Hi folks, welcome back to the Thinker. If you're hearing my voice, you know what that means. David Barr is no longer with us, both in mind and in his very large body. But we are joined by a fellow brother in boldness, Stephen Hayward.
Stephen Hayward is the Gaylord, visiting professor at Pepperdine University, right? He's the author of numerous books and really, I mean, the list of things he's done goes on and on. So I'll just promote his most recent book on M. Stan Evans, conservative with a puzzle of freedom, which you can get on Amazon.
It's on discount, 49% off. I don't know why they don't go to full 50. You can get hardcover for $17.44. So John, I don't know if that'll be the case when he says it could be a month or so down the line, but very pleased to have Steve back.
This is your third time on the show, right? Wow, I guess so, right. Let's go back to you guys. You guys are really bunch.
You need some discipline. So with a title like that, you'll certainly disem lotus. So let's jump into it. What are we discussing today?
We're discussing the movie and book Cloud Atlas, which in typical undergraduate fashion, Greg and I have watched the movie and Steve, our professor, has actually read the book. And watch the movie. He's done both. He's done both.
Yeah. It's a very long book, 500 or so pages. And Steve, you've also written a couple of essays on it, which we'll link to on Twitter. If anybody's interested, go follow us, like, subscribe, donate, blah, blah, blah.
But making the case, it's got some very interesting sort of philosophical themes going on about freedom and about enduring human nature and so on and so forth. We'll get into the details of that. But welcome back to the show and maybe you can get us started by just giving us a little background on the book or the movie or the kindling of your interest that you taught us in your first article, but it might be of more general interest. Right.
I mean, it's, well, take my time here and please interrupt because otherwise it'll turn into a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long podcast. Well, so first of all, I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction. I, you know, there's too many nonfiction break books that I, on my list to get through, right? And things to reread like Plato's dialogues and so forth as you guys know.
But I'd seen the movie on an airplane when it came out 10, 11 years ago and I thought, what a hot mess this is. Just the first introduction. It's six different stories spread over 500 years and the movie jumps around between all of them. And it's going to be very confusing.
Watching it on an airplane is the worst place to watch it. You really need to have a bigger screen where it's quiet, you can pay attention. That whose views I greatly respect to tell me, Oh, no, the novel is a classic. A minor, a model from David Mitchell published around 2005, I think.
So fairly recent. And so I picked it up and read it and was bold over by it. And then I watched the movie again and not change my mind about the movie. But actually, I think the movie, although it does require close attention, I think the movie is a masterpiece also.
And then the summary point is it's not really a political novel or movie in the ordinary sense you use that. But I think a metaphysical novel or a moral political model and then it then dropped. We'll talk about this. I mean, draws from a lot of classic literature.
It means for a critic would say, well, it's just derivative of Orwell and Ray Bradbury. And if you think about other science fiction tropes and movies like Blade Runner, it kind of makes it a parent in a certain way. A sort of green is an element of the movie. But I think it's done in a brilliant style.
And I think it's quite moving. So that's my opening bid on it, at least. Yeah. Is there anything by this author before?
Nope. Never have. And I've had people say other works are good, but this is his best. Okay.
Yeah. I like the way you put a metaphysical novel. It's more conscious than a lot of contemporary literature of its basic premises behind its storytelling. And I'll say in the movie, so one thing, the movie, so sometimes people will be like, oh, you need to watch the show.
And I'm like, oh, well, I tried one episode. I wasn't really that into it. It gets really good around the third season. I'm like, I'm not watching.
I hate those kind of move those series. You got to be making a career out of watching it. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah.
But then I say that as a caveat to this movie takes about 45 minutes into its three hours to really start to click. But it's fascinating. It switches. It's with six main characters in six different times.
And the times are both metaphysically linked and that the same themes play out. But also they're chronologically linked and that certain events in one timeline will echo down. So for instance, there's a narrative in 2012 about a publisher who gets stuck into it. It's very comic.
It's hilarious that he writes a novel about it and then he gets turned into a movie. And then that movie ends up influencing this freedom fighter who becomes a god in the 200 years later. Yeah. In the fifth storyline, the movie influencers are in the sixth, she's basically deemed a god in this.
It's fascinating how these things echo down. And there's even maybe some suggestion that there's a kind of circularity to time even, or that history reaches an arc and goes back back. But we can discuss that. But the thing the movie does well is that objects will repeat from one movie.
So there's like a little blue stone that's handled in the last story that's also plays out in the second story from 1939, or the first story on somebody's vest. You see the same stone or one scene will end with a car screeching to a halt and it cuts to another timeline where a car is screeching to a halt or somebody's at the door and the parallel character. It's the same six actors in the six sequences. And so you can tell it's very complicated.
But it leaves in and because they're kind of six pressing stories in three hours, you really can't identify. It's me. What is it? Thirty minutes?
The story or something like that? Or a story when you, if you, on average, right? Yeah. And so it's really compelling and gripping.
And I could not stop watching it. Yeah. So the movie had to be structured different from the book just by the necessity of film because what happens in the book is there are, let's see, 11 chapters. So you have five stories that started chronological order from 1849 and the very, the very simple story.
Sorry, we started over again. There's five stories that start and then end in the middle. And then there's the simple chapter. It's one complete story by itself.
That's the one that solutions crossing. And then the film, it's Tom Hanks on the island in the distant future after some kind of holocaust has ruined the planet. And then in the novel, you go back and it worked backwards from the story of Korea, back through the guy in the asylum in Britain, back to the first character, ends the book. So you sort of go up and down.
Some people said it's like a Russian nested doll. You couldn't have done it that way in the movie because you would have forgotten everything at the end of three hours so that we'd be all together. But among other things, before you even get to the substance, the literary styles are remarkable because each one has a distinctive literary style. The first one, the Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, this young lawyer on a sailboat crossing the Pacific in 1849.
It reads like Melville. I think there's some sort of Melville-type themes in there. And the second installment was set in England in the 1930s, balls of the Spire and Young Composer. That's written like Ian Forster, one of those early 20th century British novels and manners.
Then the third one is set in San Francisco in the 1970s. It's pretty much like a Raymond Chandler or Leonard Klein thriller. That by the way, those two stories, the one from the 30s and the one from the 70s is the only one that has a character from the previous story. It's the scientist whose name I'm blanking on right now.
Right, right. Yeah, that's the only one in the movie or in the book where there's one character. That's the Rufus. That's right.
Yeah. Rufus, I forget Rufus. I know that's a great name. The fourth one quickly is the Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish set around 2012.
He's this sort of shady, vanity publisher who gets tricked by his brother to check him into the asylum. That's very much British farce. Yes. And you know, entirely unserious in a larger way except that as you just mentioned a moment ago, his embellished story of his life later gets made into a movie.
It takes on a whole new meaning, 200 years in the future as a freedom fighter. And he does, by the way, as a guy who writes about Soulja needs a couple of times. By the way, he shows up several times in the movie. And finally, the fifth story, which is to me is the most gripping is a classic futuristic sci-fi story set in New Soul Korea, I think in the year 2245, something like that.
And it's a classic anti-utopian futurist nightmare. And it's very much like Winston Smith being interrogated in 1984. Most of it is the interrogation of this woman who she's a, what they call her, is a fabricant who's essentially the same as a replicant from Blade Runner, an artificial genetic engineer to even be, who starts to think for herself. And that's a threat to the regime, which is known as the corpocracy, which is run by the unanimity, which sounds to me like a university board of regents, but never mind that.
So, it goes to your five stories to build up. And then there's the central story that we can talk some more about, because I'm going on too long. And then it goes backwards after that central story. And I think the central theme is the idea of nature, human nature, the state of nature.
I think at the end of the day, the book is a rejection of myelism and Rousseau at the same time. I don't know whether David Mitchell was conscious of this or not, or whether he just had all the elements in his head to put him together in this very inventive story. Yeah, we were texting once again. Go ahead.
Go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Well, obviously, you mentioned this in passing, but you mentioned the Melville-like quality of the story that said in the 19th century.
And it is also about sailing and these things. But you also, in one of your two pieces on this, you say that you think that this might actually be a minor classic, it might even be the closest thing we have to a piece by Melville these days. I think it's possible, for the very reasons I've just started with that, that there's some really deep things that work here. I mean, you know, friends of ours like, you know, Catherine Zuckert wrote that in a terrific book 30 years ago, A Natural Right in Novel Form.
And lots of other of our friends have talked over the years about some of the deep things you can find in Melville. Who knows whether Melville was intending that consciously or not, right? And so, yeah, I think that this is to the extent that people still write ambitious novels that are worth reading that will hold up in 100 years. I think this might be one of them.
I'm no great expert on modern literature. So, you know, attach all the caveats you want. And you mentioned Orwell, Melville, Rousseau, I mean, the state of nature, the eternal recurrences of theme that's mentioned several times. And that's a Nietzsche sort of, I mean, like, gosh, there's just so much going on here.
Solzhenitsyn has mentioned several times in several of the different stories. And so it seems like the author, if this is in the book as well, is at least trying to point to some of these things. That does seem fairly conscious, right? Yeah.
I've got to think that there's somewhere deep in David Mitchell's awareness of these things, whether, you know, he studied them deeply the way you and I have. But a couple of things from the novel, I think I quote this in my article early on in the anime. So, Adam, you know, you should say this about him. Why he's important to the whole story arc, he begins an ends the novel.
He's this young, idealistic lawyer, player in the movie, I think, in the opening scene, somewhat naive about the world at large. You know, he's shocked at the scenes of, you know, natives being beaten and slavery. And he ends the book, joining abolitionist cause back in the United States, right? So, and even though he's told, there's, you know, by one of the older cynics, that there's an order of nature.
You can't go against this, right? And, you know, he sticks to his idealism. So, one of the early paintings of the book, one of these old wisdom guys trying to explain the world to him says, if there's no God west of the horn in part of Africa, why there's none of your constitutions all men are created equal, neither Mr. Ewing.
And there's a whole bunch of statements like that early on, because the part of the early storyline that's not as well drawn out, in fact, it's omitted in the movie. But part of the storyline, the novel is Ewing observing two indigenous tribes of the region. One is, I think, of some fictional tribe that's very much through so noble savage. They've lived in peace for hundreds of years and they get wiped out by the New Zealand mountains, so much more violent.
And, you know, you draw the lesson there that is explicit in the movie in several places, that the swan do what they will, we do what they must use, the obscenities formulation of it. He has all the back guys put it, what the, you know, the week army, the swan do eat, right? That's his version of the obscenities in the movie, right? And, you know, the point there is, and somewhere it says that, you know, rights and institutions are only as good as people share your opinions, you know, if there's virtue.
So that's why I say that, you know, throughout the book, you can't escape making certain moral political points. Yeah, here's what we have one early in the first chapter. What moral to draw? We love it up our Lord is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
So that, you know, the fundamental problem of predation of the strong against the weak is a running theme in every one of the stories. Yeah, that line, right, the week of the week of the week, the strong to eat occurs in the first story, yeah, temporally in the last story, temporally. Right. Interestingly, in the movie, Tom Hanks's character says before he's beaten by a slave who has markings like tattoo markings on his face.
And then Tom Hanks's character is like inner devil or something like that says that to him. And Tom Hanks's character has the markings on his face. So there's these characters shift from one side to the other quite a bit and they're these interesting parallel motifs. But and then both stories feature, oh, yeah, I just think one of my favorite things about the movie was Hugh Grant with his pretty eyes as like a post-apocalyptic cannibalistic war.
Yeah. Yeah. And then passed out after, after drinking human blood, I mean, it's like, I can see what a movie did do well. There's something unbelievable about those eyes with that soul.
Just didn't make it. Yeah, I know. I thought it. He's a terrible, and he's definitely canceled in real life.
Yeah. I'm not buying the rom-com Jentil soul. Right. So you mentioned this thing about maybe the author not being or the filmmakers not being fully aware of what's going on.
I think that's right. I think it's wrestling in a way the book or the movie is wrestling with a problem that often occurs, which is on the one hand, we have a kind of historicism and relativism where we just want to say there's progress and things change. On the other hand, we want to say that racism is by nature wrong, right? It's just simply wrong.
And it seems like the movie ultimately is squaring the two. It's got this strong anti-capitalist or anti-corporate theme running through it from the slave owners who are involved in international trade up through this dystopia. It's all it all falls apart where it seems like they want to point the finger at corporate greed as instrumentalizing human beings either through slavery or even for food in the dystopian like 2,200 narrative. And then there's the other side saying, well, the only reason we can condemn this is because it's just wrong to treat people this way.
And it seems like they're struggling with a kind of Marxism on the one hand, and then a real sense that all men are created equal. And I guess one thing you could say, maybe you can sell this out, is that it begrudgingly comes back to the American founding in a way, right? Or the founding principle, right? They're like its own condemations have to say, well, yeah, we might want to condemn the United States as a capitalist country, but we have to say they got the basic thing, right?
That this was correct. Yeah, I'm trying to find the, oh, yeah, here we are. So in the, that central chapter called Seuss's Crossing where Tom Hanks plays Zachary, who's the sort of simple minded Valley person as they're called. And they live in, they live in social, social, social, social, social, social, social, social and all the rest of that.
And by the way, that chapter is written in kind of a pigeon English. Yeah. Still just think and take a while to get used to it, because Mitchell has made up some words in terms and you've got to figure out what they are. So I just translate one he asks the, the, the, how he very places this person who comes by a future powered hoverboat from far across the ocean to what's now why, and, and why and they're advanced.
And so Zachary is curious, and asking this woman, Marion him, all kinds of questions about the world. And she says to him, yes, the question is better to be savaged or civilized. And her answer is listen, savages and civilized people aren't divided by private belief or mountain ranges. Every human is both.
Right? It's the real line that I think the social needs to say is that you could need one's right through the all human hearts and this, of course, to us what makes us think about. That's why the victim of the king of ethics is important, right? The habituation and all that flows from all that.
And so I mean, that is a very simple thing to the book. And, you know, there's a, so you have characters. So I'll mention that, you know, you mentioned that the actors play six different roles, some very minor, but some are very large parts in each one of the timelines. So Tom Hanks is a bad guy in the first story.
He's the simple minded, but good, hard person in the simple story in between. He's this naive businessman. And by the way, that the Luis Ray crime story in the 70s, Tom Hanks plays a scientist who then gets killed in an airplane that's blown up by the bad guys. It's very much that 70s watergate era, anti-corporate vibe to it.
Yeah. It's very, it's sort of sound makes it feel very familiar to if you're as old as I am. And so, but other people, like Tom, sorry, Hugh Grant, we mentioned, and Hugo Weaving is in every seat, those two, they're bad guys in every storyline. And maybe this is overdoing it.
But the point is there are some kinds of human beings, some types of human beings who are just irredeemably evil in whatever setting you put them in. We usually call them criminals and put them in prison if we can't, right? But with other people, it depends on a lot of things. Chance, circumstance, upbringing, institutions, you know, go through the rest.
Because Tom Hanks is at the end of the day, you know, he tries to murder Adam Ewing. He's the sort of nice guy, but naive and the Luis Ray timeline. And he's somebody who you root for conflicted in that simple story, right? He's got the devil whispering into his ear.
He should kill this woman. She's trying to take over your land. He has to resist the siren call of the devil. Right.
So, and so there's a guy who's wrestling with his moral character and his decisions and ultimately goes the right way. It's locking too, right? That is the rational industrious and the quarrelsome, the contentious, the types and all that. One thing the movie does, and it seems like, obviously the book probably does not do this, is that the actors persist across the different storylines, which can give you and you wrote about this, can give kind of the false impression that maybe the story is about reincarnation or something like that.
I didn't really get that so much from the movie, but I just sort of thought, well, they've got these six actors, they want to use them and sort of move away. Because it doesn't, I mean, there's no explicit mentions of reincarnation, if I recall, but I mean, there's this notion of the eternal occurrence, which would be much more in line with what you were saying that these types were cur. It's not so much that you're actually reincarnated exactly the same as a different person, but there are these middling types, there are types that are good, they're types that are bad. There is something about past lives.
What was it, Tom Hanks character in the 1970s, why he says, yeah, I used to date this girl past lives. But then you get this. That's the 70s, man. Yeah.
But then you get this, and then there are sometimes intimations like, I feel like I've seen you before, like you're familiar and it's coming off of a transition from, so there is some intimation, but then there's also the, I love this line that Hallie Berry's character makes in that 1970s, which she's reading the letters from two things by his lover. What was his name again? Robert Froesher. Robert Froesher.
Great name. Right. And he, and he's writing these letters and he's been shot. She's picked up the letters.
She's reading them and she asked herself. She says, I wonder why we keep making the same mistakes, which I thought was really good. So, yeah, there's this kind of metaphysical side that you don't have to buy, but it seems like it's a metaphysical premise intended to drive home this point that the same soul can find itself in different circumstances and arrive at very different results or sometimes exactly the same. There's in the last two narratives, Hugh Grant's character ends up in the same position on his back covered in the thing he gets intoxicated in one, it's the old soap.
He's just lying back. Right. Yes. The last one is blood.
He's lying back with blood all over his face. But it's the same, of course, because the soap is actually, it's blood. Yeah. It's true.
The cannibalism story actually seems to link the stories in some way. I was going to talk about that when Steve mentioned that, but cannibalism seems to, you know, there's the mention to it's soil and green or whatever, then there's the soap and then there's the actual cannibalism. So, you know, cannibalism is a term of recurrence as well. That's also the fact that the other thing is the best and the worst of the animals.
I mean, so the book doesn't, I don't remember some of those scenes that you mentioned, Alex, from the book. They might be there, and I just don't remember or miss them. One thing that isn't the book that is accentuated in the movie is the birthmark of the shooting star that so many that all the main characters have. And that's in the book, but it's not played up as much.
And so I think, again, the requirements of translating it to the film meant you had to cast the same actors in six different stories, although it would be heavy prosthetics. It could be very distracting for the viewer. But then also they played up the birthmark word in the movie. And so a lot of people said, oh, this is kind of reincarnation.
And that's a reincarnation thing. You can pick it out of the book here and there, but it's not as evident as in the movie. And I did, I just, you know, the movie was made by, I should be mentioned the, about three directors. They actually had two units going at once making it.
It was very expensive to make, over a $100 million budget. And one of the units was the Wurchoski siblings, I guess we call them. I can't remember if one of the Wurchoski's switch teams from male to female here a few years ago, but they made the matrix, right, which is what really made them famous 20 some years ago. And just as their course was on the philosophy of the matrix, which I think are kind of ridiculous, I think in this case, I watched a couple of interviews where they think it's all about reincarnation and, you know, the eternal return without really getting very deep in the leeching part of it.
And I think they just missed the Switzerland in front of them. And then a wonderful job of putting together a very inventive adaptation of the book. So you know, that happens now in the filmmakers, right? Yeah.
They did, I think a fantastic job with what they could do. And they both transitioned. It's so small. Yeah.
Okay. Right. But anyways, yeah, I think it's, it is one of those, I wonder how deep these parallels with there's so many of them and sometimes they're very small. And sometimes it's, it connects to completely opposing scenes.
And it's, it's not clear that every single one is meant to be interpreted in the sort of deep textual manner. But it does, I mean, it does bring out, I think this is maybe one general insight, not just the essential ambiguity in human nature, but the essential ambiguity in objects, in motions, in actions, right? That the opening of a door can be friendly and foreboding the screeching of tires can be saving or frightening depending on the situation. And it shows that these sort of emotional nexus that engages in that engages, that engages these activities and objects, endows them with sort of opposing meaning all the time.
The question I had for you is that sort of the peak of, you could say the narrative in as regards its, its lessons comes in this almost revelation from this, this, this character and even soon me, I forget about four five one or so many four, which I think by the way, the four five one is an homage to Bradbury is my guess. Got it. That makes sense. But she, she's, what are they called?
A fabricance. A fabricate. Yeah. So she's a fabricate, which means she's like made and leaves just to serve other people.
She sleeps in a drawer basically. And then she comes out and she serves them and she's been engineered to look nice, but to be kind of just obedient. And, but then through a series of events, she ends up broadcasting this revelation of moral truth. I was wondering, do you think I kind of don't like it when an author or a filmmaker just tells you what everything means?
Because it kind of makes everything else superfluous. Just put your argument on the page and tell me. Yeah. So I conceptual art is kind of creating that to me.
But do you think that Sue Meese revelation is just meant to be the meaning of the book or do you think it goes deeper than what she's aware of? Yeah. So it's different to the book. They had to change it for the movie.
And I can see why in the book, it's funny. It's spools out much more slowly. By the way, her chapter is all entirely dialogue between her and the inquisitor who's giving her final interview before she's executed. Has he called the inquisitor in the book?
You know, that's not the name. He's the archivist. He's called the archivist. Right.
Yeah, I should have said the quisitor. And then she narrates on the story of what's happened. But what happened when you realize toward the end is the corpocracy actually likes the Soviet Unionist to do, like the communist or the Eastern Europeanist to do. The rebellion that she becomes the spokesperson for and profit for turns out to have been controlled opposition.
It was opposition run by the government designed to actually make people more obedient at the end of the day. And she actually figures it out. But she started thinking for herself and she doesn't care. So the movie they had to, that wouldn't work very well in the movie.
And so they changed it some. And then her revelation that is done in sort of speech that they have her do in the midst of all the bio is going on around her. That spools out much more slowly differently in the book. And it's quite a lot more interesting.
I'll just put it that way. The interesting Alex was just saying, there are some objects in different contexts. There's some very interesting parts of the book where there's some width involved, but it's very much of how things change in different contexts. So one thing in the book that they couldn't do in the movie for some obvious reason is they referred to a little, all TV screens are sonnies.
And when you watch on a Sony, you watch a Disney instead of a movie. So I'm saying, oh, I watched this Disney one time in that story. And that story, but you couldn't have done that in the movie for trademark and copyright reasons, right? So they didn't try to do that.
And then as one place we talk about the old holiday fable, something like Rudolph the red lip blood drinker or something. You see, an old story somehow gets warped and all changed around as time goes on. And some of that I think is just for fun. And some of that I think is also perhaps making the deeper point about how context changes are the way we regard things in the past.
And so one last thing about Sony is in the final story of Solutions Crossing. Sony is a deity, not just a private, but a deity who has worshiped. And there's a lot of confusion about this. And the actual authentic, and how, where she came from, what involved is forgotten or unknown.
And I'm not quite sure what the author may have intended or meant by all that, but it certainly adds to something to the puzzle over. Yeah. It seems like an account of how humans become deities over time. Yes.
The message gets kind of muddled, right? Which is the transmission of prophecy over time. Right. Anyway, yeah.
One funny detail about the movie was that so you have the publisher gets trapped the old person so he writes a book. It becomes a movie that movies then watched in this later, but it's a very old movie. Yeah. And Tom Hanks in that narrative plays the actor, places publisher very, very seriously.
Is it Tom Hanks in the movie? That's how it works. I think it's Tom Hanks playing a fictional version of Tom Hanks, because that's the kind of role Tom Hanks plays. Yeah, that's what I was saying.
It was kind of like, I'm going to be serious for a moment. And he's kind of popular novels turned into movies. So I thought that was very funny that he plays that seems like a fictional version of himself, because if the book was written in 2012, it would have been made sometime in the 2020s, which Tom Hanks could have done. Right.
Yeah. That's right. I mean, there's another example of what you're just saying about context. It is in the book, but also in the movie, this Timothy Cavendish guy is kind of a figure of mockery.
He's kind of a buffoon. Yeah. The scene that gets made in the movie and shown 200 years in the future, he's saying, I will not be held captive. I have human rights, something like that.
And you laugh at it when you see it happening in the actual story. Well, 200 years in the future, it becomes an inspiration. And a rallying cry for the freedom fighters of the dystopia of the future. And they watch the scene and very seriously, this is kind of the cabinet.
He's our hero. So, you know, it's sort of a slightly comic touch, but also a serious one. Yeah. Even the, even the Ewing example, the guy says to him, you said that there's, you know, we don't have that all men are critical, like your constitution, right?
That's also a religion, because that's obviously comes from the Declaration of the Constitution. So even, even the area. Yeah. Well, you know, I tend to excuse British authors when they confuse the two.
Fair enough. Right. I was actually wondering how, I mean, I was surprised when I saw that this author was British. I mean, because it did strike me.
I don't know if this gets to the maybe a serious kind of question. I, you know, have read the both pieces that you wrote and I was persuaded. I mean, the book seems very pro natural rights. Yes.
It's conservative. I think that's right. It seems to do things surreptitiously that I think if you just were to say these things, you couldn't make this movie. Yes.
Like, I mean, there's one truth, all men are critical. It seems to, it seems to the way that the characters are playing people at different races seems to be the point. Like you, you literally just, you know, actually all men are critical that all of these distinctions that we make amongst people are actually in the, like they make up like, like, like, African versus womb born or whatever it is natural. Yeah.
Natural war. Right. Yes. Yeah.
All these things. Right. So there's no such things as true born and, and, and fabricance, all, you know, it comes pretty close to saying that all human, all better created equal, right? Right.
And then the line that's in the beginning of the movie, I mentioned in my article where the archivist opens up, I say, please tell us your version of the truth. And she ends up with this singular version of the truth or falsehoods. I don't think that's a book. I don't remember it, but that's, but that is very direct.
Right. This is why it's history too. Sorry, I was just gonna say, I mean, like, this seems like a conservative account of history. History is contingent.
Um, individuals matter, right? Like there's no arc of history. It's not historical progress. There's no world spirit guiding things.
Uh, there could be world cataclysm that eventually, you know, make the races go away. Well, this is where I think I would come back to the point where I think he's struggling with his historicism. It's just like when you get these postmodern fixations on systems of power and oppression. And it's like, Oh, everything is just contingent.
It's all just since the power. There is no truth. It's truth is just manufactured product of power. But it's like, well, then why are you trying to free the oppressed?
Who cares? Like, why does that? Why would that be your impetus? What do you say if they were being honest that they think it's wrong, right?
So we're using the Marxist stuff. It's absolutely wrong that people are oppressed. And so I think the author and the filmmakers are maybe a bit more honest and say, well, yeah, obviously there's historical variability and there's different counts and perspectives, but we have to ultimately agree on this one ethical principle of human equality and the truth of human freedom as a good. Otherwise, otherwise we have no way to object to this or that system that we find oppressive.
Uh, yeah, I'm not quite. I think I'm with Greg here. I'm not quite seeing a very overt from Marxist attitude of it. Um, although I mean, I'll have to think about it.
So why don't they call it in a second? I, this is kind of what I'm hinting on. Is it called in the second one? Uh, is it called the corpocracy or something like that?
Yeah, that's the one in the future, right? And right. The corpocracy is the regime type and yeah, it, uh, I mean, I, I suppose you can, um, but I don't know if you necessarily have to go to Marxism for that. I think you can just go straight up a corporatism that we're familiar with today, right?
You know, sort of Sweden on steroids or something. Uh, you know, it's all supposed to be very benign. Um, so I don't know. I wonder if that was part of the, I mean, look, I don't know, I'd actually do some research on this author, David Mitchell or whoever made the films, like you said, but it seems to me like if I, if one, if I wanted a package and natural rights movie and make it seem like it was on board with leftist kinds of things, I would do exactly this.
Yeah. I would be like, Oh, no, the corporatisms in charge, the corpocracy. Yeah. Cause it's, I mean, really the corpocracy is also, I mean, like the whole idea of that's not necessarily what classical liberal economics is about, right?
Because it's going to affirm the, you know, the natural rights of individuals, right? And the, the replicants or whatever they're called, the fabricants, that would be. I don't think, I don't think the founders had in mind, like global, multinational corporations. Exactly.
Yeah. They did. And so, they were supposed to like aristocratic farmers. And I mean, Adam Smith was perfectly well aware that, you know, that the corporations or were not in favor of free market liberalism, right?
That these are the guys who will, this is one of the roles of governance for event corporations, for being able to use the government to prevent competition and violate rights. Anyway, Mill was the first one of these classical liberals who became okay with some of these less free ideas, right? Like he was okay with colonialism, but most of those early liberals were all like, this is terrible. You can't have these things all been a great equal.
Yeah. Well, even I was digression a little bit, I was looking point to Edmund Burke as someone who was partially critical of colonial practices, right? He's holding a peach with a horn Hastings. If you read that, you know, I like to say the leftists were all about colonialism.
Well, I hope you do include Edmund Burke on your syllabus, right? Right. And of course, he probably got to wear this, but it was very harsh for all the right reasons about the way the British East India Company was treating the people in culture of India as a, as a first student's note and no one else does. Yeah.
Let me give you guys one paragraph on the opening chapter. Please. It's not too long, but it, I think it will peak your interest to read the book, but you can see why it was too long for the movie, but it's, you know, in his journal, that's, that the chapter is his journal about this older guy, the one who said there's no woman or credit equal here, Mr. Ewing.
And now he's several pages later, he says, consider this 2000 savages and trying thou shalt not kill in word and indeed and frame an oral magna carda to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the 60th century since Adam tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriari. That's the peaceful tribe that the experience is down the South Pacific. War was as alien a concept to the Moriari as the telescope is to the pygmy peace, not hiatus bequixed wars, but millennia of imperishable peace rules these far from islands who can deny their old villages like closer to Morazutopia that our states of progress governed by war-hungry prince loans in Versailles and Vienna, Washington and Westminster, here to claim Mr.
Darnock and here only were those elusive phantasms, the noble savages framed in fresh flesh and blood. Then he goes on to say, glass and peace alike, we trade, we trade proof of fragility under repeated blows. So you may, you know, there can be examples of the noble savage, but guess about the greater forces of evil will overcome them eventually. I mean, it's not quite that far, but so there's a, you know, pretty thoughtful paragraph.
It's a very thought provoking, I think. That quote you just mentioned reminded me and I think we passed along this earlier that there's even also seemingly references to Genesis and this flood narrative going on as well. So it's drawn in philosophy, it's drawn in literature, it seems also be drawn in the Bible and even kind of validating some of the those kinds of considerations it seems that are raised in Genesis. Yeah, Darwin gets some equivocal references in the novel also.
That wouldn't make it to the movie, but they're in the book. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. We make a little case regarding Darwin in the movie though. I thought I, I didn't, there might be an album.
Yeah. I was gonna ask, what do you guys make up the locations? Is there any significance to them? San Francisco, Seoul or New Soul?
Why there's two set in the United Kingdom, I guess? Yeah. And then, you know, because the hotel, where the composer lives, at least in the movie, ends up becoming the hostel, right? Where everybody's like, that's right.
Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That's not, yeah. You put up the big, close attention to recognize that in the South Pacific. Is it the opposite?
Where the first place? Yeah. It's sort of been determined, but it's somewhere it sounds like down close to New Zealand or, you know, to hear one of those Pacific Islands down there. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I was just bridging. I was just, you know, in the genre of these anti-atopian novels to be set in the Far East Asia, but I was struck by the choice of Korea, for example, as a location. Maybe as the idea that being there that sort of Japan and Korea maybe took this capitalism and put it on steroids, is that, is that what's going on?
Well, you know, I mean, I don't know if you guys were firefly fans when that show was briefly on TV 20 years ago, but remember there that future involved United States and China merging. And there's a little bit of a vibe of that here, I suppose, right? We are very worried now about the Chinese form of capitalism. I mean, right today, and then you're 2023.
And I have been worried about, I'm worried about, I'm worried about, I'm worried about Japanese industrial policy in the 80s. I remember that. Right. Those people all have pretty silly in retrospect.
They do. I remember the forecast that Japan was going to pass us by the year 2010 in economic output. And I remember that too. That's always maybe somewhat dubious about the claims about China passing us as well for us.
Exactly. Yeah. For some of those reasons. Yeah.
It seems to rely, this is so far I feel, but it seems to rely on this kind of crazy belief that, like the rural sides of China are just going to become like industrial, like professionalized. Right. It just doesn't seem like it. It's pretty.
Yeah. Anyways. Yeah, I couldn't make sense of that. I thought it was strange because it, I mean, it gloeb hops enough.
It's time hopping. It's gloeb hopping. Like something, something significant seems to be going on. Africans, Asians, Europeans, Americans.
Yeah. It seems to be moving from centers of power to different centers of power and to, and it seems like, at least in the last one, it's not even clear that anybody's there. Like there's other people maybe in other places, but it's pretty. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's two changes the movie made. One is that the composer Vivian Ayres, the Robert Frobcher tries to link up with it. And the novel is actually based over in Belgium.
And in the movie, they moved him up to Scotland, I think. And therefore, you know, the same house was available to be the asylum for the next storyline. I think that was an interesting one. The film took the other one is in the novel, Marinam is trying to contact other isolated human survivors, I think, in Central America or South America by some old radio device.
In the film, it's we go into some other planets, right? Right. And salvation involves leaving the earth. And that was one change there.
I think I think that's a successful change in the movie. It would have been a little harder to sort of grasp the story arc. I think if they kept it with the original, it's a little less dramatic. Although it doesn't fall, you know, how do we?
One of the things in the movie is, you know, all these simple village people saying, what's this crazy boat that skims across the water? Yeah, I left it then. So it's fusion powered and all that native knowledge. Oh, yeah.
I don't know what it is. It's pretty, pretty, pretty little bit. Yeah. That's another thing about the movie.
I'm not sure if this is in the book, but there seems to be a global warming narrative, right? They say, oh, that's old. So your water in 100 years will be under two, which seems to imply like you're just going to have to leave the planet. So it seems like they left the planet at some point and then some catastrophe occurred, which I guess would explain why, soon, as they don't know the historical narrative, because that planet is just inundated and destroyed.
So yeah, it's implied both in the book and the film that some kind of catastrophe has happened. They're not very specific about it. It sounds like it's either a nuclear holocaust or maybe potentially some kind of pandemic that's on our mind these days, right? They leave that entirely uncertain and ambiguous.
And I mean, I thought the movie, there's that one reference to old souls underwater, but otherwise there are in the book that they really, you know, try and beat you up the head on the global warming sea level rising business. It's, I think, you know, I think I probably hand you plot devices with an off list more than intention to, you know, companies are conscious about this crazy, knowing business. It was a great movie. I remember, you know, I did not, I intentionally avoided watching it because the commercials, I remember at the time, we're so confusing.
I thought this looks ridiculous. Yeah. But it is extraordinarily ambitious, the movie as the novel sounds like. And also the following Alex and I were texting about this a little bit earlier today.
And the movie strikes me as on the one hand, so very, very good. But then they're like, I don't know, there's some other things you're like, oh, that something in the back of my head is just not quite happy with this movie. It's just like there are two or three missteps away from having made it just an outstanding A plus movie. I mean, some of the casting, like you said, like having someone who's not very credible is this species or this race or this, whatever, not species race, a different type of like real Greg comes out.
Just spoke. I just spoke. You know, you have several of the actors made up as Asians for the scenes in the show and that attracted a lot of criticism at the time and today, which is caused riot. I think I missed the point.
They were trying to establish the continuity between the characters, the people and I have to say, I mean, you also know, so James Darcse plays the archivist. He's also the lover Robert Frobisher in a second story, but in the Swami 451 in the soul in 2245, he's the archivist who's the interrogator of Swami the heroine. He's very heavily made up to look Asian. You almost don't recognize.
You have to work to realize, oh my God, that's the same guy. And even for all the prosthetics, I thought, he was a great actor. You could see. He was fantastic, actually, even though he's clearly not Asian, he's clearly somebody made a re-Asian, but I thought that was fantastic.
Yeah, I mean, his subtle facial expressions, I thought were especially at the end when this is not in the book. This was modified the movie when he says to her at the very last time, he says, what I'm no one believe you. And she says someone already does. And I think she means him.
You don't see him look on his face. He's very showy. He's just gone through. You know, you know, through power, the intrinsic power of truth.
And I thought that was a very effective scene. And boy, what a magnificent acting job on his part through all those heavy prosthetics. Some of it was overdone. I think that's quite interesting.
Yeah, I was watching that. I found it so hard not to laugh because I can't imagine if they stay cut and you know the Korean actors like, you know, I look nothing like that. Like, I would look at their eyes. You know, you know, the makeup guys like, I'm so sorry, I'm doing this.
I can't try to, but they just like, they would do their eyes to try to make them look Korean. I just did not. Yeah, it was pretty. Yeah.
And you're right. It is remarkable that he does a really good job in that scene of conveying the shock mostly through like the movement of almost his eyeballs and his cheeks and mouth more than anything else. And yeah, right. And there's a couple times where the makeup, the faces are just frozen and you're like, but yeah, yeah, Tom, Tom, he's a skizy snake oil doctor is totally right.
Right. He's right up. Very ugly, you know, and yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead. I love him in the 2012 narrative where he plays the fighter who's book his hand and I was shocking to him. Oh my God, I totally forgot about this.
Oh my God. And then there's this loud splat. I jumped up in my seat. Oh, yeah.
It comes out of nowhere. And it's so loud. It's like, yeah. And then the car alarm was on.
But the way he acts in that man, Tom Hanks is hilarious. You know how he used to do these comedies back in the 80s and got really sick. In this movie, he's definitely funny at moments in a way. Oh, yeah.
And Jim Broadbent is fantastic throughout the movie. He's really good. Yeah. He plays so many different parts.
Yeah. Right. A lot of rings there. Yeah.
I mean, the movie bomb at the box office, I guess I'm not surprised because as you were saying, Greg, you know, hard to market that movie, hard to describe it. They did. I don't know if you know what your sub-sex will do to go with the podcast, you might try and look up the five minute trailer on YouTube, which is better than the two minute theatrical trailer. And so many people say that I can try to better for the movie.
But a bomb at the box office can also got, I think, almost no Academy Award nominations, which I think is kind of criminal. I think it deserves some recognition. Yeah. And I'm mystified at that.
I mean, it's a movie ahead of time. You know, there have been other movies that bomb at the box office and then later on acquired a big audience like the Big Lebowski. It's one. You know, Blade Runner?
It's another. It's very well. It came out. So I don't know.
I still have some hopes for this. But who knows? I don't think it's broadcast on any of the cable channels very often because it's just too weird and too long. You're going to say to me, I mean, I really enjoyed it.
I'm going to watch it again because I think it seems like it's a movie that pays rewatching. I know Alex at Lusignol, Roger twice. I was not. Yeah, I've watched it probably six, seven times now.
And I pick up something new every time that I missed before or that. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. So it's actually a big, it's actually a big, confusing because on the second time what I found myself doing was noticing new things.
But then also getting confused because there are illusions forward to events. I'm like, wait, did I already passed this part? And then it occurs later. I'm like, oh, this is actually, it gets confusing in a new way because you know what's going to happen.
And you don't realize how many little subtle connections are. So you're like, wait, is this calling back? Did I not offer a minute or something? I will also say just a small point.
I was surprised by how graphic there were a few graphic sex scenes. There were a few graphic violent scenes. Yeah. And it seemed, I'm not sure I'm a mature, I'm a mature, I'm not sure I'm a mature, but I can handle it.
But it just seemed a little more adult or a little more serious than I would have expected from this film, like in some, in a few flash moments. Yeah. I mean, you should mention throwing the critic off the rooftop and that was pretty close to great scene. Don't we all, all that was academic writers, which we can do that.
And yeah, I thought some of those scenes you referenced Greg or Ron necessary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not horrible. You know, they're not putting, but yeah.
Yeah. We've got some criticisms on our podcast thing and I wish I could throw like, beefy boy 37 off a roof. I think David might actually do that, by the way, if you ever meet David. I think it might be.
If any of us are at home, since David's not here, let's just say this, if you want to really get under David Barskin, just write a really bad review of us on iTunes. Don't say how much, say how much, say how much partially David's better than us. What you should do is do a little screen rep of that scene of Tom Hanks throwing the critic off the roof and post that. Yeah.
We put a give of that tweet. Sleepy before going reading anything interesting, studying anything interesting. Oh, you know, I've got, I mean, I always read two meanings at once. I did just pick up this brand actually not brand.
It's not around a while. I picked up this intellectual biography of Alistair McIntyre by who's a French author, Emil Perros, Fauci, my French is not very good. I've only read the first chapter, but I wasn't sure if I get very far because you know, McIntyre's kind of interesting after Virginia's about her stuff. But this book so far, I like it because it puts back entire in a broader context and the contextual work in this book so far is really interesting what French intellectual life was like back in the 50s and early 60s when McIntyre was a person fixed on the left.
It was a Marxist. And I'm kind of fascinated with French politics. I don't want to go on too long here, but I'll write to the present, right? In fact, the floor to this book is by Pierre Monon, who, well, right, we're all fans.
So that's what my latest acquisition. I like Glenn Elmer's new book, the narrow passage. I think it's very good. It's an essay that go out of control.
It's only 80 pages long, but it's very well done for such a short and compact book. So there's a couple of things on my reading part. What's the one on Foucault, Plato and the founder? Yeah.
Part of it. Yeah, not done with it. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm just getting into the Foucault part. Well, this was a ball. Thanks for suggesting the movie. Thanks for coming on and talking about it.
It's always fun to see you have a yawn. Well, what's great. So it's an easy to do said, art will save the world or something like that or maybe I'll try to just root in both of them. And I think that, you know, we find it these contemporary art and actually is kind of grown in some of the ways that we try to educate the world and think about the world that ought to be observed and celebrate it and pass along.