talking about a love triangle. And I love this is a really wonderful little speech that I wrote down because I thought it would be good material. She says, it's almost like a weird sort of moral paradox that's presented as a joke that I think is getting at something. She goes, to love is to suffer.
To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer. Not to love is to suffer.
To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy.
Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting all this down. And she's trying there to wrestle with the notion of love. And it's funny because it's so circular, but the circle seemed real.
This is what Boris has gone through. He's lived this paradox yet he didn't grasp it. I think altogether. My favorite syllogism in the film was earlier on, we go, Socrates was a homosexual.
There's Socrates was a man, all men are mortal, all men are Socrates. And then he says, therefore, all men are homosexuals. Something like that. Something like that.
So that's, I mean, the film is just, it's weird. It's like, it's a syllogism. I would have said sophistries, I mean, there's a statistical arguments. There's many of them, right?
Is there, is there God or isn't there God? One of their early arguments, this about Socrates and about the Greeks being gay. I thought he was just making fun of the modern day philosophy professor. I should do, you know what I mean?
Like these weird, he goes to these analytic arguments. This is very Kantian, some of them. Yeah, it's like, it's a joke that they're dry. Nobody converses in this manner.
Yeah, I think that is part of the joke. But I mean, yeah, fine. But even at the end, the speech that Alex just read, well, first off the meaning is what it's all hopeless and there's nothing, there's no happiness. So it's kind of sad.
But I guess, you know, when the earlier questions you asked David was to what degree is this a work of political philosophy or something like that? I don't really answer that. But this strikes me as being, if this is sort of representative Woody Allen's view, somewhat dismissive of philosophy, right? If you really are nihilist, isn't that in fact the case?
Like there's no, you can do philosophy or nothing philosophy. It's there's no difference. You can love or not love. There's no difference.
Like life is about suffering. And that's kind of all there is. Yeah, it is definitely mocking philosophy. And there's a movie he did called Irrational Man about a philosophy professor, which I don't want to ruin it because it seems like it's about a love relationship between this professor and a student, but it actually changes completely the plot.
It's really, really brilliant. But it's again about this ostensibly rational guy who ends up doing horribly irrational things against his own self-interest. And I think going back to this, there's a one joke. I really like where this man is really goofy looking guy.
He's playing music with Sony at the piano and he's playing the violin. And he's just like, please, please go home with me. Come with me. And she goes, no, and they start getting into a debate.
And then it gets into questions of a priori principles and whether it is of the thing itself or for the thing. It's very abstract. And then she just cuts them off and goes, can we just not talk about sex? Right.
Because it gets so abstract. But I think he is forcing us to think a little bit, what's the relationship between the theoretical and the abstract and our attempt to give a transcendence sort of principled ground to our actions on the one hand and our sort of just stupidly erotic natures, our kind of willful natures, represented by people like Ivan, who is so stupid he can't write his name in the ground with a stick, who just eats raw meat, but somehow is more in tuned with his desires than Alanis who goes to these sort of theoretical heights. I do think there is, if not a critique of philosophy, there's certainly, I think a valid question here about the relationship between reason and unreason. Yeah.
The only thing I was off putting about much of the film for me is that while humor, I'm employed by an Aristophanes, can bring out deeper philosophic truths or a false death, much of Woody's humor seemed like a dodge and it was kind of cynical. And so it's like, yeah, well, we have these weighty issues like love and death, but ha ha, you know, and then he just makes a joke about having sex. And so Alex, you're kind of a rare viewer of these films where you can kind of bring this deeper stuff out. I wonder how intentional this was on Woody's part.
Because he just seems like dodging. I don't know, maybe that's unfair, obviously he's deeper than I am, but. So I'm not gonna be able, I don't think you can justify every joke here is meaningful, right? The bottle thing, the slapsticky stuff, sometimes it's silly.
Sometimes he uses that, I think, in meaningful ways like a plate against Sam, but to take one really small joke that just seems like a throwaway line. He said, she's saying, what are you talking about when she's Napoleon's in the vid? What do you wanna do? He goes, I suggest we flee, FLEA flee.
And it seems like just a dumb spelling joke, but then he goes on to call himself a vermin, a worm, right? And so there's a sense that by fleeing, it becomes subhuman and he becomes like a bug, where they'd be stamped out by a great, great man, and uber-mensch like Napoleon as he goes. So I do think that when you go through the jokes, you can find out that even if they're not necessary, that it be this joke, they have a substantive import for the plot generally. So.
That particular example, Alex, when we were texting back and forth watching the movie, that's where I took there to be, I took part of the background of this movie to be about Hitler's invasion of Europe. The language Woody Allen uses to describe himself in that circumstance is one that the Germans or the Nazis used to describe the Jews, right? And I wondered if Napoleon wasn't to stand in for Hitler. And I kept trying to make something deeper out of it.
But even then I was just sort of like, well, I mean, what's the guy's name on all the bloody movies where they have the Hitler and he kills him, right? And glorious bastards, something like that. Yeah, do you know? Right, so I mean, that's, I think it has its own problems, but at least it's trying to deal with this problem of what you do with Hitler or something like that.
And I guess the suggestion is, well, we can at least go back and try and wipe him from history or something like this. Whereas Woody Allen, the Napoleon character lives, obviously, it's sort of comically inept to assassinate him. And what's the moral there? What's the teaching?
Try to run away as best you can? I don't know. The Napoleon is the world. This is just the way the world these things will happen and say, well, have you, I suppose.
Yeah, maybe to go back to David's point, and maybe I kind of danched it a bit. I do think overall that putting this plot as a comedy is meant to, I think, send the message or it expresses his viewpoint that in light of the suffering of the world and the plight of the world, whether it's a Hitler, it's an Napoleon or something like that, despite all that, really all you can do is make light of it. So it's a very sort of, and this is where I think it becomes nihilistic and deeply tragic, despite the comedic, you know, and this is a hobby horse of Allen's and it gets beat to death in his work. There's a great opening joke to the movie he did where Larry David said it, it's just one of the names of the movie.
Anyways, it begins with him, he wakes up in a terror and he goes, I'm dying, I'm dying, and his wife or girlfriend goes, you're dying? What's wrong? What's going on? And she goes, not now, eventually.
Right? It's whatever works, by the way. Yeah, whatever works, yeah. And which you just look at the title of it, come on.
Right? And that one's really nihilism with us, smiley faces as sometimes people put it, yeah. So I do think at a certain point, it's philosophic chops end up flounding on this issue, but for that reason, you can still view it as from the angle of how are people to deal with this sense that there's no meaning, which is a real problem in modern life, right? So.
Yeah, for sure. So what's interesting then is that leads me to, like I was asking myself as you were going through that, what is the plot, you know, simple summary, or what are the major plot devices or what is the big thing? And I thought the biggest one is the attempted assassination assassination of Napoleon. And one can say earlier that we're going to war and this, that, and the other.
But even then, so to your point, that even the structure of the movie sort of shows that there is no real structure, it's just kind of something weird happens and then they make light of it. But perhaps it is worth dwelling for a moment on the murder plot. I kind of went to David to jump in here and talk a little bit about it because he made some really interesting connections regarding Sonia's character and the centrality that she plays in this idea of murdering Napoleon. She seems to think that if they can murder Napoleon, this will somehow solve all of their problems.
And I thought you did a really good job, David, connecting like she's the driver for this, for murder, for sort of, so and actually maybe this even cuts against the nihilism. Is nihilistic as Woody Allen seems to be or is Boris seems to be in this movie? He refuses to commit murder, which would really cut against the nihilism, right? I mean, he jokingly referred to a crime and punishment at one point, his father, his father, they're having drinks and his dad says, well, someone's like, I'm not going to call him a coffee, he killed these two old ladies and he's like, oh my God, that's horrible, right?
So the idea that murder is something you just should never do. Yeah, and just before David jumps in, that pious speech comes after a moral speech. And the moral speech is about having these ethical standards, that he has to live up to when he's about to kill quote unquote Napoleon, this false Napoleon. And it seems like he has a kind of yearning for some kind of transcendent standard, philosophically, that's not altogether dissimilar from a kind of nascent piety.
You guys kept saying that I had something to add here, I don't recall a popping thing. Well, I mean, you know, it did cause me to think that I consider Sonia the protagonist of this film. Yeah, tell me more. I mean, not more.
We did that. She's clear-sided. She's clear-sided and she's more in tune with her feelings. So at the beginning, she is essentially forced to marry a fishmonger.
He always smells like fish, right? Herring? Herring was not herring was a bird, but herring is. Whatever.
So she's, in fact, turns out never to have slept or us, even as he's dying. He's like, would have been nice if he had slept with me once. Instead, she sleeps with all of the men in town. And she's the one that proposes to deal with the on-wee of life, this murder of Napoleon.
Woody just kind of is impressed into her plan against his wishes, like he was impressed into the war by the military. And so she kind of played for me a Lady Macbeth character, always pushing Woody to do things that he would rather not do. That he would rather not do. She also doesn't pull the trigger and she joins him to do it.
And ultimately, it's her involvement in his life that destabilizes him. And I don't, so there's some obvious breaks from Macbeth. But I think that she's the destabilizing agent in Woody's life. He's in search of me and he comes across this woman who sees things more clearly.
And she goes, let's get into this plan. And she can see the plan through it when she's at pizza with the plan, but Woody can't deal with it. And then he unravels. Yeah, and I think just slightly adjustment, she's a Lady Macbeth character, except what they're trying to do is not murder the pious king Duncan, right?
But the tired, which is what you're getting at when you say that she's in a way that protagonists, because she urges him. She also seems to not have Boris's unhealthy sexual or erotic views, right? I mean, she seems actually to enjoy her understanding of love. I mean, is that fair to say?
I mean, like she likes what she does, although she's a little upset about the reputation that it brings her, but she doesn't seem to put as too much of hope in it. She doesn't seem to misplace too much hope in it, like Boris does. Does that seem right? No, she takes it for what it is.
She's the one that says, oh gosh, one of those says something about sex being meaningless or something like this. I don't know, it's actually Boris. Yeah, it was actually sex with a lot of meaningless. And he goes, well, you know, meaningless things go as one of the best.
Yeah, it's one of the best. If it's interesting about what he's care about, Boris is he can talk the talk, but only Sonia walks the walk. So Sonia is able to kind of like face a dying husband without ever having been faithful to him and just kind of there are three men alongside the bed while her husband, the hearing monger is dying. And she makes it, he says something like, you know, you've always been faithful to me.
And I praise you for it. And then they laugh, they're laughing at him in front of her. He doesn't. And then they cough to try to.
They cough, right? Yeah, so it's all, it's like this slapstick scene. She looks up and she smiles as they keep it down, boys. Like I know I've slept with all of you.
She's really the darkest character of the film as well. So she's able to just engage in like very, and shameful acts that none of us, except for me could engage in. And then just, no, no, you can never pull it off with that coolness. No, no, of course not.
So she, so a couple of thoughts. One of my favorite scenes in the movies there first. They had their first conversation when they're in like that attic area or whatever. I love the line, he goes out there, he goes, so are you dating any Russians I should know about?
I think for some reason makes me laugh every time. But then they're talking and she says, I'm in love with Yvonne, and he's taken it back and he's like, Yvonne, are you kidding me? The guy's a moron, right? Can't spell with me with a stick.
Then she says, he warms the cockles of my life. He goes, yeah, there's nothing like hot cockles. He goes, there's always a man in the box. So anyway, she falls in love with Yvonne, but then Yvonne marries.
It's a cockle. I don't know, it's just like a guy. That's a tarp, okay. Anyway, so she's in love with Yvonne, but then Yvonne marries another cousin, I think, right?
She's a hard-broken, so she marries, she goes to marry the 81-year-old guy who's so excited he gets up and he dies. So then she marries the herring salesman. She's not a marriage for love. So like Alan's character, she ends up not being satisfied with her circumstances.
So her erotic longings are unmoored, right? And so she's cheating left to right. He eventually dies defending her honor, right? Trying to do this noble act, much like other characters do in the movie.
Then finally, they get together after the duel, right? And she loves him, but not out of like a deep sort of longing, but out of familiarity. They just sort of get used to each other. And then she wants, right, they want something more.
So both of them are sort of getting what they want or coming to terms with what they have, and then they want more. And so one thing I'd say is that if we want to talk about the plot of what's driving this whole movie, it is their longing for something beautiful or meaningful in their lives. And the sense that what they get just doesn't satisfy it, unless it's something of grand world historical or transcendent importance, right? And it's a very kind of, I think it's very tragic in that it views those longings as somehow really destructive, right?
But it's tragic, but it's tragic, but it's laughing at them. Like you said earlier, it's sort of, it's like this mild laughter at tragedy. And there's this one passage where I think we already alluded to it where Boris and his father go back and forth and they're jokingly like using or incorporating either titles or main themes of subtle Dostosci novels. And I just couldn't help but think, is this, why is this movie set in Russia, for example, right?
We could have chosen any historical period, any conqueror, right? Why Russia, was it, does this show Woody Allen's disagreement with the sort of Russian literary view of the world, that there's something wrong fundamentally with the Dostosci's view of the world told story of these guys? I don't know. I mean, I've read those and enjoyed them.
I know me and Stoythek are an expert on them. But Dostosci is not an idolist, right? I mean, there's redemption and there's... Let me ask you, Rick.
And definitely redemption and Tolstoy. Yeah. So I have not read War and Peace, but I always took the title to be a reference to War and Peace, right? It's the same period.
It's got the same sort of X and Y, right? So you have... Oh, a lot of death War and Peace. Yeah.
So I don't know War and Peace, so maybe you can comment on any kind of similarity between the... I mean, it's the book about Napoleon. That's really good. Of course, the Napoleon.
No, the Napoleon Convasions of Russia is the key. It's not really the plot because it's more about the other things that are going on, but that's the thing in the background that's driving most of it. I'm sure we missed many of the drama. And it is about marital bliss, right?
War and Peace or trying to get some of that family happiness, right? Which is... In the midst of war. Yeah.
So now I don't know the plot or how that spells out or what Tolstoy is really trying to communicate, but it seems like it's touching on the same themes, but with a kind of dissatisfaction about it. But... I think that's a good place to end. You know, Alex, when I was...
At first I wasn't thrilled to be watching this film, but I do... I did enjoy it. And as far as films go, if your wife asks for a rom-com or your husband, you can slip on over on her sheet and put on a Woody Allen film. I mean, philosophically, there's always something alive.
Yeah, for sure. So we're not that far in. So do you want to... I think we have one mail-back question.
Let me check Twitter real quick. What movies would you guys like to do next? Or maybe we should ask our viewers to let us know. If we had viewers, we could ask them, but we can ask our listeners.
Listeners, we can ask our listeners. Yeah. It's a nice and gigantic work. Well, listen, if we do viewers, I'm gonna have to shave.
So we have one really interesting question. From Bowling Broke at King Bowling Broke. And he says, is Allen or some other filmmaker or a televisual artist generally? He says televisual, that's like from the 70s.
My colleague James Polis says it. King Bowling Broke says it. And it's Bowling Broke, yeah. So is Allen or some other filmmaker or televisual artist generally self-consciously participating in political philosophy?
Or is it usually only accidentally? Thinking about the influence of the muse versus active participation in the tradition? Is it a really good question? That is a good question.
I have to say it's accidental with Woody. Or to the extent that it is willful and planned, there's only so far he can go. And maybe that's a limit of the medium. I'll go next, I'll let Alex at the concluding piece here.
I took it to be very intentionally trying to be quasi-philosophic. The Sophisms, for example, the references. But at the end of the day, I took Woody Allen to be taking the side of poetry. I think he sees himself as what a screenwriter, what he calls him, he makes movies.
A director, he's not a philosopher, he's a poet. And I realize that, you know how out of touch you're gonna sound to our audience? Well, we just wanna talk to you as a kid. Yeah, so, but the point is like, I think he's, to the extent that poetry and philosophy touch on very similar themes, love and death, for example.
I mean, we did this whole long series on symposium, where the main rivals to Socrates and trying to capture this phenomenon and sort of explain it well to others, his main rivals are poets. And I think that Woody Allen, I don't know, I'm not an expert at anything but I have never interviewed with him, but my guess would be his self understanding is that he's on the tradition of poetry and that he's creating some beautiful story for us. And I think that's related to the nihilism that we detected in the story too. But Alex can bring it home for us.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. He says things like that in interviews. I mean, he does, yeah, he does. I mean, he basically says, I'm gonna die, I gotta do something.
But I think one thing is, the movie does kind of escape its own sort of plot trap. So the basic problem is, okay, life is meaningless, whatever, but then for, we have to enjoy beautiful things. But beautiful things require some sacrifice, which can end your life, right? This is the problem is he's a coward because he's a thinker, but he's brought by his arrows into wanting something more.
And then he's, the one exception to this seems to be the film itself, which does not have some sort of transcendent sort of escape, right? That they're trying to have, but sort of tries to make light of this sort of thing. It might be deeply tragic, but we can live with it by joking about how we can't do anything about it. And that beautiful projection, which we could argue is actually not beautiful.
It is simply ugly at the end of the day. That would be I think a criticism. But that beautiful thing does not call for you to kill yourself or something. You can still attain some kind of greatness by being a great filmmaker that explores these questions in various attempts, failing attempts to escape it.
But it does seem like at the end of the day, there's, yeah, there's no way, there's no way out of it for Alan. I mean, I think there's something missing there, obviously. And so I do think, I think one way to approach the bowling brooks question is to say, well, we recognize that there's a lot of control that he's exhibiting and we recognize that there's a kind of horizon. The question is where does that line, do we actually draw that line?
And I do think that with him, the amount of control in detail he has, it is difficult, but it does seem like he does not offer a positive redemption from it. Maybe we could look at Annie Hall because I think that might go a little deeper than this film in treating this question. Just one small thing, the positive takeaway that I take away from this movie is laughter and sex can make life bearable, not even food or any of the other bodily pleasures. Laughter and sex, it seems to me.
And if you're. Guys, this is a family shake, Jake. You got to blast that cheese Louise. Yeah, yeah, at the same time.
Thanks for joining us on the new degree. Don't forget to rate us. Yeah, rate us, review us, donate. Kiss us.
Oh, oh, jang jang. All right, I'll see you guys later. Peace.